The cover isn’t much — a ledge maybe nine or ten feet across squeezed under a dripping lid of rock open on three sides to the weather — but at least it keeps the rain off. It’s a bit of a squeeze, everybody wedged in shoulder to shoulder, boot to boot, and the first thing they do, to a man and woman, is dig into their packs for food. There isn’t much to say beyond “Scoot over just a little, could you?” or “Did you want the peanut butter or the cream cheese and sprouts?” and for a long moment there’s no sound but the hiss of the rain, the crinkle of cellophane and the soft snap of mastication. Then Josh produces a bota bag (vinyl and plastic, no sheep’s stomach on his conscience) and asks if anybody wants a hit.
“What’s in it?” Toni Walsh looks up with interest. She’s crouched in a pink heap amidst a tangle of legs and muddy boots, her face fish-belly white, her hair like the stuff they line packing crates with, and she’s making no concession to present company, working her way through what looks to be a deli sandwich thick with prosciutto and cheese. “Brandy, I hope?”
“Red wine. A nice sturdy zin. It’s good, go ahead.”
And then they’re opening wide, one by one, for a taste of it. By the time Suzanne passes out the homemade oatmeal cookies, everyone seems to be feeling marginally better. When the wine comes round he takes a hit too — why not? He can use the boost.
“So what do you think?” Cammy says, turning to him. “Realistically, I mean? Do we have a chance of getting up there and back before dark?” She’s slumped against the overhang in a sprawl of limbs, looking about twelve years old. “Because I know you didn’t count on this,” she adds quickly. “These conditions, I mean.”
He shrugs to show it’s no big deal and passes the bota bag to Kelly, who’s practically sitting in his lap. If there was any adventure in her face, it’s long gone, but she lifts the bag dutifully, tips back her head and squeezes a thread of wine into her mouth. She smells of sweat and the orange she’s been peeling and her hair frizzes out under the bill of her cap. Absently, he watches her lick the stain from her lips, a dumpy girl, graceless, dull, in desperate need of a makeover if she ever hopes to attract a man and have a life for herself or any life at all beyond a nunnery, before turning back to Cammy. “Yeah, I was thinking maybe I’d go on ahead with maybe two other people while the rest of you make your way back — Toni, I’ll take your camera if you want. Maybe I’ll get lucky.” They’re all watching him but he can’t tell from their expressions whether they’re relieved or not. “But Cammy’s right — we just picked a bad day, that’s all, and there’s no way we’re going to be able to do all that much. Or not the kind of scope we’d planned on anyway.”
“It sucks,” Josh says, his voice gone hollow. He’s looking at nothing, cradling his knees to his chest, the depleted bota bag dangling limply from the fingers of one hand. His boots are mud to the laces. He’s shivering. They’re all shivering. Below them, louder now, loud as static, there’s the steady mocking roar of the water crashing through the canyon. No one else seems to have anything to say. They want to go back, want to give up, all of them — he can see it in their faces.
It’s a debilitating moment, hopeless, depressing. But there’s no way he’s giving up — he’s going to climb up out of this canyon and snap off one shameful inflammatory picture after another so the Press Citizen can run them on the front page and everybody can see for themselves what the killers are up to, and then he’s going to cut wire if it takes him all night, if he has to swim back to the boat, if he. .
And then the wind shifts and everything changes.
“Does anybody smell anything?” It’s Kelly, stirring herself. She sits up, arches her back, narrows her eyes. She sniffs audibly, deliberately, making a face. “It’s like”—and here it is, they can all smell it now, rank, musty and corporeally sweet all at once—“something died.”
In the next moment they’re back out in the rain, everybody, even Toni Walsh, working their way higher, to the next ledge, the one above the overhang. There’s a turning there, a scoop of rock carved out of the high wall of the canyon — sage, coyote brush, coreopsis, and something else, a dark shape wedged like a doormat between two over-spilling rocks in a pale slurry of mud. The footing’s bad, horrendous. The odor intensifies, deepens till it’s an assault. “Is that—?” somebody says.
They are looking at the remains — the carcasses — of two pigs, one an adult the size of a big overfed dog, the other a juvenile. The eyes of both are gone, reddened pits gouged out of their faces, their jaws gaping, intestines exposed and shading from blue to gray. The hide is a black bristle animated by the maggots feeding there in a frenzy of moving parts.
“Gross,” Kelly says.
Josh lets out a curse. “Jesus,” he snarls, “what did they ever do to deserve this?”
Shivering, hunched, the big pink pocketbook like a withered limb and her face intent on the viewfinder, Toni Walsh moves in to hover over the scene, freezing one frame after another. She doesn’t say anything, not a word, because she’s at work now, doing her job, recording the scene, making history. The others look awed. Or scared. This is the configuration of death, the thing they’ve been fighting — the very thing — and here it is, right in their faces, stinking at their feet.
He’s trying to sort out his own feelings — horror, pity, sorrow, anger — but there’s something else too, a rush of excitement, of happiness even. “Good,” he’s saying, “excellent — this is just what we want,” and he has a stick in his hand now, poking at the carcass of the larger animal, looking for the entry wound, for the bullet, for evidence no one can controvert because these pigs didn’t just lose their balance and topple over the rim of the canyon to wash up here. No, they were murdered, exterminated—that’s the word. “Here, Toni — here, I think this is where they shot him, see? Can you get a close-up on this?”
It’s a small space they’re inhabiting, no bigger than a hot tub, the stone slick, the creek boiling below, rain in their faces and drooling from the bills of their hats, everyone crowding in for a look and he and Toni at the center of it, ratified, vindicated, the sons of bitches, and when Kelly takes a step back to give them space — a single step — he has trouble registering what’s unfolding before him. She doesn’t cry out. Doesn’t clutch at his shoulder or the withered excuse of the pale insubstantial shadow of a bush beside her. She just murmurs Oh, shit, as if she’s engaged in a private conversation on a subject no one could begin to guess at, and then she’s gone.
She goes down headfirst, on her back, both arms spread wide and her hands snatching at nothing, and half the hillside goes with her in a rattling concussion of rock and dirt, a chute opening up before her all the way down to the water a hundred feet below. There’s a thunderous splash, her khaki slicker flapping and billowing in the current even as the dark pinpoint of her bare head, the hat gone and her hair spreading like drift, bobs once, twice, three times before she’s sucked down the channel and out of sight.
There’s no time to absorb the shock of it, no time for curses, exclamations or the strangled shriek that climbs up out of Suzanne’s throat to ring impotently through the canyon, because he’s already in motion, launching himself back down the rock face, darting beneath the overhang and dropping into the mudfield below, his eyes straining at the place where she went down, expecting at any moment — or no, demanding — to see her there clinging to a rock or log. He can hear the others calling out and fumbling behind him and he can only pray that another one of them doesn’t lose their grip and go down with her. There are no handholds. He’s made of mud. He can taste something foul in the back of his mouth.