Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

Chapter 6

1

TWO DAYS LATER. ANDREW SHOWED UP, HIS FACE

sunburned, his hair short, his eyes aglow with eagerness.

I spotted him when I paused to catch my breath and feel my pulse in the clearing near my cabin. I’d just come from a ten-mile run along the stretch of roadway that wound around the base of the hills. Since my arrival, I could sense tremors threatening to overtake me, like a psychic foretelling an earthquake in Asia. I hadn’t had a drink in several days, and the sharpness of the world struck me like sudden daggers.

Andrew, dressed in neon orange snow pants and a Windbreaker, stood at the opposite end of the clearing, a pair of binoculars around his neck. Grinning, he opened his arms as if to hug me, despite the fact that he was nearly twenty yards away.

I approached, still catching my breath (I was not used to running for long distances at this altitude and had suffered a minor nosebleed somewhere around the seven-mile mark), and was quickly folded into Andrew’s embrace.

“Can you believe places like this still exist in the world?” he said. “It’s enough exhilaration just standing here breathing.”

“It’s beautiful, all right.”

“The flight out was good?”

“It was horrible,” I said, “but at least they didn’t lose my luggage.”

“Did you have a chance to meet the others?”

Aside from John Petras, I’d run into Michael Hollinger, a tattooed, well-built, introverted Australian who’d received an airline ticket and an invitation from Andrew in the same cryptic fashion as both Petras and I had.

We met last night during dinner at the lodge—a meal of stewed goat and an eclectic selection of wild vegetables that I was quite certain had not yet been cataloged by mankind. I must have looked overtly American in my Gap button-down and American Eagle corduroys because he approached my table and introduced himself. I invited him to dine with me, and we ate and talked for several hours. Hollinger knew Andrew from time spent in the Australian outback. For six months in their early twenties, they’d lived together with two aboriginal women in a hut built of fronds while subsisting on marsupials hunted with bows and arrows.

“A couple of the guys,” I told Andrew. “John Petras and Michael Hollinger.”

He winked. “Good guys, yeah?”

“When did you get in?”

“This morning. I’m jet-lagged like a motherfucker.”

“Listen,” I said, “I need to talk to you about something.”

“It’ll have to wait.” He scanned the sky, one hand shielding the sun from his eyes. “I’m on the hunt.”

“For what?”

“For whatever’s out there.” Andrew placed the binoculars to his eyes and took a series of steps backward. Gravel crunched under his Timberlands. “Tonight,” he said, still examining the sky, “in the main lounge. The food’s on me. All the guys will be there. I’ll make an appearance to go over the itinerary. We’ll leave at the end of the week.”

He pivoted in the dirt and stalked toward the woods, the heavy binoculars still at his eyes. I watched him weave through a stand of spindly trees until he was nothing more than an orange neon dot getting lost in the woods.

Asshole , I thought.

Not for the first time, I wondered what the hell I was doing here. The answer I’d given Petras that first night in the lounge was true enough—that I had been slowly dying in my little apartment back home—but that didn’t necessarily mean I had to come here, did it? There were plenty of other interesting places on the planet, many I’d already witnessed. I could have gone anywhere. But now I was here in Nepal, preparing to scale a mountain. With Andrew fucking Trumbauer.

As I walked to my cabin, I couldn’t help but recall that evening in San Juan when he and I jumped off the cliff into the shocking black water below. I also remembered how Hannah had pressed her warm, little mouth against my ear after I told her where I’d been. “Oh,” she’d said, “the cliff-diving thing.” It was our honeymoon, yet I’d remained awake in bed for maybe half an hour, wondering if she’d ever gone naked cliff diving with Andrew.

“Fuck this,” I said now, not wanting to deal with those old thoughts, those old feelings. After all, it was the reason I was here.

I opened the door to my room slowly, as if anticipating a burglar, ready to split my skull with a crowbar, hiding behind the door.

For all I knew, this wasn’t too far from the truth; I was still concerned about the open window from two nights ago and the fact that someone had gone through my luggage. I’d assumed it was a robbery, but nothing had been taken … which, in a way, bothered me even more.

Why would someone break into my room and rifle through my belongings if not to steal? It made me think about James Bond movies and how bad guys always planted venomous snakes and deadly scorpions under his pillow or in the pocket of his bathrobe. At first, this notion caused me to grin, but then I thought of Shomas, the mysterious hulkwho’d materialized outside the cabin on that very same night, preaching about danger and turning back. James Bond, indeed …

But no one was here. The windows were still closed, and my luggage was just how I’d left it. While this helped calm my heartbeat, it did little to soothe the shakes I could feel rumbling up through the core of my body. I needed a drink. Bad.

I decided to shower and take my mind off my withdrawal. The water wouldn’t get hotter than lukewarm, which was fine by me, because by the time I stepped under the spray, I was sweating like a hostage.

2

ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER. I WATCHED AS A

caravan of nomads rolled through the clearing on horse-drawn carts. They reminded me of the old paintings in high school history textbooks of the carpetbaggers traversing the flatlands of a blossoming new country. There were children among them; they shouted and laughed and hopped down from the carts to sell vegetables to whomever they could.

I felt a lower eyelid tremble. The withdrawal shakes were coming, all right. Easy , I willed it. Easy now, boyo .

As I watched the caravan, a man appeared above an embankment. He was deeply tanned with feathered yellow hair and wraparound sunglasses. He carried a backpack over one shoulder, and his strides were long and well defined.

The children hurried over to him, proffering their goods. The man smiled, exposing what appeared to be—at least from what I could see while standing on my cabin porch—two rows of perfect white teeth. The man tousled the hair of the nearest child, then lightly slapped the underside of the child’s hand that held a plump, red tomato. The tomato hopped into the air, and the man snatched it before it could fall back into the child’s hand. He nodded at theyoung boy, and even though he was wearing those wraparound sunglasses, I got the distinct impression he winked at him, too.

As the children looked on, their giddy playfulness fading, the man’s two rows of perfect teeth reappeared for an encore performance before disappearing into the fat skin of the tomato. I could almost hear the snap of the bite and the patter of the juices down the man’s chin.

The caravan continued down the roadway. The children, collectively expressionless, stared at the man for several moments before catching up to the carts. I could still hear the clop of the horses’ hooves and the creaking of the wooden carts after the caravan disappeared over the embankment.

“Howdy,” the tomato thief said, tipping me a salute as he strode toward the main lodge. “You from the States?”

“Yeah.”

“You look like a Trumbauer experiment.” If this was meant as some sort of joke, I was not in the mood.