The Forge of God

60

Smoky haze hung high over the valley from fires in the east: Idaho, Arizona, Utah. The morning sun glowered bright orange through the pall, casting all Yosemite in a dreamy shadow-light the color of Apocalypse.

Edward walked past the general store and saw Minelli sitting in the open doorway of his car in the parking lot, listening to the radio with one leg drawn up on the other knee, picking mud out of his boot tread with a twig.

“What’s the word?” Edward asked, leaning his walking stick on the car’s bumper.

“Nothing close to us yet,” Minelli answered. “Fires to the south, spreading south but not north, and fires to the east about three, four hundred miles.”

“Anything else?”

“The bullets have dropped below microseismic background. Nobody can hear them now.” He smirked and flipped the mud-tipped twig onto the asphalt. “Makes you wish- we were out there at work, doesn’t it? Feeling the patient’s pulse.”

“Not really,” Edward said. “Walking today?”

“Been,” Minelli said, gesturing to the west. “Since about five. It’s nice getting up in the dark. The sunrise was spectacular. Lots of my habits are changing. I’m feeling very calm now. Does that make any sense?”

“Denial, anger, withdrawal…acceptance,” Edward said. “The four stages.”

“I don’t accept at all,” Minelli said. “I’m just calm about what’s going to happen. Where are you going?”

“I’m taking the Mist Trail up to Vernal and Nevada falls. Never been there.”

Minelli nodded. “You know, I’ve specked out where I want to be when the crunch comes.” He raised a finger to Glacier Point. “You can see everything up there, and it’s going to be spectacular. I’ll hike up and camp out for a week or however long it takes, just to be ready.”

“What if you meet some kind female?”

“I expect she’ll go with me,” Minelli said. “But I’m not holding out much hope.” He rubbed his beard and grinned fiendishly. “I’m not grade-A Choice.”

Edward glanced at a sticker in the side window: BORN TO RAISE HECK. “Mazel,” he called back over his shoulder, walking east.

“I’m a Catholic boy. I don’t know that stuff.”

“I’m Episcopalian,” Edward said.

“When are you coming back?”

“In time for the meeting at five.”

Edward followed the switchbacks of the first leg of the Muir Trail, pausing on rock-masonry vantage points to gaze out over gorges filled with roaring white water. He was halfway up the steep Mist Trail by eleven. The smell of moss and spray and damp humus filled his nose. Vernal Fall bellowed constantly on his left, ghostly clouds of moisture soaking his clothes and beading on his face and hands. He grimaced against the chill but refused to wear a parka or anything else that would isolate him.

The wet dark gray trail rocks reflected the sky and became a somber orange-brown. When the breeze blew thick fingers of mist in his direction, he seemed suspended in a warm amber fog, the fall and weathered, moss-covered granite walls lost in a general vaporous void.

I saw Eternity the other night, he quoted, and not remembering the rest, concluded aloud with, “And it gave me quite a fright…”

At the top of Vernal Fall, he walked across a broad, almost level expanse of dry white granite, one hand on an iron railing, and stood near the wide, sleek green lip of plummeting water. Here was the noise and the power, but little of the wetness; observation and immediacy and yet isolation. The true experience, Edward thought, would be sweeping down the falls in the middle of the water, suspended in cold green and white, curtains of bubbles and long translucent vertical surfaces distorting all sky and earth. What would it be like to live as a water sprite, able to magically suspend oneself in the middle of certain death?

He looked across at Liberty Cap and thought again of the vast granite spaces within the domes, unseen. Why an obsession with places out of view?

He frowned in concentration, trying to bring up the monstrous big thought he had so loosely hooked. Living things see only the surface, can’t exist in the depths. Life is painted on the surface of the real. Death is the great unexplored volume. Death rises from the inaccessible, depth and death sounding so much alike…

There had been only three other people on the trail that morning, one descending, two climbing behind Edward. Another he had not seen, a blond-haired woman in a tan parka arid dark blue shorts lugging a big expensive blue backpack. She stood on the opposite side of the granite block, looking over Emerald Lake, the pool where water from 600-foot Nevada Fall rested before slipping over the shorter Vernal Fall. She must have camped overnight, or was perhaps on the morning leg of a long trek around the rim of the valley.

The woman turned and Edward saw she was strikingly beautiful, tall and Nordic, a long face with perfectly cut nose, clear blue eyes, and lips both sensual and faintly disapproving. He looked away quickly, all too intensely aware she was outside his range. He had long since learned that women this beautiful paid little attention to men of his mild appearance and social standing.

Still, she seemed to be alone.

Came that high, painful interior singing he had always known when in the presence of the desirable and inaccessible woman, not lust, but an almost religious longing. It was not a sensation he wanted now; he did not wish to be seduced away from worshiping the land, the Earth, to focus on a single woman, let alone one he could not possibly have. The woman or women he had imagined the night before would not evoke this kind of response; they would be safe, undemanding, undistressing. Quickly, with nothing more than a polite smile and nod, he passed the woman where she stood by the bridge and continued along the trail.

In the rocky tree-spotted upland meadow beyond Emerald Lake, he found a natural granite bench and laid out his lunch of two processed-American-cheese sandwiches and dried fruit, very much like what he had eaten on hikes in the valley as a boy. Facing the white plume of Nevada Fall, still a few hundred yards distant, he chewed crescents from a leathery apricot and brewed hot tea on a tiny portable stove.

Someone came up behind him, tread so light as to be almost undetected. “Excuse me.”

He twisted his torso and stared at the blond woman. She smiled down on him. She was at least six feet tall. “Yes?” he asked, swallowing most of a mouthful of half-chewed apricot.

“Did you see a man here, a little taller than I, with a very black full beard and wearing a red parka?” She indicated the man’s height with a hand held level above her head.

Edward hadn’t, but the woman’s worried expression suggested that it would be best if he paused to consider before answering. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “There aren’t many people here today.”

“I’ve been waiting two days,” she said, sighing. “We were supposed, to meet here, at the Emerald Lake, actually.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Did you see anybody like him down on the valley floor? You came up from there, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I don’t remember any men with black beards and red parkas. Or any with just black beards, for that matter — unless he’s a biker.”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head and turned away, then turned back. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. May I offer some tea, fruit?”

“No thank you. I’ve eaten. I carried food for both of us.”

Edward watched her with an embarrassed smile. She seemed unsure what to do next. He half wished she would go away; his attraction to her was almost painful.

“He’s my husband,” she said, staring up at Liberty Cap, shading her eyes against the hazy glare. “We’re separated. We met in Yosemite, and we thought if we came back here, before…” Her voice trailed off and she made a negligible shrug of her shoulders and arms. “We might be able to stay together. We agreed to meet at Emerald Lake.”

“I’m sure he must be here someplace.” He gestured at the lake and trail and the Nevada Fall.

“Thank you,” she said. This time, she did not smile, simply turned and walked back toward the head of Vernal Fall and the descending Mist Trail. He watched her go and took a deep breath, biting into his second sandwich.

He stared at the sandwich ruefully as he chewed. “Must be the white bread,” he told himself. “Can’t catch a beauty like that with anything less than whole wheat.”

At three, the meadow and the perimeter of the lake, the falls and the trail below, were empty. He was the only human for miles, or so it seemed; might even be true, he thought. He crossed the bridge and lingered in the trees on the other side, with only the roar of the falls above and below and snatches of birdsong. He knew rocks of any description but little about birds. Red-winged blackbirds and robins and jays were obvious; he thought about buying a book in the general store to learn the others, but then, what use applying names? If his memories were soon to be scattered fine-ground over space, education was a waste.

What was important was finding his center, or pinning down some locus of being, establishing a moment of purity and concentrated awareness. He did not think that was possible with people all around; now was a chance to try.

Prayer perhaps. God had not been on his mind much recently, a telltale void; he did not wish to be inconsistent when all the world was a foxhole. But consistency was as useless now as nature studies, and not nearly so tempting.

The valley was still in sun, Liberty Cap half shadowed. The smoke had cleared some and the sky was bluer, green at the edges of the haze, more real than it had been.

“I am going to die,” he said out loud, in a normal tone of voice, experimenting. “What I am will come to an end. My thoughts will end. I will experience nothing, not even the final end.” Rising rocks and smoke and lava. No; probably not like that. Will it hurt? Will there be time for pain?

Mass death; God was probably busy also with mass prayer.

God.

Not a protector, unless there be miracles.

He shuffled his booted feet in the dry trail dirt. “What in hell am I looking for? Revelation?” He shook his head and forced a laugh. “Naive sonofabitch. You’re out of training; your prayer muscles, your enlightenment biceps, they’re all out of shape. Can’t lift you any higher than your goddamned head.” The bitterness in his voice shook him. Did he really want revelation, confirmation, assurance of existence or meaning beyond the end?

“God is what you love.” He said this softly; it was embarrassing to realize how much he believed it. Yet he had never been particularly good at love, neither the love of people in all its forms nor the other kinds, except perhaps love of his work. “I love the Earth.”

But that was rather vague and broad. The Earth offered only unthinking obstacles to love: storms, rock slides, volcanoes, quakes. Accidents. Earth could not help being incontinent. Easy to love the great mother.

The wind picked up and carried droplets of mist above the Vernal Fall and over the forest, landing cool and lightly stinging-tickling on his cheek. He thought of down on his cheek and not whiskers, and of wanting his father to stay with them, even then knowing (truly did he realize it then?) that the unknit would soon separate.

That time, in Yosemite, had not been altogether blissful. The memories he now recovered were of a young boy’s ignorant but sharp eye, observing a man and a woman, shakily acting the roles of mother and father, husband and wife, not connecting anymore.

The boy had been unable to foresee what would happen after the separation so obviously but so deniably coming.

He squinted.

Earth = mother. God = father. No God = no father = inability to connect with the after.

“That,” he said, “cuts the fucking cake.” He swatted at a gnat and hefted his pack higher on his back, descending along the wet dark gray rock steps carved out beside Vernal Fall, and then following the path above the foaming, violently full Merced.

Pausing with a slight smile, he left the path and stood on a granite boulder at the very edge of the tumult, contemplating the lost green volumes of water beneath and between the white bubbles. The roar seemed to recede; he felt almost hypnotized. He could just lean forward, shift one foot beyond the edge, and all would end very quickly. No suspense. His choice.

Somehow, the option was not attractive. He shook his head slowly and glanced up at the trees on the opposite side of the spill. Glints of silver shined through the boughs and moved along the trunks. It took him a moment to resolve what he was seeing. The trees were crawling with fist-sized silvery spiders. Two of them scuttled along a branch, carrying what appeared to be a dead jay. Another had stripped away a slice of bark from a pine trunk, revealing a wedge of white wood.

He thought of the Guest, and did not doubt his eyes.

Who controls them? he asked himself. What do they mean? He watched them for several minutes, vaguely bothered by their indifference, and then shrugged — yet another inexplicable marvel — and returned to the path.

Edward was back in the valley, freshly showered and in clean jeans and white shirt, by five o’clock, as he had promised. The amphitheater was more crowded than it had been for yesterday’s meeting. No music was scheduled; instead, they had a minister, a psychologist, and a second ranger arrayed before the podium, waiting their turn after Elizabeth’s introduction. Minelli grumbled at the New Age lineup, but he stayed. There was a bond growing between all of them, even those who had not spoken; they were in this together, and it was better to be together than otherwise, even if it meant sitting through a handful of puerile speakers.

Edward looked for but did not see the jilted blonde in the audience.

61

After three days of interrogation by the FBI and agents from the National Security Agency, as well as six hours of intense grilling by the Secretary of the Navy, Senator Gilmonn had been set free from his office and apartment in Long Beach, California. He had ordered his chauffeur to drive east.

Nobody had been able, or particularly willing, to hang anything on him, though the trail of the arrow or monkey or whatever from the U.S.S. Saratoga to his car was reasonably well defined. Given more than a mere two and a half months of investigation and second-guessing, he might have been in some trouble, and the captain of the Saratoga relieved of his command, but things had changed markedly now in these United States. It was a different nation, a different government — functioning to all intents and purposes without a head. The President, under impeachment, was still in office but with most of his strings of influence and therefore power severed.

Gilmonn’s incarceration, which might have been pro forma half a year ago, was now simply out of the question.

For all that, what had they accomplished? They had killed Lieutenant Colonel Rogers and perhaps thirty Forgers who had refused to vacate the desert around the bogey. They had blown the bogey into scattered pieces. Yet few involved in the conspiracy believed, now, that they had done anything to even postpone, much less remove, the sentence of death placed on the Earth.

He stood on the sand near the gravel road that passed within two miles of the site of the disintegrated bogey, binoculars hanging on a leather strap from his neck, face streaming with sweat under the brim of his hat. The white limousine that he had hired with his own money waited a few yards away, the chauffeur impassive behind his dark glasses and blue-black uniform.

Army and government trucks passed along the road every few minutes, some bearing radiation stickers; many of those outward bound, he knew, carried fragments of the bogey. He was not privy to what they were finding. Basically, his presence was tolerated, but now that the conspiracy had accomplished what virtually everybody wanted, those directly involved, while not charged, were being shunned. Scapegoats might be too strong a word…and it might not be.

Gilmonn unabashedly cursed Crockerman for having forced them all into an untenable and illegal no-man’s-land of circumventions and conspiracies.

And still, deep in the Earth, what some — mostly geologists — had called “the freight trains” and others “bullets” rumbled toward their rendezvous. They could not be traced anymore, but few doubted they were there. The end might be a matter of days or weeks away.

Gilmonn entered the limousine’s rear door and poured himself a Scotch and soda from the dispenser. “Tony,” he said, slowly twirling the glass between the ringers of his right hand, “where do you want to be when it happens?”

The chauffeur did not hesitate. “In bed,” he said. “Screwing my brains out, sir.”

They had talked a great deal during the drive from Long Beach. Tony had been married only six months. Gilmonn thought of Madeline, his wife for twenty-three years, and while he wanted to be with her, he did not think they would be screwing their brains out. They would have their kids together, and their two grandchildren, perhaps in the ranch house in Arizona. A huge family gathering. The whole clan hadn’t been together in five or six years.

“All that, and we didn’t accomplish a Goddamned thing, Tony,” he said with a sudden deep flood of bitterness. For the first time since the death of his son, he felt like cursing God. “We don’t know that for sure, Senator.” “I do,” Gilmonn said. “If any man has a right to know he’s failed, I do.”