“It was going to kill you, Angie.”
“I would rather die. I want to die. I’m sick of this life and all the selfless, cruel, thoughtless animals allowed to live! Where is a God in that?”
“It wasn’t your fault. None of this is your fault!”
“I’ll tell you whose fault it is,” she said.
She stood up and crossed over to the rifle that lay beside Charlie’s dead body.
“What are you doing?” Robert leapt to his feet.
Angie pulled the gun barrel around and nuzzled it into the soft flesh under her chin.
Robert leapt at her, swinging his right hand around.
His hand hit the barrel.
The rifle shot echoed out across the lake.
Robert screamed, and Angie fell back away from him. The rifle clattered to the leaf-covered ground.
“Angie!”
She lay on the ground. Robert cried out “Angie!” once more and fell to his knees on the ground next to her. He grabbed her in his arms and pulled her up close to him. He felt the dampness of blood on her face against his own, felt her shaking with tears in his arms, and held her close until he was certain that he felt her own arms rising up around him, holding onto him as though it was the last thing on earth that mattered.
They held each other while Angie wept.
Epilogue
Arizona Cougar Kills Five was the headline the Charlotte Observer used two days later. The Arkansas Democrat played the story up from the biologists’ angle: Conservationists Kill Cougar. And the Detroit Free Press headline read, End to Arizona Terror: Cougar Dead. There were color photos of Dr. Rippard on an ambulance gurney, being lifted into the back; she looked like she’d been through a war zone.
It took a couple of days for the story to catch on, but the national media realized the politics and power of Rippard’s story. Probably the most emotional photograph was the very first one; a freelance photojournalist with Arizona Highways magazine stood on the side of a dirt road photographing Apache Lake fifteen miles northeast of Tortilla Flat, Arizona. Everything was dry and dusty, the late afternoon light at just the right angle on the lake to make for a great picture. The man turned and saw Angie and Robert on horseback coming down the dirt road out of the mountains. They looked like they’d been through a bombing, clothes torn and bloody, hair matted. The photographer snapped three pictures, and one ended up on the cover of Newsweek.
Angie looked like a soldier bracing a near-dead comrade. There was something noble and true in that image, something that spoke volumes about Angie Rippard’s character.
The doctors at Banner Baywood Hospital gave a press conference that night at nine-fifteen MST. Rippard and Gonzalez were in stable condition. And though they were asked, the doctors couldn’t comment on the fate of the mountain lion. That came out the next day when Rippard allowed a single reporter from the Phoenix Tribune into her seventh-floor hospital room. She gave him twenty-five minutes, and she knew that his story would hold until she was healthy enough to leave the hospital on her own.
She described it as the single most unusual case of a cougar attack on humans that she’d ever seen. Even in the hospital bed, she advocated compassion and conservation for the North American mountain lion. She called it “a bad case” and “tragic,” and she felt “lucky” to have made it out of the mountains alive. And those were the words that cycled through newspaper and television reports the next ten days.
Governor Horace G. Redmond III called the event “a tragedy beyond reckoning” and said that he and his wife’s prayers were with Angie and Robert whose “actions rose above the standard definitions of the word ‘hero’.” Horace G. ordered National Guardsmen to go up into the mountains north of Roosevelt Lake, and National Forest Rangers worked with military and civilian authorities to locate the mine, the cabin, and the bodies down by the lake. Angie began a two-week-long cycle of rabies vaccinations just to be safe.
By the fourth day in the hospital, she was walking up and down the hallways in her hospital gown, pushing her IV unit along with her. Robert’s room was at the end of the hall.
“How you doing?” she said from his doorway.
Robert lay in his bed, and he turned and smiled at her.
“I’m tired of this hospital bed,” he said good naturedly. “Look at you.”
That night, she sat next to his bed, and they played a game of Scrabble. Robert was pretty well medicated, his speech slow, his eyes slowly blinking, but he stayed in the game until they reached the triple-word-score squares.
The fourteenth word Angie played was “brave,” and Robert looked up and saw tears forming in her eyes as she placed the tiles on the board.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
Angie wiped the tears back stubbornly.
“I don’t know.” She sniffed. Leaning forward, she placed her hands over her face and just sobbed.
It was one of those cries that was so intense that it almost hurt, but when it was over, she felt like she was breathing through new lungs. There was a single light behind the head of Robert’s bed, and he lay there quiet, reverent, letting her work it out of her system.
He held his Scrabble tray of letters and just watched her, listening, waiting to see if there was something he could say, should say.
He only said, “Everything’s gonna be alright.”
She looked at him, her eyes puffy and red. Then, she leaned forward and kissed him. Robert did not fight the kiss, but he did not return it either. He only looked into her eyes and felt the weight of so much pain in her gaze.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No. Don’t be. Maybe in time, Angie. But not now. We’re going to make it through this. You’re going to make it through this.”
She held her hand up over her eyes as though trying to cover up the shame of crying, in letting her emotions control her. This kid, this graduate student, well, he’d seen her at her highest highs and at her lowest lows, and there was something so nakedly vulnerable in that realization that she felt broken inside to the point of crying. She didn’t have anything to hide, but she wanted a part of herself always to remain hidden.
She wanted to save something for herself, but he’d pretty much seen it all. She felt her loyalty and her emotions mixed in her mind, and she only wanted someone to hold onto.
• •
The Avis car rental center was a mile from the Kahului Airport, but they offered a shuttle that picked up customers just outside of the airport terminal. Angie helped a young girl and her mother load their suitcases onto the shuttle because she herself had only a backpack and one suitcase. She smiled affably and took a seat at the back of the shuttle bus.
Everything was green on the island of Maui. The air was thick and moist with humidity, and bright sunshine peaked out from behind large puffy cumulous clouds that drifted off of Puu Kukui, the mountain on the west end of Maui. Angie leaned back in the seat and let the fresh breeze roll in from the open window. She could smell the ocean and the fragrance of rain coming down over the sugar plantations southwest of Kahului.
There were only two left; it seemed the land was too valuable to waste on sugar crops. Hotels were in their future.
Angie rented a black convertible and drove with the top down along State Highway 380 and onward west along Highway 30. It was a two-lane stretch of blacktop with double-yellow center lines, and once west of the harbor town of Maalaea, the highway carved along steep ocean-side cliffs.
The wind whipped through her hair, and Angie looked out at the Pacific through Wayfarer sunglasses. Seven miles across the Auau Channel, the island of Lanai rose like a giant tortoise shell from the sea.
That fall afternoon from her fourteenth-floor balcony, Angie gazed out over pools and beaches, watching sailboats navigate the Auau’s blue water. She put her legs up on the patio table and sipped an ice-cold margarita.
She ate the best seafood of her life that night at Leilani’s. The outdoor table overlooked a gre
en lawn, white sand beach, and a sunset straight out of a Hollywood movie. After dinner, she drove down to the waterfront town of Lahaina. There were shops and bars and restaurants and taverns, and an old man stood on a street corner, selling kittens from a wooden box.
“How much?” Angie asked.
“Two dollars,” the old man said.
Angie reached in the box and retrieved a little calico hardly larger than her hand. The poor thing cried, and Angie held it close to her chest, saying, “There, there, little fella. Everything’s gonna be alright. You just need a little milk.”
The old man smiled and placed her two dollars in his pocket.
“Which way is Lahainaluna?”
“Lahainaluna Street?” the old guy said.
“Yes,” she said. “My brother lives up there.”
“It’s just two blocks that way.” He pointed.
Angie walked away, holding the kitten close to her chest, and she thought of something funny she could say when her brother opened his door. The lights from shops poured out onto the sidewalk, and somewhere in the distance, a ship’s bell clanged merrily in the night.
THE END
CLAWS Page 24