He said the same thing I was thinking, “Been a long time. Too long.”
“Four years at least. You in town, Harry?”
“No, I'm calling from The Pines.” That was a small village not far from Eden Lake. “Listen, buddy, you couldn't get away for a few days, could you? Come up and do a little fishing and kick over old times?”
I hesitated. “Well—I don't know.”
“Be good to see you,” he said. “And the bass are big and hungry this year.”
I've got a lesion on my left lung, I thought. I might have lung cancer. I said, “Maybe I can swing it next week. I'm not sure yet.”
“No chance you could make it right away?”
“You mean today?”
“The sooner the better.”
There was something in his voice that told me he had more on his mind than fishing and kicking over old times. I said as much, and then I said, “You got some sort of problem, Harry?”
“Yeah, maybe,” he admitted.
“Urgent?”
“It could be.”
“You want to tell me about it now?”
“It's a little complicated,” Harry said. “Has to do with some of the people staying at my camp. You'd have to see the situation yourself to get a real handle on it.” He paused. “Hell, I hate to come out of the blue like this after four years and ask a favor, but I don't know anybody else. And it'd be good to see you again anyway, believe that.”
“Harry—look, I just don't know. I'll have to see if I can get away. Can I call back a little later?”
“I'll be here for another hour. That enough time?”
“Maybe. If not, I could leave a message.” There were no telephones at the camp; even though it was less than five miles from The Pines, Harry liked to maintain the illusion of wilderness and isolation.
“Fair enough.” He gave me the number: The Pines General Store. “I hope you can manage it, buddy.”
“I'll call,” I said.
I put the phone down and went out into the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee. I stood with it, staring down into the sink and its overflow of crusty-looking dishes.
You can't do it, I thought. You've got to go in on Tuesday and find out the results of the sputum test—find out that the lesion is benign.
Or malignant.
I don't want to know the results of that frigging test, I thought.
Tuesday.
You'll go crazy sitting around here, waiting for Tuesday.
Well, you could go up to Eden Lake and you could be back by Tuesday, couldn't you?
Unless Harry's problem took longer than that.
All right, suppose it did. I could always
call
White from The Pines; I did not necessarily have to go in and see him. Besides, I was in a sorry mental state right now and I needed activity, a place and a direction to concentrate my sensibilities. I had always been motivated by my work, and it was a tried and true antidote for self-pity and depression. So was fishing for lake bass and reliving some of the good moments of the past with an old friend. And I owed Harry a favor because of our friendship, if for no other reason.
Sunday morning coming down
.
In the living room again I sat and stared at the walls and listened to the silence. After a while I said aloud, “You're a damned fool.” Then I got up and did what I had known all along I was going to do: I went in and called Harry Burroughs at The Pines General Store and told him I would be up later that day.
The Mother Lode extends one hundred and fifty miles north and south along the western slopes of the central Sierra Nevada. In the Southern Mines of Tuolumne County, due east of Modesto where Eden Lake was located, hundreds of thousands of men had used picks, washing pans, rockers, hydraulic rams, sluices, and crude and modern machinery to extract billions of dollars' worth of placer and quartz gold during the last half of the nineteenth century. Some of the towns that had sprung up then had long since died, become ghosts or nothing at all except historical memories. Others remained to the present, carefully preserving their heritage so that tourists could peer at the old brick-and-fieldstone and false-fronted buildings, prowl the nearby abandoned diggings, and study the relics left by those who had come long ago in search of dreams. And maybe a hundred years from now, if the world lasted that long, tourists of that era would come to gape and gawk at what was left of
our
dreams …
The Pines was one of those towns rich in history, situated in the foothills off the Mono Highway east of Twain Harte and set against a backdrop of forested mountains and snow-capped crags thirteen thousand feet high and more. The surrounding countryside was rolling, hilly grassland and placer-pocked limestone—the town had been built on mining claims—and a spur of the Old Sierra Railroad passed through it and up into the mountains to where lumberjacks still felled trees and cut logs for the sawmills at Standard and Tuolumne.
When I came into The Pines a few minutes before three, the main street was crowded with cars and people. Traffic had been heavy all the way from San Francisco, and especially heavy into and out of Sonora on the Mono Road, mostly transient tourists and vacationers from the resorts at Long Barn and Pine Crest and local families on a Sunday outing. It was very hot, up in the nineties; the hot-metal glare of the sun made the trees on Buck Horn Hill look as though they were aflame. I had my window rolled down, and the air was redolent with the scents of pine and wood smoke and summer dust.
There was not much to the town—a two-story, false-fronted hotel with double porch posts and a sign hanging from the second-floor veranda that said it had been built in 1882; the General Store, a couple of souvenir shops, three restaurants, a simulated Old West saloon that dispensed “genuine sarsparilla” instead of alcoholic beverages, a white frame church, and The Pines Museum—the last nearly dwarfed by a pair of seventy-foot, partially dismantled tailing wheels along its near side. Down the side streets were a few houses, open pasture land, and at least one example of gold-rush architecture that nobody had seen fit to restore—a low square building with a brick front and stone sides and heavy iron doors.
I wedged my car into a space in front of the General Store, between a VW bus and a big Dodge van that seemed curiously out of place in these surroundings because it had the words
Vahram Terzian—Fine Oriental Rugs and Carpets
painted on the side. I bought a fishing license and a few things I would need in the way of groceries: a small jar of instant coffee and a salami and some hard rolls. The place was jammed and the prices were exorbitant and the fat woman who waited on me wore a broad smile; I thought that she was probably the owner.
At the far end of the village was the dirt-and-gravel county road that led to Eden Lake. Nobody seemed to want to go there except me—the road was deserted. It wound upward past cuts of bluish limestone and the ancient, crumbling outbuilding of a pocket mine that lay against the hillside like an old scar that had never healed; then, after three dusty miles, it began to climb sharply into heavy sugar and digger pine. When it finally crested I could see Eden Lake shimmering ice-blue in the sunlight below.
The lake was small, maybe a half-mile wide and a quarter-mile long. Forestland grew to the water's edge in a full half-moon to the north and east; to the west there was a high bluff and a grassy meadow rising in a gentle slope beside it. Harry Burroughs' fishing camp was at the south end, and its buildings were the only ones anywhere on or near the lake. All of the surrounding land was owned by either the state or the county, I couldn't remember which, and through a friend on the real-estate board Harry had managed a long-term lease for the portion on which he had built his camp. One of these days, though, at least some other parts of the lakefront property were going to undergo development—a fact he did not much care to think about.
The first view you had of the camp was when you came down out of the trees and neared the graveled circle that served as a parking area. There were six cabins, set into a rough wide horseshoe shape and sweeping inland from the lake, but the only one visible from here was Harry's, the largest and the one nearest the parking circle; the others were hidden by pines and other forest growth. Extending into the lake fifty yards from Harry's front door was a short narrow pier, and tied to the end of it were two fourteen-foot, oak-hulled skiffs with five-horsepower outboards.
His ten-year-old jeep was parked in the circle, along with four cars: a new dark-brown Cadillac, a dusty Rambler station wagon, a 1972 Ford, and an expensive yellow Italian sports job. I pulled my car in beside the Rambler and got out into the hot, dry mountain air.
Nobody came to meet me, and the camp looked empty for all I could see. I went over to Harry's cabin and up onto the log-railed porch and rapped on the door. There was no response. So I came down again and walked around to the far side, to where there was a large Coca-Cola cooler that I knew he always kept well-stocked with beer and soft drinks. I helped myself to a can of Schlitz, popped the tab, and drank a third of it before I lowered the can. It had been a long drive from San Francisco.
The beer brought on an instant craving for a cigarette, as beer often did with me; I made an effort to blank my mind against it. I had not had any trouble doing that during the drive—I had managed to concentrate enough on the road and on the radio broadcast of the Giants game. My chest felt all right, maybe a little tight; I wondered if the thin mountain air, the summer dust, would have any effect on my lungs.
But I did not want to think about my lungs.
I drank more of the beer and looked around and still did not see anyone. Behind Harry's cabin was a shed with the doors spread open. I wandered over there and looked inside and saw the same things I had seen the last time I was up for a visit: another skiff up on davits, several rolls of heavy canvas for added protection of the boats during the winter months, an uncluttered workbench along one wall, shelves of paint and motor oil and other items neatly stored. Unlike me, Harry had always been a fastidious man.
I finished the beer and turned back toward the lake. A young guy wearing only a pair of gabardine slacks came out of the trees from the direction of the first of the guest cabins. He saw me, paused, and then walked over casually. He was tall and lean, with one of these bronzed beachboy physiques and a lot of shaggy flax-colored hair that covered his ears and curled up on the back of his neck. A thick, stylish mustache right-angled down on either side of his mouth, forming three sides of a frame for the kind of lips some women would call sensuous.
He smiled crookedly as he approached. “Well,” he said, “new blood in no man's land. You joining our happy little group?”
“For a day or two.”
“I wish I could say the same thing. You alone?”
“I'm alone.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, and stepped around me to the cooler, lifted the lid, and took out a beer. When he had it open he sipped a little, made a face, and gave me his crooked grin again. “This stuff is rat piss, you know? I like imported beer if I have to drink it at all.”
“Is that right?”
“Sure. I'm Todd Cody. Vegas.”
I told him my name and where I was from. He gave no indication of wanting to shake hands, and that and the beer comment made me decide I was not going to like him much. I said, “Do you know where Harry is?”
“Burroughs? Nope. I've been taking a nap; too damned hot to do anything else.”
“You been here long, have you?”
“Two weeks. With another two to go, unless I can get time off for good behavior.”
“How's that?”
“My old man,” Cody said. “He sends me to places like this periodically, when he thinks I've been getting out of hand. If I don't go, he stops sending checks. So I go. I suffer, but I go.”
So that was the way it was. I said, “It takes all kinds.”
“Sure,” he agreed. He thought I was talking about his old man.
In the hot stillness I heard the distant hum of an outboard, and I turned to look out over the lake. A fourth skiff was just pulling out from the southwest shore, heading across the lake at an angle away from the camp. There were two men in it, the one at the tiller wearing what looked like a jungle helmet; they both appeared good-sized and they were both wearing white T-shirts.
Cody said contemptuously, “Knox and Talesco.”
“Guests here too?”
“Yeah. You're in for a treat when you meet them.”
“Why is that?”
“A couple of machos straight out of Hemingway,” he said. “But wherever you see one, the other's not far away. Closet fags, if you want my opinion.”
I didn't. I said, “Who else is staying here right now?”
“Guy named Bascomb, an artist or something. Spends all his time painting and sketching. A real fun dude.”
“Anyone else?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Jerrold,” Cody said. The crooked smile again, with a leer in it this time. “You're also in for a treat when you meet little Angela—a
genuine
treat. The lady is a fox of the first order, you know what I mean?”
But that question turned out to be rhetorical, because a voice called sharply “Cody! You, Cody!” and turned both our heads toward the rear of Harry's cabin.