Back to Beag

In a matter of five minutes the ground pulls sharply away from us and falls far, far below. Far enough that wide dirt roads become lines slicing through hillsides and the sheep in the fields stand out against the green as white pinpricks, like stars in the night.

I unbutton the top of my sweater to let some of the heat of haste escape. The whir of the helicopter as it ascends is loud even with the headset passed to me pressed over my ears.

Katia watches two worlds change through the helicopter windows. The life she’s known on that quickly vanishing farm in Beag will be a far cry from the future that has been planned for her. And, as she stares, she’s growing a distance from the ground she must never have thought she would.

She’s tiny. But she will grow from shrinking violet to blooming rose now that her father has sent for her, so the pilot says. Her headset dwarfs her with its large earpads and covers most of her thin, straw coloured hair. I’ve given her a puffer jacket to convince the warmth of her bones to stay, but her teeth still chatter, so she pushes her shoulders under my arm and leans into me. I am her guard now. I am her defender. At least until we reach the rendezvous.

My son Ivis must be close to her age. He has his mother’s eyes and my cheeks, a better deal than if the two had been swapped. If his red and wild hair has anything to say about it, the beard that will follow will fill out better on my cheeks than hers.

The pilot turns and leers at me. It takes me a second to hear his crackled shouts through the headset, I’m so absorbed by the flash of his teeth. “We’ll be heading into some rough weather. Make sure the kids buckled in properly or she’ll really go airborne.” I take this advice seriously and turn, though it is a tight squeeze with my bulk, to double check Katia’s clasps. Her hands are picking restlessly at dirt under fingernails. She lifts them to allow me access and I test the buckles, give them a shake.

“He says it’s gonna get a bit rough,” I say loudly to her. Her fern coloured eyes rise and fall. I realize she doesn’t know what I mean and hasten to add: “It’ll be bumpy, the helicopter may shake. If you get scared, you can hang on to me. Did the wagon ever get bumpy from town to the farmhouse?” When she nods, I can see she understands.

We look out past the windshield. The blades of the chopper are a dark, curved blur above us, backlit by the haze of a spring mid-morning. We would have taken off earlier, but the other kids had wanted to say goodbye. I could understand. Our sunglass-wearing pilot couldn’t. The man had stood chain-smoking outside the threshold, crossly flicking ashes into the gravel and growling back at the white and black collies darting through the yard.

The dirt roads below fade into lush fields deep with green and spotted with wildflowers. I don’t think the townsfolk travel quite that far toward the fringes of the deep woods we’re approaching, where hulking trees shade the shrubs from sun and the earth rarely sees the snow. I wonder what creatures lurk in there. I point out a black spot at the outskirts of the forest so Katia can watch a giant bear trundle through the grass.

I look over the waif of a girl, watch her press a palm against the window and contract when the pilot barks at her over his shoulder. I tuck my arm protectively around her and think about her future ahead. Katia’s father is a man to fear. When I am around him, I instinctively brace for impact. There is an air about him that makes one feel they need to be ready to be hit by anything. He is nothing like the child shivering beside me. Remembering his line of silent daughters makes my heart ache. Those small, pale faces hovering in the hall. They did not look like him either.

The helicopter trembles, and then lurches. Winds gust out of nowhere and force our pilot, swearing to high heaven, to yank on his control stick. I pull Katia closer into my side and force a hand across her eyes. The pitch of the aircraft disorients and dizzies. “Hang on,” the pilot demands. Katia cries out. I would too, but I’m busy trying to keep my breakfast down.

For several seconds we freefall. The blades churn against the sudden winds and the pilot forces us through the streams into a pocket of air where we halt and hover in the air. I’m sweating more under my sweater and unbutton it fully between tremors. “You doing alright?” I yell. Katia, eyes still closed, shakes her head. “Me either,” I respond in earnest. That earns a weak smile as we begin to ascend again.

The pilot has used curses I’ve never heard. To calm her, and perhaps myself, I start to pat the back of Katia’s head and make sure she’s still tightly secured. She’s nearly vibrating, out of cold or fear or both. “Deep breaths,” I coach her. “We’ll be there soon.”

It occurs to me she may not even know where there is. After the goodbye with her family, I’d handed over the cheque and they hadn’t looked up after that. Perhaps her mother was glad to be rid of another mouth to feed while four others cried for milk and oats. Four others she’d been allowed to love.

I got the impression after talking with Katia’s father that the woman in Beag had owed him a favor. To bear his child and raise it was quite the favor indeed. Hush money, the cheque I’d handed over, ending in more zeroes than I brought in over my last two jobs. Smoke had furled from the father’s mouth to the ceiling, lit by the glow of a fireplace. “Bring the child.”

And I am.

We begin to hover closer to the border, the winds occasionally toying and fighting against our flight. I’ve managed to convince some sips of water into Katia and we haven’t run into turbulence as severe. Once we cruise smoothly the pilot looks over his shoulder and motions to me to mute Katia’s headset. I comply without question.

“Look,” he crackles. Without really knowing why my heart begins to sink. I start to get the feeling that I need to be ready for impact as he drapes an arm over the back of his seat. He keeps his attention on the sky, but part is dedicated to me.

“We’re to drop her off at the hospital wing of the mansion. They have a helipad out front. I was with you when we picked her up, I can attest to her condition, that she’s been..” He nods toward Katia, “…that way since you and I picked her up.” I don’t understand. Sure, she’s a frail thing, but the implication of punitive action unnerves me.

“What do you mean that way?” I chatter back. I’m crouching to fit my bulk into my seat and my back is beginning to grow sore.

The pilot eyes me uncertainly. After a minute he lifts his sunglasses. “This your first pickup?”

“For him, yes.”

We pass through an uneasy stream of wind and Katia squeezes my arm. I hope she’s keeping her eyes closed. Our pilot pushes a sigh through his lips. “He wants the strong ones. He’s been waiting for this one to mature for a while. Gonna to be disappointed. Three trips ago, brought a kid back whose caretakers had beaten him. At least this one isn’t abused.” He shakes his head. “He wiped the caretakers off the map.”

I’m still confused. I struggle to hear myself think under the din of the blades churning above us and let my attention wander while I try to grasp his meaning.

We start to fly over an inlet before the city. The sea below us is choppy and white capped and splashing. I wonder if Katia’s seen the ocean before. I gesture for the pilot to wait, and he turns back to his controls while I unmute her headset. “Look. The sea. Have you seen it before?” She blinks her eyes several times to adjust to the light and moves out under my arm to look.

She takes in the water with interest, leaning forward, taking great care not to touch the glass, and then turns to me. “The sea?” Her timid voice melts my heart, it’s so soft it barely translates through the headset. I massage my chin through my beard and nod.

“Like the largest lake in the world. Salty.”

She mulls these words over and over and loses herself in thought. I see her disappear behind the green of her eyes and hole up to consider its meaning. If she’s never seen the sea before, I wonder what else she can possibly have experienced in Beag. The small town she has lived within has a population of seventeen and that includes her former family living on its outskirts. Wildlife, sure. It would take their wagons days to get to the oceanside and that would include moving through the forests, a danger to all but the well-prepared. Katia’s mother didn’t look well-prepared.

I flick the mute of her headset on again while she’s lost and return my attention to the pilot. He’s navigating out of the path of a flock of white and grey gulls looming in the distance. “What do you mean he’s going to be disappointed?” I finally ask.

“The kid looks poorly. She’s an investment, you know? Hope her insides look better than her outsides.”

The pilot’s words drag open a soaking cold hole in the base of my stomach and the hairs on my neck stand on end. Without planning it my arm is squeezing defensively around Katia. My brain works itself into a frenzy, before my minds eye it raises thoughts as dots and begins to trace a connecting line, weaving, writhing through and between them until I reach a deduction so disturbing I cannot sit still. “Her… insides?”

The pale faces in the hallway. Multiple children. At least three trips, the pilot had said, maybe more. All the while, their father sits on his fortune and bequeaths portions of it to desperate women who will birth and raise new life. New hope. New attempts to fix.

He can tell he has said too much. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t know better, feel anything, know anything. In the slim conversation we had on the flight to Beag, he may have assumed I was just another merc. Just another man here to do the dirty work, because surely big burly souls couldn’t possibly care about family, life, tiny kids in puffer jackets being stripped of their fake lives and taken from their fake homes to a fake future. He turns away and pretends to concentrate on navigating another airstream. I see his cheeks puff a bit as he grinds his teeth.

The words “spare parts” appear in the dark of my mind. My thoughts have deepened into a well of sorrow and I compare Katia’s fragile state to the ruckus that is my Ivis. No child deserves to be born a sacrifice, born to be scrapped. Children deserve better than that. Children are born to live. Children matter. Our children matter.

She is being brought to slaughter.

I have never been Katia’s guardian. I have only ever been her new captor. The antagonist in her short, short story. The realization crushes the air out of my lungs, and I re-button my sweater to fend off the harrowing chill of reality that rattles my nerves. When I turn to look at Katia I’m horrified to see her wide eyes staring back at me, uncertain but smiling weakly. Her shivering has stopped. Something in the spray of freckles across her nose is familiar to me and I search for it with a portion of conscious thought while the rest of it vacillates wildly between torrid anger and pragmaticism.

Dally. My heart sinks, and my stomach does too but I can’t tell if it’s because of the rock of the chopper. My wife wouldn’t approve of this job if she knew. Work takes me to tight corners of the earth. She doesn’t mind or question what I do as long as the travels bring stories and scores. I swallow. I’ll end up omitting a few details of this trip when I’m back in her arms and hugging Ivis.

I make the decision in the time it takes for an eye to track a bird winging past: We’re getting out of here. But where is some place we can stay, where I can figure out a next move? Where can we go? We can’t just leap out of a helicopter.

The sea has disappeared behind us. Dark groves of pine and fir are slowly beginning to rise, and I know we’re running out of time. Afternoon is coming, and so too Katia’s unknown sacrifice. I have to acknowledge the horror before I can move, though. If I avoid it, it will dig into the depths of me and disturb me, shock me into still. I imagine Ivis laughing uproariously in my arms as I swing him in circles on my returns home. I imagine Dally rocking in her chair beside the crib before he was born, sunlight playing in the loose strands of her golden hair. I picture the vivid, red scraps of hair stuck to Ivis’s head after he was born, and the tears that slid down our faces when we first held our bright, baby boy.

I am a father. The man who claims to be Katia’s is no more than an organ harvester now, no matter what he thought he needed to become to save the pale, shivering faces in the halls of his mansion. We cannot control what the future brings to our lives, to ourselves, to our families. We can only love until the end and know that we loved where and when we could. He may have started his descent into demons with good intentions, the very best, but a corrupted heart now coagulates the blood of life trying to seep through it.

I can’t change his mind. But maybe I can save Katia. One more life to live and grow, to flourish in a life where she is fed and cared for, warmed and safe. If someone were in my place and Ivis were to, God forbid, be in Katia’s, I would hope that my someone would do this for him. I reach out to tuck a piece of her hair away from her eyes and slowly lean forward to lift one side of her headset. She is confused and begins to back away, frightened by the sudden harshness of the helicopter sounds outside of the earpads, but I raise one finger to my lips. She stills. I bring myself close to her ear, and speak.

“Katia, you are a smart girl. I need the pilot to stop somewhere before we reach your father’s house. He is not going to want to stop. I am going to make him. I need you to stay calm and stay where you are, alright?” I make sure her puffer jacket is zipped up to the top and that her seatbelt and buckles are fastened tight.

She’s watching me as though I’m the big black bear we saw lumbering the forests far from Beag. There is a curiosity in her eyes, mixed with awe, disbelief. Uncertainty. Fear. I see it change to fear very quickly and I force a smile that melts authentic when she begins to relax again. Holding the earpad a little closer to her ear so she doesn’t experience much more discomfort, I explain the plan.

We’re not far from the mansion, can almost see the maroon flags waving in the distance when my arm shoots out around the pilot’s neck and pulls him into my chest. He struggles, albeit in vain, and shouts confused profanities. The helicopter dips suddenly. Katia screams. I apply pressure. Gritting my teeth against the pilot’s wild thrashing I leave his hands free to hold the control stick and speak through my headset.

“Change of plans, we’re making a pitstop. Comply or die.”

“What the HELL are you doing? There’s no way I’m-"

My arm tightens around his neck hard enough I can feel his racing pulse through my sleeve. “Comply.” In the reflection of the windshield I can see Katia flattening herself into the corner as best as she can, staying out of my way. My beard catches between my chin and the pilot’s shoulder and it pulls, hurts, but I ignore it. Fields are opening up beneath us, yellow grass of Katia’s father’s city, of the one place I now know I will never let her land.

Where can we go?

“There are no changes in plan, we go to the mansion. Who’s gonna fly this thing if you knock me out, huh?” The pilot shouts.

“Nobody’s knocking you out. We’re taking a pit stop.”

The pilot is considering his actions and his life very carefully in the time he has. His face is reddening under my grip. I know, and he knows, that if he doesn’t decide soon he will pass out. It has been seconds already and his brain knows that it is missing blood it needs to remain conscious. We will all die.

I need to let Dally know to expect company. We need fuel, money, because I don’t have much left on my person and most of my belongings are at the mansion, and I need to find contacts to transport one man and one girl back to my homeland. I’m in my element now, the adrenaline coursing through me as I get the chance to do what means most to me in this moment: Force a decision. Force a stop. Land. Save Katia. Return to Dally and Ivis. Remind my son how much I love him.

I will not hand an innocent child into the hands of a murderer.

And suddenly, I know where I can get money. More money than I’ve made over the past few jobs I’ve worked.

“Alright!” The pilot screams. He’s struggling for the air and we’re beginning to sag in the sky. I relax slightly and allow further blood flow into the man’s neck. He gasps and splutters. “Alright. Don’t feel like dying.”

“How much fuel is left?” I ask.

“Won’t get us far from the mansion.”

“Turn and head east to Normanse. That’s outside the city limits. We’ll refuel there.”

He’s sweating. “And where are we going after that?”

Katia’s frightened eyes flash in my head. I check over my shoulder to make sure she’s okay. She is staring. Scared, confused, but present. I smile at her, an authentic grin this time and she begins to mirror it without thinking.

“We’re going back to Beag.”