I noticed an odd sound, a tiny ringing in the car. I glanced over and saw that he was spinning a key on a chain. He noticed me looking and held it up, but said nothing. It was a bus-station locker key. I’d seen plenty of them when I was roaming the country, trying to settle down somewhere to find my art again. Sometimes you start to drift and you just keep going, for no reason you can name. You ride and ride and hope the right thing appears around the next corner, even though you have no idea what it might be. He shoved the key back in his pocket.
We kept climbing higher until we were in the switchbacks. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees over the last several miles. Another thousand feet and we’d be able to see our breath. We’d left the towns and the cabins behind and kept threading through the mountains. The car started puttering, the thin air fouling the engine. You were supposed to do something to the timing or the spark plugs or the air filter, who the hell knew. Bradley was getting more and more excited, as if he knew we were heading to a special, secret place where he’d put his past to rest.
Snow started to appear on the ground, on the rock. The air thinned but held in the cold, the atmosphere lush and vibrant around us. I’d never been up this far. The wind tore at the car, rocking us on our shocks. The trails thinned. Finally, we ran out of road.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Get out. Climb.”
We got out and he prodded me forward across the rugged, stony landscape. I’d been in Colorado five years and had never hiked through the national park, or anywhere else for that matter. Now he had me clambering up rocks like those adrenaline junkies who scaled sheer bluff faces. I was out of shape and I wouldn’t last long. Not that Bradley would need me to. I knew he was leading me to an edge someplace. His edge, my edge. Maybe he’d been here himself before, ready to throw himself off the rim. Maybe he was walking as blindly as me, just waiting for the next thing to come along.
We came to a slope that dropped off into nothingness. We were so high up that there was an electrical buzzing in my fingers and toes and chest, an assaulting awareness that one foot further would be a step into oblivion.
The wind slithered around us. Bradley jabbed the gun into my back again. “Move.”
“No.”
“Then I’ll kill you.”
“You know, Bradley... you give a man two choices at death and he’s going to choose the one that makes you work a little harder for it.”
“It’s just pulling a trigger.”
“It’s better to make you do it than do it myself.” I didn’t know why that was the case, but I knew it was true. I still wasn’t all that worried — maybe it was altitude sickness, or maybe I’d had a death wish for a while and only now was starting to realize it.
“Move! To the edge!”
“I’m not going down there.”
“Yes, you are. We both are.”
“Why are you doing this?”
He rushed me and jabbed the barrel under my chin. It hurt like hell. “I want you to know what it was like for my son.”
I growled, “You’re the one who put him in it. You’re the one who took him up.”
“Shut up!”
“You’re the one who let go, same as me. We had no choice.”
“Shut up, damn you!”
He jabbed the barrel harder into my throat until I gagged.
“Now, jump! Do it or I’ll put one in your brain.”
“How is that supposed to scare me at this point?”
“You might survive if you jump.”
“At twelve thousand feet? Yeah, right.”
Twelve thousand feet. One hundred and twenty stories. We were higher than the Empire State Building.
Not only had he gone insane with his rage and grief, but he really hadn’t thought about the end game at all. There wasn’t enough thrill in it for him. He was starting to understand that my death wouldn’t take away an ounce of his agony. It was descending on him very quickly now and an unbearable horror came with it. He’d be alone soon with nothing but his guilt. The fear in him was much greater than my own. I saw the realization grow in his eyes along with his terror.
My feet were slipping out from beneath me on the icy rock. I was gearing up for some kind of a stupid move. Everybody thinks it’s easy, you just attack, you just spin and kick, punch and whirl and karate chop. These people, the kind who never say boo to the boss, let their relatives roll over them, and take every gram of garbage force-fed to them through their entire lives. These people, they think it’s easy to make your move on death.
Then I saw it, no more than fifty feet from us, down in the rocks, nearly at the rim. I’d been expecting it the whole ride up, because when facing your fear you also face your fate, and in that moment, any damn thing can happen.
I pointed over his shoulder and said, “There’s the balloon.”
It had drifted twenty miles and more than six thousand feet thanks to the front-range winds. It was impossible, I thought. It had to be. There was no way the balloon could have gotten up this high. Even with the updraft carrying the kid along, it never should have made it this far. Even if the kid had accidentally gotten the burner opened up all the way, it shouldn’t have been enough to get the balloon this high.
It should have bounced into one of the cliffs miles ago. The silk would have torn and the whole thing would have plummeted down in the middle of the mountains. But somehow the flight of the balloon had missed every jagged rock. Hiding behind the ridges and within the thinning tree line of the national park so nobody could see it, dancing so close to the craggy banks that he just kept rising. With hundreds of volunteers searching for him and nobody seeing.
The balloon had wedged into a tight stony niche. The basket had folded in half and the deflated silk had collapsed on top of it. When you saw a hot-air balloon you saw a beautiful mammoth thing. This you could’ve fit in your closet.
Bradley let out a cry that was part despair and part elation. He dropped the gun and forgot about me. I had to keep reminding myself that he was crazy.
He ran up to the niche and started yanking at the silk, trying to pull the basket free. He screamed his son’s name, and the echoes swarmed across the cliffs like a thousand distressed men calling out the names of their thousand dead sons.
I picked up the pistol and tossed it over the edge.
Bradley yelled, “Help me!” I stared at him for a moment and then climbed over there.
It wasn’t for him. I wanted to see the boy’s face. It still felt very important that I actually see what the kid looked like.
Bradley gripped one end of the basket and I took hold of the other and we pulled until we got it open wide enough that he could climb in. He ducked low for a second and I lurched aside until I could peer into the cramped space.
The dry, cold mountain climate had preserved the boy these last several days. At this elevation, no animals or insects had been at him in the crags. Even though the basket had struck the mountain hard enough to crumple in on itself, his skin hadn’t been touched. He wore a T-shirt and shorts and sneakers with holes in the big toes. The basket had folded around him like a cocoon, without actually coming in contact with his flesh. It was another miracle, depending on whether you saw it that way.
He was still facing away from me.
From what I could see, except for his coloring, he looked like a perfectly healthy, sleeping child.
Bradley screamed, “Johnny!” He took the boy in his arms and fell against the side of the basket.
It started to slide. I had a chance to dive, maybe grab ahold of it, but I didn’t see much point anymore. It skidded across the rock ledge and the deflated silk washed across the rocks and rippled like river water.