- Archive (3)
- Fiction: Ookpik (7)
- Ha Ha Ha (17)
- Lyin' Judy Bridger (7)
- Outdoors (70)
- Science (15)
- The News (174)
- The Vons Report (18)
- U. of Mammoth (7)
 |
By Bump Diamond
|
A Crash In The Night: An Ookpik Adventure
Chapter 1: We've Only Come For Dancing
January 4, 2006
By Buck Meadows
Yankton Rondeau rose from the hot spring and lifted his hand from the water, palm out.
“Shhh,” he said to the dog, Barco.
The man searched the moonless sky. His yellow eyes flashed in the darkness. He swiveled his ears this way and that. The December meteors—the Geminids—streaked across the sky, painting the black expanse with brushstrokes of white fire. The man could barely make out a faint glow, caused by runway lights at the Ski Town's small airport, more than a mile away.
In the distance, coyotes howled against the downslope wind off the mountains.
Yankton Rondeau, the French Canadian adventurer, thought he heard singing on the crest of the wind.
“Shhh.”
Barco, a husky from the Great North, lay among the sagebrush and bitterroot in the snow by the side of the hot pool.
“The midnight sky only seems to be beautiful, mon ami,” the man half-whispered to the dog. He spoke with a thick Québécois accent. “But tonight it is also dangerous. It is good that Juanita Clarita has chosen not to come.”
“She may come yet,” said the dog. The dog pointed his ears straight up.
“You hope too much.”
“But I am a dog, Monsieur. Dogs hope too much.”
“Shhh. I hear … what? An airplane?”
Rondeau lurched upward. He felt talons extend from his toes and dig into the soft mud of the hot spring. He felt his shoulders roll forward, then twitch backward. He pulled the talons back and winced in discomfort, then settled back into the hot spring. “Marde!” the man said to himself, using the Québéc version of the obscenity.
“Monsieur, qu'est-ce que c'est?” the dog Barco gruffed. The dog laughed in low growl whenever he called his great friend “Monsieur” in this way, and Barco gruff-chuckled now. “I thought you might fly away!”
“Shh!” the French Canadian said. “Se fermer la trappe.”
“You are all strain and alarm,” the dog said. “What is happening? Where is Juanita? When do we open the wine? Is she wearing the djeballa you sewed for her? She said she would be wearing the djeballa, Monsieur.”
“Shhh,” the man warned the dog. “This is not good magic tonight, my friend. There is much badness and sickness in spirit, and it is in the air.”
Barco raised his head.
“I hear it now,” Barco said. The dog clambered to his feet, put his nose in the air, then cocked his head to hear.
The man stood still, his eyes to the east. He said nothing. Yankton Rondeau blinked, and Barco saw a third eyelid swipe sideways across the man's eyes.
“I knew all night that something was going to happen,” the dog said in his low growl.
“Eh? Mon chien, tell me.”
The man waited for Barco to answer but he did not take his eyes from the sky.
“I heard music on the wind, Monsieur,” said the dog. “Sad voices. Sad voices singing songs in Spanish. They frightened me.”
“I also heard the voices,” the man said, “or at least I thought I did. I wasn't sure.”
“Perhaps it was because you were preoccupied with thoughts of Juanita that you did not hear them more clearly Monsieur? Juanita, naked in a hot spring, with her hair tied on top, her face lit by the stars under the meteor shower? You must admit …”
Barco growled a low laugh and licked his chops.
The drone of the airplane was uneven, as if it were spinning.
“I see it!” Yankton Rondeau said, and he lifted his other arm from the pool, water beading—then dripping—off white feathers. “He has no lights and he is out of control!”
“He's going to corkscrew into the hot creek!” Barco cried. Barco did not take his eyes off the plane, or what he thought was the plane. He never told anyone that his eyesight was as poor as his nose and ears were good. “Mon ami,” he barked, “this plane is going to crash on top of us!” Barco flexed his haunches, ready to leap.
“Hey hey hey hey!” warned Barco in his thick Québécois. “Hey hey hey hey!”
Yankton Rondeau continued to keep his yellow eyes fastened on the plane. The third eyelid swiped his eyes. From the back of the plane he saw a shadow — no, a box — drop, then tumble to the ground. The box bounced twice, an instant before the terrible thud of the airplane as it hit the ground, barely a quarter mile from the hot spring.
The man and his great friend scrambled out of the hot spring.
“Barco, you go ahead,” Yankton Rondeau said. “I will be along. I will be with the wind.”
The husky began to trot away from the hot spring and toward the wreckage of the plane.
Barco had black markings on his face and ears. Otherwise he was white. He stood 21 inches tall and weighed 52 pounds. He had a perpetual expression that was keen, friendly, interested and mischievous.
His tail had the appearance of a round brush.
His ears were of medium size, triangular in shape, close fitting and set high on his head. They were thick, well furred, slightly arched at the back, with slightly rounded tips pointing straight up. Barco, at six years of age, felt he was at the top of his game.
“Hey hey hey hey!” Barco yowled.
Barco increased the pace of his trot. His head snapped back and forth as objects and scents cascaded in front of his eyes and nose. Sage. Snow. Rabbitbrush. Pumice. Cold. More sage, and now the unmistakable scent of petrol. Barco shifted into a slow run but kept his nose in motion, up and down, across and over.
A human. A human? Steel. Leather. Sage, sage, sulfur, bitterroot, sage, sulfur, petrol, petrol, petrol, human, petrol. Barco concentrated, piling the images and scents into his sensory repertoire.
Sage, petrol, sulfur, pumice. Human.
At the same time, Yankton Rondeau climbed out of the hot spring. His right shoulder lurched forward, then his left, then both snapped back and rolled. He felt talons again extend forward from his toes. He swiveled his ears in all directions. His inspected his feathers — the feathers of the Great White Owl, the “Ookpik” of the North — to make sure that they were properly serrated. He would make no sound when flying.
Above him, the meteor showers. Behind him, the great California mountains rose from the high desert floor and ran along the sky toward the Ski Town. In front of him, the crumpled airplane, petrol leaking from its wings.
And there was something else.
The owl, circling and in full flight, saw there was a human lying on the granite rock beside the roiling hot creek, near the airplane, twisted into a barbarous position. The owl saw Barco approach the scene.
Ookpik tried to tie the scene together but he could not. The human — a woman? — seemed too far away from the plane to have been thrown from it, yet she was close enough to suggest more than a coincidence. And where was the pilot?
“Mon Dieu,” Rondeau said to himself out loud as he swooped toward the plane.
Ookpik circled, looking for the box that had dropped from the back of the aircraft. He found it easily, lying alongside a sagebrush, a metal box with its lid jarred open.
He then inspected the fuselage and the cockpit, looking for the pilot and perhaps passengers. The crackle of the cockpit radio mingled with the gurgle of leaking aviation fuel.
“Hey hey hey hey!” yelled Barco from below. “Monsieur, we have trouble! Vite, s'il vous plait! And Juanita is here!”
Juanita Clarita knelt on the granite beside the body and pointed her headlamp at the face of the human — a woman. The woman's face was partially covered where her hair had fallen over her face. Even so, Juanita could see that the woman's eyes were wide open — terrified. Juanita scanned the body, looking for what, she did not know. The woman's left hand lay open, but her right hand was clenched in a fist.
Juanita tucked the back of her winter djeballa underneath her and sat in the snow, astonished. She continued to stare at the contorted face and mouth of the woman. Suddenly it dawned on her that there was something very familiar about this woman in the snow. She leaned in closer and brushed some of the dead woman's hair away from her face.
“Oh my God!” she whispered to herself. “I know this woman. She is from the Ski Area's payroll department. Her name is Naira. Naira Delgado.”
Only then did Juanita turn her attention to the patient dog beside her.
“I am so sorry I am late, Barco,” she said, and she smoothed the fur on top of the dog's head. “What has happened here?”
Barco took a moment to admire Juanita Clarita. Small and athletic, with thick black hair that flowed over her shoulders. She looks like the ski champion that she is, Barco thought. Barco saw that she wore the winter djeballa – a kind of robe – that the master tailor, Yankton Rondeau, had made for her at his sewing machine, and that she wore it well. The pattern suggested Mexican Indian – Zapotec, from the Oaxacan highlands, like Juanita herself. Barco shook his head back into the moment and turned to the task at hand.
He panted and walked toward the body, sniffing. Barco's nostrils assimilated many things: paper, ink, other office smells. He also recognized the scent of another human on her skin — from a touch or caress or hug, Barco thought — and a chemical: methyl trichloride — chloroform. Barco also smelled panic, and a concentration of perspiration in one of the woman's hands.
“Barco, what is it?” Juanita wanted to know.
Barco nudged an arm and wrist of the body of Naira Delgado. Juanita lifted the arm of the dead woman and kissed her clenched fist. The dead woman's hand opened, as if by magic. She held two slips of paper. Juanita saw that there were numbers on one of the pieces of paper, and that the other was currency of some sort or another. On the first piece of paper she saw that the numeral 7s were crossed, in European or South American style. She counted 16 numbers, a slash, then three more numbers.
From the blackness, Yankton Rondeau approached, and Barco saw Juanita Clarita double over slightly, lose her breath, and recover — as if someone had punched her in the stomach. He also saw the man's face jump to life as he approached the woman Barco knew he loved.
“Juanita, this is not the way I thought this night would be,” the man said as soon as he arrived.
Juanita Clarita sat in the snow, but Rondeau saw that there was no magic in her eyes. Her face appeared to be blank — in shock, he wondered? — and she was hugging herself. Her snowshoes and trekking poles lay next to the body of the dead woman.
“My friend is dead,” she said to the French Canadian. Rondeau clenched his jaw and inhaled sharply, making a low whistling noise. He looked straight into her eyes.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “There was a plane crash. Did you hear it?”
“I heard the engine, then I didn't hear anything,” she said. “And you? Where have you been?”
Rondeau did not answer right away, as if he were considering her response carefully. Finally, he broke the silence. He lowered his voice and spoke in measured tones.
“I have found a box of money—a metal box, thrown or dropped from the plane. It contains bundles of notes, in Péruvian Nuevo Sols. There is a lot of it. Also, there is a folder containing dozens of pages of nothing but numbers.”
Rondeau stared at the body. “Who is she?” he said in thick Québécois French.
“Her name is Naira Delgado,” said Juanita Clarita.
“Naira. Naira,” said Rondeau, repeating the dead woman's name several times. “It is the Quechua name, no? From Péru. It is an Indian name. It means ‘Big eyes.'”
“And in the plane?” Juanita asked. “Did you find the pilot? Was the pilot killed? What happened?”
“There was no one at the scene of the crash,” Rondeau said. His French Canadian accent had the effect of linking all his American English words together into a kind of melody. “There was no pilot, no passenger, no blood, no sign of anything. It was as if the plane flew in here by itself, even though the radio was on.”
Rondeau took in the rest of the scene in front of him.
“What is that in her hand?” he asked Juanita Clarita.
“It's money,” she said, “but I don't know from where. Is it the same kind as in the metal box?”
Rondeau looked at Barco and Barco lifted his eyebrows.
“We were expecting you at the hot spring, Juanita,” said Rondeau. “We thought you were not coming.”
“Hans called me from the Ski Patrol headquarters,” she said. “He needed a ride, but I'm still not so sure why he just didn't take his own truck. Anyway, I was late because of that. When I got near the spring, I saw that you had been there, but had left in the wrong direction.
“That's when I walked up along the hot creek here, and found Naira.”
The man studied her closely in the nearly imperceptible light of the stars and meteors.
“We need to move fast and contact the sheriff,” Rondeau said.
“Should we contact Hans?” Juanita asked.
“Why would Hans Errmann be concerned with this?” Rondeau quickly answered his own question silently. It was because Hans Errmann was a god in the Ski Town. It was because Hans Errmann had more rescues, in more grueling situations, than anyone. It was because there was a statue of Errmann in front of the Ski Lodge in the manner of Apollo. It was because when the sheriff himself was stumped, he asked always for advice from the head of the Ski Town's ski patrol, Hans Errmann — Juanita Clarita's man.
“Yes, Juanita, when you get home, tell Hans what happened right away, bien sûr.”
The three friends made ready to leave, and discussed who would tell what to whom at the sheriff's office. Juanita Clarita stepped into her snowshoes and clasped them onto her feet.
“Thank you for my gift,” she said to the Québéquer. She lifted the fabric of the djebella from her chest. “It is a beautiful winter djeballa and it was such a surprise. Thank you.”
She looked back toward the body of her friend. “You said in your note that the robe was magic, Monsieur. Will it bring Naira back to life?”
“No,” said the man, “but it will prevent you from all harm.”
Juanita moved off through the darkness while the man and the dog returned to the hot spring to gather their things. Barco coughed nervously along the way.
“What is it?” the man said.
“Monsieur,” said Barco. “You must know something. Juanita did not tell you everything. There was another piece of paper in addition to the Nuevo Sol in the dead woman's hand. It was a small piece of paper, and it had numbers written on it. Juanita folded that piece of paper and tucked it into her pocket. Why do you think she did not tell you of this piece of paper?”
Yankton Rondeau looked into the dog's eyes, then looked into the distance, along the ridgeline of the magnificent range. Above, meteors fell from the sky and disappeared behind the curtain of the mountains.
“I do not know,” he said, finally. “Yet.”
In the night air, a coyote yipped and howled and a snippet of song drifted in and out, in Péruvian Spanish.
Yankton Rondeau and the dogboth strained to hear the words of the song.
“We come from Hell
Don't be scared of us
Devils! Devils!
With our evil tails and horns
We've only come for dancing.”
E-mail this page to a friend.
Enter your e-mail address and your friend's e-mail address, then click "Send Link". Your friend will receive a link to this page. Your e-mail addresses will not be saved or shared.
