Graphic the Valley (3 page)

It was two full years until Lucy. So many girls at Sentinel, in Camp 4, the Lodge, Curry, and the Village. But none of them kissed me.

Nineteen years old the summer I worked slash on the Tioga road. I walked up to the crew chief and said, “Do you need people?” I’d been in Tuolumne, in the high country one week, sleeping in a shelter east of Tenaya Lake.

The crew chief said, “Are you a rock climber?”

I held up my hands, showed the flaking skin on my first finger pads. Torn callouses.

“Okay then,” he said. “You’ll do good.”

I didn’t know what to write on the address or social security lines, so I left those blank, and put the clipboard on the seat of the truck. Then I went to work.

At the end of the day, the crew chief called me over to his truck. “You do good work, kid. Piled a lot of slash.” He tapped my application page with the back of his pen. “You don’t have a social security number though, huh?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

He hocked a chunk of phlegm into his mouth and spat it over his truck. “No number at all? Or you can’t remember?”

I shook my head.

He tapped the application page again. “I thought you looked maybe Mexican. Are you Mexican?”

“No,” I said.

“Okay…” He rubbed his pen with his fingers. “But you’re illegal anyways, huh?”

“Illegal?”

He smiled. “You know what I mean. You ain’t exactly a citizen, right?”

I said, “I don’t know about that.”

He laughed. I didn’t know what to do so I laughed too. We both stood and laughed.

“Well,” he said, “whatever. It means shit to me. I’ll just give you cash for what you do just like you were Mexican, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

He shrugged. He said, “Done it before.”

• • •

I remembered my mother’s hands in my hair. Washing. I was six years old. Half a year since that night on the Merced. I looked down at the meadows, heard her voice there, the crows’. Every morning when I heard them, I looked for her. That still tricked me.

My mother scrubbed my armpits, then my neck. Held my face in her hands that smelled like wax on the brown soap. I didn’t say that I was cold. Sometimes I talked to her, and sometimes I didn’t.

I looked back upstream, saw the water run the dips around the big boulder, like the hump of a submerged animal. My mother turned my face back toward her. Kissed my forehead, wiped it with the back of her hand. She pursed her lips.

I said, “I love you too.”

• • •

The Tioga Road took two months, clearing slash all the way to the Meadows, like beaver dams piled above ground.

The other workers were college boys, here for summer employment. Joking with girls at Valley parties on the weekends. I’d seen those Housekeeping parties and wondered about the beach girls, their tight tank tops on cold evenings, red cups of beer, screaming for no reason. I wanted to be in the middle of one of those parties, hear the music from inside the house, smell the perfume and sweat and beer.

Our work crew was underneath Pywiack Dome in early August, off Lake Tenaya, the mosquitoes awake, waiting in the shade, sucking at the wets of our eyes. The sun turned around a grove of trees baking flakes of skin off the tops of our shoulders. I smelled the lake behind me, waiting to swim.

She came on a Thursday, two days before the weekend. The only girl ever. Too pretty for our crew.

I couldn’t talk to her, but everyone else did, like the Village store lines. Every boy on the crew already there, shirtless, working close, talking and joking at her, throwing pinecones back and forth over her head.

After an hour, the crew chief yelled at them. He said, “All the brush doesn’t lie in one spot, boys.” He smiled and said, “Lucy.” He motioned with his finger.

He talked to her about her paper forms. He leaned in close to point things out on the clipboard. She didn’t seem to notice.

When she went back to work, I watched the way sweat dropped down from her forehead off the end of her nose, how she itched her face with the front of her shoulder, turning her neck. How her braids kept catching in her mouth as she leaned over the slash piles, her black hair like the finished burn.

I watched the neckline of her T-shirt where she’d cut the collar out, dropping it open. That was Thursday.

On Friday, I worked and tried not to look at her. She was too much to watch and everyone was staying near her.

I collected brush in the trees. Thought of finishing the day and getting to swim before dinner. I was the only one camping at the lake on the weekends, in one of the crew’s wall tents, everyone else going back to the Valley to see friends, to drink, to buy food that they couldn’t get in the Meadows store.

As soon as the group left each Friday, I climbed an easy route on Pywiack, feeling the granite on my palms and fingertips, the knobs on the lower dome, then the cracks, climbing past the chopped bolts into the systems up high.

On clear evenings, I liked to lie on top of the dome and watch the stars drop down. It was like submerging in the reed shallows above Mirror Lake, turning with the slow current until Half Dome disappeared, everything multiplying, pine needles, snags, blades of grass. The barely visible molecule circles in the air.

• • •

I was scraping moss off a boulder with my boot, early Friday afternoon. Lucy was out to my right. I’d worked back toward her.

She stood up. “Is anyone staying up here this weekend?”

I stopped scraping.

Other workers shook their heads.

“Nobody?” she said.

The crew chief picked up his water bottle and pointed at me. “The Valley kid is. Tenaya.” He took a drink. “The one with long hair. He stays up here every weekend.”

Lucy looked at me. “You’re staying?”

“Yes.”

She smiled, one dogtooth turned backward, like a river pearl. That tooth angled wrong. She said, “So I can stay up here with him?”

The crew chief shook his water bottle back and forth. “No, no,” he said. “We don’t really do that. The tents are for weeknights or emergencies. Nothing else. You can ride back down with me if you want to.”

She took off one of her gloves and wiped her forehead. “I can’t go down this weekend. Just can’t.”

All the other workers had stopped working. We all stood and listened.

The crew chief said, “What do you mean you can’t?”

Lucy shook her head. “I just can’t go down this weekend.”

The chief flipped his water bottle and caught it. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “I mean, I guess you could stay up.”

I smiled and turned away. Went back to scraping moss. Clearing the boulder wasn’t part of my job but I did this sometimes at the end of the day so I could come back and climb a feature.

I heard one of the other boys say, “Lucky fucking bastard. And he doesn’t even barely talk.”

• • •

We used the group stove to warm up Nalley’s Hot Chili out of cans. Lucy cut slices of cheddar cheese off the block. “Want some?” she said.

“Thanks.”

She smiled, and I saw that crooked tooth again, so turned that it caught on her bottom lip.

I opened a bag of corn chips and held them out to her.

“Thanks,” she said. The chili was warm, and she flipped off the stove. “Good enough, right?”

We ate.

She said, “You don’t want to go down to the Valley on the weekends either?” She pointed her spoon at me.

“No, not really,” I said.

She took a huge bite of chili and said, “Me either,” with her mouth full.

I said, “Why not?”

She swallowed. “I’ve been there a lot before,” she said.

“Me too.”

• • •

After dinner, we cleaned our bowls with jug water, scrubbing with the pads of our fingers.

She said, “Want to go for a swim?”

It was almost dark and I’d gone swimming earlier. I’d planned on climbing after dinner. Venus was blinking in the west and I climbed every night now. But I looked at Lucy, a girl close to my age, prettier than granite. I said, “Yeah, I could swim.”

At the edge of the lake, she stripped to her bra and underwear. Black and black with a small line of lace along the top. She was facing away, so I stared. Surprised by how strong she was. Big shoulders. She had a curve in her spine like a snake turning over stone, and scar lines across her left shoulder, two straight lines two inches across. Her skin there and down, I examined the space between her bra and underwear, that curve of her low back, then her backside, the half-circles of her butt, the muscles and the shadow between her legs. I held my breath.

She ran through the shallows and dove in. Swam out. I was still standing. Hadn’t even undressed yet. She bobbed up and wiped her eyes. “Aren’t you coming in?”

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. I pulled off my shirt, then my jeans. Ran in. The water was cold, tightening my pores. I swam out to Lucy.

She was shorter than me, barely able to touch where we stood, and she kept kicking off her toes, bobbing like a small animal crossing a river. Her nostrils flared as she bobbed. She said, “Do you like it out here?”

“In the lake?”

“No, no,” she laughed, “in the high country. In Tuolumne.”

“Yeah, I like the Domes,” I said. “That’s why I came back this summer.”

“The Domes?” she said. She looked up at Pywiack, mounded above the lake. She stared like she hadn’t seen it until then. Then she turned and looked across the road at Polly Dome. “Oh yeah,” she said, “the Domes are cool. I didn’t think about them.”

I cupped water over my hair. Dove down and grabbed a handful of the gritty silt from the bottom. Rubbed it all the way to the ends of my hair, the way my father had showed me.

“Did you just put mud in your hair?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She laughed at me. “Nature’s soap, huh?”

“The grit works,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. She flipped and went under. Came up with two handfuls. Scrubbed her armpits. She said, “It feels like sandpaper.”

We both scrubbed like cleaning the dishes before. That first night, we cleaned together.

Lucy said, “Did you grow up near here?”

“Yes, in the Valley.”

“In the Yosemite Valley?”

“Yes.” I bent my knees and washed the mud out of my armpits. I didn’t know why I was being so honest with her.

“Your family is park workers then?”

“No,” I said. I leaned back and started to rinse out my hair.

When I came back up and wiped my eyes, Lucy said, “But I thought…”

I knew what she was asking but I didn’t explain.

She did a backward roll, flipped, and came up next to my face. She spit water and swam away.

I cut my feet and swam in place, watching her swim out farther, toward the only deep part of the lake, where the water turned from gray to black.

• • •

My sleeping bag was already set out in one of the boys’ designated pole tents, across from the stove. Lucy came in and laid her sleeping bag down, perpendicular like a T at the bottom of mine.

She said, “I didn’t want to sleep alone in the girls’ tent again. Since no one else is up here, is it all right if I sleep in here with you?”

I said, “Sure.”

It got warmer in the tent. I tried to relax. Lucy was lying on top of her bag, breathing deeply, inhaling and exhaling. I’d started to read but couldn’t follow the sentences with her breathing. She was just beyond my feet, six inches from the end of my sleeping bag. I kept thinking of her bra straps, the thin line of lace across the top, the way she looked before she ran into the lake, her near-naked body standing by the water in less than a swimsuit.

I flipped the page of my book and realized that I’d forgotten to read it. I went back a page. Then I sat up. I said, “I was just lying down for a minute, but I’m not really that tired. I’ll be back, okay?”

“Okay,” Lucy said, and turned over.

I stepped out of the tent and jogged up the road. Turned toward the dome, then into the stunted trees. I jogged down the short switchback and hopped across the creek. In the dark, up in front of me, the white granite glowed.

I found the south face. It’s easy climbing. Knobs on 50-degree rock, then 60 degrees as the steepness increased. Up higher on the dome, hand jams in a long, arcing, more vertical crack, then laybacks on the left side of the crack system, stepping over a corner. The stone was bright even in the dark, and I climbed barefoot. My feet were calloused from climbing each night, bouldering near the lake on weekend mornings.

Half an hour later, on top of the granite dome, I was alone. No other climbers there at that time of night. I looked up at a waning crescent moon and millions of stars. I was facing south but Orion hadn’t yet returned to the sky. I looked back at the Ursas. Cassiopeia. Polaris. I felt the stars drop down and prick my skin like droplets of water. The water thickened and covered me as I extended my arms and rose up, floating.

Lucy was in my tent, her sleeping bag touching the bottom edge of mine.

• • •

My father says, “Warriors.”

I say, “What?” I’m twelve years old. We’re fishing the logjam pool across from Housekeeping, fifteen feet deep where the river gouges on the north side.

“Yes,” he says. “They don’t care about now because they’re always fighting the past.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. “So is that good or bad?”

My father looks at me like he looks at scrub jays when they tear apart a food bag in our cache. He says, “Good, of course. That’s all we can do.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Never, never,” he says. “We can’t forget the old things, the old wrongs.”

He pulls a three-pound whitefish out of the water, oily and fat. Unhooks it from his treble.

I cast into the pool again. Reel across the current line, and my rooster tail runs downstream.

He says, “You understand me, right?”

I don’t, but I say, “Yes.”

“The betrayal, right? Do you understand me?” he says.

He hooks his index finger in the squirming whitefish’s mouth. Gains leverage. Lifts his elbow and his thumb pops a hole through the top of the skull. The whitefish jerks once then stops moving.

• • •

The stars like bugs on the water. Black on reflected white.