by Mic Roland
Martin knew he could not keep chewing that bite of pancake indefinitely. They were both waiting for him to say something. He swallowed hard.
“Well?” Susan’s face was almost imploring. Margaret’s face had the start of a worried frown.
“They’re pretty good,” he said cautiously. Susan beamed. Margaret’s eyes narrowed. “They’re not as good as Margaret’s of course, but they’re okay.” Margaret’s semi-scowl softened into a small grin. She was still the benchmark. Susan’s smile remained: happy to have passed her first test. Both women were smiling!
Martin could feel himself slump and blow out a little sigh of relief. He had stepped off the mine and it had not exploded. Life in a minefield was not easy.
“Oh, I am so glad,” Susan said. “I really wanted them to turn out, but you don’t know how hard it was to cook on top of that wood stove.” Martin caught Margaret rolling her eyes. She stopped in mid roll when he gave her his “stern dad” look.
“First, it was too hot, then not hot enough, then too hot again. I mean, it was nearly impossible not to burn them. I had to watch them all the time!” They finished their breakfast with Susan recounting the ups and downs of her cooking experience.
After carrying the dishes in so Susan could wash up, Margaret went down to the garage for another box to hold more kindling. Martin poured a cup of coffee. “So, where are the other pancakes?” he asked Susan.
With a hint of shame, she pointed at the upside down bowl on the counter. Martin lifted the bowl and examined the dark disks. “What. These aren’t so bad.”
“Aren’t so bad? They’re totally ruined!”
“Bah,” said Martin. “You always hear in TV ads how the best baked-goods are ‘golden brown’, right?
Susan squinted at him skeptically. “Yeah?” she said slowly.
“Well, these are just Extra-Golden. That’s all.”
“What are you talking about? They’re burnt.”
“You keep saying that wrong. Extra. Golden. Don’t be so negative. We just pick off some of these crispier edges, and see? The middles are fine.” He tore off a bit and tossed it in his mouth. “Shee? deesh are jush fine. Extra golden. These will make a fine snack during the day. We’ll save the edges for the chickens. Nothing goes to waste.”
—
Martin was pulling up dead pumpkin vines from the front garden when the crunch of tires on dirt road caught his ear. There had been almost no traffic on Old Stockman Road since he had gotten home, so the sound was unusual. They were not driving very fast, whoever it was. People only drove slow on his road when they were looking for something. But, with the houses so far apart on Old Stockman, there was little to look for, unless, perhaps it was trouble.
He realized that if it might be trouble coming down the road, he should be ready. His pocket was empty. Pulling up dead vines did not seem to warrant being armed. There was no time to go inside and get the revolver. Whoever it was, would come into view in a few seconds. Perhaps he did not need a gun. Perhaps it was someone just driving by. He mentally traced his steps to the front door, should he need to run inside and get a gun. Martin watched to see whoever it was emerge from behind the trees before deciding whether to bolt inside or not.
An older Subaru wagon rolled down the gentle hill and into the Simmons’ driveway. Martin did not recognize it at first, but the ample amateur body repair with sheet aluminum and pop rivets could be none other than his son’s car, affectionately nicknamed The Beast.
“Dustin!” Martin strode up to the car, arms wide. “Oh, it’s so great to see you two!” He gave his son a fatherly hug, but got a longer hug back than he expected.
Margaret stepped out of the front door to see what the commotion was. She stood at the top of the stairs. “Dustin!” she said enthusiastically. Then, rather flatly she added, “Judith.”
“Mrs. Simmons,” said Judy in matching flatness from behind her car door.
“What brings you down from the mountains?” Martin asked. “From your last text, it sounded like you were all set to go Grizzly Adams up there.”
“Yeah, well, we were, but we ran into a pretty significant snag and I knew you and mom had some room, a wood stove and…so, well, I thought…”
“Of course, of course. You’re both welcome to stay. Come on in by the fire.” Martin led Dustin and Judy up the front steps. As he passed Margaret he whispered out of the side of his mouth, “It’s bound to go better this time. We all know the boundaries.”
As they topped the stairs into the living room, Dustin stopped. Susan sat at the far end of the couch with an awkward smile. “Oh, hello,” said Dustin. He looked at Martin for an explanation.
“Dustin, this is Susan. It’s kind of a long story, but the bottom line is that she had no place to stay during this outage, so we’re letting her stay in Lindsey’s room. Susan, this is my son, Dustin and his lovely wife Judy.”
Margaret pulled in a couple of dining room chairs and set them near the wood stove. Martin brought a pair of mugs from the kitchen and poured coffee.
“Are you hungry?” Margaret asked. “I wasn’t going to start lunch until later, but I could…”
“No. But thanks, mom. We ate a bit in the car. What we are is really tired. We’ve been awake all night.”
“Well, sit and warm up.” Martin pointed to the chairs. “What made you leave the mountains? From the way you talked before all this, I figured you were all set to hunker down.”
“We thought we could make a go of it up there,” Dustin said as he sat down. “I mean, we were getting by, right?” Judy nodded on cue but with a worried look. “We ran into a problem, though, and I knew we needed to get out of town.”
“When the power went out, I was at work,” Dustin sipped his coffee. “Jeff kept the store open because we were doing a brisk business selling batteries. I snagged some packs of rechargeable AAs for myself. Good thing too. All the batteries were going fast. About 3:00, we sold our last battery, cannibalized from an RC car. Jeff sent me home and closed up.”
“I had to stay at the daycare until, like, 6:00,” said Judy. “Some parents came right away to get their kids. But a couple of kids looked like they were going to have to stay overnight. I guess that last couple of parents had a hard time getting in.”
“The first night at the cottage wasn’t so bad,” said Dustin. “We had our candles going when it got dark.”
“You had heat in the cottage, right?” asked Martin. “You said you had propane?”
“Yeah, we could cook and stuff, but without power, the heater’s blower didn’t run, so the burner wouldn’t stay running: an over-temp thermostat thing. We ran the oven for heat…”
“But I was worried about carbon monoxide,” interrupted Judy.
“Don’t want to mess with that,” added Martin with a glance at Susan.
“Yeah, so I got the idea to run the oven during the day, with the windows open a bit, but heat up our heavy skillet and pots of water. Then at night, shut it off and coasted on the leftover heat in the pots. It’s a little cottage, so it sorta worked.”
“But by morning,” added Judy, “It was down to 50 degrees in there.”
“The cottage isn’t strong on insulation. By the second night, we knew we had to sleep with socks and sweaters on. It was a manageable routine, if not very romantic.”
Judy blushed and quickly got back on topic. “But then the gas ran out.”
“Oh no,” said Margaret in that way that mothers do. “What did you do?”
“I tried our landlord, since they live up the street,” said Dustin. “They have a wood stove, and plenty of wood, but his whole family had come to stay. There was no room for us too. He was all sorry and stuff, but couldn’t help since the cottage didn’t have a wood stove.”
“On the way back to the cottage,” he said. “I remembered that our landlord had a lot of bricks out behind the cottage, left over from his sidewalk project. I stacked them up to make a little rocket stove on our front walk. It work
ed great for heating up soup or hotdogs. I started cooking up stuff from the fridge that would spoil soonest. But the really cool part was that I heated up bricks on it. I figured we needed more mass for overnight.”
“I carried the bricks inside with oven mitts,” said Judy. “And stacked them on cookie sheets under the bed.”
“It was a little tedious,” Dustin said with a knowing sigh, “And the cottage was cool again by morning, but better: mid-50s. We were heating without any gas and getting by. I went up into the woods on the slope behind the cottage and gathered sticks. There were jillions of them. No way I could use up all the sticks on that mountain. I figured we could probably get by for a few weeks until they fixed the power: cooking and heating with sticks.”
“It got a little harder on Thursday,” interjected Judy, “That afternoon, the water started to give out.”
Driving Blind
Dustin nodded. “I figured the town’s storage tank on the hill had run dry.”
“It trickled for awhile, so I filled up whatever I could while Dustin was up gathering sticks. I had a few big soda bottles and a bucket filled before it just stopped altogether.”
“What about that stream?” Martin asked. “Weren’t you telling me there was a stream nearby.”
“Not all that nearby. Over the ridge, but yeah. That’s why I wasn’t too worried about the town water giving out. Things were getting a bit more rustic… (Martin glanced at Susan who broke a little smile at the word) …but I figured we still had shelter, a source of heat, a way to cook, plenty of food, and still had a source of water. It was a lot more work, but it was still do-able. I wasn’t worried.”
“We had some necessities,” Judy said, “but it was so freaky quiet. There was no TV, no internet and I couldn’t get anything on the car radio. At night, there were just no sounds at all — not even crickets! After a couple of days of the power being out, seems like almost everyone in town had packed up and gone south.”
“I could see the highway from up on the slope when I was gathering sticks. Stuff all bundled on their car roofs, trailers, etc.,” Dustin added. “It looked like refugees fleeing a war zone or something.”
“Of course,” resumed Judy, “most of the people in town this time of year were the tourists, leaf peepers, so no surprise that they all packed off. I mean, last winter it was really quiet in town with just the locals, but after the tourists left it was creepy quiet. I wondered if most of the locals left too. We hardly saw any other lights, or cars, and never heard any sounds of people anywhere.”
“Until yesterday,” Dustin said. “Yesterday, a little after sundown, I was cooking up some mac n’ cheese outside on my rocket stove. Judy was in the house filtering the water I boiled, otherwise she might have seen him coming.”
“I heard voices outside,” Judy said. “So I came out to see who it was. I’d never seen him before.”
“The guy said he and his friends were up on vacation from Georgia, you know, to see the foliage, but were stranded by the outage. He seemed really friendly and said he was out searching for food since they were running low and said how really hungry he was. I offered him a plate of mac n’ cheese. He sat and ate it, but kept asking questions about how we were getting by and were we okay or worried about anything. I tried asking some questions about his friends, like where they were staying, n’ stuff, but I noticed his answers were always vague. There were ‘just a couple of them’ and were ‘over beyond the highway.’ Stuff like that. It was setting off little alarm bells in my head.”
“For me,” Judy added, “It was how he spoke. He talked with a slow southern accent, which figured, since he said he was from Georgia. But every now and then, when he was talking faster, New Jersey would leak out. Gram and Gramps came from New Jersey, so I know the accent well. I asked him if he ever lived anywhere besides Georgia, thinking maybe he grew up in Jersey, but he said no: lived there all his life. I felt a shiver run down my back. Why would a guy lie about where he came from? I didn’t like it.”
“I was creeped out too, but I offered him some more mac n’ cheese. He was playing all friendly like, so I thought I’d work that angle too. He sorta asked, but was really just telling us that he and his friends would be back for breakfast. I joked a little, asking how they liked their eggs cooked, but inside, I was all code-red.”
“Me too,” said Judy. “I saw Dustin playing along, so I did too. It took everything I had to smile and wave as he walked down the street.”
“Once he was out of sight, Judy and I ran in the house and started loading up boxes and bags. We knew we had to get out of there fast. All his questions: he was just sizing us up. Him and his friends might come back for breakfast, or they could come anytime that night. I had my shotgun, but what if there were lots of them and they rushed us? I figured we had just a little time while he walked back to his friends, told them about us, and planned whatever they were going to do. Maybe a half hour to an hour. I wanted to be gone before they came back.”
“We had our car bags all set and in the car already,” said Judy. “So I concentrated on filling up our laundry totes with our food and water. Dustin said we were coming down to your place and needed to bring supplies.”
“Glad you did,” said Martin with a glance at Margaret.
“I packed some winter clothes in the laundry duffle and got my shotgun. I only had six shells! Can you believe it? Another box of shells has been on my Walmart list for months, but just never did it. Anyhow, I kept lookout outside with my shotgun, staying out of sight behind The Beast. He made good cover out in the driveway. Judy loaded him up with the boxes and stuff. My eyes were pretty used to the dark, so I could see if anyone was coming up the street.”
“It was crazy, packing in a hurry with only that little red flashlight. It made everything slower. I was glad Dustin was watching out, so I could just concentrate on packing. We had the car loaded as full as we could get it, in about an hour.”
“We got in as quiet as we could and didn’t even snick the doors shut so we’d make no noise. I had no idea if they were going to come on foot, or what. I knew that the sound of the starter would carry a long way, so I had to get out of there fast once I started the engine. I had no idea if they had a car, would follow us, or had a roadblock on the highway or what, but I figured the sooner we were out of there, the less ready to come after us they would be.”
“I had the GPS ready,” said Judy, but I had to keep a towel over my head so the screen wouldn’t ruin Dustin’s night-eyes. Even on night-screen, it’s really bright.”
“The Beast didn’t give me any trouble starting up, for a change. Thank God for that. I hung a left and went the opposite way down the street from where the guy went. I didn’t turn on my lights and used my handbrake so I would’t light up my brake lights. I had to turn the dash lights off too, to keep a smidgeon of night vision. I could just make out the road as a darker patch between the slightly lighter yards.”
“I watched the GPS and told him when to slow down and turn.”
“It was nerve-wracking, let me tell ya. Kirkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’ has got nothin’ on night driving without lights and only your copilot’s verbal directions to go by.”
“We did pretty good though,” Judy comforted him with a pat on the arm. “We only hit that one mailbox…and that…other thing…”
“Yeah, I don’t know what that was. I hope it wasn’t a person.”
“We said we weren’t going to worry about that, remember? We got through. That’s what counts.”
“Wait. You left last night?” Margaret asked. “It’s not even a two hour drive.”
“Yeah, IF you use the main roads and IF you can use your lights,” Dustin countered. “I didn’t want to have taillights on in case they were following in a car. After I took the back roads around town, I decided it was probably best to stick to back roads.”
“We thought there would be less random traffic on back roads too,” added Judy.
“And there wasn’
t anyone out driving. It was still slow going, though. Even driving at just a crawl felt really fast. I was surprised how much I could actually make out the road in the dark. No details, of course, but I could tell where the sides were.”
“We had quite a scare outside of Farmington. It was a much narrower road and harder to see. We came over this little rise and something didn’t look right. I mean, I could barely make out anything, but still, it just seemed like there was something in the road. I thought maybe it was a moose or a deer or something. Whatever it was, I sure didn’t want to hit it.”
“I hated to do it, but I turned on my headlights. It was a man in the middle of the road. Must’ve scared the crap out of him. Sorry mom. He dropped the armload of firewood he was carrying then couldn’t decide which way to run. Finally, he ran to a pickup parked beside the road. I had to swerve around the logs he dropped in the road. The back of his truck was about a quarter full of logs. Across the road was a house. I could see the wood stack beside the garage. I’m guessing he was stealing firewood when we happened to come by.”