Free Fall in Crimson (20 page)

"I'd like to try it, but not very much."

She studied me and smiled. "That's an honest reaction. This should be a routine flight. What do people call you?"

"Travis. Or McGee. Or whatever, Joya."

"Joya Murphy-Wheeler. With a hyphen, Travis. Mostly what you have to do is keep out of my way which isn't easy, and admire the view."

We killed time for an hour, and finally they took Josie down to ground level and let her out, and put another propane tank aboard and another smallish dark-haired woman dressed like Josie.

"That's the stunt woman," Joya said. "Linda." She said the name the way she might say "snake."

They took the number-one balloon back up again to twenty feet above the ground. Linda held the burner support, straddled the side of the basket. The man with her, who had been in the long scene with Josie, grabbed for her and missed as she toppled over the side. She fell neatly into the safety net, bounced up, clasped her hands over her head, duck-walked to the edge of the net, grasped it, and swung down. George stood up out of his concealment in the basket and hit the blast valve for a few seconds. The balloon sagged down anyway, and the crew grabbed the edge of the basket. The actor climbed out and then was told to climb back in. The dummy was brought aboard and stowed. After a small conference, Linda climbed aboard, too, and Kesner yelled through his bullhorn, "Joya, get your people ready to go."

It took about thirty minutes to get all seven balloons inflated. They seemed to come growing up out of the field like a crop of huge poisonous puffballs. The gas blasts were almost constant.

Joya had arranged the signals. When number one took off, number three followed almost immediately, staying near it, gaining a little height on it. Joya's crew people, Dave and Ed, held
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the basket down and made bad jokes about what I might expect of the flight.

"Weight off?" Joya ordered. They removed their hands. We had positive buoyancy, and she blasted for eight or ten seconds. A little while after the blast ended, we began to lift more rapidly, following the first two in their mated ascent.

"I'll have to try to stay close, for the sake of the cameras, but then we'll peel off."

"I thought you said you couldn't steer these things."

"You'll see." She worked the blaster valve, ripping the silence with that startling bray, a snorting sound that shot the blue flame high into the envelope. Without that noise, there was a strange silence. We were moving with the wind, so there was no wind sound. I heard the other balloons blasting in short staccato sequences, then heard the wicker of the basket creak as she rested her hip against the edge. The ground had dropped away. Behind us I could see the pattern of vehicles, of the muddy paths, the trailers and trucks.

"There!" Joya said.

I looked where she pointed and saw the lifelike dummy ejected from the number-one balloon, about seventy feet above us and ahead of us. I heard the rattle of the clothing as the dummy fell, turning slowly. It seemed to pause and then pick up a terrible speed as it dwindled below us to smack into the tough pastureland.

We held position for a little while until Joya said, "I think they have enough." She pulled the line to the maneuvering vent and bent to watch the variometer scale, explaining that we were too high to use visual reference points to indicate altitude. She let us sag downward until it seemed to me that our descent accelerated. At just that point she began feeding it short intermittent blasts. The harsh sound startled me each time until I learned to watch her gloved hand on the lever.

The others were far ahead of us, much higher and leaving us well behind. "Higher wind speeds aloft," she explained. "They'll be coming down soon, to fly close to the ground. That's when it's best. You'll see."

She gave all her attention to stabilizing the balloon at the height she wanted, explaining that as we came down we were pushing cooler air up into the envelope, thus decreasing lift. She leveled it out at about twenty feet above the ground. The breeze carried us along at I would guess ten miles an hour. Now and again she would pull the blast lever for a short sequence of that ungodly racket, and in a little while I began to comprehend the rhythm of it. If there was a tree line ahead she would give a two-second blast which, thirty seconds later, would lift us up over the trees.

We moved in silence, looking at the flat rich country. We heard the birdsongs, heard a chain saw in a woodlot, heard horses whinny. Children ran and waved at us. We crossed small country roads and once saw our reflection in a farm pond. "What do you think?" she asked.

"There aren't any words," I said. There weren't. In incredible silence between her infrequent short blasts for control, we moved across the afternoon land, steady as a cathedral, moving through the land scents, barn scents, the summery sounds. It was a sensation unlike anything else in the world. It was a placid excitement, with the quality of an extended dream.

We beamed at each other, sharing pleasure. It made her strong plain face quite lovely. It was the instant of becoming friends.

At last she bumped it up to two hundred feet, where her exquisite coordination was not as imperative. We used the wrench to cut an almost empty tank out of the line and tie in another full one. She explained that we had wasted gas by using the maneuvering vent to drop us down, but she had wanted to get down quickly and get away from the others. From our altitude I scanned the horizon and could see but two of the others, little round pieces of hard candy way off to the west of us. "Divergent winds at different altitudes," she explained.

She perched a hip on the edge of the basket again, one hand overhead on the blast lever. She glanced at the control panel, then looked at me with the questing look she had concealed before.

"Travis, I can't add anything to what I told them on the phone."

Moment of decision. The proper thing to do would be to express all the confusion I felt, to take
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her off the hook, to correct her misapprehension. But there was a flavor of conspiracy, and I did not want to sidestep anything that might become of use to me. Apparently she and I were having a clandestine meeting, hanging up there in a wicker basket under a seventy-foot bulge of rainbow nylon, moving northeasterly across middle America.

I took my time with the response, knowing it was make or break. "They said they felt it would be better if I got it from you, rather than secondhand from them."

"I thought they were taping it. There was that little beep every few seconds."

"Listening to a tape and listening directly to a person are two quite different experiences, Joya.

So if you don't mind . . ."

She shrugged, sighed. She pointed out a small deer, bounding toward a woodlot. And then she told me the story.

They had been going to leave when a lot of the others left. But she had been concerned about what had happened to her friend, Jean Norman, who was staying at the hotel with Kesner. There was a large trailer at the far end of the leased pastureland, fixed up like a bedroom set. There the withered little technician named Mercer used a video camera setup with a video-recorder, and with Dirty Bob and Jean and Linda, who was gay, they made cassettes, masters, which were flown to Las Vegas, where a distributor paid three thousand apiece for them and could then duplicate a thousand copies a day, title them, package them, and send them out. They kept Jeanie on pills and paid so little attention to her that she heard more than they realized. She signed releases every time, and they gave her a little money every time. Lately they had been bringing local girls into the action, making them think it was going to be some sort of screen test. The girls got some false reassurance from the presence of Linda and Jeanie, but the fake rape turned out to be real rape, and the screams were real as well. With enough Valium in them to quiet them down, they would take the money later on and sign the release and never dare reveal what had actually happened, hoping only that no collector in Rosedale Station ever bought one of those X

tapes and recognized his neighbor's daughter or granddaughter in the jolly tattooed clutch of Desmin Grizzel.

"I haven't got any proof at all," she said. "I shouldn't have gotten involved. But I think it is rotten. And they should pay somehow for what they did to Jeanie, if for nothing else. She told me bits and pieces when she was sort of lucid. And I put it together. I don't think Josie Laurant knows about it. I like her. Kesner and Dirty Bob are monsters. Like I told your people on the phone, we're cutting out. Dave is driving the chase car and Ed is driving the truck with all our gear. I don't even want to take you back to where we left from. It's going to get very dangerous around there. The people around there hate the movie people and us too. If any one of those girls talks about what happened to her, it could start a shooting war. It's almost a shooting war now. One balloon came in with three rifle bullet holes right through it, but little holes won't bring a balloon down. From now on it's up to you people."

"How did you know I was the one?"

"They said somebody would be here today, somebody with a cover story, to look around and decide whether it is worth further investigation." She looked up into the envelope and down at the variometer dial, gave a five- or six-second blast, frowned at me, and said, "Anyway, you look like the sort of person I expected them to send. What will you do?"

"Try to nail down the violations. Interstate transportation of obscene materials. There's a corrupt organizations statute that might fit."

"Will they go to prison for a long time?"

"Probably not."

"One of those girls was fifteen."

"If she would testify against them, it would be a big help. Lots of nice charges there, with the locals in the driver's seat."

"She probably wouldn't ever testify."

"Well, we're very grateful for the help of any citizen."

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"You're welcome. I've got to get back anyway. I've taken too much time off work. I'm from Ottumwa. All four of us are. We're shares on the balloon. It's a Cameron. We've got about four thousand total in it. We really wanted to see it flying in a movie. But I don't think there'll be any movie. I tried to read that script. It doesn't make any sense at all. I think Peter Kesner is crazy."

"What do you work at?"

"Oh, I'm a systems analyst, and I do some computer programming. It's kind of a slack time right now, so they let me off work. I think we better come down, and I think I see a good place. And there's the search car." She pointed it out to me, the Subaru with a yellow and green target painted on the roof, running along a road that paralleled our course.

She took the CB out of the straps, extended the aerial, and spoke into it. "Breaker Thirty-eight, this is Joytime, calling Little Sue. Come in, Little Sue."

"Little Sue sees you, Joytime."

"Take your second left and go in about two hundred yards, and that should be about right, Little Sue."

"Got you. See you there."

She made a face at me as she packed the CB away. "Not what you'd call good radio discipline.

But it gets the job done."

She turned her attention to the descent, checking the stowage of loose equipment, checking on helmets, reading the surface wind, telling me where to stand and what to hold on to. She worked the maneuvering port line, bringing us down at a steady angle, clear of any obstructions. We passed the parked Subaru, twenty feet in front of it and a few feet higher than its roof. Ground speed seemed to increase. At the instant the bottom of the basket bumped the earth, she yanked the red line to empty the envelope and turned the fuel tank valve off: We bumped along for perhaps a dozen feet and stopped.

She scrambled to keep any part of the nylon skirt from touching the hot burner. Dave, round, redheaded, and heavily freckled, came trotting up, saying, "Great work, Joya. Real nice. You like it, Mr. McGee?"

"It's fantastic."

A pack of farm children arrived on bicycles and hung back at a shy distance until Dave and Joya gave them chores. She bled off the fuel pressure, and then we emptied the envelope by holding the mouth closed and squeezing the air out toward the apex. Dave disconnected the pyrometer, and we packed the envelope in the bag, inspecting it as it was accordion-folded in. Everything fitted on or in the Subaru. As I helped fold, lift, and carry, I wrestled with my conscience and with my liking for guile. Guile won. So I was not going to walk her a little way down the road and confess. I walked her a little way down the road and asked for the name of the fifteen-year-old, knowing what a useful lever I might make of it.

"Karen," she said. "Thatcher? Or Fletcher? Hatcher! That's it. Karen Hatcher. Blond. With some baby fat."

"Thank you for the balloon ride, Joya."

"It was a good private place to talk. I ... I'll be watching the newspapers. I hope you smash them flat. I really do."

So we said goodbye to the farm kids, and Dave made a rendezvous with the truck, let Joya off there, and we moved the basket and the rest of the gear into the truck. Then Dave drove me back to Rosedale Station. The last of the breeze was gone. The late afternoon was utterly still.

There was no one behind the desk at the Rosedale Lodge. I was tall enough to bend over the counter and lift my key out of the box. I went up the stairs, walked silently down the corridor to rooms 25 and 26, listened at both doors, and heard no sound. I went up the next flight to my fiftydollar room and sat on the edge of my narrow sagging bed.

There could not, I realized, be any clean resolution of this whole thing. Ellis Esterland had been killed twenty-one months ago. And what he had been killed for was long since down the drain, flushed down by an erratic and talented middleaged woman, misled by her parasitic friend, Peter
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Kesner. Circumstances changed for the folks in the black hats, just as they did for the white hats.

And the gray. Their universe continued to unfold. The Senator flew over the cliff with a sea gull in his face. Up until now I had not been able to feel any particular personal imperative at work.