by Jeff Long
Why can't she just let it be, he started thinking. Then his jumars hit the top edge and he didn't have to think anymore. The first thing he saw was the mountain.
Shaped like a giant isosceles triangle, the East Face was a blinding golden sun-scoop above the thinning mist. The brilliance hurt his eyes for a minute. Bowie Peak, said the map. Twelve thousand forty-four feet at the summit, minus ten thousand eight sixty-five for the lake: that made the radiant face eleven hundred feet high, give or take some, by Valley standards, a day climb. But still. Eyes pinched, John tried to penetrate the glare and figure out the technical value of this glittering plum. Much of the face's charm turned out to be a function of the light, though.
It wasn't nearly as steep as he first thought, and there was a chimney of ivory snow indenting the entire center line. It led up to a wide ledge. Factor out the whitewash of sunlight and it was nothing spectacular, just a thousand-foot turkey shoot. Moderate, real moderate.
Like kissing your sister. Or watching ice melt. He swiveled on the flat glassy file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (69
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light streambed and looked below. Tucker was sitting on a rock. He was small. Everything was dressed in blue. There was no complexity. It looked starved down there.
Two-
dimensional. Like a black-and-white TV. "I'm off," he called down. Tucker waved a hand and hopped off his rock.
Bullseye's pack and skis were gone, John saw, and his tracks showed where he'd removed his crampons and then headed over a ridge into the mist. The snow was crusted hard and his boot prints stood on top. In the distance other peaks showed as islands drifting on a lake of tangerine fog. Another fifteen minutes, maybe, and the spectacle would burn off. Mountains would simply be mountains. John shucked his jacket and sat down to wait for Tucker. Simply, unabashedly, he drew in the serenity.
Straight from Reno to this, now that was culture shock. He loved silence and color, but like many climbers didn't talk much about such appreciations. Too often they come out sounding like Yoko Ono on a poppy binge. The sublime: It conjured images of green Jell-O. And of Jesuits, them and their twenty-two-cent Thomist propaganda
—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. No, among the tribe, certain things like the sacred and profane could be taken for granted, and you didn't have to flap your gums about it. Not one among them hadn't seen night mountains getting harrowed with lightning bolts and otherworldly cloud formations folding on summits and pits so deep there was no bottom, none at all. They'd Page 59
tasted milky-white glacier water and listened to satellites creeping across the moon. They'd eaten canned pudding using pitons for spoons and sucked the blood off their cuts for the salt. They'd smelled bears shitting in the woods. There was your sublime. There was your go and do. It went far beyond peace-love, brother. That was hippie hooey. This here was dead center of the celestial harmony, but all words did was cheapen it and so climbers mostly just told sex and death jokes.
John basked in the quiet, not even a jet raping the sky, and then Tucker joined him.
"You want me to pull up the rope?" Tucker asked.
"Nah," said John. "Leave it fixed. Might as well leave the skis here, too. All the hard work's done. Might as well go out on the tracks we cut coming in."
Tucker dropped the slack rope in his hands. The rope slapped against the ice as it came tight down below. "I don't see any lake."
"Shouldn't be too hard to find if it's here. You up for some exploring?"
Tucker wasn't. Nevertheless he slipped on his big, empty pack and they padded up the rounded drifts aiming in general for Bowie Peak, first ascended by two cowboy-gold miners in 1872. It took its name, according to the stories, from the knife they'd jabbed into a crack and used for a foothold. Back then anything went, even lassos. As John and Tucker topped the ridge, the face got bigger and bigger. At the base of the face, they discovered, three-hundred-foot-high cliffs formed a cirque, or ring. The center of the cirque was filled with fog, but down there, John guessed, was their lake.
Abruptly the air ripped open with an ugly noise. John flinched. The mist on the lake file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (70
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light parted. And there stood Kresinski with an enormous timber cutter's chain saw in his hands. The mist opened further. The lake was frozen over and he was standing twenty yards from shore on the ice dressed in a tight white T-shirt and even tighter purple Lycra tights, surrounded by a small herd of figures keeping their distance from the machine's long snarling snout.
"Kreski!" said Tucker. Even from this distance you could see the man's big arm muscles wrapped with veins and shivering from the chain saw's vibration. John knew the underside of the carriage would bear the stenciled legend
U.S. PARK SERVICE.
He recognized the make from a fire-fight the rangers had used him for in late summer 1976. They'd tried to hire him on as a seasonal after that, too, but the tourist season was also the climbing season. That, in fact, had been the topic of his first conversation ever with Liz. You ranger, me climber.
The mist suddenly lost its glue and came apart altogether. The whole lake appeared before John and Tucker. Like Liz and Bullseye and no doubt everyone else in between who'd visited, they were utterly astounded. Jutting from the ice like a red, white, and blue leg bone stuck the truncated remains of the airplane's tail section.
Five feet tall, it stood eighty degrees vertical. Another two feet of the tail lay on the ice.
Someone—the authorities or Kresinski with his chain saw—had lopped off the very top of the tail in order to look down inside the submerged plane. The surface of the lake was fused with snow that had seen whiter days. Everywhere footsteps and ski tracks mutilated the snow, and out toward the middle a helicopter's skidmarks were still melting. There were pink stains from spilled kerosene and gas, black stains from oil, yellow stains from urine, orange stains from the vitamin freaks on B
complex, and bright orange and pink X's that looked like swatches of Day-Glo spray paint.
Bottles and food wrappers littered the lake. A balding stand of pines on the north shore had become the repository for pieces of plane metal torn away in the crash. Twisted aluminum Page 60
glinted like Christmas tinsel in the upper bones of thin trees, and the entire right wing of the plane lay where it had been ripped loose. A
good thirty strong, all of Camp Four was out on the lake laboring at the ice with the meticulous frenzy of a cargo cult. A dozen holes had been cut down to the water level, and these were marked by waterlogged vegetation and discarded burlap and yellow plastic. Above the racket of Kresinski's stolen chain saw, somebody rebel-yelled.
"Carpe diem,"
John breathed out.
"Sorry?"
"Seize the day. They've gone and seized the day."
Tucker didn't know what to make of that and stored it for later. One thing he did know was that any minute a whole hornet's nest of helicopters could come stabbing hot and bristling from below the near horizon and that luck alone would allow a few people to escape. The feds would be armed and ready. Bullseye was wrong. If they wanted to, the feds could bust every mother's son's fanny. He searched for the word,
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light eminently mispronounceable, found, and excavated it. Abattoir. A place of slaughter.
Snake Lake. The feds would slaughter Camp Four.
"Amazing," said John.
"I guess Liz was right."
John looked at the boy. "Right about what?"
"That there was a whole lot more under the lake than on it."
"She told you that?"
"Yeah, we talked about it in Reno."
She'd told John nothing at all. John was amuse
d. Deprived of taking Tucker's virginity, she'd taken his confidence. "How come you didn't tell me?"
"Liz said don't."
John punched Tucker on the arm. "Let's go check it out."
As if carrying a heavy weight, Tucker shifted the pack on his back and adjusted the shoulder straps. He was torn between descending to the lake and telling John forget it. But "forget it" was perilously close to abandonment, and you never ditch your partner. Never. Tucker was an open book, his reluctance apparent.
Just then a small party of four departed from the pine stand and slowly plodded down-valley.
For the first time John noticed a trail beaten in the snow, the long cut.
A stampede of cattle would have been harder to track. None of the slow figures looked up from the trail. They moved with the kind of burdened walk you see in the Third World, human beings harnessed to their labor. They could have been Thamang or Balti porters in the Himalayas and were obviously heavily laden.
"Isn't that Katie?" said John. Louder he called, "Katie," and the caravan halted. Two people tried to lift their heads, but the packs kept them bent over. John and Tucker slid and cantered down-slope to the trail.
"Johnny!" chirped Katie. She was even happier to see Tucker. "Tuck!" Bent beside and behind her, Tavini, Pete, and some stranger with a beard and stomach muscles each grunted hey's. Their faces were haggard but luminous. Each was wearing a dazed, Mona Lisa grin. Tavini and the bearded stranger moved around and continued down. "Later," Tavini said gruffly. John wondered if he was going to tithe any of the loot over to Jerry Falwell or whoever his guiding light was. One thing was sure: Bullseye was going to have fun with Tavini next time they all met Page 61
for dinner.
The stranger wagged his eyebrows at John and then they were gone.
"Help me out of this," said Katie. John staggered under the weight of her pack. There were at least ninety pounds in there, and not much more than ninety carrying it. She straightened up.
"Dump it, Pete," she ordered. "Let's take five."
Tucker helped Pete flop backward onto his enormous, dripping pack and unstrap.
Katie's T-shirt, one of twenty she maintained, trumpeted "This Ain't No
*#*&!!!
Wienie Roast." "Cool, huh?" she said.
"Hey, you animals got any food?" said Pete, lying on top of his pack. "Or vitamins.
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Man, I'm starvin'."
"We been here since yesterday," Katie explained. "Dug all day, all night, all today."
"Kreski said fuck the eats, man. He didn't say it was two days in and two days out, though."
Katie shook her head sadly. "And so doo-dah here didn't bring in any food."
"Or vitamins," added John.
"Half the people up here came empty. Milk and honey, Kreski said. Shit. We're gonna look like Ethiopia in another day. Lucky thing we got the weather on our side."
"Yeah, but check the booty," said Pete. He squirreled a hand into the top of his pack and brought out a fistful of familiar-looking weed. "Huh?" he challenged. "And if I don't blow my knees out on this load, I'm comin' back for more. Only I'm bringin'
food next time."
"Gold fever," said Katie.
"Kreski even got a pipeline set up to turn the stuff down in the Bay area. All we got to do is get it to the trailhead. Twenty-five bucks an ounce. A
wet ounce, man. But fuck, I'm beat out already."
"Squeeze Tuck," said John. "He's got the Oreos." Tucker flinched.
"Oreos!" barked Pete. "You give me ten Oreos, I'll pay you twenty bucks, man."
Tucker sidestepped him like he was yesterday's bad news. "Fifty bucks, Tuck. That's five bucks per unit. Come on." Tucker's face thawed. In the background you could hear people laughing and yelling, propelled by the moment. And Pete's shenanigans were contagious. Tucker's spirits visibly lifted. He let Pete trail after him bargaining furiously.
"I'm wiped," Katie said to John. She kept her eyes on Tucker, though. "But what a kick."
"It's going to be hard to beat this one," John agreed.
"Tell me about it. Last night we must have smoked a pound of this stuff. In five minutes flat the crew was all seeing ghosts. Ask him." She jerked her thumb at Pete.
"He started the one about seeing a green light shining up from the lake floor, and pretty soon everyone was steering clear of the lake. You wouldn't believe the bullshit.
There's talk about gold bullion down there. Cocaine, M16s, diamonds. I'll bet the secret of who killed Bruce Lee's down there, too."
"Five Oreos, man." Pete raised his voice. "A hundred bucks and I'll tell you where there's a parachute. I seen it but I didn't go up there. Dead man's up there, I know it."
"Where?" Tucker suddenly demanded. A parachute? A dead man? He liked mysteries. It would give him a project, and better yet, an excuse for not being on the lake. Maybe when the helicopters arrived, they wouldn't see him.
"Up there behind that shoulder of rock." Tucker fixed him with a withering hanging judge's Page 62
glare. Liars repulsed him, and everyone knew it. "I'm not shittin' ya," Pete swore. "Come on. All I want's some food." Tucker took a moment to make up his file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (73
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light mind, then unthreaded the top flap straps and flipped open his pack.
"It's there,"
Pete promised again. Tucker sucked on his teeth and none too quickly dipped his arm into the pack to remove a rectangular, gallon-size Tupperware container that was the last of his family reliquiae. He vividly remembered standing in his mom's
Colonial-style kitchen with copper Revere Ware hanging by the microwave and deciding he was stuck, adrift, marooned, and taking a deep breath and looting the bottom cupboard for souvenirs of his childhood. Neatly arranged inside the
Tupperware tub, padded with Park Service industrial-strength toilet paper, lay three dozen Oreos, not a one broken.
"Here," he said, handing over the five required by contract. Being Tucker, he gave Pete an extra five with the injunction, "Just don't tell anybody." Then he brought the tub over to John and Katie and offered them all what he knew they wanted. John took one, Katie a handful.
"Tucker." Katie grabbed his arm. There wasn't much that affected her. But Tucker touched her every time. "Put your Oreos down for a minute."
"Why?"
"Just do."
He did. Before he could react Katie slid one scarred hand over the burr of his Mohawk, and with the other caught him around the back. Sigourney Weaver couldn't have done it better. She looked in his eyes, gave him a hard squeeze when he started to look away, and waited until she had his full attention. Soot smudged her face and her almond eyes were red from two nights of campfires and she smelled like menstrual blood and sweat, a good smell if raw. Tucker swallowed hard, of course.
Then she kissed him on the lips and let him go. "Thanks," she said. She turned and saddled up quickly, sitting back against her giant load. She buckled in and with John's help fought up onto her feet. Pete followed suit, exhaling dry black cookie crumbs onto the snow.
"You ready?" Katie called from beneath her pack.
"It's up there," Pete reiterated to Tucker. "Be careful, man. The living dead."
"See you mañana," said Katie.
"Bye," Tucker said. Nobody'd ever done that to him, nobody that knew how to, anyway. The girls who didn't know how were too shy to try him out in the first place, and the ones who should have known better always tried too fast with too much skill, making him feel dumb and uncoordinated. But Katie. Katie'd gone straight for the heart. He'd never even noticed her before. Now he couldn't put her out of his mind.
"Grab your pack," John broke in.
John was nearly up to the lake when another band o
f fully loaded climbers appeared.
They hey'ed and yo'ed him and picked their way down the hillside. Suddenly one of them, one of the Fuller twins, lost his footing on the wet snow, slammed backward onto his hundred-pound load, and rocketed off into the lower acres. Half a mile
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light down, he skidded to a halt, but like a turtle on its back, couldn't Page 63
seem to right himself. With great whoops of "Surf's up," the rest of the boys cast themselves down the hill, too. Stoned to the gills. It would be a good idea to patrol the trail just before sunset and make sure no one pulled over to sleep off the THC without a sleeping bag, thought John. Screw that, though. If this was the Boy Scouts, none of them would have been here in the first place.
A few steps higher and John was there. The bent, severed airplane wing marked the entrance to Snake Lake. Saturated marijuana lay drying on the shiny metal, and here and there around the shore other torn panels of metal were seeing the same employment. Close up now, John saw that some of the faces were unfamiliar, but that was to be expected. Something like this was bound to bring out friends and friends of friends and outright strangers. One bellicose longhair in camouflaged hunting pants was toting a lever-action Remington deer rifle as he paced, a one-man anti-fed army. Nobody talked to him and he didn't appear to want any of the score, just some of the audience. Nobody noticed, too busy pushing and pulling at bales or digging holes in the ice or probing the water with sections of copper pipe liberated through the plane's tail. John started to count people, gave up, tried to count the number of holes gouged in the ice, and gave up on that, too. The smell of burning pot was rich and sweet, and twice while he appreciated the lake, wrecked wanderers suddenly plunged one or the other leg hip-deep into the slick round-edged holes.
Whether they wore fiberglass Kastingers with super-gaiters for high mountain work, or tennis shoes, moon boots, or rubber galoshes borrowed from a Norman Rockwell painting, everyone's feet stood half buried with a freezing, creamy slush, the result of water splashed from the holes and of sunlight thawing the ice. There had to be a rhyme and reason to the proceedings, but all he could see was chaos and joy. Here was Hieronymus Bosch's paradise, every face stunned with lotus frenzy. They'd found the end of the rainbow. John paused by the erect tail section. The cut had been made with an acetylene torch, the work of the feds unless someone had hiked one in and he doubted it. Tucker joined him.