Tainted Mountain

by Shannon Baker

  “A gully washer.”

  He guffawed. “I like an optimist.”

  With his unflappable attitude and quirky outlook, Charlie often felt like her only ally. Even if he objected to snow making, he never argued with her about it. She felt slightly uncomfortable that he spent his days dragging logs across trails to thwart the wheels of hated motorized vehicles in his forest. But he had given up stringing cable from tree to tree when he nearly decapitated a dirt biker and ended up with a month’s jail time.

  He reached into a pocket of the oversized army jacket he always wore, probably the one issued to him back in Vietnam, and pulled out another PBR. “Care for a beverage?”

  Nora laughed. “That stuff tastes like gasoline.”

  He popped the top and took a swig. “Coming from anyone else, I’d say that was an elitist comment made by an exclusionary capitalist out to exploit the underclass. A real Barrett McCreary.”

  “I don’t really mind being compared to Barrett McCreary.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Child, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  Charlie tipped his head back and drained his PBR in one long chug. He crushed the can and slipped it into a pocket. “Got work to do. You be careful and lock that door.”

  Abbey, tail wagging, joined Charlie and they ambled across the grass, disappearing in the forest. Nora wandered into the dark lodge. She checked the back door. No wonder Charlie walked right in. Scott must have broken the mechanism and forgot to tell her. She needed to rework her revenue projections, but then she’d head back to town to hit the hardware store. No way did she want to spend a night here without sturdy locks.

  The sound of a chair scraping over the floor startled her. Her head whipped around, and she searched the vast darkness. “Who’s there? Charlie?” Her pulse pounded in her ears, blocking any other sound. Movement next to the white stone fireplace caught her eyes.

  “If you’re one of those activists, you’d better get off my property.” She stepped toward the door. “I’m calling the police.” Another step. No replies. Maybe her overloaded mind blew a fuse and nobody was here. She hurried toward the door anyway. In the dim lodge her eyes strayed to a hulking shadow jutting from the wall. Breath caught in her throat.

  Knife Guy glared at her from behind the rental counter.

  There was no debate between fight and flight; Nora took off for the screen door.

  She barely cleared the rental counter when what felt like a brick wall slammed into her back, sending her crashing to the floor in a crush between concrete and two hundred pounds of lean, murderous Indian.

  Fingers raked her head and grabbed a handful of hair. He jerked her around and pounded her down, the back of her head cracking on the floor. Fissures of pain blinded her. He straddled her chest, letting only the barest stream of air into her lungs, hatred shooting from his eyes. “You won’t destroy our sacred moun-ain.” His words came from clenched teeth.

  She struggled for breath. “I … ”

  His hand smashed into the side of her face, grating her cheek and tongue against her teeth. Agony exploded through her temple, and the taste of blood filled her mouth.

  “Shut up!”

  His hands wrapped around her throat, squeezing as if her neck were nothing more than a wash rag. Rage turned his dark face into a mask of destruction, eyes glinting with absolute power.

  She kicked for her life, fought to buck him off, struggled to shake her head. Yet she barely moved, despite adrenaline pumping through her. Impossible that death could find her so easily. It shouldn’t happen this effortlessly. Someone shouldn’t simply walk in the door and kill her. No preamble, no preparation. Hardly any struggle. Just dead.

  And then she felt a new pain. Real, excruciating, burning her lungs as they dried up, turning in on themselves, begging for air. Her mouth gaped. Blackness seeped into her vision, closing in, shuttering life. Her arms dropped to the floor, her body no longer obeying her dying brain. The twisted face hovering over hers faded into darkness. This was it.

  Death brought instant relief. The weight on her chest disappeared. It felt as if air actually raked against her raw throat. But it burned. There shouldn’t be pain in death, right? Great gulps triggered coughs that scraped her delicate tissue.

  The blackness receded from her eyes and sound returned to her in the form of grunts and pounding flesh. Two men grappled on the floor next to her. Knife Guy, larger and heavier, took a fist to his face. The other man moved with grace and agility, planting another blow and another.

  Knife Guy shoved the thinner man off balance and settled himself in an attack stance. And there it was. The knife appeared and the blade emerged with a schwit.

  Jump, scream, run. Do something! But she just wallowed as though buried in tar. The man, her savior, jumped to his feet. Cole Huntsman. He crouched, his eyes burning into the attacker’s, calculating, calling him on.

  The heart-stuttering siren of an emergency vehicle sliced through the air.

  Knife Guy hesitated only a second, then bounded past Cole and out the screen door.

  Before the door even banged closed, Cole knelt beside Nora. “Are you okay?” He put an arm under her shoulders and helped her sit.

  She swallowed fire. Her voice sounded raspy and weak. “Yes. No.”

  “Can you stand?” She nodded and he pulled her to her feet.

  Her core shook, radiating out to her arms and legs. She leaned on Cole. “He’s gone?”

  “The siren saved us. It looked bad when he pulled the knife.” He supported her weight and helped her toward a bench.

  Sirens. Police? Ambulance? Her brain still felt foggy, and she couldn’t think straight. How long since Charlie had left her—minutes, a half hour? He might have been careless, fallen and broken a leg or crushed a foot with a heavy log.

  Scott always teased Nora for overreacting. It was probably just a hiker who twisted a knee or something.

  Cole lowered Nora to sit. “Where is your husband? You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

  But she wasn’t alone, was she? Cole was here. A dangerous environmental activist. Her heart accelerated again. Fear made for a terrific aerobic workout. She glanced at the door, wondering if she could get outside before he caught her. Cole Huntsman couldn’t be any more pleased with her making snow than Knife Guy. “What are you doing here?”

  He looked startled at her accusing tone. “Well.” His Western drawl sounded as if he just stepped in from the range. Even in the dim light she saw a blush creeping into his cheeks. “I couldn’t help but notice that things didn’t go that great between you and your husband yesterday. I don’t mean to butt in, but I just wanted to check to make sure you were all right.”

  Likely story. He and Big Elk had to be in cahoots and he was taking the “good cop” role. Maybe he came to Flagstaff to stop Barrett’s uranium mining—why else would he be hounding Barrett—but he’d obviously joined Big Elk’s camp. Still, he saved her life.

  Her life. Her throat and neck ached with bruises inside and out and her tremors returned. She’d nearly died. And the man who wanted her dead was still out there somewhere.

  Cole’s hand rested on her shoulder and rubbed slowly across her back. “Let’s get you into the sunshine.”

  Good guy or bad guy, right now Cole was the only guy around. He’d kept her alive so far. She let him help her stand and stagger to the deck. As soon as possible she ducked from his supporting arm.

  The lodge squatted halfway up the mountain. Two short flights of wide metal stairs led from the ground to the deck. Five giant picnic tables spread out on the expansive redwood platform that faced the lift. Nora and Scott’s tiny apartment sat on the second story, accessed by a steep outside stairway that climbed the front of the lodge.

  A police cruiser pulled into the parking lot, lights swirling, and stopped.

  Who called the cop
s? How did they know about the attack? Odd that they showed up so quickly.

  She and Cole watched as the cop walked up the path and clumped up the stairs. Nora recognized him as the same senior officer who had investigated her slashed tires and the broken shed window, the most recent incidents of vandalism on the property. Nora searched her brain for his name. Gary something or other.

  Gary glanced at Cole then settled his focus on Nora.

  “Hi, Nora,” Gary looked down at his shoes then up at her again. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  It suddenly dawned on her this wasn’t about the attack. The ambulance. Charlie.

  “We just brought Scott down.”

  “Scott? What?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Scott? Brought him down? Down from where? The ambulance. Not in town but on the mountain. Scott.

  Her eyes lifted to a hint of red glow through the trees. Scott was there.

  Her husband had been hurt on the mountain. He needed her. She sprinted past Cole and hit the stairs two at a time.

  Gary called to her, but she dashed on across the parking lot and around the bend in the road. Scott needed her.

  The ambulance sat at the trailhead across the road from the parking lot. Its red lights flared off the pines.

  “Scott!” Her gravelly screams echoed off the mountain.

  No, oh no. He’s got to be okay. He’s fine.

  Then she saw it. The gurney. Two people wheeled it toward the back of the ambulance. There was no face. It couldn’t be Scott.

  No face.

  Because it was covered with a sheet.

  Seven

  Barrett stood at his office window assessing the view. His home commanded the countryside from atop a hill that looked over an expanse of juniper, scrub, and desert. Across the valley the San Francisco Peaks rose in splendor.

  The mystery and power of the peaks still had the ability to awe him, despite his years in the sometimes-sordid energy business. God, how Ester had hated the ski resort. He barely remembered his own disgust in those earlier times. Ester wouldn’t understand why he’d had to do what he did to Scott. What happened on the sacred mountain this morning would break her heart, if he hadn’t destroyed it forty years ago.

  But Ester wasn’t here to rail against him. Her sacred kachinas hadn’t saved her. He lifted the faded photo and stared at the happy young family. Ester, with her black hair falling over one shoulder to her waist, bent toward their two-year-old daughter at her feet, his darling Soowi. Next to them stood the man who used to be Barrett. He was thin and sunburned with a baby resting on his arm: his son, Manangya. In the photo, Barrett’s head tilted back, his mouth open in laughter. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember what his daughter had said that morning to make them laugh. Just one more thing that haunted him.

  The sun slipped below the tallest peak.

  Heather skipped down the stairs, the short skirt flipping, a bare strip of brown belly showing. Instead of the usual burst of love and joy at the sight of his daughter, he girded himself for battle. Being a father required more courage, strength, and sacrifice than running a multinational energy corporation.

  She ran to him and stretched to kiss his cheek. This affection used to be her normal state. Now it was usually sighs and outbursts, tears and slamming doors. There should be an Alcatraz for teenaged girls, Barrett thought. You send them there at thirteen and pick them up when the hormones settled, whenever that might be. In the meantime, a vast moat would protect them from sniffing and groping men.

  “I’m meeting some friends in town. I won’t be late.”

  A rock sat in his gullet. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Quicker than a teenaged boy’s orgasm, she whipped toward him, her eyes heating with temper. “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  Bad start, but he was committed. He patiently motioned for her to enter his office and she flounced in front of him. “I saw you at the courthouse yesterday.”

  She thrust her chin in challenge. “So?”

  Screw patience. “You will stay away from Big Elk.”

  Heather leaned back against his desk and faced him as he dominated the room. She folded her arms, that impenetrable look on her face. She’d never met her, yet Heather’s expression matched Ester’s. It still took Barrett’s breath away. “Do I have your word you won’t have anything to do with Big Elk?” He wouldn’t bring up Alex Seweingyawma, the boy he’d identified as Heather’s friend at the courthouse hoopla. Barrett had had no trouble finding the hoodlum’s name, or making sure the cops locked him up.

  She stared at him, emotionless except the flash of defiance in her eyes. “You have no right to keep me from my people.”

  Barrett was surprised his clenched jaw didn’t pulverize his molars. “Your people are the McCrearys.”

  “My adopted people.” Her nearly black eyes glistened with contempt.

  He glared back, ignoring the blow. “Nevertheless. McCreary’s don’t carry signs and stop economic progress. We don’t spout fairy tales about sacred mountains.”

  Though Heather assumed an icy attitude, she hadn’t yet established Ester’s stamina to hold the calm. She broke and shouted. “You bigot! You think your Christian doctrine, the one that says the world was created for you, is the only viable religion on the planet. It’s never occurred to you that you were created to protect the planet. That’s what Hopi believe. To you, the whole world is here for you to rape and pillage.”

  Now Barrett had the upper hand. “I know what the Hopi believe. I spent a fair amount of time on the rez. I’ve even been inside the kivas during certain ceremonies.”

  She laughed in disbelief. “When were you ever open-minded enough to learn the true Hopi way?”

  “I was young once.” It sounded cliché even to him.

  She narrowed her eyes as if detecting a lie. “Maybe. But you don’t get it.”

  Déjà vu sent a chilly wind over his skin, raising goose bumps. He remembered when he stood outside a home on Second Mesa, the ancient bricks crumbling beside the newer stone repairs and cinder blocks. Heat radiated from the empty plaza and created a haze across the landscape below the mesa. Sweat drenched his body under his dashiki. His heart was broken, but he made sure Ester didn’t see the fracture.

  Ester stood in front of him in a colorful peasant dress he’d bought for her in a Flagstaff boutique. It was one of the few gifts she’d let him buy, always insisting she didn’t want anything that cost him mere money. If her heart broke too, she did an equally good job of hiding it. She said those same words to him: “You don’t get it, do you?”

  Barrett’s heart had pounded in desperation to make Ester understand. As much as she talked about responsibility to her people, the world, and respecting the Hopi way, she should know he had a responsibility to his family.

  But Ester left him sweating on the blazing plaza. Barrett never saw her again. They didn’t even tell him when she died.

  He couldn’t let Heather slip from him like that. Not after all this time.

  Barrett cleared his throat. These damn flashbacks had to stop. “The Hopi are wrong,” he said. “Their claims of being able to save the human race are nothing but false hope and giant egos. All they amount to is trying to control their youth, ban world progress, and keep the people living in poverty.”

  “The simple life brings us into balance, lets us focus on what’s important.”

  This from the iPod princess with the plasma TV, driving a new Toyota SUV and charging gas and lattes on his card. “Ask some of your new Hopi clan how they like living in squalor, not having money for food or clothes, and the sorry state of their medical care.”

  “A spiritual person doesn’t need much to be happy.”

  “A poor person has to be spiritual because that�
�s all he has.”

  Heather jumped from the desk and started for the door. “If you can’t touch it or put a price tag on it you don’t believe in it, do you?”

  Barrett grabbed her arm and forced her into a chair. “There you are wrong, little girl. Show me where I can touch our heritage and the essence of McCreary. Yet I believe in family above all else. And show me where I can touch the love I feel for you. Because, Heather, that is the most important thing in my life.”

  She ignored his exposed heart. “Hopi have a special bond with the forces of nature. If we don’t pay attention, the world will be out of balance.” Heather glared at him. “And then it will end.”

  Barrett’s temper threatened to break loose. “Hopi are like children. They don’t know how to function in the real world and are afraid of it. We, the McCrearys you think are so evil, have been taking care of them for three generations.”

  Heather’s voice rose to a shriek. “Taking care of them? Is that what you call strip mining their coal and pumping water for a coal slurry? And you paid them a pittance.”

  Acid ate Barrett’s stomach and he wondered if he could mainline Rolaids for the next few years. “You call twenty-five million dollars a pittance? That’s what it cost to seal those nine hundred mines. And McCreary Energy reseeded thousands of acres.”

  Heather swiped at her tears. “Yeah. You hauled off the radioactive tailings and boarded up the bad wells and water holes. But Poppy, before you did that, people died.”

  His heart went as dry and cold as the mesa in winter. It continued to beat even so. Just as he still breathed and walked around. He couldn’t stop the image of the twinkling brown eyes, the soft skin and baby fat thighs, the gurgle of delight from Daddy’s embrace. The son that would never swim in the creek, eat a popsicle, or even go to school. He remembered Ester’s eyes burning with love and passion the last time they made love.

  Barrett drank in the sight of the beautiful girl in front of him, his last chance at redemption. He’d lost everything but her.

  “You are forbidden to see Big Elk. You will not go up to the Mesas.”