The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy (11 page)

“Family keepsake,” I say.

“Ah, family,” he sighs. “Family’s all a man’s got. Man with no children disappears when he’s dead, but a man with a family, well, that man lives on in his kin.” His eyes tear up sentimental like, and he grabs the leash and jerks it, pulling the dancing freak onto his lap. We stand for a minute watching as he pets its head, the freak closing its eyes and moaning with pleasure, and just when I’m beginning to think he’s forgotten that we’re here, he looks up.

“Sure there ain’t no lady folk down there yonder? From where y’all come from?’

“Everyone’s dead,” I say.

Jimmy pushes me aside and steps up.

“That’s more’n enough talk now,” he says. “We ain’t come all this way to sit and visit with you’s. Now good luck to ya, sir. Damn good luck to both of you’s.”

That said, Jimmy steps forward and turns, squeezing past them on the path. I hesitate long enough to watch the man’s shocked expression turn to acceptance and then almost to an expression of sadness. Then I step forward and squeeze past him too, and I can smell his sweat and mildewed fur, his freaky son in his lap looking up at me wide-eyed, head resting on his tumor, and I step clear of them and follow Jimmy up the path.

I look back once from high above, before we turn and lose them from our sight, and I see them sitting as before, the man cradling his son in his lap and watching after us as we go.

CHAPTER 21
One Foot In Front of the Other, and Don’t Slip

Snow appears in shady patches.

Nooks and crevices.

Places where the sun doesn’t penetrate.

Miniature icefalls melting into tiny streams where we stop and drink and fill our canteens.

We crest a ridge, the air suddenly cold, and snow stretches beyond the shadows and comes together in a vast snowfield up which we climb. The snowfield is dirty and littered with dead insects, and when we step our feet crunch through and reveal perfect white powder hidden beneath the crust. I look back and see our two sets of white footprints trailing behind us, glowing in the shadows as if they had a light of their own.

With the sun high now in blue skies, the icy crust begins to melt, and we slosh through it soaking our tattered shoes, finally taking them off and walking barefoot. The air thins, Jimmy wheezing beside me. I breathe better up here, which is strange because I grew up at much lower elevations than Jimmy did.

Arriving at a swath of sun-dried boulders cutting across the wet snowfield, we sit down to rest and drink, admiring the fine lichen that swirls gray and green across the stone surface like ancient writing. A curious marmot pokes its head over a nearby rock and stands still against the blue sky taking us in, but neither of us have the energy to make a move to kill it. When we start up again, I look back and see the marmot on its toes, inspecting our urine stains on the rock.

“Is yer vision blurry?” Jimmy asks, hours later.

Trudging the clean upper snowfield now, I pause to rest my weary legs, looking behind us and then ahead again.

“Yeah, but it’s probably just the glare from the snow.”

Jimmy strips off his pack where he stands.

“Shit, we’ll be lucky if we dun’ lose our sight.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Snow blindness.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“That uncle tried to cross once. He come down blind as a mole, all bloodied from trippin’. Never did see nothin’ again.”

We tear strips of skin from our packs, stretch them over our faces, and mark the location of our eyes with smudges of charcoal. Then we poke holes there and tie them around our heads. Jimmy looks like a cartoon bandit from some old story I read on my slate and I must look just as silly to him.

We pause to look up at the summit high in the hazy blue sky, smoking like some windblown and frozen other world

“What do ya figure we’ll find?” Jimmy asks.

“On the other side?”

“Yeah, if we make it.”

“Think positive,” I say. “We’ll make it.”

“Well, when we make it then.”

“I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

“Then why’s we goin’?”

“We gotta do something.”

Jimmy laughs, shakes his head, and we start up again.

After a while we come up on a strange set of tracks in the snow, and Jimmy stops and squats to inspect them. He brushes the edges clear, looking them over for a long time.

“Bear,” he says.

I want nothing to do with another bear, but Jimmy sets off again following the tracks and I fall in line behind him.

“What do you think a bear’s doing way up here?”

“Prob’ly same as us,” he says, smirking over his shoulder. “Tryin’ to get to the other side.”

The man was right: Jimmy does have a smart mouth.

When the snowfield steepens, we switchback our way up, crossing the bear tracks, and then crossing them again. The sun beats down and we pant and drip with sweat, but when we stop to sip from our canteens, I go from hot to freezing fast.

Another half hour climbing and we crest the snowfield and stand on a windblown saddle of rock, looking back through our pinhole bandito masks at the way we came up. We’ve climbed much higher than I thought. The snowfield drops away beneath us, and the fading ridges we crossed roll away into the distance like rock waves on an endless sea, puffs of white cloud floating through the valleys there. A gust of wind rises up the snowfield and tickles my hair. Time seems to stand still up here.

“We better find shelter for the night,” Jimmy says.

“Okay, just a little higher.”

We spot a horizontal cut of recessed rock, enough of an overhang to protect us from the wind. We drop our packs and settle in. Jimmy sits watching the sunset with his feet dangling off the ledge, and I lie down and look at the darkening sky and one single point of light that must be a planet.

“First rule of packing,” I say, “don’t stand when you can sit, and don’t sit when you can lie down.”

Jimmy laughs and lies down beside me. We fish the furs from our packs and bundle up together to share our body heat.

“What planet do you think that is?” I ask.

“There’s more planets than jus’ ours?”

“Yeah, there are lots of planets.”

“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 see 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.