The Blue (The Complete Novel) (16 page)
I try to take the bag from him, but he holds it tight and skip-limps up the ridge past me, only to get five easy steps higher and turn his head. He looks back at me from my sitting position and waits. Okay, I tell him. You can carry it. And then I rise and battle. One after the next, for the millionth time. As many footsteps as raindrops. And I go slower, more carefully, but I still slip. Each time I catch myself, and I don’t tumble like before. When I think I’m going to die, and I want to throw it in because my muscles are all broken and without any kind of food to keep them going, I see Voley stop and look back at me. The bag dangling down almost into the icy slush from his mouth. And he’s just paused. Quiet and waiting and full of strange patience for me that I cannot understand. It pushes me on.
Once we crest the ridge, I finally see what the pack really looks like. And I know. Russell was right.
In every direction, except for Plane Floe, the pack is separating again. And there are nothing but wide open leads of brown sea. Even behind us, I see the line of darkness widening between our floe and Spots’s. We have to move fast or he’ll drift away too. But in front, the Plane Floe is connected to the bottom of the ridge. There’s not even another lead of ocean to jump over—just a thin neck of ice, like a very narrow bridge, that connects the landing of the ridge to the large and high shelf of Plane Floe.
I turn back for a moment. For maybe the last moment I’ll ever have this view. The rain beats sideways and into my eyes, trying to strip them of clarity, to prevent me from knowing the truth. But I wipe it away as fast as it comes and look back, on the spreading pack behind us. The once great measure of the Ice Pancake. I look over every fragment and shard of ice. One giant waste of frost and sea. I search each floe, small and large, and look for a body. A form. It’s a trick. I know it is—he’s gone. Maybe bobbing, hitting up underneath a shelf now, over and over, riding in with the waves and being battered. And with that, I’m done. I want to see no more of the beautiful expanse.
Voley waits until I start first, but when I do, he tears into the downward slope, charging ahead so fast I have to call out to him to slow down. And with a little effort, I manage to drop onto my butt and slide most of the way down the higher half of the ridge. My heels kick in, and then, in another minute, I’m up, right behind Voley, and following him single file across the thin strip of ice that’s raised like a bridge between us and the plane. At each step I feel like I’ll slip. When I start to go so slow that Voley even stops, looking back again, I try to pick up the pace. At first, all I can see is the water—white and slapping up on either side—nowhere to go if I slip but in. The waves hit and send up their vapor. And the shelf is too high to climb if I fall in. I saw the bridge’s sides from the top of the ridge—four feet at least. But then, when I catch sight of the windows of the plane, and what’s inside them, I lose all thought of the taunting sea raging on both sides of me. Each step becomes quick and perfect, my feet in unison, without even having to transfer weight for a limp. As if my body turned off its wound somehow. And then, when the strip begins to widen out, and I know for sure I’m safely across, I ask Voley if I really see what I think I see.
“What’s in there, boy?” I ask. I tell him what I think it is, seeing if he’ll give me a clue. But he doesn’t. He just drops the bag from his mouth and sits down, like all of the sudden, after being invincible and tireless, he needs a rest. I say it again, but it’s no longer a question, and I stop dead in my tracks. Someone’s in there.
Chapter 17
A mix of panic and relief spreads through me at the same time until I can sort them out. Neither of them hold, and instead they turn into a strange awe. It washes over me as my eyes follow the lines of the face, smushed right into the glass, mixed into a mess of hair, all pressed with frost against the porthole. The head of a man slumped over, sleeping with his head against the side of the window. As if he took a nap and never woke up.
Or he is taking a nap. Staying alive somehow inside the plane.
The notion that anyone could live out here—even on Plane Floe where I don’t feel the swells anymore—for any amount of time seems impossible. But you’re still alive, I tell myself, and my hand squeezes tightly around the handle of the knife. I move as close as I can to Voley and kneel down next to him, squatting in a pool of ice melt. My eyes catch a bit of my exposed arm and I look away—it looks too rubbery, like fake skin. Pale and ready to slide off. Abused and beyond its expiration date. And I know that’s what all of me must look like now. But with the sudden rage of the wind, and the loud pelting of the slamming drops against the metal wing, hanging out like an alien canopy over the barren floe, I block out any more thoughts of myself. I have to talk to Voley.
“We’re going to sneak around. I don’t want you to bark. Don’t do anything until it’s time,” I say. And then, with my eyes on the burnt charcoal metal and the single window with a head in it, we start to move along the flat mush toward the edge of the plane.
Up close, I can see how mangled and broken the metal shell is. But with each step, and as close as we get, the body in the window doesn’t move. I start to know that he has to be dead. Whoever it is in there. Dead on impact.
Along the ice are smears of deep gray soot, and black, that look like they’ve been tattooed deep into the ice along crack lines. Charred so bad even the rain isn’t wiping them away. And in another couple minutes, we’re directly under the upturned wing. The steady tin drum of the wing porch beats above us, and I see the bolts and siding of the plane. I try to find a label, or anything to read, but there’s nothing. Just nubs that have been painted silver, all trailing around the barrel of the plane’s body, higher than my head, until it curves under where its belly is stripped of paint. The belly slants on an angle, even past my feet, and there, the entire thing opens up, a smashed and gnarled shell. Splinters of metal lay stuck in the ice, some long and high like pikes, and others that look like they’re still intact pieces from the plane—square and rectangular objects and pipes and wire. Some are half-buried in the ice, or floating in pools of water. And then I see the other wing. It’s on the other side of the plane, and from under the belly, as I squat down, holding Voley close, I see the torn sheet like a lost arm, flat on the ice. A beater, sounding loudly the quick rhythm of medium rain. Everything about the wreck runs through me like a vision—the crash and the explosion and the fire and the deaths of everyone inside. He must be dead. And how many would have been on it? I lean out and start to count the windows. Five that I see—and right by the last window, a long scar breaks the plane, flattening the nose into the floe. Where the cockpit should be. Pulverized.
I look at Voley, wondering if we should go inside now. And then, before I make a decision, my hand smacks right into the side of the plane. The knife clanks loudly, metal on metal, and I freeze up. Loud enough to send a rattle through the whole inside of the plane. I glance back at the tail, pointed on an angle like a hill into the sky. I look right up where the blue should be. There’s nothing but gray. And right where I think it should be, there are swirling clouds, moving faster than any I’ve ever seen. I step in tighter against the belly of the plane, tugging Voley along with me, and wait to see if I’ve woken up a dead man.
The rain seems to grow louder on purpose as I try to separate pelting drops on metal from footsteps inside the plane, traveling along the interior hallway, a downward slope right out to the floe. He’s dead, I tell myself, trying to work up the nerve to move far enough out from under the wing to glance up at the window again. To see the smushed face again. Unmoved. But it takes another five minutes of sameness before I’m convinced he didn’t hear me. Or thought it was just the noise of the rain. Or is dead. And when I finally draw myself out, edging away from the wing porch far enough to peer straight up, I see nothing. A poor angle. I look back at Voley, and he’s resting, lying down on the patch of rainless triangle. Gritting my teeth I take another step and twist quickly, ready to pull back and hide, so that I can still perform an ambush if I have to. That’s when I see the eyes.
They’re wide open, pointed at such a hard angle downward that I think the man is looking right at me. And with the connection of our gazes, I cannot move—I’m paralyzed, holding the knife, and I wait for him to jump out of the seat and run out after me. Or raise a pistol and shoot right through the glass, killing me and stranding Voley. But his eyes don’t even blink, and he never rises up. And from the raw color and hardened lines of the face that I can see under the pressed hair, he looks like a plastic doll. And I know—I’ve seen that skin enough times—he’s dead. The corpse never blinks, and when Voley comes over to see why I’m stuck, I’m already telling him to come after me, and cautiously, we step over the mangled break in the plane and walk all the way around to the door.
Its lower hinge is snapped off and there’s a gaping hole right next to it, like someone tried to blast out of the plane while it was flying. I wonder if there was an argument on board, maybe about which way the plane should be traveling, and one of the passengers took it down. And then, only taking a moment to examine the mangled black metal surrounding the other side of the plane, I step through the door.
The aisle is cramped and narrow and runs up like a hill. The air smells stale. Everything is much darker than the storm-gray skies dimming the pack outside. And there, three rows of chairs high and deep is the man, wedged against the glass. I glance behind me and see the cockpit. Or what’s left of it. The entire front of the plane is buried under the ice, and all I can make out is the top of one of the pilot chairs and the broken glass of a windshield that merged into the ceiling metal. And then the ice blends with the snow and the frost and the metal and the glass and it all becomes one thing. But the hand. I see it raised out, just a bit of a forearm. The rest of the body submerged. I turn away, and even as I take my first uphill step, grabbing the back of a chair to pull myself while Voley watches, the dreams of Russell rush through my head.
I hear him talking—
the plane will have food
.
A raft. Fuel. Maybe a map. Supplies—maybe another gun
. He talked for hours about the plane, and all that time, I’d thought I’d tuned him out. Pushed away his delirium, thinking we were only marching to die under the blue. And now I’m in the plane. The taps of the rain overhead remind me that the blue isn’t even here to die under anymore, replaced by the return of the rain and the waves and the wind and a complete steel sky. And as I pull myself, one limb after the next, up the slippery center aisle, looking at the overhead compartments and the burnt seats and the floor, searching for something, anything but the body, I see nothing. Like someone ransacked every one of Russell’s dreams before the fire in the plane even went out. Someone else must have survived and stripped the thing. And then, right before the body, I stop to the sound of a loud creaking.
It sounds like the whole raised part of the plane is going to crash back down to the ice, and then there’ll be ripping metal, and it will cut me open and leave me here, buried next to the stranger until the great floe melts into the sea, and we’ll all go down together, a shared tomb, somewhere down in the silent and watery towns and roadways far below. All of this a reef. But my feet still feel sturdy, and the plane doesn’t even budge, and my mind turns sharply to the man. For some reason, now that I know the plane’s stable, I expect the loud creaking to wake him up. As if I’ve forgotten he’s dead. And I wait, strangely, with the knife drawn and pointed out, ready to slash his face if he moves. But there’s no movement, and after a long spell of fear, I decide to turn his head around.
I extend my glove slowly, touching the crispy hair that’s frozen like a sheet, and try to twist his neck around. The body is one rigid mass of dead weight, and with my first push, nothing happens. I try again, much harder this time, and the whole body twists with his head—like he’s a frozen solid joint, one single ice cube. But when I let go, and he resettles against the window with a thud, his face is slightly turned. Just enough that I can make out his lips and his nose. I watch the lips, and then the nose, seeing the steam rise from my own breath but waiting for it to come from his too. And all of the sudden, like I’m entranced with a corpse and it doesn’t make any sense, I realize that I want him to be alive. That I’m more scared of being alone than him being alive. But he doesn’t come to life and he won’t, and I remember Russell’s words again.
The wind will push the pack apart
. And I know I have to get back to Spots, so that we can eat him before he drifts too far away. I have to make it back across the bridge of ice, up the ridge again, and then down, and over the gap, and somehow salvage the body.
But you never told me how,
I say back to him.
The fact rolls through my head, becoming more of a question, one I can’t help but direct to Russell. How am I supposed to eat it—or bring it here—you never told me how. It’s too heavy. And the only thing that buries my thought and moves me into action is the sight of an open overhead compartment. All the way near the tip of the plane. So high that I might not even be able to make it up there to reach. But what I see forces me to try. Hanging over the edge, like at the top of a charred pyramid, is a red plastic box with a first aid sticker. And next to it is another black box. It’s too dark to see for sure but the red box looks open. And without spending another thought on the seal or the corpse I wrap my hands around the next seat, and with a grunt, I pull myself up another seat. The jarring scream of metal warns me as I put my weight on the back legs of the seat behind me, planting my feet while holding on to the head of the chair above me. I crane my neck to see the corpse’s scalp, and then down at the bottom, Voley, sniffing and licking around near the doorway. The only thing I see are the glass shards, scattered into the ice, and I yell at him to stop. Stop licking boy! He listens to me just for a moment, licks again, and then runs outside the plane. I try to follow him as he passes the slanted porthole windows, and I catch a glimpse of him going, and then, when it seems like he’s right under the plane, hiding beneath the wing porch again, he vanishes from my view. Get back here! I call again and again. I try four times and he won’t come back. And then, my eyes fall upon the boxes again. I think of the stove, and how there has to be a lighter in one of the plastic cases.
Find the fuel lines. Use the knife
—he’d said that. And with a wakened obsession for warmth, I take the next step.
