They were a mule train, packs on their backs, hands bound in front. As Gale demanded, they stayed within three feet of the person ahead of them: Beck limped in the lead, her pace slower than previous days; Tilda was in the middle, sniffling, maybe crying. In the full light of day she had what looked like an enflamed blister just above her right pinky, the venom a halo of red that engulfed half her hand. Once again, Imogen hiked behind them and in front of Gale. He’d tied the other two walking sticks to the back of her pack, “In case we need them.” She still felt conflicted about the fact that Gale didn’t view her as the least bit formidable. His spear made it easier than ever for him to swat her away like a pesky gnat.
Beck led them along Boucher Creek, in the opposite direction from the route that had taken them to the river. After a few hundred feet she paused, and they all stopped to consider the large cairn, a three-foot tower of rocks that someone had made to mark the trail. Usually cairns were smaller, three or four or five rocks; three was the minimum number to use as a trail marker, since two stacked rocks could be a coincidence. Beck pointed with her bound hands.
“We’ll take these switchbacks up to the Tonto, then it’s level the whole way from there.”
Beside them was a wall of Tapeats sandstone a hundred feet high. Short switchbacks zigzagged along the ledges, leading them out of Boucher canyon. As they clambered up, a realization slashed a wound in Imogen’s mind: they were off schedule now, no longer adhering to the locations indicated on their backcountry permit. It was too soon for anyone to think they were missing, but it would be harder to find them now, if someone did come looking. Imogen wanted to drop some crumbs—pieces of thread or fabric from her clothing, anything that a searcher might follow as a clue—but Gale was too close at her back.
Once they reached the Tonto Platform, Imogen scanned ahead for the trail out to Slate. She spotted pieces, but it was faint, a delicate demarcation of trampled red dirt. Beck said it was an easy walk, which physically seemed to be true, but without her in the lead they probably would have gotten lost. Imogen had never been on a path so little traveled, in the Canyon or elsewhere. It wound around washes and sometimes smudged into nothing, disappearing between the scraggy foliage that mottled the rolling desert.
Beck came to a full stop, scrutinizing the terrain ahead with her one functioning eye. Imogen immediately realized the problem and bypassed Tilda to stand beside her sister.
“Somebody coming?” Gale pointed his spear at Beck. Uh-oh, Paranoid Gale was emerging.
“No. There’s a split in the trail.” With her bound hands Beck indicated the left path, and the right. “I have to figure out which is the real one.”
“Won’t they end up at the same place?” he asked.
“No, probably not. All of the trails…they were originally animal tracks, and the animals aren’t necessarily trying to get from the same Point A to Point B that we are.” She shielded her good eye with her elbow, the best defense against the light that she could manage. The sun had reestablished its dominion, the drunk clouds long gone.
Gale scanned the terrain too, but whatever he was looking for it wasn’t the trail. “Get going, we don’t have all day.” He mock-thrust the spear in her direction.
“If I get it wrong we’ll have to backtrack.”
“Pick. I don’t like being so out in the open here.” He looked skyward. Eastward. Round about.
Did he think a satellite could detect him? Or that drones were hunting him down? Did he think he was so important that such resources would be allotted for his capture? Then again, they couldn’t be sure what else he’d done since killing the highway patrolman; maybe he was being pursued by law enforcement in multiple states. Strange to think that the worse his crimes, the more diligence would be put into apprehending him. Imogen wasn’t sure where that left her, or what she should be praying for. Tilda looked more forlorn than Imogen had ever seen her, gazing out with glassy eyes on a relentless wasteland.
Imogen blocked the glare with her forearm, eager to help Beck. Gale’s antsiness was infectious; she was feeling exposed too.
“Look near the head of the washes,” Beck advised her.
“Okay.”
“It can’t be that hard.” Even Tilda was getting impatient.
Beck and Imogen studied the land, trying to figure out where the missing pieces of the maze would lead.
“Aw, come on…” Fidgety, Gale struck out with his spear. Tilda shrieked, though she wasn’t the one he’d clipped. He might have intended it as a move-it-along nick, but the knife was sharp. A trickle of blood oozed through Beck’s shirt where he’d stabbed her upper arm. She gasped, her attention diverted to the gash she couldn’t reach.
Imogen grasped her sister’s arm in both hands and squeezed, trying to stanch the blood. “Come on, we’re really trying!” she yelled at Gale, a frantic whine in her voice.
“Sorry.” In his browbeaten apology Imogen saw a boy who trudged in shame on weekly visits to the principal’s office.
“Cut the bottom of my T-shirt and tear it off, we can use it as a bandage.” Imogen had never thought of herself as the bossy type, but Gale did as he was told. He lifted her sweatshirt out of the way and sliced off the bottom two inches of the shirt beneath it. “You okay?” she asked Beck.
“Think so.”
How many times in the past few days had they asked each other if they were okay? Tilda held her cuffed hands below her chin, her arms tight against her body as if she were freezing. She looked more hurt than Beck, a dazed despair on her face.
“I’m okay, Til,” Beck told her, and Tilda nodded yes yes of course, wild-eyed.
Gale yanked open the hole in Beck’s fleece to get access to her wound. He wrapped the strip of T-shirt around and around her upper arm and tied it in a knot. “It ain’t deep,” he said with the confidence of a man who knew about stab wounds.
Imogen’s palms were red. She didn’t want to see her sister’s blood smeared on her khaki shorts, so she bent a little to rub it off on her blackish leggings. For an instant she flashed on the synagogue, stained by violence, splattered with hate, desecrated by murder.
“Please girls, everybody just do what yer supposed to do.”
I thought we were. But aloud Imogen said, “I think it’s that one.” And gestured with her chin toward the path on the left.
“I think you’re right,” Beck said.
“See, no need fer so much fuss.”
Beck limped on as if nothing had happened, and the mule train fell into line.
The walking became monotonous. The creak of shifting packs. A distant whir of a helicopter. The faint song of a canyon wren. The muffled sound of their boots, swallowed by dust. Their heartbeats begged the prayers they couldn’t speak.
It might not have been a terribly long walk but it seemed interminable. A palpable shroud drifted above them, a white windingsheet waiting to ready them for burial. Imogen struggled for words. She couldn’t concentrate on the present for her fear of the future. When she tried to examine her thoughts, her emotions, she found them in a state of evaporation, as if written in invisible ink, leaving her with an endless, wordless nothingness. There was only one question that mattered: Where was he taking them? And the answer: The end of the road.
There rose in her an impulse to scream. Her lungs filled, ready to release it, but Gale stole the air again.
“Y’all never chitchat while yer walking?” he asked. “You just…plod on, lost in yer own thoughts?”
His questions angled toward irritation. Did he really think they’d stroll along and gossip as if death weren’t on their heels?
“Walking’s good for thinking,” Beck replied.
“Well, it’s bugging me. All this…quiet. I thought girls were chatty but I know a dozen grown men who talk circles round all a you.”
Instead of reminding him of the circumstances, Imogen simply said, “If you want to talk, we’ll listen.”
He sighed. “I’d rather do the listening. Need some distraction. All this quiet and thinking, it’s like being stuck in a storm cellar.”
It was, rather. But Imogen was no longer in the mood to swap personal regrets or insecurities. She waited: perhaps Beck would take this moment to wax poetic on the greens and yellows and soft wood hues of a genderless baby room. Or maybe Tilda would tell them more about the life she was planning with Jalal. Imogen hadn’t realized, before the previous night, just how serious their relationship was getting. Tilda used to post boyfriend pics online, romantic dates, interesting excursions, or lessons learned from a recent argument. But, as with her volunteer work, she kept Jalal more private, and maybe that said everything about Tilda’s true priorities.
Judging by their reticence, Imogen sensed they were so deep in their own thoughts that they’d already forgotten he’d spoken. Gale seemed concerned about that possibility too.
“Well?” he said loudly.
More and more, Imogen felt the need to take charge. Not only was Beck in rough shape, but Imogen had been right since the beginning. So many times she’d thought of herself as useless, but her paranoia had been valid. Paranoia could be an early-warning system, like a siren that blares for an approaching storm, or a reminder of a lesson from the past. She took a step sideways, trying to draw Tilda’s attention and lure her out of whatever miserable reverie she was lost in. “Seen any good movies lately?”
“Nah,” Gale said, either oblivious to the direction of the question or more eager to talk than he’d admitted. “Was binging some TV shows. Could never keep up with everything on account a spending so much time locked up.”
Imogen was about to ask him what shows he liked, certain he was a fan of Alone, but Tilda came back to life and joined the conversation.
“You haven’t missed much in the way of movies,” she said, sounding authoritative. “Mostly comic book adaptations. It’s like all of Hollywood has given in to some superhero fetish. Jalal and I have been trying to see more independent and foreign films, so the market won’t totally die, but we don’t go out that much.”
“Jalal? That yer boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“What kinda name is that? He an Arab?”
Tilda stopped and swiveled, giving Gale a short, hard look. “He’s from Portland. His family’s from Iraq.”
“He one a those Muslims?”
“Don’t bother,” Imogen said quietly. She gave Tilda a little push to set her going forward again.
“I’m just asking. I don’t have nothing against Arabs or Mexicans or anyone, I just like to know who’s who because contrary to popular belief, we ain’t all the same. And that doesn’t mean some are less and some are more—think I like being considered white trash?”
“Jalal is an atheist. A lawyer, for a group that provides pro bono services to nonprofits and families, mostly immigrants.” She kept her eyes straight ahead, but spoke with a raised, defiant voice. “He enjoys cooking—especially Indian food. He has the worst taste in comedies, but he laughs so hard I end up laughing with him. He’s three years younger than I am and we’ve been seriously talking about getting married. A small wedding. With purple bridesmaid dresses. Or Beck can wear a tux with a purple tie, if she likes that better. And we’re thinking about having a baby. Or adopting. Because we’re concerned about the climate crisis and what kind of world our child will inherit and who are we to just keep populating the earth when we haven’t figured out how to coexist with the other living things on the planet. Or maybe we’ll buy a house together first, and see how that goes.” She stopped again, turned. If Tilda had possessed superpowers, her glare would have obliterated Gale.
He probably missed everything she was actually saying, but Imogen heard it loud and clear: I have a life, with wonderful people, and dreams and hopes, and fuck you for jeopardizing everything. And then Imogen wondered if she’d be invited to the wedding. Tilda had been talking about purple bridesmaids’ dresses since high school, back when Imogen had no doubt she’d be there to accompany her best friend to the altar.
“Can we have some water?” Beck asked, taking advantage of the mule train’s pause.
“All right.” Gale sounded a tad grumpy, but he took a canteen out of the side pocket of Imogen’s pack and handed it to her. “Pass it round.”
“Thanks,” she said. Imogen took a drink and handed it to Tilda, who did the same and handed it to Beck.
It was unlikely Beck was dying of thirst (unless it was from lack of coffee), but she was smart to put a halt to their conversation. There was nothing they could chat about that wouldn’t make someone mad or sad. Knowing her sister, Beck might never share the news of Afiya’s pregnancy with Gale, not if she couldn’t hold herself together while talking about it. It was a tricky balance to keep your reasons to live present in your mind while not letting them become a distraction, or a source of destruction; Beck understood she couldn’t fall apart.
After a quick sip for himself, Gale put the canteen away and they resumed heading west.