“Are you insane?” I asked. “That would be like lighting a fire under a bomb!”
“Lighting a fire under a bomb usually will not detonate it,” Ben said. “It depends on the intensity of the fire, the type of bomb, the age of the bomb, and its repair status. For example—”
“See, it’ll work,” Dad said. “The tank’s in good repair. I don’t smell propane around it. I’ll build a fire just big enough to unfreeze the nut. It won’t heat the propane enough for it to blow.”
“Maybe.” I still thought he was nuts. But on the other hand, I’d built a fire inside an SUV last year when we were escaping Iowa. Darla told me its gas tank wouldn’t explode, and it hadn’t. Would a propane tank work the same way as an SUV’s gas tank?
“Everyone else go into the office,” Dad ordered.
“If you’re so confident it’ll work, why are you sending us inside?”
“It’ll work. But if I’m wrong, that office is built like a bunker.”
“You sure about this, Doug?” Mom asked.
“Yeah.” He kissed her. “Go on.”
We all retreated to the cement-block office. Dad scooped some coals onto a log and grabbed a handful of kindling. Nobody else did anything. We stared at each other, dreading and half-expecting an explosion.
I leaned out the door to watch Dad work. He was silhouetted by the blaze he’d built under the propane tank. The idea seemed even dumber now as flames licked the underside of the tank, blackening it.
I felt a hand on my side. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Mom had joined me at the doorway. “Your Dad wouldn’t want you out here,” she said.
“I know. You either,” I replied, but neither of us made any move to leave.
Dad took off his left glove and wadded it up in his right hand. He reached almost into the fire, grabbing the lever through the double layer of insulation. He turned it easily; I heard the clank of the catch releasing. Dad yelled “Yes!” and kicked his boot through the fire, scattering the burning sticks into the snow.
“Told you,” he said as he passed us, returning to the office.
We spent the rest of the afternoon digging a path from the truck to the tank. The only tools we had were the spade, snow shovel, and three sticks left over from our battering ram. The mountain of hard-packed snow and ice alongside the highway yielded slowly to our assault. Around midafternoon, the snow shovel broke. After that, working on our knees, we used the blade to scrape or push the snow.
The only tool left that worked well was the spade. Its sharp blade would cut into the packed snow, and the fiberglass handle was apparently unbreakable. Soon we settled into a rhythm—one person would always be on break, watching the road. When the person on the spade slowed, the rested person would take over. Everyone else used their hands to dig.
The highway was deserted all day. It made sense, I guessed—with the Peckerwoods wiped out, they wouldn’t be using the road. And any Black Lake employees going back to their camp would head east toward Maquoketa, not south toward us.
By nightfall we’d cleared a hole in the snow berm barely large enough to pull the truck off the road. We still had almost one hundred feet of deep snow between the truck and tank.
We slept around the fire in the smoky office. Despite the draft from the open door, it was easily the warmest place I’d slept since I’d left Worthington.
It took us the entirety of the next day to excavate a path large enough for the truck. It was mind-numbing work that left me far too much time to imagine what Darla might be going through while we dug in the snow. By the time we had the truck backed up so that the open rear doors engulfed the end of the tank, the dim yellowish daytime light was being replaced by murky twilight.
The following morning, we faced the problem of how to get the tank loaded the rest of the way onto the truck. Dad tried backing the truck under it, but it just pushed the base of the tank along. And if the base collapsed, we’d have no good way to raise the tank back up to the right level.
We needed something to multiply our strength. We needed more of Ben’s levers, although I could have done without his repeat disquisition on the role of the lever in military history. We cut three small trees and jammed them under the back end of the tank so we could slide it forward by pushing up on them. That was the theory, anyway. What actually happened was that one of the trees broke, and we didn’t shift the tank one iota.
“Use these trees as a brace, maybe?” Alyssa asked.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Brace the back end of the tank so it can’t slide. Then back up the truck. The base will slide back, and the tank should be forced into the truck.”
Her solution worked beautifully. In less than twenty minutes, we had a UPS truck-cum-propane tank setup that looked like the Jolly Green Giant had knocked over his brown lunch box, leaving an ear of corn sticking out the top.
It took an hour of fiddling with hoses and fittings to get the big propane tank connected to the smaller tanks inside the truck. When Dad cranked the truck, it started right up—and the fuel gauge shot to full.
“Now we’re in business!” Dad yelled, a huge smile splitting his face. Alyssa, Dad, and I shared high fives. Ben did not like arbitrary touching, and Mom wasn’t even smiling.
“What?” I asked her.
“Now that we’ve got a working vehicle and plenty of fuel, we should go straight to Warren,” Mom said.
“We discussed this last night, Janice,” Dad replied, his smile disappearing.
“I’m going with Alex,” Alyssa said.
“Even if we did go to Iowa City and this Darla is alive, how are we going to find her?” Mom asked.
“Um,” Alyssa said in a tremulous voice, “I have an idea.”