Authors: Clinton McKinzie
THIRTY-FIVE
T
he rock looked like whitewashed granite. There was close to two thousand feet of it rearing up out of a maze of piñon and juniper canyons. The entire east-facing wall blazed in the early-morning light. It reflected the sunlight like a mirror.
“Look at that fucker,” Tony said with awe in his voice.
“Man, that thing’s a monster,” Barb agreed.
We stood atop a canyon rim that was nearly as high as the shining summit but a couple of miles off. I could see that it was going to take a lot of bushwhacking and scrambling—maybe even some rappelling—just to get to El Trono’s base. Three hours of it, possibly a lot more. Then there would be sixteen hundred feet of difficult, vertical-to-overhanging rock to climb. Not to mention the hike back out. And it was already getting hot. All I had in my backpack other than climbing gear and binoculars were two quart bottles of water and a handful of PowerBars.
There’d been a time when I would have gone for it anyway. And I would have suffered, but loved every minute of it. But that time had passed. It wasn’t what I’d come here for anyway.
“I’m going to have to bag out on the Giraffe,” I said, naming the hard route they were headed for. “It’s too big for me to do in a day. And the approach looks heinous. I’m going to try to do something a little shorter on the south face instead.”
The south face of El Trono was a smaller wall, only eight or nine hundred feet high. But it still led all the way up to the summit, where I hoped to get a good look at Hidalgo’s hacienda and then make my plans.
The four desert rats looked at me. Their packs weren’t any bigger than mine. They couldn’t have much more water or food.
Tony said, “You sure, man? You’re going to miss out on an epic.”
That’s what I was afraid of. An “epic climb” is one where everything goes to shit and you come out alive by only a hairbreadth.
One of Roberto’s expressions came to mind. I shrugged and said in his soft voice, “You eat what you can kill.”
All four of them looked at me a little strangely. Kevin grinned and nodded, though. He liked that. So did the others.
“I already know that thing’s going to eat
me,
” Lydia said. “So I’m going to do the south face with Robert.”
No one argued with her. In the climbing world, it’s considered bad manners to try too hard to talk someone into doing something that might get them killed.
We headed down into the canyons as a group. Much of the descent was torture. There was a lot of getting speared in the calves by yucca, a lot of precarious boulder-hopping on house-sized rocks, a lot of dusty scrambling down hot, gravelly stone, and a lot of bushwhacking through canyon floors thick with manzanita. It was so hot that we took off our shirts despite the stinging slaps of thorny branches. The men would have taken off their shorts, too, and the women their sports bras and shorts, if there hadn’t been a great likelihood of getting poked or swatted on some particularly sensitive body parts. All of us were pouring sweat that, like our cursing, was turning from fragrant to stinking.
The torture came to an end not far from where we would need to split into two groups: Lydia and I for the bottom of the south face, and Kevin, Tony, and Barb even farther down-canyon to the base of the bigger east-facing wall.
Here, in a little side canyon that dead-ended in a cliff, we stumbled onto a copper-colored pool of water. It was shaded by Washington palms and it looked a little like a desert oasis. We all plowed straight into it, taking only time to dump our packs of ropes and gear on the rocky bank.
The water felt so good it was like chilled silk on my skin. I closed my eyes and ducked my head, letting the water embrace me completely. Letting it suspend me in its gentle, cool grasp. I almost didn’t want to come up for air.
A little while later we wrung out our clothes and laid them on rocks in the sun to dry. We dried ourselves in the shade. It was interesting to be back in a world where nakedness was accepted. More than that, where it was preferred. No one took it too seriously. The girls teased the boys and the boys teased them back. The only thing that mattered to any of us was that we were soon going to be on the rock with a lot of air beneath our heels.
The anticipation was building. Despite all the things I should have been worrying about—like: Was I, a sworn peace officer, really going to kill a man in cold blood?—what I really wanted to do was feed the Rat.
The chalky cliff of the south face loomed over Lydia and me as we booted up and flaked out a rope at the base. The rock looked manky—crumbly and weak—but it was surprisingly solid to the touch. I remembered thinking exactly the same thing ten years earlier when Roberto and I had first touched similar rock only a couple of miles away.
With the others down toward the base of the east face, Lydia had suddenly become chatty. She started asking me all these questions about myself that I didn’t really want to answer. So I turned it around and started asking about her—where she came from, where she was going, and all that. A long time ago I learned that people like talking about themselves far better than asking questions. It’s a useful thing to know when you work undercover.
“Are you dating one of those guys?” I’d asked at one point. I meant Kevin or Tony, but I could have been referring to Barb, too.
She chuckled. “Ha. It’s a little complex. See, I used to hang with Kevin, but we’ve pretty much stopped that. Dude was getting a little serious. Barb’s hooked up with him a couple of times since then, but not so much lately. She’s slept with Tony, too, the slut. Now he follows her around everywhere like a puppy dog. I guess I should admit that I hooked up with him once, too.”
It was funny, how it all came back to me. How I knew Lydia and her friends so well and I’d only met them. I knew how it worked. I remembered it, and I missed the complete innocence of it. You start traveling together, everything casual, everything about the climbing. Then there are starry nights around campfires when it’s too dark to climb anymore and the hormones swirl around in your blood because the adrenaline can’t. While music plays on some tinny boom box held together with duct tape, wine and marijuana are passed around, and so, later, are the partners. Everyone so determined to remain a free spirit, yet still occasionally falling into brooding, desperate adult attachments.
“Anyway,” she said, her blue eyes bright, “if that sick little history didn’t freak you out too much, then you should know I’m available. And interested.”
I smiled but didn’t respond. I was too caught up in the memories to decide whether to flirt back or to gently put her off. Too caught up with thinking about how I’d outgrown all that—with a pregnant woman in Denver who was doing her best to let me down gently. I was too caught up to even think of further questions to ask.
“I guess I should tell you that Barb is, too—the slut. But it’s only fair, so you know.”
I still didn’t answer.
“Well?” she pressed.
I brought myself back to earth. “Hey, I’m really flattered. Or at least I would be if I weren’t the only man within a hundred miles that you haven’t slept with.”
“Hey! I didn’t sleep with either one of those creepy Mexican cops last night!”
“That’s true. Okay. I really am flattered. But I’m too old for you. What are you, nineteen?”
“Twenty. And a Scorpio. You know what that means, don’t you?” She gave me a wink.
I didn’t, or at least I couldn’t remember the lessons about astrology and auras that some old girlfriend had tried to teach me, but I nodded anyway.
“Anyway, you can’t be much more than thirty, Robert. And it’s not how many years you’ve lived, but how many lives. And I bet I’ve lived as many as you, if not more.”
“I bet you have,” I agreed. To be this free you had to be either really naive or really wise. Either way, I was envious. “I told you. I’m flattered.”
“But?”
“But what? I like you. And Barb. And Kevin and Tony. We’ll see, okay?”
She shook her head and laughed. “Oh, man. You’re cool, you know that? You’re going to be trouble.”
I was less cool—and more conflicted—than she knew. But she was right about the trouble part.
In graduate school at Colorado I took a class called Theories of Justice. We were forced to read a book by Leo Tolstoy, which I found I liked in the end. It was called
The Kingdom of God Is Within You,
and the book was supposed to be the basis for the philosophies of people like Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King—people I’d always admired. The book made a case for pacifism. The professor argued that it proved that tyrants, from Hitler to Saddam Hussein, would have simply withered away without wars and the resulting loss of lives.
This came into my head when I was about six hundred feet off the deck. I was sitting on a shallow ledge atop a buttress. The ledge was two feet wide, two feet deep, and exposed on three sides to nothing but space. My legs swung free. I was belaying Lydia up to me as she worked on a difficult fingertips-only corner on one side of the buttress.
At first I thought these thoughts and memories might be hallucinations caused by the onset of heat exhaustion. But it wasn’t that hot anymore. Clouds had been forming over the last hour, and the wind had been rising. My sweat was drying on my skin.
I could remember some of what Tolstoy had written. He had talked about a “ruffian” who was pursuing a young girl, intending to rape or kill her. “I kill the ruffian and save the girl. But the death or the wounding of the ruffian has positively taken place, while what would have happened if this had not been I cannot know. And what an immense mass of evil must result, and indeed does result, from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen. Ninety-nine percent of the evil of the world is founded on this reasoning—from the Inquisition to dynamite bombs.”
I wanted to believe in this as I had back in school. It would be so easy. Finish the climb and walk away. Get back in the Pig, drive back to Colorado. Wait and see what happens. Maybe Hidalgo will decide it’s too dangerous to bother with my parents, Rebecca, and me. Maybe he’ll let it go.
But Jesús Hidalgo is not just idly pursuing me and my family. He has already taken a significant step toward harming us. More than that—he’s all but killed Roberto.
I realized I wasn’t going after him just to preemptively eliminate a threat. I was going for a little payback, too. A little justice. The fury was still in me, not as hot as it had been in the potash mine, but somehow even more powerful. Radioactive. It was ironic, but the emotion that had made me want to be a cop in the first place all those years ago came back, right as I was contemplating doing something totally lawless, in violation of sworn oaths and Tolstoy’s virtuous theory.
Did he think he could terrorize all these people for all these years and not pay a price? Did he really think he could get away with it? Was he so fucking cocky that he thought he could do what he did to my brother with impunity?
He was, and he did. And he needed to be taught otherwise. Better than that, he needed to disappear from the earth like those beer cans I’d blasted in the desert.
I was becoming more and more like Roberto. Not the Roberto who was lying lifeless and broken on a hospital bed. And not like he’d been shortly before—the wolf peering out from the trees and watching the children play. But the Roberto I’d always worshiped and feared. The one who was
destraillado,
as Mom said. Unleashed.
Do what needs to be done and don’t worry about the consequences
.
Lydia’s taped palm smacked the ledge just as the first raindrops started to fall. She pulled herself halfway up, looked at the tiny ledge, then squirmed her sweaty body onto the only space available—my lap. She pulled off her slippers while I reached behind me and tied her into the anchor I’d built. At first the rain was soft and warm. As warm as Lydia’s skin. I thought it would only last a minute, then evaporate off the hot wall ten minutes later.
But I was wrong. The rain picked up. The wind, too. Soon it became a torrent. It spilled over the top of the wall above us like a waterfall, washing over us.
“What the hell is this?” Lydia yelled, laughing, pleased to be so suddenly cold. She was holding out her cupped palms to catch and drink as much of it as she could.
“It think it’s called a
chubasco
. It’s like a short, sudden squall. I’ve heard they get them a lot in Baja.”
It was exactly what had happened to Roberto and me ten years earlier. In almost exactly the same place, at very close to the same time in the afternoon. I thought I could even see where we’d been—a white dome of rock a couple of miles away that some ancient glacier had sheared in half. We’d been three-quarters of the way up, just like Lydia and I were now, when the storm hit. We’d bivied on a ledge not much bigger than this one, shivering and talking and laughing all night. Then we’d been woken up by the gunshots of Hidalgo’s men. My introduction to them.
“Great timing,” Lydia said. “I was ready for another bath. I’ve been sweating like a pig on this mother.”
“It would have been better if we’d made it to the top before it hit.”
“No way. This is more fun. I just hope the other guys are all right.”
With her squirming in my lap, her damp dreads batting my face every time she turned her head, and the skin of her all-but-bare back and legs sticky against my chest and thighs, I had a hard time not letting my newfound
destraillado
side take over. She didn’t make it any easier.
“This harness has a cool feature. I can take off my shorts without untying from the rope. Want to see?”
“That’s okay,” I told her. “I believe you.”
“Come on. You ever done it up this high? Man, it’s a rush.”
“Actually, yeah, I have.” A lifetime ago there’d been a woman—a client—whom I’d found myself bivying next to on the Thank God ledge of El Cap.
She turned around to face me. To straddle me, too, six hundred feet in the air. There was no other way to look at each other on the little ledge, but I’m not sure looking at each other was strictly necessary. It wasn’t necessary, either, for her to press her chest against mine or to say, with her mouth and eyes just two inches away while the rainwater streamed down our faces, “Are you going to kiss me or what?”