The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  I imagine the Diné’s choices as they moved, keeping to this convoluted country, poking here and there, finding routes, inching themselves deeper into the terrain. I see them walking these high buttresses of sandstone, slipping out of the wind for a rest, two people sent ahead as scouts, pausing at the edges, one crouching, one standing. The land, it would seem, rose behind and around them, shielding them from the pursuers who found themselves lost in the outermost regions, where cliffs stand within cliffs. In the desert twenty miles behind where we are now, the confused and frustrated U.S. troops gave up the hunt.

  Among the Diné who live in this part of the country there is still a palpable pride. They are descendants of families that never gave in, people who endured years in the wilderness. They were not captured and dragged away. When these few families emerged from the canyons seven years after their escape, they came like Moses off the mountain, carrying a new religion in their hands. They had found a ceremony in the far desert, an entire pantheon of rock formations and water holes that took on names and places in stories more ancient than tribal memory.

  We begin working our way through house-sized boulders—not mansions, but modest homes, two stories tall at the most. The boulders end, and we start up a bald arc of sandstone. It is a cliff made round. Its grains feel like sandpaper. We slide our hands in front of us, taking holds, inching our bodies upward with our Sherpa loads of winter gear. Cursive patterns are raised from the bedrock, loops of rust offering texture, enough to hold the tips of our boots. I can hear the scratching of my clothes, and Dirk’s breath below as he reaches up for a grip.

  A cranny of a canyon opens through the side of this arc, and we file into it, finding a string of water holes along a narrow floor. They are ornaments of old rain and snowmelt set deeply into the bedrock. The sole kind of water source we expect to find out here. Like seals to a breathing hole in the ice, we both drop to one of them, head to head. Our lips graze the surface, and the water tastes grainy but clean. Our palms lay flat, shoulder blades up like wings. I feel Dirk’s exhale. Water drips from his lips. His ripples pass across mine.

  Done, we sit back, allowing the packs to take our weight on the ground. Dirk’s expression is a sort-of smile, long-remembered satisfaction. It says, We have been here before. I lean my head back, same smile.

  By evening we reach a high boneyard of boulders, setting our camp in a dry, wrinkled surface of weathering pits and crevices. In weary, automatic moves, my hands drape to unlace my boots.

  The sun sets, and I glance up to watch it go. The air freezes. Night comes.

  Gathered up into warm clothing, Dirk and I move to our chores. We have the same way of going about things, year to year, with no gap in conversation or in the sway of hands passing back and forth a black-beaten pan, a spoon, a small alcohol-fueled stove. Dirk lays out his dinner belongings as if arranging santos at an altar. He scrapes a comfortable clearing on the ground for himself, brushing away rocks, assembling his life.

  I quickly find that my chosen spot, as usual, is not well planned. I am on a slope leading into a crack between boulders where a pen might roll, clattering beyond reach. I keep my belongings close to me like a worried juggler, aware at every moment of what might fall out of my grip. Looking at Dirk’s spartan clearing, I realize how much crap I carry around, bits and baubles hauled into the wilderness. I never unpack after a trip, so my equipment is peppered with whatever I’ve collected over the years: a marble given to me by a boy in Mexico, a chestnut seed, a few shell beads, a magnifying glass that I hardly use but always carry, a broken pencil that I refuse to part with, figuring I can sharpen it with my knife if I ever need it.

  Dirk relaxes in his sanctum while I balance a lighter on my knee, groping around for my spoon, catching my lamp before it slides away.

  I do the cooking, making udon noodles and curry, handing the pot to Dirk when I am finished. He eyes it with his lamp, spooning his share into a bowl. When it looks as if he might be done with the division, he begins stirring the pot. In our travels I have watched him do this many times. I know exactly what comes next. He is unsure that this is an equitable split, worrying the noodles with his spoon, judging volume and weight. Finally, he takes a resolved spoonful from the pot, dumps it into his bowl, and now all is right with the world. He starts eating.

  I take back the pot and look at him.

  “What’s up with that spoon ritual of yours?”

  He chews, examining his spoon in his small cone of light. “I’ve never noticed,” he says. He takes up a hot bite and mouths it to get it cool. Talking up over the bite, he says, “Gotta have order in the world. Gotta make things even.”

  “But you’ll get more one night and I’ll get more another,” I reason. “You’ll be hungrier sometimes and me other times. It all works out in the end.”

  Dirk stops chewing and looks straight at me through the faint cast of his lamp. “No,” he corrects me, making a square with his spoon in the air. “Equal distribution. It’s the only way.” With stern strokes, he divides his square into even quarters.

  I scowl at that. How can a man of intelligence believe in such rubbish? But I know this isn’t about bowls of food. Dirk’s talking about how the universe is supposed to work. He is a man of order. Still, it is rubbish.

  “Oh, come on, Dirk,” I rebut. “Even with your spoon equation you still don’t know who has more food.”

  About to unearth another bite from his bowl, he stalls and wags his spoon at me. “You’ve got to have some kind of plan. Otherwise, you’re talking chaos.”

  “Your plan is an illusion, Dirk.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “You find your order and you stick with it.”

  “That’s living a lie, and you know it.”

  He’s just eating, hardly listening to me. Grinning, in fact. Damn him. I launch a frustrated barrage at him: “Equality isn’t a numerical thing. It doesn’t matter how much ends up in your bowl; the line is randomly set. You’re comparing irrelevant numbers to irrelevant numbers. We’ve got to let go of these petty illusions that the lines we draw are real.”

  Now he is listening, shaking his head. “Listen, Ope, on this planet we’ve got laws to live by. You start pulling that anarchy crap and no one’ll know what to do. Then you have real inequity, lack of clarity, trouble, violence, combat, military intervention, sex crimes . . .”

  I’m not eating. Just staring at him. “Bring it on, then.”

  He reaches in for the next bite, saying, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t want to live a lie.”

  “We must have rules,” he answers.

  “I want an older kind of balance, something not restrained by the human mind. Something not poisoned with judgment or values. Where everything is just relationships; it’s not that one side of the relationship is more important than the other. That’s what this universe works on.”

  He takes his bite and talks through the food in his mouth, saying, “Your dinner’s getting cold.”

  I put my spoon into the food. Enough said. I let go of my argument, feeling a bit foolish, but still in the right. The night settles in as we go through our meal, the quiet rippled by the last tinkering of spoons. For washing, we boil tea water in the same pot, adding bits of dinner’s flotsam to our drink. The air is motionless under stars. I hear Dirk drink off the metal rim of his cup and take in a breath. Out of the dark, he speaks with a quiet visionary’s voice,

  Starlight travels into infinity

  Yet we only see it when the night is black.

  I say nothing, my cup warm in my gloved hands, pulled into my body. I look over stars and the dark earth below that conceals a thousand canyons, listening for him to go on. It’s from a song, some music he’s played to me in his living room before.

  Dirk takes another sip and continues with his musical poetry,

  This is the question the brothers and sisters fear;

  What is the color of the soul?

  S
aid Buddha, Jesus, Plato, and the poets of Old,

  That evening is the color of the soul.

  If evening is the color of the soul, Dirk, why are you so worried about your precious spoonfuls of imaginary order?

  I finish my tea and set down the cup, the metal loud in the darkness. Straightening my wool serape across my back, I lie on the cold rock, arms pulled together on my chest, head on a piece of gear.

  Dirk’s voice stays with me, the theater of his words. I feel sometimes that I am a vine hooked into his woody branches, sweeping around his trunk with delicate feelers. I am holding on to him the way I hold on to this land. I need something firm, someone who believes in organization. It is not so much that Dirk might be a stable father figure to me, or even a watchful brother. He is a friend who has answers to my questions.

  Before the age of sixteen I had moved sixteen times between Arizona and Colorado. Stepfathers came and went, treating my fleeting homes like doorways to someplace else. Everything, in fact, was a doorway. Every place led elsewhere. Maybe that’s why I am so drawn to Dirk, why I set my camp near his sense of order.

  After Dirk quit the force, he and his two brothers bought a Moab business that shuttles people and equipment to and from the wilderness rivers. They bought the outfit with its boats and fat-tired school bus and warehouse of gear from a man named Tex McClatchy. I used to work the rivers with Tex, so I came in to see who had taken over. Hands were shaken, small talk bantered around.

  Immediately Dirk and I looked at each other like animals from different continents. We sniffed and paced around each other.

  I was perplexed and enchanted by him: You used to be a street cop? You’ve killed someone?

  And he had equal curiosity: You just walk in the desert? That is what you do?

  Dirk invited me to his house. He sat me on a sofa in front of his full-power stereo, the Doors vibrating through the floor.

  Dirk watched me as the music went on, his wife’s zoo of cats wandering around us wide-eyed. I closed my eyes, nodding to the tune. After a few songs, he turned down the stereo and read Robinson Jeffers’s poetry over a couple of beers at his kitchen table:

  As for me, I would rather

  Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.

  But we are what we are, and we might remember

  Not to hate any person, for all are vicious;

  And not be astonished at any evil, all are deserved;

  And not fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

  I nodded to that, too.

  For his final investigation he produced a piece of lined paper, revealing something in blue ballpoint that had come from his own hand. He read it with the pained conviction of a café poet:

  I face the fears that make you

  Piss the bedclothes.

  I find the truth that hides

  Beneath lies and chaos.

  I document the flowing wounds

  You inflict upon each other.

  I wear the equalizer

  The one to end your final fit.

  Still, I nodded.

  A short time later, I asked Dirk to join me in the wilderness. We went out together, hunkering in a snowstorm, eight days into the Utah canyons beyond the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. It was a place I knew, way out beyond public trails. That evening the air smelled of snow draping over stone. Dirk and I watched the great arms of a dead juniper collect thin white railings. Then the sound of water arrived, snowmelt coming down, a stream clattering like silverware on bare rock. We both turned at once.

  He did not dumbly nod at this sound. He let go of his eyesight and became ruled by further senses. He was engulfed. That is when Dirk became a part of my mythology, the man who fell into the desert as if from out of the sky.

  I had already spent much of my life walking the charred peaks and cactus basins of the Sonoran Desert. I had wormed my way through sandstone canyons in the high Blood Desert. My truck, in which I lived—having no address or phone number—was clogged half with hounded field equipment and half with papers and notes on the sediment loads of flash floods and rates of cliff erosion across the Colorado Plateau, things Dirk would have once dismissed as utter frivolity. After he began walking with me, he understood why I ask the questions that I do. He realized that asking questions was the only way to truly survive in this landscape.

  No longer the man with a gun who flew high above all others, he needed an interpreter to read this new topography. I insisted to him that the world was not merely judicious, as he believed, black and white and sterile. There was room to move. There were ways of seeing beyond the confines that the city had branded onto him. My interests would have seemed laughable to his former companions on the streets. I had reasonable theories on hunting practices among the Anasazi culture. I developed methods of predicting eclipses without the use of modern astronomy or calendars. I identified a strain of corn eight hundred years old in an abandoned rock shelter. My obscure knowledge inspired my life in this shifting, convoluted realm through which I traveled. He wanted to know how it was done.

  Of course, I was equally engrossed by him; spending time with Dirk was like drawing my finger along the cold metal of a knife’s blade, admiring the craft of its handle, the cleanness of its edge. Like any hunter-gatherer, I wanted to keep this new tool close to me. I was amazed by its sharpness. His decisions were made without argument or vacillation. His convictions and oaths were carried around like papers to prove his identity. Dirk saw into the land in ways that I had not imagined, moving briskly through the terrain, his cop years having left his eyes unmistakably trained. He was alert to everything, like a hunting animal, a predator. I had seen this before in hawks sweeping into their kills. I had long envied them for their ferocity and sureness.

  When we traveled it was as if we were tied together, flinging each other deeper and deeper into places we would have never discovered alone. Our treks eventually brought us to this night in the singer’s country, to these stars, to my back cold against the ground, teacup empty. Ready for bed.

  Dirk’s light comes on, and I hear him opening the poetry book, his to carry for the day. Pages turn against the silence. He clears his throat:

  The poet, who wishes not to play games with words,

  His affair being to awake dangerous images

  And call the hawks;—they all feed the future, they serve God,

  Who is very beautiful, but hardly a friend of humanity.

  The Projects

  A call was sent from the most interior block of the city’s government projects. It was a place Dirk knew the same way a novice might know the innards of a car engine—it was made up of numerous enigmatic parts and emitted strange smells, and little about it was familiar. Still, the projects were a seductive taboo, a place where he usually did all his talking out the rolled-down window of his patrol car, rarely daring to get out and walk in the open. Whenever he drove by the stale project buildings, he imagined the unknowable and the unthinkable within, not sure of what he might see if he was ever called inside. This morning he intercepted the call and out of curiosity decided to turn his car around. He was still a young cop. He intercepted calls whenever he could.

  It was midmorning in autumn. Gingerroot light fell on the pavement between buildings. The engines of a jetliner strained as the plane gained its first altitude over this gray clutter of buildings. Dirk parked and walked along a row of hastily constructed cinder-block structures, no signs of immediate violence around him. Cars were abandoned in postapocalyptic disrepair on the street. Scattered like windblown dust around the buildings were broken bottles, wadded paper bags, and unaccountable pieces of oily fabric.

  He came to a ground-level door, identical to every other door except for the number, and knocked on it. A girl answered, maybe six years old. She should have been shy or polite, but she was nothing. She pointed behind her, inside. There was a grimness about her that disturbed him. She was too young to have this expression. He could not muster even a smil
e, sensing it would have been naively wasted on her. He slipped around her small body into the dark of a room. She pointed down the hallway, to the bathroom.

  The first information to come to him was the odor of a life utterly unlike his own. It arrived in layers: the dense smell of mildew; the acid of cat urine in the carpet from past tenants; blankets and towels overwhelmed by the territorial musk of a man.

  He moved through the dark hallway and came upon a raw, metallic scent. It was the smell of fresh blood. Closer to the open bathroom door was a wash of meat-locker odors, as if a deer had had its belly split open. He walked around the door and looked in.

  A woman sat on the toilet. She had swollen lips, one busted at the corner with a pastry of dry blood. One eyelid blossomed purple. She sat bowlegged on the toilet seat, mascara streaked in tears. In her hands she cradled the slick body of a fetus. Its umbilical cord raveled back into her own body.

  He could see between her legs toilet water darkly feathered in blood. Rocking her dead child, as if sending it to sleep, the woman looked up at him. Her face was vacant, pleading like a voice too far down a well for rescue.

  Panic rose through him. He tasted bile. His lungs jerked for breath. He swallowed to hold down his vomit.

  He backed out of the bathroom like the swing of a robotic arm. He stepped from her view and pressed his back to the hallway wall, taking short gulps of air. His body trembled. His skin was cold. He felt an atrocious fear. He had stepped into hell. Even his gun could not save him here. He fought the hot taste on his tongue.

  He was still against the wall when the paramedics arrived. They wore pale rubber gloves to protect themselves, their hands looking like the hands of ghosts. Even with their uniforms and paraphernalia-filled belts and handheld kits of official, precise equipment, they could not break the spell for him. They were only tools of the trade, men like him designed to plunge themselves in, grab what is needed, and plunge back out. He said nothing to them. He made quick, distracted eye contact and pointed, directing them to the open door beside him.