by Jeff Long
That's just the way it was. Suddenly he was tired. Tired of thinking. Tired of wondering. Way too tired to bluff the night and try for the valley floor. The night promised to be eternal the way bad, cold nights in the open always are. The cave would at least break the wind and keep him dry. In the morning, regenerated, he could descend from the mountain. Or maybe he wouldn't descend.
Why not wake up and finish climbing the face to the very top? It was uncharted territory up there.
Maybe there were fossils to find. Maybe he'd even find that cowboy's Bowie knife still jammed in a crack on the back shoulder. Pull it loose and show up in Camp Four, and he could become the new King. The sun would shine. The climbers would thrive.
There would be peace. He grimaced at his own bullshit.
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Aiming for the mountain, he started walking. The shattered rock turned to hard, crusted snow as he started up the ramp. He followed Kresinski's footsteps, which followed earlier eroded tracks—Tucker's, John guessed. With plenty of space buffering them and no rope connecting them, the two climbers moved swiftly and separately. The ramp was easy. It led to a ledge atop the stone wall ringing the lake, and a five-minute traverse on the ledge led to the col that led to the cave. The ledge was steeply pitched with snow, and John was careful as he looked over the edge down at the lake. From this height, the holes in the ice reminded him dismally of pockmarks, his own. It was a good three pitches down to the ice from here, four hundred vertical feet of air. Like Tucker before him, John tried to imagine the pilot standing here overlooking his crashed plane and ruined dreams with winter stropping its claws on his face and hands and the mountain wall resounding with sheer presence. He turned from the lake and started up toward the cave.
Just as Tucker had, John read the pilot's mental deterioration on the climb to the col.
He passed first one discarded shoe, then the other, and a glove, all frozen into the snow and ice.
He read the madness brought on by hypothermia. The col was tricky, but not overly difficult.
John found some of the holds thin and greasy, especially when it was just tennis shoe rubber on slick, icy verglas. But even with a pack on, the climbing was smooth and unexposed. Because he was a climber, John admired the pilot's insane decision to tackle the gully. It had been a very Page 162
wrong decision, but at least it had been ascent. Several hundred feet higher, as the mountain was darkening for the night, John's hand touched the bottom tip of a rope. It was Kresinski's yellow nine-mil and, John saw, it extended right up to the cave. He grabbed it and batmanned up to the cave. A rocky ledge jutted from the cave like a cat's rough tongue.
"Kreski?" said John.
"How's this for real estate?" Kresinski's voice answered from inside the cave. John paused to take in the panorama. The landscape was all gothic peaks and ghastly, Dantesque shadows.
Sprawled before him was a profoundly humbling wilderness.
The horizon was jagged and impossibly low, meaning this cave was impossibly high.
The sight stuffed John full of the same sense of grandeur that once led explorers like Zebulon Pike and Robert Brown, the botanist, to calculate their mountains five and ten thousand feet higher than they really were. Up here, fiction was equal to fact.
Here things could be what you said they were. It was the wilderness of antiquity, the devouring, relentless wilderness in which Kresinski's savage faith in himself made perfect sense. You divided the universe into night and day, black and white, tribe, taboo, and trespass—the simple brutality of a species under way.
"Come on in."
John tried to see inside the cave. In the darkness all he could make out was the tiny blue flame of a propane cookstove. Kresinski already had a pot of water on for soup.
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The exterior rock was speckled with garnets. John ran his fingers over the ruby-color buds as he stepped inside. Instantly he felt lighter and realized how hard he'd been fighting the wind all day long.
"Cocoa?" Kresinski offered without much enthusiasm. After a minute John adjusted to the darkness and saw that Kresinski was hunkered down on his heels, pouring chocolate powder into a tin cup. He set his pack against one wall, too weary to refuse.
"Hot," snapped Kresinski at the handle on the metal pot. He blew on his fingertips.
John drank some of the cocoa, then contributed a pint of his water into the pot and started it boiling for a packet of soup. Cooking, even over a fire this trivial, was one of those rituals that climbers appreciate with atavistic pleasure. Slowly the two men settled in for the night, each taking turns over the pot, concocting whatever hot foods and drinks they'd brought in with them. On a big mountain at high altitude, the ritual could go on for many hours and served practically to replenish their body fluids. Here, in this cave, the ritual was little more than a form of truce. They squatted by the cookstove as if it provided real heat or protection from the night.
The flame cast a mineral-blue illumination on the curved walls while they plucked chill peach halves from a can and sucked the juice from their filthy fingers. Outside, the wind thundered monstrously.
Once their bellies were full, they pulled out the sleeping bags and pads. Each visited the cave's mouth for a final piss and came back in wiping urine from his hands and face and muttering about the blowing gale. With another partner, it might have been funny. With Kresinski, it was just another thing. John stripped and bunched his clothing inside an empty stuff sack to make a pillow, then zipped the bag up around his body, lay back, and plunged toward sleep. Kresinski wanted to talk, though.
"You ever wonder what it must have been like to be the first guy into, like, King Tut's tomb?" he contemplated out loud. John focused on the howling wind. He tried to ignore Kresinski. "Or one of those guys that found Spanish gold on the bottom of the sea?"
"You want to be quiet?" John said.
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Kresinski didn't. "You know what? You're the only guy who didn't come up and say, hey man, what'd you find down under the ice? And you know what? You're the only guy I'm gonna tell.
The truth, I mean."
"I'm asleep. Shut up."
"It was spooky down there," Kresinski said. He was talking fast. It was aggressive, speedy coke talk. "That dead pilot was floating around, I could see him not so far away. And you could hear our guys beating away on the ice, like boom, boom, boom.
And there was that old Lodestar, nose down. You're the only guy who didn't ask me, hey Kreski, what the fuck was in there? Everybody else, I just said it was all smashed to hell, you couldn't get in." John let him ramble. "But it wasn't."
Suddenly Kresinski flicked his headlamp on and painted its light across the ceiling.
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With a sigh John looked over at him. Kresinski was staring at the ceiling's sparkling red garnets, a whole vaulted mosaic of them twinkling like a galaxy of dwarf stars.
His long, aquiline nose and jutting brow showed a brute silhouette. Beneath the funnel of light, zipped into his bag, he looked like a sleek, beached nylon shark, long and streamlined and menacing.
"I had this hunch, you know. So I told Pete to bring in my wet suit."
"It was Sammy who brought it in."
"Whoever. The thing is I had this hunch. Pot's one thing. But there's better cargo for my money.
That's what I was thinking. And I figured, where would stash it? In the I
cockpit where it was real handy. Hell. It's worth more than the whole load of weed plus the airplane. I'd want it real close to me."
&nb
sp; Now John was fully awake, despising the Neanderthal profile beside him because there was very little else Kresinski could be doing but confessing, and he didn't want to hear it. Even in confession, Kresinski wouldn't be hunting penance. It would just be business as usual, annihilation, his own and everyone else's.
"That pilot wasn't crazy like everybody thinks, man. He might of come up here. But then he went back down to the lake to get his cargo. He knew what he was doing. It was just like finding treasure, Johnny."
"Bullshit," said John. "He was crazy. He came up here. He was out of his mind."
"Nah." Kresinski already had it down in his mind the way he wanted it.
"The only reason he ended up down in the lake was because he fell," said John. "Fell.
Or jumped."
"It was just like finding treasure," Kresinski went on. He wanted an audience, not a dialogue. So what else is new, thought John. "He didn't quite make it. But I did. I found it. First I stirred up lots of lake mud for cover. Then I got inside the cockpit.
And there it was in a steel trunk."
"What?" said John.
But Kresinski was going to unfold it at his own pace. "After that it was just a matter of swimming it down the lake to where we tied the pilot. It was a safe hole. Nobody was going to go pulling that fucker out again. Remember how scared everybody was?
Nobody was even digging inside of fifty yards of that hole."
"What are you talking about?"
"Man, you should have seen the guy underwater all naked and decorated with Day-Glo. He looked like somebody's bad dream swimming around down there. He looked like he Page 164
was waiting for his trunk. So I tied the trunk to a rope that was floating loose beside him. He kept bumping into me. He kept putting his arms around me."
Kresinski's skull kept on chattering.
John was barely breathing. He already knew the punch line. Suddenly everything already made sense. It wasn't much consolation. But at least things made sense.
"I came up through that hole by the plane and got the hero's welcome. I dried out. I file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (195
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light warmed up. Ate. Got laid. Took a nap. I got ready for the night.
And then just when it started gettin' nice and dark, I went out on the ice and fetched up the trunk. I still didn't know what was in the trunk for sure because if it was what I thought it was, you couldn't open it underwater without ruining everything. I was just guessin', but all my guesses were right on that far."
Kresinski's excitement had been building with each sentence. Now, unable to lie still anymore, he swept the light down into a corner of the cave, set the headlamp on the floor, and unzipped his sleeping bag. He hopped to his bare feet, and frost poured from his mouth. John followed his beam of light and for the first time saw Kresinski's old black Lowe Alpine pack nestled in the farthest corner. It was completely encased in an inch of transparent ice.
"I pulled up the ropes. First I got the dead guy. But on the other rope was my trunk.
And once I got it hauled out and layin' there on the ice, that's when I knew I'd scored."
He advanced on the pack and struck the ice with the edge of his hand. "Bingo. Heavy, heavy score."
The ice shattered with a crunch. He yanked the straps open, flipped the top up, and dumped the pack on its belly. Plastic bags of cocaine spilled around his ankles onto the cave floor. He stood there with the treasure piled on his feet, ankle-deep in white gold.
"Sometimes you know things, man. You just do. And I did. The trunk was waterproof and airtight. Not even one key got wet. All I had to do was wait for the right time.
Right then was the wrong time. Everybody and his grandma would have been lining up for a share. And why should I share?
"So I packed it all up and humped it up to here. It was the perfect place. Everybody else had their noses down to the ice, they weren't comin' up here. And Tuck had broken a great trail for me. In the morning people were gonna wake up and see tracks up the ramp toward this cave, and they'd just say, Tucker's tracks. They'd never even know I left the lake. So I loaded up and humped it. Ninety, a hundred pounds. You ever try to climb wearing that kind of load? Shit, I've fucked women that weighed less than that.
"There was no problem. No problem at all. Nobody even knew I was gone. Then I ran into old Tuck. My timing was off. I thought he was already down and he wasn't. We ran into each other at the base of the ramp, and he gave me that picture. And here we are. You and me."
John listened to the wind. Part of him wanted to find the evil in this. Another part was in love with Kresinski's audacity and power. Here was the essence of soloing, and soloing is the essence of climbing. But still something was missing in the story.
"Why'd you bring me in?" he said.
"What do old climbers do when their fingers start going on them, Johnny? You've got file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (196
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light years to go, but fuck-all little future 'cause you wasted it on the rock.
No job. No education. No family. Nowhere to go. No real nothing. You got too much pride to Page 165
be a peon, but that's exactly what you've trained yourself to be. So what do you do? You ever ask yourself that? I do." He didn't wait for the reply that wouldn't have come anyway. "But then it came to me." Shuffling gently among the fat plastic bags, he turned around in the light. "You retire."
"Why me?" John said.
"Because I have a problem, man. From the picture it looks like he's about six foot eight, two hundred sixty pounds. That's about eight inches and eighty pounds more than I want to deal with alone. And of all the people I know, you're the one who'd appreciate the solution most."
The solution. John intended to get back to what Kresinski meant, though he already knew. But there were other questions, too. "How'd he know to come looking for you, though? How'd he know anyone found the coke in the first place?"
"Easy. He asked. He asked Tuck and Bullseye, and all they could do was shrug and drop like bird shit. And he knew the feds didn't find it, because they would have splashed '
COCAINE DISCOVERED
' all over the newspapers. Which they didn't. In the face of all that ignorance and silence, he did what I did. He guessed."
John's black eyes fastened on Kresinski. He felt empty and cheated, not by Kresinski but by himself. He felt beguiled and had nothing to blame but his own will to innocence. Well, here was a crash course in the geopolitics of the human spirit. Not trusting himself to remain thoughtful, he remained prone. He listened with the probing attention of a philosophy student. Something was still missing. Less the truth than a proper question with a proper answer. "How'd he know it wasn't on the bottom of the lake, Kreski? Or in the trees. How'd he know?"
"How does anyone know anything?" Kresinski volleyed back.
The evasion alerted John. It could only mean he was closing on the problem. "Uh-uh," he grunted. "He knew. How?"
Kresinski surrendered with a shrug. "The aluminum trunk," he said. "I ditched it in the trees. The feds didn't find it. But he did. He must have."
On the face of it, Kresinski's answer was inane. By itself it had no value. But Kresinski's manner implied a special gravity. He'd screwed up and had somehow led the smuggler on to the tribe. If it were anyone else but him you could write it off as a mistake. But with Kresinski there were too damn few mistakes that could be called honest ones.
"Why'd he go after Tucker and Bullseye?" John asked. "Why didn't he pick on you?
You were the one that went down in the lake."
"Who knows? Maybe it was that leather jacket. Maybe he figured Tuck found it with the coke.
Maybe he thought Tuck stripped it off his brother's body, and he just wanted a pound of flesh back."
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And then, bitterly, John recalled how Kresinski had manipulated Camp Four to believe Tucker's murder was John's doing. He scanned backward and saw that damn near every response Kresinski had made over the past few weeks had been part of a charade. "You knew Tucker got killed, didn't you?" he said. "You knew he didn't fall."
Like a vampire, Kresinski withdrew into his own darkness. "What do you think?" he answered.
Now the implications came tumbling together. It had taken a while despite all the clues, but now John knew. "You used us," he said.
"Ah. Yeah," said Kresinski. "Don't worry. You got a share coming. How's twenty percent?"
"You killed us," said John, groping for the full scope of when Kresinski had known what. But the man had worked his way with them to such an extent that it almost made no difference anymore.
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"Get a grip, man. The boogeyman's out yonder. Down there. He's comin' to git ya.
You'll get your crack at him." He tossed a kilo packet across to John. It landed on his chest.
"You get another nine of those for your trouble. Nobody's even had a chance to step on it. Pure unadulterated handmade Third World folk craft. That's a quarter-million bucks just for you."
Arms still enclosed in the sleeping bag, John lifted his head and examined the packet. He didn't think of white sand, turquoise waters, pink coral, and margaritas.
He didn't calculate the quarter million in terms of real estate, cars, MX missiles, hamburgers, or Picassos. He didn't gawk or doubt. He didn't bother considering that for this Kresinski had cheated and lied to them. All he did was look. There was nothing moral or immoral about it, nothing bizarre or significant. It rested on his chest like so much baby powder or processed sugar. Finally he tilted his body and the packet slid to the cave floor. He closed his eyes and obeyed the wind. He went to sleep.
CHAPTER 16
Morning came in thick plasmic waves. The wind was shrieking. They could have been stranded on Bullseye's Martian volcano, it was so cold and alien. The parachute saved them. Her, anyway.
