Graphic the Valley (7 page)

I say, “Did you get a lot?”

He giggles. “Oh, fuck yes, man…you have no idea. People set themselves up forever with one quick trip into San Francisco.” He puffs and holds his smoke. Exhales through his nose. “One quick trip to the city and people set for life. If you’re a dirtbag camping in the Valley, it doesn’t take much to be rich, you know? All sorts of people scored it too.”

“Like who?” I say.

“Like anyone who heard about it and could get the scuba gear. Climbers. Dirtbags. Hikers. Some of them just people who scrounged around for a while, anyone who wanted to live long-term here, that’s who really went for it. I know a lot of people who never needed to work again. Not even Search and Rescue.”

Greazy puffs one, two, three. Waits to blow smoke. He says, “There was just too much damn money in that plane.”

• • •

Out along Tenaya Lake, early morning, the sun showing layers and spangling the flat blade of green water.

Lucy said, “Do you know?”

“Know what?” I said.

She looked at me. Her eyes flint. She laced her fingers into mine. She said, “I didn’t think about that. Did you?”

I kept looking at her. We stood there next to the lake.

“Yeah?” she said.

Then I understood. “No, wait. Really?” I said.

She nodded.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t think about that possibility.”

“Me either,” she said. “I’m a little scared.”

We started walking again. We walked for a while, not speaking. The water lapped on the granite next to us, each wave like the sound of a person gulping.

Lucy shivered and leaned in to me. She said, “I came up here to work for a few months, to think about leaving the park. I used to be so close to my father.”

I said. “But you’re not now?”

“No. He’s into other things. And I don’t know all of them. I need to get closer to him again. He keeps saying that he’ll ‘bring me in on it,’ but I don’t know what that means. I’m trying to decide if I want to be brought in on everything he does. I’m thinking I do, but maybe I don’t.”

Lucy walked a little faster. The birds were moving now, and out on the water, an eagle hit for a fish.

She said, “Are you close to your father?”

“Yes,” I said. “But not as close as we used to be either. I spend a lot of time away now.”

“Why?” she said.

“I don’t know.” But I thought of the superintendent, my first summer away. I said, “I guess I didn’t know how to tell my father everything anymore. And that mattered to me.”

“But he still talks to you?” she said.

“Yeah, we still talk, and he still tells me to be a warrior.”

Lucy said, “A warrior in what war?”

“The old one, I guess,” I said. “Or the one he says is still going on. Either way, I want to make him happy, so I think about it.”

• • •

When we got back to the tent site, the day was warming fast.

“Play me in checkers?” Lucy said, and pointed to the slab below the dome’s headwall.

“Okay,” I said.

She got out the board and we crossed the road. Walked up to find rocks. She leaned down and picked one up. “I’ll be white,” she said.

“All right,” I said, “I’ve got dark then.”

We found twelve stones each, sat down, and set up the game.

Lucy said, “You go first,” and we started to play.

I watched her think. The way she scraped her teeth together, top and bottom, the way she touched her tongue to her one turned tooth.

I touched her ankle. “My parents will be interesting,” I said. I slid a gray rock toward her front line.

She rotated a rock, spun it in a circle, and tapped it on the board. She said, “They won’t be happy with this?”

“Well…” I said.

She said, “They won’t be happy with me?” She slid a white rock to the left edge where she was protected by the sideline.

I slid a checker to back up my first. “Maybe not with this,” I said. “Not with all of it.”

She moved a piece on the opposite side of the board.

I said, “My parents are…it’s tough to explain. You’ll see when you meet them.”

She nodded and looked at the board.

“They’re interesting,” I said. I moved a middle rock forward into an open space, a stupid move, but I wasn’t thinking about checkers. I said, “My father told me stories growing up.”

Lucy raised her eyebrows. Jumped my unprotected checker. We played back and forth for a moment. Lucy’s teeth sounded like two pebbles, grating. I’d noticed the slight indent where they rubbed on her right incisor.

I said, “Old stories.” I made another bad move.

Lucy leaned forward. Double-jumped me. “Old stories?”

I jumped her back, once, but I had to open up a back-line square.

Lucy said, “Have you dated many girls, Tenaya?”

“No,” I said.

She slid another stone to the edge. “How many?”

“None,” I said.

She said, “None at all?” She flicked my hand. “Are you kidding?”

I said, “I’ve hung out with girls, been around them in Camp 4 or at the bridge, but I never dated anyone.”

Lucy smiled and nodded.

I moved a checker but with no game plan. Moving just to move. I said, “You’d have to understand my parents. What they believe and where we live. If you saw it, you’d understand.”

Lucy tapped a rock on the slab, two beats. Three, then four.

I said, “How would I meet a girl?”

Lucy set up another double jump.

I moved to block her.

“You’d meet a girl in Tuolumne,” she said.

“Right.”

She leaned across the board and kissed me. “And you’d be so happy.”

“Yes,” I said.

Lucy was playing outside in, keeping my checkers in the middle. The game wasn’t close.

She said, “You want to keep living like that?”

“No,” I said, “I mean, maybe…” But I didn’t know.

Lucy leaned across and kissed me again. She sat back and crossed her arms. “When will you know?”

I stared at the board. There was no way to win this checkers game. I was already down four.

Lucy said, “Your move.”

I moved, but I had no strategy. Each play worse than the one before.

“Some of these things…” she said. “Some of these things are…” she jumped me again, “they are what they are.”

I was losing by five now.

I looked at the board trying to think of something to do, but saw nothing there.

Lucy’s arms were crossed, her biceps strong. I admired her shoulders. I looked at her face then, the way her lips were set as she stared at the board. Her eyes and dark eyelashes over her sunburned cheeks. The only girl.

I moved a checker and said, “We could get married.”

She’d had her head down, following my moves, but her head popped up when I said that. She said, “Are you joking?” She put her fingers to her mouth and pinched her bottom lip.

I tapped one of my rocks on the board. Looked out at the camp and the lake. “No,” I said. “Actually I’m not. Do you want to get married?”

She said, “Really?”

I looked right at her. The flush in her face. The way she held that lip with her finger and her thumb. She let go, and I saw her hand shake. “Really?” she said again.

“Yes.”

Lucy folded her legs underneath her and sat back on her ankles. Closed her eyes.

I said, “What are you thinking?”

“Okay,” she said. Her eyes were still closed. She nodded. “Okay,” she said again. She opened her eyes, leaned across the board and kissed me. Then she stood up. She had my checkers in her hand, the rocks that she’d won. She took a rock and threw it at the road sign down below. And missed.

I stood up next to her. “So, yes?”

“Yes,” she said. She threw a second rock, and that one hit the sign with a clank.

Lucy hopped forward and screamed.

I screamed too. Then I began to throw my checkers at the sign.

One by one, we threw the rocks out at the yellow road marker. A few of them hit the metal, clanking, and we screamed like lit gasoline.

• • •

I came into my parents’ camp as the sun set on the bottom of the nimbus. Sky like the underbelly of a pink ocean.

The ’46 Plymouth was in the high grass near the creek. Full gas can next to the tree. In winter, my parents slept on the bench seats, front and back, inside the car, but their summer tarp-tent was hung off to the side of camp now.

My father was sitting in front of the car, shaping a figurine out of a chunk of incense cedar, working ticks off with his sheath knife. The soft, straight-grained wood whittled off in dips.

I hadn’t seen him in almost two months. He looked older than I remembered.

He smiled when he saw me. “Did you like the job?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I met someone.” I’d decided to tell my parents right away. Not wait. I said, “A girl named Lucy.”

He turned his knife through the cedar at an eye, put pressure on the back of his knife with his thumb. A small chunk of bright came off. I could smell the sap.

He said, “So you like her?”

“Yes. We’re getting married.”

He stopped whittling. Butted the knife on his thigh, blade up.

I said, “Soon. At the end of this month.”

He wiped the splinters off his knees. Used his thumb to feel for burrs on the knife. “This month?”

“Yes.”

He said, “So you’re serious.”

“Yes,” I said.

He found a small burr and examined it. Took granite granules from next to his chair and set them on the sideways blade. Ran them across with a pressed thumb. He said, “And you’ve thought this through? Thought about everything?”

I saw a loose rock at the fire ring. I squatted to wedge it back in, took a smaller granite piece and puzzled it tight. I said, “No. I probably haven’t thought of everything.”

I looked at him and he raised his eyebrows. Still working that burr with the granules across his knife blade.

I said, “But I will.” I shimmed the loose rock with another flake. Wedged it tight. I said, “She and I will.”

My father popped the burr. Held up his blade and looked across. Popped again. Then he scraped the knife sideways on a block of wood to see for catch. He said, “So you’re willing to make a mistake.”

I found another loose rock in the fire ring and worked that one. Shimmed with flakes.

My mother returned to camp with full water buckets, looking too thin to carry the weight. She set the buckets down and hugged me. I could feel her ribs.

My father pointed his knife at me. He said, “Tenaya says he’s getting married.”

My mother’s fingers curled, made a fist. Her exhale sounded a note.

My father said, “This month.”

I hugged my mother and she gripped my back. I felt the ten points of her fingertips.

This is how the war starts. Miners shoot a Miwok trapper in the back and call him a “brave.” They tell the newspaper that he’s been a horse-thief Indian
.

The next war party leaves the mangled bodies of Boden’s four companions, one of the men skinned alive. These are true stories, your history
.

The Miwoks are divided. Juarez and Jose Rey are preparing for war. Those leaders are in the mountains, waiting. Others are living in mining camps, forgetting former lives, their wives and children. Drinking whiskey in the daylight
.

During the militia’s first campaign into the mountains, twenty-two Indians are killed without a single death among the settlers. The soldiers light the wigwams with irons from the fire, and the panicked warriors run out without any organization. Jose Rey is one of the first to be shot down, and the soldiers believe he has died
.

The Yosemiti hear everything through runners. They hear that the ghosts will never come to the Valley, and they believe the story
.

Tenaya is up north in the high country. Watching past North Dome. He sees a great cloud come from the southwest and blow over Glacier Point, filling the U. It drops down and hangs like fog among the trees. But it is not fog
.

My father said, “It’s like 1850.”

“No. It isn’t,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is now. There are new things going on.”

I threw my water bottle on top of my day gear. Cinched my pack. Then I hiked out of camp.

• • •

The night of the mountain lion. Lion like winter storm, like the metal mirrors in the Camp 4 bathrooms, dull, reflecting, and scratched. Of the winter flood and flashes.

I took the path across Swinging Bridge. Saw the logjams left over from the swell in January when the Merced flowed a quarter-mile across, fifteen feet above the top of the bank. The bears come now to paw at the watermark, wondering about all the berry bushes lost downstream.

I hiked Four Mile Trail under Sentinel, Union, Moran, the granite dust puffing in the heat. The smell of every summer, the dust and the green acorns not ripe hanging on the trees, and the bitter taste of the soft, green nut that wicked the moisture from inside my cheeks.

Up in the pines I met the Pohono Trail near Glacier Point. Then I could run, had to run to catch her before dark. I wanted to talk to her, ask her about the New Parks Plan, hear that everything was okay. I wanted to see if she was still real.

To North Wawona, past Bridalveil, maybe North Wawona by eight or nine o’clock. Running hard above the meadow, I noticed the easy cool in the trees and the smell of the wind coming over the high stream. The half-light slant like mist filling. The new dew smell.

And I saw the lion.

Up on split granite, rock that sluffs old skin, the lion waiting, hoping for a short hunt. I ran underneath him. But I saw him too, saw him as his body tensed.

The lion jumped soft yellow above me as I stepped back. Then he hit me and we fell downhill toward the meadow. Both the same size. Both animals. It was like that in the meadow, and I gouged at his eyes and kept my forearm over my own throat. I’d watched lions kill deer in El Cap Meadow in the spring and I knew what he would do.

We were face to face, and I could smell the rotten meat smell of his breath. Then we rolled and I saw the patterns of the pines above us like woodcuts displayed along the lodge wall.

Each moment clipped, with a gap between to keep it slow, slow at the freeze, that slow.