Just One More Story

Episode 3: The Lookout

By Lloyd W. Alexander

Final Version (Revision 1.2)

Ben had a theory about mountains.

The higher you went, the fewer people there were. It was simple arithmetic. Most people would walk a quarter of a mile for a view. Fewer would walk a mile. Almost nobody would walk two and a half miles uphill in July for the privilege of sitting alone on a rock.

Ben would.

That was the whole point.

He parked at the end of Stone House Road a little before eight, beside a closed gate and a handful of other cars, and sat for a moment with the engine off, listening to nothing.

It was going to be hot. He could already feel it coming up off the gravel.

He shouldered his pack, stepped around the gate, and started walking.

* * *

The first stretch was a road through somebody else’s world. Fields of tall grass. A long, quiet estate that clearly did not belong to anyone who would ever invite him in. Old stone walls running off into the trees.

A family passed him going the same direction. Two kids carrying towels, a mother carrying everything else, a father carrying a cooler and the look of a man who had been told this would be relaxing.

“Rattlesnake Pool?” the father asked, nodding up the road.

“I think so,” Ben said, which was true, and also the end of his knowledge on the subject.

The kids ran ahead. The parents followed. Ben slowed down until the sound of them faded, then kept going.

Where the trail left the road and turned into the woods, it got better.

Cooler. Darker. The kind of quiet that had meaning to it. A brook somewhere off to the right. Spruce and pine and the soft, deep give of needles underfoot. A chipmunk on a rock scolded him furiously, as though he’d tracked mud into its house.

“Sorry,” Ben said.

The chipmunk did not accept.

He passed the side trail to the pool and heard the kids shrieking at the cold water somewhere below. He did not take it.

The trail began to climb.

It climbed in switchbacks, then in rock, then in long slabs of granite where Ben had to look for the cairns, small careful stacks of stones that someone had set there so people like him wouldn’t wander off and become a news story. The trees got shorter. The sun got closer. The mosquitoes, who had been waiting for him in the shade like small, devoted fans, gave up and went home.

By the time he came out onto the open rock near the top, his shirt was soaked through and he was breathing hard.

He stopped. Drank some water.

There was a sign at a junction. A little arrow pointing off to the side.

Lookout Loop.

Ben considered it.

He had come for a view. He had come, specifically, for a view with no one else in it.

He took the loop.

* * *

It wound through low evergreens and over bare bedrock, the trail sometimes a path and sometimes more of a suggestion. Blueberry bushes grew in every crack and hollow, low and thick and heavy with fruit. Ben ate a handful without slowing down. They were warm from the sun and tasted like the inside of July.

Then the trees opened, and there it was.

A ledge of granite at the edge of everything. A long drop of green below. A pond far down in the valley, flat and silver as a dropped coin, and beyond it, low rounded hills fading into haze.

It was exactly what Ben had climbed for.

Except there was a man sitting on it.

He was sitting near the edge, his knees up, his arms resting across them. He looked to be in his thirties. Ball cap, gray T-shirt, a blue backpack beside him on the rock. As Ben stepped out of the trees, the man glanced down at his watch.

Then he looked out at the view again.

He was humming.

Low, almost under his breath. Something slow and simple, a tune Ben was sure he’d known since he was a kid. It had wide-open country in it.

Ben stopped at the edge of the trees.

The man heard him and turned. He gave a short nod.

Ben nodded back.

For a moment, neither of them said anything. It was, Ben thought, an entirely civilized arrangement. Two men who wanted to be left alone, recognizing it in each other.

The man looked at his watch again.

Ben took the hint, or what he decided was a hint, and stepped back into the trees. There would be other ledges. There was a whole mountaintop. He could find his own.

He felt rather good about it, actually.

Behind him, the humming started again.

* * *

The actual top of the mountain turned out to be a modest affair. A flat, wooded spot that hardly seemed to know it was a summit. Ben walked right across it before he realized it was the high point.

Past it, the trees broke apart again into open ledges, and the view swung around to the north and west. Mountains. Real ones, big and blue and shouldering into the sky. Somewhere over there was New Hampshire, not that it looked any different.

And on the ledges, sitting cross-legged on a rock with a sun hat in her lap, was a woman.

Of course there was.

She was young, in her twenties probably. Sunburned across the nose and shoulders in the way of someone who was sunburned all summer long. Her hair was tied back with what looked like a piece of rope. A battered pack sat beside her, and a water bottle covered in stickers.

She was watching the trail.

She saw Ben come out of the trees, and her whole face lit up.

“Are you Orion?” she called.

Ben stopped.

He looked behind himself, briefly, in case there was a more qualified candidate.

“No,” he said. “Sorry. Ben.”

“Oh.” She deflated, then laughed. “That’s all right. You’re the fourth man today who isn’t him. You’re in good company.”

“Is it a long list?”

“Well, it’s not even ten.” She patted the rock beside her, a good four feet away. “You can sit. I don’t bite. I’m just waiting for somebody.”

Ben looked at the open ledges. There was plenty of rock. There was an entire mountain’s worth of rock.

He sat down where she’d patted.

He had no idea why.

* * *

Her name was Juniper.

“Like the bush,” she said. “My mother was going through a phase.”

She was a canoe guide on the Saco River. She told him that within the first two minutes, along with the fact that she could read a river better than she could read most people, that she had once seen a man try to bring a full-size gas grill on a three-day canoe trip, and that the Saco was low this year, which was a tragedy for everyone involved.

Ben said almost nothing. It didn’t slow her down at all.

He drank some water and looked at the mountains and found, a little to his surprise, that he didn’t mind.

“So,” he said eventually. “Orion.”

“Orion,” she agreed, and grinned.

“Is that a real name?”

“That’s what I said!” She pointed at him like he’d answered a quiz question. “That was the first thing I ever said to him. I said, ‘Is that a real name?’ And he said, ‘Is Juniper?’”

She laughed.

“A year ago today,” she said. “Right here. On this rock, actually. I came up by myself, same as you. He was sitting right about where you are. I asked if he was Orion—no, wait, that’s not right, I didn’t know he was Orion yet.” She shook her head. “I asked him if he wanted half a sandwich. That was it. That was the whole beginning.”

“Half a sandwich,” Ben said.

“Peanut butter and blueberry. I picked the blueberries right there.” She nodded at a bush. “And then we just… talked. All day. I don’t even know about what. Everything. The river. His grandmother. Whether you could be homesick for a place you’ve never lived. We watched a hawk for about an hour.”

She smiled down at her hands.

“And when it got late, we walked down together. And we were going to swap numbers, like normal people. And then we didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said something stupid.” She rolled her eyes at herself. “I said, ‘What if we don’t? What if we just come back here. One year from today. And if we both show up, then it means something.’”

She glanced at him.

“I know. I know how that sounds. I sound like a movie that came out before I was born.”

“A little,” Ben admitted.

“He said yes.” She shrugged, but there was nothing careless about it. “He said yes right away. Like he’d been hoping I’d say something stupid.”

Ben looked at the trail.

“And this is the day.”

“This is the day.” She checked her phone, out of what was clearly habit, and put it away again. “No signal up here anyway. Not that it matters. I don’t have his number. I don’t even know his last name.”

She held up a finger.

“I do know he’s named after a constellation you can’t see in July. I told him that. I said, ‘You’re named after something that isn’t even here in the summer.’ He thought that was very funny.”

“Is it true?”

“Totally true. Orion’s a winter thing. You don’t see him till fall.” She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “So, I guess technically he’s right on schedule by not being here.”

She laughed again.

Ben did not.

* * *

By eleven, three more people had come up the trail.

A retired couple in matching hats, who stood on the ledge for six minutes, said the view was “very nice,” and left.

A teenage boy with earbuds who did not look at anything.

A young man with a beard who made Juniper sit up so fast she nearly dropped her water bottle, and who turned out to be named Kyle.

“Five,” Juniper said, after Kyle had gone. “Five men who are not Orion.”

“Maybe it’s a slow day for Orions,” Ben said.

She laughed. She had a good laugh. It went right out over the edge of the mountain.

“What does he look like?” Ben asked.

It was an idle question. He’d meant it as one, anyway.

“Oh, you know.” She waved a hand. “Tall-ish. Brown hair. Kind of a nice, sad face, even when he’s laughing. He wears a ball cap like every man in Maine.” She tilted her head, remembering. “And he hums.”

Ben went still.

“He hummed the whole way down,” Juniper said. “The same song, over and over again. Cowboy song. ‘Home on the Range.’ I said, ‘Who hums cowboy songs in Maine?’ And he said, ‘Somebody has to.’”

She smiled at the trail.

“He just kept humming it.”

Ben looked at his hands.

He thought about a man sitting on a ledge, ten minutes away, through a screen of evergreens. A blue backpack. A ball cap. A watch he kept looking at.

Something slow and simple. Something with wide-open country in it.

“Juniper,” he said.

She looked at him.

He opened his mouth.

And there it was, the same feeling he got on the edge of every conversation that mattered. The sense of standing at the top of a staircase in the dark, unsure how many steps there were.

He wasn’t sure.

He hadn’t asked the man’s name. He hadn’t heard the song clearly enough to swear to it. There were probably a hundred men in Maine with ball caps and blue backpacks who hummed. Probably more. It was that kind of state.

And if it was him, and he’d gone, then what was Ben supposed to say? I think he came, and I think he left, and I didn’t say anything because I was busy feeling good about giving him his privacy?

“It’s hot,” Ben said.

Juniper blinked.

“Up here,” he went on, hating himself a little. “It’s very hot. Do you have enough water?”

She looked at him for a second, and he thought she might ask what he was actually going to say.

Then she held up her water bottle and sloshed it.

“Two liters,” she said. “And a headlamp. I came to stay.”

“Right,” Ben said. “Good.”

He looked at the mountains.

They did not offer him anything better.

* * *

He had meant to leave by noon.

At noon, he was still there.

At one, he was still there, and he had eaten most of a bag of trail mix, and so had Juniper, and they had picked blueberries off the bushes around the ledge until both of their fingers were stained purple.

At two, she told him about a moose she’d once seen standing in the middle of the Saco at dawn, so still and so huge she thought for a full minute it was a boulder. Then it turned its head and looked at her, she said, like she was the strange one.

At two-thirty, Ben tried again.

“Juniper. This morning, on the way up—”

“Hang on.” She was already half on her feet. Someone was coming out of the trees. A man, alone, in a ball cap.

He was about sixty, and named Doug, and wanted to know if either of them had seen his dog.

They hadn’t.

When Doug was gone, Juniper sat back down slowly. She didn’t laugh this time.

“Sorry,” she said. “What were you saying?”

Ben looked at her.

“Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing.”

* * *

The afternoon got long.

The sun moved around behind them. The shadows of the low pines stretched out across the rock. A hawk turned slow circles over the valley, and Ben watched it for what was probably an hour and felt, the whole time, the weight of a thing he wasn’t saying.

Juniper got quieter.

She stopped telling river stories. She sat with her chin on her knees and watched the place where the trail came out of the trees. Every time a branch moved, her eyes went to it.

“I turned down three dates this year,” she said, out of nowhere.

Ben looked over.

“Three. Nice guys, too. One of them was a very nice guy. He had a boat.” She laughed, but it came out thin. “And every time, I thought, What if? What if I say yes, and then July comes, and I’m sitting up here, and I’m already sort of with somebody? That wouldn’t be fair to anybody.”

She picked at a bit of lichen on the rock.

“So, I said no. To a guy with a boat. Because of a guy I met for one day.”

“That’s not stupid,” Ben said.

“It’s a little stupid.”

“A little,” Ben admitted. “But not the bad kind.”

She smiled at that, a small one.

Then she went back to watching the trail.

* * *

“You can go, you know,” she said, around five. “You don’t have to stay. You’ve done your good deed. You’ve listened to me talk about canoes for eight hours. That’s more than most people can handle.”

“I know,” Ben said.

He didn’t get up.

She looked at him for a long moment.

“I’m giving him till sunset,” she said finally. “That’s the deal I made with myself. Sunset, and then I go home.”

Ben nodded.

He still didn’t get up.

She seemed to understand something about that, because she didn’t tell him to go again.

* * *

The sun went down somewhere behind the big mountains to the west, and the light did what light does in the last hour. Everything turned gold, then orange, then a kind of soft, failing pink. The pond in the valley went dark first. Then the hills. Then, one by one, the trees on the near slopes.

Nobody came out of the trees.

When the pink was almost gone, Juniper stood up.

She stood there a moment, looking at the trail. Then she put on her pack.

“Well,” she said brightly, in a voice that was not bright at all. “That’s that.”

She pulled her headlamp out of a side pocket and settled it on her forehead.

Ben looked at it.

He looked at his own pack, which contained an empty water bottle, a crumpled trail mix bag, and absolutely no headlamp, because he had planned to be home by lunch.

“You didn’t bring one,” Juniper said.

“I did not.”

“You’re going to die on this mountain, Ben.”

“That had occurred to me.”

She laughed. A real one, small and cracked, but real.

“Come on,” she said. “Stick close. I’ll light the way. We’ll go down the loop.”

Ben’s stomach dropped.

“The loop?”

“The Lookout Loop. That’s how we went down last year.” She was already heading for the trees. “Always go down the way you came. That’s a rule. I just made it up.”

* * *

The woods were nearly dark already.

Juniper’s headlamp threw a white circle on the rock ahead of them, and Ben followed it, stepping where she stepped. The air was cooler under the trees. It smelled of pine and warm stone.

The mosquitoes found him almost immediately.

They had, apparently, been waiting all day.

He slapped at his neck. His arm. His other arm. His neck again.

“They like you,” Juniper said over her shoulder.

“Everybody does,” Ben said. “It’s a curse.”

She laughed, and he followed the sound through the trees.

The trees opened. The granite came underfoot. And then they were on the ledge again, at the edge of the dark valley, the same ledge where Ben had stood that morning in the sun and decided, very generously, to leave a stranger alone.

It was empty now.

Juniper stopped.

Her headlamp swept across the rock, slowly. Ben didn’t know what she was looking for. He wasn’t sure she did, either.

Then the light stopped.

Near the edge of the ledge, right where a person might sit with his knees up to watch a view, there was a stone.

A small, smooth stone. Gray, with a white band running around it like a ring. Sitting all by itself on the granite, placed squarely in the middle of a flat spot, as though someone had set it down very carefully and then stood back to make sure it wouldn’t roll.

Juniper made a sound Ben had never heard a person make before.

She went to it and knelt, picked it up.

She held it in her palm in the light of her headlamp and didn’t say anything for a long time.

“It’s mine,” she said finally.

Her voice was very small.

“It’s from the cove behind my grandmother’s house. I gave it to him. Right here. Last year. I told him what it was, so he’d have a piece of somewhere I loved.”

She turned it over. Turned it back.

“He was here,” she whispered. “He came.”

Ben didn’t move.

The mosquitoes, who did not respect a moment, kept working on his ankles.

“He came,” Juniper said again, louder, and then she was laughing and crying at the same time and wiping her face with the back of her wrist, and the headlamp beam swung wildly over the trees. “He came. He was right here. He was right here, and I was right there, and he—why didn’t he—”

She stopped.

She looked down at the stone.

“He left it,” she said. “He came all the way here, and he left it where he knew I’d walk.”

Ben said nothing.

There was nothing in him that could have come out right.

* * *

They went down slowly.

Juniper didn’t talk at first. She walked ahead with the stone closed in her fist, and every so often she would stop on a slab of rock, swing her headlamp around until it found the next cairn, and go on.

Ben followed.

He was trying very hard not to think.

Not about the ledge. Not about a man checking his watch. Not about ten minutes and a screen of evergreens. Not about two people sitting on the same mountain all morning, close enough to hear each other if either one had shouted.

He hadn’t told her.

He had sat with her for most of a day and not told her.

He walked. He swatted at mosquitoes. He followed the light.

And somewhere on the long switchbacks down off the rock, his mind went quiet the way it did sometimes on a hike, when your feet took over and your thoughts drifted off on their own.

He didn’t notice he was humming.

He didn’t notice what he was humming.

Not until the light in front of him stopped moving.

Juniper had turned around. Her headlamp was pointed straight at his face. He squinted and put up a hand.

“What,” she said, “is that?”

Ben stopped humming.

He hadn’t known he’d started.

“What’s what?”

“That song.” Her voice was very level. “Where did you hear that song?”

Ben opened his mouth.

He tried to think of something. Anything. The radio. My grandmother. A movie that came out before you were born.

Nothing came.

The light stayed on his face.

“You saw him,” Juniper said. “Didn’t you.”

It wasn’t really a question.

Ben stood on the dark trail with the mosquitoes singing in his ears, and he found that, whatever else he was, he was not a man who could look someone in the eye and lie to her about this.

“I think so,” he said.

The light didn’t move.

“This morning,” Ben said. “On the way up. I took the loop. There was a man sitting on that ledge. Ball cap. Blue backpack. He kept checking his watch.” He swallowed. “He was humming. I didn’t know what it was. Not until you said.”

For a long moment, Juniper said nothing at all.

Ben braced himself.

He wasn’t sure what for though. Anger, probably. He would have understood anger. He had spent the last two hours rehearsing several versions of it in his head, all of them deserved.

Instead, she said, in a strange, wondering voice:

“He’s real.”

Ben blinked.

“He’s real,” Juniper said again, and the headlamp beam started to bounce, because she was bouncing. “Ben. I spent all day thinking maybe I made him up. Like maybe I had heatstroke last year and invented a guy named after a winter constellation. But he’s real. He was here. You saw him.”

“I saw a man,” Ben said carefully.

“What did he look like? Was he okay? Did he look sad? Did he look nervous? Which way did he go?”

“He looked like… a man,” Ben said. “Sitting down.”

“Ben.”

“He had a hat!”

“What color hat?”

Ben thought about it.

“Hat-colored,” he said.

Juniper made a noise of pure exasperation, then laughed so hard she had to put her hand on a tree.

“You are the worst witness in the history of the world.”

“That’s fair,” Ben said, and slapped a mosquito off his forehead.

* * *

She asked him everything.

All the way down the switchbacks, past the side trail to the pool, out of the woods onto the dark road through the fields, she asked him everything she could think of and a few things she couldn’t possibly have expected him to know.

Was he tall? Ben thought so. Sitting down, it was hard to tell.

Did he look like he’d been there long? Ben thought maybe. He’d looked settled. Like a man who’d been sitting for a while.

Did he smile? He nodded, Ben said. That was all. Just a nod.

Did he say anything? No.

Did you say anything?

No.

Juniper turned around and walked backward for a few steps so she could shine the light on him.

“You didn’t say anything?”

“I thought he wanted to be left alone,” Ben said.

It came out sounding worse than he’d meant it to. Or maybe exactly as bad as it was.

Juniper turned around and walked forward again.

For a little while, the only sound was their feet on the gravel and the mosquitoes, who had followed them out of the woods with real loyalty.

“If you’d told me this morning,” Juniper said quietly, “I’d have run down there.”

“I know,” Ben said.

“I might have caught him.”

“I know.”

He waited for the rest of it.

It didn’t come.

When she spoke again, her voice had gone back to something lighter.

“Why didn’t you?”

Ben thought about how to answer that. There were several true answers. He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t heard the song clearly. It might have been anyone.

All of that was true.

None of it was the reason.

“I didn’t know how,” he said.

Juniper was quiet.

Then she reached back without turning around and gave his arm a quick, hard squeeze, right on top of a mosquito bite.

“Ow,” Ben said.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “He came.”

* * *

At the gate, there were only two cars left.

Hers, which was a small and dented hatchback with a canoe rack on top and a bumper sticker that said I’D RATHER BE PADDLING.

And Ben’s.

Nothing else.

Juniper stood looking at the empty gravel for a moment, the stone still closed in her fist.

Then she turned off her headlamp, and in the sudden dark, she put her arms around Ben and hugged him. Briefly. Hard. Like she was making sure he was real, too.

“Thanks for staying,” she said into his shoulder.

“I didn’t do anything,” Ben said.

“You stayed.”

She let go, got into her car, rolled down the window, and pointed at him.

“Next year,” she said, “I’m bringing you a headlamp.”

Then she was gone, her taillights bumping away down Stone House Road.

Ben stood alone at the gate in the dark.

The mosquitoes found him almost at once.

He got into his car and shut the door on them and sat for a moment in the dark with the windows up.

Something whined past his ear.

He’d brought one with him.

Ben sighed, started the car, and pulled out onto Stone House Road.

Somewhere around the end of the fields, he realized he was humming again.

This time, he didn’t stop.

Afterthoughts

Ben

He couldn’t sleep.

It might have been the bites. He had stopped counting at forty, mostly out of respect for himself.

It wasn’t the bites.

He lay in the dark and did arithmetic he didn’t want to do.

Ten minutes. That was how far it was from the open ledges to the lookout. Ten minutes, through the trees.

If he had said something at eleven o’clock this morning, when she first said the word hum, she would have been on her feet before he finished the sentence. She would have been down that loop in five minutes, not ten. She was that kind of person. He had known her for one day and he already knew that.

Maybe the man would still have been there.

Maybe not.

Ben would never know.

He had told himself all day that he wasn’t sure. That it might not have been him. That it wasn’t his business. That a man sitting alone on a ledge deserved to be left alone.

Every one of those things had been true.

None of them were why he hadn’t said anything.

Around two in the morning, he gave up, put on a sweatshirt, and went outside.

The night was warm and still. Crickets. A dog somewhere far off, barking at something it would never catch.

Ben looked up.

He wasn’t sure what he was looking for until he realized he was looking for it. Three stars in a row. A belt. A hunter with his arm raised.

He searched the whole sky.

It wasn’t there.

Of course it wasn’t. She’d told him. A winter thing. You didn’t see him till fall.

Ben stood in the dark for a long time with his hands in his sweatshirt pocket, looking at the place where it wasn’t.

It would be back in the fall, he told himself.

He wasn’t entirely sure which thing he meant.

Then he went inside, put some cream on his bites, and slept until nine.

Juniper

She set the stone on the windowsill of her kitchen, where the moon could reach it, and then she couldn’t stop looking at it.

At midnight, she gave up trying to sleep and sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and the back of an old river map.

At the top, she wrote: ORION.

Then she sat there.

It was not, she realized, a lot to go on.

A first name. A ball cap, like every man in Maine. A blue backpack, maybe. A song every kid learns in second grade and no grown man hums.

She wrote down Home on the Range anyway.

She wrote down nice, sad face.

She wrote down grandmother, because he’d talked about his grandmother a year ago, a whole long story about her garden, and Juniper was suddenly furious with herself for not remembering where the garden was.

She looked at the list.

It looked like nothing. It looked like a riddle with half the words missing.

But it wasn’t nothing.

He had come.

He had climbed two and a half miles in July and sat on that ledge and checked his watch and hummed a cowboy song on a mountain in Maine. And then something had stopped him. Something had turned him around.

But not before he made sure, she’d know.

Juniper drew a line under the list and wrote one more thing.

Lookout. Next year. Same day. Bring a note this time. Bring a headlamp for Ben.

She looked at the last part and smiled.

Then she stopped smiling.

Because it occurred to her, sitting there in the quiet kitchen with the moon on the windowsill, that she had talked to Ben for nine hours.

She had told him about the river and the moose and the man with the gas grill. About her grandmother’s cove. About three dates and a guy with a boat. About Orion.

And she didn’t know a single thing about him.

Not where he lived. Not what he did. Not why a man would climb a mountain alone on a weekday in July, just to sit on a rock with nobody else on it.

She had never asked.

And he had never offered.

He had just stayed.

Juniper picked up the stone and turned it over in her fingers.

She hoped somebody, someday, sat on a mountain all day and listened to him.

She thought he probably had a few stories of his own.

The End