Voley sticks his nose into the nook of my arm after I stop squeezing him, tired of the incessant thunder and the beating rain and the cold spray that carpets us after each crest hits. I shield him the best I can and wait, as calm and patient as I can be—waiting for it. A lightning hunter. My eyes search the steel blanket for the streaks of white and blue—and as soon as they burst, arcing across the sky with impossible speed, spilling their light on the sea floor, the same light that hides behind the gray clouds, I search for the form. A man’s form, lying, just a slight protrusion from the flat table of one of the floes. A sign of Russell. But as each thunder roars and rolls and fades, and the light erupts, blanketing everything with crystal clarity, I find nothing. Not a single shape. Not the man I love. Nothing but the shaking and trembling pack.
At last something catches my eye after a lightning bolt, so much that I’m shaken from my half-sleep, and forget for a moment how hungry and scared and cold I am. I turn in the direction I saw it, but it’s hard to tell what it was, or even where it came from in the horizon. High or low, near or far. I try to find the stars to calm my nausea, but they’re gone—covered up by the heart of the storm. We ride up and down, and each time the waves pass and slide us a little, I stand up and take a few steps back again, closer to the center, so we won’t slip off the shelf and into the boiling sea. And then, with just the right amount of luck, I catch it—the lightning erupts and I see the plane. It’s there, just for a moment, clear as if the sky was full blue. The tail is raised, stuck up, and the body slants directly down into the snow, like it rammed headfirst into the floe. I see the tiny windows, circular, that run along the barrel-shaped chest of silver. I see the silver turn to dark and charred gray and black near the bottom of the plane, and by what must be the engines on the wings. They look like enormous tubes above the flat paper-thin silver. One of the wings is torn in half, but the other one looks perfect. Flat and silver and metal strong. Like a raft. I push the thought away. And then what strikes me most about the sight, right before it all fades again, is just how long the floe is that it’s stuck in. I see the ridges, near the shelves leading up to it, and I almost convince myself that the floe is so big that it doesn’t even feel the waves. And it’s all so close that if the sea were calm, I would attempt to swim to it. If Voley weren’t with me. But the sea rips at my face, wind gusting hard and reminding me that I can’t go anywhere. Voley whines with the air that rushes through our soaked bodies, icing us as we huddle, staring at the edges of our floe, twenty feet away on all sides.
To keep calm, I start to count. This time, it’s the lightning flashes. I look, even as my eyes become dogged and tired, for any sign of Russell on the floes. Each time the lightning flashes I count the number and try to search a different section of the sea. Twenty-two. Twenty-three…
When I count the fortieth lightning flash, and I’m desensitized to the rocking of the floe, I stop counting and dig my fingers into the closest deep pocket of slush. With cupped hands, and most of the water spilling from my gloves, I offer Voley the drink. He works his nose out from under my arm after I say his name twice and poke him a bit until he’s pointed to see what I have. He looks disinterested until I put it to my own mouth, showing him my tongue, licking the water so that he can see. You have to drink Vole, I tell him. And then he tastes my finger. And just like that, in two drags of his tongue, he takes it all in and I refill my hands. We each drink until we can’t drink anymore, and then I’m suddenly hit with a tremendous wave of nausea. I get up, walking just a few dizzy steps away from Voley, so that I can throw up where it won’t run back onto us. The retching brings me back down on my knees, but all that comes up is liquid. It smells awful and I recoil in disgust at myself, retreating in time with a flash of lightning. And then I catch the outline of the seal. Spots moved.
But then, I calm myself down, waiting for another flash. I tell myself no, you’re imagining it. He’s just sliding. And when it finally comes, and I see his floe lit like day under the brilliant lightning sky, I see his eyes: still closed, and his dog face—asleep forever. And I know he’s dead. And that we have to eat him if we’re going to survive.
Survival. The word sticks in my brain, meaningless without Russell. You’ve been without him before, I tell myself. Thought he was dead before. And you pushed on. Voices argue inside my head, reliving the walk through Nuke Town, and the circumstances then, and how I went on, knowing everything was just about over, but I had still wanted to survive for some reason. To push on no matter how bad it seemed. Because it can only be bad when I stop and think about it. But it’s nothing at all when I’m moving. And we just have to find a way to keep moving.
My stomach growls, a tired growl, like it’s about given up, or finally started to eat up the most important organs. I’m convinced there’s erosion inside as I feel a pang. And then my leg speaks too, reminding me that even without thought, even with the ability to shut out the waking nightmare of my thinking, there will always be feeling. And pain. Pain can’t be blocked out.
Ernest did it, though. He blocked it out. Even Russell and Voley. They ignored the pain. And kept going, fighting, even while it tore down their insides, cutting right through them, warning them they would die. I make my way across the slick mush and entangle myself with Voley again. And as I try to count, and then lose count, of the lightning flashes, I start to believe that the wind is dying down. The storm is slackening. And that each swell isn’t quite lifting us as high as the last one did. And with the hope for a calm pack, and another gray-lighted day to find Russell, my body freezes into an uncomfortable slumber, all twisted up with Voley in the middle of the floe. When I wake up, it’s to the sound of a voice calling my name.
Chapter 15
Through the chop of the sea and the rain, I hear my name again. It’s Russell. He yells to me.
“Tanner!” And my eyes light up and I fight out of the locked bones that don’t want to me to ever move again and I see him. His floe is twenty feet away. I watch it rise and fall softly, and see only his head. It almost looks like he’s hanging over the edge of the shelf, about to dangle his hair into the water, but he goes no farther. He just calls my name, hysterically. He wants to know if we’re okay. I cry back to him. I tell him we’re okay.
Right away, he tells me he’s going to try to sit up. I just call out, What? But then he tells me. He shouts it so loud but I feel like I can barely hear him. “My leg. It’s crushed.”
My heart sinks through the ice, down into the cold icy hell below. I relive Spots dropping down on us, me escaping and Russell receiving the blow of a thousand pounds all at once. I imagine his leg, the thing I’ve always worried most about—the infection that I thought would kill him for all that time, and the sprain that would keep us on the ice—shattering. And now it’s real. He’s not holding it back from me. And I know it’s true this time, because as soon as he tells me, he lurches back and up, like he’s trying to right his body, so that he can sit upright, but he flops right back down to the ice, his head nearly over the edge again. But he does it over, like it will work the second time, and somehow, he shifts his weight so that he’s sitting up. All I can see is his upper body and his shaggy hair, and the dark beard that falls from his mouth. The same eyes, not broken, or sad, but on fire. And he tells me: “I’m going to throw the stove. You have to catch it.”
He roars, so much louder than the sea has ever been, and against the rain I yell back at him. I tell him no, wait. I tell him to wait because even though he’s told me he’ll throw the stove, I know what he’s doing. He’s giving up.
“We have to wait it out!” I yell. I tell him the pack will push us together eventually, and then I can help him get onto my floe. I tell him that’s what happened with Voley’s floe. And just like that, like my own hope is carried over the waves, into his spirit, energizing him after all these years, he tries to stand up. And with a slow and steady motion, I see his one leg press beneath him. I hold my breath and pray. And I start to believe, and star
t to think that he doesn’t even know his own strength, and his leg isn’t crushed, and in another minute he’ll be convinced that all we have to do is wait for the pack to close. But then, his slow movement comes to a halt, as he has to try to plant the other leg. And that’s when he crumples. With a violent scream, before he even tries to put weight on his smashed leg, but just to draw it up into the air to place the foot. And he rolls so close to the edge after he goes down that I rush forward, almost over the lip of my own floe, and scream to him. But he stops before he spills in, digging his hands into the shelf, and he peers up at me. He smiles, so wide and big. His eyes glow at me, even from twenty feet away I can see the shine in them. Like all of a sudden, he’s as happy as when we were in Philadelphia. And he’s looking right at me. I tell him as forcefully as I can: “You’re going to wait. Right there. Don’t move.” I try to sound like Ernest, strong and sure and able to see clearly into the future. To make Russell know that I can control the elements. “The storm will pass and the pack will close again,” I yell. But even as the words leave my mouth, mixing into the rain, the tears start to come from my eyes. They glide warmly down my cheeks, and behind me, Voley starts to whine, because he doesn’t like the shaking in my voice. And Russell just keeps on smiling, and he tells me, using the same steady roar that beats away the wind and the chop of the sea so that I can hear nothing else:
“I love you Tanner. I always have. No less than my daughter. I want you to know that. Okay?” he says. But I can’t keep looking at him, because I don’t want him to see me sob. I don’t want him to see that I’m buying it, what he wants it all to mean. I stiffen my throat and try to shut everything off. Just like I’ve always done. Like he’s taught me to do. Like I’ve become so good at. But it doesn’t work this time. And all that floods through me are the stories he’s always told me. Stories of our future. And how sure he was when he told them, always about what we were going to do once we found our home. Even before it was Leadville, it was the warm and the dry. A home together. It was always the two of us in it. Him running, playing his music, and me heading out for trouble, solving all the mysteries about who was stealing or who was hurting someone or who was taking care of someone. Or the times when we’d do nothing at all. Where there’d be warmth and food and shelter and there’d be nothing at all to do but be safe. And sit and enjoy the blue sky and the sunshine. And together we’d let it happen. Really slowly. And he’d finally tell me the details about his old life. The life before the rain. And I shout to him.
I scold him for his decision. I tell him that he can’t break his promise. I yell it at the top of my lungs, cursing into the rain and the spray and the wind, making sure my anger pierces him. Making sure he feels all of it. Like it’s the only thing powerful enough to stop him now. For me to make him know that he has to keep his promise to protect me. To get me to the warm and the dry. To find our home. Build up the veneer again. Where he has to tell me the rest of his stories he was always too tired to go into, but that I knew he didn’t want to open up about. I yell at him, saying that the rain beat us up too much but he can’t give up before he tells me everything. All the memories I’ll never have.
From all of my gushing and the shaking of my voice, Russell tries to stand again for me. To show me he’s listening. I watch his floe rise, and then his chest. And then it happens again, as he tries to put weight back onto his leg. It’s the same screaming yelp, somehow even worse, and he crashes again, just near the edge of the floe. And I realize he’s not even trying to stand to try to stand. He’s doing it for me. To make it easier for me to accept. So that I know it’s not his fault. So that I understand why. Voley dances nervously around me, and I warn him to stay back. The waves hit and burst over us, and I shiver and cry, and tell him that we have to wait out the storm. Wait out the pack.
Finally, his smile vanishes. And he talks like everything is just business as usual.
“I’m going to throw you everything I have. Some of it might not make it. But I’m going to give it a shot. And you’re going catch it, okay?”
It’s impossible for me to reply to him. But he says it again, more sternly, and I can only muster the energy to nod. And then he tells me he wants me to turn around. And for the first time since I woke up, I see where the pack’s pushed us. We’re about five feet off the edge of Spots’s floe. And beyond that, it looks like I could hop to the plane’s iceberg. It fires through me all the more, suddenly, to try to convince him. I try to speak calmly now, like he’s doing to me, to reason with him.
“The pack closed in here so it will close in on your side too,” I tell him. But he doesn’t say a word for the longest time. All I hear is the rain. I repeat myself. I say that it will close in on your side, bringing our floes together, just like it did behind, and with Voley. But he finally turns, looks at the horizon, and answers me. And part of me thinks he only waited to speak so that the fight would drain out of me, so that I’d believe he’d actually considered my plea, and that he’d truly thought about waiting. But he shakes his head at last and calls.
“No. Wind’s changed. We’re only going to drift farther apart. You don’t have much time close to the seal.” And then, just like that, he grunts and heaves up, bringing himself upright on his butt, somehow sitting on the pain of his smashed leg. This is it, he tells me. This is our only shot.
Our. The word rolls through my head as he grabs the bag. He still has it. Stove’s inside, and the knife, and the cup, he yells over the wind. And I know, even as he prepares his arm to throw, twisting around in circles to loosen his joints, that it isn’t our only shot anymore. It’s my only shot. That’s what he’s giving me. Voley and me. Our only shot. No longer any shot at all for him, but that’s how he’d said it. And with that, he tosses the bag. At first, it goes so high that I think it will sail clear past my floe. But then, just when the thing looks like it will keep gliding on, for one hundred feet, the wind lifts it and then drags it down, right near the center of the ice. Voley leaps in excitement and limps over to the bag. And then, when I turn to see that everything isn’t sliding out of it and into the sea, and that Voley isn’t going to sink into a slush pocket, Russell starts to take his shirt off. I call out to him but the words are unintelligible. I go to ask him what he’s doing, but I choke on the words. I choke because I know.
“When you reach the plane,” he says, still calm and business-like, “find the fuel line on the wing. Cut into it. Find a lighter in the cockpit. Get the stove going. Use the knife. Eat the seal.” And I watch speechlessly as he wads his shirt into a ball and puts it down on the ice next to himself, and then he starts to slide off his layers of pants. All of the things I want to say to him—all of the sharp protests—slide away from my consciousness. All I can muster is his name. Russell, I say. I say it so softly that he can’t hear it over the wind and the rain. And as he takes off everything, hidden from my view, and begins to tangle it all together into one heavy ball of all his protection left in the world, I say his name again, and keep repeating it, louder and louder, until I’m yelling it. But then I stop, as suddenly as I start, just when he grabs the ball into his throwing arm, and bare-chested, glares at me. And then, just before he launches it, the last of his possessions on Earth—a bloody mess of sweater, pants, socks, and underwear—he smiles again. The business is gone. It’s his face again—the one I love. It’s like the lines of his ribs and the shallow depressions of his cheeks are gone. And there is only his beautiful eyes and his handsome smile and his long hair, and his laughter. He smiles and laughs. You might not want to try to catch this one, he tells me. And he laughs again. And then, just for a moment, he turns back to his business voice. He tells me to put every goddamn piece of clothing on myself, no matter how bloody it is or how much it smells. And I know why he has to tell me as I look at myself, and realize that nothing could be more gross than my own bloody mess of clothing, smeared with sweat and grime and dirt and pus and crud. And for the first time, just as he’s about to throw, I tell him okay. �
�I will,” I promise. And all the tears stop, and I watch the mass of tangled clothes sail through the sky, just heavy enough to barely catch the edge of my floe. As they come down everything flies apart, and I see a sock go into the ocean. And in another moment a large wave crashes in, spitting up a heavy mist, and the sock is gone.
“Should have played football,” he yells. I want to yell back that he never taught me about football. And that’s the reason he can’t go. He has to stay so I can learn about it. But I can’t even say anything at all because my throat’s completely closed up as I pick up his clothes and gather them together.
“You two will do all right,” he says. “Don’t forget what I told you—bleed the fuel out of that plane. Scrape the metal until you get a spark if you have to. And you eat that damned seal. Eat him for me.”
And just like that, Russell starts to slide back, away from the edge of the floe. Retreating from my view. I yell for him not to go, but I know. He showed me why twice already. Even if the pack did close up, it might reopen on the side leading to the plane. And then we might all starve to death. But he wouldn’t make it to the plane. Because he’ll never walk again. And I can’t carry him that far or lift him by myself from the waves.
He slides, really slowly, until with each rise over a new crest, he disappears from my view for just a moment. And as the waves roll through, catching underneath our floe each time, and raising us up, I catch another glimpse of him, crawling back to the far edge. I choke out I love you, over and over, but not a single note leaves from my throat. And Voley sniffs Russell’s clothes and barks, and then he runs back with the other sock in his mouth, taking it to the center of the floe by the bag.
The Blue (The Complete Novel) Page 11