The Way Out Read online

  Then came the storm. At first there were only a couple of plinking sounds off the drum of the roof, like the first strikes of hail out of a thunderhead. A beer can crushed and thrown. A half-eaten chicken leg lobbed. The sounds multiplied, each slightly different in tone, one adding to the next until the hail poured down upon them, a steady, deafening roar from above. Glass bottles, forks, slices of tomato, handfuls of ice, a head of lettuce, a tennis shoe, pocket change.

  Buzz clutched the microphone, demanding backup. A paper-plate Frisbee winged against Dirk’s window, splattering the glass with Jackson Pollock ketchup and mayonnaise, a slice of bread sliding down, finally falling to the ground.

  “Bullshit,” Dirk shouted. He reached behind the seat for his riot helmet. “We’re sitting here like fish in a fucking barrel!”

  “Just hold tight, you hear?”

  “Bullshit.” He clapped, shoving the helmet onto his head, snapping the face shield into position. He reached beside him and jerked the seat-side shotgun from its hold.

  The door flew open. The shotgun barrel lurched into position, as quick and wicked as a rattrap. Each cut of his posture announced the weapon, broadcasting his force clear across the park. He marched into the people, arcing his barrel from side to side, every arc sending a ripple of recoil into the crowd, wind touching grass.

  “Which one of you motherfuckers wants to die today?” he bellowed. “Come on! Which one of you motherfuckers wants to die today?”

  The crowd parted as sirens sounded in the distance. People turned and ran. They saw it in him, that he might just do it, that someone’s chest might get shredded open. He was the man. He would kill.

  The men with dark, netted hair, tattooed shoulders bare in the sun, staggered backward, trying to hold their ground against this sudden specter, jerking their heads back like startled horses. Even they fell away, cursing and thrusting their chins, eyes narrow with revulsion.

  Soon there was no one, as if a drop of oil had hit water. The shotgun never went off. No one else drew a weapon or hysterically charged him. Dirk, twenty-one years old, stood alone as the last of the people swept to the edges of the park like windblown leaves. Nearby picnics were left abandoned, ice chests still open. He turned slowly. He felt the swift percussion of his heart, his eyes still training back and forth, the adrenaline high of inhuman, godlike strength racing through his mind.

  So this is how it works, he thought.

  He heard sirens even closer now, patrol cars turning corners at vengeful speeds. A web spread around him. Every thin strand of it was visible to him, every fleeing set of eyes, each car leading toward the axis. He was the center point standing in the park, shotgun in hand like a lightning rod. He felt his body charged, focused, full of force that could cut through any obstacle. He was a weapon, an arrow, the shaft hissing through the air in flight. He was the man.

  DAY THREE

  We float the smooth surface of a desert waterway, a river’s gorge standing sheer around us. A dry and desolate cold pulls at the skin on our faces. As the bow of the boat nudges stone, Dirk jumps to the wall, landing on a ledge, the boat bucking behind him. His body is firm, well balanced as he moves. His hair is pulled back under his wool cap, tied above his shoulders. I throw him the bowline, and he swings it expertly around his wrist, securing it for an instant before reaching down with the loose end and sweeping it behind a few large rocks. The line goes taut. I situate myself with one foot on the bow, one on the ledge.

  “Start with the packs,” I say.

  Two companions are on the boat moving gear toward us. After they get the two of us unloaded this afternoon, they will travel on their own downstream. Dirk and I will be left to walk from here into the singer’s country. I heft the packs to Dirk, who rests them on the ledge.

  “Whatever’s left,” I say. “The camera. That water. The rope over there.”

  Gear is stacked piece by piece on the ledge until room is hardly left for us to maneuver without pitching into the water.

  It always seems this way before a long winter’s foot trek, as if there is too much equipment and food and clothing, an infeasible weight to strap on to our backs. Fuel, water containers, folded tarps, food sacks heavy as cinder blocks, winter clothing, cooking gear, sleeping bags, pads, rain and snow gear. Small bags of ceaseless miscellany: lighters, love letters, sewing needles, pens, film, compass, headlamp, spoon, bandages, maps. Winter is the heavy time of year. Packs are never light.

  We will sit on this ledge and deal with these things when our companions float away, arranging every last object by thrusting fistfuls into our packs. The two packs are slightly wider and taller than our torsos, made of heavy, dark Cordura and a festoon of straps and buckles.

  The last item to come to the ledge is a book of poetry, a massive tome. I cringe; I’d hoped we’d forget it. Twelve chapters. Seven hundred fifty-eight pages. We don’t truly know what kind of topography we are committing ourselves to, how much the smallest addition of weight will change our lives. It was Dirk’s idea to bring this along. I look to Dirk, and he also draws his brow when he sees the book.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “We can trade it off every day,” I offer, reaching out for it. Two hands are needed. I pass it to Dirk. He tests it by lifting it up, letting it drop, lifting it again. He glances up the gorge wall over our heads where this journey will begin, a narrow plunge of a canyon that can hardly be called a canyon—a chute, a slide, a five-hundred-foot-tall recess in a cliff face.

  “You start with it today,” he says.

  I nod in acceptance.

  A woman on the boat asks, “Is that it?”

  “We can’t carry any more,” I say.

  “All right, then. We’re gone.”

  I pull the bowline from between the rocks and toss it back. The boat hesitates, then drifts from us, turning downstream with the metal-wood sounds of movement, two people settling into their places. We watch them for a moment, waving good-bye, studying our gear, watching again as the boat becomes smaller.

  Our ledge goes nowhere. Either end dives into deep water. The only way from here is up. We both stand for a while, surveying our surroundings. On the other side of the gorge, spheres of sandstone rise above the walls, pressed together as if they might be giants wrestling each other to the ground. Beyond this commotion of stone are the lifted heads of faraway buttes. Behind us we see nothing but the wall, a cliff that swallows everything.

  Customary languages do not suit a place like this. They are too simple, too general. Can I even call this thing above us a cliff or a wall? Such words do little to speak of the field guide of shapes in this country: twenty-foot benches, braided walls that wind in and out of each other, harrowing precipices, lone-standing strikes of rock, places that are gentle enough not to be called cliffs but where you die anyway if you fall, chalkboard faces seven hundred feet tall, and stubborn little pancake stacks of rock outcrops.

  This unmarked route above us is a common man’s cliff: perched ledges among gaping vaults, a variety of possibilities, plenty of vertigo interspersed with safe places where breath can be caught, rests taken. It is approachable enough to climb without ropes, just hands feeling for holds, eyes working the rock ahead.

  I glance at the book of poetry lying like a fat brick on the ground, picture on the cover of some wire-muscled poet holding a Prince Albert tobacco tin in his hand. Our ride is gone, vanished around the bend, so we can’t give it back.

  Dirk moves into the gear, flipping through items as if picking at a trash heap for something useful. It looks as if we have been dropped into a safari camp with all of this equipment, but we’ve done this before. More times than we can remember. We will work it down until everything fits onto our backs, and we will again adjust to moving with weight through complex terrain. That part of the journey we know. What we don’t know is this place ahead of us. We have only the maps, my memories from flying over, a book of poetry, and the words of an old man who hid out here as a child.
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br />   Fire Man

  I remember a camping trip I took with my father when I was seven years old. I remember my eyes were drawn into the fire. Boot-splintered limbs of ironwood glowed furiously beneath the flames. My father moved slowly around the edges, like a potter tending his kiln, slipping in sticks, which the fire took with the hungriness of a dog. Neither of us could see past the shadows into the night around us. The entire world was made of fire and blackness.

  Once my father’s creation was perfectly balanced, he said, “There,” and sat down beside me.

  This campfire was not a badge-earning Boy Scout blaze with logs stacked neatly into a pyramid. The branches were crooked and gnarled, set into each other’s crotches for support. The wood turned translucent in the center, breathing as the air shifted, white with heat.

  “It’s hottest in the coals,” my father said. He was then a young, strongly thin man. “The flames just let the heat escape. The coals, though . . .”

  He slipped a beer bottle into the fire, holding it by its neck, pushing a nest open into the coals. Then he quickly whipped his hand back from the heat. Slowly, the bottle bent into an amber glow. Its neck drooped into lenses of molten glass. My father did not smile at this. He only watched with fascination.

  “Fire is a living substance,” he said, not to me but to the fire itself. “It wants to spread. It calls out for wood, for anything. It is pure sensation searching for touch.”

  I traveled along his words, understanding only the trance of his tone.

  “It is filled with desire. It is life. The way of things is written in it.”

  He stood and walked to the truck, bringing back an assemblage of items, cradling the ingredients of a bomb. One item was an empty bean can. He poured into it a small amount of gasoline, swirling the can around as if about to take a drink.

  “If we really have been alive forever,” he said, fingering three .357 Magnum bullets into his palm where I could see them, “then I was the fire keeper. Back before we had flint and bow drills, I was the caveman who carried embers and called up the fire each night. That was my job.”

  He dropped the three bullets into his bean can of gasoline, and again he swirled his concoction, rattling the lead points like ice. He looked at me, judging my expression, seeing if I was prepared. He lifted the can to the sky, an offering. Then he nestled it into the coals.

  “Now, run. Get behind something.”

  I leaped to my feet and scrambled away from the fire, dodging into the darkness, where I dropped into the dirt-and-cobble trench of an arroyo. I glanced up from the barricaded edge, seeing the form of my pyrotechnician-shaman father still crouched in front of the fire. He rose, turned, walked swiftly toward me, and slipped into my shelter.

  “Don’t watch the fire,” he told me. “Stay out of its light.”

  I scooted to the bottom of the arroyo, a cheek against coarse sand.

  The first shot exploded, flashing the surrounding paloverde trees as our campfire blew apart. Instinct jolted my body into the ground. Before, there had been nothing in my night but fire and its halo of darkness. Now there was only the bullet’s discharge stretching through every spectrum of my hearing.

  The second bullet followed instantly. There was no sound of bursting windshield glass or the dead pang of metal struck with a bullet. They must have both fired straight into space.

  The third . . . we waited for it. Ten seconds. Twenty. How long do we wait? Is it ever safe? Too curious to stay put, I inched up to the edge. I saw burning coals all around the fire, as if a building had just burned down and this was all that was left. Small bunches of dry grass ignited, little conflagrations eeking across the ground. Burning ironwood limbs lay scattered. What an astounding mark.

  The third. Any second.

  I shrank behind the arroyo’s bank, looking to my father for instruction. I could not see his face in the dark. He lay on his back against the slope.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Had the third bullet been blown free of the heat? Did it rest in a field of scattered coals, its gunpowder gradually warming? Was it on the cold ground as if dropped from a pocket?

  I wrestled, waiting for it, thinking that I was about to pop, my heart ballooning in my chest.

  My father heard the itchiness of my movement, clothes against the ground. Again, he said, “Wait.”

  Wait.

  I sat in the secret dark beyond the fire listening through the snaps and whips of heat and flame for the sound. I held every sense in my imagination—the oily-sweet smell of creosote bushes, the burn of stars. They would be gone at any second, exploded from my grasp.

  Wait.

  POW! Sound bolted my body into itself, arms crunched against my rib cage. It was over that fast, replaced by the night’s silence. How could it be? I wondered. Did it even happen? Did the third bullet really discharge, or was I eternally caught in this moment of anticipation my father had assembled, hovering like a bullet not yet fired?

  My father stood and wiped his hands on his pants. He looked across the remains of our fire, and he called it good.

  DAY FOUR

  This stone is the color of blood stirred into buttermilk. It goes on for miles, nothing but solid rock and a single far-off juniper tree, a few flares of last season’s ricegrass leaning wind-bent from the cracks.

  Yesterday we left, climbing from the water up the gorge wall to this higher country of rolling stone domes, setting camp on a high mesa. Today, wind wraps this earth like muscles over a skeleton, some places bone-bare, others strapped by dense, streaming tissue.

  Dirk stops, the weight of his life trussed to his back. He lifts his head into the cold winter bluster as if smelling for something. I stop, too, my head down to block the wind.

  Suddenly, he starts shouting at me. Through the wind I don’t get all the words. Something about high-impact urban police work, how this place reminds him of it. His hands are flying, so at least I know the nature of what he is telling me. I get bits and pieces, him saying that there are no sex crimes or daily murders here, but that just like on the streets, everything here happens on an elevated plain. I hear him shout that each brush of wind and chime of breaking glass was once filled with meaning for him.

  If you want to survive you gotta understand tones of voices and how someone has parked a car, if it’s parked hurriedly, if the engine’s still hot. Same way here; there’s a language of landscape. Rock ledges and thunderstorm floods and water holes. You gotta learn the subtleties.

  At least that is what I think I hear. I would expect it. He has long believed that his work as a cop and his life in the wilderness are both driven by the same desire to navigate complex terrain. But he never says it calmly. Always, his explanations are thrilling. What brought it on this time? Probably this wind bearing down on us like a swarm of wasps. We’ve been walking for miles without conversation, and finally, his thoughts are breaking free. He comes right up to me, leaning on his argument, his face fearsome like a mad evangelist. Now he’s poking me in the chest, and I can hear him clearly over the wind. I avoid his eyes.

  With every poke, he tells me that he used to walk into bars and watch the eyes fall on his uniform, that he had to figure out his escape routes, who was going to shoot him, who was hiding a crime, who wasn’t, and that here he doesn’t see just a landscape but a web of possibilities, endless routes. He reads the land the same way he would read a person’s face. Finger poking, he explains, “You walk into the landscape and you’re wired tight, nailed to the fucking wall, every sense amplified.”

  The wind unaccountably dies, and we lean away from each other in the release. Wind does this out here, regulated by the tumescence of the land. We hear it elsewhere, hemming over far ridges, thrusting ferretlike into lower canyons.

  The sudden void defuses him. His voice lowers. He takes a break. With the volume of a table conversation now, he tells me that this place is some kind of Tao, a way of living, something of religions and philosophies.

  “It’s not j
ust some place,” he says. “Not some piece of ground. It’s a way of comprehension, one of the paths available to our minds. You can’t help having an internal dialogue out here. You just can’t help it. No wonder people keep away from places like this. This is the last thing they want, a completely undistracted internal dialogue.”

  I’ve got a sore spot from his poking, and I am wondering about his brain, how it must be just a mess of fallen boulders in there, busted tree limbs, dust devils whipping sand hither and thither. Still, none of his comments catch me by surprise, though I can never anticipate what he might start shouting in the wind.

  We move again, drifting away from each other with the conversation unfinished, words replaced by boot scrapes and the hunph! of landing on the other side of a fissure. We travel across the stone like hunters, shoulders shifting to the terrain, ducking into parched flood draws and up their other sides. Miles of wind-eroded sandstone bells lift around us, many too sheer and steep to be climbed. This is the singer’s territory. His childhood refuge lies some miles ahead, a region out of our view where the land descends into a cauldron of gorges. We only have theories about what it is like inside. The singer did not wag his finger telling us to beware; he never said anything about finding water or a thousand dead-end passages. He only explained that it was a place where no one could be found.

  On the other side of all this we will eventually reach the water again, and a supply cache that we left hidden in sand. There, friends have agreed to meet us; they will float in and pick us up in the still of backwater. We have two weeks to get there.

  The old man had told us that armies of the United States once rounded up whatever natives could be found in the Southwest and marched them hundreds of miles to winter encampments in the east, a walk that left a good number of them dead. A couple of dozen Diné broke away from this march, fleeing here to this lifeless quarter. Some came from near present-day Kayenta, Arizona, others from Black Mesa, forming a group of distantly related families, people who had found one another at the last moment. Troops were sent in pursuit, hunting these Diné families as they fled and scattered into the cliffs like birds.