Damask

 

The annals of Fourier’s western utopias are incomplete.  Records were either lost, or, perhaps, destroyed by disappointed disciples.  However, some chronicles relating to Damask, a phalanx founded on Fourier’s principles in the Oregon territory, remain extant. 

Charles Fourier was a French thinker.  He died in 1837, but his ideas remained influential long after that time.  Fourier believed that the ideal human society would consist of loosely allied “phalanxes” – that is self-sustaining communes consisting of 1620 inhabitants.  (The population of the phalanx would consist of all possible personality types as defined by Fourier in various combinations suitable to the industry in which the commune engaged.)  People would live in hotel-like phalansteries consisting of four floors: the rich would occupy the top and the poorest members were to live at ground level.  At these communes, labor would become pleasure.  There would be free love and, ultimately, the world would be organized into six million peaceful phalanxes in loose alliance with one another under the leadership of an Omniarch.  When perfect harmony was achieved, the North Pole would melt and the Arctic Ocean would become as warm as the Mediterranean and the seas would no longer be salt – instead the water would become a kind of lemonade popular in Paris in first half of the 19th century and called limonade a cedre.  

Records show that colonists in the first Damask expedition left St. Louis is the early Spring of 1850.  Each traveler was allotted a ration of water and, also, several bottles of restorative tea brewed with herbs imported from South America.  The tea was intoxicating and its consumption in small amounts reduced fatigue, eliminated pain, and made the traveler drinking the brew energetic and jovial.  But, in large quantities, the tea had aphrodisiac effects and caused mania.  

The colonist’s wagons were laden with potted mulberry trees as well as crates of fruit from which orchards could be planted.  Cocoons were to be seeded in the mulberry trees and the phalanx was organized to produce silk.  A herd of sheep followed the wagon train.  The name of the phalanx was Damask, identifying a textile comprised of silk woven with wool.  Because of the utopia’s planned industry, the colonists were selected according to insect and herd-animal personality types.  In the leader’s wagon, index cards identifying the character traits of each colonist and his or her sexual preferences were kept in a locked red trunk.

In the western great basin, between ranges of distant snow-capped mountains, the social experiment collapsed.  Some of the colonists imprudently consumed all of their restorative tea and demanded that they receive rations from those who had been more frugal in their use of the beverage.  Evidently, the tea had addictive qualities: women prostituted themselves for it and men fought over bottles of the stuff.  Finally, it was determined that the remaining stores of the tea would be confiscated by the leader and shared-out among all members of the expedition.  But those hoarding the tea fought to retain its possession and several men were killed.  At last, the leader enlisted the help of military dragoons in the territory and the remaining bottles of the brew were gathered at his wagon and, then, accused of fomenting dissension, poured out onto the hard, baked desert soil.  That night, someone set afire several of the wagons and there was a riot.  The precious mulberry saplings were dumped out of their pots and the fruits crushed and destroyed.  The blaze frightened the sheep and they went astray in the stony badlands.  The hot sun wilted the leaves of the mulberry trees and birds flocked to devour the silkworms and their cocoons strewn across the desert.

The survivors of the ill-fated expedition to Damask limped back to St. Louis.  When another expedition to the Oregon territory was planned, everyone agreed that the tea brewed from the Peruvian herbs should not be sent with the pioneers.  Indeed, after a few years, the recipe for brewing the marvelous tea was lost and, in any event, its ingredients could no longer be found. M (The phalanxes around Cusco had all failed and no longer existed.)  On this expedition, barrels of water were under the strict command of the leader who also controlled all rations distributed to the settlers.  A dozen mounted police, refugees from military service, were deployed to protect the water, food, and the mulberry seedlings, as well as the silkworms necessary for the phalanx’s sericulture.  Advance agents to the northwest determined that sheep could be purchased in abundance there from the incumbent settlers and so, on this expedition, herd-animals did not accompany the pioneers.

These measures proved successful and the colonists reached the gorges of the Columbia in the Fall of 1856.  Some stone buildings were erected and a cocoonery, as it was called, was established.  The phalanx dormitories were built in the shadow of a craggy mountain and, as a result, the sun did not shine down onto the phalanstery until mid-day or, even, later depending upon the season of the year.  The gloom prevailing in the phalanstery was thought to be insalubrious and so the colony was moved onto a sunny plateau where, however, water was scarce.  Nonetheless, the colonists were industrious, built brick-lined channels to direct rivulets of snow-melt to their orchards, and, for a decade, their social experiment flourished.  Inevitably, some of the orchards were more productive than others and disputes arose about the division of produce.  These controversies proved to be intractable and, so, after much deliberation, each family was provided its own allotment to farm as it deemed proper.  People moved out of the phalanstery and the big stone structure was used as a quarry for the farmhouses built in the area.  Until recently, some knee-high stone walls were still visible – all that remained of the dormitories where the colonists had once lived.  A new highway eradicated these remains and, now, the only traces of Damask on the high, barren plateau are a few stands of ancient and shriveled mulberry trees.        

Saturday Evening Post

 

1.

The delta tamed the flood, spreading the water out in a great fan-shaped lagoon in the valley under the mountains.  Under grey skies, the great shallow ponds were turbid and brown, but when the sun shone, the flood reflected the serrated escarpments of the Himalaya.  Motor-scooters and small cars were overturned in the mud and there were dead cows strewn around like boulders, tin roofs of houses, and  corpses cracked and broken like plaster statues.

The NATGEO Tv crew had come up from New Delhi, three days drive by lorry.  The wheat fields at the base of the mountains were underwater and the roads choked with mud and debris.  The crew’s drivers plotted routes around the inundated delta but these were not main highways and, so, were slow, passing through innumerable villages in the foothills.  On the terraces on the hillside, the trucks stopped and the camera crew surveyed the flooded land and shot some footage.  It was beside the point of the expedition, but, perhaps, the film could be used to make a point about global warming or climate change for another documentary.  A half-dozen acres of glacier had broken loose from the snow-cap high in the mountains, impounded a river behind the ice-jam, and, then, ruptured.  Floods like this happened sometimes in the Spring but it was Rabi, the cold season, and strange that such a disaster would occur at this time of the year.  

The outlet of the river gorge was scoured to the bed-rock.  When Carter’s team reached the canyon’s outlet, the Dhauli Ganga was no longer a raging torrent.  Some cold rivulets of water ran among cairns of rock tangled with uprooted brush.  Between boulders, icy ponds filled potholes.  The dams and hydro-electric plants higher up the canyon were sheared apart and the road winding along the side of the river had been mostly washed away.  Standing in the rock ravine, Carter could see a few traces of the highway, broken hyphens of concrete, clinging to high cliff walls, but most of the road bed was gone.  NDMA teams were combing through the mud fanned out across the plain.  Many of villagers were almost naked, wading in the muck, but the NDMA workers were wearing orange haz-mat suits. 

They camped near an intact village at the mouth of the canyon.  Bells tinkled in the cool air.  At night, the mountains breathed with chilly adiabatic winds rushing down the hillsides.  

Carter sent a couple men into the village to buy some food and bottled water.  The villagers said that there was poison in the glacier and that it was rotting so that the water from the mountains was deadly.     

NATGEO had hired four helicopters to lift the production crew up to the head of the gorge and the Valley of Flowers.  They were supposed to be hunting for evidence of the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman – monsters were good for ratings.  The next morning, the helicopters arrived and, after loading the gear, whisked them up to the monastery near the border with Tibet.  The ‘copter pilots commented that several of the crates of camera gear were exceedingly heavy.  Carter knew that the crates contained automatic weapons but it was best not to say anything on that subject.  

The Dhauli Ganga river gorge was a raw scar beneath the helicopters.  Fragments of villages clung to the sheer rock walls.  Landslides of yellow and ocher mud colored the ravine.  Glaciers ringed that plateau crouching like white sphinxes under the high peaks.  Nanda Devi, the mountain of the bliss-bestowing goddess, rose like a blue shark’s tooth over the border with Tibet.  

 

2.

Snow dusted the village.  Goat hoofprints tattooed the hillside.  By noon, the sun was bright and the snow gone.

With Enrique, Carter walked through the town.  The disaster in the gorge made the way into the mountains impassable to tourists and so the lanes between the old houses and shops were empty.  A sad-looking woman sat on a stool behind the counter at the Yeti Snack Bar.  Normally, guides gathered there to meet tourists and climbers that they were taking into the hills.  Except for an old man reading a newspaper, there was no one in the place.   

At the monastery, prayer flags slapped against the stucco facade.  The place was like a school but built without windows.  A porch extended from the front of the monastery supported by ox-blood red pillars.  The cornices supporting the roof were also red.  The abbot sat on a wooden bench under the porch smoking a cigarette.  A clinic made from whitewashed concrete blocks was next to the monastery and there was a wood-frame dormitory for the novices built into the side of the hill behind the medical building.  

Between the clinic and dormitory, a basketball hoop mounted atop a metal frame with wheels rested on a slab of concrete.  The novices in their saffron robes were shooting baskets.  Carter heard the sound of the ball bouncing on the concrete or reverberating against the backboard.  He nodded to the old abbot and saw that his head was enveloped in white vapor – it was either his breath freezing in the cold air or smoke from his cigarette.  Above the dormitory, at the crest of steep hill, Carter saw the profile of a stupa, a stack of old adobe bricks supporting an onion dome with a spike on its top.  The stupa looked like a public lavatory in Delhi or the helmet of a German soldier from the Great War.  

Carter and Enrique made their way past the novices playing basketball.  Sloan was seated at a picnic table beside the improvised court.  They shook hands and, then, Sloan led them among a half-dozen houses assembled like lathe and stucco ladders against the steep hillside.  All of the houses were equipped with satellite dishes except the place where Sloan lived.  Carter commented on the fact that Sloan didn’t have the ear of dish on the side of his home.  

Sloan gestured to the spire of Nanda Devi jutting into the sky above the grey, swirling mist lapping at the sheer cliffs that rimmed the valley.  Some tatters of mist clung to the blue blade of the peak.

“The view’s better than TV,” Sloan said.  “It never gets old.  And the reception up here is lousy anyway.”

The house with bright with big windows.  Sloan had a Nordic Track exercise machine facing the picture window displaying the mountain.  His wife looked ancient with leathery skin and dark eyes like obsidian flints.  She served them buttered tea.  Carter couldn’t abide the stuff.  He sniffed at his cup, tasted the tea with the tip of his tongue to be polite and, then, put it aside.

Carter asked what the “package” was like.  

“It doesn’t matter,” Sloan said.  “You’ll never find it.”  He told Carter and Enrique that he had some good pictures at his office down in the village and that, after their visit to the monastery, he would show them the images.  Sloan worked for an NGO, the UNESCO office that administered the Valley of Flowers and Nanda Devi national park.  

“Anyone else showing interest?” Carter asked.

“Not from this side of the peak,” Sloan said.  “If you want to get to Nanda Devi from India, there’s no way up except through the gorge and this village.  So I know the traffic to and from.”

“Well, we know there’s interest on the other side,” Enrique said.

“So I’m told,” Sloan said.  

“We don’t know their imaging capability,” Carter said.  “It’s possible they’ve got eyes on the prize from one of their satellites.”

“I doubt that very much,” Sloan said.

They talked about the original mission.  Sloan wasn’t on the first ascent but he knew the intelligence.  In 1964, the Chinese were testing atomic bombs above the Tibetan plateau in the western Himalaya.  The CIA devised a sensor battery-powered by six small plutonium cores.  The specifications were lost and there was some question whether the batteries ran from plutonium or enriched uranium, but the result was the same: the sensor was loaded with fissile, bomb-quality fuel.  During the ‘64 climbing season, some CIA mountaineers with their Sherpas lugged the sensor up the flank of Nanda Devi.  The idea was to use the device to eavesdrop on the Chinese nuclear tests.  But at 24,000 feet, the expedition encountered bad weather.  The situation became deadly and half of the agents died.  The sensor was abandoned on the upper edge of a glacier, removed from its wooden crate and perched on a metal tripod.  

The next year, Sloan was part of another ascent, tasked with retrieving the sensor.  When they reached the place where the sensor had been abandoned, the terrain was different – huge blocks of ice studded with rock had fallen from the peak.  Searching a mountainside at 6400 meters above sea level is difficult.  Another storm blotted out the expedition.  Sloan was one of the few survivors, although he lost all of the toes on his left foot.  

A couple years later, another nuclear-powered sensor was placed on a nearby peak.  The device stopped working and a team was sent to pull it off the summit.  The sensor was leaking radiation and had eaten out a hollow pit in the ice-cap forty feet deep.  There were signs that the radioactivity was breaking down the granite around the sensor – or, at least, the rock had become brittle due to freeze-thaw cycles.  The device was boring down into the mountain.  The retrieval team wrapped the device in lead-lined blankets and got it off the mountain.  But the price was high – most of the team members succumbed to particularly malignant cancers within the next two decades.

  

“Obviously, if the weapons-grade fuel in the sensor falls into the wrong hands, we will have an incident” Carter said.

“Well, it’s an incident for the next 25,000 years,” Sloan said.

Enrique corrected him: “The half-life for plutonium-238 is about 24,000 years.”

Sloan had been in the village for almost 20 years.  When he retired from the Agency, they posted him to the base of Nanda Devi to keep an eye on things.  

“Sometimes, I don’t believe any of its true,” Sloan said.  “But when I look at my left foot, I can see proof-positive.  It’s real cloak-and-dagger stuff.  Like something you’d read in the Saturday Evening Post.”

Carter didn’t get the reference.  “Saturday Evening Post?”

“It was an old magazine.  Used to publish adventure stories.  I think it folded awhile ago,” Sloan said.

“Famous for its Norman Rockwell covers,” Enrique said.

“Who?” Carter asked.

 

3.

They said goodbye to Sloan’s wife and walked down to the monastery.  The Abbot was still sitting on the porch with his ashtray full of cigarette butts.  Carter noticed that Sloan limped due to the injury to his left foot.

In the monastery, it was dim.  The gilding on the lacquered wood Furious Deities shimmered in candle-light cast by small lamps burning ghee.  Someone was chanting in a wavering voice in the corner of the hall.  Carter saw little urns packed with rice sitting in front of the idols.  Many arms cast shadows on the red and yellow screens behind the figures.  The shadows were those of giant spiders.  

In a small sacristy, the Abbot showed them the relic.  It was a large skull-cap with a furry crown adorned with golden tassels on its brim.  

“So this is supposed to be a Yeti scalp?” Carter asked.

“Indeed,” the Abbot said.

The agreement was that the NATGEO crew could take still pictures of the artifact, but not moving images.  Enrique took his camera from its case and took about fifty photographs of the skull cap from various angles and distances.  

“It would be great to get a tiny sample for DNA testing,” Carter said.

“Forbidden, I’m afraid,” the Abbot said.  He had studied at Oxford and had a British accent.

“No harm in asking,” Carter replied.

“It’s obviously from a Himalayan snow bear,” the Abbot said.  “But there’s no need to slander the faith of the pious.”

“Understood,” Enrique said.

After photographing the shaggy skull-cap, Carter with Enrique and Sloan shook the Abbot’s hand and walked down to the UNESCO office for the National Park.  

“Will there really be a documentary?” Sloan asked.

“Sure,” Enrique said.  “It’s not just a cover.  National Geographic has worked with the Agency for as long as there’s been an Agency.  Hand-in-glove.  We’ll deliver the documentary and get the package off the mountain as well.”

“That’s the mission,” Carter said.  

“Well, when the show gets on satellite dish up here, let me know and I’ll go to the neighbors to have a look-see,” Sloan said.

“We need to have this cover for the mission,” Enrique said.

“Everyone in town knows why you’re here,” Sloan said.  “TV crews don’t arrive in military helicopters.”  

“I questioned that detail myself,” Carter said.  

4.

Stately cedars enclosed the parking lot at the UNESCO office.  On a terrace below the lot, a dense brushy mass of rhododendrons were blossoming, purple froth blurring the tips of the shrubs.  Some dirt-bike trails were cut through the rhododendrons and Carter could hear the chain-saw sound of Vespa motors churning through the undergrowth.  

“A half-dozen Australians are trapped up here,” Sloan said.  “As you know, the roads are out and the lads can’t get down to Delhi.”

“I can hear them zipping around in the woods,” Carter said.

“They’re bored and pretty soon troubles with the local girls will start and, then...” Sloan told him.

“I suppose,” Enrique said.

“It’s a headache,” Sloan replied.

The UNESCO park office was closed.  Sloan had slung a sign across the door that was printed with yellow letters that read: WILL BE BACK AT ------   The sign was made so that a grease-pencil could be used to set a time, but nothing was written in the blank space.

In the office, there was some communication equipment, large photos of the mountain and its glaciers and a relief map on which trekking trails were marked.  Maps and postcards were for sale.  

Sloan led them into a small conference room, excused himself for a minute, and, then, returned with some 1:24,000 topographic maps.  He took some pictures from a file on the table and spread them out on the surface.  

The sensor was a stout tripod supporting a barrel-shaped core something like an aluminum beer-keg.

“That’s the package,” Sloan said.  

The device came to the height of a man’s chest in the black-and-white picture.  In the photograph, Carter saw the fuselage of a smashed plane.  

“What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the shattered aluminum cocoon.  

“I don’t know,” Sloan said.  “It’s illustrative only.”

He showed them pictures taken on the mountain.  They showed icy cliffs and ragged glaciers.  

“It’s not like Everest,” Sloan said.  

Carter and Enrique had both been on Everest.

“Everest is a stroll at high altitude,” Sloan said.  “Nanda Devi is the Matterhorn but three times as high.  It’s all technical.  You sleep on shelves two feet wide.”

“We’re prepared,” Enrique said.

Sloan unfolded the topographic map and showed them the location where the device had been lost.  Carter and Enrique entered the GPS coordinates into their phones.

“Are you reasonably certain as to the site?” Carter asked.

“I lost half my toes up there,” Sloan said.  “You don’t forget after a thing like that.”  

Later that afternoon, Sloan phoned Carter and told him that there was satellite confirmation that the adversary was advancing from the Tibetan side.  He said that pictures showed five two-ton trucks parked along a high pass on the other side of the border.  “There may be two separate parties on the ascent,” Sloan said.  “It looks like you’ve got a reasonable window in the weather.”

“We best be going,” Carter said.

5.

The mountain made weather.  The great blue prism of rock scooped at the jet stream and deflected the icy blast down and across the steep apron of snowfields.  Carter crouched on the arete with a savage wind clawing at his back.  On both sides of him, snow blazed like a torch against the ridge-top.  The vantage overlooked a hollow cirque carved into the side of the mountain, a narrow tilted bowl 150 meters deep chiseled into the peak’s flank.  A climbing party was slowly ascending the steep snowy amphitheater, moving step by step up a 45 degree slope.  Carter estimated the climbing party to be 500 meters away.

Below the arete, on the escarpment opposite the cirque, Carter’s Sherpas were huddled in a rock shelter.  They were about 100 feet below Carter’s position, squatting around the package.  A black body-bag was strapped with bungee cords into a telescoping aluminum toboggan that was now fully extended.  The ridge cast a shadow down the cliff-side and the Sherpas were huddled in bluish darkness.  If the sun had probed their shelter, the edges of the aluminum toboggan would have reflected beams of light and exposed the hiding place.  But the shadows were now long, flooding that side of the mountain with cold, blue-grey darkness.

Carter could see the decoy flag that Enrique had stabbed into the snow.  The climbing team was slowly ascending toward the little orange pennant that hung slack in the center of the snowy amphitheater.  The wind that tormented Carter didn’t penetrate into the cirque and it was still there.  About a hundred yards uphill from the flag, Enrique had collapsed and lay face-down in the snow, arms outstretched ahead of him.  A half-hour earlier he had tried to rise and writhed in the snow, lifting up his buttocks as he flexed his knees, but each of these efforts had failed and now he was motionless.  The night before Enrique told Carter that he felt like he was drowning.  His face was grey.  In his tent, he could not rest on his back because the fluid in his lungs was suffocating him and so he had tried to sleep sitting upright, a space-blanket draped over his shoulders as he coughing for hours head tilted down into his lap.  The dexamethasone hadn’t helped his headache and, when he skidded down the side of the arete to place the decoy flag, dropping through clouds of displaced snow, Carter thought that it was unlikely that he would be able to climb back up to the serrated ridge where he was positioned.  And, indeed, as the climbers inched up the center of the cirque, Enrique lay face-down and motionless on an icy terrace above the flag.  

Carter kept his mittens on his hands as he assembled the AW 50.  He slid the butt-stock into the bolt action firing mechanism.  Then, he rested the muzzle on the bipod spread between two bluish-grey boulders.  The crest of the arete was serrated with places where the knife-edge of rock had fallen away.  Where Carter extended his sniper rifle, there was a breast-high palisade of shattered stone protecting him.  It was enough of a fortification that the mountaineers climbing the snowy canyon below could not see his location.

The wind howled and the rifle trembled on the bipod.  Carter slipped the magazine onto the rifle, hands still mittened.  Then, he tilted the muzzle down toward the climbing party.  Through the telescopic sight, Carter counted five men, all of them roped together and moving slowly, one laborious step at another up the steep slope.  The men wore white Winter combat gear and their eyes were hidden behind opaque black goggles.  The gun was bolt-action with de-icing features and Carter inspected the mechanism.  It looked operable despite the bitter cold.  He peered through the telescope, aiming at the man in the center of the rope-line.  Carter couldn’t manage the trigger wearing his mitten and, so, he slid his hand out of the nylon and cloth glove.  The metal on the gun burned his finger like a flame for a second, but, then, his hand became numb.  

The first and second shots missed.  The climbing party stopped and looked around them.  The report from the gun ricocheted off the rock and ice cliffs and the men below couldn’t determine the source of the sound.  The third shot went through the head of the central climber and he dropped to the side.  The rope tautened and the man above him, as well as the climber below, were yanked off their feet.  The fourth shot took off the head of the lead climber.  The fifth shot was another miss.

Carter put the second five-cartridge magazine into the sniper rifle.  He took a deep breath, held it in his lungs, and shot the last man in the climbing party.  This left two climbers intact, but snared by the rope, their bodies slithering down the slope.  Carter waited for the roped men to stop sliding downhill.  Flat layers of snow surfed down the slope below them.  When their descent had stopped, Carter shot the other two climbers, missing only once in the course of three shots.  

The dead men had been shot through their skulls and, from the arete, the climbing party looked like a necklace strung with bright red rubies thrown down on the glittering white fan of snow.  

Carter slung the rifle still attached to the bipod over his shoulder and picked his way between slabs of fallen rock down the steep wall of the ridge.  When he reached the rock shelter, one of the Sherpas pointed to his right hand.  It was bare.  Carter had left his mitten at the top of the arete.  The lead Sherpa shook his head sadly.  Carter turned to scale the ridge, but the Sherpa tapped him on his shoulder and pointed to the hollow in the hillside.  Carter unzipped his coat and put his numb right-hand in his armpit.  The Sherpa climbed up to the spine of serrated boulders, found the mitten, and, then, skidded back down to where the others were waiting with the package.

6.

The day before, the team had located the package in a glistening ice alcove at the lower edge of a hanging glacier.  The snowfield above clung to an almost vertical pinnacle of blue rock, but at its base the ice was honeycombed with small grottos and a lattice of deep fissures.  The sensor was half-crushed at the base of a wet hollow cistern.  Obviously, radiation had melted an abscess into the glacier around the foreign object embedded in its icy depths.  

Carter was suffering from altitude sickness and had a blinding headache so some of the details of the find were unclear to him.  The sensor’s tripod was shattered into pieces but its metal staves were thrust into the ice near the device like grave-markers.  It seemed to Carter that there was some sort of fur tangled around the tripod’s broken legs.  He wondered if a marmoset or snow fox had been killed by the radiation.  There was also a reddish-brown wreath of fur garlanding the barrel full of plutonium battery cells.

There was no need to retrieve the tripod legs and so they were left staked into the ice.  The Sherpas bundled the keg-shaped sensor into a body-bag lined with a light sheet of woven chain-mail lead.  Then, they extended the aluminum toboggan and strapped the black bag into the sled’s shallow trough.  

The surveillance satellite sent a text-message to Carter’s cell-phone.  The message reported that a team of climbers, probably from the Chinese army, was ascending the mountain and were above the ice-fall at about 22,000 feet.  Carter responded that he would neutralize the Chinese climbers.  An hour later, there was another message: a third team was below at 14,000 feet, a vertical half-mile beneath the ice-fall.  These climbers had not come from the Tibetan side of the mountain and, it was thought, that they were Iranian special forces.  

“We will try to avoid them,” Carter texted to his handlers.   

7.

By the time, they reached the ice-fall, the moon was shining in the blue sky above the spike of the mountain.  It had been a sunny day and, no doubt, the maze of broken ice was slippery and unstable.  Carter said that they would camp on a rib of rock above the ice-fall and make their way through the labyrinth the next morning, just before dawn, when the badlands of ice were frozen solid.  

He had a bad night in his tent.  He now knew what Enrique had been suffering before he died.  When Carter tried to rest on his shoulders, his throat filled with fluid and he coughed until he vomited.  So he had to sit upright in the tent, feverish and shivering in his sleeping bag.  The night seemed endless and, when he crawled outside to vomit, the mass of the mountain loomed over him, a great black pier thrust out into a sea of innumerable stars.  He didn’t think that he slept but must have – he opened his eyes and saw a faint pinkish light reflected down into his tent.  Creeping through the flap, he saw the summit shining rose-red in the light of dawn.

“We’ll leave the camp behind,” Carter said.  “Either we get down the mountain to a better elevation or we all die up here.”  The Sherpas said that they agreed with him, but they silently struck camp anyway, loading the gear into their backpacks.  Then, the men roped themselves together and gingerly walked down the slope in the grey shadow of the mountain.  

8.

On the ascent through the ice-fall a couple days earlier, they had left some orange flags tacked to cairns of rock.  At first, they couldn’t find the markers, but, then, one of the Sherpas sighted a flag amidst the crumbling pillars of ice and they went that way.  Along with some provisions, there were a couple of aluminum ladders for crossing ravines.  The seracs were blue in the half-light, crowding around the slits in the ice through which they made their way.

Then, the sun was overhead.  The ice-fall creaked like a sail boat under heavy wind.  They heard the ice crumbling and drizzling down onto the glacier with a sound like breaking glass.  In the blue gorges, the ice sang out with sharp cracks and guttural groans.  Rivulets of bright water slid down grooves in the glacier.

They moved in single-file through a slot canyon under a pale ribbon of overhead ice-bridge.  Carter could see that they were near the base of the ice-fall.  A hundred meters below, the obelisks and spikes of ice were sculpted to strange shapes, clusters of glazed pinnacles that looked like monks or half transparent women.  Beyond, the glacier extended its paws like a crouching lion, rounded hillocks with talons of ice at their base  were brown and grey with matted debris. Braided streams glinted in the bright sunlight, silver ropes unraveling across the skirt of gravel descending to the valley below.

On the terrace above the amphitheater of eroded seracs, the twisting trench by which they were descending was split cross-wise by a deep crevasse.  The fissure seemed bottomless with glistening sides constricting over black, wet cavities in the ice.  The Sherpas extended the ladder over the crevasse and two of them crawled on hands and knees over the metal bridge.  It was too dangerous to remain roped together and so they detached themselves from the nylon line.  Carter knelt to cross the ladder.  It flexed under him and his right hand, ruined by frost bite, couldn’t take hold of the rail.  He inched forward.  Somewhere, in the ice gorges above them, there was the rattle of an avalanche, a spitting sound of ice popping apart.  Carter looked to his side and saw the Sherpa kneeling along the edge of the fissure suddenly billowing blood.  The man pitched into the crevasse and the package on its toboggan slithered sideways, tilting into the ravine.  A bullet hit the Sherpa across from Carter, bent forward to hold the ladder in place.  The man recoiled backward and the aluminum span tilted, the forward edge slipping down the side of the crevasse where it jammed into a crack in the ice.  For a moment, Carter clung to the ladder rail and rungs but, then, he fell, slamming his head against the sheer side of the fissure.  

The ladder was a little above him, speared into the side of the ravine.  Carter had fallen onto a spiky ledge and, when he breathed, it seemed that his ribs were broken.  The gunfire continued in spurts.  Another Sherpa fell into the pit, swimming downward through the blue shadows and, then, vanishing into a keyhole-shaped aperture below.  Carter looked  along the slit in the ice and saw the package, like a black teardrop hanging in a chimney of ice.  Something yielded, and the body bag dropped out of sight.

A head appeared in the ribbon of blue above.  Then, bullets splashed off the side of the crevasse.  Ice shrapnel burst around him.   Carter heard voices.  Above a man leaned forward to seize the upper end of the ladder but he couldn’t reach it.  Someone must have gripped the man by the ankles because half of his body hung over the fissure.  Still, he couldn’t reach the ladder.     

For a long time, voices called across the top of the crevasse.  Then, it was silent.

9.

Every instinct told Carter to pull himself up from the ravine using the ladder.  But when he rose from his ledge and reached for the aluminum rail, the ladder dislodged and dropped through his damaged right hand, plunging down into the narrow oubliette below him.  Carter nudged the ladder with his boot.  It seemed steady, speared into another ice-shelf below him.  There was nothing to do but crawl down the rungs of the ladder, deeper into the heart of the glacier.

It was horror to climb down away from the narrow band of light shining above.  Carter felt the horror in his belly and lungs and paused to vomit.  At the bottom of the ladder, he heard water rushing below.  He pulled the ladder down past his body and found a sticking point in the wall of the chimney and climbed deeper into the ice.  

The bottom of the hole was an awful place, a glassy corkscrew that twisted down into the darkness.  Carter knew that if he wormed his way down into that fistula in the ice he would not be able to climb back up again.  For a while, he wept and cursed.  Then, he lowered himself down into the twisting hole, slid for a dozen feet or so, and, then, dropped into a chamber.  Dim blue light filled the room.  Water was flowing in a trough of ice, cascading down into a large space.  

Carter waded in the stream, numbed by its hip-deep cold water.  The larger room was wet with dark puddles and big pillars of ice like piers supporting the glacier above.  Carter followed the stream, slipping and sliding downward.  In several places, the surge of water filled the tunnel.  At the first siphon, Carter paused wondering how he could go forward since the entire bore hole was throbbing with water.  The current made up his mind for him, knocking him off his feet.  He went under the frigid water, flailed at the hard ice ceiling over head and, then, felt his hands flapping in the air.  The siphon passed into a hollow space that was brighter.  Above, Carter saw translucent panes of ice, shimmering with veils of falling water.  A few feet downhill, the tunnel expanded into a narrow canyon at the foot of the glacier where water toppled in cascades down to a notch opening onto the gravel-strewn plain.  Carter came out of the darkness.  Hypothermia dazed him and he kept falling down, tripped by small rocks lying next to the stream bed.  Each time he fell, Carter thought that he should rest for a while and, even close his eyes, but something nudged him upright and he continued to stagger downhill on a tongue of pebbles between two ribbons of silvery, plunging water.  

10.

He didn’t remember much of the descent.

For a time, Carter waded through flowers, hip deep in blossoms that seemed preternaturally bright and vivid.  

At the edge of a flowering wall of rhododendron, the purple foam of blossoms parted.  Carter saw a red-haired Australian boy with freckles on a Vespa.  The boy had a mountain girl riding behind him on the motor-bike.  Carter saw her dark eyes and her arms wrapped around the young man’s belly.

He tried to smile reassuringly at them, but his face seemed all hardened, crusty and cracked.  Carter raised his right hand.  It was black and shaggy with blisters.  The boy glared at him with horror and the girl cried out.

Later, Carter lay bathed and perfumed across the bier of a hospital bed.  His right hand was heavily bandaged.  

Sloan came to see him.  

The room smelled of carbolic acid.  When the nurse had left, Sloan squinted at him and said: “ Please don’t tell me that you left six batteries of plutonium at the headwaters of the Ganges River.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Carter said.

“C’est la guerre,” Sloan remarked.

“What is that?” Carter asked.

“Shit happens,” Sloan said.

11.

Later, Carter hobbled around the village.  Some tourists had been able to ascend the canyon brought up from the plains by high-clearance four-wheel drive jeeps.

Carter sat in the Yeti Snack Bar.  He held his Taj Mahal beer in his left hand.  Most of the fingers on his trigger-hand had been amputated.  

A young Japanese man with his girlfriend sat at a table in the middle of the room.  Both of the tourists wore blue surgical masks and they were paging through a guide-book.  Beyond the open door to the café, Carter saw Nanda Devi, a great blue throne where purplish storms were seated in all their glory.

Sloan came into the Yeti Snack Bar, nodded to the proprietor and ordered a beer.

Carter said that, when they found the sensor, it was all wreathed in strands and tangles of reddish brown fur.  

“It was the exact color of that skull-cap made from the scalp of the Abominable Snow Man up at the monastery,” Carter said.

“Now that’s a real story,” Sloan replied.  “That’s a story worthy of Saturday Evening Post.”

Frodo's Death

 

Frodo was sick.  Frodo was dying.  

For a week, the dog watched Gander.  Frodo’s eyes were big and wet.  Sometimes, he whimpered.  At night, the dog was restless and Gander heard him whining when he dragged himself from place to place.  He lay on his belly on the hardwood floor for a while and, then, rolled onto his side.  Then, he staggered over to the carpet and rested there.  Frodo was too stiff to climb up on the couch where he used to sleep.  Gander didn’t know how he could help the sick dog.  

Gander wasn’t well himself.  His joints ached and he couldn’t walk very well.  He never imagined that he would grow to be so old.  His wife was gone and most of his friends and, now, his dog was dying.  Vials and bottles of medicine stood by Gander’s bedside like pieces battling one another on a diabolical chess board.  

In the morning, Gander found the old dog lying on his side next to his steel water bowl.  The dog’s tongue was hanging from between his teeth but the animal was still breathing.  

Gander remembered when Frodo was a puppy.  He was a mischievous rascal always leaping here and there with boundless energy.  Gander recalled throwing a stick in his backyard for the puppy to retrieve.  Frodo was tireless, charging out to the place under the old oak tree where the stick had fallen.  Each time, he seized the stick in his mouth and pranced back to Gander tail wagging and bright-eyed with joy.  How long had they played in that way?  Gander wasn’t sure any more but he hoped it had been at least an hour or, even, two.    

Gander rolled the old dog onto a blanket and, then, called his neighbor whom he saw working with a rake in his side-yard.  He neighbor shook his head sadly when he saw the stricken dog.  “He was a very good dog,” Gander’s neighbor said.  The two men hauled the inert dog to Gander’s van and they carefully set the animal in the back of the vehicle.  Frodo opened his eyes for a moment when Gander slipped the leash around his neck and tried to wag his tail, but it only twitched a little.

He was alone when he came back from the vet’s office.  If he had been younger, Gander would have brought the dog home and buried him under the old oak tree.  But he was too feeble to accomplish this.  Gander carried Frodo’s leash and hung it around the bedpost next to the chess pieces of painkillers and heart and gut medication.  

Gander couldn’t fall asleep.  He thought about Frodo.  He knew that it was blasphemous to speculate about such a thing, but he wondered if Frodo was in heaven.  Gander imagined the little brown dog dancing back and forth under the oak tree, tail wagging, waiting for the stick to drop down between his front paws.  He supposed that if the dog were in heaven Frodo would be playing ‘fetch’ in some celestial backyard.  But there was something wrong with this picture.  As he thought about the little dog carrying the stick in his jaws, Gander knew that someone was missing.  Dogs are companion-animals and they are unhappy without human friendship.  

Gander wondered whether you are given a healthy, pain-free body in heaven.  He had heard something about the resurrection of the body and supposed if that idea meant anything, Frodo would be romping around in heaven’s backyard with all the vigor and spirit of a puppy.  

He slept for a few hours and rose before dawn.  Gander surveyed the pills and vials next to his pillow.  Death had made a move at midnight and, now, it looked like checkmate.  

Gander carried the bottles of pills into the bathroom and ran the faucet.  He knew his next move.  After that, it was all a mystery. 

Fun with a Pit Bull

 

They tell this story in small-town taverns down along the Iowa border.  Here’d how it goes:

Ginger came back from Afghanistan pretty fucked-up.  After getting free from the Marine corps, Ginger declared that he was trans and became a woman.  (Some people said that the VA paid for the surgery.)  Ginger had been an unsightly burly dude with a soft, smooth face and didn’t look much better as a woman.  She kept an ornery pit-bull also named Ginger.  When Ginger strolled around town, the dog was with her – people were prone to making cruel remarks but not when the dog was at her heel.  She carried a big walking stick that she used to beat her dog off other pooches that the bitch was prone to attack.

One day, Ginger came into the local tap with her fat, grumpy dog on a leash beside her.  A guy from the City was visiting a cousin in town and had bellied up to the bar.  He had a big mouth and said: “If I had a dog that ugly, I’d shave his ass and teach him to walk backward.”  

“Excuse me,” Ginger said.  People were always surprised that her voice was so low.

“No offense,” the city guy said.  “Nice dog.  If I hurt your feelings, you could crack me ten times over the head with your walking stick.  But, then, you’d have to give me your dog free and clear.”

“Is that a joke?” Ginger asked.

“No, I’m serious,” the city guy replied.  He took a deep drink from his mug of beer.

“Well, maybe, we can do business,” Ginger said.  “Let me pop you over the head with my walking stick and if you can stand five blows, I’ll give you the dog right here and now.”

“Five knocks to the head,” the city dweller said.  “I don’t know.”

“Well, how about three?”

The city fellow was pretty drunk and not feeling any pain as the saying goes.  

“Three and it’s a deal,” Ginger replied.

“You’re making a promise to me?” the city-dweller said.

“Sure, but if you think this is too shady, we can have a contract drawn up.”

Ginger saw that a paralegal who worked at the law firm in town was sitting at the end of bar.

Ginger and the city guy went to the paralegal and he wrote up an agreement on a napkin.

The writing was as follows:

This note provides that the undersigned will give her dog, Ginger, to the bearer on the condition that the bearer agrees to pay for the dog by accepting three strokes from the walking stick that the undersigned is even now wielding.

Ginger dated the napkin and signed it.  Then, she handed the napkin to the city dweller.  His hand trembled a little when he took the napkin and perused it.  “So your name is Ginger too?” the man from the Metro asked.  “That it is,” Ginger said.  “Nice to make your acquaintance,” the city fellow said.  They shook hands.

Ginger bought the man another beer and they drank together.

“Well, I guess we should get to work,” Ginger said.

She told the man to lay across a table.  “I’m gonna belt you on the butt,” Ginger said.  “If I clubbed you over the head, I’d bust your skull and, then, we’d both be in trouble.”

“At your service,” the man from the City said.  He leaned over the table.

Ginger wound up like a major-league pitcher and slammed the stick against the man’s hind parts.  He let out a yelp and said: “That’ll leave a mark for sure.”

He stood up and ordered a round for the two of them.  When they finished the beer, the man said: “Please sir, can I have another?”

“Sir?” Ginger said.

“No offense meant,” the man said.

“No offense taken,” Ginger replied.

She swung the walking stick behind her head like Tiger Wood teeing off and, then, smashed it into the city man’s rear-end.

He moaned and said: “That put a real dent in me.”

The pit bull was alarmed and, tilting her snout to the air, howled mournfully.

Ginger ordered another round.  “Let’s get this over with,” the city dweller said.

“No,” Ginger replied.  “That last stroke has made me powerfully thirsty.  I need another beer.”

They drank their beer.  The city man thought that the dog was as good as his.  He stooped over to scratch the dog on her chin.  She nipped at his fingers.

“Let’s do it,” the man from the metro said.

“I don’t think so,” Ginger replied.  “This whole thing is too upsetting to me.  I’m not going to administer the third stroke.”

“But that’s a breach of contact,” the city dweller said.

He put the napkin on the table in front of the paralegal.  “It says that you get the dog if Ginger hits you three times with her stick,” paralegal said.  “But I don’t see anything that requires her to administer the stroke.”

And, so, if I have this correctly, the man from the Metro is still waiting for the third blow from the stick and his pit bull. 

After Hebel

  

Yellowjacket Trestle

 

The day was warm, but aerated with cooling breezes. I parked my car downtown near the grain elevators on the river and jogged along the trail built atop the old railroad right-of-way.  When the Milwaukee Road abandoned its tracks, the city reclaimed the easement, pulled up the rails and cross-ties, and laid an asphalt path along the crest of the embankment.  The trail snaked through town, elevated as high as a house, and, on a weekend morning in nice weather, it was crowded: people walked their dogs and joggers loped along the top of the embankment and there were many bicyclists, some of them families with small helmeted children behind their parents peddling earnestly on bikes with trainer wheels.  But the crowd thinned at the outskirts of town where the trail curved among old warehouses and dusty-looking vacant lots full of broken-up concrete and salvage metal, and, then, the long, narrow grade climbed out of the river valley occupied by our city and ran above fields of corn superintended by small farms in the green hollows of the hills.  My plan was to run to the Yellowjacket Trestle, hydrate and rest for a half-hour, and, then, jog the four miles back to my car. 

The trestle cast a short shadow in the midday sun.  The air was resinous with pine-scent.  Under the trestle, muck glinted, a slop of shallow wetlands between low tufts of prairie grass.  In the jogging trail’s quarter century, a copse of small, wiry-looking trees had grown up on the steep slopes of the railroad bed at both ends of the trestle.  On the far side of the span, I knew there was a bench engraved with the name of a deceased sponsor whose generosity supported the maintenance of the trail.  An old man wearing a baseball cap was sitting on the bench with a small terrier sleeping between his feet.  When I sat down, the terrier startled a little, opened one eye to look at me, and, then, fell back asleep. 

I took out my water-bottle and drank.  The old man mentioned something about the fine weather.  He said that he often walked to this place from his acreage a half-mile away.  He asked me if I knew why the bridge over the swamp-land was called the “Yellowjacket Trestle”?  I didn’t know.  “When they put up the trestle, now 150 years ago, they used pine wood that wasn’t properly cured,” he said. “The sap in the wood was still sweet and bees and wasps and yellowjackets smelled it.  The wasps had nests under the bridge.  People said that you’d get stung if you walked on the trestle.  I don’t know if that was true – probably, it was just adults trying to keep kids from playing up here.”  

The old man said that the trestle had figured in a little bit of history still remembered out in the country.  He told me that he heard the story from his great-grandpa who learned it from his father.

“It was about eight days after the skirmish up at Northfield that survivors from Jesse James’ gang, all battered and bleeding, passed through these parts.  In 1876, the seventy miles between here and the bank at Northfield was what they called ‘Big Woods’ –that is, swamps and forests that had never been cut for timber, a thousand little lakes in the wetlands cupped in ridges of gravel left by the ancient glaciers.  There weren’t but a few trails passing through this wilderness and it was lonely out here, empty except for a few Indians run away from reservations, hermits and old trappers running fur-lines, a half-dozen sawmills scattered along creeks in the woods.  It had taken the outlaws a week or more to find their way west through the wilderness and some of them ended-up right here, camped under the Yellowjacket trestle.”

“The weather, folks recall, was wet and rainy, a dismal cold September.  When the mail train came along these tracks, someone noticed smoke sifting up between the sleepers on the trestle.  They looked down below and saw a campfire and some men huddled there, miserable in the drizzle, but with fine-looking ponies.  It was pretty clear that these were the desperadoes who had robbed the Northfield Bank and left people dead and dying in that town and, so, when the train reached the depot, the cry was sounded and everyone took up arms to hunt for the outlaws.”

“My great-grandpa Lars was just a kid then, about 15, but he loaded up a fowling gun with buckshot and went with his uncle Olaf out to one of the bridges a couple miles from town.  The bridge was on the old Madelia road where the way dipped down into a deep ravine and spanned a fast-flowing creek that had its headwaters in a slough up on the prairie.  Olaf had been deputized to guard the bridge and keep the outlaws from sneaking away on that road.”

“It was cold and rainy.  The two men had a mule and buckboard and they had pitched a canvas lean-to off the side of the wagon.  Nothing much happened.  Some swallows twittered in holes pecked in a mud cliff above the creek and a couple deer crossed the ruts of the road where there was a meadow  between the bluffs along the road.  Olaf had a jug and was drinking.  He sang a hymn that he said was stuck in his head.  Lars thought he was singing loudly to warn any brigands nearby that they should avoid the bridge in the ravine where they were posted.”

“Twilight was grey and misty.  Olaf said that the corn likker in the jug had twisted up his guts a little.  He told Lars that he had to unburden himself from a meat-pie that he had eaten earlier in the day.  ‘I’m going down there,’ he said, pointing to a willow garden on the bank of the creek.  Olaf asked if Lars had a handkerchief on him.  Lars said that he did: ‘But why do you want to take that?’  Olaf said that he didn’t want to wipe his ass with leaves and twigs.  ‘Just gimme the handkerchief,’ Olaf demanded.  ‘I’ll see to it that you get another.’” 

“My great-great grandpa reluctantly handed the linen to Olaf.  Olaf grinned at him and said that he should hold the fort and, then, he slipped away into the brush growing up on the bank below the bridge.”

“So, what do you think happened?  After a couple minutes, Lars heard a horse whinny up the road and, then, he saw two men appear on the lane, shadowy in the mist and gloaming.  The men were on foot, leading their ponies, and one of them was limping a little.  Lars shouted out: ‘Who goes there?’  He put a finger between his lips and whistled loudly.  But Olaf, hidden in the scrub-brush, didn’t answer.”

“The bandits sauntered up to Lars, greeting him with a cheerful ‘Good evening!’  They were big rough-looking fellows.  Their ponies seemed footsore and frightened.  Lars saw the whites of the horses’ eyes.  It was probably for the best that Lars didn’t have the presence of mind to reach for his old fowling piece.  The two men tapped the brim of their hats to salute him.  One of them said: ‘Now, sonny, you don’t want to be making trouble for us.’  Lars nodded his head.  ‘Just let us get down the road a couple miles or so,’ the other man said.  He had an accent like the old rebel soldiers that Lars had met in town a couple times.  ‘We’ll just get on down the road,’ the bandit said, “then, you can go back to town and tell everyone how you tried to stop us but we was just too ornery and mean.’  Lars didn’t have anything to say.  Olaf was nowhere to be seen.”

“The two men led their ponies across the bridge, then, walked to the top of the hill where they mounted and rode away.  A couple minutes later, Olaf stumbled up out of the brush.   ‘I feel much better,’ he told Lars.  His nephew said that he thought the outlaws had just crossed the bridge and were riding away down the Madelia road.  ‘Did you try to stop them?’  Lars said: ‘They come up upon me real stealthy and I didn’t have time to do anything.’   Lars pointed up the road.  ‘I shouted and whistled for you,’ Lars said.  ‘Didn’t hear nothing at all,’ Olaf replied.  ‘I should have tried to stop them,’ Lars said.  ‘Well, there was two of them,’ Olaf said.  ‘You were outnumbered.’  He shrugged his shoulders.”

“Olaf said that there was nothing they could do now and it would be best to take the wagon back into town and raise up a posse.  On the way back to town, they passed under a low-hanging branch and

Olaf’s hat was knocked off.  Wet leaves dowsed his forehead.  Olaf took a handkerchief out of his pant’s pocket and dabbed at his forehead.  Lars asked him if this was his handkerchief.  ‘Nope,’ Olaf said, ‘that got pretty much soiled down in the bushes.’ 

“Lars said: ‘I thought you told me you needed my handkerchief for your business.’  

“ ‘That’s right,’ Olaf said, ‘but I didn’t never tell you I didn’t have one of my own.’”

The old man nudged his terrier with his tennis shoe.  

“So that’s my story,” he said.  

I thanked him.  The angle of sun had changed slightly and I saw the stark skeletal shadow of the Yellowjacket trestle cast against peat-brown pools of water in the old swamp.