It was his own death that finally brought Ken Ecchols home.  Ecchols saw the doorknob shake and turned off the TV.  Without the sound of static from the big-screen, the jiggling motion was joined by a persistent metallic probing, and he realized with interest that the lock in his front door was being picked.  Who picked locks any more?

He tugged up quickly on his zipper and hooked his slacks shut beneath his still-buckled belt,.waited.  It was unlikely to be one of his "girlfriends" making an entrance with a stolen key—she would have been in and looking across the coffee table at his sorry self long before.

The door opened and two guys in white overalls with pockets came in, fumbling comically as they felt their way out of the summer sun.  The big one, whose name Ecchols soon learned was Larry, was talking as though he couldn't see him, which evidently he couldn't.

"The first place I look is the bedroom, because that's where they usually kick it.  Hey.  Look at all this stuff.  Might be some good salvage.  Bet he's got a coin collection or something hid around here somewhere." Larry said.

The other man, "Moe," was doing a 3-stooges double-take and a palms down as he registered Ecchols quiet presence in the dark beyond the brash afternoon light.

"I quit collecting coins when I was a teenager," Ecchols said.  "I'm more into folding money now.  Takes less space."

"More flammable, though," he noted in fairness.  Where were his cigarettes? He plugged a filter-tip into his face and huffed to light it up.  Larry started at the lighter spark, finally locating him.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked.

"Ken Ecchols.  Kenny," Ecchols replied reasonably.  "You guys?"

"We're from Emergency Medical.  Supposed to pick you up," Moe said.

"Really.  Is this an emergency?"

Someone had called him in dead.  No doubt Mrs.  Simmons next door.  As though there was some kind of law about watering your lawn or turning your lights on at night.

"Listen, we apologize for what we said," Larry said reluctantly.  "See if you can get your neighbor to get her facts straight next time."

"It's OK," Ecchols said.  "You guys want a drink or something?" He pointed to the half-gallon of Maker's Mark on the table.  "The least I can do for lack of the coin collection, I figure." The paramedics sat down and Ecchols splashed a big measure of the whisky into a couple of crystal bar glasses with a shaky hand.  He told them about how it had been when he was a kid, growing up in eastern California, back when his family owned the whole darn town.  How much fun it had been.  Later, he had had a disagreement with his Pop and come out here to Hayward, running a welding shop for some years.  It turned out to be a rare half-hour or so.

"I could be like your Curly Joe," Ecchols said, laughing at the thought of it, because now, of course, most of his hair was gone.

There was already a Curly, Larry explained, shaking his head.  Another guy that worked for the ambulances.  He was off this week.

And so then it was time for company to leave, the two men backing into the angled light like a movie beginning to run backwards.

For a long time Ecchols stayed still in the gloom of his front room, restored to his normal isolation.  Then he realized that he wished it was true, wished he was dead, wished that Larry was pulled over on some neighborhood street right now with his skinny old body strapped down in the back and using guilt to screw Moe out of a share as he threw a heap of Ecchols' stuff into the trunk of his car.

Abruptly he was taken up with self-disgust, turning the TV back on in a reflex to escape the need for reflection, then turning it off again as he realized it wouldn't help.  Even if there was a good old show on, he knew he had seen it before.  The fact was, evidently, you could learn most of your own moves in a few weeks.  You didn't need to carry on for fifty-eight years.  Like changing, for instance.  With the same old anger he knew so well, Ecchols took the jug of Maker's Mark bourbon and wobbled to the sink.  It wasn't as though plenty of hard liquor hadn't gone down that drain before, though, or plenty that had dribbled impotently through his shriveled pecker since.

Ecchols took the half-step down into the garage and squeezed by the van.  The keys were still in the envelope he had gotten from the lawyer, the envelope pushed under the lid of a handmade cedar box he had concealed in cardboard beneath his workbench.  He took a deliberate breath and unfolded the interleaved flaps, exposing the rich rough wooden surface.

On the top of the box was a carved inscription, "The Storm Tribe." Ecchols groaned with embarassment.  Inside, the keys, a black and white photo, a feather, a roll of hundred dollar bills held loosely by a petrified rubber band.  He looked carefully into the photo.  A picture of Nora and Jack Ecchols standing smiling by their car.  He counted out ten of the hundred dollar bills, then shrugged, re-latched the container, and threw the whole thing into the passenger seat.  Having money would be important when the prodigy returned home.

The tires of his new mountain bike had gone soft, even though he had never even ridden it, but Ecchols had bought one of those foot pumps to take care of that in advance.  He tossed it in too and hung the bike on the back of the van.

Since they had taken away his drivers' license Ecchols was careful about driving around.  You didn't want any mothers getting mad at you.  His sense of humor was coming back.  He knew he would be OK as soon as he got moving and got sober.  Be about a three and a half hour trip back to Ecchols Station.  He had better get gas.

"Deal me out a couple packs of Kools, would you please, Dan," Ecchols asked the kid behind the glass at the Self-Serve.  It took him back to the first job the old man had gotten him at the sawmill, sweeping and shoveling.  Supposed to teach him ambition or something like that.  Ecchols wondered if this kid knew about ambition.

"Go ahead and keep that change," he said.  He collected his smokes out of the drawer, cramming both packs into his front shirt pocket.  So maybe he had learned a few things in his time, even if they didn't seem to be all that useful any more.  Ecchols shut the door of the van and sat there for a few seconds.  Did he really want to do this?

Ecchols Station is on the other side of the Sierra, just past the high point along the route the Donner party didn't take way back when folks were dragging wagons through the mountains instead of gassing up their Dodge vans.  Depending on your mode of transportation it could take anywhere from three and a half hours to two months to twenty-five years to cover the distance from the Bay Area.  Ecchols sat stiff behind the steering wheel, blinking back memories that were already so dim they hardly had any pictures or words any more.

There was a beeping horn behind him and Ecchols swiveled, raising his hand in acknowledgement to the waiting driver.  Two hours later he was in Fresno, getting lost as he searched for the start of a secondary road that had been buried by an expanding city.  An hour after that and the transmission shifted back into high as he came over the summit of Carson pass.

Ecchols bumped the van over railroad tracks and down a graveled incline, steering by touch as the road changed color and disappeared in the dark redwood trees that still lined Highway 28.

The trees will always be here, he thought, remembering Pop's words.  The rare eastside stand of timber was the reason Pop had settled down here, started the town that carried his name.

And it was the wood from the trees, the beams and boards from his sawmill, that Jack Ecchols had used to build a home for his family.  Now, the house sat buried in a muffling blanket of earthy orange debris, dusty and deserted.  Ecchols looked at it, nodding with dull satisfaction.  There was still nothing for him here.

"Hey, Pop," he said.  He worked open the door with the ancient key and went inside, suddenly feeling sure that he was about to come face to face with the old man.  Just like the two paramedics who had pushed into his front room in Hayward a few hours before.  But they had arrived too early while he had arrived four years too late.

Ecchols found the strangely shaped switch Pop had mounted near the entrance to the kitchen.  The filament of an unfrosted bulb burned into mute life, held captive by inert gasses, charged by a monthly service bill paid with blind diligence through time.  The place looked cleaner, somehow, than he had imagined it would.  Ecchols looked down dumbly at the little table that sat beside a reclining chair cranked permanently into the shape of an old man's body.  There was a half-empty pack of Winstons there.  Pop's last pack.

"I Need A Drink," Ecchols told himself.  It was never less a lie.

He went back out and took the mountain bike off the van, setting it down on its fat tires.  He could pump them up later.  He swung a leg over, grunting as he put weight down on the pedals and made the bike move.

He hadn't needed to see the bar to know it was there, but it had been right there anyway as he turned off Highway 28.  Now, as he came back downhill he could see the lights of passing traffic blipping behind a columned fence of tall trees.  It had been called the Golden State Bar back then and it still was.  There were only two vehicles outside—a pickup with its lights on—a white VW Passat with a banged in hatchback pulled up at the back.  Ecchols locked the mountain bike to a gas pipe and went inside.

"Someone left his lights on," he reported.  At the end of the bar a plump American Indian woman in tight jeans and a cranberry colored sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off turned his way, then did a double-take, knocking over a Budweiser bottle.

"It's you," she stated, without attempting to recover the spill.  The lady behind the bar deftly stopped the bottle's rolling arc and plucked it upright with two fingers.

"Jesus Christ, Maria!" The bartendress was a tall and well-made blonde in her mid-forties, with a long nose that poked between slightly crossed brown eyes.  She would be a lot more attractive, Ecchols decided, without the broken neck.  She had on one of those foam braces people get who have been in car accidents.

"Can I get you something?"

Ecchols scanned the mirror-backed shelf twice, tasting his drink already.  "A double of Maker's Mark, on the rocks, please."

"Don't have it.  If you want yuppie liquor you'll have to drive into Fresno.  Jack Daniels?"

Ecchols winced.  "Sure.  What the heck." He held back from making any conversation until the woman had placed the drink in front of him.  The cheaper whisky had a nasty metallic tang to it.  He inched around on the barstool, feeling for a grip with his feet, surveying the bar.  There was a big dancefloor you crossed after you came in, a couple of catsup-stained tables, a jukebox, a pooltable.  

"Nice place," Ecchols lied, to break the ice.  It hadn't changed much.  The woman on the stool beside him snorted something unintelligible.

The bartendress exchanged a grimy bar rag for a lipstick-stained cigarette from an ashtray balanced on the bumper, folding her arms and looking along her beaked nose at him.

"My name's Ken," Ecchols offered.  "Kenny." He didn't see any reason to mention his last name at this point.  "Have you been working here long?"

The woman sighed smoke.  "That's seven-fifty."

"I might have another," Ecchols said.  He fished out Pop's pack and lit up one of the ancient Winstons.

"Then it will be seven-fifty then, too.  It's pay-as-you-go here at the Golden State, Kenny."

"I'll have another, too," the indian woman said, turning an open armpit toward him as she prodded in her pants pocket.  "Another Budweiser.  Here's your fuckin' money, Carole.  Get one for this dude, too."

"That's OK," Ecchols said.  "I can get my own." He inched the stool away from the drunk, extracting his wallet deliberately.  He set one of the hundreds down.  "Working here for long?" he asked again.

"Seems like it.  Over five years.  Since I bought the place in ninety-four.  I'm Carole Allen.  That's seven-fifty."

"She's like a fuckin' fixture."

"Keep that change against my tab," Ecchols said.  "You must have known the guy who used to own the bar, then."

"Oh, yeah…" Carole Allen said.  She looked distant.

"We both knew him," the woman who had been called Maria said.  Ecchols ignored her.

"What happened to your neck? Car wreck?" he asked Carole Allen.

She tried to nod, a ludicrous effort with a head immobilized by a foam ring and brought two bottles of beer to the top of the bar.  "And the yuppie scum's going to pay for trying to change his CD while coming up over Conner pass.  A million dollars.  That's what I'm suing for." She smirked smugly.

"Far as Jack Ecchols goes, we both knew him," the other woman repeated with casual hostility.  "But I knew him best."

Ecchols pulled the stale Winston from his mouth with a shaky hand.  "I'm Ken Ecchols," he said.  "Jack Ecchols was my Pop."

"I know.  I know who you are.  You look a lot like him now, too, Kenny.  Skinny old white guy.  It's okay.  You can still have the beer.  No hard feelings, I guess."

Ecchols looked at her in amazement.

"Am I supposed to recognize you?" She was a typical bar squaw, still high in the cheekbones but a little loose from the ears down to her rounded shoulders.  Dark brown eyes flicked at him from alcohol-hardened creases.

"Maria Murillo?" he asked uncertainly.  He watched as the woman slid a smug look behind her bottle of Bud.

"We only fucked a few times," Maria acknowledged.  "We was both doing a lot of screwing in those days."

Carole Allen's cynical smile swiveled between them and Ecchols flushed.  "Can I have another JD, please?" he asked the blonde bartendress, making the best of it.  "Actually Maria and I grew up together," he explained to her.  "How the heck are you, Maria? What have you been up to all these years?"

"Working for your dad in the sawmill, what else?" she said.  "I lived in Reno for a few years a while back.  Let me have one of them cigarettes."

Ecchols drew back.  "These are old," he said.  "Wouldn't want to give you one.  Carole, could you stake Maria to a smoke?"

The bartendress shrugged unwillingly.  "Sure." She pulled a couple of ultralongs from a green pack and tossed one to the bar, flicking a butane lighter to start the other.  She dished a short glass into a sink of ice and turned two quick measures of orange whiskey over it.  "Seven-fifty" she announced to no one in particular, making change.

Ecchols took the drink and sucked some of the liquor off the ice.  "I knew another guy at work that got his neck whiplashed.  It can really mess you up."

Carole Allen put a hand behind her head, swiveling her shoulders slowly.  She had big pointed boobs underneath a cream colored sweater.  "Yeah," she said.  "So you're Jack's kid."

"This lady was almost your step-mom," Maria told Ecchols happily, "You know that?"

Ecchols smiled a twisted smile.  It wasn't exactly the role he wanted to think of Carole Allen in.  She was a few years younger than either he or Maria.  Which meant she had been at least twenty years younger than Pop.  But, big surprise.  Lady bartender in a two-horse town.

"Drop it, Maria," Carol Allen said warningly.

"Your old man never would have let her pull this whiplash crap neither.  She wasn't even in the car.  Just parked her rig too close to the road," Maria told Ecchols, rear-ending one subject with the other.  "You know that, don't you, Carole?.  You'll never get a dime."

"Doesn't really matter what Jack Ecchols would have done, does it?" Carole Allen remarked with some bitterness.  "You're the kid that didn't come back when he died, aren't you? That lawyer in Fresno said you never returned the letters or phone calls."

"I talked to him a few times," Ecchols said.  "He pays some bills for me and stuff.  This the same guy that's suing the yuppie for you?"

"That's right." Carole Allen's chest swelled again.  "Yes, Jack and I were an item for quite some time.  We just never had gotten around to setting a date."

"You won't mind if he calls you, ‘mama', then, will you?" Maria said.  "Hey, I knew Jack for a lot of years too.  We made a lot of dates.  Probably should have given me his stinkin sawmill for all the horse manure I took from that guy."

"I don't really care what the heck Jack Ecchols did," Ecchols said angrily, blushing.  "Or who he did.  We got the point, Maria.  You don't have to beat it into the ground.  Pour me another whiskey.  A couple more Buds for Maria and a coke or something for you, Carole.  Let's all have a drink to Pop, girls." He pushed the short glass of unmelted cubes to the inside of the bar, watching close as Carole Allen poured.

For a second Maria seemed to soften.  "He wasn't such a bad guy, you know, Kenny.  I talked to him quite a bit.  I used to go by and see if he needed anything.  It's a shame that the two of you split like that."

"Yeah.  Well.  I guess he felt like I did something he couldn't forgive."

"That's right.  And he never did.  You were both stubborner than shit.  But that wasn't all of it.  Remember the days when we all would go out and ‘walk the land'?"

Ecchols did.  "That's right.  The Storm Tribe."

Maria nodded, suddenly uneasy.  Carole Allen perked up visibly.

"I never forget when you and me and the old man were out at Weasel Falls and we saw the weasel," Ecchols said.  "That's why we called it that, isn't it? And you were saying how the weasel was the spirit of your mother's brother, Spencer.  Remember? Pop really got off on that."

"We all have our own little scams going," Carole Allen remarked.  "Let's have a drink to old Jack, then, and one for the Storm Tribe, too, eh, Maria? How's that going? You had your hearing yet?"

Ecchols could almost hear the creak as his muscles tightened again.  "What did you say?"

"Same lawyer as mine.  Maria's got him down in Sacramento.  Getting recognition with the State of California for her "Storm Tribe".  Then we're going to turn this place into indian gaming.  A casino.  Right, Maria?"

Ecchols felt like he had stepped off the edge of forever.  "Storm Tribe's a joke, man," he spit out.  "Something we made up when we were kids."

"Not when we get done with it," Maria said.  "My people have always lived here in the eastern Sierra," she intoned gravely, her voice a parody of the flat broken cadence of reservation english, "Here we have hunted and trapped for generations, the souls of our ancestors bound always by these mountainsides, heard in the voices of the tumbling rivers, living forever in the vast stands of timber."

"You are a whore," Ecchols rasped.

"Now we are few," Maria said, her dark eyes widening past him, then falling downward, "Our lands taken away, our rights violated, our folkways forgotten.  Yet our spirit still fills this place.  And it is for our children's sake, our children who so much deserve this chance to regain the pride and traditions of the Storm Tribe…"

"How many kids you have again, Maria?" Carole Allen asked with forced brightness.  "That's a good touch.  I like that."

"Four," Maria said.  She looked at Ecchols challengingly.  "That I know of.  Don't worry.  None of them's yours.  The girls are good looking and the boys have balls."

So there it was.  "We made that stuff up," Ecchols told Carole Allen.  "As I'm sure Maria remembers.  She's no more than a half-indian anyway.  Maybe she gets a check from somebody, I don't know.  Yeah.  I remember those days.  We had a lot of fun, hiking around these hills and camping out and stuff.  But that's all the "Storm Tribe" was.  Lying out naked on the rocks.  Sending those smoke signals.  Remember that, Maria?"

"Yeah.  I remember it."

"A couple lousy families of log-skidders who wouldn't have had a job or sent their scrawny kids to school if it hadn't been for Pop and his sawmill," Ecchols said with sudden booziness.

"Your poppa should never have let you sell that land," Maria told Ecchols pointedly.  "He told me that himself a hundred times before he died."

"Nothing he could do about it," he shrugged.  "The Wilson tract came straight down from Mom to me.  Plus Pop was wrong.  Same as all of the rest of you.  The town would have dried up in five years if it wasn't for Central Pine."

"What are you two talking about?" Carole Allen asked, and they turned and pierced her into a triangle of looks.  How could she not know?

"Kenny here was the one sold the town out to Central Pine and Plywood," Maria explained.  "Why all you see is stumps and roads on the south slope.  Hey, Ken, what the fuck.  Who should be calling who a whore? You come back here to do a little sight-seeing?"

"I came back to remember my Pop and I came here to have a drink or two," Ecchols said, tapping his empty glass.  "That's what I came for.  I didn't plan to look you up or care to get into this discussion if I did run into you.  I knew there would be some tree-hugger or other.  So just drink the beer to Jack Ecchols and leave me alone."

"I'll drink it.  Somewhere else if it's okay with you." Maria picked up the two bottles of Bud from the bar and bumped her way backwards through the swinging door.

The sudden quiet was a relief.  "Who needs that kind of aggravation," Ecchols said.

"I think what bugs me the most is that she would take to using the Storm tribe to make money off of," Ecchols told Carole Allen a while later, shaking his head sadly.  "We used to call her ‘Cloud'.  It was supposedly her indian name."

""I told her it wouldn't work," the woman replied.  "It's just plain dishonest." She bent over and rummaged in a floor-level shelf, extracting another fifth of Jack Daniels.  Ecchols leaned across to watch, his elbows on the bar.  

"I'm always getting in these conversations with people who don't do me any good," he said.  "Pop was like that too."

"You grow up, you get older and these things aren't as simple as they were when you were a kid," he said.  "I never sold any land anyway.  Just logging rights.  Kept Maria in a job all these years.  She doesn't know Jack about it.  Or Jack about Jack Ecchols." He pushed his glass toward Carole Allen with the back of a heavy hand.

"Oh, I know it," Carole Allen said again.  "Good old Jack." She transferred the metal bar spout to the new bottle and tipped the thin stream over the rim of his glass.

"Gosh," she said, raising her hands to touch her neck brace gingerly.  "My neck's so sore.  I don't know whether these things do any good or not."

"You aren't an insurance investigator or a cop or anything like that are you?" She undid the clips that held the foam circle closed.  The sight of her bared throat was somehow as indecently intimate as her big titties squeezed up from an underwire bra.  Ecchols stared at her admiringly.

"How much money did you say you got for your mother's land?"

Ecchols made a small smile.  "Three point seven mil," he said.  Carole Allen's wide eyes were dark brown, a deepness behind her swept blonde hair.  "Plus a fire station for the town."

"So.  You and Pop," he added.  "He always did have a certain taste in women." Behind the bar, Carole Allen simpered and leaned toward him confidentially.

"Did you and Maria really, mess around?"

"I don't know.  I don't remember.  I was too drunk in those days." Ecchols blushed behind his drink as a dark tincture of shame stained his memory.  Something almost insane about doing it with this girl he had grown up with, suddenly seeing the transformed tomboy in a horny way and then pushing her sexy mouth down to take the tip of his sticky hard-on.  It was like she said.  They had both been doing a lot of screwing in those early days, so what difference did it make.  "It was weird…"

It wouldn't be any weirder than making it with your old man's girlfriend.  "What the heck," he summed it up.  "Too much guilt.  Too many strings attached.  She never had the looks like you do, Carole.  Couldn't understand what a man needs the way you do.  If I did happen to be an insurance investigator, I bet you wouldn't have any trouble with me.  I bet you there's nothing wrong with your pretty neck at all."

Ecchols tried to push the mountain bike into the back of the VW, but the hatch wouldn't open right.  He staggered and almost fell down as he pulled the aluminum frame back out and leaned the bike against the car.  He went around to talk to Carole Allen.  "You know where it is, right?" he said.  She was standing at the driver's side door, crossed by banded moonlight, the shadows of the sky high trees, now that the neon bar signs were gone, the Golden State bar locked and quiet.

He moved Carole Allen back against the car, his tongue stuck hard through her open lips.  She rolled up to meet his rough embrace, her body warm with fragile femininity beneath him.  "I'll meet you there," she whispered enticingly, "Kenny."

Whereas, if she had been Maria, she probably would have spit in his eye.  Ecchols pulled back on the handlebars, pedaling standing up until the tailights of the VW turned the corner and went uphill.  He let the seat come up underneath him, his legs already aching.

How could Maria have said that she knew Pop best? Ecchols sucked his breath in painfully as he labored the mountain bike back toward the cabin.  Carole Allen was a lot more his style.  Someone whose motives he could understand, ambitious, a woman he could make a deal with.  Like mom had been, for that matter.  Ecchols felt a rush of familiar jealousy he hadn't experienced for three decades.  The old man and Cloud had always shared an understanding that seemed beyond him.

This was the old part of the town of Ecchols Station, an ascending grid of dirt streets that narrowed together near the county road that ran across to the Wilson tract.  Ahead, Ecchols saw the VW's taillights flare and bounce as Carole Allen's foot touched the brake and she turned off toward the Ecchols homestead.  A few hundred yards further straight on another vehicle angled to the top of the ridge and over.

Carole Allen was waiting by the van as he finally came up, puffing and laughing with relief as he laid the soft-tired bike down.  "I should have left it there, let you drive me," he panted, which he'd been saying since the first fifty feet.  Carole Allen was pointing to the front of the van.  

"Look what that little bitch did." Two massive spiderweb cracks decorated the windshield.  Two empty Budweiser bottles lay repulsed on the redwood carpet.

Ecchols put his hands on his knees while he tried to get his breath back.  "I didn't know she cared until now," he wheezed sarcastically.  "Nothing money won't fix."

"She used to clean the place on Tuesdays and Thursdays," Carole Allen said as they came through the door.  "I think Jack used to slip her a hundred a week.  Looks like she didn't bother to come that last time…" The two of them came to a halt, each contemplating the empty reclining chair.

"I wanted to come back and talk to him about it," Ecchols ground out.  "I know it just burned him that I made the Central Pine deal and he didn't.  That I never asked for his advice.  That was a mistake, I know."

"He never said anything bad about you, Kenny," Carole Allen said tearfully.  "He loved you, I'm sure he did.  He always said he was going to take care of me too.  But then he just died."

Ecchols let his hands smooth upward from hips to ribs, taking the hem of Carol Allen's cream-colored sweater above the rippled waistband of her pants.  "Sometimes with Pop you were better off when he didn't try," he said.

"I know," Carole Allen agreed wistfully.  "It's just that he was such a special man." She turned inside Ecchols' enclosing arms, her firm bust sweeping against him, and kissed him while her fingers worked the buttons of his shirt.

"You're special too," she promised, and she tugged him backwards in the night to an unmade bed in an unmade bedroom that seemed silently to have waited for her return.  Beneath him, Carole Allen's naked brown eyes glistened softly as she accepted him, went round with pretense at the size of him, fluttered and crinkled in his honor, closed in fulfillment as she rocked him slowly to her.

Later Ecchols got up and went to turn off the light.  "Each in our own way, then, Jack," Ecchols told his departed father, looking down with measured tenderness at the sleeping blonde.  But if the words had any sound or meaning for Carole Allen, lying below him with a corner of sheet twisted between her now small, nippled cones, there was no sign.  Without waking her Ecchols pulled his clothes from the heap on the floor and retreated to the front room.

Six.  Seven.  Eight.  Ecchols let the rest of the hundred-dollar bills fluff into a pile on the table by his father's chair.  Plus the sixty change from the bar.  He didn't think he could write a note that would mean as much to Carole.  He pulled the pint from the pocket of his pants, undid the top and turned the screwtop opening past his twisted lips.  A salute to them both.

The mountain bike lay on its side where he had set it down.  Ecchols jerked it upright, straddled it experimentally, checking as the hard corner of the bottle dug painfully against his rump.  To heck with it.  Ecchols let the bike fall in a clattering heap and hoisted himself into the van, pumping gas to the engine as he rammed his way blindly back down the drive.

In the depths of the tall trees the shattered windshield was nearly unseen, a shadowy mesh cast across his vision.  But after Ecchols guided the vehicle up the road and crested the ridge it exploded in refracted moonlight as the treeline ended.  Below him, on the northern drainage, the Wilson tract stretched away.  Ecchols leaned out the side window to navigate and bumped the van a few dozen yards downhill to the overlook.  Maria's pickup sat there, empty.

He let the door fall crookedly open and breathed in sadly.  He felt around with the toe of his boot until he found his way and then walked off more quickly as his vision adjusted, clenching the keys nervously.  Just drive away again? Ecchols raised his head, thinking hard.  There wasn't any point in trying to talk to Maria while she was angry.

The bluff looked out at scattered lights.  To the left, as if arrayed in balance against organic disorder, a dull grid of street-lighting showed the spread of Ecchols Station.

Ecchols found the flat bottle again and uncurled its cap.  He took in more than he wanted, clamping closed the front of his face with hate.  Then whenever this pain of rediscovered memory was finally cut by alcohol she would appear, to draw the groove deeper--or else she would never come.  

It was like a disease that finally bore you down after riding your shoulders for years.  The illusion of strength lasts even as the resources are being depleted, like a skin tube made stiff by the fluid that bleeds out from its core.  Asinine.  She had never really cared.

Shaking his head, his heart slugging his chest from the inside, Ecchols trudged slantwise up from the road to where a crown of rocks stood in clumpy resistance to erosion.

"Maria?" he called out.  "Cloud?" She was standing with her fists on her hips, looking down with evident disapproval on the rivulet they had once called Weasel Falls.

"I knew you'd show up here, Ecchols," she said.  "Sorry about your van."

"It's OK.  I let the air out of your tires.  Want another drink?"

"Nah.  I'll take one of them cigarettes though." Ecchols tipped the pint to himself first, then shook a Winston out for her, striking a light beneath her lidded eyes.

"Pop's last pack," he explained.  "A little stale."

"Yeah.  I don't smoke.  But I recognized them."

"You come back to beg your dead daddy's spirit for forgiveness, didn't you? He won't give it to you, I guarantee you that, Ecchols."

The whiskey was finally beginning to work, and Ecchols was enchanted by the change in Maria by moonlight.  Made luminous, surrounded by sierra night, she leaned against the land, the Winston scissored poisonously between her fingers, its breath infusing her with bitter memory.  "How about you?" he asked.

"I'm not dead yet." Maria said, as if discovering a fact.  "But I do still hate you quite a bit.  I suppose you're here for that knobjob I never finished giving you."

Ecchols gave a high hee of surprised laughter.  "That's right.  I believe you do owe me one of those." The things people would remember on you.  "It's all right, though.  I got another gal to do it for me."

Now she was as scowlingly beautiful as she had ever been.  In her angry features Ecchols could see the weather building again.  She hates me?

"I'm sorry, Cloud," he said.  "Just teasing.  Did a lot of stupid things when we were that age."

"You could have said..." she bore in, "You could have told us why you left."

"Well, I didn't," Ecchols said, trying to make another joke.  "Here I am."

"Bullshit.  After twenty-five years.  Pretending you didn't know your daddy would die? Did you think I would wait? What a flipping waste." Maria was crying with exasperation, now.

"See, that's the thing," he tried to explain to her, "You didn't have any more claim on me or the land than the old man did.  You want me to say that it was all a mistake my moving to Frisco? The most I remember, it wasn't.  Not until I put the shop up for sale and ran out of things to do, anyhow."

"What did you do there? I don't think I ever knew."

Ecchols shrugged.  "Ran a welding shop.  Custom fittings, specialty work.  That sort of thing.  It was okay.  Had about eight or ten guys.  Some of them were pretty good."

"So why'd you sell?"

Ecchols sighed, letting the truth come out.  "Woman.  A god-damned woman." It was ironic to be admitting this to another one of them, but maybe that was the way it always worked.  He looked Maria over with a sly eye.  "Not the one with the knobjob.  Another lady.  Maybe I just had to come back."

With the sudden clarity that alcohol provides, Ecchols wondered what he looked like to Maria.  Not as though he could see himself through her eyes but like a man who came as close as anything to realizing that someone else could see him for what he was.  "I had to come back," he said.

She offered a place for him in the curve between her shoulder and her neck and Ecchols staggered into it, looking chin out across the bare hills on the other side.  The puffy fabric of her sleeveless sweatshirt pushed loosely inward and Ecchols cupped her naked sides.

"It was all crap, that stuff about the Storm Tribe," Maria said in a whisper from within the thicket of his arms.  "Carole's idea.  She's got a scam for every occasion."

"I guess I knew that.  You really pissed me off, though."

"Well how do you think I felt? You're the guy who did all this." Maria raised her arms to embrace the hillsides below.  Ecchols' searching fingers found her nubbled nipples.

"I never sold anything except a few trees and some time," Ecchols said defensively.  "Those leases are coming up again next year."

"Doubt they'll be worth as much this time around.  Most of the older growth is gone.  Get your fucking hands off my tits, Kenny."

"Shit," he said, without moving.  "I might as well go back and ball the bartender again."

"Where'd you dump Carole at, anyway? Don't answer that.  It'll just make me madder.  She's okay.  For sure she doesn't deserve to get hooked up with you."

"Like you're such a prize.  Old Jack Ecchols must really have thought he was lucky to have gotten to sleep with you."

"Yeah, we slept together a few times.  Usually on the couch, right after the ten o'clock news, when we both had too many beers.  We were friends, Kenny.  I guess you just never understood that."

"Isn't there anything you like about me, Cloud?" Ecchols pleaded.  He realized he was serious.  "I must have done something right, once."

"Sure," she said.  "Sure you did.  I remember that time when we were kids and you made me that cedar jewelry box.  You remember that thing? I loved that.  You were kind of a sweet kid, you know that? I don't know why you had to grow up."

He had taken a seasoned log from the back of the yard and sectioned it carefully with a bandsaw until he held a solid block of fragrant cedar, the wood pinkish, fine-grained, and clear.  Then, as though beginning to craft a chinese puzzle, he had sawn three times again, defining the long sides and top into delicate, deliciously perceptible curves.

At twelve he was the scarred veteran of numerous shop projects dedicated and brought home to his unappreciative mother—this one had been for Maria from the start.

Ecchols pulled his hands to himself again with dignity.  "You gave that box back," he said.

"I asked you to keep it for me." Maria said.  "How stupid are you?"

"Yeah, well.  It's in the van." Now he was beginning to make sense to himself at last, even as he tried the lie on again.  "I told you before—I had to come."

He wished the trees would have re-grown faster.  It seemed as though twenty five years should have been enough to raise a new stand of timber, but the empty landscape was stubbled with brushy long-needled growth no more than his own height.  There was a half moon rising behind the bounding Sierra, so bright that Ecchols could pretty much see everything on it and the two of them underneath it, the lit up side and the green cheese side both.