Halfway

by Tom Macher

  She wasn’t dumb, we knew, but stupid in that way smart people are stupid for thinking they’re outsmarting someone so clearly beneath them.

  We shifted her within our line front to back and back to front, putting our fastest on her heels to harry her, and talked incessantly, we all did: C’mon, now, push, push, you can do it, push.

  Enough, she said. It doesn’t matter how fast I ski. In the world, y’all don’t matter and I do. In two weeks, you’ll be using and I’ll still be sober. Two years from now, you’ll be dead and I’ll be sipping hot chocolate someplace warm.

  * * *

  I WANTED TO KEEP MY HEAD DOWN. If I kept my head down, maybe they’d let me go home. So I skied. I watched the others. I made camp, helped cook and clean, slept, broke camp, skied again the next day. Sleep came easy. I don’t know what pushed the others, if they thought they were going home, if they even wanted to. I’m sure at the time I knew exactly what everyone believed for themselves—both their hopes as children and their revised dreams. Maybe they, too, had simply moved on to the practical.

  I can recall us being honest with one another, yet only in that way the young are honest. Tent flaps open under a billion stars, we talked about the ways we’d be better. Or how a hope will flatline. And we’d ask, Is that flat line a good thing or bad? Of course we discussed other things, too. Our bathroom habits. Our wilderdumps. How much snow was enough snow to roll in the handfuls of Spanish moss we used to wipe our ass. And girls. Always girls. Ones we knew, would know, or wished we knew, but always the social worker came over the top, batty and defensive—Watch your language, be respectful, shut it—and one night I said something back and she said, Here he goes with his mouth again. He’ll be the first to tell you how smart he is. HA! Let me tell you what he scored on his MMPI. He has, she said, the mind of a small child, a boy. He’s dumb. He doesn’t know anything.

  About that MMPI, I scoffed.

  It is what it is, she said. You’re dumb. I didn’t take the test. They’re your scores.

  And what could I say to this? For all I knew, she was right.

  Your dad is dying, she said. How do you feel about that?

  Boys quieted themselves around the fire. No one moved. Not even me. I had no idea how to answer that question.

  If you want to see him again, she warned, you’ll behave.

  The wilderness guide was a normie and wasn’t supposed to get involved, wasn’t supposed to talk about recovery, life, or anything. He had one job and one job only: lead us safely through the mountains.

  He stared into the fire, an impossible stillness to his small mouth.

  * * *

  I FOUND MYSELF miles ahead of the group, all alone, really, and happy, when I came across a heap of steaming shit on the trail; bear or mountain lion scat, I’m no expert. It scared me silly. The day was balmy, bright, maybe forty degrees, and this sense of the unseasonably warm brought unease. That night some of the boys found a bottle of hooch in the woods and drank. I don’t remember who. It wouldn’t matter, I guess, if I did. It wasn’t me. But even that doesn’t matter. We were all going to drink again eventually. In that way, the social worker was right and we were wrong.

  * * *

  OUR PLANS THE NEXT DAY called for making camp in a valley for two nights and climbing one of the mountains. This climb was important, we were told, both before coming out here and again now. Things will change for you on that mountain, the social worker said. She instructed us to gather rocks and fill our pockets with them. A lot of them. These rocks, she told us, are your past and your resentments. You’ll climb the mountain carrying these rocks and, at the top of the mountain, release them to the elements. You could say you’ll be letting go or whatever. It’s a metaphor, she explained.

  Seemed dumb to me. Ditto the others. No one wanted to climb a mountain. Our camp sat in a quiet valley of birch and evergreen. Alongside our bivouac of pup tents and snow caves, a river was frozen at its rapids, wavy and white and pure.

  It was warm again. Eerily so.

  Won’t need your parkas, gentlemen, the guide said. Just lunch stuff, water, your windbreakers. It’ll be warm on trail, you’ll sweat. He marched about in trim pants and an ascot. We’re going straight up, he said, and straight down. Be on trail eight hours, tops.

  It was late already, past ten a.m. What the shit? guys asked. How we fixing to try? No way we summit and return before sundown.

  Why not, the social worker said.

  We wanted to tell her the truth—it was because of her, she hadn’t trained, hadn’t skied in years, and wasn’t in shape—but shut our mouths. Of course, sometimes when you shut your mouth and stare blankly into a fire or busy yourself with chores no one wants to do, like the scullery, you are saying quite a lot.

  She frowned. She stomped her feet and grabbed at her ears, peacocking about and peering into our eyes. She detected some feelings, she said. She wanted to have group.

  No time for group, we said. Not if we’re fixing to climb.

  The guide remained passive, his sunglasses reflecting the sky above, and yet she insisted. Always time for group, she said. I’ll start.

  She felt bullied. Controlled. She’d come out here expecting some fun in the snow, but this wasn’t fun. Not at all. Being rushed isn’t fun. Normally, she loved skiing and was a good skier, but we’d sapped her of its joy. It was our fault. We had bad attitudes. We made her a worse skier. Because we were mean. No one likes being told how fast to move! It’s human nature, she explained. Ask anyone!

  We all said yup, you’re right, my bad, but no, sir, she did not feel heard and continued rambling for another hour or two. This and that. Blah-blah. You and you and you. While she spoke, the guide stuffed his daypack with the coiled rope that mountaineers tie around their skis for icy inclines, but by the end of her speech, he’d looped a rope around a low-hanging branch and was tying a noose around his throat. Boys had to be kicked awake. Big Bill foamed at the mouth. Shawn bled from his ears.

  At noon, four hours till sundown, we set out.

  * * *

  AND WHAT DO YOU DO when your pity runs out? How do you behave when things shift? How do you treat someone who once lorded their might over you once things have turned and you occupy the high ground? Are you kind? Are you forgiving? Or do you bully?

  We fucked with the woman that afternoon, stopping every few minutes, claiming we had to piss or lay cable, all of it tomfoolery, grab-ass, slap and tickle, mocking her—we’d crest a hill and remove our rocks, toss them in the snow. Here’s as good a place as any.

  It drove her insane. If any of you stop again, she claimed, I’ll make your next home unimaginable. It’ll set you back ten years. They’ll make you get your GED, and you’ll fade into a cycle of middle management at a fast-food company, if you’re lucky. Go on, she said. Pee again, Tommy boy, and kiss your college dreams goodbye.

  We picked up handfuls of snow and jiggled our wrists, here’s a handful, whatever.

  You little, she shrieked. You little pieces of. As if a loon. Louder and louder. Her voice rolled through the lows and boomeranged again and again. Her shrieking became too much and we climbed. At first densely packed with fir and spruce, once we got higher, the trees thinned. At eight thousand feet, they took on odd forms: shorter, squatter, now their needles grew only downwind.

  The sun fell.

  Snow turned to ice.

  We wrapped ropes around our skis and waists. The switchbacks narrowed, tightened, the trail steepened. No longer perpendicular, we inched on, parallel to the mountain. Coming around one bend, I saw the contours of a frozen lake thousands of feet below, but on the switchback, its contours faded, and the valley floor finally disappeared altogether.

  Summiting felt only like stopping, another break—a place to pick at the last few oats collecting in the corner of my food bag. I was hungry, uncomfortable. Somewhere in front of us, the mountain’s edge led to a ten-thousand-foot free fall, but a lowering cloud front blocked the moon and stars, and all I saw
was a black nothing. I knew, because Donald told me, in the mythical distance lay Canada.

  In the daytime, he said, you can see the fucking North Pole.

  Ain’t that some shit. I can’t even see the edge of this mountain.

  Oh yeah, he told me. We’re going to die up here.

  Is that true? I asked.

  He produced a few rocks and tossed them on the ground. Say your prayers, man.

  I turned to the guide. What now?

  Well, there’s no way we can ski back down that way, he said. Too much ice. No big deal. We’ll just ski down the back side.

  Have you done this before?

  No, he admitted. I’ve never been here in my life.

  So you don’t know what’s on the back side. Am I right?

  He didn’t respond. Not really. Just insisted, It’ll be okay. Take a few hours, he said. Tops. We’ll be back in camp by midnight. At most.

  It was six p.m.

  * * *

  I DON’T KNOW if you’ve ever seen those movies where motherfuckers get lost in the woods. It’s always cold, the lenses drip with rain, sleet, and snow. The actors want you to think, because they’re told to act this way, they’re hungry and tired. And maybe they are. Filming requires long hours—chances are some of their feelings are real. They probably don’t like each other much, even when they’re playing buddies. They smell bad, their hair’s greasy. Often a bear shows up, or a mountain lion, maybe a pit viper, and one of these players gets eaten ass through belly. If you’ve seen one of those pictures, then you might understand the feelings we had. They weren’t good. Boys were scared. The social worker was scared. Even the guide seemed rattled.

  Ten hours passed. We were still on the mountain. Ten hours. Still sloshing along. Every so often we called out to the guide. Hey, you. Up there. Are we lost?

  Nope. He knew our exact location—still on the mountain!

  Yes, but are we lost?

  Silence.

  One dumb, stupid thing about me, though: the closer I come to calamity, the calmer I feel. I just kept skiing under the canopy of pines, listening to the prattle on prattle on of boys who don’t want to sound scared. It’s a fucked-up thing to know this boisterousness for what it is and then—in one moment—have it fade away to the swoosh-swoosh of skis and the semi-silence of group fear.

  I don’t remember who broke first, but once it happened, everyone burst open. Boys called to the low sky and trees. They called at the snow and one another, fell to their stomachs and cursed, punched the snowpack and pines. I kept an eye out for Bad Jeff, the type of boy who will act as good or bad as those around him. Put a gun in his hand and tell him to shoot a guy in the back and he will pull the trigger. Yet in the end it was Good Jeff who snapped.

  Good Jeff was mild-mannered, unwavering, friendly, empathetic. He’d talk about anything. Whatever troubled you, he cared. How are you? he’d ask. Need a hug, an ear? Scars lined his wrists along his radial artery. He’d downed a hundred sleeping pills once, swallowed two hundred Advils, hung himself from a rafter, jumped off a bridge, but survived. He was a walking advertisement, a true miracle. This is what happens, the child actor had said, you stay down this road: Shit gets worse and then worse still. You reach a point of sobriety or death. It’s anything but this. And Good Jeff had got there. He was done. Going to make it or die. He never bitched about the social worker or being in the home, never bemoaned the left-behind world. He wanted to be here. And yet now, lost in the woods on a dark mountain, thirty miles out with no food or shelter, no flashlight, no matches, or winter coat, tired and scared, a new sense of things emerged. He knew once and for all, after so many attempts, he would die. This was it. He was going to die sober. He sat down in the snow, removed his skis, and refused to go on.

  I yelled for the others to hold up.

  The social worker screamed. What did I say? No more stopping. Hello? Jeff? Get. Up.

  He needs a minute, I told her, though clearly, he needed more than a minute. I crouched beside him. My friend, I said. Man? Can you make it?

  No, he said. I’m done.

  He needs to collect himself, I said.

  He clutched at me, shaking his head. I’ve never been so clearheaded in my life. Please, he begged, leave me. It’s over.

  I reached out for his arm, saying how much I admired and needed him, but the social worker came stomping through the snow, falling as she did, righting herself, marching on, until she grabbed at my windbreaker and pulled me free of Jeff. Get the fuck away from him. Her breath reeked of bile, malnourishment, dehydration.

  Why, Good Jeff asked, are you yelling at him?

  Get up, she screamed. GET UP!

  So he got up. And in her face. Just kick me right in the dick, he growled, if that’s what you want. He yanked off his pants and long underwear, exposing a cold penis and some constricted balls, which he clutched at. Kick me right in the nuts, why don’t you. Go on, if it makes you feel better. He flipped dick-down in the snow and began squirting about as if a penguin. And then—I don’t know—he must have skidded over a spruce trap. A branch snapped. He disappeared into the powdery nothing.

  * * *

  ALL I CAN SPEAK TO now are outcomes. Both Jeffs would eventually smoke rock again and disappear into correctional cycles, etc. Big Bill returned home to work for his family, but they fired him. Shawn went to a facility in Omaha, then moved in with his mother, where he stayed sober a while, working in kitchens, attending college, and drumming in a band, until finally, he disappeared. Kev never made it home. As for myself, well, this was twenty years ago, and as bleak as things seemed then, they were not bleak, for I didn’t know who I was yet and, in the unknowing, still had a lot to look forward to. I thought I’d go back to school, to college eventually, find a career, a girl, have a home. Maybe not right away but someday.

  The guide quit his job. The social worker never went on another trip. And I was not going home.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, after we’d returned to camp safely and regrouped, while the guide and social worker tried to make sense of what had happened on the mountain, Donald and I followed the frozen river into a stand of birches, and he asked me, he said, Hey, what do you think, should we go back to camp, pull the social worker from her tent, drag her ass out here, and rape her?

  I wasn’t sure if he was serious or speaking in some weirdly negative euphemism.

  You know what’ll happen, he said, if we don’t.

  We were supposed to ski twenty-two miles the following day, a double day, really, to make up for the lost time, to resupply for the trek out of the wilderness. It was a hard, flat number—impossible to imagine. By my own calculations, including the variables of energy, mood, and the social worker’s laziness, I believed it would take twenty hours.

  I shook my head. It’s hard to say, really.

  From the birch, I could see downriver to our scattered camp of tents, snow caves, and gear. The sun had just slipped behind the mountain, and the gloaming cast a dimness across the snow. Shawn and Kev stood above the water on its shore. Below them, leaning over the icy crust, Big Bill held a large rock above his head. He seemed to be entertaining some private thoughts, though I hadn’t slept yet—none of us had—and the severity of his thoughts didn’t register. I felt dreamlike, vague, as if watching something in slow motion I’d seen already.

  Smoke fluttered from the fire where Good Jeff was warming himself. Something stirred in the treeline. The wilderness guide emerged from the woods, a smile in his beard. I couldn’t see the social worker.

  It’s a true thing that any time two boys huddle in a place like this, they’re either confiding or conspiring. Bad Jeff sloshed over and asked which was it.

  Donald gave him a look like what do you think.

  I’m in, Bad Jeff said. Whatever it is.

  That makes two, Donald told me.

  I shook my head.

  C’mon, Tommy, Donald said. This is bullshit, man. I need some pussy.

  Lo
ok, I get sometimes things are about needing some pussy, I’ve been there, but this wasn’t about needing pussy, and even a dumb virgin knew that. This was a statement of fact: I am bigger, stronger, and more powerful than you can imagine; I will hold you down and become your fear because I hate you and I can.

  What do you think? Donald asked.

  Ask me tomorrow.

  Do it tomorrow?

  Ask me tomorrow.

  Tomorrow?

  We’ll talk about it tomorrow.

  * * *

  WHEN TOMORROW CAME, we squatted about the remains of the fire, all of us eyeing one another, asking: Are you ready? Can you keep yourself together? We’d be skiing in the dark again today, we’d be hungry, we’d be tired, and uncertain. Donald shook his head at me and frowned at the social worker, who stood off to the side, slumped and disheveled, her baggy parka unzipped and flapping in the wind, her backpack on but unfastened. Behind her, tied to her waist, was a sled. No, I thought, no-no, no-fucking-no, yeah-nope, not happening.

  Listen, I started to say, and I meant to give her a kind of tough-love talk about limits and self-realization and humility, only I was planning on being much more curt about it, something like Get your head out of your ass, or even Get serious, but the wilderness guide jumped to his feet.

  What the fuck is he doing? he said.

  Big Bill was out in the middle of the frozen river, knees bent, struggling to gain balance. He was holding a shovel. Once steady, he raised the shovel above his head and smashed it into the ice. He lifted it again and smacked the ice once more. He stabbed the spade into the crusty rapids and kicked it. He was methodical, earnest; he kicked again and again until the shovel broke though. He worked the handle back and forth, snapping the ice. Then he sat down, removed his boots and socks, flung them to the shore, rolled back his rubber pants and long underwear, and submerged himself in the water.