For a moment it was as if I were in a wax museum that was displaying a tableau frozen in time. Only the crimson stain seeping from Yuri’s head into the snow got larger. Scarface sat rigidly pointing his gun to where Yuri had been, and my three interrogators, half turned toward him, looked like statues with their torsos awkwardly twisted.
Then everyone exploded into action. George confirmed that Yuri was dead, kicking the knife in his hand away from the body, and then started shouting at Scarface, who stood with his right arm hanging limply but still clutching the gun.
They ignored me while they stripped Yuri’s body. His skin was as white as the snow around him, but I noticed a large reddish area on his back, as if he had a sunburn. Omar and Thanh burned the bloodstained clothes while Scarface and George dragged the naked body off somewhere into the darkness. The red stain in the snow was covered up, and by the time those two returned, the camp looked entirely normal. Scarface sat down and rapidly disassembled and cleaned his gun and put it back together. This was a man who knew his weapon.
Suddenly I was the one who felt out of his depth, as a military atmosphere suffused the camp. George issued terse orders, and the others carried them out without question. They soon turned their attention to me. My ankles and wrists were tied, and George decided that he liked my company after all, because he crawled into my cave with his sleeping bag next to mine. He had a rope tied to his wrist, the other end of which was looped around my throat. I awoke several times during the night to the sensation that I was suffocating; whenever George turned over, the loop would tighten around my neck, and I’d be forced to turn with him. Needless to say, I did not get much sleep. I guess Lana was right—I have issues about getting close.
When George and I did our synchronized crawl out of the snow cave the next morning, we were greeted by fog that was, if anything, more dense than the day before. This was surprising. It was rare for conditions to stay stable for such an extended period, because weather systems in the mountains tend to evolve rapidly. True, we were on the glacier, which forms an extended flat area and is more conducive to allowing a stable system.
Not that I could even tell that we were on the glacier. I could barely make out the openings to the snow caves where the others were sleeping, just five meters from me.
Our remaining provisions consisted of some coffee and a tiny bag of oatmeal, and George let me off my leash only long enough so that I could melt snow and prepare this travesty of a breakfast.
As I went about my tasks, I pondered my situation. I thought seriously about just making a break and leaving them. Surviving without my pack would have been difficult, but not impossible. In any case, I had little doubt that George would dispose of me once I led them across the border.
However, even if I abandoned the group, there was a chance that they would survive to carry out their mission. Scarface clearly had mountaineering skills. I had to chuckle at my dilemma. Owen and the other self-righteous activists always said that we all have to choose sides at some point. Circumstances sometimes force us to make surprising choices.
As I ruminated on this, my foot came in contact with something hard that was wedged into the crack under a block of snow that I was using as a makeshift counter. I bent down. In the dim light of dawn I saw the dark handle of Yuri’s knife that George had kicked away from that inert body. Looking around to make sure no one observed me, I tucked the knife inside my parka.
Later, the process of dividing up the contents of Yuri’s pack took place. George tied me up again, leaving me inside my snow cave, but even in the mist it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t drugs they were transporting. As I peered out the opening, I could make out another blue metal canister, and something square that must have been a piece of electronics inside a layer of cushioning.
Soon we were under way again. Even under less bizarre circumstances it would have been advisable to rope ourselves together. If any of us fell into a crevasse, the others would prevent him from falling too far.
The storm a few days previously had dumped a large amount of snow over the area. This meant that the crevasses were difficult to detect. Over the winter, a snow bridge often forms over a crack in the ice. As long as it’s cold, these snow bridges are strong enough to support a person crossing them. In spring, the bridges melt, revealing the gaping openings in the deep ice of the glacier. The most dangerous time is in between. The snow hides the traps but is not strong enough to support someone crossing over them.
We trudged along almost in lockstep, one long rope looped through the climbing harnesses that we all wore. I was in the lead, with George behind me, followed by Omar, Thanh, and then Scarface at the back.
Progress was slow, because of the poor visibility. Scarface had the GPS, and he occasionally shouted to me if I wandered too far from the correct heading. His voice sounded as if it came from another world, muffled by the fog. I could see no more than a couple of meters ahead, and when I looked back, I could see George, but Omar was a dark blur, and my eyes could not penetrate to see Thanh or Scarface.
George called for frequent stops. Their packs were obscenely heavy, having increased 50 percent as their numbers dropped. Mine, in contrast, got lighter as we used up all our food, since they were unwilling to trust me with their lethal cargo.
In the dull rhythm of putting one ski in front of the other, I had lots of time to consider exactly what these men were carrying. The red marks on Yuri’s back looked like radiation burns to my inexperienced eye.
We stopped again after a while, sitting in a circle, sipping from our water bottles. There was some discussion in Russian, which may have concerned sharing the load with me. The only decision made was to put Scarface immediately behind me, thus leaving Thanh at the end. There was a fair amount of loose snow from the storm, and breaking trail made the going harder. The farther back in the line one was, the more packed the trail.
“How much longer until we get out of this fog?” George asked.
“It looks like it’s settled onto the glacier for good. Once we start climbing, we’ll probably get above it.”
“How long?”
“Maybe seven kilometers. Depends on how fast we go.”
He scowled, and then gave the order to move.
About a half-hour later, as my right ski slid forward, I thought I heard a soft crunch in the snow under me. My numbed brain took a moment to decipher the meaning of this sound, but my body kept its rhythm, one ski ahead of the other, and an instant later I heard a louder crack behind me. Instinctively, I threw myself to the ground, kicked off my skis, and dug my heels into the snow; at the same time, both of my hands grabbed the rope connecting me to the others. There was a violent yank on the rope, only a little of which I was able to absorb with my arms. I was being pulled back, my heels making deep grooves in the packed snow as I slid toward a wide black opening. On the other side of the gap I could make out Thanh, in much the same situation. We continued to skid, from opposite sides, toward the edge of the crevasse, pulled by the weight of the three men dangling on our rope.
For a moment the mist thinned, and I could clearly see the horror in Thanh’s eyes as I swiftly pulled out Yuri’s knife and cut the rope. Thanh struggled, but even for the two of us the weight had been too much. Thanh’s face had a look of reproach as he disappeared over the lip of the crevasse.
I scrambled farther away from the edge, taking my skis with me. I dug a trench parallel to the opening, tied another rope to my skis, and then buried them to form an anchor. Using the rope as a belay, I crawled on my stomach until I could look over the lip.
The crevasse was very deep, and the walls were almost vertical. Not even Joe Simpson could climb out of it. I could barely see Thanh lying face-down deep below, on a narrow ledge. He looked to be unconscious, and there was a red smear near his face. I couldn’t even see the others.
I crawled back to my pack, dug out the skis, put them on, and started trudging toward the border. I could sneak into some small town, pick up a f
ew supplies, and then head back to Nelson.
The rhythm of my motion provided a hypnotic background to the thoughts swirling around in my head. I had deliberately killed four people, yet I felt no guilt. For one thing, Thanh and I could not have held the other three, so the alternative was that all five of us would die.
But I had to admit that even if there had been a way to save the others, I would not have done it. Like Oetzi, their bodies, along with their lethal cargo, would be spit out by the glacier in a few thousand years. I wondered if any humans would be left to find them.
As a kid, during the Cold War, I had lived with the constant threat of nuclear war. It had been averted, and we believed we had emerged into a new era of tranquility, where we would not have to be thinking about death from an outside, impersonal force. But we were wrong.
Terrorism became the new boogeyman. It made me think of Orwell’s 1984; our government always finds some outside threat, so that we stay docile.
I’m tired of being held hostage to someone else’s fanatical ideas, whether it’s some desperate character in the Middle East or some religious zealot in Washington. I’d rather face any danger in the wilderness than be hostage to their insanity.
I thought about what had held those six disparate men together. After all, Yuri and Scarface had most likely fought on opposite sides in Afghanistan. And how did Thanh fit in?
There was only one logical explanation. Their blind hatred of the U.S. was the bond that could overwhelm even their own natural antipathy toward each other.
I wondered what Owen would say now about my lack of political commitment.
Sometimes we’re forced to take sides, even if it’s just for a few split seconds. But that doesn’t obligate me to buy into the rest of the bullshit.
As soon as I get back to Nelson, I’m heading for high ground. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a few years before the serious shit begins.
KEVIN LEAHY
Remora, IL
FROM The Briar Cliff Review
WE WERE DESPERATE, it’s true. That doesn’t excuse what happened, but we don’t know what we could have done differently. As soon as the last car rolled off the line, the owners shuttered the plant, sold the machinery, and returned to Europe. To this day, the mention of it turns a heart to lead. The kids weren’t scared, though. The night the plant closed, a handful of them drove to the property’s edge with cases of beer. Girls danced in headlights while the radio blared from open doors. Boys carved doughnuts in the Blooms’ nearby cornfield until Kyle Rouse’s pickup got stuck in mud. They laughed it off. All their lives they’d been told the plant would be waiting for them with a good job once they turned eighteen. Now they’d be spared the fates of their parents, who had built boxy, affordable sedans and carried a vague unease in the lines around their eyes.
But to everyone else it seemed like a bomb had gone off in the center of town—the shock wave knocking down stores all through the summer. Hal’s Bakery went first, followed by the record shop and the Bailey Café. By the time the leaves changed colors, even the grand old Cineplex was hollowed out, its marquee denuded of the letters we sometimes found rearranged into profanities. Sheets of plywood with spray-painted X’s blinded its windows, and tufts of crabgrass reclaimed its parkway. The town manager shifted public workers to a four-day week and promised to do everything he could to attract business.
We all hoped things would return to normal and tried to get by. We flushed our cars’ engines and scoured the sediment from our hot water heaters, hoping both would last another winter. We bought dry beans instead of canned, and canned vegetables instead of fresh. Our wallets grew fat with coupons.
It would not be a stretch to say those first hard months made us closer, as a town. We stopped feeling sorry for ourselves, and lingered in the church basement after services for crumb cake and coffee. Helen Bree, whose late husband had worked at the plant for thirty-eight years, organized a clothing drive. Parents tutored each other’s children when the schools closed on Fridays. People invited out-of-work friends to dinner, and they pretended not to notice their gratitude, or their envy. And when they left, the hosts lay in bed and prayed that the spirit that had claimed their guests would pass over them.
No one recalls who came up with the prison. It might have been Herman Floss, who had sold life, car, and homeowner’s insurance to nearly the whole town, and who was given to making uncomfortably deep and probing eye contact with each of us at town meetings. It could have been Deputy Ken Dufresne, who muttered to anyone who would listen that the uptick in unemployment meant a looming epidemic of bar fights, drunk-and-disorderlies, and what have you. In any case, around the first of the year the council invited a consultant from a private prison company to lay out our options.
Not that there weren’t objections. At the town meeting, the Bloom family, who came from Quakers, spoke against it right in front of the consultant, who sat behind the dais at the front of the hall with the selectmen and manager. Herman Floss said that the Blooms had farm subsidies to fall back on, so why didn’t they tend to their soybeans and keep out of it? Helen Bree stood and declared it “unseemly.” We loved Helen Bree, and we had nothing against the Blooms, but by then the town was so mired in debt that we canceled the Christmas parade and cut our trash collection to twice monthly. All winter the town lay dormant, the trees along the main thoroughfare naked—no lights, no foil Santas or tinseled candy canes. Parents bought dollar-store toys for their children and baked gingerbread for relatives. Husbands and wives surprised each other with nothing, and were disappointed and glad in equal measure. The weather was likewise stingy. Though the ground was packed hard with frost, little snow fell, and rows of desiccated cornstalks, ordinarily invisible under a blanket of white, thrust up from the Blooms’ fields like grave markers.
“There’s real opportunity here,” said the prison consultant. “This would mean jobs not only in the facility but for the shops that serve visitors.”
Ed McConnell, who owned a ranch not far from the abandoned plant, stood to speak. “The plant bought meat from me for twenty years. What kind of guarantees can you give us that you’ll do likewise?”
We hated McConnell for asking that, as if the wrong question might blow our chances. We’d become shy about making demands. But the consultant nodded and said, “I don’t think that’ll be a problem. We usually make use of local producers.” He gestured to the screen on the stage, where a chart was projected from a device he’d hooked to his laptop. “There are ancillary benefits, too,” he said, scanning our faces. “Each prisoner counts as a resident. That means more dollars for your district.”
Most of us didn’t need persuading. We were using one credit card to pay off another. We ransacked our filing cabinets and dresser drawers for half-remembered savings bonds. People looted their pensions and college funds and spent the inheritances they’d hoped to leave their children. Young couples postponed their weddings. Though we weren’t supposed to know, we heard whispers that Grace Chilton, the kindergarten teacher whose unemployed husband, Robert, once worked double shifts between the record shop and the Cineplex, had stopped her fertility treatments. We were ready for something good to happen, and we hoped this was it.
Corvus Correctional won the bid, with construction to begin after the first thaw.
On a cold March morning we watched a wrecking ball punch through the plant’s façade. The structure collapsed on the fourth swing, coughing up plumes of dust we could taste from a quarter mile away. It fell so easily—we had no idea how frail it was. For a while a great number of us worked as unskilled laborers, heaving broken pieces of the building into dumpsters. Rumor had it that Kyle Rouse smuggled out all the copper pipes that first night and sold them for scrap two towns over, but nothing came of it. Who could blame him? We would have done the same, if we’d thought of it. Those first paychecks were intoxicating. We’d forgotten the feel of having money, and were starving for it.
After work we were exhausted but happy. There w
as pleasure in our aching shoulders, in the newfound roughness of our hands. On paydays some went to Barry’s Tap to drink. Those who’d worked at the plant confessed to feeling funny about Corvus using that space. They’d be loading a wheelbarrow with cinder block when a remnant of floor tile signaled they were standing in the old break room, where Bill Bree had hustled them and many of their fathers in penny-ante poker. The banks of lockers they hauled away were the same ones in which they’d hung their coveralls and filter masks, glittering with metallic dust, at the end of a shift. It wasn’t that the plant had been problem-free. There’d been strikes and wage freezes and every so often an accident that claimed a limb. But day by day, as they dismantled what was left of their old workplace, they marveled that anyone had looked at that site and imagined a prison.
Then there came a need for construction workers and tradesmen–welders, pipefitters, laborers, and the like. But only the skilled among us could do that work, and a fresh wave of discord passed through as we were sorted yet again into those with jobs and those without. From the ground rose a fortress of towers joined by ramparts, its perimeter enclosed by a cursive scrawl of razor-wire fence. Inside, men slotted together racks of iron bars. They partitioned the floor into six-by-eight-foot cells, which everyone deemed both too small and entirely appropriate. They studded common areas with concrete embankments to disrupt foot traffic and minimize opportunities for mayhem. They painted lines that prisoners would not be allowed to cross.
With thousands of inmates arriving in a year, we expected a boon from the prisoners’ relatives and police who would eat in our restaurants, gas up at our filling stations, and shop in our stores. The council rezoned everything, which would allow us to rent out unused bedrooms to overnight visitors. Real estate speculators from upstate bought foreclosed businesses and leased them out. The Baileys reopened their café, though they rented the space they once owned. Robert Chilton, Grace’s husband, found occasional work.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 Page 20