She’d felt his weight on the platform and turned to give him a smile. He was tall and powerful across the chest and shoulders and he’d tipped his hat to her and poked his head in the open door. “Enjoying the view?” he said.
There was something in his eyes that should have warned her off, but she was feeling sociable and buoyant and she saw the generosity in his shoulders and hands. “It’s nothing compared to the Ventura Freeway,” she deadpanned.
He laughed out loud at that, and he was leaning in the door now, both hands on the frame. “I see the monastic life hasn’t hurt your sense of humor any—” and then he paused, as if he’d gone too far. “Or that’s not the word I want, ‘monastic’—is there a feminine version of that?”
Pretty presumptuous. Flirtatious, too. But she was in the mood, she didn’t know what it was — maybe having Todd with her, maybe just the sheer bubbling joy of living on the crest of the sky — and at least he wasn’t dragging her through the same old tired conversation about loneliness and beauty and smoke on the horizon she had to endure about a hundred times a week. “Come in,” she said. “Take a load off your feet.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and removed his hat. He wore his hair in a modified punk style — hard irregular spikes — and that surprised her: somehow it just didn’t go with the cowboy hat. His jeans were stiff and new and his tooled boots looked as if they’d just been polished. He was studying her — she was wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt, she’d washed her hair that morning in anticipation of the crowd, and her legs were good — she knew it — tanned and shaped by her treks up and down the trail. She felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time, an ice age, and she knew her cheeks were flushed. “You probably had a whole slew of visitors today, huh?” he said, and there was something incongruous in the enforced folksiness of the phrase, something that didn’t go with his accent, just as the haircut didn’t go with the hat.
“I’ve counted twenty-six since this morning.” She diced a carrot and tossed it into the pan to simmer with the onions and zucchini she’d chopped a moment earlier.
He was gazing out the window, working his hands on the brim of his hat. “Hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you’re the best thing about this view as far as I can see. You’re pretty. Really pretty.”
This one she’d heard before. About a thousand times. Probably seventy percent of the day-trippers who made the hike out to the lookout were male, and if they were alone or with other males, about ninety percent of those tried to hit on her in some way. She resented it, but she couldn’t blame them really. There was probably something irresistible in the formula: young woman with blond hair and good legs in a glass tower in the middle of nowhere — and all alone. Rapunzel, let down your hair. Usually she deflected the compliment — or the moves — by turning officious, standing on her authority as Forestry Service employee, government servant and the chief, queen and despot of the Needles Lookout. This time she said nothing. Just lifted her head for a quick scan of the horizon and then looked back down at the knife and the cutting board and began chopping green onion and cilantro.
He was still watching her. The bed was big, a double, one of the few creature comforts the Forestry Service provided up here. There was no headboard, of course — just a big flat hard slab of mattress attached to the wall at window level, so you could be lying in bed and still do your job. Presumably, it was designed for couples. When he spoke again, she knew what he was going to say before the words were out of his mouth. “Nice bed,” he said.
What did she expect? He was no different from the rest — why would he be? All of a sudden he’d begun to get on her nerves, and when she turned her face to him her voice was cold. “Have you seen the telescope,” she said, indicating the Bushnell Televar mounted on the rail of the catwalk — beyond the window and out the door.
He ignored her. He rose to his feet. Thirteen by thirteen: two’s a crowd. “You must get awfully lonely up here,” he said, and his voice was different now too, no attempt at folksiness or jocularity, “a pretty woman like you. A beautiful woman. You’ve got sexy legs, you know that?”
She flushed — he could see that, she was sure of it — and the flush made her angry. She was about to tell him off, to tell him to get the hell out of her house and stay out, when Todd came rumbling up the steps, wild-eyed and excited. “Mom!” he shouted, and he was out of breath, his voice high-pitched and hoarse, “there’s water leaking all over the place out there!”
Water. It took a moment to register. The water was precious up here, irreplaceable. Once a month two bearded men with Forestry Service patches on their sleeves brought her six twenty-gallon containers of it — in the old way, on the backs of mules. She husbanded that water as if she were in the middle of the Negev, every drop of it, rarely allowing herself the luxury of a quick shampoo and rinse, as she had that morning. In the next instant she was out the door and jolting down the steps behind her son. Down below, outside the storage room where the cartons were lined up in a straight standing row, she saw that the rock face was slick with a finely spread sheen of water. She bent to the near carton. It was leaking from a thin milky stress fracture in the plastic, an inch from the bottom. “Take hold of it, Todd,” she said. “We’ve got to turn it over so the leak’s on top.”
Full, the carton weighed better than a hundred and sixty pounds, and this one was nearly full. She put her weight behind it, the power of her honed and muscular legs, but the best she could do, even with Todd’s help, was to push the thing over on its side. She was breathing hard, sweating, she’d scraped her knee and there was a stipple of blood on the skin over the kneecap. It was then that she became aware of the stranger standing there behind her. She looked up at him framed against the vastness of the sky, the sun in his face, his big hands on his hips. “Need a hand there?” he asked.
Looking back on it, she didn’t know why she’d refused — maybe it was the way Todd gaped at him in awe, maybe it was the old pretty-woman/lonely-up-here routine or the helpless-female syndrome — but before she could think she was saying “I don’t need your help: I can do it myself.”
And then his hands fell from his hips and he backed away a step, and suddenly he was apologetic, he was smooth and funny and winning and he was sorry for bothering her and he just wanted to help and he knew she was capable, he wasn’t implying anything — and just as suddenly he caught himself, dropped his shoulders and slunk off down the steps without another word.
For a long moment she watched him receding down the trail, and then she turned back to the water container. By the time she and Todd got it upended it was half empty.
Yes. And now he was here when he had no right to be, now he was intruding and he knew it, now he was a crazy defining new levels of the affliction. She’d call in an emergency in a second — she wouldn’t hesitate — and they’d have a helicopter here in less than five minutes, that’s how quick these firefighters were, she’d seen them in action. Five minutes. She wouldn’t hesitate. She kept her head down. She cut and chewed each piece of meat with slow deliberation and she read and reread the same paragraph until it lost all sense. When she looked up, he was gone.
After that, the day dragged on as if it would never end. He couldn’t have been there more than ten minutes, slouching around with his mercenary grin and his pathetic flowers, but he’d managed to ruin her day. He’d upset her equilibrium and she found that she couldn’t read, couldn’t sketch or work on the sweater she was knitting for Todd. She caught herself staring at a fixed point on the horizon, drifting, her mind a blank. She ate too much. Lunch was a ceremony, dinner a ritual. There were no visitors, though for once she longed for them. Dusk lingered in the western sky and when night fell she didn’t bother with her propane lantern but merely sat there on the corner of the bed, caught up in the wheeling immensity of the constellations and the dream of the Milky Way.