I kept thinking, I never should’ve moved out West.
I kept thinking my crappy apartment in the East Village really hadn’t been so bad.
We couldn’t bring the balloon down by ourselves. It bounced into another huge tree and the awful, overwhelming crashing sound was harrowing around us. The balloon shook insanely and the ropes twisted. I cracked sideways into the trunk and pine needles tore at my face. My feet touched branches. Then I was standing on air, and then there were branches again. I had to drop. It was something you couldn’t think about, you just had to do it.
Another vicious collision nearly ripped my arms from the sockets and Bradley and I both let go at the same moment. We clung to thick tree limbs seventy-five feet off the ground. He let out a screech. I think I did, too. He glared at me with his agonized eyes and edged his way across the branch looking toward the balloon, which had almost cleared the trees and started to rise again.
The basket slipped free of the last limb with an enormous scraping noise, but the silk still hadn’t been pierced. Bradley worked like a maniac to get up to the basket, hand over hand as wads of bark came off and rained down to the ground. His palms were shredded. There was no way for him to get to it.
The boy inside cried out and a sob broke in my own throat. He whimpered, “Daddy, please, Daddy—” He was petrified but still thought his father could save him.
But he never raised his head over the top of the basket. I wanted to see his face, if only for an instant. It was extremely important to me, and I didn’t know why.
Bradley screamed, “Johnny!”
He and I watched the balloon soar away until we couldn’t hear his son anymore. It lifted higher and higher, caught on the canyon winds, occasionally bouncing against the cliff walls until it was over them and almost out of sight.
We were both breathless from our exertions, but he had enough left in him to turn back and glare at me some more. He said, “You let go!”
“So did you. We had no choice.”
“You could’ve held on!”
“We couldn’t have.”
Talking to the guy this high in the air, covered in pine bristles and sap, his blood drying on my face — just hanging there and waiting for the next moment to happen as his son floated away.
It took me twenty minutes to climb down out of the tree.
Bradley stayed up there wailing and cursing me as I cautiously clutched at branches and lowered myself. By the time I hit the ground there were two ambulances, a fire truck, and eight cruisers parked at the edge of the woods, cops and park rangers prowling everywhere.
The shock of what had happened hit me all at once, before I’d taken two steps toward anybody. A heaviness thickened in my chest and my hands started to tremble badly. My legs weakened and I could feel the blood draining out of my head. A wash of blackness passed across my eyes and I might’ve toppled over if a cop with the name badge Kowalski hadn’t grabbed me.
He had gray eyes and some real muscle and power to him. He held me up with one hand and said, “Sit down.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Yeah, but sit down.”
But I didn’t want to sit anywhere among the pines. I scanned the sky and didn’t see the balloon anywhere.
“The kid?” I asked.
“What kid?”
“The one in the balloon.”
“Somebody was in there?”
“The hell do you think we were all trying so hard to hold on to it for? Is anyone following it?”
“It’s gone over the tree line and ridge of the canyon.”
“You’ve got to get some rangers up there.”
He thumbed his radio but there was already lots of buzzing going on, people squawking and more sirens erupting in the distance. They were coming in from Fort Collins and Greeley and other nearby towns, everybody driving to the wrong place. I saw a helicopter go overhead.
Kowalski said, “Tell me what happened.”
“There’s not much.”
“Tell me anyway.”
We recognized each other as former New Yorkers transplanted to Colorado for reasons we still weren’t sure about. We both had the same general air of confusion and homesickness about us, mired in a false toughness and a general who-gives-a-damn attitude to hide our fears. It took one to recognize one. It was pretty obvious that somewhere along the way he’d made a misstep and it had fouled up his life so badly that he had to move two thousand miles away to get clear of it. Some kind of scandal — he’d taken money from the wrong guy or hadn’t given a cut of it to the right one. Whatever the mistake, it was costing him now and it would for the rest of his life. I was a different story.
A ring of cops stepped in close but no one said anything.
I explained how I’d been in the park staring off at Long’s Peak trying to find inspiration for the next story or song, the way I usually did when my thoughts ran dry.
I’d been sitting around the park a hell of a lot lately and not much had been shaking loose inside my head. I’d written one line — Between the Dark and the Daylight — knowing I was lifting it from somewhere but not caring so long as something else followed. Nothing did.
So I tried to sweat the next sentence out, staring into the white of the page. Sitting there like that for a while, waiting for something to guide my hand.
Instead, a tremendous shadow crossed over my notebook and a man howled and two guys ran past directly in front of me.
I looked up and there was the balloon, with Bradley dangling off one of the safety lines and shouting for help, the other two guys doing their best to catch up, reaching for the trailing ropes as the balloon swung low but still didn’t hit the ground.
You’re sitting there waiting for your next sentence and instead you get this.
I hadn’t seen a hot-air balloon since I was kid on Long Island and couldn’t figure out how anybody could lose one.
I got to my feet and started stumbling in that direction, the sheer forceful oddity of the situation sort of pulling me after it. The guy who’d eventually be paralyzed from the neck down looked back to me while he ran and shouted, “There’s a boy in there! We have to get it back down!”
I hesitated another second. It’s normal, it would happen to anybody. We don’t trust unfamiliar conditions and unknown people, it’s easier to sit back down and fight the empty page. But the kid let out a murmuring whine that caught on the wind and somehow that got me moving.
I sprinted maybe fifty yards across the park before I finally caught up to the lines. By then, Bradley had actually managed to climb up a few more feet, almost to within reaching distance of the basket, and the other guys had grabbed hold of the ropes. I did a weird flying dive that should have made me land on my head, but somehow it worked. I was on a safety line draping from the basket, flitting there, sort of flying along with three other men, and we were rising.
There should’ve been about ten emergency shut-offs and built-in features to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Without anybody working the burner, the balloon should’ve been lowering, even in the wind. I looked up, but couldn’t see anything but the bottom of the basket. Then the rope I was on flailed outwards a few feet and I spun around.
There were health nuts in the world that did this sort of thing for fun, I was sure. I craned my neck and saw that the burner was still lit, a lick of orange and blue flame igniting. Something had gone seriously wrong, and I’d jumped right into it. The balloon wasn’t going to come down on its own.