“I’m sure you’ve thought of everything. Girls have to these days.” Mrs. Gladstone re-hoisted the dog and re-gathered the quilt around her.
Sophia said goodbye and drove to the grocery store. She picked up some rice, bouillon cubes, jerky, raisins, Dr Pepper, and B vitamins. At this hour, the store was almost empty. A few employees were stocking the last of the night freight. She worked through her list, and the last thing on it was ChapStick. In Princeton, she’d lose a tube before it ran out. Here in the desert she went through it so fast it caught her off guard. Her hair, skin, and lips felt stiff, like clothes left out on the line.
As she came around the end of the vitamin aisle, she saw the two jerks from a couple of days ago on the monument. The tall one with slumped shoulders had his arms filled with cans of beans. The shorter one was squatting down to get at the cans that were near the back of the shelf.
“Not that kind,” one of them said.
“This is the kind I like. They’ve already got seasoning.”
“It’s too salty.”
“The salt is what I like.”
Sophia turned, backed up until she was out of sight, and stopped to listen.
“Now’s not the time to get picky. We’ve got bigger problems right now than salty beans.”
The other one chuckled, then said, “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
“Three who? What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. It’s from a movie. You never saw it.”
“Well, there’s only two of us. So shut up and get a cart.”
She went up the next aisle and hoped to stay away from these two. It was becoming clear how the walls of a small town were always up. She was the stranger, and they were locals. The store employees were locals, too. What must it be like to live in a place where you knew everyone but mostly only interacted with the steady flow of tourists who might only spend an hour or two in your hometown? She remembered once waiting for a table at a restaurant and seeing four kids from the university on a double date saying hello to an older woman who was leaving the restaurant. When the woman and her husband left, the students talked about how weird it was to run into a professor out in the world. One of them said, “I know it’s dumb, but I guess I never think about how they have, like, this whole other life.”
A whole other life.
She made her way to the back of the store and turned to consider the lip balm. She grabbed her go-to basic, then noticed all the choices. Some had SPF protection, some had color, the whole gamut of shades from plum to rose to aubergine. She picked a color she liked and held it in her hands for a few seconds before putting it back, feeling a little crazy about lingering like this. Eventually she picked an unscented tube that offered sun protection and would be less likely to attract pests. Boring but useful.
She asked for a bag of ice, paid, went to the truck, put the ice and soda into her cooler, loaded everything into her pack, then stopped at McDonald’s for breakfast. She ate, leaning against her truck in the morning light, then she threw away all the trash so Paul wouldn’t know about her culinary indiscretion. She liked the greasy comfort of the sandwich but felt the shame of Paul’s paleo-super-macro diet, a practice that would possibly keep him alive forever. She poured her coffee from the Styrofoam cup into her vacuum mug and drove south toward the monument.
___
The Ashdowns left the grocery store and drove out to the state highway, then went twenty-five miles west before turning onto a road that was close to invisible until you were right on top of it. Byron followed each turn of the road with absolute certainty, following a series of branching dirt tracks that shrank down to a pair of ruts in the underbrush. Lonnie pointed to a red rock alcove fifty yards into the sagebrush.
“We camped there once,” he said.
“Not here,” Byron said, and he kept driving.
“I like that spot.”
“This ain’t about liking it. We need a place where we can see our house without anybody seeing us.”
“An ugly hideout isn’t, you know, like some mark of quality. Plus, we can get a line of sight from a bunch of places.” Lonnie folded his arms. They bounced in the cab for a couple more miles before Lonnie asked how much gas was left.
“There’s enough,” Byron snapped. “Plus, we brought the gas can. I don’t need a backseat driver right now.”
“I’m sitting shotgun, though,” Lonnie said.
Byron slammed on the brakes, which bounced Lonnie’s face off the dashboard. He came up holding his nose with both hands. “Uncool,” Lonnie said, examining the blood on his palms. He massaged the sides of his nose with his middle fingers.
Byron’s eyes were tight and dark like the cut ends of a steel rod. “How many times do I have to remind you that we are running for our lives right now?”
Lonnie shrugged.
“I thought you would have a little more focus.”
“Thinking about us getting killed gets me weird, so I let my mind think about other things. I let it go where it wants to like my meditation DVD says to.”
“One of us needs to be on task, don’t you think?”
“Probably.” Lonnie reached up for the handle above his window. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about since I’ve never been killed before. You know, or had somebody trying to kill me because his brother stole a map he wasn’t supposed to steal.”
“No wonder Mom worried about you.” Byron started driving again. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Lonnie had both pinkies up his nose and he was trying to adjust something. Neither of them said anything about it. In a few minutes, Lonnie noticed a bare patch of sun-dried dirt next to a single mature juniper tree, and he pointed to it. Byron slowed and rolled down the window. He raised himself up a little, looked into the distance, and said, “Yeah, we’ll have a good view from here.”
Byron pulled over, and they worked together silently to unhitch the trailer and chock the tires. When they were done, Byron said, “That Las Vegas SOB ain’t going to sneak up on us here.”
“We should get a bag of rattlesnakes and throw them in his car,” Lonnie suggested. “I brought a pillowcase, so we could if we wanted to.”
“Who’s gonna fill it with snakes?”
Lonnie shrugged. “There’s not supposed to be any bad ideas in brainstorming.”
“Is that what we’re doing?” Byron asked.
Lonnie set down his duffel. “Well, we don’t have any ideas other than being here, do we?”
Byron spat on the ground. “Not yet. Come take a look.” He walked past the truck, up a gentle incline, and stood on a bluff that overlooked the tiny cluster of ranch houses, mobile homes, and trailers that made up their outpost neighborhood. From this distance, everything was tiny, the size of Matchbox cars. “If he comes looking for us at the house, we’ll see him before he sees us.”
“Then what?”
“We’ve been hunting before,” Byron said. “We’ll set up the soft blind,” then he closed one eye and pantomimed firing a rifle. Byron went back to the truck and pulled the soft blind out and began erecting it. They brought two camp chairs, a cooler, the gun case, and the spotting scope over to the blind, then made themselves comfortable and dug in for the duration. Byron opened the cooler and handed his brother a beer. “I’m finally calming down,” he said.
After a few sips of beer Lonnie said, “How do we know he’s coming?”
“Because that’s how people like him make money. Nobody’s going to pay him for leaving loose ends. That’s why he’s called a cleaner, because he does the dirty work.”
Lonnie and Byron sat back in their chairs and watched the valley through the slit in the blind with their eyes unfocused to take in everything at once. They’d learned this as boys, when they were poaching deer with their father. They had to keep an eye out for the bucks and for State Fish and Game. He told them when you’re watching for something in particular, you won’t really se
e anything.
As they sat, time broke down into segments, the way ice clears a stream in springtime. They each drank a second beer, then they nodded off, woke and slept, woke and slept. Still nothing out there. Clouds spread across the sky, gathering, boiling, pushing shadows across the valley floor. A crescendo and decrescendo of sunlight. Another beer. Handful of salted nuts. Checking the spotting scope. Nothing but the door to their house, everything unmoving. One distant crack of thunder. No rain. Lonnie got up to pee and came back. Then Byron went. The shadows shortened, and with the sun overhead, they put on wide-brimmed camouflage hats. Above them at intervals the white trails of jets skimmed the belly of the stratosphere.
Byron crashed. His whole body collapsed as if the connective tissue had been removed. His head flopped back, hands dangling almost to the ground. Lonnie pulled the spotting scope over and focused again on their house, down in the valley. In the bright disk, at the center of the crosshairs, he watched a silver Chrysler Sebring creep up the driveway. Lonnie nosed the scope over so the windshield was right at the middle. It was Scissors.
Byron snuffled and settled a little deeper into his chair. Lonnie wasn’t sure he should wake him right away. Maybe the whole thing was like hornets. Stay still and they’ll fly away. If Byron woke up, he’d try to take him out, and there was no way he’d make that shot from here. There would only be one chance, and Lonnie didn’t like the odds.
Through the scope he saw the car door open. Scissors got out, reached into his jacket and pulled a pistol from a shoulder holster, then closed the car door with his foot. He looked around, stooped, and took a pinch of dirt in his fingers, dropped it, and stood again. He went up the stairs to the front door, stooped to peer inside, then without hesitating, he broke the glass with the barrel of the gun and reached inside to open the door.
“Hey,” Lonnie said without thinking.
Byron heard him and started awake. “What’s going on? Is he here?”
“Down there.”
Lonnie didn’t take his eye from the spotting scope, so Byron took the rifle and pointed it toward the trailer, using it to see. “Is that his stupid car?”
“Yep. He’s inside the house,” Lonnie said.
“Give me the clip,” Byron said, holding out his hand.
“I don’t have it.”
“We’ve got a gun and no bullets?”
“I mean, maybe. It’s not my gun, so how would I know?” Lonnie said.
“Seriously, there’s no bullets? At all?”
“There could be some in the truck. You’re not supposed to keep it loaded. We went through that with the cop.”
“Don’t lecture me on the law,” Byron said.
“I don’t think shooting at him is a good plan,” Lonnie said.
“I don’t plan to shoot at him.”
“I’m not sure anyone could make that shot the first time.”
Byron kept looking through the rifle scope and swearing in a steady stream. “What’s he doing in there?”
He watched Scissors emerge from the single-wide and head to the shelter where they kept their travel trailer. He searched around until he found a red gas can, which he lifted and shook to take stock of how much fuel was left.
“I guess we forgot the gas can, too,” Lonnie said.
“Shut up,” Byron said.
They watched as Scissors doused their house and the rickety front porch, and they both swore when he lifted the cover of their gas grill and lit it with the piezo switch.
“You got anything in there that matters?” Byron asked.
“My winter coat. Picture of Mom and her sisters. Books. A box of football cards,” Lonnie said, his eye still on the spotting scope. “It’s a good coat. How about you?”
Scissors carefully tipped the grill over on its side. Flames leapt out of the interior and raced across the patio, turning at a right angle when they hit the wall.
“I got what I need. Prison teaches you to strip down.”
“I think that’s maybe not exactly what you meant to say.”
Byron ignored the comment and adjusted his position, then dry fired the rifle with a click. “I know a couple of guys who could make a shot like this. They’d do it just to see if they had it in them.”
“I really don’t think jail made you a better person,” Lonnie said.
“No, it did not,” Byron said, sitting back and setting the rifle in his lap. “But that’s not what prison is for, little brother. It’s just another way for some rich guys to get richer.”
“It’s burning pretty fast, huh?” Lonnie said.
“What’s he doing now?”
“Getting into his car.”
“This lets you know what that guy was gonna to do to us,” Byron said.
Lonnie sat back in his chair. He got two beers out of the cooler and passed one over. They cracked them open at the same time and drank in silence. Above the top of the blind, they could see the billowing column of black smoke coiling skyward.
___
An hour into the drive, Sophia crumpled the wrapper of a small caramel and glanced in her mirrors. Behind her was a column of black smoke, to the northwest near Cane Beds, near the Paiute reservation. While she was watching the smoke, a pronghorn antelope bounded alongside the truck, keeping pace through the golden mesh of grass. Its stark white face ignored her. This was a creature so present in its own motion, the world was an afterthought. As she reached for her phone to snap a picture, the antelope pulled ahead, cut in front of her, and burst diagonally across the open ground, following the receding line of steel giants carrying power from the hydroelectric dams on the Colorado River to Las Vegas and L.A.
After so many weeks in this new place, Sophia realized that even though she was meant to be studying the past, she was, in fact, deeply involved in a long sequence of present moments that served as historical muses, creating a rhythm for the long view. Clouds would gather and dissipate. A snake would uncoil itself across the road. Dry grasses would oscillate in the breeze. Birds would chase one another beneath the open sky. Each moment gone in the instance of its unfolding. Each day so much like the others that had come and gone before.
The terrain changed. Flat roads gave way to gentle undulations. After a time, she came across a rise and saw a white NPS Jeep parked at the junction of two county roads. Paul was wearing regular clothes, stretching his hamstrings. As she slowed and approached, he looked up to greet her. He looked exhausted, but immediately asked about her voyage. The word threw her. Why not say “trip”? “Street clothes, huh?” she asked instead of answering his question.
He shrugged, “All work and no play. That’s why I’m leaving the Jeep here.”
She watched him close up the Jeep and lock it. He moved deliberately, like someone doing Tai Chi.
She circled back to his question and said her “voyage” was uneventful except for her encounter with an antelope.
“Pronghorn,” he said. “Antilocapra americana.”
“I can’t believe how fast it was. I must have been going forty.”
“Fastest creature in North America. Amazing stamina.” Paul transferred his gear to her truck and said he hoped it was okay if she drove. He’d been doing a lot of it lately. Then he switched topics and asked about the resupply.
She said she got everything on the list. “You can go through it while we drive.”
“I’ll wait. We should just catch up,” he said. “That’s what I’m looking forward to.”
Within a few minutes, they were under way. The sky that was empty in the morning had filled with clouds during the day, and a few dumped dark patches of virga into the air. They drove out of the open into a different place, where the rocks emerged from the soil like the bones of something buried eons ago.
They spoke of the land and the weather. Paul talked about the mundanities of the monument, the complications of politics and budgets. Sophia talked about her research and how she was trying to clarify, for herself, at least, what the work of arch
eology should be. This led to a discussion of museums and repositories and eventually they returned to parks. She told Paul about her presentation at Bryce and the idea that people should have access. At the same time, people have a habit of ruining what they love. She told Paul about the man’s heart attack and the doctor who had saved him. Paul asked her what mattered to her most, and she said it was the truth. She wanted her work to cut through the bogus ideas that museums have put into people’s heads. She was also worried that sometimes parks are sacrificial. You have to let people ruin part of a place so you can save the rest of it.
Paul nodded. “We think about that a lot,” he said. “It’s a hard call. I don’t think we always get it right. I mean, we didn’t used to, when a park meant a lodge. I mean, we don’t do it like that anymore. It’s not supposed to be Jellystone. Some people in charge don’t know that.”
As they drove on, they spoke less frequently. Paul would point out a remarkable red-rock fin or an anomalous tree on the dry plain tapping into some scarce underground water. After a time, Paul pointed to a spot in the distance where the low cliffs gathered into a kind of promontory. “Up there,” Paul said. “That’s the trailhead.”
“Here?” she asked. “But there’s no road.”
“Where we’re going, Sophia, we don’t need roads,” Paul said, grinning.
Sophia took note of the odd rhythms of his speech. His language was graceful when he spoke on the subject of the natural world, but it was an odd grab bag of movie and TV quotations when it came to anything else. She decided to meet him halfway. “Since this truck doesn’t fly, I wouldn’t mind a good road,” she said.
“If people had flying cars there wouldn’t be any place left worth going to,” he said, turning to look out the window.
Sophia put the truck into four-wheel drive and abruptly turned off the road, which banged Paul’s head against the window. He sat back and adjusted his seat belt.
“Sorry,” she said, trying not to laugh.
The truck whined as it climbed and bounced over the rocks. In a few hundred feet, she came to dry open ground scattered with bone-colored rocks. Around the perimeter were a number of small blooming cacti. Paul said they could park there. “You can’t do this up at Bryce, but the monument is different, and parking here helps hide the vehicle,” he said.
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