In a small, neat condominium in Berkeley, the girls’ godfather, Nieman Gluuk, was finishing the last of twenty algebra problems he had set himself for the day. His phone was off the hook. His flower gardens were going wild. His cupboards were bare. His sink was full of dishes. His bed was unmade.
He put the last notation onto the last problem and stood up and began to rub his neck with his hand. He was lonely. His house felt like a tomb. “I’m going to Willits to see the kids,” he said out loud. “I’m going crazy all alone in this house. Starting to talk to myself. They are my family and I need them and it’s spring vacation and they won’t be ten forever.”
He went into his bedroom and began to throw clothes into a suitcase. It was three o’clock in the morning. He had been working on the algebra problems for fourteen hours. When Nieman Gluuk set out to conquer a body of knowledge, he did it right. When he had studied philosophy he had learned German and French and Greek. Now he was studying biochemistry and he was learning math. “If my eyes hold out I will learn this stuff,” he muttered. “If my eyes give out, I’ll learn it with my ears.” He pushed the half-filled suitcase onto the floor and turned off the lights and pulled off his shirt and pants and fell into his bed in his underpants. It would be ten in the morning before he woke. Since he had quit his job at the newspaper he had been sleeping nine and ten hours a night. The day he canceled his subscription he slept twelve hours that night.
“The destination,” Freddy was saying to his daughters, “is the high caves above Red River. They aren’t on this map but you can see the cliff face in these old photographs. Nieman and I took these when we were about twenty years old. We developed them in my old darkroom in Grandmother Ann’s house. See all the smudges? We were experimenting with developers.” He held the photograph up. “Anyway, we follow the riverbed for a few miles, then up and around the mountain to this pass. Four rivers rise on this mountain. All running west except this one. Red River runs east and north. It’s an anomaly, probably left behind from some cataclysm when the earth cooled or else created by an earthquake eons ago. It’s unique in every way. If there was enough snow last winter the falls will be spectacular this time of year. Some years they are spectacular and sometimes just a trickle. We won’t know until we get there. Even in dry years the sound is great. Where we are camping we will be surrounded by water and the sound of water. It’s the best sleeping spot in the world. I’ll put it up against any place you can name. I wish your mother was going with us. She doesn’t know what she’s missing.” He took the plate of pancakes Nora Jane handed him and began to eat, lifting each mouthful delicately and dramatically, meeting her violet-blue eyes and saying secrets to her about the night that had passed and the one she was going to be missing.
Tammili and Lydia played with their food. Neither of them could eat when they were excited and they were excited now.
“Is this enough?” Lydia asked her mother. “I really don’t want any more.”
“Whatever you like. It’s a long way to go and the easy way to carry food is in your stomach.”
“It weighs the same inside or out,” Tammili said. “We’re only taking dehydrated packs. In your stomach it’s mixed with water so it really weighs less if you carry it in the pack.”
Lydia giggled and got up and put her plate by the sink. Tammili followed her. “Let’s go,” they both said. “Come on, let’s get going.”
“I wish you had a weather report,” Nora Jane put in. “If it turns colder you just come on back.”
“Look at that sky. It’s as clear as summer. There’s nothing moving in today. I’ve been coming up here for twenty years. I can read this weather like the back of my hand. It’s perfect for camping out.”
“I know. The world is magic and there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” Nora Jane went to her husband and held him in her arms. “Go on and sleep by a waterfall. I wish I could go but I have to finish this paper. That’s it. I want to turn it in next week.”
“Let’s go,” Tammili called out. “What’s keeping you, Dad? Let’s get going.” Freddy kissed his wife and went out and got into the driver’s seat of the Jeep Cherokee and the girls strapped themselves into the seats behind him and plugged their Walkmans into their ears.
Nora Jane went back into the house and stacked the rest of the dishes by the sink and sat down at the table and got her papers out. She was writing a paper on Dylan Thomas. “‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age;’” she read, “‘that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer. . . .’”
Freddy took a right at the main road to Willits, then turned onto an old gold-mining trail that had been worn down by a hundred years of rain. “Hold on,” he told the girls. “This is only for four miles, then we’ll be on a better road. It will save us hours if we use this shortcut.” The girls took the plugs out of their ears and held on to the seats in front of them. The mobile phone fell from its holder and rattled around on the floor. Tammili captured it and turned it on to see if it was working. “It’s broken,” she said. “You broke the phone, Dad. It wasn’t put back in right.”
“Good,” he said. “One less hook to civilization. When we get rid of the Jeep we’ll be really free. The wilderness doesn’t want you to bring a bunch of junk along. It wants you to trust it to provide for you.”
“Trusting the earth is trusting yourself. Trusting yourself is trusting the earth. This is our home. We were made for it and it for us.” The girls chanted Freddy’s credo in unison, then fell into a giggling fit. The Jeep bounced along over the ruts. The girls giggled until they were coughing.
“You have reached the apex of the silly phase,” Freddy said, in between the bumps. “You have perfected being ten years old. I don’t want this growing up to go a day further. If you get a day older, I’ll be mad at you.” He gripped the steering wheel, went around a boulder, and came down a steep incline onto a blacktop road that curved around and up the mountain. “Okay” he said. “Now we’re railroading. Now we’re whistling Dixie.”
“He hated that mobile phone,” Tammili said to her sister. “He’s been dying for it to break.”
“It’s Momma’s phone so she can call us from her school,” Lydia answered. “He’s going to have to get her another one as soon as he gets back.”
Nieman woke with a start. He had been dreaming about the equations from the day before. They lined up in front of the newspaper office. Gray uniformed and armed to the teeth, they barred his way to his typewriter. When he tried to reason with them, they held up their guns. They fixed their bayonets.
“I hate dreams,” he said. He put his feet down on the floor and looked around at the mess his house was in. He lay back down on the bed. He dialed a number and spoke to the office manager at Merry Maids. Yes, they would send someone to clean the place while he was gone. Yes, they would tell Mr. Levin hello. Yes, they would be sure to come.
I’m out of here, Nieman decided. I’ll eat breakfast on the way. They know I’m coming. They know I wouldn’t stay away all week. I’ll go by the deli and get bagels and smoked salmon. I’ll take the math book and do five more problems before Monday. Only five. That’s it. I don’t have to be crazy if I don’t want to be. An obsessive can pick and choose among obsessions.
He put the suitcase back onto the unmade bed. He added a pair of hiking shorts and a sun-resistant Patagonia shirt he always wore in Willits. He closed the suitcase and went into the bathroom and got into the shower and closed his eyes and tried to think about the composition of water. Hydrogen, he was thinking. So much is invisible to us. We think we’re so hot with our five senses but we know nothing, really. Ninety-nine percent of what is going on escapes us. Ninety-nine percent to the tenth power or the thousandth power. The rest we know. We are so wonderful in our egos, dressed out in all our ignorance and bliss. Our self-importance, our blessed hope.
Freddy went up a last long curve, cut off on a dirt road for half a mile, then stopped the Jeep at the foot of an ab
andoned gold mine. “Watch your step,” he said to the girls. “There are loose stones everywhere. You have to keep an eye on the path. It’s rough going all the way to where the trees begin.”
“It’s so nice here,” Lydia said. “I feel like no one’s been here in years. I bet we’re the only people on this mountain. Do you think we are, Dad? Do you think anyone else is climbing it today?”
“I doubt it. Nieman and I never saw a soul when we were here. Of course, we have managed to keep our mouths shut about it, unlike some people who have to photograph and publish every good spot they find.”
“Feel the air,” Tammili added. “It tastes like spring. I’m glad we’re here, Dad. This is a thousand times better than some old ski resort.”
“Was a ski resort a possibility?” Freddy was trying not to grin.
“No. But some people went to them. Half the school went to Sun Valley. I don’t care. I’d lots rather be in the wilderness with you.”
“I’m glad you approve. Look up there. Not a cloud in the sky. What a lucky day.”
“There’s a cloud formation in the west,” Tammili said. “I’ve been watching it for half an hour.” They turned in the direction of the sea. Sure enough. On the very tip of the horizon a gray cloud was approaching. Nothing to worry about. Not a black system. Just a very small patch of gray on the horizon.
“Gather up the packs,” Freddy said. “Let’s start climbing. The sooner we make camp the sooner we don’t have to worry about the weather. Those trees up there have withstood a thousand years of weather. We’d be safe there in a hurricane.”
“What about a map check?” Tammili asked. She was pulling the straps of her pack onto her strong, skinny shoulders. Lydia was beside her, looking equally determined. This will never come again, Freddy thought. This time when they are children and women in the same skin. This innocence and power. My angels.
“Daddy. Come to.” Lydia touched his sleeve, and he turned and kissed her on the head.
“Of course. Get a drink of water out of the thermos we’re leaving. Then we’ll climb up to that lookout and take our bearings.” He handed paper cups to them and they poured water from a thermos and drank it, then folded the cups and left them in the Jeep. They hiked up half a mile to a lookout from where they could see the terrain between them and the place they were going. “Take a reading,” Freddy said. “We’ll write the readings down, but I want you to memorize them. Paper can get lost or wet. As long as the compass is on your wrist and you memorize the readings, you can find your way back to any base point.”
“The best thing is to look where you’re going,” Tammili said. “Anyone can look at the sun and figure out where the ocean is.”
“We won’t always be hiking in Northern California,” Freddy countered. “We’ll do the Grand Canyon soon and then Nepal.”
“Momma’s friend Brittany got pregnant in Nepal,” Lydia said. “She got pregnant with a monk. We saw pictures of the baby.”
“Well, that isn’t going to happen to either of you. I’m not going to let either of you get pregnant until you have an M.D. or a Ph.D., for starters. I may not let you get pregnant until you’re forty. I was thinking thirty-five, now I’m thinking forty.”
“We know. You’re going to buy a freezer so we can freeze our eggs and save them until we can hire someone to have the babies.” They started giggling again. When Lydia and Tammili decided something was funny, they thought it was funnier and funnier the more they laughed.
“Maps and compasses,” Freddy said. “Find out where we are. Then find out where we’re going, then chart a course.”
“Where are we going?”
“Up there. To that cliff face. Around the corner is the waterfall that is the source of Red River.” He watched as their faces bent toward their indescribably beautiful small wrists. The perfect bones and skin of ten-year-olds, burdened with the huge wrist compasses and watches. I could spend the day worshiping their arms, Freddy thought, or I could teach them something. “This is the Western Cordillera,” he added. “Those are Douglas fir, as you know, and most of the others are pines, several varieties. Are the packs too heavy?”
“They’re okay. We can stash things on the trail if we have to.”
“In twenty minutes, we’ll rest for five. All right?”
“I think I hear the waterfall,” he said. “Can you hear it?”
“Not if you’re talking,” Tammili said. “You have to be quiet to get nature to give up its secrets.”
“Stop it, Tammili. Stop teasing him.”
“Yeah, Tammili. Stop teasing me.” They walked in silence then, up almost a thousand feet before they stopped to rest. The path was loose and slippery and the landscape to the east was barren and rough. To the west it was more dramatic. The cloud formation they had noticed earlier was growing into a larger mass.
“A gathering storm,” Freddy said. “We’ll be glad I put the waterproofing on the tent last night.”
“I am glad,” Lydia said. “I don’t like to get wet when I’m camping.”
“Let’s go on then,” Tammili said. “That might get here sooner than we think it’s going to.”
They shouldered the packs and began to climb again. Freddy was drawing the terrain in his mind. He had planned on camping at a site that was surrounded by watercourses. It was so steep that even if there was a deluge it would run off. Still, there was a dry riverbed that had to be crossed to get to the site. We could make for the caves, he was thinking. There wouldn’t be bears this high but there are always snakes. Well, hell, I should have gotten a weather report but I didn’t. That was stupid but we’ll be safe.
“He’s worrying,” Tammili said to her sister.
“I knew he would. He thinks we’ll get wet.”
“I don’t know about all this.” Freddy stopped on the path above them and shook his head. “That cloud’s worrying me. Maybe we should go back and camp by the Jeep. We could climb all around down there. We can go to Red River another time.”
“We’re halfway there,” Tammili said. “We can’t turn back now. We’ve got the tent. We’ll get it up and if it rains, it rains.”
“Yeah,” Lydia agreed. “We’ll ride it out.”
In the solar-powered house Nora Jane was watching the sky. She would study for a while, then go outside and watch the weather. Finally, she started the old truck they kept for emergencies and tried to get a station on the radio. A scratchy AM station in Fort Bragg came on but it was only playing country music. She was about to drive the truck to town when she saw dust on the road and Nieman came driving up in his Volvo. “Thank God you came,” she said, pulling open the door as soon as he parked. “Freddy took the girls to Red River and now it’s going to storm. I could kill him for doing that. Why does he do such stupid things, Nieman? He didn’t get a weather report and he just goes driving off to take the girls to see a waterfall.”
“We’ll go and find them,” Nieman said. “Then we’ll kill him. How about that?”
The adventurers climbed until they came to a dry riverbed that had to be crossed to gain the top. It was thirty feet wide and abruptly steep at the place where it could be crossed. The bed was a jumble of boulders rounded off by centuries of water. Some were as tall as a man. Others were the size of a man’s head or foot or hand. Among the dark rounded boulders were sharper ones of a lighter color. “The sharp-looking pieces are granite,” Freddy was saying. “It’s rare in the coastal ranges. God knows where it was formed or what journeys it took to get here. Hang on to the large boulders and take your time. We are lucky it’s dry. Nieman and I have crossed it when it’s running, but I wouldn’t let you.” He led the girls halfway across the bed, then let them go in front of him, Tammili, then Lydia. They were surefooted and careful and he watched them negotiate the boulders with more than his usual pride. When they were across he started after them. A broken piece of granite caught his eye. He leaned over to pick it up. He stepped on a piece of moss and his foot slipped and kept on slipping. H
e stepped out wildly with his other foot to stop it. He kept on falling. He twisted his right ankle between two boulders and landed on his left elbow and shattered the humerus at the epicondyle.
“Don’t come back here,” he called. “Stay where you are. I’ll crawl to you.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Tammili said. She dropped her pack on the ground and climbed back over the boulders to where he lay gasping with pain. “Cut the pack strap,” he said. “Use the big blade on your knife. Cut it off my shoulder if you can.”
“What time did they leave?” Nieman asked. He had called the weather station and gotten a report and put in a preliminary request for information on distress flares in the area.
“They left about six-thirty this morning. Maybe they’re on their way back. Freddy can see this front as well as we can. He wouldn’t go up the mountain with a storm coming. All they have is that damned little tent. It barely sleeps three.”
“They could go to the caves. I’m going to try to call him on the mobile phone. If they’re driving, he’ll answer.” Nieman tried raising Freddy on the mobile phone, then called the telephone company and had them try. “Nothing. They can’t get a thing. We are probably crazy to worry. What could go wrong? The girls are better campers than I am. They’re not children.”
“Tammili only weighs eighty pounds. I want to call the park rangers.”
“Then call them. We’ll tell them to be on the alert for flares from that area. I know he has flares with him. He loves flares. He always has them. Then we’ll get in the Volvo and go look for them. I guess it will go down that road. Maybe we better take the truck.”
“We have to make a stretcher and carry him to the trees,” Tammili was saying. Freddy was slowly moving his body but he wasn’t making much progress. He couldn’t stand on his left ankle and he couldn’t use his right arm and he could barely breathe for the pain. There were pain pills in the kit but he wouldn’t take them. “At least I can think,” he kept saying. “I can stand it and I can think. We have to get a shelter set up before the rain hits. I want you to go on over there and wait for me. I can make it. I’ll get there.” Then he went blank and the girls were standing over him.
The Courts of Love Page 13
