Necessity

The baby is yelling again.

She’s trying desperately to think of a way out. Trying to remember the map but nothing comes to mind. Never been over here on the back side. Nothing here to see except woods all around.

She finds clearings and uses them—several times plunging into thick mud bogs before knowing they are there in the deep grass; only the low range four-wheel traction brings her through.

Smashing thickets she skirts a brown pond and fits between saplings as thick as her forearms; the side-mounted spare tire catches on one of them and begins to pull the Jeep around but she manhandles it through.

Ellen in panic tries to scramble out of her imprisoning grip. She has to let go of the wheel to confine the baby with both hands. A tire bangs against something and pulls to the side; she has to grab the wheel again; she tucks Ellen against her, lowers her chin, lifts the baby and pushes her mouth against Ellen’s forehead. “Okay—okay—okay.”

The tires jitter across a rocky patch, making a loud rataplan that jars all her bones; the frame of the windshield shakes so violently before her eyes that she feels caught up in a kaleidoscopic maelstrom.

“Hang on, baby girl. Yell all you want but just don’t let go.”

Then in a stand of pines she crosses a trail and nearly misses it but then it registers and she brakes to a slamming stop, fights the shift into reverse and backs up.

It’s an overgrown track that looks like the sort of road forest rangers use—not much more than a hiking trail but wide enough to admit vehicular passage.

It goes uphill to the left, downhill to the right. That’s south, more or less, and she goes that way even though she knows her best escape is northward; she goes that way because it’s downhill and maybe it will lead her out of the mountains.

The track carries the Jeep out of the trees at the edge of a sloping meadow and the world opens before her. Worn green mountains all around; all the hillsides spill into a narrow valley that curves away to the northeast.

She can see cleared building sites down there—half a dozen scattered summer houses.

Where there are cabins there must be a road.

While she considers her options she hears a drone of distant engines and she sees them above the range quite some distance away to the north—a ballet of two tiny craft dark against the grey white clouds: airplane and helicopter weaving and bobbing and swaying as if performing some strange ritual dance.

The damn helicopter is still chasing Charlie.

To hell with him.

She continues down the track—hurrying, slithering on the weeds. Branches and thorns reach out to scrape and scratch the Jeep as it comes juddering by.

The ride is less brutal on this downslope. The baby’s panic subsides; crying softly now. Keep talking to her. Keep reassuring her.

She’s doing about twenty miles an hour—not very fast by normal standards but any faster and she wouldn’t be able to stop in time to avoid the sudden rocks and holes that appear at intervals; she has to find a way around each of them—or bull right over it, mechanism gnashing.

Toward the bottom the slope grows steeper. The path begins to switchback. Hairpin turns—she has to back and fill. For a few hundred yards she runs back and forth along a descending Z-shaped series of terraces. Stopping and crushing the stick into reverse for the last turn she looks out the window up the long hill she’s just descended—and sees the Bronco bouncing its way down from the top.

Bastards. Bastards.

They’re not far behind—a couple of minutes, no more. She blasts out of the hairpin and goes lurching across the valley floor, following the faint track and hoping it will take her out to a road near those houses on the opposite slope.

“A kiss for my little one. Quiet now, Ellen. Stop blubbering, that’s a good girl. I know you’re scared and hungry and thirsty and exhausted—you’ve got a whole world of things to complain about—but Momma’s got to think. You’re just going to have to bear with me. I’ll apologize later.”

Thing is, as soon as we get out onto a decent road we’re going to want all the speed we can get. That means shifting the controls on this beast—taking it out of four-wheel and low range. Converting it back to a road car. Now we’ve got to try and remember how to do that because they’re not going to give us a whole lot of time to read the damn manual and work it out by trial and error.…

There’s a hedgerow ahead, maples and oaks and birches—big trees masking whatever lies beyond. Directly above the trees, by some trick of random fate, she can see the distant game of tag that’s still in progress between George Talmy’s helicopter and Charlie’s airplane.

They seem quite near the bank of clouds that hovers above the mountains and for a very brief moment she wonders why Charlie doesn’t just fly into the clouds and disappear; then she’s slowing down to drive into the hedgerow and she’s got to concentrate on the trail. In the mirror the Bronco is nearly at the bottom of the switchbacks.

Out of the trees there’s a tangle of thorn. A lot of bright color in here: it’s dense and it feels tropical. The Jeep pries its way through thickets and without warning she finds herself poised at the edge of a stream looking at a white frothy flow of fast water and heaps of jumbled grey rocks everywhere. She barely stops in time.

The birling water makes a steady racket. It comes rushing around the bend in high-speed fury. A sizable broken sapling whips along the surface, smashing into rocks, caroming about, heaving and sliding past.

Christ. How deep is that river? Can the Jeep get across or has the rain swollen it too high? Is there a fording? Have any of those ugly boulders rolled into it?

Is this contraption waterproof? What happens if we get halfway across and the Jeep stalls?

Can I stand up and walk in that current with a baby in one arm?

If it’s deeper than it looks can I possibly swim one-armed in that mess with the baby—and avoid smashing both of us up on those rocks?

Even if I could—where could we go to get away from them?

The Bronco will be on them any second now and there’s no alternative, really.

I am endangering this kid’s life and I’ll do a term in purgatory for it but I honestly believe she’d be better off taking the risk of drowning than sentenced to a life with that verminous pig for a father.

“Here we go, darling. Hold tight.”

She hammers it into low and puts it down the steep pitch into the water. Nothing to do but hope and pray.

57 Not too fast. Keep it slow and steady. Can’t afford to lose footing in this treacherous water …

The flood buffets the side of the Jeep, rocking it. She fights the wheel, pulling back to the right, struggling against the Jeep’s desire to slide away with the current. It feels as if the bottom is hard and flat—possibly a sunken paved bridge but certainly it was never intended for use at flood stage.

The baby is caterwauling herself hoarse; her face has gone red, splotchy around the nose.

Her hand on the steering wheel is numb. Her arm is giving out.

Sorry Ellen but I need this other hand; just lie here in my lap and please don’t flail around so much.

Both hands on the wheel. Leaning her weight to the right—pulling the wheel—it’s so hard …

Please give me the strength to hold it straight.

Her foot. Cold. Wet…

There’s water coming up around her feet. Must be coming through holes in the floorboards.

The baby rolls off her lap onto the seat beside her and cries out. She can’t take her hand off the wheel. “Don’t move. Please, Ellen don’t move.”