or stones. But this cloud passed quickly, so the sipping butterfly hunkered only briefly, then resumed its suck from the sweet-filled floret. A bigger black form took flight when the bright intruder entered its territory. The raven charged the big yellow bird to chase the interloper out of its airspace, succeeded, and resettled.
As the slope fell away toward the canyon below, more than keeping pace with the glide path of the Ghia, so fell the yellow missile. Sky whooshed aside to make room for it, otherwise there was no sound but for three shrieks on the alpine air: a nutcracker’s alarm scream; the whine of the engine, gunned by the foot glued to the Ghia’s floorboard; and a third, muffled by the glass, growing into a hopeless wail.
The thin alpine air parted before the plummeting car, smelling of green musk, of the great high lawn that is the Colorado mountain tundra. The perfumes of a hundred alpine wildflowers filled the grille of the Ghia. Soon the sweet mingled scents would be overcome by the rank fumes of oil and gasoline mixing with the terpenes of torn evergreens as the grille split against pine and stone. But the rider smelled nothing.
The air took on a chill as the projectile left the sunny upper reaches, crossed over timberline, and entered the shade of the upper forest. Never once had it touched down since takeoff, nor could it fly much farther. Gravity never ran out, but the earth rushed up at last to meet it. All the elements of the alpine earth—mineral soil, bare stone, grass, sedge, herb, shrub, and solid trunk of ancient limber pine—mingled with the yellow metal when the Ghia went to ground. Soft parts met hard. Granite tore rubber. Branches smashed glass and pierced the cloth upholstery. The engine block escaped its mounts and flew a little farther before shattering against a boulder and coming to rest as shiny shrapnel in the streambed far below. The blow that tore the motor free, ending its long scream, ripped the driver’s door from its hinges. That other shriek was loosed into the general clamor. Then nothing.
Almost nothing remained from this unplanned event to disturb the day up above, where it began. The nutcracker returned to its snag, the marmot to its post, the raven to its rock. The black butterfly nectared on, then flew. The forget-me-nots still flowered low against the ground. Not even the green verge of the road betrayed anything amiss. Only a black rubber streak in the roadway gave away the launching spot. Even the golden-mantled ground squirrel whose mad dash across the asphalt had started it all lay not dead on the shoulder, but basking on a boulder nearby in the late-summer sun, unabashed by her close call.
Of the steaming yellow mass among the trees and rocks a thousand feet below, no one knew a thing. Bumblebees investigating the yellow spatter on the slope found battered, barren steel instead of woolly sunflowers. The Karmann Ghia’s aberrant track would never be repeated. And for all the difference it made to the mountain, it might never have happened at all.
2
Yellow cottonwoods left the creekbeds outside Albuquerque and boarded an eastbound cross-country bus en masse as the driver called out destinations: “All passengers for Parmalee Gulch, Raton Junction, Cambridge, and Peoria, yer on the right bus. If yer plannin’ on goin’ anywheres else, better get the heck off now. An’ git them gol-durned ’possums offa my bus!”
It seemed to James Mead that he was indeed going somewhere else, although he couldn’t quite remember where, and in any case the bus was already moving too fast and too far off the ground to jump. Besides, if he jumped, what about his luggage? God, I forgot my suitcase, he yelped, and then realized he was also absent his pants, and the other passengers were beginning to look and snicker, and he had to pee in the worst way. The rows of cottonwood trees began shedding their yellow leaves along with the possums hanging upside down from their lower boughs. The possums dropped like great gray bombs onto people’s heads, exploding into storms of gray confetti like that crap in padded envelopes that gets all over everything. Mead felt the ratty tail of a possum slap his cheek and its thin gray hair go up his nostrils. This tickled, made him sneeze, and woke him up.
Mead shook his head, rubbed his gritty eyes, and tried to reconstruct the dream. “Okay, Albuquerque and the trees,” he mumbled to himself. He’d boarded the bus there the day before, among the glint of afternoon autumn poplars. “I remember Parmalee from field trips, and I do have to pee like crazy.” He assumed his bag was safely stowed below. “But what’s the deal with the possums?”
“God placed the opossum on the earth for a reason,” began the amateur evangelist in the seat next to him, “to serve men in the only way they know how . . .” The man had been silent for over an hour in deference to his young seatmate’s nodding slumber. Now that he’d awakened, Mead became fair game again. “. . . by giving possum hounds a run for their money and by patching potholes in the mud with their poor, battered bodies. Now let me tell you, son, how we all must serve His greater purpose.”
Mead made his escape by pleading his bladder’s screaming need. He slung his way down the aisle toward the chemical stink of the toilet. For balance, he hung on to the luggage racks instead of the seat backs, as people of lesser height usually do. A young woman on her way to Bowdoin vetted his long-sleeved cotton plaid shirt, his khaki chinos (which he was wearing, after all), his Bass shoes. He would do for conversation. Maybe he was Ivy, she conjectured, and resolved to catch his eye on his return journey up the aisle.
Considering Mead’s fine-featured face, partly hidden, partly chiseled by a short-trimmed brown beard, a matron thought, now that was a son she wouldn’t mind having. The bus driver noticed him too, as he appraised everyone in the rearview mirror, especially the young women whose breasts jostled with the sway of the road. He regarded his own paunch jammed against the big steering wheel, and he envied Mead his slender, muscular frame, the youth that went with it, and the gaze of the woman on her way to Maine.
Mead, heading back to his seat, noticed the girl’s glance. Eager to sit anywhere other than beside the preacher, he asked if the seat next to her was free. Her rehearsed shrug said sure, and she smiled, so Mead coiled into the seat. As he dropped down to window level, he spotted a grayish lump beside the median strip, and the source of the dream possums came clear. For miles and miles after Peoria, road-killed marsupials lay along the highway like omens, or reproaches. “Yeah, that’s it—roadkill!” he said. The girl next to him frowned, pretty sure she’d made a mistake encouraging his company. Mead saw the look in her eyes and thought he’d better just go back to sleep.
He dropped off, the bus rolled on, and a new dream began to roll, in which an endless graduation march seemed to include every face he’d ever known except his own. The faculty marshals, brightly gowned and carrying ceremonial maces carved from cottonwood sticks, wore grins like the leers of flattened possums.
Mead awoke to the whine of the air brakes as the driver called a lunch stop in Akron. Outside the bus, Mead sucked in air that would have seemed marginal in New Mexico but tasted great now. He stretched, tucked in his shirt (for he suffered the curse of the long torso: his shirttails always came out, always would), and lanked off in search of lunch. The girl from Bowdoin joined him, and they scared up a sandwich and a park bench.
Twenty minutes later they dumped their leavings into the overflowing trash bin as a pigeon lady took their place on the bench and began scattering bread crumbs. They emerged from a pearly curtain of pigeon wings to find the bus driver staring in their direction.
“Where the hell have you two been?” he growled. “Eager to move to Akron, are we?” His jowls swelled and glowed like the cock pigeons’ plumbeous puffs, his envy sitting like stale bread in his gizzard. His eyes crawled over Chloe as she climbed up the steps and resumed her seat. Mead plopped down beside her and glared back. The big bus pulled back onto the interstate, a traveling humidor of smoke, stale air, and overtired bodies.
Chloe definitely beat the Baptist for conversation. But truth to tell, Mead wouldn’t have cared much if she were a Pentecostal bearing down with hammer and tracts, as long
