by Philip Webb
But just when I’m thinking the pace of the river will only increase with each mile, the roar abates and we enter a dreamy stretch. The flow dissipates into sluggish dust and gravel, a kind of doldrums. But it is still faster than ordinary riding and we make steady progress. In my head I mark off the journey — Cerro de la Campana (Hill of the Bell), La Cebolla (The Onion), Sierra de la Cruz. We bank close to the banded rock face of Mesa de la Redonda where the rubble has gouged out a new cliff. We can only pray that the overhangs don’t shear off and bury us. It is a new landscape forged from Zone power, like watching ranges form over accelerated millennia.
On and on we ride, until at last we reach a kind of spinning rock plate. It pitches up out of the depths like an enormous raft. It is several hundred yards wide and perhaps twice as long. Marshall gathers us in as we tip and lurch. The sound of boulders being pulverized over the edge is as loud as cannon fire.
He passes around a water bottle. “We rest up here for a bit, I reckon. But stay sharp. This baby ain’t gonna last five minutes we hit rapids. We break for the bank if things is gettin’ rough, you hear me?”
“You telling me this ain’t rough already?” Kelly says. Then she is violently sick over the last clean patch of her poncho.
“Stay in the saddle,” says Marshall, unfazed.
We huddle together on the island as it drifts ever northward, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. The nameless land river plots a course between the Rio Bravo and the East Mountains. At times the dust is so thick, it makes a pale disc of the sun and we pull our neckerchiefs over our mouths.
Through a break in the choking cloud, I fancy that I see buildings ahead — the outskirts of Albuquerque. We have covered an astonishing distance — one hundred and thirty-odd miles in only eight hours.
Just as my head is full of figures and routes and remembered fragments of map, a tremendous crack deafens me in one ear.
“Capsize!” yells Marshall.
The slab spills me into a skidding slope. Our island has split in two, no, four …
Cisco scrambles backward, trying not to tip into a gallop.
Beside me Marshall’s mule slithers onto its flank, losing purchase as the angle leans practically upright. Marshall half runs, half tumbles, trying to reach it.
And below us, in seething slides of smashed rock, the land river descends into rapids.
Shelves of rock concertina before my eyes. Slabs disappear in a volley of cracks. Cisco teeters above a shadow in the earth. It widens, spilling lumps of stone over the edge, and for a moment we are poised.
He must jump, though the far side is leaning away.
And far, far below I glimpse fires — fleeting traces of molten orange.
I clasp his neck, knowing the leap is too far, and we hang there mid-stride above the chasm.
It ripples, and convulses, and … shuts. A thunderous boom of closing earth engulfs us. We flee but so does the land — in toppling waves and leaning towers. A storm of grit blinds me, and when I open my eyes again, I am on a crest of shale, buoyed up somehow by forces from below.
Marshall is no more than fifty feet to one side of me, clinging to his mule, yelling Lord knows what. I wrench around in the saddle.
And see Kelly. She ducks as two gigantic boulders clash above her head, then she brings her horse bursting through an updraft of dirt.
I scan wildly for Luis. But he is nowhere. The fixed bank seems so close — I can see trees, their roots exposed, their branches dangling down to the torrent.
Marshall screams my name.
And then it is all wrong — my weight. My legs fly up past Cisco’s ears … Head whipping back … Reins snapping taut …
The sun. Through a hole in rock. Like a window. And a man standing there, draped in a poncho, his back to me. He waits as patiently as a sentinel, shimmers in the heat, and is gone.
The sun. It moves. A streak of burn. Fast. Slow. Fast. Ground close. It stopped. Did it stop?
My face is pushed against the peaks of mountains, jagged and dry. My face … must … be … huge. Like the sun, that moves. It cannot move. It moves above me, though my eyes are slung on stalks that hang from the sky. So how can I see it move? MOVE. Move. The mountain slopes are so close they are blurred. Blur-red. Blur. Red. And red rivers run down those valleys. They trickle, stop, start, trickle — pushing like giant drips in the dust.
Noise I can see.
Light I can hear.
All is wrong. In Wronglands.
The noise I see comes over the horizon. Which is close. Just another line. Like my lashes, which move. MOVE. Move. Giddy-up … Me-egg-and-me. Meg-and. Meg …
“Megan, can you move?”
“Wha-t?”
“Can you move?” Urgent voice. Someone I know.
There is another noise. Judder-thunder. And these tiny-massive mountains that press my face are … moving.
“… you move? We …” Something, something.
I feel broken. I am lying sideways. Recovery position? The ground stretches away like the skin of a drum and upon it bounce stones — billions of them, thrumming and jostling and clacking.
Somewhere in my head I build back. Pa. Zone. Land river.
I crawl, find my legs, my arms. My head is wet with blood. Someone is trying to dab it all away. Kelly. It is Kelly. I’m so grateful to remember her name, I nearly start laughing.
“Jesus, that was the greatest rodeo wipeout I’ve ever seen,” she says.
I look through strands of my hair, claggy with blood. A horse shifts about next to us. Appaloosa. It jerks at a rope, but it’s tied to the trunk of a fallen tree. The tree scrapes and flails at the ground, branches half submerged. Like it’s trying to escape, too.
I cast about. There are things missing — people and things.
I stagger onto my hands and knees. “Cisco! Luis!”
“Hey, take it easy …”
“WHERE are they?”
“You got thrown. But Cisco made it. And Marshall.”
“Made it where? WHERE?” I scramble to my feet and drop again as the blood roars into my head.
“To the bank. I saw him lead Cisco out. Poor horse went stir-crazy. Marshall had a job keeping him. But a horse don’t buck like that if he’s injured.”
I scan all about, but I can’t see more than fifty feet before everything goes murky with dust. The land river courses along, but the rapids have passed — it is smooth. Ahead lies the sunset — we are heading due west.
“Luis?” I don’t remember seeing him at all after our island-raft disintegrated.
Kelly doesn’t answer straightaway. She reaches down to cup my face in her hands. “I don’t know. I didn’t see him …”
“What?” If I refuse those words, they will cease to be. Won’t they?
“He’s a good rider, Megan.”
We have to go find them. I realize I haven’t spoken. My tongue is as dry as leather. “We have to go find them.”
“Megan, that was two hours ago.”
I stare at her. Her lip is split and her teeth are swabbed with blood. Clods of earth dangle from her hair. She is a troglodyte.
“Two hours. But …”
“You’ve been out cold. I thought you was dead. Guess you shoulda been, the way you came off Cisco …”
“Why didn’t you get us to the bank? Two hours ago?”
“Hey!” She backs away from me in sudden disgust. “You were down, Megan! You don’t move someone who’s out! Case your back’s busted.”
Now I’m angry, too. “So? You can’t call an ambulance out here! If my back’s broken, I’m done for anyway!”
“Getting off makes about as much sense as staying on! Luis could still be on it, for all we know, ahead of us, behind us. Goddamn crazy conveyor belt to hell!”
She’s right. The rapids just scattered us. There is no simple course of action. My temper blows out. And all I’m left with is a soul sick with worry. My friend. My beloved horse. Lost.
Awful snatches
of the land rapids jump to my head. Boulders battering into each other, into dust. I think about how I will not see them again — my horse beset with exhaustion, roaming until he drops. And Luis … Luis taken into the earth. I think of the porch at Marshall’s house — my last chance to say to him how I feel, how I really feel. Gone now. Forever. I feel panic. The Zone’s worst danger. It threatens to overwhelm me. A silent, screaming panic — and if I give way to it, if I let it in, there will be no respite. It will undo me.
As three we were strong. Now?
I watch threads of boiling brass run onto the clouds. A sunset that never moves but always changes.
Kelly has her back to me. She is trying not to cry. I watch her overcome it, shaking out the sobs before they can rise to her throat.
“I am sorry,” I say at last. “Thank you for staying with me.”
She turns and nods, not trusting her voice.
“Do you know where we are?” I ask.
She sends me a half smile at the futility of the question. Where is anything when the very land itself is on the move?
“Albuquerque was two hours back. That’s all I know. What’s left of it. Looked like ten twisters went through it.”
And as if to underline the madness of this country, a building emerges from the dusty gloom behind us. It grinds by on a faster current, set at a sharp angle. It is a church — two adobe bell towers slowly separating under the strain. The dull clanging of the one remaining bell passes into the west.
I lean against the fallen tree and try to soothe the Appaloosa — nonsense things I would say to Cisco if he were here. Kelly joins me, and together we watch the scenery change. We share the last of her whiskey.
Hours slip by. Kelly dozes, her head thudding gently against my shoulder.
I gaze at the land, hoping for a sign, something to tell me we are close. And as bats give way to swallows, I spot one — a hole in a cliff of russet sandstone. For the briefest of moments I fancy I see a figure standing at the base of the O shape. A trick in the light? The hole is filled with light like a sun with the red rock as sky. Another fixed sunset. I have never been here, but I know this place. It is a story of the Zone told to me by Pa many times — a premonition of Visitation Day or so the legend goes. Window Rock — sacred to the Navajo.
It is a new day, and we are here at last. The gateway to Canyon de Chelly.
We walk the Appaloosa, to keep him fresh. It is unlikely that we will be welcome in this place — Marshall warned of hostile Navajo, although they are not the only tribe to have returned here. Hopi and Pueblo and Zuni peoples revere the canyon — the ancient home of their ancestors. But the Zone does not respect ownership claims. People of any kind are only tolerated here if they can read the vagaries of Zone forces.
For ten miles or so, we move north, watching on all sides for signs of a threat. Away from the noise and dust of the land river, a profound quiet descends about us. We pass by Navajo farms — barns and trailer homes in advanced states of collapse. Budget supermarkets, flatbed trucks, chain-link fences, propane cylinders — all the mundane debris of a civilization strewn to the wind.
A feral hound follows us for a mile, whining for food but not brave enough to beg closer. Just as well, since Kelly announces to me that she’s hungry enough to eat the mutt raw. She has “barfed her load on that wilderness travelator,” and what little provisions we had were lost from the horse.
The hound leaves us as we enter a southern spur of the canyon proper. It feels like an ill omen, that starving as it is, the dog refuses to follow.
Sounds echo between the rising walls, trapped and amplified — the snorting of the Appaloosa, a strident crow, the swish of swallowtails. We trudge through the soft powder sand of the canyon floor beneath the boughs of olive trees draped in shadow. Above us on the eastern rim, the sun picks out a stripe of bright tan rock, and buzzards lazily patrol the overlooks. Crouching under the overhangs of cliffs are the ruins of ancient Pueblo homes. I half expect furious tribespeople to charge us from these vantage points, but the canyon is empty.
At the river, we water the horse and take a wash. All the whorls and crinkles of the rock, the iron-gray streaks, the ribbons and crevices and crags — they surround us in the melting forms of a dream. It is a beautiful place, but I feel vulnerable. If we were to be ambushed now, there would be no escape.
Crickets catapult into our clothes like puny sprung traps. We try to catch them for a snack, but they’re too wily.
My Zone quivers are ambiguous. I feel the menace of the place, its melancholy. But also our progress into the deeps of the canyon has become hypnotic.
We aim for the roar of a faster-flowing river and come out of our smaller spur into the majesty of the main canyon.
Kelly grabs my arm. There, at the junction of buttes and winding trails, stand two mighty pillars. Sisters of sandstone. Spider Rock. The split between them runs as narrow and sheer as a cleaver strike. Only the head of the taller tower, two hundred yards or so above us, is dipped in sunshine.
I had held a thought, rarely visited these last hours for fear of jinxing it, that Luis might be here. And Cisco. And Marshall. But the place is empty.
My heart begins to hammer as we skirt the base of the rocks in search of the cemetery. Here I will either hope or despair. The graves run down one shallow and broken slope. There are literally hundreds of them. Why are they here? A battle? A massacre?
We split up, scanning the crosses and markers, slowly at first. But the search becomes feverish for me. There are makeshift crosses fashioned from worm-ridden coffin timbers. There are faded photos in plastic wrappers, and epitaphs scratched into slates, and cairns and twig dolls and shredded bunting. Dearly beloved, sorely missed, rest in peace. Names and years and signs — a litany for the dead. It all whips by in a blur, until at last, under the canopy of a cottonwood, I come to the grave I have been dreading.
One weathered plank is planted at the head of the mound. The writing runs sideways — burnt into the wood with a hot knife, by the looks of it. The spelling is wrong. Vergil Bridge-Water. Which makes me fear that he is indeed laid to rest here. A companion has carved his name for posterity — perhaps the tracker Yiska.
Kelly stands beside me and takes my hand. “Do you want me to do the digging?” she asks.
“I have to see, Kelly.”
We lay aside the rocks that cover the grave and scrape at the dirt, first with our bare hands, then with the plank that bears my father’s name. The dry ground is crumbly, easy to shift, and after a few minutes my hand knocks against wood. The coffin is rudimentary — pilfered from other graves. I kneel before it, knowing that whatever it contains has been here since long before this day. My prayers, such as they are, have already been answered or ignored. All that remains is for me to find out which.
I close my eyes and I lever back the lid. In my mind, I see the stiff, flattened shape of a dead man in a coat …
The gasp from Kelly makes me look.
And the blood beats in my head.
There are no bones. No remains at all. For several wild seconds I cannot make sense of what it does contain.
Kelly jumps into the grave and pulls it out: It is a bundle wrapped in a threadbare Old Glory. She unfurls its stars and stripes to the breeze. Inside is a knife made of polished obsidian with an antler handle, and a pair of moccasins decorated with white shells.
“Is this a joke?” says Kelly.
“No” comes a voice from behind us. “Not a joke. A challenge.”
I draw my gun.
He stands unconcerned — a tall Native American draped in a wool blanket, barefoot. Polished stones hang from his neck. Around his head, a ragged red band. He seems disappointed by what he sees.
“The Zone should have sent three.”
“Yeah, well, it’s just us two right now,” starts Kelly.
He ignores her, addressing only me. “You are Megan Bridgwater.”
“You’re Yiska, aren’t you?” I say.
The tracker who made the map, who marked the clues, who led us here.
“Great,” says Kelly, taking a step toward him. “So you can start off by telling us what’s the big idea scaring my friend half outta her mind spreading lies about her daddy being dead.”
He holds out his hand to stop her from advancing. Kelly staggers back. There is a gaping hole in Yiska’s palm — something inside the wound moves. A nest of blue worms.
“Come no closer. It seeks a more willing host than I.”
“Shoot, Megan! Visitor!”
I stare at the man’s eyes — they are gray with the onset of cataracts, impenetrable, like two riverbed pebbles.
“Not Visitor. Navajo. I resist. This body is a battleground. I will die before it takes me.”
“What do you know of my pa?” I demand. “Is he alive or dead?”
“Alive. Spirit guide for you on this journey. He is held by her in the Valley of the Rocks.”
“Her?”
“She who spawns this plague. We thought her a goddess — the White Shell Woman. Wife of the moon. Mother of the Navajo people. We prayed that she would come to deliver back our lands. Our songs brought her. But she broke the moon, tamed the sun; she is a blight on the Earth.”
“Where’s the Valley of the Rocks?”
“The heart of the Zone. She waits for you. You have a choice to make. Go to her where the rock splits the sky. You must resist, as I have done.” He closes a fist around the worms that infect him.
“Hey,” says Kelly. “Enough with the riddles, OK?”
He shuts his eyes tight as if fighting a great pain.
The arrow comes from behind us. I hear it before I see it thud into Yiska’s chest. It is tipped with flame that makes short work of his blanket. And in an instant he is ablaze. He sways, a grimace of dead-eyed shock on his face. Then he falls into the dust.
There are cries and the drumming of hooves behind me, but I do not turn. I snatch the poncho from Kelly’s shoulders. Yiska holds the secret of this grave. Without it I fear I will never find my father. I rush to him with the poncho to staunch the flames on his chest.
