Top of the Hill, page 32
“The damn fool,” Michael said to Cully, who was riding with him. “It’d just about stopped snowing at three o’clock,” Cully said. “I guess he thought the storm was over.”
“Did anybody see what run he took?”
Cully shook his head. “There was hardly anybody else on the mountain. Jones closed down the lift at four because it began to really come down again and the wind was beginning to blow up hard.” At the top they divided up, the two boys of the ski patrol with the sled going down one run, and Cully, Michael and Dr. Baines going down another. They skied slowly, their big flashlights searching the storm. It took them an hour and a half to get down the first run and the ski patrol boys reached the bottom of the lift the same time they did. Neither party had seen any sign of Heggener. They went up again and again divided up, this time going down two different runs, stopping every minute or two to call out Heggener’s name. From the other run, Michael could hear the voices of the ski patrol boys, faint through the trees. The shouts echoed in the darkness, but there were no answering cries.
More than an hour later, they were all down at the bottom of the lift again. The storm was getting worse, the wind rising, and Jones told them that he’d have to slow the lift down to a crawl and even then he wasn’t sure a cable might not swing off a tower wheel.
It was torture, bitterly cold, going up now, inch by slow inch, and Cully and Michael sat hunched in grim silence, their gloved hands under their armpits to keep them from freezing. There was only one more slope they had not covered and when they got to the top, Cully asked Michael, “Did he ever do the Black Knight with you?”
“Never,” Michael said. “But this might just be the time he . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. A man who admitted he had killed a friend might be mad enough to do anything.
Now they all went down the Black Knight together, painfully slowly. Michael pitied Dr. Baines, who was a portly man of fifty and not all that good a skier. Baines was tiring badly now and fell twice on the steep slope and had to be helped back to his feet and brushed off. The snow had frozen on his cheeks and the others took turns rubbing them to keep them from being frostbitten.
They worked their way down to the turn in the forest and followed the trail past the boulder and then all the way down to the lift. Jones had a big pot of coffee on a hot plate in the lift house and to keep Baines from collapsing they had to go in and pour the coffee into him and sit him down in front of the wood stove that Jones had piled high with split logs. It was fifteen minutes before Baines could get on his feet again and Michael said, “Listen, Doctor, I don’t think you ought to go up on this one.”
Baines didn’t say anything, but merely looked icily at him, then put on his gloves and went out and started putting on his skis.
Harold Jones went out of the lift house with them, scowling, looking uphill as the wind howled through the cables. “I’m sorry, fellas,” he said. “You can’t go up again. I can’t run the goddamn chairs in this wind. Either a chair’d hit a tower or the cable would fly off a wheel and you’d just drop off and like as not somebody’d be killed.” “Harold,” Michael said, “there’s a man up there somewhere . . .” “I’m sorry, Mike,” Jones said.
“Don’t argue with him, Mike,” Cully said. “He’s right. We just have to sit inside and wait until the wind dies down.”
Silently, they watched Baines take off his skis and carefully stand them up against the side of the lift house. Then they went in and took off their gloves and parkas and boots and sat on the floor in the steamy warmth, because there was only one chair and they had a hard time getting Baines to take it. Nobody said anything and the only sound was the loud ticking of a battered alarm clock. Michael stared at it wearily. It was ten past one in the morning and Heggener had been out in the cold since four o’clock the afternoon before.
Outside the wind rose higher and higher, shaking the windows in their frames.
Baines fell asleep sitting in the chair and his snores were added to the ticking of the clock.
The wind began falling at dawn, the light the color of steel coming in through the lift house windows. “Okay, boys,” Jones said. “You can go up now. But it’s still going to be slow.”
They woke Baines, who groaned and stood up stiffly, and they all put on their boots, which had been warming in front of the stove. They put on their parkas and gloves and went out into the suddenly still, steel-cold air, where they stepped into their skis, none of them saying anything, their faces grave. There was a thermometer on the outside wall of the lift house, but Michael refused to look at it.
Jones started the lift and Michael and Cully took the first chair up. It had stopped snowing and the trees of the forest below them made a cemetery of pale symmetrical monuments.
“My guess,” Michael said to Cully, “is that our best bet is to try the Black Knight again. I skied all the other runs with him and he never had any trouble with them. But I kept him off the Knight because I didn’t want him to get hurt . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.
“Okay,” Cully said. “If you have a hunch, it’s as good as anything else. Though if we do find anything I’m afraid it’s going to be dead.”
Cully was the one who saw the handle of the ski pole, just barely sticking out of the piled snow and moving in a little circle. It was about ten yards into the forest, on a line with the big boulder in the middle of the trail.
“This way,” Cully shouted, and traversed swiftly between the trees and knelt beside the snow drift above which the pole was making its slow little circles. He was digging frantically with his hands as the others came up to him. In a moment he had uncovered a gloved hand gripping the pole and moving. Michael was digging, too, and felt something hard under the snow. Carefully, he removed handfuls of snow from whatever it was. It was the top of Heggener’s head, the blue wool balaclava helmet frozen stiff. A second later, as through a thin white veil, Heggener’s face appeared. His lips moved, but there was no sound.
“That’s all right, Andreas,” Michael kept saying as he held Heggener’s head while the others cleared the piled snow off the stiff body, “everything’s all right, all right.”
Now the others had the snow off him and Cully was feeding him little sips of hot coffee from the thermos bottle he had in his pack and Michael could see by the position of Heggener’s right foot that the leg was broken. Somehow Heggener had managed to get his skis off and to dig himself a hole in the snow.
Roughly, tearing at Heggener’s cement-stiff clothes, Baines bared a patch of Heggener’s skin and injected a shot of camphor, for the heart. Heggener groaned and shut his eyes, which had been staring, unblinkingly, up into the limbs of the tree which had sheltered him. He groaned again as they put him on the sled, his leg in first-aid splints, and covered him with blankets. Then the ski patrol boys took off down the slope with the sled, going straight down without making any turns, one in front between the shafts, the second boy behind holding the ropes to brake the sled.
Michael waited behind while Baines put on his skis. “Unbelievable.” Baines kept shaking his head. “He’s still alive.”
Michael skied behind the doctor. Baines was wobbling and each turn he made looked as though it might be his last, and if he fell and got hurt, Michael wanted to be sure he would not be left alone on the hill.
At the bottom, Cully and the two boys and Harold Jones were putting Heggener into the back of Cully’s station wagon. When he saw Michael, Heggener tried to smile and raised his hand a few inches and waved his fingers weakly. “Sorry, Michael,” he whispered. “Terribly sorry.”
“Don’t try to talk, Andreas,” Michael said.
Baines got into the back of the station wagon and said to Cully, who was at the wheel, “My place, Dave. And quick.”
Michael stood in the parking lot with the ski patrol boys watching the station wagon speed off. Then he turned to the two boys. They were about twenty years old, with childish, innocent faces. Michael had seen them around for months now, but he had never really noticed them before. He didn’t know their names, had perhaps said “Hi” only once or twice to them when he had passed them, local boys who made their living at odd jobs when the season was over, American peasants, as Eva would describe them. But now, looking at the youthful faces, grim with the exhaustion of the night’s deadly search for a stranger they had probably never even met, Michael wanted to put his arms around both of them, weep with them, tell them that he loved them. But all he said was, “God, it’s a good thing you two guys were born.”
Then he went over to the Porsche and wearily put his skis on the rack and got behind the wheel and sat there for a minute in silence, too tired to move, as the motor coughed, caught on. Then, maneuvering very carefully, he drove to Dr. Baines’s office.
Baines and his nurse and Cully had gotten Heggener’s clothes off and Heggener was lying on a white operating table covered with a sheet and Baines had given him a shot of morphine and was gently moving his ankle. Heggener was almost out, but when Michael came into the room he smiled at him drowsily and murmured, “You were right, Michael, that run was not for me.” Then he dropped off to sleep.
“He’ll live,” Baines said. “Fifteen minutes more . . .” He shook his head and did not finish the sentence. “I don’t know how or why, but he’ll live.”
oooo
When Michael and Cully came out of the doctor’s office after waiting until the cast was plastered on Heggener’s leg and Heggener was in a drugged sleep and the nurse had called for the ambulance from New-burg, the sun was high over the mountains and the sky was blue and the wind had shifted to the south and was soft against the skin, and there was the splash of running water as the snow melted. Cully squinted up at the sky, took a deep breath. “Winter’s over,” he said. “One more winter. I never know whether to mourn or celebrate.” “Celebrate, Dave,” Michael said. “Celebrate.”
“They were very kind to me this morning,” Heggener was saying, his right leg, in its cast, propped up over a wire frame at the bottom of the hospital bed. “They took me off the critical list.”
He had been on the list for three days, but now the pain had almost disappeared in the injured leg and all his vital signs, Dr. Baines had assured Michael, were back to normal. Michael had only been allowed in to see Heggener for a minute or so a day and Heggener had been warned by Baines not to waste his strength trying to talk. Now his color had returned and he seemed comfortable, breathing deeply in the soft warm wind, with its smell of spring, that came into the cheerful, bright room through the wide-open window.
It was Saturday morning and Michael had his jump suit and boots in the car ready for the skydiving at noon.
“You look especially fine this morning,” Heggener said. “As though you’re looking forward to a pleasant afternoon.”
“I am,” Michael said. “I’m going to have a good lunch and then take a long walk through the woods.” Somehow, he felt that it would be unwise to tell the man in the bed about the skydiving. Perhaps after it was over. “Dr. Baines is very pleased with you, too.”
“For what?”
“For being alive.”
Heggener chuckled. “Many people seem to manage it.”
“He said it was touch and go there for a while,” Michael said seriously. “If you had fallen asleep . . .”
“I made a point of not falling asleep,” Heggener said. “I haven’t been in the mountains all these many years for nothing. When I found that I was able to crawl to the shelter of that tree and could dig a hole for myself, I knew I had a chance. I discovered once and for all I had no wish to die. So I took the necessary steps to avoid doing so, like moving at all times and keeping my eyes open. You know, I heard you calling my name some time in the middle of the night and tried to call out to you, but the wind was making such a noise and I was covered in snow and I heard your voices fade away down the hill. I must admit, for a while after that, it was difficult for me to keep my eyes open.”
“What made you do it, Andreas? Go out alone, in bad weather, down that particular slope? You knew how dangerous it was, didn’t you?”
“I knew it was dangerous,” Heggener admitted. “But just how dangerous it was going to turn out to be—no. I had received a cable that afternoon. From Eva. In it she said that if I didn’t come to Austria immediately, she was going to sue for divorce and marry someone she was seeing there.” He sighed. “I couldn’t stand staying in that big house alone that afternoon and felt like doing something physical—testing. Some ultimate test. Putting some final, live-or-die questions to myself. You know I’ve wanted to do that run just one last time and that afternoon seemed like the most fitting time to do it.”
“Are you going to Austria?”
“Perhaps if nothing had happened on the mountain I would have skied down and gone home and packed my things and flown to Europe the next day,” Heggener said, his voice just above a whisper, “but lying there, helpless, with the snow drifting over me, I made my decision. There are some things in life-like life itself—that you must make enormous, heartbreaking sacrifices to preserve. In this case, what I was preserving was myself. I will be desolate, perhaps, for a long time, without Eva, but I will be my own man and in the long run I will be free of her and my obsession with her.” He paused. “And with death. So,” he said, smiling faintly, “a night out in the snow can help clear the mind and set things in their proper perspective. We must make use of the facts as they are presented to us. Well, I’ve talked enough. I know how boring visits to a sick room can be. Go and enjoy your lunch and your long walk in the woods.”
Michael leaned over the bed and kissed Heggener’s forehead.
“What was that for?” Heggener asked, smiling. “Farewell?”
“No,” said Michael, “it was a salute.”
He left the hospital feeling invigorated, young and glad to be alive in the fresh spring breeze. All his vital signs, he thought, were sparkling like diamonds.
He drove to the airfield. There were about a thousand people who had assembled to watch the exhibition. He saw that Williams and the other men he was going to jump with were already talking in a little group out on the runway where the plane was standing. He reached back for his jump suit and boots, then let them drop onto the back seat. He got out of the car and walked through the crowd at the edge of the field toward the plane.
“Hey,” Williams said as he approached, “you’re going to make us late. Where’s your suit and boots?”
“I have to talk to you, Jerry,” Michael said. “Alone.”
He walked away a few paces from the group and Williams followed him.
“What’s up, Mike?” Williams asked.
“I’m not jumping,” Michael said quietly.
“Oh, Christ,” Williams said. “You don’t mean to say you’re chickening out.”
“That’s exactly what I mean to say,” Michael said. “I’m chickening out. I’ve given up jumping. Among other things.”
“There goes my three-hundred-dollar watch,” Williams said. “Shit.”
“I’ll buy you the watch. It’s the least I can do,” Michael said. “Make my excuses to the others.”
“Mike, you’re the last man in the world I’d’ve thought would do something like this.”
“Until a few minutes ago,” Michael said, “I’d have thought the same thing. I learned a lesson this morning. It took some time to sink in, but I learned it. If you ask me, I may tell you what it is. It might help you, too.” He waved to the men around the plane and walked back through the crowd to the Porsche. He got in and drove back to the hospital.
Heggener was having his lunch and looked up in surprise when he saw Michael enter the room. “Is anything wrong?” he asked, looking anxious.
“Nothing at all.”
“I thought you were going to have lunch and go for a long walk.” “That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Michael said. “But I have a question to ask you first.”
“What is it?”
“Is that job still open?”
“Of course.”
“I want it.”
“You’ve got it,” Heggener said soberly.
“On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“If you promise to be around to help me.”
Heggener smiled. “I promise,” he said. “I’ve learned something. Marriage bonds do not a prison make . . .” He picked up the edge of his blanket. “Nor hospital beds a tomb.”
“Good,” Michael said. “Now go back to your lunch.”
He went out of the room and downstairs to the telephone booth at the entrance and called Tracy’s number collect because he didn’t have any change on him. He smiled when he heard Tracy’s voice and heard the operator ask if she would take a collect call from a Mr. Storrs in Vermont.
“Certainly,” he heard Tracy say.
“Go ahead, sir,” the operator said. “You’re connected.”
Connected was the word for the morning, Michael thought, as he said, “Hello, Tracy, how are you?”
“I’m fine.” Then she said, worriedly, “Are you all right?”
“Never better,” he said. “I want you to do something for me. I want you to drive up to Green Hollow as soon as you can. I’m planning to build a house here and since you’ll be using it, at least on weekends and holidays, I think you ought to be in on choosing the site.”
“Oh, Michael.” He heard her gasp. “Is it going to work?”
“If it doesn’t,” he said, “it will be one tremendous try.”
“What do I need up there?”
“A warm and forgiving heart.”
“Idiot.” He heard her laugh. “I mean clothes.”
“Whatever you have on at the moment will be perfect,” he said. “And thank you for paying for the call. I’ll make it up to you somehow.”
Then he went and had the lunch and the long walk in the sunny woods he had promised himself.
Irwin Shaw, Top of the Hill
