Snowblind (9 page)

We were a small country. The rich and powerful doing bizarre stuff at the top while the workers labored at the bottom. And it worked, just like in real life. The porters never said: Screw this, what a waste, I could feed my family for three months with what I've got on my back. They wouldn't even have had to riot. They could have just walked home. What could we have done to stop them? And our little republic of America wasn't alone. Germany was on the move that day, too, and we caught up with Italy the next day. So it was complete chaos. A few dozen white people all speaking different languages trying to herd hundreds of brown people down a trail six inches wide and five hundred feet above a river like a roaring freight train.

My fever spiked somewhere along here, and I started shitting green goo. Hubert tutted over me, fed me pills, scolded me for exerting myself so pointlessly. I stumbled along during the day because I didn't want to be left and because I was certain that somewhere up ahead was a mountain that I had come around the world to climb. Wind stuck with me in those days. He helped me along when I was in a bad way. Kept me steady when the path was crumbling right into the Braldu Gorge. “Careful there, chief,” he'd say, and he'd keep his
hand on my shoulder. Tucked me in at night when I was half out of my mind with fever dreams. Kept me drinking water and eating rice, which was the one thing that seemed to stay in me. I was grateful, but it was also embarrassing. Here I was, the mighty mountaineer, come to duke it out with the most dangerous mountain in the Himalayas. And I could barely stay on the trail on the approach. And there was Wind, looking like a lumberjack dressed as a court jester, with no plan or experience—he'd just decided it would be cool to see the mountains. And he was the one taking care of me.

Of the bad nights, I only remember things in snatches. We roasted one of the goats, and Bill cut it up, giving the porters each a sliver of meat. Bill waved this giant knife around and bellowed enthusiastically and asked each porter what cut he'd like, even though they couldn't understand him and he didn't care anyway. There was a huge fire—flames ten feet high, shadows, glowing faces, singing and dancing. Gregor stomped out some kind of Russian jig that made the porters wild. Even Luther and Alan got up and pranced around. Wind was sitting shoulder to shoulder with the porters eating goat. I don't know how he got his hands on a portion. I don't think he knew more than six words of Urdu, but it didn't seem to be a problem. Somehow he was still joking with the porters, slapping them on the knees and getting the same in return. But he never forgot himself, either. He always had twenty yards' separation from Bill and the Captain. During the dancing, Captain charged him from the other side of the bonfire, like some kind of flanking maneuver, winding up his stick like he was going to impale Wind, but Wind rolled backward into the dark and disappeared while the porters cheered.

There was trash everywhere from past expeditions. Maybe some of them didn't care, but most, I think, were just too desperate to get away to pay attention to their garbage. Anyway, Wind had been scavenging. He found a shredded backpack that he fixed up the same way as his pants. Piece by piece, he accumulated clothes as we moved higher and the temperature dropped. A mouse-bit sock here, a dirty sweater there, a strip of Gore-Tex that he sewed on to a shirt to start a jacket. He had stiff competition—the locals were the ultimate recyclers, and the expedition junkyards were like a Goodwill to them. But he was ingenious, and the sand was always shifting and exposing new leavings. One scrap at a time, he added insulation. After all, what did he really need? He drank the river water—which was basically liquid silt—straight without getting sick. I guess he had been hanging out long enough in the valleys that his guts ate the local bugs like candy. He schmoozed food from the porters who looked on him as some kind of mascot or fallen white demon or something. Maybe he stole a pinch of rice or sugar here and there—there were enough expedition kitchens, it couldn't have been noticed. What more did he need? The ground was free. The air was free.

My fever burned itself out, and I shat myself clean through. I was light as a feather. Weak, but floaty, like my bowels had shed lead. That day, we reached the Baltoro, and I could see the mountains. Great Trango Tower. Nameless Tower. Muztagh. They were beautiful. Like, I wanted to cry they looked so good. I don't know much about music—my mom used to play the piano in the house when I was growing up, but it didn't rub off on me. But sometimes I hear a sound that's pure and deep and it swells up big, fills all of Big Yellow
and keeps going, and kind of makes me ache. And I'll have to turn off the radio to let the sound roll around in my head because I want it to last a while. Those mountains are like that—beautiful and scary big, uncontainable, and I had to stand there a moment and let them echo through my brain.

Alan came up to me while I was staring at Trango Tower. “You're feeling better, man, that's good,” he said. He stood next to me, chin up, tan, square jaw stuck out, blond hair just the right amount disheveled. Christ, what am I saying? What did I care that he looked like Captain California? “Trango, huh?” he said. “Epic. You know what that makes me feel like?” He cupped his pecker in his hands and worked his hips. “Here, I'll show you,” he said. He made a big show of whipping out his digital point-and-shoot, then held the screen over his crotch. He turned the camera on and zoomed the lens all the way out. He cracked up then, like that was the funniest thing. “Bro, it's epic out here,” he said, and he slapped me on the shoulder and walked away hooting.

Wind walked with me for a while up the glacier. His pants were irregular. One leg was patched with threadbare wool, or maybe rotten burlap, I wasn't sure, but it looked like leopard-spotted camel. The other was covered in wisps of purple and green fleece. He had found a good sun shirt missing a sleeve and a stripe out of the back, and he fashioned the missing bits from duct tape and strips of a torched tent. He was still bulking up his winter coat. He was a great shaggy hulk of a guy, and he hardly knew what to do with all that strength. Earlier, I had watched him catch a rock that was bouncing down the gorge toward a porter. He just stuck out one paw and
cradled this flying granite basketball. And then he looked kind of sheepish and uncomfortable while the porters made a lot of noise and he held this big rock in one hand. He took a few steps with it and then flipped it into the river.

That first day on the glacier, the ice was mostly covered in moraine rubble with paths through it from all the passing feet. A lot of the porters were still barefoot. They'd sold the shoes we'd given them in Askole. We'd sent about a quarter of the porters back already because their loads had been eaten. I asked Wind how far up the glacier he planned to go. He asked me how far it went. About fifty miles, I told him. He thought for a moment and told me that that sounded far enough. I asked him if he had even thought about his destination before the moment I'd asked. He laughed at me, rubbery lips flapping. “You mean physically or metaphysically?” he said. “Are you fooling around in the cosmic punnery?” I told him I wasn't. I just wanted to know, when he woke up in the morning, did he think about where he was headed or did he just walk?

That made him get all serious. “No difference, man. The whole point is to
move
.”

Which was weird, right? Because the whole time, I had been wanting to move, too. But I wanted to move
toward
something—the summit—and Wind just wanted to
move
. I wanted the destination, and he wanted the action itself—a pure desire for the world to turn under his feet. And it had gotten him to the same place I had gotten to. Here we both were. Only he had no baggage. No obligations to Bill's list. No army of porters carrying his belongings. No obligations to the mountain up ahead or the hubris in his own mind. Of course,
the porters
were
carrying him, just like they were carrying me. I was the class above the workers, and he was the class below them. If it had been 1923 and the mountains empty, he would have been stuck on the outside unless he press-ganged his own coolies or found a way to live on the river water alone. Which made me consider my life stateside, which only works because there are farmers growing cheap food and people paying taxes to maintain the roads. Course, it's no different for Alan. Jerking off in the stock market doesn't produce anything but his own juices. It's not like he's making anything but money.

Wind told me that he didn't think Bill cared for him. I asked him what gave him that idea. “He reminds me of my dad,” he said. “He pays attention to all the wrong things.”

I didn't really see the connection: “You think he doesn't like you because he reminds you of your dad?”

“Sure. I totally offend his sense of order.”

I suggested that maybe it was because Captain Shafiq wanted Wind thrown out of the Karakorum but couldn't get his hands on him and kept threatening our permit instead. “I know!” he said. “It's like war games with him! He makes me feel like I'm some kind of international criminal.” I reminded him that he
was
an international criminal. I'm not even sure he had a passport. I don't know where he would have kept it. His pants—at least the pants I first saw him in—didn't have pockets. He'd named himself well. He passed right through the cracks in the walls. But what I said seemed to make him unhappy. Bill wasn't the only one paying attention to the wrong stuff. What difference could him being here possibly make to Captain Shafiq? What
difference did he make at all? All he wanted was to roam around some. So maybe he should have joined Frank in 1923 after all.

The mountains crowded around the open strip of glacier. Too many to count. Pick one at random and stick it down in California, and climbers would come running from all over the hemisphere. But over there, it might not even have a name. They
erupted
out of the glacier. Rock and ice spikes shot straight up from below. We were colorful little lice crawling all over the glacier, shitting and scattering trash, and the summits watched us from ten thousand feet above, cold, sharp points that made me feel soft and vulnerable like shish kebab meat.

Luther asked me about Wind the next day, and what could I say? That he was an elemental gas that should be left to blow around in peace? That he was going to get us all kicked out of the Karakorum? Luther and I ended up walking together for a few hours. I'd hardly talked to him yet. He was pole-thin, always frowning, bones sticking out of his cheeks, but he seemed more serious than unhappy. Dark eyes—hard to tell the pupil apart from the rest. He hardly ever laughed at other people's jokes—like, he wouldn't have even bothered to notice Alan's antics, and Alan knew that, so the two got along just fine. But every once in a while, this huge Cheshire grin would split his face, usually when no one else was laughing, when he had discovered some private irony in what was going on. Sometimes the first sign that you'd said something funny was Luther's moon-grin staring back at you.

Luther called Wind a “fleabag hobo”—as in, “whatcha know about that fleabag hobo?” The mountain, K2, our mountain, had
come into view dead ahead. We had been walking through a place that felt musical and unreal, but K2 was where the music stopped. Its shape was too abstract. It was its own abstraction. All straight lines and menace. Unrelenting. What did I know about Wind? What did I care? I'd finally seen the mountain. I'd finally seen something that scared me scalp to toe. Something so huge and implacable that I had trouble looking at it. It filled me up, made it hard to breathe—it was getting harder to breathe anyway. The advantages were all on its side. This is what I'd come for. I didn't care about anything else. I told Luther that Wind was just a guy wandering through.

“Yeah?” Luther said to me. “You two seemed kind of tight. I figured you'd known him from somewhere before.” I told him that I didn't know him at all. But I repeated what Wind had said about Bill reminding him of his dad. Luther agreed. He thought Bill was a titan. He misunderstood Wind's meaning completely. He said he thought Bill should run for president. He said that was why he climbed with Bill whenever he could. With him, he felt safer; he thought the odds of getting home went up. My dad wasn't around too much when I grew up. Maybe that's why I didn't know how to act around Bill.

Luther asked me if I had eaten any of the goat the other night, but I had been too sick. It turned out that when Luther wasn't climbing mountains or pulling natural gas out of the ground in Wyoming, he traveled around shooting things and eating them. He'd eaten grizzly in Alaska, python in Brazil, waterbuck, hippo, in Tanzania. “Now, your roo—I mean your wild roo—has got a real strong flavor,” he told me. “It's not for everyone. Too wild.” And I'm thinking, wild roo? Is there any other kind? Do they have herds of them somewhere?
“It kicks,” he said, “in your mouth. Taste follows form—ain't that cool?” I asked him whether, if he had the chance, he would eat human. I mean, there are places it still happens. If you were there and it was dead already, wouldn't you be curious?

Anyway, Luther grinned at me. “The long pig,” he said. “Sometimes it's called that. Hard to say till it's on your plate, but I guess I would. People get consumed all kinds of ways.” The guys he employed—they knew and he knew that roughnecking was taking years off their lives. He thought he might as well do the consuming when the body was dead rather than alive. “Probably worse getting killed than getting eaten,” he said. I told him I'd keep that in mind if we got pinned up high. He said not to worry, I was too small to mess with. And then—how could we help it?—we spent a half hour under those toothy mountains speculating about which member of the team would be tastiest—we chose Nick—and how he could be best prepared in a high-altitude tent with a single-burner stove.