The Ski Lodgers by Art Bell

“You might wanna slow down on these curves, Dave,” Wally said, leaning forward in the passenger seat, his eyes wide behind his giant, black-rimmed glasses and glued to the road. If only Dave’s eyes were glued to the road, I would have felt a lot better because Dave was the one driving. None of us wore seatbelts because the ten-year-old 1970 Ford pickup truck, once red but now kind of a brownish pink due to rust and sun fade, didn’t have any. I sat in the middle between Wally and Dave, my body tense, bracing for the inevitable disaster. I imagined my body smashing through the windshield, hurtling into the frigid darkness, and landing in a lifeless heap on the shoulder of the West Virginia road, where it would be ravaged by forest creatures great and small.

“This baby handles, doesn’t she?” said Dave, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a Budweiser in a longneck bottle. “You sure you don’t want a beer, Art?” he asked, turning to look at me. I shook my head. Dave leaned forward to catch Wally’s eye. “Wally? Another beer?” That’s when I noticed the yellow line in the middle of the road drift rightward so that it bisected the truck. And me.

“Whoa, Dave, watch the road for chrissake!” I screamed. Dave swerved back to his lane, and Wally slid into me, and I slid into Dave. Seatbelts—weren’t they mandated by some government regulation?

“Art, you gotta relax, man!” Dave said. He threw his empty longneck over his shoulder into the back of the cab. The clink of bottles made me shudder. That must have been his fourth beer since the start of the trip, an hour ago.

Dave reached for another beer, took his hands off the wheel to open it with the bottle opener hanging by a string from the rearview mirror, like a chrome-plated St. Christopher medal, and took a long pull. At that moment, I thought of all the people, starting with my mother, who had told me not to get into a moving vehicle with someone who’d been drinking. It’s not just sound advice; it’s completely unassailable advice, and up until that moment, I’d done a fair job of heeding it. A lot of good it was doing me now. Everything seemed to be getting darker despite the fact that the sun had set hours ago. The headlights were illuminating less and less of the road as we drove. Was the battery dying, or was Dave speeding up? I glanced at the speedometer, but of course, the dash lights were out. I guessed we were pushing eighty.

Wally spoke again, calmly, almost casually. “Hey, Dave, why don’t you make this your last beer?” Then he snorted. Wally snorted now and then. It was kind of like a tick or something. A nervous snort.

“Good idea,” Dave said, wiping some spilled beer from his beard with the back of his right arm. Then he pulled a silver hip flask out of his jacket pocket. “Got some brandy in here, and it’s a good thing, too. It’s colder than a witch’s titty outside, and this heater sucks.” He put the flask between his thighs and banged the dashboard. “C’mon ya damn heater. Don’t die on me in front of my friends.”

Actually, Dave Farley, Wally Shinkowski, and I barely knew each other. We’d started working together at a Washington D.C. consulting firm a few months earlier, having just graduated from different colleges. Dave was a geologist, Wally was an environmental scientist, and I was supposed to be an economist. Dave, Wally, and I were teamed up on a project that had to do with coal and environmental regulations, and this being the late 1970s, all eyes were on the EPA to get some regulations in place. The three of us became work buddies, sometimes grabbing a beer after work. It was over a beer that Dave told us that his uncle lived next to a ski resort in West Virginia, and he could put us up if we wanted to go skiing. “I’ve got wheels, so I can drive,” Dave said. We made a plan to go the following weekend.

We’d been driving for four hours, and it was past midnight when Dave manhandled the old pickup truck off the main road. After fifteen minutes, we turned onto a dirt road that led into the darkness of the woods. The headlights bounced off the trees and shone on the snow packed a foot deep that surrounded them. “Well, boys, here we are!” Dave said, drunk and victorious. The truck’s heater had quit an hour ago. The cab of the truck, warmed only by the heat of our bodies, was so cold that frost crept up the windshield and on all the metal surfaces. We bounced along a dirt road or path through what seemed to be a heavily wooded area.

“There’s my uncle’s place,” said Dave, pointing as we passed a two-story house with lots of windows and an elaborate TV antenna lashed to the chimney.

“No lights, Dave,” I said. “Do we wake your uncle, or did he leave the door open for us?”

“What? Oh, we’re not staying in the house. My uncle’s a mean old bastard. You wouldn’t wanna stay there anyway.” Dave said, steering the truck toward a shack about twenty-five feet from the house. The truck stopped. “We bunk in here.”

Shivering, I said, “As long as it’s got heat and a bed, it’s fine with me.”

Dave got out of the truck and slammed his door closed. “Oh, we’re here,” Wally said. “I must’ve dozed.”  He opened his door, stepped out, and slipped on the icy driveway. I followed and managed to stay upright. Dave grabbed my duffle from the back of the truck and tossed it at me. Dave led us into the shack and flipped a switch on the wall. A single naked bulb hanging from a wire illuminated the small room. There was a window on each wall except for the one with the door in it, where I stood. The ceiling was low, and the place smelled of smoke and rotting wood. Scanning the room, I saw an old wooden armoire on the far wall, a small round table with some dirty dishes on it flanked by three folding chairs, and an iron potbellied stove in the corner, its exhaust pipe going through the ceiling. Next to the stove was a neatly stacked pile of split logs and some old newspapers. In another corner were two discarded lamps, an iron, a toaster, and some blankets.

“Hey,” I said, “am I hallucinating, or can I see my breath in here? And where are the beds?” Instead of answering, Dave walked up to the armoire, pulled out a sleeping bag, and tossed it to me. Wally walked in behind me in time to catch his sleeping bag.

After looking around for a few seconds, Wally dropped the sleeping bag and said, “What the fuck, Dave? I thought we were sleeping at your uncle’s place. It’s freezing in here. And this sleeping back stinks of mold.” He dropped the sleeping bag, then took a few steps over to the table and picked up a coffee cup. He looked into it, then turned it upside down. “This thing’s half full of frozen coffee,” he said. “Scientists tell us that coffee freezes at thirty-two degrees, Dave. Fahrenheit. It can’t be more than twenty in here.”

“Relax, Wally, we’ll be okay,” Dave replied, “soon as we get this fire going.” He knelt in front of the stove and threw in some crumpled newspaper and four or five pieces of wood. Dusting splinters off his hands, he scanned the area, then the rest of the shack. “Must be some matches around here someplace,” he muttered as he started poking around. “You guys wanna help me find some matches, or would you rather try and sleep without the stove going?”

Wally and I looked at each other. Wally reached into his pocket, pulled out a book of matches, and threw them at Dave, who picked them up and lit the newspaper. He closed the door of the stove, but there was a little window that let you see the fire. We stood in silence and watched the newspaper through a small glass window in the door or the stove. After a minute, the paper was aflame, crackling and spitting sparks and casting jumpy shadows around the shack.

I’d lived in a bunch of places by then, all with central heating. So I was amazed at how quickly our little shack heated up from the inferno raging in the potbellied stove heater. Dave put as much wood in there as it could hold before unrolling his sleeping bag on the floor. He unlaced his work boots and pulled them off, and his dirty white socks looked like they were as old as the pickup truck. “I’m sleeping in my clothes, guys. I suggest you do, too.”

“Guess I packed my nightie for nothing. Damn,” said Wally.

Dave laughed, but I just mumbled, “Shut up, Wally.” I think I said it just to convince myself that I hadn’t yet died of exposure or shock.

“One more thing, guys,” Dave said, reaching into his coat pocket and pulling out his brandy flask. “A nightcap! I’ll go first.” He opened it and took a long pull. When he stopped, he coughed a few times, wiped his mouth with his hand, and offered the flask to me. I declined, but Wally grabbed it and took a drink. Dave recovered it from Wally and took another swig, coughing and wiping as before. “Okay, guys, goodnight. Gotta get some sleep if we’re gonna get to the mountain early. It’s about a 40-minute drive to the ski resort.”

“Of course it is,” Wally said. I looked at Wally and shook my head. Dave had told us his uncle lived right next to the ski resort. I decided to get into my sleeping bag before I heard any other discouraging news.

It was a snug fit in there because I was wearing my ski jacket. But after about five minutes, I began to feel almost comfortable. The place had warmed considerably; the stove was radiating an astonishing amount of heat and adding a soft flickering glow to the hut, and it was the kind of quiet you only get deep in the woods on an icy cold night where even the animals were hunkered down against the elements. My eyes closed. The last thing I heard before I drifted off to sleep was Dave’s slow, rhythmic snoring accented by Wally’s randomly timed snorts.

I woke suddenly. My eyes sprung open. My eyeballs felt cold—I wondered if that was even possible or if I was dreaming it. My nose was also cold, much colder than when I passed out a few hours ago. I shifted in my sleeping bag, and my feet, still inside my boots, were so cold they ached. My arms were wrapped around me in a bear hug, and I marveled at my vain attempt to keep warm by hugging myself while I slept. I looked over at the stove and saw its outline in the dark. But there were no dancing flames through the window. The fire was out.

“Anybody awake?” I whispered into the darkness. “Wally? Dave?”

It was Wally who replied. “Yeah, I’m up. I’m freezing to death.”

“The fire’s gone out. We gotta wake Dave,” I whispered. “Hey, Dave,” I said a little more loudly, “Dave, get up, the fire’s out!”

“Dave!” Wally screamed, scaring me. When Dave still didn’t answer, Wally turned me and said, “Okay, one of us has to start the fire. How ‘bout you.”

“Wally, shut up a second. What do you hear?.”

He waited five seconds and said, “I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly. But drinking makes you snore, right? Before I fell asleep, Dave was snoring like a banshee.”

“Drinking also lowers your body temperature,” Wally said. “Actually, you’re not supposed to drink alcohol if you’re trying to survive in subzero temperatures. It makes you feel warmer, but you’re more likely to freeze to death. I learned that in the Boy Scouts.”

“You were a Boy Scout? Great, you light the stinking fire.” Neither of us moved. We just listened to the silence. Finally, I said, “Wally, you think Dave’s dead?”

Wally snorted. “Maybe he’s just in a coma.”

“Shit, really?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” he said, then climbed out of his sleeping bag and went over to the stove. “This thing’s ice cold. Must have been out for a while.” I pulled myself further into my sleeping bag, hugging myself and shivering. My eyes were closed, but I heard the creak of the stove door opening and the sound of crumpling newspapers, then the wood clunking into the stove…one, two, three, four logs. The match chirped, and I could hear the small flame sizzle to life. I closed my eyes tighter, hoping that would warm me. The newspaper crackled, and I tried to imagine the fire starting to warm the air around the stove, the warmth slowly filling the room and drifting toward me. Wally shut the stove door and scrambled back into his sleeping bag. “Jeez, it’s cold.”

“What about Dave?” I asked. “Should we try and wake him? What if he needs to go to the hospital or something?”

“I’m not getting out of my sleeping bag again. I just lit the fire—I probably just saved our lives. Mine and yours, anyway. It’s your turn. You wanna check out Dave, be my guest. I’m going back to sleep, where it’s warm.” Wally scrunched down into his sleeping bag. I listened to the fire and watched the light show the flames made on the wall next to me, wondering what to do.

Wally was right. Dave was probably fine. But, lying there in the dark, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much he drank, how cold it was, and the possibility, no matter how remote, that something was wrong. Bad outcomes always seem more likely in the middle of the night. This trip had been enough of a mess already without a real casualty. If Dave were sick or dead, we’d have to tell his “mean old bastard” uncle, who I pictured with no teeth and a shotgun pointed at my forehead. At the very least, we’d have to take Dave to a hospital in his truck. I might end up driving it or, worse, riding in the back of the pickup so Dave could lie across the seat.

I decided to try to roll myself over to Dave without getting out of my sleeping bag. Unfortunately, Wally was sleeping between us, but I figured if I moved fast, I could roll over Wally without waking him. Even if I did, he’d get over it. I lay there trying to get up my nerve. I rolled over once, stopping to rest before rolling over Wally. While I was resting, I fell asleep.

The next thing I knew, sunshine was streaming into the cabin.

It was warm in the shack, but I could tell the fire was dying. I wriggled out of my sleeping bag and tried to shake off the stiffness caused by sleeping in the cold before throwing some wood into the stove. I watched the new wood burst into flame and held my hands out to catch the radiating heat. Wally was still asleep. Dave, clearly not dead, was not in the cabin. Wally snorted in his sleep, so he wasn’t dead either. We’d survived the night. My sense of relief passed quickly as I realized that I had to go to the bathroom, and there wasn’t one in the shack. I went to the door and opened it. Dave was walking toward me, his eyes red and squinty in the sun. “Bathroom?” I asked. Dave pointed to a small outhouse twenty yards away.

“You got any aspirin?” he asked, his voice raspy. “I got a wicked headache.” When I shook my head, he just turned around and started walking down the driveway toward his uncle’s house.

When I returned from the outhouse, Wally was still in his sleeping bag, but his eyes were open. “Where’s Dave?” he asked.

“He went to his uncle’s house to find some aspirin.”

“Are we still going skiing?”

“It’s about the last thing I feel like doing,” I replied, “but after all that, we might as well.” I added, “I could use a hot shower.”

Wally chuckled. “At this point, I’d settle for a couple pancakes and some undercooked bacon.”

A few minutes later, Dave walked in, hand on his forehead. “Hey, Wally. You sleep okay?”

“Yeah, I slept great until the fire went out. Art and I both woke up, but you were sleeping so quietly that we thought you were dead. Anyway, I got up and restarted the fire.”

“You thought I was dead?” Dave started laughing. “Why would I be dead?” He laughed some more before the rough laugh turned into a short coughing fit. “Hey, I forgot to tell you guys something,” he said when his cough subsided. “My uncle wants to be paid for letting us stay here last night. He wants fifty bucks from each of us.”

Wally and I looked at each other. Then Wally turned to Dave and said, “You’re kidding, right?” But Dave wasn’t kidding, so we paid up without another word.

A half-hour later, we got back in Dave’s truck for the long drive to the ski resort. As soon as the engine turned over, Dave slammed his fist on the dashboard. The truck’s heater roared to life.