“Evidently I do. It comes as a surprise.”
Jinx looked at me for such a long time that I felt scrutinized, almost as though I was meant to cough something up. At first, I worried that I was expected to admit to something about Tessa, as though I had anything to admit, just acknowledging that the question was in the air. And I was not willing to do that, but she read my mind. She said, “I have no interest and no suspicions about that poor woman, but you seem to have dropped a stitch right in the middle of your life and it is time for you to do something else.” I was well aware of the owlish look on my face as I failed to comment, knowing it was no use when Jinx was in launch mode. “Perhaps,” she said, “you find it difficult living in a morally bankrupt and hate-filled nation, and it’s not for me to say. But you go around like a cat ruining a blanket trying to find a place to lie down.”
Jinx had long harbored somewhat radical notions, ignored by her colleagues as the frustrations of an unmarried woman. They found them cute. I sometimes considered her views more eccentric than convincing. In the context of what seemed about to turn into a lecture, however, they had the sting of authority. As my rage grew over the next few days, I finally had to accept that I was its only object. Something would have to be done: I was burning up. “What about my skills, such as they are, my experience?”
Jinx told me they no longer applied. “Do you mean my life?” I asked.
“You tell me. You’re going nowhere.”
By the end of the week, that was no longer true. What had come to an absolute head in the aftermath of Tessa’s death was not my acceptance of responsibility for it but my beginning to understand my guilt for her neglect, and that one day I would have to work out what we had owed each other with greater clarity than I had so far. This was at considerable odds with the planktonic drift that had marked my days to date, punctuated by the gruesome pop-up figure of the late Cody Worrell.
13
IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE of the long northern evening; the dust devils had died in the fallow fields and off to the west a small island range of mountains floated in shadow. I had a tall bourbon and water with lots of ice tinkling in a handy holder between the seats, and as I passed the empty old country schools, grain elevators on abandoned spurs and glimpses of creeks running through brush that slowly reclaimed homesteads, I thought I could feel the lives of the missing population like so many sad, if amiable, ghosts. As usual when faced with troubling things I seemed unable to understand, I resorted to fishing. I had a favorite fly rod with me, a nice, leisurely old glass Winston, and Dr. Olsson’s English aluminum case that had gone on so many trips. My plan was working: I was in a very good mood.
I took a two-track road used by irrigators and crossed a cattle guard, culverts, and a wire gap before getting into the field I intended, at the far edge of which was a slow mountain creek that held lots of cutthroat trout, vigorous spotted beauties with orange slash marks at their throats. A crop duster was flying in the distance, just at the ledge of mountain where yellow panels of grain extended toward the valley bottom. As it pulled up at the end of each run, clouds streaming behind it, the changing pitch of its engine carried all the way down to where I could clearly hear its whine. I parked under a power line that angled off toward the town of Wilsall and heard the dense murmur of summertime insects as I got out of the car. I saw clouds in the hood of the Olds in the late light, the crop duster rising and falling in the distance. The plane was treating wheat fields right at the edge where the foothills broke elevation, reversing direction by a dangerous maneuver called a hammerhead stall, sending the plane straight up at the end of each field right in the face of the hills for a falling turn down the next row. Suddenly one wingtip caught a juniper ridge and the plane tumbled.
I wasn’t absorbing the scene quite as I should. What seemed implausible was the complete lack of movement from this so recently dashing machine, which at the slightest contact with the earth had turned into junk. I got back into my car and drove recklessly until I was close to the accident. I got out and ran the rest of the way to the wreck. I smelled fuel and heard a voice—“Get away before this thing catches fire!”—a woman’s voice. With the smell of gasoline and the word “fire,” I admit that I nearly bolted. Instead, I approached the cockpit — the propeller was wrapped back around the nose and fuel was running onto the ground — and discerned the torso of the pilot somewhat pinned under the plane. I began to pull her out, expecting screams, but I was met with only a weird silence, made even more inexplicable when I finally had her clear and saw that one foot was pointing in the exact opposite direction from the other. “Keep moving. Get farther from the plane.” There was such urgency in this command that overcoming my aversion to moving her at all I kept pulling until we were both many yards from the wreck. The plane went up in flames and a rush of air. She said, “Was that the plane?”
The burning airplane spewed a column of ugly smoke into the clear, windless air. Whatever chemicals that were aboard in addition to its fuel combined with the wiring plastics and other petrochemical elements in the craft to lend the smoke a greasy industrial quality that soon towered against the foothills.
The pilot lay faceup on the grass in front of me. She wore the sort of crash helmet you’d associate with motorcycles, and since one foot was still headed the wrong way, I declined to move her any more than I’d had to in order to get her clear of the coming fire, now a small throbbing inferno that made an X-ray of the airframe. With great delicacy I removed the crash helmet. A surprising mass of auburn hair spilled out. Physical anguish had transformed her features, and so I had no idea what she looked like. I knew she mustn’t be moved. I had seen results of accidents like this before, and I was well aware that the internal injuries could be anywhere and anything. There was always a list of things you hoped not to find, and the sometimes mad process of elimination during a race against the clock of declining vital signs was life’s most awful rush.
A ranch hand on an ATV arrived first, turned straight around and headed back downhill for a telephone. I wedged my coat and sweater on either side of her head to immobilize it; the worst things I knew were when the victim was vomiting or choking on blood and it was impossible to move the head without knowing if the neck or spine had been injured; you could only lift the jaw forward and with your fingers try to clear the airway. But no signs of head injury presented; the woman was not losing consciousness nor had she lost control of her bowels or limbs, the familiar signs. If she expressed anything, it was exasperation, but her discomfort prevented much of that. In a spell shortened by my obsessively checking vitals with squeamish glances directed at the upside-down foot, a compact four-wheel-drive ambulance from the small med center nearby arrived, and the pilot was lashed in place and rolled inside it. This whole while, though clearly conscious, she made no sound. I watched the ambulance ease its way down the two-track, before hitting the pavement, when its emergency light popped on and it was gone, heading west.
Thus my fishing, the vaunted evening rise, went right out the window.
Not a week after I saw Enid at the car wash I saw her again. I had paid a visit to one of my elders — mature folks in my first practice who had grown old — up the Shields River valley, and I’d stayed late, deciding to stop off at the Wilsall Bar for a drink before boarding the Oldsmobile for home. The only other customer was Enid, who this time saw me before I saw her. She motioned me over to the table, and I called my drink out to the bartender to save him the trip. Enid must have had a few drinks already, for she wore a mellow look I’d never seen on her face before, and it was quite becoming; one drink and one drink only was what I had in mind, but Enid’s demeanor suggested we were both headed for last call.