Baptism for the Dead

by Libbie Hawker

  “Please understand, James. Please. I can’t go back to that life. It’s not me anymore.”

  “I don’t understand. I’ll never understand how you can want anything different from that life.

  Anything else is not really a life.”

  “Life is what you make of it. Life is eternity.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” He spit the last word into the phone. It pounded in my ear.

  The sky was dim blue, growing dimmer and grayer. The bluffs lost the glow on their skin; their faces turned sober gray-red, cold, the color of desert shadow.

  “Please,” I said again. “Try to understand. Talk to Brian. He loves you. I do, too. That’s why I have to do this.”

  “I can’t believe it,” he said, stubborn, his voice steady with determination. “I believe what the Spirit told me. You will come home. I have faith.”

  “I know you do.” And I had none. All I had was my longing for eternity and the feel of the red rock temple vibrating in my middle.

  “I love you,” he told me, as if the words were his hands on my head, a blessing to guide me home.

  I hung up in time to see X striding out of the store, his long thin arms unswinging, laden with bags. I opened the door to help him pack the food into the cooler but he noted the look on my face. He put down his burden, right there in the parking lot, and pulled me to him. His shirt picked the tears off my cheeks, blotted them away. I pressed my eyes and my nose against his chest and breathed deep so I would not sob.

  “You did it, didn’t you?”

  I nodded as best I could, pressed up against him like that.

  “It’s going to rain,” X said softly. “Rain in the desert.” I pulled away from him. The sky was black and hot with thunder.

  I said, business-like, “Let’s get everything put away for we’ll be outside the car when the lightning hits.”

  “You’re going to be all right,” he said. He sounded so assured.

  With the thunder coming on, I knew the fox in the red stone temple would go to ground somewhere, curl itself into the purple cleft of a rock or push deep into the cool sandy earth in a burrow beneath a yucca. Tell me, I implored it. Tell me James will be all right. It was not a prayer. Not exactly.

  10.

  Somebody set the Grand Canyon on fire. Or the rim, at least. A camp fire jumped its metal ring. A cigarette butt out a window. The air stung our eyes. The smell of burning juniper trees filled our hair and clothing. We bought ice cream at a concessions building where men were busy installing a new roof – smell of the smoke, violence of the nail guns, punching the air, punctuating. We climbed the old stone watchtower and peered out its arched windows but the view was all fouled and obscured. The Colorado was a weak dirty snake twisting in the earth. The fire had advanced clear to the canyon’s edge, a mile or more off to our left. Smoke poured over the rim and hung in the still air just below, to fill the gorge by degrees, inevitably. X said there might be a good sunset with all this smoke, but he didn’t want to try to paint it. Too many people, too much noise. When we finished our ice cream we pressed on.

  “Well, that was a disappointment,” he said when the low, slumping plume of smoke that was the Grand Canyon finally disappeared behind us.

  I watched it go, turned around in my car seat, twisted so hard my side ached like I had been running too long. I had hoped for a better view. The Grand Canyon was the big trip we took the summer of my thirteenth year. My dad was given a major contract and a bonus. We had a little extra for the first time in my young life, and a family vacation was in order – one of those memory-builders, with the big rented white van that smells of hot vinyl and the cooler full of cans of pop and bologna sandwiches. Car songs: everybody sings on these vacations, as if the singular joy of moving and seeing can’t be adequately expressed by regular conversation. My big brother taught us Boy Scout songs. Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegar. We sang it in rounds. Mom’s voice was as schooled and lovely as it ever was in church, warbling over her hymnal. She told me once that she could have been an opera singer but she decided to be a mom instead. I felt lucky.

  At the Grand Canyon we camped and hiked and posed on the edges of rock walls for snapshots, and behind all these memories was a spectacular vastness of Creation, the land carved and painted just so, planned, a deliberate act of beauty just for me to enjoy with my kind siblings and my opera singer mother and my big-shot businessman father. I was so lucky; I was so blessed. It was the last time I can clearly recall feeling that way: that God had made it all for me, that God was a force of making, a friendly something in the sky that cared whether I enjoyed the view.

  It was the summer before Adam. It was the last summer when I still believed. That the Grand Canyon was now a sullen stand of impersonal cliffs hiding behind smog, and a noisy crowd setting brush fires, and a crew of men with nail guns – it all seemed so tragically perfect. It made me laugh. X gave me his side-eye look that meant he’d pay a penny for my thoughts.

  “The last time I was here it looked very different,” I explained.

  “It’s the Grand Canyon. How different could it have looked?”

  I told him about the car songs and the camping, and the feeling I still had back then that God had made it all for me. “You know, Rexburg isn’t so bad.” The words came from nowhere, from a pause to catch my breath, but they were right out before I had even thought them, voice on autopilot.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s got something you can only find there – this conviction that a Creator spent so much time making the Grand Canyon just so that one day millions of years later you will stand at an overlook with your family and think, Wow. It’s stupid, I know, but that kind of simple view of the world...it’s so easy. It’s so comforting. I understand why James doesn’t want to give it up. It feels so good to believe that you’ve got it all right, and your life will be perfect and you’ll live forever in Heaven and be happy all the time.”

  “And all you have to do is play along.”

  “No. You have to believe. James believes. He thinks he can make himself into something simple and pure enough for Rexburg. But I don’t want him to. That place is fine for the people who are already simple and pure. But James and me – we’re not like them. We can’t hammer ourselves into that mold.”

  “You can’t decide that for him.” X’s words were gentle, not a reprimand.

  “I know. But I can decide it for myself. The cruel thing is that without me, he has to remake himself all over again, or find someplace else to go – someplace just like Rexburg, where he can start the whole simple life over.” Hiding all the while. “So if I don’t go back and take up where I left off, I am deciding for him.”

  “So where do you want to go? What do you want to do?”

  Highway signs and billboards whipped past us. The air inside the car still smelled faintly of juniper smoke. There as an echo of a nail gun inside my head. I thought of Rebecca, of the way her face was shaped just like mine, how her hands folded the way mine did. I couldn’t go with X to Seattle. He was chasing his own ghost. He was not committed to me, but to his memories. And I – was I still looking for Adam? In Seattle I might find him. Perhaps after his parents’ divorce he had put down roots there. Maybe on a street silver with rain our paths would cross, we’d catch one another’s eyes, stop midstep, laugh at the shock of finding each other so unexpectedly, so far from where we first fell in love. On the streets of this city I had never seen, a city I imagined to be as reticent and gray as the Grand Canyon in smoke, we would erase the lost years between us. But no – no, X would be in Seattle, too. X and I both, proxies for one another’s losses, crossing paths just as surely as I would with Adam, X and I chasing each other through the rain.

  “I don’t know what I want to do.” For now I just wanted to build my memories. Life was short, and X, proxy or not, was here, and his leg was warm stone beneath my palm. Let’s make a lighting strike together, X. Let’s wire a circuit that will one day be a g
reat wind in the Teton Valley. Let’s tear down a whole forest of cottonwoods. “I know what I want to do. I want to teach you a song.”

  “A song?”

  “It’s a Boy Scout song. My brother taught it to me when we visited the Grand Canyon.”

  “Good. I don’t know any Boy Scout songs yet.”

  X cranked the air conditioner against the afternoon heat. It raised the fine hairs on my arms. We sang in a round all the way across Arizona.

  Veil

  1.

  X was determined to show me the Pacific Coast. We headed through the desert toward California, a place whose very name felt mythological. Our road cut across the neat angle of Arizona’s northwest corner. The sun neared the horizon. The light was coral-flushed and fading as we descended into the Virgin River Gorge, deeply cut on one side by machines and dynamite. On the other side the river itself had done the cutting, tumbling and touching and smoothing red rock walls into rounded curves, the river like a potter’s hands, wet and thick with mud.

  We pulled into the entrance of a recreation area on the canyon’s floor, drawn level with the crafty river – a boat launch, a sandy hiking trail. The absurd figure of a road runner skittered across the trail head, paused, bobbed its mohawked head and blinked at us with its glaring yellow eye. “Meep meep,” X said. It disappeared into a tangle of thorns, too dignified to respond. Cholla bushes stretched their fishnetted, jagged arms this way and that. The air was still plenty warm, though sunset was not far off. We followed the trail down to the place where red water flashed and stirred past boulder and brush.

  We removed our shoes and socks, piled them atop a flat purple stone. The floor of this place was red sand, soft as skin – the walls of the canyon worn and worn and cast down grain by grain. I wondered how many years of the river’s life each grain represented. I wondered, and I pushed my toes deep into the sand. A buried twig pricked me. The walls of the canyon were streaked with great slashes of violet-black, banded vertically as if stained by falling water, as if the gorge had recently wept its makeup onto its sorrowful face. But of course there was no falling water here, and what could anyone cry over in a place such as this?

  Where the river arced gently against the shore the sand had turned to mud. The mud was tepid, blood-colored, imprinted with the feet of shy animals. I stepped carefully through the tracks, sometimes raising up on my toes so that I would not erase a single one. I paused to see where my feet fell, the proof of my passing woven into the lace of deep, sharp, delicate prints of deer, the skewed pad-marks of a coyote, the incised primitive cuneiform of birds’ feet. In a million years, I told myself, these prints will harden and some future archaeologist will wonder what I was doing here, a human coming down to the river to drink with the wild things. But of course with the next rain up in the mountains the creeks would swell, the Virgin River would rush and rise and fill all our tracks with bits of canyon. We never were here. The thought made me smile – precious, impermanent tracks in mud. That we had proof, even for a few hours, that a deer passed this way on legs like lovers’ fingers, that a deer was at all – and that I was, barefoot and anonymous to this gorge....

  I waded into the river up to my ankles. It pulled at my skin. Beside me, a splash: X rolled the legs of his jeans up past his wooly knees and strode into the river, taking more and more of it with each step. It hit his calves, rippled around his legs, his knees. “You’re going to get wet,” I called to him, but he only laughed and went deeper. Thigh deep, waist deep, until the end of his shirt drank up the red muddy tinge of the river, until his skin was soaked in river. He turned back to look at me. He laughed again, loud, his mouth wide as my heart. The warmth of sunset flashed like a fire under his skin, illuminating him, making him glow until I felt the heat of him against my face, though my ankles were still in the shallows and he was there, staggering and laughing in the current.

  What a rare thing, that interval of time between the moment when the sun touches the horizon and the moment the sky cools and darkens. How bright and special is the light just then, how low and warm, how sweetly it speaks. How many times in my life would I see it? How many times would the sun set on X in the middle of this river, soaked and glowing, laughing? I had only seconds to live this. And because I had only seconds, the present filled my hands with a weight like gold. What good is eternity? Let the river rise. Let the canyon wear. Let the tracks wash away. I saw you laughing in the river, X. What is heaven beside that?

  2.

  We were nearly an hour into the Mojave night when my phone rang. I pulled it from my purse and stared numbly at the name on the screen: Mom-Dad. My veins turned sluggish and cold. The phone kept ringing. X glanced at the phone’s screen, at me, turned back to the road. I let it go to voice mail, and gripped the phone tightly as though I might squeeze something out of its hard plastic electrons, some meaning behind the fear that clutched at my bowels and heart so suddenly.

  Why should a call from my family chill me? I sorted it with ponderous care. My thoughts moved like hands under water, dragging, wavering, too slow to keep up. In the same instant that my voice mail indicator beeped it came to me.

  “The whole time I’ve been gone from Rexburg, no one in my family has called me.” X nodded.

  “They pretended nothing happened, like I never left.”

  X said nothing, watching the road with a face that was too calm for real calm. He knew something was wrong as surely as I did. The voice mail was too hasty for this call to be an extended olive branch. There was something terse and dutiful about it. There was some vast unpleasantness here, something best gotten over with quick.

  X pulled over.

  The desert was pallid and cold under the blue-white light of the moon. Brittle clumps of some weedy, sickly grass shivered in a constant small wind. Beyond the shoulder of the road the ground was crusted with white pebbles, hard as asphalt. X switched on the hazard lights and followed me out into the darkness, away from the road. I walked until my phone showed just one bar of signal, and then I called my mom and dad.

  Mom answered. It had been so long since I’d heard her voice that the sound of it choked me. She sounded tired, distressed, not pleased to hear from me.

  “The police came by our house because they couldn’t find you,” she said. Her voice was at war with itself. Something in her wanted to push me away and something wanted to draw me close and rock me.

  “Don’t tell me.” I didn’t want to hear these words.

  She sighed, and there was a pause, and I could see her, so clearly, drawing in a breath and holding it, her face fighting to stay calm but crumpling anyway, the way it had done when she told me Grandpa died, the way it had done one night when I found her crying alone in my parents’ bed, my father gone from the house.

  Then she coughed out a little sob, a tiny, confused sound.

  “Tell me.”

  Hands gone useless. Clutching the phone so tight, so I would not drop it into the desert, so it would not fall through the hole opening below me in the cold hard earth.

  “Oh, honey...James is dead. They found him in the river in Idaho Falls.”

  Not real. Real was the slant of the distant mountains, bright blue in the moon. Real was the noise the dry plants made in the wind, in my silence, in my mother’s silence. I reached out my free hand as if I might touch a mountain, brush some of the blue light off its flank with my stiff fingers. X took my hand, held it hard, squeezed until it felt real, and painful, and real.

  “What happened?” There were tears in my voice. My eyes were hot. Was I crying now? Water runs down the red rock wall to stain it in vivid purple bands.

  “He took his own life. He shot himself in the chest. You have to come back to Rexburg. How soon can you get here? You have to come back so we can plan his funeral.”

  Our car on the shoulder looked very far away. Its hazards flashed, rhythmic and mindless, a rapid heartbeat; the light stained my eyes in reverse, so that for every orange beat of the heart a blue echo blinded
me, blotted out the desert and the sky and the phone in my hand, nothing but a blue glow and a hot lit heart. I told my mother yes, of course I would come back, I would be back soon. We would have a funeral for James. I would come home.

  **

  And then X is picking up my phone from the white pebbles on the ground, and my vision is full of blue blood stains, and I howl, doubled over, pressing my fists into my stomach. A semi like a windstorm passes us and screams, the great throat of its horn open and wailing. The sounds bends around me like a steel bar.

  3.

  The sky filled with cloud, in bands like the stripes on the canyon wall, ripples in a puddle. We were...somewhere. Somewhere, Utah, innumerable somewheres with perfect homes on the hills and white steeples every half mile, someplace where everyone played their part, everyone did as they should. We drove fast. We passed these places by.

  Far outside a town it began to rain. A skinny girl on a spotted horse galloped alongside our car, right on the edge of the highway. Her young body moved with a strength and confidence, a familiarity with the muscle and flow of the animal’s gait. How beautiful, I thought, and then I hated myself for thinking of beauty now. How could I think of anything now but how cold it is in the Snake River? I had never held a gun but I imagined it felt cold, too, and awkward, pointed at your own heart, clumsy and slow.

  Dimly I realized that now was the time when I should pray; this was the time when people prayed, when the world blew down, when the tree cracked the roof and cleaved the house in two. Why did this happen? I asked God. What is your plan? There must be a plan. There must be a reason. What are you for unless there is a reason? What good are you without a plan?

  I watched the hooves of the horse pounding and the whip of the girl’s black braided hair, and the flaring of the red-rimmed nostrils as the horse, straining, fell behind us and we pulled ahead.