Angels of Light

by Jeff Long

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light cartoon. Time to bag it and haul on out of here before the day turned him into a stick figure, too. But John hesitated anyway. He took stock. They'd covered at least fourteen miles since dawn, and the lake was supposedly twenty miles in by this route.

  Doing some hasty math, he calculated that it would actually be quicker to go up to the lake and descend by his shortcut than to double back along the path already covered. The day brightened for him. By going to the lake he would actually be accelerating his departure from it. Also, he now admitted, there was something undeniably magnetic about the lake. That little scoop of water had given birth to much legend, both good and bad. One more look and he could really say good-bye.

  He'd done too many climbs to expect any sort of punctuation at the lake, of course.

  There was no end to the circle any more than there was a one and only summit. From every summit, you always saw other summits, that was in the topography of ascent.

  Indeed, climbers take their bearings off other mountains and past ascents and future summits the way sailors once did off the stars. One last look at the lake, John told himself, and his compass would be set. He would know there was nothing else to be pulled from the lake, or from the walls or the Valley itself. He could be at peace with his escape into the future, wherever else it lay. So he didn't turn and leave. Plowed by the wind, he stepped up to the edge and looped the rope between his legs and across one shoulder and decisively lowered himself down to the thin spine of igneous rock.

  The spine was so narrow he had to straddle it, a leg on each side. Hastily he pulled the rope free Page 157

  of his body and inched himself forward with dwarf evergreens whistling far below. It was hard enough to move along the spine with twenty pounds of down and food in his pack, and he wondered what it must have been like for all those people carrying sixty-, seventy-, and ninety-pound packs. At last the extrusion widened, and he was able to stand and carefully balance across the remaining hundred yards to less threatening ground. He picked up Kresinski's tracks again and headed upslope across ragged, stubby grasses that had no smell because the wind was so hungry.

  It took him another half hour to reach Kresinski. At the top of the vast, inclined grassy plain, hiding from the wind behind a solitary boulder, Kresinski was sitting inside his pack. It was a mountaineer's bivouac. He'd taken all the things out of his pack and stuck his legs inside it. For a pad, he was sitting on a coil of yellow rope. For a moment John thought he meant to spend the night here. "This the bivy?" he asked.

  "You must be kidding," Kresinski said. "I'm just keepin' warm." John turned and searched the horizon and middle ground behind and below them. There wasn't a single motion out there.

  Even the stunted pines, deformed by the elements, weren't moving in the wind. John's black hair whipped across his eyes. He kept looking for any part of the landscape to shift and become a tiny animal that would become a man, their man. Or ghost. "Don't worry about it, man,"

  Kresinski shouted up to him.

  "He's coming."

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  John backed up and squatted down beside him. Something about the flat light made Kresinski's eyes even lighter. It was like looking into the sky when there was nothing to see up there. Kresinski smiled. "Want some strawberry Kool Aid?" he said, offering a plastic water bottle.

  "We'd see him from here," said John.

  "Don't crap out on me now, dude."

  "There's no one out there, Kreski."

  "Don't give me that redskin crap," Kresinski retorted, losing his smile. More heatedly, he said,

  "You can't see everything. Besides, I got a feeling he don't want to be seen." And then he smiled again.

  John pried a pebble loose from the tundra and flicked it in the air with his thumb.

  "I'm thinking I'll head back now," he said, even though he wasn't. "This is a drag."

  "Yeah?" Kresinski appraised with a glance. "I think you're going the distance. You look pretty beat, though. You tired?" When John didn't reply, he fished inside his parka and pulled out a small jar that said D. Marie's Olives on the label. "Time to punch on the overdrive." He unfolded a blade from his Swiss army knife, unscrewed the jar's lid, and then hunched against the boulder, away from the wind. His back lifted once, then twice with separate inhalations. It was cocaine. "Here you go, bud,"

  Kresinski offered. "Put you over the hump."

  John almost accepted the jar of powder and the knife. It would indeed put him over the hump.

  He could pack his nose and race to the lake, and there wouldn't have to be a downside to the high. Not for a day or two at any rate. There was enough coke in the jar to last them to the lake and back. But it was Kresinski's high. Bad enough this was Kresinski's trail on Kresinski's time schedule. "Where'd you get that?" John asked, not that it mattered. It was just something to say.

  Kresinski screwed the lid back on and tucked it inside his parka. He wiped the blade between his fingers and smeared the residue on his gums. "It's just leftovers, man.

  Come on, you sure you don't want to catch up?" When there was no response, he snapped the Page 158

  blade shut.

  "He's not out there," said John.

  "No problem. He'll come."

  John stood up into the wind. It tore at his long black hair. "We'll see," he said. He saddled up and walked on. The lake couldn't be more than a few hours deeper in, and he'd grown tired of having Kresinski out front like a guide. By dusk they'd be on the shore of the lake; by dawn tomorrow, John would be hustling down the Valley of

  Death toward exit and Liz. He wondered if Bullseye's rope was still attached at the top of the ice pillar or if the feds had cut it loose or confiscated it as evidence. Either way, descent was no problem. Like Kresinski, he was carrying a coil of rope.

  It was ironic, he thought. He had more in common with Kresinski than any other person alive.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light hundreds of walls and mountains and seen things people had never seen. They had seen tiny spiders clambering across snow on twenty-six-thousand-foot mountains and solitary blue flowers in the Antarctic. They had seen that where life was possible, it persisted.

  Especially on the brink. In their vertical wilderness, that was the measure. It was more honest than right or wrong, sin or justice. Survival itself was right and just. The fact that each of them was still on his feet with air in his lungs on a day like today made it so. They should have been friends.

  John moved quickly, a prizefighter's ache in his bare hands. Closer to the lake, he started coming across refuse left by the Gold Rush crowd. Smaller trash like candy and food wrappers had blown east with the jet stream, but the heavier stuff like abandoned sleeping bags and flattened tents were either pegged to the ground or tied off to rocks or plastered into the trees and brush.

  People had jettisoned everything they owned to make room for the marijuana. Closer still, John found torn, slashed burlap sacking fluttering from branches. He passed sorry roofless shelters made of stone with blackened circles staining this or that corner: cavemen's fire pits. Well, the fire had gone out. There were no Young Turks in search of booty this time around. They'd come all this way just to find the ruins of Stone Age rock and rollers.

  The place looked more like an archaeological dig, like the disintegrating remains of a long-lost tribe.

  The temperature continued dropping and snowflakes streaked past. Up ahead the land hit sky in a solid horizontal line. That would be the lake, John knew. He hurried on, anxious to get it ov
er with. The mud was freezing up; his footing got slicker but also more solid. Hell, he thought, why bother even staying the night? He could tag the lake, descend what was left of the ice pillar, and be partway home before

  Kresinski even got here. With the headlamp in his pack he could even pick his way back to the valley floor and Liz by dawn. When all was said and done, he'd accomplished nothing by coming up here except to put more wear and tear on his knees and more hurt in Liz's heart. Certainly he didn't feel noble for having come. He didn't feel particularly true to Tucker's spirit. To the contrary, Tucker had never wanted to come up here in the first place. The smuggler, if there was a smuggler, had declined their invitation to follow them. The closer he got, the more reasons John counted for not being where he was. Spurning the lake was a luxury he could indulge in now that the lake was so close. A true ascetic at heart, John believed in pacing his self-indulgences, and for him emotions were as much an indulgence as sex, food, or climbing.

  Only now did he allow himself to be angry at being led off to tilt Kresinski's windmills. He had too many of his own to tilt.

  Nevertheless, for all the negatives, it was a fine, brusque day. He looked around and sniffed the Page 159

  wind. A touch of ozone in the air, and that could mean lightning among the snowflakes, always a sight to see. The wilderness swelled lyrically on every side.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light since even his aesthetics were subject to pacing, his pleasure with the lake steadily mounted along with his repulsion of it. A few steps higher, and John reached the object of his ambivalence.

  He was shocked. The lake looked like a scavenged battlefield. John hadn't expected the sunny carnival scene of the Gold Rush, but he'd figured that over almost a month's time nature would somehow have improved upon the rape of Snake Lake.

  But what lay before him was a ravaged, forgotten corpse. It was completely untransfigured. The ice had not thawed. The holes chopped in its surface could have been shotgun wounds, raw and ugly. Slinging around the rocky, looming cirque, the wind was faster and colder as it howled across the lake. None of the Lodestar's metal had been airlifted out, none of the crash cleaned up. The hacked, spray-painted, cruciform tail section jutted vertically. Bowie's East Face soared overhead like a massive gravestone. John had been in inhospitable places, but this beat them all.

  The sky and his mood didn't help. He took a step out onto the ice, but it creaked and groaned, forcing him back to the shore. Even as he watched, Bowie unleashed a small powder avalanche down its lower face. When it hit the top of the ring of stone, the snow rocketed up and out, forming a cloud that descended slowly to the lake below.

  A few minutes later the sound came rumbling across to John. The lake, the whole area, was in cold decay. It looked like the far end of a lost civilization.

  The wind mashed against John in a steady tide. Its roar formed a continuous, thundering ceiling.

  Despite that, he heard a low, repeating pop-pop sound in the distance. He turned his head and opened his mouth slightly to locate the sound. It was off to the right somewhere. Only as an afterthought did he consider it might be muffled gunfire. It wasn't anyway. Following his ears, he crossed over a hummock of glacier debris and found the parachute Tucker had found. It had detached from the ramp above and blown down. The shroud lines were tangled around a rock and the fabric was snapping and popping in the wind, flapping hopelessly like a bird with one broken wing. It reminded John of Buddhist prayer flags deep in the Himalayas: not a human in sight, their muslin turned to rags, their inked message faded with every passing breeze. Whatever ambitions the pilot and his brother had written into this flight and its cargo, however high-minded or money-grubbing their hopes had been, the details were gone now. All that was left was this parachute punctuating the elements. From above, John watched the shroud arch up, then lose its volume of air with a pop.

  A sudden idea carried him down the slope of glacier debris to the parachute. He needed a new shoelace for his left shoe, and the shroud cord looked perfect for the job. With his pocketknife he cut off a long, ten-foot length, and from that cut a piece for his shoe. He pulled the wispy nylon strands out from the cord's sheath and sat down. With one slice of the knife he dispensed with the old lace, and then threaded his shoe with the new cord.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  The sight of his knife and an old story about parachutes set John to thinking about a weapon, not that he believed the smuggler was coming. He recalled how aviators downed in jungles and deserts fashioned primitive slingshots from the elastic band in the parachute's vent hole. John Page 160

  had never examined a parachute this close, but sure enough the vent hole contained a twelve-inch circle of elastic rubber. More to test the theory than compose a weapon, John carefully cut the vent band free and slotted a speckled granite pebble into the crook of elastic.

  He drew it back and fired off a shot of moderate velocity and miserable accuracy. He tried a few more pebbles.

  The slingshot was distinctly nonlethal, at least against anything larger than a rabbit or squirrel.

  Mainly it was a curio. He decided to keep the elastic and experiment with his marksmanship.

  With a sense of self-satisfaction at having derived two uses from the parachute's carcass, a shoelace and a slingshot, he backed away from the flapping, bucking shroud. It was time to break out of this hinterland. Kresinski could find his own way home, and if he couldn't who would miss him? John started to leave, but then a sentiment drew him back for one final act. He opened his knife and, thinking this was the sort of thing Tucker might have done, sawed through the remaining shroud cords, freeing the parachute. The strings tore loose from his hand, and the shroud ballooned diagonally with the wind. It stayed aloft for nearly a minute before dipping out of sight.

  "That was cute," said Kresinski. John took his time closing the knife. He looked down at the makeshift slingshot and saw how ridiculous it was and threw it away. Kresinski was standing overhead, shaking his head in amusement. "God, this place looks like hell. Did we tear the shit out of it or what?"

  "You were wrong," said John.

  "Not yet, I'm not. He'll show."

  "Best of luck, Kreski. I'm gone."

  "He wants us too bad. He's comin'. For all I know he's already here."

  "He's not here," John stated decisively. He hadn't checked more than a portion of the lakeshore, but chances were pretty good he would have cut any sign by now. The smuggler absolutely had not beaten them in along their trail, and the shortcut was far too obscure for him to find. There wasn't a map in existence that showed the shortcut; it belonged exclusively to climbers' oral literature.

  "See that cave up there?" Kresinski pointed at Tucker's cave on the East Face. "He doesn't know it, but he's waitin' for us to go up there. And come down."

  Now it was John's turn to smile. He smiled his pity-the-mad smile. Kresinski recognized the deference and his eyes hardened, but he kept his temper. "I was up there not so long ago," he said. "Nobody knows it except Tuck." He watched John's face for a reaction, and John was careful not to show any. But he was surprised.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light encounter on Bowie Peak a secret. "See that col?" It was Tucker's col, or couloir, a gully that was very nearly vertical from this head-on view. The bottom part was full of hard snow that probably wouldn't thaw until August, just in time for a new plastering. The col
funneled straight up to the cave from the tall, circular walls ringing the lake. Over to their right lay the ramp that Tucker had used to gain the top of the stone ring. "For people like me and you, Johnny, that col's a sidewalk. For people like our friend out there..."

  John snorted his dismay. Kresinski was actually trying to entice him up to the cave.

  Step by step, this was a seduction. But it wasn't going to work. "You're crazy," he said.

  "Let's cruise, sport. We got an hour to make the cave before it gets dark. It's dry and it's out of this fucking wind."

  "I told you, I'm out of here. See ya."

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  "And miss out on me and Tuck's big secret? I don't think so. I don't think you're goin'

  anywhere 'til you've seen the whole tamale."

  Again John kept his face impassive. "Fuck your secrets," he said.

  "Ah, ah. Bad attitude." Kresinski paused. "No wonder you keep ending up with the sloppy seconds." A gust punched Kresinski's back. His hair guttered sideways with the blast, and his clothing smeared against his arms and legs. But he was solid.

  Immovable.

  I can take you, John scowled. No one would miss you, asshole. No one would ask.

  Kresinski chuckled. "He's comin', man, believe it or not. And when he gets here, you're gonna be a whole lot safer with me. And me with you. All for one."

  And one for one, John finished in his head. Kresinski turned toward the face and started threading up the fan of glacier debris. John looked over his shoulder in the direction of the ice pillar. He still didn't know if the rope was hanging down where Bullseye had fixed it, and although it was only a few hundred yards away, he suddenly didn't care.

  If the rope was there now, it would be there later. If there was any foothold left for him in Liz's life, it would still be there tomorrow night or the next day or the next. Of course he was going up on the mountain, just as, of course, he'd come up here to the lake. You can't go halfway or you never reach the end.