Heaven's keep

SEVENTEEN

Day Seven, Missing 144 Hours

The man from Luger Oil and Gas was named Harmon Bolt. He had enormous ears, a three-day shadow, the look of a hangover, and the smell of cigar smoke in his clothing. He was brusque and coarse, but he’d brought the magnetometer, so Cork forgave him everything. Bolt took the seat next to Rude. Cork and Stephen sat in back. Nightwind flew ahead, once again leading the way over the Absarokas. The flight out was quiet, except for Bolt, who kept hacking up junk that he spit into a dirty handkerchief. The magnetometer was stored behind Cork and Stephen. It was a yellow tube constructed of PVC, approximately four feet long and maybe two feet in circumference. Its rounded head and sleek body gave it the look of a torpedo. Bolt had explained that though he’d used it only on land, it was also designed for use underwater. “Treasure hunting and that kind of bullshit,” he said.

They were all conscious of the weather. The storm front out of the northwest was barreling through Idaho. By late afternoon it would slam into the Absarokas, and heavy snowfall was predicted.

Though neither he nor Stephen had spoken of it, Cork understood that they were no longer thinking of finding Jo alive. Over the six days since her disappearance, with all the planes in the air and the search yielding nothing, they’d gradually left that hope behind. There was no moment, no event he could look back at and say, “Here. Here, I lost hope.” There were even times when he wondered if he’d ever really had any hope. Now, staring at the back of Bolt’s head, at the greasy hair badly in need of a cut, at the ridiculously large ears, Cork realized that what he’d been reduced to was a concern that, in a way, was almost pointless: Would they find her body?

They neared Heaven’s Keep, and Cork saw that the towering wall of rock and snow and ice cast a long black shadow west across the Absarokas. It reminded him of the dark of an open grave.

Twenty minutes later, they swept through Giant’s Gate. As soon as they entered Baby’s Cradle, the chopper plummeted, caught in a sudden, powerful down current. Bolt hollered, “Oh shit!” and grabbed the passenger assist handle on the cockpit frame. Cork felt like he’d left his stomach a hundred feet above.

Rude seemed unruffled. “Going to be a little rough today,” he said.

Below them, Baby’s Cradle was a white fury. Rude gradually brought the chopper to a difficult hover a couple of feet above the surface of the snow near the northern end of the lake. Near whiteout conditions surrounded them, the result both of the wind and of the tempest caused by the chopper blades. Bolt had put a pair of snowshoes in the space between Cork and Stephen. Now Stephen passed them to him. Cork pulled the magnetometer from the storage area behind his seat and held it while Bolt zipped himself into his down parka.

“This is how it’s going to go,” Bolt said. He wasn’t wearing a flight helmet, and he shouted to be heard over the noise of the chopper. “I’m going to open the door and situate myself so that I can get these snowshoes on. Then I’m going to drop down onto the snow cover. O’Connor, you’ll hand me the magnetometer. I’m going to make two passes the length of the lake. That instrument’ll pick up any variation in the magnetic field for a thousand feet around it. If the plane’s under the ice, we’ll know. Rude, you stay above me, far enough you don’t add to this goddamn mess of blowing snow. Lose me in this shit, you son of a bitch, and I’ll kick your ass from here to Arkansas. Got that?”

“Loud and clear,” Rude said.

Bolt opened the door, and wind and snow screamed into the cockpit. He leaned down and spent a couple of minutes getting into his snowshoes, swearing a blue streak the whole time. Finally he hollered over his shoulder, “Ready with that instrument, O’Connor?”

“Ready!” Cork yelled.

Bolt tugged his mittens on and disappeared from the doorway. Cork opened his own door, and the wind struck him like a fist. He squeezed his eyes shut against the needles of ice and held out the magnetometer, which was snatched from his hands.

“Shut the door!” Rude called. “I’m taking ’er up.”

The chopper rose a couple hundred feet above the lake. Below, they could make out Bolt, a figure in a dark green parka plodding south.

“You know him well?” Cork asked.

“Not really,” Rude said. “He used to prospect for himself. He’s been working for Luger for quite a while, but like most Wyoming men, he’d rather be independent. If it came down to it, he wouldn’t think twice about telling the Luger people to go fuck themselves. Hard as a branding iron and nobody you’d want to spend time with. But it’s a hell of a thing he’s doing down there.”

They followed Bolt the length of the lake, more than a mile, which took a little over an hour. At the southern end, Bolt cut to the west a couple of hundred yards and started back north, heading into the wind. Above them, Nightwind flew a broad circle inside Baby’s Cradle. As Bolt began his long trek back through the deep snow that covered the frozen lake, Nightwind radioed a weather update. Static again prevented Cork from hearing Nightwind’s transmission. Over his shoulder, Rude said, “That storm’s moving faster than they predicted. Lame figures we’ve got at best another hour, before getting home safely becomes a serious question.”

Cork watched the small figure below, which was obscured at times by sudden blasts of white. Bent into the wind, he moved more slowly now. Fatigue and the bitter high-mountain cold were probably working on him as well. Cork knew it would take much longer for the second leg of the sweep than it had for the first.

He leaned toward Rude. “If the plane had come in from the north through Giant’s Gate and the pilot tried to land, he’d have ended up more toward the southern end of the lake, don’t you think?”

“A reasonable assumption,” Rude agreed.

“So even if Bolt doesn’t make it all the way back to the north end, he’ll still have covered the most likely area by the time we have to bring him in.”

“I’d say that’s right.”

“Then that’s the way we’ll have to play it.” Cork turned to his son, who looked troubled by the decision. “It’s that or put us all in danger, Stephen.”

“But won’t there still be a question?”

“Hardly any,” Cork said. “It’s the best we can do under the circumstances. Okay?”

Stephen stared down where Bolt struggled against the elements, and finally he gave a silent nod.

The rate of Bolt’s progress continued to deteriorate. Rude scanned the sky above Baby’s Cradle, where dirty-looking clouds were piling up against the tops of the ridges. Bolt had made it just over halfway when snow began to fall, and Rude said, “We’ve got to pull the plug.” He maneuvered the chopper to a spot a dozen yards in front of Bolt. The man came alongside and cracked the door open. He handed the magnetometer to Cork, then heaved himself in after. He turned on his seat and undid his snowshoes, which he handed to Stephen. He slammed the door, threw back the hood of his parka, spraying snow over the others, and howled, “Mother of God, it’s cold out there!”

“Did you find anything?” Cork said.

“Nada,” Bolt said. He pulled off his mittens and blew into his hands. “Christ, I can’t feel my toes.”

“There’s a thermos of coffee in back, Harmon. Help yourself.” Into his radio mic, Rude said, “We’ve got our cargo aboard and we’re heading home. Do you read me, Lame?” The chopper began to ascend, and Rude brought it to a heading that would take them out through Giant’s Gate. He shook his head in response to something that came through his headphones. “Negative. Harmon got nothing.” He listened again and said, “That’s a roger.” He turned to the others. “We’ll stay with Nightwind until we’re clear of the mountains. Make sure the Absarokas don’t swallow another aircraft.”

They continued to be pummeled as they approached the gap in the north ridge, which had grown faint behind a gauze of blowing snow. In the battle between the little chopper and the wind, it was clear to Cork which of them was Goliath, and he began to be afraid they’d waited too long to get out. He feared for his own safety, but more he feared for Stephen, whose face was drawn taut and whose dark eyes were riveted on the icy ridge dead ahead, where thick coils of snow rose up into the air like snakes on the head of Medusa.

“God fucking damn it!” Bolt yelled. “You want me to get out and lift, Rude?”

“Easy, Harmon. We’re going to make it.”

Rude swung the chopper back the way they’d come, turning in an impossibly tight radius, so that Cork’s stomach rolled. The helicopter climbed rapidly, and Rude swung it again toward Giant’s Gate. The snow was falling more heavily now, and, along with what blew off the ridge, it appeared as if a white door had slammed shut before them.

Bolt’s hand wrapped around his passenger assist handle in a death grip. “Jesus, you got any idea where we are?”

“I know exactly where we are,” Rude replied in a tight voice, and added a few moments later, “We’re through Giant’s Gate.”

They broke out of the blind of white, and Cork saw the mountains to the north, wrapped in dense clouds almost level with the chopper. Half a mile directly ahead, Nightwind’s Super Cub circled in a holding pattern.

“We’re clear, Lame,” Rude said into his mic. Then to his passengers he said, “We’re heading back.”

The flight seemed to take forever, and the silence among the men in the little chopper was profound. At one point, Rude spoke with Dewey Quinn on the radio. Quinn reported that, like every other day, the search planes had found nothing. Above them, the clouds were rushing forward, and behind them the mountains were already nearly lost. The turbulence had increased, and there were moments when the chopper bounced like a rubber ball on a storm-tossed sea. Stephen stared out the window. Cork thought about the flight through Giant’s Gate, about how afraid he’d been that they wouldn’t make it, and he thought about Jo and what it must have been like for her as the plane dropped from the sky. And he wondered, wondered deeply, wondered sadly where she’d come to rest. And he wondered if he would ever know.

They set down at the Hot Springs airfield, where Cork and Stephen helped Bolt transfer his equipment to his old pickup while Rude secured the chopper.

Bolt paused before he climbed into his cab to leave. He looked into Stephen’s eyes. “Son, I don’t know if I ought to be wishing I found something up there. But seems to me since I didn’t, maybe you still got something to hope for.”

“Thank you for trying,” Stephen said, and he shook the man’s hand.

As Bolt drove off, Lame Deer Nightwind came from where he’d momentarily parked his Super Cub. “I need to get back to my own place before the storm hits. Anything I can do, Cork, let me know.”

“You’ve already been a big help, Lame. Thanks for everything.”

Nightwind put his hand on Stephen’s shoulder. “I don’t say this to many men, but I admire everything about you, son. I wish things had turned out different.” He headed back to his plane and a few minutes later was airborne.

Rude stood in the gathering gloom of the afternoon. The first flakes began to fall, and he looked up at the sky. “Dewey’ll call off the search, at least until this passes.”

“He’ll call it off for good,” Cork said. “It’s what I’d do. Where haven’t we looked?”

Rude nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. You did everything you could. We all did.”

“You want to come over for dinner, you’re welcome to.”

“Thanks, but I think we’d like to be alone tonight.”

“Sure.” Rude reached out his hand one last time. “Take care, guys.” He got into his pickup and headed away.

Cork and Stephen stood alone at the edge of the airstrip. The snow drifted down around them like ash from a fire. It was quiet and the air was strangely still, but that would soon change. Cork could feel it. Even in the basin of the Bighorn River, where sometimes the storms didn’t blow, something big was about to hit.

“She’s gone,” Stephen said. He stared toward the mountains. “She’s really gone.”

He’d held his back straight through the whole ordeal, but now Stephen bent and began, quietly, to cry.

Cork put his arms around his son and looked toward the mountains. Up there the snow was already falling heavily, burying everything more deeply. Beneath it, the grass and flowers of the meadows would lie dormant until spring, when they would rise again. Beneath it, animals lay curled in holes and in mountain caves where they would sleep through the dark, cold months ahead, and wake in the spring. And beneath it somewhere, God alone knew where, lay Jo, who would neither wake nor rise.

“Come on, Stephen,” Cork said gently. “It’s time to go home.”