Free The Wall by Jeff Long

no-man’s-land.
    On a sunlit day, the crowd might wait hours to see climbers start in like they were warriors going off to battle. They usually kept a distance, as if only the lost and disaffected dared come in here, and they weren’t completely wrong. Draped with ropes, sporting scabbed knuckles and the eyes of old-fashioned cross-and-sword entradas, the big-wall boys—and girls now—were either the chosen or the damned. They were poet-commandos, psychological riffraff, and rock and roll Galahads. In their boldness, they seemed to certify El Cap’s monstrosity.
    Briskly now, Hugh switched on his headlamp and descended from the road. The autumn field was dry and brittle. At first, their passage went unencumbered. Shins and knees, Hugh threshed through the grass, leaving broken, dead stems. Overhead, the spotlight seemed to connect heaven and earth. The roar of the generator dwindled.
    Draped with coils of rope, Lewis followed like a prisoner, a happy one, perfectly resigned to his fate. He was whistling. Rachel’s harangue had given him hope. She cared enough to be angry. He thought El Cap was working its magic once again.
    Hugh wasn’t about to spoil his delusion. Rachel was angry because she was afraid. There was an irony to it. All three of them—she, Hugh, and Lewis—were creating a void, she by divorce, and he and Lewis by climbing. Now they had to survive their choices.
    They came to the edge of the trees, and Hugh hesitated for an instant, long enough to glance up at the treetops forming a ragged blackness against the stars, and then back at the road and the ethereal figures manning the light. There was safe harbor among them, it was not too late.
    “Lost already?” Lewis said.
    “Just letting you catch your breath, dad.”
    Hugh entered the forest. Shadows jumped ahead of his light. He clambered up a junk heap of talus that marked the beginning of the shatter zone. In this region girdling the base, rock from the summit landed in great explosions that smashed trees and mowed down the manzanita scrub.
    He did not mean to revisit the accident site, but suddenly they were upon it. Bright orange tape marked the slab where she had landed. Trees were flagged to help the SAR people locate the site. All that remained of her was dried blood.
    The place was empty. Not just empty of the body and the searchers and the crime-scene rangers with their cameras and vials and Baggies. It was empty of that presence he’d felt yesterday. Empty.
    Lewis crossed himself. Hugh remembered receiving the baptism and first-communion announcements for the Cole daughters, and the Christmas photos and birthday thank-you cards that had always delighted Annie, but also saddened her. They’d never managed to get pregnant, but talked about adoption, and then it was too late. In her dementia, she’d made a baby out of towels and would hold it for hours.
    The trees were feverish looking, cold and sweaty with glassed-over bark. The Spanish moss hung in strands. Except for the cold, they might have been in some dank bayou.
    “What are we doing here?” said Lewis.
    “I was trying to avoid it.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Believe me, I didn’t need to see this again.”
    “You’re right. It’s not healthy, Hugh.”
    Did Lewis think he had a morbid fixation? That he was joining one missing woman with another? “It has nothing to do with Annie,” Hugh told him. “I got turned around in the woods.”
    They peered up through the opening in the trees, and that tube of white light was glued to the wall overhead. It had tricked the day birds into flight. Hugh could see starlings flitting in and out of the beam. From this angle, the body on the rope was hidden from view, and he was thankful for that. Days from now, by the time they reached that height on Anasazi and looked across, Augustine would have cleared El Cap of its prey.
    Lewis said, “Let’s keep on truckin’, compañero .”
    Hugh’s pack sat where he’d propped it. He’d told the