The Mountain Story (21 page)

“Leaves,” Byrd whispered from the trees.

The wind caught the trees and spoke to us all. “Leaves,” it said. “Leaves,” Vonn echoed, like she’d heard too. “Don’t some leaves have medicinal powers? Like, aren’t some antibacterial?”

“You know anything about that, Mountain Man?” Bridget asked.

“Sterasote,” I said, aware that had the bush not blocked my path to Angel’s Peak I might not have thought of it when she asked.

“Never heard of it,” Bridget said.

“You know it by smell. I smelled it somewhere here. After we fell. Native Americans used it for healing everything. We could make a paste. Mash it or something.”

“A poultice,” Vonn said.

“Stay with Mim,” Bridget instructed Vonn, as she took my hand and dragged me into the brush. “Where? Where is it? Come on. It’s going to be dark in two minutes.”

We searched through the brush, my eyes darting here and there. I couldn’t remember where I’d smelled that camphor smell and I started to panic that I was remembering the one that had blocked my way to Angel’s Peak and that indeed there was no sterasote bush here.

When we came to a small clearing where Jeffrey pines framed a scarlet sunset, Bridget stopped. “Is my mother going to die?”

A bad infection could kill a person and our circumstances were, as Nola would say,
not ideal
. I figure Bridget knew it too. “No,” I lied.

I carried on, taking Bridget by the hand when she faltered. “Vonn will blame me if something happens to Mim,” Bridget said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“I ran from the bees,” Bridget said. “If I hadn’t run from the bees we would have gone to the lake and we would be home right now.”

“It’s not your fault you’re allergic to bees.”

“Other things
are
my fault,” she said. “And it looks like I’m not allergic anyway.”

“Maybe you weren’t stung.”

“I was stung!”

“Okay.”

“Imagine if your whole life you thought you were allergic to bees then found out that you weren’t. Just imagine thinking something your whole life then finding out it isn’t true.”

“What would you have done differently?” I asked Bridget as we searched for the sterasote bush. “If you thought you weren’t allergic.”

“Smelled more flowers,” Bridget said with a shrug. “Isn’t that a funny, stupid cliché? I would have stopped to smell the flowers, which I’ve never really done because I’m afraid of bees. Especially the roses. I would seriously stop and smell the roses.”

The wind chased us in circles. I lifted my nose, praying to catch a whiff of the sterasote bush but my keenest sense, overwhelmed by frustration, had abandoned me. The cold wind bit my nose and cheeks, and when I looked back to find long shadows over Bridget’s slender face, I cursed the coming night.

She moved to take the lead, but we found no sterasote bush through the pines or near the cluster of brittlebush or beyond the spiky chamise or through the common juniper.

Night was closing in and I was annoyed when Bridget stumbled over a loose boulder and fell to her knees, then frustrated
to find that she was weeping. She clearly wasn’t injured. All I could think was
we don’t have time for this
.

Bridget looked up at me and asked again, “Is she going to die?”

“No.”

“It’s a bad infection.”

“She’ll be all right.”

“I can’t lose my mother, Wolf.”

“Shh.” I didn’t know how to comfort her.

I kneeled down beside Bridget, taking her heaving shoulders, and drew her body close to mine. The warmth of her gave me such comfort as I’d never known. We found each other’s eyes, and at that moment I caught a draft from the west and began to sneeze fiercely. “Sterasote,” I managed to say.

I rose, helping Bridget to her feet, and drew her over the rocks and through the trees, searching for the sterasote bush, whose odour grew brighter as we got closer. I covered my nose with my jacket. “Be careful. It’s over here, close to the edge.”

We found the bush and began to yank at the small, stubborn leaves. Quickly we snapped the dry fibrous stems, stuffing our pockets with what we hoped would be a miracle cure for Nola.

Armed with the sterasote leaves and stems, we charged back through the brush. As we drew near the cave we were frightened to hear the strangled cries of an injured beast—a horrible screech that sounded like no night bird I knew. We scoped the trees as we hurried on.

But it was Nola who was making the terrible sounds, as Vonn, blinking tears, cleaned the festering wound with the edge of a credit card. Her ability to stomach the task impressed me.

Vonn looked up. “What took so long?”

We emptied our pockets of the sterasote into the mortars in the rocks near the wall. Bridget started to pound the stems and leaves into a slimy mush with a round stone she found nearby, squinting against the vapours from the plant’s volatile oils. “This stinks,” she said.

Together we ground the sterasote into a thick paste, while a few yards away Nola endured the vigorous cleansing of her wound.

When I ventured back to check on Vonn’s progress, I wished I hadn’t. “How can you do that without hurling?” I wondered aloud.

“You do what you have to do,” Vonn said. “I’m almost ready for the paste.”

When I returned to the metates to collect the mashed sterasote with a fresh plastic credit card from Nola’s wallet, I remarked on Vonn’s ability to handle the rancid wound.

“She gets motion sick on anything that moves but she’s fine with everything else,” Bridget said. “I have vertigo and she gets motion sick. We wouldn’t have come but then Mim confided about the secret anniversary ritual with Pip. We could see she didn’t want to go alone.”

Bridget stopped mashing the sterasote, her attention caught by something moving on the rock beside me.
Please God don’t let it be a snake
.

I glanced down and discovered, an inch away from my hand, the fat ground squirrel who’d startled us earlier. I could have snatched him, then and there. And what? Thumped him dead with a stone? Torn his flesh with my fingers and teeth, sucked his warm blood? I was revolted by the thought and would not have believed that later I’d have some graphic and disturbing fantasies about doing all of those things. “Git,” I said.

Bridget turned to look in the direction of the cave. That morning she’d been the most optimistic of us, so sure about the helicopter, so certain of our survival. Mountain time being as it was she’d had a rapid shift in spirit. “What if we don’t make it, Wolf?” she asked.

“Well,” I said slowly, giving the question full weight. “When I was a kid I spent a lot of time at the library. I’ve read a lot of adventure books, true stories, and I guess, if I broke it down, I’d say the most successful people in the most impossible situations are the ones who are sure they’re gonna get out of it, and they go on thinking that, even if they die trying. So that’s what we’re gonna do.”

We fell silent. Agreed.

The owl called from the distance.

Bridget and I approached the cave to find Nola propped up against the rock, pale and stoic. Vonn looked at the sterasote mulch—a mound of green pulp on the credit card in my palm. She leaned over to smell it, cringing, then suggested we apply the pulp directly to the wound. “We need a clean bandage to put over top.”

“My brassiere?” Nola offered.

“
Brassiere
,” Vonn said, snorting at the word. “Here, use my
brassiere
.” In several deft movements she removed her bra and a long tank top undershirt without taking off the Christmas sweater Nola had given her. After scooping the sterasote mulch into one of the bra cups Vonn bound it with the undershirt while Nola shrank in pain.

Something caught my attention—a scent on the air—and it must have been a strong scent to overpower the sterasote. I found myself sniffing the wind, a grin splitting my lips. The quiet blue fragrance meant
rain
. I felt instantly buoyed. “It’s going to rain tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

“How do you know, Wolf?”

“I can smell it. We have to figure out a way to collect the rainwater.”

Nola peered at me from under half-closed lids. “My poncho,” she said. “There’s no seam in the hood. The plastic’ll hold water.”

Vonn went to the poncho, and turning the hood inside out, saw that it made a large leak-proof container in which to collect enough rain to fill the canteen.

“Good idea, Mim,” Vonn said.

“Make sure those grips on the poncho are wrapped tight around the branches,” Nola said, shivering in pain.

As Bridget and Vonn set about securing the poncho, Nola whispered to me, “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“It’s not
good
, Mrs. Devine. You need a doctor.”

When Bridget finished with the poncho she pulled me away from the cave, punching me hard on the arm. “Why would you tell her that?”

“I think she knows.”

“
You
know nothing! You said you knew the way when you didn’t! You said you could climb the wall and you can’t! You said tracking dogs would come and you said we’d find the granola bars. You know nothing!”

I walked away before she could say anything more, taking my place in the cave with Nola and Vonn.

“What was all that about?” Vonn asked.

I shrugged, relieved that Bridget stayed outside to cool off. She was right. I’d made promises only God could keep. When she pressed in beside us a little later, I avoided her eye.

There were scents that rose up to me that night, microscopic particles that brought odours from far away; fry grease from the fast food joint a few miles down the highway, diesel fuel, dry-rot in a wood cabin, dead koi in some distant pond. We watched the lights of Palm Springs grow in the darkness, and Vonn, mooching my thoughts, said, “I hate that it’s so close. It’s like starving with a tin of food in your hand and no way to open it.”

“Dying of thirst on the ocean.”

Bridget said, “One of these times, when we think it’s a helicopter it won’t be the wind.”

“They will never fly a helicopter here,” I said, more harshly than I needed to. “Never.”

“My dream.”

“The air in this part of the canyon is never stable long enough for a helicopter to search. Even if they’re looking for us right now they’re not using helicopters to search Devil’s Canyon.”

“That so?” She didn’t believe me. I could hear it in her voice. Bridget’s faith in her dream was absolute.

Only Nola slept. Bridget and Vonn were restless, shifting and sighing. It was cold.

“I can’t sleep,” Vonn said.

“Me neither.”

“We need to think of ways to make the time go faster,” I said.

The owl flapped invisibly above us as coyotes howled in the distance. Beside us Nola kicked in her sleep. I turned to look at Bridget with her dry lips and wide eyes. Vonn’s toes burned against my flesh. Her face had grown subtly longer.

“We need a story,” I said, thinking of Byrd. “A distraction.”

“No more stories,” Bridget begged. “I can’t get Laura Dorrie out of my head.”

“Games then. Games will make the night go faster.”

“Were you in love with my father?” Vonn asked, startling Bridget. I could tell from her voice that Vonn wanted the answer to be
yes
.

“I was
eighteen
, Vonn,” Bridget said plaintively.

“Did you love him?”

“I worked at a hotel bar while I was taking some college classes,” Bridget began. “I was engaged. I guess I was bored. He used to come in with clients. He’d flirt with me. He flirted with all of the girls. He was older and handsome and sophisticated. I was driving to work on the freeway one night and my engine started smoking. You’ll never guess who pulled over. I’d just shaved my legs. Felt fated.”

“Was he stalking you?”

“He was heading back to work from one of his son’s baseball games. He’d just had a fight with his wife.”

“They had four boys. Didn’t you tell me that?”

“The whole thing only lasted a couple of months. When I found out I was pregnant, I called him at work, but before I got to tell him about you, Vonn, he told me that his wife had found
out about the affair and it was over and he would call the police if I came anywhere near him or his family. He was a creep.”