Winter's Tale Part 14

"Why don't you just shut up," said Hardesty. Jesse didn't open his mouth until the frame he made to hold his clothes near their fire collapsed, and his purple knickers burned up. From that time forward, he went bare below the waist except for a New Guinea style p.e.n.i.s s.h.i.+eld that he fas.h.i.+oned from a discarded Dr Pepper can and hung from his waist on a piece of reepschnur. He soon took to extolling this form of dress as if he were a Seventh Avenue designer introducing a new line."It's very comfortable," he said "You should try it."

Two hours after the fire burned out, a thundering ma.s.s of steel wheels and coughing diesels swung by the lakesh.o.r.e, and Jesse and Hardesty found a comfortable flatcar to carry them toward Yellowstone. Hardesty got up first, and Jesse ran by the side of the tracks, flagging dangerously, until Hardesty hoisted him aboard. Hardesty was easily able to see him, because his b.u.t.tocks shone in the light of the moon. Twenty-four hours later they jumped off the train rather than ride north into Montana and Canada, walked for a while, and then were stopped by what they thought was the Yellowstone River. Hardesty looked up at the sky, which seemed to be threatening rain."Why don't we build a shelter, and see what we can do about crossing this river tomorrow?" he said."I think it's going to rain."

"Rain! You think that looks like rain?" Jesse asked."Obviously, you never were in the mountains for very long. I know that it can't rain. Do you know what infallibility is? I'll tell you: it's me predicting the weather." He glanced at the huge c.u.mulonimbus clouds rolling toward them from the north in a mountainlike wall that shredded up the moonlight."That's going to pa.s.s in five minutes. Tonight will be pure velvet. Stretch out on the pine needles and sleep."

"I don't know," Hardesty said, wary of the clouds."Trust me."

Half an hour after they had fallen asleep, a crack of thunder popped them up from the ground where they had been lying and turned them over like flapjacks. Lightning struck in machine-gun reports, felling trees. The river, which had already been a whipping, das.h.i.+ng flume, was now so fast and white that it looked like a streak of lightning itself. And the rain that came down was not ordinaryrain that falls in inoffensive drops. Hardesty and Jesse tried as best they could not to drown."Follow me," Jesse said through a mouthful of water.

"What for?"

"I know where there's shelter. I saw it on the way in."

They swam uphill for a few hundred yards until they got to theentrance of a cave.

"I don't want to go in there," Hardesty proclaimed, althoughhe knew he would go in.

"Why not? It's perfectly safe."

"I've always hated caves. I guess it's because I'm Italian."

"Come on. I've been in this cave before, I think. If I remember correctly, a hermit used to live here, and he left a couple of nice feather beds, supplies, furniture, and lamps."

"Sure," Hardesty said, as darkness swallowed them up."Why do we have to go in so far?"

"To get to the hermit's place."

"What about bats?"

"There aren't any bats west of the Platte."

"That's not true. I've seen bats in San Francisco."

"Or east of Fresno."

After twenty minutes of groping along dark paths in a hissing subworld of hidden streams and mocking echoes, they came to what they sensed was a great chamber, for the sounds of their footsteps fled away from them as if into the open air. They felt vast s.p.a.ce above and to the sides, and no matter which way they walked they found no walls but only level floor of rock and earth. They crossed small well-behaved streams as warm as bathwater and saw in them glowing chains of phosph.o.r.escent creatures.

How strange it was to see these things that made their own light, blinking by the hundreds of thousands in busy silent codes. They seemed like an army of dedicated workers absorbed in preparations for an unspecified journey. Batteries of little lights that racked up billions upon billions of permutations and combinations seemed to be driving unhindered toward some mysterious goal.

For hours, or perhaps days, Hardesty and his guide wandered on the plain of lighted streams. Jesse completely forgot about thehermit's place. All they cared for was the color, the endless map of calculating rivulets, and the routes of tranquillity and silence that they followed into pitch-black emptiness. Like musical tones, the streams mixed and separated. Hardesty clutched the small pack in which he carried the salver. At one point, they stood in the middle of a glowing plain so vast that they wondered if, in fact, they were still alive.

But eventually they had to think about returning to the surface Hardesty suggested that they walk against the flow of the largest stream. That way, they would at least be going up. Soon the other streams in the luminescent net began to drop away, the one they followed grew larger, the phosph.o.r.escence gradually disappeared, and they found themselves in a huge chamber at a distant end of which flashes of lightning were visible through an opening.

"This is perfect," Jesse said."A nice soft floor, dry, and the exit is right over there. Let's go to sleep."

"Don't you think," Hardesty asked,"that we should light a match, to see what's in here?"

"What could be in here? There's nothing in here."

"I don't want to go to sleep without knowing what's around me."

"That's stupid," Jesse yelled."Hey! Whatever's in here, to h.e.l.l with you! Go to h.e.l.l! Kill us if you like!

Arrragghh!" For a small man, he had a miraculous voice. The challenges made Hardesty's ears ring.

"Even so," Hardesty said, searching in his pack for a box of matches,"I want to take a look."

He struck a match. At first the white-and-blue spark blinded them, but then the golden flame strengthened, and they looked up."I see," Hardesty said quietly.

In lines as neat and well ordered as the rows of cardinals seated at an ec.u.menical council, were a hundred or more surprised, temporarily blinded, twelve-foot-high grizzly bears. Not knowing what to think of the two strangers who had come into their midst, they turned to each other for advice, pawed the air, and rotated their heads in confusion.

Hoping to keep away the bears, Hardesty lit as many match.e.s.h.e could hold in his palpitating fingers. The augmented light enabled him to see the bats. The bats, not surprisingly, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, or in the millions. They clung to the roof of of the cave in a solid ma.s.s several bats deep; they were the size of the broken umbrellas that one sees stuffed in trash cans on a windy day; and their ears and joints were hideously purple and pink. They began to move in a growing chain reaction which prompted the bears to roar, showing white teeth as sharp as a splintered hayrack.

When the matches were exhausted, the bears converged and the bats began to fly. Smothered in brown fur and silky wings, Hardesty and Jesse realized that they were not being attacked, but, rather, that they had started a panic. A torrent of bats and bears burst from the cave, like boiling mud spit from a volcano. Hardesty and Jessie were thrown out the entrance onto a pile of rocks illuminated by bolts and sheets of stroboscopic lightning.

After the animals were out, Jesse suggested that they go back into the cave to sleep.

"I suppose you don't think they'll come back, do you?"

"I would say the chances of that are only about fifty-fifty."

"You do what you want. I'm going to sleep right here on this sharp rock."

The next morning, Hardesty awakened to see Jesse trying to make a fire by rubbing two pinecones together. When that failed, he tried to get a spark by hitting a rock with a stick. Finally, Hardesty found some more matches, and they were able to make a fire that didn't burn down the forest only because everything was so wet. They still had to cross the river.

"We should walk downriver to try to find a bridge," Hardesty suggested."Although the chances of the river getting narrower upstream are obviously greater, the alt.i.tude's going to increase, which probably means less settlement, whereas, downriver, there will likely be highways, easier terrain on the banks, and maybe a stretch that's calm enough for us to swim or shallow enough to wade."

"That shows what you know," Jesse answered with considerable indignation, since he was the professional guide, and they were in his mountains."There isn't a bridge that we can use for two hundred miles up or down this river. If you walk against the flow you'll findyourself in a h.e.l.l of rotten rock and mossy cliffs. To the south, it gets wider and stronger as tributaries join in. You'd have to go to Utah before you'd find a place still enough to wade."

"Then what do you propose?"

"Doing what I always do, what I've done a hundred times in situations like this, what anyone who really knows the mountains would do almost automatically."

"What?"

"Build a catapult."

"To throw us across?" Hardesty asked.

"That's right."

"It's a quarter of a mile wide!"

"So?"

"Let's say we could make a catapult that would do the job. All right. It throws us across. What do you think's going to happen then? I don't know what trajectory you plan, but we could be falling from very high. We'd be killed instantly."

"No we wouldn't," said Jesse.

"Why not?"

"You see how closely the trees are s.p.a.ced on the opposite bank? All we have to do is ride on shock pancakes, with extended reticular netting to catch in the trees."

"Shock pancakes."

"I'll show you." Jesse then set immediately to building the catapult, the shock pancakes, reticular netting, lean-to's, and access paths. Although Hardesty didn't believe for a minute that anything would work, he was carried away by Jesse's confidence, his surety in constructing the various travesties, and the splendid, cla.s.sical, intriguing idea of a machine that would enable them to fly.

For two weeks they labored without sleep, eating little except the notebook-sized pieces of jerked beef, tea, and the trout that they pulled from the river. At first, Jesse insisted on cooking the trout with body heat during the night (according to him, an old Indian method)."There are better ways," said Hardesty, who then showed his guide how to plank fish.

At the center of a new clearing, their machine rested on a foundation of earth, rock, and piles. They had felled many trees and stripped miles of vines with which to build a two-story frame suporting a one-hundred-foot tree that pivoted on a huge beam. A basket containing several tons of rock held the shorter end down until the long tree was winched close to the ground and fixed there as taut as a crossbow. Shock pancakes and reticulated nets were attached to the catapult head. They looked like wicker-weave lily pads ten feet thick and forty feet in diameter. Hardesty and Jesse were to be strapped onto them with guy wires of orange and black mountain-climbing rope. To protect themselves further, they made big balloonlike suits of soft underbark that they wrapped around themselves over alternating layers of moss and puffb.a.l.l.s. These "cus.h.i.+ons," as Jesse called them, were so big and unwieldy that they had to be kept on top of the shock pancakes, or Jesse and Hardesty would never have been able to clirnb on.

All in all, Hardesty was skeptical, and refused to commit himself to launch. But in the end he was so tired and hungry that, rather than walk to Utah, he decided to take his chances in a moss-and-puff ball suit on a shock pancake thrown into the air by a giant catapult. Besides, the thing was insanely alluring.

At the appointed hour, they climbed the launching pad, put on their suits, and tied themselves in. Jesse had in hand a lanyard that would yank a wooden cotter pin from the trigger mechanism, and send them flying."You see that clump of green over there?" he asked, indicating a soft-looking bed of young pine."That's where we'll land. Our descent through the air will be slowed by the aerodynamically stable design of the nets and pancakes. The nets will grapple the trees, and the pancakes will take the force out of any direct impact. Needless to say, these suits are the ultimate protection.

"If you're frightened, don't be. I'm an engineer, and I've got this figured to the last decimal point. Are you ready?"

"Hold it just a second," said Hardesty."I've got to adjust this group of puffb.a.l.l.s here. Okay. I'm ready now.

Mind you, I think you're a lunatic, and I don't know why I'm trust... t...."

Jesse yanked the lanyard, and they were thrown with tremendous force, not upward into the air, but directly into the river, about fifty feet from sh.o.r.e.

They hit the water like an artillery sh.e.l.l, throwing a geyser ofwhite foam a hundred feet high, and they, the pancakes, and the nets were quickly submerged deep in the rapids. Luckily for them, the whole package was righted in the neutral buoyancy, and when they surfaced they found themselves floating head-up. Racing downstream, tied into their suits and onto the pancakes, and unable to move, they were conscious only because the freezing water had revived them after the first shock.

Hardesty started to struggle out of his suit.

"Don't!" Jesse screamed."You'll drown. At least this is sort of a boat."

"Go to h.e.l.l!" "Seriously!"

"Seriously?" Hardesty was frozen with acc.u.mulated anger, annoyance, disbelief, and disgust."Seriously?"

"Take my advice or you'll be in for trouble."

"You don't think that riding at forty miles an hour down ice-cold rapids, on shock pancakes, in puffball suits, is trouble? You know what you are? I'll tell you. You're an incompetent. You don't do anything right."

"I can't help it if I was born short," Jesse screamed back over the roar of the waters."Tall people aren't so great just because they're a few feet higher."

Hardesty exploded."It has nothing to do with short or tall!" Then he realized that they were about to float under a bridge that could not have been more than a mile or two from the catapult. Little girls in rhubarb-colored gla.s.ses peered over the railings, fascinated by the strange boat that was pa.s.sing below."What do you call that?" Hardesty asked.

"That's a toll bridge. I don't know about you, but I don't throw good money after bad."

Too exhausted to continue shouting over the sounds of the rapids, Hardesty slumped in his puffball suit, staring with tired eyes at scenery that rushed by as if seen from a railroad train. Just as he was thinking that the situation wasn't so bad, because in a day or two they might hit calm water and be able to swim to the east bank, he saw that the river up ahead disappeared completely. The water juststopped, and a shocking picture of empty air and faraway clouds continued in its place.

"Ryerson Falls," said Jesse."Three-quarters of a mile high. Inever went over them in a puffball suit."

Hardesty was torn between wanting to strangle Jesse, and trying to gather his thoughts before death so that upon quitting the earth he could cry out something beautiful and true, and not die, as had his father, with an amused smile.

He was able to find the intensity and beauty that he wanted, in the plunge itself. Physical forces in a complicated coalition of gravity, acceleration, and temperature were powerful and intense enough to satisfy him. It made sense. Nothing was as comforting as the enduring purity of elemental forces, and returning to them could not mean defeat. But he neyer thought that he would die in a bark suit, strapped to a shock pancake, next to an incompetent midget. They went over a dizzying edge, and found themselves in the empty air. As they fell, they sometimes. .h.i.t the water that was falling next to them and were tipped one way or another. The farther down Hardesty went, the greater his hope that, having come as far as he had, he would survive. In the last few feet, although he was going very fast, his hopes skyrocketed because the water was so close.

The bottom of the falls was a blizzard of foam and bubbles in water so frothed and agitated that it was possible to breathe air a hundred feet below the surface. Their buoyant contraption was eventually hurled upward, and they popped up in the middle of the stream half a mile from the falls, greatly startling two fishermena"who weren't sure what they had seen, but knew that it was as big as a car, and seemed to be driven by two backward-facing humanoid figuresin strange uniforms.

They landed in a place that was full of geysers, mud holes, and pits of boiling sulfur. Without even looking at Jesse, Hardesty got out of his puffball suit, slung his pack over his shoulder, and set outtoward the east.

"It's not a good idea to go in that direction," he heard Jesse calling out from behind."You'd do best to follow me. You have to have years of experience to walk on these crusts. Otherwise, you cango right through. It's more dangerous than walking on a minefield, and you've got no training. Look at all these sink hoa" " That was the last of Jesse Honey.

AFTER six months on a sheep ranch in Colorado, Hardesty had earned enough and been in one place for a long enough time to set out east again. The owners of the ranch, a young couple whose names were Henry and Agnes, had needed him to help bring the sheep down from high pasture, to take in the hay, and to do whatever else had to be done before the snows. But when, in November, winter came in tentative fas.h.i.+on, laying down snowfields that were swept away by a weakening sun, they needed him no longer. Anyway, Agnes was far too pretty for the sanity and dignity of a hired man without a wife of his own. So they took him in their ancient wooden station wagon to a railhead somewhere at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo range, from where he rode in a single diesel-powered freight and mail car, sitting on the plank floor next to the conductor, to a larger town through which pa.s.sed the last of the transcontinental trains.

"In five hours," the young conductor said,"thePolaris will speed through here faster than a burning rabbit. If you want the station-master to flag it down for you, you'll have to tell him in plenty of time, because he has to climb to the top of the water tower with his lantern to do it."

Hardesty bought a new pair of pants in the town store. His jeans were so soaked with lanolin that he used them to make a fire by the side of the tracks, where he waited for the Polaris as it grew dark. He was used to sitting very still at the higher alt.i.tudes where Henry and Agnes kept their sheep, and he knew how to out-think the colda"with the help of a ma.s.sive shearling coat that had been given to him as a part of his pay. The trance he used to defy temperature robbed some senses to pay others. He felt nothing, but he could see and hear everything. And because of that he was able to detect the Polaris long before the stationmaster. Smothered in distance and the hills, its blinding headlight made a faintly s.h.i.+fting glow in the mountains far away, and its barely audible, attenuated sounds camedrifting through the night air to unsettle the dogs and to alert Hardesty, who got the stationmaster to climb the water tower and light his lantern.

The swinging red lantern eye charmed from the mountains a dancing white blaze that ran across the plain, slewing its agile beam on every curve to trim the young winter wheat and catch the animals of the field by riveting in place their translucent green eyes. As it closed without losing speed, the stationmaster yelled down from the tower,"Don't be disappointed if he doesn't stop. Sometimes they just don't see my lantern. They go so d.a.m.n fast, this is such a little town, and when they're on the eastern run they pa.s.s through here right after dinner. I guess it makes them a little sleepy." But he kept waving his lantern from the top of the tower, swaying his entire body, even when the train was at the outskirts of the village.

"They saw it!" the stationmaster yelled down."Start runnin' that way. The last car will be a mile down the track before it stops." Hardesty ran alongside the squealing, decelerating train. The yellow lamps of the dining cars made the snow in front of him the color of an oilcloth slicker. Glancing up, he could see people at dinner, some lifting bottles of wine, some pressing their faces against the windows in vain efforts to see why they were stopping, some with cloth napkins held to their lips. The last car pa.s.sed him very slowly. Streamlined into a teardrop, it had above the lantern on its rounded end a lighted gla.s.s nameplate that read "Polaris," as if it were the t.i.tle of a film on a movie marquee.

A porter pulled him in through a bullet-shaped door, and hit the go signal. By the time the door was closed, the train was clacking down the track, and had restored the smooth heartbeat of the plains."Where you goin'?" asked the porter.

"New York."

"Most people that get on in the middle of nowhere don't go to New York. Maybe Kansas City, and that's a big thing for them, but New York? Uh-uh. You got enough money?"

"What's the fare?"

"I can't tell from this place. It's not on my card. I'll send the conductor, and he'll calculate it. Meanwhile, you can't ride in the club car, so come with me, and wait in the vestibule."

As they walked through the club car, an old man in black stopped the porter."Kindly leave him here, Ramsey. We'll take care of him."

"Mr. Cozad?" the porter asked, in surprise.

"We need a fourth for our game." The old man spoke in a voice colored by three-quarters of a century in west Texas."Have a seat young man," he said to Hardesty, pointing out the empty fourth seat at his table.

The leather was comfortable and soft. Still throbbing and red from his run in the cold, Hardesty loosened the sheepskin coat, then decided to take it off entirely, and put it and his pack near the window.

The club car was a purple and black canister dotted with incandescent lamps in red shades. The silver-haired old men who played cards were in dark suits: their hands moved about as if disconnected, and their faces were like white masks floating above an unlighted stage. The light seemed to be fueled by the rhythm of the rails, its frequency determined by the ticking of the track joints. The cards themselves glowed mysteriously, like phosph.o.r.escent bones, and the faces of the kings, queens, and jacks smiled like Ches.h.i.+re cats.

"Like a gin and tonic?" asked Cozad.

"No, thank you," Hardesty replied."I don't drink."

"Something else then?"

"Tea."

Cozad ordered tea, which was brought to Hardesty in a century-old railroad pot that was as silver as a leaping ba.s.s."You do play cards."