Day Seven

An easier way to make money : Dynamite : Inauthenticity : There’s people in here : Pok-pok-pok : With winged boots : Vexations : Plan D

The sheriff’s deputy returned Reinhardt’s driver’s license and the rental car’s registration papers. “That German license doesn’t give you diplomatic immunity, Mr. Kupfer,” he said.

“No, of course not, Sheriff—” Reinhardt looked up at the man’s name tag. “—Sheriff Tanner.”

“Deputy. It’s just deputy.”

“It is very difficult to obtain a German driving license, but I understand you, and I will slow down.”

“That sign isn’t a suggestion.”

“I understand.”

Reinhardt watched Tanner return to his car, then he continued following his phone’s instructions to a diner for breakfast. He drove past the Kanab Chamber of Commerce until he came to a sign with three large columns of orange rock surrounding the name HooDoo Diner in red neon.

The waitress told him to sit wherever he wanted. There was a man in the first booth with a plate of eggs, link sausages, and hash browns covered in ketchup. Alongside his meal was a gray laptop, and he was reading the newspaper as he ate. Most of the other tables were taken, so Reinhardt took a booth near the back. As he sat, the waitress showed up with a tall, red glass of ice water. She asked Reinhardt if he’d like something to drink. He asked for coffee, and she set down a menu. “Specials are on the board,” she said.

There was a Belgian waffle for $5.99 and a Navajo taco for $6.50. When she returned, he asked about the Navajo taco. “We don’t serve that until 11:30, hon,” she said.

He chose the Denver omelet and biscuits, then took out his phone and started going through his photos. There was one of the kid at the rental car place giving him the peace sign with his two front teeth protruding from under his top lip, a picture of the black Mustang he rented, then blurry pictures he should not have taken while driving from Cedar City to Kanab.

There were pictures of towering sandstone walls and smaller minarets. Travel trailers and small clusters of cattle. There were many images of old buildings, contrails crossing the open sky. Thunderheads on the horizon, and the massive storm cloud he’d seen yesterday while driving from Cedar City as it opened up to the south on the monument, the dark tatters of rain localized and intense. On either side of that storm was calm blue sky as far as he could see. Next was a picture of his own two feet plunged into the blue waters of the Virgin River, then photos of vivid Indian paintbrush and pale sage. He was looking for the one image he could use to announce that he’d reached escape velocity and left the oppressive tour. None of yesterday’s photos were right. They looked like loafing.

The last photo, one he’d taken in the middle of the night, was a rectangle of black and pixel noise. This was the experience he wanted to share. It happened late last night when he’d arrived in Kanab to find all the motel signs lit to say NO VACANCY. He ventured inside their shabby offices once or twice to inquire, but they all shook their heads and said they were sorry. He drove out of town, branching off onto a series of ever-narrowing dirt roads, then he parked the car behind a dark clump of rustling bushes, retrieved his cheap new sleeping bag from its box, and tried to fold down the back seats and arrange himself inside the trunk compartment. Eventually, he curled into the fetal position and managed to fall asleep.

When he woke in the night, he heard what he thought was a group of girls talking. He was embarrassed, and he thrashed around in the car until he could look out into the surrounding terrain. There was nothing but darkness. He lay back down and again heard the voices. His head popped up a number of times, and he scanned the darkness, then lay back down. When the voices returned, they were louder. The sky was lighter, but he couldn’t see anything. Even though it was ridiculous, Reinhardt lifted his phone and took a picture.

As he looked at the photo, he saw something in it, and he tapped the edit button. When he dragged the brightness slider to the left, three pixelated coyotes materialized in the middle of a blue field. They were nearly white, like creatures from another planet, and their metallic eyes glowed. They were trotting along the road, their legs blurred. One coyote stared straight into the lens. Reinhardt gasped, then checked to see if anyone was watching. They were all eating and staring blankly at their own cell phones.

He selected this ragged image for upload. He tagged @doktor_tomahawk and added the caption MEET YOUR COUSINS, THE COYOTES. He thought Wolf would laugh at the joke, but mostly he wanted to document something about his new quest. He tapped the map icon and located the image in Kanab, Utah, at @thehoodoodiner, then he uploaded the image. He watched the blue bar span the width of his phone, and then the image appeared in his feed. Wolf, in far-off Berlin, would see it at suppertime.

Just as he closed his phone, the waitress slid a massive plate in front of him, and with the other hand refilled his coffee.

A bell hanging on the door jangled. Reinhardt glanced over his shoulder when he heard it and saw two filthy men enter. One was tall with a slow, simian gait. The other was short, with a ponytail and a massive hunting knife on his belt. The short one carried a large roll of paper under his arm. The cook glanced at the waitress and the waitress shrugged.

The two men sat at the booth right behind Reinhardt and resumed an argument that seemed to have been under way for a while. Reinhardt set his phone down and began to work on his meal. The men made a racket rolling out the paper and holding it down with various items from the table.

“Why do you get to have it right side up?” one of the men complained.

“Because I can’t read it upside down.”

“And I can?”

“I’m the one driving.”

“If you turn it a little, then it’s halfway for both of us.”

Reinhardt twisted around to ask them if they could be a little quieter, and the short one said, “Mind your own business, jackass.” Reinhardt tried to make eye contact with someone else in the diner to verify that the man had actually talked to him like that. Everyone was keeping their heads down.

The waitress said, “The cook wants you boys to mind your p’s and q’s.”

Reinhardt craned his neck back to the window above the grill and watched the cook fold his massive arms and frown. His neck sloped directly into his shoulders like a tree trunk just above the roots. “I’m letting you Ashdowns eat here out of respect for your Uncle Pete,” he said, pointing at them. “You hear me, Lonnie?”

“We’re cool,” Lonnie said.

“Byron?” the cook said. “You’re the one I’m really talking to.”

“Yeah, we’re cool. How about some coffee?” Byron said.

The two men went right back to their conversation. The taller one, who sat directly behind Reinhardt, said, “What do you think we’re going to find out there?”

“Those little circles show where the pots are.”

“Pots?”

“Yes, Lonnie. Pots.”

“We don’t need pots. We need, you know, like some place to . . .” There was a pause, then Lonnie lowered his voice, making what he said inaudible.

“I told you what we’re doing. We sell the pots to that guy in Fredonia,” Byron said, “which’ll get us that tacos-and-cervezas-on-the-beach cash money. There’s all kinds of circles up there around Swallow Valley.”

“But there’s no roads,” Lonnie said. “I don’t want to have to hike in, B. My knees are crap.”

“This is the place Uncle Pete and Dad used to talk about. Dad said the Aztec gold was up there, not in Johnson Canyon like everyone thinks.”

“There ain’t no Aztec gold, even I know that. People been looking for it since, like, forever. Don’t tell me you stole this off Scissors because of gold fever.”

“Shut up and listen. This map has all the old places on it. Antelope Flats. Dutch John’s Butte. Las Casas Altas. Swallow Valley. Since they put in the monument, people don’t go to the old places anymore. They just follow the signs. Only a couple of guys know where any of these places are, and one of them was you know who. I feel like I keep telling you this.”

“Right,” Lonnie said, then more softly, “yeah, okay. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Reinhardt ate more of his breakfast and washed it down with the coffee. He noticed the waitress and the cook whispering to each other through the grill window, which made him nervous.

“Can’t drive to Swallow Valley,” Lonnie pointed out. “It’s up on the plateau. Plus, after the rain last night, who knows what’s washed out up there.”

“I know that, but we can get to here, here, or here,” Byron said, thumping the table three times. “I say we try Las Casas Altas or Antelope Flats. It’s a good road, and there’s tons of them little circles. We could make short work of it. We got all weekend.”

“Well that’s good luck, for once, I guess,” Lonnie said.

“Right?” Byron said. “Where’s that coffee? Man, I’m starving.” He got up, approached the waitress, and asked when she was going to get to them.

Reinhardt turned on his phone and switched to the selfie mode so he could spy on them over the table. With a little tilt of the wrist, he was able to get a good picture of the map. He shot a quick burst, then ate more of his breakfast, trying to look nonchalant.

Byron sat back down and rolled up the map.

“There’s gotta be easier ways to make money, rob a bank or something,” Lonnie said.

“But we need clean cash at this point. Ain’t no time for a real job, Lonnie. Ain’t no time for paychecks or taxes or dye packs blowing up in our faces.”

“How come you rolled it up?” Lonnie asked.

“Cause they’re bringing the coffee. Last thing we need is you spilling something all over it.”

“Last thing we need is you spilling something on it,” Lonnie said. Reinhardt heard him skootch out of the booth. “I gotta see a man about a horse.”

“What should I order?”

“Ranch breakfast and some yogurt, like a parfait or something. My guts aren’t feeling great.”

The taller one walked past Reinhardt, his long arms swinging slowly. Reinhardt finished his breakfast, and when the waitress passed, he asked for his check. “I’ll get you at the register, hon,” she said.

Reinhardt left a tip, paid the bill, and went to the car. From behind the wheel, he pulled up the first image and zoomed in. He could see the map with pretty good detail: the roads, the contour lines, the little circles, all skewed because of the angle, but all there, hand drawn, and amazing. In the Antelope Flats area, he could see five treasure circles. In faint handwriting, there were the words Pueblo II, five vessels returned, and burial site—human remains.

A treasure map, he thought, a real treasure map. He set down his phone and picked up Mythstructures for Blockbusters, thumbing through it to the chapter on the first threshold gatekeeper. He skimmed until he came to the term “herald,” where he slowed, learning about how people or objects or letters can announce the need for change and point the hero in the right direction. He looked up and took stock of himself sitting alone in a strange town and began to create a mental list: the woman lecturing at Bryce, the Kwons, his flying dream, Kenji, the coyotes, and now this map. He was normally a rational person, but here it was, all lined up.

Just then his phone buzzed. It was a text from Wolf: I SAW THAT PHOTO OF YOUR SPIRIT GUIDES. FOLLOW YOUR BLISS, MY FRIEND. WE’LL TALK WHEN YOU RETURN.

Yes, Reinhardt thought, and he began to lay plans for an adventure to Antelope Flats.

___

When they came to the spot where the canyon narrowed to a high-walled chute flanked on each side by pines, Sophia noticed the slick rock transitioning to cobble and larger stones. Beyond that was a massive boulder, and after that, the sixty-foot drop to the level below.

Paul stopped by a pinyon pine and pulled on it from a number of different directions.

“We climbed that? It looks worse from up here,” she said.

“It does. But don’t worry, we’ll rappel down.” Paul removed his pack and pulled out his rope along with the other gear.

While he tied a series of arcane knots around the pine, Sophia said, “So, I’m putting it together, I think.” She pointed to a section of the canyon wall above and behind them. There was a pathway smashed through the trees and a trail of rubble behind. “Cluff blasted this boulder out from up there.” She pointed to a spot halfway up the side of the canyon.

“Yep,” Paul said.

“I’m surprised he didn’t kill himself in the process.”

“So was he,” Paul said.

They harnessed up, then lowered their packs and prepared for the belay, and after a moment, Sophia swallowed hard and backed over the brow of the rock, hopping a few feet at a time, past an empty spot where the tiny tenacious pine tree had grown. At the bottom, when she was clear of the rope, she called to Paul, who whistled over the edge, then lowered himself with the delicacy of an aerialist.

“Fun, huh?” he said, uncoupling from the rope.

“Don’t push it,” she said. “You still occupy a complicated place in my head.”

Paul’s face grew sad, then he exhaled and performed some kind of magic with one end of the rope, and the length of it fell, unspooling, to the ground. The ease with which it came free made Sophia unsure about wanting to repeat the process.

Once the gear was repacked, they continued on. The sky above them was blue, and there was no sign of flooding in any of the canyons. The view of the return hike was disorienting. The descent was beginning to take its toll on her knees and ankles, but she distracted herself by thinking through her photos and notes and by justifying her feelings about Paul and his stupid off-the-books project. No wonder he kept going on about hiding the vehicle and having her drive. Returning artifacts this way would probably cost him his job. The whole ends-justify-the-means attitude was common in archeology. You see it in salvage divers and in Howard Carter’s journals from the Valley of the Kings. Their belief in the greater good was overpowering. She felt science was the only way to keep self-interest out of it, but even the science was accomplished by politics and bureaucracy and personalities. In graduate school, they talked about the emic and etic. There were insiders and outsiders. The more she moved about in this desert landscape, exploring these ruins, the more she felt like a foreigner. You could try to grow close to another culture, but that wouldn’t make you part of it. You’d always be an observer. And if you were exploring the past, then that rift would become a gulf.

Her thoughts flowed through these channels all morning. As the hours passed, the sky became white, and the landscape around them went specular as the sun blazed down. Sophia thought about people who sought out a life in this environment, the ones who did not gather with others in the larger pueblos but instead retreated here. These lives were not accidental; neither could they be known except by the people who lived here and passed on. What she felt now was another aspect of the emptiness and absence she felt yesterday at the granary.

She paused at a switchback and sipped her water. As she adjusted the sternum strap on her pack, she realized that she had one Jolly Rancher left in the breast pocket of her shirt. Paul had rationed them out that morning, and she’d gone through them. She quickly popped the candy into her mouth only to discover it was grape. She would have to deal with it. She wrapped the luxurious rectangle in her tongue, and as she hiked, she turned it over and over until it was nothing more than a purple ribbon.

And then it was gone.

They came again to the vista of the lava field. Paul was waiting for her. “You doing okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve been quiet.”

“I’ve got a lot on my mind. Obviously.”

They hiked on, stopping regularly to stretch and drink.

During one break, Paul said, “You’re not going to tell anyone about what happened up there—you know—with the bowl, are you?”

“I haven’t decided,” Sophia said, adjusting her backpack.

Paul moved his hands to his hips and adjusted his sunglasses. “You’re still mad.”

“Very observant.”

“I really hoped this trip might go in an entirely different direction.”

“Me too.”

“I was thinking if I had a chance to meet the me going up the trail two days ago, I’d pull him aside and give him some advice.”

“Like, don’t ruin everything?” she said.

“Well, more like don’t lie to Sophia.”

Sophia exhaled and tried not to roll her eyes. “Not lying to people is really important. I hope this isn’t a brand-new insight for you.”

“I made a promise to Bruce, and I wanted to see it through. But it’s bigger than that. Political stuff. We all know it’s coming, but we don’t know when. It’s like the bad guys are gaining on us, trying to unwrite a hundred years of hard work, sell it all off to the highest bidder. Sometimes, when you’re here in the middle, the only thing you can do to make a difference is break the rules. It’s just hard to be the one who has to enforce them at the same time.”

Sophia did not know what to say and what to hold back, so instead of speaking, she looked through a gap in the low hills toward Antelope Flats and then back up at the way they’d come down. She felt many responses come to the surface of her mind, then depart. During her silence, she saw Paul’s impeccable posture eroding, and she felt as if her message was coming across just fine.

“How much longer do we have?”

“At this pace, maybe an hour.”

They continued on, her feet growing sore from the hammering of the trail. The way flattened out, and eventually her truck materialized out of the junipers. She dropped her pack in the truck bed and opened her cooler, which was full of ice water. She removed two cans of Dr Pepper and placed one on the back of her neck. She offered the other to Paul, who declined.

“Suit yourself. More for me,” she said. She cracked open the soda and drank half of it in a single, long, burning, delicious stream, then unlocked the truck.

They drove in welcome silence down the steadily widening paths to the county road, until they came to Paul’s Jeep.

“I’m sorry I ruined everything,” he said.

Sophia shrugged. “I’m sorry I set my expectations so high.” Sophia got out of the truck but left it idling.

Paul unbuckled his seatbelt and said, “At least you got to prove that people actually do suck. It’s not just confirmation bias.” He smiled weakly, got out, and started transferring his gear from Sophia’s truck into his vehicle. After a couple of trips, he stopped, swore, and began hurriedly checking his vehicle top to bottom, saying, “This isn’t possible. No. No. No. It couldn’t just disappear.”

“What’s gone?”

“My weapon—the M16—it’s gone.”

“Are you sure you brought it?”

“The SIG Sauer and the Remington are here, still locked up. The vehicle was locked.” He checked the doors and windows and threw his arms in the air.

“Maybe your mind was somewhere else. When was the last time you saw it?” Sophia said, not minding at all that she came across as smug.

“I serviced it last week,” he said, slumping against the vehicle. “So, it’s got to be back on my workbench. It’s the only thing that makes sense. With all the crap going on right now, I’m just not on top of things.”

“It’s okay to be imperfect,” Sophia said.

“Not right now it’s not, not for me,” Paul said. “I’m going to have to hustle back to Dellenbaugh Station. I’m so sorry. I’ll be in touch. We should talk about all of this at some point.”

“We should,” Sophia said and watched Paul speed off to the south.

___

Reinhardt arrived at a gas station that perched on the edge of the Paiute Indian Reservation, thirty miles southwest of Kanab. It was a standard American highway oasis with a massive open roof sheltering eight self-service fuel pumps. He had seen so many photographs of places like this that it did not seem foreign to him at all. During the drive, the wind had picked up, and percussive gusts shoved his car with enough force to make him veer out of his lane. As he pulled into the station from the side road, dust exploded into the air like waves breaking on a dry beach. In the open, flat ground between the station and the highway stood a huge green fiberglass brontosaurus.

As Reinhardt parked, he noticed more dinosaurs printed on every sign and pump, and he thought how strange it was for people to cling to the fiction that our oil came from these creatures. Another gust buffeted the car, and across the way, an old man with a wispy white beard and no mustache labored outside in the turbulence to fuel his old camper. Reinhardt watched him carry a step stool, which he stood on to clean the windshield. As he began his work, the wind snatched the paper towels from his hand and carried them off.

Reinhardt got out of the car to throw his trash into the garbage, and the old man saw him. He climbed down from his stool, looked to where the towels had gone, then approached Reinhardt with a fury in his small eyes. “Supposed to rain again,” he said without preamble. “Like to be the monsoons.”

Reinhardt nodded and turned to scan the southward expanse where the dark and distant mountains lay derelict against the sky, which was blue at its zenith and populated by a dozen or more clouds heaped in bales that dwindled in size as they approached the tan haze of the horizon. “Rain? But it’s so clear now,” Reinhardt said.

The old man gestured to all sides, the wind blowing his hair and beard around. “Winds of change, son,” he said. “Winds of change.” Then the man walked back to his camper, a slight limp in his right leg. He stowed the stool in the back camper, then disappeared around the other side. When he reappeared, the man shouted, “Don’t fool with the rain.”

Reinhardt nodded and thanked him.

“It looks like a desert now,” the old man said, “but this whole place was created with water.”

“I will remember your advice,” Reinhardt called back.

“Not advice,” the man said. “It’s a warning.” Then he limped across the concrete to the convenience store, the wind picking up again so that he struggled to open the door. After several attempts, he pounded on the glass with his fist. The door opened slowly, and a teenage girl with long straight black hair pushed against it until the old man could enter, then she guided the door closed. It looked like she was used to the task.

Reinhardt began pumping his gas, and a burst of dust blasted him in the face, so he hunched behind the pump and looked past it toward the open desert. A wall of dust formed in the air and billowed across the open ground, targeting him. Inside the dark roller, debris lifted into the air and fell scattered behind. The wall cloud swelled as it approached and surged across the highway. Reinhardt ducked, pulling his face down into the neck of his shirt right as he and the gas station were engulfed. He squatted and waited until the roar of the wind had passed, then he stood.

A half-powered wind lingered, then the gas dispenser clicked off. Reinhardt replaced the nozzle and saw the gas station door opening slowly against the wind, the teenage girl turning her shoulder into it, pushing with everything she had, like someone in a silent movie. While she leaned against the glass, the old man limped past her and crossed to his camper, then the girl walked the door backward carefully so it wouldn’t slam.

Reinhardt walked past the camper as it drove off, noticing the Arkansas license plates and the bumper sticker that said I ♥ ATHENS. He pried open the gas station door and eased it shut. Inside, the girl sat on a stool behind the register, inspecting the tips of her hair. His breath caught in his chest as he recognized that she was an Indian. “Rote Indianer,” he whispered to himself, and she looked up.

“Can I help you?” she said.

He shook his head, embarrassed and surprised and a little confused by the girl’s red plastic hoop earrings and her black hoodie. Naturally, she wouldn’t be wearing eagle feathers or beadwork, but he was expecting something else. She returned to her hair, and Reinhardt continued to look at her, noticing the acne on her cheeks, and the dermatologist in him thought perhaps he might recommend a retinoid cream.

But he said nothing and continued on to the restroom. He used the toilet, then washed his hands and face. Out there was a real flesh-and-blood Indian, bored like any teenager with a bad job, surrounded by cigarettes and lottery tickets and a flimsy display of unsold LED flashlights. He was disappointed in himself for confusing her with his idea of Native people. She was not playing Indian like Wolf and his friends from the teepee camps back home.

He dried his face and returned to the store and saw her sitting in the same position but now playing a game on her phone. He picked up a few bottles of Cherry Coke, a few bottles of water, and set them on the counter, then went back down the aisles for potato chips, nuts, and candy. From different parts of the store, he watched her until the guilt of it overpowered him. He looked for a back door, but there wasn’t one, so he approached the register and set his purchases down. The girl rang him up and put everything into a plastic sack. He had so many questions he wanted to ask her, but he knew he would be clumsy and embarrass himself even more, so he settled for directions. “I’m looking for the road that leads to Antelope Flats,” he asked.

“Where?” she asked.

“Antelope Flats.”

“I don’t know where that is. Is it on the monument or something?”

“It is supposed to be near here, or out there,” Reinhardt said, pointing through the window. “Let me show you the map I—”

“Hey, Ronnie?” the girl called out.

After a second, “What?” The voice was quiet.

“Where’s a place called Antelope Flats?”

“Where’s what?”

“Antelope Flats, like somewhere on the monument.” The girl sighed, then a skinny kid came out of the back wearing a Limp Bizkit T-shirt and saggy gray jeans. His ears were gauged and he had a round face with square glasses. “Antelope what?” he said, still quiet.

“Flats,” she said.

“Is that a place?” They both looked at each other for a moment.

“He says it is,” she said, pointing to Reinhardt.

“Hello, yes,” Reinhardt said. “My map says the turnoff is close. I am supposed to find a road called Sundown.”

“Ah, okay,” Ronnie said. “Sundown is what my grandma calls . . .” The boy thought for a moment. “If you’ve got a map, how come you can’t find it?”

Reinhardt shrugged. “It’s not a very good one. And I am not from around here.”

The girl laughed.

“My grandma used to talk about Sundown. Maybe it’s just County Road 16. It’s like three miles that way,” he said, pointing east. “There’s a tiny little sign, but you won’t see it if you’re going fast.” Ronnie squinted out the window at Reinhardt’s Mustang. “No four-wheel drive?”

“This is my only transportation,” Reinhardt said.

“Okay, but Sundown is only graded for a few miles. Then it gets pretty bad.”

“Yeah,” the girl said. “And you should fill up first, though.”

“For reals. Get gas now. People run out of gas out there all the time. Tow truck will rip you off. Maybe you should get a better map.”

“He already paid,” the girl said.

Reinhardt held up the bags, then he thanked them and pushed against the door. The wind had dropped off enough that it worked easily.

He looked back at the windows of the store and saw Ronnie and the girl staring at him. After a few seconds the girl covered her mouth and turned away. He thought he could see Ronnie smiling. As Reinhardt took another step, his angle of view changed and the sun struck the glass, turning it into an opaque flare of white. When he left the tour group, he was hoping to find something real that hadn’t been staged, but now he knew that they’d only been shown what the tour company wanted them to see. He moved his two bags into one hand and opened the car door. An empty plastic sack blew past him like a ghost. Gazing into the vault of the sky, he saw himself as a creature given over to and divided by vanity; his cheeks burned with shame and anger for the tour and for believing Krause and Wolf and the web pages that planted these ideas in his head about what he’d find out here. He regretted having to pay so much for the truth. Then he corrected himself. Anyone with the truth, he thought, should not be willing to sell it.

He sat behind the wheel and considered aborting the trip, then looked down at Mythstructures for Blockbusters and he thought about the call to adventure and how a refusal follows it. If the hero stays home, there is no story. He set the key fob into the ashtray and looked around, thinking of everything that had brought him here to this X on the map, and he made the choice to press on.

Before he left the gas station, he rolled down the window and snapped a picture of the glossy brontosaurus with a vast desert panorama stretching out behind it, and he posted it to Instagram and geotagged the image with PIPE SPRING GAS AND GROCERY, ARIZONA. The caption: INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN.

Reinhardt found County Road 16 after passing it twice. He wanted to drive with the top down, but the wind made it impossible. Enveloped in air conditioning, he opened one of his Cherry Cokes and drove on. His attention drifted outward to the mesas in the empty distance. The lack of green gave Reinhardt the impression of moving through a landscape drawn in chalk on a sheet of packing paper.

Eventually the wind died down, and being the only movement in such stillness made him question the passing of time. Every few miles he stopped and took more photographs with his phone. At some point there was no longer cell service. Eventually the road was blocked by three cows: two females and a calf. One of them swung her head and stared at him, white-faced, like somebody waiting their turn to speak. He took a photo of her through the dust-spotted windshield, then he honked, but it did not disperse them, so he got out and ran them off with shouts and waving arms.

He drove on, watching the steady unbroken, unchanging view, listening to the rumble of the tires and the hum of the engine. He noticed that his body had relaxed, so he rearranged his limbs. This was better than what he planned. Perhaps that was the mistake, thinking he could imagine this place from his apartment in Berlin after a few clicks on the internet. Even Sigmund F. Krause’s books didn’t have the full feeling of the space, and a map is never anything more than a finger pointing the way. Above all else, this mess of a trip made Reinhardt feel possibilities that had been veiled before.

He heard a horn and noticed a turquoise pickup bursting forth from the dust behind him. The truck pulled a trailer carrying a large yellow excavation machine with a blade on the front and a digging arm in the back. The English word for it escaped him, and as the truck zoomed past, leaving him in the wash of its dust, he thought of the German: Löffelbagger. After a few minutes, he drove clear of the cloud and saw the truck was gone. He was glad to be alone again.

The next photograph he stopped to take was of a derelict truck from the forties that lay a hundred feet from the road, swallowed by creosote bushes. As he approached the vehicle, he saw that it was riddled with bullet holes. Sunlight lanced the interior with slender white beams, each one filled with swirling dust. The inside was littered with broken bottles and old cans. As he returned to the car, he thought for a moment about the difference between Bryce Canyon, which was a national park, and this national monument. One was an amusement park full of noise and tourists, the other something frozen in its own time.

After a while, Reinhardt dug into his bag looking for the packets of pemmican he had brought from Germany. He’d tasted it for the first time sitting around a fire in buckskins at a hobby club encampment in the Black Forest. It was before he’d met Wolf, at the start of it all. Friends from college took him and a woman he thought he might marry—Greta; her Indian name was The Blue Sky Girl. He’d loved Krause’s books as a child, but so did everyone. The camps unlocked something in him, an escape from the anxieties of school and the mounting waves of digital connections. According to his friends, Indian people lived authentic lives, which he and his friends imitated, hoping to escape the modern world.

He opened the pemmican and took a bite, remembering the games and drum circles, the teepees and dances. He thought about how, much later, Wolf had taken him to other camps and introduced him to Germans who had transformed themselves completely into what they thought an Indian was. As he drove, he began to see how false those gatherings had been, how misguided and ill conceived. Taking the thinnest possible slice of the truth, they had concocted their own mythology from afar, using Native people as props and side characters. The Krause Museum was a sham. Their powwows and trinkets like so many cardboard cutouts. The kids in that gas station were real; he was fake. Wolf was fake, though he called himself a practical anthropologist. All of it was an idea of an idea of an idea.

Reinhardt set the unfinished pemmican down on the seat and drove on. He did not know how to have this conversation with Wolf when he returned to Germany, but he knew he must. It was overwhelming enough to have this dialogue with himself. Was this his quest? Was he to return home with this new knowledge?

Reinhardt took many photographs on the drive, saving them in his phone for uploading later. A single cloud separated from the others, casting a massive shadow across the expanse. A ramshackle homestead collapsed back into the crumbling hillside it was built into. He drove and snacked and looked for more things to photograph. Eventually he came to a section of the road where the high-voltage lines crossed overhead. The towers were massive, and as Reinhardt considered them, he tried to guide his thinking to something more Teutonic and less borrowed. He imagined them as golems given the task to guide power from the country to the city. He dreamed up a story where a boy was given magic metallic seeds and told not to plant them until there was a full moon. The boy, of course, rejected this counsel and that night these giants grew and wreaked havoc on the nearby village. A wizard gave them all magic rope to carry, which froze the golems in their tracks.

Reinhardt crested a rise to find a man standing alongside the road, next to a silver Sebring convertible. His clothes were not a hiker’s. He wore a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt, green pants, and white loafers with no socks, and he was waving Reinhardt down.

Reinhardt stopped, and a thick tan cloud of dust immediately engulfed the both of them. The man approached the car, motioning for him to roll down the window by cranking his hand. Reinhardt lowered the window with a button, then he turned off the car.

“It’s odd,” the man said, repeating his pantomime and looking at it. There was a tattoo of a dagger-pierced skull on his arm. “We do this gesture, even when there’s no crank to turn.”

“Excuse me?” Reinhardt said.

“Like how we say that we hang up the phone when there is just a button, and even then, often there is no button at all, just an image of a button.”

Reinhardt looked all around to see if there was anyone else. There wasn’t.

“But we didn’t come here to philosophize,” the man said. “I am looking for some business associates. One tall, the other short. They drive a turquoise Ford, I believe.”

“That truck passed me a while ago,” Reinhardt said.

“Which way?”

Reinhardt pointed backward with his thumb. “They passed me back there, then I didn’t see them again. It would be easy to get lost out here.”

“It is very easy. I’ve been beating myself up about losing these two.” The man noticed the snacks on his seat. “Is that pemmican?” he asked.

“It is,” Reinhardt said. “But I am embarrassed to say I bought it on the internet.”

“No shame in that. Using the internet is not really a choice anymore.”

“My friend Wolf makes his own. Mine is inauthentic. It has raisins and walnuts.”

“I stand corrected. Shame on you for raisins and walnuts.” The man stood and looked up the road and back again.

“Can I help you find them?” Reinhardt asked.

“You came in on 16, then. Not sure what road we’re on now.”

Reinhardt said he did. “I can show you my map,” he said, reaching for his phone.

“That isn’t necessary,” the man said.

“Do you think they are okay?”

“For now,” he said. “They know their way around here. I’m just following.”

“If I see them should I say that you are looking for them?”

“Ah, no. I’d like to surprise them,” the man said, looking at his wristwatch. “I appreciate your time.” He thumped the roof of the car and stepped back. Reinhardt looked over and saw that the man’s car was using its undersized spare tire. He thought about pointing out that such a small tire would cause problems on these roads, but instead he put the car in gear and drove on, with the man waving him past, like somebody guiding planes at the airport. Reinhardt watched the man in his rearview mirror. He crossed the road to his car and got in.

A hill rose in front of him, and after crossing it, he lost sight of the man completely.

He sped up, dropping down into another dry valley, then rose over another hill. In the near distance rose a fantastic palisade of orange rock that folded upon itself like the ruffle on a costume. The road carved through the sagebrush, toward the cliffs. He opened his phone and flipped to the map. By his best reckoning, he was close to a place called Las Casas Altas.

He drove on, stopping to take photos of each new thing. At one stop, he got out of the car to get a closer photograph of a cluster of small humanoid orange rocks, and bursting through the general buzz of insects, he heard the sudden blasting racket of a rattlesnake. Before he could think, he jumped back and saw the snake coiled under a bush, watching him, its black tongue whipping the air. Everything else was motionless.

When Reinhardt moved, the snake cautioned him with a quick burst of sound, then walked its looped body back over itself as it retreated farther into the vegetation. Soon, it was entirely gone.

Reinhardt took his own pulse at the neck. It was about 125, double his resting rate. A clammy feeling moved across his skin. He felt tired, then nauseous, then elated. He wanted, for some reason, to chase the snake, but he kept himself from it. Instead he looked to the sky. This, he thought, is what I came here for.

He returned to the car and emptied one of his water bottles. He tried to orient himself again on the photograph of the map and verified that Las Casas Altas was a cliff dwelling, and he was close by. He drove on, with the undulating cliff wall on his left. Soon he could make out a high row of small, dark squares on the cliff face, higher up than anyone could climb without help.

A deafening bang jolted the car. The steering wheel wrenched out of Reinhardt’s hands and the vehicle swerved into the cut side of the road with enough force to deploy the airbag, which exploded against his face in a blinding white flash. He sat in the seat, stunned for a moment, his ears ringing, surrounded by the smell of something burning. He gathered himself together and opened the car door. The fiberglass bumper was splintered, and the engine ticked with dissipating heat. He bent down to get a look under the car and saw a lacerated rock and a line of reddish fluid streaming from the transmission into the dirt.

He looked around at his surroundings, then up into the sky, which was filling with clouds. In the midst of it, a tiny jet airplane flew diagonally across the blue vault. He noticed that there were no vultures, then quickly realized that there would be no vultures yet. In that tumble of thinking, queasiness came first, then panic, then tears. After it had all passed, he said to himself, “Listen, Dr. Kupfer. You need a plan, not hysterics.” He stood, brushed himself off, and started looking through the car for anything useful.

___

The Ashdowns were parked on County Road 16 a few hundred feet into the sagebrush in a place called Antelope Flats with the truck windows open, the borrowed backhoe off the trailer, and Bruce Cluff’s fifth map unrolled on the hood and held down with a pair of toolbox magnets. The other two corners flapped in the wind. A scant number of junipers and creosote were scattered about in this tight dish of land. A low palisade of dark basalt hemmed them in on the east and gave way to a box canyon that dropped fifteen abrupt feet to a concavity with a natural dirt ramp that led back to the level of the road. Beyond that area, farther to the north, was a single hill rising out of the chaparral. The county road rose up to the base of the hill and followed its contour and continued farther into the monument. They were sixty-five miles from the state highway. Another thirty-five miles of dirt road lay between them and the north rim of the Grand Canyon.

Byron sat inside his uncle’s backhoe at the bottom of the draw with the black stone wall of the box canyon wrapped around him on one side and a steep dirt slope on the other. The steel boom curled behind the machine like the segmented tail of a massive yellow scorpion. Lonnie stood next to him holding the roll cage while Byron worked the loader down into the rocky ground. The bucket came up, quivered, then dropped, and the monstrous tines bit into the dirt. As Byron cranked the control levers, the front rode up slightly, the pitch of the pumps rising. The loader bucket sank into the ground, and the machine spasmed, throwing Lonnie off. He screamed and rolled out of the way, then jumped up and tried to flap his arms to get Byron’s attention, but Byron kept digging.

“Hey,” Lonnie shouted. “Hey, Byron!” He waved his hands until Byron turned off the machine.

“What?” Byron said, spitting through the open side of the cab.

“Aren’t the pots and whatever gonna be worth more if they’re, like, you know, all in one piece?”

“You and me and a couple shovels ain’t gonna cut it. We’ll make it up in volume,” Byron said.

Lonnie shook his head. “I don’t think it works like that.”

“Let me remind you that we’re at this particular crossroads because of your problem-solving skills, not mine. Get out of the way. The clock is running.”

“I feel it too, you know. This guy isn’t going to just lay off and let us go.”

“He’ll lose interest.”

“I’m starting to lose interest,” Lonnie said. “I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

“Then you’re free to go. But I’m tired of eating scraps with the dogs.”

“I know. You’ve said that before.”

Byron turned on the machine, lifted the bucket, pulled back, swiveled around, and dumped its contents at Lonnie’s feet. A large white thing tumbled out of the dark cascade of dirt and rocks. When it came to rest, Lonnie saw two eye sockets and a row of small flat teeth.

He looked up to see if his brother had noticed, but Byron was already turning the machine around. He drove ahead a dozen feet and dug again. Lonnie reached down and pulled the skull out of the dirt, considering it. His first thought was surprise that the map was right when it said this spot had human remains, then he thought maybe there wasn’t just one person here. Lonnie turned the skull around and saw, behind the eye, a radiating web of cracks. His eyes unfocused, and for a moment, he thought he might pass out. “We can’t do this,” he said, but the sound of his voice was swallowed up by the backhoe. He dug into the loose earth with his hands, which was still damp from the recent rain, and kicked up the curved tines of a rib cage. As he scanned the mound, he saw the crusted dome and serpentine cracks of a second skull, which he pulled out and set alongside the first. He wanted to get these people away from Byron and the random tires of the backhoe. Lonnie dropped to his knees and started digging. He quickly found the parallel bones of a forearm. At the end of it was a curled fist held together by the clumped dirt.

He stood, and when Byron swung the bucket back around, Lonnie lifted up the bones, and when Byron saw them, he shut down the machine. “What’s that?” he shouted.

Lonnie pointed to the mound of dirt. “There’s people in here. You have to stop.”

Byron smiled and whooped and climbed down from the machine. “Gimme that,” he said, snatching the bone away from his brother. Lonnie scrambled, picking up the two skulls, as Byron tossed the arm bones aside. “You know what those mean?” Byron said.

“This is a graveyard?”

“It means we hit the jackpot.”

“I don’t think that’s what it means, Byron. This is the opposite of a jackpot.”

“What would you call it, then?”

“Well, disaster comes to mind,” Lonnie said. “Maybe a curse.” He showed Byron the fractured skull. He wanted his brother to see there was something going on here that was more important than money. He thought about his own mother buried in Kanab, and he knew his brother wouldn’t even consider digging in that cemetery. “These are somebody’s ancestors, Byron. Please, let’s just go,” he said.

His brother was unmoved. “Oh, shut up and get the shovels,” Byron said, and he headed back to the machine.

___

As Sophia drove back to town, she tried to listen to her book, but she was too mad about what happened on the trip to follow the story. She tried music, but even the angry songs were angry in the wrong way, so she switched to silence and let herself stew. Yes, Paul lied to her, but that was not exactly right; he kept information back—he was playing a role. It was supposed to be a trip for them—that’s what it was, right?—but it turned out to be a disguise. A ruse—that was the word she wanted. He obviously had no plans to tell her about anything until he was caught—the double-dipping bastard.

When the road straightened, she checked the signal on her phone: NO SERVICE.

Over the summer, she had discovered some of the places on the monument with coverage: on top of Mt. Logan and west of the Hurricane Cliffs. In Antelope Flats, a little ways from here, you could get a sliver of signal if you were high enough, not enough for data, but you could make a call or send a text. She weighed it all out, and given the work she was doing, she decided to stop at Antelope Flats and call Bryce Canyon and see if Dalinda could walk her through the procedure for something like this. Then she could focus on what to say instead of how to say it.

As she came around the corner and dropped down the hill, she saw the turquoise Ford again parked off the road in a sparse area of juniper. There was a trailer there, too. She slowed, and when she didn’t see anybody, she pulled in behind the truck and stopped to give the place a closer look. Beyond the truck, a yellow backhoe arm flashed into view, then disappeared. She got out. This time she was going to at least get the license plate number.

On the hood of the Ford was the same hand-drawn map she’d seen last week. She groaned and scanned the map more carefully to see if she could figure out what they were doing. Swallow Valley was on it, as well as a spot nestled in a canyon, marked with a small square surrounding an X. Next to it was the note 2 sticks dynamite set here in 1981. Access controlled. She recognized the handwriting from the blue book Paul had with him, and she thought of everything Paul told her about Cluff. Her pulse jumped as the dots connected. She pulled out her phone, checked again for a signal. When she failed to get one, she snapped a picture of the license plate and the map, ran back to her truck, and hopped into the bed. Still no signal, so she stepped up, stood above the cab, and picked up 1X, which was enough to connect. But from that height, she could see the two guys moving earth with the backhoe, which meant they could see her.

She hopped down and sprinted to their truck, plucking the map from the hood, tearing it where the magnets held it down. On her way back to her own truck, a voice called out, “Hey! We seen you a couple days ago.” It was the taller one. He looked exhausted, and he carried a human skull carefully in each hand. It looked like he’d been crying.

“Disturbing a burial site is a federal offense,” she shouted, standing tall, to make herself seem larger, because she had been trained in mountain lion safety but not for anything like this.

Lonnie looked down at the skulls in his hands. “I tried to stop him,” he said, then he lifted his face.

Sophia took out her phone and pointed it at him. “I’m filming this. My name is Sophia Shepard, and this man is—”

“Won’t do any good if you can’t send it. No reception out here.”

She looked down and still had the 1X. “I’m good. We can use it in court,” she said, then continued narrating the scene. When she did, Lonnie raised both hands and the skulls over his head. She looked around for something she could use to defend herself, but she had a phone in one hand and a map in the other, so she jumped down and reached for her truck’s door, thinking she’d lock herself in. Then a light flashed on the scrubby hill north of them, and an instant later Lonnie’s face burst into a kaleidoscope of blood and sunlight, which fanned into a mist as he dropped to his knees and fell forward into the dirt. The skulls leapt free of his grasp, rolled for a few inches, then came to a stop.

The surrounding space collapsed around Sophia, and she could no longer hear the straining of the backhoe’s engine. One second later, a staggered line of holes burst across the center of her windshield, each impact followed immediately by a burst of scintillating glass and the dull thud of the bullet burying itself in the back of her vehicle. Sophia dove to the ground and covered her head. A series of metallic pings came in triplets. During a pause she spotted the dead man through the tires of her truck and saw his back lurch as a bullet struck him across the shoulder. After a few seconds, another string of bullets rang across the fender of the other truck.

Her father, who had been a Marine in Iraq during Desert Storm, had taught her combat tactical breathing to help her with anxiety attacks in middle school. He said it’s how you can get in control of your parasympathetic nervous system. She did not know what that was, but they were the right words to show he wasn’t making any of it up. He told her this is how she can pull her head back in the game when she loses it. Breathe in, hold, exhale, repeat. After three cycles, she could feel her vision sharpen. Another few rounds and her thoughts started making sense. She could hear the backhoe again.

She turned on her phone and checked that she still had a connection. She thought about calling 911, realized their response time would be two hours or more, then with one hand she typed a hurried text to Paul: IM BEING SHOT AT ROAD 16 ENVELOPE FLATS. The second she sent it, she saw the autocorrect error and fixed it with a second text: ANTELOPE. The delivery message appeared and another round of pok-pok-pok rang out somewhere in the sheet metal above. She crouched.

While the backhoe growled and groaned, Sophia lay on the ground with the map next to her and the phone cradled in both hands, waiting for “delivered” to change to “read.” She tried to process what was happening. It seemed like some kind of drug deal in a movie going bad. Was this random or planned? Was it a turf war? Was one of these guys double-crossing the others? Two against one? Pottery was worth money, but not that much. Her thoughts stopped sprinting when another flash popped on the hill. She tensed, anticipating the incoming bullets, until she realized the glint wasn’t shots at all, but it had come off the windshield of a car crawling down the road toward her. The delivery message switched to “read,” and her pulse jumped. A new balloon appeared on the screen followed by three bouncing dots, but there were no words in it yet. If the shooter was in the car, she had just a sliver of time.

She rolled up the map and slipped it into her pack, then she stood, opened the truck door and grabbed her water bottle, and somehow in the middle of her reaching, the phone slipped from her hand and fell, hard. She looked up and around at the hill and the surrounding bluffs, then crouched and turned over the phone. The screen was shattered, entirely, pieces of glass sliding off and dropping to the ground. When she pressed the on button, the phone did not light up. The glass would shred everything, so she zipped her pack shut and threw her phone into the truck, shards flying everywhere. Taking her bearings, she pulled her pack onto her shoulders and ran straight for the curving terrace of rock that lay thirty yards east of their vehicles. As she ran, she stopped to check behind her just as the car pulled off the road and rolled slowly in her direction.

When she came to the basalt wall, she realized there was no way around it. She wedged herself into one of the angled corners and climbed straight up like she had on the way into Swallow Valley. In a few quick moves, she made it to the top and rolled across the rocks to the dirt on the other side. From this shallow depression she returned to her combat breathing. Then the car door slammed, barely audible over the rumble of the backhoe.

She knew she should keep her head down, but she didn’t want the man to sneak up on her, so she peered over the edge and saw him strutting around her truck with a military weapon slung across his back. He wore a pair of blue medical gloves, a white panama hat, and a garish Hawaiian shirt. After a quick inspection of the area, he stopped and removed his sunglasses, then he continued to the dead man, toed the body, placed the muzzle of the gun against the back of his head, and fired.

The backhoe kept working. The man walked down the incline, lifting the weapon to his shoulder. A few seconds after he disappeared, she heard the backhoe stop, and then the desert sounds filled in: an insectile shriek from the junipers and undulating clap-clap-clap pulse coming from all directions. Two more gunshots echoed across the space, then silence filled in as a group of wrens zipped past her and disappeared into the space beyond.

Sophia watched the man climb back up the draw and walk straight toward the turquoise pickup. After he searched the cab and bed completely, he began systematically tearing the truck apart, pulling the seats forward and cutting them open with a folding knife. When he finished, he shot out the tires, then moved on to her truck, which he dismantled in the same fashion. When he was done, he stood to one side and held up a can of her Dr Pepper, popped it open, and chugged it, wiping his mouth with the back of his forearm. Once it was gone, he shot out the tires of her truck, crushed the can with the heel of his shoe, then took it to his own car and left it on the seat.

“Thank you for the soft drink, Sophia,” the man shouted. “I found the sodas and the wallet you left behind. It surprises me how perfectly those twenty-three flavors quench my thirst. Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?” He paused and moved his gun to one shoulder. “I realize it is entirely possible that you have run off. Someone in good physical condition could be half a mile from here by now, which would be the safest thing. No doubt. Then again, a reasonable person might be wondering if running might reveal her position. Such a tremendous thing to weigh out. The whole situation makes you a little bit like Schrödinger’s cat, doesn’t it? To me, you are both alive and dead.” He paused, and Sophia closed her eyes, squeezing out the tears she’d been fighting against.

Sophia felt herself losing it again.

“A few moments ago, as a final gesture, the gentleman on the backhoe informed me that the map I am looking for was on the hood of his truck. I see now that it’s missing. Since it is not in your truck, and since it doesn’t appear to have blown off—there are some torn pieces here under the magnets—I imagine the map is with you. So, I am giving you a one-time offer to set things right.”

From the south, she heard a vehicle. She imagined that it must be Paul. She hoped it was. The vehicle stopped, and she heard the echo of the door slamming.

“Hands where I can see them,” Paul directed.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“For starters, that’s my weapon, which means ten years of federal time for you.”

“How strange,” the man said. “I found this here, right in the middle of a tragic situation. I’m glad I have the opportunity to return it to you directly.”

Sophia rolled over and peered across the rocks and saw Paul, now in uniform, advancing with his pistol leveled at the man, who held Paul’s gun awkwardly out to the side with one hand.

“This escalated quickly,” the man said.

“Lace your fingers behind your head and get down on your knees,” Paul shouted.

Sophia was emboldened by Paul’s command of the situation, and she called out. “I’m up here.”

“Are you hurt?” Paul asked.

“I’m fine.”

The man looked in her direction and stared.

“Eyes over here,” Paul said. “Set that weapon on the ground.”

The man went down on his knees, relaxed his shoulder, and the gun dropped.

“Stay on your knees and move back,” Paul ordered.

“That will ruin my outfit,” the man said.

“Just the pants,” Paul said.

Sophia laughed a little to release some pressure. She stood and watched Paul pick up his weapon and set it on the hood of the turquoise pickup.

“I notice you have a radio,” the man said, “but I haven’t heard you call anything in.”

“This isn’t a performance evaluation,” Paul said, walking around the man, who kept his bent arms rigid like fins on an old car. Paul checked on the body lying facedown, then moved to where he could see into the draw.

“Sophia. I’ve got two guys down. Is that right?” he called out.

“I think so,” she shouted back.

“Sophia?” the man said, toying with Paul. “So you know each other.”

“Shut up,” Paul said, returning to the man with a pair of handcuffs. Sophia watched Paul as he cuffed one hand, then the other, and stood the man up. As Paul turned the man around, he struck out with his forehead and knocked Paul backward. The man dropped to the ground, slipping his cuffed hands behind him as he fell. In a single motion, he pulled his feet through the ring of his arms and reappeared standing, with a pistol he’d pulled from an ankle holster.

Paul was still reeling from the head butt when the man shot him point-blank in the chest. Paul staggered back. The man shot him again, and Paul disappeared over the sheer stone edge of the box canyon.

Sophia screamed, drawing the man’s attention. He turned, with his hands still cuffed, and shot at her until the pistol emptied. Bullets ricocheted off the cliffs, and she ran away through the sage in a straight line, leaping over boulders. The man’s voice followed her, now amplified through the speaker in Paul’s vehicle. “SOPHIA! I RESCIND THE PREVIOUS OFFER!” She cut through a row of dense bushes that tore at her clothes. Ahead of her was a wash that might lead to a hiding place. She ducked into it.

“ONCE I NEUTRALIZE THESE VEHICLES, I’LL COME FOR YOU AND MY MAP!”

___

Reinhardt figured he was about eight kilometers from his Mustang, going in what seemed like the right direction. The sameness of this sage flat would have turned him around if not for the sun burning in its transit across the sky. With all this walking, he hadn’t even made it back to the place where he’d encountered the strange man wearing golf pants. He crinkled the water bottles he carried in each hand and felt the dryness in his mouth modulate to a dull throbbing ache. He stopped and selected a white stone from the side of the road and placed it into his mouth. This lozenge was warm and rasping on his tongue. Saliva gathered around it, which he swallowed, knowing there would be only so many times he could recirculate his water this way.

The sky was filled with proportional white clouds. Behind them was a belt of gray. Rain fell from two of the clouds in separate sectors of the sky, neither of them near. He told himself that this road led to the state highway, and if he could just keep going, he would meet up with a vehicle. It was a national monument after all. As he trudged, the sun dropped steadily from its zenith toward the west. When his eyes went out of focus, he rubbed them only to discover they were crusted in salt. He dabbed a finger to his tongue to confirm. The flavor made his stomach growl.

He kept walking, checking his phone periodically for a signal, noting that it was after 16:00. Eventually, he switched the phone off to preserve what battery was left. For the last two hours he’d been talking to himself in German. He told himself that he was in good physical condition, and that he would know enough to be able to monitor his own vital signs.

As he walked, he took note of the distant cliff formation and the occasional relics of recent human occupation. Everything was so vast and still and bright that the space was difficult at times to look into, so he kept his eyes to the ground. The most common signs of humanity aside from the road were the wind-blown plastic bags. He noted glinting fragments of broken glass, and the flattened bodies of small birds, snakes, lizards, and mice. So, people did come down this road. All was not lost.

Occasionally, a beetle moved deliberately through the gravel of the road, a single crisp point of blackness trundling toward some objective. Reinhardt tried to imagine what it was heading for, but he applauded its singleness of purpose. At random intervals, a bar of shadow would sweep across the landscape. His skin could sense the transitions from light to dark with the sensitivity of a phonograph needle. He was also acutely aware of his sunburn. The hat he’d fashioned from a few thin branches and the same grocery sacks he saw blowing around did little to offer shade.

Eventually Reinhardt looked up and realized that he could sense no visible progress. He did some quick calculations and decided that, if no one came along, continuing on would certainly kill him. He set his backpack on the ground and opened Mythstructures for Blockbusters and skimmed the section on The Ordeal, part of The Descent. As powerful as this mythology felt to him, Reinhardt rejected the idea that a hero must die and be reborn. If he was unable to save Kwon, how could he save himself? So, he turned back to retrace his path.

In the distance, he focused on a gray mesa and the green backs of pine-covered mountains. He began walking, though each step was agony. He lapsed into a meditation so deep, his wrecked car surprised him when he came upon it.

He opened all the doors and sat inside with the seat fully reclined. It was scorchingly hot, but his body savored the rest. After a few minutes, he went through every inch of the car. There was a red-and-white-striped candy wrapped in plastic deep in the crack of one of the back seats. He placed it in his mouth and felt a zing of Christmas.

He imagined that with a tarp he could build a solar water collector. He’d built one once, as a boy, for a school project, and it worked. He thought about how Wolf would take the news that he’d left the tour and died in the desert like an outlaw. He tried to remember if he’d learned anything useful from any of the teepee gatherings he had been to in college and with Wolf. They had learned archery, how to shoot guns, and he could make fire without matches, but these skills all seemed ridiculous now. He did not need to build a fire using a bow, a spindle, and a length of leather cord. He was useless out here. He had learned nothing, and he would be remembered as a fool. The tour group would use him as a cautionary tale. “Remember Reinhardt Kupfer, who was devoured by vultures and coyotes?” At that moment, Reinhardt took solace in the fact that he was unmarried and childless.

A breeze picked up, and Reinhardt felt some relief. He reviewed the order in which his body would close down: his urine would darken from the color of a pilsner, to an ale, to a porter, to a stout. His heart rate would spike because of his thickened blood. Then his body would shut down any organs that were not key to survival. He would be unconscious when his liver failed. Animals would feast upon his remains. They would have to identify him by the rental car paperwork.

Reinhardt looked over at Mythstructures for Blockbusters and thought about how this should be the time for supernatural helpers to arrive. He picked up his phone and recalled what Kenji said about the digital assistant and powered the phone on. There was no signal, so he stared at it until he decided to check the photograph of the map. He saw the circles of Antelope Flats, which he felt like he passed long ago. Everything was so close on the map and so far apart in reality. At this point, he was closest to the ruins called Las Casas Altas and a cluster of three wavy lines with a word he couldn’t read, but it ended with “tsuvats.” The map had a number of these glyphs spread across it, difficult to see while pinching and dragging. He had 4 percent battery left. The tsuvats-glyphs were nearby, close to the road, so he powered the phone down, took his empty bottles, some jerky, and walked southward.

He could see a long way down the length of road, and there was nothing but a smaller road, unnoticeable to anyone in a vehicle. He followed it to an abandoned homestead. In the harsh light, he saw an old wood barn collapsing on itself and a fence line that ran for thirty feet. Past the fence was a cluster of green trees and shrubs at the base of a large rounded hill, popping out against the brown and the blown-out white sky.

At the center of this oasis, in the shade, was a moss-covered cluster of rocks. From the bearded chin of the lowermost rock, a single clear drop of water swelled, broke free, and fell into the mud at the bottom. The land reclaimed the water into its own secret cache. Another drop gathered immediately, not quite, but almost, forming a trickle.

Reinhardt found that he could lie next to the glorious damp rocks in such a way that the droplets would land in his mouth. His mouth would fill every twenty minutes. He wouldn’t die of thirst this way, but this was certainly no way to solve his problem quickly. After two mouthfuls, he set up his bottles and let them fill.

The day was waning, and he did not think he would die of thirst tonight.

From the shade, Reinhardt watched a jet cross the sky, the contrail miraculously threading its way through the many clouds. He thought about how strange it was to be absolutely and utterly alone and also in plain view of two hundred people, close enough to be seen but as unreachable as people on their way to Mars. With winged boots, it would be a six-mile walk to that airplane. In a couple of hours, he could be up there with his thumb out, and soon after, hitching his way to Los Angeles, where he would crawl into the crisp sheets of a hotel on Sunset Boulevard with bottles of San Pellegrino scattered about. He would cash in all of his frequent flyer miles then and fly home first class. What good is money if you can’t use it to save your own life?

He untied his boot laces and ate some of the very dry jerky that remained in the bag. The pemmican was gone. Venus appeared in the deepening blue, and without preamble, one of the clouds lit up, the interior flashing twice, with the faint tracery of electric blue following after.

___

By midafternoon, Dalton quit working and drove home to tackle the repairs his house would need before he could sell it. He started weeks ago but let it sit until he had a free day, which never came. It’s always easier to resist a chore near the beginning than it is at the end. Now it was clear that the shower would not re-grout and seal itself, no handyman would straighten the gutter and nail it in place, and the weeds would continue to encroach. Dalton felt he’d been set before the crank of a massive dynamo that powered everything around him. He could turn this crank and keep everything going or rest and enjoy the darkness.

Each chore on his list began as a plain and innocent task that quickly became a vexation for which he did not have the proper tools, know-how, or patience to complete in a single afternoon. He originally thought he might cross a half dozen or more items off his list, but he ended up finishing two.

When hunger and the long shadows of evening stopped him, he realized he had nothing to show for his labor, so he threw in the towel and drove to the Shake Stop for a cheeseburger, fries, and a strawberry malt. He paid, and the girl handed him a number on a small plastic A-frame.

A woman standing behind him in line asked, “Sheriff? Is it true? All that stuff they’re saying in the paper?”

Dalton turned around. He felt suddenly self-conscious wearing a T-shirt, cargo shorts, and running shoes instead of his uniform. “I haven’t been keeping up,” he said.

“You know, about Bruce taking his own life because the government is coming after his Indian stuff.”

“Does that sound like something Bruce would do?” he said.

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like him. Suicide doesn’t sound right either, a good church member like him.”

“Lots of people take their own lives, Emmalene.”

“Not in Utah.”

“I wish that was true,” he said. “We get more than our share of that trouble.”

“But, you know. This kind of thing has happened before. Down in Page. Anyone that knows anything about when the FBI came looking for pots and arrowheads says this is just like it was then. It’s too much government.”

“I know that’s what Stan Forsythe says, but I don’t see it like that, and I’d be in the know if that’s what was happening. But it’s not. So, don’t worry about it.”

“Stan’s been talking to people.”

“I’m sure he has,” Dalton said.

The girl called Dalton’s number and he went up to get his food, which they gave to him on a plastic tray. “Could I get this to go?” he asked.

“We’ve got the liberals to thank for it. Never should have been parks or monuments in the first place. Nobody wanted it. We finally have someone in Washington who can get these parks straightened out. We should get the land back in the hands of people who’ve lived here and raised their families on it.”

“You mean the Indians?” Dalton asked.

The woman laughed and gestured to the buildings and streets around them. “None of this was built by Indians.” Her arm settled at her side, and she smiled.

“The Paiutes have a different story about that,” Dalton said. The girl slid Dalton’s food through the window in a pulp-fiber tray, the malt jammed into one of the cutout slots, the food warm in a paper sack. He thanked her and turned back to Emmalene, nodded, and left before she had a chance to say anything else.

He got right in the car and decided he didn’t want to go home and surround himself with failed projects, so he drove to the office. He thought he might just sit at the computer and start the listing on the real estate website. The next time Karen called, he wanted to be able to show some progress. As he drove, he spotted a cluster of thunderheads to the south. They were deeply shadowed at the base and almost specular at the top, the light shearing them into flat stacked planes. A thin flicker of lightning pulsed twice in the core of the cloud, and in the gathering dusk, the evening star came on in a single pulse. It was a little early for monsoons, but it was nice to have things cooling off.

Dalton pulled into the building, unlocked the door, and found LaRae inside, sitting at her desk. “I didn’t think anyone would be here after hours.”

“I’m getting some work done. No sense sitting at home thinking about all this, you know,” she said. “Plus, it feels better being here, you know, with everything coming in at once. I mean, I know none of it is official.”

“Yeah. I get it,” he said.

“Most people think it was the one thing, but now we know it’s something else.” She moved her hands around her head to show a process. “It makes me crazy watching all the bits and pieces whiz by, and I can’t say anything about it. It’s just a lot, you know.”

“More than I was expecting.”

“Have you read the ME’s report?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Well, you should. I mean, I peeked at it. I don’t know if that was okay. But you should read it.”

“You’re fine.”

“Doesn’t help me being home alone, thinking about it. You brought your dinner, and I’m stopping you,” she said.

“Yeah. I was going to—I was going to come here to list the house tonight. They want me to use a website.”

“I know you’re supposed to,” LaRae said. “Karen’s been calling here all week.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I told her you’re underwater. I could help you with some of it,” she said.

“You don’t have to. This is my thing.”

“After what you did for me when Thom left, I figure I owe you.”

“I appreciate that. You don’t owe me. And you don’t have to worry.”

“I didn’t tell her anything specific. Karen, I mean.”

“That’s good.”

“She asked, but I didn’t tell her.”

“She’s used to knowing.”

“But she did say something weird. She asked if I thought everything Stan Forsythe’s been saying would make it hard to sell a house. I guess she’s been following his blog or something. Maybe it’s on Twitter.”

“You can’t put any stock in it.”

“He’s stirring the pot.”

“I know it. I’m old-fashioned, I don’t use my phone for anything but calls. Keeps my blood pressure down.”

“You should eat your dinner before it gets cold,” she said.

“I’m starving.” Dalton went past her and looked down at the stack of papers and mail on her desk. “Is that all for me?”

LaRae nodded. “Let me know when you want it, and I’ll bring it to you. But you should look at the ME’s report, but maybe after you eat. It’s got pictures. Also, I called the Beehive House about Raylene. They say you can pick her up tomorrow. They aren’t sure what you’re hoping to get out of it.”

“A lot of Bruce’s stuff is missing. More was taken during that last break-in. I’m trying to see what she remembers. I was thinking maybe a Sunday drive onto the monument might bring something to light. They said old memories aren’t all the way gone at first.”

Dalton let himself into his office and logged into his computer. He spread his food out on the desk and googled Red Cliffs Realty. As he ate, he filled out the fields and clicked the check boxes, but each one made him more and more furious.

He switched over to his email and opened the secure link to the ME’s report. He scanned down to find the cause of death. It said homicide. He pushed the food aside and leaned in.

The report described two wounds. The first was an impact to the side of the head, a traumatic blow to the pterion, rupturing the middle meningeal artery. Blood from this wound had begun to gelify when it was over-sprayed by a second event, a gunshot that entered between the eyes at the glabella and exited through the occipital bone at the base of the skull, an angle difficult or impossible to self-inflict.

___

Sophia ran until she could not continue, stopped, and leaned against a boulder. When she looked up, the world around her darkened at the edges, forming a vignette. At the center was a pool of blue against orange against buff. She stepped forward and turned and steadied herself, moved the hair out of her eyes, and said, “You can keep going. I believe in you.” Then she felt herself jerk upright and continue on. At first her feet did not know where to land, and she was too muddled to place them. Then they began to understand the trail, allowing her to shut that part of the thinking down and watch the stones along each side of her path drift out of the way. She smiled at them, and they nodded silently back at her.

When she became thirsty, she saw the water bottle emerge from the pack and received it. “Careful. Careful,” she said. “Stop running. It all needs to go inside of you.” She felt her legs stiffen, so she handed the bottle back and ran on.

Ahead of her, at the top of an incline, she saw two women sitting together wearing chadors. They looked like her aunts back in Iran. When they saw Sophia, they lifted their arms and beckoned her. She ran to the top, using the stones as steps, and she stopped when she saw that it was only the top of a ridgeline, dropping away at the other side. The women reached out and held her hands. She saw the fine tracery of the henna tattoos on their hands, the silver rings. Their hands slipped away, and when she turned to thank them, they were gone.

The valley filled with thunder, then the echo of it drained slowly out.

Behind Sophia was the ground she’d crossed, the cinder cone, and the miniature backhoe jerking silently in the distance, a tiny pickup truck carried in the bucket, lifted high into the air. The scene looked like toys photographed with a tilt-shift lens, focused at the center and foggy at the edges. She sat on a flat orange stone, hands braced on her knees, and she tried to process what was happening. Three stories played simultaneously: the one where a man she did not know was killed in front of her, the one where the invincible Paul Thrift was murdered, and the one where the killer was now coming after her. Stacked on top of those stories were three more: how she interrupted two grave robbers, how another man was killed offscreen, and how she was now running for her life with a map valuable enough to set all of this off.

Each time a story would come at her, she would gently relax and let its own momentum carry it beyond her. Eventually, they struck at her and regrouped enough times to make her grow tired and confused. During this slowness, she reached out and chose the running-for-her-life story and the finding-a-map story, then she tied these long, rippling streamers together as they fought against the wind. When she pulled the knot tight, she felt the sounds of the desert returning: wind, the thrumming of insects, the rustle of hair against the collar of her shirt, and in the distance, the crash of a pickup truck dropping to the ground.

Her skin drew taut. Her eyes came back into focus. Her Plan A was to wait, get back to the truck, and drive out, which was probably the man’s Plan A, which is why he was destroying the vehicles. So Plan B was hiking out, back to the state highway. She unzipped her backpack and sized up the not-quite-one-liter of water she had in there. This guy would be on the road, so she’d have to go overland, which would be a death sentence. She dropped her head into her hands and decided Plan C would be to make her way to the Dellenbaugh ranger station, which was twenty miles away. This would be the least likely plan to be on his list and the most likely to put her in touch with people. Dellenbaugh Station was the population center around here. She would wait until night, find her way to the road, and hike in the cool hours to minimize her water loss.

Lightning flickered in the clouds again, leaping and pulsing from the column of the clouds like the bones of a bat wing. A cool breeze riffled the leaves and carried petrichor to her nose. When she realized it would rain, she felt options opening. She’d be able to replenish her water, and the man would be out of his element. He was, after all, wearing a panama hat. She kept to Plan C, wanting to stack the odds in her favor.

She had some food, but she didn’t want it. After two sips of water, she dug in her bag and found, to her surprise, one more loose watermelon Jolly Rancher, which triggered the memory of Paul staggering backward over the cliff. She caught the panic loop before it knocked the wind out of her. Eventually, when Paul did not report in, someone would take notice, and they would investigate. But given Paul’s habit of disappearing into the desert and his reputation for being a master of this landscape, waiting to be rescued was no plan at all.

She stood, stepped away from the rock, and turned her back on the catastrophe to look over the other side of the ridge. Now that her vision had come back into focus, she saw a thin road running down through the bones of the canyon. That road split into a pair of smaller ones. She pulled out the map and unrolled it. She saw the spot where she was standing circled in ballpoint pen and all the names and dates clustered in this area. With her index finger, she traced the curve of the mesa that ran all the way into the Dellenbaugh Valley. She turned the map to match it to north and guessed that the smaller of the two forking roads would take her to the station. After returning the map to her pack, she noticed a strange momentary glint. It was a car, a black car parked down there. Okay, on to Plan D.

Without thinking, she clambered down the ridge, skating on the loose stone, catching herself on scrawny junipers and pinyons until she realized she just might kill herself trying to get to safety. She thought of something her mother always said, “Slow is fast, baby.” The sky surrounding her was darkening, turning the color of blue she thought only happened in Spielberg movies. There wasn’t a lot of time until darkness would come, but she imagined a timeline where she fell, shattered her knee, and had to crawl to the road on her belly. She thought about the phone call she’d make when this was all over. Mom, Dad, I’m okay. I just wanted to let you know that I remembered combat breathing and I remembered slow is fast.

As she descended, she realized she was crying and thought it was stupid. She had also lost sight of the car but kept moving in the same direction, hoping to find it again. In the dimming light, something flew toward her. She crouched and looked up in surprise as an owl revealed itself in its passage overhead, its wide wings and round head unmistakable. She expected to hear the pulsing of its wings as it passed over, but there was nothing but the sound of her own breathing.

When she stood, she saw a bright orange section of cliff in the midst of the shadowed valley, and in a straight line across the middle of the façade, she saw a line of rectangular windows, like the granary. Five of them in a row. Las Casas Altas, she thought. They were on her list of sites to record, but she hadn’t gotten to them yet. She was two weeks from that section of the monument.

At the bottom of the slope, she crossed a short flat shoulder and jumped from a low berm onto the road. The black car was a Mustang. The hood was up and the doors open. The driver’s side seat was reclined, and a single leg emerged from the interior, the calf resting in the notch formed by the car frame and the open door. The man in the car was whistling a simple five-note tune, something familiar. She remembered it from middle school dances. Was it “Wind of Change” by the Scorpions? She followed along in her head, and when he sang the chorus aloud, she let out a chuckle that made the man sit up.

“Wolf, is that you?” a voice called out.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said. “Not Wolf. Someone else.”

“No, not Wolf.”

The man stood weakly and supported himself with the car. He was scarlet red with a mad look in his eyes. “Wolf is my medical partner back in Germany.” He blinked and looked around, held up an empty water bottle, and crinkled it. “Oh, that is right. I am still in America on this adventure. The dream was vivid.”

In the dim light, it took a moment, but she soon realized she knew this man. “You’re the doctor from Bryce Canyon,” she said.

“Berlin. I’m actually from elsewhere. The home of Alexanderplatz and the Brandenburg Gate. Not jelly donuts. That is a great goof—blown out of proportion.”

He came across as drunk, but it was clear that he was reeling from dehydration and exposure. “Why don’t you stand here,” she said, taking his hand and placing it on the car. The black metal was still hot.

Sophia looked at the car to size things up. A mire of black fluid flowed a few inches from under the front of the car, then soaked into the dust. In the failing light she could barely see it. The man cleared his throat. “Excuse me, but I was wondering if you had a vehicle we might use for a rescue. It is all mixed up though. This is the road of trials, but I thought I was through the first gate, but you are obviously the supernatural aid. It is all out of order.”

“Supernatural what?”

“Aid. You know. But that is for act one. You were the one who told me about these places, that they existed. That was the call to adventure, but I didn’t heed it. Kenji was there, too, for the second call. He said he was a gatekeeper, but perhaps not. This ordeal seems more appropriate for—” The man doubled over with his hands on his knees, and he growled through his teeth. “Oh, this is not good.”

“Are you okay?” When he nodded, she asked, “More appropriate for what?”

The man breathed deeply a few times, then stood again. “For act two. I cannot tell which part of the story we are in right now.”

Sophia realized that this poor man was trying to talk to her about Joseph Campbell. She tried to refocus him. “What happened to your car?”

“This is not my car,” he said, trying to take a few steps.

“How did you get out here, then?”

“It’s a rental.”

“Oh no,” Sophia said, “there’s really no time for this.”

“It’s okay. I paid for the insurance,” he said with absolute seriousness.

She intercepted the man and took hold of his shoulders. “Do you have any water? We are both in a life-and-death situation.”

The man laughed and ducked back into the car for his backpack. He then walked past her, beckoning with his hand. He looked as if he might collapse at any moment. As he walked along, he babbled incoherently about someone called Kwon or maybe Krause or maybe he was talking about two people. He said Kwon died, that it was now his time, and he walked on.

“Where are we going?”

“To the water,” he said, shambling. He mentioned Wolf again and talked about the sisterhood of coyotes, who were also supernatural helpers. So many supernatural helpers. He talked about all these things as if Sophia were familiar with them. Soon they arrived at a cluster of green trees and shrubs at the base of a large rounded hill. Even in the gloaming, the green stood out against the dryness and the clouds gathering around them. At the center of this oasis was a cluster of moss-covered rocks. The man sat on them and placed his hand under the drip. “Here is the water. We’ll have to be patient,” he said, then he toppled over.

Sophia ran to his side, knelt down, and lifted his head, setting it on her thigh. She opened her pack and took out her water bottle. Only twenty ounces remained. She remembered that when she was growing up, her mother would tell any guests they brought bliss to her home, so she swirled the water and took a sip, then put the bottle to his lips. “Drink this,” she said, and when the water touched his lips, she watched them curl and open. He stopped himself.

“This is yours,” he said.

“My water belongs to the tribe,” she said.

“Yes, we are all one tribe,” Reinhardt said.

“No, it’s not that, it’s something my dad used to always quote from his favorite book.”

Reinhardt nodded, then reached up and lifted the bottle and drank some more. “Not too much,” she said, “you’ll get sick.”

“Hyponatremia,” Reinhardt croaked. “You are correct. I am a doctor, which makes all of this worse because I know what is happening to me on the inside. I will sip. Sip, sip, sip, sip.” He took another small amount, then licked his lips and handed her the bottle. “Take this from me. I will not be able to stop myself.”

She screwed the lid back on and the man collapsed more fully. Her leg was starting to tingle with numbness, and she strained her ears for the sounds of a car. The trees above them shook in the growing breeze, and the air temperature dropped. She heard a pap, pap, pap of raindrops in the dirt and looked up. The sky above them was a swirl of purple, gray, and abalone.

“Have you seen a man in a silver car? Dressed funny, like for the golf course or something?”

“If I were tiny, I could slip into this bottle for a little swim,” he said.

“A silver car,” she repeated. “Have you seen anyone out here like that?”

“Yes,” he said. “He was lost, I think. Or his friends were lost. Maybe we could take your car back to town.”

“Mine is out of commission. What is wrong with yours?”

“The transmission is gone, which is my fault.”

“Do you have a phone?”

“I do, but the battery is now dead.”

“Can we charge it with the car?

“That is dead, too. It is also my fault, but I don’t know how I did it. I think I was trying to use the fan.”

“Can you sit up? My leg is going to sleep.”

He lifted himself and sat cross-legged. “Put your bottle under there. It’ll be full in a few hours.”

There was a flash in the sky, and a clap of thunder cracked overhead, the echo bouncing from wall to wall like stones in a giant metal box. The wind picked up even more as the squall line came closer. Rain began to fall with greater frequency. Sophia could feel it on her skin. Three small birds passed above the car and flew in undulating lines toward the cliff dwellings at Las Casas Altas.

“This is a gift from the goddess,” Reinhardt said.

The rain picked up, pelting them. “We should look for shelter,” she said.

Large raindrops peppered the ground, coming in half notes at first, then the tempo sped up. Initially, Sophia thought they might be able to wait out the storm in the Mustang but realized they were right on a road, too visible, so she led the way across the sage flats toward the cliff dwellings. There were no channels to fill with flood waters, and the cliff would make sure nobody could come up behind them. Reinhardt marched on with his arms out to the side to maximize his exposure to the rain. Overhead was another stroke of lightning, the flash painting the junipers and cholla bone white.

“Hey, we need to get to the cliff,” she said. “This isn’t safe.”

“But it feels wonderful. I am renewed. Perhaps reborn.”

Thunder crashed through the space, startling the man.

“The lightning is the least of our worries,” she said.

Reinhardt spun and ran in wobbly circles. Sophia chased him, attempting to capture his attention, like someone trying to gather up a loose chicken. “Look, mister. There’s a crazy person out there trying to kill us. Not us, but me.”

Reinhardt stopped. “I know about this part. This is the initiation. After the road of trials, I am supposed to meet the goddess.” He pointed at Sophia, then at himself. “And we emerge from the abyss transformed.” He stopped spinning, and the rain grew more intense. “It is absurd,” he said, patting his backpack, “but everything in the book keeps happening.”

“What book?”

He pointed to the rock overhang. “I will show you under the cover of these cliffs.” Then he ran. Sophia followed. She realized that any plans she had for getting to the ranger station were going to depend on having water, and they were soon going to have the problem of too much water and nowhere to put it. When they got to the overhang, they huddled on the dry flank of dirt at the base of the cliff. To one side were a series of openings, like the orbits in a massive skull. “There,” she said, and they scurried inside.

They stood as they dripped. Reinhardt put his pack on frontways and opened it. He withdrew a large book and showed it to her.

“It’s too dark. What does it say?”

“Mythstructures for Blockbusters,” he announced. “It is a book for writers.”

“Blockbusters? You think we’re in a movie?”

“No. It’s about how our story is all stories.” In what remained of the daylight, she saw Reinhardt’s teeth. His voice sounded like a smile.

“You’re dehydrated, and we have to hide.”

“From what?”

“From the man in the silver car.”

“You saw him, too?”

“Yes,” she snapped. Sophia began to shiver, so she hugged herself and rubbed her arms. She watched the world outside the cave tiptoe into darkness. In the west, a single bleached-out vortex punched through the black sky, which was only a shade lighter than the black of the cliffs, which was a bit lighter than the black of the ground.

Reinhardt looked at Sophia for a moment, then he ran into the rain and returned with a small bundle of sticks. “Wolf gave me a small fire starter, which I have with me in my pack.”

“That guy would see a fire,” Sophia said.

“We could build it back here, in the innermost cave.”

“No fire. And I can see what you’re trying to do here. I have a master’s degree in cultural anthropology. We’re not doing the monomyth, and I’m starting to lose my mind.”

“And yet the cave is right here, around us,” he said. “I feel much better by the way, though I think some diarrhea is coming.” Reinhardt reached into his open pack and withdrew a head lamp, which he slipped around his head and switched on. As he looked around, he saw pictographs. “Look,” he said, walking up to the wall.

“Don’t touch them,” Sophia yelled. “The oils in your hands—” When Sophia saw the images, her breath stopped. On the wall was a series of six enshrouded purple figures, each the length of her forearm. A seventh figure was over to one side with considerable space between. It was the same size as the others but lighter, faded. This figure was robed in stripes, with a long beard running down the front. Its eyes were wide and round like rings and its mouth was drawn with two parallel horizontal stripes.

“It looks like a robot,” Reinhardt said.

“Shhh,” Sophia said. “Let me borrow your light.”

Reinhardt handed it to her, and she placed it on her forehead. The panel contained other images: a crescent moon, stars, water glyphs, and spirals. To the left of the figures, below them, someone had carved J. NYE 1954 and below that NEPHI P. -67. She looked around the cave and found charred wood, a pack rat nest, a tin can smashed flat and rusted almost black. The ceiling was black from smoke that came from an unknowable number of fires. She reached for her phone to take a photo, then remembered it was broken. She did not have her other camera with her, so she took out her notebook and sketched the whole panel quickly and deftly, then she drew each figure more slowly and carefully.

When she was done, they were both shivering. “Let’s go outside and try to catch some water,” she said, “then we can build a fire, okay?”

They left the cave and heard a great crashing of water all around them in the darkness. Massive sheets of water came over the cliff tops. Sophia took her empty water bottle and held it in the rimfall. The bottle filled swiftly. She drank half and gave the bottle to Reinhardt, who drank the rest. She refilled the bottle and traded it with the cheap disposable bottles Reinhardt handed to her. Once they filled everything they had, they stood and listened to the immensity of it.

“This rain was foretold,” Reinhardt said. “I promised that man at the gas station that I would remember his warning, but I didn’t.”

Sophia looked at Reinhardt, afraid to answer him and unlock the full story.

After a while, they lit a fire and curled up in the sand to sleep. From time to time, Reinhardt rose and bolted from the cave into the darkness, returning after a few minutes. This happened over and over. Soon he began shivering again and asked if Sophia would get his sleeping bag from the car. He had other useful things there, too. Sophia jogged back to the car with the head lamp, which she kept dark. The rain had stopped, and her motion through the night helped warm her up and dry her off.

She returned with his sleeping bag, a fleece jacket, and an inflatable pad. The small fire had burned down to embers. She helped Reinhardt into the bag and zipped herself into the jacket, keeping the pad for herself.

She tried to sleep, but when it didn’t work, she sat up, listening for intrusions. Reinhardt drifted into an uneasy sleep, like a giant blue caterpillar writhing in the sand. She thought of the Caterpillar from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a book she loved as a child. The Caterpillar posed a nagging question that Sophia often thought about: “Who are you?” Alice gave the best of all possible answers: “I knew who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I’ve changed several times since then.”