by Zoje Stage
“We need to refill the canteens before we go,” Beck said.
Gale nodded. “Gather ’em up,” he told Imogen.
She could’ve used a drink of water. Some breakfast. Even after a big meal the night before, she always woke up hungry. Beck was probably dying for some coffee, but she and Tilda remained bound on their sides, tethered to Imogen’s walking stick. Everything else was ready to go. Imogen grabbed four canteens and headed out of the shelter, relieved to see the sun, normal and rising.
The crisp air roused her a bit, its movement across her face a fleeting reminder of the dream she’d been having when Tilda’s screams awakened her.
34
She thought Gale meant for her to go to the creek alone and her mind moved its scrabbled tiles around, trying to form a coherent idea: What could she do? When he came scurrying along behind her, spear in hand, she swiftly rearranged them: What could they do? Could Beck and Tilda get themselves untied? Waylay him upon their return? Gale must have been feeling confident but Imogen knew her sister would do something; Beck wouldn’t let this opportunity go to waste.
He made her scamper along faster than she would have liked, so she tried to think of ways to distract him, ways to slow them down, if only a little. Give Tilda and Beck that much more time.
“Is your arm feeling any better?” They were almost to the creek.
“A bit. Yer sis is right, helps to rest it.” Gale held the spear like the walking stick it was, blade pointed to the sky. He looked out toward where the man had come across the day before, as if he expected company any minute. Imogen had long given up hope that the backpacker had companions, but that didn’t mean other people weren’t on the way.
She knelt by the edge of the water. It could only sluice into the canteens at its own rate, but she prayed for it to run a little slower. Please? For me? Maybe there was still a chance for her to strengthen her connection to him; she still worried she was the only one capable of it, despite Beck’s personal ammunition with Afiya’s pregnancy. Beck and Tilda didn’t believe they had anything in common with Gale, but Imogen understood that certain desires and fears were universal.
“Maybe this sounds weird,” she said, “after everything that’s happened, but…we appreciate how you’re trying to look after us. And know you don’t want to hurt us.” She hoped she could get him in a chattier mood. At least Gabby Gale could seem like a sympathetic person, and Paranoid Gale was always bad news. “And we understand now, about time, how precious it is. Maybe this is all you have left.” She looked up at him, hoping to draw his attention, wanting him to read her sincerity. When he met her eyes, she went on. “I know you might not believe me, but…I think we all have empathy for you. For how this got so…out of control.”
He scoffed. “I know what yer feeling fer me and it ain’t ‘poor Gale.’”
“Actually it is. Sort of.” She closed up the first canteen and started on the second. “I understood it, Gale, what you said before, about how things can go wrong. In life—not just one day. My life hasn’t gone as I thought it would. There are things that’ve happened that…messed me up, messed up everything else. There were things I used to want, and I pushed them away for so long, until eventually I believed I didn’t want them anymore. But the truth was, I didn’t know how to do anything differently, with my life. Beck was the one who really saw it. Sometimes it’s hard to look at your own crap. But I want to try to fix it. I see that in you—see you wanting to try to fix the things that got all screwed up. I know it’s not easy.”
And she really did see that, his desire for things to be different, his desire to change and be better than what he was. Beyond his regrettable actions, she believed he possessed the capacity to love. And he’d shown glimpses of kindness. The only real difference between them was that she’d directed all her frustrations and anger inward, attacking herself, while Gale directed his outward.
“Sometimes people get turned around,” she said. “If things had been different…I know you didn’t want to end up here.”
“So ya get it then.” He nodded—at nothing, at the distance. “I fucked it all up, I admit that. And it’s too late fer me now.”
“Are you sure?” She meant that earnestly. There were times when the thought of him, the fear of what he might do, was worse than his actual presence. Talking with him one-on-one, her optimism returned. “It might not be too late—and even if you feel like it is for you, it doesn’t have to be for all of us. I think you feel bad, about a lot of things. You don’t have to add me and Beck and Tilda to your conscience.”
She finished another canteen, set it aside, and immediately started on the next.
He shifted his jaw, chewed on the inside of his cheek. Imogen thought he might be fighting back tears. “I like you girls, I do,” he said softly. “Yer different, from other people I met. Kinda weird, but ya got pluck. I like that. I kinda wish…wish we could sit around a campfire and share stuff, real stuff, about our lives. I think…I think you’d actually listen. You, anyway.”
“I would.” It touched her, more deeply than she expected, that he saw something of value in her—patience, or compassion. An ability to listen to and understand someone else’s story. “We should do that. Maybe later, when we get resettled at Slate.”
The thought of it brought her a warm rush of hope. It’s working! But Gale was lost in another universe.
“I wish…” He sounded dreamy, wistful. “I wish we had some poison, and we could have our meal, eat up everything we got left, and then…drift off to sleep. Peaceful.”
What? How could he be fantasizing about them all dying together while she was trying to give him reasons to let them live?
He snapped back to the here and now, his tone turning harsh. “You finished?”
Imogen pressed the last of the canteens deeper into the water, now urging it to hurry. He sure knew how to suck the oxygen out of a room.
“That’s enough, come on. There a creek out at the other place?”
“I don’t know—”
“Don’t matter, this is enough.” He shooed her away from her task and she twisted the lid on the last canteen. She carried all four, and they hung heavily by the fingers of her manacled hands. Gale strode slightly ahead of her with his spear–walking stick, fast enough that she had to jog to keep up. But he stepped aside, grinning, to let her take the lead on the final scramble up to the overhang. “Just in case they got an ambush planned, they’ll club you first.”
Imogen needed a second for her eyes to adjust to the shadows at the back of the shelter, but whatever she’d been hoping Beck and Tilda might conjure in Gale’s absence…They weren’t free, hiding in the wings, ready to attack. Everything was just as she’d left it. Tilda and Beck were lying on their sides, a gap between them where she had once been. As Imogen secured the canteens to the packs, she studied their sleeping area more carefully. Was the dirt more scuffed up than it had been? Had Beck and Tilda shifted around? And wiggled back into place so it looked like they hadn’t been up to anything? Or maybe Imogen was seeing what she wanted to see.
“How far out to the other place?”
Beck lifted her head to answer him.
“Maybe there’s somewhere better,” Imogen suggested quickly, locking eyes with her sister. After hearing his morbid thoughts at the creek, Slate was the last place they should go—they needed to head toward people, not away. Counting on his ignorance, she threw out an idea. “Maybe Phantom?”
There were always people at Phantom Ranch. It even had small, year-round cabins; their dad still sometimes mentioned celebrating New Year’s there, if they could get it together to make reservations far enough in advance. Tilda looked from sister to sister, cautious and uncertain. Imogen couldn’t read Beck’s tense face. The walk to Phantom Ranch was ridiculously long, two solid days of hiking, but reaching it wasn’t her goal. Heading that way would take them back through the main corridor of trails, where they’d start passing other backpackers with increasing freque
ncy.
“That closer?” Gale asked.
“Farther,” said Beck.
“More private?”
Beck gave Imogen a tiny, sad shake of her head. “We’d have to go back through Hermit. And cross the Tricky Spot.”
This information was for Imogen, not Gale, and she got it: her sister was afraid to cross the gorge, hands bound, one eye out of commission, and with her knee still a question mark. Beck considered her odds for survival better at Slate. Oblivious, Gale strapped on his backpack.
“Ferget that, let’s stick with the other place. Better get ’em untied.” Gale gestured with his head and Imogen went to Tilda first, and started to undo her knots. “How long’s it gonna take?”
“No more than two or three hours,” said Beck, “and it’s a level walk.”
“Great. We’ll have breakfast there. Get away from…” He made an impatient, sweeping gesture—toward the walls, toward the world beyond the overhang.
It struck Imogen that he had no names for the things he was running away from. This canyon. The next one. The man he’d murdered. The thousand ghosts fast on the wind, threatening to catch up to him.
35
They were a mule train, packs on their backs, hands bound in front. As Gale demanded, they stayed within three feet of the person ahead of them: Beck limped in the lead, her pace slower than previous days; Tilda was in the middle, sniffling, maybe crying. In the full light of day she had what looked like an enflamed blister just above her right pinky, the venom a halo of red that engulfed half her hand. Once again, Imogen hiked behind them and in front of Gale. He’d tied the other two walking sticks to the back of her pack, “In case we need them.” She still felt conflicted about the fact that Gale didn’t view her as the least bit formidable. His spear made it easier than ever for him to swat her away like a pesky gnat.
Beck led them along Boucher Creek, in the opposite direction from the route that had taken them to the river. After a few hundred feet she paused, and they all stopped to consider the large cairn, a three-foot tower of rocks that someone had made to mark the trail. Usually cairns were smaller, three or four or five rocks; three was the minimum number to use as a trail marker, since two stacked rocks could be a coincidence. Beck pointed with her bound hands.
“We’ll take these switchbacks up to the Tonto, then it’s level the whole way from there.”
Beside them was a wall of Tapeats sandstone a hundred feet high. Short switchbacks zigzagged along the ledges, leading them out of Boucher canyon. As they clambered up, a realization slashed a wound in Imogen’s mind: they were off schedule now, no longer adhering to the locations indicated on their backcountry permit. It was too soon for anyone to think they were missing, but it would be harder to find them now, if someone did come looking. Imogen wanted to drop some crumbs—pieces of thread or fabric from her clothing, anything that a searcher might follow as a clue—but Gale was too close at her back.
Once they reached the Tonto Platform, Imogen scanned ahead for the trail out to Slate. She spotted pieces, but it was faint, a delicate demarcation of trampled red dirt. Beck said it was an easy walk, which physically seemed to be true, but without her in the lead they probably would have gotten lost. Imogen had never been on a path so little traveled, in the Canyon or elsewhere. It wound around washes and sometimes smudged into nothing, disappearing between the scraggy foliage that mottled the rolling desert.
Beck came to a full stop, scrutinizing the terrain ahead with her one functioning eye. Imogen immediately realized the problem and bypassed Tilda to stand beside her sister.
“Somebody coming?” Gale pointed his spear at Beck. Uh-oh, Paranoid Gale was emerging.
“No. There’s a split in the trail.” With her bound hands Beck indicated the left path, and the right. “I have to figure out which is the real one.”
“Won’t they end up at the same place?” he asked.
“No, probably not. All of the trails…they were originally animal tracks, and the animals aren’t necessarily trying to get from the same Point A to Point B that we are.” She shielded her good eye with her elbow, the best defense against the light that she could manage. The sun had reestablished its dominion, the drunk clouds long gone.
Gale scanned the terrain too, but whatever he was looking for it wasn’t the trail. “Get going, we don’t have all day.” He mock-thrust the spear in her direction.
“If I get it wrong we’ll have to backtrack.”
“Pick. I don’t like being so out in the open here.” He looked skyward. Eastward. Round about.
Did he think a satellite could detect him? Or that drones were hunting him down? Did he think he was so important that such resources would be allotted for his capture? Then again, they couldn’t be sure what else he’d done since killing the highway patrolman; maybe he was being pursued by law enforcement in multiple states. Strange to think that the worse his crimes, the more diligence would be put into apprehending him. Imogen wasn’t sure where that left her, or what she should be praying for. Tilda looked more forlorn than Imogen had ever seen her, gazing out with glassy eyes on a relentless wasteland.
Imogen blocked the glare with her forearm, eager to help Beck. Gale’s antsiness was infectious; she was feeling exposed too.
“Look near the head of the washes,” Beck advised her.
“Okay.”
“It can’t be that hard.” Even Tilda was getting impatient.
Beck and Imogen studied the land, trying to figure out where the missing pieces of the maze would lead.
“Aw, come on…” Fidgety, Gale struck out with his spear. Tilda shrieked, though she wasn’t the one he’d clipped. He might have intended it as a move-it-along nick, but the knife was sharp. A trickle of blood oozed through Beck’s shirt where he’d stabbed her upper arm. She gasped, her attention diverted to the gash she couldn’t reach.
Imogen grasped her sister’s arm in both hands and squeezed, trying to stanch the blood. “Come on, we’re really trying!” she yelled at Gale, a frantic whine in her voice.
“Sorry.” In his browbeaten apology Imogen saw a boy who trudged in shame on weekly visits to the principal’s office.
“Cut the bottom of my T-shirt and tear it off, we can use it as a bandage.” Imogen had never thought of herself as the bossy type, but Gale did as he was told. He lifted her sweatshirt out of the way and sliced off the bottom two inches of the shirt beneath it. “You okay?” she asked Beck.
“Think so.”
How many times in the past few days had they asked each other if they were okay? Tilda held her cuffed hands below her chin, her arms tight against her body as if she were freezing. She looked more hurt than Beck, a dazed despair on her face.
“I’m okay, Til,” Beck told her, and Tilda nodded yes yes of course, wild-eyed.
Gale yanked open the hole in Beck’s fleece to get access to her wound. He wrapped the strip of T-shirt around and around her upper arm and tied it in a knot. “It ain’t deep,” he said with the confidence of a man who knew about stab wounds.
Imogen’s palms were red. She didn’t want to see her sister’s blood smeared on her khaki shorts, so she bent a little to rub it off on her blackish leggings. For an instant she flashed on the synagogue, stained by violence, splattered with hate, desecrated by murder.
“Please girls, everybody just do what yer supposed to do.”
I thought we were. But aloud Imogen said, “I think it’s that one.” And gestured with her chin toward the path on the left.
“I think you’re right,” Beck said.
“See, no need fer so much fuss.”
Beck limped on as if nothing had happened, and the mule train fell into line.
The walking became monotonous. The creak of shifting packs. A distant whir of a helicopter. The faint song of a canyon wren. The muffled sound of their boots, swallowed by dust. Their heartbeats begged the prayers they couldn’t speak.
It might not have been a terribly long walk but it seemed inte
rminable. A palpable shroud drifted above them, a white windingsheet waiting to ready them for burial. Imogen struggled for words. She couldn’t concentrate on the present for her fear of the future. When she tried to examine her thoughts, her emotions, she found them in a state of evaporation, as if written in invisible ink, leaving her with an endless, wordless nothingness. There was only one question that mattered: Where was he taking them? And the answer: The end of the road.
There rose in her an impulse to scream. Her lungs filled, ready to release it, but Gale stole the air again.
“Y’all never chitchat while yer walking?” he asked. “You just…plod on, lost in yer own thoughts?”
His questions angled toward irritation. Did he really think they’d stroll along and gossip as if death weren’t on their heels?
“Walking’s good for thinking,” Beck replied.
“Well, it’s bugging me. All this…quiet. I thought girls were chatty but I know a dozen grown men who talk circles round all a you.”
Instead of reminding him of the circumstances, Imogen simply said, “If you want to talk, we’ll listen.”
He sighed. “I’d rather do the listening. Need some distraction. All this quiet and thinking, it’s like being stuck in a storm cellar.”
It was, rather. But Imogen was no longer in the mood to swap personal regrets or insecurities. She waited: perhaps Beck would take this moment to wax poetic on the greens and yellows and soft wood hues of a genderless baby room. Or maybe Tilda would tell them more about the life she was planning with Jalal. Imogen hadn’t realized, before the previous night, just how serious their relationship was getting. Tilda used to post boyfriend pics online, romantic dates, interesting excursions, or lessons learned from a recent argument. But, as with her volunteer work, she kept Jalal more private, and maybe that said everything about Tilda’s true priorities.