Chapter 79
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The next day dawned even colder, but the snow held. Driving Tioga Pass road was a time machine, taking Lee and Jack further into winter and the Park’s past. The high-pressure system kept the valley floor in late fall, but with every thousand feet of altitude the temperature dropped three to five degrees.
The occasional hardwood gave way to conifers at higher altitudes. As they climbed, evidence of man, other than the weather-beaten road, disappeared. The thick forest showed man’s interference. Men suppressed fire here since the early 1900s. A forest not doomed by man would have six inches of fuel on the ground, all that was left from the regular cleansing fires of nature. There were places in Yosemite where fuel was six feet deep. Fires here, once they had a foothold, were infernos and then firestorms.
When John Muir walked the woods of the Sierra Nevada he talked about their inviting openness. Not anymore. Bark beetles killed the pines. The heat from the fires men insisted on putting out were the only thing that killed the bark beetle.
Lee slowed to pull off the road at one of the few approved parking spots in Tuolumne Meadows. She pulled out the offending spark plug wires, having already made up the labels for the plugs and distributor. She taped the signs to the inside of the windshield.
Please leave our car be
Went to town for plug wires
They crossed the meadow at a brutal pace. If rangers spotted them weighted down as they were, they’d know they were headed for high country. No one was permitted in high country in winter except park personnel. The rangers said it was suicide for anyone to be out, but the rangers got to play in the snow whenever they wanted. A properly equipped expedition could survive any weather, if they didn’t panic or outlast their supplies, and if their luck held.
They made the tree line, what little there was of it, over wet ground with heavy packs at nine thousand feet five hundred feet, in under fifteen minutes. In a straight line they were only nineteen miles from Lundy Canyon. They would have to walk at least twenty-five miles to cover those nineteen miles. They would climb three thousand very rough feet. Then they would lose over eight thousand feet and then gain nine thousand before they dropped the nearly ten thousand feet into the Canyon.
The racers who finished the Western States 100 gained and lost a total of over 41,000 feet over the course of one day. Of course they were seasoned, obsessed athletes carrying only their body weight, sunscreen, goo, and water enough to make it to the next station. And they didn’t do it in the dead of winter.
It took five minutes to catch their breath enough to go on. Jacks throat was already raw from dragging thin cold air into straining lungs. The air was so dry sweat evaporated right away, despite the cold. They would have to be very careful about hydration. He forced as much water as he could.
He was so proud of Lee. She’d kept up and didn’t look hurt by the sprint. With the cross-country skis they were carried, on top of heavy packs, their pace slowed to less than a half mile an hour. The trail was barely marked. Once snow hit it would be nearly impossible to find without GPS. And they couldn’t use GPS because of the electronic footprint. So it was time for map and compass.
“I’VE GOT TO REST,” Lee said, slumping down on the side of the trail, and then on her side to get out of the pack.
She was cramping badly. He rubbed her back until most of the knots in her trapezius muscles were gone. She guzzled Gatorade.
“Sorry I’m pushing so hard baby. Why don’t you rest for a half hour? I’ll give my woodsman’s skills a test and sneak up on you.”
She was too tired to keep disbelief out of her bleary eyes. The woods called to him. There was a higher pitched shushing sound from the wind through thin needles and branches in the top of the pines. Lower down thicker branches thrummed like bass strings plucked by the same wind. Dry leaves on low evergreen bushes rattled like a medicine man’s tambourine.
HONG LEE, favorite granddaughter of the retired head of the Three Dragons Triad, watched her Jack disappear into the brush next to the trail. She had shoved the feelings about him fucking that bitch into a little box. He was a man. And, such a man, like all men, had needs. Chinese women looked at things differently. Was she really Chinese? She had been born Chinese. She had always been different, like her father. She had known very early that she was some kind of mutant, also like her father.
She was six when she discovered she was different.
She’d been lying in her little bed. She wanted the card Father sent to her from the US. It was so small. She reached her hand out. The card was in the middle of the nightstand, where she had put it to keep it safe. She couldn’t reach it. She was so tired. She wanted to read the card again, but she didn’t want to get out of bed. She reached again one more time and still couldn’t get it. One more time, and then she would either get up and get it or go…to…sleep. She reached out again and stretched as far as she could and the card slid off the table onto the floor.
She sat up in bed and turned on her reading light. She picked the card up and put it back on the table. She lay down and reached for the card again. Nothing happened. She tried again. She tried seventeen more times before she fell asleep. When she woke in the morning, while she was still half asleep, she reached for the card again. It slid off the table on to the floor and slid a few inches toward her. By the time father returned from his trip she could make the card slide off the table and move along the floor every other time.
Hong Lee didn’t know why, but she didn’t tell anyone about her new trick. Father traveled so much then. She liked to wait for him to return to show him the new things she had learned. Mother always said that she and father were alike in many ways; that they were both…different. Hong Lee heard her mother talk about her when her mother didn’t think Hong Lee could hear and her mother used another word: “Strange.”
Father always bought her little gifts when he traveled. She waited until he was alone with her in her room to show him. She showed him her new math skills. He was always quick with numbers too, just like her. He was so very tired. But, she put the card on the table and told him to watch and then made it slide off on to the floor. She thought he would applaud and bow like he did when she showed him that she could do what Americans called long division. He looked sad and asked her to show him again. She did. He did something that she had never seen him do. He picked her up and held her and cried. She asked him what was wrong and he said:
“Nothing is wrong, my little butterfly. You have a gift. I have the same gift.”
He reached out to hold his hand over a pencil that she used to show him her math skills. The pencil flew into his hand. She giggled and made him do it again. Then he said that he needed to tell her a story, but that she was not old enough to understand it yet.
He thought that by the time she was ten she would be old enough. What he had to tell her now was that she would have to keep her gift a secret from all of her friends, and all of her relatives, even her mother. He asked if she could do that. She said that she could.
Then he asked her about her gift, when had she discovered it, and how she thought that it worked? She did not have the words. She did have the words when she was ten. By then she had explored her talent and refined it. And, practiced and practiced until the gift was hers all the time.
Hong Lee shivered in the cold and thought about her crazy, lovely man and what he would think about her gift. He had a gift too, one different than hers, but still a gift.
She stretched her leg, and felt it again, “Fuck!” she muttered under her breath. Her knee was already starting to swell. She swallowed four ibuprofen and threw rocks with her mind.
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GRAY SQUIRRELS scrabbled after every morsel with an urgency that let Jack know the storm was indeed coming. Ravens watched the squirrels scratching for any forgotten treasures. Landslides started ant-sized, caused by the heavyweight combination of erosion and gravity, cascaded down the mountain. Some gathered enough momentum to land with a crash.
Something was missing. What? Water. Even this late in the year there was always sound, sometimes close, sometimes not, of moving water. Snowmelt, anyway. It had been such a dry year that there was almost no snow pack. When this storm hit it wouldn’t release its energy as water until late spring.
The key to moving without being heard wasn’t to move silently. It was impossible to move without making sound in the real world. The keys were to move slowly and only make sounds that fit in. Jack could imitate that medicine man rattle of dry leaves, the chattering quarrel between squirrels, and those tiny landslides.
He stepped into the low evergreen brush at the base of the trail and walked far enough downhill to hide from view. The cold, clean smells forced their way through his human brain and into his reptilian brain. Quick fear tried to empty his stomach as the raw smell of a bear in a den somewhere close by ran up his nostrils and into his spine. He forced the fear away.
The picked-clean bones of a squirrel lay at his feet. He flashed on the cat that had adopted him, toward the end when cancer had eaten the tough old Tom down to nothing. Marmot’s tracks cut across the squirrel run, unusual this late in the season.
He slid through the forest, closer to who and what he was with every breath, each step, and all the notes of the symphony of the wind. He fought the urge to keep going forever into the woods. He turned back toward the trail. The bear smell came and went on the wind. The plaintive cry of a hawk that should have left for the lowlands a while ago was answered by a challenging caw from a raven.
He low-crawled back to the lip of the trail, checking for sign before he crossed. A group of four people had passed toward the meadows a few days before. They were probably women from the narrow, small boots and light tracks. One of the women, the one with the biggest feet and newest boots, had a serious hitch in her get-along. Bob’s prints were similar, one leg carrying all the weight and the other dropped and dragged.
Jack jumped across the trail and climbed near straight up for a hundred yards. He exposed himself briefly as he topped the military crest of the ridgeline above the trail. He walked back along the ridge, keeping far enough below the crest so Lee couldn’t see him. Once he was well past her he crawled to the lip of the crest and looked down.
She stood in the middle of the trail, arms wrapped around her body in a self-hug, staring back up the trail the way they had come, not looking up. He slid down over the crest in a crouching crawl that took him a hundred feet closer. He low-crawled until he could smell her perfume. The alchemist who designed it guaranteed no real man could ignore the scent. Jack knew the alchemist was right.
As Jack watched, she placed a row of pebbles on a rock and sat on another rock a few feet away. He smiled, expecting some kind of puzzle or game, perhaps a cairn. As he watched, the pebbles, without being touched or pushed or anything he could see, flew off the rock and chased a squirrel that sprinted for its hollow.
He felt fear and elation and then confusion. He didn’t know what he felt. He knew he felt closer to her and a little scared at the same time. She had a talent too! What to do? Let her know he knew? If he did, he could share his talent with her. Would she think he was a freak? Would it bring them closer together? This was neither the right time nor the right place to have a discussion about sixth sense or ESP or magic or voodoo or whatever it was. There was no good time or place for some conversations. She took him to a Dr. Phoon. The healer had used her magic to take metal out of his back. Perhaps then would have been the right time and place.
Jack waited until Lee paced back up the trail, looked at her watch and sat back down. She pulled her parka close around to keep out the chill of wind and thirty minutes alone. He stood, took a step closer, and breathed her in. He reached out to touch her and stopped. He took four steps back and coughed. She let out a girlish squeal and moved into his arms. Her look of relief, and the salty damp smell of her mixed with perfume was a tonic.
They shouldered their heavy packs and leaned into the hill. They stopped the march at three, having looked since two for a campsite. He wanted overhead cover, knowing the enemy could have air power. For all he knew the sons-of-bitches had access to NSA satellite imagery. If they did, his plan for the compound would fail very quickly.
They weren’t in cave country, but found the next best thing. A slab of rock had fallen away, split vertically off a cliff face that begged for a climb. The fifty foot tall splinter had driven itself into the earth at the bottom of the cliff, then fallen into a lean-too. The split had occurred long enough ago for scree to build, mostly blocking the back. There was a natural chimney and crawl-way if they had to leave by the back door. The floor of their temporary home was littered with boulders from the size of his fist to that of medicine balls.
Moving the smaller rocks was Lee’s job. He lifted the smaller boulders and levered the bigger ones away using a staff as thick as his calf that looked like it had been singed off a pine by lightning. The triple devils of altitude, exercise, and fear chewed at their strength. When they finished they were stoned from exhaustion.
The package of linguini with alfredo sauce followed by mug after mug of hot chocolate tasted better than food had a right to. They had eaten bars high in protein and fat on every other break. He ate as much on the trail as he could. He never knew when he’d be able to stop for food and any excuse to feed his natural gluttony was a good one. They finished dinner by four-thirty just as the sun dropped behind the mountains to the west. The air temperature fell as if a curtain drawn. By five-thirty it was twenty degrees colder.
The sky was clear to the west and stars shone like a carpet of light. Their tired went away for a little while. They moved inside the tent. He again thanked the gods of technology. The three-season tent that weighed six pounds would keep away anything but the strongest blizzard. His bag, which weighed less than four pounds, would keep him warm down to thirty below zero, Fahrenheit. His boots kept his feet warm and dry in near-Arctic conditions. The two stoves, which weighed only ounces, put out as many BTUs as fireplaces that had roasted sides of beef in king’s castles.
They snuggled as much as they could.
He brought it up. “You know we never talked about how the doctor fixed my back.”
Lee asked, “Why do you need to know how? I don’t know how the machine language in my Mac works, but I happily use it every day.”
Jack heard something in her voice, caught a feeling. “I’m beating around the bush. While I was sneaking around in the woods I saw you using magic to throw pebbles. I have a talent as well. Mine detects danger almost all the time. And I can feel fear. I can detect fear. And, sometimes, more often than not, I can persuade people to do things, to at least tell me things. That’s how I had the big payday in the market, back when the tech bubble burst. It was this big…wave of fear and panic. People in the City went from being crazy with excitement to crazy with fear, but not so crazy that they couldn’t sell stocks.”
Jack watched Lee’s beautiful face as he talked. He had already decided he would never play poker with her. He renewed his promise to himself. At first she wouldn’t let her face let him in. When she saw that he loved her as much, maybe more because of her talent, and she let him in.
Lee said, “I knew you had a talent. I heard too many stories about your ‘intuition.’ I watched you with people. I found out about my talent when I was six. My father had the same talent. My little brother, the one who died on the motorcycle, had a different talent. His was much like yours. My father had a theory that it was some genetic change in just a few people. He thought most humans had talents in ancient times and that they went away, were forced away, or they would be killed by the priests and shamans. He thinks the bomb tests in the forties and fifties and sixties maybe changed some genetic code so now they are back.”
They talked, snuggling as much as they could, until late, almost 8:00 PM, when they both fell into exhausted sleep.
Jack had the omen dream again that night. This time his chute had no static line. He was first man in the door and the jumpmaster was mad at him for holding things up. The jumpmaster used dental floss, instead of a static line, tying it to the end of the chute and looping it over the cable.
Jack said, “You tied a granny knot.”
The jumpmaster said, “It’s a square knot,” and kicked him out the door. Jack tumbled out the door knowing his chute wouldn’t open. When he reached for the reserve handle he pulled away a glass doorknob.
He woke to Lee shaking him gently and whispering, “My precious man, it’s all right. Just a dream, baby.”
He held on to her until his heart slowed enough to talk without gasping and tried to tell her about the dream until sleep took him again.
JACK AWOKE THAT morning in Lee’s arms. She’d put on three more layers of her clothes and some of his. She wore glove liners and mittens. Leaving her legs inside the bag with him inside his, she held him. Ice had formed on the inside of the tent, and in the water bottle he put between his bag and pad the night before, there was a mixture of slush and water.
The thermometer said two degrees. Lee didn’t wake as he slid out of the tent. His trapezius muscles felt as if they were permanently dented. His gluteus felt as if someone had hit them with a hammer. His quads felt worse. He swayed and leaned and stretched through a Tai Chi warm up for ten minutes before he could move without groaning.
He had the stove going and water on for tea and coffee, minutes after that. Lee and he had discovered a matching taste for oatmeal. The strong coffee smelled so good he expected squirrels to be lined up with nut-cups ready.
Lee was in as bad shape as he was, but recovered faster. Jack’s ten minutes of agony were cut to five for her. Except for her knee. The left one was spongy right below the cap and swollen. The best treatment was rest, but they couldn’t do that. Instead, they had ice, ibuprofen, and knee wraps. Jack saw that Lee was bothered to her core. At first he thought it was from the pain in her knee and didn’t understand.
Pain is a quirky thing. He had known women who’d go through natural childbirth without a whimper. The same woman would cry and whine as if tortured from the soreness after a first workout. He had seen her in pain before and this reaction didn’t jibe.
He knelt in front of her, the icy cold of the ground coming up through his trousers into his knees. He took his gloves off and knelt on them as he gently took her face in his hands. He looked deep into her.
Jack had seen a look like hers before. Olga Boganskia’s car had been in the shop and he gave her a ride to school to pick up her little boy at the end of his first day of kindergarten. A little girl stood off to the right by herself. The little girl had the same look on her face that Lee did. The little girl’s look said she was certain her parents had abandoned her at this strange place and she was never going to see them again.
He said, “If it comes to that, I’ll carry you on my back. If I can’t carry you, I’ll stay with you until you can move again. I will not leave you.”
She smiled, pretending she believed him. They broke camp. Within an hour she walked without a limp. Temperature rose and wind speed fell as cloud cover moved in. The air smelled wet and felt thick enough to take a bite out of. Snow came.
It was one thing to intellectually wish for a snowstorm to use as cover. It was a thing of a totally different kind to be out when a major mountain storm hit. It was impossible to imagine how fast snow could accumulate. They walked along on a bare, dry trail and two hours later pulled on snowshoes to get through the foot of new snow. Six hours after that they buckled on cross-country skis for the dip down into the Grand Canyon of the Yosemite.
The change in weather was a blessing for Lee’s knee. Tendonitis was a repetitive motion injury. Lee’s stride changed from the narrow one-foot-almost-behind-the-other she used walking in boots to the figure-eight swivel in snowshoes. Then her stride changed again to the sliding, lifting, planting glide of cross-country skis. This helped her knee for a while. The changes were brutal on her musculature and cardiovascular system and easy on her knees-at least for a while.
Jack hated cross-country skiing. He felt like he was on a snow-covered NordicTrack, stuck in a giant freezer, never quite getting into the rhythm he saw others use. Today it felt right. He would lift and slide and plant, swing his weight forward, push off with the pole and nearly glide over the snow.
Lee set the pace and he discovered she was a great cross-country skier. At first he kept up with her, entranced by the bunch and flow of her butt muscles under the white tights she’d slipped on. They were both in white, draped with white where they didn’t have white clothing. Soon he was gasping as he tried to suck in enough oxygen to keep up. He tried to yell out to her to slow down. She heard the croak and glided back to where he stopped, barely able to stand.
They were too exposed to stop and confronted by a problem he hadn’t planned for. The sharp rocks and deep crevices were all camouflaged in white. They could be skiing over what looked smooth and inviting and was actually a death-trap, waiting for one of them to take a fall they couldn’t recover from.
They couldn’t stay out in the open and couldn’t move quickly across the snow without risking injury or death. They headed on again, him leading this time, their pace slowed to a tenth of what it had been hoping to hit the tree line.
She said, “Let’s dig out the tent, climbing harness, and rope. Extend the shock-corded tent pole and wrap where it connects with duct tape. Slide the pole down into the snow ahead of us and pull it out checking each few feet.”
“Damn I love my smart, hot, sexy, did I say smart, woman?”
It wasn’t perfect, but they made do. They put on the harnesses and, using a quick release set-up, clipped themselves together. They found shelter and settled in for a hot lunch of macaroni and cheese, mixing in whey protein, more mugs of hot chocolate and as much dried fruit as they could eat. Dessert was Girl Scout cookies they’d bought in Manteca in front of Wal-Mart.
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