The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  With a distracted drone, he says, “There are parts of myself that remain inside. We aren’t meant to be entirely open books like this.”

  I pull out a bag of nuts, open it, and offer some to him. His eyes come down. He regards the bag as if I am holding a snake.

  “Eat,” I urge.

  We return to our packs defeated, no routes found, knees weak from fear and strain. Under this weight we move slowly into the end of the day in search of a place to camp. Dirk stops, head suddenly turned to the side. He hears something. His alertness calls me to stop behind him. I am tired, my pack heavy, but my senses sharpen, mirroring his.

  A flock of small birds, juncos, slips around a canyon bend and into the floor with us. They are winter nomads, flown down from the higher snowbound mesas, finding seeds wherever they can. They rain onto a nearby sandbar of sparse vegetation. Some of them land to survey the surroundings from a dead juniper’s branches, while others drop to the ground and begin snapping up ricegrass seeds. Their ensemble of faint twitters sounds like the chirps of children in a field, each secretly aware of the others. Dirk does not stir. His breathing seems to have stopped. If either of us moves, a thread will be plucked. They will all fly away, messages sent between them faster than sound. We have seen hardly any other living creatures. We watch, amazed.

  I sense the vigilance of these small birds, thinking that this is how it needs to be done. The juncos have an old way of going about things, the protection of fellowship in a place ripe with hazard. Their unanimity seems like a bright point in a country as friendless and dryly cold as space.

  At once, by command of a mutual mind, they dash to the air and flit down canyon from us. The hungry are fed, the watchers relieved. Not enough seeds here to stay.

  Dirk stares where they vanished, and once their sounds are gone, says, “You can’t help feeling allegiance with anything else alive out here.”

  We start walking again. I come around front and listen to Dirk behind me, hearing exactly how he negotiates a loose rock that had barely tipped under my step. Without looking, I know that he steps over it differently, warned by my body that it might give way and trip his gait. Every signal between us is like this, minuscule details alerting us by the half second. I listen to the rasp of his clothes, to the scrape of rocks beneath his weight.

  Our minds are emptied by fatigue, so we walk with less and less cogitation, like water now, flowing and turning into eddies. The land opens and closes as we slide through, still behind the first chasm, hardly farther along than when we awoke this morning.

  We find a good camp. Down in the compound of canyons: an alcove carved into a wall by a tiny, eroding seep. We climb into it, inspecting the line-dried laundry of black widow webs. Widows have not lived here for some years. We drop our packs and sit beside each other, our bodies hanging loosely from our shoulders like work coats put away in the closet, still warm and sweaty from the day.

  This is the first night that we will not leave ourselves out in the open. We have a roof of hollowed stone. It leans over our heads, protecting us from the sky, from the eyes of stars beaming through gaps in evening clouds.

  “Fire,” I say.

  Dirk smiles. “Yeah, a fire. That sounds good.”

  A fire will be a reprieve in this immense land. A thing made by our own hands. We will be able to rest at the flames far into the night.

  I do the cooking. Dried flakes of potatoes and hard cheese crumbled with salt. While I stir the pot over our fist-sized stove, Dirk gathers the dry wood of last year’s yucca stalks. He breaks the wood in his hands, placing it into neat, small piles: a stack of dry grass to get the fire going, slender twigs for kindling, and thumb-thick stalks to last into the dark. He tinkers with his piles, arranging wood, laying out the kindling so that pieces can be selected according to quick need.

  The alcove feels like home. Even Dirk’s belongings are scattered idly on the ground, as if he had tossed himself down on a couch, feet up on the furniture. The sounds of our movements are comfortably boxed in, muffled by the ceiling and the floor. Dust and rocks.

  This alcove fulfills a very old longing, I think, probably from back when animals first learned about mutual interest, when protozoa began fluttering around each other for protection. Some of these same protozoa gathered in dark nooks behind rocks, like this alcove, when the bigger predators were about. With our modern human houses and our fenced yards and our sleeping-caves, how do we Homo sapiens imagine that we are brilliant above all others? We have had the same desires since we turned away from chlorophyll and started bustling about, eating other animals. We have wanted our caves, our shelters made of hide, the door flaps constructed to seal closed behind us like garage doors at the end of the workday.

  Dirk starts our night’s fire in a lock of grass, burning it in an aluminum dish so that the ashes will be contained. He selects his kindling and begins setting pieces into the flames. I enjoy watching his command, how he gazes over his cauldron. He chooses how high to make the flames. He arranges the sticks so that they catch but do not burn and die too quickly. Then he sits back as the fire burns on its own, a music box wound to play in front of us.

  There is a faint light beyond us, in the surrounding canyon, a slim blue of the newly waxing moon. The fire soon takes this other light from our eyes. We are quiet with our small flames. Wood snaps and hisses.

  Still stirring the pot, looking at the fire instead of my work, I say, “This is why television was invented.”

  Sparks sizzle out of a splinter of juniper wood. Dirk stares into it. He says, “Everybody’s got to have their home fires. A little candy to come home to.”

  I blow out the clean blue flame of our stove and hand the pot of food over for Dirk to divide. He does the usual, weighing the food in his spoon, debating over the final amount. Later, as I eat, I study the lit ceiling, the black streaks where runoff storm water pours in—not all the way back to our camp, but close. I cannot clearly think of this place as a sanctuary. Even in this shelter and this warming light, the air is taut with apprehension. I am well aware of the darkness, the three chasms left to cross.

  Dirk finishes his meal and turns to govern the fire’s wood. He pushes small pieces into just the right space so that there is no smoke, only flame. He lets the coals burn down. There is wood left, but we do not burn it. The fire has had its time. I reach out with my stick, mending the coals, brightening them. The glow subsides, turned and turned so that it is nothing but fine ash. Now it will easily blow away. Our remains will be erased. We will pass through undetected. I plant my stick in sand to keep it from smoldering.

  I do not know where we are. On the map, yes, I could find our camp. But what use is this map? It tells of a land that is not here, a place that can be rolled out flat. The land that Dirk and I know about is a series of interconnecting passageways. Regions are defined by our personal movements, by the second landscape Dirk had talked about days ago, the place that etches into our memory. Now, it feels as if we are not even on the land. We are moving through the shapes of our own minds. We have found the space in between passageways. The Diné reached into this same space. Somewhere in here, they found the Protectionway. They found a sacred safety, a wilderness ritual of discovery in which the oldest of stories are revealed, the ones that tell how we survive. Dirk and I will pass through this place undetected because, like the Diné who came before, our presence is sheathed here. This is not a place of humans.

  But we are not lost, I remind myself. We are still learning how to move, that’s all.

  Then I think of my father. He knew about paths in the land and talked sometimes of the places between, the balancing points that perch at the peripheries of worlds. I think of the times we sat in the night desert together, the fires we tended side by side. I grew up with him and his fires. I remember the long talks as he described the universe to me, how there is a preciousness to the dark, to the stars, to the wilderness. He would never have walked this far into the desert, but he would have understo
od why Dirk and I have come. He wanted this sensation of the eternal in his life. He wanted to sleep with this infinity. He would have enjoyed the strange quiet here.

  I mention this to Dirk.

  Dirk looks up from the last hot bellies of coal that I turned over.

  He says, “Your father was a pathetic drunk.”

  I look at Dirk’s coal-lit form, not sure of what to say. I shouldn’t have brought this up. Dirk never met my father, but somehow the man has become a bane in Dirk’s mind, an agent of vicious chaos. Maybe I didn’t explain things well enough to Dirk. Maybe I only told him that my father was a vile man. I never adequately described the nights we spent together around campfires.

  “I don’t think you can define him so easily,” I tell Dirk. “Even his madness was something of value. I learned about this unexpected element to the world. I think I learned to crave it.”

  Dirk is not in the mood. He begins fiddling with his own stick, tapping at the coals. All he can add is, “Your father was a stuporific, alcoholic potato head.”

  I say, “But sometimes I think he died because he understood this kind of place so well. At least he understood it in his mind. I think there was a wilderness inside his head. His heart exploded, maybe out of desire, or unmet desire, or I don’t know . . .”

  “He died of a heart attack.” Dirk points with his stick. “It isn’t some mystery. You gotta be careful about worshipping this corruption that surrounded your dad. If he was really hungry for something in his life the way you are, why didn’t he take it by the horns?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I just can’t tell if he was some sort of pure animal or if he was a destructive waste.”

  Dirk plants his stick in the sand so it will not burn and says, “Destructive waste.”

  I think, How I love you Dirk, how I trust you. But there are illusions of certainty I cannot sleep with tonight.

  Brawl

  My father and I went to a Phoenix bar to play pool. I was twenty-seven years old. The place was flooded with music, street punks with their metal piercings, and urban drunkards in black T-shirts, tattoos flowing up their arms. My father strutted around the pool table like Aristotle. He ordered shots of whiskey for both of us and hailed me with a toast, calling me a master of an ancient art, the commander of stories. I had just published my first book.

  “Stories,” he announced, “are the tools of transformation.”

  He slapped an empty shot glass on the nearest table and bent over to send his eye down his pool cue.

  “But transformation is a hoax, my son,” he said, measuring the smooth wood of the cue in his hands. “You must know this. Four in the corner.”

  The balls clacked against each other. The four ball shot into the corner pocket, choking into the table’s underside. He launched his stick over his shoulder, never once risking his back to me.

  My father said, “Transformation is the bullshit we use on ourselves as a distraction in between birth and death. It’s a lie, a pacifier we pop into our mouths and suck on.”

  He walked to the other side and leaned again, sawing the cue back and forth. He fired. The ball sank. “You, my son, are the master of bullshit. My young Marcos de Niza, coming out of the desert crying, Cities of gold! Cities of fucking gold.”

  I polished his voice in my head, every word bathed and examined. What was he telling me? By now I was used to thinking of him as a gate swinging back and forth, a man of endless contradiction. I could not tell his lies from his truths, and whether he was sober or drunk, he always said that there were no such things as truths or lies. “There is only what is,” he would always say. I turned his words over and over the way I might a small stone in my hand, feeling for subtle messages.

  The master of bullshit, I thought. Transformation is a hoax.

  My father’s pool playing was brutally graceful. He set himself up superbly with every shot, twisting me around backward, leaving me with nothing. I hated his ruthlessness. I slopped the balls around after him, inaccurate and clumsy.

  “Both worlds,” he said, commanding me to balance my game, to find my grace as I steadied my cue. His words made me crazy with rage, and I slipped my shot. The cue ball stretched straight into a pocket and sank into the table’s clattering bowels.

  “Fuck you,” I said to him, moving away so that he could make his next shot, never showing my back.

  Three games lost out of five; it was after midnight when I drove us both home in my father’s treasure-trove truck, drunk on the backstreets, dangerous. Should have walked, should have tossed the keys on the pavement at his feet, but I didn’t. My father’s wife was awake and reading in the kitchen when we got there.

  I should have thrown down my gear in his backyard to sleep. I should have fled for the desert. But I stayed. My father and I fell into a set of kitty-corner couches, dredging into a conversation mostly about the rate of universal expansion and whether we will all die in cold nothingness or collapse into a lively fireball. We had philosophical differences on the matter. My father stared at me with repugnance. I told him to screw himself.

  The conversation roughened, rising from astronomy to feminism. Dreaded feminism. One of my primary studies in college had been feminist theory and historic women’s literature. When I graduated, I stood with the women’s studies department. This had been an indisputable insult to my father, a man of great womanizing reputation, an admitted misogynist.

  No way out of it. Now that feminism was on the table, there would be blood.

  A coffee table sat between us.

  I had a drink in my hand.

  He called me a bitch.

  I pounded my drink against the wood rim of the table, knowing that the glass would shatter. It did.

  The air exploded. My father’s cigarette hit the floor. He leaped over the table, breaking whatever was in his path. Surprisingly agile for a fat man.

  I threw myself straight into him, a blocking move. I buried my right fist into his gut, a shoulder up to shove him away, my mind dancing with the thrill. I could feel my father’s body, a tightness, cables of muscles leaping beneath his fat. The rest was just movement, our bodies thrown into each other, hair grabbed, the blunt drive of a fist once, twice. I felt his grip. I had not seen it coming. It closed around my throat. My breath left me. I snapped backward just out of his range.

  It was as if I were watching my father dance, observing his steps, while I floated barely beyond him. I recorded his movements, seeing weakness in his swing, strength in his forwardness, momentum to his mass.

  The only word going through his mind: kill.

  I heard screaming. His wife. There was blood. I didn’t know whose or from where. The broken glass? My hand? His face?

  I felt my father’s fingers on my throat again. How did he get here so fast? His fingers worked for a hold, not yet revealing their full strength. They searched the way a mountain lion tracks the spine of a deer, feeling for the space to open with its teeth.

  His wife dived between us. She screamed, raging her arms in the air. His grip was hurled from my throat. She plastered him with her open hands. With her back she shoved me out the nearest open door. It was just behind me, leading to the porch outside.

  As I stumbled away, I saw my father’s eyes. He was calculating over his wife’s shoulders, dodging the obstacle of her head. He tracked me perfectly, in search of weakness. I was still dancing, amazed, enthralled.

  His wife reached behind her and slammed the door shut. Suddenly it was quiet. Moths stooped and stalled around the porch light. I stood alone, my heart thumping into my throat, my body shaking with formless electricity.

  An hour later I was still standing in the faint porch light out in the yard’s hinterlands. The back door opened, and my father stepped out, the sound of the hinges and the closing so familiar, like a potent smell from childhood. I turned my head skyward, looking for any impression of stars over the city. My father walked up beside me and stopped. He must have stood there for ten minutes, searching t
he lemon-lit sky for stars, saying nothing.

  “I was going to kill you,” he finally said. “I didn’t know who you were. I just knew that you were younger and probably stronger. I knew I had to kill you quickly. I had no idea who you were.”

  He’s lying, I thought. He’s grabbing the nearest answer.

  I could not say anything.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” he said.

  “That was your last chance,” I told him.

  He lowered his head, cupped a hand. My father’s face flared as he flashed a lighter to a cigarette. Leaning his head back, he blew smoke into the city sky.

  DAY ELEVEN

  At night I dream of movement. Nothing is still. I slide through canyons, floating, touching ground only with the tip of my foot, a finger, a palm. The dimensions and the atmosphere of these dream canyons are identical to the ones we travel by day, equally as quixotic and gripping.

  Dirk is with me in my dreams now. Every night he is an observer beside me, not a subject, but another dreamer himself. In this dream it begins to rain, and he watches along with me. Then it snows. The rock turns to ice. I panic. I am in a windowless box of canyons, trapped. Where has Dirk gone? Where is he?

  I wake at the very edge of dawn, and the air reeks of moisture. I have not tasted this in a while, not even in the last swirling of low, dark clouds that days ago gave us nothing but wind. This smells wet at the back of the tongue.

  I open the hood of my bag. It is past dawn. Whatever morning light gets through is stricken to a faint blue by the canyon, hardly reaching all the way down to this red alcove. I listen for rain. Nothing.

  Actually, the air smells of snow. Snow is a poisonous dart in this part of the desert. It hits the nervous system, unravels motor reflexes so that a person is left helpless, every rock face as slick as oil.

  As I lie here I go through the routes behind us: the one that led to here, the one coming down behind that, the one to there; tiny steps and holds, indecisions, gateways, balancing points. The impressions are too many and too vivid for my recollection. If we packed at this very moment and retreated, how long would it take for us to retrace our steps? And then where?