by Jeff Long
Hugh resorted to all his best tricks, pushing himself to dance her dance, admiring the hell out of her, whoever she’d been. He had to push to keep up with the nameless woman. It was like a chase. He followed, literally, in her footsteps.
“Twenty feet,” Augustine’s voice rose up to him. There were just twenty feet of rope left.
Hugh began hunting for her resting place, and it appeared to him in the smoke, a ledge wide enough for the side of one shoe. At his shoulder level, he found slight scratch marks in the crack where she’d placed her anchor. Injecting two cams and a number three hex, he hitched himself in, and called for Augustine to come.
While Augustine climbed the one rope, Hugh hauled their bag on the second rope. It was fifty pounds, likely less. That was the weight of their long-term survival. Four gallons of water, some food, and a little bivvy gear. It was plenty for now, but way short if Murphy’s Law decided to kick in.
Augustine’s coughing came through the smog. He sounded like a tuberculosis ward approaching. As he materialized on the rope, he stopped to rest and catch his breath and sample some of the rounded chickenheads. He looked up at Hugh and said, “Goddamn.”
That made Hugh feel good. It was like the old days again, spearing the great white. “I was starting to think we’d lost them,” he said. “But they were just hiding from us.” He did not point out that, in praising Hugh, goddamn, Augustine was also praising the “witches” who had preceded them.
Augustine scanned the muddy nothingness above. “Still no sign of the Eye. It’s got to be close.”
“It’s getting late,” Hugh said.
Augustine reacted. “We’re fine. There’s still plenty of day left.”
Hugh stood his ground. “We spent a lot of time spinning our wheels. Look at the sun.”
The metal ball had rolled across the sky and was sinking behind the shrouded prow.
“We’re not turning back,” Augustine warned him.
Hugh changed the topic. “Let’s check on the others.”
“Others?”
“Our partners,” Hugh said. “I want to know if they touched down.”
“Them,” said Augustine. “Right.” He took out the radio. Preserving the battery had been his excuse for radio silence, but now Hugh wondered if it wasn’t simply the silence he was protecting. No communication meant no news, and more important, no countermanding orders. Hugh had this hunch Augustine was fighting the whole world to press on with this deliverance.
Hugh could hear a woman’s voice answer the call. Then Augustine pressed the receiver tight against his ear. He asked about Lewis and Joe. “Good,” he said. He asked if they’d found any sign of a body at the base of El Cap. The radio crackled. “That nails it,” Augustine said. “She’s still up here.”
The dispatcher said something else.
“I don’t need to talk to him,” Augustine replied. A different voice came on, and Augustine said, “Chief.” He listened with growing impatience. After a minute, he broke in. “Not to worry,” he said. “We’re closing in on her. We’re almost there.”
Hugh looked up at the swampy miasma. Closing in on her? They had no idea where on the wall they were.
The chief spoke again. Augustine replied, “That doesn’t work for me. And it’s my call. I’m the first responder. I’m the one on the scene.”
An argument developed. Augustine screwed the receiver against his ear. “Negative,” he said. “We’re not going down. We’re almost there. Tell them, keep the faith. Hold their position up there. Keep them sharp. When the time comes, we’re going to want them ready.”
The chief started to say more, Hugh could hear his tiny voice. But Augustine turned off the radio.
“What was that all about?” Hugh asked.
“Our guys got down,” Augustine reported. “The rangers found them wandering along the road. Also they ran a search along the base. No body. It’s like I said. Andie got herself back up the rope during the fire. She’s in the Eye. She’s alive.”
Maybe, maybe not, thought Hugh. “They want us to retreat, is that what I heard?”
“A bunch of backseat drivers. They’re stressed out from the fire. And they’re rangers.”
“Meaning what?”
“Cops. They like to tell you what to do.”
Hugh didn’t like it. A conservative approach, right about now, would include some discussion about alternatives, such as retreat. But there was nothing conservative about Augustine’s repeated thrusts at the wall. He meant to break through Trojan Women’s defenses, and Hugh had known that when he’d volunteered to cross over from the safeness of Anasazi.
Augustine was watching him. He couldn’t do this alone, and he knew it. Hugh let him wonder another few moments. He cut his eyes up at the no-man’s-land.
“Your lead,” he finally said. They would go on.
“Actually,” Augustine said, “you seem to have a better feel for it.”
Hugh kept his expression mild. But it was a pivotal moment. Augustine was subordinating himself. He was admitting that the climbing was beyond him, and that he needed more help than he’d known. Augustine had touched the rounded chickenheads and seen the evidence of Hugh’s nerveless run-out on the pitch below. In effect, he was asking Hugh to become his rope gun.
This hadn’t been part of the proposition. Hugh had come to lend a hand, not be the Man. He wanted to be a passenger, not a principal. This was Augustine’s karma playing out, not his. And yet he found himself sinking deeper into the siren song, pulled along by whispers and dreams.
By this stage, he was beginning to question whether his discovery of the girl’s body in the forest was any more an accident than Joshua’s fire. He’d been thinking about that a lot. There was too much coincidence in the string of events to call it coincidence anymore. Maybe Lewis was on to something, maybe disaster was following Augustine around. Hugh didn’t believe that, necessarily. But there was some larger mystery to this ascent. A welter of trajectories was crossing and connecting the farther he climbed. He couldn’t see the pattern to it yet, and had no idea where it was all leading. His one shot at gaining the big picture meant continuing higher.
Hugh took the rack of gear from Augustine. “All right,” he said. “For now.”
He made himself part of the race, though it was a different race than he’d started. This was no longer Augustine’s solo contest with El Cap. That bullshit was over. The Eye and its cold, silent camp—wherever it lay—were just a feature along the way.
From here on, Hugh had a deliverance of his own to see through. He had himself to carry out of the abyss. If he could finish this thing and get to the top, then the smoke would part, and the floor would lie revealed, and he would surely be able to read his own fate.
TWENTY
On the next pitch, a thin flake, the soot was like dry grease. The toes of his shoes simply would not smear upon the outer rock. All his weight went onto his tired arms. Once again, he was forced to run the rope out its full length before finding a place to anchor to the wall.
While Augustine jugged up and retrieved the protection, Hugh hauled the bag. He took out his notepad and added a line to his map. He wrote, “160’, 5.10-ish, no bolts, cams only (1–2"), HB.” The line of ink hovered on his page, attached below to dots and a cartoon explosion of false cracks and other lines and hieroglyphics. “Many blades and arrows, two rurps, beaks,” a note read, and elsewhere, “Rope drag!” and “mantle off beak.”
Every detail held meaning to a climber, and Hugh was meticulous with his record. At the same time, he knew the map was gibberish. It had no beginning and would have no end, because they had inserted themselves onto Trojan Women at an indefinite midpoint, and their climbing would halt when they reached the women. Disconnected from the ground and the summit, it was a map of nowhere.
He felt dangerously lost. Navigation came as second nature to him, a habit from his doodlebugging days in the Louisiana bayou. He always plotted his location, the more remote, the more
precisely. Deep in the desert or among nameless mountains, he kept track of his progress as if it were an autobiography. But Trojan Women erased all his reference points. It made a sham of his fragment of a map. His head ached.
Augustine appeared in the smoke.
“One more pitch,” Hugh told him. “Then we park for the night.”
“It can’t be more than one pitch,” Augustine assured him.
But at the top of the next pitch, with the tan smog turning coffee, the Eye still eluded them. “One more,” said Augustine.
“No. We’re tired. This is it for the night.”
“But it’s right there.”
“You’re pointing at smoke.”
Augustine tapped at Hugh’s open notebook. It left a smudge of blood on his map. “Look how far we’ve come.”
The question is how far we’ve got to go, and what shape we’ll be in when we get there.”
“We’re on route. They came this way. Those are their chalk marks.”
“I’m not climbing in the dark for something I can’t see in the day.”
“You just said you can’t see anything anyway.”
Hugh looked at his red eyes. “You’re pushing too hard.”
Augustine sagged. He whispered. “I’m afraid.”
“I know.” Hugh placed one hand on Augustine’s arm. It was not all that intimate. They were shoulder to shoulder as it was, crowded together by the ropes. When one coughed, it shook the other.
“You think I’m a fool.”
“I think you’re tired.”
“I’m out of bounds.”
“That makes two of us, wherever we are.”
“I mean out of bounds with you,” Augustine said. “I know how this looks to you, like a dumb infatuation. You lost a woman who was your wife. And Andie was just a dream anymore.”
Augustine seemed to be preparing himself for the worst. That would mean more for Hugh to haul, more of other men’s guilt. “That’s what life’s all about though, right? The dream.”
“There’s a difference,” Augustine said. “I know it was worse for you.”
Hugh looked to see if Augustine was trying to beguile him. But the man seemed earnest, and miserable, with his bracelet made of hair. “Not necessarily,” Hugh said. “My wife and I got to live our years. And yours were all ahead of you.”
“Maybe once,” said Augustine.
They slung the two hammocks, one below the other, and burrowed in. They rigged slings to pass a jug of water up and down. Hugh had to restrain himself from drinking the whole gallon. They weren’t out of the woods yet. The darkness gathered.
“Is it true you never found her?” Augustine asked from underneath him.
Hugh grunted. Couldn’t they just let the desert lie? His head was pounding. The hammock was squashing him. It was going to be a long night. But Augustine needed to talk.
“Your friend told me,” Augustine said. “It was on the ledges last night. He woke me up. He threatened me. He said to take my claws out of you. You’re grieving. I’m exploiting you. He said quit for the good of everybody.”
“Lewis, my archangel,” Hugh said.
“I almost did what he said.”
“Quit?”
Augustine’s voice grew softer. “What if you’re right? What if she’s gone?”
They were supposed to be flying on Augustine’s hopes. Instead Hugh was carrying them on his wings, leading the way, decoding the wall, keeping them sound.
“The smoke should settle tonight,” Hugh told him. “Maybe by morning, we can see what’s what. We’ll reach the Eye tomorrow. Then we’ll deal with it.”
“That’s what scares me.” Augustine was quiet a moment. “How do you deal with it?”
Hugh nested his head against the hammock. First Lewis, now this man, each wanted a guide to lead them through their damage. It was as if Augustine needed him, not to rescue a living woman, but to help bury her. Hugh was a rope gun for his mourning.
“You walk on,” Hugh said.
“That’s it?”
“Leave her behind. The past. Put it away from you.” Hugh was firm.
“But you came back.”
“Call it a high school reunion.”
“This is where you met your wife,” Augustine said. “I heard you in the bar.”
“And we lived a life,” Hugh said, “and then she vanished. You think people didn’t talk? I took a woman with no mind into the desert, and came home alone. People talked. No different than when you came back from Patagonia.”
“Except you didn’t choose to leave her out there.”
“Look,” said Hugh. “There are no rules in the wilderness. Not in the mountains, not out in the desert.” Nor on El Cap, he almost added. Because with Trojan Women, Augustine was carrying double the load of ghosts. He’d failed Andie’s brother and now it seemed he’d failed her, too. “There’s no good. There’s no bad. Forget the chattering class. When we’re this far from the world, there are no eyes to see into our hearts. There’s no one to judge us.”
“That’s the worst part,” Augustine said, “getting left to judge yourself.”
Hugh shoved at the wall with his shoulder. The hammock and the smoke and this burden of desire were smothering him. “That gets you nowhere. Think of it this way. We’re left alone by those who couldn’t keep up with us. You survive. You shed your skin. You grow a new one. You heal. It just happens.”
“Then we might as well give up,” Augustine said. He coughed.
Hugh didn’t like his tone. Attitude counted. It added up in all the myriad tiny details that stood between them and the summit. As much as Augustine needed him, Hugh needed Augustine. What he needed was for the man to stay glued together until they reached land, whether that was all the way up or all the way down.
“I said to shed your skin, not your spirit. We came to take care of her,” Hugh said. “Andie still needs you.”
Augustine didn’t speak again. Hugh tinkered with a piece of plastic pipe, trying to prop the hammock open, but it wasn’t much use. Finally he fell asleep.
He wasn’t surprised to be woken late in the night. By this time, he’d resigned himself to a steady diet of nightmares until El Cap was behind him.
He waited in his hammock, mashed against the wall, hurting, and miserable with thirst. He waited for the evening clue. What was it this time? Underneath him, Augustine was murmuring in his sleep and coughing softly.
After another minute, the noise repeated. A chorus of unearthly shrieks and howls rose up from the remains of the forest. It was the coyotes and other predators. They were ripping each other to shreds as they fed on burnt animals in the ashes of the forest.
It shouldn’t have bothered him. They were hanging two thousand feet above the savagery. But the blood drummed in his head, and he felt vulnerable and hunted in his little sack of nylon. He wrapped a length of slack rope around his hands and forearms, and held it hard against his pounding heart, and prayed for them to stop, even knowing it was the way of things.
TWENTY-ONE
On one venture deep into the Rub’, Hugh and Annie had come upon a perfect reef of coral, preserved in all its details by dunes that had fanned open for a brief span of time. The ancient sea barrier rose like a dolphin’s back and dipped back into the sands. It predated their paleo lakes by millions of years. They found delicate fans and sticklike trees of limestone and a wall of mineral polyps like a thousand open mouths shouting at them, the skeletons of silence.
As they continued into the smoke the next morning, he was reminded of that day. The crack had petered away again, and he was climbing on the edges of dirty coins—of nickels and dimes, flakes that thin—when he came upon a vein of olivine. Like his lost reef in the desert, the vein suddenly surfaced from the white-and-tan granite without explanation or fanfare, a relic of deeper movements within El Cap. It curved upward like dark green vertebrae.
As he picked up speed on the spine of olivine with its glowing, bony burls, Hugh took
heart. Perhaps this morning they might break through to the blue sky and a bright yellow sun and at least a peek of the summit.
The smoke was not so thick at this elevation. Soot still dulled El Cap’s colors, but no longer overwhelmed them. The gray world was giving way to life. They were escaping the inferno, or its aftermath.
The vein of olivine snaked up and to the right like the arch of a bridge. As he went, he found white chalk marks left by whichever woman had been leading. It was not unlikely that she was his same dance partner from yesterday. This high on the wall—this near the summit—the team would have sorted out its various specialties and assigned the free climbing to their fastest, most confident member.
He was growing fond of this woman, or the combination of women who made her up. Out here on the sharp edge, the two of them shared the same exact dangers and suffered the same questions and renewed their same faith in a pinch of stone. The only thing separating them was time. With the blood chemistry highballing his senses, and her sequence of moves affirming his moves, his contact with her verged on the sensual. His dancer seemed to be waiting for him at crucial moments. And the way he clutched and pulled and grunted and opened himself up on the rock came very close to embracing her.
In a sense, she was seducing him. Part of it lay in their climbing, part in their desire for El Cap, and part in the morbid attraction between the undertaker and his dead. However you put it, she was pursuing him even as he was pursuing her.
Hugh tried to remember the last time he’d felt chased this way, and it was by Annie back in the very beginning, on a rainy afternoon decades ago. He put away her image. This was a different woman. This was now. He gave in to the ferocious, nearly silent game. The only sound was of his breathing and heartbeat and the sigh of rope across stone.