by Rick Bass
He studied one photo, his favorite, in particular.
“Man, I ever catch up with this one, I can’t begin to tell you the things I’d like to do to her,” he said.
Matthew rolled down the electric window, snatched the photo from Old Dudley, and tossed it outside. Dudley wailed, causing the hawks to screech and flail about on their jesses—wings beating and drumming against the roof—and then said, “Ah, that’s all right, they’re not the real thing”—and he stared out at the snow spiraling past as they climbed higher into the mountains. Dudley said, “Oh, I’ve got to stop thinking about it, got to get it out of my mind, or I’m lost,” and he drank from the bottle and was silent then, settling down into some grim, lower place of torpor.
They drove into and then through the cold front, so that the snow was behind them and the stars burned fiercely above, so bright that the stabs and flashes of them welded and seared old memories in their minds, summoned things within them, old stories and histories they had not remembered in a long time, or had never known.
At the summit, the pass was snowed in, but the upper skin of snow was frozen so tight and polished so smooth by the wind that Old Dudley believed they could drive across it, and he forced Matthew to keep going.
They had extra clothes in their suitcases and duffel bags, but they were still wearing their black business suits and ties, and their slick-soled little black leather pointed-toe dress shoes, so that they looked like undertakers. If they got stuck, Matthew thought—if even one wheel punched through that crust, taut as stone but only a few inches thick—the car would be swallowed by snow, and they had no skis or snowshoes, nor even winter boots or sleeping bags, so that almost surely they would freeze.
Perhaps Matthew could build a few small fires with the limousine’s cigarette lighter, and perhaps they could hunt a grouse or a hare with the hawks, but then one or both of the hawks would fly off and not come back. Matthew and Dudley would starve if they did not freeze first, for no one would be up in the high country to help them for months. There would perhaps be a mid-winter delivery by snow machine, but perhaps not. In any event, they would be buried beneath several feet of snow by then, and their frozen carcasses, and the car itself, would not be discovered until May or even June.
They raced across the ice shield, sliding crossways and backward sometimes, skating and spinning, with Old Dudley ranting at Matthew to “Push on, push on”; and they were in too deep, Matthew understood, to do anything but that. Sometimes in their spins the flanks of the long car grazed the trunks of trees. Matthew had no idea whether they were on the road itself. He knew they were near it, but it was also possible that in places they were driving over hundred-foot gorges filled with snow. Shooting stars tumbled from the sky like diving things taking shelter from the presence of the two men’s horrid advance.
Dudley’s adrenaline, his musk, was as dense as the odor of overripe fruit, so that Matthew had to roll the window down despite the great cold. The hawks chittered and shat more freely than ever. A snowy owl glided across the snow in front of them, carrying a still-struggling snowshoe hare: white on white on white, illumined in their headlights.
They almost made it. They found the road again—scattered the caribou herd like sheep before wild dogs—and passed through town without pausing. Matthew wanted to stop in and see Helen first, to wake her and tell her he was back in the valley, but Old Dudley said, “No way; push on,” and so they kept driving. The heat of the car’s engine began to melt the ice beneath them, so that their tires were beginning to sink as if in slush; and as they drove, they bogged deeper and deeper, the engine revving and racing harder than ever—a raw, roaring sound that could be heard all through the valley, and which troubled the dreams of all who heard it—and when the car finally sank up to the windows, they were less than a mile from Mel’s cabin. They rolled the windows down and climbed out like escaping convicts and went hurrying across the frozen landscape, carrying nothing, only running, as if being pursued, or late to some important engagement: hurrying to get there before they froze. They each carried a hawk on one arm.
Matthew led; Old Dudley struggled to keep up. Not far from the cabin, Matthew cut across the tracks of the carolers, and the horses’ hoofprints and turds, and read what had happened—but then closer to the cabin, he came across Colters tracks, and paused, intrigued. The tracks, striking straight for the river, were about the size of Mel’s, but Matthew couldn’t tell from the gait and carriage of them whether they were masculine or feminine. They seemed to be both. He lay down on his stomach and sniffed them. He did not smell Mel’s scent in them.
“What in the fuck are you doing?” Dudley asked.
Matthew sat up on his knees and stared off toward the river. He rose and hooded his hawk and tethered it to the low branch of a lodgepole, then took Dudley’s hawk and did the same.
“What are you doing?” Dudley asked. “I thought Mel’s cabin was that way.” His voice rose as Matthew started off in the direction Colter’s tracks had gone. “Why aren’t you taking the hawks? Are you lost? Which direction is Mel’s cabin?”
Matthew didn’t answer. He was anxious to see Mel—anxious to see Wallis, too, and reclaim him—but the unknown tracks were too fresh, too mysterious, too tempting.
Old Dudley waited until Matthew was almost out of sight before running after him: tripping and stumbling as he ran, and glancing behind him often to be sure that some horrible predator—wolf, lion, bear, lynx, wolverine, or some fanged creature not yet known to man—wasn’t following him. He hurried as fast as was possible for a seventy-year-old man, trying to keep the dark figure in front of him from disappearing.
They found Colter down by the river, collapsed and frozen, his face as blue as a robin’s egg. He had had a small fire burning out on the river ice, but he’d curled up on the shore while the fire was still burning and had gone to sleep. If the river had opened briefly beneath the fire to reveal another glimpse of his father, it had done so as he slept, and now with the fire extinguished and the great cold and wind having swept through, the river was sealed off again for good.
As Colter slept—his heart having slowed to around thirty beats a minute—he was dimly aware of a force beneath the frozen ground, something still vital and alive, which—in his sleep—he was convinced was his father; and as Old Dudley and Matthew pulled him from the snow—kicking at the wind-curled ice clutches that had swept over him as he slept—Colter felt that force growing weaker with distance, and was convinced it was his father still down there, caught amongst those branches, holding steady; though as Old Dudley and Matthew carried him away, all he could hear was the river itself, faint but strong, riffling and murmuring beneath the vastness of the ice.
Carrying him was like portaging a pillar of ice, and despite their labor, they soon grew chilled, wearing only their thin silk suits. They moved through the woods like black-shimmering angels, or devils, their own feet and fingers turning numb—their faces paling to blue—and gasping, sweating, Old Dudley said, “The little fucker’s already dead, or is going to be—let’s leave him”—and in his ice-sleep, Colter heard him. Dudley released his share of the load and stood there panting, searching for a depth and ease of breath he could not find. Matthew then assumed all of the load, shifted the stiff-frozen boy across his back and draped both arms over him as if in a yoke, or as if carrying a crucifix; and once again, Old Dudley hurried to keep up with the dark figure ahead.
It was too cold. They couldn’t make it, Matthew thought. Should they stop and make a quick fire to warm up—to gather enough brief warmth to enable them to rest and recover, and then push on?
He decided against it. They were so close, and it was so cold that he did not think a fire would matter. That had been Colter’s mistake.
They reached the tree where Matthew had tethered and hooded the hawks. There were now only piles and tufts of feathers on the snow; two russet martens sat on the branch side by side, their eyes gleaming, holding the remains of the trapped
hawks in their paws and crunching on the hawks’ skulls. The hawks, weakened from not having hunted in so long, had been unable to pull free and escape.
Dudley wailed in anger and pain: his feet in agony, his fingers, his nose; he moaned and wept, but did not quit, and now they turned toward the cabin, less than a quarter of a mile away. Their shoes were wet from the snow and ice and had refrozen, picking up clumps of snow, so that it was as if they were treading in ice boots, which helped make the walking a little easier, though now they could feel nothing from their knees down.
In the cabin, wrapped in their sleep of warmth, Mel and Wallis awakened to the nearing sounds of the howls, and believed at first that it was the wolves. When they went to the porch, however, they recognized the pitch and tenor of the two men, and Mel cried, “They came! They made it!” and now they could see the strange silhouettes of Matthew carrying something, and the floundering, humpbacked figure of Old Dudley behind him.
They saw then that it was a human that Matthew had on his back, and they ran out onto the snow-crust in their stocking feet and took Colter from him, and hauled him inside.
Mel hugged Old Dudley and Matthew—Dudley was still whimpering like a pup, but was glad to see his daughter. He shook hands with Wallis, as did Matthew, and Wallis marveled at the iciness of their hands.
The men shed to their underwear in front of the fire and warmed their skin—it turned patchy and mottled, from blue to red, ugly as an old turkey gobbler’s head and cockscomb—and then they dressed in some of Matthew’s old coveralls.
As the two men were dressing, Wallis noticed that Dudley had a long purple scar, crescent-shaped, running across one side of his chest—that one nipple was missing, as if seared or scalded or melted into some new clastic shape, and he wondered if Dudley had received it when he received his tong marks. It looked as if he had been branded. The scar was a foot long.
Rocks—yellow ore—tumbled from the pockets and clattered to the floor as the two men pulled their coveralls on—rock specimens Matthew had gathered on his own missions long ago—and Wallis gathered them up as they rolled across the floor.
Colter lay by the fire like one prepared for burial.
The two men moaned and whimpered as life returned to their digits and limbs with a vengeance—Old Dudley fell to the ground and grabbed his bare feet with both hands and began rocking back and forth, keening like some deranged bear in a zoo—and now Colter began to murmur and groan as the pain of life returned to him, also.
Colter could no longer feel the river moving beneath him. He coughed up crystals of ice, his lungs practically frozen. His eyes fluttered.
“Guess I was wrong,” Dudley admitted. “Guess he’s going to make it after all.”
Mel got more tea for him. Colter sat up, stunned, and though the blueness began to leave his skin, it was not replaced with the kind of ruddiness that had returned to Matthew and Old Dudley, but instead came as an ashy gray color. Mel got a towel and rubbed hard at his skin, trying to raise his blood from its depths, but it would not come to the surface. Colter still appeared dopey and loopy to them—he tried to say something, but then paused, unable to organize the words into complete sentences—and Mel frowned and rubbed harder, wondering what part of him had been left behind.
“Isn’t there something that occurs like the bends, if they wake up too quickly?” Matthew asked. “The raptor of the deep?”
“I don’t know,” Mel said. “I never heard of it. But he doesn’t look right.”
“He has been to a faraway place,” Dudley said, “that’s all. He will be fine.”
“He doesn’t look right,” Mel said. “He doesn’t look like he used to.”
Colter could hear and understand everything. It was true that the words he heard them speaking were processing themselves more slowly in his mind than usual, but that seemed to help him understand them with a greater depth and power. Again he opened his mouth to speak—intending to tell them about the faraway place he had visited—but still, no words would come.
“Good God almighty,” Old Dudley said, horror-stricken.
Salamanders were crawling slowly from out of Colter’s pockets. They were coming from beneath his coat, warmed by the fire, so that they seemed to be hatched from his chest. Black and silver, with electric green stripes running down their spines and purple hoodoo masks around their faces, they appeared from beneath his coat as if crawling out of a rotting log.
“A nasty savage,” Old Dudley said, regaining his composure. “A pure-God, nasty little savage.”
Colter’s eyes, seemingly catatonic, stared straight at Dudley, and the salamanders kept climbing out from his coat and tumbling down the front of his coat, spilling to the floor and creeping away from the fire, traveling in Dudley’s direction, wriggling and yawning with silent little roars. Mel gathered the salamanders and put them in a saucepan, and for a moment, Old Dudley thought she intended to cook them.
Steam rose from Colter—from his wild, ice-bent hair, and from the damp back of his neck—and it seemed more than ever that he was incubating those salamanders.
Mel covered Colter with more hides. Blood was slowly returning to his face; perhaps the salamanders were what had been the matter with him.
Now Old Dudley turned his attention to Wallis. “You’ve changed,” he said, not entirely pleased with what he saw. It was the look Wallis had seen on the silly-ass businessmen sitting on park benches in downtown Houston on a fine spring day, legs crossed and the newspaper opened double-wide before them, held inches from their faces, as they squinted through their bifocals and tried to ascertain that day’s stock listings—their little stockpiles—while overhead, the geese cried, heading back north against a blue sky.
“You’re all black,” Matthew said. “What have you been doing?”
Dudley felt the edges of alarm rise up in him: the suspicion that he might have picked the wrong one, or turned him free too soon. Things had been going so well in Houston: Wallis had been finding oil, and had been showing every sign of developing an addiction.
“I was helping Colter build a fire earlier this evening,” Wallis explained.
“Well, my God, son,” Dudley said, “don’t you ever take a bath? You’re not going native, are you?” He stepped forward, peered into Wallis’s eyes—stepping over Colter to do so, ignoring him as if he were cordwood—and for a moment, as Dudley’s fierce golden-green eyes held him, Wallis felt a hypnosis coming over him: a feeling he imagined to be very much like what Colter had felt as he curled up and lay down for a nap in the snow.
“Oh, son,” Dudley said slowly, still staring into Wallis’s eyes, “you’ve been spending too much time up on the surface.”
There was an infinite sorrow in Dudley’s voice: not so much at the fact that Wallis had failed, but that a pure potential had been squandered, or underutilized. It seemed to Wallis that it must have been like an extinction: a species vanishing, leaving behind only a niche unoccupied in the landscape. An echo; a loneliness. Other species eventually divide up the forfeited territory and move in slowly—but they are the generalists, and rarely in claiming such a territory do they possess the grace of fit, the authority, of their predecessors.
Finally Dudley broke eye contact with Wallis. He turned to Mel and said, “You have been corrupting him.”
“I have done no such thing,” Mel said, “but if I wanted to, it would be my own damn business. All I’ve done is fed and sheltered him for you for the last month, and you come up here saying I’ve corrupted him, like he’s some piece of property you own, or like I am? If that’s the way you’re going to be, you can just march your sorry old ass right outside the door and head back home, and take your boys with you.”
“Easy, easy, little filly,” Dudley said, chuckling. He held his hands up, palms out. “Easy. No harm done. He’s still salvageable. It’s just that you’ve set me back a little, is all. You’ve undone some of the good at which I’d labored so long and hard—”
“Stop it!�
�� Mel said. She slapped her father’s still-outstretched hand. “Listen! This is my home and my valley you keep punching around in. I wish the whole lot of you would clear out and never come back. So stop the bullshit about how I’m causing you problems. And anyway,” she said, “he’s been working on a map. He’s been reading your foolish old books”—Old Dudley’s gaze flickered to the shelf, and a strange look passed between him and Mel—“and he’s been working his ass off out there, clawing at the ground like some goddamn neurotic hound looking for a bone. So cut the shit.”
Was it better to have a bad family, or no family at all? Mel went to her bedroom.
Everyone was still ignoring Colter, who nonetheless listened, processing the sentences, the anger of them, with that slow power, so that he seemed to know more about what was being said than the mere content of that which was being carried along on the surface, by the skin of the words and sentences themselves.
He felt as if the ice had cleaned his brain: as if he were watching and listening to two things at once. Part of him was hearing the argument, but the other part of him was imagining a place quieter and more peaceful than this one; a place farther north and west, even more isolated, raw and untouched. A place for which no map would be accurate.
He was tired. Absorbing the meaning of what people were feeling and what they really wanted—the direction and content of their sentences like a decoy, so that their true intents were buried below—was exhausting. He lay back down and went to sleep. Still no one paid any attention to him. The three men in the room reassembled now like one organism, and began to talk gingerly around the edges of their one goal.
“It must be her period,” Old Dudley said primly, “or the stress of the holiday season. She was like that, growing up, too.” A pause. “She really never finished growing up,” he said. He shook his head and tsked. “If only her mother hadn’t died so young, she would be normal,” he said.
