by John Hansen
One day I started out on the trail, audaciously determined to reach the peak of Mount Sinopah, who top I had been eyeing enviously for days. Eventually, to my own surprise I reached the top, but only after eight solid hours of non-stop chugging, scrabbling, stumbling and cursing up its side.
When I finally reached the summit I was awarded with a view of the dark-indigo waters of Two Medicine Lake down below, where Alia and I had glided across in the canoe, and the surrounding forests like a thick carpet of green. Further on I could see the small, thin, Lower Two Medicine Lake, which our lake fed, and which lay in reservation land near Browning. And beyond all that? The eastern prairie sprawled seemingly forever into the horizon till it was lost in the haze of the evening light.
I was late getting back from the peak, because I had seriously and naively underestimated its distance. By the time I found the lake trail, the one that meandered around the edge of the lake in a lazy circle hidden in the trees, and which ended at our store, it was already ten p.m. and I was exhausted, dirty, scratched by branches and … immensely satisfied. Another forty-five minutes to my bed, I thought as I trudged down the trail.
I hiked in the dark, with no flashlight or even my phone’s light to aid me. Phones didn’t really work up in Glacier anyway, and I hadn’t used mine in weeks, so I had long ago stopped carrying it on hikes. I could barely see down the trail except for some moonlight palely showing through the trees. I felt a calm exhaustion and I fell into a rhythm of walking only the shadowy trail. Suddenly I felt an eerie presence near me, like something was following, and as I walked I heard steps behind me, a slight sound of crunching as feet fell on the path. I stopped and stood still, listening, and trying to pinpoint how far it was. As I listened I could tell it was close, and coming closer. A bear? I thought of Greg and what he would have thought of my night hiking.
I grew worried as the sound got even closer, and it sounded heavier than a human. I edged back onto the trees next to the trail, becoming enveloped in branches and perfect darkness. A dark shape approached. I saw a light break through the trees, peeking out between branches as the shape now came into view around a bend in the trail. I could see a fat, hairy figure, holding an old lantern in its right hand, and something long and silvery in the other. Bigfoot?
I peer out from the trees and the figure emerged into view in the weak glow of the swinging lantern.
“Thunderbird?” I said, now recognizing him with relief.
He looked over sharply at me, not seeing who called him. I stepped out and looked at what he was holding – three or four long, lake trout.
“Will?” he asked. “What are you doing out here?”
“I could ask you the same thing. Aren’t you worried about bears with that smelly catch in your hands, out here alone?”
He looked down at the fish confused for a moment, and then back at me, one of his eyes glinted in the reflection of the lantern light.
“Oh, they won’t bother me,” he said lightly, shrugging and looking around in the dark, as if bears were standing in a circle out there watching us. “They wouldn’t bother me,” he said again, louder, into the dark.
I noticed that there were no night sounds anymore as we stood there, no crickets, no wind rustling the branches, no coyote calls. I felt a chill run up my spine as I watched him stare into the dark. I noticed he didn’t have a fishing pole.
Then he turned and smiled brightly to me as if we had just ran into each other on the street. “Walk back with me!”
He sauntered off again and I caught up with him, his lantern casting swinging shadows before us in the trees. I pictured a big bear rumbling around a corner and roaring a challenge as it stood on hind legs in that pale lantern light – but none came as Thunderbird predicted.
The whole was back we didn’t say a word; it felt wrong to make a noise.
Fourteen
Alia didn’t come back until the week after, on a Tuesday as a matter of fact, and I was off. I was spending the morning fishing on the shore near to the store – rather trying to fish. I used to fish a lot as a kid so I had purchased a rod from the store and had taken up the sport again – hoping to catch some trout like Thunderbird did. But I had found something out that I hadn’t encountered before in my sojourns as a kid, and that hadn’t been mentioned in any of the articles, websites or other glitzy propaganda about my little valley in Montana (intentionally no doubt), and that was that each summer in Glacier, in the first couple of weeks of June, so right when the park opened, all of the valleys throughout the park were plagued by thick and hungry swarms of mosquitoes.
They hatched in May, and developed on the wing, voraciously ready to bite in June. They got so thick at times that they would look like a cloud of smoke around a person’s face; and I would resort to wearing long pants and a hoodie sweatshirt to avoid their swarms, even though it was often warm in the sun, and even though I used repellant that we sold at the store – which didn’t really work on these mosquitoes.
On that particular Tuesday, however, I was out fishing and wearing my makeshift mosquito uniform when Alia suddenly appeared. To avoid the flurry of the bloodthirsty swarm I had cinched down my hood of my sweatshirt to where only a hole about the size of a baseball was left open that I could stick my nose out of to breathe and to see a little; and I had pulled my sleeves down over my hands as I gripped the fishing rod and tried to turn the reel. Thus, there wasn’t one patch of skin exposed, except for my nose on which I had slathered a heavy layer of repellant like a lifeguard with a dab of sunblock. My system was starting to work when Alia suddenly strode up out of nowhere, walking along the lakeshore to where I was sitting on a log, not far from the store.
My body was hunched over the fishing rod, working the reel with awkward jerks. Alia laughed as she saw me. “You look like some homeless guy under a bridge,” she said, smiling at me.
The surprised grin on my face was concealed by my hood, but I got up and dropped the pole. I walked over to her without saying a word, and gave her a little hug. I pulled down the hood and stood up to meet her, brushing the mosquitoes swarming in from my eyes.
“I was wondering if you were gonna turn up again,” I said. She hugged me a second time, the top of her heard only coming up to my chin. I saw that she was wearing the same little, metal arrowhead earrings again.
“I’ve been around, but I’m working a lot” she said as we parted. “I’ve been trying to save up some money – I need to get a car. I’m tired of hitching rides.”
She had on some kind of mosquito repellant, natural stuff they had in Browning she told me, and it seemed to work perfectly. Since I didn’t want to wrap myself up like a mummy in my hood again now that she was there, we decided to go into the store and hang out in my room for a bit. It was the only place I could think to go that was indoors. It was looking like it was going to rain, anyway.
“So now you now,” she said to me as we walked, towards the store. “Here we have two weeks of mosquitoes, then two weeks of black flies, then we’re done.” Our feet make crunching sounds on the pebbles and stones lining the shore.
“The black flies don’t bite though; they just buzz around, in your face.”
I didn’t want to stare at her too obviously, so I casually watched her out of the corner of my eye as we walked, watching her little lips move as she spoke. I suddenly felt such a deep rush of longing as we walked up those stairs to the back porch of the store that almost tripped up the steps. I pulled her close and hugged her again, smelling her hair, a sweet, flowery fragrance.
“You’re trouble,” Alia said in a voice muffled in my shirt.
I looked up at the screen door. Like last time, I didn’t want to hassle with Larry in some embarrassing encounter with his “no guests” mandate, so I peeked into the kitchen and saw that no one was there. Alia and I crept, holding hands, over the kitchen floor to the stair case leading up to the rooms when I heard Ronnie’s voice booming out.
“Hey bro! Who ya got there?” he bawled
.
He was up on the floor above where it looked down at the kitchen, and he was almost naked, wearing only a small pair of tight white underwear and showing not the slightest bit of self-consciousness or self-constraint – not even as he trotted down the stairs and bee-lined it over to the stairs to shake hands with Alia.
“Well, well, well, what have we here?” he asked. “Will? Maybe I should go get Larry and see what he things about this!” He winked at me, then turning to Alia and extending a hand, “Hi, I’m Ronnie. Who are you?”
Alia was amused, and laughed openly at the spectacle.
“Nice tighty-whiteys…” she said, shaking his hand. “I’m Alia.” She turned and buried her face in my shirt in mock embarrassment. “I think I just saw his wiener!” she said into my chest.
I laughed too, but warily, giving Ronnie a warning look as we walked over to my door. He followed us over with a big grin on his face.
“Nice to meet you, Alia!” he said as I slammed the door shut in his beaming face.
I could smell a faint sweet perfume rising off of her again, as I closed the door and she walked over to the bed.
“So you got any ‘tighty whiteys’ in here, Will?” Alia asked as she opened one of my dresser drawers and playfully poked around in it with her hand.
“Come sit over here,” I shook my head. “I want to show you something.”
Worried now about intrusion at any minute, from Ronnie, Larry, or whomever, I wanted to make the most of any private time I had with her. That was really the main downside to the living situation at the store – you had very little privacy. My bedroom door had a 2-inch gap between the floor that transported every sound out in to the hall, and vice versa. More than one I had heard Ronnie rutting like a hog in his bedroom with some poor girl he had picked up who knows where.
I pulled out my acoustic guitar from the beat up case and tuned it as she came over and sat down close to me on the bed, close enough for our shoulders to touch and her thigh to touch mine, close enough for it to have been on purpose to sit so close. She smiled as I finished tuning the old guitar.
“You gonna serenade me?” she asked, looking up at me with her big, dark eyes.
“I do take requests,” I said a little low-voiced, because I was staring back into her eyes and it made me nervous and full of adrenaline at the same time.
I looked down at my guitar neck, staring at the strings, desperate to think of a song I could play that she’d know, or even like. I was drawing a blank when she slide so close to me our hips were now touching, along with everything else. She smelled so good. “Teach me something,” she said quietly.
That helped. I had one sure-fire song in my repertoire to teach someone in a pinch – it was the easiest guitar song to play that was ever written, at least the easiest guitar intro to a song ever written – Silent Lucidity by the band Queensryche.
I slide the guitar over to her, which seemed a huge instrument as her little arm draped over the front of his to pluck the strings, as she cradled it in her lap.
I told her how to play the two little notes at the beginning, and, since she was familiar with the song, she was thrilled when she started playing it. She laughed openly, obviously delighted at the sound of the song coming from the strings, and she kept playing the two little notes as she looked up at me, throwing her a strand of her dark hair back with a shake of her head and then staring up at me again.
I leaned over and kissed her, and it was on the neck that my lips touched. Her neck was suddenly just there in front of me, so soft and smooth and exposed, with little strands of hair meeting the nape – an area I could not resist. I kissed her neck up and down a couple of times softly, then moved up to her lips and we kissed, tentatively at first, then deeply, pressing my lips heavily into hers, tasting her, then backing away slightly to let our lips lightly touch, my arms around her back and head. The guitar slid down off her lap onto the floor. She caught it with her foot as it almost hit the floor and let it rest softly down, even as we kissed.
I pulled her cheek aside and kissed her neck again, both sides, as she pulled her long straight hair back from my way. The arrowhead earring tickled my nose. I kissed the little area where the neck meets the shoulder, on her right side – a little spot I had been craving since I had first seen her. She rubbed my back and then held the back of my head while I kissed her, her hands buried in my hair.
We leaned back down into the bed and I began kissing her silently as I lay on her left side, half on top of her, but not wanting to crush her. I must have told her she was beautiful about a million times. She whispered that she loved my eyes and the way I looked at her. I kissed her head and chest and shoulders, her neck and earlobes, that little spot below the earlobes...
She stopped for a second and smiled, and she said, “I wanted to do this the moment we met… But you seemed so… unapproachable.”
Odd, given that fact that I felt I had stared at her like a vulture when she first walked in the store that day.
She kissed me and then she rolled onto the top of me. She sat up, straddling my waist with her prefect, brown thighs gripping me. My hands found her bottom and I gripped her by her cheeks, my hands digging into her firmness. But then she pulled my hands off, smiling, and scooted off the bed and walked over to the door. I thought she was about to leave for a moment, but then she switched off the light, and in a dimness only illuminated by dusk outside the half-closed window she came back to me, sitting back on top of me exactly as before.
She pulled my hand up and slid it up under her t-shirt. I felt her small breast, her little firm nipple between my fingers as I squeezed and held her in my hand, and I began slide my other hand under her shirt.
She stared down at me as I caressed both breasts, but I couldn’t see her face in the dim light, just her silhouette. I felt too self-conscious to speak in such a moment, and I thought she felt the same. But suddenly she leaned down and kissed me, and then whispered in my ear, “Are you for real? Can I trust you?”
“I’m as real as you are, Alia.”
Our lips were together again, and then a blanket was over us as our clothes and our fears and our doubts were shed. I entered her hungrily, beneath the covers, smelling her fragrance and I held her so close that it felt like we pressed into one. My hands explored every inch of her body, all of the parts I had watched, and I kissed her a hundred times.
Fifteen
Somewhere in the middle of the night, I awoke and we were still cuddling, entangled – her face on my chest and our legs intertwined as we held each other. She was awake; I could feel her eyelids blinking and brushing against my chest. Crickets chirped outside the window, and I could see a clear, star-heavy night sky outside, through the branches in the window.
“Will,” Alia whispered.
“Yes?”
“I just want you to know that you made me so happy when you asked me to spend time with you. Thank you for hanging out with me.”
She said it so quietly that it was hard for me to hear her tone of voice as she spoke, but it sounded like she was almost pleading, but I couldn’t be sure.
“Being with you,” I said back to her, “is different than it has been with others. I don’t know what it is, something about you… I had sworn off trying to find someone to be with when I moved here – at least for a long time.” I reached up and cradled her head in my hand.
I felt the tip of her finger touch me on the lips, and then linger there for a moment. She pulled it away slowly, and I felt her shudder.
“You make me feel like I can actually maybe be happy someday, Will, and I’ve never really felt that,” she whispered. “All I want in life is to be with a person who loves me, despite knowing everything about me, you know? Someone who misses me when I’m gone?”
I kissed her on top of her head, and she snuggled up closer to me, holding me tighter. “I even missed you these last few days. I wondered if you would come back at all,” I said in a voice heavy with feeling.
&nb
sp; “I’ve never told anyone this, Will,” she said. She repeated my name as if she liked the sound of it on her lips. “But I want to move… to California. I want to be an actress. It’s so stupid and corny that I don’t tell anyone. But if can just get out there and work somewhere, anywhere, be on the stage, or TV, I wouldn’t want anything else. Except you.”
She squirmed even closer into my arms. She reached up with her hand and ran her fingers through my hair, kissing my neck and the underside of my chin.
For a time, we just lay there, her head on my chest, cuddled up to me. I stared up at the dark wood paneling on the ceiling and just breathed in the scent of her hair. I wondered about her dream of moving to California, and thought it was no crazier than me moving to Two Medicine. The crazier the dream the better.
I pulled her on top of me and we kissed again, this time slowly, in no hurry. As we moved together, now knowing each other better, I whispered in her ear a thousand times that I loved her.
Sixteen
BAM, BAM, BAM! I opened my eyes wide as the loud booming sound came from my door, instantly wide awake. BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM! Larry; it had to be Larry. He was pounding on the door with his big, meaty fist.
“WILL!” Larry bellowed, “YOU’RE 30 MINUTES LATE TO WORK!”
I looked next to me on the covers where Alia had lain all night. She was gone.
“GET UP!” Larry shouted, pounding on the door again.
I was furious at his intrusion, treating me like a kid who overslept the bus to school. “All right, I got it!” I shouted.
I heard him stomping down the hall and back down the stairs to the kitchen. There was no sign of Alia. It had not been a dream though, I told myself as I sat up wearily in bed, because I could still smell her fragrance on the pillow. I then noticed that she had left the necklace that she had been wearing that night on her pillow. It was a small black string necklace with a little stone arrowhead on it.
