NICK RETURNED the coyote effigy to the burial cave without encountering the Navajo tribal police or anyone else and arrived back in Salt Lake late Sunday night. Free of the artifacts—all but the pot he’d broken and the basket he would return on the San Juan trip—he told himself that nothing stood between him and Day now. Until he found the note his roommate Jack had left on his door. Day called.
She knew he’d gone somewhere. Imagining what she must be thinking, Nick picked up the phone and called her.
“Hi,” she said. “I saw your truck in town Friday night.”
No condemnation in her voice. Just resignation and curiosity.
“I went backpacking. Down south.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Nick couldn’t answer right away.
On the other end of the phone Day felt his hesitation. “Did you go with someone else?”
“No.”
His answer was a breath, a flat denial. But his discomposure was evident.
Nick clutched the receiver, knowing he should lie. Say something about needing to be alone, by himself.
He couldn’t lie to Day. All he could do was stand there, holding the phone.
She said nothing, and finally he told her, “I’m through with school Friday. I’ll be home for good. I thought I’d bring Bob to spend the night. In your guest room?”
“Our guest room?”
He felt such relief he could have cried. She wasn’t going to question him. She had accepted his unexplained trip. “Our guest room,” he said. “Is it okay?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind sharing the house with a couple of dogs. I promised I’d take Coupon and Ninochka. Zac’s modeling in L.A., and Grace is going with him. They’re going to some movie premiere.”
Nick remembered Kah-Puh-Rats, the movie Zac had been filming when he became psychotic in Cataract Canyon. It was out on video now, but one viewing had been enough for all of them. No one liked to remember when Zac was sick.
“Bob will like seeing the dogs,” Nick agreed. “And I’ll like seeing you. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Nick.” In Moab Day felt her own relief. He hadn’t been escaping her; he’d just needed some space. Maybe if they ever found his sister, he would need less.
WHEN HE DROVE into the Rapid Riggers lot on Friday, it was four o’clock, and the sun was sinking, coloring the river and Carl Orson’s Santa Fe-style building on the opposite bank. A circus of flags and banners waved from beams in the adobe, and Carl’s row of orange-and-blue rafts was impossible to ignore. Even Bob found his voice to say, “Oh, my God. When did that happen?”
The spontaneous response made Nick laugh. But looking around Rapid Riggers made him frown. The four new rafts and those he’d painted that winter sat on trailers in the yard, but the row of Suburbans had a used and abused look, and the whole outfit appeared vaguely untidy.
“While you were sleeping,” said Nick. “Want to get out or go right over to the house?”
Before Bob could answer, the Porsche turned into the lot.
“I’ll get out.” Bob’s legs had recovered from the accident. His primary difficulty with walking was balance, and the solution was practice and concentration.
Nick walked around the hood to stand near his friend, but his eyes smiled at Day, emerging from the Porsche. She was brighter than the other colors of spring in a yellow stretch-knit dress and black-patent leather boots.
As the dogs tumbled after her, Nick said, “Hi, Ninochka. Hi, Coupon, you little stinkpot.” When Day came over, he hugged her. “I love you.”
She clung to him, kissed his mouth, a lipstick kiss, then turned to Bob and embraced him. “Hi, you. I’m glad you’re here. Susan’s on a four-wheel-drive trip, but she’s coming over for dinner.”
“Good,” Bob said.
Coupon wriggled around his sneakers, and Bob carefully bent down and picked him up. As he straightened, he grabbed Nick’s arm, catching his balance.
Nick smiled encouragingly, and he and Day both watched Coupon kiss Bob’s face. Day didn’t think Coupon was the ugliest dog in the world anymore. Zachary had damned good taste, and so did his dogs.
She told Bob and Nick, “You should see the River Inn. It’s about ready for the grand opening.”
“Wish we were.” Nick grimaced at the river outfit and caught Day’s eye.
They needed to talk. If he was in for the long haul with her, the same was true with Rapid Riggers. And they’d done things her way long enough.
SUSAN BROUGHT VEGETABLES from her garden for dinner, and together she and Day and Nick made spring rolls and a vegetable stir-fry. The four of them ate on Day’s back patio, and it was decided that Susan would drive Bob to Grand Junction the next day. She visited with them till ten, when Bob said he was tired and had a headache and went to bed.
Nick locked up the house and joined Day in the bedroom, and they moved together in the dark, desire heightened by their recent separation. As they kissed, Day felt all the tender magic she’d always known with Nick. Commitment carried it further. They couldn’t prevent the bed’s rhythmic rocking, but Day pressed her mouth to his shoulder, muffling the cries she wanted to make. His hands held her through the emotion and physical release of orgasm, and Day had never felt more certain of his love.
His friend sleeping in the next room reassured her that Nick was done running. That he had grown into a man who would stay.
Afterward, fitting her tightly against him, cradling her with his whole body, he said, “Day, we need new vehicles.”
It was the last thing she’d expected him to say. She realized they’d never really reached an agreement about new equipment—just a temporary compromise. Nick was back now, and his ideas about how to run the outfit hadn’t changed.
“Nick, it’s such a risk,” she said at last. They already had one loan out. “Payments on the kind of money you’re talking about could put us under.”
That wasn’t going to happen. “Is that all?” he asked. He held her close.
Day knew what he was saying.
They had each other.
Giving up, she said, “Oh, get your frigging loan.”
“I thought you’d see it my way.”
Day wriggled out of his arms. “I almost forgot. I have something for you.” Naked, she went to her chest of drawers. Returning to the bed, she switched on the bedside lamp and handed him the gift-wrapped box.
It looked like a clothing box, and there was a bulging envelope taped on top. He opened it. After the word “Congratulations!” she had stuck a Life Saver candy. Nick kissed her. He hadn’t thought his becoming certified as a paramedic mattered to anyone but him.
Smiling, he unwrapped the box and opened it.
She’d made him some paramedic pants, with pockets for all his supplies.
BOB LEFT THE NEXT DAY at noon, and on Monday Nick began teaching the annual Moab classes in advanced first aid and wilderness medicine and CPR. They were attended by guides throughout the canyonlands, and even Grace and Zac signed up. They would be using the Rapid Riggers river permits to guide canoe trips from the inn. Day needed to renew her certifications in order to drive passengers to the put-in.
Nick and Day rode bicycles to the community center, which was on a ridge overlooking town. But as soon as they entered the room where the class would be taught, they separated, so that he could prepare to teach and meet with the other instructor. When Zac and Grace and Fast Susan came in, Day sat with them in the back row, drinking the bad coffee provided and listening to other guides and outfitters exchange stories.
Nick opened the class. “Welcome to advanced first aid and wilderness medicine. I’m Nick Colter of Rapid Riggers River and Jeep Expeditions. I’m a paramedic. This is Lorraine Gates of River Legends. We’ll be instructing this class. Please sign the sheet that’s going around the room, so we’ll know you’re here.”
He explained that most first-aid classes were designed for urban environments where hospitals were minutes away.
“In the wilderness, you can find yourself with an emergency situation when you’re days from help. So in this class we teach what we call second aid, which helps you care for injured people until they can reach the definitive care of a medical team.”
That morning they reviewed the ABCs of rescue. Airway, Breathing and Circulation. Day had taken the course many times before, so the concepts were familiar, but she paid keen attention. One horrible day in Cataract Canyon had forever affected the way she viewed first aid and CPR.
At noon when they broke for lunch, Nick got away from the questioning students to eat with her. They’d packed their lunches together that morning, and they ate them outside in a covered pavilion above the Moab Valley. Nick was wearing his sunglasses, with a cotton keeper strap attached.
The sight transfixed Day. She forced herself to think of other things and eventually remembered her talk with Susan. She told Nick how Susan had said he could post a message for Kelly on the Internet. “It can say anything. You probably want to do something straightforward like‘Kelly, I’m looking for you.’ You could have a question, too. Something no one else could answer.”
Nick frowned over the sandwich he was eating. Setting it down, he reached for Day’s notebook and pen, which she was using to take first-aid notes. He wrote, “Kelly—I am looking for you. What is the name of the—”
He stopped. What if the Internet turned up nothing, too? He’d been through this before, trying to find her. The disappointment was intense, affected him for weeks. He put down the pen. “Let’s not do this.”
“Nick.” Day looked away from the strap holding his sunglasses.
“She’s not going to be on the Internet.”
As he resumed eating, she read what he’d written. “What’s the name of the what? Come on, Nick. Let’s just try.”
He drank some more water. “The mouse.”
Day tipped her head sideways, interested. “What mouse?”
“I made up stories about him. He was a thief and a chief. He took care of the other mice.” If Kelly was alive and if she could remember anything about their childhood, she would remember the name of that mouse.
He gazed down at the streets of Moab. “We never ate the mice.”
Day closed her eyes. She had to find that woman. For Nick. And for Kelly, wherever she was.
WHEN THE WEEK of first-aid and CPR classes was over, Bob came to Moab for another overnight visit, and this time Susan suggested that the two of them stay upstairs at the Rapid Riggers office. It seemed to work well, and on Sunday, Nick asked Bob to help him with some simple work on the back porch. Untangling old lines, checking to see if they were frayed.
Having his friend there working gave Nick more peace than he’d known since the accident, and he was eager for Bob to leave the rehab center and come back to Rapid Riggers. It looked like that could happen soon. Susan and Bob both said they’d been very comfortable upstairs.
To give Bob a sense of his value to the outfit, Nick talked to him about the new vehicles and rental mountain bikes he wanted to buy. Bob surprised him by saying, “You should wait till July to, you know, go to the bank. Then, you have…money.”
Nick caught his drift. In July the outfit would appear fiscally robust. It sounded like wisdom, and he met Bob’s eyes and said, “Yeah, I think you’re right. Thanks.”
Susan drove Bob back to Grand Junction that afternoon, and when she returned, it was with the news that he could move home the following weekend. She and Day and Nick talked about it in the reception room while Leah and Joe reorganized the kitchen for the upcoming season.
Nick asked, “Are you really going to be okay, Susan?”
“No problem.”
“Upstairs is okay?”
“We love it. I’m going to make curtains this week.”
“I see.” Nick smothered a grin. “None of us asked how was last night.”
Susan patted his cheek affectionately. “You have a dirty one-track mind. And it’s a good mind, too.”
They embraced. “It was really great to have him back today, huh?”
Susan said, “It was the best.”
NICK AND DAY rode their bikes to work the following morning, and as he unlocked the office door, Nick told her, “I need a swamper for that Cataract Canyon trip. I’m not sure who to ask.”
A swamper helped with unloading gear from the raft, setting up the Groover—the toilet—washing dishes, et cetera.
“Can’t Zac do that?”
He wheeled his bicycle inside, and she rolled hers after it. As they leaned them against opposite walls and removed their helmets, Nick said, “Another pair of hands would be good.” He didn’t want to come out and say Zac’s mental health worried him. The first time he’d mentioned it had been enough.
Day wished he trusted Zachary more—in many ways—but it couldn’t be helped. She stepped behind the counter to consult the schedule. “Susan’s running Westwater that week, and Joe has a Needles trip.”
“What about Leah? I can let her row some, see how she does in Cataract before we give her any passengers of her own.’
Day’s heart clenched. Not Leah. She wasn’t ready for that. To hide her insecurity, she went into the kitchen and began making coffee.
Nothing in the way Nick had spoken should make her afraid. He wouldn’t sleep with another woman. But why didn’t he ask me? Maybe because she was needed in the office.
Or because it was Cataract.
Day abandoned the coffee and returned to the reception counter, where Nick was flipping through the logbook. “Nick, why don’t you take me?”
THE SAN JUAN came first.
They left early Wednesday morning. The put-in was just three hours from Moab. They drove there in Nick’s truck and were rigging the raft by nine. By ten, they had the boat in the water, after watching three others launch.
Day didn’t even seem to notice the extra ammo can Nick tied into the raft, the can that contained a 1500-year-old basket, the last artifact in his possession. Nick had known she wouldn’t. She had other things on her mind. The river.
Trying to rid herself of just that worry, Day coated herself with sunscreen, picked up Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, which she was reading, and settled into the raft. The water raced by, carrying the new spring snowmelt from the San Juan Mountains. They wouldn’t see white water until tomorrow, and the most difficult rapids on the river were only class II, but already her stomach was swimming. She’d skipped breakfast.
As Nick shoved them away from the shore and stepped over gear on the way to his seat, Day studied the mud banks, the low slickrock that would grow to towering sandstone cliffs. “I love it down here. Moab’s getting so crowded. But here there’s nothing.”
Nick fitted the oars in the oarlocks. “True.”
The edge in his voice reminded her that he’d lived down in this area before he’d come to Moab. “Nick, where was that shack?”
The shack? The rhythm of the oars possessed him. It was a rhythm that had saved him, a rhythm Sam Sutter had taught him. “Outside Covenant. Why?”
“Maybe it would help you to see it now.”
Nick had never thought to go back. He wasn’t sure the shack was even standing—or how he’d feel about seeing it if it was. “I don’t know if I could find it.”
The subject burned away in the peace of the morning, under the sun evaporating water droplets from the raft. Spotting a beaver paddling on the far side of the river, Nick nudged Day and pointed.
She laid aside her book to watch the coffee-and-cream water and the banks passing like a slow movie, to follow Nick’s sun-browned arms as he rowed by the green cottonwoods on Sand Island.
“This was the first river my dad ever took me on,” she said. “I was about six. I loved it. We had a big mud fight. Him and Grace and me.”
Nick knew what those family trips were like. In high school Sam had brought him along and never stopped him from climbing as high as he wanted on the cliffs along the river corridors. From the Colorado, they’d hiked up Horse and Jasper canyons. Day had groaned under her pack, and she and Grace had sunbathed on the rocks while he and their father explored.
“Do you remember the first time I kissed you?” he asked.
“Yes.” It had been in the Doll’s House above Spanish Bottom. Day had been sixteen and had wanted to stay down on the river beach, but her father had insisted she hike to the rim. At the top she’d found an isolated rock and collapsed in the shade until Nick found her.
“It was the first time anyone kissed me with his tongue. Remember when my dad found us?”
“He didn’t buy the line about you having something in your eye.”
They both laughed. For the most part, Sam had always let them be, as though he’d known he couldn’t keep them apart if he tried. But as the years passed, he’d said how he felt about Nick’s treatment of his daughter.
One remark, the last thing he’d said on the subject before his death, would stay with Nick forever.
Aware of the memory, living with it, Nick shipped the oars and crawled back in the raft to lie beside her against the dry bags and let the river carry them. Taking off Day’s sunglasses and setting them aside, he kissed her beneath her Rapid Riggers hat. Then he unfastened her life vest and unbuttoned her blouse. “Remember the first time I did this?”
“Yes.” Beneath her hat brim, she watched his fingers, his brown hands.
In his mind Nick saw the basket in the ammo can. By nightfall it would be gone, and he would be free.
He slid his hand into her blouse, cupped her breast over her bikini top. Her tremulous response excited him. In love with her, he asked, “Will you marry me, Day?”
The disbelief in her eyes turned rapidly to joy. She nodded and pressed her head against his throat. Yet even as he held her and knew that he was the luckiest man alive, Nick thought of the basket.
Day had forgiven him ten years of indecision. Of callousness. Of confusion. Of other women.
But pot hunting was a felony. And he wasn’t sure she would forgive that.
“DID YOU GET a permit?”
“I knew you’d ask that.”
Day continued to eye him suspiciously. Nick’s moral development did not always extend to getting the right permits, and he’d just eddied out on the Navajo-reservation side of the river.
He grinned. “So the way I see it is that I rowed, so you should pitch the tent and set up the Groover.”
“All right.” Uncomplaining, she loosened the knots on the webbing that secured the dry bags.
While she set up their outdoor bathroom behind some tamarisk, Nick carefully moved the basket from the ammo can to his day pack. The pit house where he’d found it was a half hour away, a climb up a nontrail on the side of the canyon.
When Day emerged from the brush, Nick said, “I want to go up to a ruin I remember. I think it would be a hard climb for you.”
Day trusted his judgment on that. “I’ll stay here and read.”
“I’ll be back in, say, an hour and a half.”
“Have fun.”
Up on the mesa top, a half hour later, he found the pit house.
The sight shouldn’t have shocked him. It was just as he’d left it.
Gutted.
Nauseated, he remembered how he’d found it, when the floor was smooth, when the sand had covered all but the rim of that single basket. There had been others, too, and an ancient twig figure, which he’d kept for a time, then sold for four thousand dollars.
Now there was a gaping hole in the floor.
He remembered the tents in New Mexico. They’re doing the same thing. To excavate a site, whether haphazardly or methodically, was to destroy it. Even archaeologists admitted that.
Nick wished he’d left this ruin as it was. He wished he could be discovering it for the first time now, with maturity, and that he could go down to Day and bring her back here. They would touch nothing.
As the sun turned the slickrock and sand into mounds of copper and gold, he put the basket in the earth and carefully buried it, and used his boots to scrape the dirt back into the hole.
He had expected the act to make him feel free. But as he left the pit house and began walking back toward the canyon where he’d left Day, he knew he would never be free of what he’d done.
And maybe that was as it should be.
“WHAT’S WRONG?” she asked him in the tent that night.
Nick shrugged in the dark. His conscience had never manifested itself in his body before. But tonight he couldn’t make love. “I don’t know. Nervous about getting married.” It was close to the truth. He hugged her naked body. “Just lie close to me for a while.”
She did.
Outside, frogs sang in the tamarisk and the river whispered as it slid by.
After a minute he asked her, “How do you want to get married?”
Day gave herself the advice she would offer any woman given the chance to make an honest man of Nick Colter. “Soon. Like at the courthouse on the way home.”
She was transparent and candid. He loved her for that. And for loving him so much.
“Truly?”
She nodded.
His body responded to her love. “Okay.” He pressed against her. “I think I can do this now.”
“I’m noticing.” She moved up onto her knees.
“I can definitely do this.”
When she felt the muscles of his thighs behind hers, it excited her more. Feeling that excitement, Nick did all he could to take her higher. He kept his mind blank of all but her, until he came inside her. Then, however, the guilt assaulted him, and he knew why he didn’t feel free.
The mug and the basket and the fetish were gone.
But other artifacts had been sold.
And the life he was bringing to Day had been bought on those gains.
THE NEXT MORNING, Day met her first rapid of the trip.
“Doing okay?” he asked as the sound of the white water grew louder.
“Sure.” Just a little rapid. Class I +.
“This one’s nothing. Four-Foot Rapid.”
Nick rowed into the white water, and Day hung on. The bouncing of the boat and the spray of the water made her stomach feel as it had when she’d rappelled. Then, suddenly, it was over. It had only been a riffle.
Nick shipped the oars and climbed to the back of the raft where she sat. “You know what I think?”
“What?” She tried to look as if going through the riffle had cured her fears.
“I think you should row.”
Day knew he was right.
She rowed Eight-Foot Rapid and the Upper Narrows, and the feel of the oars was something she remembered from long before. She had liked rowing once. Now, guiding the raft in the current gave her a sense of power, of competence, of all she could do. She’d been born beside a river, descended from river people. She was Sam Sutter’s daughter.
And Nick’s kind of woman.
There on the San Juan, she was her own kind of woman, too. Day liked that very much.
As they left the Upper Narrows, her limbs and posture felt strong, straight energized. Resting on the oars, she gazed downstream toward Ledge Rapid. “Do you want to row?”
She was watching the white water, her fingers still wrapped around the oar handles. Pleased with what he saw, Nick lay back on the dry bags and made the ultimate sacrifice. Yawning, he said, “And you thought I was just taking a little break.”
AS THEY DERIGGED that night, he said, “Maybe we’ll have you on the Selway yet.”
Her stomach flipflopped, but she replied, “Who knows?” Fear returned. Cataract. She’d played in Class II white water today. That was nothing.
“Day?”
How could he pick up on things so easily?
“Just leave that stuff. Sit down with me.” They lay together on the sand, and he cradled her against his chest. “What gets to you most about that accident?”
“The screaming.” She told him something she’d never said. “He was wearing his glasses held on with that kind of keeper strap, like you wear. They were twisted sideways on his face, and he couldn’t move them, though his hands were free. I never knew why. Whenever I see those keeper straps, it all comes back.”
Nick knew about things like that. Whenever he saw his guide shell with the hood inside out, it reminded him of the mountain biker’s body beneath the Portal Trail. He saw everything all over again.
“You don’t have to go, Day.”
It surprised her that she didn’t see Leah and Shep in her mind.
She didn’t even see her father.
Just herself.
“I think I do.”
TWO NIGHTS LATER they camped at the take-out, and in the morning they loaded the truck. Tying the boat into the back, Nick said, “Want to get married?”
Day was trying to hoist the cooler into the truck bed. “Today?”
“Don’t try to lift that. I’ll get it. Yes, today. Want to?”
“Yes!”
“We don’t have rings. What do you think? Trading post?”
“You are so cheap.” They’d buy silver Hopi wedding bands. Day loved the idea. “Yes, trading post.”
It was early, but there was a trading post near Lake Powell, and they stopped there and found matching silver bands with the signs for water and for thunder and lightning etched on them.
“Give us a minute,” Nick told the man behind the counter and drew her away.
“We could go to Salt Lake, Day. Get you a diamond. I’ll buy anything for you. Tell me what you want.”
“You. And Hopi wedding bands.” Her charm bracelet was silver, too. And the Aquitaine he’d given her for her birthday. No other jewelry mattered.
Nick went back to the counter and bought their wedding bands for forty dollars.
“IF ANYONE HAD ever told me I was going to get married in Blanding, Utah…” Nick muttered as they approached the courthouse in the dry desert heat.
“Or that you were going to get married at all.”
They paused outside the brick building, and her blue eyes asked if he was sure. All around him was the edgy feeling that came from the town, this part of southeastern Utah, this land where cattle and mining and old values were king, where a man could dig up pots because the government was his, and government land was his, too. Where people disciplined their children without interference. Do as you see fit.
In slow small steps he was rising above his childhood. By some miracle he’d found a friend who loved him, who had been willing to wait for him to make that climb. He embraced her. “How many of my babies do you want to have?”
“Six?”
The clerk who issued their license was young and pretty. “Just get off the river?”
“Yes.”
“I saw your boat in your truck bed.” She notarized the document and handed it to Nick.
He said, “We need someone to marry us now.”
“Let me see who I can dig up.”
She found the mayor. Beaming at the prospect of fulfilling such a happy function, he collected the clerk and a court reporter as witnesses. In his dry little office that smelled of Utah dust, the mayor said, “Do you, Day, take Nicholas to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward…?”
“I do.”
“Do you Nicholas…?”
“I do.”
They exchanged rings, and Day watched his hand slide hers on her finger and knew she would never take it off. She put the other ring on his hand and silently bound him to be faithful, to be hers forever.
“By the power invested in me by the state of Utah, I pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
Nick did, then thanked the mayor and gave him a tendollar bill for officiating. After signing another document, they left, and when they were outside the courthouse and down the steps, he and Day grabbed each other. In her dusty wraparound cotton miniskirt, she jumped up on him and wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck, and he carried her to the truck and held her against it and took her mouth, amazed that she was his wife.
And he her husband.
The courthouse window opened, and the clerk and the court reporter whistled enthusiastically and blew on a toy horn.
NICK DIDN’T HEAD straight home.
Without explaining, he turned toward Covenant on the small eastward highway, and he watched the dirt roads, the ranch roads, the roads to nowhere.
Day knew he wasn’t going back to Moab. She knew where he was going, and she said nothing, but moved over on the bench seat and buckled herself in beside him. She studied the desert outside and felt his bare leg against hers and gazed down at her ring. They were married. She was married to Nick Colter and wanted to sing in triumph.
Rolling lines of sagebrush and slickrock outcroppings, humps of pinkish-brown sandstone, poked up from the desert, giving texture to the land. The country was familiar to Nick. His chest tight, as though someone larger than him had twisted one arm behind his back, he kept a vigilant eye out for landmarks, not even certain what he sought.
Then, out of the mix of red sand and light green sage, rose a rock that was all black on one side, covered with a patina of desert varnish. There was a picture cut in it, a petroglyph, and the petroglyph had been blasted away with a rifle.
Awareness took hold. A mile beyond that place a double track led away through deep sand. Nick’s father had made him lay boards and rocks on that road for their truck. He was scared, anxious, but he switched on the signal and spun off the highway onto the track, and the landscape spoke to him through the opaque memory of childhood. It was like a river where your foot disappeared when you dipped it in. But he knew the rocks.
He had hidden among them. Nick! You’ll be sorrier if I have to find you!
He had always been found and dragged, screaming…That was how his arm had been broken. When his father took him to the doctor two weeks later, after the other cuts and bruises had healed, they’d had to break his arm again.
There was sweat on his upper lip. Day saw the set of his jaw, the strange expression in his eyes as he guided the truck over the sandy ruts. The road was getting worse. Anyone would turn around. Except Nick, today.
“We don’t want to get stuck.”
“You can say that again.” He steered around a miniature gorge in the road.
Dust had settled all over the windshield, like the dust on his father’s truck. The air was dry and ovenlike, though this was only April. He remembered July. Sweating, sticking to the seat, butt sore.
Day watched the odometer. We’re going to get stuck. I know it.
She knew better than to ask him to stop. He had committed himself now. Yet the way he looked—angry and scared—dug a pit of misgiving inside her.
What he’d been through was hideous. Facing where it had happened could put him in a mental hospital.
Too late to say that maybe this wasn’t a good idea, after all.
“Do you want me to drive?” she asked.
“No.”
“Is it far?”
“I don’t know.”
They had come miles already on this nowhere road. If they had a flat…
“Be careful, okay?” They still had two full five-gallon water jugs. They even had a can of gasoline. But she hadn’t brought real hiking shoes, just high-top sneakers for the river.
He didn’t answer.
The miles rolled on. It was approaching three o’clock, the spring sunshine slanting down on the desert. The land was desolate, dry and dusty, but in the distance Day could see the mixture of pines and red rock and rising land that meant forest.
Nick glowered at the road, driving too fast. The truck bounced, and Day would have hit her head on the roof if not for her seat belt. The cab was like an oven, but whenever she opened the windows dust plumed in.
They were miles from anywhere.
No wonder he was allowed to be treated like that. No one knew he existed.
Even now, rumor said, polygamists excommunicated by the Mormons hid out among these sandstone monoliths, blending into the landscape that gave freedom.
The road petered out in a parched setting that reminded Day of the ghost town of Cisco on the way to Grand Junction from Moab. But there were just two buildings here, both uranium-era, both falling apart.
A wooden door banged open on the larger of the two, a one-room shack.
Nick braked hard in the sand, a scream building inside him.
He wanted to make himself small, to hide under the steering wheel of the truck…
He had done that. He had hidden there.
No one inside, Nick. You‘re big now.
Zachary had gone mad in Cataract Canyon. What if this made him insane?
He barely noticed Day beside him, slender and fair and still. He forgot her. He opened the door and got out, and the heat scorched him. They had sweated beneath the house. He’d had fevers there. Infected sores.
In the dust lay the curved shape of a rotted ax handle, and he picked it up. Beside it, a scorpion raised its tail. Hearing the truck door slam, Nick glanced behind him, but it was just Day. He forgot her again.
There was still glass in one of the windowpanes, and when he reached the building, he swung the ax handle against the glass with all his might. The window broke, and so did the ax handle, and he remembered how much strength there was in a grown man’s arm. He searched until he found a talus-size boulder with a centipede crawling on it. He hurled it against the shack, denting the wall. He kicked the swinging door and went inside.
Nothing there but a broken table that looked like it had been stolen from a hotel a long time before.
But there was still a trap in the floor. The cover was gone now, and he could smell everything. It smelled the same. It reeked.
A shadow blocked the light from the door and he jumped.
“It’s just me.”
She looked scared, reminding him of Kelly. Kelly, with her funny face and funny voice.
His throat choked, Nick pushed past her. Outside, he found a four-by-four post, two feet long, and knocked the black ants off it. Circling the shack revealed another whole windowpane, and Nick slammed the post through it, breaking the wood surrounding the glass.
Day backed away from the door of the cabin and sat on the front bumper of his truck. She wrapped her arms around herself and watched him throw his strength at the building, his hair flying wild, his face contorted.
Why did I suggest we come here?
But it had to be a good thing, because such pain had to have reason.
He went inside the shell of a building, and she heard him hitting the walls with that four-by-four. She heard him scream and stood up, poised to do something. She didn’t know what.
Ants crawled on her legs, and she brushed them away.
The four-by-four smashed against the door, and a man’s cry of rage flew out into the desert, into the empty space.
Day clutched herself, imagining a child screaming with no one to help. Who would hear? This had become surreal. It was their wedding day, and he’d come here. She did not want to imagine what was in his mind.
But finally the sounds from the shelter changed, softened, went away.
She crossed the white salt-covered mud toward the door he’d broken. “Nick. It’s Day. Don’t throw anything at me.”
He sat against the wall, his face dirty and tear-streaked, his head in his arms. When she came in, he sprang up and pulled her toward a square gap in the floorboards. “Smell that? Ever tried to sleep in an outhouse? We should have died.”
The floor beneath the hole was dirt, and any smell was faint. But to Nick it must be strong.
He snatched up the four-by-four again, banged it dully against the door. “I remember more things. I remember things. I shouldn’t have come here.”
“I’m sorry.”
Outside, he threw the post as far as he could. Then he saw his truck and he went to it, climbed into the back. There had to be something, something he could use.
Emerging from the shack, Day stared at the other structure, a smaller stone shed with no door. Nick had told her things about that building. She was glad it seemed to have escaped his attention so far.
He jumped out of the truck bed, then reached inside and pulled out the spare gas can.
“Nick.” She hurried toward him, to head him off as he walked toward the shack. “You could start a brushfire.”
“It’s April. And I don’t care if I burn down the whole state of Utah.”
“I’m going to take the truck. I’m going to go get the fire people. Don’t do this.”
“There’s sand everywhere. Nothing to burn.”
“Sparks. Sagebrush.”
“It rained last week.”
“It won’t make it better, Nick.”
“That’s what you think.” He walked by her, and she watched him douse the walls of the building with gasoline.
Day shuddered.
The water in the truck. Should they wet the ground? Which way was the wind blowing?
Flame lit up the wall.
Nick stepped back, then walked purposefully back to the truck. In a moment he passed her again, carrying one of the five-gallon water jugs. His black hair hung loose and tangled around his face, and his T-shirt was stuck to his body with sweat.
Day sat on the bumper of the truck, and the heat from the blaze reached her even there. Within ten minutes, the building burned and fell in on itself, and soon only the tin roof lay black and smoldering on the ground.
No sirens came.
Nick poured water on the hot ashes, which sizzled and sparked at him, and then, leaving the heat, the remains of the blaze, he regarded the small stone shed.
There was no sledgehammer among the tools in his truck, no way he could take down this place. He crept toward it, toward the vacant hole of the door. Crumbling brick. It was brick, and he saw a gaping hole in the brick that he remembered.
Tears fell out of his eyes, but he didn’t notice them. He went back to his truck and got in. Vaguely he noticed that Day had found one of his shovels and was shoveling sand onto the hot coals, wiping sweat from her bright red face.
But when he started the engine, she paused in her shoveling and watched.
As he drove slowly and deliberately toward the brick building, Day reflected that flames from the shack had shot twenty feet in the air, and no one had come.
The wall of the little stone building caved, and through the windshield Nick saw the color of the wall inside. He backed up his truck, and he ran it against another wall, knowing he was wrecking the chrome bumper and that the blue paint was being scraped and the hood dented by the falling bricks.
He didn’t care.
When all that was left were low broken walls and broken wood from the workbench inside, when all was turned to rubble, he switched off the ignition and got out of the truck. Walking toward the ruin he’d made, he found another ax handle on the ground. He flung it toward the smoldering ashes, and then he went to Day.
His face was smoke-grayed, his eyes red, his clothes filthy.
“You’re right,” he said. “It doesn’t help.”