The Mountain Story

  Frankie never responded when people asked where his four-year-old son was during what happened next. He seemed not to remember that the feverish child with the stomach ache followed him, stumbling some distance behind as he strode up the street, looking for Garvin Lister’s car.

  I wanted to find my mother too, but I couldn’t see Mr. Lister’s shiny sports car in the road or in the driveway of any of the houses on New Dewey or Old. The sun was falling when Frankie turned back in the direction of home and he must have caught the glint of red metal through the slats in a fence. I followed him through the walkway and tried to peer through the open back gate where the red Corvette was parked in the alley.

  Two oily black crows tearing at a trash bag started making a racket to warn Frankie off their stash. “Go to hell,” Frankie cawed back at the birds, laughing at first, then seeming confused when Garvin Lister looked up to see him and didn’t crack a smile.

  “What’s up, Garve?” Frankie called. “You all right?”

  Mr. Lister was sitting alone in the front seat of his car, ashes from the priest’s sign of the cross still on his forehead. He took a long swig from a silver flask. My father had a flask exactly like it—a gift from my mother.

  “Garve?” my father called, drawing closer. “That my flask?”

  “Stop there, Frankie!” Garvin Lister warned.

  The crows took our attention briefly, flapping away like they knew what was coming.

  “You seen Glory, Garve?” my father called.

  Then, rising from beneath the dashboard, was my mother’s face; mascara smeared, eyes bleary, lips raw, the shadow of the ash cross on her forehead. She found me where I was hiding by the trash cans and stared at me blankly through the car window, then she turned to look at my father, and I did too.

  “What the hell?” Frankie said, nearly hysterical at what he saw or thought he saw. “What the hell?”

  My mother pulled the arms of her white dress up over her shoulders and I could see her mouthing my father’s name before turning to say something to Mr. Lister in the front seat. I remember the blue and grey snapping sounds the locks made as he pressed the button to lock the doors. I remember seeing the nose of the small black gun in his hand.

  My mother was struggling to get out of the car. Mr. Lister’s fingers held Glory’s pretty blond curls in one fist and the shiny black gun in the other.

  “Frankie! Frankie!” my mother screamed.

  “Okay, Glory. Okay, baby. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Frankie made a move toward the car.

  Garvin shouted, “No!”

  My mother held my gaze briefly and mouthed Wolf.

  No time to say goodbye.

  “Carpe diem!” Mr. Lister shouted, then pressed the black gun to my mother’s head and pulled the trigger.

  Carpe diem. I chanted those words in my head to drown out my father’s howls, running down the narrow alley as fast and hard and far as my small legs had ever taken me. Carpe diem. Carpe diem. Carpe diem. The mantra carried me to my house, which I found by the green peace sign Frankie’d painted on the side of the purple garage. I busted through the back door and streaked for the safety of Glory’s bed, where I’d closed my eyes, breathing her lemon scent on the pillow, imagining her whispering voice and petting hand. Just a dream, little Wolf. Not really my face. Carpe diem. Carpe diem carpe diem.

  The next morning I woke in my mother’s bed, which usually meant I’d had a nightmare. Beneath the covers, I searched for Glory’s warm skin, awash in relief when I heard my mother’s footsteps in the hall.

  When she pulled back the covers I blinked against the light, disturbed to find that my mother’s eyes were bruised and blackened, a sloping white splint mending her broken nose. “You awake?”

  “Mama?” I said, hoping that my mother wouldn’t have to wear the ugly white splint on her nose for long. “Mama?” I did not understand why my mother had different eyes. And darker hair.

  “An awful thing happened, Wolf.” The voice belonged to Pam Govay. “I’m going to tell you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You have to be a big boy now. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Something happened to your mama.”

  “Mama?”

  “There was an accident, okay?” Pam Govay said from behind the white splint.

  I must have remembered what happened in the alley then because I stopped calling for my mother.

  “She’s gone,” Pam Govay said. “And Frankie’s gonna need someone around to help him through this and that’s gonna be me. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Mistaken identity—a case of mistaken identity—that was the only explanation that my child’s mind could faintly grasp. In that white dress, my mother had looked too much like an angel.

  The story of what happened in the alley made the national news but I never found a clipping about it in the blue house on Old Dewey and I doubt that Garvin Lister’s last words would have made it in anyway. In fourth grade I’d read the microfiche at the Mercury Public Library and discovered that Mr. Lister had killed himself and his passenger, Glory Elizabeth Truly, with a small-calibre handgun registered to his wife, Rayanne. It was speculated that stress over the school board investigation into his misuse of funds and the discovery of his prescription drug abuse contributed to the murder/suicide.

  The newspaper didn’t say anything about Frankie being a witness. And no one seemed to know that the victim’s little boy, feverish and confused, would never forget the look on his mother’s face, or the words the man shouted before everything went red.

  I was very young when I first told Frankie about my memory of Glory in the alley and about Garvin Lister shouting “carpe diem.” He’d blanched, and I knew that it was a true memory because no one had ever told me that my mother was wearing a white, flowing dress on that Ash Wednesday she was killed. One day I asked Frankie what carpe diem means. “Buyer be aware,” Frankie said solemnly. “Buyer be-a-motherfucking-ware.”

  When I was a child I wondered what Garvin Lister had meant when he shouted Buyer be aware in the seconds before he left the planet. Who was the buyer? What was he buying? What should he be aware of? I’d accepted that what Mr. Lister did was the desperate act of a desperate man but I wanted to find sense in his final words. (There’s a recipe for crazy.) Later I learned that carpe diem actually means “seize the day.” I couldn’t understand what Garvin Lister intended by that either, since he was not seizing the day but relinquishing it fully.

  My mother has come to me over the years, a lemon-scented draft through an open window. “Wolf,” she whispers.

  Glory. Always.

  There we were, the Devines and me, on the morning of our third lost day. It was shortly after I’d unwittingly told them the whole story about what had happened to my friend.

  We were quiet, watching the sun wash over the ragged terrain, the serrated green pines, the grey rock and the brittle brush, praying for our rescue, wondering why they hadn’t found us yet. They had grown large in all of our imaginations, to be sure. “They’ll be coming soon,” Bridget said, for the twentieth time. “They must have dozens out looking for us by now.”

  “They’ll be able to track our prints,” Nola said. “Won’t they, Wolf?”

  “Okay,” I said. I was remembering something from my dream—my mother telling me that no one was looking for us. And something else, something important. Something about a tree.

  “Wolf?”

  I sat there, paralyzed, trying to remember what it was. Something about a pine tree. A tree trunk.

  “You all right, Wolf?” Vonn asked.

  “We gotta get back to the wall.” I tried to stand but my stomach was in turmoil from hunger and dehydration, and maybe a little, from my story about Byrd.

  “Last night you said something about making a climbing rope,” Vonn said.

  Nola passed the remnants of the knapsack to her granddaughter. “You’re handy, Vonn. Maybe you could braid what’s left of it to
gether.”

  “I could try,” Vonn said. “It’s pretty ripped up though.”

  “Maybe there’s something else we could use. Vines or something?” Nola turned to me. “Do you think?”

  “We could look for some plant or vine. It’s a good idea, Nola,” I said.

  “I’ll go,” Vonn volunteered.

  “Okay,” I said. “You two rest, right, Nola? Bridget?”

  “I’m fine,” Nola said.

  “You’re not fine, Mim,” Bridget said. “I’m having terrible stomach spasms. You must be too.”

  “A little.”

  “Am I starving? Are we starving, Wolf?”

  “You can go three weeks without food. Remember?” I said. “What you’re feeling now are just hunger pains.”

  “I used to get those between the appetizer and the entree,” Bridget said and we all managed a laugh.

  “My stomach hurts too,” Vonn admitted.

  “It hurt before we left,” Bridget pointed out.

  “You were sick last week too,” Nola said. “We thought it was the rotisserie chicken.”

  “Maybe I caught a bug,” Vonn said.

  Vonn and I searched high and low for a fibrous plant that I could make a corded rope with. “We’re too high up for yucca,” I said to myself, then to Vonn, “Where’s that mesh bag?”

  “Maybe she left it up there,” Vonn said, gesturing at the ridge. “Maybe she took it off to push the log and all this searching has been for nothing.”

  Maybe she was right. “We should go back. I can’t waste time looking for something to make a rope.”

  “Wait, I have to …” Vonn said shyly.

  “You do?”

  “I just … need some privacy.”

  “I’ll stay right here,” I said. I knew she couldn’t need to urinate and blushed at the thought that the girl might be menstruating.

  Vonn went to a spot behind some juniper bushes, near a massive fallen log, and squatted down.

  Seeing Vonn’s head drop behind the fallen tree trunk, I called, “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Vonn answered uncertainly.

  “You want help?” I called.

  “No,” she called back emphatically.

  After a short time she appeared again, her face blotchy from crying. I didn’t wonder if her tears were for any reason beyond the obvious. When I moved to embrace her she ducked my arm. “Come on,” she said. “We should look at Nola’s wrist. Change the dressing. Kinda miraculous, isn’t it? The sterasote?”

  “You cleaned it. Getting rid of all that dead tissue had to have helped.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Vonn said, cringing. “That’s worse than anything I’ve done at the Petting Zoo and they make me clean all the cages.”

  “The Petting Zoo?”

  “That’s the name of the pet clinic/animal rescue place where I work.”

  “I’ve been thinking about getting a dog,” I said. “I like dogs.”

  “Me too,” Vonn said, “but I’m such a vagabond.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll come to the rescue place and get a dog. You know. When we get back.”

  “That would seem about right. Balance the universe a little,” Vonn said. “I had a cat once. Sort of.”

  “Stray?”

  “Two boyfriends before my mother brought home the Idiot from Camarillo there was the Goof from Golden Hills. He had a cat. So I sort of had a cat. This fat, old black cat with a bitten-off ear. Sad cat. Lame front leg. One tooth. I don’t remember the guy’s name but the cat was named Midnight. I went on a junk food binge after Bridget told me Goof was moving in. I was feeling sorry for myself and then this fat, old black cat limps into the TV room and he nuzzles my leg, and he tries to jump into my lap but he’s too old and fat so I have to lift him up myself.”

  “Can’t imagine Bridget as a cat person.”

  “Bridget didn’t know the guy was bringing his cat. She didn’t even know he had a cat, which is pretty shocking because it shed over everything.

  “They went away for the weekend and I fed Midnight these soft cat treats made for toothless old cats that I had delivered from the grocery store, and I just let him sit there in my lap eating for two days straight. Picked him up and set him down in his litter box a few times a day. I thought I was being nice.”

  “Lucky cat.”

  “I had gas. All that crap I was eating,” Vonn went on. “It was bad.”

  Her chin was quivering, so I didn’t laugh.

  “I was sitting there at Bridget’s with Midnight on my lap, and Bridget and Goof walk into the room with another couple and they hit this deadly wall of stink and they start to howl and gag and all I can say is, ‘Um, I think your cat’s sick.’ ”

  She paused to swallow. “The guy sees the empty packages of cat treats and grabs Midnight off my lap and kicks him out the back door. I went out to the porch to apologize but he wouldn’t come near me.” Vonn sniffed, but she had no tears to spend.

  “So you blamed the cat? That’s all?”

  “On Monday when I got home from school Midnight was gone. My mother said her boyfriend had taken him to the vet. I felt bad because I knew I’d overfed him and I hoped they could give him some pills or something. When I refilled Midnight’s water bowl Bridget looked at me like I was crazy. That’s when she explained that Midnight was being put down.”

  “Oh.”

  “The Goof had said any animal that smelled as bad as that cat smelled must be rotting from the inside out. He said it’d be cruel to let him live.”

  “Oh.”

  “I jumped in the car and drove straight to the vet but it was too late.”

  We walked on in silence for a beat.

  “I killed Midnight.”

  “You didn’t kill Midnight. You were just part of his story at the end of his days,” I said. “Besides, Midnight got to spend all that time in your lap. Paradise. I mean …”

  “When I came up here to stay with Mim after Pip died, I saw they were hiring at the neighbourhood vet. It’s my job to pet the animals when they go.”

  Closer to the cave we could hear Nola humming the concerto I’d heard her hum before. It was then that Vonn realized she’d left the shredded knapsack back at the fallen log where she’d gone to cry.

  Without missing a beat I spun around and began to chug back through the bushes to retrieve the thing, calling, “Go back with the others.”

  But I turned to find Vonn staggering after me in the wool socks and ridiculous green flip-flops. “I’ll go,” she said between breaths. “I’ll get it!”

  “I’ll get it,” I insisted, turning into the wind.

  Breathless, I came to the place where Vonn had excused herself to be alone. I saw the shredded knapsack right away and when I bent to scoop it up I saw something else—a sliver of silver the length and width of a toothpick sticking out from beneath a curiously set rock. I knew before I lifted it that I was about to find one of the granola bar wrappers from Bridget’s lost bag.

  I took it in my shaking hands—one half of a granola bar intact inside the carefully folded foil.

  Vonn had eaten the other half. I didn’t need to have witnessed the crime. The night before, when I’d pressed my dry, parched lips to hers I’d detected the merest whiff of cinnamon. That was the something else in her kiss. That was the something I’d noticed, and denied, and ignored, and knew I’d have to return to.

  When I stood up, Vonn was there, wide-eyed. She had no words. I didn’t either, only thoughts and sounds and smells; cinnamon, oats, brown sugar. The crows cawed from the pines nearby as I stared at the slim square of granola bar.

  Vonn dropped to her knees, looking up at me. “I found it here, beside this log yesterday. I called for Bridget, but she didn’t hear me. I looked everywhere for the bag, the other bars, the water, but it was just this one, just sitting right there.”

  Together we looked up into the dense pines towering above our heads. Had the bag been hurled this far when we’d tumbled? I
t was possible.

  “I waited for Bridget to get back and then I couldn’t … I was staring at the granola bar and then I opened it and I smelled it and I thought of how small it was to divide in four—such a tease, and no nutrition, being so small—but I still knew I shouldn’t eat it. Couldn’t eat it.”

  “But you did.”

  “I thought I’d have the tiniest nibble, and then I had another and a little more and little more.”

  “And when we stopped earlier?” I asked. “A little more?”

  “I’m so afraid to die,” she breathed.

  Even as claws sprang from my fingertips, I forgave her. Even as I growled at her, ripping at the silver foil, I forgave her.

  I opened my mouth and threw the morsel of that granola bar down my throat, and then began to gag.

  “Keep it down,” Vonn begged. “Swallow it for God’s sake, Wolf.”

  I swallowed the lump of sugar and oats. Then for the first time on the mountain I began to cry, and for the first and only time since my mother died, a beautiful woman took me in her arms and rocked me like a child.

  When we returned to the cave, I took a long look at Bridget, who was sallow and gaunt and exhausted. There was no question that the water bottles and other granola bars had not been found by Bridget. Or Nola—she hadn’t been out of my sight. Most likely, I thought, the other granola bars had been found by the ground squirrels and dragged away. Maybe the bottles of water landed in one of the denser areas of brush or stuck on a pine bough too high up to see.

  My shame over eating that fragment of food weighed on me heavily, but it fortified me too. Redemption is a powerful motivator.

  Vonn and I avoided looking at each other.

  The yellow canteen, containing a cup or so of water, sat between us. I felt nauseated remembering the red weed, and worse that I’d shared with the Devines the story of what happened to Byrd.

  “I’m so hungry, Wolf. Can we eat grass? Can we chew bark?” Bridget asked.

  “Don’t eat grass,” I warned. “It’ll just make you vomit and lose more fluid.”

  “I’m so thirsty, I feel shrunken,” Bridget said.

  I sniffed the air. It smelled of the rain to come. I’d been wrong before, though, and didn’t want to raise the Devines’ hopes again. I tried to stand, mumbling, “Gotta get back to the wall.”