mud and rocks washing over the pavement. The wipers slapped furiously at the sheets of water blinding the windshield, and the low clouds shrouded the stunning beauty of the Andes.
Just after noon, the bus screeched to a halt at its terminus in Cielo Santo, Jack’s destination. The driver killed the noisy V-8. No one spoke.
Jack stood a head and a half taller than the men in front of and behind him, the rain drumming the roof just inches above his ball cap. He pulled on his disposable emergency poncho and followed the others into the storm as they shuffled off the bus and into one of Dante’s circles of Hell.
* * *
—
Cielo Santo wasn’t on any map Jack could find, but Cory told him he wouldn’t. Originally, it was a quaint, alpine village nestled at the foot and midway between the looming twin peaks of La Hermana Alta and El Hermano Gordo. It stood approximately thirteen thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean, which was less than a hundred miles to the west, typical of Peru’s dramatic topography.
According to Cory, a gold rush in the forties had exploded the population to a few thousand and expanded the number of buildings to include at least one hotel, La Vicuña Roja. When the gold ran out in the sixties and the government made further mining in the region illegal in the nineties, the miners left but the adventure tourists came, including Cory’s father, who had climbed La Hermana as a young man.
Standing beneath the thundering steel roof at the bus terminal—a gas station—Jack surveyed the rain-soaked gloom around him. Unlike the clean and neatly ordered villages like Anta he’d seen previously, Cielo Santo was the Peruvian version of Deadwood.
The street he surveyed was lined by rusted, faded, and crumbling two- and three-story buildings, with skeins of improvised power lines webbing the sky overhead. The rain hadn’t quite washed away the stench of diesel where he stood, or the garbage and urine from an alley behind him.
Dozens of dark-faced Quechua in ponchos and rain gear stood in knots beneath leaking awnings or hustled up and down the muddy, trash-strewn street. Others wore construction helmets and heavy rubber boots, carrying tools or plastic buckets, like miners. Jack had read that with the economy tanking, desperate Peruvians—mostly Quechua and mestizos—engaged in illegal mining operations that had popped up all over the Andes, rummaging through the tailings or attempting to revive abandoned gold and silver mines like the ones in the mountains above the town.
Cory’s instructions told Jack where to find La Vicuña Roja, the hotel-bar where his father had stayed decades before. Cory had written everything down for Jack, but the tone in his deathbed voice carried the weight of the unfulfilled promise he had made to his father to climb La Hermana together. The two of them had hiked a dozen mountains together in America before his father died when Cory was still in college. His tragic death had cut short their plans to travel to Peru together for a trekking adventure, including La Hermana near Cielo Santo, where his dad lived for a time.
Jack touched the hollow wooden amulet hanging around his neck for the thousandth time, an unconscious check to make sure Cory’s ashes were still in place, but also to connect once again with his dead friend. Jack also carried a faded Polaroid of Cory’s dad standing on the peak. Jack’s mission was to carry the picture, along with a small portion of Cory’s ashes, to the top of La Hermana and scatter them so that Cory could keep his promise to his father to one day climb it together, and then to bury the photo on the spot where his dad had stood.
Jack’s promise was to keep Cory’s promise to his father, and he was determined to keep it no matter what.
Cory estimated Jack could make the trek up the steep incline in five hours, most of it walking a rugged trail with the last hundred meters being an easy hand climb over granite boulders.
The plan was to hit the trail by one o’clock and arrive at the peak just as the sun was setting, then make his way back down with a flashlight and grab the noon bus back to Anta the next day, reversing his trip and winding up back in D.C. by three p.m. the day after tomorrow.
It was a good plan.
Until the rain killed it.
71
Jack worked his way from the gas station toward the hotel, past makeshift