Mammoth

by Douglas Perry

  “This is crazy, man,” Jackson said in response.

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I mean, fucked up. We’ve fucked up.”

  Billy kept looking out the windshield, tried to keep his voice blank. “Why’s that?”

  Jackson looked at Billy with popped-out eyes. “You and the two of us show up at a girl’s summer camp? A floppy-haired hick and two black dudes? Shit. You think they’re going to ask us to roast marshmallows with them? Have a pillow fight?”

  “What are a bunch of kids going to do?” This was Sam, chiming in from the back.

  “You don’t think there are adults with ’em?” Jackson barked, looking at him in the rear-view mirror. “Dumbass.”

  They were ascending Minaret Road now, the Buick’s engine growling. Billy remembered it from when he took Tori to the camp; it felt strange to go up and up and up like this. He reflexively torqued his jaw to make his ears pop. Without leveling off, they came to a break in the road, with Minaret continuing along the side of the mountain while three smaller tributaries headed straight up to the ski lifts. Jackson pounded on the steering wheel. He was scared. He couldn’t hide it.

  “Which way do I go, goddamn it?”

  “That way.” Billy pointed.

  “So what are we going to do?” Sam asked, leaning forward. “We gonna kill the people?”

  Billy twisted around in his seat. “We’re not going to hurt anyone, you got that? Jesus!”

  “All right, all right. No need to take the Lord’s name in vain,” Sam said, smiling and putting his palms up. “You’re the one who discharged his weapon in the bank, man.”

  Billy faced forward again. Discharged his weapon? What was that, army-speak? He was beginning to wonder if he’d discharged his weapon at the wrong man.

  “So what are we going to do?” Jackson asked.

  Billy kept staring out the windshield. He wasn’t thinking straight when he made the decision to go up the mountain. Jackson was right. He had fucked up. He didn’t want to tell them about Tori, which was the reason he’d thought of hiding out at the camp in the first place. What had he been thinking? He didn’t want Jackson and Sam to know about his daughter. He didn’t want them to know anything pertinent about him or his life. It was safer that way.

  He turned to Jackson. “Look, they’ve probably heard about what’s happening in the town, right? The panic, I mean. They had to have felt the earthquake.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “So as far as they know, it was the Big One. And we’re showing up to save the day. We’re their saviors.”

  “Praise Jesus,” said Sam.

  “Their saviors?” Jackson ground his mouth into a grimace.

  “Good Samaritans,” Billy insisted, warming to the idea, trying to actually sell it now. “We’re there to protect them. We’re concerned citizens. We spend the night, and in the morning, with the panic and the jam-up over, we convoy out of there. We lead the way. They must have some cars up there. When we get to the highway, we ditch ’em. Put the pedal to the metal. Easy-peasy.”

  “Right,” Sam said, enthusiastic. “Easy fucking peasy.”

  Jackson’s skin prickled from anger and frustration. Why hadn’t he realized Billy Lane was a moron? “They’re going to see us, man,” he said. “They’ll be able to identify us. You didn’t think of that?”

  Billy pressed a thumb to his temple. Jackson was a worrier. Worse than an old lady. “We’re not bank robbers, for crying out loud. We’re Good Samaritans. Just remember to use your operational name, and we’ll be fine. Nobody’s going to be questioning these girls about the bank.”

  Jackson let it go. What else could they do at this point? He pushed the Buick up the mountain, taking the engine to a stuttering whine before easing off the accelerator. Damn, he thought. This was a big fucking mountain. Had to be as big as Everest. Why hadn’t he ever heard of it? A big mountain like this just four hours from Los Angeles? A four-foot-wide wooden sign appeared on the side of the road, attached to two two-by-fours that had been pounded into the ground. “Spritle’s Racers, Est. 1975,” it said. The words were carved into the wood in a faux cursive script: that must’ve taken someone hours and hours of whittling, Jackson thought. He wondered if Spritle—whoever the hell that was—had done it himself. He quickly discarded the thought. Spritle sounded like a Jewish name, and they weren’t really whittlers.

  The car turned into the property and followed the driveway around a dumpster and a storage shed. Billy craned his neck, hoping to see Tori right off, scared at the thought of seeing her. There were times when he’d thought—fleetingly—about bringing her into the business. Some street cons were easier to pull off with an innocent-looking girl. Tori had the smarts for it, and she was tough—Billy had noticed. She’d be better at the life than Becky ever was. She’d been brought up in it, even if she didn’t realize exactly what was going on. And God wouldn’t get in the way, like He had with Becky. That would be a bonus. Billy had never taken Tori to church. As the car pulled up to the turnaround in front of the main building, he spotted a middle-aged woman hustling toward them. He didn’t see any girls around. “Who are you?” the woman asked, peering into the driver’s side window at Jackson.

  Billy leaned across Jackson and into the sunlight so the woman could see he was a white man. He put on a reassuring smile. “We’re here to help. You know what’s going on?”

  The woman nodded warily. “Coach P—the head of the camp—just got back from Mammoth View. He says there’s no one anywhere. He’s going to go looking for the police or the sheriff.”

  Billy didn’t like the sound of that. He’d hoped they wouldn’t be so pro-active. “The police are pretty busy, Ma’am.” He recalculated his plan on the fly. “You should all go,” he said to her. “Right now. There are evacuation spots, away from the trouble. Plenty of protection there. We can lead you.”

  Fear washed over the woman’s face like a toxin. “What’s happened? What’s going on?”

  “Lot of conflicting information, Ma’am, but we have to do what the authorities tell us. For the good of everyone. How many people do you have here?”

  The woman stepped back, staggered for a moment and caught herself. She looked around, then back to the car. “Is it the Russians?”

  Billy cocked his head, surprised by the question.

  “We haven’t seen any Russians,” Jackson piped in, fearful of dead air. “It’s probably just precautionary. You know, the earthquake.”

  “Who are you?” the woman asked again.

  Billy made eye contact, smiled. “Just people, Ma’am. Citizens. I’m Curtis. Curtis Jones. We’re trying to do the right thing. We’ve kind of been deputized. How many people do you have up here?”

  The woman looked into the distance, as if she would be able to see all the mysteries of life if she just squinted hard enough. “Okay. Okay. There’s twenty-one of us. Seventeen kids. Teens. This is a camp for runners.”

  “Rumors?” Jackson asked.

  “Runners. Like Jim Fixx.”

  “Right,” Jackson said, confused.

  “I see you have some cars over there,” Billy said, tilting his head toward the side of the building, where the back ends of a ’74 Monte Carlo and another vehicle were visible. “Can you fit everyone in them?”

  “I think so, yes. There are four cars. One of them’s a station wagon. One’s a van.”

  “All right, let’s get moving.”

  The woman nodded. Billy noticed that tears had filled her eyes. She headed back the way she came.

  Billy had rethought the whole plan. They couldn’t just take off on their own now—that would be suspicious. The woman would remember every line and mole on their faces. But the headmaster, or whoever the guy was who’d gone into town, had already gotten everyone spooked, so they couldn’t stay the night, either. The headmaster clearly wanted to
take the initiative. So they’d take it for him. They’d lead all of them north, higher into the mountains. During the planning for the job, Billy had studied a map for just this reason. There was a little road, Route 120, up there. It was the long way around—more than twice as long, switchbacking through the mountains—but it eventually would dump them into Stockton. Once they made it to the city, they could easily lose the campers, “accidentally.” The group would be so grateful to have survived the crisis, everyone calling parents and spouses from pay phones, that they wouldn’t even notice that their saviors were gone. Now he just had to catch Tori’s eye, give her the sign before she said something. He knew he could count on her.

  ______

  Tori kept her eyes down. She focused on the wooden floor, on the nail heads and the gaps between the slats. She could hear Coach P., that was enough. She didn’t want to see him. She knew that look, had seen it on her father’s face more than once. There was nothing worse than an adult trying to disguise his fear with a mask of calm.

  The running trails were off-limits, he was saying. Same with the pond. The lights had suddenly gone out about an hour before, and it appeared the blackout was affecting much of the area. Obviously the earthquake had been bigger than they could tell here at the camp. There might be aftershocks, Coach P. said, so everyone should stay in the camp, where the coaches could keep an eye on them. Just hunker down until they got some answers.

  “I’m going to go back into town to coordinate with the authorities,” he said, pulling mindlessly on the bill of his cap. “I’ll bring back supplies, and we’ll have a plan of action. All right?” He marched out of the dining hall without waiting for an answer.

  Silence followed his exit. He forgot to say that everything was going to be fine, Tori thought. That was rule number one when talking to kids during a crisis. You’re announcing you’re divorcing mom, that the cops are at the door, whatever—you always end by saying everything’s going to be all right. Tori stewed over what it meant that he’d forgotten to say it. One of the girls—Eileen—stood and headed for the walk-in pantry behind the tray-table rack. Others began to follow. Within a few minutes, a dozen girls were rummaging through the canned goods and elbowing each other. Girls returned to their tables with cold cereal and Graham crackers and warm 7-Up. The fruit and veggies were gone—a delivery hadn’t arrived as scheduled that morning. “I’m getting fat just looking at this crap,” Mary Bowen said as she settled again at the back table where she always sat. “I can feel my butt squish when I sit down.”

  “At Princeton, the freshmen have to run around the campus naked the first time it snows,” Robin said, leaning in to make eye contact with Mary. “They call it the Nude Olympics.”

  “They have to?”

  Robin shrugged. “I think the seniors make them.”

  Mary Bowen looked dubious. “Does Princeton even have a track program?”

  Robin shrugged again and dumped a pile of powdered milk on her bowl of Wheaties. She shoveled a spoonful into her mouth. “It doesn’t taste like milk at all,” she said, forcing herself to swallow.

  Liesel laughed with such force that a glob of whatever she was chewing shot across the table, clopping onto Mary Bowen’s tray.

  “Dammit!” Mary barked, abruptly standing up. She grabbed the tray with both hands and banged it on the table in frustration. She left it there and stormed off.

  “You’re supposed to add water to it,” Tori said, tapping the directions on the powdered milk container.

  Robin flushed, her cheeks and forehead darkening to a crimson glow. She started to laugh. She pushed another spoonful of cereal into her mouth.

  “I don’t think that’s good for you,” one of the girls said.

  Robin opened her mouth to show the girl the masticated bran puttied to her teeth and tongue. It looked like vomit.

  Sitting there, watching Robin gross everyone out, Tori knew she needed to get away from these people. From all people. Things had become too tense. She would sneak out of the camp and go swimming, she decided. Along with a desire to be alone, she feared that she stank. With the electricity out, the showers didn’t work. There were backup batteries for the pumps, but no one seemed to know how to connect them. That meant Tori had been on two runs without washing. She was tired of being hot and itchy. Leaving the cafeteria, she headed for the track and, after looking around for the coaches, casually dropped off the side of the path.

  Ten minutes later she was kicking away her shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, and walking into the pond in her underwear and bra. She dunked her head under and hung herself, arms out, feet swinging. The dead man’s float. Her legs felt like sandbags, wonderfully heavy and useless. She’d been so relieved when the coaches said they didn’t have to train anymore today. She’d decided right then and there that she didn’t want to know if she had the makings of a Kalenjin. Maybe because she was sure that she didn’t. She was sure she would be found lacking: inherently, biologically ordinary. She was good at this one thing—running—but with no chance to be great. Story of her life.

  When she surfaced, Tori discovered she had drifted at a forty-five degree angle more than halfway across the pond. And she wasn’t alone anymore. At the edge of her sightline, she could make out Mary Bowen standing thigh-deep in the water under the big granite outcropping. She had pulled her blond hair into a ponytail, and she was vigorously lathering her pits with a bar of soap. Her glistening white swimsuit made her shine in the sun like a decommissioned missile in a Fourth of July parade. Up on the rocks, Robin, who’d become Mary’s devoted pet, stared at the sky. There’d been a lot of smoke in the air all morning. A wildfire, probably. Robin cupped a hand at her forehead to block the sun. Her paisley bikini top floated on her concave chest. The coaches had said the smoke was nothing to worry about, that whatever it was, it was far in the distance. Robin looked worried anyway.

  Tori saw that Summer was there, too, trying to be brave now to make up for her embarrassing crying jag during the wolf attack. (That’s what they were calling it, The Wolf Attack.) She appeared to be doing calisthenics. Ally, Madison, and Adrienne were stretched out on the rocks across from Robin, no doubt burning the undersides of their arms and legs and enjoying the pain.

  Robin inched down the rocks and into the water. She said something to Mary Bowen, who turned and looked up the path. Someone was there at the top of the trail, calling to them, waving. Tori didn’t want to be around Mary and Robin—Batman and Robin, as Liesel had started calling them, a slap at Robin, not Mary Bowen. Tori had been out here enough times, sitting in the shade and watching Mary Bowen . . . and Robin, Ally and Madison, her Girl Wonders. They were always laughing among themselves, confident in the purity of their characters because the subject of their derision—self-conscious, pathetic Summer or maybe even dorky Tori herself—could never say with absolute certainty that the sniggering was directed at her. Tori slipped under the water, pinched her eyes shut, and kicked for the little alcove where Batman and the others wouldn’t be able to see her surface. She sneaked out of the water and, dripping wet, bounded into the woods. She immediately realized her mistake. Not only had she left her clothes, flip-flops, and towel behind, but the trail as well.

  She refused to consider going back in the pond and doing a walk of shame out of the water in front of Mary Bowen and the others, who would know she’d tried to get away unseen. She wondered what jokes they’d make about her soggy, old-lady underwear. She stepped gingerly through the pine needles and grit along the hillside that led around to the back of the camp. A shiver bolted through her, sudden and mean. She felt gooseflesh fluff along her arms.

  After about a hundred yards, she hopped over some brush and noticed a patchy, makeshift path, barely wide enough for a person. Thanking the gods, she followed it. The path came and went; she wasn’t entirely certain it was a path. It could have been created by stampeding animals—ducks or wild boar or lemmings, rather than hum
ans. Twice she lost the thread and thought that was it, only to again find bare ground that approximated footfalls.

  Fifteen minutes later she came upon a surprise: a small hot spring squeezed between a clutch of trees. Steam wafted from the pool like the aftermath of a magic trick. It was a beautiful sight: a watery black hole, shrouded in mist and full of promise. She knew she shouldn’t go in, that it was too tucked away, too isolated, but she also felt like she had to. There was a hot spring right in camp, but she’d never been in it. Unless you went at two in the morning, there were always other girls in there already. And it was always the obnoxious ones.

  Tori dipped her toe in the water and immediately jerked it away with a grunt of surprise. The water was really hot. She’d never even heard of a hot spring until she’d arrived at the camp. She didn’t believe at first that it was a natural thing. It sounded like a miracle, one of the wonders of the world. She plunked her foot into the water and gritted her teeth. She worked her way into the spring slowly, section by section, sucking in her breath when she submerged her torso. It hurt, and it was perfect. Finally, she lay back, allowed her feet to float, and watched the forest telescope into the sky. She let herself relax, really relax.