The Edge of Justice (12 page)

I laugh too, realizing I've had a stupid, drunken grin on my face even while we wrestled. “Make you one?”

“Do it, man.”

I take a spare quart water bottle and fill it with ice, then half tequila and half lime juice. As I make it she turns off my western movie and turns on and up what must be MTV. The wail of John Popper's harmonica fills the room. “So what the fuck's going on?” she asks.

“First, I need to know what you were doing up there that night,” I answer, trying to concentrate on the questions I should be asking her.

She scrunches her face either because of my question or the sip she's taken of the drink. “We go up there to party, man. All the time when it's warm. Anyway, Cindy and Sierra and me split early that night. It was just the guys and Kate who stayed.”

I can't tell if she's lying. My receptors are definitely impaired. “Did you leave with Cindy and Sierra?”

“No way. I don't hang out with those two whores much. I had my own ride, my truck.” She also tells me that she didn't run around with Kate all that much either. She more or less keeps to herself.

I try to question her more about what was going on that night, but all she'll tell me is that it was a usual party for them—smoking dope and drinking. I ask who was tweaking on meth but she says not her, that she didn't know anyone up there was, at least not that night. Despite my impairment, I'm pretty sure she's lying about that. I ask why Brad didn't tell the police about her being up there and all she can tell me is that maybe he forgot, or maybe Billy told him not to, to keep her out of it.

Lynn finishes the quart I gave her and I make two more. My eyes keep catching on her thin lips, her sharp teeth, and her pointed tongue when she licks her lips. Then my eyes drop to the open buttons at the top of her shirt. It takes a staggering amount of effort to lift them back to her face. We're talking about other things now, and I realize I've become somewhat desperate for her company. Any company. My emotions have been bouncing like a yo-yo for the last two days.

Coffee with Rebecca had boosted my libido, as had the renewal of my climbing career. The tequila just fueled the fire and added to eighteen months of depression and loneliness. Things are getting dangerously out of control. I know it but can't stop it.

While we talk she gets her embroidered cloth bag from where she'd dropped it by the door in the midst of pushing me.

“Before I got pissed at you, I found this and wanted to show it to you.” Then she laughs and adds, “Shit, before I got pissed I even shaved my legs!”

She hands me an old, well-thumbed issue of
Rock and Ice
magazine. It's the issue that featured me and the climb I did with my friends in Alaska's Ruth Gorge. Lynn takes it back and opens it to the full-page picture of me hanging from the colossal, three-thousand-foot wall, as high as three Empire State Buildings stacked one on top of the other.

Pointing at it, she's swaying slightly on her feet. I can't tell if she is dancing to the music from the TV or just feeling the effects of the drink. “Now that's feeding the Rat,” she says.

“Feeding the what?” I haven't heard the term in years and my tequila-fogged brain has a hard time recalling what it means.

“The Rat, man. You know, it's something climbers got in their bellies. It claws around in there, begging for and feeding on the stupid shit we do. Like getting a fix. It's something Billy's always talking about.”

I hold the magazine open and look at the picture with her. The friend who took it was above me, looking down. He took it just a few minutes after the dinner-plate-size flake of rock had come whistling out of the sky. I'd looked up at the sound, thinking maybe I could dodge to the side, but wasn't quick enough. The picture shows me hanging suspended from a rope, gazing up at the camera. Beneath me is simply a universe of space and then a jumbled glacier far below it. I'm grinning at the camera but the smile isn't genuine. A smear of bright red blood is running from my left eye, across my mouth, down my neck, and splashes across my yellow jacket. The cheekbone from which the blood has erupted is already swelling grotesquely. My helmet too is streaked with four smeared lines of red from where I'd felt it for holes with my fingertips. Even more than the blood, the most arresting part of the photograph is my eyes. They are round with terror despite the grin. The Rat was feasting.

I remember the bite of the antiseptic that Hal had splashed on my face before pinching the skin back together with Krazy Glue from the repair kit. I'd been taking hard pulls on a plastic flask of Yukon Jack at the time, the taste and the pain bringing tears to my eyes that stung when they mixed with the flayed skin of my cheek.

“That's how you got that, right?” she asks as she stands close and traces the scar on my cheek with her fingers.

I nod, unable to take my eyes off the photo.

Tequila-scented and still swaying, she moves behind me and puts her arms around my chest, pressing herself against my back. Her hands move over my muscles, then trace the ridges of my ribs and stomach. For a moment I think, irrationally and drunkenly, that it's Rebecca behind me. I almost say her name. I feel her face between my shoulder blades as she blows hotly through my shirt and wet on my skin. Rising up on her toes, she touches my neck with her lips. I drop the magazine on the bed and reach behind me, holding her to me. Then I turn to her.

I finally lie still, spent and exhilarated and wary. I've never known a girl to be so strong and wild. My wariness comes from that roughness, the way she shouted those words in my ear and impaled her body upon me with such force. “Fuck me!” she'd demanded, again and again. “Harder!” Although I am by no means inexperienced, this was a whole other world. Past girls had proved agile and limber but nothing like this. This was something else altogether.

Lynn's face is buried against my chest. Her breath is still blowing as hot and fast as mine. Again without intending to, I imagine that her blonde hair, where it sweeps across the muscles of my stomach, is darker and richer, like Rebecca's. Turning my head, I can see Oso's yellow eyes watching from his prone position in the corner. His ears are forward; his amber eyes concerned. I feel that he's trying to send me a message that he himself doesn't quite understand or know how to express. A hint of danger. A warning.

“Holy shit,” she says, rearing up over me with her voice a purr and her eyes glassy, “that was good. Give me a minute, man—then let's do that again.”

FOURTEEN

I
'
M UP EARLY
the next morning despite a headache and a slightly sick feeling down low in my gut. The sight of the bed torn apart and the empty tequila bottle on the dresser turns a worm within me. Outside, as I hurry through my morning training, Oso watches balefully from where he's preemptively tied to a tree as another soccer game is taking place.

Back at the hotel I shower, shave, and take two bagels and a paper cup of tea from the hotel's coffee shop. The mountain-born wind hasn't warmed yet so I pull on my wool coat and call for Oso to “load up” into the truck. Once on Interstate 80, we head east past Vedauwoo, where the granite is orange in the morning light. In Cheyenne I stop by the unoccupied lab at DCI's headquarters to drop off the bottle I'd recovered from the cave. I had already called the chief tech and conveyed the need for urgency along with McGee's endorsement. I was told to expect results the next day, Sunday. Then Oso and I turn south on I-25 and cross the state border into Colorado and the flatland of the eastern plains.

Five hours later the sun is high and the road has turned hot. I pass the signs for Canon City and follow directions to the Colorado Bureau of Prisons. It's a sprawling series of concrete buildings ringed with chain-link fencing, concertina wire, and warning signs. Parking at the far end of the asphalt lot under the shade of some dusty elms, I let Oso out to water the trees before locking him back in the truck with the windows partway down. Distracted, I forget to tell him the usual, “Stay, Oso, I'll be back,” and the dog gives his impolite master a hurt look as I stride away toward the building.

He looks harder than ever, I think, staring at a face that is very much like my own through the bulletproof glass. We have the same slightly hooked nose, full lips, and dark hair that come from our mother's Indio ancestors. We have the same heavy brows and protruding jaws from the Celts whose blood runs in our father's veins. But my features lack both the cruelty and beauty of my brother's. His cheekbones are higher, his eye sockets more slanted, and the eyes themselves convey a mercilessness that mine do not. They are a pale, cold, and startling shade of blue. His skin used to be tan like mine from too much sun, but confinement has turned it a faint shade of olive, almost translucent. And the man behind the glass wears his hair long and unkempt. He could be a movie star playing swashbuckling leading men if he weren't an adrenaline junkie whose fix comes from the dangers of both heights and chemicals. And if he weren't a convicted killer.

At a bar in Durango one night three years ago, when thunder roared across the sky and Roberto had stabbed a syringe into his arm like a bolt of lightning, mainlining meth, a cowboy was scoping the girl my brother was with. The cowboy left his friends, who were chuckling and elbowing each other in a cracked leather booth, and approached Roberto's girl. The cowboy came between them like a driven wedge. “Take off, spic,” he said as he shouldered Roberto out of the way. Then he reached a hand up beneath the girl's skirt and grabbed at her crotch. Almost casually, my brother smashed his mug of beer against the bar's brass rail so that he was palming the mug's base, the broken upper half like an open mouth with teeth of jagged glass. When the cowboy turned at the sound, Roberto slammed it into the cowboy's face while the man's friends looked on. Then he took him to the floor and beat him to death before a bar full of witnesses. They said my brother was laughing.

“Hey, bro. What's up?” he says, grinning into the telephone receiver, his eyes exuding some weird demonic energy.

“'Berto. You doing okay?”

“Gettin' by.”

There's a long pause as we simply look at one another. His smile turns surprisingly gentle.

“How come you called?” I ask. “It got me worried about you.” He's never called before. He's never written. He's never wanted me or anyone else in the family to see him like this.

And I can understand that. Seeing my brother this way is the last thing I want to do. It's hard to imagine him confined. Even as a child Roberto was always like a cougar, utterly wild and uncontrollable. The rest of the family was a little scared of him and a little awed—he seemed to have too much energy for this world. Yet here he is, kept in a cage, snapping at the bars. I can see in his hard blue eyes that the past two years since he began serving his sentence have certainly not tamed him. His eyes look frenzied and maniacal. In a way, I'm glad to see a spark still in him. Only it doesn't look like just a spark. It looks like an inferno.

“
Che,
I've been thinking a lot 'bout you. I got you in my mind, you know?” He taps his index finger between his eyes. “I could feel it when you were on the rock, when you were shooting those fuckers I read about, when you were mopin' after. Now you're back in the saddle, right?”

“Yeah, 'Berto, I am.” I try to laugh. “Don't get too weird on me, okay?”

For the first time since sitting down behind the glass, my brother closes his eyes and stops the family's signature staring. “Tell me what you've been climbing, Ant.”

I describe in detail the few big climbs I did in the Tetons and the Winds that summer before the shooting in Cheyenne. There was a brief trip to the pink granite of the Bugaboos when I used up some vacation days. I don't explain my year-and-a-half absence from the stone. My brother keeps his eyes shut as I talk, interrupting only to ask for more detail. Then I tell him I've been at Vedauwoo the last week and he smiles, remembering the cracks our father had first taught us on.

“Veed-a-voo,”
he almost hums without opening his eyes. “That's a magic word. That's the first place I'm heading to when I get out of here.”

When I've finally caught him up on the intimacies of the climbs, Roberto opens those mad eyes and says, “Now tell me what you've been fucking.”

“Not much,” I lie, “but I've got prospects. How about you?”

He laughs so hard he pounds the phone on the counter in front of him. A guard steps up behind him but Roberto waves him off. “Real comedian,
che.
Very fucking funny. But I've been getting in shape for both.” I can see it's true. His jaw is swollen with muscle, as is his throat. Under the V-neck of his blue jailhouse shirt, I can see a deep line that intersects his pectoral muscles. Each of his forearms is as thick as the striking end of a baseball bat. I've never seen him stronger or crazier.

“Starting your training a little early, aren't you? You got a few years left before you want to peak.”

“It won't be that long, bro. I guarantee it. And I've already peaked.”

I don't like the way he says that. I don't like the sudden heat I feel radiating through the phone in my hand. I speak carefully, slowly. “'Berto, do your time and come out clean. Don't screw it up.”

He waves my concerns away and I try to let it go. “That's all there is for me to do here. Train. Pull-ups and shit all day long. I've got some maps in my cell that Mom sent me. Topos of the Cerro Torre, Punta Herro, Cerro Standhardt and Torre Egger, all that stuff near the ranch. Some photos too. I think there's some new routes to be done, bro, and I think some old ones can go free.”

“The Rat's getting hungry,” I say without thinking, repeating the expression Lynn had reminded me of.

He knows exactly what I mean. “Fucking starving, bro. Fucking
e-mac-i-at-ed
.”

“Mom's writing you?”

“Uh-huh. Can you believe she's encouraging me to do more climbing when I get out? She used to freak when Dad took us, then when we got older and started going on our own. Guess she's decided it's better than other rushes.” He winks. “Speaking of rushes, how you liking carrying that gun and shield these days? Still hookin' and bookin'? Shot any more of those nasty drug dealers lately?”

So I tell him that I'm thinking of quitting, about next week's hearing, and what I'm doing down in Laramie. He frowns when I mention Billy Heller's name and turns serious.

“I know that old freak,” he says. “Stay away from him, little bro. He's even crazier than me.”

“That's hard to believe.”

He laughs. “You still got that dog? He doin' okay?”

Oso was far younger the last few times I saw my brother, when Roberto was living and using in the mountains of southern Colorado. The visits were infrequent because I couldn't stand seeing Roberto on the edge of combustion. My brother and I were opposites then, I believed, with me a rookie cop with a master's degree and him cooking off his brain cells as fast as he could. But there was an immediate bond between the beast and him. I think Oso recognized Roberto as a kindred wild spirit, a canine soul before the days of domestication. The two of them would wrestle like wolf cubs for hours on the carpet while growling ferociously and gently gnawing at each other's throat.

I tell him Oso is all right, just old, and repeat the story about the soccer ball, which has Roberto hooting.

Even as he laughs, I feel overwhelmingly sad about so many things. About my faithful dog who won't be at my side much longer. About my brother burning himself up in jail. About two other brothers who may unjustly get a fatal ride on a hospital gurney. About an unsolved climber's murder in Vedauwoo. About the lives I took in Cheyenne. About the upcoming hearing that may result in my being criminally charged and publicly humiliated. And about the end of the career I once thought was my calling. I feel as if I'm trying to ascend a thin, worn rope with an impossible weight strapped to my back. I'm ready to leave—I desperately want to get back on the rock, where the only thing I have to worry about is falling.

“So how come you called for me to come down here?” I finally ask him.

“I wanted you to see this, see me here. And I want you to know you'll never see me in a fucking hole like this again.”

“What do you mean? I'll come down and see you here any time you want.”

“You'll never see me here again, Ant,” he repeats, smiling and looking right through me. “But don't worry, I'll still be looking after you.” Then he slowly hangs up the phone. I see his lips purse in what must be a whistle to the guard. I bang my own phone against the glass but he doesn't turn around.

From Canon City I drive north back toward Wyoming. I nearly swoon with the need to feel an enormous void beneath my heels. The short climbs I've done in the past few days have set the hook firmly back in my mouth. And the visit to my brother has only jerked it deeper. Just past Denver I suddenly cut across three lanes of traffic and leave the interstate highway, going through Boulder on the way to Estes and Rocky Mountain National Park. As I drop into the valley there, I feel the old thrill that the sight of the craggy peaks always gives me. The glaciers high above Estes sparkle violet in the sunset, and above the snow and ice the granite of the peaks are a deep purple.

I drop off Oso under the porch light at the small house of a graduate school roommate. And I politely refuse my friend's offer to climb with me while his wife entertains Oso. I want to climb alone, solo. I drive a little farther through the night toward the Glacier Gorge trailhead and try to forget about the incriminating look the dog gave me as I pulled away.

At the parking lot I fill two water bottles that still hold the sickly odor of tequila. I feed into my pack a rope, a jacket, a small rack of gear, two ice tools, and my crampons. All I take in the way of food is a couple of PowerBars.

Near midnight I'm breathing lightly, wet with sweat, when I come up out of the trees and low mountains and reach the dark wall that is the base of McHenrys Peak. My crampons scrape and squeak up a long pitch of easy rock before I gain a couloir of ice that has hardened to glass under the months of summer sun. It shatters into broken circles the size of dinner plates with each swing of my ax, but I'm immune to the peril. My mind is heavy with my brother's last words. I wonder if he's feeling me in his mind right now, feeling the vast black space beneath my boots.

On the summit I sit under the stars and let the cold wind dry my clothes. When I begin shivering in earnest I put on my down jacket and pull my pack up over my legs. Through the chattering of my teeth the concerns that clog my head mutely rattle out of me until my mind begins to clear. I lie that way until the dawn lifts away the darkness, and I resolve to do nothing about what my brother said. Telling the prison officials would do nothing but get him hurt or make him angrier. It's his life. The Rat is buckled in the driver's seat and will take Roberto wherever he wants with the accelerator jammed to the floor.