Snowblind Page 14

  PROUD LINE

  I

  THE 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 b
aby 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.”

  JUST BEFORE DAWN, Sam tossed off his sleeping bag. The Brits were long gone, already plunged into their war with history. Asleep, Sam had barely registered their departure in the middle of the night. He imagined them now, two bearded faces staring wide-eyed up into the unknown. He could feel their sweat freeze at the belays in the shadows on the immense north-facing wall. Sam found it uncomfortable to wake up rested and easy knowing that nearby, the two of them were working hard to stay alive. They had crossed over to a territory inhuman, and he was standing around inside a womb of milled wood. The air and floor were sharply cold, but Sam stayed barefoot and shirtless in defiance—of what, he couldn’t say. He walked outside to piss off the porch into the stained snow below.

  The mountain teeth in the first sunshine: big, sharp, erupting out of the earth and towering over the hut, tapering to points so slender Sam imagined balancing on their tops with one foot. Lower, closer mountains crowded forward and blocked his view of the Aiguille de la Flèche. A few cuts of steep, dark rock and curtains of ice hinted at the beast rising just there over the edge. Shivering, Sam retreated to the hut and told Tyson to get his carcass out of bed.

  They climbed rock that day, following a zigzagging crack system for twelve hundred feet up the Tomas Spur. They climbed well; they climbed fast. It was a good day, the kind of day when gravity lets go and the rock reaches out and shakes your hand with a firm grip. The sun kept them warm, but the rock stayed crisp. Sam hand-traversed the final knife ridge to the summit, pasting his climbing shoes to bare friction, looking down past his feet through an immense well of air all the way to the glacier below. Following, Tyson stood up and took the edge on tiptoe, arms raised like a wire walker—because he could, because the stone was that good to them. The afternoon sun angled down and colored him gold, and Sam hooted and whistled from the summit like a spectator at the fair.

  The top, a lightning-scarred anvil for the local thunderheads, allowed them just enough room to sit stuck together at the shoulder. They stared out at the surrounding peaks, which seemed built to shred the sky. Curling zephyrs and updrafts swam past, tugging the two climbers into space. On three sides, the ground fell away, stamped into flat two-dimensionality by the sheer distance down. On the fourth side, a notch connected them to the Azzu Massif, to which the Tomas Spur was really only a satellite. The Azzu dwarfed the Tomas to the west, but to the south, the Aiguille de la Flèche lifted its head high above them all.

  The line was breathtaking—not like the Venus at the museum, breathtaking like being held underwater in the middle of a cold ocean. From east and west, two great planes of rock joined in the center, the prow of a stone ship cutting through the earth. From far back, the prow looked straight, monolithic. Spit from the summit on a dead-calm day, and you’d dampen the ground right where you’d started. But when Sam pried into the details, trying to piece together the climb in his head, he saw cut-stone roofs, cresting waves of rock, stacked icicles like stands of inverted white pines dangling down the wall. The mountain pushed him further and further into space with every move.

  “Crazy,” Tyson said. “Those Brits better not suck.”

  Sam looked for the Brits but saw no sign of them. This meant nothing. The mountain opened for him like a Chinese box each time he looked closer. The Brits could have been hidden in a hundred places. Still, Sam would have liked to have caught a glimpse of the two, to give the mountain some scale and put a chink in its armor.

  “Come on,” Tyson said. “We should go. Look at the sun.”

  Eleven rappels toward the shadows leaking from the base of the mountain took them back down to the Gesner. They slid down their ropes, letting gravity reclaim them, the work of the day undone in lengths of 150 feet. Then down the glacier and up the tatty rope and back into the hut, where they had food and goose down and protection from the twilight winds. Sam sat on the porch an extra few minutes, feet dangling over the glacier, watching the late sun drench the mountains in color. It had been a good day—a good day, but not a proud day, not the kind of day that added enough coal to the fire of satisfaction for it to be carried through the valleys and cities.

  The last light leaked away slowly, and Sam spent some time cleaning the hut. He cleared the cobwebs and spider husks from the corners. He wiped out the copper washbasin. He felt like an archaeologist. Restoring the hut’s interior made it easier to see the climbers who’d been there. Maybe the walls would tell him about Zapelli. The night before, had the man been calm, jittery, wild? What had he done to push himself over the Styx and off the map? With his pocketknife, Sam pried candle wax off the walls and beams, uncovering the nail-less joinery and the glow of the wood. Beautiful craftwork, clean, solid.

  “It’s not too late,” Tyson said. “You could warden the hut. Hang out your shingle, have hot dinner going, collect dimes or francs or whatever. Become the old man of the mountain. Who’d bother chasing you away?”

  “My cooking’s lousy. I’d eat bark if it had calories.”

  “Good point. Nickels then.”

  Darkness settled, and the temperature dropped. Tyson brought out his pack to find some warm clothes. He also produced a plastic bag of reefer and rolling papers. He shrugged at Sam. “It’s not wine, but I bet the Brits will appreciate a little sm
oke. One way or the other.”

  “If they make it back tonight.” Sam felt antsy when he thought about the Brits facing the oncoming night. It was one thing to watch darkness spread from behind wood and glass and another to be up there, enveloped by the black cold, preparing for a night standing in nylon slings, hoping the relentless drip-drip-drip of heat lost to the void won’t bleed your body dry.

  “It’s just enough to go around,” Tyson said. “I’ll save it.”

  With full dark in the hut, there wasn’t much to do besides eat and go to sleep, but Sam delayed both. The wind gusted past outside. Twice Sam went out to check that the rope hadn’t blown out of reach.

  “This is a side of you I’ve never seen,” Tyson said. “You’re like a mother hen.”

  Sam dropped back into a chair. “I feel lazy sitting here. Those two are sticking out their necks, and I’m eating dinner off a table.” He snapped his fingers in the air. “Garçon! Where’s my baguette and claret?”

  “Hey, man, I was stoked about today. Don’t ruin it with your big ideas.”

  Toward midnight, the door banged open, and two men entered the hut, strangers at first, then barely recognizable. Both of them looked bewildered by the candlelight. They seemed to sag, all the elastic given out between muscle and skin. They dropped their packs and headlamps by the door without a downward glance. Nigel collapsed into the chair on Sam’s left, and James took the one to his right.

  “So?” Sam said, after a moment. He’d thought the answer would be obvious, but instead they just looked evacuated.

  “So what?” Nigel snarled.

  “Did you make it or not?” Tyson said.

  “Of course not,” Nigel said. “It’s impossible.”

  “Impossible?” Sam asked, with visions of a shrunken little Italian man grinning and pounding on the bar for another round.