Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 (3 page)

The girls stopped. One of them-the one with the bared breast-took a step closer.
"I'm all tangled up. See?" Again Heath shone the flashlight on her legs and the overturned wheelchair.
"We thought you were a bear," the girl said in a voice years too young for the body it emanated from, the voice of a three-year-old.
"I thought you guys were bears," Heath told her. "I got scared and tried to get back to camp but my wheelchair fell over."
"Heath! Heath!" A sharp-edged cry came through the darkness. Before the girls could run, Heath hurried on. "That's my aunt. She's an old lady." Mentally she apologized to Gwen for the categorization. "She can't lift me by herself but she's real nice. She made s'mores for dessert. They're real good. There's some left." Heath realized she was talking as if she spoke to preschoolers, toddlers, not young girls, but these battered children had slipped back in time and mind and treating them like babies felt right.
"Heath! Damn it! Answer me!" Thunder sounded in the distance underlining Gwen's shout.
"Will you stay and help my aunt put me back together again?" Heath pleaded.
"Humpty Dumpty," said the one who'd not yet spoken, and she giggled, a high uneven sound with the broken notes of hysteria beneath.
"Just like Humpty Dumpty," Heath said and smiled. "Okay. I'm going to holler for my aunt. Don't be scared, she's a nice person and a doctor. A lady doctor. Ready?
"Up here," Heath yelled. "Up the trail on the eastern side of the tent. Bring a light."
"Heath," Gwen cried again and there was the sound of feet pounding up the trail, a "Yowch!," a "Damn it," and Gwen stumbled up to the over-turned chair. 'Are you all right? My god, I heard screaming-"
"Gwen." Heath stopped her with a concrete tone. "I want you to meet some friends of mine."
Heath shined her light on her aunt's face to show the girls Gwen was truly, if not as she'd represented her, at least a kindly soul who did not apparently devour lost children. "My aunt." Introduction made, she turned her light on the girls still in the woods, still poised as if for flight. Or a blow. Gwen's light followed in natural succession and the children cowered.
"Oh my heavens, my heavens, my darlings, poor babies. Y'all come here. Whatever happened? No. Never you mind that. Whatever it is, it's over. Come on, sweethearts. Oh, look at your little feet!" Gwen started toward them, propelled by a maternal instinct that had inspired her to deliver thousands of babies and take care of their sniffles, mumps and other disasters large and small till they reached young adulthood.
The girls were mesmerized by the soft southern flow of motherly love but didn't leave their woodland darkness till Heath remembered Wiley. Or rather Wiley intruded into her world again by pushing his nose under her arm. Good sense or good training had stopped his aggression the moment Heath had identified the girls as nonthreatening.
Something-probably the arrival of Gwen, a witness to his dere-liction-made him decide it was time to come back on duty.
"Bring them to me," Heath said to the dog and pointed at the shiver-ing half-naked creatures.
Obligingly, Wiley trotted into the circle of illumination made by the two flashlights.
The dog Gwen had bought in hopes of increasing Heath's so-called independence might not have won a single show or even placed. He wasn't the best or smartest helper. What Wiley had was wit and charm. His walk was the jaunty distillation of cartoon cocksuredness, and his scruffy demeanor an example of nature mirroring art. Crooked whiskers, half-salute ears, baleful grin, raggedy fur, his maker had fashioned a Disney star. Only fate had decided he had a higher calling.
"Oooh," the girls cooed, like a movie audience when baby tigers gam-bol onto the screen. "A dog." Wiley sat down neatly in front of them and cocked his head as if in approval of their astute zoological perception. That pose complete, he bowed down, front legs outstretched, chin on paws.
"He's a ham," Heath said half apologetically from her bed of dirt and rock. Now that the excitement was over and Wiley had successfully taken the intruders captive, her elbows were registering complaints about sup-porting her body so long.
The children followed Wiley out the three or four yards from forest to path. They were in sorry shape. How sorry Heath guessed from the sharp intake of breath full view of them elicited from her aunt.
"Go ahead back to camp," Heath said. "I can get myself righted."
"No. No. I can't..." Gwen looked from Heath to the girls and back. The look of panic on her face as she struggled with the minuscule Sophie's choice, whether to leave her crippled niece sprawled helpless in the dirt or to get the children to safety and warmth before they bolted or collapsed, infuriated Heath.
"I can do it," she hissed, hating herself because maybe she couldn't and hating Gwen because maybe she knew it and hating the sound of her voice, peevish and beseeching at the same time.
Gwen hesitated just long enough Heath wanted to spit at her like an angry cat-or cry-then, muttering soothing nothings, she gathered the girls to her and started down the path.
Heath allowed herself to lay her head down for a moment, cushioned on her folded arms. She was exhausted in mind and body and soul, the kind of tired that gets in the bones, replacing marrow with tears. She couldn't get back in the chair. She doubted she could even set the chair back on its wheels. The fall from the ice hadn't merely taken her legs, it had taken her strength, her endurance. Her willingness.
Hot, none too sweet-smelling breath blew on the back of her neck. Wiley had stayed behind. He knew which side his kibble was buttered on.
"What're you looking at?" Heath growled. Wiley did his courtly bow again. "Oh yeah, like that's going to work on me." But it did. It always did.
The machinations required to return her butt to its previous place twenty-six inches up on a scrap of vinyl took considerably longer than she would have thought. Before she'd even dragged her worthless legs around the right way and got her chair up and the brakes locked, she was drenched in sweat and as filthy as a prolonged bout of wallowing in the dirt could make a woman. With the assistance of the dog, the vocabulary of a steve-dore and a small pine tree, she finally regained her chair. Gwen never came thumping back up the path to see if she was all right. By turns Heath was grateful for the faith and pissed off at the indifference.
When she rolled back into camp, heralded by her wheels crunching
obnoxiously on the gravel and her flashlight held in her lap like the headlight of a crotch-high train, Gwen had both girls dressed in sweatsuits-one Gwen's own, the other belonging to Heath. Water was on the camp stove heating for tea, and Aunt Gwen had returned to her old persona as Dr. Littleton. One of the girls had both her feet in Gwen's lap, allowing the doctor to bathe and dress them. The quietest one, the littlest, sat with her feet soaking in the dishpan.
The girls saw Heath, and the tranquil field hospital scene shattered. As one they cried out. Feet went flying. Dirty water and blood spattered on Gwen, hissed against the chimney of a lantern. Disregarding injuries and what had to be a lot of pain, the children scrambled free of lawn chair and picnic table.
Gwen was calling, "Wait. No. Sweetie. Your feet. No. No. Darlins, you mustn't-" Wiley, forgetting his training and his trusted position as Good Disciplined Helper, began to bark.
A litany of self-scorn poured through Heath's mind, a mind made feeble from fighting gravity and floundering helplessness. Rolling in, rocks clat-tering under her wheels like some sort of deformed robo-beast from a Terminator prequel, she was more monster than human. The girls, already traumatized by god knew what-and from their state of undress, Heath could hazard a guess-were terrified, running.
They ran, not away, but toward her.
Heath stopped. The flashlight fell from her lap, rolled a few feet along the ground.
They want Wiley, the scruffy charmer, Heath realized. Then the girls were upon her-Wiley ignored, Gwen forgotten. The taller of the two hung about her neck, nearly strangling her. The quiet one crawled into her lap, knees banging the metal of the chair, elbow digging into Heath's middle, and attached herself like a limpet. Both were crying. Not the tiny whimpers of the woods but bawling like babies, gulping and sobbing. Heath could feel tears hot as embers falling on her neck and cheek.
These two battered girls saw her as their savior. Heath felt like a fraud. Wiley had found them. Gwen had rescued them. All Heath had done was writhe on the ground like a half-squashed earthworm.
"You poor little buggers," she said softly. "You must've had a real bad rap."
Gwen and Wiley shepherding, Heath blew out the last of her strength pushing her wheels through the crushed rock with her added burden. The smaller girl did not want to leave her lap and, for reasons she wasn't cer-tain of, Heath didn't want to make her. Maybe it was just that whatever had happened to the girl, it was probably ugly. Definitely ugly. Maybe uglier than anything that had ever befallen Heath, even waking up in a hospital room and being told she'd never walk again. If sitting on a rolling lap clinging to half a middle-aged ex-climber comforted her, so be it.
And maybe Heath needed a little comforting herself.
Gwen coaxed the girls back to their former positions. The lap sitter was finally lured to the bench and allowed her feet to be returned to the dishpan but chose not to let go of Heath's hand. Wiley took up guard duty while Gwen redressed and bandaged the other child's feet.
After the tightly knit darkness beneath the lodgepole pines, the light of Coleman lanterns was shockingly bright. For the first time Heath was able to see what her dog had sniffed out and her aunt had brought home.
The limpet-the darker, smaller girl who'd flung herself into Heath's lap and still clung so tightly to her hand she wondered if she'd be able to use a knife and fork again-had jaw-length red hair and brown eyes. Shock or night or drugs had dilated her pupils till they looked as black and bot-tomless as deep wells. Dry wells; there was no glitter of interest or spark of life. Though she was probably in sixth or seventh grade, she had the prom-ise of womanly beauty beneath the skin of a baby. Deadly combination.
Girls matured earlier every generation and Heath thought she could smell menstrual blood. In the woods she noticed both girls' legs were en-crusted with grime. How much was blood and how much dirt, she won-dered. To cover the grim thoughts, Heath smiled into those empty eyes. The girl who'd spoken first was quite tall. Heath had noticed when she'd walked next to Gwen. Gwen was five-foot-ten and this slender reed of a girl wasn't much shorter. Judging height was another thing her fall had affected. Sitting down, everyone seemed to tower. Often Heath felt like an egret among the cows.
The tall girl sat in a webbed lawn chair, her feet in Gwen's lap. The child was mostly legs and what Heath imagined, when shampooed, was blond hair-the long, pale, silky kind that most teenagers want and pre-cious few have. Even ratty and caked with grime the hair hung to the middle of her back. There was something utterly familiar about this girl and Heath wracked her brain trying to remember if she'd seen her around the park, in the Visitors' Center maybe, or at an eatery in town.
Then it came to her. She looked like Skipper, Barbie's little sister, right down to the preternatural long legs and stick-straight hair. Down to the blank doll-like expression on her face and the unfocused painted-on eyes.
"They aren't talking," she said to her aunt, suddenly realizing the quiet was unnatural.
"I know," Gwen said.
"Skipper can talk," Heath said. "The girl you've got. She said, 'It's a dog,' back in the woods."
"She doesn't want to talk now, do you, sweetheart?" Gwen said kindly.
Heath turned to the red-haired girl with a death-grip on her hand. "What's your name?"
The eyes seemed to grow larger, darker, till they resembled what Heath had always imagined interstellar black holes looked like: places where nothing could survive-not matter, not rock, not steel.
"Can I call you 'limpet'?" Heath took the silence for just that, silence, and stopped prodding. She was afraid she was too heavy-handed, too inept, and would cause more damage. "Come here, Wiley."
The dog obediently trotted to between Heath's knees and those of the girl.
"You can hold onto Wiley if you want. I do it when I'm totally freaked out. It always makes me feel better." The limpet looked at the dog and reached out tentatively.
Her hand was babyish, dimples where knuckles would one day be, wrists barely defined. Her finger ends were raw and bloody. The black of dirt and old blood caked under the nails and in the tiny creases in the once-smooth skin.
"Go ahead. Pet him. He doesn't mind. I think it makes him feel important."
The small hand closed in the thick fur of the dog's ruff. Wiley sat very still and grinned.
"They can understand us at least," Heath said to her aunt, then: "Oh shit, we should call somebody," as she remembered her responsibilities.
"I already tried," Gwen said. Skipper's feet were cleaned and bound. The doctor set them gently on the ground and moved over to attend to the limpet's feet. "Cell phone won't work in this canyon. The guy camped next to us offered to drive in toward town till he could get a signal and call the rangers."
"Good." Heath should have thought of that. Since the accident, things had been dropping through the cracks in her brain. Sometimes it felt as if, in losing her legs, her independence and her mobility, she'd lost part of her mind as well. She'd wondered-but never dared to ask the doctors for fear they'd add "crazy" to the list of things wrong with her- if the much-vaunted "muscle memory" was an actual real thing, bits of knowledge stored, not in the cells of the brain, but cached in cells in other parts of the body. When her brain had lost contact with her legs, had it also lost access to information, memory and experience as well as sensation?
The sound of a truck engine vibrated out from the trees, and a boxy white ambulance came into view at the far end of the parking lot.
"Your guy must've got his signal," Heath said.
"Finish her." Gwen put the limpet's dripping feet in Heath's lap and rose to go flag down the ambulance.
Heath's little bears were in bad shape but, of the obvious injuries those to their feet were the most series. It was a testimony to their courage and fortitude-or their desperation and terror-that they'd kept on keeping on, putting one bloody ragged little foot down in front of the other.