Appian, Adolphe. Pond at the Edge of the Wood. 1862, The Art Institute of Chicago.
Dry Gulch
by Isabelle Stillman
She fled in the middle of the night, her white minivan racing down the highway. She’d flung the campsite reservation clipboard on the ground, left the wash bucket on the stoop of the outhouse. Her tent still pitched. Probably a Ranger had found the mess and thought what a stupid old woman she was. Probably the Ranger was angry with her. The way she’d left the clipboard.
She spent the next months housekeeping at a motel in California. She used the money to replace her tent and found another Camp Hosting job near Yosemite. She’d missed hosting – showing campers to their sites, doing rounds in the mornings, even cleaning the outhouse; she’d been doing it for years – decades. She’d do it again, just more safely this time, at a busier place. A place where there were people around if something happened.
Now, she stood on the river bank that edged her new campground. She thought of the old campground at the lake in Idaho, her minivan in the night, the angry Ranger. It was hot and dry here, and she wanted to get in the water. Campers did it all the time, stripping down to their underwear, shrieking and giggling, eyes boggled at the cold. Bernie had been here a week and hadn’t gotten in yet. She looked around: there was no one here now.
But anyone could come at any moment – a Ranger, a camper back from the Park, a new group checking in. It was almost June. June was the most popular month, by far. That was what Rickley had said: the most popular month, by far.
A car pulled up behind her. See? Anyone, anytime. She turned. It was a Ranger truck, yellow stripe down the side, green hips reflecting the sun.
It was good that she hadn’t swum.
#
The campground near Yosemite was small – a five-siter on less than an acre of dry land. It was bordered on one side by a gravel road and on the other by the river – the Merced, Rickley told her. To get to the site, you had to turn off the highway, cross the river, turn left onto a gravel road, and drive ten minutes downhill. The temperature went up as you went down. Ticking up to 110 some days. Sometimes 115.
The campsites were just patches of dust, a firepit, picnic table, and bear box each. Spindly bushes separated them like seams, and a hem of shrubs, ripped here and there by footpaths, separated the sites from the river. A sequoia stood in the middle, its knobby roots pushing out of the earth like they were searching the air for water. At the entrance to the site, there was an old bulletin board, a sun-faded map pinned in one corner, curling up at the sides. The rest was stuck with laminated signs:
Lock your bear box!
Leave no trace: dispose of all waste properly.
$30 per night. No exceptions.
Bernie liked the site. It had a nice outhouse, and people made their reservations on a website, which made it easier: in Idaho, you had to write down everyone’s reservations on the clipboard while they stood there and told you about their trip. The host site here was nice, too: on the far side of the road and up a small slope, with a little wood sign that said Host in red lettering. Space for her tent behind the sign, and her van, too.
“It’s a free life and a strong life.” That’s what the man who’d first told her about hosting had said, decades ago, at her father’s birthday. Early November, a party bubbling in their yard. Steam from the mouths of her Aunties and Uncles, children running wildly around their legs, coughing on winter air. “Ain’t easy, but it’s free and it’s strong,” the man said, crushing an empty can of Old Milwaukee in his leather-gloved hand.
Bernie had listened quietly. Her father stood at the edge of their deck holding one of her brothers by the neck of his camo coat, threatening to toss him off.
The children stopped running to shriek. “No, Grandpa Ned! Grandpa, don’t!”
The older ones: “Do it, Ned, do it!”
Bernie just watched.
Months later, when she told her father that she’d gotten a hosting job, he’d laughed, the sound like a screeching brake. “Living in the woods? What’re you, girl, some hunter’s whore?”
Her mother was sitting in the corner of the living room, folding dish towels. “She’s not a girl, Ned,” she said. She didn’t look up.
Free life, strong life, Bernie had thought.
Now, in this new job near Yosemite, she had a website and a nicer outhouse. She had a host site up on a hill. “Queen of the Gulch,” Rickley called her. She didn’t get the river breeze up on the hill, but she did get a good view. She could see anything coming, plus everyone who was already there.
#
The reservation website was down.
That was what the Ranger had come in her truck to say.
“For now, you’ll collect the $30 nightly fee in cash or check from the guests, and one of us will come once a week to collect the receipts and the money.” She gave Bernie a clipboard stuck with reservation forms and carbon copies. She was young. 27, 28. Dark hair in a shiny little bun. “Simple enough?”
Bernie nodded. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Simple enough,” she said; she’d used a clipboard before.
“We like to keep things easy peasy for our guests,” the Ranger said. She smiled.
Bernie knew the Ranger meant they liked to keep things easy peasy for the hosts. Rangers thought hosts were stupid. Bernie nodded, looking past the woman and down at the campsites. A pair of campers unpacked a red cooler, heads bobbing in and out like an oil well. “Easy peasy,” she said.
The Ranger left. Bernie watched the green truck drive off, kicking up dust. She flipped through the reservation forms and then sat on her hill, waiting for someone to come.
#
The first week the website was down, Bernie collected the $30-per-night fee in cash from three groups of campers. When the fourth, a worried mother in a magenta tank top whose son kept kicking up dust with his basketball sneakers, didn’t have cash, she remembered the Ranger had said cash or check, so she said, “Cash or check, simple enough.” The woman wrote a check, holding the slip of paper against the sweating ridges of her palm.
At the end of the week, she sat on the hill and counted the money again: 30 times three for the mom and kid; 30 times two for the group that paid for two nights but said it was too hot and left early; 30 for the man who came Saturday night and left Sunday before dawn, a squeezed-out packet of peanut butter fluttering in his fire pit. The Ranger would be there to collect it soon.
Behind her, Rickley was asleep in the driver’s seat of her van. Mouth open, tongue out. The goon. But she couldn’t tease him too much – she’d gotten this job because of him.
She’d hated the motel. The rooms smelled like piss, and the uniform rubbed her belly raw. Her manager Mindy called her Benny. “Benny, get the towels from 23.” She was 19, she said once, making a point. Bernie was almost 60. Almost 60 and getting towels from 23. The people in 23 had shat on those towels, too. Or wiped up shit with them.
She got fed up. In February, she left work and went to the public library in Fresno. In the parking lot, she removed her Madera Motel shirt and put on her grey tank top. She didn’t want anyone seeing her in that uniform.
Inside, she found a computer and opened the Internet. There was nobody there, except an old woman a few seats down, her face so close to her computer it looked like she was smelling it. CAMP HOST JOB IN CALIFRNIA, Bernie typed and hit search before she could fix the spelling mistake. She looked around to see if anyone had seen when a person appeared suddenly at her side. She flinched, scrambled out of her chair, looked around for help.
The person grabbed her arm. “Hey, hey, ma’am!”
She screamed.
The person let go, backed away. Bernie found that she was holding her chair in front of her like a shield. She put it down. Slowly, her vision came into focus.
It was a man. Skin taut and tanned. Lips scabby at the edges. Small. Smaller than the man in Idaho. She breathed.
“Oohwee,” the man said. “I beg your pardon.” He held up his hands in a gesture of innocence.
Bernie looked around again. The old woman a few seats down was watching: there was someone.
“I was just coming to ask” – he gestured toward her screen – “what’s a nice lil’ lady like you doing looking up hosting?”
She cleared her throat. “Gotta find work.”
“What’s your name?”
“Bernie.”
“I think I remember you.”
“No,” Bernie said, voice dry. “I don’t know you.”
“Must be someone else,” he said after a pause. “I would’ve remembered a face like that.” He paused again. “Lemme help you, huh?”
Bernie sat, pulling her tank top up over her cleavage as he reached across her chest for the mouse. “Here’s a good one,” he said, clicking on a post. “Right on the river.”
SIERRA NATIONAL FOREST HOST NEEDED: DRY GULCH CAMPGROUND, the post read. There was a picture of a picnic bench sitting under a leafless tree. Next to it stood the brown-painted, yellow-lettered sign of every National Forest.
She didn’t want to think of this now, not with this strange man standing over her, but she couldn’t help it: the sign always reminded her of the one in Payette National Forest. Her father, young and sunburned, leaning against it, yelling at Gina to take his photo. Let me get one, no kids, he yelled. The five of them tangled among their mother’s legs, and one bolting suddenly toward their father. “No kids!” Ned yelled. The child stopped mid-stride.
That was the day before it happened.
“What do you think?” the man said, squinting at the screen.
Bernie swallowed. “It’s good.”
“Got you some bears out there! No joke!” He jostled her. “Ah, but you can take ‘em.”
“It’s good,” she said again.
Five months later, the man appeared at her campsite. It was her second day on the job. She had pitched her tent and arranged her bedroll inside. Next to it, her white minivan sat open, boxes of papers and extra blankets under the pilot seats and across the bench in back. Someone had come walking down the road, yelling, “Howdy ho! Queen of the Gulch.”
She’d felt her body tense.
“It’s just Rickley,” the man shouted. “Rickley, from the library.”
Now, he slept in the van’s driver’s seat behind her. He’d been there almost every day since, helping with the firewood and the rounds, napping in the driver’s seat – he said he liked to feel like he was behind the wheel. She didn’t need the help, but he’d been a host for twenty years – Washington, Arizona, everywhere – and once you started, you couldn’t stop. She knew that feeling. Plus, it was good to have someone around. In case something happened.
If he knew she was waiting for the Ranger like this, counting up the money again, he’d tease her. “Good old Bernie. Always tryin’ to do the right thing.”
But she had to worry. In Idaho, she’d relaxed. In Payette National Forest, too. In Yosemite, she would be more careful. She would wait for the Ranger to pull up. She would hand her the right amount of money. The Ranger would be happy with all the money and all the receipts. With how the clipboard was organized.
And there it was now: a cloud of dust. Green hips glaring in the sun.
#
The day after Bernie turned in the first fees to the Ranger, Rickley started telling her about the bears.
It was morning and they were doing the rounds. He stood in the doorway of the outhouse, holding it open with a cocked foot as she crawled across the concrete, picking up scraps of toilet paper.
“They won’t hurt you too bad,” he said. “The lions on the other hand –”
She turned to look at him, her nose brushing the toilet seat.
“I’m teasing! Look at you.”
Bernie stood, hands full of dirty paper. “Don’t do that.”
Rickley laughed and kicked open the door. “Alright, Queen of the Gulch, we got work to do!”
They finished the rounds at noon that day, ending at the firewood – a large stack of bundles tied with frizzy hemp. “Campers love a fire,” Rickley said, “no matter how hot. Fire, fire, fire.” He adjusted the duct-taped sign: $6 each.
When they were done, they sat by the river and put their feet in. Campers had nestled beer bottles in the shallows. Down the bank, a shirtless man stood on a branch that hung out over the water. He waved without smiling. If he weren’t there, Bernie might’ve wanted to go swimming – she might’ve asked Rickley to help her wade in over the rocky parts.
“Oohwee, my dogs are barking!” Rickley flexed his toes in the water. “Bernie, Bernie, Bern,” he said, exhaling. “You’s a good host.” Dark petals of wet bloomed up his cargo shorts.
Bernie smiled. “Ain’t a lot to it.”
“But listen, hey.” Rickley leaned in, his voice suddenly soft. “I didn’t tell you before ‘cause I didn’t wanna scare ya, but – ” He looked around to see if anyone was listening. “One time? Right down here?” He jabbed a thumb behind him. “A bear came through. Tore up everything. I mean tents, shoes, packs, everything. Had to hide in the car for an hour. Windows up, hundred degrees.” He shook his head. “Someone’d left a banana out.”
Bernie felt sweat drip down her stomach.
“Aw, look at you, Bern. I don’t want to worry you!” He smiled. “Look – all’s you gotta do’s make a fire at night. That keeps ‘em away. Bears hate fire. Don’t you worry, alright?” He put an arm around her shoulder.
“Alright,” she said. She pulled her tank top out of the folds of her stomach.
A car pulled up behind them then, and they got out of the water and walked up the hill. Bernie ducked into the tent to get her clipboard, thinking about the bears, and when she came out, the new campers were standing on her hill talking to Rickley. Two twenty-something girls, sunburn-pink noses. They were looking at him slack-jawed.
“The bears around here,” he was saying. “We had one come tearing through not too long ago. Ripping tents, ripping clothes. In our cars for hours. Hundred degrees. But, listen, make a good fire, and they won’t bother you, alright?”
Bernie approached. “Cash or check,” she said to the girls, her voice cracking.
“And get you a couple bundles of wood for the bears.” Rickley walked around to the driver’s side of the van as the girls nodded. “Eight bucks a pop.” He climbed in and closed the door.
Bernie looked at the stack of firewood. The $6 sign was gone.
#
Ned Jones had once taught his children to fight bears.
They’d been camping at Pole Bridge. Not all of them: Wyatt and Ned Jr. were gone by then. Colt and Bernie and Ollie were left.
Ollie, the littlest, had spotted a bear in the tall-grassed field behind their camper.
“Mama,” he’d said, fingers in his mouth. “Mama, is that a bear?” He was seven.
Gina was sitting at the picnic table, slicing hot dogs on a paper plate. “No,” she said, not looking up. She sawed the meat aggressively.
“Yeah, Ollie! That’s a grizzly!” their father had yelled. He was sitting in a camp chair, the red one with the gum in the netting of the cupholder. “Look at it run!” He looked at Colt. “It’s coming this way!”
And the animal was – coming through the grass in their direction.
“Bear, Mama!” Ollie had cried.
“It’s gonna get your mama!” Ned yelled. “Better go get it!”
Colt choked down a laugh. “Go get it!”
Crying, Ollie ran toward the edge of the field. The animal was quick, disappearing and reappearing through the grasses as it leapt.
“Look at him!” Colt laughed. “Look at him!” He squeezed a beer can in his crotch, doubled over in glee.
Ollie disappeared into the field. Bernie went after him, yelling her brother’s name.
“Look, she’s gonna save him! Save the little pussy from a bear!” Ned and Colt were hysterical.
As Bernie reached the edge of the field, a dog launched out of the grass and ran across their campsite, knocking over a stack of pots. It darted through the obstacle course of RV hook-ups. Other campers shrieked and laughed.
“Ollie,” she said.
The cupholder in Ned’s camp chair had flipped with his thrashing, and his beer poured out on the ground. “This bitch thought that it was a bear!”
Colt was on the ground. He coughed on the dust as he laughed. “Little pussy!”
“She thought it was a bear! This bitch thought it was a bear!”
#
Rickley told another pair of campers about the bears again the next day.
Bernie had been using the outhouse when the car pulled up. She’d been thinking on the toilet about how nice it would feel to get in the river.
When she came out of the outhouse, the campers were walking away from Rickley.
“Bear won’t getcha now!” he called after them. “Just light up that fire.”
One of them was carrying a bundle of wood under an arm. As Bernie approached, Rickley looked to make sure the campers weren’t paying attention.
“Website’s still down, ain’t it?” he said, holding up two dollar bills and waggling his eyebrows. “One for you, one for me.”
He tucked them both in his pocket.
#
At the camp host training in May, the Sierra National Forest Rangers made Bernie and the other new hosts learn fun facts about the Yosemite area.
“It’s important to know information to help campers have a good experience.” The Ranger, a woman in creased khaki pants, balanced the short edge of a clipboard against her hip. “You have to have tools,” she said, making eye contact with each of the hosts.
The training was in a basement classroom of El Portal Elementary School, and from the gym above them, a rainstorm of children’s feet beat down. The Rangers gave the hosts time to use the computers around the circumference of the room to look up facts. Bernie found a chair near the back, and when she sat, she noticed the man next to her looked familiar. He wore a black t-shirt with a messy white and red picture across the front. He wore white-rimmed sunglasses that reflected blue and orange. He had a dark beard all the way up his cheeks.
It took Bernie several breaths to realize that he was smaller and his beard was shorter, and he wasn’t yelling at her: that he was not the man from her campsite in Idaho. But she had already begun to sweat, and the stomping of the children felt like it was inside her chest. Her hand was slick against the computer mouse, her sweat smudging the graphite of a child’s initials.
By the time the Rangers called them back for the next lesson, Bernie had only memorized one fun fact. In her fear, all she could remember about the area was Fresno, because of the library, so she looked up the city and read on the right-hand side of the results page, “The Fresno Zoo has sea lions and a stingray touch pool.”
She whispered this fact to herself as the Ranger gave instructions about flipping reservation signs and checking fire rings. The cadence of it calmed her.
The Fresno Zoo has sea lions and a stingray touch pool.
#
Bernie woke in the middle of the night. Someone was hitting her tent.
“Hey! Hey!” Hit.
It was her father.
“Lady!” Hit, hit.
No, not her father, a Ranger.
“Wake up!” Hit, hit.
No, it was the man! The man from Idaho. And there was no one else around.
She screamed.
“The fuck?” The hitting stopped. “Lady, I can’t sleep. It’s a thousand degrees, I can’t – I can’t sleep.”
The image of a person came to her. A young man Rickley had sold a campsite to that day. 35 for the night. Had he found out about the price? That it was supposed to be 30?
“Lady!” He hit. “Where can I go to get some sleep?”
“Fresno!” she screamed.
“What?”
“Fresno!”
“The fuck?”
“Go!”
He left.
That was the middle of the night.
Now it was morning. The sky was grey-orange with sunrise. The camper was gone. She sat on the river bank, thinking about how she had fled from Idaho in the middle of the night, thinking about her minivan. She would have driven away last night, too, if the man had kept hitting. She would’ve had to get out.
It had been eleven days since the website went down, four days since she’d given the Ranger the first week’s money.
Rickley arrived later that morning carrying a cardboard tray of cinnamon rolls. He brought food often, buying it in El Portal with their extra cash. His, not hers – he was keeping hers safe. They ate, and Bernie told him about the man who hit her tent.
“Fuckin’ campers,” Rickley said. He licked icing off his chin.
“Yeah,” Bernie said. She thought about telling him she’d first thought it was a Ranger or someone angry about the money. But instead she said, “I had a crazy guy at my last place.”
“Yeah?” Rickley dangled a piece of roll into his mouth from above.
“Yeah. Yelling in my face, pushing me, screaming. And there wasn’t anybody around.”
“What’d ya do?” He looked at her.
“Ran. Left my tent there. And the clipboard.”
Rickley swallowed. “Aw, Bern.” He wiped his fingers in the dirt. Then he thwacked her shoulder and said, “Wanna get in the water?”
She nodded. They went in, wading until she was knee-deep.
“Good girl,” Rickley said.
Later that day, Rickley sold four bundles of wood to a group of men who arrived while Bernie was taking the trash out. “We had a bear come through here ’bout a week, five days ago?” she heard him say. “Rippin’, tearin’ apart everything. I mean everything – had to sit in our cars for hours.”
When she came up the hill, he took her by the arm. “Next time,” he said, “we gonna get 40 for the night.” He poked her in the chest. She could see his scabby lips up close. “And you gonna do it.”
#
“What about the Rangers?” Bernie asked that night.
It was late, eleven or twelve, the air just beginning to cool. Rickley had made a fire and brought burgers from El Portal, their yellow wrappers shiny with grease. He bought them with his portion of the money, he said; he was keeping hers safe. “We ain’t doing no white-collar nothing,” he said. “Just a few burgers. What’s wrong with a few burgers?”
“The Rangers,” Bernie said. She was exhausted. The heat of the fire and the grease of the burger weighed her down.
“Ah, don’t be a pussy,” Rickley laughed. Little pussy, she thought.
He tossed his wrapper in the fire, grabbed hers and did the same. “Destroy the evidence,” he said. “We don’t want no bears, do we, Bug?” He’d taken to calling her that lately – Bug.
When he spoke again, it was a whisper. She couldn’t tell if she’d fallen asleep. “You remember the bear? Bug?”
A breeze tickled her arm.
“Just last week, hiding out in the minivan, you and me?”
She nodded, eyes closed.
“Yeah. You remember,” he whispered. This bitch remembers, she thought.
When she woke, she was still in the camping chair. Rickley was asleep in the driver’s seat, hands folded across his belly, tongue out, dry and white.
Free life, she thought. Strong life.
She went to sit by the water. The sun was just rising, glinting off the rapids and the rocks. The Ranger was coming tomorrow to take the money. She thought about this as she dangled her feet in the water, letting her eyes flutter closed. She’d hardly slept. On the far bank, she thought she could see a slim figure holding himself by the neck of a camo coat. Her father, she saw as she stepped closer. Dangling himself over the rapids on the river’s far side. Do it, Ned. She walked toward him. Do it. She walked closer.
She was calf-deep in the river when a car honked behind her. She jolted, looked around, and ran toward the bank, forgetting she was on a rocky riverbed. Something sliced into her toe. She shouldn’t have let herself go in. She knew better: anyone could come at any time.
As she struggled onto the bank, Rickley appeared in front of her.
He jerked his head at the car. “Your turn.”
Behind him, the campers were closing their car doors, heads swiveling for the host. Bernie looked down. Her foot was covered in blood.
“You get nervous, say a code word.” Rickley smiled as he pushed her uphill. “I’ll come get ya, okay?”
There were four campers: two kids flying plastic airplanes and two grandparents in visors and long socks. As Bernie retrieved her clipboard, they told her they’d come from Fresno and wanted to stay one night. Rickley watched from the driver’s seat.
“Yep,” Bernie said, flipping to a new page. Her toe bled openly onto the dust. “That’ll be 40 dollars.”
The woman looked at the man. The man said, “We thought – ”
Bernie’s blood had started to run downhill. “Cash or check, simple enough,” she said.
She looked up. They knew. She could tell they knew. Use a code word, Rickley had said.
“Fresno,” she said. “The Fresno Zoo.”
Behind her, Rickley said nothing. She turned to look at him, and he nodded her on.
“The Fresno Zoo has sea lions and a stingray touch pool,” she said, looking at him. But the old man was holding two twenties out to her.
“Yes,” the old man said, wiping a bandana across his forehead. “The kids loved the zoo.”
#
He’d gotten her out to her crotch. Wet shorts, the tickle of the water against her privates.
“That’s good, Bug,” he said looking at where the water hit her. “Good job.”
“What if somebody comes?”
“No one’s coming.” He splashed her. “Quitchyer worrying. And if they do? What are they gonna do?”
She didn’t know. The Ranger had come yesterday. Bernie had given her the right amount of money. She’d left. Not angry. Not anything.
#
When Ned drank, he liked to make Bernie drive. He’d put her in the driver’s seat of his minivan and tell her to speed through a field or down a highway. “Do it, Bernie. Do it.” In Payette National Forest, that’s what had happened. He came in the night, pulled her from her sleeping bag, and threw her into the car. Forced her faster and faster. 90, 110, 120. Her foot against the minivan’s floor, and something shiny up ahead.
A lake. Huge, dark, slick. She tried to brake and he punched her. The front wheels were on the shore when he finally said, “Now stop! Stop!”
He laughed.
When she’d sped away in her own minivan, leaving Idaho in the night, she’d heard his voice: Do it, Bernie. Do it. She’d heard his voice: Let me get one, no kids.
#
“Bug,” Rickley said the day she went up to her crotch in the river. “Get fifty today. Alright?”
She did. All that week she did. It was June – the most popular month, by far. Campers kept coming, dragging coolers and tents and beer. Rickley sat in the driver’s seat of the minivan as they arrived, watched through the open passenger door as they told Bernie their information, paid, and looked at each other saying, “Wasn’t it supposed to be . . . ?” Website’s down. Saying, “Alright.” Cash or check, simple enough. Going to their center consoles to search for more money. You’ll want to get some wood too. We had a bear here, just the other day.
He stopped helping with the rounds. He sat in the driver’s seat counting money while she picked chips of orange peel out of the dust, thin slices of wayward plastic out of the branches. He kept her money for her.
Once she tried to use the code again: “Have you been to the Fresno Zoo?” she asked a camper, looking at Rickley. Fifty-five, he’d said that morning. But there was a car coming up the road – a Ranger, she thought.
“It has – ” she started, but the car came into view then. A red sedan. No hips.
“Why you always talking about the fuckin’ zoo?” he said when the campers, a group of young girls in bikini tops, had gone.
“What are they, whoring you out to advertise their fucking animals?”
What’re you, some hunter’s whore? she thought.
#
Anyone could come at any time. Anyone could see her.
That was why she had come here. More people around, if something happened.
She thought of her tent in Idaho, the wash bucket on the concrete stoop of the outhouse. The Ranger angry with how she left it. But if the Ranger had been there when the man had come, maybe they would have helped her. Maybe they would have understood.
“Sixty,” Rickley said. He leaned over her in her chair. His breath smelled like the pizza he’d brought for breakfast.
A car was coming up the road. It was a truck. Bernie felt her heart pound, but as it came closer, she could see: it was black, not green.
Rickley said, “Do it.” He got in the driver’s seat as campers tumbled out of the truck.
She stood on the hill by her host sign. Two men walked toward her. Tall, sleeveless. She’d been sunburned the day before while standing in the river, and it hurt badly, made it hard to think, hard to sleep. Two nights, sixty per night. Simple enough. She did it all without really knowing. Heard about the bear? Just a couple days ago. But bears hate fire. Suddenly, they were walking away.
As they left, another car came down the road. “Do it again,” Rickley said from the van.
It was a truck. Dust clouds and sun reflecting off.
It came closer. Green. Yellow stripes down the sides.
Hips glaring in the sun.
“Rickley,” Bernie said. She was holding $140 in her hand. She turned to look at him, and held the cash out. “Rickley.” The Ranger was parking.
“Do it,” he said and closed the passenger door. She watched as he locked the car.
Behind her, the Ranger’s footsteps crunched against the gravel. They knew. They had come for her. She had to run.
She knocked on the van window. Rickley had disappeared inside.
She had to run, but the van was locked. She pounded on the window. The keys were – she didn’t know where. The Ranger was walking toward her down the only road.
She turned. It was a woman. Tall and thin, a long blond ponytail down her back. She waved from afar. “I’m just checking the bear boxes.” She walked down toward the sites.
Maybe she would understand.
“Help,” Bernie said, inching toward her.
The Ranger waved with her back turned. “Yep! I got you – no worries.” She kept walking.
“Help,” Bernie yelled as quietly as she could. Rickley was still in the van behind her. If he knew what she was doing, he might drive away.
The Ranger stopped, turned. “Yeah – I got the boxes and then you won’t have to worry about them.” She looked irritated.
Bernie had always known what Rangers thought about hosts.
“Help with – ” Bernie waved her clipboard.
“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t understand you.” She took a step toward Bernie. “Good news – the website is back up. Someone will come by with the list from online tomorrow, and it’ll be all over with the clipboard and stuff. Simple again. Sound good? Alright.”
She turned and continued toward the sites.
Bernie stood still. Sweat dripped over her sunburn, stinging. She felt herself begin to cry. She thought of her father laughing in his camping chair.
When the Ranger was gone, Rickley came out of the van.
He was clapping, laughing.
“You should have seen your face!” He bent over, hysterical. “Look like you seen a bear! Bug thought that Ranger was a bear!”
#
The website was up.
That should help, the Ranger had said.
But Bernie understood the Rangers now. They wouldn’t help her. They had never helped her.
She was sitting on the hill, Rickley in the van, when a car came up the road. It was small and blue. She watched it come closer.
When it parked, she stood and walked toward her host sign. Rickley was watching from behind.
A woman got out of the car, then took a girl out of the backseat. The woman wore glasses and a tight bun, a button-down flapping open over a t-shirt and khaki shorts. She looked important, like a lawyer or a businesswoman. She held the girl’s hand as they walked up.
“We’d like to camp tonight and tomorrow,” the woman said.
“Did you use the website?” Bernie asked.
A noise came from the van. Bernie turned. Rickley had opened the driver’s side door. “$120 for the two nights, ma’am,” he said. He scratched at his lip scabs.
“The website’s back up,” Bernie said. Her throat was dry as gravel.
“Website?” Rickley leaned forward. “What website?”
The woman looked from Bernie to Rickley and back. Her eyes and face worked slowly, as if she were doing a calculation. “We didn’t use the website,” she said.
“$120 for two nights,” Rickley said again, his voice severe.
Bernie shifted. The woman was watching her intently.
“Is it . . . $120?” the woman said.
Rickley grunted and said, “60 for one makes 120 for two.”
The woman was still looking at Bernie. Her eyes went to Rickley and back. Around her daughter’s shoulders, her grip tightened. She reached for her wallet.
Bernie could feel sweat down her neck, her sides, her cleavage. Behind her, she heard the jangle of keys. If she turned to look, she knew she’d see Rickley dangling them at her. She knew she couldn’t run.
“Ma’am,” Bernie said, her throat tight as a fist. “You been to Fresno? The Fresno Zoo?” The keys stopped jangling.
The woman answered slowly, eyes locked on Bernie’s. “Yes.”
“The Fresno Zoo – ” Bernie coughed – “the Fresno Zoo has sea lions and a stingray touch pool.” Her sunburned face stung with tears. She widened her eyes at the woman.
“Yes.” The woman looked at Rickley in the van. “I see. The Fresno Zoo.”
“Yes,” Bernie said. The woman held out a wad of money and Bernie took it. “The Fresno Zoo. Please.”
She heard Rickley sit back in his seat.
“Simple enough,” she said as the woman released the money.
The woman nodded at her as she stepped back toward her car. “We’re going to the zoo, and then, we’ll be back.”
Bernie nodded back. She went to the van and gave Rickley the money. He looked at her with an unreadable expression and watched as she went to sit back on the hill and wait for someone to come.
Isabelle Stillman is a Los Angeles-based writer. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine and Ninth Letter. She is the Prose Editor for december magazine. You can follow her work at isabellestillman.com.
