Leadville: 300 Days Away

by Kara Skye Smith

  Matseidha shakes her head, no, almost feeling she might not have wanted to say it this way.

  "The letter," she says. "The Chinese soldiers found it. They attacked her."

  "O! Matseidha!" he lunges for her wrapping his arms around her shoulders and laying his head against her hair. "I never thought they would know or bother you. I guess I never thought about it. Damn that I would put you, and your mother in danger, I can never forgive myself. Please understand, I didn't know," he says and pulls his head away. He looks at her, so close now to her. He looks into her eyes. He closes his eyes, "I would not ever want to hurt you, Matseidha. Do you hate me now?" He asks again. Matseidha presses her lips against his. She closes her eyes and kisses him.

  "I can never let you say those words out loud," she tells him. And then she nearly whispers, "I loved that letter. It made me so happy - I can not let you blame yourself. No one knew the Chinese would open our letters. No one even knew they would invade, or the parachutes would be shot down. You risked your life to save us. Please -" she says and makes a shushing sound, nearly crying at the thought of how all her memories collide with loss that seems to surround itself around the man that sits in front of her; the one she wants to be with more than anything in the world.

  "Come with me then," he says. "We'll run away. I can't go back. I said I wouldn't leave, but Matseidha, when I look at you, I know why I did. I know why I 'saw' you at the center. I had a vision of you there. And when I lay there, in the camp starving, fighting for the Resistance, I knew it was you, out here, in these hills that led me to run, and live, and find you. Come with me! I have been to Darjeeling, and there is a place for us to go. There is a way for us to live, together, if you will, without the war. I can not take you home," he says. "I went to CIA training."

  "Yes, you told me, in the letter," she says.

  "This is part of why I can not go back there, to Litang, or I will be away from you. I must fight if I go there, and this, you," he holds her hands, "these days with you, is the closest I can ever get to home."

  "I can not go back either," she says. "The soldiers looked for me, after the letter was not found in my mother's home. If I return, the Chinese soldiers, they will look for me, again."

  "Darjeeling is a beautiful place," he tells her. She smiles and he hugs her. He rubs his cheek against her face.

  "We could stay here," she offers a suggestion, thinking of the girl, her pleading with Matseidha to stay; but as soon as Matseidha says this, she regrets it. The look on Tenzing's face, as he pulls away is one of sadness.

  "You love a man, already, don't you?" he asks, "I should have thought to ask. I saw -"

  "No! No," she interrupts him. "I don't love Zhingtu. I like him. And he is good to me. He is good to my 'daughter'. He calls Tenizia my daughter. She is not. She fled too; but, he has never harmed me. We all pulled together, for safety and survival," her voice gets whiny, nearly desperate, "I never thought I'd see you, again-" she says and hugs him close to her again, "or I never would have," her voice trails off.

  Tenzing empathizes, "I understand survival, Matseidha. I have survived many things," he comforts her and does not seem disapproving. This makes Matseidha remember her intrepidations - the old woman's death, the mountain passes. She urges Tenzing, gently to stay, in the camp, with her.

  "I could tell Zhingtu," she says, "He will understand; and we could stay here. He is not a bitter man." And then she groans, "O no. It wouldn't work," she says.

  "Matseidha," Tenzing says, "I do not understand you," "You are not as happy to be here with me as I am to be here with you, I take it, because I have no doubts in my mind Matseidha and you are full of doubts. I can see you don't truly want to go."

  "She died! - in the mountains - the pass. We tried to get there, to your Darjeeling. We were told to go there, but we couldn't make it. It was awful; and, she died!" Matseidha confesses. "I wasn't mean to her, but I couldn't stand her, for some reason. I don't know why. It wasn't her fault. I was mean, I guess. And she died. She died on the pass in the cold."

  "But it is August. We can travel through without such coldness. Is that what you worry about; or, is it me? It is me, isn't it? You don't want to leave Zhingtu?"

  "No! I told you," Matseidha says. And then she smiles slightly at his jealousy, freed from her fear and of her guilt about the old woman's death she concedes to travel, "We will go. I'll go. We'll go together."

  "Really?! Yes?" "Yes," she says. "When do we go? Tonight?"

  Tenzing laughs. "We do not leave at night. We will go in the morning. Sunrise. Okay?"

  "Yes," she smiles, "okay."

  "I am so happy," Tenzing says. "I am so happy, too," she says and kisses his lips as they press against hers. They both smile, lips close together. They smile and kiss and kiss and smile. Tenzing tells her, his lips still close to hers, "of all that I have been through, Matseidha, all the loss and all the fighting, the cold and the hunger, I knew I'd find you. And I knew, I'd find in you my reason to want, so much, to be a part of life, again, like I am right now, with you. Do you know when I knew this, Matseidha?" he asks her. She shakes her head no. "The first time I saw you," he says. "The very first time that I saw you, in Litang. Those were my favorite horse races of all the races, my most favorite days of all. And in all this fighting for Litang, fighting to go home again, Matseidha, I now know, that where you are, is where I am; it's where I want to be. Forever. I am asking you to be my wife, Matseidha. I know it is soon. Too soon, maybe, but it is also too late; and, I do not want to wait another minute," he starts to laugh.

  She laughs too.

  "You know?" he says, "I do not want to wait another minute to be too late, not ever again."

  She nods her head.

  "Is that a yes? You're coming with me?"

  She nods again. "I think so," she smiles.

  "I can't live without you," he says, "what if I can't live without you," he laughs, "now that I've found you?"

  "What about the mountains?" she asks.

  "We can make it," he says. "We can make it through the mountains; and if you are afraid, I will carry you!" he yells.

  She laughs.

  "I will. I will carry you through the mountains, every step!" He pulls her up to standing. He picks her up in his arms. "You see?"

  "Put me down!" she yells at him and slaps his shoulder, "put me

  down."

  "Okay, but only if you want to walk," he starts to put her down, but he doesn't, "otherwise, I will carry you."

  "No!" she says firmly. He lets her down. She glares at him.

  "I don't need you to carry me!" She pulls her clothing back into place. "I'll walk," she says.

  "Okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Zhingtu going to get mad?"

  "Maybe I have been too hasty. You are teasing me now."

  "I am just happy, Matseidha. I am just the happiest I have ever been before, that's all. Can we go and tell the others?"

  Matseidha shakes her head, no. "I don't think that would be a good idea. Maybe we should just go?"

  "We'll go tonight, just before dawn," he tells her. "One last kiss, until the entire camp is sleeping," he says; and then he lets her go.

  1959 Leadville.

  "Huh," Mac says out loud, "well isn't that a coincidence."

  "What?" Antoine asks him in the officer's tent. He stands, stirring his coffee with a plastic stir stick in a styrafoam cup.

  "Just looking here. I've been exactly 300 days up here."

  "Yeah," Antoine tells him, "that's quite a while. Too bad your break isn't turning out to be a real vacation. Not like we all couldn't use one, you know."

  "Yeah," Mac says, "that's what I was thinking. The other day," he says. "I told someone - I told this girl, 300 days. Thought I'd been up here 300 days. She said something like she thought I needed a break, you know, vacation. And here I am, 300th day, discharged - cleared to go. Might not even half-ta tell the wife."

&n
bsp; Antoine pats him on the back, "Won't miss anybody here, Mac, like I'll miss you. Job well done."

  "You mean that?" he asks.

  "Sure do, Mac. Sure do. Look what we had to work with, after all. Just a free for all over there, really. You turned 'em around, really, ship shape platoons by the time they left here. Stuff ain't nobody ever taught 'em, you know. You did it. Honest. Ain't no shame in that. None of us could take this, you know. Nights and days we'll probably never talk about."

  "Shh. Yeah," he says, shaking his head and looking down at the floor. He kicks his foot. He looks Antoine in the eyes, "You know, I'm sorry. That Dora thing, just one last straw, I guess. You know, the message. Couldn't even get that to me - I didn't know, I guess, how I needed the break, or just how that would hit me."

  Antoine puts out his hand for Mac to shake it, "No disrespect, Mac. Proud to have known you. Proud to have worked with you." Mac shakes his hand and then Antoine does something rare between these men, rare even with their own boys. He thrusts his arm around Mac's shoulders and gives him sort of a hug. "It's been like a trap up here, sometimes. The intensity of it all; even in the vastness of these mountain tops seems like we're hemmed in. Under the thumb of God, kind of; all these men's lives in our hands. You did your best. And I'm not ashamed to say, Mac, you did a hell-of-a-job. Really." He pulls away. "Good luck to 'ya. When you need a reference, you know where to call."

  "Appreciate it," he tells his superior officer, the lead man of the ST Circus operation.

  "I'll keep in touch."

  "You do that," Antoine waves him out the door. "You do that."

  Mac sees his own way out, letting the underling sent to help him go. "I got it," he tells the young officer, "I can do this. You take care," he says. He drops they styrafoam cup in the standard issue aluminum waste basket and picks up his own bags. He carries them to the vehicle he'd once cursed; the beginning of his edginess that lasted 57 days and ended with his discharge on what, coincidentally, turns out to be Mac's 300th day away from his wife and kids, from Dora who'd had the sickness (cancer), and from the incompetence of his father who'd left her in his wife's care and run off with a younger woman. These things, this type of falderal, just don't happen to Mac; a CIA official, for god's sakes, these kind of things just don't happen in his picture-perfect, 1950's family - a family even the president of the United States has counted on the service of its head of household, through several missions and on at least one particular occasion. But it did. And at the worst time too. At a time when Jack, being the one who cares, the one with heart, the one who'd worked on and off with the personalities of the men, their training, their adaptiveness: first to America, and then to their situation, their surroundings, their own instincts; their abilities, quickness and shortcomings to overcome. No one could teach them like Jack could. No one got 'into their heads' like that. And no one, no officer, any way, could feel that loss as personal as he could. Jack knew it. And he hid it.

  It came out, though.

  "It sure did," he thinks, and then he walks to the car. Past the line of officers who salute him. Past the point where he stands at attention and salutes them back. Jack walks toward the car, things in hand, toward his home, toward the father, whose 'news' finally 'undid' him.

  Under the great pressure and weight of the last catastrophe's loss and the, "well," he thinks, "there is just no other word for it but the god-damed incompetence!"

  The supplies not arriving in time, or missing their mark - arriving to muraders, "the men," he thinks, "leaving their positions..." He rubs his hand around his face, down his eye and off the side into his well-greased hair. He catches himself mumbling and as he fumbles for his keys, once inside the car, to 'start it up', he drops them into his lap, grabs onto his head and exhales with a mournful sigh.

  "It is time for a break," he says out loud. "Time to go." He lays his head against the steering wheel, his arms crossed, opposite hands at ten and two; and up it comes, the sorrow and the loss, in sounds of sobbing and "O god!" "O god!". Jack nearly vomits out the hatred of the 'god-damned incompetence' in sobbing sounds that start from his lower belly and come up, out of his mouth, reaching his ears, surprising even himself, like he never knew, or 'let on' that he was so discouraged. Discouraged by nearly every human being he had been around, lately, as he noticed and observed them; and now, he is even discouraged by his father. "Right down, god-dammit, to my own, miserable father," he says out loud. "In front of God and everyone," he says of the let down, the foible; the unforseeable, unimaginable - nothing-can-be-done-about-it 'mess-up' - of his own, god-damned father. And in Mac's mind, for just a moment, an image of his 'saintly' mother reflects upon the tip-tops of the Rocky mountains with the images of the now dead, Tibetan men he'd trained. Like he had imagined innocent Tiyo's face, that day, living on as a vision in Mac's mind against the Himalayan mountains; a vision of his mother's face appears in his mind as he looks to the mountain tops that have surrounded him these many days of hardship. Unconsolingly, at this moment, great, big, Jack, feels like a miserable let down to all these people, the purity of the white, mountain snow judging him 'a failure' (the worst word Jack could ever say) - and he is one, he thinks, "a failure", due to his inability to control 'the god-damned incompetence' around him. And suddenly, tree-tall Jack falls down. He bows his head, like prayers to these 'saints', the sound of which comes out in wails and sobs of sorrow, sobs of loss, sobs of the uncertainty a child feels faced with the incompetence of his own father, downed by his own failure to 'control' his anger in his place of work. A 'discharge'. The word is weighty. An actual letter, received from the President, to 'go home'.

  Eventually, Jack wipes the 'water' that has come from his eyes, so very few times in his life, on a clean, white handkerchief, kept always in his pocket, a new one each and every day. He blows his nose.

  "300 hundred days away," he says out loud, looking at the mountain tops that have now become familiar beacons, staring down at him these days where the 10th Mountain Division taught Tibetan men to keep themselves alive, as if Washington, Jefferson and the men of Mount Rushmore were carved right into the snow

  upon them.

  "I'll be going home now," he tells these moutaintops, and picks the keys up from his lap, starts the car and drives himself down the Interstate; but he does not drive to Denver. Jack does not drive home, that day, to his wife and kids, his dying mom, nor his newly philandering father. Jack drives the State-issued sedan into Leadville; to The Bar at the Top of the Rockies, and Jack sits his 'sorry ass', as he tells Stephanie, up against the polished counter-top of Colorado oak, sucking down Wild Turkey, practicing the word 'discharged', trying to find the courage to 'face' the wife who depends on him so proudly, thinking of how to even go near this 'saint' of a mother the world has certainly 'let-down'.

  "I don't know how you do it, Stephanie," he says with all the gusto of a gnat, after Stephanie finishes going on about Mary Beth - her usual dialogue with the 'front bar' customers, held captive to her rants most of these nights while Mary Beth waits at home, nursing the baby. At the alarming sound of his 'faded' enthusiasm, Stephanie puts down the bar towel with which she has just wiped her hands and places her wedding-ringless hand down onto the bar's countertop - her fingers spread wide, her nails coated with Sugarplum Ice.

  "There ain't a snowball's chance in hell that you remember one word I said just now, is there, Jack?" she asks him. Her voice is soft and liquid, suddenly concerned by and caring for the humped over man in front of her, the posture of the many 'broken, front bar' customers she's had over the years. "You're not yourself, at all, tonight, are ya?" she asks. He shakes his head, sorrowfully, left to right.

  "I guess I'm not," he says and lifts his glass, "I'm workin' on it, though." He fakes a smidgeon of a smile, but Stephanie is not moved. "I've seen it, in here, a hundred and two times, Jack, if I've seen it all. You know that ain't gonna make you feel a darned bit better. In fact, if you don't 'talk it out' that stuff'll only
have you crying, if not by the end of the night, certainly by morning." Jack laughs, kind of. A forced out sound from somewhere just above his breast bone past his throat. Not a word or a sound getting past his 'heart area' tonight, for those flood gates cannot be 'opened', he knows; barracaded, blocked.

  "Ain't no one getting in, or out," he says to her and she smiles wide at this.

  "O, you don't know ME, Jack," she says. "I'm a professional." Suddenly, Jack smiles.

  Jack starts his story with, "Gosh darn it all, I lost my head," he tells her; and by the end of the night, with Stephanie's coaxing plus the warmth of Wild Turkey loosening up the blocked areas of barricade, he manages to tell her he was 'asked to leave'. Although he still does not say 'discharged', with a little more coaxing he does tell her, "Okay, I was let go." Stephanie knows what 'let go' means.

  She bursts out triumphantly, having gotten all the way to his faults in less than two hour's time, "There! Don'tcha see?" she tells him, "this is what you needed. That ain't so bad, Jack. Once you get it out, you know where to start again - gettin' back to who you are. You ain't gonna let that little of a thing move you again. Not from who you are, Mac. A big guy like you?" She leans in and whispers, unknowingly 'getting him back' for having given 'fuel' to Mary Beth on the least day she 'needed' it, "Not a big guy from the CIA like you!" And then she pulls back, and sees his face. She thinks about what it would be like to date a guy in the CIA. Her voice goes sugary with kindness and she asks, quite honestly, "Do you feel better now? Do you?" she asks, "feel better?" and the very words, last heard by her from Mary Beth bring a little look of sadness to her own face. For a fleeting moment Stephanie pictures Mary Bethers - where she might be, how alone. With a softness to her voice, she repeats herself, but not a question, "You feel better, now, I know."