Snowblind (19 page)

Ian appeared from around an old avalanche cone, his red suit fuzzing up out of the brightness and then sprouting arms and legs. He had something dark and battered in his hands. “This is all I found,” Ian said. “It's all there is.”

What was he carrying? Bloody fuck. The Russian's head. The man's nose and one eye socket had been crushed. Bone poked through the ragged collar of his neck.

“You're sick,” David said. He felt like vomiting, but his stomach was a dried-up void.

“Don't you understand?” Ian said. “There's nothing else here. I've looked.”

“The rest went down a crevasse,” David said. He refused to acknowledge Ian's implication. He wanted no part of that. He had no intention of following Ian any further.

Ian pushed the head toward David. It was black, lopsided, bristly. Dried blood scabbed its ragged parts and crusted Ian's hands. “Don't turn away from this,” Ian said. “Here's your chance to see below the surface. He's come back.”

David was revolted. “Stop it. Throw it down a crevasse with the rest of the body. Give it some peace.”

“He's yours,” Ian said. He put the head down in the snow, faceup toward David and the mountain behind him. “Do what you like with him.”

It looked foul in the snow. All David could think of was to get the head down a crevasse, out of sight, so the mountain could be clean and bare again. He took one step forward and punted the head toward the nearest crack. But the front points of his crampon stuck in the Russian's face, and the head stayed stuck to his boot—as if it were eating the front part of his foot—no matter how hard he kicked and swore. And Ian laughed and laughed at him, a sound like ice moving over rock.

PROUD LINE

I

T
HE CROIX VERTE hut was built on a flat step in the rock, level with the surface ice of the Gesner Glacier, during that brief time between the wars when the future could be imagined without alarm. The hut was designed so that the alpinist could step directly from the ice to the front porch, and with two steps more be inside and handed a cup of tea by the warden. But the glacier retreated and left the hut high above a newly born headwall. By 1987, the hut sat fifty feet above the glacier, with a sheer drop down to the ice.

Officially, the Croix Verte was abandoned, but rumor had it the hut was still used. Which is why Sam, having left his tent behind, found himself clambering hand over hand through the dregs of twilight up a knotted length of faded climbing rope someone had fixed to a porch beam long ago. Sam had left more than his tent. He'd left his home mountains, too. Back in Washington, he would have been climbing volcanoes on the Pacific Rim. Young mountains,
those—cinder stacks, really, so recently piled they hadn't yet been dismantled and tossed into the sea by their glaciers, even though Sam could practically watch them crumble out from under his boots. Later in the summer, he'd move inland to where the granite peaks pushed up through the fleece of dark, wet pines. At night he'd read—he always brought a book because otherwise on a stormbound day the tent walls closed in and his watch ran slow and his head filled with restless lunatics. Sam escaped into stories about Terray and Messner and Rébuffat. He liked best the time of the beginning, when men and women quit lumbering around the mountains like the upright apes they were and began instead to climb, putting their monkey hands to good use. The orange nylon disappeared from around him, and he'd share nightmare bivies on the Eiger or follow Joe Brown up wet gritstone with nothing but a hemp rope, a wobbly piton, and their fingertips between them and gravity's hook.

From inside his tent under a volcano or a jag of Pacific granite, Sam made plans to go into the country of his books. Now that he'd arrived and was swimming up out of the twilight toward the hut, he saw everything doubled, the images off the page overlapping the real mountains around him. His hands yarded on the sun-bleached fixed rope, but there were other hands too, probably some he had read about, on the rope, on the rock. The shadows of the past roamed around him. Sam reached the porch, pulled himself over the edge, and had a seat. Perched there, he could have been a gargoyle on a battlement. His face was gaunt, all hollows and bones, a contradiction to his youth people found unsettling. He looked feverish. Sam tossed a few words down into the darkness to let his partner know it was his turn.

Five minutes later, Tyson surfaced and heaved himself up beside Sam. “Damn the Euros,” he said. “That rope is thrashed.”

Sam nodded. The sheath had disintegrated, and parts of the core were shot too. “Old-world standards,” he muttered. “Everything's so old over here they probably don't see the problem.”

“Lucky for them,” Tyson said. “I'd rather they keep the raggy tapestries in their castles.”

Sam didn't answer, his attention already taken back by the mountains. The moon was out, and the Gesner cut a silver stripe through black cliffs running up to jagged silhouettes. For a moment he saw the glacier as the tongue of a fabulous monster and the arc of mountains the teeth set in its lower jaw.
And we're the little sucker fish
, he thought. Was he ready for old-world mountains? All the tales he'd absorbed of bearded seekers with gorilla arms weren't just words anymore. The rock was real. So were the stories. Past climbers filled the night-mountains. Sam sensed them ghosting through the darkness. He'd walked into the realm of legend, and who was he? He'd read too damn much.

“We're not alone,” Tyson said, jerking his head toward the front window of the hut, where a face and a candle appeared for a moment and then sank away behind the glass.

The lock on the door had been chiseled out, and what was left of the latch opened with a push of the thumb. Inside, a half dozen candles threw off more shadows than light. Unlit stubs and wax pools scabbed every surface, including the chairs and floor. Two men sat across from each other at the long table in the room's center, a wristwatch, a bottle of wine, and a candle between them. One of
the two must have been up to look out the window, but now they seemed rooted. Maybe they'd hoped for someone other than a couple American wankers to wash up at the front door. The light barely found their faces, lighting the tips of their noses—one hooked, the other broad, broken, and flat—and the curls of their beards, but leaving the rest in shadow. “Oy,” offered the one with the black beard and hooked nose.

“Room for two more?” Tyson asked.

“Depends,” barked the redder, thinner beard, without looking up. “You two feeling protective towards your arse-holes?”

“Don't listen to 'im,” the other said. “Bunks are on the other side. Check 'em for mouse turds.”

Through the partition dividing the hut in half, they found the sleeping room, crammed floor to ceiling with wooden platforms and thin, mildewed mattresses. Sam and Tyson each chose a bunk and brushed away the rodent piles. Despite the thick blond timbers in the walls, the air inside was as cold as out, and the heat they'd made coming up the valley evaporated fast into the night. An old cast iron woodstove filled a corner in the other room, but it had looked rusty and stone-cold, and Sam figured that no one had bothered dragging fuel up here since the hut and glacier parted ways.

“It's like we're squatting in a museum,” he said to Tyson. “I keep expecting faces to come out of the walls.”

Back in the common room, the two Brits hadn't budged. Sam took a chair to the front window, where he could sit and look out at the moon and stars by shielding the glass with his hands. He felt unaccountably jittery. Despite the cold, his palms felt wet. Warnings,
vague fears brushed by. He shook out his hands and poked around the corners of his mind, searching for the bad juju, then realized the atmosphere was so strained around the two at the table that he'd been infected from clear across the room.

“Looks like execution day,” he said to the Brits.

“Ha! Close on it.” That was the hook-nosed man again, who said his name was Nigel, his partner's James. His beard straggled off at his collarbone, and his eyebrows shagged down over his eyes, though it was hard to distinguish between shadow and the man's black wool. “Poor planning on our parts to wind up here with nothing to do apart from a bottle of wine. It's too much head time.”

James slouched elaborately in his chair. Red fuzz covered his face, which was all sharp angles except for the nose, which looked like the aftermath of a half-hearted effort to smear a whole strawberry on a piece of toast. “Some beautiful riots been had under conditions like these,” he said. “Shameful waste.”

“Couldn't afford it,” Nigel said. “Have to be in form tomorrow.”

“Pah. Be worth it.”

A honey-grained countertop ran along the backside of the hut and ended where a copper sink drained directly outside through a pipe cut down through the wall. Tyson levered himself up onto the counter and casually lotused his legs. “Don't make us guess,” he said. “Got something famous planned?”

“It's the devil come to tempt us into the talking jinx,” James said.

“Be strong, brother,” Nigel answered.

“We'll have at the Center Route on the Aiguille de la Flèche,” James said.

Nigel banged his hand down flat on the table. “Well done. You've avoided temptation. As always.”

“I've never heard of it,” Tyson said.

“The Yankees don't know their history.”

“I've heard of it,” Sam said. “That was Zapelli's retirement route.”

“I was there,” Nigel said, “when he came back from the climb. He'd been up there with a Frenchman. Everyone knew where they'd been. Zapelli walked into La Pierre d'Or, and the whole joint went silent the moment he opened the door. The first time in his life he looked old. He looked more than that. Absolutely spent. Vacant. Shuffling baby steps to a chair and table.

“I was seventeen, getting my bum handed to me by my first season in the Alps. I remember his face, like the life had been scooped out, naught left but the flesh. Marcel Tappes was there that day, celebrating his own tenth year of retirement. He walked over and put a hand on Zapelli's shoulder. He bent his head down to ask the question we all were waiting for the answer to. A young old man bent over an old young man, that's what it looked like. Zapelli just nodded his head.

“Tappes stood straight, and I wasn't sure whether he was going to salute or start passing out cigars. He shook Zapelli's hand and walked back to his table, kicking his feet like he'd vault the bar. We got noisy then. It's not every day you get to be there when one of the Last Greats hikes her skirts for a fellow. The barman himself got off his duff and took a glass of wine to Zapelli, and that was a big moment, as he had no love of Italians. We were all swilling
and toasting. But I saw that few of us went over to talk to the man who was the cause of the celebrating. He'd gone beyond us. Who knows what he thought of himself, but we couldn't touch him just the same.

“He never said a thing about the route. But we could tell from his face what was up there. We could fill in the blanks. Pain and fear. Tattooed to his skin. That was his last big climb. He slid down into glory.”

Nigel closed up, his mouth buried by his beard. The night had become turbulent outside. The sound of the wind rubbing against the rocks and the roof vibrated down through the walls, but the air inside remained still, the candle flames undisturbed.

“That was fifteen years back,” James said. “And the beast ain't yet seen a second ascent. Fifteen fucking years. And not from lack of trying. Lowe went up there. And Harrison and Thule. And Dickey and Frémont. Not a single one of them made it to the top. They all abandoned the route. They came sleepwalking back with their tails between their legs, looking shattered, just like Zapelli, only tense and spooked instead of slack tired.”

Sam looked back out through the window to see if the wind had brought any clouds, but it was still clear, the stars brilliant, almost caustic to his eyes. From inside the hut, the landscape looked unnatural—lunar, dangerous. He imagined the Italian, Zapelli, rafting out into that darkness, one warm spark between the mountains and the stars.

“You scared of it?” Tyson asked.

“Shitless,” James said.

“To the point where I reckon I'll fall off the rope just coming down from the roost in the morning,” Nigel said.

“No, we'll be better off then, when we can stop this sitting,” James said.

“The morning's never going to come, brother,” Nigel answered. “Look at the watch. You tired? I'm not. The night's never going to end.”