by Jeff Long
Why Tucker? Why up there? And why let you go? How come you keep surviving and your partners don't?"
John leaned against the table. Those were the questions he'd slept through for three days now, the questions Bullseye and Kresinski were supposed to help him answer.
But they hadn't come down with answers.
"I hiked around and went up the stairs to the top, John," Bullseye said. "There wasn't anybody up there."
John raised his head. "You didn't find Tucker's anchor?"
"I looked."
Then he remembered. "But Tucker dropped his rack halfway across the ceiling.
When he got to the top he didn't have gear. So there wasn't any anchor to find."
"So what'd he tie off to?"
"A rock? A tree?"
"There's no fucking trees up there," Kresinski said.
"I don't know," said John. "Maybe a rock."
"What about tracks?"
Bullseye shrugged.
"Ah, you're not going to pull that redskin horseshit on us, are you?" groaned Kresinski. "Come on, man. Why would anybody go all the way up there to boot the little fart over?"
"I don't know." Then he had a thought. It was remote, but at least something. "The lake. Maybe it had to do with the lake?"
"Woo! You're reachin', Johnny. We were all at the lake. Why pick on Tucker?"
"Maybe Tucker found something we didn't, I don't know."
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (136
of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52
Jeff Long - Angels of Light
"Fuck that," Kresinski exploded, all patience gone. "I think you're a fucking psycho, man." It came out as a terrible hiss. Something rang false, though. He was too angry too suddenly. Even Bullseye detected it and looked over. "Next thing, you're gonna tell us the dead man rose up out of the waters and came looking for... what?"
Kresinski looked around, saw the jacket on Bullseye. "For his jacket? What, or his airplane?" He hit the table with his open hand. "Psycho garbage. Lies."
"That's real useful," Bullseye said to Kresinski.
Kresinski hit the table again. "What, you buy his line? This thing keeps getting more twisted by the second. First he comes down—alone—looking like a junkie, babbling about how Tucker's gone. Tucker got shoved. We look around and come up empty.
Then we find out from the horse's fucking asshole here that he didn't see anything in the first place. And then he tries out Tucker got assassinated."
Bullseye reflected a moment. "He's right, John. Something's off. Pick a smuggler. Put yourself in his shoes. The feds already have his plane, his pilot, his dope. Everything's gone. What's left to get? Much less kill for?"
Page 115
"Blood?" John tried.
"Goddamn it," swore Kresinski.
"Uh-uh, John, I don't think so. It's too weird that way. Too spooky and screwy."
"I don't know." John lowered his head into his folded arms.
The water was boiling. Catching one sleeve in his hand for a pot holder, Bullseye lifted the pan off the fire and poured it into a big plastic mug. With a twig he stirred in a packet of soup mix.
"Here." He pushed the mug against John's arm. "Drink this."
"We've got to do—something," said John.
"Tell the rangers?" said Kresinski. "Go ahead. They'll file that one and you know where. Or the FBI? Maybe Communists did it. Or the ghostbusters. Hell, maybe Bigfoot punted old Tuck off the top."
"Leave it," said Bullseye. He sounded weary and disgusted, all the trust gone from his voice.
"He keeps acting like he's got to figure something out," Kresinski went on. "But it's already all figured out. Tucker crashed somewhere up on the wall. You panicked. You ditched him. Just like with Tony. But at least you told us half the truth about Tony."
He paused, furious. "Still moving. Still talking. You son of a bitch. Alive and kicking when you left him up there. But Tucker? All I'm getting are fairy tales. And self-pity.
Tell me something, Johnny. How come you're still alive? How come you keep coming back down?" The invitation was as malicious as it was clear. Every five or ten years someone went up high and "slipped." People didn't mourn. To the contrary, the suicides were a point of pride because they were so true to the Jack London formula:
Go in flames, not embers. Like Norsemen who cursed the "straw death" of ending in your bed with no teeth and a soft cock.
Suddenly Bullseye did an astonishing thing. He reached across the wood table and file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (137
of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52
Jeff Long - Angels of Light hit Kresinski. "Why don't you just shut the hell up," he said. It wasn't much of a blow, more like punching a bull on the shoulder. By clenching his fist speckled with warts and scars and swinging blindly at the King, though, Bullseye reasserted his faith in John.
"You stupid bastard," Kresinski barked in surprise. Over at the other table people stopped and looked. Even from a distance they didn't like to see Kresinski mad, because there was no guarantee his fury wouldn't still be whirling destructively days down the pike. He started around toward Bullseye.
John levered himself to his feet to block Kresinski's advance. They were, all of them, descending.
Someone needed to say enough before the whole balance disintegrated and the tribe with it. But even as he got his leg out from under the table and squinted through his headache, the thought wouldn't go away that something about Kresinski was false. Too much talk, too little destruction. Beneath all the gutting, goring harangue about abandoned partners and sanity lost, something was not quite authentic. Maybe later there would be time to put his finger on it. For now just standing up to intercept Kresinski took a hundred percent. On another day, John might have won. Tonight it was child's play for Kresinski to swipe him out of the way.
John stumbled. The corner of the table knocked against his infected thigh. John clutched his leg and fell down.
For years Camp Four had been waiting for this battle. Three seconds of nothing and already it was over. Even if they'd known about the infection in John's leg, it wouldn't have mattered. You are where you are in the world, and what they saw was defeat. John had crumpled at a touch and now he lay at their feet. Only Kresinski, because he was the one who touched him, understood that John was debilitated and that another night it could have been different. The victory Page 116
disappointed him, but still it was victory. From now on, the Apache would be mortal and common in the eyes of Camp Four. His power was gone. For that reason, Kresinski suddenly lost interest in Bullseye. He could now afford just to walk off into the darkness, leaving Bullseye to help John back to his tent. And so he did.
CHAPTER 11
Another smaller team went up to scour the base of Half Dome for Tucker's remains.
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (138
of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52
Jeff Long - Angels of Light
But Kresinski didn't go this time. In another week or two, word had it, he was going up on the Visor Wall for "the final look." By repeating the climb, he meant to find out what had really happened. Thanks to Kresinski and a few other wild imaginations, the grapevine flourished with rumors of a tunnel halfway up the wall into which John might have dropped the body.
According to one version, this tunnel shaft sank a thousand feet deep within Half Dome, and Tucker was permanently entombed at the heart of the mountain. Someone countered with a story that Kresinski was really going to climb just to climb, but that he was waiting a week or two or more—his departure date remained fuzzy—so that the wind would have a chance to sweep away
Tucker's chalky handprints on the underside of the Visor ceiling. That way, Kresinski could call into question one last time Tucker's magical abilities. He could try his hand at the ceiling, and if it proved beyond his talents, he could claim that the route had never been f
inished anyway, that no one, including
Tuck, had broken the back of impossibility. Among the other stories, rumors, and outright lies making the rounds, what could be classified as "middle explanations" had it that Tucker had simply slipped, or that the wind had knocked him overboard, or that he had wandered off into the woods and that John may have been so delirious from thirst and hunger that he'd imagined the whole disaster. Remembering Tucker's nightmares, some people harbored opinions that the boy had freaked out and jumped for no reason at all. It was also suggested that Tucker and John had spent their week camping, not climbing, and that this was all a ruse to test Camp Four's affections and grief, that
Tucker was hiding somewhere, spying on his own funeral in the manner of Huckleberry Finn. The obvious rebuttal was that if it were so, the joke was really on Tucker, for all his equipment had been given away. His dictionary now belonged to Katie, his comic book collection had been dispersed among a dozen readers, Bullseye wore his giant leather jacket, and most of the tapes in his library of classical music had been recorded over with U2, Talking Heads, and Johnny Paycheck.
But the most favored rumor was, perhaps out of habit, the most esoteric one. It took John's strange suspicions and festooned them with Katie's insistence that Tucker had told her Page 117
about seeing the ghost of the smuggler on the night of Camp Four's blowout.
While the idea of a huge, bloody ghost seeking vengeance was gory and superstitious, it was far less frightening than the alternative explanation that John had marooned his partner, dead or injured, on the wall. The Valley climbers were fundamentally peaceful folk, and it came naturally to them to give John the benefit of the doubt even if it meant lying to each other with impossible ghost stories no one really believed. For some reason this particular rumor angered Kresinski more than anything else. He would get quieter as the various details were told, until finally it got too much and he'd erupt, cursing their naïveté and paranoia. Why he should get so hot over the absurd ghost story, no one really knew. But one result was that people took to steering clear of Kresinski's campsite and knitting their gossip around other file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (139
of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52
Jeff Long - Angels of Light fires. Everyone did his best to pretend the war was over, that the matter was buried and it was the old days again when you could smile and tell jokes while racking up for your day climb. Big-wall season, when the dark nights were short and the weather mild, was right around the corner, and everyone had begun thinking of this or that route and training for another bright, hard-core summer.
Only eleven climbers volunteered to hike up to the base of Half Dome for the second look. At Bullseye's suggestion, three people jogged up the tourist route to the top of Half Dome and snaked out to the edge of the Visor on their bellies and examined the entire face from above with binoculars. Not only had they found no body, they'd found no ledges except for that last one with the white sand, and Tucker definitely wasn't there. Empty-handed, they were back in camp before twilight. Already people were forgetting what Tucker looked like, and the rangers hadn't even been told about his disappearance yet.
On his third morning down, John quit hiding. Hobbling across the road to the pay showers, he cut the filthy hand tape off with a pocket-knife, washed away the sweat, blood, mud, and wall dirt, shaved, and poured a small brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide over his cuts and blisters, astonished at how much the foaming solution burned. Wearing a clean pair of jeans and a brilliant white oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he returned to Camp Four and grabbed his climbing shoes, a pair of green cotton shorts, a last can of tuna, and his notebook with the hand-drawn topo of the Visor inside. He passed through camp to the parking lot. The fact that his truck's engine started right up gave him confidence. Maybe things would start going his way again. He pulled out of the lot and headed west toward the park exits. It was a warm day and he had some decisions to make. If nothing else, maybe he could get some bouldering in up near Tuolumne Meadows. As El Cap soared in his windshield, John couldn't resist pulling over to sightsee and check the obvious lines for climbers.
It was still early enough in the morning so that the Nose was highlit beside the Dawn Wall, and west of the prow the Heart, Salathe, Excalibur, the Shield, the Diagonal, and all the other routes hung cool in the shadows. To the right of the Nose, John's eye traced up Mosquito Wall. It was closed and off limits for the next six months so the falcons could breed and nest, and there were no climbers on it. That was a rule the rangers didn't have to enforce. For the local climbers, the animals—the real animals like falcons, not the caricatures like the sugar-stupefied bears—came first in the Valley. In close second came the climbers themselves.
And way behind them came everyone else. Any "outside" climber stupid or brash enough to trespass on the nesting grounds would be met at the top by a posse of Valley boys. If they were lucky and pleaded dumb and their ignorance was halfway credible, they only lost their equipment. If they acted righteous, though, as a pair from Santa Cruz once had, they got a beating and their fingers broken—climbing privileges revoked. John and Tucker's risky ascent of Mosquito Wall last Christmas, with all its dangers and off-Page 118
of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52
Jeff Long - Angels of Light season suffering, had exemplified the sincerity behind Camp Four's aesthetics. It was the Golden Rule backward: Do as we do, or fuck you, die. John let the truck idle while he squinted up at the Captain. Sometimes climbers blended in with the stone, so he spent an extra minute looking for stationary dots of color that would signify haul bags. But there was no one up on the wall yet. Almost May, and the walls were empty. We got distracted, thought John. The lake had blinded them to their purpose.
In that sense, they'd lost far more than they'd gained these past few weeks. Soon, though, people would be back on track. The rock would be teeming with minuscule creatures inching high. How strange, the old thought suddenly hit him. To gamble everything and only end up where you started. Each climber carries a landscape in his mind, a place of very private mountains and seas.
For some, Everest or the Eiger
Nordwand or the Visor or Tucker's Makalu West Face had to be wrestled with and suffered and touched before they had a place in this landscape. For other people, just driving through the Valley was enough to connect them with their interior mountains. And in the end, the mountains were all inside your mind anyway.
John had begun to let Tucker fade. It was hard to let go. But then again, it was hard to hang on.
As with Tony, his last image of Tucker was of a breathing, moving, vital person square in the middle of life. As with Tony, there was no body—yet—to say good-bye to. So it went. One minute they were so present you could smell what they'd eaten for breakfast and touch them and hear their exertion under heavy labor. And the next minute, the other end of the rope was suddenly simply empty. After years of carrying Tony around inside him, John had found a place to leave his memory. By now he could barely remember the shape of Tony's long face. Likewise, Tucker was fresh today, but in six months? In two years?
"Goddamn it, Tuck," John whispered. His heart was heavy. It shouldn't have been like this. He wanted Tucker here beside him so they could pass the binoculars back and forth while they lounged in the meadow dreaming up new routes on El Cap, pointing, wondering, fearing. No more. John clenched his teeth at those two words.
No more. He limped up to the cab and worked his right leg in, purposely milking some hurt out of the leg in order to blanket the hurt in his chest. Tucker's equipment had been absorbed into the tribe. His body was nowhere to be found. The boy had been erased. And still his parents didn't know any more than the rangers knew, which was nothing. The thought put John in a spin.
Yesterday Katie had asked him to go over to Yosemite Lodge with her and make the phone call to Tucker's parents. It took him a few minutes to say yes, and then once they were there at the bank of pay phones he'd
almost bolted for the door in search of air. The operator put them through to Norman, Oklahoma, but as chance had it, all they'd gotten was a woman's voice on a recording machine, and of course they'd immediately hung up. The Valley climbers truly lived in a separate world. If they chose to, Tucker's death could be kept a secret for months, maybe forever. The rest of the world would believe he was deep
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (141
of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52
Jeff Long - Angels of Light in a Sierran maw, playing out his teenage destiny, safe with himself.
At peace. And he was. All of those things. The only difference was that Tucker couldn't sit in the meadow anymore. He couldn't brush his teeth in the river. He couldn't dumbfound Bullseye with his mispronunciations, and he couldn't stand in stirrups at a belay anchor listening to Beethoven on his Walkman. John was going to miss that. He already did. Badly. He pulled Page 119
out onto the one-way road and continued along, turning right toward Mantica, and twenty minutes later turning right again on
Highway 120 toward Tioga Pass and Tuolumne.
As he tooled east and north, domes started surfacing from the earth like white and gold whales taking air. Their humped backs gleamed with glacier polish and sunlight, and water streaks showed black where erosion had fleshed away the granite and left behind dark feldspar crystals and spurs. John had spent many summers up here high above the Valley's heat and tourists, and the domes spoke to him with an old familiarity. He knew his way around up here, and that was a comfort. On his left stately Pleasure Dome faced Tenaya Lake and faded into Harlequin Dome and The
Shark. He passed cracks and smooth face-climbs sporting titles like Get Slick, Aztec Two-Step, Vicious Thing, Shit Hooks, Luke Skywalker, Pencil-Necked Geek, The Whore That Ate Chicago, and Tales From The Crypt. There was still a good amount of snow up here. The snowplows had given up just short of the sweeping flanks of The Lamb, and their circular turnaround had become a convenient parking lot for weekend cross-country skiers. The plows would begin chewing away at the snow in a couple of weeks, opening the highway pass for summer tourists. Today the cul-de-sac was empty. Half a dozen wispy, melting ski tracks led off into the woods in different directions. John parked. Ahead stood Daff Dome with its 5.11a Bearded Clam, and to the left jutted the glossy tit of Doda Dome. He enjoyed it here in the Meadows, but though he was alone this morning, the terrain felt over-populated, too public. He suddenly felt impatient to get where he was going.