The Wall (15 page)

Augustine held up a hank of haul line, and it was gnawed to the core. “The crack monsters are getting hungry. Joshua’s fire bankrupted the whole ecosystem up here. The place is an open wound.”

That pretty much answered the mystery. They were voyaging among starving beasts. Infiltrating a wound. They had to watch themselves.

Hugh looked back along the curved rope leading to the Archipelago, and could almost feel the knots untying themselves and the anchors easing from the stone and the animals tracking them for the slightest morsel. Even as they hung in their stirrups, the bridge back to Anasazi was coming apart, turning to smoke.

“How many more pitches to the Eye?” Hugh asked.

“A few. Not many.” Hugh could tell he didn’t know, and that it didn’t matter to him. Augustine looked up at the crack. “Do you have me?”

Hugh took the rope and ran a swift eye through the belay setup. He planted his feet against the wall. “You’re on.”

Augustine stretched overhead and probed the crack. It resisted him. The crack was sized for smaller fingers, a woman’s fingers. Augustine tried stuffing his fingertips into the fissure, and failing that, unable to free the crack, he turned to aid. “This is going to slow us down,” he groused, slotting in a nut.

That was when Hugh noticed what Augustine was wearing around his outstretched wrist. Now he understood Lewis’s warning. In ordinary circumstances, he would have passed off the bracelet as braided threads or twine. Climbers wore all kinds of fetishes brought back from their expeditions. But this was different.

The bracelet was made of human hair, a long lock of it lovingly braided, blond, bleached nearly white by a sun that seemed just a memory now. Instantly Hugh knew whose hair it was. His only question was when Augustine had harvested it from her, awake or asleep, with or without her knowing.

They came
to a crazed spray of fractures. Each crack led off into the smoke, and there was no telling which led in the correct direction. More precious hours scaled away.

Hugh had depended on Augustine to be the superior climber, but the younger man’s urgency and exhaustion made him clumsy. Holds snapped off in his hands. His feet pawed at the rock. For all his reputation as a rescue climber, he had no gift for route finding, and what few clues the women had left were covered with grime. When one crack proved false, he tried a second, and a third, and each time Augustine went up, he had to come down, laboriously undoing his own protection.

“It’s almost like they won’t let me inside,” he said.

They did seem unwelcome. Augustine had tried the back door from the summit, and now this massive front door stood locked against them, too. The closer they got to the women, the more complicated their maze became.

“We’ll crack it,” Hugh told him. He had out his leather notebook, still logging details of the last pitch. “These things take time.”

“Andie doesn’t have time,” Augustine said, and without another moment’s rest attacked a different crack.

By the time he lowered off the fourth false crack, they’d wasted five hours, and Augustine was fuming. Above all, he was frustrated by his lover’s risk taking. “What was she thinking?” he said. “This was so totally over their heads. They must have known they didn’t belong here.”

“They’d come so far,” said Hugh. “And the summit was right there.”

“The summit,” spat Augustine.

“We get the sun in our eyes, and sometimes it blinds us,” Hugh said, all too aware of their present sunless circumstances. “You know how it goes.”

He was baffled by the general resentment, first Lewis’s, now Augustine’s. The hard men, the big-wall mavericks, begrudged these three women their bodacious nerve. It was a way for the two men to regret their various losses, of course, and no doubt to vent some envy. But also the resentment was visceral, as if the women had trespassed beyond some border.

“She had no business being with them.”

“It’s a free country,” said Hugh.

“There was nothing free about it. They had her brainwashed.”

Hugh didn’t respond. Augustine was the one who didn’t belong, at least not in his depleted condition.

“They were witches,” Augustine said. “Cuba and Cassie. Cuba especially.”

“Isn’t that what climbers do?” Hugh asked. “We’re in the magic business. Houdini had nothing on us. Escape artists, that’s our part in the greater scheme.”

“Real witches,” Augustine said. “The kind that brew potions. They were always stirring something in the pot, or fermenting mash, or picking mushrooms. Always hatching conspiracies, always pushing it. Cuba, especially. She told people her mother was a
cuarandera.
And maybe it was true, she wasn’t born here. They did the El Norte thing when she was a baby.”

At one level, it didn’t matter a bit as Hugh perched in stirrups with nothing beneath his feet. And yet this
cuarandera
business seemed oddly crucial, not just to Augustine but to their quest, like a missing handhold, one more link. “A shaman?”

“A granny woman, that’s what we called them in Arkansas. The old conjure ladies and midwives. They handled snakes and talked in tongues, some of them.”

A Southern boy, thought Hugh, finally getting a handle on Augustine’s hatchet-and-honey accent. He imagined Andy of Mayberry, and sultry summers, and a kid with a slingshot. Maybe none of it was so, but he still couldn’t help wondering how Opie had ended up in the Valley of giants.

“This Cuba girl,” Hugh said, “it sounds like she talked a lot of tall shit. Climbers do that. They come into the hills and invent themselves fresh.”

“She did more than invent. She messed with their heads. She wanted a following.”

“Like a cult or something?”

“Not a cult, there were only a couple of them,” Augustine said. “But she had something they wanted, some riddle of the Sphinx thing. Like you couldn’t get past her without becoming part of her. She got Andie with it, hook, line, and sinker. They drank tea made of poison ivy to immunize themselves. They fasted for their cramps. They did yoga in the dirt, and chanted mantras at dawn. Stuff like that.”

“The mystical-mountain thing,” Hugh said. At some point, serious climbers all dabbled in it. As a teenager, he’d practiced tying knots with one hand, in pitch blackness, in a cold shower, over and over. That was what the great British and German climbers did, he’d heard. He and Lewis used to walk around carrying snowballs in their bare hands to toughen them for winter ascents, and loaded backpacks with their body weight in bricks for training sessions. They’d talked Zen versus Tantric at the bouldering sites, and made blood oaths, and held séances with Rachel and Annie before their big climbs. And, yeah, bayed at the moon. It was wacky nonsense, but innocent, a phase.

“Cuba got an infected tooth,” Augustine went on. “She made Andie pull it with a pair of pliers in the parking lot at Camp Four.”

Hugh frowned. “A pair of pliers?”

“Like a rite of passage. A blood rite. Think about it. She got Andie to inflict pain in order to relieve it. She gave her power.” Augustine went on. “Cassie got pregnant. Cuba gave her an abortion with herbs and mushrooms. They buried whatever came out on top of a mountain. You mean mystical like that?”

Hugh paused. “They did that?”

“Andie was vulnerable. Fragile. Ready to break. You’ve heard what happened with her brother and me.”

Hugh was careful. “Just about nothing. It’s not my business.”

“You’re tied in to me, aren’t you? It’s your business.”

“I’m tied in to you. That ought to say it all.”

But it didn’t. Augustine was no longer used to trust. The tragedy was eating him up from the inside out. Patagonia was his cancer. His eyes met Hugh’s and it was plain that, guilty or not, he was haunted. “After I got back from Cerro Torre, Andie was a wreck,” he said. “She didn’t know what to think, who to turn to, who to believe. I was in bad shape myself. I didn’t know what to say. Sorry? I ditched your big bro in a storm, still alive, bummer? And there were all these other rumors. Have you heard the cannibal one?”

Walking wounded, thought Hugh. He wondered if the Patagonia disaster had marked the beginning of Augustine’s rescue work. Penance would explain him. Lewis was right. The rot of guilt. “Screw the rumors. There are always rumors,” he said. “That’s how people are. They say the worst things when you’re down. I know. It’s crap.”

Augustine darted a look at him, almost hopefully. Then the gleam in his eyes dimmed. He squinted and gestured up into the smoke. “I don’t blame her. Andie was hearing all this…stuff. She needed help sorting it out, and Cuba came along to heal her. All I could do was watch Andie fall into this, like, weird orbit. I reached out to her, but she just drifted further away. It wasn’t out of hate. She never hated me, that was the worst part. She’d just get sad seeing me around. I was this unfinished business, like I’d died along with the others on Cerro Torre, and come back, and she couldn’t decide how to get rid of me. Sometimes I wonder.”

“What, if you’re a ghost?” Hugh snorted. “You look real enough to me.”

“Dumb, I know.” Augustine dipped his head. “Anyway, this happened.”

“Trojan Women?”

“They wanted to be ahead of their time.” Augustine jerked a nut from the false crack. “What they really wanted was to show the world how big their balls were. I told her, Andie, the Captain’s not a finishing school. It’s real life. A new route like this, it takes no prisoners. But Cuba was always right there whispering in her other ear.”

Hugh suddenly felt weighed down by the history. It was getting them nowhere. Augustine had issues, who didn’t? He was an adult, and, like he said, this was real life. Above all, Hugh was no priest. He had no wisdom to offer, no forgiveness to dispense. “You want me to give it a try?” he quietly asked.

Augustine screwed his face up, as if he’d caught himself begging for pity. He lifted the rack of gear from his shoulders and handed it across. “I’m climbing like puke,” he said. “Get us straightened out.”

Hugh took the rack,
and turned his thoughts to the rock. For the last five hours, while Augustine had stolen into the smoke and returned empty-handed, Hugh had been trying to sort out the mess of cracks.

The smoke hampered their sight, of course. But he had a feeling that even on a clear day, the route demanded more than mere craft and muscle. The three women had been playing vertical chess up here, inventing gambits, creating moves, foxing their way up the cracks. Never giving in. Bit by bit they’d tiptoed through the labyrinth.
A female labyrinth.
Somehow that was key.

Hugh tried one crack, and quickly decided against it. He couldn’t explain why. It felt vacant somehow, discarded and unused. Minus any obvious signs, he was searching for some wordless sense of a woman’s exploration. One of them—he didn’t know which—had found the way through here. She was the one he needed to dance with in his head.

He tried a few moves up yet another crack, and discarded that, too. The cracks were a false start. Forget normal sight, he told himself. Feel for the way.

On an impulse, he worked left around a bulge, away from anything obvious. And there it lay. On the far side of the swell, tucked from plain view, rose a sequence of knobs, or chickenheads. They were sloped and eroded and minimal, little more than the backs of horseshoe crabs clinging to the stone. But they marched upward. And something about them spoke of a separate awareness. They would require tenacity and counterlogic and grace. It matched his image of a ballerina with steel fingers.

Hugh shaped his fingers over the first chickenhead, and got a toe settled. He reached for the next, and the next, following them into the concealed heights. His focus turned tubular. The sprawling stone with its false offerings and colliding angles folded into blankness. He was left with a single tunnel through the smoke.

The knobs and bumps weren’t so hard to climb. They formed a virtual ladder. The problem was protection. He tried cinching a green sling over one knob, but it squirreled loose and fluttered into the void without a sound. After that, he didn’t waste any more slings and carabiners on illusions of security. He just climbed.

With each move, he committed that much more deeply to his choice. If he’d guessed wrong, it was going to be nearly impossible to reverse course and down-climb. He glanced between his feet, and the chickenheads—so obvious at eye level—had vanished from sight. His trail was disappearing behind him.

His knee trembled. “Tetanus” was the technical term. Climbers called it sewing-machine leg. Uncontrolled, you could shake yourself right off your holds.
Get still,
he thought. Not just the knee. The mind.
Smooth it out.
He breathed, in, out. The ripples in his pond grew glassy still. The trembling stopped.

He got on with the waltz, more and more out of options. He had climbed a hundred feet out, and there wasn’t a hint of pro between him and Augustine. That meant a two-hundred-foot whipper if he lost a hold, and that would mean a free fall you could measure in tons. There was no way Augustine could catch such a thing. Hugh had entered the suicide zone. He was dancing with a dead woman. He had no choice but to follow where she led.

As a reward for his good faith, almost, a crack appeared in the stone.

Hugh slotted in a nut, clipped to it, and rested his nerves. While he clung there, he stuck another piece into the crack for good measure. Then he continued higher. A little higher, he came upon handprints beneath the tawny soot, and this time they were real, the traces left by gymnastic chalk. His doubts fell away. Here was her path.

The prints were like shadows in a photograph negative, white instead of black. He placed his hand beside her ghost hand, and his long fingers and taped paw dwarfed the pale vestiges of her.

There was no way to repeat her moves exactly. She had a shorter reach, but greater range and more flexibility, which translated into a completely different style using different holds. By this stage of the women’s climb, after seven or eight or nine days, however long they’d been at it, she’d probably starved down to half his hundred and seventy pounds. And judging by the girl’s body he’d found in the forest, this phantom climber would have been less than half his age…Annie’s age when he’d first met her.

Hugh resorted to all his best tricks, pushing himself to dance her dance, admiring the hell out of her, whoever she’d been. He had to push to keep up with the nameless woman. It was like a chase. He followed, literally, in her footsteps.

“Twenty feet,” Augustine’s voice rose up to him. There were just twenty feet of rope left.

Hugh began hunting for her resting place, and it appeared to him in the smoke, a ledge wide enough for the side of one shoe. At his shoulder level, he found slight scratch marks in the crack where she’d placed her anchor. Injecting two cams and a number three hex, he hitched himself in, and called for Augustine to come.

While Augustine climbed the one rope, Hugh hauled their bag on the second rope. It was fifty pounds, likely less. That was the weight of their long-term survival. Four gallons of water, some food, and a little bivvy gear. It was plenty for now, but way short if Murphy’s Law decided to kick in.

Augustine’s coughing came through the smog. He sounded like a tuberculosis ward approaching. As he materialized on the rope, he stopped to rest and catch his breath and sample some of the rounded chickenheads. He looked up at Hugh and said, “Goddamn.”

That made Hugh feel good. It was like the old days again, spearing the great white. “I was starting to think we’d lost them,” he said. “But they were just hiding from us.” He did not point out that, in praising Hugh,
goddamn,
Augustine was also praising the “witches” who had preceded them.

Augustine scanned the muddy nothingness above. “Still no sign of the Eye. It’s got to be close.”

“It’s getting late,” Hugh said.

Augustine reacted. “We’re fine. There’s still plenty of day left.”

Hugh stood his ground. “We spent a lot of time spinning our wheels. Look at the sun.”

The metal ball had rolled across the sky and was sinking behind the shrouded prow.

“We’re not turning back,” Augustine warned him.

Hugh changed the topic. “Let’s check on the others.”

“Others?”

“Our partners,” Hugh said. “I want to know if they touched down.”

“Them,” said Augustine. “Right.” He took out the radio. Preserving the battery had been his excuse for radio silence, but now Hugh wondered if it wasn’t simply the silence he was protecting. No communication meant no news, and more important, no countermanding orders. Hugh had this hunch Augustine was fighting the whole world to press on with this deliverance.

Hugh could hear a woman’s voice answer the call. Then Augustine pressed the receiver tight against his ear. He asked about Lewis and Joe. “Good,” he said. He asked if they’d found any sign of a body at the base of El Cap. The radio crackled. “That nails it,” Augustine said. “She’s still up here.”

The dispatcher said something else.

“I don’t need to talk to him,” Augustine replied. A different voice came on, and Augustine said, “Chief.” He listened with growing impatience. After a minute, he broke in. “Not to worry,” he said. “We’re closing in on her. We’re almost there.”

Hugh looked up at the swampy miasma. Closing in on her? They had no idea where on the wall they were.

The chief spoke again. Augustine replied, “That doesn’t work for me. And it’s my call. I’m the first responder. I’m the one on the scene.”

An argument developed. Augustine screwed the receiver against his ear. “Negative,” he said. “We’re not going down. We’re almost there. Tell them, keep the faith. Hold their position up there. Keep them sharp. When the time comes, we’re going to want them ready.”

The chief started to say more, Hugh could hear his tiny voice. But Augustine turned off the radio.

“What was that all about?” Hugh asked.

“Our guys got down,” Augustine reported. “The rangers found them wandering along the road. Also they ran a search along the base. No body. It’s like I said. Andie got herself back up the rope during the fire. She’s in the Eye. She’s alive.”

Maybe, maybe not, thought Hugh. “They want us to retreat, is that what I heard?”

“A bunch of backseat drivers. They’re stressed out from the fire. And they’re rangers.”

“Meaning what?”

“Cops. They like to tell you what to do.”

Hugh didn’t like it. A conservative approach, right about now, would include some discussion about alternatives, such as retreat. But there was nothing conservative about Augustine’s repeated thrusts at the wall. He meant to break through Trojan Women’s defenses, and Hugh had known that when he’d volunteered to cross over from the safeness of Anasazi.

Augustine was watching him. He couldn’t do this alone, and he knew it. Hugh let him wonder another few moments. He cut his eyes up at the no-man’s-land.

“Your lead,” he finally said. They would go on.

“Actually,” Augustine said, “you seem to have a better feel for it.”

Hugh kept his expression mild. But it was a pivotal moment. Augustine was subordinating himself. He was admitting that the climbing was beyond him, and that he needed more help than he’d known. Augustine had touched the rounded chickenheads and seen the evidence of Hugh’s nerveless run-out on the pitch below. In effect, he was asking Hugh to become his rope gun.

This hadn’t been part of the proposition. Hugh had come to lend a hand, not be the Man. He wanted to be a passenger, not a principal. This was Augustine’s karma playing out, not his. And yet he found himself sinking deeper into the siren song, pulled along by whispers and dreams.

By this stage, he was beginning to question whether his discovery of the girl’s body in the forest was any more an accident than Joshua’s fire. He’d been thinking about that a lot. There was too much coincidence in the string of events to call it coincidence anymore. Maybe Lewis was on to something, maybe disaster was following Augustine around. Hugh didn’t believe that, necessarily. But there was some larger mystery to this ascent. A welter of trajectories was crossing and connecting the farther he climbed. He couldn’t see the pattern to it yet, and had no idea where it was all leading. His one shot at gaining the big picture meant continuing higher.

Hugh took the rack of gear from Augustine. “All right,” he said. “For now.”

He made himself part of the race, though it was a different race than he’d started. This was no longer Augustine’s solo contest with El Cap. That bullshit was over. The Eye and its cold, silent camp—wherever it lay—were just a feature along the way.

From here on, Hugh had a deliverance of his own to see through. He had himself to carry out of the abyss. If he could finish this thing and get to the top, then the smoke would part, and the floor would lie revealed, and he would surely be able to read his own fate.