by Charlie Haas
We drove a few miles up Pikes Peak and parked his rented CR-V at a trailhead. It was a half hour till sunrise, with grudging violet light leaking into the sky.
The trail climbed past red rock formations with pubic fringes of pines and scrub at their bases. There were huge stacked flanges of rock, frozen ocean waves of it, and walls that looked like whole mountain ranges condensed into a hundred yards. When the trail narrowed to single track, Barney got ahead of me, and I lost sight of his bouncing backpack the first time I stopped to catch my breath.
Soon it was light enough for me to see the dirt underfoot, red as Mars in a movie, and the surfaces of the rock formations. In the craggy friezes I saw horse heads, elephant tusks, men in the moon, and Indians on nickels, and holes like navels, pockmarks, sourdough tunnels, and toe prints in wet sand. Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t supposed to be seeing all those things, that the idea was to see the rocks as just rocks. I had no idea whose idea that was. It just seemed purer.
Half an hour later I saw Barney up ahead. He’d stopped to watch the sunrise, and I stopped too. The light spread out across the canyon wall so fast it scared me, as if I was nocturnal and had to find cover. It was a sunrise that made me colder. I didn’t know what I was doing there: Patti was mad, Dad was weird, and the rented shoes were killing me. When Barney turned and looked at me his expression was nothing like the tear of joy I’d pictured. He looked as bad as I felt. He started walking again before I could reach him.
In an hour we were in a meadow that looked like pictures of the Alps, with tall grass, shimmering aspens, and moss-covered rocks. The air was thin but sweet, as if sunlight had replaced the oxygen. We were high now but the summit, a jagged black crown striped with snow, was so much higher it looked like five mountains away instead of the same one we were on.
The rocks Barney wanted to climb were smoothed vertical boulders that covered a hillside. The biggest one, a sand-colored obelisk fifty feet tall, had a crack running nearly all the way up it, ranging in width from a fingertip to almost a foot.
We put on climbing harnesses, leather waistbands attached to loops around our thighs. Barney took a long nylon rope from his backpack, secured it around a tree, tied it to our harnesses, and loaded his belt with cams, carabiners, and rope runners.
He chalked his hands and started climbing as I paid out rope. When he was ten feet up he placed his first anchor, wedging a nut into the crack and tying it to the climbing rope. He yelled, “On belay?” I yelled, “Belay on!” He yelled, “Climbing!” I yelled, “Climb!” and he continued up, using wrinkles in the rock as stair steps and handholds.
I’d seen people do this well. They moved fluidly, doing the climbing with their legs and always knowing where their feet were going next before they moved them. Barney’s moves were choppy and he put his weight on his hands, but he had enthusiasm, and after half an hour he’d climbed thirty-five feet and put three anchors in the rock. I moved around to watch him so I could copy his holds when my turn came. He was sixty feet up when he fell.
This was supposed to be routine. Climbers fell onto the rope all the time. When Barney lost his balance and yelled, “Falling!” I should have been standing braced so I could bend the rope across my harness and keep him from dropping any farther. If I did it right he’d fall only a few feet before his last anchor stopped him.
I’d moved out of line with the climbing rope, though, and put slack between myself and the anchoring tree. The force of his fall yanked me back into line, toward the boulders. I tripped over my feet and stumbled straight at the rock face until the line from the tree went taut. The rope tore from my hands, burning them, and I fell to the ground, catching an upside-down glimpse of Barney plunging and yelling, “Henry!”
I scrambled up on to one knee, grabbed the rope, and wrenched it across my harness. He finally stopped falling, bounced hard on the rope, and said, “Jesus!” I stood up, panting, and yelled that I was sorry.
He’d stopped at one of his anchors and was hanging sideways on the rope. He flailed himself upright, climbed the rope a few feet, got back on the rock, and yelled, “On belay?” with an edge in his voice.
I went to where I should have been all along and yelled, “Belay on,” the burn on my hands throbbing as I held the rope tight. He climbed more cautiously now, and it was forty minutes before he hoisted himself to the top of the big boulder. He anchored the rope there, and I started up.
Barney pulled in rope as I climbed, so any fall I took would be short. I followed his chalk marks but kept missing the footholds, my legs dangling as my eyes filled with sweat.
I was supposed to remove the anchors he’d left in the rock. The first few were easy, but twenty feet from Barney, as I stood on bad holds and banged on a taper nut, my left leg started shaking violently. In Rappel it was called sewing-machine leg. I’d edited a box on ten ways to avoid it.
“Relax!” Barney yelled. That had been first on the list. I closed my eyes, put my weight on my good leg, leaned toward the rock, and breathed deeply till the thin air made me dizzy. The shaking slowed down.
I left the anchor in the rock and kept climbing. When I finally reached him he gave me a hand up and I almost fell on him, all my limbs shaking now. “Are you okay?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay. Let’s wait a minute and we’ll go down. I guess we shouldn’t try to rappel.”
I didn’t say anything, and we walked down the rope. You were supposed to lean back but I bent toward the rock, stubbing my feet on every step. When I dropped to the ground at the bottom he asked again if I was okay.
“Yeah,” I said. “I always do this, pretty much.”
“Do what?”
My calf cramped. “Every place I work, they take me out to do whatever the thing is, and this is how I do.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. Because I’m not good at it.” He handed me a water bottle. My starring in his life hadn’t lasted long. He sat down next to me.
“How are things with Patti?” he said.
“Medium,” I said.
“Yeah, they seem medium. Is that because of Jillian?”
“What? No,” I said. I know I almost dropped you on your head just now, but Jesus. For the first time I could remember, I didn’t really care if he liked me or not. It was an alien feeling, but I checked and it was still there. “I haven’t talked to Jillian in years,” I said. He helped me stand, and we gathered up the rope.
Off the hotel lobby was a business center, a day spa for my kind, where you could fax and compute behind a tinted glass door, bathing in dejuvenating electromagnetic fields and acrylic smells, walking out with a fresh cubicle tan and enhanced eye bags. I went in there when we got back, logged onto my office computer, and put in twenty minutes on the “Kicked in the Sack!” page of next month’s Hacky Sack World.
When I got out and headed for the elevators I saw Barney sitting on a bench in a courtyard off the lobby, his back to me. I decided to say goodbye now and save time, but when I got out there I saw he was talking on his cell phone.
“Honey, that’s not true,” he said. “No. I would never do that. It’s not true, sweetheart. Please. I’ve told you that. No, honey. You know that’s not how it is.”
He hadn’t seen me. I slipped back inside and got on the elevator, hoping that my fight with Patti had expired while I was away. It had. She gave me hotel lotion for my rope burns and said, “So what’s with Barney today?”
“I can’t answer that,” I said. “I don’t know what’s with any of them. They’re just these people I’m related to.”
“No, I know,” Patti said. “I mean, I like your mom. I like all of them.”
“No, I like them,” I said. “I just don’t want to think about them all the time,” thinking, Watch this, Barney. It’s not that hard. It’s just you and your wife against all outside parties. I thought you and Deirdre had that, monitoring Pearl and Michael’s cultural intake an
d all that, but from that phone call you were having it sounds like things are only medium there.
“Well, God, look at my family,” Patti said. “Look at Stewart and Stephanie.”
“Stewart’s okay,” I said. “Stephanie’s okay.” Are you getting this, Barney, the fair-mindedness to the point of science fiction that says Patti’s sister and brother-in-law, matching New Jersey shark lawyers, are in any sense okay?
“This place,” Patti said, looking out the window. “This gradient we’re in here.”
“No, it’s weird,” I said. She started telling me about a phone call she’d had that morning, about some snowboarder’s mother’s sister, and I got engrossed on purpose, thinking, Check this out, Barney, it’s not rocket science. Maybe that’s your problem. Just listen, be interested in what you’re not interested in, take out a five-minute mortgage on your patience and then the patience floods in for real.
I said goodbye to Barney by voice mail, and we did quick hugs at Mom and Dad’s room because the day-planner guy was there for coffee. My peace with Patti lasted all the way home, and on the plane she told me that Misty, the BMX girl we’d maybe saved from going off the pedestrian bridge, was in college now, studying clinical psychology. She said she’d heard that a few months ago. She’d been meaning to tell me.
15
A week later Barney called and said, “I’m going to a conference in Illinois next weekend. It’s in the woods, down near St. Louis. I was wondering if you’d want to meet me there.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I knew the area from my Clayton days but I wasn’t ready for another visit like the one we’d just had in Colorado.
“Okay,” he said, but then paused. “There was some stuff I wanted to tell you about.”
“What kind of stuff?”
He paused again. “About Pearl.”
I landed in St. Louis on Saturday morning, rented a Cobalt, and drove across the Mississippi to the big farms and small towns of southern Illinois. An hour from the airport I was far enough out in the country that the graffiti were legible and spoke of love.
The conference center was in the hills, its back against the forest. I parked by the main building, a screen-windowed hexagon, and got out. The guest rooms were cabins connected by gravel paths through thinned-out woods. It was eighty-five degrees and humid, with bugs humming like bad wiring.
The lodge-style lobby was full of waxed wood, Indian blankets, and the smell of cinnamon coffee. I tried Barney’s room on the house phone and got no answer, but a guy with a conference nametag heard me and said, “I think he’s in the forest. There’s a path that starts back there.”
The trailhead at the back of the property had a SHAWNEE NATIONAL FOREST sign, with a placard tacked to it that said, SNAKE MIGRATION IN PROGRESS—DO NOT DISTURB OR COLLECT SNAKES. I walked in. The trail was overgrown, the forest sloping steeply down from it on either side. Trees and grasses grew from every depth to every height, making a green mosaic that blocked out everything but a few islands of hot sky. The ground was a carpet of dust and leaf fragments that took detailed footprints. After twenty minutes I came around a turn and saw Barney a quarter mile away, flying through the air.
He was zip-lining, an enthusiasm I knew about because Clean Page had just bought Zip-Line World, a monthly in Lumley, South Dakota. He’d strung a hundred-foot steel cable between two trees, like a tightrope over the gorge beside the trail. Holding a handle that hooked onto the cable, his body in an L like a human tramway car, he sailed between the trees at what looked like thirty miles an hour. Two feet from the tree on the far side, he squeezed the handbrake and stopped.
He caught sight of me as he returned to the tree on my side. When he stopped he grabbed the trunk with his legs, held on to a branch, unclipped the handle from the cable, and climbed down.
“Hey,” he said, catching his breath. “You just get in?”
I nodded. He didn’t have a safety harness for the zip line, just the handle. He’d mastered the saxophone of uncertainty.
“I’m glad you came,” he said, sitting down on a rock. “So. This stuff about Pearl.”
I sat on a rock across from his. He looked at the ground for a minute and then said, “About a year ago? It was after you guys came to visit. One Saturday, I was supposed to take her to math team, and I knocked on her door and she wouldn’t come out. She said, ‘No, thank you, I don’t want to go,’ but she sounded like she was crying. I said, ‘That’s okay, you don’t have to go, but what’s wrong? Can I come in?’ She didn’t say anything. Deirdre came over and she wouldn’t open the door for her, either.”
“So we’re both saying, ‘It’s okay, Pearl, just tell us what’s wrong,’ and she says, ‘Nothing’s wrong, I just want to be by myself.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’m going away, and if you want to talk, just tell me.’ I start to leave and the door opens, and she says, ‘I’m crying because of the babies that never grow up.’
“I said, ‘Pearl, you know that’s not true. You know that’s not what we’re doing.’”
“Those people talked to her?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Barney said. “I asked her, but she wouldn’t say. It could be kids. It could be a friend of hers. I said, ‘Sweetie, you know this, you’ve been to the lab. You know that’s not what we’re doing, or I wouldn’t be doing it,’ and she starts crying and closes the door again.
“And then that’s how it was for a long time. She’d sit there at dinner, not eating and not talking. Deirdre would say, ‘Okay, you have to eat something,’ and she’d eat something. She’d be polite and that’s it, or she’d talk to Michael but not us. Michael was okay at first, but then it started scaring him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s a little better now. It’s kind of normal. Although sometimes she wakes up crying and she stops eating again, and then I’m constantly saying, ‘No, sweetie, that’s not what I do. There aren’t any babies. It’s some cells, it’s cells from people who were trying to get some help having a baby but there wasn’t any baby, and the lab they went to was going to throw the cells away, and…’” He shook his head. “I thought if I understood the religious thing better. I was talking to that football guy in Colorado, trying to get a sense of it.”
It was quiet for a minute. “Was that when you started luging and stuff?” I said.
He considered. “That was part of it.” He looked the way he’d looked during that cold sunrise in Colorado, and I turned away for a minute. The breeze drew a singing note from the zip line. No one was starring in anyone’s life now, and the bugs were getting worse. He held the handle out to me. “You want to try this?”
“Thanks,” I said. “No, I think I’ll go check in and get a shower. Are you okay here if I go back?”
“Sure. I’m just going to do this another few minutes. We can have breakfast. Save me a seat, okay?”
I said I would and started back. The trees’ shadows were shortening, the heat closing in. In ten minutes I sweated through my shirt.
I was half a mile away from Barney and a mile from the conference center when a guy with a beard, in hiking clothes and a daypack, came toward me on the path. I’d seen him before somewhere. He’s probably here for the conference, I decided, and I must have seen him at the one in Idaho, where Barney was talking to the other scientists before our bike ride.
Then he got closer and I knew where I’d actually seen him, not in Idaho but outside Barney’s lab in Kansas, bending down to Pearl’s car window and saying he wanted to talk to the kids.
He was passing me. He turned his eyes away but I saw them for a second, and it came to me that I’d seen his face even before Kansas. It was on the FREEBIRD T-shirt at the gun show.
I turned around. He had a hand in one pocket and was walking fast toward where Barney was zip-lining. I ran after him.
I might have been wrong but I didn’t think so. The clean-cut police sketch didn’t look like the guy at Barney’s lab but the face on the T-shirt did, its mess of f
eathers filling in for the hair and beard.
I ran up behind him and yelled, “Freebird!” like a guy with five brain cells holding up his lighter at a mud festival. He turned around, his hand coming out of his pocket with a gun in it.
Time didn’t slow down, the way people talk about. Everything has led up to this, my public interest work starts now—those were some of the things that didn’t go through my mind. Time kept running, leaving me none to think in, which was ideal. The lizard brain saw sun on metal and I flailed at his arm, catching hold of his wrist with one hand and pushing him with the other.
His heel caught on a thick root that crossed the trail and he lost his balance. I fell with him, fighting to point the gun away from me, my hand going white against its knurled butt as I looked at his furious eyes and bared teeth.
I yelled Barney’s name as Freebird twisted under me in the dirt, getting his weight behind his hand and turning the barrel back toward me. I jumped off him, dived off the trail and ran down the hillside, hoping my knowing who he was would make me a more pressing problem than Barney was.
It did. The gun went off behind me as I ran down the hill under a racket of terrified birds, twisting my ankle. There was a second shot. I ran faster. My wind had never been good and my side hurt already, but I crashed deeper into green, tripped over it and scraped my face on it, hid behind a tree to catch my breath and rub my ankle, looked back up the hillside and saw nothing moving. I slipped my phone from my pocket and read NO SERVICE. When I started out again I heard the crackle my steps made, took my shoes off, and let the brush tear my feet as I ran.
I got to the bottom of the hill, crossed a dry streambed, and went up the other side, my brain a bird whose cry was Where’s Barney? Where’s Barney? I put my shoes back on, and when I couldn’t run anymore I walked.
