The Mountain Story (8 page)

“You probably shouldn’t call her the
bitch
, considering she’s named after a saint.”

“I’m not superstitious, Wolf,” he said, driving the wrong way out of town.

“You mean religious,” I corrected.

“I know what I mean,” Frankie said, signalling right, then left, but not making either turn. “We’re going to climb—like men—all the way to the peak.”

“I think that’s a long way.”

“Supposed to be a hell of a view. A father should see that with his son,” Frankie said.

Unlike most adolescent boys I found the idea of climbing a mountain, or of doing anything at all with my old man, highly appealing. “First day there.”

“First day there. We’ll go up in the afternoon and watch the sun set,” Frankie said.

“The book said the climb takes all day though, Frankie, and that’s just from the tram station to the peak. And you should only attempt it if you’re in amazing shape.”

“I’m a
rock
,” he said, falling into a coughing fit.

I had to take the wheel so he could huck some mucus into a rag he’d found on the floor. “Maybe you should stop smoking.”

He wiped his nose on his shirt sleeve, trying to focus on the road. “I’m letting things get to me,” he said. “I’ve been letting things get to me, Wolf. This hasn’t been an easy time. There’s been a lot of pain. A lot of disappointment. Heartache.”

It was true.

“I am not getting what I need from this world. You understand?”

I did.

He blew his nose again. “I need to get my shit together.”

“You do,” I agreed, which irritated him.

“That’s what this move is all about. Clean living. That’s what I need. Your California sunshine and your orange trees and your lemon trees and your olives and your avocados. That shit’ll extend your life thirty years or better.”

The thing that got me was you could see on Frankie’s face, even as he was saying it, that he wasn’t sure he wanted thirty more years.

I offered only a weak protest when he suggested a quick stop at a friend’s house, which was, he said, on the way out of town. The fact is that I wanted to be anywhere but trapped in the rank Gremlin with my sniffling, ring-tapping, hyped-up father.

The farmhouse where Frankie was to meet his
associate
Warren was a fifteen-minute drive from the blue house on Old Dewey and still officially inside Mercury city limits.

“You sure about this?” I asked as we scuffed up the porch steps.

The odour of cattle from the neighbour’s pasture was earthy and raw. I breathed in the scent, and was startled when the porch light flickered on above our heads and a diminutive man with a wiry beard opened the door wearing a woman’s turquoise bathrobe and mud-caked cowboy boots. I was three inches taller but he could smell my fear.

Warren led us down the long hall, squeezing sideways past dusty stacks of newspapers and cardboard that drove me to sneeze uncontrollably. “Tell your kid to quit being an asshole,” he said.

“Be respectful,” my father warned.

Frankie told me to wait in the kitchen, where tomatoes festered in a basket near an ashtray. Breathing through my mouth I watched my father follow Warren’s blue bathrobe down to the end of the dusty hall.

The wind drove against the trembling pane as I strained to look out over the plowed fields and the dimly lit pasture beyond. I missed my mother. All at once leaving Mercury felt like leaving her. My misery grew as the cool night slipped in under the kitchen door.

As was my habit I’d brought a book along. I learned young that when we left the blue house we wouldn’t be going to a Tigers game, or a Lions game, or the Metropolitan Beach, or a skating rink, or a splash park, or a park of any kind, or the zoo or a movie, or even the mall or the grocery store. We would be going to a house, or sometimes a small office, an alley or a parking lot, where Frankie would disappear for an hour or longer. Without a book, I was alone, or worse, alone with other people’s children, or someone’s drunken wife, or sad sister, or bitter secretary, or sometimes just the dark.

I opened my novel but it was hard to concentrate because of the noise coming from where Frankie and Warren had retired to talk business. I heard Frankie start to rant, then Warren to agitate and it went on like that for nearly half an hour. The silence, when it came, was deafening.

For a moment I was paralyzed. Finally I got up to venture down the hallway and found my father slumped on the floor of a bedroom near a pile of dirty blankets. The back window was open and I could see Warren in the moonlight making his way across the rutted field, hugging a pillow to his robe, headed for
the dense forest beyond. How far could he get? Why the pillow? Why the forest? What the hell?

I sank to my knees and tried to lift my father’s heavy head. His hair felt coarser than I’d remembered and his neck more muscular than I’d imagined. How long since I’d touched him?
Years?

As a child I sat on his lap, breathing in his scent (Camel filters and Irish Spring on good days), listening to his heartbeat, tracing the rainbow
Glory Always
tattoo with my dirty fingernail. “What else did she like to do?” I’d ask, and Frankie’d tell me stories about my mother’s affection for books and libraries, and rainbows, and second-hand clothing stores, and baking, and how she was always looking for ways to go back in time instead of ways to move forward. No detail was too small—“Glory loved peppermints—always had a tin in her purse.” I remembered the tin, and the peppermint smell.

The window banged against the sash as I steadied his lolling head and searched his neck for a pulse. The scent of urine burned my nostrils and I almost collapsed with relief when I felt the warm puddle at my knee, but my panic was reborn when I realized that Frankie’s urine stream didn’t effectively prove he was alive. In fact I had no knowledge whatsoever of which bodily fluids the dead were capable of releasing.

I settled my father down on the floor and tilted his head back to clear his airways then leaned over him, like we were shown on the dummy in health class. After covering Frankie’s mouth with mine, I exhaled hard for three seconds, then stopped, and repeated. I realized I’d forgotten to pinch his nose, then I couldn’t remember when to blow and when to pinch. I tried to blow again. What if I was suffocating him? I became
aware of his teeth, the taste of his saliva—he’d eaten something with cheese at dinner. I stifled a gag. Again I felt for a pulse.

Funny what you remember—a frying pan filled with cigarette butts on the bedside table; brown splatters on the wall, blood or maybe coffee; dog hairs on the plaid blanket; a dirty white bra on a hook by the door like it was something you should remember to grab on your way out. Nothing illegal if you didn’t count the filth. Warren must have taken his contraband with him in the pillow. How far could he get in a lady’s bathrobe?

The clock mocked me. Why did a guy like Warren need a clock? I pressed my ear to Frankie’s chest, relieved to find there, faint and uneven, a heartbeat. I leapt into action, calling his name, slapping his cheeks. His colour was ash.

This, of course, is the part where I call the ambulance. I remembered seeing a phone in the kitchen and ran to it, fumbling for the receiver. I lifted it, then put it back down, then picked it up again, and put it down once more. If I called for an ambulance the police would become involved. Frankie, if he survived, would go to jail or rehab and I would fall into dreaded
care
.

Returning to my father, I noted the wind driving in through the open window, carrying the stink of manure. I stood over Frankie for a beat, and then reared back and kicked his leg hard. He didn’t move. I kicked him again. I kicked him once more, harder, and he startled me when he gasped. Like his engine had been tripped, Frankie coughed and sputtered a little and started breathing again. I believe that I saved my father’s life that night while attempting to put him out of my misery.

I helped him to sit up, and as Frankie dropped his head to puke on my jeans, I patted his back and was seized by an
overwhelming instinct to protect him. Many years later I’d recognize the feeling as paternal love, which is not as strange a thing for a child to feel for a parent as you might imagine. I wiped Frankie’s mouth with a crumpled napkin from the floor and for once didn’t find his confusion funny. I stroked his stubbled cheek and told him that I was so, so sorry and that everything was going to be fine. It was the truth—at least the first part. He couldn’t seem to decide, if by waking, he’d just won a prize or suffered a crushing defeat. I resisted the impulse to say I loved him. I don’t know why. “Okay?”

“Warren,” he said, after a moment.

At first I took it for a directive. “Warn who?”

“Blue bathrobe.” Frankie blinked, recovering a memory.

“He thought you were dead.”

“Whoa.”

“So did I.”

Frankie sat up. “Did you call for an ambulance?”

It was a simple question but the answer contained the essence of our complicated future. I shook my head. “No.”

Something passed between us then, a mantle of sorts, though Frankie was as reluctant to bestow it as I was to receive. “Good,” he said.

It wasn’t the move to Santa Sophia that changed things for Frankie and me. That moment came before the desert, the night we started out for California, in the filthy farmhouse on the outskirts of Mercury, Michigan, where we both learned that I was my father’s son.

My father had many, many bad habits but one of his good habits was to keep a full tank of gas. His motto was “You never know how fast you might need to leave or how far you might have to go.”

That’s what I remember most about the trip from Michigan to California—stopping for gas. Our meals consisted mainly of service station food—Gatorade, pork rinds and potato chips, which Frankie saw respectively as a fruit, a protein and a veg. I developed chronic indigestion and got black circles under my eyes. My lips cracked and bled. I think I was getting scurvy.

For miles and days the most my father ever said was, “Hot.”

I was grateful for the distraction of my books. Sometimes the books made me think of the pretty head librarian.

Before we left for Santa Sophia, on a day Frankie and I were supposed to be clearing out the garage, Miss Kittle showed up at our blue door on Old Dewey. I already knew she wasn’t there to see me when Frankie pounced on her. He must have been right about the pheromones.

Frankie’d found a picture of Miss Kittle, torn from an article in the local paper, beside my bed, and thought it was funny as hell that I had a crush on her. I think that’s why he decided to date her. A few days after her first visit I came home to find Miss Kittle on the ripped chaise beside the broken porch, sunning herself in a strapless summer dress. Frankie grabbed the newspaper and suggested I keep “Kitten” (that’s what he called her) company for the duration of what he assured us would be a protracted bowel movement.

I took the chair beside Miss Kittle, closing my eyes, pretending to like the sun too, but mostly so I wouldn’t be tempted to stare.

“You excited?” she asked.

“Sorry?”

“About moving to the desert? About the mountain?”

“I can’t wait to ride in that tramcar.”

“And don’t forget the peak.”

“I’m going to be a mountain climber. Like the guys in the book you gave me. I want to climb Everest like Norgay and Hillary.”

“Adventurous men.”

“Definitely.”

“I like an adventurous man,” Miss Kittle said, which honestly made me wonder why she was with Frankie, who had only
mis
adventures. “In some cultures boys are considered men when they turn thirteen.”

“Which I already am,” I reminded her.

“Which you already are,” she agreed.

“Thirteen and a half,” I said, reaching deep inside the front pocket of my jeans.

“You can do anything a man can do,” she said, focused on my hand. “What are you doing now?”

I pulled a short stack of baseball cards from my pocket. “Trading cards. I got Al Kaline today. Did you bring more books?”

“I brought a book about native uses for plants,” Miss Kittle said, reaching into her bag. “See, Wolf. Here—red weed. This is important. Take a good long look at it.”

She sounded serious so I did take a good long look at the photograph in the book. “You know this plant by the ruby pods and the white flower. The little seeds from the pods are brewed into a tea or dried and smoked. They were used by Native Americans in a male rite of passage ritual. Don’t ever get close to it. Don’t ever, God forbid, ingest it.”

“Like poison ivy?”

“If you drink it or eat it or smoke it, it induces visions.”

“Cool.”

“And multiple organ failure,” Miss Kittle said, wagging her finger. “I knew a boy who died from it in my senior year. His father was the police chief. They went around with tracking dogs and dug up all the bushes. You won’t see red weed within fifty miles of Santa Sophia now. But if anyone ever does offer you red weed you don’t accept, right?”

“Okay.”

When Miss Kittle shifted in her chair her dress rose up even higher and I was shocked to see her bare right flank. My baseball cards fell from my hands, scattering at her feet. She smiled at me as she swept them into a little pile with her bare toes, accidentally flashing me each time she moved her legs.
How could a grown woman forget to wear underwear?