“People have no respect,” somebody said.
“You can say that again,” the woman who’d been worried about the bears put in, and in the next moment she was kneeling beside him, scooping up trash with hands like risen dough and nails done in two colors, magenta and pink. “They’re like animals.” And then, lowering her voice to address him so he had to turn his face to hers and see that she was wearing mascara and blusher — on a hike — she said, “I’m Beverly, by the way. Beverly Slezak? I thought you might have known my husband Hal, from down in Visalia? He was a great one for hiking — before the cancer got to him. Lung,” she added, her shoulder brushing against his as she leaned forward to dump a handful of cans into the bag.
“No,” he said, scuttling forward with the bag as some of the others brought him offerings, “I don’t think I know him. Or knew him, that is.”
Mal’s voice, from somewhere behind him: “People are animals. Apes. The third chimpanzee, along with the bonobo and the common chimp.”
“Right,” Syl put in. “And that’s why we’re out here in the woods, cleaning up trash. It’s what apes do.”
Somebody laughed. And then the old guy (old: he was ten years older than Brice, if that) opined in a flat voice that it was probably Mexicans because the whole world’s just a dump to them and one of the other men — tall, with swept-back features and a long white braid trailing down his back — objected. “Hey, I resent that. I’m Mexican and you don’t see me throwing shit all over the place—”
“All right,” Brice heard himself say, and he was straightening up now and twisting a knot in the neck of the bag, “it’s nothing to get worked up over, sad as it is — it’s just the kind of thing we want to educate people about. But what we’ll do? We’ll leave the bag here beside the trail and collect it when we come back down, because no litterer’s going to spoil my day, are you with me?”
After that, they went on up along a series of meadows and he pointed out the frost-withered remains of the various plants that flowered here in July — corn lilies, sneezeweed, columbine, rein orchids, geraniums — and promised he’d lead a summer hike if anybody was interested in seeing the meadows in bloom. “Right,” said Beverly, who seemed to have taken up post position just behind him, “and get eaten alive by the mosquitoes. And gnats. And those biting things, what are they? They look like houseflies but they sure make you dance.”
He turned his head to look at her without breaking stride — and where was Syl? There, back toward the rear, in animated discussion with Mal. She was matching him stride for stride, her hands juggling ideas, the brim of her baseball cap pulled down so he couldn’t make out the upper half of her face, only her outthrust chin and the gleam of her moving lips. “Deerflies,” he said.
“Not the yellow ones, the black ones.”
A breeze stirred the tops of the pines. He could taste the moisture on the air. The sun was gone. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some sort of horsefly maybe. But you don’t have to worry today, do you?”
“No,” she said, taking the grade with short powerful thrusts of her legs, and he saw that she wasn’t so much overweight as muscular, her calves swelling against the woolen knee socks and her thighs caught in the grip of a pair of tight blue nylon shorts. “No, I guess not.”
“That’s the beauty of a fall hike,” he said, swinging round to fling out his arms as if he’d created it all, the meadows, the views, the soaring pines and big granite boulders ranged like giants’ skulls along the trail. Soon it would all be covered in snow and you’d need skis to get up here.
The old man — he was second behind Beverly — took the opportunity to ask an involved question about the geology of the mountain, throwing around terms like “pre-cretaceous” and “metamorphic,” and the best Brice could do was to say he honestly didn’t know but that up top, up at nine thousand feet, there were all sorts of rare plants, like purple mountain parsley, which hadn’t even been discovered — or identified, that is — till 1976.
“Dead now, I suppose,” the old man said.
Brice acknowledged the point, taking a quick glance behind him to be sure everybody was still there, the group in single file now as the trail steepened and the switchbacks dug into the slope in the thinning air. “Just like the bugs.”
—
Two miles up was a saddle with a scatter of downed trees, where he liked to call a rest stop so people could catch up, refer to their water bottles and power bars and take in the view of the granite spires known as the Needles where they rose up like outstretched fingers from the grip of the mountain opposite. The group settled in, some of them spreading groundcloths, others easing down in the pine needles to sort through their packs. Everyone seemed companionable enough at this point, all the hang-ups and anxieties of their daily lives washed clean on the flow of blood pumping through their hearts and lungs and down into the loose working muscles of their legs. As advertised. And what had John Muir said? I never saw a discontented tree. Exactly.
He was unwrapping the avocado and bean-sprout sandwich he’d prepared in the kitchen before first light when Syl, the bill of her cap set at a rakish angle, eased down beside him and began sorting through her own pack. She was on a diet — a perpetual diet, though to his eyes her figure had scarcely changed over the years, her legs firm, her stomach flat and her small, perfectly proportioned breasts still right where they should be, whether she was wearing a bra or not, and never mind the striations above her upper lip or the way her throat sagged to give away her age — and so she’d passed on his offer to make her a sandwich, relying on her cache of low-cal fiber bars instead. She unwrapped one now and gave him a grin.
He grinned back. He was feeling good, better than good — he could have climbed up over Slate and kept on going down the far side and into the foothills, along the river course and all the way home. Car? What car? Who needed a car? “What were you two talking about back there?” he asked. “From what I could see it looked like you barely had time to catch your breath.”
“What? Mal and me? He’s a talker, that’s for sure. He’s still upset about his last wife — Gloria, the one we never met? They lasted two years, I gather, if that. Plus, he keeps repeating himself, starts on one story and then suddenly he’s off on another one and then another till he doesn’t even know what the subject is and you have to guide him back to it.”
“If you’ve got the patience.” He took a bite of the sandwich, gazed across the massed treetops below them to where the Kern River cut its canyon and then to the mountains beyond, mountains that rolled into other ranges altogether, on and on till they dropped off into the deserts to the east.
“I don’t know what it is between you two — I mean, after all these years. He’s Mal, what can I say? He’s got his charms. Still.”
The notion irritated him. “I thought he was a real bore.”
“That’s just because he was nervous.”
“Nervous? About what?”
“You. The situation. Seeing us both after all this time. You know what he said? He said I was as beautiful as the day we first met.”
He didn’t have anything to say to this. He studied her a moment, her legs sprawled in front of her, her lips pursed, her gaze eclipsed by some private memory. She took a bite of the fiber bar, a smear of chocolate caught in the corner of her mouth, then unscrewed the cap of her water bottle and took a long swallow.