The Wrong Trail

Nelson Duncan was sixty-four years old and his knee had strong opinions about the Swiss Alps before he even got out of the rental car. He stood in Claude Masterson's beekeeper yard with his hands on his hips and made sure everybody within earshot knew about it.

"Six in the morning, Claude. You know what time it is in Napa right now? It's bedtime."

Claude came around the corner of his shed with a veil pushed up on his forehead and a smear of honey on his forearm. He was sixty-three and built as if he wrestled boxes of bees for a living, which he did. "You'll live. The light on the mountains this early is worth getting up for. Also, Thad is coming."

Nelson felt something in his chest do a small, unhelpful hop. He kept his face still. "The lawyer."

"The lawyer," Claude said, grinning like he'd been waiting a year to say it. "You remember him. Dinner party last spring. You two argued about terroir for two hours and then both pretended you hadn't enjoyed it."

"I don't pretend."

"You pretend constantly. Go say hello, he's by the gate."

Thad Schaffer was leaning on the wooden gate looking out at the hives, and when he turned around Nelson saw that the man had gotten a new pair of glasses over the winter and had maybe lost a little weight, and that none of that should have mattered but somehow did. Sixty-one years old, silver at the temples, a probate lawyer from Bern who could apparently still fill out an alpine hiking shirt.

"Nelson," Thad said, and he smiled the kind of smile that made Nelson's sore knee feel like a secondary problem. "Claude told me you were coming. I almost didn't believe him."

"Why wouldn't you believe him?"

"Because he said you'd complain about the hour the entire time, and I thought that was slander." Thad stuck out his hand. Nelson took it and held it a beat longer than a handshake required.

"It's not slander if it's true," Nelson said. "It's been what, a year?"

"A year and two months," Thad said, and Nelson caught the fact that Thad had counted too. "Since the dinner party."

Claude appeared between them with three water bottles like a man distributing communion. "Good, you remember each other. Now. There is a trail behind my property that goes up to a meadow. Wildflowers, view of the whole valley, and I am told there is an old hammock up there some farmer left. We go up, we eat the sandwiches I made, we come down. Simple. Even for two old men."

"Sixty-four is not old," Nelson said.

"Sixty-one is not old either," Thad said.

"Sixty-three is ancient," Claude said, "and I'm carrying the sandwiches, so nobody argue with me."

* * *

The trail started gently enough, a dirt path winding up through pines with the hives humming behind them like a town with a low opinion of visitors. Nelson set a steady pace and told himself the steady pace was a choice and not a negotiation with his left knee. Thad fell in beside him and Claude, true to his nature as a beekeeper and a menace, drifted ahead the way Claude always drifted ahead, moving as if he had grown up on these slopes and considered gravity a rumor.

"So wine," Thad said after a while. "Still making the Pinot?"

"Still making everything. Pinot, a Chardonnay I'm embarrassed by, and a red blend that won a medal nobody cares about."

"I'd care about it. I like medals. Lawyers collect them like cats collect string."

"How many do you have?"

"Two. One for a case I actually won and one for participation at a charity golf thing." Thad laughed at himself, a warm low laugh, and Nelson found himself watching the way the man's shoulders moved when he did it. "You?"

"Zero. Winemaking medals go to the wine, not the man. The wine is very decorated. The man is jealous of the wine."

They climbed. The trail forked at a big split boulder, and both paths looked equally worn, and Nelson stopped and pointed at the left one because it went the way the morning sun was coming from, which felt like reasoning to him.

"Claude said the trail goes up to a meadow with wildflowers and a view of the valley," Thad said.

"Claude said a lot of things at six in the morning. Nobody retains information at six in the morning. Look, this one has more boot prints."

"It doesn't. I've been watching the trail. That's why I said it."

"Counting boot prints. You really are a lawyer."

"I'm a probate lawyer. Boot prints are basically evidence." But Thad was smiling when he said it, and Nelson noticed he was smiling too, and the two of them stood at the fork like two men doing a very slow dance neither had admitted to.

Somewhere ahead, Claude's voice floated back down through the trees. "I'm going on ahead! Check the hives at the top! Don't dawdle!" And then his footsteps faded and the forest got quiet in that specific mountain way, just birds and their own breathing.

"He left us," Nelson said.

"He absolutely left us. Deliberately."

"On purpose."

"Completely on purpose," Thad agreed, and they looked at each other and Nelson understood that they had both been set up and that neither of them minded.

They took the left fork because Nelson was stubborn and Thad let him, which Nelson would later realize was a kindness and not a concession. The trail got steeper, then quieter, then it stopped looking like a trail at all and started looking like a suggestion the forest had made. Twenty minutes later they came out of the trees into a meadow that was not the meadow, because the meadow they were supposed to find had a view of the valley, and this one was tucked in a bowl of hills with no view of anything except itself.

Wildflowers everywhere, though. That part Claude had gotten right. Yellow and purple and a kind of white flower Nelson didn't know, all of it leaning in the warm wind. And there, strung between two old pines, was a hammock, canvas, faded gray, sagging like it had been waiting there for years specifically to embarrass two men who could not read a trail.

"The wrong trail," Nelson announced, hands on hips again.

"The wrong trail," Thad agreed. He looked around, unhurried, as if he had billed a thousand hours and was not afraid of a delay. "A very good wrong trail, though."

"How can you tell it's good?"

"Hammock. Sun. No other people." Thad started walking toward it. "I'd call that a nine out of ten happy accident."

There was a rocky outcrop at the far end of the meadow, a shoulder of gray stone maybe fifteen feet tall, and the view from the top of it would have been the view they were promised. Nelson looked at it and felt his knee send up a formal objection, and he felt his pride do the thing his pride always did, which was vote the objection down.

"There's the view," he said, and started toward it.

Thad caught up to him in four steps. "Nelson. There's an easier scramble around the left side. Or I can give you a hand."

"I don't need a hand. I climbed worse than this in the Dolomites when I was fifty."

"When you were fifty," Thad said gently. "Fourteen years ago."

"Fourteen years is nothing. Fourteen years is a Tuesday." Nelson got a foot up on the first ledge, felt the knee file its complaint in writing, kept going, got a hand on the next hold, and then his shoe skated on a patch of dry lichen and the whole world tilted, and he had exactly enough time to think, oh, this is going to hurt, before a pair of strong