A Fountain Filled With Blood (38 page)

“Right.” His tone was so flat, she couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or was just scared.

“Once you’re in the net, I’ll use the cockpit control to pull the boom strap up tight. That’ll swing you out the door. Then I’ll lower the netting nice and easy until you’re on the ground.”

“Nice and easy.”

She ducked her head. “You may take a couple of bumps when you reach the ground. I’ll do everything I can to set you down smoothly.”

He bent over and put his head between his knees. “Oh God,” he said. She thought it might be as authentic a prayer as she had ever heard.

“If anything happens, if you need me, I’ll be right behind you. Look.” She pointed to where one of the passenger seats rested against the partial bulkhead. “You’ll sit there. You can see the pilot’s seat right behind it. I can be up and over in a few seconds.”

“I have to tell you that’s not a big comfort right now.”

“You ready?”

He nodded. He looked like a man going to his own execution, but he gave her a thumbs-up.

“Then let’s fly.”

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. Russ had been there before. Pilots could never just get you on board and go. They had to stretch it out, playing with switches and revving up the engine until it sounded like it was going to explode, and all the time poor jackasses like him had to sit in a puddle of sweat and misery. His skin was itching and creeping, until he wanted to scratch it off, tear off the headphones that made his skull feel like a china cup in a vise, jump out of the chopper, and run far enough away that he would no longer hear the
thwap-thwap-thwap
noise that was the sound track to all his nightmares.

He was strapped into the left side passenger seat, hands on knees, eyes forward. He fixed his field of vision on the hunter’s orange of the safety web hanging between him and the cargo area. He tried not to look out the open cargo door, or out the window to his right, although that was damn hard, because the thing was as big as a minivan’s windshield. He tried not to listen to the whine of the engine and the beat of the rotors, which, although muffled by his headphones, penetrated straight into the back of his neck.

Instead, he listened to the sounds of Clare getting ready for takeoff. She had the same habit as one of the helo jocks he had flown with in Nam. She was singing under her breath as she worked her controls.

“I don’t know why I love you like I do, all the things you put me through,” his headset sang. Jesus Christ, he thought, I think that’s the same song. What do they do, give them a sound track in flight school?

“Take me to the river,” his headset sang. “Drop me in the water.” Over his head, the rotors powered up into a dull roar. Under his feet, the skids shifted. He braced his elbows on his knees and shut his eyes. Clare was making
ch-ch-ch
sounds between her teeth, accompanying her mental music.

“Here we go,” she sang out. The floor lurched beneath him and then they rose slowly, slowly into the sky. Beyond the open cargo doors, the world sank out of view. He thought if he looked at the seat to his left, he would see his buddy Mac, his transistor radio blasting between his boots, his hands slapping out the rhythm of the song.

“I-I-I want to know, can you tell me?” his headphones sang.

Mac would have liked Clare. Except she was sixteen years older than he would ever get. And he, Russ, would look like an old man to Mac. How had he gotten to be so old when he still felt the same inside?

“I need your help here.” Clare’s voice cut through his reverie. “I don’t know where the gorge is. I’m having a hard time sighting the road through all these trees.”

He opened his eyes and looked out the window in the cabin door. Forget the minivan. This was a frickin’ picture window. He shifted sideways in his seat and pressed his hands against the solid metal edges of the door to hold back the sensation of falling. “Um,” he said, taking a deep breath. They were creeping along a dozen yards above the trees. “That’s it, down there. The road. Keep heading in that direction and you’ll be over the gorge.” If he turned his head, he could look at the back of Clare’s.

“There?” she asked, twisting and pointing at the window in the cockpit door.

“Shouldn’t you keep your eyes on the instruments?”

“The army gives us special training on how to look out the window and fly at the same time.”

He could tell she was having a good old time. He leaned forward and closed his eyes again. The rotors whined and the chopper tilted forward slightly as she brought it around and headed toward the crevasse.

“Okay, I’ve got it in sight,” she said. “Russ—where are you?”

He sat up again. He could see the curve of her jaw beneath her helmet as she twisted back, craning to see him.

“Are you feeling airsick?” She sounded doubtful. As she should be, since the drive up the mountain road to the spa site had bounced him around a lot more than anything she had done.

“No.”

“Okay. Can you unbuckle and shift seats? I want you to look out the other cabin window. It makes for a better search if you cover both sides.”

“Okay.” He didn’t have the wherewithal to answer in anything more than single-word sentences. He unclipped and shifted to the ghostly Mac’s seat. The geologist’s description of the gorge knifing down the mountains was more clearly accurate from this height. The crevasse looked a lot narrower than it had when he’d peered over the edge. He thought of descending into that crack in the rock, wrapped in nothing but cargo netting. It’d be a miracle if he didn’t end up a smear on the rock wall.

“See anything?”

“No.”

“Are you doing okay?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to drop her down a bit.” The chopper sank in a series of jerks, like an elevator on the fritz. He pressed his lips tightly together and braced his hands for another look out the window. Green leaves, everywhere green pulsing in the hazy sunlight, with a gray slash through the jungle, a scar in the earth.

Jesus, he thought. Get a grip. He forced himself to focus on the crevasse, picking out boulders and scrubby plants, the tobacco brown trickle that was all that remained of the brook at summer’s height, the flash of metal—

“Wait! I think I see something.”

The chopper stopped its forward motion and hovered, twisting slightly back and forth. He saw it again, a glint of metal on a lumpy bundle rolled against a small boulder. A backpack? He hadn’t noticed one when he’d surveyed the accident scene the first time. “Can you go a little lower?”

Clare dropped the chopper another few yards. He let his eyes spiral out from the backpack, searching, searching…. He spotted the geologist’s hiking boots first.

“I’ve got him.”

“Where?”

“See where there’s a clump of birch saplings growing low on the wall?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“That’s ten o’clock. Look at two o’clock.”

There was a pause as she searched over the floor of the ravine. “Okay, I see him, too. I’m going to maneuver us so that the cargo door is above him. Good Lord, he’s still. Are you sure he’s not dead?”

“If he is, and I go through all this for nothing, I’m going to be seriously pissed off.”

There was a sound in his headset that might have been a stifled laugh. The chopper dipped and swayed into position.

“Okay, you’re on.”

He rose from his seat and, crouching, crossed back to the left side of the chopper and pushed the webbing out of the way. The thing he noticed—and he wished he had noticed it when Clare was going through how all this was going to work—was that there was nothing beside the safety webbing and the bungee cord to hold on to while he got himself inside the net. And he was going to have to unclip the bungee cord anyway.

“Clare,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“There’s nothing to hold on to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Getting into the net. There’s nothing I can hold on to.”

“We went over this. You hold on to the edges of the net while you step inside.”

“It’s in front of an open door!”

There was a pause. Then she said in the patient voice of a kindergarten teacher explaining something to a new student, “I’m holding the ship dead even. There’s nothing to cause you to lose your balance and fall.”

“What if I trip?” He realized how whiny he sounded, but he couldn’t help it.

“Russ.” The teacher was gone; the officer was back. “Get into the net.”

He took a deep breath. With his fingers clutching the safety webbing, he took the D ring in a death grip. Then he let go of the webbing and jerked the bungee cord out. It sprang back against the bulkhead with a metallic clang. He looked along the wide strap running from the ring in his fist, out the door, and up out of sight to the boom. One twitch of the helicopter and he would be dangling sixty feet above the gorge’s rocky bottom. His palm was so sweaty, the D ring was already slipping in his grasp. He pawed the edges of the net open and tumbled inside with a tailbone-bruising jolt.

“I’m in,” he said. The relief of it made him laugh.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I just can’t believe I’m doing this. It reminds me of the time I tried to trim one of the old trees in our yard with a chain saw.”

“That sounds pretty normal to me.”

“I was twenty feet up on a limb at the time. Without a safety harness.”

“What happened?”

“I fell.” He laughed again, this time with the realization that he now had to scoot over to the door so she could reel in the net and lift him out. He tugged the folded lawn chairs half over his knees and kicked against the floor, pushing with his thighs. He and the netting skidded a foot. “It was just two years ago, and I remember thinking that at my age, it was the last really stupid thing I’d ever do. I’m glad to see that I still have it in me.”

He kicked again and moved along another foot. The lawn chairs bumped into his head. The cargo door yawned open behind him like the gateway to the next world. His back was to it, deliberately, so he wouldn’t have to see the tops of the trees shaking madly in the chopper’s wash below. He kicked a third time, but his butt jammed up against a line of smooth-headed rivets sunk into the cargo floor. He shifted his weight and tried again. Nothing.

“What are you doing back there?”

“I’m just getting myself closer to the door. I’m hung up on some rivets.”

“Don’t bother,” she said as he wiggled himself over the obstacle. Then just as she said, “I’m going to pull in the strap from there,” he kicked out hard with his legs. There was a rush and a grinding sound and a scrape as his rear end went over the edge, and then he was falling and yelling until he came up hard with a jerk and a snap.

The lawn chairs slammed flat against his face as the cording of the net tightened around him, cutting into his skin. The helicopter tilted hard. He swung wide, away from and then toward the landing gear. Clare was snarling something into the earphones, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. The jolt as the strap caught had cut him off mid-yell, and the spasms in his lungs and ribs made him cough violently. The downwash from the rotors made his eyes water. He fought to clear his face of green webbing and aluminum, shoving and twisting until the chairs were at his side instead of pressing against his nose and chest. The net swung in ever-decreasing arcs as the helicopter circled tightly, slowly tipping back into a stable position.

“I didn’t ask you to jump out the door!” He heard that one. “Okay, I’m leveled out. I’m going to lower you now. For God’s sake, don’t try any more stunts.”

“No,” he wheezed.

There was a vibration along the strap. The net quivered and then began to descend. He glanced up, but the blur of rotors and the fat tadpole-shaped body of the chopper made him queasy, so he looked down instead. The bottom of the crevasse was rushing up at him, its boulders and shale suddenly a lot larger and more alarming than they had been from the air. He was between the trees, then below the lip of the gorge, then descending between its narrow walls, every striation in the rock and every plant clinging to a minute cleft burning itself into his vision with a kind of hyperclarity. The part of his brain that wasn’t numbed over marveled at Clare’s precision. He went down, down, down—and stopped with a jerk.

“Where are you?”

He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing his mind back into its normal channels. Opening them again, he peered at the ground, estimating his distance. “You done good,” he said. “I’m maybe five feet above the stream.”

“Okay. Get ready. Here we go.”

The net jerked, jerked, jerked down, and then his butt was in the cold water, sliding over slick round rocks. “I’m down, I’m down,” he said.

“Okay, I’m letting it go,” she said. The net collapsed all around him as several yards of the wide strap ribboned over itself. He flailed out of the wet netting and sloshed the two steps to dry ground. He reflexively patted himself down to make sure everything was there and wiggled the bows of his glasses where they were clamped to the side of his head by his earphones. He was intact. He glanced up and waved his arms. “I see you,” she said. “You’re a couple yards downstream from Waxman. Can you see him?”

He picked his way upstream over loose stones. He could clearly see Waxman’s backpack resting against the cutaway curve where the sides of the crevasse met the bottom. Then he spotted Waxman. He was sprawled awkwardly near the stream, half-hidden by a boulder.

“I’ve got him.” Russ crouched next to the unmoving form and placed two fingers at the side of his neck. “He’s got a pulse.” He ran his hands lightly over Waxman’s body and head. “I’m pretty sure both his arms are broken. His legs may be okay. God only knows about his spine.” He looked up to the chopper as if he could see Clare’s face. “Even with the stuff we brought, we’re taking a risk by moving him.”

“I could fly us to Glens Falls and alert the life-flight helicopter. That’ll tack on another hour and a half, two hours before he gets any treatment. You’re the man on the ground, Russ. Literally. It’s your call.”

He looked back down at Waxman. His face was pale despite his tan, and a swollen purple bruise spread across his forehead and disappeared into his hair. Russ pried open one eyelid, but Waxman remained unconscious, his pupil fixed and unresponsive.