Tibetan Cross

by Mike Bond

  “No dice, Sam. She's our insurance. Otherwise you won't talk.”

  “I promise.”

  “Try to understand my position, Sam. If I fail, my ass is in the sling. So far I've failed with you. She's the only way I have to make you talk. How can I let her go?”

  Cohen tried to lick his lips but his tongue was dry. “What day's it?”

  Mort looked at his wrist. “In a half hour, April twenty-seventh.”

  “We've got to hurry.”

  “Where?”

  “Colorado, like I said.”

  “I remember something about a map, and horses. Fill me in.”

  “Shut up, Sam!” Claire had come to.

  Cohen ignored her, turned to Mort. “Paul and I once hunted there, years ago. West of the Crystal River there's a place in the aspen near a small beaver clearing where he killed his first elk. It has no geographic significance – there's hundreds like it in those mountains – but we both know where it is. Starting in two days, he'll be there sometime the following week.”

  “Where is this Crystal River?”

  “South of Carbondale. You follow a dirt road to Dead Horse Creek, and go in ten, maybe fifteen miles to a particular saddle between two low hills, climb that saddle, walk for a couple hours, till you reach the Clear Fork of Dead Horse Creek. You follow the Clear Fork for an hour or two and then there's a certain blue spruce to look for, a schoolmarm…”

  “Schoolmarm?”

  “Has a split trunk about halfway up. Like a woman with her legs spread, upside down. Facing it from across the Clear Fork is a parson, and that's where you climb toward a long mesa rising into the flanks of Huntsman Ridge. It's thick aspen with spruce above, and bogs and beaver ponds everywhere. Once you're in the forest you lose all landmarks except those inside your head. That's why we chose it.”

  “A parson?”

  “That's a tree with a strongly out-jutting limb about half way up, you know, like a hard-on? What you get when you beat off with your dirty books.”

  Mort rubbed his head. “Can you show us on a map?”

  “I could show you Dead Horse. I wouldn't know for sure where the mesa is, on a map. But I could show you Huntsman Ridge. It goes to ten thousand feet, maybe fifty or a hundred miles long.”

  “And all forest?”

  “Nearly all.”

  “You'll have to show us.”

  “Sam, don't!” Claire tried to break free. “I can stand the pain. They're going to kill us anyway.”

  Cohen eyed Mort. “Will you let us go, afterwards?”

  “Of course, Sam. Once we get a promise from Paul, and from you two, not to reveal anything that could jeopardize national security.”

  Claire shook her head. “Don't be stupid, Sam.”

  Mort called the others. “Take her out of here. Get her some clothes. She's going with us.”

  “Where?”

  “Colorado.” Mort left. The bearded ones untied Claire and walked her carefully into the next room. Cohen watched the wall shudder. The beef sides hanging in the corner seemed to nod on the gentlest of currents. A roach ran into the center of the linoleum, hesitated, and crossed under a sink.

  They injected him again; he dropped into choking silence. He had forgotten who they were when they woke him. They untied him and moved him to a room with a table. On it was a green and white U.S. Geological Survey map with ashtrays holding down the corners.

  Mort splayed the single, ringed finger on the map. “Here's Dead Horse Creek. Where's the spot?”

  Cohen was entranced by the broad, blanched moon of Mort's fingernail. “Like I said.” His voice felt crusted and unworldly. “I know where Huntsman Ridge is.” He drew a six-inch circle with his own finger. “Must be in here someplace.”

  “Step at a time.” It was Lou from Neuenweg. “Here's the Creek. And the road.” As Lou bent over the map his chest hairs, long and black, slipped like coal grass out the breach of his collar. Cohen vomited on the map. They brought out another. “When you went into Dead Horse with Paul, how did you travel?” the squeaky-voiced man said.

  “I don't know you.”

  “This is Stan,” Mort said.

  “I don't know him. I'm not speaking to him.”

  “C'mon, Sam, he's a regular one of the guys.”

  “Fuck him. If he stays, I'm not helping you.”

  “Want him to leave the room, Sam?”

  Cohen nodded.

  “Okay, Stan, you heard the man. So,” Mort smiled, “how did you get into Dead Horse?”

  “We rented two riding horses and two pack horses from a rancher.”

  “Where could we land a copter?”

  Cohen thought. “Maybe on a beaver pond. You can get one with pontoons? Even on the beaver ponds there's hundreds of standing dead trees where the water's risen.”

  “On horseback, how long did it take, from the Dead Horse road?”

  “A day.”

  WITH LOU GUARDING HIM he showered and ate the hamburger and fries they brought, dried blood in his nasal cavity crackling as he chewed. They climbed together out of the cool, rancid cellar into glaring midday. Heat danced like flame over the soft macadam, the seedy windows across the street, the smog-coated cars. The Impala sat in the sun's full blast, hot air rippling up from its trunk. I should have killed you, Clay. If somebody finds you alive, Claire and I are finally and truly doomed. As if we weren't already.

  He sat wedged beside Claire in the back of a blue Ford Fairlane with tinted windows, bulletproof plastic between them and the front, the two bearded men flanking them, squeezing them together. She faced ahead, saying nothing. A new shot made them both sleep. They were in the back of a small jet. An Air Force C-130, flaps down, rumbled past. New faces looked down at him.

  EVENING'S RED sunlight ran up the west-facing slopes above the Crystal River, dyeing the higher trees gold-green, like jade weeds seen underwater. Bleached cliff bones broke through this sheen like fossils through the ocean floor, giving Cohen a sense of unreal hope. They spent the night in cabins on the river, Cohen bound in darkness, listening for Claire's breathing in the next room, hearing only stones clacking underwater on the riverbed.

  The next morning they parked on the shoulder of the Dead Horse road, by a livestock truck and jeep. A tall, saturnine man in a western hat sat on the jeep's dusty fender. Another, bent-nosed and chunky, moved from the shade of the livestock truck to shake hands with Mort.

  “All set, Walt?”

  “You got it,” Walt replied, shifted a wad of tobacco from under his front teeth to the cheek, bent aside to spit. They led them to the horses tethered at the far side of the livestock truck, and tied Cohen into the saddle of a brown-white paint. Walt adjusted the stirrups. “Do'n wan'er ta take a notion,” he smiled, a thread of tobacco juice down the side of his jaw.

  They tied Claire into the saddle of a slender palomino and rode up a sagey draw into a filigree of aspen shadows. The new leaves were still porphyry along their edges, the peeling white trunks black where elk had winter-gnawed them. Beyond the saddle they zigzagged down into a columnar white forest, leaf shadows flirting with the breeze over a tumult of decaying leaves, bright moss, and purple-brown oakbrush seedlings. The pack horses bunched up and Walt had to ride behind, swearing and pulling them apart.

  The forest cleared into a glistening valley with a silvery stock pond in its center, beyond which they forded the dank trickle of Little Horse, and rode north over scrubby overgrazed hills to the steep, crumbling banks of the Clear Fork. “While a man awaits a time of challenge he places his mind at ease, he laughs, he sings,” said Hem, reining his spotted gray closer to the paint. Cohen blinked, but there was nothing save soft dust from the hooves, like pollen filling the air.

  “We keepin’ you up?” It was the tall, taciturn cowboy. Cohen said nothing. “We keepin’ you up, I aksed!” Cohen twisted in the saddle to stare back at him, at his small, self-assertive nose, the surprisingly intelligent eyes, the thin lips, the colorless brown hair meager
under his hat brim. Cohen shrugged and leaned forward.

  After an hour riding its west bank they forded the Clear Fork, horseshoes clanking on its bed. Cohen pointed out the schoolmarm and parson. He nudged the paint with his knee and she turned amiably uphill toward the mesa, her head dipping from time to time to snatch at bunchgrass tufts. She halted, ears perked forward. From the alders came a fading bonk bonk bonk of elk hooves banging through the down timber.

  At the north end of the mesa a series of beaver ponds let light into the forest. The beavers had cut away the willows by a stream, felled the aspen, and worn deep grooves in the earth where they had dragged aspen branches down to the stream. Beyond this perimeter the forest stepped upward in verdant waves to the gray cirques and black spruce of Huntsman Ridge.

  Mort rode forward, his horse winded. “This it?”

  “Near enough. It's too thick for horses up there. I'll show you tomorrow.”

  “You'll show us today.”

  “Up to you.”

  They tied Cohen's wrists to a young aspen, and Claire to another tree out of sight behind him. They unpacked the horses, set up camp, and ate. Only Walt and the slender cowboy, whom they called Link, seemed familiar with the process. Mort could not pitch his tent and angrily told Link to do it; Lou swore at Walt when a tethered horse shied. Walt grinned. “Sorry, par'ner,” he said.

  Cohen hunched himself round into the sunshine. The sky through the leaves was ultramarine; a vulture hung on levels in it. What must he see, he wondered. Mort brought him a sandwich and water, and then the hypodermic.

  “Forget it,” Cohen said. “I'm not going anywhere.”

  “Keeps us in touch.” Mort gripped Cohen's shoulder and stuck in the needle. Cohen waited in the sunlight. The shot seemed more manageable each time he received it. He realized that he almost enjoyed its sudden illuminations, the way it reinforced the physical fabric of the world; he saw that he no longer needed to fear it, and his fear was gone.

  The remaining fear's Clay. If he's found alive, he'll send a message over Mort's radio, and Claire and I will be dead and buried in the aspens an hour later. Cohen remembered the heat rippling off the Impala's trunk. Wish I'd killed you, Clay.

  A camp robber swifted down and stood on the dead leaves, watching him sideways from one red eye. “You here already?” he said. The bird nodded and flitted across the clearing to call from the peak of a blue spruce that stood drowned at the edge of the beaver pond.

  Walt was talking about “big city cowboys.” He poured Jack Daniels into his coffee. “Gotta have a fur-wheel drive, ‘n ruuf lights. Gotta be muddy. Gotta have a rifle rack. They all growed up in Nuh Jersey. Whut the hill're we cumin’ ta?” The camp robber swooped down on the far side of the stream and ran along the bank with something white in its beak. A hawk screeched; Cohen looked into the sun but could not find it.

  “Time ta go, son,” Walt said, pulling Cohen up. “Let's find this meetin’ place.”

  “It's called Paul's pond.”

  “I don't see it.” Lou held the map.

  “It wouldn't be there; that's Paul's and my name for it. It's where he shot his first elk. That's how we remember it.”

  While Lou stayed to watch Claire, Cohen led them up a steep, aspeny slope to a higher table of the mesa. It was difficult to walk uphill with his hands cuffed behind his back, but he moved fast. Mort and Link began to breathe hard. Cohen and Walt crested a ridge and waited for them. As soon as they arrived, red-faced and sweating, Cohen set off again.

  He maneuvered them up game trails through a mile of thick oakbrush that caught at their clothes and cut their faces. Everywhere was the aroma of fresh elk droppings. Beyond the oakbrush was a vast aspen blowdown, started by beavers. He led them over and under the dusty white logs, Mort swearing with effort. “This better not,” he puffed, “be a goose chase.”

  “It's because it's so hard that we picked it.”

  The sky was drifting furtively toward gray. Shadows had gone from under the supine trunks. A chill wind began to work on their wet shirts and sweaty necks. “Haw much mor?” Walt, finally beginning to tire, sat beside a service-berry bush, hat in his lap.

  “The first pond's up ahead,” Cohen called, forcing them to follow. He came to the lowest pond in the string. It was perhaps twenty feet wide, its dam of mud and sticks barely wide enough to walk on. Brown and yellow aspen leaves carpeted its bottom; stems of new grass leaned over its banks, tracing black reflections.

  “Here?” Walt said.

  “It's one up ahead. Let me check.”

  Walt glanced up. Cirrus tails were yielding the last sunlight. “It's an owuh off this gaddam hill.”

  Link joined them. “Fuckin’ game.”

  Mort arrived. “We've got time, Walt,” he panted.

  “In the mawnin', then.”

  BACK AT CAMP they handcuffed him to the young aspen. Claire, still cuffed to her tree, had ignored him when he passed. Scowling in the firelight, Walt cooked chicken-fried steak and potatoes. They ate, ignoring Cohen and Claire. The horses were nickering from the trees where Link had short-roped them. Walt stepped into the darkness with hobbles and a bag of oats.

  “When do we eat?” Cohen called.

  Lou nodded at the horses. “Maybe when he comes back.”

  A low whine like a dying alarm clock sent Mort scrambling for his tent. Moments later his voice came rumbling soft through the nylon fabric, “Right, right. He did? When?” Cohen felt the night's chill sink into him. The radio. So this is death. In a minute he'll come out of there and walk over here and put a pistol barrel against my temple and the world will explode. And then he'll kill Claire.

  Mort stepped out of the tent and crossed to the fire, patted Lou's shoulder. “Daisy says hi.”

  “No news?”

  Mort shrugged. “Nothing. They'll check in again in a couple days. Maybe something then.”

  Cohen eased back against his aspen. Oh Jesus to live. I thank you God, for this moment, for this life. And Claire's. Maybe Clay's dead?

  Walt fed him greasy eggs too hot from the pan, and tossed a horse blanket over him and two more over Claire. “Sorry, you kids gotta stay pinned to them trees.”

  Mort took the first watch. He sat on a log staring into the fire, rousing himself occasionally to gaze at Cohen or Claire, or to rummage in the woodpile Link had cut. He drank whiskey with his coffee, after a while not bothering to mix in the coffee. The others snored in the two tents pitched back from each side of the fire.

  STARS flickered through the reflections of the flames on the overhead aspen boughs. The wind, soft and chill from the west, tossed the leaves, altering the star pattern. Coyotes were talking, higher on the flanks of Huntsman Ridge, and closer, in the draws leading up to camp. A beaver splashed in the pond.

  Orion strode up the southeast sky, the line of his dagger sharp in the thin air. Mort was replaced by Link, who soon fell asleep. Cohen watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Link's chest, and tugged at his handcuffs.

  WHEN ORION had fallen from the center of his arc, Link roused himself and went into his tent. After some mumbling, Walt appeared and sat on the log, rubbing his hands close to the fire. Cohen scratched the back of his head against the elk-gnawed bark.

  ORION was dipping toward the west. Walt sat with head sloped forward, hands on knees. His hat began to fall and he roused himself.

  “Hey, Walt,” Cohen whispered. “I gotta piss. Terrible!”

  Walt stood, stretching. He bent over and rubbed his knees, slipped a gun from his coat and stepped round the fire to the tree.

  “You gotta what?” His voice was sleepy.

  “Piss. Hurry up!”

  Walt glanced over at Claire and then stepped behind Cohen to inspect the cuffs. Cohen felt the hard presence of the gun on his spine as Walt unlocked them.

  “Quick,” Walt said.

  Cohen crossed to a willow clump and urinated. Buttoning his fly, he looked up. Orion was hidden.

  “Back up.” Walt s
hifted the gun to his left hand. Orion reappeared between the branches. Cohen felt the cuff slide over his right wrist. He spun round the trunk and punched Walt as his right hand grabbed for the gun. It fell. Walt dropped sideways, mouth open to yell. Cohen shoved a fist into his mouth, driving his head back into the leafy earth. He straddled him and squeezed the knobby neck until Walt's hands ceased to beat against his face.

  He turned Walt over, heavy as wet garbage, found the gun, and dug a Buck knife from Walt's pocket. Downslope a lion screamed like a child dying in fire. The horses whinnied nervously and stamped their hobbles. He could not find the gun's safety. He glanced across the fire at the orange tents, then beyond, where Claire slept against her tree. A coyote barked. The fire hissed. Another coyote answered, to the north. He glanced up at the sky. One hour more of darkness.

  He fished in Walt's pockets but could not find a key for Claire's handcuffs. Maybe it's the same one. He found the key to his own cuffs and slipped through the trees to her side, put his hand over her mouth.

  She awoke at once. He took away his hand. “Who's got the key to your cuffs?”

  “Lou.”

  He felt her cuffs; they were hardened steel, too thick to break. His key would not work. I could shoot through them but the tents are too far away to cover after the shot. I might kill Link in the closer tent but Mort and Lou'll come out firing and the advantage of surprise'll be gone. He kissed her. “You stay here. I'll get the key.”

  She kissed him back. “I'm not likely to go anywhere.”

  He checked the gun. It had a two-inch barrel and a wide bore. Even standing between the tents I can't be sure of hitting either, nor the people in them. So the trick's to kill Link first in the one tent, then concentrate on Lou and Mort in the other. Is it possible? Is it possible soon we might be free?

  Moving upslope until the fire was only a glow on the trunks, he crossed the first beaver pond. A great bang exploded on the water; he ducked fumbling for the safety. The beaver that had slapped its tail swam away across the starlit surface of the pond. He lowered the gun and edged downslope until the tents were visible again.

  An owl hooted. A trail of sparks ran up from the fire. Wind slipped under his collar. From the trees came a clump, clump of tethered hooves and a tearing of grass. He knelt before Link's tent. Light snoring within, like a child's. He stepped over a white guy line, snapping a twig. The snoring slowed. The word Talon was visible on the black plastic tent zipper. He shifted his stance and bumped another guy line. The tent quivered. The snoring halted. A whisper of nylon, then the scratchy snuffle of a man rubbing his face. Cohen watched his own motionless fire shadow on the tent flap.