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  A Song for the Asking

  Steve Gannon

  A

  KANE

  NOVEL

  A Song for the Asking

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2012 by Steve Gannon

  A Song for the Asking is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gannon, Steve.

  A Song for the Asking / Steve Gannon.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-615-43270-0

  A Song for the Asking / Steve Gannon.

  1st Edition Hardcover

  Copyright © 1997 Steve Gannon

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  In loving memory of my parents

  Capt. Henry Thomas Gannon, MD, USN, Ret.

  Dorothy Helen Gannon

  All music is what awakes from you when you are

  reminded by the instruments,

  It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not

  the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the

  score of the baritone singer singing his

  sweet romanza, nor that of the men’s

  chorus, not that of the women’s chorus,

  It is nearer and farther than they.

  ~ Walt Whitman

  August

  Travis! Wake up! Rise and shine, rookie.”

  “Huh?”

  “C’mon, we’ve gotta get moving if we want to make it over the pass and still have time to climb.”

  With a groan, Travis Kane eased up on one elbow and squinted through the tent flaps at his older brother. “The sun’s not even up yet, Tommy.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Tommy insisted, reaching in and shaking Travis’s foot.

  “Damn, you know I hate that,” yawned Travis, struggling to recover his captured foot and lashing out ineffectually at Tommy’s grinning face with the other. “I swear, sometimes you’re a bigger pain in the ass than Dad.”

  “If T. Rex were here, we’d be halfway up the trail by now,” Tommy noted dryly. “How’re you feeling?”

  Travis gingerly tested the bridge of his nose, finding it still tender and swollen from the fight. “I’ll live. Only hurts when I smile.”

  “You’re gonna wind up with a nice shiner there, bro. Maybe two. But look at the bright side. I’ll bet you’re definitely in better shape than Cobb.” Tommy rose and started across the campsite. “Come on, get up,” he called back over his shoulder. “I’ve got water boiling for breakfast.”

  Reluctantly, Travis pushed to a sitting position. Although a hint of morning had begun to illuminate the interior of the tent, he knew it would be hours before the sun crested the ridge behind them. Shivering, he wormed from the warmth of his sleeping bag, quickly donning his clothes and down jacket. Even in August, overnight temperatures in the High Sierra routinely dropped well below freezing. Later that morning he knew he would be shedding layers; right now the extra insulation felt good.

  Without leaving the tent, Travis reached outside and grabbed his boots, shaking them to clear anything that might have taken up residence during the night. As he pulled them on, he glanced across the campsite. Twenty feet away he could see Tommy kneeling beside a granite slab they had set up as a cooking area the previous evening. He had both butane camp stoves going: one for coffee, the other heating a large pot of water for their customary trail breakfast of freeze-dried scrambled eggs, fruit, and oatmeal.

  Unobserved, Travis remained in his quiet sanctuary for several minutes watching Tommy cook, sensing, for a fleeting moment, the familiar, hateful stab of resentment he had felt for his brother all his life. They had both inherited their unruly reddish hair, an odious (to all four Kane siblings) genetic gift from their father, but the physical similarity between the two brothers ended there. Like their father, Tommy possessed the natural grace, size, and physical presence of a born athlete—qualities that had earned him a football scholarship to the University of Arizona starting that fall. Tall and wiry, Travis had inherited the fine bones and artistic demeanor of their mother. He had never beaten Tommy at anything, and long ago he had resigned himself to living in the shadow of his brother’s accomplishments. Tommy played varsity football; Travis ran second-string track.

  Whistling happily, Tommy dumped a generous portion of Tang into a plastic bottle, added water, shook the container, and peered over at the tent. “Chow’s on, cupcake,” he growled in a credible burlesque of their father’s autocratic bark.

  “Now you’re even talking like him,” Travis grumbled as he crawled from the tent. “I thought we came up here to get away from Dad.”

  “Right,” Tommy laughed. “From what you told me, it sounds like he really topped himself on Friday. And when Mom found out about your fight with Cobb … man, was I glad to get out of there.”

  “You weren’t laughing at the time, Tom. You’re lucky to be leaving for college soon. I’ve still got another year in our house left to go.”

  “You’ll survive. Especially with Mom running interference for you.”

  “Screw you. I don’t need Mom to protect me.”

  “Come on, bro. I didn’t mean it that way. Besides, Dad’s usually not that bad.”

  “Yeah, he is.” Travis poured himself a cup of coffee and took a sip, wincing at the bitter taste. “He is to me.”

  “Jeez, lighten up,” said Tommy. “Let’s just enjoy the trip and try to forget about everything at home.” When Travis didn’t reply, Tommy bolted the remainder of his breakfast in silence, then rose to his feet and began breaking camp.

  Travis finished eating a few minutes later. After setting down his plate, he gazed over thoughtfully at his brother, who by now had organized his pack and moved on to filtering water for their canteens. “You realize he would kill us if he knew we were climbing,” he said, not letting it go.

  Tommy turned and cracked his knuckles, shooting Travis a ferocious glare. “I gave you girls a direct order,” he snapped in another startling rendition of their father. “No rock climbing till after Tom’s first college season is over.”

  “He’s worried you’ll get hurt and blow the scholarship.”

  “Bull. Dad just wants to lead the climb himself.”

  “Maybe,” said Travis, remembering their father’s excitement when they had first discovered the towering granite wall on a backpacking trip the previous summer. “But whatever his reasons, if he finds out—”

  “How’s he going to find out? I’m sure not gonna tell him. Are you?”

  “Hell, no. But Dad’s a detective, and cops have a nasty habit of discovering things.”

  Tommy regarded Travis carefully. “No one else knows, right?”

  “Well, uh …”

  “Jesus, you told somebody? Who?”

  “Arnie.”

  “You told Dad’s partner? Damn! I don’t believe this!”

  “It just slipped out. He promised not to tell, and as we’re here, he obviously hasn’t,” Travis pointed out. “Anyway, someone ought to know where we are in case something happens. We didn’t even sign in with the ranger. Until the snow melts, the chances of anybody else trying to make it over the pass are pretty slim.”

  Tommy shook his head in disgust. “You told Dad’s partner,” he said angrily. “That’s just great, Tra
v. Good thinking.”

  “So maybe I screwed up,” Travis retorted. “I still think—”

  “Forget it,” Tommy interrupted curtly. “What’s done is done. Gimme a hand breaking camp.”

  “In a sec. Nature calls.” Irritated by Tommy’s criticism, Travis tossed the dregs of his coffee, grabbed a wad of toilet paper, and headed for a stand of gnarled pines fifty yards above their campsite.

  “Make it quick,” Tommy called after him.

  When he reached the trees, Travis dug a shallow trench in the soft layer of needles and loam at their base. Still stinging from his brother’s reproach, he dropped his trousers and squatted, spending several moments contemplating the placid surface of Franklin Lake far below. Although deep shadow still engulfed their camp, the snowfields capping Tulare Peak across the water already glared in the morning sun, and as Travis watched, the demarcation between light and darkness began to creep down the mountain’s chocolate-brown slopes, illuminating a peppering of sparse, twisted pines clinging to its flanks. Only the bright blue dome of their tent seemed alien in the otherwise pristine, beautiful surroundings.

  A thousand feet above lay the approach to the pass, with unbroken snow covering the trail for the final third of its serpentine ascent. An unusually heavy snowfall the previous winter had kept the pass closed until now, and Travis knew it would be a tough slog to reach the wall on Needleham Mountain they planned to climb. Grudgingly, he had to admit that Tommy’s eagerness to get moving made sense.

  Still, after finishing, Travis delayed returning to camp a few minutes more, breathing in the crisp Sierra morning and enjoying the harsh beauty of the high country. As he looked down from his perch high on the ridge, he saw his brother withdrawing their tent’s collapsible poles, causing the blue fabric to deflate like a punctured beach ball. Once it had fluttered to the ground, Tommy turned and scanned the slopes above. “You fall in or something?” his call echoed up.

  “I’m coming,” Travis called back.

  It took Travis several minutes to make his way down. By then Tommy had the tent rolled and stowed, both sleeping bags stuffed, and the climbing rope lashed to his pack. “Damn,” said Travis, shaking his head. “A couple more wipes, and you’d have had everything done.”

  “You’re right about that,” Tommy replied impatiently. He eyed the cook kit, which still needed cleaning from their morning’s breakfast. “It’s your turn to wash,” he added. “C’mon, Trav. Let’s get going.”

  When the two brothers set out twenty minutes later, Tommy quickly assumed his usual position well ahead. Since they’d been boys, each had always hiked at his own pace, with Tommy out front unless Dad was along—in which case he’d take the lead and neither brother would see him until the end of the day when he’d catcall them into camp, gleefully accusing them of being whiners and pussies and wimps. Nonetheless, this isolated hiking style suited Travis, who for most of the time on the trail had little energy for chatter and found the rhythmic movement of steady walking a perfect background for introspection and daydreaming. Now, as he plodded along, his mind returned to a subject he’d found increasingly troubling as the summer had worn on: the climb.

  Why did I let Tommy talk me into it? he wondered for the hundredth time, regretting his role in his brother’s typical rebellion against their father.

  You know why, a perverse voice inside him whispered.

  Travis picked up his pace, battling to ignore the voice within. Tommy always has to play the big man—prove he’s as good as Dad, he thought resentfully. Well, the hell with it. Why don’t I just tell Tommy to forget it?

  You know why, the voice whispered again.

  Oh, yeah? Why?

  You don’t want to admit to him that you’re scared.

  “Shut up,” Travis said aloud. “That’s not it at all.”

  Yeah, sure, the voice persisted. The truth is, Tommy tries to act like Dad and you try to act like Tom, and you know it. You also know you can’t climb like him. He’ll have to lead most of it, and if something goes wrong …

  Two hours later, after negotiating the summit snowfield by following in Tommy’s posthole footprints, Travis joined his brother atop Franklin Pass, 11,250 feet above sea level. Momentarily forgetting his misgivings, he paused in silence on the Great Western Divide, gazing with awe into the heart of the High Sierra. Five hundred feet below he could see the trail emerging once again from its dazzling blanket of snow—winding down a rocky slope on the far side of the pass in a series of tortuous switchbacks to a runneled alpine meadow. Farther east the grassy fields surrendered to a dense forest of pine, beyond which lay a huge canyon, carved over millennia by the Kern River on its southward rush to Isabella Lake. And in the distance, rising silent and majestic into a sky as clear as diamond, stood the easternmost spine of the Sierra Nevada—the range’s final cataclysmic upheaval before plunging ten thousand feet to the floor of the Owens Valley beyond.

  Welcoming the break, Travis shrugged off his pack and glanced over at Tommy. “I’ll bet you can see for a hundred miles,” he said.

  Tommy, who had already shed his pack, turned from his own quiet introspection of the rugged wilderness below. “Yeah,” he agreed, his anger following their earlier argument regarding Arnie apparently forgotten. “Speaking of miles,” he added, “we’ve still got a few to go ourselves.” Without awaiting a response, he reshouldered his pack and started down the far side.

  Just before noon, after slogging their way down the eastern snowfield and continuing north past Little Claire Lake, Tommy and Travis paused at the base of Needleham Mountain. With a shiver of excitement, Travis stared up at the peak’s daunting southeast buttress, struck silent by the sheer size and scale of the granite wall before them. It rose more than eleven hundred feet from a chaos of shattered stone at its base, terminating in a broad shelf capped by a rocky outcrop. Although initially the rock face ascended moderately, it soon increased in pitch, turning vertical by the time it had risen a few hundred feet from the valley floor.

  Thrilled in spite of himself, Travis studied the rock, trying to pick out the route they would climb. In the center of the wall, extending from the talus foot to within a hundred feet of the final shelf, broad sections of stone had exfoliated over the centuries, peeling from the monolith in layers like the skin of an onion. The resulting loss had carved a giant overhanging arc, a monstrous roof looming eight hundred feet above. The right side of the wall consisted of a blank, soaring face of stone; on the left a tremendous dihedral—two flat, intersecting granite planes—formed its westernmost boundary, rising like an open book for several hundred feet to a large vertical slot. Above, after passing a huge chockstone jammed into the top, the slot gave way to a system of cracks running all the way to the summit shelf, beyond which the rock continued upward at a gentler pace—a fourth-class scramble—to Needleham’s peak.

  “Damn, it’s a lot bigger than I remembered,” Tommy observed.

  “It sure is,” said Travis, still staring at the wall in amazement. “Want to bail?”

  Tommy opened his pack and pulled out a Mineral King geologic survey map. “No way. We can do it,” he answered confidently. “This map isn’t much of a guidebook, but it’s better than nothing,” he added as he began comparing the rock’s features to the lines on the quadrangle.

  Travis found himself unable to contain his growing apprehension. “Well? What do you think?”

  Tommy folded the map, smiling at his brother’s nervousness. “Six pitches, maybe seven,” he answered, squinting up at the mammoth dihedral. “Nothing tougher than 5.11, 5.12 at the most.”

  Travis felt his heart plummet. At one time the climbing community had allocated a 5.10 rating (on a scale ranging from 5.0 to 5.10) to the most difficult technical routes; since then limits had been pushed to 5.13 and beyond. Although Travis had followed Tommy and their father on a number of 5.12 climbs, he had never led anything harder than 5.10.

  “Here’s the plan,” Tommy continued, his eyes lighting with en
thusiasm. “We ascend the dihedral to the slot, then climb the chimney to the cracks. From there we traverse right, get above the overhang, and then up to the summit. I’ll lead the tough pitches; you take the easy ones.”

  “What easy ones?”

  Tommy glanced at the sun, which by then had risen well into the sky. “Hell, there’s bound to be at least one,” he said with a smile. “Come on. If we don’t want to spend the night up there, we’d better get humping.”

  Reluctantly, Travis dug his climbing shoes from his pack. He pulled them on and began tightening the flat nylon laces, watching as Tommy ordered their gear on the equipment rack—smallest stoppers first, larger hexagonal nuts next, and finally the cam-shaped Flexible Friends—arranging the variously sized pieces of wire and metal that the lead climber would wedge into cracks and flaws in the rock for protection on the ascent. Next, after both boys had stepped into their sit-harnesses and fastened the thick protective belts around their waists, Travis passed Tommy a handful of climbing slings—lengths of nylon webbing tied in two-foot-diameter loops. As Travis started to close his pack, he noticed a pair of metal ascenders lying on the bottom. “Want to take the Jumars?” he asked. Clipped to the climbing rope, the Jumars could be used to bypass a difficult section of rock, allowing one to move up a rope fixed from above much like climbing a ladder.

  “What for? Think you won’t be able to follow my leads?” Tommy snorted. “Leave ’em. I’ll haul your ass up if I have to.”

  With a shrug, Travis closed his pack and leaned it against a boulder.

  “Ready, bro?” asked Tommy.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Travis lied, realizing it was too late to back out.

  “Good. Let’s do it.”

  With Tommy out front, they scrabbled over broken rock to the base of the dihedral. Once there, Travis uncoiled the fifty-meter line that would connect them throughout the climb. Tommy shrugged on the rack and slings. “This is gonna be great, bro,” he said, grinning at Travis with unconcealed enthusiasm.

  “Yeah,” said Travis, attempting to return his smile.

  By tacit agreement Tommy took the first lead.