The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  Chapter 11

  I guess Ram told you, this is the best bunch of foals we’ve had in years. It’s a good thing Douglas is doin’ a man’s work around here now. You sure you don’t want more pancakes before I put this batter away?”

  “No thanks, ‘Cille. I’m too full to ride as it is. I wanted to be up by sunrise, but I was dead to the world.”

  “Well, it would have surprised me if you’d been up that early. I saw how tired you were when you got here.”

  “I’m sure going to make up for lost time. Lying there last night, I saw the whole summer stretching out before me. I heard the crickets and the wind in the live oak outside my window…smelled the jasmine floating in—or maybe I was floating out,” Catherine laughed. “I was falling asleep by then. But I could feel myself already letting go.”

  “Good. If you’re not open to it, this country can’t do much more for you than the city can.”

  “Oh I’m open to it! And meals like this. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to your cooking.”

  Lucille smiled appreciatively as she took a large potato from the pantry for Ram’s breakfast. It was nice to have someone new to cook for again. She washed and diced the potato, affecting a casualness in her voice that she didn’t really feel. “You talk to your parents before you left?”

  “What for? I don’t need their permission to come up here.”

  Sighing, Lucille replied, “I just wondered if you’d spoken to them recently.”

  With great post-adolescent weariness, Catherine got up from the table and carried her dishes to the sink. “Things haven’t changed between us, ‘Cille. My father still thinks I’m some kind of retro-hippie tramp or something—I’m not sure what he thinks anymore. And Mom’s just another of his executive vice presidents. Without pay of course, no title on the door. Just unquestioning loyalty to the firm.”

  Lucille pursed her lips in disapproval but checked her response. When she did speak it was with resignation. “What upsets me isn’t what you say about your folks but how you feel about yourself. All I can say is I’m glad you’ve got another summer to get acquainted. One of these days you’re going to find out you’re not half bad.”

  Catherine, standing at the sink, looked at Lucille with a mixture of gratitude, anguish, and embarrassment, unable to respond. The two women stood there, no longer separated by the space between them. This is all there is, a voice said to Lucille.

  And then Ram walked in. The moment stretched to admit him…but wouldn’t hold; time rushed in around him. Catherine whooshed like a released balloon. “I was hoping you’d come in, before I go off for the day!” she exclaimed, running up to him with an expansive gesture mimicking a bird soaring. “I have so much to talk to you about.”

  The Indian opened one big arm, bringing serene silent laughter in with the morning air. “What do you have to tell me?” He really wanted to know, there was no question about that.

  “There’s so much I don’t know where to begin. Mmm, that smells good!” Lucille had just handed Ram a cup of his favorite tea, steeping in a bamboo strainer. “What is it?”

  “Spearmint, fennel, lemon grass….” They were all herbs from the mountain or the forests and meadows at its base. The ingredients varied with the seasons and subtle changes in his state of health, though it was generally superb.

  “I’m going to take a picnic out by the falls and just ride all day,” Catherine said.

  “Is that what you wished to discuss?” Ram lifted the steaming cup to his lips.

  Catherine asked herself whether she really wanted to get into a discussion now that she had the opportunity. Maybe a beginning. “…What do you think about my coming back up here again this summer? Instead of working, I mean. Bill thinks it’s just an escape.”

  Lucille snorted in disagreement at the stove. Ram seemed preoccupied with something. He cradled the cup in his big leathery hands, inhaling its steaming vapor, his eyes for the moment turned inward. As he spoke, however, he looked deeply into Catherine’s.

  “When I said yesterday that you had been anticipated, I did not mean by only those of us here at the ranch.”

  Catherine was delighted with this mysterious preface. “What do you mean, Ram?”

  He didn’t answer. Rising gracefully from the table, he set his half-empty cup on the counter, at the same time exchanging a curt, ambiguous look with Lucille. Catherine noticed and wondered whether he was simply excusing himself for walking out on the breakfast, or whether something deeper was implied. Ram looked over at her standing there expectantly and chuckled at the sense of drama in the room.

  “Ra-am…tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “Let’s walk.” His face had become serious again as they left the house and walked arm-in-arm to the corrals. “I had a dream the night before you came.”

  Catherine’s eyes widened but she said nothing. Ram sculpted the scene he was describing in wonderfully spare gestures which brought it vividly to life. The sound of his voice, the natural intonation of a masterful story-teller, was almost hypnotic. “Jebel Druze, alone in a sea of grass. The sky was orange, as if a prairie fire or a great wind approached.”

  Catherine heard the sound of that howling wind and saw the horse. “The stallion looked toward me. ‘ When does she come?’ I knew it was more than the animal asking.”

  They had reached the stallion’s corral. The Indian, his elbows on the top rail, was looking at Jebel Druze. Catherine glanced briefly at the horse, but her attention quickly returned to Ram and the vision he had created for her. It hovered impalpably in the air between them, yet distant, in her mind’s eye. The stallion—the visionary one, stretched out now in full stride in ominous, premonitory stillness—advanced at the head of a great billowing plume of dust, or smoke.

  “The dream came from the Mountain,” said Ram. “This summer will be very special for you, Catherine. You must be alert.”

  Chapter 12

  Eugene came out of the turn about 80, so low his cold steel footrest pulled a fiery train through the turn. Tired of its inland journey, Baja 1 had returned to the sea. Mirages shimmered over the ribbon of hot pavement as if phantom fingers of the Pacific were taking the highway’s pulse. Suddenly in the distance, signal-like flashes of sun on metal caught Eugene’s eye. He squinted. It was a cluster of bikes.

  Wondering idly who they were, he didn’t particularly welcome the intrusion. At times now he drove in an almost meditative state, in which he so lost himself that all sense of his own motion stopped; he became a still spot in the center of an oceanic landscape, which flowed against, beneath, around him as if he were suspended in air or water. Naturally, the first few times he’d found himself slipping into this state of mind it scared the hell out of him. After a few close calls, he no longer drove stoned, and this seemed even more dangerous. What was he supposed to do, negotiate by remote control?

  That’s just about what he’d learned to do. In this condition of apparent vulnerability, his field of perception actually seemed to expand somehow, his sense of timing to become synchronous with events rather than responsive to them. He couldn’t foresee the van about to careen around the corner or the box about to fall from the truck in front of him—even a split second before they happened. But when these things did occur it was as if he had already adjusted for them on some unconscious level. When he was in this still, suspended place, events seldom took him by surprise.

  Unfortunately, these experiences were rare. He couldn’t induce them. About the only control he had was his recognition and acceptance of the mental condition when it came over him. And this morning, having come back to the coast for the long run into the States, he’d been hovering on the edge of it. Now he was firmly back on the ground. It pissed him off.

  As he got closer to the bikes Eugene saw that they were choppers—nine of them, taking up both lanes of the narrow highway. They didn’t appear aware of him as he came up fast on the outside, but as he was about to pass the three in
back, they swung abruptly to the left in unison. Only his exceptional reflexes kept Eugene from shooting off a high embankment onto the narrow rocky beach. Instead, his sharp turn to the right thrust him into the middle of the gang. He realized now that they had been waiting for him.

  On his left was a little guy in wire rim glasses. Immediately in front was a big fella, the Fool. He slowed suddenly and Eugene made a move that just about blew the three in back off their bikes. Instead of braking he accelerated, lifting his front wheel almost straight up and leaning back until it looked as if he’d pulled a wheelie that was going to land the bike on top of him. But it didn’t happen. Pivoting the bike on its rear wheel, he threw his weight into a 360-degree turn in one continuous motion.

  When he came down he was angled to the left and shot between wire rims and the Fool before either knew what had happened. The trio in back looked at one another for confirmation of what they’d just witnessed and Jerry, the little boy on the Fool’s bike, whooped in amazed delight.

  Meanwhile Eugene juked Pretty Boy with ease, feinting to his right and passing on the left. Just ahead, long braid streaming behind him like a weapon in his slipstream, was Fu—arguably the best rider in the gang. He hung tight on the left edge of the highway, ignoring Eugene’s quick feints to the right. When he finally made his move, the Chinaman went right with him.

  But Eugene wasn’t about to be contained by either Fu or the highway. Along the right side of the road ran a clay bank about eight feet high, slightly concave and littered with loose rock. Eugene cut into it so smoothly he was up under the overhanging lip and back down on the road, ahead of Fu, before clay and sandstone could think of giving way beneath him. Instead it was the Fool and the three in back who had to maneuver sharply to avoid the falling rocks.

  Now who was the young lady? Fine-looking—and look at how she handled that Harley! She matched Eugene juke for wheel-fake as he hung on her tail trying to pass. And he had to get past quickly—he could feel Fu’s fury right on his ass.

  They were approaching a gentle curve to the left. The road dropped off steeply on the ocean side but there was no guardrail. Eugene saw his opening. He swung violently to the right, braked then shot out toward the unguarded berm on the left. If the girl recovered quickly enough to force him off the road, and wanted to, he was dead. But he didn’t stop to consider the consequences. He had to get past her; the encounter had become a test of wills and skill that he was as caught up in as they were.

  When he accelerated, Eugene’s bike left the ground entirely. There couldn’t have been the width of his tires between hurtling machine and the sheer drop-off. He flashed past the Leader uncontested, with a small tight smile of conquest, impulsively thrusting his fist into the air. The same momentum that had lifted his bike off the ground left him electrified. Mind, body, senses, and emotions were fused in that upraised gloved fist.

  Who the hell was that bunch? They were already far behind. He hadn’t run across a bike yet that could keep up with the classic expertly maintained Custom 1200. He glanced at the speedometer and was surprised at his speed. His pulse was racing. Wow—what a show! He erupted in a loud long rebel yell that he felt clear to his fingertips. He hadn’t made some of those moves in years. Hell, he’d never made the full twist before. That was a performance he couldn’t improve on.

  Yet he had the strangest feeling he might have to. He was going to run into these people again—he suddenly knew this with unsettling certainty. The guy in front, the only one who’d made no attempt to stop him. Eugene had caught just a glimpse of him when he shot past: cool, imperturbable. Nothing remarkable, but somehow he’d induced an intuition that Eugene wasn’t getting past him this easily.

  Why did the knowledge bother him? He wasn’t afraid of them was he? Perhaps it was the sense of premonition that was vaguely disturbing. A shiver of excitement ran up his back. Was this damn mountain talking to him already?

  Eugene spent the rest of the day tracing the Mexican coastline from Rosario to Tijuana like a child outlining a picture in a coloring book. He wasn’t tired at the border, he wanted to go on. There were people he could stay with: friends in Venice and Van Nuys, both ends of the gaudy spectrum in the City of the Angels. He could spend the night watching the Marina lust after its barefoot neighbor—trying to entice Aphrodite into his big black Cadillac car—or he could wheel up Van Nuys Boulevard and pretend to be King of the Valley.

  * * *

  In the meantime, Catherine was reclaiming the country she’d grown up in. Her picnic was only part of an all-day sensory feast. In her nostrils was the sweet pine-scented air of the highlands; against her skin, the undiffused heat of the sun and mentholating intermittent breezes, cool enough to make the snow above her on the Mountain real, not just a whiteness to please the eye.

  And Jebel Druze: all the surrounding beauty somehow focused into substantiality, grace and power beneath her, at her control, carrying her swiftly, smoothly where her heart desired and her desire willed—a flying dream come true.

  Late in the morning she came to one of the many streams which in the spring descended from Shasta’s snowfields. This one was special though: the only one on the ranch side of the mountain that ran full year-round. Jebel snorted loudly and shook his head in satisfaction as he entered the water up to his fetlocks.

  “Oh I agree, Jebel! It’s been one hell of a morning! Ga-lor-i-ous!” Dropping the reins, she slipped her boots off in the stirrups and tossed them onto the bank. “You know where we’re going, don’cha, Baby. I’ll bet no one’s been there since last summer.”

  She slid into the icy water, gasping. “Oh Jesus it’s cold! Whoo!” Her shrieks turned to laughter as she leaned against the drinking stallion. “I can’t believe I’m here again, Jebel! Isn’t it wonderful? Did you miss me, Baby? Did you miss me?” Catherine put her head right down beside his own. He snorted again, blowing bubbles around his nose and sending her into another peal of excited laughter. He rolled his eye at her as she leaned over and dipped her hands in the rushing water to splash against her face.

  “Do you remember how to get there? That tricky little ledge. Not too hard for you is it, Baby.” Refreshed, she swung back into the saddle, leaving her boots to pick up later, and guided the horse along a narrow shelf of rock beside the stream. At the foot of a series of short falls, the ledge wound upstream, midway between the bank above it and the trellis of falling water. It was a risky climb, but Jebel was no clumsy trail horse, and the secluded pool at the trail’s end was Catherine’s sanctuary from the world.

  Clear and deep, the pool filled a granite goblet like an emerald liqueur. One piece of its rim was missing and here the water spilled onto a small sandy beach that was sun-warmed most of the day. Ringed by aspen and alder, the pool lay in the center of a glade that had once been a pond and was now a bowl of lush grass and trees, surrounded on three sides by steep banks. A thick stand of sugar pines hid glade and pool from an overgrown logging trail that only the deer used anymore.

  As she took it all in again—water, sun, trees and wind: sitting here bathed in radiance—Catherine’s chest expanded with excitement and fulfillment until she literally gasped with each intake of breath. My God, she was going to explode with joy! Why? Why? Why couldn’t she carry over from such moments this deep sense of wonder and thankfulness at being alive. What an incredible gift life was! She exhaled deeply, tears filling her eyes and now running down her cheeks as if, the thought flashed into her mind, pulled by the stream itself—pulled by the forces which draw all flowing water.

  A scalding sensation was working its way up through her bowels and intestines, into her solar plexus and rib cavity, searing her heart, damming up in her throat to squeeze a high keening wail from her larynx. Building in volume and intensity until the stallion’s ears twitched and she herself laughed and sobbed at the same time as the bubble of emotion forced its way through her constricted throat to burst out into the afternoon, this cry of release.

  Then it was over. She
leaned back in the saddle with her hands on the horse’s flanks, the expression on her tear-streaked face as serene as the surface of the clear, deep pool.

  Chapter 13

  Eugene glanced at the sleepers as he walked past their door to the bathroom. A streetlight and the smell of dawn intruded through their partially open window. United in sleep now, and by inertia in a failed relationship, they had been too busy quarreling with other last night to communicate much with him.

  Oh, they’d jumped him at first, as a temporary diversion. He knew Gage from their street days in New York and had met Marty four or five years ago. She was a singer who worked as a waitress when they needed the extra money, which was most of the time now. She’d begun to give up on her dream. Gage was a welder and sculptor who couldn’t seem to put enough time or energy into either one to get ahead or to gain any real satisfaction. He’d started imagining his torch as a weapon, he said. Standing in line at the bank or mired in traffic, he fantasized wielding it like a laser in a future-fantasy flick.

  Eugene had looked for an opening, some way to get beneath his old friend’s armor of bluster and anger, but then Gage and Marty had started in on each other, at first trying to get him to take sides, then channeling the energy of his visit into whatever game they were playing. He threw his bedroll on the floor in the spare room and got four hours of sound sleep.

  He stood now on the porch overlooking a secluded Venice walk street overgrown with jasmine, hibiscus, and bamboo. The predawn stillness let the least breath of night air have its final say. He’d intended to leave a note for his hosts but had found nothing to say, before deciding that this was as blunt and honest a message as any. Dropping the pen he’d dug out of a drawer, he sighed, thinking of the stale friendship, the drifting and pointless lives, his negligence over the years of these people and others.