The Mountain Story

  “It was Thanksgiving,” Nola said. “Who moves on Thanksgiving?”

  “I remember now,” Vonn said. “You’d just met the realtor.”

  “His wife was going to Maine,” Bridget recalled. “He stayed back to close my colonial.”

  “Interesting euphemism,” Vonn muttered.

  “Stop,” Bridget warned.

  “You basically ate that woman’s turkey,” Vonn said.

  “You’re disgusting,” Bridget hissed, then turned to Nola. “I didn’t know it was going to be Pip’s last Thanksgiving.”

  “You never know. That’s the point, Bridge. Carpe diem,” Nola said. Carpe diem. My heart stopped, electrocuted by those words. Carpe diem. Carpe diem. Carpe diem.

  “Wolf?”

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “You’ve got that look again,” Bridget said, sharing a glance with Nola and Vonn.

  We listened to the wind as we scanned the ridge for signs of life.

  Vonn paused to meet my eyes before she said, “We all want to know, Wolf, what happened to your best friend? After the helicopter took him away with no sound at all?”

  I was surprised, but not necessarily relieved to see the Gremlin parked beside Kriket’s trailer when the police drove me to Tin Town on the morning after Byrd’s accident. Frankie hadn’t been around the trailer in a few weeks.

  My father must have seen the police cruiser through the kitchen window. He was out on the porch in a second. “What’d you do?” he called.

  “Where were you?” I called back. “No one answered the phone all night.”

  Frankie turned to the cops. “What’d he do?”

  “Your son here found some red weed,” the officer told Frankie.

  “He did.”

  “That’s right. He and some of his friends brewed some tea and went up to the mountain last night.”

  “You did?”

  “I made the tea,” I said.

  “You drink it?”

  “One girl drank it,” I said.

  “Red weed is not illegal,” Frankie told the cops. “You can’t arrest him for red weed.”

  “We didn’t arrest him. Just had a few questions. They don’t think the other boy’s going to make it.”

  “Other boy? You said a girl drank it.”

  “Byrd,” I said. “He fell.”

  “He’s in a coma,” one of the police officers said. “Just had word they’re airlifting him to Cedars.”

  Less than an hour later, I’d packed my knapsack and was on my way to the bus station to catch a bus to Los Angeles, where they’d transferred my best friend. I found Frankie at the table taking a belt from a greasy bottle of Scotch, a few stray children at his feet.

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “Pull the plug,” he said darkly.

  “What?”

  “Pull the plug.”

  “He’s not …”

  “You don’t know.”

  “He’s just in a coma.”

  “Pull my plug,” Frankie said, “if I’m ever like that.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll do the same for you. A father should do that for his son.”

  “A father should do a lot of things for his son.”

  Frankie followed me out of the kitchen, taking another long pull from the bottle in his hand. “You want a ride?”

  “Ride? With you? To Los Angeles?”

  “Course not.” Frankie snorted. “Just out to the highway so you can hitch.”

  “I’m good. I’m taking a bus.”

  “I’ll take you to the station. Going that way anyway.” He patted his pockets, looking for his car keys. I spotted the keys on a cluttered table and moved quickly to snatch them.

  “Wolf?” Frankie said, stopping me.

  “Yeah.” I hoped he hadn’t seen me grab the keys.

  “I mean it—pull my plug,” he slurred.

  “I’m trying, Frankie,” I muttered, as I tossed his car keys beside the trash bins outside of the front door.

  “Wolf?” Frankie called one last time.

  “Yeah?” I turned back, thinking maybe he wanted a proper goodbye.

  “Could you loan me fifty bucks?” Frankie asked.

  I shook my head and left the trailer, heading for the bus station with Byrd’s Swiss Army knife in my pocket.

  The bus dropped me off near the hospital in LA. I entered through the lobby, got directions from a woman at the reception, then found the bank of elevators. I prayed as we rose that by some miracle Byrd would be sitting up, waiting for me, ready to crack a joke.

  When the elevator doors parted I saw Harley standing tall over a crowd of other Diazes inside a glass-walled waiting room. Dantay was among them, Byrd’s cousin Juan Carlos, a few other faces I recognized from the ranch, but not Lark. Harley turned to see me. His eyes blazed as he motioned me away.

  I retreated but he came after me into the hall. He said, “You should go.”

  “Go? What about Byrd? How is he? What’s happening?”

  He shook his head. He couldn’t look me in the eye. “Red weed?” Harley said. “You might as well have set a fire.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to … he didn’t even drink it … I …” I floundered.

  “You brought the red weed,” he said. “Isn’t that true? You were the one who knew where it grew?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head in disgust. “Your father’s son after all?”

  That cut deep. I glanced into the waiting room—a dizzying mass of dark hair and anxious eyes—and felt their waves of pain and fear. Dantay turned to see me standing there with Harley. I could see by his face that he blamed me too. Maybe they all did. I was sure Lark would set them straight about what happened though. She was probably just too shaken up to talk about it yet. Maybe Gisele Michel’s lawyer-father had advised her to keep quiet.

  I took the stairs down to the hospital lobby and found an armchair where I waited for hours, caressing the contours of Byrd’s Swiss Army knife in my pocket, until I saw Dantay, and the others, and finally Harley, leave.

  The floor was quiet when I stepped off the elevator—just the squeaking of my sneakers on the linoleum. When I came around the corner a nurse turned sharply, outraged to see me there. She paused, sizing me up. “You’re his friend?”

  I nodded.

  “The family has a problem with you,” she said, having already decided, for reasons I didn’t understand, that I wasn’t a threat. “Do you have drugs or alcohol or weapons on your person?”

  I shook my head, saying nothing about the knife, and dropped my gaze to her badge. Nancy Heard—Head Nurse.

  “What’s your name?”

  I looked up. “Wolf.”

  She motioned for me to follow, saying, “You’ll want to make yourself scarce when his relatives are here.”

  White-haired Nurse Nancy was an angel of compassion, leading me down the hall where I could see through the windows of a small white room. Byrd—at least she said it was him—was on a gurney, one of his legs and both of his arms encased in plaster casts. His head was huge, a big bulb wrapped in white bandages. He was intubated, machines blinking beside him.

  “They don’t want you to see him,” the nurse said.

  I nodded.

  “You obviously love him very much.”

  It did occur to me then that Nurse Nancy misunderstood the nature of my relationship with Byrd and the reason that the Diazes didn’t want to see me. Still, I wasn’t lying, exactly, when I nodded. She pulled a chair up to the glass and left me there to sit at the window to his room.

  I woke with my cheek against the glass, the sound of Harley Diaz’s deep voice booming down the hall. A different nurse woke me and helped me out of the chair, and passed me some orange juice and stale toast on my way out the door.

  Outside I walked the unfamiliar streets until my feet ached, muttering to myself like the homeless I’d seen scattered in the parks and pushing carts on the streets. I repla
yed the events leading up to Byrd’s accident. Lark. Where was Lark in all this?

  It went on like that for days. I left the hospital when the family arrived, avoiding detection with the help of the sympathetic nurses, waiting for some sign that Lark had straightened everything out so that Harley and the others would forgive me, waiting for Byrd to wake up so we could return to the desert, and the mountain, and our friendship. I wanted the nightmare to end.

  Lark never appeared. The family didn’t forgive me. Byrd didn’t wake up. After the first couple of weeks the family only made the trip from Santa Sophia to Los Angeles on the weekends, then it was every other week, and then only Harley and Dantay. Byrd was non-responsive. Who could blame them.

  I spent all of my free time at the hospital. The nurses fed me their patients’ leftovers, gave me fresh clothes from their husbands and sons, pretended they didn’t know that I slept in a chair beside Byrd’s bed nearly every night.

  Nurse Nancy said that no one really knew if Byrd could hear me but encouraged me to talk to him anyway. I told him things—things I’d never told anyone else. I hoped to quiz him one day about my cache of secrets, certain he could hear me while he was in the coma. What an elaborate experiment, just to prove that the soul is without bounds.

  Byrd had always been curious about my mother. I’d never told him or anybody about her, beyond the fact that I remembered the smell of her lemon-scented hairspray, and that she was beautiful. My mother’s story was the first thing I decided to tell him as I sat beside his plugged-in body draped in white sheets.

  There was a picture of my mother at five years old wearing an elaborate white-lace First Communion dress in one of the boxes of photographs accidentally sold at some yard sale or lost long ago. (My mother and those white dresses.) I wonder if the image still exists somewhere of little Glory, hands clasped in prayer, eyes lifted to the ceiling in adoration. Frankie told me that when she was little my mother’d wanted to be a nun.

  Glory became a saint instead of a nun, and gave her life to Frankie instead of God, at least in my father’s version of their story, the one in which she forgives his every trespass and never speaks a harsh word. I’ve never believed his version of their marriage. What person would accept a spouse’s lack of loyalty, and ambition, not to mention employment? And what working woman would not complain that the house is a disaster when she gets home from work each night, or flip her lid when the husband drinks Johnnie Walker while the baby plays in the cereal cupboard?

  Aside from her name in Frankie’s tattoo, and the repetition of her DNA in me, the only indelible thing about Glory Truly is her story. Even though everyone in Mercury already knew it, Frankie’d tell anyone who’d listen, multiple times, with varying facts depending on his level of sobriety. He told strangers in bars. He told his parade of women, and the petty criminals who sat around the kitchen table, and the beautiful girl with a tulip tattoo at the car wash in Nevada when she asked, “Does the kid have a mother?” He told it clean. Told it sober. Told it better drunk.

  My mother and I were home sleeping on her lemon-scented pillows on the night Frankie wrecked my mother’s Mustang convertible. That’s usually how Frankie started my mother’s story—with the night he wrecked her car.

  In the passenger seat when Frankie drove the convertible into the big oak tree on Old River Road was my mother’s best friend, Pam Govay. Frankie and she had been wearing seat belts, and there wasn’t a scratch on Frankie, but Pam broke her nose on the dashboard and it never did set right. The convertible (a sixteenth-birthday gift from her parents) was demolished, but the radio, as Frankie’s story goes, was still blasting away when the ambulance arrived, playing some classic Detroit rock or Motown song whose title Frankie changed with each telling, depending on his audience and his mood.

  I asked him once, after moving to Santa Sophia, how it was that Aunt Kriket had a hundred kids and grandkids and he had only me.

  Frankie’d tilted his chin and commenced a mock national public service ad. “Condoms? Condoms work. I am here to tell you that I’ve made love to hundreds of women, maybe a thousand, and only one of them got pregnant. Condoms. They stop ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of unwanted pregnancy. Use condoms—or you will have huge regrets.”

  On cue, my teenaged cousin’s new baby started wailing in the other room and Frankie and I had a good laugh at the timing. But that night and for many nights after I’d lain awake glum with the knowledge that I was an unwanted child. When I asked Frankie about it, he shrugged. “Beats the alternative,” he said.

  “Wanted?” I asked, confused.

  “Terminated,” he said, thumping my head.

  From the day my mother brought me home from the hospital in Mercury until Frankie and I left for the desert, we lived in the same small bungalow on what everyone called Old Dewey Road, distinguished from New Dewey Road, where the mortgages were fatter, the sidewalks broader, and the homes had attached two-car garages instead of painted shacks out back with alley access.

  The Listers, Garvin and Rayanne, who were much older than my parents and had four grown sons, lived a couple of blocks away on New Dewey. In photographs, bald, brown-eyed Garvin Lister, the principal at St. Agnes Catholic School, had the look of a hungry man, not that he was slender, quite the opposite. He’d hired my mother fresh from college and he and his wife, Rayanne, a tiny woman with a strawberry birthmark on her forehead, had taken a parental interest in Glory Elizabeth Frost, whose parents had already passed by then.

  When Glory met Frankie, a rudderless loser ten years her senior, Garvin and Rayanne discouraged the instantly serious relationship. Whether it was the smooth talk or those supercharged pheromones of his, Frankie overcame the couple’s objections to the point that Garvin paid for the wedding reception and walked my young mother down the aisle. Rayanne sat in the mother-of-the-groom spot, the only guest on Frankie’s empty side of the church.

  “They were like the parents we never had,” Frankie’d say of the Listers, though I doubted Glory was similarly bereft of fond childhood memories. In the early days, the Listers would bring baked goods and casseroles to the newlyweds and send their strapping sons to help Frankie with the yard. But as the months passed, my young parents saw less and less of Rayanne, and the next year she developed a winter depression and stopped leaving the house altogether, or at least that’s what Garvin told people.

  When he turned fifty Garvin Lister bought himself a Corvette Stingray, metallic red with a custom sunroof. A car (or as Frankie put it, “That’s no car—that’s an automobile!”) well beyond any principal’s salary, and outside of his capacity to drive comfortably. My father loved to see Garvin Lister pull up in that beautiful car. Sometimes Garvin let Frankie take the Stingray for a spin while he sat in the kitchen with my mother. I remember that the smell of Garvin Lister would linger for days in our little house on Old Dewey—Juicy Fruit gum.

  On the night Frankie crashed Glory’s Mustang GT Convertible he’d made a drunken call to Garvin afterward to ask if he’d give Glory a lift to school the following day. Frankie was confused when Glory said she’d rather walk. “Why would you not want a ride from Garve?”

  “I’d rather walk, that’s all. Besides, it’s Ash Wednesday. We have to be there early.”

  “So Garvin will get you there early. He’s two blocks away.”

  My mother’d looked genuinely afraid. “The way he drives that thing! Everyone talks about it in the teacher’s lounge.”

  “Why would you own a Corvette if you’re not gonna drive it? What would be the point?” Frankie had laughed.

  “It’s not only that,” she said.

  “Give the poor guy the pleasure of your company. You’re the daughter he never had.”

  “I know.”

  “You make him smile.”

  “I know. Just lately he seems … And with the new car and everything …”

  “So he speeds a little.”

  “It’s not just the speeding. I’m worried about Rayanne.”


  “Worried about what?”

  “People talk, Frankie.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “I wouldn’t want her to get the wrong idea.”

  “About you and Garve?” My father had laughed pretty hard at that. “Who’d believe you’d take Garvin Lister over me?”

  The following morning I noticed that gentle flakes of snow were falling outside of the bathroom window. I imagined the snow was falling in honour of Ash Wednesday, the way children believe nature has motive and intent.

  The faculty at St. Agnes was expected at morning mass to observe the first day of Lent. The priest would use his thumb to draw a cross of ashes on the foreheads of the members of his congregation to remind them—or was it to warn them?—thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return. My beautiful mother told me all about it as she spritzed her curls with the lemony hairspray. I felt strongly that I did not want her to leave the house.

  One detail that Frankie left out when he told the story is that my mother wore a special dress that day, purchased from a second-hand shop in Mount Clemens—which I know because I was there, hiding in the rack of scratchy wool blazers, and I’d watched her find it—long and white with sheer flowing batwing sleeves. It’s the dress from my memory. The one she wore when she twirled me in the dressing room mirrors.

  That morning Garvin—hungry, haunted Garvin—pulled up to the curb in his fine automobile. If I close my eyes I can smell my mother’s lemon hair and feel her pink lips whisper, “Always,” when she nuzzles my cheek. I cried when she let me go. Before Glory climbed inside the sports car she smiled at me and placed her pretty hand over her heart, as she did each morning. I wanted to punch Frankie in the nose when he touched his hand to his heart in kind. That farewell was meant for me.

  Frankie said that, later that afternoon, he felt something shift in the air. My father claimed that I started complaining about a stomach ache. Soon I was feverish, vomiting, crying. Frankie couldn’t comfort me and Glory was late. Glory was never late. My father called the school office but got no answer. He called Garvin Lister’s house but got no answer.