“Oh, I told him about that,” Lily said.
“Jesus, Lily,” I said. “That's why he hasn't come back. He's looking for a club. Does he have his gun?” I ran to the pile of gear and started to rummage through. Of course he had his gun; he always wore it.
“Louis!” Lily cried.
“Get in the boat!” I said, now looking in the gear for a gun of my own. I could see Lily explaining to him what had happened; I could see her trying to explain how she had called on her shamanic powers to climb into the clouds. I could see her mentioning, without being asked, that she had had to remove all her clothing. How she had had to have an assistant, well, watch her, carefully. I could see Gurley hearing all of this, understanding none of it, except for the part where his naked girlfriend lay in a darkened tent with another man.
“Listen,” she said. She came over and tried to tug me free of the pile. I used one arm to keep her away and kept searching with the other. Then I felt a sharp pain in the back of my knee, and suddenly I was sitting on the ground, staring up at her. “Louis,” she said. I started to get up, but she put a hand out and pointed to the knee. “Would you like it to hurt more?”
“Lily,” I started, then stopped. “No,” I said. I scooted away but didn't stand. “I think I have, we have, a right to be scared. He's not- Gurley's never been on an even keel, and hearing about you and me in a tent could set him off-will set him off, for sure.”
“I don't care about what he thinks happened between us last night-or the last five months, for that matter.”
“Then what are you worried about?” I said.
“What indeed,” said Gurley, who appeared beside us with all the speed and pallor of a ghost.
I scrambled to my feet. “Sir,” I said.
Gurley kept his eyes on Lily. “The lady is speaking, Mr. Belk. About something that worries her.” He turned to me. “And unlike you, I want to hear what it is.” I couldn't tell what the cold fire in his eyes meant: violence, certainly, but to Lily or me and when?
Lily stared at him. “I'm worried you don't believe what I saw on my journey. Or even that I went.”
Gurley looked at her, then me, then her, and then turned and walked over to the pile of gear. He began packing items. “Oh, the journey part, I believe that,” he said, and leered at me. “But what you saw, no-in fact, it makes me wonder if I've been in Alaska too long. At war too long. Chasing balloons too long. What have I done, Belk? Hauled an Eskimo woman out into the bush to play fortune-teller and find me balloons. Spies.” He cinched tight a pack and stood. “Really, now. I should be shot.”
And with that, he removed his prized Colt from his holster and began to examine it.
I stopped breathing. Lily spoke.
“We're very close to the spot,” she said.
“Tingle, tingle,” Gurley said, not looking up from the gun. “Can you feel it, Belk?”
“What, sir?”
“Didn't you tell him, fair Sacagawea? When you got back from your trip? Without a stitch of clothing? Or did you have other things to talk about?”
I turned to Lily.
“I didn't get a chance to,” she said.
“My goodness,” said Gurley, raising his eyes. “By all means tell him. See what he thinks. I trust Sergeant Belk's judgment implicitly.” He returned the gun to his hip and then hefted a bag toward the boat. Lily looked after him and bit her lip.
“There's a very special balloon nearby,” she said quietly.
I looked quickly in Gurley's direction, but he was busy stowing the bag. “Is it Saburo?” I whispered. “He's actually come for you? Is that what you saw?”
She looked at me, eyes instantly full of tears. “No,” she hissed. “I told you before, he left as soon as we got out here. I could feel it; I knew it. No-this is different. Not a plane. This is a balloon.” She took a step closer to me, and looked over my shoulder to Gurley and the boat. “But there's something…” She twisted her neck to look back into the interior of the island.
“Not Saburo?” I asked.
She looked around, as if searching out someone who would better understand her. “Something,” she finally said to me. “You have to believe me. He has to believe me. We have to go-to follow-”
I could hear Gurley walking up behind us.
“What's this?” he asked, never more brittle. “Whisper, whisper.”
“I'm not sure it's safe out here, Captain,” I said, trying hard not to exchange a look with Lily.
“A hunch, Sergeant?” he said, and raised his eyebrows. “Don't tell me that you've caught the soothsaying bug, too?” He smirked. “Quite a night in the ol' tent. Sorry I missed it. Finish loading, Sergeant.”
I did, and as I did, I watched Lily lead Gurley into another whispered conversation. I couldn't hear them, but I could see them. I could see Lily pointing, gesturing. I could see Gurley standing tall, and then, after a few minutes, just slightly-easing. And I thought I could see why. The tiniest part of him really did believe her-not just about her sense of where to go next, but about her need to convince him, to connect with him. That is to say, he had started to believe that she really did care for him. And the strangest thing about that to me was that I sensed he was right.
I thought about it as I finished loading the boat. I replayed the trip we'd taken in my head, and I stopped the film whenever I saw them exchange a glance, or better yet, when their eyes didn't meet; when just one of them was stealing a look at the other.
I don't know what had happened, or what was happening, but clearly there was something working on all of us-more of Lily's magic, I suppose-and when we got back into the boat, Gurley returned Lily to the bow and me to the stern, and pointed ahead. “Onward, Belk,” he said to the air, and then turned back to me. “Follow that woman in the bow wherever she tells us to go.” Then he took out his handkerchief and let it rest on his knee while reaching down with his other hand to unsnap, once more, his holster.
CHAPTER 18
THE CLOUDS RETURNED, THIS TIME TO STAY. A SLOW, STEADY rain seemed to follow us down the Kuskokwim, and no arrangement of tarps and ponchos could keep us all from getting soaked through.
Occasionally, the rain would lift, but then the mosquitoes would descend. They took a particular interest in Gurley which I enjoyed except for those times when he had his gun out. He'd been obsessively removing it, cleaning and polishing it with the handkerchief, then replacing it and starting again thirty minutes later. But whenever the mosquitoes wreathed his head, Lily and I would be treated to the terrifying display of him wildly swatting at them, gun in hand.
Gurley had put his faith in Lily to lead us through the delta, but ever since then, she had grown more hesitant and unsure. She would point us one way, then another. She let her hand drift along in the water outside the boat. She studied the skies. And with each passing hour, she grew more anxious.
When Gurley suggested we stop for lunch, she just shook her head. Gurley looked at me and rolled his eyes-a standard gesture of his, but darker, somehow, out here alone in the bush. He and I tore into some C rations that had been stowed, and we continued on.
About one o'clock, the engine sputtered, coughed out a few mouthfuls of smoke, and died. While Gurley and Lily looked on with great concern, I uncoupled the gas line from the primary tank and inserted it into the reserve. Then I started the engine again. Miraculous. My passengers turned away, satisfied. I thought to joke that we'd need Lily to use her powers of divination to find us a gas depot eventually, but it wasn't a joke-we would.
I was the first to see it. I had been following the contortions of an ever-widening waterway, wondering if we'd made it back into the main channel of the Kuskokwim. Even though it was wet, Gurley was slumped in the floor of the boat, sleeping or pretending to. Lily was looking at him, and I was trying to catch her eye when something downriver caught mine.
Of course, I thought I was hallucinating. There had been the strange appearance of that fire balloon my last night in Anchorage, but t
o actually see a balloon, in flight-that hadn't happened since Shuyak, and that whole episode had seemed like a kind of dream anyway. But now, here one was, drifting along, not fifty feet above the ground, bright as the moon.
It was beautiful. I mean that. I knew these balloons had killed people and that one might someday kill me. But they were spectacular all the same. They were the most gorgeous thing the war produced, and again, I know that's a horrible thing to say, given their intent. But they couldn't help it, even if their makers could. Nothing else soared the way those balloons did. They even elevated the quality of that pokey training film that Gurley had made me watch. Before getting down to the dirty business of charts and diagrams and the stolid reenactment of disassembling a balloon, the film lingered over a long, sweeping shot of a balloon in morning flight along the Pacific Coast. The balloon seemed to be moving incredibly, effortlessly fast. Part of the thrill came from thinking how lucky the filmmakers must have been to actually capture one in flight, but even if they'd just reinflated one and sent it aloft for filming, it was still extraordinary. It felt like the beginning of an epic. There are films I see today that have such aspirations, but, honestly, none matches the power that film's balloon had sailing through that sunny, black-and-white landscape.
Such memories have made me biased. Balloons were mankind's first aircraft, and I do not think we have improved upon them. Planes are noisy, metal things, all angles and exhaust, that require you to tell them where to go. Balloons are a much purer kind of flight; they go where they will and leave you little say. I wondered then and wonder still what it would have been like to travel aboard one of those bomb balloons. What would the sky have looked like from up there, or the ocean, or a man on the ground like me?
If you've ever been that man on the ground, you know there is something about the silence of a balloon in flight that consumes you, that renders everything around it silent, as if the balloon's magic included not only flight but the ability to swallow sound. Accept that, if you like, as my reason for not shouting, for throttling back the engine and just drifting, watching as the balloon seemed first to come toward us, then turn away, and then float closer once more.
Lily was silent as well. But as the balloon drew closer she began to rise in the boat, steadying herself with one arm and reaching up with the other. Gurley on the other hand, might never have awakened had the balloon not begun bleating.
It sounded like a bird and I assumed it was, but the closer we drew, the more distinct the noise became: a whistle, the kind air raid wardens frantically blew, the kind you might have mistaken for a cricket, except the sound went on too long. Still, I was ready to chalk it up to a bird or some strange way that the wind moved through the balloon's rope-work, until Gurley startled awake. He saw the balloon and scrambled shakily to his feet. Without taking his eyes off the balloon, he snapped his fingers at me. “Glasses, Belk. Binoculars. My God-Lily. My God.” I found the binoculars in a case beneath the seat and handed them to him.
The balloon had crossed our path, and the river's, and was now making a slow descent to the tundra. As the river carried us past, Gurley shouted at me to hold our position and then cursed, fumbling the glasses. He caught them, but when he raised them again to his eyes, he had one hand on his holster.
“Find and load your sidearm, Sergeant Belk,” Gurley said. “Lily, get down. Lie down.” Lily didn't move. “Bring us ashore here, Sergeant. Lily, down.” Lily crouched down, but put a hand on Gurley's pant leg as she did.
“It's okay,” she said. “Don't worry.”
“It's landing!” Gurley said. “It's going to crash! Beach us, Belk, dammit, land!” He dropped into a crouch, and I sped to the bank. Luckily, we tangled in some grass, or I think I would have sent us all flying out of the boat in my haste to execute Gurley's order.
Gurley splashed out into knee-deep water and began pulling the boat onto the shore. With one last tug, he beached the boat, and then turned to face Lily and me with delight. “The enemy!” He looked up. The balloon seemed to be hovering with indecision about a hundred yards off, about two stories off the ground. Then a gust of wind pushed it toward us, and lower. Gurley ducked down.
“Sir?” I asked. It all seems so inevitable now, but at the time, I had not figured it out.
Gurley was checking his gun, so Lily answered for me, with bit lip. “There's a man-there's someone inside.”
Gurley looked at her with some surprise. “Perhaps you possess some magic powers yet, dearest. I would have thought one needed the binoculars to know that.” I stared at Gurley, unable to speak. “Belk, with me. Miss Lily, stay here.” He checked his gun one more time. “Finally,” he said.
Lily grabbed for him, but Gurley darted ahead, and then waved me after him. Lily caught me before I got away. “Don't let him-” she started.
“I won't,” I said.
“Don't-”
Then the blast came.
My first thought was that the balloon had exploded, but when I looked up and saw it still there, I realized that the noise had come from Gurley's gun. Leave it to Gurley to shoot at something as big as a balloon and miss. He was just a few yards in front of me, holding the gun with both hands, head cocked to the side to help his aim. I came up behind him.
Once he sensed I was beside him, he lowered his gun and turned to me. The wind had picked up again and the balloon began to drift away from us. Gurley cursed, looked at me, and then raised the gun again. I put a hand on his forearm as gently as I could.
“Sir,” I started.
Gurley yanked his shooting arm away. “Don't ever,” he said, glowing red. Lily crept beside us and Gurley looked at her for a moment. “Get back in the boat, Lily.”
“Sir,” I said carefully. “Aren't standing orders now to, well, to not shoot them down? For fear of what the balloon might release?” Gurley wasn't listening. “I mean, even if it was a regular balloon-the explosives? If we fire at it from this close, we could-”
“It's not a regular balloon,” Gurley said. “And I'm not about to let some little Jap fire on us at will. Give me the goddamn glasses.” The balloon was still a hundred yards off, but just a few feet above the ground now, drifting slowly. A rope trailed along behind it like a tail. A rope, or perhaps that long fuse, the one that was supposed to ignite the balloon itself. But with the balloon so low to the ground, the rope or fuse kept snagging in the grass. Then the wind would pull it free, the balloon would bounce, and the rope would snag again. Finally, a clump of alderwood caught the fuse, and the balloon was trapped. Now, when the wind blew, instead of breaking free, the balloon pulled to the ground. As it did, we could see the man inside grow agitated. Gurley had the glasses, but it was still clear to Lily and me that the man was standing, peering about. Moreover, he looked drunk-or weak. As the basket pitched back and forth, he seemed unable to keep his balance. He would topple and disappear from view and then struggle up once more. Sometimes he wouldn't even stand; we'd only see his head, peering over the side like a little kid.
He should have noticed us by now, but there was no sign he had. He seemed too intent on the rope that had snagged to pay attention to anything else. “What are you going to do?” Lily whispered, angry. Gurley kept staring through the binoculars and said nothing. Every now and then, he'd shake his head, whistle low. Finally, he lowered the binoculars.
“Well, Sergeant,” he said. Then he turned to Lily and nodded. “Ma'am, if you'll excuse us.” He looked back to the balloon. “I'm not going to take the chance that he somehow gets that snag free and takes off again. There's no way we'd be able to keep up with him across this sodden mess. We're going to have to take him, or the balloon, or both, down. Sergeant?”
I shook my head. I wasn't sure what to do. The war had proceeded so slowly for Gurley and me. It was partly a function of our quarry: whatever the balloons were, they weren't speedy. Elsewhere, rockets flew, airplanes dove, bullets raced. But the balloons: you could watch them move. You never saw a bullet in flight, just the after
effects of its stopping. A balloon let you see the whole progress of death, from anticipation to impact.
And though I didn't have the words to say it then, I knew Gurley was tampering with this measured, preordained pace. It was as though he'd placed the alderwood there, he'd arranged the snagged line, he'd frozen the balloon like we'd reached some crucial point in the training film that he had wanted me to study carefully. But I'd frozen along with the film.
Gurley was about to smack me back into motion when the film lurched forward of its own accord. A quick shout from Lily drew our eyes back to the balloon, where we saw the figure crane out of the basket and work at the snagged rope. Gurley shouted, too, and now the man looked up at us. I'm not sure what he saw, but it obviously frightened him enough to work at the cord more frantically.
Gurley fired a shot. The man looked up again.
Lily stood, and moved toward Gurley. As he took his second shot, she grabbed his arm. The shot went high. I saw something tug at the top of the balloon, but didn't take time to figure out if he'd actually hit it. Instead I scrambled to get myself between Gurley and Lily. But I was too late; he'd backhanded her with the gun. She fell, hands to her face, the too-red blood of a new wound leaking through her fingers.
I could have avenged Lily then; I could have finally struck Gurley myself, or better yet, found my own gun and shot him. But I did not. I suppose cowardice was part of the reason, but it wasn't the only reason. Because before I could do anything, before Gurley could even spit out an apology or added insult, another sharp report cracked across the tundra. Gurley and I dropped. Gurley cursed and muttered something about how we'd given the balloonist all the time in the world to fire upon us. But when I looked, I didn't see a gun, but rather, a tiny figure of a man dangling from the balloon by his right arm, which was caught up in the rigging. A tiny puff of smoke was already dissipating. His legs were limp and his feet dragged along the ground as the balloon continued its feeble struggle against the alderwood. I thought he was dead, but then saw his head move. I grabbed up the binoculars for myself this time and focused while Gurley continued his sputtering.
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