Deb Caletti - 10,000 Miles Into The Grand Canyon
About Deb Caletti
Deb Caletti is the author of the young adult novels "The Queen of Everything," "Honey, Baby, Sweetheart" and "Wild Roses." She was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her fourth book, "The Nature of Jade," will be released in March 2007.
Deb wrote the following piece for "Telling Childhood" at Richard Hugo House on
10,000 Miles Into The
By Deb Caletti
The papers he uses come in an orange envelope, and they're called Zig-Zag. There's a picture of a man on the package - he looks like Jesus if Jesus got a good haircut and trimmed his beard. Step one is, take out a paper and lay it on the table, sticky side up. Step two is, curl a tiny piece of cardboard into a circle. Step three, lay the "weed" onto the paper in a line, just behind the cardboard circle. Dad calls it weed, which makes it sound unplanned, accidental as clover or thistle, but Cassie thinks it looks less like a weed than the oregano Dad's girlfriend Jillian puts into the spaghetti sauce when she comes over sometimes to make them dinner. Step four is, pinch each side of the paper between your thumb and forefinger. This is where things get tricky, Dad says. You gotta be swift and sure, don't stop and think, just go. Step five, roll and pinch your way around, then lick the end down.
Dad pats his jeans pockets, then the chest of his T-shirt, where the pockets would be if it had any. "Okay, where'd you go," he says, as if his lighter is prone to practical jokes. His lighter has a painting on it of two dolphins leaping from the sea into the air. Jillian gave it to him on his birthday, set in a small white box on a rectangle of cotton like a piece of jewelry, but Cassie has seen the same ones for sale at the counter of the 76 station. Dad hunts around in the Folgers can of spare change by the telephone, fishes through the junk drawer-out comes masking tape and loose batteries and a handful of pens he stole from work and a cellophane package of red wax lips from Halloween. He's borrowed one of her elastic hair bands, Cassie notices, the red one, to pull back his black-gray hair into a ponytail. Now out comes a screwdriver, a key chain that says "I Shower Naked," a mini Magic 8 Ball, and farther back, the manual to an Osterizer blender they don't have anymore and a bright orange field trip permission form for a trip to the Science Center Cassie's fifth grade class went on three years ago.
"Ha!" Dad says. He's found an old lighter way back there, victoriously outsmarting the new one. It's a fast-food yellow, the shade of one of those plastic lemons with the juice inside, but he doesn't care. He holds it in the air in triumph, then flick-flick-flicks the metal wheel with his thumb a few times before a flame appears. "Man make fire," he says in a caveman voice. "Man make fire, hunt bear, smoke joint."
Cassie knows what he'll do next, and sure enough, he goes into the living room and she hears the rocking chair complain under his weight. Back and forth the chair goes, nag-nag, nag-nag. Sometimes he just sits there, holding that joint oh so tender, a newborn baby, and sometimes he puts Bob Marley on the stereo, and sometimes he watches the news or old re-runs of "I Dream Of Jeannie," which he says he loved as a kid, with Major Healey and those blinking, long-eye lashed eyes on the jeweled bottle, the pink smoke, from the time when people knew the names of astronauts.
She can hear him flip through channels - A fifty dollar value for... After severe weather pounded these parts... Thirty-five pounds on the Nutri-Sys... The island is a stop along an ocean-wide migra... Difficult or painful swallowing, headaches, stomach aches... And then he's back to the newscasters, their voices making the newscaster swoop from serious to hopeful to serious again.
Cassie puts everything that Dad left on the counter back in the drawer, everything except the field trip form and some rubber bands, which are so old they're dusty-brittle. Then she starts dinner. Mac and cheese, hot dogs, he never gets tired of that. Fill both pans with 2/3 cup of water; when the noodles are done it's ¼ cup of margarine and ¼ cup of milk and the package of cheese dust.
"Hey, Cass, you hear that? Hear what President Bozo's planning now? A wall across the border. Yeah. Great idea. Hey, why stop there. Build a fucking wall around the country. Build a million-mile wall around the whole fucking country."
Thirteen thousand four hundred miles, actually. That's what the wall would be. Thirteen thousand four hundred miles of boundary. Cassie doesn't correct him, though. She just stays there and watches for the bubbles to start around the edges of the water. She doesn't like it when he's hazy, when his eyes are unfocused. It makes her get that middle-of-the-night feeling, when you wake up and sit there in bed with your heart pounding, when you're sure you hear a sound but probably don't hear a sound.
"Oh man," he shouts from the living room. "They say he's gonna make them all speak English before they can come in! Christ. Yeah, maybe they oughtta make him learn to speak it first." He chuckles.
Cassie brings him dinner, the macaroni in the bowls he likes, with the Rice Krispies characters on the bottom. His favorite is Crackle, because Crackle is the fun, middle child, who's always supposedly playing jokes on Snap, the one Cassie always uses. Pop was lost somewhere long ago. In Cassie's palm is the dolphin lighter, which she found in the silverware drawer, nestled next to the bottle opener. "Catch," Cassie says, and tosses it to him.
"Ah, excellent! Thanks babe," he says. He tucks it into the front pocket of his jeans. He scratches his black beard at the jaw line. "You know what I heard about dolphins today? They give each other names."
"Really?" Cassie says. "How do they know?"
He shrugs. "I didn't hear the whole thing. Some sort of repeating patterns of dolphin sounds, dash, dot, dash-dash? Something. What do you think they call each other?"
"Bart," Cassie suggests.
"Louise," he says. "Or wait, no, like those mafia guys. Gino, The Nose. Jimmy, 'Big Fin' Balducci."
Cassie laughs. "And Flipper is the common name, like John," she says. But he's already moved on in his thoughts. A curl of smoke winds up his fingers, drifts up.
"You gonna eat with me?" he says.
"I've got homework."
"You're too serious, you know that?"
She knows that. He's told her this and other things many times. That she's too serious. That she needed to stop and smell the roses; that she shouldn't forget to play. He's said it so often, his words are like a roar, that whoosh that fills your ears when you drive through a tunnel and the car windows are down.
"I know a man who all he did was work, work, work and then he dropped dead of a heart attack at 36," he says.
There is a desk in Cassie's room, and she sits there now, setting her macaroni bowl with Snap in his chef's hat on the bottom beside her. Above her desk are pictures she's torn from the old National Geographics they gave out free at the library. Maps of mountainous terrain, strata of rock with dates posted beside each layer, and her favorite, the periodic table of elements that was a foldout from the center of November, 1987. Too serious-Cassie knows she can't be summed up as easily as Dad thinks. Good, responsible people-they're the ones with the most secrets, aren't they? They need secrets, like dry ground needs rain. Dad doesn't know, for example, that she made out with Jack Kevins behind the gym building two weeks ago. Okay, maybe not made out. Maybe just kissed. And maybe it wasn't even all that great. A kiss needed something more important than curiosity. A kiss needed desire.
She unzips her backpack, removes her math book, and splays it open to the day's homework. She sets out two pencils next to it, a clean sheet of lined paper.
The names of my mother, my father, my brother, my sister and me in no particular order are Sandy, Sharon, Pat, Jennifer and Connie. Pat is younger than I am. I am older than Connie.
Dad wants to make a picture frame for Mom's picture of the family. He has plywood in the shape shown below. What is the area of the wood he will be using for the frame? What is its perimeter?
Cassie can hear Dad in the living room. It's not old "I Dream of Jeannie" re-runs, but "Gilligan's Island" -Cassie hears the disgusted voice of Skipper: "Gilligan, you idiot!," the capable tones of the professor, constructing a phone from a coconut, and Dad's voice, "Fuck, man," and laughter. She finishes her math and works on her social studies project, due in a week-Fort
"Cass? What about your birthday? It's next week already. Want to make that road trip to the
Cassie looks up. "That'd be great." That'd be so great.
"We could bring Jillian," Cassie says. There's a part of Cassie that knows Jillian could make it really happen. Jillian with her tight jeans and plants that are watered and not withered and crunchy.
"Or just us," Dad says. "Jillian gets so serious sometimes. Uptight." Cassie outlines the curve of the scissor handles with the tip of her finger. "We should really do it this time."
"This time we'll really do it," he says.
Hope is something you should be careful with, Cassie knows. Hope is a lit match that you have to cup your hand around. You have to hold your breath or it might go out. She holds her breath all that Friday, her birthday. She holds her breath through English and science and math and P.E., through lunch, through art. She doesn't tell anyone it's her birthday, not her friend Jessa Winters, with her skin-snug shirts that show a stripe of her tanned stomach, not Jake Kevins, who probably wouldn't care anyway. When Cassie walks to the bus stop and waits for bus 220, she stands as still as possible with her backpack on. She forces herself not to think about maybe getting in the car with her dad behind the wheel, heading for that place she'd only seen on a map.
The bus sighs to a stop. The seat Cassie likes best is empty; it's 11 rows back, enough to watch the passengers, not too many to make it a long walk to the door when her stop came. On the ride to school, Cassie liked to watch the fathers, heading to work. Fathers in suits, with striped ties and shiny shoes. Fathers with watches on their wrists and combed hair and briefcases at their feet or on the seat beside them. Gold rings on the fourth finger of the left hand. She'd count dress socks on capable ankles. Eighteen ribbed, black socks. She'd picture those socks rolled together in a neat lumps, lying in tidy rows in drawers.
But on the trip home, it's too early for many fathers to be there, usually only two regulars, including her favorite one, the man who always looks up at her and smiles whenever she gets on, as he smiles now. Him, with his blue crisp trousers, a white shirt, his jacket lying over his knees. His neat, wavy dark hair, his white teeth. The bus would exhale its exhaust and rubber mat smell, but when she passes him, there is always the clean, welcome drift of soap, cologne, something sting-y you'd pat onto your cheeks after shaving. It's the kind of smell that would cling to the cotton of his shirt when he hung it up again on a wooden hanger in his closet.
Cassie smiles back. She knows he watches her as she walks past-she feels his eyes. The awareness comes from the same place inside that senses when a thunderstorm is coming, or a snowfall. She thinks she should probably mind him looking at her, but she doesn't think she does mind. She lifts her backpack to sit beside her. The bus lurches forward in its tired fashion. It's slower than ever since Cassie's eager to get home, expectant, in spite of her best intentions not to feel anything near to that. Her mind is an unruly class and she's the substitute teacher. She tries to establish order. She purposefully remembers how a wish is slippery, but how disappointment clutched. If they were really going, Dad's truck would be in the driveway. If they were really going, the front door would be open, maybe, and he'd be rushing in and out, carrying a cooler to put in the backseat, a bag with a change of clothes. Cassie sets her cheek against the cool bus window. At her stop, she gets off, and when she passes the man with the black hair and white teeth, she notices a drop of sweat rolling down his neck.
Dad's truck is in the driveway, but the front door is closed. Inside, though, Cassie sees a case of Red Ale and a six-pack of Diet Coke on the kitchen counter. Then the door to the garage flings wide and bangs hard against the doorstop because Dad has kicked it open with one foot. He stands there, hefting the large red cooler in both hands. The sight of him makes Cassie's heart leap-he's got a map held in his teeth. His hair has those sidetracked wisps around his face, but his grin is wide and he's wearing his "lucky" Grateful Dead shirt, the one he had on when he'd bought a lottery ticket that earned him 1,200 bucks. He sets the cooler down on the kitchen table, takes the map from his mouth.
"Get a move on, girlie. Fifteen minutes, we're outta here."
Cassie ditches her backpack where she stands, grabs a change of clothes and her toothbrush and her old camera that has double-spooled 110 film you could barely find anymore. "We're, we're, we're going to the Grand, Grand Canyon," she sings, and in a few moments, she's sitting in the passenger side of Dad's truck, and they're heading away from their house, the gravel driveway, their scratchy tan lawn, the neighbor's dog, Bob, who always stands at the corner and watches traffic.
"Adios, Bob," Cassie says out the open window.
"For fuck's sake, Bob, get a life," Dad says.
Route 66 is a two-lane road Dad says they have to take because that's what you do on a road trip. They get into
"Here's to your fourteenth year, Cass," Dad says. They slurp to the brown-white swirled liquid bottom. Dad pays the check at the cash register and buys two rectangular mints wrapped in green foil.
"'We were somewhere in
She scrunches her eyebrows together to form a question. "Hunter Thompson," he says.
They follow beside a train on I-40, the rail cars coursing through the flat, yellow ground.
"Wanna race?" Dad shouts to the train. He steps on the accelerator, and the old truck roars and rattles and the compass in a plastic ball that Dad has on his dashboard shimmies and the McDonald's toy Corvette also there rolls off the dash and ends up somewhere by Cassie's feet. Cassie grips the armrest. "Dad!" she yells. He slows, but not much.
"Ha, we could have beat that bastard," Dad says.
It's dark by the time they get to the Shady Dell Motel in Williams,
"You coming in?" Dad says.
"I'll wait here," Cassie says.
He doesn't protest, so Cassie leans against the truck and gathers her hair up into a ponytail and lets the late hour cool her neck. Va ncy, the sign reads. Rooms with Zenith Chromacolor TV. There are13 rooms, 11 with little yellow lights glowing outside, moths circling. Someone, somewhere, lights a cigarette-there's the meandering of nicotine on night air.
Dad comes back with the key and a credit card slip, which he crumples up and tosses in the back of the truck.
"You made 16 miles to the gallon," Cassie tells him as he fits the key in the door.
"I'll remember that next time I'm on 'Jeopardy,'" he says.
They hurry out of there the next morning, which is okay with Cassie. The Shady Dell is a place where you want to wear your shoes in the bathroom. You can feel the grit of humanity under your feet on the tile floor, too many lives passing through. The dresser tells stories-cigarette burns, permanent three-quarter rings of coffee. It smells like Lysol and clothes left too long in suitcases.
Dad comes out of their bathroom with a paper toilet seat over his head, settled over his shoulders. "Never trust a motel that has a canister of paper seats in the bathroom. That's my fatherly wisdom," he says.
"Yeah, aren't the seats supposed to be clean already?" Cassie says.
"They're worried we're gonna catch something," he says.
"You're not going out like that," Cassie says.
"Sure I am. It's hilarious. Don't you think it's hilarious? I think it looks like one of those things pilgrims wear. Disposable pilgrim collar."
"I think it looks like a paper toilet seat on your head," Cassie says. She feels a twist in her stomach, the tight coil of embarrassment. "Come on, Dad."
But he ignores her. Grabs up his bag and opens the motel door. It's bright out there, on the other side of those heavy plastic motel curtains. Cassie squints. The air outside smells like bacon cooking. Dad steps through the door and as he does, Cassie makes a grab for the paper and it rips in her hand.
"You're no fun," he says.
Dad edges coins into the vending machine outside the motel office and down clunks a Reese's and a Butterfinger and a Baby Ruth and M&Ms and a package of orange crackers with peanut butter between them. He tosses them one at a time to Cassie and she catches them neatly, the cellophane scrunching in her palm. "Breakfast," he says. "Par-tee time."
The wrappers litter the floor of the truck. It's a 50-mile drive to the south rim, but the way Dad's driving, Cassie calculates, they'll be there in 35 minutes. Cassie reads facts from a pamphlet she found in the motel dresser drawer. "'The length of the
"I wonder how many people have fallen in," he says.
Cassie studies the glossy photo on the front of the pamphlet, the deep cut into the earth.
"Look there," Dad points. It's a sign by the side of the road: Mule Crossing. "They need one of those for the Oval Office."
They both want to hurry through the
"That is some big hole," Dad says. He has his camera around his neck, same as everyone else, and Cassie holds her own camera to her eye, trying to gather in the breadth and grandeur in a plastic square the size of a stamp. Dad leans far over the top ledge of the fence, but Cassie is glad for the barrier. Looking down gives her stomach that flop of fear, makes panic gather in her throat. It's crowded at the lookout. A little boy tries to climb the crisscross of the metal fence; his mother grips a clump of his shirt in her hand, yanks him back, and he screeches. There's the singsong chatter of different languages-foreign rhythms and lilts, groups gathering for photos that pause the foot traffic in both directions.
"Cass? Let's get out of here. Let's drive over to the trail. I can't feel the I'm-so small-in-the-scheme-of-things spirituality when I've got the edge of some woman's purse in my back."
"Okay."
It's fine at first, the trail along the rim. The beginning is paved, with waterspouts and signs warning hikers to stay on the path. The fence is gone, though, and Cassie walks to the far side of the trail, nearest the canyon wall. Dad is happier, his camera bouncing around his chest as he strides.
"This is more like it. Cass, look at that."
"I know," she says. He stops, heads to the edge of the pavement, and steps down onto a jagged ridge of rock. "Dad," she says. He holds his camera to his eye. "Dad. It says to stay on the path."
"Yeah? And who's listening?"
He's right, really. People dot the cliffs; crawl their way down stone ledges. One guy lies on a narrow, stone strip, his shirt off, hands behind his head. "Come on," she says. She hates seeing Dad there, his toes over the end of that rock.
But he doesn't listen. Instead, he turns sideways, eases down. Cassie can hear the skid of dirt under his shoe.
"God, Dad, what are you doing!"
"This is gonna be some kick-ass photo," he says. There's the twist, twist back of the lens as he focuses, and finally, the click of the shutter. He bends over, uses one hand to balance himself on his way back up. They hike farther. After a while, the pavement ends. There's only the curve of dirt path, down, up, around until you can't see it anymore. At the floor of the canyon, Cassie knows, the
"Dad?"
He's up ahead of her, but Cassie's ready to go back. It's hard to see the beauty, it's hard to take in the red rock, the pink and brown layers, the magnitude, when she's aware, too aware, that all the other hikers that passed had backpacks and water bottles. That she has only sandals on.
"This is fucking majestic!" Dad shouts. His voice bounces around. He holds his arms out, as if to embrace the largeness.
"Dad, I'm..." God, her feet are slipping on this path, these loose rocks. Maybe she should take her sandals off. Her hand grabs at the cliff beside her, at a clump of green brush. The path winds more steeply now, and her feet are angled straight down. There's no grip under the smooth flatness of her shoes.
"Look at that hawk!" Dad says, but Cassie must watch her feet. She won't take her eyes off each step ahead of her.
"Dad! Can we go back?" She hears the panic in her own voice.
"Okay. I think this is it!" Dad says. "The perfect spot. See it? Right there. Wait 'til you see this. This is something I always wanted to do."
She doesn't know what he's talking about; she can't even think about his words right then. She can only search for those branches, something sticking from the cliff with which to steady herself. She doesn't want to do this any longer. It's not fun anymore. It's hot, unlike above at the lookout; her shoulders prick with the heat of the sun, and her mouth is dry, and the ground is so loose and there is only down, down. She sees a flash of yellow, the color of Dad's T-shirt. He's climbing the craggy notches of the wall again, to another boulder perch, lower, farther. God damn it, why does he have to do this? She can see him, inching out farther.
"Dad!"
But he's where he wants to be. He drops to his knees and then sits. He fishes around in one of the side pockets of his cargo shorts. "Wait 'til you see this, Cass!"
She creeps down, toward him. Feels the roll of the gravel beneath the slick surface of her shoe.
"Check it out!"
He holds something to his mouth. She doesn't know what, God, please, don't let him be getting high right now, but it isn't that-it's something bright. Pink. And then she sees the sudden release of luminescence-the round bubbles he is blowing, the blue-green-pink shine, the colors of a fly's back, their fragile globes lifting, floating, crashing against rocks.
"Oh my God, Dad!" She reaches as she falls down, for a branch, for a handful of desert scrub, but there is nothing. She hears the sound of her feet skittering out from her. Hears the tick-ping of pebbles tumbling down. She twists, lands hard on her knees, and she grips the ground with her hands. She grips the harsh, ancient sand so hard she feels it dig beneath her nails. Oh shit, her heart is thudding and she opens her eyes and sees the red ground beneath her, and just beyond her fingertips, the drop-off, the endless, bottomless layers, and the sound of her own pulse is in her ears. She can feel the gravel under the skin of her knees, the burn and the warmth of blood. Her chest heaves. She wants to sob, but no sound comes out. Her chest just heaves, and she won't, won't, won't turn her head and look. No, she grips the ground, because if she looks, she will see a space so vast and immeasurable you could be lost within it forever.
Finally, he is back. He stands above her. His hands glisten with the slip of soap from the container of bubbles. "Cass! What are you doing down there?" he says. "Christ, you missed the best part."
They arrive back home Sunday afternoon, and the next day
Carrying the fort is awkward, and Cassie is glad to get to the bus stop. She stands by the pole of the bus stop sign, and all at once a cool breeze rushes past, like someone late for an appointment. Her arms dot with sudden goose bumps. Cassie looks up. She sees the clouds unfurling, a dark gray rolling across the sky out of nowhere. The change is rapid and dramatic and Cassie knows what this means but there's nothing she can do to stop it. The sky is so dark, so fast and now there's a fat drop of rain that lands on her arm, and her heart falls with the knowledge of inevitable catastrophe. Another drop, there, on her shoulder, and then another, on the black curl of a Magic Marker letter S. It splotches, spreads, and Cassie tries to stop it with the tip of her finger, making it worse, making it smear and turning her finger black.
The drops, they come faster and harder and then they aren't drops at all, but a pounding sheet of rain, and she tries to cover the fort with her body but it's no use, and it is raining so hard the cardboard is getting wet-growing soft enough that the fort is sagging in the middle, and the script of the labeled rooms bleeds together in bewildered black streaks. One inch equals three feet, you can't even see the words anymore. She wants to cry, she wants to, looking at the devastation in her hands as the rain pelts down, as the bus finally arrives, its wipers on, its doors opening to her.
"Crazy rain," the old driver says, as she climbs the steps.
And suddenly, as she walks down the aisle with the soft cardboard in her hands, she feels a wide vista of emotion, too many choices but all desperate ones-anything could make those tears come, anything-a broken binding, an untied shoelace. She could weep at an overturned chair, or maybe the opposite, cut off her hair, get in someone's car and drive fast, fast, fast. She is translucent, she could break against rocks, she is 10,000 miles down and 10,000 miles across and around and it's too far and too long and too deep, and that's when she slips on the wet, rubbery bus floor, and she can feel the lurch, the imminent loss, the propelling forward, and that's when the hand grips her wrist.
"Are you all right?" he asks.
She nods, but he keeps a firm hold on her arm. She can smell his cologne, a smell that asks something in a way that maybe you'd want to answer. His tie is silky blue, the knot smooth. He is looking up at her; he looks deep into Cassie's eyes and he can see her, right in her, she can tell. And then, gently as a passing thought, or even as gently as a memory, his thumb moves across the soft flesh of the underside of her wrist. He is holding his breath, she realizes, because he exhales and then lets her go, and when he does Cassie takes her seat but she can sense his fingers still, their heat, where he touched her. She sees the back of his head, the thick wave of black hair, his profile, and she feels this energy between them, an awareness that they're looking at each other, only not looking. He feels it, too, she knows. He feels it until he must look around at her again; he turns his head, smiles. She doesn't know exactly what his smile means, only that it means something. It curls around her, like smoke, or like the arm of true love, and she wonders then if it's possible to fall 10,000 miles into the Grand Canyon and be held safe at the same time.
