Night Wings (7 page)

“N
o bars.”

We’ve stopped for our four captors to drink from their canteens. Tip is frowning at his cell phone and tapping it with an index finger.

“Tip, Tip.” Field’s patronizing voice comes from behind me. “You’re wasting your time with that. Reception is spotty at best in mountains such as these, filled with magnetite ore. And who were you about to call?”

“Just tryin’ to check my messages,” Tip complains. “No law against that.”

Field looks at an electronic device of his own that he has pulled from one of the many pockets in the khaki vest he put on just before we started our hike. And now he is frowning too.

“Strange,” Field says to himself. He looks over at Grampa Peter as if to ask him a question, but catches himself before he does so. He’s learned that even though my grandfather may look as if he is about to keel over and die at at any minute, it hasn’t done a thing to loosen his tongue.

Field shoves the device in his hand in front of my face. “Know what this is, boy?”

I nod my head. “It’s a GPS unit.”

We see a lot of them up here. I have never used one myself. Having lived near here all my life, I don’t even use a guidebook like the ones put out by the Appalachian Mountain Club. But these days most hikers and hunters and fishermen carry GPS units with them whenever they go out. On a nice day in the summer, you can sit on certain high spots that look out over the main trails and see three or four different parties of flatlander hikers walk for a hundred yards or so, then stop to check their satellite coordinates, then walk, then stop, and so on all the way up the mountain. As if they could get lost on a marked trail in broad daylight. Actually, maybe they could.

“Well?” Field snaps.

“It isn’t giving you a reading,” I reply.

“I know that. The question is why.”

I don’t know the answer to that. I understand why Field is confused. There’s nothing, except for that big bird that is still circling high above, between us and the location of that geosynchronous satellite. Strange. I almost say he really should hand it to Grampa Peter, because if anyone in the world can get a piece of electronic equipment to work, it’s him. But I am not about to go out of my way to be helpful. So all I say is, “I don’t know much about stuff like that.”

“Idiot,” Field snarls. I think for a minute he is going to hit me with the GPS.

Stazi comes up just then. He’s holding his own GPS unit.

“Might be sunspots. Solar flares can interfere, ja?”

“Hmmpph,” Field says, then jams the GPS back into one of his pockets, turns on his heel, and almost bumps into Louise, who is looking up into the sky, shading her eyes with her palm. Why he didn’t notice her behind him is beyond me. Her perfume, which smells like a mixture of rotting roses and a cat box overdue for a cleaning, is so strong that I can tell whenever she is within a hundred feet of me.

“That is one big bird,” she says.

“Where?” Tip reaches into the pack he’s placed at his feet. He pulls out a long-barreled machine pistol. Clearly he is one of those people who likes to shoot at anything that moves whenever he goes into the woods.

Field holds up his hand.

“No gunfire,” he commands. “Too high for you to hit with that popgun anyway.” He snaps his fingers. “Come on, give me the glasses.”

Tip looks like a dog that’s been kicked in the teeth just as it was about to bite into a bunny, but he puts the gun away and pulls out a set of binoculars.

Field lifts them up to his eyes, focuses. “Got it. Moving fast, whatever it is. Now it’s diving.”

He’s following the dark-winged shape, but as it moves across the midday sun, he’s momentarily blinded.

“Blast it!” He drops the binoculars from his eyes.

“Eagle?” Stazi asks.

“Couldn’t tell,” Field says, rubbing his eyes and blinking. “Sizable, though. Probably a golden eagle.” Then he smirks at me. “Unless it’s your fabled Poh-moh-lah.”

He thinks he is being funny. But I was also watching that huge-winged creature as its flight
took it across the sky. Even without binoculars I could tell that it was larger than any eagle I’d ever seen before. I also saw that the direction it was traveling led down as if it was going to land above the little pass through the rocky hills just ahead of us. The same direction we are going.

Field and Stazi and Tip and Louise are ignoring me now. They are still trying to decide whether or not to break out the cameras and work this sighting into the narrative of their dramatic quest. They’re also taking turns drinking something that has the sharp smell of alcohol from a silver flask that Stazi has just produced from his back pocket.

I look over at Grampa Peter, asking the question with my eyes.
What was that?

He links his thumbs together, spreads his open palms wide, then nods his head.

“R
ight or left?” Field is talking to Grampa Peter the way you would to someone who is mentally challenged. Grampa Peter is still pretending it doesn’t bother him. He keeps playing the part of the feeble old man who is so broken that he’ll do whatever they ask him to do—aside from talking.

Grampa Peter nods toward the pass just above us. The way is narrow, with ridges rising and falling. The land looks as if it were made by the hands of a giant, pushing rocks together here, dropping piles of boulders there. Sometimes we’re at the edge of long drop-offs and other times we’re squeezing through narrow crevices.

We’ve stopped twice for Field to shoot more of his dumb speeches about the danger and difficulty of his quest. He’s actually changed his shirt each time—making it appear as if we have been on the trail for days rather than just a few hours. If we had stayed on the regular trail, we would have been at the Lake of the Clouds Hut by now, which is only three miles from the trail-head at the end of Base Road.

We haven’t run into any hikers or seen any sign of other people, even from the overlooks that give us a view of one or two of the other trails. I suppose that’s not so strange. This is a vast area, and even on a beautiful summer day like this, when lots of people should be out hiking, you can avoid others by not using the easiest and most direct routes. But things feel sort of wrong to me, and I still haven’t seen a plane or even heard the distant rumble of a jet from the cloudless sky.

It’s really steep here, almost straight up. Tip is huffing a little, and Louise has a grim and determined look on her face as she climbs. Stazi is reaching back and helping Field, who looks a little winded. At first none of them notice what Grampa Peter and I hear at the same time. It’s a rumbling, but not from the engine of a
plane overhead. A couple of pebbles fall from the rock face next to us, and then the ground begins to shake.

“Avalanche!” Stazi yells.

I look up, but only for a second. Grampa Peter grabs me by the shoulder and yanks me up onto a ledge. You’d think I weighed nothing the way he does it. Weak old man, indeed. He pushes me back, and we flatten ourselves against the cliff side as a cloud of dust filled with stones of all sizes—some of them as big as cars—comes rolling and bouncing like a huge moving curtain pulled in front of our faces. We’re at just the right angle so that it is all going past us, rattling and roaring and sounding like a gigantic freight train. It’s terrifying, but it’s also exciting. When something dramatic like a huge thunderstorm or an avalanche happens, it reminds me of the power of nature, and it makes me feel elated. My heart is thumping in my chest.

And my mind is moving just as fast as the rock slide. I’m wondering what caused it. Did it just happen by accident, or did someone begin it on purpose by pushing a key rock that started the others rolling? What was it that I saw as I looked up at the top of the ridge? Was it a rock starting to fall or was a wide-shouldered person moving up there?

Then I think of something else. Were our four captors caught in the rock slide? Maybe this has saved us. I hate to think of anyone being killed by an avalanche, but if anyone deserved it, they did.

The dust from the slide is so thick that it is getting into my eyes and my nose and my throat. I’m racked with coughs, finding it hard to keep my balance on this narrow ledge. But if I slip off it, I’ll be carried away by the avalanche and killed for sure. Grampa Peter and I are holding on to each other and keeping each other steady, pushing a little, pulling a little, readjusting ourselves almost like two dancers, preventing each other from falling. I’m remembering something my dad told me, about how grandparents and grandchildren are even closer to each other on the circle of life than kids and their parents are. Grandparents and grandchildren support each other.

Suddenly the noise stops except for a ringing in my ears and an increasingly distant rumble from below that ends as the last rocks hit the bottom.

Grampa Peter and I help each other off the ledge and look below. What there was of a trail is gone. At one point, just a hundred feet
below, the ledge has been sheered off and there’s a straight drop. Going back down the way we came is out of the question. But we can keep climbing up.

“I think we can cut across and get to one of the main trails beyond the ridge above us,” I say.

Grampa Peter nods and I smile at him.

“We’re safe, Grampa. Now we just have to get this tape off our wrists.”

“I vould say no,” a deep voice rumbles from behind me. I turn to see Stazi’s large, square head rising from the other side of the boulder that sheltered him from the avalanche. There’s a long gash on his cheek that is dripping blood, but aside from that he seems uninjured.

And just to add to this turn of bad luck, three other figures appear behind him. Field, Louise, and Tip, who is actually holding his camera and has clearly managed to film some of the near disaster. Like Stazi they are dusty and bruised, but still in possession of their lives, their packs, their weapons…and us.

T
hings have gone from bad to worse. It’s night now, and we are still on the mountain. Just where I am not sure. Ever since the avalanche I haven’t been sure of much of anything. Other than the fact that my grandfather is trickier than a raccoon. Of the six of us, he is the only one who is totally relaxed and unconcerned right now. Not that Field and his gang know that. They think he is unconscious and maybe dying.

After Stazi pulled us down from that ledge, Grampa Peter started acting strange. Matter of fact, he also looked weird. He looked fine just before I was yanked down from my perch and lost sight of him for a second. But then I heard
Stazi say, “Vat is wrong
mit
you?” and I turned around to see my grandfather, his face covered with blood, fall into the big man’s arms.

I had to help Stazi carry him—which was not easy with my wrists taped together—to where the other three were still collecting themselves. Grampa Peter was moaning, his fingers opening and closing, and every now and then his whole body would shake as if he was going into convulsions.

“Grampa,” I kept saying. “Don’t die, Grampa. Don’t die!” Tears were flowing out of my eyes and I was sobbing.

I probably would have meant it if I hadn’t caught the little hand gesture he gave me as I was picking him up. His ring finger and his little finger briefly extended and moved twice in a circle.

Keep it going, play along with me.

So I did. And the crying part was easy since I still had so much dust in my eyes that they were watering like crazy.

Darby Field was so upset I thought he was going to hit Stazi.

“I told you to keep an eye on the old man,” Field yelled, waving his arms, his eyes bulging like they were going to pop out of his head.

Stazi stared at him. “So,” he said in a slow voice, “you vant I should haf let you be crushed by der rocks?”

That stopped Field’s yelling. But he turned around and started to take his anger out on Tip, who cringed in front of him like a dog that’s used to being kicked. The only one who didn’t get all that worked up about my grandfather’s condition was Louise. She was busy fishing in her fanny pack for a mirror and a comb and some other stuff to repair her makeup. One cold customer.

I’d managed to get some tissues out of my pocket to wipe my grandfather’s face. I could see what he’d done, just spread the blood from a scalp wound in the hair above his forehead. It wasn’t a bad cut, but scalp wounds bleed a lot. I didn’t let on that it wasn’t serious, just dabbed it out of his eyes and then smeared the blood and dust around a little more on his cheeks so that he ended up looking worse.

The others soon realized that there was no way to go back down the mountain. It had to be onward and upward. But without a clear trail, it took us a long time to pick our way through the maze of rocks, plus we had to be careful not to dislodge any stones that might start another slide.

Stazi and Tip were assigned to Grampa Peter. They held him up on either side as he weakly tried to walk. Most of the time they were pretty much carrying him along. In little ways, stumbling now and then, going limp at others, almost toppling backward, my grandfather made himself as heavy a load as you could imagine. And all the while he kept moaning—not words, just sounds like, “Unnnh, oooohh, hunnnh, hunnnh.” Tip looked ready to have a heart attack himself, and even Stazi was exhausted by the time we reached the top of the ridge above the slide.

“If,” Tip panted, “he doesn’t…actually die…I am gonna kill him.”

They let go of my grandfather’s arms, and he slumped down onto all fours. I dropped down next to him.

“Grampa,” I said. “Grampa!” I managed to keep my voice all concerned, even after he lifted his head just enough for me to see him lift both eyebrows up and down a couple of times like Groucho Marx in one of those old movies Grampa Peter is always watching on Turner Classic Movies.

The trail led back down again from the ridge to what looked like a good place to camp. There was a flat area in a grove of trees and also a brook.
Was it Monroe Brook? If so, there was a waterfall near here and a pool. I should have known this spot, but it looked, well, different. And I didn’t remember the trees being that big around here.

Field’s crew had come prepared for at least one night of emergency camping. They had a couple of tents, sleeping bags, one of those mini cooking stoves, pots, and packets of freeze-dried food. Most of the heavier stuff, in fact, was in the pack I’d been forced to carry.

It was getting dark by the time the campsite was set up, including a ring of stones where they made a campfire and started boiling the water they had me lug from the brook for them. In the old days you could always drink the water straight from the streams up here, but since the last part of the twentieth century, even the high mountain streams had become unsafe to drink because of coliform and a parasite that causes something called beaver fever. Which is a lousy name for it since it actually comes from human waste contaminating the streams, not beavers.

For some reason, though, as soon as I bent over that stream and smelled its water, I found myself leaning down, cupping my bound hands, and drinking. It tasted clean and sweet.

Anyhow, here we are now like a bunch of happy Boy Scouts, sitting around the campfire and about to sing songs together. Not.

My grandfather is conked out next to me with a blanket over him. I found a place where the moss was really thick and managed to maneuver us both into that spot. The best place for sleeping, even if it isn’t close to the fire. Neither of us have sleeping bags—those are reserved for Field and company. We just have a couple of thermal blankets. It won’t bother us, though. We are both used to spending the night in the woods with even less than this. We were also handed a little food—not much, but enough to give us the energy we’ll need tomorrow to do some more walking.

Field must have thought ahead enough to plan for a situation something like this because he brought along a couple of combination locks and the kind of plastic-encased cables that are used to secure a bicycle. We each have a cable looped tightly around our right ankles connecting us to the spruce tree that arches overhead.

“You think the old man is going to be up to it tomorrow?” Louise asks.

It’s dark, but I see Field’s teeth reflecting the firelight as he grins. “He had better be. If not, we have our methods.” Field chuckles, and a
chill runs down my back. I can imagine what those methods might be. When they unpacked their gear and I saw the needle-nose pliers and the heavy-duty metal cutters, my imagination started working overtime. I find myself curling my hands in, reflexively protecting my fingers and my nails.

“Boss?” Tip’s voice is tentative.

“Yes, Tip.” Field’s tone is that familiar condescending one. “What now?”

“Boss, I was just thinking.”

“A dangerous pursuit for one so ill-prepared,” Field drawls.

“Huh?” Tip sounds confused.

Louise laughs, and I can see by the motion of his silhouetted form against the fire that Tip turns to glare at her.

Field sighs. “Ah, Tip, Tip, if you must share some gem of perception with us, do it now.”

“Okay, I will. I think I saw something.”

“As we all have done often in our lives,” Field replies.

Louise snickers even louder, but this time Tip ignores her.

“No, I mean before those rocks started coming down the hill. I saw something. It was up on the hilltop and it was like…”

Tip pauses. Whatever he wants to say, he’s having a hard time getting it out.

Field gives another sigh. “Out with it, Tip. I assure you that I am listening, no matter how inane or insane your little insight might be. I am…here for you.”

Tip takes a deep breath and then lets it out in a rush of words. “Okay. What I saw looked like it was a giant…with wings.”

I take a deep breath of my own. Field and Stazi are now laughing. Tip is hunching his shoulders like someone who has just had a bucket of ice water poured over his head. I feel my grandfather’s elbow dig into my side. He hasn’t been sleeping at all. And he’s letting me know that his reaction to what Tip just said is like mine.

Take what he says seriously.

When the laughter dies down, Field clears his throat. “Tip, forgive us for our outburst. But allow me to ask you a question or two.”

Tip shifts in his seat, trying to regain his dignity. “Okay,” he says after a moment. The tone of his voice is wounded.

“How many of these little expeditions have we been on together in search of our”—Field pauses dramatically—“forbidden mysteries?”

Another pause. Tip is mentally counting. “Twelve,” he finally says.

“Yes. And this is number thirteen. Good. Now, exactly how many fabled monsters—apart from innuendo, and by that I mean just suggesting we might have found something with shadows, quick cuts, camera angles, and plain old fakery—how many monsters have we actually found and put onto film?”

Tip’s answer is quick this time. “None.”

“Excellent. But what have we found? No, let me answer my own question, Tip. We have found excellent cable ratings and sizable sales of our DVDs. And we have also found some other bonuses that we have not shared with our credulous and adoring public.”

Field leans back and spreads his hands out wide, then begins to hold his fingers up one by one as he tallies their accomplishments.

“Take Ghana, for example. Did we find Sansibonsa, the ten-foot-tall forest cannibal with feet that face backward? No. What did we find?”

“Gold,” Tip says.

“And in Sierra Leone, did we discover the lair of the Leopard Men? Not at all. But what did we bring home with us?”

“Diamonds,” Tip replies. His voice is a lot happier now.

“And, as you well know, I could continue this little list. No fifty-foot-long lizard, but a nice take of emeralds from Australia. No vampires in the Yucatán, no giant sloth in Patagonia, et cetera, et cetera, but a very nice payoff each time. And that was not luck, Tip, but the result of careful research, separating out mere myth and folktale from the real truth: namely, that certain monsters have been invented by local folk to keep outsiders away from their little treasure troves.”

Field drops his hands. “And this Poh-mohlah is just that. A boogeyman designed to keep away those who might find that which has been hidden. A story passed down in certain families such as theirs”—Field points back in our direction—“to protect their little heirlooms.”

“Like those pretty gold statues we got in Colombia,” Tip says, wanting to show that he’s understood what his boss is saying.

“Exactly. Of course their owners didn’t know the true worth, seeing them as icons, sacred talismans that would—how did they put it, Louise?”

“Preserve the heart of the world,” Louise answers, a phony tone of reverence in her voice.

“Quite. As opposed to their much greater value on the antiquities black market.”

I’m clenching my fists hard now. The thought of what Field and his crew have been doing all over the world makes me wish that Pmola really is here and really was the one who started that avalanche. Field’s words, though, have reassured his jumpy henchman.

“Okay, boss,” Tip says. “I was just imagining things. You’re right. But now I gotta go…you know.”

“By all means,” Field replies.

Tip picks up a flashlight and heads in the direction of the path that leads up out of this little valley. I hear his feet crunching the twigs and kicking against the stones. He’s about twenty yards away now. Suddenly the sound of his walking stops. And the night is torn by his terrified scream.