Snowblind Page 17

  Dane didn’t see as much of Leo anymore. Their orbits had veered apart. Maybe Leo’s had just expanded. Leo spent the year jetting between the Andes or Himalaya or Romsdalen—the old spiritual ranges—gathering material for his next project. Meanwhile, Dane had an Airstream trailer with a view of the Flat Irons on the ragged edge of Boulder, Colorado, where he worked as a contract welder for the physics and bio buildings at the university. Dane ministered to the usual gates and fences, but he also had a touch, and his number was posted on the corkboards of a dozen different labs as a last resort for when bad things happened to fussy, expensive equipment. So Dane wasn’t exactly poor. As far as he knew, banks would happily have hitched him to a mortgage. But he liked knowing he could pull out of town on any given night, even though the light tipping down off the Rockies onto the plains each morning hit him like coffee and champagne, and he wasn’t likely going anywhere.

  The years of accumulated weathering were beginning to groove Dane’s cheeks and arms. He looked like an animated bundle of rope, skin stretched a turn too tight over his inner cords. Most nights, he would drink a little Jimmy Beam and read a few pages from one of Leo’s books, follow along with his old friend through mountains that bloomed at dawn and died at dusk. It wasn’t just college kids who swooned for Leo. Dane had talked to young and old, greybeards and ropeguns, even a Kansan farmer who sold Dane an occasional beef quarter and had never seen the mountains. They’d all read Leo and turned all deep-eyed talking about beauty and elevation. It was impossible not to. When Dane read Pine Mountain with the moon and the mountains outside the portals of his trailer, he felt like Leo was sitting right there, taking the husk off the world and showing him the jewels. Which was what Dane needed, because lately, his own climbs had all been turning into knife fights. Thuggish rock, hairy ice, storms like Jack the Ripper in the sky. Pine Mountain took the edge off, made Dane feel less brutal.

  Dane figured this was the other reason he and Leo saw less of each other. Their tastes had diverged, too. The last time they’d climbed together had been the previous winter, a wet winter turned hard and cold. Waterfall ice touched down in places it hadn’t for years. Locals, Dane chief among them, climbed every day, freely letting small sectors of the Denver-Boulder metroplex grind to a halt, knowing that such an overflow of frozen wax slopped down their mountains would be gone in a month and might not return until the next ice age. But Dane saved something special for Leo, a hidden curtain named Kinky Undies that had been climbed just once fifteen years before and never seen again.

  They might as well have tried climbing free-hanging window glass. The ice shivered and creaked, shorting-out Dane’s nerves. Terrified of taking full swings with their tools, they hooked half-exploded air pockets, feeling tiny pops and fragmentations while searching out new placements that wouldn’t unzip the whole curtain and fly them down onto the rocks below. Their screws gripped lenses of ice between empty gaps, and Dane was afraid to even hang on them. At one belay—a stubby screw that wiggled like a loose tooth and a hammered ice hook that looked about as useful as a lucky rabbit foot—Dane said: “Authors who die young always end up immortal, right?” He hadn’t meant anything by it. They’d said that kind of thing to each other as teenagers. But Leo didn’t reply, and Dane couldn’t read him.

  Afterward, flying high, Dane had suggested they go pick apples in celebration, which was the code they’d developed in high school for getting blind drunk on a warm summer night in the Wasatch foothills. Leo had answered that he needed to get a few pages down before he caught his flight to Chile. Dane wasn’t offended. If his friend had acquired responsibilities to higher purposes of the brain, there was nothing wrong with that. In retrospect, if Dane had thought it through, he might have chosen a different route. Leo Salazaar, mountaintop prophet, wilderness poet for a whole new generation, might not have been psyched to risk dying on an obscure ice curtain named for see-through panties. And maybe Dane shouldn’t have been either. But even though he read Leo and aspired to the places his friend described, he also liked piping red horror movies into his trailer: slasher flicks that spiked his adrenaline and popped his eyes, then made him bust up inappropriately when things got too gory.

  Dane thought he’d learned from Kinky Undies. Leo planned to drop by Boulder again that summer, and Dane had a different stripe of climb picked out for them: a long ridge traverse into the high blue, on white, Coliseum granite with lakes on all sides. He showed up at the airport to meet Leo, feeling overeager. He’d come bearing gifts and wondered if Leo would notice his thoughtfulness.

  Dane watched troops of passengers emerge from security and scatter. An hour after the flight from Yellowknife had arrived, it occurred to him that Leo was not in the building. Air Canada had a reservation but no record of Leo boarding their plane. Dane drove home, unconcerned. Sometimes a mountain took a liking to Leo and wouldn’t let him go. It wouldn’t be the first time a storm had held the man back a few days.

  Five days passed with no word. Dane ran through a list of friends who either hadn’t spoken to Leo or were away in the mountains themselves. He tried Leo’s publisher in New York but got nowhere. Leo’s publicist thought he was in Montana, but Dane realized that to the voice on the line, the distinctions between Montana, Canada, even Colorado, were local semantics mattering little. No one he talked to had actually spoken to Leo in months. What was Leo doing in the Northwest Territories? Dane didn’t even know.

  Eight days after Leo’s missed flight, Dane bought himself a ticket to Yellowknife, one of the two names Leo had dropped in conversation, the other being Fort Clyde. A voice in Dane’s head told him not to be an idiot. Did he think he could find Leo in the Canadian north? Canada wasn’t small. Probably Leo was just off in the woods, communing with the wind. But Dane was the only one who seemed to know or care that Leo had gone missing, so Dane shoveled some gear in a duffel and flew over the border.

  In an outbuilding at the Yellowknife airport, Dane found a silver-bearded pilot who agreed to fly him to Fort Clyde in his Twin Otter floatplane. Dane liked the man immediately because he looked like a real Santa Claus—hard around the face and in his consonants, able to fly out of the north in dead winter if he wanted. Dane imagined him airdropping shotgun shells and whisky to hard-bitten tundra homesteaders, yelling “Ho-Ho-Ho” out his cockpit window. They flung Dane’s bag into the body of the plane, and Dane climbed into the copilot’s seat. The pilot put them in the air and pointed to a switch on the headset hanging from a hook by Dane’s knee.

  “Never been out here before, heh?” the pilot said once Dane had the headset working.

  “No.”

  “Hoping for gold? You don’t look like a miner.”

  “No. Friend of mine, a mountain climber, was due out of Fort Clyde a week ago, and I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Yeh? Brown man? Lanky? Know the fellow who took him in. Bout a month back.”

  “Leo Salazaar,” Dane said. “That’s his name.” He felt better for getting his first sniff of Leo. He should have asked earlier. The pilots must know everything about who was moving around the north. Dane had studied the map. The other ways to Fort Clyde were a month-long overland expedition or a canoe ride down six hundred miles of the Mackenzie River. There weren’t any roads. “Did he come back out?”

  “Not so I’ve heard. Plenty pilots, though. Plenty planes.”

  The Twin Otter bumped and dropped. Black clouds metastasized across the sky. The pilot changed elevations. “Air out this way is always nasty,” he said. “Even on clear days, it feels like hands on the bird.”

  “Do you know anything about the mountains?” Dane asked.

  “Mountains?” The pilot looked over at Dane, then back out at the weather. “Around Fort Clyde, there’s only one to speak of. Ugliest thing you’ll ever see. I’ve heard miners from up that way say the sight of it makes it hard to believe in God. Burly men, you understand, with moose jackets they’ve made themselves and beards like mine.”

  “Must be so
mething to see,” Dane said. People overreacted to mountains. They pulled strange ideas out of thin air.

  “Nasty sucker,” the pilot continued. “Gives me the willies. You think your friend flew in to climb it?”

  “I don’t know,” Dane said.

  “Must be some kind of desperado. Man like that is tough on the friends. If he’s gone missing in that country, you won’t find him.” The pilot spoke matter-of-factly, as if offering directions to the corner store. “Don’t he have mountains closer by?”

  “Leo’s always climbing new mountains,” Dane said. “He writes books about them.”

  “Oh, ho!” the pilot said. “You want to watch out for people who write things in books. They’re a pack of liars. I don’t care for mountains myself. Too much turbulence. Like old men farting. You can count on a steady stream of bad air. I like lakes. A place to land, and dinner under the skids. You ever eat arctic char fresh?”

  Dane laughed. “No. I should probably ask you to take me to the best fishing lake around and then back to Yellowknife in a few days.”

  “You should,” the pilot agreed. “We’d fry a couple for your friend, for sentiment and all. He’ll get more out a that than a one-man ground search around Fort Clyde.”

  “You’re a cynic,” Dane said.

  “Just practical.”

  Dane could laugh because he didn’t know what he expected to find of Leo. The possibilities all seemed equally unlikely. He’s got an idea he can’t let go of, Dane thought. He’s in a tundra shack writing it out till his fingers bleed. That was the image he returned to, the one he liked best. It fit Leo right, better than death or absentmindedness. Dane would knock on the door, settle in, and they’d swap stories until Leo was done. Dane guessed his own flight north was a self-serving exercise. If something had happened to Leo, Dane didn’t want to spend his life thinking that he’d twiddled his dick in Boulder, waiting. It didn’t matter if he’d do as much good for Leo eating char with the pilot—the point was to do and have done, leaving no questions.

  The clouds hardened into dark anvils, and the pilot began telling stories of friends who’d been lightning-struck in their planes. A ground layer of grey turned solid, and Dane could no longer see land, nothing but cloud below and piled black masses above. “We’re close, now,” the pilot said, and Dane wondered which seat sat the fool, but the pilot’s grey seemed at least to signal a lucky fool. The plane fell out of the cloud layer, and Dane had only a few seconds to see an enormous elbow bend of river with tundra stretching away on both sides before the pilot splashed them down on the inside crook of the bend where the water was calm. A wooden dock stretched out from the land, and the plane pulled up alongside it.

  “Better get out quick,” the pilot said. “Things are worse’n I thought.”

  Dane jumped out on the dock and barely had his duffle by the handle when the plane pulled away. The water was grey-blue, the tundra grey-green, the sky grey-black. Dane felt grey himself, as if the clouds had gotten into his skin. He walked the dock to the land and a collection of cabins and shacks. The clouds were low overhead—dark, fast-moving shapes that dove down and expanded as he watched. There were no people in sight. Where am I? he thought. Goddamn Arctic ghost town. But it couldn’t be a ghost town. He saw well-fed engines and machines parked under porches. The buildings were warped and faded, but none were collapsing. Dane walked north up what he took to be the main path through town.

  The clouds on the near horizon parted, a two-second gap in the black swarm. The mountain leapt up over Dane and the shacks. Dane stopped and stared, paralyzed by its sudden nearness. The clouds closed again, and the world shrank. A hard burst of rain swept over him. What had he just seen? Something terrible. A claw ripping through the ground. He wanted to see it again and he didn’t. It was obscene. A corpse on a stick. Stop it, he told himself. It’s nothing new. Rock. Snow. But he felt dirty just for staring at the image in his mind. He waited for the clouds to open again. Now that he’d caught the mountain once, he’d have preferred it in plain sight, not lurking behind the storm.

  The clouds thickened, and more rain hammered down. Dane realized it was cold, barely above freezing, and he was soaked. One shack had a light on in a window and a faded Budweiser poster on the door. Dane pushed the door, and it opened. Inside there were three tables with fold-out legs and a few chairs and a plywood sheet nailed between one wall and a counter. A flesh giant wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt was hunched over the plywood, watching television. The television was small, and the man looked ready to put his face through the screen. Dane could hear a generator humming somewhere in back. He dropped his duffle by the door.

  “What’s that mountain called?” Dane asked.

  The giant swiveled his head without moving his shoulders. “Mount Ozdon,” he said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. I go days now without seeing it. Just keep my eyes on other things.” He heaved himself upright, his flesh lagging behind his bones. “What’ll you have? I carry cheap whisky, fancy whisky, and beer. The cheap whisky’s cheapest on account of transport costs. But it’s all money, so don’t be surprised.”

  Dane looked out the window. It was unmistakably day, despite the storm. The hands on the clock on the bar’s back wall were reaching for eleven. “Is that clock slow?” Dane asked.

  “Nope, it’s right.”

  “I’ve been traveling all day,” Dane said. “It can’t be morning.”

  The giant slapped his plywood bar and laughed. “Fellow, you’re north. It’s summer. Won’t be night again till August.” He hunched himself back over the plank, propped on forearms like pink balloons. “Hope you can sleep. I’ve seen ’em come up here and go crazy with the light. No sleep for days, you understand? Drifting around, awake and dreaming. It don’t pay to be awake that long.”

  Dane lowered himself into a chair, cursing his wet clothes. He studied the barman. Twenty-four-hour light, high UV, and the man was pink and pale. He must never go outside. Another flight of rain hammered down. Like a hermit crab in his shell, only his shell was anchored to the tundra. Dane wondered if the man could leave. He might be too much for a Twin Otter to handle.

  Dane asked, “Do you know of a guy, a climber, came through here about a month ago? Name was Leo Salazaar?”

  “Ha! Now I know you,” the man said. He opened two rows of sharp grey teeth. “Wondered what you were doing up here. You need to go talk to Asa about that business. You’ll find him in the machine shop up the way. I’m closing now. The outside door doesn’t lock. Leave whenever you want. Asa’s usually up all hours.” The man jacked himself up off his arms until he was upright, then lumbered out through a door behind the bar. It took Dane a moment to realize he wasn’t coming back.

  Dane staggered back out into the daylight and storm. The mountain did not reappear. On the line between tundra and cloud, the land seemed unfinished, still precipitating out of the primordial dawn. Dane suddenly missed Leo fiercely. A few words would do. He’d like to hear what his friend had to say about this place. He imagined clear days when the mountain would be squatted practically on top of Fort Clyde, requiring constant, eyes-averted penitence. How could a person live like that? Dane followed the mud track between pillboxes of plywood and sheet metal. None were marked, but the glow of a stick welder leaked from around the edges of a roll-down door set in the face of one of the last structures. Dane pounded on a side door until the light dimmed and he heard movement inside. A man—Asa, Dane told himself—wearing a leather apron and a flipped-up welder’s hood, threw open the door.

  “Fuck do you want?”

  “Honestly?” Dane returned. “A bed and a bottle. Know anything about Leo Salazaar?”

  Asa had a fleshless face, just skin and skull and a pair of blue-yellow eyes that seemed to want to incinerate Dane. Asa stood in the doorway a long moment, then disappeared back inside, leaving the door open. Dane followed into a crowded, meticulously ordered metalworking shop. Chains hung from the ceiling, tools covered the walls,
lathes and drills stood idle on the concrete floor. Dark fog ran past the one window, and rain rattled down on the roof. Asa hung his hood on a peg.

  “He’s dead,” Asa said. “Up there.” He shrugged north, toward the mountain.

  The moment the words were out, Dane felt the hole in his soul, right where he’d been covering it up. The image of Leo at work on some last great thought, or flying to the Andes, too rushed to make contact, shriveled back, obvious wishful thinking. Still, Dane couldn’t make the reality true in his head either. Leo could die on a Himalayan icon, some monument to mountains and mountaineers. But not in a Canadian backwater on a mountain no one had ever heard of. It’s not the place, Dane thought. It’s the mountain. Leo couldn’t die on something that ugly. Dane’s glimpse of Ozdon was fading, but not the sick feeling it had left with him.

  “How?” Dane asked.

  “Badly,” Asa said. “He was a fool. I told him so. Rainbow chaser to the very end.”

  “You poor fuck,” Dane said. Grief flashed to anger. It was bad enough without some Podunk ragging on the dead. “Leo was no fool. You don’t know who he was.”

  Asa blew air out his nose and gestured at one wall. Dane turned and saw a shelf of books. Leo’s books.

  “While y’all were kissing his ass,” Asa said, “Leo was up here, with me. I know all about the Great Author.”

  Bright sunlight flashed outside the window. The back of the storm disappeared to the east. Dane fought the presumption of sunrise. It must have been near midnight. His brain felt snowed under. A thick separation distorted the outer world. Dane looked through the window and flinched back to find the mountain staring down at him. He looked again, trying to hold steady. Ozdon was huge, sheer. It seemed torn from the earth, a bone from below dripping with ice and crusted with jags of black rock. Dane heard or felt distant rumbling. Thunder? No. Rockfall? Earthquake?