In her hands, at that moment, she was holding a yellow dump truck. She looked older than when I knew her. I was sure I looked exactly the same.
***
Cody put out his hand, and Prine gave him the keys. So I guess he was old enough to drive—fifteen or sixteen.
She came out in front of the house to see us go. She’d put a sweater, a blue cardigan, over her shoulders, and the sleeves hung down over her arms. She shrugged the front of the sweater together, with one hand, as we backed out of the driveway. That gesture went into the part of my brain that knows indisputable facts. State capitals, which planet has the rings.
We drove through the night, through Spanish Fork and Helper and Price. Then we were in the canyon country, filling up at an all-night station outside of Green River. The big trucks coursed by, hauling away the dead, and dragging the sun into place for another day.
“Cody. How’d you get a name like that?” I said when he got back in the car.
He shook his head. “What?”
“You’re too old to be a Cody.” The West was being overrun with four- and five-year-old Codys, Tanners, and Tylers. He was one of them, but older. I stared at the back of his head. He could have been my son.
Prine was asleep in the passenger seat, and later on, Cody also nodded off. His foot was still on the gas, although the car slowed down, eventually floating onto the shoulder. We continued to move forward while the canyon walls grew tall around us, like something we were dreaming.
“What? What?” Prine was talking in his sleep, answering his dreams.
I opened my eyes. “Is it a flash flood?” A roaring sound was all around us, like you’d imagine boulders would make crashing against each other. The car filled with light like an egg about to hatch. The earth was coming up with the sun. We got out and stomped around on the hard, frosty ground. Somehow we had steered off the road right up into a beautiful valley. Everything was red—the rock spires, and the ground, and the bottoms of the silky clouds.
“Do you hear that?” I asked them. Was this a sound that always accompanied the sunrise, and we just couldn’t hear it in the city with all the traffic and the power lines? It came from behind the rocks, then rose up over our heads.
“Well, would you look at that,” Prine said.
A helicopter was hovering, with a truck slung on ropes underneath, settling onto the flat top of one of the red buttes.
“So that’s how they do it,” Prine said.
“They could do it with computers, but they’re doing it for real,” I marveled.
We felt like we were watching a man land on the moon, the small rockets lowering onto the remote surface. We were witnesses.
***
After that, it felt almost like an afterthought to go up on the mesa. The road climbed, and the rest of the world dropped away. We passed, rusted on a ledge, the uranium truck that had gone over in the fifties. Then we were a thousand feet higher, in the pinyon and juniper forest. It was colder up there, and patches of old snow lingered under the trees.
Prine was at the wheel. I sat forward, watching for the mile markers at the side of the highway.
“Slow down, slow down,” I said.
“There’s supposed to be a road here?” Prine said.
“There is,” I said. “Turn. Here.”
It was just a wide spot between the trees, until we nosed down into the gully and up the other side. Tracks appeared, leading into the forest.
“Wunderbar,” Prine said, easing the car between the trees.
“What about rangers?” Cody asked.
“No one comes up here but Navajos cutting wood.” I was excited about the burial I was sure we would find.
Brush was dragging on the sides of the marketing manager’s car. At a clearing, Prine backed up into the trees. There were soda cans lying around on the ground, the lettering bleached off, and yellow plastic jugs where Indians had changed their oil. Tire tracks went everywhere, in overlapping figure eights. We set off on foot down one of the two-tracks. I wouldn’t have been surprised to come upon a little hut, a woodcutter’s or a witch’s, someone who knew our names and what we were doing there.
The mesa was thick with pinyon and wide-branched juniper. Between the trees there were deep, soft gullies that we plunge-stepped down. In a little while, we came to the white rimrock and dropped down into the canyon.
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