by Vicki Grove
Hawk’s Slope is a treacherous gravel mountain, a monster built of tons of zinc mine leavings that looms a good three hundred feet high. Even ATV maniacs respect the Hawk and lay their trails only along the bottom third of it. It’s not easy to climb even in the daytime, the gravel tumbles and heaves so much. You slide back down as much as you make progress. People break legs and arms trying to get to the top. That hadn’t happened to any of the four of us, so we figured it only happened to fools. But even the local BMX fanatics had pretty much had their fill of pain and now left the Hawk alone.
Because the zinc mine fields were near the lake, we went there to do our pre-bonfire drinking, but definitely not to do night climbing up the gravel mountains. Everything about this latest Zero plan was too sudden, too extreme, and too illegal.
“Aren’t you gonna try and talk me out of it?” Zero had popped forward again to yell the question right at me, teasing me for worrying like they all three did upon occasion.
“We’re late already for the bonfire without climbing, that’s all,” I murmured.
Trey reached with an elbow to pry Zero back a few inches, yelling in his good-natured way, “Hey, save what you’re saying for the party, man! Nobody can hear you with Tucker racing the devil like this!”
Racing the devil. It was a strange thing to say, wasn’t it? Something from a movie, probably. Trey liked movies, even really old ones.
Zero disappeared from my peripheral vision, and the next time I glanced into the mirror, he was twiddling his fingers with his eyes slightly glazed again, planning.
You’re driving alongside Steve’s stepfather’s land for miles before you see the huge gates of the ranch. Those iron gates are hardly ever closed, but if you dare drive through them, there are surveillance cameras watching you all the time, hidden in the trees along the half-mile lane leading to Jasper Nordike’s sprawling mansion of a ranch house.
I’m not saying I know what qualifies as a mansion. But Janet’s been in that house a few times to cater parties and that’s what she calls it.
“I felt like I was at the White House, it was so beautiful,” she told me the first time she came back from being over there. “That music room where Cynthia keeps her harp and grand piano? Oh, my. And those collections she has, all that bone china in that huge walnut buffet, and I guess my favorite was that antique cabinet displaying those little glass thatched houses from her trips to England.”
Which is where her husband met the tour guide who’s now his trophy wife, I could hardly keep from saying. To occupy my mouth, I took another of the little leftover crepe things she’d brought back from that fancy party Steve’s mother had thrown.
“There’s six bedrooms in that house,” Janet went on. “Each with its own big-screen television set and its own bathroom, all with jetted tubs. It’s been featured in six decorator magazines.” She sighed like a dazzled little girl. “They even have a bowling alley in the basement. But you know all about it, Tuck, being good friends with Steve.”
I’d never been in the ranch house. Steve doesn’t ever go in it unless he’s forced to.
Four years ago, his mother had been playing harp with a small orchestra at a cattlemen’s convention in Memphis when she met Jasper Nordike, the third-largest rancher in Oklahoma. They married and Steve had to move here from Memphis right in the middle of ninth grade. You only had to hear Steve take out his battered clarinet and play some Memphis blues to understand completely how he felt about that sudden move.
Since Steve grew up on horseback, Jasper Nordike was happy to let him help with the ranch, working cattle in the summers and a lot of school-year afternoons. They use several full-time hands on their three thousand acres, so there’s a bunkhouse, and Steve begged and pleaded until finally his mother gave up and let him move his stuff out there.
He ate breakfast in the bunkhouse, did his share of cooking, and only visited the ranch house for supper sometimes, not very often. In the bunkhouse he slept in a top bunk, one of six narrow beds, three sets of bunks, all in the same room with a small television, a kitchenette, and hooks for gear and clothes lining the log walls. There’s one shower stall for all six ranch hands. Being clean isn’t a huge priority.
Steve had movie star cowboy looks to begin with, and they only got worse until by this year most of the girls in our class were either sick with longing for him or furious with him for dating them then dropping them with no explanation. His white-blond hair was always sweat spiked in random directions, set off by his all-year tan. He wore his jeans for so many days that they became fitted. His boots, relics from Memphis, had the broken-in look boots only get when you’ve done years of crazy things in them.
“Steved” is what we enviously called the reaction he caused when he slouched down the halls of Clevesdale High. Those poor girls he passed had been “Steved.”
He didn’t realize how handsome he was, or care. The word around school was that Steve was too vain and too choosy to date a girl more than once or twice. But he was the farthest thing from vain, and the only choice that truly mattered to him had been taken away when his mother remarried and moved him to Clevesdale, Oklahoma. He dreamed so constantly of moving back to Memphis that it was clear to Zero, Trey, and me that he didn’t have the heart or head space left over to care about much beyond that.
I slowed the Mustang to a crawl as we turned off the paved entrance lane to the ranch house and onto the rutted dirt road leading to the stables and the bunkhouse.
There was Steve, leaning against a fencepost with his boots crossed at the ankle, playing his clarinet. He raised one arm in our direction to say he saw us, then took off his hat and sailed it onto the bunkhouse porch. I thought he’d dodge inside the bunkhouse himself to stow his clarinet, but he tucked it into its ratty case and brought it with him.
“Last bonfire of the year,” he explained as he hoisted that case onto the backseat and climbed in behind it. “Thought I’d play us some music in honor of that, out at the zinc mines. When I first got good enough to play blues, I used to play ‘St. Louie Woman’ from the roof of the Peabody Hotel sometimes, just as the sun set over the Mississippi.”
Zero snorted. “You are one seriously sentimental dude.”
Trey and I were smiling at that as I carefully turned the car and took us back over the dirt trail of a road to its junction with Jasper Nordike’s smooth entrance drive.
I let the car idle there for a minute because the dozens of automatic lights surrounding the ranch house had just come on. From this distance the place looked like a castle from a kids’ book, or maybe a cathedral like in Europe. It drew all our eyes.
“Dude, I would live there,” Zero told Steve. “I’d bowl every single night.”
At first Steve said nothing. Then, “It’s a real treasure house, all right,” he allowed. “But everything cost so much. My mother tells anyone who’ll listen that most of it’s one of a kind and can’t be replaced. Who can get comfortable in a place like that, where you can’t quit looking around and thinking how easy everything breaks?”
II
At the SpeedMart, Zero and I waited in the car while Trey and Steve started in to get the beer. “Guard my instrument!” Steve called back to Zero before the big double doors whooshed shut behind them.
Zero and I shook our heads and had a quick laugh at Steve thinking anyone would have an interest in his grungy old instrument case. Then Zero pushed himself forward.
“Admit that you’re worrying about my climb tonight, Tuck,” he demanded, giving my shoulder a little shake. “Come on, just admit it.”
What difference did it make? I shrugged. “It’ll be totally dark by the time we’re out there, too dangerous for the Hawk. And we are already late for the bonfire.”
“I knew it!” He gave a sort of triumphant cackle as he slid back to his own place. “Tucker, you innocent wonder, our lives are random, don’t you get that? A coin is flipped each time you walk outside—heads you get to eat your favorite pizza, tails you get hit
by a bus on the way to the pizza place. So you might as well get loose, dude. Maybe drink a few beers tonight, you know? Quit worrying so much! Have fun!”
I leaned forward and pushed my forehead against the hard black plastic of the steering wheel, letting Trey’s music thump its way directly into my brain. Why was Zero’s banter getting to me? It was just Zero being Zero. Besides, maybe he was right.
I’d tried drinking a couple of beers on two different occasions the fall of sophomore year. Beer tasted to me like something gone off, and I couldn’t stand the feeling it gave me of not being able to handle myself. So I gave up trying to get into it, and my function since was to sit watch on the deep chrome fender of the Mustang while the other three drank, ready to give them a whistled signal if the police or one of Steve’s angry ex-girlfriends materialized while they were whooping it up in the zinc mine fields. That was how I had gained the “innocent wonder” nickname, though, a nickname that was starting, I suddenly realized, to get really and truly old.
Steve and Trey came out carrying two squared-off sacks. Steve threw his toward Zero and Zero reached out his window and snatched it from the air.
“That hopeless Leo carded me after all. Can you believe it? His own cousin!” Trey shook his head at the outrage as he dropped his package through the passenger-side window and went to join Steve, who was already at work pushing back and stowing the convertible’s white vinyl top.
When they finished, Trey came toward the driver’s side, pulling his wild new-penny hair back into a rubber band he’d found on the sidewalk. I opened my door to let him have the wheel, but he just shook his head and threw the pack of cigs he’d just bought next to his green lighter on the floor between the door and seat where he kept that stuff. Then he ran around the car, finger-drumming a happy little riff on the hood as he went.
He dropped back into the passenger seat. “Drive on, Tuck, my friend.” He slammed his door and ripped into the box on the floor between his feet. “The rest of us can get a head start on these babies on the way out there!” he called over his shoulder.
I stared at the metallic blue of the cardboard box Trey was tearing apart. The rest of us, Trey had just said. Everyone knew junior year was the best, and this was our last bonfire of the year. I could swallow down some beer, why not?
“Tuck? You okay, dude?” I flinched and looked up to meet Trey’s innocent, friendly eyes.
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Just save a couple of those for me, for when we get there.”
Trey punched me, happy at the news. I turned the key, and by the time we pulled from the SpeedMart parking lot, they were all guzzling their first beers.
True night comes on fast in October once the sun sinks, so the moon was up and shining like a quarter by the time we bumped onto the rock road to the zinc mine fields. Ahead of us loomed our homegrown mountains of excavated gravel, with Hawk’s Slope shining high and serene above the rest. I let the Mustang roll along in neutral as Trey always did here, and before long we could feel the shock of the slippery clay that meant we were now right on top of the hollowed-out and then abandoned underground mines.
I gently toed the brake, and before the car had glided to a complete stop, Zero and Steve scrambled out and began jumping up and down to feel the hollow ground shuddering in response. Steve grabbed a rock and dropped it down one of the air-shaft holes, and we all heard the eerie flute-like sound of its long descent to what sounded like it might be the center of the earth.
“Hey, guys, we got the place to ourselves!” Zero shouted. We’d been running late. Everyone else who’d done their pre-bonfire drinking out here must have already moved on to the lake, where the fire was set.
“Y’all look over at the sky, right above the bluff!” Steve yelled. “It’s that crazy light thing, that Oreo boardless thing!”
We all turned toward where Seneca Bluff rose like a high backbone between the zinc mine fields and Chisum Lake. It was too dark to actually see the bluff, but we could tell where it was. It blotted out a long section of stars like some gigantic prehistoric monster.
“Aurora borealis,” Zero casually corrected Steve. “But that light in the clouds is just a reflection of the bonfire. You can see it tonight because the clouds are low and the rest of the sky has gotten so black.”
There was an old access road that connected the zinc mines to the lake. It zigzagged up one side of Seneca Bluff, then zigzagged down the other side. That narrow road had been blasted out of the bluff by the mine owners to give them a handy water supply, then it had been closed when the mines shut down. But one night, someone cut the entrance chain that held the No Trespassing sign and now the old road was considered a public thoroughfare, at least by Clevesdale’s junior and senior classes.
Most people thought the old mine road was too narrow and too steep to drive at night and so they took the time to drive clear around the bluff to reach the lake. A few others took the access road each time there was a bonfire or some other kind of beach party because they enjoyed that crazy tilted road as a nice little thrill ride.
Trey was somewhere in the middle. He ordinarily took the long way around the bluff, worried about scraping the Mustang’s paint against the bluff’s limestone surface. It could happen, the access road was that narrow in places. But tonight we were already late and Zero was running toward the Hawk, beers cradled in his shirt, yelling crazy things and laughing. No question, he was climbing, which meant we were climbing.
We’d take the shortcut over the bluff when we’d drunk our beer and satisfied Zero. It was pretty much a given if we ever wanted to get there.
Steve lifted his clarinet case and headed off to commune with the darkness. Trey and I stayed in the car, shaking our heads at Zero’s nutty enthusiasm. Trey glowed in the darkness, ghostly pale as the moon, still drumming his fingers to a beat in his head.
I watched my hand take a beer from the package on the floor between his feet. I drank it in one grimacing swallow, then took a second can with me and choked most of it down as I got out of the car. I heard Trey’s door slam too as I jogged to join Zero.
“Hey, hey!” Zero noticed the can dangling from my fingers when I came close, and nodded appreciatively. “Here.” He stuck one of his own beers into my free hand, then grabbed my elbow and began dragging me behind him. “Now, c’mon, Tucker, let’s climb this mountain before it gets to looking even higher!”
I broke free of his grip and paused to turn myself in a slow circle on my heel, looking up at the sky as I drained that second can. White stars began entering the night like popcorn. White stars entering like popcorn. That image seemed so beautiful, perfect, and even, yes, wise. Who knew you became a poet when you drank?
And then I was climbing, fast, faster than I’d ever dared climb Hawk’s Slope. I could see Zero speeding along above me with his moving dreads a cloud. I looked down through my legs and saw Trey climbing a few yards below me, dodging the trickle of small rocks I was dislodging. My boots were throwing sparks as they shifted the gravel, and I wondered if I had magical powers. One thing I was sure of, you became a better climber when your brain was deactivated so you didn’t worry about falling or causing an avalanche.
I told myself to remember that, when I was sober again.
“Whoo, woo—eee!” Zero sang above me. “I wanta fly right into this black, black night. I wanta ride this sky like an eagle!”
I twisted around, then flipped over, digging my heels into the gravel so I could lie back against the steep slope like Zero was doing, like we’d all learned to do when we wanted a quick rest from slogging our way up the loose gravel. The view was incredible at night. Everything on the ground looked insignificant and you could see the lights of several towns that were miles away.
A few yards beneath me, Trey had turned to rest as well. I could glimpse his bright hair through my feet. “Look at Steve!” he called up to Zero and me. “Can you see him, down there to the left of the car?”
Steve was standing in one of the few splotches of
moonlight not shadowed by the mountains. His battered instrument case was a tiny rectangle at his feet and he had his clarinet in his hands. And then he began to play.
And as the sly, lovelorn notes of “St. Louie Woman” come gliding up that silver mountain with the stars ticking through the universe and the wind turning cold but the rocks beneath our backs holding their heat, I felt something true and elemental and knew the others were feeling it as well and that none of us would ever forget how authentic we felt at that exact moment. A car-obsessed, heedless drummer and a scienceloving daredevil, a heartbroken cowboy and a silent Indian. The four of us, authentic as our individual selves and authentic as the thing we were together upon this wide earth.
I wanted to stay that way, to live in that feeling forever.
We howled and applauded when Steve finished, which is when I noticed that that third beer was still, unbelievably, in my hand. How I’d climbed with it I didn’t know, but I popped it and drank it down, then twisted back around to keep climbing.
But I suddenly felt so dizzy that a red flash of fear hit my heart. I twisted to face outward again, but then I felt like I was about to slide right off the world.
“I think I’ll go on down now,” I managed to tell Trey when he came up even.
I could tell my forced nonchalance didn’t fool him, but he asked no questions, merely nodded. “I better follow Zero to hurry him along,” he said. “But hey, man, take it real slow and easy going down, okay?”
The moon was a sort of nightmare sun that cast jagged, disorienting shadows everywhere I looked. I half crawled, half slid back down, and when I finally landed, I picked a spot of glare that I thought might be the chrome fender of the Mustang. I tried to run straight to it and, a bit to my surprise, I eventually reached the car.
I flopped into the backseat and covered my eyes with my arms.
“No way can I drive,” I groaned pitifully to myself, forgetting that I wasn’t alone.
A few seconds later I heard Steve yell toward the mountain, “Hey, Tuck’s down and he ain’t looking so good! Y’all had better come on back so’s we can get on goin’ to where we’re supposed to be goin’!”
