by Jeff Long
differently. His chin was shaved to a smooth polish. He washed his white socks three
times in as many days. He even recorded the laundry dates in his journal.
On March 25, someone killed Kelly's potted geranium. Back in her fall quarter at the
high school she taught in, Kelly's students had cooked up a theory that plant life would
add oxygen to their beloved teacher's Base Camp tent. Kelly didn't believe it herself,
but nevertheless she'd gone ahead and bought the stoutest green geranium
Kathmandu had to offer. She had carried it past glaring Chinese border guards who
suspected the plant for no other reason than because a Western woman with yellow
hair happened to be carrying it. She had guarded it from hungry goats and curious
Tibetans and – ultimately – from Jorgens, who one night groused that the plant was a
childish affectation and that they had come to Everest to climb, not garden.
Like a canary in a coal mine, the wilting plant clearly evidenced the effects of their
environment, losing color and leaves by the day. It was dying anyway. But someone
helped it along one morning by reaching into Kelly's tent and setting it out beneath the
sun. By noon it had shrivelled to a crisp. Gus caught Kelly weeping over the small
vandalism and tongue-lashed her for showing weakness in this camp full of men.
Stump heard Gus and told her to ease up, and that led to more hard words.
'This is no good,' Robby said to Abe later on. 'You can't park combat troops in a box
like this or they turn mean. You watch what I say, there's going to be blood soon.'
Abe filed the prediction with all of Robby's other predictions. The carpenter was
best at forecasting dumplings and blue sky, things that were inevitable. Mostly he just
registered hot air.
The yaks still didn't come.
Camp turned into a pressure cooker. The climbers fretted and muttered and
sometimes bellowed, but always in the privacy of their tents or on short day hikes
around the valley. People grew afraid of their own frustration and meals became
largely silent with a sprinkling of small talk. The group's morale spiraled downward.
Abe could see it in his dwindling supply of Percodan, amphetamines and morphine,
the recreational drugs, to which some climbers freely helped themselves in the
hospital. Abe didn't stop them – they were getting his surplus – but he did note their
despair.
And then the sky came tumbling down, or almost did. It was the middle of the day
on March 28, though Abe was starting to slip on which day of the week it was
anymore. They were gathered at what was called the Tomb, a squat stone hut some
hundred yards out from camp on top of a small hill.
When George Mallory disappeared near the summit in 1924, his comrades had
stacked a primitive monument atop the hill. Over the years, expeditions had
borrowed flat stones from the monument for windbreaks and to make this
ten-by-ten-foot hut with its doorway aimed at Everest. Now the only thing left of the
monument was the hut, and there was little left of that. The tops of the walls were
falling in and there was no roof.
Jorgens had talked about making the Tomb their latrine, declaring that the women
should have privacy, a building with walls, not just a hole in the ground. But it was
Gus, a woman, who got mad and told him no. 'It wouldn't be proper,' she said. Jorgens
scoffed and said everything and nothing was proper up here on Everest. And Gus
replied how that was the point, it was up to them to decide what was right and what
wasn't, and shitting in a hut made of monument stones wasn't right. It would be like
shitting into a grave. The climbers liked to gather here and lounge about, some
reading bad horror and techno-military novels and comic books, others snoozing with
their feet jutting out the hut door or fiddling with climbing gear or sipping Sherpa tea.
Behind a rock, Thomas was puffing short, breathless blues riffs on one of his
harmonicas. Jorgens and Robby were taking their crack at trying to fix their seven
Korean-made walkie-talkies. Without the handsets there would be no communication
between camps on the mountain. But that was providing they ever got on the
mountain.
Stump was dabbing at his latest watercolor of the Hill, continually thwarted by the
cold and dryness. Every time he had it right, the paint would freeze and when it
thawed his image became something completely different.
Krishna Rai, their lilliputian cook, had propped the expedition boom box outside the
mess tent and Cowboy Junkies music was drifting between sunbeams. Today was
Abe's day with the stack of Ultimate Summit postcards, and he still had two or three
hundred cards left to sign.
It was about then J.J. erupted.
'Hey,' he suddenly shouted, and Abe's pen halted. The harmonica died in the
background. Stump lowered his paint-brush. A dozen heads swiveled to see what
J.J.'s hormones had jumped at this time.
It was Li. The liaison officer was striding by on his way back from the mess tent
with a refill of Swiss chocolate coffee, a luxury fast becoming a personal addiction. Li
had no inkling he was J.J.'s target, and so, concentrating on his full mug and the
bumpy terrain, he just kept on walking.
'Hey you,' J.J. shouted again. He was standing in shorts and thongs and the noon sun
filleted his physique into gleaming lines and plates. 'Where's those yaks, man.'
Li slowed. He looked up, surprised. 'Mr. Packard?' He blinked.
'We had promises,' J.J. said more softly. Now was his turn to be surprised, for he
hadn't meant to make a complicated declaration, only to bark once or twice and shake
some rust off. But he had begun.
'We paid for those yaks. We paid the Chinese government. In American dollars. In
full.'
'J.J.,' Jorgens growled up from his spot on the ground. But he didn't move and J.J.
ignored him.
'You owe us yaks, man. I didn't quit my job and leave my kid and come six thousand
miles around the world to get had by the People's Republic.'
'Had?' wondered Li, who was just starting to get the gist of this harangue.
'Hell yes, had. Like, ripped off.'
The L.O. looked around at the crop of uplifted faces. Some of the Sherpas had come
over and curious climbers were appearing from their tents. Abe watched, fascinated
by the brewing ugliness. There was a sense of mob excitement here. Abe felt it
himself, the allure of an August lynching. Li's face hardened by degrees, in direct
proportion to the crowd's growing interest.
'The yaks will come,' Li said. 'I have told you this.'
'There are no yaks,' J.J. shot back. 'It's all make-believe.'
Li blushed. 'The yaks will come.'
That was when Daniel stepped from out of nowhere and faced J.J. He was wearing
baggy blue jeans and a baggy gray shirt, and though he had Abe's same height and his
forearms looked like feeder cables in some sort of power tool, Daniel looked thin
against the giant. 'Enough,' Daniel said.
'Stay out,' J.J. snarled.
'You're out of line,' Daniel said. 'I'm telling you – politely – just stand down.'
J.J. looked up at the sky for an instant. Something like anguish flashed across his
face and Abe could tell that J.J. wish
ed he'd never started this, not with Daniel in on it
now. But the event had taken on its own momentum and J.J. had to play it out.
'Out of line?' he said, twisting to address the circle of onlookers. The veins were
standing in his neck and biceps. 'We got no yaks. Our good weather's wasting. We're
getting fat. And all the L.O. does is drink fancy coffee and make up lies. And I'm out of
line?'
Abe felt himself nodding his head in agreement. They had come to climb, not feed
and sleep and listen to the boom box. J.J.'s anger was his anger, too. It was all of
theirs, and it was genuine.
But then J.J. made a mistake. He ran out of things to say, you could tell. His face
went blank for a full minute. Then he slapped his bare thighs and shrugged his big
shoulders, and ad-libbed his idea of a finale. 'Well anyway,' he sighed to the gathering,
'what do you expect from a gook?'
Later Abe would allow that Li probably never heard the slur, because Abe wasn't
sure he'd heard it himself. As it was, the word was barely a syllable before Daniel's fist
was plowing a tight furrow across J.J.'s face.
J.J. dropped hard. His legs crumpled like a killed steer's. He hit the ground so fast
that gouts of blood were still flying when his head slapped the earth. A moment later
Abe felt a warm raindrop on his face and when he touched it, his fingertip showed red.
Instantly the fight was over. Without a single word, the climbers and Sherpas
turned away from the nasty spectacle, each returning to their distractions, everyone
but Abe and Daniel, who shook his hand as if he'd just barked it on a tree. Li moved on
with his mugful of chocolate coffee, stepping very carefully around the giant's body.
Stump went back to his painting. J.J. lay in the dirt.
It took a minute for J.J. to even moan, and by then Abe was kneeling over him,
doing his damage control. There was blood on the rocks, on J.J.'s face, on Abe's new
Nikes. His chief concern was J.J.'s teeth, because any dentistry would have to be
derived from a book. To his relief, Daniel's fist had opened a simple gash over the right
eye, and that was only a matter of thread and a tube of Neosporin.
Jorgens stood up and came over. He nested his fists on his hips and blew air through
his sharp beard.
'I didn't mean it that hard,' Daniel spoke down at J.J.'s stunned form.
'Well I'm glad you didn't mean it any harder, then,' Jorgens approved. Abe had seen
Jorgen's scared look while J.J. was hectoring the L.O., but the look was different now.
Jorgens was excited and relieved both, charged by Daniel's power and relieved that
the mutiny was over. Abe could tell it in the man's eyes and by the rural fatalism in
his voice.
'I can't have him fouling this climb, that's all,' Daniel explained.
'Hell, no,' Jorgens agreed.
Abe kept his head down. He couldn't believe the violence, first the shout, then the
raving, then the fist. And the indifference, he saw it from the corner of his eye,
indifference all around the Tomb.
But more, Abe couldn't believe that Daniel had decided so quickly, though that
wasn't it either. No, it wasn't so much the quickness of Daniel's act that overwhelmed
Abe but the completeness of it. Daniel's fist had completed the thing so fully that in
itself it didn't admit right or wrong. The fist was just something that had happened,
like the yaks not showing up or like the sun going down.
'Hell yes, you were right,' Jorgens said. 'That was close. One more word, and we
would have been packing for home. But you stopped it. Hell yes, you were right. And
J.J. was wrong.'
'No,' said Daniel, 'he was right too. Li owes us the damn yaks.'
Jorgens's head snapped back, not much different from taking a blow to the jaw. In a
panic, he cast around for Li, but Li had left, toting off his Swiss chocolate coffee.
J.J. was beginning to recover his senses. He was shaking his head, tossing blood
drops right and left and lifting his eyebrows and declaring, 'Gaw, man. Gaw.'
Daniel looked down at J.J. and said, 'Damn it.' Slowly, with a pained hitch, Daniel
knelt down and rested one hand on J.J.'s shoulder.
J.J. focused on Daniel's face. His eyes cleared. He smiled. 'Daniel,' he said. 'Are we
okay, Daniel?'
And suddenly Abe knew this had been a mutiny and everything would be different
from now on. The outfit had a new leader.
As if the demons ruling this Himalayan niche had decided the blood offering was
enough, the mountain finally opened to them. That very same afternoon, the climbers'
destiny broke free of the valley.
Abe was facing north and he was the first to see them in the far distance, huge dark
birds swinging back and forth through the empty sky like albatrosses following a fleet
of galleons. One minute the northward view was nothing but rocks and flat valley floor
and the next there were these birds, and then, even as he looked, a mass of dark,
lumbering figures appeared at the far mouth of the valley.
'Look,' he said.
'The yaks,' someone shouted, 'they're here.'
Everyone came out from their tents to watch the yaks arrive. It took almost two
hours. The herd came slowly, and from the distance Abe heard a guttural blat and
sharp cracking. The blat was easy to place, it was a shout, a grotesque human shout.
As for the sharp cracking noise, Abe decided it was the snapping of whips. Closer still,
he saw it was the sound of stone on bone. The yakherders steered their animals by
throwing rocks at one or the other side of their horns.
All through camp, the climbers were whooping like cowboys on Saturday night. Abe
grabbed his old Pentax camera and a telephoto lens and hustled through camp for a
closer vantage. He saw Li near the mess tent doorway and paused, a friendly gesture.
The Chinese official was wearing a look of vindicated authority and Abe allowed that
he deserved it. He hoped Li wouldn't carry it too far, however, because it would only
make him enemies among these climbers.
The braying shouts and cracking of rocks against horn grew more distinct, and now
Abe heard the big black ravens calling from above the herd. 'Now you will see,' Li said,
'the Tibetans are barbarians.'
Abe had to agree. Through his telephoto lens, the herders and their animals
resembled nothing short of a Gothic invasion. They moved stolidly, like a storm cloud.
The yakkies' faces were black from the sun and their thick layers of clothing were so
filthy they had the color of the earth. Some of the men had removed one arm from
their jackets, nomad-style, baring a white shoulder. Some wore long black braids,
others Mao caps and ancient mountaineering goggles.
They loomed closer in the lens and Abe heard the primitive ringing of yak bells, all
pitched differently, and he saw that some of the men wore pants made of thick
leather, others of Chinese quilting. Some were barefoot, others walked in ragged
tennis shoes or hide wrappings.
'The edge of the world is here,' Li commented.
Abe didn't answer. It was easy to see these yakherders the way Li saw them, as
children of the wilderness, the real wilderness, even a brood of the darkness. If there
was a Chinese Rome, it was Li's Beijing, and here he was, a func
tionary faced with the
hairy underbelly of his empire. From within the safe walls of his bureau, order must
have seemed automatic. But out here, the blue sky and these gutting mountains and
strange, dark natives wrecked the order.
'We must be careful,' Li said, 'we must guard against the...' he searched, 'the danger.'
Abe had never seen a yak before, and he was a little disappointed by how small they
were. What few wild yaks remained in Tibet were said to be prehistorically enormous.
These domestic versions were a comedown, standing midway between a St. Bernard
and an American dairy cow. They had the wild aspect of Texas longhorns, but none of
the menace. They were shy animals that spooked easily, and so the climbers quit their
joyous cheering. There were fifty or sixty of them, some blond or tawny, some black.
Their hair hung shaggy.
The herders and their herd entered Base Camp and immediately it became their
camp, too. Now Abe saw why the yak and human dung had been so intermixed on the
ground. The Tibetans pitched their open-sided tents among the climbers' tents and
their beasts milled everywhere, bells chiming, grazing on straw.
From the midst of the yak mass, someone hallowed Abe. He searched the throng for
the voice. It took him a minute to spot Daniel, who was taller than the Tibetans and
white with a pronounced limp and dressed in Western gear. But something about him
tricked Abe's eye and he was hard to distinguish from the nomads.
'Heads up,' Daniel called over the backs of milling yaks. 'Tie down everything you've
got. These yakkies are pirates.' He was wearing what Abe termed the Nordwand grin.
Something about the North Face – just this promise of it, these yaks that would bring
them to its base – had unleashed an epidemic of toothy hellbent smile. Every climber
had it. Abe could feel it stretching his own face.
'I wasn't sure they'd come,' Abe said.
'These guys? They'd come even if they weren't invited. We're like the circus, the
mall and the bank all wrapped up in one. We provide the entertainment and put on a
feed and pay them to watch all at the same time.' In the distance, Gus was watching
them talk. When Abe nodded to her, she turned away.
'You knew they'd show up?'
'That's the easy part. The question with these guys is always when. The trick is