The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  I am in the eye of a mountain lion with no knife in my hand. I turn my head, looking up through the vaults of sunlight and shadow. This is what is meant by a landscape of protection. This place does not outfit me in heavy armor impervious to spears and bullets. It pulls me into the open where I can no longer hide. I stand unflinching and unadorned, as curved and knotted as some primeval tree.

  This is where I leave you, fathers, grandfathers, briars of ancients so far back that you seem like a single stone that I have carried for centuries. This is where I have brought you, where I leave you.

  I peer back along the chasm. Dirk should have been here by now. I have not been away from him for this long in weeks. It would be reassuring to hear the strike of his voice. Something must have happened to him. Leaving the fern grove, I go back into the lower shadows. The water sends me down as I duck and crawl, grabbing arms of scrub oaks and jumping across still pools.

  Dirk listens for me. I am not there. Last he saw I had picked up speed, moving quickly along the stream ahead of him, now gone. Off hunting the Giant Carp, no doubt. Dirk thinks that the chasm must end very near to here. A minute or two away and this floor should go off like fireworks, straight up, leaving him on the ground, agape. But he has been thinking this for the last hour. The final wall takes up most of what little sky might otherwise be visible. Dirk listens closely for me, for a crack of rock, a splash. There is only the garble of water. He moves on.

  The chasm splits in two. The larger of these two incoming canyons is the source of the stream. The smaller is dry. Rock, paper, scissors. Where to from here?

  Fresh sand lies in the floor of the barren one, easier to read than the other. Dirk walks almost into its mouth and then sees the tracks of a cat. They are fresh in the sand. Hours maybe. A day at the most. The gait had been easy.

  Once more Dirk looks in my direction, listening. He does not see my tracks anywhere, so he knows that I followed the water and did not come this way. He imagines me toiling through the thickness of willows into the Carp’s mouth about now.

  Dirk goes along the dry canyon to follow the cat.

  Arms and roots of scrub oak block his path, and he ducks through, hands taking hold, head lowered, watching how this animal ahead of him had dodged the same obstacles, how it moved unencumbered. The floor steepens slightly into plots of boulders. There will soon be a reckoning, he thinks. The end of this is just ahead. He sees the cat tracks going in but not coming out. There will be a cat or there will be a route. He imagines there is no mountain lion cornered in the back of this chasm, not with such a familiar gait as this. There must be a way out. This is hard, tangible proof. The earth is defined, always leading to an incontestable response. Live or die. Route or no route. Yes or no. Shoot or don’t shoot. Still, there is something else, a sense Dirk has of flow, of one thing leading seamlessly to the next, even in this disarray of cliffs and boulders. He is able to read these cat tracks as if they were written in English. The choreography of instinct and knowledge becomes uncanny as he moves: the ability to know where an animal is; the skill of walking through canyons and flanks of palisades that should be impenetrable. The sensation is familiar. Dirk has spent many quickened moments with it.

  He remembers one night patrolling a dance club parking lot. On the surface of his mind is the quality of light, how asphalt can seem as dark as the ocean no matter how many streetlights are around. Especially between cars, where it is so hard to see, places all over for people to hide. Dirk came upon a kid sitting in a passenger seat with the door open, his legs casually extended, tennis shoes planted on the ground. The kid had a .38 Special revolver stuck into his belt. When Dirk stopped, the kid panicked and pulled the gun, leveling it at Dirk, who was five feet away.

  He had known it would happen this way. His muscles were trained to slip this trap: Feint to the side in an unflinching draw; the first and second shots go to the chest, the clearest target; two hollow-point bullets explode inside the rib cage, knocking the kid back into the car with a burst of blood; and since people are known to fire back even after being hit in the chest, a third shot is steadied on the forehead; the bullet enters the skull and blossoms inside.

  Quick as wind, Dirk abandoned his training. Time stretched wide, and he felt his body moving. He did not reach for his gun. Instead, he plowed through the open car door and clobbered the kid with his full weight, pinning him into the seat. He felt the revolver’s barrel dig into his stomach.

  Dirk knew that he would not feel the bullet. He would feel only the surge of the gun’s recoil, the shot barely muffled by his abdomen. The bullet would flee through his body like a whisper, cutting his spinal cord at eight hundred feet per second. But the kid’s gun had no bullets. It was just for show. There was no sound, no shiver of explosion. Dirk knocked the gun away and wrestled the kid onto the oily asphalt, thrusting cuffs onto his wrists.

  Dirk thinks now that there is something about walking in this chasm that has no name. It leaves him clean of illusions, if only for a moment, for just a breath. Swifter than the reason Dirk had chosen not to shoot the kid. The kid’s face had been too scared, flushed with uncertainty—an expression that said, There are no bullets in my gun. With unmarred clarity, Dirk knows that this mountain lion is at the river gorge by now. The thing without a name lies in the water paths, in the carve of chasms, in the strange erosion of boulders. It lies in his vision as much as it lies in the world surrounding him. He senses it in the motion of the lion ahead of him. He sees beyond his eyes, a skill that has saved him in this desert wilderness, in his cop landscape, in the interior country of his life. People so easily abandon the ability to see, to assess, and to know, lingering half asleep and half awake. Too dangerous a life, he thinks. Too dangerous to live so unaware.

  The boulders become larger as Dirk nears the wall: big, freshly broken chunks of cliff standing about, a sign that he is almost there. The cat moves elegantly in front of him. The canyon sinks into the face of the cliff, and the floor ends here.

  Dirk sees the jump, the paw-press of sand where the cat sprang upward, glancing against a rock surface, leaping to the next tier. He starts up to follow where it had been maybe only hours ago, stemming through narrow spaces where boulders hang. He imagines the moves of the cat. Like an alchemist, he transforms these moves into his own.

  Dirk stops, hearing my approach below.

  I am coming up the sandy floor, looking up the slender cut of the canyon. Up, up, up. I cannot see where it ends. I had already seen the cat prints like round hands in the sand. I follow them up with my eyes, finding not a mountain lion in the cliff crack, but Dirk Vaughan looking down his shoulder at me.

  Dirk shouts that this route goes out. I study him, then look behind to the rest of the way we are going to have to walk today, retreating to camp to reach our packs.

  “It’s hours back to camp,” I complain.

  Dirk pulls himself to a ledge and looks down at me. “It’s a perfect route,” he says.

  I truly do not want to climb this thing. Perfect, yes, but the day is far from over. As it is we will not reach our packs until dusk. There has to be a route out of here somewhere closer to our last camp.

  “I’m tired, Dirk.”

  He nods his head, then stands, turning to face the wall, the mountain lion’s route extending high above him. He lifts his arms as if cradling the passageway. I hear him whisper, “Good-bye.”

  Shamu

  Dirk began with a letter to the family of the man who died in the car accident. He wrote,

  Do I wish I had been driving slower? Absolutely yes. I wish I had gone slower. I wish the car engine had blown up and stopped. I wish I had called in sick that night. I wish I had chosen a career as a mailman or insurance salesman or park ranger. I wish many things. It was an accident in the true meaning of the word. A terrible set of coincidental circumstances that can never be fully understood or accepted.

  Then he resigned from the police force and made his last move with Linda to Moab. This tim
e, they lived differently, settling into a pop-up tent trailer anchored in the parking lot of a river outfit. He avoided any notion of working in law enforcement. Instead he bought into a company that hauled equipment out to the wilderness rivers.

  With his last paycheck he purchased two plane tickets to Florida. Sea World was the destination, a completely unfamiliar ceremonial ground where he could relinquish the last fifteen years of police work. Dirk wanted to mingle with oddities of marine life, to stroll the bizarre circuses of aquariums and hot dog stands. He wanted to gawk at the world with no gun on his hip and vanish into the press of aimless and vaguely blissful citizens.

  Dirk told this Sea World story to me only once, the night we were camped together in a winter canyon north of here. I remember how his body jetted into the air, how his voice lifted away from everything around him as he talked.

  “Linda kept trying to get me to go see Shamu,” he told me. “The captured, tormented killer whale. I said no way, this is where I’m drawing the line. Give me the lower sea creatures, invertebrates, anemones, crabs, sea horses, the things that can’t tell if they’re living in the wild or in a toilet bowl. But a gargantuan mammalian predator stored in a closet, probably berserk from claustrophobia and eating buckets of dead fish? Not happening. I’ve seen enough horror, thank you. But you know Linda. She finally dragged me out to these bleachers in front of a glorified swimming pool, and I couldn’t stop thinking: This is just barbaric.

  “Then the pool gates opened, and this enormous underwater shape moved in, circling the edges. I shut up right then. It started going faster and faster, and this ominous music was piped in through speakers while a deep voice announced: This is the largest predator in the world that hunts like a wolf. It consumes however many tons of fish in a week, weighs this much, jaw strength of however many ridiculous pounds per square inch. And this thing was racing with increasing agility right in front of me, totally mad with speed, a shield of water slipping over its back. The music was booming, and the voice crescendoed to a triumphant cry: IT’S SHAMU! THE KILLER WHALE!

  “Right then this thing exploded straight into the air. Sleek as fucking death. All these kids in the bleachers were up on their feet screaming. Man, I was right with them, up on my feet, howling like a madman. You’re in the water and this thing decides to eat you? You’re nothing but a mosquito. I was going absolutely wild.

  “Linda was tugging at me, begging me to sit down. Please, please, please. But there was no way I was sitting down. I’m looking at the kids. They’re looking at me. This killer whale is on the same planet with us! I was goddamned born again!”

  DAY SIXTEEN

  We have been walking for only two weeks. The maps tell us that since this journey began we have covered no more than five miles. How much actual wear? Maybe a hundred miles on our feet. Ten thousand handholds.

  In our packs only the sparest food remains, sandy bags of nuts, raisins wrinkled and hidden among folded clothes. We will soon find a food cache that we had set near the river in anticipation of this day. It is a metal ammunition box lodged in sand, its contents difficult to recall. Rice, perhaps. Chocolate if we had the foresight.

  Dirk and I climb from the third chasm. Our route turns out not to be the vexing gallows of ledges and cliffs we had anticipated. It is an opening in the land, a falling away of wings. It is not the long walk from camp we had expected, either, just a notch a surprisingly short distance from where we slept last night. The stone walls spread apart as we walk through them. The walking is steady as we scan for the next step, the next shape of rock that will take our hands. We come into a land of stone wells and domes. The chasm drifts behind us, losing form, hidden by distance, finally gone.

  When I leave this desert, I will forget these stories, the details of sand and entrancement. I will forget, in the act of opening a letter in front of the post office, of waking up late in a bed of cotton sheets. Then I will remember. I will notice three snail shells on my desk. I will look at them as if I had not been the one who placed them there, and I will remember everything. I will pluck a pebble from my shoe, and the desert will fall back into me.

  Now I am here. An image of a horse is engraved into one of the curving walls ahead of us, a big Diné horse with a draping tail, egg-sized nostrils. Beside each other, Dirk and I step up to it, hands against its warm south-facing wall. Someone, probably a sheepherder with a camp nearby, spent days carving it. Perhaps he was dreaming of a mythical horse to carry him across this country. Our fingers follow its outlandishly intentional lines. It might as well be a billboard. We have returned to the human world, a place where stories are not only told, but yearned for, chiseled into stone blow by blow in a wonderful race against erosion. I walk along the wall and find on the ground the grayed sand of campfires and a rusty scatter of tin cans as foreign as Sputniks fallen from the sky.

  Dirk and I stand now in the country of a domestic horse, of fifty-year-old rubbish, a land of people with hands and eyes like our own, a land marked by our longing. We keep moving, finding more and more of this. A stairway has been chiseled into stone using metal wedges and hammers, a passage built for sparse herds of livestock that nibble at dead ricegrass and juniper branches. We use their stairs as we descend a great nose of sandstone.

  No talking. The sound of boots working the stone. Gear shifting on our backs. I never should have been a man, a human being. All along I was this thing tumbling, a leaf, a wind-delivered sand grain. And all along Dirk was a hawk at the side of the road. It has taken us this long to become familiar with each other. I hardly see him as we walk down this prominence, yet I can see the ground that he sees. No longer are we alone. We have been rinsed in each other’s memories. We are two forces of nature forever and irresistibly married, miraculously poised like a needle balanced on its tip. We sleep with infinity. We wake, if there is such a thing as waking, to a world shattered into water holes, X’s, and vortex streets.

  Finally, Dirk and I reach a drab olive ammunition box in the sand. The water is a few hundred feet below, sun-sparkled at the bend where tomorrow our companions will arrive in a boat. They will toss their bowline to a ledge, where our hands will catch it.

  We dig free this military surplus canister and haul it over to bare rock, where it makes amazing sounds. The clack of metal! The pop of air as we break the seal! Inside we find a store of food that could last—how long? We sort it out: rice, pasta, curry, beans, chocolate, foil-wrapped bars of food, dried figs, and apples. Ten days of food, we figure. If we had arrived earlier, this bulk would have been useful, but only one night’s worth is needed. Tomorrow we will float away from here.

  Passing a bag back and forth, we sit eating figs, their insides jellied and grained with seeds. They are sweet, and they pop open in our mouths. In the quiet of eating, we see a raven a mile in the distance. The first raven. Dirk thrusts his chin toward it. Yes, I see it, too. We have truly returned to accustomed land. The shape of the raven’s flight, effortless without a single budge of wings, is so filled with grace, so familiar, that I swallow and do not take another fig.

  “Does it see us?” Dirk asks, a question to nobody.

  I say nothing.

  The raven rides above a cliff edge, its wings held by the rising warmth of the day. Even from here, I can see how it cups its talons, fists tucked into its body. I can see the observant movement of its head, the world that it sees below. We have both loved ravens. They are our clever tricksters. They have clutched pebbles and twigs, then dropped them from the air onto us. They have flown in close from behind and suddenly called, causing us to jump with surprise. We have imagined ourselves in their eyes, creatures restricted to the ground, but curious, looking up, following them as they follow us. We have longed for ravens in these days of walking.

  The raven swings into a turn.

  Dirk says, “Now it sees us.”

  If we are lucky, I think, if we are blessed, the raven will come.

  The raven drifts across the gorge, making a straight lin
e toward us. Within half a minute it is here, its black feathers fingering the air as it turns just above our heads, spiraling down to us, wondering who, what, we might be. Its eyes are wet with reflection. It is so close to us. So close that if I were standing, holding up my hand, I would graze its wings. But neither of us moves. We savor this bird as it turns steep on a wing, puzzled.

  As the raven touches the sun, blackness illuminates to a blinding white. Its shadow cuts Dirk’s face, then mine. So rare is this alignment that I hardly remember if it’s happened to us before. We have been found by a raven’s shadow.

  Dirk and I both lift our hands to shade our eyes. The raven bats the air at our sudden movement, jerking away from us with an astonished, gritty cry. It was expecting maybe two boulders, two carcasses to perch upon. Three strokes of its wings and it is gone from us, sailing into the gorge. Our hands fall back to our knees.

  We both want to speak, but finally there is nothing we can say to each other. We sit mute, forever marked by the passing wings of a raven.

  EPILOGUE

  Summer. I sit on a Utah ledge not far from the dead man, watching Dirk, who is small in the distance. He is approaching, crossing a bench of rock, turning for a nearby canyon. He stops a mile off. We see each other. He moves on from there, coming toward me. The heat is incredible, even as the day is ending.

  I shoulder my pack and go to him, the dead man who waits. Evening is coming. I walk across spans of open rock as thunderstorms roam in the south. Bursts of amber light show me the lay of my home country, buttes weeks away standing as sharp and remote silhouettes. I climb down through leaning boulders and enter his shelter, a slight cave formed in the benches of the cliff where he died, where he was buried, rock dust now where the Turin shroud of his skin once rested. His skull is on its side, eyes decorated, jaw fallen open.