Matilda Barto glared through her sunglasses at the endlessly falling snow and briefly considered just giving up on the morning and trying to fight her way home. The day really probably wasn't going to get any better, unless by some miracle the weather actually caught up with the calendar and suddenly, miraculously, this became the kind of June she remembered even from years past.
Even last June compared favorably. Yes, there had still been snow, but only about a dozen inches, and the river flowed freely with a little bit of runoff and was floatable in a canoe, if you brought a sledgehammer to break up the bigger ice floes. The fishing, too, had been extraordinary. Oh, had they been hungry! Ah, June.
This June, though, this June, there was still a good four feet of snow on the ground, the river was still frozen over except for spots where hot springs fed into it, and every kind of wind except the Chinooks that were supposed to melt off all the snow and warm up the landscape again kept whipping across her chapped face.
And she'd just broken the binding on her left ski for the third time since April.
Just short of a mile away from the highway.
Was this the time to berate herself again for having chosen to go on living in the cabin by the river out on the Herring-Hart ranch instead of a nice apartment in town like everyone else, even after gasoline prices had gotten so high that no one who wasn't a trust fund baby could afford to commute by car?
No, it really wasn't, but Matilda did, just for a moment. Then she had more immediate concerns; her toolkit was back at the house.
Not, judging from the damage this time – all three pins had sheared off when she'd accidentally strayed off her trail and hit that rock – that having her tool kit would do all that much good anyway.
Sighing, Matilda released the other binding, threw her skis and poles over her shoulder, and began fighting her way through the deep, deep snow. One would think seven months of skiing along this trail would have packed it down enough to bear up under at least some weight.
One would be wrong.
By the time Matilda reached the highway, she was winded, her face red, her heart beating hard and sideways in her chest. Each step between the rock and the highway had plunged her hip deep in snow, and the snow had not wanted to let her go, caking heavily on her wool pants, her gaiters, packing in between her boot laces. The eyelets on her boots had turned traitor, let in wads of snow that melted into icy cold water and soaked her socks.
At last she broke through the towering wall of snow created by eighteen months of plows and found herself on the highway itself.
Knowing she need fear little actual automobile traffic anymore, Matilda threw her skis and poles onto the pavement and bent over, hands on her knees, head hanging down, to catch her breath. Screw making it to work on time; her entire body burned with lactic acid and muscle strain, her feet stung with new blisters from walking in ski boots.
At least the highway had been plowed recently. To stand on the pavement was to lose all sight of the surrounding landscape, stuck in a trench with sides that reached well over Matilda's head, but at least the agonizing high-step-and-sink routine was over.
Gradually, she regained her breath and was able to force herself to pick up her gear, to stand, to begin walking, gingerly at first on the frequent patches of ice, then with greater confidence. She slid occasionally, but had gotten and kept her ice legs a long time ago. Eight miles to town.
First thing she was going to do was check the classifieds in the newspaper and find an apartment, if there was one to be had. She could maybe move into it gradually, pare down her belongings so she could make the move in one expensive trip in her increasingly useless pickup. She'd have to lay off the schnapps and a lot of other luxuries for a while to afford it, but it would be worth it. Enough of this crap.
A rumbling sound in the distance, and wasn't it a somehow familiar noise? Matilda stopped, listened, tried to place it. Coming from the direction of the tiny town of Battle, 35 miles south of her destination. Surely it wasn't a car engine? What could possibly be so important. A car trip from Battle ? Or, could it be, even further south?
No way. Imagination, memory, fata morgana... Matilda kept trudging onward, trying to focus on the problem she had set for herself: how many books she could bear to part with for the sake of living in town again and no longer having to make this kind of trudge to work every day.
A lot, actually.
The sound persisted, stubborn for something that was just in her head. It even seemed to doppler. She stopped again, watching her breath freeze in front of her. When was the last time she'd heard a car engine on this road? Other than a snowplow, of course. Even without car traffic, the road needed to stay passable; horses had just as much trouble as she had in making their way through the depths of this snow – and she was never pulling wagon loads of people, hay, furniture, supplies. Groceries, yes, but only what fit in her backpack.
Maybe her memory for sounds was just getting warped, and she just thought it sounded like a car engine. Maybe she'd finally just lost it, gone mad in the snow and the emptiness like so many had done before. There was a story told sometimes over coffee or beer at the Bawdy Beaver about a settler man back in the 1800s who spent the whole winter trying to feed the frozen corpses of his wife and children. He'd cook a whole meal for them every day over the little stove. When they'd found the sod cabin in the spring the bodies were covered in frozen stew, barley porridge, clots of long-congealed and now rancid gravy, and he had disappeared.
Maybe she was lucky she was just imagining car noises.
A gust of wind roared down the canyon that was the roadway, penetrating right through the knit of her wool sweater. She'd not worn her long underwear today – too filthy from a week's sweating in it during the exertions of her trip to and from town; she couldn't bear the smell of it when she had dressed. She regretted that now as stinging little needles of ice caught in the wind ripped at her skin through the sweater.
If she was going to be moving, she might as well set her sights on really moving, she decided then, gritting her teeth and resuming her trek. The Weather Channel – solar powered and relocated to central Wyoming since 2012 – always showed South Texas in greenish-blue on its temperature maps, indicating that at least there were occasional thaws there. The shows had long stopped bothering with still more shots of Texans, Floridians, Mexicans dealing with the unfamiliar onslaught of snow and frost. It would have been more interesting if they'd all still been trying to drive cars on it. Sliding, slipping, jackknifing, wrecks. And less depressing than the daily counts of frozen senior citizens found dead in their air-conditioned but not insulated homes.
Still, a thaw was a thaw.
And why limit her ambitions so?
Good god, either she really was already beyond hope or that really was a car. It was even louder now, almost like it was right behind her.
Matilda turned around, squinted. She could actually see it, an old pickup, its color indefinable under a crust of dirty ice, barreling along at a speed she hadn't seen in a long time – definitely over 55, the government's old recommended optimum speed for safety and gas mileage. Wow.
Old reflexes kicked in. The truck was barreling along towards her, and she was in its way. Try to dig a refuge in the snow to clear out of the way, or try to wave it down and hope the driver gave a damn that she was there?
Both. She threw herself into the wall of snow and ice, hacking at it with everything she had except for the lone ski pole – mercifully, hot pink – she waved frantically in her left hand.
The snow wouldn't yield. Maybe if she had a sledgehammer.
The truck was getting closer. Maybe a mile away. It would be here in less than a minute. And it wasn't slowing down.
Matilda started to scream and pressed herself up against the snowbank. She ripped her water bottle out of her backpack loop. Frozen solid. It would probably break the windshield. She threw it anyway, with all her might. Anything to get his attention. Anything.
Her throw didn't even cover half the distance. The bottle bounced pointlessly on the icy road. Still Matilda screamed.
She was still screaming when the truck swerved to miss her, though the sound was drowned out by the sound of metal tearing through compacted ice and snow and the roaring rev of the engine. Roar and roar and roar as the driver first tried to bully through, roar and roar and roar again as he tried then to back out of the impact crater in the side of the road.
He succeeded at last, and the truck came to a stop just a few feet away from where Matilda had at last, her throat raw, stopped screaming.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing, you fucking maniac?" Matilda demanded as a large man swathed head to toe in the cleanest set of Carhartts she had ever seen strode her way. "You fucker. You fucker." Her eyes squeezed shut, her hoarse voice grew louder. "You fucker."
"Cuss all you want, little lady, but you're lucky I saw you to swerve."
"Fucker. Fucker. Fucker." Matilda was shaking all over, but from the cold. The crotch of her pants was unexpectedly warm. Oh god, she'd actually peed herself. "FUCK!"
The driver of the truck stood silently in front of her while she raged on, his mouth hanging slightly open, as though he were stunned, surprised to see a woman so angry.
Finally Matilda was quiet. Still pressed flat against the snow she took a good look at the man who had failed at the last second to kill her. He really was huge, a good foot and a half or more taller than she, and proportionally broad and formidably built, if his coveralls didn't lie. His face was hidden within a hood and ball cap and behind a big pair of snowmobile goggles. Only his lips and a wild red beard rapidly crusting with ice from his breath were visible.
He wasn't from anywhere around here, either. She'd never seen anyone like him in her life.
Matilda opened her mouth to speak, but couldn't think of anything to say. What does one say after screaming "fucker" at the top of her lungs at a complete stranger?
"Are you going to be okay?" he finally asked.
Matilda started to cry.
"Hey..." the stranger put out a hand as if to pat her shoulder or something, then pulled it back. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small bottle of Wild Turkey. "Here."
Matilda gulped at it greedily, downing several shots worth before trying again to speak. She could feel tears and salt building up; the wind stung where they wet the exposed skin of her face, and she realized her own sunglasses had slid off in the confusion. They hung on by only one ear piece.
"Thanks," she said, screwing the bottle cap back on.
"No, you keep that. So, are you OK?"
"I guess so." She took a big breath, let it out in a thick cloud of condensation.
"You're not bleeding or anything that I can see. Probably just had a big scare. I really am sorry about that. Probably a hundred miles or better since I've actually seen anyone on this road."
Another deep breath. Another. The Wild Turkey was helping.
"Oh, your ski's broken," the man said, pointing.
Almost normal now. "No, no, that was already broken. It's why I was walking."
"Bad place to break a ski. How far are we from town now? With all the signs buried, I'm pretty much dead reckoning." He smiled, revealing huge teeth.
"About five miles. Hooo..." Matilda let out another huge breath. "Maybe six."
"Wait, then, which town?"
"Colter Valley."
"Colter Valley. Colter Valley. Shit. They always say don't blink or you'll miss Battle, and I guess I finally did."
"Overshot, huh?"
"Guess I'll have to overshoot some more, too," the man said, looking over at his pickup. "I don't imagine I'm going to be able to turn that around out here."
Matilda smiled a little. "Probably not."
"Probably lucky I was able to get it out of the snowbank, aren't I?"
A little more. "Yes."
"Well, I assume you were heading into CV?"
"Yes."
"And this wasn't just a pleasure trip?"
"No."
"Supply run?"
"Actually, I was on my way to work."
"Holy balls, you live somewhere out here and you work in CV?"
"Used to be kind of nice," Matilda said. "I have a little house on the river, right near an eagle's next, good little fishing eddy right there, nice bike ride into town in the summer."
"Summer? Oh yeah, I remember those." It had become a standard joke, actually pretty tired, like co-workers saying one remembered vacations, or friends with kids saying they remembered sex. Matilda gave a little laugh anyway.
"Yeah," she said. "So anyway, I've been thinking maybe it's time to reconsider my living arrangements."
"Not a bad idea, considering."
"Yeah, considering."
"So, what do you do in CV?"
"Oh, actually, I'm sort of a teacher."
"You're kidding."
"Yeah. I mean no, I'm not. Kidding, I mean."
"But, well, I know it doesn't look much like it, but, shouldn't it be, you know, summer vacation now?" Both of them laughed at this.
"We're still catching up from all of the snow days, actually," Matilda said, and laughed some more. But then, U"m, not that it's not great talking to you and all, but –"
"Aw, I'm being an asshole, aren't I. You want a ride into town? Least I can do."

NEW STUFF AS OF SUNDAY STARTS HERE

"Oh," Matilda said, eyeing the stranger, the roadway, the truck. He seemed nice enough, but isn't that what they had always said about Ted Bundy or Sandro Hinman? And in these days of even greater isolation and danger...
On the other hand – "Wow. Do you know how long it's been since I've ridden in a truck? Mine's pretty much just a beached whale back at the house. It hasn't even had gas in it in probably a year. I don't even know if it will start now."
"Well, ma'am," the stranger said, picking up Matilda's dropped skis and poles. "Come with me. I'll drop you off wherever you like. School, I suppose?"
"Yeah. Know where that is?"
"I believe so. It's been years, but hey, Colter Valley isn't that big a town. Especially now, I suppose. How many folks are still here?" He opened the passenger door, cleared the seat of roadmaps and other debris, helped Matilda to clamber inside.
"A few hundred or so, I think. There's about seventy kids in the high school, anyway."
"More than I would have expected, considering. Tough folks out here, tough folks."
"Or crazy. Or stubborn."
"To-may-to, to-mah-to," the stranger said.
"Good point. Oh, by the way," Matilda said, holding out a still-mittened hand as the stranger started up the truck. "Matilda Barto."
"Oh, manners still blowing out in the wind someplace. Sorry. Modi Ericsson." He paused for a moment, eyebrows raised. Should she know the name from somewhere? "Pleased to meet you, Mrs? Miss? Ms?"
"Oh, Miss, I guess. I never did like 'Ms." much. But just call me Matilda, Mr. Ericsson."
"Then I'm Modi." He started the truck and they were off, exposed strata of snow and ice whizzing past her eyes faster than she could recall having seen it in years, it seemed.
"So, what do you do, Modi?"
"I'm... I'm sort of retired, actually. It's complicated."
"Oh, so you're not bringing anything to the market or anything?"
"Just myself."
"Just yourself? On a car trip?"
"Yup."
"Some retirement. Christ, I'm going to have to save up for a month or so just for a tank of gas to move back into town, I think. How in the hell do you– Sorry. I'm being rude."
"Not at all. Maybe I will tell you about it someday, but for now, just, well, you'll understand. Someday. Maybe."
"I guess so." Matilda frowned, turned to look again out the window. "Did you ever see this country before the Big Freeze? It was so beautiful. Hay meadows, cottonwood trees, wildflowers... cows that didn't look like they'd come from concentration camps."
"Used to come fishing here when I was a kid. I know what you mean," Modi said. "I always liked to stop and swim at that one bend in the Medicine Cloud, where there's that sort of grotto with the exposed tree roots and the runoff from the meadow trickling through them into that pond."
"God, yeah. I always thought my friends and I were the only ones who did that!"
"I think everybody thinks that."
"Could be. So, wow, you know this area pretty well."
"Like I said, I've been coming here since I was a kid."
"Wonder that I never met you."
"We always kind of kept to ourselves. Up on the hill."
"Oh, you were at the country club?"
"Most of the time. We stayed at the – hey, did you say your name's Barto?"
"Uh huh."
"As in the Barto Hotel?"
"Yes."
"Belong to your family, then?"
"It did, but it's closed now. Long story, there."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Modi said. "Best prime rib I ever had."
Matilda smiled, but her voice as she replied was barely above a whisper. "Dad never got tired of hearing that."
"Huh?"
"Nothing. But, you know, thanks for saying that."

The rest of the ride passed pleasantly enough, banal questions about how Colter Valley had changed since the snows came to stay coupled with more fruitless attempts to learn how Modi rated the gasoline to travel around just on a seeming whim. Of course he obviously came from wealth, or he wouldn't have frequented the old Copper Mountain Club... Could it really just be money? Did the economy still work that way somewhere out there?
Most of the students were still just arriving when they pulled into the parking lot at the Colter Valley School, so there were plenty of gawkers on hand to watch Matilda emerge. A few younger kids eyed the truck's bed for merchandise, their disappointment obvious when they saw nothing but Miss Barto's crappy old skis. One or two nudged closer to Modi and Matilda, ready to ask questions, but Matilda shooed them off with promises to tell all soon enough.
"Light the stove, and make sure the big pot's on top; we've got a big batch to make today," she called after Corson, her student aide.
"Is he coming, too?" the boy asked, nodding at Modi.
"Well, that depends. Get inside and get things ready, would you?"
Corson nodded and headed toward the building.
"Is he coming, too?" Matilda echoed. "You're more than welcome to join us, since you saved me a tardy and all."
"Join you in what?"
"Well, my kids are making another batch of soap, but I'm going to have some coffee. Got a preference?"
"Soap?"
"Soap."
"What is it you said you teach again?"
"Well, home ec. Or a version of it. We make do, nowadays."
"Ah."
"So did you want some coffee, then?"
"Where does it come from?"
"Our very own greenhouse. Still working on the roast, so I can't guarantee you're going to like it, but, well... Want some?"
"Sure!"
Matilda gestured for him to follow, and they joined the small line of children filing into the school, a school much altered from Matilda's own days attending there. Classrooms doubled as laboratories, bakeries, aquaculture facilities, meeting rooms. It had truly become the heart of Colter Valley. She pointed out some of the more interesting rooms as she led Modi down the halls.
"Over there, my friend Tomasi has his first and second hour classes raising tilapia fish for food, and they have tanks of... something else, I forget, that they make into fish meal to feed the pigs in the pens down the road."
"Impressive."
"Yeah, well, we get tired of eating half-starved beef all the time. They've got a greenhouse, too, where they grow my coffee when there's space. Tomasi keeps wanting to experiment with hydroponics but so far it's just pots of plants."
"So he's kind of feeding the whole town?"
"Well, a lot. He takes it all to the old supermarket. There's some other people around who have set-ups sort of like these, too, just not as big. We're sort of back on the barter system, mostly, but our school board has ruled that anything the school produces needs to be pretty much freely available to anyone that really needs it."
"And you've got your kids making soap?"
"Pine Tar, mostly." Matilda nodded.
"So, when do they learn the good old stuff? You know, reading..."
"Oh, there's plenty of time for that while, say, the fat renders or the glycerine hardens. Plus, you know, there's a lot of math in cooking, just like there's a lot of science in raising fish or growing tomatoes. Tomasi's even got a few of the older kids working on plant breeding."
"All very practical. Wow," Modi said. "This is the most interesting place I've visited in years."
"I think you're going to turn out to be an interesting visitor." Matilda opened the door to her classroom, in which a dozen students were already busy stirring away at enormous iron kettles with wooden spoons. Corson rushed up at the sound of the door with a jar of what was smelled like Vicks Vap-O-Rub.
"You're gonna need this," he said, holding the jar out to Modi. "I always do. It stinks to high heaven in here when we get going on the rendering."
"Corson, that's really thoughtful! Thank you for thinking of him," Matilda said proudly. "I'll take some, too, when you're done. I've never gotten used to the smell myself."
"Thanks." Modi dosed himself, handed the jar to Matilda, and began to peel off his layers of winter clothing. Matilda did the same.
A commotion arose as the goggles came off.
"Guys! Guys! C'mere! It's Modi Ericsson, I swear to God!" Corson bellowed after taking a good look at his face.
"Who's Modi Ericsson?" a girl asked without turning around. "Never heard of 'im."
"You wouldn't know, I guess," a smaller boy said, bustling past her. The girl cursed under her breath as he knocked over a plate of pork cracklings. The boy, oblivious, continued his dash to the front of the room, followed by most of his classmates. "Wow, Miss Barto, how'd you get Modi Ericsson to come all the way out here?"
"You guys know him?" Matilda was confused. Sure, the name had sounded vaguely familiar, but.
The general cacophony assured her that yes, they did, and that this was definitely the most exciting thing that had happened all school year.
Matilda turned around to get a good look. He was quite tall, as she'd seen already, and his hair was indeed a very bright red, long, curly and exceedingly well-groomed for having been crammed into a hat all morning. He was also rather well-dressed in a pair of machine-made khaki pants that were as clean as his Carhartts and a deep blue oxford cloth shirt. Matilda had to admit he looked pretty good, better than she would have guessed from their encounter on the road. Broad shoulders, bulky but solid build, big, strong hands.
And then there were his eyes.
"Very dark eyes are so attactive because they look like large dilated pupils, which is a powerful sexual signal," Matilda blurted, staring into them. They were very widely spaced, and blinked slowly under raised eyebrows. Then she realized what she had just said. "Oh my god, I–"
"Shh," Modi said, "Not in front of the children." And he laughed softly, and there were those teeth again.
Matilda blushed, hurried over to a far counter, and began to measure out her carefully roasted bens for the grinder, breathing deeply. Meanwhile, the children crowded around Modi, pestering him with questions she couldn't hear over the sound of her pulse pounding in her ears. Where the hell had that come from? She bowed her head further over the grinder and began to crank.
"One question at a time, kids," she heard Modi say. "We're not in any hurry."

- posted by Kate Sherrod @ 6:47 AM

 
Matilda Barto glared through her sunglasses at the endlessly falling snow and briefly considered just giving up on the morning and trying to fight her way home. The day really probably wasn't going to get any better, unless by some miracle the weather actually caught up with the calendar and suddenly, miraculously, this became the kind of June 20 she remembered even from last year.
Ah, last June. Yes, there had still been snow, but only about a dozen inches, and the river flowed freely with a little bit of runoff and was floatable in a canoe, if you brought a sledgehammer to break up the bigger ice floes. The fishing, too, had been extraordinary. Oh, had they been hungry! Ah, June.
This June, though, this June, there was still a good four feet of snow on the ground, the river was still frozen over except for spots where hot springs fed into it, and every kind of wind except the Chinooks that were supposed to melt off all the snow and warm up the landscape again kept whipping across her chapped face.
And she'd just broken the binding on her left ski for the third time since April.
Just short of a mile away from the highway.
Was this the time to berate herself again for having chosen to go on living in the cabin by the river out on the Herring-Hart ranch instead of a nice apartment in town like everyone else, even after gasoline prices had gotten so high that no one who wasn't a trust fund baby could afford to commute by car?
No, it really wasn't, but Matilda did, just for a moment. Then she had more immediate concerns; her toolkit was back at the house.
Not, judging from the damage this time – all three pins had sheared off when she'd accidentally strayed off her trail and hit that rock – that having her tool kit would do all that much good anyway.
Sighing, Matilda released the other binding, threw her skis and poles over her shoulder, and began fighting her way through the deep, deep snow. One would think seven months of skiing along this trail would have packed it down enough to bear up under at least some weight.
One would be wrong.
By the time Matilda reached the highway, she was winded, her face red, her heart beating hard and sideways in her chest. Each step between the rock and the highway had plunged her hip deep in snow, and the snow had not wanted to let her go, caking heavily on her wool pants, her gaiters, packing in between her boot laces. The eyelets on her boots had turned traitor, let in wads of snow that melted into icy cold water and soaked her socks.
At last she broke through the towering wall of snow created by eighteen months of plows and found herself on the highway itself.
Knowing she need fear little actual automobile traffic, Matilda threw her skis and poles onto the pavement and bent over, hands on her knees, head hanging down, to catch her breath. Screw making it to work on time; her entire body burned with lactic acid and muscle strain, her feet stung with new blisters from walking in ski boots.
At least the highway had been plowed recently. To stand on the pavement was to lose all sight of the surrounding landscape, stuck in a trench with sides that reached well over Matilda's head, but at least the agonizing high-step-and-sink routine was over.
Gradually, she regained her breath and was able to force herself to pick up her gear, to stand, to begin walking, gingerly at first on the frequent patches of ice, then with greater confidence. She slid occasionally, but had gotten and kept her ice legs a long time ago. Eight miles to town.
First thing she was going to do was check the classifieds in the newspaper and find an apartment, if there was one to be had. She could maybe move into it gradually, pare down her belongings so she could make the move in one expensive trip in her increasingly useless pickup. She'd have to lay off the schnapps and a lot of other luxuries for a while to afford it, but it would be worth it. Enough of this crap.
A rumbling sound in the distance, and wasn't it a somehow familiar noise? Matilda stopped, listened, tried to place it. The plow trucks operated in the dead of night; she hadn't even seen one parked since before the first snow had fallen a year and a half ago.
This was coming from the direction of the tiny town of Battle, 35 miles south of her destination. Surely it wasn't a car engine? What could possibly be so important. A car trip from Battle ? Or, could it be, even further south?
No way. Imagination, memory, fata morgana... Matilda kept trudging onward, trying to focus on the problem she had set for herself: how many books she could bear to part with for the sake of living in town again and no longer having to make this kind of trudge to work every day.
A lot, actually.
The sound persisted, stubborn for something that was just in her head. It even seemed to doppler. She stopped again, watching her breath freeze in front of her. When was the last time she'd heard a car engine on this road? Other than a snowplow, of course. Even without car traffic, the road needed to stay passable; horses had just as much trouble as she had in making their way through the depths of this snow – and she was never pulling wagon loads of people, hay, furniture, supplies. Groceries, yes, but only what fit in her backpack.
Maybe her memory for sounds was just getting warped, and she just thought it sounded like a car engine. Maybe she'd finally just lost it, gone mad in the snow and the emptiness like so many had done before. There was a story told sometimes over coffee or beer at the Bawdy Beaver about a settler man back in the 1800s who spent the whole winter trying to feed the frozen corpses of his wife and children. He'd cook a whole meal for them every day over the little stove. When they'd found the sod cabin in the spring the bodies were covered in frozen stew, barley porridge, crumbs of gravy, and he had disappeared.
Maybe she was lucky she was just imagining car noises.
A gust of wind roared down the canyon that was the roadway, penetrating right through the knit of her wool sweater. She'd not worn her long underwear today – too filthy from a week's sweating in it during the exertions of her trip to and from town; she couldn't bear the smell of it when she had dressed. She regretted that now as stinging little needles of ice caught in the wind ripped at her skin through the sweater.
If she was going to be moving, she might as well set her sights on really moving, she decided then, gritting her teeth and resuming her trek. The Weather Channel – solar powered and relocated to central Wyoming since 2012 – always showed South Texas in greenish on its temperature maps, indicating that at least there were occasional thaws there. The shows had long stopped bothering with still more shots of Texans, Floridians, Mexicans dealing with the unfamiliar onslaught of snow and frost. It would have been more interesting if they'd all still been trying to drive cars on it. Sliding, slipping, jackknifing, wrecks. And less depressing than the daily counts of frozen senior citizens found dead in their air-conditioned but not insulated homes.
Still, a thaw was a thaw.
And why limit her ambitions so?
Good god, either she really was already beyond hope or that really was a car. It was even louder now, almost like it was right behind her.
Matilda turned around, squinted. She could actually see it, an old pickup, its color indefinable under a crust of dirty ice, barreling along at a speed she hadn't seen in a long time – definitely over 55, the government's old recommended optimum speed for safety and gas mileage. Wow.
Old reflexes kicked in. It was barreling along towards her, and she was in its way. Try to dig a refuge in the snow to clear out of the way, or try to wave it down and hope the driver gave a damn that she was there?
Both. She threw herself into the wall of snow and ice, hacking at it with everything she had except for the lone ski pole – mercifully, hot pink – she waved frantically in her left hand.
The snow wouldn't yield. Maybe if she had a sledgehammer.
The truck was getting closer. Maybe a mile away. It would be here in less than a minute. And it wasn't slowing down.
Matilda started to scream and pressed herself up against the snowbank. She ripped her water bottle out of her backpack loop. Frozen solid. It would probably break the windshield. She threw it anyway, with all her might. Anything to get his attention. Anything.
Her throw didn't even cover half the distance. The bottle bounced pointlessly on the icy road. Still Matilda screamed.
She was still screaming when the truck swerved to miss her, though the sound was drowned out by the sound of metal tearing through compacted ice and snow and the roaring rev of the engine. Roar and roar and roar as the driver first tried to bully through, roar and roar and roar again as he tried then to back out of the impact crater in the side of the road.
He succeeded at last, and the truck came to a stop just a few feet away from where Matilda had at last, her throat raw, stopped screaming.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing, you fucking maniac?" Matilda demanded as a large man swathed head to toe in Carhartts strode her way. "You fucker. You fucker." Her eyes squeezed shut, her hoarse voice grew louder. "You fucker."
"Cuss all you want, little lady, but you're lucky I saw you to swerve."
"Fucker. Fucker. Fucker." Matilda was shaking all over, but from the cold. The crotch of her pants was unexpectedly warm. Oh god, she'd actually peed herself. "FUCK!"
The driver of the truck stood silently in front of her while she raged on, his mouth hanging slightly open, as though he were stunned, surprised to see a woman so angry.
Finally Matilda was quiet. Still pressed flat against the snow she took a good luck at the man who had failed at the last second to kill her. He really was huge, a good foot and a half or more taller than she, and proportionally broad and formidably built, if his coveralls didn't lie. His face was hidden within a hood and ball cap and behind a big pair of snowmobile goggles. Only his lips and a wild red beard rapidly crusting with ice from his breath were visible.
He wasn't from anywhere around here, either. She'd never seen anyone like him in her life.
Matilda opened her mouth to speak, but couldn't think of anything to say. What does one say after screaming "fucker" at the top of her lungs at a complete stranger?
"Are you going to be okay?" he finally asked.
Matilda started to cry.
"Hey..." the stranger put out a hand as if to pat her shoulder or something, then pulled it back. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small bottle of Wild Turkey. "Here."
Matilda gulped at it greedily, downing several shots worth before trying again to speak. She could feel tears and salt building up; the wind stung where they wet the exposed skin of her face, and she realized her own sunglasses had slid off in the confusion. They hung on by only one ear piece.
"Thanks," she said, screwing the bottle cap back on.
"No, you keep that. So, are you OK?"
"I guess so." She took a big breath, let it out in a thick cloud of condensation.
"You're not bleeding or anything that I can see. Probably just had a big scare. I really am sorry about that. Probably a hundred miles or better since I've actually seen anyone on this road."
Another deep breath. Another. The Wild Turkey was helping.
"Oh, your ski's broken," the man said, pointing.
Almost normal now. "That was already broken. It's why I was walking."
"Bad place to break a ski. How far are we from town now? With all the signs buried, I'm pretty much dead reckoning." He smiled, revealing huge teeth.
"About five miles. Hooo..." Matilda let out another huge breath. "Maybe six."
"Wait, then, which town?"
"Colter Valley."
"Colter Valley. Colter Valley. Shit. They always say don't blink or you'll miss Battle, and I guess I finally did."
"Overshot, huh?"
"Guess I'll have to overshoot some more, too," the man said, looking over at his pickup. "I don't imagine I'm going to be able to turn that around out here."
Matilda smiled a little. "Probably not."
"Probably lucky I was able to get it out of the snowbank, aren't I?"
A little more. "Yes."
"Well, I assume you were heading into CV?"
"Yes."
"And this wasn't just a pleasure trip?"
"No."
"Supply run?"
"Actually, I was on my way to work."
"Holy balls, you live somewhere out here and you work in CV?"
"Used to be kind of nice," Matilda said. "I have a little house on the river, right near an eagle's next, good little fishing eddy right there, nice bike ride into town in the summer."
"Summer? Oh yeah, I remember those." It had become a standard joke, actually pretty tired, like co-workers saying one remembered vacations, or friends with kids saying they remembered sex. Matilda gave a little laugh anyway.
"Yeah," she said. "So anyway, I've been thinking maybe it's time to reconsider my living arrangements."
"Not a bad idea, considering."
"Yeah, considering."
"So, what do you do in CV?"
"Oh, actually, I'm a substitute teacher."
"You're kidding."
"Yeah. I mean no, I'm not. Kidding, I mean."
"Wow, they must be hard up."
"What?"
"Sorry. That came out wrong. It's just... you live clear out here..."
"A few miles more to the south, actually. But I see what you mean. Well, I'm not really a sub in the old sense. It's more like an unofficial rotation schedule. It's hard to explain. Um, not that it's not great talking to you and all, but –"
"Aw, I'm being an asshole, aren't I. You want a ride into town? Least I can do."
"Oh," Matilda said. "Uh, sure. That would be... Wow. Do you know how long it's been since I've ridden in a truck? Mine's pretty much just a beached whale back at the house. It hasn't even had gas in it in probably a year. I don't even know if it will start now."
"Well, ma'am," the stranger said, picking up Matilda's dropped skis and poles. "Come with me. I'll drop you off wherever you like."

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Yes, I started over. See the entry on my letter from my protagonist in my NaNoWriMo diary and you'll have a good idea as to why.)

- posted by Kate Sherrod @ 10:47 PM

 
An early April morning, and a finger of water from a puddle just beginning to form around her snowy boots began to travel across the floor. It mimicked the course of a small trickle down the kitchen window, but Matilda Barto didn't notice this, barely noticed the water on the glass. Too busy cursing...
Her car sat in the driveway, only halfway excavated from an obscuring 18 inches of snow, puffs of grey exhaust still drifting upward in the still dawn air. It was stuck, stalled, and staying put.
As was Matilda, appointment two counties away or no; her car radio had announced that the interstate was still closed all the way across Wyoming, for a record ninth day in a row. The Department of Transportation had still been digging out the roadway from last week's storm when this one had hit, burying the snow fences, the delineator posts, the overturned semis in the barrow pits.
It was hard to blame them, but she tried. Who else could she blame?
Matilda sighed, pulled off her coat and threw it onto a chair. It was too early to call and reschedule because word had it that this guy never hit his office before 10 a.m. on an ordinary day, and she'd allowed an extra hour for the drive time.
Hell, even the security staff wouldn't be there yet.
Of course, the guy had voice mail on his office line, didn't he? Matilda tried to remember, reached for her bag to check her PDA, cursed again. Laptop, PDA, phone, wallet, all were still in the front seat of her car.
Without bothering to put her coat back on, she shoved her front door open again, shivering at the nails on chalkboard sound of rickety wood scraping across the ice on the doorstep, and stomped out into the enormous snowdrift that was her driveway. Her teeth began to chatter as a surprise gust of wind whipped at her shirt, streaming in between the buttons and across bare flesh. Could she just go back to bed after this? Burrow deeply back under the pile of ancient quilts and the electric blanket on her bed and just give up on the day?
Probably not at 5:30 a.m.
"Meh," she muttered, yanking her belongings out of the car.
"Feh," she muttered, dragging the door across the ice again.
Her PDA said nothing about – Modi! That was his name – having voice mail, but the AppleWorks file on her aging iBook had a note about her having left him a message. Nothing about a secretary. Must have been voice mail.
She fished out a phone. It was the red one, her personal phone. Try again. The magazine's phone was yellow.
NO SERVICE, the LED read clearly next to where the signal icon should be, would be if there were a signal. Her personal phone gave the same news.
So much for that idea.
She would have to get to somewhere with a land line if she really wanted to call out, it appeared. That would be a neat trick, with 18" of new snow on the ground, two crusty feet of old below it, and a car that wouldn't budge.
Remember the view, Matilda told herself as reached behind the refrigerator for her ski gear. A half a mile west of town, but this place is right on the river and the sunsets are spectacular. And the stars.
Outside and to the east, Venus still shone mockingly in the sky as she fastened her gaiters, pulled on her gloves, and began the hard work of breaking herself a trail to the state highway that became, a half mile later, the main street of Colter Valley, Wyoming.
At least her father was an early riser. He made better coffee than Matilda did, too, and had a habit on snowy mornings of firing up the waffle iron he'd gotten for Christmas last year to very good effect.
This year, the iron had been getting a workout.
Coffee. Waffles. Coffee. Waffles. Coffee. Waffles.
The distance between her driveway and the state highway was 100 coffees (right leg) and 99 waffles (left) at her current speed and ability through heavy and deep powder. Pathetic.
Goddam trailpackers.
When she finally did get paid for this story, Matilda decided, she was going to invest in some back-country skis.

The lobby of the Barto Hotel, the family business since 1923, was warm and dark as she came off the mud porch.
"Tilly!" Only Matilda's parents still called her by this nickname, and only at home. Jack Barto tossed aside his newspaper and came from around the front desk to hold the door open for his daughter. "I thought you were on your way to Gillette this morning."
"I was, but my car's stuck," Matilda said. "Really stuck. Fucking stuck."
"Fucking stuck?"
"Fucking stuck."
"Sounds serious."
"Doesn't matter though," she said. "The interstate's still closed."
"Yeah, I heard. What about–"
"That's closed, too. The radio said. Not that I'd take it with 80 closed – every pea-brained trucker in the country'd be crawling along at 20 miles an hour and they'd still find a way to jacknife right in front of me."
"You know that wouldn't be a problem if – Tilly, when you going to get a job that doesn't haul your ass out of bed to drive halfway across the state in every single blizzard we get?"
Matilda rolled her eyes, not in the mood for another round of there's-always-a-job-for-you-here, dumped herself onto the lobby sofa, and took a deep breath. Then – "You're experimenting with the coffee again."
"Smell the..." Jack thought a moment. "Chicory, do you?"
"Didn't think that would quite be your thing, but yeah. Where'd you find chicory coffee?"
"Oh, some hunters from down south left a can in one of the sportsman's rooms last fall. Hadn't even been opened. Just tried it today on a whim."
"Do you like it?"
"Kind of reminds me of your grandpa's camp coffee, to tell the truth. So whatcha going to do today, bebbe?"
"Well, I need to try call that Modi and try to reschedule. Again. Then, I don't know. Hang, I guess."
"Try?"
"No cell service again."
"Aw, hell," Jack said. "I coulda told you that. There's a woman up in 27 plans to sue me personally if she can't get through to her agent or whatever."
"She can't maybe use her room phone?"
"Thinks it's bugged." Jack shrugged. "Want some of this coffee?"
"Oh God, I love that stuff! There was this great Cajun place just a block away from my house when I lived in Denver. Used to drink that every morning."
"I'll take that as a yes, then." Jack said, handing her a full cup and joining her on the couch.
"So, where's Mom?"
"Grocery store. Turned out I was out of Krusteaz."
"Krusteaz? I thought you made 'em yourself."
"Krusteaz makes the batter, I make the waffles."
"Another illusion shattered."
"Waffles is waffles. You want some or not?"
"Of course. But first, I just gotta do this. It's driving me crazy. Gotta tell this guy I'm not going to make it."
"He probably already knows," Jack said.
"He's probably still in bed," Matilda said, pulling herself up, heading for the courtesy desk, cracking open her laptop. "But it's going to bug the hell out of me until I take care of it."
"Suit yourself. I should get back on the stick, too. Gotta find a way to get Caroline here. Her car sucks, too."
"My car doesn't suck. It's just buried. Well, and the battery's frozen, I think."
"OK, her car sucks more. Whatever. We need her. Had a full house, and the maids don't ever listen to me. I'm just a man."
"It's not that you're a man, you just don't do things the bosslady's way, and they're the ones who get shrieked at upstairs."
Jack just nodded and went back behind the desk. Father and daughter picked up phones, dialed nine for outside lines, exchanged annoyed looks.
"Dad, I'm getting a whole lot of nothing."
"Guess it's not just the cell towers."
"Fucking great. That means no e-mail, either."
"Looks like."
Matilda slammed her computer shut and put her chin in her hands, watching the snow fall and fall through the picture window by the desk.
"Well, honey, I could use your help when the rest of the guests are up and about. You don't have to clean rooms or anything, but..."
"Oh god, I suppose. You want me to run interference on the road closed and no phones and be patient please crap, right?"
"It would be a big help."
"I know."
"There's waffles in it for ya."
"I thought there were waffles in it for me anyway."
"Yeah, well, there's real maple syrup in it for ya, then."
"You hate that stuff."
"I know. But your mom is coming round."
"Great."
"Great. You can start by making one of those little sign dealies to put up on the bulletin board to warn everybody about the roads."
"And the phones?"
"And the phones."
Matilda came behind the front desk and sat down in front of the hotel's only computer and opened up PageMaker, an extravagance dating back to when her mother had thought she'd publish a newsletter for their regular clients.
"We should just have The Pressman make us a big laminated one, you've had to do this so often this year," Matilda joked while her sign printed out.
"Not a bad idea." Jack scribbled it down. "'Cept this is the first time the phones have been out."
"It would still save some paper," his daughter said. "I'll go hang this."
Before Matilda had made two strides back toward the front door, however, an ominous mix of rattles and hisses came from the mechanical room next door, replacing the quiet, subliminal hum of the building's central heating system.
"Oh Christ," Jack said. "I bet we're out of propane."
Matilda's spun around on her heel. "You didn't–"
"Oh, I didn't forget to buy some. Only–"
"Only you bought it from Q-Gas?"
"His son."
"Ah. The one who–"
"Got fired for short-selling everybody up in Battle. Yup."
"So you think–"
"Yup."
The pair stared at each other in horror. A hotel full of cold and cranky guests, stuck there until the roads opened with no phone. Every small-town innkeeper's nightmare.
It was already beginning to cool down in the high-ceilinged lobby when Matilda's mother bustled in with her arms full.
"Well hi Tilly, honey! Jack, the apartment door is locked again and there's one more sack of groceries in the car. Could you help?" She gave her daughter a peck on the cheek as she breezed past.
"In a minute."
"Honey, you always forget. Could you do it now, please? I'll get the bacon st–"
"I said in a minute." Jack almost knocked his wife over in his rush to the mechanical room.
"Um, I'll get it, Mom."
"Thanks, sweetie. I see someone hasn't had enough coffee yet."
"Uh, yeah. Jussec."

With the exception of the third-string actress in room 27, the guests had all borne the closures and outages with relative philosophy. It could have been, and usually was, much worse. Visiting Californians rarely understood why the highway department reacted the way they did when the snow fences along the roads disappeared, for instance, and really, Matilda couldn't blame them for that when her father enjoyed so to tell them the odd post and pole contraptions were "bleachers for watching the annual antelope races in the spring." Wouldn't be needing them just now, then, would we?
Though actually, it was, technically, spring by the calendar, though heavy snows and closed roads were not unheard of in any month in Colter Valley, surrounded by 12,000 foot mountains and a National Forest on three sides. Matilda's old boss at the local newspaper had once written a column daring himself to pull off the feet of telemarking in every month in 1999, and while August saw him carrying his skis farther than he'd skied on them, he'd done it.
He was a lot more dedicated than Matilda was, though she seemed to be on her way toward maybe involuntarily duplicating his feat, she thought as she followed her own trail back to her house on the river. The skiing seemed a little easier, or maybe she was just getting to be in better shape. That was one way to look at it.
The land lines had come back up at right around check-out time, and 11 a.m. saw a visibly calmer Jack at last talking to his old friend from Q-Gas in his usual genial tones, though her father had stood firm on a free refill for his inconvenience and his guests' discomfort. There were rumors of a pipeline coming to the Colter Valley at long last, bringing with it real natural gas service with no need to keep an eye on the tanks or worry that closed roads would stop delivery, and Jack played on these for all it was worth. News that the Bartos had been the first to switch over wouldn't bode too well for Q-Gas, would it?
For her part, Matilda finally got through to Modi Ericksson, who was, coincidentally, Wyoming's vice president for public and government affairs for the natural gas giant about whom the pipeline rumors were being repeated.
Matilda wasn't chasing him over pipeline rumors, though. It was known only to a few that Ericksson was getting ready to strike out on his own little venture, and he had promised her the exclusive months ago.
"I'm still not going to tell you about it over the phone, Mizzzz Barto," he had told her. "I'm holding out for face time with you. It's high time."
"Oh yes, high time," she'd agreed. "Uh, weather permitting."
"We'll see what we can do about that."
With one eye on the Weather Channel online, Matilda had rescheduled for the following week. It was going to be tight up against her deadline, but it wouldn't be the first time.
*************
The landscape around her glowed bluish white under an almost full moon as she left the sparse lights of Colter Valley behind her, and hers was the only car on the road. The only reason for headlights on a morning like this was for deer and antelope – or highway patrolmen. Matilda flashed her brights at the crest of the hill. No cars, no animals in sight. Cool.
She killed the headlights and zoomed on towards the interstate. It was like driving through a luminous white canyon, the snow piled up four feet high on either side of the pavement, hacked through by snowplows the day before.
The Wind River mountains in central Wyoming are labeled here and there along the highway with signs pointing out the geological age of the exposed layers of sediment in the rocks. Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Cenozoic, Mesozoic... What could she call the layers in the snow exposed at different points along this route?
The lowest crust had snow in it from last September, when four inches fell on a Friday afternoon and the bus driver for the incoming Lyman Eagle football team nearly slid off the road at Pressman Junction – right in front of a "road toad" as her dad called highway patrolmen (just as he called game wardens "rabbit sheriffs". A former police officer himself, he could get away with it). The game against Colter Valley's own "Crushin' Cougars" was delayed by 45 minutes as a result of that driver's having to get out and walk the line. Call it the Late Eagle layer?
That was probably mixed in with the big Halloween Night storm. Always in Wyoming there is a blizzard on Halloween; Matilda's mother wisely always concocted costumes for her that easily incorporated snowmobile suits, thus an endless succession of toilet paper mummies, huge medieval dresses, oversized clown pants, snowboot spats. Spook layer?
This was a fun way to think about the past six months, but it was, alas, cut short as Matilda reached Pressman Junction and Interstate 80, miraculously, at this early hour, lightly traveled, but still nothing to coast along on, lightless and carefree. There were cars, there were trucks, there was the buffalo herd at the Herring-Hart ranch...
And it was coming up on 6 a.m., and she was at last coming out of Radio Free Wyoming and into range to pick up a station, if the tower at Fort Steele had been repaired. Glory be, it had.
"From National Public Radio in Washington, this is Bob Edwards, and this is Morning Edition..."
Matilda sipped her coffee, eased onto the interstate, and bumped up the speed on her cruise control.

"Mr. Ericsson is running a little behind this morning, but he said to go ahead and show you into his office. He'll be there in a little while," the secretary told her as she skiffed the last of the snow off her dress boots.
"From my experience, he's always running somewhat behind," Matilda said.
"Oh, do you know him?"
"Only over the telephone. Old pals over the telephone."
"That's mostly how I get to talk to him, too," the secretary said, leading her down a long, boring hallway. Blue carpet, white walls, framed topographical maps marked up in red ink, taxidermy animal heads – a typical Wyoming office complex. Except for one head.
"Wow, did that happen before or after?" Matilda asked, stopping and staring at a large antelope with one horn bent backwards by nearly 90 degrees.
"I'm told it was like that probably all its life."
"Weird. Whose is it?"
"I don't know, I think it came with the office, but it might be Mr. Ericsson's."
"Do you always call him 'Mr. Ericsson?'"
"Of course. He is my employer. He calls me Miss Strickland, I call him Mr. Ericsson. Here we are. You're to make yourself comfortable. May I fetch you some cocoa?"
"Sure. Or coffee."
Miss Strickland's upper lift twitched upward as she sniffed. "Perhaps Mr. Tomasi's office has some of that. I will inquire."
Oops, must be a Mormon. Off to a great start already.
The secretary gone, Matilda settled into a comfortable, leather upholstered office chair near the main desk and pulled out her computer and camera.
"You don't need those just yet, do you?" came the rich and genial voice she'd come to know on the phone.
"Mr. Ericsson?" Matilda asked, turning around in her chair.
One of the biggest men she had ever seen loped into the room and perched on the edge of the big desk in front of her. After the starchy Miss Strickland, Matilda had half-expected some uptight east coast suit, but instead, this man looked like he'd just come off the trails in ski boots, gaiters and wool pants, a thick pair of serious mittens that reached to his elbows still hiding his hands, and a messily knit stocking cap mashed down over unruly red hair. His beard and mustache still had little ice crystals in them.
He bunched his eyebrows, wrinkled his nose as he pulled off a mitten and reached for her hand. "Mr. Ericsson," he said, and shook his head. "Modi. Mohhh-Di. Say it with me. Modi. It's not that strange a name, is it?"
"Norwegian, isn't it?"
"You didn't say it with me. Modi."
"Modi."
"Modi."
"Modi," she repeated.
"Much better!" He bounded behind his desk, but didn't sit down. "Miss Stickland only calls me that because she thinks my name's pagan or something. I don't know. I inherited her from the old VP, and she's the only one who knows how the maps and things are organized."
"I guess there's one in every office."
"They call it 'the spider' in all those stupid management books."
"Middle of the web, a foot on every thread, the center of everything..."
"Exactly! So! What can I do for you, Mizzzz Barto." It wasn't really a question; his eyebrows still scowled despite his smile.
"If you're Mohhhh-Di then I'm Matilda."
"It's more fun to say Mizzzzz Barto, Mizzzzz Barto. See? I can't stop saying it." At last the complexly fierce look was gone.
"OK, whatever. Well, you know why I'm here, I think."
"I do?" He looked down at his desk blotter. "Mizzzz Barto, Western Energy News, 11 o'clock," he read, then looked up. "Doesn't say why."
Matilda sighed. "So it's going to be like this after all we've meant to each other?"
Modi laughed, long and loud. A laugh like that, you could use for echolocation in a crowded room, even if everyone else were 6'6" or so.
"I LIKE you," he roared. "This is going to be FUN. Come on, young lady" – he looked to be maybe five years older than Matilda – "We're having an early lunch! You wouldn't believe it, but there's a place here actually serves Thai food. Thai food! In Gillette!"
Matilda laughed back at him and re-stowed her laptop.
"You're on, Modi, but–"
"Mr. Tomasi did, in fact have some," Miss Strickland made another face as she brought a steaming mug into the office and offering it to Matilda, "Coffee."
"STRICKLAND–" Modi began, but then appeared to think better of it and sank down into his desk chair, glaring fiercely at his assistant from under unruly red eyebrows.
"Your guest demanded coffee" – Matilda goggled at that "demanded" and Modi curtly nodded her way – "And you told me to make her comfortable." Miss Strickland sniffed again, and all but shoved the mug into Matilda's face before striding from the room.
Modi continued to brood, appeared actually to gnash his teeth as he pulled off his hat.
"Um, after all that, I... I think I'd better drink this before we go," Matilda said after a moment, just to break the silence.
"You're probably right." Modi sat down.
He continued to sit, arms folded, behind his desk, while Matilda sipped her coffee.
He did not speak again until she'd finished the cup.


END SECTION ONE, PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 1 & 2

BEGIN SECTION TWO, PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 8


Modi's car, which he insisted they both take to this alleged Thai restaurant, was actually a truck, of course, a 1998 white Chevy Silverado. Its fenders were encrusted with what looked like the entire winter's accumulation of ice and mud, and it was overall so dirty it might be mistaken for a tan truck with flecks of snow on the top and hood.
The interior, though, was as clean as the exterior was filthy, as Matilda saw when Modi rushed through the slush to open the passenger door for her. He waited until she was seated and belted in, then shut the door with an affectionate pat – a gesture Matilda might have found endearingly old-fashioned had she not still been a little befuddled by the silent treatment she had gotten over the coffee. Not one word as she sipped, no response to attempts at small talk or preliminary queries about his plans, then boom! right after she set down her empty mug, he'd leapt out of his chair, bounded around the table and helped her from her seat, saying "Lunch time, ma'am!"
Strange man.
Passing through downtown Gillette, it was easy to see how the car had gotten so filthy. Like everywhere else in Wyoming, the town's every intersection had at least one towering pile of dirty snow scraped off the streets; like everywhere else in Wyoming, the town's every street was strewn heavily with gravel and sand to provide some traction. Layer after layer of ice, snow, dirt, ice, snow, dirt. When spring finally came, the pavement below would be inches deep in mud.
"Hell of a mess this winter, eh?" Modi asked from behind the wheel.
"It's like you read my mind," Matilda said. "Everywhere I've gone this winter, even down in southern Colorado, it's been like this. It's really a disaster."
"Disaster? It's just winter."
"But what a winter! And yes, disaster. Financially, for instance. I don't suppose Gillette has this problem, with all the money you guys dig out of the ground, but a lot of little towns are having trouble affording all the sand and ice slicer and stuff they need."
"Really? You know, I never thought about it that way. Huh. Unintended consequences... but there's bigger problems afoot." He chuckled.
"What's so funny?"
"Oh, I'll tell you someday. Or maybe I'll just let you figure it out." He eased up on the steering wheel, balanced his right hand at 12 o'clock and just steered with his wrist for a few blocks, still chuckling quietly to himself.
The restaurant turned out to be a tiny old diner planted stubbornly between two large-for-Wyoming (five stories!) office buildings. Definitely a story there. The zoning battles were probably eternal. Matilda liked it on sight.
"Sook's Noodle Shack" she read from the handpainted picture window in the building's front while Modi opened her door again. "I approve."
"Wait'll you try the noodles. Ah, ah, ah–" he nodded toward Matilda's shoulder bag. "No tape recorder, no computer, no notepads. Bah. This is lunch. We're going to have lunch like civilized people."
Matilda's eyes narrowed. "But after–"
"Oh, yes yes yes." Modi swatted at imaginary flies buzzing between them. "You'll get your interview. Your big exclusive. But not while we're eating. 'A hungry man is not a bright speaker,' my granddad always used to say."
"Who was your granddad? It's been hell doing the background research on you, I've gotta say. Hell indeed."
Modi just laughed at this and motioned toward the restaurant.
"After lunch," he said. "After lunch."

Sook himself served them, with evident pride and obvious fondness for Modi, though his tendency to refer to Matilda as Modi's "lady friend" irked her after a while. Also, he insisted on serving real Thai iced tea, thick with coconut milk and sweet enough to put a diabetic in a coma – but she forgave him the tea when she took a big bite of her Sri Racha omelet. Only coconut milk could soothe the burn from that sauce; Sook didn't skimp on the chili oil.
When she and Modi were done laughing at her reaction, she sat back a moment and gazed out the window.
"Do you know how bizarre this is?" she said.
"What is?"
"I'm sitting in Gillette, Wyoming, in the middle of winter, looking out the window at snow, snow, snow, sitting in a restaurant with a giant viking cross country ski god cooling my jets after some Thai hot sauce!"
"Your point?"
Matilda just stared at him for a moment.
"My point, Mr. Ericsson," she took another cooling sip of tea, "Is that we've really stepped through the looking glass. Thai food in the ultimate energy grunt town. Coal miners and coconut milk. You know?"
Modi slurped some noodles, swallowed, appeared to ponder her words.
"Guess I've just taken it for granted. But I travel a lot, so, yeah, maybe I didn't notice. I see what you mean, though. Even this" – he pointed to the remains of a plate of fried mussel pancakes – "Isn't really exotic anymore.
"But you want to know what's even funnier?"
"Sure," Matilda said.
"'Sook' isn't that guy's real name. Ever meet someone who's actually from Thailand?"
"Nope."
"Take another look at our chef/waiter/busboy/superman."
Matilda obeyed. Sure, he looked Asian, but Matilda was no expert. Could be Thai, could be not. Could be from the rez for all she knew. Finally, she looked back at Modi and shrugged.
"I'll give you a hint. His last name is Medicine Cloud."
Matilda goggled again.
"Of the Ethete Medicine Clouds?"
"The same."
"One of Gary's kids?"
"Nephew, I think."
"Oh my god. How–?"
"He credits his home-ec teacher. Says she gave him a Yan Can Cook book or something for his graduation present, and he just went from there. Absolutely loves Thai food, total stickler for ingredients and recipes, really, more Thai than the Thai. Or something."
"You are so pulling my leg."
"I don't know. Am I?"
Matilda looked at "Sook" again. Was there a family resemblance? Jack would know. Jack knew all the Medicine Clouds. He'd played high school basketball against six or seven of them; at one point they'd made up the entire Wyoming Indian High School starting five. Way back in the day.
"I don't know either... No," she finally decided. "That's just too weird for you to have made it up."
"I think it's pretty neat," Modi said.
"Actually, yeah, it is. Further proof of what I was saying! Here we are in Gillette, Wyoming, surrounded by coalbed methane wells and driling rigs and cranky ranchers eating Thai food cooked by an Indian – feathers not dots."
"Feathers not dots?"
"Usually you say 'dots not feathers' when you're talking about someone from India so people don't think you mean he's from the rez. So this time, 'feathers not dots.'"
"Oh."
Matilda shrugged. "Stupid, I know. But funny. Especially now."
"If you say so."
"Sure. So, yeah, we've made a strange ol' world for ourselves, haven't we?"
Modi said nothing, just raised his eyebrows and inclined his head. He sipped some tea and just watched her for a minute. Way to make a girl feel stupid. Matilda squirmed in her seat.
"So, Mizzz Barto," he said, finally. "Tell me about this paper you're writing for these days."
"Oh, you read it, don't you? It's all about the energy industry and issues surrounding it. You know, landowner issues, environmental stuff, technology, politics. I mostly do politics, but my publisher remembered that I did that story on your company in the business paper I used to write for, so she asked me to look in on you. And then I find out you're leaving 'em!"
"Well, not exactly leaving them, but I'll get to that. But tell me, do you like writing for this paper?"
"What's not to like?"
"Do people think maybe you're a shill?"
"Strange thing to come from someone like you," Matilda said, absently twirling her fork. "But, well, yeah, sometimes people who don't read us think we're just a propaganda rag or something, I suppose. But once they read it, they get it. Mostly. I think."
"Do they?"
"Well, the smart ones do, and fuck the rest. Oh! Sorry. Pardon my–"
"Don't worry about it. I like the honesty. But I suppose I touched a nerve, hmm?"
"Maybe so," Matilda admitted. "It's just, well... certain people do piss me off quite a bit. You know, the ones who want to stop drilling pretty much everywhere in case there's some prairie dog town or some endangered toad or something, but they still sit there in California or wherever and run their blowdriers and their TVs and their lights on 24 hours a day and never even think about where all that power comes from, you know? I mean... You guys are just meeting a need, right? Supplying to meet demand."
"Oh, yes."
"And it's not like we just throw you softballs. When you guys mess up, we report it, just like we report it if the BLM is dragging its feet on permits or if someone's patent on some EOR technology is running out or whatever."
"Oh really?"
Matilda blushed. "Shut up."
Modi smiled. "Interesting you mention EOR patents – you mean EOR like enhanced oil recovery?"
"Yeah. It's sort of turned into another one of my beats."
"Then you'll definitely be interested in what I'm getting ready to do."
- posted by Kate Sherrod @ 1:50 PM