When Jamie looked at it she imagined the inflamed tent collapsing around her in a blanket of fiery death. She knew she wouldn’t sleep until she had witnessed the snuffing of the lamp flame.
After dinner, after Lois, Betty, and Jamie had washed the dishes in the sink of the public bathroom, after Leon had extinguished half of the campfire by peeing on it while yodeling (which made Jamie wonder if everyone with a penis used it to pee on fire), after Allen had fetched sticks and carved them to points for roasting marshmallows, Betty pulled out her guitar. Her voice was beautiful and full, a gift that neither of her daughters had inherited.
Leon stared at Betty as she sang, her face glowing orange from the firelight. His lips were pulled slightly, like he wanted to smile, but wouldn’t. For several minutes he was frozen, a half-burned marshmallow hanging lopsided off his stick as he watched Betty. Allen and Lois were talking quietly about meditation, they were sharing their mantras, revealing ones that worked and ones that had failed. Jamie reached over and plucked the dangling marshmallow from Leon’s stick. He looked at her for a second, then looked back toward Betty, nodding his head with the beat. Jamie wished Renee were there so she’d have someone to eat marshmallows with, someone to nudge when she said,
“Do you think Mom has a crush on Leon, the man with
the floppiest penis our backyard has ever seen? Or is it just that he is in love with Mom?”
Betty was not in the tent in the morning.
“Where’s your mother?” Allen asked Jamie, waking her up.
“Maybe she went for a morning hike.” Jamie flopped onto her stomach and tried to go back to sleep.
“Was I snoring?”
“Yeah.”
“She probably moved out because of my snoring.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“BETTY!” Allen called out from the sleeping bag.
Betty stuck her head in the tent.
“What are you screaming about?”
“Did you sleep here last night?”
“I went into Jamie’s tent.”
“It’s not my tent.” Jamie sat up. “I won’t sleep there.”
“You were snoring again,” Betty said.
“What’d you use for a sleeping bag?” Allen asked.
“The blankets from the car.”
“You walked to the car in the dark?!” Jamie asked.
“No, I put them in there before we went to bed in case your dad started snoring. What’s the big deal? I slept in the other tent, okay? Now come out and have breakfast.”
“What’s for breakfast?” Allen smiled at Betty like he was flirting.
“Cooked, hot Grape-Nuts,” Betty said.
“Ever eat a pine tree?” Jamie asked with an Appalacian twang. “Many parts are edible.”
“What’s that from?” Allen asked. “It sounds familiar.”
“Euell Gibbons,” Jamie said. “He says it in a commercial for Grape-Nuts.”
“You’re reciting commercials? You should be reciting poetry, or Shakespearean sonnets, for godsakes.”
“Nothing wrong with reciting commercials,” Betty said.
“There’s something very wrong with reciting commercials,” Allen said. “Maybe you should have homeschooled them.”
“Come eat Grape-Nuts,” Betty said, and she threw back the flap from the tent and walked away.
The third day in Yosemite, Allen, Leon, and Lois woke up early to hike to the top of Half Dome, a giant amphitheater-shaped rock, high up on a mountain peak. Betty decided to take Jamie to the hot spring swimming hole she had read about in Mother Jones magazine. A hot spring sounded good, as the Tuolumne River was as chilly as ice water, turning Jamie’s ankles and feet white, like flesh socks, when she waded at the rocky banks.
Jamie wore her bathing suit under her shorts and T-shirt, and stuffed a thin, white towel into her mother’s backpack. Betty wore blue jean cutoff shorts with no underwear and a mossy green tank top with no bra. They both had on hiking boots that made their feet look oversized and lumbering.
The hike was short but steep, up a mountain trail full of switchbacks, like a circular stairway that had been flattened wide. A sturdy, middle-aged couple on their way down stopped to chat with Betty.
“It might not be appropriate for your daughter,” the man
said. He looked like the men in the Grecian Formula ads: slick gray hair with a swooping side part.
“Really?” Betty asked.
“Nudists,” he said, with a knowing grin.
Betty and Jamie carried on up the mountain, Betty smiling blissfully from what Jamie imagined was anticipation of a naked swim.
Soon they approached an arch of bushes and overhanging trees. They walked through the arch and found themselves on a large, sloping sheet of orangey rock, pressed against a sheer rock wall. In the nook where the rock wall met the rock floor was a deep, rectangular pool. There were five people in the pool, mostly standing and talking. Everyone appeared younger than Betty, older than Jamie. Everyone was naked.
“Who fills that pool?” Jamie asked.
“Maybe I should have homeschooled you,” Betty said.
“What?”
“It’s a hot spring. There are streams flowing under all this rock, and the water from those streams seeps out into that pool. The water probably formed the pool.” Betty peeled off her shorts. Then, slowly, she lifted off her tank top. A dark-haired, square-faced man turned away from the woman who was speaking to him and smiled at Betty. He had pronounced canine teeth that made him wolfish. Betty returned the smile, then sauntered to the edge of the pool and stepped in. The water came up to Betty’s chest. Her massive breasts floated like buoys. The Wolf pushed himself toward her; Jamie wondered if he was terribly short or floating on his knees, for his eyes were level with Betty’s nipples.
“How’s it goin’?” he asked Betty.
Jamie turned away from the scene and busied herself by digging through Betty’s backpack, pulling out her towel, and lying on an empty spot in the sun. There was a small breeze that chilled her, but when she lay flat the breeze was gone.
Eventually Jamie slipped off her shorts and shirt so that she was wearing only her black, crocheted bikini. Jamie’s skin was brown as a nut, with deep tan lines that seemed to have been drawn with a straight edge. When an outline of white peeked out along her breasts or thighs, she adjusted her suit so that it disappeared, thus reinforcing the exactitude of her tan. Jamie hadn’t slept well the night before, so she had no trouble falling asleep with the sun lighting up the inside of her eyelids a glowing pink, and the drone of voices drifting from the pool and settling around her ears like a lullaby.
When Jamie awoke, the sun had sunk into the valley, leaving her in a puddle of shade. There was no one around, no towels strewn hither and yon; she was alone. An eerie chill shot across Jamie’s skin, but then she spied Betty’s backpack and knew that her mother couldn’t be far. The air had drastically cooled and a steamy fog was rising off the surface of the water. Jamie wanted to jump in the pool to warm up but was afraid of water snakes hiding in the cracks of the stone wall. She walked to the edge of the water and was contemplating it when she heard her mother’s braying laugh. Seconds later, Betty and the Wolf emerged from the brush. They were each wearing shorts, hiking boots, and no shirt.
“Hey!” Betty said.
“Hey.”
“This is Dog Feather,” Betty said. “He took me up to this ledge where there’s an amazing view of the valley.”
“Dog Feather?” Jamie dipped her toe into the water, swung her leg back and forth.
“My grandfather was a tribal elder,” Dog Feather said.
“He named me after watching me grasp the dog’s tail and yank out a handful of hair. When I opened my tiny fist, the hair was arranged like a perfect feather.”
“Isn’t that a wonderful story?” Betty said.
“So you weren’t named until you were old enough to grab a dog’s tail?” Jamie asked.
“I was about four or five days old,” Dog Feather said. “I started grabbing the day I was born.”
“Are there snakes in here?” Jamie asked.
“Not usually,” Dog Feather said, and he sat down on the rock floor, looking up toward Betty, who was standing right beside him.
“Dog Feather is a Pomo Indian,” Betty said.
“Full-blooded,” Dog Feather added.
“If there are snakes,” Jamie asked, “do they bite?”
“They’re more afraid of you,” Dog Feather said.
“Go in,” Betty said. “It’s like a warm bath.”
“What about leeches?” Jamie asked.
“Only in the river,” Dog Feather said.
“Salamanders?”
“Yeah, there are salamanders, but they don’t do anything.
They just look at you.”
“No harm in being looked at,” Betty said, and she giggled in a way that made her breasts jiggle.
Jamie jumped in, then turned and hauled herself out. The water was warm and silky, but she felt too alone in there—the only target for whatever might be lurking. Dog Feather sat on the rock beside Betty. They both smiled as they chatted,
and nodded their heads at the same time. Jamie dried off with the towel and put on her shirt and shoes. The wet swimsuit made her colder than she had been before she jumped in.
“It’s cold,” Jamie said. “Let’s go.”
“Just a minute,” Betty said, continuing to chat with Dog Feather.
“My suit is wet and I’m cold.” Jamie would rather have had Betty’s invasive personal attention than witness her mother flirting with a sharp-toothed Pomo.
“Can you wait a few minutes?”
“I’m freezing. I wish I were in Hawaii with Flip.”
“Well, you’re not. So relax.” Betty’s face was poised like a knife in the direction of Jamie.
“Fine,” Jamie snapped, and she decided that when she was a mother she would never flirt in front of her children, she would never let them feel the tenuousness of love and marriage, the dangers that lurked, waiting like land mines that could blow the family apart.
“Where are you staying?” Betty asked Dog Feather, her face instantly relaxing.
“Wherever I land at sunset,” Dog Feather said. “Last night I slept up here on this rock.”
“We have an extra tent,” Betty said. “You should stay with us tonight.”
“Are you talking about my tent?” Jamie asked. “Is that the extra tent?”
“Well, you won’t sleep in it!” Betty turned to Dog Feather and added, “She’s fourteen, she’s got a boyfriend who’s seventeen, but she’s afraid to sleep in a tent alone.”
“I’m not afraid of the tent.” Jamie tempered her voice lest her mother blurt out more personal details that Jamie preferred remain in the family.
“Well, you’re afraid of a million imagined threats to your safety, and you won’t sleep in the tent, so Dog Feather might as well use it.”
“Fine,” Jamie said. Unlike her parents, who seemed willing to discuss any subject in any forum, Jamie preferred to give in than to publicly argue with her mother.
“Beautiful,” Dog Feather said.
Dinner that night was lively. Everyone, except Jamie, seemed sparked by the presence of Dog Feather. Betty asked Dog Feather about life as a Native American, what he ate growing up, what he wore, where he slept. Dog Feather claimed he’d never slept in a bed in his life and he didn’t understand why the white man had beds. He also said that because he was born on a piece of stretched calf skin in the dirt, he wasn’t circumcised until he was an adult.
Jamie didn’t understand what calf skin had to do with a flap of skin on his penis, but everyone else seemed to get the connection as they oohed and aahed, their faces scrunched with curiosity. Allen wanted to know if Dog Feather received any government money for being Native American.
“It’s so little,” Dog Feather said, “that I pass my share on to my mother, who has greater need.” Lois and Betty both gasped and Betty put a hand on his forearm as if to thank him on behalf of mothers everywhere.
Leon asked Dog Feather if he knew any secrets to growing female marijuana plants. Indeed, Dog Feather seemed to know everything about growing female marijuana plants—so much, in fact, that Leon dug out a pad of paper and a pen from the glove box of his car so he could take notes.
After dinner there was a marijuana tasting: Dog Feather’s versus Leon’s. Jamie sat on a log eating marshmallows out of the bag, watching the adults’ faces change from excited alertness into the melted, buttery look of being stoned. At one point Dog Feather reached his big hand back to pass Jamie a joint. She took the joint, stood, walked over to Allen, and delivered it to him.
“You didn’t start smoking, did you?” her father asked.
“No. Dog Feather gave it to me.”
“But haven’t we smoked with Fred?”
“Flip?”
“Yeah, I remember seeing him smoking.”
“He did, but I didn’t. I don’t smoke.”
“Good,” Allen said, lifting the twisted cigarette to his mouth. “Don’t smoke.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I already don’t.”
“I know. That’s good. Don’t smoke.”
“I don’t.”
“Good.”
“And I probably never will.” Jamie was happy to tell her father she didn’t smoke. She wanted him to see her as a good girl—she wanted to see herself that way.
“Good,” Allen said with finality.
Betty went to the car and fetched her guitar. She sat on a log playing, picking and strumming. Leon stood, pulled Lois up, and the two of them started dancing, Lois with her hands winding around her tiny head like flaccid snakes.
Then Dog Feather danced, a body-bending rhythmic thump that didn’t follow the music and looked like the way the Indians danced in black-and-white movies. Allen stood to dance, holding his arms out to Jamie to join him.
“No thanks, Dad,” she said. “I gotta go to bed.”
Allen looked disappointed, but Jamie simply walked away and ducked into the tent. The fact that she was on a camping trip with her parents already, in her mind, defined her as a friendless freak. And although she loved dancing, Jamie couldn’t help but imagine Tammy or Debbie or Flip, even, looking down on her dancing with her dad and thinking she was a freak beyond freaks, one of those geeky kids who are like oddball parent replicas. Like Bobby Chillings, who was always in math classes with Jamie and who built model freight ships with his dad and started most sentences with the words, “When my dad . . .” Or Jamie’s old best friend from sixth grade, Julie Freemore, whose mother would pick up an extension and talk with them every time Julie and Jamie were on the phone.