Angels of Light

by Jeff Long

  "Bury them," she said.

  "I can't."

  "You can."

  "Do you know how much I hate them?" he asked.

  She frowned.

  "I was sick. I was dying. Just like him." Sometimes he could see it so vividly. "Torn to shit by the mountain. And the storm, it was like a Veg-o-Matic, ripping us down. We were getting shredded." Immense, beautiful avalanches had blossomed on either side of their ridge. Until the sun disappeared you could even see rainbows in the hovering avalanche powder. "There was no hope. And he knew it. There was no reason for him to say fuck yeah, John. What's that mean, fuck yeah, John? That's my name. John."

  If he stared at the fossils hard enough, Tony's face appeared sometimes, lips working over and Page 125

  over at John's name. Now there were two of them to answer to. He'd begun hearing Tucker call to him on the long swim down.

  "John," said Liz.

  He was desperate.

  "I forgive you, John," she said.

  "You can't."

  "But I do."

  She took the chance and collected him against her chest. There was a moment of pushing away, but she held on. In the end she was right. He was not a strong man.

  Holding his scratched, brown body against hers, Liz wondered if she had any love left for him, but that wasn't the point right now. She had forgiven him. That was paramount. Having said it, now she had to find ways to be true to it.

  When they ended up making love beneath that strange wall of fossils, Liz felt little passion.

  Neither of them climaxed, which embarrassed them both because impotence seemed like a bad way to start things all over again, if that's what this really was. Instead of trying the sex with more energy, they fell asleep cushioned against one another. In that way, each wordlessly hoped, when they woke up the bad times could seem like a dream.

  As it turned out, Liz had packed in gear and supplies for an overnight. The sleeping bag and food and gas stove had nothing to do with spontaneity, even less to do with expectation. She hadn't really expected to find John. But even cashiered and disgraced, she was a professional, and no professional would enter the backcountry on a search without the basics. Unable to sleep for long, she squeezed out through the entrance-way and then manhandled her pack back through. John woke up, and they shared some food and kept their talk small while the horizon burned out and dusk fell. The hike out would be simple and flat, unimpeded by trees or streams, and they could be back on the valley floor before midnight. All the same, seeing her file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (149

  of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52

  Jeff Long - Angels of Light sleeping bag, John asked Liz to stay the night. "There's some sort of mineral in the wall," he said. "It makes the fossils glow in the dark."

  "We could," she answered dubiously.

  "I want to sleep with you is what I'm saying." Because of Kresinski, Liz had always refused to stay overnight with John in Camp Four: "Too incestuous," she'd say. And now, because of her trouble with the law, John guessed Liz wouldn't want him at her cabin.

  "Are you cold?" They had dressed again, and she was nestled under his arm.

  "Keep me warm is all."

  John had never built a fire in the cove, and he didn't offer to now. For one thing you could never be sure who might see the glow and try to investigate. Also, he was afraid the smoke might blacken the olive-color limestone and mute its fluorescence.

  "You know," he said, "I have some money."

  To his surprise, Liz smiled in the failing light. "I'll bet you do."

  "A lot of money." Her good humor warmed him. "And none of it's spent."

  "And you want me to run away with you."

  John decided she wasn't being sarcastic. "Yeah. I do."

  "Leave the Valley?"

  "We already talked about it."

  "I know."

  "I'm not part of it anymore. You aren't, either."

  "Amen. But what about my grand jury?"

  "Screw it."

  Page 126

  "Jump bail?"

  "Screw it."

  "You have enough money to buy my parents a new ranch?"

  He stopped. Even turning it into a game had hidden snags. His spirits sank. "I'm just saying—"

  "What?"

  "Are we that stuck, Liz?"

  "I am."

  "But afterward, we can go, Liz."

  "Afterward? You can see the future?"

  "It's all bullshit. They're not going to do anything to you. You didn't do anything."

  "You're going to make a great character witness, John. Camp Four Bum. Drug pirate." She was trying to keep it light. Trying to dodge his intent.

  John plowed ahead. "I want you to go with me. Now or later. Whenever you say."

  "That's a switch," Liz said. Her voice was guardedly wooden. To John's ear, she sounded the way he felt about Tucker. As if he were tiptoeing beneath a levee that was about to break.

  file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (150

  of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52

  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  "Not really. It just took a little time, you know."

  "John," she sighed. "I don't know if I can do that with you anymore."

  He tried misunderstanding her. "Anywhere you want," he said.

  "It might be you and I've gone everywhere we need to. Maybe it's just too late anymore."

  "No," he reacted. But of course he would react. It was a climber's mind-set. Wherever there was a challenge, there was a fight. Wherever there was a mountain, there was assault. Once upon a time, Liz had found that contrariness charming. Now it was tiresome. John sensed her annoyance and tried to back away.

  "What I mean is, all of a sudden, lately, everything seems too late," he said. "And I just don't want it to be too late for you and me."

  "Uh-huh," she said. Even the "you and me" annoyed her.

  I'm losing her, thought John. But maybe it had been too late to start with. With distaste, he suddenly saw in himself his father's pattern. Drift. See the sights. Beat the bitch, there was always some bitch: your latest pussy, the rig chief, the worn-out clutch, the road, the sun, the wind. And there was always some way to beat it. Cuss it.

  Hit it. Quit. Move on. It was a curse, and John could see a future in which there was no way free of it. There seemed not a single thing to say that would change things.

  The night got chillier. Liz's Thermolite pad and sleeping bag were designed for one person, so they kept their clothes on and clung together for warmth. Her head pillowed on John's shoulder, Liz dropped into a deep, still sleep that suggested need.

  She needed sleep. And she needs me, John decided. Her breath was warm and smelled a little of garlic from the supper cheese. For John, there wasn't much sleep.

  The night was like a big-wall night. Through the first half, he catnapped. Around midnight, though, the stars and the glowing fossil wall and the silence kept him awake. The water's source froze up and the waterfall quit splashing into its granite bowl. High above, the constellations moved. He felt a rock poking his ribs through the pad, but shifting would have meant waking Liz, so the ribs stayed on the rock. He breathed her smells gratefully and waited for the eastern sky to darken into the cobalt that precedes dawn. The sunlight would turn Liz's hair into a golden nest. He remembered other mornings, lying in the cabin or out in a tent or on the ground, watching the way her hair caught the light while she went on sleeping, oblivious to how central she was to the sun's purpose. John waited and thought a few thoughts, drifting halfway Page 127

  between yesterday and tomorrow.

  file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (151

  of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52

  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  CHAPTER 12

  It might have been another night as Bullseye knelt on the edge of the abyss with his hands and arms wired together behind his back, slightly stoned
and yet sharp as a laser. But it wasn't. It was the same sky twisting overhead, the same star groups, the same rising moon that elsewhere was lighting up Liz's golden hair in John's secret cove. He found Sagittarius, his birth sign, and connected the dots and shot the arrow.

  Cross-valley, Sentinel gleamed like a vast slick cock. The trees were like candles guttering silver in the moonlight. And beneath his knees spread the floor of a small amphitheater, but he couldn't see it, didn't look. Forever hung in that inky pool. It was only a hundred feet or so of free-fall, but that was about eighty feet more than he wanted to go.

  Nada was nada.

  It was that kind of a night, Manichaean with lots of dark, but lots of light, too. He even saw a white owl leap from its roost, utterly transcendent, and wing off into the nether hunting critters.

  Taxman's comin', thought Bullseye. Always got to pay them taxes. His mind was racing.

  Logically he knew that a rock dropped from this cliff would strike ground in, what, about five seconds. But that was the trouble with logic. Because he also knew that if you dropped Bullseye into the pit, he'd never land. No problem, though. He wasn't going to take off in the first place.

  He had a plan.

  His face was pulpy from the beating. The beating, Bullseye had decided by now, was for shock value. The stranger had simply yanked him out of z-land and administered his fists without a word. Too bad Ernie was off courting coyote bitches or taking rabbit or just checking it out, wherever he was, because this bastard would have gone down in a pile of screaming meat. You got the wrong guy, Bullseye had meant to shout in the first few minutes. But the man had already thought of that with a blow to his belly, which kept Bullseye occupied searching for air. Besides, there wasn't any right guy for middle-of-the-night gestapo crap like this. It was like the man had wandered in from a Nicaragua death squad or something. And yet there was nothing sadistic about those big methodical knuckles. They did their job, no more or less. It took probably three minutes to flatten his nose and seriously scare him. He'd been allowed to vomit, then his arms got pulled behind him and he felt the wire whipping tight around his wrists. Right away his hands went dead. The man knew exactly what he was doing as he bound higher up Bullseye's arms.

  With a final tug, he got

  Bullseye's elbows to touch and wrapped them tight that way, an impossible position that created impossible pain. Bullseye heard his sternum pop and he wanted to bellow his hurt, but that was the whole idea of getting trussed this way, shallow breathing, minimal protest. A shorter strand Page 128

  of wire bound around his neck formed a leash that got wired to the van's door handle. The man had actually patted him on

  file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (152

  of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52

  Jeff Long - Angels of Light the shoulder, like relax, this'll only take a minute. It took a bit longer than that, though not much.

  First he ransacked the van, throwing books and gear and his spider collection and some potted cacti around. The damage could have been worse, but the man appeared to be searching for something fairly large, and Bullseye had figured, screw it. Once the son of a bitch realized his mistake, he'd untie him and Bullseye could put his house back in order and let his face heal up.

  No real harm done. No teeth broken.

  And the nose had never been much to look at in the first place. He wouldn't even report the incident to the rangers. Strange, violent things happened when outsiders came into the Valley.

  Sometimes you got in their way was all. Mostly they just disappeared like evil genies back to their nether lands and you never saw them again.

  Living alone out in the woods carried certain vulnerabilities. As Bullseye stood in his Fruit of the Looms next to his van tied with baling wire smelling Ernie's musky piss on the bumper, he actually wondered why something like this hadn't happened before.

  In a word, he was pacific. His water was calm, no tempest in sight. Once or twice, he let himself wonder where the hell his dog had hied off to, and God, the weeping and gnashing of teeth when this motherfucker met the bloody wrath of a kick-ass halfbreed. But, seeing as how Ernie was nowhere on the horizon and his only alternative was to choke in the wire leash, Bullseye kept it sweet and cool. His various efforts to see his assailant's face were in vain, for one eye was puffed shut, and the darkness among all his trees was profound. All he could say for sure was that the man had the strength of—he paused—a garage mechanic? A sumo wrestler? A robot? The residual THC of his earlier pot helped a bit, but mainly he kept his anger down by keeping his intellectual composure up. There were, for instance, the five journalistic W's that needed answering: who, what, why, where, when. None of it was coming together, though. Was this one of the duped bikers from his past? Some L.A.

  chemical freak? A highway psycho? Strange thing was, the man acted more like a cop than a stalker, certain of himself, unfrenzied, every motion a study in economy. But what had he done that everyone else hadn't? And say this was a cop. What kind? And why alone? And what was he looking for? DEA? One of those FBI dudes he'd harangued at the blowout? But even at the height of his revolutionary fever in the ripe hot days of Vietnam and Chicago, Bullseye wouldn't have dreamed up a lone agent working this far beyond the pale. Weirder things had happened, he reckoned, and just wished it could be over soon. At last the man backed through the van's sliding door. Stabbing his flashlight beam here and there around the clearing, he started to circle the van to where Bullseye waited.

  Suddenly, his light picked up Bullseye's food bag hanging like a giant blue plum in the treetops, and the man stopped cold. The way he looked from the bag to Bullseye and back up, you could tell he was thinking bingo. He lowered the bag and eagerly file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (153

  of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52

  Jeff Long - Angels of Light yanked open the drawstring on top and jammed his light inside.

  From where he stood, all Bullseye could see was a yard-wide set of shoulders slumped in disappointment, which was enough. Whatever the man thought was in there wasn't.

  Perch on it, Bullseye grinned with deep satisfaction. Now it was over. The bastard would leave.

  Page 129

  Fuck you, thought Bullseye, and started to plot how he'd cut the man off in the woods and hamstring him with his Swiss army knife or call a strike in with his dog or sound a hue and cry in Camp Four, not that they'd hear. But, still being wired to the van, Bullseye kept his cards close to the vest. The sucker was crazy, but even a crazy man's not going to let a hornet loose. And that's what Bullseye figured he was: a mad fucking hornet. So Bullseye was surprised when the man came over and unwired the leash from the door handle. He was even more surprised when, incredibly, the man pushed the van shell over on its side. It was like being at the mercy of a bad drug.

  "What the fuck do you want?" Bullseye finally dared to ask.

  "That's not even close to good enough," the man replied.

  "Serious, man. I don't know what you want."

  The dark shape sighed. "That's your elective," he said. "Let's go." He started to lead Bullseye off into the woods by the wire leash.

  "Tell me what it is," Bullseye pleaded. "I don't know."

  "Here's what it is, Mr. Broomis." The use of his real name seemed as calculated as the rise-'n'-shine beating. Again Bullseye tried to see his assailant's face, and again glimpsed only a huge dark figure in the night, like a black hole in the blackness. "All you need to know is that you're doing this to yourself. I'm not really against you."

  The thought hit Bullseye harder than a fist. "Can I think a minute?" he begged. He needed to slow down, sort through, orient. It was a mistake. But the man knew his name. There had to be options. Compromise. Already Bullseye was prepared to capitulate on almost any terms, if only he could grasp the terms. A minute and he could find his bearings and communicate. He could network with the motherfucker.

  All he needed was a minut
e.

  "No," the man said and yanked on the wire around his neck. Stage by rapid stage, Bullseye learned how quickly the human spirit shuns chaos. He was at the man's mercy, and yet there was no hint of mercy in this man. This was Bullseye's Valley, and yet this stranger knew the path better than he did. The assault made no sense, and yet Bullseye had always believed that ignorance was your own responsibility.

  He kept begging for a minute, just a minute, first to think, finally just to breathe. And he kept not getting it. By the time they had climbed the hillside stretching high above Bullseye's hole in the forest and threaded between piles of old, rotting slash left over from a fire ignited by lightning in 1958, by the time Bullseye was led to the edge of this circular cliff and had knelt down on the cold earth to observe the quicksilver trees and the quicksilver owl, he knew his captor was exactly right, that ignorance is

  file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (154

  of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52

  Jeff Long - Angels of Light a form of knowledge, too. There are no accidents. There is no coincidence. The goofy fog he'd spent a lifetime weaving for himself... lifted. He suddenly understood that

  John had warned them all, but they'd made themselves deaf. They'd made themselves blind with doubt, mute with gossip. Tucker hadn't slipped, because

  Tucker wouldn't have. Because there are no accidents. There is will. Bullseye stared off over the trees, marveling at how much we pretend to ourselves not to see. Now he realized that from his very first perception, he'd known this giant was Tucker's killer.

  The other connections escaped him, the whys and now-whats, but at least he was clear now. He was in tremendous pain and fear. But at least the confusion was gone.

  As it always does, if only to affect the next cause, the chaos took on a purpose. That was the foothold he needed. He began crafting a plan.

  Page 130

  "Mr. Broomis?" The man was pacing behind him, but his voice was patient.

  "Not much scares me," said Bullseye. "But you got me scared. Honest-to-fucking-God scared."