Whispers of Old Winds (2 page)

Something about Michael that I’m not yet sure I understand is what he told me in Taos the night before we got married. We’d had a nice dinner, then returned to our B&B, probably drank too much wine, made love, and then lay in bed, talking and watching the fire in the Kiva gradually burn itself out. I hadn’t yet met Michael’s family, except for the doting uncle, who, although Michael denied it, was as gay as could be. It was no mystery why Michael had become his favorite nephew. We talked a bit about that uncle, who had recently died, and then I asked him about the rest of his family. He hadn’t told me much of anything about them and I was curious.

“We’re 100 percent Sicilian,” Michael said. “Our name, Bellomo, means ‘handsome man.’”

“Of course it does.”

“Anyway…. My father is in the, um, family business, and my mother is a full-time seeker of martyrdom.”

“What’s the family business?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Okay. And your mother? Martyrdom?”

Michael reached over to the nightstand and grabbed the two glasses of wine we’d earlier put there. He handed me one and then sipped from his. I waited for him to continue, and when he did, it was tentative, almost as if this was a story he didn’t want to tell.

“My mother, my grandmother, and who knows how many generations back this goes…. They believed in, oh, I guess the mysticism of the Catholic Church—the stigmata, the suffering, the guilt. They fed on everything about Catholicism that is… dark.”

I waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, I said, “And you were… around this growing up?”

“Yes. How could I not be? But, see, the thing was… I was born with a caul—behind the veil is what they call it.”

“I’ve heard of that. It means something.”

“It does. And I think, ever since I was born with that thing around my head, my mother has tried to pray herself out of it.”

“Pray herself out of it?”

“She thinks it was her fault. Even though a caul is supposed to be a good thing, an omen that the child is… special, her darkness—the darkness she took from all those generations of women—turned it around and made it a bad thing. Like it was… I don’t know. Like it was witchcraft or something.”

I was reminded then of the times that I’d noticed Michael’s own darkness—passing moments when I thought he was somewhere inside himself, trying to deal with some damned thing he couldn’t share with me. He’d always come out of his transitory funks with a smile, and I’d never thought there was anything to them except Michael being Michael.

“But let’s not even think about all that right now. Okay?” Michael said, taking hold of my hand. “We’re getting fucking married tomorrow! Can you believe that!”

I did believe that. And we did get married the next morning in the great room of the B&B, with the owners of the place as witnesses and a district court judge presiding. It was a good day. But since then, whenever I notice Michael with that faraway look in his eyes, I do wonder… about a lot of things.

D
IGGER
WALKS
into my office with two pairs of snowshoes, holds them up, and says, “Okay. Ready to go.”

“Yeah. Well…. You hang on for a bit. Something I need to do first.” I stand and grab my coat from the back of my chair and my hat from the top of the filing cabinet. “I’ll be back in an hour,” I say as I squeeze by him.

“You out?” Mary asks as I walk past her desk.

“Just for a bit. I’ve got my phone.”

She grabs a handheld radio from the credenza behind her desk and holds it out to me. “You’ll take this too. Your phone will crap out up there.”

I take the handheld and go out into the snow apocalypse that began in the earliest hours of this morning. I walk to Brunhilda, the ten-year-old Suburban with a gold star on both front doors, get in, and start up the behemoth. The lamentation she provides is a little like, “You’ve got to be kidding,” but she does crank herself up to her usual burpy purr. I back out of the space and head for Hank’s place, halfway up the mountain.

The climb isn’t that difficult, as I had Jim put on the chains earlier. He didn’t fuss with me at all about completing that directive. Jim’s like that: Duty, honor, all those things he learned in the Corps while doing his own duty in Nam a thousand years ago—he’s now sixty-five with no thoughts about retiring. His war experience allows him to see the worth of digging in for the duration, whether it be a firefight in the sticky mire of a jungle or a snow event, like today, that requires equipment to be ready for any unforeseen disaster or emergency. I would have told Digger to do it, but figured Jim would’ve had to show him how.

After fifteen minutes climbing, the landscape evens out a bit. Hank’s cabin is up ahead, and I notice the flash-spark of embers coming out of the chimney. I’ve told him more times than I can remember that he needs to repair the wire mesh on the top of that metal pipe, and each time I do, he says, “Okay, I’ll do that.” He’s never done it, and right now it doesn’t matter. I look at the juniper berries that Hank attaches to strings and hangs around the frames of his windows and door, the fruit now black with age. He’ll replace them in the spring with fresh ones. I’ve asked him about that too, and he always smiles and says, “I think it is pretty.”

As I stop Brunhilda about twenty yards in front of his house, the door opens and Hank steps onto his porch, his long gray hair billowing with the force of the wind. He waves, and I quickly get out and run up to the cabin.

I sit in one of the two recliners he’s got in his small parlor, see he’s got his own epic event going on within his wood stove—it’s got to be a hundred degrees in here—and I unbutton my coat and pull the flaps off my chest.

“It’s snowin’ pretty good,” he says, taking the other chair.

“You get your trees cut before it got bad?”

“A few. Took them down to Michael’s store. He gave me fifty bucks for them. Maybe he can sell them. Maybe he can’t.”

“Good.” I nod. “Wanted to ask you about what you told Digger. A body down in the bowl by Elk Creek? That the truth or you just playing with him again?”

Hank raises his arms, spreads them out, then raises his legs and spreads them out too. “Just like that. Like he was making a snow angel down there in the bowl.”

“You’re not kidding?”

“No. I hollered at him and he fell down. Thought about going down there, but Charlie held me back.”

At the mention of that name, Hank’s massive but half-crippled Malamute pads into the parlor from wherever he’s been. He sniffs my pants, glances at Hank, and then returns to wherever he’d hidden himself from the conflagration in the parlor.

“Besides,” Hank says, “that bowl is like quicksand when it snows like this.”

“So, the guy didn’t move? Just laid there?”

“Yup. Told your helluva deputy when I took the trees down to Michael’s, and that was that.”

“Couldn’t have been something else?”

“Yes, it could have.”

When he doesn’t say anything else, I slap my hands on my thighs and stand. “I guess we’ll have to go check it out.”

“Guess you will,” Hank stands and walks me to the door. Before I step outside, he adds, “Wear snowshoes.”

I button my coat, flip my collar up, and nod. “Thanks for your help, Hank.” I stop after opening the door, turn back to him, and ask, “When are you going to get a phone?”

“I’ll do that,” he says, his smile as sly as the fox’s Michael and I have seen three mornings in a row outside our bedroom window.

I
HEAD
back down the mountain, get Digger and the snowshoes, and then turn Brunhilda around and head back the way I’d come.

As we pass Hank’s cabin, Digger says, “He better fix his chimney.”

“Why? What’s wrong with it.”

“Well… I just thought that with all those sparks…. It…. Never mind.”

Yeah, I play with Digger too. I shouldn’t, but I do.

E
LK
C
REEK
is fed by the high mountains that lose their snowpack well after the end of May. It meanders through the forest for miles and eventually spills into the South Platte River. The dirt road that takes us near its headwaters is about a six-mile gentle climb from Hank’s cabin. Once you get there, the road ends, providing a view fashioned by the combined efforts of Mother Earth and Father Sky. There are two fourteeners to the northwest, a massive valley to the south, and on clear days, a sky as broad and blue as the Caribbean.

Just west of where the road ends, though, is what is called the bowl—a circular depression in the landscape that is about three hundred yards wide and probably fifty yards deep at the center. In the late spring and summer, it appears as a meadow where wildflowers and grasses abound, and at its center is a small lake that is probably five or six feet deep. In the winter, after the accumulation of one snowfall upon another, the bowl becomes a beautiful but deadly hazard. Only the most robust deer, elk, and other critters who venture into it will make it out alive. What appears as just the latest layer of snow is really multiple layers, hard-packed on the downslopes, but gradually and deceptively fragile the nearer you get to the center.

Just before we get to the end of the road, the clouds overtake us—we’re at about 9500 feet—and the nearly total whiteout is as eerie as the darkest room in a house believed to be haunted. Luckily the bowl has not yet been enveloped by the clouds, and we can see it off to our left.

“Wow,” Digger says.

“Yeah. You follow me. Walk where I walk and keep your voice to a whisper. We don’t want our own personal avalanche down there.”

“Yessir.”

We get out of Brunhilda, walk to the back, open the hatch, and grab the snowshoes. They’re nothing fancy, and we both take off our gloves to tighten the leather straps around the front of our boots. Once we do that, we put our gloves back on, and I turn and face Digger. “You remember what I just told you.”

He nods. “Follow you. Walk where you walk and whisper.”

“You’ll remember that?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Now, reach in there and get those ski poles.” I learned a long time ago that Brunhilda can’t go everywhere and had installed a rack inside the SUV to hold a pair of skis and poles.

Digger leans over into the back and grabs the poles, hands me one, and keeps the other.

“Get that rope in there too.” He snatches the rope, and I close the hatch. “Tie one end of the rope around your waist.” I take the other end of the rope and tie it around mine.

After we’ve done that, I’ll be damned if Digger doesn’t start walking toward the edge of the bowl.

“What did we just talk about?”

He stops and looks at me. His smile would momentarily tame a lion. “Sorry.”

I walk to where he stands, shake my head, and then look at the spread of the bowl below. “Hank said the guy was about a hundred yards out. Right? You see anything down there?”

“No. Not a thing.”

I walk farther and stop at the edge. “Slow and easy,” I say, carefully taking the first gently descending step.

“Right behind you.”

The snowpack feels solid and I continue down, noticing the farther I go that there’s an odd vortex or something created by the bowl that’s sending what up above was sideways-blowing snow into a swirl coming at us from every side. I look up and see the clouds are still hovering near the rim of the bowl. I mentally kick myself for not thinking to bring goggles with us.

“Hard to see now,” Digger says.

“Yeah, it is.” I plant my ski pole in front of me before I take another step. Still solid. After we’ve gone about a hundred yards, I stop and turn to Digger. “You okay?”

“Yes. You?”

“I’m fine.” I turn back and try to pinpoint where the middle of the bowl is, and think I see it, and I see something else—just a speck of something not white this side of where I’ve determined the middle is. “You see that?” I say, pointing.

“It’s…,” Digger says and pauses. “Yes, it’s something black. Maybe blue.”

I plant my pole in front of me again, and there’s a little give as it sinks down about a foot. “Okay. You stay where you are. Dig in your snowshoes and stick your pole as far as you can get it in the ground. Be ready to hang on to the rope if I start to… disappear. Okay?”

“Yeah. I’m ready.”

Very carefully, I take a step, and my snowshoe sinks down in the softer snow. My next step affirms even more that what everybody up here knows about the bowl is absolutely true. After about ten more steps, I’m wading through snow nearly up to my waist, and the dark-colored anomaly has formed itself into what is clearly an arm. If it’s human, this was one hairy son of a bitch, or he’s got an animal-hide coat. If it’s not human…. Well, maybe it’s a bear. “Another twenty-five, thirty feet,” I say, turning my head slightly toward Digger. “Keep the rope taut.”

“Yessir,” he says.

With each additional step I take, I feel like I’m walking on a bottomless layer of cotton. The snow is now up to my shoulders, and there, right in front of me, is that arm. I slowly hunker down on my haunches, reach out, and grab it.

Frozen stiff would be an understatement.

“How much more rope you got?” I say.

“What?”

I turn my head and say it again.

“About five feet.”

“Okay. I’m going to untie myself and retie it on the body. Let me have a little slack.”

“A dead body?”

I don’t answer as I feel myself sinking another foot. I wait a moment, and when I don’t feel any more movement, I untie the rope from my waist and wrap it around the body’s arm and tie it securely. I slowly stand and turn my head to the side. “Okay. You brace yourself. Keep the rope tight and start pulling as soon as I turn around.”

“Okay.”

Very carefully I maneuver myself around as best I can. The awkwardness of the snowshoes doesn’t make that easy, but I manage and start pulling on the rope as I head back up. The path I made coming down is nearly gone, as the snow has collapsed in from the sides. “Start pulling,” I say, and he does. I feel the proverbial deadweight behind me begin to move, and as it does, I hear what sounds like a clogged drain opening up. The whoosh sound is immediate, as is the collapse of the fragile terra firma beneath me. I hang on to the rope, but it, too, is collapsing, and something large and heavy smacks me on the head, and I am falling, falling….