Snowblind Read online

  So Lisa kept her clients on a short leash, treated them like a matador with a bull. Kept them close, but not too close. But really she felt like a midwife. Sometimes the labor was short, sometimes long and hard, but if all went well and they got through the heavy-breathing terror, then up on the summit out popped a little child, eyes freshly open to the world, hands clapping with delight. That was something to see.

  The man this morning had had the shoulders of a cast iron stove and the potbelly to match. What did he say he did? Busy-ness of some kind, money farming for some corp. Red-raw cheeks that all but glowed. Lisa took right to him because he had a sense of humor about his fear. When he got scared, he laughed. Called himself a chickenshit. Seemed to think his own panicky cardio was the damnedest thing, like it was happening to someone else. Lisa could work with that. She kept him laughing, kept his feet moving, kept him upright until he was past the Gates, where the mountain eased climbers up to its summit ridge. On top, on trembling legs, he smiled like the sun and lurched around like a foal. Whoa there, big fella, I got you.

  On the descent, with the upper mountain behind them, he did most of the talking, which suited Lisa fine because it was his afterglow and his day. She could happily stare south, across the thick green ocean of trees, to the next fire mountain, Jefferson, with its shapely sides, its glaciers knocking sunbeams around.

  She left him at the lodge. He would go to the lunch bar, then his car, then the city. And she’d be here. In a day or two, his replacement would come to her, come up for air, and say, Goddamn, that’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw, and she would say, Yup. As if it were some big surprise.

  Lisa showered in the lodge’s locker room, then put on flannel bottoms, a secondhand T, a baggy fleece, her regular after-work uniform. Outside, the parking lot was a quarter full, the weekend summer crowd of diehards skiing on slush and salt. There was heat in the sun and the radiating asphalt, but the air was too thin to hold it and too easily pushed around by the wind, so the warmth was mostly lost. Lisa slapped her way across the lot in flip-flops anyway, because her feet hated reentry into shoes after the hours spent in her plastic doubles.

  Rust frosted the boxy corners of her van where the dark green paint had given up. The machine was seven years her junior, and she thought of it as something like a half-retarded brother with whom she cohabitated. In van-years it might be more like her grandfather, but that notion led to forebodings of senility, end-times, junkyards—and those were ideas she preferred not to entertain, as if her sisterly faith were all that kept the engine running. Her key no longer turned the door locks, so she carried a wire coat hanger for entry and left the ignition key under her seat.

  A scrap of yellow paper fluttered under one windshield wiper. She pulled it loose and turned it over and found a familiar, neat hand.

  Lisa! Recognized your van (of course). We’ve got a place down in town now. Come on by—you can meet my wife. We’ll be there tonight. It’s right where the pavement ends on Montgomery St. Love to see you.

  —Greg

  Inside she had hung wool curtains against the night, but she left one window uncovered so that the mountain would always be visible. That way she could talk to it, ask it questions when she had need. She draped her towel over the passenger seat and stretched out on her plywood bed in the back, propping her head so that she could stare at the view. Lanes of groomed snow snaked down toward the cars bunched together at the far end of the lot. Above, the solid sheets of glacier capped by cliffs and sulfurous vents and the summit etched against the sky. Her favorite time was cloudless early morning long before the sun, with so many stars the night seemed to be leaking away through a sieve and the mountain a pure outline. She felt fatigue tugging at the corners of her eyes. She elbowed herself upright before she drifted any further from the present.

  Greg, goddamnit. Married. Ha! Settled down. Wonder if she knows what she’s signed up for. Wonder if he knows. Nuts, the whole world.

  She pulled a pair of jeans and a white shirt with buttons out of a cardboard box under the bed frame. She pulled a brush through her hair and slapped at her cheeks in an effort to perk up. She totaled the gas and thought of the looming brake job and imagined the starter dying down in town and decided to walk. The road switchbacked down off the mountain for twelve miles, but the trail was straight and steep and only three. Into old running shoes with her feet and a coat tied around her waist, she grabbed a clean yogurt tub and pushed off into the thin afternoon.

  The trees were gaunt, straight, snow-shedding pines, green at the needle tips and grey in the woody center, packed thickly together but with room underfoot for the berry bushes. The purple dots shone dully under the leaves. Mountain huckleberries, these, small, tart, dispersed. An hour might yield up a quart. She pushed through the hip-high thickets, her hands disconnected from her forward progress, plucking carefully at the tiny circles.

  Mount Robson. Ice. Cold. Brittle, nasty stuff, chunks falling all the time. Bruised all over, mine purple, his brown. Never saw him so strong. He felt it, too. In his shoulders. We could have climbed out of hell that day. No celebrating on top. No war whoop. All unnecessary.

  A wife! Does she feel squishy under him? But maybe his bones are padded now, too. He has accumulated. Let the dragon get ahold of him, yup. House in the city, cabin on the mountain, cars for in-between. Art, cable, wine, teaspoons. Blankets in front of a fire and something hot and rain falling outside—nice, sure. Tags on little strings trailing off it all, printed with spinning numbers, interest compounding.

  The yogurt tub was nearly full, the berries fading into the shadows under the leaves. Lisa moved toward the lights of the cabins on the outskirts of town. On Montgomery Street, where the pavement ends and the dirt begins, he had said. A little place. Wood shake roof, cobbled chimney, a cord or so of wood under the eaves. She lifted her fist and knocked the door.

  The door swung forward, and Greg was there. “Lizzie,” he said, and he crushed her in his arms like an affable bear. He was smoother around the edges, the old angles absorbed by new tissue. His cheeks were thicker. There would be jowls there some day. But right now he looked healthy and strong, a little pink, even. He wore a loose Hawaiian shirt and faded canvas pants, the sour man-smell tamped down by soap. “I was hoping you’d come. Lizzie, this is Anne.”

  The clutter of inside sights struck the bottleneck in Lisa’s brain left by the fading stillness of the woods. Ceramic dishes and framed pictures and tasteful little dangly ornaments. An extended hand with deft fingers connected to a thin, silver-bangled wrist. Four ivory tapers in clear glass sticks lighting a table in the corner by the windows. A wide, white smile, filled with little teeth. Wet blue eyes. An enclosed fire, not yet hot, a wooden bowl of peaches. A carefully piled mass of shiny blond ringlets.

  “Greg says you’ll have been up since midnight. You must be exhausted.” Those light fingers on her shoulder, gentle pressure guiding her toward a stool by the woodstove, giving her the poker, telling her to do whatever she’d like with the fire.

  “It’s fine. I’m used to it, and I’m on my second wind. I brought some berries. They’re fresh.” The disconnected features merged and cohered. She was a cute, curvy woman wearing corduroys and a knit sweater. Lisa gripped the poker, something solid and metal to hang onto.

  “That’s kind. You’ve got so much more patience than me. I tried once, with the bushes around here, but I had to give it up because I got so frustrated and I didn’t even have the bottom of my bowl covered.”

  Kiss him? Nope, don’t feel it anymore. He used to look like hollowed-out death, and what does that say about me? “Your place is much smaller than I’d pictured. It’s good.” She’s staring.

  “It’s an original.” Greg’s voice, from around the chimney corner. “From the thirties, back when the whole town was a government project. Some of the wood was cut right here.”

  Anne’s eyes worked slowly down and then back up, taking their time, without concealment or any apparent sense
of impropriety. Lisa, feeling slow and tongue-tied, gave up her attempt at unembarrassed calm and turned away, toward the scree of an oven door opening. The scent of pie drifted past. She looked back, and the eyes were back, where she knew they would be.

  “Greg was there when it happened,” Lisa said. “It’s all right, I can hear fine.”

  “Can I touch it?”

  Lisa pulled back her hair.

  “It’s so smooth. Scars fascinate me. I know that’s weird.”

  Those soft fingers again! That light touch on the stub of her ear. They were like goddamn Vicodin. Did Greg’s body hurt so much he needed that kind of treatment?

  Greg returned from the kitchen, and the roasted fruit smell dissipated. “It was too warm on Tocllaraju,” he said. “Like the mountain was shitting on us—the rocks wouldn’t stay in place. Lizzie was leading, and she gave this little yelp, and I didn’t think much of it until I got up to the next belay and half her ear was gone.”

  You never said down. I was proud of that, us. But it made me wonder, what’s us—partners? lovers?—for the first time.

  “Five more minutes,” Greg said. He straightened the chairs by the table. “Peach and strawberry. How many times have you been up the mountain this season, Liz?”

  “I don’t know anymore. They’ve all blurred together. Twenty, anyway, so far.”

  “Any good ones?”

  “The usual, pretty much.” Times of fear and joy and revelation that fall apart when you bring them downhill, fragile as dreams. “Last week I had a triathlete. That was fun. He was set on seeing the sunrise, so we beat it up there pretty quick. Fairytale horizon out east, weird shadows and the sun making gold all over the desert. Nice day. Oh, in May I had a disaster. Wife promises to get in shape for her husband. Their anniversary and all. So awkward. The whole way up she kept talking, saying this meant no papers. Divorce papers, you know. Greg, last I heard of you was from Kit, and she said you were in Portland working tree removal. But that was—years now, I don’t know, three or four.”

  Greg beamed. “Kindergarten. I’m a teacher. Little chaps with big eyes and new clothes their mothers have just bought. We’ve still got the same house I was in then, but it’s better now, and we have a garden. Salad stuff now, blueberries ready in a week or so.”

  “Horseshit.” An act? “Come on partner, don’t snow me.” Tsk, no tact. Too tired. Please don’t screw with me.

  Anne laughed, a sound like a lively wood fire. Greg’s eyes shot up, and he rocked back in his chair, but then he bounced forward, guffawed, slapped at his knee. Lisa gave in and joined them, as if that had been her intention all along. How could she have known?

  The pie came out of the oven, and Greg cut three rough wedges that Anne piled up with ice cream and huckleberries. All the blood went to Lisa’s stomach. She could not remember when she’d eaten last. On the mountain? In the lodge? The heat turned the ice cream to slush that soaked through the dough. At the periphery, she registered Anne cutting little bites from the edges, Greg taking in big forkfuls between satisfied pauses, Anne watching Lisa’s own dwindling plate.

  “You’re starving,” Anne said.

  Lisa swallowed, laughed, made herself pause. “Not really. I forget about food sometimes. Work on the mountain turns my head around.”

  “Please, I like to watch you eat. I’ll get you another slice, don’t get up.”

  Anne stood and turned through a swing of hip and breast that Greg watched with a familiar hunger, though the expression was sleepier, now, around the folds of his eyelids than what Lisa remembered. Anne’s curls bobbed up and down with the cutting, a heap of taffy springs.

  “When were you married?” Lisa asked.

  “Two years ago,” Anne said. She lowered another two plates of pie to the table. “At the Rose Garden. The smell was heavenly. Greg’s poor father, though, sneezed through the whole afternoon. He was such a good sport.”

  “I never met your dad.”

  “We reconciled the year before. Now sometimes we go to a hockey match.”

  Lisa abandoned herself again to the sugar and cream, the acid in the huckleberries allowing for more of the rest to be eaten. The accumulation seemed to press her spine back into the corner of her chair, to tug her brain down against the bottom of her skull. She was hardly conscious of when the humming began or when it turned to music. It was sweet and low, a folk song, or a lullaby, about a boy and a river, though the words hardly mattered. Greg leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, eyes even with the last inches of the candles. Nothing, in fact, existed beyond the circle of the candlelight filled by the sound coming from between Anne’s lips.

  The song ended, and Anne stood and stacked the plates. “All right, out, both of you. I’ll do the dishes. You’ll have plenty to talk about, go take a walk now.” She snapped a dish towel at Greg and gave them both their jackets and pushed them toward the door.

  Lisa still felt swaddled at the table even as her feet carried her out into the night. Their first steps were silent. The air was cold and flavored with pitch from the bordering pines. Her pupils relaxed in the dark. The stars were bright glittery dots, not quite so dense as higher on the mountain, but sharp and clear. The mountain itself was hidden by the trees, but the land all swelled up in that direction. The prickling air tightened the skin around her face and hands. She felt like she was being resuscitated.

  “I had no idea this was what you wanted,” Lisa said.

  Greg arched his eyebrows, shook his head. “What? This isn’t so strange.”

  “It is from the man who wore Gore-Tex to his sister’s wedding because he didn’t have anything else.”

  “Eh—sweetheart,” he said, with nothing but affection, “you’ve lived too long in your van. The mountain’s not your friend. You can’t talk to it at night. That’s just you talking to yourself.”

  Fuck—how’d he know about that? “Yeah? How many times did you tell me a roof over your head was one step from a coffin lid?” No, she didn’t mean to needle him. She was supposed to be above that. “Greg, what you have, it seems really nice. You don’t get bored?”

  “No. Sometimes. I’m better now. You remember how relaxed I’d be after we did something really hard?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s how I feel all the time, now.”

  That’s it, then. Like the moment the classical station starts sounding good.

  “How long did it take?” Lisa’s night vision had begun to adjust. Ghostly shapes emerged in the woods on both sides. If only it were that easy with people.

  “For what?”

  “Skip it. I really don’t want to know. You get enough from the mountain, now, just seeing it?”

  “More, maybe. Could be it’s hard to really enjoy its company when you’re only ever thinking about climbing it.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “Now who’s talking to the mountain?”

  They ambled further up the old dirt track above town. The forest pressed in on them. For the first time all day, Lisa’s muscles protested. The cabin and the fire called her inside. Her feet felt slow and heavy. Stars glowed through the chinks between the arms of the pines.

  “I can’t go back in there,” she said, nodding back down the road.

  “Okay.” He grinned at her. “We’re not infectious, you know.”

  “Yeah, well. You really garden?”

  “It’s great. Hands in the dirt, fresh salad on the porch.”

  She shook her head and put her hands up around Greg’s neck and pulled down a little, to kiss his cheek. He kissed her back, behind her torn ear.

  And she was off, back up the mountain, lengthening out her stride to build up speed. Her muscles turned hungry again, from the pace and from the promise of a destination, and rest. Upward steps brought colder air, but she took off her jacket anyway, to vent, and because the raw air felt good against her skin and stomach.

  Eleven o’clock? Don’t know. Lap myself before I’m done tonight. Sleep in maybe.
r />   She topped a little rise where the forest thinned out, and there, cut into the sky, her mountain silhouette, as pure and cold as ever.

  Looks the same. Maybe it won’t ever change. Not yet, anyway.

  After the forest, the empty lot looked flat and alien, unwalkable without texture. She stumbled across it, her muscles giving in, at last. Inside her van was as cold as outside, her sleeping bag holding an icy chill in its filling. Jeans and shirt were traded for long underwear, the first wave of goose bumps crawling by during the exchange. She curled in a fetal ball at the center of the bag to wait for her leftover heat to drive the bite away from its corners and fell asleep before she had the chance to stretch out.

  OZDON

  LEO SALAZAAR UNDERSTOOD the mountains. You read a few phrases of his and thought, my god, rock became man and learned to talk and that’s what’s on the page. Graceful, weather-shaped words. Transcribed dreams of ice and stone.

  Dane had known Leo since they were high school kids growing up in Salt Lake. If someone had told him then that his friend would become a post-Kerouac Emerson with a following of dewy-eyed, hairy-legged, granola-eating lit majors, Dane would have shrugged. Why not? Leo was a natural-born visionary. He was always seeing things on mountaintops Dane hadn’t, or couldn’t. But when Dane thought of Leo, he still pictured the brown kid with long bones and long hair disappearing up ahead through the trail dust. They’d banded together at first because they were misfits outside the iron embrace of the LDS church, and then they discovered they could both run mountain paths like hungry jackals. Before long they were eyeing the territory above the end of the trails, then egging each other on up dinosaur-back ridges and long drools of ice in the Wasatch Mountains.