Graphic the Valley (25 page)

• • •

Kenny was staying in my cave until he went up on the wall. He had a sleeping bag that matched his down coat in both puffiness and grime. He’d found the bag on the El Cap slabs, near the area of poop drops, where climbers threw their loaded Ziplocs from the Nose route. Kenny didn’t own a sleeping pad. He was lying in the dirt next to my mattress in the wet. I knew he didn’t even need the bag around him. Kenny was like a crow.

At Curry Village, two days earlier, he’d said, “Hold on a minute,” and hopped down off the rock. He lay down on the dirt, on his side, scraped a pile of pine needles and leaves over himself, and went to sleep. When he woke up five hours later, I was sitting next to him reading the book he’d brought out for the day.

He sat up and blinked. He said, “It’s horrible what they’re doing to this place, huh?”

“What?” I was finishing reading a poem.

“Don’t say ‘what’ to me.” Kenny scratched at the corner of his eyes where the sleepy was stuck. He said, “I know you know what I’m talking about. You’re the guardian of this thing, right?”

I said, “How am I the guardian?”

“You are,” Kenny said, “and you know it.” He laughed at me.

I said, “You want to walk down to Housekeeping and swim?”

“Okay,” he said. “I could afford to be cleaner than this.”

We were walking along the bike path near the Curry bridge a few minutes later when Kenny saw the paper bag. It was sitting on a log under an oak, by the path. He stepped over and looked inside. “Oranges,” he said. “It’s a whole bag full of oranges.”

“That’s weird.”

He pulled out an orange, smelled it and rotated it in his hands. “Yeah, these are good,” he said. He pulled out another orange and inspected that one too. “This is a bag full of perfect oranges.”

I reached down and took one. Smelled its thick peel.

Kenny said, “Do you think these belong to someone?”

“Not anymore,” I said. I looked around. “Plus, the bears won’t leave them for long.” I pointed up into the trees behind the last cabin. “I know of at least three full-grown bears who live up there, and ‘Yellow Tag 12’ is notorious.”

Kenny giggled. He spun an orange in his hands. “Not even one bruise here. I mean, a whole bag. Can you believe it?” He bit into the peel and started tearing it off.

He ate that first orange so fast that some of the peel was still sticking to the sections. Mouth full, Kenny mumbled, “These oranges are all ours. Yours and mine. Sometimes I don’t even know what to say.” Juice ran down through his scraggly beard.

I started eating my orange too. Then we were both laughing.

As Kenny peeled his second orange, he said, “Some people are just luckier than everyone else.”

During the flood, the bears come out of hibernation, woken like ghosts. They drop down off the scree slopes underneath El Cap to see the river for themselves, to know if the flood is real. They will tell their grandchildren that they saw the water up close, that the current was as powerful as people said
.

You know this
.

The bears come down and paw at the brown water, water weaving between trees like lines in a birch mat
.

There are no fish to catch, no suckers in the shallow pools, no rainbow trout, no caddis fly hatches, no stoneflies
.

There are no berries
.

The bears search through tents and cars. Check the locks on the boxes. Snatch grocery bags and unguarded Coleman coolers
.

Plastic and aluminum are scrunched in their scats, duct tape and pieces of Ziploc bags
.

How do I explain the beginning of this? Of the end? My arms tingled. Fingernails covered in wax. Maybe Kenny was the wildlife that tourists were not supposed to feed
.

Kenny said, “Mishmash.” He put a slice of chicken on top of his waffle, forked them both, and took a bite. He said, “Always different.”

I was eating a breakfast of hamburger halves.

Kenny said, “The dumpsters in the rest of this country are crazy.” He had that Camp 4 squirrel look in his eye like when he’d just found an unopened can of beer behind a boulder. “They’ve got good food in them, full sometimes, not even dented cans. Pizza and bread. I’ve gone behind Safeways and found enough food to eat for a month. No joke. But here—” he waved a French fry in the air—“here we have to worry about the bears. So there are no open dumpsters. No big scores. Then, places like this cafeteria become our dumpsters. The Curry deck. And box-diving.”

I said, “No trouble with those though.”

Kenny pointed his fork at me. “Are you going up on the wall with me next week or what?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But I’ll see.”

“You’ll see? Why? You’re not doing anything down here. There’s no reason for you to stay the next few weeks.”

I hadn’t told Kenny about McKenzie. I hadn’t talked about her at all, how I couldn’t stay away from her. How I didn’t want to. She was still working in the Valley, and I was meeting her in an hour.

Kenny said, “Name one thing that’s keeping you here on the ground.”

I took a big bite of hamburger bun.

• • •

After dinner and drinks.

Many drinks.

McKenzie didn’t know that I was still awake. I was watching her through the bathroom door. She stood naked in front of the mirror, examining herself.

I lay there, wanting to watch her without being noticed.

Over dinner she’d told me about her childhood, her parents’ divorce, her father taking her car camping once a year in Sequoia. How her father would be drunk the whole time.

She told me the story of her shoplifting postcards from the general store, thirty glossy images, and handing those out to her friends back in Long Beach, telling them that her father was the photographer, that he was a traveling photographer, and that was why he was never in town. None of her friends had ever met her father, so they believed her story. Or at least they pretended to.

She told me about sneaking away from the tent one summer night and meeting up with some college boys, about going into one of their tents with them, feeling a blond-haired college boy through his pants. She told me about the sound of his zipper. She was fourteen.

I watched McKenzie in the mirror. I closed my eyes and opened them again. I was trying to put all of the pieces together.

McKenzie found a hair on her face and plucked it with tweezers. She stood back and examined herself. Touched the light brown mole on her hip, tapped it with her index finger as she shifted her weight from left to right. The muscles in her butt and hips flexed one way, then the other. She looked thin in her underwear. Even taller. She’d told me that she’d been a middle-distance runner in college.

I’d said, “I don’t know what that is, but it must make a person strong.”

McKenzie ran her thumb underneath her left eye, wiping something away, but I couldn’t see it.

I was watching her, and I wanted her to never put on clothes again. She said aloud, “Pale and blobby,” to the mirror. But she was neither pale nor blobby. I pictured her at fourteen. Shorter? Skinnier? With a college boy running his hands all over her body. I blinked.

McKenzie didn’t look drunk. Five strong drinks after dinner in the bar though, and I knew she was drunk. Seven and Diet Sevens, and she didn’t weigh much.

My alcohol was fluttering.

McKenzie leaned toward the mirror and pushed her breasts together to make cleavage. She frowned. Then she grabbed a loose T-shirt, slipped it on, and stepped toward the bed. I could see her nipples through the cotton as she turned.

I closed my eyes.

She got in under the covers, scooted back against me, the backs of her legs touching the fronts of my thighs. Her back against my chest, and only that thin T-shirt between us.

I pulled her hips closer to me and reached up under her shirt with one hand.

She said, “Are you still awake?”

I didn’t say anything. I slid my other hand down and pulled her underwear out of the way.

• • •

I went out into the meadow and the yellow jackets were there. At a lightning-split pine, the downed trunk across a runoff, natural bridge over the sand cleft. Two crows, disease-twisted, one foot of each to the sky as if they were pointing sunlight, sundial lines with claw points.

The yellow jackets went in and out of the beak of the second crow like drippings of metal. They tumbled from the opening until their wings caught and they lifted.

I leaned down and saw the pulsing of the crow’s insect-pregnant belly. The arthropods pushing out like vomit building.

I let a yellow jacket land on my forearm and watched as it turned to an upside-down V, ready to bite and sting. Then I crushed it with a slap, starting a pheromone war, the other yellow jackets coming up in an armored cloud, chasing me for a few hundred feet. I ran as they stung my shoulder and neck, biting at the smell I’d caused.

• • •

I went to visit my mother, but she wasn’t in camp.

I walked up the creek until I heard her, the humming, and the song slow as the Merced run in August. I waited at the white pine near the big pool in the creek. I didn’t want to scare her.

Her head listed and she stumbled. Still humming the song but rickety on her legs, her knees turned out. She played pat-a-cake on the surface of the water to right herself, slapping like a little girl, then she waded over to the bank and dried her hands on the grass. She blew her nose into her hand and wiped that hand on the mud. Washed it with water.

Then she picked up the metal tube of glue and squeezed a pea-sized drop on two fingers. She put half of the glue under her right nostril and the other half under her left. Then she waded out into the water again, turned her palms up to the sky.

I put my feet in the water and waited for her to turn around.

I said, “Do you want to go visit him?”

But she didn’t hear me.

I went back to her camp and started the fire. Heated a small amount of water in the pot on the grate and dropped in a handful of oatmeal and brown sugar.

• • •

Six years old at the river, and the water cold, prickly as ponderosa cones. The snow is in the water, but I know we can swim it. Both of us swim well.

We’re in an eddy, and my father isn’t far behind us. My mother said she was coming soon. I wade out to the current line, deep as my waist, stare at the submerged boulders out in front of me.

I’m not holding her hand like I used to because she can swim now. I’ve seen her swim the eddies. But when I turn around and look, she isn’t there.

I see her hair on the surface, down at the far end of the eddy, and then her hair sucking under. I try to swim to her, but the eddy is in a reversal and the river pushes me upriver. I put my head down and swim out into the current, but when I come up I’m past the spot where she went under.

Then the water, dark in the shade like blackberry pulp, a thin coating of mud on the eddy stones. I swim back to the bank and stand up. I lose my balance and slide off a rock. Land on my elbow. I stand up and scramble the shallows back to the bottom of the eddy. Look in every direction. Hear the water. Where the water is lapping the stones it sounds like an animal drinking.

I search the eddy again. Yell her name. My father comes. My father falls in the water, gets up, turns around, swims out and back. He scrambles up on shore and runs down the bank. At an undercut by a riffle, I hear his choke. He pulls an arm. Smaller than mine.

Her foot is turned underneath where her ankle is broken, her foot jagging right like she’s trying to run away, to go somewhere the rest of her doesn’t want to follow.

Wovoka has not given a time. He only knows that they are still coming. He points to a tree with his right hand and a boulder with his left. He says, “They come riding horses of sickness. They swell past us to the ocean where they rot like dead fish on the shore. Then they return to this place where we Ghost Dance.”

But there is no Ghost Dance, and no one is listening. No one has listened for two decades. The Sioux rot on the pine ridge, while the Paiutes stay at Pyramid Lake. Commodity food
.

Then it is 1932, and Wovoka walks with God
.

In a tent on the Hetch Hetchy shoreline, I am born, and I will come here to bring you to this Valley. That is the end and also the beginning
.

Summer. The early night heat pushed into the cave like the warm tongue of an unbrushed animal. Kenny and I lay on top of our sleeping bags.

He said, “I’m going up in two days. There’s supposed to be a lot of wind, you know?”

“Wind?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. I could hear his dry lips crack into a smile even though I couldn’t see them in the dark.

I said, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, man.”

“Think about it. On a portaledge, just getting hammered. Feeling the power and the glory.”

I looked at the black line of the cave mouth where it severed the night’s stars like a cut of aluminum. “No,” I said, “I still don’t think so.”

Kenny rustled around on the top of his bag. He said, “I wish you’d change your mind and go with me, ’cause I’m going up no matter what.”

• • •

I spent the day in Stoneman Meadow. Sat and watched the grass breathe. Locusts popped on the stalks, and I caught one in my hand and wondered about honey. I ate the bug and it wasn’t bad, the rear legs crunching after the thorax. I caught another and ate that too.

There was no air near the floor of the Valley, the meadow grass yellow and papered. Ninety-five degrees and the wind that breathed was like the exhale of a burning log. I counted RVs that passed on the loop. Stopped at seventy-seven.

My mother would leave too, one way or another. I pictured her with a sticky bag in her hand, heard the rasp of locust legs, and wondered at the sound of my mother’s voice.

• • •

I knocked on McKenzie’s door late that evening. She opened it. Her smile was crooked in the space and I knew she’d been drinking again.

“It’s wrong,” she said. She opened the door all the way.