The Mountain Story

  Warren led us down the long hall, squeezing sideways past dusty stacks of newspapers and cardboard that drove me to sneeze uncontrollably. “Tell your kid to quit being an asshole,” he said.

  “Be respectful,” my father warned.

  Frankie told me to wait in the kitchen, where tomatoes festered in a basket near an ashtray. Breathing through my mouth I watched my father follow Warren’s blue bathrobe down to the end of the dusty hall.

  The wind drove against the trembling pane as I strained to look out over the plowed fields and the dimly lit pasture beyond. I missed my mother. All at once leaving Mercury felt like leaving her. My misery grew as the cool night slipped in under the kitchen door.

  As was my habit I’d brought a book along. I learned young that when we left the blue house we wouldn’t be going to a Tigers game, or a Lions game, or the Metropolitan Beach, or a skating rink, or a splash park, or a park of any kind, or the zoo or a movie, or even the mall or the grocery store. We would be going to a house, or sometimes a small office, an alley or a parking lot, where Frankie would disappear for an hour or longer. Without a book, I was alone, or worse, alone with other people’s children, or someone’s drunken wife, or sad sister, or bitter secretary, or sometimes just the dark.

  I opened my novel but it was hard to concentrate because of the noise coming from where Frankie and Warren had retired to talk business. I heard Frankie start to rant, then Warren to agitate and it went on like that for nearly half an hour. The silence, when it came, was deafening.

  For a moment I was paralyzed. Finally I got up to venture down the hallway and found my father slumped on the floor of a bedroom near a pile of dirty blankets. The back window was open and I could see Warren in the moonlight making his way across the rutted field, hugging a pillow to his robe, headed for the dense forest beyond. How far could he get? Why the pillow? Why the forest? What the hell?

  I sank to my knees and tried to lift my father’s heavy head. His hair felt coarser than I’d remembered and his neck more muscular than I’d imagined. How long since I’d touched him? Years?

  As a child I sat on his lap, breathing in his scent (Camel filters and Irish Spring on good days), listening to his heartbeat, tracing the rainbow Glory Always tattoo with my dirty fingernail. “What else did she like to do?” I’d ask, and Frankie’d tell me stories about my mother’s affection for books and libraries, and rainbows, and second-hand clothing stores, and baking, and how she was always looking for ways to go back in time instead of ways to move forward. No detail was too small—“Glory loved peppermints—always had a tin in her purse.” I remembered the tin, and the peppermint smell.

  The window banged against the sash as I steadied his lolling head and searched his neck for a pulse. The scent of urine burned my nostrils and I almost collapsed with relief when I felt the warm puddle at my knee, but my panic was reborn when I realized that Frankie’s urine stream didn’t effectively prove he was alive. In fact I had no knowledge whatsoever of which bodily fluids the dead were capable of releasing.

  I settled my father down on the floor and tilted his head back to clear his airways then leaned over him, like we were shown on the dummy in health class. After covering Frankie’s mouth with mine, I exhaled hard for three seconds, then stopped, and repeated. I realized I’d forgotten to pinch his nose, then I couldn’t remember when to blow and when to pinch. I tried to blow again. What if I was suffocating him? I became aware of his teeth, the taste of his saliva—he’d eaten something with cheese at dinner. I stifled a gag. Again I felt for a pulse.

  Funny what you remember—a frying pan filled with cigarette butts on the bedside table; brown splatters on the wall, blood or maybe coffee; dog hairs on the plaid blanket; a dirty white bra on a hook by the door like it was something you should remember to grab on your way out. Nothing illegal if you didn’t count the filth. Warren must have taken his contraband with him in the pillow. How far could he get in a lady’s bathrobe?

  The clock mocked me. Why did a guy like Warren need a clock? I pressed my ear to Frankie’s chest, relieved to find there, faint and uneven, a heartbeat. I leapt into action, calling his name, slapping his cheeks. His colour was ash.

  This, of course, is the part where I call the ambulance. I remembered seeing a phone in the kitchen and ran to it, fumbling for the receiver. I lifted it, then put it back down, then picked it up again, and put it down once more. If I called for an ambulance the police would become involved. Frankie, if he survived, would go to jail or rehab and I would fall into dreaded care.

  Returning to my father, I noted the wind driving in through the open window, carrying the stink of manure. I stood over Frankie for a beat, and then reared back and kicked his leg hard. He didn’t move. I kicked him again. I kicked him once more, harder, and he startled me when he gasped. Like his engine had been tripped, Frankie coughed and sputtered a little and started breathing again. I believe that I saved my father’s life that night while attempting to put him out of my misery.

  I helped him to sit up, and as Frankie dropped his head to puke on my jeans, I patted his back and was seized by an overwhelming instinct to protect him. Many years later I’d recognize the feeling as paternal love, which is not as strange a thing for a child to feel for a parent as you might imagine. I wiped Frankie’s mouth with a crumpled napkin from the floor and for once didn’t find his confusion funny. I stroked his stubbled cheek and told him that I was so, so sorry and that everything was going to be fine. It was the truth—at least the first part. He couldn’t seem to decide, if by waking, he’d just won a prize or suffered a crushing defeat. I resisted the impulse to say I loved him. I don’t know why. “Okay?”

  “Warren,” he said, after a moment.

  At first I took it for a directive. “Warn who?”

  “Blue bathrobe.” Frankie blinked, recovering a memory.

  “He thought you were dead.”

  “Whoa.”

  “So did I.”

  Frankie sat up. “Did you call for an ambulance?”

  It was a simple question but the answer contained the essence of our complicated future. I shook my head. “No.”

  Something passed between us then, a mantle of sorts, though Frankie was as reluctant to bestow it as I was to receive. “Good,” he said.

  It wasn’t the move to Santa Sophia that changed things for Frankie and me. That moment came before the desert, the night we started out for California, in the filthy farmhouse on the outskirts of Mercury, Michigan, where we both learned that I was my father’s son.

  My father had many, many bad habits but one of his good habits was to keep a full tank of gas. His motto was “You never know how fast you might need to leave or how far you might have to go.”

  That’s what I remember most about the trip from Michigan to California—stopping for gas. Our meals consisted mainly of service station food—Gatorade, pork rinds and potato chips, which Frankie saw respectively as a fruit, a protein and a veg. I developed chronic indigestion and got black circles under my eyes. My lips cracked and bled. I think I was getting scurvy.

  For miles and days the most my father ever said was, “Hot.”

  I was grateful for the distraction of my books. Sometimes the books made me think of the pretty head librarian.

  Before we left for Santa Sophia, on a day Frankie and I were supposed to be clearing out the garage, Miss Kittle showed up at our blue door on Old Dewey. I already knew she wasn’t there to see me when Frankie pounced on her. He must have been right about the pheromones.

  Frankie’d found a picture of Miss Kittle, torn from an article in the local paper, beside my bed, and thought it was funny as hell that I had a crush on her. I think that’s why he decided to date her. A few days after her first visit I came home to find Miss Kittle on the ripped chaise beside the broken porch, sunning herself in a strapless summer dress. Frankie grabbed the newspaper and suggested I keep “Kitten” (that’s what he called her) company for the duration of what he assured us woul
d be a protracted bowel movement.

  I took the chair beside Miss Kittle, closing my eyes, pretending to like the sun too, but mostly so I wouldn’t be tempted to stare.

  “You excited?” she asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “About moving to the desert? About the mountain?”

  “I can’t wait to ride in that tramcar.”

  “And don’t forget the peak.”

  “I’m going to be a mountain climber. Like the guys in the book you gave me. I want to climb Everest like Norgay and Hillary.”

  “Adventurous men.”

  “Definitely.”

  “I like an adventurous man,” Miss Kittle said, which honestly made me wonder why she was with Frankie, who had only misadventures. “In some cultures boys are considered men when they turn thirteen.”

  “Which I already am,” I reminded her.

  “Which you already are,” she agreed.

  “Thirteen and a half,” I said, reaching deep inside the front pocket of my jeans.

  “You can do anything a man can do,” she said, focused on my hand. “What are you doing now?”

  I pulled a short stack of baseball cards from my pocket. “Trading cards. I got Al Kaline today. Did you bring more books?”

  “I brought a book about native uses for plants,” Miss Kittle said, reaching into her bag. “See, Wolf. Here—red weed. This is important. Take a good long look at it.”

  She sounded serious so I did take a good long look at the photograph in the book. “You know this plant by the ruby pods and the white flower. The little seeds from the pods are brewed into a tea or dried and smoked. They were used by Native Americans in a male rite of passage ritual. Don’t ever get close to it. Don’t ever, God forbid, ingest it.”

  “Like poison ivy?”

  “If you drink it or eat it or smoke it, it induces visions.”

  “Cool.”

  “And multiple organ failure,” Miss Kittle said, wagging her finger. “I knew a boy who died from it in my senior year. His father was the police chief. They went around with tracking dogs and dug up all the bushes. You won’t see red weed within fifty miles of Santa Sophia now. But if anyone ever does offer you red weed you don’t accept, right?”

  “Okay.”

  When Miss Kittle shifted in her chair her dress rose up even higher and I was shocked to see her bare right flank. My baseball cards fell from my hands, scattering at her feet. She smiled at me as she swept them into a little pile with her bare toes, accidentally flashing me each time she moved her legs. How could a grown woman forget to wear underwear?

  “Maybe I’ll come see you and Frankie when I go back to visit my father in late August,” she said, seemingly unaware of her wardrobe gaffe.

  “Cool,” I said, looking away when the button on her sundress threatened to bust open at her chest.

  “So it’s a date,” she said, leaning closer.

  I was sweating profusely. I looked at my baseball cards in the pile she’d made with her toes. Detroit catcher John Wockenfuss was on top. I distracted myself thinking of Wockenfuss and his unusual batting stance, how he’d turn his back on the pitcher and twist his head all the way over his shoulder. John Wockenfuss.

  “Wolf,” Miss Kittle said, drawing even closer.

  Peering out of the corner of my eye I saw that not only had Miss Kittle’s ill-fitting dress slid up even higher on her thigh, but the button had busted open at her chest and one of her pink nipples was exposed now too. Wockenfuss. Wockenfuss. Wockenfuss.

  “Wolf?”

  The door opened, and my father appeared. Miss Kittle fixed her dress. I bolted for my room and hid my head beneath my pillow, grateful when some time later I heard the front door slam, which meant Frankie and his Kitten had gone out to get drunk instead of staying in to get drunk. Small mercies.

  It wasn’t until some days later it hit me that Miss Kittle’s revealing situation had been an invitation, not a mishap. It took me even longer to realize that Frankie had orchestrated the whole thing. When I confronted him about it later, he said, “Some fathers throw bar mitzvahs for their sons when they’re thirteen.”

  “I asked for a bike.”

  Soon Miss Kittle stopped coming by. I never heard the details of their break-up. Maybe he cheated on her, maybe he stole from her, or maybe he lied to her. Sadly, she banned us—well, me—from the Mercury library. The bonus was that Frankie had more free time, even if we did spend most of it packing up the blue house.

  My father said I should keep the library books about Palm Springs and the mountain, and the stack of overdue novels. I did, even though I knew I shouldn’t. I still have them.

  On the drive to California I looked through the book about the desert hot springs, mildly interested in the thought that millennia earlier prehistoric animals had set foot in the same agua caliente that still burbled up from the middle of the earth. Didn’t even open the book about the history of golf in the area. I was undereducated in the matter of celebrities current or past so the books about the Hollywood history of Palm Springs didn’t interest me much either. But I pored over the one about rattlesnakes, memorized their detailed markings, and lingered over pornographic close-ups of milky dripping fangs.

  The Mountain in the Desert was the book I spent the most time reading though, acquainting myself with the mountain’s changing life zones, from desert scrub to alpine forest. The chapters about the Native Americans who lived in the foothills and believed the mountain held the cure for every ailment, physical or spiritual, intrigued me. What if they were right? There were a number of quotations in the book, from naturalists and hikers, who claimed to have seen God on the mountain. When I read the quotes to Frankie he laughed. “Must be the thin air.”

  The final chapters were about the Swiss-designed tram. I’d never been to a theme park but I couldn’t imagine any roller coaster being more thrilling than that tram ride. To be lifted that high, that fast, catapulted from one climate to another—that sounded like the closest thing you could get to time travel.

  I couldn’t read once it got dark though. It was hard to imagine cool mountain breezes when I was stuck with Frankie in that crappy Gremlin. I remember looking out the window and not knowing which state we were driving through, Frankie humming along with the radio the whole way, a cigarette burning in the ashtray, day after dismal day.

  That first night on the mountain with the three women, shivering together in the dark, we were not lost, but stranded, with the long night before us. You’d think we would have gone around the circle and told a little bit about ourselves. You’d think we might have taken a minute or two to discuss what just happened and what we should do next. You’d think that one of us would have cried or freaked out or laid blame. We did none of those things. At least not at first. We were quiet for a long time.

  “How’s your hand?” I asked, finally, because I could see Nola, in her red poncho, grimacing in the moonlight.

  “A little swollen is all.” With her good hand she reached into her knapsack for the yellow canteen. “We should drink.”

  Bridget reached out to take the canteen. “Here, let me do the cap.” She opened it and gulped the water, and then passed the canteen back to Nola, who drank modestly before placing it in the hands of Vonn, who took only a very small sip. Our fingers touched when Vonn passed the canteen to me. Hers were surprisingly warm.

  The feel of the yellow canteen brought back the memory of the worst night of my life—and that’s saying something—one year to the day earlier. I could not bring myself to put my lips on the spout. “I drank a lot at the fountain before,” I managed to say. It was somewhat true. I handed the canteen back.

  “This really is an adventure, isn’t it? I mean it really is,” Nola said. “I could never have imagined that today would end like this.”

  “We don’t have much water,” Bridget said. “Just the one canteen.”

  “In the morning we’ll find the bag,” I said.

  “And my binoculars.
”

  “And your binoculars.”

  “I’m freezing,” Bridget said.

  “We’re all freezing,” Vonn said.

  There was a long pause. I didn’t need to see their collective expressions.

  “Maybe some people have a lower tolerance for the cold,” Bridget said.

  “The cap, Bridget,” Nola said.

  Bridget reached across and took the yellow canteen back from Nola, saying, “Let me do it, Mother.”

  Mother? Did she say Mother?

  In the moon glow I saw what I hadn’t noticed before; the shape of their jaws, the slope of their noses. Mother and daughter. Bridget’s cosmetic alterations had thrown me off. She’d removed the dent between her brows, which would have deepened in time, like Nola’s, and her lips were plump and pouting where Nola’s were thinner but shaped prettily. It was clear that even denatured, Bridget was her mother’s daughter.

  “How did you get us so lost, Wolf?” Bridget asked plaintively, tipping the yellow canteen for another gulp of water.

  “We should ration the water, Bridget,” Vonn said.

  Bridget pounced. “I thought you weren’t speaking to me, Vonn? What happened to that? I liked it better when you were doing your silent thing.”

  Another puzzle piece. Bridget knew Vonn. They were not friends.

  “You’re so stubborn!” Bridget hissed. “I can’t believe you. Even with all this!”

  “Studied with the master,” Vonn returned.

  “Didn’t your therapist tell you to disengage, Vonn? Can we please just go back to that?”

  Nola tsked. “Let her be silent if she needs to be silent, Bridget. Let her talk if she needs to talk.”

  Sisters? I wondered.

  “Retreat into silence,” Bridget said mockingly. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Retreat into silence?”