Tim sweated beneath a messy olive tree planted in the middle of a round concrete planter that doubled as a bench and provided the only shade. The air outside the train and bus station was thick with heat. He watched an attractive woman walk up and sit about four feet away from him. He’d had no luck dating since his divorce a year and half ago and had begun to think he would never be with anyone again. He felt like the desperation probably seeped from his pores. When he was married, it seemed women regularly hit on him. He’d even contemplated wearing a ring just to see if it might help. But he hadn’t done it.
She walked up and leaned her backpack next to his. She was tall and thin and wore an expensive-looking, hiking shirt, hiking shorts, and boots. Her hair was blond brown and pulled back in a high ponytail. Her legs were long and tanned. A faded six-inch scar ran the length of her left thigh. Their eyes met and she smiled at him. This surprised him. “Same boots,” she said, cheerily, and pointed down at hers and then his. Her speaking to him really surprised him.
“Oh yea,” he said and smiled, nodded his head, probably with too much enthusiasm. She had blue-green eyes and a slightly upturned and sunburnt nose. Her lips were bow shaped and a little dry. He thought about kissing those dry lips. “And backpacks,” he added, and pointed at their packs.
“Mountain Supply Store?” she said.
“Yep,” he said. He tried to think of something else to say. “Those guys know how to sell, don’t they?” What was he? Some sales expert?
“They do,” she said, like he’d said something she’d thought but not been able to put into words. “I was buying things I didn’t even know existed.” She shook her head. “A bear canister?”
Tim laughed. “Yea. But it is great gear. And they do require bear canisters up in the park.” He twisted his feet in his boots. “And these boots? A year old and I’ve never had a blister.”
“Good to know.”
“And these backpacks can be compressed down to nothing.”
She nodded, her eyebrows raised, and Tim thought he’d said enough about gear. So he took a chance and introduced himself. “I’m Tim. Tim Stevens.”
She glanced over at him. “Lulu,” she said, and gave her dry lips an odd twist, like a half-smile.
“Lulu? That’s an interesting name.”
“Yep, that’s me,” she said. “Interesting.”
“No. I…I mean it’s unique.” He definitely should have stopped while he was ahead. She didn’t want commentary on her name.
She nodded and gave a tight smile and looked off down the tracks. Her reaction made him feel self-conscious. They sat in silence and watched an elderly Asian couple sweat in heavy jackets. Several clusters of college students with logoed hats and shirts examined their phones. A few young families herded children who ran around the legs of concession workers commuting up to their jobs in the national park.
Tim felt goofy and insecure. He tried to think of other topics of conversation, but the more seconds ticked by, the more lame each of them sounded. Weather? Heat? Destination? Purpose of trip? Tim thought she looked sad. She was hard to read.
The bus turned the corner, and people jostled each other to be first in line. Lulu stood a few people in front of him. Tim paid the driver and walked down the narrow aisle. He passed Lulu and tried to catch her eye, hoped she might give him a sign that he was welcome to sit next to her. But her head was down, and she sorted through some papers. He sat a row behind and across from her. He could just make out her profile between the seats across the aisle.
The engine rumbled to life and the door hissed shut. Tim could see the driver in the long rear view mirror startle as someone pounded on the closed doors. The driver opened the doors and frowned. An older, middle-aged man with sallow, pockmarked skin and a pot belly thrust money at the driver who shook his head and took it. The man clomped down the aisle followed by a younger, skinny man with a strange, bird-like haircut, shaved on the sides and feathered on top. They looked like bad caricatures of a style twenty years out of date. Tan stretch pants, polyester bowling shirts, slip on dress boots. They slowed at Lulu’s seat. Tim saw the older man say something to her. He watched through the seats. Lulu didn’t look up at them.
Tim was jostled and annoyed as they grabbed his seat and sat directly behind him. The bus labored out of town and onto the two-lane highway that would eventually lead up into the mountains and the national park. The sky was achingly blue and a few white clouds scudded across the horizon. They passed orchards with fruit and nut trees in orderly rows. Then the flat fields turned to hills dotted with twisted oaks.
The rolling hills, the low murmur of voices, and the warm thrum of the engine made Tim sleepy. But the hypnotic feeling was broken by the older man who began to talk loudly into his cell phone. He thought the language sounded Slavic. Maybe Russian.
Tim watched as Lulu leaned her head out into the aisle and looked back. He tried to make eye contact and signal a shared annoyance. But she avoided his gaze. Her face looked paler than it had back at the bus stop. Then she began to talk on her cell phone. He couldn’t hear her. But the man behind him nearly shouted. The bus driver looked back in the rear-view mirror. What the hell, Tim thought. This is ridiculous. He lifted himself up over the seat and looked back at the two men.
“Vat? You need zomething?” said the younger man, his head tilted to one side. He had pale green eyes. He bared yellowed teeth, like a dog. The older man stopped talking and stared flatly at Tim. Tim dropped back into his seat. His heart pounded from the flush of adrenalin. Why had he turned around? What had he planned on doing?
He looked out the window and watched as the bus crawled down a steep mountain and into a small valley. “Colibiri,” called the bus driver. “Five minute stop.” Small touristy shops and a few restaurants, bars, and cafes lined the street. The driver pulled into a parking lot bordered with a bathroom, pine trees, and a small park. The doors opened and the driver climbed down.
Tim stood up. Still jarred by their interaction, he wanted to escape the men behind him. He followed a mom and her small boy and glanced down at Lulu as he walked past her. She sat with her eyes closed. Still beautiful. Outside, the cooler air hit him in the face. He smelled the driver’s cigarette and thought about bumming one but decided against it. He went into the restroom and, when he came back out, saw the shapes of the two men through the tinted bus windows. They were near where Lulu sat. The bulky shape raised an arm. What the hell? Were they threatening her, hitting on her? Tim looked at the bus driver to see if he was watching. He wasn’t. Tim walked over to get back onto the bus. He wasn’t prepared to do anything, obviously. They were pretty intimidating. But maybe just being present would give them pause. He walked up to the door and, just as he was about to mount the stairs, the two men jostled past him and almost pushed him down.
“Hey,” said Tim and threw up his arms.
They ignored him. “Ve get off here,” said the older man to the bus driver.
“Well, hey, you paid for….”
The two men brushed past him and disappeared around the corner of the restrooms.
“Assholes,” said the driver.
Tim tchhed and shook his head. “Some people….”
On his way back to his seat, he looked down at Lulu. Her eyes were open, her face pale, lips pursed together.
“Were they bothering you?” Tim said.
She looked up at him. “Huh?”
“Those two guys. It looked like they might be bothering you.”
“Oh, no. They thought they knew me.”
“Really? That’s weird.”
“It happens quite a bit. Maybe I just have one of those faces.”
Tim nodded. He supposed that’s what looking like Lulu meant–getting hit on by strangers. “Hey, do you mind if I sit here?” He motioned to the seats across from her.
She gave her head a quick shake and then a tight smile.
He grabbed his water, gum, and headphones and sat down. They were quiet as the bus trundled out of town and labored up a few steep climbs with long views down sheer mountainsides.
Lulu shifted higher in her seat to better see out the window. “Oh my god!”
“What,” said Tim. He looked out her window and realized what she’d seen.
“That’s tragic!”
“So hot, nothin’s left,” said the driver and peered at her in his long rear-view mirror.
“God,” said Lulu. “I mean I heard about it on the news but to see it….”
“Yea it was bad. A hundred thousand acres.” Tim had seen the wildfire devastation earlier that summer.
“It’s like the surface of the moon.”
“Yea, the firefighters were real heroes,” said the driver.
“I can’t believe they were able to save some of the houses.”
They rode along in silence and watched as the gray ashes of the burnt landscape turned to silvery gray cliffs that towered above the highway. And then the emerald-green forest returned.
“Oh my god!” said Lulu.
“What?” said Tim. He felt like she was including him in her exclamations. He thought his seat move had been the right choice.
“The river! It’s gorgeous!”
He looked out her window. The river sparkled as sunlight refracted and rainbowed from every drop.
“It’s runnin’ full,” said the driver.
“It was a really wet winter,” added Tim.
The bus began to downshift and slow. “Alrighty folks,” said the driver as they came to a stop. “Time for a little break. Road’s down to one lane ahead. Rock slide last week. It’ll be a little bit.”
They followed the driver out into the cool, sweet smelling mountain air. Tim stood at the edge of the road and looked into the churning white rapids below.
He looked over as Lulu walked up and stood beside him. “It sounds like a thunderstorm,” she said.
“Yea, it does,” said Tim.
“I can feel the spray on my legs,” she said, and lifted the one with the scar. Tim looked down. Her leg with its pink scar glistened and he felt a deep pull of attraction, like what he imagined being pulled into the rapids might feel like.
Just then, behind them, Tim heard an engine rev and he quickly moved closer to the edge, as did Lulu. “What the…!” he said and looked into the driver’s window. He recognized the face glaring back at him and his heart skipped a beat. It was the older foreign man. Tim looked over at Lulu. She hustled over to the bus door and onto the bus. The car raced up to the front of the line and someone honked a horn.
The driver stubbed out his cigarette and shook his head. “I’ll tell you. Some people, they just got less sense than a plastic flower.”
Tim chuckled.
Back on the bus, Lulu looked pale and small in her seat. Tim wondered what was going on and thought about asking her but then decided against it. He didn’t want to come on too strong. The bus shook to a start and they continued climbing. Boulders scattered across the opposite lane.
High mountain peaks and sheer cliffs lined both sides of the road. This seemed to break Lulu out of whatever she’d been feeling, and she bent her head to look at the peaks out the window. Tim pointed out some of the names. His ears felt like they had cotton in them and he took out a piece of gum and offered one to Lulu. “Helps the ears pop,” he said.
She smiled and took one. “Thanks.”
“So where are you planning on going?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it. Just…out, I guess.”
“Ohh. If you’re going to go into the backcountry, you have to have a wilderness permit.
“Oh no. I don’t have one.”
“Well, they do have some day-of passes?”
“Do you think I’ll be able to get one?”
“I dunno. They go pretty fast in the summer.”
She twisted her lips and looked out the window. They rode in silence until the bus stopped in front of a store and tent cabins surrounded by ferns and tall pines. Lulu stood to get off.
“Not yet,” said Tim. “We need the visitor’s center.”
She glanced at him with a self-conscious smile. “Oh, thanks.”
When they pulled up in front of the visitor’s center, Lulu stayed seated and busily organized her things. She didn’t look at him. Outside, he glanced around and wondered if he should wait for her. When she didn’t appear, he decided to go to the wilderness permit office by himself. He thought the bus ride must be it for them.
A bell clanged as he opened the old wooden door. Two youngish park employees in green, a tall thin man and a shorter, squat woman, looked up at him.
The woman, whose name tag said Jan, took his information and looked up his reservation. She was just about finished with the paperwork when the bell clanged again.
Tim turned as the other ranger, Steve, smiled. Tim’s stomach flipped as he took in the whole of Lulu yet again. Tall, lithe, radiant. She walked up to the desk and stood beside Tim.
“Hey stranger,” she said.
His stomach dropped, he smiled, and met her gaze. “Fancy meeting you here.”
She laughed and he felt his chest expand with pride.
“Is this…Bill?” said Ranger Jan.
“Huh?” said Tim, confused.
“On your reservation. It says Tim and Bill Edwards.”
Tim laughed. “Oh no. Bill’s my brother. He’s not coming.” Bill struggled with addiction and had dropped off the radar. Again.
“Howdy,” said Ranger Steve to Lulu and Tim watched his eyes flick up and down her.
“Hi,” said Lulu. “So…I guess I need a wilderness permit? For backpacking?” She glanced over at Tim and smiled.
Ranger Jan finished the paperwork and turned it around for Tim to sign. “We’re all out,” she said, smirking. Ranger Steve nodded and gave her a sympathetic shrug.
“Oh shoot,” said Lulu.
“Yea, they go real quick this time of year,” said Ranger Steve. “Best if you reserve in advance.”
Lulu sighed and they stood in silence for a few seconds.
“Hey,” said Tim. “Maybe she can have my brother’s pass.” He looked over at Lulu. “He’s not coming. I mean, if you want.”
“Oh my god! Really? That would be amazing!” She looked at Ranger Steve. “Can we do that?” Ranger Steve looked at Ranger Jan.
Ranger Jan looked at Tim. “Unfortunately your pass was given as a party pass.”
“Party pass?” said Tim.
“Party pass!” said Lulu and pushed her hands up at her shoulders. Ranger Steve smiled and Tim laughed.
“Yeaa,” said Ranger Jan, sardonic. “You’d actually have to hike together.”
“Oh,” said Tim.
“Well, it’d have to be up to him,” said Lulu and tilted her head toward Tim. “It’s his ‘party pass.’”
Tim felt xcitement jangle through him like the bell on the door. “No, yea. I mean, that’d be fine. With me, I mean. If you want.” Lulu beamed.
“It’s settled then,” said Ranger Steve as he looked at Tim with what Tim thought must be jealousy, or admiration. “Party pass it is.”
After the rangers quizzed them on backcountry etiquette, they set off into the cool air filled with the smell of pine and sound of songbirds.
“This trail is beautiful,” said Lulu. “You wouldn’t even know it’s here from back at the visitor’s center.”
“Yea, a ranger pointed it out to me on my first trip out a couple years back. It’ll take us straight up into the backcountry.”
“It’s so quiet.”
“It’ll be like this until we get to the falls. Then there’ll be a crowd for a bit.”
“Well, I don’t mind people so much,” said Lulu.
“I don’t either, really.
“It’s fun watching them.”
“Wait until you see the ones who can barely make it parked on the side of the trails puffing on cigarettes.”
“That’s so so sad! But I guess I shouldn’t talk.” Lulu laughed. “I brought cigarettes.”
“You know what? I did too.” Lulu laughed again. Tim loved her laugh and loved making her laugh. He could make her laugh for the rest of his life.
“You’re a smoker? I wouldn’t have guessed.
“I like smoking one or two around the campfire at night. It’s ceremonial.” They laughed together.
“Yeah right. Ceremonial. Well,” she said, and pulled a green pack of menthols from the pocket on the front strap, waved them back and forth.
“Wow, right there in front.”
“I just keep them there so they don’t get smashed.”
“News flash. Didn’t work.” She laughed again.
They walked on in a comfortable silence as the trail hit switchbacks, the only sound the creak of packs and crunch of boots. Tim thought about how he knew nothing about her and how strange it was to have run into somebody like Lulu, beautiful, personable, and funny. She seemed to really like him. And the feeling was certainly mutual from his side. How long had he waited for something like this after the divorce? He’d had two semi-serious relationships, and both had turned out badly. The first had embezzled money from her employer and been arrested. The second had had some serious mental health issues and turned suicidal and been hospitalized. Granted, he didn’t know much about Lulu either. But something about her seemed to be different. She was up here to start. In the wilderness, backpacking.
They came upon the waterfall from up above and watched as day hikers who’d come from below on the main trail stood too close to the precarious looking edge. Tim smirked and Lulu shook her head in disbelief at the tourists’ stupidity. They turned to leave and light refracted into rainbows above their heads as the water turned white and frothy and plunged into a pool below. Lulu oohed and awed and looked over at him. Her face beamed with appreciation. Tim smiled back.
They left the falls and continued along the trail through small valleys and stretches of granite, and then dropped back down near the river.
Tim looked at his watch. “I never asked you how far you wanted to go,” he said.
“Hey, you’re the guide. I’ll go as far as you want to go.”
Tim couldn’t help but wonder about the potential double entendre. But he dismissed the thought. As far as we could tell, she was a companion of circumstance. And she hadn’t communicated more, unless he had misread things. Which was always a possibility.
“Well, it gets dark up here pretty quick once the sun goes behind the mountains. We still need to set up camp. And eat.”
“Oh my god! I’m famished.”
They walked for a few more minutes and found a flat clearing between the trail and river. They dropped their packs and stretched their backs, drank water.
“The beauty! You have to be kidding me,” said Lulu. “How the river comes out from between the birch and ferns and cascades into those rock pools? And there’s a butterfly!”
Tim smiled and shook his head. “Yea,” he said. “It’s something else. Like a fairy land.”
Lulu laughed. “Yes! Exactly.” She looked around. “I’m going to string my hammock up between those two trees”.
“Nice. I’ll set my tent up and then gather some wood.”
When they finished, he watched as Lulu set up a teepee with sticks and filled it with pine needles. “Where’d you learn to make a fire?” The flames licked up the sticks.
“My dad taught me when I was a girl.”
They sat on a log in front of the fire and talked about camping as kids and their families. He used his stove to boil water and waited for his freeze-dried food to hydrate.
“I only brought dry goods. It’s what the guy at the store said to do to save weight.”
She filled a tortilla with a package of tuna and squirted mayo on the top.
“Do you want some of my stroganoff?”
“Oh no.”
“No really. It’s supposed to feed two. There’s plenty.”
She dug in and he was surprised by how much she’d eaten.
“You want a bite?” She offered her tuna roll and he went ahead and took a bite–to be polite.
Tim spread the map out before them. The fire lit up the map in the remains of the evening light. Here’s where we came from. Here’s where we are now, he said.
She leaned in to get a better look. He could smell her hair, a mix between sweat and spice. Her arm touched his. “Wow. I thought we went a lot further.”
He laughed. “It’s the scale.”
“You probably would have gotten further without me.”
“What? No. The pace was great.”
“You know we don’t have to stick together. We could go our own ways.”
“Oh. Is…is that what you want to do?”
“No! This is great.”
“Plus, if a ranger stopped you, you wouldn’t have a permit….”
“So they’d lock me up?”
“Yep. It’s a serious offense.”
They laughed and Lulu looked at him as they leaned together over the map.
He felt awkward and self-conscious. But she leaned in closer and so he leaned in, like he was being pulled by a magnet, which he was, really, because that’s the effect she’d had on him since he’d first looked up at the bus/train station–that seemed like a lifetime ago–and their lips met. Those dry lips sent a shock down his spine, and he was lost for a moment. She pulled back then and smiled. “So that happened,” she said.
“Yea,” he said. He barely stopped himself from thanking her. “That was nice.”
Only nice, huh?”
He didn’t know what to say, just smiled, felt bashful, stretched his hands out to the fire as if summoning some fire spirit or something. She laughed. She pulled out her crumpled pack of cigarettes. He stirred the fire, added wood, and the flames leapt up and illuminated their camp. He took out one of his own and sat on a stump. He looked at her, arms propped on knees, cigarette held out in front, fire shimmering in her blond hair slightly ropy from sweat hanging past her shoulders. Her face glowed in the firelight and her eyes flashed greener now than blue. He didn’t know if he’d ever seen anyone quite as beautiful.
Over the next two days, they hiked out to the high alpine lake. They talked off and on while hiking. He told her about the divorce and made her laugh with stories about his parents, the kids, and his attempts at romance since the divorce. She’d told him her story. The rich hotelier in Vegas. The abuse, although not in detail. Definitely verbal and emotional, intimations of physical. Her eyes went far away, and her face grew tight and pale.
“You don’t have to tell me everything,” Tim said. “It’s okay.”
She came back to the present and looked at him, smiled sadly.
He asked about the scar and her face lit up again. She was just a girl, a gymnastics injury in Minnesota.
They’d slept together and sex had been as intimate as can be between two people who didn’t know each other that well, and as passionate as could be expected given the tent, air mattresses, and sleeping bags. They bathed naked in the lake, and she dunked him, and he chased her. They stood on a rock beneath the water, and it felt like they were standing on the surface of the lake near the middle. He saw a glint of something metallic in the forest on the other side of the lake and they dove off the rock into the water.
“Are there other people up here?” she said.
“I don’t usually see too many people out this far.”
They went to bed early without making a fire and made love. Sunburnt and drunk with each other, they fell asleep. Tim woke from a dream in which he’d climbed out on a branch over a waterfall. The branch had broken with a loud crack. As he plunged into the white water below, he woke up. His heart pounded and he heard the crack again. The sound of whatever it was reverberated through the cold night air. It sounded like a gunshot. Maybe another hiker protecting himself from a bear or a mountain lion? Guns weren’t even allowed in the national park. He remembered Lulu and put out his hand onto the bag next to him. She was gone. Maybe she’d gone back to her hammock.
He unzipped the tent and peered out. The quarter moon bathed the camp in a low light and the fire was dead. Lulu’s hammock hung slack and unoccupied. He pulled on his shorts, t-shirt, and boots with no socks and grabbed one of the fist-sized rocks he kept outside the tent just in case of bears.
Tim listened and heard only silence. He made his way back up to the main trail. Maybe she’d gone to the bathroom or gone to investigate the cracking sound. He walked twenty or thirty feet down the trail, and then, off to one side, heard a whimper. Maybe a wounded animal? By whoever’d shot the gun? He heard the sound again and thought it could be human. The serial killer who murdered a couple of women in this park a decade earlier flashed through his mind.
He cautiously pushed through the dense chaparral at the edge of the trail. A branch whipped his face. He followed a narrow deer trail up a small hill. The trees looked like ghost-men with arms raised to the star-filled sky. The wind murmured like voices through the tops of the trees. His heart nearly exploded as a squirrel ran in front of him and up the trunk of a tree.
At the edge of the thicket that overlooked a clearing were two ethereal shapes dully illuminated by the half-moon. One was tall and bulky, the other thin and shorter. There was a lumpy mound between them. Tim moved closer around the edge of the clearing, camouflaged by brush. The thin shape was Lulu. Closer, he could hear their voices more clearly. He felt disoriented as he recognized the older man from the bus. Light glinted silver from his hand. A gun. The shape on the ground between them was the younger man.
“He took everything from me and threw me away like garbage,” said Lulu and her voice broke. “You don’t think I deserve something? Anything?”
“You knew vat you were doing. You knew what Serge eez. Even if I agree, I can’t let you go. Now, you shoot Petra. You shoot my nephew. Why?”
“He was going to kill me”, she pleaded. “Look. I have the diamonds. They’re in my backpack. I’ll get them for you. You take them. Give some to his mother. And you can be free of Serge.”
“So I can be chased down by someone like me? Like I am chasing you down? And you killed Petra.” He held the gun at arm’s length pointed at Lulu.
“You don’t have to do this. We don’t have to do this. There’s another world out here. Look at where we are.”
Tim heard the trigger cock and was surprised by how loud the sound was.
Lulu cried out and fell to her knees, her head turned to the earth. Then Tim stepped out of the underbrush, perhaps twenty feet to the side of the man. Tim took aim with the rock in his damp hand and released the rock just as the man caught him in the corner of his eye and turned. The rock contacted the man’s head with a dull thud and the man stumbled forward. The gun fell from his hand as he struggled to stay on his feet and then reeled forward and fell to the ground. Lulu jumped up and pointed her own small pistol at the man’s head.
“Don’t do it!” said Tim. “We’ll work it out. Take him in.” The gun cracked and fire from the muzzle lit up the clearing. The trees and branches were jagged and stark. Tim saw the white’s of the man’s eyes. And then everything went dark, his night vision gone.
When shapes began to reemerge, he saw the two dark figures on the ground and behind them stood Lulu’s lithe figure, her hair glowing in the moonlight. Her arm out, the gun was pointed at him. He wanted to laugh, to believe this was a joke. She couldn’t be serious. Their gazes locked. Dark shapes of birds soundlessly lifted into the moonlit sky.