by Craig Childs
Coming low, I reach a hand down, scoop up a palm of water, and put it to my lips. Diamonds of cold droplets land on my pants and soak to my skin. The water is lightly spiced with blackbrush leaves and the taste of rust from the rock. We will not treat this water with chemicals or force it through a filter. It is good water.
Dirk hands down canvas bladders and plastic bottles. Anchoring my weight, I fill one after the next. The coldness cuts my skin as I sink an arm, serape pulled and draped on my shoulders, shirtsleeve rolled to my elbow. I am surprised there is no ice. It must be the insulation of this wraparound enclosure that keeps the ice from forming. I stretch the containers up to Dirk. His arm hangs from the edge to grab them. Water traces down my arm, streaming past my rolled-up sleeve, marking the warm skin of my chest like a razor.
I climb out, coming to the open country above. Dirk is leaning over his gear, securing his water. The canyon below us is jeweled with water holes, most easier to fill from than this—I had wanted to climb in only to feel its throaty shape of erosion. The ground surrounding us has been drilled into so many cavities that it is more of an absence than a presence. In other parts of the desert, we are used to water holes made of smooth eggshells or shallow stone dishes deep enough only to kiss. Occasionally in our travels we have come across wildly constructed wormholes, but nothing like these here. This place is a sculpture garden. Each water hole is flood-burrowed, like a fist twisted into fresh bread dough. The holes stream in and out of each other, as smooth and worked over as hand-thrown pottery. This elaboration must have to do with a consistency to the rock formation, perhaps a function of runoff patterns across so much bare stone.
Where to now? This is the still point. We stand for a bit, drinking from the bags, wiping water from our beards and gaping at the scenery. I buckle water containers into my gear and strap everything over my shoulder, around my waist.
“Down,” I shout, and I start running into the canyon below, skimming the edges of holes, the weight of water beating at me.
I hear Dirk complain, “Jesus,” behind me, and I turn, not slowing.
I call to him, “Let’s get down there, see what this place is made of.”
Making his voice into a caricature of a Southern accent, he shouts, “You a damn foo runnin’ around lack some craized monkeh! Get yosef keeowed!”
I am getting out of reach. He jogs behind me to catch up. Then his body snaps into action. We are in flight. Hollow black water holes are cleared in jumps, bodies pressed centrifugally across their sidewalls.
I feel like a marble coming down a track, swerving around one object, rounding into a dead end, and, without losing speed, spinning out of it and rolling on to the next ramp. The land draws down, stretching away from us. Our hands reach back to push ourselves off, or to hold ourselves in place for a half second before leaping ahead. There is no bottom to this place. The closer we come to it, the faster it falls away. I like the running, though. I do not have time to stop and consider. The land builds and collapses quickly, and still no sudden edge stops me. We speed in and out of massive sandstone formations, cold arcs as steeply sided as shark fins, their summits so high that they are out of our view. By the time we stop running, gulping our breath, it looks as if our canyon will end. It is quickly tapering. I pull off my serape and roll it up. I hang it around my back. Dirk unbuttons his outer shirt and strips the bandanna from his head, pulling off his sunglasses to let out the fog.
Water holes pass around us as we continue, slowly now, stopping to look into the olive water. We are still skirting the outer edges of this lower chasm realm, not yet able to find a way into it. New topography is revealed every ten, fifteen feet. Dirk is out in front, and I can see his head drifting above the quirks and jumps of his body like a gyroscope, the way a small bird steadies itself as its grass stalk dips toward the ground.
We stop where a thin hallway of the canyon falls ahead of us. Our eyes hunt in and out of it.
Dirk turns to me and says, “If anyone else was here right now, they’d be sure we were completely lost. They’d be thinking, Where are we going? How are we gonna get out of here? They wouldn’t know that we’re piecing together our knowledge, that it’s the only way to make it.”
I lean my back against the wall, watching him, listening to the instruction of his voice. He has to stop every once in a while and set a benchmark, speaking out loud as if the moment must be understood in English before we can move on. It is a way, I imagine, to keep from getting lost, to verify that we are indeed here, as if otherwise we are dreaming. I imagine he did the same when he was a cop, turning to his partner and riddling him with observations and explanations.
“Lost?” he asks, and then answers himself. “No. Nervous? Yeah, maybe. A little nervous. Kind of like a blind date. It’s a willingness to suspend intention. Let the place talk to you. Let it direct you. You’ve got to examine things, see what qualities make this place what it is.”
His finger lifts to trace the canyon around him. “This sudden narrow here,” he says. “It’s something different. Something to remember. Why? The drainage is cutting through rock a little harder, more resistant. We should know about this. It’ll show up again, and maybe it will be even tighter, maybe impassable. Everything has something to say here. We need to be fluent.”
As we walk ahead, the narrow stretch tightens further. It shoves us down into a smaller and smaller hole. The grace of isolation is overwhelming down here. Sand gathers around the canyon’s inside turns, remnants of lost winds. The outsides are scraped raw by floods. The bedrock carves into snaking hallways of stagnant water, the overlapping walls no farther apart in some places than our shoulders. Our voices dampen whenever we find something to say. We walk bend by bend, the sky swerving drunkenly overhead. In the rubric of geomorphology, this is called sinuosity: a canyon’s urge to twist, a straight line made into a ray of curls as the laws of stone and fluid dynamics rub against each other; the desire to live.
We palm the bare rock as the canyon closes. A dark wind moans over its depths. I see Dirk ahead of me, his arms spread as if in flight, and I know what it means.
“Ends here,” he says.
I come and look over his shoulder. The canyon falls away. There is no route. We have marked another doorway to nowhere. I can see a few ledges inside. We could shimmy down if we wanted, jump from one ledge to the next.
“We could try it,” I say, but I’m not serious. This is one of those places we would tumble into and our bodies would never be found.
“Fuck off,” he tells me.
We both retreat to a higher platform of rock, up in the sun, unloading small bags of food, nuts, dried fruits, sharing back and forth. As he is passing across the nut bag, his hand meets mine. It is rough, skin chipped and scabbed from the dryness and the rocks. Sometimes I can’t help imagining his hands in combat. I see him wailing his fists into someone. These thoughts are so out of place that I try to put them away, but then I remember that this is why I am with him. He teaches me of a world I can scarcely imagine. He is a foreign animal. I am alert in his presence.
I’ve asked it before, but out of the blue, I have to ask again.
“Did you ever cross that line?”
He looks at me once. He knows immediately what I am asking. Did he ever become the beast, the cop who kept hitting someone out of sadistic, uncontrollable pleasure? Did he ever slip through an open door, warrant in hand, hoping to fire his weapon into someone’s chest? I have asked him before, and his answer is always the same.
“Never,” he says.
“I don’t believe you,” I say. And I don’t. With his methods of structuring the world, he could put the line wherever he wants.
“I never did,” he insists. “Sure, I danced the edge. I mean, there is some madness you’ve got to work with. Going to some woman who had her geraniums stolen when ten minutes ago you were fighting fucking tooth and nail for your very life, some goddamned shoot-out, bar scene . . . whatever it was. And you have to put on thi
s face that says, Oh yeah, I’m perfectly sane and rational now. How many geraniums were stolen?”
He eats his apple, thinking about it, shaking his head. “I’ve been there enough times. That cop shit was too intense. Scares me to think about it.” Then he laughs, almost as if he shouldn’t. “It was a fucking gas. I’ll give you that. It’s like walking out here. You’re just on fire. Everything has a story. But you cross the line and you’re on the other side. You never come back.”
He feared he would someday cross the line and find his logic, his cleanly organized world, vanquished like a house of cards. Someone would die at his hands, and he would not be able to turn around and step back to solid ground. He could never trust his own mind again.
“You really think you didn’t cross the line?”
He stops chewing for a moment. “I’ve been in the emergency room,” he says. “The doctor pulls up the pant legs on this guy I just hounded with a nightstick, and I’m looking at these lacerations where I’ve split his shin meat wide open, thinking, Damn, that’s got to hurt. I did that. I did that. Could I have found another way besides beating the crap out of his legs? Did I go too far? It would have been so much easier to just write this sort of thing off, go home, listen to some music, never think about it again. But I’m in bed wondering, Did I enjoy that? Who am I?”
I watch him carefully. He holds his face still. Did he just admit it? I wonder. Does he even know whether he crossed the line or not?
Ten Minutes of Thrill
The air around him smelled of electricity, oil, and water. Somehow it was a fresh scent, a restorative city night after a freezing rain. At midnight the wet pavement had just a touch of ice. Snow had been shoved off the freeway by weeks-ago snowplows, turned black with exhaust.
Dirk stood outside his car finishing a report on the arrest of a drunk driver. The driver was gone, hauled away in another patrol car. Now the only actors left on the side of the freeway were Dirk and a tow-truck driver grappling his chains around the car’s frame, yellow warning lights turning lazily. The chains sounded barbaric, industrial.
Dirk’s own red and blue lights tracked across the asphalt. He leaned against his car, clipboard in hand, pen checking boxes, recording the event. He was proud of his reports. Unlike most police reports, they were written like stories, colorful details added. He let his pen hover, planning the next words.
The arrestee refused to perform any roadside sobriety maneuvers and referred to this officer as “you cocksucker” numerous times.
He could hear a car chase coming through the radio. A stolen Camaro was darting through urban streets with a wolf pack of sirens behind it. The Camaro had just left the scene of a house robbery. Its backseat was piled with stereo equipment and pillowcases stuffed with whatever household baubles attracted the driver’s raccoonlike fascination. A low-grade amateur burglar. The night was alive somewhere far from Dirk, city streets turned into a barrel race.
The tow-truck driver went through his routine of tugs and pulls to make sure everything was secure. The two of them did not make eye contact. They were both tools of the city, the mundane clicking and turning of mechanical parts.
Dirk brought the pen to paper.
This officer observed an empty bottle of Wild Turkey liquor on the passenger-side floorboard in what appeared to be a pool of vomit.
The radio voices sounded calm in their chase. He knew the blunder they were avoiding: appear excited or fearful across the airwaves in such a moment and you have confessed to every patrol car. The voices ran steadily, as dull as if they were reading a grocery list.
“Near collision at State and Main. Still going . . .”
“He just busted a red light . . .”
Dirk listened beneath their tones. The cool-cop voices in the lead spoke secretly of radical danger, incredible speeds, insurmountable concentration, critical judgment, barely contained rage. It was like fast, nasty sex out there: a grainy, subterranean atmosphere of speed and viscera that had everyone’s back arched, eyes dashing like bullets, feet drumming impossibly hasty rhythms against floor pedals. Cross streets ticked off like the spin of a roulette wheel.
Dirk listened to the progress, his pen winding down the page to capture further details of the arrest.
Elsewhere, the Camaro struck the same interstate he was on, hauling a net of swirling red and blue lights behind it. It ripped into the median to shake them, fishtailing, then jumped to the other side into oncoming traffic.
Dirk peered along the freeway’s sulfur-yellow globes. Embers of taillights faded at melancholy, law-abiding speeds. He flipped back through to check his work.
The Camaro was sailing in and out of the median, pouring through oncoming traffic, headlights splitting around it.
Dirk signed his report and stood away from his car. He could now see the fire glow of patrol cars coming toward him from the opposite lanes. Clusters of headlights appeared far off in their own lanes—Blameless bystanders, he thought, if there is such a thing. The clipboard hung from his hand as he judged distances, calculated speeds. People were going to get killed here. Someone needed to end this game.
He opened the door, swung into his seat, slammed the door, seat belt sliding from hand to lock. The clipboard landed in the empty passenger seat as the siren yowled to life. He banked across two lanes and pointed straight at the headlights, driving the wrong way down the freeway. Engine pistons bunched like gathered muscles. Ahead, the Camaro appeared from the opposite direction, hitting bottom over the median, carving a U-turn.
Canals of shadow and light flashed inside Dirk’s car. The engine raged through his body. The thoughtfulness of his report was gone. He was now part of the violation, a predator in the night’s horror, his life poised. He glimpsed the Camaro running up from the median, tires about to catch pavement on his side.
He played his accelerator, calculating exactly when they would meet. Lines of equations stabbed across the asphalt into his eyes from the oncoming headlights, from the Camaro, from the other patrol cars, from the glistening surface of the road. The driver had not checked his sideview mirror. Dirk lay undetected.
The Camaro’s tires grabbed wet asphalt on the shoulder, shrieking. It lurched forward, gaining sudden speed. Dirk dropped back on his accelerator, then pressed it to the floor. He jerked the steering wheel to the right and was instantly pummeled into his seat belt.
The Camaro took most of the force, folding at the impact, its back axle firing out of the body like a spear.
Dirk’s driver’s-side door remained uncrumpled, the hinges intact so that he could be on the ground as soon as he stopped. The two cars grazed across the slick surface, spinning, welded together. They careened into the median. As the spin wound down, Dirk snapped out of his seat belt. He opened his door, watching the grainy, cold earth slide by. The moment it stopped, he was out and moving.
He pulled his flashlight and torched the inside of the car. The driver’s head hung unresponsive. Dirk tried the door. It was locked. With the back of his black-gloved hand, he knocked on the window.
A young man lifted his head from a far-off place. His eyes barely found the side window. He moved from Dirk’s holstered gun to the pen in his breast pocket to his face. He understood nothing. A moment ago he was on fire, terrified and frantic, the world writhing behind him, everyone’s eyes on his taillights. Inexplicably, he was now hovering in space.
Dirk irritably pointed at the lock. The driver followed this pointing and came back to Dirk’s face utterly baffled.
Dirk turned his flashlight butt-first. He drew back and smashed through. Kernels of blue glass showered inward. The man lifted his hands to cover his head, feeling a rush of cold air, the door unlocked from the outside and thrown open. He felt hands. Then he was on the ground, wrists instantly locked together by cuffs.
Dirk pinned the man’s body into a sharp pile of old snow. This was the game. Dirk was the victor. He grabbed a handful of snow, crushing it in his fist, then ground it into the man’s
face. The man squirmed and screeched.
“You like that?” Dirk barked, bringing his face down close, a terrifying vision. The man was in an unbearably hypnotic stupor. Dirk was the animal, the guide hauling him to the other side.
“You like running from the cops? You like causing mayhem? You like trying to get people killed so your sorry ass can get away? Yeah? So you can steal your little shit? What is it you got that’s worth anyone’s life, huh?”
Dirk grabbed more snow, jammed it into the man’s clothes, packed it down his arms, milled it cruelly into his chest. The man screamed and flopped, but Dirk held him.
“How about this? You like this, too?”
Dirk saw the other patrol cars sweeping in. He knew that these officers were probably raging. The dynamics of a chase. Heat would be in their blood for hours. They were shivering with wrath, and if things got out of control, they might shatter this man’s ribs, sinking fists into kidneys until they bled. This snow rubbing was like a good, hard spanking among cops, not the torment that might be demanded. The man got off easy in Dirk’s hands—Dirk, who showed up to this chase at the last minute, not yet burned on adrenaline.
Dirk fisted him up by the collar and said, “I’m your guardian now, you stupid fuck. Just keep still from here on out. I’ll keep them off you.”
The man’s eyes found nothing, stopped searching, in fact. No more screaming, just moaning and drool spurting across his shiny, wet lips. Dirk examined him for a moment, thinking, I am the end of your road. He could see the man’s future. Ten minutes of thrill and now he would go to prison. He would be let out on parole but would never be accepted by most of civilization. No hopeful jobs. Little meaningful sex. He would commit another crime, go to prison again, and again after that. He would kill someone finally. He would never escape.
