All for One (47 page)

I fear that something terrible is going to happen, Charlie. Pleasant dreams.

My best,

Mandy Fine

Forty Four

Friday night had been spent in large group meetings, doing getting-to-know-ya kind of activities first, then broke up into smaller caucuses where the representatives from three or four schools met to talk about issues that affected them. Teachers helped facilitate the conversations.

Guns had asked what an issue was.

Saturday was altogether different. The groups broke up and students mixed without regard to school or class. The teachers had to ‘facilitate’ them not choosing to stay with their own.

The meetings lasted from nine until two. The work part of the weekend was officially over.

Mary met her kids in front of the dining hall, grinning convincingly and scanning the trail to the manager’s house.

“What are we doing now?” Elena asked. Regina Dayton-Wickes and Judy Devaux stood close behind her, their hands draped over the new class treasurer’s shoulders.

Joey smiled. He knew. He had suggested it to Miss Austin two weeks into school, and she had taken it from there, calling to make the arrangements. It wasn’t a big thing, but it sure was a cool thing.

“We’re going to do something special,” Mary answered.

PJ let the long sleeves of her sweatshirt hang past her hands and leaned close to Joey. “What’s going on?”

“You’ll see,” Joey said, beaming. He gave Jeff a good natured poke with his elbow, but got no response.

Jeff looked away, at the groups of kids and their teachers walking off. He wanted to be one of them.

“There,” Mary said, pointing, and all eyes, even Jeff’s, looked toward the trail from the manager’s house. A tall, sinewy man about thirty with a pony tail and a beard was jogging toward them. He was in shorts and a tee shirt. It was forty degrees.

“Hey, earthlings!”

“Ballard!” Joey said, and jumped out to greet the lanky manager.

“Big Joe? Man, it has been too long!” Ballard hugged the One Wing regular and pulled him along to meet the teacher.

“Hi,” Mary said, holding out her hand.

“I’m Ballard,” he said, and shook her hand. “Who are all these creatures?”

Joey did the intros. “This is PJ, and Elena, and Jeff, and Donna, and Judy, and—”

“Too many names, Big Joe,” Ballard said, reeling with exaggeration. “Let’s just call ‘em the gang.”

The class smiled politely. Jeff lifted his cast and scratched at the plaster.

“Jeff, right?” Ballard said. “You look familiar.”

Jeff squinted. “Huh?”

Ballard jumped back theatrically, his hands spreading above his head. “Once, a long time ago, there came to this place in the mountains a bird.”

Joey suppressed a laugh. The rest watched eagerly, even Jeff.

“A blue jay,” Ballard continued. “Not just any blue jay, mind you. One with just one wing.”

“Why did it only have one wing?” Joey asked, playing the straight man.

Ballard’s tan, trim face went deadpan. “Lost the other in a skiing accident.”

Jeff rolled his eyes. The others giggled.

“So this bird dragged itself up the mountain.” Ballard put one arm behind his back, dangled the other limp, and dragged himself in a circle, exhaustion his emotion of the moment. “Up, and up, until it came to this spot, where a kindly old man...” He waited, winking sideways at Joey. “
Until a kindly old man...
”

“Oh.” Joey snapped to. “Was it Santa Claus?”

“It was December! He was busy!”

“Wellllll, then who was it?” Joey asked, playing the part perfectly.

Ballard instantly crouched, his long, calloused fingers held claw-like at the kids. “He was...just a nice old guy.” He fell on his butt and sat cross-legged on the dirt. “But this nice old guy was building a camp. And he told the bird about it, and the bird said...”

“The bird talked?” Joey said on cue.

“Quite well, thank you. And this bird said, ‘Hey, old dude, what about naming this piece of rock after me.’ And the old man asked the bird what his name was, and the bird said, ‘Bob’.” Ballard pinched his nose. “‘Camp Bob?’ the old man said to the bird, and decided that no one would come to a place called Camp Bob. Except maybe guys named Bob.”

Chris Bickle chuckled loud and everyone looked at him. “That’s my dad’s name.”

Ballard went on. “So he took a good look at the determined, lopsided blue jay, and decided right there and then that the place would be called...”

“Camp One Wing!” Joey led the others in saying. They clapped and Ballard bounced to his feet and took a bow.

“Quite impressive,” Mary commented.

Ballard tipped his head to her, then pointed at Jeff. “You’ve got one wing right now, fella.”

Jeff nodded blandly.

Well, no sense giving the one with the attitude more attention than he needed, Ballard knew. “All right. Everybody ready?”

“For what?” Elena asked.

“Oooh. Big surprise.” Ballard stole a piece of her nose. He was used to third and fourth graders, but sixth graders didn’t think they were too grown up, he’d discovered. “Now. Everybody warm enough? It gets chilly out where we’re going.” He looked to PJ. “How about you? You gonna need a jacket?”

PJ shook her head pleasantly.

Mary put a hand on PJ’s shoulder. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I’ve got two sweatshirts on.”

“Good enough,” Ballard said. “Shall we?”

“Let’s!” Joey said excitedly, and they were off.

Ballard led them down the trail from the dining hall and past Whitetail 1 and 2, the last of the girls’ cabins. The trail narrowed and rose easily into the woods, then leveled out, weaving between thick stands of pine until it split into two trails.

Ballard led them down the left fork. Soon they could hear rushing water.

“What’s that?” PJ asked.

Joey looked back to her, his face mockingly ominous. “The
gorge
.”

The trees thinned a bit as they neared the sound that seemed to rise from somewhere deep and roar straight up, and soon they could all see a wide fissure in the landscape.

“The Indians used to say that this is the earth’s mouth,” Ballard told the group, stopping them just short of the tear in the ground. “And that when the earth is mad, it screams right here.”

PJ peeked over the edge. A train of white foam rushed from right to left seventy feet below. Her eyes came up, wide, and fell upon two pairs of wire spanning the gorge’s thirty foot width, one at ground level and the other waist high. There was maybe two feet between the pairs, the upper one looking a lot like handrails and the lower like the supports for something to walk on. But there was nothing to walk on.

“What are we doing here?” PJ asked.

“We’re gonna cross the gorge,” Ballard said nonchalantly.

Elena’s head pulled toward him. “What?”

Ballard grinned and said to Joey, “You’ve been here once before, right?”

“Three times!” Joey reminded him.

“Right. I forgot. Do you think you can handle setting the walkway?”

Joey’s eyes became saucers. “Yeah!”

“All right.” Ballard jogged off behind a nearby tree and dragged a rolled up path of wire-bound planks to the spot where the walkway would be set. Then, from one of the stout trees that anchored the left-side hand and foot rails, he removed a climber’s harness. Double thick ropes led from it to a pulley suspended by a cable twenty feet above the handrails and dead center over the gorge, and from the pulley back to a tie-off on the tree.

He pulled slack into the ropes and gave the harness to Joey. “Suit up, muchacho.”

Joey stepped into the lower part of the harness, Mary helping him, the whole class watching intently, and fixed the chest and shoulder straps tight. Ballard checked them and triple checked the connection of the ropes to the harness. He’d brought the whole thing out just this morning for this one post-summer use, and had inspected it all then, but it was a long drop into the gorge, and not a very happy one at that.

He’d lost no one in the twelve years he’d been running One Wing. Triple checking was why.

“All right,” Ballard said, pronouncing the rigging sound. “You know how to do this?”

“I’ve watched you do it for three summers.”

“All right, Big Joe. Everybody back up. Give him room.”

Mary and the kids did, watching intently as Ballard let more slack into the rope, enough so that Joey was able to back forty feet away from the edge of the gorge.

Ballard put a climber’s harness on himself and attached the loose end of the rope to it, using an intricate knot through a carabiner. He held tight on the rope and looked to Joey. “Ready?”

Joey gave him a thumbs up and got into a runner’s stance. “Ready.”

Mary put a hand over her mouth.

PJ and Elena joined hands. The whites grew in everyone’s eyes.

Jeff couldn’t help but watch this.
What the hell is Joey doing?

“Go, Big Joe!”

Joey took off, running as fast as he could, Ballard reeling in the slackening rope as fast as he could. When Joey was ten feet from the edge, Ballard grabbed the rope tight and backed away fast, removing any slack and lifting Joey into the air, still moving forward and then swinging out over the gorge like Tarzan on a vine.

“Whoa!” PJ exclaimed.

Mary gasped. Jeff and Elena were stunned into silence. Judy Devaux turned away and shrieked.

When Joey was halfway through the arcing swing, Ballard began to let out rope, extending the distance his little human pendulum could travel, expertly feeding the rope out until Joey was over the far edge and reaching for the grab net strung between two trees.

He snagged it with both hands and hung on for dear life.

“Shit,” he swore to himself. His heart felt like it was going to burst through his chest.

“Big Joe! Yeah!”

PJ tapped Ballard on the shoulder and said, “I can’t do that.”

Elena couldn’t put the same sentiment into words, but her face said it just fine.

“You don’t have to do that,” Ballard assured them with a chuckle.

“Good,” PJ said, swallowing.

He took the rolled-up walkway and fixed one end to two steel eyelets attached to the trees anchoring the wire rails. Pins held them in, and he finger-tightened two bolts to keep the pins from sliding out.

“This is...safe...right?” Mary checked.

Ballard smiled back at her and scratched his chin. “That’s what they tell me.”

He took a coil of rope from the center of the rolled-up walkway and gripped one end. “Ready, Big Joe?”

Joey had come off of the grab net and now stood near the edge, harness and line still linking him and Ballard. “Go!”

Ballard heaved the loop of line across, and Joey fed his end through a pulley anchored to a tree. He held onto the rope tight and shouted, just like he had heard Ballard do for three summers, “Ready to drag her!”

Ballard tied his end to a ring on the loose end of the walkway and started feeding it out as Joey pulled it. When it was halfway across the gorge, arrow straight between the wire foot rails, it got very heavy. “You gettin’ it, Big Joe?”

The pulley made it easier, but it was still a heavy damn thing, Joey thought. He pulled and pulled, and finally got his end over dry land and made quick work of the pins and eyelets, and carefully bolted the pins in solidly. “Got it!”

Ballard held onto the hand rails and walked out onto the newly installed footbridge. At the center point he fixed two more attachments that bound the walkway to the foot rails. Then he bounced up and down on the wobbly contraption and made the girls scream.

When he came back to the class he asked who was going to be first. There were no volunteers.

He looked to Mary and said, “Those who teach, can...”

She took a breath and nodded. “All right.”

Ballard went to the edge and had Joey step out of his harness and swing it across. He helped Mary into it and did the triple check. “Now remember: I’m on this end. We’re both hooked through that pulley. If you should fall, the worst that’s going to happen is some kind of yo-yo thing with the both of us. Got it?”

“So I just walk across?”

“Just hold onto the handrails and walk across,” Ballard said. “Piece of chocolate cake.”

Mary took hold of the rails as her kids watched from close by.

“You can do it, Miss Austin!” Joey shouted. “Piece of chocolate cake!”

She put one foot onto the unsteady footbridge and that was it.

“Look across,” Ballard suggested. “Not down.”

“There’s something over there worth seeing, right?”

“Beeeeeeauuutiful view from Walker Plateau. You’ll see.”

Mary looked across. Joey was smiling at her. She took quick breaths and put another foot out.

The thing under her feet sank a bit with her weight and teeter-tottered from side to side. Her hands gripped the rail like vises. “Oh, boy. Oh, Boy.”

“Do it fast, Miss Austin,” Joey yelled to her. “Just walk across fast. You hardly feel anything then.”

Mary nodded and took a really long breath, the another, and then just...ran.

Before she knew it she was across, with Joey hugging her.

“You should keep your eyes open, though,” Joey told her.

“Next time.”

Joey helped her out of the harness and swung it back. Jeff came next, a little awkwardly at first because of his cast, but discovered a quarter of the way across that the hunk of plaster would slide quite nicely atop the right handrail.

When the harness came back again, PJ took it. “I can do that.”

And she did, faster than any of them. The thing shimmied like the fire escape at their old apartment, but it was really not bad at all.

One by one Room 18 crossed the gorge on the rickety footbridge, the harness coming back each time for the next brave little soul.

Soon there was just one little soul left.

Ballard caught the harness again and helped Elena into it. She seemed alright right up to the edge, even taking good hold of the handrails, but then her face went flat and white, her hair whipping across it in the breeze.

“You can do it Elena!” PJ said. The whole class implored her with eager eyes.