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.
