“I though those were stars.”
“Well some are,” I say, “but some are planets.”
“Ya think there’s some other boys up there lookin’ back and wonderin’ about us?”
“Maybe,” I say.
“Yeah, maybe,” Jimmy says.
The sky darkens, a few stars appear.
“Maybe there’s jus’ planets goin’ on forever,” Jimmy says. “Boys lookin’ up at boys lookin’ up at boys as far as any eye could ever see.”
“Yeah, maybe so,” I say. “Maybe so.”
“It still dun’ make a fella feel less alone, though.”
“No, it sure doesn’t.”
The sky fades blue to purple to black, and one by one stars punch through it until the whole royal canvas above is littered with stars swirling in clusters and constellations.
“You really believe anyone is out there watching?”
Jimmy doesn’t answer.
“Guess I’m asking if you think we’re really alone. I mean, do you believe there’s any God or anything?”
A gust of wind whistles past our ledge, dies down again.
“Jimmy?” I nudge him, but he’s fast asleep.
When we set off, the sky is still dark and hung with stars.
The sky turns gray and then blue, but the stars never do leave it in this high and barren twilight landscape. The air bites cold and we wrap ours furs tight, climbing over cleaves of rock and steep snowpack until we come to the foot of the glacier.
It comes down the mountainside like a giant frozen river, a treacherous incline cracked with crevasses and hemmed in on either side by impossible cliffs. On its low side, it turns down a thousand meter drop where huge seracs hang precariously from its edge like ice houses perched to fall off a cliff. The glacier chews up the mountain as it grinds on slow as time itself, and huge boulders sit, spit like crumbs at our feet.
“There’s no goin’ around less we go back.”
“We can’t climb it,” I say. “We’ll both end up in a crevasse and a hundred years from now somebody’ll be standing right here looking at us spit out the bottom instead of these rocks.”
Jimmy points up. I look, but the sun’s reflection on the ice blinds me so I strap on my mask and look again. Very high on the upper glacier a figure moves. I shield my eyes with my hand and squint through the mask and look harder. Sniffing its way around the crevasses and lumbering toward the summit, climbs the bear whose tracks we’ve been following. It’s little more than a speck from this distance, but we stand and watch as it shrinks into the altitude, climbing ever higher, until with one burst of energy and a sort of leap, it disappears over the crater rim.
Jimmy ties our rope around his waist and then pays out the slack and hands me the other end. I copy his knot as best I can and follow him up onto the glacier. There’s no more than three meters between us, and the rope is thin and meant for hanging game—so thin I doubt it’s good for anything more than a little peace of mind between us.
Climbing the glacier is slow work. We’re forced to move great distances left and right to navigate around crevasses, and I make the mistake of looking down over the edge into one where the blue jaws of the glacier fall away in an icy prison that must be hundreds of meters deep. Jimmy pries a stone loose from the ice and tosses it in, and we listen to it ricocheting back and forth off the walls at it drops, the sound finally fading away but the stone never hitting bottom.
We climb this way for hours.
The sun beats down and melts the layer of snow covering the glacier, and we climb even slower, using our spears to break footholds in the exposed ice.
Nightfall catches us halfway up. Jimmy stops and loops the rope in as I climb up to where he stands. We carve a thin ledge in the ice and strip off our packs and spear them to the glacier so they won’t slide away. Then we sit and drink water and look down and pretend we’re not scared.
“We gotta keep movin’ up,” Jimmy says. “Ain’t no way we can make camp here.”
“I know it,” I say.
“Shouldn’t be no differ’nt in the dark, right?”
“Nah,” I say. “It’s no big deal.”
“Jus’ one foot in front of the other, right?”
“Yep. One foot in front of the other, and don’t slip.”
The sunset is blocked, and it seems as though the western ridge has pierced the sky and that the blue is quickly bleeding out of it. The stars that never quite left grow brighter, the sky black, and then the three-quarter moon rises above the eastern ridge and hangs in front of us, seeming close enough to touch.
“Well fuck a duck,” Jimmy says, “It’s our lucky night.”
“Think it’s enough to see?”
“It’ll jus’ have to be, I ’spose.”
We stay put and watch for a minute—the stark-white lunar glow, the marbled surface dotted with shadowed craters.
“Sure is somethin’ to look at, ain’t it?” Jimmy says.
“Yeah, it sure is something,” I say. “Hard to believe there’s footprints somewhere up there.”
“Footprints? On the moon?”
“Yep. On that moon right there.”
“Well, how’d they get there?”
“We were there once. A long, long time ago.”
“A human’s footprints? No way.”
“Yes way.”
“How would ya even know?”
“I read all about it.”
“Hmm …,” he says, pondering. “Then I guess it’s true.”
We wrap our furs tighter and strap on our packs again and climb on in the silver moonlight, choosing our steps carefully. The glacier crust freezes, and I hear Jimmy’s feet crunching on the ice ahead of me. I have no idea how high up the summit is or how far down the fall would be.
After a while, Jimmy calls back to me. “Hey, Aubrey.”
“Yeah?”
“Even if there was somebody on the moon, what makes ya think their footprints is still up there?”
It’s a good question and I’m not sure how to answer it, so I just say: “Because I read it in the book.”
Apparently satisfied, Jimmy nods and keeps climbing.
The glacier comes alive at night. Creaking and groaning beneath our feet. We hear a serac cleave off the cliff behind us in the dark and crash down the mountain with a deafening roar that rumbles on forever in the void.
An hour later we come to a wide crevasse and stop at its edge to search a way around. A cold wind rises from the deadly crack and whistles through the ice, sounding like small children screaming from the deep. The only way around is up and over across a steep patch of solid ice. There’s no way we can make it. The crevasse is too wide, the ice leading around it too steep.
I get an idea and tug the rope, pulling Jimmy to me. Then I take out Uncle John’s knife and cut the rope between us.
Jimmy looks at me wide-eyed. “What are you doin’?”
“Trust me,” I say, “I’ve got an idea.”
I untie the knot at my waist and saw the rope in half again, making two shorter pieces.
“Well, shit,” Jimmy says, “there ain’t no turnin’ back now.”
I sit, signaling Jimmy to grip my pack and hold me steady. Then I wrap a length of rope around my homemade shoes and pull it tight and loop it and wrap it again. Five turns, then I double loop and tie it off. Same thing on my other foot. When I finish and stand, five passes of rope run like treads beneath my feet, gripping the ice and giving me traction. Next I hold his pack while Jimmy ties his feet, too.
With no rope between us now, I take the lead and use the moonlight to find a path up and over. The only way to cross is to the right on steep ice, right over the crevasse. One slip and we’re gone. Forever. My stomach drops, sweat beads on my brow. One cautious step at a time, we dig our roped feet into the slope, freezing there and breathing out plumes of hot breath as we search the ice before stepping again.
Once, while looking down for a place to set my foot, I se
e my silhouette in the ice against the reflected moon, and it’s as if I have a twin trapped beneath the glacier and I startle with the thought that maybe he’s risen to pull me down to join him.
All is silent as we inch our way above the crevasse, neither of us daring to speak. Then I step up and the ice is less steep. Another step and I’m on firmer ground. I turn back and reach a hand to Jimmy and pull him up to join me. He laughs, and it sets me laughing, too. Then his laugh somehow turns to tears, and he grabs me and hugs me. We stand there embracing one another and crying in the moonlight until we both feel silly and pull apart, wiping our eyes and laughing again.
An hour later the storm overtakes us.
We still have a long way to the top and the success of our crevasse crossing quickly fades as dark clouds pass in front of the moon. The moon seems hesitant to leave us alone to our fate, and it makes several attempts to rise above the clouds. But within minutes the moon is swallowed completely, leaving us in utter darkness. The temperature plummets, as if the moon itself had given off some heat, and a wicked wind comes whipping down the glacier in great gusts that threaten to knock us off the mountainside. We lean into the slope and drive our spears into the ice and climb. There’s nowhere to go but up. Up into the storm. The wind drives snow into our faces, sends it skating across the ice at our feet, making our steps uncertain and blind.
Jimmy yells something up to me but it’s snatched by the wind and carried away and only my name reaches my ears.
We climb on.
The storm intensifies.
My feet go numb with cold. My hands.
Suddenly, the hair on my arms stands up, my scalp tingles, and the cold air smells of metal. Then a blue flash arcs across the sky and lights the snow electric white, the crack of thunder nearly throwing me backwards down the mountain. I look over my shoulder at Jimmy’s shadow, shivering behind me, hanging on against the wind. I turn and climb higher into the storm.
Coarse ice crystals grate against my skin, snot runs from my nose and freezes on my face. I stumble, get up again. I have no idea if Jimmy is still behind me, or if he’s blown off the glacier, but I reach deep inside myself and summon all of my remaining strength, and I set my teeth and pump my legs and climb. The wind whips wildly, lashing me left and right, and my pack rips free and goes flying off somewhere behind me like a kite. My fingers stiffen, my spear falls from my grasp.
I plunge forward, stepping, stepping, stepping, drop now to my knees, crawling, clawing at the ice, reaching, searching, tilting into empty space, teetering there, pulling back, too late—I free fall into quiet nothingness, the sound of the wind fading above as I flail my arms uselessly in the cold air rushing past.
My back slams into hard ice, forcing the air from my lungs. I lie in the dark, willing myself to breathe again. But either I can’t breathe, or I won’t, and all is black and still and quiet.
Somewhere high above I can hear the scream of the wind and then even that fades away with my final thought—
Jimmy.
CHAPTER 22
Who Lives Here?
Water dripping.
Echoing and amplified in a cavernous silence.
All around me is blue light.
I turn my head slowly toward the source of the drip, and I know what I see will haunt me forever—
I’m lying on the edge of a sort of subterranean lake, a deep pool melted by the heat rising from some fissure in a dormant volcano. I must be inside the crater. The lake is still and black and it reflects back the thick sheet of blue crater ice hanging as a ceiling above it. And that’s not all. It also reflects back what hangs suspended from the retreating grip of that glacial roof. Protruding from the ice, hanging precariously above the lake, is an enormous intercontinental ballistic missile.
There’s at least three meters of it exposed, another twenty meters trapped in the ice above. The point of the warhead is red, the green body wide enough that five men couldn’t stretch their arms around it, cryptic characters printed there in some violent-looking language, etched yellow triangles arranged in the international nuclear sign. I wonder how long it’s been hanging here. I wonder at what rate it’s melting free, the ice replaced every season by fresh snowpack above. And I wonder why it didn’t detonate, and if it’s a dud, or if there’s even such a thing when it comes to hydrogen bombs.
I grit my teeth and sit. I can see I’ve fallen down a crevasse where the crater glacier breaks away from the crater rim, the narrow crack above showing a sliver of blue sky and no trace of the storm that sent me here.
All I can think about is Jimmy. Did he fall into some other crevasse and land in a similar nightmare? Or something worse, maybe? Was he blown off the mountain? I see an image of him sliding down the glacier wall and plunging to his death, and the image makes me cringe.
I force myself to stand, testing for broken bones. Nope, just some bruises and scrapes. I take one last look at the evil thing hanging above that black and bottomless lake, and then I turn away with the image burned forever in my mind.
At first it looks as though I might be trapped down here with civilization’s destruction hanging above my head. But then I see a pile of fresh snow on the edge of the lake and when I look up, I see a climbable incline leading out. The ropes are still on my shoes, but the going is slow and tedious. In places where the incline steepens, I have to wedge my feet against one wall and press my back into the other, shimmying up an inch at a time. But as the blue-sky crack above grows, my spirits lift and I climb the last several meters and roll out onto the crater floor.
The sun is up, reflecting white off the fresh snow. I cover my face with my hand, peeping through my fingers and turning to take in my surroundings. I’m on the edge of the crater bowl, snowpack sloping gently down in the center and then rising again to the other side. When I spin nearly all the way around, I see Jimmy sitting on the crater edge, facing away from me with his pack sitting next to him and my pack sitting next to it.
When I tap him on the shoulder, he startles and I have to grab his arm to keep him from falling over the edge.
“Hellfire, man!” he shouts, stepping back from the edge. “You coulda killed me jus’ now.”
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“Shit. I dunno,” he says. “Two, maybe three hours now. Sun jus’ come up over there.”
“You thought I was dead,” I say, “didn’t you?”
“Yes’m, I did,” he says, picking up his pack. “But dun’ go gettin’ all sappy ’cause I ain’t even finished puzzlin’ out whether I’s happy or sad about it.”
He tries hard to look stoic, but his face breaks into a smile. I shoulder my pack and we start across the crater together.
“Where in hell was ya hidin’?” he asks.
I shudder to think what’s suspended beneath our feet.
“Hell is right,” is all I say.
The other side looks much friendlier. There’s no wind at our elevation, but beneath us billowy clouds float across the sky providing glimpses of the landscape below. A wide glacier, with few visible crevasses, slopes down into a canyon where the ice melt rushes out and becomes a river. The river runs northeast into a pine forest, the trees powdered with fresh snow, and beyond the forest, cupped on three sides by a ring of jagged snowcapped peaks, is an alpine lake so big and blue that it reflects back mountains, trees, and sky, giving it the appearance of another upside down world in itself.
Anxious as I am to get away from the crater and its frozen cargo, we sit on the summit lip, eat handfuls of fresh snow, and look out over the view.
“Ya think she made it?” Jimmy says.
“Huh?” I say, my mouth full of snow.
“The bear,” he says. “Do ya think she made it?”
“How do you know it was a she?”
“I dunno,” he says, “jus’ figured it.”
“Yeah, I think she made it.”
The sun rises higher and chases the shadows into the folds of the mountains. F
ar beneath us some enormous predatory bird hovers motionless on a breeze, circling above the river.
“It’s so quiet up here,” I say.
“I know it,” Jimmy says. “And I’d bet my head ya can see three hundred miles right from where we sit.”
“We use kilometers where I’m from,” I say, “but it doesn’t matter because you can’t see farther than the cavern walls.”
“Ya ever miss it?”
“No, not ever.”
“Ya ever think about yer family down there?”
“I miss my dad sometimes.”
“Yeah, I figured it so.”
“You ever think about yours?”
“I miss my mum mostly,” he says.
Jimmy looks away and picks at the snow. After a while, he stands. “Well, we better get on gettin’ on,” he says. “I’m hungry and this snow ain’t helpin’ it none.”
With the crevasses hidden under fresh snow laid down by last night’s storm, it’s slower going than I thought it would be, and by the time the roar of the river reaches us, our shadows have disappeared in the pink glow of sunset on the mountain.
We stand on the bottom edge of the glacier and watch the water rush out from beneath our feet and pour into the river, and we watch the river disappear into the twilight forest.
“The river’s gotta end up at that lake,” Jimmy says.
“That what we’re heading for?”
“North’s how the train was headin’,” he says. “Sides, they’s bound to be plenty to eat.”
We pick our way down off the glacier and follow the river into the forest. It must run much higher in some other season, because the banks are wide and strewn with boulders and fallen sun-bleached trees, the bone-colored wood water-stripped, the roots still attached and sticking up like gnarled fists. The river runs down the center of this hazard-filled boneyard, reflecting the last light and creating the impression of a silver highway hemmed in on either side by the clean, dark pines.
Jimmy and I both stop at the same time.
Silhouetted against the silver rapids, a fox sits on a boulder staring off downriver with its fluffy tail swooshing back and forth across the surface of the stone. Other than the clock-like swing of its tail, the fox is as still as the stone it sits on, and it looks almost as if it were parked there patiently waiting on some long overdue friend to come up that silvery road.
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