A Fountain Filled With Blood (41 page)

“Thank God,” she said. “Where were you?”

“Putting out a fire. You need to get out of there
now.”

“A fire!”

“Something threw a spark into a bunch of old pine needles three or four yards from here. I stomped it dead, but there could be a dozen others all around this place that we won’t see until they hit enough oxygen to bring ’em up. C’mon.” He thrust his hand down toward her. “Now.”

“We have to get Waxman out.”

“Leave him! He’s half-dead already. I’m not going to lose you trying to save somebody who’s neck-deep in Ingraham’s murder.”

She set her hands atop the tail boom and heaved herself up. With an agonized squeal, it sank beneath her like a teeter-totter, its fulcrum the hole it had blown in the rear of the helicopter. She stood up on the rounded form, her feet gripping at it through her sneakers. Her head was through the doorway.

“Good. Take my hand. We’ll have you out of there in no time.”

She held up her hands, but instead of clutching his wrist, she threaded her fingers through his. “I can’t leave him behind.” She looked into his eyes, willing him to understand her. “It was my idea to bring him out with the helicopter. I was at the controls when we went down.” To her mortification, she felt her eyes begin to tear up. She squeezed them shut. “If we had done what you suggested, the Mountain Rescue people would already be on their way to get him out of the ravine.” She opened her eyes again, blinking hard against unwanted emotion. “I can’t leave him behind. I can’t.”

He let go of her hands, and for a moment she thought she had failed to persuade him. Then he took her face between his hands and rocked it back and forth. “What am I going to do with you?” he said.

It didn’t seem like a question requiring an answer. He released her. “As quickly as possible,” he said. “Every second counts.”

She nodded and slid off the tail boom. “There’s a fire extinguisher behind the pilot’s seat,” she called up.

“I’ll get it,” he said. She saw him reach through the pilot’s door and yank the extinguisher free. Then he dropped over the edge of the cabin door, hitting the now-stabilized tail boom with a thud and sliding to the floor in her wake. He glanced around at the cabin wreckage. “Wait.” He grabbed Waxman’s backpack and hurtled it through the open doorway. “Okay, let’s get him on top of this thing.”

They each squatted at one end of the unconscious man, Clare at his head and Russ at his feet. “One, two, three,” she said, and they lifted him onto the tail boom.

Russ looked at the raggedly wrapped form and shook his head. “Can you climb through the door by yourself?”

“Sure,” she said.

“I’ll hand you up the webbing and then climb out myself. Between the two of us, we can fish him out.”

Clare climbed onto the tail boom and straddled Waxman’s body. She crouched down and jumped, her abdomen hitting the edge of the doorway, forcing out a loud “Ooof!” but gaining her enough leverage to swing first one leg and then another up onto the door frame. Immediately, Russ thrust two handfuls of webbing at her. She grabbed them as he began hoisting himself. In a minute, he sat facing her across the opening. She pulled up more webbing, handing him the leading edge, and he leaned forward, drawing it to him until the webbing hung between their hands like a fishing net waiting to be cast.

“Okay?” she said. He nodded.

Gripping their catch, they each got to their feet, teetering on the edge of the frame for balance while bending down so as to not loose the webbing they were drawing taut.

“Ready?” he said.

“Let’s do it.”

She reached down, tangled her fingers in the webbing, and heaved, her biceps contracting into a hard bunch. Across the doorway, Russ did the same. She reached and pulled. He reached and pulled. Waxman rose from the depths.

“‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,’” she quoted. She felt almost giddy, buoyed up by the conviction that at least here and now, she was where she was meant to be, doing what she was supposed to do.

Russ grunted. One more pull and the unconscious geologist was out of the cabin, hanging between them. Russ jerked his head toward the lower edge of the doorway. Awkwardly, they sidestepped until they could rest him on the helicopter’s pitted skin. Russ sat down by Waxman’s head and she followed suit.

“Lower him to the ground,” Russ said. Leaning back, they eased him over the ship’s belly onto the raw dirt. Clare followed, sliding down with a thump, which was echoed a moment later by Russ, fire extinguisher in hand. “Now,” he said, “can we please get out of here?”

“Oh yes.”

Russ shouldered Waxman’s backpack and picked up the webbing above the man’s head. Standing at Waxman’s feet, Clare did the same. They shuffled awkwardly uphill with him, his legs bumping into Clare’s shin and the aluminum struts poking into Russ’s calves. Russ twisted back, as if he was going to say something to her, but his face went pale as he looked over her shoulder.

She turned to see, and her eyes immediately caught sight of a curl of flame and smoke scarcely bigger than if coming from a pipe bowl. It crackled through a pile of dried leaves beyond the remnants of the helicopter’s tail.

“Double time,” she said, her voice higher than usual.

Russ glanced at the fire extinguisher, which was still dangling from one hand, and threw it toward the helicopter. Lopsided, they sprinted up the hill, the geologist’s body swinging and banging into their legs with bruising force, their free arms churning to counterbalance the load. Clare beat against the hill, attempting to keep pace with Russ’s longer stride, trying not to slip as the almost-smooth soles of her sneakers skidded against the dirt and tufts of grass.

They reached the top and headed down the other side without pausing, dodging trees and saplings, picking up momentum until they were loping. Her arm and shoulder were burning and cramping with Waxman’s weight. She staggered as the ground beneath her rose again and they lurched upward to another small summit.

“Stream,” Russ gasped out, pointing with his free hand to a rock-bottomed brook below them. They plummeted down toward it, thrashing through thick ferns that obscured the forest floor. A rock rolled beneath her heel and she went down on her backside with bone-jarring force but kept her forward momentum so that she rolled up again and continued with only a break in stride.

They had just reached the stream when an enormous
whumpf
sent them sprawling on their bellies. It was like the hammer of God striking the forest, a sound so huge, it seemed a solid thing pressing them down. Clare could feel the air around them compress, causing pressure in her inner ears. Then came the rush of hot wind, blasting out through the forest, shaking leaves wildly and sending a torrent of birds squawking into the skies. Then the wind was gone, like a departed train, and she could hear a clattering, crackling, roaring noise from where they had left the helicopter and the pipe bowl’s worth of smoke.

She rolled over and sat up. Russ pushed himself onto his knees. She looked at him, amazed, excited, and profoundly grateful to be sitting there, filthy, sweat-stained, aching in every muscle.

“We made it!” she said.

He dropped to his hands and knees and threw up.

Russ was conscious of two things: the sour taste in his mouth and the cold water pouring over his head and shoulders.

He heard a voice making sympathetic noises, felt the weight of the backpack being lifted off him, the straps tugging over his arms. His ribs ached, his knees were throbbing, and the slow wind rolling over him felt like waves of heat from a furnace grate. The fire. The explosion. The crash. Involuntarily, his stomach spasmed again, trying to wring out the last ounce of bile.

“Rinse your mouth with this.” Clare bent over him, water brimming in her cupped hands. He slurped a mouthful, swished it around his mouth, and spit it out.

“More?” he managed to say. She reappeared with another handful of water. He gargled it into the back of his throat and spat again. She wiped the rest of the water on his face.

He sat back on his haunches. “Sorry.”

She was all practicality. “Take off your shirt. I’ll soak it in the stream. You’ll feel better.” Her matter-of-fact attitude helped him feel less embarrassed about tossing his lunch. He peeled off the stinking, sweat-soaked garment, and when she brought it back, he rubbed the sopping cloth over his face, neck, and hair before putting it on. It was shockingly cold for a moment, before his skin got accustomed to the clinging wet. The cool barrier against the heat attacking him everywhere helped him to breathe again. He sank back into the ferns. Clare sat beside him, cross-legged. She reached out and began stroking his forehead, pushing his wet hair back, her hand cool and firm. And her touch undid him, just undid him. He felt a knot in his chest loosen, and there he was, opened like a package. He closed his eyes.

“We were flying into the central highlands. It was hot, heavy VC activity in the area, and the artillery units were hammering the place night and day, laying down fire to clear out enough space for the slicks to land and for the squads to set up their perimeters. So we’re in the chopper, me and my friend Mac and a bunch of other guys and our lieutenant.” He opened his eyes, looking into the green leaves above him. “We were kind of goofing, getting ourselves revved up, ’cause we figured we were dropping straight into a firefight. All of a sudden, we get hit. The helicopter starts to drop. The pilot’s screaming, ‘Jump! Jump!’ and the chopper’s bucking like a bronco and we’re all hanging on for dear life. I could see out the door we weren’t too far above the trees. The lieutenant yells, ‘Come on,’ and me and Mac stand up, but the other three guys are yelling that there was no fucking way they were going to jump into the fucking jungle. The pilot’s still screaming, ‘Jump, jump,’ and I look at Mac and he kind of shrugs. The lieutenant sees it, and he slaps his pistol into my hand and yells, ‘Go for it,’ like he’s got to stay with the other guys, maybe persuade them off. Like he had more than a minute anyway. So we jumped. Mac and me.”

He glanced at Clare. She was sitting very still, not looking at him directly, looking just past him, as if the ferns were something she had never seen before. She nodded without taking her eyes off the ferns.

“I bounced down through some trees, and next thing I know, I’m on the ground. Right away, I knew I had broken both my legs. I’m looking around for Mac, when the whole sky lights up. The slick had crashed and exploded. And I could hear…there was so much noise, but I could hear guys screaming and screaming like animals trapped in a burning barn.” He paused for a moment. “Then over the sound, I can hear Mac. Above me. He’s kind of sobbing and moaning. And for a while, in the light from the fire, I could see what had happened to him.” He shut his mouth for a moment. “I don’t know how long it went on. When I remember it, it seems like an hour, but it couldn’t have been. Mac hanging in the tree, going, ‘Kill me, Christ, kill me,’ and crying. And the noise from the chopper dying down, the fire burning out. And I knew…knew Charlie was closing in on us, and that as soon as the VC heard Mac, they would find us. So I…I took the lieutenant’s gun and I…did what Mac wanted.”

She took his hand in hers and squeezed hard.

“They came about a half hour after. They didn’t find me, and no one else was alive, so they went away after awhile. I tried dragging myself a ways, but where could I go with two broken legs? So I gave up and laid there in the brush beneath the tree until this squad of marines came around and hauled my ass out.”

Clare laid her other hand on top of his. “How long were you there?”

“Two days.”

“Beneath the tree.”

“Yeah.” He looked at her directly for the first time. “Only three people have ever heard about this. And you’re the third.”

She rubbed his hand between hers.

“I didn’t tell you so you’d feel sorry for me.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you. I—” She shut her eyes slowly and then opened them again. “I hurt. For what you had to go through. For the boy you were. For what you have to keep in your head.”

They were both silent for a moment. He felt lighter somehow, as if he’d been lifting weights for a long time and then put them down and taken a cool shower. Tired out, but fresh at the same time.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For being there. For going over and doing what you did. For being faithful to your country even when what your country asked of you was terrible and futile and confused. Thank you.”

He started to laugh. “Only you, Clare. Only you.”

He let go of her hand and stood up, his legs trembling and his sides aching. Clare rose in front of him, holding his glasses. He hadn’t even realized they had come off.

He put them on and glanced up the last hill. No signs of fire. He recalled, from the weekly volunteer fire department’s report, that the hazard was low to moderate. Still, it didn’t mean they weren’t in danger. He looked downstream. God. Right now, he felt as if he would collapse if he had to take one more step.

Clare touched his arm. Her hand was still wet. “Do you…Should I…” She pressed her lips together and shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she said, “What do you need to do right now and how can I help you?”

He felt an ache, a tenderness so real, he thought he might see a bruise on his sternum if he looked beneath his soggy shirt. He knew if he wanted to, he could lie down in the ferns and have her bring him handfuls of water. Knew that if he sent her ahead to find help, she would do it. Knew if he said he couldn’t go on, she’d make a travois for Waxman and drag him out of this forest. She didn’t need him to be the leader, to make decisions, to stand in front. And because she didn’t, he found he could take that one more step after all.

“Let’s head downstream.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “If it doesn’t take us anywhere, at least it’ll be easier than hiking over these hills.”

She looked at him carefully, as if measuring his ability against his words. Then she smiled. “Let’s go.”