Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  Silas threw the flyers in the trash and put the papers down on the desk, amid piles of other paperwork. He sat down heavily in his leather office chair—liberated from his final teaching post at Northern Arizona University—and turned on his computer. While the machine grumbled to life, he scanned the area newspapers’ headlines, including the Salt Lake City Tribune, for relevant stories concerning a mysterious discovery, a crank call to the police about something—anything—turning up where it shouldn’t. There was nothing about a body.

  He checked his email, deleting almost everything without reading it. There seemed to be no trace whatsoever.

  Feeling suddenly weary beyond words, Silas turned off the computer, switched off the air conditioner and the lights and left the store in darkness. He made his way to the City Market for a stack of frozen dinners, then to the state liquor store for a case of Molson Canadian. He left Moab via Highway 191 north. Thirty minutes and he’d be home.

  For a moment Silas slipped into a familiar wistful reverie: He was driving up the narrow, looping road that led from Flagstaff, Arizona, to his home in the woods below the San Francisco Peaks. The sun was setting and the forest was full of long shadows; the vanilla scent of the pines was intoxicating, invigorating. As warm as the days of the autumn semester could be, it was always cool in the evening deep in the woods along the base of Humphrey’s Peak. Soon he’d be home. They might sit on the wide porch a while, sipping gin and tonics; maybe he’d retreat to his library, as he often did, to review notes for the next day’s lecture.

  His wife, however, did not await him at his new home in the Castle Valley. It had been three and a half years since Silas had seen Penelope. It had been three and a half years since she had gone for a hike, somewhere within a day’s drive of Moab, never to return.

  Lost in his dream, Silas took the turnoff to his small ranch house too fast. He kicked a spray of gravel and sand into the defenseless weeds and cactus before driving the track to a single-story, wood frame house that sat pressed against the fifteen-hundred-foot sheer wall of Porcupine Rim. His lights swept across the front of the house as he came to a stop, a cloud of dust swirling up and then settling in the dense evening air. He turned the engine off and sat for a moment, feeling tired and thirsty and numb.

  Hunger soon won out over fatigue, and he stepped from the car, carrying as much of his gear as he could to the front door. The house was hot and airless. He went first to the kitchen and opened the fridge to let its cool air spill out. He took the last cold can of beer from the fridge and opened it. Without stopping for a breath, he downed half of it, then put the new case in the nearly empty icebox. He tucked the dozen frozen dinners, save one, into the freezer, and popped the remaining meal into the microwave. The four water bottles from his dusty day pack he rinsed and refilled, then placed in the freezer next to the dinners.

  Silas closed the fridge door, went into the living room and turned on the central air conditioner. He carried the rest of the gear to the second bedroom, which he had turned into a gear room, and plugged in his GPS. Next he went to his bedroom. A small chest of drawers sat against one wall next to the open closet. Beside the bed stood a nightstand with a lamp, a clock radio, and a single framed picture, and on the walls hung half a dozen large-scale road maps of the region.

  At the back of the house, next to the bathroom, was the utility room, with a back door that led to a picnic table and hammock beneath a thatched pergola. With the lights off, he stripped naked next to the washing machine and put his sweat-stained, dusty clothing directly into the wash. He padded to the bathroom and took a cold shower.

  By the time Silas was finished, dressed, and had dinner ready, the house had begun to cool. He sat in the darkness at a small, square table at the center of the room and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the world beyond. His view was dominated by the conical form of Round Mountain, and beyond that the steep precipice of the Adobe Mesa. In the faint light cast by the stars he could just make out the mesa’s edge, its forested crown looking like the bristles on a wire brush.

  He ate half of the cardboard meal and finished the beer and sat back in his chair and regarded the darkness. There was one more task to complete and then he could fall into bed, perchance to sleep.

  He turned on the lights in the living room. The walls were filled from floor to ceiling with a series of topographic maps. The 7.5 minute quadrangles were arranged end to end: the entirety of the Canyonlands and Arches National Parks; the Manti-La Sal National Forest, stretching south to Natural Bridges National Monument; and farther south still through the Vermilion Cliffs and the Grand Canyon. Then west to Glen Canyon, Dark Canyon, and Paria Canyon; the Arizona Strip; and then, on another wall, the vast expanse of the Kaiparowits Plateau and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. On a third wall were trail maps of various national monuments, state parks and national forests scattered across the American Southwest.

  Silas moved to the sheet that showed the vast tableland called the Island in the Sky, spread out over several maps pinned next to one another. He took a colored pencil from a box on the floor and found the location of his day’s exploration. Carefully he hatched in the five-mile-long and half-mile-wide section of terrain he had traversed. He indicated on the map, with a black pencil, the narrow defile he had explored with a dashed line. He stepped back and regarded his progress.

  Much of the Island in the Sky area had now been hatched to indicate he had searched the area once. Other sections, more easily accessible, had been shaded in, indicating a second exploration. Large areas of the vast region along the Green River and down through the more remote sections of the Needles district and the Maze still required examination. He looked up and to the right, where he had indicated that most of Arches National Park had been searched, as had much of the La Sal Mountains. Looking around the room he could plainly see that despite his tiresome tromping of three years, so much country remained to be searched. At his current pace he knew it would be the work of a lifetime. He put the pencils back in their box and turned out the lights.

  In the bathroom, Silas regarded himself in the mirror. Disoriented, he retreated to the bedroom, where the bed was the only piece of furniture he had kept from Flagstaff. He reached to turn out the bedside light, letting his fingers trail over the framed picture that rested there.

  She smiled back at him, as she always did in his memories, her midnight hair pooled like the waves on a river where they break over stones just below the surface; at once soft yet strong. His fingers traced the line of her cheek and then trailed down her mouth and chin. A tear ran from his bloodshot eyes and he brushed it away. He turned out the light, and into the emptiness of the night whispered the first words he had said all day: “I miss you.”

  THEY SAT TOGETHER AT THE dining room table. The room was illuminated by two candles flickering in their brass holders. Silas held her hand. Outside, in the dark woods that ringed the San Francisco Peaks, the snow lay deep and cool. It felt good to be cool again.

  Dinner had been cleared away and they sat facing one another across the end of the long antique table she had inherited from her Mexican grandmother. He topped up her wine, then they raised glasses and drank. She smiled at him, the same smile he had first fallen in love with more than a decade ago when he was a visiting professor from the University of British Columbia. She had been an associate in the Department of English at NAU. They had different tastes: he chose Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto; she liked Edward Abbey and Cormac McCarthy. They had argued long into the night. It had been like that, in the beginning; he was drawn to her youthful vitality and she to his experience.

  In that candlelit room the passion was still there.

  He felt her hand drawing back and felt the hot flush that always accompanied that retreat. Not this time. Not this time. Please don’t go, he thought, holding her large brown eyes. “There is water in Sleepy Hollow, Si,” she said, calling him by his nickname, her fingers tightening around his hand.

&n
bsp; I don’t understand.

  “That’s where you’ll find what you need.” Her hand slipped away. He stood up, the table rocking, the candles flickering, sending shadows swooning across the blackness of the room. Please wait. I don’t know what you mean.

  He made his way from the dining room into the study with its wood-paneled walls and tall bookshelves crammed with tomes. He found what he was looking for, always seemed to be searching for, and rushed back, the book in hand, flipping through the worn, dust-stained pages. But she was gone.

  “Penny!” He turned in a circle. He felt the cool wind sweep through the room and the candles blew out, casting the house into blackness. “Penny!” He ran for the door, dropping the book. The front door was open, the winter chill sweeping down the hall, snow and leaves on the floor.

  He stepped out onto the broad front porch. The moon was up and full and cast its hollow light down on the ponderosa pine forest that ringed the house and crept up the slopes of the peaks above, the winter trees like skeletons in the blue light.

  “Penny!” he yelled again, but she was not there. The tracks led off into the woods, and in his stocking feet he ran after her into the black and white landscape, but the tracks led on and on and he could never follow them far enough.

  HE WOKE WITH a start. He had dreamt that he was cool once again, but it was the same dream as ever and he was sweating, naked on top of the sheets. He rolled onto his side and looked at the clock. It was almost five. There was no light outside from stars or moon or the first rays of the sun. He tried to remember everything about the dream; the way her hand felt in his, the soft gaze of her beautiful eyes. The sound of her voice. “There is water in Sleepy Hollow,” he said aloud. The dream was the same but this time she had spoken to him. He sat up in bed. From a small drawer in the bedside table he found a notebook and pen and jotted those words down. He knew those words.

  When the sun finally splashed across the bold face of Dome Plateau and Dry Mesa to the north, he was sitting at the small table, surrounded by his maps. A cold cup of coffee rested in his hand, a pile of books open before him.

  Is it possible he could have missed something? He stood, placing the coffee down on the table, and picked up the book again, walking with it to the map of Arches National Park. He traced his finger down the long, winding path of Courthouse Wash. It had been one of the very first places he had searched. That was three and a half years ago. He had looked there even before retiring from NAU, before selling the Flagstaff house and their possessions and moving to the Castle Valley to be closer to her last known location. He had searched again shortly after moving: the cross-hatched length of Courthouse Wash had been colored in.

  It was a ten-mile stretch of arboreal canyons that cut across the western edge of Arches National Park and emptied into the Colorado River just outside of Moab. He opened the book to an essay called “Cowboys and Indians” and, with his finger on the map, read, “There is water in Sleepy Hollow, a big pool under a seep in the canyon wall, fenced off from the cows. We paused for a few minutes to drive and refill our canteens, then moved on. No time for a swim today . . .”

  The book was an original 1968 edition of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, chronicling three summers in which the iconic desert writer worked as a park ranger in what was then an off-the-beaten-track national monument attracting a few thousand adventurous tourists each year. The book was a requiem for the desert, for the canyons and for America’s national parks. Silas had disdained it throughout his career as a professor of comparative western literature. Now he had much of the book’s text memorized.

  “‘There is water in Sleepy Hollow.’” He tossed the book onto the table and headed for the gear room.

  IT WAS 7:00 AM when Silas parked his Outback at the old trailhead for Courthouse Wash. He had bypassed the new park entrance and chosen instead to drop into the canyon as near as he could to where Abbey would have begun in Desert Solitaire. That meant driving along the rough track that wove between Seven Mile Canyon and the upper reach of Courthouse Wash to where Arches National Park began and the road ended.

  He set off on foot, past an old stock pond, and down into the canyon. Weaving his way down the wash, he pushed through every grove of alder, looking beneath each tangled mass of tamarisk. The branches pulled at this hat and scratched his face so that by mid morning he looked as if he’d been in a fight with a cat.

  At midday, the canyon opened up into a broad valley, and he knew, from his previous searches of Courthouse Wash, that he would soon pass under Park Entrance Road. Through waves of undulating heat he made out the distinctive shape of the Tower of Babel, its perpendicular walls rising a thousand feet above the sandy flats below. Another ten minutes of trudging through the dust and the Courthouse Towers hove into view.

  There were still several miles of Courthouse Wash, including Sleepy Hollow, yet to search. He passed under the park road’s bridge, lingering in the shade, drinking from his second water bottle before plunging back into the liquid heat.

  The day grew hotter still, and soon he could see, where the canyon ran east by northeast, the daily collision of clouds forming high over distant plateaus. Sleepy Hollow was just around the corner, so he pressed on, pushing through the suppurating morass of quicksand that pulled at his boots and made him light-headed with expended effort. He reached the opening of the side canyon where Abbey had found water during his cattle drive, and where hikers often found solace from the intense afternoon sun.

  Silas headed up the canyon, its walls narrow and in places overhung, the black stains of desert varnish extending from rim to canyon floor. In places the sandy bottom was wet, and as he strode on, pools appeared, stagnant but lovely in the brutal heat. He cupped water with his hands, splashing it against his gritty face. He took off his sagging hat and submerged it in a pool, then put it back on so that the evaporation would cool him. In less than ten minutes it would be dry again.

  When he finally reached the spring, he sat down on a slab of sandstone that had peeled off from the canyon rim. The slab was in the shade of the overhang, next to the pool of water that seeped from a fissure in the canyon wall. He drank from his water bottle and lay back on the stone and fell into the chasm of an uneasy sleep. He woke with a start a few minutes later, blinking, trying to remember where he was. He searched the area around the spring. Crawling on hands and knees through the tangles of alder and willow, he found nothing. “There is water in Sleepy Hollow,” he said out loud, his voice sounding weak. “But nothing else . . .”

  He stood and shouldered his pack and decided to walk out the rest of the narrow gulch to where it boxed up in another mile, just to be certain no stone was left unturned. If Penelope had come this way on her last hike into canyon country before vanishing three and a half years before, she would be plainly visible to all.

  Maybe the naysayers were right. Maybe she would never be found out here amid the rocks and canyons. Maybe she had simply disappeared of her own volition and was living now in the south of France, on a desert island, in a cabin somewhere in the Maine woods, perhaps not alone.

  Silas shook his head. He may not have been the most attentive husband in the world, but he knew that his wife would never leave him. Not for another man. Not without telling him why.

  Three and a half years of doubt swelled in him as thunderheads roiled over the Windows section of Arches National Park.

  As he moved farther up the canyon, away from the spring, the quiet in the canyon grew deeper. He walked through a world reduced to the barest of elements: sun, sand, slickrock, and silence.

  Distracted and weary, Silas didn’t notice the earth moving beneath his feet until he heard the deep growl from ahead in the canyon. He stopped. He squatted down and put his hand on the canyon floor, then on the sandstone wall next to him.

  “Fucker,” he cursed.

  He turned and began to run down the canyon, shedding his pack. Drained as he was, he ran for his life, the sound in the canyon growing with intensity. In
a short moment the ground beneath him started to quiver, the sand became saturated and he was suddenly splashing through ankle-deep water. He knew that if he made the mouth of the Hollow where it met Courthouse Wash he would be okay. He risked a glace back over his shoulder. That was a mistake.

  The torrent of water raging down the canyon was half as tall as he was, and surged up the ruddy wall in a thick, gelatinous meniscus, heaving from one side of the chasm to the other as it rounded each corner. A short, intense thunderstorm in the Windows area of the park had dumped a month’s worth of rain inside of ten minutes, and it was all racing down Sleepy Hollow, with Silas between it and the Colorado River. He turned again and ran hard, but before he reached the spring he was overtaken by the thick slurry of the flood and swept away.

  IT WAS EVENING when Silas awoke. He knew he should be dead. He could see stars, and realized he was lying on his back. He tried to move but could not. His immediate thought was that his back must be broken. He tried his arms and found that the left arm could move and he reached across his body. He was covered in a thick, soupy muck, buried except for his left arm and face. He clawed at the stuff, trying to push his arms and legs free. In a moment, he had pulled himself from the mud and lay down on his face, vomiting. He pushed himself to his knees and tried to stand. His left ankle gave away and he fell again into the ooze. Scratching and clawing for purchase in the watery mess, he pulled himself toward the trunk of an uprooted cottonwood log and lay there a moment.

  His pack and hat were nowhere to be seen, his shirt was in tatters. He imagined his body to be covered in cuts and bruises and he did what he could to feel for rents in his flesh. Having survived the flood, he didn’t want to bleed to death there in the quagmire.