Ken Grimwood - Replay

The plane shook again, dipped further toward the right. The Golden Gate Bridge came into view, its towers shockingly close.

"We’re going to hit it," Sharla whispered urgently. "We’re going to hit the bridge!"

"No," Jeff rasped out. "We’re still more or less level. We haven’t dropped much since the engine went. We’ll miss the bridge, anyway."

"This is Captain Kimes," a studiedly calm voice said. "We have a minor problem, ladies and gentlemen … Well, maybe it’s not so minor."

They were limping back over land now, back toward the hills and high rises of San Francisco.

"We’re gonna try to—We’re gonna head for Travis Air Force Base—that’s about forty miles—because they’ve got a nice, long runway there we can use, longer than anything at San Francisco International. I’m gonna be pretty busy up here, so just settle down and I’ll put Second Officer Webb on to tell you what you need to know about the landing."

"He doesn’t think we can make it," Sharla wailed. "We’re going to crash, I know we are!"

"Keep quiet," Jeff told her. "Those kids across the aisle can hear you."

"This is Second Officer Max Webb," said the new voice from the tinny speakers. "We’ll be making an emergency landing at Travis in about ten minutes, so…"

Sharla began to whimper, and Jeff held her hand more tightly.

"… If we use the chutes, please stay calm. Remember, you will sit down to go out the chute. Don’t panic. When we do land, and if it is a rough landing—which is a possibility—please lean forward in your seats. You grab your ankles and stay down, or put your arms under your knees. Move as far forward as you possibly can. Do not move until we tell you what we’re going to do…"

The plane was losing altitude fast. As they approached the broad expanse of the military base, Jeff could see fire equipment and ambulances lining the longest of the crisscrossing, empty runways.

They began a long, looping circle, just a few hundred feet above the Air Force barracks and hangars. Jeff heard the wheels emerge in jerky fits and starts from the plane’s undercarriage. The crew must be cranking them down manually, he thought. The explosion had probably wrecked the hydraulic system.

Sharla was mumbling something beside him; it sounded like she was praying. Jeff took a last look out the window and saw a whirlwind kicking up dust at the near end of the runway they were aiming for. That could mean trouble; with the damage the plane had already sustained, a last-minute spate of turbulence might—Well, there was no point thinking about it. He pulled his hand away from Sharla’s, helped her get into a fetal position, then curled his own head between his knees, clutching his ankles.

The remaining engines gave a sudden burst of power, and the plane heaved to the left, then lurched back on course. Pilot must have been trying to avoid that whirlwind, must have—

The wheels touched, screeched against the tarmac, seemed to hold. For several agonizing seconds they raced along the runway. Then the engines roared again and they were slowing, stopping … they had landed.

The passengers burst into applause. Then the stewardesses threw open the emergency exits and everyone scrambled to slide down the escape chutes. The crippled plane reeked of jet fuel, and when he was outside Jeff could see the clear, flammable liquid pouring from cracks in the broken right wing. He pulled Sharla along with him and they ran from the plane.

Three hundred yards away they collapsed, exhausted, on a grassy strip between two runways. Military fire engines were dousing the 707 with white foam, and all around them people milled about in a state of shock.

"Oh, Jeff," Sharla cried, putting her arms around his neck and her face against his shoulder. "Oh my God, I was so scared up there. I thought—I thought—"

He pried her arms loose, pushed her away, and stood up. The stark black-and-white makeup she wore was streaked with tears, her op-art dress stained from the escape chute, the smoke, the grass.

Jeff looked around, spotted one building off to the left that seemed to be a center of activity, a hive of returning ambulances and asbestos-suited emergency personnel. He started walking in that direction, leaving Sharla where she lay weeping on the ground.

"Jeff!" she screamed after him. "You can’t leave me, not now! Not after that!"

Why not? he thought, started to say it aloud, then just kept on walking.

Jeff finished his eggs and bacon as the sun was coming up, scrubbed the dishes, and left the pan to soak. Usually he took a cup of coffee on the little porch of the steep-roofed white house, but this morning he was running late, and there was much to do.

He pulled a down jacket over his flannel shirt and stepped outside. Third week of May, but the air still had a bite to it; last frost of the year had come night before last. He nodded his respects to the rock pile where old man Smyth was buried, and strode over to one of the newly furrowed corn fields, all staked out and ready for planting. Smyth had worked this land alone, too, after he’d homesteaded it in the 1880s. Had fallen ill after some sort of accident, Jeff had been told, and nobody’d found his body for weeks. People who’d bought the place in the tax auction afterward had never planted a thing; hadn’t even kept the land, not once they’d found the small fortune in gold coins that Smyth had hidden in the Dutch oven. The old man had had some secrets of his own, it seemed.

Jeff dug the toe of his boot into the thick black topsoil where he’d be planting the first corn of the season this afternoon, the Sugar and Gold early variety. Good volcanic California soil it was, rich in minerals. He had nothing but contempt for the family that, so long ago, had let it lie fallow, had taken Sylvester Smyth’s gold and departed The Cove in search of unearned joys and comforts. Land like this demanded to be tilled, and the fresh food it would yield in return held far greater value than any coins. That was the contract, the bargain struck between man and earth ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia. To abandon good land, Jeff believed, was to break an ancient and almost holy bond.

He walked on past the plot where the asparagus would soon be coming up; he’d get at least another two years out of that original planting, and it was time now for the first of the plants' twice-yearly feedings. The late spring frosts didn’t seem to bother them at all; Jeff thought it made the stalks crisper. He knelt beside the spring that ran through his property, scooped a double handful of the icy mountain water to his mouth. As he drank, a pair of German brown trout swam past. If he finished planting the corn and feeding the asparagus before nightfall, he decided, he’d bring a rod down and catch some dinner.

The sun continued to climb the sky, lighting the tips of the pines on the humped rise of Hogback Mountain to the southwest. Jeff followed the meandering uphill path of the spring, pausing every twenty feet or so to clean it of accumulated debris, opening the clogged collection boxes and pipes on which his crops depended for irrigation.

He’d bought the place nine years ago, a few weeks after the near-disaster on the plane to Honolulu. He hadn’t seen Sharla since that day beside the smoky runway. Hadn’t seen much of anybody since that summer, truth to tell.

His closest full-time neighbor was at Turtle Pond, three miles east along an old wagon road. Only way into or out of Jeff s place was by way of a switchback road that was often washed away. From November through January the snows and rains and mud made the passage over Marble Creek all but impossible; he’d learned to stockpile well for the winter.

Rest of the year he kept to himself almost as much. Every week °r so he’d drive into the little town of Montgomery Creek, buy some things at the store there or get his pickup serviced at the two-pump Shell station. He’d quit drinking, by and large, but if the harvest was a good one he might celebrate with a beer and dinner at the Forked Horn or the Hillcrest Lodge. An amiable family, the Mazzinis, owned the Forked Horn, and the wife, Eleanor, ran a branch of the Shasta County library out of their big, rambling house in town. Jeff would chat with one or the other of them sometimes, about this and that. Their son Joe was a couple of years younger than Jeff, and his intelligent curiosity about the outside world seemed to know no bounds. Yet none of the family ever pried; they never dug too deeply into why Jeff had sought such an isolated life for himself. Joe had helped him set up a shortwave rig out at The Cove, and the radio had become Jeff’s only contact with civilization, aside from his occasional talks with the Mazzinis.