Read Online The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin - Free Book Online
Authors: Alix Ohlin
Tags: Fiction
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Wylie asked to keep it, but my dad said no, so he pouted all the way home. But Iâd seen what Wylie didnât: that the rabbit just lay there, stiff, on the ground.
The shade had widened over the landing. In front of me, the stray dog snapped up a piece of garbage in somebodyâs yard, seemed dubious about it, then moved on. I watched it leave, shaking my head at myself. It had been over ten years since Iâd gone on a hike of any kind. But if your brother held wilderness all-important in an overly civilized world, why on earth wait for him at an apartment building? Why would you, unless you didnât really want to find him in the first place? I decided I was an idiot and got back into the car.
I could remember only that one trail, which started in the western foothills by a water reservoir, a round white container that always looked to me like an oversized aspirin the mountain was trying, year after year, to swallow. At the trailhead, two mountain bikers in fluorescent gear were squirting energy food from tubes into their mouths. It was a weekday afternoon, and aside from a single jogger far ahead up the trail, there was no one else around: just the sky and the sun and the arid ground, with dry husks of burnt-out cactus making the skeleton shapes of bushes.
I started walking. Where the dusty foothills pulled steeply upwards into a bit more greenery, I saw the jogger disappear around a bend. Now there was really no one around. Gradually the trail took on a malevolent air. The dead cacti rustled and whispered; invisible animals scurried underneath. Fifteen minutes later I was exhausted. I could walk for hours on city blocks in high-heeled boots, but a quick stroll at Albuquerque elevation was killing me.
On a rock barely shaded by a juniper tree, I sat down and wiped my forehead with my T-shirt. âI hate being hot,â I said out loud. I hated being thirsty, too. I vaguely recalled there was some kind of stream on this trail, although maybe you werenât supposed to drink from it because of the bacteria. Or was that somewhere else? I was ignorant; my feet hurt. I thought about Wylie spending weeks at a time in the mountains, philosophizing or thinking or whatever it was that he did out here, and felt a profound wash of affection, even gratitude, for the attributes of civilized life, for apartments and stoplights and magazines and the steam that issued from manholes on the streets of New York.
But none of that was within my reach just now, so I stood up again. Somewhere up ahead was the cave where Wylie and I used to pretend, over lunch, that we were prehistoric man, if prehistoric man had had access to peanut-butter sandwiches and Nilla wafers. My father often began those hikes with a distant, preoccupied air, speaking about current events and the weather as if we were strangers heâd just happened to fall in step with; but gradually heâd relax into his more fatherly self, telling stories and jokes, every once in a while ruffling Wylieâs hair. I always thought that it took him a while to get used to his family again, not because he didnât like us but because during the week, when he was at work, he just didnât think about us that much. We werenât the central focus of his life, and he was capable of forgetting us. When he died I thought: if heâd cared a little more, he would have fought harder to stay.
Birds muttered in the low bushes by the side of the trail. The sun shone on the back of my neck, the heat a pressure as real and finite as an iron flat on your skin. My shoes were covered in brown dust. I climbed up through rocky crags, heading up switchbacks, turning back and forth like a goat. I kept thinking the cave would be around the next corner, but it never was. On another rock I rested again, this time looking back toward the city, flat and undistinguished below me: the gray acreage of parking lots, the beige hulks of new malls, the streets hectic with tiny
The shade had widened over the landing. In front of me, the stray dog snapped up a piece of garbage in somebodyâs yard, seemed dubious about it, then moved on. I watched it leave, shaking my head at myself. It had been over ten years since Iâd gone on a hike of any kind. But if your brother held wilderness all-important in an overly civilized world, why on earth wait for him at an apartment building? Why would you, unless you didnât really want to find him in the first place? I decided I was an idiot and got back into the car.
I could remember only that one trail, which started in the western foothills by a water reservoir, a round white container that always looked to me like an oversized aspirin the mountain was trying, year after year, to swallow. At the trailhead, two mountain bikers in fluorescent gear were squirting energy food from tubes into their mouths. It was a weekday afternoon, and aside from a single jogger far ahead up the trail, there was no one else around: just the sky and the sun and the arid ground, with dry husks of burnt-out cactus making the skeleton shapes of bushes.
I started walking. Where the dusty foothills pulled steeply upwards into a bit more greenery, I saw the jogger disappear around a bend. Now there was really no one around. Gradually the trail took on a malevolent air. The dead cacti rustled and whispered; invisible animals scurried underneath. Fifteen minutes later I was exhausted. I could walk for hours on city blocks in high-heeled boots, but a quick stroll at Albuquerque elevation was killing me.
On a rock barely shaded by a juniper tree, I sat down and wiped my forehead with my T-shirt. âI hate being hot,â I said out loud. I hated being thirsty, too. I vaguely recalled there was some kind of stream on this trail, although maybe you werenât supposed to drink from it because of the bacteria. Or was that somewhere else? I was ignorant; my feet hurt. I thought about Wylie spending weeks at a time in the mountains, philosophizing or thinking or whatever it was that he did out here, and felt a profound wash of affection, even gratitude, for the attributes of civilized life, for apartments and stoplights and magazines and the steam that issued from manholes on the streets of New York.
But none of that was within my reach just now, so I stood up again. Somewhere up ahead was the cave where Wylie and I used to pretend, over lunch, that we were prehistoric man, if prehistoric man had had access to peanut-butter sandwiches and Nilla wafers. My father often began those hikes with a distant, preoccupied air, speaking about current events and the weather as if we were strangers heâd just happened to fall in step with; but gradually heâd relax into his more fatherly self, telling stories and jokes, every once in a while ruffling Wylieâs hair. I always thought that it took him a while to get used to his family again, not because he didnât like us but because during the week, when he was at work, he just didnât think about us that much. We werenât the central focus of his life, and he was capable of forgetting us. When he died I thought: if heâd cared a little more, he would have fought harder to stay.
Birds muttered in the low bushes by the side of the trail. The sun shone on the back of my neck, the heat a pressure as real and finite as an iron flat on your skin. My shoes were covered in brown dust. I climbed up through rocky crags, heading up switchbacks, turning back and forth like a goat. I kept thinking the cave would be around the next corner, but it never was. On another rock I rested again, this time looking back toward the city, flat and undistinguished below me: the gray acreage of parking lots, the beige hulks of new malls, the streets hectic with tiny
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