They Almost Always Come Home (30 page)

He felt his way with his feet as he ventured deeper into the water. Knee-deep. Thigh-deep. Deep enough. He squat- ted, lowering most of the upper half of his body into the icy water. He splashed it over his shoulders, shuddering as he did. Bending forward, he submerged his head and used his fingers to comb the water through his wiry hair. No soap or shampoo. Those, too, were in his food pack.

If he’d guessed right about the sequence of amorphous days and nights he’d lived through since the lightning, Libby would have expected him home days ago. How long before she started to worry? Would she worry? Or would his absence serve only

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as yet another annoyance? He scrubbed hard at his scalp, then shot up for air, spewing like a whale.

He couldn’t risk floating on the water. Without the gift of

sight, he could easily become disoriented. No. Straight out from shore, carefully counted steps, and straight back. That’s all he dared attempt.

He squeegeed his hair with his hands, sloshed more cold

water on his armpits, and headed back the way he came. It comforted him to feel the water lapping lower on his legs as he walked. The right direction. Closer to shore. A simple knowl- edge. More valuable than a Harvard degree in this place under these conditions.

Would Libby call the police first or his dad? She would call

someone, wouldn’t she? Only Providence could tell them where to look for him. He’d made his own twisted detour, blazed his own trail. No one would expect him to venture this far off the traditional routes through this region. Only Providence.

“Jehovah Jireh, my Provider. Jehovah Shalom, my Peace.

Jehovah Rapha, my Healer.”

Greg pulled his pants over his wet body, grabbed the rest of

his belongings, and walked sock-footed through the gauntlet of fallen logs toward the living room of his camp.

His balance was improving. He cringed at the thought that

he was getting used to being blind. Maybe someday he’d look back on this time with no more clarity than he remembered two semesters of high school Spanish.
¿Donde está el baño?
could elicit a response to let him know the location of the nearest restroom if he were stranded in a Mexican village, but that was about the extent of his recollection of those semesters.

That one important question remained in his mind, plus

the amazing taco parties Señora Carolina threw for her students twice a year.

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Was there any hope he’d live long enough to forget how this trip ended?

The sun dried the beads of lake water from his skin and hair as he sat in its warmth. When the breeze picked up, he slipped back into his shirt. He’d been heading out of the park when he took this detour. Nothing in his clothes pack was any cleaner than the shirt he’d worn earlier. When his rescuers came, they’d find him dressed in crusty clothes.

Message in a bottle. Could he put a message in a bottle and launch it on the lake, hoping someone somewhere along the line of the waterways would find it? How many years from now?

One of the empty water bottles lying on the floor of the Cherokee would work perfectly—a few too many miles away to be of any help.

Like the last straw in an already groaning wagonload, it dawned on Greg that he’d left his keys in the ignition of the Jeep. Another in a string of smart moves. He’d heard Libby call him
clueless
under her breath once. Maybe she was right. Clueless. Sightless. Hopeless. And hungry. His stomach rumbled again.

“And for your dining pleasure this evening,” he told it, “we have an excellent vintage lake water. For an entrée the chef rec- ommends the sun-baked fruit leather, small but succulent.” He felt in his shirt pocket and added, “And for dessert, a single, salt-encrusted sunflower seed.”

********

After his meal, he crawled straight forward toward the cliff edge, found it with his fingertips, then scooted back a cou- ple of yards and planted a couple of medium sized rocks as a

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warning barricade. Two or three more trips and he had built something that must look like a caveman’s guardrail.

Hunger made him weaker than he thought it could. He’d

lost a day to the storm, then who knows how many to the lightning strike and its aftereffects? Three days—or was it four?—since he ate anything that resembled a legitimate meal. His body would adjust to that, too, wouldn’t it? Every time Libby embraced a new diet, she’d complain hardest the first few days. Then she fell into a couple of weeks of tolerance before deciding it was her duty as a Wisconsinite to support the dairy industry and pork farmers, most particularly through consuming frozen custard, sharp cheddar, and bacon in all its forms.

“Greg, get your mind off food.”

So, the list of unmentionables now included food, anything

having to do with vision, death, and happily ever after. Not necessarily in that order.

A low roar interrupted his thoughts. Closer. Closer. An air-

plane! Probably one of the forest service float planes.

“Hey! Hey! Over here! I’m here! HELP!”

Greg jumped up and down, swinging his arms in wide,

frantic arcs. “Down here! HELP!”

He needed a way to signal the plane. Was it night? It felt

like night. The temperature had dropped considerably in the last few hours. He’d start a fire, no matter what the risk of set- ting the woods ablaze. No. No time. The plane sounded as if it were almost directly overhead.

His flashlight. He could flash an SOS-like signal into the

air. That would draw the pilot’s attention. But he’d tossed Sparky aside as worthless to a blind man. How wrong he’d been. Somewhere tangled in the underbrush lay the one piece of equipment that could help him. The drone of the plane’s engine faded into nothingness while he searched for it.

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he sun on his face. Warm. Penetrating. Black as the stone lining of a burned-out tomb.

Another day. Another colorless, lightless, sightless day. He’d lost count of how many dawns he hadn’t seen. Eight? Nine? Stretches of warm and cold, dry and drizzle, a patch or two of rain again, twisted together with no defined edges.

Was it too much to hope he’d wake one morning and have to shield his eyes from the blinding sun? Blinding?

Sight impaired. He was sight impaired. Temporarily. The word
blind
was for people who stayed blind. Not him.

Introspection held the potential to sour his existence or sweeten it. Somehow he had to find a way to keep the sour at bay. The hours stretched into days with little to do but think and calculate. How many days without any more protein than the bugs and bacteria floating in his drinking water?

Purchase orders scrolled through Greg’s mind. Cases of canned peaches. Spaghetti sauce. Flats of hamburger buns. A gross of Bibb lettuce heads. Freezers full of turkeys.

40

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What he wouldn’t give right now for the overripe bananas

the produce guy at Greene’s tossed in the dumpster. Or the slightly expired lunchmeat. Or less-than-fresh fish.

Fish. He could have fished, if he’d brought his fishing gear

rather than his useless photography equipment. His camera. Brilliant move. What was he thinking? How long did that dream last? Not quite the two weeks of his dream solo trip. All the fabulous shots stored in his camera might as well remain there. What was the point of capturing such incredible beauty if he could never view it?

His mind traced the contents of the digital memory of his

camera. The island with the lone pine sentry. The fireball sun- set threading its flames through the line of trees. The mist hovering over the surface of the lake like a downy blanket too light to settle. The leaf caught in the back eddy between two rocks. The columbine’s regal crown-blossom, claiming sover- eignty over its domain. The rich mosses. The otters at play. The loons in dance mode. The eagles outstretched against a cobalt sky.

The memory card in his mind still held the shots. For how

long? If this blindness lasted, and if he survived long enough to be rescued, how soon before the darkness snuffed out mem- ories of sights and colors and vastness and grandeur?

Maybe it was the hunger talking, but Greg decided to make

a plan, to orchestrate his own rescue operation. How much more trouble could he collect if he set out on foot—albeit slowly and blindly—until he came close enough to another camp or a canoeist who could help him?

“A wilderness full of trouble.” He said the answer out loud.

Someone had to say it.

Could he fish? What in his meager possessions could morph

into a hook and line? A shoelace? Quite a lot of overkill and

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quite a lot of underlength, but possible. Did he have a pin? A paper clip?

His spiral notebook. His handwritten Bible. The blindly penned journal of his demise.

He could fashion a hook from the metal spiral. A few rings of it.

And what would he use for bait to catch this mentally chal- lenged fish who wouldn’t mind chomping down on part of a notebook tethered to eighteen inches of shoelace tethered to a desperate man?

Does a fish that bright need bait?

Time for another math lesson. How much food was left? A few crumbs from the last breakfast bar. A piece of fruit leather the size of a Boy Scout badge. Two sunflower seeds, coated with lint from his shirt pocket.

He couldn’t be more than a quarter mile from the canoe and his food pack. He could eat if he could get to it. Not a lot in the pack. A few meals at best. He’d assumed he was heading out of the Quetico after his sightseeing detour.
Not much left
sounded a lot better than his current pantry, though.

The pack was on the ground under the canoe. Enough pro- tection for what Greg figured would be a couple of hours at the most. After multiple nights within easy reach of woodland nightlife, what could possibly be left?

Greg brooked no sympathy for hungry wolves—wolves whose mournful cries seemed to draw a tighter circle around his camp the longer he remained their accidental guest. Was his hearing more acute? Or were they truly moving closer? Did they watch for him to give up as they might watch a fawn struggling against quicksand?

“Morbid, Greg Holden. You are morosely, pathologically morbid.”

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He shook the dust from the throw rug he was using for his

mind. “Happy thoughts. Happy thoughts.” The phrase nearly gagged him.

“Bacon cheeseburger meatloaf with onion frills on top.”

His plan for happy thoughts lacked a healthy focus.

He rose and paced the perimeter of his compound, his steps

slower and shakier than a few days ago. Ten paces across the front, waterview side. Five paces along a right angle toward the woods. Nine across the back to the largest of the trees in his limited domain. Definitely a pine, not an aspen or birch or pop- lar or cedar. When he touched its trunk, his hand came away sticky and smelling like industrial-strength cleaner. Turn. Six or seven more steps, depending on his level of frustration, and he’d completed the odd geometric shape that probably had a legitimate name recognizable only to math geeks.

His foot kicked against something, sending it scooting

behind him a short distance. He heard it roll and bang along the edge of the guard rails. Probably a fallen branch, although it had greater heft to it than a small branch.

He hadn’t fallen when he stumbled over the object. Not

even close. Then where did the dizziness come from?

His pulse pounded in his ears. Since when was blood loud?

His heart rate shot up and stayed up. Greg lowered himself to the ground, not waiting to find a log or rock. On his hands and knees he crouched, waiting for the sensation to pass. It didn’t.

He rolled onto his side. The contents of his skull followed

a split-second later, as if it hadn’t gotten the memo in time to move in sync. “Lord, what is this? Is this what starvation does?”

Was it foolish to think his vision was the lone casualty of

the lightning strike? Maybe dehydration made him weak. No matter how uncomfortable the sloshing of water and gastric

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juices in an otherwise empty stomach, he’d have to make it a point to drink more frequently.

Pine cones. Are they edible?

“Any time You want a test subject for modern-day manna, Lord, I’m your man.”

Greg stayed on his side until the spinning stopped. Then he pushed himself up, worked the kinks out of his neck, and decided he had no choice but to limit his physical activity even more than normal.

Normal. What an odd word for his current existence. He took a step forward, then stopped. The water was to his back, right? Or had he gotten turned around? The confidence he’d gained in memorizing the footprint of that plot of land fled into the darkness.

“God, help me!” he cried.

All he heard in response was a whispering, mocking pine.

********

Sheets snapped and flapped, straining against the wooden pins
that secured them to the clothesline. He’d bury his face in them later
that night, drinking in the preserved sunshine. Like a kid making
snow angels, he’d slide his arms and legs over the crisp fabric. One
of life’s simple pleasures. Sun-baked sheets.

He’d have to be careful mowing. Grass clippings discharged in
that direction would not be good. Maybe Libby would take down the
laundry before he reached that part of the yard.

She stood in the doorway, propping open the screen door with
her hip. In her hands she balanced a wooden tray with a pitcher of
homemade lemonade and five glasses. One for each of them.
She smiled his way. Smiled. He shut down the mower and leaned
on the handle for a moment, drunk with the wonder of it.
Snap. Snap.