Angels of Light

by Jeff Long

  A voice whispered in shock, "FBI?"

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  Kresinski turned from Delwood to the crowd at large. "Don't be simple. This is a federal park, isn't it? Federal property. Federal crime. Federal Bureau of Investigation."

  "But officer," one of the city boys mimed, "we was just hikin' around and found it.

  This shit's just for souvenirs." Bullseye draped the sleeping bag liner over the body.

  "Yeah," Kresinski snarled. "Well, my picture's not a souvenir."

  "What do we do now?" the question resurfaced.

  "Bail out," someone reiterated.

  "Why?" challenged Kresinski, and he stepped forward and yanked the liner off the nude body.

  "Because of him? Big deal. He went too high. He blew it. He cratered. It happens to our guys all the time."

  "Matt, don't," John said quietly. Kresinski was starting to grandstand, never a good sign.

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  "You think covering him up is going to make him go away? Shit!"

  "The fun's over," said Bullseye, and he tore the liner from Kresinski's hands. "Have some respect."

  "What? You guys want to bury him with honors in a snowbank? Maybe we should build him a Viking ship and burn it? Or, I know, why don't we carry him out and give him to the rangers for a present? They'd appreciate our act of conscience. Let's all say cheese, and Delwood, you take our picture, we'll give them a photo to go with the stiff." He looked down at the body. "Fuck.

  Look at him." He kicked the corpse's shoulder. "He's been in the freezer for two, three months now. And he looks pretty damn good for it. He was happy enough under the ice. I say put him back where he was. Forget about him."

  "It's bad luck," someone repeated.

  "Three thousand pounds of smoke is some bad luck, brother," said Kresinski. "And we haven't even gone down for a look inside yet."

  "There's nothin' down there," said Sammy. "We cleaned it out."

  "Wanna bet?" said Kresinski. "Ask this guy here then." He nudged the corpse with his foot again. "He was safe. He was alive. He landed with his parachute up there, but then he came down here and he took off his clothes and dove in the water. How come?"

  "Hypothermia," Bullseye told him.

  "Uh-uh. He was lookin' for something."

  "Like what?"

  Kresinski shrugged. "Ask him. Or you can ask me. 'Cause I'm goin' down and find out.

  Whatever it was, he paid everything he had trying to get it." He stepped across the blue legs.

  "Do what you want. I'm here until we empty this gold mine."

  "Yeah, me too." Anybody could have said it.

  "What about him?" asked Sammy.

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  "Leave him."

  "That's not decent."

  "Raise him up then, brother." There were snickers in the crowd.

  "You can't throw him back in the water," Sammy persisted. "He ain't a fish."

  "We got to do something for him," another voice voted.

  "With him, not for him," growled Kresinski. "Look, you take care of your own. He's not us, though. He's not our dead."

  "That's bad luck if you don't... do something."

  "Something?" challenged Kresinski. He unzipped the little ski pack on his hips and took out one of the aerosal cans of paint they'd been using to mark holes. "How's this?" he said. Before anyone could stop him, Kresinski bent down and sprayed the dead man's face a bright Day-Glo orange.

  "What the fuck..." said a voice, more startled than outraged. The crowd stirred but not much.

  Everyone was mesmerized by Kresinski's performance, and that's what it was, pure street theater. He had something to say and they wanted to hear it.

  "There's only so much bad luck in the world," Kresinski quickly declared. "And this guy's had it for all of us." Quickly again, he bent over the corpse and with a second can spray-painted "

  MEAT

  " in crude hot-pink script. "This guy's done, same as the hamburger in your mom's freezer. It doesn't matter where he is anymore. Besides, what do you think he'd do for one of us? Same thing. Nothing. I say dump him back in the drink. I say let's get on with business before the feds Page 70

  wake up."

  "I'm not diggin' around in the water if this sucker's floating around in it, man."

  Kresinski was losing his patience. "So tie him off. Put a rope on him and anchor him right here under this hole. Anybody got a rope?"

  "Delwood brought a nine-mil," someone volunteered.

  "Let's have it, Eddie."

  It took Delwood off-balance. "That's not a trash rope. It's brand new. I just started climbing on it."

  "Give us the rope, Eddie."

  "Come on, Del wood."

  Kresinski was smiling as he backed away from the crowd. Even when he bumped into John, who'd maneuvered around and placed himself there, the smile stayed bright and full. "John Boy!"

  "You're a scumbag," said John.

  "A

  rich scumbag," Kresinski qualified. "Just like you. And them. We're all family."

  John indicated the body with his chin. "You're wrong. That's all." He moved off.

  "That's slick, Johnny.

  You lecturing about the dead?"

  "I quit apologizing for that a long time ago."

  "Yeah. I noticed."

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light each other, so John walked away. It was time to fetch Tucker and make camp. First thing tomorrow morning he meant to exit the lake. Half a pack of weed came to something like seventeen thousand dollars, and that wasn't too shabby for a three-day romp in the high range. Seventeen thousand dollars would take some of the pout off Liz's anger. That was a year's wages for her, five years' wages for him. He found his pack propped against a piece of weathered driftwood and looked up the mountain. Tucker's footsteps led high and disappeared onto the crest of the stone ring. The boy was nowhere in sight, but he had to return this way.

  "Where's my air?" Kresinski yelled over by the plane's tail. He was suited up and ready to go.

  "It's time for Captain Nemo to find out what's what down there. Come on, where's my air?"

  In the center of the ring a climber was genuflecting by the dead man's head. In his hands were an ice screw and an ice hammer. He took a quick notch out of the ice, set the screw to it and, twisting the screw with each hammer blow, drove in a picket stake. Someone else showed up with Delwood's new rope and skillfully tethered the corpse with a doubled figure eight under the arms and, for good measure, with the opposite end of the rope, a hangman's noose around the neck. "Real funny," groused

  Sammy, but it was beyond his control now. In colorful fluorescent paint, Kresinski's black humor was carrying the tribe back to its festive innocence. Spirits visibly lifted when the body was levered back into its hole and tied off. Bullseye was still too shaken to deliver any funeral invocations, so the unblinking spray-painted pilot of the red, white, and blue Lodestar and its Lightning slipped back under the ice with no memory for the future, no guidance but a climber's rope. Kresinski made his dive and saw what the dead man saw: the bottom of the ice green from the filtered sunlight, bales of pot nudging against the cold lens like seeds ready to break into the upper world, and deeper down the tip of the wonderful spear of an airplane stuck in the still-black silt. People watched Kresinski's progress through various holes, but the light was no Page 71

  longer quite right for viewing, and when he passed too close over the lake's floor—intentionally, some whispered—clouds of sediment puffed upward, obscu
ring all sight. He was down for a very long time, leading people to believe he was extricating a marvelous treasure from the cockpit. They waited to hear from him that the backside of the moon held ancient, ruined cities, that Prester John would save Europe from the Mongols, that old age had a remedy and they could stay forever in the Valley. But when he surfaced, Kresinski's hands were as empty and blue as the corpse's. Luckily for him, several climbers had built a hot fire with deadwood carried up from three miles away. The girl with the steaming tea asked to sleep with him that night, and before the sun had even gone down he took her to his tent. Shortly after twilight, though, Kresinski dressed and said the moon was keeping him awake. His footsteps squeaked on the cold snow. Had she bothered to look, the girl would have seen there was no moon. It was dark, and dark was the way Kresinski wanted it.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  CHAPTER 7

  Like a huge, nylon man-of-war washed onto a tilted white beach, the parachute's shroud lay limp on top of the ring of stone that married the lake to the mountain.

  Entangled in a comb of boulders, the shroud lines held it captive, and though it rustled and bubbled up occasionally, what little breeze there was kept failing to really give it loft. The jump harness was still attached to the rigging, sliced neatly open with a knife, one more shell of the past shed and forgotten. An hour above the lake, Tucker stood on two nipples of granite poking up through the snow and tried to read the tragedy even though the evidence was slim and he wasn't Apache.

  Winging it, Tucker patched together how the parachutist must have floated miraculously to the one and only place possible on the mountain itself, onto this slanted ramp of snow and ice. The man must have cut free of the chute and said his thanks and took stock and saw his plane down below in the water. Up here, the slope was steep and slippery but not impassable, even for a nonclimber. If it was me, thought Tucker, I'd of tiptoed around on the precarious ramp and descended. But where to? To the lake to await the rescue that never came, a long, slow starve day after day casting for fish that probably didn't exist in the lake below? Maybe he'd tried to walk out and lost his way and his spirit was still wandering in the woods, a limbo man. Or maybe he'd just sat up here with a broken leg and counted stars until sleep took over. Tucker glanced around. The deep snow was like a quilt. The man could be dozing right under his feet, a Sierran Rip Van Winkle hibernating until the statute of limitations ran out. One way or another, each of Tucker's versions trailed off peacefully and without any final resolution. He preferred stories without ends.

  Conclusions frightened him. He hated birthdays and high school graduations and Page 72

  Life magazine yearbooks and bicentennial celebrations because they were conclusions. Novels and biographies always made him forlorn, not for their content but for their form: They always came to an end. The dictionary was safer in that sense because you could always cycle back through it. Likewise he avoided summits, shunned them in fact, though the few people who'd noticed had never figured out why it was he always declined the final few steps onto the hard-bought top. He told himself he was simply emulating the British team that climbed to within thirty feet—

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light no further—of Macha Pucchare's summit in Nepal, because Hindu gods lived on top.

  Tucker didn't believe in Hindu gods though, any more than he believed in MTV.

  Every climb, every mountain, was part of the same mountain in Tucker's mind.

  Somewhere along the line he'd decided there was going to be only one summit for him, the last, ultimate, sixty-megawatt touchdown. Then he would descend and take his journey into other terrains, a kayak trip down the longest rivers of the world perhaps, or a walk all the way through the Americas' cordilleras, top to bottom. His book would never run out of pages, and why should it? He didn't have the language for this will to never-endingness, or rather he had the words but not the verbal glue to declare it out loud. His favorite parable was about the man who couldn't decide if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

  Underneath it all, life as dream just about summed up the whole deal. And so, because he'd missed the resurrection of the giant blue nude of the lake, Tucker had the imaginary smuggler dreaming imaginary dreams. And lest he disturb those dreams, Tucker forbade himself to root around in the crusted snow. Even so, he made a discovery.

  First there was a glove jammed into the niche of an exposed boulder ten feet higher up, as if someone's hand had gotten stuck in the mountain and the only thing to do was pull loose and leave the empty glove. It had two significances for Tucker. In the middle of winter his man had lost the covering for that most precious of tools, his hand. And he'd lost it not in descent, but while climbing up the mountain. Tucker scrutinized the higher way. With hard, compacted snow like now, the climb was child's play up to a certain level. A good, swift kick and the toe of your boot could dent the surface enough to stand on. A staircase of such minimal toeholds would lead straight up to steeper rock where the snow didn't cling, and from there medium-angle slabs culminated at the mouth of a big cave maybe five hundred feet up.

  Tucker pulled the glove from the rock and tried it on his own hand. It was enormous.

  Without really thinking about it he notched the glove back into the rock, a mountaineering habit.

  You never could tell when the owner might be back and need a stray piece of clothing or gear.

  The mystery built. Had the man gone up instead of down? He tried to visualize the circumstances behind the reasoning, but came up empty. Climbing up to the cave was one thing, descending the slabs and snow was something else again. Down-climbing is always more difficult because you haven't yet seen and touched your footholds the way you do going up. It would take a climber's eyes and feet to descend, and even then it was chancy. One slip and you'd come plunging down the low-angle stuff and go streaking out over the lip of the stone ring. Then it looked like a good three hundred feet of free-fall to the lake. Maybe one of those Mexican cliff divers could survive it in the late summer, but with a sheath of ice covering the water anyone else would be a goner. Well, maybe that's what had happened then. Tucker kept asking questions of the mountain. Did his man go

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light straight up this gully of snow or had he moved over to the wind pattern snaking along a rocky spine? Would a nonclimber see the subtleties or simply go for it?

  Was the glove a false scent? Had the man really gone up? And then he saw the heel of a jogging shoe.

  Tucker kick-stepped up and across to the shoe and pulled it from the snow. The laces were untied. The man had shucked it on purpose. Connecting the dots, glove to shoe, Tucker calculated the man's path. Now he understood. The man had been crazy.

  Maybe a concussion had knocked him silly, maybe he'd shot up too much pain drug or smoked too much of his cargo or drunk some liquor to warm up or get brave.

  However it happened, the man had decided, piece by piece, that clothes were an unnecessary burden. On a vertical beeline for the cave now, Tucker found a green argyle sock and an Oregon Timber cap all locked into the snow. Where the snow met stone, the second glove was frozen under a half-inch coating of ice.

  Tucker paused. The sun had slunk around behind the mountain, but it was still early afternoon, plenty of time to make the round trip to the cave and back. It was going to be tricky coming down without a rope, but he had nothing else to do with his time.

  He'd already given up hopes of returning to the Valley or even leaving the lake by tonight. He shrugged and continued higher. Though steeper, the rock slabs went faster than the
snow, and within a half hour Tucker was at the cave.

  "Hello," he called, pulling up onto the ledge. Why chance it? he was thinking. After three months alone in a cave, a barefoot crazy man would be crazier than ever. He sniffed for the odor of human dung, any dung for that matter, but smelled nothing.

  He peered in.

  It was a classic cave. An eight-foot-high ceiling curved back to join a flat dirt floor.

  None too large, the cave was still good enough to break all but a head-on wind. It took a minute to adjust to the darkness. Then Tucker entered the vaulted chamber.

  To his relief it was empty. Not even a bird's nest or a bone.

  So much for the afternoon's diversion, he thought. He'd found a size thirteen running shoe, two giant gloves, a redneck's cap, and an argyle sock. Slim pickings compared to business down on the lake. He didn't regret coming up—he never regretted touching a mountain—but it was a little disappointing to have come all this way for stuff you can find in the back of a closet. The clues had been so... eligible for a solution. No loss, anyway. He'd added another cave to his internal compendium of geological nuances, and that counted for something.

  He turned to leave. And there, slumped almost invisibly in the corner like one more derelict rock, sat a brown leather flight jacket, the kind hotshot combat jocks wore in war movies.

  Instantly a shiver passed through Tucker. He wanted to plunder it the way Camp Four was plundering the lake below. But with the masochism of a trained archaeologist he forced himself to stand there trembling, reveling for a minute or two longer in the lonely company of his find.

  He pretended to himself that maybe he

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light ought to leave it right where it lay, all the time knowing he was going to pick it up. A

  couple of heartbeats later, he did. It was stuck to the cave floor. On closer examination, he found that the walls of the cave were seeping water and that the bottom of the jacket had frozen in a thin pool of ice. The mountain didn't want to relinquish it to him. Tucker stood up, and with a clean hard jerk yanked it loose. His excitement mounting, he carried the jacket outside, where Page 74