Graphic the Valley Read online

  I said, “I just had to go for a while.” I shook my head.

  He nodded. For him, it was still 150 years ago, 1851, sleeping with the shadow of the 36th on the trail below, snow on their blue coats. I’ve read that some animals have the instinctual memory of their ancestors.

  My mother kept hugging me and petting my hair. She picked pine needles out of my tangles.

  I said, “I was hiking and climbing.”

  My father nodded and waited as my mother scanned back and forth across my eyes. She put her head down and wiped her nose. I kissed her on top of her head, smelling the oil on her scalp.

  • • •

  One evening, I watched my mother braille the grass, her eyes closed as she dropped into the V, dragonflies looping above the nests, landing blue on her head and shoulders.

  I was running a trout line, fifty feet and trebles every five on a bite, eleven in all, with a grasshopper floating each. I’d tied no weights so the bugs struggled circles on the surface to make the fish rise as the day cooled to blue.

  But I was watching my mother, down in the drop. I saw her closed eyes, and her hands the colors of shooting stars, pink to white, a palm-down dance like holding gravity against the top of the grass, the dragonflies landing, stay-winged prehistoric bugs on her shoulders.

  Her mouth moved but she wasn’t talking.

  • • •

  For five more years I lived in that camp with my parents, the camp of my childhood. We went back to our old jobs, my mother cooking and washing clothes, my father collecting wood and tending fires, me bringing back any food I could find.

  We read books.

  I went down to fish the eddies on the Merced. The dead pull of the whites and the quick slashes of rainbows at the turn, in the new day’s light. I fished underneath the trees, away from the bridges and roads, where the rangers didn’t go.

  I cut firewood and collected deadfall for kindling to help my father. Built up the cord piles. Stitched holes in the tent with dental floss.

  When there was nothing to do, I read books scored from the Curry lost-and-found or hiked above El Cap along the north rim and down the slabs descent. I slept sometimes in Camp 4, but always came back, always bringing fish when I returned to my parents’ clearing.

  I never heard any more about the superintendent. Nothing at all. And a year later, I often wondered if that morning had happened, if a man in a suit had ever smoked a cigar, if his suit compressed against my hands as I pushed him over. I carried that moment in a box in front of me, the rope digging into the back of my neck, the nylon frays like small wires cutting my skin.

  I saw his face in the reeds. Saw his face on the body of a man at Curry, in the face of a man in a Merced rental raft. And then he was alive again.

  • • •

  I climbed the freestanding boulders on the Valley floor, rocks to thirty feet, gaining confidence in my climbing, my hands strong, my shoulders and arms building. I bouldered some evenings until my forearms gave out and my finger pads wore down. The granite edges cut flappers, and I sucked the iron from the slits in my fingers.

  Then I hiked back in the dark along the Northside Drive, startling black-tail or peanut-butter-and-jelly coyotes with the thin fur even in winter, their fur like grease hair.

  I tried not to think of the superintendent. I put his box on my shoulder. Tied him on my back. Bent with him. Bent as he breathed smoke into my ear.

  Sometimes when I watched the rain, leaning against a pine tree, under its cover as the water came down around me, I wondered if he was watching me. Sometimes I turned around to look for him. And she was there too then, anytime I smelled the wet. Leaning at the granite as I bent over to land a fish, in the eddy swirl, the riffle, the turn like a water’s exhale.

  • • •

  In camp, there were the three of us and little talk. My mother hummed as she ladled food into our blue aluminum bowls, and I recognized all her songs. But we ate to the sound of the wind gusting up-river in the evening, the cold air meeting the warm, the scrape of the low branches, and the tic tic tic of pinecones falling through.

  Sometimes, after dinner, my father told stories, the two of us sitting side by side against the set log, watching the meteorites burn through the gaps in the trees. My mother walked away with the pot, toward the grit at the edge of the creek where she sand-cleaned dishes, and my father told me about Old Tenaya, The Prophet Wovoka, Captain John, everyone he’d read about. I chewed grass stalks, poking between teeth with the hard stems, memorizing what my father said.

  “Sometimes we’re stupid,” he said. “Foolish. But even at our worst, there can be acts of honor.”

  I nodded. I wanted to ask if the superintendent was an act of honor. I said, “Have you ever done something in the moment and not known what was going to happen?”

  My father picked up a flat chip of granite and spun it out in front of us as if he were skipping a rock on the river. He said, “We all do.”

  “But,” I said, “do we all do bad things?”

  He picked up another rock. Flipped it in the air above him and caught it with his other hand. He said, “They wanted everything. They burned people out, caught the last few hiding, made this a plastic and gasoline world.”

  I said, “The soldiers made Old Tenaya lead them back up the Merced, right?”

  “Yes,” my father said. “But after that, they murdered his son. Even after that.”

  • • •

  I was a teenage boy and it was just the tourist girls until Lucy. Girls with swimsuits like peach skins wet on their flesh, and I watched them at the El Cap bridge in summer, me coming down from the wall, and them standing at the bridge railing trying to decide whether or not to jump.

  When I saw them, I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

  The bridge was not tall, never more than fifteen feet even at low water in August, but some people stood, waited, looked down at the height.

  I heard a girl say, “Can’t they regulate the flow out of the dam? The water’s too low today.” But this wasn’t Hetch Hetchy. I watched the girl wait and wait, and never jump.

  Another time, two girls in matching red suits and braids, and they were beautiful. I could see the wet pricking at the end of their swells.

  I was at the end of the bridge. I wanted to do a back flip off the railing next to them. But somehow I couldn’t make myself walk up there, and the girls in those suits the same red, thin and tight, and the legs and arms coming out of the red making me think of all of the skin on a girl’s body.

  There was no way for me to say hello. And what I would say after that? If they spoke to me?

  A loud tourist boy yelled, “You afraid?” and shook his hips. He was down on the sandbank. He said, “Don’t be scaredy little bitches, huh?”

  I wanted to hold his throat for that. Shatter his teeth with my fist. But the girls jumped, first one, then the next, and swam over to him. They both kissed him on the mouth, one after the other as they stood up and walked onto the bank, and they smiled then and covered their shoulders with towels.

  • • •

  A tourist girl did kiss me once. When I was seventeen. Walking on the path near the bridge, she grabbed my forearm. Said, “Hey,” and I turned. Then she kissed me on the mouth, smelling like beer cans warming in the sun. Her tongue touched my bottom lip, licking across.

  I didn’t do anything. It was my first kiss, and I didn’t know what I could do.

  The girl was gripping my forearm with her fingernails. Pink. I saw her nails as she pulled back. I looked at her, her smeared black lashes and blue eyes, flakes of chapped skin on her bottom lip like coconut.

  Her friend said, “Whoa, slut,” and pulled her away by her hair. “What were you thinking there?”

  She tilted, leaning into her friend. I heard her say, “I had to. He just looked so wild.”

  In my tent that night, I thought of everything. Her eyes blinking. Her water-smeared mascara. The arch of her back and the bare expanse b
etween the two pieces of her bikini. I wished I’d put my arms around her, put my hands on her skin, felt her hips, her rib cage, felt the droplets of water dripping down. I wished that I’d kissed her longer, asked her to come swim with me. I wished I’d done any of the things I’d read about in books.

  I didn’t sleep. I lay awake thinking about teenage girls I’d seen at the water. The bridge. Their bathing suits and bodies. I tried to remember each girl I’d ever seen. Then I wondered about hallways full of girls in the high schools in books. Beautiful girls sitting at desks, listening to teachers. I wanted to trade homework answers, help girls cheat on tests, ask girls to dances.

  It was two full years until Lucy. So many girls at Sentinel, in Camp 4, the Lodge, Curry, and the Village. But none of them kissed me.

  Nineteen years old the summer I worked slash on the Tioga road. I walked up to the crew chief and said, “Do you need people?” I’d been in Tuolumne, in the high country one week, sleeping in a shelter east of Tenaya Lake.

  The crew chief said, “Are you a rock climber?”

  I held up my hands, showed the flaking skin on my first finger pads. Torn callouses.

  “Okay then,” he said. “You’ll do good.”

  I didn’t know what to write on the address or social security lines, so I left those blank, and put the clipboard on the seat of the truck. Then I went to work.

  At the end of the day, the crew chief called me over to his truck. “You do good work, kid. Piled a lot of slash.” He tapped my application page with the back of his pen. “You don’t have a social security number though, huh?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

  He hocked a chunk of phlegm into his mouth and spat it over his truck. “No number at all? Or you can’t remember?”

  I shook my head.

  He tapped the application page again. “I thought you looked maybe Mexican. Are you Mexican?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Okay…” He rubbed his pen with his fingers. “But you’re illegal anyways, huh?”

  “Illegal?”

  He smiled. “You know what I mean. You ain’t exactly a citizen, right?”

  I said, “I don’t know about that.”

  He laughed. I didn’t know what to do so I laughed too. We both stood and laughed.

  “Well,” he said, “whatever. It means shit to me. I’ll just give you cash for what you do just like you were Mexican, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He shrugged. He said, “Done it before.”

  • • •

  I remembered my mother’s hands in my hair. Washing. I was six years old. Half a year since that night on the Merced. I looked down at the meadows, heard her voice there, the crows’. Every morning when I heard them, I looked for her. That still tricked me.

  My mother scrubbed my armpits, then my neck. Held my face in her hands that smelled like wax on the brown soap. I didn’t say that I was cold. Sometimes I talked to her, and sometimes I didn’t.

  I looked back upstream, saw the water run the dips around the big boulder, like the hump of a submerged animal. My mother turned my face back toward her. Kissed my forehead, wiped it with the back of her hand. She pursed her lips.

  I said, “I love you too.”

  • • •

  The Tioga Road took two months, clearing slash all the way to the Meadows, like beaver dams piled above ground.

  The other workers were college boys, here for summer employment. Joking with girls at Valley parties on the weekends. I’d seen those Housekeeping parties and wondered about the beach girls, their tight tank tops on cold evenings, red cups of beer, screaming for no reason. I wanted to be in the middle of one of those parties, hear the music from inside the house, smell the perfume and sweat and beer.

  Our work crew was underneath Pywiack Dome in early August, off Lake Tenaya, the mosquitoes awake, waiting in the shade, sucking at the wets of our eyes. The sun turned around a grove of trees baking flakes of skin off the tops of our shoulders. I smelled the lake behind me, waiting to swim.

  She came on a Thursday, two days before the weekend. The only girl ever. Too pretty for our crew.

  I couldn’t talk to her, but everyone else did, like the Village store lines. Every boy on the crew already there, shirtless, working close, talking and joking at her, throwing pinecones back and forth over her head.

  After an hour, the crew chief yelled at them. He said, “All the brush doesn’t lie in one spot, boys.” He smiled and said, “Lucy.” He motioned with his finger.

  He talked to her about her paper forms. He leaned in close to point things out on the clipboard. She didn’t seem to notice.

  When she went back to work, I watched the way sweat dropped down from her forehead off the end of her nose, how she itched her face with the front of her shoulder, turning her neck. How her braids kept catching in her mouth as she leaned over the slash piles, her black hair like the finished burn.

  I watched the neckline of her T-shirt where she’d cut the collar out, dropping it open. That was Thursday.

  On Friday, I worked and tried not to look at her. She was too much to watch and everyone was staying near her.

  I collected brush in the trees. Thought of finishing the day and getting to swim before dinner. I was the only one camping at the lake on the weekends, in one of the crew’s wall tents, everyone else going back to the Valley to see friends, to drink, to buy food that they couldn’t get in the Meadows store.

  As soon as the group left each Friday, I climbed an easy route on Pywiack, feeling the granite on my palms and fingertips, the knobs on the lower dome, then the cracks, climbing past the chopped bolts into the systems up high.

  On clear evenings, I liked to lie on top of the dome and watch the stars drop down. It was like submerging in the reed shallows above Mirror Lake, turning with the slow current until Half Dome disappeared, everything multiplying, pine needles, snags, blades of grass. The barely visible molecule circles in the air.

  • • •

  I was scraping moss off a boulder with my boot, early Friday afternoon. Lucy was out to my right. I’d worked back toward her.

  She stood up. “Is anyone staying up here this weekend?”

  I stopped scraping.

  Other workers shook their heads.

  “Nobody?” she said.

  The crew chief picked up his water bottle and pointed at me. “The Valley kid is. Tenaya.” He took a drink. “The one with long hair. He stays up here every weekend.”

  Lucy looked at me. “You’re staying?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled, one dogtooth turned backward, like a river pearl. That tooth angled wrong. She said, “So I can stay up here with him?”

  The crew chief shook his water bottle back and forth. “No, no,” he said. “We don’t really do that. The tents are for weeknights or emergencies. Nothing else. You can ride back down with me if you want to.”

  She took off one of her gloves and wiped her forehead. “I can’t go down this weekend. Just can’t.”

  All the other workers had stopped working. We all stood and listened.

  The crew chief said, “What do you mean you can’t?”

  Lucy shook her head. “I just can’t go down this weekend.”

  The chief flipped his water bottle and caught it. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “I mean, I guess you could stay up.”

  I smiled and turned away. Went back to scraping moss. Clearing the boulder wasn’t part of my job but I did this sometimes at the end of the day so I could come back and climb a feature.

  I heard one of the other boys say, “Lucky fucking bastard. And he doesn’t even barely talk.”

  • • •

  We used the group stove to warm up Nalley’s Hot Chili out of cans. Lucy cut slices of cheddar cheese off the block. “Want some?” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  She smiled, and I saw that crooked tooth again, so turned that it caught on her bottom lip.r />
  I opened a bag of corn chips and held them out to her.

  “Thanks,” she said. The chili was warm, and she flipped off the stove. “Good enough, right?”

  We ate.

  She said, “You don’t want to go down to the Valley on the weekends either?” She pointed her spoon at me.

  “No, not really,” I said.

  She took a huge bite of chili and said, “Me either,” with her mouth full.

  I said, “Why not?”

  She swallowed. “I’ve been there a lot before,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  • • •

  After dinner, we cleaned our bowls with jug water, scrubbing with the pads of our fingers.

  She said, “Want to go for a swim?”

  It was almost dark and I’d gone swimming earlier. I’d planned on climbing after dinner. Venus was blinking in the west and I climbed every night now. But I looked at Lucy, a girl close to my age, prettier than granite. I said, “Yeah, I could swim.”

  At the edge of the lake, she stripped to her bra and underwear. Black and black with a small line of lace along the top. She was facing away, so I stared. Surprised by how strong she was. Big shoulders. She had a curve in her spine like a snake turning over stone, and scar lines across her left shoulder, two straight lines two inches across. Her skin there and down, I examined the space between her bra and underwear, that curve of her low back, then her backside, the half-circles of her butt, the muscles and the shadow between her legs. I held my breath.

  She ran through the shallows and dove in. Swam out. I was still standing. Hadn’t even undressed yet. She bobbed up and wiped her eyes. “Aren’t you coming in?”

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said. I pulled off my shirt, then my jeans. Ran in. The water was cold, tightening my pores. I swam out to Lucy.

  She was shorter than me, barely able to touch where we stood, and she kept kicking off her toes, bobbing like a small animal crossing a river. Her nostrils flared as she bobbed. She said, “Do you like it out here?”

  “In the lake?”

  “No, no,” she laughed, “in the high country. In Tuolumne.”

  “Yeah, I like the Domes,” I said. “That’s why I came back this summer.”