back to Patrick and Mrs. Camp.
With the Invader Lights on, the crash was vividly outlined. It might have been machine guns over a period of years that had done all that damage. Metal debris, screaming victims, pieces of seats and human and tree. Immense curved plane divisions. By the reflecting pool lay a snowbank of airplane pillows.
Smoke, stinking and hideous, leaped like escaping souls from the burning wing.
Saturday: 5:47 P.M.
His feet did not move.
Patrick was stunned. This could not be how he would react in a crisis: freezing up. He tried to take a deep breath and found that even filling his lungs was no longer a simple task. He forced himself not to imitate the horrible shocky noises the old woman was making. The girl Heidi was drenched, her ski jacket coated with ice, so she glittered like a rock star on stage. He took the flashlight from her, said, “Come on,” although in fact she was already going, and then he was going, too, and once he took the first step he was fine. Action had begun.
Fear and fascination filled his veins, like some new kind of blood: a dizzying, whirling blood; he was transfused with it. A wild, clear excitement possessed him again: the adrenalin pump he’d gotten driving here: as if he were superman, could do it all, could do it forever.
In the woods where there was no fire, at least twenty people were up and walking around. Remarkably, an entire section of plane had landed rather easily. But from here, way below the house, the wrecked plane seemed horrifyingly close to the fire. The stench hit him like a blow to the head: nauseating, charred.
Patrick shouted, “Everybody who can walk, help somebody to the house! It’s about two hundred yards out of the woods and up a grassy hill. You can see it as soon as you’re out of the trees. Get in out of the rain and get warm. Help is on the way.”
A woman took off her sweater and wrapped it around somebody’s bleeding head, and then the two of them aimed for the house. A rather small man carried a similar-sized victim in his arms, like a newborn, apparently not noticing the weight. A big man in a sweatsuit and socks, no shoes at all, he must have taken them off to snooze comfortably while airborne, carried a young boy piggyback.
Patrick was able to get two people into the house very quickly. They were hardly hurt at all and used him like a conveyor belt. One was a woman who said she would make coffee, which struck Patrick as very peculiar: who would respond to a plane crash by perking coffee? The elderly woman in the pink slippers, however, was back inside, and she seemed to think that was an excellent idea. The women bustled away.
The other was a man who said he didn’t like dogs, which also seemed to Patrick to be peculiar. What did dogs have to do with anything?
He had a sense of his mind being too full; he had to think of his mind as shelves, and allow only the important things to sit on them. Coffee and dogs he could cut. Patrick went down the hill again, and it was even more slippery; the treading feet had mushed the old wet snow into a ski slope. He ended up skidding on the other side of a large plane piece.
It was crushed and mangled, like a car run over by big-wheelies at the coliseum. Nobody in there could be alive. The ripped-open end of the plane had come together like jaws clenching.
At his feet lay a person, or what had once been a person.
Patrick sucked in air to stop himself from vomiting or weeping. Get up, get going, he willed himself. Don’t think about this body, find somebody you can help.
Inches from his face hung a pair of dangling feet. Boys’ white high tops. Brand-new. Not a single scuff. As he walked away, knowing that it too was dead, the feet swung. Whoever owned them was alive, trapped in a roll of plane.
Hanging onto plane pieces for support, Patrick curled himself up and around gaping, torn metal corners to see the tiny space where the victim lay. The space was so narrow it did not seem as if
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