Janson couldn’t write for several days and nights, until he was convinced that it would never come, and that he had lost it all. He had lost the check with four figures on it, the town that was not a city, and worst of all, the demons would forever stay their perch inside him. He watched the fan spin for nights and nights and then, at last, it lulled him to the edge of a cliff where sleep was waiting.
He had no idea when he woke up, but he woke up typing, and there was night all in his room and in his head. He was drenched in sweat, and it took him great effort to pull his clinging undershirt off. His fingers were running, running away from something, and they hammered on the metal keys until they ached with a dull throbbing pain. The ragged skin on the side of one of his fingernails finally gave way. He winced as he typed on. Droplets of blood made their way down under the key and flew up with the key’s release, faintly spraying the sheet. The paper was almost out, and he prayed to a God he no longer believed in that it would hold just that much longer, just until it was out of him.
The wind picked up the rain on its bosom and bore it to my face. It was no longer liquid, but a thick, solid paste smearing my brow and eyes. I was all feet and knees high-pumping and knocking my gear, but I had Henry’s footsteps to pull me through the mud and the brush. The one face from before the war, the one laugh I knew from a time when all laughs weren’t merely crackings of the soul to push the fear out. Again I thought of his footsteps when he blocked for me against Allston and I was the county sweetheart. A two-hundred-eighteen-yard game, and all two hundred and eighteen had been my feet in his footsteps just as they were now, but that was back when boys would be boys and when we loved rather than feared the thickness of soil and turf. I watched his feet sink in the mud ahead of me and pressed my own into the messy mounds they left.
The copter was there just like they’d sent word on the radio, but then they sent all codes and numbers over the radio and all we usually got was fire and brimstone. They were behind us still as they always seemed to be and we could see the spinning blades lowering in the clearing ahead, and suddenly our whole lives narrowed to a single gem-like point. Three hundred yards from the jungle to the clearing. I could feel my soul moving to the clearing with the might of a boulder on a downhill roll. It pushed toward the opening with euphoric longing, with a desire to escape that was red tinged pink around the edges and lit like a forest fire underneath my moving body.
That was when the ground gave and I saw Henry’s knees where his feet had been and then his shoulders and he dangled above the tunnel, the roaring rain crashing on him even through the leaves. The whirring of the helicopter tormented our ears with the full glory of our world just in reach and leaving without us. The ground yawned around him and a furrow opened up and I saw his legs still moving like they were running. One of them appeared beneath him in the tunnel with his gun trained up on us. On his ridiculously kicking legs and my head framed in the light above the tunnel, and with our guns somewhere back in the blast behind us, dropped in tangles of brush and churning soil when we first heard the full promise of the metal bird which would carry us like babies to our rebirth. And it called to us still, deep-throated from the clearing ahead, the only sweet-voiced bird I heard in sixteen months spent in a bird’s habitat.
He stared at me from below, all cruelty in the smallness of his eyes, and jerked once with his gun to indicate my movement, that he wanted me to drop to them, to fall into the earth of my own volition after willing myself to life with a will like steel doubled over. And it called, hovering gently, that it was leaving without us and we had been so close, Henry Wilder and I, to going back shoulder to shoulder and starting to drink away the memories together but alone. We had been strides away that I counted in my mind as I gazed ahead and saw the line of the blades through the bend of the trees and the mist, and Henry was already lost, his legs within their reach and no hope of pulling up and out and free.
I flooded with instinct; it moved through my body like water washing across my grave, and I kicked him, just once, a shove of my boot on his shoulder and I was running before he fell. I didn’t see his face-no, I did not, or even the few hours of sleep that I now steal would be lost-just the surprised face of the underground rat below as Henry’s living body hurtled toward him blocking out the sun and his arms raised momentarily above his face as he stepped back in surprise to avoid the falling man and missing, sweetly missing, me as I fled on fairy’s wings to my bird.
I swear to God, though by then I was all but through to the clearing with footsteps between us that had never turned over faster, I swear to God that even above the angry wind and the cry of the copter I heard his body hit the ground. I heard it then, and I’ve heard it every night since. It comes to me, all echoes in hallways and rapping knuckles against wooden doors. The sound of Henry Wilder’s living body hitting beneath the earth in a jungle that carried the licks of Hell’s little flames on every leaf.
Janson was sobbing now, sobbing so thickly he barely noticed when the “d” went out. The underside of the key was soaked with blood from his split finger, and it stuck. He had to type a “c” next to an “l,” to make a “d.” He had come this far sprinting underwater through blood, and a single damned key wasn’t going to stop him. He saw he was at the bottom of the last sheet of paper, and the words had slowed from a torrent to a trickle, but still they came relentlessly.
They hoistecl me up with strong arms onto my metal bircl, the angel of heaven which woulcl commancl me through the wincls ancl the rains ancl bear me home. Bear me home to the smell of hospitals with forever walls of white ancl to my mother’s kitchen ancl the full breastecl sobs ancl vicarious embrace of Wencly Wilcler, a woman grayecl past the age which she sharecl with my mother to the clawn of a new sunset. Ancl they bore me on, these strong arms, to a forgotten hero’s welcome, ancl to half paracles where they clressecl me in recl, white ancl blue. Because that’s what I was. A
The paper ran out. The stack, the whole stack was out and gone, and with all the tears gone from his eyes, all the sobs racked from his chest, Janson had a word, a single word, left stuck in his throat. He yelled once, a hoarse, frightened choke, and pushed back from the typewriter, sending it and the crates crashing to the floor. Stumbling into the hallway, he found what he was looking for, a crumpled-up page from a newspaper that was lodged in the wall beneath some pipes to keep the cold air at bay. He pulled it out and smoothed it flat on the wall. There was an advertisement on the back side with some blank space at the top, and he ripped out a small segment of the grayish-white paper and returned to his room.
He sank to his haunches and righted the typewriter, noticing, as if for the first time, the blood sprayed through it. Turning the small blank piece of newspaper to meet the keys, he typed his final word.
The weight, a weight he had been living with for so long that he felt it as a part of himself, lifted slowly from his aching shoulders. He left the word in the jaws of the typewriter and fell to his back on the mattress, the rotating paddles of the fan breaking up the neon flickers into dove-like featherings across his face and bare chest. He cried a different cry this time, a softer cry. The tears were just as resonant with pain, but they cleansed him. They fell like a late autumn snow, blanketing Janson Tanker as he fell into an exhausted sleep.