The plane didn’t come. Stu lay on the rock again, fighting to stay alert. He pinched his skin, talked to himself, and checked the clock on his phone every few minutes. Screw the battery. And still, nothing came over the ridge but a lone hawk, and even if he squinted, he couldn’t pretend it was a plane. It took all evening to drag himself up the mountain again. He stopped to rest and to drain his bowels every hundred yards, too proud to soil his pants, and when he reached the hard wooden cot, he collapsed like a marathoner who’d overrun his training. In the night he was either uncomfortable or unconscious.
He couldn’t hike back down to the lake the next morning. His tortured body was too weak, so he simply hauled himself outside and leaned against the cabin, which leaned against the pine. He imagined that he looked like a small domino leaning against a large one. And he listened for the plane. He planned to fire the rifle as a signal if he heard an engine, and to use the flare from the Great Beyond emergency kit. But the sky remained quiet. It was cloudy and cold, and his hands were numb, but he didn’t have the energy to drag himself back inside for gloves, so he mostly kept them shoved into his pockets. This time the day didn’t warm up. Soon he couldn’t feel the toes on his tennis-shoed foot either. And everything that he could feel hurt. He wasn’t vomiting so much anymore, but stomach cramps doubled him over at intervals. Nor was he thirsty, but he was aware he needed to drink, and he forced himself to do so, sipping a small mouthful every minute or two. He was out of water by ten o’clock in the morning. By noon he was out of cell phone battery. The one thing he had plenty of, he noted, was bullets.
And then it began to snow again, big wet flakes. Stu wondered if the indigenous people had a name for this particular type. He sure did, and it wasn’t a nice one. They fell on him for maybe an hour—he could no longer keep track of the time—before he crawled back inside. He would still hear a plane from the cot, he reasoned. But it was token logic. He didn’t expect to hear anything now. He just wanted to be comfortable, or as comfortable as possible.
But as Stu stretched himself on the cot that might be his final resting place, he couldn’t get comfortable. It was a grim realization: he would die slowly and in pain, watching white snow trickle through the torn ceiling, past the red stain of rat blood he’d painted it with.
How did I get here? A simple question with an easy answer. It had all started with Butz. He’d had a sinking feeling the first time he’d read the Court of Appeals decision that had walked his murderer, and his life had been the second half of a bell curve graph ever since. This was merely the inevitable ending for which he’d volunteered seven years ago. “No body, no case,” Stu’s fellow attorneys at the Bristol County DA’s Office had warned him. He hadn’t listened. But as he lay dying in the ramshackle cabin in the middle of the Alaska interior, he wished he had.