第19章 The First Crossing

The plan was Halleck's, and it was a good one, and everyone who heard it hated it. A school of thirty-one people cannot walk in a line. It breaks into a wave: the sure-footed at the front, the children in the middle where four adults can see them, and the slow ones at the back where nobody in the middle has to know how fast or how badly they are moving. So there would be two parties. The first would go at five in the afternoon with the eight children and the eight people over sixty and everybody who had a hand that could not grip: nineteen of them, with Aughrim, with Juna, and with Halleck. They would have four hours of light and they would be on the far side before midnight, in the wind shelter below the north head, with the creek a mile and a half away. The second party would go at seven with the twelve adults who were left, and they would be lighter and faster, and they would have no business whatsoever losing a minute, because they were going to walk down to a creek at first light and get into a boat. And Omar Hadid would stay on the peak with the radio and the battery and the drum, because somebody had to keep the record, and because forty minutes of bus battery was not going to be spent on anything but the boat. "I am going to be forty-one miles up this hill with a wind gauge and a pencil," he said, "and if anybody wants me I will be the least interesting man in this county for the next eighteen hours." Before they went, they went past the school. The two parties assembled on the roof of the school because the school roof was the last dry ground on this side of the ridge that anybody could reach without wading, and the mast was standing on it with its top section gone and the antenna wire hanging off the head in a loose loop that snapped in the wind like a rope on a drum. Forty feet of lattice with the antenna on it, two hundred yards above the ruin of everything, standing there for nothing. Juna got up to it and cut the loop free and coiled it into the coil can and gave it to Halleck, and Halleck said, without any particular tone, "We could have had it up a day early." "We could have had everything up a day early. The gym had a mast in it the whole time." She looked down the slope at the water going out of the draw. "So get that down to the creek tonight and we will have something to talk to the boat with." They went at five, and the sun was still on the saddle, and for the first mile it was almost ordinary. The trail to the saddle goes along the shoulder of the dome for a quarter mile and then turns back on itself into eleven short switchbacks up onto the bench. Halleck had done that bench once in the last three days and had thought about it ever since: a mile of open ground, flat and gravelly and dead straight, with a windbreak of stunted cypress along the seaward side that had been planted in 1911 for a reason and was now twenty feet of scrub and no more. At ten past six they got the wind. It came up the bench the way a current comes, one continuous push instead of gusts, twenty-six knots out of the southwest, and by seven o'clock it was forty-one, and it came across that mile of open ground without ever touching the ground. It went through clothing. It took the windbreak tarp off its lashings at the west end, picked up a corner, and got hold of it, and tore three grommets out of the corner and dragged six feet of canvas along the gravel before Niko's mother and a man from Fourth Street got hold of it together and got it down and got it rolled. That took eleven minutes and it cost them twenty by Halleck's watch, and Halleck said so out loud in a voice that made a nine-year-old look at him, because he had decided in the last hour that if this was going to go wrong it was going to go wrong in a way people could point at afterwards. At half past seven, two miles out, on the last of the light, Aughrim's knee went. She went down on the crest of the bench on both knees with her hands on the gravel and said nothing for ten seconds, and then she got up on one leg, and then she got up on two, and she walked another two hundred yards before she sat down on a boulder for two minutes. Nobody argued with her about it. She had taught third grade at that school for twenty-two years and there were seven children on that bench and she was going to get to the far side of it with all of them, and the only question on the table was the arithmetic of it. Two miles and a half after they left the peak they crested the saddle at eleven minutes past eight, and below them the whole of the draw lay open in the last of the light, and Juna stopped them all on the crest for four minutes, because there is a thing you do at the top of a ridge with twenty people on it and four minutes to do it in. It is the biggest thing any of them had ever seen. The valley had no water in it. The valley was a scar: a mile and a half of gravel and dead timber and the roofs of the town lying over on their sides where the surge had put them, and in the bottom of it, three hundred and fifty feet below and two miles off, the harbor was a pale grey plate with the white ring standing on it like a coin. And on the north side, below them, the country went on being country. A creek in a gravel flat. A county road coming down out of the trees in one switchback and then another. The state highway, black, twelve feet of it above everything, running east into a haze that had trees in it, and a hundred yards of guardrail catching the last of the sun. "There," Juna said. "That is where we are going. Two miles down and one mile across. Do not let anybody look at the bay." The descent was the worst ground of the whole route and it went fast, and they got into the trees at half past nine and into the shelter of the creek bank at ten to ten, and Aughrim's knee did not do it again, and one of the old men had to be carried the last quarter mile on a pack frame made of two litter poles and forty feet of cord, and that was Halleck and the man from Fourth Street on the poles and it took them forty minutes for the two hundred yards. By midnight they were on the creek, and there were nineteen of them, and Juna counted twice. Halleck had put Omar's handheld into her hand at the crest of the saddle and said, without being asked, that it was hers until somebody came back up the trail for it. He had said it the way a man hands a woman a boat plug in a parking lot. She had put it in the dry pocket against her ribs and then, at midnight, sitting on the creek bank with nineteen people asleep in a gravel flat and the water moving past her boots, she took it out and keyed it and got Omar on the first turn. "Nineteen on the ground at the creek," she said. "Nineteen and all the walking ones. What is the number on the board?" "Four-twenty-two for the first hour and thirty-one for the last," said Omar. "They went at five and a quarter and forty-one. It has not been above forty-three." "And the drum?" A pause. Long enough that she took the handset off her mouth and looked at it. "It moved again at eleven-ten," he said. "It is doing something now that it was not doing yesterday. I will explain it when there is somebody here to explain it to." "Reyes." "Go and get some sleep, Juna. You are going to want it at four." ---