My Abandonment (18 page)

"Hey!" I shout. "Paul!" But he doesn't answer.

I'm pulling the sled back up the hill when the lady's voice starts. First I hear it and next I see Susan standing outside the yurt holding something red. She sets it down to hold her hands up to her mouth to shout louder.

"Paul!" she shouts. "You come down here now! Leon! Paul! Stanley! Paul!"

While I watch and listen Paul is plowing down through the snow toward her without making any noise so I see his head rise up into where I'm looking and then his body standing down there close to hers.

When I reach them she's already buckled my red plastic snowshoes onto his feet.

"Those are mine," I say. "What are you doing?"

"I worked it out with your father," she says. "This red pack, too." She is wearing Father's snowshoes buckled tight to her sneakers. She looks different than before since her hair is now straight and black but then I see that it's that she's wearing a black wig on top so the blond hair shows out one side.

"What is happening?" I say.

"We traded," she says. "It's all right, dear."

Paul lifts one snowshoe then the other. He looks up at me.

"We were sledding," he says.

"Away from here, now," Susan says. "It was very nice to meet you. Goodbye."

"Goodbye," I say.

"It was very nice to meet you," Paul says and then they are walking away with the snowshoes making scratching sounds in the snow. He is not as fast and stumbling, learning to walk in those things. She has Father's red frame pack on her back and her head looks too tall with both those wigs.

I push the door of the yurt scraping open. The air smells like burnt plastic and worse. I can hardly breathe. I turn my face to the open door for a moment before I can go inside.

"Father?" I say.

All I can tell is that the wires are torn loose from one wall. None of them are glowing any more at all and it is hard to see since there's not much light from the window. I kick the headlamp and then find it and shine it across our scattered things and then see the edge of Father's shirt. I shine it up and across him and right to his face. His teeth are biting together and his lips are pulled open. All his hair is burnt down close on one side and his beard is not hair I see but blackened burned skin. I cannot see his ear on that side very well.

"Father," I say. "Don't worry. Rest."

He jerks once and kicks his leg then like sometimes he does when he's asleep and then he doesn't move again. There is no breath, no heartbeat in his throat. If I ran after Susan and Paul I might not catch them and if I did they wouldn't help me since she is the one who did this to him. The town is down the valley, Father said last night, so if I keep going down I'll find it. Sisters. If I go alone, can I find my way back to him? Will I get back too late?

I try to move Father and can't. He's not snared up in the wires, he's just so heavy. I've always been proud of how big he is. The best thing I can do is open the door and kick snow inside, and then put the orange sled on top of that. I roll Father and pull him out the door and then I can see him better.

All the buttons and snaps and zippers of his clothes are broken or gone. His hair is breaking off like ashes against the snow. Around his throat there's black burnt lines heading beneath his undershirt. His right sleeve is gone and that arm is black and red with the sharp white bones at the elbow. That hand is so burnt it doesn't look like a hand. His left boot has been blown all the way off even if his bare foot looks fine. I find the boot inside and it's shredded and useless. Instead I put one of his wool socks on that foot. It's then that I see the sole of his foot is all blackened with a hole in the middle.

"Hey!" I shout, standing and turning in a circle.

It's getting darker. With the headlamp on even in that small space I have to find everything one at a time and my clothes and papers are all scattered too. I'm coughing. I fit everything and Randy and our food which they took none of into my small pack with the broken zipper.

Now that I don't have them I see how much help the snow-shoes were. Still, the snow has frozen a hard crust that I can walk on top of but Father's weight on the sled keeps breaking through and I have to strain harder. He slips halfway off. His head catches the snow and holds and the sled slips out from under him. Shifting him up it feels like his one arm is just loose and only held on by the sleeve of his shirt.

It's impossible to go uphill and going sideways is not easy and the deep hollows around the trees try to pull the sled in. Downhill it's hard to keep control and really the only way I can go. Only downhill is toward the town of Sisters and now I am not so sure that it's a good idea to go there.

"I don't know what to say," I say. "I don't know what to do. You're the one who taught me everything."

And I know as soon as I say that that he did teach me everything, that even if Father is burnt up and not talking, he would say, "Caroline, think. You are the sharpest girl. You like a challenge and anything you can handle. Think, Caroline."

A stalactite forms from dripping water on the stone ceiling of a cave. Usually limestone, but this can also happen in lava caves. Where the stalactite drips on the cave floor a stalagmite may form. Where the two meet, if they do, this is called a column. It takes a long time for them to form. Deep in its cave, a stalactite has surprising beauty.

It's been hours since I saw the sun. The air around me is darker but I'm also under the thick pine trees where the deep holes around the trees pull at the sled and I have to be careful not to walk too close to them. I don't use the headlamp unless I have to. Father's really too wide for the sled and his good arm keeps falling and dragging behind above his head like he's waving at the sky.

First I hear engines. I look up but there are no helicopters, there's no chopping in the air. The sky is clear black and the stars are all across it, the Dipper upside down and the Milky Way. The wind blows snow out of the branches, down at my face. And then there's headlights down below and coming in pairs, zigzagging their way upward and coming closer. I am not afraid. Father would not be proud if I was afraid.

The headlights stop and the engines rattle down and I hear car doors slamming. It's not long before there is shouting, voices. I slide the sled down under the cover of a fallen branch, careful not to let the sharp needles poke Father's face. He is hidden. My shoulders hurt as I step away and my hands from where they held the rope. I feel lighter, floating since it's so easy to walk.

I'm in the trees hidden and a flashlight jerks up the slope, one bright circle switching back and forth. The people are just dark shapes coming closer. There are three of them, then four even though it seems like twice as many since the moon is out now and the black shadows against the snow make it look like every one is two.

The first one is out ahead and now he turns and shouts back: "Up here! The cave's right here, the opening!"

"The mouth!" one of the others shouts and they laugh.

Down below more headlights come close and wink out. More dark shapes stumble and laugh upward sometimes with flashlights and sometimes just following the trail broken by the first people. I watch. I wait. I think of Father, cold and hidden nearby beneath the branch and the cold snow beneath him through the thin plastic of the sled.

Staying in the trees I climb closer to where the man said the cave was. I see light, flickering light from a fire. There's voices of men and women and loud music with drums.

"There you are!" a man says, off to one side of me where I wasn't looking. "Trisha!"

Closer, he is almost my age, almost a boy.

"No," I say. "I just."

"What are you doing out here?" he says. "I thought you were Trisha. Was just draining the main vein, you know, but it was like pissing an icicle, you know? Freeze to death. Your name's Helen, right?"

"Right," I say.

"So you came up with Carter and them. Cool."

"Yes," I say.

"Let's get back to that fire," he says.

It's so loud inside the cave. Everyone is shouting and a boom-box is playing music of more shouting. There's twenty or thirty people and the cave could hold more probably. Everyone is young like teenagers and only a couple older. Some of them are wearing puffy camouflage coats and snowmobile boots like they're going hunting. Others have on ski pants with racing stripes and matching jackets and gloves that have zippers on their backs. The air smells like dirt, like smoke, and the floor of the cave is hard dirt with stones in it.

I drift away from the man and closer to the fire where mostly boards and splintered posts are burning. Sharp nails stick black and hot out of almost everything. Cigarettes are smoked down, passed around, flicked into the fire. Tall shadows of the people climb up on the walls and ceiling, through the smoky air. It seems like they all go to school together and I think it's a high school but maybe they're a little older. They like to shout and jostle each other, pretending to fight.

A boy hands me a red plastic cup. I sniff at it and it's bitter. I pretend to sip at it.

"I love beer," he says.

"Yes," I say. I say cheers and hit my cup against other people's cups when they say it to me. Mostly I stand by the fire. When someone stands up from a log I sit down.

My left foot hurts and then it doesn't hurt. The ceiling stretches twenty feet above and slants down on the other side toward the back. The stone up there is black like there's been fires here before and the black stretches in a thick line across to the mouth of the cave which is where the smoke escapes. There, at the mouth, someone is trying to drag in a small pine tree or a broken off branch and someone else yells that it's too green and covered in snow to ever burn. For a moment I worry that the branch was taken off Father, but no one says anything like this and still I think of Father out there waiting for me to return and guarding my pack where there is food. I'm hungry now but there's nothing to eat in the cave.

"It's so cool," says a boy next to me. "Tons more fun than if we were in someone's house or a condo or something. No one's parents would ever have a clue. My dad would shit, if he knew where I was."

When I look over at this boy I see he's really just talking at the fire and not looking at me or expecting me to say anything. He's wearing a ski mask so I can only see his puffy chapped lips and his bloodshot brown eyes. No one is hardly bothering me. They just keep drinking and shouting. My face is hot and my back is cold. I turn around and watch two boys who are trying to crawl as far back in the cave as they can. The firelight flashes on the soles of their boots. The ceiling slopes down there and there's just jagged black spaces stretching back.

"Son of a bitch!" one boy yells.

"Motherfucker!" yells the other.

The cave swallows up their voices and doesn't really echo.

"Rad hair," a girl says, sitting next to me. She has a sharp chin and a striped hat on her head. Her face flickers.

"Thanks," I say. "I think there's bats that live in this cave, probably."

"What?" she says. There's a pompom made of yarn on top of her hat.

"Bats probably don't like all this racket," I say.

"I know you from chemistry," she says. "Right? I didn't know you partied."

"Chemistry," I say. "I think so."

"God, I'm thinking of dropping that class. Were you at Mary's party last week?" she says and then looks past me at three boys coming close.

"Keg stand!" they yell, pointing, and then she's over by the metal barrel and they're holding her upside down while she drinks beer from the black hose.

I keep having these conversations that are not quite conversations. Mostly I am trying to stay close to the fire and to wait for the night to be over. I keep thinking if someone I talk to seems like a friend or a person I could trust that maybe they could help us but no one seems like that. They are only getting drunker and more stupid.

A girl vomits and someone puts snow on top of it. A boy across the fire from me stands and unzips his pants and takes his penis out and pees on the fire with a sizzling sound. He almost falls over, sitting down. Someone behind me is saying that lava came through this cave, a long time ago, that that's how it was made. The batteries on the boombox are wearing out so the music goes wobbly. Words are just stretched out sounds. No one seems to notice.

I just stare and stare into the red and yellow and orange flames. After a while I look up and there are maybe only ten people left in the cave. A tall boy in a ski parka with a beard and snowmobile boots comes over to the fire and looks at the few of us that are left sitting there.

"Keg's kicked," he says. "Now or never, everyone's taking off."

"We should put out the fire," a girl says and then everyone says that doesn't matter, that it's not like the cave would burn down.

"What about all this leftover wood?" a boy says. "I carried it all the way up here, man, but I'm not carrying it down."

"Next time, maybe," another boy says, "or whatever."

I stand and walk outside, where the moon is even brighter. The air is freezing cold in my nostrils and throat but is fresh and thin. I cough and taste smoke.

"Did anyone get Jared?" someone says. "He passed out, before."

"Yeah," someone else says. "They dragged him through the snow and that woke his ass up!"

"Helen," the tall boy says, and it takes a minute to tell that he's talking to me so I turn around.

"What?" I say.

"You got a ride with Courtney, right? I think she's waiting down there. You can get a ride with me or Jericho, though." He points back toward the cave.

"Tell Courtney I'll ride with Jericho," I say.

"You sure?" he says. "All right."

He turns away down the slope and I wait and then follow a little. I check back and no one else is coming out of the cave yet so I drift over to the side, into the trees. I hide while people start coming out and stumble past. Below cars are driving away with their red taillights going smaller.

I wait. No one calls and no one comes back. It's quiet again with the moonlight and at the mouth of the cave some orange flickers and glows.