Graphic the Valley (26 page)

Her white blouse was untucked from her skirt and unbuttoned most of the way down. I could see her lacy bra. She stepped back and waved me in. Closed the door behind me.

She said, “Why are we doing this? It’s fucking wrong. And me? I don’t even know what I want. Or why I’m still here.”

“Neither do I,” I said.

“But that’s not good enough,” she said. “You’re here. You know?”

I said, “I don’t know what that means.”

“This,” she said, “this place. Right? This place. And you’re actually here. All of you. And you’ll stay here where you were born.”

“Well, I don’t know now. You know what I did today?”

“No,” she said.

“I sat out in a meadow. I ate locusts.”

“Locusts?” she said. She stepped over to the table and swigged from an open fifth of Maker’s Mark.

I still stood in the doorway. “Yes,” I said, “locusts. I ate them like in the old stories, when the people ate honeydew and locusts, the honeydew rolled from the trees and the locust swarms caught as they traveled.”

“See,” she said, “I don’t know those old stories. I don’t know any stories. Nothing.” She took a long drink. Then she handed me the bottle.

I took a big drink and handed it back. The whiskey was warm and went down like a handful of sparks.

“And this?” she said. She wagged her finger back and worth. Took another drink.

I said, “Thompson?”

“No, no,” she said, “you and me. We can’t do this.”

I leaned back against the wall.

She handed me the whiskey again, and I took two big gulps, one after the other. My eyes watered. I watched her walk toward the TV, her fingers playing with the buttons of her blouse. Then she stood still.

The alcohol thickened like moss in my empty stomach. I took another big swig and set the bottle down on the nightstand.

McKenzie said, “Do you know what you want?”

“Here?” I said.

“Everywhere,” she said. “In general.”

“No, I don’t know anything about that. Do you?”

“Nope,” she said. “I don’t either. Do you ever just feel…” She was still standing by the television. “…I don’t know.” She turned and walked over to me. Kissed me hard. Then she said, “I try not to, but I want to.”

I kissed her back.

She was swaying. She said, “Am I beautiful?”

“Yes. Of course, you’re so beautiful.”

“And you want me?” She unzipped my pants.

“Yes,” I said, “I do.”

She pushed me back against the wall. Started kissing me again, her thumbs hooked in the waistline of my pants.

I turned her around and pushed her up against the wall, her face against the plaster. I smelled her hair and kissed the back of her neck.

I stripped her shirt, peeling it to her wrists. Undid her bra. Pressed her nakedness to the white. I kissed the back of her neck again, listened to her breathing and the sounds of her nails scritching against the wall.

• • •

In the morning, McKenzie brought a large glass of orange juice back to the room. I watched as she did a workout. Push-ups, jumping jacks, sit-ups, then a drink of orange juice. She repeated the sets.

Afterward, she took a shower.

She was drying her hair with a towel around her waist. Nothing on top. She brushed her teeth. Applied mascara and lipstick. Her nipples were hard as she leaned toward the mirror, and I watched.

She stood back and put her hands on her hips.

I came up behind her and put my arms around her. Felt the goosebumps. Then her breasts.

She said, “We have to make a plan. We can’t just do this forever.”

I said, “Okay.” I had my hands on her breasts.

“No,” she said. “I mean it. We have to decide what we’re doing.”

• • •

My father came from Hetch Hetchy when he was a teenager. He had his own time alone in the woods, then hitchhiked down the 120, came into the Valley and never left again, reclaiming his home from the Wisconsin 36th.

I could see the face he made as he gutted browns at our eddy. “This is dinner, Tenaya. Dinner and breakfast, huh?”

I waited all morning while McKenzie was at a meeting. She was taking notes that she promised to share with me. That was our first plan.

I talked to myself. I said, “Should I?” and waited. I expected my father to answer me somehow. But he was a hundred miles away.

I watched a ground squirrel drag a Kraft macaroni and cheese box around the side of a boulder. The box was unopened and heavy, and the squirrel worked the corner.

• • •

McKenzie and I met for lunch.

She was outside the deli, waiting. She said, “I ordered us grilled sandwiches so we could take them somewhere else. We should talk in private.”

“Right,” I said.

We took our food out on the back path. The summer dust puffed underneath our feet. McKenzie said, “How old are you, Tenaya?”

It’s funny that she’d never asked me that before.

I said, “I’m twenty.”

“Shit,” she said, and sucked in her breath. “Really?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Oh my god. I thought you were at least five years older than that.”

I said, “How old are you?”

She took a bite of her sandwich. “Twenty-nine. I’ll be thirty in a month.”

I said, “I’ll be twenty-one soon.”

“Right,” she said, and took another bite. “I guess that doesn’t matter. Or at least that’s not the most important thing right now. But this thing with the meeting…”

“Yes.”

She said, “Two weeks from now.”

I said, “I know. I’ve been thinking about it.” I looked at her. There was no one else around. We were in the trees. I said, “I’ve been thinking that we have to end it somehow. Get them out of the Valley forever.”

“But how?”

I said, “The meeting and the hotel. They’re both symbols. So we have to do something big.”

She said, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not sure either,” I said, “but we have to stop it.”

• • •

Kenny and I hiked along the base of El Cap to the start of Tangerine Trip. I carried his second haul bag full of water. Ten gallons in reused milk jugs. Eighty pounds of water on my back.

He had all of the climbing and camping gear plus food on his back. We were both sweating hard.

Kenny said, “I really appreciate your help. You’ve got to go up with me, huh?”

“No, Kenny. I really can’t.”

Kenny dropped his pack at the base of the route. He shook out his arms.

I dropped my haul pack and leaned it against the wall.

Kenny picked up a pebble and threw it out in front of us. “The water would make it ten days with both of us. Maybe longer…”

“Yeah, I know.”

He said, “And there’s that convention in town.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Yeah,” he said, “developers gunning for the big contracts. You don’t want to be in the Valley with those people. Motel 4 and Thompson. Have you been paying attention to that?”

I started chewing my thumbnail.

Kenny said, “And there’s this new superintendent of the park.”

“Yeah,” I said. I picked up a rock and threw it downhill. It bounced off a boulder below us.

“I mean…” Kenny snapped his fingers like he’d just remembered something. But he didn’t finish his thought. He started pulling out gear, laying it on top of his rope tarp. He piled his gear in a big jumble, and I began sorting through the pile to give my hands something to do. I racked cams, hexes, and chocks in order. Then beaks, hooks, and angles. I said, “You sure you have everything you need?”

Kenny kept snapping his fingers. He was thinking about something. He kept squeezing his eyes closed.

I pulled a sling. Opened and closed the trigger of a cam.

Kenny looked at me. “What?”

“What?” I said. “No, what were you thinking? I can tell you were thinking about something.”

He fingered the gear I’d put in order. He said, “I’m not really sure.”

I straightened the cams on the sling, turned their carabiners so the draws lay flat. Untwisted each one.

Kenny looked out toward the Cathedrals.

I looked across the Valley too then, to the three Cathedral spires to the south. To the west, I saw the round hump of Turtleback Dome.

Kenny picked up a small flake of rock between his index finger and thumb. He said, “So what’s the deal, Tenaya?”

I cocked my head sideways to see between two fallen pieces of talus downhill, trying to sight the river. But the boulders blocked my view.

Kenny waited.

I said, “I don’t know if I can explain it all.”

“But you can try.” Kenny was still holding that little flake of rock. He flicked it with his opposite index finger and it made a tick sound. Spun in his hand. He said, “Start at the beginning. I know it’s not just burning the forms of one longhouse. There’s a lot more to that story.”

“The beginning?” I said. My sister. My mother on the boulder and the sticky bags in her hands. My father in a hospital room in Merced.

“Wherever you want,” Kenny said. “I’ll listen to any of your stories. Pearl for pearl. Give me something.”

I put my hands down on the granite sand next to me, fine-grained, white with flecks of yellow. I said, “Do you ever feel like everything’s coming together for a purpose, like there’s some reason you’re supposed to do something, or be somewhere?”

Kenny smiled. “Everything is for a purpose.”

“Well, if that’s true, and sometimes it seems like it’s true, then why can’t I figure everything out? Sometimes I think about…I don’t know, putting everything together, everything, and I can’t make it work out in my head.”

Kenny said, “That’s the best place to be, don’t you think?”

“Confused?”

“Yes, confused,” he said. “Humbled. That’s the best place to be. Every time I get like that, I think it’s good.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I’ve felt like that for a long time, maybe my whole life. So the question is, is it the best place to stay? Should I always be confused?”

Kenny began reracking his gear in his own order, different from mine, the blue cams in a row of five and the yellow cams next. Then the oranges.

He said, “I was in a cave once on the east side of the Baja peninsula, in there for two weeks just looking out at the ocean. I’d go fish off the cliff in the morning, then come back. And there wasn’t anything around me. Or anyone. Just me. And I thought, I could go back to the rear wall of that cave, burn my clothes, and lie down. Die right there. And no one would ever find me, not for hundreds of years. They might carbon-date me or something, thinking I was a caveman from the prehistoric, but then they’d be all confused when the numbers came back and I was only dead a little while.”

Kenny set the red cams next to the oranges. Blacks next. I was watching his hands. I said, “But what about now?”

“Right,” he said, “this is where we are. Right now. Here. We’re not anywhere else, and I had to learn that.”

I still had my hands on the sand, palms in the heat. I was moving my fingers apart like miniature snow angels. Hand-size sand stars.

Kenny dropped the green cams next to the black, everything adding up to him. He reached across me to the water pack. Grabbed a gallon.

I smelled the sharp reek of his armpits.

He said, “Come up with me. We’ll have time to talk up there.” His teeth were covered in plaque, dark yellow at each joint. Brownish.

I piled all the light-blue cams while he gulped water. I said, “I’m not coming up, Kenny. This is a bad idea. There’s weather coming in, heavy weather. Plus, I have to be in the Valley. That’s one thing I think I know.”

“So I’m going to suffer up there alone?” Kenny said, and smiled.

It was getting dark. I took the gallon jug and had a drink, a smaller drink than I wanted, to conserve Kenny’s water supply. Then I handed it back to him.

He held out half of a peanut butter Clif bar that he’d found earlier. I ate it slowly, then took another small drink.

I stepped off a few paces to pee and Kenny went the other way. We met back at the packs and pulled out our sleeping bags. Put them down on the sand.

Kenny said, “Do you need anything else for dinner?”

I was hungry but I knew how little Kenny had for his twenty days up on the wall.

“No,” I said. “I’m good.”

“Yeah,” Kenny said. “Me too.”

I stayed awake. The stars filled like a glittering sandbar above us, suspended, the grains reflecting the lost heat of the day, mirroring the sand around our bags.

Sometimes I tried to count the stars in a small section of sky, a box between any four constellations. But not on a night like this. In the high dark, the stars procreated like white flies, their new young filling spaces, exponential sparkling.

I told stories to Kenny.

I was arrested two nights later.

• • •

“Can I give you a haircut?” McKenzie’s eyes glittered from the whiskey.

My nervous system surged. I took a sip from her plastic cup. We’d been drinking all evening.

“Please?” she said.

It was one of the things I’d never done. My mother’s voice about the man at the car. A boy set apart for the Valley. Uncut.

I said, “Okay.” Sipped from that cup.

She said, “You’ll look so good with short hair.”

I put a towel over my shoulders like a blanket. My fingers tingled as the scissors touched my scalp. I felt the weakness. My arms numb up to my elbows.

• • •

I rolled over in bed and saw the outline of McKenzie’s shoulder. I couldn’t go back to sleep.

I sat on the edge of the bed looking at my hands in the faint light of the moon through the window shades. I opened and closed my fingers. After a while, I slid back underneath the covers. Then I fell asleep again.

McKenzie must have snuck out to go for a run or to get orange juice for one of her quick morning workouts. I was alone when the door rattled. McKenzie lurched through the door.

“Tenaya,” she said, “the FBI’s coming. Quick! Quick!”

I sat up. “What?”

But they were already at the door. Pounding.

McKenzie said, “Just a minute.” She put one finger to her lips and pointed to the bathroom with the other.

I ducked in. Locked the door behind me. But there was no way out. No window in there.