Tag Man (20 page)

But the woman in the doorway was showing no suspicions whatsoever, even though Sally was wondering where in hell her father had cooked up that one. Sally had learned early on to front for her father by carrying the load of most social interactions. To see him as poised as he’d been since all this began had revealed a whole new person to her—and proved how much he felt was at stake.

“Norm’s my dad,” the woman told them, coming forward to shake their hands. “I’m Peggy Harrison. He lives with us nowadays.” She pointed to the extension attached to the house.

“Unfortunately,” she then said, “you just missed him. He’s taking his annual pilgrimage to see the wreck.”

Dan and Sally exchanged glances.

Peggy interpreted the gesture. “Sorry. It’s a huge local thing. Nobody else knows much about it. There was a plane crash on Hawks Mountain, back in the forties. It was a really bad night: a military plane got lost and flew right into the mountainside. It was terrible. Everybody onboard died. All the locals climbed the mountain in the dark to see if they could help. My dad was part of that, as a young man. It’s haunted him ever since, so every year, he revisits where it happened.” She then admitted, “It’s a little weird. I never got it. But it’s a big deal to him.”

Sally remembered what Jonny had said about Norm’s mental health, and was groping for how to broach the subject, when Dan asked, “He can do that? Alone? Jonny said he was a little worse for wear mentally.”

Peggy’s eyes widened, but she was smiling as she said, “He did, did he? Well, maybe it doesn’t take one to tell one. I would’ve called Jonny a moron. No, my dad’s a hundred percent. He’s old, but he’s wiry and as sound as a bell. Plus, he’s been doing this for over sixty years. He’d more likely lose his way to the bathroom than get lost on Hawks Mountain.”

Dan was agreeably nodding his head. “I heard about that crash,” he said. “It was a B-29, I think. A heavy bomber. What they called a Superfortress.”

“That sounds right,” Peggy agreed.

Dan turned to his daughter and explained, “Same type of plane that dropped the A-bomb on Japan, at the end of World War Two.”

Peggy was still speaking. “So I’m afraid you won’t get to see him today, unless you want to chase after him.”

Dan looked at her, surprised. “We could do that? He wouldn’t mind? I’m asking because we are on a tight schedule, and heading up north at the end of the day. Coming back would seriously mess up the calendar.”

“No, no. That would be fine,” Peggy said. “Dad would love to share this with somebody. I’m afraid I’m a big disappointment to him there. Let me get you a map.”

She vanished inside the house and reemerged with a single sheet of paper, which she handed over. “It’s incredibly easy. You have to ask permission of the people whose property you’ll be crossing, but Dad already did that, so if anyone challenges you, just say you’re with Norm Myers.” She laughed. “They know him by now almost as well as I do. You’ll have fun. It’ll only take a few hours, it’s a beautiful day, and you two look pretty fit.”

It was a beautiful day—a true advertisement of Vermont’s best features—and after a quick glance at Sally, Dan accepted Peggy’s suggestion, made his farewell, and drove them both to the jumping-off place in the heart of Perkinsville village.

“The Manaqueetoc Water Control Group?” Sally asked as they climbed out of the Land Rover and got themselves oriented at the foot of the first sloping field they were to address. Hawks Mountain—carpeted with trees, devoid of any signs of humanity, loomed above them like the menacing thing it had once been so long ago.

Dan smiled slightly. “I liked the sound of it.”

“What is Manaqueetoc?”

He checked to see that the water bottle he’d attached to his belt was secure. “Beats me.”

Hawks Mountain lay at the heart of an official wildlife-management area, which helped preserve its pristine condition, so it wasn’t more than fifteen minutes later that Dan and Sally found themselves as surrounded by trees as they might have been in Colonial times—excepting, as Dan pointed out, that Vermont had been clear cut of forests by the mid-1800s, making all of this woodland a second-growth crop, if not more recent.

But it was still old and sheltering, and wonderfully quiet, and the higher they climbed, the more often they caught glimpses of the valley below and to the east, including—Sally noticed with sad irony—a clear view of the Springfield airport, its paved and slightly elevated runway gleaming in the early-summer sun.

What they didn’t see for well over an hour, however, was any sign of Norman Myers, who they now both realized had either left home a lot earlier than they’d been told, or was built like a billy goat.

It turned out to be the latter. Just as they encountered the first amateur paper signs, covered in plastic wrap, announcing the beginning of the general crash site, Dan saw a red shirt bobbing far ahead of them, like a cardinal flitting amid the green foliage.

He put on a little more steam to close the distance, not bothering to admire a couple of mangled metal objects lying by the side of the trail—far too large to be carted off by souvenir seekers. Finally, he placed his hands around his mouth and called out, “Norm? Norm Myers?”

The slender, white-haired man far ahead stopped and turned, his face as welcoming as his daughter’s had been earlier.

“Hi,” he said simply.

Sally tried guessing her father’s mood, no longer so sure how to play her role now that Dan had become such an extrovert.

As if reading her thoughts, Dan stepped right up to the man and made the introductions—truthfully, this time.

“Hi, Norm. I’m Dan and this is my daughter, Sally. Peggy told us how to find you. I hope we’re not interrupting. I understand that this is a special yearly pilgrimage for you.”

Norm was visibly impressed.

“You know this place?”

While Sally shook her head, her father said, “I read about it, but I’ve never been.”

Norm turned to the scene. The surrounding trees stood farther back here, creating an area like a forested box canyon—open at one end, enclosed on two sides, and faced at the head wall by a steep and forbidding cliff that launched straight up to the top of Hawks Mountain, 150 yards or more overhead.

The entire setting had a faintly cathedral air, which in turn was given meaning by the presence of several objects noticeably at odds with the peaceful backdrop.

Norm pointed to one of them. “One of four engines. All of them are still here, and parts of the landing gear and undercarriage.” His finger moved up the cliff. “Up there, on the ledge. If they’d just been a few hundred feet higher up, they would’ve missed it.” He added, “Not that it probably would’ve mattered.”

“Why not?” Sally asked.

“This isn’t the highest peak in the neighborhood. Ascutney is a lot taller, and just a few miles north. The way the pilot was poking around, looking for a landmark, I guess he was going to hit something, sooner or later. Still … You never know.”

Norm walked a little farther into the shrine. As their eyes adjusted to the environment, differentiating the rocks from the trees from the scattered dull-metal reminders, they became increasingly aware of how much debris remained. A true sense of the disaster materialized, causing Sally to suddenly recognize that the glade they were occupying had most likely been formed less by nature and more by a cataclysmic and fiery explosion of unimaginable proportions.

“I was there,” Norm said simply. “When it happened.”

“That must have been horrible,” Sally sympathized.

Norm turned and smiled at her. “Changed my life. I was a young man then—1947. Full of beans and ready to take on the world. I was angry that I’d missed the war. Just a couple of years too young. And I was filled with … I guess you’d call it resentment. I felt I could’ve been a hero, that I would’ve had amazing stories to tell, and a sense of being rounded out somehow. The guys who had served and come back didn’t talk about it, and pretty much brushed me off, and I couldn’t figure that out. I thought they were putting me down. At that age, everything’s about you, you know?”

He focused on Sally more closely at that and immediately apologized. “No offense.”

“None taken,” she said. “You’re right.”

“So that night,” Dan brought him back. “You got a small taste of reality?”

Norm nodded. “Good way of putting it.” He looked around. “It’s hard to tell now. It’s so peaceful and there’s not much left. But the explosion was really huge. Middle of the night, raining like crazy. The whole world shook with a rumble. I was listening to the radio in my bedroom when my window lit up like the sun had come out of nowhere. I knew what it was—or at least I had a pretty good idea. We’d all heard the plane going over a couple of times, like it was looking for something, and those engines made a hell of a row. Just a few seconds before the explosion, they went out, like you snapped a switch. I remember sitting up, all tingly, wondering what was going on, and then,
boom.
” He raised both his arms overhead as he said the last word very quietly.

“You came up here that night?” Sally asked.

“Nothing could’ve held me back,” Norm told her. “Everything I was telling you welled up in me like nobody’s business. This was it, I thought. This is my shot at a real story. An incredible adventure. I mean, here it was, after midnight, still pouring, black as the bottom of a well, and we had no problem knowing where to head. There was that much fire. Thousands of gallons of aviation fuel, burning hundreds of trees … You can’t even imagine.”

Dan turned in a circle, as if admiring a museum display. “All right here,” he murmured.

“It was like everything I’d ever been told about Hell,” Norm said. “The old Bible version—fire and brimstone and burning flesh. Even after all the time it took us to slip and slide up the mountain in the dark and the rain, there were still pools of gasoline burning like bonfires, and huge pieces of plane everyplace—including the whole tail section, and bodies and body parts … It was huge and it went on forever. There didn’t seem to be an end to it. We ran from place to place, trying to find somebody to help, but behind all the crackling fire and hissing steam and the shouting from all of us, there was a silence.”

He looked at them both intently. “It was like the dead were making more noise than we were, you know what I mean?”

Dan thought of Hauser’s albums. “Yeah. I do.”

Sally, however, with no such scarring memories, was of a more practical mien. “So what happened?”

Norm blinked at her. “Here? We collected what we could of the bodies. The army came and finished it up, blowing up the wreck and carrying away a lot of the mess. Nature did the rest.”

“They blew up the wreck? Why?”

“They didn’t want it seen from the air,” he explained. “Big impact like that would’ve been visible for years, and been reported by other flyers again and again. I think it was a sign of respect, too.”

“And a reflection of the Red Scare era,” Dan put in, his voice low. “People worried about secrets.”

Norm shrugged. “Probably. In any case, there’s not much left from that night.”

“And what about you?” Dan asked, sensitive to a kindred spirit.

The old man’s smile was sad. “Like I said, changed my life. What I saw here, and what I saw in the faces of the men who climbed with me, told me a lot. I realized what an idiot I’d been, believing all that John Wayne crap.” He glanced at Sally. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

He continued. “Korea started up a couple of years later. I was the right age this time, and given how I’d been thinking, I was a natural to serve. But I didn’t. I’d had nightmares ever since, and begun drinking by then, too.” He was staring at the ground and shaking his head. “Good thing I didn’t fight in the war, the way I reacted up here. I probably would’ve been shot as a deserter.”

“Oh,” Sally said.

Dan joined her. “I don’t think you’re being fair to yourself. You were a kid, and this mayhem came from out of the blue. Men in battle don’t go there straight from listening to the radio in their bedrooms, Norm. There’s a process that hardens them.”

“Oh, I know,” he said vaguely, wandering a few steps.

Dan was aware that they were overstaying their welcome, especially with such armchair psychology. Norm Myers’s course had been set long ago. He didn’t want anyone telling him that his reaction to all this had been perfectly normal. On that level, it was akin to telling a pilgrim to Lourdes that God is dead.

Dan veered him back to more tangible matters. “You may not have gone to war, but you did well—a daughter who’s happy to keep you nearby; an apartment complex that you knew like the palm of your hand. People think well of you.”

Norm gave him a blank stare. “Apartment complex?”

“Yeah. In Claremont. Back when. I think maybe you even built the place. Is that right?”

Norm scowled slightly. “What about it?”

Dan decided to give up the subtle approach, for fear of losing everything. “I’m really sorry about this, Norm—interrupting your privacy and everything—but did you ever have a tenant named Paul Hauser? It’s really important that we find him.”

Norm looked like a man waking up from a dream—and none too thrilled at the interruption. His earlier mood of drifting reminiscence became soured by reality. “I had a lot of tenants. Most of them weren’t worth remembering.”

Sally was watching his connective tissue of age and memory and private pain, stretch and tear apart.

“What about Bryn?” she asked, sensing little to lose.

The older man looked at her in surprise, the darkness clearing from his face. “Bryn? Oh sure. He was a character. But he wasn’t a tenant.”

Dan followed his daughter’s lead. “My mistake. Guess I messed that up. Sorry.”

Norm Myers was happy to go there. “It’s because of that crazy name. Took me forever. Bryn Huxley-Reicher, with a hyphen. I always said it sounded like a British lord, or maybe one of the guys in the Charge of the Light Brigade. He isn’t like that at all, really, but it sounds like it from the outside—until you meet him.”

That made Dan hopeful. “You’re using the present tense—you still see him?”