Buck and Caitlin set out to recover the men inside the Eye as soon as possible the next day. But, they had a visitor.
Cold destroys the body, regardless if the person is alive or not. News regarding the Eye was released the night of Hal’s death to those connected to the bodies. The next morning, a woman arrived. She had all the gear she would need. She knew crevasse rescue, and she recounted her history as a ski instructor. According to the team, there was no reason to turn her down, especially since she was the sister of James Melendez, the man who first fell into The Eye.
I still had the day off, but I couldn’t resist knowing about the rescue as soon as it was over. Once they returned in the afternoon, I set out to join them at Caitlin’s house for dinner, hoping to hear everything about the mission. I arrived just in time to help Caitlin’s wife, Jeanie, pull a recently killed deer out of the back of her truck.
As dinner was being prepared, I took an audio recording.
Me: Alright, it’s on.
Buck: Do I look good?
Me: It’s just audio.
Jeanie: (yelling from the kitchen) The answer is no!
Buck: Aaaah I don’t think so. She right Davy?
David: Please don’t call me that.
Buck: What were we gonna talk about?
Caitlin: (bringing drinks to the table) The rescue with, uh, Sasha, from today. You feeling better, kiddo?
Me: Yeah.
Caitlin: Good, good. Okay, so, Sasha…
Buck: What was she, like, thirty?
Caitlin: Wasn’t much older than her brother. She had way more experience though. Smart too.
Buck: I don’t know if this is true, but it seemed like she raised him. You think that?
Caitlin: I can see it.
Buck: I took care of my siblings when I was a kid and you can tell when someone got that kind of maturity… wait, Jeanie what is this?
Jeanie: Uh, it’s an IPA from the brewery down the road. It’s good, right Cate?
Caitlin: Yeah! (shaking her head at Buck)
Buck: It tastes like batteries. Tell me it tastes like batteries, David.
David tastes it. He shrugs.
Buck: That’s a yes. The California boy can have it, right?
Me: Sure. (I pushed away a glass I had already emptied glass)
Caitlin: Jesus, you’re crashing on the couch.
Me: Fine. What was Sasha like?
Buck: You know, she’s a ski instructor from Anchorage so she’s all business and familiar with all the kind of stuff we do.
Caitlin: Very knowledgable. She asked all the questions she could, I guess, before the chopper ride in.
Me: What do you mean all she could?
Caitlin: Well, she didn’t want to know too much about her brother. She just wanted to know how to get him out, you know?
Buck: We landed and immediately set up a belay. We were confident about the ice holding so we got her in there quick.
Me: Her? She went in?
Buck: Trust me, I know. (he raised his hand in disbelief, looking at Caitlin)
Caitlin: She had a way about her. It took us a couple minutes to try and talk her out of it, but it wasn’t going to work.
Buck: I just said fuck it and radioed the rangers to see if we’d get in trouble.
Me: And?
Buck: They said they had no problem with us letting her in there as long as she got out, and she did.
Caitlin: Much quicker than we expected too.
Me: She didn’t stay in there long?
Buck: How long’d she stay in there David?
David: I’d say after her head dipped below the hole, she descended slowly for about thirty seconds. Then, she radioed back up.
Me: Why? Was she scared?
David: (shrugged)
Caitlin: Well, in the moment, we had no way of knowing. The radio malfunctioned and wasn’t carrying her voice. It was really quiet. We were lowering her down and suddenly we heard static.
Buck: When it came through we started to pull her up, just to be safe. When she came up, she didn’t complain.
Caitlin: She scrambled up the side, and, oh, that’s when I noticed what you noticed!
Me: What?
Caitlin: The ice. It was suddenly getting slippery. She had to slam her crampons hard into the side, and even then it only held for a second.
Buck: Wasn’t much of a problem since we just pulled her out quick, but yeah, she seemed to struggle with it.
Me: Did she say anything?
Caitlin: Well, when she stood up she started smacking the side of her flashlight.
Buck: She said it was broken.
Caitlin: Yeah. Looked like it was working fine to me, and then she was just quiet.
Me: Was she acting weird?
Buck: I don’t know what weird would be in this situation. Not being able to find your brother when you’re right above him is definitely weird, you know? She just… (he gestures at Catilin)
Caitlin: She didn’t say much on the way back.
Buck: Just looked at her feet.
Caitlin: Yeah. Poor girl. She said thank you when she left, but that was it. She was really meek when she said it too.
Buck: I won’t lie, it was heartbreaking. She seemed like a little kid. Wouldn’t look us in the eyes. The sun was setting and she was just sitting in her car as we left for the day.
Me: Damn.
Buck: I need another beer. Jeanie!
Jeanie: What? I’m not bothering the recording, am I?
Buck: Absolutely not, Ji Ji.
Caitlin: He’s just whining about another beer. He (she points at me) definitely does not need another.
Me: I don’t know what she’s talking about.
Caitlin: We can’t have him be a drunken idiot all the time!
Buck: What if we actually need his help out there?
Jeanie: I’ll see what I can do. (She points at me) Are you done encouraging my wife and her Indiana Jones fantasy yet?
Hey everyone! Sorry for the wait on the next entry. I should be able to edit and put out a new one soon.
On Friday, October 18th, we got a distress signal. The lost mountaineer spoke to us through his radio and informed us that he was lost. A storm had developed over the area. While the wind wasn’t severe, the snowfall had drastically hindered his visibility. While the man had his bearings and didn’t seem to be in immediate physical danger, he had lost the man he’d ventured out with.
The man’s satellite location revealed him to be in a forest at the base of the mountain range. The two had traveled by snowmobile and had become separated from their vehicles after they explored on foot and didn’t return before the storm. He was ordered to remain where he was and not search for his friend or his vehicle. The trees and snowstorm made helicopter travel dangerous. We decided to embark on our snowmobiles.
Caitlin, Buck, and myself were joined by David. He was our helicopter pilot and an ex-military field doctor. He silently lead the group into the forest, our headlights beaming into a blanket of falling snow around us. For almost an hour, there was nothing but the hum of engines against the faint wisps of the storm. We were forced to move slow, making the trip last almost an hour across the suffocating expanse. My heart raced for the men as I stared into the white veil surrounding me. It was beautiful.
We reached the coordinates from the satellite phone to find a black mound powdered with snow leaning against a tree. The man was cowering against the trunk, shrouded by the tree buckling under the snow. Caitlin and Buck pulled him to his feet. His arms were clutched tightly to his chest. He didn’t grab his loose gear, so I picked up pile of rope and an ice axe leaning against the tree.
“Thank you,” the man said, his voice trembling, “thank you, thank you so much,” Each of his hands clutched Buck and Caitlin as he rested on the snowmobile.
“Ain’t nothing,” Buck said.
“Can you tell me your name?” Caitlin said.
“Jerry.”
“How are you feeling Jerry? Are you injured?”
“No ma’am.”
Caitlin asked him some more diagnostic questions while the man slowed his breathing. I surveyed the forest watching faint pillars of snow sift through the tree cover. It was quiet.
“Now Jerry,” Buck said, “you had someone traveling with you?”
“Yes sir.”
“Where did you lose him?”
“Up the mountain, sir, on the glacier.”
“Where?” Buck leaned in.
“I don’t know. We were walking down and it was snowing and I turned around and he was gone.”
“It’s alright, Jerry. We’ll fi–“
“I don’t know, man. We only went about a half mile up but we stayed too late and it started snowing on our way down. I couldn’t see anything, man.”
“When did he… hold up son, slow your breathing.”
“He was right behind me and then… when I turned he was gone.”
“How long ago did you lose him?” Caitlin said, putting her hand on his shoulder.
“He… I thought I could make it down to the snowmobile. Fuck man, I’m gonna have to tell his wife.”
David kneeled in front of the man. He took off his glasses and stared through the haze of the man’s labored breath.
“Jerry,” he said.
The man was quiet, clearly lost in thought.
“We were told your friends name is Hal, right?
“Yes, sir.”
“Now listen, when and where did you lose Hal?”
“I’m sorry, ma—“
“When, and where?”
“About a quarter mile down from where we were practicing at. Almost a quarter mile from the forest. By now, its been almost an hour and a half.”
David nodded and stood up.
“Thank you, Jerry,” Caitlin said, “We’ll take it from here.”
“You’ll find him?”
“Yessir,” Buck said, “David, you wanna drive him back?”
David shrugged and guided the man onto his snowmobile. I provided some encouraging words as I loaded up the rest of his gear. He was trembling when I shook his hand. Not ten minutes after we arrived, I watched as the blinking lights faded into the snow as the men rode off into storm.
The three of us remaining quickly roped ourselves together and put on our crampons.
“You wanna know what I think?” Buck said.
“Not usually.” Caitlin said.
Buck pulled back a branch and launched some snow into her face. She wiped it off, revealing a smug smile.
“So,” Buck says, “our Ben gets lost and he can’t see shit, right?”
“Yup.”
“And it’s clear these guys don’t have a lot of experience, so they were probably trying some new things out.”
“He said they were practicing something,” Caitlin said.
“He had a rope and an axe,” I added, “so they were probably trying out some climbing or crevasse rescue.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Buck said, “so our best shot is to follow their footsteps up the glacier. That’s gotta be our search area because if he got disoriented, he might have been the one to have the sense to stay in place.”
We walk towards the footsteps heading up the mountain. Before we got far, I said what we were all thinking.
“Do you think they went the Eye?”
“Nah,” Buck said, “these guys were reckless, but I don’t think they’d ignore the warnings.”
I was in the middle of the pack, so I turned to back to Caitlin to see what she thought. She just shrugged.
For fifteen minutes we marched through the forest, kicking up fresh powder into the air. My legs immediately started to burn. I focused on the land and everything I could appreciate. It’s rare to see a forest during a storm this strong and hear how quiet it is. Pitch white columns fell through the canopy but everything else was still. So many trees were slumping from the weight. Small ones in the distance started to look like people frozen on their way down the mountain, preserved from a time long ago.
In the distance we approached what looked like a white sheet cloaked over the trees. The wall of snow the forest’s edge appeared to be a cliff into nothingness. I shivered as I approached. Part of it felt too simple, almost welcoming.
“Lights on!” Buck yelled back to us.
The beams cut through the pouring snow and we followed the footsteps. I looked closely in front of us. The footsteps were small and deliberate. Evan must have made his way down slowly.
I surveyed our surroundings and saw a faint light at the ridge of the mountaintops. It just barely broke through the downpour. For a moment, it confused me what kind of light could be be flickering like a candle at the top of the mountain, but then I chuckled quietly to myself. It was the sun.
After almost half an hour of climbing, the steps in front of us got crowded and deep. We paused and looked for another path, but there was none. I briefly wondered if Hal had disappeared into thin air.
“Did he go back?” Caitlin yelled.
“I think so,” Buck hollered, “what do you think?”
I nodded, but I was confused. I understood being disoriented. The appeal of these places are that you get to forge your own path, problem solve when you get in trouble, but this was an emergency. How could you mistake going up for down?
For another fifteen minutes we marched in silence before coming upon a small mound of snow. We approached and noticed a sliver of blue cresting behind it. It got bigger as we approached and saw the scope of the crevasse next to it. It was the Eye, opening up to us. The tracks stopped there.
Instinctively, we left the previous tracks untouched to not destroy any evidence. Buck quietly surveyed the crevasse. Caitlin knelled at the side, the toe of her boot cresting over into the pit.
“Look,” she yelled, “there’s marks on the side.”
Faint lines of broken ice fell into the crevasse towards the hole. They were spaced out like footsteps. Someone had repelled down into the crevasse.
“Well,” Buck said, “these assholes went into the hole.”
“At least one did,” I said.
Caitlin and Buck started slowly walking around the crevasse, taking care to not disturb the snow and never straying too far as to become lost themselves. I stared into the crevasse and investigated the footholds created by their crampons. Everything indicated that one of the men had ventured down with the support of the other. Based on the marks around the hole, it was unlikely they did anything more than just look in before ascending.
My eyes were glossing across the ice looking for more clues when I noticed something, something I still can’t explain. The others were so preoccupied with the tracks that they missed something about the ice. I kneeled at the side.
Snow was pouring in, but it wasn’t sticking. Each flake hit the ice and drifted down into the hole like water down a drain. During our first encounter with it, the crashed snow ceiling littered the bottom, but now it was completely smooth.
For a moment, I forgot about Hal and became fascinated by what could be causing this. I took my glove off and put my palm against the ice. Cold, but it felt like almost like silk.
“That’s strange,” I said. Buck and Caitlin walked up to me.
“What are yo— oh,” Buck said, his arms crossed.
“Interesting,” Caitlin said while gazing into the Eye. She quickly returned to searching for tracks.
“This isn’t weird to you?” I said to her.
“Nope.”
I looked at Bill.
“Oh yeah, it’s weird,” he said, “but I ain’t concerned ‘bout it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not a meteorologist. I can’t explain what’s up with it, but that don’t mean it’s weird.”
“Unless it helps us find that missing kid,” Caitlin yelled, “it’s not our concern right now. We need to find evidence that he isn’t in there.”
“You didn’t find anything?” I yelled.
They shook their heads. My heart rate spiked as I surveyed the crevasse, praying there was another option. Our lights were darting back and forth. My eyes eventually found their way to the ridge.
“Wait, when did we leave?” I yelled.
“What?” Buck said.
“A little over two hours ago,” Caitlin said.
“Jerry said it had been an hour and a half since he lost Hal, and it took us almost an hour to get up here.”
Buck looked confused for a moment, but then nodded his head.
“If it took us half an hour to get here from where he turned around,” I said, “then that means…two hours is the maximum amount of time he was up here before we arrived.”
“Probably a lot less too,” Caitlin said.
“Well put, kid,” Buck said, “that means he’s not far.”
“Not far?” Caitlin said, pointing to the hole, “Where else could he be?”
“We don’t know that!” Buck yelled, a slight quiver in his voice. “We can’t see shit, and it’s snowing so damn much his tracks could be covered!”
“There are no tracks, Buck,” Caitlin yelled, her hand outstretched in exhaustion, “You would have seen them.”
Buck put his hand over his chin and crouched. He stared at his feet, trying to see something in the snow. For a moment, the three of us sat with our thoughts, the only spark of ourselves against the oblivion.
“Check again,” Buck said as he stood up.
Caitlin and I rose and started circling the Eye. I approached the path we ascended on and studied the area. I walked down it to look for divergences, but upon returning I payed attention to the mound of snow right at the edge.
It was more pronounced than the surrounding disturbances. I thought for a moment that this is where the two repelled down, but the marks in the ice didn’t line up.
I noticed two parallel depressions pointing towards the edge, nearly identical to the ones I made when I kneeled at the side.
I looked closer, and the snow surrounding it was elevated beyond the displacements made by the surrounding footprints. I ran my finger across the ridge. It was softer. Fresher.
I quickly looked to the edge; when we arrived, Caitlin had kneeled to survey the Eye just to the right of the mound. Her foot dug into the snow just enough to meet the foundation of ice. Snow had already started to fill it in. I kneeled next to it and brought two of my fingers up to it.
Two fingertips brought together is roughly an inch, and the snow in Caitlin’s recent footprint had already risen enough to reach half of one finger. In only fifteen minutes, just over a quarter of an inch of snow fell, meaning that every hour, one inch of snow was covering our tracks. I went back to measure the fresh snow over where Ben was kneeling, and the snow just barely met the hight of my two fingers, and then another two on top of them.
“Two hours,” I said softly.
I held my breath, trying to think of another scenario than Ben kneeling there, completely still, for almost two hours. I measured again, trying to find any deviation in the snow that would prove me wrong. I found nothing. When the others returned, I told them my theory.
“It looks like he was here for a while. The snow piled up around him. Look.”
Caitlin and Buck leaned into the divot and nodded quietly.
“He disappeared just before we arrived, maybe even moments before we got up here.”
Caitlin only stood there quietly with her arms crossed. Buck said nothing.
“That’s all?” I said, “What do we do now?”
“We come back later to get the body,” Buck said.
“What?” I jumped to my feet. “He could still be alive in there! He might have been here just before we arrived!”
I was beginning to lose my breath. My mind was lost. I envisioned Hal, tired, cold, inexperienced, and alone up here, looking deep into the abyss, he decides to make it quick, just as we break across the horizon.
“Maybe h-“
“Kid,” Buck said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “the sun is going down. we have to head back. There’s nothing more we can do here.”
“He could have just fallen in! Maybe there’s time!”
“It’s too deep for us to rescue him now,” Caitlin said.
“We’ll be back tomorrow. We don’t know much, but we know for sure of them walked on top of the ice. That means it’s safe to cross.”
Flashes of white cascading over my team. The surge through my knees as I walked down the mountain. Rage. That’s what I remembered from the descent. When we got to the snowmobiles, I leaned over mine, taking long then usual to start it. I didn’t know if I wanted them to notice or not, but before I could find out, they were right there beside me.
“Don’t let this get to you,” Buck said, “Remember, we do what we can and that’s all we can do.”
“Relax tonight, okay?” Caitlin said, “Buck and I’ll go down to the hospital to talk to Jerry. We’ll be back here tomorrow, and I want you to take the day off.”
“Why?” I said, more surprised than upset.
“This has been a lot. You need rest. We’ll get one of the rangers to help us out.”
“Okay,” I said, my unease growing. Buck noticed.
“Hey, a day off never hurt nobody,” he said, “You were a big help today. I don’t think we were going to notice some of those clues without you.”
I looked down at my feet.
“Really!” Buck said, slapping me on the head, “You’re not dead weight, kid!”
Caitlin smacked me on the side of my head too. Buck hit the other side again, and the both spent a couple seconds bouncing my head between them until I broke and started to laugh.
“Lets get out of here,” Caitlin said, “and please take some time for yourself tonight! Take a warm bath. Do whatever it is you do. We’re gonna talk to Jerry and announce yet again that people need to leave that place alone.”
“Why do you think they went down there in the first place?” I said.
“Well, that’s what Jerry is going to tell us,” Buck said, “and if he doesn’t tell us, then we’ll see if David’s dead eyes will do him in.”
I chuckled and they started to head to their snowmobiles. I took a moment to breathe, and I looked at the spot I had helped Jerry from beneath the tree. Seeing him curled up made me remember how helpless he looked when we arrived, and then I remembered something.
“Hey,” I said, “you all want to make a bet?”
They both turned to me.
“When the first guy fell in, a piece of his ski was broken next to the hole, and that wasn’t there today, right?”
“Yeah,” they said in unison.
“Jerry was holding his jacket pretty tight when we found him. How much do you want to bet he’s got a souvenir?”
They both smiled.
After they arrived at the hospital, Jerry handed over the ski as soon as they asked. They delivered the news in return, and he became inconsolable. Both of them left just as Hal’s wife arrived at the hospital.
My night was quiet. I ended up taking a bath, hoping the pain in my muscles would leave with the water. I’d never been given a bubble bath as a child, so I treated myself to one. I watched the mountains of bubbles break against the air, the valleys sink, until there was nothing left but the reflection of my legs against the stillness. The longer I looked across the water, the more it appeared that nothing was there.
Out of a passion for internet history and to get some much needed inspiration, I decided to peruse some old blogs. I put some of my own writing aside for the sake of sharing this one that I retrieved from the Internet Archive. It was published in the winter of 2001. I’ve taken the liberty of changing some real names to simple placeholders and cleaned up some grammatical errors (I may have missed some). I will post more entries as I continue to put them together. They are scattered, but I’ve taken to calling them “Our Place in the Ice.”
Entry #1
If we don’t know, we cannot react. If we can’t react, we cannot hope. When I discuss what I’ve seen with others, they dismiss the patterns and gesture at the great unknown to explain it all away. I’ve seen too much for the charity that comes with accepting the emptiness of it all. There is a path through the unexplainable, either towards understanding itself or the true limits. Fighting to know either one of them is terrifying. A life in the wild has required that I learn this.
I’ve been volunteering with the local rescue team for almost four years since I moved to Alaska. I’ve come to accept the necessary grit I need to push myself into the mountains, but also the compassion to hold my boundary with the earth. I’ve broken through too much snow to find it’s turned red, to witness an adventurer on their final date with nature. The one that’s always coming, and yet it’s the one they never expect. The piece of equipment most commonly left behind by the people we rescue is humility.
I was eighteen when I started. Since I was thirteen I was climbing at any place my bike could take me. I solo camped in the winter and read about survival skills by flashlight. When I was sixteen, I took my car and I soloed the mountaineer’s route at Mount Whitney. I told my PE teacher about it and my mom got a call from the school.
A welfare check. My greatest honor. She didn’t care, lucky for me. I took off from home and high school as soon as the law would let me.
I got a job in a lumberyard and pestered my way into being involved in the local rescue team. Observing, then record keeping, then carrying the gear. For the past year, I’ve been saving lives. Consistently too, which is what has made recent events so strange.
On Friday, September 20th, we got a call from some hikers about a skier who crashed into a crevasse. The afternoon weather was clear so we took the helicopter and confirmed it from above: half of a broken ski laying towards the bottom of a crevasse less than a quarter mile where the glacier met the mountainside.
The crevasse in question was substantial. Approximately twenty-five feet wide and sixty feet long. It formed a rippling blue oval that could reasonably conceal our helicopter if we landed inside. The walls converged about twenty feet in the glacier to form a jagged bowl with the basin covered in slabs of broken ice and snow. As we descended at a safe distance, my team observed a hole no more than five feet in diameter offset slightly from the center.
We dismounted the helicopter and approached the side with care. This crevasse hadn’t been seen by the team before, and the bottom being covered in snow and broken ice meant the skier didn’t see it either.
All of us had the same judgement: he rode over and broke through the snow ceiling, carrying enough force to crash through the slab of ice below, creating the hole. My thought, while morbid, was that his ski likely snapped trying to hold his weight as he dangled by his foot.
We didn’t know when he fell or if he was dead or alive, but we knew he was in that hole.
All four of us stood at the edge while our team leader, Buck, squatted at the edge and tightened the bandana around his helmet. He quietly surveyed the bowl below while the rest of us started unpacking some of the medical equipment on our backs. Caitlin, another volunteer like me, started yelling into the crevasse that help has arrived. No response.
“Pulley is almost ready,” Caitlin said to the team.
“Don’t bother,” Buck said. Out of all of us, he had the most experience with rescues. He’d worked as a ranger at Denali for years and recently started working as a trauma surgeon while volunteering for rescues with our team.
“Why?” she said. I turned to face them. Both had pulled off rescues together for years, and I rarely saw them out of sync. The ranger with us continued to prepare for a rope rescue. Buck waved his hand over the crevasse.
“The bottom is delicate. It was thin enough for someone to fall through, including us if we get close to those cracks around the hole. Even if we managed to lower ourselves in, I reckon the rope would get damaged being pulled against the sharp ice. If the weight broke any more of the sides, it’ll send someone swinging. We don’t know how deep it is in there.”
Caitlin looked pensive for a moment and then nodded. The ranger looked up from his work with a confused look on his face. Buck responded.
“I ain’t ruling it out yet, but it’s too risky from where we’re at.”
I decided to speak up.
“What if we got a ladder, laid it across, and descended from a right angle above the hole? It’d be more stable that way.”
Buck turned to me. “You’re getting less dumb by the day, son,” he said with a smile, “but it wouldn’t support the weight. Plus, it’d be too tricky.”
I nodded as Buck turned to the ranger.
“We know who’s in there?”
“A young guy named James Melendez checked in at the ranger station this morning. He was the only person skiing alone today.”
He raised his eyebrows, “When this morning?”
“‘Bout six.”
Buck looked back at the hole and stroked his beard.
“Anything else?”
I ended up interjecting something I heard one of the rangers say before we left for the helicopter.
“Apparently he’s wearing a full red Marlboro ski suit.”
“Shit,” Buck said, “I like him already. Let me tell you what, hand me one of the med kits, a headlamp, and a radio.”
In less than a minute, Buck had tied them all to the end of a rope and started lowering them into the crevasse. We all crouched at the edge as we watched it drop into the inky spot beneath us. Just as it fell in, Buck held the rope tight and raised his radio.
“James, we’re lowering aid to you. Give us a sign of your condition if you can. Stay strong down there. We’ll get you out.”
We heard nothing but the dying echo of Buck’s voice against the mountains. He lowered the supplies further.
“Yell as loud as you can for us, James. We’re close.”
After no response, Buck continued to let out slack and the pack descended further. After some time hearing nothing but the scraping of the rope, our eyes left the crevasse and watched pile of rope behind us. It was a hundred feet long, and it was getting smaller.
“Speak to me, son,” Buck said, quieter this time.
Sixty feet left and the silence continued. The snow felt colder, the mountains grew tighter. Forty feet, and the ranger turned around. He hung his head and said nothing. Twenty feet, and Caitlin turned to wave at the helicopter. The engine ripped through the air as Buck extended his arm out into the crevasse, the tip of the rope in his palm. I looked at him and saw his eyes staring blankly into the wall of ice. Without saying a word, he began pulling the rope back up.
The team was quieter then usual on the ride back, especially me. The others were used to tragedies coming from people not taking the right safety measures. A part of them undoubtedly saw James as a fool, and if I’m being honest, I did too. I just tend to feel more pain for people like them. It wasn’t long ago that I was one of those guys going out alone into the wild. I never made a wrong move, or maybe I just got lucky, but I know now how vulnerable I was.
All I could think about was that guy lying beneath us. I knew with the depth of that chasm he was dead, but I hate that we left him in the dark and in that cold. At least we couldn’t hear anything, I thought to myself. We didn’t hear him suffer. I shuddered and sunk into my seat, watching the mountains get smaller in the window.
Caitlin quickly saw how I was feeling. She put her arm around my shoulder and I felt some of the weight melt away. She worked as a nurse for decades before volunteering and knew how to care for people better than any of us. You could tell by looking at her that the wrinkles on her face were chiseled by years of kindness. Buck, on the other hand, took off his glove and smacked my knee with it. I looked up and saw him smiling, giving me a thumbs up. I smiled too. We often couldn’t communicate easily over the noise of the helicopter, but we always found a way.
We contacted the family members we could at the station but couldn’t do much more. More rangers eventually assessed the situation and determined retrieving the body was too risky. The ice was too fragile but since we knew where James was, we would check the location often and reassess whenever we could. The crevasse stuck out visibly to anyone traveling around it and warnings were issues to all visitors. Little more was disclosed other than informing people that a fatal accident took place there and traveling near it was dangerous. It was marked on our maps and because of the shape the ice took, we took to calling it The Eye from then on.
For almost a month everything went as usual. Over the past season the team started trusting me to address medical issues and I helped bandage an exposed break in a snowboarder’s leg. Being only a high school grad meant I didn’t have a lot of options for learning this stuff, but Caitlin, when she wasn’t volunteering, worked as a biology professor. She encouraged me to sit in on her lectures and it inspired me enroll in community college. I’m planning on applying to med school soon, and keeping at is has made the previous failed rescue attempt less painful. I focused on looking forward.
The father took a draw from his cigarette as he turned the page on his daughter’s score. She played Silent Night on her violin, pausing to skip the notes meant for her missing E string. It was late and the score was lit only by the fading sunlight coming through the open window of the trailer. Her father loudly tapped his foot while she played, a habit she learned to overpower to keep the correct tempo. He ashed the cigarette on the music stand and tossed it into a Mickey Mouse mug on the coffee table. Towards the end of the song, a car pulled into the driveway. The father watched the sheet intently, and just after his daughter played the final note, he planted a kiss on her head. Outside, he spoke to his wife as she unloaded groceries. “Hey” “How was work?” “Oh God, I’m exhausted.” “Yeah?” “Yeah, I think I might need a break. What do you think?” She watched her husband’s fingers furiously tap on the hood of the car while he feigned curiosity about her response. “Is she good for the recital?” “Uh huh.” She studied his eyes for a moment and then nodded. He quickly bolted inside to grab a backpack that had already been packed, and she sighed as he kissed her forehead and took the keys.
It was an uncharacteristically warm night for December in Virginia, so he cranked the windows down as he drove towards the airport. The father stuck to the right side of the highway, feeling that the other Richmond drivers wouldn’t notice him if he did. For a man in his late twenties, he looked older due to how pale and bony he was. His clothes were worn and his shirt was gaining another hole from an ember he failed to notice fall from his cigarette. The wind roared across his face but he took little pleasure from it. He took a straight, quiet road that went away from the airport and saw his friend on his bicycle in front of him. He was an older man, probably in his forties, and he swerved back and forth on his bike as he waved a cooler filled with beer in the breeze. When the father drove by they both laughed, and his friend kicked up his feet as his bike rolled across the cracks in the road.
Coming over the flat horizon were two hotels that accommodated travelers coming from the airport. One was of a reasonable quality, a member of a franchise. The beds were made accordingly, the grass was cut, and no light in the building flickered for very long. It was comfortable. The father pulled into the other hotel. It was much smaller and the rooms were cheap. The parking lot had multiple ashtrays that were filled to the brim and smokers around them who stomped their cigarettes into the concrete. The first set of sliding doors into the foyer were broken, and when the father jogged inside a robin was searching through the carpet for crumbs. It took no notice of him. “Good evening, my friend! How are we today?” the father said at the counter, laying his head sideways to yell under the glass security barrier. On the glass was a sign indicating that full refunds could not be offered over thirty minutes after paying for the room. No exceptions. “Very good, yes, very good. $85.” “Of course.” After paying the clerk picked up a pencil to mark the time but remembered that for him, he didn’t need to.
The father’s room was on the ground floor but he went to the elevator knowing, as the locals know, that the only working ice machine was on the third floor. When he walked inside a mother pulled her kids close and went stiff, a detail the father failed to notice as he scratched at his forearm. Just before the doors would close, his friend jammed his front bicycle tire inside. His friend handed him the cooler so he could wipe the sweat off his brow with his shirt. He was still wearing his uniform from the convenience store, which was inside-out, and he instinctively held his bike close. A month ago he had punched a woman in the jaw for trying to steal it outside the hotel. After pulling his shirt down, he nodded at the woman and her children. The mother nodded politely and looked at her watch to see when it would be thirty minutes past check-in. While the daughter focused on her phone, the little boy furrowed his brow. “Why did you bring your bicycle in here?” he asked. “I love my bicycle.” The boy lit up. “Me too!” They both smiled and gave each other a fist bump. The mother gave a labored smile, and the family exited onto the second floor.
At the vending machine there was a young woman leaning against it, looking inside. Her hair was thin and her legs were covered in bruises that flowered from the veins visible through her porcelain skin. She was looking down at a honey bun stuck at the bottom, her forehead leaving a sweaty smudge on the glass as she rocked back and forth. The friend handed the father the cooler and walked up beside the girl. He realized it was the same woman he had punched the month before. “I told the motherfucker behind the desk to fix this shit.” “I know,” she said, “it’s fucked.” The friend seized the sides of the vending machine and began to rock it back and forth as the father waited for the ice to dispense. As he waited, he gazed out the window at a one of the roads leaving the hotel. It was under construction and had been for over a year. It used to be so bumpy he would take his daughter on drives through it to make her laugh, but now it was stuck being repaired so slowly that he almost forgot where it connected to. He felt that somebody should be embarrassed for this but didn’t know who that person would be. “Look at my boy,” said his friend, “Lanky as hell. Grab that honey bun, bro.” The father’s thin arm easily slipped into the machine, and once he was in they had all the food they needed for the night. Sensing their plans aligned, the past suddenly felt like nothing. The woman decided to join them.
The hotel room was small and had two queen beds. The friend sorted the snacks on the desk while the father rummaged through his bag. In the corner, the woman pulled a painting off the wall. A jack russel is seen looking away from the car it’s chasing to listen to a blues band on an old New Orleans street, but the woman flips the painting around. Doodles and signatures from previous residents cover the back of the frame and a message is written across the bottom. “When I’m gone, I’ll still be here in the stains on the bed.”
The father supplied the crystal and after twenty minutes he was on the bed twitching his fingers across the sheets, speaking of things known and unknown. The woman sat with her head to the back of the air conditioner letting her hair fly across her face as she laughed wildly, and the friend was glued to the peephole at the door. He was breathing heavily. “Why’s he got that thing on the counter?” “What?” said the father. “The glass, man. The fucking barrier between us.” “At the front desk?” “Yeah… What’s he hiding back there?” The friend let his body slump against the door, running his hands slowly across the wood, looking for cracks. “So much. So much is hidden from us, man.” “Have another beer,” said the father. “Hey,” said the woman, “look at this shit.” She was slowly turning the handle to open the window.
Outside was the parking lot to the other hotel, and in the distance was a black SUV with four men waiting next to it. They were dressed in flowing Hawaiian shirts and khakis, and they were staring at the top of the nice hotel. The father and his friend crowded the woman at the window, watching them closely. One of the men checked his watch, nodded, and three started walking towards the entrance. One remained. He leaned against the hood of the car while looking at his phone, and a black briefcase sat behind his feet. Opportunity knocked. By the time the men had entered the hotel, the father was already holding the screen that had been pulled from the window. The woman crouched into the tall grass and quietly approached the SUV. Her bare feet made no sound on the concrete and she picked up the briefcase with no issue. She bolted back to the window without a sound—only popping in the air for a moment after she stepped on a thistle. She passed the briefcase inside and as soon as she hit the floor, the curtains were ripped shut.
The lock on the briefcase was firm but could not withstand the industriousness of methamphetamine. After another hit of the crystal, it broke open. Once the father looked inside, he fell to his knees.
The woman’s feet pounded across the floor like a jackhammer as she danced and screamed and the father’s friend jumped across the beds, letting the money fly out of the briefcase with each bound.
The father watched between his fingers as the money wafted across the room. There was no need for math, no division. Between the three was the shared joy that they didn’t need to count it. Each one of them, no matter how it was split, had enough.
“My baby… my baby’s gonna get a new violin.” the father said between sobs.
“We can buy this hotel,” the friend yelled, “It can be a place where people fucking… go! People can stay here, with us! Bro…”
He ran into the bathroom. The sound of little bits of metal clanged against the tile, and the man reemerged with a wide, toothy smile. His hand in a fist at his neck, holding the shower curtain around his back like a cape. The shower rod, a king’s staff.
The woman fell to the floor laughing. She rolled over to the bicycle flipped next to the wall where she started to pick the spokes like a harp. Flaccid twangs rungs across the room as the kind spread his legs between the two beds, towering over the father who was catching his breath between his sobs. They both began to laugh.
“You’re too rich to cry, bitch,” the king bellowed, “Sit up!”
The father slid his knees across the cash, beaming a smile at the ground. The king raised his chin with the end of his staff.
“You calling me tonight… you, you bringing all of us here,” the king said gesturing at the woman, “It’s our world now.”
The woman gripped her t-shirt over her heart, steadying her breath, now trying to find a word better suited for her than sober. She closed her eyes. The polyester in her hands became a smooth leather. Reigns, back in her hands. She saw the dirt under her nails, and she smiled.
Outside the window, across the wild grass, flashes of light came through the curtains on the top floor of the other hotel. An alarm blared through the revolving door as people poured out of the building, most in their pajamas. A brief, senseless community formed over the concrete as guests waited for guidance. The mother from the elevator loaded her children into a car as the police arrived, and a man in a partially undone suit ground his jaw back and forth and picked a scab under his watch.
Windows from the smaller hotel blinked as residents peeked out of their curtains. After realizing that the police weren’t concerned with them, a rare moment of reprieve washed over the rooms. The father and his friends, however, noticed nothing. They were huddled in the bathroom.
The crystal was gone. The toilet flush was a triumph, and he father watched the water as it slipped down the drain. He breathed deeply, letting his tired lungs fill as the bowl found new water.
“Big man, you’re a whole new daddy,” the king said.
“I hope so,” he said.
He took a moment to himself as his friends went back to sorting the money. In the silence of his visions, he became almost invisible. A dog barking from their townhouse. His wife opening the door. His daughter with her friends, back from exploring the museum down the road. They improvise on their instruments to make incoherent, perfect noise. The way kids do.
The guttural ache from his failure began to fade. Pain was becoming nostalgic now, and the father began to feel that he had time to sacrifice for his daughter like other dads did. In some way that was secret to him, everything had been for something. He had a chance at what other people had. The crystal was still in his system, but he finally had a sleepless night that was just for her.
The king and the woman sorted money into three piles. The hundreds made a soft rhythm with the beat of their hearts as lights flashed across the window.
The woman sighed and smiled as they reached the end. “Shit, mine’s a hundred short.”
The king looked furious despite the indifference from the woman. He tapped her shoulder and pointed to his bike.
“It’s the only way” he said with a smile.
She gasped and embraced him. The father burst into laughter, a short moment of serenity before they heard a knock at the door. They froze. The only movement was the flame of the father’s lighter against his cigarette.
At the first slam the father doubled back to the bathroom as the king bolted towards the window, only to meet a man staring at him through the glass. The father’s thin arms shoved their pipes into the light fixture in the ceiling. The lock on the door shattered as the men wearing Hawaiian shirts from the other hotel’s parking lot ran inside. Splayed across the money, the woman put her hands up while looking down the barrel of the officer’s gun. The room was frozen.
Filth from the disturbed carpet drifted through the air as three of the officers held everyone down. It was completely silent. No Miranda rights were spoken as one of the men, broad shouldered white man with a square jaw and a buzz cut, surveyed the room. He walked over to the father who was being pinned on the floor in the doorway of the bathroom, and when he leaned over to look at him, little pieces of metal dropped onto the carpet from his shirt. They were bullets from his vest. The man gently pulled the cigarette from the father’s mouth and placed it his own.
The man walked across the room, looking first at the broken suitcase, then the beer on the dresser, and then at the mess in the bathroom. The officers looked up from their detainees but also found nothing incriminating, other than the piles of money.
“We didn’t steal it. The money.” the woman said. The father stifled a chuckle. The man chuckled too. He grabbed a hundred off one of the piles and held it up to a light. The bill looked flat, green like turf. He smiled at the woman.
“What money?”
Each of the three officers felt the muscles beneath them go limp. Still, one of the officers held up handcuffs, but the man shrugged and let out a deep, labored breath, followed by a cough that made him keel over his broken ribs he got from the set-up across the parking lot. He waved his hand towards the door.
“I’m tired” he said.
The officers watched the three closely as they left. Nobody on the floor moved. For an endless section of the morning, each of them laid quietly on the ground as the TV continued to play Shark Tank on mute.
Eventually, the woman rose only to kick her pile with her foot and lay on the bed.
The sun was rising and they had no reason to stay. Each one of them packed up their things and headed down towards the lobby where the king set up a payment plan for the shower curtain. The father walked out to his car and leaned against the side of it, exhausted and defeated. He bounced his forehead against the car with no rhythm, holding back tears.
The woman came out the door and sat down to lean against a cigarette holder, followed shortly by the king with his bike. He walked up to her with a puzzled look on his face.
“Where’s my ride?”
She looked confused, taking a draw from her cigarette.
“What are you talking about?”
“Damn,” he said, “I’m gonna need to catch a ride with my boy, seeing that I’m stranded.”
He softly let the bike down onto her shoulders. She smiled up at him, grabbed the handles, and then bolted off towards the road, dropping her cigarette onto the concrete. The king clapped and jumped up and down with joy. The father watched as the woman ripped into the road closed for construction, disappearing into the sunrise.
“Ay, you ain’t wave?” the king yelled. “You act like it ain’t almost Christmas.”
The father gave a small wave as they got into the car.
The highways were quiet. The king leaned his head out the window to take in the cool air while the father’s knuckles pulsed between red and white on the wheel. After pulling his head back into the car and hearing the silence, the king spoke.
“You know, I almost forgot something.”
“What?”
The king undid a button on his cargo pants and pulled out a small white drawstring bag.
“Got it at the pawn shop a while ago.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a harmonica, for your baby. I figure she likes music and all.”
“Yeah, yeah she does. Thank you, man.”
“That’s not all. You know what I got you?”
“What?”
He laughed.
“I figure you get to wrap it up and tell her it’s from you.”
It was only after the father dropped his friend off that he began to cry. He drove slowly, trying to navigate safely through his sobs, keeping what he had of himself together for what felt like the first time. He wanted nothing more than to see his trailer.
His body retched like he was in the depths of a divine sickness, cleansed with each passing mile, but even as he shook he held the harmonica tenderly in his hand. Through his tears, the light of the sunrise whipped across the sky like he was conducting an orchestra of fire.
His wife had left the door unlocked. When he walked inside he went straight to their room where the bed was empty. He placed the harmonica in a gift bag and left it under the tree.
It was seven and his daughter’s alarm was set for eight. He took a blanket from his room and at her door, he spent the last of his strength opening it as quietly as possible. At the foot of her bed, he curled up in his blanket and faded away for the last hour of the night, dreaming he was a dog chasing a car down an endless New Orleans street.
