“She can’t leave?”
“Coroner’s coming from Flag. Retired Air Force surgeon, just elected. Everything by the book. Wants to visit the scene before he accompanies the boyfriend’s body back to town. Until then, Begay says she stays close.”
Chuck recalled the man’s Isotopes sweatshirt. “She’s from Albuquerque?”
“Yep.”
“The guy fell? That’s what Donald said.”
Rachel inclined her head. “Something to do with a fight. She says he was showing off, trying to save face. Climbed up on the railing, struck a pose, slipped. Big guy, like her. Never had a chance.”
“The fight was between the two of them?”
“No. Him and some other guy. She says it was over before it began. Doesn’t sound like there’s much to it. This woman and her boyfriend, from the sound of things, their whole life was one big brawl.”
“‘Big’ being the operative word.”
“Zipper on the body bag blew out during the retrieval. Paramedics had to suture him back in just to get him to the top.” Rachel’s lips ticked upward in the start of a smile.
Chuck had forgotten how much he enjoyed being with her. He gave the roof of her car an amiable tap. “Good seeing you.”
“You, too.” She sounded as if she meant it. She accelerated a few feet, then stopped and stuck her head out the window. “Good luck, family man,” she said, before ducking back inside and driving away.
He stood in the middle of the exit until an approaching car sounded its horn behind him, herding him out of the way. The evening sunlight winked out as a small cloud passed in front of the sun. Chuck dug his fingers into the palms of his hands as he headed across the campground toward Janelle and the girls, his thoughts returning to the woman from Albuquerque. Why had she ignored him when she’d spotted him spying on her? Why hadn’t she told Rachel it was Chuck who had punched her boyfriend?
According to Rachel, Chuck’s fight with the guy in the Isotopes sweatshirt was at least partly to blame for the guy’s death. Chuck kicked at a pinecone lying in the campground drive. He knew one thing for sure: he had to get away from here. He shouldn’t have agreed to come to the canyon. There was no rush for Janelle to learn the details of his profession; she’d get to know all about what he did for a living as she got to know him.
He stopped.
Janelle didn’t really know him yet, did she? As fast as everything had happened between them, how could she? And, when it came right down to it, Chuck knew just as little about her.
It was far too soon for Janelle to judge the strength of their marriage. How could either of them measure their true commitment to each other at this early stage? That was the reasoning he would present to her as soon as they were back in Durango. She would agree that they should give themselves enough time to fully get to know one another, and things between them would smooth out.
He resumed walking. He had to get away from the canyon with Janelle and the girls, get back to the new life they were still in the process of creating for themselves in Colorado. No excuse he could come up with would convince Janelle to break camp this evening and drive back to Durango through the night, but he’d be able to come up with something by morning that would require their departure—maybe a sudden need to finish the final report on the transmission-line project sooner rather than later for Marvin Begay.
Yes, that excuse would work when he trotted it out over breakfast tomorrow. All he had to do was make it through tonight.
The girls were seated side by side at the picnic table eating dinner when Chuck returned to camp. Rosie’s cheeks were shiny with chicken grease. She bounced up and down in excitement at his appearance. Even Carmelita, looking up from wiping each of her fingers fastidiously with a paper towel, brightened at his approach.
Janelle waved him over to where she sat in her camp chair. “My folks are so glad we made it,” she told him. She held up her phone, beaming. “Dolores and Amelia, too,” she added, naming her closest friends in Albuquerque.
Chuck took in Janelle and the girls. This would work. Sunset in a little while, a good night’s sleep followed by a second round of pancakes in the morning, then, upon checking messages, he would announce that Marvin had moved up the delivery date for the final report, and Janelle would agree to head for home. Once they were back in Durango, they would have the time and space their still-developing relationship needed. The girls would start school. Janelle would finish moving into Chuck’s house. And he would do whatever it took to prove himself to her.
As for what had happened this morning on Maricopa Point? That was done, finished.
“And guess what,” Janelle announced with a wide smile, her phone now clasped between her palms. “Clarence is joining us. He’s on his way right now!”
SEVEN
7 p.m.
Chuck glanced away in an attempt to hide his dismay. Why hadn’t Janelle checked with him first?
She leaned forward, trying to catch his eye. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Chuck looked back at her. “Really.”
So much for the truth, always the truth, between them.
“It was his idea, Chuck. He’s so excited for me. For us. He asked if he could come. Of course I said yes. He’s my brother.”
“And my brother-in-law.”
“And your assistant. Is that what this is about?”
“Was my assistant. The fieldwork’s finished.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“I told you. No problem.” Which was, to a certain extent, the truth.
Chuck had enjoyed working with Clarence Ortega more than any other subcontractor he’d hired over the years. Twenty-four months on the transmission-line project, the longest contract Chuck had ever worked, and Janelle’s brother had been with him the whole time.
Clarence had been a fresh graduate out of the University of New Mexico School of Anthropology who’d been smart enough to follow up the résumé he’d sent Chuck with a personal phone call. At Chuck’s side, as the two worked their way section by section, month after month, along the transmission-line right-of-way across the Navajo Reservation, Clarence had proven himself to be hard-working, eager to learn, and acceptably, if not entirely, reliable.
As had Chuck in his early twenties, Clarence partied too long and too hard on a number of weeknights over the course of the contract. He’d arrive at the worksite an hour or two late on those occasions, uncharacteristically soft-spoken, clearly hung over, and not worth a dime productivity-wise. Clarence hadn’t racked up enough of those unproductive days for Chuck to make an issue of them. Besides, Chuck enjoyed having Clarence around. The young man was friendly and easygoing. He got along well with Chuck and, notably, with young Navajos across the reservation as well.
Clarence mixed easily with the twenty-something Navajos, many chronically unemployed, who filled the rez towns along the transmission-line route, hanging out in fast-food joints and crowding the impromptu flea markets held several days a week in every reservation community. While working for Chuck, Clarence often spent his weekends just across the border from Arizona in the mid-sized city of Gallup, New Mexico. The primary gathering spot on the rez for young tribal members was a few miles southeast of Window Rock, the Arizona town that served as the official capital of the Navajo Nation.
“My Latino people been mixing it up with Indian folks ‘round here for more than four hundred years,” Clarence said with a laugh when Chuck gave him a hard time about his late-night wanderings. “I’m just keeping the tradition alive.”
Archaeological digs on the reservation often fostered accusations of grave robbery and cultural theft, which made Clarence’s off-hours role as an unofficial goodwill ambassador for Bender Archaeological a significant plus. Clarence’s informal public relations work on the reservation was particularly beneficial given the unusually long timeframe of the transmission-line contract. It made good business sense, then, for Chuck to cut Clarence some slack on the rare occasions
the young man’s off-the-clock fun limited his on-the-job performance.
Not until this past spring had Chuck accepted Clarence’s long-tendered offer to swing through Albuquerque and meet his parents, Enrique and Yolanda. Janelle stopped by her parents’ small stucco home in Albuquerque’s South Valley the same evening Chuck showed up for dinner, and Chuck’s life had been on fast-forward ever since.
Carmelita and Rosie looked up at Chuck from the picnic table as he stared out across the campground. No way could he convince Janelle to return to Durango tomorrow morning with the girls’ Uncle Clarence set to arrive here tonight. If Chuck announced that Marvin Begay had moved up the deadline for the final transmission-line report, Janelle would suggest, logically enough, that Chuck work on the report in camp on his laptop while she, the girls, and Clarence explored the South Rim on their own.
Chuck took a deep breath. Any way he looked at it, he was trapped at the canyon for at least another day. The best thing he could do, he supposed, was get used to the idea. He exhaled. Everything would be all right. The woman from Albuquerque had chosen not to point him out to Rachel when she’d had the chance. She would leave in the morning to accompany her boyfriend’s body to Flagstaff. After that, Chuck would be in the clear.
He summoned a smile and slipped behind the girls. “Hear that? Your Uncle Clarence is coming!” He tickled each of them in turn. Rosie shrieked in delight, laying her head back against Chuck’s chest. Even Carmelita managed a giggle as she curled her shoulders away from him.
“We gotta eat,” he said to Janelle, waving her over to the table. “Sunset’s in forty-five minutes.”
They left camp at a brisk walk fifteen minutes later and arrived at crowded Grandeur Point just west of the South Rim Visitor Center as the last of the sun’s rays set fire to the farthest walls of the canyon. The topmost ramparts of Shiva Temple, a wedding-cake-layered butte rising a vertical half-mile from the bottom of the canyon, shone like a Roman candle in the last of the day’s sunlight.
Chuck positioned Janelle and the girls against the overlook railing and used Janelle’s phone to snap pictures with Shiva glowing behind them. Rosie jumped from one foot to another. Carmelita held her mother’s hand and displayed a timid smile.
When an elderly man with a heavy German accent offered to take a picture of the four of them together, Chuck handed him the phone and found it easy to slide behind Janelle and the girls at the railing and grin over the tops of their heads. He accepted the phone back from the German man, draped an arm around Janelle’s shoulders, and looked out over the canyon. Around them, dozens of tourists spoke in reverent tones in all sorts of languages as daylight gave way to dusk. The setting sun splashed the cliffs of the North Rim with orange and red, and shadows smoldered deep in the purpling canyon below the pulsating cliffs, the Colorado River a thin dark curl at the bottom of the gorge.
The four of them headed back to the campground after the last of the sun’s rays left the canyon. Chuck tucked his hand around Janelle’s waist as they ambled alongside one another while the girls skipped ahead. This was everything he had imagined married life could be, though he’d always thought of it with friends and acquaintances in mind, not himself. As he’d told Rachel two years ago, ‘til-death-do-you-part never had been part of what he’d pictured for his future, not after his upbringing, if it could be called that, as a lonely only child with a mostly absent mother and entirely absent father. Yet here he was, barely four months after meeting Janelle, and he couldn’t dream of being any happier than he was at this minute.
Yes, there was still the stuff that was eating at him, to use Janelle’s terminology. And there was her time-limit comment earlier today in the museum. But all that was muted this evening. Maybe the death of the guy he’d punched had something to do with it, the finality of the bulging body bag. Chuck was ashamed to think how eager he’d been to confront the guy on Maricopa Point. But he was through with all that now. No more looking for fights. That version of himself didn’t fit with being a committed husband to Janelle and parent to Carmelita and Rosie. He pulled Janelle close as they walked, happy to find that, for the first time since he’d stood beside her and pronounced a shaky “I do” to the Albuquerque City Hall clerk twenty-some days ago, he had no qualms whatsoever about his life’s recent radical change of course.
When they got back to camp, Janelle phoned Clarence while Chuck picked up the hatchet and called the girls over. He made a show of removing the plastic head cover.
“It’s super sharp,” he warned Carmelita as he handed her the hatchet. This time, she took it from him without hesitation. “Now that the cover’s off, this is the real deal.”
She shot him a pointed look, identical to one of Janelle’s. “I’m good,” she replied. “Seriously.”
Janelle watched while talking on the phone with Clarence, her eyes wide with concern, as Chuck fetched firewood from a box beneath the camper and wadded up pages of newspaper. The girls stayed close to him as darkness closed in around them.
Chuck took the hatchet back from Carmelita and demonstrated how to strip thin slices of kindling from one of the chunks of split cedar he’d brought from Durango.
“See?” he said as he leaned the piece of wood against the metal wall of the fire pit and angled a gentle stroke down its side. A reddish-hued sliver peeled from the chunk of wood and the air filled with the pungent aroma of cedar. He flipped the hatchet in his hand and held it out to Carmelita by its handle. “Take it easy. It’s not about blunt force. The idea is to let the sharpness of the blade do the work.”
Carmelita took the hatchet while Rosie, on her toes, looked on.
“Can I do it, too? Can I? Can I?” she begged.
“Afraid not,” Chuck told her.
“Awww.”
“For now, Carm will have to take your cuts for you.” He turned to Carmelita. “All set?”
She nodded, dead serious. Chuck steadied the chunk of cedar and stepped back.
“Spread your feet so there’s no chance of hitting your leg if you miss,” he instructed.
She took a couple of practice swings, then let the hatchet fall so gently against the piece of cedar that the blade didn’t even bite into the wood. She shot an embarrassed look at Janelle, who raised her eyebrows in nervous encouragement, still talking to Clarence on the phone.
Carmelita licked her lips and lifted the hatchet for another try. She swung the hatchet downward with a little more force, breaking a small piece of kindling free from the chunk of cedar.
“Yippee!” Rosie cheered.
“Now you’re getting it,” Chuck said.
Carmelita set herself again and took several light chops at the chunk of wood, her confidence growing with each blow. Over the course of a few minutes, she reduced a third of the piece of cedar to a pile of kindling. Chuck showed her how to arrange the kindling pieces and larger chunks of firewood in a pyramid over the wadded-up newspaper in the center of the fire pit. He helped her put a lighter to the base of the pyramid. The flames licked upward, illuminating her face.
“You did it, Carm!” Rosie squealed, dancing around the fire.
Carmelita crouched in front of the flames and held out her hands to the growing warmth. “Yeah,” she said softly. “I did.”
“Way to go,” Janelle praised Carmelita, lowering her phone.
“And she’s still got all ten fingers,” Chuck said.
“You didn’t tell me my daughters would become ax-wielding pyromaniacs if we came here.”
“Daugh-ter,” he corrected, pointing at Carmelita. “She’s a natural.”
Carmelita straightened her back but did not look up from the flames.
“Agreed,” Janelle said. She set her phone on the picnic table. “He’s two hours out. Almost to Flagstaff.”
“Good to hear.” Chuck found himself looking forward to Clarence’s arrival. He’d missed working with him since the completion of the fieldwork portion of the transmission-line contract a month ago. Janelle’s broth
er had been fun on the job; he’d be just as fun here at the canyon.
Before bedtime, the girls enjoyed their first-ever marshmallow roast, during which Rosie slimed her hair with a long string of melted white sugar. The sliming precipitated a trip with Janelle to the hot-water tap in the sink of the nearest bathroom. Just as Janelle and Rosie returned to camp, Carmelita said that she, too, needed to visit the bathroom.
“You can’t be serious,” Janelle said in response to Carmelita’s ill-timed announcement.
“You don’t need to go with her,” Chuck said, gesturing at the well-lit bathroom building little more than a hundred feet away. “She’s seven. She’s a big girl.” He pointed at the fire. “She proved it.”
Carmelita’s eyes grew large at Chuck’s proposal. “Can I, Mamá?”
Janelle looked from Carmelita to Chuck and back. “I guess,” she said hesitantly. “Straight there, straight back, got it?”
“Got it,” Carmelita said with a solemn nod to her mother. Then she looked at Chuck for reassurance.
“I meant what I said,” he told her. “You’re a big girl. You can handle it.”
She nodded again, this time to herself. Chuck held a flashlight out to her from his seat by the fire. She dusted her hands on the sides of her striped sweat pants and looked out at the darkness. Then she accepted the flashlight and set off. Janelle watched the beam of light bob away up the gravel road.
“Oh, Chuck,” she said, her voice small.
She reached for him from her chair. The fire crackled and popped. A tendril of wood smoke drifted between them. Chuck took Janelle’s hand in both of his. How incredibly brave—or foolhardy—she was. Her life as a single mother in Albuquerque had been fine—decent apartment, steady job as an office receptionist, built-in babysitters in her parents—yet she’d sacrificed it all for a lifelong bachelor who didn’t know a thing about raising kids, or how to be involved in a fully committed adult relationship either, for that matter. Late last month, she’d left her friends, her family, her whole world behind in New Mexico to embark on an entirely new life for herself and the girls in the mountains of southwest Colorado, far from everything and everyone she’d ever known. Now here she was, trusting the well-being of her oldest daughter to a man she’d known only a few months. If Chuck was nervous about his new life with Janelle, then Janelle had every right to be terrified of her new life with him.
Canyon Sacrifice Page 5