Graphic the Valley (5 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “I watched a man die once after a little fall, a really little fall.”

Lucy said, “Did you know him well?”

“No,” I said. “I was just there.”

She sipped the whiskey. “How far did he fall?”

“Just a few feet. But he was upside down, and he broke his neck.”

“Oh wow,” she said. “That must’ve been horrible.” She handed me the bottle.

I took a swig. I said, “Yeah, I didn’t expect it.”

I thought of the newspaper reports, how the sheriff’s department investigated for over a year, trying to figure out who had bled on the boardwalk. The
San Francisco Chronicle
kept updating the story, writing about the new superintendent and how he planned on carrying out all of the old superintendent’s plans for the park. Concessions and advertising. But after a while, the stories stopped. The sheriff’s department never found any leads on the person of interest, and I stopped reading.

“You just happened to be there at the time?” Lucy said. “That’s weird.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was weird.”

We sat on the picnic table, passing the bottle, drinking until it was empty. And I didn’t explain anything.

• • •

My father holds the oak chunk in his four-fingered hand, his left. Then the short ax in his right.

He says, “You have to keep the hand ax sharp. Or else it won’t chop through.”

His fingers splay over the top of the wedge. He chops down to splice off kindling. Short blows, and the wedges of oak come off in inch-wide shards.

He adjusts his hand, and the ax blade cuts through where his index finger would have been. “You know how I lost this?” he says.

“No.”

“I was a little kid in Manteca. We got in a car accident and I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. The impact threw me forward and I hit the seat in front of me with my hand straight out.” He puts his arm in front of him to act it out.

“And what happened?”

“That one finger caught and it ripped off. Strangest thing. But strange things happen. That was when I realized that. In real life, the strangest things really do happen.”

• • •

In the tent, Lucy lay down first. She pulled her sleeping bag over the top of her. Face up. Protecting her hurt hand.

I watched her, saw her submerge inside of her bag and rustle around. I thought she was changing her clothes.

Buzzing from the whiskey, I stripped off my shirt and lay down on top of my bag.

Quiet then. Near dark. Wind moved the tent canvas behind my head and made a flapping sound. I looked into the corners of the tent, felt the canvas press against my hair. I scooted away.

Lucy crawled over to me, her clothes in her sleeping bag behind her. Crawling to me, wearing nothing.

I watched the lines of that nothing, the slopes of her shoulders, the rounded, hanging half-circles of her breasts, the dark nipples pointing down, nothing I could believe. Above me now. On her hands and knees. She kissed my chest and up to my neck.

I could smell her. The hair and skin smell of her scalp where she parted her braids. Her duct-taped fingers. Then we were kissing, and I smelled the clean smell of her cheek. Her whiskey breath. Tongue tip warm.

Her body over me, my hands on her hips, sliding on her skin, then down. All of that skin.

Her thumb hooked at the top of my shorts. She pulled them down, one side, then the other. Then she was against me. Wet slick. I kissed her chest. Felt her breasts against my skin. And that smell at her throat, the scent of animal fear.

They blame us twice. First for their own raids on miners’ camps. Second for the war. They are like the ground squirrels in Camp 4. Bloated and conniving. Living on the infection of tourism. Do you understand? This is as much us as anything. But there was before that too
.

I told you about Juarez in San Francisco, but you weren’t old enough to remember that
.

Listen to me now: James Savage, the mining camp leader, takes Juarez because he wants the Miwoks to be intimidated. Juarez had spoken out, saying he did not believe the stories about the whites, stories that they had become like foam on the water
.

In the city, Juarez trades gold dust for whiskey. Drinks on the street. Spits racial slurs. Calls Savage the name of a dog that he had beaten to death for snarling at him
.

Juarez says, “There is a war coming for you.” He is not a Yosemiti, but this speech leads them back to the Valley
.

The Yosemiti are here, unknowing, like a bear that wanders in front of a lifted rifle. Even the hunter is surprised as he holds the gun, the groove of the trigger smooth behind his index finger
.

I woke up early and felt her body against me. Her naked breasts pressing against me, her nipples hard in the morning cool. Arm draped over me. Her one duct-taped hand.

I shifted slowly, not wanting to wake her. Slid to the side of her injured hand. Worked my body away, pushed up, and tried to slip out of the sleeping bag.

But she reached and caught me with the fingertips of her injured hand. Winced. She woke up all the way. She said, “Tenaya?”

I had started to slide out of our sleeping bag.

“Come back,” she said. She moved her hips over, underneath me.

I was up above her, above all that naked skin. She shifted and centered herself.

I held there, my heart pumping the lake, Tenaya’s blood. Running barefoot on the sand. The smell of water.

Lucy scraped the fingernails of her good hand down my chest, my stomach. I smelled the water and the shore. A man held the rock that killed Tenaya. I was above her and Lucy’s legs were open.

I left the lake. Lowered, Tenaya moved away, lowered down, inside of her, tasted her neck, breathed her skin. And she did not know about the stories, and they were not her fault.

• • •

“We can’t. Not all week,” she said.

“Okay.”

“So they won’t know,” she said. “Then they’ll leave us up here.”

“Okay,” I said again.

We kept apart. Didn’t talk. Hoped they wouldn’t suspect us. I heard Lucy ask the crew chief the second Friday morning. “Can I stay up here again this weekend? I really don’t have anything to do in the Valley.”

He looked up from his time log. “Again?” he said.

“Yeah.” Lucy pointed to the Domes. She said, “I just love this country. I don’t want to go back down to the Valley or to Wawona. Mariposa.”

The crew chief said, “Your hand though. Shouldn’t we get that looked at?”

The finger was bruised black, one streak to Lucy’s wrist like a line of ink.

“No,” Lucy said. “It’s getting better. And taped up, it barely hurts.”

The crew chief spun his pen between his fingers. Squinted at her. “That Tenaya kid’s going to be up here again though. Was that a problem last weekend?”

“No,” Lucy shrugged. “It was fine. He leaves me alone.”

The crew chief flipped his pen again. He said, “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter. So whatever you want to do…”

I turned so the crew chief wouldn’t see me smiling. I walked off to work a slash pile at the edge of the clearing.

At quitting time, I went straight to the tent. Pretended to be reading. I heard the first few trucks pull out, and I realized that my hands were shaking.

After the last person left, Lucy came over to the tents, and I met her at the tent door. She kissed me so hard that our teeth clicked. We kept kissing, and I pulled her head underneath the tent flap. I tore one of the seams of her T-shirt as I ripped it off. She fought with the shoelace that held my shorts up. Bit the knot loose with her teeth.

We didn’t come out at dinnertime, not until after dark.

• • •

We were swimming in the afternoon the next day, Saturday, when we saw the rattlesnake. I had just gotten to the shallows and Lucy was behind me in the deep, near the rocks’ slag. The snake slid off a split shelf and cut out.

Lucy was submerged to her eyes, saw the snake making S-curves toward her. She stayed where she was and the snake never veered. It swam right by her head, not more than a foot away.

When it was past her, I said, “Why didn’t you move or at least go under?”

Lucy ducked her head, swam to me, and bobbed up. She said, “Why would I move?”

“Because a rattlesnake was coming right at you.”

“It wasn’t a big deal,” she said. “I like rattlesnakes.”

“Oh,” I said.

She said, “I once saw a four-foot Northern Pacific Rattlesnake eat a chipmunk. The snake struck it, then sat back and watched the thing twitch. Then the snake swallowed it whole, unhinged its jaw and slid it in.” Lucy leaned to the side and squeezed water out of her hair. “Incredible.”

“But coming at you in the water?”

Lucy said, “I scared one off a log once, scared it toward me, on the Merced. I was downstream, and we kept zigzagging back and forth, trying to get out of each other’s way. I just started laughing.”

I said, “My mother kills them.”

Lucy shook her head. “That’s not good. We need rattlesnakes.”

I said, “You sound like my father.”

Lucy raised her eyebrows. “Then I like your father.”

I said, “My mother once found a rattlesnake coiled under the outside corner of our tent. I heard her suck in breath and knew it was a snake because of the sound she made. She killed it with a shovel, and I saw the venom drops against the metal. Then she buried the head, skinned it out, battered and salted the meat. We fried it in butter and pepper, and it tasted good.”

“You liked it?”

“Oh yeah. Gray and tender. It was pretty nice, but it was also something other than fish, which was good. My father was always talking about the treasure that we’d found when I was little, but he never wanted to buy meat.”

“Treasure?” Lucy said.

“That’s another long story.”

Lucy opened the food bin and got out more Nalley’s cans. “Chili burritos? What do you say? Instead of plain chili we can wrap it in something for variety.”

“Sure,” I said. I got out the tortillas and the block of cheese. Started cutting slices.

We warmed two cans on the Coleman stove, then glopped big scoops onto slices of cheese on top of tortillas. Then we wrapped them.

Lucy’s burrito spilled and she rewrapped it. She said, “I don’t like reptiles dying.”

I took a big bite. Chewed and swallowed. I said, “I guess that’s not my favorite thing either.”

Lucy said, “My cousin caught an alligator lizard on the Vernal Trail when I was six years old, and it was about this long.” She held her hands a foot apart. “He caught the lizard in a pile of leaves and needles, then started waving it around like it was a toy.”

“And it was dying?”

“No, no. The lizard was fine. Healthy. But then he put it in my sister Anne’s face, and she held up her hand, and the lizard bit onto her finger.”

“Bit hard?” I said.

“Oh yeah. Wouldn’t let go. Anne was screaming and trying to rip her finger back out, and my cousin was just laughing and laughing. Then Anne started cussing at him, so he took out his sheath knife and pried the point of the blade into the side of the lizard’s head. He was still laughing as he popped the jaws open and tore the top of the lizard’s head off.”

“What was your sister doing then?”

“Still screaming,” Lucy said. She took a bite of her burrito. Talked with her mouth full. “The lizard writhed and spun around, flipped upside down. Its blood was everywhere. It was sick.” Lucy swallowed her bite. Took another.

The cheese hadn’t melted in my burrito but I liked it like that. I was eating fast. I said, “So you were pretty mad at him?”

Lucy said, “I called him a murderer.”

I laughed.

“But he was a murderer,” she said. “That was murder. And I called him a murderer for a long time after that too.”

“Well, it sounded pretty intense anyway.”

“It was.”

Lucy smiled. Touched her chili burrito to mine. “Cheers for more chili dinners, huh? Same old chili, but a new style of eating it.”

I said, “People do terrible things sometimes. Much worse than killing lizards.”

“I know,” she said. “But I was six. And that sort of thing is worse when you’re six.”

“Right,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“But just the same, tell me a terrible thing you’ve done.” Lucy ate the last bite of her burrito and tapped me with her index finger. “You go,” she said.

“A terrible thing?”

“Yes,” she said. “No, wait. Don’t tell me a terrible thing. All terrible things are the same. Tell me something beautiful instead.”

“Beautiful like what?”

“Beautiful like an image,” she said. “Tell me something I can picture.”

“Okay,” I said, “let me think.” I took a bite of my burrito. Chewed. I thought of the butterflies in August, how they came in great orange clouds when they were migrating, landing on me as I stood still. But then I remembered something I loved even more. I said, “Some nights in winter, when I was a kid, and it was cold, we’d go into our tent right after dinner, and I’d lay my head in my mother’s lap and my feet in my father’s, and we’d have these thick, wool blankets over all of us. My dad would read from this book of animal stories, where a rabbit was always getting in trouble and a coyote and a fox were always tricking each other, and there was a big bear and a family of deer, and I loved it. We read that book three, maybe four times all the way through, and I could look out the door of our tent at the stars and listen to my father read.”

“Exactly,” Lucy said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

A tourist told us about the first wildfire that night, in the mountains to the southwest. Out of the park, but not far. Cabins burnt. Utility lines and 10,000 acres scorched.

The tourist said, “It’s going to fill the Valley with smoke. And they’re saying this season will be the worst fire season in a long, long time.”

Lucy said, “Isn’t it too late in the year for fires?”

“No,” he shook his head. “Big Indian summer coming. They’re saying lots of fires will go all fall.”

• • •

I woke up to the smell of her in my sleeping bag. Didn’t want to sleep anymore. Didn’t want to lose the time with her. I could hear her measured breathing, the quiet pull of air. Water and the seasons. Geology.