East of the Mountains

  "We climbed the Marmolada," the boy replied. "We stayed at San Martino di Castrozza and went climbing every day. I totally loved the place."

  "It's beautiful there," Ben agreed.

  "We went up Sella Pass," said the boy. "We climbed all up around Cima Pardoi. We went over to Tre Cime di Laveredo and climbed up in there, too. We would have stayed forever," he added, "except that we ran out of bucks."

  "That happens," Ben said. "Reality intrudes."

  "Only if you let it," the boy said.

  Ben made no answer. He sat with his right hand cupping his waist and his left fingering his bandaged temple. He remembered that long ago in the Dolomites, he and Rachel had taken the high trail from Vigo di Fassa to Ciampedie to see the glow of the setting sun against the Torre di Vaiolet spires. At their hotel on the Lago di Carezza, the electricity was unreliable. At Falzarego they'd bought wine and crostini and traversed uphill to Lagazuoi. At dusk a roseate glow had suffused the world. The mountain walls appeared buffed and polished. In the twilight they came to the Refugio Scotoni, a small inn in a narrow valley. They'd been married only ten days. The mountains were in the scent of Rachel's shoulder blades. The odor at her throat was salt and pine, the smell of her hair, wood smoke.

  The Hotel Monte Sella in San Vigilio de Marebbe had been done up in the Jugendstil fashion: rough pine doors with wrought-iron grilles, grisaille tile in the corridors. The plaster had been painted to look like marble. In the vestibule, a lake pastoral, painted delicately against the walls: pleasure boats on turquoise waters, birds aloft over cypress trees, tranquil skies, pines. At midday, the headwaiter used his handbell with a delicate, calm persistence. Bruschettà and saltimbocca, consommé, tortellini filled with mashed potato, scallope di vitello with eggplant. In the lounge, late, card games. An atmosphere of pastoral extravagance. Bottles of grappa set out; carafes of the hotel's house wine—slightly bitter, tannic.

  They'd bathed together in a claw-foot tub. The moon risen high over the mountaintops. On the chill, clean air, the chiming of the village bells. In the hall, late revelers moved toward sleep. The smell of the sheets, of bath soap; then no smell but hers. His mouth against her hairline, slow. A long descent toward those incidental places he found he did not want to neglect: the shallow channel in her lower back, the bones in her wrists, her heels. The rest of the world obliterated. Time arrested now. Everything possible, all manner of entanglement pleasurable. When they understood there was no choice anymore, they watched each other without shame.

  He'd felt himself at the height of life. He told her so. He said that he loved her. He said that he wanted to hold her forever. He kissed her deeply, sweetly.

  Sitting in the back of the Volkswagen van, Ben mistrusted his memories. Everything in memory achieved a truth that was only a brand of falsehood. He remembered what was beautiful—a torture unto itself, really—while all else receded and blurred, dwindled into insignificance. It pained him to think that with his death the narrative of his time with Rachel would disappear, the story of their love expire. He could not explain it to anyone. It would leave the earth when he did.

  At the far end of Keechelus Lake, the sky eastward opened wide over distant coulees, buttes, and canyons, all swathed in morning light. Ahead lay a low film of red on the horizon where the sun was new; the road wound down through a stand of grand firs with long, broad, flat needles. Ben sat back and watched the country grow larger and more sparsely treed and gentle. They drove down out of Snoqualmie Pass and left the mountains behind. The girl gave Ben more pumpkin seeds; the boy flipped down his sun visor. They asked him his name, and he gave it to them, and the boy introduced himself as Kevin Lamont and the girl as Christine Reilly. The road ran straight and true into the southeast, the hills spread out beneath the sky, and there was no sign of rain now. Along the Yakima River, the cottonwoods had gone russet yellow. The light was huge and unadulterated. West of the mountains the light ran to gray, hushed and annealed by ocean clouds, but here on the east side the world yielded and lay unguarded beneath the sun.

  They came down into the pine flats past the town of Easton, where half a dozen horses grazed on the north side of the highway. They passed the cutoff to Roslyn, the road grading down toward Cle Elum, the river twisting past gravel bars and islands, leaving sloughs and eddies behind, the tincture of autumn wood-stove smoke hanging heavily on the air. As they climbed eastward into Elk Heights, the land was all pastures, hills, and range, the big hay sheds loaded to the rafters, the hay wintered under tin roofs. Off to the north was the Stuart Range, distant and ethereal as a mirage.

  The country was given over to cattle graze, and the cottonwoods lay in folds and vales that rose toward the east horizon and north to the foothills of snowy peaks. Christine pointed out for Ben the autumnal beauty of all those trees, smoothing her hair just over one ear, and Ben quietly agreed. They climbed over Indian John Hill, where power wires marched west across the land as though cobbled together by the children of giants passing their time playfully. In Elk Heights Pass they saw to the east the hills of bitterbrush and ponderosa pine, and the rangelands of sage and bunchgrass. There were treeless, fruitless, sad buttes, their soil barren as the moon.

  "You must be feeling better," said Christine. "You seem nice and mellow."

  "I'm fine," said Ben. "I'm comfortable."

  "We got the van for that," said Kevin. "It's nice to kind of stretch out."

  "We travel a lot," Christine added.

  "Were going climbing," Kevin explained. "We're going out to the Sawtooths for a while and then down into Sun Valley."

  "If things work out, we'll ski all winter," Christine said hopefully. "That's what we did last season. There's this friend we know in Ketchum who can hook us into the ski patrol."

  "Free lift tickets and a crash pad," said Kevin. "Only thing is, it's too crowded."

  "We thought we'd get into heli-skiing," said Christine. "You guide people up in the backcountry, get away from the crowd."

  "That's a few years off," said Kevin. "We don't have that focused yet."

  "We're sort of poor right now," explained Christine. "We just have the cash to get there."

  "Not even that," Kevin countered.

  He opened the glove compartment, found his sunglasses, and slid them onto his face. They were mirrored glasses of the sort skiers wore, and he looked less handsome in them suddenly, with the mirrors concealing his brown eyes. "The sun," he said. "I'm driving straight into it."

  "Better than rain," Christine said.

  They passed the Thorp Fruit and Antique Mall. The hills in the distance were barren; eastward the land lay lifeless. They passed a grain silo, fenced pastureland, a row of willows planted as a windbreak beside a forlorn farmhouse. There were long wheeled irrigators lined up by ditches and canals full of runoff water. The river spilled broadly past cutbanks.

  "Listen," said Ben. "It's apple season. If you're out of money, you could go up and pick. They'll be looking for people now."

  "That's a good idea," Christine said.

  "Yeah," said Kevin. "Maybe."

  "You know what? It sounds really great."

  "It does sounds great, you're right."

  Christine put a hand on his thigh again. "I've always wanted to pick," she said.

  "We ought to do it," agreed Kevin.

  At Ellensburg they passed into the stench of a slaughterhouse—the reek of blood spilled into the earth and of the exposed viscera of cows. The yards and gates stood empty now, the corrals deeply pocked by hooves and pools of muddy water. Plumes of steam rose off the ground; hundreds of cows fed until the last on a dirt hillside nearby.

  "There's a good reason right there," said Christine, "to totally go vegetarian."

  "We tried it once," Kevin said. "Then we sort of slipped."

  "We made exceptions. It all fell apart."

  "Thanksgiving," said Kevin. "We went to her mom's. What were we supposed to do?"

  "We could have stuck to potatoes, you know. We just
didn't, was all. We were weak."

  They rolled on into the eastward country. The hills were more windswept and vast as they graded up out of the valley. A pig farm stood on the north side of the road, and the pigs wallowed in thick black mud beneath the shade of cottonwoods fast shedding their leaves. Ragged cover followed the fence lines, and the fields in the distance were muddy and furrowed, with the ditch water reflecting sunlight. They were leaving the cultivated, well-kept country and entering hills that had been there before the farms, hills dotted with islands of wheatgrass sprouting up between the sage.

  "This stretch of road is spooky," said Christine. "Everything looks so old."

  The country appeared bleaker, more desolate, WARNING! a sign read, NEXT EXIT 23 MILES, LAST CHANCE FOR FOOD OR GASOLINE. They drove on past the Kittitas exit, where cottonwoods stood on both sides of a ditch swollen with running water. Big irrigators loomed in the hayfields. Everything was still, silent, and sad; everything looked dilapidated. Against a fence grew Russian thistle, most of which had turned to tumbleweed. At the edge of the highway sat a run-down farmhouse, the ruins of a shed beside it. A swaybacked dog paced its front porch, halting to sniff at a sofa. The sage desert began in the farmhouse's sideyard and ran infinitely eastward.

  Ben sat kneading the right side of his belly and staring out the window. The hills rose tan, olive, and brown, and the ribbon of asphalt cutting through them was the darkest thing on the landscape. They passed beneath a railroad trestle; they passed a concrete spillway. The power wires appeared feeble against the hills, like old telegraph lines. Now the road before them steepened, and as they ascended into Ryegrass Summit, Kevin downshifted into third gear. "Everything up here is crumbling," he said. "Erosion city or something."

  "Basalt lava," Christine said.

  "Old volcanoes."

  "Very old volcanoes."

  "Like fifty million years."

  "Even older."

  They made their way over Ryegrass. The country broke open into long barren slopes falling to the Columbia. Off in the distance, off to the east, Ben saw the breaks on the far side of the river shimmer in the October sunlight.

  "We're coming into Vantage," said Kevin, moving into the right-hand lane, slowing to take the exit ramp. They emerged from the shadows of the talus buttes, where the river lay throttled behind Wanapum Dam, still and flat, a green lake. A flock of mallards, tightly packed, bobbed together in the lee of the bridge. A magpie perched on a stop sign.

  Ben pointed north, upriver. "I was born out there about thirty miles," he said. "Up past the canyon and around a few bends. Back before there were any dams."

  "Those were the good times," said Kevin.

  Vantage sat sheltered behind windbreak trees—venerable Lombardy poplars. There was a Shell, a Texaco, an RV campground, a restaurant called the Golden Harvest. Kevin turned at the general store and stopped beside a phone booth. He came around and slid open the van's door, his sunglasses in his hand. "Stay," he said, pointing at Rex. "Just hold it right there, dog."

  He gestured toward the campground office, through the break of poplars. "If you need to rent yourself a car, you can do it over there."

  "Good," Ben said. "Thanks."

  "We'd take you on," Kevin added, "but were turning off toward Othello."

  "It's all right," Ben said. "I'm glad to have gotten this far."

  "Your eye's swelling up," Kevin observed. "Looks like you're going to have a black eye. It's going to be kind of gnarly."

  "That's okay. I can live with that."

  "Your neck looks pretty stiff, too. You better just take it ti easy.

  Christine got out and stood in the sun with her hands in the front pockets of her jeans. "What about your dogs?" she asked. "Can we let them run loose out here? Or do you want to tie them up?"

  "They can run," Ben said. "They wont go anywhere."

  The boy and girl stood to one side and watched the dogs sidle out. Ben followed and slipped on his hunting cap. His side burned. His back hurt. He still couldn't see clearly.

  "It's a great day," Kevin declared. "Everything smells like sage."

  "It's warm out," added Christine.

  The young couple stood by their van holding hands while Ben called his insurance company. He called the state patrol, too. The girl slipped her fingers into the boy's rear pocket, then around his slim waist. The boy pulled her to him, and they kissed briefly. They were seriously in love, Ben could see that. They were easy and familiar with each other. He turned from the sight of them, hung up the phone, and made his way to their van. He hauled his rucksack and duffel bag out, propped them beside the phone booth, and rummaged for the Manila cord he would need to leash Tristan and Rex.

  "What's the deal?" asked Kevin.

  "My friend's on his way," Ben said. "He'll pick me up right here."

  "Okay," said Kevin. "Perfect."

  "You forget anything in the van?" asked Christine. "You got everything out here?"

  "I think so," Ben said. "I left your bandanna on the seat back there. It probably goes in the trash." He slid his wallet free of his pocket, plucked out four twenty-dollar bills, and thrust them into the girl's hand. "Don't argue," he said. "Just take it."

  "We don't want your money," Christine said. "We didn't help you out for this."

  "You can skip picking apples this way. That money will get you to the Sawtooths."

  "Not a good reason," said Christine.

  "Take it. You need it more than I do. So just take it and let's not talk about it."

  "No way. Come on."

  "Yeah," added Kevin. "Come on."

  Ben backed away and put his wallet in his pocket. "You keep that money," he told them.

  They stood for a moment looking at him. Then Kevin pulled open the van door. He came out with the bag of pumpkin seeds, a small carton of the Himalayan incense manufactured by Tibetan monks, and the length of purple climber's webbing, threaded with the carabiner and ring-angle piton, that had hung from the rearview mirror. "Here," he said. "Our gift."

  "That 'biner is really good luck," explained Christine. "We found it up in the Dolomites."

  "You're an old climber," Kevin added. "You ought to take this 'biner."

  "I don't know," Ben said.

  "Take it. We want you to have it." Christine took the webbing from the boy's hand and looped it over Ben's neck. "There," she said. "It's yours."

  "It looks right," Kevin said. "It looks perfect on you."

  "Take this other stuff, too," said Christine. And she gave him the incense and the pumpkin seeds. "It's not worth eighty bucks," she said. "But maybe it'll come in handy."

  "Thank you," said Ben. "I appreciate it."

  They stood looking at him awkwardly, uncertain about taking their leave. "You don't have to wait around," said Ben. "My friends on his way. Its all taken care of. I can't thank you two enough."

  "Okay," said Christine. "Good luck and all."

  "Yeah," said Kevin. "Hope it goes well."

  The girl reached back for her ponytail and laid it over her left shoulder. Her features, Ben saw, were much like Rachel's: her beauty was in her fine bones. Her beauty was not an ephemeral thing or a condition of her age alone. It would still be there in fifty years, underneath her aging skin. "If you haven't done it already," said Ben, "you two ought to get married."

  Christine smiled and nudged Kevin, who put an arm around her neck. "I'm never going to leave her," he said. "I don't need a piece of paper."

  "We're soulmates," Christine said. "We're forever."

  When they had pulled away in their Volkswagen van, Ben sat down by his rucksack and perched his head against his hands. The van crossed the bridge in the distance, small against the rising hills.

  Ben remembered that in Italy, he and Rachel had slipped down between rows of apple trees on the plain of the Po, deep into the cool and dark of orchards, and there they had kissed with the sadness of newlyweds who know that their kisses are too poignantly tender and that their good fortun
e is subject, like all things, to the crush of time, which remorselessly obliterates what is most desired and pervades all that is beautiful.

  THREE

  The wound in his forehead throbbed now. There was not a soul to be seen in Vantage; the town appeared lifeless, barren. Below was the silent highway and the river, and to the east spread a sky unfathomably vast, becalmed, devoid of clouds. Everything close, the stones and the grass, seemed hard-edged and vivid to Bens eyes, but in the distance the clear substance of things gave way to mirages and shadows.

  Tristan sidled over to lie at his feet and to rest his throat on Bens boot. Ben put one hand on the dogs muzzle and with the other prodded his own wounded forehead and massaged his aching temples. He stayed that way for a long while, taking in the dark hills to the south; then he stood and leashed up the dogs with the length of Manila cord. He spoke to them gently, explaining the state of things, but the sound of his voice was strange to his ears and he retreated into silence. Stretching his neck, back, and shoulders, he tried to fend off the lassitude growing in him even at this hour of the morning. It seemed to him he had to move or risk falling into a pause that might become a stupor. At last, drumming up his energy, he maneuvered into the rucksack straps and, bearing his duffel over one shoulder, hiked up toward the campground with his dogs trailing, leashed.

  The campground's office smelled of cigarettes, and on a shelf in the front window lay a dusty collection of quartz and petrified wood. On the counter sat a five-gallon aquarium of desultory neon tetras milling behind algae-tinted glass. There was a black velvet scroll, perhaps made in Hong Kong, of a sequined and benign-looking tiger. There were ceramic finger vases, ceramic snakes, and ceramic miniature flamingos. Behind the counter, on a couch in the corner, two small children, a boy and a girl, sat curled under a sleeping bag, watching a cartoon.

  "Good morning," Ben said to them. "How are you?"

  Neither child answered at first; instead they gawked at his swollen eye, the boy with the sleeping bag pulled up to his chin, the girl with a corner of it in her mouth. "Did somebody punch you?" she finally asked.