Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  What if she had died that night? Would her friends have built an altar in front of her apartment building, or in West Hollywood? Sleater-Kinney and Spicy Champon CDs, an issue of her magazine, a jar of buttons, framed fashion sketches, spread among organically grown flowers? Would they include a photo of her with Eva or not? Would the neighbors walk by and wonder what happened?

  Lilac died here, but there’s nothing to show for it, and this makes Felix feel small. What about this Cal person—why didn’t he pound a wooden cross into the ground? What about Lilac’s father? Everyone becomes suspicious.

  There is a rumble. Felix’s first thought is cave-in! Her second thought is that it’s her stomach. She remembers her lunch and stands up, switching her flashlight back on.

  This time the beam illuminates an oval of short, yellow-brown fur. She leaps back and presses her body against the other side of the tunnel. She swings her flashlight away and runs for the mouth of the cave, heart in her stomach.

  Her feet pound the hard-packed dirt. This is too familiar. Again, something wants to harm her. Something bigger than both of the creatures involved, as big as fear and hunger. The too-soon reprise of the night on Cynthia Street sickens her. The melody lets her know it could wear her down: You want to be part of something? Be a part of this worst, common thing. Fear-and-hunger. What to do but crumple in its wake, again? But her feet are part of something bigger too, and they keep moving.

  It’s a short distance to the entrance, but she is out of breath by the time she hits sunlight. She stops in front of her car and remembers that her keys are in her backpack, which is in the mine, not far from the breathing, growling animal. Her first instinct is to keep running, but she doesn’t want to enter a foot race with a creature who has twice as many legs as she does. Whose stomach might be the one making noise. She has to go back.

  She tries to recall everything she learned when she went camping with her parents as a kid. When you see a mountain lion, you’re supposed to yell and stomp. When you see a bear, crouch down and put your hands over your head and neck. Or is it the other way around? The animal was too light-colored to be a bear, she’s pretty sure, but it could have been a coyote, a lost dog, a chupacabra.

  She settles on a strategy of non-invasiveness. Don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you, she thinks. Flashlight aimed at the side of the tunnel where her backpack is and, thankfully, where the animal isn’t, Felix takes the softest steps she can into the mine. But her red Adidas sneakers still make a gentle crunch against the ground. Her backpack rests just a few feet from the half-asleep thing. There is a glistening to her right.

  She crouches down, puts her hands on the backpack. Two glassy spots. Eyes. They get narrow, then large again. In the dusky perimeter of her flashlight’s beam, there is a stirring of tawny fur. Holding her backpack in front of her, she creeps backward, watched.

  Felix leaves her lunch as an offering. This will be the day that beasts of the Sierras discover soy salami.

  It takes an eternity to reach the entrance. She hits the sun and fresh air like she’s coming up from a dive. She can’t resist running the remaining distance to her car, ignoring her cramping side.

  She doesn’t notice that her hand is shaking until she puts the key in the door. As she starts the engine, she sees a cat the size of a Vespa slink out of the tunnel and into the light. It looks around quickly, pink nose sniffing for danger, then bounds up the hillside on huge, cappuccino-colored haunches.

  When she reaches the paved road, her heart stops bounding as well. The cat acted the way that Endora, Crane’s girlfriend’s former alley cat, did whenever someone nudged a broom in her direction. Imagine never getting to take a nap without fearing for your life.

  The yawning autumn sun is low in the sky, and Felix pulls her car’s visor down. Her sunglasses, she realizes, are still in the mine. They were cheap, but she liked the way they made her look. Still, she decides, they have nothing on real cat eyes.

  “You saw a mountain lion? No one ever sees mountain lions.” This is the most animated Felix has seen her aunt. “How far away did you say you were?”

  “Like four feet maybe,” Felix says.

  “Wow. Goddamn. I mean, I’ve been doing search and rescue for 20 years and I’ve never seen one. I’ve seen a couple of torn-up deer carcasses that made me think that was fine by me.” Anna Lisa shakes her head. “Wait till I tell the guys on the squad about this. Four feet, huh?”

  “Really?” Felix bites her bottom lip to stifle her smile.

  “Sure. They’re so shy. More of a legend than an animal, practically. As the place gets more developed maybe there’ll be more encounters—I worry about that sometimes—but for the most part they just don’t want to be bothered.”

  “I just didn’t want to be bothered.” Felix is grinning in full now, laughing with relief. Anna Lisa’s reaction makes her wonder if she was in more danger than she knew. She feels stupid, lucky, and proud.

  “Shit,” Anna Lisa continues, “I can’t believe you just stared that thing down.”

  “I didn’t ’stare it down,’ ” Felix protests. “I needed my car keys.”

  “Hey, when isn’t it about survival? Maybe you’ve got more in you than you know.” Anna Lisa hangs Felix’s backpack on the hook by the door like a trophy. For the rest of the week, she calls Felix “Lion Tamer,” and Felix itches to live up to it.

  “Genevieve’s school supposedly has the best Halloween party every year,” says Crane when she calls late one Wednesday night. Usually Felix has to call her. “This year they’re calling it the Terrorgasm Ball. She’s going to try to get us tickets.”

  Felix is cross-legged on her bed, phone wedged between ear and shoulder. She feels like a teenager. The postcard is propped on a lump of blanket, the looping L facing her. She’s a little tired of Genevieve, who seems to have unlimited access to all things edgy.

  “If that falls through,” Crane continues, “I guess we’ll do the West Hollywood thing.” She sighs.

  “Remember last time, two years ago?” says Felix.

  “Was that the year we got stuck behind the KIIS-FM booth?” Crane says.

  “Yeah, and Robbie and Andrew were fighting, and the stupid DJ kept making fun of the drag queens. It’s like, why is the station there then?”

  “ ‘Cause fags love dance music.”

  “Mm.”

  “What are you doing for Halloween?” Crane asks.

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing.”

  “But Halloween’s your favorite holiday. It’s, like, our culture. Are you still obsessing over Eva?” she demands. She says it like, Are you still wearing body glitter? Something Felix should be done with.

  “Yeah, sort of. I’m horny, I can tell you that. But mostly there’s not a lot to do here. You know what I really want to do? I want to go to a real haunted house.” Felix is pacing the room now, leaning her shoulder against the window. She studies the splotchy moon and stars spilled like hole punchings on the black velvet sky.

  “How are you… doing?” Crane says carefully. Her voice implies that Felix has a terminal illness. The girl who once danced at raves wearing only a glowstick is crushed by the weight of taboo.

  Felix touches her ribcage. A few days ago, a doctor friend of Anna Lisa’s gave her permission to remove the bandage for good. Yellow-green bruises on her pale stomach are the only remaining evidence. In a way, she feels betrayed, as if her body has moved on without her.

  “I kicked a mountain lion’s ass,” she says.

  “Huh?”

  “But ultimately I felt sorry, it looked kind of ragged. All that scampering through the hills.”

  “Nature is crazy, girl,” Crane laughs when it’s clear that she won’t have to play therapist. “That’s why I stick to good old Koreatown. Oh, hey, before I forget, how long are you staying there again? Because Vive is graduating at the end of the semester, but she got this internship at LACMA and even though she’d rather work at MOCA, she said she’ll take
it if she can keep living here, ’cause the commute is so not-that-bad.”

  “Vive?”

  “Genevieve. So would your aunt let you stay for another couple of months?”

  “Thanks for missing me,” Felix says.

  “Honey, you know I miss you. Robbie, he cries for you every night. Neither of us are bathing till you get home.” “Shut up.”

  Crane laughs. “Of course, we miss you. But Vive wants to know, and she’s cool, so, you’ve just gotta decide.”

  Felix decides she needs to find the postcard’s origins. Not so she can become famous, but so her dreams will stop filling up with missing girls. Eva dancing in the mouth of the tunnel. A bonneted figure climbing the ruins of the Berlin Wall, braids swinging. She wants Lilac to stop looking like Melissa Gilbert.

  She turns down lunch at Gold Nugget Pizza with Tawn, who seems slightly hurt (Tawn is hurt by the oddest things), and returns to the Visitors’ Center. She has a half hour before she has to get back to work, so she gets right to the point.

  “I found this postcard,” Felix tells Ranger LeVoy. The ranger has ditched her blonde braids for a traffic-cone-orange pageboy. Maybe the blonde wasn’t natural either. Felix describes the postcard. She could have brought it, but she didn’t want it to get smudged with her backpack’s 21st century mess: lipstick, protein bar, ballpoint pen. She wants to keep it safe.

  Ranger LeVoy is immediately interested. “Well, very little is known about the Ambroses, but something like this—if it’s the real thing—might give us some insight. Do you have it with you?” Ranger LeVoy asks eagerly.

  “No, it’s at home. My aunt’s, I mean.”

  “Definitely bring it in so I can take a look at it. I’m not an expert, but I could probably gauge the era.”

  “It’s postmarked 1899,” Felix reminds her.

  “I could still help. I was halfway through a Master’s in Art History at U.N.L.V., but then I got married and my son sort of showed up by surprise, you know how it is.”

  Felix wants to say, No, I don’t. She’s impatient and she can see that Ranger LeVoy is, too.

  “Maybe I’ll stop by this weekend,” Felix says. She was hoping Ranger LeVoy could provide her with information, but it seems like she wants the same from Felix.

  “Or sooner… I could stay open late one night this week. My personal theory, and I’m not supposed to talk anything except facts on the job so keep this a little hush-hush if you don’t mind, is that that little gal didn’t die at all. I think she eloped. I think she and some boy headed over the mountains to Nevada to get hitched. And what you’re saying about the postcard, about this Cal fellow, is right in keeping with that.”

  Felix wonders if this is how she seems to Anna Lisa, pressing for information to fortify her own experience. “You know, this week is pretty busy for me,” Felix says. “My aunt really needs my help with some things.” This is a bit of an exaggeration. Anna Lisa asked Felix to tape a TV show for her Thursday night, when she’ll be a PTA meeting.

  Ranger LeVoy comes around to the front of the counter, so that she is just a few feet from Felix. She is tall, broad-hipped. She smells like pine cones and hand lotion, or maybe pine cone hand lotion.

  “Just don’t take this too lightly,” says Ranger LeVoy. Her Midwestern accent hardens at the edges. Felix feels like she’s being warned not to flirt with the farmer’s daughter at the barn dance. “This is our town, you know. The Historical Preservation Committee has a right to anything that contributes to the town’s history. Just ’cause it’s not some big city doesn’t mean we don’t care about it. Bring that postcard in as soon as you can.”

  Felix takes a step backward. Her platform sandals wobble. She wants to tell Ranger LeVoy that her “theory” sounds like a bad romance novel, that the town has been “hers” only since she ditched Vegas, apparently. But it’s not like Felix has much of a claim either. So she paid 10 cents for an old postcard. Is that what ownership is? An accident?

  “I’ll talk to my aunt,” Felix says. It sounds believable.

  “Laura, Leslie, Louise,” says Gary Schipp. “LaVerne. LeAnn, Lois, Lauren—well, there weren’t too many Laurens in the 19th century, but you get my point.”

  Felix does. She is slumped in an orange plastic chair at the library. Through the window she can see a woman hanging clothes on a wire running from her trailer to a rusty swing set. Thin T-shirts, a stretched-out sundress, a pair of acid-washed jeans.

  “I’ll grant you,” Gary continues, “it’s interesting. It’s incredibly, thought-provokingly fascinating. But do you know how much information is in the world? How many thousands of people sent postcards and how many thousands received them? I like Lilac Mines because it’s small enough to make history seem manageable. I mean, it’s my job—to record and catalog and make information available for people who, for the most part, couldn’t care less. The kids at the elementary school take a field trip here once a year, and Trixie Netherby keeps the large print mystery market in business, and at least once a week I kick someone off a porn website.” Gary wags his head, his pseudo-bangs shaking like flapper fringe.

  “Say you did find out that Lilac Ambrose wrote that postcard,” Gary says. “Say you had irrefutable proof. Then what? It would get written up in a couple of the local papers, and then the postcard would be locked behind glass at the Visitors’ Center or maybe it would get a spot at one of the museums in Columbia. If you really hit the big time, a few parents would force their kids to look at it before they let them pan for gold. Felix, the ugly truth about the Information Age is that information doesn’t solve anything. When people figure that out, I’m out of a job. And so what, really? I can’t blame them.”

  Felix says something feeble like, “But I came in here, didn’t I? I wanted information.” Ranger LeVoy tried to take her postcard, which was bad, but Gary Schipp is trying to take her search, which is worse. She knows Ranger LeVoy’s brand of desire: wanting shoes, money; for the popular kids to make room for you at their table. But Gary is at peace with futility in his rickety library, and Felix doesn’t know what to do with that.

  She browses the New Fiction shelf. She reads book jackets about crusading lawyers and feline detectives. About girls who find love in Paris and girls who learn about their oppressed ancestors. The blurbs are soothing. To hell with nonfiction. She returns to the front desk.

  “One more thing before I go,” she says, taking Lucas Twentyman’s skinny, much-renewed book from her messenger bag. She opens it to the group photo of the miners. “You don’t know any of these guys, do you?”

  “How old do I look?” he says.

  “You know what I mean.”

  His eyes gaze at the page, barely taking it in. He’s seen the photo a million times. “I’m sure you already know which one Harold Ambrose is.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But,” he perks up almost imperceptibly, pushing his glasses higher on his nose, “there’s a book in the health section called Mountain Air: A Health History of the Sierras. Someone’s dissertation, as you might imagine. Some Lilac Mines miners get a few pages to shine in there. If you can call lung fibrosis and blue fingernails ’shining.’ ”

  “Yuck,” Felix says. “But thanks.”

  That night she sits on the deck as Anna Lisa watches TV inside. She has to literally crack open the book, its pages are so stiff and unread, though already yellow. She clips a book light to the back cover, and soon a funny lime-green moth begins to romance the bulb. The night is warm, and Felix is barefoot, and if the book weren’t full of dreary technical phrases, she might enjoy herself.

  There aren’t many pictures, but there are a few blurry reprints of obituaries from an era when people died of gruesome, poetic diseases: rubella, scarlet fever, consumption. Maybe the latter is due for a comeback. Everyone she knows is consuming and being consumed.

  And so is a man named Ashley Burd. He stares up at her with light, pleading eyes. She almost doesn’t recognize him in close-up. But it’s him—the man
she named Cal. He has the same straight nose forming a T with his flat, uncurious eyebrows. She can’t tell for sure, but the grainy obituary photo looks like a crop of the larger group shot of the miners. It is the same and different. He looks weaker all by himself, even with that too-white smile.

  She shivers in the warm, starlit night. She thinks of her college internship at Variety, where she researched and wrote obituaries for aging stars who hadn’t died yet. The trade paper wanted to be ready. At the time Felix told Jia Li, “I’m actually writing about the future. How cool is that?” But all the forgotten movies and sitcom guest spots made her sad.

  The caption beneath Ashley Burd’s photo says, Ashley Burd, b. 1867 Oklahoma City, d. 1898 East Beedleborough, Calif. of silicosis. Survived by wife, Clarabelle. He is not the boy of Lilac’s postcard. Here—close up and dead—he doesn’t even look like a jerk. He looks like, well, a guy named Ashley. Someone unfortunate enough to live in a time where modern medicine consisted of leeches and morphine. And no matter what story the photo tells, tuberculosis got him a year before he could get Lilac.

  Felix throws her head against the back of the lawn chair. Of course. Of course her hunch was nothing but superstition and pathology. Nevertheless, disappointment boils beneath her skin. She slams the book, inadvertently sandwiching the moth between its pages, which makes her feel even worse. Now she is helpless and she’s a murderer of small, innocent things.

  She stands up and stomps around the deck’s perimeter. She’d wanted an enemy. How is she supposed to save Lilac without one? How dark the world beyond the deck is, full of animals watching and waiting to pounce. Felix opens the sliding glass door and barges into the living room, where Anna Lisa is still glued to the local news.

  “Why even bother?” Felix growls. “It’s just car chases and negative representations of ethnic neighborhoods.”