Angels of Light

by Jeff Long

  it wasn't any warmer but at least the light was better.

  The leather was brown and pliable with little fissures that spoke of many storms and dry spells.

  One cuff was torn and sewn up. The collar of white wool was stained from neck dirt. It was an ail-American jacket, functional, heavy-duty, well worn, and the smell was like something out of a Hemingway novel—tobacco smoke, blunt bar talk where silence wouldn't do, gunpowder.

  Tucker checked it front and back, inside and out, for blood marks. Finding none, he tried it on.

  As he suspected, even over his sweater and Polypro vest, the jacket swallowed him up. The man had carried magnificent shoulders on him, and long arms with thick wrists. It was a warm jacket.

  Too bad he'd taken it off. Tucker saw it all now. The man had landed, cut free of the chute, and very soon started to freeze. He'd seen this cave and reckoned better up than nowhere, at least get out of the snow and wind. Too bad he hadn't thought to carry the parachute up with him, it would have made good bedding. But then again the man was crazy before he'd even begun the climb. Looking like a ragged barefoot pilgrim, he'd reached the cave and stood on this ledge.

  He'd shucked the jacket, probably shucked his pants and shirt for good measure, too. And he'd stood on this flat porch. Maybe he'd thought there were wings on his shoulders. Maybe he'd thought there was only one way to find out and had actually tried to fly. Never to be seen again.

  Tucker looked down at the lake. Just so. It made him sad and yet pleased.

  An ending without an ending. Out across the range, you could see a scattering of the Tuolumne domes, so many trolls' fannies spanked pink by the sinking sun. Bowie Peak's shadow cut long and cold across the valley. There was the plane's tail, a toy surrounded by animated figurines, and even as he stood there the sky took on bold streaky layers of color like a gaudy finger painting. Suddenly Tucker wished he'd brought up the parachute. It would have been nice to spend the night in this cave overlooking the range. He hadn't, though, and before the light dimmed much more, descent was in order.

  Tucker got firm footing on the edge of the ledge and peeked down the steep gully. It always looks worse when you have to climb down, and he took a deep breath to settle down for business. He zipped the jacket shut and pressed its folds against him. There was something hard in the left exterior pocket and something else in an arm pocket.

  But there was no time to examine the contents now. The alpenglow was about to crest and the mountain was burying itself in blue shadows.

  On his knees, then belly, casting all style to the wind, he wrestled over a curl of wind-file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (88

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light blasted snow, felt a foothold with one boot, and lowered himself into the gully. The rock was colder, and by the time Tucker made it to the snow slab five hundred feet down, his fingers were like frozen link sausages. There was no sensation left, and he had to look at each hand to make sure its grip was obedient. Down on the snow again, his feet took over. The angle was still severe, but to Tucker it felt flat as a sidewalk. He kicked his toes into the snow and ten minutes later was down at the parachute and his pack again. He paused to stick his hands, one at a time, down into the front of his pants and warm them by his balls.

  Down by the lake several small fires were winking orange eyes at him, and the ramp was fast disappearing from sight. He was happy. It had been a worthwhile day, full of solved mysteries and well-timed climbing. There was always something very appropriate about getting off a route as night swarmed in.

  His belly was empty and his blood sugar low, so he dipped into his Oreo stash, scarfed a half dozen down, and hastily tossed the pack on over the leather jacket. Just then he saw a disembodied pinpoint of white light bobbing around as it neared the base of his ramp. It was a headlamp. Someone was coming to check on him. John, it had to be John. He couldn't wait to Page 75

  tell John the news. All but blind now, he set off traversing along the top of the cliffs. He found the upper tip of the ramp and slid and skated down toward John's headlamp. Except it wasn't John's.

  A voice uncoiled from the dark. "Hey, sport." The light stabbed his eyes. It was Kresinski. "Wow, look at that jacket."

  Tucker tried to ward away the light. "What are you doing?" he said.

  "Just lookin'," said Kresinski. "Hey, everybody figured you headed home."

  "Is John lookin' for me?"

  "Nah. Just askin' around. They're down by the fires."

  "What are you doing?"

  Kresinski shifted in his footsteps and grunted. They were Tucker's footsteps actually.

  There was only one trail up, and that was the one he'd plowed. Tucker heard the creaking of pack straps like traces on a mule. Kresinski was heavily loaded. And a heavy load for him could mean two times too heavy for anyone else. Instead of answering, he said, "Where'd you get that cool jacket, Tuck?" He sounded friendly enough.

  Now it was Tucker's turn to shift in his footsteps and try to figure a dodge. "Up there," he said.

  "Little big, huh?"

  "Could you please not shine your light in my face?"

  "Whoops. Sorry." Kresinski bent it toward the ground, and now Tucker could see better. In the light's penumbra, Kresinski was leaning into a surprisingly small pack.

  Tucker had expected a mammoth, towering load of pot.

  "It was in that cave," Tucker said.

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  "No shit. Let's see."

  "I'm sort of cold."

  "You tryin' to hide something there?"

  "I'll show you later."

  "Nah, come on. Let's see what you got there." Kresinski hit the release on his belly band and dumped the pack backward into the snow. Reluctantly, Tucker removed his pack and set it down. The smell of wood smoke drifted up.

  "Nice leather. Let me try it on."

  "Nah."

  Kresinski laughed at his suspicion.

  Tucker heard the snow crunch and suddenly Kresinski was right there beside him, feeling the leather. He smelled clean, like he'd just washed. Then Tucker remembered his dive.

  "You find anything under the water?" he tried.

  Kresinski was locked on, though. "Some rusty guns. Nothin' like this." Too late, Tucker realized Kresinski was doing more than feel the fine leather. He was patting the jacket down. By the time the bigger man felt the left pocket, it was too late to stop him. "Wow, what's this?"

  Tucker wanted to step away, but that seemed worse than letting Kresinski see inside the pocket.

  "I don't know."

  "Come on. You don't know?"

  "I was saving it for down by the fire."

  "Why wait, man. Let's see." He didn't wait. His hand curtly rifled the pocket. "God, look at all this shit."

  Face up in Kresinski's fingers, illuminated by their globe of light, was a fat rawhide wallet. You could tell by the cheap tooled relief of an Aztec pyramid it was made in Page 76

  Mexico. Kresinski knelt down in the snow and carefully dissected the insides on the sparkling flat whiteness. Paper after paper, he laid out the contents of the whole wallet. "Son of a bitch, Tuck.

  You know what you got here, don't you? You just ID'ed the body."

  "The body?" said Tucker.

  "Yeah. You missed it. A fucking giant. In his birthday suit."

  "Yeah?" said Tucker. That was his man with wings, all right. Naked to the moonbeams and snowflakes.

  "Harold R. Zamora," Kresinski read off a driver's license. "Two hundred and fifty-five pounds, single, eyes blue, hailing from McCall, Idaho. Here, wanna take a look at Harry's face?" He handed the license over to Tucker. "What else we got here?

  Licensed small-craft pilot. Commercial helicopter pilot... oops, no, Harry let that one expire.

  American Express. Nop
e, that one's expired, too. Social Security card, book of stamps, Gold Visa card. Ah, darn, expired while he was in the drink. Kind of hard to file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (90

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light yup around if your plastic's no good, Harry. Whoa, hey, what's this thing?" He brought a worn dog-eared card closer to his headlamp. "United States Army, one-oone Airborne, Bronze Star, Purple Heart. So the old fart was a card-carrying combat vet. Must be where he got his color coordination for the Lodestar Art Deco."

  Tucker picked up each little document, read it, and then set it back on the snow in a meticulous line.

  "You know what I think, Tuck? I think Harry fell on bad times. Things got tight in old McCall. But he knew how to fly. So he gassed up his trusty Lodestar and he went charging off into the unknown. Dadgum it, he was gonna save the old homestead one way or another. Would have made it, too, except for these hills."

  "Anything else in there?" he asked the wallet, prying at the flaps and corners. His hands were very clean and white. The persistence paid off. An overlapping fold of leather gave up one last piece of the puzzle, a creased color photo. "Holy shit,"

  whistled Kresinski. "Twins!"

  The thing that made Tucker look over was what almost passed for fear in Kresinski's voice. It was an extraordinary intonation for the King.

  "Let me see," said Tucker, and he plucked the bent photo from Kresinski's fingers. In front of a sleek khaki needle of a gunship squatted a double image of the same soldier. Both wore their uniforms with the sleeves rolled high above the elbows, both sported the same brushy mustache, the same lofty reserve as if all their lives they'd been marked by Olympian similarities. Between the two of them, you got the sense, very little could not be engaged and won: barroom brawls, a football line of scrimmage, a forest of trees on some Idaho mountain. Paul Bunyan and his brother

  Sergeant Fury. Tucker laid them down by the other dross. This stuff was all so much driftwood now.

  "Now," said Kresinski, reaching for the little red address book. "Let's take a gander at how many girlfriends Harry had." It was bound with a thick rubber band that was too cold to stretch.

  The rubber broke, the pages fell open. A small, folded pink memo page fluttered loose to the snow, almost escaping from the bright light never to be seen again. Tucker leaned over and snagged it while Kresinski riffled the pages. "This fucker prints like he was still in fourth grade or something."

  "Yeah, but he could fly helicopters and airplanes." Tucker defended the dead man.

  And fight wars and cut down monster trees. And single-handedly deal with Central American gangsters and make it almost home, an hour short that was all. One hour.

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  "Touchy?" Kresinski grinned.

  "He wasn't dumb." Tucker tried to break down his sympatico with the smuggler.

  Maybe it was as basic as they'd climbed the same mountain, stood in the same cave that no one but them had ever stood in. Why did Kresinski always have to wreck and ruin?

  "Didn't say he was, Tuck. At least he knew how to print." Kresinski stopped at the file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (91

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light back of the small book. "Hello," he said. "What have we here?"

  "What?"

  Kresinski showed him. Written on the flip side of the last page were five phone numbers bearing only the names of colors. Blue—546-4733, Red—499-3092, and so on.

  "Mafia," Tinkerbell murmured knowingly, not really knowing.

  "Mafia?" Kresinski barked with a laugh. "You ever heard of McCall, Idaho, man?

  Well, I can guarantee no Mafia ever has, either. Nah, this guy was a lone ranger. This was a one-shot deal. Just trying to save the spud farm or some damn thing. I'll bet you he hocked everything he owned in the world, took his grubstake down to wherever, and smashed it all into this lake. A total fucking loser. These numbers, they're probably some fishing buddies. Or secret pussy, hell I don't know."

  Tucker shrugged. It had been fun to hang all the clues together and sketch a composite of the man, even if it was overblown and romanticized. Kresinski wouldn't let it be, though, until everyone smelled like dogshit. He looked down and saw the piece of pink paper in his fingers.

  With little spirit left, he idly unfolded it. And suddenly Kresinski's mean little world opened up and the smuggler was Conan the

  Barbarian all over again. For neatly ranked in that blocky pencil print marched a vertical row of names and numbers of guns: 150 M16. 350 M14. Uzi, M11, Kalish—

  any/all. etc. It was a shopping list. Tucker was dumbfounded. It evoked images of an alien, killing world, of guerrillas and tyrannies and midnight knocks on your wood door. All the list lacked was a request for banana-belt berets and mirror sunglasses.

  His smuggler wasn't just some freak out of

  Doonesbury, he was a full-scale mercenary gunrunner.

  "What you got there?" said Kresinski.

  "Guns."

  Kresinski didn't even ask, he just pulled it from Tucker's fingers. The connection was easy to furnish, especially in Tucker's imagination. Cargo planes are for cargo; if you're coming north, you first have to go south, and it might as well be with a full load of goods each way. Leave no profit unturned. This list was the weak link in the chain. It was evidence.

  "Bullshit," muttered Kresinski. "This is make-believe. Why would some farmer be carrying a list of guns around with him when he could get caught?"

  "He wasn't a farmer," Tucker replied, confident now that his man had walked with seven-league boots. Obviously the smuggler hadn't intended to fail. Still, Kresinski's question bore merit. If this guy was a professional, then why had he acted like an amateur? Carrying your whole business network in your jacket pocket was the act of either a zealot or a fool.

  "How do you know?"

  "I found his hat. It said Oregon Timber. He was a lumberjack."

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  "Oh, great detective work, Tuck." Kresinski waved the pink memo page in the lamplight.

  "That's like saying this proves he was workin' for the CIA."

  "Maybe he was." The thought hadn't occurred to Tucker.

  "I don't have time for this," Kresinski said. He started scraping the row of documents into a pile and stuffing the papers into his shirt pocket.

  "Hey."

  "Forget it." Kresinski stood up.

  "That stuff's mine."

  "You blew it, man. You should have worked the lake instead of solving riddles.

  Everybody else got rich. All you got was some hairy-ass fantasies. So we know Harry's name now, big deal. We got a bunch of phone numbers and a list of phony guns. What's that? Nothin'."

  "If it's nothing, then give it back."

  "Here's the problem, Tucker. Once I leave here I don't want any connection with this lake. When the shit hits, and it's going to once the feds see what happened, nobody's gonna know I so much as dreamed about Snake Lake. Everybody else is getting rid of their pot the minute they hit the trailhead. This stuff, though. I can see you hanging on to it for years to come."

  "I didn't do anything."

  "You were here. That's enough. And if you were here, maybe I was. You're just a scary little kid.

  You didn't do anything? Hell, they find these papers on you and push you around a little bit and pretty soon you're telling them who did do something."

  "That's a lie."

  "Yeah, well I'm not taking any chances." He stood up.

  "Let me have the wallet anyway."

  Kresinski thought it over for a minute. "Sure. Here." The empty wallet hit him in the chest.

  "Here's how it is, Tucker. We didn't meet. You didn't see me. I wasn't here.

  There wa
s nothing in that wallet. Got it?"

  Tucker was shocked. Kresinski had just robbed him.

  The light swung away and Tucker could hear Kresinski saddling up. Once again the pack sounded like it was stressed to the point of ripping. He stood up and found his own pack.

  "Promise me, Tuck."

  Tucker started walking away. "Go ahead. Brag about your jacket. Brag about your wallet. But you never saw me up here, Tucker, got it?"

  Tucker didn't answer. He aimed for the closest fire and walked off. The fire was farther away than it looked, and by the time he reached it he was very hungry and tired. John and Bullseye were among the few people surrounding the ebbing flames.

  There were greetings all around, and someone heated water for a packet of chicken soup for the returning explorer. Everyone admired his leather jacket and asked file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (93

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light questions, and Tucker told them about the lost clothing and the cave, and he was about to take his revenge on Kresinski by telling them about the theft, but Bullseye interrupted him.

  "You look in the pockets?" he asked. Then Tucker remembered the lump in the arm pocket, and while everyone looked on he unzipped the zipper and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside the plastic bag, stacked neatly and wrapped with a red rubber band, was over six thousand dollars in crisp hundred-dollar bills. Flush with their newfound wealth, everyone congratulated him. They were flush, he knew, because no one even tried to borrow money from him.

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  CHAPTER 8

  There would never be a party like this one again, John registered in the brute din of Airplane, firelight, and unabashed, punch-drunk, joyful triumph. It was a rendezvous in the bygone fur-trapping tradition, no Hawken rifles, no knives or pelts, but everything else, the frivolity, drunkenness, and forest bacchanalia was true and happy and reckless. They were rich, they had won. And it was spring. A new moon sat pegged on the points of redwoods and ponderosas, and the bonfire was rimmed with kegs of beer, and when Grace Slick wasn't warbling full-decibel about the white rabbit in wonderland, then it was Jagger or that most primitive of rock canticles, "Gloria." As self-delegated Il Duce of the tunes, Bullseye was relentless, and even though younger climbers were less sentimental about his backward-looking tastes, still early pagan rock seemed acutely right for this giddy, acid victory over the feds and dead men and Camp Four's history of feral poverty. Tucker's attempts to infiltrate the psychedelia with a movement or two of, say, Ludwig's Fifth had so far been thwarted, and he was being closely monitored whenever anyone could remember, which was not often. Around midnight the real huns began fire-jumping, first in their thongs and blown-out Nikes and Adidas, then barefoot through the flames. Somebody fell in and was rolled out, smoking, Gore-Tex melted, but feeling no pain, nor would he until morning. Everywhere there were boasts, inquiries, and air moves: hands locking off on imaginary holds, toes twisting, feet torquing.