T. Boyle - Without a Hero

She woke late, the sun slanting across the floor to touch her lips and mask her eyes. Zachary was on the radio with the news that Oakland had clinched the pennant and a hurricane was tearing up the East Coast. “You sound awful,” he said. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Stargazing again, huh?”

She tried out a laugh for him. “I guess,” she said. There was a silence. “Jesus, you just relieved me. I’ve got four more days to put in before I come back down to the ground.”

“Just don’t get mystical on me. And leave me some granola this time, will you? And if you run out, call me. That’s my breakfast we’re talking about. And lunch. And sometimes, if I don’t feel like cooking—”

She cut him off: “Dinner. I know. I will.” She yawned. “Talk to you.”

“Yeah. Over and out.”

“Over and out.”

When she set the kettle on the grill there was gas, but when she turned her back to dig the butter out of the refrigerator, the flame was gone. She tried another match, but there was nothing. That meant she had to switch propane tanks, a minor nuisance. The tanks, which were flown in once a year by helicopter, were located at the base of the stairway, one hundred and fifty steps down. There was a flat spot there, a gap cut into the teeth of the outcrop and overhung on one side by a sloping twenty-foot-high wall of rock. On the other side, the first step was a thousand feet down.

She shrugged into her shorts, and because it was cold despite the sun — she’d seen snow as early as the fifth of September, and the month was almost gone now — she pulled on an oversized sweater that had once belonged to Mike. After she’d moved out she’d found it in a pillowcase she’d stuffed full of clothes. He hadn’t wanted it back. It was windy, and a blast knifed into her when she threw open the door and started down the steps. Big pristine tufts of cumulus hurried across the sky, swelling and attenuating and changing shape, but she didn’t see anything dark enough — or big enough — to portend a storm. Still, you could never tell. The breeze was from the north and the radio had reported a storm front moving in off the Pacific — it really wouldn’t surprise her to see snow on the ground by this time tomorrow. A good snowfall and the fire season would be over and she could go home. Early.

She thought about that — about the four walls of the little efficiency she rented on a dead street in a dead town to be near Todd during the winter — and hoped it wouldn’t snow. Not now. Not yet. In a dry year — and this had been the third dry year in a row — she could stay through mid-November. She reached the bottom of the steps and crouched over the propane tanks, two three-hundred-gallon jobs painted Forestry Service green, feeling depressed over the thought of those four dull walls and the cold in the air and the storm that might or might not develop. There was gooseflesh on her legs and her breath crowded the air round her. She watched a ground squirrel, its shoulders bulky with patches of bright gray fur, dart up over the face of the overhang, and then she unfastened the coupling on the empty tank and switched the hose to the full one.

“Gas problems?”

The voice came from above and behind her and she jumped as if she’d been stung. Even before she whirled round she knew whose voice it was.

“Hey, hey: didn’t mean to startle you. Whoa. Sorry.” There he was, the happy camper, knife lashed to his thigh, standing right behind her, two steps up. This time his eyes were hidden behind a pair of reflecting sunglasses. The brim of the Stetson was pulled down low and he wore a sheepskin coat, the fleecy collar turned up in back.

She couldn’t answer. Couldn’t smile. Couldn’t humor him. He’d caught her out of her sanctuary, caught her out in the open, one hundred and fifty steep and unforgiving steps from the radio, the kitchen knife, the hard flat soaring bed. She was crouching. He towered above her, his shoulders cut out of the sky. Todd was in school. Mike — she didn’t want to think about Mike. She was all alone.

He stood there, the mustache the only thing alive in his face. It lifted from his teeth in a grin. “Those things can be a pain,” he said, the folksy tone creeping into his voice, “those tanks, I mean. Dangerous. I use electricity myself.”

She lifted herself cautiously from her crouch, the hard muscles swelling in her legs. She would have risked a dash up the stairs, all hundred and fifty of them, would have put her confidence in her legs, but he was blocking the stairway — almost as if he’d anticipated her. She hadn’t said a word yet. She looked scared, she knew it. “Still camping?” she said, fighting to open up her face and give him his smile back, insisting on banality, normalcy, the meaningless drift of meaningless conversation.

He looked away from her, light flashing from the slick convexity of the sunglasses, and kicked at the edge of the step with the silver-tipped toe of his boot. After a moment he turned back to her and removed the sunglasses. “Yeah,” he said, shrugging. “I guess.”

It wasn’t an answer she expected. He guessed? What was that supposed to mean? He hadn’t moved a muscle and he was watching her with that look in his eyes — she knew that look, knew that stance, that mustache and hat, but she didn’t know his name. He knew hers but she didn’t know his, not even his first name. “I’m sorry,” she said, and when she put a hand up to her eyes to shade them from the sun, it was trembling, “but what was your name again? I mean, I remember you, of course, not just from yesterday but from that time a month or so ago, but…” She trailed off.

He didn’t seem to have heard her. The wind sang in the trees. She just stood there, squinting into the sun — there was nothing else she could do. “I wasn’t camping, not really,” he said. “Not that I don’t love the wilderness — and I do camp, backpack and all that — but I just — I thought that’s what you’d want to hear.”

What she’d want to hear? What was he talking about? She stole a glance at the tower, sun flashing the windows, clouds pricked on the peak of the roof, and it seemed as distant as the stars at night. If only she were up there she’d put out an emergency, she would, she’d have them here in five minutes….

“Actually,” and he looked away now, his shoulders slumping in that same hangdog way they had when she’d refused his help with the water carton, “actually I’ve got a cabin up on Cedar Slope. I just, I just thought you’d want to hear I was camping.” He’d been staring down at the toe of his boots, but suddenly he looked up at her and grinned till his back fillings glinted in the light. “I think Elaine’s a pretty name, did I tell you that?”

“Thank you,” she said, almost against her will, and softly, so softly she could barely hear it herself. He could rape her here, he could kill her, anything. Was that what he wanted? Was that it? “Listen,” she said, pushing it, she couldn’t help herself, “listen, I’ve got to get back to work—”

“I know, I know,” he said, holding up the big slab of his hand, “back to the nest, huh? I know I must be a pain in the — in the butt for you, and I’ll bet I’m not the first one to say it, but you’re just too good-looking a woman to be wasted out here on the squirrels and coyotes.” He stepped down, stepped toward her, and she thought in that instant of trying to dart past him, a wild thought, instinctual and desperate, a thought that clawed its way into her brain and froze there before she could move. “Jesus,” he said, and his voice was harsh with conviction, “don’t you get lonely?”

And then she saw it, below and to the right, movement, two bobbing pink hunter’s caps, coming up the trail. It was over. Just like that. She could walk away from him, mount the stairs, lock herself in the tower. But why was her heart still going, why did she feel as if it hadn’t even begun? “Damn,” she said, directing her gaze, “more visitors. Now I really have to get back.”