And no one down the path was now walking back in his direction. He was alone here, unobserved. He put the camera on the sunny top of the wall and started crawling over, one bare knee then the other, scraping his shin but getting himself down onto the dusty ground where Frances was supposed to be, beyond where the film package and the cigarette box were. He took a step through the loose rocks—it smelled warm and familiarly like urine. But after only four cautious steps (a snake seemed possible here) he found himself at a sudden rough edge and a straight drop down.
And it was at this instant that his head began to pound and his heart jerk, and his breathing became shallow and difficult and oddly hoarse, and a roar commenced in his ears, as if he’d been running and shouting to get to here. And it was now that he got down on his knees and his fists like an animal, as though he could breathe better that way, and peered over the jagged edge and down, far down, far, far down—certainly not to where the river was shining whitely. But far. Two hundred feet, at least, to where the dirt and rock sidewall of the canyon discontinued its straight drop and angled out a few feet before breaking off again for the long, long drop to the bottom. There were rocks and more piney bushes there, and a tree—a ragged, Asiatic-looking cedar growing into the dirt and stone at an angle that would eventually cause it to fall away. And it was just there, at the up-slope base of this ancient cedar, that Frances was, two hundred feet below him.
It was her face he saw first, appearing round and shiny in the sunlight. She was staring up at him, her eyes seemingly open, though the rest of her—her white shorts and blue sail-cloth top with the anchor, her bare legs and arms—these were all jumbled about her in a crazy way, as if her face had been dropped first, and then the rest of her. It actually seemed, from here, that one arm was intact but separated from her body.
And she didn’t move. For a moment he thought the expression on her face changed the instant he saw her. But that wasn’t likely, because it didn’t change again. As poorly as he could make her out, her expression never changed.
How long did he kneel in the pine scrub and rubble and bits of paper trash and urine scent beyond the wall? He couldn’t be sure. Though not long. The roar in his ears stopped first. His heart beat furiously for a time, and then seemed almost to stop beating, after which a cool perspiration rose on his neck and in his hair and stained through his T-shirt. He looked down at Frances again and, keeping a careful eye on her very white upward-turned face, he tried to think what he might do: help her, save her, comfort her, bring her back to here, give her what she needed, given where she was. Anything. All of these. What? Time did not pass slowly or quickly. Yet he seemed to have all the time he needed, alone there in the brush, to decide something.
Only, he knew that this time wouldn’t last. Howard gazed up toward the telescopes, where the other visitors had wandered. Frances would not be seen at first—she was too near to the canyon wall, too hidden among the cedar branches. Too surprising. For a time she’d be mistaken for something she wasn’t. An article of her own clothing. No one would want to see what had happened. They wanted to look at something else entirely.
Though if anyone had seen, they would already be coming —shouting, arms waving—the way he’d felt a moment or ten minutes ago. Other people would already be at the wall looking down. He would be seen, too, hunkering like an animal, his T-shirt a white flag in the underbrush. Soon enough this would happen. Her camera was on the wall. He needed to move, now.
On his hands and knees he backed away from the edge, got turned around and crawled up through the pine roots and human debris to the piss-scented base of the wall. And as he was so tall, he simply stood and peered over, able to see all the way back down the asphalt path to the parking lot where he and Frances had followed the crowd. No one was walking up, nor was anyone coming back from the telescopes. And in that moment’s recognition he leaped-hoisted himself up onto and over the wall, and in doing so kicked Frances’s cheap Pentax down onto the pavement.
He stood up again quickly, on the right side of the wall, the correct side, where the rest of the world was supposed to stay. And it was not, he felt, the cool breeze lifting out of the open expanse of canyon—not at all a bad feeling to be here. Whatever was bad had occurred on the other side. Now he was here. Safe.
Though all the other many phrases were about to begin now. Their exact meanings would very soon be present in his thinking. Authorities notified. Help summoned. Frances rescued (though of course she was dead). The forces responsible for terrible events had to be mobilized and mobilized now.
He stared at the Pentax lying on the black sequined asphalt, ruined. He tried to remember if she’d taken his picture in the car this morning, his picture in the motel last night, his picture in Phoenix, his picture at the scenic turn-out even one hour ago. But he simply couldn’t remember. His mind wasn’t so still that he could bring back that kind of thing, although he knew he very much wanted for the answer to be no, that she had not taken his picture, and for the camera to stay where it had come to rest. (Though hadn’t he touched it?)
And of course yes, the answer was that his face was in the camera. More than once. That recognition did come back now. And of course he had touched it. And despite the fact that in two minutes or less he would walk quickly to the tourist center or the ranger station or to whatever there was, and make a call for emergency assistance, the camera needed to be removed. Since everything that would happen—happen to Frances, happen to him, happen to Mary, to Ed—could depend on what happened to this one camera and what it contained. Now being the significant time—he knew this from TV—with Frances suspended face-up to the empty sky and himself unscathed; now was the “critical period” that, in a thorough police investigation, had to be accounted for, challenged, scrutinized, gone over again and again and again. The time up to, during, and immediately after, would be considered and reconsidered to determine if he had killed Frances Bilandic and why that had suddenly become necessary. (Love gone sour? A sudden breakfast quarrel? Resentment repaid. An inexplicable act of passion or fury. A simple mistake. You could almost think you did do it, there were so many allowable reasons that you might’ve.)
Too bad, he thought, standing above the black camera, on its side on the black asphalt, too bad he hadn’t snapped Frances just at the moment she’d gone over. So many thousands of words would be saved by that luck. “Oh my.” Those were her last words to the world, apparently. He was the one who’d heard them. No one else knew that. He was very involved in this.
He grabbed the camera up then and, for a reason he wasn’t at all clear about, started back from the canyon rim toward the parking lot, not toward the tourist village where help was. Newly arrived Grand Canyon tourists-enthusiasts were strolling out of the lot in shorts and bright sweaters, carrying cameras, lugging backpacks, laughing about seeing “a big hole in the ground.” They would see him holding Frances’s camera. But there was nothing truly suspicious about him except that he was very tall and alone. Did his face look strange? Distressed?
A pay phone sat just at the border of the prettily landscaped parking lot, at the edge of some pinewoods. Pink wildflowers still grew here. Of course he should make the call. Do that much. Call in the emergency. Though there was no such thing as an anonymous call now. Everything flashed up on a screen someplace: “Howard Cameron is calling in a death.” Response would be instantaneous. And then what? He needed to think, as more visitors drifted past him chatting, chuckling. Call and say what? Explain what? Own up to what? (Since he hadn’t done anything but not take a picture.) Possibilities fluttered hotly in his face like cinders above a fire—none of them distinct or graspable, but all real, full of danger. And it was so so odd, he kept thinking: they had just arrived, and then she’d fallen in. He had wanted not to come.
He looked out across the sunny parking lot. The ranger in his campaign hat was waving vehicles past his little house, leaning in the car windows, smiling and joking with passengers. The sight of the ranger made hi
m lonely, made him long to be miles and miles and miles from where he was—at home, or waking up, lying in bed, thinking about the day when he would sell a house, eat lunch with a friend, call his mother, drive to the playground, shoot baskets, then return at dusk to someone who loved and understood him. All that was real. All of that was possible if he didn’t call.
Though all of that would soon become a dream-life he’d never live again, since eventually, somehow he’d be trapped. Reeled in. You didn’t really get away with things. And he had come up here with Frances—if only just to fuck her; he had made crazy mistakes of judgment, mistakes of excess, of intemperance, of passion, of nearsightedness, of stupidity. Of course, they’d all seemed natural when he was doing them. But no one would see them that way. No one would take his part, even if it became clear and beyond any argument that he hadn’t pushed Frances Bilandic off the cliff (he was in the camera, his hands and feet, even his toenails had left traces in the car’s carpet, he had been seen with her often at the convention). Even if he was finally acquitted in court, he was still guilty of so much that he might as well have done it. Who actually did do it—Frances had done it to herself—was just a matter of splitting hairs. He did it. “A fuck-up, oh what a fuck-up.” He said these words out loud as strangers walked past him. A young woman carrying a baby papoose-style glanced at him and smiled sympathetically. “I just should plan things. I can’t understand,” he said in agony, because of course there was no way out of this now.
So that he simply walked to the pay phone, shining there in the morning’s sun, looped the camera strap around his wrist and began to set the whole complicated machinery of responsibility into motion.
Later in the day, when he went to find the rental car to show the park police how they’d arrived at the Grand Canyon, it was gone. Howard stood, in his shorts and T-shirt, again in the warm parking lot, gazing at the taillights of cars and campers and vans and SUVs. He walked across into the next yellow-lined row—the one he knew was the wrong one—and looked there. Nothing he saw he recognized. The big fire chief’s car was gone. It seemed unimaginable. In the sunshine, with two officers watching him, it was as though he’d invented a car. Too bad, he thought, he hadn’t.
“I just don’t know,” he said, feeling tired, confused, but inexplicably smiling, as if he was lying. “We left it right here.” He pointed to a place where someone had parked a huge white Dodge Ram Charger and emptied the contents of an ashtray on the pavement. He thought oddly about the Tito Puente CD and the bottle of gin and Frances’s purse and her cell phone and her guidebook. All gone with the car.
One of the officers was a young, stiff, short-necked blonde not so different in her appearance from Frances Bilandic, but dressed in a tight, high-waisted beige uniform with a clean white T-shirt under her tunic. She was carrying an absurdly large black-gripped automatic pistol high on her plump little hip. Jorgensen was the name on her brass name-plate. “And you are sure you drove up here in a rental car?” she said, looking up at Howard, her tiny periwinkle eyes blinking as though to penetrate him, see his soul, locate the wellspring cause of the profound dislike she’d begun to experience. His height, he thought, made him dislikable. Though who wouldn’t doubt his story? He doubted it. Nothing seemed very true.
“Yes,” he said, distracted. “I’m sure.” He watched a crow fly across the blue pane of sky above the lot. “You can call the rental-car company. She rented it. Not me.”
“And which rental-car company was that?” Officer Jorgensen said, continuing to ponder him, squinting.
“I don’t know,” he said and smiled. “I don’t know very much.”
“Did you notice anyone suspicious following you?” Suddenly she sounded almost sympathetic—as if no one should’ve followed him. He felt willing, since she was willing to be sympathetic, to think back through the day. Such a long day, so complicated with complex, terrible things. And now the stupid car. He could barely believe such a day had begun where it had, in the cool sunny breeze outside a teepee, watching an Indian woman sweep beetles off the stoop, while Frances slept. He remembered the Camaro with the flames on the side and the doughnut tire. And the little chapel where Chris died for everyone’s sins. He thought a moment about Frances saying, “Those were our ancient spirits,” last night, but couldn’t remember what had made her say that.
“No, I don’t think anyone followed us,” he said and shook his head. He looked back down the row of taillights. He felt he’d have to see the red Lincoln now. It would be there, like your wallet on the hall table—present, only for a time invisible. But no. It was far away. Something else hard to imagine.
He hadn’t done what Frances told him to do, of course, as if she’d been foreseeing everything. He remembered her advice at intervals through the day, when for a time suspicion fell upon him; when he’d been informed by a rescue crew member in a plaid shirt—while he was eating a sandwich— that Frances’s body had been recovered by use of a wire basket and cables, not a helicopter, and that her left arm had indeed become separated; when he’d heard her next-of-kin had been informed, using cards from a small beaded wallet she’d carried—something he didn’t even know about; and when he had heard Ed’s name (surprisingly, Ed’s last name was Murphy); and when the name Weiboldt Company was spoken, and then the name of his wife and the town he lived in all sounding quite peculiar in the voices of strangers; on and on and on through the details of lives that now were affected, possibly spoiled, unquestionably made less good, even made impossible because of a few misguided occurrences, and by his questionable decision to stand up for them. At several intervals—sitting in a metal folding chair in a wood-paneled office with a window that looked out into the new-but-rustic visitors’ center—he thought again that he’d compounded a mistake with a worse mistake, and that he should’ve walked away, just as Frances had said; let all he was enduring now come out not in just one day, or maybe never come out. Every single thing he’d done for two days could’ve gone unnoticed. And instead of these lengthy, wrenching moments, he could’ve been in Phoenix considering how best to put the day’s events behind him and greet the evening. Though, of course, that might have turned out to be harder. Whereas what he had done—stayed, told, accepted—might actually be easier.
In the end, even before the afternoon was concluded, suspicion gradually lifted and settled on the concept of an accident. He had told it all, handed over the camera almost gratefully, endured the police officers’ disapproval, until something about him, he thought, something actually honest in his height, something in the patient way he sat in the folding chair, elbows on his bare knees, eyes on his large soft empty hands, and explained not without emotion, what had happened—all of that just began to seem true and almost, for a fleeting instant, to seem interesting. So that finally, without even declaring so precisely, the police accepted his story. And once another hour had passed, and three documents were filled out and signed, and his address noted, and his driver’s license returned, and the names of officers and telephone numbers given, he was informed he was free to go. He noticed that it was three o’clock in the afternoon.
Though not before he had spoken briefly to Ed. The police woman had asked him if he wished to when she called, and he’d felt she wanted him to, that it was his duty, after all, given his position.
“I don’t really get all this,” Ed had said, his voice slow and gruff with emotion. He imagined Ed sitting in a dark room, a bitter, disheveled man (more or less the man he’d imagined having a fistfight with—Lon Chaney, Jr.). “What were you doing there?”
“I’m a friend,” Howard said, solemnly. “We drove up together.”
“Is that it?” Ed said. “A friend?”
“Yes,” Howard said, and paused. “That’s it. Basically.”
Ed laughed a dry mirthless laugh, and then possibly—Howard wasn’t sure, but possibly—he sobbed.
He wanted to say more to Ed, but neither one seemed to have any more to say, not even “I’m sorry.” And t
hen Ed simply hung up.
For reasons he didn’t understand, a corporal from the Arizona Highway Patrol suggested they drive back down to where Howard could catch a bus back to Phoenix. The STRIKE IT RICH was where the bus stopped. One would be arriving late. He had the drinks coupons if there was a wait.
On the drive down, the officer wanted to talk about everything under the sun but seemed not to want to talk about what had transpired that day. He was a large, thick-shouldered, dark-haired man in his fifties, with a lined, square, attractively tanned face, whose beige uniform and pointed trooper’s hat seemed to fill up the driver’s seat. His name was Fitzgerald, and he was interested that Howard sold real estate, and that his deceased “friend” had, too. Trooper Fitzgerald said he’d moved to Arizona from Pittsburgh many years before, because it was getting too crowded back east. Real estate, he believed, was the measure and key to everything. Everyone’s quality of life was measured out in real estate values, only it was in reverse: the higher the price, the worse the life. Though the sad truth, he believed, was that in not much time all you’d see (Officer Fitzgerald pointed straight out the windshield, down to where Howard had seen the multi-colored, multi-layered beautiful desert open up that morning, but where it now seemed purplish, smoggy gray), all that would be houses and parking lots and malls and offices and the whole array of the world’s ills that come of living too near to your neighbor: crime, poverty, hostility, deceit and insufficient air to breathe. These would presently descend like a plague, and it wouldn’t be long after that until the apocalypse. All the police in the world couldn’t stop that onslaught, he said. He nodded his head in deep agreement with himself.