Badwater (16 page)

twenty-two

M
oriah was getting more and more difficult as the summer ran out, and I was getting increasingly desperate to conquer her. She was harder to hold on to than anything I’d ever dreamed of grasping. I hated to even think it because of her namesake . . . but Moriah was a bitch.

I tried backing off for a while and giving my torn flesh and muscles a chance to recover. Between excursions all over the state while still scouting for meth labs, I had visited Denver twice. While there I held my squalling baby until I couldn’t take it anymore, then handed her back and slept on the couch. I went to Cheyenne once, where I had an unhappy meeting with my superiors—who regarded me with a combination of suspicion and contempt. I went to Vedauwoo, the world’s Mecca for fat cracks, and practiced an assortment of techniques on climbs like Penis Dimension, Trip Master Monkey, and Squat. I kept returning to my little canyon west of Badwater, swearing each time that I was more determined than ever, swearing I was stuffed full of renewed vigor, but inwardly knowing I was more scared and defeated than I’d ever been in my life.

I tried facing left, then right, tried groping deep into the recess for an edge I could crimp or even a pimple of rock I could pinch, tried running my hands over the underside of the roof for any protrusion that would accept even the most fragile smear, but there was nothing that would allow me to cling to her. All I could do was jam. My muscles screamed, my mouth went dry, and I shook out of the crack again and again, each time falling through space until the rope caught in the cams I’d placed and ripped me out of near-terminal velocity. All I got for my efforts was a hide patchy with raspberry rashes where it wasn’t black-and-blue.

Meanwhile, the aspen leaves changed from green to gold. They dried out and started to rattle in the wind like small bones. I spent far too much time lying on my back, staring up and contemplating the bitch while getting high.

I didn’t spend much time thinking about Jonah Strasburg. Or at least I tried not to. The guilt I knew he felt was something I too closely sympathized with, and I didn’t know how to help him. I’d read in the paper that he’d been unable to meet a $100,000 bond (apparently my opinion hadn’t much swayed the judge—either that, or he was worried about his own reelection). I also read in the same article that Jonah had been temporarily transferred to the jail in the next county while awaiting trial in the fall.

That, at least, was a good thing.

The only time the case was mentioned to me was on the single trip to Cheyenne for my semiannual review.

McGee and two suits listened to my report of new meth lab discoveries and their surging abundance with silence and the promise of more inactivity. Then I was told that my performance was being rated as “unsatisfactory.” Once my reviews had been consistently stellar, far and away the best among the state’s criminal investigators. When I imprudently demanded to know why things had changed, McGee smirked through his beard and one of the suits informed me that a prosecutor had made a formal complaint, accusing me of undermining his most important case—which just happened to be the only case I was currently assigned to.

I was officially placed on probation.

Afterward, McGee had followed me out into the parking lot. As a hot wind blew dust and trash between us, he made no apology, no greeting, and offered no jokes. He simply informed me with a growl that the DEA was interested in having an agent fly up from El Paso to speak to me about the disappearance of drug lord Jesús Hidalgo, and that he’d told them that at the moment I was still unavailable, that I was doing sensitive undercover work exposing methamphetamine laboratories.

The threat couldn’t be more clear: behave, or else.

The only other time I thought about the case was when I ran into Brandy Walsh.

I’d finally managed to swallow a taste of the fear and overwhelming guilt that seemed to be drowning me, and had taken Roberto climbing. Or to watch me climb, anyway. I made him promise not to even try.

Rebecca had talked me into it, saying I had to do something for him. “He’s using again,” she’d told me. “Using heavily. Remember that nice Tibetan monk I told you about, the one who brought him out to see Moriah? He called the other day. They had to ask Roberto to leave the meditation center—they said he was acting crazy. He’d climbed up on the outside of a monument called the Great Stupa and refused to come down.” I’d seen the Great Stupa in the mountains outside Fort Collins. It was over one hundred feet high. Not a bad little climb.

In his new custom van, we drove up to Vedauwoo to see if he, or any of the legendary fat cracks there, could suggest a strategy for Moriah. I knew of one called Lucille that Roberto had climbed years ago. An acquaintance of ours named Jay Anderson had spent almost a decade working on this forty-foot off-width roof crack before making the first ascent. I wanted to check it out and get my brother’s advice. But the crack sat atop a two-hundred-foot formation, and first I had to figure out how to get up there with Mungo, Roberto and his metal canes, and a packful of ropes and gear. Jay had somehow done it, I knew, with his canine buddy Alobar. I figured there had to be a way. And that it would be a good, and hopefully not too humbling, test for my bro.

We were standing at the base of a beginner’s wall with me wondering if Mungo and Roberto could climb and/or be dragged up an easy system of cracks. Another climber was floundering around high above on a steep slab. Roberto pointed out the way his calves were pumping like twin sewing machines. It was obvious the climber was about to fall, that he was going to jitter himself right off the wall. His belayer was a girl in a bikini top who was obliviously reclining on a boulder, more interested in getting a nice tan than protecting her boyfriend. She had at least ten feet of slack in the rope.

I walked over to her and said hi. She smiled up at me and checked out Mungo, too.

“Dude. That’s a seriously badass dog.”

“Thanks.”

Then she checked out my brother.

Women had always stared at him, but not like this. Before the accident, he’d always seemed—to them and to me—half Superman and half wild animal. They’d been mesmerized by his blatant intensity.
Destraillado
was how our mother described it. Unleashed. Utterly feral, utterly free. A kind of noble savage. But now I could see that this girl regarded him as something out of a freak show as he swayed nearby on a pair of metal canes.

He’d come a long way from the romantic poster I’d glimpsed in the Badwater Adventures store. His hair was now shorn, revealing a scarred and dented skull, and his neck was covered with a wide leather collar. Shirtless, his overdeveloped arms, shoulders, and chest mocked the two thin sticks that could barely be called legs. He appeared both monstrous and monstrously pathetic. During the hours I’d spent with him on the drive up, I could barely make conversation. All I’d wanted to do was run away—run back to the wilderness and hole up with my wine, pot, and guilt.

Just as I was trying to think of something nasty to say to break her stare, a scream came down from the sky.

Roberto slammed his cane down on the slack rope as the boyfriend peeled off the rock. The fall was even bigger and more entertaining than anything I could have hoped for.

He plummeted twenty feet before the rope tied to his harness snatched him short, and only then because the weight of Roberto’s cane locked it in his girlfriend’s belay plate. She was rudely ripped off her boulder and bounced into the cliff by the force of the fall.

What was unexpected was the way his screaming went on and on, even after the fall had been caught. My first thought was that maybe his ankle had struck an edge and been broken. But I reassessed as I saw him gripping his hands to his chest as he howled.

I put my arms around the dazed girl and began to lower him gently using the belay plate on her harness. He was howling so loudly that other climbers, hikers, and mountain bikers were soon scrambling up the boulders toward us. By the time I had him near the ground, a crowd of ten or more people had gathered.

“What happened?” they were all asking. “Is he all right?”

Among them there was a man and a woman dressed in cycling gear. Helmets, sunglasses, CamelBaks, and tights. Something about the woman was familiar. Even more noticeable was the way she seemed to be staring at me through her yellow lenses instead of up at the rapidly descending howler.

It was hard not to curse when I finally recognized her.

Twenty feet off the deck the howler spun around on the rope. His hands were still clutched to his chest, but now I could see that they were running with blood. It was streaming down to drip off his elbows, and there were tears running down his cheeks.

“What happened? Are you okay?” everyone kept yelling.

He was almost to the ground when he moaned, “My finger! I tried to hook the bolt with my finger! It tore my frigging finger off!”

“Which one?” his girlfriend demanded, which seemed like an odd question.

Still descending, he opened his hands to either check or illustrate, and a rubbery little something the size of a .40-caliber bullet tumbled down the rock the last few feet to the ground.

The growing group of us at the base of the climb barely had time to glance down at the thing in the dirt and conclude it was indeed a fingertip, when a gray blur snaked between our legs. I opened my mouth to yell, “Mungo! No!” but knew it was too late before I got the words out. She was playing Snatch, her favorite game. In another two seconds she was running over the boulders along the bottom of the cliff, running with a familiar slinky stride that meant she thought she was being playful.

I kept my mouth shut.

Other people didn’t, though. A couple of them vomited, including the male cyclist with the blonde. I managed to get the howler to the ground where he lay, still screaming, in a fetal position in the dirt.

“Was that your dog?” the horrified girlfriend shrieked at me when I finally released her. “Make him give it back!”

But I knew it was far too late. Mungo would have gulped the snack the moment she snatched it up. I heard a clattering noise and saw Roberto speedily hobbling away, the muscles in his back jerking with suppressed laughter.

“No,” I said with as much sincerity and outrage as I could muster, “I’ve never seen that dog before in my life.”

The girlfriend turned to make the same shrill demand to other potential dog owners. I turned and looked around, too, hoping I didn’t appear too guilty.

Brandy Walsh was staring right back at me.

Behind the dark-yellow lenses, I could see that her eyes were wide. Her mouth was slightly open, too. Either from the exertion of running up to the cliff’s base in her cycling shoes, or she was about to shout out an accusation. I gave her a little shake of my head.

She stayed silent. She even lowered her head a little to one side, and I swear it looked like she, too, was trying to hold back a laugh.

I didn’t hang around to find out. I picked up my pack and jogged down the boulders in the direction Roberto had gone. I wouldn’t whistle for Mungo until we were well out of sight. As I ran, I felt an unfamiliar smile on my face. I think it was the first time I’d smiled all summer.

I did manage to accomplish something constructive after eight weeks of effort, both physical and mental: I got a third Number 5 Camalot fixed in place more than halfway through the roof. The technique I used was a sudden, bizarre inspiration. If anyone had seen me, I probably would have been strapped in a straitjacket and hustled into a white van.

I wiggled more than thirty feet out—passing the two cams I’d placed months earlier. I squirmed with one shoulder, elbow, and knee jammed in the crack, when, as usual, the moment I reached for a third cam on my harness, my legs cut out and I prepared to take another drop and swing.

I resisted the inevitable with a sudden and surprising fury. Kicking at air that offered no purchase, I punched my free arm into the crack just as the rock began to peel another layer of skin off the jammed shoulder. I found myself relatively secure, with my head now inside the crack, both palms smearing, counterbalanced by my back and triceps, both feet pedaling in space. My head was twisted to the side, a cheek pressed to one side, an ear and the back of my skull pressed to the other. A head jam. It took only a few pounds of pressure off my screaming arms and shoulders, but it was enough.

I started to laugh, inhaling rock dust and lichen. But I stayed put.

It was such a ridiculous position that I had nothing to lose by getting even sillier. So I torqued my legs up and out, jackknifing them with a spine-twisting move even farther out into the crack. I somehow managed to jam my feet there, one with the side against a wall, the other foot’s heel to its mate, and toes grinding hard into the rock. For a long minute I held it, head in the rock, feet in too, even higher and farther out than my head, and as the lactic acid in my arms and neck began to build, and as the rock began to peel the skin from my cheek and opposite ear, I wondered what to do next.

My arms gave out. My upper body swung out of the crack, tearing some skin from my face. But my feet now held. Suddenly I was a bat, suspended upside-down, three hundred feet off the earth. This was even crazier, but I wasn’t laughing now. With numb, shaking hands, I ripped the big cam off my harness, did an upside-down sit-up, and shoved the protection deep into the crack. Shaking even harder, I managed to clip the rope to it. Then I released my feet and dove headfirst toward the ground.

The bone-jarring jerk of the rope snapped me upright. I was hanging out in space, free and easy, half-blinded by light. Actual sunlight, after all the months of groping in the shadows. I squinted up at Moriah and saw that the cam was almost two-thirds of the way to the lip.

I screamed.

The triumphant whoop tore up and down the canyon, sending birds into the air, rabbits diving for their holes, and Mungo into the Pig.

What I screamed was
“Batman!”

I held the key—all I needed now was to get stronger.