by Clara Hume
“Is your name really Leo?” is all I could say.
He did not answer. He just looked out at the night, sighing.
***
Although I had gone home most weekends to help out around the ranch, summer was coming to an end and I would be heading with Casey back up to the ranch for harvesting. Then I would winter in my cabin, for the colder seasons were too harsh for cave-living.
I wanted to talk to Leo before leaving the beach. We’d never spoken more than a few words. He was a loner and seemed gruff all the time. His mornings were spent meditating, his days off traipsing in the mountains hunting or fishing, his evenings at his campfire or not at all. It didn’t seem he was too interested in hanging out with the drifters or me. From talk I heard from some of the girls who came down to visit me now and then, seems the gang was thinking about moving on too. Everyone knew that mountains in the winter could be brutal without proper shelter. The shabby home they’d taken over wasn’t very solid. Part of the roof and walls were missing. They oughtta be getting back down to solid ground. Those folks wouldn’t survive a mountain winter and its storms, that’s for sure, I thought.
I was torn between hanging out on the beach a little longer, for summers at the lake were clearly superior with cooling breezes, or heading home. Elena had found out that she was pregnant again, however, and I wanted to be there for her.
Two weeks before I’d pack up and head up the mountain until the following spring, I finally got up the nerve to talk to Leo and strode over to his campfire one night, plopping down on the sand near him.
“You'll be glad to know I’m headed back up to my ranch soon, and you’ll have this whole beach to yourself," I said.
He looked at me surprised and then handed me a piece of dried trout. I thanked him.
“No reason to feel you need to leave because of me,” he said. His voice was raw.
“I always leave for the winter. You should too. You’ll die out here.”
He sat with his legs stretched out in front of him and didn't say much for a while. The fire crackled in the growing winds. I heard a pack of wolves cry.
Then he reached over into a pack and pulled out some old rum, asking me if I wanted some. Why not, I thought—drinking some rum with a man like this, on a night like this on the edge of human history. With the winds running across the lake like spirits. Who could refuse that offer? We drank straight out of the bottle, passing it back and forth.
He said, “My brother’s girlfriend is in that pack of hooligans that came from Montana and is now up on the mountain. My brother is dead. I was all she got. I saw her to this place, but hell if I'm going to see her further.”
I nodded, now realizing his connection. “I am sorry to hear about your brother." Automatically I extended my hand and placed it on his. He didn't react. I took back my hand and asked which girl had been his brother's partner.
“Miranda, the red-headed chick.”
I remembered her from the first day I'd come down to the beach in the spring. “They say they are leaving soon, heading on down to California.”
“I know, but I ain’t going with them.”
“Where are you going to go?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I haven’t thought that far ahead," he said with a little impatience. His eyes shot me a look like I was just bothering him. "I can make do anywhere if I have to.”
“Leo,” I took a chance. “Have you been in the Selkirks in the past few years, during winter? It’s all you can do to stay warm and alive. Food is scarce because there are hardly any animals, due to the severity out here.”
“I grew up in Montana, Miss…”
“Fran.”
“Well, Miss Fran, I’ve wintered the past few just fine. When my brother was dying last year, he made me promise to look after Miranda, the only reason I headed here with that gang. But she’s already gone and hooked herself up with Barley. He’s the fine gentleman who came to your door that one night.”
I nodded and said, “Poor girl.”
“Poor girl, my ass.”
We drank more, and he promised me he had some resources for the winter. I told him where the ranch was. “You come up there if you need help.” I may not have said that without the backing of rum. I could be kindly and charitable, despite my solitude, but Leo was intimidating too.
“Tomorrow I am going to a supper up at their place,” he said. “Big to-do with some chickens they caught and some booze they’d found at the house up there. You’re free to join us." Inviting me seemed to be a struggle. "I'll keep my eyes on Barley," he said.
"I hope those weren't my chickens," I said.
"Naw, they were wild ones."
I leaned back on my elbow, enjoying the lonely stars, feeling the warm pit in my stomach inspired by Leo and rum. He had just asked me out on sort of a date in the wild new world, and it felt good. We hardly said anything else for a while, and I eventually headed back to my own part of the beach and slept more comfortably than I had in ages.
The shindig the next day was not that fun. The Unfortunate Youth Drifters were aimless in conversation, obnoxiously loud, and terrible cooks. I found one of the dishes—a berry tart—good though. Leo had made it in a clay oven at the place; it had hawthorn and currants.
Leo and I both felt out of place that day. I mingled some with Miranda. Leo and I threw glances at each other. I learned his smug look was not precisely smug but a natural observatory gaze. It was like a content old Buddha face but with a sneer. We stared at each other often. I liked to look at his eyes; they held a strange lifetime in them, and took me elsewhere. I am not sure why he looked at me though. It was hard to read what he thought of me. His mannerisms were cold, and I figured he was still mourning his brother.
The house had some red wine, my preferred drink, unlike Leo’s dark Cuban rum. He could have passed for a rum-drinking pirate, but I thought he would be handsome with less hair.
The bash went on all day, with buzzing heat, biting insects, and smelly beer breath hovering over badly cooked meals. I could hear people having sex in the broken house's bedrooms. Half the house had no walls, but I still felt too confined and wanted out.
Leo got a little tipsy and played an old guitar. His normal brusque pretense transformed to a softer one as he crooned a Lord Byron poem:
And now I’m in the world alone,
Upon the wide, wide sea;
But why should I for others groan,
When none will sigh for me?
Perchance my dog will whine in vain,
Till fed by stranger hands;
But long ere I come back again
He’d tear me where he stands.
With thee, my bark, I’ll swiftly go
Athwart the foaming brine;
Nor care what land thou bear’st me to,
So not again to mine.
Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves!
And when you fail my sight,
Welcome ye deserts, and ye caves!
My native land—Good Night!
It wasn’t dark yet. I felt my eyes tearing up and had to get out of that place.
Leo had been watching me that whole time, and saw me tear up, and when I turned around to get away, I heard the music stop.
Leo—Chapter 4
She didn't know who I was, and that made her even more desirable.
I kept my distance at the beach. Thanking whichever deity was up there that had created this view around me and allowing myself the quiet meditation of another morning in a life full of death. Pissing in the shrubbery. Eating a stale granola bar, looted from Missoula. I would have paid, but nobody was there at the checkout stand. Pulling on my old jeans and cotton tunic for a day's adventure. It could be hunting elusive elk or deer, which I never found. Or trying for some fish, which thanks to Fran's stocking of Lake Stardust, were in abundance. Finding berries, nuts, and natural forest veggies. I hated going to the old house up where Miranda and her crew were but could do some baking in a makeshift clay oven
up there. Nights were rum or whiskey. Trying to both remember and forget David, my brother, who died earlier in the year.
I was lost when I met Fran and purposefully avoided her. I didn't think she was real at first. I think I might have gone mad for awhile, and she seemed like a ghost. Everything in this land seemed haunted. Having crossed the tipping point we went from one world to another, where memories greeted us like wraiths. Everywhere was nostalgia. It was a lost charnel ground, and spirits rose and fell around us.
Everyone else in Miranda's crew was rowdy and full of triviality. Fran was silent but meaningful. She puttered about on the beach, her golden skin like a bangle bracelet, with freckles peeking out behind black or white tunics and belly robes. Her short, golden hair was wild and wavy. Her eyes a strange hazel blue, soft and soulful. But these things are a dime a dozen on a model from France.
Fran also had true grit. I knew it when I saw her, as a lone woman in this tough new world, camping by herself, with a finger to the world, even though in truth she seemed like a genuinely caring person. I remember the first time she found me at "her" cave and didn't even know her foot was one damn inch from a scorpion. The thing scampered away when she was near, because I don't think it wanted to harm another living creature as beautiful as that. Even her horse wouldn't take her eyes off me, lest I made one wrong move. Her appeal was the grace with which she moved, the toughness beneath that gentle skin, the complete vulnerability of her expression, combined with deep and unintentional fear of the changing world and her near solitary existence in it, with so few others to hang onto.
I'd been watching her out of the corner of my eye. Said nope, I am not going to fall in love. You cannot fall in love with goddesses. It's not allowed in the natural order. I'd had my share, back in my shaved days of celebrity and perfect bodies and flawless touches—always exposing imperfections the next day, imperfections that spoke too loudly. Unlike those with Fran, which only enhanced her being: a crooked tooth, unkempt hair, bitten fingernails.
The night she came down to warn me about winter coming, and shared in my rum...well, without that talk I'd have never made a move at all because until she really spoke to me I thought I had imagined her.
The next day up at the "drifter house," as she called it, I was drinking a bit, trying to ease the pain of being in that loathsome place, and knowing she was just as lost, I sang her a song. Our eyes watched each other all day. I've seen women cry before. Seen them scream, wail, yell, weep, and drown in their sorrows. But Fran didn't cry. Her eyes just got watery. That's when I had to follow her.
We didn't speak as we headed back to the beach, but when we got there I finally said, "I'm sorry I made you sad."
"It was a good sad. It was the song."
***
We were living in the time of terrible devastation. It wasn't just one thing, but layers upon layers. The extreme weather had been warned about for decades and had gradually grown worse each year. After our part of the country up in the northwest warmed enough, after the rivers and lakes began to wither, and after all kinds of new species of bugs and diseases starting running rampant, it was wild, stretching our old short and wet summers to be drier, hotter, and longer, with winters in these mountains being shorter but colder and more stormy for parts of the year.
Nobody had the oil to run their wheels or crops. Nobody had the water to run the oil. Droughts in many areas had dehydrated the earth, hell, separated it to the point it had deep crevices. There were floods in other places, where seas tumbled onto coastal homes. Mass refugees had nowhere to go, not enough food. I'd heard of skeleton fields but had not seen that myself.
The world had always had resource wars, but the official Wars finally erupted in full force years before. Had I not been a young, rich actor or a survivor like Fran up on an isolated mountain, I may have been tossed to the side like billions of others. Fran and I, along with the rest of the world, had gone through turbulent times, watching the world change drastically year after year. Change had always been a great word to use, but this change could not be harnessed by humankind because it was too late. We were at its mercy. By the time I met Fran, I think both of us were still in the dreamlike aftermath of it all, navigating a different world than we or our ancestors had known.
We, as a species, had lost loved ones. All the old conveniences—accessible gas and electricity, surplus food, medical help—were gone. For people like Fran and me, who had the resources and knowledge to survive, it was easier, but not without trauma. In the short few weeks I knew her in Idaho, we had not talked about the shifts in the world—no more movies, little travel (for a damn fact, no travel for pleasure or luxury getaways), no dreams. We had to shift along with the new haunted world, accepting its wildness, its certainty for new species as well as the sad extinction of many species we had known.
The tipping point ushered in a rapid onset into a wilder word full of ghosts, remnants of large civilizations. Not that it caught anyone by surprise. It was expected by then. I left Los Angeles and came home to visit my family back in Montana.
It was there that I must now return, for when I'd left a few months ago with Miranda and the other drifters, I'd been too grief-stricken to get the belongings that I wanted. With this business to attend to, before leaving I followed Fran back to the ranch and checked out her cottage. She said it had once been a magnificent home, but after a storm and mudslide it had been renovated into a small two-bedroom cabin with a kitchen and cupboards, a diminutive bathroom, a basement, and a front hearth room that had a window above a couch—the window looking out over meadows, mountains, forests, and the delicate land in the changing world. In the front room was a fireplace, where Fran cooked meals in a hanging iron kettle or skillet.
Fran and I were friendly, our eyes warm, our affection wanting—but we were withholding and trying to find out how to date or fall in love and court each other in the new world. Considering she had no previous experience with anyone serious, and I had been a playboy and nothing else, this new center we had to find did not come easy or fast, and rather than talk about it or force ourselves to discover it, we were feeling each other out instead. I didn't know much more about her the day I left back to Montana than I did the day I first saw her at the cave. But I knew I would return.
I had to go to Missoula, promising Fran I'd come back this way within a couple months' time, and she hoped the mountain passes would still be open. I felt driftless. I had no real home anymore. Idaho was something to consider.
The day I trekked up the mountain to say good bye, she came out the door of her cottage, and it was just cool enough that a breeze tousled her hair and caressed a goofy smile lightening her eyes. I turned to her and didn't know how to say good bye. These days, you might have every intention of coming back but may never come back. Shade trees above dappled her skin. Her freckles smiled. Her eyes danced. But beneath it all, I could tell there was a looming uncertainty, like that of the wolves at her land's perimeter.
"Please be careful," she whispered. She reached out to touch my arm, and I saw her eyes watering.
"Don't worry about me," I said. There was nothing to give her but my own confidence. "I will be back as soon as I can."
She nodded. We gazed at each other. Her hand slid off my arm. Fran lifted her head in strength, and her eyes followed me. I waved off, and turned my back, heading down the path that led past the stables and ultimately down the dirt road down the mountain that would wind its way to Montana.
With the drastically changing economy, my money meant nothing anymore, but I was able to get back to Montana by walking and hitching down lonely roads. I’d see people in wagons just rarely, and they would let me ride with them for a spell. I came home to an empty house, with both front and back doors hanging off their hinges. The place had been ransacked, and a tree had fallen on the west side of the house, ripping a big hole in the roof. The first thing I saw upon entering the house was an old letter I'd received from my agent in Santa Barbara years ago. At the time
I had casually tossed it on an end table in the living room. He had written about the end of my contract, which seemed silly at the time since nobody was seeing movies anymore. But I still virtually had a lot of money. Millions. Tied up in investments and my two homes: one on Mulholland Drive and one in Paris. Missoula was my mom's home, but she was long gone, like most people I knew. I'd moved all my things here. Began to think about changing my life.
Now there was a jeep I wanted to get, and some personal items. I hadn't had the time or focus when David died. I now walked through the long-shadowed house, near dusk. The house had been torn apart, but I collected old photographs of Mom, Dad, David, and me. That's what I came to get mainly...memories and a guitar.
I flipped through albums up on the second floor in my mom's old flowery bedroom and saw photos of us at football games and high school plays. Rays of setting sun in the golden air whispered into the room. I found a picture of my mother when she was a little girl. She was looking into the camera on a windy day with a smirk on her face and a beach behind her. I settled on her photo, thought "to hell with it all," and grabbed my old guitar before heading out of the room.
David had gotten sick with the Dengue virus, caused by mosquitoes. The virus had mutated to be more dangerous and was now common around the whole world, though had its localized variations. It wasn't the only disease around but had been a popular one for a while. Warmer temperatures meant mosquitoes began to survive winters, tropical insects migrated northward, and public health and sanitation went away; these things, combined with polluted water sources and unsanitary conditions, had resulted in increased diseases transported by mosquitoes and other insects.
David was my younger brother. When he died, his girl Miranda came up to Montana with some friends and followed me when I left my mom's place. I left home without thinking I was leaving for good. I needed to walk, go somewhere else. There wasn't enough room in my jeep to take all those drifters to Idaho, so we just headed out on foot.