The Spirit of Steamboat Read online

  “Not yet.” I started to turn but then pointed at the gallon jug. “What’s that for?”

  She smiled. “My mouth gets dry when I get nervous, and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion I’m going to be getting nervous on this flight, so I’m taking my water and my Beemans. I’m betting I’ll finish both by the time this flight is over.” She put the gum back in her pocket, picked up the jug, and reached into the fuselage. Placing a foot on the ladder, she disappeared, her voice the only thing reaching me. “Stay here, Walt.”

  As I turned toward the administrative offices, Lucian started banging on the door of the locker. I paused long enough to ask, “What are you doing, old man?”

  He turned the dial again, tried the latch, and started over. “This is my locker—I’ve had it since after the war—and I still keep a pair of headphones, a flight bag, and a few other things in here.” He yanked on the handle, and the door opened. “8-6-45, the date we dropped the big one—knew I wouldn’t forget that.”

  I looked at him strangely, but he ignored me. “Okay, but they’ve about got that thing ready to run, so we need to shake a leg.” He glanced at me. “No pun intended.”

  He continued to gather his things and disregarded me, so I ducked in the office to take care of my last-minute business. The phone was an old rotary, and I quickly dialed 6798, my home number.

  Martha picked up on the first ring, and her voice sounded tired and sexy but maybe that was just me, wanting to go home and be in bed with her, not here with a bunch of cantankerous pilots. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the airport.”

  She sighed. “What airport?”

  “Our airport, Durant.”

  “You hate to fly. Why are you there?”

  “There was an accident up in Montana, and there’s a victim who needs to be flown down to Denver.”

  Her voice was wary. “Tonight?”

  “Yep.” I listened to the silence on the line and thought about how many nights she’d gotten calls similar to this one and how many more nights she would.

  When I’d gotten back from being a Marine investigator in Vietnam, I’d sworn I’d never make a living behind a badge again, but the only available job had been as a deputy in the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department. We needed the money, and I’d taken it. A decade and a half later, here I was, the sheriff of the county but only because Lucian Connally had wanted to retire and there was a pay raise—neither my wife nor I were completely satisfied with the situation.

  The strain in her voice was becoming more evident. “You’re going to fly down there with the medevac crew?”

  “Not exactly.” I explained the situation quickly, so that she couldn’t interrupt and inject some sanity into the conversation, but I finally finished and there was nothing more for me to say.

  She, on the other hand, was not at a loss for words. “Oh, Walt. Is it safe?”

  This is the point when, if you are given to fabrication, a deceiving man would lie, but I knew that if I were to be scattered across the high plains in pieces no bigger than pocket change, I probably needed to tell the truth, mostly. “I guess.” I glanced back through the open doorway and watched as Rick beat on the plane’s bomb-bay doors with a rubber mallet in an attempt to get them closed. “Everybody seems to think so.”

  “Walter, it’s Christmas Eve. Cady is counting on you being here in the morning.”

  “I know, I know . . .” I continued to watch as Isaac Bloomfield, one of the techs, and Julie carefully lifted the covered gurney with the portable ventilator, battery pack, and oxygen tanks into the main body of the old bomber at midships, just behind the bomb-bay doors, the grandmother following, tears on her cheeks. I cupped the receiver close to my mouth. “It’s a child; a little girl.”

  Her voice grew small. “There’s no other way?”

  “No.” I listened again to the wind in the wires. “Martha, what if it was our daughter; what if it was Cady?”

  She didn’t answer right away, but when she did, her voice had softened. “All right, you go, but you make sure you’re back here safe for Christmas. That nine-year-old daughter of yours is asleep in the next room, and she’s been attempting to read To Kill a Mockingbird and talking about law school again.”

  “So, she’ll be the greatest-legal-mind-of-our-time.” I sighed, joking. “What’d we do wrong?”

  “I blame Henry.”

  I smiled at the mention of our good friend and operator of the Red Pony Bar out near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and wished that the Bear were here now, if for no other reason than for good medicine.

  “Get going, Sheriff, I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be paying for tuition for the rest of our lives.”

  I tucked the receiver in close, imagining she could feel my proximity. “Good thing we’ve got a long road ahead of us, huh?”

  A trace of emotion slipped into her voice. “I love you.”

  I poked my head up into the fuselage and glanced back into the moderate darkness of the plane’s interior, where Isaac and the med-tech were attaching the gurney to the bracings on the floor, the IVs and battery pack hanging from the rounded ceiling of the bomber, giving the appearance that the victim had become part of the two-engine aircraft; her grandmother, covered in blankets, sat on a jump seat. I yelled to Isaac, a concentration camp survivor who had been the general medical practitioner for the greater Durant, Wyoming, region for thirtysome years, the man who had delivered Cady and took care of all of us. “You better get out of there, Doc, and head home. Sky King is getting ready to fire this baby up, so wish us luck—I think we might need it.”

  Isaac approached the hatch and kneeled down to talk to me, his heavily padded down coat bunching around his face. “Sky King?”

  “Didn’t you ever watch television, Doc?”

  “Very little.” He straightened the knit cap on his head, which read MEADOWLARK SKI RESORT, and looked me in the eye. “It looks like you get me, Walter.”

  I glanced at the young man who had flown in on the helicopter from Billings. “He’s not going?”

  “No, so I am.”

  I lowered my voice. “Isaac, are you crazy?”

  He kneeled in closer, and I could see his hands still shaking. “I am not crazy, and as a matter of fact, I’m profoundly scared.” He smiled a timid smile, one that wouldn’t hold. “She’ll need someone to check the battery pack on the ventilator and possibly change the oxygen tanks and IVs. She’ll need a doctor, Walter. I have a suspicion that she’s suffering from a pneumothorax . . .”

  I climbed up into the bomber. “English, Doc.”

  He pulled some X-rays from a thick manila envelope and held one up to the opaque light of the side-gunner window, pointing at a small mark within the girl’s chest. “Possible air trapped between the lungs where they were punctured by rib fractures.”

  I covered my face with a hand. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  He pulled out his stethoscope and listened to her breathing.

  “It could be the case, that or the whistling in her breathing is due to smoke inhalation and damage by fire and steam. Hot smoke usually burns only the pharynx, but steam can burn the airway below the glottis.”

  I peeked at him through my fingers. “So, what are we supposed to do if it’s the pneumo-whatever-it-is?”

  “Well, we should be able to drain the pressure with a regular needle from a large syringe, but in a worst-case scenario we will have to open her up and drain the air and blood from the cavity in her chest.”

  “On the plane?”

  He glanced behind him and lowered his voice. “It’s only a one- to two-centimeter incision . . . At any rate, Walter, you need medical expertise, and I am what you have.”

  I looked around. “Have we got the equipment to do all that?”

  “Hopefully . . .”

  “Hopefully?”

  “When I spoke with the surgeon, Carlton, in Billings, he was rushed, but said he had only a suspicion, that there hadn’t been
enough time to do a thorough examination and the radiologist might not have had time to review the X-rays. Carlton threw in some equipment, just in case, but I’m in hopes that we won’t have to use it.” He shook his head. “This is nothing in comparison to the burns, Walter, I can’t treat her for that in Durant. As limited as our abilities might be between here and Denver, she’ll die if we don’t take this foolish flight.”

  I tried to smile back, but mine wasn’t sticking either. “Foolish flight, huh? Maybe we should paint that on the side of old Steamboat.” I looked behind me at another bulkhead that seemed to restrict access to the front of the plane. “How do you get up to the cockpit in this thing?”

  He glanced past me. “Lucian said there is a crawlspace above the bomb bay and that there are radio headsets scattered throughout the aircraft so that the crew can stay in communication with each other.” He glanced toward the rear of the cabin where the burned child lay in the tented gurney, her grandmother having moved next to her to hold her hand once the med-tech had gotten out of the way. “Walter, I think someone needs to speak to Mrs. Oda about the situation.”

  Preoccupied with the thought of an in-flight surgical procedure, I glanced at the doc. “Who?”

  “The grandmother. Mrs. Oda.”

  I whispered. “Why is that?”

  “Because as far as I know, no one has.”

  I studied the older woman for a moment and thought about how little time we had as the technician continued to secure all the equipment so that it wouldn’t shift in flight. Bringing my mouth down to the doc’s ear, I whispered, “Didn’t she say she wanted to be here to do this?”

  “She indicated to me that she wants to save her grandchild, but I don’t think she understands the implications of what we’re doing or how dangerous it most likely will be.”

  I nodded. “You want me to level with her then?”

  He gripped my shoulder and looked at me in honest horror. “Oh, God, no.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t think she speaks that much English.” He paused and looked around. “That woman has just lost her sister, her son-in-law, and her daughter in a terrible crash, and I think she needs to be reassured. Someone needs to comfort her, Walter.”

  “I don’t speak Japanese, Doc.”

  “Does Lucian? I mean, he was in that prison camp.”

  The thought of Lucian bearing the responsibility of reassuring anybody was funny under any circumstance other than this one. “Just curse words, and I don’t think that’s going to help.”

  “Well, I think that if somebody would just communicate with her in a reassuring tone it would make her feel better, and you are the sheriff now.”

  “Boy howdy.” I took a deep breath and then patted the doc on the arm and moved past him and the med-tech toward the tiny woman crouched by her granddaughter, the girl who was possibly the only surviving member of her immediate family. “Mrs. Oda?”

  She turned her face to me as I crouched down beside her, and I was surprised at the calm there; her eyes were red-rimmed, but her features were composed as she gazed up at me. “Hai?”

  “Mrs. Oda, I just wanted to tell you that, umm . . . that if there was any other way . . .” I shot a glance over my shoulder to the doc, who raised an eyebrow. “Umm . . .” I turned back to the woman and smiled. “Mrs. Oda, this plane may not look like much, but it’s very powerful and we’ve got a top-notch pilot up there who is going to bore a hole in the sky getting your granddaughter down to Denver.” She continued to stare at me, and I felt words unready for speech falling from my mouth. “The plane, umm . . . It’s got a very lucky name—Steamboat was one of the toughest bucking horses in the history of rodeo.” She continued to look at me blankly. “He’s on all the license plates . . .” I sighed and leaned against the gurney. “Mrs. Oda, I don’t know what to say to you, other than we’re all going to do our best to get your granddaughter to Denver; I honestly don’t know if this plane is tough or lucky, but I can promise you that we’re willing to gamble everything, even our own lives, to save your granddaughter.”

  She studied me and then took my hand in hers, joining it with the other to hold the fingers of the girl; through the plastic, I looked at the child’s damaged face, half covered in bandages. If not for my rib cage, I’m pretty sure my heart would’ve fallen out onto the floor’s wire grating, but instead, as I crouched there looking at that broken face, I could feel the thing thumping in my chest.

  “Amaterasu.”

  I glanced at her and then at the child again. “Her name is Amaterasu?”

  “Hai.” She nodded and then gestured upward with her hands. “Ama . . .” She gestured again, I supposed wanting me to guess the name’s meaning.

  “Up? Ama—her name means up?”

  The older woman shook her head and gestured even farther. “Ama.”

  “The sky?” Her hands continued to push higher, gesturing past what I assumed meant the sky. “Heaven, you mean heaven?”

  She nodded, her hands dropping, and she extended an index finger pointing at the sparkle of light on the star pinned to my chest. “Terasu.”

  “Star?”

  The older woman’s fingers splayed out in a burst.

  “Glow?”

  She began nodding. “Amaterasu.”

  “Her name means shining over heaven.”

  I turned and looked at the med-tech as he finished up and stood, still avoiding looking at all of us. “Her name, Amaterasu, means shining over heaven—one of the doctors at St. Vincent, Frank Carlton, speaks some Japanese, and he said her name was of mythological derivation for the sun goddess who rules the heavens.”

  I smiled and turned back to the grandmother. “Well, speaking of good luck—there’s no way the sky can reject the sun goddess who rules the heavens.”

  She smiled back as I lifted her and sat her in the seat beside the gurney. Attaching a harness around her, I gestured that she should stay. “You’ll be safer here, and the ride is bound to get bumpy.”

  As I turned, the technician was pulling up blankets and insulated coveralls through the hatch below. I took his load and distributed the heavy clothes among the three of us. “How cold is it going to get?”

  The tech shook his head. “Cold, believe me; we were in a sealed cabin and we almost froze our asses off.” He glanced around. “This thing isn’t pressurized, is it? Does it even have heat? It’s going to get cold, according to how high he flies this thing, but I’d say fifty below zero, easy.”

  I glanced at the gurney.

  He shook his head. “She’ll be fine; we’ve got oxygen and heat keeping her at a constant. It’s you guys I’d worry about.”

  “Julie said she thinks the heat works.” I leaned in close. “C’mon, make the flight with us.”

  His mouth stiffened. “No way; I’ve been up there and this is pure trolleyism.”

  “What?”

  “Trolleyism. If you had this little girl on a track with a trolley bearing down on her and you could throw a switch that sent the car onto another track with five other people on it—would you throw that lever?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  His eyes studied the padded surface of the plane’s interior. “You’re right, because you’re not even going to be able to save the girl. You’re all going to die up there.” His eyes came back to mine. “You’re sacrificing five people’s lives for the possibility of saving one girl . . .”

  “It’s not a question of numbers, it’s a question of what you have to do, what you have to live with if you don’t.” I thought about the book in my pocket, the advice that the Ghost of Christmas Present gives Scrooge on decreasing the surplus population, and mumbled to myself: “Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless . . . [than] . . . this poor . . . child. . . .”

  “Excuse me?”

  His eyes were on mine when I reached out and clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Once we take off, I
’m sure we’ll all be fighting to save everyone’s lives on board.”

  He shook his head and looked at the ground outside the hatchway. “Your odds are lousy.”

  I threw a thumb back to the tented gurney. “C’mon, we’ve got the sun goddess who rules the heavens; what could go wrong?”

  He froze just for that instant and I thought I’d convinced him, but he shook his head some more. “No way, Sheriff; you’re on your own.” He stuck out a hand. “Good luck. You’re going to need it.”

  I took a deep breath and turned to assist the doc by pulling the coveralls over his shoulders, zipping him up, and holding his down jacket for him to crawl back into.

  Isaac watched as the young man exited the aircraft. “I am concerned with the sense of service in the younger generation.” He adjusted the thick lenses of his glasses. “As for my generation . . .” He straightened his stocking cap as he turned to regard me. “Am I correct in the assumption that Lucian has been drinking?”

  “Just enough to limber him up.”

  “Mein Gott.”

  I smiled at the doc’s tendency to revert back to his native language in times of duress. “Yours or mine?”

  He reached out and placed a hand along the riveted frame bracing, the chromate green structure looking for all the world like the inside of a rib cage. “Anyone who will answer, Walter. Anyone who will answer.”

  I moved aside so that the doc could slide by and then folded my own pair of coveralls under my arm and lowered myself through the hatch and down the short ladder. “Amen to that, Doc. Amen to that.”

  I ducked my head and watched as the airport manager slid the ladder up, closed the doors behind me, and, twisting the latch, locked them.

  Julie was standing next to him at the back hatch. “The flight plan is filed with the Sheridan Flight Service, Rick, and I entered LIFEGUARD in the remarks section since we are on a mission of an urgent medical nature and will, I’m betting, need expeditious handling—especially with this weather and this aircraft. I placed our clearance on request, but haven’t gotten it yet. Can you call them back, copy it down, and read it to us over your UNICOM before we take off? We can’t raise them on the ground with ours—we filed under the call sign Raider N4030LC.”