Читать книгу Snow - Mike Bond - Страница 9

LADY COKE

“THIRTY GRAND A kilo!” Steve tugged a plastic bag of powder from the broken coffin and jumped down from the plane. “What this,” he held it up. “is worth on the street! And there’s a ton of kilos in these coffins!”

“So what?”

“It’s a fortune!” Steve stared out at the fading landscape, the white snow almost dark now, the black trees and dark night. “Imagine, if we could sell this …”

Zack laughed. “You nuts? It’s not even ours.”

“So do we care?” Steve nodded at the plane. “These guys are drug dealers. Crooks.”

“What would we be, if we took it?”

Steve grinned. “Could make us rich.”

“We’re already rich.” A black scorpion logo, Zack saw, was printed on the bag: A warning. The bag was torn on one end and the powder trickling out made him want to cup it in his hands. He glanced up at the glacial peaks, the lofty darkening trees, the hills of deep silent snow, the horizon empty of humans. “What would we do with it?”

“Sell it!” Steve tipped powder onto the blade of his Buck knife. “Oh Jesus this is good.” He sniffed again, head back, inhaled. “Absolutely pure.”

“If we take it, then these guys,” Zack nodded at the plane, “they come after us.”

“You’re telling me you are afraid of some scumbag coke dealers?”

“It’s an added hassle, that’s all.”

Steve smiled at him with affection. “You know, in all my life, all the shit I’ve done, all that’s happened, Lady Coke’s done me more good than bad.”

“I don’t care. Let’s get back to camp.”

Steve tipped more powder on his knife and held it blade-first to Zack. “Try it.”

“Giving it a break for a while. You know that.”

“Because Monica told you to?”

“You know she wouldn’t.”

Steve withdrew the blade. “Never have you had coke like this. We’re on vacation … don’t tell me you don’t do it when you’re going live.”

“Not anymore.”

“You, the great white linebacker, and now the handsome TV guy with all the answers – and you’re afraid of a little snow?” Steve took another hit. “Is that why you’re losing your edge? Why they’re not offering you another season?”

“I didn’t say they weren’t. I said it was possible. I’ve got a meeting next week, after we get back …”

“Are you’re losing your edge? You’re in a wicked business, every instant have to have the right words, the fast talk … Be looking good …”

Zack laughed. “I can retire now. I told you.”

“You don’t want to. Not when the market’s this hot.” Steve snorted some coke, tipped more on the blade. “Just try it. We do this right, we can make so much money you won’t need to sell our portfolio.”

“It’s not our portfolio. It’s mine. Money I made breaking bones and pissing blood.”

Steve gave him a curious look. “So what’s the difference between doing that and selling coke?”

“Maybe nothing.” Zack unsheathed his own knife, with a fingernail scraped dried elk blood from the blade, shook on some powder. “This ain’t so unusual.”

Then it seared into his bones, electrified his muscles, drove pure oxygen deep into his lungs, exploded his vision to infinity. Everything grew clear. He sat on the snow. It felt warm and cradling, fit his body like a glove. He looked out over the vast horizon, the great sweeping white plateaus, the raw black peaks and tree-thick ridges under the near-black sky, and sensed the magnificence of it all.

Jesus life is magical. What a great gift. He smiled at the white plateaus, sharp cliffs and endless forests. Thank God for this.

With this God inside him, he could do anything. So what was he afraid for? “Holy shit!”

“Yeah,” Steve chuckled. “Holy shit.”

“How much you say?”

“Thirty grand a kilo, Wall Street or Vegas.”

It always amazed Zack how coke instantly hones your judgment and will power. You can do whatever you decide to.

But does it hurt you? He couldn’t tell. Is it evil, to steal what’s evil? Or is coke even evil? It’s always been good to me. Or maybe coke hurt one person inside him but helped another. Helped the athlete facing endless pain from so many battered places in his body, helped the TV anchor deal with the endless fraud and hustle. But hurt the other side, the one Monica loved, the one she called the real you.

What seemed impossible an hour ago now looked easy. As if you can move the earth with one hand.

True, a century ago lots of folks did coke. It was in every bottle of Coca Cola – how Coke got its name. It’s been the basis of so many medicines that have done so much good – why forbid it?

Funny how so many government prohibitions were not to protect the citizen but rather the powerful interests that could be financially harmed by the item proscribed. Like it’s okay to smoke cigarettes that kill half a million Americans a year – the industry even gets government subsidies. But smoking marijuana, which kills no one, is against federal law. How funny. How tragic.

“Is it better to be poor and honest?” Steve grinned, “or rich and crooked?” He hunched into his black parka against the thickening snowfall. “Is coke even crooked? Anyway,” he chuckled, “if it comes down to a choice, I’ll take rich and crooked any time.”

Zack laughed. And felt a blade drop between his past and now.

“All I’m saying,” Steve added, “is what if there’s a way to do this? Think what we’re doing with our lives. You want to spend thirty more years like this? Or do you want to live?”

“It’s insane. How would we get it out of here?”

Snow began to fall harder, twirling down through the green-black treetops and blotting out the early stars.

FIRELIGHT flickering through the trees ahead made Steve think of ancient hunters returning home out of the cold darkness, generations after generations over thousands, millions of years.

“You boys been gone a while,” Curt said. He stood from the fire and helped them shake snow off their coats. “I was even thinking of looking for you.”

“Beautiful night out there,” Zack said, excited from the coke and trying not to show it.

They unloaded their rifles and slid them into their tents, knelt by the fire. Curt handed them each a cup of coffee and Jack Daniels. “This’ll warm you up.”

“You’re not going to believe what I found,” Zack said.

“Zack killed an elk,” Steve broke in, “but a griz got it.”

Curt glanced at him. “What griz?”

“That’s not all I found,” Zack said.

Steve slapped Zack’s shoulder. “A big griz. Chased Zack, knocked him down … Then he chewed on the elk and Zack got up a tree.”

Curt turned to Zack. “You okay?”

“Fine. Just scared for a while.” Zack looked down at his snow-soaked, still-bloody boots. “But the griz got my elk. Six-pointer.”

“That’s a damn shame.” Curt chewed on a grass stalk. “But at least he’s fed for the winter and won’t bother us now.” He stood and stretched. “I’ll get you boys some more coffee and Jack. Then we’ll have dinner.”

Zack stared at Steve. “That’s not all I found.”

Curt halted. “What else?”

Feeling as if he’d transgressed somehow, Zack told him about the plane.

“Why didn’t you say before?”

“The pilot got away fine,” Steve put in. “Zack followed his tracks part way down toward 191. No emergency.”

“So what was in this plane?”

“Nothing,” Steve said. “Just a couple coffins in the back.”

“Coffins?” Curt half-smiled, as if this might be a joke.

“If there’s bodies in them,” Steve chuckled, “they won’t rot at twenty below … And that pilot was obviously okay, probably on his way to where he came from by now.”

Curt took the grass stalk from his teeth, tossed it. “We’ll have to ride down to the road, call it in.”

“Tonight?” Steve raised his hands, palms up, collecting the fast-falling flakes. “In this?”

“Tomorrow morning.” Curt took off his hat to dump snow from the brim. “If this weather keeps up, we should go down anyway. Getting too deep for the horses.”

“It’s not that bad,” Steve said.

“We agree every year, if there’s too much snow we cut it short.”

“We paid for a full hunt,” Steve said.

Zack glanced at their tracks entering camp. “It’s only knee-deep.”

Curt nodded. “So far.”

“I don’t see any reason to ride out because of that plane,” Steve added. “The pilot’s surely reported it by now. And like I said, those corpses …”

Curt smiled. “Maybe those coffins’re empty.”

“Yeah,” Zack said. “Maybe.”

“If it stops snowing,” Curt said, “I’ll ride down in the morning, call it in. You boys can keep hunting.”

“Too bad there’s no service up here,” Zack said. “Or we could call it in now.”

“Yeah, too bad,” Curt said, “that a little bit of this world’s still natural.”

“When I climbed that ridge,” Zack said, “chasing my elk, I looked out at these mountains and forest …” he halted, not knowing what to say. “It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.”

“Be nice to keep it that way.” Curt shook more snow off his jacket, clapped his hat against his knee. “Time I get you boys some dinner.”

“What we got, chef?”

“Elk liver’n onions.”

“Elk liver? Where from?”

“I shot him as he was coming right through camp. Must’ve been running from you guys.” Curt pointed a thumb toward the kitchen tent. “There’s liver and heart in that pail, and four quarters hanging from the crossbar behind the tent.”

“We hire you to find us elk,” Steve half-laughed, “and you shoot them instead?”

“What was I going to do? Tie him down till you got here?”

“What you shoot him with?” Zack broke in.

Curt patted his thigh. “Ruger.”

“Anyway there’s plenty more elk out there,” Zack said.

“That’s not the point,” Steve tailed off, as if not sure what the point was. “Anyway, I’m not leaving tomorrow just because of a little snow.”

“If we have to we have to.” Curt grinned. “Unless you want to stay up here without a tent or food or sleeping bags or horses.”

“Hell, Curt, how many seasons you’ve guided us up here? You know we’re not afraid of a little bad weather.”

Curt walked back to the cook tent whacking snow off the low branches, not answering.

Is it true, Zack wondered, that every snowflake is unique? A multi-infinite paradigm, an endlessly varying geometry? How could there be so infinitely many?

Steve turned on him. “What you tell him about the plane for?”

Zack drained his Jack Daniels. “It could be an emergency, maybe that pilot didn’t get to the highway.”

“You said he was fine.”

“I said his tracks looked like he was fine.”

“And now we’ve got Curt wanting to go down? We paid him for the whole trip.”

Zack glanced at the fast-falling snow, blinking as it hit his eyes. “Not his fault if this keeps up. Four years now we’ve hunted with him, he’s always been fair.”

As a football announcer Zack had a bye week every year, when the team didn’t have a game and he could get away for ten days. He and Steve had always hired Curt, who picked them up at Bozeman airport, drove them up here and had camp ready. Any meat they shot was packed on horses down to Curt’s truck and driven to a game butcher in Bozeman. Two weeks later it was shipped, frozen, to Steve in New York and Zack in LA. Elk they had killed high in the wilds of Montana now fed to rich friends in a huge city, on a table set with silver, crystal and fine Bordeaux.

But this year felt different. It wasn’t just the foolishness about the cocaine. Steve seemed tense, less reachable, worried about something Zack couldn’t decode. Steve had made him a fortune when he broke into the NFL, and since then they’d always been close; now Zack found himself almost nervous around him, but didn’t know why.

“TO THE CHEYENNE,” Curt said, “Bear is mother or father, sister or brother. We – what’s your word – we revere Bear. And Bear takes care of us. Even Griz. We tell each other stories.” He jostled the fire with a scrub oak branch and laid it on the flames. “True stories.”

They’d finished the elk liver, onions and pan-fried potatoes and two bags of chocolate chip cookies and had opened another bottle of Jack. Curt brushed new snow off his shoulders and leaned toward Steve and Zack. “Guess how come Bear has no tail.”

“Hell, yes,” Zack said, remembering where he was. “How come?”

“One winter day Bear was fishing in a hole in the ice when Fox came by. Fox asked him if he was having any luck, and Bear said no. So Fox said, ‘Stick your long tail down through that hole in the ice and you’ll surely catch a fish.’ So Bear stuck his tail down through the hole, and Fox went off, saying ‘Don’t pull your tail out till I tell you.’

“Bear sat there a long time, till finally Fox called him to pull his tail out. But now the ice had completely frozen around his tail, and it broke off when he pulled it out …”

“Ouch,” Steve said.

“So that’s how it happened,” Zack laughed.

“That’s how the ancestors tell it,” Curt said. “But speaking of bears, I’ve had a bear lick my ear, a bear eat out of my hand, I’ve had a bear cub sitting in my kitchen sink …”

“What’d you do?”

“Opened the door and let him out. The one who licked my ear was when I was sleeping, out in the woods somewhere, but that woke me up. I yelled at him and he ran off. The one who ate out of my hand – it was a buffalo rib – I called him Boston. For the Boston Bruins, you know … And I think he took that rib from my hand out of kindness, not wanting to hurt my feelings by refusing.”

“In LA,” Zack said, “we don’t have bears.”

“That’s because you killed them all … You even got a grizzly on the California state flag.” For a moment Curt said nothing more, then, “Friend of mine once was chased by a griz, it got him down, clawing his backpack, the pain getting worse and worse, then the bear suddenly took off. My friend rolled over, realized his backpack was on fire, the bear had lit a box of safety matches when he clawed it …”

“Holy shit,” Steve laughed, still high on the coke.

Zack thought of the grizzly today ripping the elk leg apart, how when he walked the mountain seemed to tremble. “He meant me no harm, that griz. He just sniffed me and went away. He wanted the elk.”

“He recognized your spirit. That you’re a good man. That’s why he didn’t kill you.” Curt huddled over the fire with his cup of Jack, his shoulders touching Zack’s and Steve’s, the fast-falling snow blanketing them, “Just think, how many thousands of years, we humans, in dark caves, in the cold, the fear of the bear coming in …”

Zack smiled, seeing Curt as he was, entirely without subterfuge or bullshit. Slim, tall and muscular in his white-tanned elk vest, long black ponytail, high hard cheeks and wide black eyes, an elkhorn knife at his belt and an eagle-feathered white Stetson on his head, impervious to the biting cold, unafraid of grizzlies … Yet human too, with a wife, a ranch, a truck that didn’t run right.

They’d always been close, Curt more friend than guide. Someone you care about beyond normal human connections. Who had your back, and out of respect and gratitude you had his.

Maybe it was the woods, the wilderness. Hunting. Made you closer in the old way. He glanced at Steve, grinned. Steve telling another of his funny stories. Closer to him too.