He had to get calm before he took the next step, whatever that would be. He walked away from the truck and headed toward the guard rail. Maybe the Lonely Rocks would know. Maybe they would help him remember where the cell reception started again or where the nearest police station was.
Or ranger station. Or some kind of coast guard unit. Any place with someone official.
The ocean was bright blue with a topping of snow-white foam near the rocks. In the distance, the horizon blended with the ocean, looking like the kind of smudge an artist would deliberately make with chalk by rubbing his finger along a firm line.
Oscar made himself concentrate on that smudge as he crossed the parking lot, trying to remind himself that this was just a blip in his day, a bad event, one that he could cope with if he only tried hard enough.
He just didn’t want to be alone with it, nor, for some reason he didn’t fully understand, did he want to leave the poor victim alone. The guy had been alone long enough already.
The far edge of the guard rail was battered, and a section was missing. Oscar frowned. He hadn’t noticed that before, but it meant nothing. He hardly ever came this far down the parking lot, both because he never needed to — you could see the ocean from the road — and because the sliding earth made him nervous. The asphalt already had big cracks in it, and he, with his oversize footballer’s frame, didn’t want to be the guy to send another section tumbling toward the sea.
He stopped, his heart pounding. He needed to leave this all for the experts.
But he couldn’t. He needed to go forward, to see if the break in the rail had something to do with the poor slob in the portable toilet.
Cautiously, he took the next few steps, putting a foot down, then easing his weight onto it, then taking the next step. The ground felt stable enough. There hadn’t been a lot of rain, so the ground shouldn’t have been saturated. And there hadn’t been a lot of wind or high surf, so nothing should have been eroded from underneath.
In other words, he had nothing to fear.
Except that hole in the guard rail and that body in the toilet.
He squared his shoulders again — a trick, he realized, he’d learned from his old coach — and continued forward, reaching the middle of the still-intact guard rail and peering over.
The upside-down station wagon didn’t surprise him. Its undercarriage was scratched and dented, probably from going end over end as it headed toward the water.
It got hung up on one of the larger lava rocks near the edge of the surf. The car’s front end pointed toward the sky, the wheels looking oddly vulnerable in the morning light.
An expensive bicycle had been thrown clear, its frame twisted and flattened, probably by the weight of the car.
To the car’s right, he saw camping equipment scattered on the cliffside, and one of those pointed cycler’s helmets hanging from a bush.
It took him another minute to realize that what he thought was a pile of blankets was actually another human being.
The bile rose in his throat again. Two dead? How could that happen out here?
“Hey!” he shouted down, mostly out of hope rather than any thought that someone would be alive after that crash. “Hey! You okay down there?”
His voice sounded faint and ineffective against the surf pounding against the rocks below. On this side of the parking lot, he would have trouble hearing cars as they passed. He doubted anyone could have heard him talking to the poor dead guy in the can, or the beep-beep-beep of his truck as he’d parked.
“Hey!” he shouted again. “You okay?”
The person — a woman? — raised her head. He took two steps backward in surprise. He really hadn’t thought that person was alive at all.
But, he realized as he went back to the edge, she couldn’t have gotten there by falling out of the tumbling car. She had to have slipped down the side, or pulled her way up from the bottom. She was resting on a rock ledge, and the reason he’d thought she was all blankets was because she had made a nest of her clothing.
She had been there a while, and judging by the claw marks in the loose dirt above her, she’d tried to climb up more than once.
“Hello!” he shouted. “You all right?”
She nodded but held up hands scraped and filthy, just in case he didn’t get the point. She shouted something at him.
“I didn’t get that,” he yelled back.
She shouted again, only slower. He read her lips more than heard her. She said, “The ledge is crumbling.”
Great. Now if he went away and she died, it would be his fault. He had to get her out of there, without hurting her or him, or killing them both.
He didn’t have rope, but he did have the thick cords, which his colleagues incorrectly called bungees, that he wrapped around the new portable toilet in the back. He had extra cords just in case he had to do a pick-up or seal a door on a malfunctioning toilet until he could come back to it.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he yelled to the woman, hoping she could hear him over the surf. He ran — he hadn’t run since college; his knees ached, and he suddenly realized how out of shape he had let himself become — and reached the side of the truck in what seemed like forever. He could imagine the crumbling ledge in his mind, the way that the rock shifted, the unsteadiness of it; a slight movement would make it fall away altogether.
First, breathe. Thank God for Coach Stevens. The man’s instructions were in his head — they were about football, but they’d have to do. Oscar had never been in another situation like this.
He breathed. Then he realized he had to test the cords to see if he could hook them together in a way that would hold. The older ones had frayed hooks and pulls. He tossed those in the truck bed and removed the newer ones from the new toilet. If someone drove up on this deserted road and stole the damn thing, so be it. His employers would have to understand.
It took him a minute to hook the cords together, but they seemed stable enough to get a small woman up a crumbling hillside. Not that he had any way of measuring this.
Still, he wasn’t sure his back could take the weight. He unhooked the bungees at the back of the truck, then he lowered the gate. He eased the new portable off, using his back and knees like he always did when he put a new toilet in place.
It looked kinda funny next to the old toilet, but he couldn’t worry about that.
He raised the gate, then hooked it in place. He got in the truck and backed toward the guard rail.
He tried not to think about the cracking asphalt. He told himself that the broken guard rail had happened when the station wagon went through it, not when the ground fell away, but he didn’t lie that well, not even to himself.
He stopped the truck several yards from the guard rail. He couldn’t quite bring himself to get as close as possible: The last thing he wanted to do was save her and then have the entire cliffside crumble beneath her, him, and the truck.
He didn’t want to hook the cords to the back gate — it was too unstable — so he found a thick piece of metal near one of the wheel wells. Then he unspooled the cords and hurried to the guard rail.
As he looked over, he prayed that she was still there. The movement of the truck could shake earth this unstable, and that would be the last straw for that ledge.
But she was still there, crouched against the side, the blue ocean beneath her, crashing into the rocks and spraying foam up the grass and sand hillside.
He held up the cord, but before he tossed it, he mimed tying it around his stomach.