by Lori Lansens
ALSO BY LORI LANSENS
Rush Home Road
The Girls
The Wife’s Tale
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2015 Lori Lansens
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lansens, Lori, author
The mountain story / Lori Lansens.
ISBN 978-0-345-80902-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-80904-9
I. Title.
PS8573.A5866M68 2015 C812’.6 C2014-906340-7
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant
Cover image © Zakharova_Natalia / iStockphoto.com
v3.1
for
Max and Tashi
and
Addam, Andrew, Chloe and Nathan
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Before
The First Day
The Second Day
The Third Day
The Fourth Day
The Fifth Day
After
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Dear Daniel,
A person has to have lived a little to appreciate a survival story. That’s what I’ve always said, and I promised that when you were old enough, I’d tell you mine. It’s no tale for a child, but you’re not a child anymore. You’re older now than I was when I got lost in the mountain wilderness.
Five days in the freezing cold without food or water or shelter. You know that part, and you know that I was with three strangers, and that not everyone survived. What happened up there changed my life, Danny. Hearing the story is going to change yours.
It’s hard to know when a son’s ready for the truth about his old man. The night of your middle school graduation was the first time I almost told you; then it was your fourteenth birthday, and fifteenth, and every birthday after. You had a right to be told, but it’s never been that simple. To understand about the mountain, you need to know what came before.
Remember last spring when we were visiting colleges? We were on that dark gravel road just outside of Bloomington and I nearly hit the deer. Remember we had to pull off at that truck stop because I couldn’t stop shaking? The deer was safe, and you didn’t understand why I was so rattled by the close call. Later, when I was calm, driving down the highway toward home, you asked me if I’d ever killed anything—accidentally or on purpose. You’d given me the perfect opening in the perfect setting—we always have our best talks in the car.
You were ready. I wasn’t. That night I realized I was never going to be able to tell you the whole story—not face to face. If I had to watch you take it in I’d have edited, censored, lied, anything to avoid seeing your pain. But there’s no point in telling half a story, is there? Or worse, one that’s only half true.
So I wrote it down. I typed it out as it came to my fingers because that felt like the most honest thing to do. It’s longer than I thought it would be—shorter somehow too. As for the timing of all of this? With you starting Indiana State? When you’re older you’ll see that there isn’t so much a good time or bad time for things, appearances to the contrary. There is just a time. Anyway, it’ll be good for you to read this while you’re away at school. You’ll need some time to absorb it, and some distance from me.
The day I got lost with the others—that fateful November day—was the one-year anniversary of Byrd’s accident. It was a tough year, and I didn’t think it could get worse. Then Frankie, my father, got drunk on Halloween night and killed a young couple with his car. My best friend was gone, my father sent to prison for vehicular manslaughter. I was on my own—no one to keep abreast of my plans. Not that I would have told anyone about my trip to the mountain anyway, because on that cool, grey afternoon, which was also the day of my eighteenth birthday, I had decided to hike to a spot called Angel’s Peak to jump to my death.
No one else knows that part of the story. Not even your mother.
My fellow hikers have been with me, in one way or another, since we were lost together all those years ago, walking alongside me when I’m out with the dogs, quiet when I’m reading in bed, guiding me with whispers when I can’t find my way, looking over my shoulder the whole time I was typing out these pages. I’ll miss their haunting.
When you were a little boy you’d study me in quiet moments and ask if I was thinking about the mountain. I almost always was. You asked if I ever dreamed about it. I did. Still do—especially now. Sometimes I wake up in a panic. Sometimes I wake longing for old friends.
Your mother? She’s always said she didn’t need to know all the gory details. Still, we both knew this day would come, and once you’re finished this, she’ll have to read it too. I’m afraid I’ve caged the mountain story for so long it’ll die in the wild. Mom wishes it already had.
Here it is, Danny. As you read this, remember our family motto—there will be sway.
Love,
Dad
BEFORE
MY BOYHOOD HOME on Old Dewey Road stood among similar clapboard bungalows in the older, grimier section of Mercury, upwind of Michigan’s largest rendering plant, with the train tracks near enough that I could tell passenger from freight by the way the house shook. A year and a half after my mother’s accident—that’s what we called it—my father briefly got sober and painted the entire house, inside and out, a dark, flat blue. Drowning Man Blue. Frankie said it was a tribute to Glory. She loved the colour blue.
Frankie said I was too young, only four years old when she passed away, to have an honest recollection of my mother, but I do. Glory Elizabeth Truly. In my favourite memory she wears a silky white dress with batwing sleeves—one I’ve never seen in photographs. She’s standing in front of a dressing room mirror smiling at our reflection and behind us is another mirror where I discover our infinity. “Always,” I say. My beautiful mother laughs and tells me I’m clever before covering my face with soft kisses and spinning me in her embrace. I glimpse us with each turn. Glory looks like an angel in that white dress.
I remember the mornings with my mother the most, watching her get ready for work (kindergarten teacher) while Frankie (entrepreneur) slept upstairs. We talked in whispers as she made up her pretty face and spritzed her curls with lemon-scented hairspray. Before disappearing out the door, she’d turn to smile and then lay her hand on her heart to say she kept me there, even when she was away.
After she died, Frankie had her name tattooed on his forearm—Glory—in a rainbow that arched over the word Always. I used to think it would have been truer if the tattoo said Glory Once or Glory Briefly or even better Sorry Glory.
I have never, to my recollection, called Frankie by any name other than his first. My ears were filled with the sound of it, usually shouted, often slurred, by the strangers that came and went from that smoke-choked blue house. Men who slammed doors and broke bottles. Women I didn’t know cooking food I wouldn’t eat. Children I’d never seen playing board games I didn’t own. I remember one time Frankie tossed me a package of gum and w
arned, “Share that with your sisters.” I turned around to find two freckled redheads I’d never seen before sitting behind me on the couch.
Glory Always? She was only twenty-five (Frankie a full decade older) when she died. I have my mother’s smile, I’ve been told, but otherwise I’m the image of my dark-haired father. I remember after a second-grade lesson about immigration, I’d asked Frankie the details of my heritage. He told me that Glory’s family came from England when she was a baby and that her parents, both older physicians, had died of natural causes before my mother graduated from teacher’s college. Frankie guessed they wouldn’t have liked him. It did occur to me that if Glory’s parents had lived longer, I might never have lived at all.
When I asked about his side of the family, Frankie hesitated. He was secretive about his past, like me. “On my father’s side, we were Trulinos until the nineteen-thirties but then my grandfather decided he wanted a more American-sounding name so he changed it to Truly and that caused a rift and that’s how we ended up in Michigan. On my mother’s side we’re French Canadian and Cree. My cousins came down to visit us from Quebec one time. They were dark and lean. Badass. I take after my mother’s side. That’s how come I’m so stealthy. Why I like my feet bare.”
There was this rotting cedar porch out front of our blue house from which I’d leap as a boy, towel-cape aflutter behind me, shouting, “I am Batman,” or “I am Superman,” but I remember one day I lost my cape, and I simply shouted, “I am … ME!” Frankie slammed his palm on the kitchen table and hollered through the open window, “That kinda arrogance’ll take you to Cleveland, Wolf! Cleveland and back!” Whether he meant to encourage, mock or scold me, I still have no clue. My father has left me, my whole life, in a state of wonder.
One spring day when I was thirteen, Frankie stood up from the kitchen table and announced, “We need to be near family now,” like the tragedy of my mother’s death was ten days, and not ten years, old.
“What family?”
“We’re moving to California. This summer.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll stay with Kriket till we get on our feet.”
I’d never been to California and neither had Frankie. I’d never met his sister Kriket (Katherine) and never knew them to be close.
I figured Frankie had gotten himself into some kind of trouble in Mercury, a debt he couldn’t repay, or maybe he’d slept with somebody’s wife or girlfriend or sister or mother. You wouldn’t think women would go for an unemployed widower in a stained concert T-shirt but there were plenty of pretty girls around to finger the rainbow on Frankie’s Glory Always tattoo. “I reek of pheromones,” he told me once, flapping his hands around his armpits, encouraging me to take a whiff.
We made a plan to head for Kriket’s place in the California desert in late July. Frankie was vague when I asked about the future of the little blue house. (Later he told me he’d lost it in a bet.) He bulldozed Glory’s toiletries from their bathroom shelf shrine—the lemon-scented hairspray, prescription ointment for a patch of eczema, an unopened box of decongestant to relieve her springtime allergies—and threw them all into the trash.
“Won’t need all this where we’re going, Wolf,” he said, which made me wonder why we’d needed it where we were.
I spent a lot of time at the Mercury Public Library when I was a kid. Frankie sent me there to borrow books by way of free babysitting. Miss Kittle was the head librarian, a buttoned-up brunette who, along with the rest of the staff, barely tolerated me. I couldn’t blame them. I stole doughnuts from the seniors’ meetings, made a mess of the shelves and spent far too much time in the men’s room. Still, I loved the library. I loved books. I especially loved plump, berry-scented Miss Kittle.
A few weeks before we left for the desert, Miss Kittle surprised me by calling out my name when I walked through the library doors. “Wolf Truly!”
There was something different about Miss Kittle—her cheeks were pinker and her lips were glossed and her thick dark hair fell in waves over her shoulders. By the look of her face I wasn’t in trouble, which confused me.
“I have something for you, Wolf,” she said. Miss Kittle had never spoken to me directly before.
“Okay.”
“I heard you were moving to Santa Sophia.”
Her eyes were even prettier up close. “My aunt Kriket lives there,” I said.
“That’s where I’m from,” Miss Kittle said. “My father’s still there. I visit every summer.”
“California’s a long way from Michigan.” My cheeks were hot.
“I had to move up here to help take care of my grandmother. I miss the desert.”
“I’ll miss winter.”
“Ah!” she said, raising her index finger. Then she reached beneath the counter and drew out a large heavy book. “You won’t have to miss winter.”
“I won’t?”
“You’ll have the mountain,” she said, passing me the hefty book. “The Mountain in the Desert.”
The moment I glimpsed the photograph on the cover—a helicopter shot of the pine-rimmed granite peak—I knew that mountain contained my destiny. The details leapt from the pages like some 3-D déjà vu; ten thousand feet at the summit, mother of the transverse mountain ranges, hundreds of miles of pristine wilderness, hunting ground of the Agua Caliente band of Native Americans, habitat of bighorn sheep, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, precipitation ten times higher than what falls in the desert below, torrential rains in spring and fall, blizzards in winter. It was a place I’d never heard of but felt that I’d already been.
“You have to climb to the peak,” Miss Kittle said.
“That looks pretty high.”
“You take the tram most of the way,” she said, turning to the back of the book and pointing to a full-page photograph. “The ride up is almost vertical. Look.”
It was.
“This tram car takes you from the Desert Station—the climate of Mexico—to the Mountain Station—the climate of northern Canada—in less than twenty minutes. Palms to pines.”
“Cool,” I said.
“You can climb to the peak from there. I only made it once,” she confessed. “It was cloudy.”
“Too bad.”
“Maybe I’ll try again when I’m in Palm Springs this summer to visit my father,” she said.
“You should.”
“Maybe I’ll see if you and your dad want to come with me. Frankie—right?” She blushed.
Oh no, I thought. Frankie never came into the library, so I couldn’t imagine where the two had met. “Frankie. That’s right,” I said.
“Do you know where in Santa Sophia your aunt lives?”
“Verdi Village,” I said, remembering what Frankie told me.
“Sounds familiar. I think it’s gated.”
I knew nothing about gates.
“Most of the gated places have golf.”
Verdi Village did not have golf. Or gates. Or shimmering pools. Or tennis courts. Or decorative fountains. Or paved roads for that matter. Santa Sophia was a tidy desert town consisting mostly of guarded, affluent communities. But past the missionstyle shopping malls and beyond the fuchsia bougainvillea and the median beds of white aggregate and flowering cacti, and over the abandoned train tracks, thousands populated the thrice-foreclosed-upon Verdi Village mobile home development that bled out over two square miles of hard-baked, treeless earth.
The original double-wide, pitch-roofed aluminum trailers were run down, but at least they still had electricity and running water, unlike the second strata of dwellings beyond them—mobile housing grown from the seeds of Airstreams and Coachmen and Four Winds. Past that, vagabonds had erected a haphazard crust of shacks and shanties, shelter for economic refugees, the mentally ill, and bikers. Locals called the place Tin Town.
In those dangerous narrows grew children who knew too much too young, but sadly, always seemed to learn too little too late. It was hot as hell in Tin Town—it set the most records in the state
for triple-digit temperatures. I can still smell the unwashed bodies and twice-fried sausage, cigarette smoke and cat shit; and I can hear the discontent like bad radio reception. But mostly I can feel it—the wind, constant through the San Gorgonio Pass, polishing the earth and nourishing the groves of wind turbines along the desert roads.
You can see those ribbons of straight white stalks from eight thousand feet up the mountain. It’s a hell of a view.
THE
FIRST
DAY
THE NIGHT BEFORE I left for Angel’s Peak I didn’t sleep at all, yet I lingered in my bed until almost noon. Finally I rose, pulled on some clothes, and found the warm wool socks that Byrd had given me two Christmases before. I tied the laces on my hiking boots for the first time in a year and reached for my knapsack, hanging on a hook near the front door. I hesitated and put the knapsack back—a moment that would haunt me—because I had no further need of the Swiss Army knife, or food rations, or water, or blankets, and didn’t want the things to go to waste.
At the Desert Station, I waited to take what I believed would be my final tram trip up the mountain and, leaning against the wall, took a moment to survey the crowd. The three hikers I became lost with that autumn day were strangers to me, but I’d noticed each, for different reasons, before our fates became entangled. Nola. Vonn. Bridget.
Nola, with her soulful blue eyes and neat silver hair, strode by in her oxblood poncho and I remember thinking that a person would be able to see that shiny red poncho from space. She was wearing good hiking shoes and shouldering a black knapsack, a tattered field guide in her slender hands. I took her for one of the park docents who lead the short hikes in the Wide Valley at the foot of the Mountain Station.
She was the first rider to board the tramcar that was about to launch us from the desert scrub to an alpine wilderness, and she took a spot at the window where she’d have a view of the desert. Some people want to watch where they’re going and some like to see where they’ve been. She turned to catch me staring. I looked away, embarrassed.