Holy shit. I made it.
As I staggered down the road I called out for the voice.
I heard it coming from just around the bend. Suddenly a dog appeared. Skinny. Brown. Then a teenage boy, wearing a jacket over a Pendleton flannel. He froze in his tracks. I walked toward him.
Are you from the crash? he said.
It was weird that he knew, I thought. Yes, I said.
Is there anybody else up there?
Yes. My dad and his girlfriend Sandra. The pilot’s dead.
What about your dad?
Before I could stop it, it spilled out of me.
Dead or just knocked out, I said. I shook him but he didn’t wake up.
The teenager stared at me. His stunned expression and my saying dead out loud unleashed the bleakness of it all—my dad is gone forever. He will never again wake me for hockey practice, never again lure me into a wave, never again point out the beauty in some storm. Pain attacked my bones, brittle and cold and easy to crush. An unbearable weight mounted on my back and my legs and feet trembled and I couldn’t look at the teenager’s sad face anymore. He was living proof that it was all real, that Dad was dead.
I looked at the ground and my spine strained to keep me from collapsing.
Should I carry you? he said.
No I’m fine, I said.
He picked me up anyway and I didn’t resist. He laid me across his outstretched arms. They felt like knives and the pain shot through my body and spiked through my head and it hurt so bad that I contorted—mind and body buckling into a pretzel.
As he carried me down the road I stared back at the mountain. Although it was smothered in boils of cloud, I knew vividly what was inside that storm, and for an instant the whole arc of my life was clear to me: Dad coaxing me past boundaries of comfort, day after day, molding me into his little masterpiece, even Nick’s vile fingers of doubt that I was left to fight alone, it was all completely transformed. Every misadventure, every struggle, everything that had pissed me off and made me curse Dad sometimes, rippled together, one scene tripping the next, the pieces speeding forward like falling dominoes into a streak.
I glared at the storm as it feasted on the mountain, hammering on my dad still trapped in there. It did not get me. And I knew—I knew that what he had put me through saved my life.
In the charcoal gray dusk the teenager, who said his name was Glenn Farmer, carried me toward a sawmill that was next to a ranch house. A tall blond woman was standing outside the sawmill watching us approach. She moved into the middle of the road and Glenn carried me right to her. She winced at my black-and-blue eyes, blood-encrusted lacerations, and raw knuckles, but just for an instant, then her heavily hooded eyelids relaxed, softening her gaze.
Are you from the plane crash? she said.
I was startled that she knew too. I nodded.
My name’s Patricia Chapman, she said. You’re safe now.
She called into the sawmill. A man in overalls came out. This was her husband Bob. I told him what had happened and where to find Sandra and my dad.
Then Patricia walked me to her house. She tugged the heavy block of wood open and ushered me inside. An old Native American rug cushioned my feet. I saw two low-slung rocking chairs facing a potbelly stove like the one in my dad’s house. I could feel the heat defrosting my skin all the way from the doorway.
Sit down, she said.
The chair was something amazing, the way it cradled me and let me rest. I reached my hands and feet toward the embers. She asked me if I wanted hot chocolate.
Yes please.
Patricia said she was a mom and that her two sons were playing down at the far end of the road. I stared into the pink-red glow throbbing beyond the open door of the potbelly stove. I wondered if they had bikes or skateboards.
A few minutes later Patricia handed me a mug of hot chocolate. She sat in the other rocking chair and we both leaned forward. My feet tingled and needles shot up my ankles and shins. The hot cocoa and the radiating stove thawed my hands.
There was a crippling pain in my right hand and I noticed that it was swollen so I switched the mug to the other hand.
Patricia asked me if there was anything else I wanted.
No. Just to get warm.
She was relaxed and patient. We sat quietly, staring at the fire. I felt myself adapting to the calm and warmth of the room. My first rest in more than nine hours.
After I finished my hot chocolate she said she thought she had better call somebody and let them know I was okay. I nodded.
Patricia called the Mount Baldy fire station from the other room and came back and told me they would meet us at the gate by the highway. I got up and took her hand and she led me out the door.
We walked under the last whisper of light down a path through pools of snow and around big reddish-brown tree trunks. Patricia told me the footprints I had spotted leading down from the meadow were hers and her sons’. I asked her why she went there.
Just had a feeling, she said.
I thought about us both being drawn to the meadow, about the helicopter not being able to help me, about how only she helped me—her footprints were like a yellow brick road.
At a wooden gate by the main road I saw a fire truck, an ambulance and a couple unmarked cars. Guys in suits stood in front of the cars. They approached as a group while a paramedic looked me over. When he was done one of the men wearing a suit stepped forward. Detective So-and-So. He was taking me to the Ontario hospital. I waved good-bye to Patricia.
On the way down the winding road the detective asked me questions about the crash. Who was flying? Was I sure it was not my dad? Did I notice anybody suspicious when I boarded the plane? Did the pilot say anything before we hit the mountain? Was something wrong with the plane? I told him what I knew, and twenty minutes later we arrived at the hospital.
CHAPTER 38
I WAS LYING ON my back looking into a lamp. The faces of a nurse and doctor stared down at me while they stitched up my chin. The doctor sutured it from the inside, going through my mouth, then from the outside. He then worked on the punctures in my cheeks.
You’re doin’ great, said the doctor. When I’m done, is there anything you want to eat or drink?
I hadn’t eaten in more than twelve hours. My stomach grumbled.
Yeah. A chocolate milkshake, I said.
I sort of held my breath after I said it, half expecting my dad’s voice to boom out, No way, Ollestad. How about a turkey sandwich on wheat?
No one objected. And the doctor called out to someone to fix up a chocolate milkshake right away.
When he was finished stitching my face I sat up and the nurse handed me the milkshake. I slurped it right down. I couldn’t understand why there was a sheriff standing at the door the whole time. I wasn’t a criminal. Then they put ointment on my raw knuckles and wrapped gauze around them.
The doctor took me to another room and the sheriff followed us. On the way I saw all the news people with cameras and microphones jostling at the end of the corridor. What’s the big deal? I told myself. I just couldn’t admit what had really happened. It would crush me and I could never let anything ever crush me. Those news people were forcing me to acknowledge the whole ordeal, so I turned away.
The doctor X-rayed my right hand and the nurse stayed with me when he left to check the results.
You have a broken hand, he said when he got back.
I looked at my hand. The top bulged into a red mound. Trying to flex it was impossible and the pain immobilized my whole arm. I heard the sheriff’s radio chirp—something about the rescue team needing ropes to get up the mountain. I thought of the chute—so steep it nearly pitched me backward as I hugged the ice. It seemed impossible to make it down that mountain with my hand like this. The doctor bent his ear toward the sheriff’s radio while stealing a glance at my broken hand. Ever so slightly he recoiled and he looked spooked for a second. Then he smiled.
Time to put a cast on that hand, Norm
an, he said.
After the cast was on the nurse re-dressed my seared fingers with ointment and gauze, then wrapped an Ace bandage around the cast—it looked like a fatheaded club.
I was lost in thought—Sandra’s wide-open eyes staring up at me, tiny chunks of sapphire, not brown like they were supposed to be. No matter how hard I pressed the blue out and pushed the brown in, the iris remained sapphire. A voice was directing somebody into my room. I slid off the bed. The door opened and my mom rushed up to me and her purse banged the linoleum floor as she kneeled and hugged me, her tears dripping onto my cheek. Her voice sputtered. They told me the search had been called off, she said.
My mom raked her fingers through my hair. Her eyes searched as if to make sure I was really there.
Then an hour later they called again and said, A boy alleging to be from a plane crash showed up in Baldy Village.
My mom clenched me tighter.
Nick came forward. He patted my back and told me he thanked God I was alive. I remembered the deal I had made—that if I made it down I’d believe in God—but it didn’t seem like God had anything to do with my making it down. Instead I thanked my dad.
Did they get Dad yet? I said.
Nick glanced at my mom.
No, honey, she said. They found Sandra though.
Is she dead?
Yes.
I thought so, I said.
They said you covered her with twigs, said Nick.
Yeah. To keep her warm.
If you thought she was dead why did you cover her up? said Nick.
I furrowed my brow. Does he think I’m lying again?
What if she wasn’t dead, I said.
Nick blinked as if having been slapped across the cheek. Uh-huh, he said.
There was a window in the room and I noticed it was dark. That was the last time I asked about my dad. No tears. I felt buffered, having replaced my eleven-year-old-boy skin with something thicker.
CHAPTER 39
THE NEXT MORNING Nick’s face was swollen and his eyes were bloodshot, the way he looked after a big night of drinking. I was wheeled into a large room filled with reporters and cameras. My mom and I answered their questions. I told them that my dad taught me never give up. It was something Nick had said the night before and it sounded right so I said it.
After the interview we drove back to the Palisades, to the house my dad had bought on the edge of a canyon above the ocean. My hands were useless with the gauze and cast and my feet were still numb on the tips so I didn’t get to go outside and play.
Eleanor came over that night. She rested in bed with me. My mom and Nick were very quiet upstairs. My legs were cramping and the pain made me squirm around. I couldn’t sleep. I turned on the radio, which was tuned to a news channel. They were talking about the airplane crash. Two people were speculating about whether or not the plane could have been sabotaged by an incensed element within the FBI. They talked about J. Edgar Hoover’s vindictiveness and how he had a lot of loyal lieutenants still high up in the FBI.
Hogwash, said Eleanor, turning the dial to a different station. They’re always looking for conspiracies. People love bad pretends.
My legs were knotting up, so she rubbed them out for me. She had to massage my legs the entire night, talking me through the pain, reading to me, making me feel safe. I knew my mom was busy with Nick, discussing things, important things, I guessed. As long as I had Eleanor, my other mother, I had what I needed.
I slept most of the following day. My mom made me whatever kind of food I wanted and right after wolfing it down I’d fall back to sleep.
On my second night home I woke up around 9:00 p.m. I lay in bed for a while before I smelled the scent of weed coming from upstairs. I heard my mom and Nick laughing. It was loud. I called Eleanor from the phone beside my bed.
Please come over, I said.
When she showed up at the door my mom asked her what she was doing. Eleanor told her that I had called.
Eleanor. I can handle it, said my mom.
I came upstairs and insisted that Eleanor stay. Nick and my mom appeared paralyzed by my demand. I’m sure my bruised sutured face, broken hand and gauze-covered fingers had disarmed them.
A few days later Grandma and Grandpa Ollestad arrived from Puerto Vallarta. Grandma talked continually, as if deafening herself against something wailing inside her. Grandpa was stoic as usual and his eyes were soft and stirring. They shone with tears that never dripped down his cheeks.
Aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered at my dad’s cabin-house in Topanga Canyon. We all sat in the living room and they told stories about Dad. I went to my room and cried without all those sympathetic faces watching me.
Alone in my old room, I felt my chest begin to burn. The armor around me, the animal skin, was melting from the heat in my body. My tears seemed to come out of the hot space in my chest. The faster they spilled, the more out of control I felt.
You could easily turn into a weirdo. Watch out, I told myself. Don’t fall apart.
Allowing my body to unclamp was too dangerous. The skin knitted me together. Kept me whole.
One more bad thing happens and you might lose it, I thought.
Timothy, the kid on my block who always stared at his feet, haunted me. I thought about him dragging around like a beaten dog, hiding behind his comic books, tripping over his feet as he scuttled away from the neighborhood boys throwing balls at him.
I stood up from my old bed and sucked up my pain. I wiped my cheeks and walked back into the living room with a smile, just like my dad would have.
Hundreds of people showed up to my dad’s funeral at the Little Church of the Flowers. Many stood in the aisles and the crowd seeped out the doorways because the church only accommodated 250 people and there were no seats left. I cried every time somebody went to the podium and when Eleanor spoke she seemed far off in the distance. I kept blinking and the people around me appeared very close, then far away. I mentally shucked off these splintered images, reeling myself back to the steady world that I knew was right there.
They had to stop letting people talk because two hours had gone by and the church officials wanted to wind it down.
Uncle Joe, my dad’s half brother, whose hotel we stayed at in Lake Tahoe, threw a party after the funeral. All my relatives danced to a live Dixieland band and they all said they thought it was what my dad would have wanted. He always hooted in powder—good or bad—and fought through storms and riptides, I thought, and played guitar even when the vaqueros despised him, transforming that hostile night into something beautiful.
I danced at the party too and it seemed like I was on an escalator moving on a different plane at a different pace, like there was no gravity holding me. Cousins, aunts and uncles moved with their feet on the ground—they had gravity. I seemed separated from everyone by thick glass and it made all sounds a din of noise and I told myself not to get creepy like that Timothy kid.
I stopped playing hockey, stopped surfing, and mostly just hung out with the neighborhood kids and hoped I wouldn’t turn sullen and awkward. Instead I came down with a lot of sore throats and had to stay inside and alone several days a week. My body was not used to all that hanging around and my grief stayed crammed up inside me, with no outlet—except the sore throats.
That spring I got strep throat and a high fever, and it was Nick who nursed me back to health. He put his lips to my forehead to measure my temperature, and tenderly administered his Irish remedies, coming to my bed with a spoonful of warm water, plopping an aspirin in the water, and telling me how to drink it down while we watched it dissolve. As Nick prescribed, I let the aspirin bits catch in my throat. Amazingly it took most of the pain away. That evening he made a hot toddy—hot tea with shots of brandy, some lemon and honey. My mom saw him concocting the hot toddy in the kitchen and she deemed him Nurse Nick. When it was ready he brought a mug of it to my bedside. Then he rolled me up inside two comforters with only my head poking free like a sausage rol
led up in a pancake. He carefully poured the hot toddy into my mouth and it burned my throat and stomach.
Nick told me that his mom used to nurse him and his brother and sisters back to health with hot toddies. She hated having to take care of us when we were sick, said Nick.
You mean she didn’t want to? I strained to say.
God no, he said. She’d scowl at us if we seemed like we were coming down with something.
The hot toddy made me sweat before I even finished it. Nick tucked me in, making a big show of it—tucking the comforter under my ribs and thighs and feet. I fell right to sleep. When I woke up the next morning the comforters were soaked, my temperature was gone and my throat was just a little scratchy.
Thanks Nurse Nick, I said to him.
It was a relief to feel closer to him, but it seemed dangerous too.
At the end of June, I graduated from grammar school and Grandma Ollestad had pneumonia so I couldn’t go to Mexico until later that summer. Nick said I had to get a job. Grandpa was in L.A., perhaps picking up special medicine for Grandma, and he informed me of a new diner across from Topanga Beach that he had stopped at while taking a cruise down the Coast Highway. So he drove me down there and I got a job as a food prepper, server and busboy. Grandpa left a few days later.
On a whim one day after work I crossed the Pacific Coast Highway and stood on the bluff above the converted lifeguard station. All the surf legends were hanging out on the sand in front of the station, and different-colored surfboards leaned against the bottom half of it, which was open on all four sides. The waves were small and I recognized Chris Rolloff, my old buddy who had surprised me in Mexico last summer. He was riding a sparkling green peeler, his front arm cocked at the elbow like a scarecrow. He was goofy-footed like me and I found myself going through the motions, pumping up and down to make the section. He rode the wave to the inside. In one motion he hopped off his board, snatched it up under his arm and danced from one slippery rock to the next all the way to the beach. Man he’s gotten good, I thought.
Crazy for the Storm Page 17
