The Glacier Read Online Free

covered in pale mud paint, like a ghostly aboriginal. The man also looks remarkably like Samson. The two stare at each other for a moment, like mirror images.
    Sam turns and quickly pushes his cart down the aisle in the opposite direction. He walks back through the store, passing aisle after aisle. The mud man mirrors his steps, at the far end of each aisle. Sam watches him as they move together, spellbound by the strange and synchronous apparition.
    Then he cuts into a checkout line and unloads the contents of his cart onto a conveyor belt.

III
    A sledgehammer comes down hard onto a wooden stake, driving it several times into the cold, hard earth.
    Jonah pulls off one of his gloves and places a small metal tack on top of the wooden stake.
    His radio squawks.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    Right just a little. Little more. All right, good. Let’s shoot it there.
    Jonah adjusts the tack as instructed and taps it into the top of the stake with his hammer. He pulls his glove back on and grabs the surveyor’s prism rod. He places the spear-like tip of the rod onto the concave head of the metal tack and holds the rod level and steady.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    Shooting—
    He waits, his breath steaming in the cold, both hands concentrated on the surveyor’s staff.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    Got the shot. And— Good!
    Jonah paces out a new distance, hiking over the hard-packed earth and counting out paces under his breath. The surveyors are at work, running a circuit out on a cold and bleak landscape. A large field has been razed for development. Nearby houses rise from the frozen mud and sprawl into the countryside.
    Sue sits in the warm truck running numbers over his engineering charts with a pencil and an old calculator. Still separated by the truck window, Gunner and Sue communicate over their radios like astronauts on a lunar outpost.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    Okay, next set.
    SUE
    (radio)
    Hang on. Gimme just a minute here.
    Jonah pauses out on the field and considers the landscape about him, an arid enclave of brand new haunted houses, silent and brooding in broad daylight.
    Gunner sips at some coffee and also observes the frames of houses in various stages of construction. Inanimate windows stare back at him, some empty and hollow, others darkened by new glass.
    Sue works at his charts and numbers with pencil and calculator. Gunner interrupts him over the radio.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    Sue.
    SUE
    (radio)
    Yes, Gunner.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    You ever get uneasy out here?
    SUE
    (radio)
    Out here where?
    Gunner shoots him a look and raises his voice, emphatically, not bothering to use the radio.
    GUNNER
    Here.
    Sue rephrases, obligingly.
    SUE
    (radio)
    How do you mean, Gunner.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    I mean where in the hell is everyone? For example.
    SUE
    (radio)
    Who?
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    All these fucking people.
    SUE
    (radio)
    They’re obviously not here yet.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    Either way, I don’t know how in the hell they live like this. I’ll tell you one thing, you unplug the mainline on these goddamn people and they wouldn’t last two seconds out here all frantic and helpless like little poodle dogs.
    SUE
    (radio)
    That’d be a sight, wouldn’t it. Now just give me a second here.
    Gunner kicks at the dirt and does his best to keep his mouth shut, his trigger-finger fiddling on the radio.
    One window seems oddly placed on the side of a house, a single window on a wall of siding. A single dark eye.
    Gunner lays back into the radio.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    I just think it’s pretty fucking weird that all of a sudden there’s twice as many houses as there was five minutes ago.
    SUE
    (radio)
    All right, Gunner, let’s cut the chatter. I need to concentrate for a minute.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    But who are these people? What in the hell-God’s-name do they all do?
    SUE
    (radio)
    They work, just like you and I do.
    GUNNER
    (radio)
    No they do not work just like I do. They breeze into their little cubicles in forty dollar socks and write