THIRTY-THREE
A
CCORDING TO THE
stationmaster at the depot off Tomichi’s main street, the next train is leaving in just thirty minutes. It’s already smoking on the tracks. A huge black engine leads a series of open passenger cars. A plaque above the cashier’s window informs us that an actual coal-fired locomotive powers the train. I pay for tickets. Then the three of us stand around the truck in the parking lot while I shove gear into packs and discuss what we’ll need to bring.
“Guns,” Roberto says.
“I’ll bring my Beretta, but that’s it. The last thing you need, bro, is a gun.” I rattle off a list of groceries to Kim, who’ll run to a grocery store just a few blocks away. Bread, pasta, oatmeal, candy bars, water bottles, peanut butter and jelly. Kim scribbles on a torn piece of paper.
“We need more guns,” Roberto says again.
“Don’t forget the peanut butter,” I tell Kim the vegetarian, ignoring my brother. “We’ll need the protein.”
“Peanut butter and guns!” Roberto suddenly hollers. People walking nearby turn to stare. Even Kim looks alarmed at his outburst.
“Easy, Hayduke,” I say to him. Then to Kim by way of explanation, “Now he’s doing Edward Abbey.”
“Monkey wrenchers. I’ve read it,” she says, smiling.
Before she leaves for the store, I give her a pair of worn canvas pants to replace the borrowed shorts. Pulling my sweat-stiff fleece pants over my own legs, I explain that for the long hike, she’ll need something to cover hers. I wish I had some boots that would fit her—her worn-out sneakers are unsuitable for backcountry travel, but there’s no time to run out to her house. Roberto watches approvingly, along with the other male spectators in the parking lot, as she drops the shorts right there by the back of my truck and steps into the baggy pants.
When she runs for the store, I ask Roberto to sit down with me on my truck’s tailgate. Despite the warm sunlight on the asphalt, the gentle breeze, the easy talk and laughter of the people passing by, I feel incredibly wound up. Like an alarm clock wired to a time bomb. It’s the apprehension of facing Fast and Burgermeister as well as Roberto’s energy that’s making me feel this way. Ever since I’d gotten him out of the jail just over an hour earlier, it’s as if some storm is building and churning within him. It crowds me. And it scares me. “We need to talk for a minute.”
“Yeah, bro, I know. The chick’s yours.”
“You call her that again and she might punch your lights out. No, I want to talk about what we’re about to do. I want to make sure you don’t freak out on me and do something crazy.” Roberto frowns, pretending to be hurt. “We’re just going to grab Sunny and run. That’s it. No paybacks or anything. We’ll let the law do the justice part once we’ve got the girl. It’s what Kim’s been fighting for all along. And it’s still more her fight than ours.” I don’t tell him about how Fast had been one of the men who had humiliated Kim twelve years before, causing the loss of her eye. I don’t need to stoke the fire already raging within him.
He laughs. “Yeah, right. Justice. ‘The law shows her teeth, but dares not bite.’ I read that somewhere. Some old poet.”
“I’m serious, ’Berto. I’d leave you behind if I could.”
But I can’t. If Kim and I are going to confront Fast and Burgermeister and rescue Sunny, we need some of Roberto’s madness. Unleashing it, though, has me as nervous as the danger to ourselves. I stifle my second thoughts—it’s too late to change the plan now. I know that if I leave him alone and bored, he’ll get into some serious trouble and wind up back in jail where more killers are waiting for him. And I’d lose a half million bucks.
“You never could leave me behind, little bro. I’m always a step ahead of you, you know. But don’t worry. I’ll behave.” The grin he gives me along with another wink doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Kim comes back just as the train’s whistle shrieks twice and the conductor, dressed in an old-fashioned engineer’s suit and cap, shouts, “All aboard!” Plastic shopping bags dangle from her wrists. Roberto and I shove them into climbing packs and the three of us hop up the steps into an open car just as the train starts to move.
Leaving the depot, the train chugs at a snail’s pace. When I stop the conductor and demand to know the reason for the exasperating lack of speed, he informs me that for safety reasons the train can’t go faster than ten miles an hour until we’re outside of town. I can’t believe how far the small town’s suburbs stretch. Heading north, we pass the Forest Service entrance to Wild Fire Valley to our right. I don’t see any patrol cars parked at the base, but it’s hard to tell because of the trees that line the tracks beside us. If what the deputy had told Roberto is true, the sheriff’s men will be out of sight and up the road somewhere, hoping to catch us stepping past a newly posted “No Trespassing” sign.
The northern valley we enter is broad at first. Ahead, though, through the black cloud of coal exhaust coming off the engine’s furnace and the stinging ashes, I can see that it narrows and deepens. A river of turquoise water gurgles, rushes, and boils to one side. It takes a long, long time before we’re past the last of the town’s trailer parks and cute trackside cabins.
While Roberto paces through the cars, drawing the usual admiring glances from the women and nervous looks from the men, Kim stands on the car’s east side staring at the yellow-leafed aspens on the steep hillside that divides us from Wild Fire Valley. On an impulse I step up behind her and put my arms around her waist. She cocks her head back a little, rolling her dirty hair into the side of my neck and jaw. Her taut buttocks feel good against my hips. I remember the warmth of her shivering, naked skin last night.
“It’s beautiful,” she says quietly.
“I wish we were doing this under different circumstances.”
She sighs. “I haven’t figured it out yet, Anton. What I’m going to do with you, I mean.” Then she looks around. “There’s people staring at us, wondering what the handsome young man is doing grinding on his mom.”
I laugh. “You were a young mother, then. All of nine years old.” I push my hips against her butt again.
“I feel and look years older.”
“I hear having only one eye can affect depth perception,” I say with my lips brushing her ear. “The only reason people are staring is because they’re wondering how a scar-faced freak like me is lucky enough to get to grope a tragic beauty like you. Should we sneak into the bathroom or something? It looked big enough when I was in there earlier.” She elbows me in the ribs.
Finally away from the town, the train starts picking up speed.
THIRTY-FOUR
W
HEN THE CONDUCTOR
comes by collecting tickets and pointing out landmarks to the tourists, Kim talks to him and explains that we want to go backpacking. She asks if he’s willing to stop the train when we’re near the back side of Wild Fire Peak. He’s reluctant, but it’s hard to say no to a beautiful one-eyed woman. And even harder with Roberto and me standing by her side, looking determined. He agrees to stop the train for just a few seconds near an old mining camp on the side of the river we’ve been following up-canyon. He advises us to be ready—we need to immediately leap off so that he can stay on schedule.
Roberto and I shrug our way into the two packs we’d brought while Kim laces her running shoes tight.
The train chugs to a halt in a grove of aspens near where the river boils with rapids. Up until this moment, I hadn’t realized that we would have to cross the river. But instead of taking a chance and trying to convince the conductor to make yet another stop once the train passes over a bridge, I quickly climb off the train and am followed by Kim and my brother.
As soon as we hit the dirt the train starts rolling again. The conductor had been serious about only stopping for a few seconds. As the cars full of tourists pass by, they wave to us, as if we’re embarking on some great and dangerous adventure. We are, but they can’t possibly know that. In just a minute or two the train is only a distant wisp of black smoke drifting into the sky. The whistle blasts twice again in farewell.
“That’s it. Wild Fire Peak.” Kim points at a jagged summit that rises at the end of the valley like a shark’s tooth. It must grow three thousand feet out of the valley’s end, all of it either vertical granite, dirty ice-choked couloirs, or steep fields of talus. I would never have recognized it—from the meadow on the other side, the mountain slopes gently and the lower two-thirds are thickly forested.
I had hoped to find an easy pass leading to the other side, but there is a sawtooth ridge to both sides of the summit, just five or six hundred feet beneath it. We’re going to have to climb the damn thing almost all the way to the top.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Kim says. “I forgot how imposing it is.”
Although it definitely is imposing, I feel confident because of the lightweight ropes and harnesses I’d had the foresight to stuff in my pack. Once past the tree line, I think we can weave our way up on the slopes of talus and along some sharply angled ledges. I hadn’t thought to bring axes and crampons, so the speediest and safest method of ascent up the couloirs isn’t an option. Beside me Roberto smiles at the peak. From this side, it’s his kind of mountain.
“It’ll go all right,” I tell her. “What I’m more worried about is the river.”
“Let’s swim it, bro.”
That’s something I really don’t want to do. The water is moving fast enough to make even wading dangerous, and it looks more than a few feet deep. Besides, the river is pure glacial meltwater. It’s probably not more than a few degrees above freezing—cold enough to seize the blood in our limbs and make us hypothermic within minutes. This is the real thing, not like the desert lake water that had caused my teeth to chatter all last night and this morning. For a minute I feel unbearably cold again, even though I’m standing in the mountain sunlight. I can’t suppress a shiver.
I walk out to the top of the steep bank and look up and down the river, hoping to spot a shallower crossing. There’s cable drooped across the river a little ways away. It appears to be strung between two pines on opposite shores.
“What’s that?” I ask Kim.
“I don’t know. Probably some sort of old mining thing, some sort of pulley line.”
We hike down to it. The cable is nearly an inch thick. The end on our side of the river is wired high up in a pine, which has old boards nailed to the trunk, making a sort of ladder up to a rotting platform.
“It’ll beat swimming,” I tell them.
“Shit. I was looking forward to seeing your girlfriend naked. Or at least in a wet T-shirt.”
Surprisingly, Kim laughs.
I drop my pack and pull out the two lightweight harnesses I’d brought. With some webbing, I tie a third.
Roberto ascends the ladder and without a second thought clips a short sling from his harness to the cable. He shoves off from the tree’s trunk with a powerful thrust of his legs and shouts a yodel of delight. Sailing out over the river, he travels at an incredible speed until just past the river’s center and the bottom of the cable’s droop. Past that, the upward momentum causes him to slow. Near the top of the inverted arc, he grabs the cable with his hands before he starts to slide backwards.
“He makes it look fun,” Kim says to me.
“Your turn.”
She climbs up to the platform and clips the locking carabiner to the cable as I’d instructed, but then she hesitates. She looks dubiously at where the cable is tied to the tree. Then she stares out at the droop above the river. I realize that from her perspective, and lack of depth perception, it probably looks like the wire runs straight down into the thrashing rapids. She looks down at me and shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“You’ve just got to go for it.”
“How about telling me something helpful, Anton?”
“Okay. Put your eye patch over your good eye.”
She looks at me without even a trace of humor in her expression.
“Just trust me,” I say, sincerely now. “You’ll be fine. Trust me.”
She nods twice, closes her eye, takes a breath, and leaps. She doesn’t give an exuberant shout like my brother, but I’m pleased that she doesn’t scream in fear either. Rotating in slow circles, she shoots past the droop to where Roberto still hangs from the cable, holding himself in place with one hand. He snags the back of her harness with the other.
I wait until they’ve pulled their way to the platform on the other side, not wanting my added weight to bring the whole cable down. Once they’re across, I make the ride, too, and do my best to imitate Roberto’s wild cry of exaltation. It lacks his authenticity.
For two hours we hike fast up the rising depression toward tree line at the base of the naked rock. I’m impressed that Kim moves without complaint and without apparent effort. All that long-distance running must be worth something. By the time we emerge out from the last of the wind-twisted pines, all three of us are slick with sweat. I can smell the strong odor of sun and exertion rising off me. I lick Kim’s bare shoulder to taste the salt. Looking back, she smiles at me and shakes her head.
At tree line—about twelve thousand feet—there’s a cool wind. It’s getting darker, too—the sun is sinking past the mountains on the other side of the river. In another hour or so it’ll be full night. We pull back on shirts, then jackets, as we choose a likely route up broken ledges and steep slopes of talus to the ridge just left of the summit.
“We should probably start trying to be quiet,” I tell them. “They may be holding Sunny in those trailers up by the burnt-out lodge—they’ll hear us if we bang around too much. And we should fuel.”
Stopping for food is the last thing I want to do. But we’ll need energy and fluids in our systems for the remaining climb up to the ridge and then down into the valley. And for whatever comes after that. For all I know, Fast and his pals may have already forced Sunny to show them the cave. They may have already killed her. At least we haven’t heard any blast of dynamite, the sound of which I’m sure would carry all over these mountains. Or a gunshot.
None of us sit as we swallow sticky hunks of PowerBars and gulp down a quart of water each. Sitting would just make it that much harder to stand. Belatedly, I remember that I should have told my father what we’re doing in case something goes wrong. I take the cell phone from the hip pack I wear reversed on my waist and hit the power button. “No Service,” the screen reads. Within five minutes we’re moving again.
The scramble to the ridge starts with a field of talus that rises nearly five hundred feet to a low-angled slab. The individual stones composing the steep field are large and fairly stable. Roberto hops from one to the next like a mountain goat, his movements pure and unhesitating. Kim moves more haltingly at first, and I try to stay near her side so that I can put out a stabilizing arm if the need arises. But within a few minutes she’s gotten the hang of it and is moving with her usual grace.
The smooth slab above us rises another two hundred or so feet. It’s steep enough to require the use of both hands and feet, which we smear against the weather-polished granite, while feeling for any edge or wrinkle. I consider taking the time to put a rope around Kim and belay her to the top, but decide it would take too much time.
“Keep your butt high in the air,” I advise her instead. “It seems counterintuitive, but your feet will have more friction against the stone that way.”
Just as she’d done on the cable across the river, Kim nods at me in a way that says, “Okay, I’m scared, but I trust you,” and starts up. That look makes me feel guilty—I’m putting speed ahead of her safety. But often in the mountains speed
is
safety. Especially when considering Sunny’s safety, and how every minute she remains in Fast’s control puts her in greater danger.
I try to stay just behind Kim, thinking that if she slips maybe I can arrest the fall. In truth, if she slips she’ll just kill us both. She doesn’t, though, and ten minutes later we’re on a good ledge at the base of a cliff.
Roberto has already scouted ahead. He says he’s found an ascending ledge that he thinks goes all the way up to the ridgeline to one side of the summit. Unfortunately, it’s too dark now to know for sure. We drink off another half-quart of water each then follow him up.
Roberto’s ledge is frightening. It would be scary even in the daylight. Between two and four feet wide, it rises steeply and at the same time slopes down toward the cliff. If any one of us falls, we’ll bounce off the wide spot far below where we’d rested, then grate down the two hundred feet of slab. It would be a very bad way to die. To make matters worse, the ledge is covered with small, round stones that feel as if they could easily roll under our feet like ball bearings.
Up ahead and above, I can see stars to the west through a keyhole-like slot in the ridge. When Kim and I are just fifty feet from it, we meet Roberto, who is scrambling back down.
“Doesn’t go,” he tells us. “There’s some big fucking cliff on the other side and I can’t tell if the rope will reach.”
What he means is that he can’t be sure a rappel on my doubled ropes will reach solid ground on the valley side of the mountain. Long ago and many times, Dad had lectured us about how one of the most foolish things you can do is to rappel at night when you’re unsure if the ropes are long enough to reach a ledge. If you make an error, you’ll be stuck swinging at the knots on the rope’s ends. There’s no way we can check the distance with our flashlights because lights high up on the peak could easily be seen from down in Wild Fire Valley. And other than my small Beretta, surprise is our only weapon.
Roberto moves off our ledge to the left, gripping unseen holds on the cliff face with his hands and the toes of his boots. Within seconds he’s slipped into the darkness. I try not to think of the void beneath him. I’m worried, although I know this is nothing compared to some of the things he’s soloed. Still, all it takes is one loose handhold . . .
While we wait for him to find a better route, I once again take out my cell phone and punch a button to activate the night-light. There’s finally a connection, but just barely. The signal reads one-by-four. I realize it must be ten o’clock on the East Coast and suspect my father will be at his desk unless he’s already left for Bosnia or Egypt. When I direct-dial his office, the connection is maintained despite the hissing and scratching sounds coming over the receiver.
“Air Force. Colonel Burns,” his perpetually calm voice answers.
“Dad. It’s me.”
“Anton, are you okay?”
“No problems so far, but I may get cut off because my signal’s not too good.”
“—barely hear you. Where are you, Ant?”
“High on Wild Fire Peak, headed for that red cliff above the meadow. Roberto’s with me. And Kim Walsh. We’re going after the girl. I just wanted you to know.”
There’s a few seconds of silence on the other end. I start to wonder if I’ve lost the signal when the colonel says very clearly, “Back off, Anton. Now. That’s an order. You get the hell out of there and let the locals or the Feds handle this!” His voice is still calm, but his words are so short and clipped that after a lifetime of knowing him, I recognize that inside he’s shouting.
“I can’t do that, Dad. The local sheriff might be in on it, and the Feds don’t believe us. In any event, the valley’s been sealed off now. They closed the road. So we’re going in through the back door. It’s now or never. They’re going to kill the girl, Dad, once she gives them what they want. Remember her? That pretty blonde in the meadow we met our first day there?” I want the image of the vibrant young girl in the skimpy top and too-short shorts to be in his head.
There’s a long hiss of static. I hear only a few words of my father’s reply, and understand just two. “I’m coming.”
The scratching over the receiver fades to nothing but the hair is standing on my arms. Those two words send a thrill through me.
He’s coming
. He’s far too late of course, but still, he’s coming. All those years of indoctrination about family loyalty at all costs—it had been the truth.