The Last Descent

by Jeff Soloway

  “Whore? Why not?”

  “People pretend to use it for women who like sex. Really they use it for women they hate. Everybody likes sex. That’s the whole point of sex.”

  “No,” said Glenda. “Sex is a bomb. It explodes beautifully, like fireworks, but it starts fires. It destroys marriages and minds. More and more I find myself admiring virgins. Not the nuns and priests—not those who choose chastity. I mean the outcasts. The spinsters. The basement bachelors. They refuse to risk the inner explosion. I was once a whore.” She glanced back at the photo of her younger, slimmer self. “Jewel waylaid me last weekend. She asked why I was so recklessly destroying what other people treasured. She meant the Grand Canyon, but what a question, from her.”

  “Jewel was a good woman. You could be too, even if you hate your husband.”

  Glenda smiled more broadly than she meant to, revealing long lines in concentric arches from ear to chin. “Why would I hate him? He made me the mayor. Now get out. And remember how Gus feels about libel.”

  Chapter 14

  I had expected my room, like the lobby, to be styled in some variation of Modern Teddy Roosevelt, and indeed the room’s ceiling was fake-supported by fake wooden four-by-four beams and the white canopy over the four-poster bed was made of heavy canvas, like a tent in the Spanish-American War. But the room’s walls were simply weird: pink, irregularly curved, and rough to the touch. Except for the color, they resembled the stone walls of a luxury cave hotel I once reviewed in Turkey’s Cappadocia region, where for centuries the inhabitants have carved homes out of the Seussian rocks bursting from the treeless landscape. I assumed they were intended to be Grand Canyon sandstone. I hadn’t seen plaster geology so realistic since I’d zipped through the Southwest Red Rock section of Disneyland’s Cars Land ride. Perhaps Greenbaum had hired away an Imagineer.

  A television was embedded in the wall across from the bed, its sleek modern flatness contrasting with the faux-geologic curves around it. The far side of the room was draped floor-to-ceiling with a black curtain. I yanked it aside—unlike the bed canopy, it was as light as a silk scarf—to reveal a plate-glass window. The window turned out to stretch the width of the room. The view might have been magnificent, but all I could see at this time of night was my own reflection amid the flesh-colored walls. The Grand Chalet Imagineer had tried to conjure the impression that the room’s inhabitant was living within the Canyon; instead the walls looked like the lining of a stomach.

  I unbuttoned my pants and pulled the paper packet from within. What had been scratching my pubes turned out to be the fringe of paper ripped from a pocket-size spiral notebook.

  But there were two other papers as well: a topographic map and a letter-size piece of plain paper folded in quarters. I laid all three documents on the step-pyramid-patterned bedspread, then snatched them back up. Nobody who knows hotels trusts hotel bedspreads. I pulled back the bedspread and blanket, so I could lay them on the laundered sheet. Jewel would have laughed at my fastidiousness. I could feel her looking over my shoulder, grateful for my attention but also groaning silently at every delay in my understanding.

  I wanted to read her writing first, so I picked up the notebook page. It was her hand. Jewel’s writing was neat, precise, and tiny, the kind the world enjoyed widely in the centuries before paper became cheap enough to waste. I had seen it in the books I used to leaf through in her apartment while she ignored me to work. She liked to annotate travel-writer classics by John McPhee and Jan Morris (she hated Paul Theroux). I remember, beside a check mark in the margin of a John McPhee collection, she commented: “Down-home quote enriches fat-cat character,” as if McPhee’s interview subjects were not real people but novelistic creations. I sometimes wondered if Jewel believed that real people came alive only if some journalistic genius—such as John McPhee, or herself—helped create them.

  I bent to the page. The writing was already giving me a headache. Script is always daunting, but notebook scribble can be all but impossible to decipher. Even when notes are typed up they don’t always make sense. Mine tend to be a kind of sloppy after-work cocktail party where the personal and idiosyncratic mingle with the professional. A few months ago I had been in Lima—that sad foggy city of Colonial architecture, five-star ceviche, and flaming roadside tire-piles—where I saw an old guitarist in the city center playing Bob Marley. He looked wistfully at me and all the pale young foreigners nearby, obviously hopeful that travelers still listened to the same stuff they did in his day. I turned my back on him, flipped open my notebook—in Lima, it’s best to leave the smartphone in the hotel safe—and sketched the scene, from his mangled lyrics, to his lank, very un-Rasta hair, to his wistfulness. I had no place to publish such a description, which certainly wouldn’t fit in my contribution to the Caravan Guide to Peru, but I didn’t want to forget that desperate man appealing to the oldest cliché of marijuana tourism. He played with passion. He liked Bob Marley. Who didn’t?

  What if Jewel too used her notebook as a diary? She would be more personal than me; she had more faith in the significance of her own emotional life. I might be about to learn something horrifying about her. I might learn something horrifying she’d thought about me.

  Her writing filled only the first half of one side of the notebook page. With some labor, I made it out: “At the rim, Hopi Point, see the skinny river far below, the Grand Canyon’s engine, rapids glittering, drilling, eroding. Hike farther. Go deeper. You see it and you just want to get to the bottom of it.”

  Hmm. Jewel’s published style was not so breathless, but I could imagine her refining this flight of free association into some appealingly lyric descriptive paragraph. Maybe even a lede if she could narrow its focus—get to the bottom of it. To her that phrase would have meant not just discovering the Grand Canyon’s secret but also discovering, within yourself, the nature of the secret you hoped the Canyon would reveal. Some people might be searching simply for the Grand Canyon’s hidden beauty, but others would want to discover something more inward, perhaps the limits of their own physical capacity for exploration or mental capacity for wonder, or perhaps some other secret entirely. Or maybe something completely different, not inward at all, something social, political, natural, or even romantic. For Jewel, the secret she sought in the Canyon might have been the Mystery of the Grand Chalet. Or the Devastating Drought. Or the Unfaithful Lover.

  I turned the notebook page over, but that was all there was. Why, out of everything, had she saved those words?

  I sprang from the bed and stood over the bedside lamp. I flattened the paper against the lampshade and looked for hidden script. Perhaps Jewel had written crucial information on the previous notebook page and the impressions were captured on this one. A kind of double-secret writing to foil Grand Chalet spies.

  I stared for a long time. The faint impressions of secret words failed to appear.

  I set the notebook page aside, sat down again on the bed, and picked up the topo map, which looked like it had been sliced down to letter size with an X-ACTO knife. What remained showed Hermit Canyon and the entire Hermit Trail from the access road to the Colorado River, along with a few labeled tributary and intersecting trails, such as the Boucher Trail and the Dripping Springs Trail—the one Jewel had died on. In several places, the map was circled, starred, and annotated in black pen, which she always used—she thought blue was chintzy. That someone so sloppily attired demanded respectability from her ink was a mark of how much she esteemed her own work. Some of the annotations were in her writing, and almost too tiny to read, but I made out brach or branch near the beginning of the Hermit Trail. But a few markings were in all caps and what seemed to be a different hand. The letters DS appeared in the middle of the Dripping Springs Trail. For Dripping Springs itself, I assumed. But not too far from there, down the Boucher Trail, was the phrase “FM AT SBS.” What could that be? The only SBS I knew was New York City’s Select Bus Service. And what was FM? Front matter. Frequency modulation. Fucking monster.


  If only she could speak. She had died on the Dripping Springs Trail. Was this the map she used to plan her route?

  I had to hunt for the third document, the folded-up computer paper, which had blended into the white sheets like new snow fallen on the old. It turned out to be a printout of an email:

  From F Bridge

  To Jewel Rider

  Saturday, April 12 at 7:42 PM

  I never lie to you, you’ll see. The meter’s a fake. Bring camera, one gallon, salties. Tomorrow morning 8:30 36.06110 112.28920

  A knock. I yanked the Southwestern bedspread over the tundra of the bedsheets and opened the door.

  It was Victoria. She was wearing a gray halter top and yoga pants, the most casual and most revealing outfit I’d ever seen on her. Desire threatened to confuse me. I kept my eyes on her face.

  She shut the door quickly behind her and looked around the room. She carried an air of busy secrecy, like a veteran spy managing a complicated but routine drop.

  “You got a Luxury Limestone,” she said. “Should have asked for a Hermit Hut room.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re made for the single traveler. Queen-size bed, bigger TV, brighter lights. If you’re sleeping alone, you don’t need to hide your zits and cellulite. We get a lot of lone wolves on yoga retreats.”

  The glare from the brass standing lamp made her glasses flash at me, like an oncoming car warning of danger. She stepped closer. Her throat was distracting.

  “I’m not staying with Grant,” she said. “I have my own room. I told him I’d come to help out but that’s it.”

  “That’s it for now, or that’s it forever?”

  “I can’t think beyond now.”

  She stayed almost closer than I could bear, as if daring me to touch her, but just as my courage was gathering, or my will collapsing, she eased back.

  “What happened to Freddie Bridgewater tonight?” I asked. “Did he get away?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “What did they do with the screaming waiter?”

  “Took him to jail. His name is Martin Bridgewater. He’s Freddie brother. They call him Meat.”

  “Meat?”

  “Don’t ask me why.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “I used to see him at protests. When I was coming here with Grant every month or so. I even spoke to him. He seemed less insane than his brother. Now I wonder. But everybody knows his brother’s the kingpin.”

  “When you told me you could put me in touch with Freddie Bridgewater, were you planning to ask Meat?”

  “I did ask Meat. I had to write him a letter. I found his address in our security database. We know everything about everyone in town. I thought he’d trust me. He never wrote back.”

  “If you knew who he was, why didn’t you warn people at the reception?”

  The frustration that showed in her face unnerved me. I was hypersensitive to her emotions. “I didn’t notice him until he started screaming. I’m not responsible for vetting the staff. The caterer is from Prescott. She didn’t know who she was hiring. Is that good enough for you?”

  “For now.”

  “What about you? I saw you talking to Meat just before he freaked out. It’s like you knew he was up to something.”

  “Freddie had hinted that something was going down. Meat was the guy who most looked like he needed a Xanax.”

  She pointed at the Hopi-ish bedspread. “Can I sit there?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re not going to attack me just because I’m on a bed?”

  “Victoria, don’t—”

  She ducked under the canopy and sat.

  “I’m joking,” she said. “Nervous people make a lot of jokes. They’re never any good. That’s why we can’t get laid. Our subspecies would have died out ages ago if it weren’t for the narcissists, like Grant. They hardly notice our jokes.”

  She was more anxious than I was; or rather our anxieties were working together in a fantastically elaborate tango of insecurity.

  I took out my phone.

  “Are you texting?” she asked.

  “Get up off the bed. You should never sit on a hotel bedspread.”

  She popped up. I whipped back the bedspread. The ragged little notebook page flipped over in the breeze. “I found these papers in Jewel’s pack.”

  “But her pack was cleaned out.”

  “Not well enough.”

  Victoria picked up the email first.

  “What does this mean? Is ‘F Bridge’ Freddie Bridgewater?”

  “Could be.”

  “Could be!”

  “Let’s call it likely. What this paper also tells us is that this message scared her. Only a very nervous person prints out an email. Not your kind of nervous. Jewel wanted the email off her system. I bet she double-deleted it right after she printed it.”

  “What’s this weird email address?” Victoria pointed at the tr948kjk@gmail.com.

  “Probably something the writer made up so he couldn’t be traced. F Bridge is the name Jewel gave that email address in her contacts. Now look at this.” I indicated the 36.06110 112.28920.

  “What are those?”

  “GPS coordinates.”

  I held my phone’s glowing face up to hers. I had called up Google Maps and input the coordinates. They plotted a point near Hermits Rest, not far from the Hermit Trail trailhead.

  “This is where she was supposed to meet the guy,” I said. “It’s also where she would have started her hike the day she died.”

  Victoria sat on the bedsheets, sexual insecurity temporarily forgotten. “So Freddie Bridgewater took her on that hike.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Then Freddie Bridgewater must have killed her. It all makes sense. Remember what Doby said? The witnesses called Jewel’s companion tall, thin, dark-eyed, good-looking. Doby made a dig about Grant, but the description fits Freddie Bridgewater even better.”

  “He’s bald.”

  “He would have worn a hat on a hike. Oh, Jacob. Do you think it’s true?”

  “You mean that Freddie Bridgewater killed her?”

  “Yes! God, I hope so. I mean, if anyone killed her, I hope it’s someone not married to me. I’m sorry, Jacob, I know you loved her; I wish I felt something for her. But Grant’s all tangled up in me. I can’t deny I was starting to doubt. But if this is true, I’m free. Do you think it is?”

  Joy crouched in her face, waiting to spring.

  “No,” I said. “Why would Freddie Bridgewater make that kind of commotion tonight if he was the murderer?”

  “Because he’s crazy! Didn’t you see that banner?” The joy had crawled away; all her anxiety was back in its accustomed place. “Who have you told about this email?”

  “No one yet. I want to find Freddie Bridgewater.”

  “What for? You won’t find him. He got away. No one knows where.”

  Gus Greenbaum would be looking for him. Glenda wanted me to believe that rival activists were also after him. I wouldn’t have much time.

  “When will Meat Bridgewater get out of jail?” I asked.

  “Soon, probably tomorrow. The Grand Chalet won’t press charges. They don’t want more publicity. Why?”

  “Give me Meat’s address. You said you had it. He must know where his brother lives.”

  “What for? First tell the cops about the email. Let them do the investigating.”

  “We both know the Tusayan cops work for the Grand Chalet. They’ll arrest Freddie whether he’s guilty or not. Or just hand him over to Greenbaum.”

  “So tell Doby.”

  “Not before I talk to Freddie.”

  “Why? You know she’s coming tomorrow. You want her to arrest Grant! He didn’t do anything to you, just to me. Why should you hate him?”

  “I want to get to Freddie before anyone else does, including Doby. She doesn’t care what Jewel was looking for on that trail. I do. Freddie
and Jewel were on to something. If Doby arrests him, I might never get the chance to find out what it was. Please, Victoria—just give me Meat’s address.”

  What would I do if she refused?

  “You’ve got another reason,” she said.

  Someday I might be able to lie to her, but not now, in this room. “You’re right.”

  “What is it?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “I guessed that.”

  “I think your husband and Freddie are connected. Remember how Grant saved Meat from getting slugged by the guards? He was on him so quick, as if he knew what was going to happen. What if he did? Grant could have been helping Freddie all along. He could have tricked Jewel into going to the trail. Jewel trusted him.”

  “That’s nuts. Grant’s always quick. His wife would know, ha ha. Trust me, Grant has nothing to do with Meat or Freddie.”

  “So why won’t you give me Meat’s address?”

  “I’m afraid to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what if you’re right?”

  “You mean ‘What if Grant’s guilty?’ You said you’d spit on him on his way to prison.”

  “But I didn’t think I’d be putting him there! Think of what you’re asking me to do. You’re the only one who has the email implicating Freddie, and you’re the only one connecting Freddie to Grant. I think you’re wrong about them. But there’s only one way to find out. And that’s if I give you Meat’s address. Doby’s got nothing. The Tusayan cops are idiots. It’s all up to me.”

  “You’re afraid of knowing the truth?”

  “I’m afraid of being a murderer! This is Arizona. They execute people. I’m afraid of killing my husband. Doby’s got her mind made up. What if this gives her the evidence she needs? I’ll never trust her.”

  How could I persuade her? What medicine would clear her mind? I wanted to love her loyalty. Maybe someday I could win it for myself. If Grant had killed Jewel, he must have used Jewel’s love to betray her. What if he planned to betray Victoria in the same way?

  “We don’t know what Meat will say. He might clear Grant completely.” Not technically a lie, but lame and disingenuous when all I wanted was to be my truest self. Blame that on Grant too.