With every turn, the storm swept closer, moving faster how. I felt the chill of coming moisture seep into the tiny cockpit of the plane. I twisted on more heat, a frail creature huddling toward the fire.
Resetting the radio once more just in case a jostling would make it work, I called the larger of the two airports. “Big Piney, this is Piper two two six two foxtrot. I am over Bondurant for Jackson Hole.”
I released the microphone, waited, but got no response.
Pressing the key again, I said, “Big Piney, I am circling and getting low on fuel. Hoback is way below minimums and I sure can’t see you. If anybody’s out there, I sure could use some suggestions about now.”
Nothing.
I looked hungrily below at the narrow strip of highway that wound up over the rising ground and into the blackness of the clouds. Here and there, it was gray with clods of leftover ice and snow. What had I been thinking of, flying this plane instead of driving?
Wait, can I land this thing on that strip of pavement?
Pressing the control wheel forward, I began to descend. I would find the straightest stretch, I told myself, then fly up and down it a few hundred feet up, see how flat it was, gage how bad the patches of snow and ice might be. Then, if the clouds didn’t lift, or, worse yet, continued to loom closer—as they were—or my fuel got too low to make Big Piney or Wenz even if the clouds did rise, I would declare an emergency and set her down.
Emergency—why hadn’t I thought of that before?
I reset the radio to the international emergency frequency, took a breath, and announced, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is Piper two two six two foxtrot. I am a student pilot over Bondurant, and I’m losing minimums. Please come back if you hear me.”
No one answered.
Leaning forward, I looked out overhead through the windshield. The clouds were reaching over me now. No time to climb and see if I could fly over them. I descended lower.
I was four hundred feet over the ground now, six hundred feet under the safe minimum altitude I was supposed to maintain, dangerously low in this sea of unexpected downdrafts. The clouds roiled down toward me, closing, the angry air beginning to bounce me harder and harder, a spattering of drops now greasing the windshield. In an instant, the windshield was streaming with water and the highway below had turned black with rain. I thanked what thin luck I had that the moisture was coming as rain and not a sheet of ice that would quickly coat my wings and drop me like a rock. I scanned the roadway hungrily. With a sinking feeling, I realized that even if I found a section I liked for a landing, I would be hard-pressed in this amount of wet and turbulence to set the plane down without flipping it over its propeller or at least spinning it around to one side and breaking a wing. But any landing I can walk away from, I prayed silently. Any landing I can …
Up ahead, in the mouth of the canyon, the clouds had risen.
I lengthened my carousel turns, bringing me closer to the mouth of the canyon. At three or four hundred feet above the ground, I could see a half mile in. Underneath those clouds, it was not yet raining.
Quickly recalculating my position, I checked my airspeed indicator, set the controls for eighty knots, and reckoned times and bearings I would have to travel at that speed to thread my way through the canyon. At that speed, I would fly one and a third nautical miles per minute, or four every three minutes, barely easy enough for my panicked brain to reckon in this hurry. I ran my thumb along the line that marked the river on the chart, checking to see how tight the canyon was at four or five hundred feet above the water. Tight, but it meant staying aloft longer, maybe even flying through to one of the private airstrips marked on the chart where the canyon turned a right angle before the final pitch into Jackson. “Any port in a storm,” I muttered aloud, setting my watch to beep at me in six minutes. “To hell with you stuck-up rich boys. I’ll land this sucker right across your patio if I have to.”
Calling my intentions out over the silent radio, I turned over Bondurant once more, glanced at the course that set on the compass, and headed into the muck.
I skimmed along over the river, now three hundred feet up, now four, groping to keep sight of the ground without flying too close to it, gritting my teeth with the hope that I met no cliffs where the river dropped suddenly over a waterfall. Looking more closely at the cataracts below me, I realized with relief that the I had crossed a divide just east of Bondurant; this water was flowing west, toward the Snake River. “Point to Em,” I muttered bitterly. “Now, how about a little more sky?”
I glanced at my watch, checked airspeed. Tried to relax. Flicked my eyes left and right, watching the canyon walls. And saw a wall of cloud and slashing rain, black all the way to the river.
I looked left. I looked right. Enough room to turn back, but what would I find there? Pressing the control wheel forward one more time, I turned toward the right side of the canyon to give myself room to turn around to the left, eased off the throttle, and eyed the road hungrily. Yes, there, up there, I can put it down there, start your turn … I eased off the throttle farther, set a notch of flaps.
A semitractor pulling a heavy load loomed out of the murk, its headlights burning against the gloom.
I slapped the throttle forward. Released the flaps. Straightened my course. Pulled back the control wheel. Cursed. And flew up into the cloud.
I could see nothing. The windscreen streamed with water, but beyond it was only darkness.
I glanced at my watch. How much time had I lost slowing down for the aborted landing? How much distance gained speeding up? How would I know when to turn, flying completely blind? I felt moisture on my cheeks and realized that I was crying.
Not now, I told myself. First get yourself out of this jam, and then cry.
Staring into the gray nothing, my head swam with vertigo. Pressing my cheek against the cold glass of the window beside me to keep my head clear, I rested my eyes on the artificial horizon instrument, made quick glances toward the dials that indicated altitude and rate of decent, and forced myself to make only tiny movements with the controls.
Suddenly, the clouds parted, and I saw only rock, a sheer face, the ugly shoulder of a mountain directly ahead. I banked left. The clouds closed, opened again. Closed. You idiot! a voice screamed. What were you thinking of? Where did you think you were passing through to this time? I glanced left and right, trying to spot the mouth that spoke, and realized that I was alone, and that the voice howled from inside my head.
I flew onward, climbing, praying. I corrected my course to the northwest. Gave it ten endless minutes more, straining my senses for each small glimpse of the river down below me, saw finally a confluence with another, glanced at the chart to make certain there were no creeks that size coming into the one I was following before the canyon turned, grabbed myself by my heart, and rolled right to zero compass bearing. Held my breath, waiting for the blinding flash that would be the last thing I saw. And flew out into brilliant sunshine.
Light, blessed light danced on the waters of the Snake River as I flew up the long glacial outwash valley that led me north into Jackson Hole. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I felt alive and newborn, each sight, sound, and smell around me brilliant, sharp, and richly perfumed.
Ten minutes later, I slipped the tiny plane into the downwind line of landing aircraft traffic between a Delta Airlines jet and a Beechcraft Baron, not even bothering to call the unicorn frequency. What the heck, I told myself. My radio doesn’t work, this ain’t no control-tower airport, and I can sure see better’n I could twenty minutes ago.
I banked left and left again, turning base and final, running out the flaps. I slowed to sixty, then fifty-five, dropped the little plane gently onto the numbers at the end of the runway, rolled a third of the way down the strip until the first exit onto the taxiway, pulled off, set the brake, and bawled.
THIRTY-SIX
I stood on the walkway in front of the rambling rose Bed-and-Breakfast Inn, my knees still weak, my hands trembling
slightly even though thrust deep into my pockets. I felt poised on the threshold between heaven and hell, no longer sure which way was which. I needed to be near people in this aftermath of almost dying, to step resolutely back into a world of normalcy, where I could walk up the steps of a harmless-looking inn and in fact find no harm there.
It was, after all, just a quaint Victorian house painted yellow, no doubt a fitting backdrop to the vigorous climbing roses whose winter-naked canes twined through dark green trellises along the front. In my heightened sense of nerves, I imagined the blaze of color that would greet visitors in the summertime, could almost smell the perfume that would fill the air when the last snows had melted off the slopes and the leaves and buds had burst forth for another season’s luring of the bees.
My mind dwelt in the shadows, hopelessly removed from the bucolic image it beheld. And found something next to this in that place of shadows, a deep and basic need, a motivation to rebel against nature. It urged me to break even further away from the sanity and safety of the herd, to move down into the coldness and mystery of the night, to be the woman I was at last.
Inside this house waited a man who knew about the dark.
Ortega was but a distant memory, a sentinel left behind on the surface. I was underground, bedeviled by the illusion of daylight.
I thought of Miriam, who loved to be touched. What had she learned in her hours of ecstasy?
A distant voice tried to remind me that the man inside this house was a monster, a predator who preyed on women and even girls like a cougar stalked sick sheep.
So what am I, asked a voice within me that knew a new candor, healthy? With resignation, I moved my feet down that walkway toward the inn.
The front door stood open to the fresh-smelling breeze that had followed the rain. With a sigh, I let myself in, and found myself confronted immediately with the temptation of the registration calendar, which lay open on an antique desk. Reaching out a hand, I flipped through it, discovering that it went back only to the first of the year. I needed further back. Crossing fingers that still wobbled slightly from the stresses I now raced to escape, I silently eased open the drawer beneath it.
“What you lookin’ for, darlin’?” asked a hearty female voice, the voice I had heard the day before on the phone. I didn’t even jump. There wasn’t enough adrenaline left in me. Instead, I just felt slightly dizzy. Looking up, I found myself confronted by the smiling but curious innkeeper. She was a middle-aged woman, dressed that day in soft gabardine slacks and a loose white tab-collared shirt, its tails hanging out underneath a long vest, the better to artistically drape a spreading waist. She was petite and had dark curly hair cut close to her face.
“Uh, trying to see if a friend of mine was here last August.”
“August what?”
“Oh, around the third.”
She laughed. “No one here but me and your friend Chandler,” she said. When my eyes flew wide in surprise, she added, “I recognize your voice. And that’s an easy date to remember. It was my birthday. Right in the middle of the tourist season, but I always close that day, or at least for guests who don’t stay as long as he does. Chandler’s in the parlor,” she added, and disappeared into the dining room.
I looked sharply into the space where she had stood. Even through my mental fog, I could hear that the alibi had come quickly, easily. Could I believe it?
I turned and pushed the French doors, which opened to my left. It was time to find out.
I found Chandler as a blind person locates the fireplace in a cold room—following the heat. The jittery sense of exhaustion I felt now rose, gripping my throat. My heart began to cannon. Over there … closer … I turned toward the windows, excitement ripping at me like the flood that races suddenly down a dry creek bed carrying mud and the artillery of stones.
I saw his legs first—long, well-muscled and limber, like an athlete’s, and enshrouded in corduroy trousers that draped just so. They were crossed lazily one over the other, sprawling lavishly off the front of an overstuffed chair sumptuously upholstered in cabbage roses. His long feet were dressed in gray woolly socks and a well-worn pair of deck shoes, even though he was about as far from an ocean as one can get in the United States. The rest of him, save for his large, broad fingertips, was screened from my view by the newspaper he was reading. But it had to be him.
The newspaper folded and snapped shut as he laid it across his lap and lengthened his gaze to take me in, just as if he’d been waiting for me to arrive. He smiled, a wolfish, half-crazy glow lighting his broad-boned face as the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled with the quickness of the easily merry.
The eyes themselves were a pale greenish gray, like the mist that spins across a lake just before morning. But unlike the dawn lake, they were not calm, but crazy. Totally mad. Alive in some other universe. And looking straight at and inside me, as if I were a cage and the mouse he wanted to catch was in there hiding.
His lips moved beneath his rich brush mustache. “Who might you be?” he asked.
“Em,” I said foolishly.
“Great.”
“Hansen.”
“Better yet.”
I looked down quickly at my hands. They were trembling again, visibly. I was certain he could see it even from across the room. I forced myself to look him in the eye. “I’ve been looking for you.”
His eyebrows flicked upward in ardent surprise, like a hungry gourmet finding that the wayside restaurant is not only open but serving delicacies. He got up from the chair, rising as a slow series of unwinding S curves, dropping the newspaper on the floor, stretching his arms above his head until his shirttail pulled free a bit at the waist, revealing a finely muscled abdomen covered with soft, smooth skin dappled with golden brown hairs. Exalting for a moment in the pleasure of his stretch, he closed his eyes and sighed. Lowered his arms, let them swing at his sides, totally relaxed. “Mmmm,” he purred, “looks like you’ve found me.”
“I—”
“Want something to drink, Em Hansen? The house stocks tea and coffee, but I know where they keep the beer.”
“No. I—”
He strode past me, brushing my arm as he did so, and I had to rock my head back to take in his height. Six four at least, a good two hundred pounds of muscle and grace. When he was almost out of reach, he swung an arm backward almost as an afterthought and caught my hand, spinning me around to follow him, and murmured, “This way to the goodies.”
I stumbled awkwardly behind him through a catchment of narrowing hallways and into the kitchen. We settled at either side of a round oak table, he swilling a beer, I chewing nervously at a date from the dish that rested invitingly in the middle of a lace doily between us. “So, Em Hansen,” he purred. “You’ve found me. Now tell me: was I lost?”
I was just about to launch into some stupid explanation of how no, he was right where he was, I was sure, when I realized that the wide-eyed gaze he had fixed on me was his version of a playful grin. “No, I don’t suppose so.”
“Then perhaps it’s you who were lost.”
“I—” Huh? “Sure,” I volleyed, going along with the insanity of his speech. As fear melted into the relative peace of confusion, I thought, When in Rome, right? “Yeah, I’ve been totally lost for about a year now,” I said, more candidly than I’d intended, “and it’s been the pits.”
“Tell me more.”
“Me?”
“Who else?”
I stared into his eyes. They were hypnotic, yes, but what fascinated me was the particular elements that conspired to make them so: I had the sense that whatever lived behind them was both hurtling toward me and escaping me at the same instant. This is what makes charisma, I thought dully, and without meaning to, I began to speak again. “It’s the usual story, I suppose. Out of work, father died last summer, mom took over the ranch—but what in hell am I telling you this for!” I jumped up from the table, started to back away into the common room nearer the front door.
> Chandler calmly took another swig of his beer, then put it down on the lace doily in the center of the table and rose to his feet. “Of course. You’re tired. Long trip? How far did you come today?”
How the hell did he know I didn’t live in Jackson? I didn’t answer.
“No matter,” he said soothingly, looking away so that the intensity of his gaze no longer disturbed me. “We’ll take my car. It’s parked out back here. Just let me get my coat.” As he started to move out of the kitchen, he spun quickly back, looking on me with anxiety stitching his brow. “Don’t go away. Really. My car’s out back there. It’s the—”
“Gold BMW. Needs a tune-up.”
His invasive grin returned. “Yeah.”
I braced myself against the doorjamb, trying to sort out what it was I thought I was going to get from his human whirlwind.
He didn’t leave me time to think. He was gone just an instant, returning with a dark brown suede jacket draped softly over one broad shoulder. Planting one enormous hand against the small of my back, he steered me out the back door to his car. What flashed through my mind was: Don’t let him out of your sight. The boys from Saratoga might not know where to find him, but let’s not give him a chance to tell them where to find me.
“Can’t we walk?” I asked, my mind focusing enough to remind me not to get into a car with this man. Better off on Jackson’s still-icy sidewalks, in broad daylight in the middle of the town, where I could call for help if needed.
“Anything you say, Em Hansen.”
We walked (I almost running to keep up with his enormous strides) about half a mile to a pub run by the Snake River Brewery. It was a two-story deconstructionist modern job with all sorts of metal beams and glass and most of the ground floor open clear to the roof. Chandler rocked his head back to appraise the balcony seating, then showed me to a table up there. From this lofty perch, we looked inward to the brewing vats and downward onto the heads of the assembled swells, who sat sipping their porters and ales and munching on succulent-looking appetizers. Everyone seemed too relaxed, too unaware that I had so recently been awash in the fetid breath of eternity. Couldn’t they smell it on my skin? I felt lost and confused, relieved to have gotten there alive but uncertain where I now was. The subtle aromas of someone’s dinner met my nostrils, and I began to shake. It hit me all at once that I hadn’t eaten since dawn.
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