Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  “Ah, Jesus Christ,” muttered Carl and he almost put the camcorder down. Almost.

  With an explosion of water that spiraled into the air like an erupting underwater volcano the young woman broke the surface. A loud gasp of air effused from her mouth as she sucked in air that she so desperately needed and filled her lungs to capacity.

  There was a similar gasp from the people watching above.

  The young woman with the mop of red hair the same color as a clown’s nose held the boy in her arms. One of her slender arms snaked around his neck and held his head above the water so that he wouldn’t drown. He was spewing water from his mouth and his little body was shaking.

  Even while a cheer went through the crowd, Carl was grinning ear to ear.

  The young woman took a few strokes to the life preserver and hooked her other arm around it. Then she glanced over her shoulder and waited for the Mary Celeste to launch its life raft.

  Not sixty seconds later the little boy was lifted from her arms and then one of the men on the ship firmly grasped her forearms and pulled her out. There wasn’t a person watching who didn’t realize that she was bleeding from her forehead and that she was favoring her left side as if her ribs might be broken.

  The boy’s mother was crying as she watched from the side of the bridge and the large woman who had thrown the life preserver tapped her on her shoulder, saying, “Let me take you down to the dock, so you can meet him when it pulls up.”

  Carl took the opportunity and followed the pair as they made their way down a long set of stairs that twisted and wound its way to the surface of the bay, where the docks gently bumped against the buildings below counting on old tires tied to the sides to cushion the repeated blows.

  The Mary Celeste expertly pulled up to the wooden wharf and one of the men aboard carried the slight form of the boy, concealed in blankets, to his mother. She rushed to him, tears streaming down her face, and Carl made a little noise in his throat.

  Then the young woman was carried off on the stretcher, her eyes closed, and her trim body strapped to the stretcher. Carl’s last shot of the young woman was as she passed. He focused squarely on her head. The relentless sea had washed off every bit of makeup and left the innocent face of a child. Wet hair was darkened from scarlet to a more normal looking color, leaving no more spikes or even a trace of hair gel. Only the diamond stud and eyebrow ring were left to testify of her previous appearance.

  The paramedics carried her up the stairs and Carl finally put his camcorder down. He looked back and saw a third man examining the little boy. After a moment the man said, “Looks like he’s got some bruises, but I think God was watching after drunks and little children today.”

  “Thank God. Thank God. Thank God,” prayed the woman, holding her son firmly in her hands until he began to squirm.

  “Mom,” said the boy, obviously astute enough to milk a situation for all it was worth. “Can I have ice cream?”

  “No, and if you think you’re going to play on your Wii again for the rest of this year, buddy, are you in for a big surprise,” the mother replied tartly, pulling the boy into her arms, and hugging him firmly.

  The man shrugged, and added, “He should go to the hospital. Get some X-Rays. Make sure everything is copasetic.”

  Carl turned away and saw his own children watching him from the bridge above. Carl, Jr. and Angelica were staring at the scene with awestruck eyes. He studied their little faces, and thought, There goes I, but for the grace of God...

  He sighed and put the camcorder away in its little bag. When he joined his family once more, he folded his arms around his daughter and his son, and watched a melancholy expression cross his wife’s face. Their eyes met for a moment and she sighed as well, moving closer so she could rest her hand on his shoulder.

  Carl said, “Let’s find some beach to explore, huh? Bet we can find some cool sea shells if we look hard enough. Then we have to race the surf. The one to get their feet wet is a rotten egg.”

  The ambulance moved off and drove down highway 101, not in any kind of hurry because their occupants did not have life-threatening injuries.

  Chapter Two

  August 14th

  Part of a folktale originating in the Pacific Northwest about the Raven, sometimes whispered in the darkness only after the raven has made its nest for the night: He is the divine trickster of the people. He steals from the people so that they will rise up against him and celebrate their existence by uniting in community and in their resiliency to defy him. Raven is the wily deceiver who calls Wolf and Coyote to his own kills to lure them into cleaning the carcass and making the meat more accessible to him. He is the crafty hoaxer who changes the world to test the people, and sometimes he tests that foolhardy individual who loudly utters his identity for the wind to carry back to him...

  The dream was the same as it ever was. A raven was pecking at the glass of the window. But in the land of nod it was not a bird with feathers as black as the darkest pitch from the bleakest tree in the most dismal forest, it was, instead, Teddy’s father. He was the raven and the raven was he. His long-fingered hands with well-manicured nails stroked the glass of the window of her bedroom and tapped. First the index finger and then the middle. Tap. Tap. Then it repeated. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Teddy stirred her head in the dream, lazily turning to see what it was that was disturbing her. She lay on the white fluffy quilt that decorated her canopy bed, the bed of her childhood years, a scene from a baker’s dozen years in the past. And she saw her father, smiling in at her, giving her that indulgent look that showed that he still loved her, had always loved her, and nothing would ever change it. Then, he stood in his library where his desk was, one hand on his favorite birding book, and above him giant, gilded birdcages swung slowly in a gentle breeze. Then they were back in her childhood bedroom, with her father standing near the windows. Just a gentle tap on the window to remind her that he was there. Then he was the raven again with the flames of a huge fire behind him, endlessly burning. He was the mischievous raven who played tricks on the Native-American Indians of the northwest coast, from stories Teddy had heard from some of the women down at the fish plant.

  But even in sleep and in the unfathomable place that was the black of her subconscious, deep inside herself, she knew that there was more to the dream than simply a memory of father and places gone forever. It was more than believing that her father had the elements of the trickster within him. It was more than all of that.

  And in the dream there was another man in the room, one with an inane grin plastered across his face, as if he were glad to see her. He was so glad that he could cheerfully wrap his hands around her delicate neck and squeeze until her face turned the same color of the raven’s wings. Beyond that. Far beyond that. He wouldn’t lose his grip until her flesh decomposed from the bones in shreds of putrefied pulp. She might claw at his skin, desperate for her release, kicking and pounding with every bit of her resolve, but it wouldn’t make a difference because he didn’t dare release her. Then, the raven screamed, the piercing sound of a sharpened knife thrusting into the helpless victim, and Teddy sat up, a cry on her lips.

  She wrapped her arms around her body and shivered. Looking to one side, she blinked, trying to chase away the sleep that befuddled her. There was a window that clearly showed the purpling light from the setting sun. Coughing weakly, she did a mental check of her situation. Hospital room. White sheets. Uncomfortable bed. IV in the back of her wrist. Ribs taped. Still coughing up a little brine.

  Her throat felt like she had swallowed a gallon or two of the icy seawater. Her head felt a brick had been dropped on her. She was alone in a two-bed room. The other bed was neatly made and appeared unoccupied. The blinds on the windows were half-down. The bathroom door was half open and showed no other occupant. The main door was shut. A pot of yellow carnations sat on the table next to the bed. Next to the carnations was a glass of water with a bendy straw. A group of balloons with ‘Get Well Soon!’ emblaz
oned across their multicolored hues floated at the end of her bed. She was all there, bruised and battered. Not restrained like she was in a psychiatric clinic for the terminally stupid. Not in a prison hospital ward waiting for some paid-off trustee to come stick a shiv in between her ribs. Not waiting for the man who haunted the deepest recesses of her nightmares to come knocking at her hospital room’s door.

  Teddy knew what she had done. She grimaced. It wasn’t good. Sure, the little boy was alive. But she wasn’t in great shape, and pretty damned quick she could expect the questions to come bouncing at her like hard balls in a batting cage. Who was insane enough to dive off the Bay Bridge like some demented idiot? Apparently she had been.

  The memory roared over her as if she were replaying it on a video-tape. She had seen the blonde hair atop the blue windbreaker, the shiny material glinting in the morning light, balanced on the rock wall, like a stupid little ninny. And where was his mother? Nowhere to be found. Not yanking his skinny little arm so that his tiny feet wouldn’t slip on the wet stone as he safely parted company with the damp bridge. Not about to prevent the child from taking a fall into the water, some seventy-two feet below. No, Mother was waiting her turn to get on the whale watching ship, anxious to get a good spot, not knowing as Teddy did, that three-quarters of the trips that lasted about fifty minutes didn’t even see flotsam that looked like whales, much less any kind of other sea life. The migration season was later in the year and the California Grays weren’t due until October or November. But that didn’t matter to the woman, who hadn’t been watching her son, at the very moment that he most needed her.

  The kid, name unknown, had climbed up on the wall of the bridge...again. Teddy had watched from the corner of her eye as he had done it a full five times. The last time was when the tourists had herded themselves across the highway to watch the Mary Celeste traverse the narrow channel into the bay. But not the kid. Willing to take advantage of an opportunity he had climbed up again, agile as a monkey. Teddy had watched every second of it, waiting for mommy to see him and shriek with maternal rage at the behavioral misadventure, then to rush over and yank him off again, threatening to ground him until he was old enough to run for the Presidency of the USA.

  Instead the little boy had gone over the side. Teddy hadn’t made a conscious decision. One moment she was in the booth. The next Big Bridget was calling to her, her husky voice clearly confused, “Hey, Teds, what the hell are you...” as she hurled herself over the counter, not going to the door, but throwing herself through the broad window that allowed customers to give them their money for the trips. The moment after that she was standing on the abutment, her little boat shoes surprisingly firm on the slick stones that made up the bridge, her eyes searching endlessly. A choppy channel of water was plainly displayed below her. It was a larger area than she would have imagined from the booth. And anywhere in that area there could be a boy sinking into the sea like a tiny stone.

  She didn’t see blonde hair in the water. Nor did she see a sky-blue windbreaker contrasted against the murky turquoise of the channel’s churning waters. All she saw was a bit of white froth was where something had interrupted the regular flow of the ocean’s eternal tides. Then it was gone.

  But the area where it had been became a target. She aimed herself five feet in front of it and stepped off the bridge. Falling seventy-two feet, as the sign on the far end of the Bay Bridge indicated the difference between the bottom of the structure and the level of the water at high tide, as it was at that time, only took seconds. As Teddy was looking down and as she was falling, it seemed much longer. It occurred to her, too late that she needed to reduce the amount of area that her body would impact the water by falling with herself straight up or straight down. Instead she hit the water at an angle and the gasp that sucked in a mouthful of seawater wasn’t a reaction to the glacial temperature of the ocean. Instead it was from the crush of her ribs and the sudden blasting pressure against her upper body, as if someone had punched a huge fist into her.

  Teddy regained the top of the water, fiercely ignoring the tendrils of pure ice invading her body, the stinging, dreadful seawater that she had swallowed, and the shattering pain at her side and searched again. There was a pitiful thought that she couldn’t help thinking as time seemed to stretch out. The undertow’s got the boy. It’s too late. But she glimpsed something. Only for the briefest of seconds. Something that moved under the water. Something with pale, white flesh, and a flash of blue, a different color than the murk.

  Taking a deep breath that painfully reminded her that she would be paying the cost of the long fall by bruises and a belly full of seawater, Teddy thrust herself into the swirling waters. She forced herself against the water and it was like a blanket of oozing liquid substance that fought her tooth and nail to prevent her freedom of movement. It pushed against her very flesh and attempted to obstruct her without matter and without form.

  If she hadn’t been quick on the mark, if the gods of fortune hadn’t been watching over her and the boy, if the undertow had been faster than she had mentally calculated, if a hundred other things had happened instead, she would have never found the child. Her lungs were starting to burn as she turned herself in the water, seeking something, anything to give her guidance, and then the little boy, still struggling, kicked her right across her forehead. If it had been a fight, he would have scored a point off her. But even with her head spinning from the blow a thrill of excitement coursed through her veins that she had found the child. She reached out and touched him, his small limbs still frantically battling the ocean.

  Teddy saw the blood in the water as she firmly grasped the kid and kicked upward, following a line of air bubbles headed for the surface. One strong kick and she thought, Maybe we ain’t a gonna make it. Another strong kick and she thought, But it’s right there, dammit. I’ve stayed alive this long. Not this way. Not this way! Another strong kick and she exploded from the water, a furious intake of precious oxygen magnifying the roaring in her ears, the water breaking loose from her body and returning to its own.

  She shifted the kid in her arms, blinking salt water out of her eyes, and saw that a bright, orange donut floated within reach. Two more kicks and she was there when the kid started to struggle again, frightened, anxious, afraid for his life. Teddy wasn’t in the mood for it. Her forehead was stinging, salt water washing the wound and exacerbating it. Her side felt like a mule had kicked her, and she was positive she wouldn’t be wearing any sleeveless evening gowns to the debutante balls this year. She snarled, “Can it, kid. You’ll drown us both.” Eyes as blue as the sky and as large as saucers turned to examine her with an expression that denoted sincere amazement at her words and he immediately stopped his frantic movements. The child coughed up water as she held him and she was immediately thankful that he showed enough energy to struggle that much.

  Teddy shifted to the present and felt her shoulder once more. She pulled up the hospital gown and saw a rainbow of colors. She gingerly touched her ribs and thought that maybe she was all right. She shifted herself to the bottom of the bed and retrieved her medical chart. The name on the top was Teddy Smith. She grimaced. I shouldn’t have used Teddy. It’s not a common girl’s name, even in today’s age of naming their kids any old thing. I could have picked Jane instead. Jane Smith. Does anyone name their child Jane anymore?

  Her clear gray eyes efficiently wandered down the chart, surveying the damage. Multiple contusions. Seven stitches above one of her eyebrows, where that little snit had royally nailed her. No concussion. Two ribs cracked. Possible lung damage. Some other medical jargon that seemed to indicate that she was a prime candidate for catching pneumonia, Or maybe flesh-eating virus? The boogie-woogie flu?

  The door opened and Teddy jumped guiltily. A nurse strolled in holding a can of Coca-Cola and smiled genially when she saw that her charge was up and very much awake. The name tag said Chapman. She was a tall woman with gray hair and brown eyes. She looked like she could be a linebacker
for the Cowboys. A steely gaze that could be devastating or kind, depending on the situation.

  Teddy put the chart back. The metal clanged against the end of the bed. She remembered being pulled onto the Mary Celeste and then being very tired. The next time she’d opened her eyes people in white were poking needles in her toes and asking questions about who was President and what year it was. After she had tiredly answered them, they’d left her alone and she’d woken up here. Saving somebody’s life was exhausting business. Dangerous business.

  Nurse Chapman raised her eyebrows. “Nothing in there but chicken scratches anyway, dear. Docs like to make everything stuffy for the medical insurance, so that it all sounds up and up. But stitches in the head, a bruised butt, and a gut full of ocean water is what you got. A little hypothermia. Don’t worry, you’re going to be up watching Survivor, along with the rest of us, by the end of the week. Hell, you could be on the next round.”

  “Peachy,” Teddy croaked. She swallowed reluctantly. Seawater wasn’t good for the throat unless one gargled it.

  The nurse laughed. “Brought you a coke. Tastes better than tap water and you can turn on the telly if you’ve a mind.”

  Teddy moved back to a more normal position in the bed. Time to play vague. Oh, Nurse, I still don’t remember a thing. What’s my name and where am I? And I’m feeling quite faint, possibly the salt water has done damage to my cerebral cortex. Quickly, the smelling salts, while I exit stage right, skipping all the way. “How’s the kid?”

  Chapman smiled at Teddy again, putting the perspiring can of cola next to the glass with the bendy straw in it. “His name is Danby Shelton. Wretched thing to name a child,” she added under her breath. “He’s peachy, too,” she repeated for Teddy’s benefit. “At the end of the hall, if you want to wander down later. His mom’s got a regular toy store in there, plus about three gallons of ice cream. If the kid doesn’t become a diabetic then he’s going to have to waddle out of the hospital.”