Wild

“Is he going to be in the wedding?” I asked, but she made no reply. She only turned the music down low and I knew instantly that I’d said the wrong thing.

“He died five years ago, when he was eight,” said Lou, a few moments later.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I leaned forward and patted her shoulder.

“He was riding his bike and he was hit by a truck,” she said plainly. “He wasn’t killed right away. He held on for a week in the hospital. None of the doctors could believe it, that he didn’t die instantly.”

“He was a tough little motherfucker,” said Spider.

“He sure was,” said Lou.

“Just like his mom,” Dave said, grabbing Lou’s knee.

“I’m so very sorry,” I said again.

“I know you are,” said Lou before she turned the music up loud. We drove without talking, listening to Vaughan’s electric guitar wail its way through “Texas Flood,” my heart clenching at the sound of it.

A few minutes later Lou shouted, “Here’s your junction.” She pulled over and shut the engine off and looked at Dave. “Why don’t you boys take Stevie Ray for a leak?”

They all got out with me and stood around lighting up cigarettes while I pulled my pack out of the trunk. Dave and Spider led Stevie Ray into the trees by the side of the road and Lou and I stood in a patch of shade near the car while I buckled Monster on. She asked me if I had kids, how old I was, if I was married or ever had been.

No, twenty-six, no, yes, I told her.

She said, “You’re pretty, so you’ll be okay whatever you do. Me, people always just gotta go on the fact that I’m good-hearted. I never did have the looks.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I think you’re pretty.”

“You do?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, though pretty wasn’t precisely how I would have described her.

“You do? Thanks. That’s nice to hear. Usually Dave’s the only one who thinks that.” She looked down at my legs. “You need a shave, girl!” she bellowed, then laughed in the same raucous way she had when she’d said how big my pack was. “Nah,” she said, blowing smoke from her mouth. “I’m just giving you shit. I think it’s neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me—just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we’d be better off.” She took a drag and blew the smoke out in a hard line. “Anyway, after all that stuff about my son getting killed? After that happened, I died too. Inside.” She patted her chest with the hand that held the cigarette. “I look the same, but I’m not the same in here. I mean, life goes on and all that crap, but Luke dying took it out of me. I try not to act like it, but it did. It took the Lou out of Lou, and I ain’t getting it back. You know what I mean?”

“I do,” I said, looking into her hazel eyes.

“I thought so,” she said. “I had that feeling about you.”

I said goodbye to them, crossed the intersection, and walked to the road that would take me to Old Station. The heat was so potent it rose in visible waves from the ground. When I got to the road, I saw three figures undulating in the distance.

“Stacy!” I shouted. “Trina!”

They saw me and waved their arms. Odin barked hello.

Together we hitched a ride to Old Station—another tiny village that was more a gathering of buildings than a town. Trina walked to the post office to mail a few things home while Stacy and I waited for her in the air-conditioned café, drinking soda pop and discussing the next section of the trail. It was a slice of the Modoc Plateau called Hat Creek Rim—desolate and famous for its lack of shade and water, a legendary stretch on a trail of legends. Dry and hot, it was scorched clean by a fire in 1987. The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California informed me that although there was no reliable water source from Old Station to Rock Springs Creek thirty miles away, when the book went to print in 1989, the Forest Service was about to install a water tank near the ruins of an old fire lookout tower, fifteen miles in. The book cautioned that this information should be verified and that even if it was installed, such tanks can’t always be relied upon because of vandalism in the form of bullet holes.

I sucked on the ice in my tumbler of soda one cube at a time, pondering this information. I’d ditched my dromedary bag back in Kennedy Meadows, since most sections of the trail north of there had adequate water. In anticipation of the dry Hat Creek Rim, I’d planned to buy a large jug of water and strap it to Monster, but for reasons both financial and physical I was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary. I hoped to spend my last bits of money on food at that café rather than on a jug of water, not to mention the misery of carrying that jug for thirty miles across the rim. So I almost fell out of my chair in joy and relief when Trina returned from the post office with the news that southbound hikers had written in the trail register that the tank mentioned in the guidebook was there and that it had water in it.