Graphic the Valley (17 page)

I went straight back, then north, away from the trail. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw the CAT go up like a huge animal lit and burning. The security guard’s flashlight swept back and forth between the two burns.

Kenny met me on the north side of the clearing. He had the gas can in his hand and he was laughing so hard that he was wheezing. We watched the security guard’s flashlight bounce up and down through the field.

The creek was rushing with snowmelt, and Kenny had to spin around and throw the can high and far to get it across. Then we swam after. I found the can in the reeds.

We hiked southwest in the trees, moving slowly now, avoiding the moss on tops of rocks, wet grass, dry tree branches. We tried not to hit anything that would scuff or imprint, anything that would leave an easy trail for people to follow the next day. We walked ten feet apart. Quiet for half an hour. Watching our feet.

Kenny kept giggling.

We cut west underneath North Dome, then the Arches, and arrived at the east end of the Ahwahnee property in less than half an hour. While it was still dark, I dug a grave for the gas can and buried it.

He said, “Are you really worried someone will find it?”

“Well, I might have to use it again.”

“More arson?” he said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Not sure what I’ll need to do.”

“Okay, then. You sift needles over that dirt. I’ll make an arrow and a small cairn over here to mark the direction.” He counted paces and made the marks.

Jose Rey does not die on the battlefield. He is carried off the field by his warriors and survives in a grove hut
.

The elders talk about his bravery against the grizzly, when he fought the animal alone in the dark with a sheath knife. There is a scar down Jose Rey’s back like a river running next to his spine. He says that the scar is from his dance with the bear, when he cut around the heart, his fist doubling in size, when he left the knife inside the bear and pulled out the animal’s heart
.

Jose Rey releases venom in his last days and there are many who listen. They say that his venom is truth. He says that the ghosts are tearing through the blackberry patch, rending the roots from the ground. If they can, they will find a way to take the very ground itself
.

Carlos walked up to me near the Upper Falls path. He surprised me because he didn’t sneak. He knew where I lived.

I grabbed a rock.

He held out his hands. He said, “It’s not like that. We’re even now, one to one. Or actually—” he touched his scar—“mine’s worse.”

I said, “What do you want?”

He smiled. “I know you burned the new Miwok forms.”

“You don’t know anything, Carlos.”

“Look,” he said, “I don’t mind. That’s fine with me.”

I laughed at him. “I didn’t ask you. And you’re a ranger anyway. I know you care about that.”

“I do?” he said. “Is that right?”

I was holding the rock and he was standing with his hands up. He said, “We need to talk about some things.” He dropped his hands and put them in his pockets.

The rock I held was heavy enough to crush his skull, a Chief Tenaya rock. I said, “Maybe I don’t want to talk to you about things.”

“Maybe you don’t,” he said, “but we should talk anyway. Then you’ll understand what’s going on.”

I waited. I didn’t go toward him or away.

“For example,” he said, “Twin Burgers is paying private investigators to supplement the FBI’s investigation of what the Park Service calls ‘The Yosemite Arsons.’ Three burns in one year. Twin Burgers doesn’t want similar trouble with its Valley locations. The security guard from the night of the third arson saw two men, but he didn’t have good descriptions. Young and athletic. Long, dirty hair. The FBI and the investigators are pursuing those descriptions.”

I hoped Kenny hadn’t talked to anyone about anything. I said, “What does that have to do with me?”

“You and I both know what that has to do with you, Tenaya.” Carlos turned and walked off down the trail. I watched him until he reached the Camp 4 entrance path. Then I went back to my cave and found my sheath knife. I ran cordelette through the belt loop and tied it so the knife hung behind my right hip.

I moved out of the Bachar Cracker cave. I took my sleeping bag and gear further up on the north side to a lean-to of gray boulders, not even rainproof. But the sky was clear, and I slept near the bear hollows.

• • •

“Not to anybody, right?”

“Right,” Kenny said.

“I know you wouldn’t brag about it.”

“No,” he said. “I thought it was funny, but I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Good.”

Kenny and I walked into Curry, around the back of the shower building. It was early morning, before anyone was up. Kenny said, “My parents probably wanted something different for my life. I’m thirty-one now.” We got to the lost-and-found boxes. Most of the things I owned were from those boxes.

“Look at this puffy.” Kenny held up a bright orange jacket, waiting on top of the first box, clean and bright compared to the one he normally wore.

“That’ll work,” I said. I pulled out a pair of long underwear and smelled them. They were rank, but I could wash them in the free showers with the pump soap.

He said, “My parents are cool though.”

I found a North Face fleece. Checked the size and tried it on. It was big but close enough.

Kenny said, “They really are. And they want me to be happy.”

I nodded, started sorting through the second box. Mostly T-shirts.

“You know what I hate?” Kenny held up a Yosemite Sam T-shirt. “Junk drawers.”

I smelled a polypro shirt, body odor like rotting onions. I waited for Kenny to explain.

“You know what I mean,” he said, “the drawer in the kitchen, next to the phone, full of rubber bands, pennies, pliers, old pencils, golf tees, string, tape, wire, everything?” He was making a pile next to his lost-and-found box, mugs and hats and T-shirts. “Most houses have them,” he said. “Then again, I guess you wouldn’t know about that.”

“No,” I said.

“Do you miss that?” he said. “Houses and everything?”

“I don’t think I miss them, but I sometimes wonder. Houses or the ocean. Or my father taught me to drive a car, but I’ve never driven a car anywhere but the Valley Loop Road. And what would anything else be like?”

“Right,” Kenny said. “Right.”

We were finished with the boxes. We each had a couple items.

Kenny said, “Want to score free cups of coffee before the rangers and tourists come around at the kiosk?”

We went to the rentals center. The employees glared at us but didn’t say anything. Kenny poured the first cup of coffee and handed it to me. He said, “My parents wouldn’t want my life, and I wouldn’t want a junk drawer.” He poured himself a cup. “But they’re good people. Probably yours too.”

I added cream to the rim. Took a sip. We walked to the amphitheater and sat down on one of the wooden benches. I said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m less me and more everything around me. You know?”

“That makes sense,” Kenny said. “Like you have no control?”

“Right,” I said. “I’m angry about it. I know that. Like I’m trying to live a life that doesn’t exist, or like everything’s fighting me, and I can’t make things work the way I want them to.”

Kenny sipped at his coffee and looked at the empty amphitheater’s stage in front of us. We were the only people sitting in the rows of benches. He said, “I think most people feel that a little bit. And that’s why I go on my long adventures. It’s true. I just try to push and push, go by myself to see how far I can go in any direction, to see what I’m capable of.”

I nodded and sipped at my coffee.

Kenny said, “We’ve got a little time, but that’s all. We’ve got to live these little moments.”

• • •

My mother could improvise with newspaper, putting the glue in the middle, then catching the corners of the square and pulling those four corners in until they met in her hand. When she blew, the newspaper ballooned in front of her as she waited to take that first big inhale. I watched her hands shake at that moment, right before, putting the fist of newsprint to her mouth, closing her eyes, and her hands shaking, anticipating that first big suck.

I was in Camp 4, under the Thriller oak tree, reading a book. The pages kept flipping in the wind, and I had trouble concentrating. I kept thinking about the FBI and Twin Burgers.

A little girl was there. Her parents were bouldering, and she was playing make-believe with a pile of pinecones and a stick wand. She kept spinning around in circles, casting spells at invisible monsters. Dark and curly haired. Kid dreadlocks like tree roots coming out of her head. Maybe five years old.

The little girl whispered, “
A la muerte
,” as her mother attempted Thriller.

The little girl had a centimeter gap between her two front teeth. She balanced on her right leg, swinging the left, then hopped. Her arm shot out and she waved the wand in the air.

I tried to see her face better. Her eyes. It had been so long.

She spun again. Turned on something with the wand in her right hand. Facing away, and I sat forward.

Then she spun around and pointed her wand right at me. Her hair was wild as matted weeds, a clump of hair stuck off to the side. She looked right at me, and I knew she was someone else. So I looked away.

• • •

That night, Kenny said that he wanted to walk to Truckee.

“Walk there?” I said. “How far is that?”

“Two hundred miles,” he said. “Maybe 250 walking, or maybe less. I’m not really sure. I want to see Lovers’ Leap though, look at the place where they jumped.”

“Yeah,” I said, “my father told me that legend when I was little, the one about the suicide pact.”

“Did he call it a legend?” Kenny said.

“Yeah, the legend of them jumping while holding hands.”

He shook his head. “That’s not a legend, man. Not if you mean legend as untrue. Most stories like that are more true than anything else we hear.”

I was starting to understand Kenny. He’d laughed at the idea of a newspaper when I’d showed him the last
San Francisco Chronicle
article. He’d said, “You believe anything in that thing? It’s probably secretly owned by Rupert Murdoch too.”

I didn’t know who that was.

Kenny said, “So you want to walk with me to Truckee or what?”

We were under the Book Cliffs near the Lower Falls Path. We’d just climbed up Munginella, down the broken trail, and now we were sliding on the loose pack.

“Walk to Truckee?” I said. “I’m not sure.”

He said, “To the Leap,” and made a cliff edge with his left hand, someone jumping off with his right, two fingers kicking in the air.

“No,” I said, “probably not.”

Kenny tied his shoes together and hung them on his neck. He said, “Is that ’cause you always stay here in the park or what?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“No, seriously,” he said, “are you ever going to leave here or what? Even for a little bit?”

We turned a corner on the trail, and there was a longer steep straight below us. I said, “I don’t think so. Well, maybe. I don’t really know.”

“You never just want to go? Just leave?” he said. “Just take off somewhere?”

“Yeah, I did want that. I wanted that last year for a while. And I’ve been up in Tuolumne…twice now. Two different summers up there in the high country, and I wanted to keep going then.”

“And?” he said.

“And I didn’t. I didn’t have the opportunity,” I said.

“The opportunity? But you have the opportunity all the time. Just start walking, then keep walking.”

“I don’t know. I guess it didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to go farther than Tuolumne. Or at least it didn’t feel like I could,” I said. “It’s hard to explain.”

Kenny’s feet slipped on the trail and he fell onto his butt. He laughed and stood back up. He said, “So that’s it? You’re never going to leave?”

“Last year I sort of started to, at least in my mind. I made a decision that I was going, that I was leaving, but…” I was talking about Lucy, but I didn’t want to talk about Lucy. I said, “It just didn’t work out.”

Kenny waited, but I didn’t say anything else. He looked at me as we hiked down to the end of the steep, then back into a zigzag turn. I hiked off the trail there, to stomp steps, and Kenny followed me. We scrambled over and under fallen trees.

Kenny said, “There’s still time, you know. You’re not going to die tomorrow.”

The Lower Falls was blasting mist to our left, snowmelt surging from the high country. There were hot days coming.

• • •

My father says, “Think like Tenaya.” He taps my forehead.

I’m eight years old. I don’t know what he means.

He says, “Nothing less than that. Do you understand me?”

I say, “Yes,” but I don’t.

“The Great One. Like you?” he says.

I say, “Yes,” again.

The fox has stolen both packages of meat, the white-wrapped hamburger from the cache.

My father says, “He could only do that if he came through twice. You know that?”

I don’t want to admit that I missed him twice, that I didn’t protect our food stores.

“Think,” my father says. “A third time through and you catch him, okay? So what are you going to do?”

“Catch him,” I say. “Set a good trap.”

“Right,” he says. “You have to know these things. Learn everything. This is where you’ll live forever, in this place, in this Valley, Tenaya.”

• • •

I slept underneath a log near one of the Arches streams. The cool air came off the water and I lay down. Turned and slept all night. Some days, after climbing hard, the tiredness comes in like a wool blanket pulled to the chin.

Morning then, and I smelled the familiar smell of pine loam. Dew smoke. Childhood in my nostrils, and the camp up Ribbon Creek. I stepped over to the Arches stream and took two cupped hands of water and drank. This stream didn’t have any giardia. I’d walked it up to the wall dozens of times, climbed Royal’s routes above, jammed through splitters and seams, corners of waterfall that made my bare feet slip until they dried. I’d seen the purifying granite. Washed my head in the 38-degree water that dizzies.