Hole in the Sky

by Pete Hautman

  “That’s right,” said Hap. “The water will rush three hundred miles down the canyon and hit the Hoover Dam like God with a firehose. The Hoover gives way, the thousand trillion gallons in Lake Mead will go, too. The flood will blast through Laughlin and Lake Havasu and take out the Parker Dam, another hundred miles down river. There are people there—dozens of settlements. It won’t stop till it hits the Gulf.”

  As he spoke, I translated for Harryette.

  “Bottom line is, the Glen Canyon goes, a lot of plants, animals, and people get washed all the way down to the Sea of Cortez.”

  We all sat quietly. Hap pulled a bag of tobacco from his shirt pocket. He rolled a cigarette, then offered the bag to Uncle, who accepted it and rolled one for himself. I’d never seen Uncle smoke a cigarette before.

  “The thing is,” Uncle said slowly, smoke curling from his mouth, “we’ve got to go up there and try to open those sluice gates.”

  “How come you didn’t do it while you were there?” I asked.

  “Didn’t know how,” said Hap. “Your uncle here, he’s the one knows his way around machinery. Chandler could fix a busted radiator with spit and mud.”

  It was true. Uncle had kept our truck and generator and all the other machines we needed going for years.

  “That dam’s a lot bigger than my Land Rover,” Uncle said. “But I guess we’ve got to give it a whirl” “When do we go?” I asked.

  Uncle shook his head. “You and Tim and Harryette are staying here. We’ll be gone four or five days, maybe. Somebody’s got to keep the mules fed. Besides, no point in risking all of our skins.”

  “What d’you mean? It’s not that dangerous, is it?”

  Uncle shook his head slowly. “Tell him the rest of it, Hap.”

  When Hap and Tim and Emory had arrived at Page, they knew right away something was wrong. The gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the compound hung open, and the air stank of death. The first body they found was a child, half-eaten by coyotes and vultures. The second one was a bloated figure locked in a car, the windows fogged with condensed body fluids. They quickly backed away from the compound, horrified and fearful of the Flu. Circling the town at a good distance, they climbed to a rocky outcropping above the compound and, looking down, saw several other bodies scattered among the buildings.

  “What do you think?” Hap asked Emory.

  Emory shrugged his wide shoulders. “I think they got the sickness.”

  “I know that, you silly ass.”

  A coyote trotted across an open area. Tim raised his rifle to shoot it, but Hap pushed the barrel down.

  “We don’t know what we’re dealing with, son.”

  For the next hour they waited, watching for signs of life. Other than the lone coyote, they saw nothing.

  Hap said, “What do you say, Emory? You want to go have a look-see?” Because Emory was a Survivor, he could be exposed to the Flu without getting sick.

  Wordlessly, Emory climbed down the rocks and scaled the chain-link fence. He was gone for thirty minutes. Just when Hap was considering going in after him, Emory appeared.

  “Everybody dead,” he reported.

  Hap shook his head sadly. Emory’s report was no surprise.

  “Most of them tied up,” Emory said.

  “Tied up? What do you mean?”

  Emory crossed his thick wrists. “Like with rope. They all tied up.”

  Hap took a deep breath, fearing the worst. “You see anything else? Anything unusual?”

  Emory had stared back at him, then handed over a piece of paper.

  Hap pulled a paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

  “This is what Emory found,” he said. I looked at Emory, still standing silently beneath the stuffed moose head.

  Harryette took the paper. I read over her shoulder.

  These are the words of the Kinka.

  The Divine has touched these people

  and judged them wanting. None have

  joined us. All have died.

  We mourn their passing, but we

  Survive.

  We feel their pain, but we Survive.

  All who Survive are welcome to join us.

  This World

  is our World.

  The Kinka have spoken.

  I drew a ragged breath. “They’re real,” I said.

  Hap nodded. “They’re real, all right. And they brought the Flu to Page.”

  “We think they did it on purpose,” Uncle said. “They infected everybody in Page, hoping to make more Survivors.”

  “I thought you couldn’t get the Flu from Survivors,” I said.

  “We don’t know how they did it,” Uncle said. “There’s been a rumor of these Kinka infecting other communities. They must have some way of transporting the virus, but we don’t know how, or why they do it.”

  I looked toward Emory, but all I saw was Bullwinkle’s hairy head. Emory was gone.

  Harryette was staring at the paper with ferocious intensity, her fingers white from holding it so tight. Uncle got up from his chair and tried to take the paper from her, but Harryette wouldn’t let go.

  Just then, we heard the sound of an engine starting.

  EIGHT DAYS

  EMORY DID NOT RETURN THAT NIGHT.

  Hap was furious. “That stupid Survivor don’t know enough to get his shoes on the right feet, and here he’s gone wandering off in my Jeep. That burns my ass, I swear it does!”

  “You know where he’s going,” Uncle said.

  We were all sitting around the big table in the kitchen eating breakfast. Harryette had gotten up early to make fresh tortillas and chilaquile sauce. She knew chilaquiles was Uncle’s favorite breakfast. I can’t say it was one of my personal favorites: slimy hunks of tortilla floating around in sweet, red, spicy sauce. Fortunately, Hap had brought ten pounds of real coffee beans with him. It was pre-Flu stuff, but it tasted fine to me. I loaded it up with powdered creamer and honey, and washed down the chilaquiles, no problem. Tim was shoveling down his second helping. Anything Harryette made was fine with him.

  Hap said, “I know where he thinks he’s going! He can go straight to hell for all I care.”

  I asked, “You think he’ll find them?”

  “That boy’s so stupid he’s lucky to find his mouth with a chunk of food. Besides, the Kinka are probably halfway to Albuquerque by now.”

  Uncle loaded a forkful of chilaquiles into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Harryette, sitting across from me, signed, What’s he saying?

  Hap was telling Uncle that Emory is an idiot.

  Harryette frowned. He’s not so stupid.

  I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about Emory, Hap, or Uncle.

  Uncle said, “None of that changes what we have to do.”

  “I know that,” said Hap. “Damned if I don’t know that. But I can’t say I won’t miss that bald-headed dolt.”

  Harryette signed, I’m going with you.

  Uncle either didn’t see her, or chose to ignore her. Harryette kicked me under the table and made an angry sign at me. Tell him.

  I said, “Harryette wants to go.”

  Uncle and Hap both looked at me, then at Harryette.

  You need me, she signed.

  Uncle shook his head.

  You can’t go without a Survivor. Too dangerous.

  “What’s she saying?” Hap asked.

  “She says you need her,” I said.

  Uncle shook his head harder. They glared at each other. I’d seen Uncle and Harryette lock horns plenty of times. There wasn’t much question who was going to win.

  Hap said, “You know, she’s got a point, Chandler.”

  Uncle turned his fierce glare upon Hap.

  “We might need her to go into Page. Also, if we run into those crazies—God forbid—we might need her to talk to ’em.”

  “She doesn’t talk,” said Uncle.

  “You know what I mean. She can write and sign.”

  Uncle looked at Ha
rryette.

  I’m going with you, she signed.

  Early the next morning Tim and I watched them leave—Hap, Uncle, and Harryette in the Land Rover. I felt afraid for them. But mostly I was angry about being left behind. As the rear end of the Land Rover disappeared behind the wall of pine trees, Tim said, “What do you want to do?”

  I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I had to do. “Let’s clean up the breakfast dishes. Then I got to set up the perimeter alarms, then brush down and feed Cecil and Frosty.”

  “You want to go fishing instead?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Want to go hunting?”

  “We’ve got plenty of meat. Uncle shot a pronghorn last week.”

  Tim followed me back into the hotel. While I gathered the dishes and began to wash them, he “helped” me by keeping up a steady chatter. For a few minutes he talked about a group of travelers he and Hap had seen heading west on 1-40 near Flagstaff.

  “They were like these robot people, marching down the middle of the freeway. They had uniforms. There were about a hundred of them. Wearing these black and green uniforms and big blue backpacks and marching like to music, but there wasn’t any.”

  “You think they were the Kinka?”

  “Nah. Kinkas are all Survivors. This bunch had hair. They were some other sort of cult. You should come with us next time we drive our circuit. We see all kinds of cool stuff. One time we visited this bunch of naked people down by Sedona. Called themselves ‘Naturists.’ We traded them a case of sunblock for some dried beef.”

  “You told me about that.” Actually, he’d told me about the Naturists about six times.

  “There was this one looked kind of like Sigourney Weaver.”

  That’s how weird Tim was. He had watched all of the Alien movies twice. He thought Sigourney Weaver was the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

  “I’m not sitting through Alien again,” I said.

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Finish these dishes, set up the perimeter alarms, brush down the mules.”

  Tim rolled his eyes. After a moment he said, “You should’ve seen the one in the car.”

  “Are we talking about the Naturists?”

  “No. I mean in Page. The windows were all foggy but you could see the guy’s face. It was like his eyes had popped out. And then the wind shifted and the smell hit us. I puked, just like that.” He looked like he was going to puke again, just thinking about it.

  “I wish we’d gone with them,” I said.

  “Not me,” said Tim.

  The perimeter alarms were basically wires strung a couple of inches above the ground. If somebody tripped on one, it would set off a battery-operated horn. Uncle had salvaged the horns and batteries from old cars. We had alarms on all the roads and foot trails leading into the village. Usually we didn’t bother with them because it took forever to set them up, and they were as likely to be triggered by a deer as anything. But Uncle had made me promise, so Tim and I spent the next two hours testing batteries, stringing trip wires and camouflaging them with sticks and leaves.

  Of course, when you do something with Tim, it’s never ordinary. I was bent over one of the horns attaching a wire when I felt a buzz in my fingertips and the thing went off right in my ear. I was so startled I fell over backwards.

  Tim was laughing so hard I thought he’d choke, but he must have been breathing okay because I chased him all the way around Hopi House twice before giving up. I went back to stringing the alarms. My ears were still ringing.

  Tim showed his face when I was about finished. He said he was sorry. Tim wasn’t very good at apologizing. He must’ve about bit his tongue off trying not to laugh. I used his contrite mood, such as it was, to ask him to take care of the mules. Grudgingly, he agreed.

  As soon as Tim was out of sight, I took a battery, some lamp cord, and the biggest horn I had—I think it was from a Mack truck—and carried it up to his bedroom. I hid the horn under the head of his bed, then ran the wires under the edge of the carpet and down the hall to my room. All I had to do was wait till he was asleep, touch the wires to the poles of the battery, and send him right through the roof.

  That night, after a dinner of pronghorn steaks, tortillas, and canned artichoke hearts, we put on a disc and watched Ghostbusters, another of Tim’s favorites. We’d both seen it at least three times before. I suppose it was stupid of us to watch it again, since there were about a thousand other movies in Uncle’s collection. I guess we needed to see something familiar. We didn’t talk about Uncle and Harryette and Hap. We didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to watch the Ghostbusters bust ghosts, and Tim wanted to watch Sigourney Weaver possessed by demons. We were at the part where Dan Ackroyd gets slimed when the picture flickered, came back, then died completely. The room went black.

  Tim said, “Hey!”

  I groaned. “It’s the generator.”

  “It broke?”

  “No, I just have to switch over to the other tank.”

  “Well, hurry up!” Tim could be pretty selfish.

  I felt my way out of the room, found the flashlight by the kitchen door, and walked out back to the generator shed.

  The gasoline that ran our generator was stored in two eighty-gallon tanks behind the shed. Every few weeks, Uncle and I would load the empty tanks onto a trailer, drive down to Tusayan, and pump them full from the Texaco station. Uncle figured there was enough gas there to last us another five or six years. After that, we would have to drive all the way to Flagstaff for our fuel.

  Checking the gauge on the left tank, I saw that it was completely empty, as I expected. I closed the pet-cock, then opened the one on the other tank. While I was doing this I kept an eye out for Tim. It would be just like him to follow me, then jump out from the dark. I didn’t need any of that right then—just going into that shed was scary enough. I had once walked in on a rattler, and there was almost always a black widow or two hanging out. I opened the door and stepped back. With the beam of the flashlight, I explored the dirt floor of the shed. No snakes, tarantulas, gila monsters, or other poisonous, crawling critters. I raised the light and checked the walls and corners. I saw a couple of widows, but they were safely tucked into their ragged webs. I stepped in and pressed the starter on the generator.

  It rumbled to life. Excellent. I backed out of the shed and instantly felt something grip and dig into my left calf. I yelped and jumped away.

  “Gotcha,” said Tim.

  I threw the flashlight at him. He ducked, laughing, as the flashlight hit a rock and went out.

  “Now you did it,” he said.

  We picked our way back to the lodge in the dark.

  “I’m gonna get you good,” I promised.

  We watched the rest of Ghostbusters, then went to bed. I laid awake for an hour and a half, until I was sure that Tim was deep asleep. Then I turned on my light, untaped the ends of the wire that led to the Mack truck horn, and touched them to the battery.

  The sound of the truck horn shook the walls. I could almost see Tim blasted from a dead sleep—I bet he jumped three feet off the mattress, every nerve in his body screaming.

  When he came charging through the door to my room a minute later I was laughing so hard I didn’t even mind the bucket of water he dumped on me.

  Tim and I always had a good time together.

  After a couple days we both calmed down and quit playing jokes on each other. Actually, it got pretty boring. The perimeter alarm was tripped on the second night, and we both scrambled out of bed and took up our defense positions, but it turned out to be nothing. Probably just a deer, or a bear. In the morning I woke up holding my rifle, still sitting guard at the window.

  The next day we hiked to the outlook at Yavapai Point. From there, we could see a small section of river, and most of Phantom Ranch. I pointed out some of the other landmarks, showing off a bit.

  “That pointed butte over there, like a mountain, that’s called Isis Te
mple, and behind it, with the flat top, that’s Shiva Temple. And just to the right of that is Cheops Pyramid.”

  “How come they got all those weird names?”

  “I guess the first explorers that got here named them. I mean, the Indians were here first, and they probably gave them other names, but the ones I know are the ones in English.” I pointed out Zoroaster Temple, Angel’s Gate, Wotan’s Throne.

  “Who’s Wotan?”

  “Some really big guy, I guess.”

  “How come you know all these names?”

  “Uncle,” I said. Harryette and I didn’t go to school. There were no schools. But Uncle had taught us everything he knew. There wasn’t a peak or canyon or bird or plant within ten miles that I didn’t know the name of.

  “When you went down to the river, did you always know where you were?”

  “Sure I did. The trail’s still in pretty good shape. It’s hard to get lost completely down there, since you always know you’re between the river and the rim, and which way’s up.

  Tim shook his head. “I could get lost.”

  As I stared into the vastness that lay before us, I suddenly felt my heart begin to pound. I had gotten used to living on the rim. But every now and then I would look down into it and the size and beauty of it would suck the breath right out of my lungs. This wasn’t just a slash in the earth. I knew in that moment why those early explorers had given these buttes names like Apollo Temple, Angel’s Gate, and Tower of Ra. There was something holy in this place. Something terrifying and powerful and sacred and awesome, and whatever it was had touched me yet again.

  Tim said, “Are you okay?”

  I nodded wordlessly, swimming in a sense of wonder.

  On the fourth day I started to worry.

  “What if something happened?” I said.

  Tim bent over and picked up a rock. “They’re probably on their way back.” He threw the stone out into the abyss. “Maybe they’re having truck problems.”

  I wanted to believe that, but I had a bad feeling. Looking through Uncle’s spotting scope, I could see that the river was drier than ever. If Uncle and Hap had succeeded in opening the gates, we should have seen the water rise.