by Jeff Long
"Tuck?" John gently called. This was nothing new. Everyone had heard the tales of Tucker's nightmares—how he'd torn his tent to shreds one night, and put his hand through a bedroom window another, how he'd sleepwalked off a bivouac ledge on the South Face of Mount Watkins (with a rope attached, luckily), or how if you woke him up sometimes he'd start whistling as if it were all just a joke. Everyone had opinions about Tucker's Page 38
affliction, none of much use except for Bullseye's, which was naturally the most exotic. "Simple,"
Bullseye cheerfully theorized. "He signed a deal with the Devil." It was an argument that patently frightened Tavini, who was in constant horror of his own darker urges, but in a way it made sense. How else could a person climb the things Tucker climbed short of enlisting supernatural help? On the other hand, if it were that simple, every climber including Tavini would have signed his soul away long since.
"Hmm?" Liz stirred. She rubbed her warm back against his chest. Under the cigarette and casino odors her hair smelled like Liz, a rich Scandinavian smell that was more a function of her toilet than her Norwegian roots.
Louder this time, John said, "Tucker." Liz was having her own dream. She began stroking his upper buttock, then scratching it. Visions of sex. Or insect bites. The window was not designed to be climbed through, and Tucker was finding it difficult to get his shoulder into the outdoors.
The urgency faded.
"Tucker," he whispered. Liz suddenly grabbed a handful of muscle and pulled his body tight against her. Her face turned into the pillow, muffling a slight groan. Just then Tucker whipped his head around. "What?" he demanded. There was fear in his voice.
"Tuck, wake up."
"What?"
"It's John."
"John?"
"We're okay."
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"John?"
Tucker took a moment to digest the greater reality. "Oh," he finally said. "Yeah." As if wrestling oneself buck naked out through a skyscraper window were perfectly natural, he casually stepped back into the room. "Air. I just wanted some air."
"I know," whispered John. Liz had finished with him. She released his buttock and with a sigh cradled neatly into his arms.
"Sorry," Tucker whispered back.
"No problem."
"I did it again." He worried about himself. They said he'd fried his synapses. Too many days sailing too far beyond charted waters. Visions, Bullseye called them. Dead-of-night, singsong visions of the godhead. In Technicolor. Calling him home or into the On High. You watch, someday Tuck's going to lift right off the valley floor and not even the National Enquirer
's going to believe it. In the old days they used to name stars after people like Tuck. We'll name a star after you. A whole fucking constellation. Tucker hated that talk. It scared him, everyone waiting for him to crash and burn. It was troublesome. Death or serious injury he could handle, but not the loneliness and exaggerations. There was a way out of the nightmares, he knew there was. The journey free was going to be intricate and harrowing, that was a given, no problem.
And it would be costly. It might cost him everyone and everything, but that was better than someday mismanaging a toehold on a plastering of wet lichen near the wrong end of a 5.13, no pro. Or turning into an ice cube on the Mosquito or who knew where or when it might catch up with him. All of eighteen years old and his life was already too short. If it were as simple as selling his ropes and gear, man they'd already belong to someone else. He'd give them away. But true odysseys never let you loose until the end, and he was still somewhere in the middle. Thorns and vultures all around. Temptations and dangers. He'd find his way through, though. It was all Page 39
very physical. First the Visor had to let him pass. Then Makalu, that monster. Then he could be done with the verticality altogether maybe. Maybe.
"Go to sleep, bud."
Next morning John woke at seven-thirty, late for him, and reached for Liz. She was already in the shower, and Tucker was gone, his sleeping bag neatly stowed in a clean, bright yellow stuff sack. There was a bed for Tucker, but that was going too far, and so the boy had quartered himself on the floor. He kept all his possessions stored in stuff sacks made of waterproof, rip-stop nylon, which made his little world ultimately portable. Literally everything the boy owned fit into an expedition-size backpack, with room to spare for an extra gallon or two of water. Only in the last few years had John seen the charm in that sort of dedicated poverty, because he'd been embedded full-time in it himself. Now, having followed his dad's clay footsteps as a bohemian roughneck for a few seasons, he at least had a truck and six hundred dollars in a money market account. Another year or two, he might actually vote.
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Never far away was the memory of crossing Berkeley campus on his way to another weekend in the Valley. He had been Tuck's age, loaded down with ropes, and the hardware was ringing musically with each step, when suddenly a news camera crew swooped down for a man-on-the-street interview. American troops had just invaded Cambodia. The news crew wanted to know what was his reaction? They'd been filming hippies and Marxist radicals all afternoon; now here was someone out of the ordinary. The microphone hovered in front of his nose. The newscaster, a remarkably thin and fiery woman, hung on his silence as if his first words might open new worlds. Cambodia? he finally asked. The sound man had looked at the cameraman.
The truth was, he'd had no idea where Cambodia even was. The war in Vietnam meant student strikes, and strikes meant free time for the Valley. His geography consisted entirely of the world's Cordilleras, the mountains he'd seen and the ranges he hoped to. "Kill the mike," she'd said. The shame of that afternoon could still rouse a "you dumb fuck" shake of his head. Any Jesuit worth his salt would have punched him out for the intellectual lapse. He looked at his bare toes sticking out from the bottom of the sheets. Some things never change. He was still in the Valley, still lost and lapsing.
Liz emerged from the bathroom stripping the water from her waist-length hair with a red comb.
"You're up. Sleep well?" Her long body was a marvel.
"Yeah, minus one of Tucker's spells." He stretched and kicked the covers loose. Now he was naked, too. He watched Liz's eyes, then worked down her body again. Their bodies were taking over.
"More dreams? Poor Tuck." She moved close to the bed. Her dark golden pubis hunted nearer his face. She was talking to him from high above where she looked down. Her nipples looked enormous atop her rib cage. With a long even stroke she pulled more droplets from the heavy hank of hair and let them sprinkle down.
"So did you."
"So did I what?"
"Dream." He ran his fingers down the edge of her saddle. She pushed in closer. Her mouth came open from the sensation, but she started the comb down from her head again with forced deliberation.
"How do you know?"
He told her. "Sort of wondered what were you dreaming about," he said.
She stepped across his chest, spreading herself. "Breakfast?" she pondered and brushed his lips Page 40
with one fingertip. The red comb fell onto the far pillow.
"Where's Tuck?"
"He went for a run." That gave them anywhere between two and three hours. With the lungs of a Sherpa, it took a lot to max him out. Balanced with both hands on the wall, Liz began lowering herself.
"Tell me about that lake, Liz. The airplane." It was already a game between them. The file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (47
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light interrogation and evasion could go on for a very long time.
"What lake?" She was kneeling over his arms. All she could see was his beau
tiful face.
"Cocaine. Diamonds. Gold." He reached up with his tongue. The first touch arched her back like an electric shock. He did it again.
"John..."
"Gold." He found the crest and her breath emptied.
"You talk too much," she said, and that was the end of their playing.
Afterward they descended to the hotel restaurant to await Tucker. Slot machines cranked away in the background, otherwise breakfast was as Liz wanted it, quiet and elegant and just expensive enough. At nine-thirty, halfway through John's second cup of Earl Grey, Liz announced, "We've got to go."
"Right."
"Where is he?"
"Don't worry. He probably turned his jog into a marathon."
"You don't think he's hitching back to the Valley, do you?"
"Nah. Probably embarrassed about his midnight stalking is all."
"I feel terrible leaving him like this."
"He'll find something to do until we get back. There's always MTV." Like Tucker, John had found the rock videos irresistible and even alien. Some of the cultural references woven into the videos were so contemporary, he could only squint at the screen. Newspapers had the same effect. He was out of touch.
"I just hope some hooker doesn't get hold of him. You remember that cocktail waitress yesterday." Lots of cleavage and eyeliner. Lots of attention to their silent minority, Tucker. That was nothing new—John had long ago observed women's passion for the shy Billy Budd types—nor was Liz's maternal jealousy.
"Tucker?" he said. "You really do believe in charity."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
John heard the irritation and looked at her with surprise. "Nothing. Just he doesn't have any money. A hell of a customer."
She looked at her watch and stood up. "We can't wait anymore. The secretary said ten-thirty.
Sharp. She said this may be Nevada, but they run their offices on federal taxpayers' money and federal taxpayers' time. If I'm late, forget it."
"Maybe we ought to be late then."
She refused the humor. "I want this job, John."
"They're going to fire you before they hire you because their clocks say ten-thirty-two? Whatever happened to good old mañana?" There was no repartee. Ever since the eggs Benedict had arrived undercooked, Liz's fuse had been burning. It wasn't the eggs, of course. It was the interview. The escape hatch. "Not that I have a wristwatch. Or pay taxes," he tried mocking himself. "Hell, I don't even have an address." He paused in the clowning, figuring a small litany was equal to a big one.
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Either she was going to lighten up or she wasn't. He should have known, though. If their sex wasn't going to do it, probably nothing was.
"Nothing I'd brag about," she curtly dismissed and kept right on staring at the bill.
"Let's boogie then." He tossed it off nice and airy to contrast her bitchiness. She flicked a glance at him and grimaced.
"Just give me a break, John. Today's a big day."
"I'm right here. I'm with you."
"I know."
They slid from the booth, paid up, and left behind the chugging, ringing slots. Out on the sidewalk, his Nikes gave him an extra inch on her, and even then he wasn't looking over her head. He loved walking beside her. People looked. He felt special.
Not special like when you descend from a big-wall cut and gaunt and fried to a crisp, tentative and weird from the thirst and solitude, and the tourists give you wide berth and whisper "rock climber" as in Hell's Angel or speed freak. With Liz there was an elegance. Just the way her loose, heavy hair hung, people looked. But more. When she draped one long arm around his shoulders, she was announcing her equalness.
Her blond against his dark, both whip strong in their blue jeans, they looked born for each other.
It was a good half hour out to the Palomino Valley corrals through country wide open enough to make John feel like his soul had dropped loose and bolted for the long and far away. Part of it was that this was much the same as the desert of his boyhood, stark with the same Sonoran vegetation that washes against oil rigs from Wyoming to the Mexican border. Rabbitbrush was budding yellow and sage hung rich in the air.
The winter had not quite digested all the tumbleweed stuffed tight against the barbed-wire fences, and the speed signs and open-range signs were all aerated with bullet holes. This was terrain he'd fled from once before, and now she wanted him to come back. He wondered if other refugees suffer the same vertigo he was feeling in this reminder of a bygone homeland. At the same time, he felt relief. Rounded old volcanoes crouched with their spills of lava rock, dinosaur country. Not all bad memories. There's things inside other things, his father used to cough out. Some
Indians do that, cough their words as if language itself were a humiliation. John and his brother would stand stock-still in his cool shadow beneath the infinite sun.
Sidelong like a flimflam man or shaman he'd spit some Red Man, no joke, and heft a palm-size slab of dull gray limestone picked off the ground at random. You got to look for those secret things, he'd say, otherwise what's the use of being a human being? And so saying, would crack his geologist's pick against the rock. He'd pry apart the two halves, and in there carved on the dark brown walls would lie a fossil leaf. Or an animal print. Or a seashell. You'd marvel at the oldness, smell the rock, cup the fossils to your ear and listen to reptiles rustling through giant trees that weren't there anymore. Within this world of illusion lay another. That was a valuable file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (49
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things are other things. Somewhere inside that bastard with bony fists dwelled their father. So John and Joe busted their young asses roughnecking, risked their fingers on the same pipe changers and kelly rigging, cussed the same bosses, the same machines. They didn't have to, but they turned over half their paychecks to the old man. The Jesuits told them not to, their dad would only drink it away. The boys gave him money anyhow. He drank it away. He died. That simple. And John fled.
"Turn down here," Liz said at a dirt road. Fire-blackened land swelled and dipped on the surrounding hills, rushing right down to the wood and steel corral posts of the wild-horse center.
"Ten-twenty-three," he said, looping into the dusty parking lot. "Sharp." He heard his own bitchiness this time. He pulled in front of a one-story building with pitted aluminum siding and turned off the engine.
"Please, John. This is for us." She squeezed his hand.
He squeezed back. "Well, good luck. I'll wait out here. Over there. By the corral."
There was another pickup in the parking lot, a real one, not a Japanese dwarf like his, and it bore the inevitable bumper sticker promoting guns. That and the sound of horses running spontaneous circles in the far enclosure was it. Liz didn't get out quite yet, though, didn't even look at her watch to check the correct time. "I don't want to waitress, that's all."
"I don't want you to."
"And I don't have any other skills. I know trees and I know horses." She was earnestly trying to be nice, but her words made him feel foolish. "I know rocks" was all he could say. Oil rigs and rocks. His earlier elation about being partner to her was sinking fast. A fine pair they'd make, a prole and a bureaucrat.
"I just can't stay in the Valley anymore," she said. There it was. "And you can't either." There it was in deuces. But then he'd come to Reno and Palomino Valley for this very reason. Liz had to say leave and he had
to say I'll think about it. "It doesn't have to be here. It doesn't have to be horses. We just need to leave the Valley, John.
We can go anywhere. We can do anything."
He looked down at her hand. The first time he'd held this hand, it wasn't her long fingers or strength that astonished him so much as the thick ridges of callus on her palms. They weren't the horny pads you find on the climber's fingertips, just old-fashioned working calluses in the meat of her grip. It was the hand of Eve.
"I'll think about it."
"I know."
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"But the train's leaving?"
"The train's leaving."
CHAPTER 5
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In the tradition of boxers who pickle the skin on their knuckles in brine and urine, of alpinists on the streets of northern European cities who carry balled snow in their bare hands as a prophylactic against colder, steeper walks, of cyclists, kayakers, and football players who endure freezing showers and ice baths for the sake of improving themselves—Tucker had a theory. It reduced to one word. The word was Suffer. That was it. It was that fundamental. Suffer. Suffer enough and you reach an end to the suffering. Suffer enough and you get transformed. There's something to it, of course, the idea that by humiliating the flesh you lift yourself closer to God.
