evenings when I’d take the birds out of the marinade and Ardith would make the salad and rice and Matthew would blunder around in the kitchen with his plastic swords or superhero gear.
We headed up the creek bottom. In the black sky a sliver of moon rocked on its back. The stars looked close. The hills rose up and away in the distance, and their shapes were black like the sky but without stars in them.
Around the first big bend the trail starts uphill again, rimming around the sandstone hill, winding up. It’s steep and narrow. It passes through a canopy of scrub oak and lemonadeberry that you have to duck through and walk with your hands in front of you so your face doesn’t get scratched. I could feel Lauren’s gift on my cheek, and it pulsed hard when I bent my head toward the ground. Then, on the far side of the trees, the trail opens into a nice flat outcropping of sandstone where you can look out to the city to your left, Laguna Canyon Road straight in front, and the dark hills on the right. Below is a long drop. Behind you is a hill face pocked with big and little caves that far-flung families of the Juaneño Indians lived in centuries ago. You wonder if they chose this steep abode for safety or beauty, or both.
The smallest cave on the left holds my hiking provisions—a quart bottle of good Herradura, a coffee cup and a wooden box of Dominican cigars. I keep them in a pillowcase, which is stuffed way back, behind a sleeping bag I bought just for this place. Some months ago, when I first found the caves, I liked to smoke and drink in the big one, way back inside where the Juaneños used to be. I’d listen for their souls brushing against the rock. It was a mess when I found it—all beer cans and trash, an old mattress, skin mags—the usual things adolescents would drag into their den. But after I cleaned it out, no one ever seemed to go there again. Maybe that generation of kids had outgrown the caves and gone on to serious things like colleges or jobs. At any rate, I finally got tired of being inside it, and moved my recreations to the flat outcropping in front, unless it’s raining hard.
I’m not exactly sure why I come here. Melinda doesn’t mind my tequila, or even cigars, so long as I smoke them outside, which is where I like to smoke them anyway. She’s never expressed worry about Penny seeing me do such things, though I have my own concerns about that. In fact, Melinda has come out here with me a few times and matched me drink for drink. No, the reason I come here has more to do with solitude and liberty—the same things that the teenagers used to come here to enjoy. And it has a lot to do with the memory of Matt, which is always more alive up here, more specific and present. When I spend the night here, which I did a lot last summer, I unroll the sleeping bag in the deepest part of the cave and, with Moe curled up beside me, sleep deeply. Often, when I wake up, I won’t remember where I am or how I got here or why I didn’t just walk home to my companion and bed. I’ve awakened other places than the cave and had no memory of how I got there either. This is due to somewhat massive tequila intake. Luckily, I have an iron constitution and always wake up before dawn, whether I can see the sun or not, whether I’ve slept eight hours or forty minutes. And not once in the year I’ve been doing this has a neighbor seen me stealing back to my home in the accusing dark before sunrise. So far as I know. I drink because it makes me happy and peaceful. Most of the time. God created booze to keep us Irish from taking over the world.
Frankly, I don’t sleep out here much anymore. The worst of it was six months back, when Mel was in her own darkness about her dad and I was culminating a year and a half of ardent self-destruction. I have more to live for now. Mel is better. Ardith is going to be all right. Matt won’t come back no matter how bad I feel. My work is more important to me than ever.
Ramsey Campbell, Peter Rawlik, Mary Pletsch, Jerrod Balzer, John Goodrich, Scott Colbert, John Claude Smith, Ken Goldman, Doug Blakeslee