“Those shoes will not do,” the eldest brother scolded, spotting Liam’s habitual topsiders. “We will be amputating your feet by day’s end if you expect to hike in those.”
“We won’t be getting out of the car,” declared the other.
The adventurers drove away from approaching weather, south across the Sacramento River to Red Bluffs, which put them on the southern approach of the peak. Tundra swans matched pearl white clouds in a picturesque lake. Conifers otherwise dominated the sparse landscape, as they did not suffer deciduous trees.
Lucien asked, “Do you remember Dad’s funeral, and the casket side conversation we had with Uncle Charlie?”
“Vaguely. About Dad borrowing a jacket from him when they were younger?”
“Yes,” the brother answered. “Uncle Charlie lamented the unnatural order in their procession to the grave, and recalled a car ride with Pappa and Granny, where Dad was in the front seat. Pappa collided with another car near a narrow bridge. No one was badly injured, although Dad was thrown through the windshield. Not only did he bear no cuts or bruises from the ordeal, but the suit survived unscathed.”
“You’re saying our existence in this world was fated because our father was spared?”
“Not simply spared, but uncannily spared. Fate is what draws us up this mountain.”
The brother countered, “Anyone can insert destiny into their lives, if they look hard enough. Let’s say someone’s mother almost drank a bottle of floor cleaner when she was a child, but was stopped by a safety cap. Of course, this escape is less dramatic than flying through a car windshield, but it is the same sort of reasoning. There may be no end to the tally of near misses should one draw up a comprehensive list. The accumulative effect of them undercuts the dramatic example’s impact.”
“On the contrary,” responded Lucien. “As more narrow escapes are added, the uncanniness in one’s existence increases. The best example underscores the general idea.”
Liam related a personal account. “A month ago, while driving, I came on a walking trail where three people queued to cross the road in front of me; I yielded. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a fourth person on a skateboard rushing to catch up, so tarried to let him pass, too. A mile down the street, I just missed being part of a nasty auto collision by seconds.”
“Your kindness earned you an exemption,” declared Lucien.
The storyteller shrugged. “Even if that was the effect, did I deduce the true cause? As a narrator reconstructing a chain of events, did I select the encounter with pedestrians in making a connection to the accident, when I might as easily selected another incident? Say, minutes earlier, where I was held up at a cashier’s station because she needed to break open a roll of quarters to make change.”
The brother responded, “Reason rarely has reason to go in search of other explanations where feeling has settled on a conclusion. The two spheres are bound: Feelings divorced of logic is a lynch mob wanting to burn witches when the crops fail, while logic divorced from feeling halves babies where mothers squabble over paternity. A narrator can assign a thousand alternate causes as readily as one; but to discover anything of value, a degree of amnesia is required. A compelling story needs a skillful editor.”
Liam challenged, “Admittedly a good storyteller withholds information to keep his tale from getting bogged down in qualifiers, so to avoid the perception of moral ambiguity in his protagonist.”
The passenger chose his own illustration. “Let’s say a chef prepares a tasty pasta sauce. He cannot combine a list of ingredients as he pleases. The tastiness resides in how and when the components are assembled, not in their mere inclusion. Facts do not select themselves. Nor do they naturally organize themselves to best effect. There are always more facts than there are insights into how to assemble them. Accordingly, there are no mundane or irrelevant facts, only considerable effort involved in discovering their profundity.”
The guide pointed at a white speck careening into a cloud. He had guessed correctly the direction the airborne angel would take.
CHAPTER
Pink December light fell over Lassen snowcap peak; venting plumes of yellow sulfur further soften its menacing aspect. Holiday libation had lowered Liam’s inhibition; Lucien was himself sacrificially compromised.
An unimpeded line of timber replaced the grasslands of The Sacramento Valley. This feature functioned like the blinder on a skittish horse, and brought the rising floor of the Cascade mountain range brazenly to the adventurers; a course of winding switchbacks next joined their gentle initiation to changing elevation.
Liam questioned, nervously, “Is this a flyby? A drive-by? A collision with one or more airbags?”
“Daphne’s trail went cold here,” Lucien lamented, struggling with memory of a map he left behind in his apartment.
Clouds began to droop onto their path, first over red firs and then over the windshield. Their increasing opacity chased daylight down lava ridges and cinder cones, and left in its place a grey shadow. The weakened light passed through shades of bismuth and antimony before brightening at higher elevation. The driver judged the point of the trip ended since the angel would never be found for the fog, even if they passed within feet of it.
The prick of icy snow was heard before it was seen, and at the point of stopping, Lucien leapt from the car wearing only his light jacket. His brother watched him through the slogging windshield wipers, and cringed to think the inexperienced surveyor was either going to sink below the surface of an icy lake or tumble down a jagged face. He left the idling vehicle to urge rationality, yet neither man appeared to be afflicted with vertigo. Nothing of the height was visible in the sudden blizzard.
Lucien explained the situation. “This peaks get six-hundred inches of snow a year, yet it has no natural tributaries to get the precipitation down off the mountain—only lakes. Like the one we may be facing.”
He gazed to where the cloud cover was thinnest; the sharp-edged disc of the sun was seen beneath this muffling curtain. The summit hovered above them, although looking in its direction produced a barrage of snowflakes the size of communion wafers. Eyelashes and lids were pelted and soaked, and resulted in averted gazes.
“The road swings around,” Lucien explained. “That’s why we drove south, to get back to Redding on the north side.”
Liam doubted this scheme. “Isn’t the park road closed for winter? We should retrace our track.”
The brother reasoned, “We’ll soon be below the snow line if we keep pressing forward.”
Their rash ascent had left them with only the narrowest road and no visibility. The road doubled back on itself in sidestepping several lakes. These were assumed to occupy voids where there was little discernible tree line under the snowfall.
The shadow hanging off the east face of Lassen grew bolder as the sun tracked west, while the dropping road became easier as the snow loosened its net. A shredded trash bag strangely straddled the road. Headlights traced the trailing edge of the debris behind it, ending with a two-liter plastic Pepsi bottle. This buoy left the car to sink into another morass: The whited-out shoulder had Liam thinking about four-footed litterers and state park trash receptacles. The dashboard defogger did little to dissipate the obstruction, so the driver cracked the window.
This mist was not icy condensation but smoke, and it was like a sudden suit of clothes.
“Is there fire?” panicked the motorist. “Is that why it’s so dark?”
“Could be fumaroles,” ventured his passenger.
The driver’s eyes became poker red; his cheeks, streaked with crusting tears of ash; Liam closed the window. His distraction was brief—so brief that, once he locked sights on it through the windshield, the shape had cleared the road to barrel headlong into trees. The loose fitting of snow was shaken off the disturbed branches—and given the force required to disappear so utterly into the scenery, the size of the creature was instantly appreciated. The driver braked more forcibly—gravity pulled the car through the skid.
Only a dusting of pine needles glowed in the taillights.
“It was running on two legs,” yelped Liam. “Like the damn bears on the road signs!”
The guide was worried for the first time.
The thought of an animal running mad across a wilderness road—upright—was incomprehensible. Perhaps the headlights frightened it, but Liam was not waiting around for the creature to compose itself.
The car inched forward before lurching over wetter snow, and what had been cautiousness was now anxiousness to cover the remaining distance to the bottom of the peak. The uneven terrain blurred under accelerating tires, and resembled a slack rope tied to a runaway bucket in a well.
The automobile was more obstruent than knife carving a path through the melanic haze, but a break in the clouds revealed a side of Lassen most scarred by its volcanic history. Smoke again descended over drought-ravaged timber, and Liam, fearing imminent danger, reapplied the brakes.
“We are going back the way we came,” he told his brother. “We will follow the tire tracks.”
“We will soon be below the snow line,” assured the passenger. “In my research of wilderness misadventure, the best advice when you are lost is to always walk downhill. Or follow water downhill. Sooner or later you will converge on a well-used trailhead, or civilization.“
The driver responded with agitation. “We are following the contours of a road—not straying into trees. I do not want to drive into fire or worse.”
“But the upper road may be completely buried in fresh snow. And that thing—whatever that thing was—is back that way!”
Liam outlined his plan. “I’ll get out and circle the car. When I tap the side, you’ll turn the wheels and roll in that direction until I tap again, then you’ll stop. I’ll repeat this action until we get the car facing oppositely on the road.”
With no further expostulation offered, the driver surrendered his seat for the perils of unseen terrain. Whatever enveloped the pair had become an impenetrable curtain.
The maneuver required using the car’s exterior like a guide wire until the rear fender was reached. Lucien was not seen through the back window, but was presumed to have crawled over the console and behind the steering wheel. A thump was made to the trunk lid, and twice again, as if slapping the unresponsive sibling. The gear engaged and the chassis lifted gently against Liam’s pelvis; brightening brake lights signaled the beginning of the operation.
Wheels slowly rolled backwards, allowing the lead man to ease in the desired direction until his searching shoe found the pavement’s edge. The signal came to stop the car. Liam’s jacket zipper dragged across window glass like a nervous fingernail, and when he was at the front of the car he tapped again.
Lucien shifted into drive, but lurched forward abruptly. His brother was carried off his feet and tumbled out of sight.
Liam lay supine on a mat of pine needles, looking to where headlamps stretched like pylons through tree branches overhead. A shadow, darker than the smoke, moved further overhead. Its shape was one of colossal wings.
Lucien’s face appeared the headlight glare. “I saw her, where I last saw her!” he exclaimed.
Liam rose to his feet and shook off his setback. He glanced up again, but saw nothing of his brother.
The headlights strangely ebbed—not from a weakening battery but from attenuation. When the climber regained the high ground, the rental car was accelerating backwards into a billowy plume. Its high beams remained suspended in the amorphous particles like wands. The brother chased the trailing end of his leash and, against possibility, ran uphill while the car seemingly rolled uphill. His chest tightened and his trachea narrowed, as if a plunge, headfirst into freezing water, awaited him.
He stumbled blindly into another ravine. His body ricocheted between bruising bumpers of hemlocks and firs. These obstacles, though uncharitable in their placement, reduced the speed of his descent. Eventually he came to level terrain and comprehended, some distance below him, a large object crushing through bramble. This was assumed to be his car. The admixture of fog and smoke stifled his cry and formed a smothering ceiling of artificial nightfall. Once the angel’s silhouette passed from view, light was permitted a steep path to the resting object.
Copyright © 2008-2024 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.