Four Letter Words

Lost . . . .

Roy DeSoto lay in the dark and thought four letter words. Pain was a four-letter word, and so was fear.

In his job as a firefighter/paramedic with the Los Angeles County fire department, Roy saw the wages of stupidity and of carelessness all the time. With a wife and two children depending on him, he made it a point to never be stupid or careless. He was a sober, stolid, reliable man, always considerate and deliberate in his actions.

He didn't deserve to be lying here in the dark, crushed and broken, lost and alone. He didn't deserve to die this way, but he knew that he was going to, and even when they found his car eventually, he doubted they'd ever find his body. He would simply be gone. A disappearance. An unsolved mystery. He thought of the four people who mattered most to him: his wife, Joanne, their two children, and his best friend and partner, John Gage. With no body and no closure, how would they come to terms with him being gone? How long would Jo have to wait to collect his insurance?

Would his children even remember him when they were grown?

He thought about the uncertainty they would have to live with now and knew that, with all he did every day to show his love for them, each of them would still have a tiny nagging doubt somewhere in some dark corner of their heart. They would wonder if he had abandoned them; decided he didn't love them anymore and walked away. The idea hurt him even more than the broken bones and internal injuries and the pounding in his head.

It was Wednesday, probably sometime about noon though he didn't know for sure. He had lost consciousness and he had no idea how much time had passed. In the darkness he couldn't have seen his watch even if his left arm hadn't been buried under the rocks and dirt. Still, it was probably Wednesday. Jo and the kids had left this morning to spend a week in San Francisco with her sister and John had headed for Mexico with Chet Kelly and Marco Lopez, following the promise of a blind date with a stewardess. No one would miss Roy until he failed to show up for work Friday morning.

He wondered if he'd still be alive by then. It was possible. He wasn't even going to have the mercy of an easy death. He could linger for days, conscious and in pain, until shock or bleeding or lack of food and water finally claimed him.

Roy tried to swallow and bit back a sob of despair because it hurt. He lay in silent misery, alone in the dark, and hope was the only four-letter word he was without.

#-#-#-#-

Pain . . . .

There was water running somewhere -- an underground stream lost in the distant darkness. The faint rushing and splashing was the only sound that competed with Roy's labored breathing in the silence of this living tomb.

The cave-in that had buried him from mid-chest down had also caught his outflung left hand and arm clear to his shoulder. A heavy weight pressed down on his back, slowly grinding down broken ribs. One of his lungs was punctured and every breath was an agony. His back ached fiercely and his stomach felt inflamed. The pain in his torso made the myriad other injuries seem insignificant by comparison -- a broken left leg, a gash in his right arm, a blow to the head that had blood matted with the dirt in his fair hair.

From the distant recesses of his memory he recalled a day long gone, sitting in a sun-drenched classroom, content beside the pretty Joanne as they studied high school history. They had been learning about England from the Middle Ages to the time of Henry VIII and one random fact presented itself after all these years.

If a prisoner refused to plead he could not be tried and if he couldn't be tried he couldn't be found guilty. Refusing to plead was a means to save the family lands, wealth and titles for one's descendants, but it carried a terrible price. The punishment for refusing to enter a plea before the court was being slowly pressed to death. It was known as peine forte et dure -- "pain strong and hard".

Roy closed his eyes, though it made no difference as he couldn't see anything even with them open. He was in a prison not made by man, at the mercy of a heartless tyrant called fate as he endured pain strong and hard without even the comfort that doing so benefited his family.

#-#-#-#-

Fear . . . .

In the silence of his dark prison, Roy's calm finally shattered into panic. He struggled in vain against the rocks and earth that held him fast, ignoring the pain as broken bones dug into flesh and his bruised and bloodied body was injured even more by his struggles. In the end it all availed him naught. He lay spent and exhausted, gasping in wheezing breaths and feeling the blood gather at the corner of his mouth with every exhalation. He would have screamed if he'd had the air, would have cried had he had the tears. But all that he yet possessed was dark and pain and fear and all that he could do was wait in silence for death to overtake him.

#-#-#-#-

Hope . . . .

Chshh . . . chshh . . . chshh . . . .

Painfully, Roy held his breath and listened to the faint new sound that broke the silence. Chshh . . . chshh . . . chshh . . . . It almost sounded like . . . a shovel moving earth?

No one could find him. No one had any idea he was here. At any rate, the sound had stopped now.

Silence. And then another sound, a faint sliding that grew louder. Though he could not see, he was conscious of movement as something emerged from the deeper dark of the earth above his left arm. His strength was nearly gone, but he managed to raise his head slightly and felt a long, cool metal rod against his cheek. He let his head fall back into the dirt, gasping, and wondered if he was hallucinating.

A Kennedy probe?

There was another sliding sound, another sensation of movement, and a hissing filled the cavern as a stream of cold air kissed his bruised and battered face.

An oxygen line, run in along the probe. If someone were looking for him, this is how they would conduct the rescue. He had done it enough himself to know, plunging the rod into earth or rubble, listening on the headphones for some signs, however faint, of life. The same understanding of the rescue process, though, made him hesitate to hope.

If his dying mind were to imagine being saved, this is the scenario it would present him.

The sound that had heralded the others resumed. Suddenly the tips of his fingers on his buried left hand grew cold and he thought he heard a distant shout. The chill spread upwards until it encompassed his whole hand and wrist. He could feel gloved fingers, now, brushing the dirt away from him. A pause . . . and a warm hand took his cold one and squeezed with a fierce gentleness. Fingers encircled his wrist and settled on his pulse.

Could this be happening? Was it real?

He sensed movement as someone burrowed through the earth, following his arm as they worked to free him. Clods of dirt rained down on his face and suddenly there was a fist-sized opening in the darkness above his head. Light, brilliant and gold from a helmet lamp, shone into his prison and blinded him and a familiar voice, choked with emotion, was calling his name.

"Roy? Roy? Come on, Pally! Can you talk to me? Roy, it's Johnny. Just hang in there, man! We're gonna get you out of there!"

#-#-#-#-

Love . . . .

The light pulled back but did not disappear. His partner's voice came again, marginally farther away. "Just hang on, Roy. We gotta enlarge this opening some more so I can see if I can get in there with you. Can you hear me? Are you awake at all? 'Cause I gotta tell you, some kinda sound or a sign of some sort would be really welcome right about now. Roy?"

Roy tried to swallow, to summon his voice, and an involuntary moan escaped him.

"Okay, Pally. That's good. That's just fine. Hang in there now."

Roy found himself drifting off. When the light level abruptly fell again he jerked awake and his first thought was that the rescue effort had only been a dream after all. Then he heard Johnny cursing a few inches away.

"Damn! Hang on a sec. Helmet light went out." John Gage's skinny frame was halfway through the narrow tunnel they had thus far excavated, blocking out the light from other rescuers' helmets and work lights. There was a brief wait and then the golden glow flared again behind the sharply delineated shadow of his hand. He lowered his arm and the light blazed forth, blinding Roy. Roy winced and closed his eyes against the glare.

"Sorry about that, Pally! Just give me a second and I'll get it out of your eyes." Past the narrow point where Roy had gotten first stuck and then buried, the cavern opened out and disappeared into the dark distance. Johnny slithered through the opening, dropped to the cave floor beside his partner and turned to call back the way he had come. "I'm through! Send me my equipment!"

A rope flew through the tunnel and Johnny caught it and pulled. The drug box appeared first, and after that the trauma kit with an HT tied by its strap to the handle. The last item tied to the line was a large, freestanding electric lantern. Johnny set that up first and then, by its light, began to unpack what he would need from the boxes. As he separated and sorted medical gear with quick, sure hands, Roy finally found the breath to speak a few gasping, wondering words.

"Not . . . die . . . alone?"

Johnny froze and swallowed hard. The light in the tunnel was brilliant, the shadows absolute and the boundaries between them sharp. In the glow of the lantern, Johnny's eyes glistened brightly. Johnny's voice reflected his moods. In times of lightheartedness, of foolishness or of indignation, it might easily climb an octave. When he spoke now it was so deep that it reverberated solemnly through the dark stone chamber.

"You're not gonna die at all."

Both of them knew that was far from a given and Roy caught his eye, ignored the pains multiplying in his chest and spoke again.

"Love 'em. Jo . . . kids. Love you. Tell 'em!"

Johnny leaned close, rested one hand very gently on Roy's golden head and answered so quietly that his voice nearly disappeared into the darkness of the cavern.

"No," he said simply. "You'll tell 'em yourself."

#-#-#-#-

Care . . . .

Consciousness was becoming an elusive thing. He didn't know when Johnny put the rubber tourniquet around his right arm, but he felt the cold, wet sensation on the inside of his elbow and smelled betadine, so he was prepared for the brief sting of an IV needle sliding into place. His partner was summoning every bit of his considerable skill for this rescue and he worked with a master's touch. Roy barely felt the IV go in, and he never even noticed when Johnny put him on oxygen, he just became aware at one point that he was wearing a mask.

Half awake, the injured paramedic watched them working to rescue him without truly seeing anything. Vision was a jumble of light and shadow. Sound fell away into an insensible mumble, with only the occasional word or phrase working its way into Roy's fogged mind. "Rampart . . . bleed . . . porta power . . . get the . . . crush injuries . . . ready . . . ." Always John Gage's voice was there, a reassuring presence in the darkness -- an invisible lifeline and a conduit of hope.

There was a sudden flurry of activity. The weight on Roy's back lifted and with the release the pain multiplied. Lights exploded behind his eyes. He was drowning in waves of agony and he could hear John's voice, the words indistinguishable, rising with urgency and alarm. Roy gasped, choking on the very oxygen he needed so badly, and the last vestiges of sensibility deserted him. He sank gratefully into the empty blackness of oblivion, not knowing whether it was unconsciousness or death.

#-#-#-#-

Safe . . .

Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . .

Roy lay in a cool place, eyes closed, and enjoyed the simple pleasure of not hurting. His body felt heavy and he was too tired to breathe, but he didn't need to. There was a tube down his throat, pushing air into his lungs. Sensations returned slowly. He was lying on his back. There was a weight on his left leg -- a cast? And another, lighter weight at the foot of the bed, holding the sheet down against his feet. He smelled antiseptic. The beeping was a heart monitor.

Hospital. Rampart.

Voices were speaking somewhere nearby and he concentrated, tuning them in like faint channels on a radio. Mike Morton, he realized, and Doctor Brackett. They were discussing him.

". . . a little surprised," Morton was saying, "I'd have thought DeSoto was too smart to go caving alone, and without telling anyone where he went?"

"He didn't, Mike! Haven't you heard the whole story?"

"No, just that he was missing and when they found him he'd been trapped in a cave in."

"All he did was drive up to Seven Canyons campground and walk around a little. I gather from Gage that they think he was looking for someplace to take his son's Cub Scout troop camping. He was standing at the top of a ridge when an earthquake hit. It was only a little one, but he was standing right at the epicenter and it threw him off balance. He started sliding down the hill.

"Now, from the top it just looks like a gentle slope, but halfway down, hidden by the scrub pine and chaparral, there's a crevasse opening into an underground cavern. Roy must have rolled right into it. It drops straight down for about fifteen or twenty feet and then opens out into a sizeable cave system. That's when he got the broken leg and the head injury. Apparently he was trying to climb back out when an aftershock brought a big chunk of the ceiling down on him."

Morton whistled softly. "Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time!"

Roy opened his eyes and looked around as much as he could. Moving his head was still too much for him and his range of vision was limited to the ceiling, the underside of a monitor, fragments of various pieces of machinery and the sleeve of a white lab coat.

A third voice spoke in the quiet room. "Did you gentlemen notice you have an audience?"

Dixie McCall.

The lab coat moved, turning and coming more into his field of vision, and then Brackett was smiling down at him. "Hey, pal! Did you finally decide to join the party? Don't try to answer that! You're on a ventilator, so just relax and don't try to talk."

Roy let his eyes wander the room, hoping to convey the questions in his mind. Dixie understood him perfectly.

"Joanne's just outside. It's three in the morning. We made her go lie down a couple of hours ago. Johnny's on duty. I'll call him in a minute and I'm sure he'll be in here first chance he gets."

Roy glanced at the clock.

"Yes," Dixie told him, "I said it's three A.M., and yes, I'm going to call the station anyway. It's been over a week. He'll want to know you're awake finally. All of the guys will."

Brackett moved in again, performing a standard series of neurological tests. He had Roy move his fingers and his toes and answer a series of yes/no questions by moving one hand or the other. It was a brief, simple exercise, but it was enough to exhaust the paramedic. By the time it was over his eyes were drooping again.

"If you can hang on for another minute or two," Brackett said, "Dixie's gone to get Joanne. I know how badly she wants to see you." The doctor put a hand on Roy's shoulder and spoke kindly. "You did good. I know it's been hard but you're going to be fine." Such gentleness from the normally gruff physician told Roy more clearly than words just how serious his condition had been.

Bolstered by the promise of seeing his wife, Roy fought sleep until her familiar face smiled down at him. She looked tired, but the tears in her eyes were tears of joy. She looked at him critically, noted the goose bumps on his arms. "Are you cold?"

Roy nodded marginally and Joanne reached down to the foot of the bed and unfolded the light weight there into a soft blanket, bringing it up and tucking it around his shoulders. Wrapped in warmth, he drifted back to sleep with the feel of her kiss lingering on his cheek.

#-#-#-#-

Home . . .

"For he's a jolly good fe-e-llow!

Which nobody can deny!"

Grinning and blushing bashfully, Roy hobbled into his living room. He was still in a walking cast and using a cane, and his ribs were still taped and braced. If anyone asked, he would say that the drugs took away the worst of the pain, but the truth was that being home took away the worst of it.

Joanne and Johnny hovered one on each side of him, in case he fell, and the many friends who had turned out to welcome him home cleared a path for him to his favorite chair. He sank into it gratefully, gathered his small son and daughter carefully onto his lap and smiled shyly at the roomful of friends.

"This is really nice. Thank you. You didn't need to go to any trouble."

"Oh, sure," Chet Kelly snorted with mock sarcasm. "He makes us dig halfway to China for him, then tells us we shouldn't have bothered when we show up to eat cake!"

Everyone laughed and Roy laughed with them. "Well, when you put it like that . . . ."

Joanne perched on the arm of his chair, keeping her husband half within a protective embrace. All the guys from his shift were there, as well as a number of other firefighters, several cops, including Vince Howard from the sheriff's department, Drs. Brackett, Early, and Morton from Rampart and Dixie McCall with several of her nurses.

"Anyway," Cap teased, "you know Gage and Kelly just showed up because they heard there were going to be girls here."

"Yeah," Chet agreed easily. He waggled his moustache at Sharon Walters, getting a giggle in return. "I promised John I'd give him some lessons in dealing with the fairer sex."

Roy sat back and enjoyed the nonsense, savoring the moment. His kids snuggled up against him, content for the moment simply to be held. And he was content to hold them, forever if he could. His wife leaned against him, playing with his hair and Johnny was standing behind his chair, leaning against the back and answering Chet's wisecracks with such zingers as "oh, yeah?" and "I know you are, but what am I?"

In that moment Roy DeSoto felt like the luckiest man alive. Luck, he thought. There's another four-letter word. And that reminded him that there was still a lot he didn't know.

"If you'll forgive me for interrupting your witty repartee," he said, "I was wondering if someone could answer a question for me? How long was I down there in that cave? I still don't know. And how in the world did you ever manage to find me there?"

"That's two questions," Brackett grinned, "but I suppose, since you're still technically an invalid, we'll let it slide."

Johnny took the first question. "You fell in that hole at exactly ten twenty three on Wednesday morning."

"Exactly?" Roy's eyebrows rose. "What? Did my watch stop?"

"You just hush," Johnny told him. "This is my story. Now, you fell in at 10:23 Wednesday morning. The search started at 10:24 but we didn't find you until almost five o'clock that night. It took until seven thirty the next morning to dig down to you, and then another three hours to get you out, so you were down there for almost exactly twenty-four hours." He came around and sat on the coffee table, so he could look Roy in the eyes. The levity fell away and when he spoke again his words were just for his partner. They might have been the only two in the room.

"Roy," he said somberly, "as long as I live I’m never gonna forget digging into solid, packed earth for fourteen hours and then uncovering your hand. I think checking your wrist for a pulse is the hardest thing I've ever done."

Roy met his gaze and tone. "I knew it was you. I mean, I never expected anyone to find me. I thought I was going to die down there and no one would even know what had happened. But when somebody did find me, I knew it was you."

There was a short, intense silence, and then Chet Kelly broke it with a loud snuffle. "Gosh! This is all so sweet! Is it time for the cake yet?"

"Put a cork in it, Kelly," Cap growled.

"Yeah," Mike Morton agreed. "I haven't heard this part of the story yet either. How did you find him?"

Joanne took over. "Honey, do you remember what we did on your last birthday?"

Roy blinked, confused by the sudden change in topic. "Um . . . well . . . we kinda, sorta didn't do anything." He looked around, embarrassed for some reason at having to admit to all his friends that his birthday had been overlooked. "We were up at a fire," he explained. "A brush fire -- the Bucket Ridge fire. Every station in the county was pulling OT. And then, after we got released from that, there was that bout of flu going around. I guess there was just a lot going on. It was okay, though. I didn't mind."

"Well we minded," his wife said firmly. "We decided to make it up with a surprise belated birthday party. We were going to have a big barbecue. We had everything planned, and then the guest of honor went and disappeared."

"You were going to do that? For me?" The shy paramedic was deeply touched.

"Awww! Look at the big, tough fireman! He's blushing! I know! I know! Put a cork in it Kelly! Sheesh!"

"ANYWAY," Joanne reclaimed the floor, "we had everything planned out. The kids and I got in the car and pretended to leave for Eileen's house, but really we just circled the block and parked at the Peterson's. Then we went in and watched the house from their front window. We were expecting you to leave, so we weren't surprised when you did. We just thought everything was going according to plan."

"You were expecting me to leave?"

"We were. But when we got into the house the phone rang and it was Johnny calling to ask you to come help them with a flat tire. That's when we knew something was wrong."

"Yeah," Johnny spoke up. He indicated himself, Chet and Marco. "That's where we came in. We put a flat tire in the back of my Landrover, drove about fifteen miles towards Mexico, then pulled off the road and changed it for one of the good ones. Then we hid the jack under the back seat and called your house from a pay phone to tell you we had a flat tire and didn't have a jack. You were supposed to come out to rescue us, leaving the coast clear for Joanne to come home and set up for the party."

"And Mike and I came over to get the grill going and help with the picnic table and such," Cap added, indicating himself and Mike Stoker, 51's quiet, good-natured engineer.

"Well," Johnny continued, "while we were changing the good tire for the bad tire Vince here showed up and asked us if we'd lost our minds. We explained to him what we were doing, and mentioned that the one thing we hadn't worked out was how we were going to delay you long enough so that the three of us could get back here before you did. We figured one of us could slip back and let the air out of one of your tires, so when we drove off you'd be standing there with a flat tire of your own. That seemed kinda mean, though. Well, Vince called some friends of his and arranged for a couple of motorcycle cops to pull you over and keep you tied up after you left us, and then call us and tell us when you were on your way.

"As luck would have it, you drove past them just as Vince was giving them your license plate number. They decided to follow along so that they'd be close when it was time to pull you over. Only, as it happened, you didn't go where they were expecting you to. One of them tailed you and the other peeled off to call us and tell us you weren't where you were supposed to be."

"There was a cop tailing me?" Roy asked. "I never even saw him."

"Yeah, good thing you're a paramedic, 'cause you'd make a lousy spy! Anyway, Baker, the cop, followed you all the way up to the campground. He said he figured he'd strike up a conversation with you and find out what you were doing and when you were planning to go home. Then he could relay the information back to us. He was sitting on his bike, waiting for you to come back to your car, when the earthquake hit. It was strong enough to knock him down and as he fell he heard you yell. He's the one who noted the time. He was also the first one to start looking for you -- at 10:24.

"After that you can probably figure it out for yourself. When Baker couldn't find you he called it in and we all went up and joined the search. There was a landslide further up the trail a ways and we wasted two or three hours digging into that. When you weren't under there we didn't know where to look. It was as if you'd just vanished. We knew you were within hearing, because Baker heard you, but you hadn't come back and you didn't answer, so we knew you had to be hurt or worse. We must have all walked past that hill a hundred times, looked down, didn't see anything, went on. Then I went by as the sun was just right and I caught a clear trail of crushed grass and broken branches. I followed it down and found the hole you fell into.

"And then it was just a matter of getting you out."

For several long minutes the room was silent as all those gathered considered the improbable chain of events that had led Roy into peril, and the equally improbable events that had seen him home. Roy looked around at his friends, a lump forming in his throat with the realization that he was alive today solely because so many wonderful people cared about him. Mere words seemed inadequate, but they were all he had and so he offered them humbly.

"Thank you. All of you. Thank you for my life."

Joanne leaned down to clasp her arms around his neck and hug him. John reached over and laid a hand on his arm. Several of the women were sniffling and two or three men cleared their throats self-consciously.

"You're welcome," Chet said. "Pay us in cake."

The room dissolved into laughter. Joanne jumped up, got Chet by one side of his mustache and dragged him into the kitchen. "Okay, buster! You're so eager for cake you can come help me carry it in."

"Ow! Ow! OW OUCH! Ow!"

Later, when everyone had cake in their hands and the larger group had broken off into twos and threes, Johnny dragged a chair over and sat by his partner. Roy still had both kids on his lap -- even the promise of cake wasn't enough to separate them from their daddy after so long.

"Listen, don't let Chet kid you," Johnny said. "About three in the morning we found your wallet in the dirt. Chet stood there on the hillside and cried like a baby."

Roy blushed a bit. "I'm really sorry that I worried everyone," he said.

"Not your fault. But don't do it again!" Johnny looked at his friend's kids, sitting there covered in cake and icing. He grinned and left for a minute, returning with a wet washcloth. He washed two sets of sticky little faces and sticky little hands and then, just for the hell of it, he found a clean corner of the washcloth and washed Roy's face too. Roy ducked away laughing,

"Hey, now!"

Johnny laughed too and it occurred to Roy how good it felt just to share laughter with his best friend. Johnny dropped the washcloth on the coffee table and let a shard of the seriousness return.

"When you're ready to talk about it, you remember I'll be here."

"You always have been," Roy told him.

Johnny studied the backs of his hands and shook his head. "What was it like?" he asked. "Lying there in the darkness, waiting to die? What goes through your mind at a time like that? What were you thinking?"

Roy considered the question, looking around at his home, his wife, his kids. John Gage. And he answered honestly.

"Four letter words, Junior. I wasn't thinking anything but four letter words."

The End.

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