Journal

by Craig Buckhout

  I just started back when I heard the car door open and a woman shout, “What do you got?” emotional connection he fsep

  I froze and dropped to the ground, my heart beating with alarm. As happened several days ago, I was forced to take a series of deep breaths to calm my body. And as it happened several days ago, it only somewhat had any affect.

  From my position, I was able to see the woman walking on the road, taking these big, heavy-footed steps back toward her companion, which of course was also where Gabriel and Anna were. The obvious came to mind; they had been spotted.

  After a second or two of indecision, I moved closer to the road. I figured that if they had found Gabriel and Anna, the quicker I did something about it, the better. My plan was to come out on the road behind the woman and, if necessary, shoot the male sentry first and then the female. After that, we’d run for our lives. It was the only plan I could come up with in that short of time.

  When I gained the edge of the orchard, but still in the trees, I started moving in the direction back toward Anna and Gabriel. I heard the man say something, the words beyond my reach, followed by the woman saying, “It was probably just a deer.”

  The man said something back to her to which she replied, “OK, a fox or a coyote. They’re all over the place. It’s the pot. It’s made you paranoid.”

  When I had gone about twenty yards or so, the earth suddenly sloped down and I stumbled. It was a drainage ditch. I was so intent on moving along and getting closer that I didn’t see it. My misstep didn’t make much noise, but it still made some.

  “There it goes,” she said. “It’s already behind me. See, it’s just an animal of some kind. Ain’t no man going to run quiet like that.” Those were her words as best I can remember. She also told him that he was too jumpy and that he should come back to the car with her and she would settle him down a bit.

  I still couldn’t hear what he said, but he must have been agreeable to the idea because in a minute or so I saw the two of them pass on by, going back to the car. He had one arm hung around her shoulders and was carrying the shotgun with his other hand. She was leaning into him.

  As they passed, I heard her ask if he had another joint. He said that he had one left but they should smoke it after. It was a delicate negotiation.

  I got a fairly good look at her at this point. She was older than the guy with the chin whiskers by more than a few years and a little overweight. She had on a pair of denim jeans with the cuffs rolled up several turns and wearing some kind of hat with earflaps. Below her headwear, long, straight, yellow hair showed.

  After they passed me, I belly crawled out beyond the edge of the orchard just to make certain it wasn’t some kind of a trick. But sure enough, the man tossed his shotgun on the front seat, and they both climbed in the back of the car. I couldn’t see what they were doing back there of course, but I had a pretty good idea. Sex, the idea of it as part of my life, is something that had fa south along the riverged and llen into a state of hibernation. Living the way I have these last couple of years, there was no promise or prospect of it, so I just never thought of it anymore. But now those feelings have been re-awakened. I wish they hadn’t. I’m afraid of them. I’m afraid of their power.

  As I started backing up, I spotted a large drainage pipe that went under the road to the other side. Apparently the ditch I had earlier stumbled upon, literally, drained into the pipe or vice versa. I thought, This is our way out. I hoped so anyway.

  I got back to Gabriel and Anna and learned that the guy with the whiskers apparently got bored just standing in his shack and went to walking the road. First he went one way, was out of sight for a few minutes, and then he walked back. Anna heard him coming, his feet scraping along, and told me she thought she better get a little deeper into the trees, but in doing so she stepped on something that made a noise. The rest you know.

  For my part, I told them that I thought I had found a way to cross the road unseen and had them follow me. Once we arrived at the mouth of the drainage pipe, I had Anna and Gabriel position themselves in such a manner that if the sentries heard or saw me and came running, they could put them out of action. I didn’t think this likely. I figured their attention would be on other things.

  The bottom of the pipe was, as you might expect, thick with muck and stunk like a stockyard on a hot day. So my pants, from my knees to my shoes, as well as my hands and sleeve cuffs, got rotten, muddy wet. I made it across, though, and set up on the other side of the road, as per our plan. I signaled Gabriel and Anna to start across and that’s pretty much it. They made it across, we crawled some more on our hands and knees, probably a good hundred yards, which is no easy task (it ruffs you up something terrible) and did a low walk for another hundred yards after that before allowing ourselves the relief of standing upright.

  I wanted to make up for the time lost, so we moved along pretty good after that. It was flat and fairly open, the only impediment being stubborn, waist tall bushes that forced us to an irregular course. I was also a little nervous about our exposure. Depending on the vantage point, we were silhouetted by a filtered moon light, but then so would be our adversaries. In daylight, we would have taken a different way altogether.

  We walked on for a good five or six hours, so I would estimate that we covered another fifteen, sixteen, maybe seventeen miles. We would have kept on walking, too, except we encountered an east-west road that skirted the edge of a steep, narrow canyon. At the bottom of the canyon we could hear, more than see, a swift moving creek. This was a serious obstacle; another one of those, ‘what else can go wrong’ moments.

  As I saw it, the big problem was that I couldn’t see down to the water, so I didn’t know if it was one of those impossible big rock bottoms, or if the bank was lined with brush too thick to get through, or if the water was one foot deep or ten feet deep. We could conceivably work our way down there, only to find that we couldn’t get across and have to climb right back out again. We still needed to get across, though. But before even attempting it, we started out by walking ea the Author

  I stuck my rifle into my pack to have both hands free and started out going down at an angle that was sharp enough that my uphill hand was actually touching down. Digging the edges of my boots into the rocky earth was the only thing that kept me from sliding. In this way, it took me maybe five or six minutes to descend the approximate sixty to eighty feet to the bottom. No, no, not that much, I guess maybe more like fifty to sixty feet.

  Gabriel went next, starting where I did but at a little less of an angle, so more directly straight down. Because it was so dark, especially in the canyon, he was presented as an intermittent shape, and at the beginning of his descent only the silhouette of his head or shoulders was visible from time to time. He got approximately three quarters of the way down when I saw a series of quick, jerky movements, which I interpreted as his arms wind milling for balance, followed by the sound of him going down. He cried out only once that I could hear. The intensity of it, though, scared the heck out of me. It was one of those human sounds you immediately associate with serious and sudden pain.

  Anna, still up top, must have heard him, too, because she called out to him and asked, “Are you all right? Gabriel, can you hear me?” When we didn’t hear anything back, she asked me if he was OK. As you would expect, there was a lot of desperation in her voice. I can only imagine what she must have been thinking. I was already moving by that time and told her I was trying to get to him. No doubt my tone betrayed my own anxiety. As I moved, I heard rocks kicking down from above as she started toward us. I thought about telling her to be careful, that we didn’t need two people hurt, but didn’t, knowing such a warning would be just a waste of time.

  When I got to him, he looked a mess. He was lying on his right-side about ten feet from the bottom, holding his left upper arm with his right hand, tight to his body and gritting his teeth. His breathing was deep and every third or fourth breath formed a grunt. One side of his face had a nice raspbe
rry on it, leaking blood that ran down along his jaw, stopping at that scar on the tip of his chin. His pant cuff on the down side was pulled up from the slide after his fall, exposing his calf, and he had a pretty decent scrape there, too. He had dirt, and rock, and debris in his hair, inside the collar of his coat, on his face, all over. The pain must have been something else. I did my best to remain calm.

  I first went about taking off his pack, being mindful of his arm. His rucksack was all twisted around and would make it impossible to move him. I asked him where he hurt. His words in reply were squeezed out of his throat, between gulps of air, two or three at a time. “It’s my…shoulder. …Hurts bad. …Something broken.” Just to make sure that was his only injury, I gently squeezed and touched all up and down his body. He didn’t complain of pain with any of my manipulations nor did I feel anything out of place, so I was reasonably sure that his only serious injury was his shoulder.

  It was about this time that Anna reached us. She put her hand on her son’s forehead and rubbed his chest while I brought her up to date, talking as calmly as I could, though not too successfully I’m afraid. I suggested that we try to get his coat and shirt off to see what was going on. And that’s what we set about doing, a painful, slow process to say the least. In any other situation, we’d probably have just cut his clothes off, but he had nothing else to wear so he’d need his clothes intact.

  When we got down to skin, I saw that his shoulder was badly misshapen. It looked like it had come completely out of its socket, a sickening sight. Anna put her hand on my back and said that she knew what to do. She apparently had helped a nurse put a shoulder joint back in place while she was at the hospital. I remember wondering how she knew I was worried enough that her assurance was needed.

  She kissed Gabriel on his forehead and said, “It’s going to hurt baby but only for a while. As soon as it’s back in place, most of the pain will go away.”

  First, she bent his lower arm at the elbow, up toward his shoulder and rotated it so that it rested on his chest much like it would rest if it were in a sling. That simple movement sent a wave of pain throughout his whole body, causing him to squirm and cry out. With a gentle hand on his cheek, she told him that the hard part was coming now. Without giving him time to think about it, and holding his upper arm with one hand and his wrist with the other, she rotated his arm, still in a ninety-degree angle, up (he was on his back at this point) and all the way over until his hand was turned away from his body. It must have hurt like hell because he didn’t just cry out this time; he quite literally screamed and dug his heels into the dirt.

  Gabriel’s pain caused his mother great distress of her own. I saw tears roll down her face, cutting a path through the dirt on her cheek. When she swept them away with her forearm, a strand of her curly, dark brown hair momentarily stuck to the skin until I brushed it free with my thumb.

  I don’t think Gabriel took much notice his mother’s discomfort, though. He rolled over onto his right side and threw up.

  Unfortunately, the shoulder only went part way back into the socket on this first attempt, so Anna had to do it all over again. This time she had me put pressure on the actual joint with my hands, to help it along. That did the job. It reseated itself. I actually felt it pop back in. Gabriel halfway smiled after that and said that it wasn’t hurting nearly as much anymore. Anna checked to make sure the joint moved as it was supposed to, more pain, and finally we put his clothes back on.

  Using my belt and a piece of airplane wing fabric, we contrived a sling that held his arm close to his body. To keep my pants from falling down I used a second piece of airplane fabric to tie my two front belt loops together.

  We all just kind of sat there after that. I don’t know what they were thinking about, but I was thinking how one simple accident could be the end of anyone of us — a broken leg, a laceration, even food poisoning. None of those things could be treated. We our enemies wot were on foot, and as far as I knew, hundreds of miles from help. The person sick or hurt would just die. That’s all there was to it.

  I also thought about how, up to a few days ago, I didn’t know these people and later regretted knowing them. Now though, I fear for them no less than I fear for myself. We look out for one another. When those two mutts shot me, Anna and Gabriel stayed to help. When I couldn’t put poor Michael Bass out of his misery, she gave me the strength to do it. When I heard Gabriel fall, I was deep down scared of his injuries. We even shared our body heat in order to survive. We’ve been through so much together.

  A few paragraphs back I wrote about how, at that particular time, I was thinking that our relationship, meaning Anna’s and mine, was based on “situational need”. Remember that? Now I was starting to believe that maybe that was all just so much bull. Maybe we were real honest-to-God friends, not just traveling companions. I was also realizing something else. I hadn’t had anyone I could call a friend in such a long time, by both choice and circumstance, I might not even know what a friend is. Talk about a change of perspective, huh?

  When my mind was finally done with these thoughts, I found myself staring into the face of Anna Sanchez. We were not more than twelve inches away from one another. Her eyes were darting all over my face; my forehead, my cheeks, my nose, my chin, my lips, my eyes, never settling in one place for longer than a blink. Each stop, though, was a touch that I felt well after her eyes moved on. Not a word was exchanged between us either; silence, accompanied on her part with a little half smile that softened and warmed the moment. I know this is going to sound crazy, but next to her putting her hand on mine back there with Michael Bass, it was one of the most intimate moments I’ve ever experienced. It was so extraordinary that I felt a wave of heat move from down low, right up through my body until it flushed my cheeks. It embarrassed me to such an extent, I had to turn away. I hope she didn’t read that as rejection.

  As I carefully form these last few words, I’m admittedly confused about what’s going on with me. For some reason I seem to be going on and on about my feelings, and I don’t know why. Before all this, before them, the only emotion I felt was fear; fear of getting hurt, fear of starving, fear of dying of thirst, fear of wandering forever alone, just plain fear. Now, now I’m a cauldron of emotion. A recipe of fear, anger, hate, sadness, and something else, too, swirling and roiling and bubbling to the surface. You know what, I need to shut up for a little while and think this out a bit more before writing anything else. Instead, I should get back to what happened next. Let’s move on.

  There was a stream at the bottom of that canyon, and I haven’t told you about it yet. It was maybe thirty feet or so across, churning past, a steady rush of sound off into the night. To get to the other side wasn’t going to be a matter of just wading across it or perhaps doing some boulder hopping, especially in the dark, and especially with someone injured on top of that. So I left Gabriel and Anna there and went in search of an easier way.

  It did cross my mind to just stay where we were until daylight, but there was still a good two or three hours of travel time left and we were the Author

  As I walked west, I just couldn’t find a place where we could safely cross the water. But I did notice that the terrain was starting to flatten out. The canyon walls were dropping and the ground was showing fewer boulders and more gravel and small rock. This told me that we were likely nearing a place where this stream intersected a river. I figured that as the stream spread out because the ground flattened out, it would be easier to ford. I wish I had known this before I took us down into that canyon.

  I went back and told Anna and Gabriel of my theory, and we started out in that direction. About forty-five minutes later, the theory proved out, and we came to the larger river. Using a long sturdy branch as a rope, with me at one end, Anna at the other, and Gabriel in the middle holding it with his good hand, we were able to get across the stream without much more than the bottom of our pants legs getting wet. And it still left us maybe another hour or two of travel time before it
got light.

  So we struck off going south again, on the eastside of the larger river. In fact, we pretty much followed the river because the elevation was flat to slightly downhill, which made travel easier. Within twenty minutes of walking, we were skirting the western edge of a big orchard, and ten minutes after that we could see, even in the darkness, what looked like yet another orchard on the west side of the river.

  At one point, Anna came up next to me and touched my arm. I was learning that Anna was quite the toucher, despite my earlier impression that she was a poker. You know, I guess I should lighten up on her a little bit. As I’ve more than hinted, I’ve sensed a personal, emotional connection between us that goes unspoken. It’s not something that I’ve encouraged, and I don’t think she has either. It’s something that’s just happened all on its own; I guess you could say despite our best efforts to prevent it, and in that sense, making it a fragile thing. There I go again. This isn’t going anywhere, so I better just get back to the story.

  After getting my attention, she pointed to a part of the river where it flowed around an island of gravel and rock, about thirty feet long. There, partially resting on dry land, was the face down body of what appeared to be an adult man. His chest, head, and shoulders were fully out of the water, but his legs were bobbing up and down in the current, doing a kind of macabre, dead man’s dance I suppose you could say. My guess is that he had washed downstream from Turnbull. Maybe he was one of those killed in Michael Bass’s party. Or maybe not; there is a lot of killing going on. As we continued on our way, this caused me to periodically scan the water for other bodies. I didn’t see any, although that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.

  Eventually we reached a point where the ground rose up creating a canyon through which the river ran. What this meant to us was that we had to cut inland to continue our trek. There was nowhere to walk close-up to the river.