Angels of Light Read online

  Night was near, and here she couldn't move, wed to this bent, broken thing. No one could hear her. They probably didn't even know she was gone. She considered releasing her toe clamps and postholing the mile back to camp, but the drifts could easily be twice her height in places. The only other thing was to unbury the body and pull her skis from its grasp. Whatever she decided, Page 17

  it had to be done and now. She flapped her arms across her chest to work up some warmth. Her breasts were tender from her monthly water, but she commanded herself to ignore that and concentrate. You got calluses, her grandpa, the dour old homesteader, used to say. Use 'em.

  "Use 'em," she said out loud. She was whistling in the dark, searching for resolve. There was only one thing left to do. Dreading what was to come, she bent forward to work on the snow.

  The wind had not quit blowing, meaning the lump had been subtly changing its contours the whole time Liz was standing beside it, shifting and redrifting into new shapes. A drift, like a sand dune, can be many things even while it is none of them.

  There is no better evidence that the mind is its own animal, perceiving secrets where there are none, scorning logic, flying off with no hint of return. What had originally presented itself as a body now took on new dimensions, but Liz couldn't see the change yet. All she could see was a dead man. Tentatively she scooped away some snow. Encountering nothing but more snow, she set one knee down upon a ski and

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light leaned closer. With greater zest now but no less dread, she began shoveling snow right and left. Once committed to the task, she took little time to expose what lay beneath. Through the rest of her life, she would never forget her amazement.

  A foot down, her fingers brushed a hard object, and she rocked back onto one heel with second thoughts. She had no choice, though, and knew it. She forced herself to reach back into the carved-out cavity and dig away the remaining snow. The surface was burlap, tan and utilitarian.

  She presumed it was clothing or a makeshift blanket, or maybe a rough shroud wrapped around the body by some temporary survivor. She was wrong. She was so wrong she forgot to be relieved. Steeling herself, she swiped away the entire side of the lump. The burlap was stretched taut and flat. Under the burlap, showing through a gash in the corner, a section of plastic showed yellow. She plunged her arms to the shoulder into the snow and pulled to one side a big, crusted chunk, enough to uncover bold black lettering stenciled onto the burlap.

  Slow as a dream, the wind finished uncovering the word "

  ESPECIAL

  ." Her mitten slapped away more snow. Across the line beneath marched three red X's.

  And beneath that was an ostentatious, hand-size outline of a marijuana leaf, its five toothy fingers splayed like a partial sunburst. To Liz they were as fabulous and remote as hieroglyphics, but DEA and FBI agents would soon recognize the marks as a signature. The way a consumer can savor a product's background from the label on a jar of imported olives, federal officials would understand which part of which

  Mexican state the crop had been grown in and by which ranchero, who the middlemen were, when the vegetation had been bundled and when sold, what portion of the year's harvest this cargo represented, and even which group of federates were on the take. To the layman, branding your bales of marijuana this way might seem foolish. But real risk generally lies beyond or before what is directly perceived, in what is not seen rather than what is. Federal agents would appreciate the stenciling for what it was, the signature of gamblers, an act of style.

  If not for the cold, Liz might have stood there marveling even longer. Instead, with darkness colonizing, she forced herself to continue tunneling around her skis and the bale of marijuana. It was awkward work and the altitude was almost eleven thousand feet, but she didn't stop to rest, knowing that until the tent safely enclosed her she'd have to continue moving or freeze. On the butt end of the bale were painted the numerals "23." Twenty-three pounds, she wondered as she kept digging, or the twenty-third bale? Or more likely, twenty-three kilos. Fifty pounds of pot?

  Sweat tickled the hollow of her spine. She was overjoyed. A bale of marijuana! The thought of secreting it somewhere and returning some other time never even occurred to her.

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  Its political value far outstripped its street value. The big little Amazon had scored a coup first.

  The girl. The mizz is it or miss or missus? There was going to be some heartburn and godfuckingdamns in the other tents tonight. High fucking time, too.

  God, she was going to have fun with this, and not only with the other rangers. What file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (21

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light would John say when she told him? And her family, they'd bust, stuff this exotic only happened on their satellite dish. And if she hadn't stayed out the extra bit bounty-hunting on her own, someone else would have found it and maybe no one. Maybe the plane would have remained a mystery, probably not, but at any rate this was her bale.

  Ten minutes later, puffing and sweaty, she freed the first of her ski tips from beneath the squat rectangular bale. Her second tip took only a little more digging. One by one, quickly now, she released each ski while balancing on the other, scraped the ice from the bottoms, then repinned her toes. Sliding her skis back and forth to keep the bottoms clean, she took a final survey of her victory. She invested a moment and a grunt shoving the bale upright for maximum dramatic effect next morning when they all came skiing over the ridge. One last shake to loosen clots of snow from the burlap and she was ready to leave. Her grandkids would clamor to hear about that time, that airplane in the lake, that bale. It felt good. It felt great.

  With a broad white smile, she lifted her eyes from the bale and swept her skis up and around, reversing direction for the climb uphill. Only then did she notice that on every side, upslope and all the way down to the lake, she was surrounded by lumps of snow, a whole buried herd of them, each no different from this one.

  CHAPTER 3

  Take cowboys. Until the dime novelists and showmen came along to spruce them up, wipe the spit off their whiskers, and altogether lift them out of context, cowboys were just unwashed proles on horseback, and still you had to close your eyes and pinch your nose to imagine them as sombreroed cavaliers circling endlessly in a sagebrush paradise, dodging the Devil's whispers.

  Bullseye's point would have been that the same goes for what an Italian mountaineer once labeled "conquistadores of the useless," your pungent, garden-variety climbers. It was one thing to see them spidering up burnished crags on a Saturday afternoon sports special or advertising razor blades ("Take it from a master of close shaves"), something else entirely to be smelling and hearing them when you've sustained a second-degree sunburn on the back of your neck and arms, sprained one or both ankles on the quarter-mile hike to Yosemite Falls, locked the keys in your car, lost your traveler's checks, and otherwise earned yourself a very quiet dinner at the Four Seasons Restaurant. A sort of Ho Jo's file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (22

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light of the wilderness, the Four Seasons specialized in catering to precisely that kind of survivor. Climbers did not. The way the night belonged to the Vietcong, the Valley was owned by the hard-core, high-voltage subculture that lived on the dirt of a campground tucked behind the Conoco gas station across from Yosemite Lodge. The winter had been long and distressing for most of them, too wet to climb rock and just warm enough so that the waterfalls never properly froze or "shaped up."

  Consequently, on this early evening in late March the conquistadores were showing no mercy at all.

  They were expatriate rabble with their hair in leonine disarray and their clothing either unwashed or so o
ld and patchy that washing was a questionable expense. A dozen or so of them were lording it over two tables shoved together in the middle of the restaurant. Some wore tennis shoes with the soles taped to the toes; others sat bundled in lifeless parkas devoid of down feathers and repaired with crude X's of white adhesive tape. Legwear ranged from angle-length knickers to navy-surplus wool pants, blue jeans, and fluorescent lime or pink Lycra tights with racing stripes;

  on their heads were caps, wool balaclavas, and one or two bandannas wrapped pirate-style. What little money they had came from misused student loans, odd jobs in the park, and the dumpsters, which yielded aluminum cans worth a nickel apiece at the local grocery. Between a young man wearing a peasant shirt hand-embroidered with crude marigolds and his much younger girlfriend, for instance, lay a shiny plastic garbage bag filled with just such loot. This would keep them in beans, and therefore on the rock, for another week, after which they would forage again. "They were typical mountaineers," some observer remarked a century ago of another species of

  Rocky Mountain man, "outcasts from society, discontented with the world, comforting themselves in the solitude of nature by the occasional bearfight."

  As usual when collected together, they were too loud tonight, radiating the sort of vulgarity beatniks and Left Bank artistes used to, their behavior so outrageous it set the jaws of the family men, mothers, and honeymooning couples straining to enjoy a civilized meal at the surrounding tables. Known to the park rangers as C4Bs for

  Camp Four Bums, they weren't a gang, and many weren't even friends. If anything, the label designated a life-style, a willingness to live in a tent or cave year-round, to subsist in order to climb. They put ordinary hippies to shame with their hard-core devotion to the rock, with their biceps, poverty, and voyageur ways. As tedious as they too often proved, they were in effect John's extended family. Sitting among them, there was no need to say anything. The vortex just swept him up and around and around. He closed his eyes.

  "Dominus vobiscum,"

  entoned a rich, mock baritone.

  "Lay off," a second voice quietly menaced.

  "Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison."

  Bullseye kept right on. It took concentration to properly transmogrify one's hamburger and Bud into the body and blood. Nobody

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light was paying much attention to the rite except for the one man his irreverence was meant to sting, Burt Tavini, a muscle-bound Born Again of questionable morality, the perfect Christian soldier. Under Kresinski's tutelage, it was Tavini who'd begun booby-trapping his fixed ropes so that outsiders like that New Yorker would quit stealing Page 20

  equipment. It was simple. You hang your gear from a couple of very tenuous pitons, just enough to support the weight of the gear. Tie a rope to the false anchor, make it look real. And then you down-climb the crack for the night. Any thief happening along will start to ascend the rope, get about halfway, and, hey, the pins pull. Swift blind justice. Given that a climber's life-style depends on his gear, and further given that most Valley rats equate life-style with life, what Tavini had practiced was the old eye for an eye. Until last August it had been just a glint in Tavini's eye, and the booby traps had never been triggered. Since then none had been set. The thief's death had shocked them all, almost enough to report the real circumstances to the rangers. But no one had.

  "Christe eleison."

  Bullseye passed an air cross over the hamburger cupped in his hand.

  "I said stop it, Bullseye." Tavini liked people to believe he was a soft-spoken man, someone deeply contemplative like Billy Jack or Chuck Norris.

  "Et cum spiritu tuo."

  "You dickhead," Tavini finally erupted. John smiled. Score again for Bullseye. At Tavini's choleric outburst the two tables of climbers momentarily noticed the fool and his Antichrist.

  "Hose him, Bullseye," came a shout.

  "You dickhead," someone mimed with glee.

  "Infidels," Bullseye excoriated them. He crossed his fingers as if warding off vampires.

  "Your mama."

  "Eat yourself, man."

  "Yeah. Raw."

  Like clockwork, whenever the weather turned nasty, a glut of C4Bs could be expected to show up here in the restaurant, in the adjacent bar, or in the lounge next door. To the few tourists who actually analyzed the source of their indigestion, the climbers'

  nonchalance was appalling. They were so ruthlessly, generally nonchalant, it seemed, about everything; indifferent about their golliwog appearance, their forest odor, their machismo, their awkward, narcissistic shuffling about, above all indifferent about their lives and limbs. They seemed indifferent to everything but that vertical frontier hugging Yosemite. They were backwoodsmen down from the walls, Natty Bumpos slung with Perlon rope and sporting a disdain for Winnebagos, yuppies, and the

  Sierra Club.

  "Why do you climb?" Flatlanders always asked it that way, emphasis on the "do" as if file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (24

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light trying to seduce a Mason into revealing his secret handshake. Even the legendary

  British Everester George Leigh Mallory, ever courteous, got fed up with the question.

  His famous reply—"because it's there"—had been a stroke of genius, so much dumber than the question that it had taken people's breath away and reduced them to silence.

  Had anyone dared to ask the climbers tonight, the answer would have been a whole lot dumber and ruder. Nobody was asking.

  At the head of the two tables sat Matthew Kresinski, self-delegated liaison between the C4B

  banquet and Connie, a gland-rich waitress who had worked in the Valley for years. Kresinski had arms the size of calf flanks and a nose as straight as an old English war helmet, with a temper to match. Just now he was happy, smooth as bourbon. Each time a tray arrived heavy with beer and California wine, Kresinski hugged Connie close and got a big handful of ass. She was getting no younger, and

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  Kreski was good at what he did. So the climbers knew, was she. Kreski was like that, a beneficent tyrant who believed in share and share alike. Graphic information was his version of the trickle-down theory. Connie flexed her glutes for his benefit, then, murmuring as she passed drinks over his shoulder, tried to complain about his lack of discretion.

  "Don't, Matt."

  "But you got such a nice butt."

  Mornings, she woke early and jogged just to keep it up. She brushed his hand away.

  "The manager told me, you guys have to keep it down."

  "I do what I can, Connie. They're fucking savages is all."

  "Well, just try and control them tonight, please."

  "We got money tonight."

  "You better."

  "We do. Sammy scored some cans in the Conoco dumpster."

  Connie looked down-table at a jolly beanpole of a boy with bright red hair. She was starting to pick up the names and a jaundiced background to go with each. There was John Coloradas with his mustang looks and white T-shirts, always brooding, a killer and a liar, Matt said. And Cortland "Bullseye" Broomis, just starting to show some forehead with age, overeducated and, said Matt, overestimated. "He's okay on ice.

  But put him on a piece of rock and he moves like a turd in the sun." Katie, the petite Hawaiian girl with crack scars from fingertip to wrist on both hands, was "our little gook whore." In his eyes nobody was whole. The rot was on them all, all but him.

  Physically, anyway, he was perfect. Plus some. When he tossed in this or that nasty tidbit, Connie kept her mouth shut. She'd learned from a bad divorce that you stick by your man or lose him.

  Even when he slandered Tucker, she kept it zipped. Tucker was her favorite, what little she knew about him. He was everybody's favorite, it seemed, the wild child of any gathering becau
se of his naïveté and gullibility. Thin, with wide shoulders, a grown-in Mohawk of black hair, and acid-green eyes, he

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light stuttered every time she tried to talk to him. That was because Tuck hailed from

  Norman, Oklahoma. "Normal, Oklahoma," he would sadly confess if you asked.

  "Nothin' there but the football stadium." His hair was clipped into a shaggy Mohawk and he wore Ray Charles-style sunglasses in a semi-Terminator look. "The Boz," he'd identify the look, mystified that no one out here seemed to know him. "You,know, Brian Bosworth. Middle linebacker? Oklahoma U?" Word was that Tucker had the hottest streak going in the Valley, at least during the past climbing season. Word also had it he was a virgin. And he never failed to call Connie "ma'am."

  "Must have been a lot of cans." Connie knew Matt was lying. Either they were next to penniless, or else someone had stolen something and pawned it down in Fresno or the Bay Area.

  "Some fucking turkey threw his brand-new Nikon out with the Pepsi cans, too."

  Pawn money. A sweet, wolfish grin stole across Kresinski's face. He cared not one bit if she believed him, and she knew it. Around Matt, she was learning, one could never think of oneself too much.

  "Does that mean I get tipped tonight?"

  "I could have sworn you got tipped last night." He reached for her butt again. "You go for tip, don't you?"

  "Matt..." She looked around. No one was listening.

  "More burgers, three more burgers," a voice demanded from the row of faces.

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  "

  Cheese burgers" a neighbor amended.

  "And beaucoup fries, man."

  "Sammy's paying for all of you?" Connie asked Kresinski.

  "Don't know. Ask him."

  She sighed. By evening's end they'd be lucky to have money for half the bill. That wasn't her problem, though the manager knew she knew these people and had taken to haranguing her.