The Mountain Story

  It all happened so fast. (How many times has a sorry man said those words?)

  We were moving that damn log up the hill—and then we were falling, lost in the kaleidoscope of rocks and ochre dust and manzanita and sage, conveyed by round, rushing boulders, and silt, and brush, hitting the ground with a thud.

  It all happened so fast.

  Battered and stunned, we rose, and gathering our wits tried to find one another amidst the rocks and soil and the bare-rooted scraps of the bushes that had concealed the cliff’s edge.

  Nola, having been delivered the farthest afield, coughed, and shouted, “Everyone okay?”

  I called back in the affirmative and so did Bridget. The girl said nothing, but I could see that she’d landed on the far side of a snowberry bush and didn’t appear to be seriously injured.

  Bridget cried, from some place unseen, “Oh my God. Oh my God,” but she didn’t scream, which I took to be a good sign.

  “What about you, Nola? You all right?” I shouted.

  “Fine!” she called out. “I just hurt my wrist!”

  I stared up into the gloaming at the height from which we’d tumbled. It was a miracle that one of us hadn’t been killed. A miracle.

  I turned to find the girl shuffling toward me around a large boulder and was shocked to see that she hadn’t lost her green flip-flops. She had a small cut on her cheek and a new tear in her old peacoat but seemed otherwise fine. “Okay?”

  She nodded, as Bridget emerged from between two large rocks. Her Lycra was torn on her knees and she had some scrapes on her hands, and her cheek. “I lost my sports bag,” she said. “It had the granola bars, and water.”

  “We’ll find it in the morning,” I promised. I raised my hand to adjust my ball cap and discovered it was gone. My Detroit Tigers cap. I hoped I could find that too.

  “I have my knapsack!” Nola said triumphantly when she appeared, finally, through some thick brush. “I lost my binoculars. They were around my neck.”

  “We’ll find everything in the morning,” I said.

  Then Nola raised her hand, stunned as any of us to see a shard of white bone protruding from her right wrist.

  “Nola,” I said cautiously, afraid she might faint.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake!” She rolled her eyes like she’d spilled coffee on her blouse and was annoyed with herself for being clumsy. When she moved, blood made a fountain of the sharp bone.

  Bridget screamed and turned away.

  The girl in the green flip-flops leapt into action. “We need to wrap it up. Does anyone have a scarf?”

  So, not mute. I felt the inside of my pockets and found a crumpled black bandana. I gave it to the girl, watching her adjust the bones in Nola’s fractured wrist before tying the bandana over the wound. Nola bit her lip to stop from crying out. Must have hurt like hell.

  The girl kept pressure on the wound but Nola was bleeding badly and the bandana soon was soaked through. My heart was racing because I knew how quickly a life could end.

  “This is not ideal,” Nola said.

  “We need more bandages,” the girl said. “And a splint.”

  “What’s in your knapsack?” Bridget asked without turning around.

  “My Christmas sweater but I don’t think it would work,” she said. “Should I try to take off my turtleneck?”

  “No,” we all said.

  Quickly I began to undress, feeling the women’s eyes boring holes into me as I removed my coat, hoodie, long-sleeved shirt, and stripped down to the old Bob Seger T-shirt of Frankie’s that I’d reached for that morning when preparing my corpse for burial. I realized that I was about to reveal my tattoo to three strangers and turned my back on them before I pulled off the T-shirt. I dressed again then took some pleasure in ripping Frankie’s shirt to shreds, handing the strips to the girl.

  Bridget looked around at the darkening wilderness, then she opened her mouth and screamed at the top of her lungs, “HELP!”

  The sound bounced and echoed against the rock and was swept up again and carried off by the wind.

  “Save your breath,” I told her. “No one can hear us over that wind. We have to wait till it dies down.”

  While the girl wound the fabric strips around Nola’s wrist, I made a brief search of the rocky vicinity and found a square-shaped, shallow recess where we’d have some protection from the wind. “Here!” I called. “A cave!”

  After we’d settled inside the cave, which was more like a cove, the girl continued to wrap the makeshift bandages around Nola’s injury, fashioning a splint with a couple of small branches she’d found. We were all lucky Nola hadn’t broken an ankle, or worse, her hip.

  “I think you stopped the bleeding,” I said.

  Once Nola’s wound was dressed we attempted to get comfortable in the tight space. Nola sat beside the girl, the girl across from me, Bridget beside me, but we all touched in some way or other. A blanket of cold fell fast and hard.

  “Do you feel that?” Nola whispered as if she didn’t want the air to hear. “It just dropped double digits in a split second.”

  From my pocket I drew the thick grey socks and leaned across to find the girl’s hands. She squeezed my fingers in thanks, taking the socks and pulling them on over her stiff, bare feet.

  “We’re going to freeze to death,” Bridget said.

  “It’s only November. It won’t get that cold,” I lied.

  Nola reached for her knapsack with her good hand, fumbling for the extra sweater she’d brought along. “Put this on,” she said, pressing the scratchy wool bundle into the girl’s arms.

  “Those are good socks but your toes are still cold,” I said, repositioning myself so that she could put her cold feet under my long-sleeved shirt.

  The girl hesitated, then allowed me to guide her feet under my shirt to the warmth of my bare chest. Even through the wool socks her frozen toes shocked my nipples. “Cold,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  In the dark, I felt Nola and Bridget share a look.

  The wind kicked up, roaring into our shelter and we huddled closer for body heat. I removed my down coat and put it over Bridget’s shoulders, saying, “We’ll share the coat.”

  “I’m already freezing to death,” Bridget said.

  “No one is freezing to death,” I said.

  “Wolf,” Nola said to change the subject. “I’ve never met a Wolf. I met a Cat once. And a Bear—well—his name was Barry so they called him Bear. I don’t know how it was spelled.”

  “Try to keep your hand elevated,” I reminded Nola. “Lean it on your knee. Keep the swelling down.”

  “You’re very calm in a crisis,” Nola said.

  I was tempted to point out that we would not be here were it not for me. If our paths hadn’t crossed, the women would’ve been at the bottom of a crevice, or lost on some other part of the mountain, or maybe they’d have given up trying to find the lake and headed back to the Mountain Station. If our paths hadn’t crossed I would be no more.

  That’s when I noticed that my despair, which had weighed me down since Byrd’s accident, and been deepened by Frankie’s imprisonment, was gone, lost in the fall along with Bridget’s mesh bag and my Tigers baseball cap. It was like some switch had been flipped off, or rather, on.

  Warmed by my heat, the girl wiggled her toes.

  “You have a name?” I asked.

  “Vonn,” she said. Vonn.

  Vonn’s presence among us was confounding, and equally confusing was the scant attention paid to her by the other two women. I squeezed her feet quite forcefully to prove to myself that she wasn’t a ghost.

  “Can you make a fire, Wolf?” Nola asked.

  “Do you have anything in your knapsack that we could make a fire with?” I asked. “Matches. Lighter?”

  “I’m sorry but I don’t smoke,” Nola said sincerely.

  “First time I wished someone smoked,” Bridget said through her chattering teeth. “I mean I really, seriously wis
h I smoked cigarettes right now.”

  “Can’t you rub twigs together or something?” Nola inquired.

  I didn’t have the skills to make a fire without a flame in daylight let alone in darkness. The air was too damp anyway. “No dry kindling,” I said.

  “I thought you were a mountain guide. First you get us lost? Now you can’t make a fire?” Bridget’s tone was snarky.

  “He didn’t get us lost,” Vonn said.

  “Those darn bees!” Nola said.

  Vonn sighed, which caused Bridget to turn on her, hissing, “What should I have done? Let them sting me? Without my EpiPen?”

  Vonn opened her mouth then snapped it shut.

  “I just think it’s false advertising if you take money as a guide but have actually zero navigational or survival skills.”

  “Okay.”

  Bridget would not let it go. “Well, what’s your plan, Mountain Man?”

  Mountain Man. I thought I heard a snicker coming from behind a slab of rock. Bridget asked, “Did you hear that?”

  I thought she’d heard it too.

  “Listen.” She waited for our silence. “It sounds like that waterfall again.”

  “You can’t trust mountain acoustics. You think you hear things—waterfalls, airplanes, voices. It’s just the wind. No matter what you think you hear up here, I promise you it’s the wind.”

  The wind changed direction with a flourish, and we turned toward it, craned to watch the dense clouds lift, astonished as the valley came into view, the twinkling breadth of the city thousands of feet below us, the tiny lights of the wind turbines in the distance.

  Nola announced, “That’s Palm Springs!”

  Bridget pointed toward the distant northeast. “Look out there. God—it looks like a jewel—what is that way out there?”

  It was Tin Town. That was the hell of it. We weren’t lost.

  “We’re not lost!” Bridget cried.

  Nola laughed. “What a relief! We can just climb down in the morning!”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I’m pretty sure this is Devil’s Canyon.”

  “So we’ll climb down Devil’s Canyon,” Nola said. “We’ll have quite the story to tell.”

  “It’s not that simple,” I said.

  “We’ll come out right at that breakfast place!” she said, pointing at the city lights.

  “I’m afraid we can’t get down that way,” I said.

  “What are you saying?”

  “We can’t get down from here, Mrs. Devine. We’re going to have to try to climb back up where we fell,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Nola said. “That’s too steep for me to climb with my broken paw. Besides we could get lost again! That’s crazy when we know exactly where we are right now! Why would we climb up to get down?”

  “We’re not trying to get down exactly. We’re just trying to get off,” I said. “I know it goes against your instincts.”

  “I believe in instincts,” Nola said.

  “So do I,” Bridget said, then added, for my benefit, “I’m clairvoyant.”

  The girl gagged a little. I supposed she was still sick from the tram.

  “There must be a path down to Palm Springs,” Nola said. “I’m sure we can find it.”

  “Trust me, Mrs. Devine. It’s a maze of deep canyons and steep rock. You might be able to get down but you can’t get back up, and you can’t get to Palm Springs.

  “It looks like you could just walk down,” Nola insisted.

  I thought of the story Byrd had told me about the hiker. “One day, a long time ago, this guy named Jack missed the last tram down. He panicked up here alone in the dark when he found out he was locked out of the Mountain Station.”

  “Jack Mazlo?” Nola said. “Are you talking about Jack Mazlo?”

  “You know about Jack Mazlo? He’s kind of a legend, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I don’t know Jack Mazlo,” Bridget said.

  I told the women about his descent down the tramline trail, which wasn’t a trail at all.

  When I finished, Bridget sighed. “At least they found him. Poor man. At least he survived.”

  “But he didn’t,” Nola said.

  “Sure he did,” I said.

  “I knew Jack Mazlo,” Nola countered. “He died that night, Wolf.”

  “What?”

  “He died that night.”

  “No,” I said. “They found him in the brush near the first tram tower. He goes to the coffee shop. Sits like this.” I tipped my hip.

  “Have you ever seen him?” Nola asked.

  “Well, no.”

  “Who told you that story?”

  “A guy who knows everything about the mountain.”

  “Jack was dead when they found him,” Nola said. “He’d lain there with a broken leg for two days straight is what they figure. No one could see him because of the thick brush and no one could hear him over the tram.”

  “He didn’t get rescued.” I was trying to absorb the awful truth.

  “He was only twenty-six years old.”

  “That’s so young,” Bridget said.

  “Jack and Janice Mazlo. They were neighbours of ours in Cathedral City when we first moved down from Ohio. They had a four-year-old—Little Jack. It was the saddest thing. I heard she moved back to Texas with the boy. I wonder whatever became of Little Jack.”

  “That’s an awful story,” Vonn said.

  I was angry with Byrd for the lie.

  “I like your version better,” Nola said, leaning forward to squeeze my arm in the dark. “I was heartsick about that boy losing his daddy.”

  She made me think of Frankie, and I was disturbed by the sudden longing I felt for my father, such as he was.

  Frankie wasn’t ever father of the year but he was once or twice father of the moment. One time he got free fudge bars for the whole block after he chased down the driver of the Sweet ’n’ Freeze truck to collect on a debt. I was proud as hell to eat mine hoisted high up on his shoulders.

  Frankie and I left Mercury, Michigan, for Santa Sophia, California, in the dark, after cramming our few possessions into our newly acquired green Gremlin hatchback one warm night in July.

  A block away from home we noticed a terrible smell and suspected a dead mouse was wedged in some crevice of the cooling system since the odour was considerably worse when the air conditioning was on. Frankie hadn’t noticed the smell when he took possession of the car, because he’d been smoking. It was an ominous departure.

  The roads were quiet, and as we passed the library I turned my head to admire the towering conifers that flanked the walkway, and I remember thinking about Miss Kittle’s prediction that I would not miss winter. I tried to imagine the mountain in the desert as Frankie squirmed in the torn vinyl seat, blinking rapidly as he tapped on the steering wheel with the wedding band he still wore, humming some melody of regret.

  I didn’t know if he regretted what he paid for the smelly green Gremlin, or if he regretted his life in general, but I was pretty sure the agitation came from the “Aspirins” he’d shaken down his gullet a short time before—amphetamines to keep him awake on the drive, I guessed. Maybe he regretted taking the pills.

  We’d pulled out of the driveway on Old Dewey, with the windows down, anticipating a week on the road. I proposed we mark our arrival in California with a ritual: take the Aerial Tramway up the mountain and then hike the remaining few thousand feet to the peak on our first day.

  “We can’t take the tram. We gotta climb the bitch!” Frankie said, slamming his hand on the dash.

  “You probably shouldn’t call her the bitch, considering she’s named after a saint.”

  “I’m not superstitious, Wolf,” he said, driving the wrong way out of town.

  “You mean religious,” I corrected.

  “I know what I mean,” Frankie said, signalling right, then left, but not making either turn. “We’re going to climb—like men—all the way to the peak.
”

  “I think that’s a long way.”

  “Supposed to be a hell of a view. A father should see that with his son,” Frankie said.

  Unlike most adolescent boys I found the idea of climbing a mountain, or of doing anything at all with my old man, highly appealing. “First day there.”

  “First day there. We’ll go up in the afternoon and watch the sun set,” Frankie said.

  “The book said the climb takes all day though, Frankie, and that’s just from the tram station to the peak. And you should only attempt it if you’re in amazing shape.”

  “I’m a rock,” he said, falling into a coughing fit.

  I had to take the wheel so he could huck some mucus into a rag he’d found on the floor. “Maybe you should stop smoking.”

  He wiped his nose on his shirt sleeve, trying to focus on the road. “I’m letting things get to me,” he said. “I’ve been letting things get to me, Wolf. This hasn’t been an easy time. There’s been a lot of pain. A lot of disappointment. Heartache.”

  It was true.

  “I am not getting what I need from this world. You understand?”

  I did.

  He blew his nose again. “I need to get my shit together.”

  “You do,” I agreed, which irritated him.

  “That’s what this move is all about. Clean living. That’s what I need. Your California sunshine and your orange trees and your lemon trees and your olives and your avocados. That shit’ll extend your life thirty years or better.”

  The thing that got me was you could see on Frankie’s face, even as he was saying it, that he wasn’t sure he wanted thirty more years.

  I offered only a weak protest when he suggested a quick stop at a friend’s house, which was, he said, on the way out of town. The fact is that I wanted to be anywhere but trapped in the rank Gremlin with my sniffling, ring-tapping, hyped-up father.

  The farmhouse where Frankie was to meet his associate Warren was a fifteen-minute drive from the blue house on Old Dewey and still officially inside Mercury city limits.

  “You sure about this?” I asked as we scuffed up the porch steps.

  The odour of cattle from the neighbour’s pasture was earthy and raw. I breathed in the scent, and was startled when the porch light flickered on above our heads and a diminutive man with a wiry beard opened the door wearing a woman’s turquoise bathrobe and mud-caked cowboy boots. I was three inches taller but he could smell my fear.