Читать книгу Inhabited - Charlie Quimby - Страница 17

Do you have enough money to meet all of your expenses?

—Vulnerability Index Prescreen for Single Adults

A mallard green BMW with two passengers backed out of a garage. The double door rolled down and kissed the concrete with a sigh. Isaac lowered his head and pedaled slowly until the throaty V8 faded away. He found a place to drop his bicycle out of sight from the road and circled back. He dodged up the driveway of the BMW house and located a spigot in back. If he did take over The Mansion he’d need a reliable water supply close to the canyon trail. Six gallons, enough for four summer days, weighed fifty pounds, and there was no way Rudy Hefner had packed that much in when he lived there. He wished now he had sought out the insufferable Hefner for some pointers.

The wash cut through the uplift that formed the Colorado National Monument. Unscalable cliffs on the left, a less severe hill rose to the west. He followed the dry stream bed for half a mile until a twenty-foot granite wall stopped him. He backtracked, alert for Hefner’s departure point. This time he found the faint trail, which had been screened by a pair of juniper when approached from below. He leaned into the steep slope and imagined his pack full of provisions. After climbing five hundred feet, he paused on a sandstone slab and took measure of his solitude. From this vantage, the houses could not be seen. The valley visible in the distance seemed greener than the one he’d left. His water was warm already. Civilization settled downstream for a reason.

The trail topped out and then dropped down to the main canyon, which sat atop the bedrock blockade. The canyon floor widened. Piñon and broom crawled to the base of sheer sandstone walls. Monumental wedges had sheared from the west face. They slumped against the cliff or had shattered into boulders, boulders into rocks, rocks to pebbles, pebbles to sand—a continuous scatter of broken time. From what he had heard, The Mansion had to be concealed somewhere amid that rock fall.

Isaac homed toward the wall, eventually stumbling across the trail where Hefner had stopped scrubbing out his tracks. He would have to adopt that trick if he stayed. It made no sense to conceal a camp and then beat a path to it. The tracks made a high approach above the rocks and circled back past a split boulder. A sandy flat the width of a single bed lay between the halves—a fist aimed at an opposing palm—forming a stone cocoon. The rock would absorb sun’s warmth, release it into the night and then provide a cool respite for part of the day. A nice spot to sleep, but a disappointment if this were all of The Mansion. Moving on, he saw how two slabs the size of tennis courts had jackknifed over a third chunk of sandstone forming a giant A divided into two rooms. The larger room was tall enough to stand upright in and tapered to a window-like opening at the back. The other, the size and shape of a deep understairs closet with room for one hardy human to sleep.

He unwound from his pack and made a slow turn in the entrance. A tan tarp rolled onto a pole could be unfurled like an awning or pulled over the opening when the weather turned bad. In the corner where a smoke-blackened crevice opened to the sky, a kettle sat atop a rocket stove cut from a Coors Light mini-keg. Nearby, a bean pot and a sand-scoured iron skillet. A quartet of plastic milk cases served as a larder and bookshelf. Provisions and paperbacks commingled. Canned peaches. McMurtry. Wieners and beans. Flynn. A mouse-raided cracker box. Sandford. A quarter jar of peanut butter. Hillerman. Two packets of Taster’s Choice. Burke. A seven-dollar canvas camp chair lay on its back in the middle of the room, its beverage pocket in shreds. An army surplus duffle packed with crumpled clothes. Flattened cans in a plastic bag. A trenching tool and a hatchet. A coil of sisal rope. In the berth-like second room, a sleeping bag and a Bugler tobacco can half filled with sand. The leavings reflected no generosity on Hefner’s part. He had packed in The Mansion’s furnishings a few items at a time and would have had to take them out the same laborious way.

Isaac found a plastic trash barrel buried downhill of the shelter, fed by a flagstone-lined channel to collect runoff, its cover weighted by a cracked bowling ball with Steve engraved above the finger holes. The empty inside was mineral-encrusted but otherwise clean. Until now, The Mansion’s mocking name had seemed fitting for a blusterer like Hefner. But in this orderly canyon abode, Isaac heard the contented roar of a free man.

Sheltered from the wind, he did not sense the rain’s approach until too late. Dark clouds rolled overhead. The narrow view of the sky between the canyon rims allowed no way to gauge the storm’s extent. Desert storms often promised moisture they couldn’t deliver, sending patchy clouds to drop fly swarms of virga that evaporated before reaching the ground. The air throbbed with an ominous overtone and a train wreck of thunder burst over him. Foolish to make a break now. If a monsoon followed, runoff from the acres of bare sandstone above the rim would funnel to the vee at the top of the canyon and spew a sudden, chest-high torrent down the granite slot. Not many drowned in the desert but when they did, it happened fast in places like this. The sky turned even blacker. He unrolled the tarp curtain, tucked himself in the camp chair and waited. A rapid-fire buzz whipped over the tarp and then paused as if the wind needed to regain its breath. A sundering blast threatened to unzip the heavens, then the downpour. The dirt outside boiled into rust-colored slurry. Runlets babbled past, gathering momentum over the slickrock. Down the wash, he heard the clack of stampeding stones. The air seemed carbonated. He stripped off his clothes, let the mist kiss his skin with breaking bubbles.

Isaac woke to the flush embrace of parched earth and rain. A solitary bird called chu-wee, chu-wee, ruhruhruh, and then answered itself. He stepped past the curtain. A thin cascade spouted at the canyon’s head and dropped to a grey-green welcome at the bottom. The cistern barrel was full now, the water settled and clear. He could not see the wash, but he heard its flow, cheerful after last night’s roil. This minute, Isaac liked living here. He liked it very much.

A wind-chime tinkle of faraway voices. He fixed the source, two ant-people daring each other on the canyon’s opposite rim. Something flew apart from them and settled into a long glide. Not a drone—a yellow Frisbee heading his way. He swallowed his shout of protest. Sound had located them; they might spy him. His solitude was an illusion, his effort wasted. He had come this far only to find another place where he did not belong.

The approach he’d taken over the hill would be treacherously slick and his mud-clogged boots would leave an indelible trail. He could wait a day or two for the ground to dry, or try the shorter course down the wash now that the flow had subsided. He explored as far as the first drop. Twelve feet or so with an uneven landing. Rugged but doable. But suppose he encountered completely impassible stretches further down. Could he climb back out or would he be stranded? Not a risk he was prepared to take. He turned uphill, resigned to wait for the mud to dry, and spied the crafty boatman’s solution. Snagged in a piñon, a length of line secured to the trunk, a casting weight on its free end. With the aid of the rope, Hefner could go straight up and down the shortcut.

Isaac appraised The Mansion a final time. He might be the last visitor to know who had lived here. A hundred years from now bits of Hefner’s stash could turn up like arrow points or shards of grey ware. He checked the date on the canned peaches, popped the ring, peeled back the lid and sniffed. Still good. He raised the can to Hefner before drinking off the sweet syrup.

Down the wash he encountered sections scrubbed clean, brown sugar sand and pebbles packed into former potholes, crevices jammed with gravel, mud and twists of grass. Cottonwood saplings bent sideways, latticed with sticks and branches and clots of roots dangling like Druid ornaments. One chute required butt scooting in the stream to fit through a slot. He dragged his pack behind. Where the wash met solid granite, the declivities sharpened and became less forgiving. Twice more, Isaac used lines Hefner had anchored in the bedrock.

A shining quarter moon glinted in the sandy bottom. He kicked away enough overburden to identify a chrome headlight ring. Maybe an entire car lay buried there. He moved downstream, alert to other newly exposed prizes. A flash of milky quartz winked from a packed bed of fine gravel. Its thumb-shaped contour seemed too polished to have been tumbled in the stream. Perhaps a broken dish or chunk of kitchen sink. He dug away the binding crust and pried under its concave back. The palette-shaped fragment flipped free, revealing a grey-green circle with an obsidian center. He bent to make certain.

He’d always pictured glass eyes as marbles.

Isaac cupped the eye in his palm and stroked the smooth curvature. Fine red vessels threaded the white. The iris feathered into grey and yellow vanes that plunged into the pupil’s dark crater. He met its blind stare with a gaze of wonder. What use was another eye? He saw too much already.