here.” I pulled up to the registration office and filled out some paperwork. The place was totally deserted, not a single car or foot track in the snow, but they had left all the right stuff in a drop box on the door as promised and the cabin was easy to find. It was perfect, just what I was hoping it would be.
I offered the girl the bathroom first, while I unpacked a little and made some entries into the logbook, and then I cleaned up, myself, when she was out of there and sitting by the fire I had started. We had made good time, and still had an hour before the first real wave, when we headed out to the fields. I gave her the spare coat I always keep in the cab’s storage. The occasional snowmobile whined off in the distance, but even that settled down by midnight, when the first streaks started appearing across the sky. We had nearly this whole area to ourselves.
“Look! There!” I pointed, and her eyes followed my hand. “Make a wish.”
“Wish,” she repeated, arching her neck back, nearly being swallowed by my bulky winter coat.
“Don’t tell me or it won’t come true. Hell, I probably already know what your wish is, anyway, but I don’t think you’re gonna find that money.”
“Wish . . . someone . . . hear . . . me.”
“I’m near you,” I said, stepping up behind her, wrapping my arms around her tiny waist and resting my chin on her shoulder, my beard scratching against the shiny material. Even in that bulky coat, she felt like a bird.
“Hear me . . . no . . . not . . . near you . . . hear . . . me.” She pulled away and ran a few yards from me.
“I hear you,” I said. “I hear you.” Watching the meteors always killed my neck and this was the longest-lasting patch I had seen in years, lots of ways for my wishes to ride into reality.
I lay down in the snow and watched them for a while until the wave eased up. The next big shower was scheduled to start in about four more hours, so I was going to go in, set the alarm clock, and catch some shut-eye. Just then, I remembered something and started doing those lying-down jumping jacks you can do. “Hey,” I yelled to her, “watch this.” The snow out there was a little stiff, not as bad as it had been in Bismarck, but also, not very dusty. No matter, it was for sure no challenge against my two hundred pounds.
“This here is called a snow angel. See? Like an angel? The wings, the robe? We used to make them when we were kids, on those rare winter snows when we got more than an inch in West Texas.”
“Angel,” she said and shook her head a little. I guessed they don’t have angels there, where she was from.
“Uh, like a ghost, impression, imprint, something.” I got up and she looked at it.
“Ghost. Hiroshima. On wall,” she said, studying the shape I had made in the snow after I had crawled up from it. I’d heard about that, some people just vaporized in the blast, leaving only negatives of themselves on the walls around them. I had always thought it was, you know, made up for drama’s sake.
“Here, you make one,” I said, offering her the untouched snow to my right. She shook her head and began walking away. “Wait, come on, you go into the cabin. I’ll stay out here, in my rig. It’s fine, I do it all the time.” We went in and I checked the fire, made sure it would last the night. These new cabins all have the modern conveniences anyway, so the furnace would just kick on if the fire went out in the night. That bathroom even had a nice whirlpool in it I’d been hoping to use that night, but it would have to wait for the return trip.
“There you go, fire’s all set. I got the alarm set in my rig, for the next round. You want me to wake you?” She thought for a minute and then nodded. I set the nightstand alarm for the same time I’d be setting mine in the rig.
“What wish? Ghost friend?” she asked.
“ Yeah, that would be good, wouldn’t it? Fred finally getting his speaking part, but only me getting to hear it?” I laughed. “No.”
“What wish?”
“I told you, if you tell someone, it won’t come true.”
The rig’s cab held warmth pretty well, so it was still a reasonable temperature when I climbed back in, started her up, took my clothes off, and jumped into the sleeper. I wrapped myself in the warmth of Shirley’s Pendleton, the wool sliding up between my legs, giving me a rise even then, scratching against my belly as I buried my nose in the blanket and dreamt her smell was still with me, after all these years. That was the last thing I remembered until the alarm went off at a little after four, like I had planned. I bundled up in the same clothes I had taken off the night before, figuring I would change after I’d gotten myself a shower. I shut the rig off and stepped down into the dark. Usually I just leave it running, even if I have to hit a rest area john, but out here, it was so quiet, so removed from every part of my world that the diesel engine seemed to violate the stillness. It was just going to be me and the meteors. No snowmobiles would be flying around that time of night, or morning, or whatever.
Avoiding the neck cramps, I lay straight down to wait for the shower to peak. The rig was finishing its last hisses and ticks, but two other small noises bled through the sharp air, almost not there at all, but constant. I couldn’t place them at first, but then they came. The fire must have gone out. The lower hum sounded like a small house furnace and I could see a slight string of smoke dancing out of the chimney, but the other sound should not have been going. Even if it was, I should not have been able to hear it.
The first few stars shot through and I laid my wishes on them, like horses racing across the sky, as I do every year. I had no idea if any of them would ever come true for me, but that not knowing always allowed me to wish for things I shouldn’t have wished for in the first place.
That second sound kept bothering me, so I got up from the ground, dusted myself off, and followed it to the front door of the cabin, which was wide open. I ran in. The alarm I had set was buzzing away and I shut it off. Then only the sound of the furnace disturbed the early morning.
“Miss, are you in there?” I called. The bed was empty, but no sound came from the bathroom. My down coat sat at the edge of the bed. “Shit!” I ran outside and dug in my jeans for my penlight. It went half the world away with me to Vietnam and I actually still had it when I stepped off the plane back on U.S. soil. It wasn’t worth a damn out there in the Minnesota winter night.
Her footprints were visible in the foot diameter the penlight offered, but it wasn’t going to be much use to me. I started the rig, hit its headlights, and grabbed the Maglite from its mount on the dash. She wasn’t that far away. I found her in the angel I had made, lying there in her pink satin jacket, the backpack straps around her shoulders, the pack firmly on her back, and that map gripped tight in her hand again.
I dug out the card of that trooper who took my statement. He’d given it to me in case I needed to do any follow-up or some damned thing, who knows. Maybe he knew. I was no longer in North Dakota and Minnesota would be out of his jurisdiction, but I had to start somewhere and he seemed as good a place as any. It was too late to do anything else. I sat with her for a couple hours, until my bones, and really, the rest of me, couldn’t take the ache anymore. “Hi, this is Tommy Jack McMorsey,” I said into my cell phone as the sun came up in her wide-open eyes.
CHAPTER TWO:
Signal Fade
“Based on a True Story . . . or Not”
(Associated Newspaper Syndicate Entertainment column, May 24, 2002, byline—William Donaldson, Syndicate TV Critic)
How many times have you heard that phrase? More than you can count, most likely. From claims of Bigfoot sightings to unauthorized and thinly veiled celebrity biographies, “based on a true story” has become a catchall for a wide array of the outlandish in contemporary culture. How much would you be willing to bet on