High Country : A Novel (37 page)

Ty had pushed the pack ahead, holding the girl as they sluiced through the first rocks. The pack jammed on something and Gretta came free of it, both of them going under it, coming up into foaming water that turned them around and around again. She was behind him now and he tried to push her up, onto something, into air. But the pack came back at them, hitting her, knocking her below him as he struggled to get his legs downstream, bring her up so they could fight toward the shore.

A rush of water more powerful than anything he’d ever felt drove him down and down into rocks deep below the rushing current. He felt Gretta slip from him, her body pulled around a boulder he couldn’t see. And then he was on the surface again, gasping. Something hit him from behind and he turned to touch it and felt himself go down again, not knowing what he had touched. He felt for it, felt the dull crack of his head on a rock and was spun around again, lifted, all his body seeming to come free of the water as he went over a ledge and crashed down into a pool where everything was dark and slow as though slow-motion had taken over his life. He felt something brush against him. Then a darkness closed in.

Later he remembered clinging to the branches of a fir, its great roots exposed where the waters that had cut away its life. But he hadn’t the strength to hold on, lift himself above the power that flung him there and then reclaimed him, swept him back like a toy. He tried to push off rocks but the river denied him, spun him until he was going headfirst again, his strength no match for the water’s power.

After that he remembered only surrendering, becoming no more than the river itself—until it left him on the shallows of a rocky bar, waters pounding past in a darkness that told him nothing. The moon lifted to show him a bank close by. He reached for it, the cold shaking him so violently he had no choice. But the river recaptured him, willows slowing him just enough to find an aspen he could cling to, free himself from the sucking sweep of waters. He crawled onto the flat of a boulder and slept until his own shaking woke him, made him stand, jog, and dance the night away to fight the cold, keep some flame alive in a life he knew had no right to be.

Some time toward morning he fell again, collapsed until a morning sun revived him and he heard the pop-pop-pop of a helicopter going away. He watched it grow smaller as it searched its way down the river. Beyond it clouds were moving in, gray and thick, telling him no helicopter would be back, not soon enough. He sat, his body so sore it was an agony. One boot was gone, his clothes were shredded, heavy with wet, one foot was bloody and raw from the long night’s battle.

He still had his knife, used it to cut strips from his shirt. He wrapped the foot, cut thicker strips from his pants and fashioned a sole, made a shoe from the wraps so he could walk—if he could stand.

He looked at the cliffs above him. The crashing river before him. Downriver its banks were choked with growth, huge boulders, more growth. Upriver, cliffs, sheared-off rock—and growth so thick it looked impassable.

The gray sky chilled him. He knew he had to move. Up the river was all he could think of, back to where he’d started. Maybe Gretta was there, cast onto some shoal as he had been. He couldn’t think of her dead any more than he could think of himself alive. He couldn’t think either of those ways. He just knew he had to go up, that back at Junction Meadows were his horses. Buck. The Haslams. Jeb Walker and Lilly.

He started, each movement uncovering some new pain, something torn and broken in him. But each step bringing him closer to his high country, safety—taking him up against the relentless waters. Every few steps he stopped, let the pain settle as he scanned the banks of the river, looked across it for some sign of Gretta, even a glimpse of the trail that ran along the east bank, provided a way to follow the great river to its source. But he saw nothing: across the river everything was hidden in timber; on his side nothing but cliffs to climb and brush to fight. No sign of Gretta, no sign of anything human.

Mostly he saw the relentless work of the river, its waters taking everything out of the mountains toward the big valley, the sink where a sea had once been, where the great Kern would be swallowed into the earth just as that sea had been.

Sometimes he would fall asleep where he stopped, looking for a way to go on. In his sleep he would see the river rushing down until it became nothing, wasting its great life going nowhere. He would jerk awake with the thought, frightened to think anything would push so hard to rush into the sun-scorched earth, disappear.

In the years that followed, Ty Hardin would take Nightmare down to look across at that place where the river had thrown him on its banks. Had he been airborne, he would think—an eagle seeking food or even a helicopter on a search—he would have seen the bridge scarcely a mile below, seen the hot springs that he could have crossed to in safety, seen the trail that could have returned him safely to his horses, to his people.

But he also understood that what he couldn’t see was of no use. What he couldn’t conceive, worthless. He’d only known he had to go up—no matter the miles—to what he knew, not down, hoping for something he didn’t. And so he’d gone up where no man had gone, crawling and hobbling across a country so broken it seemed more a hundred miles than the ten the Kern had cut in such a breathtaking line that no man could navigate it, walk in its shallows, work with it—survive it.

It had taken him two days and two nights of almost constant movement to do what could not be done. He ate wild onion and miner’s lettuce and elderberries—green and sour. He ate currants and serviceberries and the leaves of flowers so bitter he couldn’t swallow. When he scraped himself on rocks, he pressed yarrow to his wounds. When he was trapped on cliffs without drink, he dipped his tattered clothes into tiny pools under dripping rock, sucked until he could move on.

He wouldn’t rest until he fell asleep, and then only rested until he woke, pulled himself forward again, moved until he could move no more because he was sleeping again, sleeping even as he slowed, collapsed against whatever he could find until he could move again.

It was as though he never rested, as though he had no choice but to keep moving up against everything the river was bringing down, his mind just as determined as his body—but his mind going in no direction he could understand. Things coming back to him and leaving him in no order that made sense. Only Fenton and Cody Jo—and Willie—seemed constant, as though they held the key to what kept him moving.

He saw Otis Johnson’s big body at the foot of his bed. “Didn’t mean to treat you so rough,” he said. And then he was gone and Ty was teaching Walker Johnson to tie a diamond hitch, watching the boy run under a pass at the football game, the pass unbelievably long but the boy running and reaching and balancing the ball until the rest of him caught up with it and he was pulling up in some end zone as quietly as he’d learned to pack Ty’s mules, as he’d talked with Jeb Walker around Ty’s fires. And then it was Fenton in the fire, his face alive in the fire, worried. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Don’t get yourself killed.” And Fenton turned, held Cody Jo. The two of them looking at Ty from the fire. Cody Jo was crying. And Ty found he was crying too, woke to find himself crying, crying as the Red Cross volunteer dressed his torn leg, crying as he walked the night away after Willie died, crying because the river had taken Gretta—crying when he came over Goat Pass and saw the High Sierra: saw the order, the peace.

Lilly Bird was the first to see him as he came from where no man could come. “Ty?” she said. “Ty!” And then she was holding him, weeping, taking him to the others. “It’s Ty.” Her voice broke over the word. “Alive!”

Alice Haslam was there. And Buck. All of them. All but the Search and Rescue teams, far down the Kern by then, searching for Ty’s body even below where they’d found Gretta’s, searching where the water’s power relented, where it finally let you see into it. The helicopters were flying by then, their blades cracking the air as they probed for the dead packer far below where he’d returned to his horses, his people.

“It’s all right.” Alice Haslam looked at Ty, her throat closing on her words. “It’s all right.You’re here.You tried.”
Ty’s mouth worked, but nothing came. He turned to Buck.
“Why’d it take her?” he said, looking up at the Kaweah shelf where he so wanted to take his horses. “Thought of climbing up there. Calling it quits.”
“That’s not what you’d do, Ty.” Buck was kneeling, dressing Ty’s mutilated foot. “You don’t know what quits is.” He hunched a shoulder to clear his eyes. “You never did.”

The helicopters came in with reporters from Bishop and Lone Pine and Sacramento. Thomas Haslam heard one of them radio out that the Park Service had saved the life of a packer.

“No.” Haslam stopped him in the midst of his transmittal. “No one rescued Ty Hardin but Ty Hardin. Ty Hardin and maybe that river that could have taken him in a moment. And he wouldn’t have needed any rescuing if he hadn’t tried to save Gretta. Which there was no way to do. He just had no choice but to try.”

Others gathered, took out their pencils, not sure what to write. “Your Park Service people can take credit for what they did do, but you can’t give them credit for saving Ty Hardin. For whatever is in him that made him try to save Gretta.” He looked at the reporter with the radio, looked at the others, his voice shaky.
“There aren’t people like him anymore,” he said. “Maybe you can’t say that in your papers, but it’s time you heard it.” His voice broke as he saw their puzzled looks. “There is no way left to become this man.”
They grew uneasy, watched him fight back his tears, not sure he could go on.
“With all these rules and regulations,” Thomas Haslam took a breath, “it’s a wonder these mountains have any room left for a Ty Hardin.”

None of that went into the papers, the reporters embarrassed by Thomas Haslam and confused about what he’d meant. But it made them mindful of what had happened. And that’s the way they reported it:

Sierra Packer Survives Kern Rescue Attempt Fails to Save Girl in Swollen Rapids Makes Heroic Return to Victim’s Family Alone Ty read the story himself, read it and looked at Lars. “They don’t

have it right, Lars,” he said. “I don’t believe they can get it right.” “What in the world do you mean, Ty?” Lars uncapped a beer and
put it in front of him. “Surviving them rapids was a miracle. And no
one understands how you could get back through that country, alone.” “Just came back to my horses,” Ty said, “. . . and I never was alone.”

After that Ty knew how much of his own life came from the people he loved. At first he lived it more than he understood it. He would hear Fenton’s voice as he tracked horses, watch with Spec as deer picked their way through a glade, feel Cody Jo’s despair about people who were bruised, haunted by some darkness. Willie seemed everywhere, in the streams and fires, the moons that helped him through his nights.

It was Lilly Bird who made him understand it, though it took time before he realized her life had made a life of its own somewhere inside him. Before that it was her songs. Not the words so much as what she did with them, her voice giving weight to the simplest line—sometimes cutting into him so sharply he would turn away, gather himself. And he wasn’t the only one her voice touched. He would watch Alice and Thomas Haslam come together when she sang, see the general stopped, embarrassed to be moved so—even find Walker Johnson taken by the world she opened with her songs.

Ty had taught Walker Johnson to pack, just as Otis wanted him to— before Walker went on to other things. But Walker returned for trips when he could, helping out, listening by Ty’s fires, comforted by Ty’s mountains. As a boy he’d packed for Ty each summer, become almost as good a packer as he was a player on his high-school teams. He’d graduated with a shelf full of trophies, but he only looked at them for a week before he sat down and wrote Ty that he wouldn’t be packing that year. He was signing up in the army—just as his father had done before him.

Ty missed packing with the boy. He’d liked his quiet ways, his patience with the mules and the comfort he took in the woods. But Ty saw the mountains could never hold him. There was something else he needed. Ty had seen it watching him watch the others around the fires, wanting to know their histories, why they came, chose their work, lived where they lived.

Ty knew there would be no answers in the army and worried when Walker joined. But there was no need. The army saw what he could do with a football. Mostly they wanted him to do that. And when he was discharged the university was waiting, wanting him to do the same for them. Ty and Cody Jo had even gone to see Walker’s last game, watched him run under the long pass as drums rolled and students chanted and the players surrounded Walker in the end zone. To Ty Walker seemed the quietest one in the whole stadium. He saw why when they met with Walker and Otis after the game.

“If you don’t sign with the football people, what then?” Otis had asked, knowing the boy had few options in this life and not liking it much that being paid to play football was the best.

“More work at the university,” Walker said, and Ty knew he’d settled on something. “There’s a professor. He wants me to stay. He’ll help.”
“At what? Reading more damn books?”
“There’s more I want to know. Ty ...he understands.”
Walker had looked at Ty just as he’d looked at him across so many campfires, as though Ty had answers to questions he wasn’t sure how to ask. Ty had turned to Cody Jo, but she’d looked away. All he could do was look back at Otis. Nod. Say it was all right. Walker should stay. There was nothing else he could think of to do.

And so Walker had gone on to graduate school in search of his past, and Ty had gone back to the mountains to make sure his past counted. And now Lilly’s songs were somehow bridging that difference. Walker was watching Ty’s fires again, as moved by the girl’s songs as Ty—who did not yet know he’d fallen in love.

That was the year Lilly dropped her last pretensions about lawyering and took the job at the Tahoe lodge, singing each night for an audience as enchanted by the girl as by old songs she sang. After he came out of the mountains Ty caved in to his need to hear her do what she did better than anyone he could imagine. He called Cody Jo and asked to go to Tahoe with him. But she decided that was a trip she didn’t want to make.

“I’m too tired,” she said. “And old. Ask her to sing ‘Have Mercy.’ No one sings it anymore but Lilly . . . and no one should.You’ll see why.”
So he went alone, arriving late, but the big lodge easy to find on the shore of the silent lake.
“I’ll take it, man.” A tall boy with lank blond hair opened the pickup’s door, as welcoming to Ty as though he’d driven up in a Mercedes.
“Wait’ll you hear Lilly.” The boy put it in gear, stuck a long arm out the window, and rapped a beat on the roof. “Great pipes!”
Then he was gone. Ty was a little startled by how quickly it had happened. He was more surprised by what he found inside: dark panels and diminished lights, the room hushed to concentrate on Lilly.
He went to the bar and whispered his order. A single light isolated Lilly, crowning her hair, revealing her slenderness. But her singing took her so far beyond that the whole room seemed hers. Nothing about her looks, the moonlight on the lake behind her, the piano, spare and direct, could touch the way she sang.
She finished to applause almost reserved, as though it might break some mood. She sang “It Never Entered My Mind,” the room quiet as the lake, and “But Not for Me.” Then her eyes found Ty, alone at the bar, as still as the rest, as unable to take his eyes away.
She talked into the microphone as though talking with old friends. “We have a special guest. If this set is longer than usual, I’m sorry.” She looked around the room. “I’d like to sing the songs he knows.”
Ty thought it must be someone else in the room she was talking about, but he couldn’t look away. And then he didn’t need to look away. She began singing those songs he would sing a few bars of around the campfire, trying to get her to sing them herself. Wishing she would sing them herself.
She seemed to remember them all. She sang “I Remember You” and “You Go to My Head” and “What’s New?” She sang “I Can’t Get Started” and “Teach Me Tonight.” She sang songs Ty hadn’t heard all the way through for years, sang them the same way he’d heard them when he danced with Cody Jo, when he’d stood with Willie watching the snow outside the Helena hotel. It was as though Lilly had some direct line into his life, into the music he loved. Only this time everything came from Lilly.
She finished with “Have Mercy.”

And it was a different Lilly standing there, her legs long in the flared pants, the blouse white and sheer. Nothing left of the law-school student at all.

“Cody Jo said you’d like it.” She turned, thanking people as they stopped, complimented her, asked if she’d recorded this song or that.
“When did she say that?”
“Tonight. She called just before I went on.”
The trio was playing, and Lilly led Ty onto the floor. “Cody Jo tells me you aren’t at all like a packer when you dance.”
“Packers dance,” Ty said. “To music like this.”
They were playing “Blue Moon,” and dancing to it with Lilly was almost like listening to Lilly sing it, the music moving them, connecting them.
They played “Mood Indigo” and “Paper Moon” and “Daybreak,” Lilly singing softly “. . . another new day,” her cheek on his shoulder.
“Take me home, Ty,” she said finally, her breath warm on his neck. “It’s time we went home.”

The boy with the long hair was playing his radio, rock music loud and insistent, the beat heavy. He turned it down when he saw Lilly.
“Just mine, Tommy,” Lilly said to him. “We’ll leave Ty’s here.”
Her Volvo was there in a moment, the motor running as Tommy opened the door for her, looked at Ty.
“Lilly told me about you. Packing up there. I dig that, man. The higher you get, the higher you get.” He smiled. “A blast, man.”
“Gotta be careful.” Ty held out a tip. “Gets cold up there.”
Tommy pushed the money away. “It’s on me when you’re with Lilly.” He looked at Ty through the window. “No wheels for me to park without Lilly.”
He went to his radio and turned up the volume. “Later, man. Ciao.”

Lilly’s place, tidy and spare, was high above the lake. Ty felt a little lost being there alone with her.
“I’m going to make drinks,” she said. “We’re going to sit and talk. Talk all night if we want to.”
She put on a tape, Red Garland playing “It Might As Well Be Spring.” Got drinks and they sat on the couch. She tucked her legs under her and watched him.
“You see it now, Ty. I’m a singer, not a lawyer.”
“ Ye s.” Ty was relieved to have the drink. He was shaken by how she moved him. “Anyone who heard you would know.”
“It’s like what makes you who you are.Your mountains.” She brushed his hair from his forehead. “I think I knew it when Gretta died . . . when you lived.” She dipped a finger into her bourbon, touched his lips with it. “But it doesn’t matter when I knew....It happened.”
She leaned forward, her face close to his.
“Didn’t it? . . .” Her lips were almost on his as she spoke. “Hasn’t it?”
“ Ye s.” Ty tried to collect himself. “And I don’t have a notion in the world of what to make of it. What to do.”
“Accept it.” Her eyes held him. “It’s easy.”
“It’s not that easy. The world you live in . . . is different.”
“How?” Lilly touched his hair again. “How different?”
He thought about it. How comfortable she was—with everything. The people in the club. The bartender. The parking-lot boy with his flowing hair and loud music. There was almost too much to say about their differences.
“Your people don’t really know my music,” he said, hoping to sum it all up somehow. “What it means.”
“I do.You know I do.” She touched his lips with her finger again, her voice just a whisper as she sang “...let’s have no controversy, moments like these were meant for kissing, lend your lips to hear. Have mercy, dear.”
Then, her voice still low but something sure in it now, “It isn’t just that I know your songs, Ty.” She watched him. “...I know you.”

Lilly had no illusions about Ty. Nina had told her about the nights he would drink too much at the Deerlodge, talking late into the night with Lars, sometimes going home with some woman he’d danced with.

But she knew what he was like in the high country too. He was always steady there. Knew things: where to ford the streams and to free his horses. The peaks first light would reach. Places to camp. How to keep people dry and warm, safe. He was at home in his mountains. That was good enough.

What surprised her was how much Ty wanted her after that night high above the lake. It went beyond making love. He wanted to be a part of her rhythms, her comings and goings, in the flow of her blood. It didn’t surprise her how much she wanted to be with him. She’d known that from the moment he showed up, alive, at Junction Meadows.

“What do you mean the past haunts us?” he would ask. “We’ll leave it behind. Start from here. Together.”
“We can’t. We are our past. Listen to those songs you love.”
“I do . . . when you sing them.”
“They’re all about sadness. How things don’t work out.” She would hold him, fit herself to him, her head on his chest. “You have it, Ty. Sadness. From a place I can’t know. Maybe I have it too.”
And she would tell him things about St. Louis, about her father, a church-going lawyer whose practice was filled by the congregation but his heart with the bluesy music from the riverfront. He would take her to the clubs along the river, listen to the jazzmen up from New Orleans. He would drink—listening to the music, talking to the people.
She liked it in those smoky rooms, watching him with his drinks— the drinks that would end all his nights too soon. She liked the music, the words, the rhythms. The singers would make over her and she would sing along with them from her table, taking in their sadness.
“Those songs could be so blue it hurt,” she told Ty one night. “All kinds of music came together in those places. Bittersweet songs. All of us in love with some sorrow.”
“Maybe it was you.” Ty said. “The sadness was in you.” When she talked that way, remembered those times, he always found himself wanting to touch the places where she’d lived.
“No.” Lilly kissed his neck. “It was in them. It was just there. This piano player told me one night, ‘Blues,’ he said, ‘is about things gone bad. About women . . . and whiskey.’”
“How old were you then?
“Ten. Twelve. I’m not even sure I got it. Not even sure I got it when my father died. After the whiskey got him.”
“I think you did.” Ty held her.
He held her close for a long time, confused by how much he wanted her in one way, how much he wanted to protect her in another.

Lilly confused him in other ways too, but he loved her so it didn’t matter. He thought his heart would break when she talked about growing up, watching her father, the drinking, the singers. And then she could talk another way, so hard and unconsidered it sent a chill through him. She would rail about her agent, a record contract, a cabal she knew was behind the killing of JFK and Bobby and Martin Luther King. She was sure there were powerful people out there who killed.

It didn’t make sense to Ty. It was beyond him to imagine anyone out to get anyone. His life was decisions made, consequences lived with. Hard times were like winter storms:You just got through them.

But for Lilly there could be demons everywhere. Sometimes she would go to church, trying to shake them. It didn’t help. Nothing did. It wasn’t long before Ty saw he couldn’t help when she was that way either. That’s when he would find his heart breaking not so much because he wanted to touch her as because he couldn’t.

But those times would pass. Most of their time together was so easy they seemed to touch each other without touching, hardly needing words. From that first night the lovemaking was right, warm and open and unaffected. She was never afraid to let him know she wanted him, fulfilling him as if she knew the secrets of his body better than he—her fingers rimming the old scar, tracing the ropes of muscle that led from it, liking where they took her.

And from that first night they were in one another’s mind and heart steadily, talking often on the telephone and driving long hours to be with one another. Lilly found ways to go into the mountains for at least one trip each summer, and when he could, Ty would find a way to hear her sing, his nights at the Deerlodge fewer and fewer.

Lars and Buck had mixed feelings about that. They were pleased to see Ty happy but sad he wasn’t with them, drinking late and explaining why some took to the high country; others found it only something to endure.