A hundred-year-old lodge is connected to the parking lot and though you are still not hungry (you finished the last of the withering blueberries) you walk over to see about dinner, if only to get away from the canyon awhile, but the dining room is full and the hostess says you will have to wait an hour or more to be seated. She suggests you head over to the saloon to sit out the rush and tells you to drop her name for a free cocktail (at the word your face puckers and your neck recoils into your shoulders like a turtle and the hostess, raising her eyebrows, moves on to help the next customer). You still have not taken a pill or touched alcohol since you woke up this morning.
The sun has set. You pace past the saloon several times but do not enter and you tell yourself you will not unless delivered a sign informing you to, though you do not mean to wait for the hand of God to reach from the canyon and open the swinging doors but something more along the lines of catching sight of a pretty girl at the bar, or for someone coming or going to wish you a good evening. When no such thing happens you walk to the saloon doors to peer inside the darkened room and the bartender's eyes and the eyes of the customers turn to you and are shining wet like a raccoon's over a trash can, and you catch sight of the rows of glowing bottles and again feel the heat gathering in your stomach, only worse this time, as if blood is pumping outward from its pit, and you push away from the flashing black eyes and rush back to the truck, climb into the shell, and close the door at your feet.
You are panting in the windless quiet of the truck. There is something unmistakably wrong with your stomach, some new pain you have not yet experienced, and you search with your fingertips for its center. When the pain and heat do not subside you gag down four aspirin and lie back in hopes of sleeping but the burning discomfort will not allow it, and as it comes in sharper waves you listen to your own moaning and whining and this is the most wretched and lonely noise you have ever heard, and a sadness like a lead-weighted curtain drops and covers you and now, with no alcohol or narcotics to disguise the long-hidden emotion, it takes over your body.
Here is a force more powerful than yourself, a quickening black-crazy desperation hurrying into your bones, and you are frightened, as in the alley at work on the night your wife left, that you are damaging your brain, and you punch at the insides of the truck, except now the pain does nothing to pacify you but seems to intensify your desolation. You are flipping around fish-like in the shell, slamming your head on the wheel well hoping to knock yourself unconscious, and blood is streaming from your nose into your eyes and mouth when some recessed, rational part of your mind informs you that this is the purpose of your coming to the Grand Canyon, and so you let go of your body and allow the attacking pressure to smother its weight on you and you wrap your face in the blanket and scream through visions of the sadness of your wife and of the women at the bar and your life at the bar and the regulars at the bar and your life alone in the house where you once lived with your pretty wife but where you now cannot look out the windows, and you think of the loneliness of the murdered ghost in the bar and you scream and scream covered in the greasy blood and tears until your voice is blown out and you push only creaking air and do not recognize your own sound and your body in time exhausts itself, of both force and emotion, and you can no longer move and are merely shivering, and then you are settled, and still. You remove the blanket from your face. Your eyes are open and you are breathing.
A half hour of calm passes and you open the tailgate of the truck to bow your head at the wind. You wipe away the sweat and blood and grease with your blanket and look out at the moon hanging low over the canyon. Your body aches as after intense exercise and you feel a contentment, a kind of pride or sense of accomplishment, and think to walk to the canyon edge to study its blue-black nighttime coloring and you squat to exit the truck, taking the long step to the ground, and as your foot hits the earth your sphincter muscle involuntarily releases and two days' worth of blueberries and a good deal of blood blast down your pant legs running over your socks and shoes and gathering in a steaming puddle at your feet:
Silence.
It is no small feat to clean yourself but you go about it with the facility of a washerwoman, leaning over the sink of the nearby public bathroom and scrubbing your pants under hot water with a found flat stone wrapped in paper towels. You throw away your underwear and socks and stand naked from the waist down, stains running the length of your buttocks and legs, and you catch a piece of luck in that there is no one around to witness this scene. You put your wet pants and shoes back on and head for the saloon but it is just closing up, and when you ask the bartender for one shot of whiskey he declines. When you tell him you will pay double for a bottle he says, "I saw you give us that look over the doors earlier," and that is that. You take to the road.
You drive sober through Flagstaff, Sedona, and Jerome, settling in the early afternoon in Prescott, Arizona. There is a rodeo in town and the streets are overrun with horse trailers and street vendors and drunken desert people dancing and kicking up dirt. You check into a twenty-five-dollar motel and ask the woman behind the desk where the nearest bar is and she tells you about the section of town called Whiskey Row a half mile down the road. "Whiskey Row?" you say. She asks if you are traveling alone and when you say you are she warns you to be careful, because the rodeo can bring out a mean crowd and the local law enforcement is understaffed and generally uninterested. You thank her and she hands you your room key; it is bent and attached by a heavy chain and screw to an eight-inch block of particleboard. "People love stealing my keys," she explains. "I wonder if they put them in memento boxes or throw them out the window or what."
You walk straightaway to Whiskey Row, bulky key dangling from your pocket, and enter a bar and order a shot that you drink in a gulp. It hurts going down and your face contracts grotesquely and you fear you will vomit but you clutch at your throat to keep the shot in your body and the nausea soon passes. The bartender is an attractive female, roughly your age; she apologizes for staring and asks if you have ever tried whiskey before and you tell her you have not. Laughing, she asks how you're liking it so far and you tell her not very much but that you've heard it's an acquired taste, and you order another and she brings you this on the house before moving down to help another customer. The drink goes down smoothly enough and the bartender smiles when you order a third.
The bar is full of cowboys and their lizard-women and you listen to the scraping of their boots on the warped wooden floor and the sound of their voices carrying on, telling their stories, and you wonder, why does everyone have to lie? You are out of place here, an obvious stranger and city dweller, the recipient of dirty looks, but the cowboys are too busy assembling a quality drunk to bother with you, and anyway it is early in the day yet for purposeless violence, with the sun still out and ice cream-sticky children shrieking on the sidewalk.
The bar is filling up and the pretty bartender has little time to talk but after your fifth shot she knows you were lying when you said you never touched whiskey before and when she gets a moment's break she returns to you, her arms across her chest in simulated dismay, and you raise your hand repentantly and offer to buy her a drink so that you might make peace, but she says she cannot drink on shift and points to an antiquated rotating camera nailed to the ceiling above her head. You then ask when she gets off work and she tells you six o'clock, and you share with her your plan, just invented, which is this: You will retire to your hotel room to bathe and become handsome and at the end of her shift you will return and then, with her consent, the both of you will walk arm in arm to the rodeo, where you will whoop at the depressing, unfunny clowns and the tortured, hate-crazy bulls and the pathetic-loser lasso-artisans, and where you will drink without fear of probably broken cameras inside of which there is almost certainly no film, and afterward, more drinks, quiet drinks alone in a room somewhere with no one to interrupt you with their life lies and sour breath and weird, girly elf shoes, and then afterward, and afterward… and you trail off, and the pretty bartender smiles shyly and brings you another whiskey and pours herself a soda water and you touch glasses, and drink.