Day Four

All the world’s a stage : Ninety-five in the shade : Let’s hope today is bullet free : The cowboy variety show

Nick Scissors sat by himself in the breakfast room of his hotel. He had one of each kind of Danish separated on small Styrofoam plates: lemon, cherry, blueberry, and plain. He sipped his coffee and watched a Fox News story about the secretary of the interior saying he supported the president’s plans to help the United States become energy independent. While the story ran, he ate two of the Danishes, wiping his fingers with a paper napkin he took from a stack.

At the table next to him, a couple worked out the itinerary of their vacation. Next stop, Zion National Park, then a day in St. George and down to Phoenix. The man pushed the map away and looked at his wife. “This would be a hell of a lot easier if there was a bridge across the Grand Canyon,” he said.

In his mind, Scissors imagined a scene where he leaned over and said, “I don’t mean to interrupt, but there are already a number of bridges across the Colorado River. One at Page. The other at Boulder City.” Next, he had the man saying, “I’m talking about a bridge that goes right across the middle.” Or maybe the man would say, “In 1969 we put a man on the moon. Ever since then, we’ve been okay with being number two.” And then the man’s wife would interrupt, saying, “I’d never drive across that bridge. Can you think what something crazy like that would cost us in taxes?”

And then the scene was over. The couple was eating in silence. Scissors looked back at Fox News, which had moved on to sports. He ate a third Danish and wrapped the fourth in a napkin and cleared his space. He rode the elevator to the third floor and let himself back into his room. The cardboard tube was on the bed and the maps were rolled out on top of each other and held down by two empty water glasses, the room’s travel iron, and a copy of the Gideon Bible.

The room clock said 8:20, so he took a seat and started playing with a deck of cards. He shuffled, fanned, and flipped the cards. He cut them with one hand and tossed them effortlessly, so they spun like the edged facets of a kaleidoscope. With his hand cupped, he sent the cards through the air, gathered them, and repeated, then he took a card—the two of clubs—from the top of the deck and slipped it into the middle, then he shuffled the cards, tapped them square, and cut the deck, going right to the two of clubs again. He repeated this trick a half dozen times.

When the clock read 8:29, he set down the cards and pulled a cell phone toward him. At 8:30 it buzzed. He answered it. A woman spoke without identifying herself. “One of my maps is missing. They’re a numbered set, and the fifth of seven isn’t there. It’s the map that shows the entire Swallow Valley site, including the approach. Did you send me all the photos?”

“I’ll check.” Scissors got up and looked through each one. She was right: he hadn’t seen them before, but there were small numbers in the lower left-hand corner of each map. “What do we do?” he asked.

“Well, Nicholas, I’d like you to circle back.”

“It’s a crime scene. I can’t just come and go.”

“You’ll have to. At my back I always hear time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near. The oil and gas auctions are in a month. I have already put an entire machine in motion.”

“You’ve been clear about that.”

“None of this goes back into the bottle.”

“Ms. Frangos, we should walk away from this one.”

“Impossible.”

“I might have to.”

“If this mess gets back to me, you’re coming along for the ride.”

“I see,” he said.

“Retrieve the missing map, and you’re released from your obligations. You were made for this job. I’ve seen you vanish into thin air.”

“That was on stage. This is different.”

“All the world’s a stage, Mr. Scissors, so it’s too bad your career as an illusionist stalled out.”

“Like you said, it was good training, and this is better pay.”

Scissors parted the vertical blinds and looked across the valley at the massive CasaBlanca sign sticking up against the white haze and the jagged black mountains in the background. He opened up the napkin holding the last Danish from downstairs. He picked it up and took a bite.

“Nicholas?” she asked. “Are you there?”

“It’s difficult for me to measure the weight of my actions when I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m not the villain in this story.”

“Villains don’t usually cop to it, but whatever.”

“You are a cog in a larger machine. What we are doing is bigger than those two pinheads, or either of us, really. Just get me the map. I will compensate you for this adjustment in the arrangements.”

“If something goes wrong, Dumb and Dumber won’t be our patsies anymore. The whole idea from the start was to throw them under the bus. I worry they’ll do it to us.”

“Don’t get caught and we’ll be fine.”

“Thanks, I’ll put that in my notes.” He reached for the deck of cards and fanned it out on the table.

He drew the seventeenth card from the left and flipped it over. It was the two of clubs. He finished what was left of the last Danish and wished he had another.

___

The casino pool was shallow and wide, surrounded by chaise lounges on one side and a fabricated fiberglass cliff face on the other. The sun was just high enough to crest the trees. It was too early for Byron, especially after cutting loose all night, but Lonnie convinced him they wouldn’t get a spot if they waited, and he was right. The place was teeming with people.

On one side, a short water slide emerged from under the trees. Lonnie, flanked by children, lowered himself into place and scooted himself into the flow with a strawberry daiquiri in his hand. The slide dumped him into the shallow receiving pool. His head went completely under, but he managed to keep his drink aloft, like a red periscope.

He popped up with his hair flat against his face and crossed the pool to the seat where Byron was lying out, faceup, in his popsicle swim trunks. His eyes were closed, his fingers interlaced across his chest, cradling a blue aluminum beer can-bottle that looked like alien technology emerging from his breastbone. Alongside the chair was a folded-up towel with both of the manila envelopes of money sitting on top. Byron knew it was a risk, but he wanted to keep the money close. When Byron heard Lonnie approach, he kept his eyes closed but slid his hand down and rested it on the cash.

“This place is great,” Lonnie said, setting his drink on the pool deck. He used his hands to squeegee the water from his beard and hair. “You gotta do the slide.”

“Don’t gotta do nothing,” Byron said, taking a swig of his beer.

“You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“I know exactly what I’m missing. I’ve watched you go down that thing like a dozen times.”

“I don’t know why you brought that money down here,” Lonnie said in a whisper voice. “There’s a safe in the room. I figured out how to use it.”

“They’re worthless.”

“What?”

“When you get back up there, press the lock button until it says SUPER, then press all nines,” Byron said.

“Then what?”

“Then you lose your money. Anyone can get into those things.”

“Whoa. How’d you learn that?”

“Cellmate. He says everybody working here knows it.” He patted the money. “That’s why the cash stays right here.”

Lonnie took his drink and pushed off the pool wall and drifted to the fake waterfall. He turned under the cascade and watched people of all shapes and sizes move around. Most of them were on a cheap vacation, not on the lam. Lonnie felt safe here, like nobody would dare do anything right out in the middle of it all. Byron was just lying there, not moving, which made sense because he was crashing. Lonnie watched his brother set his beer on the concrete next to his chair. He looked at the old palm trees, which were starting to blow around as the day heated up.

Lonnie took a few more trips down the slide, then swam over and told Byron he was going to unwind in the hot tub.

“It’s ninety-five degrees, numb nuts.”

“I like it anyway,” Lonnie said, then he swam across the pool like a skinny white frog and disappeared into the grove of trees that surrounded the hot tub. Byron felt the dryness of his mouth and sucked on his teeth to get the saliva going. He was bonking hard, but he didn’t want Lonnie to see it. He settled himself and thought about how he got here.

A guy he knew inside gave his name to Scissors, who called him on the phone, out of the blue, like some telemarketer. He said his employer was out of options and needed some help that lay somewhat outside of the law. Byron said he wasn’t interested to see if he could crank up the price. When Scissors assured him it was good pay, Byron asked, “How far outside?”

Scissors explained that Bruce Cluff, some local guy, was in the possession of certain maps and catalogs he had made of an area called the Swallow Valley. This guy’s employer was interested in purchasing said maps and catalogs, but Cluff refused to even hear his employer’s offer. The employer had already set certain processes in motion, processes that the employer was not interested in shutting down.

“They got maps on the internet,” Byron said.

“These maps are . . . unique,” Scissors said. “You will be compensated for your time.”

“For stealing some maps?”

“Let’s think of it as liberation.”

“I haven’t told you my rate,” Byron said. He was stone broke and wondered if the man on the phone knew that.

“The rate is not what you say it is, but it’s market price. Trust me. It is fair.”

“And you get to say what’s fair?”

“There are other names on our list.”

“And since mine’s Ashdown, you’re starting with me.”

“Abernathy, Aguirre, Albertson, Alsopp, Anderson, then you.”

“I get it,” Byron said.

“The thing is, it can’t look like the maps were singled out to be stolen. My employer requires discretion.”

“You can have ’em fast, cheap, or secret. Pick two.”

Scissors named the fee, which was so high Byron didn’t think to negotiate, which was exactly the plan, and when he figured that part of it out, it got under his skin. Eventually, once everything bent over and went south, Byron began hatching a plan of his own, a kind of insurance policy. After they tested the map, he took that one from the roll and left it in his closet back home. Some of that treasure was going to be his no matter what else happened.

Across the pool, a lifeguard gave three short whistles. Byron looked over and saw Lonnie running along the deck. He jumped into the pool and ran through the shallow water. A second lifeguard shouted, “Hey, man! You don’t run. Everybody knows that.” Lonnie slowed, but his face remained panicked.

“He’s still here!” Lonnie shouted, pointing behind.

“Who?”

“Scissors. Over by the fence.”

“Inside or outside?” Byron tried not to panic.

“Out. Watching me. Come look.”

“I’m not going over there. That’s what he wants.”

“You have to, so I know I’m not crazy.”

“You’ve been drunk since last night.”

“You’ve been tweaking since—never mind. Come look. If it’s not him, I’ll shut up forever.”

“Forever?” Byron pulled himself up from the lounge, bent down and took the envelopes, then he followed Lonnie. As they walked, one of the lifeguards took off his sunglasses and said, “Keep him under control.”

At the midway point, Lonnie said, “There he is.” A hundred feet past the pool deck was a ten-foot-high iron fence that separated the end of the courtyard from the parking lot. Scissors stood right in the middle, gripping the bars. He was in different clothes: a yellow golf shirt and white slacks. When he saw that they had seen him, he waved, then put his hands in his pockets and strolled away without looking back.

“Why’d he do that?” Lonnie asked.

“He’s a freak.”

“Well, it sure freaks me out.”

“He’s just trying to make us think he’s onto us. But he’s got to take the maps to his employer.” Byron put the last word in air quotes. “He just wants us to lay low.”

“Why wouldn’t we? This is awesome,” Lonnie said.

“Let’s go back,” Byron said.

“Back home? Is that a good idea?”

“Back to the chairs, you idiot.”

When they got to their place at the pool, a woman was standing next to one of the lounge chairs. She was wearing a navy blue one-piece with fishnet across the cleavage. “What is she doing here?” Byron asked.

“Don’t you remember? She stayed the night with us,” Lonnie said. “Her friend is here, too.” He pointed to a skinny woman lying facedown a couple of lounges over. The first woman was bent over, undoing the buckles of her sandals. Byron copped a look down her swimsuit and thought about last night. Across her chest was a tattoo of the word DESTINY interwoven with thorns and flowers that looked like they’d come from another planet. They had partied. Very little of it was clear. When she could not undo the buckles on her shoes, she sat, leaned over and tugged them off.

When she noticed Byron and Lonnie, she said, “We showered.”

“Sure. So did we,” Byron said, stepping astride his chair and collapsing backward into it, which startled the woman who was lying on her stomach. Her frizzed-out hair was dull, with a green dye job that was faded almost all the way out.

Lonnie got situated in his chair, and the four of them were set out in a row: girl, boy, boy, girl. Byron undid his ponytail and regathered it. He put the envelopes behind him, in the small of his back. The woman on Byron’s side put her hand on Byron’s thigh. Her acrylic nails were covered in tiny flowers and jewels, and she used them to tickle the hair on Byron’s leg. Byron looked over at her and saw the names BRADEN and HAILEE inscribed on the inside of her forearm.

“I didn’t bring any sunscreen,” she said. “I’m gonna burn.”

“We all are,” Byron said, watching to see if Scissors would show.

Lonnie tapped the other woman on her bare shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “I don’t remember your name.”

“Leia,” she said. “Like the princess.”

“She’s a general now,” Lonnie said.

___

After three o’clock, the sun drilled through the west windows of Dalton’s office and started burning up the wall from floor to ceiling. He’d been trying to do paperwork for hours, but the day had been chewed up by interruptions. At three thirty, the white bar of light came even with Dalton’s eyebrows, and the glare disturbed his work enough that he wrote a note reminding himself to request an awning.

In an attempt to save himself, he left his office, drove to town, got a late lunch, and ate it in his Bronco. Before he was finished, the phone rang. It was Karen.

“Pat,” she said. “I’m trying not to be that person.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s okay that I have to keep calling you about the house or okay that I’m trying not to be the person who has to keep calling to remind you about selling the house?”

Dalton set down his pickle. “Both?”

“Please remember that this is what we agreed to.”

“You need to have a little charity.”

“Do not do this, Patrick.”

“It’s going to happen, but not today.” He lifted his potato chip bag and looked inside: all that was left were crumbs and pieces. He poured them into his mouth. “You can come back and live in it,” he said. “I’ll move out.”

“That’s not what we want. I’ve been through that.”

“We? I haven’t heard the kids say they don’t want to live here. Put them on. I want to hear it from them. If that’s what they really want, I’ll list it this afternoon.”

“They’re at ballet.”

“Okay, then tonight.”

“Patrick.”

“Have them call me. I’m sorry. I’ve got to go find out how my dad’s best friend died.”

“I thought it was a suicide.”

“I’ll get to the realtor as soon as I can,” he said, then ended the call.

On the way back to work, Dalton watched a guy in a silver Sebring roll through his stop. Normally, he wouldn’t have worried about it, but he was procrastinating and this was a perfect distraction.

The man’s name was Nicholas Szczesny, from Las Vegas. He wore a yellow shirt and white pants, like he’d just come off the golf course. He was polite and soft-spoken, said he liked this little town, but he was used to driving in Vegas, which is a bit more aggressive.

Dalton said that’s how it was for him after driving in Iraq.

“When were you there?” Szczesny asked.

“2010,” Dalton said. “Did a second tour in Afghanistan. You?”

“2004, a little before that, a little after.”

Dalton looked down and saw a small tattoo of a skull with a bayonet sticking out of the top on the man’s forearm and decided not to ask any more questions. He took his license and registration, looked him up, and saw that his record was clear. He came back and said, “I’m going to let you go with a warning. People around here aren’t always paying attention, so a full stop can make a difference.”

The man smiled. “Attention must be paid.”

“Have a good trip.”

The man drove off, and Dalton returned to the public safety building. When he got back to his desk, he found a stack of requisitions and a Post-it reminding him not to forget to sign the overtime. Ten emails later, he tried getting back to work when a call came through from LaRae. It was five o’clock. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what?” Dalton asked.

“I know you asked not to be bothered, but it’s Janey Gladstone. She insists.”

“On what?”

“Talking to you.”

“About?”

“She says something weird is going on at Raylene Cluff’s house.” Dalton made two fists—one he set on the desk and the other tightened around the phone. He wasn’t much of a decorator, but he’d set up a few things directly in his line of sight: a picture of Karen and the kids, a shelf with some trophies from high school, a shadow box with his military medals, a photo collage of him holding up a variety of fish he’d caught over the years, and one large photo of a coho salmon he caught in Nunatak Fiord in Alaska. He’d set all these things up to be a place for his eyes to go when he didn’t want to yell, punch, or kick anything. Today he focused on the coho. He caught that thing eight years ago, right after he got back from Afghanistan. It took him forty-five minutes to land it. Weighed thirty-three pounds. The guides shipped it home for him on ice. Cost him a hundred bucks to do it, but he didn’t care. He never ate it. It was still in the freezer.

“Sheriff,” LaRae asked, “are you there?”

“Yeah, put Janey through,” he said.

There was a click, a span of silence, then the sound of rapid breathing. “Janey, this is Sheriff Dalton.”

“I am at their house, not really at, but in—inside it,” she whispered.

“Whose house?”

“The Cluff home.”

“After I said not to?”

“I came over to get some personal things for Raylene.”

“We could have sent somebody over.”

“Well, there’s a reason they call them personal things, Patrick.”

“Fair enough.”

“I believe I have found myself in an extraordinary situation. Somebody is here who should not be.”

“Somebody besides you?”

“I came down here to the basement because that’s where the laundry is, and I heard a clatter outside, so I went to the top of the stairs and looked around and saw that somebody was climbing up the outside of the house. There was no ladder, just his legs. I went back down, but I can hear him clomping around up there. It comes through the ductwork.

“Where are you now?”

“By the chest freezer.”

“Hang up and hide,” Dalton said.

“Hide? Where?”

“Someplace you can get comfortable. You might have to be there awhile.”

“Now you’re scaring me,” Mrs. Gladstone said.

“I am hanging up now so we can get someone over there.”

“Can’t someone keep talking to me?” Mrs. Gladstone’s voice was thin.

“How about LaRae Knowles? Would you talk to her?”

“Yes, I can do that,” Janey said.

“Okay, hang on.” Dalton put her on hold and rang LaRae. When she answered, she said, “I am so sorry. I know you said to hold your calls.”

“That’s fine. I need you to keep talking to Mrs. Gladstone. Tanner and I need to get to the Cluff house. Sounds like somebody is breaking in.”

“That’s really weird,” LaRae said.

“It is.”

“I’ve got it,” she said and pulled the call back to her phone.

Dalton hung up and left through a side entrance. He radioed Tanner from the Bronco and told him where to meet. He tore through town with his lights on but no siren. Time stretched out as he worried. In cop shows they always cut this part down to a couple of shots, never showing how the drive gives a person enough time to suffer through a hundred possible outcomes, catastrophe piled on top of catastrophe. There were more ways for this situation to go wrong than he was willing to imagine.

Tanner was waiting for him when he arrived. He had his sidearm unholstered and was wearing his body armor, which amped up Dalton even more. “The street is clear. Nothing weird going on. I ran the plates on these cars.” He pointed to the three vehicles on the street. “They all belong to the people who live here. That one is Janey Gladstone’s,” he said, pointing to a white Buick.

“Tell me this is nothing,” Dalton said.

Tanner shrugged. “I’d rather be ready.”

Dalton called in the situation, and the dispatcher asked if they needed backup. Dalton said, “I got everybody here with me at the moment.” Tanner chuckled.

They walked up to the house and split. Dalton continued down the driveway toward the carport, and Tanner went through the bushes and around. After a few minutes, Tanner came across the radio. “There’s a ladder here, hanging in the garage. You think the burglar returned it to where it goes?”

“Not likely,” Dalton answered.

“Then it looks like we’re dealing with somebody who can climb better than I can, which means we’re also looking at a different story than the one we thought.”

“Don’t say it.”

“You think the guy is still in there?”

“I don’t want to find out by having him shoot first,” Dalton said.

“If we crouch here all day, we’ll regret it,” Tanner said. “Meet me at the back door.”

Dalton came around the house, and Tanner was standing at the back stairs with his weapon pointed in the air. “Who goes first?” he said.

“You got here first,” Dalton said.

“A leader’s gotta lead.”

“If I get shot, who does the paperwork?”

“You’re seriously the worst boss ever.”

“There’s an old lady in there.”

“All-time worst,” Tanner said.

“Fine,” Dalton said. He cracked open the back door and went inside. They went room to room on the ground floor, passing through the crime scene, which still hadn’t been cleaned. The stench of it was uncomfortable. One of the evidence numbers on the desk had been tipped over. He walked up to it and noticed an empty rectangular spot in the dust and blood spray, not quite the size of a sheet of paper. He took a picture of it with his phone, then looked around more carefully until Tanner joined him. He showed Tanner the spot and said, “Let’s find Janey, then come through here a second time.”

“Come here first.” Tanner brought Dalton over to the shelves, and he showed him a new blank spot in the dust. This one was round, about eight inches across. Dalton took a picture of it as well.

They went upstairs and searched each room, calling each one clear when they were done. Nothing seemed to be out of order.

“You still think we’ve got a suicide?” Tanner asked.

“I’m not sure I want to know what’s going on,” Dalton said.

They went back downstairs and found Mrs. Gladstone sitting on an old couch in the far corner of the basement. She was wrapped up in an unfinished quilt, talking to LaRae on the telephone with the cord stretching to the wall. When she heard them, she said, “Oh, they’re here now. I better hang up.” She got up and placed the phone on the hook. “He left,” she said.

“When?” Dalton asked.

“Well, a while ago. He went through a window and came down one of those trees. He’s quite the climber. I told that to LaRae.”

Dalton and Tanner looked at each other. “Can you describe him?” Dalton asked.

“Well I only heard him thumping around and shaking the trees.”

Dalton sent Janey with Tanner to give a statement, then he went back to Cluff’s study. He’d seen plenty of burglaries, and there was always a trail of destruction. There was nothing like that here. Whoever came here was looking for something specific. He went to Bruce’s desk and lined himself up with the dried blood. He squinted to imagine the physics of it, trying to understand how it fit with the story. To the left of the bookshelves was a small standing table with a number of maps rolled out on it, the paper curled up around four large glass electrical insulators that held the maps in place. As he got closer, he saw that the top map was clean, and everything around it was misted in a fine brown spray. Two or three layers down, the maps were slightly rippled, like they’d been wet and dried back out. He lifted the insulators and the top three maps rolled up, taking back their original shapes. The fourth map down was covered in the same spray. Things had been moved around after the shooting.

These maps were hand-drawn renderings of places on the monument. He’d heard about Bruce’s maps. His dad had talked about them, but Bruce kept them out of the public eye. He left notes all over the maps with pencil marks so fine and faint they looked like they’d been scratched into the paper with a needle. At the base of the table was an empty cardboard tube, also unsprayed. On the side, in black marker, Cluff had written Swallow Valley.

___

Reinhardt Kupfer boarded the Bryce Canyon shuttle bus at the Agua Canyon stop. Hot and dusty, he found a seat near the back and scooted next to the window. A large man with muttonchops sat next to him, a walking stick with a half dozen fantastic human faces carved into its length resting between his knees. When the bus pulled out, Reinhardt opened his shirt pocket and dug out a small obsidian arrowhead, which he held in the palm of his hand and admired. It was a jet-black, nearly perfect, side-notched triangle flake, roughly the size of his thumbnail, more like a fighter jet than he would have imagined. He turned it over and over, testing the edge with the tip of his thumb.

“Where’d you get that?” the man next to him asked.

“I found it. On my hike.”

“Can I see it?”

Reinhardt set it in the man’s wide hand and watched him as he poked it with his finger. “It looks real,” he said.

“It is, I think. I’m going to find the ranger who spoke to us yesterday and ask her,” Reinhardt said, reaching for the artifact.

The man’s hand veered away. “I never saw one up close like this,” he said. “My cousin found one once, said it was real, but we all thought it was just some broken rock. I mean that’s what it looked like, but this one is for real.” Reinhardt set his hand lightly on the man’s wrist. “I’m not going to steal it,” he said. “It’s just cool to hold.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Reinhardt said. “It’s just that I—I would hate for it to drop.”

The man returned the arrowhead to Reinhardt’s hand.

They went along the slow road, watching red rock flash through breaks in the pines. Reinhardt took out his phone and framed up a picture of the arrowhead as he pinched it between two fingers trying to catch the perfect light. He snapped the picture, then uploaded it to Instagram, typing the caption ENDLICH EIN GUTER TAG NACH EINEM ANSONSTEN KOMPLETT BESCHISSENEN URLAUB. ICH HABE AUßERDEM EIN MENSCHENLEBEN GERETTET. It was true that this was the first good day of an otherwise completely crappy vacation. Yesterday, he had been a very good Samaritan, but he thought that perhaps it was unseemly to mention that he had also saved a human life, so he deleted the second sentence, tagged the location, and added #indiancountry, which Reinhardt noticed had over 16,000 uses already. He had only one bar of service, so the image uploaded slowly.

He dozed a little during the ride, his muscles sore from the hike. His long sleeves and pants left him feeling hot but protected from the intense sun. In his daydream, he replayed moments of his hike as short video clips, and as the bus came into a wide-open meadow, he woke, checked his phone again, and saw there was one Instagram notification for his post. It was from @doktor_tomahawk, Wolf, Reinhardt’s medical partner back in Germany.

Wolf Messer had been in his sixties and looking to bring on a young doctor to help him prepare for retirement. As they sat in Wolf’s office, Reinhardt commented on the decor: a Haida moon mask, a hand drum with the painting of a buffalo skin on the head, a red Navajo blanket with two left-turning swastikas at the center, and many other treasures. Reinhardt was so distracted he couldn’t speak of his residency. He told Wolf that his own apartment was filled with posters of similar things, photographs taken by Ansel Adams of the American Southwest. He had purchased a few small items in gatherings he’d been to in Baden-Württemberg: buckskin trousers and a pair of beaded moccasins. At this, Wolf left all talk of dermatology. Their conversation carried on through dinner and well into the night. The next morning, Wolf called him personally to invite him to join the practice. When Reinhardt came to sign the papers, Wolf emerged from his office in a lab coat and a full Lakota warbonnet, the feathers fanning out around his balding head. He had spread out each hand dramatically and said, “Welcome, welcome, welcome.”

The bus came to a stop at Sunset Point, and the others began filing off. The man sitting next to him said, “Have a good one,” and Reinhardt nodded to him.

“You also,” he said.

On the sidewalk, he checked his phone again. Wolf had sent him a photo of the walnut shadow box he kept on his desk. It was filled with a dozen stone points, each one a different material and shape. The message said this was an auspicious beginning. Reinhardt put his phone away and continued along the sidewalk, following the brown signs that pointed the way to the rim.

In the gaps between the pines, white clouds piled on top of each other, and in the negative space of the clouds, cerulean pools of sky gathered. It was a color he’d seen many times in paintings, but never this intensely. With his eyes focused on the sky, Reinhardt approached the rim of what the park pamphlets called a “hoodoo-filled amphitheater.” From those quaint words he expected to find a mere curiosity, a playground of geologic novelties. Instead, what he saw was hewn straight from the earth and scattered across the horizon like something built and abandoned by giants at play. In a single sweep of his vision lay every possible variation of standing rock: fingers, columns, teeth, pillars, knobs, turrets, toadstools, minarets, pilasters, and pylons. His breath left him all at once, and as he inched forward, the parallax of the scene shifted, and he began to sense, in the core of his belly before he actually saw it, the precipitous drop of the rim, hidden by an innocuous patch of tawny tufted grass. As he lifted his gaze, he took in each successive plane, the closer formations crisp and defined, and those at a distance becoming, by intervals, more impressionistic. At the horizon was a great silent dome, fading slowly in and out of the atmospheric haze. A hundred miles southward across the expanse, a hard black rain fell into the dry air, evaporating on the way down. A soundless arc of white electricity pulsed from the cloud and forked delicately against the flat colors in the distance. Reinhardt waited for a second strike, but it did not come. A few seconds later, the faintest rumble.

A couple passed Reinhardt on the left, talking excitedly about the sublime view. Their teenage son lagged behind, typing something into his phone. Without looking up he said, “We came all the way here, for this?”

“Put your phone away, Miles,” his dad said, but the boy ignored him.

Reinhardt soon became aware of people passing him on either side. He followed the rim to the left and saw a great throng from the tour coming toward him. He looked for an escape route, but it was too late, people waved and shouted his name, so he waved back lifelessly. When the group came closer, they called out. “Hey, it’s Doctor Hero,” somebody shouted. Reinhardt smiled and waved. A man in a T-shirt that said IT’S NOT MY FAULT / I WAS UNSUPERVISED asked where he’d been all day.

“I went down into the hoodoos,” Reinhardt said.

“Too much hiking for me,” the man’s wife said. She wore a large-brimmed straw sun hat, a fanny pack, and white sandals.

“Those are the hoodoos that you do so well,” the man said, chortling at his own joke.

His wife said flatly, “Make him stop. He’s been telling that dud all day.”

“You coming to the dinner? There’s supposed to be a whole show and everything.”

“I’ll have to clean up first,” Reinhardt said.

“Well, I hope I see you, so I can buy a hero a beer,” the man said.

“Danke,” Reinhardt said. “I’ll see you there perhaps.”

Reinhardt left the sidewalk and wove through the trees to the lodge and caught the shuttle back to the visitor’s center. The ride was short, so he stood. He stepped off the bus quickly and went into the building, looking for Sophia. He was thinking about the idea of provenance, how she had told them that the most important question anyone can ask of a thing is Who did it once belong to and who does it belong to now? His thought, who owns history, was at the forefront of it all, matched now with the question of who owns this park and the things inside it. He wanted to let her know that what she said hadn’t fallen on deaf ears.

There was a desk in the center, near the back, past the T-shirts, baseball hats, and children’s toys, by the cash registers and the day’s weather report. A ranger with clear cat-eye glasses and a green tattoo of a Celtic knot on her forearm was sharing information about a trail with a young couple. From the green, white, and red tricolor patch on the tourist’s backpack he could see that they were Italian. When they were done, Reinhardt stepped to the desk, removed the arrowhead and placed it in front of the ranger. She looked down at it, then at Reinhardt over her glasses.

“Hello,” he said. “Yesterday I was at the lodge for a presentation on antiquities. There was a young archeologist there, and I would like to ask her some questions about this arrowhead I found today on my hike in Agua Canyon.”

The ranger picked up the arrowhead and turned it over a couple of times. “Sir,” she said, “it’s against the law to take things from the park. We have over two million visitors to this park every year. If everybody pocketed one thing, there wouldn’t be much of this park left to visit.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” he said.

She set the arrowhead back down on the counter, and Reinhardt was not sure if he should take it back. “This is what we mean when we tell people to leave no trace, but in this particular case, I’m not going to cite you. This arrowhead actually comes from right over there.” She pointed to a rack of costume jewelry a dozen feet away in the gift shop, next to some multicolored scorpion refrigerator magnets. She pushed the arrowhead toward Reinhardt. “It’s okay,” she said. “Take a look.”

Reinhardt accepted the false treasure and walked over to the display of necklaces made of fake leather cord and an arrowhead in the same perfect black triangle shape, with identical chips and ridges. He ran his hand behind them, like they were strands in a beaded curtain. He glanced back at the ranger, who smiled slightly and shrugged. “Sorry,” she said, “but thank you for leaving the trail cleaner than you found it.”

Reinhardt left the visitor’s center, and on the way to the shuttle stop, tossed the arrowhead into the mouth of a green metal trash can. A small boy watched him do it. Reinhardt wanted to say something to him about the way this world can beguile and deceive us, but he spared the boy his nihilism.

When the shuttle came, he boarded and went straight to the back. The bus left the front gates, and soon they were out of the park and on their way to the small town that lay outside of it. He watched the tourists, each one concluding the day’s adventures. They all seemed happy, thirsty, and satisfied.

Reinhardt opened his phone and found the photo of the arrowhead and deleted it, then he went to Instagram and deleted his post. He thought about returning home and having to explain to Wolf how he’d been taken in by the false front of America. He wanted more from this trip than it promised, and now he was ashamed at his naïveté. He might as well have spent the afternoon looking at dioramas or IMAX films. He could have done these things without leaving Berlin.

The bus pulled off and stopped in front of a cheap amusement park version of an Old West main street. The bus emptied, and when Reinhardt stayed brooding in his seat, the bus driver’s voice came over the PA. “End of the line,” he said. “That’s it. This bus is going out of service.”

Reinhardt waved and stepped onto the pavement and wandered numbly to his hotel. There was no smell of pine, and the air conditioning chilled him. He bought two bottles of water at the front desk and went to his room, drinking one bottle on the elevator. As he showered, he thought about calling the whole thing off, but the idea of leaving was just as overwhelming as the thought of continuing on through a B-movie rendition of America. He dried off and lay on his bed, and before he could gather his thoughts, a knock at the door jolted him from his melancholy. “Dr. Kupfer. It’s time for the chuckwagon dinner,” the voice said. It was someone perky from the tour. There was a pause followed by more knocking. “Dr. Kupfer?”

“Ja,” he said. “I am almost ready.”

“Oh, good. We’d hate for you to miss it,” the annoying voice said.

Reinhardt dressed, thinking that perhaps spending the evening alone in this depressing motel room would do him more harm than good. He met with the group in the lobby, and they all walked together in a gaggle across the motel parking lot, toward the back-lot town, which was the gateway to an establishment called the Young Family Chuck Wagon Dinner Theater and Country Emporium.

The air was filled with the scent of roasting meat and the din of guitars and cowboy song. To one side was a stage featuring a covered wagon and a theatrical campfire made from red, orange, and white LEDs, pulsing in a slow, hypnotic rhythm, not at all like the quick dance of real flame. The band was clearly not cowboys but theater students from a nearby university doing their summer internships. Reinhardt imagined this was probably very exciting and fresh for them a month ago, but as he looked around, he could see that they and everyone else in the Emporium were on autopilot.

The Korean contingent of the tour had formed a subgroup. So had the Poles, and everyone else, all lapsing into the comfort and familiarity of their own languages, showing each other pictures of their version of the day on their phones. There were plenty of faces he did not recognize. Families with small children. Older couples, and a long-haired Japanese man wearing a leather jacket despite the lingering heat of the day. This man sat at a table by himself, sketching in a black notebook, his plate of food untouched.

The rest of the Emporium looked like a movie set seen from the wrong angle. The wood was new and bright, and the fake fences built with shiny brass drywall screws. Reinhardt queued up for his meal, and as the line advanced, the songs gave way to a melodrama. A college kid with a glued-on black mustache tried to steal the gal of a different college kid who was clean-shaven with a blue bandanna tied swaggeringly around his boyish neck.

The whole thing escalated quickly. There were words, a shove, and a flamboyant stepping back. More words. Hand gestures. The bad guy drew on the good guy, and while the good guy’s hand was going to his gun belt, there was a shot. The bad guy clutched his stomach and sank to his knees. The girl’s skirt was up, a thigh holster exposed, and a smoking nickel-plated derringer in one hand.

“Clementine,” the villain said, “my only crime was loving you too”—he coughed and fell forward—“much.”

The girl and the dandy embraced and sang a duet of a pop song Reinhardt did not recognize from the cowboy canon.

As he came to the buffet, he took a coarse paper plate. Dollops of food appeared on that plate with neither grace nor ceremony: meat, red beans, half a corn cob, a square of corn bread, another square of sheet cake, with a shot of whipped cream from a can. He took his plate to the only empty seat in the Emporium, which was next to the sullen Japanese man, who did not notice him when he sat. Reinhardt ate one bite of everything, then pushed the plate away.

The Japanese man leaned forward. “Some show,” he said without taking a break in his sketching.

“It’s the only way this particular day could end.”

“But it’s not very cowboy.”

Reinhardt laughed and shook his head. “No, it’s not, is it?”

“It’s okay though. I’m here for all this corny stuff. My name is Kenji,” he said, extending his hand. “I am from Osaka.”

“I am Reinhardt. From Berlin.” They shook hands.

“Wow,” Kenji said. “What a world where the Axis powers can be on vacation together right in the heartbeat of America.” He looked down and wrote a note to himself.

“Your English is excellent,” Reinhardt said.

“My father hired a tutor for me and my sister. He wanted us to follow him into business. I used English to watch old cowboy movies. I love John Ford, Sam Peckinpah. Your English is also good, but you’re German, so it makes sense.”

“Thank you?” Reinhardt said.

“Every German I know can speak excellent English.” Kenji closed his notebook and stood. “I would love to stay and chat it up with you, but I have preparations to make for a big meeting. It was nice to make your acquaintance.”

When he walked past, Reinhardt saw that Kenji had a large image of Hello Kitty painted on the back of his leather jacket. As the Emporium closed back around him, Reinhardt pulled his plate back and tried another bite of the thick beans, then the corn bread, then the cake. The band returned to the stage and started playing a song about cool, clear water.