Can't Let Her Go

“I was wrong about you. I thought you were a gentleman. I thought you were different than all those men in that bar. But you’re not different, are you? You’re just a selfish pig. You care only about your own skin. What kind of man—”

She stops abruptly when the front door is suddenly kicked open and the Sherpa comes through the door with an armload of snowy firewood. He staggers to the fireplace and dumps them on the ground.

I close the door against the snow and cold. He mutters something in Russian that I don’t catch, but Katya tells me that there’s more wood by the side of the house. It looks like I won’t have to rip apart the cabinets.

The Sherpa leans against the mantle for a moment before he pulls out a cigarette. He lights it and inhales then starts across the room. That’s when the cigarette drops from his hand. For a second he does nothing, just turns to me with a bewildered expression almost child-like expression on his old face.

“What is it?” I ask.

He opens his mouth and a string of colorful curses unfurl from his mouth. Suddenly, his hand rises up to clutch his chest and a strangled cry of pain emits from his swearing mouth. Before I can do a thing, he keels over, his body falling on the hard floor with a dull thud.

I recognize a heart attack when I see one, and I move as fast as I can. I roll the Sherpa onto his back. He looks up at the ceiling in wonder as if he could see the stars in the sky while the muscles of his throat moves valiantly as if trying to express his vision.

I open his coat and his shirt then start compressions. I’m not sure I’m doing them correctly. This is a new one for me. I have no experience reviving a man, only taking his life. I stop pumping for a second and listen for a heartbeat, but I don’t hear anything.

When I look up, the girl gapes at me. I don’t think she’s ever seen anyone die. We all do it, but most of us are a little more polite about it than the Sherpa. I learned a lot of new curses in the last minutes of his life.

“Get some water,” I tell her.

She doesn’t move. She stands there frozen.

“Water!” I bark.

She moves jerkily away, and I keep working. I don’t think we really need water, but it gives her something to do besides gape at me. I was once told that in an emergency, everyone should be given some sort of job to do to keep that person from freaking out. One disaster is enough. I don’t watch her. I keep pressing on the Sherpa’s chest.

“Come on,” I tell him. “Come on, you’re not ready to die yet. No one is. Take a breath. Kickstart that pump. Get the blood flowing.”

My talk is more for me than for the Sherpa. His eyes are open, but there is a blankness to them that gives me the impression he has already gone to join his ancestors, but there is always a possibility that he could come back with a cough. I’ve seen that happen in movies.

Katya returns with a glass of water. Her face is as white as a sheet. She kneels beside me. “What do you want me to do?”

“Put down the water,” I tell her. “And feel his neck for a pulse.”

She feels for a pulse. If his heart is working, she’ll feel something. She shakes her head, her lips are trembling.

“Put another log on the fire,” I say, giving her another job to do.

Then, I go back to pumping. Come on old man. I could really do with your guidance in the back of nowhere. I hear the log land on the fire.

“You can’t conk out,” I tell the Sherpa. “Who is gonna drive that pile of bolts you call a damn car? It can’t be me. They catch me driving without a license and they’ll send me to a gulag.”

“There are no more gulags.” Katya stands and frowns. “At least, I don’t think there are any.”

I’m not going to argue. I save my breath for the pumping. She comes back and kneels next to me.

“Feel for a pulse again.”

As she feels, I strip off my jacket. The pumping is making me sweaty, and sweat isn’t a good thing in this environment.

She shakes her head again.

“I’m going to give him two more minutes,” I tell her. “Then, we’ll just see what happens.”

She nods and I go back to work. We don’t speak as I drive down on his unresponsive chest. The Sherpa doesn’t start to breathe. His eyes remain fixed on the ceiling. I’m certain he’s dead, but if you don’t want someone to give up on you, you don’t give up on them. I keep going for the full two minutes. At the end of the two minutes, I listen for a beat.

Nothing.

I lean back and look at her. “He’s dead,” I say just to make it final.

She knows the truth, which is plain. “I know.” She sounds very calm. It could be shock or a Russian thing. I’ll find out soon enough.

I move away from the Sherpa and walk to a chair. I don’t need to sit by the fire. I’m already too hot. Katya doesn’t join me. She slumps down on the mattress by the fire. We are both lost in our own thoughts for a while. We’ve lost our guide, and that’s a bad thing—a very bad thing.

Yes, this is her country, but she’s young and I’m a fish out of water. I have no idea how to navigate through this desolate, snow covered terrain. Obviously, there is nothing like the equivalent of AAA. The wind keens around the corners of the house, reminding me that old man winter is hungry, and we look like fresh meat.

“What should we do?” she asks in a small voice.

“Well, for the next few minutes, we’re not going to do anything. Then, we’re going to take the Sherpa’s coat because he won’t need it, and we do. Staying warm is our number one priority for the next day or two. I’ll take the Sherpa out and leave him in the snow so when he is found after the snow melts it will appear he got lost and died in the storm. When I come back, we’ll figure out what we need to do next.”

She pulls up her knees and hugs herself. The firelight dances on her cheeks making her look vulnerable, young and incredibly beautiful. Even as the Sherpa lies dead on the floor, the sight of her naked flashes through my mind, I can’t help the lust rising inside me. My sick mind wants me to go over to the mattress, strip her naked and have sex with her in front of the fire. I push the terrible idea out of my mind. I never imagined I’d be the kind of man who’d think of screwing in front of the dead.

“I—I’ve never …” she starts.

“I know,” I tell her. “And the first time is the worst.” I thought about my first dead body. I was eight. Anakin made me watch. I stand. “I better take him out.”

“You’ll do it alone?” she asks.

“Yeah, I’ll do it alone.”

“I don’t mean to be a baby, but I, well, I …”

“Don’t worry about it. In fact, don’t worry about anything. You may as well go to sleep.”

&nb

sp; “I have to pee, first,” she says.

I laugh. “Yeah, there’s that, and neither one of us wants to go outside. Here’s how I see it. We can spend half the night filling up the toilet tank with snow and seeing how well it works … or you can pee in the sink. It isn’t like we’re going to be washing dishes there.”

She makes a face at the prospect. “But that would be rude to the people who own this house.”

I scratch my jaw. Principles are postures taken by those that can afford it. When your very existence is on the line, you lose everything except the need to survive. “If I were you. I’d go for the sink. We can save the toilet for the other number.”

She nods slowly. “All right. I’ll go while you are out.”

I haul the Sherpa’s lifeless body up and throw him over my shoulder. Then I go out of the front door. The wind and snow assault me. I duck my head and take him far enough away from the house and lay him on the snow. Then I strip his coat off and look through it. I find a passport for the girl in his inside pocket. After I put it into my jacket pocket, I position his body into a fetal position so it looks as if he froze to death to the people who find him. That is, if the animals don’t strip his flesh and move his bones away.

I turn away and start to retrace my steps back to shelter and Katya. My toes are already going numb, and my face feels half-frozen. It’s amazing how quickly one loses heat. It is a relief to see the flickering orange light in the windows of the house. As I reach the side of the house, I can’t help looking in.

Katya back on the mattress, hugging her calves, her back to the door, and her chin on her knees. She looks lost and scared.

I know death has placed a large, cold hand on her heart. It always does, because it’s not the death of someone else that grabs us, it’s our own death. Every time someone dies, we are reminded of our own mortality, and accepting that mortality is the hardest lesson a human has to learn. We’re finite, and until we understand that, we’ll waste our lives and chase the things that won’t make any difference. I’ve seen death enough.