“Which gives you a good six months to find somebody, before you’re past your sell by date. Ah, here we are, much nicer now.”

  She took an exit off the freeway, drove past some interesting Victorians at the edge of an obviously old town and a few minutes later, they were on a quiet, two lane road that followed for a mile or two along a rocky creek bed showing evidence of heavy and frequent flooding sometime in the past, but that was now no more than a dry swatch of white, like the shed skin of a snake. The road shortly began to lift itself out of his inland valley and to climb, gradually at first and then more sharply, between gentle green slopes where fruited bushes clustered by the roadside.

  “Blackberries,” Libby said when he asked about the bushes.

  “Blackberries? They grow on bushes? I thought they came in those little plastic cartons,” Stanley said. “Are they really the kind you can eat?”

  “Theoretically. But you wouldn’t want to. They spray along here regularly, some kind of herbicide, to keep the growth down. Fire prevention. By late summer, this will all be dead brown.”

  The road turned sharply left, rose more steeply, gentle curves becoming real snake tails, the rush and roar of the freeway now just a memory behind them. Theirs was the only vehicle on the road.

  In what seemed no time at all, they were in the mountains.

  Stanley looked off to his left, where the land dropped sharply away, nothing but a too-flimsy-looking crash barrier between DEADLY WRONG 29

  them and the sheer drop to the valley floor. He was glad that the van’s overworked engine kept them traveling slowly. He wouldn’t want to do this road at high speed.

  Below them, the air pollution spread in a layer, brown and ugly below and dazzling blue above—the way the liqueurs separated in a pousse café. Way down there the road they’d just traveled twisted its way back to the flatlands, while ahead it took them ever higher. On the right, scrub and the occasional field of grass and brush, and more hillsides sloping up to distant gray-purple peaks crowded with stately pines, and nearer still, along the road, clouds of blue lupine and the golden California poppies. And over it all, that sky, bluer and bluer.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “It is. At least, what nature made is. Men have found endless ways to fuck it up, of course. At least they’ve tried. All kinds of rampant development, makes you want to cry, to see how they’ve ravaged the place. But they haven’t yet found a way to erase the natural beauty. You’ll see the lake, Bear Mountain Lake, in a little while. It’s manmade, actually, one thing they did right. Well, there was water there when they first found it, more like a swamp, which they made into a lake back in, umm, I think the twenties. For years, it was the largest manmade lake in the country, but it isn’t any longer. Lake Mead, I guess. Or probably a bunch of them. I guess Bear Mountain Lake’s pretty small, as lakes go.”

  “This is bear country, I take it?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you, with that name? But, not really, not any more, at least, except way back in the woods.

  Mountain lion, too, but you never see them. Not unless one sneaks up on you from behind, and then it’s too late. And rattlers, the big old mean Timbers. You have to be careful hiking in the woods, especially in spring, when they’re out looking for some action.”

  Stanley made a mental note: scratch mountain hiking. He hated snakes and had no desire to get acquainted with mountain lions or bears, or anything more ferocious than a wanton mountain man. He liked his nature better viewing it from a 30 Victor Banis

  deck, with a cold martini in his hand. His idea of roughing it was a morning without a cup of coffee.

  “So, then, how did Bear Mountain become Bear Mountain?

  That name, I mean.”

  “Oh, there were bears, a lot of them, a long time ago, when some ranchers from down below came up here. Nineteenth century. Or eighteenth, maybe. They were in pursuit of a pack of renegade Indians who’d stolen a bunch of their horses. I don’t think they ever did find the Indians, or get their horses back. They camped up here, in the flats. By this time, they were about out of food, but apparently then there were still plenty of bear wandering close by, so they organized a hunting party, and shot a bunch of them. And, once their bellies were full, they started looking around and realized they had found someplace special. Some of them just stayed, and others began to join them. And when man started moving in, the bears started moving out. There are still a few of them around, but they don’t come into town. Almost never, anyway. They had to round one up a couple of weeks ago, wandered in late one night, right down the main drag, like he had some shopping to do.”

  “I’m not sure I like the idea of going shopping and meeting a bear.”

  “You don’t have to worry about them, honestly. They’re very shy creatures.”

  “Hmm. Well, if I should encounter one, I’ll do the polite thing and excuse myself,” Stanley said. “I do hope they’ll remember their manners.”

  “You’d be more likely to run into one of those rattlers, really.”

  “That’s certainly comforting.”

  She laughed. “Stanley, I’m teasing. The only animals you are really likely to encounter are some rambunctious rednecks, but they’re more talk than action, believe me. Bear Mountain is nothing if not dull.”

  “After what I’ve been through, that sounds exactly like what the doctor ordered.”

  DEADLY WRONG 31

  Clouds had begun to form on the distant horizon, big fluffy white cumulus, the kind that in seemingly no time could darken, become thunderheads and turn into a storm.

  “Rain?” Stanley said, pointing with his chin. She followed his direction.

  “Maybe. We get lots of storms in the summer. It’s a pretty good drive down to the desert in that direction, by the road, but really, it’s just a straight drop from the other side of the mountain. So you get that hot desert air rising, meeting the cool mountain air. That’s in the daytime. At night, though, the desert cools off too, so there’s fewer storms then.”

  He found himself staring at the clouds. They seemed to grow perceptibly darker as he looked at them. Something flashed, too quick for him to be sure if he had really seen lightning or not. It gave him a little anticipatory shiver. He was used to San Francisco summers. It almost never rained from March until October, until you began to wish for a shower, even a good sprinkling.

  The prospect of real rain, far from diminishing his pleasure, gave him something to look forward to. Plus, there was lots he would like to have washed out of his life. A good rainstorm could do that for you, if only symbolically.

  There goes the heartache, splash; there’s the lonesome nights staring up at the ceiling over my bed, splash; here’s old Tom Danzel, down the drain, splash, splash, splash.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  They drove for half an hour or more, chatting about mostly inconsequential things, the sort of business old friends catch up on when they haven’t seen one another in years: mutual acquaintances, common memories, a silly escapade or two.

  The mountain road straightened, became a street, a ragtag assortment of houses alongside it, a few trailers, the signs of population gradually multiplying. A glimpse of water on their right, seen through the house and trailers, quickly became a lake, aquamarine near the shore, nearly purple further out. In the distance white rocks, topped with scrubby pines, marched right down into water that was dark, almost black in their shadows. On the water’s surface, the far mountains floated on their own image.

  “Bear Mountain Lake,” Libby said, waving a hand.

  “I’m looking forward to some swimming.”

  “Well, you can, of course.” Said without a lot of enthusiasm.

  Uh oh. “But?”

  “It’s cold. Really cold. We’re in the mountains, remember.

  But there’s always a few hearty ones out there splashing around.

  Polar bears. You know the type, they go swimming in Siberia.”

  “Hmm. No sharks in the water, though? And no piranhas?”

  “It’s funny you should ask that. Somebody caught a piranha a couple of summers back. Probably somebody’s pet, you know what I mean, until they got tired of it and dumped it in the lake.”

  “And people still go in the water?” he asked, disbelieving.

  “They said it wasn’t one of the flesh eating kind.”

  “A vegan piranha? I didn’t know there were such things.”

  She laughed again. “I seriously doubt if there are, but they’d have to say that, wouldn’t they, they wouldn’t want to scare the tourists? Anyway, it was just the one.”

  34 Victor Banis

  “Ah. A bachelor vegan piranha.” He’d just supposed piranhas hung about in troops, like French Legionnaires, waiting to make a meal of the unwary camel. He wrote himself a mental list: no swimming. No mountain hikes. No late night shopping. And almost certainly no handsome gondoliers. An idea occurred to him. “They sell vodka here, right?”

  “Sure. In the supermarkets. This is still California.”

  “Good.” At least one of his favorite pastimes remained open to him.

  The lake hid itself behind some houses, reappeared, hid itself. Something was missing, he thought, and pondered what.

  He remembered a trip a few years earlier to Switzerland, to Lake Lucerne, where he was almost certain they had neither bears nor pumas nor rattlesnakes, and no vegan bachelor piranha legionnaires.

  In his mind’s eye he saw Lake Lucerne, spreading itself silkenly, seeming forever, under the Alpine sun, the little crescents of white and pink…

  “Sailboats,” he said aloud. “There are no sailboats.”

  “Different kind of lake, different kind of people. They use outboards here, or inboards, the ones with a bit more money.

  Or rowboats, the ones with less. We don’t get the sailing set, I’m afraid. It’s not that kind of resort. Not chi-chi enough. Not at all chi-chi, in fact.”

  So far, he thought, Bear Mountain was falling far short of what he had envisioned. Still, it was a pretty setting. He could imagine savoring the view from a deck, a martini, so cold it was gelid, in hand, something Shubert on the stereo.

  And it was a vacation, at least, a change of scenery, and who knew, maybe one or two of those rednecks would be interesting. He rather fancied men with a few rough edges to be polished by the right and knowing hand. Always something to look forward to. Once he got this other business straightened out, about the accident.

  Which was, he reminded himself, why he was here. “So, this business with Carl,” he changed the subject, “He’s out on bail, you said.”

  “Yes. Hannah—you remember my sister?”

  DEADLY WRONG 35

  “Sort of. She was the oldest, yes?”

  Libby nodded. “Three years older than me. Big Sis. You know how it is, always stuck taking care of us little ones. I expect she’d have liked to drown us in the lake a time or two, but so far she’s managed to cope. And just about the time she must have thought she was finally quit of a couple of younger kids, Mom started fading. These days, she needs looking after, and Hannah got stuck with that too.”

  Stanley thought back to their teens. Even though he and Libby had been friendly, he had only rarely visited her home. It occurred to him now that hardly anyone had, as if in some unspoken agreement.

  He wasn’t sure why, though. It had been a pleasant enough middle class home, nothing grand, but far from shabby. He remembered Hannah as, even then, something of a dominant force in the family dynamic. The mother, Penelope (who could forget that name?) he remembered as querulous, and the father—but that memory failed to materialize. Stanley hardly remembered the father. He must have been there on at least one or the other of Stanley’s visits, but if so, he had left no more than the vaguest of impressions.

  “Your mom is convalescent?” He caught up with Libby’s remarks.

  She shrugged. “Some. Not as much as she likes to believe, if you ask me, but she manages to keep Hannah worn to a frazzle most of the time.”

  “How are they with this business of Carl’s?”

  Libby shrugged. “Hannah’s the same as she’s always been.

  As for Mom, well, she’s always spoiled Carl, refuses to believe he’s done anything wrong.” She looked sideways at Stanley.

  “You might as well know. You’ll get all this eventually anyway, but, Carl’s always been a handful. He’s not a bad guy, really, never was. He’s just one of those people, you know, the roses always have too many thorns, the mud pies turn out to have cat poop in them. It’s like he carries this black cloud overhead wherever he goes. Wasn’t there a guy like that in the old funny papers, in Little Abner, I think it was?”

  “Joe something or other.”

  36 Victor Banis

  “Right. Anyway, Hannah’s the one who’s mostly had to deal with that. I’m sorry to say, until recently, I kind of just kept myself out of it. Partly, it’s the lesbian thing. You know what that’s like. You feel like the black sheep of the family, whether they see you that way or not. So you keep your distance. Which saves everybody embarrassment.”

  Stanley nodded. He did know. In his case, it wasn’t his imagination either. Probably it wasn’t in Libby’s case either. It was just another aspect of being gay. You were a part of the family, just not the best part.

  “What about your folks? Didn’t they ever help? With Carl, I mean.”

  “Dad died, must be ten years ago now, not long after we moved here. They said it was some kind of flu, but, I think, really, he just quit, if you know what I mean. He was one of those men, it seemed like life was just more than he could manage. And Mom—well, even before, when we were younger, I don’t know if you remember, but Mom was never the June Cleaver type. She didn’t seem to me like she ever took much notice of Dad. I couldn’t swear if she even noticed when he died.”

  She made an apologetic face. “That sounds awful, doesn’t it?

  I don’t mean she was ever some kind of ogre. She’s got her good points, but, so far as Carl was concerned, a firm hand was never one of them. And I think—this might just be sibling jealousy, I suppose—but we always thought she favored Carl. I thought that, at least. Hannah never said, but she wouldn’t, she’s too long-suffering. The truth is, though, to be honest, Mom spoiled Carl rotten. He’s always been ‘her little boy.’“

  Despite Libby’s effort at neutrality, a note of bitterness had crept into her voice. Stanley said nothing. That kind of sibling jealousy was hardly rare. And at least, whatever resentment Libby might have harbored toward her brother, she was trying now to help him out of a jam, which spoke of familial loyalty, at least, maybe even love. You didn’t go to bat for someone you didn’t care about.

  “Maybe that’s why he never developed any backbone,”

  Libby went on after a thoughtful pause. “He’s… oh, well, you’ll DEADLY WRONG 37

  see for yourself soon enough. He’s at my place. He has a little trailer, Mom got it for him a few months ago when he said he needed his own space, even though I thought he was kind of immature for that kind of independence. It was a condition of the bail thing, though, that he had to stay with one of us. And what I started to explain earlier is, Hannah’s plate is already full, taking care of Mom. So I raised my hand and took him in. It hasn’t been bad. He’s been pretty subdued since—since the accident.”

  She looked across at Stanley. “Should I tell you about that?

  Or would you rather get it from him.”

  “From him, I think. I want to hear it without prejudice.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They drove along the water, more houses here, the occasional business, a bar or two. The houses became a town, the two lane road becoming a street that followed the gentle curve of the lake.

  “We’re up about six thousand feet,” Libby said. “Closer to seven thousand on some of the slopes. There, that’s Sugarloaf.”

  She pointed over his shoulder at a rounded lump of mountain.

  “As in Rio.”

  “I think the original is somewhat more spectacular.”

  “Of course. But that’s the Andes, these are only the San Bernardinos. No competition. What I was going to say, though, about the altitude: the air is a bit thin here. You may find yourself getting short of breath. Especially if you do anything strenuous. At least until your body acclimates. Best to take it easy for a day or so.”

  “I won’t lift anything heavier than a cocktail glass, I promise.”

  Libby turned onto what was apparently the main street of Bear Mountain, lined with shops and restaurants. She pulled up in front of one of the shops. The sign above the door said

  “Bearfront Gallery.”

  “This is my little emporium,” she said. “I’ll sleep here.

  There’s a room over the store. You can stay at my place while you’re here and keep my car to get around in.” She tossed him a set of keys. “The little Toyota there, the white one. Follow me.”

  38 Victor Banis

  She led him back part of the way they had come, turned down a side street, and pulled up at a small, rather bare looking cabin practically on the water’s edge. A stretch of grassless, rocky ground passed for a front yard, the only “landscaping” a handful of daisies planted in the center of a tire that must have once helped a big-rig along the freeway. Firewood was stacked off to one side in a neat pile.

  The cabin itself was a plain rectangle with a redwood deck, absent of any furnishing. From the side, as they drove up, he could see the corner of another deck at the back, and only a few yards from that, the lake lapped onto the rocky beach in gentle undulations. A small boat with a too-large looking outboard motor on the rear bobbed up and down in the water.

  He got out, stretching, breathing deep of the cool mountain air. It tasted thin and chilly. It was hard to think that no more than four hours ago he had been in a taxi on the 280, in a river of traffic, heading for SFO.

  “This your place?” he asked.

  “No, Hannah’s. My cabin’s a couple of streets over. I thought Hannah would want to say hello. Well, really, I knew she’d want to check you out.” She paused. “And you might as well know, she’s aware of the gay business. You, as well as me.”