Graphic the Valley (28 page)

I lay on the floor with my shirt off. Arms outstretched. The numbness almost gone from my fingers. I could feel my hair beginning to grow again.

McKenzie came on day thirteen.

She looked small in her clothes, like she wasn’t eating well. “I was wrong,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I looked at her through the bars.

She said, “I’m so sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

She touched my hand. “Have they said what they have you on?”

“Arson. Also, they questioned whether or not I’m a U.S. citizen.”

“Can they prove that you’re not a citizen?” she said.

I said, “Do they have to prove that I’m not, or do I have to prove that I am?” I shook my head. I kept thinking that they were listening to us, that they had the cell set up for recording. “But maybe I am one,” I said. “I was born here, and this is the United States, right?”

She said, “Here in the Valley? You were born right here?”

“Yes,” I said, “in a car.”

She was holding my hand. “Have you told them that?”

“No.”

She said, “Why not?”

“Because of my parents,” I said. I looked around for cameras but didn’t see any. I didn’t know where they could hide microphones.

McKenzie was tapping her fingers on the bars. She said, “I’m going back to L.A. again. This will be my second time in three days.”

I said, “How did that work before?”

“Not well. My boss was gone on a business trip. I called him. We talked, but this needs to be something we meet about. I can be more persuasive in person,” she said. “He’s coming back to L.A. tonight, so I’ll drive there today. Give it one more shot.”

The clerk opened the hall door and walked up. He said, “They want to talk to Tenaya again, so ma’am, you’re going to have to leave now.”

I said, “Good luck, McKenzie.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am.”

The guard said, “Ma’am, it’s really time to go.”

“Okay,” she said, and stood up. “Goodbye, Tenaya.”

“Goodbye.”

She started down the hall, then turned around. She said, “I’ll come see you as soon as I get back, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

She left through the door and a deputy came back for me. The deputy unlocked my cell and let me out.

The agents were waiting for me in the other room. They were both standing. The shorter one pointed to the chair by the table, the one I always sat in. I sat down. The taller one still had that pad of paper. I didn’t know why they kept doing this, always the same thing.

The shorter one said, “This doesn’t mean much.”

I waited because that wasn’t a question.

He said, “But we’ll have to wait. Be patient.”

I said, “Be patient for what?”

“Right,” he said. “We’ll have you back in here soon.”

I said, “In this room?”

“In here,” he said. “And then you’ll let us know what else is going on.” He was clicking his pen again. I wanted to rip it out of his hand. My fingers were less numb each day now. Three good meals, lots of sleep, time to get strong.

“Yes,” the agent said, “you’ll let us know the whole scope. Who else is involved…” He waved his pen around.

I started to reach toward the pen but made my hand go back down to the tabletop. I spread my fingers on the Formica.

“For example,” he said, “that McKenzie Johnston?”

“No,” I said. “She’s not involved.”

“We’ll see about that,” he said. “And this Kenny Cox?”

The man behind me scratched for ten seconds then stopped.

The shorter one looked at me. He said, “Maybe someone else too? We’ll figure it all out though. Gather more evidence. Then bring you back in. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I looked back and forth between the two of them. I said, “So I’m getting out?”

They looked like campers who left out food to bait a bear. But I knew how that always worked out. I’d seen a bear break a man’s face with one tap of his paw, no effort at all, just a pat, and the orbital bone dented in an inch, the man’s face crushed.

The agent said, “So we’re going to let you go for a little while, but we’ll have you back in a week. You’ll be required to check in every two days. Can you do that? Because if you don’t, you’ll be impeding a federal investigation. Do you understand what that means?” he said. He smiled.

“Yes,” I said.

“All right then.” He clicked his pen one final time. He said, “I guess that’s it. So if you’ll wait here, we’ll go notify the clerk.”

They left the room and I sat for fifteen minutes alone in the room. I rubbed my hands over the top of my head where my hair was growing. In the last couple of days, it seemed to have grown a quarter of an inch.

• • •

I didn’t know which direction to walk as I came out of the building. I knew I was lucky to be out, and I wasn’t sure if I should go back to the caves at the Ahwahnee. I knew someone might be following me, or waiting there.

McKenzie was gone. If I’d been released an hour earlier, she would’ve still been at the jail.

• • •

My mother is there with us, outside of camp, the day after it happened. I’m six. My mother is standing with her eyes closed while we dig the hole.

The blanket, wrapped, lay off to the right, next to a tree, as if it holds belongings for a picnic, food and clothing. It looks so small, a family blanket rolled three times and folded at each end, less than three feet long.

We take turns digging, my father and I, although my turns are shorter. The ground is rocky, and I can’t move much earth. Even the small Army Surplus shovel is too heavy for me. When the hole is deep enough to stand in, my father does all the digging and I sit on the ground next to him as he deepens the hole.

My father walks over and picks up the bundle, holding it to his chest.

I say, “Can I put her in?”

My father looks at me, his eyes gray, more gray than brown.

We both look to my mother but she isn’t looking at us.

My father says, “Okay.”

I hold out my hands, flat, palms up, elbows pressed to my sides, as if my father is about to load my arms with firewood. He rolls the bundle over my hands, into the right angle of my elbows against my chest. I pull my hands in tight, hold the bundle close, and my father slips his hands out from underneath the blanket.

Even though I know it is not true, the blanket feels as heavy as I am, as if I am burying myself.

• • •

At dusk, I jogged back to the Ahwahnee caves, the sun dropping like a fire-sharpened stick. It was almost dark when I walked into camp, found my cave at the meeting of the two boulders, my sleeping bag moist from the ceiling drip. I lay down on top of my bag.

After a while, I got up. Drank some water and peed. I thought about when I first saw what was inside the trunk of the car.

My father and mother were down the hill, walking toward the river. That morning, I’d seen where my father had stashed the keys, and I waited all afternoon for this opportunity.

I read my book until I was sure that they were gone. Then I lifted the rock, pulled the keys out, and walked over to the car. Seventeen years old, and I had never seen the inside of the car’s trunk.

I slid the key in the slot. Turned it and the trunk popped, came open, and rotated on the hinges. Inside were stacks and stacks of money, rubber bands around each stack. I picked up one stack and counted it. Five hundred dollars in twenties. And all the stacks looked the same, more than one hundred of them rubber-banded.

I remembered the story of Lower Merced Lake. The divers. San Francisco trips to sell bricks from the Lodestar fuselage. This was no river treasure.

• • •

In the morning, Greazy told me about Kenny, but I already knew. I’d seen his face against the wall in my sleep, seen it blue and hard, and I didn’t want to hear about the helicopter and the YOSAR crews rappelling. I didn’t want to hear about the portaledge ripped in half, Kenny’s hands stuck to the chains, white-blue and hard.

I was sitting against the back wall of my cave, on the old mattress, my sleeping bag wrapped around my shoulders.

Greazy said, “I’m real fucking sorry, man.”

“Yeah,” I said, “me too.”

Greazy said, “He was a good guy, a great guy. I’m real, real sorry. You know that, right?”

I felt the back of my head against the granite of the boulder. The cool. The slick of the rock. “Yeah, I know,” I said.

Greazy kicked one of my water bottles left to right with his foot. Rolled it over. He said, “Kenny was…” but he didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

I said, “Yeah,” again. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“I know,” Greazy said. He rolled the water bottle back with his toe. “Hey, man, I was thinking…I mean, some of us saw you come in last night all upset looking. Before all of this. You know?”

I had been trying to read all morning, but I hadn’t gotten anywhere in the book. It was folded closed next to me, and I realized that I’d made up my mind. I knew what I had to do.

“You know,” Greazy said, “no offense or anything, right? Just hoping you’re okay, you know?”

“Right,” I said.

“Okay then. If you need anything,” Greazy waved. Then he left.

I called Carlos from the pay phone in the Ahwahnee because I wanted them to trace the call there later.

• • •

I went to the Curry deck and collected newspapers. Read all I could, memorized the names of everyone and everything. I ate pizza leftovers while I read, ate without tasting, food as a reflex, a habit. The CEOs, presidents, and the superintendent were meeting at the Ahwahnee, in the Great Room. The next meeting would bring them all together to form a “plan of conduct,” a future for the Valley. They were meeting in ten days.

I had never done much of anything that I’d planned. I looked at my hands for a mark of the superintendent’s blood.

• • •

The wet mattress. Mist. The drip at the north corner of the cave making a sound like two marbles kissing. The night-quiet of the middle hours, nocturnal animals in bed now, and diurnal animals still asleep. I heard him scream.

I rolled over onto the wet patch of the mattress and soaked my shirt at the shoulder. Sat up. Heard him again. Then the muffled scraping sounds, leather against granite. A rasping. I stood up and left the cave.

He was up in the talus fifty yards away. I found him wedged between two boulders shaped like obtuse triangles. The hole in his head was half the size of my fist. He stopped thrashing. Rolled and looked at me.

I said his name. My own name.

He looked like a darted bear. Didn’t blink. His eyes were open and watery, twitching at the corners.

I knew this story, his death at the pass in the high country. Trying to cut through the mountains after the invasion, the ambush came from above, and the rock broke a hole through his skull.

I put my hand on his chest and felt his breathing, the suck of his lungs. I leaned down next to the hole, hearing his soul’s whistling as it came through the skull.

• • •

A middle-aged man brought in the truck full of fertilizer two days later. The truck was an old silver Nissan with a tinted-windowed canopy. The bales were wrapped in the back, wound in dark plastic, only visible if I leaned in and looked with my hands cupped around my eyes.

The man said, “This stuff has sat for a week now. But you’ve got to let it sit for a few days more. After that, it’s volatile. Timing is everything, right?” He looked like a university botanist on a Valley hike. He had leather patches on the elbows of his tweed sports coat, long, gray hair, an enormous mustache.

I paid him with the money Carlos had given me in an envelope marked “Food.” The man didn’t count the money, but slid it in the pocket of his coat.

We got in the truck and he went over the remote. He said, “Don’t mess around with this. Only flip this lock when you’re ready to go. The caps are all in place. They’re set. So you make a mistake here, and you go with it. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“All right then. You take care now,” he said. “Big boom.”

He got out of the truck and closed the door behind him. Then he walked up the road and put his thumb out to hitchhike.

I started the truck and drove it across the road into the overflow parking lot. I nearly stalled the vehicle twice in a hundred yards, my driving skills not good enough to captain any other car than my father’s.

• • •

I went to see my mother. There was no wet bag coated in solvent, no glue underneath her nostrils, but it didn’t matter. She stumbled around camp, tripping over the bench log each time she passed as if that log hadn’t been there for twenty years.

“Are you okay?” I said.

She smiled at me with her eyes closed. She teetered, fell again, and I caught her.

I said, “I think you need some food, some water, then sleep.”

I fried fish for her. Cooked thin slices of potatoes that I found on the backseat of the car. They were growing roots but they still smelled good. I fed her one bite at a time.

Then I put her to bed in her tent. She insisted on sleeping in my father’s sleeping bag. I lay down right outside the tent, guarding the door, guarding her escape.

In the morning, I made her drink more water. Then I boiled coffee. Sprinkled cold water on top to settle the grounds. Gave her a mug full with a teaspoon of sugar.

I drank a cup too. We sat on the bench log.

My mother’s eyes opened all the way. I said, “We should go visit the hospital today. He would want that.”

My mother shook her head, no.

“You don’t think so?”

My mother looked at me and didn’t blink. She didn’t say anything.

• • •

The rains started the next day, on the Fourth of July, the most populated camping and visitation weekend of the year. People crawled through the Valley like wet locusts, hands and heads bent over cell phones to protect them against the sky.

The rain came down, clouds piled low, black and roiling, one storm stacking the next from the southwest, none passing the buttresses of North Dome. The air thickened in the Valley, pressed against the points of the pines, everything wet.

In the afternoon, the rains turned harder still. Drops the size of hail, but nothing frozen, the sky pounding stone-size warm water, and I laughed as I saw it splatting against the Park Service’s tin roofs, the storm making the sound of a snowplow throwing gravel against a windshield.