Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Eli
The storm wakes me the way it always does.
Not with sound but with absence, the particular dead-still hush that drops over the timberline when the snow comes in hard enough to swallow the wind.
Forty-two years on this earth, the last nine of them up here alone, and my body still keeps the old clock.
I'm awake before I decide to be. I'm at the window before I'm fully a person.
I don't see the crash. I hear it.
Sound carries strange in a blizzard, bent and thrown, but I've spent too many years listening to a mountain to mistake what comes up through the dark.
The high whine of an engine pushed past sense.
The wrong silence after. And then, faint, threaded through the storm so thin most men would file it under weather, a screech of metal going where metal shouldn't go, down, and down, and a final crump that I feel in the floorboards more than hear.
Somebody just went off the Dutchman switchback.
I stand at the glass a long moment, and I'll be honest about the man I am: my first thought is not go help.
My first thought is don't. Nine years I've kept to this rule, and the rule has kept me.
People are weather you can't read. People take, and then they leave, and the leaving is the part that doesn't heal.
I came up here to be done with all of it.
The radio calls. The body recoveries. The families on their knees in the snow looking at me like I was God or his opposite and being wrong both times.
I swore off the work. I swore off the people the work is for.
But there's a difference between a man who's sworn off rescue and a man who can lie in a warm bed and let someone freeze to death four hundred vertical feet below him. I've met the second kind. I buried a few of them. I'm not going to become one.
I'm dressed in ninety seconds. Wool, shell, the pack that's stayed packed by the door for nine years like it knew.
I take the long gun and then I think better and take the pistol too, because of the way that engine was running before it went over.
That wasn't a Sunday driver missing a turn.
That was somebody fleeing. And a person flees from something.
The dog whines at the door. I tell her stay. She stays.
Outside, the cold is a living thing. It gets into the seams of you, looks for water, tries to make ice of it.
The snow's coming so thick my headlamp throws the light right back in my face, so I cut it and go by feel and the gray ghost of the slope, which I know better than I know my own hands.
Down through the spruce. Down past the dead larch the lightning split the year I came.
Down to the lip of the switchback, where the cable guardrail's been torn clean and a furrow runs over the edge into nothing.
I find the truck on its back, sixty feet down, caught in the only stand of trees that could've caught it.
Below that stand is a long clean fall to the creek.
Another ten feet of luck either direction and I'd be recovering a body, not finding a person.
I've recovered enough bodies to know the difference in my chest before my eyes confirm it.
There's a person.
She's hanging in the belt, upside down, and when my light finds her she flinches like the light is a blow, and her free hand comes up.
Not to shield her eyes. To fight. Even ruined and half-frozen, hanging in a totaled truck, the first thing this woman does is get ready to swing at me.
Something in me that's been asleep nine years cracks one eye open.
"Easy," I say. My voice comes out rough as bark; I haven't used it on another human being in three weeks. "I've got you. I'm getting you out."
"Don't—" Her voice is a cracked thread. Blood on her lip, dark in the cold light. Young. Too young, and that registers somewhere I'll deal with later. "Are you. Were you up at the mine?"
"I live up the mountain. I heard you go over.
" I'm already in the cab, or what's left of it, glass crunching, the wind screaming through the missing windshield.
Her right leg is pinned under the folded dash.
The belt's torqued tight as a winch line.
"I'm going to cut the belt. You'll drop. I'll have you. Understand?"
She stares at me, and even now, concussed, freezing, terrified, she's reading me. I can see her doing it, taking the measure of me the way you'd take the measure of a rockface you have to climb in the dark. Whatever she finds, she decides to gamble on it.
"My leg's stuck," she says.
"I know. One thing at a time." I get the knife under the strap. "On three. One?—"
I cut on two. You always cut on two; three is when they tense.
She drops into my arms with a small broken sound.
I take her weight against my chest, and for one suspended second I have a whole person in my hands again, breathing, fighting to breathe, alive because I came down the hill.
It's been a long time since I let myself feel the thing that floods me then.
I don't have a clean word for it. It's close to grief and close to its opposite.
The leg's worse. Wedged, not crushed, but I have to brace and haul, and she screams into my shoulder. Then it's free. I get us both out through the broken back of the cab into the storm.
She's shaking violently, shock and cold racing each other for her. No coat worth the name. I get her into mine before I think about it, zip her into the warmth of my own body heat still trapped in the wool.
"There's a body," she says, against my neck, the words tumbling now, fast and certain in a way that stops me cold. "Up at the old mine. Two men. They saw me. One of them was on the phone, he was telling someone, they're going to come looking for whoever. For me. They're going to come for?—"
"Slow down."
"I am not in shock and making this up." Her eyes find mine, fierce and clear through the pain. "I watched two men put a dead man in that mine and one of them looked right at me. Do you believe me or not?"
I think of the engine. The fleeing. The way no soul drives the wrong road past my mountain in October.
"I believe you," I say.
And just like that, after nine years of keeping the world at the bottom of the hill, I've got it in my arms, bleeding, and I'm carrying it up to my door.