14

I walked in the front door with a bag of groceries. Josie was already home, inhabiting Eli’s chair with her Coke and magazine. She saluted me with a tip of the sweating bottle.

Here you are.

Uncle Nick sat in the deep spot on Gram’s couch, his clean, barber’s hands folded and quiet in his lap. He nodded his head, solemnly agreeing with Josie’s observation. Not a hair moved. Except when drunk, Uncle Nick was a walking advertisement for his craft. His hair, graying now around the temples and in a narrow streak from his widow’s peak, was always precisely trimmed and controlled with a layer of pomade which held the combed furrows in stern command from the moment of application till he went to bed at night. There was no other barber in town. Uncle Nick cut his own hair, using a mirror, meticulously sharpened scissors, and his long, agile fingers. It took the lubricating effects of serious drinking to loosen Uncle Nick’s hair. Then the graying lock at his widow’s peak fell forward and down over bleary, repentant eyes. This was the Nick we saw, even through the dry periods and the pomade: befuddled and ridiculous. I remembered the night he scratched at Aunt Anna’s window, remembered Gram’s name for him: That Nogood SonnaMaBitch. I wondered why he was here. I looked at Josie.

Dad wants to take you someplace, Josie said, grinning her Cheshire Cat grin.

Uncle Nick nodded and smiled, blushing across the pale expanse of his forehead.

I have to make dinner, I said, shifting the groceries from one hip to the other.

What are we having?

Spaghetti and salad. I already made the sauce this morning.

I can do that. Boil spaghetti.

Josie stood and took the bag from my arms, peeked in curiously. My arms felt suddenly emptied, my chest vulnerable.

But the salad …

I can do that. You go. Take her, Dad.

Uncle Nick pressed his hands to his knees and rose slowly to his feet. He eased behind me, opened the screen door, and waited in silence. In front of me Josie, balancing my groceries on her hip, blockaded the way to the kitchen.

But you have to do it right, I told her.

She took a long drink from her Coke.

Twelve minutes, Josie. There’s an egg timer on the stove. You cook the spaghetti for twelve minutes. You have to listen for the timer. And don’t forget to salt the water.

Uncle Nick beckoned patiently from the open doorway.

Not too much salt, either. Just a pinch. Two pinches.

Josie grinned.

Go.

There’s lettuce in the shopping bag.

Go.

You could get a tomato and cucumber from the garden. But be sure to wash them with soap.

Uncle Nick beckoned again.

Because of the bomb dust, I explained desperately. They need to be washed right.

Josie looked over my head at her father and said, When you bring her back, Dad, why don’t you stay for dinner?

No. Your mother expects me.

Except when he was too sodden to do anything, Uncle Nick always did what Aunt Anna told him. With a sudden understanding of what that felt like, I threw up my hands and walked out the door.

Shouldn’t you be at the shop? I grumbled at Uncle Nick as he opened the front gate for us.

No. I closed early.

The shop was often closed, when Aunt Anna put Uncle Nick to some task, when he was drinking, when he wandered off. Customers walked in the unlocked shop, took a chair, and waited. Outside, the red-and-white striped pole turned non-committally. The customers left and were replaced by others who waited and left. They would be back. They were used to the vicissitudes of haircuts in Taylor.

We crossed the street and took the shortcut to Main through Mrs. Tatolovich’s yard, through her back gate, along the narrow cement path beside her house. From her kitchen sink, Mrs. Tatolovich shook her fist inches from Uncle Nick’s ear. From window to window, we watched her progress through the rooms of her house as she moved to intercept us in the front yard. When we rounded the corner of the house, she was waiting on the front porch. She clutched her black sweater in a wrinkled fist and pointed a finger at Uncle Nick. Her babushka nodded; her sharp nose trembled.

This no goddam highway, Meester.

Uncle Nick shrugged helplessly, his neck flaming scarlet as he beat a hasty path to the front gate.

Next time go round, Mrs. Tatolovich waved Uncle Nick away menacingly.

Uncle Nick gently closed the gate behind us and nodded up earnestly at the belligerent, little crow of a woman.

Mala, Mrs. Tatalovich called in a higher, sweeter voice as we crossed Main. I make sardma. I bring you nice sardma, tomorrow, Mala. You see!

Thank you, Mrs. Tatalovich, I called over my shoulder.

Uncle Nick leaned over and whispered, She likes you. That’s lucky. She makes the best sardma …

He waved his hand in a wide arc, encompassing the entire known world.

… don’t tell Anna I said so.…

Sardma was a labor-intensive concoction of meat and rice, rolled into sticky balls and wrapped in cabbage leaves, then cooked slowly in sauerkraut and smoked ham hocks and spareribs. When a woman pulled out her secret recipe for sardma and started cooking, all of Sixth Street grew fragrant with the smell. Mouths watered uncontrollably for hours. Each recipe was slightly different, considered by its cook the pinnacle of culinary excellence, and carried to the grave in a shroud of undying mystery. In Mrs. Tatolovich’s, I detected a hint of dry mustard, and something else, an elusive spice, nutmeg maybe, or allspice.… Aunt Anna floated cloves of garlic in the stewing mixture. Not very inventive, but the meat was succulent after steeping in garlic and sauerkraut all day. As in all things, Aunt Anna expected complete loyalty to her sardma from all her extended family. The best? Yes, Anna, no question.

Does Aunt Anna know we’re going someplace?

Uncle Nick stopped on the yellow line in the middle of Main Street and blanched.

No.

I could hear a heavy truck rumbling toward town from a long way north.

I won’t tell her.

He took my hand and we crossed the street.

Where are we going, Uncle Nick?

Uncle Nick dropped my hand and pointed. Behind town, the cliff caught the late afternoon sun, the narrow trail to the top etching a jagged scar across its glowing face.

To the top?

He nodded as we walked.

Like my mom?

He nodded again.

Really? Did Josie ask you to do it?

No. My idea.

Why?

He stopped and looked down at me.

You asked what she was like. In Anna’s kitchen. You asked. We’ll go to the top of the cliff, look around, maybe see.…

He shrugged. I took his hand and we started walking again. Next to him, matching my steps to his, I realized that he, too, might be haunted by his mother, might struggle with uncertainty at her fate. Uncle Nick hadn’t heard from his mother for twenty years. She was still in a small village outside Zagreb; alive, he and Milan assumed. Every Wednesday, the two brothers gathered at the post office to buy and send off a money order. No note, she could not have read it anyway. The money traveled a thin, worn umbilical cord of love, responsibility, guilt. They had never missed a Wednesday. During the war, Aunt Anna had taken over the duty, scraping together cash, sending it off to a country ripped apart by a vicious invading army and by its own internal hatreds. With each trip to the post office, Aunt Anna shook her head grimly. Still, she did it, for Nick and Milan, for the ritual that meant more than the money.

Do you think she’s still alive, Uncle Nick?

He knew immediately whom I was talking about.

The priest will write when she dies, he said, his voice leaden with false certainty.

The truth of the matter was that he didn’t know whether his mother, the priest, or even the village existed anymore. Long before the Germans of the last decade, the people fought amongst themselves, like rival packs of dogs, over every scrap of land, every stick and rock, over religion, surname, over battles lost or won a thousand years ago. Over anything. How could one old woman, rejected by her husband, abandoned by her sons, find sanctuary there? I looked up into Uncle Nick’s face. His lips moved silently. He was counting his steps, evenly paced prayers, up the steep street that led to the smelter.

Couldn’t you have brought her with you?

No. She said she’d never come to America again.

I knew her story, a failed experiment. A bride ordered by mail, then sent back to the Old Country by a brutal, philandering drunk of a husband. But for the two small boys she took back with her, the United States was the country of their birth. They were citizens. Growing up outcasts in their small Serbian village, it had been their only hope.

But, he would have been dead by the time she came back, I said, referring to her husband, Nick and Milan’s father. The town called him Dirty Jovo.

Uncle Nick grunted, turned his head aside and spat. Saliva hit the dust in the gutter with a wet slap.

It was a common gesture in Taylor, that stream of precisely placed venom that spoke more loudly than words. From barstools in the dark of the Taylor Club, or from the sun-bleached benches beside the front door, men murmured, hawked, spat. Bartenders complained, Jesus! I’m going to have to clean that up later! Nazis, Mussolini, Russians, ancient Turks, bosses up on the hill, a neighbor whose insult has been nursed for a decade, a litany of devils strung together, brought out and expunged with spit. A habit in the blood. Knots of black-clad widows gathered from the length of Sixth Street would laugh and tease, peck and preen, hands in constant, eloquent movement. Then, suddenly something would be said, something remembered. Babuskas electric with fury would turn aside, and in unison the old ladies would spit, raining down curses. Beneath their sturdy black shoes, a condemned soul writhed.

Nick and Milan’s dad had been ducking the juices of Taylor for more than fifty years, long before he was shot crawling out of someone else’s bedroom window and long before he sent his wife and baby sons back to oblivion in the Old Country. He had been marked for contempt the moment he walked into town, his razor-sharp knife a too-visible bulge beneath his pant leg, his young wife so beaten she was barely recognizable as human. If he had been only a philanderer and a drunk he would have ranked one among many, but he was vicious, filthy, and worst of all, cheap. He only used soap when he was pursuing a new love interest. Then he was smooth and soft-spoken. He mooched off everyone in town and denied his wife the pennies it would take to buy flour and yeast for bread. She survived from dishes left surreptitiously on the front porch by neighbor women. If he found the food, he kicked the laden plate out into the street and laughed as his wife fought the magpies for scraps. On Sixth Street, Dirty Jovo was low.

When we arrive in Old Country, we have nothing.

Uncle Nick’s voice thickened with the accent he had worked so hard to lose. It only resurfaced when he was falling-down drunk or very upset. Like his hair, he controlled each word, speaking little, choosing carefully. That was when Aunt Anna let him talk.

My mother, she say, it don’t matter we starve. We already dead of shame.

We had reached the end of Taylor. Except for the road that entered the smelter complex, all the streets running up the hill dead-ended in dirt six feet from the chain link fence. A worn trail ran the perimeter of the fence, as if some creature had circled and circled the smelter. We followed the trail, Uncle Nick leading, then angled off on a less used trail that led toward the smokestack and on to the cliff.

At the cliff, Uncle Nick urged me ahead of him.

I’ll make sure you don’t fall.

Each step had to be chosen with care, firm rock, not slippery dirt. As Taylor dropped away below me, I felt my confidence grow, my need to climb, to gain the top. My mother’s hands grasped each sun-hot rock with me; her feet guided each step. Behind me I heard Uncle Nick grunt and struggle, the slide and scrabble of pebbles cascading below. Halfway up, I stopped on a large outcropping. With my back to the warm cliff I watched Uncle Nick’s labored ascent.

My mom came up here a lot?

Uncle Nick nodded, gulping air.

Almost every day about this time, he gasped.

I watched him, his chest heaving, palms braced on knees. He was scanning the town below, his eyes following Avenue C down to Main, then over two blocks along the pale sidewalk to the tiny pole swirling white, red, white, red, over two doors to the Taylor Club with its liquid wealth.

Are we going the rest of the way? I asked gently.

A hank of hair had fallen free, dangling a gray question mark down his forehead and into his left eye. He straightened, licked his dry lips, smoothed his hair back with a sweating hand and, still breathing hard, pointed up.

The top was flat and rocky, a narrow culmination. My legs trembled, both from the climb and the way the world tilted away in front and back.

Clamoring up beside me, Uncle Nick sucked in the thin, high air and looked around. He smiled and kicked the rocky ground with a dusty toe.

Limestone, he puffed. Good for caves. I’ll show you.

He waved for me to follow him. A short way down the backside of the ridge, stunted pinon and spruce clung to the rock. Through a small thicket of trees no taller than me, the entrance to a cave marked a blacker oblong on the deeply shaded slope.

The snow melts and seeps through the ground. It hollows out the earth. Come on, I’ll show you.

Uncle Nick had regained his breath and his hair was back under command. He was master of this surprising subject, a man who knew caves. I followed him curiously. We scrabbled down the slope and through the trees to the entrance. Uncle Nick pulled his battered, silver lighter out of his back pocket and deftly adjusted the tiny wheel on the bottom of the lighter. He flipped the top with his thumb and spun the wheel with one smooth movement. The flame flared four inches high, the smell of butane tickling the air. Holding his thumb to the wheel, he raised his arm. The cave’s walls were blacked, the dirt floor charred and strewn with chunks of twisted, blown metal.

Hey! I said excitedly, This must be the bootlegger’s cave!

Uncle Nick nodded, then sighed, surveying the terrible waste at his feet.

My dad came here to collect it. Gram said it was pretty nasty, but everyone drank it anyway.

Uncle Nick shrugged.

Long time ago. I was over there.

His arm waved off to the east, across one continent, an ocean and halfway across another continent.

There’s a better cave. I’ll show you.

He let go of the wheel; the flame dropped, disappeared. I followed as he strode further down the slope, to an angled shelf of dirt hidden between two outcropping of rock.

Uncle Nick, how do you know about all this stuff?

I come up here, sometimes. When your mamma died was the first time. I came up here to see …

To see if she jumped? I asked, a quick, sharp bitterness, like crushed limestone, on my tongue. I thought of the bets in the Taylor Club, the rumors that ran like dirty snow melt along the streets of the town.

Uncle Nick shook his head.

No, he said, watching his footing. To see why she came.

We were at the mouth of the second cave. Uncle Nick turned to me, his eyes shining, and took my hand.

This is special, he said in a hushed voice.

Sparking the lighter, he held the light high in front of us and drew me gently into the flickering interior.

Watch where you step, he warned.

The floor was scattered with bits of clay pottery. Off to my right, round, smooth stones had been carried up the mountain face from some far river and gathered into a fire ring. Other stones showed the diligently cupped surface of continual grinding.

Uncle Nick … I stuttered in amazement.

There’s more. Come see this, he whispered and pulled me further back into the cave.

He raised the lighter higher. In the wavering flame, the back wall of the cave swirled and cascaded with movement. Black, fat beasts with bristled horns and narrow, frantic legs streamed across the rough surface. Handprints in deep ochre splashed color in their path. Human figures danced, angular stick bodies splayed ecstatically beneath triangle heads. Waving lines, spirals, arrows, and squares in white, black, and red sprinkled geometry among the scene. An ancient world played. I reached out a tentative hand. Uncle Nick pulled me back, shaking his head.

We can’t touch it, he whispered reverently. Even the light could hurt it.

We backed away. I took a last look around, knelt by the fire ring, and fingered a slender shard of pottery.

My mom, do you think she knew about this place, Uncle Nick?

He shrugged.

Maybe. Maybe she just stayed on the top. We’ll go back up. You’ll see.

I placed the shard carefully back into its spot and rose to leave.

You should tell somebody about that cave, Uncle Nick, I said as we climbed back up the east side of the ridge.

I bet people would like to study it. You know. Scientists … or historians or somebody.

The shadows were deeper, the air carrying the cool bite of evening. Uncle Nick stopped and turned to face me.

No. Sometimes, Mala, things are better left to themselves. Sometimes, people look so close at something, they forget what they are seeing. They ruin it.

You must have come up here a lot, to find those caves. Is this where you go when you disappear?

Uncle Nick shrugged, waved vaguely.

Here. There. All over. I don’t just go to bars, he explained solemnly. I just end up there, he added with a smile, a crooked ghost of Josie’s Cheshire grin.

The top of the ridge was washed in slanting, golden rays. Below our feet, Taylor inched through the last of its day. The muted sounds of barking dogs and car engines rose on the cooling air. I could see Gram’s house at the edge of the glowing Sands. Josie was making dinner for me, hopefully washing the garden vegetables with a good dose of soap and hot water. Two doors down, Aunt Anna was probably banging her own pots, cursing Uncle Nick, worrying where he was. Standing next to me, he faced east.

Wheeler Peak, he said.

I nodded, not looking, still watching the tiny town at my feet.

Almost at the top of the peak, he said, there are bristlecone pine trees. Nothing else will grow there, no grass, nothing. The bristlecones like it up there. It’s the only place they can live, where nothing else can. Down the mountain, they die. You should see them, Mala. The wind twists them. Hardly any green, don’t even look alive. They’re the oldest living things. Maybe God made them first. When you touch them, their wood is like marble. They know about surviving.

These were more words than I had ever heard him string together. I looked over my shoulder at him, the straight back, the dark head with its precise cut. A different man looked east at the pale peak. Gram had been wrong. I had thought she saw into people’s hearts, she and all the other old women, saw everything, then condemned or forgave. But, Gram had not known this man. We were all guilty of that.

How do you know all this stuff, Uncle Nick?

He shrugged again.

I look around. I read.

He turned and smiled at me.

Like you, I ask lots of questions.

I looked back down at Taylor, graying in the falling light.

It’s ugly.

Not so bad.

You’re always leaving.

No. I’m always coming back.

Uncle Nick, do you think she did it? Jumped? Maybe she just couldn’t go back down there.

He shook his head.

I don’t think about that. That’s for her to know … and God. I think about why she came here, he repeated.

He pointed past town, past The Sands, to the deep purple hills at the horizon.

This is what I found.

The flat disk of the sun was just slipping behind the hills. Its angled rays washed the toxic wastes of The Sands in radiant silver, the town in sudden gold. Each feature of land or town etched an ebony shadow, long and leaning, that yearned toward the cliff at my feet. Only the smokestack stood close enough to pencil a thin, black finger on the illuminated face. From the western horizon the color wheel arched above, from the burning orange brilliance of the sinking sun, to rich yellow, deepening to turquoise above me, dropping through blue to purple to a clear, wavering red at the line of the land behind me.

You look this way, too, Uncle Nick urged, gently turning my body to the east. She did.

With the dropping light, the contrast between endless mountain ridges and deep valleys flattened, until a single velvet plain of deepest green swept away to the horizon, a different country. There, catching the last escaping rays of sun, Mt. Wheeler’s white peak gleamed like a diamond pin fixing land to liquid sky. Too far off to see, stubbornly clinging to the glittering peak, bristlecones lived. Did she know? Would she have listened to their lesson?

Uncle Nick …

Shhh …

Gentle hands squeezed the sharp bones of my shoulders.

Just look.

She had stood here. Nightly, she had stood on this rocky crest and her world had changed beneath her. On one side Taylor, flushed with late gilt, yearning toward her. On the other side, this secret eastern land, smooth and fertile, recognizable to her every atom, a clear and easy path calling her home. She had stood in the twilight between.

Uncle Nick was right. I would never know. She would always be fragments of color splashed across a dark cave wall, fragile, cryptic, open to any interpretation. There was only this place, this apex of her life, this place of departure.

I looked straight up, filled my lungs with air the color of glacial lakes, exhaled ghosts. I floated. If I had raised my arms I would have shot up, gained the surface of the turquoise heavens, soared east or west. It didn’t matter. I could have flown.

Now you’ve seen, Uncle Nick said quietly. It’s getting dark.

I needed him to go before me this time, to steady my descent. Pebbles showered down on him as I stumbled and slipped, but he only wiped his eyes across his sleeve and silently guided my feet to each firm spot on the trail. It was night when we reached to bottom.

The new sheriff was waiting for us at the top of town. Leaning against the fence, he blocked the narrow path that skirted the smelter. To us he was only an angled shadow, darker than its surroundings. The sudden beam from his flashlight startled and trapped us.

Seen you coming down. A low, sliding voice from darkness.

Caught up like deer in headlamps, Uncle Nick and I were motionless, accepting of this turn in fate.

What you been doing up there with that little girl.

I looked up into Uncle Nick’s face, saw the unevenness of his dusty skin in stark incandescence, the evening blur of beard along his jaw line, the hanging lock of hair that carved a dark sickle into his forehead. He blinked, his lashes brushing rapid shadows across his cheeks.

She my niece, he stuttered, his voice foreign. We take walk. I no do nothing.

The darkness beyond the beam was thick with disbelief. I heard the sheriff hawk and spit. Beside me, Uncle Nick’s head dropped. I inched my hand over and held his.

It’s true, I said into the light, added, I’m not little.

You are, he said to me.

The flashlight clicked off. Blackness enveloped us. My ears rang in the sudden void. Then the voice, tinged with disgust:

Get the hell outta here. Go on home.

We heard the scrape of a heel further along the path, the rumble of an engine starting at the edge of the street, saw the swing of headlights as the car wheeled around. We stood holding hands, waiting for the night to return to us. Then I led him home.

Uncle Nick, are you okay? I asked as we reached Sixth Street.

He wouldn’t answer, couldn’t trust himself to arrange the words as they should be. With his free hand he rubbed his chin and mouth. He wetted his lips. His hands trembled.

What you did was good, I soothed, pulling him the last few lengths to Aunt Anna’s house.

I opened the front gate and drew him into the yard and up to the door.

Thank you, Uncle Nick.

I hugged him fiercely, briefly. His arms went around me in an automatic way, but his head was turned. He was looking off towards the faint glow of Main Street, the Taylor Club. He was already gone, slipped back into character, chasing a thirst. I opened the door and pushed him gently in. I left him to the rough, capable care of Aunt Anna. I sprinted home to my supper.