Luke’s gone for a long time. Jenny whimpers in her sleep. Someone rolls over, it must be Maloney, judging by the heft of the body. Who knows whether they’ve screwed here in the barn. An unpleasant thought. Maloney and his sister, bodily fluids, mucus, sperm. At last he falls asleep and wakes to what he believes is a gunshot in the distance, a sudden blast in the night. But now it’s silent. Patricia breathes slowly and evenly next to his face. For a long time he lies awake, listening to something rustling near the loom, and now dawn’s approaching, trickling through the high windows. He’s startled by Maloney suddenly clambering to his feet and stumbling across the floor in his underwear. The door clicks shut behind him. Thomas stands up and follows him; outside the morning’s cool and foggy, and he steps barefooted onto the dewy, moist grass. Maloney’s pissing spread-legged against a tree. His ass glows white. The sky’s ash gray, and the landscape unfolds to every side: there’s the lake with the rustling black-brown rushes along the banks, the rickety pier, there the pastures and fields, there a handful of grazing horses with a skinny foal, there the sheep are lying in thick clusters. A wind chime jangles in an acacia tree. Maloney turns, showing his sleepy, sulky face. “Good morning,” Thomas says, shivering. Maloney shakes his penis. “Fucking Christ, it’s cold,” he says, as he makes his way past Thomas, wanting to head back to the barn. But Thomas grabs his arm. “Why didn’t you tell me you’re seeing Jenny? And that you were coming? I was shocked. That’s not good form, Maloney.”
Maloney looks straight at him. “You don’t need to know everything. Do you? I figured it’d be less of a problem for you to see us together than to hear about it. After all, you’ve been a little . . . what can I say . . . tense lately. I didn’t want to fan the flames.”
“Fan the flames? What are you talking about?”
“Thomas, it’s 6:00 A.M., and I’m fucking freezing my nuts off. Can’t this wait?”
“Are you two dating, or what?”
Maloney grins sleepily. “For now, yes. I think so. Yeah, I guess we are. Now get some sleep. You’re all discombobulated, man. Sleep’s what you need.”
Maloney claps him reassuringly on his shoulder and walks, leaning forward, back to the barn. He closes the door carefully behind him. Thomas clenches his teeth and feels his jaw, tense and hard. Except for his socks, he’s wearing all of his clothes. Patricia apparently couldn’t get them off when she helped him into bed. The back of his skull throbs a little, shooting down into the muscles in his neck, or perhaps it’s the opposite way around. He raises his head and gazes across the lake. A gaggle of geese has landed on the bank. They’re pecking at the grass. The farmhouse is dark and quiet. The birds aren’t chattering. Even the wind chime is silent. The silence is almost terrifying. Thomas strides back to his sleeping bag. Luke’s lying on his side, still as a mouse, his back to Alice. His wild red-brown hair is tousled, his shiny, youthful skin gleams with a greenish hue, olive-like. He appears to be in deep sleep. He’s got his arms folded across his chest. A tattoo of a heart spiked through with a sword intertwined with green vines adorns his muscular bicep. How pathetic. Does he box? It’d fit the stereotype, Thomas thinks, swallowing a mouthful of air. Someone like him. How clichéd. He stretches out in his sleeping bag. For a brief instant Patricia opens her eyes and looks at him as if from another planet, distant and strange. Then she’s asleep again. Soon Thomas himself is asleep, a heavy, dead slumber; he wakes only when Jupiter sniffs at his crotch. At some point he must have kicked his way out of the sleeping bag. He’s alone in the barn now. Outside, the sun appears to be shining.
Everyone’s gathered in the kitchen when Thomas stumbles inside, the dog nipping at his heels. There’re scrambled eggs and bacon and roasted tomatoes. It’s 9:30. Helena pulls bread from the oven with potholders. “Who got up early to bake?” Thomas asks. Helena raises her hand. “It doesn’t take long,” she says. “I’ve got my good sourdough, and I set it out in the evening.” Alice pours apple cider into glasses. Maloney brews coffee. The twins sit at the kitchen table, bent over their bowls of corn flakes. Their long, thin legs dangle and they scowl sleepily. “I didn’t get up early,” Maya says. Jenny enters, dressed in a checkered jacket and skirt. “I don’t see how you manage to stay warm up here during the winter. It’s brutally cold. And it’s May!”
“We have a wood stove. Plus the outdoor wood pellet furnace. We get by.” Kristin looks a bit worn-out. Pale and a tad gruff.
“It’s super cold up here in the winter,” Nina mumbles. “We have to walk around in felt slippers. They’re sooo ugly.”
“You want to go on a hike?” Thomas asks the girls. They shake their heads and pinch their lips shut. “We hate hiking,” Maya says.
“Ah, aren’t you two grumpy this morning,” Helena says, running her hand over Nina’s back. “You need to brush the horses and slice fruit for the dessert.” This bit of news doesn’t appear to please the two girls.
“Did we stay up late yesterday?” Thomas asks, taking a sip of his hot, strong coffee.
“You didn’t,” Alice smiles, and everyone laughs as if at a private joke. “You still want to hike with us? We’re leaving soon. You can make yourself some lunch.”
“Then we’ll be rid of all the men,” Jenny says, “except you, Maloney.” She looks up at him, her eyes gleaming.
“And you,” Kristin adds, scratching the dog behind his ear, “Isn’t that right, Jupiter?” The dog wags its fat, stumpy tail and waddles under the table.
“No way I’m going for a hike,” Maloney says. “Take good care of my friend here. He’s not used to fresh air.”
Once Thomas has devoured a helping of eggs and tomatoes and finished his coffee, Helena helps him find the cold cuts in the fridge. Everyone’s sitting or standing in the spacious kitchen, the windows are pearled with dew, the thin gray-green light is milky and soft. Luke, squatting against a wall, runs his fingers through his hair. “We figure we’ll be back around 3:00,” he says with his deep, warm, confidence-inspiring voice. “But if we’re out later than that, don’t worry. I’ve got a map.”
So he’s got a map, Thomas thinks. He’s prepared. He’s dressed like a wanderer in his flannel shirt, shorts, and hiking books. Even goddamn knee-high socks. Probably even has a walking stick. And a canteen. And a fucking compass. It doesn’t fit with his tattoo. The boy is many things, he thinks with a shudder, all too many things at once. What’s his deal? What kind of creature is he?
“Are you coming, Uncle Thomas?” Alice asks, turning her pretty face toward him. And then they leave. He kisses Patricia and whispers into her hair. “Thank you for putting me to bed.”
“Kristin was the one who schlepped you to the barn.”
“Thanks anyway.” She still has this lone wolf independence about her, and that strangeness he saw when she opened her eyes the night before, and she’s put distance between them again. But she accepts another kiss from him, leaning her head against his shoulder for a brief moment.
They drive in Luke’s metallic-blue Opel. He eagerly explains that he’s spent a lot of time fixing it up. “I got the seats from a friend who works at the incineration plant,” he says, shifting gears, “and I traded my way to a new motor. It runs like a dream.” Luke stamps on the gas pedal, accelerating. Thomas sits in the backseat. The sun’s already higher in the sky, but the light remains murky, as if filtered through a fine-meshed cloth. Luke has chosen a route that’s supposed to be well marked. “The inclines aren’t too steep,” he says. “We can park at thirteen hundred feet above sea level. There’s supposed to be an amazing view from the Bearclaw. I thought we could eat lunch up there.”
“The Bearclaw?”
“One of the highest points in the area,” Luke says. “You can see all the way to the sea.”
“You know this area?” Thomas asks.
“A little. But not the Bearclaw. I’ve only read about that.”
They drive for almost an hour, passing small farms and house-clusters with yards like automobile graveyar
ds and free-range chickens pecking at the ground. A gas station, a signpost for some small town. Alice tells them how Kristin has begun working at the hospital, and that she commutes an hour each way. She used to work at the midwife’s clinic in one of the villages. She can drive the girls now, so they don’t have to ride the school bus. But they have to leave the house by 6:30 every morning. “And they hate getting up early. I think they hate going to school, too. So did I.”
Luke stares ahead, his face revealing nothing.
Gradually the thin layer of clouds dissolve and the bright sun beats down on the landscape. New spring buds grow along the shoulder of the road, yellow-green fields extend beyond, and pines speckle the slopes. They turn off the main road and slowly ascend the tortuous mountain pass. With the eggs sloshing around in his stomach, Thomas feels carsick, nauseated. Finally they reach the parking lot and get out. There are no other cars. “It looks like we have everything to ourselves,” Luke says, satisfied. Thomas lights a cigarette. It’s windy up here, and there’s that special mountain silence that’s not a silence, but the wind whipping across the earth, through the leaves. And there’s birdsong here, and cicadas, and the buzz of bees and wasps. A thick deposit of moldering pine needles covers the ground. A small swarm of butterflies circle a cluster of purple flowers. The view from here is impressive. A couple of high-altitude lakes, clear green in color due to the calcareous soil below it, and steep black cliffs. But there’s vegetation where they stand, and the trail leads into the trees and disappears.
“You guys ready?” Luke asks, shrugging into his backpack. He smiles at Alice and squints for a moment. The bright sunlight makes his eyes appear even more golden. His high cheekbones rise above his smooth cheeks.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Alice says excitedly, hopping forward. When she moves, her windbreaker swishes. Since her hair is stubbly, her neck seems long. The tattooed snake appears to slither every time she turns her head. “Are you coming, Uncle Thomas?”
Uncle Thomas is coming. Luke takes the lead on the narrow trail, with Alice right behind him and Thomas bringing up the rear. He decides he’ll stay in the back. He won’t compete with Mr. Hiker, won’t give Luke the satisfaction. His back aches. He didn’t sleep well on the thin air mattress. He runs his hand across his unshaven chin. He didn’t even brush his teeth.
Soon he begins to sweat profusely. The trail grows steeper, and now and then they pass between astonishingly precipitous crevasses with views deep into the abyss. Overturned trunks lay scattered across a thick bed of ferns and nettles. The winter storms have clearly ravaged this place and ripped enormous trees up by the roots. The sun’s hot and piercing now. Alice sings as she jumps over a babbling brook. Thomas is short of breath. After they’ve walked for more than an hour, they pause to rest. Thomas doesn’t need to lag behind on purpose, it happens automatically. For some time he watches Alice and Luke walking along chatting far ahead of him. What are they discussing? Lactic acid flows into his shins. When he climbs upward, his knees crack, and his lower back aches. By the time he reaches the others, they’re seated on the grass drinking water from the bottles in Luke’s backpack. Alice bites into a chocolate bar and spreads out her windbreaker so Thomas can sit beside her. They’re both sitting cross-legged and it looks as though they could stay that way for hours. But Thomas can’t do that, his backache won’t allow it. Greedily he guzzles water then plops onto his back, staring into the cloudless, ice-blue sky. He hears a mosquito approaching, and smacks it on his neck.
“Beautiful weather,” Luke says, closing his eyes. “Can you feel how thin the air is up here?”
Alice has also brought coffee. They take turns drinking from the thermos cap. Thomas smokes. Luke lies on his stomach and sticks a blade of grass between his lips. As he observes Thomas, he plays with it, pushing it around in his mouth, first the left corner, then the right. “I’m hearing rumors that you’re going to expand your store,” he says.
“Where did you hear that?”
“From me,” Alice says. “I told Luke. That you’re offering me an apprenticeship.”
“Yeah?”
“But I don’t know,” she says, putting away the chocolate. “I have no idea what I want to do.”
“But you’ll only find out what you want to do if you give something a try.” With some effort Thomas sits up. “We’ll just agree on a trial period. Then you can decide whether it’s something for you. You need a job in any case, right? You don’t have any money, you said.”
She glances down. “Maybe.”
“What do you mean by ‘maybe’?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too long. I need an answer before Tuesday.”
“Before Tuesday?” Luke tilts his head and spits out the grass.
“Yes.”
Luke gives him a long, thoughtful nod. “Before Tuesday,” he repeats, as if to himself. The way Luke nods, the way he closes his eyes, as if he knows more than he’s showing—even though he might not at all—gets on Thomas’s nerves. He forces himself not to snap at him. Something tells him that he needs to avoid doing that. Something’s at stake between them, Luke’s in charge of this hike, he’s the one calling the shots. It’s best that Thomas know his place, as the tag-along that he is, and it also has to do with his age, and dignity, but Thomas can’t quite decipher how it all fits together, what it is. It’s just this intuition that tells him not to snap. Do not cause any trouble now. Luke rolls onto his side and rests his head on his fist for a moment. Then he scrambles to his feet and they all continue up the trail. Though Thomas tries to keep up with the youths, he’s quickly soaked in sweat. His feet slide in his shoes. He wipes sweat from his forehead with his arm, then blows at the hair that keeps falling across his forehead. They suddenly encounter a chamois standing on the trail, motionless, perhaps one hundred feet ahead. It’s reddish brown, with a darker stripe ridging its spine, and gnarled horns twisting backward. It stares at them, black bulging eyes, nostrils quivering, ears nearly flat against its head. Then it leaps elegantly into the trees and is gone. They’ve stopped to watch, and Thomas has reached Alice.
“It was a male,” Luke says. “They’re solitary.”
“Solitary?” Alice leans against Thomas. “What do you mean?”
“They’re loners. The females live in groups of up to twenty.”
“You’d almost think you studied biology,” Thomas says breathlessly.
“I just know what I need to know,” Luke says, with the precocious air of someone who always thinks he’s right. He scratches his arm. “What I need to know. We’re almost there. I think we have another half-hour or so, but the path gets so steep soon that we’ll have to scale the mountain.”
“Scale?” Thomas stops. “What do you mean by ‘scale?’”
Luke laughs. “We’re ascending a mountain. Pretend you’re a chamois. It’ll be much easier.”
“He looks a little bit like a chamois. A tired little chamois,” Alice clucks. “Oh, you look really beat, are you okay?”
Grimly, Thomas asks for a sip of water.
“You can also wait for us here,” Luke says. “If you can’t go on.”
“I can go on.”
After they’ve walked a stretch, the trail curves and abruptly ends. A narrow, grassy clearing followed by sheer cliff walls rises steeply above them. Climbing plants speckle the rock, blueberries or crowberry, maybe club moss. A partridge alights, flapping its wings. There’s no trail, but the area is demarcated in red, and you can see worn patches of ground between the markers where others have walked, or rather, crawled. At the summit there appears to be a kind of plateau. The wind cools Thomas’s sweaty body. His throat is parched, though he’d just gulped water. He wipes his hands on his pants. Alice and Luke have already begun scaling, and Thomas watches them balance their strong bodies perfectly, their thighs hoisting them steadily and easily upward. They don’t falter. They don’t need to clutch at the tussocks of grass before they leap like he
does. His legs tremble, and he doesn’t dare look down. But then he does and it’s dizzying. All the way down. All the way down to hell, he thinks. If I slip, I’m a goner. If I make even the slightest misstep. A grave in the breezes. He sniff les, moistens his lips. Toward the west, the mountainside pitches steeply downward, and around two-thirds of the way there he can see a wide, fresh spring flowing into a waterfall. The water rages over the mountain, gushing into the empty space, foamy and roaring, white and angry, but he’s so far away that he can’t hear it. He realizes that, despite the heat, his teeth are chattering. He heaves himself up, from notch to notch, from one cluster of roots to another. It feels as though his upper arms can’t go on, as if he’s going to be forced to let go, to fall. Three eagles circle the mountain, riding the wind before swooping into the valley and out of his line of sight. He looks skyward. Forward, he thinks, one small step at a time, no more than that. Up to that rock, that tussock, follow the demarcated area. If he tilts his head almost completely back, he can see Alice’s ass. The soles of her shoes are orange. She’s cinched her windbreaker around her waist, and she strides confidently; she turns halfway around and looks down at him, smiling. “We’re almost there,” she calls out. He doesn’t have the faintest clue how he manages to scale the rest of the way, his heart pounding, sweat dribbling into his eyes, his breathing raspy. He coughs, and suddenly he’s clutching the edge and hauling himself over, and there he sees Luke standing with his arm around Alice. It looks as though he’s showing her something, pointing at a spot in the far distance. He’s removed his backpack. Thomas gets on all fours and then finally, gasping, he stands up.
Rock, Paper, Scissors Page 21
