by Ed Gorman
I wasn’t letting go. You can make decisions in an instant that will forge the direction of the rest of your life. You can perform acts that will curse you with a hellish mark forever. You can sell your conscience by making a single mistake. You can do your best and still not make things right. Spinning in the wind, I couldn’t see the kid in the basket, but I could hear him crying. He sounded terrified and very young. Maybe only six or seven. Too damn young to work the controls and hit whichever valve had to be pressed to lower the thing. I thought, What kind of father takes a child that young up in a hot-air balloon? And how the hell did the idiot get outside of it on the ropes with the kid still in the basket? A lot goes through your mind when you’re six stories in the air and rising.
Despite his misery, I wanted to beat the hell out of Bradley — whose name I didn’t know then — all across the park meadow speeding by below us. Except I was still holding the line, and we were running out of acreage fast.
The balloon caromed into another stand of pine, and thick branches brutally scraped across Bradley’s back, breaking his grip. His fists opened and he flailed, slipping fifteen feet until he was side by side with me, holding the other rope. He screamed, “Don’t let go!”
I’d hold on as long as I could, but eventually I would have to let go. We’d both have to, and the idea scared the hell out of me. I had the rope in a death grip and didn’t want to wind up like the guy who’d be found planted half as deep as his casket would be. They were going to have to dig him up just to bury him again. “There’s no way to do it!” I shouted.
“Don’t let go!”
“Listen — ”
“Don’t let go!”
I wanted to shout, Stop saying that!
The balloon bounded from pine to pine, nothing slowing it. You’d think maybe the branches would’ve pierced the silk, but somehow — miraculously, really, if you could call it that — they didn’t. We had about another couple thousand feet of parkland forest to go and then there’d be nothing but empty fields until the first break of front-range stone ridges. After that, there were the canyon cliffs and brutal mountain winds working up for another fifteen miles until we’d be high in the Rockies.
I kept thinking, I never should’ve moved out West.
I kept thinking my crappy apartment in the East Village really hadn’t been so bad.
We couldn’t bring the balloon down by ourselves. It bounced into another huge tree and the awful, overwhelming crashing sound was harrowing around us. The balloon shook insanely and the ropes twisted. I cracked sideways into the trunk and pine needles tore at my face. My feet touched branches. Then I was standing on air, and then there were branches again. I had to drop. It was something you couldn’t think about, you just had to do it.
Another vicious collision nearly ripped my arms from the sockets and Bradley and I both let go at the same moment. We clung to thick tree limbs seventy-five feet off the ground. He let out a screech. I think I did, too. He glared at me with his agonized eyes and edged his way across the branch looking toward the balloon, which had almost cleared the trees and started to rise again.
The basket slipped free of the last limb with an enormous scraping noise, but the silk still hadn’t been pierced. Bradley worked like a maniac to get up to the basket, hand over hand as wads of bark came off and rained down to the ground. His palms were shredded. There was no way for him to get to it.
The boy inside cried out and a sob broke in my own throat. He whimpered, “Daddy, please, Daddy — ” He was petrified but still thought his father could save him.
But he never raised his head over the top of the basket. I wanted to see his face, if only for an instant. It was extremely important to me, and I didn’t know why.
Bradley screamed, “Johnny!”
He and I watched the balloon soar away until we couldn’t hear his son anymore. It lifted higher and higher, caught on the canyon winds, occasionally bouncing against the cliff walls until it was over them and almost out of sight.
We were both breathless from our exertions, but he had enough left in him to turn back and glare at me some more. He said, “You let go!”
“So did you. We had no choice.”
“You could’ve held on!”
“We couldn’t have.”
Talking to the guy this high in the air, covered in pine bristles and sap, his blood drying on my face — just hanging there and waiting for the next moment to happen as his son floated away.
It took me twenty minutes to climb down out of the tree.
Bradley stayed up there wailing and cursing me as I cautiously clutched at branches and lowered myself. By the time I hit the ground there were two ambulances, a fire truck, and eight cruisers parked at the edge of the woods, cops and park rangers prowling everywhere.
The shock of what had happened hit me all at once, before I’d taken two steps toward anybody. A heaviness thickened in my chest and my hands started to tremble badly. My legs weakened and I could feel the blood draining out of my head. A wash of blackness passed across my eyes and I might’ve toppled over if a cop with the name badge Kowalski hadn’t grabbed me.
He had gray eyes and some real muscle and power to him. He held me up with one hand and said, “Sit down.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Yeah, but sit down.”
But I didn’t want to sit anywhere among the pines. I scanned the sky and didn’t see the balloon anywhere.
“The kid?” I asked.
“What kid?”
“The one in the balloon.”
“Somebody was in there?”
“The hell do you think we were all trying so hard to hold on to it for? Is anyone following it?”
“It’s gone over the tree line and ridge of the canyon.”
“You’ve got to get some rangers up there.”
He thumbed his radio but there was already lots of buzzing going on, people squawking and more sirens erupting in the distance. They were coming in from Fort Coffins and Greeley and other nearby towns, everybody driving to the wrong place. I saw a helicopter go overhead.
Kowalski said, “Tell me what happened.”
“There’s not much.”
“Tell me anyway.”
We recognized each other as former New Yorkers transplanted to Colorado for reasons we still weren’t sure about. We both had the same general air of confusion and homesickness about us, mired in a false toughness and a general who-gives-a-damn attitude to hide our fears. It took one to recognize one. It was pretty obvious that somewhere along the way he’d made a misstep and it had fouled up his life so badly that he had to move two thousand miles away to get clear of it. Some kind of scandal — he’d taken money from the wrong guy or hadn’t given a cut of it to the right one. Whatever the mistake, it was costing him now and it would for the rest of his life. I was a different story.
A ring of cops stepped in close but no one said anything.
I explained how I’d been in the park staring off at Long’s Peak trying to find inspiration for the next story or song, the way I usually did when my thoughts ran dry.
I’d been sitting around the park a hell of a lot lately and not much had been shaking loose inside my head. I’d written one line — Between the Dark and the Daylight — knowing I was lifting it from somewhere but not caring so long as something else followed. Nothing did.
So I tried to sweat the next sentence out, staring into the white of the page. Sitting there like that for a while, waiting for something to guide my hand.
Instead, a tremendous shadow crossed over my notebook and a man howled and two guys ran past directly in front of me.
I looked up and there was the balloon, with Bradley dangling off one of the safety lines and shouting for help, the other two guys doing their best to catch up, reaching for the trailing ropes as the balloon swung low but still didn’t hit the ground.
You’re sitting there waiting for your next sentence and instead you get this.
I hadn’
t seen a hot-air balloon since I was kid on Long Island and couldn’t figure out how anybody could lose one.
I got to my feet and started stumbling in that direction, the sheer forceful oddity of the situation sort of pulling me after it. The guy who’d eventually be paralyzed from the neck down looked back to me while he ran and shouted, ‘There’s a boy in there! We have to get it back down!”
I hesitated another second. It’s normal, it would happen to anybody. We don’t trust unfamiliar conditions and unknown people, it’s easier to sit back down and fight the empty page. But the kid let out a murmuring whine that caught on the wind and somehow that got me moving.
I sprinted maybe fifty yards across the park before I finally caught up to the lines. By then, Bradley had actually managed to climb up a few more feet, almost to within reaching distance of the basket, and the other guys had grabbed hold of the ropes. I did a weird flying dive that should have made me land on my head, but somehow it worked. I was on a safety line draping from the basket, flitting there, sort of flying along with three other men, and we were rising.
There should’ve been about ten emergency shut-offs and built-in features to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Without anybody working the burner, the balloon should’ve been lowering, even in the wind. I looked up, but couldn’t see anything but the bottom of the basket. Then the rope I was on flailed outwards a few feet and I spun around.
There were health nuts in the world that did this sort of thing for fun, I was sure. I craned my neck and saw that the burner was still lit, a lick of orange and blue flame igniting. Something had gone seriously wrong, and I’d jumped right into it. The balloon wasn’t going to come down on its own.
It was already too late to jump. We were over the small lake in the center of the park. Pretty but man-made, only about four feet deep. If any of us cut loose now, even over the water, we’d hit with enough force to drive our kneecaps up through our chests. My father used to tell me about parachuting soldiers who’d leaped out over the Nam jungles and landed wrong. Twenty years later and the images were still sharp and bright in my mind. On top of everything else, I wanted to clock my father.
The kid was crying and Bradley was moaning, unable to climb any higher. He didn’t sound smart or sane or even human. He should’ve been yelling to his kid to hit the kill switch. I opened my mouth to shout and could barely hear myself. The rushing wind drove my voice back into my throat.
If you’re lucky, you get to puzzle out your what-the-hell-am-I-doing moments later on in the game. You look back and you can’t believe it occurred, and you’ve got no idea how it was you wound up there, doing that thing.
Now I’d made it down again intact. The other two guys who’d lent a hand hadn’t.
“What the hell happened?” I asked. “Who is this guy? Where’d this balloon come from?”
There was a second when Kowalski almost gave me the “I’ll ask the questions, sir” speech, but he could see it wasn’t going to work on me the way it did on the rich retirees waiting out the end of then-lives up in Estes Park.
A lot of yelling was coming from Bradley’s tree. It took three firemen on cherry pickers working up into the pine to finally grab hold of him and pull him down. He screamed as they lowered him and went wild when he hit the ground. He started seething and throwing punches and hissing worse than an animal, calling for Johnny like the kid might be just a few feet behind him, just out of eyeshot.
He spun on his heels and began to laugh in a way I’d never heard anybody laugh before, not even the schizos and addicts in the East Village alleys. It was so chilling it brushed me back a step. Kowalski felt it, too, and he puffed his chest out and held his chin up as a way to defend himself against it.
Three officers joined the firemen and they all wrestled Bradley onto his belly and got the cuffs on him.
I said, “Hey, come on …!” but Kowalski just scowled at me and started listening to and talking into his radio again. It looked like Bradley had slugged and elbowed a few of the cops. Blood speckled their faces. They’d follow procedure when it came down to somebody attacking their brother officers. It didn’t matter where you went, cops would always be the same about that.
They carried him to a cruiser and tossed him into the back. As it pulled across the field, Bradley turned in the backseat to stare at me. He wasn’t laughing anymore, but that goddamn chill stayed with me.
“Tell me what you people know so far,” I said.
Kowalski tightened his lips and then shrugged. “Information is still coming in. Looks like this one, his name’s Frank Bradley. Used to run some book in Nevada before he took a fall for bank robbery.”
“What?”
“Yeah, his wife split with the son. He figures it’s because he’s not making enough cash. So he walks in, grabs a manager by the throat, forces the guy to clear a couple of the tills. Sets off about five silent alarms. He gets something like three grand, walks outside, the dye pack explodes, and he’s standing there in the parking lot turning purple when the local PD arrives. He’s not what you call one of your better planners.”
I shook my head. “That’s more than just stupidity. This guy’s crazy.”
“Yeah, well, maybe. He did two years in the state pen. Gets out and goes looking for his wife. Finds out she’s split the state and come to Colorado. Tracks her to Berthoud. Grabs the kid and wheels off with him. Tells the boy he’s going to get him ice cream and toys and balloons. They drive by the spring carnival down there, off 17 and 287. They’ve got a hot-air balloon set up.”
“My God. So he hijacks it?”
“Figured he’d be funny, I guess. Probably tells his boy, ‘Look at the balloon I got you.’ Anyway, the thing is roped to the ground it’s just supposed to go up twenty feet or so, then back down. But Bradley takes the kid up and unties the safety lines, forces the carnival guy to fire it all the way up. They start hovering and catch a stiff breeze. The carnival guy jumps out the other side of the basket, falls ten feet, and sprains his ankle. Bradley tries to screw around with the controls and the next thing you know — ”
“The maniac is drifting over Loveland Park, holding on to one of the ropes himself.”
“Yeah.”
“Any chance the kid might be okay?”
“Maybe, if we can find him in time.”
It wasn’t going to happen.
He knew it and I knew it. I looked at the expanse of the Rockies, thinking about how far the balloon had already traveled, up from Berthoud. If the wind hadn’t been from the east, and the balloon had instead carried out toward Greeley, they could’ve tracked him no matter how long it took. There was nothing for thirty miles in that direction except farmland.
But heading west from the foothills, with the balloon drifting higher from the jammed burner, it would float across the range and just keep going until it hit a cliff and dumped the kid across a thousand feet of mountain.
Kowalski stared off in the direction the cruiser had gone with Bradley. I looked that way too, the chill working against me, tightening the skin on the back of my neck. That laugh. Jesus.
I made a full statement at the police department and signed the paperwork. They escorted me to my apartment and didn’t look back after they’d dropped me off. While I sat on my couch drinking a tumbler of whiskey — feeling the walls closing in on me, my hands twitching as if I were still holding on to the line, thinking I’d maybe never sleep again — I slept and dreamed of the boy.
He was dying, but not quite there yet. He stood in front of me, one small hand pressed against my chest. But his head was turned completely around. He spoke, and his words faded out behind him. I heard “Daddy,” and “Help,” and even my own name. It was one of those dreams where you couldn’t run or speak or do any damn thing at all. I knew I was asleep but couldn’t break out of it. I could feel myself gripping the cushions someplace far away, and heard a voice that wasn’t entirely my own, mewling there. I grabbed the kid by the shoulder and tried to spin him
around, but his head kept turning away from me.
The media went nuts. It was a big story for Colorado. Bizarre and full of human interest. You looked at it one way and you saw a bunch of strangers trying to help out a kid, one of them losing his life, another paralyzed from the shoulders down. His name was Bill Mandor and he was on every channel. Half his face was bandaged and around the edges it looked like he’d been scraped to the bone when he hit the dog walk. The one good thing about his being paralyzed was that he couldn’t feel his shattered legs and spine and didn’t need painkillers. He looked clear-headed and spoke like the kind of heroes I remembered from when I was a kid. Men who could staunchly handle the worst events and injuries through willpower and nobility. He made me shake my head.
Reporters camped out on the lawn in front of my apartment manager’s door. I took the phone off the hook and didn’t answer the door for three days. Eventually the camera crews got bored and left. I watched cable news programs every waking moment hoping there’d be information about the boy, but despite hundreds of volunteers hiking all over the front range, the canyons, and the east side of the divide, nobody had seen the balloon. It seemed impossible.
At night, helicopters buzzed through the skies, heading up to the national park and the thousands of square miles of mountain terrain and forest land.
Kowalski called me five days later, on an afternoon full of sirens, and said, “Bradley’s loose.”
“What’s that mean?”
“What do you think it means?”
“A former bank robber out of the joint only a couple of days hijacks a balloon that causes the death of a good Samaritan, and you spring him?”
“Blame your judicial system, not me. He was obviously out of his head, so they put him under guard at the hospital, in the mental wing. They said it was depression brought on by grief. You can’t help but feel sorry for the guy, his kid gone and all. He got flowers and prayer cards by the truckload. He slept for ninety-six hours straight, cuffed to the bed. What they call nonresponsive. Not a coma, just a deep sleep. They thought he might be dying. Losing his will to live.”
