Snowblind (23 page)

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.

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

L
EO 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.

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 something 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.