It was then that I glanced up and noticed the silver Toyota parked in the lot of the ice-cream parlor next door. A woman and two kids emerged from the building, licking cones, and went off down the street, and then the door swung open again and there was the blond girl, her own cone — the pale green of pistachio — held high and her face twisted in a grimace as she said something over her shoulder to the man behind her. He was wearing the same T-shirt he’d worn that day on the road and he didn’t have an ice cream of his own, but as he came through the door he twisted his face too and jerked hold of the girl’s arm. She let out a cry, and then the ice cream, double scoop, which had already begun to melt in green streaks across the back of her hand, slipped from the cone to plop wetly at her feet, just like anything else subject to the law of gravity.
“You creep,” she said. “Look what you did.” And he said something back. And then she said something. And then I was no longer watching them because as far as I was concerned they could go careering around the world on any orbit they wanted, just so long as it never intersected mine again. Space debris collides in two wide bands of low earth orbit, at 620 and 930 miles up, fragmenting and fragmenting again, things as big as satellites and rocket boosters and as small as the glove the astronaut Ed White lost on the first U.S. spacewalk. Eventually, it’s all going to come down, and whether it’ll burn up or crush a house or tap somebody on the shoulder in a dark field on a dark night is anybody’s guess.
The woman at the ATM seemed to be having trouble with her card — no bills had yet appeared and she kept punching at the keys and reinserting the card as if sheer repetition would wear the machine down. I had time. I was very calm. I pulled out my cell and called Mallory. She answered on the first ring. “Yeah?” she snapped, angry still. “What do you want?”
I didn’t say anything, not a word. I just pressed my thumb to the off switch and broke the connection. But what I’d wanted to say was that I’d taken the car and that I’d be back, I was pretty sure I’d be back, and that she should feed the dog and pay the rent, which was due the first of the month, and if she went out at night — if she went out at all — she should remember to look up, look up high, way up there where the stars burn and the space junk roams, because you never can tell what’s going to come down next.
(2012)
Slate Mountain
The sun was a little gift from the gods, pale as a nectarine and hanging just above the treetops on a morning the weatherman on the local NPR affiliate had assured him would begin with a cold misting drizzle and progress to rain. Well, the weatherman — or actually, she was a woman, a weatherwoman, with a soft whispery voice that made you think of a whole range of activities that had nothing whatever to do with the weather — had been wrong before. More times than he could count. Satellites, ocean sensors, hygrometers, anemometers, barometers — they were all right in their way, relaying messages to people stuck in cities who might want to know when to break out their galoshes and umbrellas, but more often than not he could just step out the back door, take a sniff of the air and tell you with ninety-five percent accuracy what the day was going to bring. Of course he could. And he did it now, riding a rush of endorphins as he shifted the coffee cup from his right hand to his left to swing open the back door, stroll out onto the deck with its unimpaired views of the humped yellow fields and freestanding oaks and the blue-black mountains hanging above them, and take in the air. It was damp, no doubt about that, but the sky was clear, or mostly clear, and even if it did spit a little rain — even if it snowed up there at the higher elevations — there was no way in the world he was going to cancel the hike.
It was a Saturday at the end of October, the leaves bronzing on the lower slopes, deer season safely in the can and the mosquitoes gone to mosquito hell till spring at least, and seventeen people had signed up, including Mal Warner, who’d been a member of the group executive committee of the Los Padres Chapter for as long as Brice could remember. “So we’ll have two executives along for this little stroll,” Syl had pointed out at dinner last night. It hadn’t really occurred to him to think of it in those terms — he and Mal went back forty-five years, to the time of Brower and the fight over the Grand Canyon, though they’d grown apart in recent years — but he’d looked up from his vegetarian lasagna and salad of nopal and field greens to give her a little nod of recognition. “Yes,” he’d said, acknowledging the point — he was on the executive committee of the Kern-Kaweah Chapter, after all, not to mention leader of a dozen or more group hikes a year—“I guess so.”
He’d set down his fork and gazed across the room, beyond Syl and the calendar on the wall and out the window to where the evening sun burnished the top rail of the fence till it shone as if it had been waxed, wondering all over again why Mal had decided to drive all this way to join them — and not for dinner or a drink or a night of reminiscence out on the deck but for a routine day hike up a mountain that held no challenges for either of them. Plus, Mal had chosen to e-mail rather than telephone, as if he couldn’t bother to waste his breath, though the message itself was amiable enough: See you’re leading one of your 60-plus hikes up Slate Mt. next week and thought I’d come join you. You’ve got to admit I qualify. And some. Looking forward. Yours, Mal. P.S. Say hi to Syl.
Now, as the breeze shifted and a high vanguard of cirrostratus crept into place around the sun like dirty wash, he sipped his coffee and thought of the pleasures of the trail. It had been over a month since he’d been up in the mountains because of what he liked to call the special use tax of the hunting season, Fish and Game making their pile out of it and everybody else left to duck for cover. You’d have to be suicidal to leave the paved roads when the hunters were on the loose, whether you were dressed in Day-Glo orange and carrying an air-raid siren strapped to your back or not — Christ, if it was up to him he’d impose a ban on all hunting, even of rodents, and make it permanent. Over a month. He was looking forward to stretching his legs.
Just as he was about to go in and urge Syl to get a move on — it took nearly an hour to drive the switchbacks up to the seven-thousand-foot elevation of the trailhead where the group would assemble, and he, as leader, had to be there first to reassure them as they emerged from their vehicles in a confusion of coolers, daypacks and binoculars and the like, no dogs allowed, thank you, and alcoholic beverages discouraged — a glint of light caught his eye and he looked up to see a boxy silver car swing off the main road and start up the drive toward him. It took him a moment — the flash of wire-frame spectacles, the outsized head, the gleam of a perfect set of old man’s choppers working over a wad of gum — to realize that this was Mal behind the wheel, and it took him a further moment to recollect and replay the unhappy occasion of their last meeting, which had nearly brought them to blows over the very pettiest of things, so petty it embarrassed him to recall it: a dinner check.
How long ago was it? Five or six years anyway. They’d been entertaining a party of Angels — donors in excess of the $100,000 range — after a horseback trip into the Golden Trout Wilderness, regaling them with a feast at the local lodge, no expense spared and everybody aglow with the camaraderie of the trail, when the check came. It was pretty hefty, but that was only to be expected, the overheated faces up and down the table glutted with filet mignon and lobster tail and the cocktails and wine and desserts and after-dinner drinks that preceded and rounded out the meal, but he and Mal had agreed beforehand to split the cost between their chapters. The waitress had brought the check to him, and while he was fumbling with his reading glasses and frowning over the figures that seemed to swell and recede in the candlelight, Mal had pushed himself up to come jauntily round the table, lean in and whisper in his good ear, “You’re going to have to cover this — I must have left my wallet in my other pants.” Which was exactly what he’d said, word for word, the last time. And the time before that. The upshot was a discussion out in the parking lot that managed to exhume some buried resentments, not the least of which involved Syl, who’d been Mal’s lean leggy golden-braided hiking companion before Brice had ever met her, on a hike, with Mal, some forty years ago. He’d said some harsh things. So had Mal.