Mountain Moonlight (15 page)

"It's okay. I never lived anywhere else. I think the desert's kind of neat, though."  Vala was emerging from the tent and, spotting her, Davis called, "Do you like the desert, Mom?"

"I'd forgotten how wonderful it was," she said.

Davis exchanged a look with Bram.

"Your mother has this tendency to not quite answer a question," Bram told him. "The older you get, the more you'll discover most girls and women do the same thing. It's good you're getting a education in this early. You'll need it."

"Mostly you can understand if you think about it," Davis said.

"I agree. It's one of those things men just have to accept."

"I hope you two are through talking about me as though I wasn't even on the same planet," Vala put in. "If we didn't have to get an early start, I'd list the problems women have with men."

"So, okay, you do like the desert then, Mom?" Davis persisted.

"Yes. How's that for a right-to-the-point answer? Why do you ask, anyway?"

"I just wondered."

After breakfast, the three of them acted as a team in cleaning up, repacking and saddling the horses. Watching as Vala pitched in and did her share, Bram decided it wouldn't take much to make her a real outdoors-woman.

"So we're off to find the deer landmark," Vala said once they were mounted.

"The trail seems pretty clear," Bram commented, glancing up at the sky again. "Should be an easy trip if the rain holds off."

Vala looked up and frowned. "Those don't look like storm clouds."

"They're not. Rain clouds."

"No thunder and lightning?" Davis sounded disappointed.

"Can't have everything."

"Are we gonna have to stop and camp early if it rains a lot?" Davis asked.

"Let's hope not
"
, Bram said. "A little rain won't melt us. Neither will a lot, but a downpour makes for heavy going. I don't think we'll get that kind of rain today."

"You know," Davis said, "I just remembered that Mokesh's eyes weren't all brown. His left eye had two chunks of sort of a golden-yellow in the brown. So he was named right."

"We'll hope his map is right, too," Bram said.

Then the trail narrowed and they had to go single file again.

After finding the deer marker without much difficulty, they took a rest break. Before they started up again, Bram discovered the pack horse was definitely going lame. He checked all four hoofs but found nothing to account for the problem. The supplies were fewer than when they started so the horse was carrying an increasingly lighter load. In any case, Bram never overloaded the horses he used.

"This'll slow us down," he said.

As they remounted, a slow drizzle began which soon made the trail difficult for the horses. The rain made the humans equally miserable.

"Maybe the spirits don't want us to get there," Davis said.

"Reality check," Vala put in. "Legends that are a part of another culture aren't to be taken as absolutely true."

"Aw, Mom, it's fun to imagine they might be watching us right now."

Bram kept his mouth shut. No gain in jumping in when they both had made points he could live with. After a time he spotted what looked like a good place to camp and made a decision.

"We'll stop, set up the tent and the extension and get in out of this rain," he said. "It'll also give the pack horse a chance to rest his leg."

Davis looked unhappy but he didn't protest.

When the necessary chores were taken care of, including setting up the tent and attaching the extension, the three of them ducked inside and dried off as best they could.
             

"Bummer," Davis said gloomily. "We're so close to the treasure."

Vala put her arm around him and he leaned against her for a few minutes before putting away. "Hey," he said, "I just remembered it's Mom's turn to tell a story."

"My turn? How come?" Vala protested.

"'Cause I told one about Coyote at Pauline's and after we saw the rattler Bram told about Mokesh being the Guardian of the Ndee. So you're next."

"But I don't know any Native American stories," she said.

"Didn't Grandpa or Grandma ever tell you any stories when you were little?" Davis asked.

Vala shook her head. "My father read stories to me and so did my mother."

"I don't mean stories out of books. I guess you'll just have to make up one, then."

"I'm not good at making up stories. It'd have to be a real one. Wait, something's coming to me my grandmother once told me. It's about when she was a little girl. Will that do?"

"Sure!"

"It's sort of sad."

"That's okay, 'cause this is sort of a sad day."

Bram thought Davis was more right than he knew. The day was sad. Not because of the rain or the lame horse or the fact they'd had to stop short of their goal. Time would take care of those things.

He felt sad because he'd faced the fact that this trip wasn't going to last forever. All too soon they'd be back in Phoenix. Then only he would be left in Phoenix. Vala and Davis would be gone.

He supposed he'd forget them eventually, as the memories faded and disappeared. But that might well be a long and painful process, one he didn't care to contemplate. His own fault for letting it happen, for identifying with the kid because of his own childhood. As for Vala....Bram sighed. There was no accounting for Vala.

Chapter 10

Inside the tent, Vala eased into a more comfortable sitting position on her sleeping bag. The gear in the extension smelled not unpleasantly of wet leather and horse, while outside the rain drizzled down.

She let her gaze drift from Davis to Bram, and back.

The coziness of them being close together like this gave her a warm feeling.

"My mother's mother's name was Ella," she began her story. "Davis, she'd be your great-grandmother. When she was a little girl of six her parents took her with them on a trip from Iowa where they lived to visit her mother's parents in Southern California."

"My great-great grandparents?" Davis asked.

Vala nodded. "In the olden days, Ella said, Los Angeles wasn't the huge metropolis it is now. The parks had carousels and ponds with boats and swans. Eastlake Park was near where Ella was visiting and every day her grandfather would walk down the hill with her to that park. He'd give her some change and tell her she could ride the merry-go- round until the money ran out. Of course, if she caught the gold ring, she'd get a free ride.

"Ella loved riding the carousel horses and every time she went by the ring dispenser, she grabbed one. But it was never the gold one. As she went round, she could see her grandfather sitting on a bench attached to a picnic table where he was playing cribbage with a friend. She knew it was cribbage because her parents played the game at home. Every once in a while he'd look at her and wave."

Vala went on to tell how Ella finally found out her grandfather's friend had to bring the cards and cribbage board to the park because her grandmother thought cards were the devil's playthings and didn't allow them in the house. Ella didn't know if that was true--her mother said it wasn't--but she was solidly on her grandfather's side, so she never mentioned what he did at the park while she rode the merry-go-round.

"One day, the magic happened--Ella reached out while going around and caught the gold ring. She was so excited she failed to keep a good grip and she dropped it. An older boy jumped off his horse, grabbed the gold ring and wouldn't give it back. When the ride ended, Ella told the man who took care of the carousel, but he said whoever had the gold ring in his hand won the free ride."

"That was mean," Davis said. "What'd she do?"

"Ella went crying to her grandfather. He agreed it was unfair but pointed out there was nothing to be done about it. Even the mean boy had vanished by now. He comforted her until she stopped crying.
"

"By the time they got home, Ella had somehow twisted the unfair rule around to apply to her grandmother not letting her grandfather play cards in his own house. If she'd kept her mouth shut, everything would have been all right, but Ella, still upset about the gold ring, confronted her grandmother, asking why she was so mean to Grandfather.
"

"So then it all came out. Grandmother labelled Grandfather a back-sliding sinner and lectured Ella's parents about their wayward child. They got upset and left California sooner than they'd planned. On the way home to Iowa, they told Ella she had too big a mouth and let this be a lesson. Before they visited again, Grandfather died and Ella always wondered if it wasn't somehow her fault."

"Whoa, that's way sad," Davis said.

"Is there a moral?" Bram asked.

"Yeah," Davis replied. "Don't drop the gold ring."

"Life isn't always fair," Vala put in.

"I can go along with both of those," Bram told them, "but I have a different one. Don't let something that upset you in the past color your whole life."

Vala stared at him. "That's just what happened to my Grandmother Ella. She always blamed herself when anything went wrong. I never thought about it before."

"If she hadn't dropped the gold ring, she'd've been all right," Davis insisted. "Let's not talk about any more sad things. We could tell jokes. Me first."

Though Vala laughed in the right places and even told a few jokes of her own, her mind kept going back to her Grandmother Ella. Finally she realized why. Ever since she'd divorced Neal, she'd shied away from any kind of a meaningful relationship with a man. In effect, she'd done what Ella had done. After she "lost" her wedding ring by getting divorced,
she had been
afraid to take another chance. Why? It wasn't all her fault that the marriage had failed, Neal was as much to blame as she was. Yet he hadn't let it bother him. Look at him with another wife and another son already.

It wouldn't have helped to keep the damn ring, along with the marriage. She and Neal had been miserable together, they were better off apart.

So now what did it mean that she'd plunged headlong into involvement with another man?  A hopeless involvement. Was it due to a twist in her defense mechanism? Bram was safe to fall for because there wasn't a chance for anything permanent between them? No wedding ring, no failure?

"Mom," Davis said, nudging her, "it's your turn to tell a joke."

"I think you'd better skip me this time," she said. "I'm all joked out."

As the day slipped into an early evening and the rain turned into a heavy mist, it became clear there'd be no sleeping under the stars tonight. Since their gear took up most of the extension, obviously they'd be bedding down in the tent's close quarters.

Vala tried to figure out a way to keep Davis between Bram and her but the configuration of the tent lent itself best to an arrangement whereby Davis, being shorter, slept behind their heads at the rear of the tent.

"I'll turn the sleeping bags around," Bram said, "so Davis will be at our feet instead. We're less likely to wake each other up that way."

"Yeah," Davis agreed. "Sometimes Mom snores a little."

"I do not!" Vala said.

"Want me to let you know in the morning?" Bram asked her, chuckling.

She flushed, realizing he probably already knew whether she did or not. Tonight, she decided, was not going to be peaceful.

When they were settled into their sleeping bags, Davis said, "This is fun."

For you, maybe, she thought, lying rigid, unable to relax with Bram practically nestled against her.

"It's sort of like summer camp," Davis went on, "but more like we're a family camping in our tent."

His words fell painfully onto Vala's heart.

Bram tried to think of some quip to toss into the silence that stretched out after Davis's last remark, but he couldn't come up with a thing.

He knew what the kid meant. Often during one of his guide trips, the people who'd hired him, sometimes strangers to one another, developed a sense of camaraderie born of shared hardships on the trail. He'd always stayed aloof, friendly without making anyone a comrade.

This time he'd screwed up. For one thing, he rarely had as few as two people to guide. But what had really got to him was who the two people were. Vala and Davis. He'd gotten to know them so well it seemed incredible that they'd soon be more than half a continent away from him.

His thoughts drifted to the story Vala had told about her grandmother. He'd picked up on what he saw as the moral to be learned from the tale because he'd been guilty of using his version of the past to color his world. What if, as he'd been slowly coming to realize, his version was skewed?

His father hadn't really neglected him, even if he wasn't around much of the time. When they'd been together, which seemed to be more often than Bram had once believed, his father had done the best he could to teach his son what he felt was important, to offer as much of his heritage as a kid could understand.