by Lia Matera
She listened, watching the swaying evergreen pattern of trees against a gray and white sky. She must have been injured even before the crash. She wouldn’t have been in a medical helicopter if not. But she couldn’t put her finger on how it had happened or even what kind of injury.
She had the notion, as she paused there, that she’d chosen to let her memories go. Or worse, that she’d jumped away from them as if leaping from sweat-soaked sheets in the middle of a nightmare.
Memories were strange creatures anyway, sliding into dark crevices as they lured you with bright hints and teasers. She’d been thinking a lot about memories. But, ironically, she couldn’t remember why.
Well, someone was bound to come for her soon. Then she’d learn what had happened to her, like it or not.
She closed her eyes. And a memory bloomed: Her brother George was saying, “Either we’ve both gone crazy or reality is stranger than we ever dreamed.”
He was squatting beside a dead cow at the time. He was only fifteen years old, in work boots and a flannel shirt. She was eleven, standing behind him clutching his shoulder. The dead cow had been part of their father’s herd.
In life, the cow had been as dumb and clumsy and easily prodded as others on the ranch. It had become remarkable only in death, resting in a shallow indentation in the hard ground. The flesh on the right side of its jawbone had been bloodlessly and completely sliced (or maybe lasered) away. Its right eye had been removed, leaving a perfectly clean white socket. Its anus had been reamed out. And where the udder should have been, there was only a hole as precisely oval as a puzzle piece. And there wasn’t a drop of blood on the ground. Not a drop.
She and George would later learn there was no blood inside the cow either. And that its ovaries had been neatly extracted with its colon and anus.
No flies had buzzed around the carrion. And nothing, not even an indiscriminate rodent, had taken tooth to it.
Their parents had been away in town for the weekend. So George had phoned the neighbors, he’d taken pictures, he’d called the sheriff. And he and his sister had learned an interesting lesson at a young age. When faced with the incredible, people chose to settle for any explanation they could persuade themselves made sense. Even if really, it didn’t make sense.
Shown the cow, their neighbors suddenly believed in cults. Or said it must be predators, even though they knew none made clean cuts or surgically removed ovaries. People refused to listen by turning off their heads as well as their ears. As one neighbor put it, “If it can’t be true, it isn’t.”
Maybe she’d been lucky to learn life’s most important lesson at the age of eleven, standing behind her brother George. She’d learned that reality is no small and controllable thing, no mere dollhouse of familiar props. She was changed forever in one instant, diverted from the mainstream and splashed into another river altogether.
A voice said, “Aw, no—she’s dead.”
She opened her eyes, never happier to prove someone wrong. She expected to find a man standing over her. She was trying to smile up at him as she opened her eyes.
But there was nothing above her but tree limbs against a gloomy sky darkening toward nightfall.
She lifted her head. She had crawled into the brush, and greenery partly blocked her view. But she could see the commotion near the helicopter. She could see men silhouetted against its white paint. One was doubled over as if retching. He was being helped, practically dragged, away.
One of the remaining men reached into his jacket and pulled out a walkie-talkie. He clomped off without looking over his shoulder, without noticing her there on the ground.
The men had seen the pilot, the woman in front with him, and the one in back. Did they assume there was only one nurse on board? The nurse under the gurney, her uniform was obscured by blood. Maybe they thought she was the patient. Maybe they weren’t searching for survivors because they supposed everyone was accounted for. She was about to call out, to tell them she was here, still alive.
But she heard someone say, “You think she brought the helicopter down?”
Another man said, “You believe all that bullshit?” Then, “Look at the sky, look at those clouds. It was a lightning bolt, has to have been.” But he didn’t sound convinced.
“All I meant was, maybe she got free and attacked the pilot.”
“We told them to sedate her and restrain the hell out of her.” The other man sounded angry. “God damn it, if we lose anybody … They should have stalled long enough for us to drive her.”
“But how could something like this happen?” the first man persisted. “She must have gotten loose and done something.”
Her hail died on her lips. These men seemed to blame her for the helicopter crash. What would they do to her if she announced herself?
She couldn’t remember what she’d be going back to, but she began to have a feeling it was something she didn’t like. Maybe her jumpsuit was from some prison, maybe they’d been transporting her someplace worse. Maybe she was better off out here, wounded but free.
She lay still, her head raised, watching for them, trying to catch some telltale detail of conversation. But they were out of her range of sight now, and the wind brought only murmurs. Or perhaps they’d switched to a foreign language. She rested her head. The effort of keeping it up, of remaining watchful, had drained her of energy.
She closed her eyes and drifted away.
She jerked her head up again, fully awake in an instant. Branches swayed overhead, strobing the diminishing light.
She heard men’s voices again but they were too distant to make out the words.
She’d been having nightmares about an institution where no one spoke her language, where she was corralled and regimented and never understood why—a ranch where she was just another dumb, nameless cow in the herd.
Hearing people run toward her, she rolled to her stomach and began to crawl for cover. She crawled farther from the wreckage, as far as she could on weak and pain-stiff limbs.
Acid boiled up her throat and seared her mouth but she didn’t stop. She put as many more feet as she could between herself and the helicopter.
She stopped when the men were close enough to hear her scrabbling. She sat behind a big tree, back against it, lacking the energy to crane her neck and see what these people were doing. She tried to quiet her breaths, calm her heartbeats, so she could hear them.
A man with a harsh accent said, “They’re stringing him along, but he’s getting touchy. We don’t have much time. Let’s see if we can find something to help them out over there, any kind of proof what brought this baby down.” The voice, gratingly defeatist, made her shudder. She’d heard it before somewhere, and the associations weren’t pleasant. She heard boots crunching on the duff. “You know what to do.”
A few minutes later, she heard commotion and shouting. There was a huge roar as fire exploded upward with a sucking noise punctuated by booms. Had they started the fire on purpose? Turned up the flow of the oxygen canisters? Punched holes in the gas tanks? Doused the wreck with rocket fuel?
With her back to the helicopter, she could see tree and branch shadows dancing in hot light. She twisted to look. The fire was a huge plume of red and orange tumbling with black clouds. It sent off waves of heat and choking smoke.
She got to her feet. If the fire spread, it would move faster than she could run. She knew that about fires, maybe learned it from someone. From George?
She tried to console herself with memories of her brother. She could feel the warm flannel of his shirt as she gripped him, looking down at their dead cow. The feel of his shoulder had provided reassurance. She needed that now.
She walked haltingly, painfully, as quickly as she could under the circumstances. She wound down a wooded ravine, away from the flaming debris of the helicopter that had brought her this far. She tried to take comfort in her homey
memory of her brother, though it was spoiled by its association with the cow.
A few times, she’d watched her father shoot cows. They would look startled, eyes opening wide and heads jerking back. Then they’d drop onto their front knees, pause infinitesimally, and keel over.
People killed each other pretty much the same way, she guessed. A stranger might kill you without anger or blame, for some reason of his own you’d never understand.
As if you were a cow. Cows wouldn’t understand being slaughtered for their meat because they didn’t eat meat themselves. And as for being drained of blood and having their viscera pillaged, they could have no clue. That was beyond the understanding of any earthling, human or bovine.
She heard voices again—men moving closer. Hearing them through an inadequate curtain of redwood shoots, she tried to move faster. The men were bound to spot her soon. They might grab her and kill her—she had no reason to trust them. She needed more time, time to remember who she’d become in the years after finding the cow.
She shook her head as if to shake loose memories, to jump past her image of the cow. Her present life, her best interests, seemed to fall away as she turned that event over and over in her mind.
The discovery of the cow had ruined everything. Her gruff and level-headed father, for all his Rotary and Kiwanis Club and Ranchers Association contacts, had been derided without mercy for stating the obvious: that no predator, no cult, no disease could drain a cow completely and remove its organs with laser precision. And he’d been too stubborn to back down, to pretend it was covens or coyotes. Her mother had been so mortified by the snickering, the graffiti, the sneers that she’d overdosed on tranquilizers. That cinched the neighbors’ argument they were all crazy, the whole family. For months every outing had been punctuated with jibes, or worse, pity. Her father began to lash out at everyone, especially his children.
She stopped. For a millisecond, she almost had it. She’d almost gotten to the heart of this. Her father had done something, and because of it she’d ended up here.
She could see movement in the brush. She knew she’d have to hurry, that she didn’t have time to think about it now.
But wherever George might be, she silently saluted him for being right. Reality was indeed stranger than they ever dreamed.
The man holding the bomb was interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. He answered. “Is she here?”
“George?”
George ran a hand through his greasy hair. He must look pretty bad after sweating in this building for ten solid hours.
“George?” The man’s voice was calm with authority. “George, there’s been a slight delay bringing your sister.”
George wanted to hit the switch. He’d let himself grow expectant, almost optimistic. There had been a few minutes when he’d almost believed this man, almost believed they’d take Jane out of the hospital and fly her here—without incident. He’d tried for almost six hours to believe it, in fact. God knew, he wanted to believe. It was better than the alternative.
“George, listen to me,” the man said urgently. “We’re bringing her, we really are. There’s just been a delay.”
“Did you fly her already?”
“Almost here, really. But remember I told you weather conditions aren’t good? Electrical storms, lightning? We don’t want to take any chances. Just a short delay, that’s all.”
The explosives strapped to George’s torso made his skin ooze with perspiration. The itching was almost beyond enduring. But if he unstrapped the pack, they’d shoot him for sure. He knew they must have him in their sights. He knew they’d kill him even though he hadn’t hurt the hostages, just herded them around and had his say, that’s all. The hostages were lying behind him now, trussed up and silent except for some whimpering. They smelled rank after all these hours and no bathroom breaks, that was for sure. So did he.
For the thousandth time, he considered ending it, just blowing up this plain wood box of a building—this pen—full of people. He didn’t care about any of them. And he’d just about had his fill of berating them.
It hadn’t occurred to him to bring Jane here, not at first. It was the negotiators who kept asking him what he wanted. He was ranting at the hostages when he got the idea. If they could fly Jane here, then he might be wrong, after all. The hostages might be right, they might deserve to live. If the negotiator could get Jane all the way up here from Los Angeles within, say, four or five hours, that would mean they’d flown her for sure. You couldn’t drive it in that amount of time.
But the hours had ticked by. And now the man on the phone was stalling him. Lying to him to keep his finger off the detonator.
“You’re driving her here, aren’t you?”
“We wouldn’t do that, George. We made you a promise,” the negotiator said.
George pictured him as an avuncular and gray-haired man with a potbelly and broken veins in his cheeks. But that was only because he’d once had a foster father who looked like that. For all he knew, the negotiator was lean and tough and decked out in SWAT team black with a bulletproof vest, like in the movies. It was just hard to picture something so Hollywood in a cow town like this.
“Because the whole point of me talking to you at all,” George repeated, “is you proving to me I’m wrong. Because I’d rather be wrong, I want to be wrong. I’ve always wanted that.”
“We understand,” the man assured him again.
But they didn’t understand about Jane. Just like the hostages squirming behind him didn’t understand.
“I knew you wouldn’t bring her,” George said. “I knew you were just stalling.”
“She’ll be here anytime. You’ll see your sister, George, I promise.”
It had been a long time since George had seen Jane. She’d been in the hospital since she was twelve years old, since their mother killed herself and their father went on a rampage against them for finding the cow and ruining his life. George couldn’t take it. He’d run away. Later, he’d been shipped off to foster families. But they wouldn’t let Jane go with him; she was too tweaked after the beatings she took.
At first they hoped with the right treatment she would get over it. They couldn’t see it was that unknown thing, whatever killed the cow, that Jane really dreaded. Their father’s thrashings might have damaged her brain, but mostly she was afraid of being sucked into the sky and having her organs cut bloodlessly out of her, that’s what George thought.
But he hadn’t seen her in years. He couldn’t bear to look at her tied to a bed.
“You should have had plenty of time to fly her here by now—weather’s not that bad. You’re just stalling,” he repeated.
“There are electrical storms over the mountains,” the negotiator insisted. “I’m serious. You can feel the static in the air, can’t you?”
But the air felt damp and heavy, not dry and charged.
George caught his breath. “That’s what you’re going to blame when she crashes. Isn’t it?”
“There won’t be a crash, George.”
“Yes there will.” He sat down, slumping with exhaustion. “There always is.”
He’d already told them what happened when they tried to fly Jane to a special home in Oregon. And what happened when they tried to fly her back to the first hospital. “Anything she flies in, it comes down. It has to do with the cow. Don’t ask me how.”
He knew it sounded crazy. God knew, he’d gotten used to sounding insane. And yet, proof was proof. Two airplanes had crashed with Jane aboard. The investigators settled on other reasons, of course. They found faulty wiring in the first plane and cited a collision with a flock of birds in the other. This time, apparently, they meant to blame some storm.
George had just thought—prayed—that maybe … Maybe they would put Jane up in the sky this time, and she’d make it. That would mean the other times were just bad luck,
just coincidence. That the cow—
Well, there was no getting around the cow. George had seen it with his own eyes. Over the years, he’d researched it. There’d been thousands of similar cases from Mexico to Canada, always unexplained because there’s no guessing how a cow can end up half embedded in the ground without a drop of blood around it or inside it, with its organs lasered out so perfectly the cells remained intact on either side of the incision.
In California, the Cattleman’s Association was suing the government for information after dozens of members found their cows mutilated in similar ways. The association president discovered a steer with its three-foot horn embedded in hardpan all the way to its head.
But here, the ranchers still laughed at George. It hadn’t happened again, it hadn’t happened to any of them. And so they had that luxury.
“Don’t you get it?” George spoke into the cell phone, his finger on the detonator. “Don’t you get it about reality?”
“Look, everything’s all right, George, really. Your sister’s on her way.”
“No. No, she isn’t.” He wanted to weep, thinking about Jane crashing again. And this time, it was his fault. He’d put her up in the sky to try to prove to himself that it couldn’t be true. When he knew damn well it was.
“We understand about your worries,” the man continued, “based on her bad luck before. But everything’s going to turn out fine this time. We made sure your sister’s comfortable and sedated. We’re just waiting on the weather. Just a slight delay, George. For your sister’s sake, because we know she’s paranoid about flying. You can understand that.”
The negotiator’s voice was as soothing as Mr. Rogers’. Maybe he could tell George had reached the end of his tether. Maybe he knew George was just about to hit the button.
“You’re idiots, all of you,” George fumed. “It’s no use sedating Jane. She’s not paranoid. Every time she flies she gets knocked right out of the sky—what’s delusional about that? She’s got brain damage from our dad beating on her. She’s got short-term memory deficit, she’s basically stuck where she was at age twelve. And her language processing is all screwed up—she either can’t understand or doesn’t want to. That’s why she’s been in that hospital all these years. But she’s not crazy.”
