Crash

by Joseph Monninger

  So the hut was complete, she realized, circling a little to see the top tier and the blue tarp covering the roof. They had shelter, at least, and a place to get out of the rain. Rain that — by the look of the sky — stood ready to come in over the lake at any minute.

  She stared at the sky for a moment, half hoping to see a plane patrolling overhead, then she shrugged and walked to a second blue tarp stretched out on the ground, where Seldon Eggerts and Walter Eliot had assembled everything they had recovered from the plane.

  “How’s it look?” she asked the group.

  There had been a ton of speculation about what was on the plane, but now, as she peeked past Seldon Eggerts’s shoulder, she was astonished to see how little had been salvaged. Working on the plane that morning and afternoon, it had seemed like a ton of trips, but now the result was fairly meager. Seldon had put the food to one side, tools to the other, and odds and ends in a third pile. The crossbow — something the pilot had kept in a tiny compartment behind his seat — stood out in its own place. E wasn’t interested in it, but she knew the boys had been excited at its discovery. She would have preferred that they’d found a sharp knife.

  “Not great,” Web said. “We’re in trouble.”

  He knelt on the opposite side of the tarp from Seldon Eggerts and Walter Eliot. It made E shiver a little to see Web now wore some of the pilot’s clothing. Web had come on the shoot in his ridiculous shorts and a pair of Crocs, and if it hadn’t been for the pilot’s clothing, he would have been in a bad way. Still, it made her uneasy. She kept her eyes on Buford. The basset hound sat beside Web, his silly, long body tucked into a sitting position that didn’t quite work.

  “Keep it positive,” Walter Eliot said to Web.

  “We are positively in trouble,” Web said and grinned, but no one else found him funny.

  “It’s not great,” Seldon said, his eyes down to study the food. “I thought there would be more food. I guess they don’t need to provide much food on such a short trip.”

  E looked closely at the food pile. It was paltry. Mostly, she thought, it looked like a supply for the pilot, a kind of backup picnic lunch he might have packed for himself. He had a box of instant oatmeal, a half sandwich — ham, she thought — and a six-pack of V8 tomato juice. He also had a dozen PowerBars, a nutty-honey-bran sort of thing, and a half-finished plastic bottle of Diet Coke. He had a full sleeve of Oreos — Double Stuf — and two Granny Smith apples. That was all. For eight people and one dog. It didn’t amount to much.

  They had done a little better with the tools and odds and ends, she saw. They had a hatchet, a pack of fishhooks, a bobbin of monofilament line, two flashlights, one headlamp, a half roll of duct tape, six tiny airline blankets, a U-shaped pillow — the kind that travelers use on planes — a car jack, a lug wrench, a pair of pliers, a pack of strike-anywhere matches, a jacket from the pilot, a pair of shin-high rubber boots, a pair of thigh-high rubber boots, and six whistles. Those were all the worthwhile things, although a knife, she thought, would have been an enormous help. The rest — a messy pile of junk — formed the third pile. It was possible more stuff remained on the plane, but with the water gurgling around and the plane making loud, shuddering sounds, it wasn’t going to be easy to find it.

  “You guys better not try to eat me,” Web said. “I’m not giving anyone permission to eat me if I croak.”

  “Stop it, Web,” Seldon said. “This is serious.”

  Web looked around with his face broken into a smile, trying to get the others to join in, but no one was interested, E saw.

  “Where did Paul and Titus go?” E asked.

  “They went back the way the plane came in,” Seldon said, “to see if anything valuable dropped out on the way into the crash zone. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth a look.”

  “It’s going to rain,” she said.

  Seldon looked up at the sky as if he had forgotten everything but the food and supplies in front of him. Mr. Eliot looked up, too.

  “We should get this inside,” Mr. Eliot said. “We don’t want the food to get wet.”

  “Titus said we should hang the food,” Seldon said. “It could be attractive to bears if we store it inside the hut.”

  “That kid Suryadi is attractive to bears,” Web said. “With his side and everything.”

  “It’s a risk we’ll have to run,” Seldon said.

  Big drops of rain began to fall.

  “Grab the ends, and we can drag it inside,” Mr. Eliot said. “We can hang it later if we want to. We need to eat something. People are starving.”

  E grabbed one of the corners and waited until Seldon and Mr. Eliot and Web grabbed the other corners. Then they dragged it to the hut. Rain began falling harder, hitting the ground with tiny explosions.

  “Man, look at that,” Paul Eliot said.

  Titus followed Paul’s sight line to the top of the trees. It was obvious how the plane had come through them: the pines bent over in a rough pathway marking the plane’s descent, their tops snapped off like icicles from a frozen roofline. It amazed Titus to reconstruct what had happened. At one point, the trees stood unbroken, then the path to the lake began. Obviously, the plane had started down at the point where the first trees dangled. It was simple to see what had happened, because the plane gouged deeper into the tops of the trees as it approached the lake. It had cut the trees on an angle like a wedge of cheese.

  “That pilot did a good job to get us to the lake,” Titus said, his eyes still on the treetops. “A little lower and we would have been squashed on the tree trunks.”

  “Those trees are what got him,” Paul said, his voice soft and respectful, his eyes riveted to the treetops. “Jenky, too. The branches stabbed right through the plane skin.”

  Titus nodded. He had thought the same thing.

  A few drops of rain began to fall. Titus moved deeper into the woods. It wasn’t easy going. Blowdowns and widow-makers — trees that could fall on a logger without warning and make his wife a widow — covered the forest floor. It was rare to find a clear piece for walking once you left the smooth contours of the beach; mostly it was scrambling over one branch, ducking under another, then on and on. But Titus pressed deeper in the forest until he stood directly under what had to be the first snap of trees bent over by the plane’s wing and nose.

  “Be careful,” he said to Paul. “Those tops could drop off anytime.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s just search along the ground. We probably won’t find anything, but you never know.”

  Paul nodded. He inched back toward the beach, his eyes flashing up to see the trees, then back to cover the ground. Titus worked to his right, following the same procedure. Fortunately, they didn’t have far to go, because the insects — mosquitoes and black flies — swarmed them. The insects were bad enough on the beach, but here, in the damp shade of the forest, it was unbearable. You couldn’t breathe without sucking them into your nose and mouth. Titus remembered reading books about Arctic canoe trips and exploration excursions, but reading about the insects and experiencing them were two different things.

  They found the largest part of the right wing a hundred yards toward the beach.

  “Not bad,” Titus said, circling the wing as much as he could on the uneven ground. “We can use this. It doesn’t look too broken up.”

  “We’ll need help carrying it.”

  “Yep. But if we get enough people, we can get it out. It would make a wicked good roof for something. Maybe we could put it on the hut and make the whole thing more watertight.”

  The wing rested almost on its end, the top, thicker part, sticking up toward the sky. A few yards farther on, Paul found part of a wheel assemblage. Then Titus uncovered a bunch of glass — from the windshield, from the side windows, he couldn’t say — but the rest, bright glitters of plane skin, turned out to be not worth salvaging.

  “The wing, that’s about it,” Paul said when they stepped clear of the forest. The rain had become
steadier.

  “Everything’s worth something,” Titus said.

  “I get it,” Paul said.

  Titus wasn’t sure who stopped first, but somehow they ended up under a thick tug of pine branches out of the rain. The insects still buzzed in their ears, but somehow it wasn’t quite as bad. Titus studied the clouds. The rain wasn’t going to lift any time soon. It would sock them in and turn everything damp and slippery. He felt hungry and tired, but he also didn’t want to go back to the hut right away. He wasn’t sure why.

  “What’s next?” Paul asked.

  Titus shrugged.

  “Food’s going to be a problem,” Titus said. He realized now why he had stopped. He wanted to have Paul as a sounding board. “We can probably figure out how to catch fish. We have fishhooks. But if the temperature starts dropping, we’re in real trouble. I doubt we can make ourselves warm enough to survive for long.”

  “A plane is going to come, though, right? Someone is going to come looking, don’t you think?”

  “Probably,” Titus said. “I mean, of course. The question is whether they know where we came down. If we came down on our projected flight path, then yes, they should find us pretty easily.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then we’ll have to walk out.”

  “Do you think we could?”

  Titus shrugged again. He didn’t know.

  “Maybe we could send a party out for help. I don’t know. It’s dangerous either way. The survival books always say you should stay put and let someone find you. At least that’s what I’ve always read in the Scouts. I know if you get stranded in your car, you usually shouldn’t leave it. You shouldn’t swim away from a capsized boat unless you’re absolutely sure you can make it to shore. But it makes sense to plan for an exploration party, too. You have to figure out all the contingencies.”

  “I’ll go,” Paul said.

  Titus looked at him.

  “It wouldn’t be easy,” Titus said, sorting it out a little in his mind as he talked. “It would be really, really hard. And we might not make it. In fact, I would bet we wouldn’t make it.”

  “Would you go?”

  Titus nodded. The rain, he noticed, had become a constant drone. He was curious how the hut would hold up to its first rainstorm. He thought it would do okay. It would do better with the plane wing for a roof if he could figure out how to build it.

  “You think there are any bears around here?” Paul asked, holding his hand out for the rain. He drank a little of the water from his hand. “For real?”

  “I’m sure there are. Grizzlies and black bears. I don’t have any doubt.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “We probably won’t even see one, but you never know. They scout the water’s edge, so eventually we’ll want to move the camp back. But one thing at a time.”

  “What else do we need to do?”

  “Set up latrines,” Titus said. “We’ve got a million things to do, honestly. It’s going to be a lot of work.”

  “I kind of like it, though, you know?” Paul asked.

  Titus looked at him.

  “You mean, just kind of the adventure of it?”

  Paul shrugged.

  “I know what you mean,” Titus said. “But it’s more serious than that. We can’t let it become that.”

  Titus wasn’t sure he had made his point. He wasn’t entirely sure what his point might be, exactly, but it had something to do with playing at survival rather than being serious about survival. He knew for certain that any little thing could knock them all down. It wouldn’t take much to put an end to them. That was one thing he had gleaned from books about Arctic exploration.

  “We should get out of the rain,” Titus said eventually. “You don’t want to get damp and cold.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m glad we found the wing. And I’m glad we know what’s back here. If we hadn’t checked, we would have always wondered.”

  “We can get the wing out.”

  Titus nodded, then pushed out into the rain. Fog had already covered the lake. The plane, resting with its nose pointed toward shore, looked as though it had passed through a white cloud and had simply lost its way.

  The dog was cold, Seldon realized. Or hungry. Or both. He reached down and put his hand on the dog’s ribs. The poor thing, he thought. It sat in his awkward basset hound way beside the tiny fire, his face forward. Seldon worried the dog’s ears might catch fire.

  He also worried someone might suggest eating the dog.

  Weird, he knew. But possible. If things became too tight, anything was possible. You didn’t have to be a survivor guy to figure that out. The entire game had shifted, and now, parked on a beach in a remote part of Alaska, anything was open for discussion. It wasn’t likely that anyone would want to eat old Buford, but you never knew.

  He reached down and rubbed the dog’s chest.

  “Can’t we have more wood on the fire?” someone asked.

  It was hard to tell who spoke in the dimness. Everything inside the hut was cloudy and damp. Smoke lingered near the roof before it passed quietly out, but the rain came in through the opening for smoke and hissed on the hot coals. Not a perfect system, Seldon thought. He didn’t know what a perfect system might be, but this wasn’t it.

  At least, though, they were out of the rain. Mostly.

  “We need to ration,” Jill said, taking up a theme they had been discussing most of the afternoon. “We should come up with a plan to divide the food, then stick to it.”

  “Anything that can go rotten,” Web said, “should go first. We should eat the perishables. It doesn’t make sense to hold on to them.”

  “We need to ration….” Jill said again, but then Paul and Titus ducked into the hut, and the conversation stopped.

  “Smoky in here,” Titus said. “We need to open the hole in the roof a little more.”

  “It has no draw,” Walter Eliot said from his spot on the opposite side of the fire from Seldon. “The air doesn’t move from the bottom to the top.”

  Seldon watched Titus study the situation. Then he moved to the beach side of the hut and tore out a hole in the side of the wall, down near the bottom. Almost immediately, the smoke began moving better. Air came in through the side, ran forward toward the fire, then followed the heat up toward the ceiling. If you sat low enough and stayed back from the fire, the smoke wasn’t too bad now. Titus was a pretty impressive kid when you came down to it, Seldon thought.

  “We’re talking about food,” Walter Eliot said, explaining the topic to his son and Titus. “Everyone’s hungry.”

  “So let’s eat,” Web said.

  “It’s a question of how much to eat,” Seldon said. “That’s the sticking point.”

  Titus sat down on the bench of sand that ringed the hut. So did Paul. For the first time, really, they were all together. For the first time since the accident, for the first time since they had buried the two bodies. That had been a moment, too, Seldon reflected, but they hadn’t talked then. That had been a dark, sad moment. Afterward the different teams had gone about their various jobs, but now, as the sun began setting, they were in the hut sitting around a tiny fire. The flames gave off a haunted look. Jill was the most haunted of all, Seldon thought, except for Suryadi, who no longer spoke. Suryadi was in a bad way, but there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. Everything had happened very fast and was still happening fast. It was difficult to slow anything down.

  “We’ve done okay for the first full day,” Titus said. “We should all be pretty proud of ourselves. It hasn’t been easy.”

  “I’m starving!” Web said.

  Web looked around, and when no one agreed or rallied to what he’d said, he muttered, “I am,” then shut up.

  “We have shelter,” Titus said, “such as it is. We have fire and fuel. It’s true we’re short on food, but we can manage for a little while. What do people think about aiming at five hundred to a thousand calories?”
r />   “Per day?” Walter Eliot asked.

  Titus nodded.

  “That’s not much,” E said.

  “We don’t have much,” Titus said. “We can increase it if we can catch some fish….”

  “I hate fish,” Paul said, then shrugged.

  “We might be able to supplement it somehow. And we have the crossbow….” Titus said. “Maybe we could hunt something.”

  “Is Titus in charge of everything?” Web asked. “I mean, just because he says something, is that the way it’s going to be?”

  “Titus is doing great,” Seldon said, his hand on Buford, his tolerance for Web shrinking by the minute. “So far, he’s been the most useful member of the team.”

  “We could be in the plane and out of all this rain,” Web said, “if anyone ever listened to me.”

  “The plane is filled with water,” Jill said. “And it’s creepy in there anyway.”

  “If we can eat, we will all feel better,” Walter Eliot said reasonably. “We should have a meal.”

  Titus nodded. E, who sat closest to the blue tarp with all the belongings bundled into it, spread the food out on top of the pile. Seldon felt a nervous flutter in his stomach over how little food they had. It was paltry for one person, never mind for eight. He also realized everyone stared at the food as if worried it would get passed out and they would miss out on something. He massaged Buford’s ears between his fingers. Buford nosed the tarp, sensing the food.

  “The dog’s hungry,” Seldon said, deliberately keeping his voice level. “Buford is, I mean.”

  “We’re not feeding the dog,” Web said. “No way.”

  “We are, too,” Jill said. “He can have my share if it comes to that.”

  “No one can give away a share,” Walter said. “That’s something I’ll insist on. Everyone has to eat every day as long as there’s food.”

  “What about Suryadi?” E asked.

  “Has he been conscious?” Walter asked.

  “Not for a long time.”

  Seldon forced himself to ask the next question.