The Mountain Story (36 page)

He appeared out of the blue one night, a few weeks after my fifteenth birthday, which he’d missed. “Where you been, Frankie?”

“Around.”

“You’re never here.”

“I met a woman,” he grinned. “She lives way the hell out in Indio. Divorced. Swimming pool.”

“Still …”

“You wouldn’t expect me to bring her here?”

I saw his point.

“Heard you’re working out at the gas station.”

“Early morning shift. Have been for a long time.”

Frankie wasn’t a morning person. “Try to get a later one.”

“Byrd’s got the later one.”

“They careful about inventory?”

Frankie was always looking for an angle. Maybe it
was
in his genes. I didn’t see him again until Christmas Day. He showed up at the trailer like Santa Claus with gifts for everybody. For me, a high-end car audio system wrapped up in a kid’s jacket and stuffed into a plastic pail. I still have it.

I saw Frankie much more regularly after my return to the desert following Byrd’s hospital stay because I moved into Byrd’s apartment behind the gas station and started working the night shift as well as the day shift. Frankie dropped by at least once a week. He was there to snare free cigarettes and gas but we both pretended he cared.

Harley brought Byrd to his ranch to recover, and day by day, with the help of a private nurse and the best physical therapists, he continued to improve in the basic functions of walking and eating and going to the toilet. But he still had no language. No one knew what he was thinking or feeling or how much he understood of what was said to him.

He was Byrd but not Byrd, brought back from the dead like Lazarus from the Bible, or the gruesome pets in Stephen King.

At first I visited him every day in the sunroom Harley’d built for him with its stunning view of the mountain. He’d sit there for hours on end in that brown leather chair, remembering?
Trying to forget? I was so sure if I could get him to say my name, Wolf or even Wilfred, something would reboot in his brain.

One day, out of the blue, Byrd’s hand shot out to grab my hand. He looked me dead in the eye as he raised my hand and tapped
my
finger against
his
forehead. I swear he was telling me something. But it never happened again, and day after day, he flew farther away.

I’d say I saw more of Frankie in the three months after we returned to the desert than I had in the few years I’d lived at Kriket’s. Our conversations were brief—awkward. Frankie stopped by on Halloween night, just a few hours, in fact, before he killed the young couple on the desert road.

No one knows that part of the story either—except Frankie—and the woman he was with.

Frankie limped into the store wearing a too-small pirate hat, his left eye covered by a cheap felt eye patch, the elastic of which looked ready to burst. “Aye-aye, mate-y!” he shouted.

That set me off. It didn’t seem right that a guy like Byrd was lost in space and a guy like Frankie was walking around in a kid-sized pirate hat and eye patch. “What do you need, Frankie?”

He’d driven to the gas station straight from the casino where he’d just lost all the money he’d won the night before. To top it off he’d fallen off a bar stool and hurt his leg. He stank of booze and cigars. “I need a little luck,” he said.

I plucked his brand of cigarettes from the rack above the register and flipped the package to him. He thought they were freebies. I’d pay for them later.

“You good?” he asked, his eyes darting to the high shelf behind me.

“Top-notch,” I said dryly, noting he was looking at the premium tequila.

“Good.” He glanced out at the parking lot. I wondered if he was being followed. Or thought he was.

“Don’t sleep.”

“Right.”

“Can’t eat.”

“Me too.” He kept looking out into the parking lot.

“I have nightmares about Byrd,” I said. It was the truth.

Frankie didn’t hear a word I said. He was distracted by honking in the parking lot and we looked out to see the woman in the Gremlin.

“She’s not the most patient.” He started to limp down the aisle, groaning in pain.

“What do you want? I’ll get it.”

“A six-pack, some tissues, some lip balm. She wants some of that spicy jerky you got on the display rack at the back.”

I walked to the back of the store only to find that we were out of the spicy jerky. I turned back to ask Frankie what I should bring instead, and that’s when I saw my father in the security mirror over the register, straining for the tequila on the high shelf behind the counter. When he couldn’t reach the tequila he grabbed a bottle of wine and hid it under his jacket. Then he opened the register to peel away half the stack of twenty-dollar bills.

“Thanks, Wolf,” Frankie said, when I approached the counter with his other things.

I put the items in a bag while he pretended to search his pockets. He was a terrible actor. “So you’re good out here?” he asked.

“You back at the trailer?”

Frankie shook his head. “I owe Yago a little money.”

I passed him the bag. “It’s on me, Frankie.”

“Thanks, Wolf.”

“Good luck with Yago.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

Frankie grabbed the bag and headed for the door, but then he came back. I wish he hadn’t.

“I know what you think.”

“I don’t think anything, Frankie.”

“I see the way you look at me.”

I couldn’t meet his eye.

He paused. “I’m sorry about what happened to Byrd.”

“Yeah.”

“That was bad luck, Wolf. Don’t think I don’t understand.”

“Yeah, Frankie.”

“But you don’t get to look down on me.” He looked ridiculous in the hat and eye patch. “I didn’t push Byrd off the cliff, Wolf. Besides, you were the one who brought the red weed.”

I surprised both of us with what I did next. I turned and climbed the stepladder to reach the top shelf, and selected the premium tequila Frankie’d had his eye on before.

“The good stuff,” I said, setting the bottle on the counter.

“Just when I think you’re an asshole,” he said, genuinely touched.

“We should stop underestimating each other,” I said.

“This means a lot to me, Wolf,” Frankie said. “I been going through a rough time. The thing with Yago. You know what he’s like. We gotta have each other’s back.”

I wondered if he noticed my hands were shaking when I reached for the second bottle of tequila and passed it to him.

Did I mean for Frankie to get drunk and get behind the wheel to get burgers that Halloween night? No. But I did hope he would choke on it.

THE
FOURTH
DAY

I WOKE SHIVERING
, swallowing the harvest of dread in my throat, to find the black night still around us. I felt like it should be morning, and for a second believed I’d gone blind. The rocks trembled beneath me but it wasn’t the plates shifting this time. I remember being afraid that if I closed my eyes and allowed myself to return to whatever dream I’d been having, I’d never see the Devines, or the mountain, again.

Hypothermia was a coward’s way out and I was afraid I’d take it if I got the chance.
Stay awake, scut
, I told myself.

I checked to make sure the women were all still asleep and panicked when Nola felt stiff beside me. I stared at her face in the dim light. “Nola,” I said. My mouth felt frozen. She didn’t move. I disengaged myself from Vonn on my other side, searching Nola’s neck for a pulse. Finding none I held my finger beneath her nose. I was prepared to face her death.

I was not prepared to be bitten. I suppose a person is never
prepared
to be bitten. My scream must have carried all the way to Palm Springs. Nola woke screaming too, creating a chain reaction as Vonn woke and began to scream. Bridget, could she have screamed, would have screamed, but her face spoke volumes. When the screaming was over, I was confident that no animal within three miles would dare to challenge the demon we’d just unleashed. And that if there was a rescue team within two miles, they’d heard us.

“What the heck, Nola?” I croaked, holding out my damaged finger.

“I’m so sorry.”

We gathered one another into our arms, rooting for warmth. “It’s all right. Go back to sleep. Go back to sleep.”

“My heart’s racing,” Vonn said.

“Mine too,” Bridget said.

My eyes had adjusted surprisingly quickly to the dark and when I looked around I could make out the triad of boulders cleaving to the high ridge, defying gravity. I could distinguish the cottonwood from the ironwood, and I could pick the limber pine from the Coulter pine, and as Mother Nature’s long-winded sorrow came tearing through the trees I had to admit that I could see, in this light, in any light, that we were losing Nola.

“I’m so hungry,” Bridget said.

“Don’t talk about it,” Nola said.

I thought Bridget might start up about the granola bars but she didn’t.

“They must be looking for us,” Vonn said.

“Tomorrow,” Bridget said. “I have a feeling.”

“Will you ever come back if …?” Vonn asked after a time. I knew she was talking to me and I knew she meant the mountain
and I understood what remained unspoken.
If we survive this
.

“No,” I said definitively. I stroked the rock to soften the blow, and instantly changed my mind. “Yes.” I didn’t know then if I’d ever see the mountain again.

Vonn’s hands reached reflexively for her stomach.

“Vonn?”

“It hurts,” she said.

“You’re hungry,” I said.

“Mine hurts too,” Bridget said.

My hunger had grown black wings and a sharp, hooked beak, consuming me gut-first. We tried to let the sound of the wilderness lull us back to sleep. At least we would have, had Bridget not shifted and touched something wet.

“Is that blood?” she asked, pointing.

Blood. I could smell it, even in the dark. To be sure I dipped my finger into the apple-sized wetness and brought it to my nose. The wound on Nola’s forehead was crusted over and dry. My finger wasn’t bleeding from where she’d bitten me—at least not much. The blood hadn’t come from Nola’s swollen purple wrist either.

“Who’s bleeding?” Bridget asked.

When Vonn clutched her cramping gut, I did not want to believe that the blood was hers. “Okay,” I said, which wasn’t a question. “You’re all right, Vonn.”

Vicious nature teaches us dark lessons and experience taught me to be ready for anything, especially the worst.

Vonn grasped my arm. “It hurts.”

I shuddered.

“I had some cramping when I was pregnant with you too,” Bridget said.

“You did?”

“Spotting too.”

“You did?”

“She did and look at you. You’re perfect, Vonn,” Nola said.

“Hardly,” Vonn said.

“I’ve miscarried,” Bridget said.

“You never told me.”

“It’s not something you want to talk about,” Bridget said.

“Before I was born or after?”

“Four times. All after.”

“Four times?”

“Anyway, I had five pregnancies and only had the spotting with you.”

I feared Bridget was giving her daughter false hope.

“What did the doctor say?” Vonn asked.

“He said I needed to take it easy.”

“Did you?”

“I had a job. I was alone,” Bridget said, straining her voice. “I didn’t have a car.”

“Why didn’t you move back here so Mim could help?”

“I didn’t want to run into him.”

“My father?”

“Mim and Pip came to Golden Hills a lot,” Bridget said. “And then I met Carl.”

“His house was a palace,” Vonn said, nodding.

“It was.”

“And you always wanted to be queen,” Vonn added.

Bridget shook her head. “I wanted you to be a princess.”

Vonn stroked her womb through her coat.

There came the whoosh of wide black wings. My stomach
roiled at the recollection of the black buzzards bobbing at those steaming coyote remains. I thought I was alone with my thoughts, and shuddered when Vonn said, “Vultures.”

“It was the owl.”

“Not the owl,” she said.

“I think it was the owl.”

“The vultures, Wolf.”

We reached for the comfort of each other’s hands. I held Vonn’s frozen fingers to my lips but failed to warm them. “Wolf?”

“Vonn.”

“The vultures …?” she paused.

“The vultures.”

“If anything happens …”

I didn’t want her to see my face.

“You know what I’m saying, Wolf?”

I did.

“They’re just hungry too.”

There was a dreamlike quality to that fourth day. I woke again to the metallic scent of the rock, and the rustle of the pines, and the weight of our bodies entwined, and then, surprisingly, pinpricks of cold landing on my cheek.

My first thought was that the dampness was saliva, and I was grateful when I opened my eyes to find no carnivorous beast looming over my face, just the chaotic weave of branch and needle from the towering trees overhead.

A flake of white hit my cheek. Snow. Another flake found
my forehead, another, my eyelid. When I realized the flakes were not melting on my skin, I wondered if I were dead.