by Jeff Soloway
Grayson was now toeing the chasm that protected the outcrop. “Where is he?” he shouted.
“Gone!” someone shouted back. More people laughed, and then more, their derision avalanching down the rocks.
Grayson glared into the gap. I was now close enough to see how his knees wobbled. I called to him, but he paid no attention. He took a half-step back. The chasm was only three or four feet wide and the outcrop on the other side was lower in altitude, making it an objectively easy jump—Freddie and the Broncos fan had both made it—but Grayson’s judgment was distorted by rage and his coordination dulled by alcohol. I could see that the chasm wasn’t really that deep, maybe twenty feet to the crotch between the two boulders, but that would be enough to snap his leg, and if he tumbled out of the crotch, he would fall much farther. And if he jumped too hard and skidded off the far side of the outcrop, the drop would be even worse. He would never survive it.
The wind gusted again. Grayson swung his arms for balance.
“Careful!” someone called. As the gust died, Grayson’s arms slowed and stopped, as if he hadn’t been moving them at all, only the wind. His urge to hide his fear only made it more obvious.
I was now almost beside him. I could smell the alcohol on him more strongly than before. The bottle must have spilled as he ran.
“Grayson!” A woman’s voice—Marlene, calling from above.
Grayson grunted, crouched, and leaped. His front foot sailed forward, like a scout reconnoitering the landscape ahead, and landed with a whomp and a scrape on the outcrop surface. His back foot slammed down behind it, and he staggered forward with both feet, in smaller and smaller steps but never stopping, his body’s momentum too powerful to be defeated—until finally he came to a halt on the toes of his boots, just inches from the edge. Even then, his upper body kept moving, his arms, chest, and head making a whiplike undulation out over the abyss, but he managed to pull them in too.
From behind I heard: “Ta da!”
I turned. There was Freddie, back up near the pines by the walk. He was leaping like Rocky, both hands in the air. He must have circumnavigated the lower ledge the Broncos fan had discovered and then clambered back up the paths while Grayson was summoning his courage to jump. A few tourists were leaping with him. Freddie stopped and held his casted hand high, knuckles outward; I realized he was giving Grayson the finger.
“See that guy!” he screamed. “That’s the Nazi on my banner! He works for the Grand Chalet! He beat up my comrades! He killed Jewel Rider!” People were snatching leaflets from his good hand.
“He’s a liar!” Grayson shouted.
“The Grand Canyon is for the people! Tear down the murdering Grand Chalet! Remember Jewel Rider!”
I turned back to Grayson. To get at Freddie, to get anywhere, he’d have to jump again across the chasm—but this time the jump was to the higher ground. He didn’t know the other way, down around the hidden ledge behind him.
Marlene was stumbling down the paths toward me. “He’s trapped!”
I knew the rock, I knew the trick, but I had seen it half an hour before, and now everything was different. The light had fallen. The canyon had changed. I turned back one last time. Freddie was gone. Many of the onlookers had left with him. None of those remaining had advice for Grayson. Only I knew how he could escape.
“Please!” Marlene had stopped halfway down, too scared to come closer.
“Grayson, listen to me,” I said.
“I was doing my job! Defending myself. She wasn’t even there!”
“Who?”
“Fucking Jewel Rider! That wasn’t her.” I realized he meant the woman getting clubbed on the banner. He was right; that was another woman, not Jewel.
But the man doing the clubbing was definitely him. He was the brute Jewel had shown us on her phone, and now his brutality had streamed out over the Grand Canyon. Everyone had seen it, not just the tourists who’d ventured down from the walk nearby, but everyone at the reception, including his girlfriend, his congressional representative, his colleagues, his employer, dozens of writers, and hundreds more strangers, including celebrity strangers. Victoria had once asked me to imagine my most shameful desire revealed. Here was something worse, Grayson’s most shameful deed, revealed not just to a single intimate but to the general public. I shouldn’t pity him; he had probably done still worse that no one would ever know of. But I did.
“Listen,” I said again. “There’s a better way to get back.”
A gust garbled my last words. Was the wind stronger here, out near the edge, or did it just feel stronger? Grayson stumbled back a half-step, glanced at the emptiness behind and around him, and dropped to one knee. He gritted his teeth into the wind. Still on one knee, he placed both hands flat on the rock, as if he could stick to the surface like a fly.
“Guess I got to jump,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“You won’t make it. Look behind you.”
“There’s nothing behind me!”
I heard footsteps behind me. Marlene must have overcome her fear. I couldn’t turn to speak to her. I felt that my stare was all that kept Grayson bound to the rock.
Another gust. Grayson’s cap lifted from his hair for a moment, then flew up and off, like a sparrow escaping from a cat. It tumbled over and then down into the canyon. He watched its flight with indignant fury.
“I’m not staying here!” He shook both fists at once. He wanted to strangle the unceasing wind, the stubborn outcrop, unhelpful me.
“You’ll have to show him how.” A new voice, right behind me. Not Marlene’s. It was Victoria.
“Keep talking to him,” I told her.
I tried to remember how the Broncos fan had navigated back from the ledge. Somehow he had come up from below. From where?
“Grayson, look at me,” Victoria called. “Hang on. Marlene doesn’t want you to jump.”
Peering through the gathering gloom, I managed to spot a path that seemed to wind down to the base of the boulder that Victoria and I were standing on. From there, it appeared that you could scramble to the bottom of Grayson’s boulder.
“Where is she?” Grayson demanded.
“She’s nervous,” Victoria said.
I glanced back up toward the pines, now a long dark wall against the horizon. I could still make out the tourists who remained to watch us, many of whom were perched on boulders below the trees. A few were glancing at their cellphones, but nobody was talking into one—nobody had reception. I didn’t spot any rangers or Grand Chalet staff. No one was coming to Grayson’s rescue.
I started down the path. My foot skidded on the sand; I had to grab a crag to regain my balance.
“Where’s Miguel?” Grayson was asking. “Where are the guys?”
“Getting the guests away or chasing Freddie Bridgewater.” Victoria’s voice was calm and surprisingly clear. The twilight distorted distances; she was not so far away. “But you’re the one who made him run. No one else could have got to him so fast.”
“And what do I get for it?”
I was now near the bottom of the gap. Just a short hop ahead was the ledge behind Grayson’s boulder. A short hop over a long drop. The dim light calmed my nerves—I couldn’t see exactly how long the drop was—but it would also make my handholds look fuzzier, my footing less certain. Like the stuff in Grayson’s bottle, the twilight was making me braver and more likely to die. I thought of using the flashlight on my cellphone, but I needed both hands for grasping.
“Nothing,” Grayson answered himself. “Doesn’t pay to be fast. Doesn’t pay to be smart either. I never wanted to get sucked into the…the political bullshit. Jesus, it’s cold.”
I hopped up with one foot, lunged forward with one hand. The heel of my palm bumped against a tiny protrusion and my fingers pincered it as hard as they could. I brought up my other foot, shifted my weight nauseatingly—and I was on the ledge. It was narrower than I thought, at this end, barely wider than my sneaker. I
was wearing my trusty Nikes. If only I had brought hiking boots. But I had enough room to move if I faced the boulder and sidled along the ledge. I felt I was breathing in the rock’s musty exhalations. Its surface felt gritty under my fingertips. Better to look into it than down. The ledge rose as I navigated it. Soon I would be able to see over the boulder’s top.
What if there were loose rocks on the far side? I looked down at my shoes, trying not to look at the long drop behind the ledge. How had the Broncos fan done this so fearlessly?
“Get back.” Grayson’s voice cracked. “I’m coming over.”
“Jacob’s almost there, Grayson.” Victoria’s voice was as even as his was jagged. “You might hear him behind you. He’s going to show you the way.”
I stepped up on the ledge and at last I saw the heavy isosceles props of his legs. Between them I could see the figure of a woman, motionless except for a disordered flutter of hair about her shoulders. Victoria. A little of the last light flushed one of her cheeks; the rest of her was as dim and featureless as an old memory. Her body was angled forward, probably over the gap, as if to bring her calming voice as close to its object as possible.
“Grayson.” She must have hoped hearing his name would soothe him. “Jacob’s behind you now. You’ll see him if you turn around.” The way she said my name soothed me a little too.
Grayson’s legs reorganized, and for an instant I thought he was preparing for the hopeless leap upward, but instead he bent down to one knee. He began to pivot on his knee inch by inch, turning himself as regularly as a second hand on a stopwatch, until he had turned all the way around. When he saw my head poking up over the rock, he snarled.
“I’m standing on a ledge,” I said. “You can come down and circle back with me.”
“You were with us,” Grayson said. “You saw what I could’ve done. But I didn’t hurt him. I let him go! And look how he repays me!”
“Come down.”
He shook his head very slightly, as if too much motion might dislodge him. “No way.”
“It’s easy. Just sit on your ass and scoot over to me.”
“That woman. Jewel. I didn’t kill her.”
“I know.”
“I would never. That’s not my job.” His gray eyes wandered over and past my shoulders. I glanced behind me and got a glimpse of that endless stone expanse in the distance, now as coldly colorless as the moon.
“Do you know who killed her?” I asked.
“Grayson!” Victoria called. “You have to come back. Marlene’s worried. We’re losing the light.”
The light was fading, but we had enough. She was sabotaging me.
“Freddie should’ve stayed hid,” Grayson said. “They were looking, but they couldn’t find him. They’ll make him sorry.”
“Who will?” I pressed.
“It’s not my job. Ask Grant!”
“What does Grant know?”
“Grayson, please!” This time it was Marlene.
Grayson groaned and rolled his eyes. He dropped both hands to the rock and wobbled back until he was sitting on his butt. He scuttled toward me, moving first his feet, then his hands, then his butt, then his feet again. When his feet were near enough, I gripped one of his ankles and slowly pulled it over the edge of the rock, then the other. He never resisted. Now both his feet were dangling over.
“Now slide forward,” I said.
“What?”
“Slide. I’ll hold you so you slide down onto the ledge.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.”
He started sliding, at first absurdly slowly, like a car being pushed from a dead standstill, then speeding up. His legs bent as his knees passed over the edge, and then his butt slipped over. He screamed.
But I had an arm around his waist. His feet bumped to the ledge. His chin knocked against my forehead. I had braced myself against a little knob behind my ankle so I was able to keep from staggering backward. I spun him around so that he faced the boulder and not the abyss.
“Hold on to the rock,” I said.
“What?”
I slapped his right palm against the boulder.
“Follow me.”
I took a slide step down to the lower part of the ledge.
“This way,” I said. I shuffled along the ledge to give him room to step my way. I held out my hand and wiggled the fingers encouragingly. Is that what firefighters do to get people to come to safety?
He took my hand tentatively, like I’d asked him to dance, and sidled. One foot slipped and his back twisted, but I still had his arm. I held it as he steadied himself.
“Let go!” He yanked his arm away. “Faggot.”
“Almost done.”
I sidled the rest of the way along the ledge. His breath was practically in my ear the whole way. There, beyond the little gap between boulders, was the path back up to the rim. I hopped over to it, scrambled up to make room, and beckoned him on. He took a deep breath and jumped—too strong, but again I had him.
“You did it!” I realized I sounded more like a toddler’s dad than an admiring teammate.
He bent low, like a chimp, and scrambled past me up the path. I watched until he met Marlene. They were both now just silhouettes against the stone behind them, but unmistakable. He stood straight up, spoke to her. She took his hand. I looked for Victoria. She was gone.
I trudged back up the path. I could no longer see the crunching sand under my feet, but I could follow a dark trough through the rocks. The wind gusted uselessly; I was too far from the edge to mind it.
Ahead of me, Grayson and Marlene arrived at the walk. Marlene stopped and gave Grayson a hero’s hug. He clasped her to his body, leaned back, lifted her off her feet. They laughed together.
I followed through the gap in the pines. My calves had the same weary ache they get the morning of a hangover. My hands felt dirty and scratched. All the onlookers were gone.
“I thought he was going to kill you.” Victoria was sitting on the stone wall.
“You didn’t want me to talk to him.”
“Not then. Not on the rock.”
“What was he going to say?”
“I don’t know. There’s the van. Grant!”
She jogged up to the parking lot. Grant leaped out of the van and trotted down to her. They met halfway. No embrace, no kiss, he just bent his body toward hers and she just placed a hand on his shoulder. They turned and walked back to the van.
Marlene and Grayson were behind them, moving more slowly. His arm was draped not just protectively but lovingly over her shoulders. Their chatter was rapid but quiet. I kept a respectful distance and returned to the van alone.
Chapter 13
The van’s engine was running, the windows fogged. Three faces appeared within the semi-translucent side windows, creatures trapped in ice—Grayson in the back, Victoria in the front, and Marlene in the middle. The door slid open and Marlene stepped out, as if, like a child, I might need help climbing up.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“He’s very brave.”
“I know. I changed my mind. Find me in the lobby.”
No one spoke on the way back except Brian, who was sitting behind Grant and murmuring public relations advice into his ear. Victoria turned to nod now and then, since Grant refused to. Grayson, behind me, sat with his head propped against the window. Marlene, now in the back, stroked his knee. When he looked up at her, she was ready with a proud and reassuring smile.
Grant rallied as he careened onto the Grand Chalet approach road. “What they don’t get is this is a resort for the people,” he said.
“Your resort has an indoor infinity pool and separate go-kart tracks for adults and kids,” Jeannette pointed out.
“The basketball court is open to the public. So’s the movie theater, bowling alley, and library. Yeah, we built a library. You know why? Because we want this town to be a place where people read books. And get Wi-Fi and rent French DVDs, if they want, or The
Fast and the Furious, we’re not snobs. We’re not just building the GC2. We’re building the new Tusayan. You know how far you have to drive today to get organic milk or a bagel? That’s why we’re putting in a Whole Foods. For everyone!” He waved a hand in the air, meaning write this down.
“So what happened to Jewel Rider?” Jeannette’s full-time job insulated her from travel-writer gossip.
“She got mixed up with fanatics,” said Brian, giving Grant’s shoulder a manly little rub, like he was quarter-turning a valve.
People like Brian—and even better journalists than Brian—naturally sympathize with their hosts; this kind of psychological corruption is the whole reason press trips exist. Conscientious writers can overcome their prejudices and rediscover their cynicism when left alone. But the temptation to gratify is all too powerful.
“Those activists want everything to stop!” Grant said. “They hate development. They hate construction. They hate change. I get it. I live in Hell’s Kitchen. Gentrifiers knocked down my pizza parlor and shoeshine place too. Thing is, more people are born every day, and they all need houses, food, and movie theaters. We’re Americans. We have to keep building.”
“What do you think of these loonies?” Brian now rubbed Victoria’s shoulder.
“I think I’m too tired to deal with them tonight.”
“Jet lag,” Brian said. “Try modafinil. Wait, I mean melatonin. Wait, I mean cocaine.”
The hotel’s façade now filled the windshield. It was lit by silvery floodlights, like the local castle in a French village, and it was too bulky to be graceful and too plain to be spectacular. It seemed to be lit up just so you wouldn’t get lost finding it.
We parked just under a vast porte cochere. Painted on its ceiling were the words GRAND CHALET GRAND CANYON: WHERE ADVENTURE MEETS PARADISE. The other vans were also unloading. As the writers wandered toward the lobby, their murmured conversation was trapped under the overhang. I made out the words sign, scream, and blood. Usually the writers would be forming chattering cliques, laughing with Grant and his cronies, joking about all the booze they guzzled on the last trip and planned to guzzle on this one. This time everyone was silent. The hack writers among us just wanted a good night’s sleep to prepare for the pampering tomorrow. The rebels wanted to get out of Grant’s earshot to gossip among themselves at the bar. The conscientious ones, like Magda, wanted to be alone to write up what had happened. None of the celebrities had come back with us. Perhaps they’d been taken to a private entrance. More likely they’d gone home.