Perfect Little Town (3 page)

“I’m freezing, Ron.”

“I’m thinking.”

“You’re
thinking
?”

“I’ve been trying, but there’s no cell service in this valley.”

“Right.”

“No place to stay for the—”

“Quit telling me shit I already know.”

“Let’s just get back to the Benz.  I have Lortab in my bag.  We’ll tilt the seats—”

“We’re sleeping in our car now?”

“Baby, when the Lortab hits, you won’t know the difference from that seat and a bed at the Waldorf-Astoria.  We’ll crank the heat, get it warm and toasty inside.”

“Jesus, Ron.”

“It’s the best I can do, Jess.  They’ll probably have the roads plowed when we wake up, and then we’ll get the fuck out of this town.”

They near the end of Main, every building dark, no light but the muted glow of the streetlamps.  A quarter mile ahead, Ron sees the gate lowered across the highway that climbs north out of town toward the pass.

Jessica says, “See that?”

On past the buildings of Main, near the city park, a bonfire shoots ribbons of flame into the sky.

They improve their pace, Ron noting a jolt of hope, thinking this could be a party of some sort, attended by people who might help them, but as he opens his mouth to suggest this to Jessica, she shrieks and starts running toward the flames.

-16-

Speechless, they stand thirty feet back, the Italian leather seats charred beyond any hope of salvation, the glass blown out, flames licking through the windows, the dashboard boiling, the scorching tires pouring black smoke up into the falling snow.  Ron’s face tingles in the warmth, and it occurs to him that frostbite might be an appropriate concern.

“Why are they doing this to us?” Jessica asks.

“I don’t know.”

And he realizes that his wife doesn’t sound angry anymore, just confused and scared, and for the first time he feels it, too—not annoyance or frustration, but real tangible fear.

He puts his hands on her shoulders, and she lets them stay for a moment, then turns and faces him, the firelight refracting off the tears in her eyes. 

“Hold me.”

As he embraces her, the lamps up and down Main wink out, and the drink machines at the visitors’ center across the street go dark and quit humming, and an oppressive silence blankets the town, nothing beyond the whisper of snow collecting on their jackets and the quiet hisses and exhalations from the burning Benz. 

“Something’s happening,” she says.  “Isn’t it?”

“It’s probably from the storm.”

“Do you really believe that, Ron?”

-17-

They walk up a side street lined with quaint Victorians buried under loads of powder, not a light in operation as far as they can see.

Ron opens the gate of a picket fence, and they trudge through snow to the front porch.

“What are you gonna say?” Jessica whispers.

“Tell them the truth.  We need help.”

He grasps the brass knocker, raps it three times against the door.

A moment passes.

No one comes.

“Let’s try another house,” Ron says.

They try five more on that street, three on the next one over, but despite the vehicles in the driveways, proximate tracks in the snow, and other signs of habitation, every house they approach stands vacant.

-18-

Ron’s watch beeps 11:00 p.m. as they come to the corner of Main and 12
^th
, he and Jessica both shivering, the snow still dumping, and little to see but the impression of buildings and storefronts with the streetlamps out.

“We’re gonna die if we stay out here,” Jessica says, her teeth chattering.

Ron looks up and down the street, well over a foot of snow now on the pavement, the tire tracks completely covered, just a smooth sheet of snow across the road, the sidewalks, everything.

“Ron?”

A block down, on the outskirts of perception, he thinks he sees movement—figures draped in white.

“Ron!  I’m freezing to death standing—”

“I have an idea.”

They cross the street and start south down the sidewalk.

“I can’t feel my feet, Ron.”

“Then you’re lucky.  Mine are burning.”

Four blocks up, they cross 8
^th
, and Ron stops under a canopy with “Out There Outfitters” in block letters stitched into the façade of the canvas, the snow having blown against the cloth, covered most of the words.

“Why are we here?” Jessica asks.

“If we don’t get out of the elements, we’re going to die.  I figure it’s better to break into a commercial space than a private residence, right, counselor?”

She stares at him like he’s lost his mind.

“Honey, you got a better idea?”

“No.”

“Then keep a lookout and pray this place doesn’t have an alarm.”

Ron lifts the chrome, cylindrical trashcan topped with a little cigarette butt-filled sand pit over his shoulder and runs at the storefront glass.  The first strike sends a hard recoil back through the trashcan, which flies out of Ron’s grasp and smashes into the snowblown sidewalk, the glass still intact, unblemished.  He lifts the trashcan and goes at it again, the next impact causing crystalline-shaped fractures to spread like a virus through the tall window.  This time, Ron steps back and hurls the twenty-pound trashcan at the cracking glass.

It punches through, the window disintegrating. 

Ron and Jessica wait ten seconds, eyes locked.

She says finally, “No alarm.”

“Or maybe it’s disabled ‘cause the power’s out.”

-19-

They climb down out of the storefront and walk past the cash register.  Up ahead, a group of figures congeal Ron’s blood and he freezes, lets out a tiny gasp.

Jessica says, “What is it?”

“Nothing.” 

Just a trio of mannequins outfitted in fly-fishing gear.

They move on past the display cases containing rock climbing hardware and an array of ice axes.

Against the back wall, mummy bags dangle from the ceiling, flanked by dozens of external and internal frame backpacks.

They pass through a rear doorway into a dark, narrow hall.  Jessica tries the door to the bathroom, but it’s locked.

“Damn.”

“You gotta go, babe?”

“Yeah.”

“You should squat right in front of the cash register.”

“You’re a child, Ron.”

They head back into the store.

“There it is,” Ron says.

“Where?”

The darkness makes it nearly impossible to see, but in the middle of the room, between racks of overpriced Patagonia shirts and Columbia down jackets, a diorama has been constructed—dormant campfire ring, mannequins in sandals and tank tops cooking dinner in a camp stove, their backs to a two-man tent.

Ron and Jessica untie their shoes and strip out of their wet jackets and pants and crawl into the tent, into the sleeping bags, zip themselves up.

After several minutes of intense shivering, Ron notes the return of warmth—the electricity of pins and needles in his extremities, the burn of mild frostbite on his cheeks.

“You getting warm?” he asks.

“Little by little.”

He scoots his bag toward Jessica’s until he feels her breath in his face.

“How’s the pain?”

“Quit asking.”

“Sorry, I’m a doctor, it’s in my—”

“You’re a plastic surgeon.”

“Ouch.”

“I didn’t mean that.  I’m just in a ton of pain here.”

“You think this is one of those experiences we’re gonna be able to look back on and—”

“Are you kidding?”

They lie in the dark, listening to the low moan of wind pushing through the broken glass of the storefront. 

At length, Jessica sits up, says, “I can’t sleep.  I’m too thirsty, Ron.  All that wine and walking around—I just got dehydrated.”

“All right, you know that pot sitting out there in the fake campfire ring?”

“Yeah.”

“Take it out onto the sidewalk and fill it with snow.  You’ll have to pack it in really tight.  I’ll see if I can fire up the camp stove.”  

-20-

Before starting his practice thirteen years ago, Ron was an avid outdoorsman, spending countless weekends in the Cascades, even squeezing in a weekend a month outdoors during the slog of med school.  As he kneels by the fire ring in the dark and fumbles with the camp stove, he realizes how much the gear has changed in over a decade, evidenced by the five minutes it costs him to unravel the mystery of attaching the red canister of white gas.

As he screws it in, he hears Jessica climbing back through the storefront, pushing her way between clothing racks.

“How’s it going?” she asks.

He strikes the match, holds it to the burner.

The stove flares up. 

As the fire burns down, quickly consuming the modicum of propane, he opens the gas, the lazy orange flame transformed into a low blue roar.

“Put it right here.”

She sets the pot down on the stove.

“Why don’t you get three water bottles—I saw them by the daypacks—and fill them up.  It’s gonna take a lot of melted snow to fill this pot.”

While Jessica goes for more snow, Ron sits beside one of the mannequins, monitoring the stove, the heat cranked up to high, using a plastic spoon to stir the snow.

It takes longer than he anticipates, but soon he has half a pot of slush, which he pulls off the heat and transfers into a water bottle that formerly belonged to the cute blond mannequin in the tight pink sports bra.

He says, “Jess, what’s taking?”

Another minute crawls by.

He puts on his jacket and cold, wet shoes.

Turning down the heat, he stands and walks toward the front of the store, past the cash register, into the storefront.

Snow blows in through the shattered window.

Ron steps down onto the sidewalk.

“If you’re fucking around here, Jess, I will divorce you, ‘cause this isn’t even remotely…”

No response but the quiet patter of snowflakes on his jacket.

Ron glances down at the three water bottles lying in the snow, then the multiple sets of tracks leading up the sidewalk.

Twenty feet ahead, darkness and snow obscure everything.

His watch beeps midnight, and for a moment he feels sick with fear, sick to the point of vomiting, but he shoves it back into that long-forgotten nook in the pit of his stomach that he hasn’t needed since med school—those nights he woke in cold sweats in the dark, convinced he didn’t have the hardwiring to pass the boards.

-21-

In the cold, snowy silence, Ron walks up the sidewalk, his cheeks beginning to burn again, clutching in his right hand a wicked-looking ice ax with the price tag still dangling from the blade. 

He’s slept outdoors in the desert waste of Canyonlands National Park, in the immense sweep of Denali where it got so quiet those Alaskan autumn nights (after the mosquitoes finally shut up) that he imagined he could hear the stars humming like distant generators.

The silence this winter solstice as he walks the empty streets of Lone Cone seems something else entirely—more a mask than an absence, and not a shred of peace contained within it.

The tracks turn down 3
^rd
Street, Ron’s legs aching as the snow melts and seeps through his khaki slacks.  He wishes he’d thought to outfit himself in new, dry clothes from the hiking store, but it’s too late for that now.

Around the back of a late Nineteenth-Century brick building, he turns into an alley, and after twenty feet, arrives at a pair of doors without handles—the termination of the four sets of tracks.

He beats his fists against the doors, shouting, “Jessica! 
Can you hear me?
”

If she can, she makes no answer.

Ron spins around, stares at a Dumpster capped with snow, at the power lines above his head, dipping with the weight of several fragile inches that have collected on the braided wire, hears a rusty door several blocks away swaying in the wind, hinges grinding.

It occurs to him that he might be losing his mind, and he sits down against the building and buries his head between his knees and prays for the first time in many, many years.

-22-

As he rounds the corner of Main and 3
^rd
, searching for something with which to break through the front of that brick building his wife has disappeared inside, light just ahead stops him in his tracks.

He feels certain it wasn’t there before, this soft glow of firelight flooding through windows onto the snow, and at least fifty pairs of skis leaning against the front of the building.

Ron jogs over, glancing up at “Randolph Opera House” painted in ornate red lettering that arches over the entrance, and the marquee above it which displays: “Dec. 22 - Midvinterblot.”

Through the windows that frame the doors, he glimpses an empty lobby illumined by candelabras.

The doors are unlocked, and he steps inside onto red carpeting darkened by the soles of wet shoes, sees a vacant concessions booth, coat closet, walls covered in framed posters advertising stage productions, autographed photos of musicians of modest fame who’ve played this opera house over the years.

He proceeds through the lobby into a darker corridor lined with closed doors that access the theatre, hurries through an archway on the right, and quietly ascends two flights of squeaky steps.

-23-

The balcony is sparsely peopled.

He slides into a chair in the front row, peers down through the railing, the opera house lit by three hundred points of candlelight, the lower level packed with what Ron estimates to be the entire population of Lone Cone, everyone extravagantly, ridiculously costumed as if they’ve come to a carnival or a masque—headdresses of immense proportion, the details lost in the lowlight, only profiles visible, and the room redolent of whiskey and beer and the earthy malt of marijuana smoke that seems to hover in the aisles below like mist in a hollow.

The stage is the spectacle, forested in real, potted fir trees, with a painted backdrop of the mountains enclosing Lone Cone in every season, all surrounding the strangest object in the theatre—a life-size golden bear which appears to have been forged of solid bronze.