The Mountain Story

“They jumped the crevice,” I called out. “Fifteen feet. Must be fifteen feet.”

  “They could come back.”

  “They won’t come back. They won’t bother. We’re too much work.” I wondered how much longer that would be true. “How did the Cahuilla get over?”

  “Who are you talking to?” Vonn asked.

  “Myself. I don’t know. The Cahuilla didn’t jump to get here. Not that far.”

  I was alarmed to turn and find that Nola hadn’t been awakened by the conflict with the coyotes.

  “She never woke up?”

  Vonn and Bridget shook their heads.

  “Fifteen feet,” Bridget commented. “That’s far.”

  I kneeled beside Nola. Her forehead was hot, her breathing laboured. My body ached and my spirit sagged. I said a silent prayer for the Devines, and rain.

  In my dream, Vonn’s toes were in my mouth. But then Vonn morphed into Bridget—you know how that happens in dreams—and she pointed out Nola’s arm where the undershirt-bra-bandage was loose and sterasote leaves were falling to the ground, glowing like tiny green gems. I nearly lost it—in my dream—when I saw the wound. It was healed, entirely, miraculously. Bridget gestured for me to look into the trees ahead and I grabbed my stick, ready to fight coyotes. Instead I saw an angel dancing among the pines, entreating me to join her. It was my mother, in her white, batwing-sleeved dress. I followed, even when she began to run, and I called out, “Glory. Glory! GLORY!”

  She led me through the brush and over the rocks, back to the spot where the mangy coyotes had jumped the crevice. There she balanced impossibly at the top of a free-standing lodgepole pine. “Trust,” she said.

  “Trust who?” I shouted.

  “Make a bridge, Wolf! Make a bridge with the mossy pine.”

  “Bridget what?” I shouted.

  “You still here?” Byrd laughed and plopped down beside me on the rock.

  “I’m dreaming, Byrd. Did you see my mother? Where are you?”

  “The matrix, dude. In between the rocks.”

  “Cool.”

  “Your eighteenth birthday blew scagg.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re supposed to be the guide.”

  “I know. Is that the way?” I asked, pointing across to the slope.

  “That’s the way.”

  “So that will take us back up to where we fell?”

  “That’s the way,” Byrd repeated.

  “The way we get rescued?”

  “It’s the way you have to go,” Byrd answered with a shrug. He pulled his yellow canteen out of his knapsack and took a long drink before passing it to me.

  The dream drink was cool and crisp and soothed my parched throat and reconstituted my spirit.

  Byrd gestured across the crevice. “There used to be a land bridge. Slender. Like the wing at Angel’s Peak. It broke off. They walked across a little tightrope bridge.”

  “They?” I followed his finger to see evidence that there had once been a land bridge.

  “Imagine what that stone sounded like when it fell …” Byrd mused.

  “You think a person could jump that?”

  Byrd shook his head. “Suicide. It’s not just the leap, it’s the landing. You have to be a mountain goat.”

  “Or coyote.”

  The slanted rock on the other side appeared to meet the ridge where we’d fallen. “So I make a bridge? Then I go up there? I take the Devines up there and then what?”

  “You’ll see a lone pine.”

  “A lone pine?”

  “And a mesa beyond it. That’s the way. Go toward the lone pine.”

  In this dream, Nola appeared, rising from the ridge on the other side of the slope, led by two large dogs on long leashes. Only it wasn’t Nola, it was my mother wearing Nola’s red poncho instead of the white dress, and they weren’t dogs but coyotes.

  In my dream, Nola called, “Listen to your mother, Wolf!”

  That’s all I remember of the dream, and at least some of it I’m making up.

  I’ll tell you what happened when I woke the next morning on the mountains, our third day lost, but first, for the rest of this story to mean anything, you have to know what happened to Byrd.

  It was Lark’s reappearance in my life just before I turned seventeen that set off the chain of events that led me back to the mountain, and ultimately to the Devines.

  I thought about Lark Diaz every night but I hadn’t actually seen her since the day I got heatstroke the summer we’d moved from Michigan. She’d been away at boarding school, and then college in New York—Byrd had been right about his cousin never coming back to live in Santa Sophia again, not even for the summers. When she did on the rare occasion come home she most often brought a boyfriend, some bespectacled dandy titillated by the casino culture, or some dunderheaded muscleman who wanted to hike the mountain in Jesus sandals—according to Byrd, who met the smattering of suitors at the Diaz family dinners he was obliged to attend.

  I’d taken a Friday shift at the gas station for Byrd because he’d been summoned to Harley’s ranch to make plans for college now that he was turning eighteen. I didn’t want Byrd to leave. I hoped he wouldn’t get accepted anywhere. I mocked the very notion of him going. Without Byrd, I was not just alone—without Byrd, I was just not myself.

  Tinkling silver chimes—which Byrd put up when the rusty cowbell broke—announced her entrance this time. Her face was bare of makeup, her hair long and loose. She was dressed in jean shorts and desert boots but I knew she wasn’t a local. When she saw me she grinned expansively and said, “You still owe me for two pops.”

  I caught the fragrance of citrus blossom. “Wow.” It was all I could say and I said it out loud. “You are … Lark.”

  She laughed—what a beautiful sound—and I was surprised to see that she found me charming.

  “Are you moving back?” I asked, speaking from my lowest register.

  “We’re here for the weekend,” she said. “We came all the way from New York for the big event.” The event was the birthday party Harley was throwing for Byrd and me at the ranch on Sunday.

  We? She’d brought a boyfriend?

  “You know Gisele Michel? We’re at school together in New York.”

  I was relieved when she gestured toward the parking lot to see a skinny brunette with oversized breasts climbing out of the driver’s side of a silver Mercedes. As we watched the girl clackety-clack toward us in her too-high heels, Lark said, “Her dad’s a big lawyer for TV writers. Her mom’s an interior designer to the stars. She has a beach house in Malibu. She’s been in People.” She shrugged as if she wasn’t impressed but thought I should be.

  “That’s cool,” I admitted.

  The passenger door opened on the silver Mercedes and I was confused to see Byrd climb out. “Byrd knows your friend?”

  “They met this morning.”

  “Okay,” I said, grinning.

  “I need a favour from you,” Lark said but didn’t say more.

  When Byrd and the young woman entered the store my hair stood on end. There was some subtle hint of blood under the designer fragrance that followed her down the aisle. A predator. That’s what I smelled.

  Byrd strode up to us saying, “You didn’t tell her, did you, Wolf?”

  “No,” I said. “What?”

  Gisele Michel encircled Lark’s slender waist from behind, licking her bottom lip as she sized me up. “He’s absolutely adorable,” she said in a faux-scratchy voice. “Always loved cowboys and Indians. They’re both just yummy.”

  “Don’t tell them anything,” Byrd said.

  Tell them what? I hadn’t seen Lark in the flesh in three years—now she was standing in front of me, and was she flirting? And she’d brought along a hot celebrity friend? What?

  I took a closer look at Gisele. Her best features (not explicitly hers) were the two expertly constructed breasts, impressive from an architectural standpoint with a hint of the surreal—almost manga-esque. He
r voice put me in mind of green pepper. “Introduce me,” she demanded. “I need to know the guy who knows.”

  “Gisele Michel, Wolf Truly,” Lark said.

  I was flattered that Lark knew my last name. “What do I know?”

  “Don’t tell them, Wolf,” Byrd repeated. “I said you’d never tell.”

  “Tell them what?”

  Gisele tugged Byrd in the direction of the pop fridge. “As I was saying before, I have a thing for Native Americans. Billy Jack. You know Billy Jack? I’m so into vintage. Film. Clothes. Everything. I long for a time when life was, like, simpler.”

  I could see Lark wanted to get me alone. I didn’t care that I was being played. I just hoped the game was good. “We’re friends, right?” Lark said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “When you came here that day, a long time ago, I heard you tell Byrd you found some red weed,” Lark said, grinning. “I heard you, Wolf.”

  “Red weed?” I was shocked, a little.

  “I wanted Gisele to come to the birthday party and I was talking about the vision quest thing and how they used to use red weed in the old ceremonies and she said she wanted to try it and I said I knew someone who could get it,” Lark explained, her eyes huge. “It was the only way she’d come.”

  “Dead weed?” I deadpanned.

  “You can die from a lot of things, Wolf. No one’s talking about taking too much.”

  “You don’t want red weed,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Please,” Lark begged. “She will hate me if I don’t come through.”

  At that point Gisele and Byrd crowded back into our conversation. “So,” Gisele was saying, “I think Native could be hot—feathers, beads, buckskin, animal motifs, totem prints—if people could just sort of let it go, you know—the big injustice or whatever.”

  Byrd laughed, but I don’t think she was trying to be funny. “When I saw your picture,” she stopped to bat her prodigious lashes at Byrd, “I said I’d only come to the party if I could do red weed with that very cute birthday boy.”

  Having never seen Byrd interact with a woman before I had to admit I envied his apparent ease. You’d think he had celebrity children of celebrity lawyers and designers to celebrities throwing themselves at him every day.

  “So you came all this way just to celebrate our milestone annuses,” Byrd said with a grin.

  Gisele mock-recoiled. “I’m not going near your anus!” Turning to Lark and me, she said, “When do we get it? The night before the party? Or would it be cool to be on it during the party?”

  Byrd and I shouted, “NO!” simultaneously, and then laughed because we knew we were both thinking about Harley catching us messed up on red weed.

  “What do you think, boys?” Lark asked, looking hopeful.

  “You know it makes your hair fall out,” Byrd said.

  “It does not!” Gisele protested, clutching her mane.

  “Has some chemical in it called alopeciadicide,” Byrd insisted.

  “He makes things up,” Lark said. “He’s super weird. So’s Wolf. They read. Books.”

  “You said they were straight.” Gisele pouted.

  “We are!” Byrd and I insisted in unison.

  Lark licked her bottom lip. “So what about the red weed, Wolf?”

  “I don’t even know if that bush is still there,” I said. That was true.

  “We’ll take the tiniest, littlest bit of it. Not enough to get ruined, just enough to get wrecked,” Gisele promised.

  “No one’s gonna die,” Lark said, laughing.

  “You know it makes girls super horny? You know that right, Byrd?” Gisele tipped forward on her heels and began to kiss him with an open mouth and wandering tongue. I could not look away, until Lark hopped up to sit on the counter in front of me and I caught a flash of her inner thigh.

  “I’ve read that too,” Lark said, then pulled me close so she could whisper into my ear. “I hear it makes a girl want to tear off all her clothes.”

  “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a ceremony?” Gisele said. “A rite of passage for you birthday boys. A vision quest. Like your people used to do.”

  “We could do that without red weed,” Byrd said.

  “Eighteen is legal, you know,” Gisele said, fingering Byrd’s belt buckle. “For a lot of things.”

  Lark laced her fingers behind my neck and whispered, “I’m going to owe you so hard.”

  For a moment I forgot how to speak. “I don’t know how to make the tea,” I finally admitted.

  “Don’t look at me,” Byrd said holding up his hand. “I’m from Hamtramck.”

  “Seriously.” Gisele sighed. “Is there nothing written down about this shit? Like, a recipe or something?”

  “The shamans made it,” Byrd said, sounding more Native American than he ever had before in his life. “It’s toxic.”

  “It’s a hallucinogen,” I said.

  “It’s gonna turn me into a porn star,” Gisele teased.

  “We won’t take enough to buzz a fly,” Lark promised. “So will you get it?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  Gisele grabbed Lark by the arm then, not caring that we could hear, and hissed, “I would not have dragged my ass to Santa Calientay to party with, like, high school boys if you had not promised you would get us that shit, Lark!”

  “I’ll get the red weed,” I said, to save Lark the embarrassment of disappointing her horrible friend. Good intentions. Speaking of the road to hell …

  Lark mouthed Thank you.

  To seal the deal, she pressed her bare lips to mine. My first kiss. Oranges.

  The plan was that Byrd and I would locate the red weed and brew a small quantity of tea from the leaves and stems and we four would drink a thimbleful the next night to celebrate our birthdays and transition to manhood, agreeing that dusk at Secret Lake would be a momentous time and the perfect place for the ceremony. We knew the way to and from the lake well enough that we could have managed with just moonlight but we promised the girls we’d bring flashlights, and that we’d have them home by ten.

  The next morning Byrd and I rode our bikes out to the path behind the high school, then hiked into the dense bush. Neither of us said anything about the rattlesnakes but Byrd found a hefty branch for protection and watched for movement in the dense foliage. I remembered the way through the large fragrant sage bushes, past the ring of beavertail cactus. We found the red weed spread out over the fallen oak.

  Byrd leaned over and took one of the small pods into his hand, then drew the Swiss Army knife from his sock. I was terrified of snakes and I wanted to get the hell out of there.

  “This is stupid,” he said, fingering the pod.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Seriously, Wolf. Dead weed? What are we doing?”

  “We won’t use much.”

  “Lark is playing you—you know that,” Byrd said.

  I knew and didn’t care. Not in the slightest. I glanced at my feet, sure that any moment a rattler would come slithering up my pant leg.

  “Why don’t we just say we couldn’t find it?” he said.

  “Then they won’t, you know, and I want to,” I said. “Don’t you want to?”

  “I don’t want to die.” Byrd said those words, and then repeated them. “I don’t want to die, Wolf.”

  “Two pods, Byrd,” I said. “We won’t boil it for long. We won’t drink too much. Besides, it’s a vision quest! How many times have we said we should go on a trip? It’s going to be cool.”

  “You think it might be cool?”

  “So cool. So so cool. You’ve never thought about a vision quest?” I asked. “You’ve never wondered about what it was like for your ancestors to perform their rite of passage? What kind of Indian are you? Even I’ve thought of that. Wondered what they saw … how it felt …”

  “Might be cool, I guess,” Byrd allowed.

  “You read the books about it, right? The boys would have this kind of revelati
on where they walked through this curtain and saw themselves as animals. Felt themselves in the animal’s skin.”

  “Cool.”

  “Right.”

  “I already know I’m a bird,” Byrd said.

  “Wrentit,” I said, and laughed.

  “Wrentit! How about eagle?”

  “Vulture.”

  “Owl,” Byrd said.

  “Let’s find out.” It was my father Frankie’s voice I heard, from somewhere deep within me, a genetic hot-spring rising up my throat. I didn’t care about my friend finding his spirit bird. I wanted Lark. It was all about Lark.

  Byrd jumped in with both feet after that, seduced by the possibility of a spiritual journey in some animal realm. Back in his apartment behind the gas station we boiled the little red seeds from the prickly pods and used a clean motor oil funnel to strain the foul brew into the spout of the yellow canteen. “Too much is worse than too little,” he said.

  “It smells like exudate!” I cried, using a Byrd word.

  He laughed, and snapping his fingers said, “Protection! We’ll be needing protection.” Then we collapsed with laughter like a couple of second-graders.

  “What if we trip on the red weed before anything happens?” Byrd asked.

  “Before we need protection?” I shook my head. “We can’t let that happen, Byrd.”

  “Yeah, I’ll dilute it some more,” Byrd said, pouring some of the brewed tea out of the canteen and replacing it with water. “A lot.”

  “What if they puke or something? Girls usually puke from stuff like this. Smells so bad.”

  “I’ll bring gum,” Byrd said.

  “How about toilet paper?” I suggested. “In case someone gets explosive diarrhea.” I was concerned about that particular side effect.

  “Don’t put that out there, dude,” Byrd said, laughing. “Don’t put shit like that out there in the universe.”

  “Yeah. But let’s bring some,” I said, then added, “It’d be cool to shapeshift. Just fly away.”

  “Yeah,” Byrd said. He dug into the closet to get the supplies, calling out like it wasn’t the biggest piece of news he’d ever told me, “Uncle Harley says I should go out of state. For the experience. Maybe back to Michigan. I think about that sometimes.”