Badwater

47

There was nobody to shoot.

There was nowhere to go.

So I just stared at the obstruction.

My path dead-ended at another dry waterfall, an end-of-the-liner. It was a good forty feet high and its slick chute was edged by vertical strata that I was not equipped to scale. And even if I’d had the ropes and guts for it, achieving the top of this fall would bring me to the bottom of the true obstruction. It rose above the dryfall at least another forty feet and jutted out like a defiant jaw. Its rough gray face filled the canyon from wall to wall, like it had been born here, but there was no crater in the walls from which it might have been torn. There was only one way it could have got here. It had to have come from above, carried downcanyon in some past monstrous flood, and here, unable to shove its jaw through the narrow slot, it had come to rest. It was a keystone, locking the canyon shut. It was the biggest mother chockstone I had ever come across.

I listened to the hiss of water. There was no longer any question where the water hissed — up above.

When I regained my nerve, I searched for a way up. There was a narrow ledge on the right side of the dryfall, maybe eight feet up. The ledge slanted steeply and led to a fracture in the steeper canyon wall. I continued to search for a better route but there was none to be had.

I waited, for Soliano’s helicopter to appear, for the good sense to send me back downcanyon. But the fastest way out was in front of my nose. Backpacking the subgun, I began to frog-crawl up the chute. Two feet up, I slipped back down, leaving some skin on the rock. Nopah Formation, I judged, upper Cambrian. I didn’t give a shit. I started up again. When I’d passed the bloody palm-streaks I figured I was committed.

The ledge was worse.

I no longer had to worry about slipping. I worried, instead, about toppling off. The ledge was so narrow I side-stepped, kissing the dryfall, heels hanging in air. I looked up, once, to the underside of the jutting chockstone chin. There was a stain of travertine, where water had once leached.

The steep wall was worse yet.

I glued myself to the rock, fingertips probing chinks in the brecciated dolomite, toes curling in my boots as I edged along the fracture. At last, the scarp widened and I exhaled in relief. My thin footpath now accommodated a heel-toe walk and as it angled up the wall, the wall flared inward and I could lean away from the edge. I chanced a look down and saw the chockstone directly below, where it bulged into the lower wall. I went queasy and snapped my eyes back to the business at hand. Ahead, where the scarp angled more steeply, the faint trace of a trail intersected. The trail followed a soft stratum of rock that had been eroded, creating a relatively flat bench. But this was no Park Service footpath. This was fit only for native creatures. I eyed the corrugated horns of the skull on the trail and, in the end, threw in my lot with the bighorn.

It was not until I found a wide enough pocket to collapse that I realized I was crying. I wiped my face and blew my nose, then reset the subgun and scanned the canyon, searching for Hap.

Nothing moving. Nothing orange, trying to blend in.

I turned my attention to what lay below.

It was long and narrow, like a lap pool. It nearly filled this section of canyon but for a shelf of rock that ran alongside the water below me — the decking of the pool.

I thought of the pool at the Inn. I thought of Hap diving into the deep end, doing lap after lap in his purple trunks. I thought no further along that line.

This pool was fed by a large waterfall at the upper end of the canyon. At the waterfall’s base, the pool was shallow. Then, as the canyon descended, the water deepened, plunging to unseen depths by the time it met the chockstone.

No doubt this waterfall would dry up within a day or so, once the hurricane-spawned rainstorms that fed who-knew-how-many-square-miles of this watershed stopped.

But for now, it fed the abyssal pool.

My attention moved to the chockstone. It domed maybe fifteen feet above the water line. It was the lumpy back-head of the jut-jawed face I’d seen from below. It plugged this canyon and backed up this water as surely as a knot obstructs a fire hose. Undo the knot and the water flows free through the hose to the nozzle, which compresses it into a jet stream. I didn’t know how much water was needed to create a large and rapid enough flow to flush the beads from the reservoir and take them all the way down to the springs, but if I’d wanted to make that kind of flood I guessed it could be calculated. And if I wanted to keep track of the water level, I guessed I could rig up a depth gauge that transmits a signal.

I scanned the canyon rim and spotted what looked like the desiccated spine of a cactus, only it was nothing so indigenous. It was an antenna and it rose from a cairn of rocks and it was well positioned to relay signals. Which meant there must be a box around here to send — and receive — them. Where? It didn’t really matter. Hap no longer had his remote.

Thunder sounded somewhere beyond my patch of blue sky. Somewhere, perhaps at the head of this watershed, the rains were beginning again.

I decided to have a closer look at the pool while I still safely could.

The slope below the bighorn trail was steep and crumbly with talus. I had to scramble down, nearly losing my footing in the rocky debris. When I reached the pool decking, I realized my viewpoint had changed and so I scanned the canyon yet again.

Nobody in sight.

I turned to study the water. There was a strong current right now, fed at the inflow, puckering the surface. I peered into the depths. The water was opaque with suspended sediment, concealing the bottom. I broke out in a sweat, fighting the temptation to take a dive.

Another crack of thunder brought me to my feet. I looked upcanyon and spotted a newcomer — the fat gray lip of thundercloud above the waterfall. And then I spotted a second newcomer — curled into a red-headed knob in the deep notch to the right of the fall.