Point of Law Read online

  A short way to our left is the end of the Forest Service road, the only way into this place. The road terminates in the broad meadow where we’re camped. The construction trucks have torn a new series of paths through the valley that don’t come together until they begin their winding climb up the mountainside.

  “Stay close, Oso,” I call before we come out of the screen of trees and into the valley. I don’t want him to scare the other campers in the meadow. Due to his size and cut-down tail, more than one nearsighted person has mistaken him for a shambling bear. As we walk through the pines toward where I’d left my Land Cruiser, my jaw is tight with tension and my teeth feel sore.

  Will Roberto be waiting for us? The question is crawling around in my mouth but I don’t interrupt my father’s thoughts to let it out. Like an unpleasant chore, his arrival is something I’d be happy to put off for a little while longer.

  When we’d come through the meadow earlier in the morning, before the sun had risen, there were only a few other cars parked near quiet campsites. Now, at midday, there are more like thirty. And the meadow is full of activity. The articles I’d read about the coming land swap mentioned that some of the local environmental activists intended to hold a protest vigil in the valley this week. It looks like the vigil has begun.

  Near the meadow’s center a group of seven or eight youths are standing in a circle and kicking a small, brightly woven sack the size of a lemon back and forth with their feet. They’re either college-aged or in the wandering postgraduate years. Dirty white tape clings to some of the kids’ fingers, marking them as climbers. A few mountain bikes have been tossed haphazardly in the grass nearby.

  Around the fringe of the meadow, where it’s bordered by thick stands of spruce and aspens, are the other campsites. There’s more than one rusting VW bus among the battered cars that stand in the grass near tents patched with duct tape and smoke-blackened fire rings. More young people gather around some of those, and the sweet scent of marijuana from shared joints wafts in the meadow’s gentle breeze. Music plays from a boom box—Phish, I think. I see a few backpacks with chalk bags and climbing slippers clipped to gear loops with shiny carabiners. A few older women, even fewer older men, are seated in lawn chairs next to the motor homes they’ve somehow managed to bounce up the rough road. Through the trees comes the occasional shout of laughter from the hot springs by the creek.

  The entire scene has a sad festival air. A sort of wake. Soon the entire valley will be torn down and replaced with bright condos and neat landscaping.

  There’s no sign of Roberto. Things won’t be so peaceful when he gets here. His frenetic energy is like a tornado. It never fails to stir things up, to throw shit all over the place.

  We dump our packs beside the truck. I check the locked glove box, where my badge, gun, and cell phone are stored, and find everything still there. From a cooler in back I get out a couple of jars and a loaf of bread and start smearing together peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while my dad mixes powdered Kool-Aid into two water bottles. Oso rolls in the tall grass nearby. He’s grunting with pleasure and bicycling his hind legs.

  I look up when I feel more than hear his deep growl vibrating over the beat of the boom box, which is now playing Blind Melon. Two women are walking toward us. One is blonde and young, college-aged, with a pretty face. I can’t help but admire the expanse of smooth, pale skin that extends below her brief shorts down to her bare feet. Her hair is a rat’s nest of dreadlocks and tight beaded braids. On her upper half she wears only a purple tank top that is cut to reveal a flat stomach. Braless. She has an unconscious spring in her step, as if she’s delighted to be here, half-naked in the meadow.

  The other woman is smaller, older, and darker but even more striking. She radiates intensity. My eyes are drawn to her despite the lush blonde’s obvious appeal. She’s thin, almost to the point of being gaunt, with lean muscles carving down from her shoulders to her wrists. I guess her age at middle thirties, and that’s only because of her clothes, her confident manner, and unlike the other youths in the meadow, her face is unpierced. She wears a white sleeveless shirt that she’s buttoned almost to her neck with old jeans and a pair of worn-out running shoes. Her face is all angles. High, sharp cheekbones, a long jaw, and a slightly oversized nose. The most striking thing about her is that despite the dark hair that spills over half her face, a black cord is visible where it stretches across an exposed part of her forehead. Beneath it there’s the oblong shape of an eye patch.

  “That dog’s not going to bite, is it?” she asks as they approach our camp. She looks from the beast to us warily. Our appearance, mine in particular with my damaged face, probably doesn’t inspire much confidence.

  “Oso!” I call to him. “Cut it out. Get over here.” I click my tongue against the roof of my mouth, and Oso sullenly turns, coming to sit at my side. “He’s harmless, really,” I say to the women.

  My father chuckles from behind me, not at all persuaded. It’s the first real bit of mirth I’ve heard from him all day.

  “We saw you guys come in this morning. My name is Kim Walsh,” the one-eyed woman tells us.

  “I’m Sunny,” the blonde girl says, smiling down at the dog and displaying perfect white teeth. The name is totally appropriate for her.

  I introduce us as “Antonio and Leonard Burns,” leaving out our respective titles of Special Agent and Colonel, then ask if they want some Kool-Aid.

  Kim shakes her head but Sunny says, “Sure!” and takes my father’s bottle from him.

  I have a hard time taking my eyes off Kim’s face. It isn’t the eye patch but something else, some sort of feeling in my gut that I’m destined to know her better. That sort of feeling has happened several times before, like when I’d seen a particularly beautiful girl in class the first day of school and knew she’d become my girlfriend. It has always proven true. The thing that surprises me about it now is that this woman seems to be almost a decade older than me, probably a more appropriate age for my father than me. I’ve never felt much heat for an older woman before. Yet I suppress an urge to self-consciously run my hand over the scar on my face.

  “You guys are climbers, huh?” Sunny asks.

  When I nod she says, “I’m learning how to climb. A guy I met here in the valley’s teaching me, but he’s kind of a beginner, too. Am I going to get muscles like yours?” she asks with a laugh.

  “You might,” I tell her. “And scabs and scars and all that.”

  “God, I hope not!”

  “It depends on how hard you want to climb.”

  Kim breaks in, “I was hoping for the chance to talk to you gentlemen about what’s going to happen to this place. Have you been here before?”

  I wait for my father to answer but he doesn’t. So I glance at him and say, “Dad put up a bunch of the routes in the canyon, like a hundred years ago. Before anyone even knew about this place.”

  Kim looks past me at my father for a long time while neither speaks. Measuring him. Sunny seems on the verge of saying something to break the silence, when Kim says softly, “Then you must really love this place.”

  Again Dad doesn’t answer. I’m used to it but still annoyed at how he can be so closed-mouthed with strangers, bordering on the impolite. I know it’s probably a habit he’d picked up from years of semisecret missions and training exercises as the leader of Pararescue teams, but it doesn’t seem like an effective technique to me—it just makes the strangers all the more curious. It’s my father’s commanding presence and impassive features alone that usually keep people from asking more.

  Kim doesn’t push, but doesn’t look particularly intimidated either. From the steady way she watches us with her one good eye, I’m willing to bet she’s as tough as he is. Speaking to us both, her voice now hard, she says, “It’s about to be made private land in a crooked swap with the government. A group of us are trying to do something about it.”

  I nod. That was what I’d read about in a newsletter from the Access F
und, a climbing-oriented environmental protection organization. It was the reason I’d wanted to bring my father here before it was forever closed to the public. I tell her that.

  “I’ve seen the plans,” she goes on, her coffee-colored eye blazing with a zealot’s gleam. “You men are climbers, right? Well, a developer named David Fast”—she spits out his name with such venom that I guess she must be taking his assault on the valley personally—“is going to make that canyon down there into a bunch of high-priced homes on the river. This meadow”—she turns and sweeps her brown arm past the Hacky Sackers and other campers—“it’s going to be a goddamned golf course. And the hot spring up-creek is going to be some sort of massive concrete bathing facility.” She points at Wild Fire Peak looming to the east and tells us that it will be the ski area proper once they’ve stripped it of its forests and built lodges all over it. “In about two weeks Fast will start the serious construction, when the Forest Service makes its approval official. He’ll begin with a guarded gatehouse down the road to keep us out.” She pauses to look at each of us in turn. “We need help fighting him.”

  I ask, “What are you going to do? From what I read, the Forest Service has already announced they’re going to approve the swap. It’s kind of a done deal, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not,” she says fiercely, her hair slinging back to fully expose the eye patch. “Not when there’s fraud involved. Fast bribed some scientists and then lied to get a positive environmental assessment. We’re still trying to keep the local Forest Service manager from approving the exchange. If that fails, we’ll try to get an injunction in federal court. Tomorrow we’ve got a local TV station and one from Denver coming up here for a rally. What we need is more bodies, to show the Forest Service and the media we’re serious about this.”

  Sunny chimes in, “And it could get nasty, with the townies—”

  Kim cuts her off with a glance and then explains, “Fast has managed to convince some locals that his ski resort will be good for the town. A lot of them are investors, too. There’s a rumor going around that they plan to disrupt us tomorrow.”

  My brother’s impending arrival momentarily forgotten, I look to my father. He’s methodically chewing on his sandwich, leaning against the Land Cruiser, his face as expressionless as ever. Almost imperceptibly he shakes his head at me. Turning back to Kim, I say, “I’m interested, but I don’t know yet how available I’m going to be. My dad and I are waiting here for my brother, who could arrive at any time over the next couple of days.”

  Clearly that doesn’t seem like a very good excuse to her. She gives us both a one-eyed scowl and says, “We’re having a campfire meeting tonight, over there near our sites on the other side of the meadow. At least come by and listen.”

  Hearing nothing from my father behind me, I tell her I’ll try to stop by. Kim’s turning to leave when Sunny speaks up 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

  ROBERTO 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 one point, when he was climbing inverted beneath a granite roof that jutted from the massive cliff’s face with his hands and his feet stuffed deep in a crack, Roberto turned to the camera with his movie star’s grin and streaming black hair, then hung from just his feet and one jammed hand to shake his other out over the void. His eyes were lit up with either rapture or methamphetamine. In another scene he was resting on a tiny ledge, slumped against the wall with his feet dangling in space much the way I’d sat the day before with my father. Only I’d been wearing an anchored rope. Realizing the camera was on him, he quickly popped up into a handstand with his fingers curled over the edge. The inside of his left arm was exposed just beyond his tangled hair, and there were tiny red scabs tracked down it. Over the pumping music I could hear the cameraman’s panicked shouts for him to cut it out. I realized I was quietly saying under my breath exactly the same thing as the cameraman, watching my brother on late-night TV, as the rest of the bar hollered and whooped.

  After Dad and I soaked in a hot spring that was crowded with naked and frolicking environmental activists (sadly, neither Kim nor Sunny was among them), we cook dinner over my blowtorch of a camp stove. The noise it makes is loud enough to preclude much conversation. And that’s fine with me, as the tension between us, a tension born of Roberto’s impending arrival, has been steadily increasing. Oso d
rools on my thigh when I crouch by the stove to fry turkey sausage and boil pasta. My father slumps nearby in a low sling-back chair, watching the night descend on the meadow. As a sort of peace offering I take a bottle of wine from one of the plastic gear crates in the back of my truck and toss it to him. He nods his thanks, then pops the cork from the bottle with his pocketknife.

  We eat in silence. When the food is gone and the bottle’s drained, I scrub the pans with sand in the stream where it cuts close to the meadow. Coming back into our camp, I see that Dad has built a small campfire. He’s also taken out a bottle of Yukon Jack from his own gear. Across the meadow, near where the activists have parked their cars and erected their tents, is a much larger fire. In its orange glow I can see ten or fifteen people already gathered around it.

  My father holds out the bottle to me, making a peace offering of his own. My nose automatically wrinkles at the cheap whiskey smell.

  “No thanks,” I tell him, my stomach twisting with memories of when Roberto and I used to steal the stuff from his liquor cabinet. I’d gagged it down and thrown it back up more than a dozen times in my high school years.

  “I’ll be back in a little bit,” I say as I tie Oso to the truck’s bumper with a chopped-off piece of an old climbing rope. Dad responds with a disapproving grunt.

  Everyone eyes me with suspicion when I stroll into the group. I know that my damaged, scratchily bearded face makes me appear dangerous, so I try to compensate by smiling. Judging from the way people move away from me, the result is an appearance of being both dangerous and demented. I end up standing alone, buzzing from the wine and uncomfortably scanning the dark faces, until Sunny comes out of the night and takes my hand.