For some reason—perhaps a continuation of my earlier sensation of being a human projectile aimed at the mountainside—I felt drawn to the impact’s epicenter, the broad, shallow crater created by the jet’s missilelike strike. During the excavation, we’d spent three days crouching and stooping beneath that crater, picking our way steadily down, down, down, until we’d cleared the rubble and reached bare rock at the base of the bluff. Now, as I approached, I found myself looking up, not down: up at the wide, shallow crater; up at the still-fresh fractures radiating outward, like some gigantic spider’s web etched into the stone above my head. And in one of those fractures, I caught a glimpse of something—of several small somethings, in fact—that called out for a closer look, and a climb.
Years before—for my forty-fifth birthday, when Kathleen had decided that I was sliding into some sort of midlife rut—she’d given me a weekend of instruction at a rock-climbing school in the mountains of North Carolina. The lessons hadn’t transformed me into Spider-Man by any stretch of the imagination, but they had shown me how to find toeholds on surprisingly small ledges, and how to jam a few fingers or cram a whole fist into a crack, twisting it to lock it into place and to create a powerful handhold—one that was “bombproof,” as my instructor liked to say. Now, standing at the base of the cliff, I studied it from a fresh perspective: sizing it up not as a forensic scientist, but as a climber. I noticed a half-dozen or so small, blocky bumps zigzagging upward—a simple ascent for a serious climber, though not for a rank, rusty amateur like me. But the crash itself had worked in my favor, I realized: Besides creating new cracks and sharp edges in the rock, the impact had subtly altered the angle of the rock face. The lower half of the crater was no longer absolutely vertical, but—because of its concavity—only relatively vertical now. If I was lucky, that subtle difference in geometry might just be enough. Might.
Reaching overhead, I hooked my fingertips over two bumps in the rock. Then I took a small step up with my right foot, and a bigger step with my left, stretching wide and splaying myself against the rock. I clawed higher with my left hand, then raised my right foot, feeling for a foothold that had looked within reach but that suddenly seemed to elude me. Again and again I scrabbled—with my toes, with the side of my foot, with my toes again—seeking but not finding purchase. The muscles in my hands and forearms began to tremble and shriek, and just as I finally found the foothold I needed, my grip failed, my fingers loosened, and I felt myself toppling backward. In that instant—the instant when I realized I was falling—I had just enough time to recall the last person who had fallen to the base of this cliff: a supremely jinxed man who had jumped from the frying pan of Mexico’s hardships and fallen straight into the combined fires of perilous terrain, a powerful predator, and a hurtling jet.
My descent ended not in a bone-breaking thud onto rocks, but in an unexpected embrace, of sorts: Skidder, to my surprise, was there to catch me, sort of, or at least slow my fall. “Damn, Doc,” he grunted as I half slid, half staggered to my feet in front of him. “What the hell you doing? I thought I was the only crazy stuntman around here.”
Carmelita Janus was hurrying toward us. “My God, Dr. Brockton, are you hurt?”
“Just my pride,” I said. “I was trying to get a closer look at something up there. Probably nothing, but seemed worth checking out.”
“I don’t think you should try it alone,” she said. “Let us help you. Please.”
Reluctantly—ashamed of my clumsiness and weakness—I assented. Skidder interlaced his fingers to create a stirrup for my right foot, hoisting it as high as his waist. As I raised my left foot, feeling for a toehold, Carmelita Janus grabbed my shoe and guided it to a ledge I had not noticed. Then Skidder did the same with my right foot—angling it into a niche that was as high as his head—and after one more step with my left foot, this time unaided, I reached a stable, sustainable position, my feet secure, my fists wedged into cracks that would hold me with virtually no effort required. “That’s about as high as we can get you, Doc,” Skidder said.
“It’s as high as I need to be.” I felt a second wave of adrenaline kicking in, and this one was not from my fall or my fear.
“You’ve found something,” said Carmelita. “What is it?”
“Look at this,” I said, freeing my left hand and plucking a small, cigar-shaped object—twice the size of a grain of brown rice, but hollow and almost weightless—from a nook in the rock. “I’m going to drop it now. Watch close.” I released it and watched it float down, as light as a tiny feather.
Carmelita caught it in midair, the way a child might catch a snowflake. She peered at it, then looked up at me. “What is it?”
“It’s a puparium,” I told her, wedging my fist back into the crack. “An empty pupa case. From a maggot that turned—that metamorphosed—into an adult fly. If y’all look close, you can see more of these down lower, in crevices here and there.”
“Yes,” she said after a moment, pointing. “Here’s one. And here’s another.”
“I wanted to climb to see how high they went. I followed them all the way up here.”
“Huh,” Skidder grunted. “You’re sounding kinda excited about this, Doc.”
“I am. It means there were maggots up here.”