by Jeff Long
A snowflake drifted down into his headlights, then flashed overhead. Two more hours to Kingsbury Grade, P.G. estimated, to home, a bath, food and sleep. He accelerated slightly. If it was snowing here in Lee Vining, it would be coming down heavily upon Kingsbury Grade. Snow on Halloween: a cold night for souls. Veering gently, he swept down off Tioga Pass, then slowed to enter Lee Vining. The town was dead, the Coffee Shoppe closed, the lights at the gas station off. A tenuous outcrop of brick and wood in the daytime, Lee Vining now looked like the end of the world—dark, empty and wordless. P.G. might even have failed to register the town in its brevity and silence, had not a second snowflake lanced his tired stare. Shaking his head sharply, he broke from his trance. As he crossed the outer fringes of midnight and the ghost town, his headlights picked out a third snowflake, a steady, white point. P.G. fixed his faraway highway stare on it. The snowflake didn’t drift or dance, it remained stationary. As he drove closer, it assumed proportion, then swelled into an object. At last P.G. saw that his snowflake was the figure of a man, and closer still, that of an old man.
The man was just beyond the town’s edge, stock-still and waiting, neither patiently nor impatiently to judge by his posture, just waiting. He stood at the side of the road like a tattered mannequin, hands stiffly lowered, head up. P.G. slowed down. He examined the figure with grim, half-bemused curiosity. The man was dressed in bizarre and ancient clothing: a greasy, torn cagoule, a moldering balaclava, both calves wrapped in cloth strips. In the chill desert on Highway 395, it was these last that struck P.G. more than the rest—puttees taping the frail legs of an alcoholic. He slowed even more, expecting the hobo to extend his thumb or wave him down. He was obviously in search of a ride, for why else would he be standing here on the side of the road at midnight? The Volkswagen edged closer. Despite the decrepit costume, there was something about the old man’s stance that gave him a look of fragility and sad dignity. The man didn’t raise his hand.
“OK,” murmured P.G., and he would have driven on, leaving the man to his obstinacy and cheap wine, but in the glare of the headlights the old man continued to stare with unflinching nonchalance. Ferocity or liquor? P.G. examined the old face more carefully and suddenly jerked his head in shock. Within the wizened crow’s-feet lacing of the old man’s eyes, the sockets were collapsed, sunken with disuse: the old man was blind.
P.G. stopped with a hiss, cursing the night. He must belong somewhere, thought P.G.—crouched in some empty garage or covered in newspapers beside a garbage can, but at least out of the snow. The old man waited by the car, his cagoule punched and bitten by the Nevada wind. P.G. leaned over and rolled down the window. He had to call twice before the old man’s face, sun blackened and with eyes squeezed shut, appeared at the window.
“So,” rasped the old man, “a ride north.” The proclamation twisted off with the night wind. P.G. shrugged. The old spook could go as far north as he was going, then find another ride. He wiggled the stick out of gear and stepped out. It was bitterly cold, dry and sharp. A little like Lhotse’s cold, he decided. His breath trailed him as he walked round through the two spears of light to his passenger.
“North,” mumbled the old man. P.G. opened the car door and guided him by one thin arm towards the seat. The old man limped heavily, scraping the asphalt. P.G. looked down at the cracked boots. Hobnails bordered their soles. Hobnails and puttees—antiquity itself.
“I’m Andrew,” the old man announced from inside the car. P.G. closed the door and walked back round to his own side. “Andrew,” the old man repeated as P.G. got in. His voice was bare like a worn bone. The manner and tone in which he announced his name located him far outside P.G.’s company, a passive dereliction. P.G. didn’t offer his own name. It would have been wasted breath to such an afflicted spirit. The old man, wrapped in his ancient cagoule, seemed anyway oblivious. Whipped by the accumulating storm, the Volkswagen shot away.
“I’m cold,” came a whisper.
“Heat’s on,” P.G. answered. It was already hot in the car, and he could smell the vents scorching a handful of junk Perlon he’d tossed on to the back floor. Nevertheless the old man was shivering, perhaps as a result of his wait by the roadside. For a time the old man and boy rode in silence, enveloped in the hollow can of a mutual environment, the wind outside pounding at the car. P.G. tried to plug back into his thoughts of the Column climb, but the heat and monotonous darkness seduced him. He had to break violently out of sleep a second time. He reached for the radio to dispel the journey’s weight, but just as he pinched the volume knob the old man trapped him with another whisper.
“We climbed,” he muttered. “We climbed high.”
P.G. snapped a glance at his passenger, but saw only the cowl of his hat and a shock of renegade white hair. Climbing? P.G. interpreted the old man’s remark as an ingratiating prelude to a conversation in general. But how could he have known that P.G. was a climber? The ropes and gear on the back seat? The smell of scorched Perlon? Then the old man’s ragged costume echoed its intimation. The garb was half-a-century out of time, but clearly alpinist in mode. Was the masquerade more deliberate than coincidental? A single moment passed as P.G. explored the possibility that this old man had been waiting for him, Peter Guerre, on the side of the midnight road, an ancient climber lying in wait for a young one. How ominous, P.G. chided himself, a cold blind Halloween vampire.
Since there was no tail to the old man’s opening statement, P.G. asked him with skeptical hesitation where he’d climbed. The old man raised a hand, orchestrating thoughts. P.G. watched the hand drop back on to the old man’s thigh. Finally the old man spoke, coherent but absurd.
“Everest,” he said. A smile ribbed his face. “I do remember that, that I climbed Everest.” There was neither modesty nor boasting in the coarse, empty voice. P.G. gave a little snort and turned his head to mock the blind man with a grin. He was amused. By his rigid credo a person who couldn’t fire a warthog into 85° ice, or figure out an easy 5.10, was a scrambler, or worse a liar. The old man was a liar.
“Cracker?” P.G. held up a half-rifled box of wheat thins. For several minutes he attempted a dialogue, hoping to recover the talk about the climb. But it was a wispy, halting exchange, acid with the boy’s doubt and lamed by the wino’s senility. It serviced neither of them. The old, striated face had locked shut. Suddenly, unprompted, the old man rustled.
“Yes,” he declared. “I climbed Everest.” The statement was vigorous this time, even proud. By the balls, you liar, P.G. grinned to himself. He’d been to Everest himself, climbed Lhotse, been through the Khumbu Icefall, descended by the South Col. He would let the old man build his fiction into a mountain, then, as at other times with other liars, expose the lie with the real mountain. Maybe not though, he demurred. In fact... why? This lie and these clothes were probably Andrew’s only possessions. P.G. found himself wondering how such creatures come to wander apart from the rest of their race, becoming alley and road animals without an anchor in the world. That’s just the way it is, though, P.G. conceded. Every town on earth has drifters like this one: men who appear, utter and then disappear. Their fictions atrophy, and they die.
Just then the snowstorm erupted, flinging itself in erratic, ballooning swirls at the windshield. By the time they’d passed Mono Lake there was a soft white mantle adhering to the scrub brush and coating the highway. P.G. started to chastise himself for having picked up the old man. Now he’d have to drop the spook off somewhere but with all this snow it couldn’t be just anywhere. Momentarily, P.G. considered his own home, then tallied the Samaritan complications and rejected the idea. Besides, there was a home for such spirits as this in Reno, fifty miles north, hours distant... but after all, P.G. sighed, it was merely an inconvenience, an extra couple of dollars for gas, an extra few hours. He found it a little touching that one climber should be giving a hand to another, even if it was to a liar dressed in rags. It suggested the traces of a climbing community, the young tending their elders. And tryin
g to feed them crackers, scoffed P.G., and put up with their bullshit. Everest!
He broke the thought and aligned a new one, slowly rebuilding the Column. Last night at this time... two twisted trees, a bolt painted yellow, a thin wafer of rock to sit on... and cold. But had tonight’s snow appeared last night while he was cadging sleep, P.G. thought, he would have really suffered. The snow had waited though, he wasn’t called the Magician for nothing. He always managed to recover from the nights, their loneliness and raw chill. He always had control, slender sometimes, but sufficient.
The old man muttered something loud but incoherent then, disrupting P.G.’s reverie. Giving powerful nods of his wool-capped head, the old man seemed bent on confirming his illusions. P.G. turned his attention back to the road. It was becoming thickly coated with fat snowflakes, stretching on and on.
“Cold?” the old man suddenly barked. There was a rattling deep in his throat. “Cold?” he asked again, more gently. P.G. glanced over. His cagoule tucked beneath his chin, the old man sat very straight, his tweeded thighs pointing stiffly forward like old men keep their legs, simply and firmly planted. By the greenish light radiating from the dashboard, P.G. picked out the stained wraps of the puttees, even discovering a petal of rust on the small buckle clasping the knicker cuffs.
“Andrew,” P.G. said.
“Andrew?” answered Andrew. The face smiled at him, but again not at him. The old man was looking far away, somewhere else, dark and alone. P.G. examined the old face and its intense sunburn. For the first time he noticed the perimeters of its stain, two eyelets above the blistered, peeling nose and cheeks. P.G. had seen such faces before, goggles and sun, the mark of alpine climbing. It mildly surprised him. A pair of big sunglasses and a bender in the desert, P.G. guessed. How else such an odd sunburn?
“You still cold?” he asked the old man.
“I was told to go down,” replied the old man quietly. “Give me your air, go down. It was very high you see, and I hurt and wanted to go down.” Caught in his mountains, P.G. realized. Old Andrew’s stuck on Everest. He respected the old man for that. Impoverished as he was, Andrew still had the integrity to embody his lie.
“So I hadn’t any air,” continued Andrew. “Then I remembered the length of shadows in the afternoon and followed them back down.” P.G. listened, cynical, though not unsympathetic.
“Who were they?” he finally asked.
“Who sent you down?”
“No.” The old man apologized tangentially. “Names slip by me.” Sure thing, thought P.G.. As much as he liked the old man’s bizarre facade, the gall and fatuity, he still resented the actual lie that had been created. Long ago he’d decided that mountains belong to the climbers who touch them, not to flatland men with cheap words and bravado. Ambivalently, still curious though irritated, P.G. rejoined the conversation.
“You can’t remember any names at all?”
“There was... Tibet of course. We crossed south.” The old man’s hand brushed at the air as if to clear away the obvious. A little gold star for geography, P.G. sniffed to himself. “But the mountain parts I have trouble with,” finished the old man. “It’s been so long.”
“How about the South Col?” prodded P.G. “You probably remember that, don’t you?” A vision of bleakness and wind swept through him eidetically. He saw the area again, shingled rocks and hard scabs of snow, and a single piece of cardboard poking from its grave.
“No,” said Andrew. “I don’t know about the South Col.” He didn’t seem intimidated or embarrassed by his ignorance, though, and there was no righteousness to his statement. He acted as plainly as when he’d first said his name was Andrew. It confused P.G. He’d expected a pouting, rheumy defense to his attack on the unreal mountain. But the loose smile remained, and this ingenuous amnesia continued.
Pretend, thought P.G., pretend he did climb Everest. Treat the mountain like a mirror: the Nepali half reflects the Tibetan half, the South Col weighs against the North Col, the Khumbu Glacier against the Rongbuk Glacier. P.G. looked at the old man. Let him climb the mirror. Help him climb. The game suddenly intrigued him, this piecing fact with fraud, with fiction.
“Well,” asked P.G. “did you go through the icefall?” He calculated the mountain, carefully omitting the name of the icefall.
“The icefall?” questioned the old man.
“The Khumbu ice?” offered P.G. Its blue seracs surfaced in his mind again, the moon illuminating sharp holes, tiny orange and blue tents lit up like paper lanterns among the rubble below, and the listless red marker flags on bamboo wands that tilted lower each day, the icefall ingesting them. P.G. caught his breath at the vivid memory, that solitary night in the icefall which he could never share because it was so embedded and complex. He shook his head at the memory.
“I don’t think I’ve been there, that area,” the old man decided after a moment. “Maybe we went a different way, my colleagues and I.” Okay, thought P.G. Don’t hang yourself yet old man. Let’s play the game as far as it goes. He didn’t ask about the Rongbuk Glacier which lay in Tibet, he wasn’t sure about it, nor did he want to know about it for the time being. Khumbu Icefall and South Col went together with the Nepali Everest, and the old man had denied them all. P.G. applauded the old man’s consistency. It translated into an attempt from the Tibetan side, illogically but possibly as the old man had claimed. It dated the lie, marking it a lie of the twenties or thirties. But how Tibetan can Andrew keep his fiction, P.G. asked himself. One wrong answer from the old man and the mountain would vanish into its lie. It would have turned into naive malice and P.G. would drop it altogether. But the two of them were still ascending Everest, still composing its lines, conceding its unrealities. By building as many blanks as possible, P.G. knew, they could escape pure fact. He shifted into third gear. Snow was accumulating on the highway.
“I was twenty-two years old,” the old man offered. “I was young. Then I was told, give me your air. Go down.” The old man waved his hand and slapped it softly on his leg, a gesture of fatigue.
“It wasn’t Hillary who told you to go down, was it?” P.G. felt certain that Hillary had never sent anyone back down the mountain. There was no reply. The old man was beginning to sink back into his mute images. Don’t slip away, old man, P.G. thought.
“Was it Noyce or Odell or Mallory?” P.G. had to dredge their names from nearly forgotten history. The game was complicating itself inwards. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could feed the old man blanks.
Andrew mumbled again about the cold and lengthening shadows. And P.G. remembered how shadows stretched long and low on the mountain. It would grow cold while the summit was gradually devoured from below by the darkness, the body of the mountain swallowed bit by bit until at last the very crown faded. Then all the humans would get in their tents.
“Then what did you do? Where did you go down to?” P.G. tried to make his question unobtrusive to the old man’s reverie. Beneath the blind sockets the parched, cracking lips moved rapidly. There was a long pause. The old man raised and dropped his hand.
“I can’t remember.” It was final. Old Andrew couldn’t remember.
“You can’t say how high you got?” P.G. persisted, trying to reconstruct the flow of the story, the geometry of the mountain.
“It was very painful,” said the old man. “It was very cold.” P.G. remembered that too, how very cold it could be. Everything would freeze. The only way really to thaw out would be to climb, up or down, it didn’t matter much, but stasis was fatal. Even illusions were better than simple, frozen sleep. P.G. remembered sharing a tent with two other men. Throughout the cold night he had heard them shifting and muttering, talking within themselves. Then in the morning they had all emerged from their unreal worlds, put on their boots and climbed.
The old man sank back into his algid mutters. In the headlights everything was covered now with snow; the flat white world stretched on and on. It was very cold there. P.G. drove on with the blind man pressing on
through the black morning. He tried to talk about their mountain some more, but the old man had gone to sleep.
The Virgins of Imst
“Out of the great blue, Imst had a naked saint.”
Author Note
One year before lightning killed Arnold Larcher while guiding a client in the Austrian Alps, I took a train to his village. One week turned into six months of climbing and masonry work. He, his family, and a Yugoslav assistant lived above his bakery and shop. My day began at 4:30 helping deliver breakfast rolls still oven warm. Twelve hours later I would sit with his wife and young children, peeling, coring, and slicing dozens of apples for the next day’s apple strudels. In between, I wrestled the ceramic blocks they use for the foundation and walls.
Arnold took me drinking, more and more lavish in introducing his American comrade from the “Hima-lieya” to the same villagers with the same tales of life above 8000 meters. My only way to make sense of the bragging was to tie it to the loud-mouthed tradition of Beowulf and Achilles.
In that same pub, I fell for a local beauty named Erika. We never exchanged a word, which gave free rein to my fantasies. Only near the end did I realize the entire village, and no doubt Erika, despised me.
Arnold and I had met a year before on Fritz Stammberger’s 1974 International Makalu Expedition. Arnold’s house and half of his bakery had gone up in flames at some point in the past. Between my partial deafness from a construction accident, Arnold’s accent, and the business of setting camps on the South Face, I presumed the accident had occurred months earlier.