The Mountain Story (16 page)

“Thank you, sir.”

I hadn’t told Lark’s father my address and didn’t know it anyway, but he drove directly to Tin Town and through the maze of mobile homes, coming to a stop in front of Kriket’s dented mailbox. My aunt peered out from behind her stained bedroom curtains and didn’t seem happy to recognize the car.

I could see the green Gremlin parked across the street and was glad that Frankie was back. He’d be a friendly face if he was sober and a familiar one, at least, if he was not. I thanked the big man and was sorry that I had to say yes when he asked if I needed help.

Not a fleet-footed woman, Kriket nonetheless made it to the door before we’d reached the broken front gate. “Harley,” she said without warmth.

Harley? Lark’s father was
Harley
.

“Your nephew?” Harley asked.

Kriket put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips. “Wilfred.”

“Heatstroke,” Harley explained. “Rest and fluids.”

“Dumbass. What happened to his feet?”

“Flip-flops,” Harley said.

“Idiot. What happened to his head?”

“Fainted.”

“Moron.” Kriket disappeared back inside.

Frankie appeared, an unlit cigarette dangling from his bottom lip, a cloudy glass of whisky in his hand. “Harley Diaz? I hear you got some job opportunities over at the casino.”

Harley didn’t hesitate before he shook his head. “Nothing at the moment.”

Frankie huffed and disappeared, letting the screen door bang behind him.

I took the trailer steps slowly. Harley stopped me with a firm hand on my shoulder. “Wolf?”

I thought he was going to warn me to stay away from his daughter, now that he knew I came from Tin Town. “Yes.”

“You want to be a mountain man? That right?”

“Yes, sir. I do,” I answered.

“You want to climb rocks? Plant your flag at the peak?”

“I don’t have a flag,” I said.

“I’m saying, son, that if you’re interested in climbing mountains, you have to remember something.”

“Okay.”

He stared at me hard. “Most sports require only one ball.”

THE
SECOND
DAY

J
UST BEFORE THE SUN
rose on the morning of that second lost day I untangled myself from the Devine women’s arms and legs and leaned over to check on Nola, disturbed to see how pale she’d become. Her wrist was hidden under the red poncho, but I could guess by the size of the lump it made that it had swollen to frightening proportions. Vonn’s face was twisted in pain. Her stomach, I feared. Bridget was snoring soundly.

I stood, shivering, staring down on Nola and Bridget and Vonn Devine. As the sun peered over the purple peaks I was shot with a sudden, intense feeling—one I recognized as love, but it was beyond love, and so powerful it brought tears to my eyes. Then I heard something in the white noise of the wind, not words exactly but a clear message. It was a feeling I’d had once before. I’m aware that people explain such extraordinary experiences away—a rush of endorphins, a surfeit of oxygen, a surplus of carbon dioxide, sleep deprivation, hunger, dehydration. I’m
aware that the event may have been self-induced, a product of my own need, but I can only tell you that in that moment I felt God. Make of that what you will.

Outside our cave the ground was uneven, rocky in patches and forested in clumps, with thorny bushes, Jeffrey pines, a few scrub oaks, a dense brood of limber pine, manzanita, wax currant, and a few gnarled mahogany trees. The vegetation was dense and I couldn’t tell how big the area was.

Walking carefully I manoeuvred through the trees perpendicular to the ridge from which we’d fallen, cataloguing as I went, looking for any source of food or water, surprising myself with the amount of information I’d stored about Native American plant lore. I remembered an afternoon in the canyon at the foothills when Byrd and I had gagged on raw acorn, attempting to eat a Native American food staple called
wewish
(Byrd had said, “Know why we call it
wewish
? ’Cause
we wish
it tasted better!”) We’d sampled bitter mustard flowers and chewed sweet mesquite beans and nearly turned purple from eating too many mountain berries. If there was food on this outcropping where we’d landed I was determined that I would find it.

The rising sun steamed the soil, which smelled of worms and minerals. Picking my way through the brush, I scanned the rocks for pools of water and found here and there the shallowest of drinks. The rocks were gritty and the fluid scant but it was something more than nothing, which was all I’d had since the hissing spout on the drinking fountain at the Mountain Station. My gut was cramping with hunger, my last meal, nearly twenty-four hours ago, a bag of Cheez Doodles from the rack at the gas station. Berries were gone by November though. Ditto the mesquite beans. We weren’t at a low enough elevation for
mesquite anyway. I thought of the chocolate bars in my knapsack hanging on the hook beside the door.

I remembered thinking, as I drank from that fountain before heading off to Angel’s Peak, that it would be the final fulfillment of my boring body’s tedious needs. Now it lightened me,
pleased
me to feel such a strong desire for sustenance. All I’d craved, for a long time, was nothing.

Revived by the little bit of fluid I could slurp from the rocks, I walked on, soon with the uncomfortable sense that I was being followed. The granite protrusion on which we’d fallen was about the size and shape of a high school gym, much larger than I’d originally thought.

I caught the whiff of animal—cat, and it did occur to me that a mountain lion mauling would be a fitting finale for a guy named Wolf. Then I remembered that the big cats didn’t spray the same way as the smaller cats. Bobcats wouldn’t attack, unless they were rabid. I paused to sniff the air again but the odour had disappeared and I had to admit to myself that the senses I counted on so heavily were already becoming somewhat unreliable.

From a perch in the sculpture of a dead birch a pair of ravens cawed. The branches shivered and shimmered around me, and the entire woods joined in, groaning with their bows and bends. The wind blew hard in sharp bursts. I felt my spirit soar and moved with swift, strong strides as the symphony reached a crescendo. But then the sky came hurtling through the branches and I found, with heart-stopping suddenness, that I’d reached the end of the earth. It was true then. We were perched at the mouth of Devil’s Canyon.

No view from that huge outcropping inspired optimism. I can see myself—an older boy, or was it a young man?—looking
down into the murky depths of the canyons below. Definitely not the way down to Palm Springs. I watched distant Tin Town gag to life in the morning sun and shouted an expletive to the lingering moon.

I was standing there at the cliff’s edge when I heard a noise and turned, expecting to find a ground squirrel pawing at the earth. I was startled when a brown hand pushed through the brush to grasp a branch. Byrd, I thought—but it was Vonn.

“It doesn’t look good,” she said.

“We can’t get down,” I agreed, gesturing toward the canyon depths.

“We’re trapped?”

“No,” I lied.

“It’s like a huge rock balcony.”

“It is.”

“Are we stranded?”

“I’m just saying there’s no way down from here.”

Vonn peered at the drop beyond her wool-socked, flip-flopped feet. “So we have to climb back up where we fell last night?”

“Looks like.”

“That was pretty steep.”

“Yeah.”

“And the rocks were loose.”

“They were loose.”

“Mim can’t climb that. With her wrist …,” Vonn said. “And I can’t. Not in these.” She looked down at her flip-flops.

We watched a red-tailed hawk soar past and again I thought of Byrd.

“Are we in trouble, Wolf?”

“Let’s look around some more,” I said. Together we scrambled over the rocks and through the trees from the stem to the stern of our boat-shaped outcropping, squeezing past branches, searching all the while for water, food, the blue mesh bag and, above all, a way off.

At last, red-faced, we emerged at the rocky escarpment we’d fallen down,
the wall
(as we came to call it)—a steep drop about thirty feet wide and forty feet high. “Wow,” Vonn said.

We stood before it for a long beat. I wondered if I should confess that I’d never climbed such a steep, unstable rock face, or any rock face for that matter. For all the talking Byrd and I did, we hiked more than we climbed. Even if I remembered the terms from the magazines and books we’d read, I didn’t have any rope to belay with, or carabiners or technique or experience for that matter.

I tracked the ascent, which ended at the ridge where a cornice projected several feet from the rock wall. Even if I could make it up there I couldn’t see how I’d hoist myself over the cornice. “Easy,” I said.

“Could you use that branch to help you get over?” Vonn asked, echoing my thoughts. She was staring up at an ironwood stump with a few long, slim branches that resembled a large hand, where I might be able to pull myself to safety.

“Maybe there’s an easier way,” I said, leading Vonn through the boulders to the far side of the outcropping. We found another steep drop.

The hawk soaring above us screamed, sounding strikingly like Bridget.

“Maybe we’re near her nest or something,” Vonn said. “Let’s look at the other end.”

We moved past the wall again and through a small area of brush to discover another rocky balcony next to ours, attached to a slope that appeared, farther up, to connect to the ridge from where we’d fallen.

“Look!” I said, pointing. “If we could hike up that slope there we can reconnect with the ridge. Get right back to where we were last night.”

There was, however, the insuperable problem of a fifteen-foot-wide chasm separating us from the slope, and a deep, dark crevice below. “We could jump it,” I said, half-joking, staring into the deep, dark void.

Vonn looked down, blood rushing to her cheeks. “Maybe you could,” she said. “But I couldn’t, Bridget wouldn’t and Mim is
in her sixties
, for God’s sake!”

“Devine Divide,” I said. “I think I could jump that.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“That would not be ideal.”

“Mim.” Her face fell. “She looks bad.”

“Was she awake when you got up?”

She shook her head. “She looked so pale …”

We moved closer to the edge to stare down into the depths. The wind came rushing at our backs and I caught a whiff of camphor and began to sneeze.

“You all right?”

I moved to stand upwind of the sterasote bush in my periphery.

“I can climb back up where we fell,” I promised Vonn. “I’ll climb the wall and find the way back and get help. Mountain Rescue will have ropes and whatever else. Shouldn’t take long.”

“Even if you can climb up all that loose rock, are you sure
you can find your way to the Mountain Station?” Vonn asked.

“Of course.” I couldn’t fault her for being skeptical.

“Yesterday …”

“That fog was dense. And it got dark fast. Look at the sky today. This is excellent visibility. I know how to get to the Mountain Station from here. Come on,” I said, “let’s see if we can find Bridget’s bag.”

Vonn burped behind her palm. “Sorry. The tram made me motion sick and it’s not going away.”

“Maybe it’s altitude sickness,” I said. “Tell me if you feel dizzy or faint.”

“It’s my stomach,” she said, gingerly touching her abdomen.

It was possible that Vonn had sustained an internal injury in the fall. One more thing to worry about.

As we started back toward the cave, we looked for the bag, but I kept my eye out for edible plants too. “Look for berries,” I said. “But don’t eat anything unless you show it to me first.”

“What else?”

“Acorns. Pine cones. Flowers. Sometimes you find wild apricot bushes. We’re pretty far below the Mountain Station. The fruit would be gone probably, but one time this guy said he got lost out this way and found the apricots dried on the branch.”

“Mim makes apricot preserves.”

“Why do you call her
Mim
?”

“It’s how Bridget said ‘Mama’ when she was a baby. And my grandfather was Pip. It just stuck.”

“Why do you call her Bridget?”

“Instead of Mom? I don’t know. I don’t know anything according to my mother.”

“Did you always call her Bridget?” I didn’t tell her I called my father by his first name.

“When I was little I called her Mama.” She shrugged. “She knows nothing about me.”

“So you don’t hang out in Tin Town?” I was hung up on the idea that Vonn knew Yago. He was popular with women. Vonn was his type. The thought of my cousin Yago with Vonn Devine sickened me but I had to know.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so,” I said, trying not to sound relieved.

“Once,” she clarified. “One party.”

“Oh.”

“It was my birthday. Labour Day. We’d lost Pip just a few weeks before. A friend, not a friend, just this girl I barely know, dragged me to this party in Tin Town, then ditched me. The party was outside. People had little fires going everywhere. It was crowded. I drank too much wine. No big deal. Turning eighteen is supposed to be cool but I don’t remember much about that night.”

“Yeah.”

“How did you spend your eighteenth?”

I didn’t tell her that my eighteenth birthday was yesterday and that she and her mother and grandmother had foiled my plans to leap to my death. “Nothing special.”

Vonn stopped behind me, pointing up. “Look!” she whispered.

I’d hoped to see Bridget’s mesh bag caught on a low hanging branch. Instead, I saw a falcon—an enormous taupe-and-brown raptor with a creamy speckled breast, the largest I’d ever seen. I was pretty sure that it was a gyrfalcon, although none had ever been sighted on the mountain as far as I knew. I wished
like hell that Byrd could see that great, winged beast, gripping the pine bough with such swagger.

“I think that’s a gyrfalcon.”

“Oh,” she breathed.