The Mountain Story (13 page)

“Was all that about Laura Dorrie true, Mim? The fire? Or did you just say it to make Bridget feel better?”

Nola checked once more to make sure Bridget was asleep before she said, “There’s more to the story than what I told. I didn’t get to the worst part.”

“It gets worse?” Vonn said.

Bridget’s snoring filled the cave once more. Vonn adjusted her mother’s head again and the snoring stopped.

“The next morning, crack of dawn, I heard a noise in the
yard and I saw my father out there unlocking the tool shed in the alley,” Nola said. “I went out to the backyard, and I squinted through the broken slats of the shed to see that he was loading up my old wagon with bins of sugar and flour and some tinned foods and the frosted carrot cakes Mr. Dorrie’s restaurant was famous for. Then he opened this old humming freezer and took out a big box of frozen pork loins and four boxes of New York strips. It was true. He was a thief.

“He piled it all up in the old wagon and dragged it all the way down the alley to the back of an electronics repair store where a bunch of men were waiting with cash. He sold them everything he brought.”

“Wow.”

“After that I followed him straight to my violin teacher’s apartment.”

“Oh.”

“So you see.”

I did.

“Even if my father had been able to get another job right away I couldn’t keep playing. Look what it cost him. His dignity. His soul. I couldn’t imagine going on with my violin. Plus, after what I’d done? The fire? I didn’t deserve it.”

No one said a word for a very long time. For my part, I was wishing that my own penance was as clear to me as Nola’s had been to her.

“If I close my eyes,” Nola said. “I can still imagine playing my favourite piece.”

We could make out Nola’s form in the darkness as she raised her left hand and bent her head toward an imagined chin rest. Straining she raised her injured right hand, holding a pretend
bow, and demonstrated “Spiccato. Legato. Marcato. Pizzicato. Detache. Maretele.”

“Air violin,” I said, impressed.

Bridget startled in her sleep. Nola reached over to stroke her daughter’s cheek. “Shush now. Poor Bridge. Must be so tired. She’s been training for a triathlon.”

“She told me,” I said. “On the tram.” Nola cradled her injured wrist. “Stupid osteoporosis. Drink your milk, Vonn. Doesn’t this all feel like a dream?”

No one answered. I don’t know why.

“How long will it take us in the morning, Wolf? If you’re right and we can climb back up and find our way to the Mountain Station?” Nola asked.

“How long? An hour and a half, give or take,” I answered, underestimating. My stomach was churning. “You two need to get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll keep watch.”

Nola yawned. “I don’t know how much this wrist is going to let me sleep anyway.”

“I’m wide awake. I won’t be sleeping at all. Not a wink,” Vonn promised. Four minutes later she was snoring in harmony with Bridget. Nola followed a short time afterward, adding the occasional moan of pain to the chorus.

I could only imagine what those Devine women were dreaming about that first night. Laura Dorrie? Tattooed bikers? Deadly falls? Dead husbands? Rolling fields of mountain phlox?

Me? I played my life in rewind, my mind ablaze with scenes from my past.

That first night in Santa Sophia, after we left Byrd at the gas station, I remember feeling sick in the stinking Gremlin, bilious from guzzling those grape pops, focused on the brightest stars I’d ever seen in the inkiest of nights. (
Bilious
was a Byrd word, one of those unfashionable words he was hoping to resurrect.
Egads
! No one else I knew talked like Byrd.)

I have some vague recollection of being hauled out of the car and stumbling up some stairs and passing through a squeaky broken door. Hours later I was awakened by a horrible stench, and found myself sweating in a threadbare sleeping bag on a ragged linoleum floor with a two-year-old boy defecating beside me.

A woman’s voice rattled down the hall, startling the squatting child, who disappeared, leaving his coil of waste steaming on the floor.

When I sat up I looked around the tiny room, counting two forms in each of the two single beds, adults, or almost adults, like me. There were smaller bodies in sleeping bags on mattresses on the floor, most of them young children. Eight in all. The tiny window was open, heat blasting through it like a radiator. The clock read 5:03.

It was my habit, even then, to be prepared for the worst, but I could see that I’d fallen short in priming myself for life in the three-bedroom trailer with Aunt Kriket and her brood. The home’s odour, a vintage blend of cigarettes, stale booze and bacon, was dismally familiar. I could hear my father hacking up a lung in the kitchen. I used to worry quite a lot that he’d get cancer and I’d be alone.

Frankie’d been evasive regarding his sister because he didn’t know the answers to any of my questions. Kriket moved
to California as teenaged single mother and had been tossed senseless ever since by the tempest of crying babies and gone-away men. When we lived in Mercury, Frankie’d get drunk and call her once in a while. I’d hear him crying in his room. I hated her for that. I never wondered until this moment if she’d been crying too.

My father’s parents, as Frankie’s story went, argued constantly, mostly about whose genetics were to blame for their children’s shortcomings; his mother was convinced that Frankie’d got the “lyin’-cheatin’-stealin’ gene” from the Trulinos, and his father insistent that Kriket inherited the “puta’s scratchy snatch” from the French-Canadian side.

One night when Frankie’s father was at the local bar he received a frantic call from Kriket and raced home to find his wife of twenty-five years sprawled out on the kitchen floor, dead from an apparent heart attack. Frankie claims that his old man quietly swept up the fragments of the serving platter that had shattered when his mother fell, then stretched out on the speckled linoleum beside her and had himself a fatal stroke.

The family debt doomed the siblings. Kriket moved thousands of miles away to California with her first child’s father, but Frankie, four years younger, was taken into Mercury Public Care. “Whatever happens, Wolf,” Frankie’d warn me at random moments, “do
not
let them take you into care.”

Gagging from the odour of the toddler’s mess on the bedroom floor, I got to my feet and went to find my father in the unfamiliar trailer. When I appeared in the entrance to the kitchen area, before I could even make out who she was, my aunt Kriket unleashed her animus upon me, pushing greasy bangs from her mingy eyes, saying, “He looks
exactly
like Dad.”

I could say that’s why she hated me. But it can’t be that simple.

“Don’t stare, Wilfred,” she said.

I took in her sneering, bloated face and slick, dirty hair. “A baby shit on the floor,” I said instead of good morning.

My aunt grabbed a roll of paper towels and chucked it at me, demanding, “Austin?”

“Wolf.”

“No, genius, was it Austin who no-no-ed?”

“No-no-ed? I don’t know.”

“Was his front tooth chipped?”

“I didn’t see his tooth.”

“If his tooth was chipped it’s Austin. Dodge is the chub. Them two are toilet training.” She poked me in the chest. “Got it?”

I tried to catch Frankie’s eye, my cheeks burning.

“Don’t let ’em shit on the floor.”

This woman was
blaming
me.

“You smack their butt and slap ’em down on the potty.” She pointed to a child’s plastic toilet in the corner of the kitchen, which at least one of the toddlers had used successfully.

“I’m not smacking any babies,” I stated.

“That’s how they learn.”

“Don’t they have diapers or something?”

“You can’t train them in diapers, genius.”

“Okay.”

“Besides, you want to buy the diapers, moneybags?”

“Not really.”

“Didn’t think so.”

“So they just run around naked?” I asked. That could not be right. “Shitting and pissing on the floor?”

“That’s why you gotta smack ’em, Wilfred.”

Back in that bedroom I had evil thoughts about my aunt as I dropped to my knees to clean the stinking mess. In the dim light I counted nine bodies, one more than before—the toddler who’d dumped on the floor was now pretending to be asleep on a mattress beside a blond boy with a broken tooth who was groaning like he knew he stood wrongly accused. Austin. Woe is him.

One of the sleeping boys opened his eyes and saw me on my knees with the paper towel full of shit. He threw a pillow at my head, yelling, “You
pig
!”

“Seriously?” I said.

The boy, around seven years old, sat up, demanding, “Who are you?”

“I’m Wolf. Your cousin Wolf. Are you Yago?” Yago’s name was the only one I knew.

“You don’t know Yago?” The boy was incredulous.

I shook my head, looking at the sleeping bodies. There was a resemblance between me and a number of my cousins, even though they’d been fathered by many and sundry. “My father saw a picture of Yago once. He said I look like him.”

“If you were
thirty
,” the boy said with a laugh. “And a badass cholo.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jag off,” said the seven-year-old.

Later I found the bathroom, and after tightening the broken shower head, climbed into the crusty tub and let the water wash over me. I couldn’t find any shampoo so I scraped the dry splinters from the soap holder and rubbed them into my hair. The
rusty water, playing chicken with me, alternated from too hot to too cold and I had to bob and weave so as not to get shocked or burned.

There was no towel, so I just stood there to air dry, watching the coppery rivulets soak into the grout, listening to a cartoon blaring on the television in the living room. The bathroom mirror was broken with the top half missing entirely and I could see only the fogged reflection of my rigid torso and the coarse dark hairs that I’d cultivated near my belly button in the months before we left Mercury.

I hadn’t heard the motorcycle pull up, because I had been in the shower, so when I walked into the otherwise empty kitchen I was unprepared to see a dark, heavily muscled, badass cholo taking off his helmet. It didn’t take a genius to guess this guy was Yago.

“Hey
asshole
,” Yago said.

“Hey
dickhead
,” I responded, grateful that, thanks to Frankie, “Foul” was my mother tongue.

Yago laid me out with one swift punch to the head. Didn’t see it coming. I woke seconds later, blood on the filthy floor where I’d landed. Mine, I realized. My head throbbed. I’d never been punched that hard before.

“Do you know who I am?” Yago hollered at me.

I looked up from the ground. My tongue felt strange.

“You know who I am?” He grabbed my shirt and twisted it at my throat and pulled me to my feet only to slam me against the wall, rattling my skull off the trailer’s frame. He took my chin in his free hand and made me meet his eyes. I did see some familial resemblance.

“Yago,” I said thickly, tasting blood.

“You know who I am, and you disrespect me?” he asked, spitting.

“Cousin,” I said. It hurt to talk. “Wilfred.”

(Why had I said
Wilfred
and not
Wolf
?)

“Wilfred?” Yago grinned, tightening his grip on my shirt, pulling me in face to face. “That’s your name?
Wilfred
?”

“Wolf,” I said. “Wolf.” Even as I trembled in fear, I couldn’t help but notice that Yago’d eaten garlic recently, and drunk whiskey, and smoked a Camel.

“One thing I hate worse than cousins, Wilfred,” Yago said. “Leeches.”

I nodded.

“Don’t go near my shit,” he said.

“I don’t want your shit,” I spat. My heart was pounding. My mouth was full of blood. Never had I felt so keenly alive.

A young woman entered the kitchen to see about the commotion. “That’s Uncle Frankie’s kid,” she said.

Yago cursed under his breath and let me go.

“You’re Wilfred, right?” the woman said, turning to me for corroboration. “Our cousin.”