Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  Warren took a moment to get his breath, then walked over to the bundle. He stood for a while, as if afraid to look underneath, and then peeled back the rest of the tarp. The rocks slid off the other corners, and Warren let the breeze carry the tarp across the rock face until it wrapped around a cedar tree. He ran a hand lightly over the equipment, spending more time on the cans of diesel fuel than anything else, tipping them up to check the seals. Gradually, his shoulders relaxed, and he turned to Jake.

  “That short-dropping son of a bitch,” he said. “How’d you figure it out?”

  Jake shrugged. The pilot had done what any smart man might do after taking fire. Stop a little ways off from the preset delivery location—four, five hundred yards. Not an impossible shot if there were other guys waiting, but most guys up here typically carried brush guns designed to hit their targets at under a hundred yards. Maybe the pilot knew that. He sure as hell knew he wouldn’t get paid if he returned with the equipment still in the cargo bay, so he dropped the equipment close enough to call it an honest mistake, and walked away.

  Behind them, the tarp flapped in the wind.

  “You play it close to the vest, huh?” Warren said.

  “Just glad we found it, Boss.”

  “There’ll be a bonus for this, you know. And you don’t have to play Tonto.”

  Jake walked over to the tarp and pulled it loose from the tree. He shook it out, letting it unfold in the breeze. Warren joined him, and they worked together to fold the tarp into a square bundle. It was an oddly intimate exercise, coming together to join the ends, flipping it over, and then coming together again. Jake noticed that Warren’s eyes never left him while they were folding and refolding, studying Jake with the same type of expression he’d had when inspecting the equipment and the fuel tanks. Making sure that the tools he had purchased were in the expected condition.

  Jake almost laughed at the thought, because that’s what he was, a tool. No matter what he did with the money—and it was more money than he could make in five years up here, guiding or trapping—that fact would remain. He was a tool, and his master was right here, wielding him as he saw fit. Perhaps it was not such a big deal.

  “Something funny?” Warren asked.

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “A saying from moose camp.”

  “What’s that?”

  Jake motioned at the equipment, then at the valley below them. They could see the rest of the group through the treetops, watching them. Jaimie’s tall, broad-shouldered form stood out in front, her short dark hair contrasting with her pale skin. He studied the route back down to them, the steep slope followed by the thick brush, a route that was difficult enough without carrying long core tubes, drill bits, or, god forbid, a small diesel engine. “He who finds the moose gets the lightest load home.”

  “That’s a good one,” Warren said. “Too bad this isn’t moose camp.”

  * * *

  He woke in the predawn gray of the following morning and knew immediately what kind of day it was going to be. He could feel the pain forming in his body like a thunderstorm, throbbing but not yet fully awake. Stirring, pacing, winding around his elbows and knees and shoulders, around the sockets of hips, deep in his core. It was not the ache of sore muscles, although there was plenty of that as well. This was the other, the sporadic and malicious visitor, the one that came and went . . . and sometimes came and stayed. It was in his chest, too, wrapping around his ribs and spine, and causing his heart to hammer. He could almost taste it, a bitter presence running through blood and lymph.

  He had brought himself to this point, pushing his body too far and too fast. Moderate exercise was okay—was good—but exhaustion could trigger an episode. And he was exhausted, exhausted from hauling the heavy equipment down all day long and into the twilight hours, exhausted from the pace and the load on the trip in, and more than a little worn out from biting his tongue in the presence of strangers. Add in lying on the cold, hard ground for three nights—he had not made a browse bed from balsam branches as he normally would, because they had not camped in areas where there were enough balsam boughs for everyone—and waking up to this state of the body was not unexpected.

  He reached out, stifling a groan, and felt inside his canvas Duluth Pack. From a side compartment he withdrew three pill bottles, shaking out two capsules from the largest and singles from the others. He dry-swallowed the pills, feeling them make their slow way down his esophagus. There was a thermos of water a few feet away, but it may as well have been a hundred miles. He worked his throat, forcing the pills down. He knew it was silly to swallow the prescription pills before the others, the ones he bought from a friend of a friend. Eventually he would abandon this self-imposed policy, as he had so many others, but for now it held. Prescriptions first, then the others; the ones that actually did something.

  He waited. His temples were throbbing, and it took some time for him to realize that there was another noise to the morning; the low rumble of the Geocore’s diesel engine. It ran for a moment, then stopped. Nobody tried to restart it. A test run. That was good. The first drilling location was only a few hundred yards down, in the valley, where the steep sides mellowed out into the floodplain along the river. The rest of the crew would be able to move the drill cores down there, along with the remaining gear, by themselves. Perhaps the other pill could wait.

  It was the only real self-delusion he allowed himself, that the other pill, or pills, could wait. It was part of his policy too, he supposed—not only waiting for them to be the last ones he took, but pretending they might not even be needed.

  Five long minutes later he reached out again, this time unzipping a separate side compartment. Inside was a small generic aspirin bottle with the cap’s plastic safety mechanism long since carved away. He untwisted it and laid there with his eyes closed, and tried to remove any emotion from his self-assessment. Was it a three-pill day? No; three-pill days were the kind that made carving away the safety latch on the pill bottle a necessity, and he had opened the container easily enough.

  He shook out two small white tablets and opened his eyes, gazing at them blearily. He put them in his mouth and swallowed, and closed his eyes.

  Two minutes later he was sleeping.

  * * *

  He woke to the sound of the drill rig’s engine again, coupled with a sound like sandpaper rubbing against a hard-grained wood. He straightened one leg, then the other. Pain flared and subsided. He did the same with his arms, then craned his neck from one side to the other. It was okay. Not good, but this far away from home and a warm bed, okay was perfectly acceptable. He managed to get partially up, knee-walked over to the thermos, and twisted the cap free. The lukewarm water was flat and tasted of pine needles, and he drank until the water poured down the sides of his face and soaked his collar.

  He took his time getting his boots on. His job was largely over for now and there was no hurry, no need to embarrass himself by stumbling from the tent or leaning against trees. He took another drink of water. His head was fuzzy, and he felt fairly serene. Neither of the conditions were his natural state, and it was his best indication that the pills, the second set, had fully kicked in. He did not like the false sense of well-being, at least not much, but there would be a time for pain and clarity. It would come for him within twenty-four hours. For now, the boots.

  He stepped from the tent and squinted into the late summer sun. Below him, the diesel engine purred. It was a strange contraption, several hundred pounds of anchoring legs and infrastructure, the engine itself another four hundred pounds, squatting over the river floodplain like a mechanical spider. They had delivered a tripod and winch with the rest of the gear, as well as an industrial-strength dolly fitted with wide, all-terrain tires. Without the winch and dolly there would have been no way to move or position the equipment. Warren had thought of everything, and the team seemed to know their exact roles and responsibilities. With the exception of Warren and a crew member named Andy Parkson, they were all younger than t
hirty, probably chosen for their physical stamina as much as for their technical skills.

  He stood blinking outside the tent, watching the core tube slowly rotating below him, the technicians hovering nearby to monitor the gauges. Warren had said they would gather samples for two or three days, max. From what Jake could glean from the group’s conversations, the stratum they wanted to pull samples from was close to the surface.

  Jake made his way down to the valley floor, the ground squelching under his boots as he descended, hopping from one island of rock to the other when he could, trying to avoid the worst of the boggy ground.

  What the hell were they after?

  He paused a short distance back to watch the two technicians work. Dyson Greer was the lead technician; tall, with a shaggy beard and knobby shoulders, he talked in a slow, easy tone that reminded Jake of a cross between a stoner and a Buddhist monk. Andy Parkson was the auxiliary tech, a thin and quiet man in his thirties who dry-shaved every morning and quietly pitched in to help with whatever task needed doing. They were both wearing mud-splashed hip boots, methodically drilling anchors for the rig’s legs, using a combination of the tripod, dolly, and brute strength to position the Geocore rotary rig.

  They continued drilling down into the rock, a slurry of dark loam and rock chips building up at the base of the core tube. Parkson stopped the drill rig about four feet down and then pulled a lever to retract the drill bit. Once it was free of the hole, Greer swung the rig away, and Parkson threaded an anchor rod into the hole. Jake knew the rods well; he had carried four of them, each close to eighty pounds, down the hill yesterday afternoon on separate trips. Each one was fitted with an expansion tip, and now Parkson used a small sledgehammer to slam the upper end, causing the embedded tip to balloon and anchor into the rock. The hollow clangs echoed back to them from the other side of the valley.

  Jake’s gaze drifted across the slow-moving boggy river fifty yards away, flanked with sedge grass, to the rock bluff that framed the north end of Resurrection Valley. The bluff was nearly vertical, except for a narrow hogback ridge that cut diagonally down across the face. A few wispy cedars clung to the lichen-encrusted rock. The valley bottom was pockmarked with strips of wetlands, low boggy stretches between the rocks. Pocket wetlands, Rachel had called them. The swampy ground grew even wetter next to the river, which lacked a defined shore. Instead, the land seemed to dissolve into water, a blurry transition between terra firma and the river.

  “Strange place.” Rachel had come up behind him while he surveyed the valley, partially lost in the painkiller’s pleasant haze. She was dressed in light nylon pants and a microfiber shirt, and held an iPad in a leather case in one hand. “You can tell there’s something interesting underground.”

  “Mmm,” Jake said. “I thought iPads were a no-no.”

  “It doesn’t have a 3G connection,” she said. “And the GPS has been disabled. Warren cleared me to use it.”

  “Good for you,” Jake said.

  They watched as Parkson and Greer drilled another anchoring hole into the rock. The Geocore rig’s diesel engine rpms climbed mildly as the bit chewed through the stone. A cloud of gray dust rose up from the ground, clinging to the mud on their hip boots.

  “Good thing there’s some bigger rocks,” Rachel said, tapping her foot against the rock they were standing on. “Not the bedrock they’d like, but at least they can anchor to it. The rig can float on the ground if it has to, but it’s so wet down here that Warren thought they might bend a core tube or something.”

  “He doesn’t take too many chances, does he?”

  She huffed air out through her nose. It reminded Jake of the way a whitetail doe would puff when she was angry. Probably something he shouldn’t say to her, although the reason for that escaped him at the moment. He smiled, mildly amused at his attempt to identify his political incorrectness. Yup, it was certainly a two-pill day, and he was just floating along, talking with a pretty, spoiled girl about geotech exploration in a valley his father had once called the single most uninviting place he’d ever visited. Resurrection Valley, or simply the bad country.

  “What?” she said, seeing his smile.

  Jake shook his head.

  “Are you ready to go, then?”

  “Go where?”

  “I have to gather some data,” she said. “Remember? Warren said you’d come with me.”

  “What kind of data?”

  “Well, I’m an ecologist, so . . . ?”

  He looked at her blankly.

  She sighed. “Plant and animal survey, see if there’s anything endangered or threatened. First level due diligence. For you, just a walk in the woods.”

  “Warren didn’t say anything to me about this.”

  She shrugged. “What else are you going to do? C’mon, Cameron and Jaimie are going to be collecting core samples, Dyson and Greer will be running the rig, Warren will be getting in everyone’s face about being more timely.” She poked him lightly in the arm, her eyes gleaming. “By comparison, I’m pretty good company.”

  He rolled his shoulders, feeling for the pain he knew was lurking underneath the opioid cloud. He felt a twinge and he used it to focus, to clarify his thinking, to pull himself out of this damned false happy place. “Why’d you get into ecology?”

  “For the stimulating company, obviously,” she said. “Come on, Grumpy, let’s go check out the neighborhood.”

  “No,” he said, his voice stopping her as she started away. “I want to know. Why?” He waved a hand toward the drill rig, welcoming the pain that twisted through his knuckles and wrist. “Why ecology? So you can let some suits know how much damage they can do without getting sued?”

  She gave him a patient smile. “It’s not like that.”

  “If you’re in it for the money, I can understand. But you’re an afterthought, right? They can’t be paying you as much as those guys. So what, this is the only gig you could get, figuring out how much good ole Ma Nature can give up? Some sort of ecology pimp?”

  Very slowly, the animation that had been in her face drained away. Her mouth pursed twice, but each time the words she was about to speak retreated back inside her. After a moment she turned away and started picking her way down the valley. Jake watched her as she moved from rock to rock, moving quickly at first, then slowing. She stopped near a small swamp (a pocket wetland, he thought) and took out her iPad, snapping pictures of the plants on the fringe of the marshy ground. Her face was red, her lips pursed.

  Too much, he thought. Jesus. A little push would have done it.

  And on the heels of that: Oh, Deserae. I’m sorry, babe. Sorry I even looked at that dipshit little girl, or at Jaimie.

  Deserae, who he had first met in the city when they were in college. It was a mid-December night, and the snowflakes were cartwheeling through Rice Park in downtown St. Paul, catching the glow from the Christmas lights strung up in the trees. He had come to the coffee shop to get out of the wind, his mind too cluttered to study for his upcoming finals, and when he went up to order his coffee he couldn’t decide what to get and was too embarrassed to admit he didn’t know a cappuccino from a latte. As he stood there trying to look indecisive rather than clueless, she had moved alongside him and said it was a French press sort of night, didn’t he think? He ordered two, and although she insisted on paying for her own, she allowed him to sit at the small table with her. He had tried to talk. Hard to do without studying her face, the kind of sight he thought people should have to stand in line to see.

  They met in the city, but neither one was made for it. He could still see her on a crisp September evening three years after they met, standing at the edge of the marsh with the sun setting and the massive full harvest moon rising in the east, Deserae swinging her little twenty-gauge in a smooth arc and tumbling a canvasback, almost squealing in pleasure at the thought of the roast duck dinner it would provide, then turning to him and telling him someday he might grow up and learn how to shoot, too. She was as lovely then,
her cheeks smeared with mud to hide her face from incoming ducks, as she had been in the coffee shop in her merino sweater and silk scarf, in the dim light of their apartment with clothes melting away, in the bright spring days when they walked everywhere, broke and happy and the world there just for them. Perhaps more lovely then than anywhere or anytime.

  And what would she think of him now? Creeping through his thirties, trying to cobble something together for a life, alone and growing more and more ornery with every passing day. He knew. He knew what she would think: his fate was far worse than hers.

  He heard the diesel engine rev again and turned. They were still anchoring the legs, but later that day they would begin to drill down into the ground, probing into the area where Warren had shown him those strange geomagnetic swirls. In a day, maybe two, it would all be over. He would have his money and he would go on to the rest of his non-life.

  One of these days, he thought, I promise, honey, I’ll start working on being who I was again.

  He started after Rachel, trying out different apologies in his mind as he walked.

  * * *

  It was late afternoon and she had still not spoken to him. The different things he might have said had remained inside him, curdling in the back of his mouth after her first withering glare. He stayed back, shadowing her as she moved through the marshy ground, then up through the sides of the valley, snapping pictures, occasionally plucking a leaf to study against the key on her tablet. She took nothing with her, no samples, just cataloging what she saw and marking down her observations. They were almost two miles from the drill site.

  “We need to start heading back,” he said.

  She kept walking, moving even farther away. Jake sighed and followed her in silence. It was very quiet; he couldn’t hear the drill rig from here, or much of anything else. There were few birds and no animals in the valley, and the plant life was mundane. He supposed that was a good thing for Warren, because bringing along an ecologist on an exploratory mission obviously meant there was the potential to develop this site. The idea of development seemed farfetched to him—the site was far from anything and everything—but perhaps it would not be so hard to carve a road through the swamps and brush. From a pure civil engineering perspective, he supposed it was actually quite simple—the hard part would be convincing the locals that it was a good idea. And convincing the banks it was worth the investment.