Canyon Sacrifice (16 page)

The trail angled uphill, then leveled. He squinted, his eyes dry and blurry behind his sunglasses, his contacts sticking now and then to the backs of his eyelids. There at the side of the trail was the wooden sign marking the junction of Hermit and Boucher trails. A mile and a half and a thousand vertical feet to go.

He could make it. He had to make it.

He passed the junction without stopping. His feet were on fire, his hands dead weights at his sides. His head lolled forward. The sun pounded with the force of a sledgehammer on the back of his neck.

He barely noticed the sign marking the Waldron Trail junction. One step. Another. Another.

He stopped every few feet. Each time he halted, he took a few rasping breaths, concentrated on the stretch of trail just ahead, and willed himself to resume walking. One unsteady step. Two. Three. Another halt.

The sun reflected with blowtorch-like heat off the canted face of white limestone where the worn Chalk Stairs climbed upward. He lurched up the pebble-filled gully until he slipped on the small stones gathered in the eroded trail and pitched forward, slamming his elbows and forehead on the sloping rock.

He sat up, bruised and dazed, in the middle of the expanse of blazing white stone, his head throbbing. How had he gotten here? He couldn't remember. Barely knew who he was. But sitting was nice. Far preferable to standing. And if sitting felt so good, wouldn't lying down feel even better?

He flopped backward awkwardly on his daypack, his face to the sky. The hot sun soothed his battered chin and eased the pain where he'd slammed his elbows and forehead on the rock. The worn steps were unexpectedly comfortable. The hot stone surface didn't bother him. It felt fine, in fact.

He'd always heard freezing to death was the best way to go. You just went to sleep. Now he knew dying of heatstroke wasn't
so bad either. You just evaporated.

He took off his cap and sunglasses and tossed them away, giving himself up to the canyon. He tried to unbutton his shirt, but his fingers were too swollen and clumsy. He shifted in a failed attempt to work the pack out from beneath his back only to find he was content as he was, tangled in the pack's shoulder straps, lying half on his side.

Janelle
. He'd done what he'd had to for her. At least he could be proud of that.

Carmelita
. He'd finally begun to win her over with the hatchet and campfire.

He could have been a good father to Carmelita. And to Rosie. He would have been a good father to the girls—unlike James Anthony Bender, whose last name Chuck shared despite the fact that James Bender had left Durango a few weeks after Chuck's birth and never returned, leaving Chuck to a childhood of bouncing around Durango with his waitress/bartender mother from low-rent apartment to trailer park to by-the-week motel room. A month before Chuck's high school graduation, his mother took off for Southern California with the latest in her string of straggly-haired boyfriends. Chuck worked his way through Fort Lewis College over the course of the next six years, sometimes managing only a single class per semester.

Like everyone in Durango, he'd grown up hearing the many stories of the Anasazi who'd populated the region long before the arrival of Navajos and Utes and, later, European settlers. An Intro to Anthropology course early in his college career turned him on to the welcome notion of losing himself in the study of the long-ago Anasazi. A couple of years later, one of his professors told him she saw in his single-minded pursuit of his degree the potential to one day run his own business. Chuck held fast to her suggestion. He embarked on his career as a solo contract archaeologist upon graduating, and prided himself on having
made a decent living over the years while being accountable to no one but himself.

The sun beat down on the Chalk Stairs just as it had on the hot sunny day just over a year ago when Chuck had tracked down his father, having decided the time had come to unleash a lifetime's worth of resentment on the man who'd shirked his parental responsibilities. It had been easy for Chuck to find the man who shared his genes. He ran an online search based on information provided by his mother that turned up a current address for one James A. Bender in El Paso. Chuck climbed into his truck and drove south from Durango through New Mexico and on across the Texas border. There, despite his every expectation to the contrary, the rage he'd long harbored for the father he'd never met turned to pity the instant he saw the broken man who answered his knock.

Chuck's father lived in a small, fourth-story walk-up in a weather-beaten apartment building in downtown El Paso a few blocks from the Rio Grande. The apartment was furnished with cast-offs, and Chuck's father, bowed and skeletal, turned out to be a cast-off himself.

James Bender ushered Chuck into a stuffy living room. Chuck introduced himself as the stooped man in loose slippers shuffled across the room and collapsed into a sagging easy chair. An ashtray next to the recliner overflowed with cigarette butts. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke. A bottle of cheap bourbon sat on a worn coffee table in front of a daybed along the near wall. An ancient television trumpeted the jeering audience of a daytime talk show. Latino pop music thumped through the walls.

Chuck sat on the edge of the daybed opposite his father. James Bender's translucent skin was taut over the top of his skull, which was bald save for a few stray hairs above his ears. His eyes, the same blue-gray as Chuck's, were rheumy and sunken deep in
their sockets. He clung to the arms of his easy chair with claw-like hands, as if holding his head above water.

With surprising energy, he launched into a bitter diatribe aimed at Chuck's mother. She was an arrogant woman, he proclaimed between hoarse breaths. Pig-headed. She had left him no choice but to leave Durango and never look back.

Chuck drew in his cheeks. Granted, his mother was no paragon of respectability. She was a smoker and drinker who'd never managed to get ahead financially. She'd raised her hand at Chuck more times than he could remember. But she'd never struck him. And, tenuous though their life together had been, she'd always kept a roof over their heads and some sort of food on the table.

Chuck cast his eyes around the cramped apartment and filled his lungs with the odor of his father's bleak existence. He crossed the room and rested his fingers on the back of one of his father's bony hands. Veins spread cord-like across it, identical to those that snaked across the backs of Chuck's own hands. He bent close and looked his father in the eye. “I'm glad to see you, to know you're alive,” he told him.

James Bender looked at Chuck with moist, red-rimmed eyes that were blank and lost. He said nothing in return.

“Goodbye, Pop,” Chuck said, using the term of endearment he'd always imagined he'd have used as a boy with the father he'd never known.

He straightened, left the apartment, and drove home. Every month thereafter he sent a check to El Paso that was dutifully cashed until, just six weeks ago, the envelope came back unopened. When a phone call to the El Paso County Department of Health and Human Services disclosed his father's death, Chuck slipped the returned check in a folder marked “Pop” and tucked it at the back of his filing cabinet.

In the weeks since his father's death, Chuck had come to appreciate
all the more the kind reception Janelle's parents, Enrique and Yolanda, had extended him since the first day he'd happened into their daughter's life. As he lay on his back in the middle of the deserted Chalk Stairs, hot stone searing the backs of his legs, he wondered idly why he'd been so reserved in response to the elder Ortegas' warm welcome.

Enrique and Yolanda had grown up across the Mexican border in Juarez. The two fell in love as teenagers, immigrated, and made their way north to Albuquerque, where Enrique secured a city street-crew position through connections with members of the extended Ortega family already living in the city. He and Yolanda built their house together, concrete block by concrete block, nights, weekends, and holidays, on a barren lot in Albuquerque's crime-ridden South Valley that they picked up for next to nothing before Janelle and Clarence were born. They gave their two children non-Latino names and did all they could to shield them from the gang-infested neighborhood that surrounded their home. When Janelle got pregnant and dropped out of college, the Ortegas redoubled their efforts with Clarence, hiring tutors and pushing him to excel in high school and finish college.

Enrique worked his street-crew job for more than twenty-five years, straight through to the day his knee was crushed by a front-end loader. His years of heavy construction work cost him more than just a working leg; he was in his early fifties, barely a decade older than Chuck, but he appeared much older with his weathered face, gnarled hands, and stooped shoulders.

These days, Enrique and Yolanda got by on Enrique's moderate disability payments along with the money Yolanda earned by rising before dawn each day to make breakfast burritos, which she sold to friends and neighbors. Janelle's mother was nearly as slender as Janelle, just over five feet tall, always on the move, with an ever-ready smile and long, gray-streaked black
hair she wore circled in a bun at the back of her neck.

Had Chuck been given the opportunity to choose his parents, he'd happily have selected the Ortegas. Now, as he stared up at the blinding sun from the sloping limestone, he clung to his fading vision of Enrique and Yolanda, and of their daughter and granddaughters.

Janelle
. She'd said yes to him without hesitation.

Rosie
. The firecracker.

Carmelita
. Icy cool.

He closed his eyes. The sun danced beyond his eyelids, red and leering.

He never should have hiked into the canyon. He'd known better, but still he'd set off. For Janelle. For Rosie. And for Carmelita.

His arms fell to his sides. His legs shook, then quieted. He lay, unmoving, as consciousness ebbed from him like water draining from a pool.

S
EVENTEEN

5 p.m.

Chuck choked and sputtered, coughing blood. Liquid trickled down the back of his throat, thick and dark red in his mind's eye. He gagged. Spat weakly. Clawed his way to a sitting position, eyes still closed. Felt something pressing at his back. Tried to shove it away.

He heard voices. A voice. Found he could take in a word or two at a time.

“. . . heat . . . ridiculous . . . can't believe . . .”

The voice was familiar. More liquid filled his mouth, welcoming this time. So what if it was blood? It was delicious. He gagged again. Managed to swallow. Took hold of whatever was pouring the liquid into his mouth: a bottle. Grasped it with both hands and pressed it greedily to his lips. Water, that's what it was. Not blood after all, but water, blessed water.

Chuck opened his eyes. His head spun, then cleared. He looked around him, regaining his senses and remembering. He was seated on the Chalk Stairs, his legs splayed before him. The sun, dropping in the western sky, still blazed down on him. The air temperature remained sizzling. He'd been out for an hour, maybe two.

Someone's hand pressed at his back, steadying him so he could drink.

He rotated his head woodenly and found himself staring into the accusatory eyes of the uniformed student ranger he'd left at Hermit's Rest a few hours ago. He maintained his grip on the young man's proffered bottle and drank deeply. Life flowed back into him with each swallow.

The student ranger replaced Chuck's hat on his head and his sunglasses over his eyes, centered his daypack on his back, and
helped him to his feet, catching him when he toppled sideways. Wasting no time, the young man tucked his empty bottle in his own daypack, snugged his arm around Chuck's waist, and set off slowly up the trail with Chuck held securely at his side.

“You saved my life,” Chuck croaked, barely managing to stay upright and hobble up the sloping limestone.

“Nah. Somebody would have found you later this evening. They probably would have had to chopper you out by then—which would have cost you a fortune, I might add—but you'd have been okay.”

“I can't believe—” Chuck began.

“Don't worry about it,” the young man cut in. “I figured you'd make it to the creek all right.”

“I didn't go to the creek.”

“No kidding. I'm just glad I saw you coming out. Stumbling is more like it. I watched you from the rim. You were hanging in there ‘til you went down. It was clear you weren't getting back up.”

“Ran out of water.”

“'Course you did.”

“Too hot.”

“I told you that.” The young man's tone was surprisingly mild.

“For a student ranger, you're not so bad.”

“We prefer interpretive-ranger-in-training.”

“Better yet, you got a name?”

“Conover. Hansen Conover.”

“Hansen? What kind of name is that?”

“I just walked a mile and a half into the canyon in this heat to save you from your own stupidity, and you're hassling me about the name my parents gave me?”

“No, no. You can go by whatever name you want. I'm just glad to be alive and talking.”