The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  Dinner is dehydrated potatoes and bits of hard, sand-pelted cheese with salt and dried, leathery kale. After the pan is set aside, the meal finished, we sit in this sweet light, eyes stolen by the flames.

  Again, I remember my father. I must tell Dirk that I used to sit with my father like this. Dirk will have to listen.

  “My father would never camp in campgrounds,” I venture. “He always took these horrible roads. And he used to make these great fires. He always started them with gasoline and a lighter. I don’t even know if he could have started a fire with just kindling. He used to create this magician’s spectacle, lighting off giant explosions, standing there with his face lit up as if he were calling the ancient powers.”

  I lift a stick, mending the fire by turning coals.

  “Then he’d sit up all night poking at it, talking about fire being alive, and how if there are past lives, he used to be the fire starter.”

  I look over at Dirk, his eyes also consumed by the back-and-forth skipping of light.

  “I always have memories of my father from things that happened at night. Why is that?”

  “Night is for the observant,” Dirk answers.

  Fitting, I think, for the man of the graveyard shift.

  Dirk breaks from the fire to look at me. He seems suddenly irritated. “You talk about me being nothing but black and white. Look at yourself. Only black and only white. One minute your father’s a violent lunatic and the next he’s a wise and ancient mystic. You live on extremes, Opie.”

  The fire. I look at the fire instead of Dirk. The beautiful fire, shifting, pulling, alive.

  Dirk continues, “You see a continuum and process to everything around you, but you insist on living only at the farthest edges. It’s like you live in two completely different worlds sometimes, like you can’t bring them together.”

  The fire. I keep watching it. I think, I could say the same to you, Dirk. The two sides of your coin, my crooked genes . . . maybe this is why we ended up together. We both stand between worlds, between cop and wilderness, between madness and sanity, and we have not yet learned to sustain the graceful balance.

  Dirk keeps on. “You think you’re a madman, some kind of van Gogh hacking off your ear as a prize. God, sometimes I need one of those Taser guns to use on you, just zap you so you fall down and stop and realize that you are absolutely sane.”

  I stand and wipe my hands free of dust, pulling all of my warm layers of clothing straight.

  “Gotta pee,” I say, looking for a way to get out from under Dirk’s scrutiny. But I cannot escape it. I move through the firelight passage knowing how he sees me in this world, my shadow flashing against his walls. In his pantheon of criminals, of people capable of horrible and disturbing acts, I fall into the category of the good. I am an innocent. A good and innocent man cannot at the same moment be a madman.

  But Dirk, I think, I am not one of the good. I am one of the many. I am confounded. I cannot see my way through. We are all mad.

  I walk to the mouth of our shelter, unzip my pants, and urinate into the boulders below. The storm has broken into wandering pieces, leaving me with the false light of a clouded moon, the stiff cold of unmelted snow. I can just begin to see the night terrain around me. I see the birthing rooms of canyons and their haunted moon-colored boulders.

  I glance back into the shelter.

  Dirk is showering sparks out of the fire, bright birds startled from the brush. I see hundreds of millions of years in the firelight, calligraphic layers of this wind-driven rock formation. Boulders lie crashed at the far end of the shelter, a collapse from not long ago, a deafening explosion, the ozone smell of impact and dust.

  Migrations fill this room. Meanwhile, I bang around myself like a stone in an empty box. I wish to be one of these objects fallen into this land and not a human. My insides should be exposed, broken open, my life told by my passage, by the way I have scattered my gear once again in the dust, and by my attraction to the exacting hand that Dirk uses at the fire. I want to be an alien here no longer. Release this notion that I am a man subject only to the laws of men. Come, wind, wear down my edges and build new ones of me. Make me more than black or white. Abrade me into a world without end. Turn me to sand and spin me through the air. Bring me to the ground again and I will build the next civilization of stones.

  I walk back into the shelter and sit. We say nothing to each other. I watch Dirk’s face as the fire softens and finally dies, and all that is left of him is the coal glow of his eyes.

  Small-Town Cop

  Dirk thought it would be good enough just to leave the city, get out of the heat of his job. He decided to move with his wife, Linda, a police dispatcher, to a Colorado ski town two passes away from Denver, up where the snow starts early and buries the place in winter.

  Prior to this, Dirk had been working in a part of Denver that had no extraneous vegetation or geology. He was moving through a landscape of rooftops and alleys, a secret world that everyday citizens never visited. The places that seemed even remotely organic were only the slick dark undersides of overpasses, the popcorn-vomit smells of small midnight bars. It was maybe this barrenness that had been wearing most on his mind, and not so much the gunfire and the photographs thrown into morbid investigation files. Too many junked televisions and weather-crisped fliers pasted to the buildings, not enough blowing leaves along the streets.

  Dirk was afraid that he would die in this place. He imagined himself sprawled on the ground, feet oddly askew the way they always are among the dead before clean-up crews arrive. He envisioned pulling over a car for some meaningless traffic violation. As he requested to see a driver’s license, Dirk would barely feel a bullet punching into his skull from out of the backseat. This would be his end. The mountains, he figured, would be his salvation.

  So Dirk moved away, but instead of taking a job at a café or with the snowplow crew or shelving books at the library, he found work as a local cop. It was reliable, something he knew how to do.

  All the cops there had nicknames, as did most of the residents. Blue and Rooster and Red and Smiley . . . that sort of thing. Dirk considered this, then said that he would take the name Puss-Eyed Pete. They called him Dirk.

  Not long into this new life, Dirk shot someone at a gas station. It was a late-night robbery, after closing hours. The burglar walked straight toward him even as Dirk held a gun in his left hand, flashlight in his right, announcing that if the man came any closer he would shoot. The burglar kept on, reached into his coat, behind his belt. There was a glint of metal. From a crouch, Dirk fired once. The bullet traveled ten feet in five one thousandths of a second. Bone shrapnel from the man’s left shoulder sprayed across the ground. It was a nervous shot—could have just as easily hit the head or chest—but all the same it ended with the man crumpled on the ground.

  Dirk’s friends in the city called him a shit magnet. He couldn’t go anywhere without having it fall down on him. It turned out that the burglar, mad with a heavy dosage of quaaludes, had been unarmed. The glint of metal had been a pair of channel locks pulled from his back pocket.

  It began to dawn on Dirk that no matter where he went, cop work was always the same. Far quieter in a small town, it was still a job dealing in deception and violence. His days were still marked with domestic abuse, thieves, dead bodies, car chases . . .

  The last high-speed chase of Dirk’s rural career came from a whale of a white Buick blazing from county to county, dodging through back roads, jumping on and off the nearest interstate. Dirk intercepted the Buick on a mountain pass, overtaking the other patrol cars, sliding in close on the turns, overpowering the runaway driver by boxing him against the guardrail.

  The Buick touched ice, spun off the road, and impaled a snowbank. Dirk, the first on the scene, dragged the driver out and immediately got to work, shouting into the man’s face, rolling him handcuffed against the car, driving his fists into the man’s kidneys. Suddenly, Dirk stopped as if yanked from a dream. He turned to l
ook behind him and saw a row of faces. They looked like children on the first day of school, none of them sure how to behave, a couple of sheriff’s deputies and a highway patrolman in his crisp park ranger-style hat. Their faces floated in the night silence, all staring directly at Dirk.

  Dirk glanced at the driver’s crumpled form, then turned again toward the hanging faces.

  “This is how we do it in the big city,” he explained.

  “This ain’t the big city,” one of them accused.

  Dirk studied their eyes. He grabbed the driver by his collar and tossed him into the snow at their feet.

  “Then he’s yours,” Dirk said.

  Cop work is cop work. The small town gave him nothing but low pay and poor benefits. A job opened up in Denver. Dirk took it. He moved back to the prostitute-laden beat along one of the main avenues, eventually dropping into the underworld of the graveyard shift, like an addict once more.

  DAY TWELVE

  Today Dirk and I will make the crossing. Snow has melted from any south-facing rock. There is only a scattering of white pockets in the north. We have scouted and been turned back enough times. Food is running low. We are only five days from our pickup on the backwater bend where we left our supply cache. Last night we agreed in the firelight shelter that today we would slip on packs and find our way through. There would be no more questions, no more scouting. The land would spread open. It would have to.

  The first chasm that we have been unable to cross hangs below us in a suspension of crevices and minor gorges. We stop under the weight of our gear and scan the cables of sandstone holding this place together. Dirk reaches to the ground and picks up a single gray arrowhead. It is perfect, hand-cut from glassy stone, no damage at all to its fine, napped edges.

  Dirk grins, holding it up, announcing, “I am the goddamned Yo-Yo Ma of finding shit.”

  He hands the arrowhead over, and I pass it like a faceted gem between my fingers. There have been so few artifacts out here that I have mistakenly imagined we are the first to step in one canyon or another. This is more pleasing, though—evidence of another person’s passage. Human populations have been sudden and brief in this place: the archaic nomads hunting bighorns and rabbits five, eight thousand years ago; the Anasazi in the eleventh, twelfth centuries AD; Paiutes driven out by Diné warriors some few hundred years ago; the Diné fleeing the United States in 1883; the singer in his childhood; Dirk and me today, seeking refuge against the gravity of these histories and our own. We are next in the lineage, even if we are too short-lived to be named. We are only passing shadows, as were all the others before us. Even the names that the Diné gave to some of these landmarks—Head of Mother Earth, Talking Rock—will eventually wear away while these great stones will still lean against one another. I pass the arrowhead back to Dirk. He sets it on the ground and looks up, continuing his study of canyons spreading down from us.

  “Choose your door,” he says.

  This will not be a coin toss. There is a pattern. Somewhere in this is the scheme, and we should know it by now. Some canyons fall into strings of traps. Others lead the way through. We need a route that goes down, crosses the chasm that has so far stymied us, and then takes us up and out the other side. From there we will need another, and then another. One crossing, two, and three. Today.

  There is one thin, fissured canyon. It is heaped with boulders. The canyons surrounding it, seductive hollows winding out of sight, are clean of boulders. This messy, boulder-racked canyon before us looks purposeful.

  “This is the place,” I say.

  Dirk agrees.

  We start into it. Taking ledge by ledge down toward the dark, we sling off packs and lower them to each other. The formations lift and cover us. We are quickly down inside. This must be what it feels like to stalk a great animal, I think. We check over our shoulders, aware of the smallest details: sandstone polishing, a battered shrub of mountain mahogany leaving windblown claw marks in the wall. I think of the Arctic Inuit hunting whales or polar bears: laying a hand into a fresh track of a massive creature, or from a kayak, seeing bubbles rising from unknown depths. This is what it must feel like to expect a sudden appearance, a confrontation. Dirk and I have little mechanical advantage here. The rope is useless on most of these clean faces. We have our bare hands.

  The canyon becomes a tiny gap within the earth. We lean palms against one wall; our packs grate against the other. What if this closes? What if this swallows and leaves us here? My face is against the rock, my chin, my lips touching sandstone, elbows cocked back. Boulders are jammed in here like skulls. It takes time to slip out of our packs and run them to each other. My hat catches and hangs above me, the brim wider than the canyon itself. I stretch back and swipe it down. Stagnant water waits in the lowest reaches, black with the rot of floods backed up from the main chasm. I wrestle off my boots, my pants, quickly tying laces together to contain the bundle, strapping it behind my neck. Every sound is muffled.

  Ice water bites at my legs as I enter. My cold-fog breath curls and vanishes. The floor is sand. No mud, I notice. An almost complete absence of fine organic matter. With this information, I move up the chasm in my mind, the only way to travel the length of this place. I try to imagine a spring, a nest of horsetails or cottonwoods, and I find nothing but a barren expanse, a few desert plants grabbing at the cracks. Old flood foam clings to my legs. With my toes crisply aware in the cold, I feel the belfry of a buried boulder and the flood depression just behind it. The water leads me into the chasm floor. Walls sway in and out of each other in the faint blue light of day, and I feel as if I am walking into sex, two bodies of chasm walls wrapping around and obeying each other. Above my head: wall over wall over curving wall.

  We have reached the floor of the first chasm. Finally. Our incoming fissure of a canyon bisects it like the arms of a crucifix. I hear Dirk behind me. Water gulps and echoes as he wades across. His head is ducked, as if he’s walking through a cave of ice.

  He murmurs, “This is one deep, tangled bitch.”

  I say nothing, staring up through the walls.

  Dirk and I dry ourselves on the back of a boulder. My feet know every shape they touch, the textures acute. As we wipe off with bandannas, we keep an eye on the dark vanishing points up and down the chasm. Dirk and I both leave to investigate these causeways, our pants drying our reddened legs as we move. The chasm buries itself in either direction. Downstream is a flight of water holes intricately constructed among pilastraded walls, a church of Gaudí. Upstream is a bed of ice protecting an inlet where waterfalls sometimes plunge.

  The way out is neither. The way out is in the mirror image of the overhead fissure we came down. This second fissure looks as if a city has fallen into it, an entire skyline of boulders swallowed by an X-shaped crack. We load packs and begin climbing hand over hand. There are dark places behind boulder heads, and cleanly exposed tips of rock that we clutch, our boots scraping off small pieces that glide unheard back down to the chasm we just left. I glance over my shoulder. Pebbles shower through the air, and they appear for that moment to be birds taking to the air, signs of life. Then they pop open, become quick, white dust against whatever they hit.

  Each part of my body comes into play: hand planted to the left, boot choked into a crack, pack thrown from my back into the wall as an anchor, other foot as high as I can reach, and then the burn of my thighs. I taste bile in my nostrils midway to the top, coughed up by the hardness of my breath, a deep reach into my body for strength. At every stretch my face muscles involuntarily pluck at their cords, as if I were hoisting a backbreaking weight into my arms. My face comes near a crevice filled with meltwater. I move toward it, lips touching water, groaning to draw it in for a drink.

  Dirk and I reach the top at an arc of rock in the sun. The land falls away from us on all sides. Enormous dishes of sandstone lift from the fray, wedges of earth crossing each other’s shadows. The land has been stirred, churned, folded into itself again and again. Dirk’s pack slides
off and lands hard at his heels. His face is slick with sweat.

  Hurling his voice down the crack we just ascended, he spews, “Fuck me runnin’ with a chain saw!”

  He whirls to me like a drunken man, swiping the bandanna off his head. I am sitting, tilting so that my hat brim lifts just high enough to let Dirk into my world.

  “Pull all the fuses,” he sputters. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. We are inside the beast. Come on, you pussy! Is this all you got?”

  Oh, Dirk, please don’t.

  I lower my head again. The sweat falls. Each drop dabs a dark circle onto the stone.

  Now where? The second chasm is just ahead, close enough that a loosened rock would clatter all the way to its floor. If we could become small stones, we would bound. But we have these arms and legs. We are vulnerable, fragile creatures. Together, Dirk and I study the map for a moment. The second chasm lies to the south. Our only option from here, though, is to head west. Our world is tightening. The surface to the west reclines down a shield of rock. We begin to creep along its falling crest, our palms and cheeks resting on its walls, ankles cranked sideways to hold ourselves.

  I hear Dirk, his breath huffed out, a nervous sound.

  “This ain’t the way,” he mutters, and scrambles back, crawling up to vaguely level ground.

  The quickness of his retreat freezes my blood. I am getting myself trapped. I cannot even see the bottom I might tumble into with my breakable bones. What are we thinking? I inch back to join him.

  Dirk and I pace the ledges. We spy into amphitheaters beaming over our heads. The rope is useless here, nothing to tie off to, no anchors. Every surface has been worn smooth, polished into the ice of clean sandstone. We move quickly, no time to scout for the day. There is only one way. It is the one that Dirk did not like. We return to it and I begin.

  My shoulders drop. Boots drag at the slope, barely lifting for each downward step. I turn my head in order to stretch my neck, breath filling my lungs, released. One choice. How fast can I strip out of my pack if I lose purchase? Not fast enough. There is no recovery from a mistake.