The Maze

by Will Hobbs

  “Git back under the Hummer!” commanded the man with a voice as harsh as a buzz saw.

  Curling its lip at Rick, the pit bull slunk back under the vehicle, snarling all the while.

  “What are you doing back here?” the man exploded.

  “I—I just need the bathroom key.”

  The gas station man jiggled the knob, then bumped the door open with his shoulder. “Was never locked,” he growled.

  Nice guy, Rick thought. There was no doubt where the dog had come by its charming personality.

  The man from Colorado was standing at the front corner of the building, flashing his credit card at the gas station man. Rick went inside the rest room. Someone had scratched in the mirror, CLEAN YOUR REST ROOM, NUKE.

  He guessed that he’d just met Nuke. He was surprised someone hadn’t added a comment about the dog.

  The sink was filthy, but at least there was hot water and soap. The cut over his cheekbone looked red-raw, with swelling around the sides. He knew he had to clean it out thoroughly. He splashed warm water on his face, then made a paste in the palm of his hand with the dry soap from the dispenser. On the wound it felt harsh, like gasoline.

  Rick stepped outside hoping that his driver had changed his mind, but the Dodge pickup was gone. How was he going to get another ride? There was virtually no traffic here. He looked up and down the road, half expecting to see a patrol car pull into the station with lights flashing.

  There was a new vehicle at the pump, a Ford pickup with a camper shell on the back and Arizona plates. The driver, a young, clean-shaven man wearing a Grand Canyon T-shirt, was putting the gas caps back on his dual tanks.

  Rick paused at the front corner of the station, waited until the driver went inside to the counter. Neither of the men inside was aware of him. Rick had a desperate idea. There wasn’t time to think about it. There was only time to act. Arizona sounded as good as the next place.

  He darted to the back of the pickup and tried the camper shell’s latch. It turned in his hand. Without hesitating he stepped to the bumper, climbed in the back, and closed the window behind him. The bed of the truck was crammed with coolers, milk crates full of groceries, propane bottles, all sorts of odds and ends.

  He worked fast to move forward in the bed of the pickup. Rearranging milk crates, he managed to wedge himself between two large white coolers. The see-through from the cab into the bed was blocked by equipment. With any luck the driver would return to the truck without looking in the back or through the tinted windows along the sides of the shell.

  It worked. For twenty or thirty minutes the pickup sped along the highway. Then it turned onto badly wash-boarded gravel. Rick kept peeking out the sides, trying to figure out where he was going. The truck was crossing flat mesas, crawling in and out of canyons. Had he just made another mistake? He had a bad feeling this wasn’t going to get him anywhere that was going to help him. After several hours the road got so bad that he reached for a twelve-pack of toilet paper to sit on.

  Five hours since the gas station, and still he hadn’t seen a single indication of civilization. He wondered if he was in Arizona now. He thought of one of the kids in his unit, Manuel Garcia. A month before, Manny had left on a bus for Phoenix, Arizona. His aunt had a cafe there called Penny’s Place, and Manny was going to work for her there, live with her family. Rick wondered what Manny and his aunt would say if he showed up at Penny’s Place in Phoenix, Arizona. Would they take him in?

  Why should they?

  Southern California was right next to Arizona. Southern California was where his best foster family had moved to. He’d been close to going with them, being adopted too, and he knew it. He’d even been on their scouting trip to the southern part of the state. “Sure I’d like to,” he’d overheard Mrs. Clark telling her husband that day at Disneyland. “Four of our own, and four adopted already. You know I’d like to, but it’s a question of the straw breaking the camel’s back.”

  Would they be glad to see him?

  Yes, sort of.

  Would they keep him?

  No.

  Would they hide him?

  No.

  His life was a mountain to climb, and it didn’t have handholds.

  The pickup stopped. The driver got out of the cab, left the engine running. Rick was afraid the man was about to lift the back of the camper shell.

  Instead he heard a click, then ten seconds later a second, identical click. He’s locking the hubs, Rick realized, for four-wheel drive.

  Half a minute later, with the lights on, the truck started down an incline so steep that everything in the back slid hard toward the front. This was steep, unbelievably steep. The driver was easing the truck down over sudden drops almost like stairs, creeping down the grade in the lowest of his gears.

  When the pounding let up for a few seconds, Rick managed to peek out the side. It seemed like the truck was going over the edge of the world. As they passed through a slot in the rim of a cliff, the landscape far below looked like nothing Rick had seen before in his life—a world of fantastically sculpted stone palely lit by the last daylight and strange beyond imagining. It looked like an alien planet.

  He wedged himself back into his slot, fought off the crush of a cooler. It took ten minutes for the driver to crawl down the switchbacks to the bottom of the grade. On the flats the driver shifted gears and picked up a little speed. It was getting dark. They were approaching the first of a string of tall buttes, lined up straight as office buildings on a street and silhouetted against the first stars. Where on earth was this?

  He was hungry, so hungry. Lifting the lid of the nearest cooler, one of the large white ones, he lurched back in surprise. He was looking into the glazed dead eyes of a baby cow—a half-frozen black-and-white little calf, not gutted or anything. The calf had just been thrown whole into this cooler with some dry ice.

  His mind reached for rational explanations but couldn’t find any. His heart was hammering out of control like the valves were going to burst. He tried another of the big white coolers. Another dead calf. “Weirdness,” he whispered, trying to hold back a cold flash of terror.

  The truck stopped. The driver killed the engine and got out.

  Rick knew he was going to have to run for it now. His eyes landed on a pack of hot dogs on top of a grocery bag. Grab them, he told himself. You’re going to need food. Then he saw that the whole bag was filled with hot dogs. What would anyone want with this many hot dogs?

  He took just one pack. Through the window now he could see two men talking, the driver and a slim man with a full beard.

  Rick eased the rear window of the camper shell up, slid over the tailgate, crouched, and peeked at the silhouettes of the two men. They were standing in front of three canvas wall tents erected in a row on wood platforms. A large tarp had been pitched across from the tents over an area Rick couldn’t see. He saw a white fiberglass kennel cage, but he didn’t see a dog. He’d had enough of dogs for one day. A second Ford pickup with a camper shell was parked next to a large fuel drum on a metal stand. This was quite an encampment.

  The two men, Rick realized, must be about to unload the groceries and the dead calves. He had to make his move now.

  Keeping the truck between him and them, Rick stepped softly into the darkness on the pavementlike natural surface of sandstone. A gigantic rock formation nearby, like a petrified ship in a petrified sea, promised cover.

  5

  Rick had hoped the rocks would give off heat during the night and keep him warm, but they didn’t. He shivered for hours under a clear black sky blazing with stars. The moon rose after midnight and threw cold light on the cliffs towering above the camp. Finally he slept. His dreams took him on a jangled and confusing ride until he found himself in the comfort of his old familiar flying dream.

  When he was younger, he’d been able to keep the dream going all night—hovering, weightlessly hovering, with his arms outspread. It had started when he was growing up on the Mendocino coast, i
n California. The first time he’d had the dream, he’d flown above the lighthouse where his grandmother had worked when he was little, before she got the job managing the trailer park at Fort Bragg.

  That first dream was still vivid in his memory. His grandmother had stepped outside the lighthouse gift shop. He could see her down there, looking all around for him. Finally she looked up. She saw him flying above the lighthouse. She beckoned him to come down.

  In the flying dream people were always beckoning him to come down.

  Tonight he was hovering above the yard at Blue Canyon. It was Northcut, the guard, who came out of a building and tried to wave him down. Rick hovered a little higher. Some teachers came out and called for him to come down, Mr. B. even. With a shake of his head he floated even higher until he could see the entire square shape of the compound defined by the fence. Now all the kids were flooding into the yard. The entire yard was filled with faces, too far below to identify. He could still see their arms, though, motioning for him to come back.

  It made him feel both happy and sad to be out of reach, out of everybody’s reach.

  The high desert cold in the hour before dawn woke Rick up. Instantly he was aware of the throbbing at his cheekbone. Then he recalled his dream. He could still see the compound at Blue Canyon from the air and people beckoning. The old image of flying above the lighthouse came to mind, and he remembered the ancient-looking sign he used to puzzle over at the entrance to the museum gift shop. The sign said PRAY FOR THOSE WHO ARE LOST. He wouldn’t have puzzled over it now. It was about people like him.

  He missed his grandmother, more than he’d allowed himself to miss her in a long time. He could remember her voice, her eyes. She hadn’t been that old when she died, only forty-seven. Her hair wasn’t even gray.

  “Life isn’t fair,” he’d pointed out to her once, on the subject of his mother.

  “Tough beans, kid,” his grandmother replied. “How can life be fair? Only people can be fair.”

  It was close to dawn, but a few stars were still out. The horizon was glowing with pinks and oranges and lavenders. Rick stood up, shivered, and shook. At the sound of a motor starting he skittered up a mound of smooth sandstone to peer over the top. The supply truck was pulling out, going back the same way it had come in.

  For a second Rick wondered if he should run after it and try to holler it down. Maybe he could come up with some kind of story.

  Too late anyway, he realized. The driver was making good time on the flats. In a few minutes the truck would be climbing the steep grade up the switchbacks.

  He remembered the dead calves. It was better not to have anything to do with these people.

  He needed to get out of here. He shivered again. It wasn’t just the cold.

  The more frightened he became, the more he was drawn to a desperate solution. He needed the truck he was looking at, the one that remained in camp. Not to go back the way he’d come, up that horrible road, but to head east. The road in the direction of the approaching sunrise looked much easier.

  He wouldn’t be stealing the truck. He would leave it at the first major road he came to, and he’d leave a note. What other choice did he have? Wait for a vehicle to come by, hope to hitch a ride out here on the far side of the moon?

  He could hope that the bearded man had left the keys in the ignition. In this world populated by rocks instead of human beings, that seemed possible.

  Hurry, before the sun rises.

  He crept to the truck and peered inside. The keys were there, just as he’d pictured them.

  A minute later he was behind the wheel and raising a cloud of dust. The gears ground horribly as he tried to shift into third. A light in the panel said he was in four-wheel drive. He’d leave it that way; he knew nothing about operating the stubby secondary gearshift. In his rearview mirror he saw the bearded man burst out of the tent. The man didn’t even try to run after him, just stood there with his hands on his hips and gaped in disbelief.

  Rick drove fast through sandy gullies and across terraces of solid rock sprinkled with narrow-leafed yucca and prickly pear cactus and the only trees able to survive there, scrubby pinyon pines and junipers. He stuffed hot dogs one after the other into his mouth, the three he hadn’t eaten the night before. The deteriorating road headed down the spine of the ridge past sand dunes that spilled onto a long, parched clearing dotted with bunch-grass.

  Rick saw no vehicles, no people, but he assumed that if he kept driving he would eventually put this bizarre and threatening landscape behind him. Five miles from where he’d started, however, the road abruptly dead-ended at a cluster of slender, standing formations that looked like dozens of hundred-foot giants balancing bowling pins on their heads. One of them even appeared to have an eye. It looked like a cyclops from Greek mythology.

  He knew he hadn’t passed a fork. This really was the end of the road. Could he go on foot from here?

  A five-minute run down the trail that led from road’s end brought him to the edge of an abyss.

  Rick was looking almost straight down, a thousand feet or more, at a great river winding its way through a monumental corridor of stone. He stepped back, light-headed, disbelieving. What was this place? Where in the world was he?

  Looking into the sun across the river, Rick could see another world of weirdly sculpted badlands with a mountain range beyond. To the north stretched more canyons and towering mesas, another mountain range. As far as he could see there wasn’t a single building, a single road. He’d reached the dead end of nowhere.

  There was only one direction to go: back the way he’d come. He was going to have to make a run for it past the bearded man’s camp, up the grade onto the plateau, and back to Hanksville.

  He turned the truck around and drove toward the standing red buttes and the tall red cliffs beyond. The rear end scraped badly as he forced his way too fast through a gully. After that he was able to pick up some speed.

  In the rearview mirror he saw the plume of red dust he was raising. He was going fast, so fast he hit his head on the cab roof and bit his tongue. Now he was putting the string of buttes behind him and approaching the camp. He held his breath.

  No one was there. Had the bearded man called ahead, called the police? Probably he had a radio or a cell phone.

  For the first time Rick noticed the two-way radio mounted by the base of the gearshift. A coiled cord led to a push-to-talk mike among the clutter on the bench seat of the truck. If he was lucky, this radio was the man’s only communication link to the outside.

  He put the camp behind him and raced in and out of the gullies toward the base of the boulder-strewn slopes ahead. It was here that the road, if it could be called a road, took advantage of a natural interruption in the seemingly endless march of vertical cliffs under the rim of the plateau. He knew it would be slow going when the road got bad, which it would as soon as it started to climb. There were so many places to hide, the bearded man could appear at any second. Rick held his breath.

  He was climbing the first hairpin, already a couple of hundred feet above the rocky plain. As he came around the turn, he found the narrow passage barricaded with rocks and small boulders. The man from the camp, with a full red-brown beard beginning to gray, his faded denim shirt unbuttoned, was sitting on his roadblock with his hands on his hips and breathing heavily from exertion.

  A few feet closer and Rick noticed an angry-looking scar on the man’s cheekbone, unnaturally smooth and white in comparison to the rest of his face, which was deeply tanned, lined, and leathery.

  There was no mistaking the magnitude of the man’s anger.

  For a moment Rick thought of trying to race the truck backward. But he knew he’d only drive it off the road and roll it over.

  Now this. Another dead end. His life was nothing but an endless succession of dead ends.

  6

  He looked away from the furious blue eyes and the hard white scar.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the bearded m
an yelled as he yanked open the door of the pickup. “Get out of my truck!”

  Rick jumped out, backed away slowly. “I wasn’t going to—I didn’t mean to…”

  “Who are you anyway, and how did you get here?”

  Rick kept backing up, trying to think what he should say. The truth? A lie? The guy was so mad, he was afraid to say anything.

  “Get back in the truck,” the man ordered.

  Rick went around to the passenger side and got in. He was relieved that the man hadn’t taken his fists to him or pulled out a gun.

  The bearded man set to work with a vengeance, tossing rocks off the road, then jumped into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and started backing down the grade.

  All Rick could think about was Blue Canyon. They would put him back in Blue Canyon for sure. His life was over.

  The man drove to his camp without once glancing at Rick. In camp the man continued to ignore him as he brewed a pot of coffee. He must be trying to figure out what to do with me, Rick thought.

  The man with the scar poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down on a lawn chair. “So what are you doing here?” he asked suddenly. “Where’s your stuff? You must have a backpack or a sleeping bag somewhere.”

  “I don’t have any stuff,” Rick answered. “It all got stolen…out on the highway.”

  “Then how did you get here? My supply truck? Did you hide in the back? Is that it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Look, I really wasn’t going to steal your truck. I was going to leave it as soon as I got back to the highway.”

  “You could get hurt pulling a stunt like that.”

  “I already got hurt,” Rick said, motioning toward his cheekbone. “I gotta get something on this. I’m worried about it.”