The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  Dirk flipped the body over, grabbed the back of the man’s head, and scrubbed his face into the snow so that he could be seen by all, the horrible pleasure streaking up his arm as he ground harder. He claimed his kill right there, his and no one else’s, while the other cops arrived growling and panting, their words snapping at the air. The man did not move. He did not have the ability or wish. He was an unresponsive sack of garbage tossed into the median. Dirk stood and wiped snow off his gloves. Ice grains drizzled onto the man’s back.

  He kept his feet planted around the man, making eye contact with each approaching cop. This one is mine.

  DAY EIGHT

  Camp is in the wreckage of eroded boulders. A sand-salted wind comes strong. It is the new moon night, clean and dark. There are no clouds. Dirk sits against his pack not far from me; it is too early for sleep. The sky is sown with bright seeds of stars already dead for tens of thousands of years. Twinkle, twinkle . . . are you even there?

  Dirk and I spent the day poking through the land, finding routes in the shifting light of morning and then afternoon, in the constantly low angles of winter sun. Now we make fists against our chests, protecting our gloved fingers from the wind’s sting, faces occasionally nettled with blowing sand. I set down my journal and plant a rock on it so that it will not be blown out of reach. A buckle snaps wildly at the end of a strap. I grab it and pull it back, running it through my pack to keep it secure.

  I know that Dirk’s belongings are neatly arranged right now, packaged in the lee of a boulder. He will wake in the morning and know where each item of his has been placed. He knows the location of his bandanna, where he has stored his sunglasses, his lamp, his lighter. He lives to this day with a tactile knowledge of order like the timed collision of vehicles.

  What do I know myself? I know that wind comes through, that it pulls me apart, that it threads this landscape and carries me off. All night I will wonder what part of me has blown away. Will I wake to find even my soul gone? I have too many loose ends, I think. All of me could be snatched by the wind overnight, every small part whisked into the sky until I have been scattered like a dead man’s ashes.

  Tonight I am ruled at once by a thousand hissing voices. Messages bay from far off, tunneling through air alien to this desert, never staying long enough to sit native with its landforms. There is nothing worth talking about in this kind of wind. Just hold on.

  I pull my day gear close to me, open a zipper, and rummage for my lamp. In the dark my fingers find small objects. First there is a wad of twine, then binoculars, then a red Swiss Army knife. I dig into an unintended cache of black-cinder grit from a desert far south of here.

  Each object I find is a distinct and capricious memory. I think of what it is like in Dirk’s pack. His belongings are placed like salt-and-pepper shakers on a suburban family table, always the same. After this trip, he will clean his pack out, wash everything, and put things back in perfect order. I could fault him if he were a grossly tidy person, but he is not. Instead, he is quick and efficient.

  Feeling around my gear, I believe that I am an animal. Not a fluid killer like him, but a wood rat surrounded by midden, sticks and rocks and inappreciable items that are there year after year. My pack constantly grows heavier.

  Like this thing that I find with my fingers, a limp bag of nuts crushed into powder, emergency food from how long ago? Rancid, probably. Better to keep it, I think. Times will be desperate again.

  I find a small knife sharpener in its hand-worn leather sheath. Without bringing it out, I turn it, feeling through my gloves into its memories, drawing open the leather flap and sliding the stone into my hand. It is too worn and pitted to be of use anymore. I cannot remember when I last got a good knife-sharpening off it, yet still I carry it around. My father gave it to me. He owned it for decades before passing it to me the morning after we’d had a fight. We were camped in a canyon far north of here during an ad hoc family reunion. The details of the confrontation are difficult to recall and probably do not matter. The outcome was that he charged me at the campfire. I was old enough to be charged, somewhere in my early twenties. I grabbed a bone of driftwood to wave around, bluffing him, but he called my bluff. He rushed me, landing in the center of the fire, standing there like a violent flame-lit god trying to wrench the wood from my hand. I remember how he did not burn even as the flames stroked his legs. Sometimes I think it was the alcohol that protected him. Sometimes I think he was an apparition. In the struggle, he was struck with the wood in the center of his forehead. A line of blood began to flow. There were others at the fire when this happened, some of our family, some of his wife’s. They all jumped in, shouldering us away from each other. He kept touching the blood and looking at it on his fingers, muttering, “That son of a bitch.”

  That night, cousins slept in a defensive circle around me.

  The next morning, facing each other in the yeasty smell of the Colorado River, campfire burned down to floury ash, my father pulled out this stone in its leather wrapping and handed it to me. It was the one true item of order that he carried in his life, the stone that sharpened his blades. By the way he gave it over and said, “Here,” I knew it was mine to keep.

  Humans in this world are fragile. My father had made me certain of this. We are thin as a spider’s strands, snapped at almost any misstep. Tonight in the wind I think of what we have done, of the web that my father and I left hanging with debris and limp filaments. I hear beneath tonight’s roar of wind the piercing, wasted sound of glass clinking in a cut-rate bar. I hear the night my father lit the couch on fire with a cigarette and stormed the room where I slept, threw open the door, and roared, “What the fuck is going on in here?” then slammed it closed. The odious smell of burning plastic followed right behind him.

  My father needed to have the volume turned up at every moment. The spin of alcohol, the surge of the fight, the throwing of words. He needed life to be sharp, the same way I crave tonight’s unrelenting new-moon gale. I hear the whips of wind at boulder tips, and the memories flow.

  As soon as my father gave me his sharpening stone, he laughed that he was still going to kick my ass, that he wasn’t through with me yet, pointing at the cut on his head. I took the stone, utterly baffled. How could I tell my father that I did not strike him in the head, that in his drunkenness, in the fire, he had clubbed himself? I needed to get out of his madness, but how could I escape when I understood too well his demand for an accelerated heart, when I disappeared for months into the desert so that my every breath would be amplified? The stone that he passed to me was calming. It was his talisman. It told me, Please, my son, I love you, don’t let us die this way.

  In the wind, I think, My father is dead.

  I let go of the stone and draw my hands up to my face. I begin to cry into the wind. Dirk cannot hear me over the roar, so I wail, head falling into my arms. This swell of heat rising through my chest is uncontrollable, as if dissolving my organs. A horrible groan bursts from my mouth. It is long and drawn, and I think it could not be coming from my own throat. I bury myself in the wool of my serape, biting down to hold my voice.

  It must be much later when I open my eyes. I am startled awake by quiet as the eighth day barely lets go and the ninth almost begins. The night sounds now like a train that has just departed, the tracks barely humming behind it. A light diffuses through the atmosphere, so faint and dry that the sky is green. I am curled among boulders with my bag pulled up around me. The air feels cold. The wind is gone.

  This green light turns a lunar blue, a single color that spans the sky. The blue gives way in the east to pages of violet. I crawl out into the dawn. Dirk is not in his bag. I dance around in the cold, finding extra layers, and see Dirk in the distance. He is perched like a stone Buddha, breathing the silence of the morning. A cliff descends below him, and he balances on its last point of purchase. I walk to him, swirl my serape around me, and settle onto my heels.

  Every morning in cold like this, a translucent d
rip forms at the tip of Dirk’s nose like a sacred little gem. He reaches up with his gloved hand and wipes it away.

  The landscape below, this is where my attention must lie. We will need to move our camp into it, the first true steps of our crossing. Portals appear below us, doorways dropping through canyons into inescapable holes and lengthy, unseen passageways. I know what Dirk is doing. He is playing chess, arranging the possibilities in his head, working out every step.

  This is not a mountain for me, not a north face of an unclimbed alp. It is my own mind, my life laid out in stone. I do not play concerted games with it. I will walk in and find the way.

  If I know nothing else of the world, if I am only a frightened animal hoarding objects and memories, I know at least that I can walk through this. I have gained the eye that tells me how to track fracture lines. I monitor water holes. I’m able to read places I cannot see long before I reach them, places that maps do not even suggest. I turn back through history, through a conversation held with the old singer in his hogan. The Diné families who came here, escaping the U.S. armies, knew nothing about this place other than the old stories that told them it was the end of the world. Still, they came to this forbidden land and found the way, just as Dirk has made it from the street to here, just as we will somehow walk through this maddening place below us.

  Where to begin? I think. Which one of these open doors far below our camp? I wonder where my father made his first wrong turn. How deeply did he get himself lost before he gave up, his blood turning to poison out of fear or neglect, his heart finally ceasing? I imagine that no one in my family had this opportunity that I now have. This is how I will survive. I will walk into the maze. Rather than sort unaided through the cold box of my mind, I will step into the real, tangible landscape, a country of tangle and perplexity.

  Without looking at me, in a low cadence Dirk says,

  According to what one of the elders said, taking an enemy on the battlefield is like a hawk taking a bird. Even though it enters into the midst of a thousand of them, it gives no attention to any bird other than the one that it has first marked.

  Dirk stands, gestures Go with his chin, and walks back toward camp.

  PART TWO

  CROSSING

  In Flashes of Lightning, with these he ran.

  In the Body of Black Wind, with these he ran.

  In the midst of Thunders, with these he ran.

  — night song of the Coyoteway

  DAY NINE

  As sunlight first slides over us, we heat licorice tea, drinking the residue of wind sand from the bottoms of our cups. Movements are free without last night’s drumbeating gale. The ninth day has begun. We strike camp easily, loading our packs, and travel into the country below.

  Sandstone lifts into steep-sided rock slopes as we move. Small routes unfold around us. Possibilities feed us through fissures and unpredictable slopes, lines connecting dots that from a distance seem impossible. Each way is delicate and revealed only when we come to it. We must put our hands on the rock to see. From far away, these routes appear too daunting, untouchable.

  In front of me, Dirk lifts his hands as if commanding the landscape, outlining geological, geographic matters. He uses terms of geology—imbrication, sinuosity, cross bedding. I pause behind him like a servant, begging into my journal, writing quick details about rock fractures and wind patterns.

  Dirk turns to me without warning and says, “If you smile just before you punch someone, it’s much more effective.”

  I write that down, too.

  No observation is invalid at this point. Everything is evidence for the way through. As we come down I note a huge fissured X in the wall beside us. It is a phenomenon of pressure in massive, homogeneous sandstones, an effect we have seen throughout this landscape. The same kind of fracture always appears, the same angles—60 degrees and 120 degrees to each intersection of lines. It is as if a voice once reverberated through the earth, a single word shuddering the stone. The cracks formed around the word.

  Both hundreds of feet tall and as small as clusters of jacks underfoot, these Xs erode out of the surrounding rock, changing the landforms, influencing how canyons and cliffs interact. It is good to know how the rock breaks. The top-heavy X carves away and collapses, its fulcrum left behind as a ridge that we can follow. Farther down the line, it acts like crosshairs gunning into the rock face, revealing weaknesses, opening passages in otherwise impassable stone.

  We come down through slopes scored with Xs, moving in and out of their rows. We take a canyon that falls open beneath us like the bottom of a kettledrum. It drops farther into baritone tiers of alcoves, none that we can reach, and we climb out of it on a ledge that follows the contour around to another canyon. From there we are sent along a high rib of stone. One moment our walk is not far aboveground. A minute later canyons have fallen to either side. Dirk stops and looks into one of the canyons, suddenly aware of our height.

  “Where the hell did that come from?” He looks back along the course. “How did it get so deep so fast?”

  I look down in confounded agreement. It feels as if the land is beginning to move beneath us. The Xs are hinges, and their great doors swing open and closed. I walk to the edge of this rib, seeing if there is a way down. There has to be a way. Otherwise it is hours back to the last option on the other side of last night’s camp. We might retrace steps only to find another dead end.

  I need to think precisely here, but the shapes around me leave my mind grabbing at nothing. I am in a crowd. Conversations pass in and out of each other, and I cannot stay with one for long before another steals my attention. I want to grab Dirk’s hand and hold on.

  I quiet my mind with even breathing. There will be a way. It will show itself. Keep moving. It will be there. Just over this edge.

  The edge of the rib bends downward. I shuffle my boots to its terminal steepness. This is far enough. I am looking over a waterfall of a landscape, a monstrous Niagara of stone. Streamers of canyons fall around me, dissolving before touching bottom. I snap open my arms for balance, a raven holding against the wind. My body tilts forward and back. How much traction do I have here? How good is this surface? I slowly back up on my heels.

  “No way down here,” I report to Dirk. “This is death.”

  The next possibility is a slender wormhole of a canyon tunneling into the rock. Dirk is ahead of me, scraping down its edges. He wedges himself, head craned to see below.

  “This thing just pours off into oblivion,” he calls. He crawls back and passes me, pointing behind him, masking his emotion with a quick Southern accent. “This ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  His voice triggers me. He is afraid.

  As he goes, I climb down to see for myself. I trust him, but I need to feel it with my own hands, see it with my own eyes. I shuffle along this brief spool of canyon to where it drops under me, a hatchway into space, and there settle myself into a groove staring straight down. Pinheads of sand slip from under my boot.

  Our previous days of easy walking among domes and the backs of whales have ended. This closure tells me that everything is now narrowing. A new and critical decision must be formulated every few steps.

  I let one hand dangle into this dead end, feeling the draw of gravity. This is why mazes are so frightening. The passages lead nowhere, and eventually the notion of a way out becomes as meaningless as all these false options.

  Where are my eyes that see order in chaos? I had them this morning, it seemed. They have left me. I cannot see the way. I remember once standing in an art museum, studying a heap of vertical and horizontal sticks composed by Sol Lewitt. When I moved my head one way, the sticks leaped to attention, revealing grids of passageways and stairsteps coursing faultlessly through the sculpture, the way molecules ring into chains. Then I moved my head the other way and the sculpture fell apart. The causeways collapsed into an insensible mass. I spent a good part of my visit standing there shifting my head back and forth, thinking, This is sanity; this
is insanity.

  I remember the museum, the quietness of footsteps. I was safe there. I could look at the art and walk away.

  How do I shift my head here? This hatchway leads to nothing. It is an empty passage. I wedge a boot and push myself up.

  Dirk and I leave our packs up top and scout along enormous horns of rock, slots below filled with sharply cut boulders. He slides down into one of these thin slots, climbing along as I cross over his head by leaping here to there. I can see him under my feet, his body inventing itself, bending, bracing, and throwing. I know which of his muscles are sore, how he favors his right leg. I see the compensation. So much of what is done here is devotion, a gymnastic conversation between body and terrain. It is the finding of our minutiae, the same thing that children get from playground equipment and stream banks, the innovation of perception. Into adulthood, some of us still crave this learning. We want to feel the articulation of our skeletons as we reach and pull.

  Descending this exploratory chute of boulders, Dirk and I both reach the end at the same instant. Dirk braces and looks over the edge. I stand on the boulder above his head and see exactly what he sees, the gape of a cliff falling below. Dirk looks up as if checking the rafters of a ceiling, testing whether there is a way to go up. My glance follows his. Not there either.

  “We’re getting too deep in here,” he says as he turns around. Too deep and he will no longer be in control. The land will swallow us both.

  Dirk says, speaking mostly to himself, “We get too deep in the wrong direction and we’ll never get out. We need to think about this. We need to do some map-looking.”

  The map. What good will it do? It occurs to me that there may be no way through. We are walking the Rubicon, about to slip to the other side, forever barred from return by the layers of routes we will be unable to recall. Back to our packs. I grab the map, walk it to a good vantage. It hangs from my hand, folding along its creases in the breeze. I pull the map tight. We both review it, Dirk moving in, supporting a corner with his hand.