excerpt from Owl’s Head

by Adam Forrest

 

It was always terrifying. They were practically always dead. Culkin’s breath fogged up a little heart-shaped patch of window as he stared at the ground below. Blinding in the break of morning light. Miles upon miles of white sliding by, three hundred feet down. The snow stretching forever, maybe. It was hard to imagine anything anywhere had escaped it. Massachusetts? Snow. New Jersey? Snow. Florida, California, Texas? Snow, snow, snow. The helicopter pivoted to the left and he leaned back, wiping the window clean:

“Poor bastard.”

“Stupid bastard.”

“Poor wife.”

“Lucky wife.”

“How’s that.”

“No kids.”

“Come again.”

“Freedom, baby.”

Culkin shook his head. Wanted to smile but it wouldn’t come. He knocked his boots together. Brown slush out from between the grooves. Melting and sliding on the hard deck of the cockpit. Trails of wet crisscrossing everywhere, rising and falling over the ridges of polyurethane, down into the grommets and aluminum drains lining the edges of the floor. It’d be impossible to trace them all. “Poor folks.”

“Yeah. Poor folks.” Stolie throttled the collective up a bit and the mast whispered down vibrations of new power, fuselage trembling slightly, rotor blades whipping faster, a long slow lurch in the stomach as the red arm of the altimeter jumped back to life. Out the windshield, north-northeast, the dual spires of Mt. Liberty and Mt. Flume rose up in a line. Lafayette further north. Hancock due east. Other lesser crests popping up along the spine of the ridge. Once again, the sight brought to Culkin’s mind the image of a sleeping leviathan, any moment now ready to shake off the snow and the moss and the rocks and the years and take its reckoning with the young human world. To reclaim something lost. Once again, he felt a strange disappointment as the peaks held fixed, unimpressed with the chopper’s approach. Useless talking to Stolie about it.

“Whoo-wee, Culk! Feel that juice!” Useless talking to Stolie about it.

“Feelin it, captain.”

“Yeah sure, but really feel it, man! Forty-one years and it never gets old.”

“Keep your shirt on, cowboy.”

“That a dare, young blood?”

“Polite request, Sasquatch.”

“If I wasn’t preoccupado piloting this old bird I’d be in the buff already.”

“Save it for the Mrs., Stol.”

“She wants it less than you do.” Rapping knuckles against his helmet for something like luck.

Now the smile came. Culkin turned out the window to hide it, peering down at the ground as it collected itself and began to follow their ascent. Liberty and Flume coming into prominence, slowly squeezing their neighbors out of view. Culkin, broaching. Tip-toeing:

“What’s the chances?”

“Don’t kid yourself.”

“If you had to say.”

“Look, son,” and not a comforting thing when Stolie got parental, “If we see anything, it’s gonna be a body. And we’re not gonna see a body.”

“Could’ve had a mirror in his kit. Or a flare. Coulda got a fire goin.”

“Look at it.”

Fresh powder everywhere. The dense evergreens wreathed. The Pemigewasset’s eastern branch completely buried, surface ice covered in feet of snow. A smooth white vein through hard white country. Everything camouflaged from up here, the world below squashed flat by their vertical perspective.

“Still.”

Stolie peered up and east. A grey wall of cloud falling over itself. A second front right on the tail of last night’s. Measuring. Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five miles off. That gave them an hour point five. Give or take. Minus ten minutes to destination, minus forty back to base. Equaled another forty for the search and, if all went well, the extraction. Forty was no time at all. More of a public gesture than a rescue mission. Keep the taxpayers happy.

“Culkin, I gotta be honest. I’m happy to take your money again if you want to put it down, but you’re only fleecing yourself.”

“I’m not lookin to bet this time. Don’t wanna jinx it.”

“My neighbor – Mrs. Wilson – sends the lemon bars? Yeah – she’s got these big crystals you can rub next time if it makes you feel better.”

“Right.”

“Straight from her guru in India. Guy can levitate and hasn’t eaten in twelve years, so you know they’re good.”

“They’re never alive when we bet.”

“Does palm readings in her garage if you’re interested.”

“Call me stupid but it’s bad luck.”

“Some would call it bad odds. Hang on.” Stolie pushed the cyclic to the right and the helicopter banked sharply. They turned over the ridgeline just south of Flume’s summit and held altitude as the ground fell away, down into the valley beneath. An easy bank to the left and they were pointed directly at Owl’s Head, due north. “He’s down there somewhere.”

“Could be.”

“He’s down there somewhere.”

“Could be.”

“Culkin, quit it. If he’s good enough to walk out, he’s good enough to know to stay put. If he’s not, some college kid’ll find his body ten yards off the trail in the spring.”

“Poor kid, then.”

“Holy bleeding heart.”

“It’s the truth isn’t it.”

“If you’re gettin soft about it.”

“Not getting soft about anything.”

“No shame in sayin it’s got to you.”

“Jesus, Stol. I love it, ya know? Just cause I f. Just cause I hope a little doesn’t mean I don’t love it.”

“Hopin’ll eat a man alive out here.”

“Ernest Fucking Hemingway.”

“Well. Was just messin with ya anyways, kid.”

“It’s not like I’m not thinking. I get the odds.”

“Just messin, kid.”

“Still.”

“Long as you don’t drag me into it.” Another glance to the east. Culkin following his gaze.   Some storm.

“Missing or dead and you get fifty. Alive and I get a hundred.” A blast of wind shoved on starboard,  hard.

“Shit, make it two if ya like.” They shook hands.

Culkin knew it was a losing bet but fifty was a small price for a little motivation to keep pretending. Keep the thoughts away, and images. Bodies dead of exposure were the most disconcerting. Drowning victims, car crashes, mountaineering or skiing accidents: all gruesome. But all held within a sort of logic. Bacteria decomposing flesh and internal organs turn the body into a gas-filled balloon that floats on the water’s surface. That’s biology. A one-and-a-half-ton metal frame slamming into another at fifty miles an hour will obliterate any soft, organic material within; and a rolling fall of two hundred yards down exposed slab will crack a human skull like a cantaloupe if it ends in anything other than an improbably placed pile of packing peanuts. Physics. Even the most horrific murders could be traced back to some untended seed of psychological imbalance. But hypothermia was different. Its victims – frost-bitten, ice-covered, and gaunt – were often found naked, their clothing scattered in a long line, piece by piece, behind them. Torn at zippers and seams. Footprints set at a running stride apart. As if they couldn’t get away from it fast enough. Supposedly this was because at a certain point the tiny muscles responsible for shivering and the contraction of surface capillaries – restricting blood flow to the more mission-critical areas – ran out of energy. They’d release, allowing blood to rush back to the extremities, creating a flash hot enough to convince an already-addled brain that it needed to cool down again. And off came the cold-gear. Fine, so much for that paradox. But what happened next was not so easy to explain away. After expending their final reserves sprinting around, the victims would try to dig. Under fallen logs, boulders, cars when they were available, even in the snow itself – anywhere low and dark and tight. Then they’d shove themselves in, headfirst and as far as possible, contorting their failing bodies into cartoonish angles to fit. They were burrowing.

What was it like, watching one’s mind spool out? Were they aware in those last desperate moments, trying to preserve a bit of self-respect by digging their own makeshift graves? Or was there something else happening. Something darker lurking deep down, under all the pomp and ceremony of the frontal lobe, under the great grey chatter of the cerebral cortex, under the time-conditioned understandings of the temporal region. Something that knew the real terror of the world and the stony, unyielding face of truth. Something small, and anxious, and scared, and mute, and deaf, and wet, and unthinking. What did those people remember, curled in their dark holes. The improbability of life? The absurdity of self. The totality of meaninglessness. Or, worse, was it nothing at all.

The radio crackled.

“Concord to Teams Owl and Carrigain. How’s that sky looking? Over.”

Stolie pressed the transmitter on his helmet. “Team Owl thinks it’s one fine day, Concord. Over.” He released the button and grinned over at Culkin. “Can’t have you accuse me of cheating. Let’s see what we can see.”

A third voice across the airwaves:

“Team Carrigain, here. This pilot for one’s getting jumpy. Requesting updated 10-13. Over.” Culkin leaned forward and craned his neck around to see out the cargo hold’s window behind him. Squinting, he could just make out the little black bug of another UH-60 zipping east-northeast across the backlit landscape. Thomasson and Greenwood. Just beyond the suddenly-darkened hump of Mt. Hancock, en route to Mt. Carrigain, further east. They were heading straight at the storm.

“Copy that Carrigain.” A staticky pause. “Doppler’s showing increased speed. Front coming in at 70 knots.” Only the big ones picked up speed coming over the Whites. “Going to have to pull the plug on this one, Mike. Over.”

“That official, Sarah? Over.” Another pause.

“Team Carrigain, abort and return to base. Over.”

“10-4, Concord. Over and out.” A copper glint of sun shot through Team Owl’s cockpit as, ten miles off, Mike Thomasson swung his aircraft in a tight one-hundred-eighty-degree arc and pointed it back towards the town of Lincoln, where he’d then straighten out his line and follow I-93 along the Pemi River proper, through its deep valley on the western side of the National Forest’s bounds, down past sweeping portside views of Squam Lake and Meredith Bay, through to where the mountains petered out just north of Sanbornton, and down still across that wet, cold basin-land running south to Concord.

Culkin didn’t envy Team Carragain. The low thrum of anxiety he felt sitting at base, the wait for what might come, the hope that nothing did – it was exhausting, and it was blasted away as soon as a call came through. He would suit up and strap in, terrified in a new way, a better way, hard to pin down, heading towards something definite. There was a reality in each moment of approach that made it seem as if nothing had actually mattered until that instant. Like he was watching everything from six inches outside his own body. He could never shake the sense that they were flying into something unlike anything that had ever come before, skirting along the expanding edge of a great and inexplicable knowledge. A bubble outside of time, beyond history. In the turn back to Concord, whether it was premature or not, the bubble would burst. Even when he was performing CPR or emergency surgery on a patient in the helicopter’s bay, the world was back to its normal, predictable self, and he was James Culkin again, full stop.

“Beautiful.” The storm front was rearing up, swallowing the light as it drew nearer.  Those ten miles separating Mt. Carrigain and Owl’s Head looked like nothing. They were nothing, anyway, as the chopper flies. In the winter, in good conditions, maybe fifteen or eighteen hours on foot, if you knew what you were doing. Mt. Carrigain was the hiker’s destination, according to the outline he had left his wife before he set out, but the search focused there had been a longshot from the start. There was no way he’d made it that far. It was only a small blow to the mission to have Thomasson and Greenwood called off. But Concord would likely call Team Owl off early, too, and that would be game over for the man down there, if the game wasn’t over already.