The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  Eventually we use the last of our wood. The flame tapers. Coals tick and crack as the air shifts. Mostly, it is a still night, silent but for the stream’s distant talking. We turn away to sleep on the sand. A cone of moonlight stretches through our canyon. When it passes, we are shut into the dark and the redbud vanishes.

  All-Night Refuge

  Surgeons stitched Dirk closed after the accident. When he was again fit, the police department gave him his guns, sat him in a new patrol car, and sent him back to the streets, where he did nothing at all.

  He now preferred parking lots. He clocked barely enough miles each night to account for driving from one parking lot to the next. He told headquarters that he would still shoot, he would still scramble faster than anyone on the team, but until that moment came he would be here, waiting in the predawn quiet of his patrol car. He would position himself in the driver’s seat, taking refuge behind Johnny’s Diner (“Breakfast, Burgers & Shakes”) and just sit in the late-night radio silence, surrounded by a fortress of strip malls. The parking lot was empty and clear on all sides, so no one could walk up without warning.

  Another patrol car sidled up, parking mirror to mirror, the way horses sometimes do, swatting each other’s flies with their tails.

  Dirk rolled down his window and after calm greetings said, “I’m losing touch with this menagerie.”

  The guy in the other car nodded slowly and said, “Don’t worry, it’ll come back.”

  “No, I don’t think it will,” Dirk said, gazing out the window at the featureless blacktop. “There’s always been this part of me watching in horror. I don’t think I can look at it anymore.”

  The other officer listened patiently. He knew Dirk’s fear. One day you wake up and there is nothing but a meaningless shroud of violence, when yesterday there had been tapestries of crimes, a delicately woven fabric of danger and resolution. You weaken. You become cruel, unnecessarily violent. You kill. You die. He does not know how to help. He figures Dirk will snap out of it.

  Dirk moved from there to another refuge, in the streetlights and tree shadows a block down from a convenience store. His radio was tuned to a local rock station. The car thumped lightly with the music. Dirk’s eyes barely reflected the radioactive computer glow off the dash. He saw a teenage girl walking by. He drove over, rolled down the window, asked a few questions.

  Typical response. Girl out after a fight with her friend, walking home before sunrise. Teenage theatrics.

  Dirk told her to get in, he’d give her a ride home. She did not have a choice. He went through the routine, calling the station, taking her address, recording the data, the mileage, the destination, the cause and the proposed effect. The girl lived in a fairly wealthy part of the city, houses ringed with moats of lawns. At that hour, each one seemed like a sleeping beast. The girl was unaffected, answering questions without care as they parked.

  Dirk escorted her to the door, rang the doorbell, and the porch light came on. Everything was procedural. Parents, early forties, stood there gaping. Dirk asked if he could step inside, just make sure everything was fine before he left. The parents stepped back, stunned, father saying, “Of course, of course.”

  As Dirk entered, the mother seemed overly excited. “Oh god, not the police. Not the police.” She began pointing at Dirk’s patrol car, demanding that he move it. Dirk explained that he would be gone in a moment, that he just wanted to make sure that everything was all right.

  The mother’s voice began ringing like a struck piece of metal. She fired accusations at the girl, who ran up the stairs crying, while the husband smiled sheepishly. The mother ordered Dirk to leave.

  In a moment, just give me a second.

  The husband kept smiling as if he had something very painful in his rectum. He said to Dirk, “Really, you should go. Thank you for being so patient.”

  But the mother’s voice continued its ascent. “Why did this need to happen? You parked right in front of our house. Do you have any idea what this looks like?”

  “Please, lady. I’ll be gone in a moment, I just . . .”

  “I can’t believe this,” she belted, her pitch rising like a steam kettle. “You just park here? You just think you can do that? People can see!”

  The woman started screaming as if Dirk had broken through the membrane of her mind. He tried to explain what needed to happen, that she should remain calm, but she began upending the furniture, throwing objects like a small dog furious in the trash. She caught Dirk’s instincts, her movements too swift and uncontrolled. His body widened, fingers extending in preparation: reaching for his gun; deflecting a blow; restraining and handcuffing; protecting his face.

  The woman shrieked at Dirk that he had to move his car, that he could not imagine her agony. She ran into the kitchen, and plates began to shatter against the floor.

  The husband turned to Dirk and for the first time dropped his smile, replacing it with a timid, ghostly sternness. “You should leave now.”

  “Fuck no, I’m not leaving. What the hell is going on here?”

  “She’s just upset.”

  Dirk looked at him for half a second in disbelief, thinking, You, little man, are very frightening. Dirk paced directly into the kitchen, where an amazing array of dishware was being destroyed. The woman rampaged through the coffee cups and on to the drinking glasses. With hair lashing her face, she pointed straight at Dirk.

  “YOU WILL LEAVE! YOU ARE NOT HERE! YOU MUST GO!”

  More than anything, Dirk wanted to flee. But the paperwork and the explanation of what he saw and why he left a problem unresolved must be filed. If he walked away and the next day this house became the investigation scene of a suicide/double homicide, he would have no recourse. Yet this was none of his business. He did not belong here.

  While the woman crashed and screamed, commands launched through Dirk’s head. Solve the problem. Find the solution. Kill this animal! His fingers twitched. His gun was there, in its holster. The wisdom he had once found, that he had when he’d walked through a street-side crowd to shoot a badly suffering horse, was no longer available. He felt the urge. Pull your gun and silence this woman. There must be peace.

  As glass shattered and the screaming continued, Dirk pulled his radio and called for backup.

  Five minutes later, the woman was handcuffed and still screeching. Every house on the block basked in overlapping waves of blue and red police lights as the other officers dragged the woman across the lawn and shut her into one of the cars.

  There must be peace.

  Dirk could still hear her, muffled now, but screaming all the same.

  He ducked into his patrol car and sat there for a moment. A moment of quiet before driving to headquarters to file yet another blueprint of human madness. Dirk felt the sag of his shoulders. Every answer he might call upon seemed false.

  DAY FOURTEEN

  In the first mushroom-blue light of morning, Dirk and I gather our things and go, leaving the redbud tree behind. Travel has changed for us. The demands now revolve around moving water and sheer rock to which we cling like spiders. We are bottom-walking, an entirely different experience from these past days of poising among scaffold platforms and benches hung midway up the chasms. Now, the palm of the land holds us. We are in the focal point, the lowermost of places, our course defined by the lay of this single chasm.

  Rumors of side canyons appear from above, their shadows lifting away like laughter. Eventually, there are no other canyons at all. The chasm becomes its own, conferring with no one else. Round cliffs bully over us until in places the sky is gone for good.

  In the faintness of inner morning shadows, far below skyscraper streaks of sunlight, our route becomes too narrow. There is no place to climb so as to avoid the stream. Ice lines the edges of the water. Damp sand is splintered and heaved by frost. Dirk and I pull off our pants and our boots, hoisting our packs high onto our shoulders. Dirk goes first. He slides into the water.

  I am behind him, skin flayed inch
by inch as the water deepens. I pass the terminal depth, my testicles pierced by bee-sting cold. My feet test the stone floor and turn awkwardly sideways for support along the crack. My hands brush walls on both sides to hold me up. Water slaps and hushes around me. The cold does not truly come, though, until we crawl out of the water. My skin blisters red in the air as I sit on a boulder. I have been dipped in acid. I pull on socks, pants, boots, and keep moving.

  Now the chasm bends open and closed. I imagine a snake, the way it breathes, each of its hundred ribs swelling and falling back, swelling again. I recognize the architecture. This is the same orderly back-and-forth I saw in the clockwise and counterclockwise water holes we watched during the snowstorm. This is the vortex street, the fluid mechanics of resistance and motion. I see now why this chasm appears straight on the map. Seen from an airplane, it would be only a linear passage, a generally direct line cut through the floor of this land. But that is only a roof over a still-deeper level. Down here the chasm’s true course sweeps wildly back and forth, digging under the earth, hiding itself from view. Ceilings of solid stone hang immensely tall over us as we are slung into the bends. Every word spoken between us swells, deepening and booming.

  Gulfs of chasm walls rise over us as we follow the stream down into the planet. We are walking upstream, heading for the source, yet we are burrowing deeper, cutting into solid rock. The encircling shadows are touched with a faint light, a warm remnant of the now midday sun.

  Dirk and I both stop, heads craned. This chasm is larger and more confined than any I have ever seen. The proportions do not register easily in my head. This is what it is like looking through astronomical photographs of galaxies, the vastness meaning nothing and at the same time seeming eerily familiar. The structural design is preposterous, sweeps of continuous stone pulled back like a woman’s long hair.

  We set an early camp inside these bowls of shadow, laying our gear on a flood terrace, its high ground covered with glossy gems of water-rounded stones. We sit with them as we eat from bags of nuts. We pass back and forth the last of our pulverized dates, scraping them out with a spoon.

  With our day packs Dirk and I walk farther up the chasm, checking the few narrow side canyons for escape, and find ourselves pushed back to the center every time, as if a hand were nudging us, insisting that we stay in the chasm floor. Water runs in the very back of a bend, curving around the outside stretch. Water sounds wrinkle and lift. They are small tones, privately elaborate. Thickets of maidenhair ferns are suspended over this water, growing right out of the rock. Our map does not describe this. The maps we make in our heads are little better. We register the light movement of a breeze through the ferns, their coral-black stalks trembling.

  Dirk turns his head up to see the ceiling, chest rising to take in the air.

  Man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock

  And water and sky are constant —

  His voice rains back on him word by word, growing, changing, drifting away.

  I stand still, knowing he said this only to hear himself echoed back, to hear the way this place bends the poetry.

  We walk farther, following the water through its cave. The floor greens with moss. Even the loose rocks fallen two hundred feet from the ceiling have been blanketed, hands of moss feeling over whatever rests too long. Ferns crouch as if drinking at the trickle.

  Dirk and I come to the print of an animal. It is impressed like a fist into stars of moss. Both of us bend to it, neither touching. There is no doubt: rounded, claws retracted, toes pushed away from each other. Mountain lion.

  How fresh? Can’t say, not in this exotic medium of moss. But that is not the question. There is, in fact, no question. A lion has been here. The control of its step is visible, head down as it glided through, tail carried like a weapon in a sheath of velvet. It is all we need to know.

  There are things that most of us have been led to believe about animals. The proliferations of glossy nature photography and staged wildlife footage on television have censored their lives, restricting each to its own popular image—the eagle is sweeping and stoic, the mountain lion watchful and relentless, the pronghorn ceaselessly alert. In many of our stories, including ones that I have told, we have stripped animals of much of the personal ingenuity that we ascribe to ourselves. This track before us now is from an animal’s real life. It tells something personal about a creature moving alone and with sincerity. I know that the lion craves the quickness and flush of the kill, that it is an unparalleled predator in this desert, but I can also see in this single print that it is not just a ravenous beast. It did not come through here pressed deep in a run. It was not turned slightly away from the axis of the chasm, warily listening ahead. Like us, it came through on its way.

  Neither Dirk nor I lay a finger into this track. We crouch around it and imagine ourselves as animals living here, following the path.

  The Sportspal Rides Again

  Sitting among porch furniture at my father’s house, I watched skeptically as he flurried around his canoe with tools in hand. Lights were hung and propped here and there so that even at night he could keep working. His ashtray overflowed like a backed-up toilet. Two cigarettes going at once. He put one down, moved to another side of the canoe, picked up the second, and took a drag.

  The Sportspal was made of aluminum so light that it required a spread of ribs to keep a person from falling through. My father had pulled the canoe up on top of a metal outdoor dining table like a submarine dry-docked for repairs.

  When I was a child my father would take me to desert reservoirs with the Sportspal, and we would fish all day. We would rest our paddles and rods to sit silently in the dusk. I remembered so many evenings that we waited until phosphorescent bands of skylight finally relinquished the stars. Every movement caused the canoe to nearly tip, so we did not move. When we paddled it was slow, as if sneaking up on an enemy, as if deep in a meditation.

  The canoe’s useful life ceased when my father drove into the garage with it still strapped to the top of his truck. With a loud grinding sound and an avalanche of metal pieces and bits of ceiling, the canoe became one of my father’s many unkempt items. It joined the spiderwebbed, blocked-up cars parked around the front yard and the cupboards overloaded with broken kitchen appliances. The canoe remained in this state, leaning hopelessly against the garage wall, cared for by black widows, until my father decided that the Sportspal would float again.

  He went at it with a blowtorch, masking the bow in fiberglass, adding the tiniest of screws to the gunwales. He pointed out to me the genius of his repairs, how he had dismantled parts of one of his front-yard vehicles and spliced them into the canoe’s chine. He asked my opinion a couple of times. I sat back, a cynic on the sidelines. I told my father that this was nothing but a low-walled lake canoe. I was accustomed to expertly finished wooden dories and deeply rockered white-water canoes. I told him that I wouldn’t trust it on even flat water. Too unwieldy, I said. Poorly built for the demands of water.

  My father went on undaunted, his hands toiling inside the canoe like a surgeon unscrewing someone’s lungs. He said that tonight it would float. It would be majestic. We would test it together. When was the last time we were in this thing? I had been twelve? thirteen?

  I was thirty-one now.

  Was my father drunk? Hard to tell, the way he busied himself in this task of repair. Maybe it did not matter. I watched him dart around the canoe, cigarette hanging from his lips, caught up by his words as he mumbled about the strength of epoxy and the need for screws of a certain size. I could not remember the last time he was like this, when he was not stalking through the house, his eyes narrow with attack, doors slamming. These last years of his life had been filled with rage. When his wife left him, he smashed in through her apartment window to get her back. He ripped the phone out of her wall when she tried to call the police, only then realizing that he had slashed open one of his wrists on the window and needed to go to the hospital. But there was no lo
nger a phone to call for help, so his wife had to drive him. This was the environment he lived in.

  But on this night, I realized that I was looking at an ordinary man, a man with hobbies, interests, with honest questions riding on his tongue. His more customary wizardry and aimless ferocity knotted suddenly into a single person, not a god and not a demon. An everyday human being.

  My father asked if I wanted anything to eat, and when I said maybe later, he continued milling with the screwdriver, telling me that there were leftovers in the fridge. He’d heat them up for me. At that, I wanted to rise from my seat and touch his face. I wanted to cry against his chest, feeling his arms pull me in. Talk of such simple things was something that I had not heard in years.

  After my father had refastened the last of the twenty-odd ribs, he said, “Done. Let’s get this thing into the water.”

  We carried it together, lowering it into my father’s swimming pool—a kidney-shaped basin that every other year he let lapse into an aquatic biology experiment because he did not have the heart to introduce chlorine and interrupt the life cycles he had allowed to begin.

  My father handed me a stubby wooden paddle, the only one.

  “You are the master of rivers,” he said. “Tell me if this is a good boat.”

  I carefully studied his voice, the precise intonation, and I found no sarcasm in it. He wanted me to approve of his creation. He believed that I was a master of rivers. I gathered up these words of his and stored them for whenever this would end.

  In the pool, I lowered myself into the stern and braced my knees against the canoe hull instead of taking the seat. This gave me a better position to ward off capsize. My father came in awkwardly with his body weight. I balanced the canoe as he situated himself onto the seat at the bow. Every sway and shift of my father’s body was communicated to me through the canoe’s tugs and dips. This was an old skill of mine, from years of guiding and reading people’s fears and demands as they stepped into my boat.