by Jim Nelson
The beams of the flashlights shimmied across the tree trunks and down the hillside. They were so close, she could hear the dogs' urgent panting. The men argued and cursed. The California mountain accent—now the Jefferson mountain accent—had a country-western roll, like the rolls of the mountain, but it lacked the Texan twang of a loosely-strung guitar. It was a rural accent without the rural flourishes. It was the argot of hard realities, a steep contrast to the surfer dude talk of the Central Coast and the carefree Southern California lilt of Los Angeles County. Everyone in Angels Camp had a family member or friend stationed abroad. People here wondered if they would have a job in six months. The California coast was where Mother Nature coddled and the Invisible Hand of the free market reassured rather than punished. Not in Jefferson.
The men and the dogs ambled down the hill on either side of them. One man called out he was looking forward to that beer someone had mentioned up the hill. The panting dogs did not claw at the dirt in anticipation of the search, as they did when the men first released them from the trucks. Their paws made thoughtful trots through the dead leaves blanketing the forest. They headed for their trucks, headed for that promised beer—headed for Angels Camp.
Sixty-five
When Ruby woke again, sunrise had revealed where Henry made camp. They lay among a ring of sequoias and California elms. Henry was gone. The mound he'd made for himself was cleaved in two, as though a great moth had emerged as a butterfly and flittered away.
Ruby needed time to clear off the top brush and needles. It weighed so much, she could not simply stand and let it fall away. He'd packed dirt in with the leaves the way an egg acts as a binder with flour.
She went to the split mound and saw the backpack was gone too. She wondered if he'd gone ahead to scout their way forward, or perhaps to relieve himself. She went to a secluded tree and did the same. The fever had broken while she slept. She still felt ill and achy all over.
Henry returned minutes later. "It's not far," he told her. "We're almost there."
After a quick breakfast of pemmican and raisins and a handful of chocolate chips each, Henry led them back to the dry stream bed and continued up the side of the mountain. The incline only steepened with the elevation. Ruby wondered if at some point Henry would unpack mountaineering carabineers and static lines to finish their ascent. Ruby's legs ached and burned.
After an hour and a half of slow-going climbing, Henry led them away from the dry bed and into a level plain of dogwood. A sheer wall of rock rose along one side of the plain. Slender trees grew at curves from the wall itself, their roots half-exposed. Within a few minutes, Ruby made out a cabin ahead with its back against the sheer wall. Its sides were of treated wood planks with a tar lean-to roof. A stovepipe chimney rose from one side like a periscope.
Ruby practically ran to the cabin. She waited for Henry at the door of carved blond wood. Henry went through a key ring and produced one that removed the padlock on the door. A blast of stale air emerged from within. Henry led her inside.
The cabin was furnished with chairs and tables and a two-seater sofa, all constructed of unfinished carved wood and rustic leather upholstery. A no-frills stainless steel kitchen occupied the corner of the room. Two beds, a queen-sized and a twin, took up the opposite corner. A cast iron stove sat in the center of the wall with the chimney she'd spotted outside. A slim door on the far wall led to a utilitarian bathroom with a shower stall.
"So this is the cabin," she said, taking it all in.
"This is Dad's real home," Henry said. "He wouldn't live down the hill if he didn't have to."
She thought it funny he would refer to the climb they'd just undertaken as a "hill."
"And there's no road?"
Henry pointed off. "One goes past about a half-mile from here. But good luck finding this place if you don't know about it." He stripped off the backpack and laid it on the twin bed. "Are you hungry?"
"I need water," she said. "And sleep." She remained achy, as though the tendons between all her muscle and bone were loosening. Her legs were shot.
The mattress of the queen-sized bed lay under four layers of quilts and knit blankets. It all looked hand-knit and hand-sewn. She wondered if any of this was Lea's work.
"Wake me if you hear anyone," she said to him.
"No one will find us here," Henry said. "We're safe."
Sixty-six
Ruby's illness did not recede. It was not a virus or bacterial-borne. It was a chromosome, XZ, the one that made her a bridge daughter. Two protein strands, a Fate braided into every cell of her body. She was born with this preordained illness, just as she was born with the child she still carried in her.
Two light rifles and ammunition were stored in a locked cabinet beside the queen-size bed. Both were visible through the cabinet's front grille. Ruby awoke the second morning to discover a rifle and Henry gone. Nervous, she waited outside the front door, chewing her hangnails. When he returned, he carried a lifeless rabbit dripping blood with its legs trussed.
"I'm tired of pemmican," he told her.
Henry, Ruby learned, was an able cook. She recalled the first day in the house down the hill. The kitchen was a disaster and the refuse and wrappers told of a diet of cheap fast food and microwaved meals. Why was Henry so adept now, especially given the rustic facilities?
No challenges at the bottom of the hill. Food ready to go at a moment's notice. The first sensation of hunger pangs, present a plastic card to a clerk and be handed a bag of hot, tasty food. Nothing to slice, nothing to chop, no oven to preheat, no water to boil.
Nothing in this cabin was spur of the moment. Every act required planning and preparation. Even the water was non-potable. It could only be consumed after boiling or dosing with chlorine pills Henry produced from the backpack.
The only modern convenience was a full-sized propane tank attached to the far side of the cabin. Henry lit the pilot and soon they had hot water. The propane also provided light when the sun went down. No refrigerator, but outside in a fissure in the sheer wall Kyle had built a cold box kept naturally chilled by the surrounding rock. No toilet in the bathroom either—a chemical toilet was outside, twenty hurried steps away from the front door. Ruby counted them with each trip she made.
"My mother knitted those," Henry confirmed about the afghans. "And she sewed those," he said of the quilts. He touched the blanket on his twin bed. "My grandmother made this for me when I was two."
"How often do you come up here?"
"All summer, usually," he said. "During school, we'll come up on weekends and hunt. Sometimes Dad would take me out of school for a week. He only did it when he needed to get away from the city life."
"Is that what he calls Angels Camp?" Ruby said, amused.
"Yes," Henry said. "But the school got on him about taking me out of school so much, so we had to stop."
He skinned the rabbit away from the cabin—Ruby's demand—and fried up the breast meat until it was golden brown. The hot meal was delicious.
In the mornings, Ruby stood over the bathroom sink and coughed up blood and phlegm, the humours her bridge daughter body was now shedding. She napped throughout the days and came to in a sweat. She woke with Henry staring at her with a nervous, worried face. It killed her inside to see him like that.
She spent much time organizing a mental list of suspects. Was it the prison? Did Alice make a phone call? Or was it Cara? Hagars tattling on other Hagars was not uncommon, especially if a reward could be claimed. Or was it Mrs. Griffin? Women know these things—Blake Griffin was too political, too greedy, too much a man to pick up on Ruby's true self.
On the fourth day, she awoke from her noontime nap violently. Henry was shaking one of her shoulders. He hushed her as soon as she came to.
"Someone's coming," he whispered. He held a shotgun with his left hand. "I'm going to see."
"No you're not," she said. "Put that away."
"I'll be back." And he left before she could get out another word.
Ruby clawed her way from the sweat-soaked sheets and hurried to get her shoes on. She'd worn the same clothes since they'd left the house. She went to the window beside the stove and peered outside. She cracked it open so she could hear any noise—men, trucks, dogs, the report of a fired gun.
Rustling began to emerge from the dogwood grove. She could not tell if it was the afternoon wind making the trees shiver or the approach of a complement of men.
She could go hide. She might be able to make it to the far side of the clearing if she hurried. She might be able to elude them in the trees, covering herself head to toe as Henry had taught her to.
The rustling grew. She held her breath to listen. She waited.
Through the trees and afternoon mist, she made out the outlines of three men. One sauntered broadly, proud, cocky even. He seemed the leader. Another smaller man marched with single-minded purpose beside him. A third man strode between them.
As the mist thinned and the figures approached, the third man—evaporated. Two men came toward the cabin now, the broad large one carrying something long, perhaps a rifle, she thought.
The men emerged from the shadow of the trees. Henry walked alongside his father, who was navigating the rough forest floor with his gnarled walking stick. Henry was beaming. She had never seen him smile so. Uncontrolled, she burst through the front door and raced toward them with her arms out wide. She had never smiled so either.
Sixty-seven
Kyle brought fresh supplies. They ate ham sandwiches and boiled potatoes and bottled water. They ate like royalty. Ruby had wondered if she'd ever drink water without the trench-warfare stench of chlorine in it.
"You're half-right," Kyle said to Ruby after she laid out her suspicions. "The prison did trace your call. But it was that damned fool Griff that sealed it. After the Griffins met you, Suze suspected you might be a Hagar. Someone with the prison contacted him about anyone new in town who might be connected to your mother, especially a Hagar named Ruby. Griff put two and two together."
He reached across the table to Henry. "You understand, right? What it means that Ruby is a Hagar?"
He nodded.
"I don't care about it no more," he said to Henry. "There's a whole churchful of people down in Angels Camp who turned their backs on us. But not Ruby." He looked at her with warm, bold eyes. "She stayed at our side."
"What did they do to you?" she said. "We saw them drag you off."
"Oh, they took me back to Big Bad Wolf Pack Headquarters, which is a crummy little mobile home outside of town. They quizzed me and tried to get me to say where you'd run off to. But it didn't last long. Things got hot for them within hours of picking me up."
"How?"
"California called our bluff." He sounded a little defeated. "They said if Jefferson didn't keep the wolf packs out of California, then California would set up their own border stations to inspect trucks entering and leaving Jefferson. Just like we've got border stops," he added. "Except California was able to get Oregon and Nevada to do the same. It took all of two days before we cried 'uncle.'" He said, "By that, I mean for Jefferson to wave the white flag."
"Because of border stops?"
"Commercial truck inspections. Some inspections were taking a day to complete. That meant Jefferson wasn't getting its bread and beer and gasoline and…" He took a ballpoint pen from his breast pocket and handed it to Ruby. "And trucks. Passenger trucks, I mean."
Ruby recognized the pen. Griffin Dodge was printed across its star-spangled barrel.
"That got people in the mood to negotiate," he said. "In Redding, they're talking about getting rid of the wolf packs. They're certainly going to contain them within the state lines. And Redding agreed to return the prisoners to California, to halt the blockade. That includes Folsom," he said to Ruby.
Ruby asked, "Is she…?"
"She's being released this week," he said. "I've got the truck parked half a mile away. We can go see her at the processing center in Sacramento. From what I made out from the news, there's a good chance she'll be pardoned."
Sixty-eight
After lunch, they rested. Ruby needed the sleep and Kyle needed to put up his leg. The walk in had exhausted him. Part of the healing process was keeping his leg elevated above his heart at least a few hours every day. The antibiotics still made him sleepy.
They awoke together in the bed. Henry lay across the sofa reading one of the dog-eared, spine-wrinkled paperbacks lining a wall shelf. The couple rose together. Henry had started a fire. The cabin was toasty and dry.
"You need to see something," Kyle said to her. "This is important to me."
He led her across the clearing and into the grove. She felt lost again, directionless. She wasn't even sure she could make it back to the cabin, the trees were so thick. Somehow Kyle knew the way, although she did not see any markers or natural features to lead him along.
After ten minutes the trees thinned. They stood on a sheer precipice, much like the one Henry and she had stood upon days earlier. They were now at a much higher altitude. Ruby joined Kyle at the edge. She took his hand and squeezed it. With a sudden burst of recognition, she gasped.
"This is the photograph in your bedroom," she said.
From their vantage, they had a magnificent panoramic view of the valley below. Angels Camp seemed nothing more than a model train diorama. Highway 4 was a gray shoelace laid wormlike between the miniature trees. A quilt of farm fields unfurled across the Central Valley, interrupted by the highways and high-rises of Stockton. Far off, a thin sliver of green underlined the fiery red sun. It was the Pacific.
"This is God's country," Kyle said. "This is His bestowment."
Ruby came before Kyle and put her arms around him. She pushed her face into his chest. "I don't want to leave."
"We'll come back. After we see your mother."
"I don't think so."
He leaned back and chucked her chin so he could look into her eyes.
"You did all this for your family, didn't you?" he asked.
She breathed in and out. The air was crisp and cool and free.
"I want to die here," she said. "It will be any day now."
Sixty-nine
Henry cooked all her meals. Kyle cleaned to the best of his ability. He saw to her needs. She napped all the time now. She needed his strong arm to support her across the clearing to the chemical toilet. Kyle kept a bucket next to the bed for her vomiting. He helped bathe her.
She took her afternoon naps on the sofa. She often slept so deeply, she would only wake in the evenings. Once, she stumbled to the window and watched him pacing across the clearing. He walked six times a day. Henry would take walks with him. She could see the ease with which the outdoors suited them. This was their home.
It reached the point she could no longer rise from the sofa without his help. "I'd carry you to the bed," Kyle joked, "but with my stitches, I'd be laid up again." She used his walking stick for leverage while Henry pulled her to her feet.
She lay back on the bed one evening. The gas lamps gave the cabin a golden warm light. She was half-awake and foggy-headed. Kyle leaned over her with a reassuring smile.
"Are you happy?" he asked.
"Yes," she murmured. "I just wish Henry was here."
"He's here," he said. "He's putting wood in the stove right now."
"I hope he's back in time."
"He's here," Kyle said. "We're both here for you."
"I'm here," Henry said. He sat on the bed next to her. He took her hand. "I'm here, Aunt Ruby."
"You took good care of us," Kyle said.
"I'm the easier patient," she said with a crinkled smile, eyes almost closed. "You were a big pain in the butt."
"Yes, I was."
Living among the pine trees made Kyle's clothes smell woody and evergreen. He'd not shaven since being taken away. His coarse beard against her cheek scraped and made it tingle and raw. Henry's warm hand reassured and comforted. All of this urged her to stay a
live, if even for one more day.
One more day to be with Henry and Kyle, she thought. One more day with my sister's beautiful boy.
Seventy
A small village of National Guard tents filled a vacant lot on the edge of Sacramento, not far from Highway 50. The tent she was in was filled with cots, but no blankets and no pillows. There were so many prisoners cuffed and shackled, there was only room to sit or stand. She chose to stand. She'd been sitting for sixteen years in a cell.
Her name was called through the flap in the tent. She emerged to the daylight, blinking. A beefy man in a dark blue uniform undid the handcuffs and tossed the loose pair into a plastic tray of loose cuffs. He led her to a tent with the sound of spraying water coming from inside. He handed her a wrapped bar of hotel-sized soap and a one-application squeeze bottle of shampoo.
"Use the whole bottle." He recited words he'd been reciting all morning. "Let it sit in your hair for a minute before rinsing. Towels and standard issue are beside the door."
He pulled aside the flap to the tent. Inside, a maze of white PVC pipes snaked to four shower heads around a central drain set into the wood slat floor. Three women were showering. She stripped off her Jefferson State prison issue and stepped into the cool water of the only unoccupied shower.
She squeezed all the shampoo into her palm and worked it into her mousy hair. The squeeze bottle began dissolving in the water. She realized the bottle itself was made of the shampoo but in a hard gel form. Once the bottle had dissolved in her hands, she worked the resulting goo into her hair as well. While it sat in her hair, she soaped up from face to ankle, decided hell with it, that's sixty seconds, and rinsed off. She knew the tangy odor of lice treatment shampoo. She knew the grittiness of prison-issued soap that refused to lather up.