Janelle admonished. Her reprimand was halfhearted, however, focused as she was on Carmelita three stories overhead. Janelle put her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Isn’t that high enough?” she asked Chuck.
“She might send it,” Chuck replied, agog. “She might actually top out.”
Carmelita continued her ascent, the widely spaced holds at the top of the tower presenting her no discernible difficulty until, as if by levitation alone, she was forty feet off the ground and there was no more climbing to be done. After giving the top of the fiberglass tower a tap, she leaned back in her harness as Chuck had instructed, her feet spread wide on the wall. She shook out her hands at her sides while he held her in place, his brake hand gripping the rope.
“How’s the view from up there, sweetness?” he called up to her.
She looked at the granite cliffs lining the valley thousands of feet above the tower. “I’ve got a ways to go.”
At Chuck’s side, Janelle shivered. “Don’t get any big ideas, niña.”
Chuck relaxed his grip and lowered Carmelita, the rope running through his palm. “I’m glad I belayed her,” he said to Janelle as Carmelita walked backward down the wall while he played the rope past his brake hand. “As light as she is, I wouldn’t have wanted to trust the auto-belay to kick in and catch her.”
When Carmelita reached the ground, the tower attendant, blond haired, thickly bearded, and in his mid-twenties, approached from where he’d been talking with a female climber his age. The attendant’s broad shoulders extended from his tank top straight as a crossbeam. His powerful quads filled the legs of his shorts. The woman climber, waiting her turn on the tower beyond the line of waist-high boulders between the parking lot and campground, wore a magenta bikini top and shiny black climbing tights cut low across her hips. Her bare stomach was tanned and flat. A gold ring sparkled where it pierced the skin above her navel.
At the foot of the tower, the heavily muscled attendant untied the rope from Carmelita’s waist. “Good going,” he praised her, offering his meaty palm for a high-five.
Carmelita slapped his hand and pranced over to Janelle and Chuck, a grin plastered on her face. “That was a blast.”
“You made it look easy,” Janelle said.
“It was easy.”
Chuck lifted an eyebrow at the bright-eyed youngster before him. “Not for mere mortals.”
He freed the climbing rope from his harness, allowing the attendant to set about reattaching the rope to the cylindrical auto-belay mechanism at the tower’s base.
Carmelita’s white teeth flashed in a smile. “When can I do it again?”
Chuck cocked his head at the climbers grouped and waiting behind the line of boulders separating the parking area from Camp 4. Jimmy O’Reilly stood at the front of the group, deep in conversation with Bernard Montilio, the two men clearly enjoying the opportunity to catch up with each other this morning, as the planned reunion of old climbing buddies, including Chuck, got underway.
With Jimmy and Jimmy’s longtime climbing partner Thorpe Alstad as their unofficial leaders, the other aging climbers attending the reunion this weekend had spent entire summers and significant portions of falls, winters, and springs at Camp 4 twenty years ago. They’d teamed with each other in twos, threes, and fours to put up ever-more-challenging routes on the valley’s towering walls, all the while bickering like family over who among them was the most talented climber and whose completed routes were toughest.
“The line got pretty long behind Jimmy while you were up there,” Chuck said to Carmelita. “I’m glad we came over first thing this morning.” He hesitated, avoiding Janelle’s gaze, the idea coming to him even as the words formed in his mouth. “The only way you’re going to get to climb any more this weekend is if you enter the Slam.”
“The what?” Carmelita asked.
Janelle stiffened beside Chuck as he continued. “The Yosemite Slam, Camp 4’s big climbing competition. It starts tomorrow and runs for two days, through Sunday. That’s why the tower’s here. Jimmy started the Slam a few years ago to raise money for his nonprofit organization, the Camp 4 Fund, which supports the campground. The competition has gotten bigger every year. Once it begins, entrants will be the only ones allowed on the tower.”
The reunion was Jimmy’s idea, timed to coincide with the Slam. Chuck had scheduled his Yosemite work, which called for him to explore a pair of confounding 150-year-old murders in the valley, to overlap with the get-together, too.
None of the reunion attendees had taken Jimmy up on his suggestion that they sign up for the Slam. In declining Jimmy’s offer, the climbers, all well into their forties, cited creaking joints and declining fitness. Chuck cited, as well, the tight timeframe he and Clarence faced to complete their work in the valley.
Carmelita begged Janelle. “Can I do it, Mamá?”
Janelle turned to Chuck, her smile replaced by a wary frown. “A climbing competition? Aren’t those for adults?”
“The best sport climbers in the world these days are teenagers. Their strength-to-weight ratios are off the charts thanks to the fact that—” he encircled Carmelita’s upper arm with a finger and thumb “—they’re so skinny.”
“But that’s teenagers you’re talking about.”
“I’ll be thirteen in December,” Carmelita reminded her mother.
“I don’t want to think about that.”
“Uncle Clarence said I’ll be driving in two years, with my learner’s permit.”
Janelle glared at her brother, who ducked his head, hiding a grin. She turned back to Carmelita. “Remember what we always say, m’hija. Cars are weapons. You have to be very careful with them. And two years is a long time. A very long time.” She shot another glowering look at Clarence, her brows furrowed.
He raised his hands in defense. “Carm’s getting to be a big girl. Like it or not, hermana, two years from now, your daughter’s gonna have a steering wheel in her hands. She’s gonna be one weaponized young lady.”
When the furrow between Janelle’s brows deepened, Clarence raised his hands farther, his palms out. “Just talking the truth to you.” He lifted his shoulders close to his ears in an exaggerated shrug. “What can I say?”
Janelle turned her back on her brother and crossed her arms in front of her.
“Carm was a natural up there,” Chuck told her.
She shifted her elbows, loosening her arms. “Do they actually have a kids’ section?”
“Maybe. Either way, though, I’d say she should enter the open division. The way she climbed that tower just now, you never know.”
Carmelita’s face glowed, but Janelle pursed her lips. “You mean, where she’d be going up against anybody and everybody?”
“All the other female climbers, anyway.”
“But that was the first
