Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [3]
October 29, 1956
D DAY, H HOUR MINUS NINE
I COULD NOT MOVE. My feet felt as though they were encased in cement. My brain was whirling with a mishmash of bloated, horrifying images. Weird-shaped airplanes fell out of the sky ... distorted, terrorized faces of my daughters screamed for help ... Valerie was humping some faceless bastard and screeching venomously and laughing at me ... a band of headless musicians played a military march ... Shit, what was all this about? Baby waves breaking on a beach ... hush ... hush ... hush ...
I blinked my eyes open.
Hush ... hush ... hush ...
Where the hell am I? My mouth was filled with sand. I strained to move. Trapped! Dammit! I can’t move!
I jerked hard and inched up on my elbows. The beach was empty. My face dropped to the sand again. Get it together, Gideon. Think, man. All right, I know. I ... I ... left the hotel and ... uh ... I left the hotel and took a walk on the beach to clear my head. Let me think, now. I must have stopped at the water’s edge and ... I guess I passed out from exhaustion. Where is the hotel? Dammit, I can’t see too well ... sand.
Think. The tide has washed over me. My legs and feet are sunk in the wet sand. I worked my feet and legs loose and wobbled upright, then staggered to the water and plunged my face into an oncoming little wave. Shit! Sand washed out of my face, ears, mouth, nostrils, hair. My eyes stung from the salt water. I plunged in, took a mouthful, rinsed it, spit it out. Phew!
I looked about. Not a soul, not even a bird. Nothing more empty than an empty beach.
Oh, Jesus! The past twenty-four hours flooded in. The evacuation and watching Valerie and the girls fly off. How’d I get here? I remember now. I went home but couldn’t stay there alone, so I went to the hotel. It was deserted.
Our dog, Grover! Come on, Gideon, get a handle on it. I went home, decided to go to my office in the hotel. Grover had a fever. I took him with me and had to carry him up four flights to my room. The hotel was dark and empty, scary.
Where was Grover? Yeah, okay, that’s it. I put him into the car to wait for me. I was going to take him into Tel Aviv to the vet. Then I took a walk on the beach to try to clear my head. I sat down for a rest and must have dropped off. Lucky I didn’t drown myself.
Oh, dear Lord, where were Val and the girls now? What a mess I’ve made! I began once more to replay the evacuation scene. Blow the trumpets. Gideon has just made a triumphal entry into shit city.
“Gideon!” a voice called from the distance. “Gideon!”
Now I’m hearing things.
“Gideon!” it repeated.
If that voice isn’t real, I’m in big trouble.
“Gideon!”
I squinted, tried to clear the sting from my eyes, and brought into focus the figure of a woman standing on the bluff near the hotel, shouting and waving.
“Natasha!”
I sprinted down the beach along the waterline, where the sand was hard, stopped and caught my breath, then cut over the soft sand toward the hotel. A path led up to the bluff. I grunted and growled as sharp little pebbles and shells nipped hard at the soles of my feet, and then I stood before her nearly doubled up.
Natasha clawed so hard at my back I felt and heard my shirt rip. She bit at my shoulders, weeping crazily. She pulled at my wet, salty, sandy hair and I came back at her squeezing the breath from her with my embrace.
After a time we stood holding each other up like a pair of fighters who have punched themselves out and are clinched and staggering. Our bodies became still, only wavering a bit as we fought to control our breathing. A puff of wind blew her hair into her face where it joined her tears. I pushed free and hobbled off the path to where the sand was soft in a patch surrounded by high spiky tufts of dune grass.
“They’re gone,” I managed to blurt.
“I was with B.G. all day,” she rasped. “I heard about the evacuation, but didn’t dare try to telephone out. Everything goes through the switchboard. I was crazy out of my mind. I thought—I thought you had left with them.”
I flopped my arms.
“You wanted to go with them, didn’t you?