Under Tower Peak

by Bart Paul

  It was all greasy hands and skinned knuckles for the next hour or so, me pretty much doing what Lester told me.

  “Hand me that seven-sixteenth,” he said.

  I handed it to him.

  “I hate machinery.”

  “You should quit the horseback life,” he said, “and go to aircraft mechanic school. You’re a natural.”

  “Screw you. Valves and springs and cams. It’s worse than being back in Mister Hessell’s auto shop class.”

  “I’m handled here,” he said. “Why don’t you go tear into that sucker. Break something. You’ll feel better.”

  I wiped my hands and whacked away at the door with a hammer and cold chisel. It popped off quick. The other door was under the wreck where I couldn’t get to it. Then I lowered myself down and started on the insides, unscrewing the instrument panel, unbolting the stick, cutting wires, and dismantling the cockpit from the inside out. I was careful not to touch the dried blood on the panel when I lifted out the radio and such. I kept finding little things we didn’t pay attention to before, like an Auto Club map of Nevada, a prescription bottle for Ibuprofen, a couple of empty cardboard fruit drinks with the straws still in them, and a critter-chewed Cheetos bag. Unbolting the seats took a while because it was so cramped in there and they were laying sideways, but they stacked up nice once I got them out with the hammer and chisel. I’d hauled a lot of junk out, but from outside the plane still looked about the same.

  I took a break and tended to the stock, stringing out two separate picket lines for the night and giving everybody a pile of grain on the grass when they got restless. There was snowmelt trickling down through the rocks from up toward the pass. I pulled some stones out to make a catch basin a couple of feet across and watched it fill up enough for a horse to drink out of so we wouldn’t have to walk them halfway down the mountain before we turned in.

  Lester was still humming along pulling the pistons. Give him a job like that, he’s set for hours. I built a fire near the plane and heated up a can of Dinty Moore stew we could eat while we worked. While I watched the pot, I handed Lester the old Cheetos bag.

  “The hell?”

  “Appetizers.”

  “All his money and he’s eating Cheetos like some damn kid,” he said.

  “They don’t have a separate section in the AM-PM says snack food for billionaires.”

  He crumpled up the bag and tossed it in the fire. “Give me some of them caviar Cheetos,” he said, “with that chewy caviar goodness.”

  It was close to the longest day of the year, so we had daylight for a long time. When it finally got too dusky to see inside the cockpit, I lit the Colemans, poured us some Crown Royal, and went back to helping Lester on the motor. We kept working by lamplight until he had the block picked clean and cams, and pans, and rods, and pistons, the drive shaft, heads, and a slew of bolts piled up on the blue tarp. The Nevada hills off east started to get a silver glow, and pretty soon the moon came up just about full. We were sitting a couple of thousand feet above the rim of the hills, so it looked like the moon was rising below us at our feet. When I got up I saw Tower Peak all lit up silver and black now off to the west.

  “We got enough to balance out the block with this mess,” Lester said. “It’ll be about all that big black sucker can pack, though.”

  I filled a can from my catch basin and heated water so we could wash the grease off our hands. We watered the stock one at a time, picketed them on the lines, and saw to our bedrolls. That all took a long time. We sat there for a bit on our tarps then, drinking Crown Royal and watching the row of horses and mules standing quiet in the moonlight and the big pile of junk lying next to the plane.

  “It’s like we’re at the top of the world,” he said.

  “We kind of are. Man, I’m whipped.”

  “You’re never whipped.”

  “Well, I’m whipped tonight.” I pulled off my boots and crawled into my bedroll. I called Nora again, but it was right to voicemail like before. I left a message but didn’t talk loud.

  “Hey Nora. Just wanted to make sure you’re safe in Mammoth and not gallivanting around out in the open. Call me a-s-a-p. Don’t matter how late. Doesn’t matter how late. Shit.”

  I tucked the phone under the rolled-up jacket I was using for a pillow.

  “You worried about her?” Lester asked.

  “I wish I wasn’t, but yeah.”

  I flattened out in the bedroll with the tarp open. It was a mild night, even at ten thousand feet.

  “Say, Tommy?”

  I was half dozing.

  “You think Callie’s in heaven?”

  “Sure, Lester.”

  “You believe in heaven?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not? The war?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t spend a lot of time thinking about things like that.”

  “Well, right now I got to think there is,” he said.

  “I know. Makes sense for you.”

  “It doesn’t really make sense at all though, even when I want it to. I watched too much goddamn Nova in high school.”

  “Goodnight, Lester.”

  I was awake now. I kept opening my eyes to see all that moonlit broken country down below, and the animals on the picket line, and the peaks all huge above us. I caught myself memorizing things and made myself stop.

  “You asleep?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “After someone dies, you believe in closure?”

  “I believe there’s no such thing.”

  He was quiet for a bit except for some snuffling like maybe he was crying for Callie Dean. I snuck a look over. He was laying on his back staring at the moon. It looked close enough to hit with a rock.

  “In the moonlight the plane looks like some spacecraft crashed on Mars,” he said. “You ever think about outer space?”

  “Not ever.”

  “You see those movies with guys standing all alone on some distant planet a gazillion miles out in deep space with some weird moon on the horizon. But what if we’re the ones on the distant planet and all this just over our heads is deep space, all cold and huge and empty? You ever think that lying here we’re flying a million miles an hour in outer space right now?”

  “One of us is, that’s a fact.”

  Lester got quiet. After a bit a breeze kicked up and woke me, and I saw sparks from the fire swirling around between us and the plane. That was strange. I remembered summer nights in the Sierra as almost always dead still.

  I didn’t wake up until the sun was up and Lester was shaking fuel from the chainsaw on a pile of pine chunks to start a fire. The stock was already watered and hobbled out on the grass with piles of grain, and I could see he’d already been working on the wreck. He threw a kitchen match on the pine and the gas blazed up.

  “You’re a regular woodsman, bud. Old John Muir’d be proud of you.”

  “Well, look who’s among the living,” he said. “I thought you were going to sleep for a week.”

  Lester was ready with the coffee pot to set on the wire grill to boil.

  “You just lay there and get your beauty rest,” he said. “Lunch’ll be ready before you know it.”

  I got up and pissed. The air was breezy and almost warm, like there was a storm coming. There wasn’t much to do after I gathered more firewood but watch Lester cook breakfast. He had some bacon and runny pancakes going before long and kept opening the lid of the coffeepot.

  “A watched pot never boils. Didn’t your mom tell you that?”

  “We’re up too damn high, is what,” he said.

  After breakfast we went back to work on the plane. We popped the rear flaps off the tail then hacksawed the whole section off. I wrote the numbers on the tail and wing down in my tallybook, then we swapped ends and Lester went to work on the cowling. I crawled in to see what I’d missed the night before. A bunch of flies were pasted to the inside of the windshield like the headliner of a pickup if you’ve left the
windows down and rain is coming. I popped the spot welds on one gas tank with a chisel and started to hacksaw the galvanized neck of the tank but thought better of it. It was so cramped in there I had to get out. Pretty soon we were down to the fuselage and the one wing, just tubing and fabric with the nose cut back to the windshield. With it stripped down like that, it did kind of look like some spaceship. We rocked it back and forth until we got it upright, then we unbolted the struts and started sawing off the wing with a hacksaw.

  “Get the gravy,” Lester said, “we’re down to the dark meat.”

  I broke a hacksaw blade when I was about through the last piece of tubing, and we just twisted the wing till it came off.

  “Still blows me away how flimsy this sucker is,” he said. He tossed a strut into a pile.

  “We’ll, let’s get this mess mantied up.”

  We started sorting the pieces into pack loads, the heavy stuff like the motor into paired pack bags, the big awkward junk like wingflaps, doors, and the seats buckled into slings. We’d pick up one bag then the other to keep the weight as even as we could. We separated out the long or awkward pieces like the prop. We’d tie those across the tops of the loads at the very last. We’d done this together so many times we didn’t have to say much. Pretty soon we had the place pretty well cleared off and six piles of airplane ready to pack.

  “Well, Einstein,” Lester said, “we definitely got more plane than we got mules.”

  We just looked at that gutted fuselage and wing.

  “Yeah. We need another four animals and twenty more hacksaw blades.”

  “And another full day,” he said. “You got any other bright ideas?”

  I walked around the fuselage. “Grab an end. Let’s see if we can pull it away from that tree.”

  We wiggled the wreck again so nothing was snagged, and dragged it off the rock outcropping. It was awkward, but we were stout boys and could almost lift it.

  “Where to?” Lester asked.

  “That sandy spot.”

  We wrestled it over about ten feet. It rested thirty feet off the trail.

  “You want to haul it into the trees?”

  “Couldn’t if we wanted to. Best keep it away from the trees.”

  “How come?” he asked.

  “We’re going to blow it up.”

  “The hell.”

  Lester looked at me like I was crazy. I walked over to where the pack loads were stacked and dug out the highway map. Lester watched me unfold it, then twist it and roll it into a long ropey thing. I walked around the wreck and unscrewed a gas cap.

  “There’s no gas left,” he said. “Remember?”

  “There’s fumes.”

  “You’ll need more than that, son.”

  I shoved the twisted paper into the neck of the closest tank like a fuse.

  “Go ahead and light it,” he said. “See if I’m right.”

  “Let’s tie up the stock just in case.”

  “Dreamer,” he said.

  Lester helped me unhobble and lead the animals back to the picket line. When they were all tied snug, he followed me back to the wreck. I bent down and sniffed for gas but barely got a whiff. The breeze blew out a couple of matches before I got the rolled-up map to catch fire. I scampered back about thirty feet.

  “Lester?”

  I motioned him to step away from the plane. He waved me off like usual but moved back a few steps just in case. We watched it from opposite sides of the wreck for a minute, but nothing happened. Lester was about to say something when there was a big pop, kind of hollow and tinny like from inside the gas tank as the whole plane exploded and caught fire in an instant. Just like that. Lester jumped back and fell on his butt and scrambled away from the fire. A couple of the horses flinched on the picket line. The little mule just looked sideways at us like she was saying, What else you got? Lester looked at me like a crazy man through the flames, orange and wispy and shimmering with the heat.

  “Damn,” he said. “There is like no smoke.”

  “That’s good. Nobody’ll spot it then.”

  “Damn.” He just stared at the flames.

  “Let’s grab that wing.”

  We hoisted the wing and tossed it on the fire. Then we sat on the ground and ate our lunch while the fire burned.

  “How’d you know it’d do that? How’d you know it would just explode and burn with nothing but the fumes?”

  “I don’t know. I just kinda figured it might.”

  It burned for a good twenty minutes. Pretty soon all that was left was a black frame of bent-up tubing.

  “Those old ponies hardly flinched,” he said.

  “They’re around gunfire every fall.”

  We rolled our bedrolls and stowed the kitchen gear and waited for the fire to die out. When we were about ready to pack up, I walked over to the frame and stuck my hand out. The tubing was already cool to the touch. I looked to see how much of the ground we’d singed and it wasn’t too bad.

  “Come on, Lester. Let’s find a hole to hide this sucker.”

  We split up and walked though the crushed granite and boulders and clusters of whitebark pine and snowbent hemlock. About a hundred feet south of our camp downslope in some scattered pine and boulders I found a drop-off in a granite slab that made a slot in the rocks about ten feet deep. Gray twigs and limbs of dead trees were scattered on the ground and smears of lichen gave the granite a blotchy green and orange look. No human being, even going back to the Piute hunters, had probably ever looked down into that slot because there was no reason to meander over there with the natural pass so close. Even where we camped was not a spot anybody else would choose. There was better water down-trail on our side of the pass, and Little Meadow was just over the crest about thirty minutes walk on the other side.

  We dragged the skeleton of the fuselage over the rocks and into the trees. A couple of the horses spooked on the picket line as we stumbled along near them, but the mules didn’t pay us any mind. Even if it wasn’t heavy, the frame was awkward to carry over rough ground and we set it down once to catch our breath in the thin air.

  “Damn,” Lester said. “We’re just erasing this guy right off the face of the earth.”

  We dragged the frame the rest of the way to the edge of the slot and dropped it in. It wedged about halfway to the bottom, but if you stood five feet back from the edge you couldn’t see it. Lester brought the wing over next and we used that to tamp the fuselage down another couple of feet, then we tossed the wing on top.

  “Well that’s that,” he said. “Nobody’s gonna find this puppy now.”

  “I sure hope not.”

  “Why a chopper could fly right over and never see it.”

  Before we saddled up we scoured our camp. I scuffed the burned spots on the ground as best I could with my boot, then I had Lester help me rake up the manure and scatter it on the ground where we’d burned the plane to cover the singed spots. I dropped some at the crash site to cover any oil drips.

  “The birds will peck and scratch through the horse turds for the seeds and make this look just as natural as can be.”

  “You are so weird,” he said.

  “One good rain, you’ll never know anything was here.”

  Lester lifted his head up and sniffed the air for the coming storm like a dog. We started saddling up the eight animals at the picket lines, brushing them good before we set the saddle pads on so we wouldn’t have any sore backs when we got back on down the mountain.

  “What’re we going to do with all this junk?” Lester asked.

  “I was hoping you had some ideas.” I set my rig on my horse, smoothing my pads and Navajo, brushing dirt off the cinch, buckling the rifle scabbard on the off-side. For a minute there, I didn’t do anything but just stare at the smooth brass of the rigging plate and run my hands over the oak-leaf tooling that Dad kept oiled up so well.

  “Anytime now,” Lester said.

  He was hoisting a pack bag onto one of the mules. I snapped ou
t of it and went to load the other side. We took our time getting all six animals loaded up. The first mile would be steep and I didn’t want any packs shifting on us. We used diamond hitches or squaw hitches depending on the load. About the hardest piece to pack was the tail section. We tied it on its side on top of the roan where it cantilevered out over his butt with a few inches to spare. If he was a spooky horse, we sure as hell would have found out then. We packed the big black horse last, so he wouldn’t have to stand around under all the weight any longer than he had to. The bags carrying the motor were so damned heavy we each hefted one at the same time, resting them against his sides to give us each a free hand, then slipping the straps over the sawbucks one after the other as we eased the weight from us to him. He gave a grunt as the whole thing settled.

  “This is a load,” Lester said. “Reverend Al says we’re discriminating.”

  “Cut it out.” It came out more snappish than I’d meant.

  “Look,” he said. “I know we wouldn’t have to do all this if I hadn’t swiped the damn watch. This is all because of me.”

  “Bullshit. These folks are scum. Nobody could see this coming. You’re not in their league, bud. You never meant nothing bad.”

  “But you wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

  “That ain’t the point. That dead body was worth millions to one side when it was here and millions to the other when it was gone. Somebody was bound to take it to us one way or another once we found it, and not lost a wink of sleep either.”

  “Well.”

  “Well nothing, Lester. Forget it.”

  We tarped the load, threw a squaw hitch, and snugged down the lashrope good and tight. I took one last look around the campsite, hoping we hadn’t forgot anything obvious. A person would have to look pretty hard to ever think a plane had crashed on that bench. Even the little whitebark pine was just bent but not broken off. A wind was starting to kick up.

  “Let’s string them up and get the hell out of here,” Lester said.

  I looked down that snowfield then back to those horses and mules with their crazy top-heavy loads. Even the little new mule was standing quiet like she knew today she wouldn’t have any energy to waste.