Lyle forgot to breathe for a moment, and then gasped for air, air which seemed to freeze the fibers of his lungs as he took it in. The beating of his heart, the pounding of blood flowing into his head like a drum, joined the howl of the wind. He kept wiping his eyes, but the scene in front of him didn’t change. “O God,” he thought. “O God. O God. O God. I am so stupid. So stupid!” Suddenly he had a violent urge to vomit. He belched out tobacco juice and coffee onto the snow, retching so hard that his knees fell, cold and wet, into the snow that must have been close to a foot deep. Lyle struggled to his feet, using the sleeve of his coat to wipe the vomit and snow away from his lips and beard. He walked around the stain he’d left on the clean carpet of white and trudged the ten feet or so back to the truck, slamming the door behind him after he’d crawled back in.
He was still breathing hard, and now that he was out of the wind he noticed that with each breath he inhaled the subtle odor of his truck cab, a scent that had no specific point of origin but was planted deep within the worn Santa Fe style bench-seat cover beneath him, as well as the floorboards and head liner. It was a blend of cow manure, Marlboros, and high plains dirt. It crossed his mind that it didn’t really matter how the truck smelled anymore. Lyle knew this truck was going nowhere, probably ever again. Chances were that Lyle’s truck would be in this same spot in this pasture decades later, creating an island of steel in the midst of an ocean of tall grass. The cattle would use it for a windbreak someday, and Lyle realized in that moment that a windbreak was all his old truck was to him anymore as well.
The radio station had moved on from George Strait to Roseanne Cash singing “Tennessee Flat Top Box.” Even though he liked the song, Lyle reached over with his cold and calloused hand and turned it off, leaving only the sound of the wind and his own thoughts. Searching for answers, he glanced at the fuel gauge. There was barely any gas in the truck. Even the gas stations in Pueblo had closed in preparation for the storm, the owners surely thinking no one would be foolish enough to be out on the roads on a night like that. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had more gas anyway, because the truck’s heater hadn’t worked since the previous March. He’d put off having it fixed, instead sending off most of the money he was making at the Crazy Snake, which wasn’t much to begin with, trying to make amends in the best way he knew how, one check at a time.
Even inside the truck, he could see each breath he was taking and ice crystals were beginning to form on the inside of the windshield. His fingers were numb, so he rummaged through some of the trash on the floorboard and found his gloves. Lyle knew that as cold as he already was, it was going to get much worse. The blizzard was predicted to last throughout the night and into the morning, the temperatures plummeting to close to zero. “Why did I have to push it?” he asked himself silently. “Surely she would have understood."
There would be no snow plows or police cars passing by on this county road. He was sure that by dawn his truck would be completely covered in snow, a small white wave in an endless ocean of white. It could be at the very least twenty-four hours before anyone found him, if anyone could find him. He’d be dead by then. All of these past ninety days would have been for nothing. The sleepless nights, the sweat that constantly soaked his shirts and sheets for weeks, the days without eating, the solitude, the constant ache, the letters he had been writing to everyone he could remember hurting, even though no one ever wrote back—all of it just something that Rick could say at his funeral, a funeral that barely a soul would show up to.
He could either pass the time listening to the radio until he was buried alive or frozen to death, or he could leave the truck behind, trying to find where the road was under all that white, and then praying that he could figure out which way was east. His truck had spun so many times and everything looked exactly the same, like an unpainted canvas, that he had no idea which direction was which. Even if he could find the road, and head in the right direction, he couldn’t walk the ten miles to Rocky Ford, and it was nearly thirty miles back to Pueblo. His only hope was to walk until he stumbled upon a house, which he wouldn’t be able to see until he walked right up to it since the power was out. He sat for a moment with his head in his hands, and then made his decision. He’d put on the insulated coveralls he had behind his seat, along with every other piece of cloth he could find in the truck, and start walking. It was better, Lyle thought, to be remembered as someone who tried.
