by Jeremy Bates
Nevertheless, I was hungry, so I joined my parents at the picnic table and ate a bun with ketchup and drank the metallic-tasting water from the tap.
When we finished eating—my dad had had three hotdogs, I’d counted—my mom lit another one of her funny smelling cigarettes and shared it with my dad and talked about the stars. I looked up too. The moon was little more than a silver hook, but there must have been a gazillion stars twinkling down at us. I wondered what it would be like to get on a rocket ship and visit distant places in the galaxy. I decided it would be pretty great. I’d invite my parents and maybe one of my friends, maybe even Stephanie, the girl I’d kissed recently. Maybe we’d run into aliens. Maybe we’d even find God hiding somewhere.
When my mom ran out of things to say about the stars, my dad told some ghost stories. They weren’t very scary because my mom kept interrupting him, saying, “He’s just a child, Steve,” which effectively ended each one right at the gooey parts.
Later, when it was my bedtime and I had to go to my tent, I read an Archie comic book—a Betty and Veronica Double Digest—from cover to cover. Then I turned off my flashlight and lay perfectly still in the darkness. My parents had stopped talking and laughing some time ago, so I guessed they were asleep. The only sound I heard now was the chirrups of crickets. Then I made out a soft rustling in the leaf litter. It was quick, sporadic. I pictured a wood mouse rummaging for acorns, pausing every now and then to sniff the air to make sure nothing was about to swoop down from the black sky, or sneak up behind it. I ended up falling asleep reflecting on how crappy it would be to be stuck at the bottom of the food chain, living your life in constant danger of getting eaten by something bigger than yourself.
I woke at dawn. The fire had winnowed to nothing but a pile of smoldering coals. My dad was crouched next to it in the murky half-light, trying to set fire to some scrunched up newspaper pages by rubbing two sticks together really fast. He soon gave up doing this and used my mom’s bronze Zippo with the picture of a tiny airplane on it. He set kindle atop the burgeoning flames, then larger sticks.
He was whistling and seemed to be in a good mood, so I approached and said, “What’s for breakfast, Dad?”
I almost expected him to tell me he wasn’t made of food when he grinned and said, “Pancakes.” He grabbed a box of pancake mix from next to his foot and tossed it to me. I caught it and looked at a smiling Aunt Jemima. “Don’t even need eggs or milk,” he said. “Just add water. What will they think of next?”
“Can I have three?” Two of anything was usually all I was ever allowed.
“Aren’t you listening to me, boy? It’s just mix and water. Have five if you want.”
“Five!”
“Now come here and help me out.”
I followed my dad’s instructions, pouring half the box of pancake mix into a plastic bowl, then adding water from the tap. I stirred the mix until it became thick and gooey. Then I poured three circles onto the oiled grill.
“All right, all right. Give me some space here, Brian,” my dad said. “I’ll tell you when they’re ready.”
I retreated to my stump by the fire and continued to watch my dad cook the pancakes. He was a handsome man, I thought. He still had all his hair, which I knew he was proud of, because he always made fun of bald people. When he combed his hair and shaved, my mom often told him he looked like a movie star. Now his hair was scruffy and unwashed, and stubble pebbled his jaw. He wore a pair of Bermuda shorts and a red tank-top with a picture of a setting sun on the chest. His feet were bare.
Sometimes when my mom wasn’t around, and it was just my dad and me like this, I didn’t know what to say to him. I was worried about saying the wrong thing, upsetting him. He wouldn’t yell at me or anything, not usually, but he’d go quiet, or ignore me altogether. That’s when I knew I’d annoyed him.
He used to be an air conditioner repairman, my dad. But then last month he was fired. He got in a big fight with my mom about this. They still argued about it a lot. My mom wanted him to get another job, and he said he was looking. Once he told her he was going to drive trucks. I thought that was neat. But she didn’t want him to, because it meant he would be away for long periods of time and there would be nobody home at nighttime to look after me when she went to the bar where she worked. She told me she was a waitress there, but I think she was a dancing waitress because my dad was always talking to her about quitting her dancing.
He cocked an eye at me now. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“You ready for the hike today?”
“Where are we going?”
“The north pole, where do you think?”
I didn’t know and got nervous.
“To the canyon!” he said. “Did you think we were just going to sit around here all day?”
“Awesome!”
“You bet it’s awesome. You’re going to keep up, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Hope so. Now come get your pancakes.”
I grabbed a paper plate and held it in front of me. My dad flopped three pancakes onto it. I doused them with maple syrup, then returned to my stump. While I gobbled the pancakes down, I noticed my mom stir in her tent. My dad had left the door unzipped and I could see inside as she kicked the sleeping bag off her, got up, and started to fuss through the clothes she had brought. She was wearing nothing but a pair of skimpy panties. Her breasts were medium-sized and nice-looking, like the ones you saw on TV sometimes. A tattoo of a unicorn decorated her right thigh. A much smaller dolphin circled her belly button. I frowned at the ugly bruise the size of an apple on her left biceps. She always told me the bruises were from bumping into things, but I knew that wasn’t true. They were from my dad, when he hit her.
She was old, thirty I think, but she was still pretty. When we went to a restaurant for dinner, other men would look at her. Also, the waiters were always flirting with her, or at least my dad said they were. Some of my friends had weird crushes on her too. They told me she was hot. I told them they were gross.
A moment later she emerged from the tent dressed in a pair of short canary-yellow shorts and a tight white top that made it obvious she didn’t have a bra on. Her hair was messy, and her face was free of makeup. I liked her face better like this. I thought she wore too much makeup sometimes. Without it she looked more like my mom.
“Hey, Mom,” I said with a full mouth, smiling at her.
“Morning, hon. Mmm. That smells good. Did you help your father with breakfast?”
“Yup! And he said I can have as many pancakes as I want.”
“Hold on there, Brian,” he said. “Three’s plenty. There’s not as much mix as I thought. We need to save some for tomorrow.”
I glanced at the small triangle of pancake left on my plate and wished I hadn’t eaten so fast now. My mom sat on a stump next to mine and lit a cigarette. She was rubbing the corner of her eyes like she did in the mornings when she drank wine the night before.
“Baby doll?” my dad said. “How many pancakes?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat something.”
“Brian can have mine.”
“All right!” I said.
“I just told him—”
“Please, Dad?”
He looked at me for a long moment, but I held his eyes, refusing to look away, and finally he shrugged. “One more, Brian,” he said, turning back to the grill. “But that’s it. What do you think, I’m made out of food or something?”
According to my dad, there wasn’t going to be much shade at the canyon, and the sun, even in October, would be intense at the high elevation we were at. So we filled our water bottles with water from the tap and slathered on sunscreen from an old brown Coppertone bottle that was almost empty and kept making farting noises every time I squeezed it. Then my dad clapped his favorite trucker cap on his head—“Fuck Vegetarians!” was written across the front in gothic lettering—and we set off throug
h the forest. Along the way guideposts described the trees we passed. There were sagebrush and pinyon pine and Utah juniper to name a few, all of which were apparently well-adapted to growing in the thin soil and harsh climate.
I was walking next to my mom, searching the woods for the squirrels and chipmunks that seemed to be everywhere, when my dad said excitedly, “Look at those!” He was pointing at a pair of animal tracks in the dirt. “Reckon they might belong to a bobcat, or mountain lion.”
“What did I tell you about scaring Brian, Steve?”
“I’m not scared, Mom,” I said.
“I’m not trying to scare the boy, Suz,” my dad said.
“Last night with the ghost stories—”
“He’s not a goddamn baby.”
“I’m not—”
“Quiet, Brian!” She frowned at me, touched her temple. “Sorry, honey,” she added more softly.
“I’m not scared, Mom,” I assured her.
“That’s good.” She turned to my dad. “I’m going to go back.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Suz.”
“I have a headache, and I’m not going to spend the day arguing with you.”
“I’m not arguing. I just said they were fucking bobcat tracks!”
“We’re camping in the middle of nowhere. We haven’t seen another soul since we arrived. Brian’s eleven. He doesn’t need to worry about bobcats and mountain lions.”
My dad’s eyes darkened, his face tightened. But then he said, “You’re right, baby doll.” He turned to me. “Brian, I made a mistake. They’re probably deer tracks. You’re not scared of deer, are you?”
“Steve,” my mom said.
“Look,” he said, coming over to her. “Today’s supposed to be fun. I don’t want it to be ruined. So I’m sorry for whatever I did.” He cupped her cheek with his hand, then kissed her on the lips. “Okay?”
She hesitated.
“We’ll stop in a bit, roll a spliff,” he said quietly into her ear, but not so quietly I couldn’t hear. “That’ll clear up your headache.”
“I suppose it might help…”
“Good,” he said, and broke into a wolfish grin. Then he scooped her into his arms and ran along the path, ignoring her laughing protests to put her down.
I skipped to keep pace, and when my mom was back on her feet, I said, “What’s a spliff?”
My mom ruffled my hair. “Just a cigarette, honey.”
“The funny smelling ones?”
“That’s right, angel. The funny smelling ones.”
Roughly ten minutes later we emerged from the shadowy forest and found ourselves standing under the bright blue sky and staring out over Black Canyon. My immediate impression was that the far side of the crevice seemed very close, and this made the two-thousand-foot rock walls seem all the more impressive. Large sections of them were blanketed in shadows, which, I guessed, was the reason for the canyon’s name.
“Oh wow!” I said, shading my eyes with my hand to lessen the sun’s glare.
“How’s this for something?” my dad said proudly.
“Awesome, Dad!”
I hurried toward the edge.
“Don’t go too close!” my mom called.
She didn’t have to worry, though, because the ground didn’t drop off suddenly. It angled downward from one rocky terrace to the next for some distance, each one covered with scrub and boulders.
I stopped at the edge of the first terrace and looked west along the canyon rim. “Hey!” I said to my parents, pointing to a promontory that stuck out over the lip of the canyon, almost like the tip of a ship about to sail off the end of the world. “Is that a lookout spot? Can we go there?”
“Sure, Brian,” my mom said, coming up behind me. “But you’re to stay with your father and me. No running off.”
The lookout point was fenced in to prevent people falling to their deaths. I approached the fence hesitantly and looked down. I swallowed, and my stomach felt as if it had left my body. The bottom of the chasm was impossibly far down, the river that created it little more than a squiggly blue-white line.
I stared, mesmerized at how small everything looked. I’d never been this high above anything in my life, not even when my parents’ took me to the top of the Space Needle in Seattle for my mom’s birthday dinner in March.
My dad, his arm hooked around my mom’s shoulders, said the view was gorgeous and started laughing.
I frowned because I didn’t get what was so funny.
Apparently my mom didn’t either because she said, “What’s so funny?”
“The view! It’s gorges!” He spelled it out: “G-o-r-g-e-s.”
My mom groaned.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Your father thinks he’s funny, Brian. I just hope you don’t develop his sense of humor.”
“Why not? I think Dad’s funny.”
“Thanks, Brian,” he said, leaning casually against the railing in a way that made my nonexistent stomach queasy. “Now, who’s up for hiking to the bottom?”
“The bottom?” my mom said, her eyebrows lifting above the frame of her sunglasses. Her mouth made a pink O.
“Why not? People do it all the time,” he told her. “There’s gotta be a trail.”
She joined him at the fence and peeked over the railing for the first time, hesitantly, like she thought something might streak up from the depth of the canyon and bite her nose off. “Are you serious, Steve? You want to hike all the way to the bottom?”
“We have all day. What else are we going to do?”
“We’ll have to climb back up too, remember.”
“I never forgot that in the first place. Look, Suz, it’ll only take us a couple hours to get to the bottom, then a couple to get back up. The exercise will be good for us. You’re always telling me to exercise more, right?”
“I’m never telling you to climb a mountain.”
“It’s not a mountain. It’s a canyon.”
“I don’t know…”
“Brian’s up for it. Aren’t you, Brian?”
I wasn’t. I was scared senseless by the idea. But I nodded my head.
“See?” my dad said. “Bri-guy’s game.”
“You sure you want to do this, Brian?” my mom asked.
I felt my dad’s eyes on me. “Yeah, Mom. Totally.”
She sighed. “I guess that means I’m outnumbered.” She moved away from the railing, dusting her hands on the rear of her yellow shorts. “All right, Steve. Lead the way.”
We continued the trek west, to the lowest saddle on the ridge, where we found a trail that descended below the rim into the inner canyon. This excited my dad, who increased his pace and kept shouting over his shoulder for my mom and me to keep up.
The trail switchbacked through Douglas fir and sunburst aspens before coming to a junction where a sign with an arrow pointing left read: “River Access. Permit Required.”
My mom frowned. “You didn’t say we needed a permit, Steve.”
My dad shrugged. “I didn’t know we did.”
She harrumphed.
“It’s true,” he said. “Besides, you probably only need one during the summertime, when it’s busier.”
“How much did they cost?”
“Jesus, Suz. I just told you. I didn’t know we needed one. So how am I supposed to know how much they cost?”
“What if a ranger catches us down here without one?”
“You and your rangers.”
“We’ll get fined. And the fine will be a lot more than the permit that you were too cheap to get.”
“I didn’t know we needed one!” he snapped.
I moved away from them and pretended to study a bush that had little red flowers sprouting among the green needles.
“If you had simply told me,” my mom said, “I would have paid for it.”
“Suz, I’m warning you…”
“What? You’ll hit me?”
A long pause. Then my dad, softly: “
You don’t talk about that.”
“Oh God,” my mom said, and it sounded more like a moan than words. “What am I doing?”
“Don’t say that…”
“Maybe we need a break…”
My dad’s voice hardened. “You’re going to do this? Right now?”
“It’s not working, Steve. We’re not working.”
“You’re going to throw away eight years together over a camping permit?”
“This isn’t about a permit!”
Another long pause. I blinked away the tears welling in my eyes.
“Listen,” my dad said. “I’m going to be working soon. I’ll have money. We won’t need to worry about shit like this. I’ll take care of you.”
My mom chuckled. “You’re going to take care of me? Baby, I make more with my tips—”
“Honest money, Suz. Honest fucking money. You can get out of that shithole. You just give me a bit more time, you’ll see.”
My mom started making strange noises, and I finally turned around. My dad had his arms around her and was stroking her back. Her head was buried in his shoulder, and she was trembling. When she lifted her face, to wipe the tears from her eyes, she saw me watching them and said, “It’s okay, Brian. Your father and I are just having an adult talk. Everything’s okay. We’re working some things out. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and returned my attention to the bush.
The trail steepened immediately, weaving through more thickets of oak scrub and evergreens. Some sections squeezed between huge boulders, forcing my parents and me to progress single file. Other sections tiptoed along dangerous drops of ten or twenty feet. My dad walked bravely along the edges of these, tossing rocks over them now and then, while my mom and I kept our distance.
About three quarters of the way into the canyon we came across a flat rock outcrop where we stopped for lunch. Ravenous from walking all morning, we ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we’d brought with us. We drank most of our water too. I could have easily finished the rest of mine, but my mom cautioned me to keep some for the hike back to the top of the chasm.
