Snake got it straight finally, just about the time I got close, and he started trying to take it for a run across the field. I knew by then he didn’t know how to fly. Fat Boy had probably been the pilot, and Snake only had some idea of how it was done.
I lifted the. 38 and pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. I started to reach in my pocket for a load, but Snake actually had the plane moving now, starting down the field.
I ran after the plane, which was not gaining much speed because it was bouncing and sawing left and right, and I got hold of the bottom wing and it jerked forward and I fell in the dirt and lost the. 38. I leaped to my feet and ran after the plane again, got the wing just before the speed picked up. I tugged myself onto the bottom wing and used it as a platform to spring at Snake in the open cockpit. I came down on him and hammered his head with the side of my fist and held to his neck with my other arm. The plane went crazy, and Snake lifted back on the throttle, and the plane went up and came down with a hard bounce that nearly threw me, then it went up again. I got a tighter grip on his throat and hit him again and he tried to pick one of his. 38’s from his lap and shoot me with it. The process caught his sleeve in the throttle, and as he pulled around to shoot, he jerked back on the throttle and we went up again, higher this time.
I glanced at the nose of the plane, saw it lifting toward the sky, then it dipped down and we were diving into a line of trees that appeared to be dancing along the edge of the woods. Then they weren’t dancing at all, they were just close. We hit with a sound like a bat catching a home run, only louder. The prop chopped branches like a Vegematic doing celery. A limb reached out and politely plucked me off Snake and the cockpit. The Stearman came apart like a box kite being shoved through the whirling blades of a window fan.
I lost all the breath that could possibly be in me, dropped down through a couple of boughs hard enough to crack a limb against my thigh, then made a drop that seemed to me was a world record. I hit the ground so hard I realized I only thought I’d lost all my breath. Now I knew what that sensation was truly like, and I knew another sensation as well. That of going very fast and spinning about and not being on some kind of carnival ride.
I went sliding down a muddy slope, over branches that whapped my legs and face and poked a few other parts of me for good measure. I came to rest at the base of a pine in time to see the Stearman’s parts raining?parts ra through the trees. The prop came whacking down the hill and bounced by me and crashed along, and from the sound of it, fetched up against something pretty solid. An oak was probably a good guess. An oak could stop a prop.
I lay there until my lungs came unglued and began to pump air. I used the tree I was lying against to help myself up, discovered my left wrist was broken, and my knee had a piece of tree branch in it about the size of a tent peg. I was bleeding profusely down my pants leg, and I had little desire to pull the chunk out, but I got hold of it and jerked and sat down again. The wood fragment was still in me and I felt a lot worse than I had a moment before. I gave it another jerk, and it came out this time. I tossed it aside and lay back until the pain quit churning around inside me.
My head a smidgen clearer, I was suddenly overcome with an overwhelming desire to know what Snake was doing. Decorating an assortment of trees, I hoped.
I looked up the muddy, leafy hill I’d slid down, and saw Snake at the top of it, pushing out of what was left of a clutch of young pines, all now broken off by debris of the plane. Something had caught the flesh on the top of Snake’s head and peeled back a big chunk of his cobra tattoo. I could see the bone of his bloodstained skull. He was limping like both legs were made of sticks and a chunk of canvas from the plane was draped around his neck like a scarf. He glared down on me with something less than admiration. He jerked the canvas fragment off and tossed it aside. He bent painfully and pulled up his pants leg and got a little gun, probably a. 22, out of an ankle holster.
He was moving slow, but I figured it was time to move on just the same. I got a leg under me and put my back to the tree and got up. Snake fired the gun and a chunk of bark jumped out of the tree on my left.
Most definitely a. 22.
I stumbled behind the tree, let myself fall on my butt so I could slide down the rest of the slope on the mud. At the bottom of the slope, it fell off dramatically and dropped through a thicker growth of brush and gave me up about six feet over a foot of creek water.
Splashing into the cold water charged me. I got my bad leg under me, which was about as supple and useful as a fence post, slopped down the creek and around a bend.
At the end of the bend, the creek went under a bridge, and it went under it through a metal culvert. The bridge supported a narrow dirt road that had given up to weeds and had probably once been a logging road.
I stumbled to the road and was about to climb out of the creek and cross it, when I saw the culvert the water was running into was mostly blocked by accumulated pine needles, leaves, and branches.
It occurred to me, that if I could ease that debris back, I could slip inside the culvert and pull it to me. If Snake wasn’t looking just right, he might not realize the culvert was as wide and deep as it was, and he’d go on by. That would give me a chance to sneak out later, and get back to Arnold and Price and the car.
It wasn’t a military plan up there with D-Day, but I didn’t feel all that good. In fact, I felt light headed and delirious from all the banging around I’d gone through and all the blood I’d lost.
I got hold o?›I got hf the debris and pushed it aside without pulling it up, and wiggled into the culvert head first, crawled on my hands and knees until only my feet were touching the refuse. I used the top of my foot to pull the stuff back down. It grew darker. The water sounded loud inside the culvert.
The pain in my leg was only a little worse than if it were being sawed off with a dull rock, and my wrist had taken on the appearance of a fleshy baseball. I used my good hand to palm the mud on the bottom of the culvert, and pulled myself forward, toward the other end, which was unblocked by nature’s dandruff.
When I got there, I cautiously stuck my head out and looked down. The water had eaten out a pretty fair drop on this side, ten feet maybe before you hit the creek and deeper water than the other side. Three or four feet perhaps.
I pulled back inside the culvert and listened to my breathing. It seemed stereophonic in there. I slowed and softened it by breathing deeply through my nose and letting it out easy through my mouth.
Back down the far end of the culvert I could hear Snake stumbling slowly along, the splashing of the creek water echoing up through the culvert like a megaphone. I hoped that the leaves and needles that had bunched there would fool him.
Closer he came, the dumber I felt. All I had done was climb into the mouth of a cannon with the fuse about to be lit. I felt about in the bed of the culvert for some weapon, but there was just cold water and mud. I checked my pockets and came up with the wadcutters and the pocket knife Arnold had given me. I dropped the wadcutters and opened the knife and held it. I noticed that the blood from my leg was coloring the water, running a dark stream over the lip of the opening and down into the creek. I hoped it had grown dark enough that if Snake looked he wouldn’t realize what he was seeing.
Snake stumped and splashed along until he reached the culvert and stopped.
I held my breath. I looked down past my legs, down the twelve foot length of the culvert. Through a rent in the debris, I could see Snake’s legs. He hesitated only a moment, then I heard him scrambling up the side of the bank and onto the road.