Free Fall in Crimson

by John D. MacDonald

  “Sure.”

  “So the closer together and the closer to the number-one balloon, the better. So what you do is establish the placement and the order of takeoff, and when you get the gear spread out, I’ll set up the camera stations. Okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “I want to put Simmy with a camera in the number-three balloon, so that better be the one to come off last, so he can get wide-angle stuff of the other balloons and the fall. I want him back in the basket and low, so the other cameras don’t pick him up.”

  “Upwind, then, about two hundred feet from number one, with a simultaneous takeoff, and Red has such a nice touch on that burner, he can hold it anywhere you say in relation to number one.”

  “I’d say a little higher, but not so high the envelope gets in the way of his camera angle. With the set of the wind, he should get the kind of landscape we want to show below number one. Joya, please, honey, it has to go right the first time.”

  “Do everything I can.”

  “Sorry to hear about Walter.”

  “He’ll be okay. We thought it was some sort of flu, and then he began to have trouble breathing. They’ve got him on oxygen and full of antibiotics.”

  “Leaves you shorthanded.”

  “We were already shorthanded. There’s just me, Ed, and Dave.”

  “So here is your new man. Travis McGee. Consultants are supposed to be able to do anything. Give him the speedy balloonist course. Okay with you, McGee?”

  “Fine with me.”

  There was something in her quick glance which I could not identify. It seemed like some kind of recognition. It gave me the strange feeling that she knew I was an impostor, here for some private purpose. It made me wonder if I had seen the woman before, known her in some other context. But I am good about faces, and I knew she was a stranger. I knew I had not misinterpreted some kind of flirtatious awareness. It gave me a feeling of strangeness, wariness, distrust. Proceed with caution. She either knew something about me she had no right to know, or she was making some kind of very poor guess about me. In the glance, in her body language, in her voice, there was the sense of a secret shared, a private conspiracy.

  Fourteen

  The Mist was gone, the sky brightening, and the encampment came alive, with people trotting back and forth from chore to chore, engines grinding as they moved vehicles into position.

  Joya told me where to wait for her, and after she had organized the positions and told people the timing she came back to me.

  “McGee, I hope you are a quick listener, because I don’t have much time. Stop me any time you have a question, any time anything is unclear, okay? We like to fly in the early morning before the thermals begin to kick up, but this should be a similar situation. The air is cool enough to give a nice lift. We’ve got a nice launch site here. The direction of the breeze will hold, and the first thing in the way is that line of trees at least a half mile off.”

  A truck pulled up to us, and two men hopped out and started to wrestle the wicker basket out of the back. Joya introduced them. I helped them with the basket. They lifted a big canvas sack out of the basket, set it on the ground, and began pulling the seventy feet of canopy out of it. It was very brightly patterned in wide vertical yellow and green stripes.

  “It’s ripstop nylon,” Joya said. “We stow it into the bag in accordion folds, inspect it when we fold it in, inspect again when we spread it out. We check the deflation port and the maneuvering vent.”

  “Whoa.”

  “The maneuvering vent is a slit on the side, up beyond the equator, ten or twelve feet long. You pull a cord and let hot air out to descend. When you are just about on the ground, you pull the red line for the deflation port, and that opens the top of the balloon and collapses it. It has a Velcro seal. They are checking the numbered gores and the vertical and horizontal load tapes. As owners, we’re authorized to fix little melt holes with patches. And the places where damn fools walk on the canopy. Bigger damage has to have FAA-authorized repair.”

  When they had the big bright envelope spread out, downwind, Joya and the two men brought the propane tanks from the truck and slipped them into the stowage cylinders in the corners of the basket. They bolted together the support frame for the burners, hooked up the fuel lines from the ten-gallon tanks to the burners, then tilted the basket onto its side with the frame and burners toward the spread-out envelope.

  At the other locations Joya had selected, the teams were doing the same things, getting set for a coordinated launch. They seemed to be trim and attractive people in their late twenties and early thirties. There was an earnestness about them, a cooperative efficiency, that reminded me of the sailing crowd, of preparations for a regatta. About half of them were women.

  As the men were hooking the load cables to the tie blocks, Joya showed me the small instrument panel and explained it to me: variometer for rate of ascent and descent, pyrometer for temperature up in the crown of the balloon, compass—which she said was not very meaningful because there was no way to steer once you were aloft. There were gauges on the top of each propane tank. She showed me the sparker used to ignite the propane and to reignite it quickly should the flame go out. There was a small hand-held CB radio strapped to the side of the basket, which she said they used for contact with the chase vehicle.

  She showed me the red line for deflation and the line to the maneuvering vent. She ran through a checklist with her ground crew and then turned to me, shrugged, and said, “Now we wait until it’s time to inflate. Nothing else we can do at the moment, Mr. McGee.”

  When I asked her how that was arranged, she said we could walk over and watch them at the number-one balloon. They brought out a power-operated fan, and two crew members held the mouth of the balloon wide open as the fan blew air into it. One crew member held a line fastened to the crown of the balloon and kept watch to see that it didn’t roll in any kind of side wind that would twist the steel cables at the mouth. When the balloon seemed about three quarters inflated, they started the burner, and it made a monstrous ripping, roaring sound as it gouted flame into the open mouth of the balloon.

  She leaned close to me to holler over the burner sound, “Flying, you use over twelve gallons of propane an hour, enough to heat ten houses. George is working the blast valve. See. Now there’s a lift.”

  The roaring stopped. The balloon lifted free of the ground and slowly swung up, righting the basket as it did so, and another man climbed into the basket. The basket was tethered to a truck and to a smaller vehicle. George pulled on the blast valve, giving it a three-second shot of flame up into the balloon, waited, and then did it again.

  “Short blasts are the way to do it,” Joya explained. “You don’t get any reaction for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds, and then you get the lifting effect of the new heat.”

  She took me closer to where we could look up into the balloon. It was blue and white and crimson, segmented like an orange, and there was enough daylight coming through the fabric to dim the long blue flame of the burners. The sun broke through. Kesner was walking around, arguing, waving his arms. Josie Laurant arrived, leading her small entourage, and Kesner picked her up and put her in the basket. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was visibly angry. They brought the camera boom close and wanted the area cleared. I went back to the number-two balloon with Joya.

  There was no diminution in my awareness of her special attitude toward me. She carried on a second conversation at a nonverbal level. She was telling me that she and I had some sort of arrangement. And, in addition, she was curious about me. It seemed an unemotional curiosity, speculative and slightly anxious, expressed by the quick sidelong glances, the set of the mouth.

  The number-one balloon lifted to the limit of its tether. The breeze kept it canted toward the northeast. Kesner yelled through his bullhorn. They seemed to be having trouble over there, doing the scene in between the blasts of the burner needed to keep the balloon aloft at the end of the tethers.


  “You want to take this flight with me, Mr. McGee?”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I wouldn’t be in the way?”

  “I like the extra weight. Dave was going to come along. Let me ask him.”

  She went over to the truck and in a little while she came back with leather gloves and a helmet. “He says sure. See if these are okay. If you lose balance or something, you might touch the burner or the coils that preheat the propane. Helmet is standard for landings. They can get rough. The thing is to face the direction of flight, hang on, and don’t leave the basket. That’s important. Without your weight it could take right off again and get in trouble. Look, do you want to try it or not?”

  “I’d like to try it, but not very much.”

  She studied me and smiled. “That’s an honest reaction. This should be a routine flight. What do people call you?”

  “Travis. Or McGee. Or whatever, Joya.”

  “Joya Murphy-Wheeler. With a hyphen, Travis. Mostly what you have to do is keep out of my way, which isn’t easy, and admire the view.”

  We killed time for an hour, and finally they took Josie down to ground level and let her out, and put another propane tank aboard and another smallish dark-haired woman dressed like Josie.

  “That’s the stuntwoman,” Joya said. “Linda.” She said the name the way she might say “snake.”

  They took the number-one balloon back up again to twenty feet above the ground. Linda held the burner support, straddled the side of the basket. The man with her, who had been in the long scene with Josie, grabbed for her and missed as she toppled over the side. She fell neatly into the safety net, bounced up, clasped her hands over her head, duck-walked to the edge of the net, grasped it, and swung down. George stood up out of his concealment in the basket and hit the blast valve for a few seconds. The balloon sagged down anyway, and the crew grabbed the edge of the basket. The actor climbed out and then was told to climb back in. The dummy was brought aboard and stowed. After a small conference, Linda climbed aboard, too, and Kesner yelled through his bullhorn, “Joya, get your people ready to go.”

  It took about thirty minutes to get all seven balloons inflated. They seemed to come growing up out of the field like a crop of huge poisonous puffballs. The gas blasts were almost constant. Joya had arranged the signals. When number one took off, number three followed almost immediately, staying near it, gaining a little height on it. Joya’s crew people, Dave and Ed, held the basket down and made bad jokes about what I might expect of the flight.

  “Weight off!” Joya ordered. They removed their hands. We had positive buoyancy, and she blasted for eight or ten seconds. A little while after the blast ended, we began to lift more rapidly, following the first two in their mated ascent.

  “I’ll have to try to stay close, for the sake of the cameras, but then we’ll peel off.”

  “I thought you said you couldn’t steer these things.”

  “You’ll see.” She worked the blaster valve, ripping the silence with that startling bray, a snorting sound that shot the blue flame high into the envelope. Without that noise, there was a strange silence. We were moving with the wind, so there was no wind sound. I heard the other balloons blasting in short staccato sequences, then heard the wicker of the basket creak as she rested her hip against the edge. The ground had dropped away. Behind us I could see the pattern of vehicles, of the muddy paths, the trailers and trucks.

  “There!” Joya said.

  I looked where she pointed and saw the lifelike dummy ejected from the number-one balloon, about seventy feet above us and ahead of us. I heard the rattle of the clothing as the dummy fell, turning slowly. It seemed to pause and then pick up a terrible speed as it dwindled below us to smack into the tough pastureland.

  We held position for a little while until Joya said, “I think they have enough.” She pulled the line to the maneuvering vent and bent to watch the variometer scale, explaining that we were too high to use visual reference points to indicate altitude. She let us sag downward until it seemed to me that our descent accelerated. At just that point she began feeding it short intermittent blasts. The harsh sound startled me each time until I learned to watch her gloved hand on the lever.

  The others were far ahead of us, much higher and leaving us well behind. “Higher wind speeds aloft,” she explained. “They’ll be coming down soon, to fly close to the ground. That’s when it’s best. You’ll see.”

  She gave all her attention to stabilizing the balloon at the height she wanted, explaining that as we came down we were pushing cooler air up into the envelope, thus decreasing lift. She leveled it out at about twenty feet above the ground. The breeze carried us along at I would guess ten miles an hour. Now and again she would pull the blast lever for a short sequence of that ungodly racket, and in a little while I began to comprehend the rhythm of it. If there was a tree line ahead she would give a two-second blast which, thirty seconds later, would lift us up over the trees.

  We moved in silence, looking at the flat rich country. We heard the birdsongs, heard a chain saw in a woodlot, heard horses whinny. Children ran and waved at us. We crossed small country roads and once saw our reflection in a farm pond.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “There aren’t any words,” I said. There weren’t. In incredible silence between her infrequent short blasts for control, we moved across the afternoon land, steady as a cathedral, moving through the land scents, barn scents, the summery sounds. It was a sensation unlike anything else in the world. It was a placid excitement, with the quality of an extended dream.

  We beamed at each other, sharing pleasure. It made her strong plain face quite lovely. It was the instant of becoming friends.

  At last she bumped it up to two hundred feet, where her exquisite coordination was not as imperative. We used the wrench to cut an almost empty tank out of the line and tie in another full one. She explained that we had wasted gas by using the maneuvering vent to drop us down, but she had wanted to get down quickly and get away from the others. From our altitude I scanned the horizon and could see but two of the others, little round pieces of hard candy way off to the west of us. “Divergent winds at different altitudes,” she explained.

  She perched a hip on the edge of the basket again, one hand overhead on the blast lever. She glanced at the control panel, then looked at me with the questing look she had concealed before.

  “Travis, I can’t add anything to what I told them on the phone.”

  Moment of decision. The proper thing to do would be to express all the confusion I felt, to take her off the hook, to correct her misapprehension. But there was a flavor of conspiracy, and I did not want to sidestep anything that might become of use to me. Apparently she and I were having a clandestine meeting, hanging up there in a wicker basket under a seventy-foot bulge of rainbow nylon, moving northeasterly across middle America.

  I took my time with the response, knowing it was make or break. “They said they felt it would be better if I got it from you, rather than secondhand from them.”

  “I thought they were taping it. There was that little beep every few seconds.”

  “Listening to a tape and listening directly to a person are two quite different experiences, Joya. So if you don’t mind …”

  She shrugged, sighed. She pointed out a small deer, bounding toward a woodlot. And then she told me the story.

  They had been going to leave when a lot of the others left. But she had been concerned about what had happened to her friend, Jean Norman, who was staying at the hotel with Kesner. There was a large trailer at the far end of the leased pastureland, fixed up like a bedroom set. There the withered little technician named Mercer used a video camera setup with a videorecorder, and with Dirty Bob and Jean and Linda, who was gay, they made cassettes, masters, which were flown to Las Vegas, where a distributor paid three thousand apiece for them and could then duplicate a thousand copies a day, title them, package them, and send them out. They kept
Jeanie on pills and paid so little attention to her that she heard more than they realized. She signed releases every time, and they gave her a little money every time. Lately they had been bringing local girls into the action, making them think it was going to be some sort of screen test. The girls got some false reassurance from the presence of Linda and Jeanie, but the fake rape turned out to be real rape, and the screams were real as well. With enough Valium in them to quiet them down, they would take the money later on and sign the release and never dare reveal what had actually happened, hoping only that no collector in Rosedale Station ever bought one of those X tapes and recognized his neighbor’s daughter or granddaughter in the jolly tattooed clutch of Desmin Grizzel.

  “I haven’t got any proof at all,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gotten involved. But I think it is rotten. And they should pay somehow for what they did to Jeanie, if for nothing else. She told me bits and pieces when she was sort of lucid. And I put it together. I don’t think Josie Laurant knows about it. I like her. Kesner and Dirty Bob are monsters. Like I told your people on the phone, we’re cutting out. Dave is driving the chase car and Ed is driving the truck with all our gear. I don’t even want to take you back to where we left from. It’s going to get very dangerous around there. The people around there hate the movie people and us too. If any one of those girls talks about what happened to her, it could start a shooting war. It’s almost a shooting war now. One balloon came in with three rifle-bullet holes right through it, but little holes won’t bring a balloon down. From now on it’s up to you people.”

  “How did you know I was the one?”

  “They said somebody would be here today, somebody with a cover story, to look around and decide whether it is worth further investigation.” She looked up into the envelope and down at the variometer dial, gave a five- or six-second blast, frowned at me, and said, “Anyway, you look like the sort of person I expected them to send. What will you do?”