The Edge of Justice (34 page)

Taking back the water bottle from my father, I notice that one of his thick fists still holds the rope locked tight through his belay device.

“By the way, Dad, I tied in. I'm off belay.”

He nods. “Waiting for you to say it, son. Belay off,” Finally he releases his grip. I'm annoyed and embarrassed. I've violated one of his cardinal rules by failing to announce my status, but at least he's too preoccupied to comment further.

“Do you have a strategy for dealing with your brother when or if he shows up?” he asks.

I take a deep breath. This is something I've been thinking about for weeks, ever since my suspension and the news about the pending development of Wild Fire Valley as a part of a Forest Service land swap. I'd convinced my father to fly in from the Pentagon to meet Roberto and me for a last climb here together—and an attempt to save my brother's life. Despite a lot of mental effort, I'm still uncertain what our plan should be. A hard-core user like Roberto needs confinement and careful medication, something he's not likely to submit to voluntarily. One thing I know for sure is that my father's unconcealed animosity, born out of the impending termination of his career, won't help things. Nor will my own distaste for the hard drugs I've devoted my professional life to combating. Persuading Roberto to swerve away from the path of self-destruction he's speeding down won't be easy, and there's no place in any strategy for anger and recrimination.

Climbing has always been the Burns family's first drug of choice.
La llamada del salvaje,
as my mother describes it. The call of the wild. According to her it's a sort of genetic flaw on my father's side that has descended to Roberto and me. It's a hunger we learned to feed by getting lethal amounts of air beneath our heels. The fear you feel free-climbing, hundreds or thousands of feet off the deck, and with just a skinny rope as backup, is like an illicit substance—once ingested it makes the sweet stuff called noradrenaline just ooze out from the adrenal glands. It blows through all the panic that comes from deadly heights, replacing it with a tingly sensation. Ecstasy. Exaltation. Rapture. The negative side effect is that it's a little harder to replicate that feeling after each session. You have to push it a little further. Dad and I have learned to control our addiction—we've learned that there's pleasure in just crawling up into the heights without needing to lay it all on the line for that hormonal surge. Roberto hasn't.

He reached for something even stronger. Starting in his early twenties he turned to pharmaceuticals to pump up the volume. He began with pot, mushrooms, and acid, then moved on to methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin. He was chasing the dragon, looking for a better and louder amp. On the frequent climbing trips we used to take together in my college days, he would sometimes offer me some. I'd never been interested. Even then, before having really seen the damage those drugs could do, I preferred a natural high, although I had occasionally smoked marijuana with him in my teenage years (something I still consider no more dangerous than beer). Roberto once told me he'd discovered that cocaine mixed with heroin—a speedball—could push him beyond climbing's natural rush. It could take him places far further than the thrill of fighting ordinary gravity.

“It's just an ice cream habit,” he'd explained when I'd given him a hard time about the hard drugs. “I got it under control, bro.”

Right
.

But it isn't just the drugs, although they've become the center of Roberto's life. It's the way he interacts with people, the way he thinks, even the way he climbs. Roberto has become addicted to living on the very edge. If he isn't climbing, he's slamming a needle deep into a vein. If he isn't surrounded by the circle of fast-living friends who worship him as the fastest of them all, then he's brawling with anyone he perceives as having done something unjust. And if he isn't utterly free, then he's caged in a county jail somewhere. Recently there had even been a brief stint in a federal prison. Roberto has happily danced so far out on the edge and for so long that it's a miracle the void hasn't yet sucked him in.

Do I really believe we can change that? It would require almost a repolarization of my brother's soul. I know, even now, that this is simply a last hurrah before the odds catch up with him. There's no chance in hell he'll ever become an ordinary citizen, responsible with his life and his future, and constrained by the rules that civilization demands.

So I say to my father, “No strategy, Dad. Just show him that we love him, that if he keeps this up we'll be the ones who suffer.”

My father shakes his head and uncharacteristically expresses some emotion in his voice while looking at the red and gold stone of the canyon's opposite wall. “Shit, Anton, it'd be hard to suffer much more. It'd be a relief if he were dead.”

You'd think a son would be shocked to hear his father talk about his brother like that. But I'm not. In my darkest moments I often think the same thing. I'm tired of waiting for the telephone to ring late in the night; waiting for the quiet voice of some Colorado police officer to tell me that my brother's dead.

There isn't much more to say than that.

I close my eyes and recall a scene from this morning, just a few hours ago, when my father and I sped on the highway out of the seemingly endless suburbs of Tomichi in the predawn blackness, on our way to the valley. I'd been glancing over at my father's deeply lined face while we talked, noticing how old it looked in the glow of the dashboard's light. His mouth opened suddenly. His eyes narrowed. I snapped my own eyes forward to the road. A big coyote was braced facing us in the middle of the lane. His eyes burned with green fire in the reflected heat of the headlights. The silver-tipped ruff of fur around his neck and shoulders was standing straight up. I swung the wheel hard to the left, onto the wrong side of the road, mashing the brake and throwing my big dog in the backseat across the truck. The coyote never even flinched.

That coyote was just like Roberto. Totally defiant in the face of law and civilization, even when it's coming at him seventy miles per hour in the form of three thousand pounds of rusty Japanese steel. Utterly audacious, reckless, and not long for this world. But beautiful all the same.

I realize that my brother's luck must soon run out, that the world won't swerve away much longer. And that Roberto's nuclear-powered élan combined with whatever sort of shit he likes to spike in his veins will vastly magnify the force of the inevitable collision. What I don't yet realize is just how many lives are about to be lost in the crash.

Opening my eyes to the blue sky, I take up the sling of gear my father has laid between us. Without a word I add the pieces from the anchor I'd pulled below and slip it clanking over my head and one shoulder. Standing, I arch my neck upward and try to plot the course that will take me another rope length into the sky. My skin touches the warm, rough rock as I slide my fingers over the lip of a small contour above my head. The familiar texture of it for the first time in my life fails to give me a small thrill. For a moment I'm caught off balance, experiencing a sense of vertigo and dread I've never experienced before. This is a mistake, I tell myself, as I will the web of well-conditioned muscles in my forearms to grip with my fingers and hold me on the ledge. Something bad is going to happen. A cold sweat seeps out of my skin. I glance at my father and see him looking back curiously. Concerned.

“Locked and loaded?” I ask, trying to reassure myself with the start of the short litany he'd drilled into Roberto and me as children. We examine the harness buckles and knots at each other's waist.

“Tight and right,” Dad responds, his voice puzzled.

“On belay?”

“Belay on.”

“Climbing.”

THE EDGE OF JUSTICE

A Dell Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Delacorte hardcover edition published June 2002

Dell mass market edition / April 2003

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2002 by Clinton McKinzie

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001052942

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Published simultaneously in Canada

eISBN: 978-0-440-33412-5

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