Inhabited

by Charlie Quimby

  She looked at the image in her phone. Leave a message for Isaac S. Did that mean he wouldn’t answer? Maybe she could glean some information from the voicemail or whoever answered. She wouldn’t have to leave her name.

  A woman answered without identifying herself. Was this the right number? “I’m calling for Isaac S...how do you spell his last name?”

  “Samson, no p, just like it sounds. Let me check.” The woman’s voice moved away from the receiver. Meg heard it set down with a clunk, then the squawk of a tired chair released of its burden. A dampened hum of voices.

  Isaac Samson? Besides Joe and Shelly, how many Samsons were there in town? It seemed unlikely they’d have a homeless relative. Shelly was in her book club. She’d never said anything. And Joe—beyond hellos, they’d really only talked once, years ago. About him knowing Helen...and Neulan and... She had told him about seeing Neulan at Cold Shivers! Nothing incriminating, just two sad people on a street outside a bar offering each other small comfort. But now anything said seemed too much. These were only dots, far apart in time, that inclined toward each other only in her mind. They might not connect at all. But Isaac Samson had edged them all closer.

  A pencil rattled out of a cup. “He’s not here right now. Do you want to leave a message?”

  Part Two

  September – October

  Homes are time capsules—some waiting to be filled, others sealed long ago.

  —“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style

  They had been such successful conspirators. No confederates or confidants. No letters or emails, no incriminating messages, no conversations that could be recorded and related back to the crime. Not even phone records, since Brian didn’t have a phone. Meg and Brian had developed no code words for the condition of fallen bodies, the whereabouts of glass eyes or the finer points of habeas corpus, so her only recourse was meeting in person. Brian would be surprised to see her, of course, and she accepted that he might surprise her. But for all their years of silence and separation, she trusted him more than anyone. If she had reason to worry, he would tell her. If she had screwed up, he would help her think through what to do. They were forever joined by Neulan, the way good divorced parents stayed responsible for their children even after they left the nest.

  She would have to tell Brian about her fateful first meeting with Joe Samson, drinking beer in a pizza place, his hair triple-mohawked from his bike helmet. She had kept it to herself for so long, it almost felt as if she had cheated. Joe’s story of riding Monument Road, the reason for his vigilance and his hope of saving the day. Super Samaritan in spandex. Joe remarked on her resemblance to Helen as if it had come as a revelation, as if he had been waiting half his life for this chance to confess and didn’t care that he was standing in front of a biker bar with the smokers outside making fun of his butt. He thought he had inadvertently helped Neulan escape justice, and nothing less than Meg’s forgiveness could soothe his anguish. What else could she do but reassure him, never imagining how her falsified tale of meeting Neulan at Cold Shivers might someday prove her own undoing. Or maybe not. Maybe not, maybe not, her mantra for the long drive.

  How the settlements stood apart from each other out here. In the country she was leaving, the mountains had the first say about where towns could be but here the towns were declared by the prophets, and the prophecy was only fulfilled by water. Each mile she drove seemed a further retreat into Biblical times. Crossing the state line, from the tortilla brown of Colorful Colorado descending to badland Utah’s Life Elevated. The first four exits with No Services. The old rail stop of Thompson Springs, where an abandoned Fifties diner and motel swap alien abduction tales. The garish curio shop colors at Crescent Junction obscuring the uranium tailings disposal cell behind it. Then turn onto forty miles of Thelma and Louise highway that ends where earth movers chip away at the Atlas Mill tailings pile on the bank of the river, a welcome so much more dramatic than the sideways entrance to Arches National Park. Into blasé Moab, an oft-reinvented town throbbing with jeeps, mountain bikes and beer—and boxy new motels by Marriott topped with reddish prestressed concrete arches. Eventually Monticello arises in a thickening of trees that surrenders on the far end of town. Blanding repeats the miracle. If trees didn’t exist in these desert impoundments, Mormons would have to implant them. The only shade offered in the Navajo towns of Chinle and Kayenta is under gas station canopies and in canyons too remote for franchises or highway engineers to venture. Desert peoples everywhere believe themselves chosen. Why else live in such a godforsaken landscape?

  Barren places can be beautiful when encountered without expectation. Ruins retain a dignity that a living place does not. A single tree can outshine a forest. But everywhere Meg looked on this drive, she saw desolation.

  Meg’s and Brian’s last road trip together had been along a blue highway like this one, plotted by Brian to be a healing journey. It might have worked right after their rupture began with her decision to quit the classroom and move back to Grand Junction, but post-Neulan, the outing seemed a good-faith formality, the sort of thing done by partners who wanted to remain friends. The road to Taos followed a long, gradual descent across a sagebrush steppe. Abruptly, a six-hundred-foot chasm split the land. What a surprise it must have been for the first travelers to find their route changed when the Rio Grande Gorge revealed itself. So opposite the dread the westward wagoneers must have felt trudging out of Nebraska with the Front Range of the Rockies towering ahead for days.

  Brian stopped the car next to some Navajos hawking trinkets from blanket-covered tailgates. The sellers huddled with their backs to the wind, ignoring the tourists creeping onto the narrow bridge for a look at the gorge. One daredevil leaned over the railing, flailing his arms in mock distress. A sixteen-wheeler approached from the east and blasted its horn as it crossed. Howls and whoops flew up in its wake. A woman plopped down on the walkway and planted both hands on the deck. Her companions failed to coax her up and finally two men lifted her to her feet and assisted her slow shuffle back to land.

  “I bet you can feel the bridge vibrate when the cars go across,” Brian said.

  “Be my guest.” Meg understood the woman’s fear. Not that the bridge would collapse from the traffic but that her perch forced her to acknowledge the earth’s deep indifference to her life. Somehow, the proposition excited Brian.

  “I’ll bring back some shots for you,” he said. “At least get out of the car so you can see into the gorge.”

  The wind pressed hard against Brian’s door and he had to force it open. The gusts were telling Meg to stay inside, but since they were still trying to please each other, she let herself be blown out. She stayed in the lee of the car while Brian worked his way with the camera to the mid-point of the bridge. He was the only person she knew still shooting slide film. He wielded a manual camera as if he were striking a blow for freedom of expression. He called and waved her to stand at the end of the walkway with her hand on the railing. In the wind-chilled air, the sun-stroked steel’s warmth surprised her.

  Brian clicked his way back to her. His breath was quick. “Amazing! One part of your brain is saying, this is so cooool and the other is shouting fuuuuuck, get me out of here!”

  He started the engine. Meg’s belt buckle clicked with such finality she released it to ensure she could free herself. In case I’m still alive after the car hits the river. Brian sensed her discomfort and without a word dug a map from the door pocket and shook it open over the steering wheel.

  “Okay. Maybe we don’t have to go over this bridge,” he said.

  Brian was always so careful not to judge her, a quality that had elevated him above other men and ultimately swept her into his arms. But rather than asking what she wanted to do here, he was assuming, which made his sensitivity almost condescending. The far rim waited a few hundred yards away. Maybe she could suppress her fear for that long; he should know to offer her the choice.

  Brian stepped out of the car and the
map tried to take flight. He turned, arms outstretched, so it plastered against his chest. The Indian vendors, amused, looked at their feet as the kite man blew toward them. They helped him pin the map in the bed of a pickup, pointed downstream and then at the map. Brian, fighting the wind on the way back, thrust the map through the car door in a crumple and then spread it on the dash. His finger traced an invisible line parallel to the river.

  “They say a county road follows the gorge down to a crossing at grade. It’s only a few miles out of the way and not as hairy. Then we can double back to Taos.”

  They took the detour. At the time she was irritated by Brian’s fixation on the fluttering map. Now she was struck by how hard he had been trying to hold them together.

  Long after—after the trip, the marriage—she found a coffee can of slides he had taken that day. Tiny in their paper mounts, the shots from the bridge did not capture the tectonic terror. The river seemed distant and unthreatening; the gorge, a lush interruption in the parched land. The quaking bridge, a trustworthy engineering marvel. Meg hunched at the termination of the railing with one fist buried in her jacket and her face obscured by sunglasses. She provided a focal point to the composition without being the point of Brian’s photograph. That was the story of their relationship. They were together in perfect orientation to the world but slightly at odds with each other. Meg perceived him at a distance, while his lens brought her close. Where she sought a ford, Brian imagined a bridge.

  The Food Mart looked exactly as it had on Google Street View, generic red letters on a whitewashed cinderblock wall penetrated by a window for watching the gas pumps. The interior had the same snack-food-and-cigarette stock of every quick stop in America, minus the beer, plus kachinas. Meg foraged for something with which to purchase information. She bore a box of rock-like raisins and a jar of dry-roasted peanuts to the clerk, who had so far not acknowledged Meg’s presence. Chosposi, by her name tag, her cheeks plump and starting to crowd the beauty in her eyes.

  An indirect query seemed the right approach.

  Chosposi gave no sign she’d heard of any teacher named Brian Mogrin. Or that she’d even heard the question. She surveyed the purchases and Meg’s credit card. “Any gas?”

  Meg shook her head.

  Chosposi pointed to the sign by the register:

  Min. $10 purchase on credit cards. EBT OK. —The Mgmt.

  Meg handed over cash. “Is he still around?”

  Chosposi presented the change without counting it out, coins sliding off the bills. She said, “Anglo teachers come and go. Pretty much all the same.”

  Meg could only imagine the shock of reservation life for the idealistic first-timers. “Brian’s older—not old, my age—and he’s been here for years.”

  Chosposi stared off at a spot above Meg’s head. “Oh, him.” Her eyes came back to the counter but not to Meg. She shrugged, maybe because she didn’t know anything more. Maybe because she did.

  “We used to be married,” Meg tried.

  An eyebrow inched two millimeters. “No messeege is a messeege,” Chosposi said. Her face suggested a smile beyond capture. “Oh, that was a good one.”

  Meg followed Chosposi’s directions through the village, a cluster of blocks hidden from the highway in a side canyon. She drove along a creek past a cloudy green reservoir and continued on a dirt reservation road. Fainter tracks branched and disappeared, marks on the land but not landmarks to her eye. Scrawny dogs beyond breed trotted down drives from unseen houses, confirming to her she was still on the through-road. The compass display on her rear view mirror confirmed her western heading but it seemed she had traveled too far. In such a featureless landscape, how could she have missed the rock-marked turn Chosposi had described? Perhaps she’d misunderstood. Perhaps a trickster had turned the rock into a cactus. Perhaps she was lost.

  Her GPS offered no assistance. An intermittent blue dot pulsed what she presumed was her location on a blank tan background but the display labored as though the servers had never been tasked with rendering this sector of the earth. She considered that Chosposi had sent her wandering as the butt of some inscrutable Hopi joke: No place is still a place. She continued until reaching a rocky flat that marked the boundary of her hopefulness. Now, if only she could replicate her mistakes in reverse.

  Turning, she sensed a movement—the first sign of life since she’d left dog country. A lean runner inscribed a fluid, looping line along a high bench. He bounded down an invisible trail, his arms floating for balance. For an instant, she thought it was Brian.

  She’d given up running, blaming lack of time, the Grand Junction heat and a surfeit of knee pain, but in truth the cause was losing his easy, inspiring company. Brian’s feet barely licked the ground, his fingers relaxed as if dispensing mints, his conversation might have been prerecorded, so little breath it required. Unlike shuffling joggers or overstriders beating out imaginary throws to first, Brian drew the distance to him, reminding her it was only air between them and their destination. Meg had trained hard to match his graceful lope and effortless mindset, but once she left Brian’s slipstream she stopped feeling so free and untamed. Her running, like everything else, required too much effort and calculation. Once she lost her conditioning, she gave up ever returning to form.

  The runner was a Native boy, shirtless and sinewy, movement distilled. He shifted to a lower gear and then dropped into a stroll as she overtook him. He seemed amused yet too shy to speak. She explained her quest and he nodded, turned and motioned her to follow.

  “Let me drive you,” she said before he trotted off.

  Over his shoulder he said, “Then I won’t know the way.”

  He resumed his former pace, and Meg matched her speed to his. They seemed to be traveling on different planes. He changed his gait over dips and rocky irregularities without slowing while she had the sensation of groping around furniture in a dark room. They arrived at a fork where the boy jabbed his finger in one direction and then waved her to proceed down the other branch. She understood the first way led back to town. This was where she had missed the junction rock in Chosposi’s directions. There it was, the color of the soil, the size of an ice chest. The boy led her to a doubletrack that climbed a small rise. A slow circling dogtrot brought him around to face her. He bent his head and lifted a hand as he passed, disappearing over the last hump in the road before her dust cloud had entirely settled upon it.

  Meg had dampened her expectations when Chosposi told her Brian lived in a trailer during the summer. But not to this level. She had imagined something like Jim Rockford’s tacky single-wide, a shambles redeemed by its splendid setting and its gentle owner. But this was not Malibu, which was why the Hopis still had it. She had hoped for Brian to have something better than bare dirt. Better than the red Jetta he’d driven from Grand Junction, now beaten and faded to lichen orange. Better than this breadloaf-shaped campito, a sheepherder’s trailer that belonged in a roadside museum. Perhaps this was why Brian had stayed at arm’s length even when he reached out. He didn’t want her to know how far he had fallen.

  Her mission suddenly felt cruel and intrusive. What an idiot she had been, working herself into this paranoid state and now about to drag Brian into it. He had moved on. He apparently valued solitude and frugality. Why would he care to be reminded of her bustling and comfortable life? An ex-wife made frantic by her emotional isolation. Ugh. Get over it. She put the car in reverse.

  The Dutch door at the end of the campito split. A head ducked out. The hair was still dark but cropped shorter, the face still angular, pressing toward gaunt, the eyes tracking but not quite registering. Brian-Not-Brian. He might not be able to see her inside the car. She should just go. She should floor it and get back to the highway before dark. But she had come all this way on her foolish errand. Why not stay a fool for a little while more?

  His expression changed. Not recognition, more like hope. He unlatched the bottom of the door, dropped to the ground and came crow-hopping in bar
e feet toward the car. She hadn’t planned how to start this. Certainly not by waiting as if she’d pulled up to a drive-through window. She opened the door. Frying bacon injected the afternoon air with a fresh sense of awakening. Brian wore a faded t-shirt, the name of the long-ago race almost illegible: Loveland Classic. She used to sleep in hers. Say something.

  “Remember me?”

  “Margaret Vavoris, isn’t it?” He opened his arms in mock wonder and edged around the car as if she had brought it for his inspection. “Doing well, it looks like.”

  “And you, still economizing.”

  He smiled, dropped the act.

  “It’s a surprise to see you, Meg. A nice surprise.”

  He escaped into the trailer while she waited outside in a lawn chair slung with disintegrating nylon webbing. He emerged with reassuringly cold Diet Cokes, a box of Triscuits and six strips of bacon on a paper towel. He set the spread on a wooden cable spool and perched on the platform built over the trailer’s tongue.

  “I hope this wasn’t going to be your dinner,” she said.

  “I usually just graze. I have some eggs, though, if you’re hungry.”

  “I grabbed something to eat in town.”

  “Really?” He seemed to know it was a fib. He broke up the bacon, placed it on crackers and offered her one. “How did you track me down out here?”

  “I asked around about any crazy white guys in the neighborhood.”

  “And?”

  “Apparently you have no competition.”

  Small talk had never seemed smaller. She had planned on telling him straight out what she was after and instead blathered local news Brian cared nothing about—until she told him about Amy Hostetter.

  “It’s not fair,” he said. “She was a good one.”