Chapter Eight

Lyle hushed himself and crept up behind the car like he didn’t want to startle it.  As high as the snow drift was up against the driver’s side, it might as well have been the bunny slopes up at Steamboat Springs.  The best he could tell at first in the darkness, he thought the car must have been a Cadillac or a Mercury, but then he made out a Ford emblem on the trunk.  Crown Victoria.  He quietly brushed the snow off the license plate.  Wyoming.  He couldn’t help but smile when he saw the bronc riding cowboy stamped into the aluminum.  He’d never been a bronc rider himself; team roping had always been his event.  He often missed the sound of the chute opening, and then taking off at full gallop after the steer.  His old buddy Colton would lasso the horns, then Lyle would rope the animal’s hind feet.  They’d gotten to the point where it was like they were roping with two ropes but one mind, almost like an old married couple on horseback.  There probably wasn’t a small town rodeo arena they hadn’t competed in throughout Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle during those summers.  Of course Lyle still rode, and still roped, but now it was just doing his job, riding somebody else’s horse, roping somebody else’s cattle, all on somebody else’s land.  Maybe someday it would be his horse, his cattle, his land.

With the tailpipe billowing exhaust, Lyle knew somebody had to be on the other side of those black windows, and he wasn’t sure if that somebody knew Lyle was out there, or if they’d be happy about it if they did.  He really didn’t have a choice, though, so he knocked on the front passenger side window as though he was knocking on a neighbor’s door.  Nothing.  He knocked again, this time calling out, “Hello?  Anybody in there?”  Nothing again.  He slapped the window over and over with the palm of his hand.  “Hey, if you’re in there, open up!  I’m freezing my ass off out here!”  Still nothing.  Lyle looked around to make sure no one was coming back from taking a leak or otherwise sneaking up on him.  Finally, he tried the front door handle and then the rear door.  Locked.  Maybe there wasn’t anybody in there after all?  Or maybe they’d died in the wreck or been knocked out?  Regardless, Lyle was getting in that car. 

Finally after Lyle had tried everything he could think of, he yelled out, “If there’s somebody in there, you need to know I’m about to bust out your back passenger window!  I don’t mean you no harm, but I’m going to die if I don’t get out of this weather!”  He thought about using his elbow, but he wasn’t sure that would work, and he didn’t look forward to adding a shattered elbow to his current scroll’s worth of challenges.  So he pulled the bottle of whiskey out of the lining in his coveralls.  The thick glass at the bottom of the bottle just might be strong enough to break through the window.  In just the briefest of seconds holding that bottle, though, the laughter, the dancing, the green light look of one big-haired drunken cowgirl after another, tried to work their way from Lyle’s brain to his hands, urging his fingertips to move to the cap, to turn, to remove, to tip, to taste, to swallow.  Lyle fought it off, instead grasping the bottle like you might hold a fire extinguisher before bashing out a window to escape from a fire too big for the extinguisher to handle.  But just as Lyle was about to smash the bottle into the dark glass, the back window rolled down just a few inches and a woman’s voice—or maybe it was a girl’s?—warned from within, “If you do that, it’ll be the last thing you do.”  As she said this, she eased a gun’s barrel out through the small gap between the window and its frame, a kind of barrel Lyle had looked down before.  So even in the dark, he was pretty sure he was once again staring at the business end of a .38 revolver.

Lyle jumped back, dropping the bottle into the snow, and instinctively throwing his hands up into the arctic air.  “Take it easy!  I’m not going to hurt you.”

The voice in the car laughed.  “Damn right you’re not going to hurt me.  Keep walking.”

Lyle wanted to wipe the snow from his eyes but he was afraid to move.  “Ma’am I’ve already been walking for hours.  Please, I’m in a real bad way out here.”

“If you think I’m letting you get in this car, you’re freaking crazy.”

Lyle looked down at the bottle on the ground.  “Hey, I’ve got a bottle of whiskey and some cigarettes you can have, if you let me in.”

“If you haven’t noticed, I’ve got a gun, which means if I want your whiskey and cigarettes I can have them anyway.  And now that I think about it, I could do for a smoke and a drink.  So just slide them through the window real easy like.”

Lyle cursed his stupidity as he picked up the bottle and handed it through the window to her and then did the same with the half empty pack of cigarettes in his pocket.  He could feel the warm air from inside the car on his hand as he gave them to her.

“Now get moving,” she said again.

“Please,” Lyle pleaded.  “I’m not a threat to you.  I’m just a dumb cowboy who got myself in some trouble out here.”

“Well, Cowboy, that sounds like your problem, not mine.”

“Maybe I could be of some help to you.  If nothing else I could help you pass the time.”

“I bet I know how you’d try to pass the time with me.  Not going to happen, Cowboy.”

“Listen, I was driving east when my truck hit some ice and I ended up out in a pasture.  The wreck knocked me out cold.  When I came to, I got to walking, which I did in the wrong direction for over an hour.”  Lyle’s voice sped up, trying to tell the whole story before she could tell him to leave again.  “When I hit the river, I knew I had to turn around.  Just before I found this road, I fell down in a ditch full of snow and at that point I just plain gave up.  And then I fell asleep or passed out or, hell, I might have died for a minute there for all I know.  Whatever the hell happened, I had the scariest damn dream I’ve ever had in my life, but when I woke up somehow I had the gumption to pull my ass up out of that hole and up onto the road and to start walking.  I was petering out again, though, but then… then, I saw your car, and I thought maybe I was seeing things like folks do out in the desert, but here you are, right here in front of me, and everything on my body is frozen, and I can feel that warm air creeping out of there, and I’ve got people waiting for me over in Rocky Ford.  I’m going to die out here and you are the only one who can save me.  So, please.”

“That’s a real touching story, Cowboy, but do you think I’m dumb enough to fall for that?”

“Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re doing out here, but I promise you I’m just trying to get home to my girlfriend and her little boy.”  Lyle started to raise his voice.  “Lady, I haven’t seen them in three months, and that’s all my own doing.  But, damn it, I’m trying to make things right, and I really screwed up tonight trying to beat this storm home.  If I die out here, it’ll be my own stupidity that killed me.”

The voice inside the car was silent.  Maybe she was thinking, reconsidering.

“Please!” Lyle called out.   He paused to gather in his emotions, and then decided to reach down to the bottom of the well of his own guilt and shame to pull out one last attempt to convince the woman with the gun.  “There’s somebody else who needs me to make it out of here alive… a little girl… my little girl.”  He finally wiped the snow from his eyes.  “Savannah.  That’s her name.  She’s four years old, and she lives with her mom back in Oklahoma.  I’ve only met her once in her whole life, about six months ago, and I can’t die without being some kind of dad to that little girl.  She deserves as much.  Don’t let my stupidity cost her.  So I’m begging you, ma’am, please let me in that car.”

At first there was still no reaction from the woman inside.  Then she slowly pulled the barrel of the gun back into the car, and the window rolled up, leaving Lyle once again alone with only the wind and snow for company.  He wondered what else he could have said, and how much farther down that county road he could make it.  After a moment, he turned to walk away, but just before he took his first step, he heard the click of the automatic locks disengaging, and turned back around to see the front passenger door pushed open ever so slightly.  As Lyle slipped himself into the car he kept saying, “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you."

It was so dark he still couldn’t see what the woman in the back seat looked like, but he definitely heard her say, “You better be telling the truth, Cowboy.  If you’re some kind of pervert… if you so much as think about touching me… I promise you before God and my dead momma that I’ll put all five of these bullets in between your eyes, and I won’t think twice about doing it.”  There was something in her voice that told Lyle she wasn’t bluffing.