Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

The liquor store was forty yards ahead and then twenty. A Jeep flew into the lot, bouncing one tire over the curb, and Nate caught a flash of Cielle’s terrified face in the passenger seat.

He drew Janie closer, finally discerning her words: “-it’s over now it’s over it’s over-”

It wasn’t until she’d helped him up and into the backseat that she broke down sobbing.

Beside Nate in the back of the Jeep, Janie remained stiff, leaning forward, straight arms pushing down on her knees, the hollow of her neck pronounced. They were twenty minutes from the hospital, but she was still fleeing it. Though she was done crying, each breath ended in a slight hitch.

Up front, Jason sang along incorrectly to the AC/DC disc he had taken from MonkeyBiz12’s Silver Lake house, keeping time on the steering wheel: “The walls was achin’, my heart was bakin’, and we were shakin’, ’cuz you-”

“Where are we gonna go?” Janie said. “They can track everything. There’s nowhere. No one we can call.”

“My father,” Nate said.

In the front Cielle reached across and slapped off the radio. “Did you say your father ?”

“I’ve never even met him,” Janie said.

“That’s exactly why we should call him,” Nate said. “He’s not on any of our emergency contact lists, phone records, nothing. No one will think to look.”

“He still lives in your childhood house, doesn’t he? Won’t they look there?”

“He’s got a cabin. Or at least he used to.”

Jason took a corner too sharply, making Casper bounce to attention between the suitcases in the back. Nate put his phone in his lap and stared down at it for a moment. His skin prickled, all those memories buried in his cells. The tires thrummed across the road. Everyone stayed quiet, deliberately focused on the scrolling view past the windows, giving him space.

His thumb traced the familiar pattern on the number pad. A ring. Then another.

“Hello?” The voice was dryer than before, but even over the phone every subtlety of pitch and timbre found resonance.

“It’s Nate.”

“Who?”

The freeway flew past. “Dad. It’s me.”

The line crackled. Then his father, through the phone lines: “Nate.”

The words came hard but he pushed them through. “You still got that place in Bouquet Canyon? With your friends?”

A beat while his father tried to catch up to the hasty conversation. “Just me and Ross now. Hugh passed. But I’m pretty much the only one who ever-”

“Is it under your name?”

“No. Ross set up one of those whaddayacallits. A partnership. What’s this about, Nate?”

Nate pressed his forehead to the pane. Outside, headlights and red brakes streaked together, the whole world passing them by and them it. It took him a while to find the words and even longer to say them. “I’m in trouble, Dad.”

The pause drew out, no sound but the faint rush of his father’s breaths. Nate had no idea what was coming next.

The old man cleared his throat, an awkward prelude. “Then I’ll be right there,” he said.

* * *

They followed the directions to the outskirts of Santa Clarita, the freeway yielding to a smaller freeway, which in turn gave way to a two-lane road. Houses petered out, and traffic grew sparser, though Harleys roared by with enough regularity to suggest a biker bar tucked off somewhere behind the pines. They passed the mouth of the Angeles National Forest and the reservoir itself, the road winding more aggressively as they headed up Bouquet Canyon. Between the trees, fishermen flashed into view, their heads bent beneath khaki hats, toting poles and strings of rainbow trout that gleamed in the headlights’ glow. Roadside, families loaded coolers and grocery bags of picnic residue into tailgates, kids braying and quarreling as the fathers pulled at longnecks, one last beer before the drive.

At the turnoff someone had jumped the gun and erected a plywood cutout of Santa on a chopper with the spray-painted rhetorical, WHAT’S YOUR WISH FOR THE NEW YEAR? Jason veered upslope, and they chased the creek, the not-quite-cabin houses spacing out more and more, and then it was all pines and oaks and the occasional tendril of smoke from a hidden chimney. That was one of the miracles of Los Angeles: less than an hour from Rodeo Drive, and you might as well have been transported to a square state. Nate felt his nerves rising with the altitude; he’d not seen his father in a decade and a half and was uncertain what he’d be confronting on just about every level.

Offering a cheery wave, Jason steered past a few forest rangers in their trucks.

Janie spoke for the first time in half an hour. “Thank God you have a license.”

Through the wisps of his bangs, Jason’s eyes flicked to the rearview. “I don’t have a license. I just said I could drive.”

A drawn-out silence. Cielle took care to stare straight ahead through the windshield. Finally Nate’s scowl lightened a bit, and then Janie tittered, and they all laughed a little, Jason the loudest.

Jason said, “So I can keep-”

“Pull over,” Janie said.

She steered them the final leg and down the driveway, a dirt slope leading to a Craftsman perched a stone’s throw from a finger of the creek. A bowed footbridge arced across the ribbon of water like something from Disney. At the side of the enclosed porch, bent over the propane tank fussing with a knob, was Nate’s father.

He straightened up, dusting his hands, and came toward the Jeep without waving.

“Really?” Cielle said breathlessly. “That’s him?”

He was grayer, a touch stooped, the years heavy on him, but he had good healthy color in his cheeks and his eyes were clear and sober. He wore a flannel shirt fastidiously buttoned to the throat, and it struck Nate that he had never seen the man in a T-shirt. In a flash Nate was five years old again, strapped to the foam backseat of the LeSabre convertible, his father’s elbow perched confidently on the windowsill ahead, holding the world together.

They climbed out, Casper bounding from the back and stretch-yawning with a curled tongue. Shuffling in the leaves, they confronted one another, Nate standing to favor his left foot.

“Cielle,” he said, “this is your grandfather.”

The old man’s eyes crinkled as he regarded her for the first time. “Hello, then.”

Cielle gave a self-conscious wave, all wrist. “Hi.”

Janie gave Nate’s father a quick hug, and then Jason strode forward. “I’m Jason. Her boyfriend.”

With minimal interest Nate’s father took the kid’s oversize hand, looking past him at Nate. “They’re not sleeping in the same room.”

“You’re telling me,” Nate said. They studied each other from a safe distance. “I suppose you’re wondering what the hell is going on.”

“In due time. It’s late. And you look tired.”

For the first time in his life, Nate was pleased at his father’s reticence. A rush of gratitude overtook him. “Thanks for coming, Dad.”

His father turned for the house without so much as a nod. “No use in standing around out here,” he said.

They showered and changed while Nate’s father pan-fried some elk steaks, which he served with over-easy eggs and mugs of hot cider. Drying his shaggy hair and staring down at his plate, Jason said, “I’m sort of a vegetarian,” and Nate’s father replied, “Eat the damn food, son.”

For a man’s getaway, the place was surprisingly cozy, with spongy carpeting, throw blankets over the chairs, and exposed wood beams bracing the vaulted ceiling. No television. Nate’s father threw some cedar logs in the fireplace, and they ate on the surrounding couches, breathing in the sweet fragrance, letting the flames warm them. Casper lapped meat from a mixing bowl with enough exuberance to push it across the linoleum. His tags dinged against the metal lip, and then he gave out a tragic whimper that the elk was no more.