Point of Law

by Clinton McKinzie

  The sheriff tells us, “Don’t go anywhere for the next couple of days. I’ll probably be wanting to talk with you gentlemen again.”

  “We plan on being here for two more days at most,” Dad says. He wants to make it clear to the sheriff that he’s not taking orders from anyone. Munik responds by giving my father a long gunfighter look and spitting some tobacco sideways onto the grass. Two bull elk, I think. Shit, three, with Roberto. And then me and the pint-sized deputy. It wouldn’t take a whole lot to start another brawl right here. My brother had come close to doing that already.

  Without another word Sheriff Munik walks back over to Fast’s Suburban, followed by his sidekick. Even from this distance I can see the sheriff and the developer arguing hotly. Obviously Munik is unwilling to do what Fast wants. Fast probably wants us arrested. He finally slams his truck into gear and roars out of the meadow, tearing two long strips of grass and alpine flowers from the ground. I take the ferocity of his exit as a warning, or maybe a threat. It seems to say, “I’ll be back.”

  Then the brake lights flash as Cal steps out of the trees just where the road begins its descent down the valley to the highway. Cal stares without expression at Fast’s truck, but there’s something arrogant, something victorious in the young man’s posture. When he walks across the road, and when the sheriff’s view of him is blocked by Fast’s tinted windows, Cal takes a lighter from his pocket, grins, and lights the flame.

  I expect Fast to run him over. Or at least for him and Burgermeister to get out and give chase. But they don’t. They don’t even get out to tell the sheriff what Cal has just done.

  Fast only starts moving again when there’s a light honk from the sheriff’s SUV behind him.

  ELEVEN

  LATE THAT MORNING and later into the afternoon I climb with my father and brother down in the canyon. There’s no talk about drugs or family disputes or any of our futures. Our conversations, when we have them, are only and carefully about climbing. Dad and I are full of bluff cheer. If Roberto is aware of the undercurrents and the occasional looks passing between us, he’s sharp enough to appear oblivious.

  We tell each other stories when we pause to rest. I have Roberto laughing, and even my father grinning, when I tell them about a time I’d taken Oso ice climbing last spring.

  A friend and I snowshoed with Oso five miles into the Winds through more than two feet of fresh snow. It was hard going from the very start. Oso, who always insisted on leading the way on summer trails, was frustrated by the way his thick legs sank all the way into the powder. For a while he tried to swim shoulder-deep in the snow ahead of us. Then he figured out that if he followed in our tracks—walked where we had broken and compacted the snow—it would be a lot easier.

  Only he was annoyed and impatient at not being in the lead. He walked behind me with his snout nearly up my ass. It seemed like every few steps he would place one of his fat paws on the heel of a snowshoe and send me sprawling face-first into the deep powder. Because of the heavy pack filled with ropes, screws, crampons, food, and other gear, I’d crash so deep into the soft stuff that it would take me long minutes of cursing and writhing to get back on my feet.

  We kicked steps up a long couloir toward the base of our intended route. Where the real climbing would begin, when the angle turned steep and the snow changed to gray, rock-hard ice, I stomped a platform in the snow for Oso. I even put down an insulated pad for the ungrateful beast so he could wait for us in comfort. The sight of the three hundred and fifty feet of virgin ice above put me in a forgiving mood. Then we started climbing.

  An hour later Randy and I were three hundred feet up the frozen waterfall, less than a pitch from the top, when we began to be pelted from above by spindrift, gravel, and plates of ice. I looked down for Oso, hoping he wasn’t being bombarded, too. But he was gone. I looked up and was terrified to see the black end of his snout protruding over the top of the climb. He’d somehow managed to scramble up the steep talus to one side and now stood above us, triumphant at being first again, as we labored below on the frozen ribbon of ice.

  I swore and shouted for him to stay away from the edge. The sound of my voice only excited him more. The beast sent a new barrage of ice and rock to assault us as he danced happily above. Randy took the lead, whacking his axes and kicking his crampons with amazing speed, trying to get to the top before the beast slid over the edge. He was just pulling over it when I heard a shout. I looked up to see a great black mass cartwheeling down the ice, out of the sky, right toward me.

  Oso hit me square in the chest. The force of the blow was amazing. It blew the breath right out of my lungs. It ripped my hands from my ice tools and slammed the leashes against my wrists. For a few moments of agony I thought it had dislocated my shoulders. What was even more amazing was that the anchor I was suspended from—two ice screws drilled deep into the frozen water—didn’t blow. Fighting to draw a breath, I managed to hold the massive dog in my lap. He twisted his head up to growl at me.

  Randy yelled down that I was on belay and that he’d gotten a solid anchor around a tree. Now I had to figure out how to get out of this mess. Trying to ascend with more than a hundred and fifty pounds of squirming, snarling, snow-soaked dog flesh would be impossible, even after I rigged him a questionable harness out of a couple of slings. In the end Randy had to make a risky and unprotected down-climb to us so that he could lower us back to the platform three hundred feet below.

  By the time we reached it, my calves, arms, and stomach muscles were screaming from holding the beast pinned between the ice and my hips. And my voice was hoarse from cursing.

  As I tell the story the memory causes me to look down at where Oso now lounges in the shade by the river and swear anew at him. At least he’d finally learned to wait below.

  Roberto tells stories of his own. But I seldom laugh at them and my father doesn’t smile. His stories are just too wild, too scary, for those who know and love him. But the afternoon is still peaceful. A father and sons climbing together. Maybe for the last time. Definitely here for the last time, in this place that’s about to be filled with cliff-side condominiums.

  There’s only one bad moment in an almost perfect day. It comes at about dusk, when the three of us are hurrying to finish one final climb to the canyon’s rim before night falls. Roberto is leading the last pitch while Dad and I watch from the belay, a large ledge two hundred feet off the deck.

  “Are we going to have the talk tonight?” I ask my father.

  He shakes his head. “Tomorrow. Let’s enjoy the rest of the day together before things get nasty.”

  I’m reminded again that tomorrow will be the last time he’ll ever be able to climb here at the site of his glory days. His playground and my childhood Valhalla will soon be gone.

  Waiting sounds like a good plan to me. I’m happy to put off “the talk” as long as possible. Dad and I have worked out a ridiculously hopeful strategy—he’ll offer to pay for Roberto to enroll in an exclusive inpatient rehab center not far from my current assignment in Lander, Wyoming. That way Roberto will be able to get out and climb with me on weekends.

  Killing time, I ask my dad if he’s aware of any caves or Indian ruins in the canyon.

  “No,” he answers, “but just because I haven’t seen any doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” He’s intrigued by the possibility when I tell him of Cal’s claims about finding an Indian ruin buried beneath rockfall somewhere in the valley region. He says he’s never explored the lower walls farther down in the canyon. If we had more time, I’d like to wander around down there to see if I could find Cal’s site. The idea of an unexplored cave exerts a magnetic force on me, like a black hole.

  Far above us, Roberto grunts and curses his way up over a huge roof that juts more than 20 feet from the canyon’s rim. It’s the crux of the route, rated “5.12a” by the guidebook. In other words it’s very, very hard. And it’s just getting dark enough that finding foot- and handholds has to be difficult, especially on the ro
of’s shadowed underside.

  “How’s it going?” I shout up as I feed out a little more line.

  “Fucking grim, che,” Roberto shouts back. Even though he’s sixty feet above me, I can hear him gasping with exertion and the psychological stress that comes with tying in to the sharp end of the rope. I watch him pause to lick the blood from a split knuckle. His hands have been bleeding freely all day as we’ve climbed, and I wonder if the drugs he takes have caused him to become hemophilic. Looking down at my own bloody hands, I worry for a moment about AIDS. But surely he’s smart enough to use clean needles.

  I realize the rope is pulling out into space, away from the wall. It shouldn’t. It should lie close, clipped through the protection Roberto has placed, even as he moves out from it on the underside of the roof. I study the wall above and realize Roberto hasn’t placed any gear. Nothing. He’s soloing again—the only good the rope is doing is that it will allow Dad and me to follow safely when he makes the rim, where he can belay us from above. If he makes the rim.

  “He’s not placing pro,” I say quietly to my father, who’s standing on the ledge next to me and staring out over his canyon.

  He looks up sharply and sees as I had that the rope is free from the wall. “For God’s sake, Roberto, put something in!” he hollers into a sky that’s turning the color of a new pair of blue jeans.

  My stomach tries to crawl up my throat when I see Roberto’s feet kick out from under him, forcing all his weight onto his fingertips. His legs pedal in the air.

  “Don’t need it!” he yells down, panting hard. He folds his legs back up like the blade of a jackknife. They seem to find some invisible edges for the sticky rubber shoes to grip on the underside of the roof. With a slowness that’s agonizing to watch from our position, he finally disappears over the roof’s lip.

  “Jesus Christ. Does he want to kill himself while we watch?” I say to my father. “What can he be thinking?”

  When he doesn’t respond, I turn my head to look at him. Despite the growing dark, I can see that his cheeks are shiny and wet. I quickly look away.

  TWELVE

  A FEW HOURS later I wake to hear a distant scream. Just when I’ve convinced myself that it was only a dream, and as I twist onto my side in the tight confines of my mummy bag to fall back asleep, Oso starts bellowing in my ear. I jerk as if I’ve been jabbed by a cattle prod. “Hey, hey. Easy boy. What is it?” The beast stops roaring at the sound of my voice but continues to growl at some faraway threat. I find the bag’s zipper by my head and sit up.

  In the starlight I can make out my father sitting next to me with his bald head cloaked beneath a balaclava. Roberto is groaning on the ground nearby, muttering, “What the fuck?” He had disappeared into the trees, heading toward the canyon, when Dad and I bedded down after dinner. He’d said he was going to howl at the moon for a while. And indeed we later heard a lonely “Awwooo” reverberating off the canyon’s walls. To shoot up or smoke something was the real reason. Oso had already woken us up once when Roberto staggered into the camp a couple of hours later.

  “Did you hear that?” I ask them.

  My father’s head dips in a quick nod. Like Oso, he stares around the dark meadow intently.

  “Yeah. I think that fucker just blew out my eardrums,” Roberto says with his hands rubbing his ears.

  “Not that. The scream.”

  Dad nods again, still listening. A few flashlights are blinking on and moving in the activists’ camp across the meadow. Their beams swing around the open field and are snuffed by the night just a few hundred feet from their origins. I try to recollect the sound that had awakened me. It seemed like a short cry of pain cut off mid-scream. I wasn’t sure how much of it had been a dream.

  “It sounded pretty far away,” Dad says, confirming what I’d thought.

  Roberto groans again and flops back down in his bag. “Man, you can’t get no sleep in this place!” In a few minutes he’s snoring. Dad and I sit up a while longer, looking around, watching the flashlights click off one by one. Above us the sky is a deep, deep black. Thousands of stars are freckled across it. I’m reminded of how the ancient Greeks thought the night sky was like a great black cloth, veiling the sun, but full of tiny pinpricks.

  “Nothing to do about it now,” Dad says. He lies back down.

  I’m about to do the same when Oso starts rumbling again. His head is pointed toward the center of the meadow, and I can make out a slim silhouette moving across the grass toward us. I recognize the smooth, efficient grace. It’s Kim.

  “Someone’s coming,” I say to Dad. “I’ll talk to her.” I try to quiet Oso again as I slip out of my bag and into my belay jacket. The figure stops a little ways away from our camp. I step barefoot into cold boots, leaving the laces undone, and shuffle across the grass to her. Oso follows at my side. He’s no longer growling but is loudly snuffing at the air.

  “Anton?”

  “Yeah, Kim. What’s up?”

  “Did you hear it?”

  “It sounded like a scream.”

  “I’m worried about Cal and Sunny. They’re camping a ways down the canyon, away from everyone. I think it came from that direction.”

  I want to ask, Why talk to me? But I’m flattered she’s come and don’t want to put her off. Instead I say, “What can I do?”

  “Well, you’re a cop, right?”

  “Right. In Wyoming, not Colorado.” But she’s made me feel important and sort of useful anyway. “Did it sound like Sunny?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Maybe.”

  “Do you have any reason to worry about her?”

  She shrugs and hugs her arms across her chest as if to ward off the high-altitude chill. “I don’t know. With the fire last night and all . . .”

  I wait for her to say more but she doesn’t. I know what she’s thinking, though. Maybe Fast and his boys wanted a little payback. I remember Fast and Burgermeister intercepting Cal before the melee in the meadow. I recall it looking like an angry exchange. Maybe Fast wanted to know about Indian ruins. Or maybe Cal was dumb enough to make some threats. And I remember how he’d stepped out of the trees this morning, as the developers were leaving with the sheriff, as if to say Got you, dude.

  “Okay, let’s go check on them. Let me get a light.”

  She follows me back to camp, where I dig a headlamp out of my climbing pack and explain to my father what we’re doing. Feeling the chill on my bare legs, I also pull on a pair of gray fleece pants.

  “Want me to come?” he asks.

  I look his way in surprise—he’d been very clear earlier that he wanted nothing to do with the activists. He’s worried about me, I realize. I’m too touched to respond right away.

  “No, it’s nothing,” Kim answers for me, probably very aware of my father’s disdain for her activities. “I’m just being paranoid, I’m sure.” While she’s distracted, talking to him and looking down into the star-filled V of the valley, I unlock the glove box and slip the reassuring weight of my H&K into a jacket pocket. Just in case.

  THIRTEEN

  WE HIKE IN the dark on the rugged Forest Service road. Far in the distance I think I can hear an engine gearing down the road toward Durango. The head- and taillights are either turned off or the forest obscures them. If the lights are turned off, it would explain the high-revving engine sound—they’d be downshifting to avoid braking and flashing the taillights. It’s even possible, though, that I’m simply hearing the sound of a truck miles away where the valley road meets the highway. I ask Kim if she hears it, too, but she just shakes her head as she plays her flashlight over the screen of trees to the right. She tells me there’s an old logging track into the woods somewhere around here and that’s where Cal and Sunny are camped. Up high on the valley’s side where the track dead-ends.

  The night is otherwise silent but for the gentle sweep of a breeze against the trees’ upper branches and the pulse of crickets. Overhead, the stars cast enough light on the ground to make hazy shadows
. Oso sniffs along beside us, no longer growling but looking alert with his ears bunched forward.

  We find the old track. It’s barely more than a trail, just a skinny break in the forest to the right of the road. There’s the odor of exhaust fumes in the air. To me it smells like diesel, like many of the trucks Fast and his friends had driven into the meadow for their counter-protest two days ago.

  “Kill the light,” I say quietly.

  She flips the beam off and stares at me in the dark. I stand still and silent for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust to the night. Something feels wrong. Dangerous.

  From a few hundred yards away and up the valley’s side, where the track seems to lead, I hear the faint jangle of keys. Then a door slam and the whine of a four-cylinder engine revving way too high.

  “Let’s get into the trees,” I say quickly. “We don’t know if that’s the screamer or the screamee.”

  Kim slips off the road and disappears into the forest. I hurry after her, grabbing Oso’s collar and pulling him along.

  Headlights slash through the straight trunks of lodgepole pines as a car comes slamming down the old logging track. The axles bang again and again over deep ruts. Branches screech against the paint. From where we crouch in the trees I take the pistol out of my pocket and point it at the ground between my legs. With the other hand I keep a tight grip on Oso’s collar. After only a few seconds a small white car bounds past us.

  Suddenly Kim is leaping out after it. She’s yelling, “Sunny! Sunny!” But the car hits the Forest Service road with a crashing slide and keeps slamming west toward Durango.

  “Was she alone?” I ask, running after Kim as the taillights disappear around a corner but the motor’s noise still tears through the night.

  “I . . . I think so. I just caught a glimpse of her. She looked like she was crying. And there was something dark on her face. Like blood.”