No Passengers Beyond This Point(60)

After a while, I quit trying. No getting rid of her, once she got it in her mind she was ours. Started calling her Boom, short for Boomerang because of the way she always come back.

Anyways, the plane went down—some kind of bird strike, they think, though they won’t know for sure until they find the black box. The plane lost radio contact, seemed to vanish off the radar screen. A big 727 like that don’t just poof disappear. Everyone and their brother was looking for it. We’re the closest spot to the big reserve where they thought the flight went down, so we saw it all. Those with people on the plane, they were out of their minds with worrying. They were all over town with news folks coming in a swarm behind them.

Two of them came to our place, knocked on the door. A big guy with red hair. That was his name too, Red. And the mother of three of them kids I saw on TV. I couldn’t understand why she had all three of her kids on the flight when she wasn’t on it. City people is different, I guess.

The mom, she kept talking about geography. India, Switzerland, Finland. I couldn’t follow until I finally figured out it was her kids’ names. But then she said she just knows in her gut they’s alive. Moms know that kind of thing. I’m the same with my two.

Maybe city folks ain’t so different. They love their kids even if they do have a strange way of showing it, naming them after foreign countries and sending them on plane flights all by themselves. Still, I felt for her.

It was something else she said that stuck in my mind real good. Her youngest one was interested in planets and she was smart. Said she had blue corduroys and blue sneakers that probably had a few coins in them. I guess she liked to carry dimes in her shoes.

Oh, there was a lot of other stuff too. Her son played basketball, her daughter was in the church choir and counting the days until she got her driver’s license. They was moving to the uncle’s up in Fort Baker, times being tough now and all. She was asking if I’d get my Ben to look with his crop duster.

Of course I said I would. “Benjamin Bean,” I told my Ben, “the corn can wait. You got to look for these kids.” Just about everybody in town did their bit.

But the blue shoes with the dimes—that stuck with me.

When I was fixing to feed the dogs, I was cleaning their bowls when Boom, that skinny German shepherd, sets a dusty blue, kid-size sneaker on my foot.

Boom is an odd dog. Don’t come up for a love the way the other ones do. Acts more like a cat. Comes in with dead mice, squirrels, rats, lays ’em at my feet like I’m supposed to be happy about it. But when I pick up this shoe, to take it out to the rubbish heap, something jingles. And sure enough, there were dimes taped to the inside just like that mom said and I remembered about the little girl.

Ben Bean, he was in our plane looking for the kids. So I gave Boom the shoe and I hopped in the truck and I’ll be darned if that dog didn’t lead me straight to those kids. Hundreds of people hunting for them, but the only one knew where they were was a skinny old dog ought to be livin’ in town.

Guess where she found ’em. Sittin’ in a tree. Yep. All three buckled in like the flight was still going on. They was alive too. Not conscious, but alive. The older girl had her hand so tight around the branch we couldn’t hardly pry it off. She was holding all three of their hands together, it looked to me. The little girl with just the one blue shoe had her arm in a homemade sling made from the boy’s sweatshirt. Can’t imagine how they did that. But they was right, because that arm was broke in three places.

The boy was the one worried me the most. He had his head at a funny angle didn’t seem natural, plus he was missing his sweatshirt on account of it was the little girl’s sling. Colder than the devil out there. March can surprise you that way. Think winter’s over but it ain’t. All of ’em frostbit something fierce, but they was alive.

About the only ones who survived the crash were kids. The TV said kids is the ones that make it if anyone do. I’m not sure what happened with them other two they found, but the Tompkins kids’ seats were all three bound together. They was thrown clear and the canopy of branches caught them like a big old tree hand. Probably wouldn’t have if they’d been the size of my two, but they wasn’t so big yet and they was just hanging there when Boom found them.

With that fuel on board the rest of the plane exploded. Some kind of fireball, I reckon. It was a miracle those kids didn’t burn up. A miracle their mom told me about the dimes. A miracle Boom let me know where they was at. That’s three miracles. Most folks don’t ever get but one.

Course it coulda been something else too. Somethin’ on the inside makes one person want to save himself where the next one just gives on up. Can’t give someone that or take it away neither. Just the way they’s put together.