St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  Rangi, meanwhile, has wandered away from the choir. He is sitting on a low fence at the edge of the airstrip and staring off into the trees. I take one step towards him, then another. Be that friend becomes the wind pushing me forward.

  “Hey Rangi? Listen, I’m sorry for…you know, I have this stepfather, too….” I trail off. Rangi turns and stares at me with a mirror’s flat assessment, merciless and impersonal. I can see how stupid I must look to him. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry.” I shrug. Then some secret life flames in Rangi’s eyes and for an instant I feel an identical ache quivering between us. It’s over so quickly that I wonder if I imagined it. Rangi goes back to studying invisible symmetries in the snow. I jog through the light flurries, hoping that Brauser and the others didn’t see me back here.

  A few minutes later, the planes begin to roll forward, the white egg of the sun reflected in their dark windows. On the glacier, the sun is so violently bright that, without special lenses, ice pilots can burn through their corneas within half an hour. Today there are four pilots on the tarmac, all with matching ski suits and identical lavender eyes. Each ice pilot walks around and whumps the red belly of his fuselage. They introduce themselves: Steve and Steve and Steve and Hone Te Kauriki-himi. “Call me Steve,” Hone says, with a bitter curl to his lips, and we all laugh with relief. Hone’s eyes are lavender, too, but you can see their true tea color behind the contacts.

  Hone comes around with a bucket of eel-yellow transponders. He goes from boy to boy and loops them around our necks.

  “These willies need to be jiggered at all times.”

  “Why?”

  “In case something goes less-than-good with the Avalanche.” The cold, calloused pads of Hone’s fingers brush my neck. He flips the switch to ON. “We need to be able to find you boys if you get buried.”

  The transponder feels stone-heavy around my neck. I wish that Hone would make just one more joke.

  Steve #2 hands us an ice axe and a sack lunch. My ice axe is crusted with triangles of rust or blood. My sack lunch is salami. The ice pilots start to load up the planes. Steve #3 does a head count and frowns down at the manifest.

  “Franz Josef? There are some names missing on the manifest.”

  A whispered conference. Brows furrow in our direction. Franz smiles at us, and I catch a whiff of conspiracy.

  “Mr. Gibson, Mr. Oamaru, Mr. Brauser, there’s been an, ah, error of logistics. You boys don’t mind waiting for an extra plane? Very sure? Most certain? Well.”

  The substitute pilot forgot his contacts at the lodge. He seems momentarily flustered, blinking out the cockpit window. Then he winks one naked blue eye at us and flashes us a terrifying grin.

  “Can you boys keep a secret?”

  “Rangi can!” Brauser laughs. He is rendered apoplectic by his own wit. “That’s the only thing Rangi’s good for! Because he’s dumb.

  “Ritardaaaando!” He flicks at Rangi’s left earlobe. “Figaro, figaro, you fuckin’ psycho…”

  “He’s not deaf, you know.” I am careful to say this in a coward’s voice, too soft for Brauser to hear.

  “It’s okay for me to call Ritardando dumb”—Brauser’s face goes crumple smug—“like how it’s okay to call a female dog a bitch. Because it’s the truth.”

  The substitute pilot’s smile broadens. “Good news! Nothing wrong with keeping your quiet.” He gives Rangi a friendly thump on the back. “Same goes for you two. No reason to go blabbling to the Steves that I flew you up without my lenses.”

  Rangi’s expression remains flat and illegible.

  “Dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb biiitch!” Brauser really does have a lovely contralto. He can hit, color, and hold a note like a buxom Viking princess. Otherwise Franz Josef would have kicked him out of the choir a long time ago. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Brauser, Rangi, and I got volunteered for the last flight up here. Franz often refers to us as his “problem” voices. He’s probably overjoyed for an excuse to begin the concert without us.

  Brauser’s melodic insults fill the cabin, dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb, a song that thuds into us like a steady rain laced with hailstones. He sings it until I want to scream. Rangi listens like someone locked indoors, watching the weather outside his cell window.

  During the flight up, I close my eyes and try to ignore the tremors of the cabin. It’s a perilous ascent. We rise through a low, gold-limned dross of clouds. The valley falls away from us in waves. Then nothing but frost and seracs, freckled with shale. The plane has to do all sorts of dubious maneuvers to enter the openings in the Southwest Icefalls, a dozen squint-thin eyes in the glassy rock face. Up here it’s cratered and lifeless terrain. Mount Kei looks like a cloud volcano in the rising sun, bubbling ocher and maroon. Brauser is telling some stupid joke about my father and a female reindeer. Rangi’s staring into the cockpit at the giddy, spinning controls. He gnaws on all four of his fingers. Clouds stream around the small windows. The substitute pilot is massaging his temples with his two free hands.

  Everybody is injured in the crash. The wind screams across the flat snowfields. Both skis snap off on impact, and the plane slides to a stop on its belly. The substitute pilot makes it out first, kicking through the cockpit door. I ignore the pilot’s outstretched hand and tumble face-first into the snow. It’s four feet of fresh powder. There is nothing up here, no points of reference. Just snow forever, pocked with these turquoise holes like painted whirlpools. Crevasses, I shudder, deep enough to gulp us whole. On a glacier, the ground is just an illusion, a slick disguise for a million chasms. I try to get up on my knees and let out a whimper. Brauser has rolled a few meters away from me, and I wait for him to resume cursing. But Brauser is lying fish-eyed in the snow. Not moving. Not blinking. I follow his blank gaze and see nothing. No choir director, no altos, no tenors, no planes.

  We are alone on the glacier.

  “Excuse me, sir…?” Etiquette and panic duel in each syllable. “Where are, um, the other planes?”

  Is it possible, I wonder, that we have wrecked on another glacier, the wrong glacier? Usually, the planes do a smooth glissando right into the Ice Amphitheater. Franz Josef conducts during touchdown, keeping ¾ time. When I turn around, I see that the substitute pilot’s smile has started to run like gravy. His face looks sick and yellow in the light. He yells something and points behind us.

  As we watch, the ski plane starts to slide backwards.

  “Fuck.”

  The substitute pilot stands there for what feels like a very long time. Then he starts running, falling and running and running and falling, so slowly, through the deep virgin snow.

  “Fuck. Fuck.”

  The plane skids faster and faster. It slides at a whistling speed. A dazzling wake of frost explodes up around the body of the plane.

  “Fuck!”

  And then it slides, soundless and dreamlike, over the ridge.

  On his way back to the boys, the substitute pilot falls into a small blue crevasse. He has to lift one leg out and then the other. Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot’s bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us, doughy and flushed with horror.

  “Help!” The substitute pilot waves his arms. He’s up to his waist in snow. At a lower altitude, this would have made me laugh out loud.

  “Help me! Don’t just stand there, kid.”

  I just stand there. I know better than to walk over there. Somehow, I intuit that if I extend my hand now, I will get infected by the pilot’s helplessness, his gibbering fear. The help can’t be me; the help needs to come from some other direction. I hear myself barking orders, full of an iron contempt for the pilot. What a crybaby. What a true fuckup. It’s an angry feeling that I used to use on the farm when my father first left, late at night, to immunize myself against my mother’s terror.

  “Just lift your legs, one at a time. We need your help over here.”

  Behind us, B
rauser is moaning. His cries swell and sky-crawl. It’s a wordless sound, a wild sound, this animal pain that can’t be haltered and led to meaning. It reminds me of the time that Mr. Oamaru had to shoot a two-headed reindeer calf, and for a horrid instant both heads lowed in tandem. They sang their way across some abominable threshold. I still hear them screaming in nightmares. For months afterwards, I plugged up my ears with my mother’s Dolly Nutmeg Reads the Bible! cassettes and refused to enter the barn alone. This is the worst sound, I think, the very worst sound in the whole world.

  Then the moaning stops. Brauser’s movement stops. And I regret all my hastier judgments. Any sound is better than this.

  “Brauser? Brauser!”

  Where are the others? My head is throbbing. Where are the other planes?

  “Where’s your hat, Brauser?”

  Already, Brauser’s marigold hair has become hoary with snow. With his bare white head and his curled-in spine, Brauser looks like a rapidly aging man. He blows crimson spit bubbles that I pop immediately, scared and weirdly embarrassed. Rangi sits in a shocked, straight-backed silence in the bowl left by the vanished wreck, still holding tight to his sack lunch. The soggy bottom’s torn apart. His sandwich bread and apple slices litter the snow.

  The substitute pilot manages to hoist himself out of the crevasse and stumble over. “Boys,” he says, but he directs every word at me. He holds up a hissless walkie-talkie. “I need to slide down to where I can get reception. I’m going to call for a helicopter rescue. Don’t go anywhere until that heli comes, eh? Don’t move a muscle.”

  I nod. Brauser twitches once, then stops.

  The substitute pilot is already half crawling, half sliding down the empty snowfield.

  “Wait up, I’ll come with you!” I start after him, unsteady in my boots, and fall sideways into the snow. “Wait for me!”

  Halfway down the run, the ice pilot turns around and shouts something:

  “————!”

  His words break apart on the ice. Then he scoots down the gentle snowfield on his back, shooting into a sterling ice cave like a pinball.

  “What? What was that? Hey, buddy, we can’t hear you….”

  Brauser is slumped half dead in the snow. Rangi exhales plumes of silence. I crawl a few feet away and slam a shallow hole in the powder. I open the cramped fist of my stomach, squeeze my eyes shut, and retch.

  Music is pleasant not only because of the sound of many voices, but because of the silence that is in it.

  —Franz Josef

  Weep! Weep! All of our transponders beep in tandem. There’s a silence of five seconds between each tiny sonic burst. I fiddle with the black knob. Together, the transponders sound like panicked crickets. How, exactly, will the rescue helicopter use these tiny chirps to find us?

  “Brauser?”

  Something necessary is ebbing out of Brauser’s eyes. Snow collects between his lashes. A trickle of strawberry-red blood dribbles out of the corner of his mouth.

  After some experimentation, I discover that if I poke Brauser to the right of his belly button, he’ll make a sound. A gargle. Poke! A burp of despair. There’s something pitiable and terrifying about the unconscious bully. His crumpled nose and hat.

  Brauser opens one blue eye and stares at me. I look away. I brush the snow off Brauser’s cold earlobes. This is the first true thing that Brauser and I have ever shared, this fear, besides dog-eared songbooks and cafeteria noodles.

  “Hold on, Brauser,” I say without conviction. “Help is on the way.”

  I wonder, briefly, if I could eat Brauser if it came to that. At this point, we have been alone on the glacier for fourteen minutes.

  Brauser’s face is a raw, freckly pink. I fix his hat. The shadow of my hand moves back and forth over Brauser’s open eyes. Pupils expanding, pupils contracting. A dark blue ring around the world. In between breaths, I realize that something incredible is happening at this new elevation. Up here you can hear everything—the orange ping of light on metal, the purr of water melting. These blue ocean contractions in Brauser’s eyes. His pupils make a faint tidal whoosh-ing. Shadows sound like feed pouring out of a cloth sack. When I move my hand, millions of shadow grains bounce along the hard snow. That’s my sound, I think, birdseed raining out of a sack. It shakes out across the empty snowfields. I look up at the sky, nervous. What sort of bird, I wonder, is my shadow designed to be food for?

  Above us, the sun bounces orange and yellow. The silence changes. We bump noses, but I can’t hear Brauser’s eyes anymore, or his shadow. I tug his hat down harder.

  Rangi’s air pulses red like a swallow’s breast. Brauser’s quiet is coma white. My own silence hums with these black-and-yellow bee stripes of fear:

  YOU ARE

  GOING

  TO DIE UP

  HERE

  NOBODY KNOWS

  WHERE

  YOU ARE

  THERE IS

  NO MORE DOWN

  THERE

  I snap out of it when I realize that Rangi has started walking away from us. He pushes through the shallow crater left by the ice plane, stabbing his crampons into the jellied snow. Then he climbs over a ridge of wind-scoured shale and disappears.

  “Rangi! Wait up!”

  It takes me a full five minutes to cover the short distance between us and clamber over the wedge of shale. Rangi is waiting for me on the other side. “Why did you—” The question dies on my lips. No explanation is forthcoming from Rangi. We lie flat on our bellies, taking labored breaths and watching the sky, two soldiers in the trenches. Then Rangi starts making a sound. Nothing quite so deliberate as speech, but a dense fizz of noise, like bubbles zipping up to the surface of a tall glass.

  “— — —…— — —,” he says, pointing into the clouds.

  We both look up. A helicopter is coming for us, the sun pinging off its blades.

  “We’re saved!”

  Rangi and I peer over the ridge and watch as the helicopter touches down on the glacier. Two men leap like flames out of the cockpit. Their vests glow red against the pure white backdrop. The glare off the snow makes their faces look like taupe holes.

  The men unload three stretchers from the helicopter and lay them flat across the powder. They heave Brauser onto the first stretcher. One of the rescuers is whistling a cheery tune. It’s a scary, incongruous sound in this landscape. Each whistled syllable hacks flat into the wind like a cleaver. I can see the dark fissures between his teeth.

  “Help!” I jump up and pull Rangi out of the powder, puppet-jerk him to life. “Here!” I start to wave and shout. “Here! We’re over he-e-ere!”

  The ice pilot is still whistling, oblivious of us. I think I can just make out a softer, inner whistle, under the word: Run.

  “Run,” Rangi says.

  Then I am facedown in the snow. Rangi’s kneeling on my back, digging his whole weight into the base of my spine. Something thunks against the back of my head, and for a moment red stars cluster in front of my vision. Rangi grabs me by the legs and starts dragging me across the ice gully. I’m stunned but still conscious, too shocked to struggle. Then he yanks me over a snowbank and out of sight. The world goes blue-white-blue for a series of hills. I yelp and try to kick away, but Rangi’s got me. He presses me to his chest in a murderous bear hug as we roll. We slide down the slope together and bang our way into an ice cave. In the lunar shadows, it looks as if our cheeks are sweating blue light. The altitude here manifests itself as a pernicious thirst, and my throat burns in the desiccated air of the cave. Inside, a twinkling, chandelier light fills every ablation. Even seated, I can touch the cold ceiling. I touch my tongue to the cold roof of my mouth.

  The helicopter is taking off without us. It makes three buzzard circles above us, and I’m surprised to find myself cowering with Rangi in the cave. I should be jumping up and down, screaming at its metal belly. I think about Franz Josef’s hand pressing hard on my diaphragm. Up here I can’t untangle it, the word-strangle of it, the twist
ed umbilical that binds deep panic to sound. I open my mouth and release dead air. Snip, snip! go the scissors of the wind.

  Rangi holds his hands over his ears and buries his face in my side. He doesn’t speak again. The helicopter shrinks into a dense red pinprick of noise above us, lost in the sun. Then it’s gone. After a few moments, the silence reconstitutes itself. I can hear our shadows again, spilling up the walls. It’s a scary freedom.

  When I look down and see Rangi staring up at me, I feel my stomach heave again.

  “W-what-what the hell were you thinking?” My teeth are chattering uncontrollably. “Do you enjoy being stuck up here? Those men were here to rescue us, Rangi!”

  Rangi closes his eyes and he smiles. He beams at me with ghastly relief. I move away from him, horrified.

  “Who knows how long it will take before they send another helicopter? It could be hours!”

  Anger flames through me and my muscles tense to hit him, a violence that clenches once and then vanishes. My fists uncurl without my conscious intervention. I stare down at my open palms with real surprise, feeling shaky and defeated. It’s as if my body knows before I do that it’s too dangerous to feel this way towards Rangi. Right now, he’s the only other human around for thousands of vertical miles.

  “Rangi? What are you doing?”

  Rangi is on his hands and knees, crawling towards me, his face flickering in the cavelight. His black eyes sparkle with intent.

  “Ran-gi?”

  My voice has a wobble in the middle—like a tightrope strung between two fears. It sounds as if a sly little demon is bouncing across it.

  “Come on, Rangi!” I say nervously. “Let’s go back to the snowfield. Don’t you want to get down from here? Don’t you want to get home?”