Graphic the Valley (8 page)

The lion rolled and I rolled with him. Then he bit my hand. He was growling, thrashing and biting, and I was yelling, and I didn’t know at first that my hand was caught. I didn’t see it go into his mouth. But I felt the bones give, felt the bones crack with a wet sound, a dull wet like saplings, not dry sticks, not short and
pop pop
but a slow
clssst clssst
sound.

My hand turned in the lion’s mouth, the pain striking up my wrist, up the sinews of my arm, and my shoulder twitched hard with the sudden shock of pain and the wrenching. Then I felt the Valley in me, everything tighten, down, close and close, and the Valley was with me, and the Valley was me. I was with the Valley in the meadow, and slow now. Slow again.

I felt my broken hand ball up inside and began to force it down, push and force it down the lion’s throat, slow, catching and sliding, forcing until that fist was fifteen inches down, down to the elbow. I felt the choking of the whole animal, the lion seizing.

• • •

The lion was on top of me, over my legs, a blanket of rocks. I pushed it to sit up. Struggled and cleared my legs, but my arm was still inside. And I saw that the animal was not breathing, that he was dead, something inside him broken when I forced my fist down into the bottom of his throat.

I felt the lion on my right arm, his whole weight, 150 pounds, and I ripped at the mouth, punched his teeth and jaw. Punched myself too, my right arm that was fixed inside and my punching was nothing, and the skin nicked off my left fist’s knuckles when I hit his yellow teeth, the backs of my knuckles turned red from the yellow sharps of his teeth, turned red and dripped.

I punched once more, and hit my own bicep. Pink to swell. I watched the colors.

• • •

My father says, “You’ll do this to me?”

“To you?” I say. I don’t know what he means.

“Yes, to me. My whole life. And yours. Everything I’ve told you about the history.”

I say, “This has nothing to do with you.”

He laughs. He is retying a double half hitch at the tent corner. “Is that right?” he says.

“That’s right,” I say. “It doesn’t.”

He looks at me. “I never touched you,” he says. “Not one time. You’ve lived soft, Tenaya.”

I look downhill at the dark trees. The slope where the granite scatters. “I don’t think so,” I say. “Maybe you’ve been good, but never soft. And I’m not.”

He hooks his thumbs in the sides of his shirt, pulling the edges out into triangles. He says, “I don’t ask much, but I’m asking now.”

“What,” I say. “What are you asking?”

• • •

I moved the lion between my legs, like a huge dog. The waxy scent of its hide and new urine. It’d let go on my legs and shoes when I choked it, the smell of acrid wet on my wool socks.

I made myself count to hold off panic, a trick I’d learned while climbing. Pause between each number. Count up slowly and count down.

My heart was two pieces, ore-heavy, an echo knocking into itself
da-duh
,
da-duh
,
da-duh
. I could feel the metal at my lungs. And it was darker now. Night coming. The blond hair of the lion beginning to glow in the last light, glowing like one tent in a meadow.

And she looked like that. Fifteen years ago. Her skin. Whiter on the riverbank, whiter against the gray rock. Pale-blue lips. She seemed to glow. I remembered the cold of her cheeks, the color of river stones.

I opened my eyes. My heart still thumping but my head slower now, and I could think. I used the point of my left elbow and my body weight to force the lower jaw of the lion. I leaned until the jaw snapped under the point of my elbow, until the jaw broke like a beer bottle inside a towel. With the jaw broken, the lion’s mouth was not as tight, and I began to pry at the throat, pulling to retrieve my broken right hand.

Sweat dripping. Pulling and slow progress now. Big drops of sweat off my nose down onto the glowing fur. Prying and pulling, my sweat wetting the lion’s head, and pulling still.

Then the hand came out. My hand. I saw the turned claw, the broken fingers rounded down and in, like a black bear’s paw, my hand no longer human. All four bones behind the knuckles were fractured like the fingers in front of them, the fourth bone sticking out through the skin. I couldn’t feel the pinky, or the small bone coming out behind it. I couldn’t feel that side of my hand at all, and I used my left thumb to push the stick of bone back through the skin, back into place. Then I flattened my palm on the ground and straightened the other fingers against the dirt.

I knew I would feel the hand soon enough, when everything came in, when my heart slowed. But my heart was still beating like stones, pounding and pounding. And I couldn’t stop that beat, even with my mind quiet.

I knew the pain could rush like a spring. Turn the cracked block of ice in the river until it hit the sweep at the top of the falls, and wait, edge heavy.

I couldn’t make North Wawona now. Not in the dark. But I could pull together a drag pile, a debris shelter. So I scavenged. Kicked at things with my feet until I found one big stick that I pulled over to a split rock. Then I found cross boughs of deadfall, and laid them as tight as I could with one hand. I couldn’t interlace them, so I covered them thick with whatever I could find, built up an insulation layer over the top. Then I scraped piles of needles with the insides of my feet, big piles of fresh needles, and smaller piles of loam, kicking them into the shelter before swimming in with my good arm.

Lucy would be gone in the morning. She was off to Merced with her aunt and I wouldn’t catch her now. I tried to picture her face riding in a car.

Then it was all the way dark and the pain seized. Pulsing. Pain from my fingertips to my shoulder, down the back of my neck, the muscles next to my spine cramping with the ache. I closed my eyes to shut out the throbbing. Then I waited. Pounding and waiting. Waiting through the dark with my eyes open, for the first hint of morning light, waiting until I could begin walking toward North Wawona again.

At dawn, my hand was so swollen that I couldn’t open or close my fingers. I used my shirt for a sling, pulled the knot tight with my teeth, and hiked all morning to the tourist camp. The first-aid tent there was staffed by Berkeley and Stanford medical students. A medical student came out to meet me, her clothes bright and clean.

She said, “Come here often?” She smiled. She was a little older than me but young. Pale and blue-eyed.

I tried to smile back. “No,” I said. My hand looked like meat turning rancid, purpled and gray.

She saw the hand and my small bone poking through the skin, pushed out again by the pressure of the swelling. She said, “Well, that doesn’t look good at all.”

“No,” I said. “It was a lion.” I picked at the bone, touching where it stuck out. I traced the dark purple circle around the puncture.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “A mountain lion?”

I nodded. “Last night near Bridalveil Creek.”

She tucked her blond hair behind her ear, then called back to the aid station. She said, “Guys, I think you’d better come see this.”

As she examined my hand, the other medical students asked me to explain what happened. I told the story from when I first saw the lion above me on the rock. I told about rolling downhill, the fight, how the lion choked on my fist.

One of the students kicked at a hill of dirt. Another squinted his face and shook his head. I knew they didn’t believe me.

The young woman who was inspecting my hand said, “Can a man really kill a mountain lion with his fist?” She looked at the other medical students.

No one said anything, but they all shook their heads.

She said, “If you wait until this afternoon, we’ll have an orthopedic resident come in. He’ll be able to reset your hand and cast you if it doesn’t need surgery.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem. Why don’t you come in here and we’ll make you more comfortable?”

I followed her into the medical tent. She pointed to a cot draped with a white sheet. “You can lie down there.”

She left and came back a couple minutes later. She had a little white cup in one hand, two pills inside, and a Dixie cup of water.

I swallowed both pills. Drank the water.

She said, “That’ll keep the pain down. You’ll feel a little loopy, dreamy, but it’ll help a lot.”

I said, “Thank you,” again. My hand felt like I was holding it in a fire.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll go see about some food for you.”

The pills hit and my head floated. I lay back on the cot. Watched the tent’s ceiling drop toward me and back up. When a wind gust came, the tent shivered like my father when he washed himself in Ribbon Creek.

I closed my eyes.

• • •

Following my father. Sneaking tree to tree, far enough back not to be noticed. Following him to the pool just down the creek from our camp. When he gets there, he takes off all his clothes and walks into the waist-deep water. Then he squats down and washes his armpits. Dunks and washes his hair as well, using the silt from the bottom of the creek near the bank.

When he comes up from rinsing, I think he’s shivering from the cold water, like normal, but he’s not shivering. The night is too hot, 80 degrees, and the water is only cool this time of year, not cold. Summer heat hangs above the surface.

My father has his hands over his face and he’s rubbing his eyes. I watch his body shake.

• • •

I opened my eyes in the medical tent. Blinked. The girl doctor there. Her hand on my thigh. She says, “A mountain lion?”

“Yes.”

She leans over and kisses me. Tongue like mint.

The lion’s jaws on my hand. Crushing. The tight, wet slick of its throat. The weight of the whole animal again.

Her blond hair. Breath. Eyes pale as the tourists’ bottled water.

She’s not there or I’m not. An empty tent. And the flapping sound like birds’ wings overhead.

“This should help,” she said.

• • •

The pills died. The medical student came back again with soup, saltines, Sprite in a plastic bottle. More pills. She said, “I heard the orthopod’s driving into the park soon. Here’s two more Percocet.”

I sat up. “Okay,” I said. I watched her eyes as they did not look at me. Her hair across her face.

“Did you?” I said.

She wiped her hair out of her eyes. “Did I what?” she said.

I swallowed the Percocet, cracked the Sprite, and took a sip. Lay back down. Laughed that Lucy and I both hurt our right hands. Lucy’s index finger still unhealed.

My hand itched. I looked at the bone there, peeking through like something on the road, car-crushed. I felt it with my left thumb, the end of the fracture where it stuck out.

The medical student was gone again. My head rolled, the pills weighting. Even when I touched, there was only a nudge of pain, back where the bones didn’t connect.

• • •

In Tuolumne. Fourteen. I rest my face in my palms. The night smells like pine mold. No clouds, this clear night, even, the sky stretched like a child lying in a field of grass. I watch the stars, recognize their slow shift around Polaris, the Ursas, Draco, The Charioteer, and Perseus, their rotation around a point 2 degrees from perfection.

A coyote yips from my right and another answers from my left. I’ve seen them run dog-like in the morning, ferrying stolen food packaging, Ball Park Franks’ wrappers and steak paper dripping at the corners of their mouths.

He didn’t have to die. An accident like bruises beneath the skin of fruit.

I hoped that the superintendent would fall, but he flipped upside down and turned, curled underneath, headfirst and down.

I picture him off the end of the boardwalk, lying in the reeds, smoking his cigar. Alive again and he puts the cigar to his lips, drawing smoke into his mouth, holding it, then exhaling at the corners.

My bones flourish like grass. His worm will not die.

• • •

I wanted to fix my hand. There was no one else in the tent, not the medical student, not the other volunteers, no other patients. Rows of empty cots and white sheets.

The haze of the Percocet as my head fell forward and drool pooled in my mouth. I let it slide to the floor. I stared at my hand, then pushed the bone down, pushed the bone back toward the opening in the skin. The pain came but I let that slide like the drool. The drugs put it on the floor, and I kept pushing the bone down and in.

The river ran clear, a rainbow finning upstream. I flicked a grasshopper out in front, the bug on a single worm hook, struggling on the surface. The bridge, fifteen feet with ledges on the underside, and the bone slid under the skin.

Dark rose in the hole and seeped. I clenched my teeth and squinted my eyes. On the pills, heavy, I pushed. A second time. A third. Adjusting the bone underneath the skin. I whispered to myself, “Just need to…” and hooked my left thumb into the opening to gain leverage. The bone moved with the sound of a rainbow trout’s skull crushing.

• • •

When the orthopedist came in, he felt the newly straightened bones in my hand. He said, “The med student told me this was a compound. But this looks good actually. There’s a hole here, but somehow the bone popped back in.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Alrighty, let’s see here,” he said. “Hamate and pisiform don’t feel turned, everything in the correct place here.” He pinched to the ends of my fingers. “Lots of swelling out here, but nothing out of place which is good…” He dabbed antibiotic ointment onto a Q-tip and slathered it over the wound. “A few sutures at the exit, and we’ll be ready for plaster.”

He left and returned with a kit. Then he sewed the fracture hole closed with three black sutures. The medical student came in with plaster packets and a metal mixing bowl. The orthopedist said, “This will be an old-school cast, a bit heavy, but you seem like you can handle that since you fight lions, right?”

I wiggled my thumb.

The medical student mixed, then dipped the strips. Added more water.

The orthopedist said, “Keep this really still while I cast. I don’t want any of those bones moving around.”