The Signal Flame Read online

  The other paramedic stepped out of the ambulance with a small bundle of white sheets, and Chip took them from his partner along with two rolls of one-inch adhesive tape. We’ll wrap them, he said. Then we go.

  They worked fast, and when they were finished, the two paramedics lifted the white statuettes into the truck bed and Bo slammed the tailgate shut. What about the baby? he asked.

  She’s with her mother, Chip said. Keep that radio on channel nine. We’re headed to Dardan College. They’ve set up an emergency care unit there.

  There was no traffic on the highway in either direction. The state police cruiser drove escort with its lights on, and the ambulance followed, the sound of its siren muffled and hollow in the rain. Bo hooked a dry rag over the gun on the rack in the cab so that he could not see into the bed through the mirror, and he gave the ambulance fifty feet. As they passed over the bridge at the first set of traffic lights on the outskirts of town, Bo thought he could feel the road move. Pools of rain grew on the asphalt and exploded when the ambulance drove through them. At the top of the next rise, he could see Dardan Center, the ground appearing to move like a sheen of mercury, and he realized that it was not ground but water. A growing sea without visible crest or wave, Dardan appearing to shrink as they sped into that sea. Sidewalks. Curbs. Everything at the edges disappearing beneath a brown and swirling cover as it erased all discernible terrain.

  The police cruiser was the first in, stalled, and was swept aside. The ambulance slowed and drifted right and scraped along a telephone pole until the mirror caught and held. Bo steered to avoid it but felt his truck being pushed in the same direction and then lifted, so that he was surging backward into a speed-limit sign that hooked his front bumper. He watched Chip open the driver-side door of the ambulance, step out into water up to his thighs, lose his footing, then hug his way along the vehicle to the back. Bo climbed out of the pickup and stood on the edge of the floorboard, hoisted himself onto the roof, and dropped down into the bed. He could see an outboard-powered johnboat with two men in it zigzagging down Main Street as the current sped its progress toward them. Bo felt the pickup shift and list against the sign as the water ran faster, and the rear end began to sway back and forth like a trout’s tail in a stream. Still he would not look down. He watched as the boat pulled even with the ambulance and the paramedics slid Ruth out on a stretcher and onto the thwarts, and the man at the tiller shouted, There’s another one right behind me!

  And there was. With two men in it. It raced past Bo and swung around and pushed up against the truck, and the man in the bow grabbed the bumper and dropped the tailgate just as the ambulance that was caught on the telephone pole in front of them slipped and crashed hard into the front grille of the pickup. The truck shook, and the man at the bow of the johnboat could not hold on. Bo dropped to his knees and watched as the bodies he had been carrying slipped into the water. He stood, ran the length of the bed, and jumped in after them.

  His feet hit bottom, but the current was fast and he could not stand against it. He struggled to keep his head above-water, and he could just see the bodies as they canted on the surface and began to sink. Then he closed his eyes and dived, grabbing at whatever lay in front of him as he swam, until he felt a patch of something tear in his hands. He reached with his other hand and pulled the body in close by the head until he hugged the entire length of the corpse he knew was Paul Younger by the feel of the unshaved jaw. He kicked to the surface and spat.

  Don’t let go! he heard a voice from the boat holler. It came toward him and swung around so that water sloshed over its sides. The man in the bow threw a life ring, and Bo had to take two hard strokes with a free hand to grab it. They hauled him over the gunwale first, then tried to lift the body but left it knocking against the side of the boat.

  There’s one more, Bo said.

  The man at the tiller shook his head. There’s no time. They’ll find it. Help me with this one.

  The boat turned hard, and Bo and the man reached into the water together and rolled the body onto the deck. The helmsman waited until the bowman yelled, Go!, and the boat throttled up and rode through that brown sea toward the only stretch of dry hillside visible in the town.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  BO SLEPT FOR A FEW fitful hours on a couch in the basement of Alumnae Hall at the college and woke to the sound of a Chinook thumping overhead. He sat up and turned on an AM transistor radio he had found and listened to the news, until the sound got lower and lower and then there was no sound at all. He pulled off the back and took out the nine-volt battery, held it to his tongue, and felt the weak pulse of voltage. He put it down on the armrest of the couch and walked out into the hall.

  A clock said four-thirty. He passed a line of empty gurneys and went up a flight of stairs to the ground level. He saw a woman with a clipboard walking ahead of him, and he followed her until she turned and stared him down. She had on green scrubs and blue jeans. A small silver Saint Francis medal on a chain sat in the open V of her shirt. Bo stammered and asked if he could see Ruth Younger, who had come in after a traffic accident.

  Family? she asked.

  No. I found the car and helped bring her in.

  The woman did not check any papers or pick up a telephone or even nod. The Younger woman was airlifted to the VA hospital, she said. They’re taking critical cases up there.

  He turned to go, then turned back. There was a baby who came in. It had died. Do you know where they might have put her?

  The woman shook her head. There’s no morgue here, she said. Not yet.

  Bo walked outside. Rain was still falling, the wind gusting hard. He set off across a lawn, and by the time he reached the middle of it his face and clothes were soaked, but he put his head down and walked on, moving in the direction of a row of tall pines toward a thin white cross that he knew was the college chapel. He remembered coming here as a boy with his mother to see a sister of mercy whom Hannah helped by translating the letters of a priest hiding in Czechoslovakia. Bo would sit in the sisters’ dining room and drink hot cocoa while Hannah took that week’s correspondence and they spoke of the weather, Europe after the war, and the fruit trees back at the farm. That was all he knew of the campus that should have been quiet in June but was buzzing with trucks and ambulances, then the loud and lumbering sound of another helicopter dropping out of the sky onto the big lawn.

  As he angled toward the yellow-brick and glass-fronted building, he saw Father Rovnávaha’s Scout drive through the archway of the college entrance and take a right turn onto the road along which Bo was walking. It occurred to him that the priest came to say Mass for the sisters on Friday afternoons at five-fifteen. So it’s Friday still, he thought, and Rovnávaha braked to a stop and jumped out of the truck, ran over to Bo on the sidewalk, and embraced him, whispering, Jesus, Bo. Jesus, I’m so happy to see you.

  Bo put his arms around the priest below the shoulders as if hugging a giant. He felt the dry back of the man’s jacket with his hands and said, She’s gone, Father. My brother’s girl is gone.

  The priest thought he meant Ruth and held Bo at arm’s length and pushed the wet hair out of his eyes and said, She’s gone to a hospital. They’ll do all they can.

  Bo shook his head and dropped to the ground and did not say another word. Rovnávaha sat down on the ground with him, leaned back against the rear tire of the truck, and hugged him as close as he could, as close as he would if it were his own son in his arms whom he had found and rescued from the rising waters of a flood.

  After Mass and dinner in the refectory of the convent, the mother superior insisted Bo use her phone to call his mother, and he sat in the nun’s office, walls adorned with nothing but a crucifix, and he studied the titles of books on her shelf before he dialed the number at the house and told his mother where he was and that he was all right. She asked about Ruth. He was silent for one moment too long, and she said, Bo?

  There was an accident. She’s not good, Mom. I can’
t tell you about it now.

  He hung up and went back out into the refectory. The sister gave him a hot tea, and he sipped at it and listened to her and the priest talk until Rovnávaha said it was time he got Bo home, and they went outside and climbed into the Scout.

  They drove west, away from town, past the cemetery, and into the mountains on two-lane roads that came back around to the road that skirted the Vinich land, the only way they could get to the farm until the waters receded.

  After a while Rovnávaha said to him, Everyone seems to have seen you, Bo, but no one knew where you were. You even had a few cops after you, from what I heard.

  The priest kept looking between his passenger and the road, but Bo just nodded and turned to look out the window, his eyes opening and closing on the countryside. Some improbable farmer was in his field on a tractor under the leaden sky. Bo thought again of the days when his grandfather used to drive him around like this, when Bo was younger, and he remembered a story Jozef told him about purchasing his first truck, going out for a little spin at nine o’clock in the morning and coming back at nine o’clock at night, he loved it so much.

  The evening air was warm and thick, the rain still steady, but Bo rolled down the window and hooked his elbow on the door and let his arm dangle and rise in the slipstream. He stared at the mountains, the creeks, and the pastures, and sniffed on the breeze the smell of wet and manure. Like his grandfather, he had come to know every field, stand of forest, body of water, and mountain knoll that made up this landscape through which they passed, and he heard Jozef say, When I left Pastvina, I came to where I was reminded of it the most, the time before the war, a time when I had a father and a brother and I knew peace, and death was, for a time, at least, a thing distant, and I believed that all things were possible and unbound and worth fighting for, even when I knew it wouldn’t last forever. Bo thought of Sam. He wondered if there would come a time when they, too, old men around a table in the house, would tell stories to each other, to their sons or grandsons, stories of what they had fought for as younger men, what secrets they had held, until the scared eyes of Ruth clutching her baby rose to him, and he shook the vision from his sight so hard that he flinched.

  Rovnávaha said, Bo.

  He turned from the window and looked at the priest.

  I called the chaplain at the VA as soon as I heard. He saw her come in. She’s not giving up.

  She won’t, Bo said.

  They took Paul and the baby to a funeral home out on 309. Not much else they could do.

  Bo shook the rain from his hand, rolled up the window, and rested his head against the glass. He stared out at the steep hill they were skirting, the house and barn on that hill in the distance telling him where they were and what he had yet to do. Rovnávaha stopped where the pavement stopped, got out and turned the hubs, then jumped back inside and shifted the Scout into four high and turned onto the logging road. They passed through the game lands and climbed the escarpment and came back out onto Vinich land, and they followed the back road right to the bottom of the hill that led up to the farm, where Hannah was waiting for them on the porch.

  Bo remained in his room until Sunday morning. When he came down to breakfast, Hannah was cooking bacon and eggs. She asked him how he felt and he said, Like I was drowned twice and the second time wasn’t good enough, so they had to drown me again just to make sure.

  Well, you missed a whole day. Lots of news about the flood. Nixon declared Wilkes-Barre a disaster area. Rain’s supposed to clear out today.

  He asked if she had heard anything else about Ruth, but she said she had not. Father Rovnávaha told me everything, Bo. I’m sorry. Folks are talking about you. Someone from the Dardan Post called.

  He sat down without speaking and she put a cup of coffee in front of him.

  I still keep seeing her, he said.

  Ruth?

  The baby. I never felt so weak in my life, knowing there was nothing I could do.

  Hannah sat down and touched his arm and said, You did more than anyone could have. Or would.

  On Monday he moved a cot and food out to the mill in his mother’s car and stayed there, since it took so long for him to drive the back way through the mountains from the farm, and on Tuesday morning a tow truck pulled his pickup into the yard. The driver unhooked it and told Bo he had orders from the Dardan police to deliver it there. Inside on the driver’s seat was a note that said, We all heard what you did for the Younger girl. I told them to tow this to the mill. We’ve got your shotgun at the station. Jimmy Kozick.

  Bo called Rovnávaha every day that week to ask if the priest had heard anything from his chaplain friend, and on Thursday afternoon at five o’clock the phone in the trailer office rang. Bo picked it up and it was the priest. He had heard from Father Romanelli that Ruth had woken up, and although she was weak, she was out of danger. He asked Bo if he wanted to see her.

  In what? Bo asked. That helicopter you got parked behind the rectory?

  How long does it take you to drive to the college from the mill? the priest said.

  In Hannah’s Dart? No more than fifteen. If I wake up before the National Guard.

  Let me see what I can do. I’m going to have to pull strings thick as rope, but I’ve got an idea of who to call. You just be ready tomorrow.

  Bo woke at five the next morning, pink sky visible through the open blinds. He rubbed his eyes and rose from the couch, turned on a desk lamp, and took a sip of water from a canteen. The rest he poured into the coffee percolator, then scooped grounds into the basket and plugged it in and sat down and began to go over the work orders that had arrived before the flood.

  At six-forty-five the phone rang. It was Rovnávaha.

  It’s now, Bo, he said. I’m at the college. Head to the back lot. They’ll give you fifteen minutes, like you said, then they’re lifting off with or without you.

  Bo was there in ten. He parked the car and ran toward a Huey that had a red cross painted on the side and nose below the cockpit, and UNITED STATES ARMY on the tail boom. He could hear the high-pitched whine of the engine powering up, the two rotor blades spinning at a medium lop, Rovnávaha and the crew chief waiting at the open door. Bo approached and put his head down, and the crew chief put his hand on Bo’s shoulder and directed him onto a bench seat and yelled, Buckle up! Rovnávaha sat down next to him. The chief spoke into a headset on his flight helmet and closed the door, and Bo could hear the engine revs climb, the rotors sounding like a tribe of angry swordsmen trying to come at them two at a time from the top. Then the fast whup-whup of the blades and the whine of the engine became one continuous, punctuating drone, and the helicopter shook with that beat as it slipped sideways and tilted forward and lifted off from the field in the direction of Dardan Center. Bo felt like his body might split in two and remain buckled in the canvas seat, but he looked down at the highway to his left and tried to pick out landmarks he might recognize in the morning play of shadows and light. Sam had tried to describe this once, his first trip on a marine helo in the jungles near the DMZ, the noise and shaking, the canopy of forest rushing by no closer (it seemed) than arm’s length, until they gained some altitude and it resembled a sea of green leaves from horizon to horizon, and the sheer impenetrable distance of it made him wonder if they would fly above its surface until they were swallowed up in that sea, never to be found.

  When the helicopter banked right to follow the course of the highway through the pass, the sun rolled into Bo’s eyes with a glare like a knife so that he had to look away and down at the floor. He glanced at Rovnávaha, who had his thumbs hooked into the chest straps of the seat belt and his eyes closed, and Bo wondered how the priest had made this happen. How he could summon the military in the midst of a catastrophe to do what he called simply the will of the Lord.

  There was another medic inside the helicopter and two people strapped into stretchers placed symmetrically on the floor behind where Bo and Rovnávaha sat. The crew chief knelt before one of the str
etchers and flicked the IV tube with his finger, then swung around and sat down across from Bo. TUCKER was stenciled on a nameplate over his left breast, and he shouted to Bo above the engine roar.

  Padre tells me your brother’s a marine!

  Bo nodded.

  Still in-country?

  Bo nodded again.

  Late for marines to be in ’Nam. Where is he?

  Missing! Bo yelled.

  The man looked at Rovnávaha, who still sat with his eyes closed, asleep, for all anyone knew, and he shook his head and looked out the right side of the helicopter and pointed, and Bo could see the city of Wilkes-Barre as though frozen in a mold.

  There were four people in white coats waiting for them as the helicopter landed. Tucker and the other medic got the stretchers off and handed them over to the hospital personnel, then helped Bo and Rovnávaha jump out. Tucker tapped his watch and said, Thirty minutes, Padre.

  We’ll be here, Rovnávaha said, and he and Bo walked across the tarmac to an open door and down some stairs to where a 6 was painted on the wall, and they went through that door and came out into a hall and walked toward another group of doors with a hand-painted INTENSIVE CARE on them.

  Bo held the image of her in his mind from the day of the flood, the eyes vacant, the body mostly naked and white, bloodless but for the smear the child made when Ruth pressed it to her breasts. And so the thin, waiflike girl who lay in the bed amid the IVs and machines that seemed to do all but breathe for her startled him, and he stopped. He felt Rovnávaha take him by the hand and lead him to the side of the bed, where there was a chair, and Bo sat down.

  The priest moved over to the foot of the bed and said, Ruth.

  She opened her eyes.

  Bo’s here.

  She turned slowly to her left and tried to lift her hand but placed it back on the bed. Bo watched her looking at him, the eyes empty at first, then brightening, and the lips turning up slightly, and she said, Bo. You have another letter for me?