Canyons (4 page)

When they had driven fifty or sixty miles Bill suddenly slowed the van and took a narrow, winding road that led off east into the desert, toward the canyons.

It did not look like they were going toward any kind of campground, Brennan thought, looking over his mother’s shoulder out the front window of the van. The road grew worse and worse and at last they were winding over rocks and sand and through sand dunes on little more than a narrow trail. Eventually even that ended.

“Now,” Bill said, getting out and stretching, “we walk.”

“Walk?”

Brennan couldn’t help himself, his voice had a definite down tone to it and his mother shot him a warning look. Walk—with these kids? Brennan got out of the van and shook his head, you’d have to have a whip and a chair.

But if Bill heard his voice he gave no indication. He took gear from the rack on top of the van, laughing and talking and pointing.

“See that canyon?”

Over them rose the rock canyons leading up to the mountains. They had driven past several of them on the highway and turned into the fourth or fifth one. Brennan couldn’t tell for sure now that they were so close to the bluff wall.

“It’s called Horse Canyon. I came up here once years ago hiking and found a trail to a spring in the back of it. That’s where we’re going, back up in the canyon and camp by the spring.”

Brennan looked up at the canyon. It seemed to be all rocks and cliffs—he could see no evidence of any kind of trail at all. The bed of the canyon, which lay straight before them, seemed to be an old riverbed filled with enormous boulders. It was impassable. To get “back up in” the canyon it would be necessary to work along the river and Brennan couldn’t see a way to do it.

“I don’t see a trail,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. He still did not want to ruin this for his mother.

“Don’t worry. There’s one there,” Bill said. He gave each boy a sleeping bag to carry and shouldered a pack, motioned Brennan to take another pack and Brennan’s mother to pick up the rolled-up tents. “Really, it’s not hard at all.”

Which was not quite accurate.

It was true that it wasn’t impossible, as Brennan had thought, but it was hard enough so that Brennan had to help some of the smaller children in a few of the places—just to climb over boulders and cuts across the trail—and even Brennan’s mother felt it was a bit much.

“Do we have to go all the way to the rear of the canyon?” she asked at one point.

“Aren’t there some nice places, you know, closer?”

But Bill insisted. They worked their way up on a small trail that led along the dry riverbed filled with boulders
and smooth, dishlike bowls made by an ancient river that had roared down the canyon. In some places newer runoff had cut across what little trail there was, carrying it down into the riverbed, and here they had to drop into the cuts and climb out the other side.

Whatever else he is or isn’t, Brennan thought, watching Bill up ahead with the pack on his back and helping the small boys—he isn’t a wimp. Brennan was in good shape from running and he was soon breathing hard and his mother, who did not run or exercise very much, was almost staggering.

It was the sort of place Brennan would have loved, had he not been with the rat pack, as he thought of them by this time. The canyon walls rose straight up into the late afternoon sky; towering red and yellow with dark streaks, one bluff feeding to another up into the mountains. To say it was beautiful, he thought, seeing them shoot up over him, was just not enough. The beauty seemed to come almost from inside his mind, so that he saw the cliffs and canyon walls as if he had almost painted them. Here and there a scraggly pine hung on to life and yucca plants and cactus in bloom made color spots that seemed to make the cliffs even more striking. Art, he thought—it was like art. The year before, he’d taken an art appreciation class—largely because he had to—and the teacher, a short woman named Mrs. Dixon, had spent many periods trying to get them to see the art.

“See it,” she would say to them, holding up a picture of a painting by Rembrandt or van Gogh or Whistler. “Really
see
it, inside it—see the brushstrokes? See what the artist was trying to do?”

And he tried that now, to really
see
the canyon, see what the artist was trying to do with it.

God, he thought—that was the artist. What was God trying with this?

Except that he was seeing the beauty with one eye while he was trying to watch ahead with the other and keep up with Bill and his mother and the kids, who were all over the place, sticking their fingers in cactus and screaming, throwing rocks down into the riverbed to hear them bounce, spitting off of boulders, hitting each other, jerking their pants down and mooning each other, throwing rocks at each other …

It was hard to see the beauty.

It took them almost two hours, until evening, to get up into a point where the canyon seemed to flatten out a bit and then another half hour of walking to get across a grassy area to a place where a trail dropped down into some small cottonwoods that were growing around a tiny pool of green, clear water.

“Oh,” Brennan’s mother said. “Isn’t it pretty here?”

Bill turned and smiled at them. “It’s like a calendar picture, isn’t it?”

And it was almost sweet. Even the monsters stopped and were quiet for a moment or two. In the sudden silence Brennan heard birds singing and felt the sun on his neck. It had been hot but there was a coolness in the evening air that
felt refreshing. Brennan lowered his pack and sleeping bag and two other bags and packs he’d been carrying for the younger boys.

“Is this it?” he asked, looking up and around. They were in the end of a box canyon and the walls rose above them making a huge amphitheater. The kids had been yelling and whistling for half an hour, listening to the echoes, but in their silence Brennan could hear himself breathe.

Without knowing quite why, he held his breath.

And in that instant something about the place took him, came into him and held his thoughts. Something he couldn’t understand. Some pull, some reaching and pulling thing that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

He looked to see if any of the others felt it but they didn’t seem to. Bill was still holding his arms out and smiling, the kids were beginning to move again, and his mother was in the act of dropping her pack on the ground and blowing hair out of her eyes.

He let his eyes move up and around the canyon again but could see nothing out of the ordinary. The rock cliffs towered over them, blocking the sun off so that now though it was still light they were in shade and it became almost cool.

Birds flew across the canyon. High overhead an eagle caught a thermal and wheeled out of sight past the edge of the canyon wall.

He shook his head. Strange, the feeling, he’d never had it before and now it was gone. Somebody was saying something and he looked down and saw Bill nodding.

“Yes. This is where we spend the night, where we camp. Let’s get wood for a fire and make some dinner. I’m sure everyone is starved, aren’t we, boys?”

The monsters started screaming and running in circles grabbing sticks and Brennan had to fight to keep from yelling at them.

It was going to be a long, looong night.

He did well.

During the night they went past a camp of bluebellies who had stopped on one of their patrols and Coyote Runs did well.

There were only eight of the bluebellies and they had a large fire as they always did to keep away the darkness so it was easy to see them and count them and would have been easy to kill them but Sancta shook his head.

Not this time. They stood for a time not a long bowshot from the soldiers and their fire, pinching their horses’ muzzles so they would not make sounds to the soldiers’ horses, so close the glow from the fire lit their faces, and could have gone in amongst them. Coyote Runs had his bow ready, an arrow on the string, and
knew he could hit one and maybe another soldier as they rode in, knew it in his heart but Sancta said no.

Shaking his head once, a jerk from side to side that they could not miss and the old leader turned and led his horse back into the night.

And Coyote Runs brought his pony around and led it silently in back of Magpie and did not shoot an arrow at the camp, as he wished, but held back though his neck was stiff and swollen with the need to go amongst the soldiers.

They rode all night. There were no watering places for the horses but they had carried water in clay pots tied to their horses’ blankets and stopped to walk and moisten the horses’ mouths to keep them moving.

Twice Coyote Runs’ pony seemed about to go down and he filled his mouth with water and spit it down the horse’s throat so it would not waste out the side of the horse’s mouth and the pony kept moving and he thought:

I am doing it. I am doing well. I am a man.

They rode all that night until the ridge led to a flat place with dead grass that seemed to go forever and here they stopped and made a cold camp.

They did not stay more than three hours, enough to let the horses rest but not so long they would stiffen up, then Sancta started walking again, leading his mount, and they all followed him.

Always south.

Sancta trotted ahead of them like a hurrying bear and after a time Coyote Runs realized he was beginning to see things. There was gray light coming from the east, over his left shoulder, the beginning of the new day.

Ahead he saw Sancta rolling along, his shoulders moving from side to side, his knee-high moccasins kicking up dust as he ran, his long black hair swaying from side to side and Coyote Runs knew he looked the same.

Knew that he could run this way all day, all night, as long as Sancta would need him to run.

Off to the right, many miles away, he could see the mountains that stood over the place the Mexicans called El Paso del Norte—the pass of the north—where the town lay, the white town and more, the fort where the bluebellies lived, Fort Bliss. That was there as well.

Coyote Runs had never been south this way and so had never seen the fort but he had heard about it. Buildings made of dirt as the Pueblos and Mexicans made them, arranged in a square for protection.

As if, he thought, as if the Apache would come against them in the fort. As if they would simply ride in against them in the fort and die.

Ho! There was madness there. In the bluebellies. The same as they wore dark wool clothes in the summer, buttoned tight to the collar so the heat could not get away and heavy hats to keep the heat in their heads
and rode their horses through the heat of the day—all crazy.

But they fought well. He had never fought them but he heard stories, from Sancta and the others, sitting around the fire—stories of their fights with the bluebellies. They were not easy to kill.

It was hard light now, the sun showing, and he could tell that Sancta was looking for something as he ran, leading his horse.

In moments he swung off to the left and brought the party to the edge of a depression in the desert, a low gully surrounded by mesquite that hung out over the edges. It was as far across as Coyote Runs could throw a rock and Sancta led them down into the bottom of it.

“For the day,” he said to them. “We stop here. Where we can’t be seen by the bluebelly patrols. Sleep.”

Coyote Runs led his pony beneath an overhang of mesquite so there was some small shade and lay on his back on the sand with the rein to the bridle tightly wrapped around his hand.

Magpie settled in next to him so the two horses stood closely together and could use their tails to switch flies from one another.

“Well, how do you like your first raid so far?” he asked.

But Coyote Runs was already asleep.

Brennan had thought as soon as it was dark the children would settle down, or at least slow a bit in their behavior.

He was wrong.

If anything they became more hyper and while Bill—Brennan was starting to think perhaps he wasn’t really aware of things, like the world around him—while Bill took it well and no matter what they did seemed largely to ignore any of the problems, Brennan quickly became sick of them.