And now here he was, easing out of the car and slinging a daypack over his shoulder in one fluid motion, looking not a minute older than he had in the parking lot that day, though he must have been, what? Sixty-eight? Or no: sixty-nine. Sixty-nine and loping up the walk without the slightest hesitation, no hitch in his stride, no tics or palsies or spastic readjustment of the lower back muscles after the long drive, just forward momentum. When he reached the bottom step, Brice came down to him and they shared a solemn handshake. “Brice,” Mal said.
“Mal.”
“Hope you don’t mind my stopping off here instead of meeting you up top. Thought it’d be nice to drive up with you. Plus”—and here he grinned, as if in acknowledgment of what had come between them—“it sure saves fuel.”
Before he could respond, Syl came tearing out the door. “Mal!” she cried, scooting across the porch in her hiking boots, no-nonsense jeans and down vest to fall into his arms for a sisterly embrace that might have lasted just a beat too long. “It’s so good to see you.”
“Yeah,” Mal said, his jaws working and his eyes shining, “you too.”
—
Hiking wasn’t a competitive activity, or that was the party line anyway, but of course it was. It was about endurance, about knowledge, wisdom, woodcraft, and it was as testosterone-fueled as any other sport, which was why he liked leading the sixty-and-up groups — it eliminated the young studs with their calf-length shorts and condescending attitudes, the kind who were always pressing to pass you on the trail. He could really get worked up about that if he let himself, because the first rule of the group hike, to which they’d all sworn allegiance beforehand, was never to pass the leader (or, for their opposite number, the bloated ex-athletes and desk jockeys and their top-heavy wives, never to lag behind the rear leader). Now, as they stood assembled at the trailhead, he went over the printed rules for the twelve hikers who’d showed up: four couples in their early to late sixties, a single man wearing lace-up knee boots who looked to be seventy-five or so and three stocky women in matching pastel hoodies he took to be widows or divorcées. “And remember,” he said, “always keep in sight of the person ahead of you in case there’re forks in the trail and you’re not sure which way to go. Any questions?”
“What about bears?” one of the stocky women asked.
He shrugged, gave her a slow smile. “Oh, I don’t know — what did you bring for lunch?”
“Tuna. On rye.”
“Uh-huh, well that just happens to be their favorite. They’re probably all lifting their muzzles in the air right now, taking a sniff.” He waited for laughter, but there was none. “But seriously, it shouldn’t be a problem. I rarely see bears up here, especially this time of year after the hunters have got through with them. But if a bear should come for you, you know the drilclass="underline" stand up tall, wave your arms and shout. And if that doesn’t do it, abandon your pack. And lunch. Better to go hungry than have a four-hundred-pound black bear pinning you down and licking your face, don’t you think?”
That got a chuckle out of them, at least a couple of them anyway. He gave the group a quick once-over, looking for weakness or instability, thinking of the woman who’d had some sort of nervous breakdown on the Freeman Creek trail last spring, repeating a single word—“dirigible”—over and over in an array of voices till she was screaming it at the treetops. Or the bone-thin guy dressed in motorcycle regalia who’d gone into convulsions and had to have a stick thrust between his teeth while the ravens buzzed overhead and an untimely snow sifted down to whiten his face and sculpt miniature pyramids on both ends of the stick before help could arrive. That had been a nightmare. And if it hadn’t been for one of the group, a dental hygienist who knew her way around emergencies, the guy probably would have died there on the trail. But that was an anomaly, the chance you take, whether you’re out on a mountaintop in the Sierras or pushing a cart at Walmart.
There wouldn’t be any problems today, he could see that at a glance. A cluster of mild-looking faces hung round him like pale fruit, old faces—older faces — that had seen their senses of humor erode along with everything else. They looked obedient, respectful, eager. And all of them, the seventy-five-year-old and the stocky women included, looked fit enough for what had been advertised as a moderate-to-strenuous hike of six hours’ duration and a two-thousand-foot elevation gain, lunch at the summit, back before dark. No problem. No problem at all.
He collected the liability waivers, checked his watch to give the two no-shows the requisite fifteen minutes to pull into the lot, then announced, “We’re all set then. Just follow me and I’ll try to point out anything interesting we might encounter along the way.” And he’d actually started out, the group falling into line behind him, before he swung round and added, pointing to Mal, “The rear leader today is Mal Warner, in the plaid shirt there?”
Until he pronounced it aloud, he hadn’t realized he was going to select Mal, but after being stuck in the car with him for the better part of an hour, listening to him jaw on about everything from his stock-market losses to the line of hiking gear he was trying to get off the ground with the help of a major investor and his devotion to Pilates, weight training and the modified butterfly stroke he’d devised to take pressure off his hips, Brice couldn’t help thinking it might be best all the way round if he put some distance between himself and Mal. Mal would have been the logical choice in any case, since Brice didn’t know the first thing about any of the others and Syl could get herself lost walking to the grocery store. They’d have plenty of time to catch up on things later on — at least that’s what he told himself. He even foresaw a conciliatory dinner, at which he would insist on picking up the check.
“Please be sure to stay ahead of him,” he went on, in official mode. “And if you have trouble, whether it’s a stone in your shoe or a blister or you need to catch your breath, just give a holler. We want everybody to have a super experience today, okay?” Heads nodded. People shuffled in place. “So let’s just go and enjoy the heck out of it, are you with me?”
—
The first sour note was struck before they’d gone half a mile. Someone — hunters, was his best guess — had scattered trash all over the trail, fire-blackened cans, plastic bags, a slurry of corn cobs, ground meat and chili beans in a sauce like congealed blood, the de rigueur half-crumpled beer cans and empty liquor bottles. Today it was bourbon and vodka, generic brands, the mainstay of the middle-aged sportsman. If they were younger, it would have been Jägermeister, and what the appeal of that sugary medicinal crap was, he could never figure. Of course, in his day it was sloe gin, which you gulped down without pausing for breath, telling yourself you loved it, till it came up in the back of your throat. No matter — he made a point of carrying a biodegradable trash bag with him anywhere he went, even along the back roads down below, and now he bent patiently to the trash and began stuffing it into the mouth of the bag.