The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  Dirk was never the cop who went home easily. Always there was a looseness to his stringent world, a knowledge that if he killed a man out of rage, if his grip failed on me and I tumbled away, he might burst. How can he tell me that beautiful and savage weeds have entered his garden? Their seeds have long waited to split open, and now he feels them growing everywhere.

  He asks, “Did the guy cut you?”

  “No. A friend came up and grabbed me by the shoulders. He pulled me back, and we called the sheriff.”

  “Thank god for your friends.”

  I think for a moment, then say, “Thank god for yours.”

  I feel Dirk glancing at me, probing my faint shape in the early moonlight. Then I feel him look away.

  “Let’s find some water,” he says. “We can set a camp right around here somewhere.”

  Agreed. We head in different directions in search of water.

  As I walk, moonlight drifts among clouds, rolling across fields of junipers and black soil. It is the first time on this journey I have been able to move without restraint in the dark. The night landscape has been changed by the moon. Even under cloud cover, I see the hazy, dromedary shapes of landmarks around me. I see mounds of blackbrush across the narrow plain, and they look like small creatures waiting patiently, lined up along fractures in the rock where they have been able to set roots.

  Even my own shadow is visible, faint but true. There is definition. The drop of a crosscutting canyon in front of me is tiered in gossamer. Blue-gray moonlight spills down the walls, losing strength until I see nothing.

  I realize that this plummet in front of me is the final chasm. One last hole in the earth to cross. I walk to its brink, looking down among ledges and shoulders of sandstone. On a level below me is a reflection. It turns to black and then to liquid mercury as the clouds pass overhead. I climb to this space in the ground, dropping to its edge, my knees alert through my pants to the sharp cold of the bedrock. It is a pool of water not yet frozen. The sky is perfectly reflected through its mirror. Looking into it, I see herds of clouds grazing by. I unclip a water container from my belt and slip it in. The mirror transforms into a surface of abalone ripples.

  The Only One Alive

  If he had fumbled for his keys half a second longer, everything would have been fine, status quo in the city. If he had taken that instant to sling on his seat belt before gunning the engine, perhaps he would have stayed with the police force, although unlikely, for another five years, ten maybe, until retirement even.

  But it did not happen that way. The timing was precise. It began with someone’s call for backup. Backup is a last-ditch effort, a dire circumstance. If you respond to the call fast enough, maybe no one will be killed.

  Dirk swung into his car and soon topped seventy miles per hour down the barrel of the avenue. Predawn dark enveloped the city; the streets were vacant. He crested a slight hill. Ahead was a freeway overpass and below it a stoplight. Of the thousands of intersections in the city, this one was exactly one block from the mobile home where Ed had been killed, a nexus. A sports car was heading toward Dirk in the turn lane, a man on his hazy, early morning way home from a long night out.

  Without pause, the man turned left, stepping on the accelerator. He might have seen the blur of sirens coming toward him. He may have had a flash of thought, a millisecond of electrical memory repeating oh my god for eternity.

  Dirk tried to miss him, but he didn’t quite.

  At seventy miles per hour the collision was a simple sound, not multifaceted and full of communication like water, but a single broadside of metal into metal. The patrol car’s spinning lights exploded. The sports car wrapped around Dirk’s engine like a black glove. The driver’s body somehow remained intact, but his brain turned instantly to liquid.

  Without a seat belt, Dirk flew into the steering wheel. His head punched a salad-bowl crater into the windshield, and he crumpled back into his seat.

  The predawn street then lay open and still like a gutted animal. The only sound was the hiss of hot engine parts. The stoplight overhead went through its motions. Green . . . yellow . . . red . . . green . . .

  Only one person was still alive, and barely. Robbed of his identity, the man who had been called Dirk Vaughan slumped bleeding on the rack of a steering wheel. His patrol car was twisted into a new sculpture around him. Eventually, Dirk became aware of sensation. Pain, the first division between him and the darkness. Elemental, urgent. With this first call to awareness, he now existed.

  He knew this. Nothing more.

  The next sensation was taste. It gave him imagination, a line to follow into the world. It offered information, something salty and acidic, like wine and meat. It was blood. He knew then that he was a living creature.

  He felt the inside of his mouth with his tongue and found knife blades. The soft flesh of his tongue opened and bled across his shattered teeth.

  Then came the sense of loss. Things were missing. There had been death before this moment. In his mind, puzzle pieces separated from one another, and among them he felt emotion. He became aware of his own heart, of an individual soul. He was a gathering of elements, a bag of seemingly unrelated segments. He had memory now. Confusing, disconnected images entered his head like a feverish, wakeful dream. He saw a man strapped to an emergency room table, vomiting black sludge. Out of the man’s mouth sprang a whole crawfish, its armored body limp and shiny as it fell to the floor. He knew this was not a fictional delusion. The details were too memorable. He had actually seen such a thing.

  He saw a woman seated on a toilet and holding a dead fetus in her hands, its umbilical cord leading back to her body, her eyes turning up to him, eyes too vacant and lost to still be human.

  None of these sensations seemed particularly relevant, but each was disconcerting. They came into view like clouds drifting overhead, perennially changing from one to another.

  Dirk felt his mouth again, the nest of broken teeth. The sharp edges drew more blood from his tongue with every pass.

  Finally, he opened his eyes. The scene was unreadable. His world was divided into countless tiny fragments—light, shadow, form, distance. He had to find his missing teeth. It seemed suddenly important that he not lose any more than he had already lost.

  His first physical movements defined the inside of the vehicle. Its dimensions seemed strangely out of proportion; the dashboard and steering wheel were too close. The frame was bent into odd characters that did not look like a car. Looking around, he thought, Where to start?

  A woman jumped out of a patrol car, its red and blue lights oscillating across the carcasses of metal. She found what remained of Dirk’s side of the car and looked in, saw him groping on the floorboard with his free hand, looking for his teeth.

  His sensations expanded and contracted. He became aware of hands touching him. He was being moved. The responsiveness drifted out of his reach, falling into images: a gun barrel pressed into his stomach but not fired; an old man on the floor among spilled envelopes, his chest opened by the stabs of an ice pick. Dirk was aware of invisible details within this image. He knew that the old man had been stabbed exactly twenty times. He knew the murderer would be caught the next day with the car he had bought using the thousand dollars he stole from the man. He knew that the dead man and the killer had been friends.

  Dirk let go of the images when scissors began to cut his clothes away. Was he being robbed? White lights melted through his eyelids, and then came the sound of a helicopter. He was off the ground. Something has gone wrong, he thought. I am being flown to safety.

  My wife, where is my wife? Is she okay?

  He listened to a conversation between two men very close to him. Medical specialists. They were talking about the handgun strapped beneath Dirk’s left arm. They needed to get it off in order to reach his injuries, but one said that the last time he tried to take a backup gun from an unconscious police officer, the body leaped to attention, ready for combat yet still unconscious.

>   Dirk lifted into their world for a moment. Without opening his eyes, he reached his right hand across his blood-covered chest. He pulled out his backup gun, clicked the safety with a thumb, spun the barrel into his palm, and handed it over butt first.

  He heard the astonished silence between the two men. He felt the gun come out of his hand. Again, he fell into his dreams.

  Ending on the Bathroom Floor

  I sometimes imagine generations of my family as holes cut near each other in the same bedrock. Some holes are water-bearing, some dry most of the year, some carved into unexpected bands of color. Eventually, each might erode too deeply or too wide, like an envelope opened at every seam until it can hold nothing. That is how holes in stone grow old and die.

  I come from a family of ravenous men, of water holes drilled insatiably downward. My father, my grandfather, and I used to drink together. We walked forest-mangy creeks fishing for small trout, carrying whiskey in our satchels and packs. In New Mexico we got drunk on the Rio Chama, with its black asteroids of basalt wearing away in the creek bed. We got drunk at Cimarron Creek, nested in its messy hair of willows and cottonwood trees. In Colorado we got drunk along the warm-blooded summer Conejos, which split meadows like a blow to the chest. We also took to the canyon-infested creeks running through Arizona’s Mogollon Rim, and the rare sprinklings of water that flow into the Gila in southern New Mexico. We never went to the famous fishing rivers, the Gunnison or the Green cold below Flaming Gorge. Our lives belonged to these complicated, tinkering streams that pour through dry country like spells of magic.

  On the final trip for the three of us, I was twenty-two years old. We were in the high country of northern New Mexico landing artificial flies across mirrorlike beaver ponds. We stood especially far back from shore so that the fish would not spook.

  The whiskey was Yukon Jack, a square-sided bottle on the ground between us like a translation device, something we could each speak through. My father and grandfather had grown to be enormous Caesars of men, moving with storm-cloud authority and heavy guts. Cigarette smoke tangled around them as they drew their lines off the water, stringing alphabets through the air, weaving the willows unsnagged, tapping ashes to the ground between casts.

  After three days we were done fishing, and we came out of the high country to close down a Mexican restaurant in Albuquerque, checking in to a hotel by midnight, our blood venomous with tequila. We sat in a room and argued and accused and talked of death. My grandfather made a point that night, explaining that if it ever came to it, he did not want to be kept alive on some machine. I said that I would pull the plug on him. My father said that death is the only freedom.

  By 2:30 AM everyone was asleep, my father with his girlfriend down the hall, my grandfather and I sharing a room. Around dawn I heard my grandfather pacing in front of the imitation-wood drawers.

  Jesus Christ, what time is it? My eyes refused to open. A painful, nauseating thirst scraped my gut. I barely cracked a look around, facedown in the revoltingly bleached motel pillow. Tequila was still strong in my blood. The heavy drapes were soaked in a dim blue light. I heard a complaint. Chest pains; heartburn; hand rubbing the spot. All I could do was mumble a warning about whatever he had eaten last night.

  A dark thud came from the bathroom. I was out of bed instantly, hopping into pants as I crossed the room. The drapes were just then turning orange with first sunlight.

  My grandfather’s body occupied the entire bathroom floor. One arm had fallen over his chest. The other had somehow screwed itself behind the toilet fixtures. He was a big man. His mouth draped open in complete abandon.

  I dragged him free and was on him like an owl taking prey, checking his throat for a pulse, ear against his mouth to listen into his body. There was no sound. I cradled his head and flooded his lungs with my own air.

  Before I could give him a second breath, I reeled my head back. I almost vomited. He was dead. I tasted it on my lips, the foul tang of rotten meat and cigarettes.

  Then, elbows bent, fists locked over his sternum, I drove into my grandfather’s heart, counting each thrust out loud. Somehow, I hadn’t been this close to his body since I was very young. He felt awkward, like an unresponsive horse. Again, I blew air into him, masking the taste from my mind. His body took it like a leather bag, deflating as soon as I leaned away.

  Breaking the rhythm, I sprinted to the door, threw it open, and shouted down the hallway, “Dad! Help!”

  I kicked a shoe into the door’s path to keep it from locking closed, then fell back to my grandfather.

  Partly dressed, shirt buttoned unevenly, my father reached the bathroom and stood still. I did not look up. I knew he was there, that he was frozen, carried off. His girlfriend ran in. She used my father’s body as a stop while her voice carved the air, “Oh my god, oh my god!”

  I kept my rhythm, counting on my grandfather’s chest—one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-five-and—the ands turning into open, holy spaces, while the whole numbers were the grunts of raw, body-to-body force. Then, pulling back his head, clamping his nose, my hand under his neck, I stretched my life from my mouth into his. It would not take hold.

  I was aware at every second of my father standing there. I could see him in my mind. Do you see me now? I asked him. Do you see that I am as willful and alive as you?

  My father’s eyes saw a tiny, manufactured room of formfitted plastics, artificially clean, his father loose and absent on the floor like a washed-up jellyfish, his son playing out measured but pointless actions on the dead body.

  I looked up at him between one maneuver and the next. A half second. I saw stars in his eyes. Far lights and the writhing blues and oranges of nebulae, brilliant clusters of pinpoints with edges trailing into chaos, crumbs of stars alone near the perimeter. My father seemed ancient and infinitely wise. He seemed like a newborn. He looked straight at me, and we understood each other. His father was dead. The generations welded through us at that moment, linking son to father to grandfather to who knows how far back.

  I swayed into my task, the momentum of my body locked like a pendulum, deep heaves into my grandfather’s chest.

  The paramedics came, and the motel’s manager pranced around them. We pulled the body into the hall, where there was more room. Doors opened. People gathered over each other’s shoulders, hands on mouths, not stepping past their thresholds.

  Allowing me to play out my animal urges of hope, the paramedics left me to do the chest compressions while they worked air and pure oxygen mechanically into his lungs. But it was all for show. My grandfather’s heart had left him. Each of us knew this. A stranger finally touched my shoulder. My head fell into my chest.

  The next day, we gathered at my grandfather’s house in southern New Mexico. Seated in a living-room chair like a vengeful king, my father drank an entire gallon of vodka. He kept clattering the bottle’s neck against a glass and edging the glass to his lips. I begged him, saying I did not want him to die, too. We have seen the stars together, please stop, I don’t want to lose you, too.

  “Stars?” My father’s incredulous eyes swayed toward me, head following as if towed behind. “You and your goddamned stars. My father is dead.”

  He could not get up. Cigarette ashes gathered across the rim of his gut. Neighbors brought chicken and pie and baskets of fruit, while my father’s eyes simmered and cooled and simmered again from the chair.

  That evening, I saw him staring at me, an empty bottle on the floor beside him. His arm suddenly lifted, fingers bracing a cigarette that aimed between my eyes. My father mumbled something I could not hear. Through the dim living-room light and the hanging mist of smoke, the forms coming to his lips were invisible. Whatever he was saying, it was important and angry. He violently stabbed the air with his cigarette. He looked like a judge passing a sentence of death. The last word, whatever it was, ended with a tuft of ash dashed onto the floor between us.

  I watched my father’s hand return to the armrest; the cigarette remaine
d skillfully in place. His head lost suspension. He vanished into the fog.

  PART THREE

  PEOPLE OF THE WATER

  Black Lightning is put in the body.

  Male Rain is there.

  Black Water is there.

  Crystal Rock is there.

  In the Wide Land I walk.

  In the Country of Water I walk.

  — song from the first three nights of the Coyoteway

  DAY THIRTEEN

  Stillness. I am alone before sunrise. The air does not move. Canyons stand empty and in them lies a cold silence that even the sun cannot touch. My hands gather heavy as clay beneath my serape. After a long wait, the land holding its breath, the sun cuts the horizon. A line of light extends over my eyes.

  I feel not like a man, but like a rhythm, a steady drive. I have the same measure as this land and as the first light coming across, the driving out of some shadows, the deepening of others. I am engraved by erosion this morning, a stone in the desert. I am the cadence followed by anyone who has ever walked here. This is why an infant clings with such satisfaction to its mother, listening for a heartbeat to follow. I remember that infants sometimes die when sleeping away from their mothers, overcome by the lonely silence, unable to recall the beating of their own hearts.

  I wonder about the prophecy of my family name, the one that tells how I will die, how my heart will stop. The prophecies of men, I think, are myopic. They serve fear and hope but are maybe not true. The prophecies of the land, the telling of boulders and the inches of morning light, these I can believe. This is why we read tea leaves to tell the future, why we study lines in people’s palms, why we build institutions around mathematics. We are looking for a heartbeat that matches our own.