“Avery and I run a business together back in Oregon,” Calder explained as Jack nursed his second beer. “But skiing is his real passion. He's wanted to go pro for years.”

“What kind of business is it?” Jack asked, swirling his drink around his glass and wondering if he would have to fly the transport himself to ever get decent beer to Alaska. Calder seemed flustered by the question.

“That's not really important.”

“I want to know.”

Calder huffed, face pink.

“It's a yoga studio,” he admitted, then added in a mutter under his breath. “I'm a yoga instructor.”

Jack didn't bother trying to hide his laughter. Calder, to his credit, just accepted it with a resigned sigh.

“Are you done?” he asked as Jack's laughter trailed off.

“Yeah,” Jack said, drying his eyes. “Just imagining a damn yoga instructor trying to ski St. Elias alone.”

“Well, Avery isn't an instructor,” Calder said seriously. “He's a business owner. He owns most of the businesses in the strip mall where my studio is. He makes good money and he can delegate most of the work so he has plenty of time for skiing. He met his friend Dan on a ski trip. Dan is semi-pro and he's been helping Avery break into the industry.”

“I don't know that much about the professional skiing industry,” Jack admitted.

“You don't need to know much about it to guess that a couple of near forty year old property managers aren't about to win the X-Games any time soon,” Calder said with a sigh. “But Dan and Avery were convinced that they were just one big stunt away from major corporate sponsors and their faces on cereal boxes. That's when Dan cooked up the plan to ski Mount St. Elias.”

“To break the longest vertical ski descent record, right?” Jack guessed. “That's what the two who died last time were trying to do.”

Calder nodded, expression taut with worry at the reminder. It made lines gather at the corners of his eyes, making him look older than he was.

“They started the climb at the end of last month,” Calder continued. “It's a twenty-one-day trip. When they left they had a good-sized group, but they ran into a lot of problems early on and a lot of the other climbers dropped out. By the last time they checked in it was just Avery, Dan, and one guide left, still planning to push for the summit.”

“How long ago was the last check in?” Jack asked.

“A week,” Calder admitted with obvious reluctance. Jack set back in his seat, shaking his head. “Storms on the mountain cut off satellite communication. The official rescue team couldn't keep contact with their guys either. They don't even know why the plane they sent in crashed. We only know things went wrong at all because the guide made it back down to one of the lower camps. By then it had already been a few days.”

Jack looked at Calder seriously, trying to gauge something of the younger man's mental state.

“You do realize they're dead, right?” he finally said, deciding to be as direct as possible. “I'm sorry, but your friend is gone. There's no point in you spending any more money or energy trying to find his corpse.”

Calder sat up straighter, squaring his shoulders, the same stubborn look as he'd worn outside in the snow.

“I'm sorry, but I don't believe that,” he said. “I won't believe it. I'm not going to give up while there's even a remote chance he's up there waiting for someone to find him.”

“And when he isn't?” Jack asked seriously, leaning over the table. “When you find him dead, or you don't find him at all, who do you blame?”

“We're going to find him,” Calder insisted without even a moment’s hesitation.

Jack rolled his eyes, taking a long swig of his beer.

“And that is exactly why I don't work rescue,” he said. “Everybody thinks they're the hero of some dramatic rescue story and that if they just believe hard enough everything will work out. It doesn't work like that. For every miraculous rescue there are a dozen more people who are never seen again. It'd be better for you to just go home and get started grieving. Get some therapy. It helps.”

“I'm not going anywhere except to the other end of the kitchen to order you another beer,” Calder replied, sliding out of his seat. Jack could hardly argue with that. He watched the younger man walk away, wondering what it was going to take to convince him this wasn't going to happen.

Otis sat down in the seat Calder had vacated.

“So what's up with this guy?” Otis asked, two other men leaning over the back of their seats curiously. “I heard him asking about a rescue?”

“Yup,” Jack confirmed, finishing his drink.

“You gonna take it?”

“Nope.”

“Then why is he still here?” Otis looked baffled. “Ain't you told him no yet?”

“Couple times.”

“Bullshit,” Otis claimed, and the other men listening murmured their agreement. “I've seen you tell someone no. If you'd told him no, he wouldn't still be here.”

“You haven't met this guy,” Jack said mildly. “I've met angry moose that were easier to reason with.”

“Stubborn has never stopped you before,” Otis pointed out. “You're considering it, aren't you?”

“Of course not.”

“You are! What kinda sob story does this guy have? Is his wife up that mountain with a newborn and a basket of puppies? Does she have cancer?”

“Otis.”

“Do the puppies have cancer?”

“Otis.”

“My God, cancer puppies.”

“Excuse me, you're in my seat.”

Otis looked up to see Calder holding two beers and frowning, unimpressed by Otis's conjecturing. The other pilots who had been listening intently to the conversation quickly turned back to their own tables. Otis, a bit shame faced, got out of Calder's seat. Calder handed Jack his beer and sat down across from him.

“I'll talk to you later, Otis,” Jack said as the thin man continued to hover awkwardly. “I need you to fly something up to Tahltan for me.”

“Sure thing, Jack,” Otis agreed, backing away. “Talk to you then.”

Jack waved as Otis hurried off. He and Calder watched each other over their beers for a long moment.

“What's he flying to Tahltan?” Calder asked.

“A fancy recliner.”

Silence lingered for another long moment. Then Calder, with a sigh, put his drink to his lips and didn't put it down again until the glass was empty.

“Ugh,” he said, heavy glass thumping onto the table. “This is terrible.”

“You're telling me,” Jack agreed, sipping his own.

Jack had a head start and in general drank faster, but Calder was a lightweight. By the time Jack was on his sixth watery beer and Calder his third, they were equally drunk. The tin of fudge sat open and nearly empty between them.

“I just can't believe you haven't seen it!” Calder shook his head, then seemed to regret it as his vision swam. “I mean, everyone saw that movie.”

“Do you know how far I have to go to find a movie theater around here?” Jack said with a laugh. “There's maybe three in the whole damn state that are playing first run movies. I'm not gonna fly an hour out to Anchorage just to watch a bunch of space wizards chase each other around with laser swords.”

“But it's so good!” Calder insisted. “I think it's out on DVD now. I'm- I'm going to get it, and we're going to watch it. This is a vital cultural moment you are missing out on!”

He stumbled to his feet like he intended to just walk to the store and buy it. Jack caught him, still laughing, and guided him back into his seat.

“And what makes you think I want to watch movies with you anyhow?” Jack teased as Calder searched among the empty glasses that crowded their table for one that still had liquid in it. One of the other pilots, who were enjoying watching the man make a fool of himself, put another drink in his hands.

“Oh, you do,” Calder scoffed with absolute certainty, taking the drink with an amusingly sagacious nod.

“Do I?” Jack asked, chuckling. He couldn't seem to stop.

“Who wouldn't?” Calder gestured down at himself as though that were all the explanation needed. Jack dissolved into laughter again.

“You're not exactly my type, sweetheart,” he said when he could breathe.

“I'm not?” Calder frowned into his drink. “Damn. I always do that.”

Jack might have flushed if his face weren't already red from drinking.

“Hey,” one of the other pilots put in with a cheeky grin. “If your friend's just looking for someone to watch movies with I've got a Tarantino box set in my room.”

“No one wants to watch your box set, Johansson,” Jack said, shooing the man away. “We probably should get you in a bed though. An unoccupied bed.”

He glared at Johansson again.

Most of the pilots, including Jack, lived on base in small, ramshackle little cabins that ringed the tarmac like particularly ugly toads at the edge of a still, black pond. They had a few sitting empty right now, their tenants moved on to greener pastures. They kept power and water going out there for guests in the meantime. It was to one of these Jack steered the stumbling stranger, both of them meandering a little across the snowy tarmac as they concentrated on the complicated business of getting accurate messages all the way from their beer addled brains to their legs. Jack felt uncomfortably small and lost in the vast black ocean of airfield, the world around them erased by snow.

“I wouldn't mind going with that, uh, Johansson,” Calder claimed as the chill cooled their burning faces. “I like Tarantino.”

He'd managed to get his jacket more or less on before they left, but Jack didn't know how he wasn't freezing with it open like that.

“I think he wanted to unchain a little more than Django,” Jack explained. “If you catch my drift.”

He grabbed Calder’s jacket to stop the other man momentarily so that Jack, with numb, clumsy fingers, could struggle to pull up the zipper. Calder frowned down at what Jack was doing like he couldn’t quite comprehend it.

“Oh. I just want to watch a movie.”

Jack somehow managed to get Calder’s jacket closed and they began to move again, stumbling toward the edge of the tarmac. The floodlights that illuminated the strip hung like UFO’s in the black sky above them. The two men wandered between the glow of those lamps, wandering from island to island in the sea of darkness. The light shone off of Calder’s hair, bringing out the red highlights.

He was more or less hanging off Jack's shoulder at this point, barely moving his own legs, and Jack hefted him higher, trying to jostle him back toward awareness.

“Listen, I'll watch the damn movie with you if you hold it together long enough for us to get to the house,” Jack complained, trying to remember if he’d watched Johansson’s box set already.

“Really?” Calder perked up, taking some of the weight off of Jack's shoulder. Jack, relieved, agreed.

“Sure, why not. You get the DVD, I'll watch it with you.”

“You and me and Avery,” Calder insisted. “We'll watch it together.”

Jack, whose brain was too fuzzy to properly recall who Avery was, just nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, fine, whatever. Just use your damn feet.”

They reached the empty cabin and Jack shouldered the door open. The one room cabin was cold as a tomb and mostly devoid of furniture. There was a dusty bed still in the loft and a thin sunken couch below next to a card table missing one leg. The place had clearly not seen use in a while. A silence lingered over it. A silence that stood apart from the white noise of the wind outside, the night stillness, the snow muffled sleeping world. The stillness of abandoned places as yet un-reclaimed by nature had more in common with the silence of hotel rooms than that. It was the sense of a place outside its context, waiting for purpose to return. The thought of hotel rooms made Jack nervous, putting a frosty edge on his blurred, fuzzy awareness, and he moved a little more quickly.

With enormous difficulty, Jack got Calder up the loft ladder and into the bed. Calder was out cold, still in his coat and boots, before his head hit the pillow. As he started snoring, Jack made a halfhearted effort to get his boots off, nearly broke his neck getting down the loft ladder, and then again bringing back a glass of water which he left on the nightstand. He poured one for himself, but forgot it on the kitchen table and, deciding he didn't have it in him to trek back across the tarmac to his own house, collapsed face down onto the dusty, half collapsed couch and was soon joining Calder's snores with his own.

He woke the next morning, cotton-mouthed and lead-headed, with his face stuck to the cracked pleather upholstery of a crappy sofa. The smell of bacon was in his nose, but the crackle of it cooking, as well as the light shining through the front windows, seemed to be doing it's very best to stab him directly through his eyes in an effort to impale his brain. His whole head throbbed in time with his pulse. He was hardly unfamiliar with hangovers, but waking up in an unfamiliar location made it all the more disorienting. He hadn't woken up on a stranger's couch since he moved north.

He started to sit up, a long rattling groan rumbling up out of his chest and dragging over his parched, miserable throat. He collapsed back on to the couch.

“Oh good, you're awake.”

He cracked open a red, resentful eye as Calder Beckett, cheerful and chipper as a bluebird, appeared from the kitchen and set a glass of water, a mug of coffee, a plate of eggs, elk bacon, and hash browns down on the coffee table in front of him. It smelled incredible, grease glistening in the clear morning light, white and dazzling from the windows. Jack’s stomach turned.

“I made breakfast,” Calder said brightly. “Told the people at the cafeteria that I just felt like cooking and they gave me the ingredients for free. Nice people.”

Jack grunted his agreement and reached for the coffee, hot enough to almost burn his hand through the mug and strong enough to kill lesser men. Just the way he liked it. Normally he would have been grateful to wake up to a homemade breakfast. But at the moment, he wasn't sure he was capable of positive feelings and so was instead nursing a vague, sullen resentment toward Calder for his apparent ability to pass out drunk and not even feel it in the morning.

“Eat up,” Calder said, heading back to the kitchen for his own plate. “I want to get going soon.”

“You heading back to Anchorage?” Jack asked, only half paying attention as he contemplated whether his stomach would rebel if he tried to put bacon on it this soon.

“No,” Calder said, coming back to sit on the edge of the broken card table across from Jack. “Out to Elias.”

Jack stared at Calder like he'd grown a second head.

“With whom?” he finally asked.

“With you,” Calder clarified. “You promised last night while we were drinking.”

“Like hell I did!”

Jack searched through his fuzzy memories of the previous night, worry growing as he remembered promising something around the end of the night. His face flushed with angry heat that made his headache throb even more painfully.

“Even if I did it doesn't count!” Jack insisted. “I wasn't in my right mind.”

“You made me a promise,” Calder said fiercely. “I just need a ride up to Elias. I'm not even asking you for anything else at this point.”

“You don't have to,” Jack said, frustrated, his head pounding. “If I take you up that mountain by yourself I'm as good as leaving you to die. I don't want your blood on my hands!”

“Then come with me and help me search!” Calder shouted, making Jack wince. Calder put his coffee down so hard it sloshed over the rim and on to his hand. It must have burned, but he hardly seemed to notice. “I'm going to find a way up that mountain, Jack. One way or another if I have to climb it myself. If I have to walk up alone. I'm going out there and I'm going to look for Avery. And if you're so invested in keeping me alive then you had better just fly me out there yourself, because if I walk out of here I'm not going anywhere but straight to Elias. If that means I don't come back, well that's on you.”

The two men stared each other down, Jack's blue eyes bloodshot, Calder's clear and determined. Jack knew he'd been beaten. He took a deep breath and looked away, shaking his head.

“All right,” he said. “Shit. Fine. All right. I'll help you look. But you don't get to blame me when you don't find what you wanted, all right?”

“Deal,” Calder agreed.

“And I better be getting paid for this too,” Jack added.

“Of course.” Calder shrugged like money had never been an issue. He held his hand out over the coffee table, red from the coffee burn. Jack took it gently to shake.