The Mountain Story

  I hadn’t heard the motorcycle pull up, because I had been in the shower, so when I walked into the otherwise empty kitchen I was unprepared to see a dark, heavily muscled, badass cholo taking off his helmet. It didn’t take a genius to guess this guy was Yago.

  “Hey asshole,” Yago said.

  “Hey dickhead,” I responded, grateful that, thanks to Frankie, “Foul” was my mother tongue.

  Yago laid me out with one swift punch to the head. Didn’t see it coming. I woke seconds later, blood on the filthy floor where I’d landed. Mine, I realized. My head throbbed. I’d never been punched that hard before.

  “Do you know who I am?” Yago hollered at me.

  I looked up from the ground. My tongue felt strange.

  “You know who I am?” He grabbed my shirt and twisted it at my throat and pulled me to my feet only to slam me against the wall, rattling my skull off the trailer’s frame. He took my chin in his free hand and made me meet his eyes. I did see some familial resemblance.

  “Yago,” I said thickly, tasting blood.

  “You know who I am, and you disrespect me?” he asked, spitting.

  “Cousin,” I said. It hurt to talk. “Wilfred.”

  (Why had I said Wilfred and not Wolf?)

  “Wilfred?” Yago grinned, tightening his grip on my shirt, pulling me in face to face. “That’s your name? Wilfred?”

  “Wolf,” I said. “Wolf.” Even as I trembled in fear, I couldn’t help but notice that Yago’d eaten garlic recently, and drunk whiskey, and smoked a Camel.

  “One thing I hate worse than cousins, Wilfred,” Yago said. “Leeches.”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t go near my shit,” he said.

  “I don’t want your shit,” I spat. My heart was pounding. My mouth was full of blood. Never had I felt so keenly alive.

  A young woman entered the kitchen to see about the commotion. “That’s Uncle Frankie’s kid,” she said.

  Yago cursed under his breath and let me go.

  “You’re Wilfred, right?” the woman said, turning to me for corroboration. “Our cousin.”

  “Wolf,” I said.

  “We met,” Yago said, sneering, as he climbed a small stepladder nearby. He reached up to remove a small square panel from the ceiling, drew a brown paper bag from the hiding place and stuffed the brick-sized package into the deep pocket of his baggy jeans.

  Before he left he slapped my cheek hard. “Don’t touch my shit.”

  The sound of his motorcycle as he revved it just feet from the door, the screeching, screaming, angry sound it made was one I’d never forget.

  “Ever seen a dust devil?” the woman asked when Yago was gone.

  I hadn’t yet.

  “It’s a like a little tornado—comes from out of nowhere in the desert and just starts spinning and kicking up the dust and sand. Then it’s just gone. That’s my brother Yago.”

  “Dust devil.”

  “I’m Faith,” she said, examining my cheek. “It’s swelling pretty good but it didn’t split. Open your mouth.”

  I did.

  “You bit your tongue.”

  I spat some more blood into the dishcloth she’d passed to me.

  “We don’t have ice.”

  I nodded my thanks anyway.

  “My mom and your dad are off playing the slots. They said they’d be back when they’re back.”

  I guessed that when Frankie told me we were moving because we needed to be closer to family what he really meant was that we needed to be closer to casinos.

  My aunt’s other daughters Patience and Charity, stumbled into the tiny kitchen, followed by two more, Grace and Beauty.

  “Frankie’s kid,” Faith said. “Wolf.”

  “Don’t touch Yago’s shit,” Grace warned me in a whisper.

  “You no-go where Ya-go,” Patience said. Sounded like good advice.

  Soon all of the toddlers and children were done with their cartoons and were running into the kitchen, slapping, screaming, biting, pinching. The adults (and semi-adults—because at least three of them were teenaged mothers) hit the hitters, bit the biters and pinched the pinchers in what appeared to be a lesson in Darwinism.

  I remember sitting there that morning, finding some tragic beauty in the way the sun came in through the cracked kitchen window and hit the stratus clouds of cigarette smoke, making haloes around the small children’s heads.

  No one seemed to wonder out loud if the screaming malcontents just needed a little breakfast.

  The cupboards were bare. There was beer and pop in the fridge but no milk or juice. Faith noticed me rooting and called out over the din that Kriket would bring pizza and chicken wings when she came home. Scooping up one of the diaperless babies she deftly lit a smoke, blowing the cloud away from the child’s face, apologetic when she caught my eye. “It sucks here,” she said.

  “Does Yago live here too?”

  “This place is more of a storage locker for him. Comes to hide out sometimes. Pretends he’s visiting his kids. That one is his.” She pointed. “So’s that one.”

  “How many has he got?”

  “Five altogether. But only two of them here.”

  Making conversation, I asked her about the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. Faith told me she had ridden it on one occasion and described it as “fine if you don’t get motion sick which I do,” and the mountain as “fine if you like rocks and trees which I don’t.”

  I kept my eye on the doorway to the kitchen as my extended family came and went. I was never sure if I was looking at a new cousin or if someone I’d already met had traded one dirty T-shirt for another. It was Yago that I was worried about. I wanted to be gone if he came back.

  I’d spent hours and days in Mercury, imagining family life, conjuring a big brother to torment me, a little sister I’d tease and protect. I’d never met a relative before and now I was in a strange place with more than a dozen of them and all I wanted to do was bolt. “I’m gonna take off,” I told Faith.

  My plan was to find that gas station from the night before and make arrangements to take the tram with my new friend.

  My luggage was still in the Gremlin, which Frankie had driven to the casino, and so I had only my jeans, but they’d be far too warm, and my cut off plaid pyjama pants (subbing in for underwear because I had none clean) and the overlarge Bob Seger T-shirt of Frankie’s that I was convinced would mostly hide the plaid pyjamas. I’d worn flip-flops in the car, and they’d have to do.

  I remembered that Byrd’s place was called Santa Sophia Gas Stop and got the directions from Faith.

  Walking through Tin Town, I hummed a little ditty as I passed the rusted mobile homes, waving to some children splashing brackish water in a cracked wading pool; noting the broken strollers, the maimed baby dolls, rusted bicycles, a toy (?) shotgun leaning against a picnic table, refuse, beer bottles, trash bags, and so many cats I could smell their spray no matter which way I turned my head.

  There were no trees in Tin Town and I found myself ducking from the sun the way people do from rain. I remember thinking that the half-hour walk from my aunt’s place to the gas station would be no sweat for a fit teenaged boy, but even before I’d found the main road, my foam flip-flops were breaking down from the heat of the blacktop, and the spaces between my toes where the thong rubbed were raw.

  I’d been so preoccupied by the shabbiness of my new neighbourhood I’d hardly looked up to search the distance and when I did, my breath was taken by the sight of the mountain before me. Miles high and wide, rising up from the desert floor, alive, jagged teeth poised to bite the crisp blue sky, a spiny creature whose very existence seemed to dare the daring. I stopped to take her in. I don’t know how long I just stood there staring. Batholith. I remembered the word from the library book about geology. A magnificent batholith.

  The sun beat on my scalp, and I was annoyed to find bits of bar soap clinging to my hair when I reached up to scratch. I walked on, leaning into the hot wind. Never
been so parched. I didn’t know then how much worse it could get.

  Under the slim shade of a palm tree I caught my breath, found my bearings with the help of a road sign, and felt reassured that I was heading the right way. Faith had said I’d find the gas station at the junction of the main road and freeway, guessing at the half-hour distance and confessing, “I could be wrong. No one walks here.”

  About fifteen more minutes before I got to the gas station, I figured, but twenty minutes later I was struggling along the dirt shoulder looking for somewhere to beg a drink. (Frankie had neglected to leave me any money.) There was no sign at all of the gas station and no place whatsoever to find water. The sun scorched the tops of my feet while the concrete burned my soles through the foam. I was evaporating with each step.

  Shuffling along I was relieved to find a landscaped path that led into a canopy of flowering bottlebrush trees—I never forgot the distinctive flower. I remember the cactus from that stretch of the walk too, cactus being so strange to me—the spiky cholla and the razor-sharp agave and barrel cactus and the beavertail cactus—of course I didn’t know their names back then but respected the hell out of their thorns.

  A distant bench in the shade beckoned, so I pushed myself toward it, grateful to rest my fresh-baked feet. But then I needed to pee.

  A few yards from the bench there was a roped-off area of brush, dense with aromatic sage and ringed by a cluster of fat beavertail cactus. I slipped under the rope and through a space beyond the manicured bushes to relieve myself of scant yellow urine.

  It was there that I found the tangle of red weed clambering up a fallen oak, recognizing it instantly from the picture in the book out on permanent loan to me from the Mercury Public Library—same red seed pods, willowish branches and velour stems, same trumpet-shaped white flowers. I recalled Miss Kittle warning me about the hallucinatory powers of the tiny red seeds—people died from ingesting red weed. “Every generation has their cautionary tale,” she’d said.

  The edges of the pods were prickly and I was careful not to cut my skin and infect myself with its poison when I tore the velvety sphere from the branch. I brought the thing to my nose, gagging because it smelled strongly of diaper. Then I licked it. I don’t know why I did that. I was a kid and sometimes I did dumb things. The microscopic bit of oil from the red seed pod tasted the way sewage smelled. It didn’t give me hallucinations or kill me, obviously, but I will never forget the taste of it on my tongue. Like death.

  Miss Kittle had said I was unlikely to see a red weed bush because all the plants had been dug up and burned. But I’d found it. I’d found red weed my first day in Santa Sophia. I looked around, marking the place, and had the strangest sense that I wasn’t alone. There were shuffling sounds in the brush. I sniffed but couldn’t smell much beyond the sand and sage. I called out, “Hello?” as I backed away.

  Returning to the path I felt not exactly proud, but something—I felt something. I couldn’t wait to tell my new friend Byrd about the red weed. Enlivened by my discovery I quickened my pace, but one of my rubber flip-flops snagged on a branch and the damn thing tore in half. I have not worn a pair of flip-flops since that day. You can’t hike in flip-flops, or run from a predator, or climb to the top of a mountain.

  Deciding I’d be faster in bare feet anyway, I hurled the rubber soles into the bushes. The Native American walked barefoot and sometimes slept on the ground where he could feel and see and smell the earth. According to Frankie I was one-sixteenth Quebec Cree. I began to navigate over the hot ground with fresh purpose, calling forth my thimbleful of Indian blood.

  Emerging from the path, I was startled by the sight of a large modern building. A mall? Water fountains? Food court? I leapt a high fence with surprising ease (adrenalin makes us magical) and, streaking barefoot across the thick green turf, bounded toward the building. A sign at the entrance read Santa Sophia High School. The doors to the school were chained and bolted shut.

  I caught my reflection in one of the windows and stopped to consider the stranger there; some kind of purple hives had erupted on my face and neck, and on my head the bar-soap residue had mingled with my sweat to create a revolting yellow lather. Desperate for a drink of water, I returned to the road, damning the heat, and my feet, and my father, because what the hell.

  The sun rose higher and I walked on, calling to mind graphic images of any number of unwholesome fluids (urine, sewage, tomato juice) and arguing with myself about which ones I’d swallow if they were in front of me at that moment.

  I am unclear as to how I eventually found the gas station. Seemed like one moment I couldn’t walk another step and the next I raised my eyes to see the Santa Sophia Gas sign. My femurs felt unhinged and my feet were aflame. I was lightheaded, operating on a single failing cylinder and relieved when I saw Byrd through the window—a flash of dark hair behind the cash register. Then I fell to my knees, vomiting copiously on the red vinyl welcome mat.

  I couldn’t find the strength to lift my head and worried when Byrd didn’t appear right away that he hadn’t seen me. The next thing I remember is the sound of her voice, the music that rose from her throat when she said, “Gross.”

  Lark had been the dark flash behind the register and not Byrd. I was too ill to be embarrassed as she, smaller than me by half, lifted me by my armpits and helped me into the store. The cool air instantly began to help my breathing. When she said, “You’re okay, I’ve got you,” I believed her.

  That beautiful girl drew me down the aisle and into the small office behind the cash register area, guiding me into a chair in front of an oscillating fan. “You walked?” she asked, tilting a straw so that I could drink from one of the two cans of cola she’d snatched from the fridge. “Barefoot?”

  I managed a nod.

  “Your dad said you were staying at a hotel downtown. That’s a long way.”

  Even in my diminished state I noted that my father had lied to Lark and obviously said nothing about Tin Town. “My feet broke.” I’d meant my shoes.

  Lark was frowning, focused on a spot at my hairline where the bar-soap lather had dried. “Pollen from the trees,” I lied. I let the air from the fan hit my blotchy face as I drained the cans.

  “You have bumps. Purple …,” Lark said, gesturing to the hives on my cheeks and neck.

  “They’ll go away.” I wondered if they’d come from the heat or from that microscopic sampling of the red weed.

  “Did someone hit you?” she asked, noticing the swelling on my cheek.

  “I fell,” I lied.

  She gathered a pitcher full of ice from the nearby freezer and dumped it into an empty bucket and added a large jug of distilled water, then another pitcher of ice. “You know what they say—you only get heatstroke once.”

  I wondered if Lark meant a person either dies from heatstroke in the first place or is afterward wiser about risking it. She lifted my scarlet feet and put them in the scalding cold water. I fully expected to be enveloped by steam.

  “There you go,” she said.

  I couldn’t connect this girl to the contemptuous vision from the night before. “Thanks,” I croaked.

  When she stood, her nipples stiffened from the oscillating fan. She must have noticed my expression shift because she sounded a little panicked, asking, “You gonna throw up again?”

  I shook my head without confidence.

  Lark set a cold cloth on my forehead and smiled like an angel of mercy. “Your dad said your name’s Wilfred?”

  It was as though she was speaking another tongue in which neither “dad” nor “Wilfred” were familiar words to me. “Wolf. Everyone calls me Wolf.”

  She smiled. “So you’re Canadian? French Canadian or something?”

  French Canadian? Did he use that as a line? Did it work?

  “A hundred years ago we were French Canadian,” I said. “We just moved here from Michigan.”

  “What? Is your father some kind of outlaw?”

  I didn’t like the way sh
e sounded hopeful. “Not exactly.”

  “Witness protection?”

  I liked the sound of that, and had every intention of lying about our background. “We left everything behind,” I said. “The blue house and my school and my street and Miss Kittle at the library and the shed in the alley and my mother’s grave in the old cemetery.”

  “That’s sad,” Lark said. “Will you ever go back?”

  I shook my head.

  “But you’ll find a nice place here,” she said.

  Tears began to roll down my cheeks before I had the chance to turn away.

  Then the phone behind the cash register rang and with a frown of apology Lark ran off to answer, closing the office door behind her. I strained to listen, but she only spoke for a moment, in a whisper, then she hung up and dialed another number. I hoped she was not calling an ambulance, or mental health facility.

  She didn’t return to me, as I’d hoped. Instead I heard the sound of splashing and realized, with some horror, that she was cleaning my vomit from the welcome mat. Then came the sound of her silken voice as she helped a customer at the register, then another customer, and another. I envied every eye that saw her when I couldn’t, each ear that heard her say, “That’ll be twenty-six for the gas and seven seventy-two for the Red Vines.” I loved the way she said, “Thangz,” at the end of each transaction.

  I wondered if she would rush back to me if I coughed or cried out. I didn’t want her to think I was too pitiful though, or worry that I was too ill, should the urge to kiss me overtake her. If there was to be a kiss, I badly needed a mint.

  Managing the few steps toward the adjoining restroom, I wondered what I could say to impress a girl in front of whom I’d thus far puked and wept. I washed my hair in the sink with dispenser soap and dried it with the industrial hand dryer.

  I still had no line but I had thought of a conversation starter—the mountain. I would ask if she had been up in the tram. Of course she’d ridden up in the tram! The tram would open up the general discussion about the mountain, about which I knew many interesting facts.

  I held my breath as I opened the office door. Lark was gone and Byrd was there in her place. “Forget it,” he said, grinning at my hand-dryer hair.