by Marc Zicree
But it was too late, Big T lost his battle with the slope and pitched over on top of Colleen in a spray of dirty water.
My head felt as if it might explode. I shouted wordlessly and flung myself along the ridge, shoving past the quaking packhorses.
Magritte had pulled the pack line around the thick limb of an uprooted tree. Goldie snagged the end, using his weight to keep the line tight, playing tug-of-war with the struggling mare. He needed help, but that would have to wait. I scrambled past him, slipping and falling, tearing clothing and flesh on rock and brush.
Doc was already down in the freezing flood, grappling with Big T. The horse struggled to right himself, his eyes showing white, his distended nostrils spouting steam. Doc had gotten hold of his headstall and somewhere found the strength to keep his head above water. With a final, roaring heave the horse twisted upright and surfaced, nearly bowling Doc over.
No Colleen.
My throat, already raw from yelling, constricted. God, no. I careened past Goldie on the narrow track, nearly tripping over him.
Doc was shouting Colleen’s name. When I thought he would dive into the river after her, she surfaced not two feet from him, gasping for breath.
“My boot! I’m caught!”
At that moment, in one of those flukes of the cosmos that can only have been carefully choreographed, the sodden tree limb Magritte had dallied the rope around collapsed, ripping Goldie off his feet. He pitched, screaming, toward the sinkhole, the rope still twisted around his hands.
There was no decision to be made: I turned back and lunged after him, got hold of the rope, braced my feet among the rocks and threw my whole weight against it. He scrambled upright and joined me; together we brought the struggling mare closer to shore.
Only yards away there was an explosion of sound and movement. Big T flew up out of the river, steaming and shivering. Through his quaking legs I could see Doc, still up to his thighs in the current, his frantic grip all that kept Colleen from going under.
Beyond them the smooth, misty flood was cut by something that I might have taken for a large log except that logs are rarely so purposeful and never move against a current.
“Jesus-Buddha,” Goldie prayed, and I knew he’d seen it, too.
So had Colleen. “Let go of my hands!” she shrieked, now fighting Doc as before she’d fought the river.
He shook his head. “No!”
“Just one! If I can reach the snag, I can lose the boot!” “I will lose you!”
“No. No, you won’t. Viktor, please!”
He shifted his grip, freeing her left hand. She disappeared beneath the water, only her right arm in Doc’s grasp.
The dark disturbance in the stream slipped closer, parting water and mist. It seemed to gain bulk as it approached, ride higher in the water.
A ball of light sailed out to the water’s edge and began bobbing along it, well away from Doc and Colleen. It was Magritte, trying to distract the thing.
Goldie’s grip on the pack line faltered. “Oh, Maggie, be careful,” he breathed.
She didn’t need to be careful. Whatever was in the water, her brightness and motion made no impression on it; it had focused on Colleen’s struggle.
I glanced at Goldie. “Let go.”
He gave me no argument. We released the pack line in unison, letting the floundering mare slide. She staggered backward, lost her balance, and toppled into the deepest part of the sinkhole. Then she swam, not toward shore, but out into the current. We were already in motion, headed toward where Doc fought to maintain his hold on Colleen. I drew my sword, my eyes on that dark presence making its way toward shore. We were just above Doc on the bank when Colleen broke the surface, flailing and gasping for air. He locked his arms around her and wrenched her from the water.
Farther up the bar, just offshore, a horse’s scream rent the heavy mists. The river boiled. I didn’t have to look to know that our sacrifice had been accepted by whatever god swam the currents.
By the time Goldie and I slid down to the river’s edge, Doc was carrying Colleen to shore. Coatless and bootless, she lay limp in his arms, the heaving of her chest the only evidence that she was alive. We reached down to drag them the last few feet onto relatively solid ground, supporting them up the treacherous bank to a safe place among the rocks.
“Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God.” Colleen ground the words out through chattering teeth.
I held out my arms, intending to take her from Doc, but he ignored me.
“She’ll become hypothermic if we don’t warm her. These wet clothes…”
I swung around, looking for the horses. They were just up the rocky ridge where Enid and Magritte had corralled them, and now worked at calming them down. I hoped he wasn’t singing to them. Goldie and I moved toward them in unison.
“We’ll need dry clothes,” I told him. “Doesn’t matter whose. And we’ll need a tent. Something to use as a windbreak.”
We helped Enid tether the horses, then broke out tent, clothing, and med-kit. There was no choice location, but we managed to set the tent up among the rocks in a place that offered some natural protection from the icy wind. Magritte had rounded up a sleeping bag and wrapped it around Colleen where she huddled in the lee of a tangle of driftwood, Doc feverishly checking her pulse, her eyes, her hands.
The moment I had the tent up, Doc was there, cradling Colleen as if he feared she might break. She looked awful. Her face was white, her lips blue, her eyes huge and glazed. Her entire body quivered uncontrollably. I watched him ease her into the tent, then handed in the pile of clothing and the med-kit. Doc asked for a knife and disappeared inside.
I turned to Goldie, eager to give myself something to do. “Let’s go assess our situation. I want to be ready to move as soon as they’re done.”
He nodded and moved, grim-faced, toward where Enid tended the horses.
The situation wasn’t dire, but we had lost some supplies, including food, fresh water, and horse fodder. A tent was gone, as were some of our household utensils. I was glad Colleen had instructed us to spread the critical items out across the pack animals-for this very reason. We had less of everything than before, but we still had some of everything. I tried not to think about the horse.
I returned to the tent then, to stand guard. I kept my mind occupied with planning. Colleen’s voice, rising softly through the fabric in answer to Doc’s questions, was reassuring, but only served to underscore my inability to do anything for her.
“Open your eyes, Colleen.” The tenor of Doc’s voice suggested that the danger was far from past. It jogged me out of my fragile confidence.
“So tired,” she murmured.
“You must stay awake.”
“Okay. Okay… Oh … Oh, I’m cut.”
“It’s all right. I’ll make you a patch.”
“That’s a big cut, isn’t it?”
“Then I will make it a big patch. Can you straighten your legs?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Try.”
“Hurts… Oh, no! Not the jeans! Don’t cut the jeans! I’ll try!” She whimpered. “There… oh, sonofabitch, that hurts!” “Good work, boi baba.”
There was a moment of relative silence, then Colleen moaned, “Oh, God, Viktor! I can’t feel my skin!”
A shaft of river ice twisted itself into my gut.
“It’s still there, I promise.” His voice was soothing, falsely light.
I distracted myself with memories of thawing out after my dunk in the skating pond. I had survived that chilling experience. Colleen would survive this. She was tough. Tougher than I was, by a long shot. But I had done my thawing in the warmth of my home, pampered with warm blankets, hot tea, and a fire.
And I hadn’t been in the water as long as she had. Goldie slipped over the rocks and came to stand beside me. “How goes it?”
“Slow.”
“Should we start a fire?”
I shook my head. “I think the best thing is just to get her out of thi
s damned ice swamp.”
“I’d be afraid to start a fire out here, anyway,” Goldie told me. “Too much gasoline.”
I sniffed. Among the other odors, the gasoline was almost buried, but not quite. “Good God, I’m glad you
caught that. I didn’t even notice.”
“Well, with all the other wonderful aromas-”
“Colleen!” Doc’s voice was tinged with alarm.
“Colleen!”
I took a step toward the tent.
Goldie stopped me. “He’s a doctor, Cal. What’re you going to do that he can’t?”
There was a stinging slap and Colleen gasped.
“Forgive me,” Doc said.
“S’okay.”
“Can you sit up?”
“Uh-huh.”
A quiet struggle ensued.
“Breathe,” he commanded her.
She breathed, audibly. “Better. I’m better. Whose socks’re those?”
“Do you really care? Just a little more to go. Whose dog tags do you wear?”
“Huh? Oh, those. Those’re Daddy’s. Mom gave ’em to me at the funeral … Men’s long johns?” She let out a choked laugh.
“Very fashionable.”
“I can feel my skin a little. Your hands are warm.”
“This is a relative thing, believe me.”
“Sweater’s way too big.”
“It’s Goldie’s. Put this on, then we’ll get us all onto dry land. We’ll build you a fire, make you some hot chocolate …”
“Heaven.”
I could hear her teeth chattering. Literally. I remembered that part of nearly freezing to death, too. My jaw hurt for days afterward.
“Can I sleep?” she asked.
“No!” Doc’s tone was sharp. He softened it and added, “But soon. I promise.”
He lifted her from the tent with great care. In the overlarge clothing, with her short damp hair sticking out from beneath a woolen cap, she looked like a little boy who’d raided his daddy’s closet. And she looked vulnerable. I’d never tell her either of those things.
“How is she?” I asked, and half held out my arms again. “She’s damn cold,” said Colleen, through her teeth. “An’ s’not nice to talk over a person.”
Doc offered me a thin smile. “I think she will be fine if we can get her out of here.” He gestured with his head at the vapor rising off the river. “Sooner is better.”
“Then let’s pack this up and get moving.” I dropped my arms and bent for the sodden clothing Doc had tossed outside the tent flap. It was already wearing a thin veneer of frost.
Goldie moved to dismantle the tent, while Magritte helped Doc reinstate Colleen in the sheltering driftwood, swaddled once more in a sleeping bag. Doc started to crouch next to her, but Colleen poked a hand out of the folds of quilting and caught his shoulder.
“Change your clothes,” she told him, and I realized that Doc’s jeans wore a sheath of ice from the thigh down. The hem of his anorak, likewise, was crusted with hoar, as were its sleeves where he had plunged them into the water.
“You must stay awake, Colleen.”
“Fine. Magritte can keep me awake. Change your clothes. I’ll be all right… I promise. Spacibo,” she added, in Russian. “Thank you.”
He nodded and rose stiffly.
“Viktor,” she said, turning him back around. She held his gaze for a long moment, then said, so softly I almost didn’t catch it, “I told you so.”
He said nothing, but when he turned back to face me, his eyes were glistening and haunted. I grasped his arm as he stumbled over the uneven ground.
“What did she mean?” I asked. “ ‘I told you so.’ What was that for?”
“We had spoken of choices.” He winced, and I tightened my grip on his arm. “Of how nearly impossible it is to make the correct ones. How difficult the past makes it to put yourself where you belong in the present.”
“Apparently, you belong here. If that’s what ‘I told you so’ meant, she was right.”
We had reached the horses. Doc halted at his mare’s side and laid his forehead against her steaming flank. “Cal, I begin to believe she is always right.”
We took over an hour to navigate the last stretch of the land bridge. It zigged and zagged, but presented us with no major obstacles. Colleen rode sidesaddle, still wrapped in the sleeping bag, across the pommel of Doc’s saddle. He kept up a running dialogue with her the whole way, making her focus, forcing her to speak. By the end of the journey his voice was a rasp, and she was cursing him for not letting her sleep.
We made camp as soon as we climbed beyond the river’s miasma, and laid a fire in the lee of a broken wall. There, Colleen and Doc went through the painful process of thawing out-stoically, silently.
Oddly enough, it made me realize how much of a kind they were. Very much, I thought, like father and daughter.
III
Animal, Who Are You?
… Suleiman-bin-Daoud was not proud. He very seldom showed off, and when he did he was sorry for it. Once he tried to feed all the animals in all the world in one day, but when the food was ready an Animal came out of the deep sea and ate it up in three mouthfuls. Suleiman-bin-Daoud was very surprised and said, “O Animal, who are you?” And the Animal said, “O King, live forever! I am the smallest of thirty thousand brothers, and our home is at the bottom of the sea. We heard that you were going to feed all the animals in all the world, and my brothers sent me to ask when dinner would be ready. ”
…and now the real story part of my story begins.
“The Butterfly that Stamped,”
SEVENTEEN
COLLEEN
Life is strange. I knew that long before I pitched horse first into the new and improved Fox River; before my life was stretched out in the icy water between a submerged snag and Doc’s hands. They say your life flashes before your eyes in moments like that. It’s true, but where I’d kind of expected a fast-forward movie, I got a slide show of random freeze frames.
Well, probably not random. These were all moments I suspect my subconscious wanted me to know were IMPORTANT. I’m pretty sure that’s what Goldman would’ve told me, anyway. And whereas I’d lived those moments from the inside, now I saw them from the outside, as if I were sitting in the audience, glancing at my watch and wondering how long this little documentary was going to last. At least I didn’t have time to get bored.
Slide one: I am smiling up at Dad, who has just helped me turn twelve years of hoarded allowances into a real, live, kicking, breathing horse.
Slide two: I am at a graveside service cringing under a twenty-one-gun salute while Mom clutches a triangle of red-white-and-blue to her breast but does not cry.
Slide three: I am helping a crumpled lawyer lead refugees out of an office building into a Manhattan blackout that might never end.
Slide four: I am watching Rory-or what’s left of him- scuttle across the street on which we live to lose himself under a manhole cover.
Slide five: I am having a quiet conversation with Doc in a moonlit wood that’s slipped sideways in space. Or maybe it’s a frozen plain that’s slipped sideways into winter.
Slide six: I am standing in a cold, damp barn in rural Illinois, half convinced that a kiss has just caused a freak ice storm. The world seems strangely upside down.
Slide seven: I am up to my neck in a frozen river, wondering if I’ve come to the last slide in the show. Doc is all that’s keeping my head above water, and the world has righted itself again, but not the way I expected.
Funny: in the moment that might be your last, you suddenly see everything clear as a bell.
Sometime after the slide show, I woke up late in the day from a very long sleep. I had no idea what day it was late in, but I was warm and dry. I was also bruised and stiff and my fingers and toes hurt, but all in all I felt pretty good for a person who’d almost been drowned, frozen, and eaten by a whatever.
I was alone in the tent with hazy memories of the cold
and the fear and the pain, and of first Cal, then Doc, tending and watching over me. I tested fingers and toes, making sure everything still worked. Then I made a horrible mistake: I stretched. The muscles in my calves knotted, and fire raced through them, making me yelp. I doubled over and fumbled with the zipper of the sleeping bag.
The tent flap flew back and light flooded in, bringing Cal with it. He must’ve been hovering right outside to make that quick an entrance.
“Are you all right?”
“No, dammit! I’m not all right. My legs are cramping!”
He had no trouble with the stupid zipper. A moment later he was massaging my bunched muscles. I gritted my teeth until the knots loosened.
“Better?” he asked.
I nodded. “Thanks. How long did I sleep?”
“About eighteen hours, off and on. Mostly on.”
“Eighteen hours! You’re kidding!” Hell, that was embarrassing. “Why didn’t you wake me? We don’t have time-”
He put a hand on my shoulder. “Relax. You don’t owe anyone an apology. How do you feel now? Ready to get back up on that horse?”
That horse. I caught a sudden chill. “Big T?”
“Is fine. Enid took very good care of him after the dunking. All your clothes are dry and relatively clean, so you don’t have to wear men’s unmentionables anymore. Everything smells of wood smoke, but I figured you wouldn’t mind that.”
He smiled and flicked a stray strand of hair off my cheek, and I relived all those moments when our eyes met and there was a fire in the hold. I relived the kiss. I’d wanted him to kiss me. What’d they call that-irony?
I realized I was just sitting there staring at him, when he glanced away, made a nervous gesture, and brushed his hands on his jeans as if touching me had given him cooties, or maybe something else.