Canyon Sacrifice

by Graham, Scott

  Chuck’s father lived in a small, fourth-story walk-up in a weather-beaten apartment building in downtown El Paso a few blocks from the Rio Grande. The apartment was furnished with cast-offs, and Chuck’s father, bowed and skeletal, turned out to be a cast-off himself.

  James Bender ushered Chuck into a stuffy living room. Chuck introduced himself as the stooped man in loose slippers shuffled across the room and collapsed into a sagging easy chair. An ashtray next to the recliner overflowed with cigarette butts. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke. A bottle of cheap bourbon sat on a worn coffee table in front of a daybed along the near wall. An ancient television trumpeted the jeering audience of a daytime talk show. Latino pop music thumped through the walls.

  Chuck sat on the edge of the daybed opposite his father. James Bender’s translucent skin was taut over the top of his skull, which was bald save for a few stray hairs above his ears. His eyes, the same blue-gray as Chuck’s, were rheumy and sunken deep in their sockets. He clung to the arms of his easy chair with claw-like hands, as if holding his head above water.

  With surprising energy, he launched into a bitter diatribe aimed at Chuck’s mother. She was an arrogant woman, he proclaimed between hoarse breaths. Pig-headed. She had left him no choice but to leave Durango and never look back.

  Chuck drew in his cheeks. Granted, his mother was no paragon of respectability. She was a smoker and drinker who’d never managed to get ahead financially. She’d raised her hand at Chuck more times than he could remember. But she’d never struck him. And, tenuous though their life together had been, she’d always kept a roof over their heads and some sort of food on the table.

  Chuck cast his eyes around the cramped apartment and filled his lungs with the odor of his father’s bleak existence. He crossed the room and rested his fingers on the back of one of his father’s bony hands. Veins spread cord-like across it, identical to those that snaked across the backs of Chuck’s own hands. He bent close and looked his father in the eye. “I’m glad to see you, to know you’re alive,” he told him.

  James Bender looked at Chuck with moist, red-rimmed eyes that were blank and lost. He said nothing in return.

  “Goodbye, Pop,” Chuck said, using the term of endearment he’d always imagined he’d have used as a boy with the father he’d never known.

  He straightened, left the apartment, and drove home. Every month thereafter he sent a check to El Paso that was dutifully cashed until, just six weeks ago, the envelope came back unopened. When a phone call to the El Paso County Department of Health and Human Services disclosed his father’s death, Chuck slipped the returned check in a folder marked “Pop” and tucked it at the back of his filing cabinet.

  In the weeks since his father’s death, Chuck had come to appreciate all the more the kind reception Janelle’s parents, Enrique and Yolanda, had extended him since the first day he’d happened into their daughter’s life. As he lay on his back in the middle of the deserted Chalk Stairs, hot stone searing the backs of his legs, he wondered idly why he’d been so reserved in response to the elder Ortegas’ warm welcome.

  Enrique and Yolanda had grown up across the Mexican border in Juarez. The two fell in love as teenagers, immigrated, and made their way north to Albuquerque, where Enrique secured a city street-crew position through connections with members of the extended Ortega family already living in the city. He and Yolanda built their house together, concrete block by concrete block, nights, weekends, and holidays, on a barren lot in Albuquerque’s crime-ridden South Valley that they picked up for next to nothing before Janelle and Clarence were born. They gave their two children non-Latino names and did all they could to shield them from the gang-infested neighborhood that surrounded their home. When Janelle got pregnant and dropped out of college, the Ortegas redoubled their efforts with Clarence, hiring tutors and pushing him to excel in high school and finish college.

  Enrique worked his street-crew job for more than twenty-five years, straight through to the day his knee was crushed by a front-end loader. His years of heavy construction work cost him more than just a working leg; he was in his early fifties, barely a decade older than Chuck, but he appeared much older with his weathered face, gnarled hands, and stooped shoulders.

  These days, Enrique and Yolanda got by on Enrique’s moderate disability payments along with the money Yolanda earned by rising before dawn each day to make breakfast burritos, which she sold to friends and neighbors. Janelle’s mother was nearly as slender as Janelle, just over five feet tall, always on the move, with an ever-ready smile and long, gray-streaked black hair she wore circled in a bun at the back of her neck.

  Had Chuck been given the opportunity to choose his parents, he’d happily have selected the Ortegas. Now, as he stared up at the blinding sun from the sloping limestone, he clung to his fading vision of Enrique and Yolanda, and of their daughter and granddaughters.

  Janelle. She’d said yes to him without hesitation.

  Rosie. The firecracker.

  Carmelita. Icy cool.

  He closed his eyes. The sun danced beyond his eyelids, red and leering.

  He never should have hiked into the canyon. He’d known better, but still he’d set off. For Janelle. For Rosie. And for Carmelita.

  His arms fell to his sides. His legs shook, then quieted. He lay, unmoving, as consciousness ebbed from him like water draining from a pool.

  SEVENTEEN

  5 p.m.

  Chuck choked and sputtered, coughing blood. Liquid trickled down the back of his throat, thick and dark red in his mind’s eye. He gagged. Spat weakly. Clawed his way to a sitting position, eyes still closed. Felt something pressing at his back. Tried to shove it away.

  He heard voices. A voice. Found he could take in a word or two at a time.

  “. . . heat . . . ridiculous . . . can’t believe . . .”

  The voice was familiar. More liquid filled his mouth, welcoming this time. So what if it was blood? It was delicious. He gagged again. Managed to swallow. Took hold of whatever was pouring the liquid into his mouth: a bottle. Grasped it with both hands and pressed it greedily to his lips. Water, that’s what it was. Not blood after all, but water, blessed water.

  Chuck opened his eyes. His head spun, then cleared. He looked around him, regaining his senses and remembering. He was seated on the Chalk Stairs, his legs splayed before him. The sun, dropping in the western sky, still blazed down on him. The air temperature remained sizzling. He’d been out for an hour, maybe two.

  Someone’s hand pressed at his back, steadying him so he could drink.

  He rotated his head woodenly and found himself staring into the accusatory eyes of the uniformed student ranger he’d left at Hermit’s Rest a few hours ago. He maintained his grip on the young man’s proffered bottle and drank deeply. Life flowed back into him with each swallow.

  The student ranger replaced Chuck’s hat on his head and his sunglasses over his eyes, centered his daypack on his back, and helped him to his feet, catching him when he toppled sideways. Wasting no time, the young man tucked his empty bottle in his own daypack, snugged his arm around Chuck’s waist, and set off slowly up the trail with Chuck held securely at his side.

  “You saved my life,” Chuck croaked, barely managing to stay upright and hobble up the sloping limestone.

  “Nah. Somebody would have found you later this evening. They probably would have had to chopper you out by then—which would have cost you a fortune, I might add—but you’d have been okay.”

  “I can’t believe—” Chuck began.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the young man cut in. “I figured you’d make it to the creek all right.”

  “I didn’t go to the creek.”

  “No kidding. I’m just glad I saw you coming out. Stumbling is more like it. I watched you from the rim. You were hanging in there ‘til you went down. It was clear you weren’t getting back up.”

  “Ran out of water.”

  “’Course you did.”

  �
�Too hot.”

  “I told you that.” The young man’s tone was surprisingly mild.

  “For a student ranger, you’re not so bad.”

  “We prefer interpretive-ranger-in-training.”

  “Better yet, you got a name?”

  “Conover. Hansen Conover.”

  “Hansen? What kind of name is that?”

  “I just walked a mile and a half into the canyon in this heat to save you from your own stupidity, and you’re hassling me about the name my parents gave me?”

  “No, no. You can go by whatever name you want. I’m just glad to be alive and talking.”

  Chuck was making his way up the trail under his own power by the time he and the student ranger, Hansen, reached Hermit’s Rest an hour and a half later. The sun was low in the sky and the trailhead was busy with backpackers preparing to descend into the canyon as the day gave way to evening. It was 6:40. The frequency of shuttle buses slowed from every thirty minutes to every hour as the end of the day approached. The next shuttle wasn’t due until 7:30. He hadn’t checked in with the caller or Janelle since noon.

  Hansen saw Chuck checking his watch. “I’m on my way back to the village,” he said, pointing at a white, park-service pickup truck parked at the far side of the shuttle turnaround. “Want a lift?”

  “Another lift, you mean?”

  As Hansen drove, Chuck chugged water from a gallon jug stored in the passenger compartment of the pickup. He was rehydrated by the time he climbed out of the truck at the campground entrance. The cut on his palm burned and the bruises on his head, elbows, and shins throbbed, but the nausea and lightheadedness that had plagued him in the canyon were gone.

  The campground was shadowed with the onset of evening. He headed across it, angling between sites where families were gathered at picnic tables preparing dinner. The smell of grilled hamburger filled the air.

  Ahead, Enrique’s shiny blue pickup, two ranger patrol sedans, and several private cars were parked next to Janelle’s mini-SUV and Clarence’s hatchback in front of the campsite. A crowd of twenty or so people stood around the picnic table at the center of the site, shaded from the last of the day’s light by the campground’s tall ponderosas.

  Chuck’s legs wobbled beneath him. He needed food and rest. The last thing he wanted was to face Janelle in front of all these people. But what other option did he have?

  Heads swiveled his direction as he got closer. The group around the table was made up primarily of people he didn’t know, middle-aged men and women—recruits, presumably, from the alert Janelle had posted online. In their plaid shirts, button-up blouses, high-waisted shorts, and sensible walking shoes, they clearly were tourists, their faces lined with concern, their eyes wide at Chuck’s banged-up appearance. Enrique stood on the far side of the table. He wore a work shirt and jeans. Yolanda, wearing a floral-print blouse and dark slacks, stood in front of her husband. Donald was there, talking on his cell phone. Rachel was there, too. Both were in uniform.

  Chuck recognized two women, Dolores and Amelia, Janelle’s best friends from Albuquerque, huddled together at the edge of the group. Like Janelle, they were in their late twenties. Along with Enrique, Yolanda, and Clarence, the two were key pillars in Janelle’s Albuquerque support network. Dolores was short and, if such a thing was possible, skinnier than Janelle. She wore black, form-fitting yoga pants that flared at the calf above her high-heeled leather sandals. Her sleeveless yellow shirt hugged her tiny breasts and toothpick-thin torso. Her makeup was flawless, her bob-length hair flipped and styled.

  Amelia was as big and round as Dolores was short and skinny. Below her midriff blouse, Amelia’s enormous waistline muffin-topped over a pair of wide, white-denim shorts. Her shiny black hair, teased and sprayed, rose several inches from her forehead before sweeping backward, helmet-like, to her shoulders.

  Chuck wasn’t surprised by the pair’s arrival. But that didn’t mean he was happy to see them. Janelle, Dolores, and Amelia had been tight since their school days in Albuquerque’s South Valley, where Dolores and Amelia still lived. Chuck knew Janelle’s friends had supported her throughout her trials with Miguel and in her years of single-motherhood since. But as Chuck and Janelle grew closer, Janelle confided that Dolores and Amelia had expressed plenty of concerns about him, questioning his age, his long-established bachelorhood, his lack of family ties, and the fact that his job kept him on the road so much of the time.

  Janelle’s friends scowled at Chuck from across the table. Clearly, they held him responsible for Carmelita’s disappearance.

  Janelle detached herself from the group and ran to him. He tensed, but she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close.

  “We—” she said, her voice catching. “We were afraid you were—”

  He loosened her grip and held her out from him. “I’m sorry I didn’t call. The phone . . .”

  Janelle raised her fingers to his face. She touched his scraped chin, then the hard knot on his forehead. “They’ve been calling here instead,” she said, lowering her hand. “That voice.” She shuddered. “Rachel said there was no way you could survive down there on a day like this.”

  “She was almost right.” Chuck checked out the group gathered around the table in the waning light. All eyes were on the two of them. He looked back at Janelle. “He still has Carmelita?”

  She nodded, her face drawn.

  “What’s he been telling you?”

  “To wait and see if you show,” she said. “If not, then Plan B, whatever that is.”

  “What’s Plan A?”

  “They haven’t said.”

  “They?”

  “He. She. I don’t know.”

  “It’s Miguel. It has to be.”

  “Should be.”

  “It’s computerized,” Chuck insisted. “His voice.”

  “There’s something about it, though. It doesn’t sound like him. His cadence or something.”

  Chuck thought of the twin cuts on his neck. “You think it could be a woman?”

  “It just doesn’t sound like Miguel, that’s all.”

  “And these people?” Chuck said of the group. “From your posting?”

  Janelle shrugged. “They know she’s not just missing, that there’s more to it than that. It’s been too long. Donald’s the only one who knows the whole story. He figured it out pretty quick while he was showing us around. He forwarded my Facebook posting to some sort of online bulletin board they’ve got here at the canyon. He’s a talker. Likes his phone. Knows how to get things out of people.” She squeezed a strand of her hair tightly between her fingers. “He’s agreed not to tell the whole story to anyone else—except this Rachel of yours.”

  Chuck ignored the look Janelle directed at him. “They haven’t told any other rangers?”

  “They say they haven’t. I’ve explained to them about the note. But they’re saying they can’t wait much longer. Donald already has people looking everywhere for us. Maids, cooks, janitors. Rachel’s helping him run dispatch. She knows what she’s doing, I’ll give her that much.” Janelle gave Chuck another look, this time more accepting.

  “Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on.”

  She shoved the strand of hair behind her ear and drew herself up. “I know you said we shouldn’t do anything. But Donald and Rachel insisted.”

  Chuck dipped his head. “You’re right. They’re right.” He pointed at his daypack, still on his back. “The good news is I’ve got what he wants. I just need to check in with him.” Then he frowned. It wasn’t going to be that simple, was it?

  All day he’d been reassured by the belief Carmelita was safe, at least relatively so, with her father. But Janelle had just said the computerized voice might not be Miguel’s after all. Chuck reached behind him and rested his hand on the bottom of his pack where the necklaces were stowed. How was it that a small-time drug dealer from Albuquerque knew so much about Chuck’s discovery in the canyon, and about the canyon’s trail system, too? The
truth was, Miguel couldn’t know. Not on his own. Which meant someone else had to be involved, either working with Miguel, or instead of him, someone who knew the canyon well.

  “What happens if somebody sees something?” Chuck asked.

  “There have already been, like, ten reports. They’ve been sending people to check, but nothing has panned out.”

  “You haven’t put it on the Nightly News yet?”

  The corners of Janelle’s eyes tightened. “I know Miguel. We squeeze him, he might call the whole thing off. He likes his low profile.”

  “You just said you don’t think it’s him on the phone.”

  Her face collapsed. “I just want my little girl back,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

  Unable to summon a reassuring reply, Chuck turned Janelle by the elbow and they walked to the group gathered around the picnic table. The group parted to let them approach the head of the table. He felt Rachel’s eyes on him. Across the table from her, Enrique stood stiffly behind Yolanda, his gelled hair combed across his high forehead. “M’hijo,” he implored Chuck, his salt-and-pepper mustache trembling. “Anything?”

  “We’re getting there, Enrique.”

  “Getting there?”

  “We pay, they let her go.”

  Enrique uttered a string of Spanish curses, echoing Clarence’s morning outburst.

  Chuck raised a hand and looked around the group. “We’ll do what they say. No police. Not until we’re in the clear. It won’t be long now. Everybody understands that, right?”

  Chuck glanced at Donald, now off the phone. Janelle was right about his being a talker. The question was whether Donald was capable of keeping things under wraps long enough for Chuck to trade the necklaces for Carmelita, assuming it wasn’t too late already.