Читать книгу Yosemite Fall - Scott Graham - Страница 11

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Caught off guard by Carmelita Ortega’s speedy ascent, Chuck Bender didn’t react until his twelve-year-old stepdaughter was fifteen feet off the ground and climbing higher, her yellow T-shirt incandescent in the morning sun.

Chuck retrieved the growing slack in Carmelita’s climbing rope, sliding the line past his brake hand and through the belay device attached to his waist harness. The rope’s braided sheath warmed his skin as it slipped through his cupped palm.

Thin as a whiffle bat, her navy tights hanging in loose folds from her tiny thighs and calves, Carmelita balanced the rubber soles of her climbing shoes on the resin holds bolted to the climbing tower and grasped additional holds above her head with chalked fingers, hoisting herself up the wall.

“Take it easy,” Chuck called to her, pride edging his voice, as he took up the last of the slack in the rope. “Give me a chance to keep up, would you?”

She hesitated for only a heartbeat, then shinnied skyward, her helmeted head back, her moves smooth and fluid as she moved from hold to hold up the vertical tower.

Chuck shot a grin at Janelle, who stood beside him in a form-fitting fleece top, black yoga pants, and white sneakers. “You sure she hasn’t snuck off and done this before without our knowing it?”

His grin widened as he looked back up at Carmelita. A sweet spot, that’s where he found himself, three years into parenthood, on a working vacation with his family in beautiful Yosemite Valley in the heart of California’s Yosemite National Park. Everything was right in his world on this sunny mid-August morning. Perfect.

A loner turned sudden husband to Janelle and stepdad to Carmelita and Rosie three years ago, Chuck was well settled in his new life by now, taking off for morning runs with Janelle before the girls awoke, working at his computer in his small study in the back of the house during school hours, helping Janelle with household chores and the girls with their homework in the evenings. He mostly bid nowadays for archaeological work close to Durango, in the mountains of southern Colorado, assuring he made it home on weekends while he conducted the fieldwork portion of his contracts.

His morning runs kept him fit at forty-five, fifteen years Janelle’s senior, even as gray spread from his sideburns through the rest of his scalp, and new wrinkles pleated the edges of his mouth, mimicking the crow’s feet that for years had creased the sun-scorched corners of his eyes.

Carmelita continued her smooth ascent up the portable, forty-foot climbing tower, which was raised on hydraulic arms from the bed of a flatbed trailer attached to a parked semitruck at the edge of the Camp 4 parking lot. Her bravura climb in front of the couple dozen onlookers at the foot of the tower, so out of character for her, took Chuck aback. Such brash public displays weren’t like her. Rather, they were the province of her openly exuberant ten-year-old sister, Rosie.

Chuck took in an arm’s length of rope. Another sidelong glance revealed a happy smile splashed across Janelle’s face as she watched her older daughter’s confident moves up the tower.

Janelle’s smile reinforced what she’d told Chuck in their crew-cab pickup truck late last night, after the girls had fallen asleep in back as they’d driven from Colorado. She’d spoken softly, so as not to awaken the girls, of her pride at having passed the last of her paramedic training courses and the national certification test, her application now pending with the Durango Fire and Rescue Authority. Since moving north from Albuquerque to join Chuck in Durango three years ago, she’d taken fully to the outdoor lifestyle of the Colorado mountain town, hiking and camping with him and the girls, shopping at the local farmers’ market, and participating in the many group trail runs hosted by the Durango Running Club in the forested hills above town.

“She must have gotten this from you,” Janelle said at Chuck’s side, her olive face turned to the sky. Her dark hair, long and silky, hung free down her back, and a tiny, pink gemstone winked in the side of her small, pointed nose.

“Not me.” Chuck took up more slack, maintaining slight tension on the climbing rope to assure it would catch Carmelita the instant she fell—if she fell. “I was always a grunter. I climbed by force of will. But look at her. She’s defying gravity, and she’s doing it with pure grace.”

Carmelita passed the tower’s halfway point, moving higher despite the decreasing size and number of holds on the top portion of the structure. She grasped the undersized resin grips, dyed a rainbow of colors, with the tips of her fingers while keeping most of her weight on her toes. The climbing rope extended from her harness to a pulley at the top of the wall and back down to Chuck in the parking lot below. Her chestnut hair, gathered in a ponytail, gleamed in the sunlight beneath the back of her helmet. She showed no hint of fear as she passed thirty feet off the ground, nearing the top of the tower.

“You go, girl!” Janelle’s brother and Chuck’s assistant, Clarence, called to Carmelita from where he stood forty feet back from the base of the tower with the other onlookers, several of whom waited their turn to climb when Carmelita finished.

Clarence tucked his shoulder-length black hair behind his silver-earring-studded ears and raised his hands in a two-fisted salute, the sleeves of his black T-shirt climbing his pudgy upper arms, his jeans riding low on his hips beneath his sizable gut.

“Yeah! You go, girl!” Rosie echoed from where she stood at her uncle’s side.

Rosie’s stocky frame contrasted sharply with that of her slight sister. She could have been her uncle’s twin, however, with his squat physique and potbelly, if not for the difference in their ages.

“No way am I going up that thing,” Rosie declared. She hooked her thumbs through the belt loops of her shorts. “No frickin’ way.”

“Rosie!” Janelle admonished. Her reprimand was halfhearted, however, focused as she was on Carmelita three stories overhead. Janelle put her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Isn’t that high enough?” she asked Chuck.

“She might send it,” Chuck replied, agog. “She might actually top out.”

Carmelita continued her ascent, the widely spaced holds at the top of the tower presenting her no discernible difficulty until, as if by levitation alone, she was forty feet off the ground and there was no more climbing to be done. After giving the top of the fiberglass tower a tap, she leaned back in her harness as Chuck had instructed, her feet spread wide on the wall. She shook out her hands at her sides while he held her in place, his brake hand gripping the rope.

“How’s the view from up there, sweetness?” he called up to her.

She looked at the granite cliffs lining the valley thousands of feet above the tower. “I’ve got a ways to go.”

At Chuck’s side, Janelle shivered. “Don’t get any big ideas, niña.”

Chuck relaxed his grip and lowered Carmelita, the rope running through his palm. “I’m glad I belayed her,” he said to Janelle as Carmelita walked backward down the wall while he played the rope past his brake hand. “As light as she is, I wouldn’t have wanted to trust the auto-belay to kick in and catch her.”

When Carmelita reached the ground, the tower attendant, blond haired, thickly bearded, and in his mid-twenties, approached from where he’d been talking with a female climber his age. The attendant’s broad shoulders extended from his tank top straight as a crossbeam. His powerful quads filled the legs of his shorts. The woman climber, waiting her turn on the tower beyond the line of waist-high boulders between the parking lot and campground, wore a magenta bikini top and shiny black climbing tights cut low across her hips. Her bare stomach was tanned and flat. A gold ring sparkled where it pierced the skin above her navel.

At the foot of the tower, the heavily muscled attendant untied the rope from Carmelita’s waist. “Good going,” he praised her, offering his meaty palm for a high-five.

Carmelita slapped his hand and pranced over to Janelle and Chuck, a grin plastered on her face. “That was a blast.”

“You made it look easy,” Janelle said.

“It was easy.”

Chuck lifted an eyebrow at the bright-eyed youngster before him. “Not for mere mortals.”

He freed the climbing rope from his harness, allowing the attendant to set about reattaching the rope to the cylindrical auto-belay mechanism at the tower’s base.

Carmelita’s white teeth flashed in a smile. “When can I do it again?”

Chuck cocked his head at the climbers grouped and waiting behind the line of boulders separating the parking area from Camp 4. Jimmy O’Reilly stood at the front of the group, deep in conversation with Bernard Montilio, the two men clearly enjoying the opportunity to catch up with each other this morning, as the planned reunion of old climbing buddies, including Chuck, got underway.

With Jimmy and Jimmy’s longtime climbing partner Thorpe Alstad as their unofficial leaders, the other aging climbers attending the reunion this weekend had spent entire summers and significant portions of falls, winters, and springs at Camp 4 twenty years ago. They’d teamed with each other in twos, threes, and fours to put up ever-more-challenging routes on the valley’s towering walls, all the while bickering like family over who among them was the most talented climber and whose completed routes were toughest.

“The line got pretty long behind Jimmy while you were up there,” Chuck said to Carmelita. “I’m glad we came over first thing this morning.” He hesitated, avoiding Janelle’s gaze, the idea coming to him even as the words formed in his mouth. “The only way you’re going to get to climb any more this weekend is if you enter the Slam.”

“The what?” Carmelita asked.

Janelle stiffened beside Chuck as he continued. “The Yosemite Slam, Camp 4’s big climbing competition. It starts tomorrow and runs for two days, through Sunday. That’s why the tower’s here. Jimmy started the Slam a few years ago to raise money for his nonprofit organization, the Camp 4 Fund, which supports the campground. The competition has gotten bigger every year. Once it begins, entrants will be the only ones allowed on the tower.”

The reunion was Jimmy’s idea, timed to coincide with the Slam. Chuck had scheduled his Yosemite work, which called for him to explore a pair of confounding 150-year-old murders in the valley, to overlap with the get-together, too.

None of the reunion attendees had taken Jimmy up on his suggestion that they sign up for the Slam. In declining Jimmy’s offer, the climbers, all well into their forties, cited creaking joints and declining fitness. Chuck cited, as well, the tight timeframe he and Clarence faced to complete their work in the valley.

Carmelita begged Janelle. “Can I do it, Mamá?”

Janelle turned to Chuck, her smile replaced by a wary frown. “A climbing competition? Aren’t those for adults?”

“The best sport climbers in the world these days are teenagers. Their strength-to-weight ratios are off the charts thanks to the fact that—” he encircled Carmelita’s upper arm with a finger and thumb “—they’re so skinny.”

“But that’s teenagers you’re talking about.”

“I’ll be thirteen in December,” Carmelita reminded her mother.

“I don’t want to think about that.”

“Uncle Clarence said I’ll be driving in two years, with my learner’s permit.”

Janelle glared at her brother, who ducked his head, hiding a grin. She turned back to Carmelita. “Remember what we always say, m’hija. Cars are weapons. You have to be very careful with them. And two years is a long time. A very long time.” She shot another glowering look at Clarence, her brows furrowed.

He raised his hands in defense. “Carm’s getting to be a big girl. Like it or not, hermana, two years from now, your daughter’s gonna have a steering wheel in her hands. She’s gonna be one weaponized young lady.”

When the furrow between Janelle’s brows deepened, Clarence raised his hands farther, his palms out. “Just talking the truth to you.” He lifted his shoulders close to his ears in an exaggerated shrug. “What can I say?”

Janelle turned her back on her brother and crossed her arms in front of her.

“Carm was a natural up there,” Chuck told her.

She shifted her elbows, loosening her arms. “Do they actually have a kids’ section?”

“Maybe. Either way, though, I’d say she should enter the open division. The way she climbed that tower just now, you never know.”

Carmelita’s face glowed, but Janelle pursed her lips. “You mean, where she’d be going up against anybody and everybody?”

“All the other female climbers, anyway.”

“But that was the first time she’s ever climbed anything in her whole life. You just got her the helmet and climbing shoes last week.”

Chuck glanced up at the tower. “This is why we got them for her. Besides, I can’t imagine she’d have any chance of winning. Although I will say, climbing isn’t as much about experience and repetitive practice as other sports. It’s a matter of body control and sense of balance—which, clearly, Carm’s got by the bucketful. From what I just saw, I don’t think she’d have anything to be ashamed of.”

Carmelita beamed at him. “Really?”

Chuck cupped the back of her head in his hand and looked into her luminous, hazel eyes. “Really.”

“Cool,” Rosie declared. She jigged at her sister’s side, her arms swinging. “You should do it for sure, Carm.”

Janelle rested her hand over Chuck’s at the back of Carmelita’s head. “You really think you want to try it?”

Carmelita nodded, bouncing up and down on her toes.

“You won’t be sad when you lose?”

“If she loses,” Chuck said.

“No,” Carmelita told her mother. “I won’t. I promise.”

Rosie chimed in. “But I’ll be sad for her. Would that be okay, Mamá?”

The corners of Janelle’s mouth ticked upward and her face softened. “Okay,” she said. “You guys win.”

At the base of the tower, Jimmy tied a re-woven figure eight into the end of the climbing rope with a well-practiced flip of his fingers. He clipped the loop into his harness. Still exchanging small talk with Bernard, he gave the rope a tug, assuring it ran from his waist, up through the pulley at the top of the tower, and back down to the auto-belay mechanism.

Faded tattoos purpled Jimmy’s sinewy forearms below the short sleeves of his plaid, cotton shirt. A long, braided beard, cinnamon cut with silver, curved outward from his jaw like a scorpion’s tail. Stringy, gray-streaked red hair fell to his shoulders from the back of the battered straw cowboy hat he wore low over his eyes like a country singer. His brown canvas carpenter pants clung to his narrow waist, and the top buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a thick nest of chest hair. A red bandanna—his signature style statement for as long as Chuck had known him—was knotted around his neck.

“Show us what you can do, Jimmy,” Chuck called to him.

“You’re the man,” Bernard cheered from behind the line of boulders. He tapped the sides of his legs with his hands, a quick rat-a-tat beat. “Let’s see how much gas you’ve got left in the old tank.”

Bernard’s pasty face and jowly cheeks spoke of his current life as an office-bound attorney for a downtown San Francisco law firm, as did his trendy, turquoise-framed glasses. His ample waistline pressed at his pleated khaki shorts and short-sleeved dress shirt, while his short brown hair showed only a hint of gray.

He turned to Carmelita. “And you’re the climbing-est girl of them all,” he congratulated her. He continued to tap his legs with his hands and counted off in time with the taps, “One . . . two . . . three, four, five. You’re the girl who’s got the jive.”

Jimmy settled his fingertips on two holds above his head. “You guys are next,” he called over his shoulder to Chuck and Bernard.

“Not me,” Chuck said. “No way.”

“I’m ground-based these days,” said Bernard.

“You’re scared you can’t do it anymore,” Jimmy chided.

“You got that right,” the two of them said in unison.

Jimmy tightened his grip on the holds at the base of the climbing tower and lifted himself off the ground. He ascended the large, easy-to-grasp holds on the lower portion of the tower smoothly, the belay mechanism automatically taking up the slack in the rope as he climbed. Each of his moves was precise, his fingers set, his feet poised on holds beneath him. He angled left and right, scaling the wall with no apparent strain, his decades of climbing experience evident.

He passed the halfway point on the tower and reached above his head for a small hold thirty feet off the ground. Only two of his fingertips fit atop the tiny protrusion, which sloped outward, providing little purchase.

He grunted as he transferred his weight to the hold, revealing his first sign of effort. His knuckles turned white as he clung to the tower. Then his fingertips slipped from the hold and he fell.

The ratchet in the auto-belay mechanism should have kicked in, catching him when he dropped no more than a few inches. Instead, he cartwheeled away from the wall and plummeted toward the ground, his arms and legs flailing.

He screamed as he fell, the climbing rope zipping unimpeded through the mechanical belay device bolted to the base of the tower.