Tom didn’t answer.
“Tommy…”
“Tom’s sleeping. He went to see the elephant.”
“Tom, can you see Boulder?”
Outside, a bitter white line of dawn was coming up in the sky against the jagged, sterile mountaintops.
“Yes. They’re waiting. Waiting for some word. Waiting for spring. Everything in Boulder is quiet.”
“Can you see Frannie?”
Tom’s face brightened. “Frannie, yes. She’s fat. She’s going to have a baby, I think. She stays with Lucy Swann. Lucy’s going to have a baby, too. But Frannie will have her baby first. Except…” Tom’s face grew dark.
“Tom? Except what?”
“The baby…”
“
Tom looked around uncertainly. “We were shooting wolves, weren’t we? Did I fall asleep, Stu?”
Stu forced a smile. “A little bit, Tom.”
“I had a dream about an elephant. Funny, huh?”
“Yeah.”
He began to suspect they weren’t going to be in time; that whatever Tom had seen would happen before they could arrive.
The good weather broke three days before the New Year, and they stopped in the town of Kittredge. They were close enough to Boulder now for the delay to be a bitter disappointment to them both—even Kojak seemed uneasy and restless.
“Can we push on soon, Stu?” Tom asked hopefully.
“I don’t know,” Stu said. “I hope so. If we’d only gotten two more days of good weather, I believe that’s all it would have taken. Damn!” He sighed, then shrugged. “Well, maybe it’ll just be flurries.”
But it turned out to be the worst storm of the winter. It snowed for five days, piling up drifts that were twelve and even fourteen feet high in places. When they dug themselves out on the second of January to look at a sun as flat and small as a tarnished copper coin, all the landmarks were gone. Most of the town’s small business district had been not just buried but entombed. Snowdrifts and snowdunes had been carved into wild, sinuous shapes by the wind. They might have been on another planet.
They went on, but the traveling was slower than ever; finding the road had developed from a continuing nuisance into a serious problem. The snowmobile got stuck repeatedly and they had to dig it out. And on the second day of 1991, the freight-train rumble of the avalanches began again.
On the fourth of January they came to the place where US 6 split off from the turnpike to go its own way to Golden, and although neither of them knew it—there were no dreams or premonitions—that was the day that Frannie Goldsmith went into labor.
“Okay,” Stu said as they paused at the turn-off. “No more trouble finding the road, anyhow. It’s been blasted through solid rock. We were damned lucky just to find the turn-off, though.”
Staying on the road was easy enough, but getting through the tunnels was not. To find the entrances they had to dig through powdered snow in some cases and through the packed remains of old avalanches in others. The snowmobile roared and clashed unhappily over the bare road inside.
Worse, it was scary in the tunnels—as either Larry or the Trashcan Man could have told them. They were black as minepits except for the cone of light thrown by the snowmobile’s headlamp, because both ends were packed with snow. Being inside them was like being shut in a dark refrigerator. Going was painfully slow, getting out of the far end of each tunnel was an exercise in engineering, and Stu was very much afraid that they would come upon a tunnel that was simply impassable no matter how much they grunted and heaved and shuffled the cars stuck inside from one place to another. If that happened, they would have to turn around and go back to the Interstate. They would lose a week at least. Abandoning the snowmobile was not an option; doing that would be a painful way of committing suicide.
And Boulder was maddeningly close.
On January seventh, about two hours after they had dug their way out of another tunnel, Tom stood up on the back of the snowmobile and pointed. “What’s that, Stu?”
Stu was tired and grumpy and out of sorts. The dreams had stopped coming, but perversely, that was somehow more frightening than having them.
“Don’t stand up while we’re moving, Tom, how many times do I have to tell you that? You’ll fall over backward and go headfirst into the snow and—”
“Yeah, but what
Stu looked, saw, throttled down, and stopped.
“What is it?” Tom asked anxiously.
“Overpass,” Stu muttered. “I—I just don’t believe it—”
“Overpass? Overpass?”
Stu turned around and grabbed Tom’s shoulders. “It’s the Golden overpass, Tom! That’s 119 up there, Route 119! The Boulder road! We’re only twenty miles from town! Maybe even less!”
Tom understood at last. His mouth fell open, and the comical expression on his face made Stu laugh out loud and clap him on the back. Not even the steady dull ache in his leg could bother him now.
“Are we really almost home, Stu?”
“
Then they were grabbing each other, dancing around in a clumsy circle, falling down, sending up puffs of snow, powdering themselves with the stuff. Kojak looked on, amazed… but after a few moments he began to jump around with them, barking and wagging his tail.
They camped that night in Golden, and pushed on up 119 toward Boulder early the next morning. Neither of them had slept very well the night before. Stu had never felt such anticipation in his life… and mixed with it was his steady nagging worry about Frannie and the baby.
About an hour after noon, the snowmobile began to hitch and lug. Stu turned it off and got the spare gascan lashed to the side of Kojak’s little cabin. “Oh Christ!” he said, feeling its deadly lightness.
“What’s the matter, Stu?”
“Me!
“We’re out of gas?”
Stu flung the empty can away. “We sure-God are. How could I be that stupid?”
“Thinking about Frannie, I guess. What do we do now, Stu?”
“We walk, or try to. You’ll want your sleeping bag. We’ll split this canned stuff, put it in the sleeping bags. We’ll leave the shelters behind. I’m sorry, Tom. My fault all the way.”
“That’s all right, Stu. What about the shelters?”
“Guess we better leave em, old hoss.”
They didn’t get to Boulder that day; instead they camped at dusk, exhausted from wading through the powdery snow which seemed so light but had slowed them to a literal crawl. There was no fire that night. There was no wood handy, and they were all three too exhausted to dig for it. They were surrounded by high, rolling snowdunes. Even after dark there was no glow on the northern horizon, although Stu looked anxiously for it.
They ate a cold supper and Tom disappeared into his sleeping bag and fell instantly asleep without even saying good night. Stu was tired, and his bad leg ached abominably.
But they would be in Boulder tomorrow night, sleeping in real beds—that was a promise.
An unsettling thought occurred as he crawled into his sleeping bag. They would get to Boulder and Boulder would be empty—as empty as Grand Junction had been, and Avon, and Kittredge. Empty houses, empty stores, buildings with their roofs crashed in from the weight of the snow. Streets filled in with drifts. No sound but the drip of melting snow in one of the periodic thaws—he had read at the library that it was not unheard of for the temperature in Boulder to shoot suddenly up to seventy degrees in the heart of winter. But everyone would be
