Angels of Light Read online

  Not that Tucker had in mind the intellectual history of self-mortification, from early Christian martyrs and Blackfoot warriors to flagellants in the streets of modern-day Tehran.

  He simply kneeled face forward in the bed of John's pickup truck and kept his teeth clenched against the early-morning bugs. Like that, all the way from Reno to Sacramento and then to Yosemite, he let the various winds pour over him, steeling himself for the day he would rise upon the West Face of Makalu in Nepal and be baptized in the jet stream dividing earth from heaven. His knees ached from the corrugated sheet metal, and passengers in passing cars probably thought he was a fraternity pledge. But he could feel his skin toughening.

  His blood thickening. He forced himself to peek through what would one day be the hurricane-force winds of high-altitude mountaineering. He pondered: to let his hair grow out for the big mountain or to keep it short like a Marine Corps AWOLs? Longer hair might trap heat, maybe it wouldn't. That was a pertinent question to ask John, who'd been high, eight thousand meters and higher. Like that, with Tucker in the rear of the truck shoving back at the world with wild fantasies while he "caught wind," they arrived back in the Valley on Thursday morning to find the early sun casting rays bright as canaries.

  "Home," John announced as he swung right at the Conoco gas station opposite Yosemite Lodge. Behind the gas station and its rustproof, bearproof dumpster, with a much-despised wooden National Parks marker reading "Sunnyside Campgrounds,"

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light lay the teeming, ground-level slum to which any climber worth his beans, even the

  Eastern Bloc lads, will make at least one pilgrimage in his active lifetime.

  "Home," Liz dully echoed. The Valley was no more home than Reno was Oz. She was thinking that if only there'd been the time and money, they could have flown to Mexico, a beach, a village, a boat, anywhere. At least they could have pretended to be pioneering new land. Circle the wagons. Unhitch the oxen. Taste the river. Work on a tan line, something sweet and salty to accent their nights. Spend some time. Warm time. She stared off into the woods. Screw the BLM. Screw the Valley. And if John couldn't rise to the occasion, screw him. She'd be so much dust on his narrow, pinched little horizon.

  It suddenly seemed like they'd been gone a very long time. When they'd left, the Valley's furniture—its conifers and ponderosas and massive, upright planes and the waterfalls that had paused blue in midflight for the winter—all had stood still. Now everything was in motion. Bluejays threaded the trees, the Merced was thawing.

  Yosemite Falls was frothing white with early runoff and the meadows were promising wild-flowers soon. They'd left in winter and here it was spring. She groped for the date. She groped for the headline of the Reno

  Gazette she'd purchased yesterday with the last quarter scored off a slot machine. Nothing came.

  Already the time warp had taken effect.

  "What in hell... ?" John muttered.

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  Only then did Liz take notice.

  The parking lot was skeletal. An old Buick with British Canadian plates, two Chevys from the Beach Boys era, and a much-cannibalized orange Saab rumored to be hot sat at scattered points, sad carcasses in some flatland junkyard, any flatland, all flatland being junkyard. Otherwise it was barren, not a soul to be seen. The engine idled as they gaped at the emptiness. The resurrection of John Lennon couldn't have stunned them more. Liz reached forward and punched off the tape deck, leaving them blank, no theme music, no idea what was what. Back in the bed, Tucker got off his knees and stood in place, two unmoving stovepipes of faded denim in the rear window. There wasn't even a game of Hacky Sack going on. No one slouching about spooning peanut butter from the jar, not a wave of greeting, not a sound. Even on slow days the Camp Four parking lot brought to mind the bazaars of Bombay with their scarves of motion and gossip and color fluttering everywhere. This morning it looked like a neutron bomb scare. But even then someone would have stuck around to see what a neutron bomb blast was really like.

  This was different. Camp Four was empty, and Camp Four is never empty. John switched off the truck. No one moved.

  Tucker's legs kept on blocking the rearview mirror. Liz waited for an explanation. It was eerie, well rehearsed but not too interesting, sort of like the opening of your better Steven Spielberg movies. The whole thing was a joke, of course. "Rangers must have booted everybody out," she said.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  Tucker nimbly hopped out of the bed. "Weird," he pronounced and headed for the pathway leading into camp.

  "Let's see what's up," said John, and he and Liz followed Tucker past the bulletin board tacked and taped full of scribbled messages. "For sale 1 pr. unused EBs size 43.

  $20. Site 16"; "Wanted, climbing partner. I lead 5.11. Joyce. #3"; "Final descent.

  Selling out, going to Hawaii. All gear at bargain rates. #22"; and a "Joe meet Henry"

  dated 7/15/75, an artifact of the remote past. The pieces of paper flapped their butterfly wings as John and Liz breezed on without a glance.

  In deeper, past the thirty-foot-high Columbia boulder spotted with chalky handprints like petroglyphs and smudged with shoe rubber, John slowed down and began to wonder. There were no people in here, either. But neither were there many tents.

  That was odd. A joke was one thing. Pulling up your tent stakes, unjointing the poles, and packing out all your gear took the practical out of practical joke. He doubted if even Bullseye could have orchestrated such a mass prank. There were better things to do with one's time than break camp and then remake it. Bullseye was eliminated from suspicion when they passed Kresinski's campsite and saw no tent there, either.

  Kresinski would never have played along with Bullseye. It was starting to look as if people had actually left. More ominous still, the few tents that remained were in unnerving disarray. The spines of some had relaxed and bowed, leaving the tent walls limp. Some had collapsed altogether. In their short absence the camp had been utterly depopulated.

  "What's going on?" said Liz.

  John lifted and dropped a hand. "New regulations?" he tried. During the reign of James Watt as secretary of the interior, the rangers had exercised a heavier hand.

  They'd threatened to muscle the climbers out time and again. Maybe they'd finally carried through with it.

  "Impossible," Liz said. "Not in three days' time. I'd have known about it before." She wasn't so sure, though. She was, after all, mistress to the Camp Four monarchs, first Page 45

  Matthew, now John. If a resettlement of Camp Four had really been in the works, it would make a certain kind of sense not to have told her. She'd always kept her professional life distinct from her love life, even despite heavy pressure by Kresinski to "help me boys" when ten C4Bs pulled a fire alarm at the grocery store and went on a cash-free shopping spree up the empty aisles.

  Naturally they'd gotten caught. The case was finally dismissed, but ever after that Kresinski seemed more fascinated by her refusal to "lose" the park's investigation report than by her magical hair or cloistered heart. When she finally realized that what Kreski was bent on seducing was really her loyalty, Liz dumped him. She was still trying to figure out if the last straw had been the assault on her morals or her pride.

  "It's like the end of the world," said John.

  "Or the beginning," Liz corrected him. This was how it should be. The forest empty of file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (53

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light chattering, arrogant people. A fresh start on clean ground. John cut off the trail with the odd caprice of a bird dog searching for a nest. Liz followed, not entirely cynical. It could be fun walking with him. He had a tru
e gift for finding the most remarkable stories imprinted in the earth, reading how many of what species had gone where.

  Footprints, broken twigs, depressed moss—it was all signatory. Man or animal, they had a contract with the world, all you had to know was how to read it. Beyond that, however, John could look at a sign invisible to everyone else and tell you what its maker had been thinking.

  Rabbits, snakes, deer, tourists. They all reduced to the same desires and whims when John read their tracks. All were in need of the earth.

  The emptiness was mystifying. The farther they hurried on, the more inscrutable the camp's evidence became. It had the feel of those mysteries you learn about in junior high school: the sudden departure of the Mayans, the unexplained evacuation of Mesa Verde, the disappearance of Atlantis. Compressed rectangles clearly showed in the pine needles where tents had been uprooted. Pulley systems used to dangle food sacks high off the ground where animals couldn't reach dangled from tree limbs like emptied nooses.

  "John," Tucker called over from a distant site, "your stuff's all gone. And my tent, my gear, it's all gone." He sounded heartbroken.

  "I don't know," John muttered to himself. Liz hung back, waiting for the verdict. All she had to do was check in at headquarters to get the answer, but it pleased her to watch John exercising his Apache arts. He was like this on rock, too, masterful, confident, self-conscious, in his element.

  Maybe that was why she hated to watch him climb, because one glance told her he belonged up there, reading the granite with his fingertips. John paused by a fire pit, apparently picked at random. Just like a Hollywood injun, he touched one knee to the dirt and felt the ashes for a trace of heat. Still obedient to the cliché, he let a palmful of ashes sift through his fingers, then stood up and declared his findings. "Three days," he said.

  Tucker came loping over from the far end of camp, all leg. Naturally he wasn't out of breath.

  "It's like a ghost town."

  "Whatever happened," said John, "we just missed it. They left the morning after we split for Reno."

  "I don't understand," Tucker let them know. He was a top-of-the-line man, meaning the loss of his gear was going to cost him more dearly than anyone else. Where a hundred-fifty-dollar tent might suffice for his neighbors, Tucker believed in buying only the best. Now his beautiful cantaloupe-color dome tent that turned the sunlight into a soft orange glow on the inside was gone. His rattlesnake-checkered red-and-black Blue Water rope with only one moderate leader fall on it, no retirement in sight, had vanished. Everything was gone, even his collection of Beethoven, Bach, and Miles Davis. Even Page 46

  his photo of the seldom-seen West Face of Makalu. He'd have to write off to the Japanese Alpine Association and try to pry another photo loose of

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light them. Then he remembered that his address book was gone, too. It was bad. They'd cleaned him out, except for his sleeping bag. And his Sony Walkman and three tapes.

  And the parka he was wearing. And luckily he'd taken his new pair of Spanish Fire climbing shoes with the sticky rubber soles with him to Reno, along with his chalk bag. Suddenly he wasn't so bad off after all. An afternoon spent prowling the dumpsters and the aluminum cans would provide him money for food. Winter was over, so he could sleep under a picnic table or in the open. If it rained, there was always the log-cabin bathroom floor. Above all, he could continue climbing. Whoever it was hadn't stolen that from him.

  "Why don't I go call in?" said Liz. "Unless a spaceship came and kidnapped all the happy campers, they'll know where everybody went." There was a ghetto-style telephone booth back by the parking lot with spray-painted graffiti and a shredded telephone book. John watched her walk toward it, and with a backward glance she caught him watching and tsk'ed at him self-consciously. Her walk embarrassed her, half man, half woman. She'd compensated for her size so many different ways that it was hard to tell what was her original Oregon stride and what was affected. He'd seen game animals transplanted to new territory walk like that, testing out the terrain as if they'd lost their bodies and didn't belong anywhere.

  "Pretty dang weird, huh?" Tucker observed.

  Suddenly John had an idea. He turned to the west and filled his lungs. "Hey, Bullseye," he called through cupped hands. There was no echo. No reply. He tried again. The second time they heard a faint yodel, authentic Tyrolean, vintage 1974, the year Bullseye had spent teaching American GIs mountaineering above Garmisch, Germany.

  "Should have tried there in the first place," said John. Side by side, he and Tucker set off at a rapid pace. Bullseye would know what was going on.

  "Yeah," said Tucker. "Now we'll get this thing squared around."

  They followed the trail to its end and on past the "

  NO CAMPING PERMITTED BEYOND THIS

  SIGN

  " sign. Pine needles crunched underfoot. The park-sanctioned border of Camp Four fell behind and they entered a denser wood with underbrush intact and a riot of squarish rocks lying where a landslide had tumbled them. Not one, but two big deformed trees carried gashes from old lightning strikes. Animals stirred in the thicker distance. It always struck John this way. A few steps from Camp Four and you were beyond the sanitary park with neatly managed campsites. Here in this topsy-turvy swatch of wilderness halfway to Bullseye's sanctuary you were partway back in time. Here, mimicking the aborigines, John had even harvested hazel and piñon nuts. Not many people came this way. There was no scenery for the tourists, no rocks for the climbers. The still mediocrity of the place made it a perfect barrier to trespass, which was the whole point. Bullseye liked his privacy. And yet, John saw, a lot of people had recently come this way. The prints were clear and showed lighter on

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light their exit than their entrance. That could mean only one thing. Heavy loads in, light or no loads out. Camp Four had made its exodus through here. But why?

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  "Something's up," he told Tucker.

  "Yeah?"

  They pressed through a screen of willows and brambles, and suddenly the forest opened onto a circular clearing with a thick shaft of sunlight angling in. In the middle of the clearing, lodged tight against a fat young oak, stood a '69 VW bus. It was so intricately camouflaged with forest green, tan, and gray paint and so overgrown with ivy and moss and ferns that the occasional

  "civilian" hiker saw here nothing but a squat, featureless gob of granite. "Low profile" was so dominant in this blueprint that while rangers knew of the van's existence, few ever visited because it was so easy to miss. Besides, rules need the rare exception, and Bullseye was nothing if not rare.

  The van had no wheels or engine. It was the perfect vehicle for Bullseye because it hadn't moved in over nine years and probably never would. Legend had it that he'd talked a gang of San Diego bikers into carrying the van through half a mile of woods in the dead of night in exchange for information he didn't have about some rival gang. By the time the hoodwink was discovered, the bikers had forgotten where they'd deposited the van, leaving Bullseye to make his slow last stand against nothing in particular. There were theories about why he lived out here alone, the most prevalent revolving around his allegedly eternal love for Janis Joplin. It was said that he'd once dipped his stinger in the Bayou Queen under a whiskey moon outside Atlanta, Georgia, or somewhere south, and that afterward no other woman would do.

  True or not, there had been no woman in Bullseye's life for years now. Kresinski made much of it, calling him a capon at best, a "brown-eye" at worst. Climbers new to the Valley, and therefore new to Kresinski's venom, were careful to avoid climbing with the Faggot Hermit. Everyone else knew better. Climbing with Bullseye was like a trip to the museum. Steeped in the practices and reliquiae of the late sixties,
he nested among piles of Zap and Bayou comic books and SDS

  manifestos on yellowing paper and old Leadbelly and Yardbirds records and a black Peace armband still smelling of tear gas. People figured his clock had stopped, that was all. He was rumored to know more about the night sky and planetary paths than even Carl Sagan, and if you asked and he trusted you, he'd allow that his greatest ambition was to climb the outside of the Ice Palace in St. Paul, Minnesota, the next time they built it. No one swallowed that one, though. For while the rest of them left the Valley to attend random semesters of college or headed south to Baja or the desert rock at

  Joshua Tree or took off to work or go on expeditions or just get out, even if getting out meant just driving a few hours westward for nothing more than the closest drive-in and McDonald's, Bullseye never did. It had been so long since he'd stepped foot outside the Valley that people knew he never would. Here was one child the Valley would turn into bones before it let him go.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  He was sitting on the front passenger's seat tending a row of pine seedlings in Styrofoam cups when John and Tucker broke through the thicket. Everything was calm, Bullseye most of all. "You guys." He smiled. John recognized the mellow alert, one of Bullseye's leftover specialties. The mellower he showed, the more excited he was. A tawny mutt named Ernie lay sprawled by the rear axle gorging on the warm sunlight. At John's approach the dog flapped its tail up and down a few times, then drifted off. Ernie, too, was an outlaw legend. Reported sightings had described him as a coyote, a rogue wolf, a bear cub, a raccoon, a mountain lion, a werewolf, and a naked lunatic. Few rangers had ever seen him. None, except for Liz, knew to associate him with this other outcast.

  "What's cooking?" said John.

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  "Beg pardon?" Bullseye coyly grunted.