Cadavers and Cocktails

Glad her cheeks weren’t more exposed to the whipping wind, Pollyanna Whittier pressed on. The steep climb up these rocky hills was familiar. Having covered nearly seven miles over three peaks, the girl should have been exhausted. Her ardor and her speed fogged her goggles. She approached the next bit of sign, crouched to inspect the prints, and to make herself as small as possible. With her head tucked, and her back to the powerful winter winds of the White Mountains, she took off her hood, removed her goggles, and pulled her balaclava down enough so that she could expel some of the heat her bundled body urgently needed to exhaust. As she cooled herself, she tucked away her goggles into her armpit, where they instantly iced over with frozen fog. She intended to warm and dry them with her body heat. The cool of the goggle's icy lens and frozen foam gasket felt good against her hot core.

The prints she now observed told a sophomoric short story. Four steps off the trail, heading for the edge of Bondcliff beside a large formation of stone, about head high, there was a little shuffle, maybe a scuffle, and then the prints turned and faced back toward the trail.

"Hey, Polly want a cracker? -or a goddamn cadaver? It's freezing P! I'm heading on to the shelter." Peter was strong in the cold, but of body only. He didn't have the mental power over his organs and appendages to tell them what to do, to direct more blood, faster, out to the fingers, then quickly back to the heart, and out again. Warm core, warm body.

"Peter, come here. You should see this."

Peter made hard, fast fists with his mittened hands and crouched beside her. His mountaineering boots made him step stiffly along the broken trail.

"I will walk the steps; you tell me if this is our cadaver's jumping-off-point. Get low, watch my movements."

Pollyanna left Peter where the snow met the grasses, right where the tracks made an about face. She walked toward him along the trail from a few yards back the way they had come, she stopped, she shuffled, she knew there was no scuffle here, then she turned around, her feet inches from Peter’s stare. A face-chapping cold wind gusted, forcing them to shout at each other.

"Nothing P, there is nothing here either."

With a quick soccer move she kicked the toe of her boots into the snow just at the heels of the footprints. Instinctively Peter caught what he thought was a clue.

"What the hell is this? A rock? Are we looking at a murder weapon? C'mon P, I'm freezing here!"

Pollyanna crouched on Peter's lee side, the winter wind blowing on his back. Using his body as her shelter, Pollyanna pulled her balaclava back up over her face, gave her goggles a quick wipe, seated them tightly over her eyes, and pulled up her hood.

"It isn't a weapon Peter. This is the spot where our jumper carefully left the path for the grass cover and the shelter of this rock formation. He turned to face the trail to avoid getting disoriented, he squatted here only long enough to take that shit you're holding, and then he bee-lined it right back for the path. Does that sound like the behavior of a person in a suicidal state of mind?"

Peter looked down at the blackish, snow-covered mound in his mitten and muttered, "Shit?"

Pollyanna smiled with her eyes and whispered with effect, "Shit."

Muttering something behind his balaclava, Peter warily dropped the feces into a Ziplock bag.

"Better strap that to the outside of your pack, we wouldn't want it to thaw in your pocket," Pollyanna cautioned. Muttering again, Peter removed his pack to secure the frozen bag of shit to one of the compression straps. "Warmth now?" Peter asked in desperation.

"Whiskey." Pollyanna replied reassuringly, and she set out at her breakneck pace, hopping from boulder to boulder while Peter quickly, stiffly in his lime green mountaineering boots, jogged along the snowy path.

More than a habit, it was tradition for Team members to sit together, sipping whiskey, after a cadaver recovery. It didn’t matter if there was a body or not. Funding restrictions and budgetary red tape kept the Northcountry Mountain Team’s most elite members relegated to “recovery”. The reality was that Peter and Pollyanna were called in when everybody else, including law enforcement, had given up completely. One day it will be known just how many disappearance cases remain open, dust covered, even intentionally mishelved around the mountain town of Northcountry. Until that time, Pollyanna and Peter were all that most families had working against the pain of not knowing.

There was no cadaver this time, however traces of a living body, with a fully functioning digestive system, were bagged as evidence. This meant there was a mystery. Pollyanna obsessed over mysteries. Whiskey didn’t help. To her, the unknown was something to connect to a dozen other unknowns currently getting batted around her mind. Logic took a swing, the facts ricocheted off her imagination, then creativity batted back, she would suspect the presence of nature beings, then logic would wind up and return the volley. Peter sipped and looked on as her exhausted eyes, lids half closed from exertion and drink, darted to-and-fro, ignoring Peter completely, helplessly watching the mind match in her head.

A warrant was out for a soldier. A well-trained youth who had fought and returned home was now being asked to go back out into the violence. He wasn’t having it. Peter recalled a high intellectual quotient on one of the man’s entry exams, top marks in critical thinking and ingenuity. Pollyanna was fascinated by the guy, uncomfortably so. When all they found on his trail was his shit, Peter was relieved, Pollyanna was impressed. This being their anniversary and the two of them spending it making their way over early-season snow and ice in pursuit of a trained warrior wasn’t Peter’s ideal setting for romance. But she didn’t want to just catch this guy, she wanted to meet him. She wanted to get to know him, to prove he didn’t climb a high peak just to off himself. She wanted to high five him for shitting on their investigation. Peter told himself it was simple infatuation.

This deserting soldier of apparent national importance had probably seen as many action movies as Peter. The guy had to make it look like he had killed himself, ideally in the remote wilderness of his home state, so he could be free to start over again elsewhere. Was Bondcliff a little extreme? Sure. But what better place to “disappear” than one with no history of successful cadaver recoveries. This may have to do with the overall rarity of mountain top suicides, with the brutal terrain at the base of the cliff, and its location in the middle of a wilderness area. Given the time of year, Peter and Pollyanna knew just as well as this missing soldier that incoming snow and ice would keep his demise a mystery for the next eight months at least. This was plenty of time to disappear to a equatorial beach and start over. The training, the cleverness, the retreat to high peaks in times of trouble, this guy was almost too perfect for Pollyanna. Peter quietly hoped his mystery would go unsolved forever. As the wind got wild outside the shelter and Pollyanna began to snooze, Peter thought back to the beginning.

Two years earlier wearing a secondhand houndstooth blazer, Peter was on his first night out in a new town with no plans. He wore his cleanest jeans and had polished his leather hikers to almost pass for dress shoes. Across the room, backlit by a red neon sign shaped like a martini, Pollyanna had her elbow on the bar, her head on her hand, and was ignoring the manager’s request that she please not smoke in the restaurant. The manager in the black jacket spoke in a perfunctory manner that lead Peter to believe this was not the first go around between these two. Then the manager confirmed this with a non-comital threat to call the girl’s aunt.

Peter watched from the safety of the hostess stand as Pollyanna, wearing a ratty t-shirt under a denim jacket and patched overalls, reached across the bar for the well-whiskey and flipped it up into her hand by the spout. The manager was not surprised by this move. He sighed. She poured.

Two couples were sharing a table off to the side. Peter saw them watching Pollyanna then grew concerned as the two men gestured to their dates that they’d be right back, as they made their way to intervene. The manager gestured for the guys to turn back before the belligerent girl saw them. There was an unsubtle urgency to the wide-eyed head jerk the manager was performing in the direction of his unwelcome reinforcements. Peter found this puzzling, then remembered with fondness, how it all played out. He laughed out loud over his whiskey as the Pollyanna from here and now in their shelter began to snore and coo.

Peter recalled Pollyanna reaching over the bar for a second glass. He watched, still standing in the entrance, as she appeared to experience a moment of clarity. She looked remorseful, sitting alone near the back door. The manager’s eyes were locked in with the approaching men, only a few steps remove now. She poured a third drink, then a fourth. She pushed the latter toward the manager, caught his eye, and he quickly attempted to correct the angle of his gaze. Peter watched Pollyanna straighten and drop an arm off the bar and behind her back. The manager held up the drink, offering her a toast, hoping to distract her. Then Peter saw ballet, raw nature, the smooth motions of calligraphy, and the raw fury of a cornered creature all at once.

The first man, the larger of the two, pressed down on Pollyanna’s drink hand, interrupting her attempt to clink glasses with the manager. He said something like, “you’ve had too much,” or “that’s enough.” No sooner had the man pressed his hand down on hers and began to form these words, then Pollyanna came out from behind her back with a sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga pencil in her fist. As the man began to scoff, Pollyanna reversed his grip, so she was now holding his hand to the bar. The other man reached around her torso, going for the pencil. Peter and the manager would have warned the second man off, having seen the look in Pollyanna’s eyes, a playful, sadistic look of carefree malice, but it all happened too fast. As the second man wrapped his arm around her, Pollyanna reached back and shoved her lit cigarette in his mouth before delivering an open palmed uppercut that sounded like ice cubes getting twisted from their tray.

Man-two groaned in pain and slid down the exit-door, gagging on the cigarette butt. In a blur, man-one was suddenly being pressed, head down, on the bar with the sharpened point of Pollyanna’s pencil slowly entering his ear canal. The women, having just seen their dates get taken down by what appeared to be a drunk, redheaded teenager, reached for their phones to call 911. Peter didn’t have time to think. He knew the girl was in the wrong but that the two men were the bad guys here. He approached the women at the table and deftly plucked their phones from each of their hands. He recalled explaining to them that the last way they wanted to spend their night was seeking a lawyer to defend two grown men who had accosted a drunk girl sitting alone at a bar. Peter told them that he would be available to testify that the manager was already handling the situation before the two men inserted themselves into the scene, forcing the young girl to defend herself. The women gently took their phones back from Peter and placed them in their bags before collecting the men and presumably heading straight for the hospital.

As Pollyanna pulled her pack of cigarettes out to light a fresh one, Peter slid past her, motioned with open palms to the manager that he meant no harm, and opened the fire exit behind her stool. The manager retreated a step and scanned the room. Nobody remained at the bar, the table for four had left without paying, their food almost untouched, their napkins in heaps on their chairs, and a bottle of merlot breathing between two lit candles. Peter caught the manager’s eyes as they scanned back toward Pollyanna. Peter glanced over at the wine and jerked his chin at the manager. Sighing with resignation, the manager retrieved the open bottle of wine and placed two clean glasses in front of Pollyanna. Peter took the seat next to her but leaned slightly away to gauge her reaction. Slowly peter pulled a book of matches from his jacket pocket. He cautiously slid a cigarette from her pack on the bar.

Peter lit his cigarette and offered Pollyanna the match. She leaned in and accepted, then she spoke casually, “I don’t usually drink this stuff, but we wouldn’t want it to go to waste. I’m Pollyanna. Who are you supposed to be?” She poured the merlot into each glass with a steady hand. Taking hers and not waiting for Peter to reply, she made her way out the fire exit, “shall we take this getting to know each other outside? We’re really not supposed to smoke in there.”

Peter took his glass and the bottle and joined her on the curb illuminated by the lights of the Northcountry public library. They drank Merlot and Peter listened to her describe her attic room and the coyote that visits her some nights. They sipped contentedly while Pollyanna described the big maple tree that scratched against her window when the wind blew down from the north.

The memory faded as Peter took a leak outside in the late autumn night. He wiped out the inside of his whiskey cup with clean snow. He unrolled Pollyanna’s sleeping pad and wedged it under her. He rolled up his coat and placed it between her head and the window looking out at the dark mountains. He plucked the empty whiskey cup from her hand and placed a full water bottle beside her. As he moved to set up his own bedding for the night Pollyanna croaked and coughed, “Hey Pete.”

“Hey Pollyanna,” he replied in a comforting way.

“Hey Pete?”

“Yeah?”

“If that soldier comes in here tonight, you’ve got me, right?”

Peter smiled before answering. She fucked with him even in her sleep, but maybe this was a bit of vulnerability too, “I got you Pollyanna,” he said it sincerely.

She was barely awake, and the wind was quiet outside, “Yeah, I got you too. Happy anniversary Peter.”