Ill Wind (10 page)

The trail switched back several times then narrowed to hand-hewn steps leading into a crevice between two boulders. After more than half a century the workmanship of the CCC still held fine. Only the lips of the steps had been fortified with pale scabs of modern concrete.

The stairway, just wide enough to admit people single file, was choked with tourists who’d started down before Claude Beavens had been sent to stop traffic.

“Gonna have to ask you folks to go on back up,” Drew called over the low-grade chatter. The hips of the better endowed scraped a patter of sand from the soft rock as they shifted in the confining space. Faces displayed the sheeplike vacancy of vacationers who’ve come upon the unexpected.

“Ask the guy behind you to turn around,” the helitack foreman suggested patiently. He spoke over his shoulder, his thick arms showing no strain at holding Stephanie’s little weight.

Attuned to the vital signs of her patient, Anna caught a faint sigh. She laid the palm of her hand on the girl’s diaphragm. Through the knit T-shirt, she could feel the bones of the rib cage but not the gentle rise of lungs filling with air.

“What?” Drew pressed.

Anna shook her head, waited. With a sucking sound, like the hiss of a new kitten, the child drew a sudden breath.

“Thanks,” Anna said to no one in particular. To Drew she said: “We’re in a hurry.” Edging past him, she stood at the foot of the stairs.

“Got to move you out. This girl needs medical attention. Up you go. Thanks. Thanks.” Anna spoke pleasantly, but she was prodding rounded backs and pudgy shoulders, herding people up the stairway.

As they began retreating, she turned back to Drew. His head was sunk between his massive shoulders. The little braided pigtail he affected poked out incongruously as he stared down into the litter.

Adrenaline spurted into Anna’s system. “What? What’ve you got?”

“Breathing, but way too slow. Assholes,” Anna heard him mutter. “Bringing a sick little kid way out here.”

Paul Summers, looking as close to a
GQ
model as anyone could in the ill-fitting Nomex, thrust his head over the rock above Anna’s head.

“You gonna need ropes?”

Drew shook his head. “It’d take too long. Here, Anna, you hold the front.” Stacy’s arms had grown slack, his end of the litter close to slipping from his grasp. “Stacy, pay attention,” Drew snapped as he handed Anna the litter and eased butt first under the loaded Stokes. “Put the weight on my back.”

Taking the head of the litter, Anna looked down at her patient. Even with the oxygen canister, lashed for security between her knees, turned to fifteen liters per minute on a non-rebreather face mask, the blue tinge around Stephanie’s mouth remained.

Crouched down, Drew was in place underneath the Stokes. He straightened up, and like a rowboat on the crest of a wave, the litter with its fragile burden was lifted into the air.

Anna’s arms were fully extended when he stopped. “Let’s do it,” she said.

One step at a time, she backed up the stairs. The orange plastic scraped along the sandstone but, balanced on Drew’s back, the Stokes was high enough to clear the narrowest part of the crevice. “Keep coming,” Anna said. “We’ll make it but just barely.”

“Barely’s good enough,” Drew grunted through a kinked esophagus.

Tossed as if on stormy seas, the orange litter wobbled through the crack in the rock. The
GQ
helitacker peered anxiously down, his blond head bobbing in sympathy as he worked his way along the top of the boulders they crept through.

Arms at full reach, Anna was out of eye contact with Stephanie McFarland. As the seconds ticked by, she could feel her anxiety rising.

“Paul,” she called up. “What’s she look like?”

“Not good.”

“Breathing?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Get the bag valve.” Anna kept her voice calm both for her patient and for the audience of tourists she could hear Claude Beavens organizing twenty feet up the trail behind her.

At last Drew’s head and shoulders emerged from between the walls of stone. Humped over, he carried the litter onto the landing at the foot of a long metal staircase leading up to a viewing platform cut from the mesa top.

Over her shoulder Anna glimpsed a gauntlet of visitors yet to be run. Instead of stopping them on the spacious platform, the interpreter had arranged them all on one side of the stairs, where they stood like a Busby Berkeley musical kick line waiting to go into their eleven o’clock number.

Beavens, all bony elbows and wrists, with a neck so long and skinny his flat brimmed hat took on the aspect of a plate balanced on a broom handle, was waving his arms like an officious dance master. “People, people,” he shouted. “Give them room. Emergency evac. Give the rangers room.”

“Down,” Drew said. Slowly he knelt, Anna and Stacy keeping the litter stable.

Stephanie McFarland came into view. Her face was gray and her hypoxia had grown more pronounced. Again Anna laid a hand on the child’s diaphragm. Drew and Stacy repositioned themselves around the Stokes.

“Ten,” Anna announced, timing the child’s respirations. “Let’s bag her. Paul!”

There was a scuffling sound as he slid down the sandstone to land lightly on his feet. “Okay!” he called back up the face of the boulder. An unseen person pushed a green airway kit over the edge and it fell neatly into his waiting hands. Within seconds he had the Ambu bag—a soft plastic barrel about the size of a football with a face mask on one end and a length of plastic tubing trailing from the other—out of the satchel. With an economy of movement that in one so young and so pretty always took Anna by surprise, he hooked the length of tubing to the green oxygen cylinder, then handed Anna the bag so she could fit the mask over Stephanie’s mouth and nose.

“Take the IV, Paul. Ventilating her at twenty-five breaths a minute,” she informed them, as she began pumping air into the child. “Go.”

Keeping in step with Anna as best they could, they carried the Stokes up the metal stairs. Drew had taken the foot and used his height to keep the litter level.

“In and out and in and out and,” Anna chanted under her breath, keeping time as she forced oxygen into the failing lungs. Behind her she could feel the gentle battering of camera cases and shoulder bags as she pushed past the line of people along the stair rail. Occasionally she felt something softer than steel mesh beneath her boots and heard a squawk of pain but she was only dimly aware of these things. Her eyes and mind were fixed on the now deep and regular rise of the little girl’s chest.

“Looking good,” Drew was saying. “She’s pinking up.”

Anna glanced at Stephanie’s face. The deathlike pallor had abated somewhat. “Paul,” she said quietly. “Radio for a patrol car escort. We’ll be running hot. I want the road clear.”

The firefighter keyed his mike with one hand. Keeping the IV drip high with the other, he began a series of radio calls.

The stairs were behind them. “Clear sailing,” Drew said cheerfully.

Anna secured the Stokes to the gurney with webbed belting. Stacy’d gone catatonic and without his help, she banged it ungracefully into the back of the waiting ambulance. Not for the first time, she cursed the antiquated equipment a poverty-stricken Park Service was forced to make do with year after year.

Anna and Stacy rode down in the ambulance. Paul Summers drove, Mrs. McFarland rode in the passenger seat. Anna changed Stephanie to humidified oxygen and rechecked the girl’s vital signs. Strapped into the seat near the gurney’s head, Stacy held the run sheet on his lap, but it didn’t look as if he was writing the numbers as she called them out. He’d not said a word since he’d completed his radio requests half an hour before.

Anna patted the little girl’s arm. “You’re doing real good, Steph. Hang in there.” The child had not regained consciousness and Anna had no way of knowing if she heard. To Stacy she said: “Are you okay?”

Stacy just shook his head.

Two emergency room nurses met them in the ambulance bay at Southwest Memorial. Stacy stayed in the ambulance while Anna replaced the inventory they’d used on the run from the hospital’s stock room. Anna then took a couple of minutes to talk with Bill McFarland. Stephanie had had a severe attack once before. Ridiculous as it was, the information comforted Anna, as if the park had been somehow exonerated.

 

 

ANNA drove the ambulance on the return trip. Paul Summers threw himself on the cot. “These carry-outs are getting to be a bore,” he complained. “How many now? One last Tuesday, one the week before that.”

“Maybe it’s a conspiracy,” Anna returned. “Hills gets a healthy chunk of the five hundred dollars paid for each run for his budget.”

“Hills’d do it, too,” Paul said with a laugh. “Mr. Tight-wad. How about you, Stacy, are you getting a cut?”

Stacy’s silence remained unbroken. Paul abandoned light conversation with a “G’night.”

Meyers had panicked, frozen. Anna wasn’t so much angry with him as sympathetic. Everybody had a panic button. The heroes just managed to stumble through life without it being pushed. Two hundred feet beneath the icy waters of Lake Superior Anna had met up with her own cowardice.

But she could avoid deep cold water. If Stacy wanted to be a ranger he’d have to get used to handling sick and injured people. In most national parks the only doctors available were there on vacation.

Writing the report on the McFarland medical fell to Anna. In the crowded back of the CRO, where three desks were crammed into a space where only one should have been, she sat in front of an old IBM Selectric and stared down at the 10-343 threaded around the platen. The form was five thicknesses. Hitting a wrong key meant Wite-Out in quintuplicate.

Putting off the inevitable, she turned to the district ranger. Hills Dutton was a large square-faced man with thinning sandy hair that curled at his collar. From somewhere in the mare’s nest that was his desk top, he’d retrieved a pair of calipers. Shirttail in hand, he was measuring the thickness of the excess flesh on his belly.

“Hills, what did you think of the medical today?”

“Nine percent body fat,” he announced with satisfaction, and carefully wrote in the numbers on a physical training graph he’d colored with felt-tipped pens. “Bet you can’t top that, Anna. You’re a woman more or less, right? Maybe eighteen percent? Women can be up to twenty-eight percent before they’re considered fat. Men pork out at seventeen. You got it easy.”

Unzipping his pants, he tucked the shirt in and gave his flat belly an affectionate pat before putting his gunbelt back on. “Not bad for an old man.”

“Seems like there’ve been an awful lot of carry-outs at Cliff this summer,” Anna persisted. “What’s usual for June?”

“It happens,” Hills admitted vaguely. “Lots of senior citizens up here.”

“Today we carried out a third-grader.”

“Asthma.” Hills fished a tool catalogue off the top of the pile.

Anna gave up and went back to staring at the 10-343, trying to screw her courage to the sticking place and make that first typo.

“Frieda,” Hills called over the partition to the front desk. “Call Maintenance and see if they’ve got any old ratchet sets they can spare. I’ve got to get some for the vehicles.”

“Your credit’s no good with Maintenance,” Frieda returned. “So tight he squeaks,” she muttered.

“I heard that,” Hills said. “Maybe I’ll order some. Got any DI-ones?” He named the purchase order form.

“Sure you will,” came the murmur. Then: “All out.” There was no forthcoming offer to run over to Administration and get them. Frieda’s territory as the chief ranger’s secretary and dispatcher was carefully defined. It didn’t include running errands for the lesser rangers.

“I’ll get them,” Anna offered, glad of an excuse to postpone writing the report a bit longer. “I need to talk to Patsy anyway.”

She poked along the twenty feet of path between the buildings, stopping to watch a tarantula make its majestic way across the asphalt. After the tarantulas she’d met in the backcountry of Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, these northern creatures were decidedly nonthreatening . Beside their teacup-sized Trans Pecos cousins they seemed almost cute. Still, Anna didn’t get too close. No one had yet dispelled to her satisfaction the myth that they could jump long distances.

“Don’t you just love them?”

Anna looked up from her bug to find Al Stinson, hands on knees, studying the tarantula with a look akin to true love. Off duty, Stinson dressed in classic archaeologist style: khaki shorts and a white oxford shirt. Gray hair poked out around her lined face. Chapped knuckles and clipped nails made her hands as ageless and practical-looking as any working man’s. “Just beautiful,” Stinson said of the spider.

“Maybe to a lady tarantula,” Anna hedged.

“This is a female. Lookie.” The interpreter reached down and touched the creature gently on one of its legs. “See? No hair. I don’t know about European girls, but ours don’t have leg hair. Only the males.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.” Stinson laid her hand flat on the asphalt and the tarantula tested it gingerly with a hairless foreleg. Something was evidently amiss. The creature backed away and took another route.

“Too bad,” Stinson said. She straightened and rested her hands on prominent pelvic bones. “It feels neat when they walk on you. Little elfin feet.”

“It’d take four elves to make that many tracks,” Anna returned, not envying Al the experience.

Stinson sniffed the air with a round, slightly squashed nose. “God! I love it.”

Politely, Anna sniffed too. Mixed with the smell of bus exhaust and hot tar was a delicate perfume, warmed off the tiny yellow blooms of a bush near the walk. “The bitterbrush?”

“The silence. It was after three-thirty. Construction had stopped for the day. No roaring bonegrinder. Some bones were uncovered. May mean a burial. Wouldn’t that be great? We’ll get Greeley shut down yet.” Al laughed, a nasal but infectious whinny. “The Boys will not be pleased.”