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Stories
Stories written by gv simoni.
INTERNMENT
The old motor home stood with hood propped open, rusted fender prominent, tires with but a vestige of tread, sidewalls cracked, appearing abandoned save for the two wooden stools, small table with tea service set upon its varnished surface. The woman, as slowly became apparent for, at first glance, he had mistaken her for a man, turned and rose in one graceful motion to face him.He bowed his head briefly in acknowledgement. The habit would not be broken; his grandparents, both born in Kyoto, had insisted.
The woman’s height and slender build, her short cropped greying hair, her dark eyes mirrored his own; but where his face was a flat plane with rounded cheek bones and jaw, hers was oval yet angular. His was bland and undistinguished; hers was predatory and insisting.
An alter ego, he thought, my doppelganger. My grandmother and her yokai. How odd.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello.” He took a step forward. “I heard a shot. Two shots.”
The trace of a smile.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes.” She turned her head slightly, opened a hand to the table. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”
Yuki hesitated. He had heard loud reports that seemed very like rifle shots. This woman … an awkward moment. She must have seen him come up from the cabin. And made tea?
She arched eyebrows, an inquiry.
He nodded.
They sat together quietly.
The cups, he noticed, were small well shaped inexpensive utensils that yet retained a charm, elegance even. He turned one in his hand.
“Suitable for … chanoya is the Japanese tea ceremony; integral,” he explained, “to our traditions.” He lowered his head, looked up, and said, “I have never been to Japan.”
“In Buenos Aires,” the woman replied, ” a small community of Japanese adds a good deal of aesthetic panache to the drab character of Argentinians. My father sponsored a family. 1959, that was.” Her smile, just a slight lifting of her cheeks, a widening of her dark eyes, accompanied a memory. “I was ten years old and enchanted by the grace of these people.”
The green tea brought the earthy reminiscence of his grandparents sitting on tatami, legs dangling in the recess beneath the horigotatsu, the low table on which they ate their meals, always rice and vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussel sprouts, and pickles, the large white pickled radish named takuan after the zen man who made them for his wanderings.
“They were contained by their rituals.” Absently said, looking away, a copse of juniper giving way to the pinyon pine, that imperiled tree, enclosing the dirt roadway, the shade inviting, and beyond he knew was the high pasture where the sheep grazed, and then the granite uplifts, and jutting peaks still snow patched.
His grandparents had emigrated to Canada in the 1920s, the sixth child, the fourth son, prospects dim. Farmers, they worked their way south from the Fraser valley to Bellingham. Not able to buy, they rented and saved; a produce stand became a store. His father and two aunts all worked and saved and educated themselves.
But 1941 changed all that.
Yuki sipped tea. Internment was not Auswitz. He had argued that point a score of times. Still …
She lifted the pot and poured. Swirls of steam rose from the half filled cup.
“I never left,” he said.
The candid admission surprised him. He exchanged looks with the woman. Lucia? Was her name Lucia? She had two sons: they farmed near Basin. His memories drawn out by an acceptance in her eyes.
At war’s end, his grandparents had moved to Ontario, just beyond the former exclusion zone. Raised there, Yukio had ventured as far as Corvallis, to Oregon State, for his education. Then returned to settle just east at desert’s edge, in Twin Falls. From there he had begun watering the seeming waste that had blossomed in green verdure.
“Those green crop circles, one after another seem aberrations,” she said, a slight, questioning tilt of head, ears without lobes, “caricatures, I think, artificial design.” A shrug. “Mal aconsejado, as we once so glibly labeled all false notions of our compatriots. Have you read Borges?” she asked.
He had not. He had not heard of the man.
She nodded slowly.
“But they feed millions,” he said, adamant. “Those ‘aberrations.’ They have transformed this entire crescent of desert.”
“Perhaps it were better off desert.” A slight lifting of her shoulders.
Uncommon, her way of speaking. Spanish her first language? But well educated.
“Our Pampas, now fenced and parceled. It, too, might have preferred to be left alone. Borges and his intellectual compatriots argued quite persuasively for modernization. Jorge Luis Borges. He has become the centerpiece of Argentinian literature.” A short laugh followed. “But I seem to have gotten some distance ahead of myself. Your passion for green circles—a product of your rigid rituals, perhaps— have led me astray.”
“Japanese would disagree with your ‘rigid’ I think. Traditional rituals are well rounded. It is modern Japan that remains all angles.”
‘You have given this some thought.”
“Long straight roads between here and Twin Falls.”
“And we would ride from dawn to dusk. The Pampas seemed never ending.”
“Not Basque then.”
A laugh.
“No. Gaucho, from Patagonia.”
“I am sorry.”
“Not at all. A common misconception. I take it as a compliment. Not much to chose between Gaucho and Basque. I am morisco, a person of color, as were, as are, the Basque, and we, as were they, were ostracized and often despised.”
“Ga-u-chos,” attempting her pronunciation.Three syllables?”
A nod. “On the Pampas vowels are allowed to to roam free. Borges did not understand. Modernization, industrialization was our internment, we gauchos. Not as dramatically as were your grandparents, but interned all the same. Barbed wire and greed ended the free range of the Pampas, ended our way of life.”
“And you came here?”
“Ah, I was brought here. After an idyllic childhood on horseback, with guitars and singing, dancing, growing as did the strength of our maté, chewing charqui, your jerky. eschewing vegetables as effeminate and beneath us, then the university and immersed in words, enchanted by poetry.” She paused, reflecting. “Then I married. My husband lived here. Here I came.”
“I have heard of your yerba maté. A store in Ontario sells it, where I buy my matcha, my green tea.”
“And does this store also stock the gourds and bombilla used to prepare mate, the utensils now sold at exorbitant prices for such common implements?”
“I don’t think so. No gourds.”
“Our maté and your matcha make an interesting pair, both with their ceremonies, different yet not so different. Perhaps … ” She left her thought unfinished. A trace of her smile. “Our little rounded rituals. Very effective at melting the indifference or reticence of strangers.”
Between these two a silence then ensued. The heat of the day waned. To the west the crescent of what once was desert now pocked with the green inevitable circles of center pivot irrigation. Just to the north, Minidoka, and beyond, the moonscape of ancient lava flows.
He nodded at the propped hood. “Overheat?”
She followed his gaze. “No,” she said. “The report you heard … “
“Ah,” nodding.
“A recalcitrant spark plug escaping the confinement of a despotic old motor.”
“Yes. On the exhaust stroke, Newton’s third law. Of course. The plug had loosened and was ejected.” He sat forward. “I can fix that for you. A simple business. And then you can be on your way.”
She raised eyebrows. “And you, too, can be on your way. Things to do. People to see.”
“No, no, I didn’t mean … “
She laughed, her head tilting back, her tawny face embracing the startling white crescent of her teeth.
He dropped his head, and with a slow shake left and right, deplored his usual indiscretion.
“I am content here,” she said. “My sons will come.”
He stood and shoved hands into pockets, looking off across the valley.
Then, “Stop by sometime,” he began, “for … tea … the cabin in the stand of juniper, just … ” hesitating, “Come for tea, you’d be welcome, if you wished to,” trailing off.
Tensions muddle our tenses. His grandmother’s phrase. Jisei wo magirasu.
And shimatta quickly thought but but bitten off, not said.
“Maté and matcha,” she said softly. “But perhaps without the ceremony.”
“Yes,” he said. “No ceremony. Just tea.”
“The post with the weathered boot upturned over its top.”
He nodded. “Just beyond the junipers.”
“I’d like that,” she said. “Just tea.”
THE HELMET OF MAMBRINO
This story begins here, in the middle, if in fact it is a story at all, if in fact one can call the middle of something its beginning, if in fact I am not talking through my hat. Stories more often than not are chronological. A plot line threads its way through the weft, the background, over and under becoming part of the warp, the events that make up the narrative. Narratives are connected by characters as well, although characters come and go, as life will have it. Dialogue, too, provides threads that capture their conversations, their thoughts, their feelings. And description tints the weft to add a visual element to the piece. Stories, of course, are fictional; they may be true, but the truth is usually stretched quite thin with the telling. Essays are factual. That is the expectation, though many are not; for truth is not only malleable, but elusive as well. Error and mendacity often twist the truth so that the essay does not always say what is, but says, instead, what the writer wants you to believe or simply what the writer thinks is so. If poetics are applied to evoke mimesis and catharsis, an essay may become something more like a story and facts may become actual or figurative.
My friend, who was for thirty-five years an editor for the San Jose Mercury News, told me what I had here might be called a fictional essay. He scoffed when he said it, so nearly a sneer. There are such things these days, he said. All the lines are blurred. We were sitting on his porch, he and I, watching the river and drinking whisky.
Words on paper are prose or they’re poetry. No need to split hairs.
So he said.
His dog laid at his feet. A dusky brown with limpid brown eyes to match her heavy coat, the dog’s head was huge with a body to match. She looked, at first glance, quite intimidating; but subsequently, once she had determined your intent, she became quite friendly.
Frank had returned my first drafts littered with red and blue lines, the margins cluttered with notes and comments and many exclamation points. Once, in college, Oregon perhaps, or San Jose State, I sat beneath the withering gaze of a diminutive, grey haired woman, who perched on a straight backed chair and lambasted each one of the seven or eight students sitting apprehensively at a rectangular oak table for the many deficiencies she had found in our initial essays. Composition 301 or somesuch class that I had taken as a lark and that had turned out to be purgatory at best.
Your sentences are too long. Diction is flabby. Say what you mean and be done with it. Frank, speaking frankly, tended to be irascible these days. He had said, Got the big C. Dead in six months. End of story. He poured whisky and we sat in silence listening to the river rush by below us, a spring freshet, his last apparently, boulders audibly rolling, that dull pronounced thud they have, woody debris carried along quickly, pillows of white water over large rocky obstructions, back eddies circling away from the main stream, a respite where broken limbs and cast off flotsam gathered.
I had been a slovenly young man both in my physical appearance and my intellectual proclivities. In retrospect, my grey haired hectoring tormentor who tyrannized the entire English department and who became the bane of my existence, taught me all that was essential about putting words on paper, and like Frank’s dog, once she had determined your intent, became quite maternal.
“You are a Catholic boy,” she informed me during our first session together. She insisted on these ‘chats,’ as she called them, our one-on-one meetings, to provide access to each other’s intellect and emotions. “No progress comes when barriers are present.”
“I was,” I told her.
“There you are,” she said. “Change the tense of the verb, and the world turns upside down. And now you are what? agnostic? atheist?”
I hesitated.
Her glare, in that moment, stripped away all pretension.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You are how old?”
“Nineteen.”
She lifted a delicate, translucent cup, sipped, and returned the cup to its dish.
Her office, a narrow rectangle, dominated by an oaken bookcase of such simplicity that it provoked immediate approbation, contained a worn maroon rug on the floor, a small trestle table for her desk, and two mandatory straight backed chairs. Two lamps provide a soft sufficient light. A smallish drawing that at first glance I took to be a heavyset man sitting in an armchair, turned out to be a portrait in brush and ink of a woman named Gertrude Stein, the sketch perched on the end wall of the room where one would expect a window. A cream colored paper, corners wrinkled, held by wooden push pins just below the drawing offered this sentiment: It’s up to brave hearts, sir, to be patient when things are going badly, as well as being happy when they’re going well. An improbable quote, it would seem, from Sancho Panza.
“Why are you here?”
Her question, direct, perplexing, felt like a blow. I could not hold her eyes.
“You must learn to think beyond the narrow confines of your skull, young man.”
My father had committed suicide; my mother had run off with the Fuller Brush man, a quip, a diffusion, not literally, and I had been adrift for a half dozen years awash in angst and uncertainty. I could not say these things to this woman, and, indeed, I did not. I said nothing. I stood, shook my head, and left her office.
“What’s her name?” Frank, as his illness progressed, spoke in truncated questions and declarative statements. From silence to perturbation, he spit out his queries and conditions.
I was grooming Stella, the comb extracting swathes of her coat in clumps of feathery browns and blacks, and the question coming as it seemed pulled from the air, or the grumble and splash of the river, unexpected and, seemingly out of context, begged an answer. What was whose name? Context eventually provided an answer, as we had been discussing, if that word is correct for the brief intermittent questions and answers we exchanged, my long past education.
“Bluebell Fulton you mean? The tartor of grammar, syntax, and diction?”
He turned his head away at a raven’s caw, poked a finger into the cold ashes of his pipe’s bowl, and then stared off across the river at the wooded slope beyond. Stella and I had walked to the swimming hole and back, and she had plunged in and swam circles, biting at the ripples she pushed out ahead of her. A good shaking and the warm rising sun dried her as we hiked the mile or so back to the cabin. I came most days ostensibly to walk Stella, but my intent of course, unmentioned and concealed, was to look after my recalcitrant old mentor despite his protests and apparent disgust.
“Wipe my ass for me.”
“If necessary.”
His daughter came three times a week, driving 200 miles round trip to do so, bringing soups and stews with onion and carrots and celery and mushrooms all chopped fine and bottled water which he ate and drank with difficulty and reluctance. She ignored his rebukes, swept the floors, washed dishes, dusted, kissed his cheek and left. I lived, at that time, just a few miles down river from Frank; and I timed my arrivals to coincide with Nadeen’s departures.
“How’s the head?” Frank’s query, not about the essay I was trying to write, but about an injury long past healing.
Months before, snow still covering the ground, I had fallen and hit my head while out with Stella.
“Good story, that,” he said. “Not front page though.”
The essay? I thought. Where’s he at?
“Give it a 24 point hed, couple of columns.”
A bowl of tomato soup had skimmed over and his spoon and Saltine crackers sat untouched beside the bowl, the setting just as Nadeen had left it.
“Damn fool. Saved your ass. She did.” He slouched in his wheelchair and stroked Stella’s head. “Cracked his skull, he did.” He snorted to think of it, then said, “Whose story, the ass with the barber’s basin?” but began to cough, the cough, now chronic, grated his throat, and he bent over clenched fists, rasping, choking gasps coming from the man until sobs broke the gradually diminished coughs and he spit into the small basin beside him.
Rising quickly I had brought a towel to his mouth, and encircled his shoulders with support, there being little else I could do. I had pushed the soup out of the reach of flailing arms. Stella had laid her head in his lap, her gentle whine, punctuating the raucous coughs.
He had paled, but managed to get his shoulders squared, sitting back in his chair.
“The jailbird, that Spaniard,” he said. “Rambling sentences longer than a dead man’s dream.”
Cervantes, he meant, whom he ridiculed but thought beyond reproach.
He still thought of me as I was when I wore a younger man’s clothes and had just begun learning a trade though twenty years had passed and I had three novels, a biography, and a collection of essays to my credit, a reputation of sorts, and enough sales to maintain a modest living which suited me. The concussion had not cracked my skull, fortunately; but Stella had saved my skin. The story remained unwritten though I had made several attempts all of which came to nothing. The perspective of thirty-five years finally brought out the words and phrases that had eluded me for so long.
Frank had begun to weaken and walking had become a burden, rising from a chair, lifting a foot up a step or two, climbing a hill, all efforts that taxed him beyond endurance, frustrating the man to distraction until he finally stopped trying. Stella became my charge, and I came daily to walk her regardless of weather.
The light snowfall, typical of the Cascades, had littered the hills with two or three inches of fairly dry snow. Overnight, clearing skies drew away any of the day’s warmth, and rime covered the rocks along the river. Instead of the waterhole, Stella and I had decided to take the fork that led across Old Maid Flats to the falls to see if they, too, had succumbed to falling temperatures and hardened to ice.
The shortcut across the flats wound its way through stately firs and massive rhododendrons; and, of course, was no shortcut at all, simply gave that illusion. By cutting the arc of the river trail which followed the ridge line with its many creek cuts and circuitous trail, one avoided the many ups and downs, and, as a bonus, had the mountain’s west side so prominent in the background.
When the story at last began to write itself—so it seemed, in my senescence, that once begun my stories and essays (how arbitrary the distinction would be if a distinction were to be made) literally wrote themselves— the necessary incidents and dialogues appeared as my fingers struck the keys and then in a trice the story was done.
Saska provoked the imagery. Smaller than Stella, Saska was that rare breed, a Sarplaninac, first bred in southern Yugoslavia of all places, and named for the Sar Mountains. She weighed something over 100 pounds and possessed enough strength to tow a plow through the lava field on which my house was built. For the past 14 or 15 years I had lived on a high broad saddle between the Big Island’s two massive volcanoes, Kilauea and Mauna Loa. Volcanic islands are not noted for their aquifers compounding the issue of water supplies. An abundance of rain provides a good source, but that necessitates a complicated storage and purification system, or so the government bureaucrats would have it. I had been preoccupied of late with the acidity of my water tank. A phone call to the agency responsible for testing our water had me pacing my deck oblivious to time and the beauty of another day spiraling to a close, the sun drooped to the horizon, the colors diffused through the atmosphere in yellows and reds. It was well past Saska’s dinner time.
The creature barked once, which I ignored, rose from where she commonly laid in the shade of the umbrella plant, and came to my side, nudged, barked again, to which I said, No Saska, and the bureaucrat said indignantly, I beg your pardon, and I said … well, nevermind the ‘I said’ ‘he said’ and the rancor that quickly arose. The upshot was that he would review the test when time allowed, check that procedures had been properly followed, and call me in three or possibly four days’ time with the results. As I turned to chastise my importunate beast, she took my wrist in her mouth ever so gently and commenced to drag me across the deck towards the kitchen and her dinner.
She weighed nearly as much as I did, I was 75 and somewhat frail, and resist as I might I was no match for the dog. She got her dinner. I got my story.
Stella had saved my life. To reach the fall’s trail across the flat one had to cross the Muddy Fork of the river. The Forest Service had erected a succession of bridges to accommodate the growing number of hikers, but each bridge failed to withstand the spring rains and snow melt that gave rise to floods that easily removed these bridges. Logs usually remained in place throughout the year to cross dry shod, and it was across one such that I tentatively made my way. Vertigo took hold halfway across, and I thought it prudent to straddle the log as best I could and scoot across, but could not bring myself to adopt such an undignified position. I tottered on until the inevitable happened. Off I went, a short fall, five or six feet, but into the icy cold stream with its rock strewn bottom. My shoulder struck in such a fashion that my clavicle snapped and my head in turn struck a rock hard enough to render me unconscious. I regained my senses, aware that I was being dragged up the bank and clear of the river by Stella who, once getting me clear, hovered over me whining and licking the wound on my forehead.`
We huddled together. I slowly became sensible, and ran various scenarios through my head to find a solution to this little contretemps. Clutching Stella with my good arm, her warmth and comforting presence revived me sufficiently to begin my evacuation. My belt, with some difficulty, was removed from its loops and used to strap my useless left arm to my side, teeth providing a grasp unavailable otherwise. I cinched the belt as tight as I could manage, pulling my shoulders back and aligning the cracked bones of my clavicle. My bandanna served as a sling. Leaning on Stella, grasping her collar, I stood, closing my eyes, breathing deeply against the initial dizziness, and began to follow our footsteps back to Frank’s cabin.
Hypothermia proceeds ineluctably by stages. As one’s core temperature drops, shivering begins. This shivering is the body warning of impending doom. When shivering stops, insensibility follows. Consciousness, always a dodgy business, becomes impaired. Climbers beset with such a condition inevitably feel overheated, fooled as they are by insensible signs. They remove gloves and hoods and caps and parkas and freeze to death all the quicker. Death seems inevitable, yet many cases have been reported of this death held at bay and the victim brought back to life.
I shivered. I groaned with the pain of my broken bone. Plodding on, my feeble brain focused solely on staying upright and taking the next step as Stella pulled me along. We arrived. Frank was asleep in his chair, and I slumped as quietly as possible to the floor by the fire. Stella stretched and shook and laid beside me. The cell phone sat on the end table well out of my reach, but at hand for Frank. I would have to make my way some ten feet to retrieve the phone. That task seemed beyond my resources. Clutching Stella’s ruff, the fire in the wood stove burning brightly, my head throbbing, I concluded that I would simply sit and die where I sat, that I deserved no better fate, that intelligence was no match for the perfidy of one’s perceptions and subsequent conceptions. Couldn’t think my way out of a goddamn closet. The phone may just as well have been in Turkestan.
William James brought me to my senses. Or rather, thinking suddenly of the man’s thoughts on the subject of sense perception, entire paragraphs came to mind.
Thought alone can unlock the riddle of space, and that thought is an adorable but unfathomable mystery.
Thought alone unlocks perception, and conception is an unfathomable mystery.
Between normal perception and illusion we have seen that there is no break, the process being identically the same in both.
An engaging speaker, affable, knowledgeable, mellifluous, his voice at once both melodious and clear, a tenor, soft spoken, but easily heard.
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
I gathered my knees beneath me, my consciousness focused completely on that movement, the precise position to hold my left arm, the support I needed from my right hand, and went on hand and knees slowly and carefully to the table. Sitting back on my heels, I breathed for a bit, just breathing in and breathing out. Reaching for the phone. Using my thumb to push each numeral. Dialing 9-1-1.
And waited.
Frank softly snored.
Stella rose up, stretched fore and aft, then went to her water bowl and drank.
This story began somewhere near its middle with Frank alive but not well and Stella realizing that her future was with me. If in fact it is a story at all. I seem to have called it an essay at one point.
“You shoulda had a hard hat. And wings,” snorted Frank, raising a fist up and then gently down on the arm of his chair. An exclamation point.
And so I am here back where I started, an old man with missing teeth, and soiled trousers, patched shirt, and a mind to match. Stories, of course, are fictional; they may be true, but the truth is usually stretched quite thin with the telling. Essays are factual. That is the expectation, though many are not; for truth is not only malleable, but elusive as well. Error and mendacity often twist the truth so that the essay does not always say what is, but says, instead, what the writer wants you to believe or simply what the writer thinks is so. If poetics are applied to evoke mimesis and catharsis, an essay may become something more like a story and facts may become actual or figurative.
Nothing but the facts here, ma’am. Mimesis there is, but catharsis is up to the reader.
Saska no doubt will outlive me.
Sadness resides in all relationships.
Frank cast upon the waters of his river; Stella as well.
All things come and go as life will have it.
Ineluctably.
Inevitably.
Gone.
Saska trotted out to the deck, staring down the drive, and barked.
The Blindman
This story is an exceprt from my novel THE ILLUSION OF PLURALS (2002).
The trail up to the snowfield, the snowfield itself, even that last steeper section through the Watercourse would pose no difficulty. A plod, thought Murchison. He walked up a shallow grade along a side hill above a creek. The trail followed this creek for several miles through a dense, mixed stand of fir and cedar trees. The chafe of the pack straps and the jar of his footfalls occupied Murchison. Dougal trotted easily ahead of the man. Robins whistled; jays shrieked. On the steeper pitches, the creek rippled and murmured; the clear, cold water coursed over gray and brown and red rounded stone.
Stiff with the hike in and the nights out, Murchison adjusted the straps of his pack over the bulk of his parka and pulled his wool cap down over his ears. One step followed another; one step, then another and another and another, working into a rhythm, one foot after another. He envied the dog’s easy trot.
This is how it’s done, Murchison thought. You just plod along. Anyone could do it. Endurance. That’s all it took to climb most mountains. All you need to be is perverse. Obstinate. “Hey, dog,” the man called. “Don’t look so happy with this business. Mangy crut.” Having a swell time, he is. A swell time.
The dog slowed and turned, tongue hanging from the side of his muzzle, looking back at the man, then loping away again, wolf trot.
As the man zigzagged upwards, he left the creek behind. The trees thinned becoming stunted and bent, wind swept, one side nearly bare; and Murchison felt the sting of a sudden gust. The rain had stopped, but the sky promised storm. An oatmeal sky, Murchison thought. Claire’s line. Another gust ruffled the dog’s coat. The cloud thickened, and the dog would appear and disappear and appear again. A wide spaced row of short, gnarled firs marked timberline. The man could distinguish nothing more above him. There was the dog’s shape, coming and going, and a persistent, chilling overcast.
Wind from the southwest, Murchison thought, feeling the cold on the right side of his face. Gusty up here. From this spot, he remembered, was a fine view of the summit of Grants. On a clear day. And off there somewhere, the northwest buttress. Mist swirled, condensed in the cold air, freezing; and he heard now the distinct crunch of the snow with each step. Above him, he heard the dog’s muffled bark.
“I’m coming, mutt,” the man called out. “I’m coming.”
Perverse and stupid. That pair. And, yes, dog, I’m still coming.
Dougal came back at a run, suddenly appearing, barking, turning, spinning about only to run off up the snow slope. Through the light, wet snowfall, Murchison could see the dog rolling in loose drifted snow, nuzzling and nipping at the furrows he made using his muzzle as a plow. Patches of old snow, gray and gritty with pumice dust, still lay exposed on wind blown slopes; the flats and hollows were white with new snow.
“First stop,” Murchison said. MacKenzie Snowfield. The Blindman.
Pulling an arm from a strap, he swung his pack off and down. This knapsack he carried now weighed no more than fifteen pounds with just the essentials. He had left his bigger frame pack hanging from a tree at the lake.
Seems heavier, he thought. This little pack. Too heavy. Too soon.
The dog rolled and nipped at the snow, snarling, barking, stopping to look at the man.
“It’s break time,” he said to the dog. “And time to put on the rain gear. And dig out my moth eaten balaclava.” Gloves. Won’t do to get soaked through. Hypothermia, killer of the unprepared. Where had he read that? Some Forest Service handout, he thought.
“I’m gearing up, dog. You’re on your own.”
Lucky beasts, he thought. No problem with vasoconstriction. No frostbite. Little chance of hypothermia either. And no doubts. None. Not one. The best part, probably. No doubts.
“Any second thoughts, dog? Is this weather to your liking? A lovely day.” Lovely.
The dog chewed at the snow balled between his toes.
“We’re a little behind schedule, Dougal,” Murchison said. “You’re going to have to step up the pace a bit if you expect to have any chance at the summit. Cut out this lollygagging. I’ll tell you though, boy, this mountain in this weather is no place for errors of judgment. You understand me, dog? Let’s have no errors of judgment, shall we, mutt.”
The dog sat with his ears up, head turning from side to side, listening to the man. A gust of wind raised the thick hair on the dog’s flank.
“Well,” said the man, “let’s be going then. Burning daylight.” He slipped the ice ax from its loop on the back of the pack.
Cloud engulfed them, and a gust swirled the mist into whorls of light and dark. Sleet stung the man’s cheek. His yellow anorak glistened with wet. His footsteps began to pock the snow cover. He plodded upwards. Scrambling through a boulder moraine, he reached up for a knob and felt the damp cold through the padded palm of his gloves. He unrolled the balaclava down over his ears and the back of his neck, and pulled it up to the tip of his nose. His arms swung by his side, and the plant of the ice ax on the steepening slope established a rhythm, slower now, slowing as the Blindman steepened. The thick knobby soles of his boots crunched upwards. One step, then another.
The mountain with its snow and the sky with its sleet were all of a singular grayness. No telling where one ended and the other began. Hoped I could have climbed out of this weather. Thought it might pass. Thought that. Showers and clearing. The forecast had talked about some clearing. Maybe not here though. Maybe there. Where? Here, there. Everywhere.
His calves began to ache. His toes felt numb.
No, just cold. Not numb. No feeling with numb.
He could feel the tightness in his hips from the long hike in, an ache in his knee joints. Ahead, the dog, back matted with wet snow, turned its head to look at the man. Murchison plodded on. He came to a steepening pitch and, leaning on his ax, stopped. Looked about. Nothing to see.
Some clearing would be good, he thought. Good to get out of this soup. Soup. No, that’s not right. Not a good analogy. Or metaphor. Whatever. Too damn cold for soup.
“You know, dog,” he said quietly, “for two bits I’d quit this little venture.” He brushed snow off his arms. “I’m coming, dog,” he said louder. I’m coming.
Doggedly. Standing still.
Dougal had kept on, and had disappeared in the swirl of snow above the man.
What a silly thing to do. Waiting for a bus, old man? Having a look at the view, are we?
What view would that be?
Pushing at the cuff of his anorak, he uncovered the face of his watch. He knew, with the weather, the climb would take a good deal longer than planned. Another three hours on the snowfield. Then two more up the Watercourse.
“Five hours,” he said. Then five more down. Or four. Piece of cake. Sure.
From above came the dog’s bark. Murchison whistled back, and the dog came ambling back, snow covered, tongue hanging.
“Snowing,” the man said to the dog. “Not about to go away.” Not this stuff. Not about to. Or three. Or four. “Snowing. Now that’s right.”
Stupid. Perverse. Obstinate. Cross-grained. Pigheaded.
“You know that, don’t you, mutt? Going to snow. That make a difference to you at all? No difference to me. None at all. Take longer, that’s all. So we’d better get on with it, dog. Time’s wasting.”
Mulish.
Dougal burrowed his muzzle into the snow, haunches up, stub tail working back and forth. He flopped down, cocked his head at the man, and barked. The man grinned back, wadded a ball of snow, and tossed it at the dog.
“Let’s get on with it then,” he said.
Sleet stung the side of his face as he started upslope, and he squinted his eyes against the bite in the wind. And as he climbed he felt the cold numbing his toes, his feet, his fingers. Every twenty paces he stopped to gather himself, leaning on his ax. Each step needed intention; each step was harder than the last.
Intent.
Harder.
He felt the pull of his pack, the grinding labor of lifting his leg and planting his foot for purchase.
Purchase.
Poking small holes in the snow with the pointed ferrule of the ax, he looked off into the blowing, drifting snow.
“Well, hard guy,” he said, “what are you going to do about this? You are becoming rather reluctant, hard ass.”
I’m reluctant, all right. Good word, purchase. Here on this slippery slope. I wish I could get the boots flat. The old ankles just don’t flex quite enough. Kicking a hole to stand in just bruises the toes. Holes for purchase. So I don’t lose my grip.
Reluctant. I am that.
“You’d better make up your mind, tough guy.” Fish or cut bait.
Question: Is there a point of no return?
Melodrama. The point of no return. Damned ominous, that is. No deposit, no return.
“Dougal,” he called suddenly, missing the dog. Where the hell is that beast? “Dougal, come, boy. Dougal.”
Point of no return. You’re past it, you old fool. Too old. From the day you were born. Past the point of no return. Don’t kid me.
Question: Can you come off the summit or the Watercourse, for that matter, in this weather?
Answer: That’s what a compass is for.
If you only knew the bearing. And remembered to look at the compass. And the bearing is marked on the compass. I did that before I left. So don’t kid yourself too much. But what’s the point? This isn’t Everest. Why take the risk?
The dog had come back to the man, and sat looking up at him, covered with the snow, feathers on his forelegs clotted with hanging clumps of hard balled snow.
“I want to do the Blindman,” Murchison said. “Do the snowfield. Do that much.” Then we’ll see. Not much longer now. “We’ll do the snowfield, mutt. The hell with it.”
Dougal turned his head, ears cocked, and whined at the man.
“We’ll worry about the Watercourse when we get there. Let’s get, boy,” he said. “Freeze your ass off standing here.”
Freeze your ass off, someone said. Freeze your ass off, he heard someone say. Freeze your ass off.
They trudged up the snow slope. His toes had numbed; and he began vigorously wiggling them each time he planted the foot. He would count five paces, stop and stomp his feet. Only his eyes and the bridge of his nose were exposed now, but his face ached with the cold. With the back of his glove, he wiped at his nose. Large flakes of snow swirled about him. The wind began to hum.
Freeze your ass off.
Murchison counted one, two, three, four and stopped, leaning over his ax. He pulled off a glove, unzipped his anorak, and fumbled in a pocket for his compass. The small rectangle of clear, plastic dangled from its red lanyard held by the fingers of his hand.
Time for a bearing. Bread crumbs to find my way home. Time to do that. No time to lose. No place. No place in time. Time for a muling. A pigging. To his left, somewhere in the muck … snowing, snowing pretty good, snowing sideways. Listen to it. He braced himself against the wind. Somewhere over there is that northwest buttress. Butt hole. Crevasses. Where the glacier turned and stretched and compressed. Stretched and compressed. Erudite bastard. Cracks up, it does. We’ll stay away from there. I’m no fool. Dead ahead is the Watercourse. Dead. Ahead. And over there, somewhere, drops off to Hell’s Kitchen. Abandon all hope ….
And Murchison laughed out loud. He had rolled the balaclava down over his chin, and now fumbled with his bare hand to tug the wool away from his mouth, to breath. The dog lay beside him nearly covered with snow.
“How you doing, boy?” Murchison said to the dog. “How you doing, boy?”
The dog nuzzled and licked his hand.
“Jesus,” the man said. The tips of his fingers were numb. “Jesus, I’ve lost the damn glove.” Murchison stood staring at his hand.
Done, he thought. Enough.
He half turned, facing the wind and snow.
Point the compass down the hill and go.
He should.
You should.
He lifted his hands and looked at them. He turned away from the snow and wind and stuffed his bare hand into a pocket.
Jesus.
No compass. Nothing to see. Cold and getting stupid. Classic. He squinted off down the mountain. Just the wind and the cold. An awkward turn downhill on the steep slope, cursing the wind, cursing the snow. And off down the mountain we go, me, myself and I. And that dog.
That dog. Follow the fall line home, dog. Go on now. It’s time. Time.
Mechanically, the man went. His steps, his gait, jerky, lunging down the slope, braced now against the heel plant, leading out with another step, like falling, bracing, one handed, lopsided, following the dog home. He had thought once to merely follow his tracks down; but he had forgotten. He had thought to take a bearing, but he had forgotten that, too. Forgotten that he had lost his compass, his glove. There was just the clumsy march down and down following the dog, trailing after, boot burying in the snow, lifting, stepping, down and down.
The oatmeal sky and shards of snow bore down on him. Lurching down, almost running, seeing nothing but the stub of the dog’s tail, hearing just the hum of the wind. Then his boot broke through a crust of snow, and his weight and momentum buried his leg to the knee, pushed down into the hole and stopped, suddenly. With boot and leg pinioned tight in the hole he had made, the man toppled forward, twisting, with a cry of pain and the dog’s bark. Murchison’s leg stopped abruptly, but his body toppled over quickly and he lay face down in the snow. He lay there, face down, breath harsh in his throat.
I have to get up.
You better get up, someone said.
Pushing himself to his elbows. No pain. Good. Ax. Get up out of this. Ax.
“Where’s the god damn ax?” he said.
Dougal walked circles around the man, whining.
Left it. Somewhere.
You’d better get up.
I’d better get up anyway. Better if I get up.
He pushed himself up with his hands and then rocked back onto one knee, and then sat down. He took the other knee between both hands, and pulled the boot from the small, black hole. Panting with exertion, Murchison scooted himself back uphill and sat, legs extended. The dog lapped at his face.
Stand up now, he thought. Good idea. Stand up now.
He rolled to his knees, groaned with the pain, hung his head, spit. Slowly he pushed himself up, supporting himself on the good, left leg; but as weight came onto the other leg, it gave beneath him and again he fell, a sharp gasp, a cry, groaning, rolling from his knees to sit with hands grasping his bad knee.
The dog continued to circle him. He barked once, and sat beside the man.
You’d better get up, hard ass, someone said.
You’d better get up, mimicking.
Murchison sat holding his knee, rocking back and forth. “Well, dog,” he said.
The dog sat watching him.
Well. “We’ll try it your way, pup.” All fours.
All for one, one for all …
He stared at his bare hand. “God damn,” he said. He struggled out of his pack, rummaged to find the extra socks. Need to cover that hand. Need to.
Forgot. Forget it. Done’s done.
He slipped both socks over his numbed hand.
Time to go. Dog style.
You’d better get it up.
Ha ha ha.
And someone laughed.
Caw caw caw.
Murchison moved off down the mountain on his hands and knees. The dog walked beside him, then looping in front, head down, stub tail wagging, a bark, wanting to play. They moved down the mountain. He did not recall stopping. He sat squeezing his knee with both hands. Head on paws, the dog lay eating snow.
“I’m done,” Murchison said.
Dougal looked up.
“We’re done,” he said to the dog. He reached out and brushed snow from the dog’s hip. “Good old dog. We’re done now, boy. Good old boy.”
I hope the Botkin woman’s dog is all right, he thought. Poor old dog. Struck down human. “Struck down human,” he said out loud.
Murchison huddled in the snow. He ate the granola and fruit bars he had brought with him. Drank some water. Sat on the pack. Dougal lay plopped on the snow beside him. He clutched the dog and pulled the animal closer. Snow fell swirling in the gusts without direction. The wind hummed and howled across the snowfield.
Murchison sat huddled with the dog, half buried with drift. Everything grayed. No mountain. No sky.
Poor old dog, he thought.
Struck down … all too human. Human. In all it’s misery. Lost its … dog gone.
“We’re getting some of that now, pup,” came a whisper.
Coy said, A man of principle pays his way. Ain’t talking about money here, boy. Pays his way. Every blessed day. He knows the cost and he pays. I’ll tell ya integrity.
Coyote.
The dog stirred, sighed.
Show me a man who knows his own mind, that’s what, Coyote was saying. Simple as that. Got to know yer own damn mind. Or what have you got? And to know yer mind, got to lose it. Simple.
Damn simple now, he thought.
Gray. Everything. Wind hum.
Me.
Mountain.
Dog.
Sky.
Gray.
Simple now. Simple.
Murchison laughed out loud, startling the dog.
How simple it all was. Give it up, that’s what. Give it up. Who needs it? Who wants it? Give it all up. Dancing on the head of a pin. Us mountaineers, we have no fears, we do not stop at trifles …. Foolish. Fears. Climbing the walls. Climb. No ‘b’. Climing. Where’d it go? Lost it. Ha ha ha. Us mountaineers we got no fears. We pay the world no mind. We hang our asses from a sling and snap at our behinds.
Mad dogs.
“I’m no ordinary Joe,” the man whispered.
The dog whined and wiggled into the man’s lap.
No ordinary Joe.
Frozen Joe from Kokomo.
A slough of snow rustled past the huddled figures, a rush, pushing a gust of wind, the eddies of freezing crystals biting the back of his neck, his wrists, his eyes, and nose, a sudden shiver and still.
Still. Suddenly so.
Clear, cutting cold. Slumped in a hollow the last warmth of his body had made. Clean, cutting, cold. Here rooted in the earth.
No.
Uprooted.
Cut clean, Coyote said. Cleanly cut.
The pompous old fool. Sitting in a hollow crosslegged. Rootless. Some space between. Rootless and fancy free. Rootless this earth arcing the empty sky. Hear it hum. Here it hums. Taking its own sweet time this rock. Maybe he knew. Knows.
Cold.
Knows and cuts clean and cold through wind and snow and time. Cuts clean through the hollows. The hollow. The hallowed. Some hollow the snowbound earth cuts and arcs, dancing with the moon on the head of a pinned here, hallow be my name, he who knows nothing, ever again.
Knows.
Nose. Lose it. Frozen. Blew it.
Knew nothing.
All that nothing causing all that pain.
Clean and so cold it burns like fire.
And Coyote was saying, most men know nothing about everything. Get buried, they do, beneath all the rubbish of daily living. All the man made trash. Green light, red light. Stop here, go there. The sickness of humans. Greed and lust. More. Always more. You got to get rid of that, boy. That’s the fat and the gristle, the bone. Got to cut the joints, the hollows. Pure and simple. Give up all this hankering and hollering, wanting and needing. Give it up. Don’t need anything at all. Not one damn thing. Nothing. Let it go. It’s take away, boy, ain’t addition. Let it go. Less, you get it? Not more.
Singular. Not one. Not two.
Integral.
Wind hum snowfall.
The illusion of plurals.
Our father who art a haven, hollow be thy …
Numb.
majikwoid 