Settlement

1

At the Hotel el Rancho in Gallup the snow was coming down and to the east the cloud ceiling dropped down black on the horizon. We ate hamburgers in an empty dining room next to an empty dancehall. The waiter was a young Indian. He spoke Indian to the dishwasher and Spanish to everyone else. We asked him what he thought our chances were making it to Albuquerque. He said they could close the interstate but probably they wouldn’t. Probably it would be alright. 

My father looked at silver in the gift shop. Rings and bracelets. The attendant woman was old and had never married. She said as much. We bought nothing and went outside. In the truck the dog was shivering.

We drove east. The snow came down hard and then it came down harder. The sun set or appeared to set. Traffic at a crawl. Visibility at nothing. At Acoma we pulled off the highway and talked chances. The motels were filling up, the snow a foot and rising. We put gas in the tank and bought an ice scraper. 

We moved into the dark. Out of the dark came the wind and with the wind came sheets of snow burning in the headlamps. We rolled at barely over an idle. Two lanes and then one, the highway gone white and the shoulder washed away. Ice blowing sideways through the beams, vapor spools rolling off the frozen ground.

One by one cars spun out, were lost in the darkness and distance. Someone following too close tries to stop short or swerve, fishtails down the bank into an arroyo, hazards tocking, a wife holding her nose, Christmas presents sprayed over the backseat, the husband starting to assess, always assessing, the heater already sputtering.

At Sky City they shut the highway and moved everyone off. A cop directed traffic from the offramp into a roundabout. I put down my window.

Where do you want us to go?

Just keep moving, he said. You’re obstructing. 

But where are we going?

The gas station. 

I got back in line. Hundreds of cars streaming into a slush lot between a truckstop and the Sky City Casino and Hotel. My father went to see about a room. I let the dog down to sniff but she wanted none of it and jumped back in the truck. I smoked a cigarette and watched the cars come on and on, families struck dumb, blinking in the casino light. Men stretching in the drifts urinated openly on their hands.

My father came back to say that there were no rooms. They were giving people blankets and putting them up in the bingo hall but they had run out of blankets. 

I went through the lobby to have a look. Children asleep in chairs or playing fantasy adventure games on portable electronic devices. Women curled on the floor, staring at the carpet. Old men wandering off to play the slots. A mobile smartphone device plugged into every available outlet.

We sat in the truck and talked chances. We did not like the bingo hall and we did not like sleeping in the truck but worst case was we got stuck and slept in the truck. We had plenty of gas.

I circled the lot and turned out to try to get back on the freeway. A patrolman waved me down and yelled for us to not get back on, that this was the end of the line. We asked about another road and he pointed to an orange truck. 

He’s gonna try to find Route 66 but I can’t recommend you follow him. You can follow him but I can’t recommend you follow him. 

I said I understood. We followed the orange truck down a rutted cow path in the utter black until we came to Route 66. 

If he goes left we’re going right, said my father.

The orange truck turned left and was gone in the dark. We turned right and kept on east where the road ran parallel with Interstate 40. 

All the little houses set back in the hills. Cars sunk in heaves of white. The silence and the ratcheting dark. We stopped at a bar to ask directions, predict outcomes. A sign said, GRAB SOME. A Buick parked by the front door buried up to the windows. Inside the bartender sat at a table playing solitaire smoking a long cigarette. The television showed a program where the police hunt for fugitives in Texas or Florida. 

My father asked if Route 66 ever got back to Interstate 40. 

The bartender shook her head. 

No road does.

We drove on. We passed a church lit from the inside and decided to remember it in case it came to that. After an hour we came to a turnoff for the interstate. There was no highway patrol and from the overpass I could see the the interstate deserted in both directions. I dropped down the onramp and kept going. 

For hours we saw no one. No thing moved. Cars lost off the road on both sides. Semis jackknifed, trailers twisted, splintered off the chassis. I drove with my face against the windshield, my father watching for the edge of the blacktop, keeping me centered, calling out left or right. In the flurries I saw things moving that were not there. Animals there were not there. Dogs and bears. I shook my face.

Whenever the wipers froze I stopped and my father swung out to break the ice off the blades. After that we kept going. When the blades froze again he broke off the ice again. That was how it went.

Occasionally there were lights in the distance. A wrecker on some dark errand. A circle of police cars huddled up, patrolmen pacing outside. As we passed, one of the pursuit cars left out from the group and pulled in front of us, lights on full bright, accelerating and holding. We followed him for ten miles before he turned off. At the top of the exit we stopped next to him and he came over to talk. 

Why did you get off? he said.

I was following you. 

Where you going? 

Albuquerque. 

Then keep going. But watch the drop on this side. That’s what happened to him.

I let out the brake and crept down the slope and saw where a semi had gotten caught across the ramp, the cab hanging off the road and the trailer blocking most of both lanes. As I pulled around another pursuit car went by with his lights on. He tried to stop and couldn’t and tumbled off spraying into the dark. I did not see him again. We drove on.

Little by little the road came back, the track came back, the lines came back. Little by little we saw the desert again.

Just before Albuquerque there was a billboard for a father and son casino lounge act. Hurricane Al and Hurricane Al Jr. Indians both. Senior holding a guitar and junior wearing an eye patch. We drove down the mountain into Albuquerque, the only car moving in any direction. 

That night in Santa Fe I thought I would dream of the snow and the shapes I saw moving in it but I did not dream of it and I did not dream of anything. On the table by my bed a pair of sparrow wings, a stick of sandalwood. 

Some days later I returned to another part of the country where it does not snow. I returned to my cottage by the ocean and I returned to my porch to sit and to return. Still I did not dream of the snow or the things that moved in it. 

After the new year I returned to the gym. A four hundred pound man wearing a Starbucks uniform worked the handcrank machine. On the television there was an important notice that revealed Katie and Russell were ending their marriage. On another television it was revealed that a husband and wife had posted photos of their children bound in duct tape to a popular social networking website. A third television played a news broadcast that revealed an eighteen year old widowed mother had shot and killed an intruder in her Texas home. In front of the cameras she rocked an infant bottlefed. 

I knew the man I killed, she said. I knew him from the rodeos. He used to watch me do the barrel racing. 

Later it was revealed why she was a widow. That her husband had died of cancer on Christmas.

I walked the aisles and watched the women on the treadmills. The secret of the world lies in these murders.

Now a cold front has come off the ocean. At dark and at dawn the stars are the same stars. I think about the snow in the mountains. How it was there and how we came through the dark into the bright lights of the city. How we were alone when we did it and how the dog slept the whole way. How my father’s hands looked through the glass when he got out to break the ice from the wiper blades. 

I lie down to dream but I do not dream. Nextdoor I hear the girls talking in their kitchen. 

I know how to make my life better, says one.

How? says the other.

Every time I have a negative thought I replace it with a positive one.

Yes. I have a book that says that. It says that works. That it makes you better.

It does. It really does.

In these murders the secret of the world. 

I lie down to dream but I do not dream. At work a stranger asks me when I’m going away.

You mean, when do I get off work?

No, he says. When are you leaving?

Am I leaving?

I thought you were, he says. I thought you were going away. 

Am I? Maybe I am. 

I think you are, he says. I think that’s what I heard. 

The televisions. The President saying things. Iowa. Women on treadmills. Girls on balconies. The paint on the cars. The secret of the world in these murders.

I lie down to dream and finally I dream. This is what I dream:

In the beginning water went they say. Land was not they say. Grizzlies were not they say. Leopards were not they say. Stars were not they say. In the beginning only water they say. It was very dark they say.