Krishna Rai, their lilliputian cook, had propped the expedition boom box outside the
mess tent and Cowboy Junkies music was drifting between sunbeams. Today was
Abe's day with the stack of Ultimate Summit postcards, and he still had two or three
hundred cards left to sign.
It was about then J.J. erupted.
'Hey,' he suddenly shouted, and Abe's pen halted. The harmonica died in the
background. Stump lowered his paint-brush. A dozen heads swiveled to see what
J.J.'s hormones had jumped at this time.
It was Li. The liaison officer was striding by on his way back from the mess tent
with a refill of Swiss chocolate coffee, a luxury fast becoming a personal addiction. Li
had no inkling he was J.J.'s target, and so, concentrating on his full mug and the
bumpy terrain, he just kept on walking.
'Hey you,' J.J. shouted again. He was standing in shorts and thongs and the noon sun
filleted his physique into gleaming lines and plates. 'Where's those yaks, man.'
Li slowed. He looked up, surprised. 'Mr. Packard?' He blinked.
'We had promises,' J.J. said more softly. Now was his turn to be surprised, for he
hadn't meant to make a complicated declaration, only to bark once or twice and shake
some rust off. But he had begun.
'We paid for those yaks. We paid the Chinese government. In American dollars. In
full.'
'J.J.,' Jorgens growled up from his spot on the ground. But he didn't move and J.J.
ignored him.
'You owe us yaks, man. I didn't quit my job and leave my kid and come six thousand
miles around the world to get had by the People's Republic.'
'Had?' wondered Li, who was just starting to get the gist of this harangue.
'Hell yes, had. Like, ripped off.'
The L.O. looked around at the crop of uplifted faces. Some of the Sherpas had come
over and curious climbers were appearing from their tents. Abe watched, fascinated
by the brewing ugliness. There was a sense of mob excitement here. Abe felt it
himself, the allure of an August lynching. Li's face hardened by degrees, in direct
proportion to the crowd's growing interest.
'The yaks will come,' Li said. 'I have told you this.'
'There are no yaks,' J.J. shot back. 'It's all make-believe.'
Li blushed. 'The yaks will come.'
That was when Daniel stepped from out of nowhere and faced J.J. He was wearing
baggy blue jeans and a baggy gray shirt, and though he had Abe's same height and his
forearms looked like feeder cables in some sort of power tool, Daniel looked thin
against the giant. 'Enough,' Daniel said.
'Stay out,' J.J. snarled.
'You're out of line,' Daniel said. 'I'm telling you – politely – just stand down.'
J.J. looked up at the sky for an instant. Something like anguish flashed across his
face and Abe could tell that J.J. wished he'd never started this, not with Daniel in on it
now. But the event had taken on its own momentum and J.J. had to play it out.
'Out of line?' he said, twisting to address the circle of onlookers. The veins were
standing in his neck and biceps. 'We got no yaks. Our good weather's wasting. We're
getting fat. And all the L.O. does is drink fancy coffee and make up lies. And I'm out of
line?'
Abe felt himself nodding his head in agreement. They had come to climb, not feed
and sleep and listen to the boom box. J.J.'s anger was his anger, too. It was all of
theirs, and it was genuine.
But then J.J. made a mistake. He ran out of things to say, you could tell. His face
went blank for a full minute. Then he slapped his bare thighs and shrugged his big
shoulders, and ad-libbed his idea of a finale. 'Well anyway,' he sighed to the gathering,
'what do you expect from a gook?'
Later Abe would allow that Li probably never heard the slur, because Abe wasn't
sure he'd heard it himself. As it was, the word was barely a syllable before Daniel's fist
was plowing a tight furrow across J.J.'s face.
J.J. dropped hard. His legs crumpled like a killed steer's. He hit the ground so fast
that gouts of blood were still flying when his head slapped the earth. A moment later
Abe felt a warm raindrop on his face and when he touched it, his fingertip showed red.
Instantly the fight was over. Without a single word, the climbers and Sherpas
turned away from the nasty spectacle, each returning to their distractions, everyone
but Abe and Daniel, who shook his hand as if he'd just barked it on a tree. Li moved on
with his mugful of chocolate coffee, stepping very carefully around the giant's body.
Stump went back to his painting. J.J. lay in the dirt.
It took a minute for J.J. to even moan, and by then Abe was kneeling over him,
doing his damage control. There was blood on the rocks, on J.J.'s face, on Abe's new
Nikes. His chief concern was J.J.'s teeth, because any dentistry would have to be
derived from a book. To his relief, Daniel's fist had opened a simple gash over the right
eye, and that was only a matter of thread and a tube of Neosporin.
Jorgens stood up and came over. He nested his fists on his hips and blew air through
his sharp beard.
'I didn't mean it that hard,' Daniel spoke down at J.J.'s stunned form.
'Well I'm glad you didn't mean it any harder, then,' Jorgens approved. Abe had seen
Jorgen's scared look while J.J. was hectoring the L.O., but the look was different now.
Jorgens was excited and relieved both, charged by Daniel's power and relieved that
the mutiny was over. Abe could tell it in the man's eyes and by the rural fatalism in
his voice.
'I can't have him fouling this climb, that's all,' Daniel explained.
'Hell, no,' Jorgens agreed.
Abe kept his head down. He couldn't believe the violence, first the shout, then the
raving, then the fist. And the indifference, he saw it from the corner of his eye,
indifference all around the Tomb.
But more, Abe couldn't believe that Daniel had decided so quickly, though that
wasn't it either. No, it wasn't so much the quickness of Daniel's act that overwhelmed
Abe but the completeness of it. Daniel's fist had completed the thing so fully that in
itself it didn't admit right or wrong. The fist was just something that had happened,
like the yaks not showing up or like the sun going down.
'Hell yes, you were right,' Jorgens said. 'That was close. One more word, and we
would have been packing for home. But you stopped it. Hell yes, you were right. And
J.J. was wrong.'
'No,' said Daniel, 'he was right too. Li owes us the damn yaks.'
Jorgens's head snapped back, not much different from taking a blow to the jaw. In a
panic, he cast around for Li, but Li had left, toting off his Swiss chocolate coffee.
J.J. was beginning to recover his senses. He was shaking his head, tossing blood
drops right and left and lifting his eyebrows and declaring, 'Gaw, man. Gaw.'
Daniel looked down at J.J. and said, 'Damn it.' Slowly, with a pained hitch, Daniel
knelt down and rested one hand on J.J.'s shoulder.
J.J. focused on Daniel's face. His eyes cleared. He smiled. 'Daniel,' he said. 'Are we
