Angels of Light Read online

  A bright, large-boned girl from a southeastern Oregon cattle ranch, and a graduate of file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (14

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light the University of Washington's forestry program, Liz Jenkins was the sole woman in the company of nine men, most of whom were taciturn about having her along.

  Equal opportunity was not exactly an unknown trespass in the Park Service; nonetheless, Liz had discovered, the bureau preferred to digest fads at its own bucolic rate.

  Female rangers were all right, make no mistake, but the feeling was they might better feather into the job by guiding nature walks or policing campgrounds during the summer season. Over coffee, two of the men present had gone so far as to hazard the belief that menstruating women lure bears and put them in a mauling frame of mind.

  Luckily, Liz had not been present for this airing of superstitions. As much as the more progressive rangers loved baiting the old fogies about their outlandish demagoguery, even they were less than enthusiastic to have a woman along. It wasn't Liz, certainly—she was a sturdy enough femme, if a bit acid and quick on the draw.

  Rather they shared the opinion harbored in firehouses and police departments from the Florida Keys to Port Angeles, Washington, that out yonder on the firing line muscle makes the difference. Bust a leg up in the backcountry and if your partner's a lightweight, that's all she wrote. Liz herself rankled them less than the idea of her did. She'd been hired solely to satisfy a trend, that's how most of them lived with it.

  For them, her rationale was simple: She was on a husband hunt. It made blunt sense.

  Where better to gold-dig than in the Valley midwinter among handpicked hot-blooded rangers? But here, too, Liz had proven troublesome, especially—though not exclusively—in the minds of the men actually eligible for her exploitation. For somewhere along the line she'd taken a wrong turn and parked her ass with the climber crowd, a seedy crew devoted to hedonism and multiple abuses of the system.

  Ignoring discretion altogether, she'd taken as a lover one of the Park Service's more dedicated headaches, Matt Kresinski. As if that weren't grievous enough, upon dumping Kresinski, she'd taken on John Coloradas, another of the Park's problem boys. Hardly boys, these two, more like ex-cons among the impressionable juvenile delinquents in Camp Four, climbers' camp.

  So it was, as they poured their coffee into the snow and prepared to slog on, that nine rangers tried to ignore Liz's golden rope of hair as they crept higher and deeper into the mountains east of Yosemite. No one knew exactly where they might find the downed plane, or if they ever would. They had probed every likely-looking hump of snow and studied miles of the surrounding forest for signs of sudden trauma: broken tree-tops, torn metal, bodies. After Page 13

  forty-three kick-ass miles loaded with supplies and gear, the general feeling was that if they hadn't yet skied ten feet above the buried wreckage, then they soon would and would never know it. They had found the wing, but that was three days ago, and the airplane could be anywhere. Another commonly held opinion was that an airplane filled with dope and missing a wing would not be going anywhere until the spring thaw, at which time two hippies on a leash could locate it with minimal effort. Turn one of those climbers loose up here file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (15

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light and you could have the plane tomorrow morning by breakfast. With little enthusiasm, the cold and grouchy expedition finally stopped for yet another night out and started making camp.

  By eighteen-hundred most of the rangers were neatly burrowed in snow caves and tents, snug and drowsy. Liz was not. She wanted that plane. Telling herself this was just a chance to spend an extra half hour with the slow red alpenglow that was soaking the frozen peaks, she refused to admit she might also be trying to prove herself to these men. John called this tendency of hers

  "punching out the guys,"

  which pissed her off. She wasn't that way. All she wanted this freshman year as a full-time ranger was to make it through without having to grow testicles. Why she should care about getting through the winter, though, was a mystery, because she was resigning in just a few months anyway. It was unpleasant for a ranch girl and athlete to confess, but she disliked the wilderness, this wilderness anyway. Once the summer closed out—or that job with the Bureau of Land Management's Wild Horse program opened up—she was history. The Valley could do without her.

  She headed for the crest of a nearby ridge. She was a methodical, Nordic skier, neatly attuned to her own pace. Few of the rangers knew, certainly none from watching her serviceable technique on touring skis, but Liz had put herself through college on a racing scholarship. Besides the degree and an alpine ski racer's heavily muscled butt, the racing had gained for her little more than the incentive to quit chewing Red Man.

  No Olympics. No berth on the USSA National Team. Too few trophies to even clear a shelf for.

  Not even an injury to brag about to her brothers. Competition was a dirty word. "Punching out the guys" sounded ugly to her. Like other large women, she was confounded by her size and strength. Over the years she had shortened her cowgirl stride, softened her voice, and mastered other such physical diminutions. The few men she'd cherished had always been larger than life.

  Matthew, for instance: a god in size elevens. Talk about backfires. He was the one who'd coined

  "the Amazon" for her. Somehow with Matthew she'd always felt like public property, a six-foot-tall

  Playmate who'd strayed into the wrong locker room. Until John came along she hadn't realized how destructive Matthew really was. Not that John came trouble-free.

  He had a fierce, but oddly distracted determination. In that respect, they were almost too alike.

  Vigorous but not definite. Watching him among his Camp Four people or asleep beside her, Liz could detect a beautifully tended fire grown cold. It made her sorry not to have been there a few years earlier, before South America ruined him.

  She'd been cramming for finals in Upper Sonoran to Arctic-Alpine Life Zones the year he was down on some mountain, losing a climbing partner, building a scandal.

  And yet no one, not John, not other climbers, not even Matthew, who stopped just short of calling whatever had happened murder, would talk about it. Even John's close friend Bullseye was quiet about the dark incident except to say, "After Peru some of his dogs quit barkin'."

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  "The altitude affected him?"

  "Come on, Liz. I mean he quit smilin'. I mean he got atmospheric.

  Like the Cheshire cat. Sometimes he's here, then poof, he's not."

  "Meaning?" One was always asking Bullseye to clarify.

  "Meaning there's no such thing as a happy ending. Happy middles, maybe. But no happy endings. It's rationally absurd."

  "I don't believe that."

  "No shit, Lizzie."

  Bullseye was half right anyway, she was unabashed about her quest. So why keep on with a man who made plain, simple joy feel like an open zipper in church? How much plainer and simpler could you get than a climber? Weren't they supposed to have the stuff of life lodged under every fingernail? The Valley was making a fool of her. First Matthew, wild, nuts, and crude as hell.

  Then John with his pilgrim melancholy. Climbers. Damn climbers. The slope steepened.

  Spreading into a quick herringbone, she mounted the rounded top.

  The ridge was bare on both sides of the crest, its vegetation long ago slaughtered by the wind.

  At the north end of the ridge a gentle decline swept out through a miniature forest of stunted, twisted pines and introduced Snake Lake. Visibility was marginal. Curtains of gauzy spindrift closed away the horizon, though now and then they parted to
show the ghost of a mountain drifting high overhead. A single gigantic slab reared above the lake like a gray tombstone, then blowing snow cut her sight.

  Perched on the tip of the ridge, Liz caught another frigid burst of wind and felt cold for the first time all day. The far peaks were taking some weather, too, and the alpenglow had gone dull and pewter. Not much sun left. Time to head back down to the encampment before John's bronchitis flared up in her lungs again. He'd brought the virus down from his crazy Mosquito Wall escapade and it had taken them both a month to recover, a period marked as much by claustrophobia as hoarseness.

  Bronchitis aside, winters in the Valley were famous for inflicting cabin fever. The cabin was king-size, but so was the fever.

  As she turned her back to the wind and prepared to skate back down the ridge to her tent, Liz began thinking of Reno again, a reliable counterpoint to this grunt work.

  She was bound for the bright lights as soon as they located the wreck, because Reno was where the BLM had its regional headquarters. That's what she told people. In fact, she was taking a half-month's pay, five days of paid vacation, and her man, and she meant to lose herself in grossly civilized decadence. No art museums or foreign films or Japanese teahouses. Nothing fancy this trip. The best part was how when she'd asked, John had said sure, anywhere you want.

  However brief the jaunt, they were going to leave the Valley together. The way tourists visit Yosemite, they were going to descend into the outside world. Tucker was tagging along, but that was okay, he was like a kid brother to both of them. From where she stood hunched against the file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (17

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light wind, Reno was less than a hundred crow miles away. With Tioga Pass shut down for the winter and spring, it would take a half-day's driving, though. Another blast of wind hit the mountainside, punching the cagoule hood against her wool cap. Reno was one more reason to hurry up and find this damn plane. The plane had taken on shades of the Lost Dutchman Mine, always elsewhere. Because she figured they'd expect her to, Liz alone in the group hadn't bitched about their open-ended mission.

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  There was no way for her to know it, but her stoicism had become one further source of resentment. It would have delighted her. She cast a final glance down at the lake's snowy flats, and the ghostly mountain hovered between veils of white. The sun was finished. She planted a pole to shove off, then ducked her head forward and squinted. And like that she found the object of their desire.

  Perhaps a hundred feet from the drift-covered shore, she saw the upright tail section of an airplane. It jutted like an invincible erection, the sole clue that something larger and more stimulating lay locked beneath the ice. Liz nearly reached under her cagoule for the walkie-talkie on her hip. The thought hit her, though, that this could be nothing more than illusion. It sure as hell looked like a plane's tail, but if she dragged the gang out of their toasty sleeping bags for a mirage, there'd be no end to their cackling. Could be a tree or a rock... she wiped at the snowflakes clustering on her thick eyelashes. Whatever it was, she resolved to touch it first.

  The day had been long and the company annoying. Add to that her excitement and a flagging blood-sugar content, and Liz's glide was a trifle more aggressive than it should have been. She kicked off, then kicked again to exploit her momentum. Her speed picked up on the crusted snow, and it looked like a straight, clean glide onto the flats. Until a suitcase-size mound loomed in her immediate path, she gave no thought at all to braking or turning. Then suddenly there it was, just big enough to snap her wooden ski tips if she hit it. She tried to telemark, then stem, but the crust suddenly dropped off into deep powder, trapping her full speed ahead. With a futile last-minute twist she tried to ram the object broadside instead of tips first. Her tips drove straight into the object. For a moment Liz managed to stay upright, furiously stabbing at the snow all around her to find solid ground. She toppled ignobly.

  "Bastard," she muttered. "Son of a bitch." She rose up from the snow. Carefully brushing the telltale snow off her clothing, she checked her skis and poles for fractures and with great relief found none. Her pride and equipment accounted for, Liz stabbed at the offending lump with one pole. It looked like the winter kills they used to find on her family's ranch. Her dad and brothers and all the other ranchers always cussed the coyotes and ignored the obvious starvation, which is to say they blamed the Devil, not their own poor foresight. Pride. A family trait. She expected the tip of her pole to glance off a rock or an iron-hard tree stump. Instead the tip penetrated whatever lay underneath. With a jerk, she pulled the ski pole free and stabbed experimentally at the lump again. Within its coating of snow, the surface file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (18

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light resisted, then gave under the tip. Not so different, she thought, from cow flesh. But what could it be? She popped the pole loose and prodded the lump for an answer. An old buck doe, maybe, or a bighorn? Too bulky to be a marmot. Too small to be a bear.

  She pressed on the pole's strap and slid the tip in. Right then it struck her what was lying under the snow.

  "Oh, my God." She yanked at her pole, but now it wouldn't come loose. That or the strings in her arm weren't working. They'd warned her, warned all of them.

  "Gentlemen." The echo. "And lady." And it had been for her benefit, much of it, even though she'd been on body evacs before. "Chances are you won't find the pilot and his buddies neatly buckled in their seats awaiting our assistance. More likely they'll be scattered to kingdom come over the mountain range. They aren't a priority anyhow. The plane is. So if and when you encounter any remains, just bag 'em and tag 'em. They will be choppered out at first opportunity. My hunch is, between the weather and the animals, none of those jockos will be seen again. Ever." She pulled at the pole but with more repulsion than zest, then gave up on it and yanked her hand free of the strap.

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  Liz was much too down to earth to believe in ghosts. Still, the wind and encroaching darkness were taking their toll. There was a dead man lying across the top of her skis.

  She was stuck here. Stuck. The sky's monochrome kept slurring into a thicker and thicker gray, and her imagination began taking over, no help at all. Watching the lump of snow for supernatural shrugs and shudders, chiding herself for being superstitious, she tried to slide backward. It doesn't take long for a layer of ice to stud the base of a cross-country ski; so it was that with the skis jammed against the corpse in front and too beaded with ice to slide backward, all Liz could get to move were her heels in the bindings, up and down, nowhere. A deepening revulsion seized her, and the sensation of flesh yielding to her pole's metal tip crept up her right arm all over again. With all the calm she could muster, Liz tried without luck to slide forward and away from this mistake. Her brashness was a curse. The word "don't" usually served to punch on her overdrive.

  "Idiot," she whispered to herself. The search for glory could have waited until tomorrow morning. It could have been done the right way. To begin with, she didn't belong out alone, particularly after dark. "Stupid, stupid," she cursed. Now there were holes in the body, she didn't want to think where, his head or his arm, and she was smack up against it, trapped. If she could just get a little distance, a minute to breathe, the shock would settle out. Procedure. That was always the saving grace.

  She'd seen dead and injured before, but rescue work was not her strong card.

  Anticipating a job with the Park Service, she'd put in a couple of semesters as an emergency medic with a Seattle ambulance service, just enough to pick up some skills and spoil forever the popcorn joy of horror flicks. They tell you it gets better, but for Liz it never had, that dread before arriving at an accident scene. The hand

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light reaching out through the shattered windshield. It was one thing when the bits and pieces were calf nuts or the notch sliced off a beef's ear at branding or deer or elk offal. But to her the human animal was sacrosanct. It belonged all in one piece. Just last August, there'd been that New York boy killed when his—or someone else's—

  rope broke near the summit of Washington's Column, nine hundred feet to the deck.

  Thank God it wasn't her who'd first found what was left. Worse than what sharks do to you, they said, at least sharks cut clean. Under the Column it was just tufts of hair, some bone, and meat.

  That distant afternoon still gave her nightmares, right down to the solitary Steller's jay that had challenged them, blue feathers against the blue sky.

  When they looked up, way up, there perched on the highest limb of a tall tree was one of the boy's climbing shoes, laces still tied in a bow, toe balanced on a bunch of needles as if its owner had gingerly stepped right into the sky and vanished.

  Fighting desperation, she tried again to shuffle her skis in place and shuck the ice. No luck. Even as she watched, the lump under the snow seemed to be moving. Just the wind bending the snow's shape, she knew. But it was getting harder to convince herself the lump was not going to rise up from the drift, holes and all. Liz pawed at the drawstring on the bottom edge of her cagoule to get at the walkie-talkie. "Come on," she muttered at the cagoule, eyes fixed on the lump. Her mittens were suddenly too thick, and she was uncertain her jaw would work anyway. She gave up on the radio. The way things were going, she'd drop it in the snow or the batteries would be dead. Even if they weren't, the ridge would probably block transmission. She was getting scared.