The Timer Game

FOUR

Monday

The CNN reporter had been following the taillights of a battered pickup truck for almost an hour as it headed into the Tohono O’odham Nation, a hundred miles of desert stretching from Arizona into Mexico. It was two in the morning, and stars spangled the night sky.

Mac McGuire was traveling a road he’d taken half a dozen times, but a sudden rain the night before had cut gullies through it and left part of it a mire. He was relieved to have a guide.

On the seat next to him Pete Hildebrand snoozed, a burly arm around the camera. Mac felt a flash of irritation. One day, the car would hit a bump and that camera would fly out of his arms and smack the dashboard like an egg. In back, Aaron Spense stretched out, arms crossed, wearing his dad’s Marine boots, iPod earbuds in his ears. Next to him lay a mixer in a tangle of cables and snarl of mikes. Aaron was twenty-two, Pete not much older. It made Mac feel tired. He was thirty-eight, his last birthday.

Usually, CNN would have sent at least one producer, but Mac had insisted on keeping the size down, instinctively understanding that the fewer people pushing into their world, the greater likelihood he had of getting what he’d come for.

He thought through how it was going to go, what he was going to say, where the overhead boom mike needed to be positioned, and when exactly he wanted Pete to come in close for a tight shot. The mechanics kept his mind off the shoot itself, how important this one was.

Hekka Miasonkopna was a Yaqui Indian girl, three and a half years old, who was born with a damaged left ventricle. What had started as a piece about the nightmare of getting expensive cardiac care when poor had evolved into a series about the complexity of culture shaping worldview and the ferocity of a parent’s love.

Hekka’s parents knew she would die. They accepted it. So it became Mac’s fight, for her. She was now in end-stage and would die without a transplant, something they’d resisted considering. There was another thing they could try. Something so new it was still in experimental trials. So new nobody in the media except Mac and his producers and video team even knew of its existence.

His job was laying out the options and stepping back to record what happened next. Part of him came here wanting to nudge her parents into action, a move that was right at the edge of stepping over the line, and he knew it.

He and his colleagues joked about the special hell reserved for reporters. Someplace where they’d be forced to sit for eternity with the hapless fools they’d talked into doing something – a giddy kid he’d once coached early in his career into getting a tattoo on camera came to mind; that one still gnawed at his conscience – and the problem was that even with the most altruistic of pieces, like this one, there existed a small part inside himself that was looking at it coldly, evaluating it not just for its emotional wallop but for its ability to be a Mac piece, helping him – just like that old American Express ad – go everywhere he wanted to go.

Unlike local stations keyed to November sweeps, CNN tracked ratings all the time. TV viewing was higher in the fall, and Mac was working on two series simultaneously that would get big play: a graphic and disturbing one about child porn on the Internet that was close to being in the can, and this one with Hekka, culminating in her ground-breaking surgery and its aftermath.

Providing they went for it. Or not. Either way, it was a story. He hated himself for even thinking that. Mac sincerely wanted her to live. He’d grown attached to the little girl and her family. But part of him, almost equally as strongly, knew if they chose to let her die, it would tug at the audience just as much.

Horrible business, news. Someplace along the line, he’d sold part of himself and he couldn’t figure out how to get it back.

Clouds of dust rose and seeped into his vehicle, making it look as if Arturo’s truck was floating in a puff of magic. Mac’s eyes burned. In the lights, the Coyote Mountains rose like an apparition of shaggy cliffs and granite bluffs.

The pickup veered off road and Mac shifted into low, bumping across a dry riverbed. The Swiss Army knife on his key chain clinked like wind chimes.

The mother was in his pocket; he knew that. She’d try anything to save her kid. The grandfather, Don Jose, was the challenge. Maybe he wasn’t even there anymore and it would make things easy. Somehow Mac doubted it. This one hadn’t been easy from the first.

The land crumpled into arroyos of creosote bush and cactus. Bony cattle, picking their way among the scrub, flared in the lights and disappeared. Tin houses flashed and were gone.

The truck slowed and disappeared over a rise and Mac followed. The hollow was pitch black, except for a lightbulb hanging over a wooden porch that outlined the sloping roof of a house. Moths banged into the light and an oak stood like a sleeping giant, one branch hanging low over the house.

The truck cab opened and Arturo got out, with his long braids and dusty jeans, a younger version of his elderly father. Kids spilled out of the flatbed. Maria stood in the doorway, a baby on her hip, dark hair streaked prematurely with gray. Worry had etched fine lines on her face.

‘Showtime,’ Mac McGuire said softly as he pulled to a stop. Pete and Aaron yawned and scratched and rolled out of the vehicle, shivering in the cold. Aaron’s dyed hair tips looked like white dandelion tufts in the dark.

‘Inside.’ Maria pulled Mac over the doorsill and switched on a light.

Hekka’s bed sat in the middle of the front room. The kids from the truck crept silently into the room and slid into the corners. The room smelled acrid and old. Hekka’s breathing was labored, a bubbly sound that alarmed Mac. Her hair lay limply across the gray pillow. A vein in her neck pulsed. She’d always been smaller than normal, but now her fingers were clubbed and tipped in blue and her lips were ashy. He went to the bed and took her hand. It was icy.

‘Hey,’ he said softly. ‘It’s Mac. The reporter.’ She moaned in her sleep and her eyelids fluttered. ‘Yeah, I know, that’s what everybody says when they hear it’s me.’ He gently slid his hand free and surveyed the room.

An old man close to eighty was sitting in a chair near the window. Mac nodded. Cords of sinew roped Don Jose’s arms and most of his teeth were gone. His few remaining teeth were yellowed tusks. He patted a pouch strapped to his belt, extracting a piece of guasima wood and a small knife. It was a half-carved figure three inches tall, the legs of a man, the head of a deer. Nicks outlined where the legs and feet would go. He set to work, ignoring Mac and the tangled cables at his feet as Pete and Aaron moved through the room setting up equipment.

The important thing right then was how quickly Pete and Aaron could get things ready, and Mac took the offered cup of water from Maria and stepped back as his crew adjusted the lights and checked audio levels. After a few moments, Aaron nodded to Mac, signaling they were set. Once they were inside this dusty wooden room, things always moved quickly, and Mac had learned the hard way he could never redo a moment if it wasn’t captured on video.

‘She’s dying,’ Arturo said abruptly, daring Mac to contradict him. Pete hoisted the camera and came in for a tight shot of the father’s wounded face.

‘I’m not a doctor,’ Mac started.

‘But still. You were one of those reporters in Afghanistan, you said. You saw death all the time. Even sewed some people up. Stopped that one guy from bleeding to death. You told me the story,’ he insisted. ‘You can hear it, same as me.’

‘I can hear it,’ Mac agreed.

In the corner, the blade snicked through the wood, popping shaved curls into the air.

‘She needs to go to the Center, Arturo,’ Mac said. ‘She can’t stay here anymore. That’s what the doctors say. They have a bed for her. They’ve told you it’s her best chance.’

‘But not for that!’ Arturo said. ‘Not for that heart-that-is-not-a-heart! She will die! Don Jose is certain.’

Maria buried her face in her infant daughter’s neck. Pete swung the camera onto her face and held. Maria shifted the baby in her arms.

‘You’ve changed your mind about the heart-in-a-box?’ The parents had enrolled Hekka in the experimental program four months before, only the second child out of a possible ten to be admitted, and time for her was running out.

‘It is a lie,’ Don Jose said from his chair. His voice was gravelly. The camera swung and steadied on his implacable face.

‘It’s brand-new,’ Mac countered. ‘But Dr. Bentley’s done it once before and that child is now strong.’

Mac thought of the piece he’d just finished editing that was part of the series. Eric Bettles was a five-year-old boy who’d been within days of dying a year ago when his lab-built heart had been implanted, a heart made from his own cells. He’d come back so dramatically that when they’d taped him last week, Eric was playing ball with his dad. During that year, his family had been sworn to secrecy until the series aired this week. It was a new procedure. Risky. How risky was the question. No one had an answer.

It was a crap shoot; a gamble. Eric Bettles looked strong, but no one could accurately predict what waited for him down the road. A developing heart in a fetus acquires tensile strength from the rhythmic beating of the mother’s own heart. In a lab-created heart, electronic pulses were used to simulate that movement; scientists still weren’t sure if Eric’s heart wouldn’t some day fray. If that happened, he’d die immediately. No turning back.

But Mac’s job wasn’t explaining the downside to Hekka’s parents. Doctors had done that and he’d caught it on tape.

‘It’s a heart built just for her,’ Mac reminded him. ‘I’m wondering why you’re rejecting the advice of doctors. They say it’s time to bring her into the Center and have that new heart put in.’

And then the series would air. And life forever would change across the world for transplant patients. Two lab-created hearts made out of tiny patients’ own cells and successfully implanted were enough for the Center to risk a firestorm of publicity and the attendant clamor of those wanting to enroll their kids in the experimental and risky program.

Enough to bump Mac up to whatever he wanted next. Maybe an anchor job. He wasn’t sure.

‘Except it’s a lie.’ The video whirred, the shot tight now on Don Jose. ‘I dreamed a black hole in Hekka’s chest. A heart not hers, evil found and lost. I dreamed her with wings, singing with a tuik kutanak, a good throat, and a strong heart in heaven, finally hers.’ He rolled the carving and knife between his yellowed palms and the outline of a foot emerged.

‘If she doesn’t come in, she will die. That’s what they say. It’s that simple.’ Mac’s voice was flat.

Don Jose carved in silence. Finally he said, ‘I carve the deer dancer. I carve this not for life. But for the usi mukila pahko.’

Mac searched his memory for Yaqui religious symbols and found it. When he’d first met the family and discovered the elder Don Jose was a devout Yaqui, he’d bought books through the University of Arizona to better understand the culture. Hell, use it. Why lie? Especially to himself. Usi mukila pahko. The funeral of a child.

‘You go now. We prepare for the sea ania.’ Don Jose sniffed, already done with him.

‘The flower world,’ Mac pressed. ‘But that’s east, beneath the dawn.’ East meant life.

Don Jose tipped the carving. The deer dancer stooped, caught mid-dance, elbows out, head angled, so his deer face and antlers looked behind him over his shoulder.

‘The dancer looks behind him. Toward the place of life. But his feet, still unformed, move in the opposite path. He dances west,’ Don Jose rumbled. ‘Toward death.’

‘No!’ Maria cried. Her voice was unexpected and shrill. The men froze. It was not seemly to behave this way, even over the dying of a child. ‘No. She is my daughter, too. I will not. I will not. She will go in.’

Arturo took a step toward his wife but Don Jose held up a gnarled hand, stopping him.

‘Hekka’s on the UNOS list. Maybe there will be a regular donor heart for her,’ Mac offered. ‘Arizona and California are both AREA 5 on the UNOS transplant map so that means you can stay at the Center while you wait.’

Not reminding them that because of specific immunity problems, doctors had pegged Hekka’s chances at finding a compatible heart at less than 15 percent. Only saying, ‘If she stays here, they say she doesn’t have a chance.’

They waited. The camera whirred.

‘Very well. Hekka goes to the Center with me,’ Don Jose said finally. ‘I shall be her guardian. But this heart-in-a-box, it will not save her.’

Great video, Mac thought, and felt equal parts shame and euphoria.

Pete and Aaron dropped him off at La Cholla Airpark northwest of Tucson near the Tortolita Mountains. The pair kept driving toward Tucson International, where they’d catch the same commercial flight that would carry Hekka and her grandfather back to San Diego.

The office was a modular building, sided in stucco and framed by a cement walkway larded with stepping-stones. An acacia and two bristly mesquite trees offered slight shade. Even this early, the smell of heat rising from the cement mingled with the faint scent of sage.

The pilot, Jeb Shattuck, punched in a code at the French doors and pushed them open. He was wearing black Doc Martens and his hair under his trademark Sacramento Kings hat was turning gray.

‘There’s a computer in the pilots’ lounge, if you need to go online before we leave. I’ll be outside.’

Mac nodded and stepped inside. He drank coffee out of his thermos as Jeb went through the checklist on the Cirrus. The room had lavender-gray carpeting and two sofas littered with aviation magazines. A bulletin board to the left of a small office was crammed with ads for planes, spaces to lease, and tie-down information.

Mac went to the window and looked out past a row of corrugated metal hangars and shadeports. It was just after four in the morning and the sky held the faint pearl color that came an hour before dawn, suffusing the mountains in pink. A light rain fell. In the distance, tidy homes sat amid a vast desert landscape, and horses drowsed along a corral fence.

Jeb was squatting under the plane with what looked like a shot glass and metal straw, poking the straw up into the underside of the plane, taking a fuel sample. He was based out of Sacramento but Mac always used him for trips when he could pry money out of his expense account. Jeb routinely flew media stars who wanted a low profile, and sometimes celebrity pilots whose insurance policies insisted on the presence of a second pilot on board. Mac had heard he flew with Angelina Jolie, but he’d never hear it from Jeb. And Mac liked that, how discreet and trustworthy Jeb was, and how unswayed by star power. Liked the man.