Phases of Gravity (16 page)

"But after a beer or two, Dave packed all the stuff in behind a boulder and we got back to survival training. Tom didn't speak to him for twenty-four hours. Worse than that, I don't think Tom ever completely forgave or forgot for the two years we worked together after that. At first I thought it was just that he was angry about Dave screwing up our training and jeopardizing Tom's perfect record. Then I realized that it was more than that. Dave had broken the rules and Tom could never quite get around that. And there was one other thing . . ."

"What's that?" asked Maggie.

Baedecker leaned forward and whispered. "Well, I think Tom was really looking forward to eating that damned lizard and Dave had taken some of the flavor out of it."

Deedee and Tom Jr. showed up when Baedecker and Maggie were preparing to cross the river, and the four forded together. Tommy looked pale and somewhat subdued but remained as sullen as before. Deedee was chipper enough for both of them. The river was never more than knee-deep, but the current was swift and the water was ice-cold. Baedecker waited until the others were across, untied the rope from the east bank, and brought it across with him.

Forty-five minutes later they passed a waterfall, crossed the stream again—on a fallen log this time—and soon after that they were climbing switchbacks. The summit of the Matterhorn loomed above them and each time they paused to rest, more of Uncompahgre Peak had become visible to the southeast. They were within a few miles of the mountain now, and Baedecker began to realize how large the massif actually was. It reminded him of the huge mesas and buttes he had seen in New Mexico and Arizona, but this one was sharper, steeper, and it rose not from the desert but from a ten-thousand-foot plateau.

By midafternoon they had completed the last series of switchbacks and emerged onto the high tundra. The transformation was startling. The thick pine forests of the canyon had given way to a few aged and stunted fir trees, often weathered to the point there were no branches at all on their western and northern sides, and then to tall clumps of ground juniper, and then even these had disappeared and only grass and the low, red-and-tan gorse covered the rocky tundra. To Baedecker, coming up over the last ridge from the canyon was like stepping from the top rung of a ladder onto the roof of a tall building.

From the high pass they were now traversing, Baedecker could see dozens of greater and lesser mountain peaks and a seemingly endless vista of passes, ridges, high meadows, and softly undulating tundra. Patches of snow mottled the landscape. Overhead, a scattering of fluffy cumulus stretched to the serrated horizon, the white against blue above almost blending into the white against brown below.

Baedecker paused, panting, feeling the sweat pour from him, his lungs still demanding more oxygen than they could supply. "Fantastic," he said.

Maggie was grinning. She removed a red kerchief she had been using as a headband and mopped her face. She touched Baedecker's arm and pointed to the northeast where sheep were grazing along a rolling stretch of alpine meadow several ridges away. The gray bodies mixed with the clouds and snowfields and cloud shadows to give a sense of dappled movement across the entire panorama.

"Fantastic," Baedecker said again. His heart was pounding at his ribs. He felt as if he had left some dark part of him behind in the shadows of the canyon. Maggie offered him her water bottle. He was aware of her arm touching his as he drank.

Tommy slumped down on a rock and poked at a clump of moss campion with his walking stick. Deedee smiled and looked around. "There's Tom," she said and pointed to a small figure far across the pass. "It looks like he's setting up the tent already."

"This is marvelous," Baedecker said softly to himself. For some reason he felt light-headed in the cool, thin air. He gave the water bottle to Maggie and she drank deeply, throwing her head back so that her short, blond curls caught the sunlight.

Maggie offered the water bottle to Deedee, but the older woman took her hand instead. With her other hand she seized Baedecker's fingers. The three stood in a rough circle. Deedee bowed her head. "Thank you, O Lord," she said, "for allowing us to witness the perfection of Your Creation and for sharing this special moment with dear friends who will, with the help of the Holy Spirit, come to know the truth of Thy Word. In Jesus' name we ask. Amen."

Deedee patted Baedecker's hand and looked at him. "It is marvelous," she said. There were tears in her eyes. "And admit it, Richard," she said, "don't you wish Joan were here to share this with us?"

Their campsite had three tents arranged around a tall, flat-topped boulder that stood alone at the locus of a great circle of tundra. There was no firewood at that altitude except for the branches of the low shrubbery that grew between the rocks, so they set their two backpack stoves on a flat rock next to the boulder and watched the blue propane flames as the stars came out.

Before dinner they had reconnoitered their route as the shadows of the Wetterhorn and the Matterhorn covered the plateau and moved up the terraced sides of Uncompahgre. "There," said Gavin and handed the binoculars to Baedecker. "Right at the base of the south ridge."

Baedecker looked and could make out a low, red tent set back in the shadows of the rocks. Two figures moved around it, storing equipment and working over a small stove. Baedecker handed back the binoculars. "I see two of them," he said. "I wonder where the girl and the guy carrying the hang glider are."

"Up there," said Maggie and pointed toward the high ridge just at the point where sunlight still struck the massif.

Gavin focused his binoculars. "I see them. That idiot is still dragging the kite along."

"He can't be planning to fly it tonight, can he?" asked Maggie.

Gavin shook his head. "No, he's still hours from the summit. They're just getting as high as they can before nightfall." He handed the binoculars to Maggie.

"The early-morning conditions would be best for what he wants to do," said Baedecker. "Strong thermals. Not too much wind." Maggie gave him the binoculars and Baedecker swept the ridge twice before finding the small figures high on the jagged spine of the mountain. Sunlight illuminated the red-and-yellow carrying bag as the little man bent under the burden of the aluminum and Dacron bundle. The woman followed several paces behind, bent under her own load of a large frame pack with two sleeping bags. As Baedecker watched, the sunlight left the mountain and the two struggling silhouettes became indistinguishable from the tumble of spires and boulders along the ridge.

"Uh-oh," said Maggie. She was looking toward the west. The sun had not set, but along the horizon lay a band of blue-black clouds that had swallowed the last light of day.

"Probably miss us," said Gavin. "The wind is to the southeast."

"I hope so," said Maggie.

Baedecker turned the binoculars back on the south ridge, but the two human figures there were too insignificant to stand out as storm and nightfall approached.

Stars continued to burn overhead, but in the west all was darkness. The four adults huddled near the stoves and drank hot tea while Tommy sat four feet above them on the boulder and stared off to the north. It was very cold, and there was no hint of wind.

"You've never met Dick's wife, Joan, have you, Maggie?" asked Deedee.

"No," said Maggie, "I haven't met her."

"Joan's a wonderful person," said Deedee. "She has the patience of a saint. Her personality is perfectly suited to a camping trip like this because nothing phases her. She takes things in her stride."

"Where are you going after Colorado?" Gavin asked Baedecker.

"Oregon. I thought I'd stop and see Rockford."

"Rockford?" said Gavin. "Oh, Muldorff. It's too bad about his illness."

"What illness?" asked Baedecker.

"Joan was the most patient of all the wives," Deedee said to Maggie. "When the men would be gone for days . . . weeks . . . all of us would get a little cranky . . . even me, I'm afraid . . . but Joan never complained. I don't think I once heard Joan complain in all of the years I knew her."

"He was hospitalized last June," said Gavin.

"I know," said Baedecker. "I thought that was for appendicitis. He's all right now, isn't he?"

"Joan was a Christian then, but she hadn't really given herself to Jesus," said Deedee. "Now she and Phillip . . . he's an accountant . . .? I understand that they're very active in an evangelical church in Boston."

"It wasn't appendicitis," said Gavin. "I talked to Jim Bosworth who lobbies on the Hill in Washington. He says that Muldorff's friends in the House know that he has Hodgkin's disease. He had his spleen removed last June."

"Do you attend a church there, dear? In Boston, I mean."

"No," said Maggie.

"Oh, well," said Deedee. "I just thought you might have run into Joan if you did. The world is such a small place that way, isn't it?"

"Is it?" asked Maggie.

"The prognosis isn't good, I don't think," said Gavin. "But then, there's always the possibility of a miracle."

"Yes, it really is," said Deedee. "One time when we were all getting ready for the men's mission, Joan called me and asked if I'd come over to stay with their little boy while she went out shopping for Dick's birthday present. I had a friend visiting from Dallas but I said, 'Sure, we'll both come over.' Well, Scott was about seven then and Tommy was three or four . . ."

Baedecker stood up, crossed to his tent, crawled inside, and heard no more.

When Baedecker was seven or eight, sometime early in the war, he had accompanied his father on a fishing trip to a reservoir somewhere in Illinois. It had been the first overnight fishing trip he had been allowed to go on. He remembered sleeping in the same bed with his father in a tourist cabin near the lake and going out in the morning into a hot, brilliant late-summer day. The broad expanse of water seemed to both muffle and amplify all sounds. The foliage along the gravel road going down to the dock seemed too dense to penetrate, and the leaves were already covered with dust by six-thirty in the morning.

The small ritual of preparing the boat and outboard motor was exciting, a leave-taking within the larger trip. The life jacket was reassuring in its bulky, fish-smelling clumsiness. Their little boat moved slowly across the reservoir, cutting through the calm water, stirring sluggish rainbows where oil had been spilled, the throb of the ten-horsepower motor blending with the smell of gasoline and fish scales to create a perfect sense of place and perspective in Baedecker's young consciousness.

The old highway bridge had been stranded far out from shore when the dam had bottled up the river some years before. Now only two broken fragments of the span remained, glaring white as exposed thighbones against the blue sky and dark water.

The young Baedecker was fascinated with the idea of boarding the bridges, of standing on them far out on the hot expanse of lake, of fishing from them. Baedecker knew that his father wanted to troll. He knew the infinite patience with which his father would fish, watching the line for hours almost without blinking, letting the boat creep across the lake or even drift with the motor off. Baedecker did not have his father's patience. Already the boat seemed too small, their progress far too slow. The compromise was to let the boy off—still wrapped in his bulky life jacket—while his father explored the nearby inlets for a promising hole. He made Baedecker promise that he would stay in the center of the larger of the two spans.

The sense of isolation was wonderful. He watched as his father's boat disappeared from sight around a point and continued watching until the last echoes of the outboard faded away. The sunlight was very hot, and the effect of watching his fish line and bobber soon became hypnotic. The small waves lapping at the moss-covered undersides of the bridge six feet below created an illusion of movement, as if the two segments of bridge were moving slowly across the reservoir. Within half an hour the heat and sense of motion created a slight nausea in the boy, a throbbing pulse of vertigo. He pulled in his line, propped the pole against the cracked concrete railing, and sat on the roadbed. It was too hot. He took off his life jacket and felt better as sweat dried on his back.

He was not aware of the instant when the idea of jumping from one section of the bridge to the other occurred to him. The two pieces of the shattered span were separated by no more than eight feet of water. The smaller span's roadbed was six feet above the water, but the larger section upon which Baedecker stood had not settled as much as the other and was almost a foot higher, making the jump seem even easier.

The thought of jumping quickly became an obsession, a pressure swelling in Baedecker's chest. Several times he paced his steps to the edge of his span, planning his run, rehearsing his leap. For some reason he was sure that his father would be pleased and amused when he returned to find

his son on the different section of bridge. Several times he worked up his nerve, began the run, and stopped. Each time he felt the fear rise in his throat and he would stop, his sneakers making rough sounds on the concrete. He stood there panting, his fair skin burning in the hot sunshine, his face flushed with embarrassment. Then he turned back, took five long steps, and leaped.

He tried to leap. At the last possible second he tried to stop his forward momentum, his right foot slid out over the edge of the span, and he fell. He managed to twist in midair, there was a tremendous blow to his midsection, and then he was dangling—his feet and lower legs hanging above the water, his elbows and forearms flat on the roadbed.

He had hurt himself. His arms and hands were badly scraped, there was the taste of blood in his mouth, and his stomach and ribs ached more than he had ever imagined possible. He did not have the strength left to pull himself up onto the bridge surface. His knees were under the slab of the roadbed and try as he might he could not lift his legs high enough to find purchase on the cracked concrete. The lake water seemed to create a suction that threatened to pull him in. Baedecker quit struggling and hung there with only the friction against his torn hands and arms keeping him from sliding backwards into the lake. With his child's imagination he could see the great depths of darkness that lay beneath the bridge, could sense the submerged trees far below the surface, and could feel his descent to the muddy lake bottom. He could imagine the drowned streets and houses and graveyards of the valley turned reservoir, all waiting beneath the dark waters. Waiting for him.