“Shut up!” he screams. “Just shut up!”
His feet will hit the rocks first, the shoddy boots no protection. His ankles will twist instantly, tendons popping before the bones shatter. His legs will come next, the weight of all his gear and four days of food driving them down. Then his spine, his chest, his arms, his head. He can already feel the impact.
Santi clenches his teeth as the nausea rolls over him. He opens his eyes, and the solution is right there, so simple he’s even more embarrassed that he didn’t think of it right away.
Keeping his stronger hand on the root, Santi snatches the carabiner with his left and quickly clips it across his chest, onto to the pack’s right shoulder strap. Then he unbuckles his waist belt. With the full weight of the pack now resting on his shoulders, the muscles in his right arm flare in pain.
“Pull up!” Santi screams. “Just a little! Take some weight off me.”
Above him, they pull slack from the rope, and the backpack lightens. Santi sneaks his free arm underneath the left shoulder strap, and with the pack on one shoulder, he grips the root with his left hand and quickly unshoulders his right.
The second he’s no longer supporting his pack, the rope stretches, and the pack drops a foot. It careens into him, knocking one arm off the root.
“I said pull up!” he yells.
“Sorry!” Jerry says. “We’ve got it now!”
“Jesus, your pack is heavy!” Victor says. “You got a dead guy in there?”
Free of the pack’s weight now, Santi grabs the root with both hands again, pulling up so that his elbows are completely bent. He presses his cheek into the rough bark of the tree like he’s cuddling a pillow. His hands are still cramping; he needs to hurry. When the rope comes down again, Santi takes his left hand off the root and grabs the carabiner.
He makes a loop by clipping the carabiner back onto the rope about three feet up. After threading his head and left arm through, he holds onto the root with his left hand and he snakes his right hand against his body and through. Now the rope is under his arms, wrapped around his back, with the carabiner at his chest. His forearms start to twitch and his hands are cramping and his fingers are now losing their grip. He has nothing left.
“I hope you got me,” he yells, letting go of the root.
The rope tightens around him instantly, digging into his armpits, but he doesn’t fall to his death, so they must have him. Santi scrambles up the slope until he reaches the path, and three sets of arms grasp at him.
Santi collapses. The rain pelts his back, mixing with the blood from his elbows, pooling where his hands press into the muddy trail. He’s trembling on all fours. But he’s alive.
Amelia says, “Are you okay?”
“That was good, Victor,” Jerry says. “That was really good.”
Santi struggles to catch his breath. “Thanks.”
“Hmm?” Victor says as he coils the rope back up. “I didn’t get that.”
Pushing himself to his feet, his chest still heaving, Santi glares at him.
“Are you okay?” Jerry says. “Because we really should get going.”
Santi nods. The adrenaline is trickling out of him now, and his legs feel tired and heavy. Soon, he knows, the pain will come, but there’s nothing he can do about that. “I’m fine.”
They shoulder their packs and continue on the trail. Victor hangs back, motioning for Santi to move ahead of him. “We got a connection now,” Victor says with a chuckle Santi can’t exactly figure out. “Me saving your life and all. A lot of cultures think that means you owe me your allegiance.”
Allegiance. The word rolls through his head. Allegiance is complicated.
6
The week after Santi got into Eric’s car, he sat alone on the small hill overlooking the El Real High School football field. Spring practices were underway but far enough down the hill that the sounds of the coaches’ screaming and the crush of helmets against pads were only a distant soundtrack.
There’d been no space for him in the system, no place to hold him until the adjudication, so he’d come back to school. Gone to his classes as if it hadn’t happened. Eric Ayala seated behind him in third period English. But the clock was ticking. It was his second offense, after all, and the clock was most definitely ticking.
Everyone knew it, and they were all waiting to see what Santi would do.
Diana came up behind him and sat at his side on the grass without saying a word, and Santi’s skin began to tingle. He knew her smell like a deer knows the smell of a hunter. The blend of shampoo and perfume that was her hallmark, like honey and peaches and some sort of mint.
Marisol once described Diana Martinez as “the blondest, whitest Martinez you’re ever going to see.” After the move from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, when Santi’d had to live with Ray, when he’d had to change schools, Diana had been the first person to talk to him. His first friend. Weeks of keeping to himself, just trying to get through without crying in public, and then one day at lunch this white chick Martinez was sitting across from him in the lunchroom, asking what his name was. Back then, ten years old, with some baby fat still on her, she was just another girl.
But she didn’t stay that way forever. One day Santi looked up and flinched, frightened of how beautiful she had become. Whenever they talked, he tried to arrange it so that they were next to each other, not facing each other, taking eye contact out of the equation. That way he was less likely to make an ass out of himself.
That’s how they sat now, thankfully, both surveying the field in front of them, silent for a long while. Santi figured that since Diana was the one to sit down next to him, she would have to speak first, but she refused to break the silence, and he finally cracked.
“I don’t have a choice,” Santi said.
“Why does Eric get away with it? What makes him the lucky one?”
“He didn’t wear a seat belt,” Santi said with a rueful shake of his head.
“What is that supposed to mean—”
“Never mind.”
“Santi,” she said. This time it was almost a whisper. She reached her hand toward his knee, a gesture that Santi only later realized must have been a risk for her. A signal that she felt the way he’d always prayed she would.
He knocked the hand away and stood up. “What do you expect me to do?”
She flushed, but that didn’t stop him. “There’s no witness protection for juvie felonies, right? So where am I supposed to go? It’s easy for you to act like you have all the answers, but you’re not the one who has to deal with what happens when the shit goes down.”
Her eyes went cold halfway through his speech, and by the time he’d finished, he was talking to the back of her head.
7
Santi’s jeans scour the bloody scratches on his knees when he steps; his elbows stick against the poncho when he swings his arms. His heels. His back. It’s a miracle he can move at all. Even though every footfall brings a fresh blast of hurt, he says nothing. No grunting, no wincing. Just him and his swallowed pain.
When they finally stop to rest, Santi catches a glimpse of something sharp on the hillside next to the trail. A spike, maybe? A big nail? Sticking up from underneath the muddy earth. Rain has washed the dirt away from the tip, but the rest is buried deep enough that he has to wedge it back and forth to get it out.
It’s heavy, about four inches long and at least a half-inch thick at one end. A deep orange rust cakes most of the surface, but when Santi scrapes it off, he can see the black iron beneath.
“Santi found a nail,” Rico says.
“That makes sense,” Jerry says. “We’re almost to Felton.”
“We’re stopping there, right?” Rico says. “For lunch?”
“Think about how hard it must have been back then,” Jerry says. “Coming over the passes, no protection from the elements. No Gore-Tex, no lightweight backpacks. The people here had to work for everything. Nothing was given to them.”
“Oh, man,
” Victor says. “You were this close.”
“This close to what?”
“To actually being interesting. I was learning. And then you had to go and ruin it with ‘nothing was given to them.’”
Jerry shrugs but then says, “When you have to chop wood all summer in order to have enough fuel to get through the winter, fuel for cooking, fuel for heating, then I think it’s pretty fair to say that nothing is given to you.”
“Yes, sir,” Victor says, giving Jerry an exaggerated salute. “Got it, sir.”
For a moment it looks like Jerry is going to say something else, but instead he closes his eyes, like an extra-long blink, and turns away.
They’ve only gone a few steps when Rico points at the trail ahead of him. “Check it out. More scat.”
“Since when are we on the Discovery Channel?” Victor says. “It’s cat shit. That’s all it is. Cat shit, so can we please just call it that?”
He kicks the scat off the trail with the side of his boot and trudges ahead.
“What did I do?” Rico gives Santi an anxious look, but Santi doesn’t have the energy to do anything but shrug.
A collapsed outhouse is the first sign of the ghost town. Its small square roof lies in the middle of a pile of snapped and rotting boards splayed out in every direction as if the whole thing was crushed by the foot of an angry giant.
They slog through more trees until the path opens up to reveal a clearing. Small wooden cabins are scattered around the edges, all in various states of decay. Some have four walls but no roof; others look more like lean-tos. Some are just piles of logs, any vertical surface having fallen down long ago.
The trail cuts past the rock-strewn entrance of a mine shaft on the side of the hill, about five feet tall by four feet wide. Thick wooden beams frame the opening, and the rusted ends of some sort of railroad track poke out of the ground before disappearing into a jumbled heap of boulders, broken logs, and packed earth a few steps into the shaft.
Jerry motions for them to gather around the mine’s entrance as the rain falls harder. The garbage bag covering Santi’s backpack channels every drop directly onto his neck and shoulders, which are now so drenched that he wonders why he’s wearing any rain gear at all.
They’re all soaked. All of them except Victor, of course, the rain being no match for his million-dollar jacket.
“This was operational until the early 1930s,” Jerry says. “The miners followed a vein about a half-mile deep, but the easy pickings were gone by the beginning of the Great Depression, when the price of gold went down by almost twenty percent. Some miners kept at it for a few years, but it didn’t make financial sense to keep digging much longer.”
Victor breaks from the group and ducks into the mine shaft.
“Careful,” Amelia says, “you don’t know how stable that is.”
Victor ignores her, sitting on the edge of a boulder inside the shaft. His pack rides up on his shoulders, pitching him forward so that he has to rest his elbows on his legs. “This is cool,” he says. “I’m going to hang out here for a sec.”
“There’s no more gold in there,” Santi says.
Victor smirks. “Oh, Santi-San. You so funny.”
The mine isn’t big enough for all of them, so Jerry points to a small cabin across the clearing, the only one that still seems to have a roof. “We’ll be in there,” he says. “You’re going to need to eat, so don’t dawdle.”
“I never dawdle,” Victor says, his eyes on Santi.
Jerry shakes his head as he trudges toward the cabin. Off the trail now, pushing through thick grass more than two feet high, they might as well be wading through a stream. Santi’s socks squish inside his boots with every footstep.
“Best not to lean against the walls,” Jerry says when they arrive at the small cabin’s doorway. “It may not take much for them to cave in on us.”
They follow him inside, but the benefit of shelter from the rain is almost entirely negated by the stench of decaying flesh that greets them as soon as they step over the threshold.
“What is that?” Celeste says through her elbow.
About half of the floorboards are missing, most of them on the far corner of the room. A combination of rot and animal panic has seen to that; long teeth marks scar the remaining boards. “Probably a marmot got trapped underneath,” Jerry says, covering his nose. “You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t want to get used to it,” Celeste says. “I want to puke.”
Santi gags once, then steps back outside for a cleansing breath of fresh air. It’s no use. The reek has burrowed into his nostrils. A thick smell. Mildewed. Rotten. Syrupy.
White flashes light up the clouds. One. Two. Three. The thunder rolls slowly toward them, building on itself until it fills Santi’s head, until he can’t even hear the rain cascading off the cabin roof.
“Storm’s getting closer,” Jerry says once the thunder ebbs. “Come back in. I promise you’ll get over it.”
Santi reluctantly steps inside and takes off his pack and poncho. He unties the pack’s outer garbage bag and then the inner one. He pulls out a bag of bagels, a jar of peanut butter, and their last block of cheese. The cheese and peanut butter are heavy, and he’s looking forward to losing a couple of pounds.
He lays his pack on its side and sits on it, leaning against the wall with his legs outstretched.
“I should probably do something about those, huh?” Amelia says, appearing above him with a bagel sandwich in one hand and the first-aid kit in the other.
“Nah,” Santi says, cringing as he brings his arms up to look at one elbow, then the other. It’s like someone attacked him with a weed whacker: long scrapes down the underside of his forearms, a complete lack of skin at the elbows. “Skin is overrated.”
Amelia smiles and sits at his side anyway, and he lets her clean and dress his wounds. First his elbows. Then his heels. It’s like they’re in a war movie, like she’s a nurse in a makeshift infirmary tent. Rain beats against the metal roof like machine gun fire, the thunder like distant explosions.
“You’re pretty good at beating yourself up,” she says when she’s finished.
“You’re pretty good at fixing me.” He winks, but she’s already packing up the first-aid kit and doesn’t notice.
Jerry is right about the stench, at least, which evolves from noxious to merely disgusting. Eventually, Santi doesn’t even mind eating. Celeste, on the other hand, spends the whole time by one of the open windows, still in full rain gear as she leans to keep her upper body outside the room. Every time she needs a bite of her bagel, she leans back inside, chomps down quickly, and then sticks her head outside again.
The rain starts to come down in sheets, the wind gusting, rattling the unsteady walls, enough so that Celeste finally moves away from the window. Santi leans his head against the splintered wall and closes his eyes.
It’s the rotting marmot, of all things, that makes him think of his first day on unit.
He’d only caught the stench once, as he was walking toward the main building for the first time. Past the control tower, underneath the razor wire on the perimeter fence. One breath, but one breath was enough. A sweet, stale smell with a hint of burning hair underneath. He’d asked what it was, but nobody had been able to tell him. For the rest of his time there, he kept expecting it. Whenever he walked outside, whenever he hit the yard, he’d braced himself. But the smell never returned.
“Have you guys seen Victor?” Jerry says.
“What do you mean?” Rico says. “He’s not there?”
Santi opens his eyes and looks around. He’s still in the mining shack. Rain still rattles against the roof. Jerry stands in the doorway with his hands on his hips.
“How long was I out for?” Santi asks.
“Thirty minutes, maybe?” Amelia says. “Victor never came in to eat.”
“I guess I sleep better when that dude’s not around.” Santi takes his own peek out the window. There’s no movement, no
red rain jacket. Nobody in the abandoned mine at all, at least not that he can see. “Maybe he’s taking a leak.”
Amelia says, “He must have had some food in his pack.”
“I don’t think so,” Santi says. “Not lunch, anyway.”
Jerry cups his hands around his mouth. “Victor!”
No response. Jerry unfolds the topo map from his back pocket and spreads it out on the uneven wooden floor. Their route is traced in red marker, with a big X at every planned campsite. “If we don’t leave soon, there’s no way we’ll make it to camp tonight, and if we don’t make it to camp tonight, we’re behind schedule for tomorrow and the next day.”
“We can’t leave without him,” Amelia says.
“You and I could go ahead,” Santi says to her. “Set up camp so that it’s ready when the rest of them get there.”
“I’ll go with you guys,” Rico says.
Jerry runs his fingertips through the thicket of his beard. “You could get dinner started. Maybe come back on the trail without your packs if we take too long.”
Amelia looks outside instead of responding right away. A thunderclap rattles the metal roof. She clearly wants no part of Santi’s plan, which makes him wonder what the hell she’s doing out here in the first place.
“It’s no big deal,” Santi says, pointing at the map. “It’s one trail, a little hump near Fall Creek, then down, right?”
Jerry shakes his head. “We need to stick together, especially if it starts raining harder. Thanks for offering, Santi, and no offense, but I’m not comfortable sending you out there without any wilderness experience.”
Santi has to stop himself from chuckling. The way he’d figured it, if they all thought he sucked at making fires, nobody would expect him to make them. Let Victor the Eagle Scout pick up the slack. But just because you don’t brag about how much experience you have doesn’t mean you don’t have experience at all.
8
Weekends, when everyone else was off singing hymns, Santi was learning how to make a compass out of a pine needle, how to weave a bracelet out of paracord, how to build a shelter without tools. He asked once why they didn’t go to church. His dad just smiled and said, “Where do you think God really lives?”
On the Free Page 3
