The Mountain Story

  One day, out of the blue, Byrd’s hand shot out to grab my hand. He looked me dead in the eye as he raised my hand and tapped my finger against his forehead. I swear he was telling me something. But it never happened again, and day after day, he flew farther away.

  I’d say I saw more of Frankie in the three months after we returned to the desert than I had in the few years I’d lived at Kriket’s. Our conversations were brief—awkward. Frankie stopped by on Halloween night, just a few hours, in fact, before he killed the young couple on the desert road.

  No one knows that part of the story either—except Frankie—and the woman he was with.

  Frankie limped into the store wearing a too-small pirate hat, his left eye covered by a cheap felt eye patch, the elastic of which looked ready to burst. “Aye-aye, mate-y!” he shouted.

  That set me off. It didn’t seem right that a guy like Byrd was lost in space and a guy like Frankie was walking around in a kid-sized pirate hat and eye patch. “What do you need, Frankie?”

  He’d driven to the gas station straight from the casino where he’d just lost all the money he’d won the night before. To top it off he’d fallen off a bar stool and hurt his leg. He stank of booze and cigars. “I need a little luck,” he said.

  I plucked his brand of cigarettes from the rack above the register and flipped the package to him. He thought they were freebies. I’d pay for them later.

  “You good?” he asked, his eyes darting to the high shelf behind me.

  “Top-notch,” I said dryly, noting he was looking at the premium tequila.

  “Good.” He glanced out at the parking lot. I wondered if he was being followed. Or thought he was.

  “Don’t sleep.”

  “Right.”

  “Can’t eat.”

  “Me too.” He kept looking out into the parking lot.

  “I have nightmares about Byrd,” I said. It was the truth.

  Frankie didn’t hear a word I said. He was distracted by honking in the parking lot and we looked out to see the woman in the Gremlin.

  “She’s not the most patient.” He started to limp down the aisle, groaning in pain.

  “What do you want? I’ll get it.”

  “A six-pack, some tissues, some lip balm. She wants some of that spicy jerky you got on the display rack at the back.”

  I walked to the back of the store only to find that we were out of the spicy jerky. I turned back to ask Frankie what I should bring instead, and that’s when I saw my father in the security mirror over the register, straining for the tequila on the high shelf behind the counter. When he couldn’t reach the tequila he grabbed a bottle of wine and hid it under his jacket. Then he opened the register to peel away half the stack of twenty-dollar bills.

  “Thanks, Wolf,” Frankie said, when I approached the counter with his other things.

  I put the items in a bag while he pretended to search his pockets. He was a terrible actor. “So you’re good out here?” he asked.

  “You back at the trailer?”

  Frankie shook his head. “I owe Yago a little money.”

  I passed him the bag. “It’s on me, Frankie.”

  “Thanks, Wolf.”

  “Good luck with Yago.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  Frankie grabbed the bag and headed for the door, but then he came back. I wish he hadn’t.

  “I know what you think.”

  “I don’t think anything, Frankie.”

  “I see the way you look at me.”

  I couldn’t meet his eye.

  He paused. “I’m sorry about what happened to Byrd.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was bad luck, Wolf. Don’t think I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, Frankie.”

  “But you don’t get to look down on me.” He looked ridiculous in the hat and eye patch. “I didn’t push Byrd off the cliff, Wolf. Besides, you were the one who brought the red weed.”

  I surprised both of us with what I did next. I turned and climbed the stepladder to reach the top shelf, and selected the premium tequila Frankie’d had his eye on before.

  “The good stuff,” I said, setting the bottle on the counter.

  “Just when I think you’re an asshole,” he said, genuinely touched.

  “We should stop underestimating each other,” I said.

  “This means a lot to me, Wolf,” Frankie said. “I been going through a rough time. The thing with Yago. You know what he’s like. We gotta have each other’s back.”

  I wondered if he noticed my hands were shaking when I reached for the second bottle of tequila and passed it to him.

  Did I mean for Frankie to get drunk and get behind the wheel to get burgers that Halloween night? No. But I did hope he would choke on it.

  THE

  FOURTH

  DAY

  I WOKE SHIVERING, swallowing the harvest of dread in my throat, to find the black night still around us. I felt like it should be morning, and for a second believed I’d gone blind. The rocks trembled beneath me but it wasn’t the plates shifting this time. I remember being afraid that if I closed my eyes and allowed myself to return to whatever dream I’d been having, I’d never see the Devines, or the mountain, again.

  Hypothermia was a coward’s way out and I was afraid I’d take it if I got the chance. Stay awake, scut, I told myself.

  I checked to make sure the women were all still asleep and panicked when Nola felt stiff beside me. I stared at her face in the dim light. “Nola,” I said. My mouth felt frozen. She didn’t move. I disengaged myself from Vonn on my other side, searching Nola’s neck for a pulse. Finding none I held my finger beneath her nose. I was prepared to face her death.

  I was not prepared to be bitten. I suppose a person is never prepared to be bitten. My scream must have carried all the way to Palm Springs. Nola woke screaming too, creating a chain reaction as Vonn woke and began to scream. Bridget, could she have screamed, would have screamed, but her face spoke volumes. When the screaming was over, I was confident that no animal within three miles would dare to challenge the demon we’d just unleashed. And that if there was a rescue team within two miles, they’d heard us.

  “What the heck, Nola?” I croaked, holding out my damaged finger.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  We gathered one another into our arms, rooting for warmth. “It’s all right. Go back to sleep. Go back to sleep.”

  “My heart’s racing,” Vonn said.

  “Mine too,” Bridget said.

  My eyes had adjusted surprisingly quickly to the dark and when I looked around I could make out the triad of boulders cleaving to the high ridge, defying gravity. I could distinguish the cottonwood from the ironwood, and I could pick the limber pine from the Coulter pine, and as Mother Nature’s long-winded sorrow came tearing through the trees I had to admit that I could see, in this light, in any light, that we were losing Nola.

  “I’m so hungry,” Bridget said.

  “Don’t talk about it,” Nola said.

  I thought Bridget might start up about the granola bars but she didn’t.

  “They must be looking for us,” Vonn said.

  “Tomorrow,” Bridget said. “I have a feeling.”

  “Will you ever come back if …?” Vonn asked after a time. I knew she was talking to me and I knew she meant the mountain and I understood what remained unspoken. If we survive this.

  “No,” I said definitively. I stroked the rock to soften the blow, and instantly changed my mind. “Yes.” I didn’t know then if I’d ever see the mountain again.

  Vonn’s hands reached reflexively for her stomach.

  “Vonn?”

  “It hurts,” she said.

  “You’re hungry,” I said.

  “Mine hurts too,” Bridget said.

  My hunger had grown black wings and a sharp, hooked beak, consuming me gut-first. We tried to let the sound of the wilderness lull us back to sleep. At l
east we would have, had Bridget not shifted and touched something wet.

  “Is that blood?” she asked, pointing.

  Blood. I could smell it, even in the dark. To be sure I dipped my finger into the apple-sized wetness and brought it to my nose. The wound on Nola’s forehead was crusted over and dry. My finger wasn’t bleeding from where she’d bitten me—at least not much. The blood hadn’t come from Nola’s swollen purple wrist either.

  “Who’s bleeding?” Bridget asked.

  When Vonn clutched her cramping gut, I did not want to believe that the blood was hers. “Okay,” I said, which wasn’t a question. “You’re all right, Vonn.”

  Vicious nature teaches us dark lessons and experience taught me to be ready for anything, especially the worst.

  Vonn grasped my arm. “It hurts.”

  I shuddered.

  “I had some cramping when I was pregnant with you too,” Bridget said.

  “You did?”

  “Spotting too.”

  “You did?”

  “She did and look at you. You’re perfect, Vonn,” Nola said.

  “Hardly,” Vonn said.

  “I’ve miscarried,” Bridget said.

  “You never told me.”

  “It’s not something you want to talk about,” Bridget said.

  “Before I was born or after?”

  “Four times. All after.”

  “Four times?”

  “Anyway, I had five pregnancies and only had the spotting with you.”

  I feared Bridget was giving her daughter false hope.

  “What did the doctor say?” Vonn asked.

  “He said I needed to take it easy.”

  “Did you?”

  “I had a job. I was alone,” Bridget said, straining her voice. “I didn’t have a car.”

  “Why didn’t you move back here so Mim could help?”

  “I didn’t want to run into him.”

  “My father?”

  “Mim and Pip came to Golden Hills a lot,” Bridget said. “And then I met Carl.”

  “His house was a palace,” Vonn said, nodding.

  “It was.”

  “And you always wanted to be queen,” Vonn added.

  Bridget shook her head. “I wanted you to be a princess.”

  Vonn stroked her womb through her coat.

  There came the whoosh of wide black wings. My stomach roiled at the recollection of the black buzzards bobbing at those steaming coyote remains. I thought I was alone with my thoughts, and shuddered when Vonn said, “Vultures.”

  “It was the owl.”

  “Not the owl,” she said.

  “I think it was the owl.”

  “The vultures, Wolf.”

  We reached for the comfort of each other’s hands. I held Vonn’s frozen fingers to my lips but failed to warm them. “Wolf?”

  “Vonn.”

  “The vultures …?” she paused.

  “The vultures.”

  “If anything happens …”

  I didn’t want her to see my face.

  “You know what I’m saying, Wolf?”

  I did.

  “They’re just hungry too.”

  There was a dreamlike quality to that fourth day. I woke again to the metallic scent of the rock, and the rustle of the pines, and the weight of our bodies entwined, and then, surprisingly, pinpricks of cold landing on my cheek.

  My first thought was that the dampness was saliva, and I was grateful when I opened my eyes to find no carnivorous beast looming over my face, just the chaotic weave of branch and needle from the towering trees overhead.

  A flake of white hit my cheek. Snow. Another flake found my forehead, another, my eyelid. When I realized the flakes were not melting on my skin, I wondered if I were dead.

  Only a few flakes had made it through the dense pines above our heads but when I sat up I discovered that the surrounding rocks were blanketed in a thin layer of white. We had to head to a lower elevation, I knew, or I would lose more than my baby toes to frostbite.

  “Snow.” Vonn sat upright, opening her mouth to accept the flakes. She shook her mother, saying, “Bridget. Snow.”

  Bridget woke, confused. When she saw my eyes she must have realized how grave our risk was if we stayed here in the snow. She turned to wake her mother, stroking her cold cheek, “Mim? Mim?”

  I was relieved when Nola blinked herself awake, and encouraged when she managed to sit up.

  Vonn reached down with her white fingers, scooping the snowflakes from where they’d gathered in the folds of her coat and bringing the mound to Nola’s mouth. We all followed suit, scooping handfuls of snow to melt between our tongues and our dry, frozen palates.

  “We have to go. We have to get out of the snow,” I said, helping Vonn, then Bridget to their feet.

  Stepping down from the rock, I winced at the slicing pain in my heel. I remember telling myself that pain was my friend. I remember telling myself that whatever parts of my feet hurt would be the parts I’d be keeping if we got out of this alive.

  In the distance we heard the screeching of a hawk.

  We hiked down a long rocky slope for nearly half an hour until we’d walked out of the snowfall. Each step was excruciating. We were chilled to our marrow.

  We came to a fork in the brush and I was grateful to rest as we paused to consider the granite shrapnel and spiny brush in the direction of the lone pine. The other way presented a gentle slope and what appeared to be a long stretch of meadow grass that would be much kinder to my tortured feet. The whole lone pine thing now struck me as foolhardy, arbitrary, an ill-conceived goal. I chose the simpler path, announcing, “This way.”

  “But that’s not the way to the pine tree,” Bridget said.

  “This is the best way to get there.”

  “Away from the tree?”

  “It’s a shortcut.”

  Nola was overcome by dizziness. I almost didn’t catch her when she started to fall.

  “Will they pick up our scent all this way,” Vonn wondered.

  “The coyotes?”

  “No. The rescue dogs.”

  “Would they know we got over the crevice?” Bridget wondered. “How could they know?”

  I didn’t tell them that even if Mountain Rescue had the dogs and were looking for us and even if the dogs had tracked us all the way to the ridge from where we’d fallen, and down onto the outcropping and past the cave and to the crevice, they would never believe that we’d made it safely to the other side. They would abandon the search—reclassify it as recovery.

  Wouldn’t they be surprised to find Vonn’s lime green flip-flops at the bottom of the crevice, but no bodies?

  We stumbled onward, anywhere the path was less stony and the hawkweed less dense, inching through forests and over tumbled boulders, luxuriating in patches of meadow grass, traipsing through knee-high fields of chilled skunk cabbage, Nola supported by Bridget and Vonn.

  We’d been walking for a while—there was no sun to tell us the hour—when Vonn spied something unusual ahead. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing. “That turquoise thing.”

  “A flower?” Nola guessed.

  “It’s a bird,” I said, squinting.

  “It’s not moving,” Vonn said.

  We inched through the forest toward the turquoise beacon, and only when we were all standing over it, did we realize what we were looking at.

  Vonn picked the square of plaid from the branch and held it in her hand. “It’s a pocket,” she said. “Ripped from a shirt.”

  A shirt pocket? Here?

  Vonn handed the square to me. No telling how long it had been there.

  “Hello!” we shouted, scanning the trees. “Hello! Hello!”

  There came the sound of cracking branches and we spun—each toward a different direction, to find nothing but rock and tree and root-mangled soil. The wind roared through the canyon.

  “Hello,” I called tentatively. “Hello?”

  “One of the res
cue fellows?” Nola said hopefully.

  We hastened our pace, calculating all it meant to imagine that we were not alone. We didn’t know if we needed to be hurrying to something or away from something.

  “Hello?” Vonn called again.

  We paused to listen to her echoing voice.

  “Please let him have food and water,” Bridget murmured.

  “Please,” Nola said.

  “What if he has some but he doesn’t want to share?” Vonn asked.

  “This bit of fabric could have been here for years,” I said.

  “Think he came from the same direction we did?” Vonn asked, stumbling over a boulder.

  Then the scent of cat stopped me in my tracks. Bobcats mark territory with their acrid urine just like domestic cats do. I did not wonder at that point if the plaid shirt was in any way connected to the pungent odour.

  “Smells like cat,” Vonn said.

  “Hello?” we called, surveying the rock and trees for the plaid shirt’s owner.

  There was rustling in the brush to the left of us, up a short escarpment of rusty manganese-covered granite. “Hello!” I shouted.

  “The wind,” Vonn said.

  I choked the square of blue fabric, calling, “Hello! Is anyone there?”

  We kept on through the forest, dizzy from the onslaught of trees. The heels and toes and balls of my feet begged me to stop. We did, when once again, there was movement in the brush.

  Bridget heard it first this time and crouched, calling, “Hey! Hello!?”

  There was a crashing on the other side of some thick manzanita. We stopped, holding our breath, waiting, but no animal came rushing at us and in a moment it was quiet once again.

  “What was that?” Vonn asked.

  “The wind,” I said reflexively, which was inane, unless the wind had legs and weighed enough to crack a branch.

  “What’s that?” Vonn asked, pointing up ahead.

  “Just Byrd,” I said, as I watched the figure of my friend move on through the trees.

  “It’s not a bird,” she said.