Lighthouse Island (26 page)

 

Chapter 35

T
he stairway was of the rosy Crow Creek granite with recessed lighting. She ran down broad stone steps, a wheelchair ramp alongside. At the bottom she came to the pool.

James floated in the polished water with bright spikes of light all around him. The intense lighting flooded the walls with water radiance and his wet hands sparkled as they stroked the surface. The air was steamy with humidity and all was in rich and somber tones. Artificial plants held up skillfully designed leaves.

Nadia stood with her battered tote bag, her sagging hat, her striped leggings, and her shawl in the oceanic light. James drifted in the water, his legs white and unmanned, his gray eyes regarding her. Nadia felt like a mail-order bride with the wrong name who had been sent to the wrong address. The silk plants dripped slowly and his wheelchair was backed against the wall as if it had been accused of some crime.

James?

Nadia, he said. He gripped the bars of the ladder. Nadia.

She dropped her tote bag and hurried on the slippery tiles. She set the tray on a glass-topped table. The bottle toppled and broke in a spray of glass and wine.

James. I'm here.

He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the steel tubing of the ladder. I died several times over, he said. You're here.

Nadia flung off the coat and shawl, the striped leggings and the lavender gloves, her soggy hat, and then the disreputable tunic and skirt. She kicked off her red polka-dot shoes.

Before he could say anything she splashed into the water in her underwear. Her thin arms were like sticks. She touched bottom and stood upright in a burst of spray. She stretched out her hands and he took them and pulled her through the water with his powerful arms and gripped her body in a kind of seizure. He took her hair in one hand and kissed her mouth and her forehead and shoulders. Xenia, he said. The Lost Princess of Lighthouse Island.

Neither one of them said anything but only listened to the slight booming sounds of the water galloping along the sides of the pool. The water was warm and the air vents overhead made slow breathing noises. She was caught in his iron grip and his muscular chest and arms were like pistons and it seemed she could not take him in enough, his gray eyes and the plain face.

I was helpless to do anything but wait. He said this into her dripping hair. Wait, wait, wait. You made it. You're here.

I talked to the elderly lady upstairs. Who is she? How long do we have?

Not long. He put his hands on each side of her wet head and looked into her eyes.

She held on to his forearms. Can you walk now?

A few steps. My brother will fly us north. My baggage and the equipment are stored at the airstrip.

Won't Forensics know?

Not so far.

He kissed her again and she felt as if she would dissolve in the miraculous water that surrounded them and held them up in an effortless floating. The way water talked and spoke and the way shelled hearts opened in high tides. Finally she said, So much has happened.

He wiped her hair back from her eyes and stared at her face.

There will be time to talk later. We have to move. But still he touched her face and eyes as they drifted in the lighted water. The jumping waves threw planes of light across the recessed ceiling as they held each other, dangerously close to some irrevocable deadline.

She said, You knew my father. Thin Sam was my father.

No. Your father's brother. That's my mother upstairs. Is she saying I killed the maid?

Heather? Nadia still held to his arms.

Yes.

She says Farrell did it.

God. Who knows what happens to our souls when we fall into senility? He pressed his forehead against hers and closed his eyes. You can't know how I felt, waiting for you. Hoping to not be arrested before you arrived, hoping you would get through to here, unable to go and find you for fear of being taken myself. Unable even to run were the agency officers to come after me. I would rather die than live like this.

We're not going to die.

I know. It's all all right.

You're a friend. The only friend I have in the world.

Surely not.

I wouldn't lie to you.

He smiled. Let's go.

She climbed out of the water by the pool ladder and when she turned on her bare, white feet to help him, James impatiently waved her away. He pulled himself up with his thick forearms, and then stepped carefully and precisely on the grainy step and stood up holding the ladder rails. His legs were mere pipes of bone and he was pale as the water. Nadia clasped her hands to keep from reaching for him but his eyes were not on her but on his wheelchair with its prosthetic look and its grim spokes.

He clasped the handholds for a moment and then with a silent concentration took four steps to where his clothes lay over a chair. He leaned against the wall to dress himself and then sat in the wheelchair and pulled on thick socks and new heavy shoes. Then for a moment he dropped his head back.

Come. Put your bag on the back, there's a small shelf and an elastic tie. Get dressed. Hurry, you should never have jumped into the pool, hurry.

What about your mother?

My brother will take her south. The Facilitator has been forced out and storms are upon us. The confusion works in our favor.

His hands grasped the wheel rims and he turned and rolled up the wheelchair ramp with Nadia running behind him.

A
s they came to the kitchen with its amazing refrigerator they heard low voices and laughter. James stopped his right-hand wheel as they came through the door.

Two Forensics men were making sandwiches. They smiled at James and Nadia with a kind of mechanical delight. Tissue engineering made their eyes move in jerks and their faces were artificial with elaborate tattoos. They were big strong men and they smelled like snow and wool.

Hi! said one. Hi!

The other one said, We'll just make up these sandwiches here and then we'll get you arrested. We'll need your signature. He slapped mustard on a slice of brown bread. This is good roast beef. We'll need your signature.

Nadia grasped the door frame, her mouth stupidly open. Far down the hall she heard a newscast going on and on and briefly the face of a maid or attendant who was most likely Heather appeared in the hall beyond the kitchen door with her mouth in a round horrified O. Then she disappeared.

Very well, said James. But I will want a lawyer. He shifted in the wheelchair to get at his coat pocket. I have a right to a lawyer.

No problemo, said one. They began to wrap their sandwiches in waxed paper and they were all easy authority and threat. One of them said, This woman is Sendra Bentley. She'll have to sign the arrest form agreeing to official detention, and a copy goes back to Book Dump.

Nadia stood with one hand on the wheelchair push-handle. She thought for one second of fleeing alone out of the kitchen and down the hall and out into the luxurious world of Fremont Glacier Estates. Instead she looked around for something to throw, a kitchen knife, anything. She took up a framed photograph and threw it in a slicing motion straight at the man on the left, and at the same time James's hand appeared from his coat pocket with the dart gun. The photograph hit the shelf of wineglasses, they shattered, and he shot one of the agents in the eye and the other in the neck.

The dart gun made only a light pop. The darts were propelled by CO
2
cartridges and were loaded with four hundred milligrams of a conotoxin derivative that left both the Forensics men paralyzed on the kitchen floor surrounded by bread and mustard and broken plates and thrown pieces of roast beef, glass splinters. Their lips worked as the neurotoxin shut down their breathing. Light foams of blood and sputum bubbled out of their mouths. The taller lay on one side still as a mannequin making long snoring noises and the dart wobbled where it had lodged just to one side of the pupil.

James wheeled his chair next to the head of the taller one and reached down and grasped the snake-eye earbud and wrenched it out. As he did so a long string of tissue and blood came out with it, longer and longer, until he finally ripped it loose and flung it across the room like a loop of intestine. Blood spattered.

They'll be dead in an hour, said James. Time to go.

As they fled through the house, the electricity failed and the TV went silent.

 

Chapter 36

This is the end. We must come to the end. It can't go on forever, not like the endless soap opera of our dreams, that go on and on every night of our lives until we die. Then good-bye to the messy dreams of overpopulated rooms and brief, pointless conversations and darkened hallways. We are surprised and terrified by forks, by kitchen chairs, by falls down undefined spaces without bottoms, accused of actions that deserve the death penalty such as wearing white shoes after Labor Day, such as forgetting to fill the birdfeeder. Who stands in our defense? It is not about the birdfeeder.

—Facilitator Brian Wei

A
DC-3 is a conveyance that leaves you wondering how human beings invented flight not to speak of the complexities of the flight deck: the hydraulics, the gear-flap activator, the throttle-prop mixture and fuel tank selector valves, as well as the overhead panel with its starting switches and radio gear and between the pilot and copilot seats a console with knobbed handles. And the man who has his hand on the controls, his eyes on the various instruments, the man who knows how to fly it, who invented him? What cunning hand or eye.

Nadia is unimportant among all these people, a girl whose only accomplishment is having memorized whole libraries of old poetry, whose only occupation has been evading the authorities, whose only distinction is that James loves her. He trusts her. She is a nobody. She has an eye in her coat pocket.

S
he stood at the edge of the long runway with her hands on the back of James's wheelchair. Small round clouds tumbled one over another at a low altitude, revolving, rushing away from something even more furious coming up behind them. She had never imagined she would be allowed on an airplane. She put one hand on her head to hold down her hat. The airplane's nose was in the air and its two motors socketed on the wings like giant biceps. It seemed blocky and trustworthy. Even if she died she wouldn't care. She would have been in flight over the earth itself, however briefly. In flight from killing and threats of being killed, airborne toward the unknown.

Farrell came running toward them, bent over, his earphones around his neck. He was dressed in a short flight jacket and khaki pants. He looked like James but stockier, his hair not so thick. A storm was stalking them in long, spectral columns.

Farrell said, We dragged them out and left them in a recycle pitch. My crew wanted to take the bodies and throw them out over Mount Fremont but I said we'd never get the door closed again. The dam is spewing overflow water at both ends. He turned to Nadia. You, Farrell said. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and stood in front of her. You talked him into this.

Farrell, said James. Stop. This is what I want. We're going to the island. James thrust himself about here and there in his seat. I never knew if I could do it if it came to it but I did.

For her, said Farrell. I've seen you fall all over yourself for a trollop before now. She's using you.

Nadia opened her mouth to say something. Then she realized it was a fight between brothers. She closed her mouth and tried to appear honest, competent, and resolute.

James said, You gave me a promise and I'm holding you to it. Do you hear me? He bent forward with his forearms on his thighs and his hands clasped so that his knuckles were white and the bitter, rainy wind beat at them. It brought the smell of aviation fuel and wet concrete and mud and distant snows. I said, do you hear me?

Yes, yes, I did, said Farrell. But it was a long time ago. If you want to die, it should be in a hospital.

There's a chance I'll live, said James. I've fallen in love. Both things can happen.

Farrell turned again to Nadia. You've seduced a sick man. A sick man in a wheelchair. When you get to Lighthouse Island you'll abandon him. You'll have got what you wanted.

Nadia bit her lip and tears started in her eyes.

James said, Farrell, I don't know what I can say to shut you up about this.

The medication will probably kill you.

I'm adjusting to it. What do I have to lose?

Your life.

Stay out of this, Farrell.

That is so untrue, said Nadia. Words were not enough but she said them anyway. What you said was totally untrue.

Farrell turned away.

The engines were roaring, the props spun. The mechanics carried rifles. They laid down their weapons on a wooden pallet and threw down a flat ramp from the door in the fuselage. They unbolted one of the rear seats so they could place James in his wheelchair in the slot.

James said, What about Mother?

They are putting her aboard a Tekkna 22. Elliot and Bob Morely and Findlay, they came in on foot. I called them on the last call on the dedicated phone. Elliot got Findlay out of the interrogation center in the bucket of a front-end loader. They took the wall down. His wife committed suicide. Forensics may be organized enough to track our flight and then again maybe not.

James said, I release you from your promise if you want to find another pilot.

No. Farrell turned to Nadia and stared at her with his hands on his hips. She is not who she says she is.

You are wrong. James ran his fingers over the keypad. About people you are often stupidly, furiously wrong. Stick to your engines.

Farrell studied Nadia's face. She's a con artist.

Nadia turned up her coat collar and watched the fluctuating sky. She could do nothing else.

James said, Then don't take us.

Don't be stupid. I ask you once more to reconsider.

No.

Farrell crossed his arms and stared at the concrete. When he looked up his eyes were wet.

T
he airstrip was thirty-eight hundred feet, surfaced, and at the end where they waited to board stood hangars several stories high with engine shops and arc-welding bays, all made of steel and bowed like the old Quonset huts; inside were the echoes of shouting men. Here and there smaller planes strained against their chocks and their unlocked propellers spun in the wind. The runway arrowed down between houses. There was no margin for error. Nadia heard motors and shouting and once, gunfire. The tanker truck sat with its hose in the fuel tanks of the DC-3 and the air shook with the coming storm. Birds canted and swept sideways in the wind.

James turned his head up to Nadia. It didn't use to be like this, he said. Airports were cities unto themselves. You can see them in old films. Executive channel. The Facilitator's jet is about a mile away; it's in a guarded area. His head fell back and he closed his eyes.

Nadia looked up to see a small single-engine plane take off, dip, recover, flounder upward, and then turn and disappear to the south.

The great, surfing storm had stolen up on the northwest horizon and on its forward edge a low fog poured over the mountain peaks. Behind this was a wall of solid oceanic cloud of a deep, threatening marine color. The rain had ceased but more was coming.

Nadia, listen, said James. No matter what happens save my briefcase. Maps, binoculars, my watch. Do you hear me?

Yes, she said. I have a compass.

Good girl.

Hurry, said Farrell. He had a small radio in his hand. It's the Housing Association. They are claiming this plane. The dam is giving way. Hurry.

Armored cars came down the road from the elegant houses, carrying armed men, men clinging to the sides as well as inside and the ones outside were holding on with one arm and gripping rifles with the other. They drove straight toward the airstrip throwing wings of water on all sides.

One of the mechanics walked forward in the rain with his rifle and aimed carefully and shot at their tires. His rifle jumped and a thick cloud of smoke poured out, he fired again. One of the armored cars spun and drove its front bumper into the cascading ditch water. The mechanic shot again and a rear tire on the other car collapsed with a thin puff of expelled high-pressure air.

The men jumped out of the armored cars and ran toward them.

One of them yelled. Stop, stop!

Farrell ran up the ramp and into the pilot's compartment with a sheaf of aviation charts and the mechanics wheeled James up the ramp, half turned in his chair with a grip on Nadia's wrist that nearly broke it. She ran to keep up and they made room for her. The men from the armored cars had broken into a series of running figures like spilled beads. Farrell pushed a throttle forward and the propellers began to roar at the highest RPM possible while Farrell and the copilot stood on the brakes and when the engines were at their highest pitch they suddenly popped the brakes and the DC-3 jumped forward as if it had been shot from a catapult. The asphalt runway had accumulated decades of oil and grime from exhausts and now the rain pounding down made it slick as glass. The DC-3 slid from side to side, burning rubber, and at the last moment Farrell and the copilot gave the engines all the power at their disposal, the fuel mixture on “rich.” They skimmed rooftops, and the lifting wheels ripped the top from a Douglas fir. Then they were laboring up the altimeter, yard by yard.