Point of Law Read online

  Instead of continuing our usual subtle but tense banter in which my father will attempt to degrade my career choice and voice his preference for something more “professional,” I’m surprised when he tries a new tack, mentioning Roberto for the first time himself.

  “Do your bosses know about your brother, Agent Burns?”

  “They know I’ve got one, but they don’t know about any of the trouble. It probably wouldn’t do my career much good if they found out.”

  This is something my father knows about firsthand. Just a few years ago he’d been on the verge of becoming one of the youngest generals in the Air Force. Then the crimes of his eldest son had come to the attention of the military. Dad ended up being denied further advancement. You don’t become a general, the ultimate leader of men, when you’ve sired a felon. Fortunately for me, though, the Wyoming AG’s Office doesn’t concern itself much with background checks on family members prior to promotion. I make a mental note to mention this additional benefit the next time we argue on the career subject, but don’t want to bring it up now that we’re finally talking about Roberto.

  “Do you know what he’s using these days?”

  “Not for sure. He’s banging—injecting—I know that much.”

  My father nods. Even in magazine photographs, the tracks of scabby pinpricks on my brother’s arms are hard to miss.

  “So that leads me to guess it’s either crank or heroin,” I say. After a moment I add quietly, “There’s not much out there that’s worse, Dad. At least we don’t have to worry anymore about him turning to harder drugs.”

  My father doesn’t say anything for a while. He just takes a few short pulls from my water bottle and stares up the canyon.

  The ledge is narrow where I’m slumped next to him. My feet and calves dangle over more than two hundred feet of space. I lean over and look down for the large black shape of my dog. Oso lays under the shade of a green-leafed cottonwood, staring straight up at us with his red tongue parting sharp white teeth. The dog is the cause of my current suspension—the deputy I supposedly assaulted had been trying to spear him with a shovel. I wave my hand at him and see the ears twitch forward.

  Taking back the water bottle from my father, I notice that one of his thick fists still holds the rope locked tight through his belay device.

  “By the way, Dad, I tied in. I’m off belay.”

  He nods. “Waiting for you to say it, son. Belay off.” Finally he releases his grip. I’m annoyed and embarrassed. I’ve violated one of his cardinal rules by failing to announce my status, but at least he’s too preoccupied to comment further.

  “Do you have a strategy for dealing with your brother when or if he shows up?” he asks.

  I take a deep breath. This is something I’ve been thinking about for weeks, ever since my suspension and the news about the pending development of Wild Fire Valley as a part of a Forest Service land swap. I’d convinced my father to fly in from the Pentagon to meet Roberto and me for a last climb here together—and an attempt to save my brother’s life. Despite a lot of mental effort, I’m still uncertain what our plan should be. A hard-core user like Roberto needs confinement and careful medication, something he’s not likely to submit to voluntarily. One thing I know for sure is that my father’s unconcealed animosity, born out of the impending termination of his career, won’t help things. Nor will my own distaste for the hard drugs I’ve devoted my professional life to combating. Persuading Roberto to swerve away from the path of self-destruction he’s speeding down won’t be easy, and there’s no place in any strategy for anger and recrimination.

  Climbing has always been the Burns family’s first drug of choice. La llamada del salvaje, as my mother describes it. The call of the wild. According to her it’s a sort of genetic flaw on my father’s side that has descended to Roberto and me. It’s a hunger we learned to feed by getting lethal amounts of air beneath our heels. The fear you feel free-climbing, hundreds or thousands of feet off the deck, and with just a skinny rope as backup, is like an illicit substance—once ingested it makes the sweet stuff called noradrenaline just ooze out from the adrenal glands. It blows through all the panic that comes from deadly heights, replacing it with a tingly sensation. Ecstasy. Exaltation. Rapture. The negative side effect is that it’s a little harder to replicate that feeling after each session. You have to push it a little further. Dad and I have learned to control our addiction—we’ve learned that there’s pleasure in just crawling up into the heights without needing to lay it all on the line for that hormonal surge. Roberto hasn’t.

  He reached for something even stronger. Starting in his early twenties he turned to pharmaceuticals to pump up the volume. He began with pot, mushrooms, and acid, then moved on to methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin. He was chasing the dragon, looking for a better and louder amp. On the frequent climbing trips we used to take together in my college days, he would sometimes offer me some. I’d never been interested. Even then, before having really seen the damage those drugs could do, I preferred a natural high, although I had occasionally smoked marijuana with him in my teenage years (something I still consider no more dangerous than beer). Roberto once told me he’d discovered that cocaine mixed with heroin—a speedball—could push him beyond climbing’s natural rush. It could take him places far further than the thrill of fighting ordinary gravity.

  “It’s just an ice cream habit,” he’d explained when I’d given him a hard time about the hard drugs. “I got it under control, bro.”

  Right.

  But it isn’t just the drugs, although they’ve become the center of Roberto’s life. It’s the way he interacts with people, the way he thinks, even the way he climbs. Roberto has become addicted to living on the very edge. If he isn’t climbing, he’s slamming a needle deep into a vein. If he isn’t surrounded by the circle of fast-living friends who worship him as the fastest of them all, then he’s brawling with anyone he perceives as having done something unjust. And if he isn’t utterly free, then he’s caged in a county jail somewhere. Recently there had even been a brief stint in a federal prison. Roberto has happily danced so far out on the edge and for so long that it’s a miracle the void hasn’t yet sucked him in.

  Do I really believe we can change that? It would require almost a repolarization of my brother’s soul. I know, even now, that this is simply a last hurrah before the odds catch up with him. There’s no chance in hell he’ll ever become an ordinary citizen, responsible with his life and his future, and constrained by the rules that civilization demands.

  So I say to my father, “No strategy, Dad. Just show him that we love him, that if he keeps this up we’ll be the ones who suffer.”

  My father shakes his head and uncharacteristically expresses some emotion in his voice while looking at the red and gold stone of the canyon’s opposite wall. “Shit, Anton, it’d be hard to suffer much more. It’d be a relief if he were dead.”

  You’d think a son would be shocked to hear his father talk about his brother like that. But I’m not. In my darkest moments I often think the same thing. I’m tired of waiting for the telephone to ring late in the night; waiting for the quiet voice of some Colorado police officer to tell me that my brother’s dead.

  There isn’t much more to say than that.

  I close my eyes and recall a scene from this morning, just a few hours ago, when my father and I sped on the highway out of the seemingly endless suburbs of Tomichi in the predawn blackness, on our way to the valley. I’d been glancing over at my father’s deeply lined face while we talked, noticing how old it looked in the glow of the dashboard’s lights. His mouth opened suddenly. His eyes narrowed. I snapped my own eyes forward to the road. A big coyote was braced facing us in the middle of the lane. His eyes burned with green fire in the reflected heat of the headlights. The silver-tipped ruff of fur around his neck and shoulders was standing straight up. I swung the wheel hard to the left, onto the wrong side of the road, mashing the brake and throwing my big dog in the backsea
t across the truck. The coyote never even flinched.

  That coyote was just like Roberto. Totally defiant in the face of law and civilization, even when it’s coming at him seventy miles per hour in the form of three thousand pounds of rusty Japanese steel. Utterly audacious, reckless, and not long for this world. But beautiful all the same.

  I realize that my brother’s luck must soon run out, that the world won’t swerve away much longer. And that Roberto’s nuclear-powered élan combined with whatever sort of shit he likes to spike in his veins will vastly magnify the force of the inevitable collision. What I don’t yet realize is just how many lives are about to be lost in the crash.

  Opening my eyes to the blue sky, I take up the sling of gear my father has laid between us. Without a word I add the pieces from the anchor I’d pulled below and slip it clanking over my head and one shoulder. Standing, I arch my neck upward and try to plot the course that will take me another rope length into the sky. My skin touches the warm, rough rock as I slide my fingers over the lip of a small contour above my head. The familiar texture of it for the first time in my life fails to give me a small thrill. For a moment I’m caught off balance, experiencing a sense of vertigo and dread I’ve never experienced before. This is a mistake, I tell myself, as I will the web of well-conditioned muscles in my forearms to grip with my fingers and hold me on the ledge. Something bad is going to happen. A cold sweat seeps out of my skin. I glance at my father and see him looking back curiously. Concerned.

  “Locked and loaded?” I ask, trying to reassure myself with the start of the short litany he’d drilled into Roberto and me as children. We examine the harness buckles and knots at each other’s waists.

  “Tight and right,” Dad responds, his voice puzzled.

  “On belay?”

  “Belay on.”

  “Climbing.”

  TWO

  IT TAKES MORE than an hour to rappel down the cliff’s four pitches. Oso’s yellow eyes track me all the way. But the beast doesn’t come out from the shade of the cottonwoods until my feet are on the stony canyon floor. There I pop the ropes out of the ATC and yell up to my father, who’s waiting on a ledge halfway down, that I’m off rappel. Oso finally lumbers to his feet, shakes some brambles from his woolly black coat, and approaches me with his head held low. His stump of a tail quivers in the air, not really swinging at all, when he bumps my hip with his broad snout. Over the rushing of the stream just a few feet away, I hear a low rumble from the dog’s chest. It’s his version of a purr. I rub Oso’s ears while watching my father slide down the last two pitches with the controlled grace of a spider.

  When Dad touches the ground, he too holds out a hand to scratch the beast’s massive head. Oso lifts his lips with a more audible growl and my father jerks back his hand.

  “Damn it, dog, I’m just trying to make friends,” my father growls in response.

  “He’ll come around,” I tell him. “He’s got to get to know you.” Then, after a moment’s thought, I add, “Actually, you may be better off trying to be someone else.” I can’t picture Oso warming up to my father in his current mood.

  Dad makes a mirthless noise like “Uh-huh” and turns away.

  I’ve already explained to him how it had taken a long, long time for the dog to even let me touch him. And I’d shown my father the parallel scars on one forearm from when I’d tried to take the liberty too soon. Eight weeks and eighteen stitches. It took that long to tame Oso’s savage heart enough for me to stroke him.

  I’d found Oso nine months before. He was chained to the back porch of a decrepit house outside Rawlins that was being used as a clandestine methamphetamine lab. The shaggy beast was supposed to scare away both cops and rival dealers. During my undercover investigation of the meth lab’s operators, I’d heard one of the suspects claim to have fed the dog a missing informant. Although I doubted it was really true, he’d certainly looked the part—a hundred and fifty pounds or so of unidentifiable breeding, malnourished muscle, open sores blowing with flies, and those enormous white teeth. He had the appearance and the demeanor of a starved grizzly bear.

  One hot afternoon, with the help of some deputies from the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office, I took down the lab and arrested its operators. At one point in the short fight, the monster on the back porch had to be pepper-sprayed when a deputy chased a suspect out through the rear door. Oso was lucky not to have been shot right then.

  Later on, after the arrests, the interviews, the paperwork, and the dismantling of the lab, I returned as the local officers managed to get him into a cage provided by the state’s Wildlife Control agency. They’d wrestled him in by using wire nooses on the ends of long metal poles. One of them was jabbing at him with a sharp-bladed shovel, seeing just how crazy he could make him before they carted him away. Blood from the beast’s lips and teeth ran down the cage’s steel bars as he tried to crunch through to get at his captors. Something about the plight of the tormented beast made me lose it. I knocked down the deputy with the shovel—I kicked his legs out from under him and punched him in the ribs as he fell. It took the three other officers to keep me from doing worse. Like jabbing him with the shovel, to see how he liked it.

  Despite the resulting and now-deferred charges for assault on a peace officer, I adopted the monster as my own. In some subconscious way, Oso reminded me of my brother.

  After weeks of giving love and receiving only the occasional slashing wound (for which I was lucky—his jaws have the power to snap bones), I finally convinced Oso that his days of abuse were over. Now he is cautiously devoted to me, yet reluctant to accept another’s touch and still, at times, even a little uncertain about mine.

  Because of his size and disposition, Oso continues to be an immense pain in my ass. In addition to the eighteen stitches, he’s torn apart three different rental homes when I left him alone for too long. He got me evicted from each of them. I’ve learned that I need to take the beast with me pretty much wherever I go. Even when I’m working, Oso is happiest to remain hunched massively in the passenger seat of my ancient Land Cruiser, his weight causing it to tilt to one side, where he can glare out the windshield and watch for his only friend.

  “Is that stinking pile of teeth and fur worth it?” Dad had asked yesterday after I’d picked him up at the Denver airport. He’d been visibly tense on the long ride down to Tomichi with the beast lurking in the backseat, just inches behind his exposed neck.

  “Yeah, he is,” I answered, smiling. It’s a rare thing to see my father nervous.

  When Oso wanders away to slurp at the river, I begin stuffing gear in the packs. My father pulls the ropes and then coils them. I notice that every few turns he stops and looks around, gazing up and down the canyon walls, probably reminiscing to himself about the summers he’d spent here three decades ago. I pull a small tube of sunscreen out my pack and hold it out to him.

  “Want some? Your head’s starting to look like a ripe tomato.”

  “That’s funny, son. You’ll see how funny in a few years.”

  “Not me, Dad. I’ve got Mom’s hairy Latin genes.”

  I smear some of the lotion onto my fingertips and rub it on my face. Touching the left side of my face, I feel the unnaturally smooth strip of skin that runs from my eye almost all the way down to my upper lip. It’s from where a falling flake of jagged rock the size of a dinner plate had split my face a few years earlier. I massage in the lotion with care—at one time I’d hoped to prevent the scar from baking into something permanently disfiguring. It’s a habit I’ve clung to ever since the accident. Maybe someday the scar will disappear. Between climbing and the dog, soon I’ll be nothing but scar tissue.

  I take off my sunglasses and stare at my distorted reflection in the mirrored lenses. What I see isn’t pleasant. I look like some sort of desperate fugitive, with my close-cropped hair and the short beard I’d allowed since my suspension began. The beard is an experiment with trying to hide at least a portion of the wound. But it just makes thi
ngs worse. I quickly put the glasses back on.

  Dad is again staring up the canyon to where it opens into a wide valley, and where beyond that there’s a broad mountainside containing valleys, forests, and streams of its own. It is the twelve-thousand-foot mountain that’s soon due to become a ski resort.

  “Feel like home?” I ask my father, thinking about how he’d spent every summer of his late teens and early twenties camping on this land.

  Dad shakes his head. His mouth is turned down at a tight angle. “Nope. Not anymore.” When he turns back around to continue up-canyon, his shoulders, still bulging with muscle beneath his olive T-shirt, sag a little to match his frown.

  I imagine this place in a few years’ time: the forests bulldozed to make ski runs, the ridges lined with chairlifts, the valley sprawling down-canyon with condos, asphalt, traffic lights, restaurants, and liquor stores. Already a lodge is being built halfway up on the mountainside. I can hear the distant whir of an electric saw and the faint, erratic pulse of hammers. Olympus is dying.

  Both of us are quiet as we leave the canyon and enter the broader valley. Ahead of us, directly to the north, is a small, densely wooded hillside with a red cliff in its center shaped like a heart. The cliff is only a couple hundred feet high and is composed of crumbly sandstone, unsuitable for serious climbing. At its base lies a steep field of broken boulders that had, over the centuries, spilled from the cliff’s face like drops of blood. Two small figures, barely visible, are rappelling down it. I wonder why anyone would bother when there’s such fantastic granite in the canyon. People do strange things, like tearing up a place like this.

  To our right is the 12,500-foot massif of Wild Fire Peak. Its westward face is a complex series of low-angled glades, forests, and ravines. About halfway up is the source of the distant construction noise we hear—a crew is hard at work building what’s to be the mid-mountain ski lodge. I can see a winding path of torn-out aspens and pines leading up to it.