David Wiltse: The Edge of Sleep

A long the border between Virginia and West Virginia the mountains of the Alleghenies erupt like the edges of a worn molar through a jawbone: notched, eroding cusps rising irregularly beyond the tree line and running roughly parallel through the dentition of the American southeastern massif.

Thirty miles outside of Wytheville, where the eruption is at its sharpest, stands a jagged outcropping of rock called Hatchetface. With movements as whimsical and random as bugs in water, a small team of picked its way slowly up a face of stone, a facet of the mountainside that had sheered off as if from a hammer blow, shedding its burden of ages in a cataclysmic rending and leaving itself splinter straight and smooth. It was the most difficult ascent on the mountain and the climbers had chosen it for that reason. They were not after elevation-there is no oxygen-thin height in the East-but hardship.

The leader of the group reached a two-foot-wide ledge that jutted from the face like the serrated tooth of a saw. Carefully hauling himself up, the leader wedged a nut into a seam in the rock and secured a spring-loaded carabiner gate to it. The climbing rope went through the carabiner and anchored the safety line for those who followed him.

His arms were trembling with the stress of the climb and he let them hang at his sides as he looked down at those coming up the mountain to join him. The nearest was a young woman. Lithe and lean, she scrambled up like a spider, seeming to follow the leader’s hard-earned path as if she were weightless, as if she could have come straight up without benefit of handholds or rope, carried aloft by an updraft. Below her, however, the next climber was struggling. In the informal nomenclature of the sport the leader was known as Ace, because he was the first onto the mountain. The young woman was Spidey, and the middle-aged man below her was Rich. It was not his name; the others accused him of being wealthy.

Rich had made the wrong move. Out of boldness or overconfidence he had ignored the leader’s carefully chosen route and struck out on his own. The two paths ran parallel to each other, did not deviate by more than a few feet, but the difference was crucial. The handholds that had lured him had turned out to be inadequate, and Rich was caught now in mid-step without the ability to advance or retreat. Like a jumper who has learned in mid-air that the ground before him has opened into a pit. Rich had nowhere to go but down.

The leader shouted instructions, trying to direct Rich’s blind feet to a position that would support his weight, but the man was already too far gone. The young woman had reached the ledge and the leader pulled her alongside him.

“He’s going to go,” the leader said. “We’ll have to pull him up.”

Twenty feet below them. Rich had begun to buck violently, his whole body quivering.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Cramps,” the leader said. He pulled the safety rope taut while Spidey chocked a secondary, anchor into the seam of the rock. “He’s been putting too much strain on his hands and feet for too long. He must have been frozen in that position for several minutes.”

“I never realized,” she said.

“Wasn’t your job, it was mine,” the leader said.

“It was his. Why didn’t he call out, tell me he was in trouble?”

“Too proud,” the leader said. “And pride goeth before a fall. Get ready.”

A fourth climber was hurrying up toward Rich, but he was too late to help. Rich’s spasms bucked him off the mountain face, and the leader and the young woman strained against the rope. Rich swung on the end of the lifeline like a human pendulum, his whole body shaking as if he were having a seizure. With the fourth climber assisting from below, the leader and the woman pulled Rich up to the ledge as he quivered and yelled in pain, powerless to help himself.

They stretched him flat on his stomach on the shelf of rock, his muscles fighting against them, trying to bend his body into the fetal position. The woman sat on his legs, the leader on Rich’s back, pinning him so that his gyrations didn’t jolt them all off the ledge. The fourth climber had secured himself just off the ledge, his feet standing on pitons as if on a ladder so he could help with his hands.

“What do I do, Ace?” the fourth climber asked. He had to yell to be heard over Rich’s agonized cries.

“Take his arm, bend against the cramp,” the leader said. “Then massage as deeply as you can.”

The woman was bending Rich’s toes toward his head, digging her knuckles into his calves where the muscle had bunched so violently it felt like a rock under skin. The muscles in the small of his back spasmed suddenly and he arched, bowing like a breaching dolphin, nearly hurling the leader’s weight off the face.

Rich’s cries and their own shouted communications were so loud that they didn’t hear the helicopter until it was almost upon them. The whump of the rotors slammed off the mountain wall, drowning any human noise. The rescuers looked up to see the copter hovering a few hundred feet from the mountain. A signal light flashed insistently from the open door of the helicopter and the climbers could see two helmeted heads in the front of the machine. The letters FBI were written large in white on the side.

The occupants of the helicopter had not spotted the climbers. They continued to scour the area, still flashing their coded light message for the whole mountain to see.

After the leader managed to get the cramp in Rich’s right arm to release, he turned to help the young woman work on the man’s tortured legs.

The helicopter came back for another pass, farther away this time. Someone inside had swung the light around so that it was still aimed at the mountain. The flashes came in measured bursts.

“What the hell is that about?” the woman asked.

The leader studied the lights, his lips moving silently.

“It’s Morse code,” he said.

“What does it say?”

The leader spoke the letters as he saw them come in their longs and shorts.

“B… E… C… K… E… R.”

“Becker?” the woman said, puzzled. “What’s a becker?”

The leader sighed heavily, then returned his attention to Rich’s leg.

“I’m afraid I am,” he said.

Dee was looking for something to beat him with. Cursing, she thrashed angrily around the room, testing potential instruments against the furniture, then tossing them aside-sometimes hurling them at him in disgust at their inadequacy. Ash lay on the bed, waiting. He watched as she tugged furiously at the clothes hangers in the motel closet, but they were clunky wood and metal things, permanently secured to the rod. Their resistance only enraged her further. He thought of telling her that she had already tried the hangers but decided against it. A wire clothes hanger had always been her favorite whip in the past, but the current frugality of the motel chains had forced her to use whatever came to hand.

He lay on the bed, waiting. She would find something she liked eventually. Although it looked at the moment as if she were going to use all of her fury on the search itself, as if she might collapse, exhausted and spent, before she even got around to Ash, he knew that once she started the beating her vigor would be restored. She drew strength from the violence, just as her anger fed on itself to grow into rage.

She turned for the third time to her suitcase as if she expected a wire hanger to materialize suddenly. Ash did not remind her she had already looked in the suitcase. He had left the hanger behind in their previous motel when she told him to pack. He did not like the wire hanger; it was too thin and left ugly welts. She had been suffering one of her blinding headaches, which was why she had entrusted him with the packing, and she had not noticed when he slipped the hanger under the bed. Ash was surprised that she hadn’t caught him in the act of betrayal. She always seemed to notice everything. She had told him many times that she could read his mind and he believed her. Maybe the headache had affected her mind-reading ability.