Raising his voice against the howl of the wind, Dale said, “Hang on,” and turned his attention to the wooden stake in his forearm. It was attached at its base to a broken stud that still had a chunk of bathroom wall attached to it, the stud trapped between the edge of the tub and the wreckage of the plane. A thick sliver had splintered partway off and speared his arm, driving it against the inside wall of the tub, blood dripping listlessly from it now to stain the remaining water pink. The sucker was in there pretty good and it wasn’t until Dale got his knee against it that he was able to rip the spike away from the stud. It looked like it should hurt like hell, but his last hit of smack had taken care of that.
With his injured arm free now, Dale slithered first his good arm, then his head and shoulder up through that oblong of space, all he could fit through the jagged hole. He had to squint through gusts of snow and plaster dust, but it was a hell of a scene, the aircraft itself resting maybe a foot in front of him, having plowed through the picture window out there, then through the bathroom wall before coming to rest with its nose crumpled against the tiled wall to his left. The fuselage was mostly intact, but canted away from him so that Dale could just see the bottom edge of the window in the pilot’s door.
Incredibly, the collapsible dinner tray with Daytona Beach, Florida painted on it was still standing next to the tub, its contents undisturbed.
Dale said, “Holy fuck,” and that voice came again, a man’s voice, clearer now: “Is somebody there?” and Dale said, “Yeah,” feeling a dull wonder when he realized the voice was coming from inside the plane. He said, “You’re alive, I can’t believe it,” and the guy said, “That makes two of us,” and told Dale his name.
Dale said, “Pleased to meet you, Mister Stokes,” and blacked out for a while.
––––––––
Mandy sat at her desk with the office phone pressed to her ear, shifting impatiently, wincing at the occasional cramp in her belly. Steve had crept in a few moments earlier and stood mutely behind her now, his pointy birthday hat in his hand, the party still going strong in the other room.
After failing to reestablish contact with Tom, Mandy had called Search and Rescue in Trenton. She’d started to explain the situation to the guy who answered, but the bozo said, “One moment please,” like she was ordering take-out, and put her on hold. That’s where she was now, listening to the drone of an FM station, the minutes since she’d last heard Tom’s voice adding up with excruciating insistence.
Now Steve said, “Mom,” in his tiniest voice and Mandy almost jumped out of her skin. Her reaction startled him and he cried out, and Mandy shifted in her chair to face him, seeing tears standing in the poor kid’s eyes. Doing her best to smile, she told him she was sorry, he was her little Ninja and she hadn’t realized he was there.
Steve tried to return his mother’s thin smile, but the tears got away on him and he crawled up onto her lap, his weight against her pregnant abdomen producing a deep spike of pain. Mandy thought,
Please God, not now
, and adjusted the boy’s position, shifting him off her belly...and felt his tears spill warm on her arm. She said, “Shh, baby, shh,” and stroked his silky hair. “Your daddy’s going to be just fine.”
Fran came into the room then, the party noise swelling behind her as the door swung all the way open. “Steve?” she said. “It’s piñata time. Birthday boy gets first swing.”
Hiding his face, Steve clutched his mother’s arm and Mandy said, “He’s okay here with me, Fran. Thanks.”
Fran said, “Any news?” and Mandy’s face turned beet red, fear and fury finally breaking loose in her. “God damn Search and Rescue’s got me on hold,” she said, almost shouting the words. “Can you believe it? My husband’s missing and they’ve got me listening to Gino fucking
Vanelli
.”
Steve started sobbing quietly.
Barely aware of Fran and her son now, Mandy said, “Come on, come
on
,” into the phone, her free hand clutching the bulge of her abdomen as if to keep it from bursting.
––––––––
Dale heard the guy in the plane say, “Are you still there?” but didn’t reply, his foggy mind needing a few more seconds to register again what had happened here. As it dawned on him he said, “Holy
fuck
,” and realized he was freezing, the tub completely drained now, winter air finding him through every nook and cranny in the mound of wreckage that surrounded him.
The guy, Tom Stokes, said, “Listen, man, can you give me a hand up here? I’m stuck.”
Dale said, “
You’re
stuck. Take a gander at me.”
“Angle’s bad, can’t see...”
“Then let me paint you a picture. I’m sitting in the bathtub down here, and you’re fucking
air
plane is parked right in my lap.”
Dale heard the guy giggle, then heard him say,” We’re in the bathtub together?” and Dale said, “You think it’s funny?” Tom Stokes said, “I don’t even know your name,” and his giggle escalated into deranged laughter.
Dale said, “Asshole.”
Then both men were laughing like lunatics, both of them caught in this giddy expression of relief, of death narrowly avoided.
When it settled enough that he could speak, Dale said, “The name’s Dale, and when I said you were in the tub with me I wasn’t kidding. I was taking a bath when you came through the wall. I’m butt naked down here, frozen cock stiff, I nearly drowned and I’m completely trapped by all this horseshit. Jesus
Christ
it’s cold.”
Tom said, “Where are you exactly?”
Dale said, “Right below you,” and banged his fist against the foot of the Cessna’s door.
“Okay, hold on.”
Dale could hear the guy rummaging around up there now, looking for something. Then Tom said, “Cover your eyes. I’m gonna bust out the rest of this window and hand something to you.”
Dale said, “Gimme a sec,” and slipped down into the tub, his arm really starting to throb now. He looked at it in the poor light, the stake itself about as thick as his thumb, tapering to a point that was tenting the skin on the opposite side of his arm.
Fighting the urge to puke, Dale said, “Okay,” and closed his eyes, less to protect them from flying glass than to stop himself from looking at his arm. He heard the glass break out there, a few shards of it raining down into his wet hair, then wiggled his good arm and head back up through the hole, thinking he was going to have to do something about that wooden spike. He glanced at the hit waiting for him on the dinner tray and knew what he would do.
Then Tom said, “Here you go,” and a lime green, capsule-shaped bag came through the window. It took Dale a moment to realize it was a sleeping bag in its storage sack and he reached for it with trembling fingers, snagging one of the dangling tie strings at the limit of his reach. “It’s an arctic bag,” Tom said. “Slip into that puppy you’ll be warm as toast in a jiffy.”
Dale thought,
Fucking guy’s way too cheerful
. But he eeled down into the tub again and, using his teeth as a second hand, got the sleeping bag out and wrangled his way into it, the dry fabric sticking to his wet skin. He was still freezing, but it was better.
His arm wasn’t just throbbing now, it was killing him. He reached through the hole, snagged the insulin syringe off the tray and brought it down into the tub with him. The dose he’d prepared, he realized now, was a lethal one, and maybe he would’ve done it and maybe he wouldn’t; it didn’t really matter anymore. The only thing that did matter was the howling pain in his arm.
He uncapped the syringe with his teeth and injected a safe amount into a vein on the back of his hand. The rush was instantaneous, dissolving the pain like sugar in water.
Dale grinned.
Then he braced his arm against his knees, gripped the fat end of the splinter between his teeth and pulled the fucking thing out, barely feeling it but groaning at the sheer nastiness of it.
Tom said, “Are you okay?” and Dale told him about the splinter. Tom said to hang on, he had a First Aid kit, and Dale heard him rooting around in the cockpit again. Tom said he was taking a few things out for himself, then held it out the window for Dale to catch. Dale popped out of his hole and snatched the white tin kit out of thin air, pleased with himself for the artful catch. He examined the big splinter briefly then dropped it into the tub and opened the First Aid kit on the tray. The hole in his arm was oozing blood and Dale gazed at it for a long moment, the wound reminding him of a bloody mouth. Then he got a roll of gauze out of the kit and wrapped his injured arm with it.
Above him Tom said, “There’s a bottle of Advil in there too, if you need something for the pain.”
Stoned, Dale grinned and said, “Thanks, man, I got it covered.”
* * *
While Dale dressed his wound, Tom took a fresh look at his situation. An eight-foot two-by-four had pierced the side-wall of the cockpit and come to rest diagonally across his thighs, the jagged end of it rammed into the seat-back next to him, effectively wedging him in place. His seat was adjustable, like a car seat, but because his legs were so long it was already as far back as it would go. He tried to lift the board up and shimmy free that way, but the thing was in there so tight he couldn’t even wiggle it. He struggled against it for a few seconds then gave up, panic trying to claim him again.
The worst is over
, he told himself.
Just stay calm.
He took a breath and continued his survey. The radio was toast, wires and circuit boards bristling out of it, but the onboard emergency locator transmitter should still be working. It would be just a matter of time before a rescue was initiated, if it hadn’t been already. Mandy would be on top of it by now, too, the poor thing probably worried sick.
He remembered his cell phone and dug it out of his coat pocket; but, as expected, there was no signal and the battery was almost dead. He could never remember to plug the damned thing in.
He hoped Mandy could hold off going into labor until this was over.
He thought of his son, how frightened the little guy must be, his birthday almost certainly ruined. More than anything in this instant Tom wanted to hold his son, smell his sweet smell, feel his tender warmth. Thinking of it made his eyes burn with tears. The wanting was an ache inside him.
Turning his mind to more immediate concerns, he said, “Dale, you warming up down there?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“You alone up here?”
“Till you showed up. My ex was here before that. Bitch went out louder than you came in.”
“Are you expecting anyone else?”
Dale said, “I hope not.”
“What?”
“No, not expecting anyone.”
“You don’t happen to have a phone...”
“No phone.”
“That’s okay. We’re still in good shape. Trenton Search and Rescue should’ve picked up my ELT by now.”
“Say what?”
“Emergency Locater Transmitter. Sends out a distress signal on a dedicated frequency monitored by satellite and commercial aircraft. There’s a search and rescue unit in Trenton out of the Forces Base down there. They’ll be on it in a matter of hours. Probably dispatch a helicopter. We’re as good as out of here.”
Dale said, “Peachy,” sounding foggy to Tom. Sounding stoned.
Tom said, “You okay, buddy?”
“I’m good, thanks for asking. And if it’s all the same to you, I’m gonna cop a little quiet time down here.”
A few seconds later Tom could hear the man snoring. He called out to him a couple of times, afraid the guy might be going into shock, but got no response. Knowing there was little he could do about it anyway, he retrieved the supplies he’d removed from his First Aid kit and set about cleaning and dressing the gash at his hairline.
––––––––
Within an hour of the crash of Tom Stokes’ Cessna 180, the signal from the ELT beacon in the tail of the aircraft was picked up by a passing satellite and transmitted to the Sat Center in Toronto. The specifics of approximate location and type of aircraft were then passed on to Captain Dan Tremblay of the Air and Marine Search and Rescue Unit at CFB Trenton. It was Tremblay’s job to dispatch the appropriate S&R aircraft, in this case a CC-130 Hercules, a four-engine fixed-wing turboprop that would head the search aspect of the mission, and a Bell 412 Griffon helicopter to execute the rescue.
From what Tremblay had so far been able to ascertain, the Cessna had gone down in a snow squall somewhere deep in the Kukagami region, a rugged, sprawling tourist area about 500 kilometers north of Trenton. Wild country up there, Tremblay knew, lots of lakes, rocky hills and dense forest. Summer dwellings for the most part, sparsely populated at this time of year, which meant little to no road access, especially in the more remote reaches of the region, where the Cessna was believed to have gone down. Survival in a small plane crash in terrain like that, even in good weather, was unlikely at best; but it wasn’t Tremblay’s job to gauge the odds, it was to act on what he knew. And, based on the data he’d been able to procure from the Cessna’s unique beacon signal, what he did know was that the plane was a commercial one, registered to an experienced operator who ran a small hunt-and-fish camp business in partnership with his wife, also an experienced pilot. The first thing he’d have to do was contact their business and see if anyone there could help narrow down the exact location of the aircraft.
The phone rang as he reached for it. He answered and the switchboard operator told him she had a Mrs. Mandy Stokes holding for him on line three. He punched the extension and said, “Mrs. Stokes, my name is Captain Tremblay. I was just about to call you.”
––––––––
Sumit drove the big Mercedes GL with infinite care, the highway greasy from a fresh dusting of snow. Sanj sat next to him in the passenger seat, the map Ed had drawn for them open across his knees.
Five hours into their journey now and they were headed east on Highway 17 in full darkness, Indian music coming from the vehicle’s state-of-the-art sound system. Sumit hummed along tunelessly, irritating the shit out of his brother.