One of them shrugs.
Then they walk back into the road, out of view.
He can hear them talking, can’t pick out a single word.
After a while, the snowmobiles wind up and speed away.
-32-
By midmorning Ron has covered three miles. It should have been easier traveling on the plowed highway, but his legs hurt so much the improvement is negligible. The exquisite pain makes concentrating difficult, and sometimes he forgets to listen for the distant, insect-whining of the snowmobiles.
-33-
At eleven a.m. he crawls up the highway, the pavement sun-warmed under his swollen, frostbit hands that have turned the color of ripe plums.
-34-
Ron lifts his head off the road, the surrounding snow so brilliant under the midday sun, like diamonds, he can’t see a thing but brightness.
He might have been hallucinating, but he feels reasonably sure that something’s approaching, can’t tell from which direction or the size of the incoming vehicle, realizes that a part of him (gaining greater influence by the minute) no longer cares if they find him.
The next time he manages to raise his head, he’s staring into the grill of a Dodge Ram, hears the sound of a door swinging open, glimpses heavily-scuffed cowboy boots stepping down onto the road.
-35-
The exchange of light and darkness as the firs scroll by and the sun blinking at him between the trees has the same discombobulating effect as a strobe light.
Ron pulls his forehead off the glass and looks across the cab at the grizzled driver—long, gray hair, a beard as white as a sunbleached skull, black sunglasses, and beneath all that ancient hair, a face so gaunt it does more to underscore the bones beneath.
He looks over at Ron, back at the road.
Ron whispers, “Where are we going?”
“Huh?”
“Where are we going?”
“What were you doing laying in the middle of the road, son?”
Ron feels exceedingly strange, a degree of weakness worse than the recovery following the three marathons he’d run in his twenties combined.
He wants to answer the man, but with the lightheadedness, he fears he might say the wrong thing, if there is a wrong thing to be said, so he just repeats himself: “Where are we going?”
“You were in Lone Cone last night?”
Ron sits up a little straighter, strains to buckle his shoulder harness.
“Yes. My wife and I.”
“Where’s she?”
Ron blinks through the tears that well up instantly in his eyes.
“You ain’t saying nothing,” the old man says, “but it’s plenty.”
They ride on in silence.
Another sign: “Aspen 10.”
“Used to live in Lone Cone,” the old man says. “Beautiful place. Moved up the road a ways fifteen years ago. Couldn’t take another winter solstice. I ain’t saying it’s wrong or right, or hasn’t had something to do with keeping that town like it is, but for me…I couldn’t do it no more. Every year, there’s talk of quitting the blot altogether. Probably happen someday. God, I miss that town.”
-36-
The truck stops under the emergency room entrance of the Aspen Valley Hospital, and the old man shifts into park.
“I can’t go in there with you,” he says.
Ron reaches down and unbuckles his seat belt, puts his hand on the doorknob.
“Hold on there a minute, son.” Ron looks up at the old man, who removes his shades and stares back at him through one bloodshot, jaundiced eye, one perfectly clear and perhaps a size too large—glass. “It ain’t often someone manages to slip away.”
“I just left her.”
“Wasn’t a thing you could’ve done, so you might as well start letting that go. But what I’m trying to tell you is this. Twenty years ago, a woman got away. She went to the Aspen police, told them everything that was done to her, how they murdered her husband, and you wanna know what happened?” The old man points a long, dirty finger into Ron’s shoulder. “She died in prison four years ago. Convicted of drugging her husband and setting him on fire in their car while on vacation in the peaceful town of Lone Cone. You can’t go up against a whole town, son. You hear what I’m saying? They’re already preparing for you to come back with law enforcement making crazy claims. Don’t do it. Don’t ever go back there. You walk into that hospital and tell them you and your wife got lost in the mountains, and you barely made it out.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s the only chance you got.”
Ron opens the door, climbs down out of the enormous truck.
As he turns back to close the door, the old man reaches across the seat and slams it shut himself.
The truck’s knobby tires squeal as it roars away from the hospital.
-37-
Ron stands once more on the corner of Main and 3rd.
He squeezes his wife’s hand, says, “I’m gonna go in here for a minute.”
“I’ll walk down to Starbucks. You’ll come meet me?”
It feels good stepping out of the maddening August heat and into the theatre—a hundred and fifty-two years old according to the plaque on the brick beside the entrance.
Ron passes through the lobby, through the archway, and climbs two flights of stairs on his tired legs.
He doubts he’s plopped himself down in the same seat he occupied that night, but the view down onto the stage looks exactly like the dreams that still plague him.
Below, a janitor emerges from underneath the balcony, pushing a mop bucket down the center aisle.
-38-
“Excuse me, sir?”
The janitor looks up from his mop bucket, says, “You’re not supposed to be in here.”
“The door was unlocked.”
As Ron arrives at the base of the stage, the janitor’s eyes fall on what remains of Ron’s left hand—everything lost to frostbite but the thumb.
Ron places the janitor around seventy, the man small and wiry. He asks, “How long have you lived here, sir?”
“Forty-five years next month.”
“No kidding.”
“Look, I gotta finish up here.”
“Could I just ask you one little favor?”
“What’s that?”
Ron’s heart pounds under his Hawaiian shirt, his mouth gone dry.
“I want to see the golden bear.”
“What the hell are you talking—”
“The brazen bear you bring out every winter solstice.”
The janitor smiles and shakes his head, leans against the mop handle. “You’re one of those people, huh?”
“What people?”
“Once or twice a year, some conspiracy freak comes along asking about the winter solstice celebration, and didn’t this town used to—”
“I’m not asking, and I’m not a kook. I was here, sir, twenty-nine years ago, December twenty-second, Twenty-Aught-Four.”
“You must be con—”
“I watched from the balcony while you roasted my wife inside the golden bear.”
For a moment, the theatre stands so quiet, Ron can hear the murmur of traffic out on Main, the janitor staring him down with an oblique combination of anger and fear.
Ron says, “I didn’t come here to hurt any—”
“I told you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you—”
“And I got work to do.”
The janitor turns away and pushes his mop bucket toward the far right aisle that in Ron’s dreams are always lined with white-masked executioners.
-39-
He walks slowly down the sidewalk among the throng of tourists, sweating again after half a block.
The waterfall has dried up, and the sky, so blue and pure all those years ago when he and Jessica first came to town, has faded into a pale and dirty white.
Main Street looks the same, although the two lanes have been divided into four to accommodate the tiny vehicles, and there are traffic lights and automated pedestrian crosswalks now at every intersection. Some of the older buildings have been demolished, but most remain to be dwarfed beneath the five- and six-story apartment buildings.