by Jeff Long
Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and tipped back his head. His lips curled back from his teeth and he opened his throat to the sky. What came out was a terrible wrenching groan, something from a nightmare. Then his rib cage spasmed with huge, hoarse sobs.
Abe’s mouth fell open at the climber’s pain.
While the climber did his weeping, two of the rescuers rushed him from behind and took away his axe. They were gentle, but he was strong and they ended up jostling his disjointed shoulder and he screamed.
“Daniel,” the tiny voice called out from the crevasse.
This time they heard it more distinctly and it nearly caved in Abe’s heart. Someone among the rescuers whispered “no.” Except for that there was silence for a minute. Even the mourning climber fell mute.
“Are you all right?” asked the voice.
It was a woman down there.
“What the hell?” someone demanded.
Now their pity hardened. Abe saw them grow blunt. Astounded. Their gentleness was gone.
“You brought a girl up here?”
The climber turned his eyes away from them and stared blankly at the hole in the snow.
“All right, boys.” The leader finally rallied them. “That storm’s not going away. Let’s do our job.”
It was one thing to disarm the boy, they discovered, something else to separate him from his blue rope. He didn’t want to relinquish that bond with the voice from below. He held on to the rope with his good hand, the one with the mutilated palm. But once they had tied it off to an ice screw and cut the blue knot, Daniel gave up and seemed to go somewhere else in his mind.
He knelt there, unbudging, as if his legs were bound to the very mountain. In a sense, they were. They learned this for themselves when they lifted Daniel and laid him flat on the snow and ran their hands up and down his body. Both of his knees were shattered, both femurs fractured. Daniel seemed not to care. He seemed dead within his own body.
Abe stood back as the team frantically raced against the storm. Over where they’d laid the boy, two men labored at piecing the halves of the litter together and several arranged ropes for the carry out. Two more knelt over Daniel, fitting his legs with air splints from the Vietnam War and taping his arm across his chest. They weren’t exactly rough, but they weren’t gentle either. They didn’t try to reduce the shoulder, just stuck him with a hit of morphine.
Abe was staggered by the dire scene, by the blood and unhinged bones and the dark clouds and the voice in the hole. Several men set to work with the blue rope.
“We’re the rescue, miss,” one called down into the crevasse. If she said anything in return, no one heard it, not with the wind mounting and the frenzied shouting and the clank of gear. A man hauled out long hanks of blue rope until it came taut. They tugged on the line experimentally.
“She’s down there probably seventy, eighty feet,” guessed the man with the hanks of blue rope in his hand.
“Get her the hell out,” the leader called over. “And be quick.”
Abe went over to help. Bending to take up the blue rope, he noticed it was smeared with gore, what had once been Daniel’s flesh and blood. For the next five minutes he and the other men yanked and hauled on the rope, but it was fixed in place.
“You budge, miss?” the man with sideburns shouted down the crevasse. Abe put his head directly over the hole. A few feet below the surface, the ice showed dark green. Below that was blackness and Abe turned his eyes away quickly, as if the darkness were obscene.
“Nothing,” said the little voice in the hole.
Abe was surprised by how clear the voice rose to him once his head was right over it. It slid up the glass walls, distinct and free of echoes, counterpointing the building storm.
They pulled again, and this time Abe thought there was progress, but it was only the rope’s natural stretch. “How about that?” shouted Sideburns.
“No,” said the voice.
They tried again, this time with a complicated winch system of slings and ropes and customized equipment. When that produced no results they tried a different configuration of parts and pulled again. Again it didn’t work. She was jammed.
“How about it Ted?” Sideburns asked a small man.
“I’ll try,” said Ted. While a third man cut away the snow fringing the hole, Ted shucked his jacket, then his sweater and shirts. He tied another rope around his waist and had them lower him down the crevasse. No matter how he shimmied though, the ice walls were too tight. He got only about five feet down into the darkness and finally called for them to pull him out. He shook his head no and dressed again.
“What on earth possessed him?” Sideburns said, glaring over at Daniel. “Now look at what it is.”
“He should have known a whole lot better,” someone agreed. “I wonder how old she was.” Past tense. Abe cut him a side glance, but already he was trooping off, and Sideburns and the others were walking after him. Abe dumbly followed them, then realized that they were indeed abandoning the effort. He halted.
“You want me to keep trying?” he said.
The men kept walking. “She’s jammed,” one pronounced.
“I can start digging,” Abe offered hopefully.
No one bothered answering him.
Abe saw how useless he was to them, illiterate in their universe of glaciers and mountain storms and green ice. Their very language—of brake plates and ‘biners and front pointing and all the rest of it—excluded him. He felt stupid and vulnerable and put himself to work picking up whatever litter didn’t blow away.
“You,” Abe heard. The team leader had spotted him off by himself. “Come over here.”
Abe approached. The leader handed him a small notebook and a pencil.
“I want you to go over and talk to that girl in the crevasse. Get her name, hometown, a phone number, you know, next-of-kin kind of stuff. Don’t panic her. Keep her spirits up until we get things figured out. Can you do that?”
Abe nodded his head. He walked over to the black hole and knelt down in the imprints left from Daniel’s knees. He peered into the darkness and licked his lips, suddenly shy.
He couldn’t see this woman trapped below the surface, and she couldn’t see him. All they had were words, and Abe wondered if words could be enough. He felt like a child talking to a blind person. Before he could speak, however, the woman spoke to him.
“Hey,” the voice called up from the darkness. “Is everybody gone?” She didn’t ask, Is anybody there? It struck Abe that she had no expectations. None. And yet she sounded calm and with no begrudging.
“No.” Abe cleared his throat. ‘’I’m here.”
“Is Daniel going to be okay?”
Abe flinched at the question. Whose was this voice that put another person’s welfare before her own? But at the same time, Abe felt relief. He reckoned that whoever it was down there had to be comfortable and secure, otherwise she would have sounded hysterical. Such calmness had to have a reason. Maybe she’d landed on some soft snow down inside, or simply bounced to a stop on the end of the rope. Abe’s spirits picked up. Everything was going to be okay.
“Yes. He’s fine,” Abe answered. “What’s your name?”
“Diana.”
She didn’t ask for his name, but Abe told her anyway. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, then remembered what the leader wanted. “Where are you from?” he asked.
She said, Rock Springs.
He asked for her phone number. She gave it, but warily. When he asked her address, she suddenly seemed to lose interest in his interrogation.
“Is that the wind, Abe?” Her voice was weary and yet alive with instincts. She knew there was a storm building.
Abe lifted his face to the cold gale. They were racing both the storm and nightfall now. Any minute now, the others would come over and figure out how to pull this lonely woman out of the crevasse and they could all leave the mountain and go home.
“We’ll get you out,” Abe said. “Don
’t worry.” His words sounded little as they fluttered down the hole, mere feathers. The woman didn’t waste breath returning the brave assurance and Abe felt rebuked.
“Are you hurt?” Abe asked.
“I don’t know.” Her voice got small. “Are you going to get me out?”
“Of course. That’s why we came.”
“Please,” she whispered.
Abe tried to understand what that might mean.
“Is there anything you want? Maybe I can lower something.” Abe was thinking of food or water.
“A light, please.”
Abe goggled at the simplicity of it. He tried to summon an image of being trapped down there, but nothing came. He couldn’t visualize lying caught in the glassy bowels of the earth. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll try.”
Abe stood and approached one of the rescuers, who eyed the hole in the snow before parting with his headlamp. He seemed reluctant or maybe just sad, and his attitude irritated Abe. On his return to the crevasse, Abe borrowed one of their coils of Goldline rope.
“I have a light,” Abe yelled down the crevasse. He felt more useful now. He was this woman’s sole link to the surface. Once they rescued her, she would recognize Abe by his voice and embrace him. She would hold him tight and weep her thanks into his shoulder.
Lying on his belly, Abe flicked the headlamp on, stretched his arm and head into the hole and shined it down. He had thought to find the climber sitting far below at the bottom of a rounded well shaft. Instead the crevasse presented crystal lips no wider than a man’s rib cage.
To his right and left, the crevasse stretched off into dark, terrifying rifts. Except for this accidental hole, the crevasse was covered over with snow, perfectly concealed from above. Forty feet down, the icy walls curved underneath where Abe was lying. The blue rope led down and under and disappeared from sight.
“Can you see the light?” Abe shouted.
“No,” she said. “It’s dark here.”
Abe was glad to extract his arm and head from that awful hole and return to the surface. Even those few seconds had threatened to rob his self-possession.
While Abe talked and asked questions, he tried lowering the headlamp on the Goldline rope. But the braids were new and stiff and the curve of the walls blocked passage at the fortyfoot level. Abe pulled the headlamp back out.
“Can you catch it?”
“I can try.”
“I’ll keep the light on so you can see it coming.”
Abe reached as deep as he could before letting the headlamp go. Its light ricocheted from the deeper walls, then blinked out. Abe thought the headlamp had broken in the drop. Then he heard the voice.
“Ah God,” she groaned.
“Did you get it?” Abe had expected joy. She had been delivered from darkness. But as the silence accumulated, Abe realized that with the light had come the truth, and now the woman could judge her awful predicament.
“What do you see?”
There was no reply. Abe hung his head into the hole and waited but all he heard was the wind outside. The storm was ripe. He looked up at the darkening sky, then over at the rescuers bustling around the litter. They had snugged Daniel into a sleeping bag and strapped him into the litter. Some of the men were putting their packs on and they looked close to leaving. Now the team could devote all of its energies to extracting Diana.
The team leader walked over to Abe and sternly crooked his finger to draw him away from the hole. Abe pushed up to kneeling. “All right,” said the leader. “We’re going down now. We’ll need every hand. Go saddle up.”
Abe was sure he had misunderstood. “Her name is Diana,” he explained. “She has a light now.”
The leader exhaled unhappily. “You didn’t do her any favor.”
Abe didn’t know what to say. “She’ll be fine,” he finally blustered.
“I’m glad you think so. Anyway, we’re shorthanded. If we can get the litter down before this storm ... hell, if we can get the litter down period, we’ll be lucky.”
Abe persisted. “We can dig her out.”
“Dig her out?” The leader’s eyes glazed over. “She’s deep. Way too deep. That kid had no right bringing her to this.”
“But if we all pull... “
“Look, Tex...” And suddenly Abe knew they knew him. He had fooled no one. “Down at the bottom, a crevasse thins into a V. You fall far enough, hard enough, and you get wedged down there. After a while your body heat melts you down tighter. Every minute that girl’s alive, every breath, she’s working down deeper.”
“But we’re not leaving her down there.”
“We’ll come back.”
“When?”
The leader paused. His crow’s-feet pinched into a fan. “When we can.”
“But we have to save her.” For the first time, Abe noticed how the rest of the team was shunning the hole.
“We can’t, not with things how they are. Maybe later, after she starves some more, loses some of her tissue mass, maybe then. But I doubt it.”
Abe shook his head-against this directive, against his vision of a human being pinned in an envelope of clear ice, broken and freezing and blind and yet still aware, still full of her own history and future. She had probably eaten a breakfast yesterday much like they had last night, had probably walked on the same river ice and spooked the same herd of starving deer and crossed this same glacier. And now they were condemning her to infinite darkness.
“Look,” said the leader. The icy tails of his gray mustache waggled. “Sometimes this is how it goes. You do a triage. You figure the odds. You save the ones you can save. And you leave the ones you can’t. Now it’s going to be a long carry out of here. We’re leaving. I want you to go saddle up. I’ll go tell that girl the news.”
“No,” said Abe. “I’ll tell her.” He had the right to the last word. He had touched this blue rope. He had given this woman light and whatever terrible sights that attended.
The leader made a few thoughtful stabs at the hard snow with his ice axe, then he walked off without saying more. The rescuers at the litter had turned their backs to Abe and the hole.
Abe checked his watch, then shook it. Only twenty-five minutes had elapsed since their arrival. Surely hours had passed. He couldn’t fathom what was unfolding all around him. They hoisted the litter like a coffin, three men to a side, one standing back and feeding out a safety rope in case they slipped.
The wind sucked at Abe’s face, then slapped him. The first snowflakes rattled against the shell of his new white windjacket. The storm was cracking wide open. Their little motions and hopes could do nothing to hold the sky together any longer. The rescue was over, at least for the woman inside this mountain. Abe lay down by the hole to tell her so.
“Hello?” Abe called down.
There was no reply. Abe could feel the blackness down there surrounding that solitary light.
“We have to carry Daniel down,” he called into the hole. “We’re shorthanded, so all of us have to go. But we’ll come back.” He added, “I promise.” Immediately Abe wished the words away. They had already broken one promise. They had come to save the survivors or carry bodies out, and they were only doing half the job. More promises could only mean more betrayal to this trapped woman.
There was still no answer, and Abe started to push away from the crevasse. Then Diana spoke.
“You’re not leaving me?”
Abe shook his head no, but the word wouldn’t come.
“You promised,” she screamed. Then, quickly, as if chiding herself, she said, “no,” and again, more firmly, “no.”
“They’re shorthanded... “Abe started again.
“It was my fault,” she said. Her words came to Abe low and awkward with the cadence of a last testament. In her weariness or delirium, Abe heard something far worse than acceptance. It was a tone of surrender similar to what her rescuers were using. “Tell Daniel that. Can you hear me, Abe?”
Abe lowered his head deepe
r into the hole. “Yes.”
Now her voice gained strength. “It was me that fell and pulled us down. It was me. Tell him. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened to him. I’m sorry for what happened to me. I know Daniel and he’ll take this on. Tell him not to.”
Abe wanted to protest that the fall had been bad luck and was not a matter for contrition. But maybe that was how Diana had decided to make her peace with it. “Okay,” Abe said. “I’ll tell him that.”
“Now I want you to tell me something, Abe.”
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.” For some reason, Abe felt compelled to add the full truth of it. “Almost.”
She took a long minute. “I thought something like that,” she said. And now Abe saw how they’d used him with this woman. They’d used him to buffer the horror and to interrogate her. And they’d used him for this death sentence.
“Well, Abe,” she started, then fell silent. After a moment, she finished. “There’s no blame on you either. Remember that.”
Abe’s throat clenched at that. She was forgiving him, too. He searched for something to say. At last he thought to ask her age.
“Twenty,” she said. “Almost.”
“You know, I can wait some more,” Abe offered. “I don’t mind.” Until he spoke it out loud, the thought hadn’t occurred to him. He could spend an hour here, then race down to catch the others who would be moving slow with the bulky litter. And if he could spend an hour, why not two?
Diana didn’t give him a chance. “Is that wind bringing a storm?” she asked.
“The storm’s here,” Abe said.
“Then get out of here.” There was courage in her voice, but hysteria, too. Then she screamed his name. She invoked it. “Abe,” she cried.
She needed him to stay. At least until they freed her, this woman wanted Abe with her whole heart. That was more than he’d ever known with a woman.
“I’m here,” he replied. “I’m not leaving.”
By staying Abe would make himself hostage to his own promise. By staying he would force the rescue team to return and acknowledge the life in this pit of ice. Elated by his decision, Abe clambered to his feet. He caught up with the leader as the litter team trudged downslope.