The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [41]
The new line pulls taut with an audible crack, and Bigelow winces. But the splice holds. And the O-ring is fine, made of forged steel that can withstand thousands of pounds of stress. What’s wrong is the platform, the plank to which the ring is mounted. All those bent nails he hammered straight. One end comes up, and Bigelow grabs his crimping pliers to hammer it back down, but before he’s finished, the other end comes up. So Bigelow steps on it while continuing to pound the other, but what he has isn’t a hammer, and the head of the pliers glances off the nails without really striking them.
Before he can figure what to do next, the plank comes free and knocks Bigelow off balance. He lunges after the board before it’s out of reach. Bristling with rusted nails, it claws his cheek, his neck, but he gets one arm over it and doesn’t let go, hanging on as it pulls him off the platform and onto the slope, trying to dig his heels in. But stopping is impossible; all he can do is run, ski, skid. His feet barely contact the ground; mostly he feels just a slither of dry grass and shale.
He’s praying he has the strength to hold on, until, as he approaches the end of the bluff, he begins a new prayer—that he can let go, unhook himself from the nails that have worked their way right through the fabric of his tightly buttoned jacket.
Wrestling to escape his clothes, his sleeves now nailed to a board attached to a kite wire pulling him off the edge of the world, Bigelow has his head inside his collar, he can’t see how many more yards—feet?—are left, when he comes to an abrupt, scratching, splintering stop. His chest thuds into what must be the trunk of one of the twisted, straggling spruce trees on the wind-whipped edge of the bluff. Whatever it is, he’s got his legs around it. Coughing and gasping, the air knocked out of his lungs, he hangs on with his knees bent tight while trying to get his head and arms free.
Only minutes go by, but it seems a very long time before Bigelow has caught his breath and worked himself out of the jacket, wedged the plank securely in the crotch of the tree he hit. He’s cold without the extra layer of clothing—even in summer it’s windy and raw on the bluff—but he can’t risk loosening the plank, so he leaves the jacket where it is, caught between the plank and the tree. He lowers himself onto the ground, sits scratched and bruised, bleeding, and, he guesses, nowhere near as sore as he’ll be the next day.
The kite is still in the air, five thousand feet out, over the water, pulling so hard that the plank creaks against the tree limbs. Bigelow has to shade his eyes to see it. From his new perspective on the bluff, the kite is backlit, suddenly black instead of white, silhouetted against a lowered sun.
Bigelow waits four hours, during which every muscle stiffens, for the wind to change, lift the kite. He watches it rise overhead, then gets to his feet to reposition the plank. But as he tests the line he feels it slacken. First it isn’t as taut, and then it isn’t taut at all.
The kite plummets, losing altitude and looping wire all over the tree, the ground, and Bigelow, who grabs at the falling line, trying to pull fast enough to reestablish tension. But it’s no good—impossible—the kite is dropping down an invisible canyon, its boxlike form warped and contorted into an aerodynamic monster, a great-beaked bird of prey bent on destroying itself.
Bigelow runs to thrust himself between the kite and what it’s headed for, an outcropping of rock mottled with lichen and dusted with a few scraps of vegetation, not a shred of anything that might soften its impact. He has a moment to position himself, to squat like a wrestler,