by Jeff Soloway
“What were you hoping? That he was gone, that he was there and changed his mind, or that he’d follow your plan?”
Once asked, the question, hovering on the outcrop between us, oppressed me. Yes, with time I could overcome any agony, but did I have to pack in so much at once?
“That he was gone,” she said.
“And if he wasn’t gone?”
“That the plan would work. That he’d kill you. I told you I can’t stand loving two people at the same time. And you’d never kill him. All right, Jacob. You figured everything out. Let’s go back.”
She stood up. I kept my eyes on her hands, still hanging at her sides, no longer swinging even faintly. The breeze seemed far away, stirring the dry leaves into faint sighs on the slopes around us, but not on our lifeless outcrop.
Without taking my eyes off her, I unzipped my pack. Her eyes went to my hands, but she didn’t move. I unrolled the sweatshirt and pulled out the gun.
“We’re going on to the spring,” I said. “They’ll be waiting for us—Doby, her partners, and Grant in handcuffs. I want to see if the water meter’s there. The email was fake, but that map was real. Jewel and Freddie were looking for that meter. I want to see it for myself. And I want to hand you over to Doby.”
“Put the gun away. Don’t tell me it’s yours. Does Doby know you have it? She could arrest you for it. Let’s just head back.”
“No.”
“What makes you so sure she has Grant anyway?” she asked sharply.
Was she insulted? Did she think Grant could have killed Doby and her colleagues, then run away? He didn’t seem like a Marine, but what if he was? What if he had talents beyond bullshit that I had never suspected?
“She’s good at her job,” I said. “And she’s got a platoon of rangers with her. If he’s anywhere near the spring, she’ll spot him.”
There again was that look of sympathy. She had given me a similar look on our third date, at McSwiggan’s, when I told her about the Christmas I rejected my mother. She had been careful to offer no such look at Screwshi, when she rejected me. She knew when pity would comfort me and when it would infuriate me. Why did she think I needed it now?
She nodded down the path. “Look.”
I sidled over on the outcrop so that I could keep my eye on her and follow her gaze at the same time. A lone hiker was trotting up the trail, his khaki fisherman’s hat bobbing like a floating cork.
“Grant wasn’t waiting at the spring,” she said. “He was hiding off the trail. He wanted to come at you from behind.”
He looked like he had a gun too.
Chapter 28
I hooked Victoria around her waist, pulled her close in a kind of one-armed Heimlich maneuver, and dragged her out into the path. I could both hear her breaths and feel them, as her diaphragm contracted under my forearm.
“Tell him to stop,” I said.
“Grant!” Her voice started strong but then seemed to belly flop into the depths beside us. “He has a gun.”
He must have heard her. His head dipped, as if the bobbing cork had hit a trough in the waves, but he sailed on toward us. I could now definitely make out the gun in his hand. Did he know how to shoot? Maybe he had learned the same way I had. I could imagine him devouring self-defense tips on a gun range rented for a bachelor party.
When he was just close enough that I could distinguish the individual fingers on his hand, but not see the whites of his eyes, Grant halted. The trail was narrower where he stood. Just beside him, a pile of flat red stones, like loose shingles from a Mediterranean roof, sloped off toward the edge of the cliff. If only he’d take one wrong step and end all of our troubles the same way he had tried to end his, with a lifeless body far below the trail. He peered at us from under his hat rim. “Vee! You said he wouldn’t know!”
His arms flailed in exasperation, and when they settled, the gun was in two hands and pointed at me. He looked professional, or at least practiced.
My own gun was suddenly heavy, the grip slick. It wanted to slip from my fingers. I steadied myself, tugged Victoria closer, arranged a more respectable hold on my weapon. He was still out of range—out of my range, anyway. I’d be lucky to hit the cliff behind him. My best chance was to wait for Doby. Surely she’d give up and start back up the trail once she realized Grant was nowhere to be found.
“I won’t let her go, Grant,” I said. “You’ll have to shoot us both.”
He ignored me. “How did he know?” he demanded.
“Grant!” Victoria’s stomach hummed under my arm as she spoke. “What if somebody comes by?”
“Where else could we do it? Doby passed a few hours ago, with four fat-assed friends. What if she went to the spring? I couldn’t risk it.”
I imagined him crouched behind some boulder halfway up a slope nearby. He must have been watching for us. He had planned to scramble back down to the trail after we passed, follow us to the spring, which was on a much more rugged and secluded trail, and shoot me down there. Victoria would have distracted me somehow; better not to imagine how.
“Vee, what happened?” His voice was plaintive but also insistent. He was hurt but not daunted. His body never moved from his ready-to-fire position. If Victoria wasn’t strapped to my torso like a human flak jacket, I was sure he would try it.
A whisper of wind brought a few strands of her hair up into my face. I almost sneezed. I shifted my weight to disengage my face and could hear the dirt crunch under my boot. His gun never wavered. What would it take to make him move? The pressure was gathering. How long would I have to wait for Doby?
“What happened?” He let a little growl into his voice.
“He figured it out.”
I glanced down and saw the red sunburned stripe at the part of Victoria’s hair. She should have put her hat back on. It was somehow comforting to know that she had made small mistakes in addition to big ones.
“There’s no place to go,” I said. “Doby’s down the trail waiting for us. There are more rangers at the top.”
“There are other trails.” Grant leaned forward until his head was almost over his gun, and narrowed his eyes under his big brooding forehead. “Come here, Vee.”
Obviously a lover’s through-the-air signal, and its meaning was just as obvious: Stomp on his foot. Kick him in the balls. Shove him away. Give me a shot. What would I do if she tried it? Could I shoot her? What was the point? He would shoot me while I shot her. I should do it anyway, just to make him suffer as I died.
A fantasy of cold-bloodedness. I could never do it.
“I can’t,” she said.
Not yet. But every moment gave her another chance to convince herself. She already had planned to kill me and now she actually could do it, or at least try it. Imagine if all muggers and gunpoint hostage-takers were like me, so protective of their victims, who were so completely at their mercy. It would destroy the kidnapping business. I could still feel her breathing, rapid and shallow. I could smell the sweat on her scalp and neck. She must be afraid too, for herself and for Grant. Maybe also for me.
How strange that, if she did manage to get me killed, she would remember this moment with me always, while I would remember nothing. She, my killer, would remember me longer than anyone else, longer even than my parents, who, being older, would die sooner. Her memory of me would certainly be more vivid than any of my friends’. Jewel had done better to live so vigorously, to have causes along with her more personal passions, to have so many more friends. She had earned a stronger hold on human memory and would have a longer afterlife. But I had the one thing she didn’t—a little more time.
“It’s over, Grant,” I said. “No reason for any of us to get killed. Back away around the corner, where neither of us can shoot the other.”
“Let her go and I will.”
“You know I can’t do that. I could shoot you right now.”
“You! You’re a travel writer.” His gun barrel trembled for just a moment. “Vee.” Now his voice was
trembling too. “How did he know? Did you tell him? Did he witchcraft you again?”
“No,” she said. “He saw us on video.”
“He tricked you! They don’t have video out here in the middle of the Grand Canyon.”
“Don’t be an idiot. I mean at the hotel.”
“You told him. You told him everything. Why, Vee? I know why. Fuck you, Jacob Smalls. I know what you did. You think fucking a woman gets you the truth? If it did, I’d be the smartest man alive. She hasn’t told you everything.”
“Grant, please!” I could feel her stiffen. I wished I could see her face. What hadn’t she told me?
“It was her idea to kill Jewel! I never would’ve. She made me. She said it was the only way.”
Victoria’s body swelled with breath. I only hoped I could hold on in the explosion that was about to follow, the eruption of curses, the rage that would rush down the trail like a flash flood and finally leave him humiliated and hopeless. Maybe she would try to charge down the trail at him. I would have to hold tight to save both of us.
But her body shrank, and she said nothing.
“See?” said Grant. “It’s true. So tell me, brother. Who do you hate worse? Her or me?”
“You,” I said. “You’re the murderer.”
“It wasn’t me! I didn’t kill her!”
Why hadn’t that ever occurred to me? It was Victoria all along.
The wind came up again, and now the sighing of dry leaves on the slope sounded like the Grand Canyon’s general sigh of relief. My ordeal was about to be over, my embarrassing ignorance dispelled.
“It was someone else,” Grant said.
He pulled the gun in a little closer to his chest. It was getting heavy. So was mine.
“Who killed her?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he said. “When Vee was driving me to the trail that day, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Waiting at the trailhead, I still didn’t know. Then Jewel showed up—and I still didn’t know! Hiking the trail with her, talking to her, I couldn’t even make a decision. I thought maybe I wouldn’t do it. Then we got here. Look at this place.”
He gestured with one arm to the abyss beside us.
“It’s so close. You can feel it breathing up at you.”
As if the canyon were the mouth of an enormous beast.
“She was walking in front of me, like some guy on the edge of the subway platform, texting or some shit. You think to yourself, I’d never, but what about just once? So I told myself, You have to decide. Do it or don’t. And you know what? I decided don’t. Make another plan. Tell Vee no go. Find another way to win her back. But then Jewel leaned out over the edge to check out some little raindrop flower hanging on to the lip. It was too perfect. I couldn’t help myself. It was like somebody pushed me at her. But then when I looked around it was just me. She didn’t even fall that far.”
“It was only you who saw where she fell,” I said. “Only you who climbed down to hide the body.” I could see her body now. It wasn’t the pale, half-hidden thing from the photo Doby had showed me back in my apartment, the thing trailing a dark smear. This was the body before it had been dragged, broken but still wet with blood and sweat—with all the life that just an instant before had gushed so powerfully within her.
“No, it wasn’t me. I never could have made it. The sliding down, the scrambling up. It was some angel trying to give me a second chance. And nobody came by! Not a single hiker.” He sighed. “You can’t take back your action, you can only survive it.”
So it wasn’t Victoria who killed her. She could hate, she could conspire, she could manipulate—so could I, so could anyone. All of us are monsters in our minds. But she was unable, physically, to kill. This distinction was enormously important. To kill me right now, she would have to act with her body upon mine. She couldn’t do it. She could plan my death but not perform it. Good for her. It’s our hypocrisies that make us human.
“I believe you, Grant.” And I did. I believed in his regret. It was already providing some punishment. But not enough. More than ever, I was determined to live. Life might be long for Grant too, maybe long enough for him to forget his guilt. His crime deserved to be the first thing in his mind every day for the rest of his life. I wanted him to see it in every grimy crack of his cell’s cement walls when he opened his eyes. I just had to hold my ground until Doby came.
“It was her idea,” Grant said, “to kill you too. Did she tell you that? She said no one would miss you. You hardly talk to your family. You can’t keep a girl. You’re third-string to all your friends. Your editors, forget it, I know them. They’re all waiting for you to quit so they can hit up a cheaper replacement. You’re a decent writer and you have your fun, but you’re all alone. With a turtle. She said if somebody has to die, it should be you.”
I felt a tickle on the hand I had clamped against her stomach, as if cool water had dripped on it. Her fingertips, chilly with nerves. Were they moving purposefully, to comfort me? To attack me? But they were hardly moving at all.
“She guaranteed she could get you down here. She commanded me to come and wait for you. I’m sorry, brother. You shouldn’t have to die. Let her go. Let us run. You don’t need her. I won’t shoot, I promise.”
“Jacob,” she murmured.
“Is it true?” I asked her.
I still felt her fingers as they lay against my hand. I wasn’t afraid of any violence. She had to know I would shoot her now if she tried it. I concentrated my attention on those few inches of skin. If she gave any indication that she felt any remorse, if she gave my skin the barest stroke, I felt that the memory would help to sustain me. I would need that help. All the wild miles of the Canyon, all those towering buttes and mesas, the titanic cliffs beside us, the endless slopes all around us, they meant nothing compared to a half-inch of human contact.
“I’m not waiting for Doby,” Grant said. “Come to me, Vee. He won’t hurt you. He’s not a killer.”
“This is the end, Grant,” she said.
“Not for me,” he said. “Let her go, Jacob. Come on, Vee. We’ll take the Waldron. We’ll get back to the top somehow. I’m not afraid.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t make me shoot you both. I will.”
She said nothing.
“Will he?” I whispered.
“Maybe.”
Even now, I felt a proud desire to release her, to save her, to prove I wasn’t afraid of dying alone.
“Last chance!” he screamed.
I don’t know if I felt something just then. If it was her flinging my fingers off or clutching my hand tighter. I couldn’t blame her for trying to save herself. All I could do was try to shoot him.
I fired. I missed. A rock beside him shattered and shards blew up into his face. He cringed, staggered; his foot slipped on the pile of rocks. Victoria threw off my arm and ran to him. I couldn’t have fired again without risk of hitting her, not that either of them were at much risk with my aim. But it looked like he was going over anyway, like he would die just as Jewel had, crushed on the rocks below the trail.
It’s not that easy to die, even on a narrow ledge in the Grand Canyon. Grant wobbled from right to left, wheeled his gun arm, grasped at the air with the other, and managed to keep one foot fixed like a spike in the dirt of the trail while the other sifted among the loose rocks. His face changed from confused, to determined, to triumphant.
And then his ankle turned on one of the rocks, and his other foot slipped, and his balance shifted. Grant had time only to look annoyed before he lifted his face to glare at me, furious at what I’d done. The whole rock pile began to slide, and like a giant surfing an avalanche, he went over the edge with it.
He never screamed. He must have been holding his breath on the way down. We could hear his body thump at the initial impact.
I caught up to her. She pushed me back without looking away from the edge.
“Get rid of it,” she said.
“What?”
“The gun. You’re a murderer now. You have to hide the weapon.”
I looked down at my hand. There it was. I made sure to point it in a safe direction. “I’ll tell Doby—”
She turned and snatched it from me. I was too surprised to resist.
“Put it down,” I said.
She turned to the canyon, reached back, and flung the gun far over the edge. It flew end over end, glinting in the sun like a pinwheel, until it cracked off a boulder far below Grant’s body, skipped farther out, and kept falling, out of sight.
“Now they’ll never know,” she said.
She sat at the edge of the path and gazed down, but not down at the body. We waited for Doby. Who would she have chosen at the end? Even then, I wondered how long I would wonder. Just for that afternoon, or days, or years, or forever?
Chapter 29
Jewel’s memorial service was held in the backyard of her mother’s charming fake farmhouse just up the Hudson near Garrison. Magda and I got up hours earlier than our Sunday custom, rented a car, and arrived heroically (we thought) on time but still too late to park within half a mile of the place. We had to tramp over the damp gravel alongside the parked cars, with a stream of other mourners, all our voices low, as if pressed down by the humid air. The procession turned at the driveway and spilled out into the field in back, where the bright green grass was gooey with dew. I thought of the hard-packed dirt and brown scrub of northern Arizona. How do they bury people out there? With a jackhammer? Not Jewel. The Coconino County morgue was still holding her body, and when they were ready, it would be cremated, according to what everyone assumed would have been her wish. Still, I wondered if Jewel’s mother would have wanted her home.
A huge white canopy tent, perfect for summer weddings, captured the heat and human vapor from the thickening mass of bodies underneath. Magda and I crammed ourselves in the back under a set of speakers. The series of open-mike eulogies from friends was just getting started. We cringed before the boom of uplifting reminiscences of Jewel’s most empowering words and deeds. “How many more?” I whispered to Magda in one of the pauses, and instead of making a snarky joke, she passed me a tissue. I accepted it with some embarrassment. I had just about convinced myself that the moisture on my face was all sweat.