No Time to Wave Goodbye (22 page)

“This is our contract,” she said to Beth. Lorrie removed a sliver of what smelled like spoiled salmon from one of two zippered wallets around her waist and gave it to Roman. “This is his stinky salmon. The rag and the salmon are his reward. Now he knows what we’re going to do. No matter when we find her, I’ll stop for a minute and give him his play.”

“Doesn’t he pull it out of your hands?” Pat asked.

“You can’t roughhouse with a dog this powerful,” Lorrie Sabo answered. “Romy’s the gentlest boy on earth but he’s too big to ever get the idea that anything but gentle play is okay. He learned that a long
time ago.” The tracker knelt at the door to hug her little girls and her husband. The little girls hugged the dog. From behind the children peered a second Saint Bernard that Lorrie introduced as Noble, a one-year-old pup in training. The last two things Doug handed his wife were what appeared to be a small Bible and very large handgun. As the three of them set out, the dog trotting ahead at a hand signal Lorrie gave him, Candy put both arms around Eliza.

“That’s a .45 Glock,” she said. “Think she intends to run into bears?”

“Would it work?” Beth asked.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Candy said. “This is the time for bears to come out, isn’t it?”

“I don’t want to think about any more dangerous shit than I already am,” said Pat.

Beth’s sons, walking steadily at least three feet apart, were already visibly smaller. Turn, Beth thought. Wave goodbye. But they didn’t, and soon a stand of trees obscured them.

A
ustere and silent, the landscape at the foot of Blind Bear Hill was Christmas-card exquisite. A tiny waterfall had frozen in midstream, its pool a ruffle of ice at the base. Ben stopped for a moment.

“Don’t lose sight of me,” Lorrie called back, “and please try to stay within my tracks. We’re going to have to come out of here someday and we’re not going to be stopping to look at the scenery.”

“Why aren’t you looking for signs?” Ben asked.

“You’ve seen too many TV Westerns,” she answered. “No tracker looks at the ground. Whatever made a track down there made a sign of some kind up ahead. You look up in front of you.”

Ben said, “Fine,” and Vincent knew he would have pulled a wry face at him any other time in their lives.

They hiked another hour in silence. The sun sank and the snow was deeper.

“We can’t post-hole it like this anymore,” the tracker told Vincent and Ben. “It’ll wear your legs out. Time to snowshoe up.”

Once the snowshoes were secure, the two men sat on slippery rocks and devoured handfuls of nuts and chocolate. Lorrie seemed to have some internal fuel source. She settled herself in the sun in the cleft of a rock and pulled the leather cowboy hat she wore over her ski band down to cover her eyes. Ben and Vincent sat in silence for fifteen minutes, listening to the snores of the dog, which had thrown itself over Lorrie’s legs.

Suddenly, as though she had heard an alarm sound, Lorrie sat up and slipped into her own snowshoes. “Did you sleep?” she asked.

“Were we supposed to?” Ben answered.

“I sleep whenever I can. You’ll get pretty tired otherwise. You can eat and drink walking but you can’t sleep walking, although I’ve seen people try,” the tracker said. “Are you drinking?” Neither of them had. Neither of them wanted to stop to pee. “This is serious. You have to drink all the time. From now on. Enjoy that good well water while you have it because you’re going to be drinking water purified with iodine or strained through sand we dig for pretty soon. If I can find any sand under this. Snow melt is more likely … and that will have to be warmed up or it’ll just add to how cold you feel when the sun goes down.”

Another half hour brought them to the foot of a rocky slope with a fringe of trees at its crown.

“How do we get around that?” Vincent asked.

“Around it?” Lorrie said, laughing, as Romy dug in his claws. “We’re going up. There’s still light up there. We’ll get there and camp.”

“It doesn’t look too steep,” said Ben.

By the time they got to the top, both of them were heaving for every breath and bent over, hauling on saplings. Sweat sprang from pores Vincent didn’t know he had and he tore off his hat, stuffing it into his pocket.

“Got here faster’n I thought,” Lorrie said. “Roman’s doing good. We’ll keep going.”

Vincent sighed.

“You want to go back? Go,” said Lorrie. “No new snow. Just follow our track.”

Vincent said, “No. We just don’t do this every day.”

Lorrie bounded off into the trees, where the boughs that clasped overhead erased the waning sun—thrusting them into a tunnel where the honeyed light stippled the ground in front of them. “I’m going to look for a clearing. Stay in my tracks. There’s a spring that runs down along here. It could be a trickle now but you never know. I sing to pass time. It doesn’t waste as much energy as thinking.”

As Ben and Vincent struggled up what had seemed from the bottom to be a gentle grade, their thighs began to ache and then caught fire. Even Ben swore violently under his breath. From up ahead, they could hear Lorrie singing Irish songs, from “Gentle Annie” to “Red Is the Rose,” songs they knew from their Irish grandfather, Bill Kerry, Beth’s dad. But when Lorrie began, “Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin’ Street, a gentle Irishman, mighty odd …” Vincent said, “That’s enough of this shit.”

He tried to think of any song he knew that would distract him from the elfin dissection of his hamstrings—any camp song, but then he had never been to camp. Any folk song, but he’d never had any idea what Bob Dylan was actually saying. Finally, he began to hum, then to sing, “If a body catch a body, coming through the rye … if a body kiss a body, will a body cry? Everybody loves somebody …”

“Everybody
has
somebody,” Ben corrected him. To Vincent’s surprise, he sang, “Everybody has somebody, nay they say have I …” and they finished together, “Yet all the girls, they smile at me, when coming through the rye.” And then they began again, pushing with their legs, digging with their toes.

“Forgive me and don’t answer if you don’t want to,” Vincent gasped out. “But do you remember when Beth …”

“I don’t remember, in fact, but it’s definitely one of the great Cappadora legends,” Ben answered. Vincent was gratified to notice that even Ben was winded. In fact, he was more embarrassed than irritated, sort of faking annoyance to cover up the fact that all those days at the restaurant had him a little out of shape.

“If you don’t remember, then why does Eliza sing it to Stella?” Vincent asked.

“I never heard her.”

“She sings it all the time. And she sings it like Mom did … Mom, as in
our
mom …” Vincent added, his rage suddenly a spear sharpened in the burning of his muscles. He realized his feet were nearly numb, the new boots at least a size too small. “She sings it, ‘If a bunny catch a bunny …’”

“I don’t remember!” Ben roared, as, with a horrible slowness, he slipped off the path, down a slight grade, coming to rest on a frozen crest of snow maybe three feet below Vincent.

“Don’t move, Sam. Don’t move an inch. If we’re lucky, that’s a stable shelf of snow …”

“Okay,” said Ben, his eyes blank with dread. Vincent could see his brother’s shoulders shaking. He knew what it would mean to hit water, here and now.

“I’m going to lie down on my stomach, in case it won’t hold both our weight, and hold out the snowshoe.” Vincent ditched the pack and was unlacing one snowshoe when he heard a soft, horrible shushing.

Just as Lorrie shouted, “There’s a good clearing up here, and it’s nice and flat. Come on, about fifty yards more …” the crest where Ben stood began to sink, insubstantial as a meringue. While Vincent scrambled down toward him and Ben clawed for Vincent’s hand, Ben sank silently through into water as deep as his chest.

“Jesus Christ!” Vincent yelled. “Help us! He fell in.” They heard Lorrie come schussing down the slope. The dog came huffing in front of her, lithe, sure-footed and human-eyed as he drew level with Vincent.

“Don’t move any closer to him,” Lorrie said in a voice so quiet it had the effect of literally slowing Vincent’s heart. “You’ll both go in and then neither one of you will survive. If we don’t get him out of there, his chances are slim to none anyhow.” Pulling a set of straps from her pack, she buckled it around Roman’s shoulders, tossing knotted whip ends to Ben who scrabbled to catch them in his gloves. They slipped away, and Ben pulled the gloves off. “Ben! There’s genius for you. Now he’ll lose a finger. Plus, I hate that he has to do this.”

“Me, too,” Vincent said. “Hurry, Lorrie. He’s not only freezing, he’s scared to death.”

To Ben, Lorrie said, “Drop your pack. Try not to let it slide underwater. Just shove it into the bank.” Ben did. “I mean I hate that Roman has to do this. It’s a strain on him. Roman, up,” Lorrie said and the huge dog clenched his massive hindquarters and stepped backward. Ben, visibly trembling, came stumbling and crawling up the bank. Vincent thought his brother’s face looked gray as modeling clay. Lorrie broke off a branch and snagged Ben’s pack with it. Then, ripping off the harness, Lorrie headed back up the path.

“Where the hell are you going?” Vincent howled.

“I’m going to throw the tent up in the clearing and hope to God I can find enough wood that’s dry enough to start some kind of fire!” she said. “Get him up here!” By the time they stumbled up to where she was, Lorrie had laid a platform of flat logs she had struck from a single bough and hacked apart with the ax. She’d snapped off low boughs she called “squaw wood” that were bare of snow, stripped off the bark, and used one of the Vaseline balls to start a fire that roared up, although it also smoked like a chimney that hadn’t been cleaned in years. Somewhere, she’d also found a big rotten dry stump that was dead and that she split into six pieces, all in about five minutes. “Get him out of his clothes,” Lorrie barked.

Half-dragging his brother, Vincent said, “Say again?”

“Get it all off, everything. Look at his face. His eyes. He’s sleepy. He’s already hypothermic. The wet clothes have to be hung to dry and we have to get him warmed up. We should quit this right now and go
back. I tried for a cell phone signal and there’s nothing.” Lorrie’s mouth formed a grim line. “We’re on our own.”

Vincent began pulling Ben out of his layers. Ben was groggy, shuddering like a guy in a spasm. Under the first layer, Vincent found wet silks. Water had seeped in through the waistband of Ben’s wind pants. Lorrie shook out Ben’s sleeping bag. “Get this in the tent,” she told Vincent. Ben nodded, swayed, sleepy-eyed.

He said, “Fine. I’m good. I’m warming up.”

Lorrie said, “Shit. That’s not good.”

“He said he’s warming up.”

“People who are too cold feel warm. Get his bag in the tent and get him in the bag. It’s probably twenty degrees up here and the wind’s picking up. I have to find a better way to shield the fire. I built it in the open like a fool.” Vincent was amazed at her prowess. She’d kicked away the snow for three feet around the fire so it wouldn’t go out and lugged a couple of big rocks to mount around a silver-coated shield—like a tiny version of some Japanese screen in a fancy living room. “I’ll add every bit of wood I can strip to it once we get him figured out. First, I’m going to warm up some hot chocolate.”

Once Ben was in the bag in the tent, Vincent asked her for the chocolate. “I’m letting it cool. You ever hear of guys pulled out of the ocean and were walking and talking until they took a hot drink and dropped dead? He wasn’t that bad off but I’m not taking chances. You have to give him something warm first.” She stared at Vincent. “What are you doing? Strip off.”

“I did. He’s in the sleeping bag.”

“I mean you!” Lorrie said. “Strip down to your underwear now.”

“Me?”

“Pull your boots off and leave them outside the tent. I’ll put the poncho over them. Strip and get in the bag with him.”

“What?”

Lorrie sighed. “Your human warmth is going to do more for him than anything I can do. He’s your brother, and I’m not getting in the bag with him. I have too much to do out here. I mean it! Now!” She’d
thrown a rope around the two closest trees and flipped Ben’s wet clothes over it.

“Can I pee first?” Vincent asked.

“If you hurry up about it,” Lorrie said. “We’ll dig a hole later. Try not to get too near to the fire. I don’t want a bunch of critters nosing around. When he’s warmed up, we’ll pull the food up off the ground in a bear bag …”

“Can’t he just lie down close to the fire?” Vincent asked.

“Sure, but it could kill him if it takes him that long to warm up,” Lorrie said.

Vincent pulled off his clothes down to his underwear and threw them into the tent. He set his boots just inside so Lorrie wouldn’t see how wet they already were. Then he got down on all fours and crawled into the mouth of the tent. Lorrie zipped both openings behind them and pegged down the fly to cut the wind. Ben seemed asleep but he began to thrash when Vincent started to slip into the bag.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ben’s skin was like the outside of a cold glass on a summer day, before the surface beaded up.

“It’s not my idea. You’re … you have hypothermia. I have to warm you. I’m warm from all the hiking.”

“Get outta here!” Ben mumbled, shoving weakly, his words coming slowly and slurred over each other like a song on a record with the batteries on the player about to run out of juice.

“Come on, Sam. Cut it out. If I don’t do this, you’ll really be bad off.” Vincent wiggled in next to his brother. “I’m not going to make a pass at you. Come on. Lie still.” Ben finally stopped thrashing. Vincent could feel his arms, smooth and cold as the rocks outside. He wrapped his own arms around Ben’s back and held him close and slung his leg over both of Ben’s. The inert chill of his brother’s body poured over him like a fluid. “There. Now, um, try to relax.” Vincent blew on the back of Ben’s neck, the only exposed part of him.