“It’s also none of your business,” Lew told him.
Cadan felt his belly grow tight and hot. He said, “Right. Well, I guess it isn’t. But when you want me to entertain your girlfriend while you’re out…out doing whatever…then it is my business.”
Lew dropped his hand from the search of his pockets. He said, “Christ. I’m…I’m sorry, Cade. I’m on edge. So much is going on. I don’t know how to explain myself to you.”
But that was just it, Cadan thought. What was going on? True, they’d heard from Will Mendick that Santo Kerne was dead?and yeah that was unfortunate, wasn’t it??but why would the news throw their lives into chaos if chaos was indeed where they were?
THE EQUIPMENT ROOM OF Adventures Unlimited had been constructed in a former dining hall and the former dining hall had itself once been a tea-dancing pavilion in the heyday of the Promontory King George Hotel, a heyday that had occurred between the two world wars. Often when he found himself in the equipment room, Ben Kerne tried to imagine what it had been like when the parquet floor wore a gloss, the ceiling glittered with chandeliers, and women in frothy summer frocks floated in the arms of men wearing linen suits. They’d danced with a blissful lack of awareness then, believing that the war to end all wars had actually ended all wars. They’d learned otherwise, and far too soon, but the thought of them had always been soothing, as was the music Ben imagined he heard: the orchestra playing as white-gloved waiters passed finger sandwiches on silver trays. He considered the dancers?nearly saw their ghosts?and felt a poignancy about times that had passed. But at the same moment he always felt comfort. People came and went from the Promontory King George, and life continued.
In the equipment room now, however, the tea dancers of 1933 didn’t enter Ben Kerne’s mind. He stood in front of a row of cabinets, one of which he’d unlocked. Inside this cabinet, climbing equipment hung from hooks, lay neatly in plastic containers, and coiled on shelves. Ropes, harnesses, slings, belay and camming devices, chock stones, carabiners…everything. His own equipment he stored elsewhere because he didn’t like the inconvenience of coming down here to sort out what he wanted to take with him if he had a free afternoon for a climb. But Santo’s kit had a prominent place, and above it Ben himself had proudly fixed a sign that said “Do Not Take From This.” Instructors and students alike were to know those pieces of gear were sacrosanct, the accumulation of three Christmases and four birthday celebrations.
Now, however, all of it was missing. Ben knew what this meant. He understood that the absence of Santo’s equipment constituted Santo’s final message to his father, and he felt the impact of that message, just as he felt the weight and experienced the sudden illumination that the message provided as well: His own remarks?made unthinkingly and born of pigheaded self-righteousness?had effected this. Despite his every effort, despite the fact that he and Santo could not possibly have been more unlike each other in everything from personality to appearance, history had repeated itself, in form if not in substance. His own history spoke of wrongheaded judgement, banishment, and years of estrangement. Santo’s now spoke of denunciation and death. Not in so many words but, rather, with an open acknowledgement of a heaviness of heart that in and of itself had uttered a single damning question as loudly as if Ben had shouted it: What sort of miserable excuse for a man are you, to have done such a thing?