Crazy for the Storm

CHAPTER 5

MY BODY QUIVERED like a freight train and woke me. I was freezing cold, and the cold defied the soft fog wrapping around me. It was the same as when I woke up the first time—an impossible landscape devoid of shapes, a bottomless cloud that I seemed to tumble through. Then I saw the twisted instrument panel.

I tried to move and I was on my side in my flipped-over seat. The slope, a curtain of ice, dropped from my hip, so steep I wondered why I wasn’t sliding down it. Carefully, I turned only my head. My blond hair was stuck to a piece of metal that was torn and jagged like a giant piece of tinfoil. The frozen strands cracked as I turned.

I searched beyond the instrument panel to where the tree had been before. Foamy clouds walled it off. The foam ball washed over me and I lost my sense of up and down again.

Slowly I gained buoyancy like a fetus adapting to its milky chamber. The experience of skiing in a whiteout flickered across my mind. Ignoring the instrument panel I supposed that maybe I had hit a tree and that Dad couldn’t find me in the storm.

The fog undulated, as if breathing, and it lifted off the snow for a moment. Fifteen feet across the slope the pilot’s shoes wandered in disparate directions. His legs twisted in the snow. The hem of his shirt folded back and his belly was pale.

Am I still asleep?

I squirmed away from my seat, bumping my foot against the instrument panel. It dropped away, as if through a trapdoor, down the curtain of ice, vanishing in the fog. I wanted off this sheer face and scuttled on my hip and shoulder across the slope. I wondered if the pilot was really as mangled as he had looked. I heard another piece of the plane move, metal scraping ice, but all I could see was fog crawling upward. I was slipping too so I stopped. I rolled onto my stomach. The cold cut right through my ski-racing sweater and Vans. The weather was warm in Big Bear yesterday, I thought. Wish I had my gloves and jacket and ski hat now. I clung to the ice with everything I had: bare fingers, chin, chest, pelvis and knees. The curtain of ice climbed right past my nose into the fog, so steep I seemed on the verge of falling backward. Then fog closed around me, encapsulating me in a tiny gray pod.

I inched across the curtain, from left to right, toward where I had spotted the pilot. A few minutes later the ice softened to a hard crust and it was easier to grip. I noted this change in snow texture, this easier-to-grip section. When I got close I saw the pilot’s nose resting on the snow next to his face. The empty cavity was frozen with blood and his eyes strained open as if looking over his forehead. His brains leaked out the back of his skull.

I called for my dad.

Searching the drifts of fog swarming from all directions, I was not able to find him.

Dad. Dad! I called again.

A woman’s voice echoed then dwindled away in the wind.

I followed the voice and found Sandra above me, a dim figure veiled in fog. She was still in her seat, torn free of the body of the plane. A blast of snow obliterated her for a moment and when it cleared I could see. I was in a gully that tunneled upward into the high clouds and fog. Dad and I would call it a chute. It ran down from the peak of whatever mountain this was, and I guessed it poured into a wider slope or a canyon below. I looked downward and the concave ice slide reminded me of the Hangman’s Hollow run in Mammoth. Not for the faint of heart, my dad had said. I assumed jagged rocks, now covered in fog, bordered this chute, as in Hangman’s Hollow.

I hope it’s a short chute that ends just below that line of fog, I told myself. Not some thousand-footer.

I looked upward again to find Sandra. She was perched just to the right of an even steeper, slicker groove in the chute that ran vertically down this side of the chute. Skiers would call it a funnel. When avalanches broke from the high peak they’d wash down into this funnel, wiping away everything, leaving a polished slick of ice. That’s where I had been before I crawled away from my seat—in the funnel. The funnel sucked everything into it like a black hole. Have to stay away from it.

Sandra was crying and trembling.

Your father is dead, she said.

I glanced around and could not find him anywhere. She’s just upset, I decided. Need to find him though. Through a fresh wave of mist and wind I searched for my dad. As the mist cleared I looked back toward the funnel section. Dad’s figure appeared just above my seat, just above where I was a few minutes ago—the pitch so steep and the fog so thick that I had not seen him there crumpled behind my seat. He was hunched over. The crown of his head pressed against the back of my seat. His face between his knees.

Dad had come forward and across to my side. Did he lunge to protect me, or was he thrown?

What are we going to do, Norman? cried Sandra.

Another surge of fog swept over me, passing quickly, then I saw that Sandra’s shoulders were crooked like a wilted puppet. Her hair was tangled around a wound in her forehead and it stuck to the tacky blood clumped there. She kept talking and I turned to study my dad’s body again, trying to figure out how he ended up against my seat. His arms were limp resting on his thighs and his hands dangled over his knees.

Oh God, Norman, said Sandra.

He might just be knocked out, I said.

No. No. He’s dead.

I refused to accept this. It was impossible. Dad and I were a team, and he was Superman. Sandra wailed and her right shoulder hung too far below her collarbone and I realized that it was dislocated, like she was, and that gave me confidence that she was wrong about my dad. She put her other hand over her face, sobbing like a madwoman.