Free Snowblind by Daniel Arnold Page A

do,” he said. “Black eyes like glass. Half-webbed fingers. Kind of wrinkled and smooth at the same time. Take another look.” I asked him where all he had been. Up in the hills, he told me. Praying with the monks. What for? He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t gotten that far. “Those guys are pretty seriously quiet, you know.” For someone so hard all over—hewas a stone tower—his mouth was weirdly wide. It flapped. There was something rubbery about his lips, something gross. Loose lips for making loose thoughts, I told myself. So what was he doing now? “Waiting for you,” he said. But not for me specifically. He was waiting until there were enough people moving up the trail toward the mountains. He didn’t have a permit, and he needed cover.
    Captain came up to me later and asked me who the man with the dreadlocks in his hair was. I told him he was with the American team going to Masherbrum. Captain suggested that he did not look much like a mountain climber. I allowed that the fellow was unique. “I like you, Mister Chase,” he said. “Please do not put me in a difficult position.” Trouble was, I liked him too. In fact, I liked him better than I liked Wind. But he was a captain or a major or whatever in the Pakistani army . His job was to watch us. To make we sure we didn’t take pictures of bridges or climb mountains outside our permit or pass messages to India, I guess. And Wind was—what? The pure wanderer. A miracle. He made me feel rooted, attached to my baggage and my position in Bill’s machine. What made him so goddamned free? He didn’t seem to be struggling at all! I was mesmerized by him. Like suddenly seeing a wooly mammoth.
    The next morning, we were supposed to begin walking up the Braldu Valley. Eight climbers, the Captain, and 141 porters. It took us three hours just to get started. All we had to do was give each porter a load, a pair of sunglasses, and shoes. You put a hundred Americans together, and a line just magically appears. We do it unconsciously, without even talking. But a hundred Pakistanis look and sound like three hundred. A scrum of hands and voices, shouts,laughter, grasping fingers. It was a mob. I thought a riot was on, though I didn’t know what for, but in between translating Bill’s hollering, Captain assured me it was quite normal.
    The valley started out brown and a little green, but huge. Mound over mound of brown river-cut hills, bigger than our mountains. The water looked like dirty silver. Massive and fast. God, we were small in that place. We weren’t supposed to carry anything—we were supposed to be saving ourselves for the real work ahead. But it made me uncomfortable to have half-naked locals doubled over with my gear while I strutted around with a daypack and a camera. I wasn’t used to anyone doing anything for me in the mountains. I didn’t much like it. I wasn’t there to be waited on. I live in the basement—by choice, I know—but I didn’t know how to behave around someone living below me. When’s the last time I even ate at a restaurant? I don’t get served. But it didn’t bother the others. Frank would’ve happily let the porters untie his shoes for him in the evening. He was just a half-century late for that treatment. I caught him mumbling “coolies” to himself one day on the trail, trying the sound out in different ways, rolling it around his mouth like he was tasting the word. He shrugged, grinned at me, said that he belonged in a simpler time.
    He made my skin crawl, not really so much because he was volunteering his services as a plantation owner, which just seemed outlandish, but because he assumed the white guys were all friends. I wasn’t feeling friendly. I asked him how far back he’d want to go. He thought about it for a moment, treated it as a serious question.
    â€œNineteen twenty-three,” he said.