Chapter 3
Zach stopped where the trail split at the edge of a huge, snow-covered meadow, the air over eleven thousand feet shortening his breaths.
Despite being two stories high, despite its sharply sloped roof, Pantheon Hut was nearly invisible at the end of the path branching to his right, heavily buttressed on one side by blown snow.
Bram had gone in the wrong direction, moving left up the trail leading to Mariah Bowl, its peak hidden behind a ridge.
It might be a test. He might fail by questioning his father. Or fail for not speaking up.
Zach scratched again at the torn cuticle of his thumb.
It didn’t matter. The longer he waited, the bigger either mistake would grow.
“Dad?”
Wind whipped the word downhill. Zach knocked his ski poles together, cling!
cling! cling! Bram turned and Zach pointed toward the hut, exaggeratedly moving in its direction.
His father frowned, saw the hut, then with a lift of his pole in acknowledgment, he cut off-trail and skied downhill toward Pantheon.
Bram caught up to Zach taking off his skis at the hut’s stairs. “I was so focused on mentally rehearsing my pitch, I got distracted. Eye on the prize and all. But hey, at least you inherited my sense of direction.”
His father entered the door combination, and together they stepped inside. Zach felt a taut line snap when the door closed, a welcome barrier between him and the unsettling watchfulness of the forest and its unknown predators.
“Ginny?” Bram called out for his assistant. “Where are you?”
Every surface shone with varnish, giving the log walls and knotty pine floor a clean, golden glow.
Tall picture windows filled the hut with winter sunlight and provided an expansive view of the Elk Range serrating a cloudless blue sky.
Out the side window they could now see the pinnacle of Mount Mariah, wind spinning snow from its tip at over twelve thousand feet.
A clutch of soft cobweb at the ceiling’s peak some twenty feet above moved as if the hut itself exhaled delicate breaths.
Under the lower ceiling opposite the stairs in back, propane burners and wood counters with an inset plastic bucket acting as a sink made up the kitchen.
A massive woodstove crouched on a stone slab in the middle of the room, flanked on one side by two long picnic tables, and on the other by boxy couches and lounge chairs topped with plastic cushions.
A tall metal pot with a spout at its base sat on the woodstove.
It all looked the same. Everything looked the same even though anyplace his mother had been should, ought to—shouldn’t it?—look different.
“What the hell?” Bram said. “It’s colder in here than outside. Where is she?” Raising his voice, he yelled, “Ginny?”
Zach stayed quiet as he hung up his coat, his hat. After removing his mittens he furtively tucked his bloodied thumb into his fist to hide the damage.
Bram stalked through the hut. Pounded up the stairs, rumbled above, then reappeared.
“Goddamn it. Goddamn it, Ginny! Takes the whole week off for some avalanche safety course. Confirmed she’d be here yesterday to set up.
And look!” He flung an arm out. “No sign of her. There’s a couple of packs upstairs.
But I checked ’em out and it’s all men’s stuff.
Probably a couple of the guys got here early and decided to hike up and take a run.
But—she was supposed to carry up my laptop.
The PowerPoint printouts explaining the offering terms!
Thank God I wouldn’t let her handle the checks, so at least I have those.
And she said she was going to clean up, try and make it, I dunno, luxurious up here!
But look!” Bram threw a derisive hand out at the hut.
Zach obediently took in the space around him. And though he saw nothing wrong, he shook his head, made a “mmm” sound, as if the state of the place offended him, too.
“At least it’s a good size. Why the hell do they call them ‘huts’ if they’re this big? More like a ‘lodge.’ They’d be able to charge a lot more if ‘hut’ didn’t make it sound like you’d be crammed into a shack.” Bram checked his phone. “No service. I mean, they said. But damn it.”
“There was a car at the trailhead, though?” Zach offered.
“Right but, now that I think about it—that wasn’t an orange Wrangler, right? A Jeep Wrangler?”
“No.”
“Shit. I was so focused on getting here before the group, I didn’t even think about it. But her car would’ve been down there if she’d come yesterday like she promised.”
There was a long pause, Bram scowling as his eyes roamed the hut, Zach as still as a rabbit blending into grass. Despite his efforts to stay invisible, his father fixed on him. “We’re gonna have to do it all ourselves. What did that school of yours teach you?”
Zach blinked at his father. He’d done backcountry trips with school, sure, but the huts were his mother’s refuge, bundling him and his sister into the mountains as often as she was able since they were toddlers.
Up rushed all those beautiful days where they had been different versions of themselves, free.
Free for a little while, anyway.
Anger fishhooked his throat. Because his dad was big, was strong, because the ski up hadn’t been difficult for him, he thought he knew things.
“My wife isn’t your average girl,” Bram would brag when it suited him.
“She can handle herself in the wilderness.” And yet he’d never shown any interest in coming along with his family.
When no one but his wife and children was there to hear him, Bram dismissed these trips as unchallenging, frivolous wastes of time.
No, his father didn’t know anything about the backcountry.
Zach was vicariously embarrassed by the newness of Bram’s gear; the way the stylish priciness broadcast his underlying inexperience.
Up here, as everywhere else, his father looked like a man who had stepped out of an advertisement.
Always the best dressed, the most casually casual, the man with the things people in the know knew.
But also always a little artificial, a little off, a little much.
Maybe when the others arrived they’d see through him, too.
His father snapped his fingers in front of Zach’s nose. The closeness of it, the way Bram’s blue eyes were turning to the dark cold of the Underself, frightened Zach into swallowing the spark of his sullen spite to land somewhere deep and neglected.
“Anyone home? What do we need to do first?” Bram asked, as if it were a quiz, as if he knew the answer.
“Um, f-fire?”
“You sound like a little girl when everything you say comes out like a question. That what you want?”
Zach shook his head vigorously, knowing the correct answer. When would his voice deepen and remove some of the sting of truth from this insult?
“Right. Then what’s first?”
Zach forced himself to keep his eyes on his father’s, to not shy away from Bram’s raised eyebrow, the way his father managed to squeeze the air between them tight. Because any sign of disobedience, of falling short, might escalate his irritation.
“We need to build a fire. And melt snow in the pot for water.”
“Fine. Good. I’ll handle the fire, and you deal with the rest.”
Zach took up the bucket sitting next to the woodstove.
Outside the hut’s front door he broke the snow’s crust and filled the bucket from the few inches of sugary powder below, shuttling between the snow and the pot on the stove, careful to put on then remove his boots to avoid getting the floor wet.
Bram stalked through the hut, muttering to himself. “She…goddamn it…the disrespect…why can’t anyone ever?”
Then from the kitchen Bram called out, “Come here and look at this!”
Zach went to his father’s side. Crusted dishes and a pan locked together in an inch of dirty water lightly iced over at the bottom of the sink bucket. Nothing that couldn’t be easily taken care of, once they had warm water.
“What a pain in the ass,” Bram huffed, glaring down his nose at the mess. “I’m gonna have to fire that girl.”
Things were always better when his father was focused on someone else’s failings, so Zach mirrored Bram’s pose, fists on hips, and shook his head to demonstrate how correct his father was; them against the world.
“Once you finish what you started and get water done we’ll have to deal with this,” Bram said.
Zach went back to work.
Bram loaded firewood into the woodstove. “Ginny was chomping at the bit to help when she knew Shane’d be here. Of course she was! Still deluding herself.”
Shane, son of Bram’s biggest investor, Arlo Oliver.
“She must’ve found out Pike was coming along after all.”
Pike, the only one coming who didn’t have a son to bring along. Pike, whose investment was less than his dad thought it should be.
Investments were never as big as his father thought they should be.
“This is exactly why I didn’t tell her. Last thing I needed was her bailing if she found out Pike was tagging along.
The second he heard Ginny’d be here, he was all”—Bram imitated Pike’s voice in a high-pitched singsong—“ ‘Oh a ski trip? I wouldn’t miss it!’ As if I’d invited him.
Pathetic.” Bram tossed kindling and balled-up newspaper into the woodstove.
“But what was I supposed to say? ‘You don’t even have a kid to bring along?’ Or, ‘Get over it, girl thinks you’re a loser, and I agree?
’ Hell no. He’s a dunce of a trust-fund kid with money to burn.
Figured if he came along, maybe he’d commit more money to impress her.
Hell, maybe Shane’d invest to shut me up about Ginny in front of his dad.
But now? If Ginny doesn’t show, that’s all ruined. Girl is impossible.”
Zach tried to decipher the ins and outs of this, translating it to his own experience.
Pike had a crush on Ginny so he’d wanted to come on the trip, but Ginny didn’t like him.
She had a crush on Shane. But Shane was embarrassed about that for some reason, and didn’t want his dad, Arlo, to know.
This made sense, given Zach would never want Bram to know who he had a crush on.
The thought of his father finding evidence of any of Zach’s soft feelings made his heart clench with anticipatory humiliation.
Bram flicked a lighter inside the stove.
Swore when the paper quickly fizzled out.
He went outside, returned holding a bag from the sled, and pulled out a small, red plastic container of lighter fluid.
He squirted the fluid over the wood and kindling, set a flame to it, and was forced to leap back as the thing went instantly to inferno, fire spitting out of the stove then retreating inside.
Zach’s mother would never have started a fire that way.
Would have thought lighter fluid not only too heavy to haul up but dangerous and unnecessary.
And while that made the sudden burst of flame feel wrong and rough, Zach still watched with excited awe.
The lighter fluid was not only temptingly efficient but thrilling in its showy destructiveness.
Bram gave an approving nod and slammed the stove door shut before slinging his pack over a shoulder and heading upstairs. By the time he came back down Zach had filled the enormous meltpot with snow.
“That stuff upstairs better not be the guide’s. He’s supposed to wait down at the trailhead to bring the others up. But”—Bram wagged a finger at Zach—“if it is the guide’s junk and he comes back while I’m out, you tell him he’s in the hallway bunk, got it?”
Zach froze, stomach knotting. There was no world in which he would be capable of telling an adult stranger to sleep in the hallway bunk, the worst spot in the hut.
The Pantheon reservation had been his mother’s, rolled over preferentially from year to year, and would normally house her group of up to sixteen mothers and children.
This weekend there would be only nine people.
More than enough room to allow the guide a better bunk.
Bram didn’t seem to register his son’s discomfort. If anything, the prospect of future confrontation had cheered him, and he whistled as he put on his coat and boots.
“I’m gonna head downhill and see if I can catch a signal to call Ginny,” Bram said. “Don’t start daydreaming like you do. Bring the rest of the stuff inside. Unpack. And remember those dishes, yeah? I don’t want any disrespect.”
A woosh of air and his father was gone, leaving behind an ominously undefined obligation to groom the hut into whatever Bram expected.
Zach breathed deep. Calmed himself by counting the way his mom had taught him—one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
He pulled on boots and hurried out the back door to the outhouse, at last able to use the bathroom without having to admit to his father he’d forgotten to go in the woods, or risking a lecture about how he needed to learn to hold it better, he went more often than Bonnie!
Back in the hut, the woodstove’s window had gone dark. Despite his self-satisfaction at shortcutting his way to completing the fire, Bram hadn’t opened the vent on the bottom of the stove, nearly suffocating it. Zach cranked the vent open and watched the flames spring up.
No, his father didn’t know much about the outdoors at all.
“There’s so little oxygen up here, you need to let as much air as possible sneak in,” his mother said in memory, after showing him how to operate that vent. He’d laughed as she walked two sneaky, tickling fingers along his arm.
She had been like a real mother on these trips.
Don’t start daydreaming like you do.
Zach shuttled the bags indoors, and added more snow to the meltpot. A brush and dustpan caught his eye and he went to his knees to sweep up the scrim of ash, bark fragments, and kindling splinters Bram had left around the stove.
He paused. Tipped his head.
Something glittered from between the pine planks of the floor.