The Fifth Sacred Thing (22 page)

Until his imprisonment, Bird had never thought much about his body except to appreciate its strength, its swift grace, its unending capacities for pleasure. He had never imagined that his body might be unequal to any challenge he gave it.

Now pain became the constant factor that permeated every move, every moment of time, the sharp counterpoint that in some odd way intensified the beauty of the rugged country. The shape of the ridges etched themselves in his aching ligaments and strained muscles. One sort of pain arose from the effort of pulling his body groaning and sweating up the long climbs, and another sort of pain was evoked by the stresses on his thighs and knees as he tried to brake his momentum on the long downhill stretches.

He kept heading north. Sometimes he toiled over the outflung arms of the mountains, catching glimpses of the ocean far over the green peaks. Much of the time he followed streams and rivers, making his way from rock to rock, crossing and crisscrossing, steadying himself with his walking stick or sliding and falling, wetting his ankles and banging his knees. Walking was harder by the rivers, but often he could find no trails and at least the streams offered him water. When the sun was hot on the ridges he sweated water as fast as he could drink it, and the small bottle he had brought from Avalon didn’t hold enough to keep him from thirst.

His progress was slow, a matter of carrying on until he reached the end of endurance, then pushing on some more, ten more steps, twenty. Or pausing, finally, giving himself the space of ten breaths to rest, then pushing on before he was ready because if he waited to feel ready he might never move again. He tried every magical trick he knew to heal, to bind the pain, to distract himself, to focus on the iridescent green of the sycamore leaves, or the slightly tipsy flight of the soaring vultures. In the end, he just had to keep on, putting one foot in front of the other, pumping breath in and out of his lungs.

The mountains were thickly forested; only rarely did the trees thin out and reveal a long vista or a far-off view. Stands of giant redwoods gave way to groves of live oak, bay laurel, and madrone. In the underbrush, thickets of blackberries were interlaced with poison oak. His hands and arms bubbled and blistered and itched, but he ate the blackberries after the food in his pack gave out and carried on, stumbling on river stones that etched bruises onto his feet, missing leaps he once could have taken easily, falling and pulling himself back up again, bruised and sore. He slept wrapped up in his blanket, taking shelter under the trees from the searching winds that came up from the ocean.

He had lost track of how many days he had been traveling: maybe a week, maybe more. He made his way down a river so deep that he had to wade in up to his waist to cross. The cold numbed the ache in his muscles.

From the left bank, an odor rose that was somehow familiar, that reminded him of something. He sniffed again. What was it? Then he looked toward the bank and saw a series of crescent-shaped pools marked off from the stream with stones. He went over and touched the water. It was warm. Hot. Hot springs, he thought, and recognized the smell as sulfur. Suddenly he knew where he was. There was only one place in the interior of the mountains where the water seeped naturally hot up from the earth. He had been there, in the good years, backpacking with Madrone and the others.

Stripping off his clothes, he climbed into a pool where water trickled into a hollow bowl of rock. The bottom of the pool was slippery with green and black algae, and he slid down, resting his head on the edge, letting the heat soothe his legs. He closed his eyes and let the pain in his bones drain away.

He rested for a long while, his body melting into the rocks and the water, until finally he opened his eyes and became aware of his surroundings. First he noticed that the springs were well maintained; the rock walls that contained the pools were freshly repaired and patched with cement. In the branches of the madrone that overlooked the pool hung offerings: bright ribbons, cloth dolls, feathers, clay images of the Goddess with big hips and breasts and bellies and round eyes, images of the God, the stag with the sun between his horns, locks of hair tied with colored threads, stumps of wax from candles, dead flowers. He felt protected, welcomed, and he drifted into a healing trance.

When he awoke, the skin on his fingertips had shriveled and he knew it was time to get out. He climbed down and waded into the river, letting the icy shock of the cold water wake him and run through him. His body felt almost good.

It occurred to him that since this place was obviously visited and used, the trail must be maintained. As he remembered it, the Coast Road was twelve miles away, an easy day’s walk for him once and still a distance he could cover in two days, if not one. And where there was a well-used trail, there would be people, friendly from the look of things, who might feed him and shelter him and help him out.

Maybe he was near the end of his road.

7

R
eally, Maya thought between breaths, when you came right down to it Madrone was as bad as the rest of them. Maya placed her left foot on the next step, paused for a moment, and then pulled herself up. She was old, but she refused to feel decrepit. I’m not in bad shape, she thought, it’s just on the steps. Of course, it would be her luck to live out the end of her days in a house that rose up three stories above the basement, and where they had placed the kitchen on the second floor to catch the light. She shifted the basket of greens to her opposite arm. We should have put in an elevator when we were younger and rich. But no, that would have been indulgent. Wasteful of energy. Politically incorrect.

Laboriously, she hauled herself up another few steps. Thank Goddess we at least had sense enough to put in a dishwasher. And the compost toilets. Well, they were correct enough—and years ahead of everyone else.

But it was Madrone she was thinking about. Stop, rest, breathe, continue. Just like backpacking. Climbing the flanks of some mountain, looking for visions. Or trouble. Three long breaths, then renewed effort. That was the way to do it.

The girl was just plain worn out. And that wasn’t a figure of speech, she feared. Worn out like a pair of blue jeans rubbed so thin between the thighs and patched so much on the knees that there was no way to fix them anymore. Used up. Ready to be discarded. Lying in bed for nearly a month now and still insisting, every time anyone asked, that she was fine, just fine, only needing sleep.…

Gratefully, Maya reached the door that led into the upstairs kitchen. She opened it and emptied her basket into the vegetable sink. After all these years, she was still pleased by the fact that her kitchen had two separate sinks, one for cooking, one for cleanup. She looked around the room with satisfaction. She could almost see the ghosts at the big round table in the center, Johanna expounding some educational theory, Rio stuffing cereal into a baby’s mouth, Alix rolling out a pastry, and Ben cooking some elaborate Szechwan concoction. Which was the baby who would only stop crying when they all sang
rounds in three-part harmony? And wasn’t it Brigid who always wanted the silly one—how did it go?

That was an old song even then, because certainly back in the nineties, when Brigid was a child, ten dollars wouldn’t have bought even the most down-and-out hooker. Why, she remembered walking down Haight Street when she was—what? Seventeen? Back in the sixties, and men would cruise by in cars and offer her twenty, even back then. She had been righteously insulted, of course. She did it for free or not at all.

She was humming aloud as she washed the vegetables, chopped up an onion, and set it to simmer in a soup pot full of water. What was the tune from originally? Some of that tomato sauce would go good in the soup, and she would make Madrone eat. “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” That was it.

My bonnie. My Johanna. My Rio. My Brigid. My Bird.

Stop it, she told herself. The truth is—then she laughed, remembering how Johanna used to tease her about that verbal habit.

“And just what is the truth?” Johanna used to say. “Tell us, O wise woman, what the truth is.” That was because, after Maya’s books became known, Johanna used to worry that she’d get above herself.

But the truth was—and shut up, Johanna, she said to the air—she was worried sick.
There
was an expression for you. That was all they needed, for her to get sick.

She chopped carrots and zucchini and celery and squash. The zucchini were overproducing as they always did, practically shouting at you as you walked by, “Here, eat. Please. No, take, there’s plenty more. It’s good for you.”

Take, eat. This is my body, this is my blood. Jesus as Jewish mother—why had she never thought of that connection before? She would have to discuss it with Sister Marie.

Generations of her own Jewish mothers hung around the room as she cooked, perched precariously on light fixtures and window frames. Maya could hear them, scolding her. “Look how skinny the girl is. No wonder she collapsed.” “Why didn’t you feed her?” “Didn’t you ever tell her to slow down, get some rest?”

“But she wouldn’t listen to me,” Maya said to them. “Now go away, you old bats.”

But the truth is, she thought, I do feel responsible. I let her take care of me; I should have taken care of her. I’m a spoiled old woman, and she’s too good for her own good. How does a child of Rio’s line turn out to be practically a saint? Although come to think of it, maybe she simply inherited his taste for martyrdom.

I’m not responsible for her, she said, partly to herself, partly to the ghosts at the table, Rio and Johanna, who gazed at her with eyes that neither blamed nor absolved. She saw them, not as the old woman and man they had grown to be, but more like they were in their early forties, mature but still vigorous: Johanna dressed in that blue suit she always wore when she needed to address some board or committee and look respectable, Rio in his work clothes with dirt on his hands. Madrone’s a grown woman. But I feel responsible, Maya admitted. Somehow she had failed, failed Johanna and Rio, failed herself. Madrone was the last—what was the word? Scion. Or did that only mean boys? The last scion of their triad—barring Bird, who could scarcely be counted on. And Maya should have looked after her better.

“Don’t be a fool, old woman,” Johanna said, but Maya brushed her away and persisted. Because if Madrone died, who was left? If Madrone herself could not survive, how could they expect that anyone would? Let alone the city, a green island in a toxic sea.

Maya put the kettle on. She would make tea, take some to Madrone, and leave some to placate the spirits. They preferred coffee, but that was just too bad. No one’d had coffee since the Uprising twenty years ago.

“It’s not a failure of nurture I’m talking about,” she said, sitting down at the table with the spirits of the dead. “It’s a failure of inheritance. We’ve passed on a world that’s impossible for the best of them to live in.”

“Was it any better for us?” Rio asked.

“We made a life,” Maya answered. “We used to sit in comfortable living rooms, talking about the end of the world. How the dolphins were dying in the South Atlantic or how the incidence of birth defects was rising near toxic waste dumps. Oh, I’m not saying we didn’t try. All those years of organizing and marching and getting arrested for causes. We did our best. But it wasn’t enough.”

“There’s no child in this city who goes to bed hungry,” Johanna said.
“There’s no living soul who doesn’t have a home. That’s one thing we worked for.”

“And we had a few other minor victories,” Rio added. “To name one, no one blew the world up in a nuclear war.”

“Yet,” Maya said.

“Maybe it’s something connected with her having a body,” Johanna said to Rio. “This sudden onset of cynicism. You know—hormones. Digestion. Shit like that.”