T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

That got a chuckle out of them, at least a couple of them anyway. He gave the group a quick once-over, looking for weakness or instability, thinking of the woman who’d had some sort of nervous breakdown on the Freeman Creek trail last spring, repeating a single word—“dirigible”—over and over in an array of voices till she was screaming it at the treetops. Or the bone-thin guy dressed in motorcycle regalia who’d gone into convulsions and had to have a stick thrust between his teeth while the ravens buzzed overhead and an untimely snow sifted down to whiten his face and sculpt miniature pyramids on both ends of the stick before help could arrive. That had been a nightmare. And if it hadn’t been for one of the group, a dental hygienist who knew her way around emergencies, the guy probably would have died there on the trail. But that was an anomaly, the chance you take, whether you’re out on a mountaintop in the Sierras or pushing a cart at Walmart.

There wouldn’t be any problems today, he could see that at a glance. A cluster of mild-looking faces hung round him like pale fruit, old faces— older faces — that had seen their senses of humor erode along with everything else. They looked obedient, respectful, eager. And all of them, the seventy-five-year-old and the stocky women included, looked fit enough for what had been advertised as a moderate-to-strenuous hike of six hours’ duration and a two-thousand-foot elevation gain, lunch at the summit, back before dark. No problem. No problem at all.

He collected the liability waivers, checked his watch to give the two no-shows the requisite fifteen minutes to pull into the lot, then announced, “We’re all set then. Just follow me and I’ll try to point out anything interesting we might encounter along the way.” And he’d actually started out, the group falling into line behind him, before he swung round and added, pointing to Mal, “The rear leader today is Mal Warner, in the plaid shirt there?”

Until he pronounced it aloud, he hadn’t realized he was going to select Mal, but after being stuck in the car with him for the better part of an hour, listening to him jaw on about everything from his stock-market losses to the line of hiking gear he was trying to get off the ground with the help of a major investor and his devotion to Pilates, weight training and the modified butterfly stroke he’d devised to take pressure off his hips, Brice couldn’t help thinking it might be best all the way round if he put some distance between himself and Mal. Mal would have been the logical choice in any case, since Brice didn’t know the first thing about any of the others and Syl could get herself lost walking to the grocery store. They’d have plenty of time to catch up on things later on — at least that’s what he told himself. He even foresaw a conciliatory dinner, at which he would insist on picking up the check.

“Please be sure to stay ahead of him,” he went on, in official mode. “And if you have trouble, whether it’s a stone in your shoe or a blister or you need to catch your breath, just give a holler. We want everybody to have a super experience today, okay?” Heads nodded. People shuffled in place. “So let’s just go and enjoy the heck out of it, are you with me?”

—

The first sour note was struck before they’d gone half a mile. Someone — hunters, was his best guess — had scattered trash all over the trail, fire-blackened cans, plastic bags, a slurry of corn cobs, ground meat and chili beans in a sauce like congealed blood, the de rigueur half-crumpled beer cans and empty liquor bottles. Today it was bourbon and vodka, generic brands, the mainstay of the middle-aged sportsman. If they were younger, it would have been Jägermeister, and what the appeal of that sugary medicinal crap was, he could never figure. Of course, in his day it was sloe gin, which you gulped down without pausing for breath, telling yourself you loved it, till it came up in the back of your throat. No matter — he made a point of carrying a biodegradable trash bag with him anywhere he went, even along the back roads down below, and now he bent patiently to the trash and began stuffing it into the mouth of the bag.

“People have no respect,” somebody said.

“You can say that again,” the woman who’d been worried about the bears put in, and in the next moment she was kneeling beside him, scooping up trash with hands like risen dough and nails done in two colors, magenta and pink. “They’re like animals.” And then, lowering her voice to address him so he had to turn his face to hers and see that she was wearing mascara and blusher — on a hike — she said, “I’m Beverly, by the way. Beverly Slezak? I thought you might have known my husband Hal, from down in Visalia? He was a great one for hiking — before the cancer got to him. Lung,” she added, her shoulder brushing against his as she leaned forward to dump a handful of cans into the bag.

“No,” he said, scuttling forward with the bag as some of the others brought him offerings, “I don’t think I know him. Or knew him, that is.”

Mal’s voice, from somewhere behind him: “People are animals. Apes. The third chimpanzee, along with the bonobo and the common chimp.”

“Right,” Syl put in. “And that’s why we’re out here in the woods, cleaning up trash. It’s what apes do.”

Somebody laughed. And then the old guy ( old: he was ten years older than Brice, if that) opined in a flat voice that it was probably Mexicans because the whole world’s just a dump to them and one of the other men — tall, with swept-back features and a long white braid trailing down his back — objected. “Hey, I resent that. I’m Mexican and you don’t see me throwing shit all over the place—”

“All right,” Brice heard himself say, and he was straightening up now and twisting a knot in the neck of the bag, “it’s nothing to get worked up over, sad as it is — it’s just the kind of thing we want to educate people about. But what we’ll do? We’ll leave the bag here beside the trail and collect it when we come back down, because no litterer’s going to spoil my day, are you with me?”

After that, they went on up along a series of meadows and he pointed out the frost-withered remains of the various plants that flowered here in July — corn lilies, sneezeweed, columbine, rein orchids, geraniums — and promised he’d lead a summer hike if anybody was interested in seeing the meadows in bloom. “Right,” said Beverly, who seemed to have taken up post position just behind him, “and get eaten alive by the mosquitoes. And gnats. And those biting things, what are they? They look like houseflies but they sure make you dance.”

He turned his head to look at her without breaking stride — and where was Syl? There, back toward the rear, in animated discussion with Mal. She was matching him stride for stride, her hands juggling ideas, the brim of her baseball cap pulled down so he couldn’t make out the upper half of her face, only her outthrust chin and the gleam of her moving lips. “Deerflies,” he said.

“Not the yellow ones, the black ones.”

A breeze stirred the tops of the pines. He could taste the moisture on the air. The sun was gone. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some sort of horsefly maybe. But you don’t have to worry today, do you?”

“No,” she said, taking the grade with short powerful thrusts of her legs, and he saw that she wasn’t so much overweight as muscular, her calves swelling against the woolen knee socks and her thighs caught in the grip of a pair of tight blue nylon shorts. “No, I guess not.”

“That’s the beauty of a fall hike,” he said, swinging round to fling out his arms as if he’d created it all, the meadows, the views, the soaring pines and big granite boulders ranged like giants’ skulls along the trail. Soon it would all be covered in snow and you’d need skis to get up here.