The Quickest Way Home

After he had showered and changed, Howard Darrow strolled out into the back yard of his two-year-old home, into the last minutes of the Friday evening sunshine, a drink in his hand. Beyond the green perimeter of lawn and plantings the earth changed abruptly to the ancient baked tans and browns, the sand and locks and the stubborn scrub growth of the southwest.

It was at this time of day, under the same conditions of light, twice in the past week he had seen — or thought he had seen — the significant wink of a bright reflection two-thirds of the way up Snake Mountain. The parched land stretched eastward in flatness for 500 yards from his property line, then lifted into the yellowed, furrowed, time-worn hill. It was less than a thousand feet high. It looked as if some gigantic lizard of pre-history had been half buried in the desert, the snout toward the north, the tail stretching south toward the city 12 miles away. Beyond Snake Mountain was tumbled, broken land reaching in a stone silence to the mountains 30 miles to the cast.

From the day they had moved in, Howard had felt an uneasiness when he had looked toward Snake Mountain; a subtle feeling he could not pin down. Now he understood. He had understood the instant he had seen the wink of light. Habits of survival learned amid savage violence last well. Sixteen years had passed, but Snake Mountain was high ground, and not too unlike some of the Korean terrain where, on patrol, Sergeant Howard Harrow had played the deadly game of exchanging lives for information long ago.

Last Sunday evening when he had first seen it — or thought he had seen it — the intensity of his reaction had startled him. He had made the immediate estimate that the range was between eight and nine hundred yards. Sunlight reflecting from the lens of binoculars or spotting scope. Take cover while there is a chance, before they start dropping the mortar shells into the valley on those coordinates where you’ve been spotted. Twice when they had been pinned down and had worked loose too late to regain their own lines under cover of darkness, he had seen in the dawn light that blink of reflection and experienced what had followed it. But it was absurd for a minor executive in the Liberty Casualty Insurance Company to stand in his own suburban back yard with tensed muscles, papery-dry mouth and a sudden sweat on his body.

He watched the place where he thought he had seen it, and where he had seen it the second time last Wednesday evening. It was a place where some deep furrows of erosion met, a little south of due cast from where he stood. He looked south toward the city, and he could see the Liberty Building where he had spent the last five years of his working career, a sugar cube on end, rising out of the faint haze of the heart of the city.

As he tilted his glass for the final swallow, ice sliding against his lips, he saw the wink of reflection out of the corner of his eye. It came from the same area as before. His reactions were under better control than on the other two occasions. He looked directly at the area and waited. Ten seconds later he saw another tiny, momentary point of light. Thirty seconds later he saw it again. Then the sun was gone. The temperature dropped. As he went into the house he heard the furnace start.

The Stahleys, Bert and Cathy, came over to play bridge that evening. Later, as Howard was preparing for bed, Laura said, “Is something wrong, dear?”

“Wrong? Why do you think anything is wrong?”

“It’s just... you seem so far away, somehow. It makes me keep thinking that something might be wrong at the office... or wrong with you... that you’re not telling me.”

He told her he was fine, and that everything was fine, and after he was in bed and her breathing had changed to the tempo of her sleep, he wondered how he could tell her if he wanted to tell her.

Laura, for a long time, for a year anyway, I’ve had this feeling that some terrible thing is going to happen to us. A mortal sickness for you or for me. Or some wretched thing happening to one of our girls, both so alive and vital and lovely. Deadly things do happen to lovely girls in a world that sometimes seems like a jungle. The feeling has grown until I can no longer believe in the familiar realities. I’ve begun to feel like a visitor to this life, an observer sent to wait for disaster.

Now those sunset winks of reflection, thrice observed, seemed to be confirmation. Some day this tract will be filled with houses. But now we are alone. Vulnerable. Someone is watching us. I have the unmistakable feeling of being watched. It is something you sense in the nape of your neck. If it were trash up there, a discarded beer can left by a climber, the point of light would be steady. Someone is up there. It is a malignant presence. It watches us. Some savage unbalanced boy rejected by Patty or Betts? Some crazy person looking for revenge for some claim I disallowed? A degenerate trying to learn our routines so as to be certain of finding you alone here? It has become an alien world. Someone is up there. This is the terror I knew would happen.

After he made a decision he slept, and the next morning he told Laura he was going to skip the usual golf game and go take a look at Snake Mountain. She said there was nothing there except rattlers, that it would be hot as a furnace, that he might fall, that it was a strange thing for him to decide to do. He wore boots, khaki shorts, a T-shirt, a straw golf hat. In the old musette bag slung over his shoulder he carried a plastic bottle of water, a pair of binoculars and, for the snakes he told her, his.38 revolver. She was still distressed and puzzled when he left after breakfast.

As he neared the mountain he stopped and carefully scanned the area where he had seen the reflections. He saw nothing but stone. He had the feeling he was being watched. He scanned the rounded flank of the hill and selected a possible route that angled toward the spot where the watcher lay hidden. After the first hundred feet of climb, he had to rest, astonished and disturbed at how badly out of condition he was at 37. His legs felt weak and tremulous. He gasped and wheezed audibly. Even with the dark glasses and the shade of the hat brim, the hot white glare of the sun on the rocks bothered his eyes. From the sandy feel of the dried salt on his forehead he knew he was sweating heavily but that the hot dry wind off the desert floor was evaporating it immediately. It would have been wise to bring salt tablets. It gave him a wry amusement to realize that because he played golf regularly and did some work around the yard, this sedentary executive had thought he was almost as capable as that sergeant of 16 years ago.

As he began to breathe normally once again, he fingered the softness at his waist. One lesson had been learned, at least. If this thing ended well somehow, he was going to punish this flabby body of his back into condition.

He continued, more slowly and carefully, husbanding his energies. When he rested again he estimated he was above 300 feet. The wind was stronger the higher he went, strong enough now to make a sighing sound around the edges of the rocks. He looked across the flats toward his toy house and toy green yard. He’d had to change the angle of climb so many times to find easier routes he had lost his orientation and could not tell whether his long slant would bring him out above or below the target area. Perhaps another 300 feet would bring him close.

He drank some water and continued climbing. At a difficult place, as he was moving with great care, a stone shifted under his weight. He pitched forward, fell heavily, rolled and caught himself. As he scrambled to a safer position he saw his hat swirling away in the wind. The shock of the fall made him feel nauseated. He had driven a splinter of stone into the heel of his right hand, scraped skin off the outside of his left knee, cracked the right side of his head above the car against a piece of ledge. It looked like a long, dizzy and dangerous way back down.

For a few moments he felt weakened, helpless and frightened. But, quite suddenly, as if the years had dropped away, he regained the outlook of the young sergeant, that inner sense of toughness, endurance and control. He grinned at his own clumsiness. The ones who lost their heads got taken dead. So think of the age and softness as merely a hampering thing, the same as a wound. Do what you came to do. Keep thinking.

He checked the contents of the bag. The shock had knocked both binocular prisms out of true, rendering them useless. He drained the water bottle, wedged the revolver firmly and safely into his belt, put the bag with empty bottle and broken binoculars into a cleft in the stone. He knew his leg would eventually stiffen, so it would be best to tackle the difficult part as soon as he could. Tactically, the best plan would be to go as directly toward the top as he could manage, get above the target area, then work south.

He guessed that it took him an hour to get as high as he wanted, zigzagging back and forth so as to use the best footing and concealment. Hot wind buffeted him. He came then to a deep cut which ran along the slope, invisible from below, averaging 30 feet in depth and width. He made his way into the bottom of it where the footing was reasonably good, and with the revolver in his right hand, moved southward, planning to climb to the downslope rim of the cut where he estimated he would be opposite the hiding place, and above it. He was exhausted and tense, but there was an excitement mingled with the fear. Through the years, he had remembered the fear but forgotten the excitement which came with controlling the fear and making it work for you.

The cut shallowed and became narrower as it approached a shoulder of the slope. When he looked cautiously around the corner he saw a man not 40 feet away, sprawled prone in a dark shadow of overhanging rock, looking over the downslope rim. Howard fired at the bulk of the rock 20 feet above the man. As the thin whine of ricochet was lost in the constant sound of the wind, Howard yelled, “On your feet, boy! Both hands on top of your head!”

The lean man rolled slowly onto his side, and Howard Darrow saw he was quite young. His face was wasted, badly bruised, his lips puffy and cracked. In a voice hollow and husky as the wind he said, “Help us. Oh God, please help us.”

When Howard was hallway to him, he could see the airplane another hundred feet further, down in a deeper part of the cut. It was pale green and buff, and looked like a gay and broken insect, wings smashed and twisted, thorax split wide to leak the chrome and plastic innards.

“See about Ruthie,” the boy croaked when Howard knelt beside him. The boy gestured toward the broken plane.

The girl lay on a bed of clothing taken from the nearby empty suitcases. The laceration across her forehead was deep and infected, and both wrists were grotesquely swollen and blue. Howard thought her dead, but found with the fingertips he had rubbed raw on the rock slope, a faint but steady pulse.

He went back to the boy and told him the girl was alive. The boy said, “Down draft. Cut it too close. Didn’t file a flight plan. Damn fool. Touched a wingtip and cartwheeled in. Ruthie’s been half conscious off and on. Both my ankles are smashed. Been crawling back to her at night, back here in the morning. Don’t think I would make it one more time. Last Sunday we bought it. Got to have something to drink, sir.”

“I haven’t got anything with me.”

“Most of the stuff fell out of the ship when we did, sir. Luggage, picnic basket, thermoses. There’s a six pack of soft drinks in the ship, wedged behind the pilot scat. I tried and tried. I couldn’t pull myself up there to see if maybe they didn’t all break.”

Howard climbed up the rocks and crawled out along the fuselage from the tail section. At one point his weight made it settle another three feet before it wedged itself solidly again, about eight feet above the floor of the cut.

Not one was broken. He had carried the boy down and put him near the girl. The girl groaned and stirred, drank without difficulty when he held her head up and held a plastic cup from the picnic basket to her lips.

“I’ll get off here and back down to a phone as quick as I can,” Howard said. “They’ll know how to get you two out of here fast.”

The boy was drinking in small spaced sips. He said, less huskily, “Glad you came along, sir. I did the only thing I could think of after I found out I had no way of starting a fire at night. I used the mirror from Ruthie’s purse every night when the sun got low. There was some fool in a back yard down there. I don’t think he ever saw it. I don’t think he ever lifted his head one time and looked at this mountain.”

In the early afternoon Laura Darrow finally saw her husband coming across the sand fiats toward the house. She squinted through the heat mirages and saw that he was hurrying as fast as he could. He was hatless. His bag was gone. He came on in a strange, stiff-legged, limping stride. He weaved from side to side as though drunk. She knew something was wrong, and she gave a little cry and went running to meet him, quite dreadfully certain a snake had bitten him.

But as site reached him she knew that, though something was wrong, quite a different something was right — more right than it had been in a long time. It was evident in the way he carried his head and in the blue intensity of his stare, in the air of his stare, in the air of excitement and involvement. Something had made him whole again, something up there on that ugly hummock of baked rock, and as she helped him toward the house he was too winded to explain. She was content. When he was ready he would tell her where his journey this past year had taken him, and how he had found his way back.