Free Sweetgirl by Travis Mulhauser Page A

it uphill to boot.
    Calling Krebs and the boys for help was simply out of the question. The boys didn’t respect Shelton as it was, and he could only imagine what they’d say if they found out about the sled and how he’d run her out of gas. Shelton was supposed to be in charge, but in his brief tenure he had already managed to lose a baby and strand himself in the woods.
    There shouldn’t have been anything to be in charge of in the first place. Everybody bought from Rick and then sold at their own discretion, there was no real organization to it, but his uncle loved him and wanted to give him a vote of confidence and so he told the boys he’d be speaking through his nephew while he was gone. That if Shelton said he needed something they should treat it like it came from Rick directly.
    Shelton was just out of prison and he’d done right by his uncle when he snitched out a competitor to plea down. Now that he was out and trying to make his way in the world Rick was repaying his loyalty, even if he didn’t profit from, or care for, his nephew’s product of choice.
    Shelton smoked his joint and sat for a while in the snow. He was in the middle of a break in the trees and he tipped his head back to take in a bit of the sky above. The clouds were coming in low and fast and Shelton swore he bore witness to the very moment the storm returned, as if the norther had waited to make sure he was watching before it erased the dawn and its valiant crease of light.
    Then the snow came. And the wind. Somehow, it felt personal.
    Shelton put his helmet back on and made for the highway. He must have come farther south on the trail than he realized because it wasn’t long before he reached the road. The wind pushed harder in the open and the snow was whipped off the ground until he couldn’t tell it from what was falling. There was one advantage to the bad conditions, though: Shelton figured people would be more likely to give him a ride if they couldn’t see through the blizzard and tell that it was him.
    Shelton had never seen such a storm. He’d watched Lester Hoffstead track her all week and while the weatherman had seemed downright histrionic, if anything Shelton believed he’d undersold the storm’s wrath and devastating power.
    She came down from Canada across Lake Superior and hit the Upper Peninsula first. Munising and the sandstone cliffs. Then she pushed inland and bleached the hayfields and the pines and balsam firs, the great emerald forests, the evergreen spine of Michigan’s vast and big-hearted peninsula. She was slowed some by the trees but pushed through to Lake Michigan anyway, to Mishigami, the great water, where she rallied on the cold, black depths and finally struck Cutler in a full-blown rage.
    Yes, Lester Hoffstead had done them all a disservice. Lester Hoffstead should have done everything in his power to whip his viewers into a panicked frenzy. He should have stood on his head and flapped his arms like a chicken, then read a chapter from Revelation while the camera panned across his Doppler radar.
    Speaking of the Bible, Shelton had come to feel a bit like Jonah, trapped in the belly of the whale. It was as if the stormhad swallowed him whole, especially now that he was beyond the trees on the highway, where everything was flat and folded into the violent, swirling gray.
    He hated the storm, but he respected it, too, as he turned his back to the wind and stuck out his thumb. And miracle of miracles, the first truck he saw pulled over to pick him up.
    It was Zeke Turner in his F-150. Shelton could tell because who else but Zeke had a pickup painted so brightly purple that it shone through the storm like a giant Easter egg. Shelton ran to the passenger-side door and Zeke hit the auto locks and waved him in.
    â€œGet in, man,” he said. “It’s cold as a witch’s titty out there.”
    Shelton shuddered as he climbed in the cab and Zeke tilted