Ghost Medicine Read online

  the angel is sleeping in the woods.

  I jerked my hands up, to brace myself for some kind of collision. I saw stars in a black sky. I was flat on my back, lying in tall grass, shoeless. My head ached. I felt for my hat, gone. I pulled my hand back from my hair. It smelled of blood. Reno stood beside me, his nose down in the grass by my head, sniffing at me.

  And I stared up at the sky, remembering the time I’d fallen from Reno as Tommy, Gabriel, and Luz watched.

  damn, Stotts. Whoever taught you to ride a horse?

  I don’t think I learned so much about riding as falling off from this one.

  are you hurt, Troy?

  no.

  he’s too big. I think he’s too big for you, Troy. I’m going to make my daddy trade you for another one.

  no, Luz, don’t. I’m okay.

  And she was picking up my hat, brushing it off. She knelt beside me and combed my hair back over my eyebrow with her fingers, cooling my skin, healing me. I thought it was the most perfect moment I had ever lived, and I felt Tom and Gabe’s envy on me.

  I’m okay, Luz. Look, he wants me to get back on.

  Stottsy, that look means he’s not tired of trying to kill you is all.

  And Gabe laughed.

  How long had I slept, or been knocked out? I was sweating on my back where I had been lying. I sat up, and pulled my knees into my chest. I stood, feebly.

  I could see the blackness of the treetops cutting a jagged border around a dim sky. The sun was already rising in the east. I leaned against Reno, brushing off the bottoms of my socks, one at a time, and putting my shoes on. I wondered if I had had enough, if I should head down the mountain now and go back home.

  Reno blew air through his lips.

  “I’m okay, bud.” I uncapped my canteen and poured a little water on my hair. I wiped it with my bare hand. Not too much blood, not much of a cut, but a good-sized lump.

  “Where’s my hat?” Reno nudged my chest with his nose as if trying to answer me.

  “I’ll tell you what. When I find it, if it’s right side up, we’ll go home. If it’s upside down, we’ll keep going up.”

  It was about ten feet away. Upside down.

  I ate my last candy bar, giving the final bite to Reno. I wasn’t tired anymore, and although my head stung a bit when I replaced my hat, I was feeling pretty good as we set off following the ridgeline as it rose to the north. Reno was eager to ride, as well.

  We rode higher into the mountains until it was nearly noon, stopping once in a while to take a drink or to allow Reno to graze a bit as I just stared and thought. We had followed the stream as much as possible, and as it forked smaller and smaller, kept along those feeder streams coming from the east.

  Ahead I could see the line where the trees stopped, giving way to the paleness of granite and snow on the higher peaks. Where the upper ridge split and opened up to the mountaintops there was a nice-sized pond, brilliant green, surrounded by what looked like maybe the last stand of pine forest.

  This was far enough, I thought.

  you ran how far?

  sixteen miles, I guess.

  damn, Stottsy. I wouldn’t even like to drive sixteen miles without the air conditioner on and a Coke between my legs.

  what’d you do that for, Troy?

  I don’t know, I didn’t start out thinking about how far I’d go and before I knew it I was coming into Holmes on that dirt road. And then it was either turn around and come back, or just keep going and never come back. But you know, I don’t particularly like Holmes.

  are you tired?

  I feel good.

  good enough to do it again?

  yep.

  you’re crazy.

  We rode around the entire shore of the pond. It had a rock bottom, and the water was clear and cold. In the afternoon sun, dropping at an angle, I could see fish sitting still, then jerking into deeper water when Reno’s hooves clapped down.

  At the rounded north end of the pond, there was a crooked old log cabin set back under the dark and low pines, half-dug into a mounding of earth and rock shards so that it was hardly noticeable. It had a flat log roof, which had accumulated so much dirt and debris over the years that small trees and brush and wild purple irises grew on it. A black metal stovepipe jutted up out of the right side. It had a square doorway with no door, and one four-paned window with clouded, cracked glass.

  I knew that lumbermen had built cabins a hundred years ago or so on the lower slopes, when the redwood forests were being cleared. Occasionally, signs of these old cabins would make themselves obvious along with the rusted cables and machinery that had been used before the lumber companies had to stop the clearing. This had to have been the cabin of a hunter, or maybe a hermit, but it looked sound enough. And empty, too.

  “Do me a favor. Don’t run off, okay?” I said to Reno as I got down from the saddle.

  The cabin was maybe ten feet deep, and the window allowed for enough light that I could see everything in it. The roof sagged in some spots, but even with my hat on I could stand up straight. There was an old four-leg woodstove at the end away from the window. Like the cabin itself, it was missing its door, but the pipe looked functional. Near the stove was a bed, partially carved from the log wall and made complete with dried redwood planking. The floor was dirt, but had accumulated an eclectic macadam of bottle tops, flattened cans, rocks, broken glass, and shell casings from guns of all sizes.

  A wood Coke crate was nailed to the wall, its empty square bottle cubbies having at one time served to help organize the person who put it there. A table by the window was covered with dust and pine needles, empty, unlabeled jars, one plate, two forks, and two yellow and rusted paperback books: The Idiot, and Jude the Obscure. Thumbing through them, I decided that I’d read the Hardy book if I stayed on long enough or got bored, because the first pages of The Idiot had been torn out, probably to get the stove started.

  I went out and took the saddle and pack down from Reno. At this side of the cabin, an old galvanized tub was half-dug into the hillside, where a slow trickle of spring water kept it constantly overflowing. Reno drank from it.

  I climbed up the hill to the back of the cabin’s roof and cautiously walked out onto it. The stovepipe had a crude cap made from a porous and corroded coffee can. I pulled it up and looked down the pipe to see if it was clear. A bird’s nest came up with the coffee can as I lifted it. It had long since been abandoned, and there was still half a small blue paper-thin eggshell in it, a rusted drop of dried blood on its inner surface.

  I could see light at the bottom of the pipe, so I knew I could probably get a fire going without worrying about not waking up in the morning.

  I spread my sleeping bag out on the plank bed. I cleared off the table and put the books on top of the Coke crate on the wall. I arranged my pack and food bag on the table and went outside to gather dead wood for the stove. The moon was rising behind the trees across the pond. Reno rested patiently in the temporary corral I roped on the side of the cabin. I was suddenly very hungry and very sleepy.

  I got a fire going in the belly of the stove, without having to resort to book pages as kindling. I opened a can of pork and beans and put it on the surface of the stove. When my food was warmed, I sat up on the bed and ate. Looking out the doorway of the cabin, I could see the white moon, frozen like a dripping comet in the still surface of the pond. Even now, remembering it, this was about as perfect a place as I had ever seen.

  Reno woke me in the morning with his usual wake-up-and-feed-me call, that laughing and untiring sound that horses make to let you know they’re ready even if you’re not. I slipped my feet into my shoes and went out into the bright, clear daylight. Reno was still in his pen, patiently waiting for me as though to say he approved of our new home. I untied the rope and let him go free and he ran out toward the pond, kicking his back legs like he was shaking something unpleasant off of them.

  By noon I had already caught three nice-sized trout and left them
tied on a rope stringer at the edge of the pond. I wasn’t hungry, and would save the fish for later. I walked back to the cabin, where Reno was slurping up water from the steel trough.

  “Time to do a little cleaning up, bud. I smell more like you than you do.”

  I always brought the same standard supplies with me when I camped out for more than a day with Tommy and Gabriel: one extra change of clothes, and a bar of soap and toothbrush, which I kept inside an old metal Boy Scout mess kit. I washed my dirty set of clothes with the bar soap in the pond, and hung them out to dry on the windowsill of the cabin. I brushed my teeth and bathed in the cold water at the edge of the pond. I dressed in my only dry clothes, still dirty and bloodstained from my fall. I’d wash that set of clothes tomorrow. Then I sat out under a tree with my canteen and some Oreos I’d brought, and began reading the Hardy book. That would please my dad; I knew I’d have to read it in twelfth grade, if I survived the eleventh, and with the way things had been going for me this past week, and knowing I’d have to deal with people like Chase Rutledge back at school, that was a gamble anyway.

  I know now that when I rode up the mountain alone that time, I was telling myself I was mad at my father, and I just didn’t want to look at him for a while. But it was all so confusing, too. I hadn’t spoken to him for days, since the fight we’d gotten into the night my mother died, and I was so frustrated at how he could just go on and not show that things bothered or hurt him, even if they did. And if that was what being a man meant, I guess I didn’t see the point at all.

  He was always like that. I knew he grew up here with Mr. Benavidez, and that when they were boys they were best friends. But when he grew up and moved away that time to start work as a teacher, they just stopped talking to each other. And when we came back here after my brother died, my dad and Mr. Benavidez treated each other so politely, like they were members of the same stamp club or something. Maybe Mr. Benavidez was afraid because he didn’t know what to say to a friend who’d lost a son, but both of those men just seemed to me like they never wanted to show how things really affected them, and it always made me wonder about the cost of growing up.

  And I wondered why I couldn’t see my father’s grief. Or why he wouldn’t show it to me.

  After a couple hours, the wind had picked up and big black thunderheads began rising behind the crest of the mountain. There’d be a storm coming in soon, so I penned Reno back into the rope corral and quickly set to cleaning my fish with my Dawson knife at the pond’s edge. By the time I had finished, the first explosion of thunder rolled down the mountain, and a flash of lightning electrified the air from the other side of the pond.

  Reno chuckled nervously from his corral as I ran to the doorway, and the first big gobs of raindrops began splattering down. Rain poured, bringing with it that honey-thick smell of summer thunderstorms, and the sky dimmed to twilight in an instant. I sat in the cabin as the rain bucketed down, eating the fish I cooked on the stove, and reading as long as the light held.

  I read all day and just let the time slip by. I enjoyed reading, even if it was stories about people like Jude Fawley who just can’t hold on to anything good around them.

  I was already at chapter thirteen, where Jude arrives in Christminster. The language was strange and a little difficult, and I had to stop several times to admire the drama of the lightning strikes through the amber haze of the four-paned window.

  The roof was fairly sound, leaking only around the stovepipe, allowing trickling drips to fall, sizzling on the iron stovetop. My eyes grew blurred with the reading.

  Reno never troubled about storms. In fact, it had always been a chore to get him into the barn in bad weather. When it rained or snowed, Reno would just stand there motionless, getting drenched or accumulating white frosting, depending on the weather. I had this big tom turkey, mean and white, about forty pounds, and I could always tell when a storm was approaching in winter because before any rain or snow would fall, the turkey would get up on Reno’s back as though he were riding my horse. I hated that bird. Any chance he got, he’d be after me with his claws, jumping and scratching like a fighting rooster.

  Thanksgiving’s coming soon, Troy.

  not soon enough for me, Dad, but I don’t want to have to do it.

  then he’s just going to keep getting bigger and meaner.

  The house we lived in had sat empty for years before we moved in. It was my grandfather’s place, but I never knew him. My father sometimes talked about how he never really liked the farm, and moved away when he went to school and became a teacher, but it was my mom who made him come back, and he would get quiet and angry every time she’d bring some new animals home. He’d pretty much given up, but he did tell me, “They’re going to all starve to death if you don’t feed them, Troy, because I refuse to do it even once.”

  The rain stopped just before sundown.

  In the morning Reno was eager to move. He stamped his hoof down and scooted it back like he was strong enough to set the world spinning away beneath him. I had put the clothes I had washed the day before by the stove and although they were still damp, I changed into them. Feeling clean and awake, I washed my other clothes and set them out on the windowsill. I put a last piece of fish inside my mess kit, packed my book and rifle, and then I saddled Reno and headed him north to the edge of the tree line.

  We rode fast, Reno, always so energetic in the morning, wanting to break out into a full run where the ground was spongy from the thunderstorm. As the trees got sparser, crookeder, rubbed bare by the wind all on the same side as though a herd of goats that could only face a single direction browsed through, I looked up to a drift of snow and made out what my eyes had always allowed to blend in with the white: the wreckage, nearly intact, wing and fuselage, of an airplane.

  Even if I had wanted to I could not get up to that plane; it was too high and the rocky, snowy terrain around it called for mountaineering equipment to negotiate a path. So, laying broken there like a fallen statue of a dying angel, a giant dead bird, a crucifix, it could stay there, keeping its story to itself.

  When I rode away from it, I felt suddenly heavy. It reminded me of everything I had left my father’s house to try to forget.

  TWO

  After the first week, I stopped counting the days.

  I settled into the routine of fishing, looking for berries and firewood in the forest, finishing that book about Jude Fawley’s miserable life, and taking Reno out for occasional runs, every day growing more and more comfortable with my quiet life in the cabin, where I never had to talk to anyone, never had to think about anyone, even if I still couldn’t stop myself from doing it.

  Most mornings I woke to the sound of two nesting hawks calling at each other from opposite sides of the pond. I could make out the shape of the plane from just beyond the west shore of the pond, and from time to time I would look up at it, half expecting it to be gone when I did.

  I had started reading The Idiot at page 78, and by page 200 was still trying to figure out who all the characters were and why they kept changing their names every other sentence. I’d have to ask my dad about that sometime. I was sitting on a rock, fishing line in the water and book open, facedown, to hold my place beside me, when Reno snorted, smelling the air, curling his lip back and baring his teeth. A rider was coming from out of the trees, down the lower ridge from where I had come all those days before, no doubt coming toward the smoke spiraling up from the cabin’s stovepipe chimney.

  It was Luz Benavidez riding her black-and-white paint, Doats.

  I’d been in love with her ever since I could remember, but I never said anything to her to make her think so. We’d seen each other nearly every day since we were kids. I always believed there was a wildness that Luz loved; something I would never have, someone that I could never be. And I wasn’t good enough, or handsome enough for her, anyway. I bit the inside of my mouth so many times when I was around her just to make it hurt so I wouldn’t have to think about her. But it never r
eally worked, and I’d come home some days after school and throw myself down on my bed, frustrated that she never noticed me and that she always treated me just like she treated her younger brother, Gabriel.

  And we were such close friends that I was afraid I’d ruin it by telling her I loved her. Sometimes, it was hard enough for me just to say hello to that girl, anyway.

  I watched her as she rode along the shore of the pond, confident, sitting straight. I didn’t realize until then how much I had missed my friends. And she looked beautiful, her hair, gold and brown, tied back in two braids wrapped around her head and tucked up into her hat, her pale green eyes shining and visible even at a distance. She was looking right at me and smiling.

  She jumped down from Doats and hugged me tight.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, if you wanted to disappear, you could have done a better job. I’ve only been out since this morning and I came straight up here.” And then she exhaled a sigh. “Look at you—you look so skinny, Troy.”

  I guess I did, too. But I hadn’t really thought much about eating since I’d left. Now I suddenly wanted to tell her about everything that had happened to me and why I had come here. Luz. Every summer her skin got browner while her hair lightened. There were some strands of pure blond running through it, and there was just a little sweat pasting some of the fine strands down to the back of her smooth, soft neck. Her eyes were like her brother’s, serious and calm, wondering and wide.