Mountain

by Ursula Pflug

  Skinny excused himself and went back to the kitchen tent, moved boxes around. Nobody noticed me. After my shoes were wet through, I went and sat down on a picnic bench under the fly. It was one of those big open sided things, utilitarian beige canvas, like the army or boy scouts have. Skinny and a hippie-looking woman kept moving boxes from one end of the tent to another, arguing about how it should be done. It was the woman who’d been cursing him the day we arrived. They had a little cook fire going outside by then so I took off my socks and shoes and put them nearby, hoping they would dry. “Where’s your people?” the woman asked, walking past me with a box. “I’m Nan, by the way.”

  “My mom’s Laureen,” I said, as though that explained everything. She shrugged, not impressed, I guess.

  Skinny came over just then and sat down beside me. “Hi again,” he said, and lit a cigarette.

  Laughing Eyes, I thought to call him. He was like a dolphin with its fixed, perpetually blissed out smile, or those dogs with turned up lips: happy looking, even when they’ve just been kicked. Later, I was to come back to that observation and ponder it some more, but at the moment I was busy noticing that Skinny’s teeth were white. You notice good teeth now that they’re becoming rare.

  “So, Camden,” he asked, “you want to come check in yet?”

  “Where?” I asked.

  He pointed to a big orange nylon tent set discreetly back among the pines. He’d worn a path through the muck and pine needles and bits of snow. “My office,” he said, a little proudly. The flap was open and inside I could see the screen of a laptop opened on a card table.

  “Who set up the Wi-Fi if Laureen wasn’t here?” I asked.

  “Daniel can manage a local area network,” Skinny said. “But there’s no internet yet. We’ve all been waiting for your mom on account of that.”

  “Take her twenty minutes at the outside,” I said. Skinny wasn’t the sort you could complain about Laureen to, I got the feeling, so I might as well join the bragging club. Unlike some people, I had the right to.

  Skinny laughed. He ducked into the tent and started typing without even pulling up his little folding chair.

  “Can I wait?” I asked. “Don’t feel like moving yet.”

  “Sure,” Skinny said. “Wait for your socks to dry. Where’s your boots, anyway?”

  “Truck, I think,” I said. “It’s a bit of a mess.”

  Skinny nodded as if he knew all about keeping your belongings in messy trucks. “So,” he asked, “you ever been to a Tribe thing before?”

  “I’ve been to six or seven things like this with Laureen, but I’ve never heard of this Tribe before. If it’s so important, how come she’s never mentioned it?”

  “Saving the best for last, is my guess. And the first. Tribe gatherings were the first, are the biggest, have always been the best. Everything else is a cheap imitation. I’m not complaining; you can’t have too many these days. I’m an elitist in my own way, I suppose. Estevan is Tribe too,” Skinny said. “Maybe you just haven’t been listening.”

  It seemed possible. “But not Peter?” I asked.

  “If Peter was Tribe I’d withdraw my membership,” Skinny said.

  “Ditto,” I agreed. “Where do those crates of fresh vegetables come from?” I asked, pointing at the kitchen area that had miraculously sprouted crates and boxes of produce to augment the copious supply of cans and burlap-bagged dry beans.

  “An organic farm near Redding. We make weekly runs.”

  “That is organized. These Tribe people must be smarter than they look.” I made my own elitist face, scowling at Nan who was still muttering and moving boxes.

  “Or is that part of their smartness,” Skinny asked, “that they don’t look it?”

  As if I cared about his cryptic quips. I stared sulkily at the dripping trees.

  “Forget it,” he said, “whatever it is. Come for a walk?”

  He was pretty cute so I said okay.

  I put my still damp footwear back on. A muddy trail through pines opened onto another sloping meadow, this one empty except for a pile of logs on a rise, up out of the mud. Skinny possessively opened an aluminum toolbox sitting up on the logs, took out a thermos. He poured coffee, drank a big swallow, passed me the cup. I looked at him, weighing again. How germy could this guy be? The coffee smelled like ransoming my brain back from Laureen’s second-hand marijuana smoke; I drank. We sat down, passed the cup back and forth, listening to new arrivals call to each other from far away at the bottom of the woods. The sun rose over the treetops, began burning the mist off the meadow. I took off my still wet shoes and socks, stretched out, and stared up at the sky. I heard Skinny’s footsteps departing as I drifted off but when I woke up he was back, with two plates of toast and eggs. I began to cry. Skinny watched; smiling sympathetically, only a little confused. He started shovelling food into his mouth.

  “You slept for three hours,” he said after he swallowed. “Eat up. You’re probably starving if you’ve been on the road with Laureen. I’ll bet she’s forgotten how hungry kids get.”

  I’m not a kid, I was going to say, but didn’t, wondering how old he was. “That must be it,” I said instead, wanting to apologize for coming apart, but he stopped me before I could begin. “Cry as much as you want,” he said. “What the hell d’you think you came to this mountain for?” He said it like it was just a little funny, and I started to laugh. I was afraid the laughter would flip into hysteria, tears again, and Skinny said, not unkindly, “Shut up and eat.”

  And maybe that was all it was: nervous exhaustion and hunger and sleep deprivation and trying to get Laureen to talk about Peter.

  “Why are you hanging out with me, Skinny?” I asked when half my plate was gone, vestiges of my bad mood remaining in spite of catch-up food and catch-up sleep. Maybe I needed more of each.

  He stared at me. “Something wrong with you?”

  “What?”

  “You spit on company? I have to eat with someone; you’re new, I thought we could chat. You’re Laureen’s daughter; I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “That’s just it. You should be in your tent, having it on with Laureen.”

  He choked on his food, he was so incredulous. “Laureen’s never been my lover,” he said. “She’s twenty years older than me, at least. I just know her from, you know, Estevan’s school.”

  “Just checking,” I said, but I could tell I’d offended him. Truth is, my mom has been known to have young lovers, although Skinny would probably be breaking the half-your-age-plus-seven rule. Unlike my dad, she waited till after they split up. Maybe it was a revenge thing, or maybe, once she got older, she noticed younger guys weren’t as ageist.

  “You might think I bring breakfast to everyone, Camden Town, but I don’t. I’m too busy.” He picked up our empty plates and walked away, disappearing on the woods trail.

  I sat, watching him go.

  4

  BROWN AND WHITE and blue: the colours of spring before the snow melts. As always, the media fast made everything seem flat and dull. I knew from experience this would pass, that in a day or two nature would seem a better content provider than my phone ever did. I was tempted to sneak into Skinny’s tent and update my status on his laptop, that is, if my mom would stop moping and get the linkup finished. Anyway, what would I say? I couldn’t post a link to this gathering, because there isn’t one. It’s intentionally all word of mouth.

  Before we left Toronto, Peter said he’d come up from San Francisco and hang out, but he never did, at least not yet. We’re out of range of microwave towers up here, so Laureen set up an email thing via packet radio; it’s one of her specialties, basically Ham with terminals. It seemed like everyone my mother ever knew in San Francisco was saying hello, but not her old boyfriend. I, for one, didn’t want to see Peter at all; the guy gave me hives when he was within a hundred feet of me.

>   Daniel swaggered through camp like he set up the transceiver alone, and lots of people think he did, because he couldn’t be bothered letting people know.

  When Skinny pointed this out Daniel had the nerve to ask what the point was anyhow—it wasn’t like the drive to town was longer than half an hour.

  “She was just showing off,” he said. “More or less her reputation, that. And we could just as easily have built a bridge for Wi-Fi, boost the signal so it gets up this far from town.”

  Talk about pivoting.

  “Everyone knows Wi-Fi is bad for you,” Skinny said sagely.

  “Nice, Daniel,” Laureen said, overhearing. “Did it ever occur to you I’m going to run a workshop showing everyone how I did it? Useful skills they might be needing somewhere, some time. Even you.”

  “Not just that,” I said. It was a little unnerving the way everyone looked at me to hear what I was going to say next. Usually when I’m standing in a group chatting, even outside, we’re all looking at our phones while we talk.

  “What?” Daniel asked, staring down at me from under his eyebrows, too bushy by half.

  “Not everyone has a car. Not everyone wants to beg rides. There’s people without phones. Speaking as a non driver.”

  Laureen gave me the biggest grin and I almost wished I complimented her in public more often. Almost.

  I extricated myself since I didn’t have a phone to get out and stare at, wandered off after a half-hearted wave goodbye. Most people here were my mom’s age, either that or they were around thirty, trailing little kids and carrying babies. There was no one to talk to, no one close to my age other than Skinny and he was busy, running up and down the mountain doing his Security thing, wearing the same white T-shirt and a plastic police hat that suited him. I was bored.

  5

  DAY SIX. “Here’s a little cash,” Laureen said this morning, pulling a red Canadian fifty dollar bill from the duct-taped billfold she kept in the pocket of her old down vest. “Not that you’ll need it; I’ll only be gone overnight. There’s nothing to buy here anyway.”

  “Tie-dye T-shirts over there,” I pointed.

  After breakfast, the picnic tables outside Kitchen were often used to display dried herbs, hand-screened T-shirts, ’zines, and beaded earrings: more clutter to fill your pack with.

  Laureen rolled her eyes.

  “No, some of them are nice,” I said.

  “You need more shirts, really?” she asked, digging in her other vest pocket where I knew she kept her pipe.

  It’s always a climate adjustment going from one parent to another. Lark will say, “You’re bored? Go to the mall with Kaylee. Here’s twenty bucks. Bye.”

  Laureen is just the opposite. She gave me a put upon quizzical look and asked, “Did you forget to bring clothes?”

  My mother really doesn’t understand why anyone would buy a piece of clothing if they didn’t have to. She also looked a little guilty, as if I was going off to school with no clothes on at all because she’d somehow forgotten to provide for me. Which was a look I’d seen a lot of too.

  I would’ve rolled my eyes right back at her and made a smart remark, but she was leaving. I didn’t actually see her go, later that morning. She told Skinny to tell me she’d be right back, which was what she’d told me, too. Something about her saying it so often worried me a little.

  But a day was a day was a day, right?

  6

  WHAT IS IT ABOUT your parents walking out of your life, over and over and over? Lark did it first, with the first model. Now he does it by sending me to the mall with credit cards. Laureen just does it, climbing into her truck and going. Mostly she asks me if I want to come along; I have to give her that. I usually say no, preferring my father’s absenteeism, his plastic. This time I actually would have gone with her down to San Francisco just to get away from the muck, but she never asked.

  We were at the log pile in the second meadow drinking coffee when Skinny told me the reason she’d left wasn’t just to look for a part she needed, but to pick up Peter, her old beau I’d never liked.

  “Peter. All I need,” I said.

  “Have you ever noticed how hardware geeks can’t read people very well?”

  “My guess it’s partly why my mom became a hardware geek,” I said. “Low on social skills, she needed to develop expertise in another area.”

  Skinny laughed so hard he spilled his tin cup of coffee and almost fell off our log pile. When I think back, he laughed too hard for what I said.

  “I remember the first time they met,” I said once he’d stabilized. “We were driving down from British Columbia and picked Peter up hitch-hiking. I must have been nine or ten; my parents had already split up. He was on his way from Seattle to meet up with an activist puppet theatre in Oakland. My mother’s always liked thespians, although she’s on the science side herself. Amazingly, they’re still together off and on. Thing is, I didn’t really like him, even when I first set eyes on him.”

  “Unlike your mom, you read people well,” Skinny said.

  I wondered about that. My mother and Skinny seemed good friends, but I had the feeling Lark would’ve distrusted his homemade tattoos, just for starters. My dad was an actual honest to god rock star, albeit a minor one, but the rebel often seemed long gone in him, if it had ever existed.

  “Including you?” I asked.

  Skinny shrugged and I worried I’d offended him again. He tapped the ash from his hand-rolled cigarette and rubbed it into his black jeans.

  “Is that to keep bugs away or what?” I asked. Like Daniel and my mom and Nan and other Tribe folks, Skinny was up on outdoor survival skills. But he was staring at me kind of vacantly and I wondered whether he’d even heard what I said.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Sorry, I was dissociating.”

  “So it seemed. Anyway, I told Laureen what I thought.”

  “What’d she say?” he asked.

  “She said I was just jealous of the attention she was paying Peter instead of me. Now that I’m older I still think I was right. It’s not like he didn’t try and charm me, at least at the beginning. It just didn’t work on me the way it worked on her. I’m my father’s daughter. I’ve got a few performer’s genes myself so I can smell a player.”

  “Takes one to know one,” Skinny agreed. “Unlike Laureen, who’s shy as they come, kind of Aspie really.” He picked up a lump of soggy snow from a patch of shade and rubbed it between his hands. When he was done he opened them and looked, nodding in satisfaction at their newfound cleanliness.

  “Yeah. Also unlike Laureen, I can usually smell it when people are acting.” I examined my own hands. There weren’t too dirty and there were only tiny flecks of pale blue polish remaining on my nails, unfortunately stuck to the cuticles. My friend Kaylee would’ve had fits, wheedled someone into driving her down the mountain to the store just so she could buy Cutex. “It pissed Peter off when I didn’t warm up to him,” I told Skinny. “More than a little.”

  Skinny leaned forward then and hugged me, right out of the blue. It was strange because he’s not a very touchy guy, in spite of the big hug he gave my mom when we first arrived. Then he abruptly got up and walked away down the trail back towards Kitchen, mumbling about some files he had to update, not meeting my eyes.

  Later he told me it was because he was crying, but it was a long time later.

  7

  DAY SEVEN. Some new teenagers have shown up, in couples or threes or all alone, hitching from one city or little town or another. They’re not Tribe teenagers. They stick to themselves in little campsites far back in the woods, or right out in the open near Kitchen, where you’re not really supposed to camp. Maybe they’re afraid of bears and think the presence of large quantities of canned goods might keep them safe.

  Free food. The great outdoors. We have variations of the sam
e weird conversation. It’s happened a few times now, crossing paths with new kids wandering through muddy meadows. Sometimes they’re in rags that make me ashamed of my fancy jeans and new Reeboks, admittedly mud-covered by now. I know for some of them the rags might be part of their look but even so, I still put mascara on first thing in the morning, don’t ask me why. I do it looking in a piece of broken mirror someone balanced between two nails on one of the posts holding up the new sun and rain shelter Skinny and Daniel built over the picnic tables outside Kitchen.

  “Are your parents here?” I asked a girl I met there this morning. She looked haggard and wet and hungry; shamefacedly asking for coffee as if she might be refused. I elbowed Nan away from the big urn she was acting like she owned and poured the girl the biggest mug I could find.

  “I’m here alone,” the girl said in what I guessed was a French Canadian accent that made her, like me, pretty far away from home. A whole continent, almost.

  “J’ai besoin d’un café aussi,” I said, pouring myself one in the second largest of our small hoard of mainly chipped ceramic mugs. She laughed but it was a nice laugh and I think she appreciated my trying. As lost as I sometimes felt, I still had an in compared to her, knowing Skinny and being related to Laureen.

  Not that Laureen was here. And when she was, she didn’t toot her own horn very much, in spite of her legend.

  Nan glared at us, imperiously sweeping her long black hair over the cutting board where she was about to get to work with what looked like a good knife and a bushel of potatoes. Yuck.

  “She brought me here and left,” the girl said.

  I wasn’t sure I should ask who she was. But after I thought about that, I realized we weren’t so different. “Know the feeling,” I said.