Gift of the Golden Mountain

by Shirley Streshinsky

  "No, not that," he answered, frowning.

  "Then I think you should tell me."

  "Why?"

  "Because it is part of all this . . . the sin, the reason for everything that is, or isn't. For you, and for you and me. Part of what I need to know."

  "Need to know," he repeated, squinting into the distance. "That's a phrase the intelligence services use, and the government, in some classified programs. You should know only what you need to know to do your job. Which means everyone hides everything they can from everybody else. It isn't what I want with you."

  It took all her courage to ask it: "What do you want with me?"

  He looked up at the sky now; a white cloud had moved over the sun, as if to shield them from the glare. "Too much," he said.

  "Then you will have to tell me."

  He sat for a while, looking at his hands without seeing them, and she knew he was trying to find the words to begin: "There was this guy," he finally said, "I roomed with him for a while in Africa, when I first got there, before I got sick. His name was Ernie and he was from some little ranch town in Arizona, one way back off the main road was the way he described it. He was a real cowboy—I mean, he could ride and he'd been brought up on a ranch, and he didn't talk much, it was like he'd never had much practice.

  "Anyway, after we were there about a week he started having nightmares. Nightmare, I should say. It was always the same. Sometimes he would just sit bolt upright in bed, other times he would scream out, but every time he would be sweating and shaking. This would happen about two, three in the morning.

  "He started trying to stay up, not go to sleep, I think he must have had a million ways to keep himself from dozing off. He got haggard looking, his eyes had terrible dark circles, and he walked around like a zombie. It was wearing both of us out, and finally I guess it just wore him down enough so that he told me. What had happened, the reason for the nightmare."

  He frowned, and his voice became tight. "When Ernie was ten years old he had this friend, a boy his own age whose father was a ranch hand when he wasn't riding the rodeo circuit. The father was a bronc buster, it seems, and a bar brawler. He drank too much and messed around with other men's wives and just generally raised hell, except where his kid—Ernie's friend—was concerned. He loved his boy, everybody knew that . . . The mother had died, and this guy had raised the boy, and the two of them just loved each other . . ."

  May stole a quick glance at him, she wanted to see if he knew his voice had changed into the short, terse phrases of the Arizona back country. Hayes, his jaw set, moved into the troubled story: "One day the boys were at a local rodeo. Small town stuff, just a little ring and some rickety bleachers out in the middle of a dusty field. And everybody who was there knew everybody else, local folks. Ernie and this boy were sitting almost at the top of the bleachers. And just as the boy's father was in the chute, waiting for his next ride, this man comes running in . . . He was a big guy, a cowboy, dressed in jeans and wearing one of those western shirts with big sweat stains around the armpits, Ernie remembered that. But mostly he remembered the man's face, which was tortured. Twisted into something beyond anger. Beyond madness, Ernie said, and deliberate. Like he knew exactly what he was going to do and nobody could stop him. He was wearing a gun, one with a long barrel.

  "Everybody in the stands just stared, frozen, as he went tearing up the bleachers, two at a time, fast—and purposeful, with that demon look in his eyes. People made a path, and he was coming right for Ernie and his friend. Before anybody knew what was happening, this man had grabbed Ernie's friend and hauled him to the top row of the bleachers. He just stood there, he had the boy by the hair and he was holding him up . . . up off his feet and he had a gun to the kid's head. And he stood there like that until everything got quiet, and everybody was looking at him."

  Hayes saw the shock in her face and said, "I'm sorry May, I shouldn't . . ." She gripped his hand and shook her head so that he would know he had to continue. In a curiously flat voice he went on: "Ernie wanted to shut his eyes, turn away, do anything but watch . . . but he couldn't. He couldn't move. All he remembers is the father's scream rising out of the ring, and his friend's eyes in the moment before the gun went off."

  "Oh dear God," May said, letting her head fall against his.

  "Yeah," Hayes said, his hand cupped around her jaw, "a sin, yes. Several sins. The slaughter of the innocent, and then, now, the slow, slow torture of Ernie . . . the nightmare in his head, playing the scene, like a tape, over and over again."

  "Poor Ernie," she said, leaning into him as he caressed her face.

  "Yeah, poor Ernie," he repeated, "who joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa to help the black man, the Third World, the underprivileged. Except he really went to Africa because he believed that it was where he could get to the source of it all."

  "The dream? The nightmare? How? I don't understand."

  "He thought," Hayes said, watching her closely, "that it all began in Africa—the bloodletting. He thought he would find the wellspring of anger, primeval human anger, and violence. He figured it had started there, in the beginning there had been the jungle, and blood and anger seeping up like blood out of a wound. So he came to Africa to confront it, to look it in the face. He felt it was the only way he could get rid of the nightmare."

  May could not think what to say; her leg had gone to sleep again and sent sharp jabbing pains at her, but she couldn't move. Hayes saw and took her hand and lifted her, made her stand, slipping his arm around her waist to give her support. Gingerly, she put her foot down and a shower of electrical pains shimmered into her leg.

  "But how?" she asked. "How could he come to that. . ."

  "I don't know," Hayes answered, "the reason I am telling you this is . . ." He grinned, though his eyes were not smiling. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. Funny. I've tried to tell a few other people about it, and I've never been able to. Get the words out, I mean. I'd want to but I couldn't." She could see his mind working, could see he was trying to understand something else. "But the real reason I told you, the true reason . . . true: there's another word to go with 'sin' . . . is that my running around day after day, making speeches and going to meetings and being the total political activist makes about as much sense as Ernie's going to Africa to find the root of evil."

  They sat close together on the blanket then, holding tight to each other's hands, looking out over the haze that hovered over land and water. They could see the afternoon fog piling up behind the Golden Gate, waiting to work its way into the Bay.

  "You know all the wrongs," she finally said, "but you don't know the rights."

  "Something like that," he answered. "We know what we don't want . . . and we go, sheeplike, to our rallies and we write our diatribes against the power elite and the establishment and the pigs in the police department and in Washington, but we're just another kind of sheep . . . all of us, in our radical uniforms with our pat radical speeches."

  "How do you find another way?"

  "God," he said, rubbing her hand fiercely, "I don't know. I don't even know if it is possible to create a compassionate society."

  "You know what I would really like?" he went on, with more passion than she thought could be left in him, "I would like for us to be one of those missionary couples who go off together into the jungle, ecstatic with the love of God and absolutely and totally certain that what we were doing was right. Never a doubt in our minds, ever." And then, because he had just thought of it, "I envy Eli because he is black and he can work from the inside. Part of an historical movement that includes him. A belonger. Eli is going to make a difference because in the end, he is going to do something to make life better for the black people in this country. And it will be worth it, his life I mean."

  "And your life?" she asked.

  "I sometimes think my life is going to be an unending series of meetings in which people I usually don't know and don't love drone on forever, saying what's wrong—wallowing
in the wrong— while I sit there sick of it, sick of myself most of all."

  She knew she must not talk, must not say anything at all, certainly not the obvious. She knew she must not ask, "Why are you telling me this?" What she also knew, and knew absolutely, was that she wanted to be with him. Like this, able to talk from the heart, from the mind, no detours. Straight, close, like they were now. Sitting side by side, listening, all the doors wide open between them. No barriers.

  TEN

  A JANUARY SUN sent cool tremors of morning light through the dust-spattered windows on the third floor of the Earth Sciences building where May shared an office with two other graduate students. As the wind shifted, an errant branch of a giant ponderosa dipped and waved and scratched at the pane. Had she looked out of the window at that precise moment, she might have seen Karin enter the campus at North Gate. Absorbed in reading, May neither heard nor saw.

  "Tell me what you know about Krakatoa," Jeremy Wemers said.

  May looked up, vaguely surprised. She had not noticed him enter the room. "I'm not reading about Krakatoa," she answered, trying to deflect what she suspected was coming.

  Every attractive female graduate student knew Jeremy's approach. He always opened with a question which had something to do with her major field of study. Though as volcanoes go, May thought, Krakatoa was just a trifle too obvious, even for Jeremy. If she bothered to answer the question, he would interrupt as soon as he could by saying either, "That's interesting!" or "That's terrific!" and then shift quickly to the question at hand, usually an invitation to some university function at which he was expected to appear with a date. An associate professor, he had burrowed into the academic life as a mole might. His myopia was real; he wore glasses that sat heavy on his small nose so that he had continually to push them up.

  "What are you reading?" he asked, determined.

  May sat straight in her chair, and for the measure of a breath considered not answering at all. "A report on a joint U.S.-Brazilian study of continental drift," she began reluctantly, "—the idea was that if the continents of Africa and South America were once joined, then the rock formations should match up. And they did— formations of two highly distinctive geological ages were found in Ghana and on the coast of Brazil, exactly where they should have been."

  "Fascinating!" Jeremy said.

  "Yes?" she replied cautiously.

  "Yes. Terrific," he answered, quickly adding, "I've been invited to a cocktail party and I thought you might like to go." A look of doubt must have crossed her face, because he hurried on, "It's at Philip Ward's . . . you know, our pop professor."

  "I thought he was an astronomer . . ." she said as Karin appeared at the door.

  "How can you not know about Dr. Ward?" Karin asked, "He's terribly famous . . ."

  Jeremy interrupted, "As I said, our very own media star— bestselling author and pop political scientist. Loves to rake ugly Americans over the coals and gets paid properly for it. Don't you read the gossip cols? Marlon Brando just bought his latest for a movie."

  "I read his books," Karin came back defensively, "I like what he has to say."

  "Why did I think he was an astronomer?" May asked.

  "Because he is," Jeremy answered her. "Unfortunately, when he chooses to publish it is fiction and outside his field and for the popular press. He hasn't made much of a mark in astronomy."

  Karin disagreed. "He's one of the best teachers on campus— his lectures are always packed. It's almost impossible to get into them, I know because I tried."

  "Exactly—he's popular," Jeremy said, sniffing as he pushed back his glasses.

  "Jeremy was just inviting me to a cocktail party at Ward's house," May told Karin.

  "Really?" Karin turned to Jeremy. "I'm impressed. How do you know him?"

  Jeremy plunged both hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, a stance he assumed in the lecture hall when he was on shaky ground and trying to hide it. "We've been serving together on a faculty committee," he admitted. "Actually, he's invited all of us, and a guest."

  Karin blurted, "You don't suppose you could wrangle me an invitation too, do you Jeremy?"

  He stood back as if to inspect her. Her hair was loose and curled to her shoulders; she was wearing sandals, a long peasant skirt in muted Indian designs. When she slipped off the Peruvian knit cape she had been wearing, you could see the rise of her nipples through her cotton blouse.

  "Very tempting," he told her, "showing up with a gorgeous hippie and a Eurasian geologist. But. . ."

  "I'm not Eurasian," May cut in.

  "No?" he murmured, surprised at the sharpness of her tone.

  "I suppose Amerasian would be the label, if you feel you have to slap a label on me. But I don't approve of identifying people racially, so if you feel you must include a qualifier, I'd prefer being called an American."

  He wasn't certain if she meant for him to laugh—Jeremy Wemers had trouble with subtleties—so he coughed instead, but managed still to ask: "Do you think you'd like to go?"

  "She'll go," Karin answered, grabbing May by the arm and pulling her out of the office, calling back to Jeremy, "I'll see she's ready," and whispering to May, "and I'm depending on you to get me an invitation."

  "I have to go out with Jeremy the Creep so that you can meet Philip Ward?"

  "You've got it," Karin laughed as they took the stairs arm in arm, running down in fast matched double steps, moving quickly into the January sunlight and across campus, toward a low rumbling emanating from Sproul Plaza. The Third World Liberation Front was about to begin another rally demanding a student strike to force the issue of an independent Third World College for minority students.

  "Funny," Karin said as they walked across the sunsplashed campus, "you object to being identified by race, and the Third World Liberation Front insists on it."

  "I don't agree with them," May told her.

  "I suspect Jeremy doesn't either," Karin answered. "That's what is so confusing about all this. You find yourself agreeing with people you absolutely, fundamentally disagree with."

  They hurried along the path behind South Hall, the steady throb of bongo drums urging them on. "I wanted to tell him," May said, "that I probably have a better claim to be called an 'American' than he does—measuring by his standards. My grandmother's grandmother was a Randolph of Virginia. And when you think of it, almost all of the blacks in this country have been here longer than most whites. I don't understand why they should want to be known as Afro-Americans. This is their country, they helped settle it, their ancestors did all that hard work and now they want to turn back, to become something they never were—Africans. 'American' doesn't mean 'white.'"

  "Doesn't it?" Karin asked. "Isn't that the popular conception? Both my parents were born in Norway, but nobody calls me a Norwegian-American. If you are white, you can drop the label as soon as you speak the language without accent. But if you are dark-skinned you can't."

  At Wheeler Hall they stopped. The doors were cordoned off by strips of yellow plastic and the acrid smell of charcoal lingered in the air. Two nights before the auditorium had been gutted by fire; it was arson, almost certainly set by one of the radical groups, though none had claimed responsibility.

  "I hate this," May said fiercely. "This awful rage that erupts into violence almost against oneself—students setting fire to a campus building, blacks burning down their own neighborhoods. Can't they see how self-destructive it is?"

  Karin linked her arm in May's and said, "When I asked Eli that question—about black people burning the ghettos—he said there are just times when the frustration gets unbearable, and there's nothing left to do but strike out. And he thinks the rage is better than acquiescence, that burning down your own house is some better kind of a statement than dying in it without anyone ever knowing you were there."

  "Is that what Eli said?"

  "Something like that, yes, and while I can't agree with him I believe in him, somehow. And in Hayes . . . sometimes I
think the two of them could find some answers . . . does that make any sense?"

  "I don't know if it makes sense, but I know what you mean. When they are together it's as if each gives the other something he couldn't have alone. I'm pretty sure Hayes knows it, and I think Eli does, too, but he's fighting it."

  "I think Eli is fighting Eli most of the time," Karin said. "Have you seen Hayes lately?"

  May continued walking, head down, not looking at Karin. She muttered, "As a matter of fact, yes."

  "Stop right here," Karin said, loud enough to make a few students passing by look up. She lowered her voice to add, "Let's declare this neutral territory so we can talk."

  "What do you mean, 'neutral territory'?"

  "I mean out of the house, away from Sam. I get the feeling that Hayes is a forbidden subject, so I thought that if I could find some neutral territory you might. . ."

  May sat on a wide stone ledge and began to laugh. Karin sat next to her, smiling and waiting.

  "Okay," May finally said, taking a deep breath that was meant to signal a move into a serious frame. "Okay," she repeated, "you're partially right, I suppose. I have been seeing Hayes and I haven't been talking about it, but not because of Sam. At least, I think not because of Sam, or not totally because of Sam." She smiled again, this time to acknowledge the confusion.

  She told Karin about the chance meeting with Hayes, and about the day on the hill by Lawrence Hall. "After that," she went on, "we started running into each other every few days . . . but of course it isn't chance, we plan it—casually, always, nothing at night or away from campus. We always meet in full daylight, in public. Where it's safe."

  "Safe from what?"

  "Sex. Love. Commitment."

  "Oh."

  "Yes, 'oh,'" May said, turning to look at her friend. "Is that what you wanted to know?"

  "Yes. No. No, not nearly. I want to know how you feel about him, and what is going on!"

  "Only that?" May cried out, "That's all you want? Come on, let's walk."

  They dodged bicycles and two large dogs that came bounding through the fountain, splashing water and leaping against each other. May began, "Mostly we talk about ourselves—our families, what it was like growing up. My father, his brother. My mother, his father. You, Eli. Everything. We just . . . talk. We walk into town sometimes, and go to coffee shops and sit there for hours. Sometimes we hold hands, sometimes he loops his arm through mine or puts his hand on the small of my back to guide me someplace, and when he does, this little electrical storm goes shimmering through me. I can't remember ever feeling this way before. Just all . . . well, all what? I don't know."