Angels of Light Read online

  "Come on."

  Bullseye stopped what he was doing. "I been waiting for you guys." He looked right and left, righting down a huge grin. If there was one thing he loved, it was a conspiracy. "There's big doings," he confided. "Big." His excitement started to show, but he managed to rein it in and finished tamping peat and soil around the base of a luminous green seedling. Having nothing to do with his hands, Tucker slotted them in the top of his front pockets and let John do the talking.

  "You got our stuff?" John asked. He'd already guessed Bullseye did, but hadn't voiced the thought to Tucker in case thieves really had struck.

  "Yeah."

  "You do?" Tucker was overjoyed.

  "You hit any jackpots in Reno?"

  John sighed, making room for the punch line.

  Bullseye rubbed his hands gleefully. "Because we hit the jackpot here, boyos."

  "But where's our stuff?" said Tucker. From the corner of his eye, Bullseye tried to measure the pair's curiosity, and finally his excitement broke loose. He kicked his feet loose of a pile of paperbacks under the dashboard and swung from the seat.

  "I'm the only one that stayed," said Bullseye. "Me and this." And with a natty arc, he slid open the van door. There, folded, stuffed, tied, and stacked from carpet to ceiling, lay all the possessions of Camp Four. Miles and miles of rope bearing every color of the rainbow were piled in neat, limp coils. Tents, shoes, chains of silvery carabiners and high-tech hardware, three acoustic guitars, gas stoves, dirty clothes knotted with twine, a typewriter, and even an IBM PC

  jr. all inhabited the dark cavity of the van. It smelled of mildew and wood smoke and old sweat.

  "Yeah" reveled Tucker. "Cool."

  "You going to tell us or not?" said John.

  "You guys ready for a little walk?"

  "Jesus, do I have to pull it out with pliers?"

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  "The lake, men. The lake."

  Just then Ernie snapped his head up off the ground, snout pointing toward the eastern willow break. "Someone's coming," said Bullseye. The dog vanished. A minute later they heard Liz calling, "Hello, hello."

  "In here," John shouted.

  "Boy, I don't think Delta Force One is going to be her kind of outfit."

  "Delta Force One?" Tucker asked. He'd spotted his rattlesnake-checkered rope and was trying to extricate it from the pile.

  "There you are," Liz said from the thicket. She shouldered through the brush and joined them at the van. "No one knows a thing at headquarters. It's a big mystery. In fact they instructed me to report my findings."

  "I missed you, Lizzie," Bullseye interrupted.

  "God, look at all that gear," said Liz, just noticing. "Where'd everybody go?"

  Bullseye hesitated. "There's been some developments. Some group investigation of, uh, rumors." Unable to get his coil loose, Tucker untied its knot and began pulling the rope out in a single strand onto the top of his Adidas.

  "Fuck," John whispered. The lake.

  Liz understood, too. The little half grin stayed on her face for another few seconds, then Page 49

  guttered away. Suddenly she looked very sick. "Oh, no," she groaned. "Bullseye, tell me this isn't true."

  "What?" said Tucker.

  "Too good to be true, Liz. What did you expect?"

  "Hang on," said John. He was feeling weak in the knees, too. "You mean Kreski talked the whole camp into going—"

  "It wasn't exactly the Children's Crusade," said Bullseye. "People know what they're in for.

  They've been goin' up in waves. A few of the animals have come down and gone back up already—you know, like twenty-five-hour days. It takes two days in.

  And loaded up, about two days down. I'd say Camp Four should start filling up tomorrow in the

  P.M.

  " Rope scattered across his feet, Tucker still didn't comprehend the news.

  "Stop," Liz commanded. "I don't want to hear it. I didn't hear you." She turned around and faced the willows. "I didn't see you. Damn it, don't you understand—"

  "Don't blame me," Bullseye said. "I'm here. They're up there."

  "But..." She stopped. "It's crazy."

  "Yeah." He said it with relish.

  "Don't you know what kind of trouble..." She couldn't seem to finish a thought.

  "Kreski's just a daring kind of guy," Bullseye observed. "Aren't we all."

  Liz turned, anger crabbing her brow. "I'm serious, Bullseye. And John. I was never here. Damn it. You people..." She didn't wait for refutation, just hauled off into the forest. John followed her.

  With each passing second, the implications of "the lake"

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light were becoming clearer.

  "Liz, wait a minute," he said. "You have nothing to do with it."

  "You people." She stormed ahead.

  "Would you just slow down a minute—"

  "No."

  "Slow down."

  She stopped. "Are you going up?"

  John hesitated.

  "I don't want to know you." She yanked her sleeve from his grip.

  "Would you just—"

  "Just leave me alone, John." Whirling around, she punched him hard on his chest. "I should have known better."

  "Yeah? Well hit me again. That'll make it all go away."

  "I'm done with you."

  "And you're a cunt." He said it just like his dad would say it, slapping her hard with the word.

  He'd never called her that. Then again, she'd never hit him. She hit him again, catching him on the ear this time.

  "Damn it," he said, touching the ear with his fingertips.

  Glaring to keep him at bay, Liz backed away and stalked off through the trees. "Run away from it, Liz," John called after her. Then he wished he hadn't said anything. He slapped at a dead twig and sent it flying. Words. Fists. Fuck it all. A rustling to his right made him stop. There was indistinct movement, then a dirty yellow shape burst from the brush. It was Ernie. The dog cranked its lips back in a ghastly smile and wagged its tail thick with brambles. Together they returned to the clearing.

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  Bullseye and Tucker were kneeling beside a USGS topo sheet spread out on the ground. Both looked up when John reappeared. "Snake Lake," Tucker said to John.

  "I never heard of it."

  "But it's there, Tuck." Bullseye touched the map precisely.

  "And everyone else is, too," said John.

  "Everyone," Bullseye emphasized.

  "And there's drugs."

  "Beaucoup drugs." Bullseye rocked onto his heels, stood, and reached into the van.

  He pulled a ten-gallon plastic garbage bag from behind the front seat and opened it.

  "Reach your hand in there, Tuck."

  Tucker hesitated. "What's in there?" But it was obvious he was pretending. He knew, too.

  "Gold."

  Tucker dipped his arm deep and extracted a handful of dark green and red vegetation. It was wet and stuck together. "That's like a fraction of what Sammy brought down. He said take it all.

  There's more. Tons more."

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  John stepped up and took a pinch. He smelled it. "Jesus, it's soaked with gasoline."

  "Airplane fuel. No problem. You should see it burn. Pure, smooth. Sinsemilla. Not a bud in the whole crop. It creeps down your spine and takes you on a tour. It's like '69

  all over again." Sixty-nine was Bullseye's touchstone, the height of civilization as he knew it.

  "I don't believe this."

  "It's true. The plane hit square in the lake. What blew onto shore is what
the rangers snatched.

  The rest of it... all we can figure is they decided to wait for the spring thaw to do their work for them. They're lazy. We're not. We're fucking hungry. You hungry, Tuck?"

  Tucker swallowed and dropped the pot back into the garbage bag. "But what if they decide to bust us?"

  "They can't bust all of us. Besides, they're sleeping. By the time they wake up, we'll be millionaires."

  "Snake Lake," said John. "That's a long ways up and in."

  "Two haul-ass days. But I got us a shortcut figured out." Bullseye pulled his fingertip across the topo, tracing a strenuous trek up and down the altitude lines. "We need skis," he commented.

  "But if we leave this morning we can make it tomorrow morning."

  John pointed at a parallel set of lines that showed slopes that were steep, but not steep enough.

  "That looks like avalanche country." South America had taught him well.

  "A regular Valley of Death." Bullseye shrugged. "There's always the long route."

  Tucker watched the negotiations, accumulating the behavior of grown men.

  "And this here," John said, stabbing at a tightly bunched set of lines. "That's real climbing."

  "Climbing?" Tucker parked up.

  "Ice," grinned Bullseye. "Two hundred feet of sweet blue ice. Sammy said forget it, no one could ever climb it clean." To Bullseye, the Iceman, that constituted the ultimate challenge.

  John bought in. "Okay," he said. If nothing else it would put him beyond Liz's reach for a few days and get him up into the backcountry. And it was always a pleasure to watch Bullseye strut his stuff on steep ice.

  "What do you say, Tuck?"

  "What about the Visor?" the boy wanted to know. "We're honed. We're ready."

  "Yeah, but it's not ready for us." From where they stood the upper reaches of Half Dome swelled above the treetops. The Visor jutted out at the very apex of the wall, blue and Page 51

  cold. Because it faced north, away from the sun, it would be winter up there for some time to come.

  "Besides, the Visor's not going anywhere, Tuck," Bullseye popped in. "Hell, after this file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (60

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light you can go and buy the Visor. After this one we're going to own the whole almighty

  Valley."

  CHAPTER 6

  On three-pin back-country skis, the three of them whispered up the snows of Bullseye's Valley of Death toward Snake Lake. They were on cruise control, lightweight and streamlined, packs empty except for sleeping bags, some ice and rock-climbing gear, a couple pounds of trail food, and a gas stove to melt snow.

  Casting fretful glances up at the fattened slopes on either side of them, they saw what John had foreseen with one scan of the map, that the avalanche factor was radical.

  They were so quiet infiltrating the narrow valley and the air was so thin that each felt like his ears were packed with cotton. There are places like that in the mountains, the glacial fields of Denali, for instance, or the plateau above the Khumbu Icefield on

  Mount Everest, where sound almost ceases to exist. You feel endangered, as if your next footstep might turn to stone or this veil of earthly illusions might suddenly evaporate and leave you nowhere and nothing. Bullseye tried whistling through his teeth, then quit. Tucker felt an urgent need to practice aloud what he would say when the feds arrested him for this caper, but took his cue from John and held on to his words. In early days, mountain folk believed that a sound even as slight as the beating of a swallow's wings could trigger an avalanche. Burdened with superstitions of their own, the trio slid between the deadly slopes with the timidity of thieves. Just in case the slopes avalanched, they kept fifty yards or so between them. Sunlight ricocheted off the diamond-bright snow, and when they stopped for night all three were suffering sunburn on the rims of their nostrils. John found a large rock shelf that would brunt any nocturnal slides. With a slice of new moon dangling in the east, they crawled under one by one. The day had sapped them all, but they were too excited to fall asleep right away. Bullseye tried to engage their attention by telling them, in a stage whisper, about a New York intellectual's film analysis in which she correlated fascism with the love of mountains, but only succeeded in dumbfounding

  Tucker. Bullseye sensed the lack of interest and quickly detoured.

  "I haven't whispered like this since me and my friends watched all the girls at my big sister's slumber party," he said.

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  "The avalanches," Tucker somberly whispered back.

  "I know," answered Bullseye. "The old Lightnin' Man." The Lightning Man was an in joke. Once upon a time, Satchel Paige stole two bases and home plate during a fierce thunderstorm. When asked where the burst of energy had come from, he explained it was because of the Lightning Man coming to get him. Pete had imported that little anecdote to Camp Four, where it instantly entered the language. Climbers divided their risks between objective and subjective hazards. The subjective hazards were those you created yourself, the ones you imposed upon the rock.

  Trembling knees, sweaty fingertips, a foolish move: Those and other symptoms of fear or pride could cause you to fall on a perfectly safe rock. Add some rain to slicken the rock, however, and the hazards became objective. The risk became exterior. It became the Lightning Man. Rockfall, avalanche, deep cold, rotten rock, bad ice, storm. The Lightning Man.

  Usually subjective hazards just made a fool of you. But when the Lightning Man beat you, you were dead. Tucker knew all about the Lightning Man. "It reminds me of when I was a boy,"

  whispered John. "My father took me and my brother into the Superstition Mountains looking for the Lost Dutchman Mine. We went into a sacred area the Apaches call zhich-do-banajegahi.

  The taboo mountain. The Apaches say that gods live there, and that men's spirits pass through on their way to beyond. They say that a race of little people has its home there. And that it holds a window to the past. We got there at dark and we whispered all night long. We were too afraid to build a fire because of what we might see. And if we talked out loud, the spirits might find us."

  "You find the Lost Dutchman?" asked Bullseye.

  "No. Next morning my father remembered that the mountains could change their shape.

  Trespassers die because they can't find their way out. And we were definitely trespassers. So we hauled out of there.

  Rápidamente."

  "What was the rock like?" Tucker couldn't keep from asking.

  "Go to sleep, Beanie," said Bullseye.

  Before dawn next morning, John wiggled out of his sleeping bag and waxed all three pair of skis with a hard green klister for the cold April snow. Tucker didn't move in his bag until Bullseye nudged him awake and handed in a mugful of lukewarm chocolate.

  "Two more miles," John softly informed them, map in hand.

  "To the lake," asked Tucker, "or the ice?" There was a difference. He was secretly praying that Sammy would prove correct and the icefall would be too difficult to climb. In his opinion this lark up to Snake Lake was a costly digression from more important issues, mainly the Visor. The sooner they returned to the Valley, the better. It was a matter of minutes to work their sleeping bags into stuff sacks, chew a handful each of generic beer nuts, and step into their ski bindings.

  They glided off blowing frost like high-strung racehorses, quickly awake, skating neatly across the file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (62 of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:52

  Jeff Long - Angels of Light hard crust. As they gained altitude, the trees turned into dwarfs, crumpled and mangled by chronic storm winds. This morning, however, there wasn't a puff of air.

  Snowflakes that had descended overnight balanced on pine boughs like fine white
gold dust.

  Soon the drainage took a sharp left-hand turn, then a sharp right. The lazy slopes turned into jutting maze walls a hundred, then two hundred feet high on either side.

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  "Finally," beamed Bullseye. For now the walls were too steep to hold snow. They'd survived the avalanche channel. Another bend in the twisting drainage and there it stood smack in the middle of the cold shadows, a hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall ribbon of blue ice dangling from a concave scoop of rock. It was a spillover from the lake, or so the map indicated.

  "Your mama," swore Bullseye. He didn't punch his pole tip against the binding release and dive for the gear in his pack. Instead he just stood there, and you could tell the thin column of ice looked insurmountable, even to him. Tucker was relieved and thrilled at the same time, glad because now they could retreat to Camp Four, but excited because first Bullseye would try his hand at the glassy barrier. He wasn't going to get far. But he was going to try. And the thing about ice is that it's not rock.

  And the thing about rock is that you can second-guess it usually, ice never.

  "Doesn't look like it's in very good shape," John appraised. He was giving Bullseye an out if he wanted one. In fact much of the ice looked primo, nice and plastic, not too brittle, not too soft, and Bullseye knew it.

  "It'll go. A bit thin," he conceded. "But I think she'll go." What Bullseye was talking about was ice so scarce in places that it hardly glazed the underlying rock. Near the top the column seemed to be attached to the rock by little more than a smear of frozen water, a condition alpinists call verglas. It was amazing that all those tons of inverted dagger could be held upright like this, more amazing still that Bullseye was willing to commit his body weight to it.

  "Maybe we ought to see what the sun does to it," Tucker suggested.

  "Nothin' good," said Bullseye. "Might as well give it a shot before the whole thing comes loose and falls on us."

  "Whatever," John consented. He could hear the faltering in Bullseye's tone and wanted the man to know they were behind him no matter what. "No big deal if we backtrack and take the regular trail around."

  "No big deal," said Tucker.