10. Theo
THEO
The climber’s name is Brady and he’s about forty feet of rope from being fine, and the trouble with Brady is he doesn’t know it.
I know it, though, and that’s the job. Somebody has to be the one who knows it’s fine, and on rope, that’s me.
He’s on the ledge above the creek gorge, the one that catches sport climbers who come off route chasing dry rock this late in the season.
It’s a good ledge, a roomy one. You could picnic on that ledge.
Brady is not picnicking. Brady is pressed flat to the wall like the mountain owes him money and might collect.
His girlfriend is up top with Wade, doing the thing where a person is terrified and furious at the same time and keeps switching stations without warning.
Wade’s talking to her as he talks to weather.
Jonah’s rigged at the edge with the kit, in case Brady turns out to be less fine than advertised.
I build the anchor. Three points, backed up, every carabiner turned, checked, checked again, because my hands do the checking on their own by now and I let them, they’ve earned it.
Wade looks over the system. He always looks over the system.
Some of the guys at rotation camps think that means he doesn’t trust your rigging, when it’s the opposite.
He checks it so he can trust it with his whole chest. There’s a difference there, and it took me a while to learn it.
“Rigged,” I tell him.
He checks it over. “Go get him.”
Then it’s just me, the wall, the rope going tight.
This is the part I never say right when people ask, so I’ve quit saying it.
On rope, my head goes quiet. All the second-guessing stops.
There’s rock, there’s rope, there’s a scared guy on a ledge, and every single thing I need to do next is written right there in the order I need to do it.
Nobody hands you a rope because they ran out of other people.
A rope is the one thing you only get handed on purpose.
Brady hears me coming and starts talking as scared people talk, fast and sideways. How he wasn’t even off route really, how his phone’s at four percent, how his girlfriend is going to kill him, which, having met her briefly, is a live possibility though it isn’t a medical one.
I land on the ledge soft, clip the anchor, and give him a second to see me. Big guy in a helmet, arriving from the sky, attached to things, which helps.
“Hi there. I’m Theo Calloway.”
“I’m… Brady, I’m stuck, oh shit, I’m stuck.”
“You were stuck. Now you’re waiting with a friend.” I show him the rope, follow it with my hand so his eyes go up it, all the way to the rim where Wade’s silhouette is. “See that? This rope holds a truck. I’ve got you, and the rope’s got me, so really we’re both fine.”
“You bought him a truck?”
“A big truck, we tested it. It was a hell of a good day.” I’m clipping him while I talk, harness check, buckles doubled, the talking is for his ears and the checking is for my hands, and both of us get what we need.
“Here’s everything that happens next. You and me go up together, slow, like an elevator that makes conversation.
You hold this, you don’t have to be brave, the rope’s brave.
You just hold on and tell me about literally anything else. What do you do, Brady?”
“I… sell insurance for a living?”
“Perfect,” I say and mean it. “Tell me what I’m underinsured for. We got about four minutes.”
Turns out I’m underinsured for flood. We come over the rim to his girlfriend making a sound like a kettle taken off the burner.
She hugs him, then hits him, then hugs him again.
Jonah checks Brady over and pronounces him “the healthiest man I’ve seen all season, which continues to be a hell of a low bar,” and Wade shakes my hand at the truck.
One pump, which is Wade for a whole speech. My granddad shook hands like that.
On the rope, I never wonder if I belong on it. The rope doesn’t know I was hired last.
It’s the ground where the math lives.
Because we’re a three-man crew with a letter in the logbook.
Wade told us about it after the rotation camp.
Laid it on the table, read it out plain, both times the same flat voice, consolidation, regional, hearing, comments invited.
Then he said, “Nothing changes till it changes. Rig for today.” Jonah cleaned a kit that was already clean, I went through four blanks that night without making one spoon worth burning a letter into, and nobody said the part everybody was doing in their own head.
So I’ll say it here. We’re a three-man crew, the county writes the checks, and if the county decides two men plus a regional dispatch can cover this ridge, there’s a real simple question of which chair gets taken the hell away, and I was the last one to sit down.
I do that math so much it’s got a hell of a groove in it.
Last hired, first cut. I’ve had two years here, which is the longest I’ve ever been the new guy anywhere.
Growing up, my dad’s work took us through four schools, always arriving in the middle of somebody else’s school year.
You learn that seats mostly come with a return date.
You just try to be worth keeping longer than the paperwork says.
You coil the ropes better. You get there first. You make yourself the guy nobody has to worry about, and you don’t put your name on anything you can’t carry out in one trip.
Anyway, that’s the ground. I try to stay off it.
It’s my night for dishes, which is my favorite chore because your hands are busy and your mouth is free, and that’s the exact ratio I run best at.
Jonah’s on drying duty tonight. Wade’s at the table with the logbook, doing the reports he won’t hand off.
The base is warm and smells like the stew I made, which came out okay, because I make three things okay and stew is two of them.
I’ve been carrying a sentence around all day as you carry a load up a pitch, and setting it down requires reaching the top.
So I set it down.
“I want her. For us.”
The drying stops. That’s Jonah’s tell, he goes still all over, like his whole body is listening with him. Wade doesn’t look up from the logbook, but his pen does.
“I know we don’t say things,” I say to the dishes because it’s easier.
Then I make myself face the room, because words aimed at dishes don’t count.
“In this pack, we rig and go. We don’t say things.
Okay, I’m saying one. Della Hartley. I want her.
The rotation guys call her impressive, but I mean I want all of us to be one reason she sits down.
” My hands stop washing, which they never do.
“I have thought it through, every knot of it, and it holds. That is the thing I needed to say.”
For a while, there’s just the water going cool around my wrists.
“She’s got a business and a town on her back,” Wade says, level.
The radio voice, the one that doesn’t transmit worry, which is how I know exactly how much worry there is.
“And we’re a moving van come spring, if the county gets its way.
You don’t ask a woman like that to add three men to what she’s carrying, when we can’t even promise her a goddamn zip code. Leave her be, Theo.”
I look at Jonah. Jonah looks at the plate he’s been drying dry for a full minute. He doesn’t back me. He doesn’t back Wade either, which from Jonah is practically a filibuster.
“Copy that order,” I say.
And I mean it, as I mean it on a slope Wade calls me off of. He reads ground better than me. He’s been right about ground my whole time here.
But here’s the thing about copy, and Wade knows it too, because he’s the one who taught me radio discipline. Copy means I heard you. It doesn’t mean the mountain changed.
I’m at her counter for breakfast anyway, because the order was leave her be, and I checked every word of it twice.
There’s nothing in it about hotcakes. She’s got the ponytail losing its argument with the morning and the fastest hands in the county.
She slides me my plate. I’m into the M’s now; meatloaf hash, incredible, tell my mom.
She says, “Morning, honey,” as she says it to everybody.
I say, “Morning,” per the order, and don’t say one thing more.
The stool by her register has a split in the vinyl. Nobody else will sit on it. She keeps meaning to fix it, and she doesn’t; I keep sitting on it; neither of us has ever once mentioned it.
Every seat I’ve ever had came with a return date. I do the math on all of them. It’s a groove by now.
That stool’s the first seat I’ve quit doing the math on. It doesn’t feel like a loaner. It feels like it’s got my name in it, as a rope gets your name in it, from use.
I start a new spoon that night, a bigger one, and it’s going to be terrible.
It’s going to say “For D. Still.”