The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story)

by Joseph Turkot

  “She was like you. A tomboy. Always dirty. Banging herself up. We tried to keep her inside when the rain started, but she wouldn’t have it. Couldn’t contain that girl. God, we were so young,” he says. When he falls silent again, I ask him her name. Alice’s mother.

  “Grace,” he says. I can’t help it. I ask about the wedding. The one he never had. Because even though he hasn’t brought it up in years, the story’s burned into my memory. One of his big regrets. Part of his story that he’s never unlocked.

  “We couldn’t afford it. Not yet,” he says. “We raised some money. And then we fell behind. Things would go like that. For a couple years. I tried to reason with her—we should do something really small. But she had ideas. Something she always wanted since she was a girl. And I wasn’t going to change her mind. Stubborn as Alice. And me, I guess.”

  For a moment I slip into my dream of Dusty. With Dusty. I see the sheets on the last night I lay with him on the Resilience. The yellow pillow. It had been that night when I broke something inside—when I let the future in, and started to let myself dream. Dream that I might get there one day. That it would only make sense, since Russell never got to. Somehow, that it made sense for me to marry. That it would make Russell proud. It’s Russell’s story, not yours, I tell myself. And I force myself to be present for him. I try to take it in that he’s here, right now, in front of me. I watch the water in his eyes run down, and his mouth open again.

  “When I met her, I was about your age. She didn’t like me one bit. Not for the longest time,” he says, and then he laughs, a really weak laugh, but genuine. I want to wipe off his tears but I can’t. Something tells me he needs them right now. “I worked her over, though. I wrote her this stupid song. And then I went to her house, middle of the night. She called me a stalker after that. But she messed up—she smiled when she said it. Just for a moment, but it was enough. I knew I had her.”

  I remember all at once how impossible it would be to resist him—how even I used to think we would be together, that despite our age difference, our love was something more. Something I never understood until Dusty. And now, I can’t imagine the woman who didn’t want him. That Alice could have really tried to keep him away. And like a flood I remember the times in Pittsburgh, and then in Indianapolis, when Russell still hauled a guitar. The songs he would sing. I forgot how many he knows. Like without his guitar, he’s only partly here. Then one of them comes into my mind—a single line—by grace, I found love—and now I know. It was her he was singing about. That was her song. I ask him if that was the one. The one that earned him stalker.

  “There were a lot of songs about her,” he says. “That was the one though. You remember that?” he asks. I tell him it was my favorite, and then, when he doesn’t say anything more, I say that I miss hearing him sing. I tell him about when he used to sing me to sleep, and rub my hair, and it was Silent Night, and how I felt like nothing could ever happen to me then. A different world. He tells me that he’ll sing me a song as soon as we get to Leadville and he finds himself a nice guitar. It doesn’t even bother me that Leadville is just a metaphor now. Good, dry wood, he says. I wait, hoping he tells me more.

  “We didn’t expect Alice,” he says. Then he chuckles and says, Dallas Alice. I ask him what it means. And he tells me they were on their way up from Corpus Christi, a vacation. He laughs and says they would always cave in—take money out for a vacation instead of saving it for the wedding. Live instead of save, I used to argue, he says. And it was on the way back up, through Dallas, on some flood road, he tells me. They made love. Alice. And then, he starts to hum some melody, over and over, until words come back to him from the distant past, and he sings.

  “I’ve been worked by the rain, driven by the snow…”

  At first, I think he’s singing about us, and what we’ve been through. The weather and the exposure and the moving. But then his pitch lifts up and drops, finally finding the key he wants, and everything else falls away:

  “Drunk and dirty, don’t you know. And I’m still—willin’. Out on the road, late at night, seen my pretty Alice in every headlight. Alice. Dallas Alice…”

  And just like that, when I want nothing more than his voice to go on forever, an endless song, he stops. I tell him how pretty it was, and he says that one isn’t one of his. But it’s where they got her name. Alice. And as fast as he opened up, he stops altogether. Silent minutes pass and when I look back at his face, his smile is gone. The tears are dried. Not a sound, just the water running up and down against the hull. The slapping noise starts me up. Something in my spine. A shiver and sadness and memories. Everything we’ve made out of life. I wrap my arms around him and listen to the swells and his heartbeat. We rise and fall, and he wipes what’s left of sadness from his face.

  I wouldn’t have made it, he finally says. Not very far. If you didn’t find me.

  And he turns and squeezes me. It doesn’t make sense—that I found him. I know it’s just the opposite. But I let him hold me quietly until he loses his strength. Time passes and almost sends us to dreams again, but there’s an extra loud slap of water. They’re getting bigger, he says. I tell him I’ll go check. It’s so hard to leave the warmth but I know I have to. When I get out and stand up, there’s still not a dark spot in the sky. I bend down and tell him, but he’s already coming out to see for himself. Looks about the same, I say. He nods.

  He tells me it’s time to sleep, that we should have been sleeping, and he apologizes for talking so much. It’s all I can do to just tell him to shut up. Because I don’t want to hear self-pity, because as weak as we’ve both become, we’re not that far down yet. Come on, let’s get back under, before the swells kick up too much, or the ice eats us, he says. I want to tell him that we might sleep too long, and only one of us should sleep, but I feel too dead and hungry to argue. I follow him back to the stove. Voley, who came out halfway to make sure we weren’t leaving him behind, slowly retreats under again, his three-legged walk perfected.

  I search through the bags for the food. Still dry. We eat until the crumbles in our mouth make swallowing too close to choking. And then we drink from one of the plastic gallon jugs in Ernest’s sack. Voley laps up his share too. Russell says the water will give us two weeks, if we’re careful. But the ice will be enough to keep us going if our stock runs out. Melt it right back into the jug, he says. He checks over all the guns and the ammo before lying down, as if we might need them as soon as we wake up. But I can’t imagine we’ll ever see a living soul again. But then I see the dolphins when I close my eyes. Fish. The fox. The whale. And it’s suddenly not so crazy to keep the guns ready, because who knows what lives on the ice.

  Skyscrapers and faces and ships and mountains come and go, in and out of my imagination, just like they came in and out of our lives. Phantoms, every one of them, each one pushing us onward to reach this very spot in the ocean. The middle of nowhere. And now, after all their pushing, west and west forever, I realize they’ve turned us around. The phantoms are sending us back. Toward the east. I tell Russell that if Waterspout Alley is real, maybe we’ll ride it all the way back to Philadelphia after all. That wouldn’t be so bad, he says softly. But it sounds like he’s half asleep already, and he didn’t really hear me. I poke my head out into the snow for one more look at the distant ice, and the steady swells. And after a blast of wind forces my eyes shut, I decide it’s enough. I nudge myself into their bodies and the stove. The fuel is half full. And with that, all things surrendered at last, I let myself sleep.

  Chapter 22

  When I wake up, I feel sad that Dusty didn’t come to me again. That he didn’t visit me in my dreams. Like it’s a sign he doesn’t love me anymore. And as I raise my head, I realize I don’t care if the dreams turn to nightmares every time, I just want to see him. I feel Alice’s picture still in my pocket, and I want to give it back to Russell before I forget. Before I lose it. Anxiety rolls in because I know how important it has to be—that he hasn’t lost it in
all these years.

  The tarp above is dark, and the soft glow of the stove is the only light. Without waking him up, I sneak out into the night and start scooping off the snow. It’s hard to tell how low the boat’s sunk because of the snow, which is up to my ankles, but then, once the boat is cleared again, I realize we’re in no danger. I stand as tall as I can, like it will help me pierce the darkness, and look out to find the ice. The night is pitch black. I can’t find it anymore, and I convince myself that we’d see the ice if it were right on top of us, threatening to crush us, and so that it must be very far away still. Or maybe we’ve drifted in the opposite direction, and it’s gone. The boat rises and falls just about the same as it did earlier, and that means there’s no storm. Just open and calm seas.

  I tell the rain sea that I want to see my friend again. The whale. Just for a moment. I wait for him to hear my thoughts. Nothing happens. Long minutes stretch out and I try to decide if I should stay up to watch or head back under the tarp. My hands and feet are alive again, and I feel like I can stand the wind and the snow for a while. Then the darkness presses my eyes down, and I drop against the edge of the bench on the floor of the boat. My head raised enough to see the ocean. With one small twist of my neck, I can see all three hundred and sixty degrees—a good position to watch for the whale or the ice. My eyes close and then with each gust of wind I open them, and I see clearer through the darkness. Laying my head back, everything softens. My mind goes as blank as the night, and I’m out.

  Something wrenches me awake. My dream rips me from Wyoming, standing at the edge of a muddy bank, watching the whale. And the noise, in my dream a serenade, transforms into something else. It’s not the whale I’m hearing at all. Instead it’s the worst kind of sound—it comes from underneath the boat: the grinding of wood. The familiar horror from yesterday registers—that we’re running over ice again. Before I can reach my feet to get to the tarp, the boat spins halfway around, and then jerks out straight again. My fingers dig into the rail just before I flip over into the water. Then I see what hit us as my eyes adjust—a sheet of ice so low that it barely reaches the height of the rail. Invisible. Hidden by the night. And I realize now that it’s not the distant gray sky and brown sea blending in the distant horizon. It’s fog. Surrounding us again. Each direction gives me only a small window of clear ocean, and then, the black and fog converge. Too dark to see shadows. Just the ice at the edge of the water, riding under and grinding the hull. My eyes adjust more to the dark, and the ice floe is clear—stretching out as one unbroken table until it disappears. As I turn around, it’s clear how desperate things are—how many more floes—because in the direction that the first one jerked us, there’s another slab sliding out from the curtain of nothing into my vision. I grab one of the oars and call out to Russell, holding the wood out, ready to slice down into the water if a swell sends us back into the floe. But the boat drops alongside of the ice instead of against it. Russell, I yell again. And then, in ten seconds, I hear him moving, crawling out into the ambush.

  Ice, I tell him. I hand him the other oar, and before his eyes can even adjust, we slam into another sheet. The boat knocks hard and bounces away, and it sounds like a plank of wood snapped. I wait for the cold, the sensation of water running over my feet to let me know we’re sinking, but it doesn’t happen. We just ride up another swell, snow falls into my eyes, and I wipe it away to try and find the next sheet. They’re everywhere, I tell him. Russell still doesn’t say anything, but he jolts to the other end of the boat, the other oar in his hands, ready to stab off the next floe. Keep them off, he says. But as hard as I try, I can’t see where the ice floes appear under the water. I fool myself into seeing them and stab down over and over again. Nothing but empty water. And then, the boat jolts backward. Like we smacked another one, but this time, there’s no groaning wood. And I realize Russell got to it first and pushed us away. Don’t let them split us, he says.

  The boat dips and the ice reveals itself through a stretch where the fog’s passing off. A long table, rising higher in the distance from its low edge by the boat. Like we’re at the end of its long slope, some iceberg bank. On Russell’s side, the low shelf of ice doesn’t seem to rise anywhere, lying close to the water’s surface, flat all the way until the fog covers it. Russell hits again and pushes us off the ice and the boat snaps back. Over and over he pushes us off of his side, like some kind of gravity wants to ram us that way. Finally, it stops reeling us back to his side and I’m able to smack the floe on my side—I drive the oar down, feel the wood lock in place, and plant my feet and shove back. The boat spins and Russell faces the rising floe, and I’m up against the flat sheet he was battling.

  Hooked us! Russell shouts. I turn to see what he means, and he’s frozen—digging down into the black with a death grip, putting his whole body on the oar and riding his shoulder into it from above. Pinning us to the ice. I tell him I’ll help, and before I can stumble over the tarp and back to his side, he tells me to stay, watch that side. Better we stay on her, but if you see it coming in hard, give me the word, he says. As if he can free us in time toward open water. But I know he can’t. Because as I look around, I see more ice than ocean now. Trapped in the pack. Stuck to it now, on Russell’s hope that the thing that wants to crush us can also save us.

  A steady whine starts even though the ice sheet on my side is still ten feet out. I think maybe Russell lost his grip, but when I turn around he’s in the same wild position, hanging out half over the water. It looks like he’ll fall in and I tell him to let go and get back inside the boat. He just digs in harder and I turn around, looking but not seeing anything. The wood doesn’t groan as loud this time, but the boat lists to one side and Voley howls. He scampers out and then back to the center, frantic. The noise fades and the boat stops moving altogether—no more rise and fall with the swells, no more listing, and no more wood whining. Like we’re stuck by something more than Russell’s oar hook.

  I wait and wait for the sound to return, for the boat to list again, down low enough so that we’re level with the sea and it all spills in, but everything has really stopped. Pegged to the ice and I can’t even tell that we’re in the ocean anymore. There’s just ice and snow and calm quiet. She’ll hold, Russell starts to repeat softly, like he’s trying to convince himself it’s true. From the corner of my eye I see the glow of the stove disappear and then reappear. Like it’s flickering out. But then I realize—it’s Voley moving around again. He’s heading toward Russell’s side. He moves so fast I can barely get the words out, “Get back!” But he doesn’t listen, he’s too eager. He wants to know what’s going on. He gets up to the rail near Russell and puts his paws up on it. Get back, I yell again. But he ignores me and sticks his head out at Russell’s knees, trying to figure out why Russell is hanging out over the ice. And all I can picture is the next knock. How if Voley doesn’t get back, it will suck him right over, out into the black, slide him down under the ice, and we’ll never see him again. I drop my oar and head to him. As soon as I grab his collar and start to lead him back, the boat groans again. Too much weight shifting and we tumble together into the tarp. My head hits the edge of the stove and knocks it over. The flame dies. Then, with Voley kicking on top of me, I feel the rush of water. It takes the pain away from my head and stitches up my body. And then, everything is dark. The stove rattles against the wood and gets tangled with our bodies inside the tarp. Tanner! Russell yells. I’m okay, I get out, realizing we’re still afloat. Finally the breaths start coming in again. Air, not water.

  Stay, I tell Voley. I stand up and lift the tarp from the water, untangling it from our bodies. I throw it in a lump on the seat. I still got her, Russell tells me. He hasn’t moved, still leaning into his oar, his body chained to the floe. Without the stove lit, the ice looks clearer somehow. Eyes open, Russell says. I walk through the pool of sea to my side, watching Voley to make sure he doesn’t try to go back to the rail. Stay boy, I tell him over and over as I go.

 
The ice stays off of us, but the sea is opens up again—cracks of open water widen to rivers and then shrink back to cracks. A shifting spider web of brown and blue and white. I stab in every two minutes, in case the invisible shelf is rising from underneath. After an eternity, Russell asks me if I can start to bail some of the water out. I tell him that we’re not sinking, and that the last time I left my side of the boat, it almost sank us. He says we’re okay now. Like there’s been some new sign and all I can do is trust him. There’s a cup in the bag, he tells me. I dig through the soaked mess of tarp and find the bag with the cup. And then, I start to bail. No shakes or groans or jerks. Just the quiet calm cold again. And when I’m done, he says there should also be some rope. I find it and give it to him. He ties his oar to the rail and tells me to do mine too. So if they go over we can pull them back. Once I get mine tied, I watch the ice for movement through the snow, but it’s stopped. Like it doesn’t want us dead anymore. It’s given up.

  We don’t talk for a long time. The only thing that breaks the quiet are Voley’s whines, but even they die off eventually. I think he’s shivering when I glance at the middle of the boat, but it’s too hard to tell in the dark. Then I’m sure of it. But I can’t help him. I have to stay on the edge of the water, keep my eyes on the abyss. And I realize that I’m shivering too. We need the stove. And then, after another half hour, it stops. My body shudders a few last times, and then I don’t feel it anymore. It’s just the familiar numbness again, but that’s all. No different from the mountains. Everything is silent. Not a single swell. And the boat doesn’t move for the longest time.

  We sit all night, waiting for something to change. For another piece of ice to sneak underneath of us, but it never happens. And then, when I think I can’t keep my eyes open anymore, I ask Russell if I should try to get the stove going again. It’s almost morning, he manages to get out. But he can barely speak. We’re going to freeze to death, I tell him, if we don’t get it going. He doesn’t tell me no, and he doesn’t tell me anything, so at last, I leave my spot, expecting the boat to roll into the water like last time, but it doesn’t. The boat hardly moves at all as I walk. I start to peel through the soggy mess in the center of the boat.