After twenty minutes or so, Wylie turned onto a road that was dark and wooded, lacking in neon and traffic. We passed a church with a bright white sign: THIS IS A C H C H. WHAT’S MISSING? U R. Psyche began to fuss, and Irina jiggled her on her knee and then nursed her until she quieted. Nobody was saying anything, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because I was there or because they were preparing themselves for what was about to happen.
The road started winding up the crest of the mountain, signs for picnic spots and fire-danger warnings posted alongside the asphalt. We hadn’t seen a single car since turning off. I wondered how Stan and Berto were supposed to ride their bikes all the way up here after drinking for hours, and began to doubt that the plan would come off. I felt sorry for Wylie, actually, all his philosophy and passion dissipated into this midnight drive. Then he pulled onto the shoulder and parked.
“Wylie and I are disabling the tram,” Angus said after we all got out. “Stan and Berto are working on it from the bottom. On the way down we’ll close the road. You guys are lookouts.”
“Lookouts?” I said. “That’s it?”
“Lynn,” Irina said softly, smiling her pretty, calming smile. “It’s okay.”
“But it seems so sexist. Men do the big stuff, and women just stand around.”
Angus winked at me. “Can you wrestle a steel cable? Or drag a log across a road?”
“No.”
He shrugged. “Then you’re the lookout.”
I put my hands on my hips and watched as Angus and Wylie disappeared into the darkness.
Irina didn’t seem to feel slighted in the least and sat down on the Caprice’s massive hood while managing to keep the sling in place around her chest. Nothing fazed her, I realized, nothing would ever faze her, a fact that annoyed me very much. I set off walking after Angus and my brother. It was almost cold up here at the top of the mountain, and I crossed my arms against my chest. Pine branches were scraping against each other in the wind. I thought I heard an owl hoot, although given what I knew about owls, it could as easily have been a distant car horn. Beneath the trees it was very dark, but as I followed the trail that led to the tram, I heard a crash and scuffle that was almost certainly the sound of vandalism and moved in that direction.
The last time I’d ridden the tram was with my family, when I was a teenager, and an old college friend of my father’s was visiting. The only time anyone from Albuquerque takes the tram is with out-of-town friends. Mr. Dennison was tall, thin, and youthful, with curly black hair and a bizarre penchant for Adidas shorts and Hawaiian shirts. But it wasn’t his clothes that bothered me. I was convinced he was looking at me inappropriately. I was fifteen and had just figured out that men were capable of and even prone to such behavior. I slouched against the glass as the tram ascended and my father pointed out various features of the steeply inclined landscape, the hay-colored sprays of cactus and stark, strong blooms of century plants. My mother and Wylie stood on the other side of the car, both facing out the window: Wylie with his nose pressed up against the glass, leaving smudge marks, and my mother behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Mr. Dennison kept glancing over at me and smiling with a friendly zeal that I found highly suspicious. “This is spectacular!” he said to my father, still smiling at me. My father just nodded and kept on listing species of cactus; he’d memorized all their names when he moved to New Mexico and never missed a chance to demonstrate this feat of botanical knowledge. Once we got to the top I took off on a walk, abandoning everybody else, and soon was standing in the pine trees, alone — fists clenched in anger, disoriented, wanting to make some kind of gesture or point — and lost. I was filled with wordless rage toward my parents, and especially my father, for not noticing what was going on.
I wondered now what my father thought I was doing, tramping off like that. Maybe he saw it as just another blind, teenage rage — which in a way, I guessed, it was. Probably I was as strange to him as he was to me. Anyway, I would never know if it had even registered on him at all. I kept walking for a few minutes, feeling my way in the dark, thinking I was getting closer, until I realized that once again I was lost. I had no idea where Wylie or Angus or the tram might be. Then the owl hooted again, twice, insistently. It was a car horn.
I turned around and started back, climbing upward, and before long I saw the car’s headlights flash on and off, showing me where to go. By the time I got there, everybody was standing around, looking superior and amused.
“Don’t say a word,” I warned them, and they didn’t.
Wylie pulled into a rest area toward the bottom of the crest road and parked, Stan and Berto promptly emerging from the trees with their bicycles. Irina unclipped their front wheels and started stowing them away in the trunk, so I helped her as the men walked off into the forest. When we locked the car and followed, I could hear rustling and voices but couldn’t see a thing. Then Irina pressed a flashlight into my hand. “I’m going to wait here in the car until you come back,” she said.
“Where am I going?”
“They have something to show you,” she said.
By the anemic light I could make out four silhouettes far ahead of us. I beamed it directly on Wylie, who looked back at me, startled and wide-eyed as a deer.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
I hurried toward them, but Wylie was gone — his disappearance nearly instant and complete. I stood still, breathing hard, beaming the flashlight around until it lit on Angus, who was leaning against a tree trunk, watching me stumble around.
“How are you with small spaces?” he said.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
He was next to me then, taking the flashlight out of my hand and inserting his own hot, dry palm instead. He pointed the beam at a boulder ten steps in front of us, and I could see a hole in the ground with fresh dirt at the edges. “Down,” he said. “About six feet. Then you’ll walk a few steps, then go down again. I’ll be right behind you.”
“You have got to be kidding.”
He laughed. “Your lack of courage is very honest.” Then he pushed me forward.
Just below the lip of the entrance I could feel a horizontal bar, the top rung of a ladder.
“Don’t bother looking down,” Angus said, switching off the flashlight. For some reason I closed my eyes, as if that would be more comforting than the darkness of the forest.
“Six steps,” he said. “Then dirt.”
He was right. At the bottom of the ladder I stepped away and he came down after me, then we went farther down and moved along a cramped dirt tunnel into a space large enough to stand up in. A propane lamp sat on the open seat of a folding chair, Stan and Berto on the ground next to it, giggling and drinking beer. The air was cool and oddly fresh, fragrant with earth.
It was a room of dirt. Lining the walls were plastic bottles, dried food in pouches, garbage bags, and a bulletin board with a diagram of the tunnel system and a small Chamber of Commerce poster. A red sun was setting over a brown, cracked landscape below cursive blue lettering: SPEND THE SUMMER IN BISBEE, ARIZONA.
Wylie came in from some other tunnel and stared as if challenging me to say something, which I didn’t. I could tell that he was proud of what they’d done, and it was pretty amazing, their little fort.
“We’ve got enough food and water,” he said, “for four of us to last two weeks.”
“Would you really stay here that long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“Takes to do what?”
“Make a point,” Wylie said. Berto muttered, “Excuse me”—to me apparently — and picked up an empty plastic bottle, then ducked out of sight into one of the tunnels.