'What the hell?' someone demanded. Now their pity hardened. Abe saw them grow
blunt. Astounded. Their gentleness was gone.
'You brought a girl up here?'
The climber turned his eyes away from them and stared blankly at the hole in the
snow.
'All right, boys.' The leader finally rallied them. 'That storm's not going away. Let's
do our job.'
It was one thing to disarm the boy, they discovered, something else to separate him
from his blue rope. He didn't want to relinquish that bond with the voice from below.
He held on to the rope with his good hand, the one with the mutilated palm. But once
they had tied it off to an ice screw and cut the blue knot, Daniel gave up and seemed
to go somewhere else in his mind.
He knelt there, unbudging, as if his legs were bound to the very mountain. In a
sense, they were. They learned this for themselves when they lifted Daniel and laid
him flat on the snow and ran their hands up and down his body. Both of his knees
were shattered, both femurs fractured. Daniel seemed not to care. He seemed dead
within his own body.
Abe stood back as the team frantically raced against the storm. Over where they'd
laid the boy, two men labored at piecing the halves of the litter together and several
arranged ropes for the carry out. Two more knelt over Daniel, fitting his legs with air
splints from the Vietnam War and taping his arm across his chest. They weren't
exactly rough, but they weren't gentle either. They didn't try to reduce the shoulder,
just stuck him with a hit of morphine.
Abe was staggered by the dire scene, by the blood and unhinged bones and the dark
clouds and the voice in the hole. Several men set to work with the blue rope.
'We're the rescue, miss,' one called down into the crevasse. If she said anything in
return, no one heard it, not with the wind mounting and the frenzied shouting and the
clank of gear. A man hauled out long hanks of blue rope until it came taut. They
tugged on the line experimentally.
'She's down there probably seventy, eighty feet,' guessed the man with the hanks of
blue rope in his hand.
'Get her the hell out,' the leader called over. 'And be quick.'
Abe went over to help. Bending to take up the blue rope, he noticed it was smeared
with gore, what had once been Daniel's flesh and blood. For the next five minutes he
and the other men yanked and hauled on the rope, but it was fixed in place.
'You budge, miss?' the man with sideburns shouted down the crevasse. Abe put his
head directly over the hole. A few feet below the surface, the ice showed dark green.
Below that was blackness and Abe turned his eyes away quickly, as if the darkness
were obscene.
'Nothing,' said the little voice in the hole.
Abe was surprised by how clear the voice rose to him once his head was right over
it. It slid up the glass walls, distinct and free of echoes, counterpointing the building
storm.
They pulled again, and this time Abe thought there was progress, but it was only the
rope's natural stretch. 'How about that?' shouted Sideburns.
'No,' said the voice.
They tried again, this time with a complicated winch system of slings and ropes and
customized equipment. When that produced no results they tried a different
configuration of parts and pulled again. Again it didn't work. She was jammed.
'How about it Ted?' Sideburns asked a small man.
'I'll try,' said Ted. While a third man cut away the snow fringing the hole, Ted
shucked his jacket, then his sweater and shirts. He tied another rope around his waist
and had them lower him down the crevasse. No matter how he shimmied, though, the
ice walls were too tight. He got only about five feet down into the darkness and finally
called for them to pull him out. He shook his head no and dressed again.
'What on earth possessed him?' Sideburns said, glaring over at Daniel. 'Now look at
what it is.'
'He should have known a whole lot better,' someone agreed. 'I wonder how old she
was.' Past tense. Abe cut him a side glance, but already he was trooping off, and
Sideburns and the others were walking after him. Abe dumbly followed them, then
realized that they were indeed abandoning the effort. He halted.
'You want me to keep trying?' he said.
The men kept walking. 'She's jammed,' one pronounced.
'I can start digging,' Abe offered hopefully.
No one bothered answering him.
Abe saw how useless he was to them, illiterate in their universe of glaciers and
mountain storms and green ice. Their very language – of brake plates and 'biners and
front pointing and all the rest of it – excluded him. He felt stupid and vulnerable and
put himself to work picking up whatever litter didn't blow away.
'You,' Abe heard. The team leader had spotted him off by himself. 'Come over here.'
Abe approached. The leader handed him a small notebook and a pencil.
'I want you to go over and talk to that girl in the crevasse. Get her name, hometown,
a phone number, you know, next-of-kin kind of stuff. Don't panic her. Keep her spirits
up until we get things figured out. Can you do that?'
Abe nodded his head. He walked over to the black hole and knelt down in the
imprints left from Daniel's knees. He peered into the darkness and licked his lips,
suddenly shy.
He couldn't see this woman trapped below the surface, and she couldn't see him. All
they had were words, and Abe wondered if words could be enough. He felt like a child
talking to a blind person. Before he could speak, however, the woman spoke to him.
'Hey,' the voice called up from the darkness. 'Is everybody gone?' She didn't ask, Is
anybody there? It struck Abe that she had no expectations. None. And yet she
sounded calm and with no begrudging.
'No.' Abe cleared his throat. 'I'm here.'
'Is Daniel going to be okay?'
Abe flinched at the question. Whose was this voice that put another person's welfare
before her own? But at the same time, Abe felt relief. He reckoned that whoever it
was down there had to be comfortable and secure, otherwise she would have sounded
hysterical. Such calmness had to have a reason. Maybe she'd landed on some soft
snow down inside, or simply bounced to a stop on the end of the rope. Abe's spirits
picked up. Everything was going to be okay.
'Yes. He's fine,' Abe answered. 'What's your name?'
'Diana.'
She didn't ask for his name, but Abe told her anyway. He couldn't think of anything
else to say, then remembered what the leader wanted. 'Where are you from?' he
asked.
She said, Rock Springs.
He asked for her phone number. She gave it, but warily. When he asked her
address, she suddenly seemed to lose interest in his interrogation.
