Snowblind

SNOWBLIND

Copyright © 2015 Daniel Arnold

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The Story
The Cleaning Crew
, first appeared in Issue 74 of
ZYZZYVA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

Cover design by Jason Snyder

Interior Design by Megan Jones Design

COUNTERPOINT

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Distributed by Publishers Group West

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e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-499-1

To Ashley and Sage

CONTENTS

THE CLEANING CREW

DEAD TILL PROVEN OTHERWISE

NO PLACE FOR VAGABONDS

THE SKIN OF THE WORLD

PROUD LINE

DOWN FROM THE COLD

OZDON

COWARDS RUN

THE CLEANING CREW

M
ENDOZA, THE AUSTRAL summer of 2005. Dry, hot December dust and soot from old cars hacking through the streets stuck to the flat-faced buildings, the trees, and the people strolling down the broad sidewalks. But not to the doors, which were polished and brightly colored and swung open on oiled hinges, looking both newer and older than the faded concrete of the street front. Paco's was no exception, and I raised my fist to knock wondering how he managed to keep his door immaculate with so many people like me coming to pound on it.

After a moment, Paco appeared and told me all his rooms were full. He looked the same, filling the vertical reach of his doorway, but not the horizontal. He and his brother could have stood there comfortably side-by-side.

“What about the roof?” I said. “I'd put my tent up on the roof.”

Paco raised a shaggy eyebrow and held it there a moment. The matter needed careful thought. “Why not?” he said. “It's summertime.
Anything goes. You know? Five dollars a night. Don't use too much water. There's a queue for the
baño
every damn morning.”

I piloted the seventy pounds on my back through Paco's narrow hallways, trying not to scrape the walls with the sharp edges of my load. I heard English falling down through the plaster above my head. One voice only, an avalanche of words, words, words. I passed rooms filled with things and no people, rucksacks open, jackets, sleeping bags, crampons, ice screws scattered over the beds and floor.

Everyone in the house was up on the second level, in the room stocked with third-hand couches and chairs that merged into the public kitchen and overlooked
Calle 25 de Mayo
through two large windows. Except for Paco, who was tinkering with the stove burners and could claim to be there for his own purposes, they all listened to the kid behind the voice. Paco's brother sat in a metal folding chair, and the kid—I found out later he answered to JD—sat across from him with a wobbly card table between them, though it could have been the pearly gates and an audition with Saint Peter from the way the kid talked. He wanted, what, applause? Absolution? He was trying hard, that was damn sure. A fine kid, someone's son, one presumes. Born into a generation that never shook off its bewilderment, its disbelief in the actual workings of the universe. He watched his hands, which crawled all across the tabletop, and Paco's brother stayed quiet behind the wrinkled old leather of his face. JD never swapped eyes with the rest of us, but he didn't lower his voice either, and we circled around him.

I was relieved to take the pack off my back, to be in Paco's dark, cool house, out of the city heat, to have the mountain far
away and flattening to snapshots. I sat myself on the floor next to a couch occupied by an American husband-and-wife team I'd met once in Peru. He drank maté out of a gourd through a wooden straw, which disappeared into the heavy curls of his beard. She kept her hands busy sharpening the business end of an ice tool with a bastard file.

All this time, JD was sawing away, face pinched, voice stretched tight.

“It's heaven till it's hell, right? It's all make-believe until it turns to shit and you think you're going to die. You're up there with the white angels watching movie magic—like you're in a place the movies can't touch. Then the sky goes black and drops on your head. I was little-kid scared. It was that big. In real life—or flatland life, whatever—Rex was a Unitarian minister. Maybe it was a part-time gig—I fucking can't believe it myself. I didn't know him. He'd lead AA groups in the church basement, the whole ball of wax. But he was full of shit, because midweek he was pressing flesh on the rock. He should have founded Climbers Anonymous. Up there it was like he was drunk, like he was mainlining the storm.

“Rex, he had wild eyes,” JD said. “He didn't look human. More like a wounded animal. The wind was in our heads. My lungs got no grip on the air. It played with us. Let us up, knocked us down. There were gaps when it went still and my brain started to clear, but then it swung back at us and you'd feel it coming. Ten seconds, five seconds—then out with the
claws
, man, and we'd be down and pinned again. I got killer-mad, was screaming at the lulls. For giving us space just enough to know how bad it was going to be.

“Rex led through the cliff band. The rocks stuck out like rotten teeth—all sharp and black. They freaked me out. I pulled on them, and they moved and spat gravel in my face. Ice covered everything, but not enough for my tools to stick. Every time I swung an axe, I got sparks jumping back, and rock splinters flying around.

“We were managing, though. That was the thing. Rex finished his lead and got enough of a break to yell, ‘Come on up, girly-boy.' Something like that. ‘Don't be afraid, Daddy don't spank that hard.' Stupid stuff, saying it now. The kind of thing the dickheads say at the crag. But it got me laughing, and the climbing through the teeth didn't seem as scary as it should have. The mountain was big and bad, more than we'd seen. But we weren't fools. It wasn't like that.”

I thought:
Keep saying it. Maybe it'll come true
. JD was filthy. I was too. His hair hung down to his shoulders in thick, shiny mats. He had an inch of oily blond beard. His lips were split and puffy. White craters dimpled the skin around his cheekbones where the cold had done its damage, and the tip of his nose was black, though it didn't look too bad. He would probably get to keep it. But he couldn't have been twenty-three, so he still looked healthy under all that dirt and hair and frostbite. You see a forty-year-old man walk out of an extended epic, and he looks like a bus-stop bum, but JD still had a kid's flush under the wreckage of his face. Scrub him up, and he'd be a college boy. He was still wet clay.

“The snow started dumping. Spindrift came down all over us off the cliffs.
Whoosh
. At first we'd see a slide coming and hunker down. But they were nothing, like being hit with a pillow, only no pillow, just the feathers flying past.

“We tried to climb fast. Up above us, it was all grey and snow, and then black clouds came out of nowhere, just dropped right out of the grey, right on top of us. But going fast up there doesn't mean much, you know? We crawled along, too slow. I was panicking. I wanted to puke. Rex screamed at me and screamed at the weather and cursed at his feet for going so slow when we were so close. The snow was building above us—we could feel it. We could see where we needed to get to, this cluster of rocks up on a shoulder. But we couldn't move any faster. The real avalanche was coming. We knew it. The spindrift came down all the time. Both of us were covered. It found all the gaps in my clothes. I had a whole inside jacket made of snow.

“I don't know how long it took to reach the rocks. Hours is what it felt like. But maybe only twenty minutes. There wasn't a single thing up there I could trust. My mind kept running ahead of me. It would make it to the rocks, but I was stuck in the snow waiting for the avalanche. So my mind got yanked back down. Like a dog on a leash. Run, run, run, run—
pow
—yanked back to the body.

“We made it to the rocks, and the storm blew up in our face. The wind was a jet engine. It picked up chunks of ice and threw them at me hard enough to feel through all my clothes. Rocks, too. The snow came at us in curtains. I was so cold. It was in my
bones
, man. You don't understand how deep it went. I never knew which direction I'd be able to see. Sometimes in my eyes there was nothing but static. Rex would disappear even though I could reach over and poke him with my axe. Then the wind would hit again, and the snow tilted horizontal, like we were going into hyperspace, only we were lying on the ground curled up in balls waiting for space to breathe.”

Who else was there? Three Eastern Europeans—probably Czechs or Slovenians from the bygone olive and brown they wore. Their faces looked carved by some sculptor with eighteen-inch biceps, one who used only long, straight chisel cuts. Formidable men, no doubt. There were four Germans who wore matching black pants and kept their glacier glasses hung round their necks, even indoors. They looked to be sucking on rocks, cultivating the scowls they'd wear to the summit or the sixth beer.

There were others there too, less recognizable to me beyond the general category: human flotsam, drawn by the mountain. The room stayed quiet except for JD's voice and the hiss and rasp of Angela's file. Maybe earlier people had made an effort to look occupied. Not now. JD never once looked around, but all eyes pointed in. He kept talking, and I sat there. Sat on my hands, so to speak, while the future loomed. I was under pressure, the lowland air frothing up inside me. I wanted to shake the kid, get him out of his shell. He had his chance. If he was going to tell his story, he'd damn well better get it right.

“We tunneled in. There was old snow under the powder, and we dug a cave. Our brains were gone. Mine anyway. The thinking parts. I guess I shouldn't talk for Rex. I've never felt more like an animal, digging into the ground on instinct. When we were done, I couldn't feel my hands or feet. It took me fifteen minutes to zip my sleeping bag. I couldn't hold the zipper in my fingers—I had to squeeze it between my hands.