Trial by Ice and Fire (24 page)

THIRTY

I
T
'
S THREE HOURS LATER
when I park the truck in front of my dark cabin again and rest my forehead on the steering wheel. Sidestepping explicit orders, I'd spent the afternoon and evening hanging out in a far corner of the hospital parking lot. Charles Wokowski and Bill Laughlin had been the only visitors to come and go.

Wook had visited twice, wearing a grim expression on both occasions and once bearing flowers. His cop's eyes had picked out my truck in the lot. He'd glanced over at me without slowing his pace and given me a short, quick nod. Laughlin had come once, late in the afternoon. He moved slowly, carefully, as if he were, like me, nursing a brutal hangover. I had to resist the urge to get out of the Pig and offer him some more expressions of my respect for him.
Smoke Jump
had me picturing him standing above a cliff at night as three-hundred-foot flames roared around him and licked his partner right off the wall. The only thing that kept me from getting out of the car was the awful embarrassment that once again I'd utterly failed to protect his adopted niece.

I'd left then to drive by a flower shop to buy the biggest spray of bright red tulips they had. Then I'd attached a note.
Think of three words when you fall asleep tonight—Anton Loves You. We'll talk tomorrow
. At a secondhand store I found a pair of tiny baby sneakers for a dollar. I'd driven my gifts to the Spring Creek Ranch atop Gros Ventre Butte and laid them at the door of the condo where Rebecca and her father were staying. The act eased the blackness that was threatening to swallow me. I could at least hope for hope. I drove back to town and resumed my vigil outside the hospital.

At eight o'clock a black Suburban with tinted windows pulled up and Cali had been hustled into it along with Alana, Angela, and two of her mother's oversized bodyguards. I'd followed them at a distance back up the valley to the ranch. I'd watched unseen, parked on the shoulder of the highway, as the front gate was padlocked behind them.

How much longer can I wait, can I hang on? The cell phone chimes its mocking song. I thumb it off without looking at the screen. Three times it had rung while I was driving up the valley and once Rebecca's name and number had appeared on the flashing screen. The other two calls were from the Assistant Attorney General. Two messages had been left. I hadn't listened to either of them. I could guess what the weasel-faced suit would have to say, and I'm not sure I want to know yet what Rebecca is thinking. I'm not ready.
Fall asleep tonight thinking of me.

I throw myself back in the seat and stare out at the night. Then my right hand unconsciously jerks toward the passenger's seat. My fingers close around the plastic grip of my gun.

Something is on the porch.

It's a black shape, far darker than the bleached pine boards that make up the steps. It's huddled on them—a void of light. After a moment it takes form and I realize it's a man sitting there in the darkness with his elbows on his knees. There's a tiny orange glow to one side. A burning ember—the hot end of a pale, stiff joint—moves slowly to about where the head should be and then sucks bright enough to illuminate a face.

His features are half hidden by long black hair. But even in the faint orange light I recognize the high cheekbones and the lean features.

“Thought you'd fallen asleep,
che,
” Roberto calls to me in his soft voice, exhaling sweet smoke that drifts into the truck. “What's going on? You drunk?”

I open the door and get out. “Just generally screwed up. Where have you been, 'Berto? I haven't seen you around in two days. I thought maybe you'd left for Salt Lake without saying good-bye.”

He looks the opposite of what I feel: totally serene and in control. Like a king surveying his dark domain.

“Kicking back,” he says, now lifting a squat bottle and putting it to his lips. “Came down off Moran today. The Sickle and Scythe, a route that your buddy Bill Laughlin put up in sixty-eight. God, it was good up there. You should've been with me, bro.”

“I wish I had been.”

I sit down next to him on the wooden porch steps. Mungo comes padding up out of the trees. We're both quiet as she trots across the road and climbs up the steps. She sniffs at me for a minute then lies down between us.

“That's some dog you got. You shouldn't keep her locked up like that.” He grabs the ruff of her neck and shakes it affectionately. “Ain't that right,
mariquita
?” Mungo doesn't flinch away from his touch.

“I guess you made yourself at home.”

He
tsks
his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You left a window open. That's like an invitation to us criminals,
che
. You really should be more careful. So, you get your man? The stalker?”

“Last night I thought I did. This morning it turned out I hadn't.”

He drops the joint into the dirt and crushes it under a boot heel so that the remaining paper and marijuana disintegrate into the dirt. Reaching to one side of the steps, he lifts what I now recognize as my special bottle of Chinaco Reposado, toasts me, then drains the last few swallows.

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don't know.”

“What about your girlfriend? That Rebecca chick who thinks I'm such a bad influence?”

“I don't know.”

“Shit then, Ant. You don't know much.” He throws the squat, round bottle into the blackness across the road, where it swishes through branches before landing with a thunk. “Somebody'll find that a hundred years from now and think they got a really cool artifact.”

“Good thing Mungo's already come back.”

Roberto stands up in one swift motion that seems to contradict the odors of lazy sweat, tequila, and pot emanating from him. “So, you ready to go? I got my gear right here.” He points into the shadows of the porch where there's a large lump shaped like a backpack.

I laugh for what seems the first time in forever. He has a knack for showing up when I need him. It's good to see him right now. And it's good to be touched by his impulsiveness. He wants to climb, he climbs. He wants to get high, he gets high.

I shake my head. “I can't, 'Berto. I really wish I could but I can't. I'm too tired and I've got too much work to do.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, I'm serious. Things have been really fucked up lately.”

“That's what you get for being a cop, trying to make everyone else play by your rules. Now c'mon,
che
. Get your shit together. Let's go.” He grabs one of my arms and hauls me to my feet. I don't resist, but I don't exactly leap. Mungo stands up with us. “You need to feed the Rat, bro. A little adrenaline will blow out all the shit that's clogging up your heart.”

“What about your meeting with the Feds? It's in two days, right? Thursday night? You still going to do that?”

His face grows serious and he nods. “Yeah, I think so. If it's for real. That guy they want—my old friend Jesus—he's messing with the wrong people, you know? He's doing women and kids and shit. Yeah, I'd like to fuck with him a little. 'Specially if they're willing to give me a clean break. But like I told you, there's one thing I got to do before that,
che,
” he adds, his smile a Cheshire grin in the darkness, “and that's climb with you.”

I find myself smiling back, thinking,
My brother's like a virus. He infects you.

“What do you want to do?”

“The North Face Direct.”

I laugh again. “Yeah, right. There's no way in hell I have time for that. You, either. It took us three days when we did it with Dad. And we were speedy little guys back then.”

“We can be up and down the Grand in a day. Twelve hours or less. No ropes,
che.
We'll solo the motherfucker. It'll be faster.”

I shake my head without taking my eyes off his. He's still smiling at me, and I can't stop smiling back. “I can't do it, 'Berto. Too dangerous for me. And I haven't been climbing nearly as much as you—I'm in no kind of shape for that. No way.”

But while I stand there looking at my brother, I remember that maybe I've lost the only woman I have ever loved. I've surely lost my professional reputation and my pride, anyway. I've screwed up the job of protecting a woman who trusted me. Who am I to refuse a trip into the sky with my beautiful, mad brother—even if the trip might not include a return ticket?

THIRTY-ONE

O
NE PART OF THE NIGHT SKY
is alive with color, the planets and stars pulsating blues and reds and yellows against a black-velvet backdrop. The other part—the North Face of the Grand—looms up over me on three sides and it's as dark as a celestial black hole. It yawns farther and farther over my head with every high step on the scree. I'm ascending into another world. A harsher, purer world, where the things that seemed so important below lose their significance.

Roberto moves ahead of me like a phantom, leading me higher into the night. I've always liked watching him move. Every step, every swing of an arm or turn of his head, is utterly unself-conscious. Each motion is nothing more than a fluid contraction of the requisite web of muscles. There's no interference from his psyche, no second-guessing or worrying if he's being observed. He's not even breathing hard. If he's breathing at all I can't hear it. He makes no sound except for the occasional scuff of a Vibram sole on stone.

We're ascending into the tight confines of the Teton Glacier. The rock walls of the Grand and Mt. Owens loom over us, nearly three thousand feet high. Although it is just so much sucking blackness overhead, I know the North Face of the Grand is to our left. We'd climbed it once with Dad when I was fourteen and Roberto two years older. At the time it was the biggest, scariest thing we'd ever done. It was terrifying even with Dad there guiding us and with the three fat ropes we'd brought as lifelines against the forces of gravity. The ropes might catch a fall but they provide little psychological support when you're just a boy and you've got all that space beneath your heels. And then there are the things the ropes can't help—the twin dangers of rockfall and high-altitude lightning storms that can blow up out of nowhere and go off like an atomic bomb.

I can still remember the feel of the rock on that trip—the adrenaline causes everything to be imprinted deeper in your memory. It was sixteen years ago but it still tingles in my fingertips. Low on the face it was glacier-polished and smooth as glass, while higher it had a texture like sugar and the weather had formed pits and knobs. I recall the way the gray, pink, and white granite streaked my hands with damp soot.

We have not spoken a word since abandoning the Pig at Lupine Meadows. Roberto headed up the trail without a backward glance at me, the dark hole in the night sky pulling at him with an even stronger force than it pulls at me. A monstrous Pied Piper piping in a couple of hungry rats.

I caught up to him at one point. I found him standing a little way off the trail and pushing down the sleeve of his windshirt. In his hand I caught a thin flash of moonlight on a needle. I passed by without a word, pretending to not see him.

But now, as we step onto the glacier, Roberto says over his shoulder, “Check it out. On the right.”

There is a wide crevasse running alongside us. I twist on my headlamp and point it into the chasm. It reflects back an eerie blue light as strange as that in my brother's eyes.

The glacier is not steep but the rigid soles of my mountain boots threaten to skate on the hard summer surface. It wouldn't take much of a fall to slip down into the crevasse. And God only knows where the bottom is. I was guiding once in Alaska when a glacier on Denali spit out two climbers who had disappeared more than three decades earlier. Their bodies were perfectly preserved, like they'd been in a time warp in the center of the earth. Although it's oddly warm, walking on this glacier in the predawn darkness, the thought of an icy entombment makes me shiver. But Roberto doesn't stop to put on his crampons so I don't either. Instead of walking slowly and cautiously, my brother is picking up speed as the altitude draws him into the sky.

A bergschrund—a wide gap between the rock wall and the ice—finally brings us to a halt at the base of the wall. I'm panting from the long approach, my polypro underclothes soaked with sweat. Like me, Roberto seems to remember everything about the long-ago climb here with our father. He moves left along the bergschrund's lip until he finds the bridge of snow leading across fifteen feet of bottomless space.

“Think it will hold?” I ask when he pauses before the bridge. I've turned on my headlamp again to study it.

“Only one way to find out,
che
.”

I stand next to him before the bridge and study it with my light. It's about three feet wide at the narrowest point and looks from the side to be about ten feet in depth. The rock on the other side is sheer and smooth as glass, polished by thousands of years of grinding ice. I pull my long ax off my pack and gently probe the foot of the bridge. The upper crust of snow is hard, like burnt toast, but when I push a little harder the ax slides cleanly into lighter stuff. When the head presses flat against the surface I pull it back out.

“I don't know,” I tell my brother.

“You've already said that a couple of times tonight. You're holding on too tight.”

In the light of my headlamp he's giving me one of his signature looks. A deep stare from his blue eyes framed by all that sweat-soaked black hair. He has the stare of a messiah, but it irritates me right now. Some messiah; a drug-addicted killer, a possibly suicidal adrenaline junkie.

“To what, Roberto? Living?”

His eyes remain fixed on mine. “To everything,
che.
Fucking everything. Can't have any fun unless you're willing to let go every now and then, see what happens. Loosen your grip, little bro.”

He's probably talking without thinking, talking shit, but because of his soft voice and his eyes I worry over his words like Mungo gnawing on a rawhide chew stick.

While I'm standing there thinking in the dark, Roberto brushes past me with a soft hiss from the rub of our nylon jackets. He steps right out onto the bridge without hesitation, then moves lightly across it. His boots barely crunch on its surface. At the far end he finds a few small edges in the rock for his fingers and the toes of his boots and pulls himself up onto a narrow ledge. He moves sideways toward where an alcove cuts up through the face. I take a deep breath as if to fill myself with air and make myself as light as possible then step with a quaking boot onto the bridge. The bridge holds my weight.

The alcove is like a chimney or a three-sided elevator shaft rising hundreds of feet up the wall. I remember this as the start of the route from that August dawn sixteen years ago. Only then it hadn't been choked with snow and ice.

“Let's haul ass,” Roberto says. “Won't be long to sunup. Don't want to be sitting on our thumbs when the rockfall starts.” He gives a short laugh when I touch my cheek, as he knew I would, at the mention of rockfall. Then he sits to snap his crampons onto his boots.

The snow is soft at the bottom of the chimney. I swim up it after him holding my long ax in both hands and planting it sideways in the snow. It's technically easy, and mentally no big deal, but it's physically more exhausting than the harder moves I know are lurking ahead. I'm panting and sweating by the time I scramble up onto the first large ledge on the face.

For the first time I pay attention to the wind. It had been steadily rising since we left the car and began hoofing it up Garnet Canyon. It flowed over the pass between the Middle and Grand Tetons and rushed down at us as if trying to push us back. Then, when we entered the deep cirque beneath the North Face, it had almost disappeared. Here now, high on the face, I can feel its strength. It rustles over our nylon shells and shoves us around with occasional gusts. Looking up, I can see a streak of spindrift tearing off the summit like a flag in the night.

We follow the ledge past a small cave. It's where we had bivied that August fifteen years ago, safe from the rockfall that whistled by in the late afternoon. I shine my light in the cave and can recall exactly where I had shivered in my sleeping bag all through the night. I can even remember Dad joking that my eyes looked ready to pop right out of my head.

At the west end of the ledge another chimney takes us higher. The back wall of this one is choked with vertical ice instead of snow. We climb it by swinging our picks directly into the ice or by torquing them into cracks and stemming with crampons on opposite walls. The crampons screech and spark until they find purchase on the rock.

We're getting high now. We're probably close to a thousand feet off the deck. All that space pulls at my back.

The Second Ledge angles steeply toward the abyss. We move across it cautiously for several hundred feet. One slip or a rolled ankle on a loose stone and I'll be sliding off the lip.

“How's the job? Doing justice. You still locking up them nasty addicts and jaywalkers?” Roberto shouts over the wind.

“It sucks,” I yell back.

“Know what Richard Pryor said 'bout justice? JUSTICE is for JUST US. Dude may be a flaming crackhead, but he knows what he's talking about.”

It's not until we're near the top of the three-thousand-foot face that I get truly gripped. And the Rat gets a high-altitude feast.

From the Third Ledge we climbed a sixty-foot corner using rock shoes now to smear on thin edges and pockets. At the top of this there is a narrow rail of rock leading to the left. It's about as wide as a bookshelf and it tapers down to nothing at a distant corner. There it actually inverts, a turning place where the whole world gets upside down.

Roberto crawls out onto this bookshelf in slow motion. He's on his hands and knees at first, then, as the shelf narrows, he's actually slithering along on his left shoulder and hip. Pulling on tiny edges with his hands and pushing on others with the toes of his boots, he creeps out an inch at a time. I watch with my heart in my throat.
He's doing what he wants,
I tell myself again and again.
That's as good a way to die as any.
But I can't help imagining him shifting slightly away from the rock and falling into space. I can already hear my own grieving screams.

He turns the corner as slowly as I've ever seen him move. His head disappears, then his sideways shoulders, then his hips and finally his boots. I think I take my first breath in several minutes.

Then it's my turn.

I'm shaking as I follow, being very careful to focus on nothing but the cold rock at my fingertips. I try to meld into the stone, to shrink down on the shelf and burrow into it. The wind claws at my jacket.
Rebecca,
I think.
My child. Let me live and I'll never solo up here again
. I've made that promise before but
this
time—just as I had before—I mean it.

When I stick my head around the corner I catch sight of my brother again. He's traversing up a seventy-five-degree slab that drops off into nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. I can't see the edges he's using. Watching, crouched sort of sideways on one hand and one knee, I start to breathe hard and fast. I'm perfectly still except for the shaking, and it's as if I'm running a sprint. My blood thunders through my veins like a high-speed train through a tunnel.

Why didn't we bring a rope?

It takes me a few minutes, but I manage to screw up my courage. There's nothing else to do. I sure as hell can't back off this ledge. And I sure as hell can't stay here—the stone is already transferring a debilitating numbness into my wrist and kneecap.

I inch around, looking desperately for any good handhold. There's nothing but a few rotten edges. I grip first one and then another, praying they don't break off. Then with agonizing slowness I put my weight to them and pull myself around the corner.

The will to live, the idiocy of being up here without a rope, almost overwhelms me. I have a child. I have a woman I should make my wife.
Win her. Win back my job. Fight for all of it.

I find tiny nubbins for the inside edge of my boot soles and stand there, feeling the dreadful weight of the void sucking at me. Staring at the rock just above my face, I try to find another hold. Someone has hammered a secure-looking piton into a tiny crack. It's not concern over whether the piton is still sound that keeps me from reaching for it, but ethics. You don't pull on gear. It's cheating.

I hesitate for a long moment, thinking about it, then I grab the fucking thing with a relieved groan and wiggle my index finger through the steel eyelet. Nothing's ever felt so good. I don't care if my brother sees me. Later, I know, I'll confess and my brother will mock me for my weakness but he won't attach any other importance to the crime.

He's waiting for me on another ledge—this one broad and flat and wonderfully safe—with his feet dangling out over the void. He's grinning at me but he says nothing when I pull myself up beside him and let the adrenaline crawl back into the little nodes in the small of my back. He punches my arm, but not hard enough to knock me off. Then he points out at the valley.

“What's the matter, bro? That little traverse freak you out?”

“Yeah. It freaked me.”

The Snake River is very clear from this height, its water a flashing vein of mercury in the dawn light. Beside it the highway is already bustling with traffic. Just to the east, though, where the land humps up a little, smoke is billowing into the air. A great dark cloud that is tinted with orange at the bottom.

“It's burning,” 'Berto says. “Check it out,
che.
The whole fucking valley's going up.”