by Lex Lander
Though the purpose of my odyssey had grown dim and nebulous, I knew I had to move on or die where I stood. So I moved on. The flashes of rationality were growing fewer and further between, interspersed with mirages of placid lakes, palm trees, rainstorms, even blizzards. No oases though. I wondered why.
The onset of night was swift. There I was weaving along the valley bottom, placing my feet with exaggerated care, my mouth hanging open like a drooling idiot. No drool, unfortunately. Right then I would have drunk the contents of a spittoon. How long this staggering phase of my marathon lasted was beyond my ability to calculate, but suddenly it was dark, and I could no longer see the obstacles in my path. The night was starry – more starry than I had seen for many a year. The moon was in its third quarter, its map clearly drawn. I imagined I could see the junk we had left there over the years since 1968, when Armstrong and Aldrin had done their “giant leap for mankind” moonwalk. With no haze from light pollution, the sky was pure indigo, every constellation crisp and sparkling, as if God had scattered diamonds across the heavens. Assuming God was something other than an abstraction.
Where are you when I need you, God? The thought was lucid enough. When I tried to express it, no words came forth, just a gagging sound.
No intervention from God was forthcoming. It was all down to me, André Warner alias ... alias lots of aliases. My toe stubbed a rock, I tripped, almost fell. I continued on, doggedly, flat-footedly, fumbling ahead with my feet. In the end it wasn’t a rock that brought me down, it was a hole. My toe caught on the rim of it, unbalancing the rest of me. I went sprawling onto the hard rocky slope, landing on my shoulder; my head, as ill-luck would have it, came into violent contact with a boulder. A shooting star of pain burst inside my skull. The indigo of the night dimmed to the black of a different night, and the black became blacker still, and I was plunging headfirst down a shaft with no bottom.
Then came stillness and silence like a great suffocating weight pressing down. Just how you imagine death to be.
TWENTY-FIVE
Sometime during the night I came to. It was cold, which made a change. The thirst was still there, though it wasn’t as troublesome as during the day. Shivering, I wrapped myself up in my sweater and windbreaker, and drifted off back to sleep.
When next I unstuck my eyelids, the sun had come up and brought the dawn, as usual. It was still cool but the peak on whose sides I had slept was facing east and the sun’s rays soon warmed me. I felt disorientated, slightly dizzy, and the thirst was back in spades. I couldn’t even dry-swallow. My throat felt as if it were blocked with cotton wool.
All I could think about was that I needed to walk. The distance remaining to Fort Erin was probably at least ten miles. Without liquid, I wasn’t even sure any more that I could make it. Even so, the effort had to be made. Sleep had at least clarified the purpose of my being here, lost in Death Valley. I was saving Maura and Lindy.
The shadows on my right were still long. Occasionally I walked through one and the temperature plummeted several degrees. Belatedly I remembered my compass points, the two mountain peaks; they were nowhere in sight. Puzzled, I half-crawled up the slope seeking a vantage point. A range of hills crept above the horizon, lavender-coloured, the clarity of the air giving them a surreal quality, as if they were painted on the blue void of the sky. No bird of prey today, so maybe I was more alive than I felt.
The noise started as a distant hum, like a small generator. It came from behind. I wanted to turn and look for the source, but I couldn’t muster the effort. It grew louder, so it was coming towards me anyway.
My knees abruptly buckled and I fell, sliding down the slope on my belly. A boulder brought me to a standstill, and didn’t care if it inflicted damage. I rolled over on my back, and now the noise was much louder, a throbbing, pulsating, hammering disturbance that made my ears hurt. My vision was filled with a vast blueness, otherwise known as sky. A small, darker blue bug was moving slowly across it, a whirling dervish. The rambling in my mind cleared abruptly. The whirling was the rotor blade of a helicopter. It dropped to roof level and buzzed me, then proceeded down the valley to a flat piece of ground a few hundred yards away, where it touched down without commotion.
I struggled to my feet, rested my weary bones against the boulder. A door in the chopper’s cabin slid open, and two people dismounted, carrying something long.
They waved and ran towards me. I didn’t wave back. I wasn’t that strong. It suited me to wait by my boulder and let them come to me.
‘Andy!’ One of them called. ‘Hey, Andy!’
Then they were up to me, and I saw that the long object was a stretcher. The face of the guy who had called me was familiar, though I couldn’t yet place him. His hair was sort of blond, and he had a cast in his right eye. The other guy was bigger, bulkier, and blacker.
I tried to speak. Nothing much emerged apart from a squeaking in the back of my throat.
‘It’s me, Richard Heider,’ the blond guy said. ‘Hey, you look bad. I guess you need water, huh?’
I nodded as emphatically as my physical state would allow.
‘Let’s get him on the stretcher,’ the other guy said. ‘It’ll be quicker than trying to walk him.’
They got no objection from me. It was quite pleasant making progress without having to use my legs.
Minutes later, they were loading me into the passenger compartment of the blue chopper. Something hard and round was pressed to my lips. Water! I guzzled and gurgled until Richard restrained me, made me take it slowly. As my vocal chords edged towards recovery, and the rest of my faculties took a turn for the better, I jacked myself up on my elbows and looked around.
‘Where’s Maura?’ I asked, sounding eerily hoarse, as if I were hamming up the part of a spook in a play.
‘You tell us,’ Richard said. ‘We were looking for all of you. We started out at Fort Erin, now we’re heading north. Can you guide us?’
I tried to collect my wits. ‘I was going south, towards Fort Erin,’ I said in my ghostly whisper. I guzzled more water, cleared my throat.
‘Well, you were going the wrong way. In the opposite direction, in fact.’
So I had done a full U-turn at some stage during my trek, and was returning to the crash site. I groaned.
‘Let’s just get this thing up in the air, and go north. The plane came down about twenty miles north of Fort Erin, according to Maura. Tell the pilot to hurry.’
‘Are they okay?’
It took me a moment or two to remember Maura was injured.
‘Maura has a possible broken ankle. Lindy is fine.’
‘Did they have any water?’
‘Not much.’ Now the memory came surging back. ‘A litre between them.’
‘Didn’t you take any with you?’
I shook my head.
Richard shook his, out of disbelief.
‘You’re crazy.’
‘You called me Andy. Where did you get that from?’
‘Hey, don’t you remember Maura let it slip? You prefer Drew? Anyhow, don’t worry, I’m sworn to secrecy.’ He gripped my shoulder. ‘Not only that, but I told you already, I’m on your side.’
This was the guy whose father I had killed. If he ever found out, he wouldn’t be on my side any more.
‘How did you know where to look for us?’ I said. ‘For that matter, how did you know we needed looking for?’
‘Leave it for now, Andy. All will be revealed later.’
The black guy had gone to sit beside the pilot. The speed of the rotor increased and the chopper lifted off like an express elevator, swinging round on its axis. A swathe of sunlight traversed the cabin, a reminder of my recent ordeal.
‘It’ll be no more than ten miles,’ I told Richard. He relayed this information to the pilot, who nodded.
Finding the crash site transpired to be less daunting an operation than I expected. We hadn’t been airborne long when the black guy called out, ‘There!’
From wh
ere I was lying, I couldn’t see the ground, so I had to lie there and fret as we circled, and watch Richard waving manically from the window. I wondered if alighting on the dunes would be tricky, but the pilot took it in his stride and I caught sight of the two waifs as we settled into the sand. The pilot cut the engine and all went quiet.
Debilitated though I was, I was off the stretcher sliding the door back ahead of Richard. I ran – staggered – to where Maura and Lindy were standing, looking much as they had when I left them.
Maura and I collided into each other’s arms. Lindy managed to squirm her way into our embrace and join in the celebrations.
‘Are you all right?’ was my opening question.
‘Thirsty, but otherwise in good shape. But what about you?’ She held me at arm’s length. ‘You look terrible.’
‘Never mind that. Come on, let’s get you some water inside you both.’
‘Can’t I have a Pepsi?’ Lindy demanded, pouting.
‘I don’t expect they’ve brought any Pepsi, honey,’ Maura said, suppressing a laugh.
I picked Lindy up, gave her a hug of her own. She went a bit stiff at the familiarity, wanted to get down then changed her mind and clung to my neck.
With her riding on my shoulders and Maura hobbling along, supported by me on buckling legs, we made our way to the chopper. A grinning Richard came to meet us with two small bottles of Fiji mineral water. We stopped. Maura drank hers in dainty swallows. Lindy gulped her first mouthful, said ‘Ugh!’ and consumed the rest at a more moderate pace, making frequent moues of distaste. Richard took over supporting Maura for the last few yards, as we entered the patch of shade cast by the chopper. The side of the fuselage carried the logo ORBIC/AIR.
‘Who’s Orbic Air?’ I asked Richard as we piled aboard.
‘Private charter. I thought of calling in one of the official rescue outfits, but wasn’t sure if you would welcome the red tape that goes with it.’
He wasn’t wrong about that.
We spread ourselves around the four seats. Richard handed out more bottles of Fiji; he had come well prepared. I had a lot of questions for him, but they could wait. We were out of the danger zone for now, but once Carl Heider heard about our rescue, it was anybody’s guess how long we would stay out.
My ideas on a permanent solution were straying into an area that I had promised Maura I would eschew. More than that, it would bring me into conflict with Il Sindicato. Heider posed the more immediate threat, Il Sindicato the more serious.
Maura threaded her arm through mine. ‘You were very brave and noble, going off like that into the desert without any water. You might have died.’
I shrugged off her accolade. ‘My reasons were selfish, love. If somebody had to die, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t you two.’
She nuzzled up to me. ‘Is that what you call selfish?’
Richard was regarding us, his eyes crinkling at the corners. No resentment apparent. His attitude was a bit of a mystery. Soon I would solve it.
Through the window, I watched the bleak hills and mountains flash by. Goodbye Death Valley. You were not wrongly named.
From Santa Barbara airport Richard drove us to a hospital in Palmdale, north of LA. Money talked as usual, and while Maura’s ankle was X-rayed, I was treated for mild dehydration. A saline drip was judged unnecessary. Instead I slurped gallons of fruit juice, well sweetened to replace lost sugar, and popped a handful of salt tables to replace lost salt. For good measure, I was given an oral rehydration solution.
While this was going on Maura was seeing a consultant for her ankle. When we rediscovered each other a couple of hours later, her ankle was encased in a short plaster cast, and she was walking with the aid of a cuff crutch.
The doctor who accompanied her to where Richard and I were hanging out with Lindy, was Chinese or thereabouts.
He said, in impeccable American, ‘Ms Beck has a lateral malleolus fracture. It’s not severe, but she needs to wear the cast for about six weeks.’
Maura was not looking pleased. She and Lindy hugged each other, and she sent me the usual kissing message with her lips.
The physician eyed me up and down. ‘Are you the husband?’
‘Not yet.’
Maura shot me a frowning glance. I wasn’t sure how to interpret it – was it too fainthearted, or too presumptuous on my part.
‘He’s my carer,’ she said with an impish grin. Richard chuckled.
The doctor didn’t appreciate the frivolity. ‘If you are the carer,’ he said to me, ‘take better care of her in future.’
‘You can count on it,’ I said, but I was addressing his retreating back.
The bill was paid and we checked out. Maura insisted on hobbling unaided. Lindy let me take her hot little hand, which was progress, I felt.
From the hospital, Richard drove us to a mystery destination, which turned out to be a beach house in the Summerland suburb of Santa Barbara. It was a one-story vacation home with white brick walls and the ubiquitous shingle roof, four bedrooms, and a kitchen stuffed with every appliance imaginable, plus a few you couldn’t imagine. Out back, on the beach side, was a lawned yard with a deck, on which was scattered wooden furniture. A child’s slide and swing, and a miniature house and a sandpit occupied a corner of the lawn. Neighbours were within eavesdropping range, but screened from us by a mix of fences, hedges, and, according to Maura who seemed to know her greenery, pepper trees. Wooden steps were set into the short rocky incline that descended to the beach.
‘You rented this place?’ I asked Richard, as we prowled about the rooms, to shrieks of delight from Lindy on discovering a rocking horse in one of the bedrooms.
‘I sure as hell don’t own it.’
I grunted. ‘I just hope your uncle doesn’t.’
‘Don’t let yourself get paranoid about him.’
‘He has that effect on people,’ Maura said, firing up the rocking horse. The electric motor did all the work. When I was a kid that would have taken the fun out of it, but Lindy didn’t seem to mind. She was a child of the electronic age. The rocking horse even had a built in whinny.
Richard proposed an expedition in search of provisions. Pushing a supermarket cart was out of the question for Maura, and I was too debilitated from the after-effects of my desert adventure to join him. Maura also declined his offer to take Lindy with him. She was going to be over-protective towards her daughter for a while. Understandably.
Despite the rebuffs, he went off cheerfully enough, hopefully – from my point of view – for the sole purpose of purchasing groceries. I crashed down on the king-size bed in the master bedroom, whose wall-to-wall French window offered a Pacific panorama studded with late season yachts and the odd tanker creeping along the horizon. Maura played with Lindy in the yard as best she could, given her injured ankle. Later, she promised me, she would rest it. I drifted off to a background of childlike squeals and laughter, vaguely wondering if the sound of children at play was to become part of the future. Ah, Warner, you romantic fool.
The morning dawned sunny and balmy. We breakfasted on the deck: Kellogg’s cornflakes, muesli, croissants, toast, honey, grapefruit. Richard had shopped well. For a while, the talk was just idle banter.
‘How long have you rented the place for?’ Maura enquired as she spooned muesli. Her plaster-encased leg was propped up on a chair. She was wearing blue leggings and a track top with a black zigzag pattern over pale blue. A knockout, as always, even with her hair pulled back into a bunch and minimal make-up.
‘Two weeks,’ Richard said, ‘with an option on two more. This time of year most vacation pads are standing empty, so I was able to extract favourable terms.’
‘It’s kind of you to do all this ... for us,’ Maura said.
‘Yes,’ I chimed in. ‘We really appreciate it.’
‘I like this house,’ was Lindy’s contribution through a mouthful of cornflakes. ‘I like the sea. I wish we could stay here forever.’
Maura smiled fondly
at her. ‘We’ll find somewhere just as nice, sweetheart.’ She glanced at me, maybe for confirmation, and I nodded.
‘And we’ll go sailing on my boat,’ I said.
Lindy’s eyes shone. She lifted Basset from her lap and put his nose to her ear, frowning as she listened to his imaginary discourse.
‘Basset says he wants to go for a sail,’ she announced.
‘He will,’ I said gravely.
‘What do you sail?’ Richard asked.
‘Forty foot sloop. The great thing about the Med is that there are virtually no tides, and you can sail all year round.’
After more idle talk in this vein we moved on to the precarious present; the even more uncertain future could wait. I was keen for Richard to clear up a few puzzles.
It was the kind of day that makes you appreciate the Californian climate. Early December, yet the air was benign and the skies, but for a few feathers of cirrus, were blue. The gas burner roar of breakers scouring the shore was muted, the beach free of debris. Humans were not out in quantity. The odd promenader walking his dog, a jogger or two, a young couple, the husband hauling a baby in a papoose ... People for whom trauma might be represented by a child with chicken pox, a big bill for a car repair, a leaking water pipe and no plumber available to fix it. The prospect of having to flee for their lives, to be the subject of a murder attempt, would seem to be the stuff of Hollywood’s lurid outpourings.
My dolour was not reserved for me, but for Maura and Lindy. They had survived the intended destruction of the Seneca, and its sequel. If that meant that Heider would acknowledge his failure and exit Maura’s life, so much the better. But if my and others’ reading of the man was even half accurate, the story was not going to end here, happily ever after.
‘Let me thank you for coming to the rescue,’ I said to Richard, as he poured coffee for us all. ‘You probably saved our lives. Mine for sure.’
‘You’re welcome.’ He was dressed in grey pants with razor edge creases and a chunky blue sweater with a Burberry logo. His shoes were so highly polished you could have admired your reflection in the toe caps. Something of a contrast with my cream cords and sweatshirt.