EQMM, September-October 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  The media went nuts. It was a big story for Colorado. Bizarre and full of human interest. You looked at it one way and you saw a bunch of strangers trying to help out a kid, one of them losing his life, another paralyzed from the shoulders down. His name was Bill Mandor and he was on every channel. Half his face was bandaged and around the edges it looked like he'd been scraped to the bone when he hit the dog walk. The one good thing about his being paralyzed was that he couldn't feel his shattered legs and spine and didn't need painkillers. He looked clear-headed and spoke like the kind of heroes I remembered from when I was a kid. Men who could staunchly handle the worst events and injuries through willpower and nobility. He made me shake my head.

  Reporters camped out on the lawn in front of my apartment manager's door. I took the phone off the hook and didn't answer the door for three days. Eventually the camera crews got bored and left. I watched cable news programs every waking moment hoping there'd be information about the boy, but despite hundreds of volunteers hiking all over the front range, the canyons, and the east side of the divide, nobody had seen the balloon. It seemed impossible.

  At night, helicopters buzzed through the skies, heading up to the national park and the thousands of square miles of mountain terrain and forest land.

  Kowalski called me five days later, on an afternoon full of sirens, and said, “Bradley's loose."

  "What's that mean?"

  "What do you think it means?"

  "A former bank robber out of the joint only a couple of days hijacks a balloon that causes the death of a good samaritan, and you spring him?"

  "Blame your judicial system, not me. He was obviously out of his head, so they put him under guard at the hospital, in the mental wing. They said it was depression brought on by grief. You can't help but feel sorry for the guy, his kid gone and all. He got flowers and prayer cards by the truckload. He slept for ninety-six hours straight, cuffed to the bed. What they call nonresponsive. Not a coma, just a deep sleep. They thought he might be dying. Losing his will to live."

  "Cripes."

  "Like he was forcing himself to kick the bucket. He started going into respiratory failure, so they got a crash cart in there, defibrillator, oxygen mask, the whole works. Five minutes after they got him breathing normally again, he woke up, kicked the hell out of a nurse, and stole a car from the parking lot."

  I think I hissed. “This is terrific."

  "Anyway, Bradley knocked over another bank an hour after he got free, still wearing his hospital gown. Nobody knows where he got the gun. This time he smartened up some. Got almost thirty grand, no dye pack, though he set off an alarm. But he was out of there in a hurry, and now he's on the run."

  I thought about the kind of man who would stop off somewhere for a gun but not put on a pair of pants before committing grand larceny.

  "He's going to come after me,” I said. “He thinks I killed his kid because I let go of the rope."

  Even if I hadn't been a paranoid writer with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, I would've thought that. It had been that laugh of Bradley's. It wasn't only insane. It had that see-you-later quality to it.

  Kowalski grunted. “He's a nut. If he goes anywhere, it'll be back to his ex-wife's place."

  "No, he only went there for his son. Any word on the kid?"

  "No, no sign of the balloon. Maybe it held to the front range and came down in somebody's field. I don't know. We probably won't know for a while yet."

  "Listen—"

  But he was done. Kowalski was the type of cop who got bored easily and always had to be in charge of a conversation. “I picked up one of your books,” he said. “I read about half of it. I didn't like it. So I gave it to my wife."

  "Listen—"

  "She reads everything. She didn't like it either."

  "Listen to me. Bradley will show up here next."

  "It's a possibility."

  "More than that, he just walked in my door. He's got a gun on me. Gotta go."

  I hung up and Bradley smiled at me from my apartment doorway. I figured the apartment manager had gotten tired of dealing with reporters trying to get into the building and had disconnected the buzzer wiring. I was going to die because I hadn't double-checked it. I'd gotten slack in Colorado. I wasn't paranoid enough anymore, just bored, like Kowalski, and waiting for the end.

  Bradley started in with that hideous laughter until every muscle in my body had tightened to the point of trembling. At least he'd put on pants, I was glad to see. How awful it would've been to get snuffed by a guy in a hospital gown. The noise got louder and I started breathing so fast that I got light-headed. For a second I saw the kid with his backwards head standing behind his father, still saying “Daddy,” his white hand pointing at me.

  * * * *

  I'd had my run-ins with maniacs before. Most people in the world have, but definitely everybody in New York. They were common maniacs, but still pretty “out there.” With me, it had mostly been ex-girlfriends who started off talking about taking care of me for the rest of my life and ended up setting fire to my cars. I'd had an obsessive stalker who claimed one of my horror stories had opened a portal to hell and released his father. He'd shown up at my apartment in Manhattan with a switchblade and tried to stab me with it overhand instead of slipping it between my ribs. I had a half-inch-deep scarred gouge from where the knife had deflected off my sternum. It was one of the reasons why I'd left home.

  Frank Bradley held a snub-nosed .38 on me. It wasn't a Colorado gun. The guys out here carried Colt .45s and rifles, but nothing as slick as a snub .38. You didn't show off to your cowboy barroom cronies or go hunting elk with a .38. There was only one purpose to it. You put it up to somebody's forehead and you took him out of the game fast.

  We stood there like that for two minutes. It was a long two minutes. It gave me time to think about my regrets. There were a lot of them. Bradley's laughter eventually died out, but he kept sneering at me. It was an expression I'd seen many times in my life, and it infuriated me as much now as it always had before.

  Up close now I saw the kind of man he was—had been, would always be. Every smashed hope etched into his features. The lost chances, the missed turnoffs. The failed efforts, the stupid moves, and the mistakes that shouldn't have cost him as much as they had. All of them his own fault, by his own hand. All of them covered by a hundred excuses and scapegoats. You didn't have to look hard to see it all there.

  "Bradley, think about—"

  "Don't talk. I don't want to hear you talk."

  So we stood there for another few minutes. It gave us both more time to think about the past, to wonder if there'd be a future.

  You can get used to anything if you endure it long enough. Even with the gun trained on me, I started to relax. The longer someone doesn't pull a trigger, the more you believe it won't happen. Anything was better than listening to that laugh.

  "Let's go,” he said, gesturing with the barrel.

  I moved down the hall and out into the parking lot with all the false dignity of an aristocrat heading for the guillotine. He pointed to a Mustang with the engine running. “You drive."

  "Where?"

  "Don't talk, I'll tell you."

  I drove as he directed me. We roamed the area for a while in a strange pattern that I eventually recognized as the path the balloon probably took from Berthoud up 287 to the park. I saw the empty grounds where the carnival had set up. We slipped back into town and around the park and the lake before he aimed us toward the mountains.

  I drove the canyon roads heading higher and higher into the Rockies, wondering if I should try something stupid like crashing into the narrow cliff walls. My mind was stuffed with dumb thoughts and I kept trying to cycle through them until something intelligent hit me. Nothing did.

  "Why are you here?” he asked.

  "Because you've got a gun on me."

  "Here, in this town."

  "I've been trying very hard to figure that ou
t."

  He swiped the pistol barrel across my head. I was lucky it was only a snub-nose. Despite his silence and his outward relative calm, he was wired and explosive. He really didn't know how to handle a gun. He barely tapped me, but I didn't take it lightly. The fact that he didn't know what he was doing meant he might crack my skull open next time, or the .38 might accidentally go off.

  "Do you know what you did?” he asked.

  "Got involved,” I said.

  "You killed my boy."

  "I tried to help. I held on to a rope sixty feet in the air for as long as I could."

  "Not long enough! You couldn't hold it long enough!"

  "Neither could you."

  He shoved the barrel into my ribs this time, growling and groaning, speaking words that weren't words except maybe in his nightmares. For four days he'd forced himself to sleep, on his way toward death, but had woken up just so he could make this play for me, the scapegoat for his own stabbing conscience.

  I noticed an odd sound, a tiny ringing in the car. I glanced over and saw that he was spinning a key on a chain. He noticed me looking and held it up, but said nothing. It was a bus-station locker key. I'd seen plenty of them when I was roaming the country, trying to settle down somewhere to find my art again. Sometimes you start to drift and you just keep going, for no reason you can name. You ride and ride and hope the right thing appears around the next corner, even though you have no idea what it might be. He shoved the key back in his pocket.

  We kept climbing higher until we were in the switchbacks. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees over the last several miles. Another thousand feet and we'd be able to see our breath. We'd left the towns and the cabins behind and kept threading through the mountains. The car started puttering, the thin air fouling the engine. You were supposed to do something to the timing or the spark plugs or the air filter, who the hell knew. Bradley was getting more and more excited, as if he knew we were heading to a special, secret place where he'd put his past to rest.

  Snow started to appear on the ground, on the rock. The air thinned but held in the cold, the atmosphere lush and vibrant around us. I'd never been up this far. The wind tore at the car, rocking us on our shocks. The trails thinned. Finally, we ran out of road.

  "Now what?” I asked.

  "Get out. Climb."

  We got out and he prodded me forward across the rugged, stony landscape. I'd been in Colorado five years and had never hiked through the national park, or anywhere else for that matter. Now he had me clambering up rocks like those adrenaline junkies who scaled sheer bluff faces. I was out of shape and I wouldn't last long. Not that Bradley would need me to. I knew he was leading me to an edge someplace. His edge, my edge. Maybe he'd been here himself before, ready to throw himself off the rim. Maybe he was walking as blindly as me, just waiting for the next thing to come along.

  We came to a slope that dropped off into nothingness. We were so high up that there was an electrical buzzing in my fingers and toes and chest, an assaulting awareness that one foot further would be a step into oblivion.

  The wind slithered around us. Bradley jabbed the gun into my back again. “Move."

  "No."

  "Then I'll kill you."

  "You know, Bradley ... you give a man two choices at death and he's going to choose the one that makes you work a little harder for it."

  "It's just pulling a trigger."

  "It's better to make you do it than do it myself.” I didn't know why that was the case, but I knew it was true. I still wasn't all that worried—maybe it was altitude sickness, or maybe I'd had a death wish for a while and only now was starting to realize it.

  "Move! To the edge!"

  "I'm not going down there."

  "Yes, you are. We both are."

  "Why are you doing this?"

  He rushed me and jabbed the barrel under my chin. It hurt like hell. “I want you to know what it was like for my son."

  I growled, “You're the one who put him in it. You're the one who took him up."

  "Shut up!"

  "You're the one who let go, same as me. We had no choice."

  "Shut up, damn you!"

  He jabbed the barrel harder into my throat until I gagged.

  "Now, jump! Do it or I'll put one in your brain."

  "How is that supposed to scare me at this point?"

  "You might survive if you jump."

  "At twelve thousand feet? Yeah, right."

  Twelve thousand feet. One hundred and twenty stories. We were higher than the Empire State Building.

  Not only had he gone insane with his rage and grief, but he really hadn't thought about the end game at all. There wasn't enough thrill in it for him. He was starting to understand that my death wouldn't take away an ounce of his agony. It was descending on him very quickly now and an unbearable horror came with it. He'd be alone soon with nothing but his guilt. The fear in him was much greater than my own. I saw the realization grow in his eyes along with his terror.

  My feet were slipping out from beneath me on the icy rock. I was gearing up for some kind of a stupid move. Everybody thinks it's easy, you just attack, you just spin and kick, punch and whirl and karate chop. These people, the kind who never say boo to the boss, let their relatives roll over them, and take every gram of garbage force-fed to them through their entire lives. These people, they think it's easy to make your move on death.

  Then I saw it, no more than fifty feet from us, down in the rocks, nearly at the rim. I'd been expecting it the whole ride up, because when facing your fear you also face your fate, and in that moment, any damn thing can happen.

  I pointed over his shoulder and said, “There's the balloon."

  * * * *

  It had drifted twenty miles and more than six thousand feet thanks to the front-range winds. It was impossible, I thought. It had to be. There was no way the balloon could have gotten up this high. Even with the updraft carrying the kid along, it never should have made it this far. Even if the kid had accidentally gotten the burner opened up all the way, it shouldn't have been enough to get the balloon this high.

  It should have bounced into one of the cliffs miles ago. The silk would have torn and the whole thing would have plummeted down in the middle of the mountains. But somehow the flight of the balloon had missed every jagged rock. Hiding behind the ridges and within the thinning tree line of the national park so nobody could see it, dancing so close to the craggy banks that he just kept rising. With hundreds of volunteers searching for him and nobody seeing.

  The balloon had wedged into a tight stony niche. The basket had folded in half and the deflated silk had collapsed on top of it. When you saw a hot-air balloon you saw a beautiful mammoth thing. This you could've fit in your closet.

  Bradley let out a cry that was part despair and part elation. He dropped the gun and forgot about me. I had to keep reminding myself that he was crazy.

  He ran up to the niche and started yanking at the silk, trying to pull the basket free. He screamed his son's name, and the echoes swarmed across the cliffs like a thousand distressed men calling out the names of their thousand dead sons.

  I picked up the pistol and tossed it over the edge.

  Bradley yelled, “Help me!” I stared at him for a moment and then climbed over there.

  It wasn't for him. I wanted to see the boy's face. It still felt very important that I actually see what the kid looked like.

  Bradley gripped one end of the basket and I took hold of the other and we pulled until we got it open wide enough that he could climb in. He ducked low for a second and I lurched aside until I could peer into the cramped space.

  The dry, cold mountain climate had preserved the boy these last several days. At this elevation, no animals or insects had been at him in the crags. Even though the basket had struck the mountain hard enough to crumple in on itself, his skin hadn't been touched. He wore a T-shirt and shorts and sneakers with holes in the big toes. The basket had folded around him like a coc
oon, without actually coming in contact with his flesh. It was another miracle, depending on whether you saw it that way.

  He was still facing away from me.

  From what I could see, except for his coloring, he looked like a perfectly healthy, sleeping child.

  Bradley screamed, “Johnny!” He took the boy in his arms and fell against the side of the basket.

  It started to slide. I had a chance to dive, maybe grab ahold of it, but I didn't see much point anymore. It skidded across the rock ledge and the deflated silk washed across the rocks and rippled like river water.

  The basket began to tip but bumped an outcropping and righted itself. The silk flapped out as if trying to inflate, but failed.

  For a moment, Bradley hung there in space with his arms around his dead little boy.

  He stuck his hand out to me. I reached and he clutched my right forearm. I had maybe five seconds to haul him out of the basket before it flopped over the rim.

  I stared into his eyes and thought, He's just as insane now as he was a half-hour ago. Maybe more so. He still blames me. He'll never see it any differently, especially after the kid falls into the chasm and his body is lost forever.

  You can make decisions in an instant that will forge the direction of the rest of your life. You can perform acts that will curse you with a hellish mark forever. You can sell your conscience by making a single mistake. You can do your best and still not make things right.

  I kept thinking, Here it is.

  I kept thinking, One last chance.

  I wondered if Bradley could see the same things in my face that I saw in his—the foolishness, the screwed-up attempts, the ridiculous efforts and disappointments.

  I never should've let the stalker scare me out of New York. I shouldn't have lost my dream. I could've made it through the fire if only I'd held strong.