White Plains

by David Hicks

  The next morning, during the long drive, he had been stunned by the emptiness of the land, the depth of its silence. He had arrived at his new job open-mouthed and unaware of time.

  By now, his third month on the job, he had fallen into a routine. He left every Tuesday morning at 4:30, stopped a few hours later at Jane’s Kitchen in Montrose for some sourdough French toast (if he had time) or at the McDonald’s drive-through in Delta for two Egg McMuffins (if he was running late), arrived on campus around 8:30, taught Basic Writing and two sections of Intro to Lit, and spent the night at the home of Len and his girlfriend Sydney, who taught English. On Wednesday morning, he hiked Black Canyon, then spent the afternoon meeting with students in his office (which had blank walls and only a few books); in the evening he taught a three-hour adult class on Greek Mythology. On Thursday, he taught his three classes again, gassed up, and made the long drive back.

  Flynn eased onto Rio Grande Lane, feeling the fresh snow under his tires. Within a mile he saw some familiar bulges on the road: a herd of elk, belly-down on the snow. He slowed almost to a halt as they roused themselves and loped away. Flynn was grateful for the moon; it was like an enormous headlight in the sky, and it made driving in the middle of the night like driving on a dim afternoon. But in two weeks, he’d be without its aid both coming and going—during the coldest, darkest time of the year.

  The road followed the river against the current, toward its headwaters. In the opposite direction it flowed through South Fork, bent west to Alamosa, then ran down and deep through New Mexico and along the Texas border before finally emptying into the Gulf. But here it was, so narrow you could leap across it in spots, and already frozen over, with fresh snow blanketing the icy surface. Back on March 20th, Casey and Flynn had stood on a bridge and dropped heavy rocks onto it, smashing the icy surface to expose the clear water gurgling underneath. After four hundred inches of snowfall, and no sign of spring’s imminent arrival, Casey had decided it was time to force the issue.

  Flynn eased onto route 149, a narrow road that would be empty of vehicles until it joined up with highway 50 an hour and a half away. He settled into his seat. There was nothing to do but drive and think. There was no radio reception; no place to stop and get gas or coffee; no cell-phone reception. On the passenger seat were a few CDs if he needed them—the Stay-Awake CD, the Keep-Awake CD, and the Wake the Hell Up! CD—with songs like the Ramones’ “I Want to Be Sedated,” Tom Petty’s “You Wreck Me,” and “Angels of the Silences” by the Counting Crows. But on most trips he left them there on the seat, next to the pens and notepads he used to plan for his classes or to jot down ideas he had about his unsettled life. A week earlier, he had scribbled, “Ask BC Fam Court if OK to call cops next time R hides kids”; “Use C’s lavender soap to catch packrat in horse stbl” (which, after cheese, peanut butter, and tootsie rolls, was finally what worked); “Possible to sneak pay-as-go cell phone to Nathan?”; “For new custody hrng fwd email and phone rcrds—evidence of my atmpts to see them” and “Cut hole for stovepipe NW corner of shed,” which he had been fixing up to use an office, but which Casey now wanted as a writing studio. Folded up under the passenger seat were the Grand Junction Sentinel classifieds (with one-bedroom apartments circled), print-outs of Craigslist rentals, the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (with circled job postings of schools near Binghamton), and the printout of an email from a former student, MacNair Richards, who had been living near Vail but had moved to Oregon with her partner.

  Past the headwaters, the road curved out of the valley and began its 2,000-foot climb to the first of three mountain passes, Spring Creek. Flynn’s headlights lit up the sign for the Oleo Ranch (“A Poor Man’s Spread”), otherwise there were only pine trees and aspens. He could make out the glowering peak of Mount Baldy to the right, and knew that San Luis Peak, a fourteener, was behind it, and that another, Redcloud, lurked to his left. Flynn was riding up and onto the Continental Divide. On one side, Clear Creek flowed west, eventually ending up in the Pacific, but right across the road Spring Creek flowed east, on its way to the Atlantic. So much seemed to hang in the balance, and yet whatever the direction, whatever the obstacles, the water eventually found its way home.

  He was driving through fresh snow, breaking trail, remembering a summer day when he and Casey stood at the top of Clear Creek falls, closing their eyes as the sun blazed down from a bright blue sky and the faint backspray of cold, clear water wet their faces. He remembered feeling free and happy and light.

  He passed the sign for Spring Creek Pass, 10,898 feet; he was a few miles from Slumgullion Mountain, and this stretch of road was the last to be plowed during storms. Sometimes, after a big one, the plow from Lake City would spend all day going over Slumgullion and back, and wouldn’t get to Spring Creek Pass until the next day. Flynn heard the howling outside, and felt the car shudder. It was always windy here, and snowdrifts tended to pile up, quick and deep, across the road.

  When his headlights caught the eyes of an elk, Flynn slowed the car, his tires grinding on the dry hard snow. The massive bull, seven points on each antler, stood still, its moonshadow cast on the snow behind it. A few weeks earlier, on this stretch of road, a cow elk had bounded up from a dropoff and skidded on the icy surface with her hooves splayed, slamming her head into the corner of Flynn’s car. The Sidekick wasn’t damaged, and neither was the elk—she scrambled up, shook her head, and trotted away—but Flynn had taken it as a warning.

  When he had first moved here, seeing a bull elk like that, all alone in the pitch of night, would bring tears to his eye. But today, he was all business. He shifted into first, then second, past the high-standing roadside reflectors that guided the plows when there was too much snow to see where the road was. It would deepen up Slumgullion, but Flynn’s Sidekick, with its high wheel base, would probably be okay. On the other side, however, the descent was angled and steep, a succession of switchbacks that at every turn would bring him to the edge of a cliff with no guardrails. Flynn called this stretch Slumgullion Slalom. There were five phases of his trip—Elk Alarm, Slumgullion Slalom, Deer Dodge, Rabbit Roulette, Cerro Suicide—and each one spelled trouble.

  On the way up, Flynn lost the moonlight to a storm cloud, and the landscape was reduced to the snow in front of his headlights. There was nothing but the hum of his car and the sound of his wheels over the snow. But suddenly, on a curve that ducked under a projecting cliff face, the car lost traction when he stupidly stepped on the brakes, the back end sliding to the Right and almost off the cliff before stopping. Flynn had been careless, forgetting that it was always slick on that curve, as it faced north and never saw the sun. He sat still in the driver’s seat, afraid to shift his weight. His headlights lit only a trail of cat prints, bobcat or lynx, on the otherwise smooth surface of white.

  He dropped into four-wheel low, easing the clutch up and the gas pedal down; but the back end slid a bit more, closer to the edge, a drop of about two thousand feet.

  He got out of the car.

  Snow was falling, large flakes that alighted on the road, on the bouldered slope of the mountain, on his thick, curly hair. Flynn knew that this is how people died around here, their cars dropping soundlessly into the abyss, and that he was sleepy and needed to think clearly. He looked down; his feet were deep in the snow, and he’d left his Sorels in the mud room. He lifted his face to the falling sky, calculated the time, added two hours, and pictured his children waking up for school.

  He needed to focus.

  He stepped over toward the cliff and peered at the back of his car. His rear right tire was inches from the edge.

  Flynn put on his gloves, grabbed his canvas jacket from inside the car, and wedged it under the tire. It was bald, like all his tires, the snow caking onto it instead of being gripped by the tread and then released. For the last few weeks he had meant to replace them, but he didn’t have enough cash. It was an issue: Casey, a best-selling writ
er, routinely received checks in the mail for thousands of dollars, while he was drowning in debt. When he had moved here she had set him up with a job at the hotel, but had discouraged him from looking for anything full-time. “It’s full-time just taking care of this place,” she had said, pointing out the log cabin, the shed, the horse stables, and the hundred acres of pasture. She’d buy the groceries and continue to pay the mortgage, she said, as long as he paid his own phone bill, chipped in for gas and electric, and managed the animals and property. When he brought up his child-support obligations, she frowned. “Why are you still paying that when Rachel isn’t even letting you see them?” But he couldn’t withhold money out of spite; he didn’t want his children to go without, no matter how badly their mother was behaving, and he didn’t want to give her the opportunity to depict him as a deadbeat dad. So that’s when he decided to apply for a teaching job. It still wasn’t enough—his instructorship at Mesa State earned him barely enough for child-support and credit-card payments while he was trying to save for a Christmas flight to New York, and he was also sending a hundred bucks a month to his sister to pay back a loan—but it helped. Meanwhile, he practiced austerity. In Grand Junction he took his meals with Sydney and Len, trying not to eat too much, or bought dollar-menu items at Wendy’s or Taco Bell. He routinely stole money from Casey’s change jar, and once he ate someone’s turkey sandwich from the faculty refrigerator after it had been there for over a week.

  Before he got back into the car he cleaned off his wiper blades, taking off his gloves so he could dig out the ice with his fingers. Then he sat there, the engine humming, his hand on the clutch, knowing that if he pushed the gas too hard and the back tire skidded out, he was a dead man.

  He pressed down his foot as gently as he could, felt the tire ease up and over the jacket, and rolled the car out to the middle of the road. When he was past the icy section he stopped, retrieved his coat, and threw it on the passenger-side floor.

  Okay.

  He edged forward, letting the deep snow create its own traction. The flakes came at him directly, as if he were stuck inside a white kaleidoscope, slapping the windshield and forcing him to continually refocus his sight. As he crested the summit at 11,361 feet, the snow was falling straight down again. He sat back and heaved a breath.

  On his way down the north side of the mountain, he followed the switchbacks like a drunken skier, veering left and right, as the flakes continued to lighten. Flynn dropped down to second and took it slow. He could see that there was less and less snow on the road, until eventually it was just a dusting. By the time he entered Lake City, the roads were almost bare.

  At 5:26 a.m. the town was asleep, except for a pick-up truck pulling out onto the road behind Flynn and a snowplow warming up in a driveway. Lake City was only a little bigger than Sanctuary. It had been formed centuries earlier when a part of Slumgullion had broken off and descended into the valley, blocking up a creek and forming a sparkling lake that attracted settlers. But it was a tough place to live: the cliffs surrounding the town were so high, the valley so narrow, that in the winter it began to darken in early afternoon.

  It took Flynn about a minute to enter and exit Lake City, with the window cracked so the cold air would keep him awake. He passed the café where, in July, he and Casey had stopped for breakfast before continuing on to Silverton, traversing what must surely be one of the most perilous mountain passes in America, spiraling around and up the mountain on a rock-jutted dirt road with no guardrails and barely enough room for one vehicle, every turn bringing them to the brink of an exhilarating death. Flynn’s legs were wobbly when he got out of the car in Silverton, so they went for a walk in the tiny town, and Casey bought him a Hopi key chain made of silver and engraved with a bear, her power animal. He reached for it now, running his thumb over the sharp edges as he passed the Texaco station, which wouldn’t open for another hour, and then a row of homes, converted miner’s shacks mostly, some, judging from the faint smell of smoke, with fires still going inside.

  Outside town, Flynn followed the bends of 149 alongside the Gunnison River. This was the beginning of Deer Dodge. They were everywhere. At first he saw only their eyes, but after a while the moon came out again and he could see a bevy of them lurking in the trees. Flynn swept his eyes left and right while keeping his foot on the gas, taking careful sips from his travel mug as he drove on.

  When he lost the moon again, Flynn slowed, then saw the headlights in his rearview mirror gaining on him. As Flynn considered letting the vehicle pass so it could act as a buffer between the deer and his car, a second vehicle appeared, coming the other way—a bread delivery van, headed for the Texaco station—and at that moment a fawn darted out from the right. There was nothing Flynn could do. He hit the little deer’s head as the delivery van churned past.

  Flynn pulled over. The driver behind him stopped as well. Together they got out of their vehicles and looked at the fawn. Tiny stubs protruded from his head, the promise of antlers. He was stone dead. Snowflakes fell on his open eyes. There wasn’t a sound in the air, not even the faint shudder of a last breath.

  “You all right?” the man said. Silhouetted by his truck’s headlights, he was tall and broad-chested, with blond backlit curls, and sharp eyes that glinted red from the Sidekick’s tail lights. Flynn nodded, his hands in his pockets. It was cold, at least twenty below, and still dark. He’d have to make do with one headlight the rest of the way.

  Back in his car, Flynn kept his eyes on the rearview mirror at first, waiting to see if the man wanted to go ahead of him, but when the truck didn’t move, Flynn pulled back out onto the road. The truck pulled out too, but then stopped and went in reverse. It took Flynn a while to figure out that the man was picking up his dinner.

  After Deer Dodge came Rabbit Roulette, on the cut-off from 149 to highway 50, the gray line Casey had shown him on the map. Soon Flynn wouldn’t be able to take this short cut, a dirt path that was never plowed; he’d have to continue on 149 as it bent in the wrong direction to its intersection with 50. But for now, the cut-off would be passable.

  He turned left onto the old road, which was barren at this end and dotted by a few trailers at the other, where some Natives lived. It was fairly smooth at first, with some washboarded stretches that rattled Flynn’s teeth, but at the far end some sharp rocks jutted up from the road, and depending on what time it was, he either took it slow there or blasted through so that he could get to Grand Junction in time. Today, he had left the house early, but because of his mishap on Slumgullion and the dead fawn, he was now running late; he would have to go fast and hope for the best.

  The road ran along the rim of a mesa, a stretch so lonely and uninhabitable it filled him with guilt and sadness for the Natives. But it was its own kind of beautiful. Here jackrabbits darted freely, scurrying off the road and back onto it. The only way to ensure he wouldn’t kill any was to keep his speed under thirty miles per hour, which made the cut-off worthless; he might as well stay on 149 all the way to highway 50, as both those roads were paved. So he drove quickly enough to justify the shortcut, but slowly enough to give the rabbits a fair shot.

  Three miles in, he stopped the car, got out, dumped the remains of his coffee, stretched, and relieved himself. To the west, the moon was on its descent. To the east, no Leonids; the sky there was blank due to cloud cover. In the distance he heard the faint yips of coyotes, then silence. The only sounds were of his urine hitting the dirt and his own tight shallow breaths. At Casey’s ranch, this time of night, the silence was so thin you could hear electricity humming through the wires. Here, not even that.

  He closed his eyes and pictured Nathan in his second-grade classroom, feet tapping the floor, eyes at once sleepy and restless; Janey, sitting in her pre-school semi-circle for story time, her eyes wide in anticipation of the next turn of page, the next amazing event in Peter Rabbit’s adventurous life.

  Rabbit Roulette began soon after he r
esumed his drive: a snowshoe hare scurried onto the road, brown with white flanks. Flynn swerved as it scattered first away from the car, then suddenly back in its path; he was finding it difficult to follow, absent his right headlight. They moved along like this, in spurts and swerves, Flynn and the hare, until Flynn finally slowed to a near stop and let the animal find its way off the road. In a month or so it would be completely white and harder to spot in the snowy landscape.

  The second hare darted out in front of the car, then sped ahead of the front tire in a zigzag. Flynn followed it for a few seconds before it scampered off. The third jumped straight out into his path, and somehow avoided the tires; Flynn felt mildly disappointed when it made it to the other side.

  The landscape was changing its hue: behind him a yellow glow, before him a dark blue. To the northwest, a meteor streaked long and silent, disappearing before it met the horizon. Flynn was staring at the spot, hoping to see another, when a flash of brown came from the snow-covered brush and he felt a thump under his tire.

  He stopped the car and got out. All the times he had made this drive, he had always won the rabbit roulette—or rather, he had let the rabbits win. But this one lay half-flattened, its long back paws crushed, its front paws twitching. Flynn sighed and looked behind him, at the starless sky over Slumgullion. That storm cloud would hover over the summit until daylight, dropping several more feet of snow before dissipating—a self-made, self-contained storm. By the time Flynn made his trip back, the snow would have melted—the sun was strong at high altitude—but soon there would be a storm every week, and he would have to keep hoping it wouldn’t come on a Tuesday or Thursday. It would be better for him to just stay in Grand Junction, where it was warm. He had friends there now, like Len and Sydney. He had his job. Great hiking trails. And the airport was there.

  Flynn planted the heel of his steel-toed boot onto the rabbit’s twitching ear and shifted the weight of his foot forward.