He held my gaze as if perfectly attuned to the ecstasy spiking and reverberating in every part of me.
You’ve been to a place that very few people in this world have ever gone, he said. Someplace beyond all the bullshit.
We drifted and thought about the perfect place I had been, and the ocean grew very calm. My dad bled into the water and the threat of sharks was somehow negated by my tube ride, as though we were invincible because we were a part of everything. I looked around and this strange world suddenly made perfect sense.
CHAPTER 15
SANDRA WAS CURLED up into a ball near the wing and I was startled when she grabbed my arm, squeezing viciously.
How can he be dead? she said. How can your dad be dead?
I growled like the wolf that I had imagined I had become and her question got rejected, spit out, before my brain could fully absorb it. A layer of rough hide seemed to grow over my cold skin, shielding the snow and wind and bad thoughts, and I hunkered and drew it tighter to my body. Then I slithered under the wing. I lay the rug over the snow and tucked it against the back edge of our shelter.
Get under the wing, I said.
She crawled under and I crawled in after her. She wrapped her arms around me. Two animals huddled in their cave.
I hope they come for us, she said.
Go to sleep, I said. Rest.
Are we going to die? she said.
No, I said, then wondered if we would freeze to death waiting here for someone to rescue us.
It got warm under the wing with Sandra wrapped around me and I faded into sleep.
As I dreamed I knew it was the same dream that I had dreamed before I woke up the first time after the crash. I wondered how many hours ago that was. Or was it less than an hour ago? In the dream I float upside down. My blue Vans above my head. A luminous white oval encapsulates me, black beyond its edge. At the top of the oval seeps a granular light. I drift feet first toward the light and ask myself what is happening. Calm and lucid comes the answer: You’re dying. Oh, I’m dying, I say back to myself with wonder. Something is pulling me down. I can’t quite reach the granular light, the cracked doorway. Two hands, two currents—no, a wave-shaped force pitches over me. Holds me from floating up into the granular light.
He jumped over me, I said, and my voice woke me from the dream.
Sandra was wrapped around me tight. Her hands were very cold. I turned and snuggled her, my face nestled against her neck. I envisioned my dad jumping over me as the plane broke apart. He saved my life and I would find a way to save his. I held this hope in my mind even though some part of me knew it was too late. Melting into Sandra’s body I dozed again.
A muffled thwack against the air woke me. It repeated itself and I couldn’t understand what it was and it came and went like the waves of fog.
I noticed Sandra’s watch. It was still ticking. I thought of the commercial catchphrase Takes a licking but keeps on ticking. I looked closely, and it was a Timex. It was nearly twelve noon, the big hand and little hand both near the twelve, and I laughed.
What’s happening? she said.
It’s still ticking, I said.
What’s going to happen to us, Norman? she said.
I did not know what to say. I thought about how long we’d been up here. We took off around seven, I remembered. So it’s been five hours. What the hell have we been doing? Then the thwacking noise got closer and I identified it. I slithered from under the wing and rose off my belly onto all fours.
Where are you going? said Sandra.
I hear a helicopter, I said.
The fog was breaking and the sky was patched with black-edged clouds and the strips of blue looked far away. I had to get out from under the broad reach of the spruce limbs. The light was brighter now and the trail was trodden from my two trips back and forth and I scampered across the chute. The thwack of the blades was gone again and I wondered if I had imagined it.
For the first time I could make out the chute’s broader features. As I had guessed, it was shaped like a half-pipe carved vertically down the mountainside, dropping for at least twenty yards, maybe more below the receding clouds. The icy chute was bordered by chunks of rock. The rocks hemmed us in and trees grew out of the rocks with snow filling in the nooks and crannies like mortar. A slick, icy groove washed straight down one side of the chute—the funnel. Instinctively I understood that the funnel was the predominant fall line where your skis would gravitate, the most direct and thrilling way down. I wanted nothing to do with it today.
Suddenly rotors boomed overhead again, sending laps of noise against the mountain. I yelled up at the checkered sky. Struts appeared through the shifting pools of smoky fog. I waved with both hands and yelled at the belly right above me. I waved and yelled.
Hey! Right here! Hey!
I thrashed my arms and screamed so loud it burned my throat raw.
Right here! See me?
The helicopter hovered above the treetops. The struts were like the rails of a sled that I could grab.
Just in time, I thought. Dad can’t hold on much longer.
I screamed at the ’copter and kept whipping my arms.
Dad. We’re saved!
The ’copter dipped to one side and I saw a guy with a helmet and expected him to call back through the loudspeaker. I’ll guide them over to my dad and they’ll lower down and fly him to a hospital.
My adrenaline spurred me across the chute toward my dad and I motioned to the ’copter to follow. The ’copter powered up. It whined.
I shuffled my feet, careful not to slip, and kept flagging them toward the impact zone. The closer I got to my dad, the funnel, the slower I had to go. Any moment now I’ll have to drop to my belly and hug the mountain. I won’t be able to flag them. So I stopped where I was. Arms raised high like a ref signaling a touchdown I motioned the ’copter toward my dad. You guys are the greatest. Thank you. Thank you.
Then the ’copter dipped to one side and slowly banked away from me.
Hey! Right here! Wrong way!
A cloud swallowed the blades, then the belly and struts. The thwacking noise thinned. Then faded.
What the hell?
I turned to my dad, who was about fifteen feet away across the chute. Can you believe that?
He was coated with snow like an ice sculpture.
My adrenaline went cold and flushed down my body, leaving me hollow.
I closed my eyes. I pushed everything away. Tough it out. Focus on the next thing. Don’t worry about what has already happened.
Did they see you? called Sandra.
No, I said.
She asked more questions, and I was fixed on something way way down below. It was barely visible over the clouds bottled up in the chute. My eyes settled on a flat meadow. The flat spot was unnatural and improbable in this jagged landscape. The round bed of snow glowed woodless and I thought that if I made it there I would be okay. My eyes stuttered, gobbling up the terrain that led to the meadow. How to get there?
Below my feet the chute disappeared under a long blanket of fog. Several hundred feet lower the fog bent with the easing grade and a sparsely wooded slope emerged. As my eyes traced the slope downward the trees gave way to a steep, bald apron of snow. It nosed away so that I could not see how far down it went. The fog made the terrain difficult to follow but I filled in the blanks. As if I were water I flowed with the various gullies and ravines for thousands of feet until the mountain’s creases and bulges all seemed to feed into a tight gulch, sandwiched between two walls of glacier-scathed rock. A massive ridgeline grew out of the gulch. It would take hours to climb over it, and it looked too steep, too slick. But the gulch might squeeze through or around the massive ridge. If Dad and I were skiing back here we’d flow right into that gulch and find a way through.
Then I saw a rooftop. It was not far from the meadow. Looking down on it from a couple miles away, I almost did not believe it. My eyeballs strained to segregate the clean smooth man-made shape from the sawtoothed wo
ods. It was definitely a roof.
The woods surrounding the roof were thick except for a furrow that cut toward the meadow. It was some kind of road, a passageway through the dense woods between the roof and the meadow.
I retraced my route down to the meadow. The chute, the wooded section, the long apron of snow curving away into the gulch, the massive ridgeline, then the flat meadow where we could rest before stumbling through the woods to find the shelter chiseled a map in my mind, fixing the meadow as my true north.
I took in the rooftop one more time to make sure. Looks like a ghost-town building, I thought. We can get warm there.
The storm heaved like two waves closing in on each side of me. The respite was over. Bales of mist crawled over both sides of the chute and collected in the middle. I stared at the roof. Mother Nature waved her wand and the roof turned to vapor and it was suddenly hard to trust that it was there.
Are they coming back? said Sandra.
The helicopter noise was long gone.
I don’t know, I said.
I heard her complaining from under the wing. The wing and the trunk receded behind fog. Her voice was lost in the wind. I came to all fours and stared at my hands, the wet air stuck to them, and I could feel it on my face. It crept under my ski sweater and down my socks, and the wet seemed to bite at my skin. The resurging storm was dark and angry. I was five feet from the wing when I finally saw it again.
I saw a cabin, I said.
They’ll come get us, she said.
I huddled against her. Snow piled up fast beyond the edge of the wing and I imagined the well-worn trail back toward my dad evaporating, obliterated by the wind and snow. I stuffed my hands into the cup of my armpits. I looked down to make sure they were there because I could not feel them. The tip of my nose stung and my forehead ached the way it did diving under a chilly winter wave at Topanga.
I turned my back on the cold and buried my face in Sandra’s neck. Should we wait here in case they come back? Or should we go?
CHAPTER 16
IN THE VILLAGE Dad and I drank water and coconut milk out of the coconuts and ate bananas and more chicken. I gnawed the meat to the bone this time. An elderly woman squeezed aloe vera onto my dad’s laceration and he thanked her. We finished everything they gave us and thanked the villagers and went to our hut to hide from the sun.
I could use a siesta, said my dad.
Me too, I said.
We rested on our blankets and I felt the salt on my back and the crusted salt on my eyelashes.
Where do waves come from exactly? I said.
He stared into the dark cone directly above us.
Storms. Wind.
How does it make a wave though?
The storm creates pressure on the ocean. Plunges it kind of, he said. The wind is really strong. Violent. And it drives down into the ocean. Pushing waves out.
And they travel across the ocean?
Yes.
Waves are like a piece of the storm?
That’s right, Ollestad.
He turned and the light seeping through the slit washed over his face. We eyed each other, holding on to the beautiful piece of storm.
We were invited to a village gathering that evening. The kids looked at me differently now. And they sat close to me without grabbing me or firing questions at me. We rested on woven mats in a big circle around a fire with pots hanging over it, and they moved the pots with sticks. All the vaqueros spoke to my dad now, not just the one with the mustache. I knew my dad was describing the drop-in and the inside of the tube. They kept asking him something over and over and he didn’t seem to understand. Then he said, Ah, and stared into the fire and thought about how to say what he wanted to say. He shook his head. He turned to the vaqueros and everybody stopped moving or talking. Papaya appeared in her T-shirt and white dress, clean and bright. She sat between two elders and her black eyes were riveted to my dad.
Then she spoke to him, startling me.
He answered her. Posible.
One of the vaqueros shifted uncomfortably and my dad and Papaya both turned and began speaking to whomever was next to them.
Later when we were eating I whispered to my dad. What were they asking you?
They wanted to know what it was like inside the wave.
What did you say?
I just described what it looked like. But that’s not what they meant.
What did they mean?
They meant did I see another world. Spirits and such.
I thought to myself that from the outside we must look like a streaking comet in the drape of the wave.
The girl said it best, whispered my dad.
What did she say?
She said it was a doorway to heaven.
Oh yeah! I said. Don’t you think?
I was in heaven so I guess so, said Dad.
The razor-sharp reef flashed across my mind.
But you could get crushed and shredded, I said. Maybe even die.
That’s life, Ollestad.
I turned and stared at the flames. Beautiful things were sometimes mixed up with treacherous things, they could even happen at the same time, or one could lead to the other, I thought.
We ate fish and Papaya kept looking at me. Her dark eyes were impossible to interpret. I could not tell if she was pleased or angry. She said something to one of the elders and they turned and looked at me too. I got jumping beans in my stomach, and I hoped she might talk to me. If not tonight then tomorrow, and maybe since she was older she would kiss me and I wouldn’t have to kiss her.
Then the youngest vaquero said something to her and she began talking with him.
Let’s hit the hay, Ollestad, said my dad.
We thanked everyone and went to our hut.
I wonder what her name is? I said, half asleep.
Who?
The pretty girl.
It was dark but I knew he was giving me a goading look. Shit why did I say pretty?
Esperanza, he said.
How do you know?
One of the old ladies told me.
Where’s her family?
Her mother and father both died.
How?
I think they got sick, he said.
We surfed under heavy-bellied clouds in the dawn. The surf was smaller and I got a lot of short tubes. With each the purifying sensation carved itself deeper.
My dad went to check out the truck with the older vaquero and the youngest vaquero. I put on flip-flops and took off with a gang of kids. They captured a huge iguana and we towed it by a vine around its neck and sometimes it tried to run, jerking against the collar. They showed me a cave and we watched the bats hanging upside down, sleeping. They mimed how the bats swooped down on the cows and sucked their blood.
When all the kids went in for their siestas I rested on my blanket and fell asleep also.
After my dad woke me up and made me drink water I noticed there was a dent in the head of the guitar case. My dad saw me eyeing it and he opened it. He pulled out the guitar and there was a ding on the headstock. I thought of the gunshot.
He strummed the guitar, said it still played, put the guitar away, and said he was going to paddle out. I was tired and the sun was high so I stayed in the hut.
I kept thinking about Esperanza, holding hands with her, even kissing her. But my pleasure was undercut by a yearning to leave. I wanted to get to Grandma and Grandpa’s or get home. The crisscrossing desires tied me into a foul mood.
My dad returned with a big grin.
Old cowboy Ernesto rode to town to get a mechanic, he said. He should be back pretty soon. And maybe tomorrow the truck will be fixed.
Why don’t you know how to fix cars? I said.
I was never interested in that kind of stuff, he said.
Well you should know.
He laughed.
You should, I said.
Think about all the good things, Ollestad. That’ll make you feel better.
When we arri
ved for dinner Ernesto sat by the fire next to his wife and three kids. He appeared worried or upset and my dad spoke to him and he spoke back in short curt sentences. My dad went to our hut and returned with some paper bills, pesos. Ernesto refused them and my dad dropped them in an empty clay bowl. Ernesto spoke to his wife and she took the money out of the bowl and walked to our hut and then came back empty-handed. My dad opened his hands.
Lo siento, he said.
No one spoke around the fire. The elders passed down the bowls. My dad handed me a bowl and it smelled like pork. I thought about the pigs around back. I was so hungry that I ate it anyway.
Esperanza appeared from the center hut and sat between the elders and ate. Her hair was in a braid and without the thick mane around her face her eyes looked as big as walnuts. Her beauty stood out even more tonight. Like it didn’t fit with the humble people of the village and their hardships and silence. She seemed destined for somewhere else. In the firelight her beauty seemed dangerous. I inhaled her sweet aroma. You will always be Papaya to me.
Ernesto and the other vaqueros finished first and stole away into the main hut with a lantern. My dad repeatedly glanced at the hut aglow from the lantern. Then Ernesto came out and he stared at my dad. My dad stood and went to him. They spoke in quiet voices. My dad nodded. Ernesto nodded. Then he went back into the hut.
My dad sat down beside me and his face was drawn.
What’s wrong, Dad?
They’re worried that the federales will find out they’ve been helping us.
How’d they find out about the federales?
In town I guess.
I thought you said the federales would never find us?
They won’t. Not while we’re here. But later. They may figure it out and hassle everyone.
Are they pissed? I said.
Yeah.
Is that why you tried to give him money?
He nodded.
I thought they just wanted money.
Not these kind of people.
He rubbed his palms together. He only did that when he was thinking really hard. I got scared.
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