Echo Canyon

Nobody said anything in the car.

Frederick sat in the middle row in the cold air from the vents with his hands between his knees and felt worse than he had felt at any point in the whole of his life, including some points that the Register had written about, and found that underneath it he also felt something else, which was the thing he had felt at a quarter to eight on the bus, and he did not have a name for it, and did not try.

He had thought about the phone on the bed perhaps four hundred times since a quarter to eight, and every time he had decided not to, and had then had another lemonade. He had run out of lemonades. He had run out of coins. He had the taste of a good whisky still in his mouth, and the back of his hand clean where a stranger had wiped it, and a woman standing very still at the end of an empty plaza, which he was going to have for a long time.

Kessler drove. He drove the way he did everything, without any sign of having an opinion about it, out of Old Town and west along Camelback Road, with the mountain getting bigger in the windscreen and blacker against the orange of the sky, and he did not look in the mirror once.

“She looked tired,” said Jack, from the back row, after a long time, from under his arm.

Nobody said anything to that either.

---

The trailhead was at the end of a road of very large houses, which ended in a car park, which ended in a gate.

The gate was shut. It was a steel gate across the foot of the path with a chain on it and a padlock and a sign on a post beside it, and Kessler stopped the car by the kerb opposite, and Frederick got out first and crossed the road and read the sign in the light of the car’s headlamps.

ECHO CANYON TRAIL. OPEN FROM FIRST LIGHT. NO HIKING IN DARKNESS. CARRY WATER.

Below it, smaller, somebody official had added a laminated notice about the heat, with a drawing of a sun with an unhappy face.

He looked at the gate. He looked at the sign. He looked at his watch, which said twenty-five past three, and up at the mountain, which went up from the far side of the gate into the dark like a wall, much bigger than it had looked from the plaza, a black mass against a sky that was still entirely night.

The others came across the road behind him and read the sign too.

“First light,” said Theo.

“When’s that?”

“About five.” Theo looked at his phone. “Sunrise is eight minutes to six.”

“So we wait,” said Alexander.

“So we wait,” said Frederick.

They sat down on the kerb.

There was nowhere else to sit. There was a low kerb along the edge of the car park in front of the gate, still warm from the day, warm the way a bath is warm when you have left it too long, and the five of them sat on it in a row, facing the road and the very large houses, with their backs to the mountain, in the dark.

Behind them, across the road, Kessler got out of the car, and opened the boot, and came across with a cardboard tray of bottled water, twenty-four bottles, sweating with cold, and put it down on the kerb beside Frederick without a word. Then he went back, and came again, with a torch, a heavy black rubber one, and put that down on top of the water. Then he went back to the car, and got in, and shut the door, and sat behind the wheel with the engine running for the air, and did not move again.

Frederick looked at the water. He looked at the car.

“How long has he had that in the boot?” said Jack.

“Since six,” said Alexander. “He buys water at six every evening. He has done it since the funeral. He has never said why.”

They each took a bottle and drank, and it was the best thing Frederick had ever tasted, better even than the whisky, which had been the best thing he had ever tasted an hour before, and they sat on the kerb at half past three in the morning on the edge of the March of Arizona and drank Kessler’s water, and nobody said anything for a long time.

---

It was very quiet.

It was the quietest place he had been all night. A dog somewhere, once. The sprinklers of the very large houses coming on at four, all at once, with a hiss like an indrawn breath. And under all of it the heat, holding everything still, so that the dark was thick and warm and smelled of dust and creosote and somebody’s cut grass.

Jack fell asleep at a quarter to four. He fell asleep sitting up, on the kerb, and tipped sideways slowly until his head was on Frederick’s shoulder, and stayed there, breathing, and Frederick sat very still so as not to wake him, and Theo looked at the two of them and did not say anything about it, which was the kind of thing Theo was good at, and had always been good at, and which nobody but Frederick ever noticed.

Lukas lay down on his back on the warm concrete of the car park behind the kerb, with his head on his rolled-up shirt, and looked up.

“You can see more here,” he said.

They could. Away from Old Town and its orange glow, at the foot of a mountain that blocked half the sky, the dark was darker, and above the black edge of the mountain there were stars, not many, not the kind of stars Alexander had told them about at Potsdam, but stars, a scatter of them, and one very bright one low in the east over the very large houses, white and flickering, so bright it looked wrong.

“That’s not an aeroplane,” said Theo.

“No,” said Lukas. “That is Sirius.”

“Is that a big one?”

“It is the brightest star in the sky.” Lukas did not move his head. “In the summer it goes behind the sun, and nobody can see it. For weeks. Then one morning in August it comes back, just before the sun comes up, low in the east, for a few minutes, and then the sun comes up and you cannot see it any more.” He considered it. “The Egyptians used it to know the river was going to flood.”

“Is that a fact?” said Theo.

“Facts don’t count,” said Lukas.

Alexander, beside Frederick on the kerb, upright, with his bottle of water held in both hands, said nothing for a while. Then he said, very quietly, in the voice he only used in the dark, the voice from the dome:

“He will lose his job.”

Frederick knew who he meant.

“No, he won’t,” said Frederick.

“He lied to your detail. To the Biltmore. To his own people at home, probably. He has followed us since a quarter to eight and reported nothing to anybody.” Alexander looked at the car across the road, at the dark shape behind the wheel. “In Berlin he would lose his job.”

“Nobody’s going to know.”

“Your Sergeant knows. I saw her. In my mirror. On the plaza.”

“She won’t tell,” said Frederick. “Nobody will. She decided at twenty to eight. I know she did. I’d have decided it.”

Alexander looked at him.

“How do you know what she decided?”

“Because it’s what Castellanos would have decided,” said Frederick, “and she learned it from him, and so did I.”

Alexander thought about that, the whole length of a long breath.

“Then you will have to tell her where we are,” he said. “Yourself. Not Kessler.”

“I know.”

“You have no phone.”

“I know her number.”

Theo, on Frederick’s other side, turned his head on the kerb.

“You know Kimura’s number off by heart?”

“Castellanos made me learn it when I was thirteen,” said Frederick. “Two numbers. His and the next one. In case. He said the day I needed one of them I wouldn’t have a phone, and I’d have to borrow one off a stranger, and the stranger would want to know who I was calling, and I’d have to be able to say it without looking it up.” He looked at the bright star over the houses. “He was right about everything else.”

---

At five, the sky went grey.

It happened so slowly that he did not see it start. He only saw, at some point, that he could see the very large houses across the road, which he had not been able to see, and the colour of Kessler’s car, which was not black but a very dark blue, and Theo’s face beside him, unshaven and sunburnt and tired and entirely happy. Behind them the mountain had come out of the dark, a great slope of rock and scrub and boulders going up and up towards a sky that was getting paler at the top. Sirius was still there, low in the east, but thinner, going.

A truck came up the road with a light on its roof, and stopped in the car park, and a woman in a ranger’s uniform got out with a bunch of keys and walked to the gate and looked at the five young men sitting on the kerb in front of it, one of them asleep on another’s shoulder, at five o’clock in the morning, with a tray of bottled water and a heavy black torch.

She did not look surprised. Frederick supposed that in August, in Phoenix, she had seen everything at that gate at five in the morning.

“Morning,” she said.

“Morning,” said Theo.

“You boys been here long?”

“Since half past three.”

The ranger looked at them a little longer. She unlocked the padlock and pulled the chain through and swung the gate open, and the path was there, going up into the grey between two boulders.

“You got water?”

They held up Kessler’s bottles, five of them, like a toast.

“Go on, then,” said the ranger. “Top’s an hour if you’re quick. It’s eighty-eight now and it’ll be a hundred by eight, so don’t be stupid. And go slow on the rail section. Everybody goes fast on the rail section.”

Behind her, in the car park, cars were arriving. Frederick had not heard them come. There were six or seven, and out of them were getting people in shorts and hats and boots and hydration packs, very fit people, most of them over sixty, stretching their legs against the bonnets of their cars, and one of them, a small woman with white hair and a sun visor, looked at the five of them on the kerb and said, to nobody, cheerfully, “Students,” and set off through the gate at a pace that Frederick would have needed to run to match.

Frederick woke Jack.

“Hanover,” said Jack, without opening his eyes. “Is it morning?”

“Nearly. We’re going up a mountain.”

Jack opened his eyes and looked at the mountain.

“Why?”

“To hand ourselves in.”

Jack looked at the mountain a while longer, going up into the grey, enormous.

“In Gloucestershire,” said Jack, “we have hills you can walk up,” and got to his feet, and picked up two bottles of water, and went through the gate.

---

It was the hardest thing he had ever done, and he had done a great many hard things that other people had arranged.

The path went up in steps of rock and dust between boulders, and then it stopped being a path and became rocks you went up with your hands, and then there was the rail section, a steel handrail bolted into a sheet of smooth stone at an angle Frederick did not want to think about, and they went up it fast, because everybody goes fast on the rail section. Above that it was boulders again, red and broken, and the backs of the fit old people ahead of them, getting smaller.

It was eighty-eight degrees. By halfway it was ninety. His shirt was wet through and his legs were shaking and he could hear his own breathing louder than anything else, and Theo’s behind him, and Jack’s behind that, going oh God, oh God, oh God in a Gloucestershire accent on every step, all the way up the lower path, until the rail section, where it stopped.

Frederick noticed the stopping before he noticed anything else. Jack did not say oh God on the rail section. He did not say anything. He came up it with both hands on the rail and his eyes on the rock in front of his face and, when he lifted them, on Frederick’s boots, and nowhere else, not once, not up and not down and not out at the Valley opening up grey and enormous behind him, with his mouth shut and his face the colour of the rock.

Lukas went up as if he did it every day, silent, steady. Alexander went up the way he did everything, without complaint and very exactly, putting his hands on the same holds as the person in front, and at the top of the rail section he stopped and turned, and looked at Jack’s face for about a second, and held out his hand, and Jack took it without looking at it, and Alexander pulled him up the last step onto the boulders, and held on a moment longer than he needed to, until Jack had both feet on something flat, and then let go, and said nothing, and went on.

Jack stood on the flat rock and breathed.

“All right?” said Frederick.

“Brilliant,” said Jack, to the rock. “Never better. Keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t look at me. Look at the mountain.”

Frederick looked at the mountain.

The small woman with the white hair passed them on her way down.

She had been to the top and was coming down again, briskly, with her sun visor at an angle, and she stood aside on a boulder to let them past and said, “Good morning, gentlemen. Nearly there. You’ll want to be quick. It’s coming,” and went on down, and Frederick did not know what she meant until he looked up.

The sky to the east was not grey any more. It was the colour of the inside of a shell.

He climbed.

The last part was the worst. It was a scramble over loose red rock to a broad, broken top, with the sky opening up all round it, and at the top of it there were already a dozen people, the fit old people, standing and sitting on the rocks with their backs to him, all looking the same way, east, with their phones held up, and none of them looked round.

Frederick came up over the last rock onto the summit of Camelback Mountain at twenty to six in the morning, and stood, and could not breathe, and turned round.

The Valley was below him.

All of it. The whole of it, from one edge of the world to the other, the grid of the streets going away in straight lines in every direction until they ran out of sight, the canals like silver threads, the dark mass of South Mountain to the south and the McDowells to the east and between them the city, millions of lights, every one of them still on, going pale, going grey, going out, the way the stars had gone out, as the light came. Somewhere down there was the Biltmore. Somewhere was a plaza with its torches out, and a car park on McDowell Road with a hitching post at every space, and a strip of shops in Ahwatukee, and a treatment works with a plaque on it under a square of red velvet folded over a wall like a towel. Somewhere was a bed with a phone on it.

The others came up behind him, one at a time, and stood beside him, and nobody said anything. Jack came up last but one, and did not stand beside him. He went to a rock well back from the edge, a long way back, nearly in the middle of the summit, and sat down on it, and held on to it with both hands.

The sun was not up yet. The edge of the sky over the McDowells was white, and getting whiter.

Frederick turned to Jack.

“Can I borrow your phone?”

Jack gave it to him without asking why, and without letting go of the rock with the other hand. It was warm and damp and had a crack across one corner, and it had a picture on the lock screen of a ginger cat asleep on the bar of the New Inn, and Frederick looked at it for a moment, and then he dialled, without looking anything up, the second of the two numbers Castellanos had made him learn when he was thirteen, standing on the top of a mountain in the March of Arizona with the light coming, and put the phone to his ear.

It rang once.