The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  I finish chewing, one hand absentmindedly fondling the stone ornament hanging from my neck. I say, “Mmm.” Agreement.

  After dinner we lay out our bags, Dirk close to the wind shelter of the wall in case weather comes, and me out with the broken stone artifacts. I hear Dirk throw a sudden obscenity. He calls me over. His light casts onto the shiny globe-shaped body of a black widow spider.

  I crouch to her level and watch her move. She is methodical and observant, tentatively exploring the hood of Dirk’s bag. He had set his camp too close to the wall and snapped her web. She is just down to repair her anchors. Her fine legs study the terrain. She is uncertain. Something is not right in her world. She knows we are here but is not sure who we are or what we might do.

  I slide my journal under her and carry her away. As if saving the drips off an ice-cream cone, I turn the book this way and that as she tries to leap off or skitter up my arm. I find a place and let her go.

  I come back as Dirk is moving his gear away from the wall, meticulously clearing a new spot. As he finishes he says,“Good thing you showed up. I might have killed it.”

  “Never kill spiders,” I warn. “Bad juju. Especially down here.”

  We take our lights along the wall to tally the local widow population. Their webs are numerous and catastrophically sloppy with matted and windblown detritus. Unlike the perfect, geometric nets found beneath house eaves, black widow webs seem voracious, their strong wires laced back and forth in every direction so that nothing escapes. Unconsumed insects hang dead on the peripheries, too far out on the web’s suburbs to make eating them worth the while.

  At even intervals there are two, four, seven black widows down the cliff, their spherical shadows lingering on the rock surface. With needles for legs, they hang from their blizzard-strewn webs, their black abdomens suspended as round and glossy as fresh drops of blood. The hugeness of their abdomens is alarming compared to their tricky little thoraxes and even smaller star points of eyes. What kind of animals are these? They live among their rice-paper balls of abandoned egg sacks and husks of the dead. Their fresh egg sacks are incessantly caressed by the tips of their legs, cradled like something precious. They float, listening with unmatched stillness for any quiver along any strand.

  We focus our lights on one of the black widows. I am tempted to touch her web and watch her posture change, see her snap like an animal hearing a sound, but I cannot break the tranquillity of her concentration.

  My question: Is she conscious?

  Dirk’s question: Will it crawl into his bag and weld poison into his blood?

  We move close to her. In the expansive darkness of this landscape, we hover around this single spider, our eyes inches from the perfect blood mark on her underside. Dirk turns his light toward a much smaller, frailer spider clinging to the farthest corner of the same web.

  “Bedmate,” he says.

  I turn my light. It is the male. He is also listening. The female has enough poison to lash him into death before he can lift his legs against her. For now, she is his god. He feels for her weight, for the bow she makes in her own web. He knows where she is. He senses her every concern, listening down the line.

  She slips a single leg forward, one measured movement, a question: Is someone there?

  The male keeps silent, hearing her in the distance, hearing guns, thunder. He thinks, The female moves.

  Should we be watching such an intimate dance? Dirk and I pull back our lights and return to our world of down sleeping bags and our stainless-steel cook pot. We sit beside each other in the quiet.

  The image of the widow hangs in my mind. I have long held beliefs about creatures such as spiders, that they do not move dumbly about the world, that they do not suspend motionlessly from their webs out of brainlessness. Even (or especially) in childhood I saw a consciousness within the dark, shiny, hairy arachnid souls. I imagine what it might be like to wait in a web with all senses ultimately alert.

  Finally I say, “I want to learn to be that observant.”

  “As the black widows?” Dirk asks.

  “The way they were hanging there listening to everything.”

  “You’re anthropomorphizing again, Opie.”

  “I don’t want to hear about anthropomorphizing,” I complain. “What other eyes am I supposed to be looking through?”

  He shrugs.

  I say, “When I was little my dad took me into his garage. A black widow was climbing on the wall, and he told me to get up close to her, watch her movements, get a feel for her. I remember him telling me that she was alive right then, just like me. Breathing. Heart beating. Aware of the world. Then he took his boot and flattened her against the wall. Just like that. Bang. Dead. A black streak on the wall.”

  “Mmm . . . ,” Dirk says, waiting in the cold. Then he asks, “Did I ever tell you my red boy story?”

  I say no. He has, but the night is cold, and I’ve given him my story of sudden death. Now it’s his turn. He makes himself comfortable.

  “I was in second grade, walking home from school with a bunch of other kids down a suburban street. Standard city sidewalk over a creek crossing, iron railing alongside. A lot of times kids would stop there, you know, throw rocks in the creek. There were crawdads, so kids would go down there, try to catch something. There was one boy in the first grade and two girls walking behind me. The girls were playing a game with the little boy. He was trying to steal their purses—they had these little-girl purses, shiny plastic things. I remember it so well because we’d all paused at the bridge. One of the girls reared back and said, ‘You won’t get my purse, I’ll hit you with it!’ In mock terror the little boy turned to run away and darted straight into the street, no warning whatsoever. A car was coming at thirty, forty miles an hour, not speeding. The kid ran out and WHAM, it just center punched him. Very little braking, it happened so fast. You know, he was short, so it knocked him down on the pavement. Front tires skidded past him. The back tires of the car—because now it was starting to swerve—caught him and skidded him along. Eventually one wheel bounced up over his head. The kid was lying there in the middle of the street, all broke up, blood gushing everywhere.

  “The car came to a halt. This woman got out. Early twenties. She was wearing light-colored clothing. She started shrieking. Got the kid, pulled him into her lap; she was covered in blood. I mean, the kid was lifeless. He was dead. And I’m thinking, How can there possibly be so much blood coming out of one little kid? She was rocking him back and forth, crying inconsolably. Then this guy came running out of a house with a blanket and wrapped up the kid. That’s all I can remember. I kept thinking about it after that. I was only eight years old. That’s when I began noticing stuff around me.

  “Within days I found a dead baby bird that had fallen out of its nest, a little hatchling on the ground. I stood there equating things. Dead baby bird. Dead kid in the street. Death. Motherfucking capricious thing.

  “The thing about it was that after I saw him die, I was terrified of crossing the street. I mean it was bad. I was embarrassed to go out with my friends because I just couldn’t do it. So I went out by myself and hid between two parked cars. When I heard someone driving up, I darted out and ran to the other side. Then I counted how many seconds passed before I would have been hit. Seven seconds that first time. I got away clean. So I started cutting it closer, hiding and jumping out in front of cars like some mad little dervish. Five seconds, four, three. Pretty soon I was the king of cars. I’d have them skidding sideways, brakes screaming, and I’d keep running street to street, clipping right between them.”

  He throws his hand, a chop through the dark. “They never got me once. I was in command.”

  After Dirk gives the story time to soak into the air, he laughs to himself, shaking his head. “The shit we do to figure out the world.”

  I stand up for bed. “The shit we do,” I agree. I walk away into the dark to sleep.

  The Graveyard Shift

  Graveyard shift m
embers moved like cat burglars through the city. They were the ones who loaded their own bullets at home, illegally adding more firepower than was allowed. In the checkerboard patterns of streetlight and darkness, they would work unseen, bending and stretching their own laws to match the heightened crimes of night. The graveyard shift grew into a union of secrecy. Day cops would wake in their midnight beds, hearing hurt-hawk screams of sirens racing through the distance. They would listen with envy and disdain.

  On this night, a crack addict was roving the city with a gun. He robbed convenience stores one after the next: forty dollars at 11:15 PM, a bag full of singles and fives at 12:30 AM. He was the most unstable, perilous brand of criminal available. A description of the man and his orange Dodge pickup with a camper shell had been circulated. Each member of the night team carried a photograph of him from a surveillance camera.

  The events that this man initiated on this particular night would ripple through the graveyard shift for years. One officer would be murdered. Another would end up committing suicide with his duty weapon. One would become a desert nomad, and another would turn to Christ. Others would be dismissed over matters of conduct and ethics.

  Shouting furiously down the barrel of his .38 caliber handgun, the crack addict had just robbed a 7-Eleven of eighty dollars. Immediately, Dirk and the second in command, a man named Ed, searched through a nearby parking lot, moving slowly in a crouch, flashlights shifting beneath cars, through windows, guns out. They watched each other, listening to shoe soles touch asphalt, judging the speed of shadows cast by their flashlights.

  This was the same night that higher powers at headquarters decided to lessen the visceral prestige of the graveyard shift. Night cops had been teasing the daytime crews with bad habits. Fearing that this nightly brotherhood had become too tightly bound and dangerous, those in command assigned each man to an unfamiliar location. The delicate choreography—hands reaching for hands, bodies sailing outward to meet a perfectly timed grasp—was upended. It was the same night that manpower shortages left numerous positions on the graveyard shift vacant.

  While the addict came out of the dark, grabbed money at gunpoint, and slid back into hiding, each cop was awkwardly handling his new placement. The angles of the city, the curious shadows and escapeways, were offset and alien. Nerves twitched at every unexpected sound. They had a name for this kind of tension: One Call Away from a Cop Getting Killed.

  Going on about nightly business, Dirk left Ed in the parking lot—standard procedure—and cruised the neighborhoods. Thirty minutes later, he heard the call. Everyone heard it. Ed was alone. He had found the orange truck parked in a mobile-home court. It was exactly on the east-west boundary of two police beats, hazy territory for everyone.

  Ed called for backup. They all knew the voice. Ed was a man who usually sounded bored, even in the most tense situations. Now he seemed nervous. Nothing was right. He said he was going in to have a look.

  The brotherhood scrambled. If everyone had been in place, an unbroken perimeter would have been created like trenching around a wildfire. Each member had a position and knew his own streets: streets that could be taken at ninety miles per hour without dips or holes, ones with views, ones without blind corners, ones linking to alleys to other streets to other alleys. But tonight the city was a newly made web, strands upon strands that would paralyze.

  No one got there fast enough. The gun battle between Ed and the addict was quick. Both men fired shots from no more than three feet apart.

  A stranger’s voice came on the radio. A citizen. He was frantic. “One of your officers is in the street,” he said. “He’s been shot in the head.”

  The hive roared. Sirens exploded across the entire city. The orange Dodge peeled from the neighborhood as patrol cars fired in behind it. The freeway was right there. Speeds were instantly well over one hundred miles per hour.

  Dirk jumped to the freeway. He sped the wrong way up an off-ramp—not enough time to get to the other side. Aiming for an interception, he raced opposite the chase lane, lights spinning wildly. Oncoming traffic appeared through a tunnel.

  Dirk glared straight into the speeding headlights, muttering, “Get the fuck out of my way.” The cars spilled around him.

  Out the other side of the tunnel, Dirk watched one of the patrol cars swerve in front of the orange truck. Brakes hit. Smoke blasted from under the car’s tires. The truck barged into the rear of the patrol car, clear into its backseat. The fused mass of truck and patrol car skidded into the median. Dirk snapped his steering wheel to the right and went down after them.

  Another officer made it there first. He fired his shotgun into the driver’s door, pitching sieve holes into the metal. A second officer pulled to the other side as the man tumbled out unhurt and threw his gun to the ground. His hands flashed straight into the air.

  The second officer steadied his gun on the man’s heart. He had a clean shot. The man begged, baring his hands to show that he was done; he had killed a man, and now he was finished—Please don’t kill me! The officer held his gun, his weight on the trigger, knowing what would happen if he fired, the sudden solution, the unstoppable darkness that would come over him. Muscles tightened in his face.

  Dirk arrived with the entire wave of uniforms. They poured around the officer standing with his gun, passing him frozen in the current, still struggling with the shot his training and his personal codes would not allow him to make.

  This would be their justice. The man’s bones were going to be crushed. They would take him right to the edge. Ten, fifteen cops from across the entire city descended onto this man. The scene was immediately overrun with shouting, with unfamiliar faces, people from other precincts, voices lifting: You’re dead, motherfucker! You’re dead!

  Dirk saw down this path. He felt the aimless agony that would flood their lives if they mishandled this moment. They would have crossed too far. They would never be allowed to return to their lives. They would stumble home and never sleep again.

  “No! Be fucking cool!” Dirk bellowed, dizzy with confusion, his head blaring with hatred and fear. Another officer shoved into the crowd with him, both of them yelling for calm, grabbing shoulders and arms of other officers, making eye contact, shouting, shouting.

  “We’ll lose this!” Dirk yelled. “We’ll fucking lose this! Don’t let it happen! We’ve got witnesses here! Pull it back! Calm it down!”

  The wolves circled and bit at the air. Muscles hammered at themselves. Men fell away, necks straining. No one hit the man. No one drove the man’s face into a knee, into the ground. The horrible sea wailed back into itself.

  The man was trussed like a pig, handcuffed at his back, cuffs around his ankles pulled up to the handcuffs so that his body lay bound and useless. He was tossed into the backseat of a patrol car. The crowd of uniforms wandered, wailed, and eventually dispersed.

  At Ed’s funeral, Dirk felt his organs collapse inside of his body. As he sat in the pew, he began lurching with sobs. His wife covered him with her arms, but Dirk was gone. He reached out a hand to bury the sounds, but they broadcast from space, burning through his palm. He coughed up tears and fell into himself.

  Three days after the funeral, Dirk found his way to the desert. He negotiated a canoe and entered the Green River in Utah, its gorge as barren as bones. He had been there before, vacations in the wilderness, few-day outings to the canyon desert.

  Dirk floated for days. Cliffs lifted around him, each shifting slowly behind the next. Not far from the Green’s confluence with the Colorado River, he pulled to the right shore. The canoe scratched and banged against boulders and rocks. Dirk dragged it from the current, tying off its bow with a length of dusty rope. He climbed silently from there into the jumbled boulders of a side canyon. The climbing infected his mind. Dirk felt the familiar span of his body, the quickness of his hands. The land was made of fire, every touch a scar, a flood of information. He felt his balance, his step, as if his gun were drawn, as if he had opened fire, each bulle
t racing to its mark.

  Dirk climbed into the fern grottoes and the shadows of dripping springs. Cloisters of cottonwood trees appeared between enormous boulders, their trunks knotted and turned by floods. His hands dragged across their beaten bark, and Dirk thought that the trees looked like true living creatures, ones like himself, that he was just catching a glimpse of them frozen in time as they threw their roots into the ground, bracing themselves. Some were dead, snapped at the knees by floods. Dirk touched these, too, thinking that living and dying were always this close to each other.

  Finally, he came to a pool of water, its edges sheltered in blades of cattail leaves, the tan seed heads ready to explode and madden the world with life. The water was like museum glass, absolutely clear. Dirk had never seen a thing like this. He had once imagined this desert as most people think of deserts: nothing at all, forever, drought and rock with no place comfortable to sit. He crouched at the edge of the water, touching it with his fingertips, watching the spread of ripples. Shadows ribbed the floor.

  Dirk stripped naked and slipped in. The water rose cold to his chin. He drifted across. From the gravelly floor he clutched a stone with his toes and lifted it to his hand. It was black and small, one stone in a countless world. Dirk kept it. He thought that the desert could sacrifice this one object for him, an offering for his survival.

  DAY TEN

  In the cold before dawn I wake. I crawl out and swing the serape around my naked body, the wool like wire on my skin. I prance barefoot over broken sandstone and come to the last black widow web along the skirt of cliff at our camp. There I bring out my light. The black widow still waits in her web. The male to her left has not moved all night. He listens for her without rest.