The Wall Read Online Free PDF Page A

watch in action, but he had ungodly reach and speed and fists like iron chunks, perfect for slugging it out with Yosemite’s famous cracks.
    Hugh took a seat at the little table with Lewis. Suddenly his legs felt heavy. He let his back muscles sag, and gave a silent sigh. For the first time in many hours, he could afford to be weak.
    Lewis didn’t greet him outright. There was no need. They had a shared history that went back to second grade at Whittier Elementary School, and they were about to be tied together every minute for the next seven days or so. To Lewis, Hugh had been off on a chore, no more. He threw another nut at his mouth. He offered the paper cup of them to Hugh. He waited.
    Hugh was famished, but waved it off. “I’m a little dry,” he said. The creature had eaten his pear. Hugh couldn’t get over that. When, at their insistence, he had led the rangers back to the site, his pack was lying open. The hermit had stolen his pear. Which was the least of it. But also the essence of it. The monster had felt so comfortable in stealing her body, he’d paused to help himself to Hugh’s piece of fruit. It was all about territory.
    Lewis called to the bartender. The man took his time coming over. He was shaved bald with some kind of Chinese calligraphy tattooed at the base of his skull. “More peanuts?” he said. Hugh got it. Lewis hadn’t been much of a customer.
    “Water,” said Hugh. “And I’ll have what he’s having.”
    “Water with your water.” A wise guy. “You want some gin or vodka to go with it?”
    Once upon a time, you drank the demon and raged all night, and next morning cleared the toxins out of your system on the wall. Or took the party with you, jugs of wine, hits of acid, doobies, mushrooms, name it. Great routes had been climbed in a hallucinogenic fog. But that was a thousand years ago, and tomorrow morning was almost upon them. “Just straight tonic water, the same as him,” Hugh said.
    “While you’re at it,” Lewis said, “how about changing the channel? And tweak the volume. Oh, and yeah, more peanuts.”
    The bartender signed “cool” with his horn fingers, and moseyed off.
    “We almost went looking for you,” Lewis said. “Almost. Rachel wanted to. She drove up in a rental car this afternoon and thought you’d be here. I told her you were out communing with the be-wilderness. I said to just let you ramble in the brambles.”
    Hugh smiled faintly. Lewis was clowning with his Beat speak, dishing up vestiges of auld lang syne, trying to set the tone. He saw El Cap as their time machine. It was going to take them back and make life simple and sweet again.
    “It’s good she didn’t come,” Hugh told him.
    “That’s what I told her,” Lewis said. “Glass is having his usual struggle session. Like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill. So who won, you or the water?”
    “You didn’t hear?” Hugh was surprised. The past four hours loomed in him. The earth had split open and swallowed a woman. Surely word had spread.
    Lewis heard his tone. His face clouded and he darted a glance at the TVs perched in the corners to search out his own information, looking for news of some disaster or terrorist attack.
    Just then the screens flickered to a new channel and the volume dropped to a reverent hush. Hugh looked up and the bartender had found them a nearly comatose PGA Seniors tournament.
    “Cute,” said Lewis.
    The bartender brought Hugh’s tonic water. He set down a bowl brimming with too many peanuts, as if feeding beggars. Lewis didn’t look at him.
    Hugh told Lewis about the fall and his return with the rangers, and the unbelievable body theft, and their search, still ongoing. He kept it brief, on purpose. The last thing two aging mountain men needed was a bloody foreboding. Superstition could kill a climb before you ever left the earth.
    “You are shitting me,” Lewis said when he finished. “Here, in the Valley? That’s straight out of Frankenstein or