Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

Everyone groaned, myself included.

“So we’re stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere and my face is goin’ all spongy and Alex starts slamming his hands against the steering wheel. Everyone’s looking for signs to I-70, but there’snothing but forest and run-down cabins. Then someone starts shouting out the window at some dude passing by. Figured it was one of the ATV bucketheads we’d seen cruising along Mosquito Pass earlier in the day. But this fucker turns out to be a goddamn Indian from some tribe in the Ute Mountains, scrounging for recyclable cans and bottles or whatever down here. He comes over to the truck and pops the hatchback and stares at me like I’m an alien species of wildflower he’s thinking about smoking. He’s not even wigged out by the blood, and there was a lot by now.

“Bastard climbs into the back with me and peels the bloody towel from my face. He was a big son of a bitch, and his skin looked like dried tobacco leaves. I remember thinking he was Mexican because he wore one of those wide-brimmed hats with the little cholo balls dangling from the rim. He placed his hands on either side of my face. He smelled like piss and whiskey, and for one freaky second, I thought he was simply gonna pop my head between his palms like a fucking overripe tomato.

“‘Can you see me?’ he asks. I must have responded because he then says, ‘I want you to look directly into my eyes. I want you to tell me what color are my eyes.’ So I’m looking real hard at his eyes, but I can’t for the life of me tell what color his eyes are. For a moment, one of his hands slips off my cheek, and I think I feel my head expand, ready to come apart. ‘What color are my eyes?’ he says again, and he follows this up by stuffing a foul-tasting thumb into my mouth. I’m too out of it to buck him off, so the thumb goes rooting around my mouth, and when it finally retracts, I think I can make out the color of the old Indian’s eyes. But then something weird fucking happens, and he’s no longer got two eyes but just one single eye, right smack in the center of his face. Like what do you call those fucking things …?”

“Cyclops,” Petras offered.

“Yeah, right. Cyclops. And I’m focusing on this single eye, and I can clearly see the ridge of brow above the eye, the hollow pocket it’ssitting in, the whole nine, man. I mean, the bastard morphed into some Cyclops right in front of me, and looking into that one eye was like looking at a hypnotist’s pendulum, ‘cause I’m suddenly feeling nothing but cool, calm, and relaxed. By the time Alex finds the highway and gets me to a hospital, I’m as content as an old dog after a big meal.” Finished, Chad slapped a palm on the tabletop. The plates and glasses jumped. “Now how do you boys explain something like that?”

Hollinger said, “You’d lost a lot of blood, mate. You were hallucinating.”

“Wasn’t no hallucination.”

“Peyote,” suggested Petras. “That’s why he put his thumb in your mouth.”

“Brother,” Chad said, “I’ve juggled my share of psychedelics. His eyes changed .“

“Nonetheless, it was unfortunate they couldn’t fix your face,” Hollinger said.

We all laughed, none louder than Chad, who saw it fit to bray laughter.

I crept to the bar to order another glass of the oily, black liquid we’d been imbibing all evening. It tasted like sweat wrung from gym socks, but it was all they had. And, anyway, I needed to keep pouring it down my gullet to keep my mind off the shakes.

“Speaking of psychotropic drugs,” Chad went on, “where the fuck is Trumbauer?”

“You’d think he’d show up, seeing how he put this whole thing together,” Curtis said as he leaned back in his chair, two chair legs off the floor. He’d hardly spoken all night. The sound of his voice was like the tolling of a great and distant bell.

“Oh,” howled Chad, “this is fucked up. We’ve been summoned from around the fucking world, right? Check us out. He calls and we all come running.”

“How do you know Andrew?” Petras asked Chad.

Chad’s eyes narrowed. “Any of you guys cops?”

“Go to hell,” growled Curtis.

Chad shrugged. “We met in Colorado one winter, working the slopes. I helped him move some cocaine across the country in fish.”

Michael Hollinger sat forward, smirking. “Fish?”

“Salmon.” Chad smirked back. “Cut ‘em open and pack ‘em in ice and ship ‘em all over the country. He knew a guy who knew a guy who wanted to move some powder. We packed the fish full of coke and sent them on their way. And that’s how I met Andrew Trumbauer.”

“Motherfuck,” said Shotsky. “That ain’t true.”

“Sure as shit,” Chad promised.

“How about you, Shotsky?” Hollinger said. “How do you know Andrew?”

“He saved my life,” Donald Shotsky said matter-of-factly. “Five weeks in the Bering Sea, a ship called the Kula Plate , we’re hoisting the little clawed monsters on board one pot after the next. I could see the dollar signs in my eyes, like a fucking cartoon character. I’m there and Andrew’s there and maybe eight other guys on deck, plus the engineers and the captain.

“Third week, just as a storm’s coming through, we’re bustin’ our asses to get everything pulled before we have to close up and pull everything below deck. Like an asshole, I get one of the ropes twisted around my ankle as we’re tossing one of the crab pots back overboard. And these are big fucking pots, the size of Volkswagens, heavier than shit. It goes over the side, and the line goes taut. I feel something bite into my ankle, and the next thing I know I’m on my belly, dragged across the deck and slammed into the railing. Lucky for me Andrew was close by. He cut the line before I went over. Otherwise there’d be some other fat slob sitting at this table talkin’ right now.”

“Jesus, that’s some story.” Hollinger turned to Curtis Booker. “And you?”

Booker said, “You jump out of enough planes, climb enoughmountains, you eventually hear about Andrew Trumbauer. Three years ago, I put together a climb in Alaska. Andrew was one of the guys who signed up for it. Never met him in person, but I knew who he was. I agreed to take him on—there were about fifteen of us—and thought everything was set. But he never showed up.”

“Sounds like Andrew,” remarked Chad. “Good old reliable Andrew …”

Curtis grinned. “I thought about doing the same to him on this trip, actually.”

“Why didn’t you?” I said. For some reason, the notion of screwing over Andrew appealed to me.

“Because I’m too goddamn excited to cross the Canyon of Souls. Anyway, old Andy probably made a wise decision skipping out on my little exhibition.” Curtis lowered his voice and said, “I lost two men in the death zone on that climb.”

“The death zone?” Shotsky said, his voice suddenly shaky.

“Fuck, man,” Chad interrupted. “You’ve signed up to cross the Canyon of fucking Souls, and you’ve never heard of the death zone.”

Chad was an asshole, but he was right: Donald Shotsky hadn’t done his homework. Beside me, I could almost feel Petras cringe.

“The death zone,” Curtis explained, “is the place high on a mountain where you don’t get enough oxygen. We had oxygen tanks for the summit climb, but at twenty-six thousand feet, the human body goes bad real fast.”

“Are you kidding me?” Shotsky said. Both his thick, red hands were plastered to the tabletop, and I noticed a fine glimmer of sweat breaking out along his brow. “There’s a motherfucking death zone?”

“Both guys died of edema,” said Curtis. “Was the worst climb I ever made.”

“Will we be climbing into the death zone?” Shotsky wanted to know. “I mean, how high are we going?”