Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,25
dragging a sled filled with food and medicine. The footprints weren’t his but those of the people he’d been sent to find.
When he got to the airplane, Jared pretended to unpack the supplies and give the man and woman something to eat and drink. He told them they were too hurt to walk back with him and he’d have to go and get more help. Jared took the watch off the man’s wrist. He set it in his palm, face upward. I’ve got to take your compass, he told the man. A blizzard’s coming, and I may need it.
Jared slipped the watch into his pocket. He got out of the plane and walked back up the ridge. The clouds were hard and granite-looking now, and the first flurries were falling. Jared pulled out the watch every few minutes, pointed the hour hand east as he followed his tracks back to the house.
The truck was still out front, and through the window Jared saw the mountain bike. He could see his parents as well, huddled together on the couch. For a few moments Jared simply stared through the window at them.
When he went inside, the fire was out and the room was cold enough to see his breath. His mother looked up anxiously from the couch.
“You shouldn’t go off that long without telling us where you’re going, honey.”
Jared lifted the watch from his pocket.
“Here,” he said, and gave it to his father.
His father studied it a few moments, then broke into a wide grin.
“This watch is a Rolex,” his father said.
“Thank you, Jared,” his mother said, looking as if she might cry. “You’re the best son anybody could have, ain’t he, Daddy?”
“The very best,” his father said.
“How much can we get for it?” his mother asked
“I bet a couple of hundred at least,” his father answered.
His father clamped the watch onto his wrist and got up. Jared’s mother rose as well.
“I’m going with you. I need something quick as I can get it.” She turned to Jared. “You stay here, honey. We’ll be back in just a little while. We’ll bring you back a hamburger and a Co-Cola, some more of that cereal too.”
Jared watched as they drove down the road. When the truck had vanished, he sat down on the couch and rested a few minutes. He hadn’t taken his coat off. He checked to make sure the fire was out and then went to his room and emptied his backpack of school books. He went out to the shed and picked up a wrench and a hammer and placed them in the backpack. The flurries were thicker now, already beginning to fill in his tracks. He crossed over Sawmill Ridge, the tools clanking in his backpack. More weight to carry, he thought, but at least he wouldn’t have to carry them back.
When he got to the plane, he didn’t open the door, not at first. Instead, he took the tools from the backpack and laid them before him. He studied the plane’s crushed nose and propeller, the broken right wing. The wrench was best to tighten the propeller, he decided. He’d straighten out the wing with the hammer.
As he switched tools and moved around the plane, the snow fell harder. Jared looked behind him and on up the ridge and saw his footprints were growing fainter. He chipped the snow and ice off the windshields with the hammer’s claw. Finished, he said, and dropped the hammer on the ground. He opened the passenger door and got in.
“I fixed it so it’ll fly now,” he told the man.
He sat in the backseat and waited. The work and walk had warmed him but he quickly grew cold. He watched the snow cover the plane’s front window with a darkening whiteness. After a while he began to shiver but after a longer while he was no longer cold. Jared looked out the side window and saw the whiteness was not only in front of him but below. He knew then that they had taken off and risen so high that they were enveloped inside a cloud, but still he looked down, waiting for the clouds to clear so he might look for the pickup as it followed the winding road toward Bryson City.
THE WOMAN WHO BELIEVED IN JAGUARS
On the drive home from her mother’s funeral, Ruth Lealand thinks of jaguars.
She saw one once in the Atlanta Zoo and admired the creature’s movements—like muscled water—as it paced back and forth, turning inches from