The Blue (The Complete Novel)

by Turkot, Joseph

  The rain seems to grow louder on purpose as I try to separate pelting drops on metal from footsteps inside the plane, traveling along the interior hallway, a downward slope right out to the floe. He’s dead, I tell myself, trying to work up the nerve to move far enough out from under the wing to glance up at the window again. To see the smushed face again. Unmoved. But it takes another five minutes of sameness before I’m convinced he didn’t hear me. Or thought it was just the noise of the rain. Or is dead. And when I finally draw myself out, edging away from the wing porch far enough to peer straight up, I see nothing. A poor angle. I look back at Voley, and he’s resting, lying down on the patch of rainless triangle. Gritting my teeth I take another step and twist quickly, ready to pull back and hide, so that I can still perform an ambush if I have to. That’s when I see the eyes.

  They’re wide open, pointed at such a hard angle downward that I think the man is looking right at me. And with the connection of our gazes, I cannot move—I’m paralyzed, holding the knife, and I wait for him to jump out of the seat and run out after me. Or raise a pistol and shoot right through the glass, killing me and stranding Voley. But his eyes don’t even blink, and he never rises up. And from the raw color and hardened lines of the face that I can see under the pressed hair, he looks like a plastic doll. And I know—I’ve seen that skin enough times—he’s dead. The corpse never blinks, and when Voley comes over to see why I’m stuck, I’m already telling him to come after me, and cautiously, we step over the mangled break in the plane and walk all the way around to the door.

  Its lower hinge is snapped off and there’s a gaping hole right next to it, like someone tried to blast out of the plane while it was flying. I wonder if there was an argument on board, maybe about which way the plane should be traveling, and one of the passengers took it down. And then, only taking a moment to examine the mangled black metal surrounding the other side of the plane, I step through the door.

  The aisle is cramped and narrow and runs up like a hill. The air smells stale. Everything is much darker than the storm-gray skies dimming the pack outside. And there, three rows of chairs high and deep is the man, wedged against the glass. I glance behind me and see the cockpit. Or what’s left of it. The entire front of the plane is buried under the ice, and all I can make out is the top of one of the pilot chairs and the broken glass of a windshield that merged into the ceiling metal. And then the ice blends with the snow and the frost and the metal and the glass and it all becomes one thing. But the hand. I see it raised out, just a bit of a forearm. The rest of the body submerged. I turn away, and even as I take my first uphill step, grabbing the back of a chair to pull myself while Voley watches, the dreams of Russell rush through my head.

  I hear him talking—the plane will have food. A raft. Fuel. Maybe a map. Supplies—maybe another gun. He talked for hours about the plane, and all that time, I’d thought I’d tuned him out. Pushed away his delirium, thinking we were only marching to die under the blue. And now I’m in the plane. The taps of the rain overhead remind me that the blue isn’t even here to die under anymore, replaced by the return of the rain and the waves and the wind and a complete steel sky. And as I pull myself, one limb after the next, up the slippery center aisle, looking at the overhead compartments and the burnt seats and the floor, searching for something, anything but the body, I see nothing. Like someone ransacked every one of Russell’s dreams before the fire in the plane even went out. Someone else must have survived and stripped the thing. And then, right before the body, I stop to the sound of a loud creaking.

  It sounds like the whole raised part of the plane is going to crash back down to the ice, and then there’ll be ripping metal, and it will cut me open and leave me here, buried next to the stranger until the great floe melts into the sea, and we’ll all go down together, a shared tomb, somewhere down in the silent and watery towns and roadways far below. All of this a reef. But my feet still feel sturdy, and the plane doesn’t even budge, and my mind turns sharply to the man. For some reason, now that I know the plane’s stable, I expect the loud creaking to wake him up. As if I’ve forgotten he’s dead. And I wait, strangely, with the knife drawn and pointed out, ready to slash his face if he moves. But there’s no movement, and after a long spell of fear, I decide to turn his head around.

  I extend my glove slowly, touching the crispy hair that’s frozen like a sheet, and try to twist his neck around. The body is one rigid mass of dead weight, and with my first push, nothing happens. I try again, much harder this time, and the whole body twists with his head—like he’s a frozen solid joint, one single ice cube. But when I let go, and he resettles against the window with a thud, his face is slightly turned. Just enough that I can make out his lips and his nose. I watch the lips, and then the nose, seeing the steam rise from my own breath but waiting for it to come from his too. And all of the sudden, like I’m entranced with a corpse and it doesn’t make any sense, I realize that I want him to be alive. That I’m more scared of being alone than him being alive. But he doesn’t come to life and he won’t, and I remember Russell’s words again. The wind will push the pack apart. And I know I have to get back to Spots, so that we can eat him before he drifts too far away. I have to make it back across the bridge of ice, up the ridge again, and then down, and over the gap, and somehow salvage the body. But you never told me how, I say back to him.

  The fact rolls through my head, becoming more of a question, one I can’t help but direct to Russell. How am I supposed to eat it—or bring it here—you never told me how. It’s too heavy. And the only thing that buries my thought and moves me into action is the sight of an open overhead compartment. All the way near the tip of the plane. So high that I might not even be able to make it up there to reach. But what I see forces me to try. Hanging over the edge, like at the top of a charred pyramid, is a red plastic box with a first aid sticker. And next to it is another black box. It’s too dark to see for sure but the red box looks open. And without spending another thought on the seal or the corpse I wrap my hands around the next seat, and with a grunt, I pull myself up another seat. The jarring scream of metal warns me as I put my weight on the back legs of the seat behind me, planting my feet while holding on to the head of the chair above me. I crane my neck to see the corpse’s scalp, and then down at the bottom, Voley, sniffing and licking around near the doorway. The only thing I see are the glass shards, scattered into the ice, and I yell at him to stop. Stop licking boy! He listens to me just for a moment, licks again, and then runs outside the plane. I try to follow him as he passes the slanted porthole windows, and I catch a glimpse of him going, and then, when it seems like he’s right under the plane, hiding beneath the wing porch again, he vanishes from my view. Get back here! I call again and again. I try four times and he won’t come back. And then, my eyes fall upon the boxes again. I think of the stove, and how there has to be a lighter in one of the plastic cases. Find the fuel lines. Use the knife—he’d said that. And with a wakened obsession for warmth, I take the next step.

  The plane’s moaning sounds more horrific than the last step, and everything in me tells me to stop, because Voley must be walking around underneath the plane. It’s going to fall, I tell myself. But there are only two more seats to go, and with a little stretching, I can knock the cases off and they’ll slide right down to the cockpit. I try one more time, calling to Voley, but he doesn’t answer. And knowing I might not ever have the energy to do this again, I take three deep breaths, clench tightly around the tops of the next set of chairs, and kick my left leg up, and lodge my heel behind the bracket where it’s bolted into the floor. Burning with pain, the other leg follows, and my upper body sacrifices everything it has. By the time I haul myself so that I’m only one chair away, I realize the plane didn’t even make a sound this time. No more cracking or breaking of the fire-burnt shell. It’s strong enough to hold. And it wants me to have its treasure.

  With one more glance at the portholes, checking for Voley, and not seeing him, I call. St
ay back, boy. He doesn’t appear, but I’m too high up now, and I have to try. I repeat the whole process, as gently as I can, and as soon as both my feet are planted on the back of the next set of seats, the noise starts again. It pierces my ears and this time, it doesn’t stop. The last thing I hear is the screaming metal and desperate barks, as the most horrible feeling of freefall starts.

  Chapter 18

  I wake up to the strangest feeling—I’m in a dream I’ve had before—a bolt of gold, baking me with its heat. From a blur of green, I realize it’s the field. The place Dusty showed me. And he must be somewhere around here. But when I open my eyes to see him, all that’s in sight is the twisted black metal of the plane. And the splitting in my head. Pounding pain. And the second I remember to call for Voley, I see the light that’s heating me. A bright glare channeling through the porthole over my head. Voley, I manage to whimper. And when I sit up, the first noise I hear is the pattering of feet. I look down the row of seats and see him—just his head, poking through the flattened wreck. He’s down by where the door used to be. And between us is the body of the man. Face up on the aisle floor, taking in the heat too. And then, after the throbbing in my head subsides with the movement of my arms and legs, I notice. The sound of the rain. It’s gone. And for some reason, it’s hot in the belly of the plane.

  I reach up and grab onto the seat next to me and pull myself up. The aisle is flat and the end of the plane, where the door was, is torn away. Just a clear hole leading to the outside. And right there, on the ground behind me, are the boxes. Red and black plastic. But it’s something else that catches my attention. A liquid. Running along the floor in a small trail from where the fractured metal wall ripped away, right near the first two seats. I step carefully, more to discover how sharply my calf will sting than to not trip, and then bend low to the ground, all the way down, until my nose is pressed right against the shiny streak. Fuel.

  Voley rushes over to me, curious about what I’m sniffing. He wants to smell it too, and then he backs away sharply from the acrid odor. Still, he comes back toward it, licking the ground nearby. And then, he works his way over to the body. And just like the seal, he starts to lick around the face. I turn away before my mind convinces me he’s going to try to bite it.

  Come on boy—outside, I tell him. We step over the boxes, and surprisingly, as I make my way outside, the pain in my calf seems only half as bad as before. Like the collapse of the plane that should have killed us both restored me instead. And as soon as we leave the interior of the plane’s belly, I see it. We’re directly under the blue.

  I look up, entranced. Just the cleanest cut of color, separating the deep blue from the endless gray everything of Colorado. But there, crushingly bright, more than I remember it ever being in my dreams, or the descriptions Russell told me, is the sun. A blinding disc that forces me to close my eyes, but even then, I still see it. Blinking on its own in the darkness behind my lids. And even once I look away, down at the ice, and back at the charred armor of the plane, the sun is still there. Branded on my sight. I keep blinking and wonder if I screwed up. Looked too long, and now I’ve ruined my eyesight. My first instinct is to ask Russell. Ask him if it will go away. What should I do? But I sit and push the thoughts away as the pain of my headache roars back. And I sit down, right in a running pool of slush.

  The first thing I notice when my sight returns to normal is the movement in the slush. The water all running somewhere, like a funnel. The top layer of the great Plane Floe being melted away by the blue. And the plane, the migraine maker, an oven of warmth, must be carving its own dent, hidden beneath its body. My first instinct is to go back inside and enjoy it. But I know better—the heat won’t last. The rain will come back, or the blue will disappear, or night will come. But either way it will be cold again, and I need to collect the fuel.

  Voley follows me around to the bag, lying just on the other side where we left it and near to the line of flowing melt. I watch the stream for a moment, to see where it runs, and it looks like it’s moving all the way down toward the ice bridge. And then, turning back, I see a hundred other streams of different sizes. For a moment I want to run back along the ice bridge, and then up the ridge, to get a look out at the pack. To see if it’s breaking up even more. Or if it’s closing in. To see if…

  I reach into the bag and take out the stove. Then the cup. And against the pain of my leg and my brain, I search the back of the plane where it cracked and fell back down to the earth. Above me are the giant cylinders of the engine, and when I turn and look inside them, I see the enormous blades that spin to keep it up. I wonder if something got into them, and that’s why it came down, or if a fight really did break out on board. I wonder for a moment about the pilot, and the copilot, and which one of them was buried under the snow, hand sticking out. And if they’re both under there. Lying inside the shell. But all the mysteries evaporate at the sight of a different kind of running liquid—I notice it first from a drip that hits my cheek. I lift my fingers and smear it a bit and then hold it to my nose. Fuel.

  Looking along the fracture, I find a line running up toward the engine that looks wet in spots. And then, when I see where it’s pooling, along the giant cylinder, which is only a bit above my head now, I wait. Watching. But I realize all that I have to do is look down. And there it is—a tiny grease well in the snow, widening almost to the point that it touches one of the running melt rivers. I squat down without a yelp of noise, Voley watching intently, and grind the cup into the ground, just in the ice where the fuel drips onto. And then, almost as soon as I stand back up, the first clink comes. I think about if there’s any way I can speed it up, and I remember Russell telling me to use the knife. Maybe to stab into the plane and draw out its blood. I fetch the knife and raise it up, pointing the blade right into the crack where the fuel is pooling. At first it doesn’t give at all, and it feels like the knife blade will snap in half. But then, when I start to wiggle back and forth, the drops start to come faster. Clink after clink in rapid succession. My arms tire and I drop them down, looking back to Voley and then up at the ridge behind us. Just for a second, I feel almost hot. Like I want to strip everything off. And then, the knife is back up, digging and then wiggling, back and forth, until there’s almost a steady stream of drops.

  When the cup’s filling steadily, after four more arm rests, I sit down to catch my breath. Like even the tiniest exertion is winding me. I draw quick breaths and pet Voley, who drinks from the slush. And then it hits me—the headache is from dehydration. And I can’t even start to think about the feelings in my stomach. The phantom vision of the sun appears when I close my eyes, making me afraid now to look at the blue anymore for fear that it will blind me, as I lower my head into the stream next to Voley.

  My entire head I press into the melt. For the first time in forever, the cold feels good against my skin. I cup my hands and fill my mouth and swallow over and over, until I trick my stomach into thinking it’s full. And then, I grab some of the melt and rub it along my hair, and the rest of my face. When a few minutes of peace go by, and with Voley relaxing by my side under the shade of the wing, I almost feel like nothing’s wrong. And then, all at once, I remember Spots.

  I almost want to tell Voley to stay here, because I don’t want to go through worrying about him slipping off the ice bridge again, but I know he won’t listen. And part of me knows that I don’t want him out of my sight any more. So we rise up, leaving the half-filled cup of fuel to collect more, and head out. We go alongside the racing streams of the blue fissure lines, all running toward the bridge.

  When I take my first few steps onto the bridge, I realize the top layer is still as slippery as yesterday, even without the rain coming down. Almost more slippery. But it hasn’t gotten any narrower, and we’re across and starting up the high ridge in only a few minutes. And then, just when I’ve convinced myself that the cracking of the plane was a blessing, and that instead of killing me in the fall, or crushing Voley underneath, it
opened the fuel line and brought the blue back and vanquished the rain, and gave me the sleep for my calf to finally harden over and heal, the pain lights up again. It starts when the incline becomes steep, and with each heave off from my right side, as brief as I try to make it, the nerve fire explodes.

  After about a quarter of the way up, I stop, struggling for breath, and look back at Voley. He stays behind me for some reason, and when I stop, he just looks and waits. I kneel down, pack in some ice along the strange pus around my gash, and then, when some kind of numbness begins to settle over the muscle, I start up again.

  When we reach the top, I can barely breathe. It takes two minutes just for the scene to register, and when it does, I realize the truth. That even the strong Plane Floe won’t be alive much longer. Because out over the horizon are just a million fragments of the thousand that were there yesterday, as if they’ve each split themselves once or twice. And then, on top of that, the wind blew them farther apart. They bob up and down like white diamonds over the small swells, and the reason I came up returns to me. But as much as I try, I can’t even find the floe Spots was on. It must have split too. And when I do find it, tracing a nearby floe, following its distinctive shelf, I’m convinced. That’s the one he was on, I tell Voley, whose tongue dangles down, crazed from starvation, wondering if we can cut the seal open soon. But I have to tell him. He’s gone—the sea’s got him now. And with our only source of food gone, we turn around, back down the ridge, piecemeal bursts and slow, using up everything I have just to not spill over, until I remember to just slide.

  The view coming down looks the same as on the other side—everything a wide sea with dotted ice flats, except for Plane Floe. The last runway for an out-of-control jet over the hopeless Colorado Pack.