Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  Now his wife was clearly directing him toward the overcrowded rim at Grand View Point. Under this clear directive, and with the treasure trove of intelligence in the notebook he had found, he stirred with frustration. He paced around the darkened kiva and twice kicked the deflector stones, sending a spasm of pain up his leg.

  An idea formed, providing faint hope. He bent down and tried to move one of the stones. If he could stack one on top of the next he might be able to reach the opening in the ceiling. He groaned with effort, his face turning red, the veins standing out in his neck as he labored to move a single massive rock. It was no good; he couldn’t budge it an inch.

  Sweating and exhausted, he sat back down. A cool breeze trickling across his feet directed his attention to the ventilation shaft. He bent down and turned on his headlamp. The opening was no more than eighteen inches wide, squared off with heavy, roughly hewn sandstone. He peered inside. It extended half a dozen feet, and then turned upward at a right angle. From examining other similar sites, he knew that the shaft vented into the courtyard that surrounded the ceremonial room. Shards of stone and a maze of spider webs choked the shaft, but it looked wide enough for his torso. He wondered, however, how tight the fit would be where the shaft made its pivot toward the sky. Anything less than a couple of feet and he wouldn’t be able to wedge his body into that space. He peered into the darkness again. There was no way to tell in the inky night, even with his headlamp. He would have to wait until morning.

  Silas pulled his light jacket from his pack, took a sip of water, and lay back down on the bench, again drifting into a fitful, claustrophobic sleep.

  AT FIRST LIGHT he rose, took another drink and walked to the opening in the wall by the floor. It seemed much more confined when viewed in the harsh light of day. But the sharp turn was now illuminated by the daylight penetrating the top of the shaft. There were a few stones he would have to clear before getting too far into the shaft. He contemplated it for a good ten minutes and then decided he had to try.

  The first thing he did was take off his hiking pants and his long-sleeved shirt. He needed to be as thin as possible, and didn’t want to risk his clothing catching on a loose rock. Standing in his underwear, he tied the rope around his ankle. Should he be successful he would need the rope to lower himself back down into the kiva to retrieve his pack and the precious journal inside it. He took a sip of water and ate a handful of trail mix, and sipped some water again.

  If this worked, he could back at the Outback by lunch. If he failed, sometime in the future someone, maybe the FBI or the San Juan Search and Rescue, would find him wedged in the ventilation shaft, in his underwear, likely bitten black and blue by scorpions and tarantulas and gnawed on by rodents.

  He bent down and used his long arms to clear the spider webs and debris as far as he could reach. Then, drawing a deep breath, he lay on his back on the floor of the kiva and raised his arms above his head, in part to feel his way, and in part to guide his body up when he reached the vertical shaft. As he pushed with his feet, his head entered the dark space, and he closed his eyes to keep out the dislodged dust and debris. His shoulders followed. It was cold in the shaft. The stones scratched his back, and a sharp edge pierced his shoulder. He could feel the wet, tacky blood. He reconsidered the decision to shed his clothing but decided he could live with a few cuts; he could not live with getting stuck.

  He continued to push with his feet, digging his heels into the floor, and his shoulders continued scraping against the sides of the shaft. Silas tried to breathe slowly, pulling the musty air into his lungs. His breathing became a staccato rhythm and he fought to control his spiraling fear. Silas pressed his eyes closed and forced himself to breathe normally. He worked his feet on the hard packed floor, his boots digging into the dirt. He pushed again and his chest was in the opening. He drew another deep breath and was relieved that his heaving lungs didn’t press his chest against the top of the shaft.

  His hands touched something; the elbow in the shaft where it turned upward. He felt around for something to indicate how wide the opening was. He managed to walk his hands back and forth above him and determined that the space was nearly as wide as the one he was in: eighteen inches. Would it be big enough to make the turn? He knew that if he got halfway into the vertical duct, he might not get back out. Once he had made the turn, it would be all or nothing.

  More debris fell onto his face, and another rock dug a trench down his back. He imagined he felt something moving across his stomach. The urge to panic and push his way back out grew. He started to breathe faster, his chest rising and falling, tiny stones rolling off it. His feet fought for purchase. He was going to die in this hole in the earth and he would never find her.

  He pushed with his feet and pulled on the ledge of stone where the shaft made its turn and felt his head touch the far wall. His hands holding the corner of the shaft were now by his sternum. He drew in and exhaled again. If he opened his eyes he might even be able to see the sky above him now. He felt a breeze on his face, air being sucked down the flue. He pushed again and as he did, used his abdominal muscles to bend his body as tightly as he could, his head banging roughly against the stone, his feet pushing for all he was worth. This was the moment. He wedged himself more tightly into the turn, his face pinched in a grimace, the air escaping his lungs in an involuntary cry.

  He was stuck. He stopped, then wiggled his whole body like a worm, pushing his arms fully up again. His feet were now completely within the shaft and no longer able to gain as much traction. His head and vertebrae grated against the rock wall beneath him.

  He only gradually realized he was sitting upright, the vertical shaft fractionally wider than the horizontal. He could feel blood trickling down his back, and his knees were bleeding too. He reached up high overhead and found a crack in the stones forming the walls of the shaft. Digging in his fingers, he pulled for all he was worth. He raised himself up a few inches at a time, fighting the overwhelming urge to thrash with his feet. He turned his hips, and therefore his legs and knees, sideways to make the turn. In a short moment he was standing. He could feel the outside world teasing his hair.

  He was upright; his arms extended overhead, his body touching the walls all around him. From here there was nowhere to go but up. Silas realized that he was praying. He had no idea how to do this, or to whom, but he said to the stone walls all around him, “Get me out of this place and I will find Kayah Wisechild’s killer, and find my wife. Or die trying. Get me out of this place!”

  His fingers found another hold. They felt sticky and hot and he realized he’d cut them too. His back and chest felt like they were on fire. His feet could move, so he used his heels and knees to wedge himself into the duct and then push upward. He had done this before, shimmying through the narrow slot canyons that carved up the desert plateau. He moved up a foot then another. The opening was above him and with all the strength he could muster he pulled himself free and collapsed on the earth.

  He reached up to dig the grit out of his eyes, then carefully opened them. The blue sky above was pocked with only a few tiny, high clouds. His first instinct was tremendous relief. His second was pure, unfiltered rage. He stood and went to the place where he looped the rope. He could see the track it had made when he pulled it down into the kiva. There was no way in hell it had come undone on its own. The stone he had looped it around was nearly three feet high. He would have had to snap it like a lariat to get it over that rock. It had been pulled up and over that stone by human hands. He drew it up from the shaft now and coiled it on the earth well back from the opening.

  Silas hunched down on the ground to study the area for tracks. He could see his own prints leading to the kiva opening, but could not see them in the dust around the stones he had used as an anchor. Whoever had unhooked the line had brushed away their tracks, erasing his as well. It was sloppy work. He backed out a hundred yards toward the main stem of the wash and found sign of the intruder where they had dropped a scraggly bun
ch of rabbit brush they had used as a broom. He soon found boot prints in a sandy path of earth between two boulders. He would measure them after he retrieved his pack.

  Thirst came on, now that his anger was ebbing and so he went back to the kiva and tied the rope off again. This time he tied two sets of knots and moved a heavy stone on top of the rope to provide further tension. When he wiped the sweat from his eyes, his hand came away bloody. The adrenaline that surged through him after his escape was also ebbing. He took note that his upper body, knees, and arms were crisscrossed with hundreds of tiny scrapes and cuts, some of which bled freely, while others were clogged with dirt. He brushed off his chest and legs, but that only caused several of the deeper cuts to bleed.

  Silas quickly dropped back into the kiva, slinging the rope around his back and through his legs to create an effective break for his short rappel. Back inside he put his clothes back on, gathered up his gear, reattached the ascenders to the rope, and without pausing hoisted himself back out of the ceremonial chamber.

  AFTER TAKING CAREFUL measurements of the boot imprints, Silas photographed them with his point-and-shoot camera. He washed some of the blood from his body in the tiny creek and headed back to his vehicle. His ankle ached, but the urge to be free of the place propelled him up the canyon. The last mile, through the sandy upper reaches of the arroyo, he leaned heavily on his cane.

  To his surprise, his car was where he left it. Whoever had followed him into the gorge hadn’t bothered to sabotage his vehicle, probably believing he would never make it back. He opened the hatch and took a pound of bacon and some eggs from his cooler and set up his stove. He ate a grease-laden breakfast, accompanied by a cold beer, while he sat overlooking the dendrite-like grottos where he had been left to die twenty-four hours earlier.

  Only one person knew where he was going and that was Peter Anton. Silas had a good mind to drive straight back to Cortez and confront the man that afternoon. When he considered the journal, and his dream, he thought better of it. He fished his binoculars from the chaos of his pack and scanned the country around him. It was conceivable that whoever had left him to die in the kiva might be watching him now. He turned three hundred and sixty degrees but could see no sign of other people on the plateau. Whoever had wanted to entomb him with the ghosts of the Pueblo ancestors was likely long gone.

  Silas packed up his car, and opening another beer, turned over the ignition and cranked up the air conditioning. He began the long drive back to Castle Valley. He had work to do that involved a room full of maps.

  THE SUN WAS setting over the Castle Valley and he had been staring at the maps on his living room walls for three hours. His body ached and his head hurt but he had managed to go through much of his wife’s notebook and transpose the areas she called Abbey’s Country onto the walls. Many of the locations he had already searched: Arches, Canyonlands, Natural Bridges National Monument, and Capitol Reef National Park. Others, like Dark Horse Canyon, Canyons of the Escalante, and Grand Canyon, he had made superficial explorations of, but had much legwork left to do. Areas such as the depths of Glen Canyon, now a fathom below the fetid waters of Lake Powell, the unprotected lands of Labyrinth Canyon on the Green River, and the vast tableland of the Kaiparowits Plateau he’d scarcely begun to explore.

  Silas went outside to sit in the evening air and opened his wife’s notebook again. He’d been so absorbed in the details of it, maybe he had missed something important. His raw fingers fumbled with the pages and he dropped it. Grumbling, he picked it up again. It had fallen open to the inside cover. He looked it over with bemusement. A series of random scribbles by his wife: notes about groceries, locations for finding various supplies in towns like Escalante and Kanab, a few phone numbers heavily underscored. “Call Hayduke” was scrawled across the top in a thick Sharpie marker. Next to it was a number with a Utah exchange.

  Hayduke was the creation of Edward Abbey that Silas least liked. Silas knew that Hayduke was a name Abbey applied to a variety of protagonists in unpublished stories before the character emerged as the misanthropic eco-saboteur who led the Monkey Wrench Gang. He was a Vietnam vet and a desert rat, and spent the bulk of the novel slurping cheap beer, littering the highways with his empties and cursing and cavorting with the Gang’s somewhat loose heroine Bonnie Abbzug. He supposedly died in a hail of gunfire in the Maze district of Canyonlands on a dead-end mesa above Horse Canyon.

  Call Hayduke. It wouldn’t surprise him to learn that his wife had a friend who went by that name. Silas didn’t know much about the people she ran with while she was on her crusades in the canyonlands. He wondered just how well his wife had known this Hayduke.

  He got the cordless phone from the house and sank back down. He dialed the number. It rang five times and then a woman’s voice came on telling him that the party he had called was out of the service area. He hung up. That didn’t surprise him: half of Utah was out of the service area for cell phones.

  He put the phone down and after a minute it rang. He jumped. Hayduke calling back?

  “Hello?” His voice was hoarse. He realized he hadn’t spoken to a soul in thirty-six hours, much of which he’d been below ground.

  “Dr. Pearson, it’s Katie Rain.”

  He cleared this throat. “Hi Katie.”

  “You sound like you’ve been gargling with flood water again, Silas.”

  “Thanks. I look like it too.”

  “More adventures?”

  “No, just a quiet day out here at the home place,” he said.

  “I told you I’d check in, so I am.”

  “I appreciate that. Nice to be looked in on.”

  “I have a little news. Agent Taylor paid Peter Anton a visit. Taylor knows about the rumored affair, and went to talk with him today. Anton was, shall we say, uncooperative. He did, however, give you up pretty quickly. Notes in Taylor’s file say that he now has grounds to bring you back in for another interview.”

  “Guess I’ll have company tomorrow.”

  “I’d expect so.”

  “Thanks, Katie. Why are you helping me?”

  There was a long pause. “I don’t really know. I don’t figure you for the death of the Wisechild girl. Nobody gets themselves knocked around in a flash flood just to cover up a two-year-old murder. So I guess I trust you.”

  “I had a dream, you know. That’s why I was there. In my dream my wife sent me to Sleepy Hollow; to Courthouse Wash. That’s why I was looking there.”

  The line was silent for a time. “I think you’ve been under a lot of stress, Silas. For a long time. You should see someone about it. Talk to someone, you know?”

  “I am talking with someone. You.”

  “I’m a forensic anthropologist. I’d be more comfortable with you if you’d been dead for a few hundred years.”

  He smiled. It made the cuts on his face hurt. “You think I’m crazy.”

  “I think you’re . . . dedicated.”

  “You think I’m obsessed.”

  “Silas, you’ve undergone a terrible loss. You’re feeling guilt and remorse. It’s common in these situations. You’re brain doesn’t know how to handle it. So it creates these . . . manifestations. Dreams.”

  He drew a deep breath. The sun was down and the sky was the color of the ocean after a storm. “Okay, well, thanks for the information. I guess I’ll pack my pajamas for my trip to the clink.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good luck.”

  He thanked her and hung up. He hadn’t dared tell her about his Grand View Point dream. She would have thought him certifiable.

  IN THE MORNING HE FELT the pull of two competing priorities, find Hayduke and venture out to Grand View Point. Standing in front of the maps, Silas fiddled with the notebook for a few minutes and then made a decision. He would re-pack the car for camping and head into Moab to see if he could locate what might merely be a fictional character. Knowing that the FBI would likely be requesting his presence at the Sherif
f’s Office, he took the back road into town.

  He parked by the Red Rock Inn and walked the single block to Main Street. He used his cell to dial the number in the journal again. Still no response. He knew exactly where to look for someone calling themselves Hayduke in the town of Moab.

  For more than twenty years Back of Beyond Books had been the unofficial headquarters for Edward Abbey groupies. Silas opened the door and stepped into the store. Even if the shop was organized around an Edward Abbey section, Silas still loved it. He heard a voice call from behind the counter, “Oh-oh, Janet, better look out; the competition is in the store.” Silas couldn’t help but smile. Mary Avery, one of the owners, always ribbed him when he came in.

  “Long time no see stranger . . .” and then, getting a look at him, “Jesus, Silas, what happened to you?”

  “That bad?”

  “You look like you hitched yourself to a horse and let it drag you clear across Poison Spider Mesa.”

  “Had a little argument with gravity,” he lied. “Gravity won, as usual.”

  “Come here,” Avery insisted. He did as he was told. From behind the store counter she put a delicate hand to his face. “Well, taken on their own they aren’t so bad. It’s just that all together you look to be a little worse for wear.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I suppose with me out of the way—”

  Avery laughed. “We’d sell at least three or four more books a month. When was the last time you were open?”

  “I was open for an hour the other day . . .”

  She laughed again. “What can I do for you, Silas? Or are you just here to spy?”

  He leaned on the counter. “I’m looking for someone. He goes by the name of Hayduke. Maybe you guys would know him.”

  “Half the environmentalists in Moab fancy themselves some kind of Hayduke doppelganger, all big beards and long hair and leather sombreros.”

  “I think this guy might have known my wife, Penny.”