Graphic the Valley

  “Mom?” I say, and snap my fingers in front of her face, my habit to get her attention.

  She still doesn’t make a sign.

  She finds an oil paint set. Pulls each piece out, takes off the tops and smells them. Cadmium red. Azure blue. Paint thinner.

  She leaves the colors.

  I follow her back out of the hole, push the bear door back in place, click the snap link gate.

  My mother holds the paint thinner.

  • • •

  After North Wawona, I didn’t know where to go. I slept under the El Cap Bridge on the north end where the flood debris piled. It was too dark to see there and the rangers would never look.

  I heard her voice. Fifteen years back. Child’s hands around a river frog. “See a biggy?”

  “Good catch,” I said. She could catch anything. And she held frogs soft enough. They looked to be asleep.

  She said, “See a biggy frog?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s a nice froggy, huh?”

  I heard her little voice as the ducks reset their wings, the feathers rustling and the gurgles of their bills. The ducks piled next to my feet. Her voice was what made me leave.

  • • •

  I was careful not to go near my parents’ camp. Nowhere near the creek. When I passed over the El Cap Bridge, I hiked east on the road so people might see me moving away from Ribbon. Then into the meadows, low areas. Sedge to pack up my shirt for sleeping insulation. Flower puffs.

  I went to live in the Ahwahnee caves. The boulders stacked lean-tos from thousands of years of rockfall off the Arches. Dirtbag hotels. I’d grown up around the dirtbags in Camp 4.

  It was quiet when I got to the caves. I passed three men reading dog-eared paperbacks, leaning against granite blocks. Greazy was scrambling near them on the slag. He hopped down. Said, “How is it, bro?”

  “Good,” I said. “You?”

  “Not too bad. Not too bad at all.” His arms were long for his height, weasel-muscled. He pointed to the backpack I was carrying. He said, “You going to crash up here in the caves, huh?”

  I said, “For a while if that’s okay.”

  “God’s green earth, man. God’s green earth.”

  “Thanks.”

  He said. “Kenny’s cave is open actually.”

  “Kenny’s?”

  “Yeah, you know Kenny?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Dirty adventure hippy? Dude who disappears, then comes back two or three months later.” Greazy said, “He walks to Canada and shit with no money.”

  “That’s cool,” I said.

  “Yeah, crazy. He’s gone right now, so you can crash up in his place as long as you want.”

  I said, “Thanks.”

  Greazy showed me the cave. North-facing, opening uphill, so the back of the cave was bigger than the mouth. A barrel stove pushed against the rear wall, the pipe bent crooked to fit a gap between the boulders, and a molding mattress in one corner.

  Greazy said, “It’s like a hotel, huh? Posh. And I got an old down bag too, if you want to borrow. Not going to lie though, it smells kind of shitty.”

  I looked at the mattress. “Thank you,” I said. “I’d love that.”

  Greazy fetched the bag, duct-taped at two seams.

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  For the next week, I hid out in the cave, ate the loaf of bread and half of a jar of Nutella that a climber dropped off before leaving for a month in the Tenderloin. I read four books I’d found in the Curry lost and found, then traded copies with another dirtbag.

  At the end of the week, I snuck west, down the Valley to my parents’ camp. When I walked up, my mother was cooking oatmeal on the fire-ring grate. She hugged me, smelling like burned wood. She pointed up the creek.

  “He’s up there?” I said.

  She nodded.

  I said, “I’ll stay and eat with you two.” I sat down.

  She stirred the pot in front of her.

  “I tried to talk to Lucy,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows. Blew on the spoon and tasted the oatmeal. She waved her fingers in front of her mouth. Then she scooped another spoonful and held it out to me.

  I took a bite, tasting the brown sugar she’d put in with the oats. I said, “It’s good.”

  She touched my shoulder.

  I nodded. I said, “I’ll try again.”

  She put the spoon back in the pot and turned the meal.

  I went to see Lucy. Hiked south across the Valley in the late evening, up to Pohono in the dark. I slept in the meadow by the remains of the lion, slept warm in Greazy’s duct-taped sleeping bag, under the high-country stars. In the morning, I ate the honey, the capsuled combs.

  I waited through the next day outside Wawona in the woods. When it got dark, I knocked on the front door of Lucy’s parents’ house. Her father opened the door.

  I said, “I need to see Lucy.”

  He looked at me and didn’t say anything.

  I said, “I need to see her.”

  He licked the top row of his teeth, reminding me of my own father.

  I said, “I want to apologize to her.”

  He opened the door all the way and said, “Wait here.” He pointed to the wall by the door. He disappeared for a long time, then came back.

  We walked down the hallway, him leading. There was no light on in the room. He flipped the light switch and closed the door behind me.

  I looked at the window. Big enough to crawl through. I turned the light off and looked out the window. It was dark, but I could see a far-off light and woods behind the house. I stood between the bed and the window. The room smelled like the artificial cinnamon candles they sold in the Yosemite Village.

  I heard something thump upstairs. Two people arguing. I couldn’t tell if one of them was Lucy. No one came to the door.

  I looked out of the window and thought I saw someone step behind one of the far trees, a pine at the edge of the house clearing. I waited but didn’t see anyone else.

  I tried the window. Opened it. Slid over the sill and down to the ground. Crept ten feet, hunched over. I saw movement out by the tree, somebody off to my right. Voices came from the side of the house. Quick steps.

  I knew then, and I ran toward a dark section of trees to my left.

  Someone yelled, “That’s him.”

  I was almost to the trees when I heard the crack of the rifle and the shhrrtt sound of the bullet going past me. Then three more shots. I was in the thicker woods then. A bullet thwacked against a trunk near me, but not close, the other bullets hitting nothing as they passed in the dark.

  I ran downhill on the loam, dark forest but no slash, nothing to trip me, and I covered a quarter-mile in two minutes. I knew they couldn’t catch me. I slowed my pace, kept running but not as hard now, steady to the rim, telling myself to get to the rim before first light.

  • • •

  Another week of hiding in the caves. Scrounging with Greazy. Half a loaf of moldy bread, picking off the green crust. A jug of warm milk not yet turned. A new Snickers bar that must’ve fallen out of a hiker’s pocket.

  Greazy said, “This life’s your choice, you know?”

  I was licking the inside of the candy bar wrapper. “Huh?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s either this or the rest of the real world, right?”

  I nodded like I knew the rest of the real world.

  Greazy laughed. “But that’s one of the reasons I like you. That whole rest of the real world thing doesn’t exist for you. Y-N-P. Am I right?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I’m trying not to think about that right now.”

  Greazy said, “Do you think we choose our lives though?”

  “Sort of,” I said. I peeled the last part of the wrapper, found melted chocolate in the seam. “A little yes and a little no.”

  “No,” Greazy said, “I don’t think so. I used to think so. I used to think we were people with a million variables, so many c
hoices that nothing could be predicted. But I don’t think that anymore. Did I choose thirty-seven years here? Did I make that conscious choice? Or is this where I was when I found my true self?” he said. “I wonder now if everything led me to here, to this place, if all choices put us where we are. The great myth of free will.”

  I was finished with the Snickers wrapper. I folded it and put it in my pocket. I said, “You think there’s a myth of free will? Everything we choose comes to right where we are?”

  He said, “Yes. I think that now.”

  “But I could leave,” I said. “I could go somewhere else. I could do something else.”

  Greazy handed me a bread middle. No mold. He said, “I don’t think you could. Not at all. But you could try.”

  • • •

  I scrambled up the talus to a natural bench. Stared southwest at the Sentinel. Drank from my water bottle and looked into the shadow of the North Face. I tried to imagine people in the crack systems up there, so small that they could fit inside the chimneys. I knew what I had to do.

  • • •

  I didn’t realize it was a fire. I approached North Wawona in the evening, and the smoke was subtle until the wind shifted. Then I coughed on the thick smoke. I couldn’t see any flames, just the heavy gusts of smoke blown from the south. I circled around.

  At Wawona, people were running in front of me, Forest Service and Park Service vehicles lining the road. A huge group of men and women were digging a fire line on the south side, protecting Mariposa. They were spaced every five feet, picking and shoveling, yelling to each other.

  Four houses were on fire still. Houses of the old settlement, the cabin-houses the government had given to the Miwoks years ago before the new settlement plan. I couldn’t see it until I got all the way around. Then there was Lucy’s house, black with the others. Because it was on the edge of that northeast line, it looked like it was one of the first to catch fire.

  It hadn’t burned down though. Her house still stood, upright, extinguished before the interior had burned. Someone had foamed and wet it down from the outside. The upstairs looked destroyed, but not the downstairs, and only one corner of the roof had collapsed. No one was by that house now, the fire crews moved further along the line, hurrying, only spending enough time to extinguish flames and move on.

  I kicked the front door open and it fell off its hinges. Smoke billowed out and I stepped aside to breathe. Then the house pulled air, and I went inside. The hallway was so dark I had to walk slowly to avoid running into things. I bent over to see below the smoke. I ran into a coat rack, then a table. I went deeper into the hallway where the late evening light didn’t penetrate the hanging gray and the flecks of ash. I started coughing.

  I searched through the lower house, putting my hands in front of me to feel around. There was nobody in the kitchen or the first bedroom. Nobody in the living room. I threw a dictionary through a window for air. Then I went back into the hallway.

  I found a big body on the stairs. A man. I turned him over and saw Lucy’s father. He was not burned but he was dead. I knew how thick the smoke must have been then. Even now, with the door open and the living room window smashed out, it was hard to breathe.

  I crawled up the stairs, not sure if they’d hold underneath me. The landing was lit by a small window at the end of the hall. On the wall there, I saw black streaks like swaths of dark paint. I went into the bedroom on the right and she was there, lying on the floor.

  I said, “Lucy?” Shook her. Said, “Lucy” again.

  I stood up and threw a lamp through the window. Felt the air rush in.

  Her right arm was straight out, fingertips touching the wall. I folded that arm in and pulled her onto my lap. “Lucy,” I said again. Her head lolled.

  Only her right hand, the one that had touched the wall, was burned, the fingertips blistered, discolored. I touched her index finger, felt the swell of the previously injured joint. I kissed that finger at its knuckle.

  I carried her down the stairs, not worrying about a collapse. I stepped over her father, down the hall, and out the front door. There was still nobody else near the house, everyone busy fighting the spread of the fire. I carried Lucy around the back, into the woods. I could hear the people yelling at the fire line a few hundred yards away.

  Lucy’s head tilted and her mouth opened. I saw her teeth then, the turned canine on the right like someone had flipped it with a wrench. I kissed her open mouth, her lips.

  I hiked on. My biceps began to ache, then my shoulders, my forearms, and my elbows. I set Lucy down. Sat next to her but tried not to look at her lying on the ground. I looked up at the trunks of trees, at a meadow through a gap. Rested. It was getting dark. I picked her up once again and carried her as far as I could go. My arms gave out a second time. I set her down. I lay next to her and looked at the sky, our arms touching.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Lucy. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  There was starlight above us.

  I said, “I was so stupid before.”

  I got to my knees and pulled her into me. Pine needles gathered in the back of her hair. As I stood and adjusted her body against me, I could feel the clutter stuck to her back as well.

  We walked again. We walked the deer trail to the meadow and I talked to her about the northern constellations, about the trees we passed, about what we could smell. I carried Lucy close and never dropped her, even when I stumbled. But I had to set her down over and over again.

  I got her to the meadow in the middle of the night, and I knew I would bury her there, next to the lion. I lay with her until it was light. I didn’t sleep. And in the morning, I dug, breaking the ground with a green stick and scooping with my hands. When the hole was deep enough, I laid her in the bottom, her hair tangled around her face, full of sticks. I leaned into the grave and picked them out. Patted her hair behind her ears.

  • • •

  Lightning walked across the Valley in front of me. No rain, only the blue-bottomed clouds and the white hairs of electricity. White-stacked cumulus above. Light and dark at five o’clock in the evening as I stood on the rim, dark now to the Valley floor like a gray blanket strung in front of the sun. Then the inverted dark, the snow under, white to the river, and the river black as a line of charcoal after a forest fire.

  PART II

  The Caves

  CHAPTER 6

  Millions of years ago the surrounding domes were the underground magma chambers of active volcanoes waiting to cool. So this is the middle. The year before you are born.

  In June of 1976, the Jeffrey pine on the summit of Sentinel begins to wither. Park rangers and tourists carry buckets of water to the summit slab to bathe the trunk and roots. But the tree does not survive. After 400 years of living as a scrag penitent, the Jeffrey pine dies in the heat of the next summer, a summer of no water.

  The six spring streams underneath the Arches become one. Then none. Mirror Lake disappears. Finally the Great Yosemite Falls dries up, and there is no Lower or Upper Falls.

  Coyotes steal water from the Camp 4 bathrooms, edging past people like domesticated dogs. Nervous, they drink from the slew behind the lodges. Gulp algae and mosquito larvae, vomit on the Falls path. The coyotes weave the Loop Road and stagger through the campgrounds. They are labeled as “overly social.” Two coyotes per week are euthanized by Predation Control officers, and the population does not stabilize for twenty years.

  The blade of a knife. Flat water. I waited through the winter of the coyote, a male with a white patch on his left flank. I saw him in the gap down the Merced, under the El Cap slabs, the open woods beneath the talus. He was sitting on his haunches with his head tipped sideways.

  I was hiking through and stopped to watch. He was only a hundred feet off the road, like the coyotes that hop into cars to steal food when drivers pull over to view wildlife. But no cars came, and he waited, sitting on a rise.

  He was watching me too. His head cocked, his one eye turned. I sat dow
n and we watched each other.

  The wind came with the smell of snow, the vertical push down into the Valley, the smell of the wet cold, the inversion of the Valley, white on the cliffs above camp that morning, and now the cold air at the bottom of the U.

  The coyote sat. I had another mile to go to my parents’ camp, my father sitting on the front seat of the old Plymouth, smoking, and my mother in the back with a book, leaning against the wall and side window, her legs crossed at the ankles.

  They spent all day in the car in the fall, with the windows open, transitioning to winter when my father strung a wind barrier on the down-river hillside to protect against the up-Valley blow. December to March, they burned their campfire all afternoon and evening, ran through cords of wood that they’d built up behind the moss boulder. Needing ten cords, my father always stacked eleven going into season.

  I told myself that I did not expect that life with Lucy. Not my parents’ life. I did not expect anything.

  A pinecone fell near me and the coyote turned all the way around. Didn’t hide his watching me. I clicked my teeth at him, but he didn’t yelp either. I hiked past where he sat, and he let me go.

  • • •

  My father said, “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either, but I can’t let that be. This thing,” I said, “other things too, I guess.”

  My father was holding the newspaper I’d handed him. “What was it like?” he said.

  I drew it in the dirt. “It burned straight out from the back three houses. Straight, straight out.”

  “So you think it was arson?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And who lit it then?”

  I drew a circle. Fire lines and an arrow. I said, “I don’t know. Who would?”

  “Well,” my father said, “they’re going to think it was you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes,” he said. He reached and touched the end of the paper to my knee. “If they suspected you on the Miwok forms fire, they’ll suspect you on this one too. That’s just simple logic.”

  “But Lucy?” I said. I picked up a rock, stood, and threw it into the trees. “Fuck them.”