by Mike Bond
“Shoulda turned back.” Paul's voice was hoarse.
“Too scared.” He watched the river flexing her sinews like a cold black panther. “She had me.”
“Kali Gandaki.” Paul spit into the river. “Mother of the Ganges. You're nuts – you know that, Cohen? Why out-macho Stihl?”
His own voice sounded faraway, a boy's or an old man's. “Why didn't she take me?”
Paul put a hand on his shoulder and boosted himself up. “Cause she didn't want you, right then.”
“For a moment I stopped caring – almost let go. Something held.”
“The body loves to live.” Paul reached down. “C'mon, you been hit. Walk it off.”
Cohen stood, bare toes over the edge. He turned to smile at Paul's back-tilted features, his warlike blade of a nose, high-boned ebony cheeks, his classic Greek head on its column of muscled neck. “We gotta cool Stihl off.”
“Crossed my mind to kill him, right then.”
“He must sense that.” Cohen dragged his gaze from the river. “Too much bread.”
Paul leaned out over the edge to massage his calves. “Keeps us in Nepal.”
“We gotta get tough.”
“He's unreachable, man. It's insane, this rush upriver to Mustang. We're letting him push us.” Paul thumbed mud from between his toes. “Ever since Katmandu he's been wired, every night hustling to get a few kliks further, hardassing the porters, while they got eighty pounds and he's got nothing.”
“Just his silly cameras.”
“That's his world, those kinda people. Nepal ain't real till it's plastic – a transparency to view on the idiot box while you eat ice cream.”
“You know how long since we've had ice cream?”
“Two years.”
“I've never missed it. Not one iota of that world.” Cohen snickered. “Maybe we just can't tolerate working for anyone else.”
“This ain't work.” With one toe Paul nudged a rock off the edge. Spinning wildly it clacked off the cliff and spumed into the river. “They're ugly people, Stihl and Eliott. No joy.”
“So we should feel sorry for them? We can't lead them to Nirvana, only to Mustang and back. Then they'll take their plastic Nepal back to the States.”
The slit of light atop the steepled canyon walls had brightened; rain now softly stippled the slaty, rushing river. Cohen bent to rub mud from his bare arms and legs onto his soaked T-shirt and cutoff jeans, took his glasses from a pocket, tried to clean them on his shirt, pocketed them again. He took a deep breath, forcing a grin at the pain, climbed the trail a hundred feet or so until it widened toward the first switchback up the canyon wall.
Rumbling pewter clouds ruptured against the canyon rims; a spear of sunlight struck the river, bleeding it golden, its boulders black and shiny. I'm still here, he wondered. You're still here too, Kali. As if nothing's changed. He smiled down at the river. I'm always feeling different but nothing ever changes.
He returned to help Paul hold the hawsers as Alex crawled down the far side of the bridge and pulled himself toward its sagging center. Without the wind and heavy rain Alex crossed easily, climbed up beside them on the trail, shook the rain from his hair, and stood. “I don't believe you're still alive, asshole.”
Cohen grinned. “I…”
“Don't say it.” Alex grabbed him by both biceps as if he were a child. “Don't make no excuses – nothin.” He shoved him against the canyon wall and stepped past. “Let's go.”
Cohen felt his face redden. “And leave them?”
“I don't give a sweet fuck.” Alex turned on him. “Don't ever do that again – let him bait you like that. The little cocksucker.”
Cohen tried to shake off his embarrassment. “Look, it's my life – I know what…”
“A sweet fuck it's your life! We're in this, too – we're responsible, too, for getting that little cocksucker to Mustang and back – we're getting paid, too, just like you – we're the ones'd have to search that frigid fucking river for a week for your lousy waterlogged body – so don't tell me it's your life!” He scowled across the river. “We wait for them in Bagling. If Stihl wants us to guide him there'll be no more pushing against time.”
Cohen smiled at the hairs plastered to Alex's muddy shins. “Let's wait for them here? And tonight set them straight in Bagling?”
Paul turned from picking at his scraped forearms. “This's he-man shit. I got no use for it.”
Cohen stared tiredly at the roiling current. “It isn't like we expected. Stihl and Eliott are even bigger assholes than we figured. How come there's so many more assholes than people in the world? It should be one for one.”
“They got some fear,” Alex grinned. “Something's pushing them.”
“Fear? Culture shock.”
“So we leave them.”
“And the money?” Cohen nodded at the far side, where Stihl was hesitantly descending the becalmed bridge. “How do we stay in Nepal without money? What about next year, Macha Pucchare, all that?”
“I still don't understand,” Alex said. “Why pay us so much to guide them to Mustang?”
“The other people he had first must've really laid it on him, expenses and all. So when they couldn't make it, he turned to us, or rather the Embassy turned him on to us, he says, and now here we are. Escorting a dipshit to Mustang.” Cohen made a disgusted sound in his throat. “For the bread, how can we kvetch?”
Stihl reached them, shivering, shinnied gingerly up on the trail and squeezed back against the cliff. “You should've waited, Sam. I didn't realize – I thought…”
“Don't think, you'll hurt the team.” Cohen spat into the river. “That's what my old high school coach used to say.”
Alex took up a rock and began to polish it with his hands. “You didn't think nothing, Stihl. Because you're a nothing and nothings don't think. But you push us once more and I throw you in the river.”
Stihl watched Cohen. “It must've been terrible – that rain, wind…Why didn't you turn back?”
“We're reassessing our role, Clem, whether we want to work for you any longer.”
Stihl shrugged and beckoned across the river to Eliott. “Whatever. You realize, though, I can't afford to pay you anything if we stop now?”
“Clem,” Paul interjected, “why all this hurry?”
He faced each of them in turn. Like a spider, Cohen thought, with three flies in his web. Stihl smiled. “You know we've got to reach Changtshang before the river rises. After that we cruise. All downhill.”
“Uphill,” Alex corrected.
“Metaphorically.”
“Goteen says the bridge is out at Changtshang,” Cohen said. “We'll have to wade across at Bagling.”
Stihl rubbed his palms together, started to stand, glanced over the edge, and sat again. “I know you boys've been stuck here in Nepal a long time, and the world's gone on without you. Why shouldn't I come here doing articles, travel stories, about a trip to Mustang? It's way back against the Tibetan border and nobody's been there. The Himalayas have always been remote and mysterious for Americans, for all westerners. Where there's mystery there's money. Good money. And I'm paying you more than fairly.”
“Yeah,” Alex grunted. “And where there's Mustang there's the CIA training Tibetan guerrillas, the Khambas – where there's mystery there's problems.”
Stihl grinned. “Are you telling me that you, an American, a Vietnam vet, a former All Conference wide receiver, a mountain climber, are afraid of a little danger?”
Alex's nostrils widened. Cohen put a hand on his arm. Do I let it fall apart here? Shit no, I need the bread. “Let's work it out tonight,” he smiled. “In Bagling.”
Stihl returned his smile. “You said this morning we might reach Kagbeni by dark. So why stop at Bagling?” He stood carefully, his back against the cliff, patted Cohen's shoulder. “Think it over, huh?”
“Sure, Clem, sure.” Cohen turned to watch the porters padding across the bridge. I think with my body, Stihl, not with
my head. I'm not you, couldn't be. The body's free and chooses quickly, fears death and injury, but only at the moment. It doesn't fear consequences. He stretched his bruised chest muscles. Then why do I do this, when something warns me not to? Been around you too long, Stihl, your white man ways. Contagious.
When the porters, Goteen, and Eliott had crossed, Cohen led them quickly up the steep, switchbacked trail toward the gap of light above the canyon walls. They broke over the rim into sunlight and the sight of terraced green hills stepping northward up to tawny ridgetop yak pastures under the ice-ribbed Himalayan wall.
AT NOON they descended to the disheveled outskirts of Bagling, sunbeams plunging down the canyon walls to enflame puddles in cobbled courtyards and raise steam from dungbrick walls and soggy thatch. A cock crowed warning and children pattered up to them with dark, unreadable eyes. Goteen joined them silently in the village square. “Daju,” Cohen said, “Older Brother, the river rises.”
“Stihl wishes to cross?”
Cohen peered across the river. “You have waded here?”
“Not in spring snowmelt. Once, there was a bridge.”
“What's he say?” Stihl interjected.
“That it may be impossible to wade.”
Stihl shifted ground, lug soles sucking mud. “This's the last bad crossing until Tshele, right? Let's try. Before it's too late.”
“The porters're tired,” Cohen said. “And hungry.”
Stihl's blue eyes were unshifting, pleasant. “Afraid to cross?”
Cohen snickered. “Of course. Someone could drown, a porter with a load.”
“The water's rising, Sam. You want we sit here a week?”
“In Nepal,” Alex said, “you respond to circumstances. You don't dominate them.”
“That's Buddhist bullshit,” Stihl called over his shoulder as he clumped down the path to the gravel bar at the river edge.
“If we go,” Goteen said, “it should be quickly.”
“Wha'd'e say?” Eliott tugged Cohen's elbow.
Cohen translated, watching sunlit mist shift before the now-shadowed huts of Changtshang under the opposite canyon wall. He walked down the path and across the damp, clacking gravel into the river, his feet and ankles numbing at once, stones shifting under his toes. Again Stihl's challenging me, forcing me to choose. Why? Does he hate me? Because I'm free and he's chained? What's he chained by? Water's cold. If we're crossing, better be soon.
Paul grabbed his shoulder, leaned toward him, shouting, Cohen hearing only “too deep.”
Downstream the river curved eastward, to their left. “It'll carry us over,” Cohen yelled. Paul grinned, his body steely beneath the drenched blue T-shirt, his skin coal-colored with wetness and cold. He dove and the current yanked him downriver, his head sliding along its dark surface, arms sparkling as they thrashed him toward the far canyon wall.
When Paul reached the opposite bank Cohen retreated to the gravel bar and took a coil of nylon cord and three sections of yellow climbing rope from a porter's load. He tied them together and looped them over one shoulder, found a block of waterlogged bough in the shallows and waded back into the river.
Paul had returned upstream to chest depth. Cohen tied the end of the nylon cord round the block and, holding the coil loosely in his left hand, threw the block across the center of the river, above Paul. The cord drifted down and Paul grabbed it, pulling it in as Cohen paid it out. Paul climbed the far bank and tied the rope to a tree. Cohen re-crossed the gravel bar and drew the rope tight around another tree.
Alex crossed first, hand over hand along the rope, then Stihl and Eliott. The porters looped their tumplines across one shoulder and went over one by one. Cohen untied the rope and held it loosely under his arms, waded the river to the deep channel and dove in, Alex and Paul pulling him across.
Changtshang had a defeated, resentful air. Women crouched silent in doorways; yellow pai dogs hunched like hyenas down rubbled alleys. Tibetan ponies, their red-haltered heads drooping with exhaustion, clustered in a train under a dead banyan in the village square, sinewy dark men with long sabers and black braids checking their riggings and hooves.
Stihl and Eliott stood to one side talking with two Tibetans from the pony train. “Sam!” Stihl called, beckoning.
Cohen bent to watch another Tibetan tighten a girth under a pony's belly. The pony's hair was soggy and white with sweat. “Kata janahuncha?” he asked the Tibetan – where you going?
The Tibetan eyed him under the pony's belly. “Mustang.”
“Sam!” Stihl yelled.
“What you carrying?” Cohen said to the Tibetan.
“Food for my people.” The Tibetan stood, the pony's flank shifting against Cohen. “Why care, white man?”
“I am a curious white man.” Cohen crossed to where Stihl and Eliott stood with the two Tibetans. “You're suddenly chummy with the natives.”
“Hey, these two speak some English.” Stihl waved his hand to include the two short, wiry men at his side. “They crossed earlier.” He shouldered Cohen slightly, lowered his voice. “They say there's robbers up ahead, invited us to join them.”
Cohen snickered. “There's no robbers on the Kali Gandaki.”
“They heard it in Tatopani. I think we'd be well advised to team up with them.”
“I disagree. We'd have to slow to their pace.”
“They're mounted.”
Cohen turned to the nearer Tibetan, who was tossing cucurbit seeds from his palm into his mouth. “Who said there are robbers?” he asked in Nepali.
The man grinned, showing flakes of white seed against his small ivory teeth. Wisps of unshaven hair hung from his angular chin. “Gurkhas say many bandits raiding Kali by Muktinath trail.”
“Where do you go?”
The Tibetan turned aside to spit a fragment of seed. “Mustang.”
Cohen shook his head. “In every village there'd be a scramble for food. It's too big a party.”
“It's super photo material. That's why we're here, isn't it?”
“You told us you wanted to get to Mustang. You got the permits, I don't know how, but you did. All we agreed was get you there and back.”
“Sam, I've got thousands of bucks of photo equipment on a porter's back. If it's safer to travel with these Tibetans, then I think we should.”
Cohen moved away to watch the river glinting through the banyans. Such a schmuck this Stihl. Like so many Americans he thinks what he wants is important. But why do I care? Why bait him? He turned back. “C'mon, man, these Tibetans are arms smugglers. They say they're headed to Mustang, but they're the CIA train to Tibet.”
“Oh, I heard those stories, checked them out with the embassy. They're just not true.”
“How long you been in Nepal, Stihl?”
“A month.”
“I've been climbing in the Himals for two years; so have Paul and Alex. You're paying for that experience. I don't want to be tied up with smugglers, lose my visa.”
“No gang of thieves is going to attack either arms smugglers or salt traders, which is what these boys are. Come on, Sam.” Stihl gave Cohen's shoulder a friendly punch. “Give me a break. I'm stranded way up here, dependent on you guys. Don't you owe me a little faith?” He smiled. “Please, talk to Alex and Paul. These boys want to leave soon.”
“The porters have to eat.”
“That won't take long.”
Paul shrugged when Cohen asked them. “I don't care if we travel with the Penn State marching band.” Alex merely grinned, nodding at the Tibetans. “Might as well trek with old Kali herself.”
“So what are they going to do,” Paul laughed, “steal your Swiss Army knife?”
“Levis, man, levis. Snatch ‘em right off your ass.”
“Speakin’ of that,” Paul chuckled, “do you remember Gabriel, the guy from Chamonix who went with the Italians up Dhaulagiri Three? He offered to trade a Tibetan guerrilla a pair of jeans for a Chinese watch. So six weeks later the guerrilla returns fro
m Tibet with the watch, still strapped around a Chinese soldier's rotting arm.”
“Gross. Did Gabriel keep the watch?”
“I believe so. But it took some time to scrape the skin off.”
Alex shuddered. “Endless killing. What do they hope to gain?”
“They're pissed, man. Had their houses bombed and kids killed and temples destroyed and all that other shit by the Chinese. The Dalai Lama chased out. How do you think you'd feel?”
The porters finished their noon rice, squatted against their loads, slipped the tumplines over their brows, and rose to cluster with Goteen near the village edge. One of the two Tibetans who had spoken with Stihl approached Cohen and Alex. He pointed up the trail. “Now go?” he said in English.
Cohen answered in Nepali. “There are no robbers.”
The man's eyebrows lifted. “Gurkhas say…” He shrugged, switched to Nepali. “Surely we are safer together.” He glanced up, hearing the crunch of Stihl's boot.
“What the fuck you guys waitin’ for?”
“Cool it, Stihl,” Alex chuckled. “You'll get a brain hernia.”
“We can make Kagbeni before dark.”
“You should take a copter you're in such a rush.”
Stihl shook Cohen's shoulder genially. “C'mon, let's hustle.”
“What do you think, Alex?” Cohen said. “You wanna join these guys?”
Alex scratched the week-old whiskers on his chin, put his hand on Cohen's shoulder to turn him aside. “You're gettin’ a little compulsive, Sam. Who cares about Tibetans? If Stihl, here, thinks they're a story, then let them be a story.” He licked his lip. “Do you realize we haven't been to Thailand in three months? After this trip we'll have enough bread to bang cock in Bangkok till the monsoon's over. So keep your mind on pussy, where it belongs, and we'll muddle through.”
Cohen pulled away slightly from Alex's grasp. “It feels weird. Can't explain.”
“You want to dump Stihl here, go back to K'du?”
“We should do what we agreed to.”
Alex shrugged. “So we stay a little stoned, ignore Stihl and Eliott, enjoy the mountains for five more weeks, and return rich to K'du.” He crouched, picking pebbles from the earth, stood and threw them one by one into the river. “You don't like Stihl ‘cause he reminds you of the States.”