Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  The colt worked smoothly and well and sometimes McKay felt as if he were moving toward Mariko, then spinning away from her, only to turn quite suddenly into her arms … and still she did not come.

  A shiver went through McKay’s body when he saw dust from a car rise stiffly. He watched. It was the car Kai drove when they took the paper to press. The colt worked his mouth on the bit and when the car came to a stop between the house and the corrals, McKay opened the gate from horseback and rode through.

  A mountain thunderstorm had passed earlier that morning and the ground was still beaded with hailstones—“just like a broken strand of pearls,” McKay’s mother always said. Now McKay wanted badly to string his broken feelings for Mariko on a single strand. He remembered something Bobby had told him—something like “relax with things as they are”—and he wondered what it took to be smooth and natural and happy.

  Mariko got out of the car. She stood for a moment and watched McKay dismount. She brought a handful of flowers from behind her back.

  “Look,” she said, smiling. “They’re from Mr. Nakamura’s greenhouse. Freesias.” Her voice vibrated. She held the delicate blossoms under his nose and he inhaled deeply. Laughing, her eyes danced wildly.

  “Why didn’t you wait for me when you came to the Camp?”

  McKay shook his head. Some of the petals broke loose and fell back on her arms and McKay leaned forward to kiss the places where they touched.

  “I don’t know if I can stand this anymore,” he finally said.

  “Stand what?”

  “Not being with you all the time.”

  Mariko looked at the ground. “Shigata ga nai.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means, ‘There’s nothing to be done.’”

  “Isn’t there?”

  She stared at him.

  “Maybe we should stop,” he said.

  “Stop?”

  “It’s tearing us both up.”

  “So will stopping.”

  McKay looked away. The horse sneezed and rubbed his head against McKay’s shoulder.

  “Let me see,” Mariko said, stepping closer to touch the scars on his face. “Have they gotten to you? Is that why you say these things?”

  “Who? Gotten to me how?”

  “That guard who beat you up.”

  “How could you say that?”

  He turned away, then looked. But what good did it do to read her face, to know every inch of her when it only led to more passion, another impasse? He led the colt back to the corral and pulled the saddle. Mariko followed him, carrying the flowers. He threw the saddle blankets over the horn and slung the bridle in the crook of his elbow.

  “I feel like I’m dying all the time,” he said hoarsely.

  “From it? From us?”

  “Yes.”

  The colt went down on his knees, then rolled in the dirt, first one side, then the other, stretching his neck out to rub the sweat spots behind his ears.

  “Would you come here and live with me? You could get a permanent leave.…”

  Mariko watched the horse rise to his feet and shake. “I can’t.”

  Stunned, McKay felt like an elk that’s been shot in the leg and keeps running. He wanted to start the day over again and not have to wait so long for her and, when she came, not have to hear what he just heard. He sat down in the loose dirt. So that will not be my life, he thought, a life with Mariko in it: it will be something else. But all he could think of was the life he had now, doing the work of three men and loving the only two women he had ever loved, and waiting for his brothers and friends to come home, if they survived.

  “McKay?”

  He shielded his eyes from the sun. A truck drove by the house and he saw Madeleine look in his direction.

  “Come sit by me,” he said.

  Mariko sat with her legs stretched out. “I did apply for a long-term pass,” she said in a soft, clear voice. “It was denied.”

  “When?”

  “A month ago. Because I’m married to Will and he’s what they call a ‘disloyal’—that makes me one too, in their eyes.”

  McKay rubbed his forehead. “What do we do now?” he asked wearily.

  “What we have been doing …”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked and her voice broke.

  “What’s the point?” he said.

  32

  It was summer, and Carol Lyman’s house was hot by seven in the morning so she went for an early drive, heading north for Warren through the rocky foothills of the Pryor Mountains where the wild horse herds were. She and Willard had washed the black coupe in the yard after Willard finished with the roosters, but already it was covered with a film of dust. She looked at herself in the oval rearview mirror as the car bumped along. The Wild Man once said her hair was the color of burnt umber, a color darker than rust. What had carved such deep lines in her face? she wondered. She rolled down the window and let the wind hit her, but it made no difference—nothing softened the brittleness. Stretching her neck, she held her hair back with one hand: she hated the way her ears stuck out. Then she wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel until the long, painted nails stuck into the palms and made them go white.

  The road climbed through blasted rock. Up above the world she could see the white mounds of mine tailings; the empty, waiting boxcars; the winding layout of Snuff’s. She continued on what had been the freight road between Montana and Wyoming for fifty years, passing the cave where the Outlaw Gang had spent a night on their way to the Hole-in-the-Wall country. The road switchbacked up and up. She came to a fork and recognized the road to the right which had led to the secluded Heaney Ranch.

  She decided to walk. It was a narrow valley with a long meadow bounded by pine forests. How far was the house? She couldn’t remember. Once, she bent down and drank from the creek with her hands. It was a hot day, but the breeze on her wet face cooled her.

  She tried to remember Willard’s father: one front tooth was crooked and his fingernails had grown long from not working and his dark hair was gray in the front and his voice was soft and gravelly.…

  She remembered the Chinese lanterns swinging from the veranda and the green lawn bordered by sagebrush, and the man’s black-haired Irish mother who greeted the guests bedecked with Indian jewelry and gaudy Crow moccasins, and she remembered a young boy, Henry, with deep-set green eyes, exploding with laughter everywhere he went, and the cool hallway, the sound of fiddle music, the dark room where he lay.

  The gate was open. She stood on the grass and called out. No one answered. The trees were bigger than she remembered, but why shouldn’t they be? She walked to one end, then the other. She felt so brittle as she moved, she thought she could hear her bones breaking.

  She leaned against the edge of the veranda. “Ossification of the bone results in extreme …” She stopped and drummed her fingernails on the weathered wood floor. “Narrow … so narrow …,” another thought began. She pushed her hip against the planks.

  She thought of his seed climbing the ladder of her body and the one egg, imploded by sperm.… At that moment she held the hard edge of the porch with her bony hands, then threw herself against it again and again. I must break myself, she kept thinking, break myself open. The wood gouged her abdomen. I must break into where I held him, held his beauty.… The wide planks squeaked as she threw herself, and she heard the hard sound her body made every time it struck.

  “Ma’am?”

  She jerked awake. A young cowboy with a mustache wearing a hat that had been through too many rainstorms stood before her.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?” he asked.

  She was lying on the lawn in front of the veranda because she was afraid to go back, afraid that Snuff would, at the last minute, find her unsuitable, unbendable, impervious.

  “I’m so sorry … I walked a long way, then I must have fallen asleep.” She primped her hair and ran her finger over her uncolo
red lips.

  “Yes, ma’am, I saw your car.”

  “Goodness,” she said, getting to her feet. One deep wrinkle ran diagonally down her dress. “I must be …” The shadows of pines swept across the grass. She looked back at the young man. “Are you a Heaney?”

  “No, ma’am, I just ride for the association.…”

  She looked at the house again. “I went to a party here once,” she said weakly.

  “Yes, ma’am, I heard they used to have some good ones here before the Depression.”

  “Everyone came.…”

  “Yes, ma’am …”

  Carol straightened the front of her dress and buttoned her sweater. “Well, I best be going.”

  “On foot?”

  “Oh yes … it’s not really far, is it? Then the drive back to Warren. Do you know what time it is?”

  “No, ma’am. My sundial’s plumb broke.”

  She smiled. “You must like it up here.…”

  “Yes, ma’am, it’s good country.”

  “Yes …,” she said and began the long walk back to her car.

  Carol drove down the mountain too fast because she didn’t want to use up her brakes. Some mornings Willard’s father did not seem dead, merely away, as many of the men were in those days, and she reported to him under her breath about the condition of his ranch house, about the snowpack, and war casualties. Always, at the end, she added something about Willard—what he had done that week, what a good job he was doing with Mañuel’s roosters.

  Sometimes she felt irritated that his death had impeded the future, but lately she saw how pure and unblemished by life he had become, and when she talked to him, his presence surrounded her like a pure gas.

  Willard rode a horse older than he was, a black mare with feet round as pancakes and heavy fetlocks, and thick ears that bounced forward and back like a mule’s when she walked, which was as fast as she moved in twenty years. It wasn’t just that she was approaching thirty, but she had brains. She knew more about Willard than Willard knew, understood that he had a different scent, not a man smell, a mix of sweat and sperm and beard, and not a sweet-salty woman scent, either. His was the slightly stale smell of innocence, guilelessness bottled up for so long it had become an unwitting beatitude.

  The mare knew all this when the pear-shaped boy rambled across the pasture in her direction, coming not to catch her, kidnap her, put her into service, but rather to pull carelessly toward her warmth and bulk. Everyone had seen the boy and the mare walk side by side in the borrow pit, the one not leading the other, but strolling together, stopping to swat flies. Sometimes Willard rode her bareback with a piece of twine looped loosely around her neck, giving it a shake each time he wanted to talk to her, but couldn’t.

  Mañuel had given Willard the first week of July off, though he continued to water and feed the roosters every morning, and only after did he ride. It was a hot day and he smelled the irises a homesteader had planted on the hillside, which had been left untended for fifty years. He slid off his horse and hid behind the screen of a low juniper and saw them, saw the backs of the two riders and the huge haunches of the horses churning muscle, and her black hair so long it touched the horse’s back as if it were trying to become another tail. He saw them climb through the breaks and go up into the shaded grove of juniper trees where the water came out of the ground, from between two rocks. He saw the glistening rumps of the horses where they were tied in the trees.

  Now he watched how the woman with the hair like a tail knelt by the spring and, cupping water in both hands, brought it between the man’s legs, and later, how he held her breasts with his wet hands and sucked her like a calf. Then they lay on their sides with the yellow slicker thrown over them on the juniper needles, her back fitted against his front as if there were not two of them, but one. He knew what they were doing because he had seen bulls with cows and rams with ewes, and the way roosters hopped on each other’s tail feathers and tried to hold the captive’s neck down, but it troubled him to see the woman lying on her back facing the man. Later, she turned and he saw the man climb on her from behind, and he felt better because that’s how it was supposed to be done.

  He forgot they could see him and he stood. McKay rose up from under the slicker. “Willard … what are you doing up here?”

  Willard held onto the black mare’s mane with one hand and closed the other over his eyes, as if to make himself invisible.

  “Willard?” McKay said again.

  Willard felt the aqueous part of his mind jostling, and he reached for the sounds that make words but only faint squeals came out, and when they were gone, the words McKay had spoken settled on that interior lake the way mallards land on water.

  Now the woman was sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest, and she was laughing. Willard came out from behind the juniper and walked toward the grove. McKay stood at the edge of the shade. Mayflies and mosquitoes swarmed him and he hit himself with little slaps and Willard stopped where he was, thinking the slaps were intended for him. The woman was still smiling: a shaft of hot sun pushed down on her shoulder and Willard felt drawn to her heat and repelled by McKay’s shade, so he didn’t know which way to go. One strap of his overalls was unhooked and his big forehead shone with sweat, and he made a noise that was almost a word but sounded like a door creaking.

  “Hello, Willard,” McKay said.

  Then Willard smiled broadly and the woman who had stopped laughing smiled too, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand and holding the slicker across her nudity. McKay took the metal cup off the nail in the tree and held it where the water came out of the ground and, when it was full, handed it to Willard and he drank. McKay filled the cup again and offered it to the woman, then filled it again and drank himself.

  “Willard, this is my friend Mariko,” he said, and the woman held her long arm out toward him, and Willard could only stare at her beautiful hand. He sat down in front of her and crossed his legs like a schoolboy.

  When Mariko laughed this time, he saw her eyebrows lift high on her forehead. He peered over the edge of the slicker and watched her breasts shake.

  “We were just going to the falls, Willard,” McKay said.

  Finally Mariko stood. Her nakedness rose over Willard and shafts of sun moved across one breast, then the other, as McKay’s hands had.

  “We’re going now,” McKay said again, and Willard stood, his eyes still fastened to the woman. When she turned he saw her straight back, how it narrowed suddenly at the waist, how her buttocks stirred the way a horse’s haunch does. McKay put on his shirt and draped the slicker over Mariko’s shoulders, then picked up their clothes. Willard was standing at the edge of the shade, his face in shadow, his back doused by sun, and McKay and Mariko walked up the hill away from him. He watched them go arm in arm, and saw how once McKay’s penis stuck straight out from his body, fell, and rose again, as if lifting some invisible cargo. He saw how the ends of her black hair bounced and swung across McKay’s groin.

  They picked their way through the sagebrush up the hill. When Willard couldn’t see them anymore, he took the cookies from the pocket of his overalls and ate some and gave the others to the mare. Then it was no longer a matter of hide-and-seek, but of being drawn by them as if being led.

  He could see the falls from the spring, but as he moved closer, the long threads of white water disappeared behind bushes and trees, and he walked not to any specific place, but toward the wild noise hidden within the thicket of willow and rose hip and gooseberry and pine, until he was closed in too, and wondered whether he had ever been made invisible by sound.

  The mare had stopped at the edge of the thicket, but Willard pushed through until the water bubbled at his feet, and he entered the feminine cleft of the waterfall. He climbed the slick rock, falling once into twin streams of water, though now he didn’t think of it as water, but as noise. He walked to where the ground was level. A shallow pool surrounded by rocks was dappled by light. He took off his wet boots and
rolled up his pantlegs, and put his feet into the bitter cold and pulled them out again. The driving water sound was constant and even when a squeak pushed up from the top of his throat, he could not hear it and he wondered whether sound swallows sound as well as all that is visible.

  He climbed higher. No difficulty could assuage him now. Once he saw them naked under the falls. Long threads of white water twined themselves in her black hair, hitting her shoulder and spraying sideways, then falling again on rock older than Willard knew how to count, if he knew at all. Their skin shone like fish scales. They turned to each other once, and where Mariko’s head had been, he could only see McKay’s, and this scared him because now there was one head and two very different bodies. Later, he saw them step out of the water, in toward rock, and the water cascading by them looked solid, like one silver flash, and he could see them no longer.

  He climbed. He found footholds in giant, granite boulders and belly flopped over the top, then scrambled to the next one. He stopped to get his breath. When he looked again, he saw them lying, joined and motionless on a rock far above. The roar of the water gathered in a higher pitch as he gained altitude and the air sizzled with droplets that found their way to his overheated face. He pulled himself up to a level place. A huge snout-shaped rock towered overhead, and before him was a room scoured out by water.

  He had not known until then that rocks were also houses. He entered the grotto. Streams of water blackened the wall and the hollow echoing sound it made when it hit the floor was almost as loud as the rushing water sound outside. He wondered about McKay and Mariko. Had he come up underneath them? Had he climbed that far? Were they lying on the domed rock over his head? Something stirred in him he had not felt before, as if helium and hot sand had been sent shooting through his body, and he looked at the ceiling covered with lichen and moss and then pressed his hands up and up and up into that dark wetness and green sponge.

  Three of the roosters crowed an hour before first light, and soon the whole chorus chimed in. Willard knew which bird crowed first, because he knew their voices. Sometimes in the predawn dark, he ran outside in his pajamas and put his flashlight on the one crowing and watched how the bird’s neck arched and lengthened and after, how the neck feathers ruffled and smoothed, as if making that sound were like sucking a lemon. His own rooster, the one Mañuel had let him raise and train, was never the first one to crow. He kept off by himself, sometimes jumping the fence when Willard let him loose, only to eat with the goats and rabbits in the next pens. He was a friend of the goats, the way goats are natural companions to horses, and they tolerated the brown bird as he scratched the dirt between and around their legs, but when Willard went into the yard, the bird everyone referred to as “Drumstick” flew to Willard’s side.