Calloway's Climb

The North Face of the mountain was still in shadow at mid-morning and the lead boy's yellow parka showed brightly against it as a small and now immobile sun. He stood in web stirrups suspended from pitons he had finally managed to drive into the granite roof of an overhang that jutted 15 feet out from a point almost at the perfect center of the steep 2000-foot wall, so that he stood suspended over 1000 feet of space. For two hours, Nils Johnson, a half mile distant at timber line, had watched through his binoculars the agonizing progress of the climb and he knew now, had known for many minutes, that this lead boy was going to fall.

The second boy seemed to know it, too. Less conspicuous in a dark-blue parka, he sat face out, legs dangling from a small ledge 60 feet below and 30 feet west of the center of the overhang, holding tightly in his gloved hands and across the small of his back the rope that linked him with his companion. Through Johnson's binoculars the rope was a taut golden cable that ran on a bold diagonal up from the second boy's gloved left hand through four equally spaced pitons, then through a fifth piton driven into a crack in the angle formed by the wall and the overhang. From this final protective piton, the rope went out to the waist of the lead boy, around which it had been passed three times and secured with a bowline knot.

The boy continued to stand immobile in his stirrups. His head was close under the roof of the overhang, bent slightly, and he held on to the upper quarter of one of the stirrups with his left hand and kept his balled right fist jammed into a crack that began several feet from the lip of the overhang itself. Occasionally, his companion on the ledge below would crane his neck to follow the diagonal of the golden rope, but he would not look, Johnson observed, in that direction for long. It was as if he did not wish to witness the accident that seemed imminent, as if he were not sure of the soundness of the pitons the lead boy had placed (and upon which the lead boy's life would depend in the event of a fall) nor of his own ability to handle the rope skillfully.

Johnson had two sons, at home in Denver now. His older son, Tommy, was 12: only a few years younger, he guessed, than these two boys who for two days had been inching their way up the steep north face. His wife, Elizabeth, had been the first to notice them from the camp Johnson had established beside the clear stream below the first gentle rise of the mountain. It had been his idea, which he had carried out against her will, to move their camp to the bleak terrain at timber line from which he might better observe the attempt the boys were making.

The guidebook evaluated the climb as moderately difficult, ranging on the Sierra Club scale from 5.6 to 5.8, with several pitches, including the central overhang, requiring the direct aid of stirrups and ranging in difficulty from A1 to A4. Johnson remembered it as a long, sometimes arduous climb, steep and very exposed. When he had done it a decade earlier, it had been customary to allow two days for the ascent, bivouacking on the area above the overhang; but in the years since then, numerous ropes of two had completed the wall in a single day.

The two boys who were attempting the climb now had not managed to reach the overhang in their first day, had spent what Johnson knew must have been a miserably uncomfortable night on the small ledge from which the boy in blue now payed out the rope. He had guessed from the poor time they were making, their long delays and awkward movements on the wall, that they were too inexperienced, too wary to succeed; and he had been surprised this morning when, instead of roping down the face, they had prepared to climb the overhang, which, once passed, would cut off their retreat. The first 1000 feet of the wall were the least complex, the central overhang was a reasonably straightforward technical problem, and it was only in the final 1000 feet that the climb became rigorous in its demands.

Johnson put the binoculars in his lap for a moment, closed his eyes, realigned his back against a rough concavity of sun-warmed stone behind him. He thought he knew what that lead boy was feeling: how he had reached or nearly reached the limits of skill and, perhaps, of nerve; how his ability to act, to go on or go back, was suspended now as he was suspended over 1000 feet of space; how a seven-sixteenths-inch-diameter rope, passing as it did through a handful of pitons, was his umbilical link with his companion, upon whose courage and skill as belayer his life would depend, should he fall in what would have to be his attempt, finally, to advance or retreat.

I should have gotten my butt over there, Johnson thought. I might have been able to call them down.

But she, whose bitterness, like a stream that had run deep underground for years and had begun to rise and threaten the surface of their life together, would, he knew, have used his concern for the boys against him, would have managed to manipulate it toward something sentimental with which she then would gently mock him as one more coupon torn from her book of payment for what had been his recent and disappointing infidelities.

He'll make a move out of his stirrups. He'll try to clear the overhang, but he's much too far back. If he does fall, and that last piton pulls, or his friend panics, or the belay is rigged poorly....

• • •

Then he knew she was coming to join him, heard her deliberately clumsy-footed approach as she came up across the rock-strewn slope from the last line of stunted firs beside which he had stubbornly carried out last night his erecting of their tent. Aware he admired grace, she kicked stones from her path with the toes of her climbing shoes, stood over him finally, looking down, her face even more attractive in its maturity, he thought, than it had been when, years ago now, he had been a young, cocksure instructor of English, and she, with an impassivity that had captured him, had led half a stadium in cheers for the Colorado football team. She wore her high-cut faded Levi shorts and scarlet long-sleeved jersey well, for she had scrupulously maintained her figure and even through her pregnancies had gained so little weight that Johnson had wondered since if this might account for the slightness of his sons. Her brown hair was long: She had arranged it this morning into a ponytail that spilled across her left shoulder, down the front of her jersey almost to her waist. She had, in recent months, left off wearing a bra, an emblem, he knew, of her liberation not from men in general—she had not yet pursued her instincts that far—but from him in particular. Her breasts were well shaped, but her nipples were large and it embarrassed him to see where they jutted against the fabric of her shirt.

"I thought we had a date this morning," she said. Her voice was pleasant and only one long familiar with it would have detected the slight vehicle of contempt upon which it rode.

"I was worried about those boys," he replied. He made an effort to stand.

"Don't get up," she told him. "I'd like to sit in the sun for a while. It hasn't managed to reach the tent."

"Did you warm up the eggs?"

"I ate them cold. Your fire was out." In recent months, she had become deft with the apparently innocuous phrase, and this both amused and troubled him, for until now, the ironies of their relationship had been his to define.

"Look," he said. He handed her the binoculars. With a studied lack of interest, she took them, making the adjustments necessary to adapt the lenses to her perfect sight.

"So?"

"So he's been there too long. Almost half an hour."

"Maybe he's resting."

"I don't think so."

"Well," she said, laughing as she returned the glasses. "What do you want to do—go up and bring him down in your weight-trained arms?"

"It won't be funny if he falls."

"I wasn't implying that it would."

"I don't think the other boy is very well experienced: He handles the rope awkwardly."

"Really."

"Look, if all you can do is be bitchy," he bristled, "why don't you go back to the tent?"

"Because, Nils, I've been in the tent all morning." Then, as if sensing that he could become angry and end by his silence her pleasure in tormenting him, she added: "Somebody's taken the place we had by the stream."

"Oh?" he said. "Who?"

"I haven't the slightest idea. I saw the smoke from his fire this morning. He has a small blue tent, an orange parka and moves nicely. I think he's alone."

"Is he a climber?"

"I don't know."

"Are you sure he's alone?"

"Yes. Quite."

This range of mountains was remote and the season was still early, but the area was popular with climbers and Johnson, who had come here in what had proved so far a futile effort to mend his relationship with her and—though he had not told her this—to revisit scenes of his earlier and more successful climbing days, was not surprised that others had come here, too. He wore new steel-rimmed spectacles, a stylish departure from his customary horn-rims. When he raised the binoculars now, he found they had lost clarity from her adjustments and he had to make adjustments of his own.

The lead boy, he observed finally, had driven yet another piton into the roof of the overhang, close to its outer edge, had clipped a stirrup into it and was testing the integrity of this stirrup now with his right hand, yanking its webbing back and forth. Then, slowly and awkwardly, he transferred his weight from the first and second of the web stirrups to the second and third.

"Good." Johnson breathed hard. "Good. Now you've got it. Now get up and over before you lose your nerve."

"Is that what happened to you this morning?" she asked lightly.

"Betts, I told you; I was worried about them."

"Wouldn't it be better to assume they know what they're doing?"

"I don't think they do know."

"We were going to make love, I think," she said. "Then have breakfast."

She pulled the jersey over her head, folded it and put it on the rough ground beside her.

"Do you think that's smart if other people are around?" he remarked.

"Don't tell me you care."

"Don't you?"

"Not really. No."

He glanced instinctively in the direction from which the stranger she had mentioned might appear.

"You used to be modest," he said. "I remember that from the start. When we had our first apartment, that depressing place downtown, I'd tell you to take things off during the day, remember that? And you wouldn't do it. You used to get angry as hell."

"I've changed. I'd do it now, but you don't ask."

"I still like the way you look. You know that. It's just been so bloody long——"

"I know what you're going to say," she said. "All of your clever arguments about the value of fucking around, and I really don't want to hear them again, all right?"

He sighed. "I thought we were going to try to do better, by getting away...."

"So did I. But it's been a big nothing so far."

"Were you willing to let it be anything else?"

"I don't know. Maybe not. But I think I was willing to try last night, and again this morning, if you had stayed around, if you'd been half as keen about me as you were about those damn boys."

He started to defend himself, but his position seemed hopeless and he lay back against the concavity of stone. She knelt before him, aware, he knew, that the sight of her familiar breasts unconcealed in this new environment could still arouse him.

"I'm not one of your pretty coeds," she said. "But I do feel like screwing—according to Plan A of our reconciliation—and as far as I know, except for whoever that is by the stream, you're the only man around."

"Well, go ahead, then," he said. "Help yourself."

"Thank you, Nils. I'll do that. Just try to be up to it, all right?"

"I usually am, aren't I?"

"Oh, yes. You're very big in the erection department."

He could not help laughing, but she was not amused and prepared him with a masculine detachment that, along with her coarseness, was not characteristic of her.

"Whatever you think, I still love you," he tried to say, touched by this sentiment as she arranged herself over him.

"That's not a very big deal for me right now."

"I've said I was sorry. I've told you it was an empty, meaningless thing; that it didn't work out."

"I've heard that before."

"Well, why don't you pay me back, then? So we can forget it and be civil again? Why don't you have an affair of your own?"

"Maybe I will, Nils."

"I think it would make a lot of sense. I really do." He had argued endlessly with her that they should accept what had become the new morality: relieve themselves of some of the burdens of a confining and fixed relationship, with its absurd prerogatives of jealousy. He had buttressed his persuasions with his customary and careful logic, but she had surrendered nothing to him, and his own attempts to enter a more exciting life that seemed increasingly to be passing them by had failed so far partly, he knew, because of her stubborn refusal to join him, at least in spirit. In this way, it had come to pass that he lived in a state of perpetual agitation that he had with wretched poor luck been born, as he saw it, a decade too soon.

"My students tell me that marriage is quaint," he said.

"Keep still, will you," she told him.

Halfheartedly, he took her breasts in his hands. He felt too exposed here on this open upslope of rock and was distracted by the possibility that the man who was camped by the stream might wander up this way and find them copulating. The concern surprised him, for he had not suspected until now that in such matters he might be shy; he could not remember that they had ever made love in the open before.

"Jesus," she said. She was moving rapidly now.

Gently, he put his hands on her.

"God, I hate you," she said. "I hate you, Nils."

She had begun the first of her cries when beyond the arc of her shoulder, through the sweet strands of her hair that moved in a soft breeze (as clearly as if his vision were still somehow aided but no longer magnified by the binoculars), a tiny yellow dot began its fall from the near center of the vast north face of the mountain. It fell spasmodically as, in succession, each of the pitons held for a second or two, then sprang from the cracks into which they had been driven, the tiny yellow dot swinging finally like the pendulum of a clock back and forth across the wall until, after what seemed a long time, it hung motionless by a golden thread about 70 feet below the ledge upon which, Johnson knew, a boy in a dark-blue parka held whatever was left of the life of his friend, desperately, in his two gloved hands.

"Betts," he whispered in fright as she relaxed at last against him. "That lead boy fell."

• • •

She had wanted to go at once for the assistance of the man who had taken their campsite by the stream, but Johnson had argued against it. Now, scarcely three hours later and already 400 feet up the standard north-face route, he was confident his decision had been best, that an hour or more could have been lost in attracting the help of a man neither he nor Elizabeth could be sure was a mountaineer. He moved up yet another lead toward the two boys. The boy in blue was still seated on the ledge, facing out, holding the rope in his hands, across the small of his back; the rope plunged over the edge of the ledge, taut to the place where, about 70 feet below, the boy in yellow was suspended from it as motionless as if he had been hanged. Johnson reflected that, in addition to the incessant, throbbing anxiety he felt for these young boys, he also felt a guilty pride in his ability—even after the erosion of years—to manage such a difficult climb. And he felt, too, a relief, surprising in its intensity, that he and the woman he had married were joined by the rope now as they so often had been in their early years together, he leading the way, she climbing second behind him.

The sun was on the wall, but the rock under Johnson's hands still felt cool; a warm, westerly breeze gentled against the right side of his face. He made his moves precisely and out of 20 years' experience, studying through his steel-rimmed spectacles that portion of the route that lay directly above him, finding and testing his holds, balancing up from one to the next, placing his pitons with care and at somewhat longer intervals than he would have liked, for he had not expected to do this extensive a climb and had packed in only a small amount of gear.

She stood easily on her belay stance 100 feet below him now, anchored to the wall, paying the rope to him as he climbed. Unlike him, she had never been afraid of high places, had never had to overcome the kind of terror he had felt in his first year. Since they had begun their ascent to assist the two boys, she had sustained an attitude toward him that was crisp, efficient and yielded nothing of what he hoped might be her willingness to forget, at least for a while, what had been their recent past.

"Twenty feet!" he heard her call.

"All right!" he answered. His heart beat rapidly.

He had given up calling to the boy in blue above him. Either he had been too stunned by the accident or his mouth was too cotton dry to answer. Apparently, he had not tied the rope off to the anchor piton behind him as he should have done by now in order to free his hands. Johnson knew how terrible that weight could be and wondered if the belay had been rigged properly: In whatever fashion it had been rigged, at least it had held; but the boy in yellow had showed no sign of consciousness and Johnson was reluctant to think what that might mean. Although he had participated in many rescues, seen numerous deaths, he had never managed to quite make his own attitude one of protective fatalism that most of his colleagues shared, that was also shared by Elizabeth, whose toughness he had often envied.

He found a suitable position on the wall, anchored himself and turned to face out. From here he could see the falling blue-green forested slope of the mountain and the distant glinting meander of the stream; could watch now, and take in the rope, as she climbed toward him.

She was a natural, a born climber, and he knew if she had spent a fraction of the time he had in perfecting skills, she might have been better than he. He could not help feeling proud of her as he watched her make her careful, efficient moves toward him. It was as if now in their absence of affection, she had become a finely crafted instrument that he had been wise enough, lucky enough, to purchase at a time when the demand for her had been superficial and his own credit had been good. Pausing just long enough to retrieve the pitons he had driven, whacking them loose from their cracks with her hammer, clipping them and their carabiners smartly to a loop of rope she had draped from her right shoulder to her left hip across the scarlet jersey she wore, she would glance up along the route, choosing her holds, her quick, perceptive eyes never quite meeting his own.

"You're climbing beautifully," he said when she reached him.

"How much longer will it take?"

"I don't know. A couple of hours, maybe. We're making good time."

"Has he moved at all?" she asked, squinting up.

"No."

"What about the other one?"

"I can't get him to answer. He's probably scared to death."

"We haven't got enough ropes to get them down, do we?"

"We'll rig something."

He had hoped, as they switched positions now, moving gingerly on the steep wall, she might return his compliment; but she was silent and he adjusted the rope where it circled his waist, shifted impatiently the sweat-stained straps of the small red rucksack he carried and into which he had put some sandwiches and candy bars, their first-aid kit and extra clothing.

"Want something to eat?"

"I can wait," she said.

"How about some water?"

"No, thank you."

He put his hand on hers where she held the rope in readiness to pay out to him as he went.

"Betts," he started to say. She looked at him. Her eyes were green and they pooled now with tears.

"Don't," she whispered.

"I just wanted to say thanks for doing this with me. I couldn't have done it alone." And he added, painfully aware that he meant it: "There's no one I'd (continued on page 263)Calloway's Climb(continued from page 104) rather be up here with. Do you believe that?"

She shook her head.

"Don't do this, Nils," she said. "Those boys need our help. If you're ready to go, you better go."

He felt angry that he had opened himself to her and a need now to be cruel.

"All right, fine," he said, already beginning to climb. "Try not to cry, will you, because if you do cry, you'll have trouble handling the rope."

"Don't worry about how I handle the rope," she replied, as if he were no longer a central fact of her life, no longer worthy of her anger. "Look," she said. "There he is."

"What?" he grumbled. "There who is?"

"The one I told you about. The one who took our place by the stream."

He glanced over his shoulder and down. Five hundred feet below the place where he stood balanced now on two small outcroppings of rock, a lone figure in an orange parka waved up: a figure that had materialized, it seemed, out of a void. Johnson blinked. A speck under his left eyelid had troubled him since he and Elizabeth had made love.

"Is he a climber?" he asked, moving up again. He had not bothered to return the wave.

"Yes. I think so. He's got a rope."

"Well, that's not going to do us much good, is it?" he said.

"It could," she said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She was silent for a moment and Johnson, in an awkward position on the wall, his confidence threatened subtly by the fact that now, as he climbed, he was being observed, swore softly.

"Give me some slack, will you?" he said. "What do you mean, it could?" Then he heard her laugh, as if she were relieved, as if her instincts about the stranger had been correct.

"Nils, he's coming up," she said. "By himself."

• • •

The afternoon breeze gentled finally along the surfaces of the range and higher winds began to fill the visible sky with cloud. The lead boy's body, which had bumped against the wall while the breeze had been strong, now hung motionless again from the rope, which had been jerked by the fall from his waist to a point just under his arms. On the belaying ledge, some 70 feet higher, the other boy's legs dangled and were also motionless except when, from time to time, he would bang his boots together as if to restore circulation, creating as he did an alien, helpless sound. Johnson heard it as he stood with his wife, together now on a small ledge 200 feet below the body of the fallen boy, watching as the stranger made his lone ascent.

"He's over halfway," she said, peering intently down. "He's fantastic."

Grudgingly, Johnson agreed, aware that at the rate this stranger was moving up, unencumbered as he was by a second, by piton craft and belay, he would very likely reach them before they reached the boys. He climbed almost jauntily, his orange parka tied around his waist, a small green lump of a pack bouncing against the back of what looked from Johnson's perspective like a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, its tails tucked into a pair of combat trousers. He carried a coil of rope over his shoulder and had a way of leaning out from the nearly vertical wall, studying the route for a while, then making half a dozen consecutive moves, some of which would carry him as far as 15 or 20 feet at a time. In his own history as a climber, Johnson had seen no more than a handful of men who moved as well as this man moved, and none that he could remember who had moved any better. It was a performance he respected and envied, for in it was written a talent that he himself had never had; and while he was relieved that he would now have this standard of help in carrying out the rescue, he could not quite put aside a sense of threat that seemed for him to emanate from the simple fact of this man with whom he had not as yet exchanged a word and for whom his wife had expressed a frank, even provocative regard.

"Has anyone ever soloed this face before?" she asked.

"No. I don't think so. I haven't heard of anybody."

"You must know who he is; he's not just anybody."

Johnson wiped his spectacles, which, during his hours on the wall, had become covered with a pumiceous dust.

"I don't recognize him. There are plenty like him these days."

"We're lucky to have him," she said.

"And his rope."

"Of course, Nils. His rope, too."

Johnson went up another 100-foot lead, moving with conscious deliberation, as if, in what had become an atmospheric intensity, he might otherwise be impetuous. He brushed his handholds free of grit, settled his fingers onto them, tested his footholds fussily with the rigid soles of his Kletterschuhe. He balanced carefully up in clean motions, assuring himself by the care he was taking that he would not be embarrassed by a fall. Then he found a good stance, a deep, cavelike pocket in the rock from which he could belay comfortably, and leaning against the stone behind him, sitting with his legs straight out, he brought in the slack rope and called for her to join him. Halfway through the pitch, she had trouble removing one of his pitons. He could hear her banging it stubbornly with her hammer and, when he leaned awkwardly out from his position, he could see her small hand clenched around the carabiner, yanking it fitfully back and forth.

"Leave, it, why don't you?" he called. Scarcely 100 feet below her, the lone man was coming up, moving swiftly now, for here the face was somewhat less steep and offered a variety of holds.

"I'm going to get the goddamned thing," he heard her say. "Give me some tension, will you?"

He took up the slight belly of slack that had developed between them until the rope was taut and she could use both of her hands in her attempt to loosen the jammed piton. Finally, with an odd sense of relief, as if it had been driven into his own heart, he heard it spring free, heard her snap it to the collection that hung from her shoulder loop.

"All right, climbing," she called.

"Climb ahead," he said.

The north face was in shadow again, the air cool out of the sun; he had a sense that dusk would come rapidly and that rain would fall. A swallow swept by the place where he sat; he heard the subdued, jetlike hiss of its passing. He was hungry and quite tired now and knew before he could begin the next and final lead the lone man would reach this place.

That lead boy is dead, he thought. I'm sure of it.

When she reached him, her familiar face rising suddenly in front of the opening of the recess in which he sat, he drew his knees to his chest in order to make room for her; but instead of changing places with him, as he had expected her to, she kept her position on the steep wall, turning, resting an arm along the threshold of the recess and, in doing this, whether deliberately he could not tell, she blocked his egress from the cave.

"I'm ready to climb," he told her.

"Let me rest a minute, Nils," she said tiredly. "I wore out my arm pulling that damn piton.

"You should have left it. We've been doing fine; we've got enough to finish."

"It always seems like a defeat to me to leave one. Hi," she said. She was looking down and had, apparently, spoken to the man who was coming up from somewhere below her. Johnson guessed from the little volume she had used that the man must be close now, and there had been a shyness in her tone that he recognized but had not heard her use in a long time. He caught the distant jingling of the pitons and carabiners the man carried, but as yet had not used, and heard his reply, friendly, he thought, but muffled to incoherence by the cave. Johnson moved restlessly, sensing what would be his disadvantage if the man suddenly arrived.

"Come on, Betty," he said.

"I don't know," she said, not speaking to him but to the one who was coming up. "Yes," she said. "I know. My husband saw the fall."

Then the man was standing next to her, keeping his easy balance with a careless touch of his hand to the outside edge of one of the walls of the recess, looking in to the denlike place where Johnson sat. He was a young man, mid-20s, Johnson guessed, and though he had been climbing steadily for a long time now, he showed no evident signs of fatigue. His hair was wavy and brown, fashionable in its length but also, Johnson observed, professionally trimmed. His strength was evident in his hands and wrists and forearms where they showed below the rolled-back sleeves of his shirt; and in his blue eyes, his friendly but unyielding expression, across the tanned surfaces and well-shaped planes of his face, Johnson thought he read privilege: private schools, perhaps, trips abroad, easy and useful connections in high places; and these assumptions seemed to gain validity as, when the young man spoke, his tones warm yet at the same time sober and carrying with them the confidence of one who has not only managed to survive his life so far but also managed to prevail in it, Johnson caught the cultivated accents of the East.

"Hi," he said. "My name's Calloway." And before Johnson could reply, the young man added, as if they had all just met on the approach to a tee on a busy golf course: "Do you mind if I go by?"

• • •

The lead boy, in fact, was dead. It appeared he had died instantly in his fall, his neck broken, his blond head jutting unnaturally above the bright color of his parka, a weal of blood congealed at one corner of his mouth. Calloway was removing the equipment the boy had carried, adding it impatiently to his own as if it might prove useful—the pitons, carabiners, web stirrups and slings—as Johnson came up, belayed by Elizabeth some 90 feet below now in the cave. The sky had darkened with cloud, the air was quite still; already, he had heard thunder.

"How's the other one?" he asked, pausing tentatively on his holds, for he had seen Calloway climb up to the ledge.

"Psyched out. He won't say anything. I tied the rope off for him."

"Does he know about this?"

"I told him," Calloway said. "I don't know if it registered."

Gnats were moving near the dead boy's eyes. Johnson looked away. The meander of the stream was lost in distant shadow now. Soon, he knew, a breeze would rise; almost surely, the late-afternoon rain would come. Below, he saw Elizabeth lean out from the cave, look up, her face a pale, expectant wedge above the fabric of her jersey. He shook his head. She would be saddened, he knew, but not surprised: Though she had not said so, he thought she had intuited from the beginning that the boy had not survived his fall.

"We don't have enough daylight left to get the other one down," Johnson said. "Even if we get lucky and the storm misses us."

Calloway agreed. He seemed to be waiting for the older man to make a decision, perhaps out of deference to his age, perhaps because he had been first on the wall. Johnson, keeping one hand on the rock, removed his spectacles, wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. The urgency of reaching this place had given him an adrenal strength that now was rapidly ebbing away as if to follow what had been his last fragile hope for the fallen boy. Tired, hungry, balanced gingerly on his holds, he felt his legs begin to shake; slight cramps had developed in the lower muscles of his calves.

Calloway looked up in the direction of the summit that towered above them, merging now into what had become a granite-colored sky. He seemed disgruntled, impatient to be on his way, to separate himself from this death and the failure of which it spoke. When he brushed back a shock of his brown hair and looked intently at Johnson again, Johnson sensed the younger man had reached the far limits of whatever refinement had prevented him so far from simply taking charge; and even out of his exhaustion and reluctance to state a position the younger man might challenge, Johnson discovered in himself a need to preserve his place.

"We'll have to bivouac," he said.

"Right."

"There's room on that ledge for two——"

"I think we should do the overhang," Calloway cut in—and it was clear he had worked it out, was sure of himself. "According to the book, that's the standard site. There's room enough up there for six."

"We'd be burning our bridges——"

"We can go on up and finish the face in the morning."

"I don't know," Johnson said.

"I've read the route description," Calloway said. "It doesn't sound bad; I'm frankly not worried about it. We can go one rope of four or two ropes of two: whichever you like. Once we're up there, we can walk down the east ridge. No problem.

"Look," he said. "There's no point in spending a rotten night."

"Do you think that other boy will be up to doing the overhang?"

"He'll do what we tell him to do," Calloway said. "What about this one? We'll need the rope. We can tie him off here or cut him loose."

Johnson poked a finger to his eye where, under the lid, a speck still burned. The younger man had spoken without feeling, and it was not so much this fact that troubled Johnson (he understood it as a logical and useful attitude to hold) but the fact that he could not quite do the same, that when he spoke he knew he would hear along the edges of his voice traces of the pulse of loss he felt.

"I guess there's not much point in tying him off," he said finally. "Not if we're going on. One of us should be up there with the other one, though."

"Go ahead," Calloway said. He seemed more relaxed now that they had reached a decision. "I'll take care of it. What about your wife? Will it bother her?"

"She won't like it, but she's been through this kind of thing before. She'll be all right."

"She's lovely," Calloway said. He had fished a clasp knife from his pocket. Johnson watched as the younger man drew the long blade out with the disk of his nail. The compliment had struck him as gratuitous and he did not respond to it.

"Give me a couple of minutes up there," he said. Then, as he turned to climb, he realized he would not have enough rope to reach the ledge. Calloway saw the problem at once.

"I'll give you a belay," he said. Folding the blade back into its handle, he returned the knife to his pocket and began to uncoil his rope. Johnson could not help feeling a little embarrassed, Calloway having so recently climbed unprotected to the same ledge. He called to Elizabeth, told her the plan, and then, the belay established, Calloway paying out rope from an easy, slouching stance, he went up.

The surviving boy sat on the ledge, in his blue parka, gazing vacantly out. His hands were placed on his lap in such a way that Johnson could see where the rope, during his efforts to stop the fall, had scorched the leather of the palms. He was a red-haired, freckled boy, and Johnson tried talking to him, tried to comfort him as best he could, but the boy would not speak, only nodded his head or shook it or simply gazed out at the visible horizon of high mountains and dark, lightning-illuminated cloud.

The ledge was rough, even smaller than Johnson had remembered. When he removed his pack and sat next to the boy, he felt their shoulders touch. The rope, anchored to the wall behind them, bent sharply over the edge of the shelf; and although Johnson did not wish to look at it, he forced himself to, watched it unblinkingly until, suddenly freed of its burden, it sprang lightly up. He wondered then how long it would take for the body to fall and whether or not the sound of it striking the earth might be heard at a vertical distance of almost 1000 feet. He felt an oppressive sense of inevitability. Removing his spectacles, closing his eyes for a moment, he was grateful for what had become a remote yet persistent rumble of thunder.

"I'm sorry about your friend," he said quietly, repeating what he had said before.

"He's my stepbrother," the boy said. And during the time it took for the others to come up, and even after that, these were the only words he spoke.

• • •

In reduced light, from a standing belay position established by Calloway just below the ledge, Elizabeth payed out rope to the younger man as he climbed on a bold diagonal to the overhang and then, with astonishing swiftness, built a near catwalk of stirrups from the wall to its outer lip. He trailed the belay rope behind him as if it were nothing more than an obligation, and when he stood in the last of the stirrups, his left fist balled into a crack at the edge of the overhang, he leaned out and peered up in what had become his familiar reconnaissance of route, and then, without hesitation once he had hauled up a great belly of slack so as not to be impeded by the rope behind him, he reached up with his right hand, kicked his foot free of the last stirrup, swung out over 1000 feet of space, hung there for a fraction of a second, then went cleanly up and over.

Johnson shook his head. He looked at Elizabeth, saw across the pale, tired planes of her face her frank regard for what Calloway had done. It would be easy for the rest of them to follow, protected from above by the young man whose confident cry of "Climb!" they heard already come indistinctly down.

Elizabeth went first, moving surely to the overhang itself, pausing, then going out from stirrup to stirrup until she stood in the last stirrup and Johnson, who sat on the small rough ledge, belaying her from behind, felt a clutch of fear as he saw this woman who had been his companion through all his adult years and who was the mother of his sons poised in a place almost identical to that where the lead boy had stood just prior to his fall; and when Johnson heard her familiar voice call for tension on the upper rope and saw her scrabble finally up and safely out of sight, he felt such relief as to make him weak, and he sighed and wiped his face.

"Go ahead," he said hoarsely to the surviving boy, once the ropes were secured. The boy was brave, possessed of a courage not buttressed by experience or any special skill. He went awkwardly up and out and over, his wash-blue eyes still traumatized with shock, his legs shaking badly all the while he stood in the stirrups under the dusky overhang, his hands stuttering from hold to hold, trailing obediently behind him the rope from which less than one hour ago the body of his stepbrother had been cut away.

Wearily, Johnson stood. His own legs were unsteady, his shoulders sore where the straps of his pack had chafed them. By the time he had knotted the rope around his waist and ascended to the overhang, the sky had grown so dark he had to wait for flashes of lightning in order to see clearly the ghost-white webbing of the stirrups that advanced outward from the cliff, appearing now as if they had been driven into something as insubstantial as the air itself that eddied indecisively against the face, agitated by what he guessed would prove a quick rising of the wind.

He moved cautiously from stirrup to stirrup, taking them and their carabiners with him as he went, hearing the clink and jingle of the metal as it collected around him, sensing through his finger tips the building charge of atmospheric electricity, straining his ears to hear the warning buzz, hearing only the still-distant roll of thunder, calling to Calloway for tension at last, feeling the rope pull swiftly and hard against him, hoping briefly that it would, in fact, hold him as he let it take his weight, leaned back against it out over the dark void, its engulfing dimensions clear only in the flashes of lightning that would illuminate the sky and earth for several seconds now before they flickered out and the artillery of thunder would boom along the distant range; reaching awkwardly in under the overhang to unclip the last of the stirrups, groping tiredly for some purchase on the sharp-edged rock as, from above, Calloway applied his strength to the rope; kicking and thrashing until at last he managed to deliver himself in the absence of all grace to the abundant area above the overhang where Elizabeth sat next to the younger man, combing out her long brown hair as if she were at the dressing table in the bedroom of their Denver home, and the surviving boy gazed vacantly out, and Calloway popped up and stretched and said, in his cultivated accents: "Good show. Fine. Now let's eat."

• • •

For a while, the lightning played along the far peaks, then the storm collected itself and moved off into the east, leaving behind its unfulfilled promise of rain and the light of a luminous moon. The temperature of the air began to drop, and by the time they had eaten their rations of food and Calloway had brewed tea for them all on the small Primus stove he had fished from his pack, the surfaces of the rock around them were damp to touch. Elizabeth sat next to the younger man in the area of what had become their kitchen. Johnson, separated from her by the surviving boy, watched as she applied fresh lipstick, a rust red he knew, close in color to that of the parka she now wore. He could read nothing in this old and feminine gesture except her habit of paying attention to her appearance wherever she happened to be; and yet when she pulled her lips together and recapped the small gold tube, he was surprised by a desire to have her sit next to him and sensed at the same time how awkward it might be to change positions, how she, or even Calloway, might be amused. Briefly, out of some as-yet-indistinct kinship of soul, he put his hand on the knob of the surviving boy's knee.

"How are you doing?" he said.

"OK," the boy replied, but he was half-hearted.

"We were lucky we missed the rain."

"I know."

"My name is Nils," he said. "What's yours?"

"Perry."

"Where do you live?"

"Durango."

"Have you done much climbing before this?"

"No."

Johnson nodded. Over the hiss of the stove he could hear the others talking. They talked easily, as if instead of just having met during this encounter on the wall, they had known and liked each other awhile. In his relationship with Elizabeth, played as it had been until now to the beat of his own drum, he had never experienced anything more than the most innocuous sort of jealousy. She had been so doggedly loyal to him that he had more than once in the privacy of his thoughts charged against her a lack of imagination. Now, in the context of her recent efforts to assert herself and the presence of this young, able and magnetic man, he felt a rising threat and she, whom he had taken quite for granted these many years, seemed to become more desirable, even precious, as she moved in spirit away from him.

Later, when Calloway suggested to him they begin next morning in two ropes of two, Johnson, his own practical judgment arguing against it, found that he had agreed. A consecutive rope of four with Calloway in the lead would, in spite of its slowness, he thought, be almost perfectly safe. But the younger man had made his suggestion in such a way as to cast no doubt upon Johnson's ability to lead his own rope; and, therefore, to argue against the suggestion once it had been made would have been, it seemed to Johnson, a confession of inadequacy. In spite of his fatigue, he thought he had climbed well in the first 1000 feet and was reasonably confident that he and Elizabeth could manage to complete the wall, if not with Calloway's finesse, at least with competence. It was only after a general agreement to proceed in two ropes of two that the surviving boy, for the first time, ventured a comment of his own.

"Can I go with you?" he asked Johnson, his voice still unsteady but loud enough for the others to hear.

"Fine," Calloway said at once, as if he sensed the boy did not quite trust him. "Elizabeth and I will lead. We'll take the spare rope. If there's any problem, we can all join up."

"Is that all right with you, Nils?" he heard her ask.

"Sure. Fine," he said. But he felt as if in a game of chess he had been tempted by his opponent into making a move the consequences of which he could not quite anticipate; and he wondered if his voice had betrayed his uncertainty.

Three of them lay down then and tried to sleep in their respective places on the ledge. The last thing Johnson remembered seeing was the silhouette of Calloway, who continued to sit cross-legged, gazing out where the moon rose, sipping his tea.

• • •

It went well in the first 400 feet. Then, perhaps no longer concerned, Calloway and Elizabeth began to move ahead. At 500 feet above the bivouac ledge, they were one full lead beyond Johnson and the boy; at 600 feet above the ledge, they were no longer in sight. An early wind had risen in the northeast and was blowing hard against the face. The surfaces of the rocks were cold to touch.

Johnson blew on his finger tips, squinted through his spectacles at the route above. He had reached a difficult section and was having trouble making his moves. He guessed the angle of the rock to be 80 degrees here, the small holds it provided infrequent and awkwardly distributed, so that twice he had found the only way he could shift his position and advance was to move down several inches and then reascend, placing his left foot where his right had been. He had tried to protect himself as well as he could, but the wall here was smooth and the few cracks it provided were shallow and he had used up all of his smaller pitons. Eighty feet below, anchored to the wall and belaying from stirrups, the surviving boy handled the rope indifferently, as if to him it was not conceivable that a man like Johnson could fall.

He closed his eyes, pressed his cheek against the rock. Transmitted through it he could hear the remote sound, no louder than the ticking of his watch, of Calloway banging a piton somewhere into the face above. He wanted to call for help, his pride would have allowed for that, but he knew he would not be heard in this wind and at this distance, knew if he did call he would alert the boy below to the fact they were in trouble, and that could only make things worse.

He looked up, hoping to catch a glimpse of the others, but where the wall tilted toward a less acute angle, he saw only a blue sky full of racing cloud, which, in this perspective, gave him the giddy sense that the mountain itself was toppling forward. Elizabeth had left pitons in all the most difficult pitches so far and here, 15 feet above the reach of his hand, he could see two web stirrups tossing like bunting in the wind. To reach these stirrups, he would have to negotiate a section of rock that appeared so steep and generally faultless and barren of holds he could not imagine how Calloway had done it, or he himself had done it a decade earlier, as he must have, though he held no specific memory.

He hugged the wall, felt its harshness against him. He lifted his right foot to a nubbin, slowly let it begin to take his weight, moving up an inch at a time, searching with his left hand, finding a shallow striation into which he could place the pads of his finger tips. His heart beat rapidly. When he made his next delicate move up, he felt the rope tug at his waist, and he angrily called for slack and felt the pressure ease slowly and then saw the rope belly out on the wall below his right foot and knew the boy, who had previously given him too little, now was giving him too much, but he was hoarse and more afraid than he had been since his first years as a climber, and so, without trying to communicate any further with the boy, he committed himself to yet another slight move up this sheerness of rock, found at last a thin crack with his right hand, jammed his fingers in to the second joints, felt the skin rip away, the pulse of blood, a terrible relief to have gotten even this much purchase here, moved his left foot then to a nutlike nubbin of rock scarcely large enough to take the extreme edge of his shoe, felt the wind hurling itself against him as if to dislodge him, heard it wail and sigh in the large pockets and crevices above, saw the rope belly out along the wall below, as if the surviving boy had simply payed out all the slack he had and was waiting passively for this pitch to be over.

Johnson swore, felt a sudden brutal anger that she had left him here alone, had climbed on out of sight and sound with Calloway, who must have passed this way without effort. Why had she not waited as had been their plan? Why had she not left a solid piton, thought of him, remembered him? He closed his eyes against the wind, guessed in the irrationality of his anger and fear that she would be Calloway's now, and then someone else's, and someone else's after that. He knew how it went, how insubstantial a bond fidelity was once it had been breached a single time and knew for the first time, felt, even, how she must have felt: the humiliation, old, ancient, of the one betrayed.

He opened his eyes, swore. He was in a half-crouched position now, his right arm stretched at full length above him, his right hand jammed in the thin crack, his left hand flat against the wall, his right foot scraping uselessly, his left leg trembling as he let it take his weight and began to rise out of his half crouch, pushing down on his left foot, pulling up with his right hand; and he had drawn himself to almost a full standing position when the nutlike nubbin broke suddenly and cleanly away under his left foot and he fell abruptly, the right side of his face scraping along the wall, his spectacles tugging up from his ears, bobbling, his left hand flashing up too late to stop them as they swept away from him, buffeted and joggled by the wind to fall the 1600 feet to the ground above which the hung suspended now by the fingers of his right hand, his inarticulate cry cut off by the clutching dryness of his throat. Vision blurred, he felt the strength ebb quickly from his arm, and just as quickly, in what was left of the time he would have, he began to pull himself up, testing the wall with the edges of his shoes until he found at last a small lip that would take his weight, and he balanced gingerly up until he stood pressed flat, his face close to the bloody fingers that had saved him. Then, for five long minutes, with the wind slamming against him, its banshee sound in his ears, he did nothing more or less than breathe.

• • •

The crack was shallow. It took just over two inches of the six-inch piton he drove, but that much of it was tightly wedged and when he slipped a loop of rope over it, down the exposed shaft of the piton to the place where the piton entered the crack, and clipped a stirrup onto that loop of rope, the stirrup held his weight and enabled him then to step up slowly and reach the stirrups she had left, and from that point forward, the wall was pleasant again and he and the boy finished it without incident.

Elizabeth and Calloway were waiting at the summit, sitting together in the lee of an upthrust slab of rock.

"Hello, Nils," she said offhandedly. But then she noticed the blood on his hand and the fact that he was not wearing his glasses and she seemed concerned, he thought, when she asked him what had happened.

"I was in the middle of a scramble," he told her. "The wind took them."

"Are you all right?"

"Yes. I'm fine."

"They weren't right for you, anyway," she said.

He smiled tiredly. She seemed like an old friend, the impassivity of her expression familiar, welcome; but she had left him, he sensed it, had gone farther away than she had ever gone before.

"He used to wear horn-rims," she explained to Calloway. "They made him look dignified."

Calloway laughed.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

It was then they heard the sobs of the surviving boy, whom they had overlooked as they talked. He was sitting on a rock with his face in his hands as if somehow he were ashamed. The wind was blowing his red hair. Johnson went over, sat next to him, put a hand on his shoulder.

"It's all right," he said quietly. "We know how you feel."

For a while, the boy's shoulders continued to shake, and Johnson felt a tightness in his own throat and a gathering sense of loss. He looked up at the sky, where the clouds sped by under the impetus of the quick wind. It would be near twilight, he guessed, by the time the four of them got down. Then he and Calloway would go and together they would bury the dead.