I’m certain death is upon us, swooping down in the middle of the Nevada night. I always kind of figured we’d meet our doom on this endless blacktop of blank terror, if not here on the shoulder of the snow dusted highway, then near the grim environs of Tonopah. We’d taken our chances plenty of times driving through the icy nights of Colorado, Utah, Nevada and finally California, flipping 180s and massaging the gas needle off of E, but this is it. I have the feeling.

“Oh! No, man, no!” Schuckert is a piñata beaten senseless by unknown forces in the passenger seat as I claw my way out of the dementia of backseat road sleep and crane my head into the slim console space between the two guys up front.

“Oh my god...did you see that?” I feel an ominous thud in the undercarriage. Gee, the driver, bends like an open shotgun over the wheel, his face awash in orange and green from the dashboard lights. He swivels to me, his mug contorted. “Dave, you’re awake!”

I’ve awoken to a cacophony, senses bludgeoned and butchered before they’ve had the chance to realize wakefulness. Gee slashes back and forth across the ice-crusted highway, the speedometer pinned right of center, while Schuckert slugs him relentlessly on the shoulder. I grab onto the backrests to stabilize my torso from sideways whips in the ninth circle of Nevada hell.

“Dude,” Schuckert says, fighting back tears of laughter and hiccupping robotically, “Gee is a monster…” hiccup, hiccup, “we’re gonna…need to clean the truck when we get to Bishop…or…we’re gonna be arrested...” He doubles over into a fit of laughter and the Explorer veers dangerously sideways as Gee howls into the night. I lurch akimbo into the window and curse loudly. The truck burps into the air.

Gee, eyes awash in tears and ludicrously close to legally blind, whispers, “Okay, okay…hold on …I didn’t mean to…” I’m frowning and my face is mumpy, all scrunched up. Waking up to madness again in this road trip life.

“God is conspiring, man,” Schuckert says, his reedy body tittering in the breeze of this unknown hilarity, “against the rabbits.”

* * *

“What? Come on. Twelve?” I’m pulling on my kicks below the Happy Boulder, looking incredulous and feeling ‘blah’ from the road. “Twelve?”

“Dude, I swear to god. Twelve rabbits. Five or six before we started even keeping track.” Gee shrugs at Schuckert, who opens his eyes wide in awe, aiming his guileless honesty in my direction.

“It’s true. Twelve rabbits dead. I tried to miss ‘em…but your Explorer is a murderer.”

“You’re the murderer,” I whisper, launching into ‘The Hulk’.

* * *

“Dude, there is,” I say in wonder, my headlamp illuminating bloody smudges sprawling the length of my rig’s running boards. “There’s blood all over. I’ll be a son of a bitch…the Explorer is a murderer.”

I stroll back to the campfire with a fresh PBR, Gee and Schuckert sprawled deep into their Kmart chairs, staring with blank stupidity into the licking flames. I plop down in my seat and instantly conform, as all men do. Dumbfounded campfire stares must umbrella history beginning with the Neanderthal.

As fires crackle and snap throughout the Pit, like stars twinkling in a dirt-bag constellation, the three of us fall into nitwitted conversation. The Bishop night engenders such vacuous bullshit, and before long we are well into a case and poking at the fire with sticks and pulling out embers to juggle. Tomorrow’s session is forever away and my truck is a murderer and the night is crisp and perfect.

A couple beers later Schuckert and I have had enough of this madness, mittens charred, Carhartts stained, and tongues aching from too much road trip tobacco.

“I’m stinko,” I say, listing sideways out of my camp chair and punting it well clear of the fire, as I vaguely remember waking up last year to my wee green recliner an ashen and smoldering skeleton after being blown into the fire during a windy March night.

“Yahr. Me, too. Bouldering and what-not,” chortles Schuckert, also crab-walking sideways, miraculously in the exact direction of his tent.

“You guys are pussies,” says Gee, a down wad croaking on the other side of the fire. The sharp hiss of another PBR cracks from his direction, and I’m sure he’s doomed.

* * *

Wrenching off shoes in a tent sucks. I get them off, slip into my sleeping bag and spin like a madman in a cocoon creation twirl. Adjusting my pants-pillow so the metal button above the zipper isn’t digging directly into my temple, I slow down my mind and focus on the gentle paper crumple of the fires still twittering around the Pit.

That’s when I hear the gravelly crunching of someone approaching our fire. Peering into the wall of my tent I just make out the shadowy outline of Gee, stubborn and belligerent next to the fire.

“I recognize the chair,” a man says, voice like a wire brush on lichened granite, “but I don’t recognize the face.”

Silence. What the…

“Mind if I share yer fire?” asks the man, bent and hovering over Gee.

“Uh…sure,” says Gee, his voice soaked in drunken dread. He’s not equipped for stranger talk. Not now. He’s far too gone for late night libations with a dark and mysterious oddball in the Pit. Historically, this portends the sort of mental collapse and glorious terror I would gladly zip myself out of the tent for, but this fella sounds like the real deal. Another California freak trolling into camp a few hours before the sun rises…and all this on Gee’s sauced nugget. Fantastic. I’ll hold off sleep for another hour…maybe two.

As pebbles rake my tent in Gee’s request for rescue, I smile to myself, fold my arms behind my head, and listen to the stranger’s story ramble on into the high Sierra night.

* * *

“A friggin’ rodeo clown…in the Pit,” Gee grumbles, flaking out the rope.

“Yeah, go figure, Gee. A rodeo-clown-transient in the Pit…who woulda thunk it?” I’m peeling purple sheaths off my tips, the physical fruition of two weeks on Buttermilk granite mixed with endless pitches in the Gorge. Grabbing my java press and pouring another mug, I look over to Schuckert’s tent, which has begun to shiver and shake. The Pit as a whole is just stirring to life.

“Dude, I heard the whole thing,” Schuckert grunts from inside his tent. “That guy was some kind of lonely, eh? 60 years old, or something? I think he wants to adopt you, Gee.”

“Shut up, Sugar. Friggin’ freaks. It’s like I have a bulls-eye on my forehead, or something.” Gee is suffering from some gestating form of shock. He had been damaged during the night. I take another sip of my Turkish sludge, dig deeper into my camp chair, and shake my head, wondering if and when feeling will ever return to my ravaged tips.

“Did he share your tent?” asks Schuckert, poking his head out of his yellow vestibule, his eyebrows arched in mock sincerity.

Gee drops the rope into the bag, releasing a monumental sigh, and crunches off down the way.

“I gotta take a dump.”

“Lover,” Schuckert coos, as Gee raises a salutatory finger behind his head.

* * *

Drifting out of the miasma of a month-long climbing road trip is like coming up for air and realizing you have become more accustomed to breathing water. You know that rent and plumbing problems and alarm clocks haunt the future, where the Pit had fostered symbiosis with the recondite road trip life. As we hurtle down Highway 50, nearing Ely, Nevada, dust devils churning out of the flatlands, I drop my head in resignation. All good things…

“You have any jerky left, Gee?” asks Schuckert from the back seat, a trash novel folded over his thigh.

“Negatory, Sugar.”

I glance at Gee with curiosity, still picking at my rock hard tips with my knees lodged into the front console.

“You know, I think people thought we were a gaggle of idiots because of that nickname.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, it’s not like people know our names. So, when you were on a problem, Schuckert and I were yelling ‘C’mon, G! You got it, G! Breath, G!’ I’m sure they thought we were a bunch of wannabe white-boy gangsters.”

Gee nods his head and smiles. He is used to this.

“But your nickname for Schuckert, man…I mean, Sugar?”

“Whaddya mean?” asks Gee, peering at me with a cocked eyebrow.

“Dude. What is Jason’s name?” I sit up straight in the passenger seat, tiny flecks of light purple skin tumbling off my lap.

“Sugar. Jason Sugar.”

“Gee!” Schuckert screams from the back seat, a huffing train of counterfeit indignation.

“What?” Gee says, the Explorer swerving slightly and bringing forth a rabbit-slaughtering flash back.

“Dude, his name is Schuckert. Schuck-ERT! Are you retarded?” Both Schuckert and I crumple in laughter as Gee abuses the accelerator.

“Whaaat?!” he thunders, voice rising like air escaping a crimped balloon. “Well shit, I’ve only known him for a couple of years!”

As the Explorer rockets over another hill the interior of the cab explodes in mockery and I wonder, gasping for air, how three best friends, cramped into a bloodied SUV, shuddering tents, and lightning-sheltering caves for over two years of adventures, can’t even know each others last names…