Thumbsucker (21 page)

The note was still in my pocket when Mike finished my haircut. I’d been thinking about it the whole time. Had he really faked his knee problem, or was he just being tough on himself? Even now, his right leg sometimes sagged after long drives and when he hadn’t been sleeping well. Then again, when I thought back to Audrey’s story of how the bad knee had cemented their romance—and when I considered Mike’s own mother’s knack for winning sympathy through misery—playing up pain seemed like something he might have done.

He showed me the back of my head in a hand mirror, but took it away before I could look closely. “Sit tight; I missed a spot. Don’t budge.” I heard a snipping sound and moved my eyes and saw a red Swiss Army knife, open to its little pair of scissors.

“You’ll need one of these when we go out west,” Mike said. “You could cut tinder, build a signal fire.”

He trimmed around my ears. The scissors were dull.

“Remind me to get you the big one, with the saw,” he said.

I didn’t ask him why we’d need a signal fire.

Nailed to a post where the trail entered the woods was a hikers’ registration box containing slips of paper and a pencil stub. I sharpened the stub with my knife and followed the instructions inside the box lid. I wrote down the size of our party, the date, and that we’d be gone for two days. When I dropped the slip in the box, I saw another slip.

I shoved the note in my pocket and kept walking; Joel and Audrey were still five minutes behind me. After a mile or so of level ground the trail started switching back and growing steeper. A trickle of water running down the middle deepened and widened and branched off into deltas, forcing me to jump in certain spots and tiptoe balance-beam style along dry ridges. My boots’ waffled soles attracted clumps of mud, creating broad, heavy pads that felt like snowshoes. I trimmed the pads with a stick but they grew back.

Audrey and Joel approached, already puffing. The laces of Joel’s boots were loose and dragging.

“I’m parched,” Audrey said. “I forgot to carry water.” A dry white crust had formed around her lips.

I handed over my dented tin canteen. “We have to conserve.”

Audrey gulped the water and gave the canteen to Joel.

“Conserve,” I said.

“Where are the iodine tablets?” Audrey said.

“Mike’s pack.”

“He thought of everything. Terrific.”

The canteen came to me but I barely wet my lips. The sun was high and harsh above the peaks. Audrey brought out a Baggie of salty trail mix but I warned her that eating it would make her thirstier.

“We have to do
something
for energy,” she said.

“I think Mike left me a Snickers.”

“Starvation rations. He should have just shot us and put us out of our misery.”

Out in the woods, so far from towns and people, the Snickers bar tasted unreal to me, synthetic. I outlined my plan as I broke it into thirds. I would go on ahead, walking fast, and Joel and Audrey could follow at their own pace. If, in three hours, I hadn’t caught up with Mike, I’d come back and we’d pitch a tent and wait for him.

“So who gets to keep the water?” Audrey said.

I checked the canteen’s neck and cap for leaks, then clipped it to a D-ring on Joel’s pack. Tears had pearled in the corners of his eyes, and the tip of his nose was already pink from sunburn.

“What if he doesn’t come back?” Joel said.

Audrey said, “Of course he’s coming back. He’s only trying to scare us.”

“Why?” Joel said.

“For all I know, it’s chemical. He wants us to understand how much we need him. He did it when he played football: walked out of practice until his teammates begged him to come back. It’s how he lifts himself up when he feels low.”

“I’ll see you two in a couple of hours,” I said.

“Stay. Don’t let him play with you,” said Audrey. “This is about attention. Don’t give it to him.”

I fingered the note in my pocket. Audrey was wrong. This was more serious than attention-getting. I reminded Joel to save water, then turned away. I walked slowly in case they wanted to join me, but when it was clear they weren’t going to, I sped up.

I lit a cigarette with a waterproof match and looked up the side of the mountain, toward the snow. The zigzagging scar of the trail went up and up, vanishing into a stand of pines with brown exposed roots that shelved out over a cliff. There were hot spots on my shoulders under the pack straps where it felt like the skin was being rubbed away.

My endurance surprised me as I gained altitude. By staring at the ground and counting my steps I found I could easily mount the steepest grades. Each time I
looked back to see how far I’d climbed, it was twice as far as I’d expected. My only regret was playing the martyr and leaving my canteen behind. Mistake. Rescuers have a right to be selfish, to put their mission first. Next time I put myself out for someone else I was going to make certain demands up front.

I knew I was weakening when I found myself wanting to pick and eat a ring of mushrooms growing on a log. I opened my trail guide to edible wild plants but couldn’t match the mushrooms with any pictures. Horse-flies were buzzing around my sweaty scalp. I slapped one with an open palm and combed out the crisp, stubby body with my fingernails. Next a wave of stinging gnats attacked. Their bites raised welts I could feel my heartbeat in.

I needed fluids. I was burning up.

Though Mike had warned me that drinking untreated water could give me parasites, I decided to risk it. I cupped my hands below a dribbling spring and splashed cold water on my face and lips. After the first drink, there seemed no point in stopping; either I’d been infected or I hadn’t. I drank until my stomach strained my belt and I wondered how long it would be before the cramps came, if they came at all. I might get lucky. Maybe Mother Nature cut breaks for people when she saw them doing the right thing.

The next priority was to treat my sunburn. Using my Swiss Army knife, I sliced strips of cloth from a T-shirt
in my pack and tied them around my head in a loose turban. That’s when I remembered Audrey’s makeup bag. I took it from my pack, removed the lipstick, and scooped out a blob of it with the smallest knife blade. I spread the cool grease across my nose and forehead, sealing out the sun.

I’d come through, alone, with no one’s help. I inspected my face in the mirror of Audrey’s compact and liked what I saw: a painted wild man. Appearances no longer mattered. Just the mission.

I pounded my chest with my fists and whooped my name. It disappointed me not to hear an echo.

I reached a spot on the trail where fires had burned. Without their needles, the trees seemed thin and spindly, and in the coal and ash green plants were growing, some of them with yellow starlike flowers. Now and then I heard a chattering squirrel, but otherwise the forest seemed deserted. I’d expected the mountains to be filled with wildlife, but instead they felt like a vacant stadium or a big house whose owners have moved away.

I stopped and touched my stomach. No discomfort. Apparently, the water had been pure. I raked another dead fly out of my hair.

Suddenly, I heard voices up ahead. A man and a woman came striding down the trail, followed by a panting yellow Lab with a red bandanna around its neck. The couple had lean, bowed legs and sun-worn faces.
Various camping tools and cooking utensils dangled from loops on their army surplus rucksacks.

“Down the up staircase,” the man said, coming near me. He handed a plastic bottle to his companion, who squeezed the sides and drank the arc of spray. These people knew what they were doing. They were serious.

The woman passed me the water. I drank and drank. I was too far gone to be polite.

“You lose two quarts an hour up here,” the man said. He fixed me with a disapproving stare. “Tell me you’re not alone up here this evening.”

“I’m here with my family. We got separated.”

The man faced the woman. “They got separated.”

“I’m wondering if you passed someone?” I said. “Tall guy. Unshaven. Orange pack. Green shirt. He has a bad leg, so maybe he was walking funny.”

“Don’t tell me he’s in your party?”

I kept my mouth shut.

“You listen up,” the man said, pointing a finger. “These mountains are not a playground. They’re not a park. Getting ‘separated’ has consequences. Lacing your
boots
too tight has consequences.”

The woman said, “Loring, regulate. You’ll frighten him.”

“This is not good,” said Loring. “This is bad. Besides your father—and yes, we passed him—how many more of you are there?”

“Only two. How did he seem?” I said. “Upset? Depressed?”

The couple looked at each other with lowered eyes. I got the feeling they’d been alone so long that they no longer needed to use words.

“You’re coming with us,” the man said. “That’s an order. We can send up a ranger once we’re down. If your father is having some kind of mental episode, it’s better if he deals with an authority figure. Come on, let’s go, kid.”

“I can’t.”

“You want to die up here? Is
that
the plan?”

“I don’t have a plan.”

“I see that. What have you been doing for liquids? Don’t tell me.”

I sidestepped the couple and broke into a trot. My turban unwound in the breeze and blew away and the heat of my breath began to melt the lipstick covering my face. I realized I must have looked crazy to the couple, and yet they hadn’t said a word about it, either out of kindness or from embarrassment. The thought made me want to put more distance between us, and when I heard them calling after me, I pressed my hands to my ears and started running.

I began to find things on the ground. Sunglasses. A coil of rope. Some tent stakes. I collected the objects as I walked, but when they got heavy I stashed them under a boulder. A few minutes later I glimpsed Mike’s pack lying off the trail on a steep slope, its contents strewn
about like crash debris. Either it had burst open during its fall or a wild animal had found it.