by Boyle, T. C.
“Here they come,” Cammy says, barely able to suppress the excitement in her voice. “And Josh”—she lets out a strangled little gasp of laughter—“look at Josh! Jesus.” She’s grinning, giddy as a child, and what do they think this is, a reality show? Summer camp? She springs to the rock in front of him, agile as a flea, her eyes lit with the pure joy of the moment. “Guess he decided to take a swim, huh? Hey, Josh,” she calls out, “how’s the water?”
He’s not about to offer explanations or admit he’s miscalculated the volume of water washing down out of the canyon this time of year because explanations are for losers and all that matters is getting this done. So when Kelly and Suzanne—short and soft, both of them, pear-shaped and nearly indistinguishable in their matching olive-green slickers—splash up to him, grinning, he just reaches down a hand and hoists first one, then the other, up onto the rock with the rest of the group. And here comes Josh, already shivering, and the only solution to that short of building a fire and drying him out, which is no solution at all, is movement, strenuous movement, as in getting him up out of the canyon to a place where he can manipulate the wire cutters till he works up a sweat.
“All right,” he says, lowering his voice conspiratorially though there’s no one within miles to overhear him, “the storm’s dumping water in the canyon so it’s going to be a little bit more of a climb than what it should have been, but everything’s going to be fine . . . it just might take us a little longer to get up there, that’s all.” He snatches a glance down at his wet boots, at the boulders they’re perched on, the water sluicing round them—if anything, it seems to have risen in the five minutes they’ve been here, but that’s not possible, is it?
Josh is standing in it, thigh deep, the oversized slicker fanning out behind him in the current. He’s trying to look casual, as if pitching headfirst into fifty-two-degree water is the kind of thing he does every day, trying to tough it out though his face gives him away and he’s biting his lip to keep from spasming with the cold.
Feeling faintly ridiculous, like the ruck-faced general in an old World War II flick, Dave hears himself say, “All right then, follow me,” and then he’s down in the water and making for the embankment to the left. It’s like trout fishing, that’s what he’s thinking, like fighting the current in a pair of waders only without the encumbrance of a fly rod and creel, and the water actually gets deeper before they reach the first obstacle—the embankment, which on closer inspection proves to be a thirty-foot-high wall of rock left intact as the stream chewed away the softer strata below it. He makes an attempt to round the corner, pulling himself along with both hands, but the current goes chest deep and he gives it up after a minute and begins to climb.
The cliff—hump, mound—is composed of some sort of volcanic rock, basalt, he supposes, gouged and fissured all the way to the top. The problem is, the stuff is loosely put together and it keeps fragmenting in his hands, bits and pieces sifting down behind him as he flattens his pelvis to the rock and moves from one handhold to the next. “Sorry,” he says, peering down at the pale wet melons of their faces, “we’re just going to have to get up and over this and then I’m sure it’ll be easier . . .”
It’s nothing for Cammy—she launches herself at the rock face in a goatish scramble, but the other two girls are a little slower on the uptake. And Toni Walsh, fumbling with the purse, manages to pull herself up as far as the first solid foothold, but then loses impetus. “Josh,” he shouts down, “can you give her a boost there?” He knows he should drop back and help her himself, but he’s nearly at the top now and he’s anxious to see what’s on the other side, to see what they’re up against.
Though Josh is no woodsman, though he’s clumsy and shivering in the wet sack of his clothes and a good three inches shorter than Toni Walsh, he surprises him. He’s already given a hand up to the other two girls (Kelly and Suzanne, and it’s hard to tell them apart except that Suzanne—or is it Kelly?—sports a blood-red PETA patch on her right sleeve), and he lowers himself, digs his boots in and stretches his full length to hold out a hand for Toni Walsh—and Toni, game at least for now, takes hold of it and pulls herself up to the next handhold and the next one after that, and before long they’re all on top and looking down into the brown roil of the canyon.
From this vantage, he can see that the flats are a vast muddy lake fed by a spigot in the distance, a series of spigots that climb up and into the low belly of the clouds—waterfalls, each mounting on the shoulders of the next. When he was here to release the raccoons, there were no waterfalls. The sun illuminated thin threads of water as far as he could see back into the hills, dragonflies danced and hovered, the stream rolled lazily into its shallow pools and trickled through the yellow grasping roots of the willows that were like fingers, like claws. He’s angry suddenly. Angry at himself. How could he have been so stupid as to fail to appreciate what canyons were, how they’d come to exist, what rain meant in a state of nature? But then, if they’d waited for a day struck with sunshine when everybody afloat was out cluttering the channel, they might as well have radioed ahead to tell the Park Service goons to come and arrest them. They had to slip out in the rain, no choice. And no choice now but to start down the other side and get this done.
“So, look,” he says, “the plan is we’re going to have to work our way around on the slope there, just above where the water is, because the water’s up now and it’s washed out the trail we were going to take . . .”
They all look out across the valley to where the water races through the distant gap in discolored streaks and chutes. Nobody says anything. The rain is steady, a straight fall, beating at their caps and shoulders, setting the ground at their feet in motion.
“It’s going to be steep, it’s going to be hell on your ankles, maybe, but it’s doable.” He turns to Toni Walsh. “You okay with this? Because whenever it gets too much, you just tell me, okay?”
Hunched, pale, a streak of yellowish mud painted across her cheek like a tribal cicatrice, she just shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says after a moment, and here’s that stab at a smile again—a good sign, a very good sign—“I’m afraid I’m more of a city girl. But anything for a story, right?”
And now Kelly speaks up—Kelly, definitely Kelly, with her PETA patch and her moon face and pinched disapproving lips. It comes to him that she looks nothing like Suzanne, at least not facially. “What about mudslides,” she says. “I mean, the possibility of a mudslide? You see that depression there, that bowl?” She points to the long scooped-out incline they’ll have to traverse to get up-canyon. “That was a massive slide at one time, you can see it.”
“Yeah, well, we’re just going to have to take that chance, because I’ve been out in weather like this a thousand times—I mean, haven’t you? Haven’t we all? And it might put the pig killers off for a day or two, but you know they’re sitting back oiling their rifles. Just waiting.”
The rain chooses that moment to intensify, a sudden ratcheting up of the ante. His hair hangs limp beneath the sodden cap, drip, drip, drip. He wants to be reasonable, wants to control these people by controlling himself, but that isn’t an option, not anymore. “Fuck it. I’m not going to stand around debating. You want to stay here, stay, be my guest. But I’m out of here, right now, right this minute.” And he’s moving suddenly, dropping down the slope on the other side, riding a sludge of loose stone and mud in exaggerated steps, so worked up he never even bothers to see if they’re following him—but they are, he knows they are. They have to be.
Half an hour later, the rain still coming down and the churning dark water in the ravine rising by the minute, he begins to have second thoughts. He’s feeling the strain in the long muscles of his thighs, the sleeves of his sweatshirt are mud to the elbow because there’s no way to do this without using your hands, and his ankles throb from the effort of maintaining balance on a forty-five-degree slope. And he’s in shape. Which is more than he can say for Toni Walsh or the two pear-shaped girls
or even Josh. They’re all strung out behind him in single file, fifty feet above the waterline, grasping at whatever fixed object they can—whether it has thorns or not—to keep themselves upright, and nobody’s saying anything. Cammy’s right behind him, pushing him even, followed by the two girls, then Toni Walsh (gray-faced, wet to the bone, looking like one of the risen dead), and Josh bringing up the rear so he can keep an eye on her. They must have gone half a mile—they’re almost to the first of the waterfalls, where at least they’ll be able to get out of the mud—and they haven’t seen any sign of pigs, hunters, foxes, ravens or anything else. They might as well be on the backside of the moon. Except it doesn’t rain on the moon. And there’s no mud.
The surprise has been Toni Walsh. He’s been expecting her to give out ever since they began to work their way down the first hill, but every time he glances back, there she is, head down, plodding along. Still, he’s thinking, how much more of this can she take? They need to get up out of the canyon—and soon. Or find a place where she can lie up while he and Josh or Cammy scout ahead, looking for anything that’ll make it worth her while to go on. He’s scanning the terrain where the canyon begins to narrow three or four hundred yards ahead of them—rock and more rock, everything trenched and gouged and spilling with water—when he spots an overhang projecting from the side of the hill like an outsized awning. Encouraged—Finally, he’s thinking—he swings round on Cammy and points emphatically before calling out to the others. “Up there,” he shouts, watching their eyes lift from the vacancy of their faces. “We’ll take a break.”
The cover isn’t much—a ledge maybe nine or ten feet across squeezed under a dripping lid of rock open on three sides to the weather—but at least it keeps the rain off. It’s a bit of a squeeze, everybody wedged in shoulder to shoulder, boot to boot, and the first thing they do, to a man and woman, is dig into their packs for food. There isn’t much to say beyond “Scoot over just a little, could you?” or “Did you want the peanut butter or the cream cheese and sprouts?” and for a long moment there’s no sound but the hiss of the rain, the crinkle of cellophane and the soft snap of mastication. Then Josh produces a bota bag (vinyl and plastic, no sheep’s stomach on his conscience) and asks if anybody wants a hit.
“What’s in it?” Toni Walsh looks up with interest. She’s crouched in a pink heap amidst a tangle of legs and muddy boots, her face fish-belly white, her hair like the stuff they line packing crates with, and she’s making no concession to present company, working her way through what looks to be a deli sandwich thick with prosciutto and cheese. “Brandy, I hope?”
“Red wine. A nice sturdy zin. It’s good, go ahead.”
And then they’re opening wide, one by one, for a taste of it. By the time Suzanne passes out the homemade oatmeal cookies, everyone seems to be feeling marginally better. When the wine comes round he takes a hit too—why not? He can use the boost.
“So what do you think?” Cammy says, turning to him. “Realistically, I mean? Do we have a chance of getting up there and back before dark?” She’s slumped against the overhang in a sprawl of limbs, looking about twelve years old. “Because I know you didn’t count on this,” she adds quickly. “These conditions, I mean.”
He shrugs to show it’s no big deal and passes the bota bag to Kelly, who’s practically sitting in his lap. If there was any adventure in her face, it’s long gone, but she lifts the bag dutifully, tips back her head and squeezes a thread of wine into her mouth. She smells of sweat and the orange she’s been peeling and her hair frizzes out under the bill of her cap. Absently, he watches her lick the stain from her lips, a dumpy girl, graceless, dull, in desperate need of a makeover if she ever hopes to attract a man and have a life for herself or any life at all beyond a nunnery, before turning back to Cammy. “Yeah, I was thinking maybe I’d go on ahead with maybe two other people while the rest of you make your way back—Toni, I’ll take your camera if you want. Maybe I’ll get lucky.” They’re all watching him but he can’t tell from their expressions whether they’re relieved or not. “But Cammy’s right—we just picked a bad day, that’s all, and there’s no way we’re going to be able to do all that much. Or not the kind of scope we’d planned on anyway.”
“It sucks,” Josh says, his voice gone hollow. He’s looking at nothing, cradling his knees to his chest, the depleted bota bag dangling limply from the fingers of one hand. His boots are mud to the laces. He’s shivering. They’re all shivering. Below them, louder now, loud as static, there’s the steady mocking roar of the water crashing through the canyon. No one else seems to have anything to say. They want to go back, want to give up, all of them—he can see it in their faces.
It’s a debilitating moment, hopeless, depressing. But there’s no way he’s giving up—he’s going to climb up out of this canyon and snap off one shameful inflammatory picture after another so the Press Citizen can run them on the front page and everybody can see for themselves what the killers are up to, and then he’s going to cut wire if it takes him all night, if he has to swim back to the boat, if he . . .
And then the wind shifts and everything changes.
“Does anybody smell anything?” It’s Kelly, stirring herself. She sits up, arches her back, narrows her eyes. She sniffs audibly, deliberately, making a face. “It’s like”—and here it is, they can all smell it now, rank, musty and corporeally sweet all at once—“something died.”
In the next moment they’re back out in the rain, everybody, even Toni Walsh, working their way higher, to the next ledge, the one above the overhang. There’s a turning there, a scoop of rock carved out of the high wall of the canyon—sage, coyote brush, coreopsis, and something else, a dark shape wedged like a doormat between two over-spilling rocks in a pale slurry of mud. The footing’s bad, horrendous. The odor intensifies, deepens till it’s an assault. “Is that—?” somebody says.
They are looking at the remains—the carcasses—of two pigs, one an adult the size of a big overfed dog, the other a juvenile. The eyes of both are gone, reddened pits gouged out of their faces, their jaws gaping, intestines exposed and shading from blue to gray. The hide is a black bristle animated by the maggots feeding there in a frenzy of moving parts.
“Gross,” Kelly says.
Josh lets out a curse. “Jesus,” he snarls, “what did they ever do to deserve this?”
Shivering, hunched, the big pink pocketbook like a withered limb and her face intent on the viewfinder, Toni Walsh moves in to hover over the scene, freezing one frame after another. She doesn’t say anything, not a word, because she’s at work now, doing her job, recording the scene, making history. The others look awed. Or scared. This is the configuration of death, the thing they’ve been fighting—the very thing—and here it is, right in their faces, stinking at their feet.
He’s trying to sort out his own feelings—horror, pity, sorrow, anger—but there’s something else too, a rush of excitement, of happiness even. “Good,” he’s saying, “excellent—this is just what we want,” and he has a stick in his hand now, poking at the carcass of the larger animal, looking for the entry wound, for the bullet, for evidence no one can controvert because these pigs didn’t just lose their balance and topple over the rim of the canyon to wash up here. No, they were murdered, exterminated—that’s the word. “Here, Toni—here, I think this is where they shot him, see? Can you get a close-up on this?”
It’s a small space they’re inhabiting, no bigger than a hot tub, the stone slick, the creek boiling below, rain in their faces and drooling from the bills of their hats, everyone crowding in for a look and he and Toni at the center of it, ratified, vindicated, the sons of bitches, and when Kelly takes a step back to give them space—a single step—he has trouble registering what’s unfolding before him. She doesn’t cry out. Doesn’t clutch at his shoulder or the withered excuse of the pale insubstantial shadow of a bush beside her. She just murmurs Oh, shit, as if she’s engaged in a private conversation on a subject no one could begin to guess
at, and then she’s gone.
She goes down headfirst, on her back, both arms spread wide and her hands snatching at nothing, and half the hillside goes with her in a rattling concussion of rock and dirt, a chute opening up before her all the way down to the water a hundred feet below. There’s a thunderous splash, her khaki slicker flapping and billowing in the current even as the dark pinpoint of her bare head, the hat gone and her hair spreading like drift, bobs once, twice, three times before she’s sucked down the channel and out of sight.
There’s no time to absorb the shock of it, no time for curses, exclamations or the strangled shriek that climbs up out of Suzanne’s throat to ring impotently through the canyon, because he’s already in motion, launching himself back down the rock face, darting beneath the overhang and dropping into the mudfield below, his eyes straining at the place where she went down, expecting at any moment—or no, demanding—to see her there clinging to a rock or log. He can hear the others calling out and fumbling behind him and he can only pray that another one of them doesn’t lose their grip and go down with her. There are no handholds. He’s made of mud. He can taste something foul in the back of his mouth.