“Stop being a drama queen, Avery,” Tom said. He had exactly no patience for Avery.
I distanced myself from the fight. I didn’t want to fuel the fire.
“There,” Avery said. The heater came to life.
“I told you that would work, Avery,” Jack said, not smiling. “You’re stubborn as shit. You know that.”
Ignoring Jack, Avery said, “Whoever wired this engine did a horrendous job.”
“Well, we don’t have time to fix it, so don’t touch it,” Tom said, fearing Avery’s OCD would compel him to fix what he thought was done poorly.
“When was the last time this was actually driven – started for that matter?” Jack asked.
Everyone looked at one another, hoping someone would say yesterday or two weeks ago or even a couple months ago, but no one knew.
“Not exactly confidence inspiring is it?” Jack said.
I laughed. “Freeze here, or freeze stranded on the ice. Either way, you’re frozen.”
“Very poetic, William. Wish Sam was here to regale us with some of his stuff. You know, like the dick slapper poem? Remember that one?” Jack said, letting go of a hardy laugh.
“Yeah, I remember. He had a bit too much to drink that night…”
“Sam is a Neanderthal,” Avery said.
“He hears you say that, he’ll give you the ol’ dick slapper,” Jack said, now chortling.
Avery rolled his eyes.
“Alright, let’s fire this thing up,” I said, looking at Jack and shaking my head. Dick slapper.
The good news was the battery in the Shining was charged because it turned over. The bad news was it didn’t start. We waited a few minutes and tried it again, but still nothing. Avery decided the heater needed to be closer to the engine block. I feared that it would melt the rubber tracks, but it really didn’t matter if they were melted or not if it wouldn’t start.
Thirty minutes or so had passed before we tried starting it again. It turned over, but nothing happened. The fear was the battery would die. Because of the conditions on the patch, any battery installed outside was supposed to be checked every two weeks. Being that the Shining tended to be forgotten, its preventative maintenance might’ve gotten skipped. Compounding that issue was the guy who changed the batteries tended to be, well, damn lazy.
“Can I offer a suggestion?” Avery asked.
We pretty much sighed in unison. Tom finally broke the silence. “As long as you can say it in under a minute.”
Tom stole my line.
“I will just show you rather than telling you, then.”
“Dammit, Avery,” Tom said. I grabbed his arm and motioned for him to let him do it. Tom clenched his fist and jaws. He cursed loudly but conceded that Avery might’ve been their best chance at getting it started.
Avery proceeded to climb into the engine box of the Shining. I couldn’t exactly see what he was doing because Avery’s lamp hid his hands from view. All I could do at that point was hope he knew what he was doing. Part of me wanted to grab him out of there, but the other part that had seen him do wicked clever things in the past won out. Tom chimed in a few times but decided to save his sanity by walking far enough away that he couldn’t see inside the engine bay.
Avery finished whatever it was he did and quickly put his mittens back on. With a wry smile, he said, “Try it now.”
Jack climbed onto the tracks and then into the driver’s seat. I climbed onto the tracks and around to the engine bay. I took one of my gloves off and gave the engine block a feel. It was warm to the touch at that point. I gave Jack the thumbs up. Time seemed to slow down for those few moments. He cranked it a couple times before it knocked and sputtered for a few seconds before dying. On the next try, however, with a huge plume of black smoke belching from the exhaust, it came to life.
Avery walked to the driver side and smugly said, “I told you that would work.” He was extremely proud of himself, not to mention remembering how smug Jack was with him about the heater. He was less willing to run the victory lap around Tom. Good thing. Sam told me later that Tom had been the one who wired it up incorrectly. The important part was, it was running. Now we just had to hope the damn thing would continue running for the ten or so miles to Barrow.
Chapter 4
We had expended a great deal of time making the Shining operational, but it was out of the lean-to and Tom was driving it around the small open area in the center of the Patch. The positives were it was still running, and it seemed to operate more or less as it was supposed to. The negatives, well, it was the Shining, and no one knew if it would run for ten minutes or ten hours. We would hope for the best but expect the worst.
We were nearly finished putting the few items we decided to take with us in the back when Titouan showed up. He didn’t say a single word to anyone. Instead, he climbed the passenger-side track, put his bag on the rear bench seat, and sat beside it. His pouty face and bag in the seat told everyone he didn’t want a traveling companion. As if anyone was going to cry because he hogged the seat. By that point he would’ve had to pay someone to sit by him.
Everyone was loaded in and as ready as you would expect given the circumstances. Tom was tasked with driving, well, because, he just was. None of us had ever driven on the ice road before, so it didn’t matter who drove. I mean it wasn’t rocket science. If we looked for blowouts, which were essentially holes in the ice, and kept our speed under seven miles an hour, we wouldn’t fall through the ice and drown in the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean. No pressure.
It didn’t take long for the first issue to arise. We knew we had to stay near or below seven miles per hour. The problem was the damn speedometer stopped working a few minutes into the trip. It’s not like the Shining was a hot rod or anything near that because it sputtered along to beat all hell. It was disconcerting not being able to see if we were going a safe speed.
Avery, of course, chimed in, saying, “Because we are not near land, rebounding pressure waves should not be an issue. If we stay in a nominal proximity to the desired speed, then we should not fall through the ice.”
I think he was talking about the cause of blowouts, but who knows. No clarification was asked for.
The second and more serious issue was the recent heavy snow had covered the ice road. There’s a good deal of maintenance that goes into keeping an ice road safe. I didn’t know everything there was to know about it, or even a little bit, but I knew that unmaintained ice was bad, and that we had ten or so miles of it to navigate.
Thanks to the unprecedented amount of snow the Patch and outlying areas had received, Tom thought he could feel when the Shining went too far off course to the left or right because of the banks of plowed snow on either side of the road. Since they were steep and of a decent size, we hoped they would corral on the ice road, like how go-cart tracks keep go-karts from leaving the track.
We were maybe fifteen minutes into our trip when Avery spoke up. “Has anyone thought about what it might feel like to drown?”
“Sweet Jesus,” Tish said, surprise raising the pitch of her voice an octave or two. “Really?”
“It is a serious question,” Avery said, without a hint of inflection that would lead us to believe he was joking. “It is times like this when we should contemplate living and all the travails that coincide with it,” he continued.
“Tell your idiot to shut up, William,” Titouan cried from the back seat.
“Oh, hell, ya guys are bein too rough on ol’ boy. He just breakin the ice,” Sam said.
“You’re as bad as he is. Except you realize what you’re doing,” Tish said.