Leaving Blythe River: A Novel (28 page)

“I think you know why I say you. You’re the lightest member of the party by quite some, and the youngest by an even bigger margin. Look, I don’t blame you if you don’t want to do it. You’ve done a lot, especially for a man you claim to hate. Option number one is pretty responsible. No one is going to hold that against you.”

“How safe is it to go down?”

“Pretty damn safe. I brought a couple of harnesses, and the rope is good. My carabiners lock, and they’re in good shape. I’ll wrap the rope twice around my saddle horn and hold the end. Biggest danger is if you spin around and hit your head on the rocks. Going all the way to the valley is not a danger. I’m not about to let that happen.”

Ethan just sat a moment. He didn’t speak, and he almost couldn’t have quantified what he was thinking.

“We can go get the pros,” Jone said. “You decide.”

“But Sam said if he’s alive, even a couple of hours could make a difference.”

No one answered. No one needed to. It had already been said. Nobody wanted to repeat it, apparently. Nobody wanted to put pressure on Ethan’s big decision.

“I can almost picture being lowered down there on a rope,” Ethan said. “Almost. What I can’t picture is that moment when you first go over the edge. And you have to let go.”

“We’re here to help you with it if you want to try,” Jone said. “That’s all we can really say.”

Another blank moment, absent of communication. It flitted through Ethan’s mind that he had no right to stall, under the circumstances. If he were lying injured down there, he would take exception to long, drawn-out decisions.

Jone spoke again, suddenly. “Aw, hell, I’ll go,” she said, mostly to Sam. “If you can handle my weight.”

“Between me and this big horse, twice over if I had to.”

“No,” Ethan said. “No, that’s not right. He’s my father. I’m the one who wanted to come up here. I’ll go.”

He rose to his feet, aware that he was already shaking. Badly, as if he might shake himself apart. He couldn’t help wondering what the trembling would become when he was dangling on a rope five hundred feet over the boulders below.

“Okay, I’m going to let go of your hands,” Jone said. “And you let go of me. But nothing’s going to happen. The rope is tight. You won’t move. Only thing is, you might feel yourself tipping over backwards some. See if you can keep your feet braced against the rock.”

Ethan tried to say “okay.” He failed.

But, oddly, the shaking had stopped. Maybe he was beyond that level of fear now. Maybe he just couldn’t afford to feel.

“One,” Jone said. “Two. Three.”

Jone let go. Ethan did not.

“Okay, let’s try this another way. I’m going to take one of your hands and move it from my arm to the edge of the cliff. Okay?”

He might have nodded slightly. He tried.

She moved his right hand, and he grasped desperately at the rock edge of the cliff, just above his head. It held, but felt less secure than Jone’s sleeve.

Ethan thought about the time earlier that morning when Jone had called him brave. Not because he wasn’t afraid, but because he was afraid but he was doing it anyway. He hadn’t meant to think about that. He hadn’t really tried. It just popped into his head.

He moved his own left hand. Let go of her sleeve. As he did, he proved to himself that something she had told him was true. The rope was taut. And solid. He was not in danger of falling.

“Lower me down,” he said.

“Sam!” Jone called. “Take him down!”

Then Ethan was moving, but slowly. He kept the toes of his athletic shoes braced against the rock and more or less walked down. Or so it felt.

He didn’t look around. He just kept looking up at Jone, who gave him a thumbs-up.

“You’re doing great,” she said.

“I don’t know about that,” he said, happy to have his voice back. “But I’m doing it.”

“You’re almost down. You’re going to be able to put your feet down in . . . three . . . two . . . one. Okay, if you take your feet off the wall now, you can stand up.”

Ethan felt around gingerly with one foot only. Jone was right. It was solid. It was horizontal. It was there.

He looked around to be sure he wasn’t about to step down too close to the edge, and in doing so got a glimpse all the way down into the valley.

“Oh, crap,” he said, his head spinning dangerously.

He squeezed his eyes closed until the feeling passed. Then he stepped down with his other foot and straightened up.

“Leave the harness on,” Sam called. “It’s safer.”

“Roger that,” he called back up. Then, more to himself, “Like I needed convincing.”

“What do you see?” Sam bellowed.

“There’s a space under that bulgy rock. It’s not much, but it’s a space. But I have to crawl along it to really see what’s under there.”

“Let me know if you need me to play out more rope.”

Ethan moved two steps toward the rock face and ducked down. Nothing underneath. He eased forward onto his hands and knees and crawled along. He literally needed to duck his head down just inches from the dirt to see underneath the overhanging rock. Nothing.

He moved along it to the left, crouching, ducking, looking.

And then . . .

In a strange moment, one Ethan would go over literally hundreds of times in his head, Ethan saw a human figure lying on its back under the rock. A man. A man Ethan felt quite sure was not his father.

Still, he felt the discovery like a near-fatal jolt of electricity.

The figure in the tiny crawl space was thinner than his father. Thinner than even six days out here alone, without food, could possibly explain in Ethan’s head. His closed eyes were too sunken. His tangled hair was no color at all. His short beard—less than a full growth but much more than a five o’clock shadow—was no color at all. His skin was no color at all. Ethan literally could not see where the man’s dirty gray skin ended and his dirty gray shorts and T-shirt began.

And yes, in a distant way Ethan registered the gray shorts and T-shirt. Yet still he could not click his father’s image into anything he saw before him in that moment.

He ran his eyes down the man’s long body.

Both of his legs appeared to be attached at an incorrect angle. His right knee was swollen to two or three times a normal size. But there was no blood. Just a disconnected appearance to the leg below the knee. His left leg had something plunged into it. Some whitish, long object, like a white stick that looked as though it had been stabbed into the flesh halfway up his thigh. And on that leg there was blood. A lot of blood. But it was old, and dried, and even that blood seemed to have too little color. A faint, dusty reddish-brown.

Ethan crawled two steps closer, partly drawn to look, partly having to force himself to approach. He stifled a reflexive gag as he saw a flurry of tiny movement—a light swarming of ants—on the open leg wound around the impaled object.

He heard Sam call down to him.

“Hey. You okay down there? What d’you see?”

Ethan didn’t answer. He looked more closely at the long object shoved into the man’s leg. Part of him must have known by that time that the man was his father. But another part of him simply had not caught up with it. Had not allowed it to click into place.

It was a bone.

Ethan scrambled back a step at the shock of seeing such a thing. The guy didn’t have something sticking
into
his leg. He had something sticking
out
of it. It was his femur.

Ethan backed up a few more steps.

His eyes moved down the savagely, illogically bent leg. It hurt just to see a leg forced into such an unnatural angle.

At the bottom of the leg was Ethan’s first look at a blast of color. In fact, he was surprised the bright red hadn’t caught his eye sooner.

His father’s running shoes.

“Oh my God,” Ethan said quietly.

He scrambled back another few steps and climbed to his feet.

He looked up to see both Sam and Jone peering at him over the edge.

“You okay down there, Ethan?” Jone asked.

“Did you find anything?” Sam added. “What do you see?”

Ethan opened his mouth. Only the tiniest squeak slipped out.

“Did you say something?” Sam called down.

“Yeah,” Ethan said. But maybe not loudly enough.

“What did you find?”

“He’s here,” Ethan said. With a little better volume.

“Is he alive?” Jone asked.

“Oh. I don’t know. I didn’t think to check.”

Part of Ethan stood outside himself in that moment, critiquing the ridiculousness of the statement. And of the truth behind it. It was true. Inexplicably true. He hadn’t thought to check.

But it was shock. It was just that simple. Ethan was in full-on shock.

“I’ll go see,” he said.

He took two steps in toward the spot that held his father. Then he fell to his knees. And did not move.

“What’re you doing, hon?” Jone asked. “You okay?”

“I . . .”

“You need help down there?”

“I don’t want to know,” Ethan called back. “I’m afraid to find out.”

A long moment passed. Nobody called to him, asked any questions. Nobody gave him any advice. Because it was no longer that easy. Sure, anybody could call down and tell him to check the pulse at the wrist or the carotid artery. Or hold a hand in front of his father’s nose to check for breathing. That wasn’t hard. But to be this man’s son . . . to hang in that moment, where the father’s dead and alive possibilities existed almost simultaneously, and to have to snap that answer into place. Forever. Whichever way it fell, it was pretty damned permanent, and Ethan knew that all too well.

Which of them was about to advise Ethan how not to be too afraid to move?

“I’ll come down,” Jone said. “I’ll do it with you.”

“No,” Ethan called. And he held one hand up high—a stop sign for her. “No, if the answer is no, you don’t need to do that. I’ll find out.”

He swallowed hard.

At first he told his knees to crawl and they didn’t. Like Rebar refusing to turn onto the trail that led up the mountain, away from home. But a deeper, more solid part of Ethan knew this wouldn’t cut it. He didn’t have the luxury of breaking inside. Not now. He was on a narrow ledge in the middle of a wilderness, not really accessible from any direction. It was simply no place to get stuck.

“Dad,” he said. “I don’t know if you can hear me. But I’m going to come in there and take hold of your wrist.”

Ethan crawled forward.

The hand he reached for seemed wholly unfamiliar. Ancient, paper-skinned, and gray. But Ethan saw something else he missed the first time around. His father’s watch. It was caked in dirt, the crystal shattered. It said eight ten, which meant it was broken. Stopped. But it was still the twin of the good, expensive watch he’d given Ethan for his sixteenth birthday. The one that was now gone. Run off into the night with a man and a knife.

See?
Ethan thought, in a weirdly disconnected moment.
You didn’t take good enough care of yours, either.

Ethan wrapped his hand around the bony wrist. As he did, he felt a jolt of fear and negative anticipation. Just the touch of his father’s skin would tell him a lot. It might be stiff and cold.

It was not stiff. The skin felt cooler than Ethan might have liked. But not cold.

He watched his father’s face—still not wholly recognizing it—for any reaction to being touched. There was none.

For what felt like long, torturous minutes—but was probably less than ten seconds—Ethan felt for a pulse. When he felt nothing, he tried to convince himself he was looking in the wrong place. On the fourth spot he tried, something. But it was something so small. So small it might have been nothing. It might only have been imagination. Wishful thinking. It might not have existed at all.

He held his fingers still, and concentrated all his will on feeling it again. But too much time went by. It couldn’t be that long between heartbeats. Could it?

And then there it was again. Something tiny.

Ethan was feeling a pulse that was so weak, so slow, that he could barely register it as having happened. Barely believe it was real.

But that meant he was feeling a pulse.

He leaped to his feet, hitting his head hard on the rock overhang.

He scrambled out into the sunlight.

“I think he’s alive!” he called up to Sam and Jone. His voice sounded excited and big. And as though it belonged to someone else entirely. Someone less shocked. “It’s just the tiniest pulse you can possibly imagine. But I felt it. I swear I felt it.”

“I’ll ride for help!” Sam called back, followed by a big whooping sound. Like something you’d hear in the roundup scene of a cowboy movie.

“Don’t go yet!” he heard Jone yell at Sam. “First we’re going to load me up with food and water. And I’m going down to wait with Ethan and his dad.”

In the time between her announcement and her arrival, Ethan sat down hard in the dirt, cross-legged, and stared at the barely familiar man under the rock overhang. And, for the first time, he allowed himself to believe, to know, to absorb, that they had found him. Against all odds, they had found him.

Even more amazingly, they had found him before it was too late.