Karen Russell - St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Hone comes around with a bucket of eel-yellow transponders. He goes from boy to boy and loops them around our necks.

“These willies need to be jiggered at all times.”

“Why?”

“In case something goes less-than-good with the Avalanche.” The cold, calloused pads of Hone’s fingers brush my neck. He flips the switch to ON. “We need to be able to find you boys if you get buried.”

The transponder feels stone-heavy around my neck. I wish that Hone would make just one more joke.

Steve #2 hands us an ice axe and a sack lunch. My ice axe is crusted with triangles of rust or blood. My sack lunch is salami. The ice pilots start to load up the planes. Steve #3 does a head count and frowns down at the manifest.

“Franz Josef? There are some names missing on the manifest.”

A whispered conference. Brows furrow in our direction. Franz smiles at us, and I catch a whiff of conspiracy.

“Mr. Gibson, Mr. Oamaru, Mr. Brauser, there’s been an, ah, error of logistics. You boys don’t mind waiting for an extra plane? Very sure? Most certain? Well.”

The substitute pilot forgot his contacts at the lodge. He seems momentarily flustered, blinking out the cockpit window. Then he winks one naked blue eye at us and flashes us a terrifying grin.

“Can you boys keep a secret?”

“Rangi can!” Brauser laughs. He is rendered apoplectic by his own wit. “That’s the only thing Rangi’s good for! Because he’s dumb.

“Ritardaaaando!” He flicks at Rangi’s left earlobe. “Figaro, figaro, you fuckin’ psycho…”

“He’s not deaf, you know.” I am careful to say this in a coward’s voice, too soft for Brauser to hear.

“It’s okay for me to call Ritardando dumb”—Brauser’s face goes crumple smug—“like how it’s okay to call a female dog a bitch. Because it’s the truth.”

The substitute pilot’s smile broadens. “Good news! Nothing wrong with keeping your quiet.” He gives Rangi a friendly thump on the back. “Same goes for you two. No reason to go blabbling to the Steves that I flew you up without my lenses.”

Rangi’s expression remains flat and illegible.

“Dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb biiitch!” Brauser really does have a lovely contralto. He can hit, color, and hold a note like a buxom Viking princess. Otherwise Franz Josef would have kicked him out of the choir a long time ago. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Brauser, Rangi, and I got volunteered for the last flight up here. Franz often refers to us as his “problem” voices. He’s probably overjoyed for an excuse to begin the concert without us.

Brauser’s melodic insults fill the cabin, dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb, a song that thuds into us like a steady rain laced with hailstones. He sings it until I want to scream. Rangi listens like someone locked indoors, watching the weather outside his cell window.

During the flight up, I close my eyes and try to ignore the tremors of the cabin. It’s a perilous ascent. We rise through a low, gold-limned dross of clouds. The valley falls away from us in waves. Then nothing but frost and seracs, freckled with shale. The plane has to do all sorts of dubious maneuvers to enter the openings in the Southwest Icefalls, a dozen squint-thin eyes in the glassy rock face. Up here it’s cratered and lifeless terrain. Mount Kei looks like a cloud volcano in the rising sun, bubbling ocher and maroon. Brauser is telling some stupid joke about my father and a female reindeer. Rangi’s staring into the cockpit at the giddy, spinning controls. He gnaws on all four of his fingers. Clouds stream around the small windows. The substitute pilot is massaging his temples with his two free hands.

Everybody is injured in the crash. The wind screams across the flat snowfields. Both skis snap off on impact, and the plane slides to a stop on its belly. The substitute pilot makes it out first, kicking through the cockpit door. I ignore the pilot’s outstretched hand and tumble face-first into the snow. It’s four feet of fresh powder. There is nothing up here, no points of reference. Just snow forever, pocked with these turquoise holes like painted whirlpools. Crevasses, I shudder, deep enough to gulp us whole. On a glacier, the ground is just an illusion, a slick disguise for a million chasms. I try to get up on my knees and let out a whimper. Brauser has rolled a few meters away from me, and I wait for him to resume cursing. But Brauser is lying fish-eyed in the snow. Not moving. Not blinking. I follow his blank gaze and see nothing. No choir director, no altos, no tenors, no planes.

We are alone on the glacier.

“Excuse me, sir…?” Etiquette and panic duel in each syllable. “Where are, um, the other planes?”

Is it possible, I wonder, that we have wrecked on another glacier, the wrong glacier? Usually, the planes do a smooth glissando right into the Ice Amphitheater. Franz Josef conducts during touchdown, keeping ¾ time. When I turn around, I see that the substitute pilot’s smile has started to run like gravy. His face looks sick and yellow in the light. He yells something and points behind us.

As we watch, the ski plane starts to slide backwards.

“Fuck.”

The substitute pilot stands there for what feels like a very long time. Then he starts running, falling and running and running and falling, so slowly, through the deep virgin snow.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

The plane skids faster and faster. It slides at a whistling speed. A dazzling wake of frost explodes up around the body of the plane.

“Fuck!”

And then it slides, soundless and dreamlike, over the ridge.

On his way back to the boys, the substitute pilot falls into a small blue crevasse. He has to lift one leg out and then the other. Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot’s bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us, doughy and flushed with horror.

“Help!” The substitute pilot waves his arms. He’s up to his waist in snow. At a lower altitude, this would have made me laugh out loud.

“Help me! Don’t just stand there, kid.”

I just stand there. I know better than to walk over there. Somehow, I intuit that if I extend my hand now, I will get infected by the pilot’s helplessness, his gibbering fear. The help can’t be me; the help needs to come from some other direction. I hear myself barking orders, full of an iron contempt for the pilot. What a crybaby. What a true fuckup. It’s an angry feeling that I used to use on the farm when my father first left, late at night, to immunize myself against my mother’s terror.

“Just lift your legs, one at a time. We need your help over here. ”

Behind us, Brauser is moaning. His cries swell and sky-crawl. It’s a wordless sound, a wild sound, this animal pain that can’t be haltered and led to meaning. It reminds me of the time that Mr. Oamaru had to shoot a two-headed reindeer calf, and for a horrid instant both heads lowed in tandem. They sang their way across some abominable threshold. I still hear them screaming in nightmares. For months afterwards, I plugged up my ears with my mother’s Dolly Nutmeg Reads the Bible! cassettes and refused to enter the barn alone. This is the worst sound, I think, the very worst sound in the whole world.

Then the moaning stops. Brauser’s movement stops. And I regret all my hastier judgments. Any sound is better than this.

“Brauser? Brauser!”

Where are the others? My head is throbbing. Where are the other planes?

“Where’s your hat, Brauser?”

Already, Brauser’s marigold hair has become hoary with snow. With his bare white head and his curled-in spine, Brauser looks like a rapidly aging man. He blows crimson spit bubbles that I pop immediately, scared and weirdly embarrassed. Rangi sits in a shocked, straight-backed silence in the bowl left by the vanished wreck, still holding tight to his sack lunch. The soggy bottom’s torn apart. His sandwich bread and apple slices litter the snow.