Robert Liparulo - The 13 th tribe

Beth looked at the sweater. “It’s… drenched.”

In one quick motion Owen grabbed the back of his collar and yanked his flannel shirt over his head, revealing a green, long-sleeved undershirt, as stained and tattered as the button-down. He handed it to Beth, who pressed it against the credit card.

Owen removed his belt and wrapped it around Tyler’s torso and over the balled-up shirt. He cinched it tight.

Beth removed her hand. She stepped up to Tyler’s head and began stroking it. “You’re going to be fine, baby,” she whispered.

Tyler’s eyes rolled to look at her, and he tried to smile.

“What about the clinic?” Jagger said. “It’s in town, just a mile.”

“He needs more than it can offer,” Owen said. “We’ll take my helicopter to Sharm el-Sheikh. We can be there in forty minutes.”

Forty minutes, Jagger thought. They’d already wasted… He clicked off the chronology of events since the woman had shot Tyler: his distress, Beth’s arrival, Owen’s, the monks’. He realized that what had seemed an emotional eternity and at least twenty real-life minutes had been no more than five. Five minutes of agonizing, soul-searing torture. But another forty? How many heartbeats was that, as Tyler drifted toward some point of no return? He felt as though he were standing on a shore watching currents carry his son toward a plunging waterfall while someone ran off to find a life rope.

He saw Tyler looking at him while Beth stroked the bangs off his forehead and whispered in his ear. A patina of sweat slicked his face. Even in the scant light from the terrace’s single bulb, Jagger could see the gray hue of Tyler’s skin. The muscles under that skin continued to tremble, the way a puddle vibrates as something huge approaches. His lids closed and opened, closed and opened. But what frightened Jagger the most was the missing sparkle in his eyes, that indefinable reflected glow of his spirit.

The two monks returned, stomping up the stairs and across the terrace, carrying a board between them, blankets draped over their shoulders. Owen beckoned them with an urgent hand, like a flagman signaling a plane. He touched Tyler’s cheek and smiled at him. Then, in his excitement, he grabbed Jagger’s collar.

“We’re on,” he said. “Let’s move!”

Using a wad of gauze clamped in a hemostat, Toby dabbed at the bullet hole in Phin’s right cheek and the much larger exit wound in his left. “Man,” he said. “And I thought you were ugly before.”

Phin moaned. His hand came up to strike Toby, but dropped back to the vinyl bench seat in the rear of the helicopter’s cabin.

“Why’s he falling asleep all the time?” Alexa said, reaching over her seatback to touch Toby’s head. He was crouched between the bench seat and a row of captain’s chairs, where she and Nev sat. In front of them, Ben occupied the copilot’s seat.

“Pain,” Toby said. “Head wounds hurt, and the bullet really messed up his mouth, tongue, and teeth.”

“And his face.”

“It’ll heal.” Toby taped squares of gauze over each wound, pushed a syringe of an analgesic-sedative cocktail-morphine, bupivacaine, and dexmedetomidine-into Phin’s thigh, and returned to his seat beside Nevaeh. He slapped her shoulder. “So what’s this?” he said. “You shot a kid?”

She glared at him. “I’ll shoot you if you don’t shut up.”

“Like, how old was he?”

Nevaeh ignored him. Ben turned in his seat to look at her, then at Toby. “Tobias,” he whispered, “our pilot’s fidelity has already cost a king’s ransom. Your mouth will make it two… if not unpurchasable at any price. We will sort everything out on the plane.”

Toby glared into the back of the pilot’s head. “Don’t you think he heard the explosion? What about all those emergency vehicles we just flew over? The El Tour Road looked like a jeweled snake.”

“Everyone has a line they won’t cross.” Ben returned his gaze to Nevaeh, who said, “It was an accident.”

Toby waited for Ben to tell her what he’d told Toby a million times: We don’t do “accident,” but the older man simply turned in his seat and stared out the windshield at the dark desert below.

The helicopter Owen called “his” was an Egyptian Air Force Mi-8MB Bissektrisa — his for the evening, he’d told Jagger, at a cost of 50,000 LE-roughly $9,000-and “the calling in of long-forgotten favors.”

“The Egyptian military owed you favors?”

“Only some of the top brass.”

Jagger suspected that Owen’s chitchat-while carrying Tyler on the makeshift stretcher to the helicopter, waiting for Gheronda’s meager medical kit, even checking Tyler’s vitals and the compress’s effectiveness-was intended to distract Beth and him from dwelling too long on how all of this might end. Little good it did: the possibility of Tyler’s not pulling through was a black pool of stinking, noxious muck at the bottom of a pit with sloping, crumbling walls. No matter how hard Jagger tried to climb away from it, he always tumbled back in.

Between the far back seats and the pilot chairs was an open area that accommodated the stretcher with room to spare. Tyler lay on his side with Jagger’s folded shirt under his head. Jagger felt naked in a black tee, his prosthetic arm fully exposed. But of course he would spend the rest of his life wandering through cities truly naked if in some truth-or-dare version of the universe it meant saving his son or even merely granting him some measure of comfort and peace.

While they carried Tyler to the helicopter, Beth had rushed back to their apartment for her purse. Now she and Jagger crouched near Tyler’s head. Jagger kept a grip on Tyler’s shoulder, partly to comfort him, partly to hold him still as the helicopter banked and maneuvered through gusts of wind. Beth stroked his face and hair, whispering words of comfort or prayers-although she would argue they were one and the same, Jagger had never been so sure as now that they weren’t. But he wouldn’t begrudge her-or Tyler-access to the one they thought was a loving God. His disagreement was between himself and God.

Owen spun out of the copilot’s chair and knelt beside Tyler. He slapped a palm on Jagger’s back. “The pilot’s called ahead. He’s cleared to land on the hospital’s roof, and they’re prepping an OR. Sharm International, very modern with all the latest technologies and world-renowned doctors. He’ll get the best care.”

The hospital’s credentials didn’t surprise Jagger; Sharm el-Sheikh was a ritzy playground for the rich and famous. What did surprise him was Owen’s timely appearance and their ability to transport Tyler so quickly… “quick” only in relative terms: traveling the single road from St. Catherine’s west to Dahab, then south to Sharm el-Sheikh would have taken a bumpy, excruciating three hours, not counting the innumerable checkpoints. He might have said both Owen and the transport were miracles, blessings, but wasn’t the God who doled out such blessings the very one who had caused their need for them?

Deep inside, he feared that his anger would cause God to withdraw the blessings part of the equation: the helicopter would malfunction; the hospital would be missing an essential supply or piece of equipment or physician; or worse, Tyler wouldn’t hold on long enough to receive the care he needed. That would be consistent with the God Jagger knew: to offer hope, only to snatch it away.

He let loose with a mental scream. This was the kind of thinking that would tick off the Guy Upstairs. If he couldn’t thank him for Owen and his helicopter, then it was best not to think of him at all.

Just take each thing as it comes. It’s a world of defeats and victories, of counterbalances. Things happen, they just happen.