Trial by Ice and Fire

by Clinton McKinzie

  She's bound at the ankles and wrists with thick strips of duct tape. Another coarsely twisted piece of tape connects the two bonds behind her back, effectively hog-tying her. What looks like a yellowed wedding dress is wrapped around her throat. Her short hair, wet with sweat, splashes from side to side as she fights against the adhesive tape. I can hear her grunting with exertion. Beyond her the fire is swelling up on the far ridge, readying to make the hop down into the valley. It'll go off like a bomb. Area ignition.

  I kneel in the streaming smoke and touch her hip, saying quietly, “Cali, don't move.”

  The feel of my hand on her skin causes her to jump as if I'd zapped her with a cattle prod. She whips her head around and stares at me, her eyes wide and red. But I don't waste time trying to calm her. All I do is whisper, “Hold still.”

  I flick the blade at the tape connecting her ankles to her wrists. It parts cleanly. As if it were spring-loaded, her body snaps straight. She rolls three hundred and sixty degrees, away from me, and manages to get to her knees before she falls over. I lunge after her, stabbing the knife down between her ankles.

  “Cali!” I say louder. “Hold still! Let me cut it!”

  Just then I hear a banging noise above my head. I look up—the trapdoor is open and Bill Laughlin's leathery face is visible, peering down at me. We stare at each other for what feels like several slow seconds from twenty feet apart. His skin is orange in the hellish light where it's not covered by the same kind of fireproof coveralls Wokowski and I had left at the bottom of the cliff. The hardman who had once been a hero of mine opens his mouth and shows me his teeth.

  “Get out of here!” he shrieks at me, as if in pain. “Go away!”

  Fuck you, I think, trying to reach around Cali in order to get at the remaining bonds without slashing her wrists. By grabbing a handful of her hair and yanking her toward me, I manage it. But she falls into me, and we both go down in the dirt. The long, straight barrel of a rifle slides into view from the trapdoor. I see Laughlin's hands working the bolt.

  For the second time in my life I live up to the hated nickname. I pull the pistol out of my pants and feel it kick in my palm a half-dozen times. I fire up blindly, without aiming, in a technique that had worked once before. At the same time I hear the windows shattering and then, even when I stop firing, the thunderclaps of Wook's big hunting rifle as he punches bullets through the shelter's flimsy plywood walls. Laughlin's rifle falls to the ground but he either rolls or falls out of my line of fire. The trapdoor bangs shut.

  “Anton?” Cali half screams in my ear. She's crawling over me, getting to her feet. “Did you kill him?”

  “I don't know. We've got to get out—”

  “No shit,” she interrupts, grabbing me by my free wrist and pulling me up while I keep the pistol pointed at the trapdoor. “But where to? Who else was shooting?”

  I answer both questions by pointing at the rocks. Wokowski is standing up now and walking toward us with the rifle still aimed over our heads at the tower. “C'mon!” he's yelling. “Run!”

  Cali is barefoot and the ground is all broken stone, so we run in a kind of three-legged race with my arm around her back. Wokowski decides we're not moving fast enough. He puts down the rifle and limps toward us, now yelling for us to run faster, goddamn it.

  We're almost to the rocks when I turn around to see if the fire's dropped into the valley yet. It has. The flames are spilling down from the ridge like a great wave of water, like a hellish dam somewhere upstream has broken. Worse than that sight is that I see something half fall and half leap out of the tower, not bothering with the ladder. Laughlin lands on his feet then goes down hard on the uneven ground. When he gets up I can see the shape of the rifle in his hands. Fuck. I should have thrown it off the cliff.

  He's coming after us.

  I want to stop and shoot at him but what seems like a lightning strike behind him goes on and on and on. The valley has detonated. A hot lash of superheated air whips across the back of my head.

  Wokowski pitches forward at the same time I hear a sharp crack over the inferno's blast. It's followed by a tidal wave of heat and noise. Cali spills onto the ground just past him, pulling me down on top of her. The rocks and Wokowski's rifle are just ten feet away. I get up first and literally throw Cali toward the rocks, yelling about the small cave. I turn and try to help Wokowski to his feet. A second crack sounds and the bullet whizzes by my head, almost skinning my cheek.

  Wokowski is like a slippery sack of cement. He flails and churns, struggling to pull himself up on me, as the rifle cracks a third time. Wokowski's flesh shudders in my hands with the impact of another bullet. I look and see Laughlin only a hundred feet away, limping heavily through the smoke toward us and chambering another round. The wall of flame is breathing on his back.

  There's no way I can get Wokowski behind the rocks in time. We're both going to get shot and burnt if I don't leave him. But I can't. Then Cali is beside me, helping to drag the big cop.

  When I look for Laughlin again he's been enveloped by the fire. The entire slope leading up to the summit goes up in a solid sheet of flame. The tower is gone, too. I remember again the term the techie at the ranger station had used. Area ignition. That's a mild way of putting it. The whole valley has gone up in seconds and now the summit is going, too. When he described it as going off like a bomb he was far more accurate. It even sounds like a bomb, and the rush of burning wind—sucking toward it to further fuel the beast—nearly knocks me off my feet.

  With adrenaline spurting through my veins and terror seizing my brain, I somehow manage to heave us all up the final steps into the rocks. My elbow slams against stone and so does my head. I'd probably be seeing stars if they all hadn't just exploded.

  Wokowski is suddenly stronger. I watch, and try to help, as he shoves Cali into the hole. I start pushing at him. But with the same amazing strength I'd witnessed at the gym when he was chopping the heavy bag in half, he peels me off and begins stuffing me in the hole after her. The air is burning. It feels like I'm drowning in a washing machine full of boiling water. Below me Cali is kicking and pulling, yelling, “Get in, Wook, get in!” and above me Wokowski is thrusting me deeper with his big hands.

  The light disappears altogether as Wokowski fills the opening with his own body. Despite the pummeling I'm receiving from both sides and the narrow confines of dirt and stone, I get the aluminum shelter out of my pocket and am pretty sure I even manage to correctly pull the tab. My hands are suddenly full of diaphanous foil. I try to worm my way up, around Wokowski, but his big fists begin hammering at me, hitting me for real.

  I fight back as best I can while clutching the foil, but my legs are folded so tightly against Cali's back and the sides of the hole that I can't get any purchase to shove my way past him. There's a roar like a train is thundering past overhead. And Wokowski's cries of “Stay the fuck down!” turn to the roars of a wounded bear. His fists keep hammering at me, harder and faster as he bellows, his body bucking like it's lightning-struck, even when I've stopped trying to force my way up past him. I have a horrible image of Laughlin dancing on his back in the flames. Clawing at his flesh.

  Beneath me Cali starts screaming again. She's weeping and yelling Wook's name. The noise from above is truly hellish—it's something I know is being imprinted on my soul, something I'll never forget. Snot runs into my mouth and tears stream down my own cheeks. And over all the noise and pain and fear I smell the stench of burning flesh.

  FORTY

  AFTER A WHILE there are only three sounds: a kind of low hiss from the ground above, Cali's weeping below, and the sound of my own ragged breath. Wokowski has long since stopped roaring, although I can't say how long ago he went silent.

  I push against him, tentatively at first, then harder. His body lifts up from my palms far too easily, as if he weighs nothing at all. It's strange and extremely disconcerting. When I push again—harder still—he rolls to one side of the hole and flops on his back. Orange light
from the still-burning embers littering the ground show that his face is relaxed.

  “Don't move,” I say to Cali as I stand upright. The fire has passed. Flames light up the sky to the east now, racing to do battle with the soon to be rising sun. The summit looks like the deepest pit of hell.

  I look closer at Wokowski's face. Contrary to the raging he'd been doing earlier—his face surely contorted with pain and fear—now he looks almost serene. The mighty jaw muscles are slack. I touch my fingers to his neck to check for a pulse and feel nothing but dry, papery skin. I press harder, hoping and praying, but there's nothing there. When I lift my fingers away their impressions remain on his skin—two deep dimples. And then I realize why he'd felt so light. The fire sucked all the moisture from his body. He's just a shell, a dried-up husk.

  My eyes start to fill up all over again, and it's not from the smoke. I reach behind one of his shoulders. Although I expect it, it still causes me to shudder. My fingers touch dry, warm bone.

  Cali's still curled in a ball at the bottom of the hole. Her hands cover her face and her back trembles with sobs. She says through her fingers, more moaning than speaking, “Is he okay? Is Wook okay?”

  I reach beneath her and manage to pull out the two blankets I'd noticed there earlier. The first I drape over Wokowski's face and chest. The second I spread on Cali's back before lifting her out.

  “No, Cali. He's not. He didn't make it.”

  I carry her to a flat-topped rock where she huddles in her blanket and cries. I do the same as I sit next to her, holding her to me. Stop it, I tell myself. Wook's gone, that's all. There's no reason to mourn. And that's not him over there with his back burned away. It's just a carcass.

  The thing that dries my eyes is the fervent hope that Laughlin hadn't been blown off the cliff by the explosion. I can't find his body, and I can't accept that he could have died that easy. I want him to have burned like Wokowski but slower, with a million times the pain.

  Although I've lost a lot of friends over the years, mostly to gravity, for the first time I find myself really wishing for a heaven and a hell. Not so much so Wokowski can be immortal among clouds and harp-strumming angels, but so that Laughlin will roast for all eternity. Burn, baby, burn.

  But even that thought is not entirely satisfying. No, I want to be the one to make him suffer. I want to be there in the pit, skewering him with my pitchfork and turning him over the coals. I want to be able to talk to him as I make him scream loud enough to silence the voices in his bleeding brain. Make him understand why he's being punished and, hopefully, make him feel a little regret. Or a lot of it.

  These thoughts are interrupted by the rising thump-thump-thump of a helicopter's blades digging into the murky air. The noise comes out of the west, where stars are now becoming apparent as bright stains in the dark sky. Three of them become more distinct as the sound comes closer. From among them a big spotlight starts slashing through the smoke. I raise an arm and wave at it, almost reluctantly, because for some reason it seems too soon, like an intrusion rather than a rescue.

  The helicopter circles a few times, cutting at us with the light, before it scatters ash and reignites embers as it sets down gingerly on the still-smoking ground.

  A man in green fireproof pants and a yellow shirt jumps out. He runs toward us awkwardly, bent over at the waist.

  “Are you all right?” he yells.

  “The two of us are.”

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “Yeah, two more. But they're dead.”

  “Come on,” he says to Cali as he takes her wrist. “Let's get you inside first.” Then to me, “Please wait until I come back.”

  He walks her through the churning ash to the helicopter, keeping her head down with one hand. Once he has her seat-belted inside, he comes back for me. I've been wrapping Wokowski's corpse with the extra blanket. I pick him up—it sickens me again, how light he is—and wait with the big cop cradled in my arms. The wetness on my cheeks and the taste of salt in my mouth tells me I'm crying again.

  “We need to leave the body for the accident investigators.”

  “No. He was a cop.”

  The ranger tries to stop me but I pull away from him and walk toward the helicopter. He tugs on my shirt a second time, causing me to shrug off his hand roughly. After that he allows me to walk on my own, warning me to lower my head and not walk to the uphill side of the machine. I carefully slide Wook onto the vibrating metal floor. Then I climb in next to Cali and snap shut my own seat belt.

  “What about the other one?”

  I look around the moonscape one last time. “Fuck him.”

  We lift into the sun's first rays as they curve over the earth and knife into the haze. Below us the forest is gone. Square miles of land look like something you'd sweep out of the bottom of a fireplace. My eyes are drawn to the south where a high band of cliffs undercut by a sparkling river has protected a part of the forest. Dusty pines still grow atop the cliffs along with cottonwoods and shiny aspens. I'm glad that something has survived intact. I know I haven't.

  Cali is staring at her knees, where her pajama bottoms are streaked black with ash and dirt. I put an arm around her shoulders but can think of nothing to say. Beyond the pilot and crew chief I can see the Teton spires pushing up into the sky. There's Mt. Moran and the Skillet Glacier that Cali had wanted to ski, then the Grand's steep snow-capped ridges and the great North Face, and then Teewinot with its thin ribbon of snow trailing all the way down from the summit. It's hard to believe that less than a week ago we'd been leaping down that and laughing. It's even harder to believe that I had regarded it as a glorious release from my problems.

  FORTY-ONE

  WHEN WE STEP onto the parking-lot asphalt at the Moran Junction ranger station, the helicopter's crew chief palms my head to keep it down as he guides me toward a crowd of people. An ambulance with flashing lights waits nearby, and I'm forced to lie back on a gurney even as I protest that I'm not hurt. Cali is more compliant when she's laid down on another next to me. Beyond a temporary chain-link fence is a horde of tourists who stare through the mesh with curious eyes. A hundred or more cameras are aimed our way. Their owners are shouting questions, wondering what all the commotion is about. I peer through the fence at the crowd and try to spot Rebecca. If she's there, I can't see her.

  It's not a heroic homecoming. And it shouldn't be. Only if Wokowski were still alive, as the audacious instigator of the harebrained rescue, would it be appropriate to celebrate.

  Someone is pushing through the EMTs, rangers, and police officers around us. A woman's voice sounds close to choking as she shouts, “Let me through!” It's Alana Reese, and she's even less composed than she'd been at the fire headquarters. Her blonde hair is wild and her mouth is twisted in an ugly grimace. Her movements as she breaks free from the people around us are jerky and frantic. She runs to kneel beside Cali's stretcher. She takes her daughter's hand and covers it with her lips and tears.

  “I'm okay, Mom,” Cali insists. But it doesn't stop her mother from weeping over her.

  People turn their backs, embarrassed for the actress. But they also spontaneously gather closer so as to shield the mother and daughter from the camera lenses. After a few minutes Alana raises her head from where it's been buried in her daughter's neck and looks at me with red, running eyes. She doesn't say anything, but I think I can read an apology in the way she nods at me and makes a brave attempt at a smile.

  I manage to get out of there although it seems like everyone is trying to stop me. The paramedics want to take me to the hospital, talking about needing to test for smoke inhalation. The Forest Service people want to talk to me about the blaze. The sheriff and two angry-looking guys with FBI badges want to know what the hell happened up there. And all I want is to be alone. Well, not exactly alone.

  A young fire crew member gives me a ride to the airport, where the Pig still waits at its illegal parking place by the curb. From there it's just fifteen minutes to my cabi
n. Be there, Rebecca. Be there.

  When I turn into the lane I see that a car is parked tight against my porch. But it's not Rebecca's shiny green Saab. It's a small pickup of indeterminate make and vintage, even rustier than my Land Cruiser. Actual holes have been chewed through the fenders, panels, and doors. The windows are dark with cracked purple tinting. It has Idaho plates from a small county on the state's northeast border with Montana.

  The bumper stickers belie the truck's ominous appearance. One is a Jesus-fish symbol that has sprouted legs. Another reads, “I'm a Gay New Yorker Here to Take Your Guns!” And then there are numerous stickers from environmental and pro-choice groups, as well as a Jamaican flag and a marijuana leaf.

  I pull in behind the pickup and get out. The front door opens and Mungo slinks toward me, dancing shyly across the porch. My brother steps out after her.

  “Nice wheels,” I tell him as Mungo wags her tail and pushes her nose over my clothes. I push her away, not wanting her to smell the odors on my clothes.

  “Was all I could borrow, che. Didn't want to draw any attention by stealing one.”

  “I thought you were going to lay low until meeting up with the Feds this afternoon in Salt Lake. You don't get going, you're going to be late.”

  “I was worried about you, little bro. You looked a little wigged up there. Thought I ought to check up on you before I leave.”

  He goes on to explain that he'd slept a few hours in a borrowed bag at the Exum hut before climbing the Middle Teton. Then he slipped down into Idaho from the mountain's west face. He'd called a friend in Driggs who'd lent him the pickup, then driven over Teton Pass into Jackson.

  “Couldn't you have found something less conspicuous?”

  He just grins and shakes his head at me. “You look like you've been dragged through a cesspool.”

  I walk past him through the door and collapse onto the couch. “It was worse than any cesspool. A thousand times worse.”