Savage Mountain

by John Smelcer

  Savage Mountain

  Books by John Smelcer

  Fiction

  Edge of Nowhere

  Lone Wolves

  The Trap

  The Great Death

  Alaskan: Stories from the Great Land

  Native Studies

  The Raven and the Totem

  A Cycle of Myths

  In the Shadows of Mountains

  The Day That Cries Forever

  Durable Breath

  Native American Classics

  We are the Land, We are the Sea

  Poetry

  The Indian Prophet

  Songs from an Outcast

  Riversong

  Without Reservation

  Beautiful Words

  Tracks

  Raven Speaks

  Changing Seasons

  Savage

  Mountain

  John Smelcer

  Leapfrog Press

  Fredonia, New York

  Savage Mountain © 2015 by John Smelcer

  All rights reserved under International and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Published in 2015 in the United States by

  Leapfrog Press LLC

  PO Box 505

  Fredonia, NY 14063

  www.leapfrogpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed in the United States by

  Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

  www.cbsd.com

  First Edition

  EISBN: 978-1-935248-66-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smelcer, John E., 1963-

  Savage mountain / John Smelcer. -- First edition.

  pages cm

  “Inspired by true events.”

  Summary: In the summer of 1980, brothers Sebastian and James Savage decide to climb one of Alaska’s highest mountains to prove themselves to their father but, instead, through testing their limits, learn that now matter how different they may be, the strongest bond of all is brotherhood. Includes discussion questions.

  ISBN 978-1-935248-65-1 (paperback)

  [1. Mountaineering--Fiction. 2. Brothers--Fiction. 3. Adventure and adventurers--Fiction. 4. Fathers and sons--Fiction. 5. Alaska--History--20th century--Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S6397Sav 2015

  [Fic]--dc23

  2014044521

  for James, still on the mountain

  Acknowledgements

  The author would like to thank Bard Young, Rod Clark, David Roberts, Amber Johnson, Dan Johnson, Steve McDuff, Matty McVarish, and Lisa Graziano.

  “It’s not the mountain we come to conquer, but ourselves.”

  —Sir Edmund Hillary

  (the first person to summit Mount Everest)

  For almost a million years the mountain had been thrusting itself skyward in violent upheavals, buckling and folding the crust from the collision and one plate riding over and consuming the other, upending the very earth itself. At more than 16,000 feet, its summit is eternally shrouded in snow and ice, tangled in clouds, and blasted by raging storms. In the brief summertime, its alpine glaciers melt, creating the headwaters of streams and rivers forever eroding the valleys and floodplains. So insurmountable, the unconquerable mountain destroys anything that dares to rise up against it.

  Some fathers are like a mountain.

  Contents

  BROTHERS

  PILLAR OF THE COMMUNITY

  APPLES & ORANGES

  NOWHERE MAN

  THE PLAN

  DAY ONE

  DAY TWO

  DAY THREE

  DAY FOUR

  DAY FIVE

  DAY SIX

  DAY SEVEN

  DAY EIGHT

  THE RECKONING

  Questions for Discussion

  The Author

  Links

  BROTHERS

  Saturday, May 29, 1980

  THE BASEBALL BAT JUST MISSED smashing Sebastian’s brains out of his head. Instead, the tip of the bat punched a hole through his bedroom door.

  “Holy crap! You could have killed me!” he shouted when he saw the hole, which was big enough to put his fist through.

  “Stop ducking and I’ll finish the job,” replied James, choking up on the grip and pulling back to swing again.

  Sebastian acted quickly, throwing all his weight against his brother, the two crashing against a hallway wall and wrestling for control of the bat. He managed to pull the weapon free of his murderous brother’s grasp.

  “Stop now!” he said, trying to defuse the situation. “Seriously! Chill out!”

  But James wouldn’t listen. He sucker-punched Sebastian in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him, and ran into the kitchen. While catching his breath, Sebastian heard drawers opening and closing. James appeared a moment later with a long butcher knife in his hand.

  For the next several minutes, fourteen-year-old James tried to slash or stab his brother, who was almost two years older. Sebastian managed to keep furniture between them—the coffee table, the recliner, the dining room table and chairs—while James lunged at him with the knife.

  “Cut it out, man! Someone’s gonna get hurt,” Sebastian warned while avoiding the wielded blade.

  The brothers had been fighting each other for most of their life. But matters had gotten worse, escalating to the point where one or both could be seriously harmed, even killed. Although Sebastian was older than James, they were almost the same height and weight.

  During a failed lunge, Sebastian managed to grab his brother’s arm and twist his wrist until he dropped the knife on the floor. Sebastian kicked it away. After that, the fight spilled down the stairs and out onto the front lawn. At one point James picked up an old weathered two-by-four from a stack of discarded lumber beside the garage. He swung it like a baseball bat, trying to strike his brother in the ribs. But Sebastian turned and hunched over, just in time, so the eight-foot board broke in half over his back. The snapping sounded like breaking bone.

  Sebastian jumped his brother and knocked him to the ground. The two were rolling on the grass slugging each other when a police car pulled up and a policeman stepped out.

  “Alright, break it up!” he commanded, with one hand patting his black, holstered night-stick.

  The brothers struggled to their unsteady feet. James gave Sebastian a shove and Sebastian pushed back so hard that James tripped and fell.

  “That’s enough!” shouted the policeman. “What’s going on here?”

  “Nothing,” replied the brothers, both with bleeding lips or noses and torn and grass-stained shirts.

  “It looks to me like you two were trying to kill each other.”

  “We’re brothers, sir. That’s all. Just brothers,” replied a nervous Sebastian.

  “Yeah, I figured as much. How old are you two?”

  “I’m sixteen,” replied Sebastian. “But I turn seventeen this summer. He’s fourteen.”


  “Yeah, but I’ll be fifteen in a couple weeks,” said a visibly angry James. “Jerkwad here didn’t mention that.”

  The cop shook his head in disbelief.

  “You guys are too old to be acting like children. Where do you live?”

  James pointed to the green two-story house behind them.

  “This is your house?” the cop asked.

  Both boys nodded, wiping away blood with the backs of their hands.

  “I have two brothers myself and we used to fight like hell all the time. Are your folks home?”

  “No, sir,” replied James. “They went shopping.”

  “Well, you can’t be out here disturbing the whole damned neighborhood,” replied the cop, noticing the woman across the street looking out her living room window. “Take it inside.”

  “Yes sir,” replied both boys, relieved.

  The brothers never did resume their fight. Truth is they didn’t even remember why it started in the first place. Instead, they cleaned up the mess they made before their parents came home, righting things they had overturned, like a lamp, the coffee table, and a magazine rack full of Popular Mechanics and National Geographic. Sebastian patched the hole in his bedroom door and painted it with a partial can of off-white paint he found in the garage. When his father later asked why he had painted the door, Sebastian replied that he just wanted to make his room look nicer.

  His dad bought it.

  PILLAR OF THE COMMUNITY

  Sunday, May 30, 1980

  “PICK IT UP, YOU DAMN SISSIES!” the insistent father shouted at Sebastian and James, who were struggling to lift a fifty-five-gallon drum full of gasoline into the bed of a pickup truck.

  “But Dad, this weighs over three hundred and sixty pounds,” complained Sebastian, having already done the calculations.

  “We’ve already tried a hundred times,” James exaggerated, wiping his dirty hands on his jeans and then examining a broken fingernail.

  “Shut up and get it in there, you crybabies!” the father scowled. “Pull up your little girl panties and act like men. How’d I end up with losers like you two?”

  The boys struggled again, managing to get the lip of the drum onto the edge of the high tailgate, but then it slipped when they tried to lift the bottom. The problem wasn’t so much the weight itself as the awkward shape and the sloshing contents of the drum. It would have been manageable had the drum been equipped with handles.

  “Get under it!” the father said sternly. “Use your legs, you friggin’ wussies!”

  But each time the boys almost got it up, James would lose his grip and the drum would fall, and the boys would jump back for fear of the sharp rim smashing their toes. Sebastian was strong for his size. He trained with weights and ran five miles three days a week, even in winter when it was 30 or 40 degrees below zero—the air burning his lungs, ice forming on his wispy, teenage moustache. On some days he ran as far as ten or fifteen miles. Although as tall as his older brother, James was nowhere near as strong.

  The father watched the boys make several more futile attempts.

  “Move out of the way, damn it,” he grumbled and shoved James aside.

  From behind his crouched father, James bit his lip and gestured as if he would punch his old man in the back of the head. With a furtive glance, Sebastian shook his head, and James lowered his balled fist and turned away, stomping his foot in anger.

  “I don’t know why I thought you two girls could do anything. “Here,” he said squatting beside the drum, “let a real man show you how to do it.”

  “Why you always gotta treat us like crap?” asked Sebastian.

  His father looked up.

  “Because life is hard. You need to be tough. Things don’t always turn out the way you want them to. Now get down here and help me, Priscilla.”

  Sebastian helped tip the drum against the lip of the tailgate, and then he crouched like his father.

  “On the count of three lift and slide it in at the same time,” said the father, their faces close from their hunched position over the barrel. “Use your legs.”

  On the third count the two were able to hoist the back of the drum waist high.

  “Push! Push!” shouted the father. “Use your muscles!”

  Sebastian dug his feet into the ground and used his shoulder to push. The drum slid into the truck bed and rolled heavily against a side wall, sloshing from side to side until finally settling.

  The father slapped his hands together, wiping away dirt and rust.

  “See! How hard was that? Now, you two pansies load the other one by yourselves and come in for dinner when you’re done. And make sure the bung is on tight.”

  “But, Dad, it could take us an hour to load it by ourselves,” said Sebastian, already hungry and exhausted from trying to load the first drum.

  “I don’t care if it takes you all night. You two cupcakes don’t set foot in the house until it’s loaded in the truck. You hear me? I’ll make men of you two wimps yet.”

  But Sebastian and James knew that it really didn’t matter if they managed to load the drum or not. Whenever they failed at something, their father was quick to demean them. When they succeeded, he dismissed their achievement just as quickly. The bar was always nudged higher, like a summit they could never reach. The brothers were trapped in a world in which they could never triumph.

  After his father left, Sebastian used a long screwdriver to make sure the bung was on tight enough so the gas wouldn’t spill when the drum was on its side.

  After failing several times to muscle the drum into the truck, Sebastian got an idea. He remembered the stack of used lumber beside the garage. James sat on the tailgate while Sebastian picked through the pile, returning moments later with three of the strongest eight-foot-long two-by-fours. He leaned each one against the tailgate, spacing them a little over a foot apart.

  “Give me a hand,” he said to his younger brother.

  Together, they tipped the drum onto its side and with some difficulty managed to roll it up the planks and onto the tailgate. It was an easy matter after that to manhandle the drum into position and slide it into the bed alongside the other drum.

  “That’s how you get it done!” exclaimed Sebastian cheerfully as he closed the tailgate.

  Sebastian was always like that: using his brain over his muscles. His father hated that.

  He worried Sebastian would grow up to be a poet or something.

  After returning the boards to the pile beside the shed and slapping each other a high five, the brothers proudly walked into the house in time for dinner. When they sat down at the table their father stared at them hard, then he stood up from his chair and walked over to the front window where he could see the truck with both barrels in the bed. He sat back down and ate his meal without saying a word.

  As he always did after dinner, their father sat in his over-stuffed, brown-fabric recliner in the living room reading the newspaper. The wall behind him was covered with plaques, photographs, certificates, and framed newspaper stories about him from the old days. He called it his “I Like Me Wall.” The most prominent item was a picture of him standing beside a four-star general next to a jeep with its tires caked in mud. The fireplace mantle and an adjacent bookshelf were lined with old high school football trophies.

  Sebastian walked in to get his school books.

  “Tonight’s garbage night, Dumbass. Take the trash cans out to the curb,” demanded his father without even looking up from the newspaper.

  “But I have to work on an essay for school,” said Sebastian, talking to the wall of newspaper. “Can’t James do it?”

  “It’ll only take a few minutes. It’s your job this month. Just do it! And stop blinking all the time. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He was used to giving orders. He had served in Vietnam during the early years
of the war. He had even won medals for valor. Sebastian knew when it came to his father’s commands there was no room for discussion or compromise, only Do as I say or suffer the consequences.

  But Sebastian didn’t do it right away. He decided to push the envelope and delay a bit. Instead, he worked on his essay for almost an hour and then called a classmate to talk about the assignment and compare notes. Afterward, he went downstairs into the garage to exercise for half an hour. He tried to train a little every day, at home or in the school weight room, where mostly wrestlers and football players trained. He had a rack of iron weights, a couple sets of dumbbells, and a sturdy bench-press bench in a corner. Although Sebastian was slight, around five-foot-six and weighing only 130 pounds, he could bench-press 225 pounds, 240 on a good day. He could deadlift every weight he had in the garage, an unbelievable 400 pounds—more than three times his own body weight. Although he had only been competing for about two years, he held numerous records in the sport.

  When Sebastian finally came up for bedtime, exhausted from a good workout, he noticed mountainous lumps beneath his blanket. He thought maybe it was his brother hiding there to surprise him, but the shape didn’t look like a person. He pulled back the blanket to find that two large bags full of garbage had been emptied onto his mattress, ripe and disgusting, with coffee grounds, egg shells, spaghetti scraped from dinner plates, pork chop bones, bacon grease, moldy bread, wilted lettuce, and greasy black banana peels. It took him over an hour to pick up all the trash, take it out to the curb, and wash his funky-smelling sheets and pillowcases.