SEVEN
A
S THE PICKUPS
rumble down the valley, I walk over and hug Roberto. “Good timing, bro. As always.” Just putting my arms around him gives me a jolt of his energy. It’s like touching a nuclear bomb—you can’t even imagine what it’s capable of.
“Shit,
che.
What’s the matter with you, letting those rednecks get you down? You should of just whipped out that shiny little tin badge of yours.”
“My badge is no good here. I’m a cop in Wyoming, remember?”
“Oh yeah, I know to stay out of that fucking state,” he laughs, squeezing me gently, then pushing me away. “Wouldn’t want my little brother throwin’ down on me or nothing.”
I smile at him with the same combination of awe and fear that I’ve always felt around him. The awe comes from the fact that he’s unwilling to accept anyone’s limits and has no concern for any consequences. The fear is not for anyone’s safety but his own. He’s hurt a lot of people in his life—I’d recently looked up his criminal history on the FBI’s national database and had seen a laundry list of assaults and batteries, many that I hadn’t been aware of—but at least in his mind he’s only hurt those who had it coming. Roberto doesn’t tolerate cruelty or meanness.
During my college days we were once having lunch and a beer at an outdoor café in Boulder. Nearby, on the sidewalk, a local well-known television reporter was berating his girlfriend for something. The conversation between us stopped as we watched. I was wondering,
What should we do if it gets physical. Get the police? Intervene somehow between them? Try to reason with the couple?
When the chubby reporter raised his hand and brought it across the girl’s face, I didn’t even hear the sound of the slap because my brother had already launched himself out of his chair. The table crashed to the ground in a racket of breaking bottles, glasses, and plates. The reporter turned just in time to see my brother’s grinning, predatory face coming at him from just inches away as Roberto’s forehead crashed down on the bridge of his nose.
The result had been one of many assault convictions. It was an unprovoked attack on one of the community’s most cherished citizens, according to the local paper and the girlfriend (who, of course, had reconciled with her boyfriend and denied that she’d ever been slapped). Due to the contradictory statements of the parties and witnesses, my brother pleaded the case down to a misdemeanor and a stipulated thirty-day sentence in the Boulder County Jail. He had no regrets, would make no apology, he told the judge at the risk of having the plea refused and a felony mandated. He’d do it again if he ever saw the fat bastard hit a woman.
Although a slew of military physicians and psychiatrists had diagnosed him with dozens of different disorders throughout his childhood, everything from severe hyperactivity to a variety of antisocial neuroses, and he had been the guinea pig for a hundred types of medication, I think my mother was the only one who truly understood what was wrong with him. “
Destraillado,
” she’d said. Unleashed. “He lives in a world where he’s totally free, totally unrestrained. Your father used to have a foot in that world, too,” she’d told me. But Roberto was born with both feet over the line, like a spastic puppy that has slipped his collar. My brother acts on all the urges and impulses the rest of us are either too civilized or too afraid to express.
For the first time I notice that Oso is silent and has been ever since Dad fired that shot. I look toward the truck, worried that the rope has broken his neck or crushed his trachea. But he’s standing rigid in the tall grass and is still straining against the rope. I walk quickly to him and rub his head while kneeling in the damp earth. He pushes his froth-covered snout against my chest. “I know you were trying to help, Oso. I should have turned you loose.”
“Look at that thing!” Roberto says from behind me. “He looks like a goddamn bear.”
Before my father or I can warn him, Roberto reaches out a hand. Oso gazes steadily up at my brother with his eyes narrowed to golden slits for a few seconds, his lips raised in a half-snarl. Then the black lips drop over the long, clenched fangs. He licks my brother’s fingers with his rough tongue. I’m amazed. I expected Oso to take his hand off. Stepping back, I watch the two study one another. Oso’s ears start to lie back in a smile. They seem to recognize each other, maybe as fellow wild beasts. Like wolf cubs from the same litter.
Roberto is movie star handsome but his face has a feral cast. Behind the sunglasses he almost always wears, he has our father’s slanting, crystal blue eyes. But they’re set wide like our mother’s, and even in repose they burn with restless energy. Like dry ice, which will burn you if you touch it. No one looking at him would question the fact that he is a dangerous man. My features are like his but not quite as sharp and defined. More of our mother’s high Pampas blood shows on his face, while mine is thick-nosed and heavy-browed thanks to our father’s Celtic ancestry. He wears his tangled dark hair long, down to his shoulders. Mine is short and conventional.
I hear the snap of my glove box and the rattle of keys as Dad locks my gun away. He walks over to us, hesitates, and then throws an arm over Roberto’s shoulder. “Hi, son.” It’s an awkward gesture, this half-hug, and appears even more awkward because it’s my father who is performing it. Roberto pats my father’s chest with his far hand, turning it into a sort of embrace.
“Dad” is all he says.
This brief, tender moment ends quickly. My father says just the wrong thing without meaning to. “I’m glad you’re here, ’Berto. It’s good to see you. I just wish you hadn’t gotten involved in that brawl. You’re still on parole, aren’t you?”
Roberto’s face remains impassive, but I think I see a tightening of the muscles along his jaw. I know from my recent conversation with his parole officer that he’ll be under her supervision for years. His most recent conviction was for vandalism. The story I’d heard was that after a few days of being jerked around by the local telephone company (which is famous for bad service) about the installation of a line in his rented cabin, Roberto had borrowed a neighbor’s chainsaw and cut down six miles of poles. Unfortunately, the destruction of communications equipment is a federal crime. With federal time.
I chime in before Roberto’s almost nonexistent self-control is overridden. He looks on the verge of saying something that could ruin this whole trip. “When you guys are done playing grab-ass, would someone mind telling me if I need any stitches?”
“Same old Dad,” Roberto mutters, releasing my father from his embrace.
My entire body stings from abrasions and rising bruises. I touch my scarred left cheek, probe gently, and decide my cheekbone has remained intact although my fingertips come away bloody. The old wound on my face has reopened. Some of the blood is running into my mouth—I spit out the coppery taste. So much for my hope of the scar one day fading. The other damage seems to consist of bruised ribs and numerous contusions that I know will all start to hurt like hell in a few minutes, once the adrenaline climbs back into my glands.
My father, who’s had enough medical training in the Pararescue Corps to be a trauma surgeon, examines my face. I watch his eyes as he studies my cheek and notice that his blue eyes have faded to gray over the years, and that the whites surrounding them have become almost yellow. Deep creases that I’d never really noticed before fan out from the corners.
“You’re lucky, Antonio,” he says, turning toward his backpack in the rear of the open truck. “No stitches. Let me see where I put the Krazy Glue.”
I groan and Roberto chuckles. Ever since the stuff first came out when we were kids, when that ridiculous commercial always played on TV of a man hanging from where his hard hat had been glued to a beam, my father had been experimenting with the stuff. On us. Our mother would shout at him that he was poisoning us. He’d argue that he’d read the ingredients and none of it was toxic. But Roberto and I had been wary, sometimes staying out all night to avoid getting what we called the “treatment” and praying our new wounds would clot. It burns like hell when dabbed on raw flesh. On his missions he claimed it saved a lot of space to dump the bandages and field dressings and just carry a tiny tube of the gunk. He also carried a few tampons—his way of plugging bullet wounds.
After rummaging through the first-aid kit he always carries in his pack, my father snaps a sterile glove over one hand. Then he squeezes some glue onto a gloved fingertip.
“Bend over,” Roberto advises me.
Dad ignores him and smears the stuff on my cheek. The fumes and the sting make my left eye burn and water. He uses both hands to pinch my reopened scar together and holds it for about thirty seconds.
When he steps back, not only does the sting remain, but my face feels unnaturally tight, as if I’d just had plastic surgery. “Thanks, Dad. I think.”
In the meantime Roberto has wheeled the giant motor-cycle next to my Land Cruiser. It’s a type I’ve never seen before. A single word,
Indian,
is painted on the fuel tank. Dad and I admire it while Roberto explains some things about cc’s and gear ratios that I don’t understand while he picks dirt and grass out of the handlebars. Apparently the bike is more than forty years old and is something he’s rebuilt himself. It has enormous wheel covers, a low-slung seat, and sounds as deep as Oso’s growl when he starts it. My dad straddles it, looking strangely pleased. I’d never known he was interested in bikes. I’ve always thought of them as simply dangerous toys—I can easily understand the thrill that must come with the exposure and speed of such a machine, but all the uncontrollable elements of other traffic makes the risk seem not worth the pleasure.
I’m glad, though, that Roberto has found something other than soloing and drug abuse to occupy his attention. And motorcycle riding seems safe in comparison.
“Where’s your gear?” my father asks, getting off the bike. All that is visible on the back of the motorcycle is the rolled leather jacket and a tightly bundled sleeping bag. Roberto lifts the top of a saddlebag and takes out a pair of climbing slippers and a bag of chalk. “That’s all you brought? Not even a harness?” Dad either isn’t aware of my brother’s recent soloing exploits or he’s refusing to acknowledge them.
“I’ve got an extra harness,” I interrupt.
“Okay. What do you boys want to do? After all the excitement, I’m itching to get up on something.”
“You guys climb,” I say. “I think I’m going to go soak in the hot spring.” I want to wash out the blood I can feel hardening in my half-grown beard. And do something to ease the bruises that are already stiffening my muscles. Besides, they should spend some time alone together—I can’t always be around to act as a mediator.
“You’d be better off in cold water,” Dad advises. Roberto lifts his sunglasses to roll his blue eyes at me.
I shrug and start to walk to where the activists are camping. “See you in a few hours. Take whatever gear you need.”
I also want to see if Cal’s nose is busted. And I want to check on Kim.
EIGHT
T
HE ACTIVISTS
’
CAMP
is tense in the aftermath of the brawl. The college kids and the retirees are gathered in small groups, talking animatedly and looking both angry and scared. Cal sits on a log holding a bloody rag over his nose. Sunny, who appears cheerful and proud that her boyfriend had been a part of the excitement, stands behind Cal and massages his shoulders. A few of Cal’s metal-studded crowd surround them as if to offer some belated protection. Nearby, Kim is being engulfed by an older, concerned group of her own. Everyone stops talking and watches when I approach.
“Are you all right?” I ask Cal.
“Yeah, man. I guess. Shit, are you?” Speaking through the rag, his voice is high and nasal like he has a bad cold.
“Nothing’s broken. But I’m not so sure about your nose. Let me take a look.”
I squat painfully in the grass, inflamed joints creaking, as Cal lifts the rag from his face. There’s drying blood all over his cheeks and mouth, and his eyes are both turning black. He winces when I run a thumb and finger down his nose from between his eyes, checking for a rough ridge under the skin that could indicate a serious break. I feel nothing but it could be because of all the swelling.
“You should probably get an X ray,” I tell him, wiping my fingers on the grass.
“Nah, dude, I’m okay.” He glances up at Sunny to make sure she acknowledges his stoicism. “Thanks for stepping in. You definitely got the worst of it.”
“That’s your brother?” Sunny asks, staring across the meadow at where Roberto kneels shirtless on the grass and wipes dirt from his bike. His bare torso is bronzed from the sun. Even at this distance he resembles a perfect anatomy specimen. You can read every flex of muscle as he moves his hands over the bike.
“Yeah. His name’s Roberto.”
“He’s like . . . he’s like a Greek god or something.”
I say nothing but agree inwardly, thinking about just how much trouble those mischievous gods always seemed to get themselves into.
Sounding a little jealous and annoyed, Cal says to Sunny in his newly nasal voice, “Don’t get too excited about that guy. He’s not long for this world.”
I look at him. He begins to turn red where he’s not already bloody.
“What do you mean?” Sunny asks.
“Sorry, man,” Cal says to me. “It’s just that he’s always in the climbing rags, soloing some impossible shit. Guy has a serious death wish.” He shakes his head in wonder, and, I think, admiration. “He’s fucking sick.”
From the widely spaced trees beyond Cal and Sunny, Kim is walking toward us. Without a word I step up to meet her halfway. The taut skin on her face is streaked with red splotches—stains of anger. Even enraged, she looks beautiful. And my attraction to her is magnified when she works at a smile and it comes out almost shy. She’s still wearing the transparent beer-stained shirt. Her dark hair is a sticky mess with grass and twigs poking out.
Coming up to me, she says, “I’m not sure whether to thank you or apologize, Anton. But I’m glad you were around.”
I smile back and touch the stinging cut on my cheek. “I kind of wish I’d been somewhere else.”
“We’ve been trying to decide if we should call the police, even though they aren’t exactly friendly to our cause. Would your father get in any trouble for firing the gun?”
He probably wouldn’t, at least not with the local authorities. There’s nothing illegal about firing a gun on Forest Service land unless it’s done recklessly. But if some sort of complaint is filed, it could make more problems for him with his superiors back at the Pentagon. Roberto, though, would be in serious trouble for having taken part in the brawl. No fighting is usually an explicit condition of any parole.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” I say. “My family can do without the hassle.”
“All right. No cops. Fast is a friend of the sheriff’s, anyway. He’s a volunteer deputy or something, if you can believe that.”
For a moment neither of us says anything more. We simply look at each other. Then she raises a hand and gently touches my cheek just as I’d touched Cal’s nose. There’s a trace of electricity in her fingers, a far milder buzz than the jolt I’d felt when hugging my brother, but powerful nonetheless.
First contact,
I think.
Progress.
“You need stitches.” She drops her hand to her side and wipes a drop of blood on her jeans.
“It’s okay. My dad Krazy Glued it.” When her single eye widens, I explain, “It’s an old Burns family remedy. Probably not a very good one, but it does the trick.”
Kim laughs. “Krazy Glue! My God!” It’s the first time I’ve heard this woman laugh. The sound is surprisingly light, like a small bird fluttering into the air. The angry red splotches start to fade from her face.
Emboldened by the laugh, I ask, “I was just going to soak in the spring, and I’d like to hear what you and Fast were fighting about. Want to come? You look like you could use a bath.”
“Good idea,” she says, and rubs a hand through her matted hair. “I’ll get us both some cold tea and meet you there.”
The hot spring is wonderfully deserted. The activists are too busy rehashing the fight to bother with taking advantage of the valley’s amenities, even though they won’t be available for public use much longer. It’s quiet, too. Thicker stands of spruce and aspens border the small pools, forming a kind of screen. The trees block out the sound of the conversations taking place just a hundred yards away. The only noise is the trickle of the stream feeding into the pools and the rustling of an easy breeze through the aspen leaves.
The three bathing pools are bordered and split by tall boulders and the rotting logs of lightning-struck trees. Dad and I had sat in the highest pool yesterday afternoon. According to his decades-old memories, it’s the warmest but also the most shallow, barely two feet deep. He’d said the two lower pools are cooler because the hot venting water has had more time to mix with the creek’s snowmelt. Remembering too Dad’s advice about cold water being more helpful to a bruised body than warm, I choose the lowest and deepest pool for my soaking. The water is the color of pennies.
Kim walks up as I sit on a boulder, groaning quietly from the pain in my ribs as I work to unstrap my sandals. In each hand she carries a dripping Mason jar with a liquid inside that’s almost as dark as the stream. Nothing’s ever looked so good to me as this woman bringing me something cool to drink.
“I make it myself. It’s a restorative tea, which you look like you could use. I make it from herbs I grow in the garden at home, then brew it in the sun,” she says, unscrewing the lid from the jar and putting the jar in my hand. It’s cold—she must have gotten it from an ice chest. “My way of saying thanks.”
“Cheers.” I finish half the tea in one pull. It tastes as if it’s been sweetened with honey.
Kim sets her own jar on a rock with a clank. She turns to one side and begins to unbutton her shirt. Trying not to stare, I get my sandals off, then drag my vest over my head. Again I feel a painful tweak in my ribs. It almost makes me gasp. My bruises and stiffening muscles ache. But I’m too distracted, checking Kim out, to really notice the pain.
She slips off her shirt to reveal a pale yellow sports bra. Turning away again so that her back’s to me, she shimmies out of her jeans. Matching yellow bottoms. Her body is lean and tan. Long runner’s muscles carve down her thighs and calves. Above them, she has narrow hips and a slender back faintly etched with muscle. If I had time, I could count the ribs. When she turns back in my direction, I see that her breasts are small and high beneath her bra.
She looks at me and catches me staring. I clumsily look away but not before I see her flush. I take another pull from the jar, draining it this time. She steps into the water with jerky steps and her hands held unnaturally rigid against her thighs. It’s as if my ill-concealed leer has robbed her of her grace. I mentally kick myself, not for admiring, but for having gotten caught.
“Uh, I don’t have a swimsuit,” I hear myself say. “Actually, I’m not wearing any underwear either.” Yesterday the activists had all been frolicking naked. I guess Kim is more modest than her followers.
“Don’t worry,” she says without looking at me. Her voice sounds a little strained. “I doubt you can show me anything uglier than your face right now.” Then she gives me a quick laugh to show me she’s only kidding.
“Ha-ha,” I answer. Dropping my shorts, I step into the water. It’s colder than I expect. It pushes the breath out from my lungs and raises goose bumps on my flesh. It makes me want to dance and shiver. I crouch down until my butt is on the gravelly bottom and the water is high on my chest and try to focus on relaxing my stiffening joints rather than the woman across from me, who’s now acting oddly shy.
“So you’re a famous climber, huh?” she asks after dunking her head, scrubbing it, and pushing the hair from her face and eye patch. “Sunny said Cal was gushing about meeting you last night.”
“A few years ago I was kind of famous. It was a long time ago.”
“It couldn’t have been that long ago. What are you, twenty-two or twenty-three?”
“Twenty-seven. How old are you?”
“Didn’t your parents teach you never to ask a question like that of an older woman?” She laughs again, sounding more relaxed but, like me, not yet quite at ease. “Well, I guess today you earned the right to ask some impertinent questions. I’m thirty-six.”
Her body is a decade younger at least. I want to tell her so but can’t think of a way of saying it without sounding too aggressive.
“You look athletic, too. Runner?” Her almost total lack of body fat, her thin calves and lean muscles, make it a good bet.
“You’ve got good eyes, Anton,” she replies, making it clear that I’d been caught. “I used to do a lot of running. Lately it’s been more hiking and yoga. This thing with the valley has got me a little too preoccupied to train.”
“Speaking of eyes—what happened to yours?”
She flinches as if I’d slapped her.
Oh shit,
I think. I expected it to be some ridiculous childhood accident that she laughs about now. But from the wounded look on her face I can tell it’s something much more than that, something she certainly doesn’t laugh about. I should have asked Sunny instead, made sure the injury wasn’t private. But I’m not very good at restraining myself—in that regard, but to a far lesser degree, I have the same tendencies as my brother.
She touches the eye patch in the same painful, self-conscious way I’ve been probing my cheek. Then she folds her arms across her chest and settles lower in the water as if to hide herself beneath the nearly transparent liquid. It feels like she’s gone from just a few feet away to miles. For a moment she doesn’t answer, just looks down at the water. But then her eye locks on mine.
“It was pierced by a knife,” she finally says. Her words hit my chin like a sharp jab. Then she swings the hook. “It happened right after I was sexually assaulted.”
Fuck.
I turn away from her gaze and lean toward where a large boulder perches on the pool’s bank. I pretend to beat my head against it. “I’m sorry for asking. I’m sorry it happened. Please believe me when I say that I had no fucking idea.”
She doesn’t laugh at my make-believe self-flagellation, but she does smile just a little, grimly, when I look her way again. “It’s okay. You didn’t know. And I’m dealing with it.”
“It’s not something you get over very easily,” I say quietly as I settle back into the water.
She’s staring at me, probably trying to see if I really believe that or if I think like so many men that rape is just something you can walk away from, like falling in a mud puddle. Wash it off and you’ll be fine. I hold her good eye until she finally says, “You’re right. It’s not.”
After a moment of staring back at me, Kim apparently decides to tell me about it. “It happened twelve years ago, when I was a law student at the University of Utah.”
Despite the way my body has finally adjusted to the cold water, her story gives me a fresh chill. I’m no stranger to violence and the sick things people can do to one another, and I’ve heard and seen far worse, but hearing it from this proud, beautiful woman in her calm voice both enrages me and at the same time makes me feel helpless and weak.
A football star at the university asked her on a date. She accepted because the invitation was so strange, coming from a jock a few years younger and someone so different from her—Kim describes herself in those days as a “rabid activist for all causes,” from the environment to gun control to protesting the U.S.’s interference in Latin America. A real hippie chick, she says, fifteen years too late. She snobbishly thought of the invitation to a fraternity party as something that would expand her consciousness and understanding of mainstream America. Sort of like a visit to a less intelligent, foreign culture. And she admits she was flattered by her date’s popularity at the school, too.
But the date didn’t go well. They’d argued before they even arrived at the party. And Kim drank too much wine at dinner. She continued drinking at the party and annoying her escort by quarreling with half the people there, yelling over the booming music. In hindsight, she suspects someone put something in one of her drinks. But in the subsequent police investigation it was never proven. They said she probably just drank too much.
She woke up somewhere in a room in the back of the fraternity house. It was the strobelike flash of a camera burning through her tightly shut eyes and the sound of drunken laughter that brought her out of her stupor. She lay still for a long time, too horrified to open her eyes, too scared to move. This had to be a nightmare. But it didn’t stop. The laughter, the rough touch of hands—squeezing, prodding, slapping—and the camera’s red flash through the veins in her eyelids didn’t stop. When she finally opened them, she discovered that she was naked in a room with four young men. One of them was her date.
They probably hadn’t
physically
raped her, according to the examining physicians at the hospital. There was no bruising and the rape kit showed no signs of semen. But that wasn’t the point. At the very least they’d violated her with their eyes, their camera lens, and their laughter. There could have been no greater defilement of her pride.