Gift of the Golden Mountain (21 page)

     "Oh Lord," May answered, leaning her forehead against her friend's.

     "Oh Freud," Karin joked, and the two started laughing then. They laughed until they had to gasp for breath, laughed until the tears flowed and they daubed each other's faces with tissues. When finally they stopped Karin managed to say, "I feel as if a hundred-pound block of ice has been lifted from my chest."

SHE SAW HIM before he saw her. He was wearing a white shirt which blazed bright in the sunlight and dazzled her eyes; she was already smiling when he looked up. He was, he said, heading for one of his weekly meetings in the barracks left over from the Second World War, which now housed an assortment of offices peripheral to the main purpose of the university. She was, she said, on her way to Earth Sciences for a seminar on Finite Strains. Their schedules had meshed, their paths colliding like atoms, setting off a chain reaction. She felt it first in her stomach, a rise and a catch and then a soft, glowing spread.

     "So," he said, shrugging—but not anxious to be off, she could tell.

     "So," she answered, allowing a very small smile, but not making it easy for him, either. It was up to him. He was the one who had held her at arm's length.

     On her way to Earth Sciences the next week, she found him waiting for her.

     "What would you say," he began slowly, "about skipping out for an hour or two?"

     She looked at him as if she were trying to solve an equation.

     "Why not?" she said at the same moment he said, ". . . unless," and they laughed. He took firm hold of her arm to turn her around, and guided her to one of the trucks that drive onto campus at midday to sell sandwiches. They peered into the polished aluminum racks, chose a chicken salad and a ham and cheese, two cans of Pepsi, oranges, and packaged brownies. Walking quickly across campus they encountered a man dressed in T-shirt and baggy dungarees who raised his hand for Hayes to stop.

     "Later," Hayes called to him, not breaking stride.

     "You mean this," she said, taking longer strides to keep pace.

     He guided her through an opening in a hedge beaten down by years of students intent on a short cut, and into a parking lot where his car waited.

     They drove up the hill behind the University, past the botanical gardens, and on to the Lawrence Hall of Science. She said nothing all this while, only sat next to him in the front seat with the brown paper bag that held their lunch in her lap—the Pepsi cans cold through her jeans. She glanced at him; he did not look at her but he knew she was looking at him and he grinned. She turned away, smiling.

     They sat on a grassy hill overlooking the whole of the Bay, spread out before them in the warm haze of the day. He stretched out full length, his head propped on his arm, and looked at her. Self-consciously, she took a bite of her sandwich and pretended to look at the view.

     "There are so many things I want to talk to you about," he said.

     She waited.

     "I want to tell you about my brother, my crazy brother who does things that are inexcusable, who can be the world's worst screwup . . ."

     "But?" she said.

     He smiled. "Yes . . . there is a 'but.' Andy does have some redeeming qualities, as hard as that may seem to believe, given his performance that Sunday."

     "I'm afraid I don't know him well enough to be forgiving," she said quietly. "I don't like what he did to Karin. I certainly don't like the way he treats women."

     Hayes sat up, squinted out at the Golden Gate. "No, you're right. That's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. If I had known that you and Karin and Sam were going to be there, we would not have come by Miyo's."

     "I thought Sam's mother had told yours."

     "She didn't. I'm sure you've figured out there is a problem, maybe Sam has told you . . ."

     She twisted a thread that was coming loose from around a buttonhole on her blouse. "Actually, no . . . but it's hard not to see how he resents—not you, but your family, his own family's position . . ."

     "I'm not sure I blame him. There have been times when Sam's mother has put my family—Andy especially—ahead of her own. She carries devotion to an extreme—and of course, she can't see it. Neither can my mother, for that matter. She just goes along, pretending we're all the best of friends, perfect equals . . . Mother and Miyo have this great fantasy they've dreamed up, that we're one big happy family."

     "And you aren't?"

     "Not their MGM version. Actually, in a looney tunes sort of way our family is happy. And so is Sam's, separately. But not together. As Sam told you the day we met, his mother is my family's housekeeper. That's the reality of it."

     He turned on his back, one hand firm around a can of Pepsi and the other flung to shade his eyes. She studied him: He had not shaved that morning, and a soft bristle covered his jaw. A strong jaw, strong face, she thought. A good face. Not sharply handsome like Sam, but good.

     They tempted a squirrel with bits of brownies. It sat up straight and considered them, its bushy red tail twitching. "Watch the tail," Hayes said, "you can tell what it's thinking by the movement of its tail."

     The talk drifted easily, like a raft on a slow-moving river, touching on this and that and moving on when some new subject floated into sight. Her foot cramped and she had to get up and hop around, then he rubbed it for her until the feeling came back. He lay back then and closed his eyes. "God," he said, "the sun. I keep forgetting it's there."

     "It always is," she answered, absently. "Don't you know it is sinful to forget the sun?"

     He sat up suddenly and with a passion that caught her by surprise said, "Do you know how old-fashioned that word sounds? Nobody talks about
sin
or
sinning
today. It's not with it, not cool . . . you rip off or you trash or you violate, you're a reactionary pig or an imperialist dog or a mass murderer—but nobody sins, and nobody is ever called a sinner."

     She knew it was just starting, that everything inside of him was in motion, spinning wildly around, and that he could no longer contain it, no longer hold it in.

     "Jesus!" he hissed, low in his throat, and then, shrugging as if at the irony of it. "Sin and Jesus, I'm beginning to sound biblical. I didn't bring you here for this."

     "I think you did," she said, controlled, knowing she had to be careful.

     He sat up, his body no longer relaxed, and he had forgotten the feel of the sun on his face in the mad colliding rush that was going on inside of him.

     "Maybe I did," he repeated, looking at her so steadily that she felt, for a moment, she would not have the courage to stand up to it.

     "So here it is," he began, clearing his throat and then stumbling over the words (so she knew, after all, that he had not planned it this way): "I'm sick of all the rhetoric, all the words, all the anger. It's become so rote, so studied, like a play we keep putting on, over and over again, and the people who make the difference . . . who make the decisions . . . some of them came to see it on opening
night, thought it was a nifty little entertainment, and laughed all the way home. We didn't get it, though, so we keep going on, pretending it makes a difference. One award-winning performance after another and it's all so damned self-deluding . . ."

     The gates were open now, he couldn't stop. She used a paper napkin to blot up a puddle of Pepsi he had spilled on the blanket and hadn't noticed. His voice was hoarse so the words came out grating: "It's all a charade, a game we play to make ourselves feel as if we have some control . . . pretending we can make changes. My mother—you've met my mother. We laugh at her, affectionately of course, because she's a good woman with a good heart. A good woman with her ridiculous good works, sending all those boxes full of old clothes—Brooks Brothers suits and sequined Saks dresses—down to Ecuador for the flood victims. But it's sheer hypocrisy for me to laugh at her when what I'm doing is worse. It's empty, posturing. More and more I hear myself talking and some other me whispers, 'Hayes, that's pure bull and you know it. . . .' I know we should not be in Vietnam and I know black people are systematically put down in this country and I know that prison abuses exist and that all of those things are wrong—are
sins
—but I've come to believe . . . I guess that's the right word, believe, an act of faith of a kind, that nothing I do on any committee or say from any podium is going to expiate any of our multiple sins."

     He turned away from her, dropped his head, and ran his hands through his hair. She looked at him, at the big hands with their long, slender fingers, at the thick tumble of light hair which curled slightly behind his ears. She wanted to touch him, but knew she should not. He wasn't done.

     "What is it you're trying to decide if you should tell me?" she asked, and his head snapped up, his eyes registered surprise.

     "You know?"

     "I don't know why you're hesitating. Unless it's a confidence."

     "No, not that," he answered, frowning.

     "Then I think you should tell me."

     "Why?"

     "Because it is part of all this . . . the sin, the reason for everything that is, or isn't. For you, and for you and me. Part of what I need to know."

     "Need to know," he repeated, squinting into the distance. "That's a phrase the intelligence services use, and the government, in some classified programs. You should know only what you need to know to do your job. Which means everyone hides everything they can from everybody else. It isn't what I want with you."

     It took all her courage to ask it: "What do you want with me?"

     He looked up at the sky now; a white cloud had moved over the sun, as if to shield them from the glare. "Too much," he said.

     "Then you will have to tell me."

     He sat for a while, looking at his hands without seeing them, and she knew he was trying to find the words to begin: "There was this guy," he finally said, "I roomed with him for a while in Africa, when I first got there, before I got sick. His name was Ernie and he was from some little ranch town in Arizona, one way back off the main road was the way he described it. He was a real cowboy—I mean, he could ride and he'd been brought up on a ranch, and he didn't talk much, it was like he'd never had much practice.

     "Anyway, after we were there about a week he started having nightmares. Nightmare, I should say. It was always the same. Sometimes he would just sit bolt upright in bed, other times he would scream out, but every time he would be sweating and shaking. This would happen about two, three in the morning.

     "He started trying to stay up, not go to sleep, I think he must have had a million ways to keep himself from dozing off. He got haggard looking, his eyes had terrible dark circles, and he walked around like a zombie. It was wearing both of us out, and finally I guess it just wore him down enough so that he told me. What had happened, the reason for the nightmare."

     He frowned, and his voice became tight. "When Ernie was ten years old he had this friend, a boy his own age whose father was a ranch hand when he wasn't riding the rodeo circuit. The father was a bronc buster, it seems, and a bar brawler. He drank too much and messed around with other men's wives and just generally raised hell, except where his kid—Ernie's friend—was concerned. He loved his boy, everybody knew that . . . The mother had died, and this guy had raised the boy, and the two of them just loved each other . . ."

     May stole a quick glance at him, she wanted to see if he knew his voice had changed into the short, terse phrases of the Arizona back country. Hayes, his jaw set, moved into the troubled story: "One day the boys were at a local rodeo. Small town stuff, just a little ring and some rickety bleachers out in the middle of a dusty field. And everybody who was there knew everybody else, local folks. Ernie and this boy were sitting almost at the top of the bleachers. And just as the boy's father was in the chute, waiting for his next ride, this man comes running in . . . He was a big guy, a cowboy, dressed in jeans and wearing one of those western shirts with big sweat stains around the armpits, Ernie remembered that. But mostly he remembered the man's face, which was tortured. Twisted into something beyond anger. Beyond madness, Ernie said, and deliberate. Like he knew exactly what he was going to do and nobody could stop him. He was wearing a gun, one with a long barrel.

     "Everybody in the stands just stared, frozen, as he went tearing up the bleachers, two at a time, fast—and purposeful, with that demon look in his eyes. People made a path, and he was coming right for Ernie and his friend. Before anybody knew what was happening, this man had grabbed Ernie's friend and hauled him to the top row of the bleachers. He just stood there, he had the boy by the hair and he was holding him up . . . up off his feet and he had a gun to the kid's head. And he stood there like that until everything got quiet, and everybody was looking at him."

     Hayes saw the shock in her face and said, "I'm sorry May, I shouldn't . . ." She gripped his hand and shook her head so that he would know he had to continue. In a curiously flat voice he went on: "Ernie wanted to shut his eyes, turn away, do anything but watch . . . but he couldn't. He couldn't move. All he remembers is the father's scream rising out of the ring, and his friend's eyes in the moment before the gun went off."

     "Oh dear God," May said, letting her head fall against his.

     "Yeah," Hayes said, his hand cupped around her jaw, "a sin, yes. Several sins. The slaughter of the innocent, and then, now, the slow, slow torture of Ernie . . . the nightmare in his head, playing the scene, like a tape, over and over again."

     "Poor Ernie," she said, leaning into him as he caressed her face.

     "Yeah, poor Ernie," he repeated, "who joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa to help the black man, the Third World, the underprivileged. Except he really went to Africa because he believed that it was where he could get to the source of it all."