Free Fall in Crimson

by John D. MacDonald

  “The Hatcher girl and her boyfriend were both killed.”

  “Do you realize how much you’re boring me?”

  “There could be some very real trouble about that, if anybody knows she starred in one of your dirty tapes, Peter.”

  “Screw her and screw this town. We’ll be out of here by lunch. We’ve only got one of the big location rigs left. And what we do, we have to do it right the first time.”

  He sat back on the bed.

  “What you can do, you can do me a favor by being out there real bright and early. We’re down to five balloons and we’re short on ground crew to handle them. I’ve got that Tyler sequence to shoot, where the balloon comes wobbling down with him stretched out dead in the basket, and all frosty from being so high he froze to death. Mercer invented some kind of crystal stuff he can spray him with. I wanted to have the other balloons settling down too, like the way animals gather around a wounded member of the herd, but you can’t control the damned things that way, so the way we work it tomorrow, we have them take off from a close formation and then later I’ll splice it in to run backward, so it will look like they are coming in, gathering from far off. I wanted it to be a big scene, but with only five balloons left, what can you do? I think I can work in some of the stuff when we had thirty of them taking off, and some bits of that could be run backward too. Will you be out there to help out? Listen, I would really really appreciate it, McGee.”

  What was there to say? There was no way to tell him what he was, even had I been entirely certain. I had the feeling that neither my vision of him nor his image of himself was particularly close to reality.

  I said yes and went up the stairs to my overpriced room. Choice was still open. I could get up in a couple of hours and take off for Des Moines. Or I could go out there in the morning and help out and see what was happening.

  I had as much as I was ever going to get out of Peter Kesner. I was personally convinced that Dez had taken Curley along and taken care of that little matter for Kesner, as a favor. Bravado. Help out your friends. It would probably be enough to satisfy Ron Esterland. He had performed the filial duty. Time to head home.

  Yet on the very edge of sleep I realized that I was going out there in the morning on the slender chance that I could get some sort of confirmation out of Desmin Grizzel. It was a narrow chance and a big risk to try to trick him into some sort of partial confirmation. He might well want to throw me to the sea gulls, off some inconceivable cliff in the flatness of Iowa.

  And also, of course, there was the slender chance I might get to ride in the gondola again, and that would give me a chance to find out if the second ride could possibly be as elegant and hypnotic as the first, moving in that sweet silence across the scents, the folds, the textures of the soft green April country.

  Seventeen

  With the oncoming sunrise a broad gold band along the eastern horizon, the area was coming awake. There was a smell of coffee, truck engines starting, balloonists breaking out the bags, baskets, tanks, spreading the big colorful envelopes downwind, ready for inflation. I was pressed into service on number five as a member of the ground crew, taking the place of a member of that team who had broken his hand landing the previous day. He had a cast and a sling, and he trotted along a half step behind me, telling me over and over everything I was supposed to do. He was very fussy, and he had a high nervous voice.

  “The envelope bag has to be stowed on board, stowed in the basket. Fold it up. No, not like that. Open it up again. Bring in the sides and fold them flat onto the bottom. Start on that side, and fold the whole thing over. Now fold it again. See. Now put it in the basket. Not underfoot. Shove it behind that brace. Right there. Now we have to check the connecting pins and rings. And then the sparker. And then the safety line. If you always check everything twice or three times, Mr. McGee, you will not have those accidents which arise out of carelessness.”

  The sun appeared and the balloon colors turned vivid as the warmth struck us. Kesner, in feverish energy, was moving camera positions back and forth with orders over his portable horn. Linda and Tyler, fresh from makeup, were sitting on folding chairs, waiting.

  “Blow them up! Blow them up, you people!” Kesner brayed.

  “He means inflate,” said my interpreter. “Put those gloves back on. And fasten the buckle on your helmet, please.”

  They positioned me out beyond the crown of the balloon, holding a line that was fastened to it, with instructions to counter any movement during inflation if it should show a tendency to roll in any side wind. Rolling would entangle the cables at the mouth and damage the burners.

  By the time the sun was up above the horizon, all five balloons were upright, fully inflated, swaying in the morning breeze, estimated at five knots, coming out of the northwest. Number five was vertically striped in broad alternating segments of crimson and light blue.

  I was put to work picking up the tools and equipment used during inflation, along with the inflator, and stowing them in the box in the big rugged pickup used by this team. It became clear to me that I was not going to get another ride. They were all waiting for the takeoff signal. The tether rope had been untied from the pickup truck bumper. Linda came over and vaulted briskly into the basket. The pilot was a lean man with a deeply grooved face, an outdoor squint. He looked like a cowboy in a cigarette ad. One of the team was on one side of the basket, holding the rim, and I was on the other. Every time the pilot gave the blast handle a twitch, I could feel the sense of life and lift in the basket long seconds later.

  The balloons were in a pentagon formation, about a hundred and fifty feet apart. Kesner decided he did not like that. He had one walked to the middle of the area and ordered enough deflation so it would look tired and flabby. He had the other four walked in closer, so that the flabby one was in the middle of the hollow square.

  The breeze was freshening slightly, and at that point a caravan of perhaps twenty pickups and vans came roaring down the road. The lead pickup turned directly into the big field, smashing aside the barricade of two-by-fours. They came closer, spread out, came to spinning, skidding stops, and fifty or so young men came piling out. They wore jeans and T-shirts, and they carried tire irons, ball bats, and short lengths of two-by-four. They came toward us in a dead, silent run, and there was no mistaking the dedication and the intent. There was going to be no measured appraisal of guilt or innocence. We were all—balloonists and grips, cameramen and drivers, script girls and lighting experts—going to take a physical beating that would maim and might even kill. This was a mob. They had whipped themselves up. The fact that they looked young, clean-cut, and middle-American did not alter their deadliness.

  In the silence of their rush toward us, I heard the prolonged ripping, roaring sound of the burners on one of the balloons. Everyone seemed to realize at the same moment that this was the best chance of escape. “Peter!” Linda screamed. “Peter! Here!” He came on a wild scrambling run, and as she began the long continuous blast of heat into the bag, he dived over the wicker rim, hitting the pilot with his shoulder. The pilot bent forward over the rim, and Peter snatched his ankles and tumbled him out. I swarmed over the rim as it began to lift. The other ground crew member let go. It moved with a painful slowness. Two beefy blond young men came running after us, too late. We lifted just out of reach. Something pinged off the round side of one of the propane tanks and went screeching off in ricochet.

  We lifted more rapidly. I looked at the pyrometer and saw it moving close to the red line, and I knocked Linda’s hand off the blast valve.

  “What are you doing!”

  “Melt the top of this thing open, and we’ll drop.”

  She understood and watched the gauge with me. It went on up right to the edge of the red and then began to fade back. The inclinometer needle held steady. I guessed we were at about eight hundred feet. I looked back and down and could see the knots of people, flailing away and struggling and falling. The other balloons were airborne, both at
a lower altitude, one ahead of us and one behind us. The flabby one was half deflated on the ground. People were fighting close to the basket of the other one, and it seemed to be deflating. Bodies lay silent in the grass. The cook tent was aflame, as was Josie’s trailer-dressing room. As I watched, three of them caught up with a running man and beat him to the ground and kept on beating him.

  “They’ve gone crazy!” Linda said. “Look! There’s two cop cars. They’re parked down the road there. They’re not going to even try to stop it!”

  “You people didn’t make many friends.”

  “We brought a lot of money into this hick town,” she said. “What the hell has happened to everybody?”

  “I can guess. I think the little Hatcher girl told her best girl friend what you wonderful moviemakers did to her, and after the two kids were killed in that accident, the girl friend decided she didn’t have to keep quiet any more. She didn’t have to keep her word.”

  “Oh.” She turned on Kesner. He was sitting with his back against the wicker, his arms wrapped around his upraised knees, his face quite blank. “I told you that girl was too damned young.”

  “I didn’t ask for a driver’s license. She said nineteen.” He pulled himself up. He looked back and saw the fires, pallid in morning sunlight. “They don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re destroying.”

  “Hey, we’re coming down!” she said.

  “We better try to fly low,” I said. “Take a look.”

  The pickups and vans were streaming away from the pastureland, taking the roads that led southeast, that followed our drifting pattern.

  “Why don’t we go high?” Kesner asked.

  “Because these things won’t go all that high. The higher you go, the less efficient they are and the more gas they use up. And we’d stay in clear sight even at ten thousand feet, and they could follow us until we come down. If we go low enough, maybe we can lose them.”

  When we were at fifty feet and descending ever more rapidly, she opened the valve. It continued to sink. The basket brushed the top of low bushes. A red barn was rushing toward us. Kesner pointed at it and screamed. The lift finally took effect, and we rose above the crest of the barn roof, missed the silo, and then, because of the long blast, went right on up to five hundred feet.

  “Short blasts, dammit,” I said. “You have to use short blasts.”

  “Run it yourself!” she said.

  And so I did, badly at first. The response always came so late, it was difficult to time. When I had the hang of it, I gained some altitude, found the wrench, and changed to fresh tanks. I could see chase cars a mile away on a parallel road, kicking up dust. I took it back down, and soon we came to a big agribusiness installation, a line of tractors, in offset pattern, working a giant expanse. They waved to us.

  It was Kesner who pointed out the balloon that was spoiling our strategy. It was above us, in a fresher breeze than ours, well behind us and gaining on us. It was pumpkin and green, with bands of white. The chase cars could follow him easily. I took us up to where we could yell at him to fly low, as we were.

  Linda recognized him first. “Hey, it’s Dirty Bob. All alone! Wouldn’t he be alone, though?” She yelled at him. “If you fly lower, they might lose you. Hey! Fly low, Dez. Low!”

  He ignored us. I worked our balloon back down again. He was even with us for a time and then moved a little ahead and a little farther off, to the left of our line of drift.

  I kept glancing at him too often. I didn’t see the power lines in time. The big ones, the high structural towers, the spiderweb look of the thick cables swooping from tower to tower. Even with a constant blast I did not think we could lift over them.

  “Get ready to land!” I said.

  “No!” Kesner yelled. “I saw them following us, right over there, past those trees.”

  “We’ve got to come down right now!”

  I yanked on the line that opened the maneuvering port just as Linda sprang and opened the blast valve. We were too high to risk opening the deflation port at the top by pulling the red line. I jumped at Linda to pry her hand free, but she was too wiry and strong. We started to lift, and I made the almost mortal decision that we were as low as we were going to get. So I went over the side, hung, kicked free, and dropped, facing the direction of flight.

  If I had to swear on all the books, I would say it was a forty-five-foot drop, at ten to twelve miles an hour. I went down toward the cultivated brown-dark earth. I dropped, pinwheeling my arms for balance, trying to remember everything I knew about falling, relaxing, rolling. The laws of motion state that a body falls at thirty-two feet per second, but it did seem to take a lot longer. One doesn’t get much practice at stepping off the roof of four-story buildings.

  I landed on the balls of my feet, inclining slightly forward, and as I hit I hugged my chest, tucked my chin down, and turned my right shoulder forward and down. I felt the right knee go, and the forward momentum took me into a shoulder roll. I went over and right back up onto my feet, where I didn’t especially want to be, and then tried to take some big running steps to stay there. But the knee bugged out, and my body got ahead of my legs, and I took a long diving fall onto my belly that huffed the wind out of me and chopped my teeth into the dirt of a corn row.

  I pushed myself up, gagging for air, spitting dirt, and saw the balloon angling up toward the wires. Relieved of my weight all of a sudden, it had taken a good upward surge. But it was still going toward the power lines. In retrospect I decided that the upward bounce had not been lost on Peter Kesner. The racket of the gas blast stopped abruptly, and an instant later a figure came tumbling down, falling away from the basket. She had, I would say, seventy feet to fall. She was a tough little woman, athletic and nervy. I learned later that she had done some sky diving, and I think that she spread-eagled her arms and legs in an attempt to stop the tumbling caused by her being thrown out of the basket by Kesner. Maybe the tumbling would have stopped if she’d had more falling room. A lot more room. She made a single lazy turn and landed at a head-down angle that snapped her neck a microsecond before the heavy thud of her body into the soil.

  Kesner was higher. The blast was ripping away, jacking that long blue flame up into the envelope. He was going to make it over the power lines. From my angle of sight he was already clear when the basket and cables struck the power lines. There was a stunning crack, loud as an antitank gun, a condensed flash of blue lightning, and then a big orange ball as the propane tanks blew up. The orange and crimson ball melted the striped crimson and blue envelope almost instantly, and a stream of debris came tumbling down in free fall, one morsel of it the flame-shrouded mannikin which had been Peter Kesner, landing under the power lines, thumping down beside the shredded and blackened basket with an impact that blew the flames out and left him smoking for a moment before the flames began again.

  Beyond the lines, high and off to the left, the pumpkin and green balloon floated in the breeze, moving away from me. Outlined against the blue sky beyond, I could see the silhouette of Desmin Grizzel from the waist up, standing there in the hard weave of the wicker basket, looking back down at us, motionless and intent. I stood up, favoring the right leg. I was dazed, and I was sickened by the pale and dying dance of flame on Kesner’s body and the small silence of Linda. Out of some vague impulse I raised an arm to Desmin Grizzel as he dwindled against the morning sky and saw him wave in response.

  I heard the hard whine of the engines of the chase cars and looked for a place to hide. I could not run to the distant row of trees. I hobbled over closer to Linda’s body, stretched out face down, dug with two paws like a dog, wormed myself against the soil, lay with my face wedged into the breathing hole. As a final act of guile, I pulled the wallet out of my pocket and pushed it down into the dirt at the bottom of the hole under my face. The earth smelled rich and moist.

  They came running, feet thudding, breathing hard.

  “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Look
at that one, Ted!”

  There was a coughing sound, a gagging sound, and then a gush, coughing, and another voice saying weakly, “I’m sorry, guys. It was the smell.”

  I took a deep slow breath and held it. Somebody put a foot against my hip and shoved. “Maybe this one’s alive.” I felt hands poking at my pockets.

  The hands went away. A deeper voice said, in exasperation, “What are you doing, Benny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Get your hands off her.”

  “She’s got something here on a chain around her neck.”

  “I said get away from her!”

  “Okay, okay, okay. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Ted, come over here. Look, guys. I think we ought to go back to town and split and keep our mouths shut.”

  “What about that balloon still in the air?”

  “There’ll be guys after it. This thing got out of hand. Right? Everybody got too excited. I saw Wicker kill a little old guy. I saw him do it on purpose. Nobody agreed to anything like that. Nobody said anything about setting fires. I saw Davis go down, and it looked as if he was hurt bad. There was a lot of blood on his face. Here we got two more dead people and one maybe dying. It got too big. There’ll be television guys and newspaper guys from Des Moines all over the place.”

  “You remember what we all agreed, Len. It was for Karen and Jamie. It was in their memory. These are evil people.”

  “ ‘Justice is mine, saith the Lord.’ I think we ought to cut out right now, guys.”

  They seemed to reach an agreement. When I heard voices again, they were too far away for me to hear what they said. I knew the explosion wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Others would be arriving. I retrieved the wallet. Somebody had scooped dirt onto Kesner and put out his fire. I brushed dirt off me as I walked out of the big field. The knee had popped back in, leaving the tendons stretched and sore, okay for limited and careful use. When I reached the tree line, I found that they were planted alongside a narrow asphalt road. I looked back and saw a glinting of vehicles back near the power lines and some tiny figures moving about in the field.