Vertical Run

PROLOGUE

Two young men on horseback.

The taller, David Elliot, is lank and dark and long of limb. His brown eyes are solemn, but he wears a subtle smile. The shorter, Taffy Weiler, is squat as a bulldog; his wiry hair is as startlingly red as the tie-dyed T-shirt he wears, and his blue eyes sparkle with no small deviltry.

Dave comes from Indiana. Taffy is a New Yorker born and bred. They met in San Francisco, which, this summer, is the only place to be. Now they are fast friends.

In September Taffy will start to work for a medium-sized electronics company near San Jose, an outfit called Hewlett-Packard; not many people at NYU have heard of it. Dave, having passed through Indiana State’s R.O.T.C. program, is entering the Army; he will report for duty the third week of August. It is certain that he will be sent to Vietnam.

This ride is their last journey together. Adulthood awaits them at summer’s end.

Today they are in the high Sierras, more than two hundred miles east of San Francisco. They crossed the mountain divide yesterday, picked up their horses and pack mule from a leathered-looking man who was waiting for them in a pickup truck, and began riding west into the mountain fastness.

Here, on a cobbled slope well above nine thousand feet, their horses have become short of breath. There is no trail; the mountainside is steep. The ground is granite, grey shot with streaks of black. Small white quartzes tumble beneath the animals’ hooves, and are so bright with afternoon sun that they cannot be looked at.

From time to time, Dave brushes a hand across the extravagant moustache he has grown this summer. He’s proud of it, thinking that it makes him look older. It does not.

Taffy leers at him. “You gotta give me one thing, compadre. You gotta give me that the day you show up to take the oath, you’ve still got the moustache.”

“The moustache goes. I’ll be a crewcut, clean-shaven, all-American boy.”

“Oh man!”

“Oh man, yourself, and pass me a brew. Arguing with you makes me sooooo thirsty.”

Taffy pulls a lukewarm can of Ballantine from his saddlebag. He passes it to Dave together with a churchkey. Dave opens the beer and swiftly lifts it to his mouth, catching the foam on his tongue. Then he lifts the brim of his floppy straw hat, using a handkerchief, one of the six that his mother made him pack, to wipe away a line of sweat. “How much further?” he asks.

Taffy shoots him a lopsided grin. “According to my sources, we should have already been there. Of course my sources were stoned at the time.”

Dave snickers.

The two ride on.

It is nearly sunset when they arrive, a holy hour in which the heavens glow, and upon which a sacred mountain silence falls. They breast a small rise, and look down. Dave catches his breath. The loveliness is heart-stopping.

“It’s perfect,” Taffy whispers. “Just like they said, the perfect place. Am I right, or am I right?”

Dave doesn’t answer. He is rapt at what he sees, a small valley, five, perhaps six times larger than the stadium at Indiana State. It is nearly a perfect circle, bounded by steep white cliffs on three sides, a towering stand of conifers at its farthest reach, a small green lake, emerald green, greener than a green bottle, in its center. Soft evening shadows lie across it. Nothing moves. The air is wine. Dave feels something that he has never felt before, and does not expect to feel again. He is uplifted; he is whole.

With a sudden rush, the sound of a feathered arrow through the air, a red-tailed hawk explodes from the sky. Its talons snatch a small grey animal. The hawk screeches in triumph as it flashes out of sight. All in a matter of seconds, here and gone, with only a burnished pinion floating in the air to mark its passage. Dave’s horse backs up nervously. Dave pats its neck.

“We camp by the lake, right, compadre?”

“Fine by me,” Dave answers. He is not really paying attention. Rather, he is cloaked in wonder, lost in dreams. Shangri-la, Bali Hai, Avalon, Armenia-in-the-Sky, Oz, Wonderland, Barsoom — everyone has a private place of dreams. This valley is his. The beauty of the place has seized him, and made him its own. He knows that he’ll never forget this valley, knows that for the rest of his life, no matter what troubles may come, the remembrance of this moment and this spot will comfort him and bring him peace.

This one moment has been the finest in his life, the finest he shall ever experience, and down all his days he will remember it with longing. He knows this, and the knowledge makes him sad.