by Rachel Kane
“So what do you read?” I asked him. It was a trick question. I knew he was going to say nothing, and when he did, it would put a little wall between us, and would make it easier for us to co-exist, because I couldn’t be attracted to someone who didn’t read. Not really.
He scowled, and I was a little embarrassed for him, knowing he was about to admit to fitting into the stereotype of Cute Dumb Guy. I almost changed the subject again.
“You’ll laugh,” he said.
“I’m a writer,” I said, trying to look noble and dignified. “I’d never laugh about reading.”
Here it comes. He reads comic books or something.
Then, out of nowhere, he recited:
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
I stopped climbing. “Coleridge? You read Samuel Taylor Coleridge?”
He shrugged. “I was just thinking about that stream, wondering where it wound up, and it reminded me of those lines.”
“So you read poetry?”
Did he blush? Did Jacob Marks, he of the glistening 8-pack and the mighty stubbled jaw, actually blush, like a kid caught reading his dad’s nudie magazines?
“A little,” said Jake. “Here and there. My mom was a teacher. I still have her books.”
“Is she…?”
“Cancer,” he said. “You don’t have to say anything, it was a long time ago. I was eleven. Ever since then it’s just been the two of us, me and my pop. But she left me her books, and when I was lonely and missed her, I’d crack them open and try to read them. Most of it was over my head, but I didn’t care. I thought… I thought if I read all the words she’d read, I would be closer to her. It would be her voice, speaking the words inside my thoughts.”
It was such an unexpectedly sad and lovely image that I stopped walking, just staring at him, picturing him as an innocent little boy, puzzling over a poem.
“My dad was flying up the mountain a few times a week back then, and I would bring a book, and it all made me feel connected. God, I can’t believe I’m saying this to a stranger.”
I knew if I said it’s okay or anything like that, it would break the spell. I said nothing.
He threw his arm outward, gesturing toward the great openness behind us as the mountain sloped down, and recited:
“But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!”
I looked out over the trees, the noonday light making things look decidedly un-enchanted, un-haunted. The brightness made everything normal…but I could picture the moon rising over the slopes and turning everything into a strange, alien place, seen through the eyes of a frightened boy who had just lost his mother.
There was a tension between us now. He had just exposed part of his history, part of his soul to me, and was waiting for my judgment. Maybe waiting for me to say it was silly for a man like him to think of poetry. Sillier still for him to recite it in his deep booming voice on the mountain slope.
I didn’t think it was silly at all. The defiant look on his face, his choice to love something so unexpectedly, using words to form that deep connection to his mother’s memory…it struck me in a way I couldn’t describe, but which I knew was even more dangerous than having seen him half-naked.
It’s one thing to lust after someone because they’ve got a good body.
It’s another to realize there’s a mind, a soul inside that body, one you want to know better.
Dangerous fucking territory. A savage place indeed.
“I think my Uncle Ron was just as affected by the mountains,” I said.
Nice deflection, self!
We were on the move again, and now it was getting tricky. We’d hit an area where the soil had eroded, leaving cracked granite underfoot. Naturally Jake was in his element, climbing like a mountain goat, while I lumbered upwards more like a mountaineering rhinoceros.
“It finally hit me who you’re talking about,” Jake said. “The writer guy.”
“Yeah, Ron was a novelist.”
“On Saturdays, Pop would fly us to the airstrip and drop off supplies for anybody up there. Usually it’d be camping stuff, canned beans or tarps or something. But we always knew when it was your uncle; he’d make us bring up typewriter ribbons and white-out and pipe tobacco.”
I’d forgotten about that pipe, but Jake had suddenly brought an image to mind, Ron out on the porch with my dad, knocking his pipe against his boot, my dad frowning at the little pile of ash it had left on the porch. Ron had seemed so dashing to me, like he’d emerged from an old movie, with his vests and hats and pipe, his big ideas and big conversation. I didn’t understand why my dad seemed so tense around him.
Now, of course, I understood…and understood why, for the rest of our lives together, my parents were going to be tense around me as well.
Don’t think about it too much. It’ll just get you down again.
I’d done a pretty good job not thinking about my fight with my parents. Fight is a strong word, maybe too strong for what really happened. The tears, the quiet voices, the this isn’t really true Eli, we’ve known you since the minute you were born, there’s no way you’re a… you’re a… one of those.
The first time you hear your parents refer to you as one of those, like you’re an object, a thing, you suddenly see your life in a whole different way. The people you thought knew you best, are aliens now.
Talk about science fiction. I was the lonely astronaut walking in a world full of alien straight people, none of whom could understand me.
But Uncle Ron would have understood. I patted my jacket pocket, where his letter was safe.
“He left a book up at his cabin,” I told Jake.
“He left a lot of stuff up there. Nobody ever came for it.”
“Yeah, but I’m talking about his final novel. If I can find it…”
He must have heard there was something in my voice trailing off, something in my silence. He turned, steadying himself against a granite boulder. “Then what? What happens if you find it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s silly. I thought I could publish it for him. Let the world know what he meant to me, you know? He was my inspiration.”
To my surprise, Jake nodded as though that made perfect sense.
Of course it does. He remembers his mother via her books. I’m doing the same for Ron.
What a strange feeling this was, to have someone understand. To have them get it, without me having to explain for hours and hours.
“I’m sorry about the plane,” said Jake. “You could have been at the cabin by now, if not for me. You could’ve found his book—”
“No, seriously,” I said. “As much as I’m going to need a long, hot shower when we get rescued, this is…surprisingly okay. None of my friends can say they survived a plane crash and climbed a mountain. Besides, the airstrip can’t be that far, and we can radio for help, and—”
His frown caught me off-guard.
“Which part of that did I get wrong?” I asked.
“There’s no radio up there.”
“What, none in the tower, I thought they—”
He shook his head. “The strip is just dirt. There’s nothing up there, just enough cleared space to land a plane, taxi around and take back off.”
Whatever I had been feeling before was replaced with a sense of foreboding.
“How on earth is that legal?” I asked. “It’s for planes, it has to have lights, and radios, and…and…”
“In the old days, it was used for smuggling. My great-granddad used to be a rum-runner during Prohibition. They had these hops they’d make, coming down from Canada, these li
ttle nowhere landing strips that the law never knew about. Then when booze was legal again, my great-granddad settled here and found other uses for his plane. For a while back in the 70s, they used the strip for smuggling again, this time for weed, but the feds shut that down pretty hard. By the time I was old enough to fly, the business was just tourists, hunters mostly. But no, there’s nothing up there. It’s basically a long dirt strip in the middle of nowhere.”
That doesn’t change anything, I tried to tell myself. Just because you can’t radio for help doesn’t mean help won’t come. Jake was right before, the search and rescue team will head for the airstrip first to set down, so they’re going to find us, even if we can’t signal them…
I swallowed. “Jake, how long do you think it’ll be before they realize we’re missing?”
He was silent for a while, then he gestured off to the west. I looked to where he was pointing. Far off on the horizon, dark clouds, towering.
“If that turns out to be a storm, we could be here a while. They could think I stuck around rather than flying through bad weather.”
“But they’ll realize we’re lost tonight, right?”
He didn’t answer.
“Tomorrow? Surely they’ll worry about you if you’re not back tomorrow morning?”
He reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed it. “Listen. We’re going to be okay. It might not be fast, all right? But eventually they’re going to realize we’re not back. They’ll send someone after us. That’s why it’s important we reach the airstrip, plain old dirt and all. I’d like to get there before the storm, because damn if I want to be marching through these woods during that.”
Another squeeze, like he could transmit his confidence into me. Then he turned back to the north, and began walking.
I had to settle my mind. No more crazy questions. No more speculating on what happens if they don’t find us, if there’s no food, if it takes a week, a month, a year—
“The thing to keep in mind,” began Jake, but he never finished his sentence.
Maybe it was the pine straw that littered this rocky ground. Maybe it was the granite itself, worn smooth in places by centuries of erosion.
His foot slipped, and then he was falling.
And then…he disappeared.
9
Jacob
“You are not taking that boy up the mountain,” said Mama, her cigarette gripped tightly between her neatly manicured fingers. I knew those fingers as well as I knew my own, watching them as she held a book to read to me for a bedtime story; I would look down at my own little fingers then back at hers, wondering over the nicotine stain on her skin, wondering if it was natural, something that adults grew with time.
This time, I was staring at her from under the kitchen table, my usual place to hide when she and Pop were fighting.
“Ain’t nothin’ happening to that boy up there,” Pop said. Back then he was still a strapping young man, broad with a thick middle, but sturdy like a tree. His own cigarette had been stubbed out just a moment ago, and smoke still curled around his face. “He’ll be safer up there than he is at that school. Hell, him being there will make me safer too.”
“Uh-unh,” Mama said, shaking her head. “It’s bad enough you ferrying around those drug men. You’re not taking Jake with you.”
Pop pressed his lips together in that way he had. “What say you, Jake? You want to go with Pop up in the plane?”
Of course I did. There was nothing I liked better. I didn’t understand why anybody traveled any other way. Who needed cars and trucks, when there were planes to make you fly? My heart thumped with excitement whenever I got to go along with Pop on a flight.
I peeked out from the table. “Can I, Mama? I wanna go in the plane.”
“You stay out of it, baby.” To Pop, she said, “Don’t you dare. You know how dangerous those men are. Now look, you’re making me late for work. If you do have to go up the mountain, you leave Jake with your mom.”
“But—”
“Promise me, Teddy. You swear to me right now, you will not take Jake up with those drug-runners.”
Pop knew when he’d been beat.
“All right, babe.”
Mama finished putting on her earrings, then leaned over and kissed Pop. Then she knelt by the table and kissed me too. “Be good for Papa, all right?”
“Promise!” I said.
I regretted going with Pop as soon as the men boarded the plane.
These guys were rough. Not country-rough, not like the big men with their shotguns and vests who came up for the deer, nor the older, quieter ones who came up for the trout. Their roughness was different. They were dangerous, you knew it by looking at them. They didn’t keep their guns in big plastic cases. The guns were out where you could see them, and I was fascinated and terrified at the same time, looking at all the gleaming steel.
“Don’t look at them,” Pop whispered.
“But why do they—”
“Don’t ask about them either.”
But soon enough I’d forgotten about the men because we were in the air, the place I felt was my true home, as though I’d been born a bird in a boy’s body. Staring down on the fields and forests, watching streams cut through rocky outcroppings to flow into rivers, it was the only vantage point from which the world made sense to me. Nobody fought up in the air. You didn’t have to hide under a table here.
My face pressed against the glass, I could hear the men muttering, laughing. We were approaching the old airfield now. Soon we were bumping over the ground, my teeth clacking on the rough ride, always a little sad those first few moments back on the ground.
I started to get out, but Pop put his hand against my chest. I looked over at him and he shook his head warily. He looked at the men out of the corner of his eye, and waited for them to climb out and talk to the other men on the airstrip.
“Listen, Jake. They’re going to load the plane and we’ll leave. You don’t have anything to worry about.”
I was still young, but I was old enough to know when a grown-up was lying to me. “Who are they?”
He watched them steadily as they talked outside. “Bad men, Jake.”
“Why do we fly bad men?”
I listened to his sigh. It sounded so tired, so old. The sound of defeat.
“Your mama isn’t making enough at the school,” he said. “And there aren’t any tourists or hunters right now for me to fly. These guys… They’re dangerous, bud, but we’ll make enough to keep us flush through the season. Then we can go back to normal.”
When you’re little, there are questions you can think in your head, that you can’t figure how to say aloud. Questions like, If they’re so dangerous, then why did you bring me?
In later years I would ask him about that.
“They fucking terrified me,” he told me. I was a teenager by that point, leaning into the plane’s cowl with grease on my overalls. “But I thought I’d be safer with you there. Nobody’s going to bother a kid, you know? People act different when there’s a kid in the plane. Hunters stop cussing, fisherman stop trying to show you pictures of naked ladies…and, I hoped, drug runners would keep their guns holstered and not try to whack me for being a witness.”
I set down my crowfoot wrench and stared at him. “You hoped.”
He just shook his head. “It was a different time, Jake.”
They were loading the plane. Big bags, it looked like trash bags, and I giggled because I thought what if they’re filling up the plane with trash? In that way imagination can seem very real to a kid, I began thinking of all the trash the tourists left behind, and wondered seriously whether these dangerous guys were actually trashmen, come to clean up the cabins.
Any humor I found in the situation drained out of me, when I saw my father’s face, pale and drawn. His fingers played over the starter nervously.
This time being in the air didn’t relax me. On the trip up I’d been able to lose myself in the view, but no
w the presence of the men in back, the rustling of their bags, kept me locked in the present. The plane felt different to me, like it was weighed down, sluggish about climbing into the air.
I thought that I would be very glad to get home. I wished Mama were here. She’d give those dangerous men a piece of her mind.
“Hey hillbilly, how much gas you got in this thing?”
One of the men was leaning over Pop’s seat.
“Don’t worry,” Pop said. “We’re fine.”
“I didn’t ask you if we were fucking fine, flyboy, I asked how much gas you got. How far can we go with it?”
Something changed in Pop’s demeanor. Before, he had been worried. Now I sensed a flicker of anger. I knew that look well. That was a look that sent me under the kitchen table. It meant trouble.
“We can get back to town,” he said.
“Nah, we ain’t going back to town,” said the man.
“You paid for a trip up the mountain and back. No extras.”
I didn’t even see the man pull his gun, but there it was, in his hand. He had it carelessly pointing at the instruments.
“I know what we paid for. But we changed our minds. How far can you get us over the state line?”
“You’ve got men back in town waiting for you,” said Pop, trying to keep his voice calm and reasonable. “What are they going to think, when I come back with an empty plane?”
That’s when the man pressed the gun against Pop’s head.
“Who says you’re coming back?”
* * *
There wasn’t time to figure out what happened to my footing. One minute I was talking to Eli, the next, the world had slipped out from under me. My shoe skidded, I lost my balance.
For a brief second it was like flying. My feet left the solidity of the mountain, and I was in the air, the place I’ve always loved being.
Perhaps I have become a bird.
Birds don’t land as hard as I landed. The mountain slammed into my ribs like it had been thrown at me by a giant. My breath was gone, no room for it in my chest anymore. By instinct I reached out, my fingers clutching smooth stone, finding no purchase.