He said, “My parents are cool though.”
I found a North Face fleece. Checked the size and tried it on. It was big but close enough.
Kenny said, “They really are. And they want me to be happy.”
I nodded, started sorting through the second box. Mostly T-shirts.
“You know what I hate?” Kenny held up a Yosemite Sam T-shirt. “Junk drawers.”
I smelled a polypro shirt, body odor like rotting onions. I waited for Kenny to explain.
“You know what I mean,” he said, “the drawer in the kitchen, next to the phone, full of rubber bands, pennies, pliers, old pencils, golf tees, string, tape, wire, everything?” He was making a pile next to his lost-and-found box, mugs and hats and T-shirts. “Most houses have them,” he said. “Then again, I guess you wouldn’t know about that.”
“No,” I said.
“Do you miss that?” he said. “Houses and everything?”
“I don’t think I miss them, but I sometimes wonder. Houses or the ocean. Or my father taught me to drive a car, but I’ve never driven a car anywhere but the Valley Loop Road. And what would anything else be like?”
“Right,” Kenny said. “Right.”
We were finished with the boxes. We each had a couple items.
Kenny said, “Want to score free cups of coffee before the rangers and tourists come around at the kiosk?”
We went to the rentals center. The employees glared at us but didn’t say anything. Kenny poured the first cup of coffee and handed it to me. He said, “My parents wouldn’t want my life, and I wouldn’t want a junk drawer.” He poured himself a cup. “But they’re good people. Probably yours too.”
I added cream to the rim. Took a sip. We walked to the amphitheater and sat down on one of the wooden benches. I said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m less me and more everything around me. You know?”
“That makes sense,” Kenny said. “Like you have no control?”
“Right,” I said. “I’m angry about it. I know that. Like I’m trying to live a life that doesn’t exist, or like everything’s fighting me, and I can’t make things work the way I want them to.”
Kenny sipped at his coffee and looked at the empty amphitheater’s stage in front of us. We were the only people sitting in the rows of benches. He said, “I think most people feel that a little bit. And that’s why I go on my long adventures. It’s true. I just try to push and push, go by myself to see how far I can go in any direction, to see what I’m capable of.”
I nodded and sipped at my coffee.
Kenny said, “We’ve got a little time, but that’s all. We’ve got to live these little moments.”
• • •
My mother could improvise with newspaper, putting the glue in the middle, then catching the corners of the square and pulling those four corners in until they met in her hand. When she blew, the newspaper ballooned in front of her as she waited to take that first big inhale. I watched her hands shake at that moment, right before, putting the fist of newsprint to her mouth, closing her eyes, and her hands shaking, anticipating that first big suck.
I was in Camp 4, under the Thriller oak tree, reading a book. The pages kept flipping in the wind, and I had trouble concentrating. I kept thinking about the FBI and Twin Burgers.
A little girl was there. Her parents were bouldering, and she was playing make-believe with a pile of pinecones and a stick wand. She kept spinning around in circles, casting spells at invisible monsters. Dark and curly haired. Kid dreadlocks like tree roots coming out of her head. Maybe five years old.
The little girl whispered, “A la muerte,” as her mother attempted Thriller.
The little girl had a centimeter gap between her two front teeth. She balanced on her right leg, swinging the left, then hopped. Her arm shot out and she waved the wand in the air.
I tried to see her face better. Her eyes. It had been so long.
She spun again. Turned on something with the wand in her right hand. Facing away, and I sat forward.
Then she spun around and pointed her wand right at me. Her hair was wild as matted weeds, a clump of hair stuck off to the side. She looked right at me, and I knew she was someone else. So I looked away.
• • •
That night, Kenny said that he wanted to walk to Truckee.
“Walk there?” I said. “How far is that?”
“Two hundred miles,” he said. “Maybe 250 walking, or maybe less. I’m not really sure. I want to see Lovers’ Leap though, look at the place where they jumped.”
“Yeah,” I said, “my father told me that legend when I was little, the one about the suicide pact.”
“Did he call it a legend?” Kenny said.
“Yeah, the legend of them jumping while holding hands.”
He shook his head. “That’s not a legend, man. Not if you mean legend as untrue. Most stories like that are more true than anything else we hear.”
I was starting to understand Kenny. He’d laughed at the idea of a newspaper when I’d showed him the last San Francisco Chronicle article. He’d said, “You believe anything in that thing? It’s probably secretly owned by Rupert Murdoch too.”
I didn’t know who that was.
Kenny said, “So you want to walk with me to Truckee or what?”
We were under the Book Cliffs near the Lower Falls Path. We’d just climbed up Munginella, down the broken trail, and now we were sliding on the loose pack.
“Walk to Truckee?” I said. “I’m not sure.”
He said, “To the Leap,” and made a cliff edge with his left hand, someone jumping off with his right, two fingers kicking in the air.
“No,” I said, “probably not.”
Kenny tied his shoes together and hung them on his neck. He said, “Is that ’cause you always stay here in the park or what?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“No, seriously,” he said, “are you ever going to leave here or what? Even for a little bit?”
We turned a corner on the trail, and there was a longer steep straight below us. I said, “I don’t think so. Well, maybe. I don’t really know.”
“You never just want to go? Just leave?” he said. “Just take off somewhere?”
“Yeah, I did want that. I wanted that last year for a while. And I’ve been up in Tuolumne…twice now. Two different summers up there in the high country, and I wanted to keep going then.”
“And?” he said.
“And I didn’t. I didn’t have the opportunity,” I said.
“The opportunity? But you have the opportunity all the time. Just start walking, then keep walking.”
“I don’t know. I guess it didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to go farther than Tuolumne. Or at least it didn’t feel like I could,” I said. “It’s hard to explain.”
Kenny’s feet slipped on the trail and he fell onto his butt. He laughed and stood back up. He said, “So that’s it? You’re never going to leave?”
“Last year I sort of started to, at least in my mind. I made a decision that I was going, that I was leaving, but…” I was talking about Lucy, but I didn’t want to talk about Lucy. I said, “It just didn’t work out.”
Kenny waited, but I didn’t say anything else. He looked at me as we hiked down to the end of the steep, then back into a zigzag turn. I hiked off the trail there, to stomp steps, and Kenny followed me. We scrambled over and under fallen trees.
Kenny said, “There’s still time, you know. You’re not going to die tomorrow.”
The Lower Falls was blasting mist to our left, snowmelt surging from the high country. There were hot days coming.
• • •
My father says, “Think like Tenaya.” He taps my forehead.
I’m eight years old. I don’t know what he means.
He says, “Nothing less than that. Do you understand me?”
I say, “Yes,” but I don’t.
“The Great One. Like you?” he says.
I say, “Yes,” again.
The fox has stolen both packages of meat, the white-wrapped hamburger from the cache.
My father says, “He could only do that if he came through twice. You know that?”
I don’t want to admit that I missed him twice, that I didn’t protect our food stores.
“Think,” my father says. “A third time through and you catch him, okay? So what are you going to do?”
“Catch him,” I say. “Set a good trap.”
“Right,” he says. “You have to know these things. Learn everything. This is where you’ll live forever, in this place, in this Valley, Tenaya.”
• • •
I slept underneath a log near one of the Arches streams. The cool air came off the water and I lay down. Turned and slept all night. Some days, after climbing hard, the tiredness comes in like a wool blanket pulled to the chin.
Morning then, and I smelled the familiar smell of pine loam. Dew smoke. Childhood in my nostrils, and the camp up Ribbon Creek. I stepped over to the Arches stream and took two cupped hands of water and drank. This stream didn’t have any giardia. I’d walked it up to the wall dozens of times, climbed Royal’s routes above, jammed through splitters and seams, corners of waterfall that made my bare feet slip until they dried. I’d seen the purifying granite. Washed my head in the 38-degree water that dizzies.
Everything visits me in the morning smoke. The superintendent keeps his cigar, his back straight, his neck, black-and-white clothes pressed. No body in the bushes. No turned face.
I tapped my index fingers and thumbs, a beautiful day cracking from the east like freeze-water splitting loose granite. The loam smoked as the sunlight scratched toward me like a thousand forest fires at their beginnings.
She was there too. Water droplets on her temples. The green slash of one blade of cutgrass stuck to her cheek.
• • •
At the hotel dumpster, Kenny was foraging like a blond bear. He had the door tilted down, shoulder deep in the box, and he pulled out a garbage bag. Ripped it open. Shook his head and threw it back in. Then he went for another bag.
When he had what he wanted, a bag full of dinner leftovers from the hotel restaurant, he smiled. Tore the bag and found mixed pasta and sauces from the night before.
Kenny took a fistful out, then passed it to me.
He said, “You all right, man? Your face doesn’t look good.”
I pulled out some of the pasta. Linguini in a cheese sauce. Cold. I said, “Yeah, I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
I shrugged.
He said, “I’ll tell you a bad story. Trade mine for your trouble.”
“Okay,” I said. I grabbed a second handful of noodles. One in each palm now, I started to eat.
“You know how much I like animals?” he said.
I didn’t really know, but I could guess.
He said, “Here’s a story about one animal that I loved.”
Kenny squatted down with his pasta. I squatted next to him, leaned back against the dumpster, my palms full of the cold noodles. I ate out of the edges of my hands.
Kenny said, “Our family friends had a dog named Beau. A big old boxer. Beautiful. Brown coat and square face, muscled chest, strong. And every time I came into town, I’d hang out at their house and play with that dog Beau.
“So one time, I was going on this camping trip with a couple of my friends, going out into the woods near the Sand Dunes National Rec Area in Oregon, and my friend said, ‘Why don’t you take Beau?’ He knew Beau would love it.
“So I went and picked him up. That’s back when I had a truck, a house, all that. Different lifetime for me.” Kenny held up a handful of pasta and laughed. Squished the noodles through his fingers and ate the falling pieces off the back of his knuckles. “Way different lifetime.”
I ate my noodles and nodded.
“Anyway,” he said, “I went and picked up my two friends, and they threw their stuff into the back of the truck with Beau. Then we hit up a store for food. Beau jumped out like he was going to walk into the store with me and I laughed and said, ‘I love you, man, but you can’t go in.’
“So I got him back in the truck, and clipped him to one of my old climbing ropes. I didn’t short-rope him though, so he’d feel okay about being tied. I just clipped him to a big old length of tatty rope tied off to a corner of the truck bed. I knew Beau was a good dog, and that he would stay in if I tied him to anything.
“Anyway, I went into the store, bought a little food, and came back out. A couple of us threw Beau a treat before we started up again, and then we drove for an hour while we told fishing and backpacking stories in the front of the truck. I didn’t worry about Beau. I didn’t even think about him.
“And when we got to the coast, we headed south. I cut west on a Forest Service road toward the beach, and I remember looking back right at that turn and seeing Beau sitting in the back, over my shoulder, smiling the way boxers always do. He was really great, that dog. So content. So mellow.
“Well, the road got twisty and beat-up. Unimproved since they finished logging it a decade before, and I focused on the driving, on not grounding out or missing a turn. We bounced all over the place in the truck. It was a rough couple miles from there.
“And when I stopped the truck, and looked over my shoulder, Beau wasn’t there. He wasn’t behind me. I figured he’d laid down in the truck bed. That, or he’d gotten sick, and I hoped he hadn’t puked on our packs.
“I hopped out to see what he was up to, but he wasn’t in the bed. He wasn’t there at all. Just the rope. And it was stretched pretty tight over the back end of the tailgate. I realized right then. I remember yelling, ‘No, no, no…’ as I ran back.
“And fifty feet off the back of the truck, there was Beau, all drug around and missing most of the skin on both sides of his body. His right leg was broken upward, and he was real dead. Just like that. Just, finished.”
I looked at Kenny’s face, now bright pink. He was crying a little, and he ducked his head and wiped his face on his shoulder.
I said, “I’m really sorry, Kenny.”
He nodded and took a bite of noodles. Choked on his bite and coughed.
I said, “I’m really sorry, man,” again. I still had two handfuls of noodles, so I patted him on his back with my forearm.
Kenny cleared his throat. Spit noodles and phlegm onto the asphalt. Sniffed. He said, “I buried him. I carried Beau way out into the woods and dug a deep hole so no coyotes would get to him. I added some rocks, and pissed all over the top of those so the coyotes wouldn’t like the smell of it. I waited a while and pissed again to be sure. And Beau stayed down there. I went back a year later to check and see that nothing had messed with him.”
Kenny cried while he ate a bite. Wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
I said, “I’m really sorry,” again.
“Yeah, me too,” he said. “Nothing should have to drag and kick itself to death, or break its own leg trying to stand up. Nothing should die like that.”
We crouched next to the dumpster, each holding the rest of our pasta.
Kenny picked a hair out of his food and took another bite.
I said, “You sold your truck after that, huh?”
“Yep,” he said. “Didn’t ever want to drive it again. Couldn’t really stand to look at it. And I’ve never had a car since.”
“Never?”
“Not in ten years,” he said. “You?”
“Had a car? No. Not unless you count the car I was born in.”
Kenny tipped his head back and scraped noodles off his palm with his teeth. Then he shook out that hand. Wiped it on the blacktop.
I ate my handful until I tasted something bitter and spat it out. Then I tossed the remainder of my handful.
Kenny reached in the garbage bag and pulled out red noodles. He looked at them from both sides and smiled. He said, “These look better.”
I grabbed some of those too, and the
y were good. Long, flat noodles with marinara soaked into them.
Kenny said, “What was bothering you this morning?”
I said, “It’s not important.”
Kenny held one long noodle above his mouth and sucked it in. He smiled, red sauce in his beard. “I don’t believe you,” he said, and wiped his face with his sleeve. “But that’s cool. Maybe another time.”
“Yeah,” I said, “another time.”
Kenny said, “You know what happened right after that thing with Beau? It’s kind of funny. I was hitchhiking in Northern California, near Crescent City, the redwoods at Jedediah, when this huge Chevy Suburban I was hitchhiking in hit a deer. The Suburban broke that deer, and the deer barely made a mark on the vehicle. Just one busted-out headlight, that’s all, and the deer’s neck was snapped, head turned all the way around backwards.
“We were standing there on the side of the road, staring at the deer when I realized she was connected to Beau, and I needed to make something of her, of her death, something I couldn’t do with Beau.
“So I got my backpack out of the car and thanked the people for the ride. They were nice enough. The man said, ‘Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to hit a deer, you know?’” Kenny took a bite of noodles and chewed slowly. He talked with his mouth full. “So after they drove away, I dragged that doe into the woods, built a smoke pit, and cut a few hundred thin strips of meat off her. Then I smoked it all and lived off it for a month.”
“A full month?”
“Yeah,” he said, “a full month. One moon. I watched the sky at night. I ate that deer and whatever else I could find out there, some berries and roots, a couple snakes for variety. And I stayed in the woods and thought about a lot of things. Felt like Beau wasn’t being wasted then. That he was in the ground, and had been killed by a car, drug to death, a pretty fucking evil thing altogether, but that the deer had redeemed him. I don’t know why the doe was given to me, but she put a bookend on Beau’s life. Put it all into a circle. That doe gave me a new way of being.”
I said, “The doe redeemed Beau because you ate her?”
“No, no,” Kenny said. “It wasn’t because I ate her. It was because she gave me time, an entire month to be alone, a month to think about Beau, to think about cars and houses and jobs and food and video games and junk drawers and everything else that I think about now, everything I gave up. Everything you…” he stopped and tapped me with his elbow “…everything that you know nothing about. That’s what she did for me.”
Graphic the Valley Page 14