Snow leopard and other s.., p.1
Snow Leopard & Other Stories, page 1
Snow Leopard
&
Other Stories
© 2013 L. Lee Low
Snow Leopard First Published April 2012
Obituary First Published April 2010
Watershed First Published Fall 2010
Noise First Published February 2010
Trick or Treat First Published October 2007
The Christmas Box First Published 2006
Legacy First Published 2006
Published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License
Table of Contents
SNOW LEOPARD
OBITUARY
WATERSHED
NOISE
TRICK OR TREAT
THE CHRISTMAS BOX
LEGACY
About the Author
SNOW LEOPARD
It was a miracle they found the cabin at all. Thom had the topographical maps and one compass, Julian another, and Marty an infallible sense of direction. They’d been friends since university, though Marty had left after his second year to start up the social media network that Julian, a lawyer, and Thom, a history teacher, took pains not to envy. Occasionally, over drinks, Julian would mention Marty to his date. If she asked the wrong questions, or pressed him for details, he calmly paid the bill and never rang again. He wrote poetry, a slim volume of which had recently received a minor award.
For one sacrosanct week each January, the three vanished into a region as rugged as it was remote. It was part of their pact to carry no gps devices, no transceivers, no modern technology whatsoever. If it were up to Marty, they wouldn’t have even packed whistles and emergency flares. Last year they’d trekked through rainforest to the Kaieteur Falls in Guyana, but the crocodiles eyeing their canoes from the riverbanks reminded Thom of his deputy department head, and this January they’d gone back to cross-country skiing.
A light snow was falling at the drop-off point and for the first few hours they made excellent time. During a break they squabbled amicably about the route, their face-off as warming — and as familiar — as their hot chocolate. Marty often reminded Julian of a pit bull, albeit a lovable one. Julian favored the pillowy glades for the climb to their cabin, while Marty had studied the satellite photos and was all for striking northeast across a sharp ridge where there would be a couple of decent chutes and a jagged forest run.
“I’m a bit out of shape,” Thom said apologetically. “The new baby and all.”
By the time they huddled for a hurried lunch, no one regretted settling on the soft option, not even Marty. Snow was falling heavily now, the wind corrosive, reducing visibility to instinct. To go back, however, would be foolhardy: back to what? The chopper wouldn’t be returning for another week, and in any case it would be grounded in blizzard conditions. They emptied their flasks and ate a high-energy bar each, then broke out a crevasse rescue rope to secure themselves to one another. They let Marty take the lead. In an hour it would be dark, but they ought to reach shelter by then.
“This isn’t skiing, it’s shuffling in a chain gang,” Marty grumbled. The weather had no earthly right to thwart their plans. If the others decided to spend the next few days holed up in a cramped cabin without even a cross-trainer or set of weights, he, Marty, would ski on his own. Not that he’d desert his mates, of course not, but a good run within a five-mile radius of the cabin wasn’t desertion by any man’s definition. A snowstorm hadn’t defeated him yet. Julian would make his usual dry remarks, and Thom — well, Thom might be getting too middle-aged, too housebroken for this sort of thing.
Thom stopped. The others lurched, nearly fell.
“Watch it!” Marty bellowed.
“What was that?” Thom asked.
“What?” Julian asked.
“Didn’t you hear it? Something was growling.”
They peered about them, only Marty keen to encounter a hungry specimen. Snow was accumulating in the vents of their goggles, and Thom’s were already so fogged up that he pulled them off in frustration, upbraiding himself a moment later when snow coated the inner lens. He squinted against the claw and bite of the storm, its blind frenzy, straining for a glimpse of what was out there, straining for a silent roar, straining.
“It’s just the wind,” Julian said. At home he wrote every morning for two hours before breakfast, his passion for an immensely complicated technical challenge not limited to jurisprudence. Whatever use he might later make of this storm, whatever voices it penned, he was not about to encourage Thom. Last year that fuss about the crocodiles! It had been all he could do to keep Marty from feeding Thom to a somnolent granddaddy.
“I know an animal when I hear one,” Thom said.
They waited for Marty to sheath his hunting knife, then set off again. The wind was at their backs, driving them onward with howls, with icy breath, tracking its quarry in a hunt to sweep the land free of intruders. By the time they stumbled through the cabin door, halfway to snowmen, night had swallowed the white darkness of the storm.
. . .
Julian switched on his torch and swept the beam around the log cabin. Warmth their first priority, he was relieved to see the promised wood-burning stove and a neat stack of firewood. The wooden ladder would lead to the sleeping loft, but it didn’t look as though they’d able to stand upright except under the gable, he himself possibly not at all. Aside from trips to the woodpile and outhouse, they’d be spending their waking time downstairs.
After shrugging off his backpack, he clumped across the room, positioned the torch on the floor, and knelt in front of the stove. It was customary to leave crumpled newspaper and kindling on a small bed of ash, ready for newcomers. He stripped off his gloves and reached for the box of matches. In the fraction of a second before the paper caught, his grief flared, the fee for loving too well. He would never forgive his ex-wife: “At least you got a book of poems out of it.”
Julian watched while the tinder went up in flame, the sudden lash of heat a form of flagellation. He always insisted on lighting the fire, on crouching within singeing range. Whoever serviced the cabin was evidently dependable: the firewood proved both seasoned and dry, soon burning with a throaty rumble. He fed the stove a few more pieces, then rose to remove his outerwear before it began to drip, his gaiters especially. There was a drying rack near the stove for just this purpose.
“Thom, why don’t you collect a bucket of snow before taking off your —” Julian turned to address his friend, who was in charge of the evening meal. “Thom?” He swung round, raising his voice. “Marty? Thom?”
The room was empty except for the small figure of his son.
. . .
When Julian was seven, he saw his first ghost. On a rainy Saturday afternoon, he’d been adding Thor’s great hall of Bilskirnir to the Lego kingdom he and his dad were building in the seldom-used sitting room. The black stool made a tall, gleaming, austere portico, behind which stretched the magnificence of the piano. Julian would be allowed to play on it once he began lessons, his mum had promised. She read to him most nights, but it was his dad who had the patience to return again and again to Julian’s beloved volume of Norse myths, whole sections of which he could recite by heart.
Julian was on his belly under the Steinway, constructing a long fire down the middle of the banquet hall, with benches and tables on either side for feasting, when he heard faint strains of music. Alice liked to listen to the radio while she dusted or ironed, but since he was trying to work out whether to dismantle the mountain that hid the three kettles of Sutung’s magic mead for more blocks, it didn’t occur to him that she had the afternoon off. Odin, god of the gods, would find the mead no matter where it was kept. And half a hall was worse than no hall at all; Thor would never countenance a ruin. Julian made up his mind. He’d rebuild the mountain as soon as his mum brought home a new box of Lego. Next week, she’d said. The last few days she’d been too busy at the office. His parents believed in keeping their word, even to a child. Especially to a child.
As he wriggled backwards, intent on not dislodging a single block, he felt the air shiver, and a series of golden arrows darted across his vision like a volley of deft thunderbolts. His fingers began to tingle, his hands and arms, and each breath tasted of honey, the delicious illicit taste of honey on a fingertip. How the music melted on his tongue! He rolled onto his back and opened his mouth wide, not wanting to waste a single drop. Above his head the piano trembled, broke apart, reformed into honeycombs. He reached up and with a forefinger prodded a bulging cell, which burst, drenching his skin with song. Amid the dazzling outpour, the cell widened and continued to widen till it became an opening — a hexagonal window through which he could see a woman seated at the piano. Her scarlet gown reminded him of the sitting room curtains, her hands rippling over the keyboard in spite of the heavy, floppy sleeves.
At some point the music came to an end, but not before the woman stretched out those beautiful hands and slid them into his skull. He spent the next day in bed, curtains drawn, dreading yet another round of vomiting. She’d done this to him — played and played till his head was screaming. Years later he would come to realize it was a gift. “A family affliction,” his mum had said. “Your grandmother always had a migraine after a concert.”
. . .
Eyes brimming with tears, Thom stripped off his gloves and balaclava, dropping them where he stood. Hoping Julian would notice, complain, say something. As Thom knelt to fumble with his gaiters, he could hear Julian crossing the room , Marty swearing as usual, and the wind, loudest of all, imperiously demanding admittance. Thom had become adept at distracting Lizzie when her lower lip issued a storm warning, better in fact than Kate — herself a ‘no’ short of a temper tantrum lately — but here he didn’t have the option of walking away till the storm passed. If he weren’t so whacked, there’d be yet another broken night in a long succession of broken nights. They said chronic sleep deprivation made you edgy; luckily he wasn’t the high-strung sort like Marty, who’d be schizo by now.
Thom didn’t fancy being cooped up by this blizzard, not with the way Marty had been acting lately. Success had come a little too fast. And ever since that talk show you’d think he’d already discovered a cure for Alzheimer’s — as if he himself were the lead scientist on the research project he was funding.
Should he talk with Julian about that knife? Marty would blow up if they tried to take it away, but they could “lose” it for him. They could, given Marty’s weird obsession with snow leopards, suggest that there was some truth in the local legends. When Marty lost his temper, he really lost it. No wonder he was still single. Kate couldn’t stand him.
Yeah, well, Kate couldn’t stand a lot of people. She thought Julian was an insensitive bastard. “What sort of person writes poems like that about the death of his own child? And publishes them?” Kate didn’t know Julian the way he did, but even he had to admit it was a touch odd, coming up with those gruesome metaphors. Or was it? Grief was supposed to do wicked things to you.
His fingers were clumsy and he’d only gotten one boot off when a bloom of light signalled that Julian, ever competent, would soon have a good fire going. Thom dug into a pocket for the clutch of toilet paper each of them carried, only to remember he’d already used up all of his. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, glancing behind himself guiltily. There were times when Julian was fastidious to the point of absurdity. He —
“Julian?” Thom rose too quickly, dizziness adding to his confusion. “Julian? Marty?”
The stove had been lit, several pieces of wood as well as tinder, but the room was empty except for Gia.
. . .
Before he was twelve, Thom had lived in five countries across assorted continents, six if you counted the new name and new status conferred by a war of independence; thereafter he ought consider himself lucky, according to his parents, to spend nearly four years in a city that offered up a decent international school and such amenities as French cheeses, a black market for their dollars, and electricity (most of the time). For a long while it had been assumed he’d do something with languages, since he was the only one of the three kids who retained a good deal of what he’d picked up from nannies and gardeners, cooks and night watchmen, rather than the swarms of local boys his brothers would inevitably search out. The only one, too, who had shivered through dengue fever and amoebic dysentery. He still did more cooking than Kate, who was slowly developing a taste for the aromatic and often fiery dishes from the kitchens of his childhood, though she didn’t understand why he’d go to such lengths to source the right ingredients: “It’ll taste just as good with mint or parsley.” “No, it won’t. It’s got to be daun kesum.”
In Thom’s first year back home, his roommate Marsden had tossed aside the sort of unwanted book that aunts and godmothers tend to choose as birthday gifts, but this one had such a striking black cover that Thom found himself wondering what could possibly be said about salt to fill its four hundred odd pages. He read it late into the night, and the next night as well, not with the page-turning speed of a thriller — Marsden had plenty of those — but with his first real sense of homecoming. “Those who think a fascination with salt is a bizarre obsession have simply never owned a rock like this” (Salt, Mark Kurlansky). Thereafter history became his rock, the salt lick he kept in his bottom drawer, pink-tinged from the battlefields and executioners’ blocks, the gulags and mass graves, taking it out when Marsden got yet another parcel stuffed full of homemade fudge from his mum, or when he, Thom, intercepted a smirk on the football pitch, or when he made the mistake of talking about their lives overseas. “Then go back there if you like it so much.” The past, he’d already learned, is the one place to which you can always go home again.
Kate had been brought up on a farm in southwest Wales, now run by one of her brothers but still the place where Christmas and Easter and family milestones were celebrated, where children, an ever burgeoning number of them, could spend entire holidays free from electronic surveillance, where Lizzie screeched in delight as soon as she caught sight from the car window of her aunt’s herd of alpacas. No matter how often Kate complained about her boisterous and demanding and practically manic family, the bad influence of certain older cousins on Lizzie, it was home. Resentment that your sister-in-law got to cut up your mum’s velvet curtains for a pantomime costume or replace the beautiful old range cooker with a catering monstrosity, all stainless steel and preen, dwindled like so many other of Kate’s grudges into something like a low-grade fever, mostly quiescent but at an unpredictable moment erupting into a blazing row. Theirs was a family that liked to fight. Oddly enough, considering how his own parents would probably murmur a mellifluous, noble, enlightened, and altogether decorous remonstrance as a terrorist raised his machete, Thom felt right at home. He didn’t, however, tell anyone about the farmhouse ghost.
. . .
Marty swore at the jammed zipper on his parka. If it broke, he’d sue the bastards with their fucking guarantees — no one toted a spare parka when his backpack was weighed to the nearest gram, and weighed again after discarding a packet of chewing gum. (He’d been minded to leave the condoms behind, but there’d been that time five years ago when three Norwegian girls had arrived at the hut a day early, some sort of booking mixup, so you never knew.) But he worked at the zipper painstakingly, not fool enough to take out his ire on essential gear. Julian could say what he liked — a multibillion-dollar company wasn’t built on temper tantrums. Temper tantrums! If ever he’d needed a camcorder on one of their trips, it had been last year to record the way Thom had acted at the sight of a crocodile.
He didn’t understand men like Thom, hadn’t for years. Why settle for teaching with his degrees and his languages and his brains? You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but of the three of them, he was undeniably the smartest. Smarter than pretty much everyone you met, and he, Marty, met a lot of smart people. Hired a lot of them too. After Lizzie was born, he’d offered to make a place for Thom at corporate headquarters — a favor, yes, but not an unsound one, and certainly not as misguided as Thom’s marriage. His friend might lack initiative (he knew for a fact that it was Kate who’d proposed), with “risk averse” threatening to become his epitaph, but you couldn’t buy loyalty like Thom’s no matter how competitive the salary. And Marty’s salaries were always competitive. Throughout his childhood his own mum had been a cleaner — a smart cleaner. “You buy cheap, you get cheap.” Despite more recent acquisitions, she still wore the Chanel suit, black cashmere, she’d saved up for years to buy. (He escorted her once or twice a year just to hear, “May I suggest that Madame consider antique rose? A perfect color for such a lovely, ageless complexion.”) Thom appreciated the offer, or so he’d said. He was still teaching.
Julian was another sort altogether. For all his family money, his reserve, his dainty little finger poems, he was a good man to have on your side in a tight spot. If he’d taken Danny to the zoo instead of Marion, those bastards wouldn’t have gotten near the boy. To do stuff like that to a child, then to torch his small, broken body … Mum was right, what a sick place the world had become. The excuses they came up with! She knew plenty about a hard life, she did, doing it all on her own, but you wouldn’t have heard her whinging like some when, dead tired, she’d come home from work, pry off her tight shoes, and roll up her sleeves to dampen the ironing and get their tea. Not that she was cold — or hid her tears. Nothing wrong with a good cry, she’d tell him. Go on, don’t keep it bottled up, I don’t want to hear that unmanly nonsense. Unmanly is when a man runs off on his responsibilities. Marty had met Julian’s mother a couple of times. She’d been dry-eyed at the funeral.
