Free Badwater by Clinton McKinzie

he’d bitten off while convulsing on his cot.

ten
    I t was after one in the morning when I finally reached my isolated camp below the overhanging cliff. It was cold, too, up at well over nine thousand feet. I was too exhausted to build a fire, so I just heated a can of beef stew on my little blowtorch of a stove. Mungo received her usual share, dumped over dry dog food. She was still angry and gave me a baleful stare before gobbling it up.
    “I read that wolves in the wild can go weeks without food. What kind of chickenshit wolf are you, anyway?”
    Mungo didn’t reply.
    There were a million pinpricks of light in the black sky. With no smog and no light pollution in these mountains, the stars were so numerous and bright it was almost impossible to make out the individual constellations. Directly overhead, though, was only blackness. Up there, three hundred feet above my head, the cliff jutted out with a roof that I was coming to know very well. On its underside was the forty feet of never-been-climbed rock that I’d made my goal.
    Actually, it was forty feet of never-been-climbed
not
rock. The hardest crack in the world. It was parallel-sided, flaring outward, and stuck straight out from the cliff face where the massive overhang topped it like the long brim of a ten-gallon hat.
    My Moriah. One of them, anyway.
    I spooned up my stew and contemplated the fact that it had been a bad day. I’d risked my life for nothing, let a kid die with my hands over his heart, failed to get in any training, gotten a tourist locked up and tortured, and violated my oath as an officer of the law. Far worse, I’d failed to make the daily phone call that was the one thing in my life—other than the fat crack over my head—that gave me hope.
    My phone, a little Motorola Iridium that was the only thing that got consistent service in Wyoming’s mountains, lay on my lap. I kept looking at digital numbers on the phone’s screen that told me the time. It never got any earlier. And it was far, far too late to call.
    Instead I got a jug of cheap red wine out of the back of the truck and took a long draw. With the heavy taste in my mouth, I thought about calling Roberto. He was the only one I knew who would be pleased with my actions. He’d absolutely love the story of me Tasing the defenseless Mr. Smit. But, as usual, thinking about my big brother brought me no solace. I took another swig from the jug to try and keep down the sudden but familiar nausea. I couldn’t afford to lose the stew, since I’d need the calories for climbing tomorrow. A cold sweat broke out on my skin as I thought of my brother’s once-magnificent and now-wrecked body—the wasted legs, the cracked spine, the myriad scars, and, worst of all, the long grin of puckered white skin across his throat from the blade of a machete.
    All of them my responsibility. I’d let him go in there, to the narcos’ compound.
    I dug deeper in the back of the Pig and came up with a small Tupperware container. In it were an eighth of clumpy weed and a small metal pipe. It worked for chemo patients suffering from chemically induced nausea—why not me? I packed the bowl and took a few hits. It was good stuff. Indigo Red. There were purplish hairs on the sticky buds, a sure sign of potency. As a narcotics officer for eight years, I was adept at telling the good from the shake.
    Mungo watched me, still bitter. Or maybe shocked at my behavior.
    “It’s been a bad day,” I tried to explain. “A really bad day.”
    After cutting Jonah loose with the blade on my pocketknife, I’d half-carried him into the officers’ lounge and dumped him on the sofa. He wouldn’t talk at first. He didn’t trust me, and I didn’t blame him. It had been me, after all, who’d put him in there in the first place. I had to spend a lot of time explaining. And apologizing.
    I chased the deputies out of the room, got Jonah a new shirt and pants, and apologized some more. I closed the door, too, to muffle the