turbulence might—Well, there was no point thinking about it. He pulled his hand away from Sharla’s, helped her get into a fetal position, then curled his own head between his knees, clutching his ankles.
The remaining engines gave a sudden burst of power, and the plane heaved to the left, then lurched back on course. Pilot must have been trying to avoid that whirlwind, must have—
The wheels touched, screeched against the tarmac, seemed to hold. For several agonizing seconds they raced along the runway. Then the engines roared again and they were slowing, stopping … they had landed.
The passengers burst into applause. Then the stewardesses threw open the emergency exits and everyone scrambled to slide down the escape chutes. The crippled plane reeked of jet fuel, and when he was outside Jeff could see the clear, flammable liquid pouring from cracks in the broken right wing. He pulled Sharla along with him and they ran from the plane.
Three hundred yards away they collapsed, exhausted, on a grassy strip between two runways. Military fire engines were dousing the 707 with white foam, and all around them people milled about in a state of shock.
'Oh, Jeff,' Sharla cried, putting her arms around his neck and her face against his shoulder. 'Oh my God, I was so scared up there. I thought—I thought—'
He pried her arms loose, pushed her away, and stood up. The stark black-and-white makeup she wore was streaked with tears, her op-art dress stained from the escape chute, the smoke, the grass.
Jeff looked around, spotted one building off to the left that seemed to be a center of activity, a hive of returning ambulances and asbestos-suited emergency personnel. He started walking in that direction, leaving Sharla where she lay weeping on the ground.
'Jeff!' she screamed after him. 'You can’t leave me, not now! Not after that!'
Why not? he thought, started to say it aloud, then just kept on walking.
TEN
Jeff finished his eggs and bacon as the sun was coming up, scrubbed the dishes, and left the pan to soak. Usually he took a cup of coffee on the little porch of the steep-roofed white house, but this morning he was running late, and there was much to do.
He pulled a down jacket over his flannel shirt and stepped outside. Third week of May, but the air still had a bite to it; last frost of the year had come night before last. He nodded his respects to the rock pile where old man Smyth was buried, and strode over to one of the newly furrowed corn fields, all staked out and ready for planting. Smyth had worked this land alone, too, after he’d homesteaded it in the 1880s. Had fallen ill after some sort of accident, Jeff had been told, and nobody’d found his body for weeks. People who’d bought the place in the tax auction afterward had never planted a thing; hadn’t even kept the land, not once they’d found the small fortune in gold coins that Smyth had hidden in the Dutch oven. The old man had had some secrets of his own, it seemed.
Jeff dug the toe of his boot into the thick black topsoil where he’d be planting the first corn of the season this afternoon, the Sugar and Gold early variety. Good volcanic California soil it was, rich in minerals. He had nothing but contempt for the family that, so long ago, had let it lie fallow, had taken Sylvester Smyth’s gold and departed The Cove in search of unearned joys and comforts. Land like this demanded to be tilled, and the fresh food it would yield in return held far greater value than any coins. That was the contract, the bargain struck between man and earth ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia. To abandon good land, Jeff believed, was to break an ancient and almost holy bond.
He walked on past the plot where the asparagus would soon be coming up; he’d get at least another two years out of that original planting, and it was time now for the first of the plants' twice-yearly feedings. The late spring frosts didn’t seem to bother them at all; Jeff thought it made the stalks crisper. He knelt beside the spring that ran through his property, scooped a double handful of the icy mountain water to his mouth. As he drank, a pair of German brown trout swam past. If he finished planting the corn and feeding the asparagus before nightfall, he decided, he’d bring a rod down and catch some dinner.
The sun continued to climb the sky, lighting the tips of the pines on the humped rise of Hogback Mountain to the southwest. Jeff followed the meandering uphill path of the spring, pausing every twenty feet or so to clean it of accumulated debris, opening the clogged collection boxes and pipes on which his crops depended for irrigation.
He’d bought the place nine years ago, a few weeks after the near-disaster on the plane to Honolulu. He hadn’t seen Sharla since that day beside the smoky runway. Hadn’t seen much of anybody since that summer, truth to tell.
His closest full-time neighbor was at Turtle Pond, three miles east along an old wagon road. Only way into or out of Jeff s place was by way of a switchback road that was often washed away. From November through January the snows and rains and mud made the passage over Marble Creek all but impossible; he’d learned to stockpile well for the winter.
Rest of the year he kept to himself almost as much. Every week °r so he’d drive into the little town of Montgomery Creek, buy some things at the store there or get his pickup serviced at the two-pump Shell station. He’d quit drinking, by and large, but if the harvest was a good one he might celebrate with a beer and dinner at the Forked Horn or the Hillcrest Lodge. An amiable family, the Mazzinis, owned the Forked Horn, and the wife, Eleanor, ran a branch of the Shasta County library out of their big, rambling house in town. Jeff would chat with one or the other of them sometimes, about this and that. Their son Joe was a couple of years younger than Jeff, and his intelligent curiosity about the outside world seemed to know no bounds. Yet none of the family ever pried; they never dug too deeply into why Jeff had sought such an isolated life for himself. Joe had helped him set up a shortwave rig out at The Cove, and the radio had become Jeff’s only contact with civilization, aside from his occasional talks with the Mazzinis.
This little corner of northern California was populated mostly by lumberjacks and Indians, neither of whom Jeff had any contact with. A smattering of hippies and other back-to-the-land types had come in shortly after he’d moved here, but most of them hadn’t stayed long. Working the land was harder than they’d expected, and it took more than marijuana crops to keep a place going.
The worst part of these years, he supposed, was the celibacy, though not for the reasons he would have imagined. He’d damn near OD’d on sex for the sake of sex during his time with Sharla and Mireille.
It had seemed, for a while, that he could live perfectly well without sexual contact, and he’d been surprised at how easy it was to kill that part of himself. But he’d soon discovered, much to his unpleasant surprise, just how strong was his need for simple human touch. The loss of that tore at him daily, troubled him both waking and sleeping. Sometimes he would dream of a woman simply touching his cheek, or of himself holding her head against his chest. The woman in these dreams might be Judy or Linda, even Sharla; more often she was faceless, an abstraction of femininity.
Always, he would awake from those dreams with an overpowering sadness and the familiar knowledge that this deprivation could not be alleviated without the risk of further betrayal and the eventual certainty of absolute erasure. Both pains were too extreme to face again. Better, it seemed, just to let his soul die slowly, bit by lonely bit.
His back was starting to ache from all the stooping he’d done to clear the irrigation system, so he sat down beside the spring. Far to the north, beyond the Flatwoods and halfway to Oregon, the astonishing white cone of Mount Shasta dominated the horizon like the sleeping god the Indians around here had once supposed it to be.
He took a chew of beef jerky, washed it down with another cold sip of spring water. This new home of his was right on the spine of the volatile Cascade range, dead center between Mount Lassen and Mount Shasta. North of there were the ruins of the massive prehistoric volcano that had collapsed to form Crater Lake, and then came Mount Hood, and on up into Washington State, Mount St. Helen’s
