TAMMILI AND LYDIA were supposed to be cleaning up the loft. Their father was working on the well. Their mother was cooking breakfast and it was their job to make the beds and straighten up the loft and clean the windows with vinegar and water.
“Why can’t we clean them with Windex like we do at home?” Lydia complained. “Just because we come to Willits for spring vacation they go environmental and we have to use vinegar for the windows. The windows are okay. I’m not cleaning them.”
“You shouldn’t have come then. You could have stayed with Grandmother. You didn’t have to come if you’re just going to complain.”
“Why can’t we have a ski lodge or something? Why do we have to have a solar house? We can’t bring anybody. It’s too little to even bring the dogs.”
“It’s a solar-powered house, not a solar house, and I don’t want to take dogs everywhere I go. There’re wolves and panthers in these woods. Those dogs wouldn’t last a week up here. Dooley is so friendly he’d let a wolf carry him off in his teeth.”
“You clean the windows and I’ll get all this stuff out from under the bed. Everyone’s always sticking stuff under here. I hate piles of junk like this.” Lydia was pulling boxes and clothes out from underneath the bed where she and Tammili had been sleeping. It was the bed on which they had been born, in the middle of the night, ten and a half years before. Their father had delivered them and a helicopter had come and taken them to a hospital at Fort Bragg. Sometimes Lydia felt sentimental about that and sometimes she didn’t like to think about it. It was embarrassing to have been delivered in a snowstorm by your father. Not to mention they had almost died. That was too terrible to think about.
“What are you thinking about?” Tammili asked, but she knew. She and Lydia always thought about things at the same time. It was the curse and blessing of being twins. You were never lonely, not even in your thoughts. On the other hand there was no place to hide.
“Who put this here?” Lydia dragged a long brown cloak out from underneath the bed. It had a cowl and a twisted cord for the waist and it was very thick, as thick as a blanket. It smelled heavenly, like some wonderful mixture of wildflowers and mist. She pulled it out and spread it on the bed. Then she wrapped it around her shoulders.
“I’ve never seen this before.” Tammili drew near the cape and touched it. “It smells like violet. I bet it belongs to Nieman. No one but Nieman would leave a cape here. Let me wear it too, will you?” She moved into one half of the cape. They wrapped it around themselves like a cocoon and fell down on the bed and started laughing.
“Once upon a time,” Lydia began, “there were two little girls and they were so poor they didn’t have any firewood for the fireplace. All the trees had been cut down by ruthless land developers and there weren’t any twigs left to gather to make a fire. They only had one thing left and that was their bed. We better cut up the bed and burn it, one of them said, or else we won’t live until the morning. We will freeze to death in this weather. Okay, the other one said. Pull that bed over here and let’s burn it up. Then they saw something under the bed. It was a long warm cape that their father had left for them when he went away to war. There was a note on it. ‘This is for my darling daughters in case they run out of firewood. Love, your dad.’ ”
“Tammili.” It was their mother calling. “You girls come on down. I want you to help me with the eggs.” Tammili and Lydia put their faces very close together. They giggled again, smothering the sound.
“We’re coming,” Lydia called. “We’ll be down in a minute.” They folded the cape and laid it on the bed by Tammili’s backpack. Then they climbed down the ladder to help their mother with the meal.
That was Wednesday morning. On Wednesday night their father decided they should go on an expedition. “To where?” their mother asked. “You know I have to study while I’m here. I can’t go off for days down a river or in the mountains. One-day trips. That’s all I’m good for this week.”
“I thought we might overnight up in the pass by Red River,” Freddy Harwood said. “Nieman and I used to camp there every spring. It might be cold but we’ll take the bedrolls and I’ll have the mobile phone. You can’t go for one night?”
“I should stay here. Do you need me?”
“We don’t need you,” Tammili said. “We can take care of things. I want to go, Dad. We’ve been hearing about Red River for years but no one ever takes us. We’re almost eleven. We can do anything.”
“Get another adult,” Nora Jane insisted. “Don’t go off with both of them and no one to help.”
“We are help,” Lydia said. “Is it a steep climb, Daddy? Is it steep?”
“No. It’s long but it’s not that steep. Nieman and I used to do the trail to the top in three hours. Two and a half coming down. There’s a bower up there under thousand-year-old pine trees. You don’t need a sleeping bag. We’ll take them but we could sleep on the ground. I haven’t been up there to camp in years. Not since I met your mother. So, we’ll go. It’s decided.”
“Tomorrow,” they both screamed.
“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Friday. Let me think about it.”They jumped on top of him and started giving him one of their famous hug attacks. They grabbed pillows and hugged him with them until he screamed for mercy. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” they kept saying. “Don’t make us wait.”
“Then we have to get everything ready tonight because we have to leave at sunup. It takes an hour to drive to the trail. Then three hours to climb. I want to have camp set up by afternoon.”
“What do we need?”
“Tent, food, clothes, extra socks. Vaseline for blisters, ankle packs for sprains, snakebite kit, Mag Lites, sleeping bags.”
“We’re going to carry all that?”
“Whatever we want we have to carry. We’ll have extra water in the car. We’ll take small canteens and the purifying kit. Go start pumping at the well, Tammili. Fill two water bags.”
“Can’t I fill them at the sink?”
“No, the idea is to know how to survive without a sink. That’s what Willits is for, sweeties.”
“We know.” They gave each other a look. “So no matter what happens your DNA is safe.”They started giggling and their mother put down the dish she was drying and started giggling too.
Freddy Harwood was an equipment freak. He had spent the summers of his youth in wilderness camps in Montana and western Canada. When he graduated to camping on his own, he took up equipment as a cause. If he was going camping he had every state-of-the-art device that could be ordered on winter nights from catalogs. He had Mag Lites on headbands and Bull Frog sunblock. He had wrist compasses and Ray-Ban sunglasses and Power Bars and dehydrated food. He had two lightweight tents, a Stretch Dome and a Lookout. The Lookout was the lightest. It weighed five pounds, fifteen ounces with the poles. He had Patagonia synchilla blankets and official referee whistles and a Pur water purifier and drinking water tablets in case the purifier broke. He had two-bladed knives for the girls and a six-bladed knife for himself. He had stainless-steel pans and waterproofing spray and tent repair kits and first aid kits of every kind.
“Bring everything we think we need and put it on the table,” Freddy said. “Then we’ll decide what to take and what to leave. Bring everything. Your boots and the clothes you’re going to wear. It’s eight o’clock. We have to be packed and in bed by ten if we’re going in the morning.”
The girls went upstairs and picked out clothes to wear. “I’m taking this cape,” Tammili said. “I’ve got a feeling about this cape. I think it’s supposed to go to Red River with us.”
“Nieman saw baby panthers up there once,” Lydia added. “The mother didn’t kill him for looking at them she was so weak with hunger because there had been a drought and a forest fire. Nieman left them all his food. He got to within twenty feet of their burrow and put the food where she could get it. Dad was there. He knows it’s true. Nieman’s so cool. I wish he was going with us.”
“He has to study. He’s going for a Nobel prize in biochemistry. That’s what Dad told Grandmother. He said Nieman wouldn’t rest until he won a Nobel.”
The girls brought their clothes and backpacks down from the loft and spread the things out on the table. “What’s this?” Freddy asked, picking up the cloak.
“Something we found underneath the bed. We think it’s Nieman’s. I was going to take it instead of a sleeping bag. Look how warm it is.”
“I wouldn’t carry it if I were you. You have to think of every ounce.”Tammili went over and took the cape from him and folded it and laid it on the hearth. Later, when they had finished packing all three of the backpacks and set them by the kitchen door, she picked up the cape and pushed it into her pack. I’m taking it, she decided. I like it. It looks like the luckiest thing you could wear.
In a small, neat condominium in Berkeley, the girls’ godfather, Nieman Gluuk, was finishing the last of twenty algebra problems he had set himself for the day. His phone was off the hook. His flower gardens were going wild. His cupboards were bare. His sink was full of dishes. His bed was unmade.
He put the last notation onto the last problem and stood up and began to rub his neck with his hand. He was lonely. His house felt like a tomb. “I’m going to Willits to see the kids,” he said out loud. “I’m going crazy all alone in this house. Starting to talk to myself. They are my family and I need them and it’s spring vacation and they won’t be ten forever.”
He went into his bedroom and began to throw clothes into a suitcase. It was three o’clock in the morning. He had been working on the algebra problems for fourteen hours. When Nieman Gluuk set out to conquer a body of knowledge, he did it right. When he had studied philosophy he had learned German and French and Greek. Now he was studying biochemistry and he was learning math. “If my eyes hold out I will learn this stuff,” he muttered. “If my eyes give out, I’ll learn it with my ears.” He pushed the half-filled suitcase onto the floor and turned off the lights and pulled off his shirt and pants and fell into his bed in his underpants. It would be ten in the morning before he woke. Since he had quit his job at the newspaper he had been sleeping nine and ten hours a night. The day he canceled his subscription he slept twelve hours that night.
“The destination,” Freddy was saying to his daughters, “is the high caves above Red River. They aren’t on this map but you can see the cliff in these old photographs. Nieman and I took these when we were about twenty years old. We developed them in my old darkroom in Grandmother Ann’s house. See all the smudges? We were experimenting with developers.” He held the photograph up. “Anyway, we follow the riverbed for a few miles, then up and around the mountain to this pass. Four rivers rise on this mountain. All running west except this one. Red River runs east and north. It’s an anomaly, probably left behind from some cataclysm when the earth cooled or else created by an earthquake eons ago. It’s unique in every way. If there was enough snow last winter the falls will be spectacular this time of year. Some years they are spectacular and sometimes just a trickle. We won’t know until we get there. Even in dry years the sound is great. Where we are camping we will be surrounded by water and the sound of water. It’s the best sleeping spot in the world. I’ll put it up against any place you can name. I wish your mother was going with us. She doesn’t know what she’s missing.” He took the plate of pancakes Nora Jane handed him and began to eat, lifting each mouthful delicately and dramatically, meeting her violet-blue eyes and saying secrets to her about the night that had passed and the one she was going to be missing.
Tammili and Lydia played with their food. Neither of them could eat when they were excited and they were excited now.
“Is this enough?” Lydia asked her mother. “I really don’t want any more.”
“Whatever you like. It’s a long way to go and the easy way to carry food is in your stomach.”
“It weighs the same inside or out,” Tammili said. “We’re only taking dehydrated packs. In your stomach it’s mixed with water so it really weighs less if you carry it in the pack.”
Lydia giggled and got up and put her plate by the sink. Tammili followed her. “Let’s go,” they both said. “Come on, let’s get going.”
“I wish you had a weather report,” Nora Jane put in. “If it turns colder you just come on back.”
“Look at that sky. It’s as clear as summer. There’s nothing moving in today. I’ve been coming up here for twenty years. I can read this weather like the back of my hand. It’s perfect for camping out.”
“I know. The world is magic and there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” Nora Jane went to her husband and held him in her arms. “Go on and sleep by a waterfall. I wish I could go but I have to finish this paper. That’s it. I want to turn it in next week.”
“Let’s go,”Tammili called out. “What’s keeping you, Dad? Let’s get going.” Freddy kissed his wife and went out and got into the driver’s seat of the Jeep Cherokee and the girls strapped themselves into the seats behind him and plugged their Walkmans into their ears.
Nora Jane went back into the house and stacked the rest of the dishes by the sink and sat down at the table and got her papers out. She was writing a paper on Dylan Thomas. “ ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age;’ ” she read, “ ‘that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer….’ ”
Freddy took a right at the main road to Willits, then turned onto an old gold-mining trail that had been worn down by a hundred years of rain. “Hold on,” he told the girls. “This is only for four miles, then we’ll be on a better road. It will save us hours if we use this shortcut.” The girls took the plugs out of their ears and held on to the seats in front of them. The mobile phone fell from its holder and rattled around on the floor. Tammili captured it and turned it on to see if it was working. “It’s broken,” she said. “You broke the phone, Dad. It wasn’t put back in right.”
“Good,” he said. “One less hook to civilization. When we get rid of the Jeep we’ll be really free. The wilderness doesn’t want you to bring a bunch of junk along. It wants you to trust it to provide for you.”
“Trusting the earth is trusting yourself. Trusting yourself is trusting the earth. This is our home. We were made for it and it for us.” The girls chanted Freddy’s credo in unison, then fell into a giggling fit. The Jeep bounced along over the ruts. The girls giggled until they were coughing.
“You have reached the apex of the silly phase,” Freddy said, in between the bumps. “You have perfected being ten years old. I don’t want this growing up to go a day further. If you get a day older, I’ll be mad at you.” He gripped the steering wheel, went around a boulder, and came down a steep incline onto a black-top road that curved around and up the mountain. “Okay,” he said. “Now we’re railroading. Now we’re whistling Dixie.”
“He hated that mobile phone,”Tammili said to her sister. “He’s been dying for it to break.”
“It’s Momma’s phone so she can call us from her school,” Lydia answered. “He’s going to have to get her another one as soon as he gets back.”
Nieman woke with a start. He had been dreaming about the equations from the day before. They lined up in front of the newspaper office. Gray uniformed and armed to the teeth, they barred his way to his typewriter. When he tried to reason with them, they held up their guns. They fixed their bayonets.
“I hate dreams,” he said. He put his feet down on the floor and looked around at the mess his house was in. He lay back down on the bed. He dialed a number and spoke to the office manager at Merry Maids. Yes, they would send someone to clean the place while he was gone. Yes, they would tell Mr. Levine hello. Yes, they would be sure to come.
I’m out of here, Nieman decided. I’ll eat breakfast on the way. They know I’m coming. They know I wouldn’t stay away all week. I’ll go by the deli and get bagels and smoked salmon. I’ll take the math book and do five more problems before Monday. Only five. That’s it. I don’t have to be crazy if I don’t want to be. An obsessive can pick and choose among obsessions.
He put the suitcase back onto the unmade bed. He added a pair of hiking shorts and a sun-resistant Patagonia shirt he always wore in Willits. He closed the suitcase and went into the bathroom and got into the shower and closed his eyes and tried to think about the composition of water. Hydrogen, he was thinking. So much is invisible to us. We think we’re so hot with our five senses but we know nothing, really. Ninety-nine percent of what is going on escapes us. Ninety-nine percent to the tenth power or the thousandth power. The rest we know. We are so wonderful in our egos, dressed out in all our ignorance and bliss. Our self-importance, our blessed hope.
Freddy went up a last curve, cut off on a dirt road for half a mile, then stopped the Jeep at the foot of an abandoned gold mine. “Watch your step,” he said to the girls. “There are loose stones everywhere. You have to keep an eye on the path. It’s rough going all the way to where the trees begin.”
“It’s so nice here,” Lydia said. “I feel like no one’s been here in years. I bet we’re the only people on this mountain. Do you think we are, Dad? Do you think anyone else is climbing it today?”
“I doubt it. Nieman and I never saw a soul when we were here. Of course, we have managed to keep our mouths shut about it, unlike some people who have to photograph and publish every good spot they find.”
“Feel the air,” Tammili added. “It tastes like spring. I’m glad we’re here, Dad. This is a thousand times better than some old ski resort.”
“Was a ski resort a possibility?” Freddy was trying not to grin.
“No. But some people went to them. Half the school went to Sun Valley. I don’t care. I’d lots rather be in the wilderness with you.”
“I’m glad you approve. Look up there. Not a cloud in the sky. What a lucky day.”
“There’s a cloud formation in the west,” Tammili said. “I’ve been watching it for half an hour.” They turned in the direction of the sea. Sure enough. On the very tip of the horizon a gray cloud was approaching. Nothing to worry about. Not a black system. Just a very small patch of gray on the horizon.
“Gather up the packs,” Freddy said. “Let’s start climbing. The sooner we make camp the sooner we don’t have to worry about the weather. Those trees up there have withstood a thousand years of weather. We’d be safe there in a hurricane.”
“What about a map check?” Tammili asked. She was pulling the straps of her pack onto her strong, skinny shoulders. Lydia was beside her, looking equally determined. This will never come again, Freddy thought. This time when they are children and women in the same skin. This innocence and power. My angels.
“Daddy. Come to.” Lydia touched his sleeve, and he turned and kissed her on the head.
“Of course. Get a drink of water out of the thermos we’re leaving. Then we’ll climb up to that lookout and take our bearings.” He handed paper cups to them and they poured water from a thermos and drank it, then folded the cups and left them in the Jeep. They hiked up half a mile to a lookout from where they could see the terrain between them and the place they were going. “Take a reading,” Freddy said. “We’ll write the readings down, but I want you to memorize them. Paper can get lost or wet. As long as the compass is on your wrist and you memorize the readings, you can find your way back to any base point.”
“The best thing is to look where you’re going,” Tammili said. “Anyone can look at the sun and figure out where the ocean is.”
“We won’t always be hiking in Northern California,” Freddy countered. “We’ll do the Grand Canyon soon and then Nepal.”
“Momma’s friend Brittany got pregnant in Nepal,” Lydia said. “She got pregnant with a monk. We saw pictures of the baby.”
“Well, that isn’t going to happen to either of you. I’m not going to let either of you get pregnant until you have an M.D. or a Ph.D., for starters. I may not let you get pregnant until you’re forty. I was thinking thirty-five, now I’m thinking forty.”
“We know. You’re going to buy a freezer so we can freeze our eggs and save them until we can hire someone to have the babies.” They started giggling again. When Lydia and Tammili decided something was funny, they thought it was funnier and funnier the more they laughed.
“Maps and compasses,” Freddy said. “Find out where we are. Then find out where we’re going, then chart a course.”
“Where are we going?”
“Up there. To that cliff face. Around the corner is the waterfall that is the source of Red River.” He watched as their faces bent toward their indescribably beautiful small wrists. The perfect bones and skin of ten-year-olds, burdened with the huge wrist compasses and watches. I could spend the day worshiping their arms, Freddy thought, or I could teach them something. “This is the Western Cordillera,” he added. “Those are Douglas fir, as you know, and most of the others are pines, several varieties. Are the packs too heavy?”
“They’re okay. We can stash things on the trail if we have to.”
“In twenty minutes, we’ll rest for five. All right?”
“I think I hear the waterfall,” he said. “Can you hear it?”
“Not if you’re talking,” Tammili said. “You have to be quiet to get nature to give up its secrets.”
“Stop it, Tammili. Stop teasing him.”
“Yeah, Tammili. Stop teasing me.”They walked in silence then, up almost a thousand feet before they stopped to rest. The path was loose and slippery and the landscape to the east was barren and rough. To the west it was more dramatic. The cloud formation they had noticed earlier was growing into a larger mass.
“A gathering storm,” Freddy said. “We’ll be glad I put the waterproofing on the tent last night.”
“I am glad,” Lydia said. “I don’t like to get wet when I’m camping.”
“Let’s go on then,” Tammili said. “That might get here sooner than we think it’s going to.”
They shouldered the packs and began to climb again. Freddy was drawing the terrain in his mind. He had planned on camping at a site that was surrounded by watercourses. It was so steep that even if there was a deluge it would run off. Still, there was a dry riverbed that had to be crossed to get to the site. We could make for the caves, he was thinking. There wouldn’t be bears this high but there are always snakes. Well, hell, I should have gotten a weather report but I didn’t. That was stupid but we’ll be safe.
“He’s worrying,” Tammili said to her sister.
“I knew he would. He thinks we’ll get wet.”
“I don’t know about all this.” Freddy stopped on the path above them and shook his head. “That cloud’s worrying me. Maybe we should go back and camp by the Jeep. We could climb all around down there. We can go to Red River another time.”
“We’re halfway there,” Tammili said. “We can’t turn back now. We’ve got the tent. We’ll get it up and if it rains, it rains.”
“Yeah,” Lydia agreed. “We’ll ride it out.”
In the solar-powered house Nora Jane was watching the sky. She would study for a while, then go outside and watch the weather. Finally, she started the old truck they kept for emergencies and tried to get a station on the radio. A scratchy AM station in Fort Bragg came on but it was only playing country music. She was about to drive the truck to town when she saw dust on the road and Nieman came driving up in his Volvo. “Thank God you came,” she said, pulling open the door as soon as he parked. “Freddy took the girls to Red River and now it’s going to storm. I could kill him for doing that. Why does he do such stupid things, Nieman? He didn’t get a weather report and he just goes driving off to take the girls to see a waterfall.”
“We’ll go and find them,” Nieman said. “Then we’ll kill him. How about that?”
The adventurers climbed until they came to a dry riverbed that had to be crossed to gain the top. It was thirty feet wide and abruptly steep at the place where it could be crossed. The bed was a jumble of boulders rounded off by centuries of water. Some were as tall as a man. Others were the size of a man’s head or foot or hand. Among the dark rounded boulders were sharper ones of a lighter color. “The sharp-looking pieces are granite,” Freddy was saying. “It’s rare in the coastal ranges. God knows where it was formed or what journeys it took to get here. Hang on to the large boulders and take your time. We are lucky it’s dry. Nieman and I have crossed it when it’s running, but I wouldn’t let you.” He led the girls halfway across the bed, then let them go in front of him. Tammili, then Lydia. They were surefooted and careful and he watched them negotiate the boulders with more than his usual pride. When they were across he started after them. A broken piece of granite caught his eye. He leaned over to pick it up. He stepped on a piece of moss and his foot slipped and kept on slipping. He stepped out wildly with his other foot to stop it. He kept on falling. He twisted his right ankle between two boulders and landed on his left elbow and shattered the humerus at the epicondyle.
“Don’t come back here,” he called. “Stay where you are. I’ll crawl to you.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Tammili said. She dropped her pack on the ground and climbed back over the boulders to where he lay gasping with pain. “Cut the pack strap,” he said. “Use the big blade on your knife. Cut it off my shoulder if you can.”
“What time did they leave?” Nieman asked. He had called the weather station and gotten a report and put in a preliminary request for information on distress flares in the area.
“They left about six-thirty this morning. Maybe they’re on their way back. Freddy can see this front as well as we can. He wouldn’t go up the mountain with a storm coming. All they have is that damned little tent. It barely sleeps three.”
“They could go to the caves. I’m going to try to call him on the mobile phone. If they’re driving, he’ll answer.” Nieman tried raising Freddy on the mobile phone, then called the telephone company and had them try. “Nothing. They can’t get a thing. We are probably crazy to worry. What could go wrong? The girls are better campers than I am. They’re not children.”
“Tammili only weighs eighty pounds. I want to call the park rangers.”
“Then call them. We’ll tell them to be on the alert for flares from that area. I know he has flares with him. He loves flares. He always has them. Then we’ll get in the Volvo and go look for them. I guess it will go down that road. Maybe we better take the truck.”
“We have to make a stretcher and carry him to the trees,” Tammili was saying. Freddy was slowly moving his body but he wasn’t making much progress. He couldn’t stand on his left ankle and he couldn’t use his right arm and he could barely breathe for the pain. There were pain pills in the kit but he wouldn’t take them. “At least I can think,” he kept saying. “I can stand it and I can think. We have to get a shelter set up before the rain hits. I want you to go on over there and wait for me. I can make it. I’ll get there.” Then he went blank and the girls were standing over him.
“Let’s go over to that stand of trees and tie down the supplies and get the tent cover and drag him on it,” Tammili said. “If you start crying I’ll smack you. What do you think we went to all those camps for? This is the emergency they trained us for. Come on. Help me drag his pack to the trees. Then we’ll come back and get him. Nothing’s going to happen to him. We can leave him for a minute.”
They pulled Freddy’s pack to the stand of pine trees where they had left their own. They tied the straps around a sapling and then found the tent cover and went back for him. The sky was very dark now but they did not notice it because they were ten years old and could live in the present.
They laid the tent cover down beside their father and tried to wake him. “You have to wake up and help us,” Tammili was saying. “You have to roll over on the cover so we can drag it up the trail. Come on, Dad. It’s going to rain. You’ll get washed down the river. Come on. Move over here if you can.” Freddy came to consciousness. He rolled over onto the tent cover with his left shoulder and tried to find a comfortable position. “Clear the rocks off the path,” Lydia said. “Come on, Tammili. Let’s clear the path.”They began to throw the rocks to the side. Working steadily they managed to clear a way from the riverbed to the trees. Freddy lay on the cover with the pain coming and going like waves on the sea. He rocked in the pain. He let the pain take him. There was no way to escape it. Nora Jane will call for help, he was thinking. I know her. This is where her worrying will come in handy. The truck runs. She will drive it into town and call for help. The rain was beginning. He felt it on his face. Then the pain won and he didn’t feel anything.
Lydia and Tammili came back down the path to the unconscious body of their father. They folded the tent cover around his body and began to pull him along the path they had cleared. Every two or three feet they would stop and try to wake him. Then they would scour the next few feet for branches and rocks. Then they would move him a few feet more. The rain was still falling softly, barely more than a mist. “It’s good to get the ground wet,” Tammili was saying. “It makes the tent slide.”
“You aren’t supposed to move wounded people. We could be making him worse.”
“We aren’t making him worse. His ankle’s right there. We aren’t moving it and his arm isn’t moving. We’re just going to that tree. We have to get away from the riverbed, Lydia. That thing could turn into a torrent. Keep pulling. Don’t start crying. Nothing’s going to happen. We’re going to pull him to that tree and stay there until this storm is over.”
“I don’t believe this happened. How did it happen to us? We shouldn’t have come up here.”
“We only have a little more to go. Keep pulling. Don’t talk so much.” Tammili dug in her heels and pulled the weight of her father six more inches up and to the right of the path. Wind came around the side of the mountain and blew rain into their faces. She went to her father and pulled the tent cover more tightly around his body. She looked up at her sister. Their eyes met. Lydia was holding back her tears. “We only have one move,” Tammili said. “We take the king to a place of safety. I’m a bishop and you’re a rook. We’re taking Dad to that tree, Lydia. We can do it if we will.”
“I’m okay,” Freddy said. “I can crawl up there. I’m okay, Lydia. Help me up, Tammili. This is just a rain. Just a rain that will end.”
He half stood with Tammili supporting his side. He managed to hobble a few more feet in the direction of the tree. Lydia dragged the tent cover around in front of him and they laid him back down on it and pulled him the rest of the way.
Nora Jane and Nieman climbed into the Volvo and started across the property toward the old gold-mining road that Freddy and the girls had taken earlier that morning. “It’s too low,” Nieman said, after five minutes of driving. “It will never make it down that riverbed. Let’s go back and get the truck.”
“The truck barely runs.”
“Well, we’ll make it run.”
“Let’s call the ranger station again. I don’t think we can overdo that. My God, Nieman, what’s that noise?”
“I think it’s a tire. It feels like something’s wrong with a tire.” He stopped the car and got out and stood looking at the left front tire. It was almost completely flat and getting flatter.
“You have a spare, don’t you?” Nora Jane asked. She had gotten out and was standing beside him.
“No. I left it months ago to be repaired and never went back to pick it up. We’ll have to walk back and get the truck.”
“Call the ranger station first, then we’ll get the truck.” Nieman didn’t argue. He got the ranger station on the phone. “No, we don’t know they’re lost. We just know they didn’t know this weather was coming. You can put it in the computer, can’t you? So if anyone sees a warning flare in that area they’ll report it? He always has flares…. Because I know. Because I’ve been camping with him a hundred times…. Okay. Just so you’re on the alert. We’re going there now. It’s the old gold-mining camp below Red River Falls. The waterfall that is the source of Red River. Surely you have it on a map…. All right. Thanks again. Thank you.”
“Insanity. Bureaucrazy. Okay, my darling Nora Jane, let’s get out and walk.”
Halfway to the house it began to rain. By the time they reached the house they were soaking wet. They changed into dry clothes and got into the truck and started driving. This time they didn’t talk. They didn’t curse. They didn’t plan. They just moved as fast as they could go in the direction of the people that they loved.
Tammili and Lydia had managed to drag Freddy almost to the tree. There was a reasonably flat patch of ground there and they surveyed it. “Let’s put the tent up over him,” Lydia suggested.
“We’d have to move him twice to do that. We haven’t got time and besides we shouldn’t move him any more than we have to.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’ll cover up with the tent and put all the packs and some rocks around to hold it down.”
“Water’s going to run in.”
“Not if we fix it right. Get it out.” Tammili was pulling things out of the packs. “We’ll get him covered up, then I’ll set off flares.”
“You better set them off before it rains any more.”
“Then hurry.” They dragged the tent over to their father and draped it over his body. Lydia took the cape and wrapped it around his legs and feet. They pulled the tent cover up to make a rain sluice and set rocks against it to hold it in place.
“Finish up,”Tammili said. “I’m going over there by the riverbed and set off flares.” She had found a pack of them in the bottom of Freddy’s pack. She pulled it out and read the directions. “Keep out of the hands of children. This is not a toy. Approved by the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Bureau of Standards. Remove plastic cap carefully. Point in the direction of clear sky. Da. Pull down lever with a firm grasp. If three pulls does not release flare, discard and try another flare. Okay, here goes.” She walked over to the cleared place. She pulled the lever down and a huge point of light rose to the sky and spread out and held.
“Do some more,” Lydia called to her. Tammili set off four more flares. Then waited. Then set off two more. Rain was beginning to fall in earnest now. She went back to the pack and put the leftover flares where she had found them. Then she buckled up the pack and put the smaller packs on top of it. Then she dragged the synchilla blanket underneath the tent and she and Lydia lay down on each side of their father. The rain was falling harder. They arranged the synchilla blanket over Freddy’s body and then covered that with the cape. They found each other’s hands. The fingers of Lydia’s right hand fit into the fingers of Tammili’s left hand as they had always done.
A volunteer fire lookout worker was in a fire tower ten miles from were they lay covered with the cape and tent. He was a twenty-year-old student who had always been good at everything he did. He prided himself on being good at things. Every other Thursday when he spent his three hours in the tower he was on the lookout every second. He didn’t go down and fill his coffee cup. He didn’t read books. He kept his eyes on the sky and the land. That was what he had volunteered to do and that is what he did. Earlier, before he began his stint, he had pulled up all the local data on a computer and read it carefully. He had especially noted the memo about Red River because his mother was a geologist and had taken him there as a child. He saw the first flare out of the corner of his eye just as it was dying. He saw the second and the third and fourth flares, but lost the last two in the approaching storm. “I will be damned,” he decreed. “I finally saw something. It finally paid off to stay alert.” He called the ranger station and reported what he had seen.
Nora Jane and Nieman were driving the four miles of rocky trail between blacktop and blacktop. They were driving in a blinding rain. Nieman was at the wheel. Nora Jane was pushing back into the seat imagining her life without her husband and her daughters. I don’t know why we built that crazy house to begin with, Nieman was thinking. I hate it there. Grass doesn’t grow. You can’t take a hot shower half the time. It’s a dangerous place. We should have been down in the inner city building houses for people to live in. Not some goddamn, lonely, scary, dangerous trap on a barren hillside. He shouldn’t have taken them up there, much less to Red River. As though they are expendable. As though we could ever breathe again if anything happened to them. But what could happen? Nothing will happen. They’ll get wet, then we’ll get them dry. He steered the old red truck down onto the blacktop and pushed the pedal to the floor. “I’m gunning it,” he said to Nora Jane. “Hold on.”
“Don’t worry, Daddy,” Tammili was crooning. “Momma will send someone to get us. Remember when Lydia broke her arm and it got all right. Her hand was hanging off her wrist like nothing and it grew back fine.”
“It sure did,” Lydia said. “It grew right back.”
“Get behind the rocks,” Freddy said. “Don’t stay here. I’m okay. I’m doing fine.” A sheet of lightning blazed a mile away. It seemed to be beside them. “It’s okay,” Freddy said. “Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does.”
“Sometimes it rains for two days,” Lydia put in. She snuggled down into a ball beside her father. She patted her father’s chest. She patted his ribs. She patted his heart. Another burst of lightning flashed even closer. Then the rain began to fall twice as hard as it had before. The earth seemed to sink beneath the force of the rain, but they were warm beneath the cape and the tent and they were together.
“These are Franciscan rocks,” Tammili said. “The whole Coast Range is made up of the softest, weirdest rocks they know. Geologists don’t know what they are. They used to be the ocean floor. Where we are, right now, as high as it seems, used to be stuff on the floor of the ocean.”
“That’s right,” Lydia added. “Before that it was the molten center of the earth.”
“The continents ride on the seas like patches of weeds in a marsh,” Tammili went on. “Fortunately for us it all moves so slowly that we’ll be dead before it changes enough to matter. Unless the big earthquake puts it all back in the sea.”
“Who told you that?” Freddy tried to rise up on his good arm. The pain in the other one had subsided for a moment. He was beginning to be able to move his foot. “When the storm subsides we’ll put up the rest of the flares. They’ll be looking for us. Somebody’s looking for us now.”
“We could drive the car,” Lydia whispered. A third network of lightning had covered the mountain with clear blue light. Far away the thunder rumbled, but the lightning seemed to be only feet away. “One of us could stay with you and the other one could get in the Jeep and go for help.”
“They’ll find us,” Freddy said. “Your mother will be right on top of this. If we don’t come back, she’ll send for help.” The rain was harder now, beating on the flattened tent. Still, they seemed to be warm and dry. “This cape wicks faster than synchilla,” Freddy added. “Just like Nieman to find this and leave it lying around.” The pain returned full force then and Freddy felt himself going down. Don’t think, he told himself. Turn it off. Don’t let it in.
“Holdmy hand,”Lydia said and reached for her sister. “Tell more about the coast and the ocean. Tell the stuff Nieman tells us.”
“It was a deep trench, the whole coast, the whole state of California. And the ocean and the hot middle of the earth keep churning and pushing and hot stuff comes up from the middle, like melted fire, only more like hot, hot honey, and it’s very beautiful and red and gold and finally it turns into rocks and mud and gets pushed up to make mountains. Then the trench got filled with stuff and it rose up like islands and made California. Then the Great Plains got in the middle of the Coast Range and the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades. They are real thick mountains and all crystalized together with granite. But not the Coast Range. The Coast Range is made of strange rocks and there is jade left here by serpentine. And maganese and mercury and bluechist and gold and everything you could want.”
“Serpentinite,” Freddy said. “Manganese.”
Nieman was saying, “You stay in the truck and wait for the rangers. Work on the phone in Freddy’s Jeep. You might get it working. I’m going up.”
They were standing at the base of the path. It was still pouring rain. Nieman was wearing a foul-weather parka and was laden with signal devices, everything they had found in the house and cars.
“Go on then. Start climbing. I’ll do what I can.”
“Do whatever you decide to do.” He looked at her then, this beautiful, whimsical creature whom his best friend adored, and he understood the adoration as never before. Her whole world was in danger and she was breathing normally and was not whining. Nieman gave her a kiss on the cheek and turned and began to climb. The rain was coming down so fast it was difficult to see, but he knew the path and he was careful. Maybe we should have gone for help instead of coming here. Maybe we should have done a dozen things. The rangers know. Surely to God they are on their way.
The ranger helicopter had turned back from the lightning and now a truck carrying a medic was headed in their direction but the road had been washed out in two places and they had had to ford it. “Plot the coordinates of the flares again,” the driver said. “Are you sure twenty-four is the nearest road?”
“There’s an old creek bed we might navigate, but not in this weather. An old mining road leads to within a mile. I’d rather take that. Here, you look at the map.”
“Jesus, what a storm. A frog strangler, that’s what we call them where I come from.”
“Two little girls and their father. I’d like to kill some people. What the hell does a man want to go off for with kids this far from nowhere? It kills me. I used to teach wilderness safety at the hospital. What a waste of breath.”
“Land of the free. Home of the foolhardy. Okay, I think I can make it across that water. Let’s give it a try.” He drove the vehicle across a creek and made it to the other side. As soon as they were across, the medic put on his seat belt and pulled it down tight across his waist and chest.
“Four hundred and three,” Nieman was counting. “Four hundred and four. Four hundred and five.”
Nora Jane sat in the passenger seat of the Jeep and worked on the phone. Once or twice she was able to hear static and she kept on trying. She took the batteries out and wiped them on her shirt and put them back in. She moved every movable part. She prayed to her old Roman Catholic God. She prayed to Mary. She made promises.
The storm was moving very slowly across the chaos of disordered rocks that is the Coast Range of Northern California. The birds pulled their wings over their heads. The panthers dreamed in their lairs. The scraggly vegetation drank the water as fast as it fell. When the sun came back out it would use the water to grow ten times as fast as vegetation in wetter climates. Tammili and Lydia held hands. Freddy slept. An infinitesimal part of the energy we call time became what we call history.
“Six thousand and one,” Nieman counted. He wanted to stop and wipe his glasses but he could not bring himself to waste a second. Some terrible intuition led him on. Some danger or unease that had bothered him ever since the night before. He had come to where he was needed. It was not the first time that had happened to him. That’s why I hated those movies, he told himself. When no one believed what they knew. When no one learned anything. The beginning of Karate Kid was okay. The beginning of it was grand.
He had come to a creek bed that was now a torrent of rushing water. I know this, he remembered. But how the hell will I cross it now? He stood up straight. He pushed the hood back from his parka and reached for his glasses to wipe them. A huge bolt of lightning shook the sky. It illuminated everything in sight. By its light Nieman saw the pile of tent and figures on the ground on the other side of the water. “Freddy,” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “It’s me. It’s Nieman. Freddy, is that you?”
The rest was drowned by thunder. Then Nieman saw a small figure rise up from the pile. She came out from under the tent and began waving her hands in the air.
“I’ll get there,” he yelled. “Stay where you are.” The rain was slacking somewhat. Nieman found a flat place a few yards down the creek and began to make his way across the rocks. Lydia met him on the other side. “Dad’s broken his arm and foot,” she told him. “We need to get him to a doctor.”
The medic spotted the Jeep and the truck. “There they are,” he yelled at the driver. “There’re the fools. Let’s go get them.”
An hour later Freddy was on a stretcher being brought down the mountain by four men. The clearing was filled with vehicles. The brown cape was thrown into the back of an EMS van. It would end up at the city laundry. Then on the bed of a seven-year-old Mexican girl who had been taken from her mother. But that is another story.
Ten days later a party gathered at Chez Panisse to eat an early dinner and discuss the events of the past week. There were nine people gathered at Freddy Harwood’s favorite table by the window in the back room. The young man who had seen the flares, the medic, the driver, Nieman, Freddy, Nora Jane, Tammili, Lydia, and a woman biochemist who was after Nieman to marry him. Her name was Stella Light and this was the first time Nieman had taken her out among his friends. It was the first time he had taken her to Chez Panisse and the first time he had introduced her to Nora Jane and Freddy and the twins. Stella Light was dressed in her best clothes, a five-year-old gray pantsuit and a white cotton blouse. She had almost added a yellow scarf but had taken it off minutes after she put it on.
“We had this magic cape we found under the bed,” Lydia was telling her. “The minute we say something’s magic, it is magic, that’s what Uncle Nieman says. It’s probably his cape but he can’t remember it. He leaves his stuff everywhere. Did you know that? He’s absentminded because he is a genius. Do you go to school with him? Is that how you met him?”
“Well, I teach in the department. Tell me about the cape.”
“It kept us warm. Dad thinks it was synchilla. Anyway, it was raining so hard it felt like rocks were falling on us.”
“It was lightning like crazy,” Tammili added. “There was lightning so near it made halos around the trees.”
“Tammili!” Freddy shook his head.
“You don’t know. You were incoherent from pain.”
“Incoherent?” Stella laughed.
“She always talks like that,” Lydia said. “It’s Uncle Nieman. He’s been working on our vocabularies since we were born.”
“I’m having goat cheese pie and salad,” Nieman said. “I think he wants to take our orders. Menus up, ladies. Magic cape, my eye. Magic forest rangers and volunteer distress signal watchers.” He stood up and raised his glass to the medic and the driver and the young man. “To your honor, gentlemen. We salute thee.”
“To all of us,” Freddy added, raising his glass with his good hand. “My saviors, my family, my friends.”
Nieman caught Stella’s eye as they drank. A long sweet look that was not lost on Tammili and Lydia. We could be the bridesmaids, Lydia decided. We never get to be in weddings. None of Mom and Dad’s friends ever get married. Pretty soon we’ll be too old to be bridesmaids. It will be too late.
“Stop it,” Tammili whispered to her sister, pretending to be bending over to pick up a napkin so she wouldn’t be scolded for telling secrets at the table. “Stop wanting that woman to marry Uncle Nieman. Uncle Nieman doesn’t need a girlfriend. He’s got everything he needs. He’s got Mom and Dad and you and me.” When she sat up she batted her eyes at her godfather. Then, for good measure, she got up and walked around the table and gave him a hug and stood by his side. Oh, my God, Stella was thinking. Well, that’s an obstacle that can be overcome. Children are such little beasts nowadays. It makes you want to get your tubes tied.
“Go back to your chair,” Nora Jane said to her daughter. “Let Uncle Nieman eat his goat cheese pie.”