Authors: Paulette Jiles
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hey told her to sit toward the front. They would not let her go back beside James's strapped-in wheelchair because she would be in the way. Nadia looked out the window and just before they rose into obscuring cloud layers she saw the world's authentic topography where Fremont Lake lay in a scrubby basin and the dam with two great spouts of water breaking through at either end. Then the dam broke; sections of the structural concrete turned over and over in a rush of what looked like glittering filth, dancing trees briefly upright, carried down by their roots. How heavy it looked. The massive rush of floodwater threw up ruffles of debris at its front edge and the rest came on heavy as molten pewter.
Rain continued to batter the square plexiglass window at Nadia's left hand and those in the cockpit. Farrell and his copilot were flying with all eight hands and feet. The altimeter said twelve thousand feet and then, suddenly, eleven thousand feet. They dropped like a stone, then began to climb again through vertical disturbances, one after another. She clicked her seat belt loose and got up and staggered to the rear from seatback to seatback.
A man clinging to handholds in the cargo area stopped her. He held up his hand. She saw a heavy-weave curtain flopping with weighted hem in front of the very back of the tail section and in another moment two of the crew came out with James between them. They managed to half fling him into the wheelchair. James gripped the arms with his powerful hands and arranged himself. The crew members returned to holding on. Then one went back to use the lavatory himself.
Nadia managed to crouch beside James and the look on his face was one of fury. You see, Nadia, why I am taking my chances with the medication. I'd rather die than endure this. He dropped his head back and got his breath. This humiliation.
She nodded and said nothing.
Go back up and strap in.
She found her seat, clutching seatbacks all the way up the aisle. She stared out the little window. She had walked so far, and now the earth rolled beneath them like the scroll of Revelation.
F
ires had broken out in the city below them. The DC-3 fought from layer to layer of storm and they flew over the Rockies in impenetrable cloud. Thunder detonated on both sides and at fifteen thousand feet the engines screamed at full power. The port engine backfired and blew ice out of the carburetor airscoop like a glittering quoit. Nadia's eardrums felt pierced. When they broke free on the other side, occasional openings in the cloud layer showed mountains scarred with mining and clear-cutting.
After some hours she saw a polyhedral knot of towers in a city-mass along a snaking inlet, a mountain like a perfect white cone. As she watched, a multistory building in the knot of towers began to erupt in flashes. Bright sparks flared from the air-conditioning window units all along its sides and then jumped out of giant antennas and transmitting masts on its roof. At its base floodwaters galloped past carrying debris. Smoke began to pour out of the building and drift away.
Roofs peeked out of the dark floodwater along with uncounted numbers of upturned Buddy cars that lay washed up on the shore of a lake with their little wheels in the air. Streams of water poured down the mountains and their running tendrils resembled the human venous system.
She went back again to sit by James.
Over the noise of the engine she said, Is there nobody there? Why can we go there?
He folded his map carefully. There are people onshore. I have no idea what kind of people they are.
Savage hippies, said Nadia. A man named Chan with a china egg, a crazy person with a wallpaper book. I heard about it. I have secret knowledge, clandestine intelligence.
You, he said. The wanderer.
What's on the island?
No people as far as I know. James pulled himself upright in his wheelchair with both thickly muscled hands on the armrests. His face was a hot color, a fever color, and cracked with fatigue lines.
But there used to be?
Yes, yes, listen. I bought the position of lighthouse keeper. One buys management positions at present. He closed his portfolio of maps. My brother and I bought the rights. Interviewed people. A family I knew seemed capable, the Shalamovs, two children. So I hired them and sent them there. My brother, Farrell, shared the expense and had them flown up. He needed trustworthy weather reports. But ten years ago they decided they wanted off. Too isolated, they had kids, no TV. So they stored everything and left. Farrell asked them to store a year's supply of . . . he paused and ran his hand across his forehead. Store a year's worth of supplies.
He was having trouble breathing and fever burned in his face. Nadia was seated on a pile of duffel bags behind the last row of seats. I want you to hold on, he said. He bent forward out of the confines of his wheelchair and took her hand and placed it firmly on the seatback. You make me nervous.
From whom? said Nadia. Bought it from whom?
From your parents' estate.
She was stunned into silence. Then she said, My parents owned the island?
Were you not listening? He ran his hand through his hair, gripped it, and let go. They owned the lighthouse keeper's
position
. After they died it was part of their estate. There was a lot of legal juggling. I managed to buy the position. My father knew them vaguely. Knew Thin Sam.
What were their names? Why did they abandon me? Are they dead?
Mary and Leonard Dronin. They were not lighthouse keepers. They never went there. You were Raisa Dronin. Your parents were packed and ready to go, with you as a child, when they were arrested. They
attempted
to go there. They didn't make it. They were planning on escaping the big purges.
And so did they?
No.
And?
Another time, Nadia.
When?
We'll see. Stop. Be quiet. He wiped his sweating face on his coat sleeve. Get me some water.
T
hey landed on a watery airstrip in several distinct crashes that nearly tore Nadia out of her seat belt. Farrell and the copilot were landing on visual alone. Mud erupted in dark wings on either side. It battered the fuselage with a sound as if people were hurling gravel at them. A fan of mud whipped over the window and Nadia jerked back as the glass was painted over with brown slush and the twin-engine wavered to a halt.
They had landed at a fire suppression station at what was at one time the American-Canadian border. They were among the tree farms. Inside the shack that served as a sort of airstrip waiting room she sat and leaned against the wooden wall. Still at last. On unmoving earth at last.
A television glowed with a broad yellow band with black letters. The crawl flashed on and off, on and off, under a still photograph of the new Facilitator. He was both old and handsome. Stay where you are, the crawl said. Emergency workers will reach you. Then an old episode of
Things You Cannot Say
came on.
F
arrell leaned against a wall, exhausted, with a bottle of energy drink in his hand.
Okay, brother? said James.
Farrell tipped up the bottle for the last drops. It was like flying a grand piano, he said. But yes, I'm all right. You'll have to go the rest of the way by helicopter. I'll copilot as best I can.
All right, said James.
I want you to get married, said Farrell. He had two days' growth of beard and his clothes were spotted with coffee and wrinkled. I won't be charged as an accessory under Square One. Plus, she will be legally obligated for your maintenance.
Nadia understood that Farrell refused to say her name. She was a “she.”
James nodded. His head lay back on the wheelchair rest. I planned to, Farrell. Don't sound so arrogant. You know what her name is.
When? said Farrell. I haven't heard anything out of you so far.
We used to get along, said James. And then I met Nadia. Elementary sort of conflict. He closed his eyes.
Farrell laughed. How many times have you been in love? Every year or so. He paced back and forth across the dirty plywood floor. It was littered with crushed poplar leaves and twigs and cigarette butts and wadded papers. Outside the window, which was obscured with dust, a skidder engine roared and a helicopter lifted into the air under a halo of thunderous rotors. They'll charge me with something. Anything. They can't say it's because of the weather report. So it will be something else. Maybe I'll make it to the new execution program. Death's cabaret.
If there's anybody left to charge people with anything, said James. He had fallen slackly against the backrest and his face was flushed, his eyes closed.
Think not? Farrell threw his energy drink bottle out the door. So I'm your best man.
I suppose at some point, said Nadia, I will be consulted.
Be quiet, said Farrell. There is a Personal Concerns counselor under the Workplace Well-Being Office of Primary Resources who shows up with the skidder operators once in a while. She's probably drunk by now, if she's here, but I've sent somebody to look for her. Farrell pulled his ear protectors from around his neck and wiped them. Everything's damp, he said. I never remember this kind of damp.
What's the real problem, Farrell, said James.
She's using you to get to Lighthouse Island. When you're there, she'll let you die.
I'm at a loss for words, said Nadia.
You'd better not be, said Farrell. He turned his square, muscular body toward her and thrust his hands into his flight jacket pockets. You'd better be able to say “I do.”
T
he Workplace Well-Being counselor wobbled into the camp on a bicycle dressed in many wet layers of green, turquoise, and mint, carrying a brandy bottle and the required papers. She read from the statutes including one very long one that established the counselor's authority to issue binding agreements between two people as to maintenance and care for each other and legal obligations of both parties. Then the legal consequences of not caring for each other. The legal consequences of neglect were severe. If that happened Nadia would be arraigned before a Personal Relations council and sent to a Severe Sanctions work camp to cook down fish guts under the charge of reckless marital endangerment and James ditto.
Nadia and James repeated various statements that began with “I affirm.” The last ones required that they say “I do.” Farrell bent his head and looked at his worn-out boot toes. The strange pattering sound of a thin rain surrounded the shack and a long crawl of leaking water sidled across the floor, pushing dust ahead of it.
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hey spent their wedding night in a cubicle in the timber workers' living quarters where each man had his own small room. Their cubicle had a blanket hung over the doorway and a single cot and a chair. James's wheelchair was backed to the wall. Nadia sat in a bewildered amazement at this rapid transit from one part of the continent to another, from the desert city to this stormy logging camp.
James lay in his clothes under the blankets and they listened to the rain. He said, Hell of a wedding night. Dear child, dear Nadia.
Nadia closed her hand around his forearm and he laid his own over hers. She was married to him, to this body, this mind, this past and this future.
We're alive. She smiled.
Yes, we're alive. No small feat for a paraplegic in a general disaster. Someday you will have wedding bread. I promise you. He lay with his eyes closed. Down the hallway a television was on at full volume. It was the trial of the Facilitator and the prosecutor's voice droned on and on, going over legal technicalities. The timber workers groaned or shouted insults. Nadia, reach into my briefcase and find the medication.
She handed the blister pack to him and he broke one out. There were only two left.
What will happen when it's gone? she said.
Then just one leg will work.
James, she said.
He put the tablet in his mouth and drank from a water bottle.
Where are your people? Nadia said. You said they had gone south.
Yes, they went to the far south. I think they will be beyond the flooding. Cousins live in that gerrymander. Another pilot flew my mother and Farrell's wife and children there. He will join them. James struggled to sit upright against the lumpy pillows. So for your wedding night, to make it memorable, I will tell you about your parents. Hand me my briefcase.
Nadia took the photograph from his hand. It was herself at age two on her father's knee and her mother standing behind them. When her name was Raisa. At her father's shoulder stood a young Thin Sam Kenobi in an aviator's uniform. No glasses. Her uncle, Samuel Dronin. But Nadia could not take her eyes away from her mother and father in their blaring overdeveloped colors and wide smiles because they were faces spectrally familiar and known as deeply as one knows one's own face in the mirror. They were smiling out of the frame of the tattered photograph the way people smile at children, with unguarded expressions and kindliness. Smiling at her from between her two hands. Mary and Leonard Dronin.
Behind her mother, a distant white wall. Her father was in a good suit and tie with a bank of medals or awards on the right side of his suit coat. Her parents and uncle were in light coming through some tall window that fell not only on them but on containers of leafy, flowering plants. The background faded away into sequential shrinking mysteries. Little Raisa rested her head against her father's coat and she was reaching up with one hand toward her mother. She looked like her father. Auburn hair and straight eyebrows and a pointed chin. In the background, unseen Forensics agents step quietly out of a collection bus and walk upstairs on noiseless runners.
Leonard and Mary Dronin sit at their dining table making a list of what they need to take to Lighthouse Island. They are not sure how to get there. The dining room is their own, eight feet by fourteen. They do not have to share it with another family. Raisa sits on the floor and tries to entice the cat who regards Raisa as deeply suspect. The cat turns its head quickly because it has heard someone running up the stairs.
Children do not live long in the camps and it is said to be terrible for their parents to watch them lose their hair and waste away. To bury them in a dusty potter's field. Only two hours off to dig the hole, lower the tiny wrapped body. A neighbor shoves Leonard and Mary's door open and says, They are coming. They're downstairs.
Leonard and Mary take up their daughter and run down the stairs and into the streets, handing her a coin purse and a paper.
Look for the North Star and we will always be there. You will be lonely at first but things will get better.
H
er parents were separated. In the grain fields Nadia's mother withered under the heat and the work and finally fell from the truck and was caught on the ball hitch. She was dragged turning over and over through soybean rows. The other workers yelled Stop! Stop! and banged on the truck cab roof but Mary Dronin had been dragged for half a mile and died the next day.
Her father survived a while longer. For all his faults he loved her mother more than was advisable in that kind of atmosphere. He was an impetuous man. He fought with the criminals in the barracks and after a while somebody killed him. Without her mother he had become somewhat lunatic, weeping and drinking the alcohol they distilled in the barracks.
Thin Sam was her father's younger brother, an aviator: Samuel Dronin. Out of the bedlam of an overpopulated world, despite everything, lines of continuity crackled here and there as lightning bolts out of the storm and strikes the same place once, twice, three times. Thin Sam talked with Farrell about flight, the complexity and oddity of aviation. The families lived near one another and against all the rules they established lateral connections. In the computer world James had come upon Sam's photograph in some forgotten declivity and had printed it out and placed it there in the house at Fremont Estates for her, for when she arrived, if she ever did.
He was so good, said Nadia. I want to know about him. She wiped tears from her face.
Sam was arrested at the same time. James laid his hand on a sheaf of papers smeared with bad printer ink; he opened and closed his fingers on it so his fingertips were tacky and smeared. He didn't seem to notice it. He said, Sam began to lose his sight in the camp because of malnutrition. He escaped. He managed to break into Health and Child Care's computers and traced you through your name change. He decided to live near you and look after you. James's fingers closed on her wrist and left prints. You were loved, James said. Nadia?
I know.
He was interrogated that night they arrested him for water theft and I suppose he felt that he might as well tell them the whole story. I found his interrogation transcripts.
Nadia sat with a wet face, listening to the endless rain. I loved him, she said. Where is he buried? I think somebody once tried to get a message to me about where.
It didn't say. It didn't even say how he was executed.
Nadia placed the tips of her fingers together, delicately. James, could he be alive?
A million to one, said James. Don't think of it now. We have a lot facing us. He watched her face from his bed. He said, I wish I had known him better. Sam was older; he was sure of things in a way that most people were not. And here. This is a map of Sissons Bend, where you were born.
Born? she said. Me? She reached out for the paper.
James lifted one knee and made a tent of the covers and then dropped his leg down again. Darling, you didn't get to this world in a pod, after all. His voice was low and hoarse.
It was a page printed out of a much larger map. Some old suburb of Kansas City, where the Missouri River, long extinct, flowed through a bend and on either side it seemed there had been houses that sat apart from one another as if they might have had gardens. She looked up at him. He had fallen into a restless, fevered sleep.
N
adia wept into a thin, coarse towel and splashed water onto her face and after an hour she heard a radio in the next cubicle. It was Big Radio speaking. The last of the day's readings, Female Voice One.
Light plays like a radio in the iron tree;
Green farms fear the night behind me
Where lightnings race across the western world.
She stood and walked to the blanket curtain, pacing, unable to sleep. It was by Thomas Merton.
Earth turns up with a dark flash, where my spade
Digs the lovely strangers' grave;
And poppies show like blood.
The woman I saw fleeing through the bended wheat:
I know I'll find her dead.
A
cargo helicopter dropped in a storm of debris onto a helipad. A vermilion-and-yellow sign said
DUCK LOW WE MEAN IT
. There was an alarming graphic of someone's head flying off their shoulders, ear protectors and all, surrounded by large, blooming sprays of blood. They wheeled James out, slack and semiconscious in his wheelchair. Nadia and the others ran for the open door, bent low beneath the rotors as if bowing to the God of Flight.
B
are velvet mountains of the coast came toward them like an enormous sculpture, earth giants made outside of time, running with water.
I see,
thought Nadia.
I see why.
She pressed the headset down over her hat. Why men labored for centuries to produce flying machines, constructed parachutes, leaped off cliffs with umbrellas and chased the sun in a chariot. The world swam beneath the skids. The odor of dry stone struck by downpours rose to them like the smell of a forge. They were in a hurricane of wind in a frail flying machine, Nadia and a crippled man and his despairing brother, going to some deserted island in the North Pacific. She was elated to the point of lunacy. The world tilted beneath their skids, columns of downpour paced the world.
Look! she shouted. The rain flowed in nets over the helicopter's plexiglass bubble windows. The ocean! I see the ocean!
Farrell jerked one of his headphones away from his ear. Shut up, he said.
If only they could get down now on that minute island in the grainy sea, which now appeared out of the storm clouds, and come to earth in one piece; if only James were not so ill. An island of twenty-two acres with a light tower and a tiny companion island, circled in lashing surf, just off the coast, sturdy and apparently unsinkable if only they could reach it. They were flying to a geography of the edge and she was not exactly sure where they were except that it was on the brink of the Pacific. They were in a borderland, an outer limit, one of the moons of Titan or a lost Atlantis sort of coast that had risen in ages past out of the sea bottom, cascading salt water and maybe it was rising yet. Floodwaters stained the river mouths with rotating, oily blossoms.
The instruments shone up on the faces of the pilot and Farrell, acting as copilot as best he could. Their heads were apostrophized by headsets. They were trying to keep the gale from driving the nose up, for then the full force of the wind would strike the underside and impel the helicopter up and backward and then permanently down and then everything would become permanent. Dump the nose down thirty degrees, full throttle to inch toward the island and the light tower.
Passing nine hundred, said Farrell.
Okay.
Passing seven hundred.
If only he would live and thrive in this place, the island of her dreams, the place she had seen when she could first see again in that dusty hospital and on all the television screens of her life, screen after screen after screen, inviting her to dream and hope in hot offices and toward which she walked all those perilous miles through the city. She held on to James's sleeve with an iron grip.
I am to see to it that I do not lose you
. Whitman, “To a Stranger.”
They settled down like a drifting, rocking leaf on an overgrown helicopter pad with the rotors tipping first one way and then another. The landing lights illuminated the rain into a blazing aquarium. Nadia threw out their bags and jumped. The tree branches and wiry nets of vegetation all streamed one way in whipped, cowering motions.
The Pacific beat against the island like a heavy drum sequence played over and over. The mountainous waves spoke to the land in irresistible and sinister voices. At the foot of the lighthouse the Outer Rocks were a maelstrom of white water. The lighthouse stood resolute, unmoved, like something arrested, without light. It disregarded the assaulting waves at its feet, the waves that roared, We love you.