The Maze (3 page)

Rick had hoped the rocks would give off heat during the night and keep him warm, but they didn't. He shivered for hours under a clear black sky blazing with stars. The moon rose after midnight and threw cold light on the cliffs towering above the camp. Finally he slept. His dreams took him on a jangled and confusing ride until he found himself in the comfort of his old familiar flying dream.

When he was younger, he'd been able to keep the dream going all night—hovering, weightlessly hovering, with his arms outspread. It had started when he was growing up on the Mendocino coast, in California. The first time he'd had the dream, he'd flown above the lighthouse where his grandmother had worked when he was little, before she got the job managing the trailer park at Fort Bragg.

That first dream was still vivid in his memory. His grandmother had stepped outside the lighthouse gift shop. He could see her down there, looking all around for him. Finally she looked
up
. She saw him flying above the lighthouse. She beckoned him to come down.

In the flying dream people were always beckoning him to come down.

Tonight he was hovering above the yard at Blue Canyon. It was Northcut, the guard, who came out of a building and tried to wave him down. Rick hovered a little higher. Some teachers came out and called for him to come down, Mr. B. even. With a shake of his head he floated even higher until he could see the entire square shape of the compound defined by the fence. Now all the kids were flooding into the yard. The entire yard was filled with faces, too far below to identify. He could still see their arms, though, motioning for him to come back.

It made him feel both happy and sad to be out of reach, out of everybody's reach.

The high desert cold in the hour before dawn woke Rick up. Instantly he was aware of the throbbing at his cheekbone. Then he recalled his dream. He could still see the compound at Blue Canyon from the air and people beckoning. The old image of flying above the lighthouse came to mind, and he remembered the ancient-looking sign he used to puzzle over at the entrance to the museum gift shop. The sign said
PRAY FOR THOSE
WHO ARE LOST
. He wouldn't have puzzled over it now. It was about people like him.

He missed his grandmother, more than he'd allowed himself to miss her in a long time. He could remember her voice, her eyes. She hadn't been that old when she died, only forty-seven. Her hair wasn't even gray.

“Life isn't fair,” he'd pointed out to her once, on the subject of his mother.

“Tough beans, kid,” his grandmother replied. “How can
life
be fair? Only people can be fair.”

It was close to dawn, but a few stars were still out. The horizon was glowing with pinks and oranges and lavenders. Rick stood up, shivered, and shook. At the sound of a motor starting he skittered up a mound of smooth sandstone to peer over the top. The supply truck was pulling out, going back the same way it had come in.

For a second Rick wondered if he should run after it and try to holler it down. Maybe he could come up with some kind of story.

Too late anyway, he realized. The driver was making good time on the flats. In a few minutes the truck would be climbing the steep grade up the switchbacks.

He remembered the dead calves. It was better not to have anything to do with these people.

He needed to get out of here. He shivered again. It wasn't just the cold.

The more frightened he became, the more he was
drawn to a desperate solution. He needed the truck he was looking at, the one that remained in camp. Not to go back the way he'd come, up that horrible road, but to head east. The road in the direction of the approaching sunrise looked much easier.

He wouldn't be stealing the truck. He would leave it at the first major road he came to, and he'd leave a note. What other choice did he have? Wait for a vehicle to come by, hope to hitch a ride out here on the far side of the moon?

He could hope that the bearded man had left the keys in the ignition. In this world populated by rocks instead of human beings, that seemed possible.

Hurry, before the sun rises.

He crept to the truck and peered inside. The keys were there, just as he'd pictured them.

A minute later he was behind the wheel and raising a cloud of dust. The gears ground horribly as he tried to shift into third. A light in the panel said he was in four-wheel drive. He'd leave it that way; he knew nothing about operating the stubby secondary gearshift. In his rearview mirror he saw the bearded man burst out of the tent. The man didn't even try to run after him, just stood there with his hands on his hips and gaped in disbelief.

Rick drove fast through sandy gullies and across terraces of solid rock sprinkled with narrow-leafed yucca and prickly pear cactus and the only trees able to survive
there, scrubby pinyon pines and junipers. He stuffed hot dogs one after the other into his mouth, the three he hadn't eaten the night before. The deteriorating road headed down the spine of the ridge past sand dunes that spilled onto a long, parched clearing dotted with bunch-grass.

Rick saw no vehicles, no people, but he assumed that if he kept driving he would eventually put this bizarre and threatening landscape behind him. Five miles from where he'd started, however, the road abruptly dead-ended at a cluster of slender, standing formations that looked like dozens of hundred-foot giants balancing bowling pins on their heads. One of them even appeared to have an eye. It looked like a cyclops from Greek mythology.

He knew he hadn't passed a fork. This really was the end of the road. Could he go on foot from here?

A five-minute run down the trail that led from road's end brought him to the edge of an abyss.

Rick was looking almost straight down, a thousand feet or more, at a great river winding its way through a monumental corridor of stone. He stepped back, light-headed, disbelieving. What was this place? Where in the world was he?

Looking into the sun across the river, Rick could see another world of weirdly sculpted badlands with a mountain range beyond. To the north stretched more canyons and towering mesas, another mountain range.
As far as he could see there wasn't a single building, a single road. He'd reached the dead end of nowhere.

There was only one direction to go: back the way he'd come. He was going to have to make a run for it past the bearded man's camp, up the grade onto the plateau, and back to Hanksville.

He turned the truck around and drove toward the standing red buttes and the tall red cliffs beyond. The rear end scraped badly as he forced his way too fast through a gully. After that he was able to pick up some speed.

In the rearview mirror he saw the plume of red dust he was raising. He was going fast, so fast he hit his head on the cab roof and bit his tongue. Now he was putting the string of buttes behind him and approaching the camp. He held his breath.

No one was there. Had the bearded man called ahead, called the police? Probably he had a radio or a cell phone.

For the first time Rick noticed the two-way radio mounted by the base of the gearshift. A coiled cord led to a push-to-talk mike among the clutter on the bench seat of the truck. If he was lucky, this radio was the man's only communication link to the outside.

He put the camp behind him and raced in and out of the gullies toward the base of the boulder-strewn slopes ahead. It was here that the road, if it could be called a road, took advantage of a natural interruption in the
seemingly endless march of vertical cliffs under the rim of the plateau. He knew it would be slow going when the road got bad, which it would as soon as it started to climb. There were so many places to hide, the bearded man could appear at any second. Rick held his breath.

He was climbing the first hairpin, already a couple of hundred feet above the rocky plain. As he came around the turn, he found the narrow passage barricaded with rocks and small boulders. The man from the camp, with a full red-brown beard beginning to gray, his faded denim shirt unbuttoned, was sitting on his roadblock with his hands on his hips and breathing heavily from exertion.

A few feet closer and Rick noticed an angry-looking scar on the man's cheekbone, unnaturally smooth and white in comparison to the rest of his face, which was deeply tanned, lined, and leathery.

There was no mistaking the magnitude of the man's anger.

For a moment Rick thought of trying to race the truck backward. But he knew he'd only drive it off the road and roll it over.

Now this. Another dead end. His life was nothing but an endless succession of dead ends.

He looked away from the furious blue eyes and the hard white scar.

“What do you think you're doing?” the bearded man yelled as he yanked open the door of the pickup. “Get out of my truck!”

Rick jumped out, backed away slowly. “I wasn't going to—I didn't mean to…”

“Who are you anyway, and how did you get here?”

Rick kept backing up, trying to think what he should say. The truth? A lie? The guy was so mad, he was afraid to say anything.

“Get back in the truck,” the man ordered.

Rick went around to the passenger side and got in. He was relieved that the man hadn't taken his fists to him or pulled out a gun.

The bearded man set to work with a vengeance, toss
ing rocks off the road, then jumped into the driver's seat, slammed the door, and started backing down the grade.

All Rick could think about was Blue Canyon. They would put him back in Blue Canyon for sure. His life was over.

The man drove to his camp without once glancing at Rick. In camp the man continued to ignore him as he brewed a pot of coffee. He must be trying to figure out what to do with me, Rick thought.

The man with the scar poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down on a lawn chair. “So what are you doing here?” he asked suddenly. “Where's your stuff? You must have a backpack or a sleeping bag somewhere.”

“I don't have any stuff,” Rick answered. “It all got stolen…out on the highway.”

“Then how did you get here? My supply truck? Did you hide in the back? Is that it?”

“Yeah, that's it. Look, I really wasn't going to steal your truck. I was going to leave it as soon as I got back to the highway.”

“You could get
hurt
pulling a stunt like that.”

“I already got hurt,” Rick said, motioning toward his cheekbone. “I gotta get something on this. I'm worried about it.”

The man pointed toward the tent on the end, directly across from his kitchen. “I got a first-aid kit in there—look for a white ammo can with a red cross on it.”

The tent turned out to be the man's commissary. Its shelves were stocked with canned goods. There was even a refrigerator and a chest freezer, each hooked up to a propane bottle. Rick found the first-aid kit and started digging through it. He pulled out a bottle of peroxide, some antibiotic cream, a mirror, and a box of bandages.

Rick cleaned up his wound in the man's open-air kitchen where he could make use of the big water jug. He smeared on some cream, then closed the cut tight with two butterfly bandages. It wasn't as good as stitches—he'd still get a scar—but it was the best he could do.

The man came over to take a look. “Not bad,” he said. “You'll live.”

Rick was relieved that the man was lightening up. Maybe this was a chance to try to be friendly. “So, what part of Arizona is this?”

“Arizona?” There was surprise and a bit of mockery in the man's deep, reverberating baritone. “You're in Utah, kid. Canyonlands National Park. You're at the edge of the Maze and about ten miles west of where the Green River joins the Colorado. You probably saw the Colorado down at the end of your little ride.”

“Maze?” Rick asked. “Like ‘rats in a maze'?”

“That's right,” the man said with a wry twist of humor creeping across his face, “and you're the rat.”

Rick laughed. “So where's this Maze you're talking about? Can I see it from here?”

“We're about a half mile away from where it starts. It's a whole network of canyons sitting below this bench my camp is on. The Maze is a thirty-square-mile puzzle in sandstone. You're at the end of the line, my dubious friend, about as remote as you can get in the lower forty-eight.”

“Did you say this is a national park? No way. I've been to Yosemite, in California. People were elbow to elbow.”

“This park's different, one of a kind. And this is the most rugged district in it. Most of the visitors are north and east of here, across the rivers. This part's really hard to get to.”

“Tell me about it.”

The man seemed about to laugh but stopped himself. It was a hopeful sign. Maybe this was going to turn out okay after all, Rick thought. It might even be a good thing—at least for the time being—that he'd ended up in such a desolate place. Whatever the calves in the coolers were all about, this guy didn't feel dangerous. Eccentric and prickly, but not dangerous.

“So does this place get patrolled by a park ranger?”

“Not as much as it used to. The ranger station—back on the flats about halfway to Hanksville—burned to the ground last spring. There's no ranger there right now.”

“How soon will you be driving out with your truck, like to go to town?”

“Thinking about leaving, are you? It'll be two or three months before I'll be driving out for anything. I've got no reason to go to town.”

“Two or three
months?
” Rick realized he sounded panicky. “Will that other guy come back soon? The guy I came in with?”

“That was Josh. He comes in every two weeks. Should be back the evening of October the fifteenth.”

“Doesn't anybody else come in here?”

“Hikers, occasionally. You know, you could walk out to Hanksville if you really wanted to. It's sixty some miles, but at least it's October.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the heat's finally let up. You wouldn't die of heatstroke, like you would in the summer. Daytime temperatures are downright pleasant this time of year. It hasn't been getting any warmer than the seventies. It's high here, you know—this is over five thousand feet in elevation.”

Rick was trying to imagine walking sixty some miles over this kind of terrain. No doubt this man could. The face that showed above the graying beard had been burned to leather and hardened by the elements and was furrowed with canyons of its own.

“So, you want to tell me how you got that cut?” the man pressed.

“Yeah, I guess you're wondering how all this happened, what I'm doing here and all. I guess I owe you an explanation—”

“On second thought”—the man with the scar interrupted—“save your energy. I'm sorry I asked.” His deep blue eyes had a weary, ancient quality Rick hadn't noticed before. “You don't have to make up a story for me. You weren't going to tell me the truth anyway, were you? Let's just start with some introductions. I'm Lon Peregrino. What's your name?”

“Rick,” he said truthfully. “My name's Rick Walker.”