The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [38]
The creatures sing and cluck, all sounding at once.
Dorothy laughs as she distributes the rye crumbs. “Well, maybe she’s a city girl.”
A pang of self-consciousness—Are they talking about me?—then embarrassment folding in on itself as it occurs to me that I’m actually worrying what a bunch of birds and rodents might think of me.
Relax, Frankka.
“Does beauty make you uncomfortable?” Dorothy wants to know when I tiptoe out to join her on the porch.
“No,” I say sheepishly.
“That’s good. All this life force blossoming makes some people a little bit nervous. First shoots of green pushing up through the earth, and people start picking fights, dropping bombs.” She rinses her coffee mug in a blue bucket, stares out over the still pewter lake. “Cynicism,” she hums.
The golden light on the far forested shore fills me with a sudden dread. Maybe beauty does make me a little bit uncomfortable.
“Are you planning to introduce yourself?” Dorothy asks.
I hadn’t planned either way. I take a deep breath. The chilled morning air. “Frankka,” I offer.
“And what brings you to the mountains without a pack, Frankka?”
A giant ant inches across a red-brown porch board, carrying the lifeless body of another. I’m pleased with myself for finding this hideaway, hostess and all, but I’m anxious, too. There’s something disarming about my host. What brings me to the mountains without a pack? I’m surprised when I hear myself answer her, “My friends turned out to be a bunch of back-stabbing bitches.”
Dorothy laughs. “A common problem. You’re fleeing that?”
I guess I am. Fleeing that. I think to tell Dorothy about the rest of it—my road weariness and insomnia; the clip-clop of the reporter’s boots as she strode into the Pig ’N Pancake, sniffing after tragedy; the church crowd spilling out into blistering Sacramento streets, the air around them thick with some desperate kind of faith; the old minister’s warning, Cops’re takin’ this pretty damn serious; the highway up from the bus shelter, green with the promise of cover—but I say nothing.
Dorothy wraps cheese and fruit in napkins, places the bundles in a black tote bag. “I’m going for a hike,” she says. “Come along?”
I’m half-sure Dorothy represents some waking dream, my intrinsic loneliness manifesting a caretaker, but I pull on my boots.
The morning sun is just a bright pledge from the other side of the mountains as we climb through sagebrush and manzanita shrub, up angled masses of gray granite cut by ancient glaciers. Black flecks glimmer like mysterious jewels in the gray-white rock. Tiny succulents and clusters of pink flowers that look like kittens’ paws push upward through the sandy dirt. We grab hold of ledges to steady our climb, rest on natural stone benches. Trees spring improbably from the soft turf between ridges, their red branches gnarled by alpine winds. We hike in silence.
Even in her housedress and comfortable shoes, Dorothy effortlessly catches her stride.
I scramble to keep up with her as she eases down a shadowed cliff. It’s not lost on me, the fact that I’m following a total stranger off trail into the Sierra outback like some creepy scene from Unsolved Mysteries, but there’s a cool wind on my shoulders, and even as I’m tripping to keep pace with Dorothy, some blind confidence whispers I’m where I need to be.
In the swampy flat of an emerald glen at the foot of a granite amphitheater, Dorothy sits on a fallen log, sets her old tote bag down next to her. Big-leafed hellebores and tiny white violets carpet the moist earth. “So what’s this about your friends?”
Where to begin? “I had a troupe,” I tell her.
“A theater troupe?” Her eyes bright.
“Yeah.” The smell of fresh mud, spring turning to summer. “A theater troupe” doesn’t quite sum it up, though, does it? Famiglia was more like it. How to explain? My little gang of kindred who seemed to get the joke of life, of the world. They saw everything for the messed-up, over-hyped show it is. A shared displacement. They cared about the constantly twisting interpretation of all the old stories. They could feel the shocking