The Sacrament by Peter Gzowski: Chapter 3
Chapter Three
He was alive.
The understanding - the wonder - snapped into Brent's mind like the spark from an ignition and startled him into wakefulness. He was alive and Donna was alive. They had made it through another night. It was...Monday. That was right. The crash was Saturday and yesterday was gone and now this was their second morning. Don was dead, and Norm had left htem, but there were two fo them and it was a new day. He wondered if he should pray again. Why not? Thank you, God, he said. Thank you for letting us make it through the night.
"Donna," he said. "You all right?"
"I'm cold."
"Jesus, I'm cold too. I wonder what the temperature is. How are your feet?"
"They hurt. Are you still bleeding?"
Tentatively, he reached a hand toward his throat. It felt dry. He ran a careful finger down the side of his neck, dreading the wet that had frightened him more than he wanted to admit, frightened him as he'd watched his own blood run down onto the floor. It was dry. The bleeding had stopped.
"It's okay."
"You sound funny."
"It's my teeth. They're all shot to hell. They're kind of hanging loose back in my mouth."
"Do they hurt?"
"Not as much as my foot. It's like I've got a toothache down there. It's hard not to think about it."
"Did Norm come back?"
"I don't think so."
"I must have been dreaming. I thought he was back. I thought Dad was alive. Dad's dead, isn't he? I don't want to look at him."
"But we're alive. And you've got to remember how much he wanted you to live. He gave you his coat. We've got to get out of here. That's the best thing you could do for him. It's like...it's like he gave his life for you."
Neither felt like moving.
They watched the snow blowing. In the night, the wind had torn away much of the makeshift window covering, and the snow was again drifting into the cabin.
"Brent."
"Uh-huh?"
"You take the coat."
"Youre dad's coat?"
"Yes, you take it. You've got less on than I have. I'm ok on top. I've got my kangaroo jacket and my own leather coat under Dad's."
"I can't."
"Just for a while. We've got to get moving. There must be some stuff in the suitcase."
"You only brought that Bauer bag, didn't you?"
"Yes, but there's stuff in it. There's that long pyjama coat. I could put that on. And socks, and some jeans and...oh, Brent, do you know what else is in there?"
"Sure, one down-filled vest, one snowmobile suit, two pair warm boots, two pair woollen mittens..."
"Don't laugh. My bathing suit's in there."
They had dressed only for the spring they'd expected in Boise. Brent wore a light pair of tan dress pants, a white shirt with brown sports with a tan pullover vest, all topped off by his brown corduroy jacket. He wore no underwear but peeking out between the cuffs of his slacks and the tops of his fashionable suede shoes, were bright green socks.
In addition to the kangaroo jacket - a loose-fitting garment of wool and velour, zippered up the front and named for the pouches into which she could place her hands - and her tailored leather jacket, Donna wore corduroy jeans, white socks, and a comfortable pair of North Star street shoes.
Brent accepted Don't jacket. Before slipping it on, he carefully loosened the blood-stiffened collar of his shirt. His wound remained closed.
"Let's see what else we've got," he said.
They began their inventory.
First the miscellany: a few maps, crinkled and hardened by the crash and the weather, showing the topography of Idaho and Montana, but with no clues to their own location.
"Remember those letters on the hill?" Donna said. "Challis something?"
"Vikings."
"What would that be?"
"Some kind of town, I guess. I can't find it on any of these maps."
"Weren't there more maps?"
"Norm must have them."
The catalogue continued: a fire extinguisher, the pop bottles they'd emptied during the flight, a copy of the National Enquirer, some Kleenex, Norm's wallet and glasses, Brent's fligh log - his student's record - and a device he used for navigational reckoning, two packages of paper airsickness bags, lined in plastic. Nothing else worth noting. They moved to the luggage.
Norm, accustomed to living out of the plane, had brought nothing but the clothes he'd worn: slacks, turtleneck and leather coat. Even his shoes, they'd remembered, had been unlaced, and they wondered if he'd done them up before he left.
Donna's Bauer bag was a light compartmentalized leather carrying case of a style much favoured by athletes and other frequent travellers and named for its manufacturer. It contained the pyjama coat she had mentioned - a woollen, hooded bathrobe - and the socks (five pair, all white) and jeans. As well, there was a shirt with a picture of Mickey Mouse on the chest, which belonged to Brent but which Donna had borrowed some weeks ago and now used as her own. There were also toiletry articles, including a bottle of her favourite Charlie perfume, and the electric curling iron she took everywhere she went. And, finally, a file-card-sized booklet of forms Donna was using in one of her Grade Twelve classes, and on which she'd intended to do some work during the stopover at Boise.
Donna was crying.
"What is it?" Brent asked.
"I can't help thinking about the bathing suit. I always forget to bring one. Dad reminded me. He said there'd be a swimming pool at the motel."
"Donna, he's dead. We've got to go on by ourselves. You know what we'll do with that goddamn bathing suit? We'll burn the sucker."
Brent's Bauer bag was next.
he, too, had jeans and socks - although only one pair - and toilet articles: a razor and an aerosol can of shaving soap, a bottle of his faviorite after-shave, Christian Dior, and some Bonne Bell after-tan lotion.
But the real treasures were the scraps of food that Cindy had stuck in before they left Saturday morning: half a box of Smarties (a brand of candy-covered chocolates), a granola bar, and a package of shelled sunflower seeds.
And finally among the luggage they found Don't Samsonite suitcase. One white dress shirt; one pair of pyjamas, one pair of swimming trunks; one beach robe; a razor and shaving kit containing a bar of soap, and a small mirror, broken in the crash. And one wire coat hanger.
There was one last package to open: the plane's first aid kit. It yielded little: some aspiring, gauze bandages and several large adhesive dressings, surgical soap, and a bottle of a commercial preparation called Stop-Bleed.
"I could have used some of that last night," Brent said. "I'm still afraid this thing on my neck is going to start again. But what I might do is just have some of those aspirins. My foot hurts stony-ass bad."
"Here, put it under my jacket. Try to warm it against my tummy."
Awkwardly, Brent scruched into his chair. The pain was rolling over him now, and the effort of trying to be cocky had left him drained. Donna cradled his foot against her sking, but she had little warmth to share.
Brent wanted to cry out, to scream. He could taste something sour in his throat - it reminded him of his drinking days, when he'd vomited until his stomach was empty. He tried to cough it up but all that came out was more of that sour tast. Donna looked terrible. One of her eyes was starting to close, and there were black rings around both of them, like shiners. She was trying to scoop snow from the cabin floor and rub it on his foot. He wanted to pass out from the pain, but he couldn't leave Donna alone.
Then he saw the cut on her hand - an ugly gash that laid open most of her right palm.
"Did you know you had that?" he said.
"I...I guess so. But I can't feel it. I suppose, like, the rest of me hurts so bad I haven't got room for any more. I just hurt all over."
With the Stop-Bleed, Brent cleaned the wound in Donna's hand, then dressed it with some of the gauze and, with his own hands stiff and clumsy, applied one of the adhesive bandages to her palm. Then they wrapped one of her extra socks around it.
"We've got to get some kind of fire going in here," Brent said. "We could die from the cold. Do you know what Norm did with my lighter?"
"I think I saw him trying to set fire to one of those logs he dragged in yesterday. I was half asleep, but I sort of saw him outside th eplane. I couldn't figure out what he was doing."
They found the lighter under the pilot's seat. It was empty of fuel. Sparks shot impotently from its flint.
"Oh, Jesus," Brent said.
"That's what he must have been doing when I saw him," Donna said. "Tried to start a fire and just held it there till it went out. You know how crazy he seemed."
"Listen, I've got an idea. Hand me one of those Coke bottles and the coat hanger from Don's suitcase."
"What are you going to do?"
"There's something a guy showed me just a couple of days ago. Thursday, when I was out at Norm's. There's a little thing under the wing. It drains fuel from the bottom of the tanks. You're supposed to use it to see if there's water in your fuel. The water goes to the bottom, see, and if you open this little valve, you can see if you've got water or gas."
Brent moved to the pilot's seat, next to the right hand window, so he could use his good arm to push through the makeshift covering. He straightened out the coat hanger. For several minutes he poked at the valve under the wing, just barely within his reach. Liquid began to drip. Exchanging the coat hanger for the Coke bottle, he reached out again. The dri was just at the farthest reach of his arm. He caught one, two, three drops, and then the flow stopped. He jabbed again with the coat hanger. Reached out again to catch. Jabbed again. Suddenly the liquid began to run freely. He caught almost half a bottle before it stopped. He brought it in and smelled it. It was gasoline.
As quickly as they could move around the cramped cabin, they made a pile of expendable materials on the cabin floor. The Kleenex, the useless maps, the lining of Don's suitcase.
"We'd better save some," Brent said.
He poured gas over the pile and held the lighter at its base. Sparks flew off the flint. He thought momentarily of the remaining fuel in the wing taks. The hell with it, he muttered to himself. It would be several feet away from any open flame.
The sparks weren't catching. He tried again. Nothing. It wasn't going to work.
Brent thought of a scene from his drinking days, when Jimmy would limit him to five gallons of gas at a time for his car. With his friends, he could a way to supplement his supply. At night, the trucks from the oil firleds were parked downtown - always, he discovered, with their tanks full of gas for the next day's work. Brent and his friends used to sneak up to the lane where they were pared and siphon off eneough fuel for their evening's driving adventures. To simplify the mechanincs of siphoning, they used green plastic garbage pails, holding them lower than the truck's fuel tanks and the raising them above the level of Brent's car. One night, he remembered, he wasn't sure if they'd got enough, and he'd tried to use his lighter to peer into the receiving pail. Va-voomph! The explosion had almost blown his hair off.
"This has got to work," he said now, and bent again to the task. More gas from the bottle. More sparks. Then: fire. Their little pile was burning.
As Brent nursed the flames, Donna began repairing the coverings on the windows, trying to maximize every precious flicker of warmth. It was working. They could feel the heat. In celebration, they opened the sunflower seeds, savouring each one they ate, promising they'd ration every particle of their food. After a dozen of the seeds were gone, they closed the package again. They'd need the rest later. They were going to make it. They'd stay alive.
After the paper, Donna's swimsuit had burned best of all.
"You know," said Brent, "when we get out of here I'm going to do a commercial for Bic lighters."
The relief of the fire was short-lived. They had to keep shifting their positions, trying to bring different parts of their bodies near the meagre blaze, and every move was painful. There was no comfortable way they could sit; each position seemed to uncover a new bruise, or to reming them, as with Brent's shoulder or Donna's hand, how serious the injuries they had discovered really were.
Donna had removed her shoes to rub her feet, and twice, as she tried to toast her toes, Brent had to point out to her that her socks were smouldering - just as they had on the first dya, near the ill-fated fire outside. She had no feeling below her ankles.
From the yield of the suitcase, they began to fashion costumes. Donna had slipped the Mickey Mouse shirt over her kangaroo hacket. Over both she wore her own leather jacket. Now, she slipped into her pyjama coat, pulling up its hood. The fit was snug, but comfortable, and she discovered to her pleasure that the coat was long enough to wrap around her legs. Bren'ts legs, scrawny to begin with an covered only by his tan slacks, needed immediate insulation. Over the slacks he pulled the bottom half of Don't pyjamas and then, finding little relief, inverted the tops too, and stuck his legs through the sleeves. With Don't leather jacket now worn over his own sportscoat, vest, and shirt, his torso seemed warm enough. As an equivalent to Donna's hood, he fashioned a kind of parka-top from Don's white dress shirt, carefully pushing the extra cloth down inside his own shirt with the coat hanger. The congealed blood on his neck stayed dry. As Donna had, he slipped one of the pairs of white socks over his hands. There was still no sunlight and the snow continued to course around the crash site, but the piercing edige of the freezing night was dulled in the afternoon. For the time being at least, and in the relative warmth of the daytime, they were protected from the cold.
A strange mood came over them. It was almost forty hours - the first night, the first long, fuzzy day, the second night, the bitterness and pain of the second morning - since the crash. Only now could they begin to realize the horror of their situation. The events since the crash - Don't death, Norm's apparent insanity, the injuries that seemed to grow in both number and severity with each exploration of their bodies - all these had passed as a drem. For much of the time their dazed condition had softened the blows of reality. This morning, the tasks of inventory and housekeeping, of starting the fire and assembling their makeshift winter garb, had kept them too busy to reflect. Now, as they rested and tried to find a way to huddle together near the remains of thier fire, they knew all too clearly what had happened to them. It was they, Brent Dyer and Donna Johnson, two young people from Estevan, Saskatchewan, and not two strangers they might read about or see on the drive-in screen, who were facing a lonely and savage death on the side of a mountain whose name they did not know. The parents who had seen them through all their troubles before were not there. Don Johnson's lifeless body was reminder enough of that. And yet, somehow, they felt relief. They were alive. The worst should...must be over. They felt almost euphoric. They would survive.
Donna announced that she was going to walk for help.
"You can't do it," Brent said. "You don't even know where we are."
"We've got to be somewhere. There's got to be someone around. Maybe Norm found help. Maybe just because he can't talk he can't tell them where we are."
"We've got to wait here. Norm must have sent some kind of Mayday out before we hit. They've got to be looking for us."
"Do you think he really sent a message?"
"I don't know. I can't remember much of what happened."
"I can't remember anything."
"I've heard people who are in car crashes have the same thing."
"We were flying and then we crashed."
"We'll probably remember it later. We'll probably remeber everything. It will all come back to us at once. Don't be scared, Donna."
"I am scared. I'm scared and I'm going to walk for help."
"You're nuts. We should stay here. You can't walk away. You can't even stand."
"I'm going."
"I don't even want to talk about it, Donna."
"You still sound funny. Do your teeth hurt?"
"You're fucking right they hurt. I think my jaw's broken. I can feel the bone in there."
"I'm going."
"Oh, for Christ's sake go then."
"I'll bring help."
"You'd be better off here."
"I'll be back. You'll see."
She couldn't pull her shoes on over her swollen feet, so she slipped two of the Cessna's airsickness bags over her socks. She wrapped the hood of her pyjama coat tightly around her neck and put an extra pair of socks over her hands. She opened the cabin door and slithered out throught the opening. Tentatively, she put one foot on the ground. She felt nothing. Holding the edge of the door with her elbow to protect the wound in her hand, she started to step onto the other foot, like a swimmer entering an icy pool. She put her weight on both feet. With a cry, she pitched face forward into the snow.
"I can't do it. I can't walk."
"Can you make it back in here?"
"I think so. Can you give me your hand?"
"Just roll over on your back and kind of hinch yourself back up to the doorway. I'll drag you in."
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. Someone will come."
"Oh, Brent, I'm so scared."
"There's nothing wrong with that. I'm scared too."
"I wish Dad was alive."
"We've got to cover him up."
"You mean, like, bury him?"
"Just cover up his face, I guess. And maybe say some kind of prayer. Like a funeral service."
"You're not supposed to think it's him there any more."
"It isn't."
"I know that but...he was so alive."
"It's not him, Donna. The real him has gone to heaven. That's just his body."
"Do you believe in heaven?"
"In God, sure. In heaven? Yeah, I guess so."
"In church they talk about heaven. Dad never went to church."
"That doesn't mean he couldn't go to heaven."
"The church says it does. I wonder if Mom ever tried to get him to join the church. I'll bet he wouldn't have."
"He wouldn't have done anything he didn't believe in."
"He couldn go to heaven, though."
"He's not there, is he? Not in that body?"
"No."
There were no extra pieces of clothing to cover Don's face. He lay - sat - where he had died, on the left side of the double back seat. His body had stiffened in death and his feet extended toward the centre of the cabin floor, just behind the front seats, where their fire still flickered. His head lay back on the head rest. His eyes started upward at the cabin roof. His mouth was open. Togehter, they raised the upper part of his heavy body and slipped off the beige sweater vest he'd worn over his brown shirt. Brent reached up and pulled the dead eyelids down. They covered the face with the woollen vest.
"Our Father," Brent began, and Donna joined in. She fought back tears. "Hallowed be Thy name. They kingdom come."
They finished the prayer together.
"Do you know any hymns?" Donna said.
"All I can think of is 'Holy, Holy, Holy.'"
Donna started, her young girl's voice clear in the ancient melody, and Brent sang with her.
"Holy, Holy, Holy,
Lord God Almight.
Early in the morning
Our song shall rise to Thee."
When they finished they sang it again, and then Donna wept, and Brent tried to hold her, and they talked about Don for a while, and then Donna crossed herself and the service was over.
Once again they felt, not the near-euphoria that had come over them as they'd sat earlier by the fire, but still a kind of comfort. Neither spoke for a while, but each was thinking about the strength they had found in the ritual of the Lord's prayer and in the only hymn they had been able to remember. It was something familiar to them, of course, but it was more than that. In the dull, hurting cold interior of the tiny plane, the words possessed - more than ever before for either of them - literal meaning. "Deliver us from evil," they had prayed. They had repeated the same litany thousands of times in church and Sunday school and in the public school system of Estevan; but for the first time the words meant something. Deliver us, Brent and Donna, from this evil, this horror, this ordeal. "Give us this day our daily bread." How easy it had been to repeat with the teacher or with the priest, but now it was a plea. In the place they now found themselves the "daily bread" that had always been on their tables would be the rest of the sunflower seeds, the still untouched half-pack of Smarties, perhaps even the toothpaste - anything. They were hungrier than they had every been in their lives.
And thirsty. Their thirst was overwhelming. The last liquid either of them had consumed was the Pepsi they had shared with Norm almost twenty-four hours ago. Their need for drink was now stronger even than their need for food. Extremes of temperature, psychological and physical trauma of shock, the altitude at which they had now been for nearly two days...even the fear...all these increase the human body's need for nourishment; but just as the body can live longer without solid food than it can without liquid, so does thirst seem a stronger urge to the deprived than actual hunger.
The snow that surrounded them was no solution. Brent was afraid of eat. He believed - correctly - that eating snow can be dangerous. It can freeze the mouth; there is so little moisture when it melts that it can serve only to increase the thirst. They had not been able to work out a system to melt the snow. They decided to drink their urine.
"What we'll do," Brent said, "is I'll pee in the Thermos. I think I've got enough in me to get a good drink. It'll at least quench our thirst. Can you get it down?"
"I'll try."
This was the first time either had wanted to urinate since the crash, and Brent was embarrassed about relieving himself in Donna's presence. He turned his back and, fumbling through the layers of his clothing, prepared to put something in the Thermos bottle. Nothing would come out.
"It's like giving a goddamn sample," he said. Then, the urine began to flow - dark and brackish in colour. He said nothing. He finished, did himself up again. "Now," he said, "I'll pour some into the top." It looked even worse in the drinking cup, almost red.
It's got blood in it," he said. "I must have hurt myself inside. Do you want to try it?"
Donna reached out her hand for the cup. Averting her eyes and trying not to inhale, she raised it to her lips and poured a sip into her mouth. Immediately she retched.
"You've got to get it into your stomach," Brent said.
She tried again, retched again. It would not go down.
Brent took the cup from her. His thirst was powerful. He tried to think of coffee, tried to hypnotize himself. It would be wet and would satisfy his need. There was salt in it. Surely he could do this, and then maybe if he drank it, Donna could do so too.
He sipped. He could not swallow. It was still warm and bitter and he was sure he could taste the blood. He spat it out. His stomach heaved and bile rose in his throat.
He dashed the cup of red-stained urine out the cabin door.
"I'd die before I could drink that," Donna said.
"I never liked tomato juice in my beer anyway," Brent said.
Donna wept.