The Mountain Story

by Lori Lansens

  “You’re dizzy, Wolf,” Vonn said.

  “I’m all right.” But I wasn’t.

  “I was thinking, maybe if I borrowed your shoes, Bridget, I could try the wall. We could let Wolf rest,” Vonn said.

  “Because you think I can’t do it?”

  “No, just to give you a rest,” Vonn said.

  “Vonn, you’re a lot shorter than me. If I don’t have the wingspan for it you don’t either.”

  “And my feet are half the size of yours,” Bridget said.

  “And how would you find your way back to the Mountain Station even if you got up there?” Nola asked.

  “I’ll worry about the wall, Vonn,” I said. “You and Bridget need to find what’s left of that blue bag.”

  “What do you mean what’s left of it?” Bridget asked.

  “Just find the bag,” I begged.

  Bridget looked back and forth from me to Vonn. “Did something happen between you two?”

  Vonn and I must have looked guilty.

  Bridget spat on the ground at my feet, which was no mean feat considering our degree of dehydration.

  “No!” I insisted.

  “Bridget,” Nola soothed. “You’re being ridiculous. At a time like this? How could you think …?”

  Vonn turned toward the morning sky and said, “I found one of the granola bars.”

  I hung my head.

  “Thank God!” Bridget cried.

  “That’s wonderful, Vonn!” Nola croaked.

  Vonn’s voice was not her own. “I ate it.”

  Nola sat blinking while Bridget said, “I don’t understand.”

  “I ate it. I found it and I ate it.”

  “She’s not telling the truth,” I said, interrupting. “I ate half of it.”

  The wind roared in then and spoke for all of us. Such a revelation, in different circumstances, with less fragile beings, or more fragile beings, might have elicited an entirely different response: fist fights, screaming, pushing, hair-pulling. On the mountain, on that third day, the only rage came from the wind. A dubious gift to the desperate—clarity, charity, perspective.

  “There’s some water left in the canteen,” I said after a while, grateful for their silent absolution. “Mrs. Devine, you and Bridget should finish it.”

  Vonn cringed. “I need the water, too.”

  Bridget grabbed the canteen and, twisting off the cap, brought it to her lips. After a fractional sip she passed it to her daughter, who took a grateful sip before passing it to her grandmother, who drank a small amount before she passed it to me.

  “Now you only have to forgive yourselves,” Nola said to Vonn and me.

  I took a small sip from the yellow canteen and thought of Byrd.

  “Wolf?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You said Byrd was in the hospital in a coma. You never said …,” Bridget ventured.

  I felt my face redden.

  “What happened to him?” Vonn asked.

  “We have to get back to the wall,” I said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  Nola took my proffered arm and we moved together, slowly, over the rock.

  I didn’t want to tell the rest of Byrd’s story, but I did.

  All those weeks at Byrd’s bedside I prayed for him to come back without actually knowing where he was. Sometimes instead of talking to Byrd’s body under the white hospital sheets I spoke to the air, and sometimes I didn’t even talk out loud but tried to find him in some corridor of my wandering mind. Sometimes I sang to him. Sometimes he shuddered.

  Frankie’s words haunted me. Pull the plug. I never considered pulling Byrd’s plug, but the way Frankie’d said it—like he wished it were him in the coma, like he’d rather leave the burden of his life to someone else, just have it done with. Pull the plug. I felt sorry for my father because I understood too well. While the mountain had changed me, made me stronger, brought me peace, the desert had been Frankie’s final ruin. Late nights, women, alcohol, drugs, gangs, gambling and all of that without leaving Tin Town. What he’d said about clean living? He’d gone from dirty to irredeemable within weeks, selling, buying, stealing, leaving for days at a time to go on a bender, or weeks at a time to laze around in the quiet home of some sexual conquest until she kicked him out. I saw Yago more often than I saw Frankie during those years in Kriket’s trailer. Yago kept his stash there. I was Frankie’s son.

  At the hospital, the nurses brought me a covered plate of turkey dinner on Christmas Day, and clean clothes from someone’s tall husband, and they let me take a hot shower while the staff had their party down the hall. I was in Byrd’s room, still wet from the shower and with a towel around my waist, waiting for the nurse to find the bag of clean clothes, when the door opened. It was Lark. She did not seem surprised to see me. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

  “You going to tell your dad?”

  She shrugged and handed me a grocery bag, saying, “The nurse asked me to give you these. Clothes?”

  It had only been weeks since that night at Secret Lake but she was different, older somehow, wearing baggy sweats and sneakers. “How is he?” she asked, hardly taking her eyes from his body on the hospital bed.

  “They’re taking the tube out next week.” I stepped behind a curtain in the small room to change.

  “What’s the point?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t he a … you know …?”

  I knew what she was asking. “No.”

  “My dad says he won’t ever be the same.”

  “No one is.”

  “I’m not,” she said quietly.

  “I thought Harley would want you home for Christmas,” I said when I joined her at Byrd’s bedside.

  “I’m driving to the desert this afternoon with Gisele.” She turned away from me, sniffling.

  “You’re still friends?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Lark said.

  We were quiet, listening to the machines.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Lark, I’m so sorry.”

  She looked me in the eye for the first time.

  “I got the red weed. I made the tea.”

  “For me, though. You did it for me.” She shifted her gaze to Byrd.

  “He’s going to get better,” I promised.

  The way she looked at me—I read so much into her expression that day. I mistook her guilt for lust, and her pity for affection, and I saw a promise for a future when there was only fervent hope she’d never have to see me again.

  “I’ll write to you,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “Will you write me back?”

  “I’m gonna be pretty busy.”

  “I’ll write to you anyway. Even if you don’t write me back.”

  Had I seen the truth in that moment I’d never have sought Lark out at the church before her friend’s wedding. Never uttered those pitiful words broadcast to the crowd—the final straw. Still, I don’t like to wonder what would have become of the Devines, what would have become of all of us, if I hadn’t been on the mountain that day.

  One Friday morning, early in the New Year, I rode the hospital elevator up to Byrd’s floor, groggy and sore from having slept, or rather not slept, on a park bench.

  His ventilator had been removed successfully and Byrd had been breathing on his own for more than a week. Harley and the others started making more frequent, unexpected trips to the hospital, staying at Byrd’s bedside long into the night. I’d have to leave to wander the streets, and sleep in the park with the other homeless. The nurses would hang a surgical mask in the window when it was all right for me to come back.

  Each day Byrd breathed on his own seemed worse than the one before. He groaned almost constantly, a low growling sound that Nurse Nancy said didn’t necessarily mean he was in pain but it was awful to hear. By the second week there was no improvement. I
was prepared to face the worst.

  I’d watched Harley from a distance, plodding up the steps to the hospital. I knew how he felt. I was anxious that day, pacing in the parking lot, looking up at the window for my all-clear sign. When I saw Nurse Nancy hang up the mask only an hour after Harley’s arrival I didn’t see it as a good sign and bolted for the door.

  The elevator doors parted on Byrd’s floor and I was shocked to see Harley still there—I was sure I’d seen the surgical mask hanging in the window. Something was wrong. There were other Diaz relatives in the corridor. Dantay. Juan Carlos. Not Lark. Harley lunged forward and grasped my shoulders, embracing me warmly. Then he looked me in the eye for the first time since the accident. “Lark told me you had nothing to do with it. She told me it was all her friend’s idea—that you and Byrd were against the red weed all along.”

  I wanted to ask what took her so long to tell the truth, but I could see there was something else going on.

  “He opened his eyes,” Harley said, grinning.

  “Byrd’s awake?”

  “Last night. The nurse said he called out for you.”

  I shot down the hall and burst into the hospital room where I found Byrd being attended by several of the nurses. Something wasn’t right. I knew it by the nurses’ sombre faces. I drew closer to the bed where Byrd was blinking rapidly.

  As I got closer to the bed he stopped blinking entirely, and focused on the ceiling with a strange expression. His upper lip twitched as his gaze shifted lower, then high, like he was a lizard scoping a fly.

  Leaning over the bed, crowding his eye-line, I could see that he didn’t recognize me. There was no brightness whatsoever in his expression. When I said my name he didn’t blink. When I said his name he didn’t react. He didn’t seem to know I was in the room. He didn’t seem to know he was in the room.

  Nurse Nancy appeared at my side. She put her warm hand on my shoulder, telling me with a gentle squeeze that I should have low expectations. Harley joined us in the room, repeating what the doctors had said about the unpredictable nature of brain injuries. Recovery would be slow or rapid, or there would be no recovery. Or full recovery. The only thing the doctors agreed on was that it was a miracle that Byrd survived at all.

  Back on the mountain, I wished I’d declined the request to tell the rest of Byrd’s story. The Devines were more than a little disheartened by the uncertain ending. The injustice of it was hard to bear.

  Carrying sticks to protect ourselves—even Nola—we made our way to the wall. From my angle at the bottom of it, the rock face appeared to have changed overnight—growing higher, steeper, more concave.

  “I’m glad, at least, that you didn’t pull Byrd’s plug,” Bridget said. “I thought that’s what you were going to tell us.”

  Something streaked through the branches over our heads.

  “Did you see that?” Nola asked, gesturing with the stick in her good hand.

  “I think it was an owl,” Vonn said.

  “We need to crush more sterasote,” I said, noting Nola’s decline.

  Bridget was proud to dispense a cache of the leaves from her pocket. “I got some more leaves earlier.” We settled down on the metates where Nola had fallen and hit her head the day before, and began to crush the sterasote. I became mesmerized by the image on the blood-stained rock in my periphery, the sharp portrait of a bird in flight. It seemed like a message. But I couldn’t think of what it meant. Was Byrd saying he was here with me? Overhead, the crows cawed, attacking a Cooper’s hawk who’d been swooping in to raid their nest. I thought of eggs, which made me feel hungry and sick.

  A branch snapped in the brush behind us. We stopped, reaching for our sticks. Coyotes. We waited, hearts thudding, primed for the fight. I sniffed the wind but couldn’t find their scent. Scenes from the previous night flashed before me: Vonn’s toes in my mouth, the coyote shaking Pip’s remains, the pair of animals making that magnificent leap over Devine Divide.

  The memory of the leaping coyotes sparked more images from my dream and I remembered the part where my mother told me to make a bridge. “Last night,” I said, “I had this strange dream.”

  “A future-dream?” Bridget said, leaning in. “What did you dream?”

  I had to see for myself if what I’d seen in my dream really existed, and so I rose and began to lurch over the rocks and through the brush toward the crevice. I must have looked like I’d lost my mind, mumbling, “My mother said to make a bridge.”

  “Wolf?”

  “WOLF!” Vonn shouted, chasing after me. “What about the sterasote?”

  Bridget helped Nola to her feet and they followed too, all of them calling my name.

  “Come on,” I shouted, charged with the notion that my dream had been a message. I badly wanted to believe.

  And there it was, near the sterasote bush—the moss-mottled lodgepole pine that my mother had been standing on. “Okay,” I said.

  The fallen pine was partly hidden in the brush, leaning against a massive boulder—not unusual in this terrain—not rooted but fallen from the ridge above. “This is it!”

  The Devines could only stare.

  The log was long enough to span the crevice and appeared sturdy enough too. If we could stand it up, with a good push from eight hands (well, seven with Nola’s injury) it would fall across the divide and become locked in by the two large boulders that flanked the slope.

  “Whatever you’re thinking—no,” Bridget said.

  “This log was in my dream. My mother told me to make a bridge.”

  “I believe you, Wolf,” Bridget said. “But no.”

  “It’s our only way out,” I said.

  “What else did you dream?” Bridget asked.

  “Byrd told me to look for a pine tree.”

  “So we could make a bridge?”

  “No, another pine. It was standing alone near this wide bare mesa.”

  “You really think this is our only chance?” Vonn said to clarify.

  “He said it was the Way.”

  “The way to Secret Lake?” Nola asked. We all turned to look at her. She was shivering badly. I took off my parka and put it on her shoulders.

  “The Mountain Station’s that way,” I said, pointing. “See up there, where the ridges connect? If we can get across here, and get back up there, I know I can find our way back now that I have my bearings.”

  The Devines studied the spot where the ridges joined at the top of the slope.

  “It does look like it’d be easy enough to get there,” Vonn said.

  “I won’t be crawling across any bridge,” Bridget said.

  “That mesa from my dream? Maybe we’ll see it up there where the ridges connect.”

  “What if it gets foggy again?”

  “Then we’ll wait it out, but at least we’re up there, which is better than being trapped down here.”

  “But won’t it roll!” Nola said, pointing at the log.

  “Look at the crux of those two boulders on the other side. If we can all push together, from here, the log will fall right there. See. And on this side it’s stabilized by this tree and this boulder.”

  “How’d it get here?” Vonn asked.

  “Fell from up there,” Bridget said. “Like us.”

  “Maybe it was the Cahuilla,” Nola said. “The ones who made the mortar holes. Maybe they were going to make a bridge.”

  “Why didn’t they then?” Vonn asked. “And how did they get here if they didn’t have a bridge?”

  “Would it even hold our weight?” Nola wondered.

  “Lodgepole is strong,” I said.

  “I’ll wait here. You can send back the rescue team,” Bridget said.

  We were silent for a while, letting the wind cool our fear. A fascinating disconnect, because while our circumstances demanded urgency our thoughts were inclined to wander, make long detours for the right answer.

  “What if no one is looking for us?” I said finally.

  We stood together
, staring at the moss-covered log.

  “Even if we could push that log over I will not be walking across it,” Bridget said again.

  “I could never do that either,” Nola said.

  “I’m thinking more that we straddle the log and shimmy across.” Like me and Byrd in the storm on Angel’s Peak.

  A pair of crows settled near some brush higher up on the rocky steps and when I turned to look at them I noticed the deep fault in the boulder to the right of the sterasote bush. I’d been standing on that very rock in the dusk collecting leaves only hours ago but looking at it from this new angle I noticed that the fissure was deep, and in fact seemed to cut through the length of the boulder.

  Time. Maybe it was the rhythmically swaying pine branches that put me in mind of a clock. The sun was moving in and out of the clouds, casting shadows then stealing them away so quickly it made me dizzy. I clapped my hands together, as much to get my own attention as that of the Devines. “We have to make decisions. I say we try the bridge.”

  “I say we stay,” Bridget voted. “No offence to your dream, Wolf. It’s too big a risk.”

  “But what if no one is looking?” Vonn asked. “Like Wolf said.”

  “They must be by now,” Bridget said weakly.

  “Look over there, Bridget!” I said, pointing to the gentle slope on the other side. “We can be home in a few hours. A few hours.”

  “Do you honestly think that I am going to shimmy over a hundred-foot-deep crevice?”

  “If we don’t do it today,” I said quietly, “we might not have the strength tomorrow.”

  “Let’s do it,” Nola said. “Come on, Bridge.”

  “We need everyone to push it,” Vonn said.

  Bridget paused, then glanced at Vonn. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try to put the log across. See if it would even work,” she said.

  “So we push it. And it drops down and lands right exactly there and there?” Vonn asked.

  I nodded. And prayed.

  We didn’t waste another breath before gripping the big piece of timber, and on the count of three, as if we’d rehearsed it, as if we’d done it a thousand times, we heaved and hoed and pushed the log until it was vertical, then we dropped it, moss side up, across the crevice. It fell exactly at the crux, locked in by the rocks on either side, precisely where we’d intended.