Tip #1: Don’t drive at over 20 miles per hour down Road 109. You may end up doing a lot of hiking you never thought of doing.

A walk to Toroweap Overlook itself treats you to plummeting views from the Grand Canyon’s North Rim to the river 3,000 feet below. Due to its inaccessibility, you won’t find much competition for camp space. There’s no charge for the 9 campsites. It’s first come, first serve. There is, however, a permit and fee required for backcountry camping. Get these permits at Pipe Springs National Monument or the Back Country Information Center. No online reservations. For more info, call 928-638-7875 1:00 to 5:00 pm, weekdays.

From Toroweap Overlook, the Colorado River extends straight toward the east for quite a stretch, a rarity for any river, much less one that wends through its chasm the way the Colorado does.

I decided to hike down to the river. The Lava Falls Route, which is more of a chute than a trail, dives 1.5 miles down to the river across sun-exposed talus. One of the most dangerous rim-to-river hikes in the Canyon.

Tip #2: Don’t do Lava Falls after you’ve aleady hiked about 7 miles up and down Tuckup Trail and used up half your water.

Due to fear of rendering myself parched, and since the Lava Falls Route required some minor rock-climbing ability which I chose not to find out whether I had or hadn’t in me, I decided to turn around about midway down to the River.

Still needing to prove my manhood, I next mounted Vulcan’s Throne, a volcanic cinder cone that rests right on the rim’s edge high above the river. Much of Toroweap Valley, which you’ll trace when you drive to Toroweap from one of the main highways, is a lava field left over from eruptions that ended only 750,000 years ago. These eruptions formed dikes that dammed up the Colorado. You can see evidence of all this when you look at sediment deposits high above the river along the walls of the Inner Gorge.

Vulcan’s Throne looks easy, but it’s like climbing a mountain of marbles several hundred feet high. And the cinders cut like glass.

Tip #3: Don’t wear shorts if you decide to climb Vulcan’s Throne. And wear gloves. Else you’ll cut the shit out of yourself.

After trudging up a down escalator for a couple hours, in heat magnified by the dark rocks upon which I swam, I realized there was no method to getting to the summit other than to take two steps up, fall back a step, take three steps up, fall back a few feet. The cinders self-sort and there are some that seemed easier to tread, size-wise. Then I realized I was full of it and that all the routes up sucked.

At the summit, NPS puts a register for you to sign, the kind you often see at mountaintops. You’ll understand why once you’ve bagged Vulcan’s Throne. ‘Tis a bitch in summer.

Toroweap offers little shade but magnificent views. And solitude. Yes, that. When I’d written my short stories about the Grand Canyon, I hadn’t yet been to Toroweap. Had I travelled here before I wrote my collection of Grand Canyon fiction, I probably would have set one of the darker pieces – maybe a murder mystery or suspense story – here. Toroweap is a haunted chasm.

He raised his head.  Coyle stared at him, catatonic and stubble-faced.  He hadn’t moved all night.

“It’s time, Indio,” Coyle said. 

Jake sat up, but Coyle kicked him down.  He knew what Coyle wanted.  He rolled over.   He showed him the cuffs were still locked. 

“Good boy.  Nice and tight,” he praised as he packed up camp. 

“OK, stand up,” Coyle said as he waved his gun like a wand. 

Jake obliged. 

“Here’s the deal, Jake.  You take me to Cheyava  Falls.”

“Cheyava Falls is miles off.”

“Well, if you can’t get me there, I guess I’ll have to shoot you now.”

“I’ll get you there,” Jake promised.

Coyle approached Jake and uncuffed him.

 “Door Number One: You misdirect me or try to run off, I shoot you in the balls, then just graze the back of your head.  I know how to leave a man a vegetable.  You’ll be a permanent guest of the VA, OK?  Door Number Two: You get me to the Falls.  One bullet to the back of the head, to the heart of the Medulla Oblongata.” 

He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, mimicking the sound of a bullet. 

“And Door Number Three?” Jake asked as they hiked.

            “Chuck already chose that door when we he went off the cliff,” Coyle explained.  “How far are the Falls?”

“About five miles.”

“You figure that’s about two hours, Indio?”

“About.” 

Jake led the way.  It heated up quick in the inner canyon.  Before the sun breached the east walls, it broke 80.  Coyle stopped three times for water breaks.  Jake got none.  The flies pestered his backpack even before sunrise, just as the carrion beetles had rustled to and from it across the pebbles all night long.  When and where Coyle planned to dump the guard’s body, Jake didn’t know.  But by midmorning, they’d made it to the Falls, just a dry hole in the middle of the scarp face this time of year.  The shading walls of Ottoman Amphitheater loomed north. 

Jake felt his throat swell up.  It was thirst, but it was life’s end, too.  He saw men up ahead, loitering in the shade.  Men from another country.  They were white, but they weren’t Anglo.  There were five, awkward, hunched over from the weight of their backpacks and sweating in their cotton tees and jeans.  They reminded Jake of Coyle and Chuck yesterday morning.  Each step he took, he expected to hear the shot peal the split second before it pierced his skull.  His heart pounded.  The flies buzzed him, buzzed the body he was carrying.  He felt a kinship with it, knowing his would soon be like it.

I’ll tell you what I could expect: 175 pounds of pink steel, blonde hair, and green eyes.  I’d outweigh him by five pounds.  Oh Jesus, what’ve I gotten myself into!?

You’re old, Lily.  He’s youthful.  Well, youthfuller than you, anyway.  You’re 37 and well past the first standard deviation on the bell curve for childbearing.  In fact, you yourself are a standard deviant, avalanching down the second slope of the bell curve. 

Here he comes, that man with . . . the girlfriend.  Whew!  Not him.  Good thing.  He was too good looking, a cruiser in the Brad Pitt class of vessel.  I’d have to leash him to the lamppost when I went into the Starbucks just to make sure no one nabbed him. 

A lost little old man half-stumbled down the trail, bereft of his legal guardian.  But then he spoke:

“Lily?”

“Yes?” 

“Lily, it’s me.  Crawford.”

“Well, the accent’s right.  But about the only thing you have in common with Crawford is that you both appear to suffer from Britlisp.  You’re Crawford’s grandfather, right?  Crawford, the Elder, if that’s how you refer to those things on your side of the Gulf Stream.”

“I’m sorry, Lily.  I misrepresented myself. I did.”

“But the picture.”

“Photos can be doctored, alas.  You . . . altered yours, too.”

“My body may have been courtesy of Victoria’s Secret, but at least the photo of my face was taken in the same decade we’re in.  You sent me a color pic of when you were forty-five.  They didn’t have color back when you were forty-five.  They probably didn’t even have photography.  Do you know how much money I spent on this?  Do you know how hard it was to get my editor to re-extend a deadline!?  Did it ever occur to Your Heinous . . . . “

I looked around.  Everyone was staring, even the mules.  I dialed my volume down a few orders of magnitude.    

“. . . .So.  You’re Crawford.  And I’m Lily.  Only you’re not Crawford, and I’m not Lily.”

I held back a tear.  He looked away during those few excruciating moments that made one understand why dating often took place in various states of inebriation. 

“Lil, we should call it a day and head back to our respective worlds.”

 “Y’all right, miss?” our mule packer drawled.

I nodded as he packed my gear onto the back of an ass.  Who was the ass?  That gear should’ve been on my back.  I required Demerol, Vikadin, pound cake.  I took in Crawford’s pear shape from the corner of my blue eye.  His hips were wider than mine, goddamn it.  And he had those little nodules on his eyelids that older men get. 

Only Crawford’s voice matched my expectation: appropriately mellifluous for an Anglo aristocrat.  I felt myself going down that slide again, the slide that would end in the consumption of two or three pints, and a depraved threesome: me and Ben, & Jerry, doing the Karmel Sutra.

“Aw no,” he mumbled. “Robin!”  

Robin trotted up.  She’d been gathering kindling for breakfast.  She dropped the bleached driftwood on the rocks as Rod knelt on a boulder and grabbed the body by the torso.  He knew better than to wade into the icy water.  The body hadn’t bloated yet so it held together.  He turned it over. 

“It’s Abel,” she said.

“Throat’s been cut,” he said matter-of-factly as Abel bobbed in the riffle.  “His boy shouldn’t see this.” 

He glanced up at her.  

“What should we do?” he asked.   

She looked back toward camp.  No one could see her or Rod from there.  Rod shivered as the water slapped his arms.  He unsnagged his line from Abel’s ankle. 

“Let him go” she said.  He released it.  “Wait.” 

She jumped into the tawny water, chest-high on her, and lost her breath. 

“Are you crazy!?” 

He scooped his elbows under her under arms and held on from shore as she held onto Abel. 

She mouthed a silent prayer she’d learned in divinity school.  She kissed her fingers and made the sign of the cross on his forehead.  She released him.  He floated off dutifully and melted into the silk of the Colorado. 

Rod hauled her up on the rock.  She wrapped her arms around her chest and shivered as she watched the last of Abel’s face dissolve into water that ran thick like blood.  He was anonymous now.  She recalled a line from the Upanishads about all rivers losing their names once they reached the ocean.  She wished she could lose her name right then.

“Didn’t take long for them to turn on each other,” Rod remarked as he reeled in his fishing line.  “Who did it, I’m wonderin’.”

“He did,” she replied.

He wore a baseball cap.  Philadelphia 76ers.  From the 80’s.  A long gray beard dropped off his chin in waves.  His rolled up polo shirt betrayed a left forearm scarred with an old, crater-like wound that had gouged away part of the muscle.  He wore black Nike workout pants from this day and age.  His old boots were black, with a slit that exposed his big toe in a wool sock.  The frayed laces knotted from several pair. I rolled over, shining the light in his face. 

“Who are you?” I repeated from my dream. 

His eyes were green, it seemed.  He was six feet plus, and bone thin.  Danny Abraham?  Maybe.  But what 20 years in the desert did to him destroyed any configuration of his former self, the tortured self I’d seen in local papers, from military photos after he’d been fingered in the death of my father; the handsome self I’d seen in high school year book pictures, in family albums I’d seen at his sister’s house in Cuba, New Mexico.  Was it him?  I couldn’t be sure.  Should I ask him?  Accuse him of his name instead?  He stood with a practiced stillness.  He turned his triangular face a few degrees to eye me straight on, his lower lip dropped open a little.  A bottom tooth was missing. 

“You look like you’ve been down here a long time,” I finally decided to say.  The only part of me that felt real was my fluttering chest. 

“Thought you were hurt,” he muttered finally in what could’ve been small town Southwest. 

“More like lost,” I proposed.

“That isn’t what I heard before.  I heard a woman scream she was fallen.”

I dared drop the light from his eyes, down to his waist.  His long finger bones, dripping from his long hand bones, grasped no weapon.  He turned and started to pour back into the nothing. 

The scattered beam of the flashlight, the side of it, nicked the bottom of the slope where my backpack lay with my father’s knife in the bottom compartment.  It held my notebook and pen, my camera, and my tape recorder.  Those were my real weapons.  What I’d come to do was bring him to justice in the public eye, in the court of the word, with the readership as prosecutor and defense counsel, but mostly as jury.  That’s what Mama had whispered without saying.  That’s what my life was.  People would listen to Mama now.  All at once all her letters and calls would be answered and the heartache washed away.  And would it earn me something, too?  Yeah, that too.  This story was more than a feature in a small town journal.  It was a bestseller.  Why not?  I’d given my life to one story.  But now, that story was dissolving in the dark.

“I know who you are, Danny Abraham!” I rattled off, freezing his leanness. He straightened out his step, but kept his back to me. 

He twisted around and faced me, then limped toward me.  “You’re pretty foursquare,” he remarked.

“That word has a few meanings.”

“Forthright.”

“You going to kill me, too?”

He scrutinized my face.  I’d asked that question with so much emotion.

“Go get your gear.  I have stew waiting back at camp.”