Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [109]
“Why?” Bob asked. He was wearing both his priest and pilot hats. “You afraid of dying?”
She shook her head. “I made peace with that long ago.” The dexamethasone had taken effect. “We all die. Some just sooner than we want.” Abbie stared at me. “I’m afraid of leaving him.”
We climbed in and Abbie tapped Bob on the shoulder. “Listen, I don’t handle things like this very well, so unless you want this little cockpit to turn into the vomit comet, you’ll get up there, do the loop and get me on the ground. Got it?”
Bob half nodded. “Not really, but…”
I tapped him on the other shoulder and pointed out across the grassy field he used as a runway. “What are all those dark green mounds?”
He yelled above the grumble of the engine. “Animal bones.”
There must’ve been a hundred mounds covered with dark green grass. “That’s a lot of bones. Where’d you get them?”
He shrugged and continued our taxi. “Roadkill, mostly.”
“Any human bones out there?”
He throttled the engine, pulled down his goggles and yelled above the roar, “Not yet.”
He left off the brakes, we sped down what seemed like at most a hundred feet and then Bob pulled back on the stick, lifting us skyward. We had just cleared the treetops when he slammed the stick back further, rocketing the nose toward the sky. We climbed and climbed and climbed and just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, he rolled us over, let the stick fall forward and we spiraled toward the earth. To add insult to injury, he started rolling. I thought we’d been shot down. Abbie howled with excitement while I tried not to crap in my pants. We shot earthward, then without notice, we leveled out and rolled six or eight times on our own axis. Abbie braced herself on both sides of the plane, laughed at the top of her lungs and babbled uncontrollably. Evidently, that was just a warm-up, because no roller coaster at Busch Gardens can do what came next. We skidded across the treetops—I think I remember seeing the reflection of the river off to my right—and then we shot heavenward again, but this time we just kept rolling over. When I could see the earth below us and we started falling, Abbie realized that she was at the top of her loop. She began screaming, “Yes! Yes! Do it again! Do it again!”
I lost count after the sixth loop.
In front of us, Bob had taken to singing at the top of his lungs. The words were off-key but washed over us just the same. With one hand on the stick, the other conducting the air around him, he sang, “I’ll fly away old Glory, I’ll fly away…”
Later, when the wheels touched down, Abbie laid her head against me and I checked her carotid pulse—her heart was about to jump out of her chest. Bob cut the engine and rolled to a stop beneath his hangar. I lifted her out and lay her flat on the ground. Knees bent, one hand braced on a post, the other spread flat across the ground, she was half smiling, half moaning and her shorts were wet where she’d peed in her pants. “Oh, please stop the earth from spinning.”
I sat down next to her and used my shirt to dab the mucusy blood trickling out of her nose.
41
We traveled to M. D. Anderson in Houston, Sloan-Kettering in New York, Mayo Clinic in Rochester, then back to Jacksonville. Each diagnosis, although worded differently, was the same. “Your cancer has metastasized and we are chasing it.” Although she’d never smoked, it went into the lining of her lungs. Next we found spots on her liver. Though the drugs were effective and the cancer seemed responsive to treatment, it was always a step ahead. In the meantime, Abbie grew weaker. Pretty soon, I knew her ability to fight a sniffle would be compromised. She couldn’t take much more.
I, on the other hand, hadn’t painted in more than three years. Leonardo da Vinci once said that “where the spirit does not work with the mind, there is no art.” He was right. Given the fact that nobody wanted to hire Abbie and that her remaining contracts had been canceled upon failure to deliver what she’d promised, i.e. herself, we were rifling through our savings. I sold my flats boat and had