“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 headset. 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.
“I don’t think he’s got that kind of time,” he said finally. “Let me get the stuff and I’ll bind him up as tightly as I can.” He picked his way back to the net and hauled out the lawn chairs and bag of rags. Opening one chair, he leaned it against the boulder and jumped on it like a kid engaged in vandalism. The flimsy rivets snapped, and he had a floppy chaise longue. He wrenched off the U-shaped leg pieces and stomped them into relative flatness before jamming them through the webbing in two parallel lines. He held up his impromptu backboard and shook it. It still shifted more than he liked, but it would give Waxman a chance to get out of this without being paralyzed. He laid it on the ground next to the unconscious man and carefully rolled him into place on top of the aluminum poles, praying that he wasn’t causing more unseen damage.
The rags needed to be knotted together before he could stretch them across Waxman’s chest and tie them to the chair’s webbing. Waxman’s breathing was shallow and sparse, more like hiccups than actual breaths. Russ pulled his headphones off to listen for the telltale hiss of a punctured lung, but he didn’t hear anything. He tied Waxman’s shoulder, chest, and waist to the supports and stood up to tackle the other chair.
This one he smashed against the boulder until it broke apart into pieces. He took the aluminum poles, splinted them against Waxman’s arms, and tied them in place with the remainder of the rags. Then he tore the plastic grocery bag in two and used it to tie Waxman’s immobilized arms to the jury-rigged backboard. He stood up and surveyed his handiwork, wiping the sweat from his eyes. Waxman looked like a victim of backyard bondage gone awry. If we don’t kill this guy trying to save him, it’ll be a miracle, he thought.
“Okay, I’m going to load him in,” Russ said. He picked up the top edges of the lawn chair contraption and dragged the injured man travois-style to the net. He unfolded the edges of the net and pulled it out of the water before wrestling Waxman into place at the center. He stood up, looked around the area one more time, then hefted the abandoned backpack onto his shoulder and rolled it into the net, next to its owner.
Russ stepped into the net, sat down tailor-style facing Waxman, and tugged the backboard onto his lap. It was awkward, but he figured he could give some added support with his crossed legs. “Clare,” he said, “we’re good to go.”
“Great. Here we go.” The boom strap began to rise out of its loose folds like a film running backward. He had thought he was prepared, but the jolt when the strap caught and yanked the netting off the ground still knocked the breath out of him. He threw his arms across Waxman’s chest. The man’s legs were forced upright by the press of the net until his knees fell forward and he spraddled like a roadkill frog. The backpack wedged itself against Russ’s shins, its metal buckles biting into his jeans. The net spun so that he had to close his eyes against the stomach-churning whirl of the horizon.
Clare was hauling him in a lot faster than she had thrown him out. The net spun up and up, then stopped with a jerk that vibrated into his bones. He opened his eyes and looked up. The sausage-shaped boom was overhead, maybe three feet away, and above it, the blur of the rotors, their hard chop pulsing through his ears and into his brain. The cargo area gaped open a couple of feet away from where he and Waxman hung. He suddenly realized that Clare had never discussed this part of the plan.
“Clare!”
“Don’t yell. I can hear you fine.”
“How am I supposed to get back in?”
“You’re not.”
The chopper rose from where it had been hovering and ascended slowly, crossing the lip of the crevasse and leaving it behind.
“You can’t just leave me hanging here!”
The voice over his headphones was soothing. “I’m heading back to the helipad. We’ll be there in a minute. Then we can get you out of the net and get Waxman settled into the cargo area.”
He closed his eyes and began counting to sixty out loud. He had reached thirty-one when he
r amused voice said, “Are you looking?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Go ahead. Open your eyes.”
He did, and then shut them again with relief when he saw the helipad rising up to meet them. The thwap-thwap-thwap of the rotors reverberated from all around and the downwash threw a whirl of grit and dust into the air. Then there was a gentle rocking and they were down. A few seconds later, Clare appeared in the cargo doorway.
“Climbed over the seat,” she said. “I don’t like to leave the ship while the engine is on.” She leaned to one side of the doorway, and the strap holding him and his load off the tarmac rolled out of the boom again, dropping him to the ground. He threw the netting off his shoulders and rose in a crouch, intently aware of the rotors still chopping overhead.
“How come it’s still going?” he yelled.
She winced, poking at her headphones. He snapped his mike off and she did the same. “I want us back in the air ASAP. Tilt him up this way and I’ll grab one end.”
He wrapped his hands around the aluminum struts protruding above Waxman’s shoulders and gave a heave. Clare knelt at the edge of the door and grabbed, pulling up and back. He worked his arms under Waxman’s legs and together they slid the unconscious man into the cargo area. Russ tossed the backpack in beside Waxman.
“Are you coming or going?” she yelled.
He opened his hands, indicating he didn’t understand the question.
“Are you flying with us to Albany? I’d like the help, but I’m not going to make you.”
He stopped, his hand on the edge of the cargo door. He hadn’t thought about just heading back to his truck and driving away. He could do that. It wasn’t as if he could do anything more for Waxman than he already had. He could head back to the station, get the paperwork started on this incident, track down Peggy, and get her statement. He looked up at Clare, who was waiting for him to make up his mind. “I’m coming with you,” he said and hauled himself up into the cargo area.
She didn’t say anything, merely winched the net back up and yanked the cargo door shut, but he could see her smiling to herself. She fiddled with her headset and tapped one of his headphones. He switched his back on. “Help me move him closer over there,” she said, gesturing past the safety web. She picked the web up and draped it over her back to keep it out of the way; then, hunched over, they half-dragged, half-lifted Waxman’s still form into place within arm’s reach of the passenger seats. She nodded, stepped into his seat, and climbed over the partial bulkhead into the pilot’s chair. “Strap in and let’s get going,” she said.
His butt was barely in the seat when the chopper rose. This he remembered, too, the scramble to get off the ground, the wounded on the floor, the trees bending and shaking as the slicks rose out of the grass. Clare was at it again. “Fee-fee-fi-fi-fo-fo-fum, Lookin’ mighty nice, now here she comes,” his headphones sang. He rested his elbows on his knees and laughed. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. All she had to do was throw in some Doors and she’d have the complete sound track to his youth. He looked at Waxman’s pale face and was suddenly consumed with the urge for a cigarette, something he had given up in1985.
Up they went. Up and up, angling slightly to the east as Clare sang “Devil with a Blue Dress” into the headphones and the rotors thundered to her rhythm. “Wearing her perfume, Chanel Number Five, got to be the—what the heck?”
He sat up again and looked out the window, immediately wishing he hadn’t. They were up. Way up. As high as an airplane. The mountaintops stretched out beneath them in rough and rounded shades of dark green and smoky blue. Clare had gone silent. In his experience, it was never good when a pilot went silent.
“What is it?”
She didn’t answer him. He craned around. She was leaning over, working a control he couldn’t see. “Clare, what is it?”
“The radio,” she said. “I can’t use it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that instead of leaving the last station on, whoever was flying this spun the dial. It’s on dead air now. And that’s not all.” She reached over her head. “Look at this.” She had a small black plastic cylinder in her hand. He took it from her. “That’s the control knob. It came off in my hand. Take a look.”
Inside the cylinder was a small hollow tube, meant to fasten tightly over whatever metal stud actually connected to the radio’s workings. The tube was splintered apart, as if someone had jammed a screwdriver or awl into it.
He tried to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach. “What’s this mean? Are we in trouble? Do we go back down?”
“It means I can’t rely on the local air-control stations to lead me to Albany. I’ll have to do it by sight. I’m going to bring her up a little higher so I can get my bearings. The visibility is lousy today because of the humidity.”
She sounded very calm and authoritative, which didn’t reassure him one bit. Pilots always sounded the most calm when they were in the deepest trouble. The chopper whined, but now the engine had a shrill note that made his back teeth ache.
“What’s that? Is the engine supposed to sound like that?”
“It’s having to work a little harder, that’s all. The humid air means there’s not as much lift under the rotors as there would be if it were cool and dry.”
“How far up are we going?”
“Four thousand feet.”
“Four thousand feet! I thought choppers only went five hundred, a thousand feet high.”
She actually laughed. “We’re only going to be about two thousand feet above the ground. Where we started from was almost two thousand feet above sea level to begin with. Okay, help me out here. I’m not very familiar with the geography around here. I see two fairly big rivers, a handful of smaller tributaries, a medium-sized lake. I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
As before, he braced his hands against the metal frame and looked out the window. He tried to pretend he was safely stowed away in a small airplane, but the laborious chop-chop-chop of the rotors made it impossible. “Which way are we pointing?”
“North.”
“Okay.” He took a breath. “The lake must be Lake Luzerne. The river to the west is the Sacandaga. It heads west, to the Great Sacandaga Lake. The river to the east has to be the Hudson.”
“Are you sure? It looks kind of small.”
“It is small this far north. It broadens out past West Point.”
“And Albany is on the Hudson?”
He leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes. “It was the last time I was there.”
“Okay. I’ve got my bearing on the compass. I’m going to take us back down to five hundred feet and head east.”
He shoved the useless control knob into his pocket and tried to ignore the queasy sensation their descent was giving him. Clare was still silent. He wished she would start singing again. He looked at Waxman, whose face was damp and pale beneath his trendy goatee, and thought how young he was. And that even at that, the men he had seen dying on helicopter floors had been younger still. Boys. Waxman would have been an old man in ’Nam.
The chopper bumped abruptly, emitting a sound like a leaky cough. He lurched in his seat belt, reaching down to keep the unconscious geologist from sliding. Waxman’s backpack rolled across the floor. Clare was talking to herself under her breath, something about airflow.
Waxman’s backpack. Which had been lying several feet away from the man. He had been fighting with Peggy before he fell. How had his backpack gotten down there? He unbuckled his seat belt and started toward where the backpack rested against the orange cargo webbing.
That was when he heard the sound, the spluttering, coughing, choking sound that sounded like some great beast dying.
“What is it?” he asked. “Clare?”
“Fuel,” she said, her voice tight. “Get into your seat and strap down.”
He could feel the question howling behind his clenched teeth: What do you mean? Didn’t you check it? He kept it th
ere. Of course she’d checked it. She was snapping off words like items on a list in a subaudible whisper. He heard a brief roar, then another choke.
“Strap yourself in and get into the crash position!”
He dived for his seat and yanked the restraint across himself. The helicopter tilted abruptly, and his inner ear sloshed sickeningly out of balance. Through the windows, he saw nothing but colorless sky, but his stomach and head felt as if they were spinning down in a spiral. Another roar. They jerked up so violently, Waxman lifted off the floor a few inches at the apogee, then slammed back down. The machine seemed to wheeze. “Come on, come on,” Clare was urging.
“Clare? How bad is this?”
“Bad.” Her voice was short, clipped, professional. “Something’s keeping the gas from getting to the engine.” She hissed, then resumed speaking in the same matter-of-fact way. “I’m going to do something called an autorotation. I’m going to plunge the ship nose down while cutting power to the rotors. They’ll spin on their own, giving us lift and slowing our descent. It’ll be a controlled crash.”
Thirty years on, and he was still going to die in a helicopter crash. Linda, his mom, and his sister flashed through his mind, but it was Mac he fixed on, Mac laughing and smoking and drumming out a rhythm on a helmet with his hands. God, he thought, just kill me quick. Don’t hang me up and make me linger.
“Here we go,” Clare said.
The floor under his feet tilted farther and farther. Waxman, still strapped tightly to his makeshift frame, slid toward the seats, ramming into Russ’s feet. His backpack rolled and bounced against Russ’s legs. The safety webbing flapped and the bungee cords clattered wildly against the window. They were balanced on the chopper’s nose when the sound cut off just like that. The sudden silence was like the sound of the grave. Then he could hear his heart beating. He could hear the rotors overhead whistling and whirring. He could hear Clare praying. They were going down so fast, his body strained against the belt strapping him in.
A Fountain Filled With Blood Page 31