During their five years of friendship, David had learned that Nelson didn’t often have time for casual relationships. They were both forty and busy, and they’d grown accustomed to grabbing time together whenever they could. A chance to make their old climb together seemed too big an adventure to turn down—a retaliation against a day of waiting for Susan Roche and a phone call that hadn’t come. “Okay. You’ve convinced me. I’m in.”
And so they were off. They drove into the national park and, after changing into sturdy climbing boots and loading two bags of climbing gear with cams and rope, abandoned the car at the Lupine Meadow parking lot. They chatted about unimportant things while Nelson Hull led the way along the distinct footpath, their feet dislodging pebbles and razor-sharp chunks of stone.
“Sarah’s having a garage sale next Saturday and she wants to sell my flannel shirts. She says I never wear them anymore and they’re taking up room in the closet. How about that? I’ve had those since before we got married. They’re my camp shirts.”
“Garage sales are bad. All that great stuff a guy manages to hoard, gone in a day.”
They entered a fragrant tunnel of pine, stringing out along an eastern slope, breathing hard, taking long switchbacks around shaded fronds of fern and pale strands of bearberry.
Chickadees flew in scallops from bough to bough. Above them, in shades of gray and shadow, spires of schist, granite, and Precambrian gneiss jutted into the sky.
For the first time in weeks, the landscape surrounding David loomed larger than the impenetrable self-reproach he carried. “It’s extraordinary here. I had forgotten.”
Nelson stopped to catch his breath. “No one should ever stay away so long that he forgets.”
“I didn’t mean to do that. It’s been years since I’ve done this. Time just… gets away.”
“You ought not to let that happen.”
A prominent rib of granite divided the gully they climbed and the first stone tower loomed above them. The Needle. David returned his attention to the rocky terrain at their feet. For several hundred feet he climbed in silence again, to where a granite face rose to the east.
“Abby put my turntable in a garage sale and I had to grab it out of someone’s hands. All those people wandering the front yard, and I put it back inside the house. Imagine. I wouldn’t have any way to play my old albums from college.”
“Do you play your old albums from college?”
“No. But that doesn’t matter. It matters that I wouldn’t have any way to.”
A narrow vertical crack split the tower of rock, suitable for climbing, but Nelson continued plodding uphill. He didn’t stop until they’d traversed a high ledge onto one large, conspicuous boulder. “Nelson, every other preacher I know goes to The Pines to relax with a round of golf. You’re the only one I know who has to climb.”
“Sarah sold my clubs at a garage sale.”
Below them the valley sprawled like a gathered skirt, the Snake River rickracking a border beside the straight seam of highway. To the northeast glistened Jackson Lake, sunk into sage flats and gleaming like a mirror. To the southeast lay the Lockhart hayfields, already green from a first cutting. David grasped his pack and sprinted on ahead of Nelson. He knelt on all fours and crawled through a narrow tunnel formed by the angle of one huge boulder.
Nelson scrabbled through behind him. “The Eye Of The Needle,” he said.
“Appropriate name.”
After that, they climbed for a while without talking. David’s thigh muscles began to burn. He welcomed the pounding of his pulse, the rich aching in his obliques.
If everything goes the right way…
As each step became harder, he embraced the fierce physical exercise.
… Abby won’t find out what I’ve done.
He leaned into the slope, climbed higher, earning both his progress and his pain.
If everything goes the right way…
With each step, he did penance, made restitution to himself and to the mountain.
… I can hide this.
“Hey,” Nelson said between breaths when they finally stopped to rest. “Got…a question…to ask you.”
“What’s that?”
“You like that Husquvarna chainsaw you bought?”
“It’s a good one. Six-point-one horsepower engine. Best chainsaw I’ve ever had.”
“Next time you go out to cut firewood for the church with your chainsaw, can I go with you? I’d love to get my hands on that piece of equipment.”
“Sure.”
“One of the occupational hazards of being a pastor. Having men serve the church so well that I never get out to do the fun stuff myself.”
“You’re too important,” David said. “Think what it would do to the congregation if a tree fell on you.”
They started up again. The landscape opened into tundra, continuing north, following a faint track in the loose scree and crossing hard-frozen patches of snow. Long ago they’d discovered that from here they could see all the way to Gannett Peak on a clear day. David shaded his eyes and searched for it now, some sixty miles away against the southeast horizon, the crowning height along the purple line of the Wind Rivers.
“Probably the same thing it would do to them if I fell off a mountain,” Nelson said.
The air was growing thin, making it harder for them to breathe as they climbed.
“It’s hazy, isn’t it?” David said between gasps. “I don’t know what happened to the sun.” For a long time, he stood on the edge of a precipice, looking out, staring off into the distance. Nelson stood on the outcropping beside him, eyes raised to the sky and to the heavenly Father beyond the sky. If anyone had been watching them with binoculars from the valley below, they would have seen two human figures jutting beyond the silhouette of the mountain, their statures confident, their feet braced wide, as if by gaining height there, they’d gained perspective on the world.
A deep bass-note of thunder rumbled at them, so close they could feel it resonate beneath their feet. Seconds later, the sound ricocheted off the far side of the valley and a streak of lightning doglegged across the sky.
“All those things the Bible says a man is supposed to be.” When David’s voice came at last, it came gruff and hard. “I don’t think I can live up to those anymore.”
Nelson searched the sky, his hair lifting in the wind. “What brought this up?”
David gestured wildly toward the lightning. “I don’t know. Life. The mountains.” What I’ve done to my wife.
“Don’t get confused. Living the right life in God’s eyes has never been about trying, David.”
“Oh, no?”
“It’s about the things you’re willing to do each time you blow it.”
The bluster bore down upon them from the Upper Saddle, blindsiding them because it came—as all Teton weather does—from the west. David hadn’t noticed when the warmth left and the wind became changeable and the far reaches of clouds became mottled by gray streaks of rain.
Nelson paused long enough to survey Mount Owen and Teewinot below them. “Even up here, there’s no getting away from the storms.”
“Storms in your life, Nelson?”
The pastor nodded. “That’s why you’re a good friend. It’s nice, spending time with someone who doesn’t have such a messed-up life and who doesn’t expect me to know the answers to fix it.”
David said nothing.
“Guess we won’t get high enough to use the ropes.”
“I never called Abby.”
“Well, you aren’t going to do it now.”
Wind sluiced over the mountain, threshing David’s hair and the tops of the trees below them, making it difficult to descend the trail. He started toward the steep ice gullies and crags rising above the mouth of Cascade Canyon. When the thunderbolt came, he didn’t have to count before he heard the rumble.
Two seconds, at best. Hardly any time at all.
“Nelson, let’s get out of here.”
Stones came tum
bling downhill as Nelson followed. David lost his footing once and slid several yards. A lightning flash underscored each crevice and outcropping of granite. David felt the roots of his hair begin to stand, negative ions attracting positive ones. “Hurry.”
Together they lurched downhill. The rain began in sparse, wet pelts before the sky opened. The wind caught the downpour and slammed it sideways against them. Rain needled their skin. They squinted against it but that didn’t help.
The hail came all at once, hitting the ground and bouncing like popcorn around their feet, striking and stinging their ears. Water began to rush in little rivers past them, pursuing the way of least resistance. Rivulets joined in the gaps to become streams, racing downward, filling furrows and troughs.
“We ought to find a rock to duck under,” Nelson bellowed as he scrabbled past his friend.
“With this much water? I think we ought to keep heading down.”
But then Nelson stopped so abruptly that David slammed into him. “Look over there!” Nelson hollered over the wind. He pointed. “Can you believe that?”
David’s shirt was plastered against him. He pried it loose so it didn’t cling to his chest and squinted into the cold rain. “What are you talking about?”
“Over there.”
“I don’t—”
“There.”
Sure enough, as David squinted through the weather, he saw what Nelson had seen: two little girls crouched beneath the brow of a narrow ledge. Two coats—a pink one and a yellow one—flew like banners from where they’d been hung on the crooks of a stunted blue spruce. Two little girls, alone.
For one instant David allowed himself to indulge his anger. Tourists visiting these mountains could do idiotic things. He had a saying for whenever the weekly Guide came out with an article about a sightseer. Every week in the summer, someone got lost in the mountains or burned in a hot pool or stranded in the Snake River or gored by a bison in Yellowstone. Your brain, don’t leave home without it.
More often than one could believe, visitors camping in the Tetons allowed their children to wander farther afield than those same children would be allowed to wander at home. Now David and Nelson hurried toward these two little girls. Though they were protected from the hail, a mad gush of water had entered the gulch of their hiding place, threatening their feet. They huddled among a vast assortment of accessories: two dolls dressed in sweaters and mountain gear, a trunk, and a table with a plastic birthday cake, all arranged upon one dry strip of earth.
Nelson bent down and peered in at them, noting their somber, serious faces. “What are you girls doing up here?”
One tucked her knees tighter beneath her chin. “We climbed up this far with her brother and her uncle. But when we got tired, they said we should stay down low and wait.”
The other clutched a pair of tiny doll crutches and a yellow plastic foot cast made to open and shut on tiny hinges. “We had to bring them someplace dangerous,” she said. “Our dolls wanted to break their legs so they could use their crutches.”
“We didn’t pass anybody climbing this route.” David surveyed what he could see of the mountain’s summit. “They must have tried the Exum Ridge instead.”
The hail tapered off even as the rain came harder. Tiny pellets of ice covered the ground. Lightning cracked in the trees below them, sending up sparks and the splintering crash of breaking wood. Thunder boomed against the rocks.
“How good are you two at piggy-backing? Bring your Barbie stuff and let’s go.”
Indignant, one of them said, “This isn’t Barbie stuff. They’re American Girl dolls. Don’t you know?” She began loading the dolls and the little birthday cake into a sodden paper sack. A minute later, they were fording the washout and getting soaked to their bones. Nelson lifted the child in the yellow raincoat. David took the one in the pink. She grabbed on and hung there, a dangling weight just like the pack beside her on his back. Slippery legs wrapped around David’s ribcage, ankles plaited in front of his midsection. He hitched up her knees and locked them against his hipbones with his elbows.
A wet little girl felt contradictory to everything he’d ever known on his shoulders—light and willowy, like driftwood or a sparrow, so opposite from Braden’s robust, square weight. She held on to him for dear life, her doll’s sharp plastic fingers jabbing David in the ear. The two of them together, doll and girl, smelled like dust and vanilla and toothpaste.
Down they went, flapping pink and yellow coats behind them like flags. David wondered who on earth could have been stupid enough to climb a mountain and leave two little girls waiting behind with no one to make sure they were out of danger.
“We’re in a tent in the campground,” the girl atop David said. When she spoke he could feel the jut of her chin working against his scalp.
“Try this way.” Nelson edged over to one side of the path. “It might be easier.”
But there wasn’t an easier way. David’s feet slid and his ankles buckled every time he broke through into a hole in the scree. His knees ached from going downhill. His calves burned.
Just when he’d managed a steady gait, the little girl atop him began to sing, the cadence a jarring rhythm to each of David’s steps.
“The een-sy, ween-sy spi-der went up the wa-ter spout…”
Her innocent, clear voice resounded all through David. On one side of his head, doll fingers poked holes in his scalp. On the other side, two small, real fingers walked up his temple and into his hair, sending goose bumps the length of his neck.
“Can you not sing, please?” he asked, feeling her fingers meddling with his hair.
“How come you don’t have very much hair on the back of your head?” she asked back.
Mercifully, the thunder began to echo again, far enough away that they could hear it bouncing back from across the far mountain. A forest-service campground came into view; soggy dome tents sat like gum-drops in spaces among the trees. Everywhere lay the signs of fleeing in haste from the rain—tablecloths left in rumpled puddles on tables, aluminum coffee pots and grills hastily thrown into boxes, firewood brought up under cars and covered with tarpaulin.
“Grandma. Grandma!”
“Oh, my word! Mandy. Kendra,” said the breathless woman who met them, screwing her grimy shirttail in her two hands. “Oh, you’re here.”
“We found them up the mountainside,” Nelson said. “We thought maybe we’d better lug them down to civilization.”
The distraught woman cupped each of the girls’ faces in her hands. “We didn’t know where you were. The boys got back hours ago.”
The girls slid off and fled into their grandma’s arms. She embraced them in a tight hug. And another. “Oh, you’re all right. Thank heaven you’re all right.” She rocked back on her heels and they all saw her face become stern. “You should be punished, you know that? Both of you. They’ve gone down to the ranger station to see if people could help find you.” She gave them both a swat that didn’t reach home. And then hug, hug, hug. “You had us worried sick.”
“You ought not to punish them,” David said. “Someone just left them there. Someone deserted them.”
“Thank you so much,” the overwrought woman said in the direction of her left shoulder, without ever even asking David or Nelson their names. And then, to the girls, as she herded them inside the tent, “Get on in there and change if you can find anything that’s still dry.”
The only sounds as the disappointed rescuers made their way to the car were chickadees lilting in the trees, the chatter of hikers along the trail, and the slop of their boots in the mud. David called Abby to let her know where they’d been.
“Yes, there’s a storm here.” He took the phone from his mouth. “Nelson, it’s clear as a bell over at the house. Can you believe it?”
They didn’t speak again as they strung out along the trail and broke into the open of Lupine Meadow the same time as the sun. Nelson dug out the keys to his Subaru, jostled them to unlock the door. They pitche
d ropes and cams into the backseat and loaded up with a slam of car doors.
Side by side the two friends sat staring at the front windshield. They sat for so long that the Subaru filled with the smell of their sweat, the windows fogged from damp clothes and hot breath.
In that moment, David thought about saying something about Samantha. He thought about bringing her up, only he didn’t know how to begin.
Nelson, I wanted to talk to you—
I made a bad move and I don’t know what to do—
Nelson, you’ll never guess who called the other day—
But Nelson must have decided it was time to pull out. The Subaru sprang to life on the first twist of the key. He shifted the car into reverse and slung his elbow across the car seat. The moment was gone.
Chapter Six
Saturday evening. All quiet except for the neighbors eating outside two doors down, leaning in toward their conversation, their plates mounded with exotic barbecued shish kebabs. The food smelled so good for two square miles that there ought to be a law.
When the telephone rang, David didn’t think to be concerned. He and Braden—his nose bandaged and still slightly swollen—were outside playing catch, doing their best to ignore the fragrance of marinated teriyaki beef wafting down the street. The rhythmic slap slap slap of the baseball as it exchanged hands, the long-awaited cool as the sun wallowed atop the western ridge of hills, had lulled David. That, and the sight of Abby standing on their back deck in black pants and a sleeveless chambray blouse. She was sans makeup, fresh-faced and young, and David thought her the most beautiful woman in the world.
“I couldn’t stand it.” She saluted him with a tray of dismembered chicken that she’d arranged drumsticks parallel, thighs aligned, breasts together. “Whenever the neighbors grill out, it makes me want to do it, too.”
“Let’s find something that smells better than theirs. Do we have any barbecue sauce?”
“Yeah.” She pulled a plastic jug from beneath her arm. “The old Treasure family recipe. Stuff in a bottle.”
That’s when the telephone rang. Right then.
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