Free Snow Blind by P.J. Tracy

Channel Three.”
    Gino sputtered, but apparently couldn’t manage to eke out a G-rated word.
    â€œThey haven’t really said anything we haven’t been thinking ourselves, Gino.”
    â€œIt isn’t what they said; it’s the way they said it. Bunch of bullshit scaremongering. Kids are going to be afraid of snowmen. They’ll stop building them. Then they’ll grow up and won’t let their kids build snowmen. The networks will never show the Frosty the Snowman cartoon again, and all the radio stations’ll pull the song off their playlists. Gene Autry’s family will never see another residual check again. This could change the winter landscape of the whole country just because Kristin Keller’s got a hard-on for a network slot.” He finally wound down his rant and signed off, leaving Magozzi with a warm beer and a mountain of paperwork.

C HAPTER 8
    K URT W EINBECK BLINKED HIMSELF AWAKE, THEN jerked upright in the seat and looked around in a panic, wondering how the hell he’d managed to fall asleep in the first place, and what had awakened him. The cold, probably. Or maybe it was a gust of wind, rocking the little car. No, that couldn’t be it. This piece-of-crap tin was locked so tight in the holes that four bald tires had dug, it would have taken a hurricane to move it a fraction of an inch.
    The ditch was ridiculously deep, and any Minnesota boy knew what that meant. They’d built the damn road right through the middle of a swamp, hauling in enough fill to raise it above the waterline, and not a crumb more. So all through the state you had these roads towering above the surrounding land with ditches so deep, you could drown in them during the spring. Driving on them in winter was like an Olympic automobile balance-beam competition. One tire one inch too far one way or the other, and you were toast.
    He’d known it the minute he’d felt the car skid and go airborne. If there hadn’t been two feet of fresh snow waiting at the bottom, he would have busted an axle when it finally smacked down. No way he was going to get it out, but still he tried, rocking back and forth as long as the tires grabbed snow, digging himself in another few inches when they spun, until the friction of the tires finally froze the snow around them into ice and they locked up tight. Worse yet, he’d dug himself in so far that the snow had packed around the doors and there was no way he could push them open.
    Goddamned snow coffin, is what it was. Ol’ Cameron Weinbeck just dug himself in so deep, the snow packed the doors shut and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to get out. ’Course he was pretty well pickled like always, so maybe it wasn’t so bad, sitting there waitin’ for his eyelids to freeze open and his fingers to break and fall off. Probably had himself a high old time until he emptied the last bottle, then I suspect things went downhill from there.
    It wasn’t your standard run-of-the-mill eulogy, but it was the story he’d heard most, standing around his dad’s coffin as an eight-year-old. And here he was, twenty-four years later, about to relive a family legacy.
    He’d almost wet his pants right then, until he remembered to roll down the window and squeeze out that way.
    It had been snowing hard by the time he crawled out of the car and got to the top of the ditch, and the temperature was dropping way too fast for his thin coat and tennis shoes. He looked around at the snowy woods, empty land, and deserted road and thought, Middle of nowhere, which was an overused phrase in this state until you realized it was the place you got to whenever you turned a corner this far north of the Cities.
    The newscasters started hammering viewers over the head with the winter driving rules sometime in mid-November. You had to have a kit in the trunk: candles, matches, canned soup, blankets, and a bunch of other stuff that was supposed to