Hold of the Bone

by Baxter Clare Trautman

  She offers Frank the canteen. The water is warm and metallic, but Frank drinks greedily. She notices Sal takes a sip only before stashing the canteen back into a saddle bag. The dogs get nothing, nor do they seem to expect it. She looks around while Sal rolls a cigarette.

  They are on the ridge, but not quite at the top. A wall of gray granite rising over the pines deepens the shade of the hurst. As if from memory, it comes to Frank that this is a good and safe encampment; no one is likely to approach from the narrow ridge above, nor from the steep slopes below. There is only the portrero to be watched. She frowns, wondering how she knows that. Sal offers the cigarette. Frank shakes her head. Wind sifts through the boughs, bringing the scent of sun-warmed pine and tobacco. And something else. Frank lifts her nose to the air. It smells faintly of the sea.

  Sal toes a hole through the needles. She takes one more drag and spits on the cigarette. It goes out with a hiss and she pinches off the wet end and puts the butt in her pocket. She walks past and in the dim light of the copse she seems like an ethereal conjuring. Frank wants to touch her, to make sure she is real, but Sal is already disappearing through the trees. The wind brushes Frank’s arm. She jumps and trots stiffly to catch up. Ahead of her, Sal boosts Cicero up onto a ledge, and after lifting Kook onto the boulder she looks back at Frank. Bone stands beside Frank and Sal tells her before clambering onto the boulder, “You’ll have to help him up.”

  Frank looks at the head-high rock, then at Bone. “Not gonna bite me, are ya?”

  He looks up at her, wagging his stump. Frank pats the rock like she saw Sal do, and Bone stands against it. She shoves him up and over the ledge, then pulls herself up using cracks and footholds. Boulders clog the way, but none Bone can’t maneuver himself. He hops over the bare granite and she follows, emerging into a shallow bowl at the top of the ridge. A solitary bush grows on one side and the dogs sprawl in its sparse shade. Sal scrambles onto the far lip of the bowl and holds a hand to Frank. She takes it. It is rough and brown and dry and Frank has the crazy notion that Sal is more of the land than of human origin.

  “Whoa.” Frank is on the dizzying verge of the mountain. It falls away below her, down hundreds of feet through brush and boulder, gradually fanning into jagged folds of ridge and canyon. She backs from the edge. Cicero leaps onto the granite bench and stands proudly, chest puffed like he’s posing for a hunting magazine.

  Sal sits on the edge of the world, legs dangling. She pats the flat rock. “Come sit.”

  “I’m good right here.”

  Sal fishes the half-smoked butt from her pocket and lights it. She takes a drag and holds it out. The cigarette is tempting. Frank is reminded again that with one quick shove Sal could disappear her so that even the coyotes and crows couldn’t find her. Still she steps forward. She sits cross-legged, a couple feet from the edge, and takes the cigarette. The smoke is cool and tastes sweetly of mint. She takes a second drag before passing it back. “I’m really not much of a smoker—a pack’ll last me a year—but this is good stuff.”

  Sal nods. “It’s my julep blend.”

  “You make your own tobacco?”

  “Yes. It’s easy. It grows wild near the ranch house.”

  “You have everything you need here, don’t you?”

  “Pretty much.”

  The wind races up the flank of the mountain face, carrying the scent of salt and rainless brush. It kisses Frank’s head and ruffles her hair. She shades the westerly sun from her eyes and points. “That purple on the horizon, is that the ocean?”

  “Yes.”

  Impelled by the endless vista, she scoots closer to the edge. “It’s so wild here.”

  Sal nods, mashing out the cigarette. “Down there it’s too foggy and up here it’s too dry. The Lucias are just miserable enough to keep most people out.”

  “But not you.”

  Sal cocks her head at Frank, and it’s hard to tell where her eyes leave off and the sky begins.

  “This place is wild until you get to know it. Then you can never leave.”

  Cicero settles behind them with a sigh. The breeze sifts through a small pine above the bowl. Frank squints at the smudge of sea and far canyons crowded with redwood and fir, the sere, wind-burned peaks dotted with only the hardiest shrubs.

  Sal nudges and points. “Look. A condor. Two of them!”

  A pair of plank-winged birds skim into view below them. Frank’s head swims with déjà vu. She places her palms on the rock to steady herself. Sal is saying she has seen them only once before. “When I was young. Before they had tags and radio wires.”

  The big birds glide north and disappear.

  “Do you know why the vulture family is bald?”

  “What?”

  “They don’t have feathers on their heads. Do you know why?”

  “Uh, to keep their heads clean because they stick ’em in dead things?”

  “Nope. It’s because a long time ago the sun started falling to earth. It was getting so close that it was burning the people that lived here and they cried for someone to carry the sun back up into the sky.”

  Frank relaxes back on her elbows, taking some of the pressure off her aching ass.

  “Fox jumped up and grabbed the sun, but it was too hot and he dropped it. That’s why he has a black mouth to this day. Raven said, ‘Give it to me’ and started to fly off with it, but the sun charred all his feathers and he finally dropped it. After a while Vulture said, ‘I’ll give it a try,’ and she picked up the sun and off she went, straight up into the sky. Higher and higher she flew. Her feathers started burning, but Vulture kept flying up and up.

  “Her feet caught fire, and all the feathers burnt off. But Vulture held onto the sun. The feathers on her head burst into flames and turned her skin red. But Vulture held on to the sun. She flew higher and higher, until she was just a speck in the sky, and when she couldn’t go any farther Vulture finally let go off the sun, But she’d flown so far and so high the sun stayed right where she dropped it. Poor Vulture. She was so badly burned that her head feathers never did grow back. And she is still so exhausted from that long-ago trip that she has to glide wherever she goes instead of fly.”

  Frank claps and Sal smiles.

  “I haven’t told that story in years. It was Cassie’s favorite. She’d make me tell it over and over.”

  Frank remembers, “She said to get you to tell me about the zopilotes.”

  “She said that?”

  “Uh-huh. Said you were a great storyteller.”

  Sal hugs her knees and looks toward the ocean. Clearing her throat, she starts. “I told you the Santa Lucias aren’t hospitable to most people, but long before there were roads and cars along the coast, there were always a few intrepid souls called to scratch out a living between the mountains and the sea. They were hardy folks, as tough as the land. For the most part they lived in shacks at the foot of the mountains, on bluffs above the ocean just wide enough to grow beans and corn on and keep a few chickens, maybe even a cow.”

  Frank lies back and closes her eyes, the sun a benediction upon her face.

  “They worked hard on their little plots of land, scratching out a meager living between the storms that battered the coast in winter and the fog that shrouded it in summer. They had simple wants and means, but a couple times a year they would saddle up their horse, if they were lucky enough to have one, and make the journey to one of the few towns along the coast. If they didn’t have a horse—well, then they walked. There was no smooth paved highway back then, just a muddy or dusty horse trail, depending on the season, that hugged the edge of the sea. It was no path to be traveling in the dark or a storm.

  “But one day a man did just that. He’d been in town to get the flour, salt, and a bolt of cloth his wife had asked for. He’d purchased all his supplies and still had a little money left over, so he thought it couldn’t hurt to have a whiskey at the bar before the long ride home. Well, the one drink turned into two, and then three, and when he was fin
ally out of money the man toddled out of the bar and started climbing onto his horse.

  “It so happened that a scoundrel who’d been watching the man lay his coins on the bar followed quietly behind. Just as the man tried pulling himself up into the saddle, the scoundrel grabbed his reins, pulled a knife, and demanded the man empty his pockets lest his throat part sides.

  “Now, a man who lives alone with the Santa Lucias at his back and the Pacific Ocean at his feet is hardly going to be intimidated by a rascal with a knife. So, pretending to empty his pockets, the man reached into his coat and in a flash of gleaming steel he slit the scoundrel from navel to chin, and off he galloped into the falling night. Though home was a hard half-day ride, the man didn’t slow. He whipped his horse, following the trail by a sliver of moonlight. He rode and rode, and as he rode the fog crept in. It gathered off the ocean and crawled toward land, keeping time with the horse and rider until at last it pulled ahead to lay as thick and heavy over them as a brand-new blanket.

  “The man slowed his horse to a trot, then a walk, until the horse balked and would move no more. Certain he could hear the pounding of hooves behind, the man kicked his horse and whipped him on. The horse took one faltering step, then another. The man gouged his spurs into the horse’s belly, urging him on, and the horse complied. Too late the man realized his mount was slipping. The horse tried to scrabble back to solid ground, but all its hooves could find were air. With a horrible screaming, beast and rider fell onto the broken, wave-swept rocks. The horse ceased its struggle, but the man was alive and in great pain. He tried to stand, but his legs twisted under him and he knew, in the darkness and wet salt air, that he would rise no more.”

  Sal stops to pull out her pouch and roll a smoke. After it is lit, she continues.

  “Throughout the night, the dawn, and the next night, the man lay on the rocks in his terrible pain and screamed, but even if someone had been passing by the edge of the cliff, he was too far down and the ocean too loud for them to hear his cries. Yet cry he did. He howled piteously in his pain and thirst. On the second sunset, the man began to lick the salt spray on the rocks. He knew it would hasten his end, and the wet saltiness did little to slake his thirst, but he had to speak once more before his black and swelling tongue forever filled his mouth.

  “So with his last breath he cried out to his animal gods, begging forgiveness for killing the scoundrel who had tried to steal his horse and hard-earned goods. He begged for mercy—not for himself but for his wife and children back home, that the gods might keep them well and free from harm despite his sins. And the man fell back upon his broken legs and as he looked up into the clouded sky he saw a patient line of zopilotes gathered upon the cliff above, and as he watched, a lone vulture took flight from the cliff and flew south, toward his wife and small children, toward his humble cabin in a sheltering arm of the mountains. The man closed his eyes and flew with the zopilote.”

  “Legend has it that upon the next storm the man’s wife gave shelter to a doctor traveling between the lonely coast towns. The doctor was so impressed by her kindness and apparent plight that he left the woman with his horse and a bag of gold, promising to return in the spring with more. And for many years after, the doctor was true to his word, visiting every spring and every fall with gifts for the woman and her grown children. When the doctor at last died, his journals went to a local museum, and there the curious notation was discovered that upon each of his visits to the woman’s cabin, the doctor was unfailingly accompanied by a single zopilote following lazily overhead.

  “To this day the abuelas swear that spirit vultures circle the Santa Lucias searching for lost souls, and that if you are ever in trouble you can call on zopilote and he will come to your aid.”

  Frank claps again and sits up. “Your daughter’s right. You are a good storyteller.” Then she asks, “Have you ever called on zopilote?”

  Sal only smiles and drags on her cigarette. Frank admires the sprawling vista, swats at a persistent gnat.

  “Do you know what jhator is?”

  Frank shakes her head. The gnat buzzes away.

  “It’s the Tibetan practice of burying the dead. It literally means ‘giving alms to the birds.’ The Tibetans dismember their dead and leave the bodies out for the vultures to feast on. I think it’s a beautiful concept. I’d love to be returned to the world like that, when it’s time. Right here. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

  Frank doesn’t find the idea particularly “lovely” but can see the symmetry for Sal, who seems such a part of the landscape.

  Sal stands. “We should get back.”

  Cicero and Kook stretch and follow her down the rocks, but Bone watches from his strip of shade. “I’m with you,” Frank confides. “I’ve got to get on that goddamned horse again.”

  Frank regrets cursing Buttons, who has been nothing but patient with her. Sore from the waist down, she grunts and limps toward the ladder of boulders. She turns for a last look at the ocean. It’s still there. It will be there, along with the rolling peaks and canyons and blue, blue sky long after she is gone. Frank turns and steps into the cleft. With a grunt and gimp to match, Bone climbs down after her.

  Chapter 27

  As if Sal has used all her words back at the pass, they don’t speak until they are in the corral, and then it is only to murmur praise to the horses. After they are brushed and turned loose behind the barn, Sal and Frank walk to the truck. The dogs are passed out in its shade, and it occurs to Frank she has barely asked any questions about the investigation. Sal kneels and checks Cicero’s feet for foxtails. Without looking at Frank, she says, “You’re welcome to spend the night, if you want.”

  “Really?”

  Sal nods. The shadows of the barn drape round her like a mantilla and Frank glances around to see that the western half of the ranch is already twilit. Figuring Sal isn’t as much generous as she is tired and reluctant to drive Frank to her car, she kicks herself for having fallen once again under the ranch’s spell. She has no intention of spending the night again. The freak storm last time made the overnight stay somewhat plausible, but this time it would be impossible to justify. She searches for a reason to stay and is unable to find one, other than she wants very badly to be part of the coming dusk, to see how it steals over the rest of the ranch and creeps up on the cabin and across the yard into the trees until all the land is washed in gray and the last traces of color are swallowed by velvet night.

  “I really should go.”

  Sal stands and wipes her hands on her jeans. Neither woman moves toward the truck.

  “Why did you come all the way up here?”

  Frank shrugs, glances helplessly around her. “I have to ask you more questions.”

  “You haven’t asked any.”

  “I know.”

  “Then you may as well at least come up for dinner.”

  Sal stalks behind the barn. A moment later she drives the quad around and parks by the truck. She drops the short tailgate and the dogs rise slowly, leaping one by one into the small bed. Frank glances into the cab of the truck. The keys hang in the ignition. She should drive herself to town. She’s pretty sure she knows the way. Just hop in and tell Sal she’ll leave the truck at the gate.

  That’d be the right thing to do. Just leave.

  Sal sits behind the wheel of the idling quad and Bone stands in back. Both stare at her. The mountains’ shadows grope for the eastern edges of the ranch. Frank looks there, toward Soledad and the highway. Soon it will be dark and she will be shut in her hotel room, studying the star-sprinkled mountains from behind the curtains.

  Swearing, but hiding a smile, she jogs to the quad and hangs on as it lurches up the meadow. They get closer to the creek and the sycamores grow in the dimming light, yet their bulk seems incorporeal. Frank lifts her nose to the air. She can smell their greenness, their sap-running life, and the smile that has been threatening busts loose. Sal stops just shy of the tree line. The dogs jump out and run across the bridge.
Frank follows her hostess, pausing to peer into the unfathomable water. A bird calls plaintively. She can’t see it in the graying leaves but knows the bird is seeking a roost out of the wind, safe from nocturnal hunters. If it picks a poor site or is forced to flee in the unnavigable darkness, it may well not live through the night. Frank leaves the sinuous bower, unsure where she has learned that.

  Sal is in the cabin getting the dogs’ food ready and tells Frank, “It’s a little chilly. Do you know how to build a fire?”

  “I do.”

  Sal appears doubtful, but asks her to start one in the fire pit while she heats their dinner.

  “Where’s the wood?”

  Sal points to a neat stack between the sheds.

  “Are there snakes in there?”

  “Possibly. Take the pieces on top.”

  Frank calls Bone to her, but he is fixated on his bowl.

  “Traitor,” she says.

  The yard is shadowy. Frank crosses it slowly, searching for snakes. She gingerly gathers an armload of wood and totes it to the fire pit, relieved the dogs have finished eating and are prowling the yard. Frank arranges the kindling, then pokes her head into the cabin. Whatever Sal is cooking smells good. The dogs must think so too, for they push past and arrange themselves in a semi-circle around the kitchen. Watching the homey scene, Frank is overcome by another déjà vu. She clings to the doorjamb until the sensation passes.

  Sal asks, “Are you alright?”

  “Yeah. Matches?”

  Sal tosses a box. Frank lights the fire just as the sun falls into the hungry ridge tops and is swallowed whole. The frisson Frank feels isn’t just from the fading heat. The dogs burst through the door again, but this time she doesn’t flinch. Sal sets down a plate of fresh tortillas and heavy bowls of chili verde. They sit near the fire, tucking silently into the spicy stew. The dogs lay at their feet waiting for spills.

  Swabbing her bowl with a tortilla, Frank casually asks, “You ever have déjà vu?”