by Ken Grimwood
What should he feel now, he wondered—anger, defeat? Neither emotion would do him any good; the damage had been done. Obviously, no one—not even Mireille—had believed what he’d told her in St. Tropez. At least the deception that she and Sharla had perpetrated didn’t present any threat to him; all it really did was leave him more alone than before.
The jet sped down the runway, lifted gracefully. He glanced toward the front of the cabin. No movie screen, of course; TWA still had exclusive rights to in-flight motion pictures. Too bad. He would have welcomed the distraction.
Jeff looked out the window as the jet climbed over the busy Bayshore Freeway. He should have brought along a book. Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-Colored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby had just been published; he wouldn’t have minded rereading—
The big plane shuddered heavily, rocked by a dull explosion. As Jeff watched in horror, the right outboard engine tore loose from its mounting and ripped a jagged hole in the wing as it fell away toward the city beneath them. Kerosene spurted from the wing-tip tank, then burst into a curling white flame that spat shards of molten metal.
"Look, the wing is on fire!" someone behind him shouted. The cabin filled with screams and the wails of children.
The outer third of the burning wing fell off, and the plane yawed crazily to the right. Jeff saw homes nestled in the pass between the hills, then the blue water of the Pacific, not more than a thousand feet below.
Sharla clutched at his left hand. He squeezed hers back, rancor and regret forgotten in the face of this appalling moment.
Only two years into this wasted replay, he thought with dread; would he return from a death so early, so violent? For all he’d cursed his repeated lives, he desperately wished now for life to continue.
The plane shook again, dipped further toward the right. The Golden Gate Bridge came into view, its towers shockingly close.
"We’re going to hit it," Sharla whispered urgently. "We’re going to hit the bridge!"
"No," Jeff rasped out. "We’re still more or less level. We haven’t dropped much since the engine went. We’ll miss the bridge, anyway."
"This is Captain Kimes," a studiedly calm voice said. "We have a minor problem, ladies and gentlemen … Well, maybe it’s not so minor."
They were limping back over land now, back toward the hills and high rises of San Francisco.
"We’re gonna try to—We’re gonna head for Travis Air Force Base—that’s about forty miles—because they’ve got a nice, long runway there we can use, longer than anything at San Francisco International. I’m gonna be pretty busy up here, so just settle down and I’ll put Second Officer Webb on to tell you what you need to know about the landing."
"He doesn’t think we can make it," Sharla wailed. "We’re going to crash, I know we are!"
"Keep quiet," Jeff told her. "Those kids across the aisle can hear you."
"This is Second Officer Max Webb," said the new voice from the tinny speakers. "We’ll be making an emergency landing at Travis in about ten minutes, so…"
Sharla began to whimper, and Jeff held her hand more tightly.
"… If we use the chutes, please stay calm. Remember, you will sit down to go out the chute. Don’t panic. When we do land, and if it is a rough landing—which is a possibility—please lean forward in your seats. You grab your ankles and stay down, or put your arms under your knees. Move as far forward as you possibly can. Do not move until we tell you what we’re going to do…"
The plane was losing altitude fast. As they approached the broad expanse of the military base, Jeff could see fire equipment and ambulances lining the longest of the crisscrossing, empty runways.
They began a long, looping circle, just a few hundred feet above the Air Force barracks and hangars. Jeff heard the wheels emerge in jerky fits and starts from the plane’s undercarriage. The crew must be cranking them down manually, he thought. The explosion had probably wrecked the hydraulic system.
Sharla was mumbling something beside him; it sounded like she was praying. Jeff took a last look out the window and saw a whirlwind kicking up dust at the near end of the runway they were aiming for. That could mean trouble; with the damage the plane had already sustained, a last-minute spate of turbulence might—Well, there was no point thinking about it. He pulled his hand away from Sharla’s, helped her get into a fetal position, then curled his own head between his knees, clutching his ankles.
The remaining engines gave a sudden burst of power, and the plane heaved to the left, then lurched back on course. Pilot must have been trying to avoid that whirlwind, must have—
The wheels touched, screeched against the tarmac, seemed to hold. For several agonizing seconds they raced along the runway. Then the engines roared again and they were slowing, stopping … they had landed.
The passengers burst into applause. Then the stewardesses threw open the emergency exits and everyone scrambled to slide down the escape chutes. The crippled plane reeked of jet fuel, and when he was outside Jeff could see the clear, flammable liquid pouring from cracks in the broken right wing. He pulled Sharla along with him and they ran from the plane.
Three hundred yards away they collapsed, exhausted, on a grassy strip between two runways. Military fire engines were dousing the 707 with white foam, and all around them people milled about in a state of shock.
"Oh, Jeff," Sharla cried, putting her arms around his neck and her face against his shoulder. "Oh my God, I was so scared up there. I thought—I thought—"
He pried her arms loose, pushed her away, and stood up. The stark black-and-white makeup she wore was streaked with tears, her op-art dress stained from the escape chute, the smoke, the grass.
Jeff looked around, spotted one building off to the left that seemed to be a center of activity, a hive of returning ambulances and asbestos-suited emergency personnel. He started walking in that direction, leaving Sharla where she lay weeping on the ground.
"Jeff!" she screamed after him. "You can’t leave me, not now! Not after that!"
Why not? he thought, started to say it aloud, then just kept on walking.
TEN
Jeff finished his eggs and bacon as the sun was coming up, scrubbed the dishes, and left the pan to soak. Usually he took a cup of coffee on the little porch of the steep-roofed white house, but this morning he was running late, and there was much to do.
He pulled a down jacket over his flannel shirt and stepped outside. Third week of May, but the air still had a bite to it; last frost of the year had come night before last. He nodded his respects to the rock pile where old man Smyth was buried, and strode over to one of the newly furrowed corn fields, all staked out and ready for planting. Smyth had worked this land alone, too, after he’d homesteaded it in the 1880s. Had fallen ill after some sort of accident, Jeff had been told, and nobody’d found his body for weeks. People who’d bought the place in the tax auction afterward had never planted a thing; hadn’t even kept the land, not once they’d found the small fortune in gold coins that Smyth had hidden in the Dutch oven. The old man had had some secrets of his own, it seemed.
Jeff dug the toe of his boot into the thick black topsoil where he’d be planting the first corn of the season this afternoon, the Sugar and Gold early variety. Good volcanic California soil it was, rich in minerals. He had nothing but contempt for the family that, so long ago, had let it lie fallow, had taken Sylvester Smyth’s gold and departed The Cove in search of unearned joys and comforts. Land like this demanded to be tilled, and the fresh food it would yield in return held far greater value than any coins. That was the contract, the bargain struck between man and earth ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia. To abandon good land, Jeff believed, was to break an ancient and almost holy bond.
He walked on past the plot where the asparagus would soon be coming up; he’d get at least another two years out of that original planting, and it was time now for the first of the plants' twice-yearly feedings. The late spring frosts didn’t seem to bother them at all; Jeff
thought it made the stalks crisper. He knelt beside the spring that ran through his property, scooped a double handful of the icy mountain water to his mouth. As he drank, a pair of German brown trout swam past. If he finished planting the corn and feeding the asparagus before nightfall, he decided, he’d bring a rod down and catch some dinner.
The sun continued to climb the sky, lighting the tips of the pines on the humped rise of Hogback Mountain to the southwest. Jeff followed the meandering uphill path of the spring, pausing every twenty feet or so to clean it of accumulated debris, opening the clogged collection boxes and pipes on which his crops depended for irrigation.
He’d bought the place nine years ago, a few weeks after the near-disaster on the plane to Honolulu. He hadn’t seen Sharla since that day beside the smoky runway. Hadn’t seen much of anybody since that summer, truth to tell.
His closest full-time neighbor was at Turtle Pond, three miles east along an old wagon road. Only way into or out of Jeff s place was by way of a switchback road that was often washed away. From November through January the snows and rains and mud made the passage over Marble Creek all but impossible; he’d learned to stockpile well for the winter.
Rest of the year he kept to himself almost as much. Every week °r so he’d drive into the little town of Montgomery Creek, buy some things at the store there or get his pickup serviced at the two-pump Shell station. He’d quit drinking, by and large, but if the harvest was a good one he might celebrate with a beer and dinner at the Forked Horn or the Hillcrest Lodge. An amiable family, the Mazzinis, owned the Forked Horn, and the wife, Eleanor, ran a branch of the Shasta County library out of their big, rambling house in town. Jeff would chat with one or the other of them sometimes, about this and that. Their son Joe was a couple of years younger than Jeff, and his intelligent curiosity about the outside world seemed to know no bounds. Yet none of the family ever pried; they never dug too deeply into why Jeff had sought such an isolated life for himself. Joe had helped him set up a shortwave rig out at The Cove, and the radio had become Jeff’s only contact with civilization, aside from his occasional talks with the Mazzinis.
This little corner of northern California was populated mostly by lumberjacks and Indians, neither of whom Jeff had any contact with. A smattering of hippies and other back-to-the-land types had come in shortly after he’d moved here, but most of them hadn’t stayed long. Working the land was harder than they’d expected, and it took more than marijuana crops to keep a place going.
The worst part of these years, he supposed, was the celibacy, though not for the reasons he would have imagined. He’d damn near OD’d on sex for the sake of sex during his time with Sharla and Mireille.
It had seemed, for a while, that he could live perfectly well without sexual contact, and he’d been surprised at how easy it was to kill that part of himself. But he’d soon discovered, much to his unpleasant surprise, just how strong was his need for simple human touch. The loss of that tore at him daily, troubled him both waking and sleeping. Sometimes he would dream of a woman simply touching his cheek, or of himself holding her head against his chest. The woman in these dreams might be Judy or Linda, even Sharla; more often she was faceless, an abstraction of femininity.
Always, he would awake from those dreams with an overpowering sadness and the familiar knowledge that this deprivation could not be alleviated without the risk of further betrayal and the eventual certainty of absolute erasure. Both pains were too extreme to face again. Better, it seemed, just to let his soul die slowly, bit by lonely bit.
His back was starting to ache from all the stooping he’d done to clear the irrigation system, so he sat down beside the spring. Far to the north, beyond the Flatwoods and halfway to Oregon, the astonishing white cone of Mount Shasta dominated the horizon like the sleeping god the Indians around here had once supposed it to be.
He took a chew of beef jerky, washed it down with another cold sip of spring water. This new home of his was right on the spine of the volatile Cascade range, dead center between Mount Lassen and Mount Shasta. North of there were the ruins of the massive prehistoric volcano that had collapsed to form Crater Lake, and then came Mount Hood, and on up into Washington State, Mount St. Helen’s rumbled quietly … for the moment. It would explode with deadly fury seven years from now, just as it had done three times before; an event that Jeff, and Jeff alone, recalled.
He was in the grip of forces that could destroy a mountain, then put it back together and destroy it again, over and over and over, like a child playing in the sand. What use was there in even attempting to comprehend something like that? If he ever did come to understand it, even partially, the knowledge might be more than one human brain could accept and still allow him to retain some measure of sanity.
Jeff folded the rest of the beef jerky in its cellophane wrapper, stuck it back in his pocket. The sun was high overhead now; time to start planting this year’s rows of corn. He made his way back down the hill, following the spring, never once raising his eyes to gaze again on the snowy heights of the distant mountain.
"How 'bout peat moss? You stocked O.K.?"
"I could do with another couple hundred pounds," Jeff said. "And I’ll need another forty gallons of Sevin."
The storekeeper clucked in sympathy, added the insecticide to the order. "Yeah, them corn earworms is something else this season, ain’t they? Old Charlie Reynolds up at Buckeye has done lost three acres to 'em already."
Jeff nodded, grunted as politely as he could remember how. These twice-yearly major supply runs down to Redding were his only contact with total strangers.
"What do you think about the Arabs, and these here gasoline lines?" the man queried. "Never thought I’d see the day."
"I figure it’ll get better," Jeff said. "Let me have one of those big boxes of beef jerky, too; the spicy kind."
"Never thought I’d see the day. You ask me, Nixon ought to be droppin' a bomb on them Arabs, 'stead of going over to talk to 'em. As if he didn’t already have troubles enough of his own right back here."
Jeff idly scanned the posters and notices tacked up behind the supply store’s cash register, hoping the man would soon realize he didn’t want to get drawn into a political conversation. The sheriff, Jeff read, was auctioning off somebody’s foreclosed property in Burney; the local hippie holdouts were throwing a big dance at Iron Canyon; lots of cars and pickups were for sale … Now, there was an odd one. It really looked out of place: a blue-black poster of the night sky, with a phosphorescent wave breaking in space above a half-full moon. Thin gold letters at the bottom spelled one word: Starsea.
"What’s that all about?" Jeff asked, pointing at the poster. The storekeeper turned to look, then gazed back at Jeff with a disbelieving frown. "Boy, how far back in the woods you been? You ain’t seen Starsea?"
"What is it?"
"Hell, it’s a movie. Last movie I saw before that was, I think, The Sound of Music, but no way could I miss this one. Kids dragged me and the wife down to Sacramento to see it three, four months ago. Seen it twice since then, and we’ll probably go again now it’s opened in Redding. Never seen nothing like it, I tell you."
"Popular movie, is it?"
"Popular?" The man laughed. "Biggest damn movie ever, they say. I hear tell it’s done made a hundred million dollars, and still goin' strong. Never thought I’d see the day."
That was impossible; no movie would make that much money until Jaws, more than a year from now. Jeff had never even heard of anything called Starsea, certainly not in 1974. The big movies this year, he recalled, were Chinatown and the sequel to The Godfather.
"What’s it about?"
"If you don’t know, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. It’s playing up at the Cascade; you ought to see it before you drive back. Worth the delay, I tell you."
Jeff felt a spark of curiosity, something he hadn’t experienced for years.
The storekeeper thumbed through a copy of the Redding Record-Searchlight. On the front pag
e, Kissinger was embracing Yitzhak Rabin. "Here it is, next show’s at … 3:20." The man glanced at the big clock on the back wall of the store. "I can hold your order here for you if you like. You could see the show and still get home before dark."
Jeff smiled. "You get a kickback from the theater or something?"
"I told you, I don’t usually care for movies, but this one here’s something special. Go ahead, I’ll have your stuff all boxed and ready to load when you get back."
The line for Starsea stretched more than a block, on a Tuesday afternoon in Redding. Jeff shook his head in amazement, bought a ticket, and joined the waiting crowd. They were of all ages, from wide-eyed six-year-olds to taciturn couples in their seventies wearing worn overalls. From the hushed conversations around him, Jeff gathered that many had already seen the movie more than once. Their attitude was almost as if they were coming together for a shared religious experience, worshipers quietly but joyously approaching a beloved shrine.
The movie was everything the storekeeper had claimed, and far more. Even to Jeff’s eyes it was years ahead of its time in theme, look, special effects; like an undersea version of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, yet with the warmth and humanity of Truffaut at his best.
The film began with an elegiac illumination of the ancient bond between humans and dolphins, then extended that mythic connection to include a philosophical race of extraterrestrials who had long ago established contact with the intelligent mammals of earth’s oceans. That race, according to the plot, had appointed the Cetaceans as benevolent caretakers of humanity until such time as mankind was ready to be welcomed to the galactic family. But near the end of the twentieth century, the dolphins learned that the mentors of Cygnus IV, whose return had been awaited for millenia, had been destroyed by an interstellar catastrophe. The dolphins then made their true nature and their great history known to humanity, in a moment of simultaneous exhilaration and deep mourning. For the first time, this planet became genuinely whole, a linked community of minds on land and undersea … yet more alone in the bleakness of space than ever, with earth’s unmet benefactors having vanished for eternity.