The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  Every word has an exponent attached, charged and thrown. I do not listen so much to Dirk’s exact words as to the way he threads them, how he pulls on some and pushes on others. His hands play off the steering wheel, air puppets to go with his story. He evokes every detail of the night, how cars stopped at odd angles and people stood horrified, helpless, while the sidewalk horse thrashed on splintered legs.

  Driving street by street in his patrol car, Dirk came upon the scene. Another patrol car was there, but the man in uniform was a rookie, a first-year cop. The rookie stood dismayed, not knowing whether he should contact animal control or the fire department.

  Dirk slowed, studying the way people were positioned, their bodies drawn back in disbelief and fear. He looked at their faces and their relief upon seeing him. Finally, help is here. He pulled near and sighted the horse. His heart immediately fled his body like a faltered breath. He knew that there was no motive here, no evidence to gather, only this: An animal had stumbled into the carnage of his city. He slipped the patrol car into park. What mistake had been made? Who allowed this creature into our barren and cruel hands? Humans are all guilty, he answered himself as he opened the door, each of us condemned to this madhouse we have built. But the wild, commanding innocence of animals should never be laid open here.

  Dirk could not tolerate being a passive witness to such suffering. He stepped out of the car, his body strained with resolve. He pushed a gap between the people. Their faces were glad for the relief, their questions dashing out: How can we get this animal to the vet? Is there something you can do for the pain? He did not return their deluded optimism, thinking, You all know what needs to be done. The first cop looked at him, same expression, What do we do here? Dirk slid by him.

  He paced directly up to the dashing form of the horse and pulled a six-shot .357 revolver from his holster, steadying the barrel inches from the horse’s head. He fired five of his six bullets.

  Dirk mimics every shot across the steering wheel, his head cocked to the recoil, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow!

  When he turned away from the executed horse, he faced the witnesses. A woman sputtered and cried through the spiderweb of her hands. A pair clung together, their eyes scandalized. A man’s unbelieving face stared at him. He looked at each of their expressions in a single sweep, saying nothing. He walked past these bystanders toward his patrol car to make his calls. If they did not understand, he had no business explaining it to them. Everyone here will find a way to cope, he figured. We all have our illusions.

  As Dirk drives, I think back to the way he fired his gun over the steering wheel beside me, the bravado of his recoil. I say, “You enjoyed it after a few shots.”

  He glances across his arm at me. “The killing? It’s an abstraction at that point. Sure, there’s a perverse pleasure. Otherwise, what are you going to do? You gonna hate yourself for doing what is right? For making the one move that no one else is willing to make? Of course, I didn’t have to fire those last three shots with those badass hollow-point bullets blowing open its brains, but I was already there. The animal was going down.”

  “You adored the killing as much as you hated it.”

  “You, young brother, would be in an insane asylum if you had to do the shit I did.”

  “I’ve belonged in an insane asylum all my life.”

  Dirk laughs, shaking his head. “It’s no contest of comparison, Opie, but the polarity between the two sides of my coin is more than a match for your crooked genes.”

  I unraveled his words in my mind, as if picking apart a code. The two sides of my coin: on one side is his human-stained memory of cophood and on the other his current life of drifting through the wilderness. Your crooked genes: a family of alcoholic men who died suddenly and early.

  I look at Dirk. How dare he. He cannot claim one of us as crazier or more sane than the other. We are the yin and the yang wrapped around each other. He knows this, only he forgets in the boldness of his stories sometimes, imagining one of us as more glorious or more wretched. He will remember once we are out there, on foot.

  I glance out the window to my side, a finger habitually running across a sickle of carved greenstone that hangs from my neck. Its edge is polished from years of my touching. Instead of pursuing an argument, I scan the comb of a distant ridge and follow it until I lose sight of it.

  Shooting the Storm Drain

  I was thirty-two years old. My father’s wife called me at home. Her words came like a letter slipped quickly from its envelope, handed over: “Your father is dead.”

  I sat on the floor with the phone. I laid a hand down.

  “He had a heart attack,” she said. “I found him in the kitchen.”

  The first words to come out of my mouth were whispered, and I could not stop them. “You are free now.”

  There was silence. Slowly, she said, “You are free, too.”

  I almost laughed, but that would have broken me just then. I returned the phone to its cradle. I let my mind be quiet for a moment. I breathed in, holding myself still. The breath felt like one taken before a dive, its air treasured.

  He is dead, I thought. Then I was gone.

  The flight to the funeral carried me over the desert, a small commuter plane out of Colorado in the middle of July. Summer storms had broken their way into the deeper southwest. Fists of clouds lifted 45,000 feet above Arizona. The plane’s wings plunged sideways in the turbulence, the body suddenly kicking forward. Poltergeists of luggage leaped from under the seats. As the six other passengers clutched seat backs and armrests, I stared out the window, watching the landscape that held my life.

  We flew down off the sheer rock of the canyon lands into the cracks and cliffs that tumbled downward toward the southern desert, the dry, hot, rock-broken country where there is no rounded sandstone, no sheer cliffs, no green-topped mesas, only rags and breaks of cactus-studded mountains. The land I watched was filled with my father, memories of him taking me out, nights when he told me about the stars, his truck breaking down in far desert places where we shot rabbits and quail for supper.

  This was the Sonoran Desert, my first home. No longer the erotic reds of Utah and northern Arizona, this was splintered earth, jags of dead volcanoes lying about, the Desert of the Fist, where I was born. I saw block-edged canyons opening like heel cracks. One night, my father plunged his truck off the edge of one of these canyons. The thing I remembered about his accident, even though I was not there, is a tow chain that came loose as the truck rolled. It snapped like a bullwhip, busting out the windshield. I imagine loose handgun bullets falling like snow through the cab as it tumbled. A fishing knife, spare keys, the diamond shards of a whiskey bottle, binoculars, a book on stargazing, pocket change. The truck rolled eight times before slamming against a boulder, stopping there. The bed tore off and continued on its own like a barrel thrust loose on a ship’s deck. My father’s wristwatch landed a hundred feet downslope. He found himself trapped on the floorboard, bleeding. The roof of the cab was crushed to the seat. Gas dribbled onto his forehead like gutter rain. There was no moon that night. He could see nothing.

  My father and I traveled to the site of this wreck many times. I was maybe ten years old the first time we went, seeing him only by visitation negotiated with my mother, who begrudgingly thought it important that I have experiences with a father figure. We found bits of his life scattered in the canyon—a matchbook, a writing pen, a 1976 Arizona fishing license. For years we kept finding things.

  Every time we went to this place, he told me that devils had been there the night of the accident. He said that he had felt evil predators lurking around, sniffing him out. When he said this his voice curled with fear, the only time he ever showed such an emotion to me. He said he had been able to hear them and smell them as he shivered in the cold, upside down, his hair wet with gasoline. He reached around for a weapon, for anything. He had been drinking. Maybe it was the gas fumes. He was sure that these beasts wanted nothing more than to tear his heart from his
chest.

  For the first time, then, I knew that he would die. It would happen the same way his father died, the same way his father’s father had died. It would be his heart.

  The afternoon after his death, the commuter plane deposited me in Phoenix, and I caught a ride to his house on the north side of the city. There were quiet voices in the living room, gentle words about my father from friends and family. I stormed in. I told them, enough quietness. I would not stand to have his memory marred by sweet stories. He was a sonofabitch, I told them.

  I left for the backyard, escaping the swelling tears and blank stares in the house. Like Sumo wrestlers bounding their stomachs and huge arms against each other, summer storms collided overhead, mooring together with straps of lightning. Rain sheeted down all at once. Flood rain. I could feel it—not the pounding of just a hard rain, but a blinding rip and a voice screaming out of the torrent: Flood! I did not move. I wore no coat, no hat. Neighbors’ houses disappeared into the storm, the palm trees in their yards bending in silver strokes of rain. My clothes whipped like a flag, then sagged with water, tugging and slapping.

  My father had known somehow of his impending death. There had been no diagnosis since he’d refused to consult medical doctors, but he knew anyway. He had gone to all the people in his life and made his peace with them. He went to my mother to say he would never see her again, when he had not seen her for many years as it was. High school friends he had not spoken with since graduation thirty-five years earlier were subject to eerie good-byes. For the first time, he confessed his fears and regrets to an old friend. The only one left was me. He did not tell me good-bye. Our last conversation had been a typically strained five minutes on the phone: awkward inquiries and irrelevant, wary answers.

  I was now his unfinished business.

  I lifted a hand to break the welting needles from my face. Lightning struck ground. The earth shivered, and then came the terrible crash of air. The wind turned hurricane. It threw water off the roof behind me, creating a jet of horizontal mist. It was the kind of storm that would be gone in an hour, leaving only water and busted tree limbs. A summer storm in the low desert.

  To the west of the house ran a cement ditch maybe twenty feet wide. A flash flood quickly shouldered into this minor canal, propelled out of new subdivisions to the south, former desert land where my father and I used to walk. It burst through my father’s fence and swept my boots. Crosscurrents took the trunk of a nearby telephone pole. Delicate and furious tendrils shot in all directions.

  My father and I had stood in this spot a number of times before, admiring this very kind of event, the city’s drain network unable to handle the suddenness of such thunderstorms. He asked me what I saw in the dark, swift water, in its surface of whirling vortices. I said order working within chaos, laminar flows within turbulent ones, and he listened thoughtfully. I said that embedded in a world of entropy is an equal world of gestation. He hung his hands from the chain link and told me not to fool myself; entropy is not to be underestimated.

  My father had a canoe. He had said that we would put it into one of these floods someday, to see where it went. I had scoffed. It was a low-walled lake canoe with negligible aluminum skin. A ridiculous Indian head had been stenciled onto its bow over the brand name: Sportspal. Since I had worked off and on as a river guide for a decade or so, I often ridiculed my father about this trifling, haphazardly built boat of his. He owned one short wooden paddle for it. He did not own a life vest. I told him it would sink.

  I had long watched floods charge down remote canyons and spill along urban streets, fascinated by the roil of water. I had wondered where these floods went. If I could follow one, if I could not chase the water but actually go with it . . .

  Now, looking through the rain, I saw the Sportspal leaning against the fence. Its body had been factory-camouflaged to look like birch bark and shredded cardboard. I walked to the canoe and jerked it over my head so that a thwart rested like a yoke across my shoulders. Rain screamed on its hull. The wind kited it into the air, and I yanked it back down to my shoulders. I reached with a free hand, grabbed the paddle from among drenched black widow webs, and pushed my way through the wind, out the backyard gate.

  The canoe rolled off my shoulder. I lowered it into the chocolate-milk floodwater. The bow caught. The canoe moved. I jumped in.

  For a moment the canoe spun while I situated myself, spreading my knees so that my body braced into it, becoming part of the vessel. The canoe was flimsy, easily swayed by the squirrelly currents. It made bending and popping sounds as I moved.

  I tested the paddle by sweeping it into the water. Searching for permanence through the paddle and through my braced knees, I looked for the things in nature that do not change. I knew they were there, lurking in the flood, patterns and paths to follow. I had two seconds, three maybe. With a quick straightening of the canoe, I ducked under a metal barricade and slipped from the canal onto a residential street.

  The street was a river. Water overflowed the sidewalks onto surrounding lawns. A lawn mower had been left out. Its handles jerked helplessly. At the first stop sign I back-paddled to the left, drifted sideways, and moved forward to cross the intersection, rainwater streaking down my face.

  I had to paddle fast to maintain maneuverability through the turns, slipping around parked cars. Houses moved by on both sides, wind chimes jangling madly, little whirling lawn ornaments spinning as if about to burst. I paddled to the center to avoid the overturned trash bins that lurched down the street, their open mouths belching rubbish.

  The flood took a right turn down Hillary Drive, where a steep pillow of water piled against a fire hydrant. The underside of the canoe struck the big yellow nut on top. Water sprang through a sudden crease in the hull. Houses kept slipping by, each tightly packed against the next. People came to their porches. They saw me and shouted. Maybe phone calls were being sent ahead—You gotta see this guy, he’s in a canoe! They clapped and raised their fists in the air for solidarity. I was fulfilling some long-held desire of theirs. I was betraying the grids of this enclosing city. Maybe I would be arrested. Maybe I would drown like people do every year in Phoenix floods. Regardless of outcome, I was a momentary hero.

  These people have no idea, I thought as I paddled down their streets, turning their corners. My father’s neighbors knew what it was like to live beside someone who did not obey the city’s grids. They listened to gunfire the night he took a shotgun and a revolver out to demolish the shed in his backyard. They slammed their windows to the wail of his stereo at three in the morning, a bang-and-clash Mussorgsky symphony impaling the neighborhood, phone ringing unanswered.

  I tempered this riverside applause with memories. I thought, You do not want me living next door. I do not even belong in this city, an unshaven nomad from the wilderness, living in a Colorado cabin with no indoor plumbing. I will satisfy your longings, but do not invite me into your homes. Like my father, I will light fires on your lawn. I will play loud, unbearable music. I will not sleep at appropriate hours. I will take your canoe and throw it into a flood, never to be seen again.

  I floated across Greenway Road, toward a private retirement community where a sign lifted from the water, shivering against the current:

  PRIVATE

  STREET

  NO

  TRESPASSING

  ARS 13-1502-A

  I entered their private street. Other streets introduced more water, and I swept into a long, graceful curve around a park and community center.

  The street turned right. The water continued straight, aiming directly into a cinder-block wall with a rectangular chute at its base. The flood funneled to a swift, smooth cord. Water always goes somewhere, I knew. I could get out now, but water is something to be followed. It knows the way. If I continued, eventually I would meet with the underworld of the city’s storm drain. I would find the other side of this impulsive journey.

  I came hastily into the low portal, lying back, gathering my body
beneath the gunwales. The canoe and I slipped through the chute in the cinder-block wall. I sat up on the other side. I was out of the neighborhoods now, and there were no more onlookers to support me. The water felt different. Its voice deepened. It constricted, its surface no longer smooth. I traveled behind people’s houses, hidden from them by their back walls.

  Empty milk jugs and crushed aluminum cans banged against the canoe, their pitches shooting through my knees. I dropped the paddle deeper, working the current with more care and muscle, feeling the canoe no longer confirming my orders. I braced my knees tighter, lowering my shoulders.

  I took the next plunge, striking off the edge of a four-foot waterfall. I stood half out, a boot sole landing on a concrete piling for stability, the other foot balancing the boat. It was a habitual maneuver, going through a river rapid of tight boulders, a quick push off and then back in. The bottom of the canoe screamed against concrete, dropping me into a much larger canal as I jumped back in. I threw my weight to keep from swamping, and nearly lost the paddle. The canoe swung backward. I worked it straight again, throwing my shoulders, digging the paddle until its shaft and my hands arced below the water’s surface.

  A busy street ran above and beside me, twenty feet over my head. I tried to keep out of sight of the cars whenever I came into view. I did not want to be rescued. I did not want to find myself on the cover of the paper the next morning, joining the usual suspects who drive into floods and have to be helicoptered off their car roofs, the teenagers who find themselves direly stranded against the pier of an overpass, floating in black inner tubes. I did not want a reporter going over the police record to reduce my life to a photo caption: A moment of despair upon the death of his father. They would not understand. I was not in this flood out of rage or blind anguish. I came because the water was moving, because it fell from hole to hole down the storm drains, leading to some point that I would reach only if I continued.