A Fountain Filled With Blood

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  Clare climbed onto the tail boom and straddled Waxman’s body. She crouched down and jumped, her abdomen hitting the edge of the doorway, forcing out a loud “Ooof!” but gaining her enough leverage to swing first one leg and then another up onto the door frame. Immediately, Russ thrust two handfuls of webbing at her. She grabbed them as he began hoisting himself. In a minute, he sat facing her across the opening. She pulled up more webbing, handing him the leading edge, and he leaned forward, drawing it to him until the webbing hung between their hands like a fishing net waiting to be cast.

  “Okay?” she said. He nodded.

  Gripping their catch, they each got to their feet, teetering on the edge of the frame for balance while bending down so as to not loose the webbing they were drawing taut.

  “Ready?” he said.

  “Let’s do it.”

  She reached down, tangled her fingers in the webbing, and heaved, her biceps contracting into a hard bunch. Across the doorway, Russ did the same. She reached and pulled. He reached and pulled. Waxman rose from the depths.

  “ ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,’ ” she quoted. She felt almost giddy, buoyed up by the conviction that at least here and now, she was where she was meant to be, doing what she was supposed to do.

  Russ grunted. One more pull and the unconscious geologist was out of the cabin, hanging between them. Russ jerked his head toward the lower edge of the doorway. Awkwardly, they sidestepped until they could rest him on the helicopter’s pitted skin. Russ sat down by Waxman’s head and she followed suit.

  “Lower him to the ground,” Russ said. Leaning back, they eased him over the ship’s belly onto the raw dirt. Clare followed, sliding down with a thump, which was echoed a moment later by Russ, fire extinguisher in hand. “Now,” he said, “can we please get out of here?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Russ shouldered Waxman’s backpack and picked up the webbing above the man’s head. Standing at Waxman’s feet, Clare did the same. They shuffled awkwardly uphill with him, his legs bumping into Clare’s shin and the aluminum struts poking into Russ’s calves. Russ twisted back, as if he was going to say something to her, but his face went pale as he looked over her shoulder.

  She turned to see, and her eyes immediately caught sight of a curl of flame and smoke scarcely bigger than if coming from a pipe bowl. It crackled through a pile of dried leaves beyond the remnants of the helicopter’s tail.

  “Double time,” she said, her voice higher than usual.

  Russ glanced at the fire extinguisher, which was still dangling from one hand, and threw it toward the helicopter. Lopsided, they sprinted up the hill, the geologist’s body swinging and banging into their legs with bruising force, their free arms churning to counterbalance the load. Clare beat against the hill, attempting to keep pace with Russ’s longer stride, trying not to slip as the almost-smooth soles of her sneakers skidded against the dirt and tufts of grass.

  They reached the top and headed down the other side without pausing, dodging trees and saplings, picking up momentum until they were loping. Her arm and shoulder were burning and cramping with Waxman’s weight. She staggered as the ground beneath her rose again and they lurched upward to another small summit.

  “Stream,” Russ gasped out, pointing with his free hand to a rock-bottomed brook below them. They plummeted down toward it, thrashing through thick ferns that obscured the forest floor. A rock rolled beneath her heel and she went down on her backside with bone-jarring force but kept her forward momentum so that she rolled up again and continued with only a break in stride.

  They had just reached the stream when an enormous whumpf sent them sprawling on their bellies. It was like the hammer of God striking the forest, a sound so huge, it seemed a solid thing pressing them down. Clare could feel the air around them compress, causing pressure in her inner ears. Then came the rush of hot wind, blasting out through the forest, shaking leaves wildly and sending a torrent of birds squawking into the skies. Then the wind was gone, like a departed train, and she could hear a clattering, crackling, roaring noise from where they had left the helicopter and the pipe bowl’s worth of smoke.

  She rolled over and sat up. Russ pushed himself onto his knees. She looked at him, amazed, excited, and profoundly grateful to be sitting there, filthy, sweat-stained, aching in every muscle.

  “We made it!” she said.

  He dropped to his hands and knees and threw up.

  Chapter Thirty

  Russ was conscious of two things: the sour taste in his mouth and the cold water pouring over his head and shoulders.

  He heard a voice making sympathetic noises, felt the weight of the backpack being lifted off him, the straps tugging over his arms. His ribs ached, his knees were throbbing, and the slow wind rolling over him felt like waves of heat from a furnace grate. The fire. The explosion. The crash. Involuntarily, his stomach spasmed again, trying to wring out the last ounce of bile.

  “Rinse your mouth with this.” Clare bent over him, water brimming in her cupped hands. He slurped a mouthful, swished it around his mouth, and spit it out.

  “More?” he managed to say. She reappeared with another handful of water. He gargled it into the back of his throat and spat again. She wiped the rest of the water on his face.

  He sat back on his haunches. “Sorry.”

  She was all practicality. “Take off your shirt. I’ll soak it in the stream. You’ll feel better.” Her matter-of-fact attitude helped him feel less embarrassed about tossing his lunch. He peeled off the stinking, sweat-soaked garment, and when she brought it back, he rubbed the sopping cloth over his face, neck, and hair before putting it on. It was shockingly cold for a moment, before his skin got accustomed to the clinging wet. The cool barrier against the heat attacking him everywhere helped him to breathe again. He sank back into the ferns. Clare sat beside him, cross-legged. She reached out and began stroking his forehead, pushing his wet hair back, her hand cool and firm. And her touch undid him, just undid him. He felt a knot in his chest loosen, and there he was, opened like a package. He closed his eyes.

  “We were flying into the central highlands. It was hot, heavy VC activity in the area, and the artillery units were hammering the place night and day, laying down fire to clear out enough space for the slicks to land and for the squads to set up their perimeters. So we’re in the chopper, me and my friend Mac and a bunch of other guys and our lieutenant.” He opened his eyes, looking into the green leaves above him. “We were kind of goofing, getting ourselves revved up, ’cause we figured we were dropping straight into a firefight. All of a sudden, we get hit. The helicopter starts to drop. The pilot’s screaming, ‘Jump! Jump!’ and the chopper’s bucking like a bronco and we’re all hanging on for dear life. I could see out the door we weren’t too far above the trees. The lieutenant yells, ‘Come on,’ and me and Mac stand up, but the other three guys are yelling that there was no fucking way they were going to jump into the fucking jungle. The pilot’s still screaming, ‘Jump, jump,’ and I look at Mac and he kind of shrugs. The lieutenant sees it, and he slaps his pistol into my hand and yells, ‘Go for it,’ like he’s got to stay with the other guys, maybe persuade them off. Like he had more than a minute anyway. So we jumped. Mac and me.”

  He glanced at Clare. She was sitting very still, not looking at him directly, looking just past him, as if the ferns were something she had never seen before. She nodded without taking her eyes off the ferns.

  “I bounced down through some trees, and next thing I know, I’m on the ground. Right away, I knew I had broken both my legs. I’m looking around for Mac, when the whole sky lights up. The slick had crashed and exploded. And I could hear…there was so much noise, but I could hear guys screaming and screaming like animals trapped in a burning barn.” He paused for a moment. “Then over the sound, I can hear Mac. Above me. He’s kind of sobbing and moaning. And for a while, in the light from the fire, I could see what had happened to him.” He shut his mouth for a moment. “I d
on’t know how long it went on. When I remember it, it seems like an hour, but it couldn’t have been. Mac hanging in the tree, going, ‘Kill me, Christ, kill me,’ and crying. And the noise from the chopper dying down, the fire burning out. And I knew…knew Charlie was closing in on us, and that as soon as the VC heard Mac, they would find us. So I…I took the lieutenant’s gun and I…did what Mac wanted.”

  She took his hand in hers and squeezed hard.

  “They came about a half hour after. They didn’t find me, and no one else was alive, so they went away after awhile. I tried dragging myself a ways, but where could I go with two broken legs? So I gave up and laid there in the brush beneath the tree until this squad of marines came around and hauled my ass out.”

  Clare laid her other hand on top of his. “How long were you there?”

  “Two days.”

  “Beneath the tree.”

  “Yeah.” He looked at her directly for the first time. “Only three people have ever heard about this. And you’re the third.”

  She rubbed his hand between hers.

  “I didn’t tell you so you’d feel sorry for me.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for you. I—” She shut her eyes slowly and then opened them again. “I hurt. For what you had to go through. For the boy you were. For what you have to keep in your head.”

  They were both silent for a moment. He felt lighter somehow, as if he’d been lifting weights for a long time and then put them down and taken a cool shower. Tired out, but fresh at the same time.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For being there. For going over and doing what you did. For being faithful to your country even when what your country asked of you was terrible and futile and confused. Thank you.”

  He started to laugh. “Only you, Clare. Only you.”

  He let go of her hand and stood up, his legs trembling and his sides aching. Clare rose in front of him, holding his glasses. He hadn’t even realized they had come off.

  He put them on and glanced up the last hill. No signs of fire. He recalled, from the weekly volunteer fire department’s report, that the hazard was low to moderate. Still, it didn’t mean they weren’t in danger. He looked downstream. God. Right now, he felt as if he would collapse if he had to take one more step.

  Clare touched his arm. Her hand was still wet. “Do you…Should I…” She pressed her lips together and shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she said, “What do you need to do right now and how can I help you?”

  He felt an ache, a tenderness so real, he thought he might see a bruise on his sternum if he looked beneath his soggy shirt. He knew if he wanted to, he could lie down in the ferns and have her bring him handfuls of water. Knew that if he sent her ahead to find help, she would do it. Knew if he said he couldn’t go on, she’d make a travois for Waxman and drag him out of this forest. She didn’t need him to be the leader, to make decisions, to stand in front. And because she didn’t, he found he could take that one more step after all.

  “Let’s head downstream.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “If it doesn’t take us anywhere, at least it’ll be easier than hiking over these hills.”

  She looked at him carefully, as if measuring his ability against his words. Then she smiled. “Let’s go.”

  Once more, he shouldered the backpack and took Waxman’s head while she took his feet. As they walked, he kept an eye out for a branch they could sling through the webbing to carry it on their shoulders, but there were no sturdy eight-foot-long pieces of wood conveniently left about. Instead, there was a thick bank of ferns, and the occasional root or stone to avoid. The constant whack—although it was never regular enough to anticipate—of the aluminum spars hitting him in the calves slowed him down.

  The heat squeezed him like a hand wringing a sponge. His shirt didn’t dry out, but warmed, until it seemed a solidified part of the humid air. Except for the gurgle of the stream and the swish, swish as they strode through the ferns, the woods were quiet. Even the usual insect droning was muted. He could feel the tension tightening inside him, the creeping fear that he was exposed, open to fire. He knew it was dumb, that there were no snipers lurking in the Adirondacks, that what he and Clare had to fear was a turned ankle or heat stroke, not a sudden shattering report through the leaves. That green and heat and wet didn’t automatically add up to death.

  Then as they rounded a bend in the stream that twisted behind a bluff of earth and pines, he saw three armed men in fatigues.

  He dropped Waxman to the ground and drew his gun in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Clare dived over Waxman as he crouched deep into a firing stance. “Drop your weapons,” he roared.

  The three men paused from where they had been toiling uphill and stared at him. They didn’t toss down their weapons, just stood in a ragged line, curious, relaxed. One of them had his arms akimbo and another one wiped his forehead.

  “Hey,” the man with his hands on his hips said. “We’re not—”

  “Police!” Russ yelled. “Put your weapons down now!” He tightened his finger slightly and a round fell into the firing chamber with an audible snick.

  “Holy crap,” one of the men said. “That’s a real gun.” All three threw their weapons into the ferns. They glanced at one another and raised their hands. The man who had spoken before said, “If we’re trespassing, we’re sorry.”

  “We had the landowner’s permission to be on the property,” a man behind him said.

  Russ lowered his gun and relaxed his stance. “Who the hell are you?”

  They glanced at one another. “Um. We’re from BancNorth,” their apparent leader said. “We’re part of a paintball team.”

  From the corner of his eye, he could see Clare clamber off Waxman’s half-hidden form.

  “Our base camp called us maybe twenty minutes ago. Someone had reported a small aircraft going down, near our position. We decided to check it out.”

  “They know where we are,” the man behind him said. “They’re sending in search and rescue teams and rangers right now.” The rest remained unspoken: So if you kill us, you won’t get away with it.

  Russ was suddenly aware that he must look like an extra in Deliverance. He holstered his gun and stepped forward. “Please, put your hands down. Sorry I scared you. I’m Chief Van Alstyne, of the Millers Kill Police Department.” He thumbed back toward Clare. “This is, um, the pilot of the aircraft you’re looking for. We were transporting a badly injured man when our helicopter went down. We could use some help.”

  The three bankers looked at one another. He could see the excitement crackle between them as they realized they were on the scene of a real live emergency. “Sure,” their leader said.

  As they drew near, Russ could see their fatigues were streaked with dried paint. One of them had on an outfit so new, there were fold lines faintly visible on his shirt. They had the thickening waists and excellent teeth of successful forty-year-old businessmen. That he had mistaken them for soldiers was clear evidence that his in-country reflexes were running amok.

  “Do you guys have a topo map I can use to figure out where we are?” he said.

  “Yeah, but you may as well do it the easy way,” said one, a pale man whose cheeks were blotchy red from the heat. He fished out something the size of a glasses case and handed it to Russ. “GPS. Hooks us up to the satellite system and tells us the exact coordinates of where we are. You can zoom in and out on the map here.” He pointed to buttons along the edge of the device.

  “You know,” said their leader as Russ switched it on, “that’s cheating.”

  “I’m not using it during the exercise,” the pale man said. “It’s just in case we get lost.”

  Russ looked at the blinking spot on the map and handed the thing to Clare. She glanced up at him. “This is the Five Mile Road,” she said. “We’re no more than a couple of miles away from the Stuyvesant Inn.” She started to laugh.
The paintball team looked at her.

  “Can we use those walkie-talkies to get your base camp to relay a message for us?” Russ asked.

  “You could, I guess,” the leader said. “But it’d be a lot quicker using a phone.” All three fished into their commodious pants pockets and held out cell phones.

  Clare laughed even harder.

  Russ made a few phone calls while she calmed down enough to cobble together a better way of carrying Waxman. He watched the guys from the paintball team search for sturdy branches long enough to serve as crossbars as he confirmed the Millers Kill Emergency Department would send an ambulance to the Stuyvesant Inn. As the men worked the poles through the webbing, Russ briefed Noble Entwhistle, who was holding down the fort at the station house, on the situation. By the time he had called the volunteer fire department and warned them about the fuel explosion, the three bankers and Clare had shouldered the crossbars like native bearers in an old movie, with Waxman swinging in the middle like a bagged tiger.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Russ said, closing the cell phone and returning it to its owner. “If we follow this stream, it’ll empty into a pasture just above the Stuyvesant Inn’s land. We’ll just need to follow the cow fence at that point. I’m thinking it’ll be maybe a half-hour walk. The hospital’s sending an ambulance to meet us there. Clare, let me take that for you.”

  She shook her head. “The best way to do this, since we’ve got an extra man, is to rotate.”

  “Okay, five minute’s rotation.” He glanced at the bankers, who quivered with suppressed excitement. “Fall in,” he said. “March!” Clare cast him a sidelong look, but the other three sprang to it like retrievers on the scent.

  By the time Russ had taken his turn lugging the unconscious geologist and then rotated out again, they were clearing the woods and entering the upper pasture. They lifted Waxman bodily over the barbed-wire fence and struck off down the fence line, their path impeded by nothing more than the occasional large rock or cow patty. Within ten minutes, Russ spotted the inn’s mauve-and-turquoise exterior, and he realized he hadn’t properly appreciated that beautiful paint job before.