The Wall Read Free Page B

been deep in Indian country up there, and had selected for a deft, light strike, for ballet, not biceps.
    He touched her shoulder. It was basic and necessary. He had to make contact, and introduce himself, and get steady. This was real.
    She was still warm. Before his eyes, even as he touched her, she lost her color. The rosy cheeks went gray. Her lips bleached to wax. He drew his hand away.
    He circled the slab, and it was like going to the dark side of the moon. The real destruction crouched back here. Her envelope of skin had ruptured up and down her side. With all the blood, it was hard to tell the rope from the entrails. Her snapped ribs showed like something in a butcher shop. Her face—so pretty from the other side—sagged in buckled folds.
    “Why you?” he whispered, partly to her, but mostly to himself. He regretted finding her. He regretted her death. Most of all, he regretted the waste.
    She was young, maybe twenty, but that was not the real pity of it. Climbers are realists. Risk confers both gain and loss, and youth had nothing to do with it. Living in other lands, seeing the ravages of famine and disease, Hugh had come to view this kind of risk as an extravagance, a kind of personal theater. For him, the tragedy was that he would forever remember this young woman, who had sewn precious stones into her hair and silver into her earlobes, as nothing more than a carcass.
    He’d seen worse. Ride the mountains long enough and you were bound to meet the dead. He’d found avalanche victims squeezed into packages no bigger than a TV set, their faces looking up from under his boots and crampons. He’d watched climbers take videos of quick-frozen limbs and torsos scattered on the glaciers beneath Everest. He’d helped retrieve a climber from the base of the Diamond on Longs Peak, just rags and sticks.
    He went to his pack, glad to turn away from the stench and ugliness, and found an old green tarp. He snapped it open and covered what he could of her, head first. Only now did he notice one foot turned upside down. Her bones would be jelly.
    He began pinning the tarp in place with chunks of granite. For the time being, there was no wind to disturb it, and a few rocks weren’t going to deter animals from rooting underneath while he went to report her. But his handiwork gave shape to the mess. It closed off the bedlam in his mind. When the rangers arrived, they would find her neatly tucked atop the slab. The stones and tarp made final his part of her burial. It signed him out of the terrible event. They could have his tarp.
    As if approving, the forest rustled.
    Hugh glanced around. The trees gently creaked and dry leaves rattled like coins. A primal thought sprang up: Her spirit’s still lingering.
    He didn’t dismiss the possibility. People assumed geologists were earthbound and geocentric, but even the ones who were carried lucky coins or a rabbit’s foot. Searching for oil and gas involved the hard data of shot graphs and core samples, but also a good bit of the witching rod and a vigilance for secrets layered deep underfoot.
    In the Arab countries, and Nigeria, and Louisiana, he’d shared field camps with experts trained to decipher the stratigraphy of hundreds of millions of years, who nonetheless spoke of biblical creation as a fact. Upon discovering Hugh was a mountaineer, one geologist had begged him to help explore Mount Ararat in Turkey, convinced the ark was frozen into its summit snow. Some oilmen lived like desert ascetics in four-wheel drive, in constant motion through faraway sands, chewing khat, smoking hash, taking peyote, having visions. These were the soothsayers who provided Tony the Tiger with his oil.
    Hugh knew the species. He knew himself. Superstition came with the territory.
    His progression to geology—from a rock hound in second grade, cracking open egg-shaped geodes, to a master of science with a license to roam the ends of the earth—had left him more pagan than American. Climbing