“Okay, fine,” Henry said. “Good enough. Let’s go.”
“You keep looking over there,” Henry said as they rode the shuttle along the narrow and twisting redrock road drawing alongside Angels Landing and Moonlight Buttress.
“I guess I do. Is that cheating?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s just such a huge wall, though. And so . . . vertical.”
“Actually, it’s a little worse than vertical. It’s slightly overhanging in places. Or . . . wait. Maybe not. Maybe I’m confusing it with The Nose route on El Capitan. But one of the walls he’s doing this trip has some overhang.”
“Oh. Well. Thanks. I feel better now.”
“The thing you have to remember, August, is that Seth has climbed lots of big walls like that one. This is not some big special first time for him. This is just the first time you knew he was doing it while he was doing it.”
They rode in silence for a few moments, listening to the shuttle driver announce the sights and the stops.
“Is that supposed to help?” August asked at last.
“I figured it couldn’t hurt,” Henry said.
Henry held one of August’s canes on the short—but fairly steep—hike up to Weeping Rock, and August threw an arm over the boy’s shoulder. He probably had a good half his weight on Henry, but Henry didn’t seem to mind.
“This really does bring it back,” Henry said. “Doesn’t it?”
“Were you still afraid when we came up here?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Of me?”
“Of you. Yeah. But also of everything else.”
“When did you stop being afraid of me?”
“When you carried me up the Angels Landing trail on your back.”
They walked in silence for a while longer, then stood under the raining overhang and leaned on the rail, looking out. Like standing on your dry porch, looking off through the rain on a drizzly day. Henry did not lean his head out into the falling water.
“You going to college, too?” August asked.
“Not sure.”
“What would stop you?”
“I don’t have Seth’s grades. Nobody has Seth’s grades. I probably couldn’t get a full-ride scholarship like that.”
“Why not a community college?”
“We don’t have one where I live. The closest one would be something like a ninety-mile round-trip drive. Not sure where I’d get a good car and all that gas money. And besides, when I turn eighteen I want to move. I want to get away.”
August leaned and stared through the weeping. Wondered briefly if Woody was sad back in camp alone. It was traditional to wonder that in this place. The only other couple to stand under Weeping Rock with them started down, leaving August to feel as though he and Henry owned the park and could enjoy it privately.
“So, go somewhere where there’s a college.”
“Yeah, but . . . food. Rent. Car. Gas. Not sure I could afford to go to school if I’m working and paying my own way at the same time. Maybe I could. But it sounds scary. It sounds big.”
August nodded, and they reluctantly started down to the shuttle stop, slowly and haltingly, and with much leaning on August’s part.
“Am I putting too much weight on you?”
“No. Not at all. You’re fine.”
“I weigh so much more than you do, though. Must be tiring.”
“Like carrying a kid on your back up to Scout Lookout on Angels Landing? That kind of tiring? You did your part, August. Now it’s my turn to be tired.”
They paused and leaned their backs against the cool, damp rock face along the River Trail. Just watching the water flow. Letting people pass them.
August knew he was taking on too much exercise, but he had every intention of doing it anyway. He would be tired. But he wouldn’t die. And maybe tired would do him good.
“There’s a community college near where I live in San Diego,” he said after a time. “Well, not very near. Fifteen miles maybe. But we have public transportation. Buses. That’s a cheap way to go.”
A long silence.
Then Henry said, “Are you inviting me to come live with you while I go to college?”
“Yes, I guess I am. If you want to.”
“That’s a pretty major offer, August. Sure you don’t want to think about it?”
“Nothing to think about. I’d be happy to have you. Your dad wouldn’t like it much, though.”
“Once I turn eighteen,” Henry said, “it won’t make a damn bit of difference what he likes and what he doesn’t.”
Chapter Six:
CHALKY WHITE HANDS
Henry and August sat in front of the campfire together in their comfortable camp chairs in the dusk. Waiting. It was about eight o’clock that night, an hour or two before the soonest Seth might come back. August could pretend to be doing many things, such as relaxing and talking. And he couldn’t speak for Henry. But inside he was waiting. Waiting and preparing himself for several extra days. Resetting his internal clock by at least forty-eight hours. Because he preferred to expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised.
Well, not the worst. The worst time-wise. The actual worst he refused to consider.
August dropped one hand almost to the ground and scratched Woody between the shoulder blades. Henry startled him by speaking.
“So, I’m going to ask you again at the end of the trip. In case you change your mind between now and then.”
“Ask me what?”
“If you really want me living in your house for four years.”
“I’m not going to change my mind.”
“I’m still going to ask again.”
Woody began to strain at the leash and whimper. August just assumed he’d smelled a critter. He didn’t even bother to look.
“Hey!” Henry said. “Seth’s back a little early!”
August tried to spring to his feet but failed. His happiness and relief had knocked all thoughts out of his head. Including the fact that he no longer sprang to his feet these days.
Seth wobbled toward camp looking like the twenty steps he still had to cover might or might not prove possible. He wore no shirt. His shirt was tied around his waist. His bare chest and legs looked painfully sunburned and streaked with dirt and sweat. His hair had been plastered down to his head by a combination of the helmet and his own perspiration and had dried that way. His hands were caked white with leftover chalk. What looked like ten or fifteen pounds of equipment hung in careful order around his waist, his climbing ropes neatly rolled into loops and hanging over one shoulder. Under his other arm he carried his helmet, the gift camera still attached with an elastic harness.
He looked like he might be about to drop into sleep on the spot or hit the ground short of camp. But when he met August’s eyes, he smiled in a way that looked genuinely happy. In fact, he looked more genuinely happy that August could ever remember seeing. Or being.
Henry jumped to his feet to offer his chair. “Here. Flop here, Seth. I’ll go get the other chair.”
Seth unceremoniously shed all of his equipment into the sandy dirt at his feet and took Henry’s instructions quite literally. He didn’t lower himself. He flopped. August winced, waiting to see if the chair would take it. It did.
“You’re early.”
“Yup. We did good. We didn’t get stuck behind anybody, and we didn’t lose the route. About nineteen or twenty hours up and a couple down. I don’t know. I lost count coming down.”
“Is that some kind of new record?”
Seth brayed laughter, his defenses obviously down. “Alex Honnold did it in eighty-three minutes.”
“How is that even possible?”
“He’s Alex Honnold. Plus, he went free. He didn’t rope up. Aid climbing takes time.”
August had no idea who Alex Honnold was, but he felt as though he should know for some reason, and so didn’t ask. In fact, there were many questions tumbling in his mind that he never asked.
>
What he did ask was, “But I guess your time includes sleeping?”
“We did not sleep,” Seth said, slurring his words slightly with fatigue. “We climbed.”
That raised even more questions in August’s mind. Like what they would have done if they’d gotten stuck behind another team. So far as he could see, they had no Portaledge, no sleeping bags, no extra food. Apparently they had wagered everything on speed. But August had no idea how to approach this issue and had a strong sense that he should not.
Instead he asked, “How’d the camera work out?”
“Okay, I think. It was no trouble. I forgot it was even up there except when I saw the shadow of it on the rock. I guess we’ll know when we see the video.”
“Did the memory card run out?”
“No idea. Too tired to check. But I took video the whole way up. Well, the part in sunlight, anyway. I didn’t want to run out of memory in the dark and then find out the low-light video sucked. I think it held. I mean, sixty-four gigabytes.”
“It was the biggest card I could find,” August said.
Henry reappeared with the third camp chair and set it up.
Seth reached his helmet out to his brother and waited patiently for Henry to notice. “Do me a favor, Henry, okay? Take the card out of this and start loading the video onto my computer.”
“Don’t you want to sleep first?” August asked.
“Nope. Too wired. I don’t want to move, but I’m not ready to sleep. I want to see what I got on that helmet cam.”
“Me too,” August said. “Now that I know you’re safe.”
“So,” Seth said, the minute Henry was gone, “did your messages from my dad sound as bad as my messages from my dad?”
August’s gut felt suddenly cold. “I didn’t get messages from your dad.”
“Hmm. That’s funny. He said he called you every day. Home and cell.”
“I’m probably not even getting reception,” August said.
“Right. That’s true. My phone probably only downloaded messages when I took it up high.”
“So what did he say?”
“That he’s called you every day. And every time you don’t answer and don’t call him back he gets more and more sure that you’re along on the trip.”
“Oh,” August said. “Wonder what we do about that?”
“No idea,” Seth said.
At nearly nine o’clock, Seth was still surprisingly awake. They hunched over the dinette table inside the motor home, watching the video. Henry stood behind them, balancing with one hand on August’s shoulder and leaning to see over their heads.
It went fine at first. It was a good twenty-five minutes of Dwayne going up the wall, seen from underneath. August found it a bit frightening how utterly vertical the wall really was, and how directly over Seth’s head Dwayne was climbing. He couldn’t help wondering what would happen if Dwayne fell. Wouldn’t he take Seth off the wall on his way down?
Then again, he supposed that was why Dwayne was carefully placing hardware every few dozen feet and clipping his rope into it. To prevent just such an accident. August wondered if that climbing hardware always held in a fall. Or just usually.
He glanced over to see Seth sitting beside him, as if to remind himself that Seth was no longer on the wall. Seth shot back a weak, exhausted smile. Maybe a bit embarrassed, too.
“He doesn’t lead every pitch, does he?” Henry asked, sounding bored.
“No. We’re about to trade. In fact . . . somewhere around here I turned off the camera so I’d be sure to get some of me leading. Right about . . .”
A few seconds passed, and then the film cut suddenly from one scene to another. Seth was looking down at his belt, reaching for a piece of equipment. August never saw which one. The camera looked down with him, and August found himself looking past Seth’s bare chest, his legs and feet weirdly tiny from that perspective as they barely braced him on the rock, to a good five or six hundred feet down the perfectly vertical wall to the valley floor below.
“Holy crap!” he shouted, startling both boys. “Oh. Sorry. I was not prepared for that. Made my stomach do that roller-coaster thing.”
“Yeah, well, hold on, August,” Seth said. “It gets hairier from here.”
August literally gripped the table and turned his eyes back to the screen. The camera turned up. Looked up the wall. It did indeed look more than vertical. Slightly overhanging. But that might have just been the perspective. The strange wide-angle perspective. Every time Seth reached up, it looked like he was reaching over the top of an outcrop of rock. Then, as he pulled himself up, it looked like that effect had been an illusion. But it was a scary illusion.
He watched Seth’s hand come up into the picture again, dusted white with chalk. Watched Seth blow on the hand. Slap it against the rock to release the cloud of excess chalk. Then the hand reached up and found a crack in the rock as if by feel. The hold in the crack was already white with chalk before Seth even touched it. From other climbers, August supposed. Then, with nothing to hold him but his fingers wedged into that minuscule hold, Seth pulled himself up.
Somehow August hadn’t been expecting that. He’d expected something more like Seth holding firmly on to a rope and pulling himself up by it. But all the rope was underneath him. It was only there to shorten his fall if he fell. It did not hold him onto the wall. Nothing external held him onto the wall. Only those few chalky fingers supported Seth as he climbed hundreds of feet over the canyon floor. August began to find it hard to breathe.
The camera looked down again, past Seth’s bare chest and legs, and August squeezed his eyes closed. When he opened them again, Seth’s hand was placing a piece of hardware into a crack in the rock. It had a loop of strap and a clip of some sort dangling from it, and Seth’s chalky hand reached up and clipped the rope into it. But he had just set it loosely between the two faces of the crack. August expected Seth to screw or wedge it in tightly. Instead he just pulled hard on it and went on climbing. August gasped when Seth put his weight on it.
“That doesn’t look like it would hold you at all!”
“Relax, August. It expands.”
“Oh.”
“If it didn’t, I wouldn’t be here, right?”
“Oh. Right.”
August watched in silence for several minutes. Determined to keep his gasps and exclamations to himself.
He could hear Seth’s winded breathing on the video, and it was making it harder and harder to breathe himself. Because Seth seemed so without options on that wall, and watching was making August feel panicky. He could hear the strain in Seth’s breathing, the grunting of effort as he pulled himself up. He watched the white hand groping for holds in a way that felt exhausted and desperate. Or maybe that was something August was reading in.
It seemed so frighteningly exhausting, so hard, but what could Seth do? You wouldn’t want to downclimb a wall like that, he thought, thinking in the jargon he’d begun to pick up during the summer. August wondered if Seth could give up and abseil down if he didn’t want to go on. But of course Seth was doing no such thing. Suddenly August felt as though no breath was coming into his lungs at all. Also as though he might vomit.
“I need air,” he gasped. “I need to get outside. Help me get outside. Please.”
August could hear the strained puffing on the videotape fade as both boys rushed him down the back stairs. All three of them nearly lost control of August in their haste. He pitched forward, expecting to land on his face in the dirt, but the boys caught him.
“Get him some water,” Seth told his brother.
Then he helped August over to one of the camp chairs to sit in front of the last of the dying fire. August still thought he might vomit, so he placed his head between his knees, waiting for the feeling to pass. When he looked up again, Seth was watching him with a look of mild discontent.
“So I guess you really don’t want to see what I do, then,” Seth said.
“I thought I did.
But now I think I’m having a panic attack.”
“August. I’m right here. You know how it turned out.”
“But I also know you’re going to keep doing it. Do you really have to keep doing it, Seth? It’s like committing suicide. I feel like I’m watching you commit suicide.”
And Seth, who was, after all, sleep-deprived and exhausted, burst into a flare of anger.
“How can you even ask me that, August? Why would you ask a question like that? And say things like that to me! It’s not suicide! I’m careful! I do it right, and I’m good at it. You have no right to call it suicide! You know it means the world to me! You just don’t want it to mean so much! You just don’t want to believe that anything that requires fitness could be that important to anyone! Because you can’t do fitness stuff anymore!”
August watched helplessly as Henry flew across his chair, hitting Seth in the chest with his full weight. Upending Seth’s chair. August watched his plastic water glass fall and tumble, the water soaking fast into the sandy dirt.
“Don’t you ever talk to August that way!” Henry shouted. “He’s August! You never talk to him like that! Never!”
Henry delivered the words from a position on top of Seth and his camp chair, and it seemed Seth could not get up. Maybe he was too tired or too surprised, or maybe Henry had knocked the wind out of him and he couldn’t breathe.
God knows August still couldn’t.
“You want to hold it down over there?” he heard a man shout from inside a tent at the next site over.
“Henry,” August said quietly. As calmly as possible. “Stop. Leave your brother alone. Let him up.”
Henry did not let Seth up.
“You apologize to August,” Henry told his brother in a more controlled voice.
“No. Just let him up, Henry. He doesn’t need to apologize. He’s right.”
Henry stumbled to his feet and shot August a scorched look, as though August had thoroughly betrayed him.
Take Me With You Page 26