"A kill a, a kill a…dead!"
These were the first words that she’d heard the youngest passenger utter. On the plane she’d noticed the tall, frightened teenager with the thick features, but she hadn’t heard him say a word until now.
"A kill a wit a mallet. Bam! Dead." Charlotte scrunched her eyes a little tighter.
During the flight the young man’s face betrayed a perpetual look of fright, from the time of takeoff, through the routine first hour of the journey, until the horrifying nose dive which just preceded Charlotte’s blacking out. She knew that all the events of the crash would come racing back to her in a flashback, but not just yet.
"You ever been with one, Leroy?" It was the other man talking now, the slender, red-faced man with the silver-gray ponytail.
"Chances are, you haven’t. Only one in every ten thousand does it. But, just between you and me, it’s probably more like one in two thousand because, if you ask a woman, she’ll lie about it." He took a quick drag from his Camel and winked at the frightened youngster. "Still, looking at you, boy, those are long odds." He cackled for a moment before the laughing fit turned into a smoker’s cough.
Charlotte peeked one eye open and glimpsed Leroy chattering his teeth into the fingertips of both his hands, like an actor in a silent movie would do to convey fear. But this habit seemed genuine in the boy; she’d seen him do it on the plane.
All seven people had survived the crash the night before, but only she and Leroy and Felix were lying by the fire now. Charlotte hoped some of the others would return soon. She didn’t feel comfortable unless the preacher and his wife were nearby.
"It’s a glorious autumn day that God has given us, my dear friends!" Charlotte didn’t raise her head, but she knew the sound of Reverend Causewell’s voice as he approached the campsite from the river.
"The Lord has spared our lives and given us fair weather," agreed Mrs. Causewell, "We should be grateful."
The preacher set down a load of two-liter Coke bottles, which he and his wife had filled with water. Felix twisted off the cap of one of them and hefted it to his lips. Mrs. Causewell sat down heavily in the wet grass with a good-natured sigh. Charlotte had noticed that she’d split the rear of her slacks when she was climbing out of the wreckage. Now she heard them rip just a little more as her heavy bottom touched ground.
"You know, through misfortune, God grants us the gift of opportunity." The cheerful look seemed never to leave her face. "Here He’s blessed each of us with the opportunity to reach out to six other beautiful living souls. Let’s get acquainted, shall we!" She grasped both her elbows tightly, cozying in, it would seem, to her particular place on the living, breathing earth. And, as Charlotte saw through slit eyelids, matting down an ever widening circle of dewy grass.
Leroy was nibbling his fingertips again. Mrs. Causewell, with an expression so exaggeratedly pleasant that Charlotte decided it must be real, launched into a stream of ingratiating chit-chat.
"Do you go to school, young man?"
Leroy sat petrified. He looked at the preacher’s wife, then at his shoes. "A kill a bovines."
The preacher’s wife hardly let the smile wane from her face. Felix took a puff from his cigarette and said, "I don’t think Leroy’s smart enough to go to school. From what I’ve been able to tell, I think they’ve got him working in a slaughterhouse."
"Oh, how nice!…I mean, how sad." The preacher’s wife presented a range of facial expressions. Leroy looked straight down at his belt buckle.
"Don’t be embarrassed, young man." Reverend Causewell said. "You provide food for the table, and that’s a noble occupation. All work is holy." The preacher turned quickly to Felix. "What do you do for a living, sir?"
"I produce and direct niche-market movies in Southern California."
The preacher stoked the fire cautiously.
"Oh! A movie director," Mrs. Causewell chimed in. "My goodness, we feel honored."
"What are these movies about?" the preacher asked, wishing that he hadn’t.
"Reverend, did you know that only one woman in every ten thousand gushes?"
Charlotte tensed at the mention of the word "gush." Felix winked at Mrs. Causewell, then added, "But me and the boy here know better."
"Gush?" Mrs. Causewell tried not to show her ignorance. "Oh! Yes, yes. I see what you’re saying. Oh, you should see my daughter Amanda when she gets going. She came home from college last May, and she gushed and gushed and gushed! ‘Oh, mama, I missed you to death. You look so fabulous, I just love you soooo much!’ You should hear her, that’s the way she talks. But I didn’t know it was such a rare commodity."
Felix snickered quietly and said, "Well, it is."
"Now, the gushing…how do you make a movie out of that? What’s the story?" Mrs. Causewell loved to discuss film.
"There’s not much of a story. The gushing is the important part."
"Oh, I didn’t realize. So I guess you have to cast topnotch talent, if the performers are going to carry the film. Like a young Elizabeth Taylor or a Shirley Temple."
"Yeah, recruiting the girls is most of the job."
"How do you go about doing that?"
"Usually, I audition them myself."
"Oh, so you do some acting as well as directing."
"I guess you could put it that way," Felix said with a sly smile. "In the movie itself, I usually let the younger fellas have their way. They can maintain wood better than I can."
The preacher pushed at the burning logs with a stick and sparks flew up into the air. "Harriet, I think you should leave this man alone."
"Oh, Richard, this is just getting good. I’ve never met a movie director." She sat forward with her chin in her palm, taking on the pose of someone engaged in a deep intellectual discussion.
"Now, why would you want them to ‘maintain wood,’ as you say? If the acting is wooden, doesn’t that hurt the film?"
"Lady, if you don’t have wood, you don’t have a gush movie."
"Oh, yes, of course, I see. The wooden acting by the men plays the foil to the gushing of, say, a Shirley Temple or a Dale Evans." Mrs. Causewell tried to read whether her knowledge of dramatic terms was impressing the director. She pressed on. "Felix, as you can probably tell, I’ve done a little acting in my day. Do you think that I might be the type you’re looking for, if you were casting a film?"
"Harriet!"
"Shoosh, it doesn’t hurt to ask!"
"It all depends on whether you gush."
"Oh, I gush all right." She chuckled lightly. "Not like Amanda, though. She’s the real gusher in the family. She met her boyfriend at the airport two weeks ago, and she just gushed all over him. That Rory really brings out the gushing in her."
"Our daughter does no such thing!" Reverend Causewell was frantic to change the subject. He jabbed at Leroy and said, "You, boy! Tell us about those bovines."
Leroy was so startled he almost fell off his tree stump, but he looked up and saw the preacher waiting for him to talk. After a pause, he uttered tentatively, "One time, a fouled ma-self." He felt the eyes of everyone staring at him, and he turned as red as his Coke bottle. He promptly resumed chewing on his fingers.
The preacher groaned inwardly. Then Felix, to humor himself, said, "Mrs. Causewell, I think I’d be more interested in your daughter."
"Oh, really."
"Yes. No disrespect intended to you, but in a movie, the younger the ‘actress’ is, the better."
Mrs. Causewell made a conscious effort not to let the smile erode from her face.
"You see, I’ve done studies. Among that select group of women who gush, the younger they are, the more they gush."
"I guess that explains Amanda then," Mrs. Causewell chirped, somewhat less enthusiastically.
"That’s why I usually audition only eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds. That’s when they’re still nice and juicy."
"You don’t say."
Leroy sat up and threw a stone into the fire. "One thing a know," he said abruptly. "They’s eyes don’t close sometimes, even after a kilt a."
"You don’t say," said the preacher.
Charlotte should have been disturbed by Leroy’s insight into slaughtering cattle. She’d been a vegetarian since she was a child and, in her activist days, she’d even protested in front of a meat-packing plant once. But the boy’s comment was welcome relief from Mrs. Causewell’s humiliation of herself. Charlotte hoped silently that the true nature of Felix’s business would dawn on her.
"Now, when you say ‘juicy,’ what exactly do you mean?"
"Well, we were doing a cowgirl scene with this one young gal, and I was in close, filming a tight shot of the action, and when she gushed, I got totally drenched."
"Cowgirl. Oh! A western." Mrs. Causewell’s chin was back in the palm of her hand.
"As a matter of fact, I did have her dressed in a cowboy hat and chaps."
"And you were ‘on location’ … outside … and it started raining … so you got drenched. Am I right?"
Felix just smiled.
"I swear, I can read you like a book." Mrs. Causewell leaned forward on her haunches and brushed flirtatiously at Felix’s arm. "It’s so nice to have a kindred soul out here in the wild—another lover of the visual arts." As Mrs. Causewell sat back down, Charlotte heard her pants split a little bit more.
Charlotte smiled, but she knew she was stranded in a dangerous place where she could very well die if she and her companions didn’t make intelligent survival decisions. And what a group of companions they were. She wondered how such a group of people could have been formed. None of the other adventurers in her Alaska tour had chosen to take the flight out of Fairbanks, but she insisted on seeing the Canadian interior. She glanced at Leroy. What in the heck was this dim-wit doing on a Yukon Territory tour flight? And Felix. How could you explain this man being so far out of his natural habitat? She knew she would have to take a leading role if they were to find their way back to civilization. But she wasn’t ready to step forward yet; she was scared.
Mrs. Causewell put Charlotte’s misgivings into words, though she applied a different spin to the situation.
"We’re so blessed to have a group of people such as this, experiencing this hardship together. It’s the hand of God at work."
Charlotte saw Reverend Causewell look Felix in the eye and say, "It’s the hand of the devil."