The Man Who Fell

A Horror Story Based on the Mystery of D. B. Cooper

I.

The boy found the money on a Sunday in February 1980, nine years after the man fell out of the sky.

He was eight years old and his name was Brian Ingram and he had come to the Columbia River with his family to build a fire and cook hotdogs. The sand along Tena Bar was frost-hardened and gray and the boy was scraping at it with a stick when the rubber bands came apart in his fingers like the ligaments of something long dead. Three packets of twenties. $5,800 in all. The bills were fused together and stained a color that was not quite brown and not quite red and the boy held them up and in the February light they looked like pages torn from a bible that had been buried with a body.

His father called the FBI.

The serial numbers matched.

What his father did not tell the FBI — what he did not tell anyone, not his wife, not the reporters, not the agents who came with their black bags and grid lines and metal detectors — was that the boy had not been digging randomly. The boy had been digging because something underneath the sand had been tapping. And the bills, when the boy first touched them, were warm — warm like the handle of a tool someone has just set down, warm in a way that nine years in frozen riverbank sediment does not allow.

The father noticed this. He held the bills himself. He said nothing. But that night, lying in bed, he pressed his fingertips together and still felt it: a faint rhythmic pulse in the pads of his fingers, as if the warmth had not merely transferred but entered, and he understood without language that something had been handed to him, and that the giving was not yet finished.

II.

On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, a man in a dark suit and a black clip-on tie walked into Portland International Airport and bought a one-way ticket to Seattle on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305. He paid $18.52 in cash. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. He carried a black attaché case and nothing else.

The stewardess would later recall his face as remarkably average. Mid-forties. Brown eyes. Olive skin. She said he was the calmest person she had ever served.

Shortly after three o’clock he handed her a slip of paper. She assumed it was his phone number — men did this, it was 1971 — and tucked it into her pocket. When she passed him again he leaned close and said, in a voice so quiet it seemed to originate behind her own sternum: Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.

He opened the attaché case. Red sticks. Wires. A battery.

Four parachutes. $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills. The plane circled Puget Sound for two hours while the ransom was assembled. Cooper sat in his seat and drank bourbon and smoked Raleigh cigarettes and watched the clouds below the wing.

When the plane landed in Seattle, thirty-six passengers walked off. Cooper stayed. He kept one stewardess, two pilots, a flight engineer. He collected his money and his parachutes and gave his instructions: fly to Mexico. Below ten thousand feet. Cabin unpressurized. Landing gear down. Flaps at fifteen degrees.

Somewhere over southwestern Washington, at approximately eight o’clock, in freezing rain turning to snow, the man who called himself Dan Cooper lowered the aft stairs of the Boeing 727 and stepped out into nothing.

They say he was never seen again.

III.

Earl Parsifal found the first piece in 1977 and he never told a soul.

Earl lived alone in a cedar-shake cabin twelve miles east of Ariel, Washington, up a logging road that hadn’t been used since the company went bust in ‘68. He was sixty-one. He’d been a choker setter and a diesel mechanic and briefly a husband. The marriage had ended the way a campfire ends — not stamped out but untended, coals collapsing inward until there was nothing left to collapse. He still kept her coffee mug on the shelf above the stove, handle turned out, as if she might reach for it. He had a dog named Hector that was mostly shepherd and partly something with pale eyes that caught the lamplight wrong. He’d gotten Hector as a puppy the year Dolores left, and the dog had learned his silences the way another person might have, and this was enough, most days, and on the days it was not enough Earl split wood until his hands ached and that was a different kind of enough.

It was late October. He was splitting wood when Hector began to dig at the base of a large fir about forty yards into the tree line. Not the playful excavation of a buried bone. Something desperate. Something like escape in reverse.

Hector unearthed a human hand.

The skin had gone the color of smoked leather. The fingers were curled inward, not in rigor but in reach — grasping downward, toward the center of the earth, as if the hand’s owner had been trying to pull himself deeper rather than climb out. On the ring finger was a plain gold band. And gripped in the fist, still legible after six years: a twenty-dollar bill. Serial number beginning with L.

Earl pried the bill out. It was warm.

He buried the hand. He burned the twenty in his woodstove. He told Hector to stay away from that tree and the dog obeyed for three days before returning with greater urgency.

This time: a forearm.

Earl reburied it. Hector dug it up. Each time it was exhumed it seemed longer, and the posture had changed — the limb was straightening, the elbow extending, the fingers spreading, as if whatever it was were assembling itself into the shape of a body in freefall: arms out, legs back, chest down. The position of a man dropping through ten thousand feet of darkness. The soil was not consuming it. The soil was shaping it.

By late November the dog had excavated a complete limb from shoulder socket to fingertip, dressed in the rotten sleeve of a black suit jacket, the hand now clutching a full brick of twenties. Earl buried it for the last time on the night of November 24 and placed a heavy stone over the site.

In the morning the stone had been pushed aside from below. The earth erupted outward. In the crater where the limb had been: nothing. Only a depression the exact size and shape of a man lying facedown with his arms extended. The posture of descent.

Earl filled the hole with gravel. In the morning the gravel was gone. Not scattered. Not displaced. Gone — pulled downward as if by a drain.

He stopped going near the tree.

The tree did not return the courtesy.

Hector died on Christmas Eve, 1978. Earl found him under the porch, curled into a shape that dogs cannot make — spine bowed outward, limbs folded beneath the body as if bracing for impact. His lips were drawn back from his teeth. His pale eyes were open. And they had changed. Not filmed over with death but cleared, as though dying had improved the dog’s vision, and in each wet cornea was a reflection. Not of Earl. Not of the porch. A man in a dark suit, arms spread, falling through banked clouds. The reflection was moving. The man was getting closer.

Earl dropped the dog. Stepped back. Looked again. The man was larger now, nearer, as though the dead eyes were not reflecting but receiving — a signal that had been broadcasting for seven years from a sky that was not above but below.

He buried the dog behind the cabin by the fir tree. In the morning the grave was open and the dog was gone and in his place was a parachute, rotted silk tangled with shroud lines, and tangled in the lines were twenty-dollar bills. Hundreds of them. They fluttered in the dawn wind. Earl picked one up. It was dated 1969. Serial number beginning with L. It was warm.

But the dates on the bills were wrong. Some read 1977, some 1978, some bore a year Earl did not recognize, a number that was too high, that had not happened yet, and he dropped them because he understood that the money was not old. The money was arriving.

He drove to the Ariel General Store and used a pay phone to call the Clark County Sheriff. He told the dispatcher there was a body on his property. She asked whose. Earl looked through the glass at the parking lot, at the sky, at the trees standing along the road like mourners, and he said: I believe it belongs to the man who fell out of that airplane.

The dispatcher asked which airplane.

Earl said: The only one that mattered.

They sent a deputy. The deputy found Earl on his porch with his rifle across his knees. There was no parachute. No bills. No open grave. There was a dog-sized depression in the earth and the faint smell of handled currency — that flat copper smell — but nothing to see and nothing to report.

The deputy left. Earl went inside. He locked the door. He sat in his chair by the woodstove and listened. The cabin was quiet.

Then a voice came from everywhere — walls, floor, stove, the crumbled chinking between logs. It was calm. The calmest voice Earl had ever heard. The voice of a man ordering bourbon and soda.  The voice said: There is no down here that is different from the down there. Ask the dog.

Earl put the barrel of the rifle under his chin and pulled the trigger and in the instant between the click and the thunder he felt the floor of the cabin give way, and he was not sitting in a chair in a cabin but suspended in black air with freezing rain on his face and the roar of a 727 above him and the tops of Douglas firs ten thousand feet below —

IV.

They found Earl three days later. A mail carrier noticed the smell.

The sheriff’s report noted the cause of death and the condition of the cabin — blood on the ceiling, a hole in the roof where the round had exited — and the curious fact that on the kitchen table, arranged in a neat fan, were fourteen twenty-dollar bills in immaculate condition. Uncirculated. Dated 1969. Serial numbers beginning with L.

The deputy who logged them into evidence did not note their temperature in his report, but he told his wife that night, and she said what do you mean, and he said: Like someone just let go of them. And his wife asked him to stop talking and he did, but he lay awake with his palms pressed flat against the mattress, feeling for something beneath the floor of their home — a vibration, a rhythm — and he thought: This is how it starts.

The bills sat in an evidence locker for eleven months until a young FBI agent on the NORJAK task force ran the serial numbers.

They matched.

The agent drove to the cabin. It was February, 1980. He stood in Earl’s cabin and looked at the stain on the ceiling and the hole in the roof and the empty table, and he felt, in the floor beneath his feet, a pull. Downward. Not toward the earth. Toward something beneath the earth that was still somehow above him.

He left quickly.

He drove back to Portland and filed his report. But he noticed, in the weeks that followed, that he could not climb stairs without a feeling of revulsion, that elevation of any kind produced in him a nausea that was almost moral, as though rising were a form of dishonesty — as though the only truthful direction were down. He took a ground-floor apartment. He refused air travel. At his retirement party, twenty years later, after three drinks, he told a colleague about the cabin.

He said: I think it’s a man who is still falling.

His colleague laughed.

The agent looked at the floor.

His colleague stopped laughing.

V.

A woman camping alone near the Lewis River woke at three in the morning to find the walls of her tent bowing inward, pressed from all sides, and the air smelled of jet fuel and bourbon. She heard a voice — calm, impossibly calm — say her name.

She ran. She told no one for eleven years. When she finally spoke about it she said the worst part was not that the voice knew her name. The worst part was the feeling in her stomach — a dropping, a lurching, the sensation of a floor giving way — and it had not stopped. It had been eleven years and it had not stopped.

Her therapist asked what she should do.

The woman said: You’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking what’s under your chair.

The therapist looked down.

The carpet was bulging. Faintly. Pressing upward from below in the shape of a hand.

Something found purchase.

And pulled.

❖  ❖  ❖