To Find a Mountain

Chapter Twenty

I walked with Dominic because I wanted to. Maybe it was the way he had led me up the mountain, or maybe it was because Papa was older and would not move as quickly as we could. Besides, there was a bit of a thrill to the chase and a part of me wanted to be the one who found the parachute and all the surprises that might be inside.

When we got out of sight from the farmer’s house, we circled around and paused briefly to decide the best strategy to find the parachute. We decided Papa would wait at the starting point, and Dominic and I would walk out and back, slowly covering the area.

As soon as Dominic and I started walking, I asked him about the color of the parachute and why it was important enough for Papa to ask the old man about it.

“The Americans use different colored parachutes to identify what kind of cargo is inside. I don’t know all the different colors and what they mean, but I do know a few,” he said. “Black is the most important and the most dangerous.”

“Dangerous?”

“Black parachutes, from what I’ve heard — I’ve never actually found one, supposedly have radio equipment and disassembled weapons. Rifles, pistols, machine guns, hand grenades.”

“They’re dangerous because they might explode upon landing?”

He laughed.

“No, no. Because if the Germans catch you with either a radio or a gun, they will execute you immediately. Especially the radio. They hate radios, more Germans have been killed because of ribellí radioing locations of German soldiers to the Allies that they take revenge upon anyone they find with a radio,” he said. His blue eyes blazed in the shade of the trees. “And if they find you with either one, radio or gun, it is not just you they will go after. Friends, family, children. No one is immune.”

“They assume you’re spying…”

He nodded. “Just for having those things in your possession.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t so eager to find the parachute.

“Red parachutes usually have medical supplies,” Dominic continued, changing the subject.

“And yellow?” I asked.

“The best one of all for us: food. Coffee, sugar, flour, cigarettes and even chocolate.”

“That’s why we’re going to try to find this one?”

“That’s why.”

We scrambled over a large rock pile choked with weeds, possibly the remnants of a misguided bomb. I was once again amazed by the devastation the war was having on the land itself. Like the people who inhabited it, nothing was left untouched.

As we picked our way through thick brush and the occasional rocky outcroppings, I was struck even more by the easy grace of Dominic Giancarlo. His long body moved with a fluid motion, never seeming to bring down all of his weight on his feet, constantly springing from one step to the next. Supple strength and a mind accustomed to walking in the mountains gave him that ability.

When the going was easy, we walked side by side. When the rough path we were following narrowed, Dominic would lead the way. If we had to climb over a steep bank, he would climb over, then reach back and pull me up; I noticed how his big hands wrapped around my forearm, his fingers like iron on my skin.

We talked as we walked, mostly about him because he seemed to know a lot about me already, having spent time with my father.

Dominic told me about Roselli, about where he lived, and that he was the third child, with two older brothers. They, too, were in the mountains, he said, but were staying with a different group for the time being.

“Do the men in the mountains move around much?” I asked.

“Yes. I have been with my brothers at their hideout, and they have been with us. Our plan was to spread out and see where the best place to hide from the Germans would be, but the truth is, they’re pretty much all the same. Isolated areas of farmland where there is very little food and water, rough conditions, but thankfully, few Germans. That last bit is the most important part.”

Dominic related to me the story of how he had managed, along with his brothers, to escape to the mountains immediately upon the Germans’ arrival. A young couple from Roselli had been on the outskirts of town late at night and heard the sound of the German vehicles approaching.

“What were they doing, the young couple?”

Dominic looked at me strangely, then raised an eyebrow.

“Oh,” I said, blushing.

He said that they had been able to warn the people of Roselli, an even smaller town than Casalveri, that the Germans were arriving and the message spread like wildfire.

“My mother woke us up,” Dominic smiled, remembering. “She was practically screaming at us to run. She scared the hell out of us,” he laughed, rolling his eyes. “My brother Antonio took forever to wake up. Momma practically broke off one of his toes trying to get him awake. He snores so loud it’s ridiculous. I think the men hiding with him in the mountains are ready to turn him over to the Germans.”

Now it was my turn to laugh.

“Anyway,” he said, “Momma threw some extra clothes at us and gave us all the bread in the house and sent us on our way.”

“She didn’t want to take any chances with her sons…”

He nodded. “Some of the other younger men in the village didn’t make it. They got caught on their way out, and went to the front two days later. Most of them are dead now.”

“Is your father in the mountains, too?” I asked, realizing that he had not mentioned his father at all yet. Normally I wouldn’t have brought it up, but I wanted to know everything about this young man.

At the sound of the word “father,” Dominic’s stride hesitated. He stopped and looked me in the eye, then, as if coming to a decision, he answered.

“My father disappeared many years ago. From what people told Momma, he was just an unhappy man. Didn’t want to work the land, and so he did what he wanted; he left.”

“I’m sorry, Dominic, I didn’t mean to…”

He waved a hand.

“No, it’s all right. We did fine without him. From what Momma said, he wasn’t much help anyway.”

We walked on for quite a while in silence. Up ahead, a distant peak continued to loom larger as we approached. It was our compass point. The old man said that if we walked straight toward it, we should come across the parachute, it had landed directly between the old man’s farm and the mountain ahead. It was difficult to see too far ahead because the land rose and dipped so frequently, we couldn’t get a real glimpse of what lay ahead until we topped the jagged and unpredictable hills.

We climbed a constantly shifting hill of soft clay, small rocks and thick stands of juniper bushes. Dominic went over the hill first and when I followed him, reaching the bottom, I crashed into his back. We both went down in a heap and when we stood up, there was the parachute on the ground wrapped in its thick fabric.

There were animal tracks around it, but for the most part nothing seemed disturbed. The depression in which the parachute lay was guarded on both sides by the steep banks, and the thick grass, along with shadow, made the bright yellow less visible. It was easy to understand why it had gone unnoticed for this amount of time.

From the way the parachute sat on the ground, it looked like the cylindrical metal tube containing the cargo had cracked on a rock and shattered into many pieces. Boxes were strewn around the small depression. One had split open and cartons of American cigarettes were spilled onto the ground.

Dominic turned to me.

“I’ll start bundling these things together. Go back and get your father. Hurry. We don’t have much time.”