Читать книгу Lighting Out - Daniel Duane - Страница 10

Hoping to find my dad and Uncle Sean up rock climbing in Yosemite, I packed my little blue pickup and drove out through the orchards and vineyards of the Central Valley toward Groveland. At Yosemite Junction in the foothills, the big range rippling up out of California’s Kansas, I went south in the summer heat to where the Tuolumne River—a big, splashing stream running over white granite boulders and slabs—cut under a bridge.

I hit the brakes at a dusty turnout, hopped out, and grabbed a towel and a guitar. My sandals picking up pebbles the whole way down, I walked through poison oak and blackberry bushes to a swimming hole. An off-duty road crew had strung a steel cable from high rocks on one side of the deep pool to oak trees on the eroding hill opposite; a thick, frayed rope hung from the cable’s midpoint down to the water. Coming up here with my mom, dad and sister when I was a kid, I’d thought of that cable as being about fifty, maybe even sixty feet off the water. Dad had to be crazy to climb out on it, swinging around like the teenagers. Mom would dive from some pretty high rocks, but she stayed away from the cable. He’d hang out there in space with his Levis on, kicking his feet around and whooping, then let go and slap into icy snow-melt water. As I got closer to the pool, I started dropping my height estimate on the cable, remembering that my preschool playground had recently turned out to be only about half an acre—not the two or three square miles I recalled. Sure enough—twelve feet, tops.

I lay out on the granite slabs getting sunburned, pinker and pinker all the time—the redhead’s fantasy that maybe, just maybe, this’ll be the year I get tan. Some local folks shotgunned malt liquors and started talking loudly about Bay Area whitebread yuppies running around the day before, thinking they were ballsy jumping off rocks. I took off my little round glasses.

A pockmarked old biker in a black leather vest and blunttoed motorcycle boots threw a full can of beer into the blackberry bramble. Two men with turtle tattoos and long black hair took off their sneakers and T-shirts, but not their Levis. The older—probably in his forties—had two deep circular scars on his belly and a braided ponytail. The other, no more than twenty-five, had predatory blue eyes and a dark olive tan. They ran across the hot slabs to the shallow end of the pool while two women in matching terry-cloth tube tops—one pink and one blue—popped open Budweisers and leaned forward to watch. The men picked around in the shallows, turning over rocks for a while until they found what they wanted. Each picked up a chunk of granite about the size of a human head and then they started walking into the deep water side by side.

Everyone on the rocks leaned over to watch through the clear water. Walking upriver into the pool, the two men picked their way carefully across the bottom. Soon their chests were submerged, then their necks. They looked at each other a last time and took a deep breath before going under. As they sank below the surface their figures warped with the ripples above. A highway patrolman slowed as he crossed the bridge. The old biker took up a collection for beers and walked off toward the road.

“Crazy Indians, huh?” said the woman in blue. She lay back on her towel in the sun.

“Are these guys real Indians?” asked the other. “Indians hate water.”

One of the men appeared to have fallen a step behind the other, and a few bubbles burst above him. A cloud shadowed the pool, and for a moment the men were hard to discern from the reflected hillside. Then the sun hit the water again and a cloud of bubbles exploded to the surface; one had stopped walking altogether. The woman in pink flashed a confused look at me, then back at the water.

With a splash the younger man burst up coughing and spitting. As he swam to the rocks, the older man walked out the other end of the pool. Only when he was standing dry on a boulder did he drop his rock. I gave up on the tan and sat under a bay tree, trying to remember bluegrass songs I’d played with my dad—“Black Mountain Rag,” “Cripple Creek,” “Old Joe Clark.” He’d played banjo in a backyard country band for years and taught me to swap melodies with him on guitar. At the opening chorus of “Billy the Kid,” the one about how at the age of twelve years Billy killed his first man, the old pockmarked biker looked straight at me and said, “Hell. That’s my music. You keep playing that shit.”

When the crowd thinned out I drove off to a deli and picked up a rib-eye steak and a six-pack of rightly named Plank Road beer. The petrified mesquite in my little hibachi took forever to get hot, so I had nothing to do in that slow foothills sunset except throw gravel at bats and think about climbing. Not just peak-bagging this time either, but actually roping up. A handful of pebbles into a lodgepole pine sent clouds of fluttering shadows into the sky. A few bats dodged close like giant squeaking houseflies.