by Jeff Long
"You've got something that belongs to him."
To his surprise, Kresinski didn't deny it. "Tell me who among us doesn't."
"Tuck. Tuck didn't."
"Fuck, John. We're all sinners. Even little Tuck. It was him who swiped the jacket and started this whole thing."
"You've got something," John repeated. He went back in his mind to their days on the lake and tried to think what Kresinski might have taken that the rest of them hadn't also. Then he remembered the dive. "You found something in the lake," he said.
"Come on, John. I came up empty. Everybody saw me. Cold. And empty."
It was true. John recalled how they'd pulled Kresinski from the freezing water and stripped his dry suit off and exposed his naked body to the fire. Some girl with black hair had given him hot tea, he remembered that now. And teeth chattering, flesh blue, Kreski had regaled them with tales of the deep, painting a fabulous underwater land of cold fishes and the barren coffinlike interior of the cockpit. Except for his bullshit, he had indeed come up empty.
"Then what's he after?"
"Unfinished business."
"What, damn it?"
Only then did it catch up to John. If Kresinski knew the answers now, he would have known them yesterday. And a week ago. There was only one place such knowledge could have come from, and that was the lake. He'd known from the beginning and yet warned none of them. The enormity of that wrong stopped John's breath for a
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light moment. Kresinski was watching his eyes carefully. When he saw John's realization, he flinched and backed against the rock, and he raised his big arms in front of him.
"The lake. It's something at the lake, John. I don't know what. I wish I did."
John's voice pinned him against the wall. "You knew."
"No, I swear." He went on. "You want him, though. And I can give him to you. But I'm in. That's part of it."
"No way."
"I want to stake this fucker to the earth. Same as you. That's it. I swear."
John stared at Kresinski. It was like looking at a stand of dead trees. He was lying his ass off, you could hear the dead words scratching against each other.
"The lake." Kresinski trailed off.
"He's up there?"
"Not yet. But he's gonna be. He's gonna follow us."
"Why?"
"He'll go where we go. He's watching us. Call it a hunch."
"So we're bait," said John. "Is that what Tucker was? And Bullseye?"
"They were in the way. Now they're not." Kresinski said it in a careless way that meant he'd lost his fear. John could see that he thought he was back in the saddle.
"Why go to the lake then? Why not Modesto or San Francisco? Why not wait for him here?"
"Might as well make it our high ground for a change."
Just then the rescue party began mounting the porch of stone. Pete was the first.
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Sweat was cutting lines down his dirty face. "Gonna be a long day," he said, and pointed at the dark crevice mouth. "Through there?"
Kresinski nodded and eyed the oxygen bottles. "You guys bring a mask, too?"
"Yeah," said Pete. He kept working on a piece of gum. "That hill's gonna be a bitch to carry him down. You sure we wouldn't be better off with a chopper?"
"We got it under control," said Kresinski.
"Liz should be coming soon," John quietly added. Kresinski snapped a look at him.
"And some extra rangers. We don't move Bullseye until they get here."
"Fine with me," said Pete.
"You trying to kill him?" Kresinski challenged.
"I told Delwood bring more rope and people," John went on. "The evac cable. And the trauma kit. And we'll see about the chopper."
"There's no room for a chopper to land up here," Kresinski spat.
"Maybe not."
"A long day," Pete reiterated for himself.
As other rescuers arrived and dumped their loads, John said, "Might as well rig it for the cable."
He told them Delwood was bringing the heavy spool of cable and more hands.
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"Fucking Delwood," one boy muttered.
"We better get in there," said Pete. "Somebody want to bring the O-two in? And the mask."
"I got it," said another climber.
The rescue team squeezed single file into the crevice, leaving John alone again with Kresinski. John opened one of the rescuer's packs and rummaged around for some hardware to make an anchor. Even if the litter was ultimately lifted out by helicopter, it made good sense to rig the cable and have it ready just in case. He found a rack of nuts, angles, and knife blades, and a rock hammer. In another pack he found a half dozen weathered slings. He scanned the wall and, finding two separate seams to work with, knelt in front of the rock and began hammering in the metal.
"You owe me, John. For Tony."
"Shit."
There was a desperation to Kresinski, an apprehension, that John found curious.
That he would keep ramming his head against John's "no" was almost mystifying.
"He's trying to spring it all loose. All."
"There's more," said John. "What is it he's really after?"
"Nothing. And everything. All at the same time," Kresinski said. "He's like a force of nature.
Like gravity. I mean, what's gravity all about?" It sounded like a dodge, and yet Kresinski's performance seemed genuine. If not genuine, then at least energetic.
He was putting every last milli-amp into the persuasion. But why me? wondered John. "Entropy," Kresinski went on. "That's what he wants. Total fucking entropy.
Flat. Still. Silent."
John looked at him. "Screw that," he finally said. "What's he want? What do you want? In plain English."
Kresinski made himself dark. He loosened the scowl on his face and the ferocity in his eyes and, like that, he took on further, darker guile. "Maybe we want the same damn thing," he said with an honesty so complete that John suddenly despised him.
He despised him because the man had reached a point where the truth was intricate enough to Page 143
actually include deceptions and lies and evil. He wasn't telling the truth.
But he was.
"What's that?"
"Nothing. And everything."
"Well," John said. "That's not good enough."
"Good enough isn't the point anymore."
John recovered himself. "You're on your own. You always were."
Then Kresinski smiled, confirming that his reasoning was all just a ploy. "Too late, Johnny." He winked. "All our choices got made a long, long time ago."
"Yours maybe," John tried. But it was strangely difficult to deny him. "Forget it."
"We're almost there," Kresinski declared brightly. The way he said it, you could file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (170
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light almost see the lake shimmering in the distance. You could sense their lost purpose restored.
John turned his head away. As wrong as Kresinski was, he was also right. They'd spent a lifetime getting to this moment, this ledge, this purchase in the world. And now they were almost there.
He matched one of the baby angles with a half-inch crack in the wall, snugged in the tip, and hit the metal with the hammer. And hit it again. But Kresinski wouldn't go away.
"What about it, man?"
Far below, at the base of the scree slope, several figures appeared from the trees.
"There's Liz," said John.
"All for one," Kresinski said.
CHAPTER 14
There was no good reason for Bullseye not to die that long,
dusty day. Everybody said so. From wings to wheelchair—or the vegetable farm—that was the bleak devolution he stood to gain. "If it of been me," Sammy murmured to John as they knelt on either side of the body, waiting for help, "just finish it. Drop a rock on my brainpan. Just let me go." John passed it off to too much Rambo until he saw the dried tears striping
Sammy's cheeks. Everything tasted of salt that day—their sweat, the blood on the backs of their hands, and, when the sight hit them one by one with their own mortality, the tears. It was almost as if Bullseye were already dead. Liz brought with her Michael Stammberger and Tip Escuela, two well-liked rangers with paramedic skills, both in their twenties, both indifferent to her and the climbers' outlaw reputation.
The first thing they did was replace the climbers' Himalayan oxygen mask with a clear plastic re-breather, crank up the flow from the classic high-altitude rate of four liters per minute to a more liberal twelve, and start an IV. While they worked to stabilize the body, Liz took Escuela's walkie-talkie out through the crevice and ordered a helicopter to meet them in the meadow Page 144
down the hillside and across the road. John held the glucose bag while the two rangers and Sammy and Pete got a plywood backboard under Bullseye and a cervical collar around his neck, and taped his forehead and chin to the board to prevent further cord damage. Then they file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (171
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light straightened and air-splinted Bullseye's twisted limbs—the traction splints for femur breaks were out of the question because you could feel the shattered pelvic bones—
and gradually packaged him for transport in the now-assembled litter. There was internal injury, though in the field you can rarely say which organs have been affected. His abdomen was swollen with hemorrhage and sounded like a liquidy drumhead when they palpated it. Even more gruesome than his broken limbs was his scrotum. Bullseye's boxer shorts had been ripped away by the landing, and it was plain for all to see that some of his organs had blown down and now rested with his testicles. Much of the skin on his buttocks and upper legs had been flayed loose by the rocks, and he looked like a sacrificial victim badly sacrificed. But worst by far was the cord damage. It was nothing you could see or feel along his spine, but it was there. No amount of scratching his bare, cut feet elicited a response, and he was breathing with his stomach, not his chest, suggesting damage near the neck level.
They were quick and thorough, but even so it was a full hour before Bullseye was strapped into the litter with a bottle of oxygen tied between his knees and ready for descent to the helicopter, which had yet to arrive in the flat meadow. He looked so peaceful and rescued lying in the litter as they carefully handed him through the crevice and attached the cable to a rung above his balding head, pinioned between two rolled-up towels and crisscrossed with tape. He looked so saved. A short spell in the hospital... a long spell of physical therapy. And then Bullseye would be back in the Valley to keep their flame bright and their pillars of ice humble. So long as he was covered up this way, you could at least wish that.
John didn't tell Liz or Sammy or Pete about the dead smuggler's violent twin. The rangers remarked on the odd lacerations girdling Bullseye's wrists and forearms, but when they asked about his drug consumption and any history of depression, it was plain what they made of the marks.
"Anybody check up there?" one of the rangers asked John, nodding toward the top of the cliff that hung overhead. "You know, for notes. Messages. Good-bye."
"No," said John, and that was the end of their curiosity. But once the litter was clipped to the cable and it was plain there were plenty of hands for a smooth carry-down, John made an excuse about his infected leg and lingered behind. When no one was looking, he slipped back inside the Amphitheater and combed the ground for further clues.
Finding nothing of use, he climbed a corner of the Amphitheater wall to the top and scoured the earth for whatever story it might tell. In his heart he knew that Kresinski was right, the mayhem was man-made and at the same time larger than life. The smuggler had killed Tucker, crushed Bullseye, decimated their tribe.
And yet John found it difficult to hate the man because he was, after all, just a concept. But then he found two imprints on the edge of the cliff that confused him.
They looked like no prints he'd ever seen, rounded and long and deep. Careful not to disturb the sign bracketing these strange, somehow precious prints, he backtracked a file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (172
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the trail forward chronologically. There were two principal sets of tracks, one made by Bullseye's bare feet, the other by a pair of enormous Vibram-lugged boots. Here, John saw, Bullseye staggered. Here he fell down and raised himself, but without benefit of his hands—
there was no palm print in the forest loam under the pine needles, John checked.
Mimicking the tracks, John replicated the event. Why no palm print? he asked himself, and tried to raise himself without his hands. In that way he understood that Bullseye's arms had been tied not in front the way Kresinski had signified, but behind him. He remembered the faint marks around Bullseye's neck and understood that his friend had been led to his slaughter by a cord or wire around his throat.
Arriving back at the strange prints on the edge of the cliff, John was again consumed with curiosity. How had they been made? From the right and the left and above and then with his head down at ground level for a side view, he studied the two rounded tracks. Only when he lifted himself from his knees and saw the imprint left in the dirt did he feel any real hate for the smuggler. For now he saw it all. Here, two inches from the edge of the abyss, hands tied behind him, Bullseye had been forced to kneel and contemplate his execution. There, a few feet behind him, the smuggler had paced back and forth, tormenting him with questions and demands. John looked out across the Valley. Out there stood Sentinel rock. Closer, an ancient tree broke the skyline.
Bullseye must have attached his soul to these and other things in the last moments.
And then his hands were untied—John found two sets of knuckle prints on either side of the knee prints—and Bullseye had stood up and tried to escape. He found the footstep where the smuggler had broken his pace to parallel the break for freedom.
Here was Bullseye's final purchase with the edge, a gouge in the earth one toe wide.
"Fuck," said John.
He started to follow the smuggler's tracks back down through the forest, but what was the use?
It would take hours to track him back to the floor, and eventually the big ugly boot prints would turn into tire marks and the tire marks would lead onto asphalt and that would be the end of it.
Returning to the lip of the Amphitheater, John searched for another five minutes. He opened his mind to anything out of the ordinary—the string or wire used to tie Bullseye, bits of torn clothing, a splash of blood, maybe a piece of paper dropped by accident or a last message scrawled in the dirt. The killer was almost what Kresinski had said, a force of nature. His violence borrowed ingeniously from what the climbers already risked their lives on: the void.
By simply tipping the balance in favor of the abyss, who but a climber could say the killer wasn't that same gravity and ego that always had and always would plague ascent? Except for some footprints and a few trivial marks on Bullseye's racked, flayed body, what evidence was there he hadn't wandered up here in a psilocybin haze and jumped?
Crouched, knees bent Apache-style, John hound-dogged the entire area, intent on file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (173
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He was almost ready to down-climb the corner and
exit the Amphitheater and descend the scree slope to help with Bullseye, when his eyes lifted from the ground and he saw the rag.
Almost out of reach, it was hanging stiff and pink from a branch, like a tattered flag.
It should have been the first thing to catch his eye, not the last; indeed, it was intended to be seen. But John had been so focused on what was at his feet instead of the whole picture that he'd walked underneath it at least four times. It had been tied to the branch not far from Bullseye's knee prints and was obviously meant to be found. John had to stand on his toes to reach the knot. Excited that here, at last, was a deliberate communication from the smuggler, possibly a key to finding the barbarian, certainly proof of an external, real malice, he opened the crusty rag.
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It was all that remained of a T-shirt. Originally white, the shreds had been dyed pink with blood and snow. Before John's mind could catch up with the possibilities, he turned the rag over.
Printed across what was left of the chest shouted the slogan, "This Ain't No
*%&*!!
Wienie Roast." Even then it took him a moment, for this was more than a message from the killer. This was Tucker.
Suddenly John knew where Tucker's body had gone. It hadn't whisked off into the heavens or limbo or been dragged away by the animals. The smuggler had taken it.
The climbers had desecrated the body of the dead pilot in the lake, and now Tucker's body belonged to the darkness. In a way the idea relieved John because now Tucker was partly found, even if more fully lost. Now he knew the boy's disappearance had nothing to do with all those venial gods in the trees and rocks and animals. Tucker's disappearance had nothing to do with sin, none that he had committed anyway. The smuggler had killed Tuck and then descended around to the base of Half Dome and laid hands on the thin, innocent, broken body and stolen from it the ultimate decency
—a place with a name.
Oddly, the thought of Tucker's spirit wandering forever without definition relieved John because it fired his hatred, and the hatred felt good. Its hot, certain existence was what counted. He hated the smuggler. He hated the smuggler's boot print and Polaroid image. He hated the man's dead brother and the lake and their ridiculous foolish plundering of the airplane's cargo. He hated Kresinski, too, because in this world of illusions there are always the magicians who point less clever people toward false gold. He even hated himself, and that was all right, too, because he recognized how that was one last chance to be true to himself. No one is your friend, not even your brother. The echoes poured over him.
