River Thunder

by Will Hobbs

  That’s telling him, I thought. That’s exactly how I feel. This guy reminds me of my dad.

  “Right on, sister!” thundered Pug, who was only half-listening, his attention focused as usual on his biceps. Despite the cold, he was wearing a T-shirt cut off at the shoulders, and was admiring the firelight’s reflection on his muscles. Without thinking about it, he proceeded to punch Troy playfully in the arm. Maybe it was Pug’s way of showing gratitude to his buddy for bestowing his nickname, the Big Fella.

  “Why don’t you blow your whistle, Heather?” suggested Adam with his wide ironic grin. “Blow your whistle, loud and clear.”

  When you blew your whistle it meant you wanted out, it meant you were going home. I’d been wondering all week when somebody was going to do it. I’d sure thought about it, about getting out of this place. But I figured out why I hadn’t done it: aside from not wanting to be first, I would have had to face what I’d be going back to. Was there “home” back there for any of us?

  I could only answer for myself. As for the others, their lives were mysteries. We were as far apart as galaxies in the night sky. Star and I shared a cabin back at base camp, yet I had little sense of what kept her going. She seemed so frail, I’d have guessed she’d be the first to blow her whistle. If the last week had been torture for me, what must it have been for her?

  2

  THE NIGHT BEFORE STORM KING, I GOT NO rest. I was whirling and tumbling inside the car with the world spinning out of control all around. I woke up and took a drink from the water bottle between Star and me. It was pitch dark, still the middle of the night. When I got back to sleep, I was climbing a mountain with Troy and some people who weren’t even in our group. I kept saying that we should turn back, we were late for something, but Troy wouldn’t. Then I slipped, and was hanging from his grasp for the longest time, but then he let go and I was falling, falling, falling.

  Thrashing around in the tent, I woke Star. “Are you okay?” she was asking.

  “I’m okay,” I said, barely coming to. “Just fell off a mountain, that’s all.”

  “That’s not good, Jessie.”

  “Well I guess not, seeing as how we’re going to be climbing a peak with ropes and all that stuff in a few hours.”

  “Imaging can make things happen,” she whispered. “You have to work on your images.”

  “It’s not like I can control my dreams, Star. I’ve had falling dreams since I was little.”

  What I didn’t tell her was, they started right after my mother died. I’d told her enough.

  Unable to get back to sleep, I lay shivering, and wondering if my dad had any idea that I still get those dreams. I told myself that the nightmare had nothing at all to do with actually falling, or with mountain climbing. Skiing doesn’t scare me, flying doesn’t either. Mountain climbing, I told myself, I can do that if I have to. If Star, for crying out loud, if Star can do it, then I can too.

  At breakfast I drew Freddy for my climbing partner. I was relieved. As withdrawn as he was, he wasn’t an exciting companion, but he was a capable climber, probably the best among us.

  The eight of us, with Al trailing, set out from the trees at dawn, trying to make as much time as we could before the weather turned bad, which it tended to do every day around noon. Troy, our navigator for the day, led the way, along with Heather, his climbing partner.

  When we cleared the trees, we couldn’t see the peak. A high ridge, serrated and imposing, blocked our view. Troy started up the ridge, making good time. He didn’t stop to look at his map and he didn’t ask anyone for a second opinion. I wondered if we should be “conferencing,” the way Al wanted us to, but like Troy, I was anxious to get on with it before the weather turned bad. Already the clouds were boiling up out of the blue skies.

  I walked three steps behind Freddy. I felt awkward with him. Freddy was not exactly an artist when it came to conversation. Anyway he seemed content to ignore me. I had the feeling he was something of a wildman, and I was a little afraid of him, like maybe he had a violent streak and had committed some awful crime. He was the only guy, I noticed, that the Big Fella wouldn’t wrestle with and sit on whenever he wanted to play or show dominance or whatever it was. Freddy had some kind of signal that said “Don’t touch,” and even Pug, the sensitive soul that he was, could pick up on it.

  Freddy slowed a bit, and I thought for a moment that he wasn’t sure if we were going the right way, but he said nothing. I stopped and caught my breath. Freddy sniffed the wind, like an animal. He did that often. His jet-black eyes would focus, never on the people, but on the clouds and the peaks, on little gray birds flitting around, on rocks and dirt and trickling water. Someone said Freddy was from New Mexico. When Freddy did speak, it was in a musical Spanish accent. Like Pug, he never flirted with the girls, but unlike Pug, he didn’t joke around with the guys either. Freddy was a loner.

  As I caught my breath, I watched Troy’s bright shock of blond hair bobbing as he chattered with Heather. I wondered what they were talking about.

  I was enjoying the walking, happy to have left my enormous backpack in the trees and feeling weightless by comparison, with only my daypack on my back, even if the slope was getting steep and the air thinning by the moment. We were somewhere around thirteen thousand feet, heading for close to fourteen. Al bounded alongside us, appearing out of nowhere with a huge grin plastered across his face and a cheerful “Great day, isn’t it!” He wasn’t even breathing hard. He’s in his mid-forties, like my dad, and strong and lean as a whip. Even his gray hair is like that, I thought, springing out like steel wool from under his cap and jumping out of his nostrils and ears. There were moments when you almost wondered if you liked him, but those were the rare moments he wasn’t killing you, and they passed quickly.

  “Say, look at this,” Al said, and swooped to pick up a bit of bone, something I would never have had the energy to notice while climbing at thirteen thousand feet. “Power object!” he proclaimed.

  Freddy, looking vaguely interested, slowed up as Al held it out for us to look at. “Bird bone—hollow. What do you think, Jessie? You’re a Colorado girl, from Boulder and all.”

  “I’m too winded to even speak,” I managed. “How am I going to think?”

  “Freddy?”

  My climbing partner shrugged.

  “Maybe a bit of Mr. Raven’s wing, chewed by Mr. Coyote,” Al theorized. He kept looking at Freddy as if Freddy should really know. Then he took the leather pouch that hung from around his neck, opened it, and dropped the bone fragment in among the rest of his “power objects,” whatever they might be. I could never tell if Al was as weird as he sounded, but I guessed that he was. He was always grinning. I had my own images of Vietnam vets, maybe from seeing too many movies, but I knew I didn’t trust him. I didn’t buy his premise that taking kids out in the mountains and making them suffer will fix what ails them. And to live the way he did, year in and year out, he had to be a madman. I sure wasn’t going to respect him for it. So I was always off balance with him.

  I looked around for Star and Adam, but they were well behind. Adam would have milked some comedy out of the “power object.”

  It wasn’t time for fun, it was time for technical climbing. We’d run out of walkable ground. Al dropped back to take up the rear on our “true test” and leave us to our own devices. As Freddy took his coil of rope off his shoulder, Troy waved us around him and Heather. The clouds were turning dark and the wind was suddenly blowing hard. I could see the uncertainty in Heather’s body language even though she avoided my eyes. Words rarely failed her, but on this occasion she didn’t say anything. Her partner motioned toward the face of the looming peak and said, “You lead, Freddy. Find us a route.”

  I watched Troy as he said it. It was a tough admission for him. He was such a natural leader and such an able person physically. It was a defeat, having led all the way from camp, to have to follow now. I glanced to Freddy, to see how he would take it. He shrugged.

 
; We broke out our nylon climbing harnesses and rigged them snug. Mine dug into my crotch a little. I hated it. I thought about how my father had never done any technical climbing in his life and yet had blithely shipped me off to Hoods in the Woods, knowing that climbing was a lot of what they did. Carefully I secured the rope to my harness. “Check my knot for me, would you, Freddy?”

  He looked me all over. “Okay,” he grunted.

  Frightened, I adjusted my helmet with the strap under my chin, and looked to Troy for reassurance. My fear had boiled up out of nowhere like the clouds, and I could taste it. Troy’s eyes skittered away for once. He bent over and busied himself getting his rain gear and his helmet out of his daypack.

  “Oh well,” I thought, “here goes nothing.” I can’t believe that was my attitude, given my fear and my nightmares, but I’d always liked to push myself. Driving too fast, that goes without saying. Wanting to hang out with older guys. I’d wear all white, I’d wear all black, I’d wear my hair long, cut it off short, put a purple streak in it just for fun. I wasn’t afraid of what people would think. My dad liked to say it was a natural stage that he had gone through too. “Young people tend to see everything in extremes, not only in our society and not just in modern times—they always did.” Anthropologists talk like that. He’s studied cultures all over the world, but mostly in books. He hasn’t done any field work in his beloved Amazon since my mother died.

  “You think in extremes, Jessie,” he liked to tell me. “Everything’s either wonderful or it’s ‘blown.’ ”

  Freddy led the way, climbing easily if not gracefully, pausing here and there to hammer pitons into the rock. His stocky body seemed to hug the earth naturally. I’m Freddy’s height, but I’m hollow-boned like Al’s raven and naturally defiant of gravity. I have a long-distance runner’s stride, I’ve always been able to leap and jump, and I’ve always liked skiing because it set me free, left me attached only marginally to the ground. Now as we started across the face of this peak, the depths were pulling powerfully at me from below, and I felt my strengths turning to weaknesses.

  “Don’t look down,” Freddy cautioned from above me.

  His warning came too late. That’s exactly what I’d just done, glanced at the drop. It had to be a thousand feet. I’d seen the sharp boulders jutting at crazy angles at the bottom of Storm King Peak’s north face, and they seemed to be rushing up to meet me.

  “Jessie, don’t look down.”

  Too late. My stomach was in free-fall already, and I was so dizzy I thought I might black out. Suddenly lightning broke from the blue-black sky and thunder exploded almost instantaneously, with all the force of a sonic boom.

  I was aware of gasps and swearing from the rest of them. I knew I hadn’t been hit by the lightning, but all the same the sheer terror of the moment chased the strength from every fiber in me, and I was paralyzed.

  I glanced up. There was Freddy, with his shaggy black hair blowing in the wind, his face all lit up with a feral sort of joy born of the wild moment. Whoever he was, my life was now tied to his, and our eyes were locked together. He said, “You can do it, Jessie. Move your right foot to that little spot over there, and your right hand to that finger hold.”

  “I can’t,” I whimpered.

  From behind me and below I heard Rita, the self-proclaimed Thief of Brooklyn, holler the loudest stage whisper I’d heard in my life. “Jessie’s got that ‘sewing machine leg’ Al talked about.”

  It was true. I was so afraid, the nerves in my right leg were buzzing and the leg was twitching up and down.

  “Take a few deep breaths,” encouraged Al. I glanced down and back toward the ridge, and saw an impression of his face, wide-eyed under his helmet.

  “Look at that leg shake!” I heard Pug yell from below. He obviously loved the spectacle of the jumping leg but had no idea it was connected to my feelings.

  “Pug,” Freddy called down, “keep your mouth shut.”

  Pug yelled something back at Freddy. I could feel the spasms in my leg—I didn’t need to look. What was worse, numbness was spreading through the rest of my body.

  “Everyone cool it except Freddy,” ruled Al. “He’s her climbing partner.” I looked back and below, the way I had come, looking for Troy. He was the only one I could trust. I was hugely relieved to see him appear behind Pug and Star. “Troy …,” I said desperately, “I’m in trouble. Help me!”