Graphic the Valley (20 page)

• • •

I say, “What’s in the trunk?”

My father eyes me like a marmot eating a climber’s shoe for salt. “Nothing,” he says.

“Nothing?”

He says again, “Nothing. Never mind that.”

I’d never seen inside the rear hatch of the car. “Why?” I say. “What’s in the trunk?”

“Listen to me, Tenaya. It’s not important,” he says. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

• • •

In the morning, I found my mother. She was on the Little Columbia Boulder. She had a cut on her knee that was open two inches. It looked like a river oyster, dark on the outside and mushy in the middle.

“Mom?”

She didn’t answer me. She was sitting on top, eight feet up, rocking, her legs pulled in, her knee bleeding a seep. She had a wet paper bag in her hand, and she was humming again, but this time her humming was loud. It was the closest she’d come to talking in fourteen years, this sound of almost singing.

She put the bag to her face and took a long breath. Her eyes flickered, then slitted, reminding me of a raccoon’s eyes when the animal has forgotten that it is nocturnal.

“Mom?” I said.

She hummed. She sucked on the bag.

I stood below her. Her right eye zagged, then her eyes crossed.

I climbed up the rail. When I touched her shoulder, she didn’t flinch or pull back. She didn’t lean in. I tried to take the bag from her, but she was holding it in her fist. The bag was wet, and when I grabbed it, it tore all the way around, the bottom half sticking to my palm. My mother held the top now, open to nothing.

She didn’t notice. She took a deep breath in and out, her fist still clutching the torn rim.

I pulled the glued bottom of the bag off my palm, felt the gumming as my mother continued to breathe through her fist, nothing but the Valley.

• • •

Carlos was waiting by my parents’ car when I went back for it. I’d taken my mother to her camp, and returned for the car. Carlos said, “Hi, Tenaya.”

I stared at the slither down his face, the curve at the middle. I listened for the snake’s rattle.

He said, “Drive with me?” He pointed to his Park Service patrol car.

“No.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll be invisible in there. People hide from cops. They really do.”

“But why would I ride with you?”

“Because,” he said, “this is important. I have to show you something. It’s not good, but you’ll understand.”

Carlos wasn’t arresting me.

He said, “You should know about this. Really, you should.” He leaned across and opened the passenger-side door. I got in. Carlos handed me a Park Service shirt and hat. “Put these on.”

We drove the Valley Loop Road. With the traffic, the loop took half an hour, but we didn’t talk. I watched all the familiar locations pass. Then we drove up through the tunnel, past Inspiration.

Carlos stopped the car on the side of the road at Wawona. He said, “Twin Burgers. Thompson. The new deal. There’s no Delaware North anymore. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“No,” I said.

He took off the hat he was wearing. Smoothed the curve in the bill. He said, “You and I are looking for the same things here. There’s a development plan in play and it’s all connected. Every single one of the companies and deals, they’re all connected. And the Park Service is going to make big money off this.”

“Money for what though?”

“Money to keep this park number one. Money to fund more of everything. Other parks. More money coming back in again.”

I said, “But for what? I don’t understand.”

Carlos said, “The more money they put into the park, the more money they’ll make. The more money they make, the more money they can spend. So this will be the richest park. It’ll have the best of everything. And corporate sponsorships will ensure protection forever. Plus, Yosemite will fund more than Yosemite.”

I said, “So the park is being sold?”

“Basically. Highest bidder situation. You probably don’t follow sports, but we’re talking sports-like, big-time corporate sponsorship. Location and naming paramount. Branding. Merchandise sales. You get it?”

“So what does that mean specifically?”

“It means that this park is going away,” he said. “Or at least the park we know. This is all going to change more than you already see. Everything’s going to change. And I’m supposed to be a ranger, protecting what we have.”

I said, “Shouldn’t you arrest me then?”

“Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Are your fires the real enemy?” Carlos reached into the middle console and pulled out a can of Copenhagen. He popped the lid and pinched a dip, packing it in with his fingertips.

The fake mint smell filled the cab. I said, “So you don’t care if I burn Miwok longhouses?”

Carlos spit into an old coffee cup. He said, “I don’t care if you burn everything anyone builds here. You understand?”

I looked out at the road where we’d parked. Carlos had stopped before the yellow caution lines, the burned houses down in front of us.

He said, “Do you know what those two were doing?”

“Which two?”

“Lucy and her father?” he said. “Do you understand everything that was going on?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think you did, but I did. I found them out. I discovered their deal, and it was like the old stories, like Vowchester. Do you know that one?”

“Yes,” I said. “The betrayal.”

“Right.” Carlos pointed down the road. “Burning the forms, the fake longhouses up here. That’s a good start. And that’s why I brought you here.”

I didn’t say anything.

“But Lucy’s father…both of them actually. Their deal with Thompson and Motel 4? The Park Service? That was them. They started that deal. Well, he started it, and she jumped in. And now no one can unstart what they started. Can’t be undone. The Park Service is moving, and it’s much more than saying that the Miwoks had ‘original rights,’ or anything like that. It’s much more than that. They’re designing a new Disneyland.”

“But you’re the same tribe,” I said. “Same ancestors. You’d win.”

Carlos readjusted his dip. He said, “You know better than that. This place owns us. Not the other way around.” He lifted the cup and spit again. “I’m going to stop the deal. Fuck everything up.”

I looked at where two ponderosa pines grew close together off the side of the road, how the smaller pine twisted around the larger trunk trying to find sunlight.

“You can be bitter,” Carlos said, “and I was for a long time. But in the end, we have to make choices. It doesn’t matter how we feel. We have to do what’s right for the Valley.” He put the car into gear and spun a U-turn. Then he drove back down the Chinquapin road.

When we got to my parents’ car, Carlos pulled over onto the shoulder. I took the Park Service hat and shirt off. Set them on the dash. Then I opened the door and got out. I walked around the front of the car, across the road.

Carlos rolled down his window. “Hey,” he said. “You have to know this.”

“Yeah?”

He said, “I started the fire.”

“What fire?”

He said, “The one at North Wawona.”

“You what?” I said. I was holding the car’s door handle.

Carlos popped his car into gear and rolled onto the road. He said, “I loved them, but I had to stop it.”

We are living off the entrance road, pulling fish from the river twice a day like the Depression families who lived in the Valley year-round in 1932. The little money we make from selling grass mats and arrowheads is spent on butter, hot dogs, potatoes, and cheese. I am in the store, and your mother is alone in the car when a man taps on the glass. Your mother rolls down the window
.

This man says, “You and your husband will have a child.”

“What?” your mother says. She is forty years old. “I can’t have children.”

The man closes his eyes. He says, “Yes, you will. And he will be set apart for the Valley. Pure. His hair uncut. His name will mean, To Dream.”

The man hands an envelope to your mother, then he walks away
.

When I return from the store, your mother says, “I can’t eat the hot dogs.” She points to the envelope. “It’s a map.”

“A map to where?”

She says, “To Lower Merced Lake.”

There is no time and there is all time. Water dries like light disappearing in the trees.

I was four years old when my sister was born. I saw her come out, blood and mucous, blue turning to pink with one scream. That is my first memory. Her hair like black goose down, wet as from water, but not water. I touched her as she turned her face back and forth against my mother’s chest like she was trying to rub her nose off.

My mother whispered, “Shh, shh, shh, shh,” and tapped her fingers on the little back.

My sister toddled early, and walked at eight months.

“That was you too,” my father said. “We could not keep you down.” But I knew that I’d walked at a year, exactly. My mother had told me that once when I was little, one of the last things she ever said to me, and I did not forget it.

She said, “You crawled everywhere, and your shoulders were so strong. Then two steps right on your birthday. Then ten the same day. You walked on that day exactly, your birthday, like it was a rule.”

I used to watch my sister wander around camp, busy with her jobs, scraping sticks into a pile, organizing the screwdrivers on the backseat of the car, tipping over water cups.

She was with me for two years, everywhere I went. Slept in the same tent, the same sleeping bag. Bathed in the same creek. She toddled the flat trails with me, her face turned up, lips set, hands out to her sides, her goose wings.

And I remember nothing of myself before her. My father said that I was not nervous until that evening.

Kenny returned from Truckee. He walked into the Ahwahnee cave boulders. “It was beautiful,” he said.

I watched him pull his gear out of his backpack. Lay his sleeping bag out to dry. Pile six books on top of each other. He’d found a headlamp somewhere and he placed that on top of the stack of books. “Got rained on hard,” he said. “Epic rain. Biblical.”

I said, “Were you here during the flood?”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t see that.”

“It was like the Valley trying to reclaim its ground. My father said that the Valley would reclaim itself someday.”

“I imagine,” Kenny said. “And I’ve seen that road sign thirteen feet up. So I know that flood was huge.” Kenny had his hands on his hips and he was staring off. He said, “I’d like to see that.”

I took his down coat and hung it over a branch. It smelled like a bear, the wet fur stink of the soiled down. I took a shirt from his pile and wrung it out for him. Kenny did the same with another. We hung them on tree branches outside the cave.

Kenny said, “Want to go find food?”

I hadn’t eaten much in the last week. I said, “Okay.”

We walked the hotel road, past the Church Bowl, into the mosquito hatch, the black clouds that hang there, May until August.

Kenny was dirtier than ever, covered in old sweat, and the mosquitoes landed all over him. He slapped a few and said, “I hitchhiked some. I didn’t just walk.”

I looked at him. It was hard to imagine a driver picking him up. Kenny looked worse than homeless. Wild dreadlocks and bloodspots where the mosquitoes had found bare skin. His bloodshot eyes.

I slapped a mosquito on my left arm. I said, “A couple nights ago, I heard that you were a major college wrestling recruit, that in high school you won five national titles.”

Kenny said, “How’d you hear that?”

“Greazy told me. Said he’d wrestled you at the campfire once and you threw him all over the place.”

“Greazy said what?”

“Yeah, and he told me about you being ranked number one in the nation for three straight years.”

“Oh,” Kenny said.

“He told me he thought that he could take you ’cause you’re short.”

Kenny said, “I did wrestle pretty small. One twenty-six at the end.” His left ear was cauliflowered, spiraled to a close. I hadn’t noticed it before. He slapped a mosquito behind that ear.

I said, “Greazy told me that you wrestled in college too.”

“For a while,” he said.

“Then you just stopped?”

“Yep,” he said, and he waved his hands around, trying to keep the mosquitoes from landing. “College wrestling wasn’t fun.”

“But I heard you were the best.”

Kenny nodded. “In high school, I was. I wasn’t the best in college.” He picked dead mosquitoes off his palm with a black fingernail. Then scraped a body off his elbow.

I said, “So why’d you quit?”

“The coaches,” he said. “They weren’t good people.”

“No?”

Kenny blew dead mosquitoes off his fingertips. “No, and I didn’t want to be around that negativity anymore.”

I waited for him to explain more, but he didn’t. We walked and waved our arms, trying to keep the bugs from landing on us. At the end of the hotel road, we turned toward the falls, and within fifty feet, the mosquitoes were gone.

I said, “I hate that patch there. The swarm.”

“Yeah, it’s weird how they sit right there and stay. The second you walk past it, they’re gone.”

Both of us picked bug remains off our necks and arms.

Kenny said, “Did you ever have a girlfriend, Tenaya?”

“Yes.”

“Was it serious?”

I said, “I had a wife.”

Kenny stopped and looked at me. “Wait, what? A wife? How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty? Did you get married at fifteen?”

“No,” I said, and kept walking, “I got married at twenty.”

I realized that I hadn’t thought about Lucy that day. I’d woken up, washed my face in the stream, boiled oatmeal, stolen coffee from the Ahwahnee, read part of a book, and never thought of Lucy.

Kenny said, “What happened?”

I didn’t know how to explain. The story was too complicated. I said, “She died.”

“What?” Kenny said. “She died?”

“Yes,” I said. “She died last fall, right after we got married.”