The Blue (The Complete Novel) (17 page)
The plane’s moaning sounds more horrific than the last step, and everything in me tells me to stop, because Voley must be walking around underneath the plane. It’s going to fall, I tell myself. But there are only two more seats to go, and with a little stretching, I can knock the cases off and they’ll slide right down to the cockpit. I try one more time, calling to Voley, but he doesn’t answer. And knowing I might not ever have the energy to do this again, I take three deep breaths, clench tightly around the tops of the next set of chairs, and kick my left leg up, and lodge my heel behind the bracket where it’s bolted into the floor. Burning with pain, the other leg follows, and my upper body sacrifices everything it has. By the time I haul myself so that I’m only one chair away, I realize the plane didn’t even make a sound this time. No more cracking or breaking of the fire-burnt shell. It’s strong enough to hold. And it wants me to have its treasure.
With one more glance at the portholes, checking for Voley, and not seeing him, I call. Stay back, boy. He doesn’t appear, but I’m too high up now, and I have to try. I repeat the whole process, as gently as I can, and as soon as both my feet are planted on the back of the next set of seats, the noise starts again. It pierces my ears and this time, it doesn’t stop. The last thing I hear is the screaming metal and desperate barks, as the most horrible feeling of freefall starts.
Chapter 18
I wake up to the strangest feeling—I’m in a dream I’ve had before—a bolt of gold, baking me with its heat. From a blur of green, I realize it’s the field. The place Dusty showed me. And he must be somewhere around here. But when I open my eyes to see him, all that’s in sight is the twisted black metal of the plane. And the splitting in my head. Pounding pain. And the second I remember to call for Voley, I see the light that’s heating me. A bright glare channeling through the porthole over my head. Voley, I manage to whimper. And when I sit up, the first noise I hear is the pattering of feet. I look down the row of seats and see him—just his head, poking through the flattened wreck. He’s down by where the door used to be. And between us is the body of the man. Face up on the aisle floor, taking in the heat too. And then, after the throbbing in my head subsides with the movement of my arms and legs, I notice. The sound of the rain. It’s gone. And for some reason, it’s hot in the belly of the plane.
I reach up and grab onto the seat next to me and pull myself up. The aisle is flat and the end of the plane, where the door was, is torn away. Just a clear hole leading to the outside. And right there, on the ground behind me, are the boxes. Red and black plastic. But it’s something else that catches my attention. A liquid. Running along the floor in a small trail from where the fractured metal wall ripped away, right near the first two seats. I step carefully, more to discover how sharply my calf will sting than to not trip, and then bend low to the ground, all the way down, until my nose is pressed right against the shiny streak. Fuel.
Voley rushes over to me, curious about what I’m sniffing. He wants to smell it too, and then he backs away sharply from the acrid odor. Still, he comes back toward it, licking the ground nearby. And then, he works his way over to the body. And just like the seal, he starts to lick around the face. I turn away before my mind convinces me he’s going to try to bite it.
Come on boy—outside, I tell him. We step over the boxes, and surprisingly, as I make my way outside, the pain in my calf seems only half as bad as before. Like the collapse of the plane that should have killed us both restored me instead. And as soon as we leave the interior of the plane’s belly, I see it. We’re directly under the blue.
I look up, entranced. Just the cleanest cut of color, separating the deep blue from the endless gray everything of Colorado. But there, crushingly bright, more than I remember it ever being in my dreams, or the descriptions Russell told me, is the sun. A blinding disc that forces me to close my eyes, but even then, I still see it. Blinking on its own in the darkness behind my lids. And even once I look away, down at the ice, and back at the charred armor of the plane, the sun is still there. Branded on my sight. I keep blinking and wonder if I screwed up. Looked too long, and now I’ve ruined my eyesight. My first instinct is to ask Russell. Ask him if it will go away. What should I do? But I sit and push the thoughts away as the pain of my headache roars back. And I sit down, right in a running pool of slush.
The first thing I notice when my sight returns to normal is the movement in the slush. The water all running somewhere, like a funnel. The top layer of the great Plane Floe being melted away by the blue. And the plane, the migraine maker, an oven of warmth, must be carving its own dent, hidden beneath its body. My first instinct is to go back inside and enjoy it. But I know better—the heat won’t last. The rain will come back, or the blue will disappear, or night will come. But either way it will be cold again, and I need to collect the fuel.
Voley follows me around to the bag, lying just on the other side where we left it and near to the line of flowing melt. I watch the stream for a moment, to see where it runs, and it looks like it’s moving all the way down toward the ice bridge. And then, turning back, I see a hundred other streams of different sizes. For a moment I want to run back along the ice bridge, and then up the ridge, to get a look out at the pack. To see if it’s breaking up even more. Or if it’s closing in. To see if…
I reach into the bag and take out the stove. Then the cup. And against the pain of my leg and my brain, I search the back of the plane where it cracked and fell back down to the earth. Above me are the giant cylinders of the engine, and when I turn and look inside them, I see the enormous blades that spin to keep it up. I wonder if something got into them, and that’s why it came down, or if a fight really did break out on board. I wonder for a moment about the pilot, and the copilot, and which one of them was buried under the snow, hand sticking out. And if they’re both under there. Lying inside the shell. But all the mysteries evaporate at the sight of a different kind of running liquid—I notice it first from a drip that hits my cheek. I lift my fingers and smear it a bit and then hold it to my nose. Fuel.
Looking along the fracture, I find a line running up toward the engine that looks wet in spots. And then, when I see where it’s pooling, along the giant cylinder, which is only a bit above my head now, I wait. Watching. But I realize all that I have to do is look down. And there it is—a tiny grease well in the snow, widening almost to the point that it touches one of the running melt rivers. I squat down without a yelp of noise, Voley watching intently, and grind the cup into the ground, just in the ice where the fuel drips onto. And then, almost as soon as I stand back up, the first clink comes. I think about if there’s any way I can speed it up, and I remember Russell telling me to use the knife. Maybe to stab into the plane and draw out its blood. I fetch the knife and raise it up, pointing the blade right into the crack where the fuel is pooling. At first it doesn’t give at all, and it feels like the knife blade will snap in half. But then, when I start to wiggle back and forth, the drops start to come faster. Clink after clink in rapid succession. My arms tire and I drop them down, looking back to Voley and then up at the ridge behind us. Just for a second, I feel almost hot. Like I want to strip everything off. And then, the knife is back up, digging and then wiggling, back and forth, until there’s almost a steady stream of drops.
When the cup’s filling steadily, after four more arm rests, I sit down to catch my breath. Like even the tiniest exertion is winding me. I draw quick breaths and pet Voley, who drinks from the slush. And then it hits me—the headache is from dehydration. And I can’t even start to think about the feelings in my stomach. The phantom vision of the sun appears when I close my eyes, making me afraid now to look at the blue anymore for fear that it will blind me, as I lower my head into the stream next to Voley.
My entire head I press into the melt. For the first time in forever, the cold feels good against my skin. I cup my hands and fill my mouth and swallow over and over, until I trick my stomach into thinking it’s full. And then, I grab some of the melt and rub it along my hair, and the rest of my face. When a few minutes of peace go by, and with Voley relaxing by my side under the shade of the wing, I almost feel like nothing’s wrong. And then, all at once, I remember Spots.
I almost want to tell Voley to stay here, because I don’t want to go through worrying about him slipping off the ice bridge again, but I know he won’t listen. And part of me knows that I don’t want him out of my sight any more. So we rise up, leaving the half-filled cup of fuel to collect more, and head out. We go alongside the racing streams of the blue fissure lines, all running toward the bridge.
When I take my first few steps onto the bridge, I realize the top layer is still as slippery as yesterday, even without the rain coming down. Almost more slippery. But it hasn’t gotten any narrower, and we’re across and starting up the high ridge in only a few minutes. And then, just when I’ve convinced myself that the cracking of the plane was a blessing, and that instead of killing me in the fall, or crushing Voley underneath, it opened the fuel line and brought the blue back and vanquished the rain, and gave me the sleep for my calf to finally harden over and heal, the pain lights up again. It starts when the incline becomes steep, and with each heave off from my right side, as brief as I try to make it, the nerve fire explodes.
After about a quarter of the way up, I stop, struggling for breath, and look back at Voley. He stays behind me for some reason, and when I stop, he just looks and waits. I kneel down, pack in some ice along the strange pus around my gash, and then, when some kind of numbness begins to settle over the muscle, I start up again.
When we reach the top, I can barely breathe. It takes two minutes just for the scene to register, and when it does, I realize the truth. That even the strong Plane Floe won’t be alive much longer. Because out over the horizon are just a million fragments of the thousand that were there yesterday, as if they’ve each split themselves once or twice. And then, on top of that, the wind blew them farther apart. They bob up and down like white diamonds over the small swells, and the reason I came up returns to me. But as much as I try, I can’t even find the floe Spots was on. It must have split too. And when I do find it, tracing a nearby floe, following its distinctive shelf, I’m convinced. That’s the one he was on, I tell Voley, whose tongue dangles down, crazed from starvation, wondering if we can cut the seal open soon. But I have to tell him. He’s gone—the sea’s got him now. And with our only source of food gone, we turn around, back down the ridge, piecemeal bursts and slow, using up everything I have just to not spill over, until I remember to just slide.
The view coming down looks the same as on the other side—everything a wide sea with dotted ice flats, except for Plane Floe. The last runway for an out-of-control jet over the hopeless Colorado Pack.
When we reach the plane, the cup’s spilling fuel over its sides. I leave it be and decide to find something else to store more fuel in, trying to forget about Spots. To push the loss out of my mind. Voley whines like he understands that we’re not going to eat now.
I walk to the open end of the plane belly and as I cross the buried nose, I try to make out where the edge of the cockpit glass submerges into the ice, but what I see is horrifying. It’s another ice melt stream, leading away from the mound of metal and ice, that must have been carved out and started by the crash itself. But it’s not the width of the stream that scares me. It’s only about as wide as the others. It’s the fact that for the life of me, I can’t remember seeing it before.
Stay back, I tell Voley, even though he ignores me and hops over the running water. Sweat drips from my forehead, and the festering hope that if I search the plane there will be some scrap of food disappears as I kneel into the slush by the stream. The water doesn’t run along a line and out to the edge of the floe’s shelf, like the other ones had. It runs into itself, from the sides, down into a deep slit that penetrates the floe. I pause for a moment, and then, just like that, I slide my hand down. It barely fits, but it doesn’t find a bottom.
Stay here boy, I tell Voley, and then, like it’s got me magnetized to its course, I follow the slit. It only takes forty feet to see the fissure widen out. The bright sun hits directly into the crack, lighting the inside walls, and I see down for what must be ten feet until blackness consumes everything. And the streams of water run over the sides like thin waterfalls, carrying the water not off the floe but directly into it. Tearing it apart from the bottom up. Working together with the heat of the sun. And at that moment, the blessing of the warmth I feel on my back flares into a nightmare. Everything’s going down.
When I get back to the plane, I pause, listening, waiting for the tell-tale sound of thunder, the deep underground quaking that I know too well now. Voley sniffs around inside the plane, and from the porthole on the outside, it looks like he’s walking around the spot where the body lies. When I’m convinced that there’s no low rumble, and the sound of the floe’s breakup isn’t about to come, I move in fast. To take what we can get from the plane and get it as far away as possible from the crack line. Part of me wonders if the metal skeleton will float, if we can ride it. I think to ask Russell.
He’s gone
is all that runs through my head. Exhausted, the heat chasing like a shooter on our backs, working the ice to kill us, I hop back past the fissure to grab our supply bag and take the cup. I balance the fuel in my hand carefully. Once I’m twenty feet from the crack, I set everything down and go back to the belly.
