Yellowstone Memories (23 page)

“And I don’t know the first thing about your ma prayin’ for you. I was just guessin’, is all. Seems like so many folks out there are runnin’ from the very thing that’ll straighten out the mess they’ve made. Drinkin’ themselves to death to forget, or laughin’ to cover the pain. But that road’ll kill ya.” Justin blinked back snowflakes. “You’ll hurt other people, too—just like I did.”

He braced his arm against Frankie’s shoulder as they came to a low ridge, stepping carefully to keep from turning an ankle. “It ain’t too late to straighten your life out, Frankie. Go to chapel and listen to what the old man says. Read the Bible your ma’s always talkin’ about. Shoot, read mine if ya want. But do somethin’ to get right with God. Before you mess up worse than ya already have.”

Frankie didn’t answer for a long time, bending against the wind and stepping carefully. When he did speak, his voice sounded choked again. “You’re pretty swell, Fairbanks. Ya know that?”

Justin lifted his head but didn’t reply. Thinking of Reverend Summers’s battered hand resting on his head amid the wreckage. The eyes that held love and pain, bright as stars, until their life ebbed away. Leaving them in a horrible, cold stare. Lashes still half open.

“No I ain’t,” Justin grunted. “Ain’t nothin’ swell about me. All I’ve done with my life ‘til now is screw things up. You don’t got any idea the things I’ve done.”

“Don’t matter. You’re still as swell as can be.” Frankie sniffled. “I hope I can be … well, like you one day.”

Justin felt his throat contort so tightly he could hardly breathe. A sudden rush of emotion stung his eyes, and for a second he couldn’t see.

“Aw, knock it off, bonehead,” he growled, turning away and blinking faster. “You’re full of it.”

And then he raised his hand to Frankie’s head in an unexpected tender gesture, ruffling his windblown hair. Resting it there for a second as if in blessing.

“Over here!” Frankie called, pointing to a snowy decline clogged with boulders. Half hidden between a thickly forested clump of pines. “I brought ‘em down this way.”

Frankie offered his arm, and Justin grasped it, nearly losing his footing on the slippery, snow-coated stones. “Is this where Mr. Parker fell?” he gasped, catching himself on a pine limb and hauling himself upright. Scrambling for footing on the spongy, frozen ground.

“Yeah. It’s real rough. Steep, too.”

Justin’s pack shifted, and the flashlight slipped out of his hand, dropping and rolling between the rocks. He choked back one of the old curses that used to fly from his lips. He hopped two boulders and followed its faint beam down through a clump of ice-glassed ferns, where it finally wedged itself against a stone. Justin got down on his knees and strained to reach it, but his arm still came up short.

“I can’t believe it,” Justin snapped, slapping his thigh. “Of all the times to lose a light! I don’t got another one, and that battery ain’t gonna last long in the cold.”

“Let me help,” sniffled Frankie. “I’ll get it for ya.” He crawled around the other boulder and stuck his bony arm through, grunting with effort. He poked a stick through the crack, managing only to push the flashlight farther into the rocks.

Justin hollered at him to stop and finally threw down his pack in disgust. “We’re sunk without that light, Frankie!” he bellowed, kneeling on the cold ground. “We gotta think of somethin’.”

“A shovel?” Frankie blabbered through chattering lips.

Bone-tired and cold, soaked to the skin, Justin felt like decking Frankie again. “Something I got in the pack, genius.”

He looked up at the cobalt sky, black trees framing a jagged circle over their heads. Gray flakes flitted across his vision and into his lashes as he tried to jog his brain to think, think.

“Pray,” Justin finally said. “You’d better get down on your knees right now and pray that we can get that light, or we’ll be stuck up here who knows how long. No tellin’ when this snow’s gonna stop.”

“Me? Pray?” Frankie’s voice came out hesitant and squeaky. “I ain’t never really prayed before, but if ya think it’ll do any good, I can try. What do I say? Do I need to cross myself or somethin’?”

“Just pray to God, Frankie.” Justin felt desperate, his last hope shredding like the tiny filaments inside the metal flashlight tube. “Tell Him we need that light. I’m gonna pray, too, hear me?”

“I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” Frankie affected a pious posture on one knee, hands folded together. Eyes closed, lips moving. “A’ight.” He shifted back up to his feet and brushed off his muddy pants. “I told Him. Don’t know as He’s gonna answer me though. Most of the time I use Jesus’ name it’s for a swear word, and I don’t reckon He likes that too much.”

“Well, quit doin’ it then.” Justin felt his patience slip another notch. “And I don’t care who He answers so long as we get that light.”

Justin scooted around to the other side of the massive boulder and tried to heave it off, but it didn’t budge. Its outline too dark to follow in murky nightfall. “Get up here and help me, will ya?”

Frankie scrambled up beside him, and they pushed at the rock, grunting and straining. Nothing moved, save a few clods of dirt and rock that clattered down the ridge.

“Not enough,” Justin grunted, feeling blind as blackness settled, thick as tar. He had to blink to make sure his eyes were still seeing. The only light came from a dull overhead glow from the blustery sky, faintest gray, and the weak glimmer of light from the flashlight beam shadowed against leaves under the rocks.

When Justin moved a hand in front of his face, he saw nothing. He had no idea how big the boulder was, or how far it stretched to the other side.

“God, gimme that light,” he pleaded under his breath, worried for the first time that he and Frankie might catch hypothermia before they could even get to the others. His feet were freezing in Frankie’s flimsy shoes, and he couldn’t seem to stop shivering. He’d lost most of the feeling in his fingers long ago, and when he tried to move a stone out of the way, he fumbled and dropped it down through the hole, clogging it even more.

“C’mon, Frankie. Help me.” He put his back and shoulders into the boulder, grunting and shouting, and Frankie joined in on the other side.

“This ain’t movin’, Fairbanks! I can’t even get my arms around it.”

“Push, or I’ll knock you in the jaw!”

And then Justin felt the boulder shift slightly. Rolling back just enough to wedge his hand in and nearly reach the light. His fingers stretched black shadows across the bumpy earth in the bright beam but still came up short.

“Here. Lemme try.” Frankie squeezed in close.

“You?” Justin spoke without thinking, not pulling his arm out.

“Sure, why not? We prayed, didn’t we? Hurry up, Fairbanks. You’re freezing. Move it.”

Justin hesitated then backed away from the crack.
Oh Jesus, have mercy
, he thought wryly, licking his stinging lips, which started to crack with cold.

Once, and nothing. Twice. Frankie dug sideways, straining, and suddenly Justin’s eyes dazzled with light. The flashlight lay there in Frankie’s upturned palm, gleaming red through cold fingers.

Justin hollered and slapped his shoulder then threw his arm around him in an awkward hug.

Just as an eerie shout rose through the trees, wispy and faraway as a coyote song.

Justin shushed Frankie. “You hear that?”

They held their breath as the sound came again through the soft silence of falling snow. The low creak of pines bending under the weight of sleet and ice.

A cry for help.

Justin snatched up his backpack and scrambled across the rocks, Frankie holding out the flashlight like the glow of a skinny lighthouse. Its weak beam bobbing across snow and boulders in a blessed golden circle.

F
rankie gestured through the trees, his cheeks red from cold in the flashlight’s pale glow. They ducked under pine boughs, powder falling from the needles, and scrambled over boulders studded with frozen moss.

When Justin turned his head he heard a tremulous rushing—the musical roar of water over stones, and its echo against rock—which he figured must be the waterfall Frankie spoke of. On a cloudless day, with streams of blue bellflowers and a waterfall crashing in a thousand streams of crystal, it’d be a swell place for photos.

But now the rocks hung craggy and dark, slippery with wet snow. In the distance, Justin heard the wail of a bobcat—its eerie scream high and mournful, deceptively vulnerable.

He’d seen bobcats slink through the trees in the Kentucky forests like black velvet, rippling and disappearing and barely rustling leaves. A blink to check the eyes, and the shadow had vanished. But when one big she-cat tried to carry off their hound Mutt, who’d been guarding Beanie, it took both Justin and a hired farm hand to beat it off with rifle stocks and fence planks. And not before it took a sizeable chunk out of Mutt’s flank and nearly killed her with jagged puncture wounds.

If that was a Kentucky bobcat, Justin couldn’t imagine the size of one grown in the vast forests of the Rockies, raised on a diet of muscular pronghorn antelope and furry-eared mule deer.

“What if Mr. Parker’s dead?” Frankie quivered, tucking his chin tighter into Justin’s wool coat as he hugged himself to keep out the cold. “What if we’re too late? I’ll die, Fairbanks. I swear I will.”

“Quit talkin’ about dying. We’re almost there.” Justin’s voice came out snappish, but his heart quivered a moment, too, wondering if an unconscious man, bleeding from a head injury, could make it long in this breath-snatching cold.

Justin cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, pulling Frankie to a standstill, and two women’s voices called back. One sounding like Lia Summers. Making an unexpected tingle under Justin’s freezing skin.

Frankie got turned around twice, poking in the wrong bushes and scooting around the wrong cliffs, but for once Justin couldn’t blame him. Everything looked the same: black, shapeless, snow-covered. Clumps of pines mirrored themselves in dizzying spitefulness, now here, now there, and another across the rocks—so that even Justin couldn’t remember which ones he’d just seen.

“They’re here! They’re here!” Frankie called in shrill, excited tones, throwing back a thick, snow-laden pine limb and ducking under. Motioning Justin to follow.

Justin ducked under in a spray of fine, sifting snow, following the bobbing circle of light, and caught his breath: four people huddled together against a rock cliff on a cone-strewn carpet of pine needles. Dense pine boughs arched over them, white-covered, forming a little cavelike enclave.

Well, well. For once Frankie had done something smart. The rocks and pines kept out the wind, and only a fine film of snow had scudded under the thick, fragrant mounds of evergreen needles.

The flashlight beam wavered across Cynthia, her cheeks tear-stained and face pink and white with cold and her bright red-gold hair rumpled in messy waves. Even crumpled and shivering, Justin had to admit she was a strikingly pretty girl. Mrs. Parker shivered, arms wrapped around her husband as if trying to soothe him, and Lia huddled next to Cynthia, whose knees were tucked up under her long skirt to keep her extremities warm.

Justin couldn’t think of Cynthia though, or her beauty—but only of Lia. Memories of her sunshiny smile crowded in his head. Her yellow dress was muddy, stained from the hem up, and her right leg lay out straight. The ankle swollen in a bulge just over her shoe and her face drawn tight in pain. One hand tightly gripped her shin as if trying to squeeze out the ache.

“They’re here, Fairbanks. All of ‘em.” Frankie stripped off Justin’s coat in uncharacteristic gallantry, his excited blabbering rising over the other voices. He draped the coat around Mrs. Parker’s shoulders, spreading the other half over Cynthia. “I reckon I believe in prayer now, huh?”

“I got crackers and some cheese.” Justin dug into his pack. “Here. Give ‘em somethin’ to eat and pass my canteen around. Y’all ain’t been drinkin’ melted snow, have ya? It’ll freeze ya from the inside out.”

“A little.” Mrs. Parker reached out a trembling hand and squeezed Justin’s arm in greeting, her face tight and pale. “He’s been begging for water for hours. I don’t know what to do—is he going to make it?”