Solo Faces Read Online Free

stays only because of the angle at which it is placed, indecision—one move achieves nothing, there must immediately be another, perhaps a third. Hesitate and the holds vanish, draw back.
    The top was level and dusty, like an untended corner of a park. Sitting on a rock in the sun were the two other climbers. They were in worn shirts and climbing pants, their rope and equipment lay near their feet. The leader, who was wearing tennis shoes, glanced up as Rand approached.
    “I thought that was you,” Rand said. “How’ve you been, Jack?”
    Cabot merely extended a leisurely hand. He had a broad smile and teeth with faintly jagged edges, of a lusterless white. His hair was rumpled, soiled, as if he had slept all night on a porch. He was amiable, assured. His voice had a certain warmth.
    “The lost brother,” he said. “At last. Sit down. Want a sandwich?” He held one out, a graceful lack of deliberation in his movement. The sun glinted on his hair. His shoulders were strong beneath the faded shirt.
    “I saw you struggling down there.”
    “Have you ever been on that?” Cabot asked.
    “The Step?”
    “You own it, right? You bastard.”
    “I wouldn’t say that.”
    “Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you.” There followed some scraps of song, Cabot singing as if to himself. “Some say that he is sinking down to mediocrity. He even climbs with useless types like Daddy Craig and me … Say,” he called to Lane who was ten feet off, not daring to join them, “how did he do? Did he manage all right?”
    Rand was dividing the flattened sandwich.
    “I asked everyone about you,” Cabot said. “Jesus. Not a clue. You know, I thought of you so many times. Really.”
    He had been in Europe, in villages where the only telephone is in a bar and the walls of the houses are two feet thick. He’d spent the summer and fall there. The names of mountains every climber knows were now his own, the Cima Grande, the Blaitière, the Walker Spur.
    “The Walker?”
    “Well, we didn’t make it to the top,” Cabot admitted. He was hunched forward a bit as if in thought. “Next time. Of course, it only comes in shape every two years, if that. You want to do it?”
    “Me?”
    “You’ve been to France, haven’t you?”
    “Sure. Who hasn’t?” Rand asked.
    “You have to go. You’ve got to get to Chamonix. It’s more than you even dreamed. You go up the glaciers for five or six hours, you can hear the water running underneath. And the climbs!”
    Rand felt his heart beating slowly, enviously. He felt unhappy, weighed down with regret. He turned to the second man,
    “Did you go?” he asked.
    “No,” Banning said, “I’m not that lucky.” He was in medical school, his climbing days were numbered.
    Lane could not hear what they said, their voices were carried away by the wind. He could see them sprawled at their ease, the blond man leaning back and smiling, a piece of waxed paper waving near his foot. He was reminded of his mother and father talking when he had been younger, discussing things he was not meant to hear. There are conversations we are barred from, not one word of which can be imagined. He sat quietly, content to be near them, to have come this far.
    Banning would become a doctor and disappear from climbing before he’d had his fill of it. Jack Cabot, it was hard to say. He was the kind of man who mapped out continents—climbing might not release him, might make him one of its myths. As for Rand, he had had a brilliant start and then defected. Something had weakened in him. That was long ago. He was like an animal that has wintered somewhere, in the shadow of a hedgerow or barn, and one morning mud-stained and dazed, shakes itself and comes to life. Sitting there, he remembered past days, their glory. He remembered the thrill of height.
    “Who was that?” Lane asked.
    “Back there? Oh, a friend of mine.”
    They made their way in silence.
    “Did you used to climb with him?”
    Rand