A CAR HORN blared, and Calvin glanced up. The line of vehicles at the entrance to Kaibab National Forest had moved forward while he had been wool gathering. He idled up to the gate house and rolled his window down. Calvin was almost surprised when a blast of desert air didn’t flow into the SUV, but he was at a higher elevation now and farther north. The air temperature was already down to eighty-six and would be forty degrees colder an hour after sunset. A blonde woman, early thirties, freckles, and a Ranger Rick hat, leaned in and beamed. Calvin liked her. She smelled very clean.
“Purpose of visit?”
Gonna’ get my head together before I go waste a fellow man of the cloth. “Do a little camping,” he said.
“And how long will you be visiting the park?” Her eyes, deep brown, dipped into the SUV and over his backpack.
“Just tonight and tomorrow day.” He pegged her eyes with his own and watched the capillaries in her cheeks dilate and fill with blood. He was being stupid, flirting like this, allowing her to etch his portrait on her memory. “It’s so pretty up here, I wish I could stay longer.”
She asked where he would camp.
He lied.
She asked if he had a National Parks Pass.
He flashed the one he’d stolen from an open vehicle back at a rest stop.
She waved him through. He smiled and almost meant it. He rolled away from the gate and into the park proper, sparing a glance or two back at the helpful ranger. Normally, when his myriad vows got in the way of something, Calvin just ignored them, but in this case, vow of celibacy or not, he couldn’t allow for distractions. Even those with freckles and smelling of Ivory soap. He glanced down at his map and turned off the black top at the second gravel road. He guided the SUV up into the woods for five miles before the gravel road ran out.
Calvin turned off the engine and got out of the SUV. The motor ticked. Birds and insects filled the air with their noise. The wind moaned up the mountainside, ten-thousand pine trees for vocal chords. To Calvin’s left the forest: a maze of wooden pillars and shifting shadow. In front the road narrowed into a hiking trail that wound into the gloom. To his right the cliff edge, sheer and plunging to the valley below. A good twenty miles into that vast expanse lay the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, a great river of absence and old force.
But between him and the Canyon was Calvin’s goal: an enormous spine of pink granite, arching out of the forest below like some Native American serpent god. If he walked into the woods in front of him and kept true, he would find himself at the serpent’s head just after sundown. Calvin strapped on his pack and walked into the scent of ancient pine tar and blue rock dust. The forest closed over him. A hawk shrieked.