Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  Avery’s smile faded. “No luck yet?” she asked respectfully.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “I heard about the girl in Courthouse Wash.”

  Silas remained implacable. At least the media didn’t know about his involvement yet. “I feared the worse. I still hope Penny will turn up in some little backward town like Hanksville, raising somebody else’s kids.”

  Avery shook her head. “You know, I saw her a lot before she . . . before she disappeared, Silas. She never once had eyes for another man. Don’t listen to that jackass Jacob Isaiah. He’s a class A prick and is just getting under your skin because of how rough your wife was on his development plans.”

  “Do you know anything about what Isaiah was up to out at Hatch Wash?”

  “He’s got big ideas for just about every place within a couple of hours of Moab,” she said. “But I don’t recall anything. Doesn’t mean much; this place is a full-time effort.”

  “What about this Hayduke?” Avery’s colleague Janet Dempsey had come to the counter during the conversation, her arms loaded with books needing to be stocked. “I think you’re talking about Josh Charleston.” Silas looked at her. He had recently met a Josh.

  “You know him?” he asked.

  “Yeah, kid about twenty-eight, maybe thirty. Calls himself Hayduke. Has the beard and the hair. Not really a serious enviro. Just makes a lot of noise. I do remember seeing him with your wife once or twice, Silas. In here, and once on Main Street.”

  “Were they friends?”

  “I don’t know,” said Janet.

  “Don’t suppose you know how to find this guy? He live here in town?”

  “Winters he does. Summers he camps out in the Manti-La Lal National Forest.”

  Silas knew exactly where to find Hayduke.

  THE ROAD TO Oowah Lake was rough and winding, but within two hours of leaving Back of Beyond Silas was driving through the aspen parkland that rimmed the La Sals. Mount Tukuhnikivatz rose prominently on the skyline, its symmetrical summit still dappled with patches of winter snow late in August. At over twelve thousand feet, summer never got a handhold on this prominent crest.

  Silas parked at the gate to the campsite and unfolded his sore body from the car, holding his cane for support. He began to walk around the lanes, looking for Josh Charleston’s Jeep. He asked about Josh when he saw other campers, but nobody had seen him or his machine. Finally, near the back of the site he found an older man who had been there on and off throughout the summer. He told Silas that Josh had moved to nearby Warner Lake.

  Silas returned to his Outback and drove for half an hour on the winding, rocky roads, and pulled up at the Warner Lake trailhead. The blue Jeep Wrangler was parked among three or four others. Taking his cane again, Silas started up the trail, but when he reached the campground, it was empty. Josh could have ventured into the high country and might not be back for a week. He could be climbing Haystack Mountain or crossing Burro Pass and be ten miles from here. Frustrated, Silas turned and walked back to his car. The breeze rustled the leaves so they sounded like wind chimes made from rice paper.

  When he got to the dirt parking lot he stopped in his tracks. The man he had met earlier in the week—who had introduced himself as Josh—was digging in the back of his Jeep.

  “Mr. Charleston?” said Silas.

  The man raised his shaggy head from the back of his machine and looked at Silas.

  “We met up in Miner’s Basin. I’m Silas Pearson.”

  Josh looked around. “Not blocking you in this time, am I?”

  Silas approached him and stuck out his hand. “You’re not. I wonder if you have time to chat.” They shook, and Josh’s hand eclipsed his own.

  “’Bout what?”

  “Would you like a beer?”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  Silas went to the back of his vehicle, opened the hatch, and took two Canadians from his cooler. He handed one to Josh, who popped the top and drank the foam from the can. Some caught in his beard. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hairy hand. Silas wondered if this young man had been genetically altered to look like his alter-ego somehow; it was eerie, and he watched in fascination.

  “What is it you want to talk about?” Josh said after swallowing half of his beer.

  “I think you must have known my wife,” Silas said.

  Josh stopped drinking and looked at him. “Listen, there have been a few girls, but . . .”

  “Not like that. I think you must have done some work with her. Some conservation work. Her name was Penelope de Silva. Did you know her?”

  As Silas watched, Josh’s face changed from mirthful to dark and somber and back to contentment. “I knew Penelope. She was a kick-ass and take-no-prisoners activist, man. She was rock solid, like rock fucking solid,” he said, and to emphasis his point, stamped his booted foot on the ground.

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Oh man, it’s been years. Like, four years? I heard she had gone missing. I heard you were looking, you know, it was in the papers and online. I haven’t seen her in so long.”

  “Do you remember exactly when?”

  “I’d need to think,” said Josh, and as if to facilitate that, he put the can of beer to his lips and drank, his hairy Adam’s apple bobbing as he tilted his head back. “I think it was in Moab, maybe May, just before she went missing. Maybe two months, three months before?” he said, and then belched. “We met at the bookstore and talked about issues. Man, she knew so much. She was really amazing.”

  “Thank you, I know she was,” said Silas, realizing that he didn’t really. He reached into his bag and took out the notebook and flipped it open. He showed Josh the book. “Is this you?” he asked, pointing to the scrawled note, “Call Hayduke.”

  “Yeah, that’s me! Penelope insisted on calling me that. She gave me that name. I sometimes called her Bonnie. But we were never, you know, like in the book. Nothing like that, man.”

  “It’s okay. I know. Do you know why she would have written that there?”

  “Well, like I said, we worked a bit together. I helped her out. You know, with protecting this place,” he said, holding his arms up. “The canyons, the deserts, the mountains. We did some good work together.”

  “Why would she have needed to write this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you remember what she was working on before she disappeared?”

  “She didn’t tell you? Man, sometimes it was hard to shut her up about stuff.”

  “We talked about a lot of other things. Can you remember?”

  “I’d need to think about that. It was a long time ago.”

  Silas offered another beer.

  “Hey,” said Josh, “Why didn’t you find me before and ask me this? It’s been a long time.”

  “Well . . . I didn’t know about you. You see, I just found this journal.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, it sounds crazy.”

  “Try me.”

  “I found it in a kiva.”

  “Like, an Anasazi kiva?”

  “Yeah, ancient Pueblo . . .”

  “Which one?”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk with you about. You see, it was in a set of ruins in Hatch Wash. In a little box canyon off the main stem. There’s an amazing set of ruins there. Supposedly unmapped.”

  “Can you believe it? And so close to town. It’s fucking crazy. They’re only thirty miles from Moab.”

  “So you know about them. I agree, it’s crazy. That’s what I thought. But I talked with Peter Anton the other day—”

  “Bad news, man. That guy is bad fucking news.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s working for the developmentalists; you know, people who are obsessed with paving this place. He’s working for that fucker Isaiah.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Once you’re in, you never get out, man. Never.”

  “What do you mean, you n
ever get out?”

  “Those fuckers, they’re like the mob, man. You take a blood oath. You don’t get to just walk away.”

  Silas started to wonder how much sun Josh had gotten recently. He changed the subject. “Peter Anton told me about the ruins in Hatch. It seems that a young woman found dead in Courthouse Wash was working with him there before she disappeared two years ago.”

  “I heard about her. Found by a hiker.”

  “That was me.”

  “Fuck off, no way.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Well, I was . . . I was looking for my wife.”

  “You found this other chick instead. That is too much of a fucking coincidence.”

  “I think so too.” Silas told him about his search, and the maps, and the dream about Sleepy Hollow.

  “Right out of Solitaire, man. That is too fucking creepy.”

  Silas sipped his beer. “I went into Hatch, and there in the kiva is this notebook.”

  “You think Pen might have left it there?”

  “Pen?”

  “Yeah, sorry, it’s what I called Penelope. Pen suited her better. You know, the pen is sharper—”

  “—than the sword.” Silas tried to keep the sadness of not knowing this nickname from registering on his face. He waited for Josh to take another long drink from his beer.

  “This Canadian shit is pretty good,” he said, belching. He crushed the can in his powerful hand. “Look, I have no idea how Pen’s book got down into Hatch. Maybe she was there working on stuff and forgot it.”

  “I don’t think so. It was not like Penelope to forget something this important. The notebook had laid out her plans for something she was calling Ed Abbey Country.”

  Josh stopped and looked at him. “You found that notebook?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “It’s just that, man, that was a really important bit of work.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, me and her, and some others I guess, we had this big idea to introduce a bill in the US Senate calling for the creation of Ed Abbey National Monument. It would protect a whole bunch of important places from further development, and restore a bunch of places the shitheads have already trashed. Stuff that’s not already protected, like Canyon Rims and Back of the Rocks, as well as designate more capital W wilderness in the parks and monuments like Grand Canyon and Escalante, under the Wilderness Act.”

  “What was happening with this plan?”

  “It wasn’t going well. Pen was looking for a senator to introduce it. She met with that asshole Thorn Smith—well, with his dick-head assistant Nephi—and she was getting nowhere. She was going to look elsewhere for a friendly senator; you know, maybe back east where they have no wilderness. That’s when she disappeared.”

  “And what about Canyon Rims? Was that part of the plan?”

  “Yeah, it was part of the plan. Canyon Rims and Basins, they call it. The whole thing, right from 191 all the way to the park, and including Back of the Rocks. We were going to kick all the OHV crowd out on their ass.”

  “What about the plans for the golf course, for the hotels.”

  “Jacob Isaiah’s fucking wet dream? We knew about it. Pen was all over it. She gave Jacob Isaiah a serious ear full.”

  “Did she talk about the ruins?”

  “No. We didn’t even know about them then. It wasn’t until we started to prowl around down there that we learned about them.”

  “How? Did you find them?”

  “No, there was a leak. Someone in Isaiah’s camp let it slip.”

  “Do you think it could have been the young woman I found in Courthouse? She worked with Peter Anton at Dead Horse Consulting.”

  “I never knew the source of the leak. When it finally happened, I was away. I’ve got projects going on all over the Southwest, you know what I mean? Pen was handling that one on her own.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that Jacob Isaiah found out that Penelope knew about the ruins and that they would be the nail in his coffin, so to speak, and, you know—”

  “What, had her bumped off?” said Josh. “Man, it’s always possible. That guy is a bad fucking dude. It’s possible.”

  “And then, after the fact, learns that it was the Wisechild girl who was leaking, and so takes her out as well?”

  “Like I said, I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “Who else do you think would have wanted my wife out of the way, Josh?”

  “Why you asking me that, man? I don’t know.” He suddenly sounded defensive.

  “Look, Josh, you’re the only person I’ve met who actually worked closely with my wife. The other enviros in town, they all knew her and respected her, but nobody really worked closely with her. Now I find this,” he said, holding up the book, “and it leads me straight to you. Do you think that’s a coincidence?”

  The young man shook his head. Something fell out of his hair; a twig or a leaf. “No, I don’t. I don’t know what happened to her. I’m as busted up about it as anybody.”

  Silas regarded him. “Josh, I need your help. I think that my wife wanted me to find Kayah Wisechild because the girl would lead me to this,” he said, again holding up the book, “and that would lead me to you. I think you’re my best shot at finding my wife.”

  “You still think Pen is alive, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where do you think she might be hiding?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you know?”

  Silas contemplated the scraggly stranger sitting next to him. “I know that my wife loved this place and that this is where she went missing. I know that against all the odds, I found the body of a young woman who had helped discover a set of ruins my wife was exploring. If I know anything about how Penelope thinks, she was hoping to use them to shut down a development that would have destroyed a place she loved. Somehow they are connected and I have been led to find you. Believe me, I’d do this on my own if I could, Josh. I would. No offense, but I really prefer my own company to just about anybody else. But I can’t do this by myself. I need you. You knew her. You helped her. I need you to help me.”

  Josh turned away and looked up the mountains. A sly, wolfish grin came over his face.

  “What is it?” asked Silas.

  “If I’m going to help you, you’re going to have to start calling me Hayduke.”

  Silas shook his head. “I don’t know if Penny told you, but I don’t really like Edward Abbey.”

  “Oh, yeah, she told me, alright.”

  JOSH CHARLESTON—HAYDUKE—HAD AGREED to sleep on Silas’s request for assistance and call him in the next couple of days. He said he needed to get his shit together before he could jump back in with both feet.

  Driving down into the Castle Valley, Silas turned his attention to his next task: finding out exactly what his wife wanted him to discover at Grand View Point. Maybe, he thought, a knot forming in his stomach, he wouldn’t need Hayduke’s help to find Penelope after all.

  IT WAS 4:00 PM BY the time he approached the narrow peninsula of land known as Grand View Point. The night before he had re-read “Dead Man,” and had used a fifteen-minute topo to carefully pinpoint the possible locations where Abbey, or more appropriately his brother Johnny, had found the cadaver at Grand View Point. He couldn’t imagine a body remaining undiscovered for more than a few days, or even a week, on the point itself. Less than a mile across, it was the most heavily visited part of Canyonlands. Even though 90 per cent of the visitors to the Point only walked from their tour buses and RVs to the overlook and back, there were still a few who prowled around, aroused by the extraordinary view, seeking a moment of blissful solitude.

  Instead of driving to the end of the road, Silas parked at Mesa Arch, where the plateau begins to narrow, and began walking north and east toward Gray’s Pasture.

  He carried his backpack, complete with light camping gear. He figured
if he didn’t find what he was looking for, he could camp illegally in one of the washes and be up at first light to continue his search.

  After four hours of constant walking, crawling, and slithering through brush and narrow defiles, he had found nothing. His GPS said that he had walked almost ten miles, but he was only two miles from his car. He was caught by surprise when the sun sank below the western rim of Island in the Sky. He wondered if he should walk back to his car and drive to the Willow Flat Campground or simply sleep where he was. He chose the former, and finding the road just a few hundred yards away, tramped down the blacktop to his Outback and then drove to the parking lot at Green River Overlook. Ignoring the No Camping sign, he lay down in the back of the car, the tailgate open, listening to coyotes yap and yammer in the distance.

  In the morning he rose before dawn and, foregoing coffee and breakfast, set out again with his pack. This time he wandered back and forth through a square mile of twisted earth that was closed in by the park access road on one side and the fifteen-hundred-foot drop into Soda Springs Basin on the other.

  As the sun came up, he emerged from a broad pothole and crested a ridge to see chunks of Navajo sandstone formed into a bench shape. Drawn to the cluster of rock, he walked up the side of the depression and stopped where the earth vanished before him. Silas could see that the stones amassed before him, hedged up against the juniper, had not fallen there naturally; they had been piled.

  Taking his pack off, Silas donned the pair of leather gloves he used for rope work and heaved a few of the stones aside. His ankle, healing well, held up for the heavy work, and in a moment he’d moved half a dozen of the giant rocks, each weighing a hundred pounds or more. After five minutes, he had shifted half the pile. Another five minutes hard labor provided him with his grisly reward.

  THE CRIME SCENE encompassed all of the Green River Overlook parking lot, which provided space for the command center involving the Park Service, Sheriff’s Office, Medical Examiner, and FBI Critical Incident Response Unit. Silas had made his call around 9:30, and by 11:00 AM Agent Taylor and his team had arrived and taken command of the vicinity. The media arrived, too, and were herded into a corner of the overlook where they milled about, spreading rumors. Just after 1:00 PM a helicopter landed on the access road and Katie Rain and another agent from the Trace Evidence Unit walked down the recently paved road.