The Wall (10 page)

Half drugged, Hugh peered from his nylon cocoon. The moon was wheeling out from the summit. He sat up to look, and a liquid shadow was coursing across the silver stone. That owl, he decided. The hunter.

Lewis was talking in his sleep. “I’m sorry, Rachel,” he whispered. “So sorry.”

Their women were infesting them. Their memories. It was temporary, just the lower latitudes still trying to pull them back to earth. Tomorrow, surely, they would break free. Tomorrow they would sink higher into El Cap.

Hugh eased back into the hammock. The Milky Way hung in a spray to the south, and it reminded him of desert nights. He drifted off again.

The day began
without them.

Hugh pried open his eyes inside a brightly lit green pea pod. His throat was swollen. He hadn’t hurt like this since…he searched back…since escaping the desert. He reached up from the confines of the hammock.

Below him, Lewis sprawled on the portaledge, his hair jutting out in clumps. He had a cowboy tan to his helmet line. He’d suffered a bad night, wrestling half out of his sleeping bag. That, Hugh decided, would explain their rocking in the middle of the night.

“Lewis, wake up.”

Lewis stirred and resisted, then came awake all at once. “Lord,” he croaked, “the sun.”

“You and your pills.”

Lewis stood and shook his head. The platform swayed with his weight. “I had a dream last night.”

“I heard you.”

“Rachel was here, right here, hanging on the slings, crawling around, staring at me. I didn’t see her face. But it was Rachel, I’m sure of it.”

Hugh was quiet. He didn’t say anything about dreaming an identical dream, not of Rachel, but of Annie. He tried to remember if he’d actually seen Annie’s face, or simply attached it as an afterthought.

“She had long hair.”

“Rachel’s got short hair, Lewis.”

“This was her younger, like the old days.”

Hugh said. “Our muses are beckoning to us.”

“Not beckoning,” Lewis said. “Warning. She was clear. Go down. Get away.”

“Our bodies are talking to us,” Hugh said. “We’re in culture shock. El Cap’s a different planet. They’re telling us to be careful. The dreams will taper off once we adjust to the wall.” He was winging it.

“You had dreams, too?”

“It’s just our brains flushing out the system.”

Lewis dogged him. “You said ‘they.’ You said our muses.”

Hugh didn’t answer directly. Whoever she was, the dream woman troubled him. She was a symptom of something. He didn’t know what. The steeping of memories was one thing. Now they were cross-pollinating each other with dreams. It was a distraction. “We’ve lost enough time already,” he said.

“She was so clear about it,” said Lewis.

“Lewis, forget Rachel.”

“Good, I like that. I’ll remember that while I’m sleeping tonight.”

“Seriously. Get focused. You’ve got to clear your head. Control, Alt, Delete. Reboot. Before she kills you.”

“But, Hugh, she’s my wife.”

Hugh had pushed it as far as Lewis was willing to hear. No doubt they’d revisit the issue. For now, they had a morning to catch up with.

He scouted the wall above. A seemingly empty panel separated them from the tail end of a beautiful hand crack. The emptiness was not entirely empty. As they’d discovered long ago, the panel offered a scattering of flakes. Fritos of Fear, they’d named the section. Most of the flakes were no thicker than the edge of a corn chip, just thick enough for hooks, Lewis’s specialty.

Hugh untangled himself from the hammock, and stood on the portaledge in his socks. They wolfed down their breakfast of energy bars, and dismantled most of the camp, stuffing their night things into the haul bags. Lewis pulled on his leather gloves with the fingertips cut off and began cherry-picking the heavy racks for what he would need on the panel of flakes.

Just below their knots, Hugh found that two of the ropes had been chewed to the core. White nylon strands showed through the colorful sheaths. “Our little friends have been visiting.”

Like the frogs, mice lived inside the wall, traveling up and down the thoroughfare of cracks. It constantly amazed him how high they would climb for a meal. Hugh didn’t mind their hunger so much, their stomachs were small enough. But they’d leave droppings in your raisins, that kind of thing.

“How much of us did they get?” Lewis asked.

“Just the ends of the ropes.”

“I should have brought my slingshot.”

It was an old joke, the slingshot, because you never saw the enemy. At best, you heard their little claws and teeth. While Vietnam was still on, Lewis dubbed them Charlie because they owned the night.

Hugh moved to the far corner and fumbled through his harness and zipper. His urine, what little there was, passed dark as camel piss. It would stay that way for a day or two even after they summitted, until they had binged on gallons of water. They were like an old-time caravan passing through the desert. Water discipline was a fact of life up here. Some big-wall climbers developed kidney stones from repeated bouts of dehydration.

It was only then, as he shook off the last drops, that he saw the others far below. “Now where did they come from?” he said.

Lewis thought he was talking to his penis. “Don’t tell me the crabs have got you.” Lice for mice. That was another big-wall affliction, along with bad teeth, dandruff, and world-class constipation.

“You better take a look, Lewis.”

“I’ll pass, old buddy. Small dicks make me sad.”

“I’m not kidding. Down there.”

There were two of them, five or six hundred feet below, with a white haul bag. These were not mirage climbers, not the way they intersected the shadow line.

Lewis swore a blue streak. “With all the real estate to choose from, why here? Why us?”

Hugh studied them and their distance. Ordinarily, five hundred feet would guarantee a certain amount of privacy. It would keep at least a day between them. But these guys weren’t ordinary.

“They’re fast,” he said. “There was nobody down there last night. They must have started this morning while we were still sleeping. And look how high they’ve gotten. They’re going to run right over us.”

“Not if I can help it,” Lewis said.

“Maybe they’ll slow down and keep a distance,” said Hugh.

“Fat chance. We’ve got to stay ahead of them.”

“They’re burning up the cracks. Look at them.”

“We’ll stop them, then,” Lewis growled.

“Come on, we don’t own the wall.”

“They don’t either. You’ve been out of the scene too long. You don’t know. These speed climbers, they’re thugs, some of them. It’s all about them. They’ll do anything to break through your party. Clip onto your gear, pull on your ropes, just totally fuck with your
wa.”

“My what?”

“Your
wa,
man. Your yin-yang.”

Hugh went on ribbing him. “Not my yin-yang, they’re not.”

“Go ahead, clown around. I don’t want them above us. You know what’s up there. That band of diorite is trash rock. It peels off if you look at it wrong. You want to be dodging their bloopers? I don’t. These young kids, they could care less if you die in front of their eyes.”

“You’re getting worked up, Lewis.”

“It’s not going to happen, they’re not going through.”

“I heard you.”

Hugh couldn’t help sharing some of his resentment. They had been in their glory yesterday, cranking moves, boisterous and lean. They
had
owned the Captain. Now these young Turks were going to expose him and Lewis for what they were, two weekend warriors ambling through a second childhood, racing to catch up with their own invention.

Muttering at the trespassers, Lewis tied in to their best rope. Suddenly there was no time to waste on dream women and crack mice. This was war.

In his prime, the Great Ape had also been known as the Hook. The Hook and the Harp, one wit had dubbed them. Huey and Louie: the Boulder Mafia.

Aid climbing was basically hook-and-ladder work, a refinement of besieging medieval castles. You placed a piece in the rock, or on it, and then attached stirrups—the ladder—and ascended on your hardware. In this case, the hook-and-ladder technique was going to involve actual hooks.

Lewis fanned open what could have been a torturer’s collection of metal claws, talons, and hooks, one or two of which he’d invented himself. Selecting one, he attached a set of stirrups to it, and set the prongs of the hook on a flake. He glanced down again.

“Forget them,” Hugh said.

“They’re trouble, Hugh.”

“Fritos, Lewis. Fritos.”

Lewis fussed the stirrups onto his left foot. Ever so delicately, he eased his 210 pounds onto the rung. The stirrups creaked. Something didn’t feel right. He returned his right foot to the platform.

He found another flake and reset the hook. He tried again. More protest from the stirrups. Hugh could hear the hook grating on microcrystals of granite. The flake held. They gained twenty vertical inches. It had taken ten minutes.

“Scrotal fortitude,” Lewis told himself.

Hugh relaxed a little. The Hook was back. “Go, fat man,” he said.

Standing in his stirrups, Lewis looked as if he was walking on prayers. He chose a different shaped hook for the next flake, and slowly transferred his weight to the upper stirrups. Hugh fed out a few more inches of rope through the belay device, miserly with the slack. They both had to be careful.

The sun slid higher. Lewis sorted his way through the flakes. After an hour or so, he’d gone only twenty feet. Hugh made himself comfortable on the platform, lying with his feet against the wall while he meted out slack in careful hanks.

There was no place for Lewis to set protection as he progressed. Just as worrying, there were only a finite number of good flakes linking the route. Rip a flake, and he could seal shut the Fritos of Fear. Then they’d end up having to chicken-bolt their own unbolted classic, or surrender and leave Anasazi for better climbers.

Lewis started whistling, a good sign. It took little physical effort to aid on hooks, just steel nerves, or extraordinary nonchalance. He’d gone past the nerve stage. “Greensleeves,” Hugh realized. Harmonic fifths and all. Thirty feet out.

Lewis fell.

There was no forewarning, no snap of rock or ping of metal, no grunt or whispered curse.

Maybe the extra fifteen pounds of muscle he’d added over the years was too much for Fritos. Or, despite “Greensleeves,” Rachel was eating at him. Maybe the approaching strangers spoiled his focus.

Hook or flake, something blew. Lewis plunged.

His hurtling body struck the edge of the platform. He went on going. The rope jerked taut where it passed through the anchor. Hugh pitched upward, face-first into the stone. He saw stars, like in the cartoons.

Then it was over.

For a few moments, the creak of stressed rope and slings filled the silence. The haul bags hung from the anchor like a pair of muggers, pinning Hugh against the wall. Hugh held Lewis on the rope, waiting for him to say something or get his feet under him.

He’d been thirty feet up, now he was thirty feet down. Lewis dangled in his seat harness. He clutched the rope to his chest with his leather gloves. Slowly he looked up at Hugh with wide eyes and a raccoon mask of tan lines. His hip sunglasses were missing in action, jerked from his face in the fall.

They weren’t in dire straits. Sixty feet of air gave you bragging rights, though each of them had ridden out much longer whippers in the past. And it was Hugh who had taken the worst of this fall, the belayers often did. Blood leaked from his nose, possibly broken. Red beads trickled across his white-taped hands. He had a nice rope burn across his inner arm. All acceptable in the scheme of things. He’d saved his partner. They were okay.

But as he went on holding Lewis, Hugh saw something he’d never seen in his old friend. Lewis had a dumb, stunned expression. He didn’t move. He didn’t help. He just sat there.

“Are you hurt?” Hugh said.

Lewis blinked at him.

“Lewis?”

Lewis opened his mouth to speak. It was his style to bounce back from near disaster and play the macho smart-ass, doing his primal
yawp,
hamming it up and rendering quotes. They had a team favorite, delivered with a thick accent.
Don’t worry, I’m the kaiser, I just came to wash my hands.
It came from a German lunatic who had gained international notoriety by climbing out of three different asylums back in the 1920s. Entering through the fifth-floor window of a screaming woman, he’d calmly introduced himself, washed his hands, and then eaten the bar of soap. It had become something of a motto for Hugh and Lewis. Dangling on a rope, beat up sometimes, down but never out:
Don’t worry, I’m the kaiser.
Having their cake and eating it, too.

But this morning no words came out. Lewis hung there, mute. He swayed liked a man on a noose.

Hugh kept his shoulder into the wall, bearing their weight, patiently bleeding onto his hands. His nose hurt like crazy.

Finally Lewis spoke. “Hold me, Hugh,” he pleaded.

“I’ve got you.”

Lewis glanced down, then swiftly up, away from the depths. At last, he grabbed one of the haul lines, taking the weight off Hugh. With a sudden rush, he grappled up the rope and straddled one of the haul bags and clung to the slings. Hugh wanted to look away.

Hugh pinched his nose to stem the blood. It didn’t feel crooked. Just a solid punch in the snout.

“I think I twisted my knee,” Lewis said.