It took him an hour and forty minutes to go eleven miles, in second gear, with the headlights stopping fifteen feet out as if they'd hit a wall. He thought about the drive to Marquette with Karen. If I can just get there. He made himself stop thinking it.
He crossed the first creek, and then the pavement ended under the snow, and the old Doty road went up into the jack pines in a long white tunnel, drifts on either side as high as the cab. There were tire tracks in it. Faint, filling in fast, but there.
He found the place where she'd stopped about three miles in.
He almost missed it. The tracks just stopped, and there was a churned-up spot in the snow at the side of the road, and a patch where the snow had been melted down to brown slush in a rough square, the kind of patch a hot engine makes when it's been sitting with the hood up. There were footprints all around it, filled in nearly to nothing. And then the tracks went on again, up the road.
He understood. Something had gone on her, out here, in a whiteout, on a road nobody would plow till morning. And then she'd gone on.
He didn't let himself think about how. He drove.
The yellow farmhouse was at the end of a long drive past the second creek, with one light burning in a downstairs window and a red barn behind it gone gray in the snow. The Volaré was in the yard. It was nosed up against a drift by the back porch, with its hood still up, and snow piling in on the engine, and steam still coming off it in the wind.
Dale got out with the lantern and went and looked under the hood.
The fan belt was gone. He found what was left of it lying in the snow by the front tire, a black curl of rubber, shredded. And wrapped around the pulleys in its place, wrapped twice and knotted hard with the ends tucked under, in what he recognized with a strange cold dizziness as a surgeon's knot, was a pair of women's nylon stockings, the color the package called Suntan. They had stretched and gone shiny with heat, and one leg had started to fray, but they had held. They had held for eight miles in the dark.
She hadn't used the spare belt. Later she'd tell him why. The belt had gone with a bang on a hill, and she had gotten out with the flashlight in her teeth and found she couldn't get the tensioner loose, not with the socket slipping on the bolt and her hands that cold. She'd worked at it for fifteen minutes until she couldn't feel her fingers. And she had stood there in the snow and thought, Arvo. Nylons. And laughed out loud, alone, in the dark on the Doty road. And then she'd taken them off right there in the blizzard, standing in the lee of the open door, and gotten back under the hood.
"It's not a fix," she would tell him. "It's a way to limp in. You said so. I just needed to limp in."
But that was later. That night he only stood in Hilma Rautio's yard with the lantern, looking at the stockings on the pulleys, with the snow going down the back of his collar, and found that he couldn't move for a minute, and then that he had to put his hand on the fender to stay standing up.
Then he went into the house.