As they strolled from shop to shop, Chuck maintained a discreet distance between himself and Janelle, counting on the passage of time to dissipate any residual heat from her comments in the museum passageway even as the day’s temperature kept climbing. He set himself to finding a gift for her in one of the shops. In the gift shop on the ground floor of Kachina Lodge, and again in the Bright Angel Lodge gift shop, he spotted some earrings he thought Janelle would like—though he wondered if she would see his present as too obvious an act of atonement.
Not daring to risk it, he abandoned the earring display and made his way to the safety of the camping-gear section in the far corner of the store. There, among familiar displays of extended-reach lighters and LED flashlights, one item caught his eye: an old-school hatchet, silver, with a black rubber handle and hard plastic head cover. The hatchet, the last in the store, hung alone between foil packets of dehydrated strawberry ice cream and a row of digital compasses that pointed to true north at the press of a button. He slid the hatchet off its hangar rod; it was coated in a layer of dust. Hatchets were fast becoming relics of a bygone era. Rather than use one to chop kindling, it was far easier these days to start a campfire with a squirt of lighter fluid and the flick of a butane lighter.
He gave the hatchet an experimental swing. It was heavy and solid in his grip. He felt someone’s eyes on him and glanced up in time to catch Carmelita watching him from a T-shirt display on the far side of the store. He smiled at her and slashed the hatchet through the air, bringing it to a sudden halt with a silent thwack when it struck imagined wood. Carmelita’s eyes lit up. He thought she might smile back at him, but, catching herself, she pursed her lips and went back to studying the display of shirts.
The brief light in Carmelita’s eyes was enough, however. Chuck paid for the hatchet and handed it to Janelle when the four of them regrouped across from the store.
“What’s this?” Janelle asked, holding the hatchet away from her body with her finger and thumb, as she might a dead fish.
“A hatchet.” Chuck grinned at her.
“I know, but . . .”
“I’m giving it to you for reasons of safety,” he explained. He buried his grin, careful not to look at the girls. “It’s indescribably sharp, a brutal and unforgiving implement of total devastation and destruction that’s really for someone else. Someones else.” He paused, feeling the girls’ eyes on him. “If you think they can handle it.”
Janelle’s face brightened in understanding. She wrapped her fingers around the hatchet’s rubber handle and spoke gravely, even as her eyes sparkled. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I can allow this dangerous implement into our household.”
The girls were on their toes, their eyes on the shimmering object now gripped firmly in their mother’s hand. Chuck allowed the agonizing silence that followed Janelle’s comment to play out for as long as he dared, his face set, smiling back at Janelle only with his eyes.
“Well, then,” he said, taking the hatchet back. “I guess we’ll just have to dispose of this in the simplest way possible.” He turned to the girls. “Here goes nothing.”
He reared back and made as if to heave the hatchet over the railing and into the depths of the canyon. Before he could complete his toss, however, Janelle laid a hand on his forearm and brought her face close to his. She was smiling openly now.
“Actually,” she purred, “I kinda like things that result in devastation and destruction.” Her fingers drifted down Chuck’s arm and closed around the back of his hand.
From the corner of his eye, Chuck saw Rosie and Carmelita smiling along with their mother’s obvious pleasure.
“Hmm,” he said to Janelle. “Sounds like this implement is too hot for either of us to handle. We’re going to have to come up with somebody else to carry it for us.”
“Me, me!” Rosie hollered, her hand thrust into the air. “I’ll carry it! It’s not too hot for me!”
Chuck looked at Janelle, his brow furrowed, then back at Rosie. “I’m tempted,” he told her. “I am. But you, all alone? I’m not sure. Don’t you have someone you could share this duty with?” He slid his hand, still holding the hatchet, out of Janelle’s grasp and raised the hatchet so that its metal handle glinted in the sunlight. “I believe this is going to have to be a shared responsibility.”
Rosie looked confused. Then she beamed. “My sister!” she shouted. “Carm! She can help me!”
“Why, of course she can,” Chuck said. He handed Carmelita the hatchet before she had a chance to refuse.
Carmelita feigned reluctance, but the gleam in her eyes betrayed her. She turned the hatchet over, its head protected by the plastic cover, as Chuck spoke to her in an Old West accent.
“You take good care of that instrument of destruction, little lady,” he said with mock seriousness. “We aim to have us a camp-far this evenin’, and we’re a-gonna need that-there blade to help make it fer us.”
“A fire! Yea!” Rosie cheered at Carmelita’s side. She turned to her sister, her eyes big and round. “Do you think you can do it, Carm?”
There was a beat of silence, long enough for Chuck to wonder whether Carmelita would reply, caught as she was between reassuring her little sister and maintaining the wall between herself and Chuck.
“Sure,” she told Rosie. “I got this.” Without looking at Chuck, she swung the hatchet through the air and brought it to a sudden stop with a silent thwack against an imaginary piece of wood. “See? Piece of cake.”
She marched down Rim Trail, hatchet in hand. Rosie skipped alongside, chattering away.
“An ax?” Janelle said to Chuck as they headed down the trail. “You’re trying to win the girls over, and you buy them an ax?”
“A chance to find out what you tied yourself and the girls into. That’s why you wanted to come here, right?” Chuck gestured ahead at the hatchet hanging from Carmelita’s hand. “For better or worse, that’s my world right there.”
Janelle dangled her thumb from the back pocket of Chuck’s jeans and reached across her body to take hold of his upper arm with her other hand. “I guess you’re right,” she said, pulling him tight against her as they followed the girls along the trail. “I guess this is exactly what I tied us into.”
Chuck glanced at her and was relieved to find that she was smiling.
SIX
6 p.m.
A comfortable, early evening breeze, no longer hot though not yet cool, sifted through the trees. Carmelita and Rosie played in the camper. The plan was for Chuck, Janelle, and the girls to dine on the prepared meal of fried chicken and potato salad they’d picked up from a snack stand in historic El Tovar Hotel, then head over to the canyon rim for sunset.
Chuck sat in a folding chair in front of the campsite’s ash-filled fire pit with a bottle of beer in hand, absorbed in his thoughts. Janelle sat next to him, her fingers tapping on the tiny keyboard attached to the Internet-enabled tablet computer balanced in her lap.
The fifteen-year age difference between Chuck and Janelle made for a gaping divide between them in any number of aspects—including their comfort levels with all things high tech. Chuck used plenty of technology in the course of his work, of course, relying on a digital transit, fluxgate magnetometer, and wheeled spectrometer to perform initial site assessments and determine how best to string grids and proceed with digs. He cataloged finds in spreadsheets on his laptop at the end of each field day, prepared reports and bids with the aid of ArchLogical software, and kept in close contact with contract administrators via text and email. His personal life, on the other hand, was decidedly low tech. Prior to meeting Janelle, his days away from work had revolved primarily around fly fishing the waters of the Animas River flowing through Durango, his nights around weekly poker games with a small circle of friends from his high-school days, and shooting pool an additional night or two a week with the same handful of buddies.
As his work grew more technological, Chuck had gone the opposite direction when it came to th
e one pastime he was truly passionate about: elk hunting. Each autumn he scheduled the timing of his contracts to give himself a two-week break, which he spent hiking through the high country north of Durango dawn to dusk in search of the elusive ungulates. He’d hunted with a high-powered rifle and scope for a number of years, until he’d grown uncomfortable with how easy it became to spot the movement of animals as far as half a mile away using his peripheral vision, a critical hunting skill, then close in and drop an unsuspecting elk with a five-hundred-yard shot. He took to hunting only with open sights, which required him to stalk within two hundred yards of an elk to make a reliable kill. After several more seasons, he increased the degree of difficulty of his fall hunts even more by switching from his 30.06 to a Civil War-era muzzle loader, which had a reliable firing range of only a hundred yards.
As he upped the challenge of his hunts over the years, Chuck remained committed to never wounding and losing an animal. Never again, anyway.
The first year he hunted elk, Chuck saw few tracks and not a single animal. He spotted elk his second year, but none were within range. During his third October hunt, he lined up a three-hundred-yard shot on a good-sized bull standing just below the top of a steep ridge.
Chuck steadied himself against the trunk of a tree and squeezed the trigger. He planned for the shot to drop several inches over the three-football-field distance to its target, but he didn’t account for the added bullet drop resulting from the shot’s uphill trajectory from his location at the foot of the ridge. That additional drop turned what should have been a clean kill into a shot that only wounded the bull. When the bullet clipped its ribcage below its heart and lungs, the elk stumbled, regained its footing, and charged up and over the ridge and out of sight.
Chuck tracked the bull until dark and resumed the search at dawn, following drops of blood, broken branches where the wounded animal had pushed blindly through thickets, and an occasional hoof print in dirt. Nearly eighteen hours after being wounded, the elk’s meat by then was unsalvageable. Still, Chuck kept tracking the animal, unable to bear the thought of leaving the bull to a lingering death. Late in the morning, he broke from a stand of trees into an open meadow. A flock of magpies rose, squawking, from knee-high grass thirty yards ahead. At the spot where the birds had risen, he came upon all that was left of the bull: a shredded ribcage, a few stray bits of hide, and the animal’s skull with a line of vertebrae attached to its base. The tines of the bull’s antlers, protruding from the skull, pointed accusingly up at him from the grass. Scat from the pack of coyotes that had ended the bull’s misery was scattered thickly around what was left of the animal.
Never again, Chuck swore that day. Never again, when presented with a shot, would he squeeze the trigger unless he knew with absolute certainty he would instantly end the animal’s life. In the years since, by sticking to his pledge, Chuck had become an expert woodsman, capable of moving in complete silence across any terrain, alert to the slightest changes in wind direction, able to recognize the barest outlines of animals more than a mile away. He’d learned that the way to rise to the challenge of hunting ghost-like elk was to become ghost-like himself, and he’d never lost an animal since.
Chuck took a swallow of beer as Janelle tapped away at her computer beside him. Janelle’s highly interactive social life was hardly ghost-like. She updated her Facebook page every few hours, and gossiped online and on the phone with her girlfriends all day, every day. Right now, with her daily, dinner-hour phone call to her parents still to come, she no doubt was divulging personal details of her first-ever visit to the Grand Canyon for all the world to see. She didn’t hide from Chuck the leading role he played in her various communication streams these days, though when she tried to let him in on everything she posted about him online, he politely begged off having to listen.
His heart sank as his thoughts turned to Janelle’s comments in the museum corridor. Was their marriage destined to end before it had a chance to begin? If so, Janelle would go back to Albuquerque. She would pick up where she’d left off, surrounded by family and friends. She’d be fine. So, too, would the girls. But what of him?
Suddenly he understood what it was that had driven Donald to drink in the years following his divorce.
Janelle must have felt Chuck’s eyes on her. “Need something?” she asked, without looking up.
“Just enjoying looking at you.”
She smiled and continued typing.
Chuck drained his beer. At least the hatchet had been a success. A piece of himself he’d shared with Janelle and the girls. And they’d liked it, hadn’t they? That proved there was at least some sort of overlap between him and the three of them. He just had to dedicate himself to finding more of those points of crossover, that was all.
He pushed himself from his chair. “I’m gonna hit the john.”
Janelle nodded without looking up, her fingers flying.
After visiting the bathroom, Chuck made his way through the campground row by row. Donald had said the woman from Maricopa Point was here at Mather somewhere. Chuck checked car license plates as he approached each campsite. Within a few minutes, he passed vehicles from Arkansas, Washington, D.C., Maine, and North Dakota. He passed two campsites with cars bearing New Mexico plates, but did not catch sight of the woman at either one. At a campsite at the far end of the campground, he spotted a ranger sedan parked in front of a large black SUV with gleaming chrome wheels.
Chuck scanned the site from behind a thin screen of brush. The patrol car blocked his view of the SUV’s license plate. A uniformed ranger stood beside the park vehicle. Chuck recognized the trim athletic figure and blaze-orange hair of Rachel Severin, Grand Canyon National Park ranger and adventure-race fanatic. And there, facing Rachel, was the woman from Maricopa Point, speaking angrily and jabbing the air with a pudgy, red-nailed finger. Behind her, a discount-store dome tent stood on the site’s gravel tent pad. No other camping gear was in evidence.
The woman looked in Chuck’s direction. Their eyes met through the brush, causing her to stop her rant in mid-sentence. Chuck froze, waiting for the woman to point him out to Rachel. Instead, the woman turned back to the ranger and resumed her diatribe.
Spooked, Chuck made for the nearest bathroom building. He ducked behind it and peeked back around the corner of the building in time to see Rachel climb behind the wheel of her ranger sedan while the woman kept right on with her tirade. Rachel pulled away from the campsite with a courteous wave to the woman, who glared after her, finally silent.
Chuck hurried across the campground as Rachel headed around the one-way loop leading to the exit. He reached the exit just ahead of Rachel and flagged her down. She stopped in the middle of the drive and looked up at him from her car window.
“Rachel,” Chuck greeted her. Butterflies fluttered unexpectedly in his stomach.
“Donald said you were here.”
“I—” he began. Why had he chased her down?
“Yes?” she urged.
“How you doing?”
“I’m not married, if that’s what you mean.”
Chuck blinked. What was he doing here? He should have known better than to go along with Janelle’s idea that they take their first family vacation at the Grand Canyon—although, he realized, blanching, it was he who had hurried across the campground to chase Rachel down.
Independent, career-oriented women like Rachel had comprised virtually all of Chuck’s romantic relationships over the years. And for the longest time, such women were all he had ever imagined wanting, partners who expected nothing more of him than the same surface companionship he took from them. The mutual desire to keep things simple had driven Chuck and Rachel apart on three different occasions. Each time they’d grown too close, they’d bounced away from one another like opposing magnets. The last time they’d spoken, Chuck had told Rachel he didn’t think either of them were the marrying kind, and Rachel had agreed.
Then along came Janelle.
“She’s
really something,” Chuck blurted.
Rachel shuttered her eyes. “I’m sure she is.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You never do, Chuck.”
“She’s . . . She’s . . . You’re . . .” Chuck stuttered his way to silence, feeling as if he were drowning, as if he were last in a mile swim and Rachel was leading the way, far ahead, with her sure and steady strokes. She was smart, pretty, confident—everything logic told him he should desire in a mate. Their third and final breakup had come two years ago, just before Chuck had completed his work at the latrine site and left the park to begin the transmission-line contract.
Rachel was waiting.
“Still competing?” he asked.
“I’m a few weeks away from hitting masters—” the masters division of the adventure-racing circuit to which she devoted all her free time was for racers forty and over “—which means, barring injury, I should be looking at nationals next year.”
Rachel’s adventure races were held in places like Utah’s red-rock country, the backwoods of Maine, and the high Sierra. The races lasted two to three days and nights, and involved rock climbing, whitewater kayaking, cross-country running, mountain biking, zip-lining, and any other outlandish outdoor pursuits race organizers could dream up. While serving as Rachel’s one-man crew at a number of her races over the years, Chuck had come to appreciate the camaraderie between opposing teams and racers at the events, the odd juxtaposition of intense athletic competition waged deep in the backcountry, and the emotional highs and lows that were an inevitable part of such lengthy contests.
“Rachel Severin, national champion,” he said. “Nice ring to it.” Her green eyes glowed in response. “I saw you with that woman back there,” he continued. “Looked like she was giving you a hard time.”
“She wasn’t too out of line, considering she’s trapped here ‘til morning. Gotta take it out on somebody.”
Canyon Sacrifice Page 4
