Bluebird Rising

by John Decure

  Twenty-six

  The Jeep rattled from side to side as I guided it off the dirt shoulder and up onto the slab of shiny black pavement. Kimberley sniffled, her long eyelashes fluttering.

  “What are you doing?” she said, sounding weakened.

  “Keep looking for the turnoff,” I told her.

  She’d fished a tissue from her purse and was dabbing her eyes and nose. “I’m kind of upset here.” The car blasted through a soggy chuckhole, rocking us both. “Do you mind?” she half shouted.

  I wasn’t in the mood for any more talk of regrets. “Look, I can appreciate that you’re upset, but this isn’t the time. Pull yourself together.” That was too strong, and I could feel her recoiling next to me. “Your dad needs you, Kimberley,” I added.

  Her sniffling died away as we curled higher and higher up the canyon. Then, just as the road briefly straightened itself, she pointed to a mailbox on the left. She had put her shades back on following her little cry.

  “We’re here,” she said, her voice still a pale imitation of the rumbling original.

  “Don’t be scared,” I said. She was shaking when I put my hand on her shoulder to steady her.

  She swallowed. “How do I do that?”

  “You don’t have to deny that you’re afraid. You just have to practice putting it out of your mind for the time being.”

  She stared at the floor mat beneath the dash. “I don’t think I can handle this.”

  “Okay. You can wait in the car.”

  I opened the car door and walked across the ribbon of gravel and dirt that passed for a road. A steep driveway not much wider than a bike path cut sideways down the hillside for less than a hundred feet, then abruptly changed direction, angling along the side of a one-story wood-paneled cabin without a garage. The surrounding woods were dead calm, but I could hear the shimmering echo of water flowing over rock far below. I got back into the Jeep and slowly navigated the drive, parking it sideways across the hairpin turn. In the event that Angie and Carlito returned, I didn’t want to be surprised.

  The cabin had a small front porch and awning, with a pair of curtained glass windows in front, both of which were cracked open. I crossed the porch and peeked through the glass.

  “That’s from the flood I told you about.”

  I almost jumped. Kimberley was standing not five feet behind me, pointing to the faded brown stripe that lined the bottom of the entire structure. “You can see where the waterline was.”

  I didn’t bother to ask her if she was okay. Perhaps she’d tried my mind-control suggestion. Maybe she just wanted Rudy safe so badly that her own safety didn’t matter for now. Either way, I needed her help.

  No lights were on inside the cabin. I tried the front door, but it was locked. Kimberley went to a hummingbird feeder that hung from an awning near the porch, sliding her fingers around the base of it. “Shit, they took it.”

  These Kirkmeyers with their hidden keys.

  The front door had a dead bolt, and I didn’t want to break it down, as it was the only entrance visible from the edge of the road. If we had to leave it that way, someone could loot the place before it could be repaired.

  “Let’s try the back,” I said.

  Kimberley made a funny face. “Got any rope?”

  As soon as we made it around the side, I saw what she was talking about. The cabin had been built on a flat ridge that stayed well hidden among the trees, but the pitch of the hillside was precipitous. We held hands, sidestepping along the cabin’s south wall. A corner of decking and wooden railing supported by a framework of thick posts jutted right out over the edge, like a defiant chin. I let go of Kimberley’s hand and reached for the railing, my feet skidding on a bed of fat brown leaves. I was at eye level with the decking, and through the railing, something about it looked amiss. I was reminded of that shabby motel bed that had tortured my spine the previous night.

  “Lemme find a way in first, and I’ll come through and open the front door,” I said over my shoulder.

  I strained to jerk myself up and over the top rail and heard a sickening crack, followed by a woman’s screams.

  I slid maybe a dozen feet face first, a two-by-four whacking me just below my right eye as it cascaded past me and down into the gulch in a shower of splintering wood. My head spun from the pain and the view below me: a long, steep drop to a creekbed lined with bluish boulders. Black dirt and dead leaves flew into my face, and I felt the waistband of my jeans tearing into my pelvis. But I’d stopped sliding.

  “Don’t move, I can barely hold you!” Kimberley shouted. She was flat on the dirt, puffing that red hair out of her eyes. Her downhill arm had a death grip on the bottom of my pant leg, and her uphill arm strangled the base of a sapling that had snapped off cleanly a few feet from its base.

  I dug around in the dirt until I felt a wiry root. I yanked it up and hung on. “I’m okay. You can let go.”

  It took a few long minutes of careful crabbing on all fours to get back up over the ridge. We leaned against the cabin, breathing hard. Then we crept around back and had a closer look.

  A few supports remained, but most of the decking and all of the railing had gone straight down the hillside. I remembered the funny look the deck had just before I’d reached to pull myself up, making me think of that warped bed last night, the satellite dish. Shit. The deck I’d been staring at was concave in the middle, a part of its support structure already gone.

  I told Kimberley what I’d seen. Then we crouched together, peering down through the trees. She’d lost her sunglasses in the scramble on the hillside and had to shield her eyes with a hand. Half her nails were broken, a few of them bleeding.

  “By the way, thank you for saving my butt,” I told her.

  “You don’t have to thank me. This is turning into the biggest fiasco of my life. We find my dad alive, I’m telling you, I’ll probably kill him myself.”

  The tangle of branches below made it hard to see much of the gulch, but I didn’t rush myself, studying the shapes one by one. A small, dark, well-rounded boulder at the edge of a line of rushing muddy water stood out. What looked like the branch of an overhead tree just above the well-rounded rock appeared, on closer inspection, shaped more like an arm. A man’s body, facedown.

  “I think I see him,” I said slowly.

  Kimberley crowded in closer to align herself with my view. The black ski parka I’d loaned her had a jagged tear just below the heart.

  “Is it Dad?”

  The body wasn’t moving. A sizable hand was twisted palm-up into the sun, a slice of powder blue shirtsleeve encasing the wrist. I felt a pang of sadness shoot through me like a jolt of high voltage.

  “No. It’s Dale.”

  I gave Kimberley the car keys and sent her to get help, then slowly, deliberately started working my way down the hillside. A rocky ridge halted my downward progress, forcing me to bear farther right through a dense jumble of brush. For a minute, I thought I might have to go back up and begin my descent all over again. I paused for a blow, resolved to hack maybe ten more feet before turning back, and within two steps, stumbled right onto a trail. The thing was no more than six inches wide and absurdly steep, but I followed it down, sliding a good part of the way on my ass.

  Dale’s skin wasn’t yet cold, but he had no pulse. Both his legs appeared broken, his left foot twisted backward, the shoe missing. I turned him over, cleared his bloody tongue, which he had swallowed, and started CPR. Ten minutes later, I stopped.

  Slats of finished wood from the cabin’s decking lay all along the creekbed. I wondered what had happened to my friend. The cabin was nothing fancy, but it was nowhere near decrepit. The decking looked solid and well constructed; that’s why I hadn’t hesitated to reach for it.

  There was no way I could move a man Dale’s size back up the hillside, but there was also no way I was going to leave him there like that. I didn’t care if he was dead. He deserved better.

  I held his head in my lap, bru
shing his loose brown hair straight, waiting. I recalled the glide in his step that first day he’d chosen me as a juror, those big hands working as smoothly as a magician’s to emphasize a point, the voice as soothing as it was authoritative. All that was years before the rapid, spectacular decline that had brought him to me, but I didn’t care about that anymore. A chill ocean breeze blew up the canyon. My jacket was torn at the armpits, the sleeves soaked with icy runoff from the creek. I held Dale a little tighter. You will be remembered well, I told my secret mentor. Then, with my thumb, I gently closed his silvery eyes to the world.

  Nothing stirred uphill, and eventually I stopped looking—hell, either they were coming or they weren’t. My right eye smarted to the touch, and my hands were rubbed raw just below both wrists from my slide off the collapsing decking. The worst pain was radiating from my rib cage when I shivered, which was more frequently now that the sun had ducked away. Lucid white clouds drifted up the canyon, the tallest trees scraping their undersides into vanishing swirls of smoke. A voice inside my head did battle with the silence, hushing the creek and the wind through the trees and the nervous tittering of unseen birds. “J.,” it called to me, quietly at first, then louder. “J.” I tried to quiet the voice with thoughts of home, of Porpoise Way and Carmen and Albert, Max’s big sphinx’s head patrolling the yard outside the kitchen windows. “J.” A wrinkled hand reached out and shook my shoulder. “Hey, J.”

  Rudy Kirkmeyer stood over me, gazing upon Dale’s peaceful visage.

  “Where did you come from?” I said.

  “I’ve been hiding.”

  He sounded coherent. “Hiding?” I asked.

  “Up there, around the bend.”

  “What happened?”

  He took his time answering. “Some wood, lotta wood came crashing down a while ago. So I waited.”

  “You waited.”

  He nodded, the hillside bearing down on us like a merciless giant. “Didn’t hear anything for a long time after, though.”

  It was the first time he’d ever spoken to me with his faculties this much intact. Resenting the deception, my jaw tightened.

  “Where’s Kimmy?” he said.

  “Up there, getting help.”

  He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off Dale. “How bad?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Rudy staggered back. “Dead? No, no, no! He can’t be!”

  I leveled an icy stink-eye on the old man. “Rest assured, he’s not faking anything.”

  A helicopter came and lowered a bright red basket three times, plucking Rudy first, then Dale, then me. They flew us to a small hospital in Monterey not three blocks from the wretched little motel where Kimberley and I had slept the night before. Rudy was given a general physical and released, his hands wrapped in white gauze. During the chopper ride over, he seemed particularly stimulated, so I asked him to recount what had happened.

  “Woke up last night to this strange noise outside, out back. Carlito was out there. Crouched down, by the decking.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Well, no, that was the thing, he was under it. Had a flashlight.”

  “What was he doing?”

  Rudy’s face glazed. “You’re J., right? How’s Dale?”

  He was fading again. This time I believed it, for he had no more reason to employ any false pretenses. The chopper glided low over wild meadows and offhand clusters of oaks.

  “What was Carlito doing?” I said a few minutes later.

  “Lotta grunting and huffing and cursing. Had a flashlight under there. Clanking noises.” Then he paused. “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, Rudy. You’re okay.”

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out their plan: a fall like that could kill even a young man. The last time I spoke by phone with Dale, he said Carlito had stopped at a hardware store to buy tools—tools he’d used to deconstruct that deck just enough for it to give way.

  Then Rudy surprised me with another burst of lucidity. “Knew my daughter offered an extra fifty grand for the divorce, but that Angie, she’s a spitfire.”

  “She was looking for your will.”

  “There wasn’t one, either. I was real worried I might tell her, too, you know, in one of my … lesser moments.” He looked away. “Carlito wouldn’t let me out of his sight. I thought, I’m dead. But I woke up this morning with an idea. Like a miracle or something, you know? There it was.”

  “What was your idea?”

  “I’d stage an accident before they got up. Their accident, the one I knew they were planning for me.” He went silent for a patch. “Sorry, having a … a spell. Like two voices in my head talking at the same time.” His hands chattered in his lap.

  I told him to take his time.

  Just before we landed at the hospital, he told me the rest. “Found some twine in the kitchen utility closet. Then I slid out the sliding glass onto the deck. Whew, that wood was sure creaky. Stayed flush against the house, sidestepped to the edge, then I slipped through the railings. Beneath the deck, one support looked pretty wobbly, bolts were all loose on it. I backed the bolts off by hand the rest of the way, then I tied the twine around and around the post. Trailed the twine behind me and slid on my backside down the hill a way. Hit the trail down below, top of it, but didn’t move. I don’t know how long it was, I have trouble with time. But I lay there, in the dirt, top of the trail, jerking that twine, jerking, jerking, come on! Nothing happened, that back porch didn’t budge. After a while—least I think it was a while—I saw Carlito up there, stomping around, knew he was looking for me. Gave up my idea and figured I’d be safer down in the gulch. Slid the rest of the way down.” He closed his eyes. “I get dizzy thinking about it.”

  “How did you wind up farther upstream?” I asked.

  He stared at me. “Was I?”

  “Yeah, you came downstream to meet me.”

  That familiar glaze had returned. “Oh, right. I … don’t know.” Then his eyes sparked. “But there is a neighbor up the canyon a little way past our cabin. I could’ve … was probably trying to get there. Doesn’t matter, though. I didn’t get fifty feet beyond the next bend there. Fell down on a pile of boulders, I do remember that.” He looked at his feet as if they were a new discovery. “My ankles were killing me.”

  “What about Dale?”

  “Don’t know. I heard Carlito swearing up there. Then this big crash came a little later.” He closed his eyes as if to help clear his mind. “Then another.”

  “Another what?”

  “Another crash.” Rudy shrugged. “I think it was a little later. I have trouble with time.”

  My best estimate—and what I told the police—about what happened to Dale was that he’d moved in quickly when he saw Angie and Carlito split in the Lexus alone, thinking they’d left Rudy behind and this was his chance to grab him back. Finding the front door locked, Dale had most likely done what I did, curling around to the back. Climbing up the railings, he’d gone down—all the way down. The second crash Rudy heard came when I duplicated Dale’s failed attempt to get inside the cabin from the rear.

  We returned to the cabin with the police and spent another hour telling the same stories before they let us go. It was just before noon when we reached the bottom of Rocky Point Drive. The morning fog was gone and the sunlight dazzled overhead, the ocean wind-whipped and electric blue. We took a vote on whether to go north, then cut inland until we hit the 101 southbound for L.A., or head south on Highway 1 for the slower but ridiculously scenic drive through Big Sur proper. I’ve seen so much scenic coastline that I didn’t really care to see any more that day, so I voted 101. Kimberley had never driven Highway 1 through Big Sur but had heard about it all her life, so she voted to head straight south. In a move that probably signaled a powerful future trend, Rudy instantly sided with his daughter.

  We stopped for lunch at a restaurant called Nepenthe, a glassedin place high on a cliff-top with a good menu and friendly earthmother waitresses. No one said mu
ch. It was the first time I’d eaten since those teeth-cracking rockamuffins at the motel that morning, and my avocado club and side salad tasted wonderful. Kimberley had given her father the business at the hospital, but since then, she’d left him alone. He’d been through plenty, and, contrary to his daughter’s cynical assessment, he’d weathered the action with a mind he couldn’t trust.

  The drive was all any tourist could ask for, but it flashed by like an old rerun I’d seen too many times. For once, the ocean’s vast seductive powers held no sway over me. Instead, in every craggy outcrop smashed by pouncing surf, every empty sandbank buffeted by the brisk onshores, every twisted cliff-side tree branch groping for the sky, I saw Dale. I thought of what he’d said a few days ago about learning from me not to sit back, but to act. Christ. He’d ignored my instructions to wait until I arrived to help Rudy, snaking his way around the back of the cabin, just as he probably thought I might have done … and just as I eventually did. As I navigated each turn, eyes fixed on little more than the endless yellow stripes ticking by beneath my window, I was struck by the notion that I’d somehow mentored him in his final days, contributing to a short-lived burst of self-confidence, and a pointless, horrible death. The thought unsettled me, and I sat there, gripping the steering wheel, the most beautiful coastline in the state blowing kiss after kiss that, on this day, could only fall short.

  With Big Sur behind us, the highway jogged left toward the rolling hills of Cambria and Hearst Castle. A few miles north of town, I spotted a handful of cars and a mammoth tourist bus parked in the dirt along the shoulder. Across a flat meadow just above the beach, people were standing and pointing and taking pictures.

  “What’s that?” Kimberley said.

  “A spot where the elephant seals have established something of a natural rookery,” I said. “Last time I checked, there were at least a few hundred of them.”

  “So, what do they do?”

  I smiled a little. “Pretty much whatever they want.”

  We whizzed past the parked vehicles and I checked the scene in my rearview mirror. Then I hit the brakes.