The sky is one shade of blue, horizon to horizon. It’s glossy and hard, a vast overturned bowl of fine china baked to brilliant sapphire. Under it, a broken line of humans stretches long and thin across the flats, then bunches thick at steep places where footing is treacherous. Each silent hiker is one bone, one vertebra in the spine of a snake that winds its way over and around crag and boulder, skin against stone.
The pale young man walks in a daze. He is thin. He trudges through an oven, the ground glaring white under that hard sky. When a trickle of sweat starts down his forehead, it’s gone in a second, sucked away by the dust-dry air. Up ahead, his even younger and paler wife limps between two men, her arms around their shoulders. He doesn’t look at them.
“What we need is a vacation together,” he had said one night as they lay in darkness, staring at opposite walls.
She seemed small under the blankets, too small to be a wife and mother. He was exhausted and she was crying again, both of them battered by the wails of a six-month old, the midnight feedings, the walking, rocking, and more wails that lasted until mere minutes before the relentless morning alarm.
“A little communing with nature, that’s it,” he said. She didn’t answer.
He searched the adventure brochures and finally convinced her to leave their daughter with grandma and come on this three-day “survival experience” in the desert a few hours’ drive from home. But he hadn’t counted on the twist of a rope that would slam her foot hard against the cliff as she rappelled down in the early morning light. slam her foot hard against the cliff as she rappelled down in the early morning light.
“Thanks!” she had spit at him later as the group rested on the trail and she watched her toenail blacken. They hadn’t spoken since.
Hours pass. A cruel blush has begun, faint pink on the young man’s pasty forehead. He keeps his dry lips closed to protect his tongue from the air. He blindly sets one foot in front of the other, again and again. Then, gradually, he’s aware of a whisper of moisture brushing his cheek, a sweet hint of green in his nostrils. It’s the muddy San Rafael River, swirling in its channel a hundred feet below, between cliffs dark with mineral stains. The narrow trail skirts the cliff edge, then leads away, out of sight of the river, wandering through slabs of rippled slickrock and across dunes dotted with blade-clumps of yucca, and meanders down a long slope to come suddenly upon the river again, rolling brown at the hikers’ feet. The San Rafael in late summer is no Mississippi. It’s thirty feet wide, chest deep in the center channel, sluggish, sandy, cool but not cold.
Across the water, rust-streaked cliffs rise from a narrow beach to a jumbled slope of boulders that leads the eye up to a new set of hard cliffs, a blackish butte against the sky. This is Mexican Mountain, base camp.
The young wife immediately has her boot off and her foot in the water. She’s grimacing. Her husband watches, then goes to her. “I’m sorry,” he says.
She grabs his arm as she tries to stand, looking up at him with eyes that brim. “It just hurts so much. It’s throbbing clear up to my head.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again, as if he knows no other words.
Holding his arm, she hobbles along the edge of the river to where the others are gathered near a lean-to that the guide has built against a sandstone overhang. The young man gently brushes his fingertips along the back of her hand as it rests on his arm. Her toenail is completely black, the toe purple and swollen. I want to kiss it, he thinks. More gently than is humanly possible, like the way air feels on your cheek, fanned by the wings of a dragonfly that’s here then gone. gathered near a lean-to that the guide has built against a sandstone overhang. The young man gently brushes his fingertips along the back of her hand as it rests on his arm. Her toenail is completely black, the toe purple and swollen. I want to kiss it, he thinks. More gently than is humanly possible, like the way air feels on your cheek, fanned by the wings of a dragonfly that’s here then gone.
The hikers fan out, each searching a site for the required “solo” camp. The pale young couple make their way downstream, slowly, crippled, her arm around his neck. Inside a half-mile, they find the perfect spot, where a bend in the river has left a wide area of smooth sand surrounded by six-foot willows. Three old cottonwoods with their craggy bark and acid-green leaves stand thirty yards away. The San Rafael curves in sunshine, then slips in under the dark red cliffs on the other side, bending again in shadow and disappearing behind the stand of willows on its way to join the wider, muddier Green.
“I’m gonna cool off,” she says. He looks for firewood while she strips and wades gingerly into the stream. He steals a glance at her. The sun hangs low; shadows are long. The air is alive with golden particles and the cliff above the river glows deep brilliant sienna. The stream slides by in shattered color, shards of mirror reflecting the orange cliff in wild patterns broken in ripples by the rich cobalt of the sky. Her body is silhouetted against the molten glare on the water. Her hands seem to be ladling gems as she splashes her sunburned shoulders, and clear droplets like liquid diamonds roll down her back. She turns slowly, nipples erect, skin roughened with goose bumps; golden light skims the tiny blonde hairs of her thighs, then the fuller, darker tuft. She lowers herself into the water chin-deep, gasping just a little. The young man looks away, glancing here and there, picking up sticks of driftwood and dead sage branches, mindless of everything but the vision in the river. He looks again. d sage branches, mindless of everything but the vision in the river. He looks again.
When she stands, the golden water streams down across her skin like summer rain on the smooth marble of an Aphrodite in some mythic ruin, and she wades toward him in slow motion, dripping. He’s blind to her awkward limp.
Behind her the cliff wall shimmers in fluid patterns of light and the only sounds are a rustle of water against sand, a tiny gurgle of whirlpools under the willows, a faint whisper of a breeze in the cottonwoods. Slowly, he stands from stacking wood to face her as she steps from the water. He’s stunned, he’s crazy, he’s in the presence of the sacred. It’s as if, just maybe, he could be in love again. As if it’s the night he first gazed at all of her, in moonlight, lying soft and open across the back seat of his car, a sweet wash of white skin like the foam of a wave in a sea of dark blue.
Now, in this wild place, in this bright slant of coppery sun, she seems to be smiling a little, softly, at him, like she did then. He steps to her, to hold her. As his hand rests lightly on her hip, she says, “Don’t,” and turns her back to him.
There is really no mistaking the absoluteness of her single word, but he refuses to believe it. He’s her husband. He reaches around her from behind, his hands on her naked stomach, pulling her close, her wet skin cool against him.
In her ear, he murmurs, “Mmm, you feel so nice.”
“Don’t.” This time the word is solid ice, an icicle dagger that hangs in the hot air, and she feels so cold he drops his arms to his sides. For one blind second, rage seethes up in him and he wants to throw her to the sand and pierce that cold shell again and again with stone-hard fury.
But he turns and walks stiffly to the river, drops his clothes and wades in, bending his knees till the cool current covers his shoulders and begins to sweep away the pain inside his skin. hes and wades in, bending his knees till the cool current covers his shoulders and begins to sweep away the pain inside his skin.
The western sky beyond the cottonwoods blazes in ripples of pink and orange against turquoise, and around his sunburned face is a rolling glass reflection of the sky. He watches his wife dress, rimmed by sunlight catching the fine gold hair on her body, and he thinks of the moist softness of her lips, the salt and sweet taste of her, the sweet sighs and whispers in his ear as stomachs meet in a slippery film of sweat, the pink warmth engulfing them in sudden gasps, and the long slow touching afterward as the sky deepens to aquamarine. In the desert stream, he reaches down and grasps himself, and the silty flow caresses him, envelopes him, every inch of him, like the touch of an endless feather, tender but insistent, pulling, growing more urgent, and he’s angry and he’s sad as he thinks of her and what they won’t have tonight, and he loves her and he hates her, and he shudders, sending his fluids swirling down the stream, to carry on through thirty miles of desolation to where the San Rafael meets the Green, and on fifty more miles to mix with the Colorado in the tangled stone heart of Canyonlands, and on and on to fade into the parched lands of Mexican farmers, never ever finding the sea.
He climbs out of the water as the sun slips behind the hills, and suddenly everything is blue and gray under fading coral, and a cooling breeze stirs the willows. Silently, he dresses, then the two of them finish gathering wood, build a fire, and put together a simple dinner of ash cakes and dehydrated soup, speaking only for necessities.
They chew and think, their eyes don’t meet, and the sky grows dark, splashed with bright stars. They sit cross-legged in an eerie circle of dancing orange shadows, while around them the blackness seems to have made this vast landscape shrink to a tiny space around their fire. space around their fire.
Something is crawling into the flickering light near the young man’s feet. Just an inch long, a cruel white hook on slow spindly legs, it strolls uncaringly across their sandy dinner table. The long shadow of its upcurled stinger leaps across the ridges of sand like a crazed warrior as its oddly-jointed legs scissor mechanically along. It’s a scorpion, the deadly sort, the fierce kind that with one strike of an upturned tail could make this little desert trip a dark disaster, a morbid memory of desperation and pain, perhaps an ending, an ending of everything.
When he glances at his wife, her eyes are staring, fixed on the thing. It seems like a ghost in the dim mad dance of light. He’s not sure it’s really there. He blinks and it seems there, then gone, then there again, pale and mean.
Very slowly, he reaches for the aluminum pan from the mess kit at his side. With a whoop, he smashes the flat of the pan down hard on the thing, crushing it into the sand, twisting the pan, pushing till he’s sure it’s flattened and dead. He holds the pan there a long time.
When he lifts the pan up, there is nothing under it.
He’s suddenly up on his knees, looking all around the flame-lit circle, straining his eyes to see a tiny rabid phantom scuttling furiously across the ground. Nothing. He picks up a stick and probes into the sand where the dead thing should be. Nothing. He digs more frantically, stirring the sand thoroughly all over the area, around the fire, under him, everywhere. Still nothing. Insane, shouting, he shakes their blankets, he scatters their pans and cups and food and clothes into the darkness. But no tiny monster is there, nothing is there, nothing.
He sits again. He looks at this pale young woman, his wife. Her eyes meet his, childlike, wide with terror. They go on sitting there, the two of them, in the wild flicker of the fire, under the hard black bulk of cliffs standing against deep blue and the silver dust of stars, silent, inert, on and on into the night.
