Graphic the Valley Read Online Free

I looked down at the meadows, heard her voice there, the crows’. Every morning when I heard them, I looked for her. That still tricked me.
    My mother scrubbed my armpits, then my neck. Held my face in her hands that smelled like wax on the brown soap. I didn’t say that I was cold. Sometimes I talked to her, and sometimes I didn’t.
    I looked back upstream, saw the water run the dips around the big boulder, like the hump of a submerged animal. My mother turned my face back toward her. Kissed my forehead, wiped it with the back of her hand. She pursed her lips.
    I said, “I love you too.”
    • • •
    The Tioga Road took two months, clearing slash all the way to the Meadows, like beaver dams piled above ground.
    The other workers were college boys, here for summer employment. Joking with girls at Valley parties on the weekends. I’d seen those Housekeeping parties and wondered about the beach girls, their tight tank tops on cold evenings, red cups of beer, screaming for no reason. I wanted to be in the middle of one of those parties, hear the music from inside the house, smell the perfume and sweat and beer.
    Our work crew was underneath Pywiack Dome in early August, off Lake Tenaya, the mosquitoes awake, waiting in the shade, sucking at the wets of our eyes. The sun turned around a grove of trees baking flakes of skin off the tops of our shoulders. I smelled the lake behind me, waiting to swim.
    She came on a Thursday, two days before the weekend. The only girl ever. Too pretty for our crew.
    I couldn’t talk to her, but everyone else did, like the Village store lines. Every boy on the crew already there, shirtless, working close, talking and joking at her, throwing pinecones back and forth over her head.
    After an hour, the crew chief yelled at them. He said, “All the brush doesn’t lie in one spot, boys.” He smiled and said, “Lucy.” He motioned with his finger.
    He talked to her about her paper forms. He leaned in close to point things out on the clipboard. She didn’t seem to notice.
    When she went back to work, I watched the way sweat dropped down from her forehead off the end of her nose, how she itched her face with the front of her shoulder, turning her neck. How her braids kept catching in her mouth as she leaned over the slash piles, her black hair like the finished burn.
    I watched the neckline of her T-shirt where she’d cut the collar out, dropping it open. That was Thursday.
    On Friday, I worked and tried not to look at her. She was too much to watch and everyone was staying near her.
    I collected brush in the trees. Thought of finishing the day and getting to swim before dinner. I was the only one camping at the lake on the weekends, in one of the crew’s wall tents, everyone else going back to the Valley to see friends, to drink, to buy food that they couldn’t get in the Meadows store.
    As soon as the group left each Friday, I climbed an easy route on Pywiack, feeling the granite on my palms and fingertips, the knobs on the lower dome, then the cracks, climbing past the chopped bolts into the systems up high.
    On clear evenings, I liked to lie on top of the dome and watch the stars drop down. It was like submerging in the reed shallows above Mirror Lake, turning with the slow current until Half Dome disappeared, everything multiplying, pine needles, snags, blades of grass. The barely visible molecule circles in the air.
    • • •
    I was scraping moss off a boulder with my boot, early Friday afternoon. Lucy was out to my right. I’d worked back toward her.
    She stood up. “Is anyone staying up here this weekend?”
    I stopped scraping.
    Other workers shook their heads.
    “Nobody?” she said.
    The crew chief picked up his water bottle and pointed at me. “The Valley kid is. Tenaya.” He took a drink. “The one with long hair. He stays up here every weekend.”
    Lucy looked at me. “You’re staying?”
    “Yes.”
    She smiled, one dogtooth turned backward, like a river pearl.