Snowblind (24 page)

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?

“You know where Leo is?” Dane asked.

“Sure.”

“You'd take me to him?” It was a nightmare: Leo's death, the mountain. Actually seeing Leo and tending his body seemed like the one thing Dane could do. Dane turned back around, taking a half-conscious step to the left so that his back was to the wall, not the window.

“I'll take you to the body if you'll climb the mountain with me,” Asa said. He grinned, all teeth and jutting bones. “Partners out this way are kind of scarce.”

“I'm not in the mood,” Dane said.

“Do you need to consult your chi? Do a little yoga?” Asa took his hood back off its peg. “Go drink some tea or whatever. Then we'll talk.”

“You're heartless, you know that? My buddy's dead up there.”

“Yeah? Mine too. And I'm pissed about it. Been pissed off for two weeks. The mountain's been laughing in my head.”

Is that what that sound is?

“You've been looking at it,” Asa said. “I saw you. If you think Leo wants us to hug and light candles, you can run on back to your lower-forty-eight commune. Or we can do something great for him. Strip our souls. Have our own little exorcism. Just don't waste my time because I fucking hate indecision.”

Could Dane come right out and admit he was already hooked, that he'd been wanting to climb the mountain since the pilot first invoked it? No. “Fine,” he said. The roaring in his ears cranked up a notch.

Asa opened a cabinet in the corner of the shop. Dane looked over Asa's shoulder at a compact arsenal of alpine gear: ice tools, crampons, ropes. The picks of Asa's tools were beautifully resharpened—Dane suddenly saw Asa, the craftsman, hunched over his axes, grinding life back into his steel. Asa had sewn hard plastic scales to the outsides of the gloves hanging in the cabinet. Dane took one off its hook, put it on his hand, watched how the scales flexed and overlapped like a medieval gauntlet.

Asa grinned again, just teeth and no humor. “The inside armor's what matters,” he said. “Put on what you've got.”

“When do we go?” Dane asked.

“Sun's out,” Asa said. He clapped Dane on the shoulder. “No time like now.”

Dane wanted to say he hadn't slept, that he was a dead man walking, but he didn't care to weather more of Asa's scorn, and he couldn't see the point. He
was
dead on his feet, but he felt as remote from sleep as he did from reality. That bright sun! And the mountain was right
there
, even when he shut his eyes. And Leo was up there, somewhere, and Dane needed to find him, to ask Leo what the hell he was doing here.

Dane unpacked his gear from his duffle, and then they were out on the tundra with the brilliant midnight air running past them like a river and the mountain tearing into the sky. In his pack, Dane carried ice tools and crampons, one twin rope and half the rack, sleeping bag and pad, food for three hungry days. The closeness of the mountain was partly an illusion of its size. By the time the two men covered the miles from Fort Clyde, Ozdon had spread its wings, a black vulture nine thousand feet high.

On the tundra, Dane seemed to be following a wraith. Asa glided over the man-trapped ground, while Dane grunted and snorted twenty feet behind with the needle in the red. When he had enough breath, Dane caught hold of the questions swooping through his head.

“How did Leo find this place?”

“I found it,” Asa said. “And then I found Leo. I read a book of his and thought, there's a rose-tinted douche bag who talks like an angel but thinks mountains are art or sun-children or some such
bullshit. I sent him a picture of Ozdon and told him to come climb it with me and then call it beautiful. Called him out. He was a name on a book. I never thought he'd read what I wrote. I was pissed off, firing shots in the dark one night. Tired of people going out like they're collecting flowers and calling it climbing.”

“But he came,” Dane said. He could imagine the photograph worming into Leo's brain. Leo would have to see it himself, make it fit into his world. A mountain that shouldn't exist, but there it was.

“He came,” Asa said. “Three years ago. Tall brown stick of a dude, up north to convert the infidel. Insufferable bastard. I wanted to strangle him.”

The idea that Leo had traveled to Fort Clyde because of a photograph and some barbed words didn't surprise Dane. Leo had followed leads more slender into the mountains. Dane didn't understand why Leo had returned. Everything about the place—the concrete pillboxes, the mines, the fat pink hermit crab in the bar—ran foul of Leo's carefully tended Zen-garden inner world. And above all, the mountain, snarling and foaming at the mouth—Dane watched as an avalanche galloped off the mountain's shoulder, just to mark his thought. Who'd want to get bit by the same rabid dog twice?

“And he came back,” Dane said.

“Half a dozen times since then. I told you he was here. It got to be I could sense him coming before I even heard the plane.”

Dane didn't say it, but that was more times than he had seen Leo over the same period.

The land scarred up where the mountain burst out of the tundra, and Dane quit talking to save breath. He followed Asa through
snowfields and over steep, broken ground. Above them, the mountain revealed new faces, an ugly, death-row lineup. Fresh snow bearded the rock. Icicles—they must have been big as trees—fell through space and shattered against buttresses, popping distant explosions on impact. Snaggle-toothed towers rooted in gums of dark old ice broke through the faces and ridgelines. Despite the sun, the cold licked at Dane like it was tasting to see if he was good to eat.