Orson was conscious, and his dark, swollen eyes widened when he saw the snow. It collected in his hair. There were red lines across his face from hours of sleeping on the carpet, and his lips were parched and split.
“We might be in trouble,” I said. “I want you to put your hands behind your back, ’cause I’m gonna undo your feet. Put ’em up here.” He hung his legs out of the trunk, and I removed the bicycle lock from his ankles. Tossing it back into a corner of the trunk, I helped my brother climb out and told him to go around to the passenger door. By the time I’d returned to my seat and adjusted the vents to their maximum output, my clothes were soaked from the snow. I opened the passenger door and Orson got in. Leaving his hands cuffed behind his back, I reached across his lap and shut the door.
We sat there for a moment without speaking. I turned off the windshield wipers. The snow fell and melted on the heated glass. The grayness darkened.
“We’re exactly seventy miles north of Rock Springs,” I said. Orson stared out the windshield. “We near the dirt road?”
“Probably within a half mile. But when it’s like this, it might as well be a hundred.”
“The cabin’s on that side, right?” I pointed out my window.
“Yeah. Somewhere out there.”
“What do you mean? You can’t find it?”
“Not in this.” Concern had tensed his jaw and reduced the gleam in his blue eyes.
“Let’s try,” I said. “It’s better than—”
“Look. About five miles that way into the desert”—he nodded at the swirling grayness out my window—“there’s a ridge. You probably remember it.”
“Yeah. So?”
“If I can’t see that ridge, I have no way of knowing where we are in relation to the cabin. Hell, we could drive that way, but it’d be a shot in the dark, and we’d probably get stuck.”
“Shit.” I turned off the engine. “I should’ve stopped in Rock Springs for the night.”
“Probably so. But you didn’t know it’d be like this.”
“No, I didn’t.” I wiped the snowmelt from my sleek bald head.
“You look like me,” Orson said. “What’s that about?”
“You thirsty?”
“Yeah.”
I fed him a full bottle of tepid water.
“Orson,” I said. “You try anything. One thing. I’ll kill you.”
“I believe it.”
The dashboard clock read 4:07. I watched it turn to 4:08, then 4:09.
“It’ll be dark out there soon,” I said. Sweat trilled down my chest and my legs. Orson leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He smelled of urine. His robe was soiled, and I felt ashamed I hadn’t let him use the bathroom properly since Vermont.
The seconds ticked on: 4:10. 4:11. 4:12.
“I can’t stand this,” I said, and I started the car.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m gonna find that dirt road.”
“Andy. Andy!” I’d shifted the car into drive, and with my foot on the accelerator, I looked over at Orson. “Quit being stupid,” he said calmly. “You aren’t gonna find the road. You aren’t gonna find the cabin. This is a full-fledged blizzard, and if you get us stuck off this highway, we are f**ked. Now, we aren’t leaving this car anytime soon. That’s a given. So let’s wait it out here, in the middle of a highway, where we at least know where we are. If you try to find that dirt road, you’re gonna put us in the middle of a desert in a whiteout.”
“All we have to do is go straight. The cabin’s that way. We’ll go straight for—”
“Which way’s straight? That way? That way? That way? It all looks straight to me!”
I punched the gas, and the tail end of the Lexus fishtailed. Letting off, I pressed more gently, and the tires found the pavement and gave us solid forward momentum. At forty miles an hour, I turned into the desert. The tires sank into the powder, and our speed slowed to thirty. The snow was twice as deep as on the road, and though I felt we might lose traction at any second, I maintained control. Steering between sagebrush, I squinted through the windshield, looking for that long, straight swath of white that would be unmarred by vegetation. It would extend westward, a thin white ribbon in the snow, and we’d follow it and find the cabin.
Orson gaped at me.
“You see anything?” I asked. “You looking?” The engine labored to keep the wheels turning, and the speedometer needle jigged between twenty and twenty-five. I watched it uneasily.
“Circle back,” he said. “Do it now and we might reach the highway. But if you let this car stop out here, we don’t have a prayer.”
“Look for the dirt road,” I said.
“Andy—”
“Look for the f**king road!”
Four minutes passed before I realized he was right. I couldn’t see farther than fifty feet beyond the hood of the car, and with the needle hovering at ten, I doubted if we had had the velocity to return to the highway.
“We’ll go back,” I said, easing the steering wheel to the right.
The back end jinked left and the tires instantly lost traction. Panicking, I stomped the gas, and the car spun 360 degrees. By the time I’d backed off the accelerator, our speed had dropped under five miles an hour, and there was nothing I could do to regain it. The Lexus came to rest against a shrub of sagebrush.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t say anything.”
Touching the gas gingerly, the tires spun, but they didn’t achieve traction. I clenched the steering wheel and pushed the pedal into the floor. The engine roared and the tires spewed up a load of snow, and, for a second, dirt. The Lexus surged forward into fresh snow, and I shoved my foot harder into the pedal until the rpm indicator redlined, and I could smell the engine cooking. But the tires never met the ground again, and after I’d overheated the engine, I turned off the car and jerked the keys from the ignition.
I opened my door and ran out into the storm. At fifty miles an hour, snowflakes become cold needles, and they relentlessly pricked my face. I bent down and scraped through six inches of powder, thinking, Maybe I’m standing on the dirt road. My hands ached as I clawed through the snow, and I reached the dirt finally, but it was too loose to be a road.
Staring up into the raging white fog, I screamed until my throat burned. My face stung from the cold, and the snow seeped through my sneakers. This isn’t happening, I thought, the dread of being stranded out here with him beginning to suffocate me. This cannot be real.