Graphic the Valley by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

watches every damn thing you do all day long. Did you know that?”
    I didn’t want to give us away, so I said, “Huh.”
    “
Huh
.” He mimicked me. “Is that all you got? This is your last weekend up here with a pretty girl. And she seems interested in you…” He tapped me on the shoulder with his fingers. “So you think about it. But not too long.”
    “Okay, thanks,” I said.
    “Thank me after you make a move, all right?” he said. He picked up two chainsaws, and carried them back to the bed of his truck.
    • • •
    “Tenaya?” Lucy and I were in the tent, in my sleeping bag. She dipped her nose against my chest. “Where do you live in the Valley?”
    We hadn’t talked about it. My parents always told me not to tell anyone, but I told her the truth. “Up Ribbon Creek. West of El Cap. Up a ways in the trees. My parents have a camp up there.”
    “And you’ve been there for a long time?” she said.
    “My whole life.”
    “What?” she said.
    “My family’s been in the Valley forever.”
    She said, “Forever?” She lifted her head.
    “Since the first Paiutes. All the way through. On my mother’s side. And my father’s been there a long time too now.”
    She moved her finger on my chest, starting to draw a picture. She said, “So you’re a Yosemiti then?”
    “Yes.”
    She put her finger on the knot of my collarbone, the old break there. Lucy made a slash across my throat.
    I lifted my head and looked at her.
    She said, “And a Miwok girl.” She settled back onto my chest and kept tracing with her finger. Drew something like a bird.
    I had my arm underneath her. The smooth skin of her back, the calluses on my fingers catching. I said, “Do you know the history?”
    “I only know what my father told me.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    “And Carlos,” she said.
    “Carlos?”
    “My cousin.” She was still drawing the bird, adding feathers to the wings. She said, “We grew up together. He’s older, and he always took care of me. He works for the Park Service, has for a while. Some kind of patrol officer or ranger or something.”
    I said, “And he taught you the history of the Yosemiti?”
    “Yeah,” she said. “His stories are different from everyone else’s. He says it’s always 1851. That there are new developments but nothing new.”
    “What does he mean?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “He just warned me about my father too. It was this spring, a few months ago. He said he wasn’t sure what my father was doing.”
    Lucy drew something on my skin, beneath the bird, something hanging in the talons.
    I tucked her hair behind her ear. I said, “Does your cousin know what he’s talking about?”
    “Huh?” Lucy stopped her drawing.
    “Well, does he know something?” I said.
    “I don’t know. My father is always dealing with the Park Service because of the property lease at North Wawona, where we live, and I don’t know what’s going on right now.”
    I wondered what a deal meant. New development. I thought of my own father.
    Lucy said, “Carlos kept trying to talk to me before I came up here this summer. He said I had to know some things. But I kind of avoided him. He gets sort of crazy sometimes.”
    I said, “Maybe it is 1851.” I thought about the sign near Mirror Lake. The one posted by the National Park Service. Pictures of Paiutes labeled as “The Original Inhabitants: The Miwoks” and a similar sign in the museum. I’d scratched the signs with a stone, but the words wouldn’t remove, the etchings too deep. I’d finally broken the plastic and buried what I could break off.
    Saturday afternoon. The sun came through the trees like shards of yellow glass. My cheeks tight, singed at the corners. The strips of skin under Lucy’s eyes burned pink-brown. She’d thrown up twice again that morning.
    I said, “Are you hungry for anything?”
    “No,” she said. She sat and looked over the lake. No wind now, and the water black glass.
    Children played in the