Synopsis: Two young adults set off on a backpacking trip and meet Milton Lewis, a man in his seventies, whose experiences have brought him to the same mountain but whose journey may end at the peak.

--- Switchback Scorpion ---

His feet creep closer to the ledge.

A gust of wind wafts up his leg and inflates his cargo pants before disappearing into the cavern between his shirt and his pack. The mountain peaks across the valley watch like wide-eyed giants, judging.

He raises his hands and folds them in front of his chest and then steps off of the cliff side. His wife’s ashes fly from the container as he falls, the tiny particles joining the wind and fanning through the air like a painter’s stroke. In this moment he seems to affect nothing but the few pebbles that follow in his fall, besides Lynn and me.

∞

“Scorpions,” Milton murmurs, digging his knife into the withering twig with rhythmic wiffts. I love that sound. He skins crisp bark off the stick like he’s peeling an apple.

“Scorpions?” I have no idea what the old man is talking about and I think I’ve had too much whiskey. Lynn has already dozed off. She’s definitely had too much whiskey.

In just two nights I’ve already grown used to how Milton starts his stories. He did it on the switchbacks- an endless zipper of trails on the face of the mountain. He did it again when we passed that tree that looked like the Budweiser crown. He always begins with a single word. Scorpions.

The reflections of the flames dance across his face. He’s propped up against his sleeping pad and a boulder, the whiskers of his white beard casting shadows on his shirt. “I was sitting around a fire with a native American elder some years ago, back before the cancer,” he tells me. “His name was Kaliska and he was from the Miwok tribe. I think his name meant coyote chasing deer.”

I can’t help but laugh. “Well, does he chase deer?”

Milton looks up at me with drooping eyes. I hope I didn’t offend him. “He chases answers. The elders said he hadn’t said a word for two days. They said it was just the way he was when he was in deep thought. Always thinking, rarely talking. Or it could have been the peyote.”

The fire pops and a spark flies close to my toes. Lynn stirs in her sleeping bag and I can just see the glob of drool trickle down her chin. “We were all sitting there,” Milton continues, “smoking things and drinking and talking around the fire. Then a scorpion snuck right through my legs and neared the flames. He snapped his claws at them and flailed his tail around. Kaliska stood from his log and grabbed the scorpion around the abdomen, placing her closer to the fire. The scorpion started convulsing in violent attacks and thrusting her stinger through the air. She finally stabbed herself with the stinger and a moment later she was dead. And then Kaliska spoke.”

There’s silence. I hate when Milton does this. I’ve known the old man for two days and he already knows how to irk me. “Well, what did he say?”

“Kaliska said that the scorpion’s brother had died two days earlier from a spider. He said that the scorpion missed him and wanted to see him again.”

“How do you know the scorpion was female?”

Milton smiles. “I don’t.”

“Animal suicide?” Lynn asks, causing Milton to jolt in surprise. The fire illuminates her white band of dyed hair that sits among the others like an albino, made of all the same stuff except for the color. I told her not to do it, but she told me she can’t stand when things look the same for too long and I couldn’t argue with that.

Milton hands her the flask of whiskey. “What do you think?”

Lynn shakes her head. She still looks groggy, but she takes a swig and some drops fall down her neck. Mom would kill me if she knew Lynn was drinking.

“What do I think?” Lynn says. “I would think that what separates humans from animals is the ability to develop complex ideas and make decisions not based solely on instinct. So no, I would think that’s a load of crap.”

“There are examples in nature of complex ideas being executed all the time,” Milton tells her. “Mass cooperation of species to prolong their survival, sacrifices to protect young. Would it be so outlandish to assume a scorpion could weigh the cost of his life?”

I keep silent. He has Lynn hooked. “If scorpions,” she says, “like all animals except us, are driven by pure instinct and desire to reproduce, then I don’t see how they could develop that thought. Maybe their strategies might look like conscious suicidal tendencies. Or maybe you all, this Kawanska person included, were so high on Leaping Squirrel’s peyote that you saw things.” 

Milton breaks out into laughter, which soon turns into a coughing spasm. I haven’t seen him laugh that hard since we first met and a bug flew into my mouth. Lynn grabs a cigarette from my pack, leans forward to block the wind, and lights it inside the hood of her sweatshirt. The smoke corkscrews into the air before it’s tackled by the wind.

“The truth,” Milton says after his coughs subside, “is that scorpions are immune to their own venom. So what really happened? They’re cold-blooded. When they’re exposed to intense heat and stress, their metabolic processes go haywire. They spasm and flail their tail into the air. This particular scorpion either died from the heat or stabbed itself to death. They live in the desert all day, but the heat of a fire makes them go crazy. Maybe it’s just an illusion like you say, but until you’re in the mind of a scorpion, you can’t know.”

“Maybe I’ll know in the next life,” Lynn says, tapping her cigarette above the dirt. The ashes plummet to the ground like miniscule meteors. “Though I don’t really like the desert.”

“All scorpions like the desert,” Milton replies. 

There’s silence now. I can hear the trickling stream of Evan Williams pouring out of the flask and into Lynn’s mouth. She’ll get drunk and pass out again soon. I think about what Milton told me earlier, around the fire, while Lynn was asleep. Actually, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Is that what he wants? To be the scorpion?

“Alex, there’s something you should know,” he told me hours earlier, while Lynn was swimming in the pond by the rocky slope. I was placing the logs into the fire ring and the coals from old flames dirtied my hands.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I think I need to tell you why I’m climbing that mountain tomorrow morning. It’s not only to place my wife’s ashes.”

“Oh,” I said, dropping the log. I remember how defined the wrinkles were beneath his eyes, like he’d trekked a thousand miles just to tell me this.

“When I go up there, I won’t be walking back down. I’m going up there to jump.”

I laughed at the time. Had I known he was serious maybe I would have cried instead. “And I’m going up there to fly.”

It was a stupid thing to say. He just looked at me, like he was confessing to a murder. “It’s the truth,” he told me. “I need to do it. You can’t tell Lynn.”

At that point I rolled back on my legs, dropping down from my crouched position. I placed my hands on my knees and tried to swallow my confusion. “Uh, Milton, are you being serious? That’s nothing to joke about.”

“I was supposed to do this alone,” Milton told me. “But then I met you and your sister. And, well, I happen to like you two trouble makers. But tomorrow I head out on my own, to the peak of Mt. Banner.”

I remember not being able to formulate questions. I asked why a lot and how and when. I’m not even sure I listened to the responses. “How will you make it up that cliff face?”

“I’ve done it before. Thirty-seven years ago. Granted these old legs worked better, but I know the way. You approach from the back, up the jagged rocks until you hit the glacial valley. The 1,000 foot climb is the hardest part, but the fire of a thousand memories will push me through. I’ll make it.”

“But why? Why there?”

“I’m seventy six, Alex. For the past few years I’ve watched as Abby withered away to nothing and now I’m following in the same path. Sure, I may have a year if I’m lucky. More likely it’ll take me in a few months. I want to use these legs while I have the energy. That mountain is where I proposed to her. It was actually a disaster,” he said, laughing. “We were standing on the peak and I told her to open the box where other hikers and climbers leave their names. 

“I had attached the ring to the notecard inside the box. When she pulled out the card the ring slid from the string and fell off the cliff. She gasped and then cried and then she hugged me. I told her not to worry about the ring. We’d spend all day together looking for it, thousands of feet below the peak. Of course we never found it, a needle in a mountainous haystack, but we had fun searching together. That’s why.”

At the time I was too numb to hear anything other than, I’m going up there to jump. I remember the way Milton smiled at me, and how the breeze carried the smell of dirt and leaves and living things.

The fire pops again and pulls me from the memory. I realize Milton was asking me a question. “You’re lost,” he said. “Lost in your own mind.”

“He’s always like that,” Lynn says. “His mind is his enemy.”

I laugh. They couldn’t be more right. “Sorry. I was thinking about earlier today.” I was thinking about how you’re going to kill yourself, I want to say. I looked up to the translucent canvas of glitter draped across the night sky. If it wasn’t for a loud pop from the fire I might have been stuck there for decades, lost in my own head.

Lynn puts the whiskey down. “Where are the peanuts?”

“In the bear canister,” I tell her. “You can’t leave that stuff out here. If I wake up and find crumbs in your tent again, you’re sleeping near the creek bed. Might as well make it that much easier for the bears.”

“Such a worrier,” she says as she stands. I can hear her joints crack.

I just stare at Milton while she’s gone. He’s still whittling the twig, turning something dull into something beautiful. I wonder what he’ll make of it.

When Lynn returned she was popping peanuts into her mouth. She stumbled over her sleeping pad, nearly barreling into the fire. “So,” she started, “if this scorpion had the ability to value his own life or whatever, would it be so wrong if he decided to do it? To commit suicide?”

“Of course,” I tell her. I’m glaring at Milton.

“I’d disagree,” Milton says. Of course he’d disagree. “I don’t think there’s a clear cut answer. On one side some can say the scorpion is an instinctive creature with an undeveloped brain incapable of such emotional thoughts. On the other you could show examples of some creatures with extreme intelligence equipped with all of the necessary tools to make such decisions. Is it right? Who’s to say?”

Lynn pops another peanut into her mouth. “Well there has to be a right answer.”

There is a damn right answer, I want to tell her. Of course it’s wrong. How could Milton, I mean the scorpion, justify taking his own life? Sure, he lost someone close to him, but he’s alive. He’s by the fire and he has a working brain and isn’t that enough?

“I don’t think there’s a right answer to some questions,” Milton says. “For centuries the world was split between sides. Church and state. Christian and pagan. Potatoes and patatoes. Modern scientific theory often alludes to the idea that only when opposites are completely broken down can the entire picture be completely understood.”

I think at that moment Milton began to lose Lynn. Just tell her you’re going to do it, I want to say. “That’s bullshit,” I say instead. “There is such a thing as right and wrong.”

Milton smiles. He’s going to be dead in the morning and he’s smiling? “Alex, How can you be so sure? Some of the moral rules that existed for centuries have later proven to miss the target completely. Just because we live in the now and we have access to extensive amounts of information doesn’t mean our philosophies and knowledge of the world is spot on.”

I speak impulsively. “So who’s to say what is right and wrong? You?”

“Not me. I’d say no one.”

I can’t take anymore. He’s just full of crap. I’m feeling a little drunk and he’s acting a little stupid. I stand up, grab the whiskey, and walk to my tent.

“What’s wrong with him?” I hear Lynn say.

“He’s just a little confused.”

∞

The morning hits me like a runaway train. My head is throbbing. For a second I thought I dreamt it all, how Milton told me what he was going to do and the stupid peanuts and something about a scorpion.

A thin fog is rising from the valley and the mountains are silent, whispering to each other through the wind. There are a few birds soaring near the start of the forest and I wonder if there’s something dead below them.

Lynn is brushing her teeth and Milton is walking back from the creek. He’ll be dead in a few hours. But what could I do? Tackle him, gather my rope from my pack and bind his hands? Run to higher ground where I might get reception and call 911, screaming, “Help us, there’s a suicidal old man hiking up a mountain to die.” Maybe they would send the choppers. Maybe they wouldn’t really care.

“Get your stuff together already,” Lynn says, flashing foamy teeth. “Milton wants to peak that mountain today. Are you game?”

“There’s no point, Lynn.”

“What has gotten into you? You’d normally jump for a chance to race me up a mountain.”

“I’m tired,” I tell her. But really I want to say that I’m not escorting an old man up a mountain to die. 

She rolls her eyes. “Well get un-tired.”

The ascent up the rocky slope is pretty terrifying. The boulders are sharp and they’re stacked on top of each other like a bowl of cheese balls. One slip of the foot and I’d fall into deep crevices. Milton doesn’t need to kill himself. The mountain can do that for him.

Forty minutes later and we’ve reached the glacier. It’s more like a valley of moguls, each one just steep enough to crouch but not enough to require ice picks. I look back and watch Milton trek up behind us, whistling to himself.

Lynn walks beside me. “Okay, what’s up Alex? You haven’t been like this all week.”

“Milton is going up here to kill himself,” I blurt out. “He’s going to jump.”

“What?” At first Lynn twists her mouth into a smile, like she’s clever and caught onto this cosmic joke. Then her eyes well up and she looks like she’s about to panic. “You’re joking.”

“I wish I was.”

She drops her pack and slides down the moguls. I can hear her crying in between the crunch of snow. “Milton!” she shouts. Her voice grows distant, so I just sit on one of the snow hills and watch.

I see Milton placing his hands on her shoulder, giving her a hug. They look like two children from this distance. Now Lynn is fixing her hair and they start back up the glacial valley. When they get closer I can see Lynn laughing and wiping her eyes.

I don’t understand how Lynn could be smiling. He must have lied. “You told her? You told her you’re going to kill yourself and she’s laughing?”

“You’re an idiot,” Lynn says as she walks by.

“Alex, I’m not going to kill myself. I said I was going to jump. Abby would fly out of this ash jar and kill me herself if she knew I was planning suicide.”

A rash of red burns down my neck and I feel like I’m the butt of a cruel joke. “You’re going to do what? Parachute?”

“If I was going to kill myself you think I’d be carrying this huge pack?” I want to punch the old man and tackle him down the valley. “I want to jump one last time before I can’t anymore. In a few months I’ll be as good as dead. I want to live a little before then.”

My legs give out from under me and I plop onto the snow. Maybe he had told me and I was too drunk? Either way it was cruel. And what does a seventy six year old man need to parachute for? Was this the plan all along? To disguise his suicide as a parachute jump gone wrong? My mind burns with questions as I hike up the rest of the mountain. My hands slip and rocks fall and I realize how absent minded I’m being. If I fall it would be Milton’s fault.

When we finally get to the peak, Milton begins to remove the parachute from his pack. I want to throw it off the mountain and yell at him some more. He stands up and double checks his lines. 

“Don’t forget to put your names in the box,” he says, pointing to the metal container. “See you at the bottom.”

His feet creep closer to the ledge.