The Wall Page 3

  Tears beaded down the greasy face. “I knew them. Kind ladies. They brought me food. Yes. They knew my camp. We had secrets. I watched over them. They said I was their homeboy.”

  Hugh didn’t buy a word of it. “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “If you were sorry, none of this would be happening. Now we’re in for it.”

  “Look at me,” Hugh said. “Right in my eyes. Have you ever seen me? Because I’ve never seen you.”

  The man grimaced. “The devil’s a dog. A black dog. You ever seen that?”

  Like talking to the wind, thought Hugh. Time was wasting. He started to walk around him.

  The hermit lifted his hiking stick, as if to block him. “Now all hell’s loose because of you.” His breath stunk of road kill.

  Hugh knew madness. He’d lived with it. He’d seen it make Annie not Annie. It had stripped the soul right out of her. He’d watched her wither away, mind and body, until his heart quit breaking. There was only so much suffering you could stand by and just watch. And then you had to walk on. God willing.

  “My friend,” he said, “this has nothing to do with us.”

  “Liar.” The man was weeping.

  “Let me go. Please.” Hugh let the stick rest against his chest. He could feel tremors through its wood. The man was harmless.

  “You killed her.”

  “Enough,” said Hugh.

  “I should have stopped you.”

  Enough.

  Taking him down was as simple as grabbing the staff and giving a pull. The man spilled to his weak side, and Hugh heard his skull, like a coconut shell, knock on a rock. The hermit gave a sharp cry, and Hugh felt a twinge of regret at his pain and surprise. But he was fighting away the animals, no more or less. Hugh didn’t offer him a hand up.

  “Get out of here,” Hugh said.

  “My stick,” the man pleaded.

  Hugh held it out of reach. The stick was a worthy thing, the product of many days and nights of loving attention. Knots had been carved into faces and forms, images of nature rising up from the wood’s surface, a whole Eden in his hand.

  “I’m going to break this. If I find you anywhere near here, I’ll break your legs.” Christ, Glass, a poor gimp? He could never do such a thing. But of course he could. Lift a rock, drop it, cripple the animal once and for all.

  “Don’t.” The slouch hat fell off, and with it fell the hermit’s menace. He gained a forehead, a pale spray of constant worries. A few wisps of hair lay matted across his soft, white scalp. It looked like a mushroom growing from quiet rot beneath a log.

  Something about that bared head brought out Hugh’s pity. Harm this poor thing? The sun was his harm. The moon was his harm. All he had was this stick to shepherd his nightmares.

  “Get going,” Hugh said. Again, he didn’t offer his hand, not out of meanness, just caution. The man had carved the stick with something. He had a knife on him somewhere.

  “My stick.”

  Hugh heaved it like a spear far into the woods.

  The man scrambled to his knees to track its general course. It went out of sight and Hugh hoped the thing didn’t hang up in the boughs.

  The man got to his feet. He tugged the hat onto his head and went in a crooked line after his stick.

  “That’s poison ivy,” Hugh called after him. It was a small act of mercy. The fool didn’t need any more misery in his hard life.

  The stranger glanced back at him. “I’ll see you here again,” he said. “Right where you left her.”

  Hugh bent as if to pick up a rock, like you’d throw at dogs. But the man was already off through the thicket, noisy for a minute, then gone.

  FOUR

  Near eight, Hugh walked into the bar at Yosemite Lodge. Thirty years ago, it would have been packed with climbers. But the nightly banquet of high-plains drifters was a thing of the past. The park service had contained the once rowdy climbing scene with rules and regs, and the beer had gotten too expensive. Also, this new breed of climbers took their training more seriously, and the semesters were back in session, and the season was wrong.

  So the place was empty. In place of audacious young bravos and their braless girlfriends, the bar was occupied by five TV sets running an endless stream of extreme sports, all scored to deafening hip-hop. The bartender was fishing for customers, or just indulging himself.

  Lewis Cole perched on a stool nursing a tonic water with lime, tossing peanuts at his mouth, waiting like it was no wait, just killing time. Tall, with the neck of a wrestler, he was too big to be a rock climber, though in the face of conventional wisdom he’d proved to be a very good one, a small legend, the Great Ape. He’d never been pretty to watch in action, but he had ungodly reach and speed and fists like iron chunks, perfect for slugging it out with Yosemite’s famous cracks.

  Hugh took a seat at the little table with Lewis. Suddenly his legs felt heavy. He let his back muscles sag, and gave a silent sigh. For the first time in many hours, he could afford to be weak.

  Lewis didn’t greet him outright. There was no need. They had a shared history that went back to second grade at Whittier Elementary School, and they were about to be tied together every minute for the next seven days or so. To Lewis, Hugh had been off on a chore, no more. He threw another nut at his mouth. He offered the paper cup of them to Hugh. He waited.

  Hugh was famished, but waved it off. “I’m a little dry,” he said. The creature had eaten his pear. Hugh couldn’t get over that. When, at their insistence, he had led the rangers back to the site, his pack was lying open. The hermit had stolen his pear. Which was the least of it. But also the essence of it. The monster had felt so comfortable in stealing her body, he’d paused to help himself to Hugh’s piece of fruit. It was all about territory.

  Lewis called to the bartender. The man took his time coming over. He was shaved bald with some kind of Chinese calligraphy tattooed at the base of his skull. “More peanuts?” he said. Hugh got it. Lewis hadn’t been much of a customer.

  “Water,” said Hugh. “And I’ll have what he’s having.”

  “Water with your water.” A wise guy. “You want some gin or vodka to go with it?”

  Once upon a time, you drank the demon and raged all night, and next morning cleared the toxins out of your system on the wall. Or took the party with you, jugs of wine, hits of acid, doobies, mushrooms, name it. Great routes had been climbed in a hallucinogenic fog. But that was a thousand years ago, and tomorrow morning was almost upon them. “Just straight tonic water, the same as him,” Hugh said.

  “While you’re at it,” Lewis said, “how about changing the channel? And tweak the volume. Oh, and yeah, more peanuts.”

  The bartender signed “cool” with his horn fingers, and moseyed off.

  “We almost went looking for you,” Lewis said. “Almost. Rachel wanted to. She drove up in a rental car this afternoon and thought you’d be here. I told her you were out communing with the be-wilderness. I said to just let you ramble in the brambles.”

  Hugh smiled faintly. Lewis was clowning with his Beat speak, dishing up vestiges of auld lang syne, trying to set the tone. He saw El Cap as their time machine. It was going to take them back and make life simple and sweet again.

  “It’s good she didn’t come,” Hugh told him.

  “That’s what I told her,” Lewis said. “Glass is having his usual struggle session. Like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill. So who won, you or the water?”

  “You didn’t hear?” Hugh was surprised. The past four hours loomed in him. The earth had split open and swallowed a woman. Surely word had spread.

  Lewis heard his tone. His face clouded and he darted a glance at the TVs perched in the corners to search out his own information, looking for news of some disaster or terrorist attack.

  Just then the screens flickered to a new channel and the volume dropped to a reverent hush. Hugh looked up and the bartender had found them a nearly comatose PGA Seniors tournament.

  “Cute,” said Lewis.r />
  The bartender brought Hugh’s tonic water. He set down a bowl brimming with too many peanuts, as if feeding beggars. Lewis didn’t look at him.

  Hugh told Lewis about the fall and his return with the rangers, and the unbelievable body theft, and their search, still ongoing. He kept it brief, on purpose. The last thing two aging mountain men needed was a bloody foreboding. Superstition could kill a climb before you ever left the earth.

  “You are shitting me,” Lewis said when he finished. “Here, in the Valley? That’s straight out of Frankenstein or Poe.”

  “He bundled her up in the tarp and took her off,” said Hugh. “A special friend. By the time I got there with the rangers, he’d had a good hour’s head start.”

  “You should have broken his legs while you had him down,” said Lewis. “You threatened him. You should have just done it.”

  “How could I know he’d do a thing like that?”

  Lewis frowned.

  Now what? Hugh waited. He’d had time to think their choices through. But Lewis would need to catch up with it and reach his own conclusions.

  Lewis got quiet. His big fingernail—carefully clipped to the quick for their climb—tapped on the photo in the center of the table. It was a photo of El Cap, though nothing pretty. The frame was filled with everyday rock and just a sliver of sky. Most people would have thought it was a reject. But for these two men, it was both past and future, a black-and-white portrait of Anasazi Wall, the route they had pioneered back in 1968. They were its fathers, and it marked the greatest year of their lives.

  Shortly after making Anasazi’s first ascent, life had taken them off in different directions. Hugh had become a doodlebugger in the bayous of Louisiana, dynamiting the mud in seismic search of oil. When a job came up with British Petroleum, he’d jumped at it and taken his bride off to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai, to vast desert country. Lewis had strayed back to Colorado and earned a graduate degree in Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and done with it the only thing he could, opening a used bookstore that had evolved over the years into a poets’ hangout and a latte bar. Now, like old warriors, the two of them were returning to their battleground, Anasazi.

  Lewis quit tapping. His finger pinned the photo flat. “I don’t mean to be insensitive,” he started. “That could be me lying out there, or you. But…” But it wasn’t.

  Right away Hugh knew in its entirety how their decision would unfold. They would go back and forth a little, paying lip service to what was proper at such times, but end with the fact that, really, the death—even her stolen remains—changed nothing. El Cap was a matter of orbit, the pull of gravity, a fact of life, their life. And she’d had her chance.

  For years, they had been tempting each other to take one more stab at the beast. Once upon a time, big walls and big mountains had been their glory. They came from a bygone era. Vietnam, Camelot, and Apollo had all been parts of their vocabulary. They had lived hand to mouth, working construction jobs, digging ditches, and one summer hiring onto the Alaska pipeline, to pay for gear and more climbing. They’d slept in caves and under picnic tables and on high ledges, subsisting on Jif peanut butter and Charlie’s tuna. A can of peaches and a tin cup of glacier melt were virtually sacraments. And at the center, always, El Cap remained their holy grail.

  In its day, the 3,600-foot-high monolith had been hailed as both the American Everest and the last Eiger. But like Hugh and Lewis, the proud Captain had grayed and slid from grace. El Cap had turned into a circus ground with a whole new breed of speed climbers, bolt gunners, and parachutists performing stunts and bagging records. Once mighty routes, including Anasazi, were now viewed as milk runs. The well-heeled adventurer could even buy a guided ascent of El Cap at the rate of $1 per vertical foot. Coming back, going up, leaving a bit of blood, it seemed the least Hugh and Lewis could do to restore some of the nobility they had known.

  And their time for the grand, absurd suffering of a multiday big-wall ascent was now or never. Anasazi would be their swan song, and they knew it. Each had kept climbing over the years, but it couldn’t last. In preparation for this climb, Hugh had made a daily diet of ibuprofen for pain and inflammation, along with vitamins and whey protein powder. Lewis had gone further, getting testosterone shots that left him bigger than ever. They were steeled and tempered and psyched for this thing. Once Anasazi was finished, Hugh reckoned each of them could slide back into the arthritis and skin cancer and mortality that awaited them.

  Lewis spoke his condolences to the young woman’s departed soul. He saluted her as “one of us,” and raised his glass of tonic water.

  “Bismullah,” whispered Hugh. Lewis looked at him. Louder, he said, “In the name of God.”

  “God? We’re dabbling in religions now?”

  “Cultures,” said Hugh. “The Arabs say it before entering a place. It keeps them safe.”

  “Do tell.” Lewis wanted to see how infected he was.

  “You know,” Hugh waved at the air. “From them.”

  “ ‘Them’? You’ve been in the land of the heathen too long. This is America, bro. Not eleventh-century Islam.”

  “It goes back before Islam, long before that. Primal fears. They have their names for them, we have ours.”

  “To guilt, ignorance, and the id,” said Lewis.

  Hugh eyed the photo, and it showed sections of the doomed climb off to the side. In the upper corner, like a bullet hole, stood Cyclops Eye.

  “The rangers will find her,” Lewis said. “They’ll get her home.” He was studying Hugh, looking for chinks in the armor. It was Hugh who had dealt with the slaughter, Hugh who had blood on his sleeve, Hugh who might have weakened.

  “She’d want us to carry on,” Hugh reassured him. “It’s what I’d want.”

  “Me, too,” said Lewis. “So we’re good for it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do me a favor.” Lewis paused, eyes furtive.

  “Sure.”

  “How about some teeth?”

  “What?”

  “A smiley face. Or at least keep the worst of it under the table, you know, about the body getting stolen. Rachel’s not in the mood.”

  “She’s not feeling well?”

  “We had a little argument.” Lewis tossed more peanuts at his mouth. “No worries. She’ll be coming any minute. She can’t wait to catch up with you.”

  “Me, too.”

  Lewis suddenly noticed the photo, as if it had sneaked up on them. “I hit Camp Four and did some more due diligence.”

  Camp Four was a sort of dumping ground for climbers from around the world, a motley base camp for all the big walls. People had once occupied it like homesteaders, planting themselves for years. The petrol station that hid it from civilian view was gone, but so was much of the camp’s ghetto comportment. In theory at least, the park service limited climbers’ stays to a couple of weeks. The worst of the shantytown shelters had disappeared and been replaced by ordinary dome tents, if only because a used dome tent could be had for the price of a good sheet of plastic. The nightly twinkle of campfires surrounded by hard-core storytellers was a bygone thing, especially this year when the drought had parched the forest to dry tinder. But for all the changes, Camp Four was still the place to get your information. The latest beta pooled there like water in an oasis.

  Hugh and Lewis were not staying at Camp Four. Lewis was chagrined. He felt like a traitor for taking a room at the lodge, but Rachel had put her foot down. She said she’d paid her dues in Camp Four, crawling up off the ground and out from tents for too many mornings of her life. Either they rented a room or she stayed home. When Lewis had called him about the matter, Hugh told him he was on Rachel’s side. Let’s save our suffering for the wall.

  Until the climb began, Hugh was very happy to have his own shower and toilet and a bed with sheets and a pillow. And his own rental car, his own entrance, his own exit. Friendship was one thing, but Hugh had outgrown the sort of camaraderie that once fueled their stolen rides on
freight trains from Denver, and their hitchhiking in storms, and their making claustrophobic fear-and-loathing marathons through Utah and Nevada packed in Hugh’s VW Beetle.

  Hugh took out a small, thick, leather-bound book. Lewis called it the bible. Filled with hand-drawn maps and topographical sketches and notes, it contained a lifetime of adventures. He opened it near the beginning, to a page neatly titled “Anasazi.” Lines met hatch marks and dots and numbers, the puzzle pieces of their climb.

  Lewis reached for the Bible as if it were his own, and aligned it beside the photo. With the tip of the little plastic sword from his lime slice, he very precisely matched sections of Hugh’s topo with the photo. He looked faintly silly, a fifty-six-year-old man stabbing with what looked like a child’s toy at a treasure map.

  “Remember that expanding flake on the ninth pitch, how it gave us fits? Well, the flake’s gone. It fell off when no one was looking. There’s a bolt ladder now. It misses the flake altogether. We can save hours. They say it cuts out the extra night.”

  “I’m for that,” said Hugh.

  The sword tip moved. “And the vegetated crack on the twentieth pitch, where we used knife blades? You can hand-place three-inch angles now.”

  Hugh let him go on. Beta or not, he was taking nothing for granted, not the bolt ladder, nor the eroded crack on the twentieth pitch, nor the summit. Anasazi had changed, and they had changed. As a young man, he’d used other men’s maps and their prior knowledge to explore the mountains and rivers and deserts. But at some point, conventional wisdom didn’t matter. You had to draw your own maps, make your own rules, and find your own way.

  Lewis went on taking them up the route with his sword tip, pitch by pitch, thrashing out details they’d covered a dozen times, burning off nervous energy that neither wanted to admit to. Hugh let him go on. Just as Hugh had needed to carry water this afternoon, Lewis needed to recite the route yet again.

  Hugh had his back to the door. When a new customer entered, he felt the night chill against his neck. The bartender straightened. Lewis glanced up from the book of maps.