Fall 2007 / Spring 2008

Motivations

by Joshua Landers

Grady Morrison checks his watch and realizes his son's been missing for more than thirty-six hours. The first twenty-four hours had been hard, the last twelve harder. Hope determined by hope alone.

He looks out at sand on sand, the sun rising over the mountains of twisted rock to the east, washing over the western peaks. Land so open, there are no details. His wife Rosemary comes out from the tent. She squirts water from her sports bottle over her face, loses breath from the shock of it.

“Stay here,” she says, and walks over to the group campsite across the road.

Grady doesn't say anything. He knows his place, knows one of them should remain at camp in case Colin wanders back. They both agreed it was better if he stayed. Why, he never questioned.

Rosemary speaks to one of the head rangers in charge and ponytails her hair while the ranger spreads a map of the monument over the hood of his Bronco. Other rangers, police officers and volunteers eat quick meals while team leaders talk about the day's routes. Then they spread in a loose V-formation toward the alluvial plain at the base of the mountains.

They scour the open terrain in the distance, walking sticks poking through chaparral and dead Yuccas a mile in every direction. Their bodies become no bigger than ants seen from a roof, voices echoing the boy's name off the rocky outcropping above the campsite.

“They gonna wake the whole goddamn desert,” Grady's father says.

He pokes his head from the tarp he'd propped between two bushes in the next site over. He yawns and army crawls out and rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms.

“No luck?” he says.

Crows shoot from high crevices when he coughs and ripples snot up his nose. Thin lizards race across the sand onto rocks and push themselves up in stationary exercise.

Grady digs into the riverbed sand and tosses pebbles at the nearest one, sends it skittering into the undergrowth.

“Nothing yet,” he says.

He tries to fight off a yawn, but it comes too hard. He shuffles through his hair and cracks his back and neck. His body sore from the fourteen hour search yesterday.

His father slouches on the picnic table between the two sites, struggling to open his eyes. There are a few crushed beer cans on top, and the old man shakes a few of them, downs what's left in one.

“How far could've he gotten?” he says, and puffs his cheeks out with a burp. “He's only six for Christ sake.”

Grady walks onto the gravel road separating the desert into two halves, stares over at the mobile police units set up near the Port-O-Johns. Rosemary straps on a fanny pack, fills up a canteen from the Igloo container rangers had brought. She ties a bandana around her head and jogs to catch up with the search team without saying anything to him. Grady tosses the rest of the pebbles in a shotgun spray to the ground.

“Colin's four.”

***

After they'd married, he took Rosemary to visit his father at a work release camp outside Fresno. They'd bought a bottle of Malibu rum for the ride up, a jug of Hawaiian Punch.

“You're right,” she said, and held up her full plastic cup. Hula danced her fingers. “This is way better than Hawaii.”

Grady could only get two days off from FedEx. He'd just gotten his own route, and didn't want to press for a full week.

“We'll go next year,” he said. “You'll get leid.”

She didn't get the joke, scrunched her face when she took another drink, and poured her cup out the window.

When they arrived, they waited at a picnic table at the center of the complex for almost an hour. Smells of dust and cow manure. A couple of inmates in orange jumpsuits played catch on the dirt outfield of a baseball diamond.

“Let's just go,” Grady said, and flattened his hands on the table. When he stood up, he felt a point at the back of his head.

“Freeze,” a voice said, then a smoker's laugh, a clap on his back.

“Jesus, Dad,” Grady said when his father slumped on the bench across from them.

Rosemary couldn't believe their resemblance, although his father's hair was thin up top, receding into pale scalp. He was also unshaved, thin shouldered. A bump on the bridge of his nose the same as Grady's. His jumpsuit slacked away, blue-green ink of faded tattoos on his upper chest. When he rolled up his sleeves, there were the ones Grady remembered from childhood.

“This your girl?” he said, and grinned at her. Rosemary laced her fingers in Grady's hand and forced a smile.

“Not bad,” his father said. “Looks like your mother.”

He pulled out his lips with thumb and forefinger and stuffed tobacco in. Flecks of it stuck to the tip of his tongue, his teeth, and he spit to the side. Held out his hand to her.

“Name's Jack,” he said. “You can call be Dad.”

Then the laugh again, the one clear memory Grady had of him.

“You two should talk,” Rosemary said, and stood. Grady half rose, sat back down, and watched her walk off toward the low uniformed buildings surrounding them. He noticed some of the chain link fences were topped with razor wire. Some without. And he wondered how many people in the same situation might try to escape something like this.

When he faced his father, the old man was leaning off the bench.

“What's her name?”

Grady picked at the hundreds of initials carved into the table, thought about how much rum was left in the car. The way Rosemary hummed the theme song to “Hawaii Five-O” when she took her first sip. What felt like days ago.

“Rose,” he said.

“She ride horses?”

Grady stared at his father, the slits of eyes within the pockets of extra skin resting above his cheekbones, the broken veins cracked over the end of the nose. He tried to smooth out the wrinkles of his father in his mind, the dog ears and rubbed white corners of memories and pictures he'd had of him while growing up.

“No,” he said.

His father sat straight.

“Not what her ass says,” the old man said. He slapped his hands together and smiled.

That was five years ago, and Grady sits on top of the rock formation behind the campsite and wonders why he'd ever let his father back into their lives. He listens to police radios skipping static out from the squad cars. He's already answered preliminary questions, twice—how's you and your wife's relationship, has there been any family troubles lately, would there be any reason for him to run away.

His father was questioned next, and he cursed and stomped around in circles, tapped his chest and popped his eyes white.

“You think I had something to do with it?” he said. They asked him similar questions, standard procedures. Being an ex-con, he felt like he was always being accused. He wouldn't cooperate and hid under his tarp until the police gave up and moved to other campsites down the way.

He's still under the tarp, and Grady opens a beer and scans the desert for the searchers coming back. It's becoming a lost cause. Nature can swallow you whole.

Two days now and the searchers have taken the same route in and out of the area. Wound their way through a dry riverbed to Jumbo Rock, along one of the few paved roads within the monument leading to Indian Cove.

He'd already gone to those places the night Colin disappeared, when hopes were still high that he was just chasing a jackrabbit or peeing his name in the sand like his grandfather had taught him before they'd even set up their tents.

Going to Joshua Tree National Monument was Grady's idea, he'd planned the trip soon after his father moved in with them a few months earlier. Once they arrived, he thought he and his wife needed some alone time.

After they made camp, Grady asked his father if he could watch Colin while he and Rosemary skipped away into the desert night, had sex for the first time in weeks under the star ridden sky.

“Can't stop you,” he said, and shuffled Colin's hair. His father was good with the boy at home, made him lunch, took him to the park. The kid clung to him right away, wouldn't let his own parents tuck him in at night without a fit.

When Grady turned back, halfway down the road, he saw the silhouettes of his son and father standing in front of the fire. Their backs faced him, and he thought he heard them singing, whistling. Then the flames Grady had got going smoked and lowered while they giggled, trying to piss it out.

Grady helped Rosemary undress on scratchy blankets in a dry riverbed a quarter of a mile away. He kept her from getting up and going back, using a little force at first, then kissing that part of her that silenced most of her sounds.

They held each other when they finished, shivered and joked like they had before life came at them. Her nose was cold on his neck, and she breathed hard, twisted strands of his chest chair around her fingertips.

“Colin really likes your dad,” she said. “Maybe we should move away and let them live together.”

She laughed, but Grady could tell it wasn't that funny to her.

They were gone to close to an hour.

“Where's Colin?” she said when they unzipped the vacant tent. Pieces of sticks clung to the ends of her hair, her underwear trapping a section of her sweatshirt in its waistband. Sex had been quick, mechanical. And the initial release lasted the amount of time it took to walk to their campsite.

Grady crouched at the entrance of his father's tarp and poked at the bundle of empty blankets. He looked around and noticed the interior light in the car was on, his father sitting in the driver's seat. He walked over and tapped on the window. The old man startled, like he hadn't expected Grady to come back. A beer rested between his legs and he closed a National Enquirer, rolled down the window.

“Seen Colin?” Grady said. He rested his elbow on the roof and peered down at his father. The keys were in the ignition and the heater was on, the radio playing low.

“Last I seen he was in your tent,” he said, and reopened the magazine over his lap. “Probably went wandering.”

Rosemary must've caught their conversation, pushing Grady aside and sticking her head through the window. She opened the back doors, checked the floorboards. Reaching an arm through the driver's window, she pushed the trunk open and searched it. To her, an ex-con was always a current liar.

“What do you mean ‘wandering?'” she said. His father shrugged and leaned back, propped an elbow on top of the passenger seat.

“It's cold,” he said. “So I come in here. He was already sleeping.”

Rosemary pounded the roof and turned around. She pointed a finger at Grady, the same hand she used to finish him off minutes earlier.

“This is your fault,” she said, and walked into the middle of the road. She called out their son's name, making dogs bark at another campsite. She hurried to the Port-O-John across the road and flung open the door, rushed to other sites to see if anyone had seen him. When she came back she stood at the edge of the campfire's glow.

“Jesus,” she said, and stood in front of him. “Where the hell is he?”

She crossed her arms and covered her mouth when she started to cry. Grady pulled her in and buried her face in his chest.

“Don't worry,” he said, and ran a hand down her back. “How far could've he gotten?” She pushed away and called out again, moving a few feet in every direction.

How far could've he gotten?

Grady crushes his beer can and tosses it in the nearest crevice. He checks his watch, whispers numbers and looks at the sun dipping down in the sky.

Almost forty-eight hours.

***

Summer, 1988. A rock climber got herself lodged in a crevice while rappelling down a steep face out in Lost Horse Valley. She hung for three days before snapping her arm at the elbow and loosening her body to solid ground. A broken arm, dehydration and fatigue her worse symptoms.

Spring, 2001. A hiker was bitten by a rattlesnake in the Desert Queen area and walked over nine miles with a venom engorged ankle to the nearest ranger station. He had one toe amputated, but still hikes on a regular basis.

Winter, 2005. A young couple ran out of gas twenty-five miles into the monument and burned their tires for four days before the flames died out and they froze.

Twenty more stories inside. Out here, anything can happen, and not everything has a happy ending.

Grady read the rest of the jacket cover and showed Rosemary the book. They'd stopped at the gift shop/museum before they made the long drive up into the monument. His father walked with Colin, holding the boy's hand around the display cases lined with pinned down scorpions and snake skins. Stuffed bobcats and roadrunners. Bins filled with rubber lizards and plastic bats. They were the only people in there, camping season still a good month away.

“I'm gonna buy it,” Grady said, and slapped the book off Rosemary's ass. She grabbed it from him and flipped it over.

“Taking out a loan?” she said, and dropped it back in the rack.

Grady went and waited outside on a concrete bench while she collected free pamphlets, a map of the area. Asked the cashier the best places to camp for children. A few minutes later, Colin ran through the automatic doors with a plastic bag hanging from the bend of his arm. Grady's father trailed behind him, his wallet in his hand.

“Look what Papa buy,” Colin said, and sat next to Grady. He was out of breath with excitement, a shine of clear snot under both nostrils. He dug into the bag and pulled out what looked like a spider trapped in a hardened bubble. An ugly, spindly legged thing encased. Grady palmed it and turned it over. The bottom was lined with felt, four rubber circles glued to the edges. The price tag sticker said: Arachnid Paperweight $9.95.

Grady gave it back to his son, and Colin kissed it and slid it over the concrete bench. Ran it up the signs posted to the exterior of the gift shop, describing desert plant life and the history of the National Park Service.

“Kinda expensive, isn't it?” Grady said, and handed his father the bag. His father leaned against the wall across from him, stuck the wallet back in his pocket and shook his head.

“Can't take it back now,” he said, and pulled out the receipt. “All sales are final.”

The sun's behind the western mountains and Grady searches the immediate areas again. He'd almost taken off with the last search party that returned to hydrate, but wondered what would happen if Colin came back to an empty campsite, disappeared again without knowing he'd been there.

Grady half expects to find his son bent down within the rocks no more than a hundred feet away, tracing the path for a stink beetle along the granite. And he half expects not to.

He sits on the edge of the rocks and watches his father stack wood in the fire pit below, crumple sheets of newspaper between logs. The old man mutters to himself, flashes looks at the police cars rolling back and forth on the road. He'd gone to jail twenty years earlier for trying to run over a cop during a routine traffic stop, clipping him and breaking his wrist. Speeding off until they sideswiped him off the highway. He made parole and was put in again six months later for doing the same thing. Grady was in the car that time, crying for his father to stop. Child endangerment added to the sentence.

First time he was released, he came home drunk, told Grady there was something about the law that he just didn't trust.

Ashes swirl around when a piece of paper lights and his father runs around batting at them. He crumples another section of paper until there's more paper than wood and kicks the entire thing over when he fails to get anything lit.

Grady lays back and feels the sharpness of the granite against his arms, his head. He rubs his elbows back and forth until they sting, his eyes beginning to fill, and listens to the searchers returning. Voices low and out of breath.

“Goddamn it,” his father says, and calls up to him. “Going to town to get lighter fluid.”

Grady doesn't say anything to him, this man he's never gotten to know better, and probably never will. This man he and Rosemary had trusted with their son for less than an hour. This man who was the last person to see Colin alive.

“Shut up,” Grady says to himself, and pounds a fist off the rock. “He's alive, he's alive.”

A door slams, the sound of his car backing up and skidding away on the gravel. Grady blinks and tears bullet down his temples, drips over his ears. The sky a pink desert mosaic above him. He hears something. Flaps of bat wings. Coyotes yipping. Low rumblings of thunder hundreds of miles away. His own hopeless breaths.

He is alive.

By the time his father returns from Twenty Nine Palms, nights fallen and Grady's losing hope. He's under his father's tarp, too much trouble to get in the tent. Volunteers whisper and huddle around a campfire across the way. Weak lights wash the area in a dull yellow, a generator whirring inside the mobile police unit. For them, a new search begins tomorrow. Another day.

His father parks and opens the trunk. He pulls out a Styrofoam cooler, a couple bags of ice, and grips a case of Schlitz under one arm and a can of lighter fluid in the other.

“Anything?” he says, and sets the cooler on the table. Grady sits up and shakes his head. His father rips open the case, grabs two cans out. Saran wrapped sandwiches stick out from his jacket pockets, and he pours ice into the cooler and sets them on top.

“For the kid,” he says, and walks to the fire pit.

What there was has gone to ashes, pinpricks of embers glowing when a low breeze comes through. His father stokes it with his boot and sprays a steady line of lighter fluid on. Flames explode and he jumps back. Then they die.

“Never was much of an outdoorsman,” he says.

Grady rests his head and rolls over, slips his hand under the blanket his father's been using as a pillow. He listens for Rosemary's voice among the others, but can't make it out. He doesn't even know if she's back from the search yet.

He almost drifts off, but when moves his hand to a more comfortable position he feels something inside the blanket, underneath one of its folds. Round, hard, the size of a river stone. He sits up and unfolds the blanket, looking to discover a rock, an old memento his father might keep close to him at night.

Flames spark and its reflections play off the inside of the tarp, flickers gold against the rocks. Grady grips the paperweight in his palm, holds it toward the fire.

The spider is light brown, three sharp joints to each leg, black lines patterned across its oval body. When he tilts it, he notices short bristles along the entire insect. He wonders how they encased it, if it was alive or dead when they did. A ten dollar paperweight species that'll never serve its purpose. He closes his fingers around it and crawls out.

His father's leaning forward on the bench with his elbows on his knees, his tattoos on each forearm dark splotches in the generated lights. Grady remembers them as a child, bold and colorful, something that came to life when his father flexed his muscles. An eagle with talons sprung, beak screaming open near his wrist. On the other, a coiled rattlesnake. Put them together they make a scene.

One day you're top of the chain, he said. The next you're the victim. Something he told Grady the day he finished off probation and moved into their garage. He had nowhere else to go and said he'd flopped over a new leaf, attempted weak apologies for mistakes he'd made in the past. How the future could be brighter than the summer sun he once thought he'd never see without walls as his horizon.

Grady hides the paperweight to the side of his leg and his father reaches into the case and holds up a beer. His father pushes himself up and looks long into the desert. He squints and nods.

“Yep,” he says, and takes a sip. “He's alive. I can feel it.”

Grady opens his mouth, sucks in a breath. His father's eyes are almost dark, a sheen of wetness glassing over them. A similar face he sees when he stares in the bathroom mirror every morning, never turning on the lights. He starts to say something, anything, but can only click his tongue.

“What?” his father says.

Grady clenches the paperweight, shakes his head and walks away. Drops the beer to the deep sand leading to the tent and zips himself up inside.

***

Outside's lighting up. Winds swept through the desert all night, scattershots of sand pelting the outside of the tent. Grady hasn't slept. Rosemary's never come back.

He pinches blisters on his toes, trying to release the fluid. His arms and hands are spotted with dirt, and he spit washes them and wipes them down his pant legs. There's no running water out here, and he hasn't showered for days.

“Fuck it,” he says, and brings Colin's sleeping bag under his chin. He flattens a part of it against his cheek and watches the world shaping up through the mesh window. There's a faint trace of urine stuck on the bag from the times they'd camped together in the backyard. Roasted single marshmallows over a lighter flame and squished them between two graham crackers. Colin's mouth sticky sweet when Grady kissed him goodnight.

“Love you, buddy,” Grady says. He taps the paperweight with his fingernails and drops it in the tent's hanging pouch. Closes his eyes.

There's excitement across the road and he sits up. He can see heads moving back and forth, and a woman runs towards the tent.

“Mr. Morrison?” she says, a spindly middle-aged lady wearing a sun hat tied tight under her chin and a bright orange windbreaker. “They've found something.”

Grady fumbles his shoes on without socks, without tying them, and bursts out.

“Where?” he says.

She points behind her, at a clump of tall rocks in the distance. She puts a hand on his bicep, squeezes, and says, “Don't know if it's him yet, but it's something.”

Grady's father crawls out in the next campsite and rises up holding the small of his back. He searches for his boots in the nearest bush, ruffling up the tarp and his blankets..

Grady stares at him, continues staring then reaches inside the tent and grabs the spider from the pouch. Hurries across the desert. He doesn't run fast because he knows how things might go, but he doesn't move slow either. Can't be too quick to be devastated, can't be too slow to become assured.

Rangers hump a wench with a large rubber hook up the rocks. They work in teams of two, shouldering the machinery up from rock to rock.

“You the father?” an officer asks, and leads Grady to the base of the granite. The closer he gets the harder it looks to climb up. Several small boulders rest on larger ones, gaps of sand and ravines filled with rusted beer cans and petrified wood.

“Careful where you step,” the officer says, and reaches a hand out. “Rattlers are waking up.”

Grady climbs on top of a flat rock, the shape of a giant loaf of bread. There's a taller rock on the opposite side, and between the two is the ravine.

A small group of searchers had come across what appeared to be the top of head lodged deep within a ravine, halfway up a clump of rocks. Matting of hair sprawled within the granite walls. What could be an outstretched arm.

Rosemary's leaning over the edge, held by the back of her belt by another woman. There are more than a dozen people up here, a few rangers, officers, people Grady doesn't recognize.

“Stand back,” the rangers say, and reposition the wench next to Rosemary. They operate it, dropping the hook end of the cable down. Grady shuffles across loose rocks and feels a blister burst warm over his toes. Then the sting.

Rosemary drops to all fours, the back of her legs scraped, dried blood on her calves. Elbows skinned.

“Lower,” she says. “Lower.”

The wench creaks and grinds.

“Hold on, baby,” Rosemary says. “Come to Mommy, honeysuckle.”

Someone prays behind Grady, quiet sobs. Then Rosemary says, “Stop.” And the spool of the wench refills itself.

Grady hears grunts and looks behind him, watches the same officer who'd helped him up lifting and pulling his father to the top of the rock. When he turns back around, the spool is almost full again.

His father flashes him a look, and stretches his neck to get a better view from where he stands. His lips sucked in on themselves, hands rubbing against one another. Grady pulls the paperweight from his pocket and grips his fingers around it like a baseball, his palms moistening it.

“Almost, baby,” Rosemary says, her words choked, sputtering, and the top of the hook rises out of the ravine. “Come on.”

Everything quiet. Grady feels his heart and nothing else. Only when the ragged, broken remains of what looks like a small coyote is pulled out and spread over the granite does he hear noise around him.

Rosemary swipes her arms at the woman trying to console her, her mouth a black oval, and kneels over the remains. Pieces of fur are stuck to the hook, what looks like a rib. Rosemary presses a hand to her mouth, squishing her nose sideways, eyes unblinking.

“It's not him,” she says, and circles around the rock. “Not him.”

Grady grabs her while she mutters to herself and bites her nails. His father stands over the bones, steps over to check the edge of the ravine. His toes scatter pieces of granite and they bounce down.

“Jesus,” he says. “Goddamn dog or something.”

He reaches a hand out and places it on Rosemary's shoulder, tightens his faces and shakes his head. She slaps his hand away.

“Don't touch me,” she says, and breaks away from Grady and walks ahead. She props her hands on her hips and takes in a deep breath while staring up at the sky, then begins her climb down.

Grady moves next to his father and faces him. He holds out his hand, the paperweight between them. The last thing his son probably touched, amazed by the beauty of something so small. The weight of it.

“I'm sorry,” the old man says, his bottom lip quivering.

“Don't,” Grady says, and grabs the forearm with the rattlesnake tattoo, his hand covering the striking head. It's skinnier, weaker than he remembers and he pulls his father closer. They stand locked together. The old man never lifts his head to look at him, and they don't say anything, wavering in each other's grip.

Grady gazes into the ravine. No way something could survive a fall that steep, that narrow. He lets go, and the old man stumbles backwards and falls to his ass. Eyes slit, lips tight, Grady raises the paperweight to throw it, shatter it. Then he clenches his eyes, water zipping from their corners, and straightens his arm to the side. Drops the spider into the ravine. It plinkos off the rocks and lands somewhere below. He wipes his hands together and leaves his father to pick at the granite.

He walks to where he'd climbed up and looks out across the sprawl of the desert. Everything's smaller from this view, flatter. The people that had been up here seem motionless along the floor, miles away from anything.

The sun's rising over the eastern mountains. It washes half the desert out in light and sand sparkles. Half in shadow. That part of the world still sleeping.

Grady watches Rosemary move from the base of the rocks, at least what he thinks is her. He toes to the edge. A step forward, and he's that much closer to her. Step. They're combing the terrain. Step. They're winding around the snake-shaped riverbed scarring the land. Step. They're mapping out another day's search. Step. They're back at the campsite, celebrating. Step. They're on their way home.

Step.

He's a father again.