The Mountain Story

by Lori Lansens

  Did we shout at Vonn? Did we reproach her? Did we throttle her? No. We sat there in shock. Vonn heaved a deep sigh, then mumbled something we assumed was a plea for forgiveness. What was that she said?

  “I said I’m pregnant,” Vonn repeated, and then said it once more, in case there was any lingering confusion. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  Dumbstruck by the first confession, dumbfounded by the second, we watched Vonn tear at the silver wrapper. I could smell it; cinnamon and oats, brown sugar. I wanted to snatch the bar from her thieving fingers and throw the whole thing down my gullet.

  She snapped the granola bar into three equal pieces and passed one to Nola, and one to Bridget, and finally to me. “I’m sorry,” she said, unable to meet our eyes. “I was throwing up so much, and I was so worried about the …”

  We, each of us, handed our morsel of granola back to Vonn. You’d think Vonn would have demurred, but she snatched back the pieces one by one and gobbled them all.

  “Does the father know?” Bridget rasped after a very long time.

  Yago popped into my head again. He’d already fathered six children at this point. Wouldn’t that be just my luck?

  Vonn shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

  “Do you know who the father is?” Bridget strained to say.

  “Are you really asking me that?”

  I’d wondered the same thing.

  “I know who it is. I just don’t remember his name,” Vonn said. “I’m not sure I ever asked his name.”

  Nola tsked.

  “I can hardly even remember what he looked like.”

  “You didn’t care what he looked like?” Bridget was aghast.

  “I was at a low point,” Vonn said. “Obviously.”

  “I usually turn to crossword puzzles,” Nola said flatly. “Or you might try crocheting. I can show you how to make mittens.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  Vonn just looked at me.

  “I mean—does everything feel normal?”

  “I guess,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  Nola smiled through her pain. “I hope it’s a girl, Vonn. Or a boy.”

  “You’ll be a great-grandmother, Mim,” Bridget said. She seemed oblivious to the fact that she would be a grandmother.

  Exhausted Vonn sat down on the rock beside me. I shifted my gaze to take in her physique. She did not look pregnant. It suddenly hit me that she might be lying. She’d already lied about the food and water.

  “How pregnant?” I asked.

  “First trimester,” Vonn said.

  I didn’t know what it meant and was embarrassed to ask.

  “Can we rest just a little longer?” Nola asked.

  We all stretched back out on the rock again, watching the birds circling over our heads.

  Vonn turned to me, speaking in a whisper. “What if we don’t make it?”

  “We will,” I said.

  “But if we don’t?”

  I had no response.

  “Three crows,” Nola said absently. “There used to be two. Weren’t there only two crows before?”

  I didn’t tell Nola that these black birds were not crows.

  Lying there in the warm sun, we must have fallen asleep, because a sound woke me—a sharp, screeching sound, metal on metal, the whirring, hacking sound of an engine turning but not catching. My mind was filled with the image of Yago trying to start his motorcycle. When I opened my eyes I could still hear the sound of Yago’s motorcycle, which obviously was not lost in the wilderness, but which I could nonetheless hear quite distinctly.

  No matter which direction I looked there was nothing but trees and bush and rock. Still, the noise—I had to see what the noise was, and so I rose, searching the perimeter for coyotes. I also found a few dozen large rocks here and there, and set them near Vonn, who I reckoned could throw the hardest in my absence, and left the slumbering Devines to follow the sound.

  Through the slanted forest I wandered, in and out of dappled light, then farther away, chasing that horrible screeching sound that both attracted and repelled me. I followed that pitchy grey and black noise beyond the bushes near a dramatic granite sculpture—a loaf of rock fractured in equal vertical portions that looked to my hungry eyes like slices of fresh bread. My gut seized with wanting and I remember having to stop myself from trying to bite the rock.

  The wind must have changed direction then. I hadn’t smelled the blood earlier and nearly gagged when it crawled up my nostrils and dripped down the back of my throat. I held my breath, but I’d been hallucinating and couldn’t trust my own eyes. Then I dared to look, wishing that I was not alone and could ask my companion if I was currently witnessing the evisceration of my cousin Yago by two of the biggest turkey buzzards I’d ever seen.

  The vultures were real, and also real were the awful, screeching, throaty engine-revving sounds they made—the reason they’re called buzzards—while pecking at the steaming carcass of a dead coyote.

  Was it the coyote with the injured leg? The one I’d hit with the jar full of Pip? The one I’d watched leap across the canyon and stumble on the landing? Possibly. I pitied the animal. And I was sorry if in some small way I was responsible for his death.

  I thought, for a moment, about salvaging the meat in some way but I wasn’t sure I had the strength to shoo the birds away, let alone the guts to swallow the scraps from a vulture’s lunch. I backed off from the exquisitely horrifying creatures, remembering there had been three of them. Where was the third?

  Back through the woods I ran, into the sunlight and over a ridge before I came to the Devines, still asleep on the warm granite bed. I remember running, but it must be a lie. I didn’t have the strength to run. Still, even weak as I was, I’m sure I would have caught and strangled the vulture I saw strutting around Vonn if he hadn’t flapped away on his own.

  Fluid. I badly needed fluid. I tried to will myself to think of anything but water, and turned to watch the sleeping Devines.

  I couldn’t entirely blame the bird, with the smell and all, for thinking that at least one of them was already dead. Time to move on. My sense of duty was intense. I had to protect these women. I had to get them safely home.

  “Vonn,” I called. “Bridget. Nola. We need to get moving.”

  Vonn woke first. “Bad dream,” she said, her mouth so dry she could barely form words. Bridget woke next. She tried to speak but her voice was still shredded. We all turned to look at Nola.

  “Mrs. Devine,” I said, leaning over her. “Nola.”

  She opened her eyes and smiled a little, but it was clear her condition was worsening. Her eyes were glassy from fever. “Another day,” she said. I couldn’t say she sounded relieved.

  The sun had fallen behind some grey-bellied clouds and without it I couldn’t begin to calculate the time.

  After helping the Devine women back into their dry coats I lifted them, one by one, to their feet, and led them onward toward our beacon—the lone pine from my dream, where the helicopter from Bridget’s dream would find us.

  My socks were no protection against the sharp rocks and thorny underbrush. My feet were as good as bare. “Shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours,” I said enthusiastically.

  After a very short time I stopped thinking about our destination, focused instead on finding a path through the wilderness that would be kindest to my shoeless feet. Where we were going didn’t seem as important as the fact that we were moving. As long as we were moving we might find food and water. As long as we were moving there was hope.

  Far away from the vultures, we picked our way down a short slope and through a forest of young white firs. I remember I was getting dizzy looking down and had to keep finding the horizon and the gesticulating pines, and the skyscrapers of gold-veined quartz, and the patches of mugwort, and the gritty Devines.

  We trudged up one short slope then down another, only to go up again and down again, and then traverse a few improvi
sed switchbacks until we had no sense that we were going one way or another, but looping back in on ourselves.

  I reminded them to look for food as we went, praying for a few paltry pine nuts forgotten by some overfed rodents. I was more optimistic that we’d come across a stream, a pond, even a puddle or two from the earlier rain.

  Up and down, through a forest of black oaks then into a mesa of manzanita and thorny chamise. After a time we came upon a collection of shaded boulders where I brushed away some dirt and acorn shells to make a place for Nola and Bridget and Vonn to rest. We huddled together as the wind rose up and the temperature fell.

  My fingers were throbbing. My feet were numb, the baby toes solid as little rocks. I didn’t express my pain or fear. Nola had set the tolerance bar ridiculously high in both regards. We were quiet, watching the clouds, imagining heaven—at least I was, calculating my odds.

  There was no water. No blue mesh bag to hope to find. No emotional revelations. No memories to keep or share. Our mouths were dry and I had the sense that my thoughts were becoming desiccated too.

  Nola pointed to the place where the darkening sky met the ragged green mountain range. “Looks like rickrack,” she said, following the line with her finger. “Your aunt Louise had a dress once with those colours. Louise. That’s a nice name, Vonn. Louise?”

  “Is it?” Vonn said.

  “Sam,” Bridget said with her strangled voice.

  “No boys’ names for girls,” Nola said. “Saints’ names always work. Theresa, Augusta, Sophia.”

  I found it disturbing that the Devine women were musing on names for a child that wouldn’t live to be born.

  “Season,” Bridget croaked. “Isn’t that one you said before, Mim?”

  Nola laughed. “Season? Wasn’t that you? How about Winter?”

  “Winter’s a boy’s name,” Bridget said.

  It was a ghoulish exercise and I needed them to stop. “We have to go on,” I said, trying to rise.

  But we couldn’t. Night had fallen. Maybe it came hard and fast, or maybe it wafted in, slowly and gently with a pink sunset in between—I don’t know. I was consumed by pain and hunger and thirst and fear and already mourning the loss of Vonn’s nameless baby.

  “It’s night,” Nola said.

  The Devines seemed as shocked about it as I was. We had no cave. We had no shelter. I turned to heaven, begging for mercy, unaware I was talking out loud. “You see us? You see us here? We’re lost as hell. We are crying out to you from the wilderness.”

  “Amen.” Nola squeezed my hand and we remained like that, hand in hand, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Bridget reached out to touch her daughter’s face, but before she could, a sound startled us all—a thunderous metal sound that we felt in the rock and saw in the trembling branches and heard in the trees and the air.

  We held our breath, looking around at one another, and then turning our attention to the earth. The plates had shifted. We didn’t know what it meant.

  Our teeth clicked in our dry mouths as we clung to one another against the cold, howling wind. Howling, yes, like a coyote, a wolf, a dying man, like a sound effect sampled from a horror show. Felt like a cheap shot, all considered. Did the wind honestly think we weren’t scared enough already?

  Beside me, Vonn began to gag and held her hand over her mouth as though she might vomit. After a moment she stopped.

  “False alarm?”

  Without anyone saying a word, we joined hands again.

  We may have slept, in and out of time and space. I remember hearing the owl hooting in my ear, and clawing my way back to awareness.

  At some point Byrd flew into my thoughts and I studied the stars, wondering where the hell he was. The Byrd who watched the mountain from Harley’s ranch was a long, dark shadow of the Byrd I knew.

  I closed my eyes, conjuring my friend as I’d done a hundred times before. I saw him in my mind’s eye, sitting there in one of the twin brown chairs at the big picture window, staring at the mountain, his eyes tracking the tram on the double jig-back system going up and down the steep rock face, all day and half the night. I saw myself there, saying my name, Wolf, wishing he understood.

  Then it was as though I could feel my own presence invade that sunroom in Harley’s ranch house and even though I had no form I sat in the twin brown leather chair across from Byrd and I said, “Dude. I am lost. I am lost with these three women and I’m afraid we’re all gonna die.”

  “You scare me when you talk to yourself,” Vonn said.

  I turned to find her wide-eyed beside me, confused to find myself surrounded by rock. “Just figuring out a plan,” I said. “We have to believe we’re going to get out of this.”

  The women, each of them, turned to stare.

  I remember that scene as vividly as any memory I have from those days on the mountain.

  Frightened of the vultures waiting in the dark, I prayed that no Devine predeceased me for it cut me to think of any one of them alone among corpses.

  Our mouths were so dry it amazes me that we made attempts to talk at all. My toes throbbed in the damp socks. The wind crept up behind me, whispering into my ear, taunting, accusing.

  I staggered to my feet, swatting at the air. In my mind I was fighting Yago. I must have looked insane.

  The women knew I’d lost it, but they also knew they were in no position to judge. The wind did die down eventually, with only the barest, sweetest lullaby still playing in the black forest. I felt like I’d won.

  “Shh!” Nola hissed, though no one was speaking.

  I could not stomach another discussion about a rescue helicopter.

  “Listen,” she said.

  We were quiet, listening for whatever it was Nola heard. Vultures, I thought. Maybe the surviving coyote? He had our scent. Or others? There were mountain lions here too. Bobcats were plentiful and could certainly kill a person with those jagged teeth and sharp claws.

  Nola sat up, her face lit by the moon. “There’s something out there.”

  And I heard it then, cracking branches, rustling leaves. It sounded like an animal, a large animal, crashing through the brush like Frankie on a bender. Mountain lion? Maybe we were threatening her cubs. Could be a male bighorn. They could gore you to death if you were in their territory during rutting season. But how did you know where their territory was?

  The crashing sound stopped on the other side of the darkness. The animal—mountain lion, I’d decided—having been lured away by some other, smaller prey.

  “It’s gone,” I said.

  We fell silent. The women gave in to exhaustion. I stayed awake, comforted by Bridget’s fluty snores.

  The branches broke around me. Leaves rustled in the breeze. We were being stalked again, or it was just the wind, or a rat. I reached for my stick and gathered several more rocks at my feet. The icy air stung my lungs.

  To keep myself awake I thought about Frankie.

  My father was one of those guys people loved until they hated. The greatest guy, the funniest guy, the most generous guy, until he cheated on you, or stole from you, or moved you away from your home in Michigan and abandoned you in a trailer in the desert. I don’t know if his presence in my life would have been less or more painful than his absence. Everything with Frankie was a toss-up.

  From time to time Frankie would burst into Kriket’s trailer in the night. I could hear him laughing, beer cans smacking against the kitchen table, the ashtray falling to the floor. Sometimes he left without saying hello. Twice he woke me in my sleeping bag on the floor. Once he wanted to borrow sixty dollars. Once he wanted to give me ten. I could never decide if I was glad or sorry he’d come.

  I didn’t attend classes at SSHS much past the middle of my freshman year. Like Byrd, I had trouble fitting in. Instead I signed up for correspondence classes, forging my father’s signature on the necessary documents, not because he wouldn’t have signed them but because he was never around when they needed to be signed. I finished the f
our-year course in less than three and was mailed my diploma the fall before I turned seventeen. Frankie didn’t know any of that. He never asked about school.

  He appeared out of the blue one night, a few weeks after my fifteenth birthday, which he’d missed. “Where you been, Frankie?”

  “Around.”

  “You’re never here.”

  “I met a woman,” he grinned. “She lives way the hell out in Indio. Divorced. Swimming pool.”

  “Still …”

  “You wouldn’t expect me to bring her here?”

  I saw his point.

  “Heard you’re working out at the gas station.”

  “Early morning shift. Have been for a long time.”

  Frankie wasn’t a morning person. “Try to get a later one.”

  “Byrd’s got the later one.”

  “They careful about inventory?”

  Frankie was always looking for an angle. Maybe it was in his genes. I didn’t see him again until Christmas Day. He showed up at the trailer like Santa Claus with gifts for everybody. For me, a high-end car audio system wrapped up in a kid’s jacket and stuffed into a plastic pail. I still have it.

  I saw Frankie much more regularly after my return to the desert following Byrd’s hospital stay because I moved into Byrd’s apartment behind the gas station and started working the night shift as well as the day shift. Frankie dropped by at least once a week. He was there to snare free cigarettes and gas but we both pretended he cared.

  Harley brought Byrd to his ranch to recover, and day by day, with the help of a private nurse and the best physical therapists, he continued to improve in the basic functions of walking and eating and going to the toilet. But he still had no language. No one knew what he was thinking or feeling or how much he understood of what was said to him.

  He was Byrd but not Byrd, brought back from the dead like Lazarus from the Bible, or the gruesome pets in Stephen King.

  At first I visited him every day in the sunroom Harley’d built for him with its stunning view of the mountain. He’d sit there for hours on end in that brown leather chair, remembering? Trying to forget? I was so sure if I could get him to say my name, Wolf or even Wilfred, something would reboot in his brain.