The Wall Read Online Free PDF Page B

steeled and tempered and psyched for this thing. Once Anasazi was finished, Hugh reckoned each of them could slide back into the arthritis and skin cancer and mortality that awaited them.
    Lewis spoke his condolences to the young woman’s departed soul. He saluted her as “one of us,” and raised his glass of tonic water.
    “Bismullah,” whispered Hugh. Lewis looked at him. Louder, he said, “In the name of God.”
    “God? We’re dabbling in religions now?”
    “Cultures,” said Hugh. “The Arabs say it before entering a place. It keeps them safe.”
    “Do tell.” Lewis wanted to see how infected he was.
    “You know,” Hugh waved at the air. “From them.”
    “ ‘Them’? You’ve been in the land of the heathen too long. This is America, bro. Not eleventh-century Islam.”
    “It goes back before Islam, long before that. Primal fears. They have their names for them, we have ours.”
    “To guilt, ignorance, and the id,” said Lewis.
    Hugh eyed the photo, and it showed sections of the doomed climb off to the side. In the upper corner, like a bullet hole, stood Cyclops Eye.
    “The rangers will find her,” Lewis said. “They’ll get her home.” He was studying Hugh, looking for chinks in the armor. It was Hugh who had dealt with the slaughter, Hugh who had blood on his sleeve, Hugh who might have weakened.
    “She’d want us to carry on,” Hugh reassured him. “It’s what I’d want.”
    “Me, too,” said Lewis. “So we’re good for it?”
    “Of course.”
    “Do me a favor.” Lewis paused, eyes furtive.
    “Sure.”
    “How about some teeth?”
    “What?”
    “A smiley face. Or at least keep the worst of it under the table, you know, about the body getting stolen. Rachel’s not in the mood.”
    “She’s not feeling well?”
    “We had a little argument.” Lewis tossed more peanuts at his mouth. “No worries. She’ll be coming any minute. She can’t wait to catch up with you.”
    “Me, too.”
    Lewis suddenly noticed the photo, as if it had sneaked up on them. “I hit Camp Four and did some more due diligence.”
    Camp Four was a sort of dumping ground for climbers from around the world, a motley base camp for all the big walls. People had once occupied it like homesteaders, planting themselves for years. The petrol station that hid it from civilian view was gone, but so was much of the camp’s ghetto comportment. In theory at least, the park service limited climbers’ stays to a couple of weeks. The worst of the shantytown shelters had disappeared and been replaced by ordinary dome tents, if only because a used dome tent could be had for the price of a good sheet of plastic. The nightly twinkle of campfires surrounded by hard-core storytellers was a bygone thing, especially this year when the drought had parched the forest to dry tinder. But for all the changes, Camp Four was still the place to get your information. The latest beta pooled there like water in an oasis.
    Hugh and Lewis were not staying at Camp Four. Lewis was chagrined. He felt like a traitor for taking a room at the lodge, but Rachel had put her foot down. She said she’d paid her dues in Camp Four, crawling up off the ground and out from tents for too many mornings of her life. Either they rented a room or she stayed home. When Lewis had called him about the matter, Hugh told him he was on Rachel’s side. Let’s save our suffering for the wall.
    Until the climb began, Hugh was very happy to have his own shower and toilet and a bed with sheets and a pillow. And his own rental car, his own entrance, his own exit. Friendship was one thing, but Hugh had outgrown the sort of camaraderie that once fueled their stolen rides on freight trains from Denver, and their hitchhiking in storms, and their making claustrophobic fear-and-loathing marathons through Utah and Nevada packed in Hugh’s VW Beetle.
    Hugh took out a small, thick, leather-bound book. Lewis called it the bible. Filled with hand-drawn maps and topographical