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again. She’s kneeling in the grass, a few feet from Oso, with one hand tentatively extended toward him. “Is it all right to pet him? God, he looks like he’s thinking about taking my arm off,” she says, laughing nervously. My eyes are drawn straight down her loose shirt where two perfect breasts, as pale and smooth as the rest of her, float above the purple fabric. It takes a conscious act of will to lift my gaze.
    When I look up, I see that Kim is watching my face. I wonder if this is why she’s brought Sunny along with her—to try to recruit us. She’s the honey to attract some worker bees. If my father and I had been women, Kim probably would have brought some shirtless stud from the Hacky Sack circle. It shows she’s pretty cunning for an environmental activist. I kind of admire that.
    Grasping Oso’s collar, I hold his head close to my hip. “Go ahead,” I tell Sunny, “just be careful. He was abused.” It seems like a good time to start socializing the beast.
    “You poor thing!” Sunny says, touching his chest with her hand uncomfortably close to my thighs. Oso starts to lift his lips but then rolls his eyes up to meet mine with a sort of annoyed resignation. His lips droop back down as Sunny continues murmuring and stroking him. “Who would do such a thing to you, you big, beautiful creature. You’re really sweet, down deep inside, aren’t you?” Behind us my father makes another noise that might be a chuckle.
    They walk away a few minutes later. Watching them, I focus on Kim’s slender back instead of Sunny’s, and I feel that strange, inevitable attraction.
    “What do you think?” I ask my father.
    “Not bad, but I’m still married to your mom.”
    “I mean about the meeting tonight. The rally tomorrow.”
    “Sounds like a lost cause to me.” After a minute he adds, “There are two things worth fighting for, son. The things you can win and the things worth dying for.” He looks around the valley for a long time before meeting my eyes. “This isn’t either one.”

THREE
    R OBERTO DOESN ’ T SHOW up in the afternoon. I’m not too surprised that he’s late—promptness has never been among his few virtues. And he’d been reluctant to agree to meet us in the first place.
    “
Che
, what the hell do I want to see that asshole for?” he’d said to me a few weeks ago when I finally reached him through his parole officer in Durango. “Haven’t seen the dude in years and I like it that way.”
    I did my best to explain that Dad was different now, that he’d mellowed a little since accepting the fact that a ceiling had been imposed on his career and that his days in the Air Force were numbered. The time was right for reconciliation. My words on that count weren’t too persuasive—Roberto wasn’t interested in apologizing for ruining Dad’s career or not living the kind of straight life our father wanted him to. Finally, I got him to agree to meet us by simply begging. “C’mon, bro, do it for me. Do it for Mom. Do it for the family. What have you got to lose by climbing with us? Besides, I hear you’re getting weak, that you can’t climb for shit anymore.”
    The last part made him laugh. A few months before, I’d received a postcard from him that was forwarded from the AG’s Office in Cheyenne to my current assignment in Lander. The scrawled message told me to watch a certain cable channel at a certain time. Not owning a TV, I’d tuned in to the program at a local bar and found it to be some sort of special called “Generation Why?” on a sports channel. It featured extreme athletes doing all sorts of high-risk things and discussed the psychology that made them do it. A primary segment showed my brother free-soloing the Painted Wall in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
    I’d watched the segment with a combination of horror, envy, and awe. A camera team filmed Roberto moving easily, ropeless, up over two thousand feet of vertical rock on Colorado’s biggest wall. At