by Pete Hautman
How can you say that? Do you want to die?
Ceej stared back at me, blinking as if I had signed gibberish. He whispered something to Bella. She sat up straighter and spoke to me, her expression intent and earnest.
Ceej interpreted, speaking and signing. She says that she is sorry that you are angry with her. She says that it is possible she has the Flu, but it does not matter, as long as we make it to the—Ceej finger spelled a word I’d never seen—Sipapuni.
The what?
Ceej frowned, thinking. It is a place—
Bella began to speak. When she spoke, her eyes became larger and fixed upon me with an intensity that reminded me of Mother K. Ceej’s hands moved, translating. It is a holy place, the place of emergence. She is the last of her people—He stopped signing and asked Bella a question. She replied. He continued,—the last Hopi. She is traveling to the Sipapuni to rejoin her people—
You said she was the last one.
Yes, the last Hopi on this world.
Wait a minute. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Are you saying she wants to go to this place to die?
Ceej frowned. Who said anything about dying?
Then what are you talking about?
Patiently, as if I were a little kid, Ceej told me a story about how the Hopi people had come into this world. Sometimes he would consult with Bella, who would speak gibberish to me, and then Ceej would translate. It sounded like a fairy tale, a Hopi myth, but Ceej told it as if he really believed it was true. I had to remind myself that this was the same little brother who thought he’d seen a ghost just a couple of weeks ago. I looked back at Tim, who shrugged, pointed at his temple and made his finger go in a circle.
I’m not crazy, Ceej said, looking very serious. And neither is Bella. It’s true. The Sipapuni is real. It will take us to the Third World. It will make us whole again. Evil cannot pass from one world to the next, and the Flu is the ultimate evil. Once we reach the other side, the Flu will no longer be with us.
I gaped at him. I could hardly believe that he was serious.
It is our only hope, he said. He wrapped his arms around Bella.
• • •
From the top of the Watchtower, looking to the northeast, we could see up-canyon, past the sheer cliff walls called the Palisades of the Desert, all the way to Cape Solitude, where the Grand Canyon meets the Little Colorado Gorge. The gorge itself was a ragged cut in the plateau.
Tim said, That’s where they’re going. He pointed at the Little Colorado Gorge, ten miles away. Beyond it lay miles of rocky, brush-dotted wasteland and, on the horizon, the Painted Desert. To the east, between us and the gorge, stood the green, flat-topped cone known as Cedar Mountain. It was a forbidding landscape, a region as awful as it was awesome.
I said to Tim, Can we talk them out of it?
He shook his head.
If Mother K was floating a few inches off the ground, my brother and his new girlfriend were living on the moon. They actually believed that they were going to visit some other world, like Alice going down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. The more they explained it, the nuttier it sounded. They planned to walk ten miles to the Little Colorado, climb down into the gorge, then find this mythical hole that would take them to Wonderland, or Nirvana, or the Third World, or whatever, and would somehow in the process screen out all the Flu virus from their bodies.
I looked down at the patio at the base of the tower where Bella and Ceej were sitting. They were talking, their faces inches apart.
Tim said, They’re going to die, aren’t they?
I hesitated. Nothing I could say would make it easier. She was in the boiler room for a long time.
Tim stared back at me, pain in his eyes. What are we going to do? he asked.
Below us, Ceej laughed. He looked happy. He wasn’t thinking about Uncle, or about the Kinka, or about the Flu. He might be dead soon, but today his head was filled with Bella. I felt something bubble up inside me. Envy? Jealousy? I did not know.
I said, We have to go with them. Tim nodded, but I wasn’t sure he completely understood, so I added, may have to take care of them. When they get sick.
Over the years the old Jeep trails had been washed out, overgrown, or buried in drifts of sand. Using Bella’s grand-father’s maps and a termite-chewed survey map we’d found at the Desert View trading post, we made our way across the plateau toward the gorge.
Ceej and Bella led the way, Tim and I trailed a hundred yards behind. When we had to talk to them we would do it at a distance, or I would run ahead to consult with them, then go back to Tim to tell him what was going on. It was frustrating, especially for Tim, but I didn’t want him to get any closer.
From the Watchtower, the plateau had looked fairly flat, but once we started walking we quickly learned that flat is a relative term. We were either walking up, down, or around something. We lost the trail several times and had to backtrack. We were not worried about missing the gorge—all we had to do was keep going northeast and we would fall into it. We were trying to follow the Jeep trail because the walking would be easier, and because it would lead us to the Blue Spring Trail, the only way down to the river.
The gorge was only ten miles from the Watchtower, but with all the twists and turns of the Jeep trails we must have walked twice that. After several hours of walking, the trail turned east, and we followed our shadows. As we came up over the top of each low hill we could see the gorge, tantalizingly close but always the same distance away. Then the trail would dip down and we would lose sight of it. The sun was nothing but a faint glow behind us when we spread our blankets beneath the stars, not knowing how close we were to our goal.
Sometime during the night I woke up and found that Tim had rolled up against me in his sleep and thrown one arm over my body. The moon had risen, and I could see the tiny, spiky shadows of eyelashes on his smooth cheeks. I remembered the Tim I had seen facing down Mother K, fierce-eyed and deadly. I could see none of that now. I saw only the gentleness and innocence of a child. I freed one hand from my sleeping bag and laid it as softly as I could upon his cheek. I watched as the man-child, still dreaming, smiled.
I awakened to the scent of distant rain. Moist air cooled my face. I opened my eyes, untangled myself from Tim’s embrace, and sat up. The sky glittered with countless stars. I could see no clouds, but a soft, steady breeze came from the north. The rain must have fallen upriver, perhaps as far north as Page.
The moon, low in the west, sank toward the horizon.
I looked at the spot where Ceej and Bella had bedded down. I saw the shape of their blanket, but that was all. I let my eyes explore my surroundings, straining to make sense of the moon-shadowed desert.
There, atop a low rise, something that was not a rock or a shrub. It was the shape of Ceej, standing with his back to me, looking to the north. I stood and walked over to him.
Where is Bella? I asked.
Ceej pointed north. After a moment I saw her. She was about a quarter of a mile away, standing before an uneven, horizontal strip of lighter-colored rock. At first I thought it was a low ridge, but then my mind reinterpreted the image and I realized that she was standing at the edge of a chasm. I was seeing moonlight reflected off the far lip of the gorge.
The Little Colorado.
Ceej nodded. We were closer than we thought.
Bella was walking toward us. The breeze had died dowrn. The plateau was nearly silent. I could hear Ceej breathing. He shifted his feet and the sound of his boots on rock seemed startlingly loud. I felt that we were standing on a great ball of rock, a planet, and that we might fly off it at any moment. Bella was growing larger. I took Ceej’s hand. He did not pull away. He let me hold his hand as we watched Bella’s approach. When she was a few yards away she spoke. Ceej took his hand back.
He moved to embrace her. They exchanged words.
What did she say? I asked.
She has found the trail.
Bella spoke.
Tomorrow we ent
er the canyon, Ceej translated.
She wants to know if you plan to come with us.
I am not going to leave you.
She wants to know if you wish to leave this world.
I shook my head. No thanks.
Bella nodded, understanding me for once. She spoke.
Ceej interpreted. She didn’t think you would, since you are a Survivor. She says this is your world now. What about Tim?
Tim is with me, I signed, surprising myself. I could not save Ceej, but there was hope for Tim.
Ceej nodded.
How is she feeling? I asked.
Bella answered my question by coughing once—a small, delicate clearing of the throat. She may not have been aware that she had done it, but I had heard such coughs before. Over the next two days it would blossom into a juicy, lung-ripping, gurgling hack that would hurt her from the roots of her shorn hair to her cramped toes.
When did she start coughing?
It’s just the cold.
We should go back to Desert View. I can take care of her.
No.
If you continue on she will die. And so will you.
If we do not continue on, then we will die.
You can’t really believe that, Ceej.
He smiled. But I do.
He turned his eyes on me and I saw in that moment how much he had changed. This was not my silly little brother. This Ceej was older and darker and he believed in something bigger than me and Tim and Uncle and Hap and the Grand Canyon. He might be mad as a Kinka, but he had something.
Bella touched his arm and spoke.
We should try to sleep, he said to me.
We walked back to our bedrolls. Tim was sitting up, awake.
What’s wrong? he asked.
Nothing, I signed. Go to sleep.
Faintly, in the distance, I heard Bella cough.
BLUE SPRING
SUN PENETRATED MY EYELIDS. I opened them. Tim’s sleeping face was inches away. He looked so young. His eyelids quivered and his lips moved, almost smiling. I wondered what he was dreaming about.
Tim once told me that he remembered nothing of his life before the Flu, even though he had been six years old when the disease struck. He did not remember his mother, or his brother, or his friends. This plague-ridden, corpse-covered world was all he knew. I envied him.
I sat up, trying not to wake him. A transparent mist hung a few feet above the earth, a desert fog that would burn off within the hour. The sky above us was blue, but to the north I saw a dark bank of clouds rising high above the desert. I could still smell rain in the air. I imagined the water falling over the dam at Glen Canyon. It had seemed like such a big deal a few days ago, but now I didn’t care. The dam could crumble, the flood could scour the canyon, and I didn’t care. Uncle was dead, and my brother would probably be dead soon, and the Glen Canyon Dam seemed like the least of my problems. I looked back at where Ceej and Bella had bedded down. I could not see them. I stood up and walked closer.
They were gone.
If you took a giant knife blade a mile long, thrust it into the earth, then dragged it, twisting and turning, through a hundred miles of rock, you’d get something like the Little Colorado River Gorge; a rent in the earth as deep as the Grand Canyon, but instead of being ten to twenty miles across, it is only a few hundred yards in some places.
From the brink, looking almost straight down, we could see the weirdly brilliant blue ribbon that was the Little Colorado. It looked impossibly thin and bright, like a thread of blue sky seen through a crack in the earth.
Between us and the river stood a vertical wilderness of rock.
You think they went down there? Tim asked.
I nodded. Somewhere below us, Ceej and Bella were making their way down through that treacherous, rocky maze. Bella’s cough would be ripening, and Ceej might be feeling a tickle at the back of his throat.
They are as good as dead, I thought.
I saw Tim staring at me and realized that my hands had spelled out my thought.
Tim signed, Maybe not.
You are right, I said. Maybe not. Much as I wanted to believe that Ceej and Bella might survive the Flu, I knew that their chances were slim. Mother K had told me that she had brought the Judgment to more than two thousand people and of all those, only three had survived. But there was a chance. I had survived, Mother K had survived—all the Kinka were Survivors. As long as there was a chance, I had to be there. Even if Ceej—or Bella—had what it took to survive the Flu, they would need someone to bring them water and feed them and protect them from predators. Even if they were not destined to live they would need someone to make their final hours as comfortable as possible.
If we can find them, I said, they have a chance.
For most of the morning we searched for a way down. Several times Tim eased himself over the edge, following a promising-looking ledge, or working his way down a tight crevice, but every time he reached a dead end and had to climb back up. Finally, a half mile upstream, we discovered a rock cairn marking a narrow cut in the lip of the gorge. Looking over the edge, we could see the river and, near the base of the Redwall, a series of blue pools.
That must be Blue Spring, I said.
Tim nodded. Then this has to be the trail.
I looked at the steep sides of the crevice. It did not look like a trail to me, but Tim climbed confidently into the cut, feeling his way down with his feet. Within a few seconds he was out of sight and I stood alone at the edge. A few minutes later I heard his voice and saw him waving to me from a ledge fifty feet below the rim. He was telling me to follow him. Trying to remember where Tim had put his feet, I lowered myself over the edge, feeling my way. Several times I thought I was stuck, but then my foot would find a crack in the rock. I worked my way down the crevice one toehold at a time until I reached a wide ledge. The ledge became a steep trail marked with sheep droppings. Moments later I caught up with Tim in the shadow of a bulging limestone wall.
He pointed to a boot print in a patch of loose, sandy dirt.
Ceej, he said.
For the next few hundred yards the trail was clear, following a series of precipitous switchbacks down the limestone wall; then it abruptly disappeared, leaving us to follow a series of cairns along the ragged face of a cliff, using our hands as much as our feet. The river appeared and disappeared as we made our way slowly down. Tim moved easily across the treacherous landscape; his hands and feet seemed to become part of the rock, finding solidity where I saw only instability. I watched where he put his feet, and tried to follow him exactly.
As we descended the steepest part of the gorge, my sense of color warped. The million shades of brown shifted toward red, giving the rocks around us an eerie, pinkish glow; the pools of water below us became an impossibly intense blue. Bluer than the sky, bluer than my mother’s eyes.
I caught up with Tim and touched his shoulder. When his eyes were level with mine I asked, Do the colors look wrong?
He shook his head, not understanding my signs. I tried again. Colors different here?
He nodded vigorously and signed back, speaking as he formed a garbled message with his hands. His signing, literally, came out as Water color rock hate above green! But I knew that what he meant was that the colors of the water, the rock, and the plants were all strange-looking. For some reason I always understood what Tim was saying, even when he signed nonsense.
After the first hour or two the route became less steep, and we found ourselves moving along a clearly marked trail. In places the rock gave way to sandy earth, and we could see the prints of my brother’s boots, and the smaller marks of Bella’s.
At midday we reached Blue Spring, a series of clear pools just above the river. Up close, the water still looked blue, but not as intensely so as it had from the rim. Tim scooped a handful of water and tasted it. He frowned and swallowed. I put my hand in the water. It was cool and it made my skin tingle. I took a cautious sip. The water fizzed on my tongue and had a strong mi
neral taste. I spat it out. Tim laughed.
I think it’s okay, he signed. It just tastes funny.
At Blue Spring, the gorge was only a hundred feet across. Millions of years ago the stream had cut a narrow slice through the Redwall layer. I felt as if the earth might close upon us at any moment. Tipping my head back, I looked straight up. The strip of visible sky looked as intensely blue as the river had looked from the rim.
We left the Blue Spring pools behind and, surprisingly quickly, found ourselves standing on a narrow strip of beach with the Little Colorado flowing at our feet. The river banks were crowded with tamarisk, catsclaw acacia, and willows.
Ceej and Bella’s footprints, clearly marked in the fine sand, followed the beach downstream, weaving in and out of clumps of grass and groves of stunted trees. Bella’s prints showed that her feet were dragging. The stress of the long climb down and the virus raging through her body were bringing her closer to death. In places it looked like Ceej was supporting her. Every time we rounded a bend or climbed a rock outcropping I expected to find them on the other side, Bella slumped in Ceej’s arms.
We were about a quarter of a mile downstream from Blue Spring when we lost the trail. Continuing along the beach, we came to a spot where the wall of the gorge bulged in, coming right up to the water, making it impossible to continue on our side.
They must have crossed the river, I said.
The Little Colorado, at that point, was squeezed to a width of less than twenty feet. Although it was fairly clear, we could not see the bottom, and the water was moving quickly.
Tim indicated that we should backtrack to a place farther upstream. He thought it would be shallower, slower, and easier to cross. A few hundred yards upstream we found Ceej and Bella’s footsteps again. We could see where they had entered the water. The stream was almost fifty feet wide there, with a small sandbar poking up in the center.
It looks deep, I said.
Tim nodded, but stepped into the water and began to cross. The water came up to his thighs, but no higher. I followed him to the sandbar, then over to the far side, where we quickly found the trail.
