Henry was thinking. Snow falls so slowly. Nothing else falls this slowly. Not from the sky. He wasn’t capable of feeling emotions anymore. He sensed things though. The way an instrument might, a machine that measures temperatures and pressures. His physical senses were heightened. The same sharpening happened when he went into the Pie Stop with his brother Jesse. While he watched Jesse picking the diners off. When he saw Wyatt Larkin hunched between the tables, then later when he shot Wyatt in the back. After the grenade went off, it was silence. Ears filled with white noise. A soft popping like Styrofoam kernels mashed together in a bag. He found his slug on the floor and took it. Like Whiteside had promised, no one seemed to see him. He was a ghost.
The grinding of gearings. Tires ripping up pavement. Lights.
Henry stepped out into the middle of the highway. He raised his arms above his head and waved. The headlights were fireballs.
Brakes hissed. The upper curve of the snowplow blade leveled with his chest.
His arms came down slowly like the snow.
He walked up to the driver’s side. The guy sat close to the wheel. Gnomelike, bearded. A cigarette dipped from his mouth. The green felt cap he wore was melting off to one side. A bell glinted at its tip.
Santa’s Helper was stitched into the band. The guy had the window rolled down. That would make it easier.
“You having a problem?”
“I found a bag of toys,” Henry said.
“What?”
“I found a bag of toys. You drove right over it. It’s under your front tire.”
The driver chuckled, frowned. He plucked the cigarette away. Then he leaned out the window and looked.
Henry opened his coat. Tucked the shotgun under the driver’s beard.
Pulled the trigger.
Henry wiped his face on his sleeve.
He popped the door handle.
The body sagged out. Cigarette still lit between the fingers.
Inside the cab, the heater was on High-High. The seat was warm. Henry adjusted it backward to accommodate his legs. The man who had been sitting there seconds ago sprawled across the highway’s double yellow line. Henry shut the door and put the truck in gear. A strawberry spill fanned across the hood. The bell stuck in the middle of it.
He drove out to the edge of town.
The highway was the only passable route connecting American Rapids to destinations south. Windswept farm roads branched east and west. They’d be snowed under. After leaving the Fuel ’N Snacks, he punched a memorized number into the pay phone next to the air pump and called the border patrol. Said he’d be coming across with a bomb. That he’d blow it sky-high on the bridge. Vehicles trickling over from Canada this evening would be searched and slowed. Henry hammered south with the blade down. White orange sparks arced into the ditch. It was pretty.
A mile out.
No houses.
No business.
He increased speed. Steered right. The plow blade cut into the filthy ridge of snow. Throwing it back onto the highway. Cigarette butts, bottles, paper plastic glass rubber steel, the furred bones of excavated roadkill—all going back where it came from.
Gouging trash and leaving a black wound in the earth.
The cab rocked. The blade shuddering, jamming, kicking as it caught large stones and wedges of pavement banged loose from their sockets. He pulled harder to the right.
Off the road.
Running parallel. Killing the tires.
The plow snapped up a snow fence, spit the snarl of stakes and wire.
A stake—end over end, topping the blade—smacked a star into the windshield.
He knuckled down, hands tight.
The muscles in his shoulders burned.
Telephone poles—he chopped into them. The lines swooping like tentacles, slithering over the cab. The truck body lifting, dropping, as if he were driving over a field of boulders, no . . . grave markers. Horrible noises. Like the cry of beasts in the jungle. It came from the snowplow. The windshield buckling inward, giving, and finally it broke with a congestive cough. A shower of blue pebbled glass piled in his lap like jewels. He ignored them. His blade bent, cockeyed. Thrust forward like a great tusk. He was bleeding. His forehead cut—nothing serious—he thumbed the blood away.
He slowed to survey his work. Bringing the wheel around, reversing, nosing into his path of destruction. Stopping to bear witness. Yes. That’s what he saw: destruction. No car or ordinary truck could pass this mountain of snow and ice. The felled wooden poles demanded chain saws and winches. He watched the blowing snow begin to hide them under blankets. It was like a monster sleeping in the road.
The highway out of town was blocked.
He tractored slowly through the torn field. He wasn’t sure if
the plow would make it. The ground was uneven, the plow damaged. He heard the shallow creek ice smashing under his wheels like mirrors.
Back on the highway, the side that was now trapped, the damned side—the home of American Rapids. Population 2,480. But not for long.
Henry idled.
Through the missing windshield the witch wind sprang on him fiercely. His face, stripped raw with pain, hardened into a mask of pinks and scarlet. He prayed for his death. Fully knowing he was a hell-bound sinner, he would have died, then and there ... if he could have. He prayed from deep inside what Whiteside had made him. Prayed, but Death did not come.
He had more things he must do.
But first he had to wait.