Trying not to intrude, I put the towel over Sunny’s shoulder. Stepping past them and back onto our rented ski boat, I grab Oso’s collar and drag him to the boat’s cockpit. I huddle with him there in the evening cold while Kim tries to comfort the distraught girl. I listen to Kim’s placating murmuring and Sunny’s sobs. The blonde girl babbles something about how she’d been meditating on top of the cliff, something about praying to the she-god for guidance and protection. My stomach growls—I realize it’s been several hours since Kim had shared her meager lunch with me on the beach.
After a while the crying stops. I step up onto the forward deck and see them huddled together on the cushions in the bigger boat’s stern. “It’s good to see you, Sunny,” I say to let them know I’m there. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
They both look at me like they’ve forgotten I exist. In a way I feel a little jealous at the way Kim has her slim arms wrapped around the blonde girl’s torso. She’s wrapped her naked body in the big towel that had been lying on the deck. Sunny says politely, in a little girl’s voice, “Anton. Thank you. Thanks for bringing her here.”
I nod. Oso makes a sudden leap, breaking my grasp on his leather collar, and lunges onto the other boat. Before I can try to call him back, he nuzzles up to the two girls, licking as they pet him. I’m amazed. I never knew the beast could respond to other people like that. The women laugh as his rough tongue sandpapers their skin. His stump of a tail swings like a broken windshield wiper set on high.
“You come over, too,” Kim calls. “I bet Sunny’s got some food on this thing.”
“Yes. I do.” Her voice is stronger now. “I’ve got enough for all of us. Him too,” she says, knuckling Oso’s head. Sunny breaks free from Kim’s embrace and ducks into the cabin.
“Everything all right?” I quietly ask Kim.
She shrugs but smiles a little in the darkness. “I think so. But I don’t know the story yet.” Her single eye looks wet and I realize she’s been crying, too.
Sunny comes out wearing a Colorado Mountain College sweatshirt and a pair a baggy shorts. She’s rubbing the towel over her shorn hair. “Come on inside. There’s enough room for everybody.”
It doesn’t look like it from the outside, but the boat’s cabin is actually quite large. Large enough to stand with my head bent just a little. Sunny flicks a hidden switch, making dim electric lights flicker on. There’s a miniature kitchen—a galley, I think—along the rear wall and two long benches extending toward the bow. A table is bolted to the floor in the center. All the way at the front there’s another low cushioned area that is about the size of a small bed. Blankets and clothes are scattered around the interior. Oso stays on deck but lies with his head thrust into the cabin above the steps.
Kim starts opening the cabinets that line the cabin’s sides and pulling things out while Sunny primes and ignites the galley’s tiny two-burner stove. They keep bumping into each other. Kim finally tells Sunny to sit down. She obeys, pulling the towel off her head and curling her legs up under her on the bench seat next to me. Soon Kim has a kettle heating water on one burner, the other covered with a pot of simmering Campbell’s vegetable and rice soup. She catches my frown at the start of a meager-looking dinner and tosses me a can of pork and beans.
“I’ll heat that up for you in a minute, Anton. Let me get some soup in Sunny first.”
Oso’s drool runs down the small fiberglass steps to our feet.
Sunny nudges my arm. “Your brother didn’t do it,” she says. When I turn to her it looks like she’s about to start crying again. “Kim told me they arrested him.”
I put my hand on hers. “I know. Fast did, didn’t he? With Burgermeister?”
She nods, tries to gulp down a sob, and says, “That motherfucker. That sick motherfucker.”
Kim turns, concerned, from the stove as Sunny begins to break down again. Feeling self-conscious, I put my arm around the sobbing girl and pull her to me. Kim nods at me, approving, then goes back to stirring the soup.
“I’ve got to get my brother out of jail and put those two in,” I tell her. I want her mad like Kim instead of weepy, grieving, and scared. “Help me nail them, Sunny. Tell us what happened so that we can make them pay for it.”
Her sobs start to slow. She’s still shivering, but warming me as she hunches half on my lap. Kim says, “Anton’s a cop. In Wyoming, but he’s still a cop. He knows what to do.” I wonder why she appears to be relinquishing command to me.
She slides a plastic bowl of steaming soup on the table in front of us, then starts opening the can of pork and beans for me. While doing it she gives me a look and a small shake of her head that I think means that Sunny doesn’t know that Fast is the man who’d been responsible for her humiliation and had indirectly taken her eye twelve years ago. I’m a tiny bit pleased that I’m the only one who understands Kim’s vendetta.
After a minute Sunny pulls away from me. She ignores the soup except to blow on it a couple of times before she starts talking. Then she tells us what happened. She tells us everything, more than I really need to know, starting from the first time she’d met Cal. It’s as much an explanation to Kim, whom she had left for Cal, as it is the testimony we’ll need to spring my brother from the Tomichi County jail. And to put David Fast and Alf Burgermeister in his place.
TWENTY-SIX
I
N THE LIGHT
of the candle lantern suspended from the tent’s roof, Cal’s bare chest was flushed a deep pink. They sat across from one another, lotus-style, both naked on the tangle of sleeping bags and clothes. Cal spun the ball of his lighter beneath his thumb in order to light the joint he held pinched in his other hand. They were both still breathing hard from the efforts of their lovemaking.
She watched him as the end of the joint flared orange and he sucked in the sweetly pungent smoke. His eyes were closed. The flesh around them was purple from the fight the day before. His skinny muscles were tight and shiny from exertion. The Chinese symbols tattooed on his shoulders and arms looked glossy. She took the joint from him and put it between her lips.
“What was it like, between you and Kim?” Cal asked, his voice just a croak as he held in the smoke.
Sunny didn’t answer as she took a hit for herself. She wished Cal would stop asking about that. She was still feeling guilty enough about leaving Kim. Her older friend hadn’t done anything to make her feel guilty, but there was guilt there nonetheless. She’d felt it since she first met Cal at a Tribe meeting, and it had steadily increased throughout their flirtation until it peaked just a few days before, at the start of the Vigil for the Valley, when she finally moved her sleeping bag out of Kim’s tent and into Cal’s.
There were other things she wanted to talk about. She wanted to talk about the fire they’d started the night before, after Cal siphoned a gallon of gas out of her Escort’s tank and then led her on a midnight hike to the partially built lodge halfway up Wild Fire Peak. She’d stood guard while he splashed the gas against the foundations and then spun his lighter. When the flames raced around the structure, far faster than she could have imagined, they ran laughing down off the mountain and through the woods on one side of the meadow.
“That will teach him to fuck with me,” Cal had said, trying to sound like a man. But his voice shook when he said it and she knew he was still just a boy. And that he’d been as scared as she was.
She wanted to talk about the cave, too. Even after seeing it with her own eyes, it was hard to believe that the tiny hole in the cliff face could lead to such unbelievable sights. Just the day before, he’d taken her there for the first time, telling her she was the only person besides him who had ever seen it. Telling her the cave would save the valley if he could ever get the Forest Service to agree to his conditions for revealing it.
Holding in the smoke, she remembered shivering with excitement when she crawled from hot sunlight into the cool black air. It smelled earthy and damp and ancient. Powerful, too, like a secret holy temple. She’d stood there alone for a moment trying to make out the shapes she could only dimly perceive. Outside on the small ledge, Cal pulled and coiled the rope so that no one would spot them, before wriggling through the hole after her. Then he switched on the flashlight and made her gasp.
It was a small, congested village of brick huts. Sunny stood on the slight rise of jumbled stone by the entrance and was able to look out over the twenty or more huts crammed into the cavern. Narrow avenues ran between them, so narrow that she could touch the huts on each side if she were to lift her elbows. The walls were constructed of large red bricks, the same color as the cliff outside. Aged wooden poles extended from the highest points on the walls at two-foot intervals, but some were missing and others broken. For the first time in her life she felt history like a physical force. She could almost hear voices calling quietly in a strange language, babies crying, grains being hammered to wheat in stone bowls, and bare feet slapping at the dusty floor.
Stepping around the huts and low walls, Cal warned her to be careful of the delicate structures as he led her toward the back of the chamber. The cave magnified everything, making each faint noise sound weighted and deep. She could hear her own delighted but whispered exclamations as if coming back to her from a distance, a faint trickle of water, and the sound of their own breathing. The only other noise was a low, faraway moan.
“Wind,” Cal explained. “There’s a connection somewhere, another way out.” Sunny could feel just the slightest breeze. She knew from listening to his stories about caving that establishing a “connection” was a caver’s ultimate goal.
Cal played the flashlight over a large depression on the ground. It was a cylindrical pit, almost twenty feet deep and with nearly vertical walls. At the bottom of the pit was a black hole. He held the light steady on it. It was where the moan of wind came from.
“I think it’s called a
kiva.
They used it to pray or something. You ain’t seen nothing yet, not till you’ve been down there.”
She couldn’t get the questions out fast enough. How had he found this place? How old was it? What had happened to the people who lived here? What was down the hole? How much had he explored? Would it really save the valley? Cal put his arms around her and warmed her with his body’s heat as he told her about finding it while teaching himself to rappel, how he’d moved a big flake of rock on the narrow ledge while looking for a place to set an anchor. About how he hadn’t explored very far, just down into the hole and into an enormous chamber beyond where passages led off in all directions. And about how
hell yes
this place would save the valley, if he could only get those buttheads in the Forest Service to agree to his conditions of secrecy and come see it for themselves.
That was the first time she’d made love to him, when he’d given her this extraordinary visual gift. With his hands rubbing over her to keep her warm, she’d stripped off her own clothes right there and lain down on a low wall beneath the vaulted stone ceiling.
Sunny let out the smoke while Cal took another hit for himself. She decided to once again ignore his question about what it had been like to make love with another woman. “When are you going to take me back in the cave?” she wanted to know.
“Tomorrow,” he croaked. “We’ll bring some waterproof clothes and I’ll take you down into the hole.”
Sunny closed her eyes, imagining slipping down a rope into that wet, dark hole. It would be like going back to the womb, entering the safety and security of the Earth Mother. The thought made her smile.
In the distance she could hear an engine on the road that led up into the meadow. Strangely, the noise went away all at once instead of fading on up the road. It was as if the car had stopped by the old logging track that led up the hillside to their camp. The only sound now was the pulse of the crickets. It eradicated all but the nearest sounds for an instant, then made the night totally quiet in the next. She wondered if it could be Kim or one of the other activists but dismissed the thought. Everyone had been at the campfire meeting just an hour before, and the car had definitely come
up
the road, not
down
. Maybe it was those climbers, the two wild-looking sons and the grumpy old man, the ones who had fought the developer in the meadow the day before.
“You hear that?” she asked Cal.
He shook his head. He was still sitting in the lotus position across from her, but he’d twisted around to get out his Walkman and two sets of headphones. Looking down and trying to hear the engine, she noticed that Cal’s penis was at half-mast and rising.
She thought she heard a faraway snick. The noise came again, more certain now. It sounded like a car door being bumped shut with a hip. Cal held out a set of headphones to her. A Phish song began to play from the tiny speakers.
“Turn it off. Someone’s coming.” She could hear the rustle of pine needles and the snap of small twigs as someone, maybe two people, began walking up the narrow track. Cal shrugged and pushed the Stop button.
“Who is it?” he asked, as if she would know. Then he answered his own question with a shrug. “Probably some of the dudes, coming to beg for weed.”
The footsteps grew louder until she could hear them even when the crickets intervened. She could also hear heavy breathing caused by the exertion of hiking up the hill. Two people, it sounded like. Men. Big men. She extended her legs out from where they were folded beneath her and slipped on her panties.
Finding her top in the dim glow from the suspended candle lantern, Sunny pulled it over her head when a man’s voice said from outside the tent, “Cal? You in there?”
It was a man’s voice, deep and confident. She recognized it but the pot had hazed her brain just enough so that she couldn’t place it.
“Yeah,” Cal answered. From the puzzlement in his voice she could tell he couldn’t place it either. She could picture the speaker standing outside the tent, staring at the yellow and blue nylon panels illuminated by the flickering lantern within.
There was a long moment of silence except for the crickets. Sunny lifted the elastic of the halter top over her breasts, then looked at Cal’s face as she hurriedly tied the strings behind her neck. He was looking right back at her, his eyes growing wide and scared.
“We were hoping to find you,
dude,
” a harsher voice said; the last part was a mocking imitation of Cal’s habitual overuse of the word.
Then the top of the tent crashed down. The candle lantern exploded, spraying hot wax onto her thighs and stomach. Everything went dark. The flexible poles snapped the tent’s roof back up for a moment before she felt a rough hand through the nylon rip them away. The fabric sank over her head. Sunny screamed but the sound was cut short when something hard, like a baseball bat or a steel bar, smashed into the side of her head.
“Jesus, Alf! Take it easy!” the first voice yelled.
Savage blows continued to rain onto the collapsed tent. One caught her on the shin. Another in the ribs. The pain was like a hot knife stuck in her flesh. She was delirious with fear—she couldn’t even draw her breath for another scream. Kicking out wildly at the suffocating nylon, she struggled to pull a sleeping bag out from under her to cushion the force of the repeated strikes. One of her feet struck Cal, who felt very still, as if he were not fighting at all.
“That’s enough! That’s enough, goddamn it!”
Then the blows stopped. She wanted to beg, to plead. But her lungs just wouldn’t draw air. She could feel a fluid warm on her face—either blood or tears. Outside, just feet away, came the rough laughter of a man who was winded from the exertion of beating the tent as if it were a piñata. Sunny tried to lie as still as Cal and struggled to keep from gasping for air. She struggled to remember a prayer she’d learned in Sunday school as a little girl.
“They’re playing possum. Let’s drag ’em out,” the panting voice said.
“Jesus, Alf. Jesus.”
A pair of hands skittered over Sunny’s calf, plucking at the tent’s fabric.
“Help me find the goddamn zipper, Dave,” Alf said, his voice as flat as an old grave.
The hands passed over her leg again. She wished she could scream but the air just wouldn’t come into her lungs. And then she wished she were dead, wished that she would be spared any further horror. Death couldn’t be far off—her heart felt like it was going to explode.
“I’m gonna cut it open and let the critters out.”
There was a snapping noise. The blade of a Buck knife locking into place. Then a slow ripping sound from down where the hands again skittered over her legs like a pair of tarantulas. Sunny felt cool air on her leg. A hairy forearm brushed her knee.
“Let’s see who we got here.”
She felt the arm reaching past one of her calves. Then it came back and stroked her skin. The hand slithered up her thigh and paused between her legs, patting her lightly, before moving on. “You stay right there, honey. Keep playing possum. I’ll get back to you in a minute.” And suddenly everything was sliding—sleeping bags, Ensolite pads, tent, and their tangled bodies—as Cal’s unmoving form was dragged out by the ankles.
“How you doing, Cal?
Dude?
”
Cal’s body came free from the jumble. Sunny could hear him being dragged in the dirt and leaves a few feet away. Her lungs were finally starting to work, but it was at the beat of a hummingbird’s wings. She lay as still as she could, with her head and torso still under the tent.
“Wake up, boy. We got some stuff to talk about.” There was the sound of a loud slap. “I think you’re just
dying
to tell me where I can find that cave of yours, right?” Another slap. “Shit, Dave, check this guy out. He’s doing the best possum job I’ve ever seen.” Then a laugh. “Help me out. Grab his nuts and squeeze.”
“No way. You do it. That’s the kind of shit I pay you for.”
After a brief pause, Alf chuckled. “Fucking-A. This sucker’s already dead.”
Then there was a longer silence. A suffocating void of sound.
“Damn it!” the one called Dave—Sunny now recognized the voice of David Fast—said in appalled fury. “Damn it, Alf! You were swinging too hard! I told you to be careful, not to kill him.”
“Cool it. Get the girl.”
“You get her. Damn it! You killed this kid!”
“No, Dave, we killed him. Don’t forget that ‘we’ part now. You’re in this as deep as me, pal. But you’ll forget all about it when we got a cool few mil in our pockets. We’re gonna make me rich and save your ass.”
“Jesus. Jesus.”
The air finally came into Sunny’s lungs. It came in a big, whooping moan, like something a dying elk would make. Even though the sound was her own, it scared her as much as if it had come from one of the men. But it also brought her out of her cringing stupor. She kicked her legs and thrust the tent from over her head. Moving faster than she’d ever moved before, she leapt to her feet and began running. She ran totally blind and far too fast, crashing off trees, being whipped by branches, stumbling and rolling and sobbing. Behind her she could hear the heavy footsteps of pursuit.
“That way!”
“Get her!”
She thrashed her way deep into a thicket. Suddenly the ground dropped away as she was falling. Then rolling through more bushes. She came to a stop deep in foliage. It held her in a tight, scratchy embrace. The footsteps kept crashing somewhere above and behind, but now she didn’t move. All she wanted to do was scream. The air for it was finally there. She wanted to let the terror out with a cutting intensity. She held it in, though, some still-rational part of her brain telling her it would only lead them to her.