by Rich Foster
He offered her coffee and she accepted. They entered a solarium, which extended out from the house toward the river. On a marble sideboard, a silver coffee urn and china cups awaited. “Traditional, bordering on ostentation”, she thought. The china cups were paper thin and expensive, the silver urn valuable and old.
“I don’t mean to be pretentious, these aren’t actually my things” he apologized, as if he were reading her mind. He handed her a cup and saucer. My mother passed away recently and I am using her things rather than bring my furnishings from storage.
Lilly had stirred cream into her coffee while gazing out the large plate glass windows which framed the pastoral view. Grass spread out from the house forming a terrace. Well-cultivated flower gardens bordered the path, which wound down to the river. Workmen painted the boat dock, which jutted out into the water’s placid flow.
“It is very serene,” she ventured. “It’s so peaceful by the river.”
“It’s too peaceful. That is why I need you. I need someone to provide a counter point.” Blain fumbled for a thought and then said what came to mind. “Imagine a large Calder mobile out on that lawn!”
She pictured it; Calder’s bright red, arching, sculpture from the Chicago Civic Center in that expanse of green, the image was stunning. It was her first hint that she had falsely appraised him. Still waters did seem to flow deep.
“I believe we could do something very exciting here Mr. Blain,” she said enthusiasm in her voice.”
“Please call me Charles, he replied.
They had walked through the house together. Lilly let him talk. She asked what use he saw for each room and tried to sense his style. It proved eclectic and non-conventional. Charles Blain certainly wasn’t looking for a “period piece”. He wasn’t seeking the conventional; rather he spoke in terms such as dynamic, vibrant, alive, and unusual.
“But it has to also work” he said. “So many mistake garish for bold.”
She found herself in sympathy with his spirit, so that genuine excitement took hold. Strolling through the house, casually chatting, they had formed an un-spoken communion, a common sense of purpose. When he had excused himself, saying he must return to town, she had felt a sense of loss, somehow the house was diminished. The rest of that first day she was left alone to take full measure of the house. The afternoon had passed quickly while she made notes of room dimensions, and took digital photographs. She made a few tentative sketches for the entry hall, mainly to record an inspiration she had for it. Preliminary ideas formed in her head as she made the house hers.
Lilly was pulled from her reverie as Charles swung the front door open.
He took her hand in warm greeting and she turned a cheek for him to kiss. He pecked her cheek and she pursed her lips near his ear and made a small smacking sound. She wasn’t sure how this habit had started. The first time he had pecked her cheek she had felt of rush of worry followed by a flush of embarrassment. Fortunately, he had turned away to hang up her coat. By the time he returned from the closet the color had receded in her cheeks and she had decided it was all “very continental.” Now she accepted it as a polite greeting.
They spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon in the library huddled over the ornate Louis Fifteenth desk. Together they bent over her plans and drawings. When Charles left to make some tea, she feigned the need to check some small detail in front of the house. At her car she picked up her cell phone, which she always left it in the car when doing business to promote to her clients the belief that they were her only interest.
There weren’t any messages, no missed calls. She dialed her office phone and entered her voice mail code. Certainly there must word from Alan, but there were no messages. Her anxiety level raised a notch.
CHAPTER THREE
The Jeep slipped off the edge with a metallic screech. Unlike the ride down the hill, this fall was in real time, hard and fast. Alan saw blue sky, the lip of the boulder receding , and then the world violently convulsed as the jeep's front end hit the water. He was a rag doll tossed against the back seat. Numbly staring up, a rock that lagged behind the rest plummet toward him. It explosively shattered the rear window.
Alan took inventory, his arms bled from cuts new and old, the barely formed scabs of the night before now torn open He wiped his bloody hand on the carpeting he found those cuts to be small.
The jeep stood in an almost vertical position. Water flooded the car, but stopped just where Alan lay. The plastic coffee cup, which had figured significantly in this disaster, floated near his face. Twisting around into a sitting position he picked up the cup, and inexplicably thrust it in the rucksack, which lay beside him. The car made low groaning noises as the river worked the frame against the rock.
This realization of imminent danger focused Alan’s attention on getting out. When he stood up on the seat back, his head and shoulders cleared the broken rear window. He set the rucksack on the tailgate, and pressed himself up and out of the opening. The car wobbled in a pool of seething water. The rock l was impossible to climb. But to the right it was no more than eight feet to a small gravel beach, from there the ground rose in a steep but climbable slope.
With a toss, his pack arched lazily through the air and plunked unto the gravel. Alan crouched like a sprinter in the gate, and waited as he found the pace of the car’s weaving wobble, and then with a loud grunt he leapt for the beach. He fell slightly short, his feet splashing in shallow water, but even there the current knocked them out from under him. His hands and knees worked madly at the gravel. Instinctively, he twisted and flexed like a Grunion crawling up from the sea until he was out.
He sat up and rummaged through his backpack with hands that trembled. After a few moments he found his cell phone. The phone was undamaged and dry but false optimism led him to think the might get a signal. Perhaps up higher? Alan stowed the phone, slipped the pack over a shoulder, that was rapidly growing tight and faced the slope.
It was a more formidable than he thought. The mountainside was talus and steep. With the toe of his shoe he dug a small foothold. His fingers grasped small roots, which strayed from the bank. Then he dug another toehold. Small bits of gravel tumbled in a slide down the slope. By his fourth or fifth toe hold he was beginning to sweat profusely and it was not the heat. It was the sheer anxiety of working on a loose bank, above a frigid river. He would move forward a few feet and then slip back losing half of his gains.
It seemed to take an hour, but in fact was only ten minutes before he achieved the boulder outcropping. He rested on the flat surface. Thirst bestirred him. I wish I thought to take a drink from the river. “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink” ran through his head. I wonder if that is Kipling?. No, I believe it’s Coleridge.
In the middle of that thought, Alan began to physically shake with the violence of one suffering as his brain and body caught up with what they just experienced. Alan felt physically sick at the thought of the descent he made. He was astonished at his good and bad fortune. Damn deer! He cursed. But he thanked what gods there be for survival.
Though he often feared death, no experience ever brought him so close. Curious? I never thought of death as I careened down the hill. Many odd thoughts passed through his mind, but not death. “I might have been dead and never known it,” he thought. For the first time Alan realized that when Death called he wanted to see its scythe coming.
The shaking passed. It was followed by the euphoria of being alive. Alan pranced around the boulder letting out loud whoops. Filled with a sense of well-being, nothing mattered but that was here, on this day, alive at this moment.
In his state of elation, he tried the cell phone again. But its mute silence and the mountain slope that rose above him, sapped the euphoria and shrunk him until he felt the insignificant of an insect.
No one can see me! Even if a car should stop, they would not see me at the base of the hill.
Nor would he know they were there. All sounds were lost in the ro
ar of the river and vastness of the canyon.
Another troubling thought arose, Nobody will look for me and if they did, where to look? He regretted the terseness of his note to Lilly. After all, there is no shattered guardrail, no dead deer in the road, not even skid marks to alert the curious. He was on his own. Save yourself or die! With a twitch of anxiety he pushed the thought aside, This was not the time to be thinking of death! For a moment Alan was ready to pray to a God he wasn’t sure existed. Instead he began digging toeholds in the hillside.
The rucksack bothered his center of gravity. He felt it pulled him away from this tenuous hold. Pausing he shifted the bag around so it was slung on his belly. It blocked his legs a bit but he felt less precarious. How far the car fell was difficult to judge. Easily three to five hundred feet. The trail was occasionally visible, but the loose talus hid most evidence of the slide. Alan tried to calculate his progress. When he looked down the boulder was a mere fifty feet below, I might not make the top by nightfall? Only fifty feet in an hour? And if it were possible the hillside seemed to become steeper and looser with each step.
An occasional seedling protruded from the slope, but evidently snow or rock slides regularly denuded the area before they became established trees. He considered working sideways toward the tree line, but it was some distance and he could not tell what obstacles lay between here and there. He continued up.
Another hour brought him abreast of a seedling that was larger than most, standing about three feet tall. Alan pulled himself up and braced his feet against its base. Puffing heavily, he lay on the uphill side and savored the somewhat relaxed position. I must have climbed three hundred feet to gain another fifty?
He rummaged in the pack that hung from his belly and found the last of the morning’s donuts. The package was flattened and the donuts mere crumbs in his hand. As he licked his fingers he almost enjoyed his aerie until suddenly the shrub snapped almost in two at the base. Alan slid past the small seedling. Frantically, he clutched at it and grasped the small trunk by the break. The fragile branches slipped through his fingers but slowed him until he made fast onto one of the last branches. He lay on his belly, panting with effort and fear. Gravel slipped away with each movement. He tried to dig his toes in but they slipped free.
Then as if to punish him for maiming the tree, the branch snapped. Clawing at the talus, he began a mad, uncontrolled descent as he tumbled and skidded toward the river below. At times small plants or rocks slowed his course, but not enough to stop him.
Alan worried he might break a leg on the boulder below, but he saw its flattened surface off to the side, then he caught a glimpse of his car standing crazily on its nose, a flash of he white water below his legs, and then he hit the glacial waters. A jolt shot through his body, his chest constricted, his jaw wouldn’t work and his ears ached. Blowing water and gasping for breath he surfaced in the middle of the pool about fifteen feet from his car. The water turned him round slowly once, as though for a last good bye, and then carried him away. He felt himself accelerating, as he rode the current, toward oblivion.
“They say drowning is not bad, nor is freezing to death. What was it they said to do if we fell in on that raft trip?” Thoughts raced through his head, amid a world of tumult and violence. His shoulder received a bruising blow from an unseen boulder, but before he felt it, he was gone, swept along a cataract of white water. Feet first, he thought! By clutching the pack on his belly he managed to form a ball and get his body turned so his feet were down stream. He was a human kayak shooting the rapids. A single blow to the head could end all human anxieties. At times it was thrilling, more often he was fighting for just a little air. There was no controlling it, one could only be swept along by the force of the river and hope to survive until it spent its fury.
Alan had never been so cold so fast. There was never a moment of shivering, rather it was sudden and absolute numbness. He tried to move his arms, but wasn’t sure if they responded. He felt himself shoot the rapids between two larger boulders. At the bottom he was pulled under briefly and then shot up and out. He caught a glancing blow to the head, the pain of which was masked by the numbness. For a time he was senseless. It was not long or he would have drowned, but it was enough to confuse him and distort time, so that he felt he had been in the water for ages.
Overhead the buzzard followed his progress and waited patiently. From the birds perspective Alan was a small dot, swept down stream, away from the road, into the wilderness.
On the road a logging truck’s engine growled as the driver down shifted. The rig glided easily around the curve that the jeep had missed. The driver saw nothing amiss. Then the truck was gone, down the road, away from the river, toward civilization.
The fear Alan had first felt faded, not because he was any safer than minutes before, but because his brain was being dulled by the cold. He felt himself drifting on a cloud of well-being. It was similar in feeling to inject able Valium. It seemed this was happening to someone else and he was an observer. He could look down and see himself swept down the river, as though he were side by side with the buzzard above. Rather than anxiety he felt speculative about this unfortunate victim of fate. But was it fate? Was this destined to be or was this just chance? Was it part of divine providence or the machinations of evil? How was one to know? And, if the results were the same did it really matter?
Drifting along in his dazed state, Alan did not hear the increasing roar of the waterfall, which lay ahead. Around the bend the river narrowed into a tight gorge. Cut and scoured by the river over a million years the granite face rose hard, blocking the light, creating a permanent twilight, between their stony faces. The water flew swiftly through the cut; a deep center channel carried the main volume of the annual flow. Depending on the volume the sides were either more leisurely, forming eddies, or one part of the mad rush toward an abyss. The gorge walls opened out and at their base a broad ledge formed the spillway for a hundred foot waterfall. The water shot out in a thunderous roar, fragmenting into a white avalanche. Nobody kayaked this part of the river, no one ever would. A human in the water did not have a chance.
But that is what saved him; chance. If the air temperature that week had been a few degrees warmer the snowmelt would have been greater and he would have been carried in a straight line by the increased flood. If it had been cooler, the river would have been lower and the eddy pools at the side of the cliffs would not have formed. In either instance, like a log in a shoot, he would have been launched into space for one last frightening plunge. Chance saved him. Alan drifted toward the walls. He slowed as the water eddied around submerged boulders at their base. A dead tree formed a snag, its base was wedged between two of the submerged rocks, its trunk was worn smooth, and its upper portion lay on the polished rim of the falls face at the edge of the waters flow. The falls roared on his right and to the left was a flat bench of smooth dry stone.
He was carried around the side of the tree and found he was pressed against the rock and the trunk of the tree. His face rubbed against the stone. He tried to crawl forward but his arms and legs would not cooperate. In his confused state he was sure he was crawling, but in fact he resembled a Grunion working its way onto the beach. His legs and arms twitched with movement, his torso twisted and rocked. He dug in with his chin. He slithered his way up. Like an evolutionary creature rising from primordial muck, he gained dry land and collapsed.
Alan awoke with a start. His back was warm, but his belly cold. His body ached as though he had been beaten with sticks. He opened his eyes and sat up into dazzling sunlight. It was midday and the sun flooded the gorge. Slowly, he became aware of the fall’s deafening roar.
His arrival here was a confused memory at best, so he apprised himself of his surroundings. The canyon walls rose one hundred or more feet above his head. On the lower side of the falls they continued down an equal distance. With a cursory glance at the rock he decided they were un-climbable. The rock on which he sat was part of the fall’s spi
llway, like an ancient stone step, the ledge was worn more deeply in the middle, where the water flowed year round. Only flood stage would cover the portion where he sat, though this must occur with frequency for the rock was smooth and slick to his touch.
He was caged by the elements, by air, water, and earth. The fourth element this association brought to mind was fire. He reached into his jean pockets and pulled out a lighter. He tried it but the flint was wet. However, after a few attempts, friction dried the flint and the lighter’s gas burst into flame. He found comfort he had fire in the wild, though, he had nothing to burn. His body trembled and his extremities were tingling as the numbness faded and feeling returned. He peeled his clothes off and spread them to dry, taking the precaution of weighting them down with small rocks lest an un-expected breeze steal them away. Then he set about house keeping while the sun bore down on his perch. He emptied his pack and took inventory. The cell phone dripped water when he held it up, even if he could dry it out, even if there was a signal here, the battery was dead, shorted by the water. He had four sodden candy bars, a bag of nuts, a thermos which miraculously survived and still was half full of coffee, a plastic insulated cup, two cartons of cigarettes that had been wrapped in a plastic bag, a pair of winter gloves, a paperback book, a ball point pen, and a shave kit. The shave kit held a razor, a can of shaving cream, twin blade razor, toothpaste, Benadryl capsules for his allergies, a plastic container of aspirin, and a fingernail kit.
He opened the cigarettes, laughing at the irony, as he noticed the warning that they were a danger to his health. Pleasantly surprising, the cigarettes were dry. He spread his supplies out on the stone to dry. Within half an hour he was feeling the effects of the sun. His pale skin was already abnormally pink, slow roasting in the sun. The shadow of the far wall of the gorge marched steadily across the water, sunstroke would not be a concern, he thought.
