The Mountain Story

  My feet were not clever about how to seek out steps and my hands were not smart about where to find holds. I kicked to make toe hooks and heel hooks, felt for pockets where I could jam my fingers, and knobs to pinch and slopers to cling to, breathing snoutfuls of dust and sediment, thrutching ever upward.

  Taxed by the hot sun and the sheer physical effort of the climb, I paused to catch my breath and looked up to find that I still had three-quarters of the wall to navigate. My hands were torn and bleeding already, so I paused to wipe them, one at a time, but I lost my grip and bounced from front to back over the choss, transferred by the tumbling rubble to the bottom of the wall. I got myself up and shook my limbs to find nothing irreparably damaged or torqued in the fall.

  When I turned I saw the three Devines fretting beneath the brooding pines, and called, “I’m fine! Bridget! Vonn! Start looking for the sports bag!”

  They rose, disappearing together down the path we’d made earlier. I wiped my bloody palms on my parka and prepared to tackle the wall once more, now desperate for a drink from the water bottles in the mesh bag, but glad that at least I had a smaller audience to witness my thrashing, graceless ascent.

  Shrill birdsong snuck up on me as I climbed again, bouncing off the jadeite in the rock. I clung, turning left to find a dozen little birds perched on the branches of a tall dead cedar. Those small grey birds inspired me. I reached for the next grip, which I could see above my head to the left, then the next, and the next. But the muscles in my forearm were so pumped with lactic acid my fingers wouldn’t grip. I cringed as the cramp took hold, grateful that I hadn’t climbed higher. I manoeuvred, one-handed, back down to the earth.

  “All good!” I called out to Nola, waiting for the cramp to subside. I was pretty certain then that we would not be rescued by lunch.

  Bridget and Vonn burst through the trees, clapping at the sight of the empty wall, assuming I was on my way for help. Their faces when they saw me there with Nola? Let’s just say my sense of failure was already complete and I’d only made two attempts.

  “Can’t find the bag?” I asked, distributing the guilt.

  Vonn shook her head.

  “Maybe I took it off,” Bridget said. “Because we were moving the log.”

  “Do you remember taking it off?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe it got stuck in a tree,” I said. “You have to keep looking.”

  I wiped the blood off my palms again and returned to the wall, deciding to attempt the climb from another angle, a vertiginous route where I hoped I could reach a particular ledge, and from there grasp the longest branch of the ironwood stump. I heaved and hoisted and grunted but when I got there found the ledge was too shallow for two big feet in hiking boots. The branch of the hand I’d planned to grasp was broken—the only broken branch on the ironwood. I made my way back down, cursing all the while.

  When I reached the rubble at the bottom I shouted, “Right side looks a little friendlier. I’ll try that next.”

  “You need water!” Nola waved the yellow canteen.

  I did need water. I felt faint. But I shook my head and started for the other side of the wall.

  My bloody palms made the rocks slippery and my progress slow. Try and try again I did, from one angle, then another, but each time I failed to reach a safe perch from where I could grip that ironwood. At some point I realized that I was drenched in sweat and overheating in the big coat. With some difficulty I managed to find my way to a spot where I could take off the coat, tying the arms around my waist.

  The sun beat down as I climbed. No matter which direction I took I’d invariably hit an obstacle and was forced to climb back down again. It went on like that for hours.

  I couldn’t escape memories of the past, voices of the dearly, or nearly, departed. My mother. Frankie. Byrd. I couldn’t help but remember the day Byrd and I first stumbled on Angel’s Peak.

  Within a short time of moving to Tin Town the mountain became my refuge from Kriket and Yago and that loud, smoky trailer. I attended my freshman high school classes sporadically, preferring to spend my days on the mountain with Byrd. After a few weeks, when it was clear I’d grown in strength and stamina, Byrd decided that I was ready to hike to the peak. The mountain had already changed me.

  Byrd reminded me that it got cold, sometimes very cold in early autumn on the mountain, so I’d borrowed an old coat from the musty closet at my aunt Kriket’s—one I was certain did not belong to Yago—and put on my Detroit Tigers cap, knowing Byrd would wear his too.

  He had procured climbing boots for me—he wouldn’t say how or where—and he had a knapsack with the day’s gear: binoculars and camera (the old Polaroid of his uncle’s, hilariously huge, but it was so cool to see instant photographs in your hands). He’d also packed the yellow canteen I’d bought him, two large bottles of pop, some packaged burritos from the gas station, and a bag of peanuts in the shell.

  The trail to the peak was hard and steep and soon I was sweating and out of breath. After only an hour of hiking uphill I was struggling. I expected my friend to be encouraging but he mocked my efforts with words I’d never heard before—scut, varlet, yawt—spurring me on with his insults, laughing when I almost puked.

  It turned out that every rocky step was worth the view even if the day was overcast. We stood there, silent above the dense white sea of cloud. It was the first time I felt that God feeling.

  “Air’s thin,” Byrd said. “Feel it?”

  I felt a loving presence all around me, and a deep connection to all living things. I didn’t want to ask Byrd if he thought it was because of the diminished oxygen. I didn’t want to break the spell.

  “Feels like another dimension,” Byrd said.

  “Frankie was going to hike up here with me,” I said.

  “He should. The mountain could change his life.”

  “How could the mountain change your life?”

  “People say when you’re standing in the centre of those lines,” Byrd said, pointing to a spot beside me where five fractures intersected to make a star shape in the rock, “you get answers to questions you didn’t even know you had. Answers that can change your life.”

  “Cool.” I stepped onto the cracked rock star.

  “Supposed to hit you like a bolt of lightning—the answer, I mean.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like my uncle was engaged to this one girl and then he stood on the star and all he could think of was his ex, so he broke off his engagement and got back with his ex. To be fair that didn’t last too long.”

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “That was a bad example but there are stories of dudes getting lottery numbers in their heads and this one guy got this image of his future where he was dressed in a fancy black suit, and he quit drinking and went back to college and became a lawyer. Stories abound.”

  “Stories abound,” I repeated, laughing. I was still getting used to the way he talked. “Has it happened to you?”

  “I don’t believe in that crap,” Byrd said, and laughed. “I’m only here to pass it on.”

  I stood waiting for the thunderbolt, but nothing happened.

  It had been an almost perfect day—the first part of it anyway. Alone for nearly an hour at the peak we used the peanuts to lure a fat ground squirrel to within an inch of Byrd’s head. I have the Polaroids to prove it. They still make me smile. Sitting there, baiting the squirrel, we’d been comfortably quiet, Byrd expressing my sentiments exactly when he said, “Doesn’t feel like we just met.”

  On our way down we’d gone off the path chasing quail but didn’t think much about it. Byrd had a hell of a good sense of direction. But we’d gotten turned around in a grove of tall pines and without a guiding sun in the darkening sky, we took one or two, then three and four wrong turns and came upon a deep crevice, much deeper and wider than the one I faced with the Devines.

  Overhanging that crevice, protruding from the mountainside, was a long and slender outcropping
—it must have been almost forty feet.

  “Looks like a harp,” Byrd said. “Or a wing.”

  It did look like a massive wing attached to the side of the mountain.

  “We have to name it,” he said.

  I was having trouble hearing him over the wind, which had kicked up considerably. Pointing at the granite projection, I said, “Eagle’s Wing.”

  “Eagle’s Peak?” Byrd shouted.

  “Angel’s Peak,” I called back.

  Angel’s Peak. Byrd and I exchanged a look. For all Byrd’s talk of preparedness and caution and respecting the mountain’s boundaries, neither one of us hesitated as we scrambled down toward that winged outcropping and, with about as much caution as we’d show the average sidewalk, skipped out to the end of the perilously slender extension to look down at the deep dark below. I shudder now, to think of it.

  It accommodated both of us, but just barely, as we stood at the far end of it, looking down. The wind began gusting from all sides. We held our ground and sang out “Detroit Rock City,” a Kiss anthem we both knew well, our voices sampled by the feldspar and quartzite—rock stars.

  Being a year younger I didn’t have quite the weight or muscle Byrd had, and when the wind started blowing more fiercely the force of it moved me. I acted cool when Byrd found a small rock at his feet and dropped it into the depths, counting until it hit bottom. “You know the free-fall equation?” he asked. “That’s about two hundred feet.”

  The wind came at us again. This time it brought tiny pellets of snow. I lost my breath for a moment and that’s when it hit us both that we were standing on a tightrope of rock over a canyon with an early winter storm bearing down.

  I could see that Byrd was scared too. “Don’t move,” he said. “These rocks will be slippery as ice in two seconds.”

  “Okay,” I said. I watched the quickly accumulating snow.

  “It’ll blow over,” Byrd said. “It won’t stick.”

  The storm didn’t blow over and the snow did stick, and the temperature continued to drop. We shivered as time slipped into the crevice. The relative safety of the mountainside seemed a thousand miles away.

  “What if it’s like this until dark?” I was freezing, shaken by the wind, starting to feel dizzy. Vertigo.

  “Right now we’re going to sit,” Byrd said. “The sound of your knocking knees is distracting.”

  Slowly we turned to face the mountain, and then carefully squatting down we sat astride the rock. I didn’t like that I was in the lead by default.

  “Start heading back.”

  “On our asses?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Might take a while.” I was terrified to move and when I finally did begin to pull myself forward, my hands slipped on the icy rock and I lost my balance. “I can’t,” I said. “It’s too slippery.”

  “Go slow,” Byrd said.

  “I’m freezing.”

  “No one’s freezing. Don’t think about the cold.”

  “I can’t think of anything else,” I said. “Except how far down that is.”

  Byrd did not look down. “Tell me a story.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Anything,” Byrd said as we inched forward. “Just talk.”

  “What for again?” I stopped, craning to look at him.

  “A distraction. Just tell me something.”

  “A story?”

  “Tell me about your friends in Michigan.” We shivered, manoeuvring over the snow-glossed rock.

  “I don’t have friends in Michigan.”

  “I don’t have friends in Michigan,” Byrd repeated—his mimicry was masterful. “Make something up. What about life with Aunt Kriket?”

  “Depressing.”

  “Depressing? My father died of a heart attack at thirty-one years old. My mother got cancer a few years later. I left my grandparents in Hamtramck and moved here. That’s my story. That is depressing. That’s why I wanted you to go first.”

  “Are you making that up?”

  “Nope.”

  We continued to shimmy forward as the snow fell around us, both startled by the sound of a rock hitting the wet depths.

  “How old were you when you moved to the desert?” I asked.

  “Seven. I remember my grandparents saying goodbye at the airport. I was torn up about leaving them.”

  “Why’d you have to?”

  “Their health wasn’t good. It was the only option. When my flight escort came we clung to each other—the woman had to pull me out of their arms. I tried to find them before I turned the corner but they were already walking away, holding each other up. I never saw them again.”

  “My father lost our house in a bet,” I said to lighten the mood.

  “Wow.”

  “He had six girlfriends move into the house after my mother’s accident.”

  “At once?”

  I laughed.

  “What happened to your mother?”

  Another rock fell into the deep crevice. The bony ridge of the wing seemed to be coming loose. I stopped, but Byrd said, “Keep going. All the way to the end.”

  “Okay.”

  “Keep talking. How many girlfriends?”

  “Six,” I shouted over the wind.

  The snow was falling faster and harder. “Why’d they have to move in?”

  “To cook and clean? They never lasted long.”

  Behind me Byrd lost his balance and fell against my back. I tilted with his weight, but clung hard until he was steady again. As we got closer to safety we could see that one of the big rocks that joined the mountain to the slender outcropping was gone, relocated somewhere far below.

  I turned around, pointing out the gap between the outcropping and the mountain to Byrd.

  “We have to stand,” Byrd said, reading my thoughts. “And step over it.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s slippery,” Byrd cautioned. “Take my hand.”

  “No,” I said. The wind pelted us with heavy snow.

  “Take my hand!”

  “If I fall I’ll take you down too!”

  “Are you going to fall?”

  “I don’t want to!” I shouted over the wind.

  “Then don’t put that out there!”

  I rose slowly, steadying myself on my knees, arms in the air like a surfer. When I was on my feet, I glanced over my shoulder to find Byrd holding out his hand to help. “Step over it,” Byrd said.

  I refused Byrd’s hand, stepping cautiously over the loose rock. “I’m fine,” I said, and then I slipped and started to fall.

  Byrd risked his life diving to save me that day. He somehow managed to launch us both forward to the mountainside where we landed on the cold, hard rock.

  “Close call,” I said and we laughed, absurdly, inanely. We laughed until we ached, then rose and started back through the snowy wilderness to the Mountain Station.

  “Snow’s pretty as hell,” Byrd said.

  It was.

  A fine blue sky emerged later that afternoon and I remember seeing it as a victory. Byrd and I had climbed to the top of the mountain, and not only that but we’d also survived a sudden storm at Angel’s Peak.

  I was feeling very good about my new life in California, until I saw Yago’s Shovelhead parked beside Kriket’s trailer. I don’t know why Yago hated me so much. I nearly didn’t go inside. But when I got closer I saw that the Gremlin was there too. If Yago tried to start something, Frankie’d have my back.

  I crept inside, hoping to make it to the sleeping bag on the floor in the bedroom without detection. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. I tried to stifle a sneeze but couldn’t.

  “Get in here, Wilfred!” Yago called from the kitchen.

  I stepped inside the small room. He was alone.

  “Did you slap my kid?” he asked.

  “What? No!”

  “Did you slap my kid?”

/>   I turned to find a half-dozen children staring up at me blankly. I wasn’t sure which of the boys was spawn of Yago.

  “I never would,” I said.

  “Then how are they going to learn?” Yago asked, pointing to a pile of toddler shit under the table.

  I shrugged, relieved I’d been accused of neglect, not abuse, and started to turn away.

  “Get back here,” Yago said.

  Kriket and Frankie emerged from the bedroom down the hall. They looked drunk or high or both. “What’s going on?” Kriket asked, herding the kids out of the room.

  “Wilfred needs to clean his mess,” Yago said, pointing to the coil.

  “Clean it up, Wilfred,” Kriket said, waving the smell away from her nose.

  Frankie wasn’t really paying attention. He looked up at the clock on the wall and seemed anxious. “That right?”

  “Five minutes slow,” Kriket said.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  Frankie grabbed his car keys from the counter. “Out.”

  “Should I come?”

  “No.”

  “You got a mess to clean,” Yago reminded.

  “Frankie?” He knew I needed his help.

  Frankie smiled at Kriket and Yago, pulling me aside. “Man up,” he said. “You can’t expect me to fight your battles anymore, Wolf.”

  “Yago outweighs me by sixty pounds,” I said. “You know he carries a gun?”

  “You can’t rely on me for everything. I won’t always be here.”

  “I rely on you for nothing,” I said. “You’re never here.”

  “Where you going, Frankie?” Kriket was suspicious.

  “I’m meeting a guy. Remember I told you before?”

  “A guy?”

  “The job interview.”

  “Thought you were gonna start working for me, Uncle Frankie,” Yago said.

  “I will,” Frankie said. “But there’s this casino job …”

  “Fine. But set your boy straight before you go.”

  At that moment I noticed that Frankie had a brick-sized brown paper bag stuffed into the waistband of his jeans. We both pretended that I hadn’t seen it as Frankie zipped up his jacket. Was he stealing from Yago? Probably. On the one hand I applauded the bold move, but what if my cousin found out and blamed me for his lost inventory? I considered ratting out Frankie to save myself a beating. I didn’t.