The Mountain Story (2 page)

I figured Frankie had gotten himself into some kind of trouble in Mercury, a debt he couldn’t repay, or maybe he’d slept with somebody’s wife or girlfriend or sister or mother. You wouldn’t think women would go for an unemployed widower in a stained concert T-shirt but there were plenty of pretty girls around to finger the rainbow on Frankie’s
Glory Always
tattoo. “I reek of pheromones,” he told me once, flapping his hands around his armpits, encouraging me to take a whiff.

We made a plan to head for Kriket’s place in the California desert in late July. Frankie was vague when I asked about the future of the little blue house. (Later he told me he’d lost it in a bet.) He bulldozed Glory’s toiletries from their bathroom shelf shrine—the lemon-scented hairspray, prescription ointment for a patch of eczema, an unopened box of decongestant to relieve her springtime allergies—and threw them all into the trash.

“Won’t need all this where we’re going, Wolf,” he said, which made me wonder why we’d needed it where we were.

I spent a lot of time at the Mercury Public Library when I was a kid. Frankie sent me there to borrow books by way of free babysitting. Miss Kittle was the head librarian, a buttoned-up brunette who, along with the rest of the staff, barely tolerated me. I couldn’t blame them. I stole doughnuts from the seniors’ meetings, made a mess of the shelves and spent far too much time in the men’s room. Still, I loved the library. I loved books. I especially loved plump, berry-scented Miss Kittle.

A few weeks before we left for the desert, Miss Kittle surprised me by calling out my name when I walked through the library doors. “Wolf Truly!”

There was something different about Miss Kittle—her cheeks were pinker and her lips were glossed and her thick dark hair fell in waves over her shoulders. By the look of her face I wasn’t in trouble, which confused me.

“I have something for you, Wolf,” she said. Miss Kittle had never spoken to me directly before.

“Okay.”

“I heard you were moving to Santa Sophia.”

Her eyes were even prettier up close. “My aunt Kriket lives there,” I said.

“That’s where I’m from,” Miss Kittle said. “My father’s still there. I visit every summer.”

“California’s a long way from Michigan.” My cheeks were hot.

“I had to move up here to help take care of my grandmother. I miss the desert.”

“I’ll miss winter.”

“Ah!” she said, raising her index finger. Then she reached beneath the counter and drew out a large heavy book. “You won’t have to miss winter.”

“I won’t?”

“You’ll have the mountain,” she said, passing me the hefty book. “
The Mountain in the Desert
.”

The moment I glimpsed the photograph on the cover—a helicopter shot of the pine-rimmed granite peak—I knew that mountain contained my destiny. The details leapt from the pages like some 3-D déjà vu; ten thousand feet at the summit, mother of the transverse mountain ranges, hundreds of miles of pristine wilderness, hunting ground of the Agua Caliente band of Native Americans, habitat of bighorn sheep, mountain
lions, rattlesnakes, precipitation ten times higher than what falls in the desert below, torrential rains in spring and fall, blizzards in winter. It was a place I’d never heard of but felt that I’d already been.

“You have to climb to the peak,” Miss Kittle said.

“That looks pretty high.”

“You take the tram most of the way,” she said, turning to the back of the book and pointing to a full-page photograph. “The ride up is almost vertical. Look.”

It was.

“This tram car takes you from the Desert Station—the climate of Mexico—to the Mountain Station—the climate of northern Canada—in less than twenty minutes. Palms to pines.”

“Cool,” I said.

“You can climb to the peak from there. I only made it once,” she confessed. “It was cloudy.”

“Too bad.”

“Maybe I’ll try again when I’m in Palm Springs this summer to visit my father,” she said.

“You should.”

“Maybe I’ll see if you and your dad want to come with me. Frankie—right?” She blushed.

Oh no
, I thought. Frankie never came into the library, so I couldn’t imagine where the two had met. “Frankie. That’s right,” I said.

“Do you know where in Santa Sophia your aunt lives?”

“Verdi Village,” I said, remembering what Frankie told me.

“Sounds familiar. I think it’s gated.”

I knew nothing about gates.

“Most of the gated places have golf.”

Verdi Village did not have golf. Or gates. Or shimmering pools. Or tennis courts. Or decorative fountains. Or paved roads for that matter. Santa Sophia was a tidy desert town consisting mostly of guarded, affluent communities. But past the missionstyle shopping malls and beyond the fuchsia bougainvillea and the median beds of white aggregate and flowering cacti, and over the abandoned train tracks, thousands populated the thrice-foreclosed-upon Verdi Village mobile home development that bled out over two square miles of hard-baked, treeless earth.

The original double-wide, pitch-roofed aluminum trailers were run down, but at least they still had electricity and running water, unlike the second strata of dwellings beyond them—mobile housing grown from the seeds of Airstreams and Coachmen and Four Winds. Past that, vagabonds had erected a haphazard crust of shacks and shanties, shelter for economic refugees, the mentally ill, and bikers. Locals called the place Tin Town.

In those dangerous narrows grew children who knew too much too young, but sadly, always seemed to learn too little too late. It was hot as hell in Tin Town—it set the most records in the state for triple-digit temperatures. I can still smell the unwashed bodies and twice-fried sausage, cigarette smoke and cat shit; and I can hear the discontent like bad radio reception. But mostly I can feel it—the wind, constant through the San Gorgonio Pass, polishing the earth and nourishing the groves of wind turbines along the desert roads.

You can see those ribbons of straight white stalks from eight thousand feet up the mountain. It’s a hell of a view.

THE
FIRST
DAY

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
I left for Angel’s Peak I didn’t sleep at all, yet I lingered in my bed until almost noon. Finally I rose, pulled on some clothes, and found the warm wool socks that Byrd had given me two Christmases before. I tied the laces on my hiking boots for the first time in a year and reached for my knapsack, hanging on a hook near the front door. I hesitated and put the knapsack back—a moment that would haunt me—because I had no further need of the Swiss Army knife, or food rations, or water, or blankets, and didn’t want the things to go to waste.

At the Desert Station, I waited to take what I believed would be my final tram trip up the mountain and, leaning against the wall, took a moment to survey the crowd. The three hikers I became lost with that autumn day were strangers to me, but I’d noticed each, for different reasons, before our fates became entangled. Nola. Vonn. Bridget.

Nola, with her soulful blue eyes and neat silver hair, strode by in her oxblood poncho and I remember thinking that a person would be able to see that shiny red poncho from space. She was wearing good hiking shoes and shouldering a black knapsack, a tattered field guide in her slender hands. I took her for one of the park docents who lead the short hikes in the Wide Valley at the foot of the Mountain Station.

She was the first rider to board the tramcar that was about to launch us from the desert scrub to an alpine wilderness, and she took a spot at the window where she’d have a view of the desert. Some people want to watch where they’re going and some like to see where they’ve been. She turned to catch me staring. I looked away, embarrassed.

Vonn boarded the tramcar behind a group of young people with whom I assumed she was travelling. I’d spotted her earlier, leafing through the Native American history books in the gift shop. She was beautiful, with black hair and dark skin, sharp cheek bones and full lips. She was wearing khaki pants and a blue peacoat, and on her feet, lime green flip-flops, by which I judged she did not intend to hike.

My father, Frankie, used to say there were two kinds of people—the noticers and the noticed. He said I was the former and he was the latter. Frankie would have described Vonn as exotic, the way people do when they’re not sure about a person’s ethnicity. I guessed the girl was biracial—Caucasian and Latina, or Caucasian and African American, or Latina and African American. She took a place at the window facing the desert, and turned away from her companions.

Bridget bounced onto the tramcar seconds before the doors closed, and squeezed her way to the centre of the cable
car, her high blond ponytail swinging with each shift of her pretty head. She was dangerously lean, swathed in layers of Lycra, with a warm-looking fleece-lined windbreaker tied around her waist and a pair of costly running shoes on her feet. When she stretched across me to grasp the pole, I felt obliged to move.

She carried a blue mesh sports bag, inside of which I could see a wallet, three bottles of water and three granola bars in silver foil wrappers. I’d taken her for a college senior until she looked up at me to smile, and I saw the ice-blue eyes of a woman in her late thirties. I might have stared a moment too long.

The tramway worked on a double jig-back system, with one cable car heading down the mountain while the second climbed up; it hung on twenty-seven miles of interlocking cable strung between five massive towers bolted into the rocky mountainside. At each of the five towers the tramcar made a transition and rocked like a carnival ride for a minute or two—longer if the winds were high. Riders had strong reactions—especially first-timers. As we approached the first tower I steadied myself. The woman with the ponytail had just opened one of her water bottles. Rookie.

The tram conductor, whom I thankfully did not recognize, announced over the microphone, “We’re approaching the first tower. Ladies and gentlemen, hold on tight.” He paused dramatically. “There will be
sway
.”

“What does that mean?” the blonde woman asked.

“Brace yourself,” I said, but she didn’t hear me because right at that moment there was a loud thump, and a quick drop, and the tramcar began to rock forcefully and she screamed and spilled her water and lost her balance on the slippery floor.

Taking her elbow to stop her from falling, I gave the impression I cared.

When the tramcar was steady again, sailing through wispy grey clouds, the woman found my eyes. “You look familiar.”

“I ride the tram a lot.”

“I’ve only been on this thing one other time and I took a sedative so I don’t remember.”

I looked away, hoping the gesture would discourage conversation.

“You look familiar from someplace else.”

“No.”

“I can’t look down. I have such bad … what is it?”

“Vertigo,” I said darkly.

“Is it gonna swing like that again?” she asked.

“Yes.”

On the other side of the tramcar a little boy began to cry. He wasn’t afraid of heights or startled by the rocking. He was crying because the clouds had stolen his desert view. I watched the older woman in the oxblood poncho lean down and pass the crying boy her binoculars. She pointed out a rift in the clouds where he could see the Santa Rosa Mountain range in the distance. The little boy smiled. The woman smiled too.

The blonde beside me carried on. “Vertigo. It’s not so much I think I’m going to fall but I think I’m going to jump. Isn’t that
weird
?”

“Yes,” I said.

When she turned to look around the tramcar her ponytail brushed my chin and bathed me in her scent, a bergamot-and-ginger mélange that I found disturbingly pleasant.

“I don’t think I’ll be doing this sober again,” she said.

I lifted my nostrils to the breeze from the open windows, taking in the crisp note of sage as we continued our ascent.

“It’s awful to be afraid,” the woman said, laughing to hide her nervousness.

She was right.

My attention was caught by the dark-skinned girl in the green flip-flops, who appeared to be staring at me from the other side of the tram. I wasn’t sure what to make of her attention or her expression. She looked pissed. I couldn’t imagine why.

From years of habit, I turned to ask my friend Byrd. I’d done that a hundred times in the year since his accident. Turned to look for him. Picked up the phone to call. Byrd wasn’t just my best friend. He was my only friend. My
brother
. We had everything in common. We even shared a birthday. I whispered in my thoughts,
Happy birthday, Byrd
.

The woman swung her ponytail and opened both eyes and lifted her head to peer out the window. “You can’t see anything with the fog. Kind of a blessing.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Can you buy water at the mountain—?” She interrupted herself to scream again as we hit the next tower.

The air grew colder as we rose. I could smell turpentine from the pines, and chilled zinc in the sediment, marine life, bones and roots and pulverized seeds, ancient odours that spoke volumes of loss. I tried to block out the sound of the nervous, chattering woman. Unsuccessfully.