The mountains seemed toy-sized, like sand castles, or topographical formations in a model train set, and part of Gene wished he could stay up there forever - dawdling with a gin and tonic, making molehills out of the mountains.
But soon enough they were taxiing to the gate at the Bozeman airport, and then they were all dragging bags and piling into the ranch van and making jet-lagged small talk with the old hand and driver, Fritz, who expressed the same amazement he did every year about how tall Mikey and Karen had grown - even if they hadn’t grown that much at all.
The biggest talkers were Ann and Fritz, and they seemed to prattle about everything under the sun that was insignificant.
No one talked about the one thing that seemed so significant to Gene there could be nothing else out here without it. The sky, the great Western sky.
Looking out from the window seat of the plane, Gene’s view had been blue, cloudless and vast. Looking out from the window seat of the van, the sky he saw was now a sulfurous yellow, thick and low.
“What the hell’s going on out here,” he finally said.
“Oh, the fires,” said Fritz. “Nature takes its course.”
Gene lowered his window less than an inch. It smelled as though someone had just struck a match.
Where Gene and his family came from, fires were put out by fire engines. But these fires were so vast they could only be put out by a change of season. When the snows came in the late fall, the fires would eventually die down. There was no other way. Not even a monster rainstorm would stop the burning, not in the summer season. Gene was told this same story, in slightly varying versions, by the ranch owner, the recreation director, the head wrangler, the bartender, and the waitress who served them the first evening’s meal, which was bison medallions in a port wine reduction - not quite what you’d call cowboy food. The fires, they said, were at least one hundred and fifty miles away. They were so huge and so hot, however, that they were devouring whole forests - one after the other - as though each forest were no more than a backyard pile of raked leaves. And the flames were belching enough smoke to cover half the state.
After traveling one hundred and fifty miles the smoke was strong enough to block the view of the stars as Gene and his family strolled back to their cabin after dinner. By then, the stench had seeped into every piece of clothing they had stuffed into the bureaus and closets. When the four of them turned in, exhausted, they smelled it deep in the mattresses and pillows. The ranch had over a dozen guest cabins, but year after year Gene and Ann returned to this one cabin, their favorite, because of its relatively secluded location under a canopy of trees beside a mountain stream. Normally, the rushing water lulled them to sleep. But this time they found the runoff as lively as a trickle from a Trenton sewer pipe. It was the driest summer in a half century, the bartender had said. Guests were consuming beer and every known form of alcohol at a record clip.
Next morning, the smoke turned the Western sun into a tiny red dot, like the point of a laser or the eye of a rabid animal. But Gene was on the trail as scheduled, riding a horse whose hide had the reek of bacon. It was as though the horse had spent the night in a smokehouse instead of an open corral. In the evening there was a get-acquainted barbecue on the hillside with a string band, and his wife coaxed him into a foxtrot.
“I’m going to do you a favor,” Ann said, slipping her fingers between the buttons of his denim shirt. He clamped his hand on hers so hard she cried out.
Breakfast, like all meals, was in the big cabin, a large common area built of logs the size of tree trunks. The kids sat at the kids’ table, and Gene and Ann sat with a couple from last year, Europeans enamored of the American West. They sat at a round table near the massive fireplace, which at this hour gaped like the mouth of a cave. “Well they won’t be lighting any wood this year,” said the man in his Dutch accent, “unless it’s the whole building.” He was pinkfaced and double-chinned, but his wife was beautiful in a Russian way, with almond eyes and raven-black tresses. Things about her - the cheekbones, the candle-length fingers, the way she wore gold - made most women who sat next to her, Ann included, take on that demoted look, the look of the wholesome servant girl. Nevertheless, Gene remembered one dinner last year when the pinkfaced man - his name was Henny or something - spent the better part of two courses with his eyes fixed on Ann’s cleavage. It hadn’t pissed Gene off in the slightest. From a European with so gorgeous a wife this fixation had come across as flattery, and Gene had left the table puffed and gloating.
Alone together after breakfast, it wasn’t two minutes before Gene and his wife were quarreling over minutia. Ann hissed at him about making a scene. When he wouldn’t lower his voice she announced it was very obvious he needed some space. They walked to the sign-up desk in silence, cancelled the horseback ride they were to take together and signed up for separate activities. Ann chose to go on a half-day float trip with Karen. Gene signed up for an all-day all-uphill hike with Mikey.
“He’s seven years old,” said Ann. “He’s never gone on a hike in his life.”
“Mikey can walk me under the table,” Gene said. For an instant, he felt Ann looked at him as though he had turned into a werewolf.
As usual, there was a bumpy van ride of a half hour or so to reach the trailhead The eight hikers, seven grownups and Mikey, piled out and straggled around with their gear until Harris the guide called everyone together for the standard speech about bears and sticking together and avoiding dehydration.
A couple of women who knew Ann stared daggers at Gene for bringing a child, but Harris didn’t seem to mind.
“This isn’t Everest,” he said. “The little guy can make it fine. Right, little guy?”
A patent lawyer from Connecticut asked about the air quality and whether it was wise to overwork the lungs when every breath was filled with toxins.
“Hey, you’re only here for a week,” said Harris. “They make me do this all summer long.”
“Once we get to the top, will we see anything?” Gene asked.
“You’ll see yellow,” Harris said. “Pretty much what you see now. But every calorie you take off you’ll be able to put back on tonight. That’s a promise.”
“Now I’m motivated,” said the lawyer, and they set off in the reeking, jaundiced haze. Like pack animals, they fell into a ragged single file, kicking up stones and powdery dust with their too-new hiking boots. The dust was gray and dry as ashes. It plumed up, stung Gene’s eyes and stuck to his sunglasses. He knew it had to be even worse for Mikey, simply because he was closer to the ground, but Mikey said nothing and Gene didn’t ask. He let everyone plod by- led by Harris with his enormous calf muscles - and then took Mikey’s hand and fell in at the back of the line, just behind a husband and wife who were new this year. “We’re the caboose,” he said to Mikey, who didn’t look up.
After ten minutes of marching in silence, the husband and wife screwed their heads around and introduced themselves - Trip and Kitty from Fort Knox. They were rigged to the teeth in matching high-tech shorts and layered tops, strategically color-coordinated to let the world know they were a true outdoor couple. Just before they had turned around, Gene overheard them making muttered plans about getting coins for the laundry room the instant they got back.
They weren’t five hundred more yards up the trail before the outer layers came off, revealing matched khaki tee shirts, wet from the heat.
As it happened, Trip was the head of sales for a specialty semiconductor manufacturer. “Trip the Chip,” drawled Kitty. Gene laughed aggressively, sniffing a writeoff in the wind.
“What kind of chips,” said Gene, “analog or digital?” He purposely cast the question in a tone that sounded more professional than conversational. It suggested he was only on the hike for business purposes.To get input for a project or a pitch.
But Trip was the laconic one and it was Kitty who answered. “Chocolate chips,” she said merrily, aiming the comment right at Mikey. “I brought some cookies with the chips, too.”
She offered him one, but Mikey said he had his own, which was true. Ann had stuffed them in his backpack.
“Love or money couldn’t get my little boy to go hiking,” said Kitty. “That’s some son there.”
Gene was about to agree with her when Harris interrupted, pointing out grizzly claw marks on a tree. “I wouldn’t worry,” Harris said, running his fingers over the broken bark. “He’s long gone from here. Three days at least.”
“How does he know it’s three days,” Gene wondered aloud, keeping his voice down so only Trip, Kitty and Mikey could hear. “Hey, if I were a bear I’d be gone too. I’d rather be in a zoo than this inferno.”
Trip managed a smile, but his eyes said he thought Gene’s remark was an act of treason against the guide.
“I call this part of the hike the Saddle Blanket,” Harris proclaimed to the group, pointing to a steeply rising meadow. “We’re about to climb over a saddle. Which is under a blanket of smoke.” Harris took a long swig of water and wiped dust from his sunglasses. “Apologies from the management.”
The plan was simple as can be. Walk against gravity all morning, stopping only for nature commentary by Harris and bathroom breaks as needed. Reach the top at one and have lunch while viewing 360 degrees of smog (”literally a breathtaking view,” Gene observed, eking a nervous smile from Kitty and a pout from Trip). After lunch, turn around and pick your way down. Total length: eight miles. Total elevation change: 6600 feet to 9300 feet. Estimated difficulty: moderate to strenuous.
Gene had done the hike in prior years. It was basically a steep old horse trail zigzagged with innumerable switchbacks, shaped like a big bolt of lightning etched in the rocky dirt. He knew the grasses and vegetation - by sight if not by name. At every turn he was struck by how withered everything was. And unreal; like a fable in which the land gets incinerated by the mighty dragon’s breath days before the dragon even arrives. He began to feel bad for Mikey, who was hauling ass like a little trooper. “How you doing?” he asked. “Want some trail mix?” Mikey nodded and Gene scooped some raisins and nuts out of a plastic bag.
“Make sure you drink water,” Gene said, but Mikey said he hated water. “Then drink this.” Gene cracked a can of apple-cranberry juice Ann had put in Mikey’s pack.
No longer than two summers ago Gene had been on this same trail, but today his body was telling him he had aged more than that - so much more it was alarming. Something was going on inside - something he couldn’t blame on the smoldering sky and bad air - and it dragged at his feet like a mooring rope. He had woken in the middle of the night feeling bloated, as though he had swallowed something large and indigestable. It was one reason he had wanted to hike today - to sweat off some gut.Yet, if anything, the effort of trudging uphill in the dust and the heat made him feel even more swollen. In frustration he loosened the drawstring on his hiking shorts but felt no relief. It was as though the real drawstring was deep inside his abdomen, where he couldn’t reach.
After a long hour they came over the saddle and the peak was visible, but only if you squinted into the murk and knew exactly where to look. This was the payoff part of the hike, where there was less than a mile to go but the angle tightened defiantly and the switchbacks disappeared. Mikey, heretofore the stoic of the expedition, clambered a dozen steps up the steepened grade, lost his footing and fell painfully into a nest of spines and thorns. But more than skin was torn. As the scratches dribbled blood, Mikey finally began to act his age, whining and clutching, bringing the march to a we-told-you-so halt.
“He’ll be fine,” Gene said to the group. “I have bandaids. You guys just keep going , we’ll catch up.”
“No no,” said Harris, his lawsuit antenna going up. “I have great stuff in my kit.” He extricated himself from his bulging pack and began unzipping pouches.
“Shoot him the morphine,” said Gene, trying to joke the crowd into a better mood as he swabbed lamely at his son’s leg.
But nobody joked back, not even as a gesture to make Mikey feel better. A pair of twitchy tri-athletes, newlyweds, jogged in place and rolled their eyes and gravely consulted their sport-watches, as if time was body fat.
At last the first aid ended and the ascent resumed, but now Mikey was a different animal. He balked at the slope and faked a stumble, just so he could whimper again. Gene felt the waves of bad karma and ostracism radiating from the disapproving guests. In response, he snatched Mikey’s hand and tugged him along like a stubborn, braying burro. Mikey tripped and fell on his knees again. Gene swept him up in his arms. With the noon heat and all the pumping straight uphill, Gene’s soft huggable child hung against his soaked shirt like a sentence of hard labor, an armload of stones hammered from the rockpile.
“We’ll do this for a little while,” Gene panted, “but then you have to try again yourself. Okay?”
Mikey said nothing. He buried his head against Gene’s collarbone and locked his two arms into a tight clamp on the back of Gene’s neck. Gene took deep breaths and tried to pretend he was on a kind of stairmaster, torturing his thigh muscles for some ultimate aerobic good.
Worse than the leg pain, though, was the storm in his abdomen. It was as though some invisible machine was pumping the acrid bilious air from the sky into his gullet, bloating it like sausage casing. Inside, the tunnels of his gut alternately rumbled and clenched, shooting pain all the way up to his shoulder blades.
“I have to put you down,” he said to Mikey. And he did, because the contractions were doubling him up and he had to bend forward. As he did something high in his left side plunged, like an elevator out of control, and landed hard down low on the sphinctre, which kicked open like a trap door.
Gene left his son sobbing and charged into the unfriendly brush.
He tried to scramble until he was out of earshot, but his sick entrails, at that point, were no longer answering to his brain, or anything but their own impulse to spasm and purge. The need to crouch stopped him right in the open, just short of a scrubby tree. The sounds his body gave out made him shiver with embarrassment, as though they were being broadcast over loudspeakers strung up the mountain.
When he was able to pull himself together and limp back, Gene found that Kitty from Fort Knox had put herself in charge of coaxing Mikey up the trail, and neither of them were happy about it. Mikey broke away with a cry and jumped at Gene, begging to be picked up. Gene managed to hold him but nearly fell over doing it. Instead of feeling relieved after the violent emptying, he felt maimed by it, as though the attack had torn out parts of his stomach and spilled them on the ground. In a matter of minutes the bloat and the pain returned, as savage and insistent as before.
As he strained to put one foot in front of the other, Gene was aware of heat in his forehead and face that had nothing to do with the distant forest fires, or with the tongues of scorching air that lapped at the mountain. This was a fever from some furnace within - or so he pictured it in the red flash of dizziness that accompanied his next desperate race for a bush, any bush to hide his misery.
When he staggered back from the cramps this time Harris gravely stopped the group and pulled him aside for a conference, like a baseball manager who’s about to send in a new pitcher.
“I want to turn this sucker around and go back right now,” Harris said. “They’ll understand.”
“No they won’t. They’ll want to kill me. If I have to, I’ll go back down myself. I know the way.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “There has to be a guide at all times. You could sue our ass.”
“Go back to the front, Harris,” Gene said. “It’s my own fault for eating the elk stew.”
Harris had some Imodium in his first aid kit. Gene gulped a double dose. But three minutes later he was back in the brush, squatting like a dog. On this visit he erupted from both ends, gushing shit and vomit simultaneously. Afterwards, as he looked around for dead grass or stray pieces of bark, anything to clean up with, he noticed a stick-like object, parched and white, jutting out from behind a rock. He crept closer and saw it was a bone, about the size of a forearm or shin.
If the bone were an animal’s, not a single patch of fur remained to identify it as such. Harris the naturalist would know the answer, but whether the bone came from a human or an antelope seemed at the moment cosmically insignificant, not even worth the energy it would take to ask the question, because Gene was in too much physical torment to care. So he re-tied his drawstring and trudged back again, without a word.
All he found was new mayhem: Harris and every one of the hikers huddled around his son, who had gone absolutely hysterical. The little boy face that looked up at him was so monstrously swollen he almost didn’t recognize it as his own flesh and blood.
It was more like a rubber mask Mikey might put on for Halloween. The lips and cheeks puffed and stretched into a hideous grotesque, a mutated face from a horror movie; the eyelids hooded and hard as shells, squeezing the eyes into lightless slits. Somebody had yanked off Mikey’s tee shirt, exposing skin that was a riot of hives, streaks and welts.
“Can you breath, can you breathe?” Harris was shouting.
Mikey’s reply was a bloodcurdling scream.
“Thank God,” Harris said. “He couldn’t do that if he couldn’t breathe.”
In normal adult society, a hurting child wins instant sympathy and succor, even if the effects of the hurt are so horrendous the adults want to look the other way. But a full-grown man who has uncontrollable diarrhea and shit-stained hiking shorts is an instant pariah, a feared, hated and untouchable being. Gene felt the annihilating force of this paradox all the way down the mountain. At the front of the pack stomped Harris and his mighty calves, clutching Mikey as though he were the infant Jesus, cracking the whip like an Olympic coach:
“Chop chop everybody, cell phones don’t work up here. We’re the only ambulance.”
Far in the back, Gene straggled and wandered like the outcast hyena, making his nasty side forays as required, returning with such a bellyful of pain he was too weak and distracted to fight for his rightful blood status. It was as though Harris had become the father and Trip the uncle - of Gene’s own son. And even the selfish tri-athlete newlyweds were now soothing and stroking Mikey as though he had always been their cherished little cousin.
If Kitty could have had her way she would have given Mikey a quart of Benadryl and put him asleep with painkillers. She begged every step of the way for codeine, or whatever narcotic relief lay in the guide’s stash, but Harris would hear none of it.
“Masking the symptoms is the worst thing you can do,” he said. “We’re not stopping now. Our job is to get him to the hospital - alive and kicking.”
A cheer went up when they reached the trailhead and sighted the van. Everyone piled into the oven of sealed air and sizzling seats, keeping roughly the same pecking order as in the race down the mountain. Harris drove and Mikey sat gasping and trembling between the newlywed wife and Kitty. Last to climb in was Gene, who got a slightly vile look from Harris as his body made contact with the upholstery. He felt they would have left him to writhe in the dust and dirt if he hadn’t managed his own entry.
At the hospital, the emergency room doctor pushed a needle of adrenaline into Mikey and handed Gene a piece of paper. The paper was a photocopy of a page from the Mayo Clinic Health Book describing allergic reactions. The doctor had drawn blue ballpoint pen lines under the word Anaphylaxis and its accompanying paragraph.
Anaphylaxis is the most severe and frightening allergic response. A mild reaction may cause only generalized hives and intense itching. A severe reaction is life-threatening because its most characteristic symptom is constriction of the passageways in the bronchial tract or in the throat, or in both. It is often accompanied by shock and cardiovascular collapse. These can cause death if not treated immediately. Almost any allergen can cause the response, including insect venom, pollens and certain foods. Some persons have anaphylactic reactions of unknown cause.
“Forget the death part,” said the doctor, in a voice that came straight from the old cowboy movies. “You folks are on your vacation, and that just wouldn’t be fair.”
To Gene, with his Atlantic Coast view of life, the doctor looked like a ski instructor masquerading in a white medical coat.
But as he spoke, Gene saw the needle work its spell. The metamorphosis of Mikey went into reverse gear, like film spooling backwards. All the huffing and gasping eased back into an automatic, almost inaudible hum, the wondrous, miraculous boredom of exhale ceaselessly following inhale. And Mikey’s swollen monster face flew at light speed through thousands of frames of transition until it was human and child-sized again, with gentle weeping eyes instead of gargoyle slits.
But for Gene himself there was no similar resurrection and certainty. No diagnosis, no handy photocopy of causes and symptoms, and not a single pill or potion to take for the stomach torture, not even when Gene described it as feeling like he had swallowed a bucket of steak knives.
“If it’s a garden variety G.I. thing you should be off the pot in forty eight hours. If not, we’ll do tests. Meanwhile, stick to the BRAT diet.”
Bananas. Rice. Apple juice. Toast.
“Can you remember that? Want me to write it down?”
Gene shook his head and doubled over, pulling his knees tight to the stomach.
“You two can sit here as long as you like,” said the doctor. “I assume you have a ride home.” He engaged Gene in a handshake that felt like a wrestling hold, broke the hold abruptly and swept out of the examination room, closing the door behind him.
Mercifully, the spasms subsided - at least enough for Gene to turn his attention to Mikey and really mean it.
His son was sitting up on the examination table, his bare legs dangling over the side. The ugly marks were still in evidence, but only as fading reminders of the fullblown inflammation.
“How do you like that,” Gene said, “they’re kicking us out of here. I thought we were staying for about a month.”
His symptoms receding, Mikey fiddled with the blood pressure cuff, the cotton balls, the tongue depressors. It occurred to Gene that for the first time in their lives he and his son were actually wearing matching outfits. When they had come in, the admitting nurse had shooed them both into hospital gowns, the disposable kind made out of blue paper.
After getting Mikey into the gown, Gene had attended to himself, ripping away the hated, filthy trail clothes. Even his watch felt heavy and cloying, something he couldn’t wait to tear off and stuff in his pack. The despicable garments lay on the hard tile floor, scattered in a corner of the narrow room like medical refuse, something poisonous and totally resistant to the cold fluorescence, the disinfected ambience that hovered over the room like a cloud of dripping ether. From where he sat he sensed the heap of clothing was as actively engaged with him as ever, reading him by arcane means, like a giant spider he had brushed from his skin but failed to kill.
Gene turned away from the rancid heap and went to sit beside his son. With the shut door, ice-white cinder walls and unrelenting coldness of the overhead light, the two of them could have been prisoners as well as patients - or perhaps both. For the first time all day, Gene found himself overcome by a feeling that was unattached to panic or even to himself. It was melodramatic in the best of ways, like organ pipes, commanding and forlorn. He looked down at Mikey’s skinny kid wrist and at the pale hospital identification band wrapped around it, a band that was the twin of the one the nurse had placed on his own wrist. The way Mikey raised his slight hand and forearm when their blue hospital gowns touched - the gesture was soothing to Gene because it was so old and deep. It made Gene think of the hospital where Mikey had been born; and he was certain Mikey had reached for him in a similar way when he had been barely an hour old. It was the reaching out of someone starting to swim as opposed to the grasping of someone starting to drown.
They emerged from the hospital and found Fritz and his shuttle van near the parked ambulances. Sent by Harris to take them back.
“You two get yourselves better real fast,” Fritz said, “or else you’ll be missing the dinner of your life. This is trout fry night. Guests have been known to kill just for the green tomatoes.”
“You eat mine,” said Gene. “Just give me tea and a mattress.”
Doing a run from the hospital instead of the airport seemed to alter something in Fritz’s driving style. He gripped the wheel like someone on a dangerous mission of mercy. For no reason at all he took a corner on two wheels, sending a geyser of bitter-tasting bile up Gene’s throat and onto his tongue.
“Hey, there’s no siren on this van,” said Gene. “Have pity on the sick and the dying.”
“I’m not dying,” protested Mikey. And he wasn’t, not at all. The features of his face were perfect again, sweet and ready to play - as if the welts and hives had been nothing more than a bad dream. “Daddy, can I go in the hot tub with the other kids?”
Gene got the yes out of his throat but then grimaced and scrunched forward, jack-knifed by a new squall of pain. It took all his will power to keep from asking Fritz to pull over and let him run into the National Forest. As he bent forward and down over the floor mats, the rushing blood tossed up a message that broke through the dam of time. Like a man forewarned by an oracle he knew precisely then that this thing plaguing his insides would not be over in forty eight hours - perhaps not in forty eight days or forty eight months. He shut his eyes to check the surging dizziness and nausea, and when he opened them again the thing that caught his first glance was the plastic hospital band. It was still on his wrist - he had forgotten to take it off and give it back with the examination gown. But Mikey’s was still on too. Gene reached over, took his son’s hand and became maudlin again, shuddering with sorrow and triumph - as though the pair of hospital bracelets were in fact medals of valor, souvenirs of a battle hard fought, of love and comradeship surpassing the generations.
At mid-afternoon, the ranch was a ghost of itself, haunted by a chemical sky and a deserted corral. Due to the aborted hike Gene and Mikey were back earlier than scheduled, even with the time spent at the hospital. The horses, wranglers and most of the paying customers were still out on trail rides. A lone produce vendor’s truck was parked at the side entrance to the ranch kitchen. Fritz had let them off in the torrid, treeless common area separating the individual cabins from the big main cabin. A few guests labored across it, heading towards the thick log steps for mid-afternoon beers in the broiling atmosphere of the veranda bar.
Hot as it was, Mikey begged to make a beeline for the hot tub.
“Nobody’s even there yet,” Gene said. “The kids aren’t back.”
“I want to be first.”
“Bathing suit?”
“Mom put one in my pack.”
Gene let him run off, and was glad to do it. As he watched his son skip away he began his own slow march to find privacy and a roof over his head. But when Mikey had put some distance between them Gene saw him yank at his wrist and drop the plastic band into the dry dirt. Immediately he doubled over again, gulping for air. Nothing had even touched him, yet the pit of his stomach felt under siege - as though Mikey had taken his little fist and rammed it neatly into his gut. Whatever job Mikey had begun, Gene yearned to finish it. Approaching the canopy of trees and the shaded cabin he drifted into a fantasy of paradise: a place where he would take a butcher’s knife and cut out all the organs of his intestines. The bloody guts he would put aside, so the rest of him - legs in particular - could take him as far as he needed to go to find peace, because there could be no peace under this reeking sulfurous sky.
A fresh shock of pain, pain that felt so deep and sharp no butcher’s knife could ever reach it, reminded him that this was Montana, and in Montana there was no escaping the sky. The sky went on forever.