Angels of Light

by Jeff Long

  If that's true, partway is far enough."

  "What man? There is no man."

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  "There was a photograph. Tucker found it in that big leather jacket. Kreski took the photo away from him before anybody else could see it, but yesterday he showed it to me. Remember that body in the lake?"

  Liz didn't reply. Of course she remembered it.

  "Well, he had a twin brother. The photo shows them both."

  "And that's got you running off with Matt? A face in a photo?" She shook her head.

  "No, John. This is too selfish. You're being paranoid and abusive. You're abusing yourself and you're abusing me."

  "There's more, Liz. I just haven't told you."

  "Don't bother."

  "Up at the Amphitheater there were tracks. The same tracks are down here. You really think someone just came out of the blue and vandalized the van? This was no chance encounter."

  "Stop. Just stop. You've created a monster out of all your fears. You want him to exist. You want a simple answer. A scapegoat."

  "I found part of Tucker up there, too."

  He felt Liz freeze in his arms. "You what?"

  "His T-shirt. It was hanging from a tree on top of the Amphitheater."

  "What are you talking about?" she said.

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  "Nothing," John said.

  "I thought you were different," she said in a sad, dying voice. "I hoped. But you and Matt, you're both the same." When John couldn't find anything to say, she turned her back to him and curled up. "I deserve better," she murmured. "I do."

  John ran his fingers down the hard, silky ridge of her spine, counting. "You're wrong," he said.

  "Kresinski." And suddenly the thought came out more forcefully.

  "He thinks all that glues us to the world is this, this much." He held up the fingertips on one hand. He reached around so that Liz could see them even though it was dark.

  "But he doesn't know. It's this." And he set his hand over her heart. "This."

  After a minute, John felt her chest heaving. She was crying. Even so, she kept her back to him.

  Then they heard Kresinski whistling off in the distance.

  "I have to go," said John. He found his clothes and quickly pulled them on. His hand touched the Clorox bottle and he took a drink of water, then groped for his tennis shoes. "Tomorrow.

  Maybe the day after. I'll be back." He leaned back and touched her leg. "It's almost over."

  She stayed curled under the sleeping bag, inert and silent. If she was still crying, he couldn't hear it.

  "I'm coming back for you, Liz."

  John muffled a groan as he straightened up outside the van. Fucking knees, he thought. His back was stiff. His hands ached. He was starved and sore and weary from too much laboring and too little sleep. But soon it would be over. A brisk hike

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light halfway to the lake, then they could lay their ambush and wait. John had no idea how to lay an ambush or if that was even the best thing to do. All he could say with certainty was that the Merced River was muddy with runoff, and that meant the backcountry snows were melting. That meant the avalanche hazard up Bullseye's Valley of Death would probably be minimal now. The sun would have triggered most of the slides. The pillar of ice that Bullseye had climbed would be gone. The lake might even be melted. He couldn't imagine what was drawing Kresinski up there, or why the smuggler should follow them all the way in.

  Again he wondered why he was going in with Kresinski, and again he accepted that there was simply a momentum. A day in. Maybe a night spent waiting. By tomorrow night he could be back in the Valley. And then his obligation to the dead would be done as far as he could personally do it. Either the smuggler would follow or he wouldn't. If not, then John would pay a visit to park headquarters and share his findings with the rangers. He would show them the boot prints at the Amphitheater and here in the clearing. He'd show them Tucker's bloody T-shirt and explain its significance. Somehow he would get that photo Kresinski was hoarding. And, of course, if Bullseye recovered enough to speak, they could all hear the story from a victim firsthand. If he and Kresinski came up empty on this "snipe hunt," then John would surrender vengeance to the state. But if along the trail John turned around and the ghost was actually there, then what? Feeling like he did—hung over from too much wilderness—he couldn't summon up the rage of yesterday. Not at this hour on this stomach in this dark. As gently as he could, John slid the metal door shut and closed Liz safely away. Kresinski quit whistling. John could feel him smiling in the dark.

  They'd come close, Liz thought curled beneath the sleeping bag. She listened to John's and Matthew's footsteps recede and kept her eyes shut. No one had traveled quite so far with her, and together she and John had almost reached the house. The house was both an image and a ruins, one of her greatest secrets. When she closed her eyes like this, she could sometimes Page 153

  draw it from the well in the backyard, a perfect oval in which the house stood reflected. It was her grandfather's place on the original homestead in Oregon, a squat, beetle-browed cabin with a chimney made of stone and stacked, rust-eaten flour tins for flues. Though it had fallen into disrepair and the roof would have caved in if not for the intertwined roots of grass growing on top, still the river mud packed between its peeled logs was hard as cement. The Oregon desert wind had cured the logs, and the house was close to ageless. The waxed-paper windows had torn, naturally, and the front door was off its steel hinges so that horses and cattle had learned to huddle in it during storms. Coyote and rabbit and mice and birds lived in burrows or nests built into the rafters or under the walls.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light would bring her there for picnics. They'd set up cans and bottles and practice with

  Ken's lever-action 30-ought. It became a faraway rendezvous for the sons and daughters of the sons and daughters of homesteaders whose names they all carried.

  Sometimes you'd drive up and find a condom outside one of the windows or someone would have forgotten a piece of their clothing. Because she'd always associated the cabin with love, and also because her grandpa had deeded it to her, Liz had decided this house was going to be her house. She was going to fill it with light and inhabit it with children. One day she would bring her husband out onto the sweet, musky desert, and they would unpiece the massive log beams. Onto each timber they would nail a metal plate stamped with a consecutive number, and then they'd truck the whole kit up off the desert onto a mountain slope. Montana, California, Colorado. It didn't matter so long as there was a thick stand of aspens outside the bedroom window so that the leaves would rattle like gold coins in the autumn. They'd build a new roof for it and trim the gables with copper flashing. The copper would slowly go to verdigris. They would be happy.

  John had come close. She'd almost invited him to drive north the afternoon after her Wild Horse interview, but Tucker had been waiting in Reno for them. And then yesterday as they departed from John's secret hole in the wall, she'd almost said on a whim to hell with the Valley, I have this dream to show you. Half the proposition still stood anyway. Precisely half. To hell with the Valley. In a way she resented him more than any other man in her life. At least Kresinski had been treacherous up front.

  John. John got your trust and faith. Even when he was a son of a bitch, you wanted to believe in him because he wanted you to. It felt safe and proper in his arms, but in the end all he was was another wild man full of visions and lies. She felt deeply disappointed in herself. There had to be
something all tangled up for her to keep abusing herself with men like that. Fuck them. Maybe it was time to go to her house after all, but leave it on the high Sonoran flats out with the cutting wind and to hell with a friend and a lover. She could do it all herself.

  Maybe a quarter hour passed, she was unsure. She might have drifted into sleep.

  Then she heard a single set of footsteps returning to the van. It was John, she knew.

  It had to be. He had changed his mind and ditched Matthew. Her heart filled with gratitude, and she started to rise up and look out the window into the darkness.

  But suddenly the door ripped open and her legs were gripped by two enormously powerful hands. Naked, she felt herself pulled out into the cold and dumped belly down on the ground.

  She started to fight, but one of those hands clapped the left side of her head with amazing force, deafening her. Even though it was too dark, she tried to look up, but her head was yanked violently backward by her hair. For a minute she was paralyzed with the thought of her neck breaking. She went perfectly still on her hands and knees as her head bent back further yet. Her breasts hung down and her cunt felt wide open. The vulnerability of her sex and breasts alarmed Page 154

  her, convincing

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light her this was a rape. That blunt. That simple. Then a thin cold edge of metal traced across her exposed throat, and she quit breathing. Her eyes stared at the cup of sky high above.

  "Please," she said.

  In the next instant she felt the knife change its mind. Instead it cut through her long, perfect hair.

  Indifferent to her flesh, the knife turned hot as it sliced part of her scalp.

  That suddenly her head was released, and her severed hair dropped in a bundle across her hands.

  "Now tell me," said a man's voice. "Where did they go?"

  CHAPTER 15

  It was slow, muddy going. Nothing was straightforward, and the detours were so numerous John began to feel like a rat in a maze. Except for where trees and rocks shaded it, the snow had melted, and their trail—Kresinski's idea of a trail—lay choked with young rubble and fallen timber. The Great Yosemite earthquake had occurred several years before, a six-pointer on the Richter, but John had largely forgotten about it because the lower Valley had consumed the marks of devastation. The Park

  Service had quickly restored ruined footpaths and bucked tipped pines and oaks into firewood and otherwise adjusted the necessary cosmetics. Where they had suddenly jutted up, shear lines had turned into conventional features and landmarks. Climbers new to the Valley never even suspected that certain cracks on the walls had shifted, closing tight or widening into difficulties they now took for granted. But here above the Valley where park rangers seldom came, the land was almost impenetrably tangled, and John was reminded of the earthquake all over again. Just a month earlier, with deep snow covering the trail and visions of gold dancing in their heads, it had been easy for the raiders from Camp Four to blithely ignore the buckled land.

  Now it was impossible. The trail was a bald, muddy, choked puzzle, and John was not pleased.

  "Hump the bitch raw," was Kresinski's parting advice, and their wisest act yet was to part almost as soon as the trek began and keep a good mile or two between them.

  Now John picked his way through the desolation. Trees had been uprooted where they stood or else piled down like Lincoln Logs by wide torrents of landslide. Higher file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (184

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light up, John saw, big granite spires along the skyline had snapped off like old telegraph poles. With great patience, not always following Kresinski's footprints, he picked his way across a field of tenuous scree, then caught the remains of the trail for a short Page 155

  while before it disappeared altogether. Rather than posthole across a field of wet snow, he outmaneuvered it along a wind-polished drift. The path cut toward Mount Lyell and Electra Peak, then crossed a minor pass. Kresinski, the trickster, stayed far ahead. He had lured John into coming to the lake, then fooled him by insisting they take the longer, conventional trail instead of the shortcut John, Bullseye, and Tucker had used on their entrance.

  The other way would have been shorter and certainly less tortuous. But Kresinski had reasoned that the smuggler might get lost on the shortcut or might suspect a trap. So the trek was on Kresinski's terms, his trail.

  John's foul mood wasn't helped much by the turning weather. The sky was dark and leaden, mottled with gangrenous patches like in one of Albert Bierstadt's stormy, moralistic landscapes.

  It reminded John of the "warts, tumors, boils, and blisters"

  and other invectives that Europeans had once heaped upon their mountains. The Christian opinion back then had held that mountains were mineral wreckage left piled after the Great Flood, and had reviled them as a terrible, chaotic region like the soul of man. Full of deceptions. Full of illusions. It was the same reason Apaches called the earth a shadow world.

  John shifted his pack. He grunted a prayer against the storm. His heart wasn't in this bullshit vigilante trek. Not for the first time this morning he sensed that Kresinski was bluffing. He was annoyed with himself, most of all for his petulant uncertainty, but kept moving along. He felt unanchored. He had a USGS topo map for the region, but it was no help at all in this strange and rapid territory. Like the land through which they were moving, events were just too masculine and large, too jungled and wild and fast. The day's sole bright point was that the pissy sky wasn't pissing on them yet, though now and then a solitary snowflake streaked by. He couldn't decide which would be worse: getting snowed in or getting snowed in with Kresinski.

  At noon or so—the sun was deeply buried—John shucked his pack and scampered up the butt of a small, smooth dome for a look around. He scanned the trail they were laying, but there was no motion back where there should have been, no smuggler. He recognized Mount Florence, but that didn't prevent his feeling lost. His old claustrophobic feelings of the labyrinth were closing in on him. The longer he stayed in here, the more the walls were going to spring up and lock him in. After a few minutes of concentration, he located Kresinski a mile or more ahead, a tiny reed receding on the long, steep plain whiskered with tufts of green spring grass. Not far from here, down on the Nevada piedmont, Paiutes used to quarry obsidian for arrowheads, and magnesium was being mined in huge sci-fi concrete tombs lit with eerie green vapor lights. In the far distance a handful of Sierra peaks bragged along the horizon. There was Mount Florence and the back of Unicorn Peak. But where was

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light he really? What was he really doing here? He felt like he was soaring high above the earth and yet at the same time trapped in the cold mud. Christ, he cursed. I'm just an ape flapping my wings. He'd come such a long, long way to find the source of the Nile, to reach the South Pole, to track Friday's footprint on the beach. And this was where he'd gotten. A country ravaged by the hand of God. We're running and we're scared, he thought, watching Kresinski. But what were they fleeing? A creature, to be sure, but a creature that was invisible, monstrous, and irrational. The smuggler had become their dragon. Slaying it would never restore the Valley's innocence, though.

  Nothing would. Nothing could. They themselves had violated the pact.

  Descending from the dome, he slipped on his pack straps and continued along the trail. Several times he fixed on a certain rock or tree in the distance and swore that would be his end point.

  He would go that far, no farther, then turn around and find Liz and leave the Valley forever. But each time he reached his landmark, he went farther. It was a Page 156

  habit. Climbers always need to see where the c
rack will lead.

  Another few feet, another pitch. Pretty soon you're standing on the summit. In a way he was just climbing another mountain by following this trail. In his mind, anyway, it felt the same: You reach, you grab.

  Moving steadily along a high, narrowing ridge, he followed a rocky tongue to where it abruptly ended and dropped away. Below, some hundred feet down, a sharp igneous spine led off into the distance. On either side the spine gave way for another five hundred feet to open space and wind. His first reaction was to be annoyed and blame his own inattention. Very obviously he'd taken a wrong turn somewhere. And yet

  Kresinski's footsteps led right up to the edge. Then John saw a faded-green rope dangling over the left-hand corner and remembered the stories told in Camp Four about a steep, frightening bottleneck on what they'd dubbed the Great Spice Road.

  This rope on this cliff had cut miles off the regular trail, but it had also cost much time, for thousands of pounds of marijuana had needed to be hauled up by hand. The wind was picking up a little, swinging the rope like a lazy cat's tail, and individual pellets of snow spun past. One of John's fingers throbbed from old frostbite, and he pulled his headband down over the tips of his ears. Enough. This had to be halfway.

  Now he could turn around and return to the Valley. They'd offered themselves as bait, but the dragon hadn't budged. Aloud, he said, "Adios," in part to Kresinski, in part to the voyage, the lake, and the revenge. He backed away from the edge. But his pride complained. He was reluctant to turn back because it would confirm his legend of abandonment. Two went up; one came down.

  As if on cue, he heard a scant ounce of noise on the forward horizon, a faint "pip" too bass for a marmot. He inspected the skyline, and there, ridiculously, was Kresinski's tiny figure flapping its arms. "Jackass." John frowned. A moment later he heard the minuscule peep again and shook his head at it. Had the King been trying, he couldn't have seemed more trivial. The whole venture was deteriorating into a nasty little