by Jeff Long
Hugh considered his options. Reason or fight. Or go with it. Finish the thing, he told himself. Get shed of this. “I’ll do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“What you said, make her decent. I’ll go up.” He motioned at the bulge above them. “I’ll get Andie away from her. You can’t, not with your shoulder. I can.”
Augustine suspected a trick. “She’ll be out cold in twenty minutes. We can wait.”
“We don’t have twenty minutes,” said Hugh. “Look, she doesn’t know me. I’m just a face. Not even that, just a dream in the smoke. I’ll take care of Andie. You don’t want to see her like this. She wouldn’t want that.”
Augustine considered. “And then?”
“Like you said, take her out of here. You and her.”
Augustine looked at him, beseeching. For a moment, his bleak Viking frown loosened, and Hugh saw the boy behind his armor, the innocence before Cerro Torre ate him. He needed Hugh, and not just to beg for the body and to secure them in this wasteland. He wanted everything to be simple, like in the old days. He wanted to let down his defenses and just have his heartbreak.
Hugh relented. Take some slack, lad. Quit fighting the world. He swayed gently in his stirrups. He took command, though of what and for how long he could not say.
“Make the call,” he said to Augustine. “Bring them down to us. The two of us working together, we’ll do what needs to be done.”
Augustine nodded.
Hugh gathered a jug of water and a sleeping bag, and started up. “Cuba,” he called.
She didn’t make a sound.
“Like a baby,” said Augustine.
TWENTY-FOUR
Hugh climbed warily, as if entering the den of a sleeping lion. Except, she was awake. The tranquilizer had yet to take effect, that or Augustine had hit the wrong bulge and sedated a corpse. Clutching her swan-necked friend, Cuba watched his approach with fierce red eyes.
“Water?” He showed her the Clorox jug. “You need to drink.”
He knew she could speak. You couldn’t stay away. She merely watched him.
“I’m Hugh.”
Nothing.
“Cuba.” He spoke her name.
Her face pinched with rage and fear and plain hunger.
He took a step higher. Lashed to the wall, weighed down with the body, sapped by a week of hardship, she was harmless. And yet she scared him. He doubted she still recognized the rag doll in her arms as human anymore, and he was probably just one more hallucination rising to her from the depths. Even out of her mind, though, she was all sinew and willpower.
With fresh eyes, aware this time of her ordeal, Hugh appraised the bizarre anchor. She must have made it after the fall, not before. While she was still sane, Cuba had locked herself into protective custody. Before the shell shock set in, she’d nailed and jammed everything in her possession into the wall to make herself safe from who she was about to become.
It was a miracle that, in her days of delirium, she hadn’t chewed through the ropes and dived into the hereafter. But she’d held it together. She wasn’t completely gone or she’d be gone.
He started the soothing patter one might offer a stray dog. “You’re safe now, Cuba. Everything’s pulling together. I’ll take care of you.” He left Augustine out of the equation. “How about some water?”
It had been summery up here when disaster had struck. He remembered that afternoon. He’d been portering this very jug of water along the forest floor, and it had been chilly in the shadows. But here in the Eye, the sun had been warm. They were dressed for the beach. Andie was wearing a little tie-dyed tank top. Cuba wore nothing more than a sports bra and white tights. A lingerie lace pattern ran along the outside of her thigh. Her bare shoulders and arms and rib cage were laced with old rope burns and yellowing bruises.
Hugh went another rung higher. She didn’t reach for the water, and he wouldn’t have handed it to her anyway. She wasn’t in her right mind and might have pitched it overboard. That aside, she needed taming.
With broad, slow motions so that she could see, he unscrewed the cap. He poured a bit into the taped cup of his palm, just to let her get the scent. Her eyes darted to the water.
He set one knee on the platform.
The water drained through his fingers. She scowled at the waste. Good, he thought. She saw gain. She saw loss. All in his hands.
He got his other knee up. The platform moved.
“I’ve come a long way to help you,” he said. He raised the Clorox jug, and her eyes followed it. She craned her head back.
“Open,” he said. He trickled a few teaspoons into her mouth. Her tongue reached for it. She moaned.
He knew from the desert the sweet purity of that first taste. He hadn’t suffered nearly as long as Cuba, only a night and two days. But on one level, survival was its own bottom line. You outlived the ones who died, that’s all. He gave her a little more.
“Take your time,” he said. “I have all you want, Cuba. I’m a friend.”
He heard a scratch of radio static through the floor, Augustine making the call. Cuba appeared oblivious to it.
“Hugh,” she whispered.
He rewarded her with an ounce of water across her forehead. “Cuba,” he said, as if christening her.
Her eyes rolled back with ecstasy. He remembered the dunes. The white sun had burned him half black. The cool water had steamed on his flesh.
He slid the water out like fingers, and then traded his fingers for the water. He touched her face. She didn’t startle or pull away, just the opposite. She pressed her cheek into his hand. “Hugh.”
It was cramped kneeling by her, and the death smell was horrendous. But now he had contact. She opened her mouth, and he doled out more sips. All the while, he talked.
They had one thing in common. He spoke to that. “Trojan Women,” he said. “You climbed like saints, Cuba. Like the last of the holy men. Women. No fear of God. Do you understand? You’ve done something for the ages here. I go back a long ways. I was a wall rat before you were even born, and trust me, I’ve never seen such a thing. You created a masterpiece here. I mean it. The Captain saved the best for last.” He went on like that, plundering Lewis and his road rap, laying it on.
“Was that you who led the way into Cyclops Eye?”
She nodded.
“Unbelievable.”
She smiled. Pearls of blood beaded up on her cracked lips. With a lick, it turned to red lipstick. He bathed her eyes with water. He whispered her praises while she drank in invalid doses.
“I followed your chalk marks. It was like having a vision, Cuba. It nearly killed me. I got lost, and my only hope was to think your thoughts. I never could have found the way without you. You led me right to you.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I brought you to me.”
He washed away her ferocity. “Can you eat? You should eat.” He couldn’t have stomached a thing with this stench and that terrible, sightless head between them. But she accepted pieces of a chocolate-flavored protein bar, shuddering as the sugar hit.
He wiped the soot from her eyebrows and doelike forehead and temples. Twenty-something, he decided. After Augustine’s witch talk, he’d expected a sun hag, leathery, wrinkled before her time, gaunt from running with the wolves. Basically another Joshua. But she was not berserk or furrowed beneath the grime. As he washed away the bloodshot, her eyes became bright green. Her flesh was ripe.
She followed his face. “Your eyes,” she said.
His black-and-blue eyes, and his bloody whiskers, and his smoke-stained flesh. He swiped at his chin, self-conscious. “I’m not always so ugly.”
“I’ll keep you,” she said.
They murmured back and forth. She nestled in his palm. They could have been lovers, exhausted by each other.
He took his time. Her grip on the corpse relaxed. The fire in her eyes faded. The tranquilizer was kicking in.
He laid her head back against the wall. Weary as s
he was, her eyes stayed locked on his. He stroked her smoky hair.
“Hugh Glass,” she said.
He thought back through his words, and not once had he mentioned his last name. “How did you know?”
She smiled. Mona Lisa with rope burns and a shag cut.
Augustine’s voice rose through the floor. He was arguing over the radio…again. “That doesn’t matter,” he was saying. “Work it out. Talk to them. Get us now.”
Hugh tried to listen, but Cuba craved attention. She drew him to her with a whisper. “Don’t leave me alone,” she said.
Poor thing. “You’re going home,” he told her. “People are waiting for you. They have a team up top. The litter will come. It’s going to be a cruise from here. Lie back, enjoy the ride. We’re almost home.”
That light flickered in her eyes again, the tiger tiger burning bright. She shook her head slowly, knowingly. “It’s not that easy, Hugh.”
He thought she was objecting on principle. Another five hundred feet and she and her sisters would have finished their climb. Now all was for nothing, halted by the fall. Even their grand title, Trojan Women, would get buried and forgotten. Because by tradition, the naming belonged to the party that finally forced the whole passage, and the parties were no doubt assembling already.
By this time, with the forest fire as a sideshow, the route would be legend. News of the accident would have shot through the community. Trojan Women, or whatever it would come to be called, was now a certified people eater, and that made it a serious prize. The fact was that after Into Thin Air was published, the price of a guided Everest climb had actually gone up.
“We can’t leave just like that,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But we can’t stay either.”
The string of prayer flags stirred. Hugh glanced out from the platform. Little eddies appeared in the smoke. He felt a soft breeze.
“It’s not over.” She spoke it like an omen.
“It is,” he said. “You can always come back. It will still be here next season.” What the rangers had told him. But it was a lie, and he knew it.
Hugh could imagine the big-wall bravos—hard men like Augustine, and long ago, himself and Lewis—phoning and emailing each other, laying plans for an immediate assault on this wall even before the dead and wounded were carried off. Ascent was like that, fundamentally Darwinian. That had always appealed to Hugh. The fittest survived. Conquest ruled. It was a meritocracy of flesh and blood in a kingdom of stone. In this case, though, he regretted Cuba’s loss. She and her friends had forged the way. They deserved better than to be a footnote in someone else’s history of their own climb.
“We called for you,” she said. “You came.”
Her eyes were getting dopey, but she still wielded that dominion Augustine hated so much. It was ingrained, her magical theater. She had presence and grit. Hugh liked that.
“Here I am.” He smiled. Then he recollected a whisper in the trees around the girl’s body. And the next morning that song in the stone too soft to really hear, calling him into the heights. And higher upon the wall, more than once, his name surfacing in the middle of the night. It was almost as if someone had been calling.
Her eyes sobered. She was fighting the drug. “I didn’t bring you here for nothing,” she told him.
He stroked her hair. “You said it yourself, Cuba. I couldn’t stay away.”
She smiled her blood-bead smile and murmured something. He put his ear closer, certain he hadn’t heard right. It was an endearment, surely.
“What was that?”
She spoke again, and it was almost loving. “You fucked up, Hugh Glass.”
He jerked his head away. They were back to square one, the two of them. Him the master, her the savage femme lodged in her world of ghosts.
“You don’t have to fight me, Cuba. You’re saved. Believe me.”
“She talks to me, you know,” she said.
Hugh looked at Cuba’s sole possession, her one companion, this lifeless weight. Her embrace with Andie had become a plague. Literally, she was carrying death upon her. This wild child was going to need therapy for years to come. “Don’t worry, Cuba. She’s going with us, too.”
Her face muscled up. The fear made her ugly for a minute. “She doesn’t need us for that. She comes and goes as she pleases.” Alive, thought Hugh, then dead, her imaginary companion. Dangling on a rope, now sprawled across her lap.
Augustine spoke to his radio. “After? But that could be days. This is an emergency. We need it now. Today.” There was a pause, and he said, “But there must be someone.”
Hugh had a sinking feeling. He started to ask what was happening. But Cuba suddenly grabbed his hand. It surprised him.
She reminded him of Rachel in the bar that night, reading his lifeline. But there was no softness here, no flirtation. The muse’s grip was primal. Her hand was battered and calloused and hard as a hoof. With a jolt, he saw that she had epoxy-glued three torn fingernails back into place sometime during her climb. Nothing stopped her. This woman was a force of nature.
Then he saw the fresh cuts in her palm, and it hit him. Here was the answer to their mystery. Here was the explanation for a dead woman’s ascent.
Wasted and dying, Cuba had somehow summoned the strength to pull up the rope holding Andie’s body. The forest fire must have spurred her to action. She could have left the corpse dangling far below, out of sight, out of mind. Instead, with her bare hands, Cuba had saved her friend from that floor of fire.
“You’ve done all you could for her, Cuba.”
“It’s a big sacrifice.”
“You’ve sacrificed enough.”
“We’re all part of it. The whole thing’s arranged. Like a wedding banquet.”
“I understand.” Whatever she was talking about.
“You don’t.” Her whisper went on like rust flakes falling. “She kept me alive for a reason.”
Yes, thought Hugh, and what a grisly trade-off it was. The corpse had kept her alive; she had kept the corpse alive. They had talked each other through the long nightmare. Now the nightmare was over. “I’ll take care of her, Cuba. She just wants to go home.”
“Too late for that. Way too late.”
“We’re almost there. A little more.”
“She borrows me,” Cuba confided.
That stumped him. “Andie?” he said.
“Her, too. And Cass. We’re all just borrowed. We didn’t ask to be part of it.”
He didn’t want to encourage her nonsense, but he had to ask. “Borrowed for what?”
“Her pound of flesh.”
Hugh frowned. He heard Augustine fall silent underneath them. She was still locked on Cerro Torre, still battling Augustine for possession of this battered husk of a woman.
“You have to let go of that,” he told her. “It’s over.”
“Tell her yourself.”
“I’m telling you, Cuba. You’re the one who hears her.”
“We didn’t ask to be part of this,” she said.
“Then let it go.”
“You don’t believe in sin?”
Augustine muttered something. Hugh felt squeezed between them. He was caught in the middle, but someone had to finish this business or they would fall to pieces.
“I believe in survival.” He spoke it loudly for Augustine’s benefit, and to halt her rambling. “That’s what this is all about. Survival.”
She smiled at his ignorance.
“It’s time to sleep,” he said.
“Come closer, Hugh.”
The breeze surfaced again, much stronger this time, a cold breeze. He thought she was running her fingers through his hair, but she wasn’t. The cotton flags snapped briskly, scattering prayers.
“Don’t leave me.” Her eyes were glazing over.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Promise.”
“I do.”
“I can’t be alone,” she whispered.
“You don’t know what it’s like.”
They were getting nowhere with this. She was nodding off, but not fast enough. And the sweet nothings were a fraud. He wanted forward momentum. Closure. Exit.
“I brought a sleeping bag for her.” He unzipped the bag and laid it lengthwise on the platform.
“She doesn’t sleep.” A murmur.
“She needs to rest, Cuba. Let’s do this together. Help me.”
She allowed him to roll the body from her lap onto the opened bag. The platform rustled with the shifting weight. Guy lines and aluminum tubes squeaked. The flags beat back and forth. Below, at the tail end of their wreckage, the platform with the ripped floor skittered in the breeze.
In climbing, you live with a constant symphony of groaning pack straps and ropes bullwhipping and slings under stress, small notes to go with the rough and tumble of waterfalls and avalanches and geological violence. But up here, under this bottomless alcove, even the tiny squeaks and squeals sounded like a machine about to fly into pieces.
As Hugh moved the body from Cuba’s legs, he was startled to find a bright, wet fan of blood across her lap. His first thought was that the body must have bled onto her. But except for the broken neck, Andie showed no wounds.
Which left Cuba. The blood could only be coming from her. Had she ruptured something, or been gored by the spiky rock? She seemed not to notice the wound, wherever it was, and he didn’t point it out. One thing at a time. The platform was too crowded. Separate the dead from the living. Go from there.
Hugh zipped the bag shut. It was his sleeping bag, a Marmot, extra long. He’d bought it new in a Sherpa trek shop in Katmandu, on sight, no haggling. It was big and full, with extra inches to cover his head during cold nights. After this, he’d never use it again. Cuba wanted sacrifice. Here it was, his treasure of warmth.
The sleeping bag swallowed Andie’s slight body with room to spare, even with her long, stretched neck. He zipped it shut and crisscrossed a rope under and around the length of the bag, tying off the sorry sight and much of the smell. When he was done, it made a slender package.