Send Down the Rain(9)

Rarely does a caller leave Suzy speechless, but I’d just succeeded. She tried to recover. Her chair squeaked, suggesting she’d sat up to look at her producer for some help. Like an actor on Broadway, she stayed in character no matter what a caller said. It was how she protected herself from the pain she served on her radio waves. Having undressed me, Suzy peeled off her mask and spoke to me. Just to me. “Jo-Jo, I’m sorry. I knew I shouldn’t have asked that one.”

I let her off easy. “Long time ago. Besides . . . the boy she walked the beach with was not the man who came home.”

Empowered, Suzy strapped her mask back on. “Sergeant?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She spoke to all of us. It’s why we listened. She spoke the words we’d never heard. “Thank you.”

I studied my hand, making and remaking a fist. “If you knew my story, you’d have trouble saying that.”

She chuckled. “I’m not talking about who you were and what you did when we sent you halfway around the world.”

I matched her chuckle. “I’m not either.”

Suzy’s voice reached through the phone and kissed the ears of every man listening: “Stay dry, Sergeant.”

She switched back into her radio voice. “This is for every sergeant who ever fell in love, but signed up anyway.”

I hung up as CCR burst into my anthem. The sound took me back to the beach and the stars and the feel of that tender and trusting hand inside mine.

It’d been a long time since I’d felt fortunate.





5

I snoozed until after midnight, when Rosco appeared next to my bed, his ears trained toward the window. I’d heard it too. I lay in the dark listening. A noise well beyond the cabin echoed faintly. Rosco’s ears were pointed toward the open window. There it was again. This time the hair stood on his back.

I tied on my boots, pulled on my coat, and grabbed my backpack. Live in the mountains long enough and you never walk out the door without a pack. It contained the just-in-case stuff I might need if something went wrong: a hundred meters of rope, compass, emergency blanket, flares, matches, butane lighter, paracord, knife, a second knife, warm hat, first-aid kit, and a dozen other things I might need.

For a minute we stood outside, snow stinging my face, listening. Rosco pressed against my side. Up here the acoustics can lie to you. Between the wind and the granite, voices carry. Out of the darkness, we heard something that sounded like a muffled scream. More like the second half of an echo. There it was again. Louder. And longer.

Rosco stood motionless, staring northeast toward the ridgeline above us, his muscles taut as a wound spring. I tapped him on top of the head, and he tore up the hillside and into the tree line, his paws flinging snow as he ran. I followed, slipping with each step. Four minutes later he was back. He stood thirty yards in front of me and spun in a circle. Then a second time. When I stepped toward him, he disappeared again into the trees. I fast-jogged up an old logging road toward a saddle between two six-thousandfoot peaks where two backpacking trails intersected at a waterfall, a popular summer hiking destination. No one really swam up here. At least not for more than a few seconds at a time. Even in summer, the water temperature never rose above thirty-six degrees. Right now it hovered in the upper twenties. The sound was growing closer. Someone was frantically calling a name.

I sprinted onto the saddle and let my eyes adjust to the snow and poor light. The attraction to this area of the trail was Big Tom’s Fall. Big Tom was the unlucky fellow who happened upon the dead body of Elisha Mitchell, after whom the mountain is named, back in the 1800s. Big Tom’s Fall is a sixty-meter cascading section of rock, steep enough and slippery enough to ride down on your butt before it empties into a small pool of water. The Fall drops off at about a seventy-degree angle. Too steep to walk unaided but doable with the right length of rope and sure footing.

I reached the top of Big Tom’s to find two people, one larger than the other, leaning over the precipice, screaming down into the water. If they leaned any farther they’d join whoever was down there. Coming out of the bottom were the muffled cries of what sounded like a young girl. To the wide-eyed amazement of the two at the top, Rosco and I ran up alongside them and stared down. It took me about half a second to realize that as this woman and her two children had been walking the knife’s edge between Big Tom Mountain and Craig Mountain, the little girl slipped. Their problem was threefold: snow, ice, and no rope. The little girl below wasn’t moving, and her head was barely sticking above water. Either she couldn’t swim or the cold wouldn’t let her.

I clicked the carabiner tied to the end of my rope to the steel anchor sunk into the rock by the forestry department. I tossed the rope down, peeled off my coat, and began rappelling backward. Sure purchase was nonexistent, so I slid my way down. At the bottom, unable to slow my descent, I splashed into the waist-deep water. The shock took my breath away, momentarily paralyzing me. Rosco appeared out of a side trail that’s longer and only accessible by a cougar or a cocky dog. He jumped into the water and swam toward the girl. I forced my body to start moving and walked sideways across the flow of the water. I grabbed the girl, who clutched my back with a whimper, and we made our way back to the rope while Rosco climbed out, shook, and disappeared the way he’d come.

I pulled the girl around in front of me, draped her arms around my neck so she was hugging me, and said, “Hold tight.” She was nearly limp as a Raggedy Ann doll and crying, which I took as a good sign. Trying to ignore the growing loss of gross motor movement in my hands, I began pulling us up, fist over fist. Step by slippery step. I used my elbows and forearms to hold the girl close to me. Above me I could hear Rosco barking and the woman screaming. Twice my hands slipped, causing my feet to fly out from beneath me, slamming me against the rock, where my forearms took the brunt of the blow while I tried to protect the child.