By the time he reached me, Ray was bathed in sweat. It was thick and acrid, laden with the scent of fear moved close to terror, but he said nothing. I ran a hand up across his forehead and he took it, reflexively moving it from his head to his heart. His chest heaved with the effort to catch his breath. He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it. “Lead on,” he said shakily.
“This way,” I told him, pointing north along the cliff. “A half mile up, there’s a river. Turn left. Another half mile, there’ll be a confluence. Take the middle fork. It will lead us straight to Castle Dale.”
“And if we find more kids with rifles?”
“Turn right. Follow the river. But either way, you go ahead of me. You can run faster. The dogs will follow my scent, not yours. If they catch up with me, you’ll still have a chance.”
Ray squeezed my had. “No. We stay together.”
I squeezed his hand in return.
We found our way quickly down the rock-strewn slope back onto the Morrison clays and picked up speed on the flat, staying close to the line of cliffs, seeking what slim cover of shadow we could find against the moody starlight that was so quickly being eaten by the storm. Up on the cliff, I heard a dog bark, one quick yelp. It would be only minutes before the dogs led their masters down off the cliff. I prayed that the slot would delay them. Perhaps those on the cliff top could see us even now, two shadows in the crosshairs of their rifle sights. I longed for the cover of the San Rafael River, where the waters might shroud our scent and the shrubs might grow thick enough to hide us.
All along the cliffs, I felt eyes of children on my naked neck, the eyes of children who knew the crazed face of hatred, feared it until it had squeezed their breath, knew it intimately,
lived each day with the specter of its glowing stare and jutting cheekbones, its sorties into the strength of angels. The punishments of Brother Nephi would be swift and ruthless, and chased quickly by the blundering panics of Manti, his witless second hand. The children who pursued us would fear that wrath until it tore them, twisted them, compelled them to eject their torment and call it Satan. And Nephi knew how to dress the devil in my clothes.
I pushed fear from my mind and tried to play the images of the agent’s maps in its place. I conjured the placement of cliffs and the river. It flowed southeast from Castle Dale, winding tortuously down through a shallow canyon of its own. We would follow it upstream, and where it cut through the Dakota cliffs, choose the middle fork of three, toward those distant lights, a telephone, a sheriff. My mind spun with contingencies, frothing with worry. We would pass houses before we reached the town—I had seen them from the bus that afternoon—but what kind of soul dwelt inside each one? Was the nearest a nest of rifles? Would a door open to a mainline Mormon who would receive Ray like a lost son, or find another recluse from the law?
My feet were heavy with the dampness that had seeped into them in the rockfall, but my lungs were filled with the sweetness of life-giving breath, propelling me along at a smooth lope. Ray ran easily beside me, his fingers loose, conserving energy. “Leave me,” I said, “Run till you reach the river. Turn left. Middle fork.”
He stayed right by me, eyes ahead.
A muted
whumpf
signalled the detonation of the C-4 explosive. I reached inside for my last ounce of speed and sprinted.
I heard the hounds bark eagerly behind and above us, heard Nephi’s truck emerge from the canyon and grow nearer. The last hundred yards toward the river flew by beneath my feet.
I could hear the water now. The sound was muffled, telling me that it flowed below us, below a cut bank, in a channel. I imagined the drop, bracing my muscles for the descent. The bank would be steep, but the clay would crumble into a slope nonetheless. I reached the brink of the bank and slid on the soft clay, my heels finding the angle that would carry me safely down to the floodplain where the river rushed.
I heard Ray stumble behind me, then accelerate, his feet uncertain in the darkness. The ground leveled out onto gravel. I kept running, heard the sound of rippling water close now, wheeled left, upstream, toward life as I had known it. Heard the crack of another rifle shot—
Something heavy splashed into the water to my right. I dived instinctively away from the rifle shot. Downstream. Away from town, from help, from hope. Rolled, fetching up in low brush by the river’s edge.
I listened for Ray.
Something large floated quickly away from me, a dark mass breaking the soft, dappled reflections of the starlight on the rippling water. Losing precious time disentangling myself from the scrub, I waded shin-deep into the water, reaching, searching for Ray’s body in the water, lost my footing in the rush of current, and fell. The river was swift and deeper than I had imagined for an autumn stream in the desert. It had swelled from a shallow stream into a rushing river, gorging itself on the storm that had played along the hills all afternoon. I thrashed, groped for the bottom with my feet, hit it, lost it, let the waters carry me onward. I reached for Ray in my mind. Tried to sense him. East. Cold. My mind filled with a panic fantasy of Ray lifeless, his blood billowing out around him like a halo—
I was chilled to the bone. Knew I had to get out of the water or die. The river curved right, sweeping me behind the
cover of the tamarisks. I reached for their branches, caught a broken twig sharp into the pad of my damaged left thumb, released.
I kicked, rolled onto my back, following helplessly along the current, the stars high above me, the dark wall of the tamarisks crowding the channel. I saw the high, distant light of a jetliner following a westbound route through the night sky, thought of its passengers, tired businessmen homeward bound, mothers with restless children, stewardesses rolling carts with drinks and peanuts down the aisle. I dreamed a signal of my distress, wondered if my tiny voice might whisper in the pilots’ ears. Wait, they’d say; I hear a person in the darkness, a human lost in the desert; let’s find her, warm her, raise her to our wings and feed her peanuts, wrap her in blankets. The fantasy held such sweetness that warm tears ran from my eyes into the roiling waters of the San Rafael.
Slowly, I realized that the waters were ebbing, carrying me from the channel to the shallows. I rolled. One foot hit, and then the other, and I was aground. I climbed out on the sandbar and watched for Ray, tracing the bouncing starlight down the riffles, hoping for a glimpse of the interruption his dark form would make.
He was not there.
I could sense you. You re a strong signal … .
I reached with all my senses. Nothing.
I wiggled up into the cover of the tamarisks, squeezing between their myriad whiplike branches, now catching a spiderweb across my face, now flushing a sleeping bird. The tamarisks danced in the wind, sighing, rubbing their branches together like a madwoman wringing her hands. I found a small clearing and sieved my thoughts from the burble of the rushing waters. I was cold, dangerously cold. I worked quickly to shuck off my blue jeans and wring them dry, and then my
socks. Poured water from my shoes, rechecked my pockets to see what resources they might hold, wishing for the pocketknife Ray had taken from me two days ago, so long ago, a lifetime past in a place far away called Innocence, in the time before Salt Lake City.
I found two quarters and a dime, and my little packet was still there. I knew that the matches would be dry, their heads were coated with paraffin. I briefly considered building a fire. Abandoned the idea.
The matches won light wet tinder, and they’d find me in an instant. I considered wrapping up in the Mylar blanket. But I’d reflect lightning like a beacon.
I wrestled off my jacket, wrung out its burden of wetness, skinned off my shirt. The jacket I put back on; it was synthetic fleece and would warm me even with its dampness. The jeans were a greater problem. They were sodden, and wet denim, I knew, would leach the strength from my muscles. I pulled my knees up underneath my jacket, wrung the heavy fabric again, and waited. Listening. I did not have long, I knew. I must decide either to leave the jeans behind or reclothe myself in them. Thinking of the thousand scratches the tamarisks could lend me, I struggled back into them, staggering with the effort. I wrung my socks again, worked my stiffening fingers over the laces of my shoes, got up, looked and listened for Ray one more time, heard shouting along the banks behind me, and moved.
I played the maps across my mind again: To the east, if I were above the banks, I faced two, three miles of badlands and cliffs, then a two-mile climb up a long, gradual slope to a BLM campsite named the Wedge. It might hold campers and, with them, radios, or with luck a cell phone angled high enough to send my voice to Price. I needed help desperately, and not just for my sake but for Ray’s. Was he alive? I peered again through the branches, searching for him, longing for him. He
had felt the danger, but I had lured him down here anyway. His blood would coat my hands just as surely as those now buried in the canyon.
A cold stab shot through me as I realized that the Wedge was on the north side of the river and I was on the south. I pumped my legs, working my knees hard against the frigid iron that was the denim. I searched my mental map for a ford, a shallow. Hadn’t there been a BLM road downstream before the Wedge? Yes, I was certain: There was a private inholding along the riverbank at a place called Fuller Bottom. Would I find a friendly human there? Or Ray, a faster swimmer, waiting for my approach? I might find a ranch, a corral, or less. Worse yet, I knew, I might stumble right inside the nest where Brother Nephi sowed his hungry seed.
I whisked through the brush, weighing speed of motion against the level at which I made too much sound. I shook my head, cold to the point of whispering to myself, reasoning my way through my predicament. The rifles Ray and I had seen on the cliff top had come on foot from the west or south within minutes of Manti’s call. Was their compound near, or had Nephi deployed them from his truck? Fuller Bottom was east, and perhaps safe. But no, it had those roads, big graded roads, over which Nephi’s truck could roll quickly, and he might meet me there. I hastened my pace.
Where
was
Ray? I could not sense his presence. Had a bullet found him? Or had he found himself westward, toward help?
I glanced overhead, watching for the needle shapes of rifles above the upper banks, taking quick bearings from the stars. The river was snaking, I knew, winding between the banks in sinuous curves as it hastened to the east. I calculated a doubling of the distance of Ray’s swimming over my scramble through the brush, if I continued to follow the bank.
Cold was seeping into my shoulders. “I’ve got to keep moving,” I whispered to myself. “I have to find him.”
Have to help
him. I got him into this. My lie. The one I told myself. That I could do this, fix this, solve the crime and win his favor,
my freedom, his admiration.
Another twig scraped my face, raising a bloody weal. I let the sting keep me conscious, distract me from the cold. I fed on the pain, met it with a lover’s heart. Rain pelted my face. I considered scrambling above the bank, where I could move faster, make better headway, make fewer oscillations from the straightest track. Knew that above this bank, on open ground, they’d pick me off like skeet.
I wondered what time it was, wondered when Not Tom would send in searchers, helpers, friends with better rifles.
But he won’t know where I am. He knows the way to Sherbrooke’s site, at least by road and trail, but that would take an hour and put him there by foot. The emergency transmitter on the helicopter is dead, and even if it were live, it’s sitting in the bottom of a narrow slot, where line-of-sight radio surveillance will miss it. A search plane can do no good before daylight, and then it will find only rubble.
I hurried onward, doggedly, thinking now about the chances missed.
What if I’d accepted Ray’s blessing? Might I then live? Might he?
I thought of the fear that had kept me from joining that gathering, fear of change, the unknown, the unseen. So foolish that now all seemed.
I pressed on, breaking here and there into the corridor between the upper bank and the tamarisks, ready to dodge back into their cover if I needed it.
I’ll find help at Fuller Bottom. Ray will be there; I’ll fish him from the waters and warm him with my sorrow, my apology, my … love. We’ll climb the ramp to the Wedge. There’ll be helpers there, nice people with cell phones, a warm fire, hot chocolate … .
The night wore onward, punctuated only by the shifting patterns of stars and clouds, the whispering of the wind, and the yelps of distant animals, a coyote here, another call there that sounded like a child pretending to be a bird. Now a dog
barking in the distance, and another answering it. I listened for trucks, saw another airplane fly high overhead, followed the far arc of a satellite barely bright enough to see. Could it find me? Could it hear my heart beat, smell the harshness of my breath? I was the daughter of a technological world, running scared through endless halls of brush and dens of animals, running, hurrying, into the quiet, too quiet, perhaps a trap—
I trudged onward. Fatigue wrapped me in its heavy cloak. As my stride slowly shortened, I heard voices in my mind, heard again Ava’s uncertain welcome, Katie’s chiding challenge.
We saw you coming
, the voices told me.
You live outside God’s love, in the lie. You’re not of us. Loneliness is a lie; don’t you hear us? Follow your heart. Find Ray. Bring him home to us.