Reckless

by Ruth Wind

  The pair he held was a reddish brown, with little white spots on them. Along the edges were exquisite, delicate feather marks. “What did these tell you they had to be?”

  Red Dog shook his head. “Poor Anglos gotta be told every little thing,” he said tongue in cheek. “Red-tailed hawk.”

  Jake thought the color would suit Ramona, and for a brief moment, he imagined how they would look swinging against her neck. “How much?”

  “For you, G.I., five dollar.”

  Jake shook his head. “Real price.”

  Red Dog turned his mouth down and shook his head. “No way, man. I’m crashing at your place. Consider them payment for the introductions tomorrow.”

  A woman Jake didn’t know stopped by the table and asked the price of a bracelet. Red Dog stood up to talk to her.

  Jake fingered the earrings, then in a single explosive rush, his grief came crashing in on him, hard. Harry was dead. Feeling an unmanly swell of tears rage up behind his eyes, he turned abruptly and walked away from the crowd, fighting to hold on until he could hide. Behind an old oak, alive with squirrels making food raids on the picnic crowd, he sank to the ground.

  A hundred pictures of Harry passed through his mind. Harry as a trim policeman in his uniform, bringing flowers to Jean after a fight, as an irate homeowner when Jake had tried to slide by with less than his best work, as a good listener when Jake had a problem.

  Jake couldn’t believe he was dead. He couldn’t believe he was taking it so hard, either. If he let himself think of it at all, he felt he’d be sucked into a black hole that would consume him.

  A familiar voice spoke at his side. “I thought I saw you disappear over here.”

  Jake looked away, hiding his tears. Only then did he realize he still held the feather jewelry. The wire scratched his cheek, and he put the earrings in Ramona’s hand. “Red Dog made these,” he said gruffly. “I thought they’d look nice on you.”

  Ramona, her hair loose on the summer breeze, looked at them, then back at Jake. “I’m sorry about Harry,” she said.

  For a long moment, he wanted only to reach for her, to put his head on her shoulder and weep away the sorrow in his heart. Her eyes, those empathetic, velvety eyes, were calm and knowing, and Jake was ashamed of himself. All he ever did was take. All she ever did was give.

  “It was just his time to go,” Jake said.

  Ramona reached into her bag and took out a white envelope. “He left a letter for you,” she said, holding it out.

  Jake took it, another swell of grief making it impossible to speak. He nodded stiffly and squeezed one word past the tightness in his throat. “Thanks.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “You know where to find me if you need anything.”

  Her hand warmed him. Everything in him ached to reach up and hold it there, to draw upon her vast strength to regain his own, but he didn’t. He let her go without a word.

  On the way back to his condo, Jake stopped by the liquor store for Guinness. Red Dog raised an eyebrow, but said nothing until they got back to the condo and Jake gustily drank one.

  “Since when do you drink stout?”

  “An old soldier died last night.” He paused, swallowing the dark brew. It cut through the thickness in his throat. “I decided I wanted to have a wake tonight.”

  Red Dog looked at him steadily. “All right. You get drunk, I take watch.” It was an old established pattern between them. “Where? Here?”

  Jake shook his head, looking through the windows to the dark gray sky and the faint line of mountains below. He suddenly knew exactly where he wanted to go. The name popped into his mind from nowhere. Henrietta Pass. There was a good, wide meadow there and a good view of the sky above town. They could watch the fireworks and mourn the passing of a good soldier.

  “Bring a coat. It might get cold up on the mountain.”

  Outside, there came a booming, thudding sound. Jake ducked automatically, bracing himself. Across the room, Red Dog did the same thing. In the sky beyond the windows, a brilliant shower of red and blue stars lit the night.

  Red Dog swore, then looked over his shoulder with a wry grin, lifting his chin. “Fireworks.”

  Another boom shook the windows, and a rocket burst high in the sky. “God bless America,” Red Dog said, and laughed. His jean jacket had an upside-down American flag on the sleeve, and he put it on, grimacing ironically. “Let’s do it.”

  Jake nodded. He bent down and gave Mr. E a good rub. “Be back in a little while, guy. I won’t leave you alone all night again.”

  “All night?” Red Dog echoed. “You spent all night with a woman?”

  Jake didn’t answer. That was private.

  But as they hiked in the dark, moving sharply upward on a path that led into the mountains from the edge of the condo lot, Jake couldn’t help thinking of Ramona. Although he walked with Red Dog through the wet of a pine forest, something of Ramona lingered around him like a wraith, as if her spirit had left her body to hover around him. It made him ache.

  It was better this way; that was what he told himself. In the long run, he would spare her pain by cutting things off now. It had been a mistake to show up at her house the night before last. It had been even more of one to make love to her the next morning—but somehow, he couldn’t regret it. He thought of her breath on his neck, of her hair brushing over his body, of the sounds she had made as he moved in her.

  He stopped abruptly on the path, winded with emotion.

  Red Dog halted and turned to look back the way they’d come. He grabbed onto a tree. “Why didn’t you tell me it was so steep?”

  Jake opened a bottle of Guinness and settled on a boulder to drink it. “I thought you were raised in New Mexico. A lot of mountains there.”

  “Yeah. In Albuquerque, which is a city, in case you don’t know your geography. And don’t believe everything you hear about Indians. We don’t all like heights.”

  “You mean you don’t want to build skyscrapers? You don’t have fleet feet that can cling to those narrow steel beams a mile above the ground?” Jake grinned across the darkness. “I’m really disappointed.”

  “If you guys wouldn’t make up those lies,” Red Dog said, peeking over the edge of a rock to see what lay below, “we wouldn’t have to act crazy on you all the time.” Seeing the town of Red Creek glittering in a tumble down the hill, he pulled back with a grunt. “That’s a cliff!”

  “You’ll be all right. Just stay on the path. It’s not far now.”

  “No way.” Red Dog sat down abruptly. “I’ll wait right here. Catch you on the way down.”

  Jake considered the view from this spot. As if to accommodate him, a burst of starry, colored lights exploded across the sky. “All right. This is far enough. By the way, this is a cross-country skiing path. In the daylight, you’ll see it isn’t quite as bad as it looks at night. And I know it like the back of my hand.” He took a long pull from the bottle, feeling a pleasant warmth all the way down his esophagus. “Spent my childhood here, remember?”

  “Yeah, well, bring me back when I can see what I’m doing.” More fireworks exploded high above in a shower of red and blue. “Too bad bombs don’t go off like that, huh?”

  Jake nodded. He glanced at the path and followed its shadowy line up as far as he could see. He suddenly wondered where Ramona had been when—damn. He couldn’t even think the word.

  He forced himself. When she had been raped. Where had it been? It seemed as if the violence of such an act would forever stain the air around it, and he wondered if he would feel it if he stumbled over the spot. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, standing up abruptly.

  “Feel free.”

  Jake hiked up the trail a little way. Just a few feet, he told himself. He did know the mountain, but he’d had a few drinks. Enough to throw off his judgment anyway.

  Behind him, the fireworks boomed, and their stars illuminated his path for a few moments. He scrambled around a tough patch of rotten granite, t
hen paused. He glanced back at Red Dog, and it seemed he’d gone farther than he thought. He couldn’t see him at all in the darkness.

  A match suddenly flared—only a couple of feet away. It lit the piercing eyes and high cheekbones of Robert “Red Dog” Martinez as he held it to his cigarette. He waved out the match, inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke. “I still remember how to sneak up on the enemy,” he said.

  “You get over your little attack of vertigo?”

  “Never said I had vertigo. I was just tired.” He lifted his chin toward the path. “Even a city boy knows you aren’t supposed to hike alone at night. What if you break a leg or something? Then I’d be stuck out here by myself.”

  They walked up to a more level stretch of ground, an open meadow with tremendous views. Henrietta Pass, named for a woman who’d camped there during a blizzard in the winter of 1902—and lived to tell the tale.

  Jake stopped abruptly. What had Ramona said to the police? Some boys raped me, and I left them passed out near Henrietta Pass. They’ll freeze if you don’t go get them. He cursed, then quickly moved forward. The meadow ended a few hundred feet away with a line of trees and a sharp, steep drop to the town. He strode to the edge of it and stared at the glittery scene. The fireworks display was just ending, and the sky exploded in one shimmering spectacle of light after the other, before gradually fading away into darkness.

  In his mind, Jake imagined the meadow as it might have been on a late winter day, thick with snow and blazing with sunshine. He saw a trusting Ramona ski into the clearing and pause in admiration of the glorious weather. He saw her realize the danger, saw her take flight.

  He cursed and bowed his head, his throat thick with grief. Red Dog joined him and bumped his arm, giving him a bottle without saying a word. Jake drank gratefully, trying to blot out images he never wanted burned on his brain.

  It didn’t help. And standing there, Jake knew it never would. Harry would still be gone. Ramona would still have been raped. A boy still would have screamed away his last breaths on a blazing desert half a world away.

  Next to him, Red Dog spoke, his voice hushed and raspy. “There isn’t a single day that I don’t think of that boy.”

  “I know,” Jake said. “We’re stuck with it.”

  But in a sudden rush of insight, Jake realized they could live with it. They could never make it okay. But it just was. That was how Ramona had done it.

  There was no miracle. No thundering revelation. It just was.

  “Let’s go back and get some sleep,” he said heavily.

  As he turned, he swayed a little with the stout and the headiness of his epiphany. Quickly, he repositioned himself, and with a sickening, slipping sensation, felt the ground give way under his right foot. Instinctively, he pitched forward, but it wasn’t enough.

  Silently, he fell.

  And fell.

  And fell. He had just enough time to notice the clouds had cleared away overhead, leaving a black sky covered with silver glitter. He distantly heard the crash of glass shattering somewhere and had enough time to note it was probably the bottle of Guinness he’d been holding. He even heard Red Dog cry out.

  And then he struck rock, landing so hard that his body mercifully couldn’t even register the pain. He thought he bounced, then his face struck something hard, and Jake tried to scramble for some hold on the rock, but his body seemed bent on a course of its own, and he felt himself tumbling again—then slammed hard.

  He thought with a brief, bright sharpness that he did not want to die, and then blackness claimed him.

  Chapter 18

  The dogs barking frantically awakened Ramona from a restless sleep, jolting her to heart-pounding wakefulness. She glanced at the clock as she tossed on her robe: 1:17 a.m. She automatically grabbed her gun and cocked it as a fist pounded on her door again and again, sending the dogs into a frenzy.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Ramona, it’s Tyler. Open up!”

  Tyler? Ramona blinked. The dogs whined and barked and trotted back toward her, then growled at the door. “Just a minute.”

  She peeked out the curtain, and sure enough, there was Jake’s brother, Tyler. With a cry, she opened the door. “What’s wrong?”

  Ty’s face was drawn and his hair was loose on his shoulders, something she’d never seen. “It’s Jake,” he said without preamble. “He’s stuck on a ledge below Henrietta. They can’t get him up till morning.” His mouth went to a hard line. “He fell almost three hundred feet.”

  A kind of numbness seemed to paralyze her. “I don’t—what can I—” Ramona’s brain refused to function.

  “He’s been conscious. Some of the time. He called for you.”

  Ramona closed her eyes, suddenly sickeningly dizzy. “Tyler, I can’t...I don’t...”

  “Go put on some clothes. I’ll wait.”

  In the truck, she said, “How did anyone know where he was?”

  “He had a friend with him. A soldier from the Gulf War, I think. He’s pretty upset. He said Jake just slipped.”

  “What were they doing up at Henrietta Pass at night?”

  “Watching fireworks.”

  Henrietta. It was a cursed place. Tyler drove to the foot of the cross-country paths and parked next to a rescue vehicle. In the wide parking lot waited a Flight for Life helicopter. Ramona stared at them.

  “Three hundred feet?” It was a long, long way to fall.

  “Yeah.”

  High on the mountain waved a plethora of lights—heavy-duty flashlights, and some kind of halogen thing. Ramona steeled herself and got out of the truck.

  The path wasn’t steep or difficult. It meandered in a graceful, deceptively easy rise in a crisscrossing pattern over the face of the mountain. But Ramona knew it intimately. There were dangerous outcroppings of rotten rock at every turn, and sheer drops that appeared out of nowhere. Jake should have known better than to come up here after dark. What could he have been thinking?

  With a needling ache, she knew he wasn’t thinking. That was the trouble. She stayed close behind Tyler.

  When they reached the meadow, Ramona saw a horde of people. Paramedics and others in forest-service uniforms or wearing the emblazoned red cross of the rescue workers. Lance was there, and when he saw them, he hurried over and grabbed Ramona’s arm. “He’s calling for you.”

  She rushed forward, aware she was numb, that all of this would hit her later. At the edge of the cliff where he’d fallen, several workers had attached a contraption of cables and harnesses to nearby trees. “Hold it,” a woman said to Ramona. “Are you the doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “The friend told us the ground just gave way. Let me fix you up before you go any farther.”

  Ramona lifted her arms and allowed the harness to be fastened around her waist. “Has anyone been down there?”

  “No. We can’t reach him.”

  “So there’s no report on the extent of his injuries?”

  “We can see him. He’s broken an arm, and there’s a considerable amount of blood, but he’s conscious from time to time. We just can’t tell any more until first light.”

  “I see,” Ramona said. The numbness thankfully insulated her from the reality of the moment. Later, there would be plenty of time to fall apart if she had to. Later, she could scream and rage. Later...

  A hoarse cry reached her. “Ramona!”

  She moved forward instinctively. The woman who’d buckled her into the harness held her back. “Drop down on your belly and crawl forward. We don’t want to have to rescue two of you.”

  Ramona followed directions and inched her way to the edge of the cliff. “Jake, don’t talk. I’m here. Save your strength.” Someone shoved a flashlight into her hand. “I’m going to turn on a flashlight, Jake, so I can see you. Close your eyes.”

  She clicked it on. The beam cut through the darkness in a widening arc, making of ordinary rocks and branches an unholy landscape. Jake lay far, far below, his body sprawled at
an unnatural angle over a ledge dotted with scrub oak and raspberry bushes. With a cool objectivity that surprised her, Ramona assessed what she could. There was a lot of blood and there was no question that one arm was broken.

  But the biggest danger in falls of this magnitude was damage to internal organs, and she couldn’t tell anything about those until she could examine him more closely. “Don’t worry, Jake,” she called. “We’re trying to figure out how to get you off that ledge. It isn’t a narrow ledge, so you don’t have to be afraid of falling any farther.”

  Ramona moved the flashlight beam slowly up the mountainside. Steep but not sheer, and that gave her hope. Judging by the pattern of snapped branches and fresh scrape marks in the dirt, his fall had been slowed by the shrubs on the way. Even better.

  “Ramona!”

  “Jake, don’t talk. Please. It might hurt you.” Her voice echoed oddly, bouncing off the rocks, and the sound gave her a sense of déjà vu.

  With a frown, she moved the flashlight in a circle around him, trying to get her bearings. It was difficult in the dark. She was spatially oriented, which meant she needed to have distance landmarks to feel where she was, and in the inky darkness of a mountain night, that was impossible.

  The flashlight revealed the gnarled trunk of a pinon, weathered and stunted by wind, and Ramona felt a deep, nauseating jolt of recognition. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Jake! Hold on!” She scrambled back from the edge and stood up. “I know how to get to him.” With shaky hands, she struggled with the belt of her harness. “I need an EMT to come with me.”

  “You can’t do that. There’s no way down!”

  Ramona swallowed. “Yes, there is. And I think we can get him out, too.”

  Reacting to her certainty, a paramedic grabbed his bag and waited while she shone a flashlight around the meadow. She had not been here since she was seventeen, not even in daylight, and it had changed some. The trees were taller, and there was a grove of aspens, their shiny leaves and white bark catching the light, that she didn’t remember.