Graphic the Valley (18 page)

Everything visits me in the morning smoke. The superintendent keeps his cigar, his back straight, his neck, black-and-white clothes pressed. No body in the bushes. No turned face.

I tapped my index fingers and thumbs, a beautiful day cracking from the east like freeze-water splitting loose granite. The loam smoked as the sunlight scratched toward me like a thousand forest fires at their beginnings.

She was there too. Water droplets on her temples. The green slash of one blade of cutgrass stuck to her cheek.

• • •

At the hotel dumpster, Kenny was foraging like a blond bear. He had the door tilted down, shoulder deep in the box, and he pulled out a garbage bag. Ripped it open. Shook his head and threw it back in. Then he went for another bag.

When he had what he wanted, a bag full of dinner leftovers from the hotel restaurant, he smiled. Tore the bag and found mixed pasta and sauces from the night before.

Kenny took a fistful out, then passed it to me.

He said, “You all right, man? Your face doesn’t look good.”

I pulled out some of the pasta. Linguini in a cheese sauce. Cold. I said, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

I shrugged.

He said, “I’ll tell you a bad story. Trade mine for your trouble.”

“Okay,” I said. I grabbed a second handful of noodles. One in each palm now, I started to eat.

“You know how much I like animals?” he said.

I didn’t really know, but I could guess.

He said, “Here’s a story about one animal that I loved.”

Kenny squatted down with his pasta. I squatted next to him, leaned back against the dumpster, my palms full of the cold noodles. I ate out of the edges of my hands.

Kenny said, “Our family friends had a dog named Beau. A big old boxer. Beautiful. Brown coat and square face, muscled chest, strong. And every time I came into town, I’d hang out at their house and play with that dog Beau.

“So one time, I was going on this camping trip with a couple of my friends, going out into the woods near the Sand Dunes National Rec Area in Oregon, and my friend said, ‘Why don’t you take Beau?’ He knew Beau would love it.

“So I went and picked him up. That’s back when I had a truck, a house, all that. Different lifetime for me.” Kenny held up a handful of pasta and laughed. Squished the noodles through his fingers and ate the falling pieces off the back of his knuckles. “Way different lifetime.”

I ate my noodles and nodded.

“Anyway,” he said, “I went and picked up my two friends, and they threw their stuff into the back of the truck with Beau. Then we hit up a store for food. Beau jumped out like he was going to walk into the store with me and I laughed and said, ‘I love you, man, but you can’t go in.’

“So I got him back in the truck, and clipped him to one of my old climbing ropes. I didn’t short-rope him though, so he’d feel okay about being tied. I just clipped him to a big old length of tatty rope tied off to a corner of the truck bed. I knew Beau was a good dog, and that he would stay in if I tied him to anything.

“Anyway, I went into the store, bought a little food, and came back out. A couple of us threw Beau a treat before we started up again, and then we drove for an hour while we told fishing and backpacking stories in the front of the truck. I didn’t worry about Beau. I didn’t even think about him.

“And when we got to the coast, we headed south. I cut west on a Forest Service road toward the beach, and I remember looking back right at that turn and seeing Beau sitting in the back, over my shoulder, smiling the way boxers always do. He was really great, that dog. So content. So mellow.

“Well, the road got twisty and beat-up. Unimproved since they finished logging it a decade before, and I focused on the driving, on not grounding out or missing a turn. We bounced all over the place in the truck. It was a rough couple miles from there.

“And when I stopped the truck, and looked over my shoulder, Beau wasn’t there. He wasn’t behind me. I figured he’d laid down in the truck bed. That, or he’d gotten sick, and I hoped he hadn’t puked on our packs.

“I hopped out to see what he was up to, but he wasn’t in the bed. He wasn’t there at all. Just the rope. And it was stretched pretty tight over the back end of the tailgate. I realized right then. I remember yelling, ‘No, no, no…’ as I ran back.

“And fifty feet off the back of the truck, there was Beau, all drug around and missing most of the skin on both sides of his body. His right leg was broken upward, and he was real dead. Just like that. Just, finished.”

I looked at Kenny’s face, now bright pink. He was crying a little, and he ducked his head and wiped his face on his shoulder.

I said, “I’m really sorry, Kenny.”

He nodded and took a bite of noodles. Choked on his bite and coughed.

I said, “I’m really sorry, man,” again. I still had two handfuls of noodles, so I patted him on his back with my forearm.

Kenny cleared his throat. Spit noodles and phlegm onto the asphalt. Sniffed. He said, “I buried him. I carried Beau way out into the woods and dug a deep hole so no coyotes would get to him. I added some rocks, and pissed all over the top of those so the coyotes wouldn’t like the smell of it. I waited a while and pissed again to be sure. And Beau stayed down there. I went back a year later to check and see that nothing had messed with him.”

Kenny cried while he ate a bite. Wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

I said, “I’m really sorry,” again.

“Yeah, me too,” he said. “Nothing should have to drag and kick itself to death, or break its own leg trying to stand up. Nothing should die like that.”

We crouched next to the dumpster, each holding the rest of our pasta.

Kenny picked a hair out of his food and took another bite.

I said, “You sold your truck after that, huh?”

“Yep,” he said. “Didn’t ever want to drive it again. Couldn’t really stand to look at it. And I’ve never had a car since.”

“Never?”

“Not in ten years,” he said. “You?”

“Had a car? No. Not unless you count the car I was born in.”

Kenny tipped his head back and scraped noodles off his palm with his teeth. Then he shook out that hand. Wiped it on the blacktop.

I ate my handful until I tasted something bitter and spat it out. Then I tossed the remainder of my handful.

Kenny reached in the garbage bag and pulled out red noodles. He looked at them from both sides and smiled. He said, “These look better.”

I grabbed some of those too, and they were good. Long, flat noodles with marinara soaked into them.

Kenny said, “What was bothering you this morning?”

I said, “It’s not important.”

Kenny held one long noodle above his mouth and sucked it in. He smiled, red sauce in his beard. “I don’t believe you,” he said, and wiped his face with his sleeve. “But that’s cool. Maybe another time.”

“Yeah,” I said, “another time.”

Kenny said, “You know what happened right after that thing with Beau? It’s kind of funny. I was hitchhiking in Northern California, near Crescent City, the redwoods at Jedediah, when this huge Chevy Suburban I was hitchhiking in hit a deer. The Suburban broke that deer, and the deer barely made a mark on the vehicle. Just one busted-out headlight, that’s all, and the deer’s neck was snapped, head turned all the way around backwards.

“We were standing there on the side of the road, staring at the deer when I realized she was connected to Beau, and I needed to make something of her, of her death, something I couldn’t do with Beau.

“So I got my backpack out of the car and thanked the people for the ride. They were nice enough. The man said, ‘Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to hit a deer, you know?’” Kenny took a bite of noodles and chewed slowly. He talked with his mouth full. “So after they drove away, I dragged that doe into the woods, built a smoke pit, and cut a few hundred thin strips of meat off her. Then I smoked it all and lived off it for a month.”

“A full month?”

“Yeah,” he said, “a full month. One moon. I watched the sky at night. I ate that deer and whatever else I could find out there, some berries and roots, a couple snakes for variety. And I stayed in the woods and thought about a lot of things. Felt like Beau wasn’t being wasted then. That he was in the ground, and had been killed by a car, drug to death, a pretty fucking evil thing altogether, but that the deer had redeemed him. I don’t know why the doe was given to me, but she put a bookend on Beau’s life. Put it all into a circle. That doe gave me a new way of being.”

I said, “The doe redeemed Beau because you ate her?”

“No, no,” Kenny said. “It wasn’t because I ate her. It was because she gave me time, an entire month to be alone, a month to think about Beau, to think about cars and houses and jobs and food and video games and junk drawers and everything else that I think about now, everything I gave up. Everything you…” he stopped and tapped me with his elbow “…everything that you know nothing about. That’s what she did for me.”

I said, “Honestly, Kenny, I don’t know that I didn’t miss some things being here. You know how lonely I was?”

Kenny looked straight up at the sky as if the blue was about to fall on us. He said, “Yeah, I bet you were.”

“No,” I said. “Really, really lonely. So many days of nothing, and I’d see kids my age in the camps in spring and summer and I’d wonder what their lives were like, what they did when they drove out of this Valley, if they were happier than me, having friends and schools and whatever else.”

“Well,” Kenny said, “I don’t think so. There’s this whole world of nothing out there. Completely valueless. Kids not really living, never being outside, hooked to wires, to computers and TVs and video games for hours every day. Kids who are afraid of bugs and spiders and wild animals, afraid of the dark and of camping, those who have never even been camping. And you had this Valley. This one.” Kenny made a circle with his finger. “You have no idea.”

I looked up at the black water streaks on the Arches above us, 1,500 feet up the granite wall. “I know I like what’s here,” I said. “I do love this Valley. But I had no people to be with. Or not enough people.”

Kenny laughed. He said, “People are the worst. That’s something I kept coming back to when I was alone out there for a month. People are selfish and wreck things. I’m selfish and wreck things. We don’t care about anything but ourselves. But you, living in this Valley? You made the best choice.”

“But I didn’t choose this,” I said. “I didn’t choose this at all.”

“Are you kidding?” Kenny said. “You’re choosing this right now.”

• • •

I stayed with the Valley, the park. I walked with Kenny as far as the Vernal Falls path. Then I stopped and watched him hike along the river.

He’d packed bread and some peanut butter I’d given him. A couple hundred feet away, he turned around and yelled, “Hang out in a few weeks?”

“Okay,” I yelled back. “Sure.”

He flipped around and hiked again, his head swinging back and forth looking at everything he was passing. He lifted a hand and waved.

I waved back, then walked back to camp. Filled my water bottle at the dish rinse station and slung it on a cord over my shoulder. Then I headed for the slabs, the west end of Swan Slabs, where the beginner rock routes led to loose, fourth-class climbing, loose but easy. I cruised a few hundred feet in the next half-hour, traversing across to Selaginella and the top-outs in the trees above the Books. I climbed this sometimes, west along the rim, looking back across the Valley at Sentinel.

When I found the in-cut, the shallow cave, I stopped and sat down at the corner where the cave met the open air. The cliff opened beneath my feet, at an overhang, then the wall dropped vertically for a few hundred feet. A thousand feet above the treetops, the trees didn’t look like trees at all but a dark-green mat, arcing in a half circle below.

I waited.

Nine years old, in a place I called the Moss Drop, a green gap in the ground near our camp. My eyes itched and the dry moss beneath me compressed. I slept there one night, sitting first, watching the dark until my head fell forward, and I lay down on my side, curled like a coyote pup.

Before I fell asleep, I could hear my father calling to me, his flashlight beam sweeping across the surface of the forest. But there was no way for him to see into this hole, and I didn’t reply. I sank deeper into the summer moss. The smell of old dirt around me. I hid. Then he went the other way and I fell asleep.

In the morning, the sunlight was above me. I sat up.

My mother was there. Ten feet away. She’d found me in the night, and she was leaning against the boulder to my left, sitting, eyes open, forearms across her knees. She was staring at me when I woke.

• • •

From the cave above the Books, the Valley was uninhabited. I saw the buildings abandoned, no one outside or in, no one in the store buying Popsicles or in the Ahwahnee Hotel watching television. Was this better? My father would say so. And Kenny maybe.

The white glints of motor-home tops and the silver curls of cars showed movement then. More trees from here though, the open meadows green and wide in the expanses, the animals hidden down there, deer and elk, bear and cougar, rattlesnakes lying on snags in the river, gathering sun, warming their cold blood.

I waited.

Kenny was off to Truckee, walking now. Lucy was in the ground, underneath the aging carcass of a lion, a layer from loam. The superintendent had waited six years with his eyes. I’d circled hundreds of times around that meadow, but I hadn’t crossed that boardwalk since.

My parents were up Ribbon Creek, stacking wood and cooking, forty years now.

I was not hungry. I would not let hunger come to me. There were times as a child when I realized that hunger was not something real but a thought that could be suppressed for a long, long time, for hours first, then days. From reading the
San Francisco Chronicle
, I knew that some people learn this when they’re young. I thought of stories I’d read about Central Africa and U.S. Indian reservations. Calcutta, India. Eastern Russia and rural China. None of those places sounding anything like my Valley. So maybe Kenny was right.