zach’s chair
by Cooper Clarence
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she crossed to the bedroom door. She had never been a pretty teenager—her face too flat and freckled, her nose too squashed, her skin stippled here and there with the pockmark scars of old acne—but this morning a one-eyed horror looked back at her. The flesh around her left eye, swollen into a purple and red baby’s fist, blinded her completely on that side. With her fingers she combed some of the tangles out of her long black hair, then shrugged and stopped.
The door to Zach’s room was shut when she came out into the hall. Behind it, Jake must still be out, sleeping his sleep of the just in her brother’s unjust bed. That was good. He needed the sleep, and she wanted no company this morning.
She found the kitchen empty. Glancing out the window toward the shop, she saw that although a flag of white smoke fluttered from the top of the flue, the windows were dark and the truck was gone. Sometimes, she knew, her father worked through the night until dawn. Sometimes he worked for days at a stretch—forgetting sleep, food, everything beyond the four shop walls and the humming, grinding, shrieking machines inside. In thrall to the work. She knew that feeling herself. But gone? That was different. There weren’t a lot of places to go. Not way out here. Not for him.
Briefly she considered the pans hanging from hooks on the wall, but the thought of breakfast stirred nothing in her, and she settled for coffee instead. While waiting for the water to boil she donned coat and hat, then stepped into her boots, insulated things clumsy with size that left prints like sasquatch in the soft mud of the yard. The old Beaufort Wrestling sweats she’d slept in were warm, but she heard the wind in the eaves and knew it would be cold on the mountain. She gave the embers in the woodstove a stir and added a log.
When it was ready, she poured the water into a thermos retrieved from a cabinet overflowing with cups and lids, then scooped Folgers on top until the brew was as black and shiny as the hair on her head. She took a sip. It scalded her lips, and had the taste and texture of motor oil that needed changing. Perfect. Screwing on the top, she headed for the door.
Her feet knew the way and left her mind free to wander, though by nature it didn’t go far. The immediate, the tangible—that was what drew her. Would there be rain, and when would it come? Did her busted eye need ice or draining or both? Deeper levels, the things behind the things, held no interest for Izzy.
The mountain—really it was just a hill, steep and stony and topped with a long ridge of bare rock that cut the sky like a stone knife, but to her younger eyes it had been a mountain, their mountain—stood to the west, beyond the long-empty cow pasture and the dirt track where she and Zach, in better times, used to give the horses their exercise, racing them shoulder to shoulder, riders whooping and mounts kicking up stones. They weren’t supposed to gallop them, their dad always said not to gallop them, but Zach didn’t care. He dug in his heels and flew, and Izzy could either do the same or get left behind. She had always hated getting left behind.
On foot the way was longer. But Zach was gone and the horses of her childhood were dead, buried out behind the shop beneath a tidy row of uncarved granite headstones, and she no longer felt a need to hurry. There was no one left to leave her.
Gravel crunched underfoot, and she weaved around tall weeds pushing up from the ground and encroaching on the graded track. Her dad didn’t come this way anymore. He stuck to the cabin and the shop, increasingly just the shop, and Izzy guessed that no one had been out here since the summer, when she’d last come home from school. It made her sad—when she stopped coming, there would be no one left to do it.
At the curve where the track turned south to skirt along the base of the mountain, she continued straight, leaving the road and tramping through the grasping sagebrush on the shoulder. Between two sizable boulders there was a path for those with eyes to see it, one that wound through the rocks and gray-green claws of the scrub.
At first the way was easy going. Level as a playing field, the path lead through a sandy wash, a water-cut channel where no water had been seen these many years gone. Stony walls rose on either side of her, so that her world was reduced to the sand beneath her feet, the sky above her head, and the path before her. A canyon wren, invisible to her eyes, trilled and buzzed somewhere nearby. A wind gusted through the narrow rock chute, rising and falling but always blowing, whistling tonelessly and stealing the breath from between her lips with blunt, dry fingers. Navigating a bend in the canyon she came to a gap in the wall, and leaving the sandy floor of the wash she passed through it, following the faint path upwards. Several times, her eyes fell on one-man boulders partially buried in the dirt. They might have been suitable, but she left them where they lay.
With a smooth, loping gait she climbed, switchbacking up and up the side of the mountain, passing dwarfed junipers and pinyon pines whose spicy green scent clung to her. The wind was less here, and she began to warm beneath her layers. Without pausing she loosened the collar of her coat.
Fifteen minutes took her to where she was going. The last stretch was along the top of the cliff over bare, exposed rock, where she had to hop from boulder to boulder to keep making progress, the open sky yawning to her left. Loose fragments of gravel skittered away from her heavy boots and plunged over the edge, pinging from surface to surface till they passed out of range of ear and eye both. The wind was back, nudging her toward the gulf and the drop, but it made little impression on her sturdy, compact frame.
Before her, the whole valley lay supine between the two ridges that defined it—the one where she stood and the other, miles away, tracing the eastern horizon on the sky. Thirteen, paved and shiny and sticky-black, ran straight down the middle like a line drawn in marker, and between her and the road a stream wound, Thirteen-Mile Creek or Fourteen-Mile Creek, depending on where you stood. And in a tiny toy-like cluster at the end of a dirt road, the green aluminum roof of the cabin, and larger white box of the shop.
She turned her back on the view and settled her eyes on a strange thing. Looming over her eight feet high, a rough pyramid of stacked boulders—hundreds of them, thousands perhaps, each the size and shape of an anvil—thrust its head above the stunted trees. Really it was more of a ziggurat, flat on the top, only two-thirds the height it should have been had the sloping sides come to a point. The structure had an unfinished look about it, the upper courses full of unevenly jutting stones like the broken, lonely teeth in the mouth of an addict. Loose boulders, of the same kind as those which made up the pile, lay littered here and there around the wide base. Approaching one, she bent and lifted it between her hands, shouldered it, and plodded forward with it balanced in the crook of one elbow. Carrying it over to one of the sad trees, she dropped it with a dull thud to the frozen ground beside the trunk, then sat on it, leaning her back against the jagged bark and closing her eyes.
That’s how Jake found her, some time later. How long exactly, she didn’t know—she didn’t think she’d dozed, but somehow the time had slipped by without her noticing. When she heard him grunting his way up the path and opened her eyes, the sky was the same colorless gray as before, and she sensed it was still morning. But whether one hour had gone by or two, or only fifteen minutes, she couldn’t say.
“How’d you find me?” she asked, when he stood panting and red faced before her. His coat—the same black wool peacoat as always—hung open like the wings of a dead bat, the cheery plaid scarf around his neck lank and damp with sweat. His face, like hers, bore signs of recent damage: in his case, a semicircular gash along the slope of his nose and the ridge of his right eyebrow, with bruising the color of a ripe eggplant all the way down to his cheek. Wordlessly, still gulping the sharp air, he pointed at her boots.
She looked down. Mud caked the rubber soles and leather uppers of her boots, reddish-black and thick like half-hardened concrete. “Tracks,” she grunted. She could imagine the trail of prints leading from the back door, across the muddy yard and down the path, so obvious even Jake the city boy would have had trouble missing it. As long as he scoped the turnoff, it would have been simple to follow her the rest of the way. There was only one way to go.
He nodded, wiping sweat off his forehead. He seemed to have finally caught his breath.
“How’s your eye?”
“Fine.” She prodded it with a finger and winced.
He looked skeptical. “Sure about that? It doesn’t look fine.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“Mine came in the line of duty, not from getting punched in the face.”
She said nothing and looked stubbornly past him at the view.
“Did you talk to your dad this morning?”
She shook her head.
“Well have you thought about what you’re going to say?”
She shot him a warning look and he shut up.
For a while, nothing was said. She sat on her rock and drank coffee and looked at the view as her butt went slowly numb, and Jake wandered over to the dropoff and peered cautiously out over the edge, leaning with one hand clamped tightly around a trunk of juniper. When he came back, his coat was buttoned and he held his hands tucked up in his armpits.
“Cold up here,” he observed. His eyes slid from her to the stone edifice behind her. Curiosity sparkled in them, but he came at the question sideways, as was his way. “What, uh, what exactly are we doing up here, anyway?”
“We aren’t doing anything—I’m up here, and you followed me. Remember?”
“A technicality,” he declared, “not worthy of our notice. But have it your way—what are you doing up here? Consider me a simple observer, irrelevant to your answer. I’m not even here. I’m Emerson’s transparent eyeball.”
Jake hunkered down in the lee of a nearby pine and shut his mouth. That was one of the things Izzy liked about him—he could and would talk a mile a minute, but when it was time to shut up, he shut up. Most people never knew when to shut up. That’s what got them in trouble. They yapped themselves right off the cliff. That was the trap she’d fallen into the night before, with dad—why they’d fought, and he’d blacked her eye, and she’d busted his lip. All over words, nothing more. Words, words—was there anything worse in the world? Surely somewhere.
“This is where we…where we took mom,” she said, haltingly. Jake watched her, motionless and unblinking, as if by making even the tiniest movement he might upset some mysterious equilibrium and cause her to stop talking. “When she died, she wanted to be cremated. She said she didn’t want to end up alone in a hole in the ground, that she’d rather get burned up, sent up into the sky as smoke and ashes. She wanted to do it at home, on a big bonfire in the pasture, but the doctors told us it wasn’t allowed. We had to let strangers do it. Strangers in coats and ties, with rubber gloves and clipboards. She would have hated that.” She gulped a hot slug of coffee. Jake shivered and his eyes followed it down her throat. “But then afterward—after the burning—this is where we brought her. Her ashes, I mean. Right here. They couldn’t stop us from doing that much, at least.”
Jake kept his mouth shut. That was good.
“Dad wanted to come. He did want to come. Not like the next time. With Zach, he locked himself in the shop and wouldn’t come out, not even when I broke the window. Threw a rock through it and yelled at him, but he yelled back that it was stupid and I was crazy, that we didn’t even have anything to burn, that all we had was a stupid flag and a letter. ‘Point to it!’ That’s what he said. ‘Point and show me where on a person the flag comes from, because I don’t see it!’”
Izzy shook her head and started to crack her knuckles, one at a time, working each finger for a double pop and then moving to the one beside it.
“He didn’t come out for three days, that time, and even then only because I needed to go back to school and he had to drive me to the airport. I drove myself, with him so drunk he kept sliding out of the passenger seat and into the footwell. He slept most of the way there, but he cried when I left him in the parking lot. We never talked about it before last night.”
She finished cracking her knuckles. Fifteen pops out of twenty wasn't bad, but in running out of fingers it seemed that her words dried up as well, and into the silent gap swirled a gust of wind. It made the trees creak and groan, and passing through the piled stones behind Izzy it whistled like a bosun’s pipe. When it died, Jake pursed his lips and let out a long, low whistle of his own, one that matched the note exactly. He held it, then went higher and higher until suddenly cutting off. A chill went up Izzy’s spine that she knew wasn’t anything to do with the cold.
“And that?” Jake asked, pointing over her shoulder with his chin. Izzy didn’t have to look to know what he was talking about.
“That’s Zach’s chair.”
“How’d it get here?”
“I built it.”
Jake’s eyebrows rose as he looked more carefully at the pile of rocks, taking in the scale, the bewildering immensity of it. “That must have taken…” He trailed off, and then: “Why?”
Izzy shifted on her rock and blew out her breath, emitting a white cloud of irritation that dissipated in the cold air. “I hate this game. I don’t want to play twenty questions today.”
“Then give me a real answer! Come on—indulge me. Tell me about it. Zach’s chair.”
She shifted again. The rock was cold and did not make for a comfortable seat, and her left leg had fallen asleep. Shaking it out, she rubbed her calf through her sweatpants, pushing at the deadened flesh in short, violent strokes. When the feeling refused to come back, she gave it up as a bad job and hauled herself to her feet to walk it off. Turning her back on Jake, she took a few wobbly steps, holding onto the gnarled trunk of the nearest tree for support.
“It was Zach’s idea,” she began slowly, the words coming faster, smoother as she warmed to her subject. “Things were always his idea. He was an ideas person—a bit like you, actually. I think you would have liked him.
“Anyway, when I was little and started getting half-decent at wrestling, Zach became obsessed with the idea that I wasn’t getting good enough coaching. He was in high school at the time, and was pretty good himself, but he wasn’t improving any more and he knew it. He always said that he had a low ceiling, that wrestling wasn’t his ‘calling.’ Dad had already given up on him by that point, so instead of trying to get better himself he started focusing more and more on me. This was when I was around nine or ten, and Zach was maybe sixteen.
“As I got older, the boys started getting stronger. Girls develop faster early on, you know, so a lot of the times when they’re young they can actually outmuscle the boys. But then the closer you get to puberty, the more the boys catch up. At ten I still had the advantage, developmentally, but Zach saw the writing on the wall. We started training harder, wrestling more but also weightlifting. Always lifting, lifting constantly, crazy stuff: A thousand bench presses in an hour. Squats with buckets of water hanging off the ends of the bar, to help with stability. Deadlifts where he’d lie on the ground in a plank and I’d have to lift him up and put him back down again without making any noise. Half of it he pulled from movies and comics he liked, and the other half he just made up out of his own head. I’ve got no idea if any of it was actually effective from a scientific perspective, but whatever he was doing it worked—I got stronger. Way stronger.
“His favorite was this thing he called sisyphusing. You know Sisyphus?”
Jake nodded. The numbness in Izzy’s legs had gone and she walked over to the massive cairn, placing an affectionate hand on its shoulder.
“Yeah, well I didn’t, until he explained it to me. I thought it was a dumb name, but I guess it made sense. Zach would tell me to pick out a rock—any rock—from the bottom of our mountain, and I would have to run it up to him at the top, carrying it over my head. At first the rocks were little, but if he felt like I was making it easy on myself by picking one that was too small, he’d make me run back down the mountain with it, pick out a new rock that was bigger, and run back up again. ‘That pansy-ass rock doesn’t belong on our mountain!’ He used to love saying that. Eventually I built up to ones this size.” She patted one of the stones set into the sloping side of the pile, a watermelon-sized chunk of river rock, smooth and rounded and glistening with chips of quartz. “Fifty-pounders, he called them, but lots were closer to seventy.”
Jake sat on his rock and looked at the pile with wide eyes. His lips moved silently as he did the math. “There must be…”
“A couple thousand, yeah. Sometimes in the summer we’d go all day, as long as the sun was up. Up and down, up and down, dozens of times. Once I did thirty-seven in one day. We went past dark that time, fifteen straight hours, and the second-to-last one I had to carry back down again because it was too small, so Zach said my record had an asterisk. That was the summer before freshman year. The next day he left for Basic, and that was the last time I saw him till mom died.”
She looked around at the stony, windswept clifftop. Her expression was old, too old for her seventeen years. The weight of memory bowed her, heavier than any rock.
“This was his favorite place. It’s where he came when dad was in one of his black moods and he needed to get away from him. He wanted to be buried here. It was in his will—they make you write one when you deploy—and he put it right at the end. ‘Bury me on top of our mountain.’ Only there wasn’t enough left of him to put in a hole in the ground.” She balled her hands into fists and squeezed, digging her bitten-off nails into the soft flesh of her palms, preferring tears of pain to those of another kind. Tears of pain she knew how to fight off, had years of practice against them—those others, less familiar, would get the best of her. “This is where I want to be, too.” She risked a glance at Jake, who sat with his delicate fingers steepled in front of his mouth, his immaculately trimmed nails pressing against the tip of his sharp nose. The wind had wreaked havoc with his side part, leaving him with a ridiculous nest of tangled cornsilk, but his eyes watched her with the utmost seriousness, their pale grayness cold and hard. “If this thing we’re doing doesn’t work out, or if it does but something happens—make sure this is where I end up. Make sure.”
A different sort of person would have demurred, would have told her she would be fine and that she had nothing to worry about. That’s what a friend would have done. Jake wasn’t that. He lowered his hands, revealing a tight frown, and nodded.
“I’ll make sure,” he said.
Movement down below them in the valley caught their attention. A pickup, slaloming around the curves, zoomed down the dirt road toward the cabin, kicking up a rooster tail of dust. Even way up where they stood, they could hear the engine whine and make out the rusty red paint job.
“Dad’s back,” said Izzy.
Jake was still squinting down at the road. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“Who else would it be, this early? Anyway, that’s the truck. I’d know it anywhere.”
Jake shrugged. “Your eyes are better than mine. Where do you think he went?”
“No idea.”
That wasn’t quite true. She did have some idea. Checking her watch, she did a calculation in her head—the bars closed at four in Broken Bow, and it was twenty minutes from town back to here…no, the math didn’t work out. It must’ve been someplace else. The Walmart was open twenty-four seven, she mused, and the only time they locked the beer cave was six to noon on Sunday. Probably that was the answer.
“Well, shall we go find out? I’m hungry, and my face is freezing.” He poked experimentally at the puffy purple flesh around his eye. “Probably good for the bruising, though. I can’t even feel it anymore. Maybe I’m ready for another go-round on the TAC-50.”
Izzy waved him away. “You go on. I’m right behind you.”
Jake gave her a penetrating look, but didn’t say anything and did as she told him. She watched him disappear down the trail, listening till the sound of his footsteps faded to nothing. Only then did she make a move. Lifting the heavy rock she’d made into a seat for herself, she carried it over to Zach’s cairn, climbed partway up the side, and with a mighty heave levered it on top of the pile. It clacked loudly against the other stones and then settled into place. She hadn’t carried it all the way up from the bottom, but it would have to do. There was no other tribute she could pay to his memory—not now, at least. Not here.
Giving the cairn a final look, she turned and headed back down the trail, following Jake. Her heart was thudding and she knew she wasn’t supposed to exert herself as much as she had this morning, but just then she didn’t give a shit about the doctors or their orders. She was her own person. Proving that—even if only to herself—was sometimes more important than staying alive.
BIO: Cooper Clarence is a New England-based librarian and writer. He loves reading and the great outdoors and fighting the good fight. His work, including recent stories “Into the Yonder” and “A Bit on the Side,” is published in Blood+Honey.