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  King because he was diplomatically generous in making them feel bold and separate and superior, too. They were mainly white, middle-class boys on the lam from white, file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (38

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light middle-class duties: school, marriage, jobs. But with Kresinski they could perceive themselves as more rarefied beings: electric drifters cruising the high, bare angles, navigating the brute, psychedelic canyons. There was a price, though. To share with the man, you had to be with the man. Watching him with Connie embarrassed them, but not enough to break with the code. Had he been here, Tucker would have said something, and John should have but didn't. Nor did Bullseye speak up. Katie almost did, but then figured it would come off as sisterhood, semper fidelis.

  Finally Kresinski was done with her. Releasing his biceps, he opened the cage and turned her loose. Connie stumbled backward, then wove her way back to the kitchen.

  "Lord of the flies?" Liz asked him. "Or just Attila the Hun?"

  "Anything you want." Kresinski smiled. Then he got Sammy's and Tavini's attention, and no one had to wonder anymore why he'd turned Connie out here and now. "Man, she's moody," he said.

  "But I'll tell you. The squeeze box on her forgives all sins." In publicly junking Connie, he'd also junked Liz, even though it was Liz who'd left him.

  Publicly.

  And again, as before, he put it into them all that they wanted what he'd already had.

  Because he could do that, they feared him more. Even John.

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  CHAPTER 4

  "Remember

  The Misfits

  ?" Liz suddenly spoke up as John eased them down over Donner Pass. Even at ten miles per hour, it was all he could do to keep the little Japanese pickup from fishtailing. They didn't belong up here with a blizzard on the outside and that helicopter music from

  Apocalypse Now blasting away on the inside.

  The chain law was in effect, and if not for a set of cheap plastic fakes John kept under the seat, they'd still be waiting in the California sun for the all-clear, and that could have been days. The plastic cleats had disintegrated just past the state trooper's checkpoint, so they were down to a crawl now, sandwiched between cautious eighteen-wheelers. Liz wondered how many nervous mothers in the cars passing them were telling their kids in the backseat about the Donner party.

  It was the first fable she could remember her own mother telling her, and she'd taken its lessons to heart. As she grew older, she'd found that the same basic lessons recycle. No free lunch. The grass is greener on the other side. And in danger as in love, life is one big file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (39

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light fuck: you insert, you extract. Bullseye held the copyright on that one.

  She rubbed the edge of her bare hand against the crystallized side window. It felt like she was passing through a veil from one world to another. It always felt like that when she left the Valley, but especially so today. Somewhere out beyond the swarming inch-fat snowflakes, a ruby was glittering on her bold high desert, a chance for a different beginning. They would descend from these Nietzschean heights, escape the snowy, craggy fastness, and there would sit Oz in the land of brute mustangers and underworld miners. With its ethereal towers and pulsing rainbows of lights, Reno had always reminded her of the city at the end of the yellow brick road, or at least of I-80. People were perpetually happy there, money was free, the casino workers dressed like Munchkins. Throughout her childhood, Reno had meant feed and seed stores, the doctor and the dentist, but it had also meant Target and new clothes and a lunch pail with cartoon characters on it for school and the boot and saddle shops where common everyday things were so gussied up with turquoise and tooled leather your mouth fell open. Reno was where she'd bought her first comic book, her first box of tampons, and, in great fascinated secrecy, her first Playboy magazine. It was where she'd seen her first real lobster and where she and her older brothers Ken and Steve had spent their first real paychecks, two hundred dollars each for the summer haying, on custom-made silver-mounted bridles with their initials stamped deep. The bridle was the one piece of her rig she'd brought to college and later Yosemite, practically an artifact.

  "The Misfits was a Walt Disney movie," Tucker expertly recalled from the backseat.

  Liz turned. Jackknifed sideways in what passed for a seat in the rear of the king cab, Tucker would have looked ill if not for the shock of black hair erect on his head.

  "No," she said. "It was about mustangers. Remember? It had Clark Gable. And Page 34

  Marilyn Monroe." Before Tuck's time. But in Burns, Oregon, that had been the Saturday afternoon fare, probably still was. John Wayne and Randolph Scott and Clint Eastwood. Stuff the cattlemen's kids could hoot at and aspire to. After the movie, she'd bought a checkered blouse just like Marilyn's and quit minding about the dust in her hair. You could be beautiful even with dirt on you. "And there was that other actor. A young guy. Nice and smoky and alone. A James Dean clone, what was his name?" And all those noble horses.

  "Oh," faded Tucker. The music swelled. Wagner. The Furies were descending. It was his choice from the small library of classical tapes he presided over, part of a self-education program he'd started for himself. Nights he always tried to read a page or two of the dictionary; according to John, he'd almost made it to the letter B before switching to random pages. A true rustic, Tucker could tell you the meaning of polysyllables he'd never heard pronounced. Wagner came out with a twang, Wag not

  Vog, and Beethoven's first name sounded like a gross insect. Part of the reason Liz loved John was this awkward, graceful boy; anyone who looked after Tucker the way file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (40

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  John did had to be worthy. "Guess I never heard of a mustanger," the boy finally confessed.

  "They round up wild horses and chicken-feed them."

  "Oh." Still in the dark.

  "Dog food and glue and chicken feed."

  "Oh."

  "I was a mustanger once." She couldn't tell from his expression how the admission sounded to him. All that showed was his innocence. Never change, she begged silently. Just stay the way you are.

  "You kill the horses yourself?" His question carried no judgment.

  "No. I just stood on one point of the gully and flapped a blanket. The horses went right into a portable corral and a semi came along and that was it." That was it anyway until Kenny came in late with a troubled look and trailing a colt. Until then she'd had no idea. Her brother had been late because he'd traced back along the path and shot all the horses that had broken their legs on the run in. She could trace the end of her childhood to that moment, when her teenage brother became father to an orphan colt. From then on she'd made a point of understanding the world.

  Ignorance was no excuse for giving away your choices. Mustanging was ugly work. Grimy, cynical, or just plain making the range work for them instead of them for it, mustangers would agree it was ugly but would also insist it was necessary work.

  "Overgrown rats," mustangers cussed the wild horses. You'd call liar on them to see a wild stallion moving across the earth, floating on his bed of glossy muscle. But when the environmentalists came along, the mustangers got proved right. The environmentalists passed laws. They put a halt to the plundering of herds. And the wild-horse population ran amok.

  Ranchers, once proud to have a few of yesteryear's chargers haunting their range, took to shooting the beasts on sight despite a hefty thousand-dollar fine. On her summer and Christmas breaks from college, Liz would come home and listen in on the growing anger. Year after year, the Jenkinses were forced to ante up to the feds a penalty fee for overgrazing that was caused not by domestic stock but by "their" wild horses. And madl
y breeding right alongside the horses were the federal regulations, each year another four or five pounds of paper to deal with. People complained, but then stockmen always do, that's how Liz looked at it. Then one afternoon while the Super Bowl was coming over their satellite dish, she heard colt-loving Kenny say maybe the mustangers had had something, maybe the horses were overgrown vermin. Damn those horses.

  And damn those feds.

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  Naturally nobody cheered when she became a fed herself. Nobody was going to cheer if she got this job with the Bureau of Land Management. But Liz was Liz. They were real philosophical about that, always had been. Nobody agreed with her. Nobody argued with her. She was just there. All her life she'd felt like a starving trespasser, a ghost. More than anything, she wanted substance. She wanted to have an effect on

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light someone. It was close to that with John. She scared him, that was obvious to her, and that was a hell of a thing to see in your lover. But their garden was growing.

  He knew she wanted to be reached for, and so he was reaching. He was reaching further than anyone ever had. It felt good. Their journey was just beginning. She had no idea where it was going to take them. Right now she didn't care. John had the makings of a companion.

  Daydreaming, Liz fell asleep.

  Somewhere between the Wagner and piano concertos she didn't recognize, John said, "Reno."

  Liz opened her eyes. The snow had stopped, disappeared in fact. The highway was dry. The hillside showed brown with patches of bluish sagebrush. The heater and window wipers were turned off, and as advertised, there lay Reno. It looked plain in the daylight. Downright sorry. "I must have slept," she said.

  "Good. You need it." He didn't say it in the past tense, which probably meant she looked like hell in the present tense. He wasn't mean, though. He never was.

  "Montgomery Clift," Tucker greeted her.

  "Hmm?" Her eyelids weighed heavy. She rolled down the window to draw fresh air.

  "The guy in the movie."

  "Movie?" It took a minute. "Oh. Right, you're right. I thought you hadn't seen it."

  "I didn't." No explanation.

  "Next five exits," John read off.

  "Let's just try downtown," said Liz.

  "Downtown," John repeated. "You bring your nickels, Tuck?"

  "I don't gamble."

  "I thought you'd never been in Nevada," Liz said.

  "I haven't."

  John looked at Liz. "I'll sell him to you"—he nodded at the rear—"cheap."

  "What would I do with him, though?"

  "Succulent young vegetable like him? You'll figure something out."

  Tucker couldn't think of any way to play along, so he blushed, which was just as good except he hated blushing. "Hope we don't get soft here," he interposed. It wasn't going to work, though.

  His concerns about losing finger strength during the holiday had already been voiced too frequently.

  "That's the attitude I like my men to have," said Liz. "I'll buy him."

  Tucker wanted to banter. He wanted to stick his tongue in her ear and shock her the way she shocked and excited him. Sammy and Bullseye had once offered to coach him, but he'd told them it was stupid. There was no mistaking Tucker's infatuation with Liz; John saw it, Liz felt it.

  She encouraged it with innocent little touches—

  mussing his hair, an arm thrown around his shoulder, and with impossible invitations like this, always public.

  "Downtown," John announced, arcing off I-80 onto the exit ramp. "Should we find the BLM

  office first?"

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  "Tomorrow," said Liz. "Right now I want a margarita. Let's get the fiesta in gear."

  "How's Motel Six?"

  "No way, John. I made reservations at the Sahara. Everything's ready. A really sleazy room with red curtains and HBO. Room service. Complimentary drinks with little umbrellas in them. The works. And I told them no mountains. If we look out the window and there's mountains, we sue.

  No mountains." Tucker stared at his folded hands. He'd never heard Liz talk like this before.

  "Sound okay to you, Tuck?" John's voice said it sounded okay to him.

  "I'll just sleep in the truck," said Tucker. They'd been all through this.

  "You're sleeping with us," Liz said firmly. "You're in a city now, Tuck. If the muggers don't get you, the cops will. That's that."

  "The desert," Tucker mumbled. They'd been through that, too.

  "Should have let me teach you how to drive a stick," John said. "You're marooned, amigo. The Sahara Hotel. It could be worse."

  "Besides," Liz concluded, "you need some practice living like a human being. Save the caveman stuff for Camp Four."

  Tucker suddenly wondered if they were punishing him for tagging along. All he'd wanted was to see Sodom and Gomorrah, not participate in it. He should have known better.

  "I didn't mean it to be this way," he tried.

  "Tucker..." sighed Liz.

  "The secret to a place like Reno," John took over, "is nickels. Don't play quarters.

  And stay away from those big silver-dollar machines. Nickel slots. You can play forever."

  "We'll get fat," Tucker muttered. He had his weight almost precisely on schedule, down to where pinching the flesh on his belly yielded as much fat as the back of his hand. He'd even cut down on his regimen of five hundred pull-ups a day and endless laps on the rope ladder, figuring he needed the weightlessness more than the lat strength. The Visor was almost right there upon his fingertips, if only he could keep off the lard of civilization.

  "We'll find you a Nautilus," John said at the rearview mirror.

  "There's got to be aerobics classes in a town this big," Liz added with a straight face.

  Tucker couldn't believe they were saying those things to him. The only way you get in shape to climb is by climbing. He was deep into the country where mistakes cost you dearly. A child of the suburbs, such instincts didn't come naturally to him. Common sense was something he'd had to pretend to ever since entering the Valley. For that reason, once he put two and two together, four became law. You tie off your knots and flip your biners gate-out, or you eat it. You dissect your fear or it devours you.

  He'd learned how to learn. Lesson one: Shut up. See. Listen. That and a few other homemade axioms kept him good and sober.

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  The Sahara loomed ahead. In the rearview mirror John saw the edge of his face eclipsing the edge of Tucker's profile. "We'll survive," he said. He didn't belong here, either. Reno was going to remind him of who he wasn't. Cities did that to him, stole his flesh and bones. They made him feel amorphous. Even the parking lot attendants had shape in this glittering exterior world, but John... out here he was just a fiction.

  Only a fiction could inhabit cliffs in a place that had struck frontier painters as a gothic dream.

  He threw a fast glance at the mirror. There were crow's-feet around those eyes, his, not Tuck's, Page 37

  not yet. A whole lot of hand-to-hand combat with his own shadow on vertical rocks beneath the white sun was starting to show. Time's march was on. You only get your first thirty years to pretend it's not, then the masterpiece loosens into fissures and peeling paint. Reno was going to be a broken mirror.

  Everywhere he turned, pieces of himself would be reflected back. John grinned at the scars crisscrossing the backs of his hands. Only a world-class athlete in a sport bare of cash or public recognition would believe how alone and old and foolish he felt on the eve of his retirement. All he c
ould seem to communicate to Liz, who didn't or wouldn't understand, was that he felt sorry for himself. I know you, Tucker, he was thinking. Look at the future, bud. I'm it.

  "HBO!" Liz gushed, catching sight of the hotel marquis. She sensed John's and Tucker's flagging spirits. They were like brothers sometimes. When one was down, the other was, too. This trip being her idea, she drew on what hostess skills her mother had imparted and treated them both like children. "First we get our room.

  Then we clean up. Then dinner. Mexican food, how's Mex sound, Tuck? And then on our way to the movies we'll go find an ice cream store—"

  "Ice cream," Tucker groaned. A desert monk couldn't have sounded less enthusiastic.

  Liz steadied herself with a big breath.

  "Let's make a deal," she said. "I promise to go easy on the sensuality if you'll go easy on the asceticism."

  "Asceticism," Tucker repeated to himself. It was apparently one of those words he'd never heard aloud.

  "You're asking the impossible," John told her.

  "Maybe from Tucker here." She reached around and lassoed the boy's head with her arm and stamped a heartfelt kiss near his eye. She held on, too, and felt Tucker's shoulder close into her hand. "But not you, John. You're already ruined. And there's no going back."

  John looked over. In the fading light, every contour of her face was exact and perfect.

  Her gray eyes were alive, lower lip seductively trapped in her teeth. "Maybe," he said.

  "Uh-uh, John. I've got you by the balls. And you know it." She heard Tucker swallow hard, caught beyond his abilities.

  "Yeah?" John was beaming.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light we're just about there," she said.

  In the middle of their third and final night together Tucker tried to escape through the window of the hotel room, which was neither sleazy nor red but definitely luxurious beyond anyone's need. John was lying with Liz curled against his chest when he heard a mechanical thump and opened his eyes. The city lights were breaking and splashing across the room's walls as the curtains shook violently. There was no wind, though, just air-conditioning and Tucker. John lifted his head from the pillow. Highlighted against the glass, Tucker was stark naked with one bare leg over the top of the opened window. A half minute more of tight snaking and he'd have the rest of his body out, and then it would be a cold, quick drop through twenty-three floors of air.