Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online

Chapter 18

1222 1/9/1981 – 1806 1/9/1981:
Decatur & Overland Snowplow Extra 3217
Lordston Northern Extra 451

“Who dealt this shit?” DeTar asked.

Snowplow Extra 3217 had made it to Rochester without getting stuck. Cziller had the train parked just past the Main Street crossing. While the conductor went back to the poker game, Bartenslager set the brakes on the idling Geeps, then walked with the road foreman back to the way car.

“What now, Steve?” he asked.

“We wait,” Cziller replied. “She won’t be here with that water pump for a while, yet.”

Bartenslager shrugged. “Might as well play some poker, then.”

The cab of the derailed Alco lay tilted sideways to the left by perhaps fifteen degrees, but this wasn’t enough to hamper Bruce Page. Once upon a time, he had taken a Red Cross first aid course through the railroad, and at the time it had seemed like a crashing bore. Now, the effort he had spent might prove to be of some value.

Diane lay crumpled on her back, where she had been thrown as the Alco hit the ground. The brakeman checked her over quickly. Right off, he noticed that she was bleeding lightly from an abrasion on her head, and a quick look showed that her arm didn’t look right. She was obviously in a lot of pain, but she was becoming more lucid. “It’s all right, Diane,” he said, knowing fully well that things were far from all right. “Where do you hurt?”

“All over,” she said. “Did it stall?”

Did what stall? “Where all over, Diane?”

“Head, arm, back, leg. Is the engine running?”

“No,” he said, noticing only now that the engine had quit. “I hadn’t noticed your leg. Which leg?”

“Drain it,” she said quietly.

Drain what? She wasn’t making any sense at all. Finally it came to Page that she had to be talking about the stupid engine. Dumb broad, he thought. “We’ve got plenty of time for the engine, Diane,” he said. “Let’s take care of you, first. I want you to lie still. Don’t move. I don’t know what’s wrong with your back, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

He began to run his hands down her sides, and she squirmed to fight him. “Drain the engine,” she said, more clearly now. “Get your hands off me.”

His voice was firm as he replied, “Look, I’m not trying to cop a feel. I want to see where else you hurt. I’ll get to the engine in a little while.” Her struggling stopped as he continued feeling down her side, but she screamed a moment later. “Broken ribs, too.”

In a few moments more, he had some idea of what the damage was, and it was considerable. The bleeding from the head wound was minor and would soon cease, even if he did nothing – but she’d had to have hit something with her head. That, along with the monomania about the engine (or was that normal?) and the poor reaction of her eyes to the light from his cigarette lighter indicated a possible concussion. She had back pains, cause unknown, and that could be serious, indeed. Also, a broken arm, a broken lower leg, broken ribs. There didn’t seem to be any major external bleeding, for her snowmobile suit had protected her to some extent, but there could be any amount of bleeding from internal injuries. The girl was definitely in sad shape.

There was a limited amount that Page could do for her under the circumstances. About all that he could do was splint the fractures, try to immobilize her back somehow, and get her to a hospital.

Right. How?

His first thought was to try the radio. There was apparently some power still available from the Alco’s battery, so he stood up, keyed the microphone, and called, “SX-3217, this is Extra 451. Emergency.”

The radio remained silent. He repeated the call several times, but there was no reply. Within a minute of two, it was obvious that the D&O snowplow train was out of the range of the radio, or perhaps it was behind the hill in Rochester.

“Anybody on this frequency, this is Extra 451. Emergency.” He called. He doubted that there was any D&O radio close enough to hear him on the yard frequency, which was the only one the Alco’s radio had. If had had the road frequency, he might have been able to raise one of the repeaters and get a reply from Putnam Yard. Perhaps someone over on the C&SL tracks would hear him, though.

Another minute or two went by, with only silence for his reward. Perhaps there was a railfan down in Coldwater with a scanner; that was his only other hope of getting a message through on the radio. “Anyone listening on this frequency, Extra 451 is derailed in snow about five miles north of Coldwater. We urgently need medical assistance.” He repeated this call several times, then hung the mike back up, not expecting a reply. “We’ll try SX-3217 again in a few minutes,” he told the injured girl. “I’m going to go outside and try to find something for splints and for a backboard. I can drain this thing if it’s not too big a job. “Not a big job,” she said, almost in a whisper. “See the operator’s manual in the right locker.”

Under normal circumstances, it would have been an easy job to drain the freezable coolant out of the Alco. These were not normal circumstances. The engine sat nose down, leaning to the left in the ditch, and there was a good amount of coolant that wouldn’t come out of it the way that it sat. There was a fire axe in with the brakeman’s tools in the engine, and working through an access door with it, Page cut all the hoses that he could reach on the left side toward the nose. It’ll take them a while to get that fixed, he thought, but it’ll drain the engine for sure. It wasn’t something that he would have thought about normally, from a first aid standpoint, but if it made Diane rest more easily, it was worth the effort.

Besides, she was going to have to stay calm, for even though Bruce made a desultory look around the engine and plow, he knew he wasn’t likely to find what he was going to need.

What he needed was a piece of plywood, perhaps two feet by four feet, a half an inch or more thick. There was nothing like that to be found. He needed to tie the girl down to immobilize her back. If it was broken and she moved around, then she could permanently paralyze herself. Her legs and toes would move now, so that hadn’t happened yet, and for that matter, there was no sign that she had injured her back that badly – but there was no guarantee that she hadn’t, either.

At least he could do something about splinting the arm and leg. That might make her rest more easily. He took the fire axe and wallowed off through the snow to a grove of saplings he could see through the storm. He cut several of them, which were an inch or more thick, and struggled back toward the stricken engine, which lay off the tracks like a beached whale. Once out of the wind, behind the engine, he stopped for a moment to figure out what to do next.

“Cut the goddamn cards.” DeTar was losing now, and he wasn’t taking it well. Cziller was getting very tired of the poker game, especially since he hadn’t been in it and had no desire to get involved. He sipped at his coffee again and looked at his watch: nearly one. She ought to be getting here with that stupid water pump any time now, and they could get back on the move again.

Maybe they weren’t that far away, he thought. There was one way to find out. He went to the way car’s radio and checked that it was on the yard frequency. “Extra 451, this is SX-3217,” he called.

The radio remained silent. He called again, and was again rewarded with silence. Bigelow looked up from a magazine. “Forget it, Steve,” the second shift conductor said. “From here, you probably aren’t getting out more than three miles to the south. They’ve got to be over on the far side of the hill.”

Cziller nodded. “Maybe the going was harder than we thought.”

Standing there in the lee of the rust-colored engine, the thought struck Bruce Page: he didn’t really need a backboard, not just now, anyway. The backboard has two purposes: to immobilize the patient, so that any spinal injuries can be kept from getting worse by the patient’s movements, and to support the back while the patient is being moved.

Besides, there was no way that he was going to be able to get a regular backboard under the girl by himself, anyway. Ambulance crews usually used four or more people, he remembered being told. And, even if he had her on a backboard, there was no way he was going to be able to move her. He could immobilize Diane’s back with splints, if she could be kept from moving. But, if he did that, he had to have help.

There wasn’t going to be much power left in the battery for the radio. He could put out more calls, but there was no guarantee that he would be heard by anyone. Still, it might work, and as the battery grew colder, it wouldn’t be putting out enough power to transmit much longer.

There in the lee of the Alco, a hard decision was being made. If he splinted the girl so that her back was immobile, he should stay with her. But the only way to be sure that help would arrive would be to go for it. That would mean leaving a hurt, scared girl alone, unable to help herself in any way; not a good idea under any circumstances, but it might prove to be the only choice he had.

Perhaps someone had heard the desperate radio call he had made earlier. If so, help would be getting there shortly. Say, an hour or so. It would take him that long to get the girl thoroughly splinted and prepared if he had to go for help. If help didn’t get to them soon, he’d have to walk out through the storm to get it. If he did that, he didn’t dare wait much beyond an hour, or daylight would be running out before he got to Coldwater. It was going to be hard enough to find his way down the tracks through the storm when there was light to see by; there was no hope at all of finding his way in the dark, without any light at all.

Those thoughts made the decision for him. If that was the way it was going to be, that was the way it was going to have to be. He picked up the poles from the saplings he had cut earlier and returned to the cab.

It was noticeably colder in the cab, and it was hardly warm down on the floor where Diane lay. She was getting uncomfortably chilly, but her first words were, “Did you get it drained?”

“Pretty well,” he said. “There were some hoses lower than the drains, with the way this thing is sitting, so I just cut them.”

“Good,” she said. He checked her pulse. It was a little slower; she might be in shock a little. But her face seemed a little red, and with the possibility of back injuries, he wasn’t about to try to turn her around. He sat down on the floor next to her.

“Diane, look. I think you know that there’s a good chance that you’ve broken your back.”

“Yes,” she said thinly.

“I’m not saying you have, but I don’t want to take the chance that you haven’t. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Now, what I’m going to have to do is to make sure that you can’t move your back and injure it more. It’s not going to be the most comfortable thing, but you probably will be in less pain than you’re in now.”

“Good,” she said.

“The thing is, I’m going to have to fix it so you can’t move at all, and you’re going to have to make a conscious effort to keep from moving.”

“All right.”

In the limited space that he had in the slanted cab of the Alco, it took as longer than he’d expected to get the splints on her. What he really needed more than the splints themselves was cloth strips to tie them up with. He’d thrown his travel bag into the Alco’s cab when they left Coldwater the morning before, and in the bag was a favorite pair of jeans. This would be the end of the road for them; his pocket knife converted them into the cloth strips he needed.

He started by tying her legs together, to use one leg as a splint for the other. The same strategy worked for the lower arm she’d broken; the other arm would also serve as a splint, and would keep her from moving her arms – possibly the worst danger for a back injury. Then, he laid a pole along each side of her body, and tied it as firmly as he could to keep her from rolling or bending. He ran out of pants material early on, and a spare flannel shirt also went into the project.

It wasn’t a thing that he did all in one burst, for he wanted to go slowly. In the breaks that he took he continued to try calling SX-3217 or anyone else on the radio until he was sure there wasn’t enough power left in the battery to transmit.

While he worked, Diane didn’t say much. Finally, he unrolled the sleeping bag that she had brought along when there had still been thoughts of joining SX-3217 for the duration. As gently as he dared, he rolled her splinted body to one side to move the bag under her a bit, and threw it over her. “That’s not very good,” he said, “But that’s the best that I dare do. How do you feel?”

“Lousy,” she said. “How long do I have to stay like this?”

“Until help gets here,” he said. “And that’s the other thing I have to talk about,” he said. “If there isn’t any help here soon, I’m going to have to go and get it.”

Cziller put the radio microphone up for the hundredth time in the last hour. “Where in hell could they be?” he asked no one in particular.

“Maybe they had trouble,” Bigelow suggested.

“Begins to look that way,” the road foreman agreed.

“Maybe they couldn’t get the engine going at all,” Anson suggested. He knew from experience that starting the engine could be a touch-and-go situation.

“You would think we would have heard about it. But then, Putnam can’t reach us from here on the road frequency. There’s one way to find out. I’m going over and make some phone calls. Keep trying on the radio, Tom. If you get anything, send someone over to me.”

It took Cziller a few minutes to enlist the aid of the Rochester police, but soon he had placed a call to Ken Sawyer, the welder and mechanic down in Lordston, thanking himself that he’d written down his number when he’d talked to Diane earlier.

“They left here, sure,” Sawyer said. “I heard them blowing the horn about eleven. I haven’t been over there since, but they had the engine going when I dropped the water pump off with them.”

They were on their way, then. One of the policemen wondered if they had made it to Coldwater, but a call to the police there revealed that the rust-colored Alco had passed through town, blowing its whistle, perhaps two hours before.

“Damn,” Cziller swore. “They must have had trouble north of there, and that hill south of here must be blocking our transmissions.”

“Don’t know how you’d find out for sure,” one of the policemen said.

“I’ve got a couple of guys on my train who can ride a snowmobile,” the road foreman said. “Is there any chance we could borrow a snowmobile here in town? I could have them ride out past the hill and try to contact them on a portable.”

“The department has a snowmobile,” the older policeman said. “And I’ve got one you can take.”

Ten minutes later, Spike Hottel and Jim Bartenslager were riding snowmobiles down the tracks to the south. The two cuts past the river were by now almost full of snow, again, but there wasn’t an Alco poking out of the drifts. At the top of the long grade, they stopped the snowmobiles, and Bartenslager pulled a brakeman’s portable radio from under his coat, and began to call over it into the storm.

His words could be heard in the way car of SX-3217, where Cziller had returned with the policemen. The engineer repeated the call several times, and the continued calling told Cziller all he needed to know. When Bartenslager called down, “Steve, I’m not getting anything,” he wasn’t passing along new information.

“Ride on south, you guys,” Cziller told the two. “You’ll be out of touch from here, but stop every couple miles and call them again. When you’ve burnt off a third of your gas, turn around and come back here. Give us a call as soon as you get back in range.”

“What do we do now?” the younger policeman wondered.

“Same thing we’ve been doing,” Cziller said. “We wait.”

The policeman frowned. “We could call down to Coldwater and have someone head north, but the gas those guys have got should take them to Coldwater, anyway. It’s not that far.”

Bartenslager’s call over the portable wasn’t heard in the cab of the Alco. Probably, the battery was too weak by now with the cold and the strain that Page had put on it.

The afternoon was crawling on, and still Page sat in the cab, putting off what was becoming increasingly inevitable. If he got on his way right now, there was still time left to make Coldwater in daylight. But that would mean leaving the injured Diane.

“Don’t leave me alone like this,” she pleaded in a weak voice.

“I don’t know what else I can do, Diane,” he responded, getting to his feet. “I don’t dare screw around here any longer, or it’s going to be getting dark. I’ll never get through after dark, and I don’t think we dare wait all night.”

“All right,” she said. “Just make sure you come back for me.”

Hat, gloves, parka. It would have to do. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he told the girl, lying immobile on the floor of the engine. “Try to sleep, if you can.”

“Fat chance,” she snorted.

He struck out down the grade. The going wasn’t too bad, since the plow had cleared the tracks pretty well earlier. Here and there, the shine of polished steel rail shone through the white of the drifting snow. There wasn’t much else to see, in fact, it was hard to see anything. The white of the drifting snow in the air blended with the white of the snow that lay all over the countryside. Here and there, the cut that the plows had made earlier in the day lay almost full of snow, and if he hadn’t had the traces of the cut to follow, he would have gotten lost in the storm for sure.

As it was, the going was bad enough. The wind was more or less at his back, and it carried him along and kept his eyes from being filled with snow. Yet, the wind tore at his relatively thin clothes; though he had on jeans and long johns, his legs were so cold that he could barely feel them. In the deepening snow, he wasn’t really going very fast, but he plugged along as steadily as he could to the south. Once in a while, he could see a tree or a bush to one side or the other of the tracks, but if there were any houses alongside the tracks where help might be had, he never saw them.

The nearest place that he could expect to find help was on the north edge of Coldwater, where a road crossed the tracks; he remembered a few houses sitting at the crossing, and someone there had to have a working telephone.

That was a good five miles off through the storm from where the Alco lay. What was it that Steve Cziller had said early that morning? Something about it not being safe to be out alone? This wasn’t safe, but there was no other choice.

The lone figure pressed on to the south.

Several miles to the north of where Bruce Page was walking, two other people were also moving southward through the storm: Spike Hottel and Jim Bartenslager on the borrowed snowmobiles. Heading downwind, they found the going relatively easy, though they had a harder time finding their way than Page. The tracks were more thoroughly snowed up, so they had to press along at considerably less than the wind speed, and the snow kicked up by the snow machines made the visibility that much worse.

This was the comfortable part of the trip. Both of them knew very well that after they turned around, the trip back to the north wasn’t going to be any fun at all.

They crawled southward, stopping every few minutes to call over the portable radio. Considering the visibility and the continued stops, they couldn’t go very fast. Nearly an hour after they had talked to Cziller on the radio, they’d gone about as far as they had dared to go, and a bit farther.

Bartenslager, in the lead, came to a stop for another radio call. “I’ve been using mine right along,” he told his companion. “Why don’t you give yours a try?”

Hottel responded by pulling out the other portable radio that SX-3217 had carried, and tried yet another call for the missing Alco; again, there was no reply. “What do you think, Jim?” he asked. “We could probably squeeze out another couple miles before we have to turn around.”

“Might be,” Bartenslager replied. “But we’re going to burn gas like mad heading back north.”

“How far do you think we’ve come?” Hottel asked.

“We’ve got to be past the point where we hit the ties this morning, I’d guess,” the engineer replied.

“I guess so too. What do you think about heading on south to Coldwater, getting gas there, and then heading back?”

“We ought to,” Bartenslager said. “But that’s going to be a bad enough damn trip as it is from here, without adding more. If we’re going to be gone that long, Cziller is going to start getting worried about us, too. Six will get you two that he’s already called down and got someone heading north out of Coldwater.”

“The hell with it,” Hottel said. “I don’t like it at all. We really ought to go on to Coldwater, just to make sure. They couldn’t have vanished into thin air. They’ve got to be down here somewhere. I guess you’re right, but hell, it’s only another five or six miles.”

“That’ll add at least another hour, maybe two, to our getting back. Cziller will have search parties out for us by then.”

“All right,” Hottel replied grudgingly. “If we’re going to give up, let’s at least get the hell back there.”

Bruce Page wasn’t walking well. The cold and the deep snow were beginning to get to him. He stumbled on though the storm, south toward Coldwater.

For some of the distance, the walking was easy, for drifts hadn’t completely plugged the track. Here, he could walk along over the ties with relative ease. But then, a drift would have walked over the tracks, sometimes to a depth of three feet or more, and then it was a slow scramble, gaining only a few feet per minute as he tried to wade through the snow.

He wondered how far he had gone. There was no easy way to tell. He felt that he was moving along as well as could be expected, but an hour out, there was no way of telling whether he had come one mile, or two, or three. He moved along steadily, for he was in no mood for taking breaks. The thought of the injured girl lying helpless and alone in the cab of the Alco had made a deep impression on him.

Page had made an impression on Diane, too. He had warned her to try and lie as still as she could, and she tried hard. There was nothing she could do but lie there, staring at the roof of the cab.

The splinting of her broken arm and leg had eased the pain shooting through her body, but only by a little, for her ribs and her back hurt more than her arm and leg. But the loneliness and helplessness that she felt after Page left brought even more pain. Since she was utterly unable to do anything for herself, she was totally dependent on the brakeman for her very life. She knew very well the risk that he was taking, both in leaving her alone and in trying to get through the storm by himself. She knew in her head that there was nothing else that could be done, but in her heart, she cried out against being left alone.

There wasn’t much going on, and time dragged by endlessly. About all there was to see was the roof of the 451, and about all there was to hear was the howling of the wind as it rattled snow up against the side of the engine.

How much longer could it be. Once, she thought she heard snowmobiles in the storm, but she decided that she had to be hearing things. Objectively, she knew that she couldn’t expect him back that soon, since it was still light outside. He had said that he couldn’t expect to get to Coldwater much before dark, much less get back.

Hottel and Bartenslager were several miles to the north, on their way back to SX-3217. Hottel was still burning over the decision to turn around, but they were committed to it by now. They had burned off too much gas to do anything but go back to Rochester.

They were heading into the wind, and the going was a lot harder than it had been earlier. Hottel thought that Bartenslager might have had a point about the difficulty of getting back, for it was a hard ride and slow going, with the wind sweeping snow around the windshields of the snowmobiles and plastering it all over the two railroad men. They didn’t stop for rests, for they were anxious to get back and get it over with.

Riding into the storm, there wasn’t much to see. For the first section, Hottel could follow the other snow machine, and try to follow its tracks, but it was a lot harder for Bartenslager. For the first few miles, he had the tracks of their outbound passage to follow, and that made the going easier, but as they pressed on farther to the north, the wind and the drifting snow pretty well wiped those tracks out. He had difficulty keeping his snowmobile between the sides of the trench that had been cut by the rotary, when it could be seen at all.

The white of the blowing snow in the gray sky merged with the white of the snow all over everything, and there were but few dark landmarks to tell which way was up. Polar explorers call the condition a “whiteout,” but Bartenslager didn’t know that. What he did know was that he was having a hell of a time, and getting a headache to match.

Hottel came forward to relieve the engineer on point, and he didn’t do much better. Still, they slowly gained ground to the north, and only the few places where the tracks were still bare told them that they were still following the railroad and not wandering off into nowhere.

They passed through, or rather, over, a particularly vicious cut, where the blowing wind threw swirling snow with such force that they could scarcely see the fronts of their snow machines. Eventually, that died down a bit as they got past it, and Hottel braked his machine to a stop to brush off some of the snow. Bartenslager stopped next to him and asked, “Got any idea where we are?”

“Might be at that big cut at the top of the hill outside Rochester,” the mechanic replied. “One way to find out.” He pulled the portable radio from under his parka and turned it on. “SX-3217, this is Hottel,” he called.

Cziller’s voice answered instantly. Hottel guessed that he must have been sitting at the radio with the microphone in his hand. “Did you find her?” he asked.

“Negative,” the mechanic replied wearily. “We got to maybe five or six miles from Coldwater, somewhere around where we hit the ties this morning, and no sign of them.”

“Where are you at?”

“We don’t know for sure,” Hottel replied. “We must be around that big cut at the grade south of Rochester.”

“Get on back here, then,” the road foreman ordered, and hung up the microphone. He shook his head. If he’d known that they were going to get that close, he’d have had them go on into Coldwater and gas up there before returning, or just stay there. At the rate that SX-3217 was going, he only needed one mechanic or engineer, anyway.

The poker game had been rather desultory for the last couple hours, and the few people still in the game were playing out of boredom. DeTar wasn’t playing at all. “What do we do now, Steve?” he asked. “Get some hotel rooms and sit out the storm?”

“Don’t know,” Cziller replied. “We could gas up the snowmobiles and send them out again. Or, we could fire up the plow, turn around, and head south ourselves, and stop and pour water to it every few minutes. But let me go over to the cop shop first.”

It was a bitterly cold and uncomfortable walk through the gathering darkness, made all the colder by what he could imagine that must be happening – or had happened – not far north of Coldwater.

“Heard anything?” one of the policemen asked.

“They got to five or six miles out of Coldwater, and didn’t find anything. They just radioed in. Do you think we can get someone to go out from Coldwater northbound? They’ve got to be stuck, or worse.”

“We’ll give a call and see,” the older cop said, turning to the phone.

Cziller only half heard the policeman give a brief outline of the situation, since he was trying to figure out the next move. He wasn’t going to move until he knew what had happened to Extra 451, but then, he couldn’t move anyway until he had that triple-damned water pump the Alco was carrying.

Cziller’s ears perked up when the policeman on the phone smiled and said broadly, “No shit?”

The old lady had been frightened by the snow-covered apparition that came knocking at her door. “What do you want?” she asked.

“There’s been an accident,” Page replied. “I need to use your telephone.”

“What happened?” Cziller asked.

“No need for a search party. Your brakeman just phoned the Coldwater police. They derailed about five miles north of town, and he walked out. They’re getting a party together to go out with snowmobiles and get the girl. She got banged up pretty bad.”

“Goddamn,” Cziller swore. “Those two must have been damn near on top of them when they turned around.”

“Well, at least you know what happened to them,” the young cop shrugged.

“Yeah,” Cziller said, disappointed at the turn of events, but happy that the kids were found, and that they were alive. “But now we’re right back where we were this morning. Can we use your snowmobiles a bit longer? As soon as those guys get back, I want to gas them up, put two other guys on them, and head back down there. If we don’t we’re going to be stuck here forever.”

“What’s so important about getting down there, anyway?” the older policeman asked.

“The reason the kids were coming up here,” Cziller replied, “Is that they’re carrying a part we need to fix that damn snowplow. We’re trying to get to the fire they’re having in Warsaw.”

“What’s the part you need, anyway?”

“A water pump off of a D-8 Caterpillar engine.”

The older cop snorted. “Hell, why didn’t you say so?” he said. “We can probably scare one of those up real easy. I’ll give a call over to the bar and see if Junior Clark is still hanging around.”

“How bad do you need that water pump?” the huge, drunken man asked.

“Real bad,” Cziller replied. “We’ve got to fix the snowplow on the train so we can get through to the fire in Warsaw.”

“Two hundred bucks.”

“Done. Where is it?”

Clark got off of the bar stool and headed for his coat. “You know that shed you’ve had the train parked next to all day?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

“My Cat’s in there. We’ll have to take it off.”

Cziller told the drunk that he’d send his people over to help, and then rushed out of the bar into the snowstorm. He burst into the way car and yelled, “Pickering! Get your ass in gear! I’ve got us a pump, but you’re going to have to yank it off the bulldozer yourself. That guy is too drunk to hit the floor with his hat.”

“What guy? What pump? Where?”

“There’s a great big drunk walking into that garage right there,” Cziller replied, pointing. “Right there,” he repeated, “We’ve been sitting next to a goddamn D-8 Cat all goddamn afternoon!”

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