Ghosts of Florence Pass

  Ghosts of Florence Pass

  by

  Brian J. Anderson

  Also by Brian J. Anderson:

  The Ascent of PJ Marshall

  For exclusive access to Brian J. Anderson's latest work in progress, along with information about author promotions, giveaways and contests, visit bjandersonauthor.com.

  Copyright © 2013 Brian J. Anderson.

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Alec and Isabelle

  The author wishes to express his gratitude to Blink-182 for “Ghost on the Dance Floor” and “Stay Together for the Kids.” They were more than ample inspiration for what follows.

  When John Parker first came to after the crash it was dark and it was cold and outside there was the patter of rain on hollow steel. From somewhere in his shell the drip of water and the close echo of it measured against his keeping. He turned his head for perspective on the darkness but there was none and so he tried to rise but his right arm was a torment and his leg hurt and was held fast by an unseen burden so he lay still. His head hurt and his neck hurt and his insides hurt as well and they felt hot and bloated like those of a dead fish on a lake.

  David, he said. Are you here?

  David didn’t say anything and by feel John Parker checked his arm and found it broken above the elbow and a jagged splinter of bone was pressed against his shirt sleeve. Then he screamed and blacked out.

  ***

  John Parker was in the dumpster behind Ricks Tavern throwing cans out of it onto the ground where his brother was picking them up and putting them in a garbage bag tied by one corner to the handlebar of his bike. The dumpster stank of stale beer and rot and it was hot inside and there were flies but he didn’t mind because he was going to buy a model of the battleship Bismarck with his share of the money. He stepped on a broken box to check the other side of the dumpster but there was something slippery underneath it and it slid from under his foot and he fell against the side of the dumpster. The back of his shirt and the seat of his pants smeared with filth.

  Shit, he said.

  You okay? David said.

  Yeah. How about you do the next one.

  How about not.

  Why not?

  Because I’m older and because this was my idea. You get em all?

  No.

  Well get goin.

  John Parker got to his knees on the flat of cardboard and bent to his work.

  Mom’s gonna be mad about my clothes, he said.

  Not my problem, David said. Stop bein a nancy and get movin. You want that stupid model or not?

  Okay.

  John Parker lifted the corner of the box he was on and found a paper grocery bag half full of cans. It was wet so he had to hold it by the bottom so it wouldn’t rip and then he handed it carefully up and over the side where his brother took it and dumped it out into the garbage bag.

  Jackpot, David said.

  Yeah.

  John Parker picked up the cans that had spilled from the bag onto the bottom of the dumpster and threw them over the side. His hands were sticky and cold with beer but he didn’t mind.

  Thanks for letting me help you, he said.

  David laughed.

  You’re welcome nancy.

  ***

  John Parker woke and it was still cold and there was still the dripping of water like a metronome but now light was coming through the windows of the plane and he could see what had happened. The floor under the seats in front of him where his mother and father were had buckled up and it had crushed them into the ceiling where they sat. His mother’s seat back had broken and she lay reclined with her arms spread like a penitent’s and her hair was wet with blood and it hung stiffly above John Parker’s chest. His father was in the seat next to his mother and his neck had been broken and his head pushed askew by his body when it rose up during the crash.

  John Parker screamed and struggled against the hold on his leg and as he did this he cried with the pain of it and with the pain of his broken arm and his head and neck still hurt and his insides were still afire.

  Help, he said. David help me!

  His brother had been in the seat next to him but instead of a seat there was only a tangle of metal braces and electrical wire where the seat had been and there was a hole in the side of the plane that was open to the rocks outside. In his panic John Parker grew lightheaded and he nearly swooned but then he collapsed with exhaustion as if his body had decided to quit him in preservation. As John Parker cried softly in the cold he looked down at his legs and saw that the left one was pinned under the frame of the seat his mother was in. The raw edges of metal cut into the flesh of his thigh and his pants were soaked with blood there but it looked like the bleeding had mostly stopped.

  Oh shit, David.

  He tried to lift the seat from his leg but he could only lift it a little bit and when he did the blood began to flow from his wound again and there was more pain, so much that he had to let it back down. He breathed through the pain and he was crying and reaching out to touch his mother’s hair but then he thought differently about it and lowered his hand and pressed against his thigh with his fingers where the brace cut into it. There was a lot of blood on his leg and on the seat cushion and he felt thirsty which was something he remembered from scouts as a sign that he was in trouble of bleeding to death.

  He looked at his mother and father and wanted to cry but he didn’t know where David was and if he was still alive and needed help then crying wouldn’t do any good so he just sat there and thought. After a while he wiped the condensation from his window and looked outside for the first time and saw that the plane was in high country with no trees and only boulders and snow as far as he could see through the fog. Then he looked out of the hole in David’s side of the plane and saw more snow and boulders but on that side he could tell that the earth sloped down and away from the plane like on the side of a mountain. John Parker rose up as far as he could in the seat and tried to see his brother in the rocks and snow outside the plane but he couldn’t.

  Okay, he said. You have to get out.

  He thought about the first aid badge he earned in scouts and went through in his head the steps of treating an injured person and figured how to apply these to himself. There was nothing he could do about his head and his neck and his insides until he was able to free himself and get to a first aid kit so these problems would have to wait. He was afraid to do it and it hurt a lot but he managed to roll up the sleeve on his broken arm and he saw that it was broken just in the one place and that it wasn’t bleeding much anymore. The arm could wait along with his head and his insides that were burning. He figured he had to stop the bleeding in his leg before he tried again to free it so he thought about that. It seemed like he was past the point of being able to use pressure to stop the blood from flowing and so he decided he would have to stop it with a tourniquet.

  At the scout meeting where he learned how to make a tourniquet Mr. Frederickson had said that you can usually find a shirt or piece of fabric or rope or something like that on hand that you can use. It turned out that Mr. Frederickson was right because there was a bird’s nest of electrical wire that had been pulled up through the floor of the plane when David’s seat had been ripped out by the crash. So John Parker pulled some of these loose and after he had torn his pants leg away from the site of his injury he wrapped wire around his leg as close to the wound as he could. He tied it in a knot around a piece of metal he foun
d on the floor to use as a handle and then he turned the handle until his leg throbbed with pain and then stopped. After he was done turning he wrapped another piece of wire around his leg to secure the piece of metal serving as a handle and to prevent it from spinning backwards and loosening the pressure. He looked at his work and decided that it looked pretty good. He looked outside through the hole in the plane.

  David, he said.

  David didn’t answer and so John Parker tried again to push his mother’s seat with his mother still in it up off his leg. It lifted a little and the pain came screaming back into his leg but he was able to back himself out a little bit from under the seat before it got too heavy and he had to set it back down. Now it was resting on his knees and this didn’t hurt as much so he left it there for a time and rested and caught his breath. For the first time he thought about the pilot and how he couldn’t see him in the cockpit because of the way his mother and father were pushed up and blocking his view and then he thought about how the pilot was probably dead as well.

  After he had rested John Parker pushed against the back of his mother’s seat and lifted it from his knees and then pulled himself out from underneath it in a wash of pain and he started to hyperventilate. He turned and swung his legs aside as he let go of the seat and the seat fell to a lower position because John Parker’s leg wasn’t there anymore to stop it and then his mother’s arm swung down to the floor and glanced off John Parker’s leg as it fell making him scream. The pain in his leg and arm and head and neck and insides in concert with the grief made him swoon and he fell to the floor and blacked out again.

  ***

  John Parker and his brother were downstairs watching Zombieland on the computer and eating popcorn and drinking hot Dr. Pepper. Zombie movies had been David’s favorite since their father had taken him to a zombie movie marathon at the point cinema earlier that summer but John Parker was still too young their father had said so he couldn’t go. Now their parents were fighting upstairs and when they were fighting it usually went on all night so for now John Parker could watch all the zombie movies he wanted and they would probably never know and besides he wasn’t too young. They’re just movies.

  You watching the stairs? David said.

  Yeah.

  You get me in trouble and I’m gonna kick your ass.

  Like you could.

  Try me nature boy.

  Stop calling me that.

  What’re you gonna do about it nature boy?

  Can we just watch the movie?

  David didn’t say anything and they watched the movie. From upstairs the muffled fighting of their mother and father came through the ceiling and David turned up the volume against it. For years this. Woody Harrelson shot a zombie through the brain and John Parker thought about the time that he and David and his parents went to Yellowstone in his tenth summer. The bears and moose and buffalo and wolves all living together in balance and having their young in accordance with the natural order of things. He thought about the people in their cars with their snack food and sodas and cameras and phones and their televisions in their winnebagos and pace arrows like in some enormous natural amusement park taking pictures of the animals and sending them to their friends and family through the ether. He thought that maybe that was the last time his mother and father were happy together but then he thought maybe not because you never know what’s going on in people’s heads. He thought about that for a little while and then asked his brother if he thought their mother and father were going to get a divorce.

  Christ how would I know, David said.

  I don’t know because you’re older. And you know more about that stuff.

  Well I don’t.

  John Parker looked up at the ceiling and said I hope they don’t.

  David turned up the volume some more and looked at his brother for a moment and then he looked at the movie.

  If they are, David said, I wish they’d hurry up.

  What?

  Nothing. Go make some more Dr. Pepper nature boy.

  Stop calling me that.

  ***

  John Parker woke up on the floor of the plane in a nest of electrical wire and he was coughing and retching in the cold. His insides hurt when he coughed and his head and leg were throbbing with the pain. He sat up and turned so that his feet were outside the plane through the hole torn in its side during the crash and then he tightened the tourniquet on his leg one turn and secured the handle with the extra wire.

  David, he said.

  The plane rocked and creaked on its moorings on the rocks as John Parker slid himself into the opening and hung his legs outside and looked about. It was cold and foggy outside the plane and he thought that they were probably in the clouds but it was bright and there were patches of blue suggested on the horizon. The rain had stopped and there was a fine mist that hung in the air that tingled on his skin when the breeze stirred it. Everywhere the plane’s confused and tangled wreckage. A wing detached and shredded against the rocks. Scraps of sheet metal and engine parts scattered and broken glass sitting atop a boulder and one of the pontoons mangled and standing upright in a crease of snow. Their tent and camp chairs and clothes and personal effects. The blackened cookpot they used to make coffee and noodles and oatmeal on the fire sat upright on a flattened rock like it had been left there in fulfillment of some promise. The smell of oil and gasoline, the refined carcasses of long dead ocean beings brought up from the depths and deposited on the mountain.

  Their canoe had come loose of the pontoon struts where the pilot had fastened it with wire before they left the lake and it lay upside down at the back of the plane bent up in the middle by the force of the crash. John Parker could see the back of David’s seat in the shadow of the canoe and David’s legs were spread out behind him and he was face down in the snow still strapped into the seat and not moving and he could tell it was David because on one foot was a black Chuck Taylor shoe that John Parker had given him for Christmas and it was untied and his other foot was bare.

  David! Oh god David!

  John Parker lowered himself out through the hole in the plane onto the rocks and his legs buckled underneath him and he fell onto his side howling with the pain in his arm that lay underneath him because he had fallen on it. He rolled onto his back and sat up and looked at his brother and screamed at him to say something or move or anything. David didn’t say anything or move.

  John Parker got to his knees and took deep breaths and counted them to keep his mind off the pain and also off the thought that maybe his brother David was dead. He rose to his feet and his leg with the tourniquet was cold and tingling with lack of circulation and he went limping to where his brother lay in the snow while sliding his hand along the side of the plane for balance. He sat next to his brother and leaned over and looked at his face. David’s eyes were closed and the area around them was black and blue and he had a big bump and a long scrape on his forehead but it wasn’t bleeding anymore. John Parker couldn’t tell if David was breathing or not and then he began to cry and he was too afraid to check for breathing or a pulse but then he thought he should stop being a nancy and just do it.

  His hand was shaking and he held the back of it in front of David’s mouth and nose and he thought he felt something there but he wasn’t sure if it was from David breathing or from the breeze blowing on the mountain. Then he moved his hand to David’s neck to check for a pulse and his hand was still shaking and when he touched David’s neck John Parker’s crying turned to tears of joy because his brother was still warm and he knew for sure that if his brother had died in the crash he would be cold. He was a long time feeling for a pulse and when he found it he thought it was slow but he thought that even a slow pulse can push blood and oxygen through a body and he must be breathing too because if he wasn’t he’d be dead. John Parker was very happy and he started to laugh even though he was still crying.

  Thank you god, he said.

  He leaned his back against the plane and looked up from
where his brother lay and he looked around. The plane had crashed on their way home from their vacation at Florence Lake and the best John Parker could remember was that they had been flying for a while maybe a half hour and the pilot had been singing before his memory went blank. He thought about that but didn’t really know what it meant. The place they had crashed was a low spot between two mountains and from the way the wreckage lay across it he thought that maybe if they had been flying a little bit higher they could have made it over. It looked like the plane had probably struck the side of the mountain straight on and then buckled up in the middle where his parents were and then slid and spun across the snow until it struck the rocks which could have been when the hole was torn in it and his brother thrown out.

  He sat thinking about the crash and the mechanics of it and how the snow on the mountain softened the crash and saved his life and the life of his brother but then he thought that it was only by some kind of miracle or gift from god that they were both still alive. Then he thought that it really didn’t make any difference why they were alive they just were and he should get his brother out of his seat.

  John Parker talked to his brother because he’d read something once or saw something on television about unconscious people or people in comas sometimes being aware of what’s going on around them. He didn’t know if this was true or not but if it was he wasn’t taking any chances. He talked to his brother about his progress with unbuckling the seatbelt and pushing the seat off his back and he talked about how they were going to be rescued and how the rescuers were probably already on their way and that he would be all right and he said these things and all other manner of encouraging sentiments as he worked.

  When John Parker had cleared the seat off his brother’s back he thought about how he looked uncomfortable lying there on the snow on his stomach with the side of his face pressed against a rock. It looked like his collar bone was broken on one side or his shoulder dislocated or both and there were holes torn in his clothes and injuries underneath that had been bleeding but not anymore.