Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Page 12

  He pressed the door shut and told his brother to light the stove. The matches caught the dry tinder, and soon the kindling and logs were ablaze. The firelight revealed the exhaustion in all their faces.

  Pino knew he’d made the right decision coming here and letting the storm sputter out before they pushed on. But would Mr. Bergstrom be there in the woods beyond Val di Lei? The Swiss man would suspect the storm had delayed their progress. He’d come back when it was over, wouldn’t he?

  In a few moments, those questions were pushed aside. The little stove was almost red-hot and throwing delicious heat into the dirt-floored, low-ceilinged hut. Mrs. D’Angelo pulled off Judith’s boots and began to knead her daughter’s frozen feet.

  “It stings,” Judith said.

  “It’s the blood returning,” Pino said. “Sit closer to the fire and take your socks off.”

  Soon they were all stripping down. Pino checked Mimo’s head wound, which had stopped bleeding, and then got out food and drink. He heated tea on the stove, and they ate cheese and bread and salami. Mrs. Napolitano said it was the best meal of her life.

  Anthony fell asleep in his father’s lap. Pino turned off the miner’s lamp and nodded into a deep, dreamless sleep of his own. He woke long enough to see everyone else dozing around him, then checked the fire, which was down to fading embers.

  Hours later, a sound like a locomotive engine woke Pino. The train rumbled right at them, shook the ground, passed, and then there was nothing but a deep silence for many long seconds, broken only by the groaning and popping of the logs supporting the roof. From deep in Pino’s gut, he knew they were in trouble once more.

  “What was that, Pino?” Mrs. Napolitano cried.

  “Avalanche,” Pino said, trying to control the tremor in his voice as he groped for the miner’s lamp. “It came right over the top of us.”

  He lit the lamp. He went to the door, pulled it open, and was shaken to his core. Avalanche-hardened snow and debris completely blocked the hut’s only exit.

  Mimo came up beside him, saw the dense wall of ice and snow, and in a terrified whisper said, “Mary, Mother of God, Pino, it’s buried us alive.”

  The hut erupted in cries and worries. Pino barely heard them. He was staring at the wall of snow and feeling like the Mother of God and God himself had betrayed him, and everyone else in that hut. What good is faith now? These people just wanted safety, refuge from the storm, and instead they got—

  Mimo tugged his arm, said, “What are we going to do?”

  Pino stared at his brother, hearing the frightened questions the D’Angelos and Mrs. Napolitano were firing at him, and feeling completely overwhelmed. He was only seventeen, after all. Part of him wanted to sit against the wall, hang his head, and cry.

  But then the faces looking at him in the glow of the miner’s lamp came back into focus. They needed him. They were his responsibility. If they died, it would be his fault. That clicked something inside him, and he looked at his watch. It was a quarter to ten in the morning.

  Air, he thought, and with that one word, his brain cleared and he had purpose.

  “Everyone be quiet and still,” he said, crossing to the cool stove and turning the damper. To his relief it moved. The snow had not come that far down the chimney.

  “Mimo, Mr. D’Angelo, help me,” Pino said as he put his gloves on and worked to free the chimney from the stove.

  “What are you doing?” Mrs. Napolitano asked.

  “Trying not to suffocate.”

  “Oh dear God,” the violinist said. “After everything I’ve been through, my baby and I are going to choke to death in here.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  Pino disconnected the stove and moved it aside. Then, close to the ceiling, they detached the lower section of the blackened sheet metal chimney and put it aside, too.

  Pino tried to shine the miner’s lamp into the tube, but he couldn’t see much. He held his hand across the hole, feeling for a breeze, some sign that air was getting through. Nothing. Fighting panic, he got one of his bamboo ski poles and used his knife to cut the leather and metal basket off the bottom, leaving him with the exposed steel spike.

  Pino pushed the ski pole up the chimney hole. It stopped when half the pole had vanished. He jabbed at the blockage. Snow dropped out and to the floor. He started jabbing and turning and probing with the ski pole, causing a steady stream of snow to fall from the tube. Five minutes. Ten minutes. He could push the ski pole and his arm up the chimney, and it still felt blocked.

  “How long can we last in here without air?” Mimo asked.

  “I have no idea,” Pino said, and pulled the pole down and out again.

  He took a second ski pole and cut the leather pieces from the pole baskets into narrower strips. With the strips and his belt, he managed to attach the two poles end to end, spike to handle. It was a wobbly connection at best, and Pino could no longer stab as hard as he could with the single pole.

  How long can we survive without air? Four, five hours? Less?

  Mimo, Mr. D’Angelo, and Pino took turns chipping at the snow in the chimney, while Mrs. Napolitano, Mrs. D’Angelo, and the children huddled in the corner, watching. All their exertions and exhalations had turned the interior of the hut warm, almost hot. The sweat poured off Pino’s head as he kept teasing the ski poles upward, chopping out snow bit by bit.

  Two hours after he started, when the handle of the lower ski pole was almost to the ceiling, he hit something that felt unmovable. He kept chipping at it, but all he was getting was slivers of ice. There had to be a block of it above.

  “It’s not going,” Mimo said, frustrated.

  “You keep at it,” Pino said, stepping aside.

  It was now stifling hot in the hut. Pino stripped off his shirt and felt himself struggling for breath. Is this it? Will it hurt, not having air? He flashed on a fish he’d seen dying on the beach at Rapallo once, how its mouth and gills had sought water, each movement smaller than the last until there was none. Is that how we’ll die? Like fish?

  Pino did his best to control the panic swirling in his stomach while his brother and then Mr. D’Angelo kept chipping at the obstruction. Please God, he prayed. Please don’t let us all die here like this. Mimo and I were trying to help these people. We don’t deserve to die like this. We deserve to get out and keep helping people escape the—

  Something came clanking down the chimney and smashed into Mimo’s hands.

  “Ahhhh,” he yelled in pain. “Damn, that hurt. What was that?”

  Pino aimed the miner’s lamp on the ground. A chunk of ice the size of two fists lay in the dirt. Then he noticed shadows wavering on the walls and the dirt around the ice chunk. He went to the chimney stub, put his hand to it, and felt a small but steady chill draft.

  “We’ve got air!” he said, hugging his brother.

  Mr. D’Angelo said, “And now we dig out?”

  “And now we dig out,” Pino said.

  “You think you can?” Mrs. Napolitano said.

  “No other choice,” Pino said, looking up the chimney tube, seeing pale light, and remembering how high the chimney stuck out of the roof. Then he looked at the open door and the wall of white debris that clogged the entrance. The top of the door frame was low—one and a half meters? He imagined a tunnel angling upward. But how long?

  Mimo must have been thinking along the same lines because he said, “We’ve got at least three meters of digging.”

  “More,” Pino said. “We can’t dig a shaft straight up. We’re going to have to go at an angle to the door so we can crawl up it.”

  They used the ice axes, the hatchet, and the small metal shovel that came with the woodstove to attack the avalanche rubble. They dug at a seventy-degree angle to the door frame, trying to bore out a passage big enough to crawl through. The first part of a meter was relatively easy. The snow was looser. Small blocks and gravel-sized streams of ice and debris came free with each strike of the ax.

 
“We’ll be out before dark,” Mimo said, shoveling the snow back into the deepest part of the hut.

  Pino’s carbide lamp died, leaving them all in pitch-blackness.

  “Shit,” Mimo said.

  “Mommy,” Anthony whined.

  Mrs. Napolitano said, “How will we see to dig?”

  Pino lit a match, dug in his pack, and came out with two devotional candles. He had three. So did Mimo. He lit them and placed them above and beside the doorway. They no longer had the strong glow of the headlamp to rely on, but their eyes soon adjusted to the flickering light, and they set at the avalanche debris again, chopping and picking at what now felt like a monolithic block of snow and ice. Superheated by the friction created in the avalanche, the debris had become as solid as cement in places.

  Progress ground to a crawl. But every chunk removed was a cause for celebration, and slowly the tunnel began to form, wider than Pino’s shoulders, first a meter, then almost two meters long. They took turns, the man up front chipping at the ice and snow, and the other two moving the snow out into the hut, where the D’Angelo family and Mrs. Napolitano were crowded into a corner, watching the snow mound grow.

  “Will we have enough room for all the snow?” the pregnant violinist asked.

  “If we have to, we’ll start up the stove and melt some of it,” Pino said.

  By eight o’clock that evening, they were, by Pino’s estimate, four meters out from the door when he had to call it quits. He couldn’t swing the axes anymore. He had to eat and to sleep. They all had to eat and to sleep.

  He divided the remaining provisions in the packs while Mimo and Mr. D’Angelo reassembled the stove. He apportioned one half of the provisions into six shares, and they ate dried meat, dried fruit, nuts, and cheese. They drank more tea and huddled together before Pino lit the stove and blew out the third-to-last candle.

  Twice during the night, he dreamed of being buried alive in a casket, and he awoke with a start, listening to the others breathing and the tic-tic-tic of the stove cooling. Snow had melted into the dirt floor, and he knew he’d soon be lying in chill mud. But he was so tired, and his muscles so sore and cramped, he didn’t care, and slept a third time.

  Mimo budged him hours later. He had the second-to-last candle lit.

  “It’s six a.m.,” his brother said. “Time to get out of here.”

  It was cold again. Pino’s bones ached. Every joint was sore. But he set about dividing up the last of the food and the water he’d melted on the stove the night before.

  Mr. D’Angelo went into the tunnel first. He lasted twenty minutes. Mimo lasted thirty and slid out of the tunnel, soaked from sweat and melting ice.

  “I left the ax and the candle up there,” he said. “You’ll have to relight it.”

  Pino crawled back up the tunnel, now five meters long by his estimate. When he hit the wall, he rolled over and lit one of his last four matches. The candle was dwindling.

  He attacked the snow and ice with a fury. He chopped, stabbed, and broke chunks of the snow. He scooped, pushed, and kicked the frozen debris behind him.

  “Slow down!” Mimo called thirty minutes into the ordeal. “We can’t keep up.”

  Pino paused, gasping like he’d run a long race, and glanced at the candle, now barely a stub and sputtering against drips of water falling every so often from the ceiling of the tunnel.

  He reached up and moved the candle over, set it on a ledge he cut with the ax. Then he set to chopping again, at a slower rhythm than before and with more strategy. He looked for the cracks in the surface and tried to cut into them. Pieces began to peel off in triangular and odder-shaped slabs ten or twelve centimeters thick.

  The snow’s different, he thought, running the granules through his hand. It was breakable, and the crystals were almost all faceted like his mother’s finest jewelry. He sat there, thinking that this kind of snow could cave in from above. As they were chopping their way through that solid block of snow and ice, he’d never considered that the ceiling could collapse. Now, it was all he could think about, and it froze him.

  “What’s the problem?” Mimo called as he crawled up the tunnel behind him.

  Before Pino could reply, the candle’s flame sputtered and died, sending him back into total darkness. He buried his face in his hands, finally overwhelmed by the feeling that he, like the candle, was about to die and go black. Waves of emotion—fear, abandonment, and disbelief—crashed over him.

  “Why?” he whispered. “What did we—?”

  “Pino!” Mimo shouted. “Pino, look up!”

  Pino raised his head and saw that the tunnel had not gone pitch dark. A dull, silvery glow showed through the tunnel ceiling, and his tears of despair turned to joy.

  They were almost to the surface, but as Pino had feared, the hoary snow broke apart and caved in on him twice, forcing him to back up and dig out before at last he pushed the ax forward and felt it break the final resistance.

  When he pulled the ax back, bright sunshine blazed in.

  “I’m through,” he shouted. “I’m through!”

  Mrs. Napolitano, Mrs. D’Angelo, and the children were cheering when he forced his head and then his shoulders up out of the snow crust. The storm had long passed, leaving cold mountain air that smelled delicious and tasted better. The sky was clear and cobalt blue. The sun had only just come over a ridgeline to the east. Fifteen new centimeters of powder snow lay over the rubble field, which he figured was nearly fifty meters wide and fifteen hundred meters long. High above him on the Groppera’s crag, he could see a jagged fracture line in the snow.

  In places, the slide had stripped the mountain almost bare. Rock and dirt and small trees were mixed into the new snow. Seeing the destruction and getting a sense of the sheer power of the avalanche, he believed it was a miracle that they’d survived.

  Mrs. D’Angelo thought so, too, as did her husband, who followed his children out. Mimo exited behind Mrs. Napolitano. Pino went back in, grabbed the skis and packs, and pushed them up the passage.

  When he emerged from the tunnel for the last time, he felt spent and filled with gratitude. It is a miracle we got out. How else can you explain it?

  “What’s that?” Anthony asked, gesturing down the valley.

  “That, my friend, is Val di Lei,” Pino said. “And those mountains over there? That’s Pizzo Emet and Pizzo Palù. Way down below those peaks, in those trees there, Italy becomes Switzerland.”

  “It looks far,” Judith said.

  “About five kilometers?” Pino said.

  “We can do it,” Mr. D’Angelo said. “Everybody helps everybody.”

  “I can’t,” Mrs. Napolitano said.

  Pino turned to find the pregnant violinist sitting on a snow boulder, one hand on her belly and the other holding her instrument case. Her clothes were coated in frost.

  “Sure you can,” Pino said.

  She shook her head, started to cry. “All this. It’s too much. I’m spotting blood.”

  Pino didn’t understand until Mrs. D’Angelo said, “The baby, Pino.”

  His gut fell. She was going to lose the baby? Out here?

  Oh God. No. Please no.

  “You can’t move?” Mimo asked.

  “I shouldn’t move at all,” Mrs. Napolitano said.

  “But you can’t stay here,” Mimo said. “You’ll die.”

  “And if I move, my child might die.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I can feel my body telling me so.”

  “But if you stay, you’ll both die here,” Mimo insisted.

  “It’s better,” the violinist said. “I could not live if my baby were to die. So go!”

  “No,” Pino said. “We are getting you to Switzerland like we promised Father Re.”

  “I won’t take a step!” Mrs. Napolitano shouted hysterically.

  Pino decided to stay with her and send on the others with Mimo, but then he looked around, thought a moment, and said, “Maybe you don�
�t have to take a step.”

  He dropped his pack and put on his long wooden skis with leather and steel cable bear trap bindings. He played with them until they were tight around his boots.

  “Ready?” he said to Mrs. Napolitano.

  “Ready for what?”

  “Get up on my back,” Pino said. “I’m taking you piggyback.”

  “On skis?” she said, terrified. “I’ve never been on skis in my entire life.”

  “You never were buried in an avalanche before, either,” Pino said. “And you won’t be on skis. I will.”

  She stared at him doubtfully. “What if we fall?”

  “I won’t let that happen,” he said with all the confidence of a seventeen-year-old who’d been skiing almost as long as he’d been walking.

  She didn’t move.

  “I’m giving you a chance to save your baby and be free,” Pino said, pulling the violin case from his pack.

  “What are you doing with my Stradivarius?” she asked.

  “Staying balanced,” Pino said, holding out the case in front of him as if it were the wheel of a car. “Like an orchestra, your violin will lead us.”

  There was a moment’s pause where Mrs. Napolitano looked to the sky and then stood up out of the snow, shaking with fear.

  “Hold my shoulders, not my neck,” Pino said, turning his back to her again. “And wrap your legs tight around my waist.”

  Mrs. Napolitano grabbed his shoulders. He squatted, got his arms behind her knees, and helped her up onto the small of his back. She got her legs around him, and he let go of them. She didn’t feel that much heavier than his pack.

  “Think like a jockey on a horse,” Pino said, bringing the violin up in front of him and holding it lengthwise. “And don’t let go.”

  “Letting go? No, never. Absolutely the farthest thing from my mind.”

  Pino felt a glimmer of doubt, but then shook it off, shuffled his feet, and aimed the skis downhill toward the outer edge of the avalanche field, some thirty meters away. They began to slide. There were bumps and ragged chunks of ice sticking up out of the newer snow. He tried to avoid them as they picked up speed. But then one loomed unavoidably in their way. They went right up over the top of it and launched, sailing through the air.