Graphic the Valley (6 page)

I kissed her face.

“You awake?” she said.

“Yes.”

She said, “I don’t want it to be Sunday night.”

“Me neither.”

“Or Monday and the rest of the silent weekdays,” she said.

“Weekdays like drought.”

Lucy smiled. She said, “It’s like drought without me?”

“Yes,” I said.

• • •

Then the workweek again. The crew around us, and we worried that everyone would catch on to us. We never talked during the day, but in moments in the evenings, by the bathrooms or the lake, or if the group broke up after dinner. The other boys on the crew continued their attempts with Lucy, so I’d walk off to avoid watching that.

By Friday, I had trouble eating. I’d been waiting five days to be with her. Each night, sleeping with the ghost of Lucy. Her hair across my face. An elbow in my ribs. I’d smell for her as I listened to the other workers snore around me.

• • •

Midmorning on a Friday. Piling slash on a steep hill near Fairview Dome. Two of our crew members were over a small rise, in a ravine shaped like a question mark. They were talking loudly. They couldn’t see each other so they yelled back and forth, the sounds slamming off the fractured granite, spilling out of the ravine to where I was working.

The first one said, “…with Lucy?”

I stopped when I heard her name.

The other one said, “Oh, hell yeah.”

I thought they were talking about me, so I crept closer. I thought Lucy and I had been discovered.

The first one said, “I hear that.”

I snuck up to the lip of the ravine. Looked down into the curve of the question. I was on my stomach, listening.

The one to my right, downhill, said, “She
is
fine.”

There was a pause, then the left one yelled back. “Oh, yeah. Real fine, no joke except for that snaggle tooth.”

Neither of them said anything for a minute while they worked their own sections of the cut. Then the left-side one said, “But that chest and ass?”

My stomach tightened. I wiped the sweat off my forehead.

The other one said, “Definitely.”

“I mean, I’d fuck the hell out of her. I’d just lean her up against a tree and go to work.”

The blood pounded in the front of my head. I picked up a fist-sized rock.

They kept talking but I couldn’t hear words. Just the noises of them. One was to my right, but I was working uphill toward the other one, the one who’d said that thing about the tree and Lucy.

I slid down the embankment, behind a stand of white pine. Crouching. Waiting to move only when he was making enough noise to mask my footfalls. Then I got to him. He was on one knee, oiling the chain on his saw, yelling over his shoulder at the other worker, the other crew member in the ravine.

I came from the left side, his blind side. I hit him once with the rock. Put him down.

• • •

The crew chief called a meeting at lunch. “Guys, we need to talk a little bit about safety. This is dangerous, uneven terrain. What happened to Joey can happen to anyone. And imagine if he’d slipped while his saw was running. Believe you me, that wouldn’t have been just a bloody knock on the back of his head. If one of you falls backwards with a saw running in his lap, you can damn well cut yourself in half. You understand?”

We nodded.

He looked at us and mimicked the motion of a chainsaw turning on him.

He said, “Joey’s been transported down to the hospital in Bishop. EMTs said it’s a bad contusion and a serious concussion, but he should be all right. Now you all need to watch yourselves for the rest of the day. Okay?”

People mumbled, “Okay.”

I didn’t tell Lucy.

That night, Lucy asked, “What are you thinking?”

I was remembering crawling back up out of the ravine and throwing the blood rock as far as I could into the trees. Thinking about my hands and the superintendent. Blood this time. Not from my tongue.

I said, “Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m just tired,” I said.

Lucy put her arms around my waist. “Too tired?”

I kissed her mouth. “No. Not too tired.”

• • •

My father held his fist in the air. I imagined that he meant to put his finger up. He said, “There’s a voice inside your head and you know.” He tapped my forehead with his fist. “You know, Tenaya. And you can’t ignore that voice. That is the Valley.”

Fifteen then. I went to chapel services alone in the old Yosemite Chapel. Sunday mornings after sleeping away, hung over from the Camp 4 parties the night before. I thought the services could take away the ghosts.

I felt the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer, my knees and shins flat on the cold floor. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Trespasses universal. Trespasses against the Valley, or my trespasses. But I could not forgive what I had already trespassed. Passed to judgment.

Dust caked like dry-cracked blood. Flaking. Remembering the petroglyphs I found near Sentinel: two men hunting mammoth and one man following. He who hunts men, the painting of the one who holds human bones.

• • •

Lucy came out sick. A Tuesday morning. She didn’t look sick, but then she threw up.

The crew chief said, “Better get in bed. Take care of that flu.”

Lucy shook her head, “I feel good now.” And she didn’t look too green. She looked flushed and pretty.

I watched her. Kept circling back by the water so I could check on her. And the funny thing was, she looked more healthy than anyone else on the crew. She looked beautiful.

The next morning, she threw up twice. Once, first off, straight out of her tent, then again after breakfast. The crew chief didn’t see either one, and Lucy went to work. Worked all morning.

I met her by the Porta-Potties. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Are you sick?”

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“I mean, I feel fine now,” she said.

I said, “That’s weird.”

“Yeah, well, we better get back to work.”

In the afternoon, Lucy went to pile slash over the slope, and I didn’t see her for the rest of the day. I didn’t like that. I tried not to lose sight of her the next day or the day after, working on the periphery of her circles.

• • •

The crew chief came over to me on Friday. He said, “Hey, Tenaya, a word?”

I waited.

He said, “Now this is none of my business, none at all, but you know Lucy?”

I said, “Yes.”

He pointed. “You know, the only girl here, that one right there?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “she stays up here all weekend with you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

He put his hand on my shoulder like my father would. “Well, you should seriously think about making a move.”

“A move?”

“Come on, son. You haven’t seen her watch you? I mean, you’re a good worker and all, but you’re not worth watching all day.” He pointed to Lucy. “And she keeps you on scout. She watches every damn thing you do all day long. Did you know that?”

I didn’t want to give us away, so I said, “Huh.”

“
Huh
.” He mimicked me. “Is that all you got? This is your last weekend up here with a pretty girl. And she seems interested in you…” He tapped me on the shoulder with his fingers. “So you think about it. But not too long.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said.

“Thank me after you make a move, all right?” he said. He picked up two chainsaws, and carried them back to the bed of his truck.

• • •

“Tenaya?” Lucy and I were in the tent, in my sleeping bag. She dipped her nose against my chest. “Where do you live in the Valley?”

We hadn’t talked about it. My parents always told me not to tell anyone, but I told her the truth. “Up Ribbon Creek. West of El Cap. Up a ways in the trees. My parents have a camp up there.”

“And you’ve been there for a long time?” she said.

“My whole life.”

“What?” she said.

“My family’s been in the Valley forever.”

She said, “Forever?” She lifted her head.

“Since the first Paiutes. All the way through. On my mother’s side. And my father’s been there a long time too now.”

She moved her finger on my chest, starting to draw a picture. She said, “So you’re a Yosemiti then?”

“Yes.”

She put her finger on the knot of my collarbone, the old break there. Lucy made a slash across my throat.

I lifted my head and looked at her.

She said, “And a Miwok girl.” She settled back onto my chest and kept tracing with her finger. Drew something like a bird.

I had my arm underneath her. The smooth skin of her back, the calluses on my fingers catching. I said, “Do you know the history?”

“I only know what my father told me.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And Carlos,” she said.

“Carlos?”

“My cousin.” She was still drawing the bird, adding feathers to the wings. She said, “We grew up together. He’s older, and he always took care of me. He works for the Park Service, has for a while. Some kind of patrol officer or ranger or something.”

I said, “And he taught you the history of the Yosemiti?”

“Yeah,” she said. “His stories are different from everyone else’s. He says it’s always 1851. That there are new developments but nothing new.”

“What does he mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He just warned me about my father too. It was this spring, a few months ago. He said he wasn’t sure what my father was doing.”

Lucy drew something on my skin, beneath the bird, something hanging in the talons.

I tucked her hair behind her ear. I said, “Does your cousin know what he’s talking about?”

“Huh?” Lucy stopped her drawing.

“Well, does he know something?” I said.

“I don’t know. My father is always dealing with the Park Service because of the property lease at North Wawona, where we live, and I don’t know what’s going on right now.”

I wondered what a deal meant. New development. I thought of my own father.

Lucy said, “Carlos kept trying to talk to me before I came up here this summer. He said I had to know some things. But I kind of avoided him. He gets sort of crazy sometimes.”

I said, “Maybe it is 1851.” I thought about the sign near Mirror Lake. The one posted by the National Park Service. Pictures of Paiutes labeled as “The Original Inhabitants: The Miwoks” and a similar sign in the museum. I’d scratched the signs with a stone, but the words wouldn’t remove, the etchings too deep. I’d finally broken the plastic and buried what I could break off.

Saturday afternoon. The sun came through the trees like shards of yellow glass. My cheeks tight, singed at the corners. The strips of skin under Lucy’s eyes burned pink-brown. She’d thrown up twice again that morning.

I said, “Are you hungry for anything?”

“No,” she said. She sat and looked over the lake. No wind now, and the water black glass.

Children played in the shallows, blond and chasing each other, laughing, their mother scolding them in German.

We were sitting side by side, leaning against the trunk of a fat juniper pine.

Lucy turned her head. “Do you ever want to leave, Tenaya?”

“Here?” I said.

“Not just here,” she said. “Yosemite.”

“For a while or for good?”

“For good,” she said, “to live somewhere else.” She picked up a juniper berry. Put it between her teeth.

“I don’t know.”

She bit down on the berry and chewed. Made a face. Spit blue and turquoise. She said, “You don’t just want to leave? Go anywhere?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve never thought about it much. Why, do you want to leave?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

I said, “We’re in Tuolumne, far enough. Up here, in the high country, I feel like I’ve already left.”

“Here?” she said. “This is still in the park though.”

I said, “To me it feels different.” Under the high sun, I thought of the stones, the opposite, and the cool. The smell of the river. The eddy when I was six, and the granite slab there. The small body laid out in the evening. I wondered where my mother was that night.

Sunday was my birthday, September 17. Lucy sitting next to me when I woke up. She’d never gotten out of bed earlier than me, but she was sitting there with eggs waiting on a paper plate next to my sleeping bag. Eggs covered in pepper and too much salt.

I smiled. She used spices like smothering a fire.

She said, “Happy birthday.”

“What is this?”

She pointed to the eggs. “Cooked them by headlamp. I know how early you like to get up.”

I reached for her.

She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. “Eat your eggs.”

“Okay,” I said.

She had a plate too but didn’t eat. I pointed to them, my mouth full.

She shook her head. “Too nauseous.”

When I finished eating, she said, “Want to walk?”

Outside the tent, a Steller’s jay hopped sideways to us. Lucy said, “Here you go,” and set down her plate of eggs for the bird. The jay hopped onto the plate, his beak dropping like a hammer drill. He ate so hard that he popped a hole in the paper.

“That’s how I feel in the morning.”

Lucy said, “That’s how I used to feel.”

• • •

Greazy puffs his joint across from me, pointing with his pinkie. The year I met him in Camp 4.

He says, “Like the ’77 weed, man.”

“Like the what?” I say.

“The 1977 weed. The big score. The Lockheed Lodestar.”

I say, “That was the year I was born.”

“Fucking star-blessed.” He giggles and scratches his beard with both hands. He says, “No shit, huh? That makes you sixteen?”

“Yes.”

He says, “You know the story?” He inhales and holds it. Exhales slowly. He says, “Okay. So the story. Sixteen years ago, in the spring of ’77, early that year, we all start hearing this thing about a Fed raid on a plane up at the pass. Lower Merced Lake. Funny thing though: it was a ranger who told us that the full score wasn’t recovered. A fucking law ranger said that, said 1,500 pounds of weed remained in the plane. And it’s March, so it’s frozen as shit up there. But we cut holes in the ice and go down with scuba gear rented in Fresno. And man if those duffel bags don’t dry out in a tent right here, in this site, number 33, Camp 4.” Greazy pats the ground, then makes circles, dirt angels with the flats of his hands.