Fire on the Mountain

by Edward Abbey

  “I wonder if it’s a trick,” Lee muttered. He put his hand on my shoulder. I shook it off and slid my chair farther away from him. “Look here, Billy,” he said, watching me severely, “your grandfather is not well. He may be very sick. If you know where he went you’d better tell us.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He might need help. He might be in trouble.”

  I was silent. Lee and my aunt stared at me, grimly, until I had to turn my head away and look somewhere else. I looked out the window at the neighbor’s wall and forsythia bush, through the neighbor’s window at his television set.

  “Does the old man have friends in El Paso?” Lee asked my Aunt Marian. “Can you think of any reason why he would get up in the middle of the night to go there?”

  “No, I can’t. I suppose he knows people down there but I don’t know who.”

  “Did he take money with him?”

  “I don’t know. He left almost all of his clothes and things here.”

  Lee looked at me. “When’s this boy supposed to fly home?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Well, keep an eye on him. Don’t let him sneak away.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  Promising to return after lunch if Grandfather failed to appear, Lee put on his hat and left us. My aunt put in a long-distance call to her sister in Phoenix and told her what had happened. She made some effort to do her housekeeping while we waited, and prepared a lunch for the two of us as the morning passed on to noon. She would not let me out of her sight.

  Late in the afternoon Lee came back.

  “Any word?” he asked Aunt Marian.

  “Nothing.”

  “Anything from El Paso?”

  “Not a word.”

  “You called them?”

  “Lee, I’ve been calling the police and the sheriff’s office about every half hour. Nobody has seen a trace of him.”

  Lee sat down at the kitchen table with us, removing his hat. He ran his hand through his thick black hair and turned his dark eyes on me. Unsmiling. “Marian,” he said, watching me, “I cannot understand why he would go to El Paso. Nobody can understand it. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for it.”

  “There’s no reason for his leaving my house in the middle of the night without even saying goodbye.”

  “I know. It’s strange. We have to try to guess what was going on in his head. Maybe we can reconstruct what happened. If the boy here will help us a little.”

  “Stop staring at me,” I said, “I don’t know where he went.”

  “Didn’t he go to El Paso?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t know. I guess he did.”

  “How did his truck get there if he didn’t go there? It didn’t drive itself. You didn’t drive it. How did it get there, Billy?”

  “I don’t know, I tell you.”

  “Billy, don’t you yell at Lee.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Lee kept looking at me all the time. “You know,” he said, speaking to Marian, “when you called me up this morning, my first idea was: I bet that old horse thief went back to the ranch. That’s the first thing I thought of. So I called the marshal and I called the Air Force Police. I thought they might be having another war out there. But no, they said everything was quiet—nobody had gone out that way last night or this morning.”

  I smiled. Too late I raised my hand to cover the smile. They pounced on me like a pair of FBI agents.

  “Billy!”

  “Did he go out there, Billy?”

  I paused, glowering back at them. They had me cornered. “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you the truth. He said he was going to Old Mexico.”

  They stared at me. “Is that the truth, Billy?”

  “He said he was sick of this country.”

  They were silent for a moment. Then Lee reached out and tried to put his hand on mine. I pulled my hand away. “Billy,” he said, peering into my eyes, “I think you are the biggest liar that ever hit Guadalupe County.”

  I said nothing.

  “I think you are the biggest liar in southeast New Mexico,” he went on. “Maybe in the whole state—outside of Santa Fe.” He paused. “I think I’ll take a ride out to the ranch.”

  “I want to go too,” I said at once.

  For the first time that day he smiled. “Get your hat.”

  “I’m going too,” Aunt Marian said.

  “No, you’re not,” Lee said. “This is a job for men. Get your hat, Billy.” And we left her there to wash the dishes.

  As we climbed into Lee’s big car, he said: “Maybe we ought to trade this for a jeep. What do you think, Billy?”

  “What for?” I said sullenly.

  He looked at me in a careful way. “Because I think your grandfather is up on the mountain.”

  I stared bitterly out of the window as we drove up the street. “Why can’t you let him alone?”

  “Billy, I just want to make sure the old man is all right. We’re not going to kidnap him. If he wants to stay there we’ll let him stay there.” He tried to touch me again; this time I let his hand rest on my arm. “Does that make you feel better?” he asked.

  I did not reply. I did not feel any better, I felt worse. I felt like a betrayer. A traitor.

  Forty-five minutes later we were barreling south on the highway in a rented jeep, bound for Baker and the old man’s ranch. When we reached the village Lee stopped in at Hayduke’s place and the Wagon Wheel Bar to make inquiries: everybody knew that grandfather was missing but no one had seen him. We got back in the jeep and turned west over the familiar dirt road. Lee inspected the road for tracks—there were too many. “Looks like an army’s been out this way today,” he said.

  We drove on under the grand clear desert sky. The sun burned along its high summer track, drifting towards evening, the dunes shimmered with heat and the bright white salt flats glittered like frosted glass, painful to look at. Lee put on a pair of sunglasses.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Sunglasses. What do they look like?”

  “They look like hell.”

  “Things change, Billy. Even the Indians wear them now. Why don’t you stop fighting the world and get in step? I mean—there must be a better way of saying it.”

  “Keep trying.”

  “You try them.” He handed the dark glasses to me and I put them on. To my surprise the sky looked bluer, the sand a deeper shade of tan, the yucca blades a more interesting green. Something wrong here, I thought; I don’t understand this, Silently I gave the sunglasses back to Lee.

  “They work, huh Billy? You have to admit they work, they even make thinks look prettier.” He grinned at me. “We have to be smart like the other Indians, Billy. We don’t take everything the white man tries to dump on us but we make choices, we take what we can use and we let him bury himself with the rest. You understand?”

  I nodded. I did not understand but I thought I could see a few dim tracks.

  “Whoa!” Lee shouted. He slowed the jeep, stopped, backed it through our trailing cloud of dust. “Did you see what I saw?”

  “No,” I said.

  He stopped the jeep again and looked over the ground to our right: perfectly parallel and fresh, the twin imprints of rubber tires veered off the road over the rocks, through the sand, and twisted among the shrubs of creosote brush and mesquite toward the northwest.

  “Why would anybody drive out there?” Lee asked. “I’ll tell you why: to get around the guards up ahead, that’s why. Your grandfather drove this far, remembered the guards at the gate, and decided to detour around them. Like you did when you walked this road.”

  “Are you going to follow the tracks?”

  “What for? We know his destination. We’re going straight to the cabin.”

  “But—if the truck’s in El Paso?”

  Lee started the jeep forward. “Oh, he’s real tricky, your grandfather. He probably picked up some wetback or soldier in Alamogordo an
d made a deal, maybe paid him something to bring him out to the hills and then told him he could keep the truck. Whoever got the truck would naturally drive it to the big city to strip it and sell the parts.”

  “Why not hide the truck out in the mountains?”

  “Because he wanted to steer us way off his tracks. Don’t you see? Real tricky. There’s only one thing now I can’t figure out.”

  “What’s that?”

  He grinned at me through the dust. “How he thought he could fool me.”

  He trusted you, I thought. But I didn’t speak it aloud—I was guilty too.

  Reading my thoughts again, he squeezed my shoulder. “Stop your brooding, Billy. We can both keep a secret. We won’t let him down.”

  “What about Aunt Marian?”

  He paused. “Yeah … that could be a problem. Well—if we have to we’ll lie to her, that’s all. Can you tell a lie as well as you can keep a secret?”

  “I guess I’m not much good at either.”

  “You’ll improve. At both.”

  The Air Police halted us when we reached the gate; Lee produced the pass he’d been using for the past couple of weeks.

  “This pass is no good any more,” the guard said. “Vogelin doesn’t live here now, Mr. Mackie, you know that. What’s your business today?”

  Lee wasn’t quite ready for the question. “We’re looking for a horse,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Lee said. “An old horse.”

  The guard eyed us warily. “Okay, Mr. Mackie, we’ll let you through this time. You promise to come out again before sundown?”

  “Yes, sure. Thanks a lot.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Mackie. Just be sure you’re out by dark.”

  We drove on through. “Great to live in a free country,” Lee said, “with well-trained and courteous cops everywhere you go. Now keep your eyeballs skinned and we’ll see where the old man came back on the road.”

  But we didn’t.

  “Well, he decided not to take any chances, that’s all,” Lee explained. “I guess he drove clean around the ranch. Don’t worry, we’ll find him.”

  That’s what I was worried about.

  As we crossed the ancient lakebed where the loading pens were—empty corrals, abandoned now to the weather and the bombing practice: they’d make satisfactory targets—we saw a funnel of dust boiling up from the other side of the basin and at its forward tip a gray government sedan, speeding toward us.

  The driver of the car flagged us down. We stopped side by side on the road and Mr. Burr leaned head and elbow out of his window to talk to Lee. The marshal was alone this time. “Where are you two going?” he asked; his tone and his expression were hostile.

  “We thought the old man might be at the ranch,” Lee said.

  “I told you this morning there wasn’t anybody out here.”

  “I see.” Lee fingered the dust on his jaw. “I thought he might possibly show up this evening.”

  “It won’t do him any good. If he does you better bring him out again.”

  “That’s why I came.”

  The marshal looked at our jeep, at me, at Lee’s hard brown face. “You’re not allowed in here after sunset,” he said.

  “We’ll be out.”

  The marshal considered us once more with his insolent, lazy, lizard eyes, withdrew into his steel shell and drove off. We continued on our way, while I looked back to make sure the marshal didn’t turn around and follow us. Lee also was glancing at the rear-view mirror.

  “You think he might try to follow us, Lee?”

  “I was thinking of that. But he’d have a hard time getting that car across the Salado. And even if he made that he couldn’t drive it very far up the trail road.”

  “He could walk.”

  “He’s too fat and lazy. It’d kill him.”

  “I hope he tries then.”

  “I know how you feel, Billy. I sure hated to have to be so polite with that—toad. I could’ve killed him the other day. I would’ve killed him if he’d hurt John.”

  We topped out on the ridge above the ranch buildings, stopped and looked down. There was no sign of human life below—no smoke in the chimney, no light in the window, no pickup truck or car in the yard under the cottonwoods. Even the dogs and chickens were gone, as well as the horses and the milk cow. The only movement we perceived down there was the slow turning of the windmill as it continued to pump water into the tank and from there into the ditches that watered the garden and filled the trough in the corral and carried whatever surplus remained to the pasture beyond the corral. And while we watched, the breeze died, the gray vanes slowed their whirling, paused and waited. The whole place became still, silent, dead.

  “This was a man’s home,” Lee murmured. “This was home for a dozen different people and their children and animals. Now it all goes back to the spiders and the rattlesnakes. And the Government.” He looked up: the sun was getting closer to the western mountains. “Let’s go, Billy.”

  We drove down the hill, down to the ranch, and through gates left open that didn’t have to be closed anymore right up to the edge of the Salado wash. Lee shifted into fourwheel drive, we dropped into the sand and stormed across through the sand and over the dry streambed and up the bank on the far side. The pale leaves of the cottonwoods twinkled above our heads with a dry rustling noise that seemed meaningless now. A pair of ravens roosting on a dead limb croaked like wizards when we passed. We began the journey to the mountains.

  “I see jeep tracks all over the place,” Lee said. “You’d think the Army was having maneuvers out here. If the old man cut back this way we won’t find his sign now.” He drove as fast as he could over the rocky trail, through pockets of sand and in and out of deepening arroyos, straight toward the glare of the sinking sun.

  We approached a scene along the road that looked familiar yet uncomfortably changed: a certain arrangement of bushes, rocks, a curve in the ruts—the bristling bayonets of a giant yucca. An instant later I recognized the place and realized, as we passed, what was wrong: the great twelve-foot stalk of the yucca, with its cluster of dry seed pods at the tip, now lay prone on the sand, hacked down by somebody with a big knife or machete. I said nothing to Lee. We bounced and rattled on, trailing a plume of dust that hung in the air for half a mile, golden in the evening sunlight, obscuring our view to the rear.

  Down into the ravine and up the other side: another windmill appeared, standing up against the sky, with its water tank, corral, loading chute. No cattle, no horses, waited for us there now. Hot, dusty, thirsty though we were, Lee drove by without slackening his speed, past the mouth of the canyon and up the narrow wagon road into the foothills.

  “I’m not even looking for his tracks now,” Lee yelled at me through the noise. “I feel so sure he’s up there.” He gestured toward the peak of Thieves’ Mountain.

  The engine groaned as the pitch grew steeper, the rear wheels spun on the loose stones, and the back of the jeep swung toward the edge of the drop-off. Again Lee had to stop and engage the front axle; with four wheels pulling we ground up into the canyon pine and juniper, over the burnt flowerless weeds of August, pursuing shadowy birds which fled before the clamor of the machine. We passed the south ridge trail, drove beyond the point where Lee and I had routed the Army, and finally reached the junction of the old mine road and the wagon trail. But there we had to stop: several felled pine trees blocked the way that led up to the cabin.

  Lee nudged the jeep against the first log and shut off the motor. “I guess we walk from here on up, old buddy.”

  We climbed out, stretched our limbs, listened to the quiet stirring of the trees, the dim bird cries, and looked at the barricaded trail. “He doesn’t want visitors,” Lee said. “Not on wheels, at any rate.” He looked around. “My God, it’s quiet up here now. Remember how lively it seemed last June?”

  “I remember.” I looked to the north: far out that way, past several fields in the mountain, my mind came to the a
wful spot where Grandfather and I had found the lost pony with his head broken, his belly ripped open, the vultures feeding on his entrails. “Let’s get up there to the cabin,” I said. “Maybe we better hurry.”

  “Listen!”

  I was still. A tree limb creaked, a few pinyon jays screeched below. And I heard the drone of an engine coming up the mountain. “My God!” I said. “He followed us.”

  “Sounds like a jeep,” Lee said, cocking his head. “It is a jeep. Maybe it’s not the marshal at all.”

  “Those Air Police had a jeep.”

  “Yes. Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now. Let’s go up to the cabin.”

  “But—we don’t want to—” I hesitated.

  “Come on. It’ll be all right.”

  I wasn’t sure about that but when Lee climbed over the fallen trees and started marching up the trail I went after him. As we climbed, the sun went down behind the mountain peak and the vast shadow covered us, covered the fear in my heart. We walked up the road through a filtered twilight, cool and gloomy, with the pine boughs whispering over our heads. A huge bird with long dark wings flopped off a limb and sailed away: the limb rose up, trembling.

  “What was that?”

  “What, Billy?”

  “That bird.”

  “I didn’t see it. I was watching the road. I think your grandfather walked up here last night. Or early this morning. See this bootprint? That’s him.”

  We climbed faster, breathing hard and not talking much. Every now and then the noise of the jeep floated up from the hills below, coming closer.

  At last we reached the end of the road and saw before us the level park of waving gramma grass, the corral, and the cabin set against the cliffs which rose up and up toward the summit of the mountain. We stopped for a moment to rest, to catch up with our breathing, and started toward the cabin. A man sat against the wall near the open door, hatless, facing us but with his head bowed, looking at the ground between his legs. He did not see us.

  “Grandfather!” I shouted, waving my hand. There was no response. Was it really the old man? At that distance, with the glow of the sunset in our eyes, I could not be certain. I called again: “Grandfather?”

  The only reply came from the mountain, as the cliffs echoed my voice. We hurried forward, staring at the man who sat by the cabin door, completely unaware of our approach.