Bliss and Other Short Stories Part 9

Katy was leaning on her elbow. Her silhouette loomed darkly, an undulating landscape, in the periphery of Mike's vision. "It's not just that, Mike. If I don't get out of here soon, I'll be lost, too."

This summer she'd climbed all the mountains up to Maine and back and twice gone out west with Frank and some others in search of tougher climbs. Both times it was a group affair.

At last, reluctantly, Mike bought a pair of hiking shoes.

The top of the mountain was rock: long, submerged ellipses of white and purple lichen-encrusted granite that reminded Mike of the whale he'd once seen from the deck of a boat off the coast of Mexico. He'd watched in awe as the whale's gleaming, corrugated skin slid out from under the water. He felt a slight giddiness now as he walked along the raised backbones of the rocks. The tingling in his legs seemed to antic.i.p.ate a senseless s.h.i.+ft-the warning of an imminent sounding-that would throw him into the depths of trees he now stood above.

Mike spied Frank standing atop the mountain's highest outcrop-ping of stone, nearly a quarter of a mile away. Frank stood with his arm outstretched, finger pointing; his legs were braced against the wind in the stance of an explorer. "Oh, holy one," Mike said to no one. Looking down and back, Frank crouched, then straightened, pulling Katy up to his level. They swayed, grabbing each other, and their laughter was blown, after a moment's delay, to Mike's ears. But the spark that lifted their voices into the air signaled their isolation, too, and after a moment they drew apart. When they spotted Mike, he already had his hand raised in greeting, and when Katy waved to him he imagined himself as she might have seen him: small and distant, with the wind slowly wearing down the mountaintop be-tween them.

"This is glorious," Katy said. She pulled off her windbreaker and sat, cross-legged, and emptied her backpack of her share of the lunch items. The sun's warmth slipped like minnows through the currents of the cool September breeze. Frank lay in the shade, his cap pulled down over his face. His st.u.r.dy legs stretched out into the sunlight that stopped where Mike sat uncomfortably against a tree, smok-ing. He had risen much too late that morning, putting them hours behind schedule, but neither Katy nor Frank had complained. No one had had much to say on the drive, either, and now the silence they had brought up the mountain unfolded itself again until it took up all s.p.a.ce. Mike opened his backpack. "Who wants a beer?"

"Sure," Katy said.

Frank didn't move for a moment. Mike felt his waiting. They all felt themselves waiting.

"Whoa," Frank said then, and propped himself up on an elbow. "It'll probably put me to sleep, but thanks, yes indeed, I'll take one." He reached for a can of beer.

"I thought you were already asleep." Mike helped himself.

Katy held up sandwiches. "Frank, which? Tuna? Have something to eat."

"Yes, ma'am." Frank took off his cap and pushed damp, curly hair back over his narrow skull. "Gimme tuna. G.o.d, this is amazing, isn't it?" he said. "Let me ask you something. Why do you suppose we're the only people up here? Why is that?"

Mike drank half his beer and said nothing.

"Why do you think?" Katy asked.

"I don't know, I haven't any idea. But look here"-he extended his arms to present their surroundings, as if offering them bruised rocks, trees, and blue afternoon sky tinting sharply, in the west, to a seething spot of weather. "Here we are, no one around. Look at that sky. Magnificent! Of all the places anyone could wish to be, and on a day like this." Frank gathered his sandwich together with both hands and bit into it. "Oh, Katy, this is good."

"No trouble, padre."

"So I guess I don't know what people do on a day like this one," he continued, after taking another bite and glancing at each of the oth-ers. "Fight the crab gra.s.s? Watch a game on TV? Go to the mall?"

"Perhaps a stimulating combination of all three," Mike said.

"Oh-you," Katy said. She slapped his leg, which required that she lean across the sun-filled center of their picnic s.p.a.ce. "You know what he means."

Frank spluttered, "I don't know what I mean!-I don't really know. It's hard for me to see what people want anymore, or why they want . . . whatever they want. People seem unaccountable to me."

"Unaccountable, how?" Mike asked.

Katy said, "I think Frank just means-"

"Yes, I was asking Frank what he meant."

"-that people are individuals, Mike. Okay? Unreadable." She took her eyes off her husband and looked at Frank. "Is that right?"

"Something like that," Frank said.

Mike lit a cigarette, relis.h.i.+ng the disapproval in the set of their expressions. "Maybe what you mean, father, is that you wish peo-ple were more like you."

Katy whistled. "Oh ho," she said.

"No, it's true enough. That's fair," Frank said. "But let me ask you something, speaking of people like you and me and us: Would you have come along today if Katy and I hadn't insisted?" Frank had set his beer can in the dust and was pressing it into concen-tric patterns.

"Nope."

"What would you have done, instead, then?"

"Gone to the mall," Mike said.

"I think I'll go for a walk," Katy said.

"You mean 'a hike,' don't you?"

"Yes, Mike," she said without getting up to go.

Frank said, "Well, I'm certainly not complaining. Maybe I haven't been around people enough-been out in the world long enough- but if people don't want to come up here, it's fine with me. All the better, in fact. It's just for us, this way. Though I'd still like to share it, this gift of G.o.d."

"Amen," Katy said.

"I guess that depends on whether or not you believe in G.o.d," Mike said. He couldn't stop.

"What?" Katy said. "What does that mean? I mean-" She shook her head. "Never mind."

Frank said, "Everyone's free to believe whatever they want to."

"I know that," she said.

Mike looked at Katy. She hadn't said a word when she woke him that morning, just pushed on his shoulder until he opened his eyes. "What, then?" he asked. "What were you thinking? We're both in-terested. Aren't we, Frank?"

"Wait a minute. Let's just . . . wait a minute," Frank said.

Katy sighed. "I really am going for a walk."

"Okay."

"You know," she said. "I was just thinking that you said-I thought you said, once-that you believed in G.o.d. That's all. Didn't you? So I'm surprised because-this is ridiculous." She put her hands flat on the ground, preparatory to rising in a single unwinding upward motion. "Maybe I'm wrong, Mike. I just don't know."

"I don't know what could have made me say such a thing," he said. "I must have been out of my mind."

"You were, as a matter of fact."

He watched her as she rose and turned and walked off. He was sweating again, as if he'd been climbing the side of something im-possibly steep. "We don't have to turn this into a big thing," Frank said. "Mike? We really don't."

"I like malls," Mike said loudly. When Katy didn't turn around, he went on: "I like them because there are no G.o.dd.a.m.ned deerflies in them."

"Michael," Frank said.

"Just shut up, father. You don't know s.h.i.+t."

"Man, I know I don't."

"Then just don't tell me, okay? Don't sit there telling me what a big thing it is or isn't, or anything. I like it there. I go there. I like it because there are lots of people-you getting this? People just keep walking around. There's no weather in there, no trees except for those ugly, skinny potted things."

"You're hurting Katy."

"Oh, that's great. I'm hurting Katy. That's really good," Mike said.

"I'm warning you, Frank."

"It's the truth."

Mike felt himself fill, suddenly. He was a cold, bright container of hate and he would pour himself over Frank.

"The truth? You're going to tell me about the truth? You want to tell me what hurts? Try cutting off your hand and tell me if it hurts.

I'll tell you what hurts, if you want to know and you think you can take it. You can have it. I'll give it to you." Mike was whispering.

"You're n.o.body's father."

Frank was crying. "I love her, too," he said.

Katy was walking back to where they sat. But when she was with in ten feet of them, she stopped and looked up. Her eyes opened wide. "Oh, my G.o.d."

The men scrambled up and went to her. Together they turned and looked up beyond the tree line at what she had seen: a full, ripe, lush yellow moon lifting free of the mountains. *

Alison had been a year and a half old when Mike took her out to look at the moon.

She was playing in her room. Mike rushed in, picked her up and hurried back down the stairs, asking her, "Do you want to see the moon? Do you? If you do, say, 'Yes, Daddy.'"

Alison looked at him with incomprehension and approval. She had a wad of his s.h.i.+rt collar in her fist. "Yes," she said, nodding.

Then, finding a rhythm, "YesYesYes."

Mike laughed and pushed the screen door open. "You have no idea what I'm talking about, right?"

"Yes, yes," the girl chanted.

The night was cooled by a breeze. The stars looked famished on the chilled black ice of the sky. Mike turned and pointed to the full, creamy moon. "There," he said. "See it? The moon. Isn't it beautiful?

The moon, sweetheart, sweet baby. It's the moon."

Puzzled by his excitement, Alison looked up, first at his upraised hand, then beyond it. The moon!

Alison stared. Her tiny lips parted. After a moment, she closed her mouth and drew back, bowing, putting her arms around Mike's neck. Her body trembled in his arms. She began to cry. "Mommy,"

she cried. "I want Mommy." *

Mike left Katy and Frank and loped heavily over the rocks. When he stopped to breathe, he found he had reached the highest point of the mountain. Looking down on the sweep of treetops, he recalled a piece of trivia from third grade: that in the country's early days, before the Eastern forests had been cleared, a squirrel could travel from the woods of New England to the Mississippi River-tree to tree-without ever once touching the ground. He remembered the sense of awe he'd felt at this ill.u.s.tration of the young forest's vast, nearly limitless abundance, its impossible density-its ability to lit erally support an army of animals that need never, in its ceaseless search for food, risk the danger and darkness of solid earth. But now, as he stood above the trees, his eyes blind to what their bil lions of shadows concealed, he felt a surge of panic, which turned at once to a longing for Alison so intense he went to his knees. He lay against the backbone of rock. He could hear Frank's voice, then Katy's, answering. He felt sleep turning toward him as it often did, unexpectedly, in a warm, seductive rush. He had thought, a year ago, that he would have to endure sleeplessness, but he hadn't: he had slept, as he would sleep now. Sleep had been the ally that betrayed him to his enemy, the dream, and his enemy was always waiting.

He closed his eyes. *

The yard stretched all the way to the trees. Alison ran with her ball down the long, green corridor, her braided hair flying. Mike marked her prog-ress by the way her footprints in the gra.s.s flared with phosph.o.r.escence, a ghostly s.h.i.+mmer from the southern ocean where whales rolled their careless, giant bodies unseen beneath the stars. There were people in the trees. Mike moved uneasily beneath the canopy of their murmuring voices and Alison ran on, flinging her ball, throwing it higher and higher until finally it soared out of sight. The sky went dark. Voices rose high up on either side of the yard as the tree people shouted to one another, leaning out, their weight fluttering the lesser darkness in the branches as if a wind were pa.s.sing through the trees. Look at that! they shouted. The moon! Alison's ball, beautifully round and s.h.i.+ning, floated down through the trees as if drawn by a string. Mike looked for her, but she was gone; her luminous prints, which faded as the ball waxed brighter and nearer, seemed to run in all directions, their color draining into the earth. Mike began to call to her but his words unraveled, drifting ca-sually up into the darkness, catching like cotton in the branches of the trees. The moon, he heard himself say. The moon!

Mike and Katy continued to look for Alison in vain all that night, and all the next day and night. Search parties were organized; flash lights flickered deep into the woods near whose borders she had last been seen. Some of the searchers returned at daybreak, clutch ing their walkie-talkies, stumbling with fatigue and failure, but oth ers, Mike among them, went on looking, along roads and across the fields and finally, without hope or sense, on into the old, high farming country of the previous century with its wild orchards and gra.s.sy, shoulder-deep cellar holes.

It seemed to Mike, exhausted and stricken but not yet grieving, that a vast exodus was taking place-that from where they had come, they could never return; that one day the searchers would walk out from under the cover of the enclosing forest to find themselves in the weak, dirty daylight on the banks of the placid Mississippi-the promised agony of safe pa.s.sage concluded-and that since Alison had led them there, she would at last be found. *

When Mike opened his eyes, he saw Katy kneeling on the rock beside him. Frank was standing nearby, his face nearly eclipsed by the shadow his cap's bill cast in the fading light. The moon had risen higher; its yellow had burned away, exposing the true, white sc.r.a.ped-raw face.

"We'd better get started down," Katy said. She wiped Mike's face with her bandana, pus.h.i.+ng her thumbs gently into the corners of his eyes. Then she tied the cloth around her neck and zipped her jacket to enclose it. "Feel that chill," she said. "Are you cold?"

"Yes," he said. "I feel it, now."

Katy looked up at the moon, but her hands went back to Mike; her fingers moved lightly over his chest, probing for evidence of where, exactly, his heart was buried. "It's like the sun, it's so bright," she said softly. "But not the sun. Not hot like the sun. Some moun-tains up there, I'll bet."

Frank hoisted his backpack onto his shoulders. "Let's go, buddy," he called. "We don't want to spend the night up here." He dropped toward the shadowy opening in the trees that would take them down to the van.

Mike watched as Katy closed and buckled her backpack and ad-justed its straps before slinging it around and onto her back, then pulling the waist straps together and cinching them in a loose but secure bond. She moved her shoulders to settle her burden. When she had finished, she stood very still in the fading light.

"I'm ready to go, now," she said.

Invisible Waves.

When Grandpa Ford says he'll die before he sees the Grand Can-yon, he means it two ways: he doesn't want to look at a monument to erosion (except in the mirror, he says), and he figures he won't be around long enough, anyway, to be subjected to such a long trip. He lisps to Ginger's mother, "In a car? Do you hate me? Why not go all the way and rent an ambulance?" His mouth twitches, the slippery conch-sh.e.l.l pink of his gums gleams. Grandpa Ford has no teeth. When he's mad, like now, his lips tend to move in undis-ciplined gusts of anger.

A year ago he still had the full set, stained ivory-yellow from smoking. He still smokes, up in his room, in secret, he thinks. Gin-ger remembers sitting up on his bony thighs when she was little, breathing in that old man smell and reaching up to tap his teeth with her fingernails while he grinned and growled. "Careful, little girl," he'd say. "I'll bite 'em right off. I'm a lion. I could eat up every-body in this house."

But Ginger's mom isn't likely to be eaten up, not by him. Not by anybody. She doesn't say a word more, just hands him a paper nap-kin before Ginger can signal to him that there's a clot of oatmeal on his chin, and he scours his mouth with the napkin and stuffs it into the pocket of his bathrobe. Since the barium treatments, he's lost most of the feeling around his mouth and nose. He got well, but the procedure fried the nerve endings.

Grandpa Ford moved in with the family two years ago, the week Ginger turned eleven. He brought only a suitcase; he'd sold every-thing else. Ginger's dad said he had drawings dating from Renais-sance Amsterdam in the trunk of his car, which in rage at his ill ness he forgot about, and they went with the car. A fortune, Gin ger's dad said.

When she does his laundry, she collects his balled-up napkins, feeling ashamed. She counts them, and then she straightens up.

Sometimes the napkins are b.l.o.o.d.y, but whether it's from his naked gums, or some deeper place, she doesn't know. *