Black Sun Descending

by Stephen Legault

  Love stood there, facing Silas in the dark. Silas could feel sweat forming under his arms and along his back. “Listen, Pearson, you should back off. I mean, back the fuck off. I’ve got a business to run and important guests to take care of. I didn’t have anything to do with Jane Vaughn’s death. I’m sorry she was killed. I am. And her death doesn’t mean that I’m out of hot water over plans for Wilderness, if that’s what you’re thinking. If you think one dead environmentalist means I can breathe easy, you’re fucking nuts. Arizona, Utah, they’re full of zealots trying to shut people out of the national parks and run people out of the backcountry. Half of the goddamned state belongs to the Sierra Club and the fucking Wilderness Society. If Jane Vaughn isn’t trying to ruin my business, someone else will. So don’t go pointing your finger at me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to look in on my boats.”

  Love brushed past Silas and walked down toward the river. Silas watched the last light of evening fade from the Colorado as he did. He drew a deep breath, walked away from the idling truck, and found his way in the dark back to the campground.

  “DON’T JUMP,” SAID HAYDUKE, WHO was waiting for Silas at the picnic table.

  Silas jumped. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “I mean, what are you doing in Lee’s Ferry?”

  “Same thing you are. Trying to find out what happened to Jane.”

  “Did you follow me here?”

  “No, not really. I followed the trail here. Just like you. Been here an hour or two … but I just got here a few minutes ago. Do you have any beer?”

  Silas stood in the dark deciding what to do. After a long moment of silence he said, “Sure. But they’re warm.”

  “Beer’s beer. I don’t care.”

  Silas unlocked the back of the Outback and took two more beers from the bottom of his cooler. He handed one to Hayduke and opened one for himself. Hayduke popped the top of the can, warm beer frothing over his hand. The young man licked the foam from his mitt and the top of the can and then put his hairy lips over the opening and started drinking. He finished the can without stopping, belched, and crushed the tin in his meaty hand.

  Silas watched him with a mixture of repulsion and amazement. Josh Charleston was trying so hard to match the persona of Edward Abbey’s character that he must believe he was, in fact, Hayduke.

  “I just talked with Paul Love.”

  “I know. When I got here I went down to have a look at the ol’ Colorado. I saw you there. I snuck around to the other side of the truck and listened. Fuck, that rig is loud. I practically had to sit in the cab next to that asshole Love to hear what you were saying.”

  Silas watched him in astonishment. “You know, Josh, I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified by you.”

  “Most people don’t. The fact is, this Love guy is dirty. He and Chas Hinkley are cooking something up. Hinkley is investing in Love’s business, and that’s a serious no-no for a guy in his position. Love’s worried that the wilder-nuts will take away his little rubber boats and that will be the end of his business. These two had every reason in the world not to want Jane Vaughn around.”

  “Well, if you were listening in, you would have heard Love say that if it wasn’t Jane, then it would be someone else.”

  “That’s true. Lots of enviros have their hooks into this issue, but the fact is Jane was leading that fight. She and Penny, that is.”

  “Let’s leave Penny out of this. That just confuses the matter. You don’t think that Jane was just another activist causing trouble?”

  “She was the one going to sue the feds over this. She was organizing locals and setting up a boycott of Grand Canyon Adventures and other outfitters.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I was there when she started it all, and you told me to stay in Flag and get some more info, so I did.”

  “But now you’re here.”

  “Jane was planning what the mainstream greenies call ‘consumer action’ against Grand Canyon Adventures. Paul Love is leading a special familiarization tour for some dignitaries starting tomorrow. I put two and two together and decided to come and brace him.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, you got to him first.”

  Silas drank the rest of his beer. “When did Jane start planning the boycott?”

  “Oh man, like, two years ago. But the plan was to put it into place this spring. She disappeared in November and nobody picked up the ball.”

  “You think Paul Love and Chas Hinkley killed her to stop it?”

  “I think it’s as good a reason to kill someone as any.”

  Silas didn’t have a response for that. “What do you want to do?”

  “Get another beer. Maybe have something to eat?”

  “I mean, about Paul Love?”

  “I don’t think we’ll need to do anything. He’ll come to us.”

  SHE WAS SITTING CROSS-LEGGED ON a bare reef of iron-red sandstone. She had her eyes closed. He stood before her, the blue sky circling, the red earth stretching as far as he could see. Eyes held lightly shut, she spoke. “Oh black and scarlet banners of revolt! Of hope!” and then she opened her eyes and winked at him. “Of free beer!” She threw her raven-black hair back and laughed, and the sandstone all around him trembled with the sound of it.

  SILAS WOKE TO the sound of a canyon wren, its tremolo like falling water over flat stones in the distance, like far-off laugher. It was just light when he crawled from the tent and set up his stove to make the day’s first cup of coffee. He stood in the ephemeral light, watching the walls of the Marble Gorge come alive, tears still streaking his windburnt, unshaven face.

  He went to the Outback and took out the large metal ammo can that served as his portable library. These boxes, surplused by the thousands after the Vietnam War, were virtually watertight and indestructible. They had become the handbag of any serious river-runner. He popped the lid and the iron smell inside greeted him. Within the box were paperback copies of twenty-two books. He kept this collection separate from the copies of the same books on his shelf in the austere living room at home. This set was for traveling.

  The phrase his wife had spoken in his dream was hard to place. It sounded like something Abbey either wrote or quoted in his non­fiction, and Silas knew it wasn’t from Desert Solitaire. He started with Abbey’s Road, then Down the River, and finally started leafing through Beyond the Wall. When he checked the table of contents for that book, he knew where to look. The essay was “Days and Nights on Old Pariah.” Silas was camped less than a mile from where the Pariah, or Paria, River emptied into the Colorado. He quickly found the line, and then reread the essay.

  The treatise was a classic Ed Abbey affair: rambling and first-person, about a trip Cactus Ed had done down Buckskin Gulch and up the Paria, slogging through quicksand and swimming in brackish water holes. Abbey had used the essay to at once extol the virtues of the Paria—what he called one of his favorite, secret places in the canyon country—and to admonish the masses to stay away.

  Silas smiled at the irony. The essay, and Abbey’s exaltations of the Paria’s virtues, was one of the main reasons the Bureau of Land Management now had to issue permits and place restrictions on the number of campers in the narrow slot canyon every year.

  Silas read the essay a second time and then contemplated the scene around him. He watched someone walk past his campsite carrying a smaller version of the same ammo can he used. The tourist bid him good morning and Silas smiled back. GRAND CANYON BOATMEN was stenciled on the side of the ammo box.

  Silas knew where he would find Kiel Pearce.

  SILAS WAS ABOUT to get his day pack ready when he heard his name called from down the road. “Pearson?”

  Paul Love came around the corner on the campground road, red-faced, hands balled into fists.

  Silas looked around to see what he could use to defend himself and decided that all he had was his intelligence, a feeble defense at tha
t.

  “There you are, you son of a bitch.”

  Silas stood his ground. There was nowhere else to go. “What do you want, Love?”

  “I want a fucking explanation!”

  “For what?”

  “Don’t treat me like a fool, you bastard. I want an explanation for this!” He held up a sheared-off key in Silas’s face. He held it so close that Silas had to step back to focus on it.

  “I have no idea what you’re going on about. Now, if you don’t mind, I was just heading out on a hike.”

  “Like hell you are. You’re going to explain to me where you get off destroying my property.”

  “Mr. Love, I suggest you turn around and walk away from here, right now … or I’ll be calling the Coconino County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “I’ll save you the effort. I’ve already called them. They are on their way. So is the Park Service. You son of a bitch, you broke my key off in the ignition and then let the truck’s emergency brake out and let it roll into the fucking river!”

  Silas had to fight back a smile. “Love, after I left you last night I came back here and went to bed.”

  Love, holding the key in his hand, poked Silas with a heavy finger. “You’re a liar.”

  “Don’t do that again.”

  Love poked him. Silas stepped back.

  “Touch him again, I’m going to break your fucking face.” Hayduke was standing behind Love.

  Love spun on Hayduke. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m camping next door. Heard the commotion. You got to settle down or you’re going to get hurt.”

  Love, his face red, his eyes bulging, looked at Hayduke and then back to Silas. “When the cops get here, you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “So will you,” said Silas. Love straightened himself and stormed past Hayduke.

  “What was that all about?” asked the young man.

  Silas watched as Love disappeared around the corner in the campground round. “I suspect I should be asking you that question.”

  “Shit, I was drunk when I left here. I went to sleep under that cliff over there.” He pointed vaguely in the direction of the Paria Canyon mouth.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, you can ask the scorpions I slept with.”

  “Well, I guess I can thank you for saving my butt again.”

  “Ah, you could have taken him. I’m just glad I didn’t have to shoot that motherfucker. That would have been tough to explain.”

  IT WAS AGREED that they shouldn’t wait around the campground for the Park Service or the sheriff’s department to continue the questioning. Silas told Hayduke about his dream, and the young man listened with what seemed to Silas like exaggerated interest, his eyes bulging, his head nodding rhythmically. “You had another dream? Right here? Holy shit!”

  “It’s not like it’s some kind of paranormal experience.”

  “But man, right here? You dreamt about Paria? How strange is that?”

  “I will admit it’s a little odd.”

  “You think he’s in Buckskin Gulch?”

  “I think he’s there, or in Paria.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Go for a hike.”

  “You got a water bottle I can borrow?”

  SILAS PACKED UP his gear as Hayduke made suggestions about where they might find the missing Kiel Pearce. “If he was going to hike the whole thing, he likely dropped into the canyon at the White House Campground. We’d have to double back through Page, but it might be a good idea to get out of here quickly.”

  “Kiel lived here during the summer months,” countered Silas. “If he was going to explore the Paria, he wouldn’t have driven all the way from Lee’s Ferry to Page and then up Highway 89 to do so. He would have started here.”

  “So where’s his rig?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know what he drove. If he was getting ready for a trip, it would likely be parked back at the landing. If the sheriff’s department was looking for him, they would have checked there first.”

  “That’s why we should start up at White House. They likely didn’t look there. You could park your truck there for a month and nobody would bother you.”

  Silas held his ground. “Let’s check the lower reach of the Paria, and if we don’t find anything, we’ll head around to White House tonight, and start fresh in the morning.”

  “My guess is that old Paul Love will have set his friends in the Coconino County Sheriff’s Department on us by then.”

  “I don’t have anything to worry about. Do you?”

  “Nothing they can prove. Sucks when a big rig like that goes into the river, man. They got to get a tow from another giant truck and that means mucho dinero.” Hayduke was smiling.

  They drove in silence for five minutes, out of the campground and toward the landing on the Colorado. Silas watched the road as Hayduke craned his neck to see the damage to Paul Love’s rig. They managed to avoid being seen and found a place to park near where the Paria entered the Colorado. Silas quickly pulled on his day pack. He turned on his GPS unit and looked at the topographic sheet of the area. Hayduke watched him.

  “I’m going to treat this like I would any other walk I do when I’m looking for Penny. If that’s too slow for you, you can do what you like.”

  “Shit, I’m just going to hope we don’t find anything that’s going to make this day any more complicated than it already is.”

  Silas recalled his dream. “I wouldn’t count on that.”

  THE WASH OF THE PARIA River was broad where it met the Colorado, forming the first minor rapids on any river voyage through the Grand Canyon. The grottos and slot canyons that the Paria and its tributary Buckskin Gulch were famous for didn’t start for nearly ten miles. Silas didn’t expect to reach them, not that day. He walked slowly, crossing the shallow, cold Paria often to search among the tamarisk and other shrubs just leafing out with the warm spring weather. The air was perfumed with the scent of green leaves and the season’s first flowers.

  Silas searched and Hayduke did his best to pick up his pattern so that after an hour or so of walking, the scruffy young man was crawling through the clusters of brush and poking around under sandstone escarpments too. Silas was almost grateful for his companionship.

  They stopped after two hours and sat in the shade of a bank of the river, where they drank water and ate a handful of gorp and a piece of beef jerky.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find Kiel here,” said Hayduke.

  “Giving up so soon?”

  “I just don’t think we’re going to find Kiel here.”

  “Did you know him?” Hayduke was quiet for a moment and Silas thought he was trying to recollect, but when he asked again Hayduke feigned waking up. He smiled at Silas, who repeated, “Did you know him?”

  “Who, Kiel? Yeah, I knew him a bit but not well.”

  “But obviously Penny did.”

  “Yeah, I think she did a river trip with him.”

  “I remember her going on that trip. That was a long time ago. Six, maybe seven years ago.”

  “She told me it was what made her get serious about protecting the Colorado Plateau.”

  “I remember her saying the same thing.”

  “Why didn’t you go?” asked Hayduke.

  “It was during exams.”

  Neither man said anything. The sun was high and hot in the sky. “Do you sometimes wish that you had done things different?” asked the young man, sounding more like Josh Charleston than Hayduke.

  Silas was silent for a moment, watching the birds. “Yes,” he finally said. “Every single hour of every single day for the last four and half years.”

  THEY FOUND A place where a narrow cleft in the sandstone entered the main stem of the Paria about half a mile from where they had rested. It wasn’t a slot canyon, more a fissure in the sandstone walls jumbled with rock. Above, a congregation of vultures glided on the day’s warming air. A dozen o
f the birds drifted in lazy circles, effortlessly planing above the naked earth.

  Silas went first with Hayduke close behind. “Something died up here,” he said, wrinkling his nose.

  “What makes you say—” Hayduke started to say when he nearly ran into Silas. He had stopped in the bottom of the grotto.

  There was a log jammed fifteen feet off the ground, wedged between two sides of the sloping canyon. As they watched, another dozen heavy, lethargic turkey vultures lifted off of the log, the ground, and the corpse that dangled from a length of climbing rope fastened to the log. The body spun slowly as the great birds took flight. The vultures had gotten at the man’s face and his guts hung out of a great rent in his belly where the birds had been gorging themselves. Silas bent over and vomited on the ground, and Hayduke looked pale and put a hand on the rocks for balance.

  When Silas stood up, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, he took a few steps closer to the cadaver swinging from the rope. “Three guesses as to who this is.” Silas spit in the red dirt at his feet.

  THEY RETREATED OUT of the canyon, the circling vultures watching them from a safe distance.

  “What do you want to do?” Hayduke asked when they were back by the Paria.

  Silas took his hat off, cupped the cool water to his face, and rubbed the invisible stench from himself. He looked up at Hayduke and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “You want to walk back down to Lee’s Ferry?”

  Silas nodded. “I haven’t got any cell reception here. I’m not staying behind to fight the vultures off.”

  “Let’s get a move on.”

  As they walked Hayduke seemed to become even more animated than usual. “You’re not going to call the cops, are you?”

  “What do you mean? We’ve got to report this.”

  “Whoever this is obviously went out of his way to find a nice quiet place where he could string himself up. We call the pigs and they will be all over this place. They’ll cut that poor bastard down and poke at him and put him in a rubber sack. This dude looks like he wanted to be vulture food. You know, it’s what Abbey always wanted: to be reincarnated as a vulture.”