by Jeff Soloway
“So am I,” said Kevin. “I thought we didn’t keep secrets.”
“Maybe he never saw this map. Where’d you find it?”
“In Jewel’s backpack.”
“They always hiked together. She would have told him. I think.”
“I also found an email in the pack. It looks like it was from him. It has GPS coordinates that match the location of the spring. It tells Jewel to meet him for the hike. He never told you he and Jewel were going to look for it?”
“Those two didn’t always tell us what they were doing. I mean Freddie didn’t. I didn’t really know Jewel. Just met her a few times. Liked her a lot.”
“She mentioned you,” I lied. “She liked you too.”
“She liked Freddie better. Everybody does. He’s got the looks in the family. Until Kev grows up, I mean. And he’s got a way with words. And people. You know what he doesn’t have? A job. He never told me about any of this. Even after Jewel died. Why wouldn’t he?” Meat sounded worried for the first time.
“We’ll have to ask him,” I said.
“Are you sure he met Jewel on the trail?”
“A witness saw someone with her who looked like him.”
“Christ. What if someone at the Grand Chalet followed him down? But why wouldn’t he tell me?”
“Meat, do you know Grant Flanders?”
“Who?”
“He does PR for the Grand Chalet.”
“Flanders. Yeah. They quote him in the paper every week.”
“He’s the one who really saved you last night.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“He bear-hugged you before the guards could beat you up.”
“Guess he figured blood is bad for business. I could have died last night. And Freddie. Did you see that maniac galloping after him? Kev too. And Jewel already. You got to tell people. Which paper do you write for?”
“I’m not actually a reporter. I write books.”
“Yeah? Ever get your chapters serialized? Reach a lot more people that way.”
“I mostly write travel books.”
“Oh. Like Edward Abbey?”
“More like Arthur Frommer. Guidebooks.”
“Huh. Which ones?”
“My last was the Caravan Guide to Bolivia.”
“Bolivia?”
“It’s in South America.”
“I know it. Where they whacked Che Guevara. It’s the landlocked one, right?”
“Yeah. I’ve done other countries too. Peru. Argentina. Those kinds of books don’t really get excerpted.”
“I know. Jesus.”
“What?”
Kevin had bent over to pile up his cards again. Meat brought two fingers down to the top of Kevin’s head and tousled his hair so gently that Kevin didn’t notice.
“We’re a pair, you and me,” Meat said.
“How so?” I asked.
“Nobody gives a shit about us.”
Kevin lifted his head. “Freddie gives a shit.” He grinned at his irreproachable use of the swearword.
“Freddie’s got revolution on his mind all day,” said Meat. “I got a million things. My job. Kev. I hate the job. I like Kev. We talked about moving to Santa Cruz, living near the redwoods. Kev wants to see a bear. But I know this town. This is where our fight is. What would I live for if I left? And Freddie’d never come. He’s got too many friends.”
“Where is Freddie?” Kevin asked. “He said he’d be here.”
“Late. He’s always late.”
“Not for me. Not this late.”
Meat checked his phone. “You’re right.”
“Kevin,” I said. “What did those kids want to show you?”
Chapter 18
I knelt like Meat to get my face closer to Kevin’s. He blinked and flinched. I was violating more than his space. I repeated the question: “What did the kids want to show you?”
“Something gross.”
“What kids?” asked Meat.
“Was it something dead?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
“Did they say what it was?”
“An animal.”
“What kind of animal?” Meat asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“Dumpster back of the new lot. But you have to climb a fence. I didn’t want to tear up my clothes.” He looked up at Meat and rubbed the red cardinal on his sweatshirt.
“He means the building site behind Camper Village,” Meat told me. “A huge lot, lots of dumpsters and pits and piles. Nobody’s working now. You could do anything back there and nobody’d know. Oh, Christ.”
“Can you take us to that dumpster?” I asked.
“They said it’s gross,” said Kevin. “Flies buzzing. Probably smells. You might throw up. Plus what if I rip my sweatshirt?”
“We’ll help you climb the fence,” I said.
“I don’t need help. You’re the one who needs help! You’re the one looking for people. And you talk funny, like Bugs Bunny. You probably watch loser shows for girls, like Jessie.”
“Kev,” said Meat. “Maybe it’s a dog. Its family is worried. We have to check its tag and let them know.”
“You don’t have to go,” I said. “Just tell me where it is.”
“I’m going,” said Meat. “And I’m not leaving him here alone.”
I assumed we all had the same suspicion. Had Kevin subconsciously suspected all morning? I wondered what Meat was feeling. Freddie might have been a resented rival and feckless co-parent, but he was also Meat’s brother and, likely, Meat’s only adult friend.
But what if it wasn’t Freddie in the dumpster? Maybe it was an animal after all. Or maybe it was nothing—a phantom dreamed up to scare the weird kid. Or maybe it was a person, but a different person. I hadn’t seen Victoria all morning.
The three of us left the trailer together.
—
Kevin led us down the gravel lane outside his house. We took a right onto a still narrower and sloppier lane, dirt instead of gravel. No trailers lined this one, just a few pines, bushes, rotting fence posts with no crosspieces, and the occasional glittering beer-bottle shard.
The lane ended at a line of orange plastic fencing, which stretched out to the thicker groves of pines to the left and, much farther, to the Fauxdobe wall protecting the Grand Chalet to the right. Beyond the fencing was a dead zone of brown brush, stumps, and dirt mounds; beyond that, piles of timber and dirt, abandoned earth movers, and a few scabby dumpsters.
“It’s supposed to be the new mall,” Meat said. “But the site’s been dead for weeks.”
“Because of us,” said Kevin.
“We fought the permit at the last town meeting,” said Meat. “Freddie brought some friends from Flagstaff. That was before he went underground.”
“We beat their asses!” said Kevin.
“For one night,” said Meat.
“Why did he come out of hiding last night?”
“For you. He heard the writers were coming. We need you to make history. Nothing in the papers today, but probably tomorrow, right?”
“Maybe,” I said.
Kevin walked along the fencing toward the pines. He stopped where a length of the plastic had been pushed over, like the sail on a heeling boat. “Wah-la,” he said.
I stepped on the pushed-over part to test my weight. The plastic jiggled and vibrated underfoot. I thought of a woven-grass rope bridge I once crossed in the Andes. The Quechua guy guarding it had wanted ten bolivianos for passage, about a dollar. The low price didn’t inspire much confidence in the local infrastructure, but I had wasted too much time trekking there to turn around. The ropes swayed and, more disconcertingly, jangled as I crossed, like a loose guitar string. I was terrified at first, but the crossing took so long that my adrenaline gave out halfway. I became numb to fear, then almost euphoric. I looked down over the lush forest that undulated in the breeze, heard a distant bird call and the tumbling of river wa
ter below, felt the sun burning my neck. It would have been a beautiful place to die, as beautiful as Jewel’s.
This journey required just a few short smelly steps over an increasingly sagging plastic surface and an unsteady hop to the dirt beyond. I turned, held down the defeated plastic with my foot, and reached back for Kevin’s hand. He waved it away and stomped across. Meat had more trouble. He sidled to the edge and tried to leap like it was a diving board but caught his toe and would have belly-flopped into the dirt if I hadn’t caught him.
“Now where?” I asked.
Kevin said nothing. I took his hand. His fingers were short and squishy and a little sticky from the Newman’s Own chocolate chips. He sighed, shook his hand away, and began to walk.
He looked into the cab of an empty backhoe as we passed it. “That’d show them,” he mumbled to himself. I hoped he was fantasizing about lifting the thing’s bucket to the sky like a trumpeting elephant and laughing at the boys’ envious faces, not using it to demolish their trailers. Maybe in his mind he was smashing the Grand Chalet, the town jail, Grayson when he reached for Freddie’s collar.
“How did the kids find the animal?” I asked.
“They were looking for wood.”
“Wood?”
“Yeah. To build a fort. Or a fire, I don’t know.”
He stopped in front of an eight-yard-long dumpster capped with a black plastic lid.
“This is it?” Meat asked.
Kevin nodded.
“You want me to look?” I asked.
“Let’s do it together,” Meat said. “Kev, you can wait back by the fence.”
“Nuh-uh,” Kevin said. “What if those two dumbasses are watching? They’ll call me a wuss.”
I looked around for dumbasses. None were in sight. “Ready?”
I shoved the plastic lid up and held it overhead. The smell inside was like a sewer. I dropped the lid immediately. I had seen nothing, but my nose was aflame with the stink. I had heard that some people shit themselves when they die. Probably animals too.
“It’s dark in there,” I said. “I’ve got a light on my phone. Can you lift it?”
Meat stepped forward and shoved the lid up with surprising alacrity. He hadn’t been socked as hard by the smell. Kevin hung back.
I took a breath, leaned forward, and shined my phone’s flashlight inside.
The body was a gleaming mess. Its limbs were tangled and twisted. Its fingers were like talons. Its head was crusted and glittering. I held the light on its face and made myself stare. The eyes were cloudy. A ragged patch of blood covered the side of one cheek and most of the ear. I wasn’t sure it was still an ear.
I saw stubble on the face. The body was a man’s.
I almost cried out in relief, but I remembered myself and looked sidelong at Meat. I wanted to absorb his reaction, let it control mine. There was no hair on the body’s head.
Meat’s arms were quivering with the effort. “Kevin!” he said. “Back off!”
I saw that Kevin, on tiptoes, was peering into the box as well. I looked inside one more time, flashed the light past the body’s arms. There was the cast. I flicked off the light.
Kevin stepped back suddenly, slipped, fell on his butt. Meat let the lid slam down.
Kevin scrambled to his feet. “It’s okay! It’s not Freddie!”
“No?” Was I wrong?
Meat was staring at Kevin.
“It’s just his shirt!” Kevin said joyfully. “I’ve got to tell them!”
“His shirt?”
“Number 11. Didn’t you see? Larry Fitzgerald!”
“Kev—”
“One of his a-hole roommates must have stole his shirt! But it’s not him. It’s some weirdo. Freddie doesn’t look like that. Wait till I tell the dumbasses.”
“Kev, we have to go,” said Meat.
“Where?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you. I can’t tell anyone.”
Kevin ran back to the fence. Meat had to sprint to catch up. I gave them a moment before I started after them. I thought I could hear, behind a dusty old backhoe, the laughter of dumbasses.
—
Meat and Kevin left their trailer loaded with duffel bags that leaked socks, political literature, and Pokémon cards. They stuffed them in their trunk and drove off.
I drove my rental back to the Grand Chalet. I had seen corpses before this, several times at wakes and once—it was Pilar’s—in an improvised morgue in a Bolivian resort, but I’d never seen a corpse like this one, abandoned, uncared for. It hadn’t been bloated or decaying, but it had stunk. How odd that the smell of death was so lively. Give the body time and the corpse would become as active as its smell. Flies would lay eggs in it. Bacteria would multiply. So-called dead bodies are really alive, beyond alive, they’re ecosystems, swelling with all those microorganisms that once cowered in the bowels and can now venture outside for the postapocalyptic orgy.
At funerals we talk about returning bodies to the earth—“for you are dust, and to dust you shall return”—but Freddie’s corpse, shut up in its dumpster, had been deprived of the earth. There were no animals to feed on its flesh, no ground to absorb its fluid. Not even any wind to carry away its stink. Had Jewel been lucky in the manner of her death? Her body, picked at by birds, must have looked worse than Freddie’s, but at least no one who loved her had stumbled upon it, as Freddie’s brothers had stumbled upon his.
I opened the windows and let the air nip at my fingers and face. As I passed the pines outside Camper Village, the air smelled like New Hampshire, where Victoria was from, where my parents had taken me as a child. We liked to stop at the mountain passes that New Englanders call notches—Franconia Notch, Crawford Notch, Pinkham Notch. My father had known where all the roadside waterfalls were, but he had let me have the map and call out the directions. Had Victoria visited the same places?
For a moment, just when I was lifting the lid, I had been so sure she was dead.
Chapter 19
I pulled over just before the rotary and texted Doby. She replied immediately. She had just finished at the Grand Chalet. She told me to meet her at her SUV near the back of the guest parking lot, the one you didn’t have to pay for.
A big black vehicle sat on its own in the lot’s back reaches, like a container ship floating in the middle of a bay. Doby wasn’t in it. I parked and waited. I called Victoria. I texted Victoria. I checked my phone for missed calls, texts, and emails. I wondered where Meat and Kevin were going.
Through the windshield I saw Doby slogging across the empty lot. She wanted to convene in her SUV, which wasn’t much smaller than a conference room.
“What did you find?” she asked.
“Some documents Jewel had hidden, including a map of the trails from Hermits Rest. I’ll show you, but what was on the security video?”
“Just Jewel, alone. I saw her in the lobby, then out in the parking lot, then cruising past the guardhouse in her rental. No sign of Grant anywhere. When they showed me the parking-lot view, I called Grant in and asked him to point out his car. He was happy to do it. Breathing over me in the video room with his skunky cigarette breath. His car never left the lot. He looked pretty cheerful about it.”
“He could have left the hotel another way.”
“Yeah, maybe he tunneled through the foundation and buzzed away on a dirt bike. That’s not all. Early this morning, I met the Tokisues at Maswick, where they’re staying.”
“Who?”
“The Tokisues. My Japanese witnesses. I showed them some photos. They didn’t recognize Grant’s picture, or Gus’s, or anyone else’s. It was cold, they said, and everybody had a hat. I think white guys in trail gear all look alike to them. They kept saying, Might be this guy, might be that guy, might be the other. The other was a picture of my nephew Carson. We took a selfie together afterward. I should have charged for the cultural experience. They told me about this buddy of theirs from Yoklahoma—”
“Yokohama?”
“Nobody forgets Jewel.”
“I just wish we knew who she was with.”
I took out the email from my pocket.
“Well,” Doby said. “Looks like we better find Freddie.”
I told her I already had.
—
I told her about my meeting with the Bridgewaters as she drove us down the access road to the highway.
“I don’t know what to make of folks like Freddie,” she said. “They call us NPS types sellouts. They say we’re handing over the Grand Canyon to miners, hunters, and builders. Somehow they decided only renegades can save the earth. All the renegades I ever met were lucky to get their pants on by noon. Poor Freddie. You could always count on him to make trouble at town meetings. Not such a bad thing. Of course, the meetings always started after dinner.”
Traffic was agonizing even on the short stretch of highway between the Grand Chalet and the next rotary.
“Think this sucks?” she said. “Wait till we get to the Grand Chalet’s new town center. New shops, new grocery, mini golf, paintball range, all those new homes for all those new workers. We’ll have to ride burros to get anywhere.”
“I heard Freddie blocked the mall.”
“Hah! It’ll be back. Well, I can’t say I’ll miss driving to Flagstaff for a real grocery store.”
“And all those people and businesses will need a lot more water. What if Freddie and Jewel were right? What if the water they’re drilling for really is drying up the Grand Canyon’s springs? Can you do anything to stop them?”
“By law, we’d have to stop them. First we have to give them a chance to find another source. Way back, they used to talk about repurposing an old coal-slurry pipeline that runs down from the Colorado River at Laughlin, Nevada. That was Plan B, after drilling groundwater. But it would cost a few hundred million at least.”
“So faking water-meter numbers saves a lot of money,” I said. “You just have to make sure to shut up anyone who tries to expose the secret. Gus Greenbaum had hundreds of millions of reasons to kill Freddie and Jewel—if they were right.”