But that was the point, wasn’t it?
She was making breakfast — a real breakfast for a change, ham and eggs from the propane refrigerator, fresh-dripped coffee and toast — when she spotted him working his way along one of the switchbacks below. She was immediately annoyed. It wasn’t even seven yet and the sign at the trailhead quite plainly stated that visitors were welcome at the lookout between the hours of ten and five only. What was wrong with this guy — did he think he was exempt or something? She calmed herself: maybe he was only crossing the trail. Deer season had opened — she’d been hearing the distant muted pop of gunfire all week — and maybe he was only a hunter tracking a deer.
No such luck. When she glanced down again, flipping her eggs, peering across the face of the granite peak and the steep snaking trail that clung to it, she saw that he was coming up to the tower. Damn, she thought, and then the kettle began to hoot and her stomach clenched. Breakfast was ruined. Now there’d be some stranger gawking over her shoulder and making the usual banal comments as she ate. To them it might have been like Disneyland or something up here, but this was her home, she lived here. How would they like it if she showed up on their doorstep at seven o’clock in the morning?
She was eating, her back to the glass door, hoping he’d go away, slip over the lip of the precipice and disappear, vanish in a puff of smoke, when she felt his footfall on the trembling catwalk that ran round the outside of the tower. Still, she didn’t turn or look up. She was reading — she went through a truckload of books in the course of a season — and she never lifted her eyes from the page. He could gawk round the catwalk, peer through the telescope and hustle himself back on down the steps for all she cared. She wasn’t a tour guide. Her job was to watch for smoke, twenty-four hours a day, and to be cordial — if she was in the mood and had the time — to the hikers who made the sweaty panting trek in from the trailhead to join her for a brief moment atop the world. There was no law that said she had to let them in the shack or show them the radio and her plotting equipment and deliver the standard lecture on how it all worked. Especially at seven in the morning. To hell with him, she thought, and she forked up egg and tried to concentrate on her book.
The problem was, she’d trained herself to look up from what she was doing and scan the horizon every thirty seconds or so, day or night, except when she was asleep, and it had become a reflex. She glanced up, and there he was. It gave her a shock. He’d gone round the catwalk to the far side and he was standing right in front of her, grinning and holding something up to the window. Flowers, wildflowers, she registered that, but then his face came into focus and she felt something go slack in her: she knew him. He’d been here before.
“Lainie,” he said, tapping the glass and brandishing the flowers, “I brought you something.”
Her name. He knew her name.
She tried a smile and her face froze around it. The book on the table before her upset the saltshaker and flipped itself shut with a tiny expiring hiss. Should she thank him? Should she get up and latch the door? Should she put out an emergency call on the radio and snatch up the kitchen knife?
“Sorry to disturb you over breakfast — I didn’t know the time,” he said, and something happened to his grin, though his eyes — a hard metallic blue — held on to hers like pincers. He raised his voice to penetrate the glass: “I’ve been camping down on Long Meadow Creek and when I crossed the trail this morning I just thought you might be lonely and I’d surprise you”—he hesitated—“I mean, with some flowers.”
Her whole body was frozen now. She’d had crazies up here before — it was an occupational hazard — but there was something unnerving about this one; this one she remembered. “It’s too early,” she said finally, miming it with her hands, as if the glass were impervious to sound, and then she got up from her untouched ham and half-eaten eggs and deliberately went to the radio. The radio was just under the window where he was standing, and when she picked up the mike and depressed the talk button she was two feet from him, the thin wall of glass all that separated them.
“Needles Lookout,” she said, “this is Elaine. Zack, you there? Over.”
Zack’s voice came right back at her. He was a college student working on a degree in forestry, and he was her relief two days a week when she hiked out and went down the mountain to spend a day with her son, do her shopping and maybe hit a bar or movie with her best friend and soul mate, Cynthia Furman. “Elaine,” he said, above the crackle of static, “what’s up? See anything funny out there? Over.”
She forced herself to look up then and locate the stranger’s eyes — he was still grinning, but the grin was slack and unsteady and there was no joy in the deeps of those hard blue eyes — and she held the black plastic mike to her lips a moment longer than she had to before answering. “Nothing, Zack,” she said, “just checking in.”
His voice was tinny. “Okay,” he said. “Talk to you. Over and out.”
“Over and out,” she said.
And now what? The guy wore a hunting knife strapped to his thigh. His cheeks were caved in as if he were sucking candy, and an old-fashioned mustache, thick and reddish, hid his upper lip. Instead of a baseball cap he wore a wide-brimmed felt hat. Wyatt Earp, she thought, and she was about to turn away from the window, prepared to ignore him till he took the hint, till he counted off the hundred and fifty wooden steps and vanished down the path and out of her life, when he rapped again on the glass and said, “You got something to put these in — the flowers, I mean?”
She didn’t want his flowers. She didn’t want him on her platform. She didn’t want him in her thirteen-by-thirteen-foot sanctuary, touching her things, poking around, asking stupid questions, making small talk. “Look,” she said finally, talking to the glass but looking through him, beyond him, scanning the infinite as she’d trained herself to do, no matter what the problem, “I’ve got a job to do up here and the fact is no one’s allowed on the platform between the hours of five in the afternoon and ten in the morning”—now she came back to him and saw that his smile had collapsed—“you ought to know that. It says so in plain English right down there at the trailhead.” She looked away; it was over, she was done with him.
She went back to her breakfast, forcing herself to stare at the page before her, though her heart was going and the words meant nothing. Todd had been with her the first time the man had come. Todd was fourteen, tall like his father, blond-headed and rangy. He was a good kid, her last and final hope, and he seemed to relish the time he spent with her up here. It was a Saturday, the middle of the afternoon, and they’d had a steady stream of visitors since the morning. Todd was in the storage room below, reading comics (in its wisdom, the Forestry Service had provided this second room, twenty-five steps down, not simply for storage but for respite too — it was a box, a womb, with only a single dull high-placed window to light it, antithesis and antidote to the naked glass box above). Elaine was at her post, chopping vegetables for soup and scanning the horizon.
She hadn’t noticed him coming — there’d been so many visitors she wasn’t attuned to them in the way she was in the quiet times. She was feeling hospitable, lighthearted, the hostess of an ongoing party. There’d been a professor up earlier, an ornithologist, and they’d had a long talk about the golden eagle and the red-tailed hawk. And then there was the young girl from Merced — she couldn’t have been more than seventeen — with her baby strapped to her back, and two heavyset women in their sixties who’d proudly made the two-and-a-half-mile trek in from the trailhead and were giddy with the thin air and the thrill of their own accomplishment. Elaine had offered them each a cup of tea, not wanting to spoil their fun and point out that it was still two and a half miles back out.