WALKING HARRY

“Summer of love, my ass.”

Tessa Scott cursed as she tore at the silver paper. Jerking her body sideways to protect her spotless white bell-bottoms, she angled a softened Hershey bar into her mouth. She readjusted the strap on her shoulder bag. It was a big yellow leather thing, a Salvation Army find. Buttery soft, it was like nothing she had ever owned. It carried all she held dear: lined notebook—black cover, red binding—spiral-bound sketchbook, favorite pens—her precious Montblanc—and a few felt-tip markers. Slotted inside, at least two of the many books she had going at any time: Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Revolution For the Hell of It by the self-professed “nosy Jew-boy,” Abbie Hoffman. Some days Tessa leaned toward the cool, spare non-judgmental tone of Didion. On others she faced life with Abbie, raw-knuckled and ready for a fight. At the bottom of her bag was a green-and-gold pack of Dunhill menthols. In among the cigarettes she could hardly afford, a freshly rolled joint.

It was the middle of August. Tessa had just turned twenty-three. There were still plenty of dog days ahead. Walking suited her, even as she tolerated the heat. She screwed her nose to the already exhausted early morning air. It reeked of rotting vegetables packed into metal trashcans awaiting pickup outside the markets on upper Broadway. This was her neighborhood, near Columbia University, where she’d sublet a studio apartment in June. Her bare arms glistened with perspiration. Already, New Yorkers were bitching about the demand for exact change on buses that would be enforced at the end of the month. Whenever she could save a couple of dimes, she walked. She’d already spent half the fare on the chocolate.

Tessa strode with purpose, avoiding the odorous proof of dogs deposited in the street. She was on her way to the East Side to pick up Harry. He was a wealthy man who required a walker. Tessa was the walker. High cheekbones supported her sleepy gaze. She had long, naturally blonde hair, and a headlight smile when she bothered to turn it on. Her favorite tight-fitting bellbottoms clung to her slender hips. A bright yellow-and-red sleeveless tie-dyed t-shirt tucked loosely into a wide patent leather belt. As soon as Tessa left Harry, the hem of her loose shirt would be gathered and knotted tightly, exposing her tanned midriff. Bangs that came to her fine eyebrows stuck to her satiny forehead. Her ponytail, defying humidity, swung jauntily in step with her determined pace. She knew she looked good.

“You remind me of Joni Mitchell,” Seth had said wistfully, before asking her to return the keys to their apartment on the Upper East Side.

She laughed out loud at an image of Seth, her soon-to-be ex, slithering nearly naked in acres of mud at some hippie fest, getting up to god knows what. At the crosswalk, an old woman alongside Tessa looked up bewildered. Tessa shrugged her shoulders in an I-can’t-help-it way.

Seth bitched that he’d missed out on the whole summer of love thing. He’d told Tessa the festival in Bethel would be a last fling before he settled into grown-up life. His old Ethical Culture buddies from the Fieldston School had gone along for the ride. They’d be gorging on sliders from White Castle, littering the dashboard and floor with grease-stained paper bags. The car’s interior, its floor gummed with soda, would be well seasoned with the aroma of fried onions, fat, cigarettes, and marijuana.

Seth was more likely to be one of the thousands stuck in traffic on a highway going nowhere. She pictured him arced like a jockey over the steering wheel of a platinum-colored El Dorado, that too-big car his father had leased for them. Seth, in his ratty navy-blue Lacoste polo, collar cocked purposefully. His clip-on sunglasses flipped like cartoon eyebrows. 

That car had been an embarrassment, conspicuously nosing through uptown streets on a hunt for dime bags. The magic gas-guzzler would look ridiculous alongside psychedelic VW buses in the anti-establishment parade of laboring pickup trucks heading for Woodstock.

Tessa continued down Broadway, more optimistic than she had been at the start of the weekend. She was rescued from a weekend of recrimination, mostly self-directed. When she’d moaned about missing out on Woodstock—this could be history in the making—her old high school friend, Hugh, set her straight. “That’s rich white hippie shit,” he told her.

He packed her into the crowd pressed inside a ragged rectangle of green in Harlem. Mount Morris Park was ringed by Black Panthers, with thousands of others who had ignored the heat, disproving the cops’ prediction of another Newark, another Detroit. Instead of rioting, the laid-back crowd sucked on fat joints, grooving to Nina Simone. From the stage the singer demanded, “Are you ready, Black people?” The crowd whooped their assent. Hugh’s unaffected grin beamed like a pearly crescent in a dark sky. He squeezed Tessa’s eager white hand. She tightened her grip on his.

Hugh had not deserted her. Not when her father fled a failed antique repair business and an erratic wife, carting Tessa off to spend her senior year in Hartford, Connecticut, where they’d shared a cramped, furnished apartment on Laurel Street. Not when she’d confessed to Hugh a disastrous friendship in Hartford with a girl whose coarse complexion and ardent nature had spooked her. Not when she returned to Manhattan and shared an apartment on Perry Street with another former classmate who hadn’t been nearly the friend Hugh was. He and Tessa were still artists together. They haunted the galleries and museums as they had done as students at the High School of Art and Design. They took classes at the Art Students League. They sketched everywhere, excited by everything—until Tessa met Seth.

Hugh had been the unwitting matchmaker. When Tessa turned nineteen, Hugh introduced her to soul food and jazz. They went to Sylvia’s, a new restaurant in Harlem. They gorged on ham hocks, fried catfish, collard greens, and black-eyed peas. 

After dinner, he walked her a few blocks to the Lenox Lounge to see a modern jazz quartet. Tessa was new to the genre. She fell quickly in love with the furious beat that both shocked and hypnotized her. The antics of a pack of over-stimulated white college boys seated near them distracted her. She leaned over to one who bore the bespectacled look of a mad scientist atop a footballer’s physique. Ever so politely, she told them to shut the fuck up. Seth was smitten. He abandoned his friends at the bar, and followed Tessa into the street after the gig. Ignoring Hugh, he pleaded for Tessa’s phone number. 

Tessa and Seth were a bad fit from the start. The foreshocks only became apparent in hindsight, when their marriage crumbled from the earthquake it turned out to be. Infatuated by their differences—for her, his wealth and for him, the paucity of hers—their brief, drug-fueled affair resulted in pregnancy. The mother of Seth’s best friend arranged a clandestine abortion, much to Seth’s relief. Afterward, Tessa’s demeanor had been wrongly interpreted. She mourned something, but what it was had escaped her.

Tessa married Seth in Arlington, Virginia. Standing near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, they had not waited long before they’d hitched a ride south. The driver, in a flagrant move, pegged them as a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, revealing immediately that he was armed. Tessa bolted from the car, back to the curb. The man grinned. Said the gun was in the glove compartment. It was not loaded. Seth, annoyed, urged her back into the car. The driver leaned across Seth, popping the glove compartment. “Take a look at that, College Boy,” he said. 

Perched in the back seat, like a watchful film extra, Tessa held her breath as Seth extracted a handgun, palming it under the driver’s watchful eye.

The driver directed Tessa to a cardboard carton filled with sawdust. At his urging she picked out a delicate bisque figurine. It was a miniature nude he called a “naughty.” Its skin was the color of peach ice cream. Tessa brought the six-inch figure closer for inspection. Its enigmatic expression defied cuteness.

The man bellowed above traffic as they sped southward, “Can you all believe that was shocking?”

“It’s beautiful,” Tessa murmured.

“She’s an innerestin’ collectible. Cheap in her time, but could be worth a lotta money.”

Seth gingerly replaced the handgun.

On the bus ride home the following day, Tessa had discovered that she’d lost the marriage certificate. 

She veered east on Eighty-Sixth Street, thinking about Hugh. Though he had not said as much, she imagined he was overjoyed when she’d told him it was over with Seth. Her marriage was broken, but her friendship with Hugh remained intact. What he had said was true, though. She had retreated from a creative life. She had allowed herself to be callously tossed—an object of curiosity—among Seth’s family, his disapproving mother and her social circle. She was the girl from the projects, the outsider.

Seth’s family was loaded. He had grown up in a sprawling apartment on Fifth Avenue, never having had a summer job during his private schooling. He went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Tessa had grown up in the Jacob Riis Projects on the Lower East Side. She worked summers throughout high school. Skipping college, she embraced the artist’s hardscrabble life. When they married, Tessa left her basement apartment on Perry Street. She moved with Seth to a brightly lit one-bedroom in a doorman building on the Upper East Side, close to the hospital where Seth would begin his medical degree. His father, a corporate attorney who had done well, paid the rent.

At first, Tessa strove for independence. She scoured the Village Voice classifieds for something different. She didn’t have to work. When she complained that his family looked down on her, Seth admonished her. “You’re just emphasizing the differences,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. Who is this guy Harry? Paint or something, or I don’t know, those woodcuts.” 

Entering the park along the transverse, Tessa slowed her pace, enjoying the summer day. She loved Central Park and missed its closer proximity when she’d lived with Seth. She had more than enough time to get to Harry’s apartment on Park Avenue.

Tessa didn’t often get beyond the front hall—the foiyay, as his wife called it—since she’d answered an ad in the Village Voice. At her interview, in the luxurious, if dated, living room, Tessa was offered a cup of tea, which she accepted from the platinum-haired, carefully dressed woman who kept her eye on her husband. Harry stood near the grand piano, trembling slightly, staring straight ahead. Tessa guessed from the black-and-white photographs in gaudy silver frames displayed like awards across the grand piano, that Harry had been in entertainment. Harry’s doctor, a psychiatrist, asked Tessa if she felt she could handle Harry.

Tessa smiled at the twitching man gripping the piano. She stood up and took Harry’s arm.

“I think we’ll do just fine,” she said.

The doctor and Harry’s wife had exchanged glances. “You’re hired,” the doctor said. Tessa had shuddered a little at the mirthless grin buried in the doctor’s dense walrus mustache.

Harry was improving. In the past couple of months, at his request, they had walked more often. Apart from a few mystifying tremors, he was calmer. Harry was rediscovering speech. He and Tessa were able to hold conversations—many abstract, some a few more personal. His gait was steadier than it had been on their first outing. 

Tessa thought the man he must have been was re-emerging. Tall, though slightly stooped to ingratiate himself and put one off guard, he was someone who had been used to running the show, whatever that show was. Harry might have been a flirt—surely a kibitzer. 

After a few sessions, Tessa ruminated on how detached Harry’s wife seemed from her husband. She talked about him, not to him. He was less like a husband, more like a ward. Rarely stepping out of the character of a well-dressed mannequin, she sometimes displayed a fawning affection for Harry that made Tessa uneasy.

Tessa collected her pay at the psychiatrist’s office a few blocks north of Harry’s building. The doctor had no receptionist, which struck Tessa as strange. She rang. He buzzed her into a windowless outer room. A deep pile carpet, the color of sand, covered the floor of the nearly bare room. The walls matched the carpet. One large abstract print in desert pastels hung on the wall behind a fawn-colored leather wing chair—the lone chair in the room. If the doctor were unable to see her he’d leave a check in an envelope on its seat. 

Tessa was always relieved when he was too busy to engage her. She felt shy and skittish around him, more so since the incident with Harry, when she’d taken him to see Roman Polanski’s new film, Rosemary’s Baby.

It was a stupid thing to do. She had been walking Harry for only a few weeks. When asked how their day had gone, Tessa usually mustered a cheery reply. “Fine,” or “Great!” She’d very nearly quit Harry after the first week. He shouted convulsively when she least expected it. Sometimes he’d stop dead in the street, fearful of crossing some invisible line. Tessa had to learn to wait patiently for his motor to shift gears. She usually gravitated to Central Park, where they spent most of the time sitting on a park bench. Children were frightened of him. She’d watch Harry as he trembled a hot dog into his mouth, sauerkraut raining onto his lap. Once they had visited the Central Park Zoo. They’d both been sad afterwards.

But on a dreary day, just after a rainstorm in early spring, Tessa had been at a loss. Park benches were pooled with rain. In just a few weeks, they’d exhausted the museums closer to home. Everyone was talking about the new Polanski film. If they sat in the balcony for an early afternoon screening, perhaps they would disturb no one. Harry might even fall asleep.

As it turned out, the doctor in the film who terrorized Mia Farrow’s character shared Harry’s psychiatrist’s surname. Harry grew visibly more agitated whenever Ralph Bellamy appeared on-screen in the role of the malevolent obstetrician. Tessa finally abandoned the film when she offered Harry popcorn. He began shouting unintelligibly, flailing his arms like a pinwheel in a storm. 

Outside the theater, Tessa picked salty white buds from her hair. The rain had stopped. A glimmer of sunshine made her hustle him past the Plaza Hotel, into the park at Fifty-Ninth Street. She prodded an agitated Harry to an empty bench near the pond, trying to calm him down.

“Sapisfucking…tryna…fuck…fucking…trynakill—,” Harry bawled.

At a loss, Tessa shouted at him, “Stop it Harry. Stop it now!”

Like a mechanical toy at the end of its wind, he collapsed into silence beside her. “Harry,” she soothed, “the doctor is trying to help you. Your wife loves you. I’m here, Harry. No one is going to hurt you.”

She’d kept quiet about the failed expedition that had caused Harry’s outburst. Tessa had been warned not to overtax him, to keep to the park, stay off public transportation. Take a taxi if they had to, but best to stay close to home. She’d held his hand in the cab. Harry had been steadier by the time she’d dropped him off, almost tranquil. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Tessa had reasoned.

The next time she picked up her pay at his office, Tessa noticed the doctor’s brass plaque was missing from the front of the building. She waited while he wrote out the check.

“Somebody steal your plaque?” she asked, making small talk.

He looked startled at first. Then came that expansive, off-putting laughter, brimful of gravity. “It’s a very interesting story actually. That film? Rosemary’s Baby?” He advised her not to see it. Tessa blushed deeply, shaking her head. “It’s rather gruesome, not for a young woman like yourself.”

“Have you seen it?” she asked.

No, it wasn’t his taste. 

Tessa fidgeted nervously, anxious to leave and cash her check.

The doctor stared through her. “I’m telling you this in confidence, okay?”

“Okay,” Tessa replied. She listened restively as he told her about his odd connection to the Polanski film.

“The author of the book had a gripe against me. Seems I was treating his girlfriend at the time. He called me. He was livid with accusation. I was trying to drive her insane. I would kill her. I was evil. I had to be stopped. I’ve decided to drop my lawsuit. Better for my patients. I don’t know if he is still with her.”

He stopped to gauge Tessa’s reaction. She remained politely poker-faced.

“She’s no longer a patient.”

He lowered his eyelids, throwing his head back. A silent minute passed, compounding Tessa’s unease. Just as Tessa was about to speak, to tell him she had somewhere else to be, he jerked forward.

“This character, this doctor in the movie, is his revenge.” He reached across the desk, her check in his outstretched hand. “Pathetic.”

Tessa shuddered at the memory as she exited the park onto Fifth Avenue. The doctor was a strange guy, but he was looking out for Harry. She’d keep the office visits short.

The Metropolitan Museum stretched downtown. Tessa wasn’t sure what was on special exhibit, but they could wander the period rooms, have a bite in the cafeteria. She loved eating off a tray at the little tables that surrounded the reflecting pool. At the far end stood the smiling Etruscans. She and Harry guessed at punch lines to the sculptures’ ancient jokes. 

They had not been back since the spring. That an extensive exhibition like Harlem On My Mind would be too much for Harry had been a possibility, though it had merely tired him. Throughout, he’d been alert and communicative, especially in the rooms devoted to the 1930s. He paused at practically every photograph, scrutinizing as if for clues. They stood silently and watched a video of a former slave who lived in Harlem. Harry had not taken his eyes off the woman. 

When they returned, Harry’s wife was incredulous. “Why would you take him there?” she asked.

Harry stuttered a retort for the first time since they’d begun their outings. “I-I-I wanted to go.”

“But it’s awful,” his wife said, nonplussed. “What he’s done to the façade. It looks like a fire sale, that ridiculous sheet hanging there.” She nervously patted Harry’s arm and called for the maid. “Tom’s up to his old tricks, I fear.” She spoke of Thomas Hoving as if he were a friend, which he probably was. “It’s too confrontational,” she sniffed. Tessa had read the newspaper article calling the exhibition irrelevant. Calling Negroes irrelevant. She didn’t understand.

Harry had responded as he’d been led away, catching his wife off guard. “It’s s-s-supposed to be.” Tessa had registered something like shock creeping into his wife’s expression.

Tessa crossed Fifth Avenue. Harry’s apartment building was just up ahead on Eighty-Third at Park Avenue. She looked forward to seeing Harry in his now customary seersucker suit, always with a club tie and a pastel-colored shirt. He’d started wearing a yellowed straw hat with a broad brown grosgrain ribbon, tipped at a rakish angle.

His wife had fussed when it first appeared. “That old thing,” she said.

The doorman at Harry’s building greeted Tessa, calling her “Miss.” She was early and knew not to show up before the appointed hour. “I’ll just sit for a few minutes,” she said, breezing into the elegant flower-bedecked lobby that stretched like one of the great halls in the Metropolitan Museum. She settled onto an upholstered bench near the elevators. Her flushed appearance drew another smile from the white-gloved elevator operator. 

Tessa fanned the pages of Abbie Hoffman’s book. She felt a wave of unease. Maybe it was the gory details about the Manson murders played out in the tabloids, or the whole Polanski thing all over again. Maybe it was too damned hot. Nowadays Harry was ready and waiting for her no matter the weather. They’d used to go to Soup Burg on Madison, which Harry liked, but his wife disapproved of what she called greasy spoons. “You’ve seen p-p-plenty,” Harry said. His wife had checked her expression, responding blithely, “Well, as you can see Tessa, he’s still got his imagination intact.” 

Maybe they’d take a cab to Serendipity. Apple pie for Harry; she’d order a chef’s salad and a frozen hot chocolate. They could still catch a movie. The Odd Couple was sure to be harmless fare. Her job was getting easier, the perks growing.

 Harry had asked if she liked walking with him. Of course she did. Then he told her that he pretended to be crazy at home just to keep up the walks with her. Tessa had been terribly moved by that. She wondered how long before she could get Harry on the Staten Island Ferry. How long it would be before he would tell her about himself, his past. How long before they could step out of the still constricting present. 

 The week before, Tessa had ventured to ask the doctor how she was doing. She had long-range dreams, both for Harry and herself.

“Well,” he said. And then, inexplicably, he’d added, “A little too well.” Of course he was kidding her, he’d added. 

When she entered the apartment, the light was the first thing Tessa noticed. Until that morning, the living room had always been shrouded in heavy, olive-green velvet drapery. Massive oak furniture had disappeared in the darkened room. Now the room glowed with sunlight from bare windows. The walls had been stripped of paint. The claret-colored carpet had been removed from the foyer, exposing a veined white marble floor. Paint samples in shades of ivory and beige were taped to the walls. Tessa saw the piano covered in plastic sheeting, the photographs removed. She waited in the foyer as the maid instructed until Harry’s doctor appeared.

“We won’t be needing you any longer,” he said. He handed her a check. “Thank you for everything. You’ve been most helpful.”

“Harry…?” Tessa managed. Her confusion only grew when he prodded her to the front door.

“Unfortunate,” is all he said. “Most unfortunate.”

Tessa stood for a moment in front of Harry’s building. “Well, that was weird,” she muttered. The doorman stared straight ahead.

What next, she wondered. Hugh would say, “No excuses now, girl.” She could finally lay siege to her life in cartons. Liberate her few possessions once and for all. Seth had let her take the stereo. He was getting a better one anyway. He’d said that in the offhand manner he’d affected since they had agreed to divorce. There was a new album Hugh had given her called Karma, by some way-out sax player named Pharaoh Sanders. There was a joint in her bag. When she got back to the sublet she’d dig out her woodcutting tools. She’d sharpen them slowly and carefully on a whetstone. With a brush loaded with India ink, she’d commit her thoughts to paper. When she was satisfied, she would transfer the ink drawing. Then she would ravage a clean block of pine with chisels and Japanese knives until the image it bore resembled her conviction.

Tessa started back toward the park. Walking suited her. She was not a collectible.

                     OUT OF THE BLUE

“I HAVE CANCER.” Her voice crept up on him like a shadow with attitude. They stood watchful at the end of the world in the hermetic air of pre-dawn darkness. It was early in August. Breathing kept them mindful of the desiccated heat waiting for them in the bone-dry furnace below. 

They were novice hikers facing an unknown trail deep into the Grand Canyon. On her fiftieth birthday—the let’s-not-talk-about-it birthday—Trudy Russo contemplated the void. Her husband, Tommy Kunze, anticipated the sunrise he’d envisioned. She stared into the darkness with galling uncertainty. 

 “You don’t have cancer,” he said. “You have a torn rotator cuff. A bone spur is not a tumor.” 

Tommy’s reproof echoed across the great crevasse. It fell through a preternatural silence to the canyon floor more than a mile below. Trudy nodded, a qualified movement of her head. Just to say he was right, of course.

Equilibrium, which lately had been iffy at best, had deserted her. She’d been fearless once. She’d rally after any setback and cry, “Fuck mistakes!” Trudy peered through the darkness and willed the landscape to emerge. She deliberated tearing the pads from the tens unit stuck to her shoulder before plummeting into the abyss. Instead, she gingerly backed away from the edge and groaned like a stalled motor, the sound that comes just before the burning smell. 

“Did we make a mistake?”

Tommy leveled an unbiased gaze at his wife. “No, Tru.” He reached for her hand. “We decided if either of us felt uneasy we would call it off. No questions, right?” 

“Right,” she said, vacantly.

He tugged her back to his side. “But we’ve come this far.” 

They were urban cliff dwellers, living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. They were not hikers. That’s what buses and subways were for. And taxis. At that moment she missed the insular back seat of a yellow cab, that familiar scent of Everyman in a hurry, the city speeding past her still self.

Trudy glanced over her shoulder at the ridiculous rental. They had requested an economy car, conscious of their newly straitened finances, but the agent had overbooked and then upgraded them. A black Lincoln Town Car, covered in a ghostly greyish dust, nosed a rock face that was only just visible. A slice of moon winked among a cluster of morning stars. 

“We’re not in the middle of nowhere, but we can see it from here,” Trudy said. 

“Right, Thelma.”

“Louise,” she countered. “We could drive that thing off the cliff, you know. Holding hands.” 

He suggested it was a cruel thing to do to the natural beauty of the place. Someone would have to clean up the mess. And besides, it was the wrong car. It would remain where it was, an incongruous sight for the next five days, parked without even a view.

Tommy looked annoyingly at ease in cargo shorts and t-shirt, not much different from his usual summer fare. The bucket hat sat perfectly at home on his head. Though his hair was thinning, he still wore it collar length. Always diffident and soft-spoken, Tommy never raised a fuss, not even when a cashier overcharged him or another driver cut him off. He was a working musician, a bass player. Steady. People loved him. They were drawn to him. Trudy sometimes found his restraint irksome.

While Tommy was unflappable, she called it like it was and had no patience for time-wasting fools. People were a little frightened of her. She always insisted it would be better if she died first.

Trudy had been an editor at Hachette Magazines, recently and unceremoniously cut adrift from a fat paycheck. For this trip she’d been coaxed out of her habitual modish black into the beige apparition she’d become. Tan cargo shorts, white t-shirt, long-sleeved. She refused to wear sunscreen, though her skin shone like bathroom marble. The only clue that it was still Trudy was jet-black hair recently renewed and cropped into a boyish cut. She made him promise never to aim the camera in her direction.

Though Trudy tended to make the big decisions, especially about money, this time Tommy had planned everything. Months before, he secured the visas required to access tribal land. He arranged a spiritual cleansing, just outside of Seligman, Arizona, with a Hopi medicine woman, who’d prepared them for the descent. Booked a room at the no-frills lodge for camping-averse, bush-league hikers to the village of Supai, their destination. He offered to arrange a helicopter ride to the village and spare Trudy the strenuous journey. It was a viper’s nest of switchbacks a dizzyingly steep mile and a half down, and some eight miles or so to the village that had to be completed before the sun was fully overhead. They would each be carrying a gallon jug of water, which she thought was excessive. Then, there were the forty-pound backpacks. But her admittedly irrational fear of decapitation by helicopter blade mitigated any qualms about the unfamiliar trail ahead.

She followed Tommy to the car. Flat-lined on the horizon was the first sign of light. While he retrieved their backpacks and water from the trunk, she thought about how this trip had very nearly been aborted.

In order to pinpoint what he called hot spots, Tommy had urged her to break in the new hiking boots. He’d estimated a dry run from South Street Seaport to their apartment on the Upper East Side would about cover the distance they were expected to trek. It had been an oppressively hot and humid day in July. The pack she carried was stuffed with incidentals, testing what weight her injured shoulder could bear. She discovered just how many blisters her feet could sustain. A carriage horse had collapsed from the heat in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, wreaking havoc with midtown traffic. That cruelty aggravated her simmering rage. When a stranger asked if she was lost, Trudy had flung the backpack onto Fifth Avenue, backed into the granite pedestal of the bronze figure of Atlas, and used every bit of what strength she had left to keep from throttling the woman who’d mistaken her for a tourist. Tommy had stepped between them and said to the woman, “We’re fine. We are not lost.”

And then, in a hot flash, she remembered that just two days ago, back in Williams, they—she—had very nearly called the trip off. Tommy had planned a couple of days to unwind in the last outpost in Arizona before they reached the Canyon. Trudy spotted the familiar cartoon grins of Wallace and Gromit on the motel owner’s powder-blue polo shirt. She clocked an English accent. The man and his wife had retired to Arizona after an outbreak of salmonella in his factory back home in Leicestershire. They’d been in the States for twelve years. They had not yet visited the Grand Canyon and that had irritated Trudy.

She’d wanted authenticity. Tommy had suggested vegetarian choices at Rosa’s Cantina. Trudy had rejected the place and now she winced, embarrassed by the memory. “We can get Mexican in New York,” she’d whined. After many cocktails to blot out a dubious meal in the snuff-colored ambiance and charred miasma of The Rustler, Trudy lurched into a dusty street bathed under a buzzing orangey glow. She collapsed in a heap onto a life-size fiberglass statue of a cow. “We had these everywhere,” she said. “Remember them? Last summer. Cow statues wherever you went.” She hung from the neck of the thing. “There was that Starry Night cow? Remember?” 

At her stubborn insistence they carried on past two grizzled cowboys with guns drawn, re-enacting a shootout for the tourists who lined the unpaved street. 

They stumbled into music from a time-warped jukebox in the barn-like interior of the Sultana Bar. Trudy managed at the same time to flirt with a sky-scraping cowboy named Bill, and to enrage the female bartender whose girlfriend shot come-hither glances at Trudy from her perch at the end of the bar, mouthing Tracy Chapman: “You got a fast car and I got a plan to get us out of here.”

When Tommy remarked that Trudy did not look well, that her face was kind of purplish, she moaned. “I feel sick.” 

He said, only half-jokingly, “You ordered fish in a steak house, in a landlocked cowboy town. You ordered Manhattans from a bartender who wasn’t in on the joke. You accepted the last bartender’s challenge to have a shot of every kind of Tequila she had. What did you expect?”

“I was scared of that woman,” she grumbled.

Tommy wrestled her back to the motel. There was a clumsy attempt at sex that she instigated, followed by her tirade. It was the shootout at the not-so-O.K.-Corral only she was the one with guns drawn. Tommy, as usual, waited for Trudy’s dust to settle. He sensed she was less angry when they finally set out for the Canyon at some cursed hour. They turned off Route 66—still a good way from Hualapai Hilltop—and in the remote blackness, she mellowed. When three enormous moose crowned with sweeping wing-like antlers had appeared at the side of the road, she’d shed irritation, yelping in childlike fear and delight before offering an apology to Tommy, which he’d accepted with a nod.

At the trailhead it was as if someone had nudged a dimmer switch up a notch. Tommy urged her to get ready. “Nearly time,” he repeated. 

Trudy studied her feet, the cinnamon-colored, carpaccio-thin moccasins she’d bought in Seligman on advice from the medicine woman. “You need something softer going down,” said Rennie Eagleflyer. “Boots are murder on the toes.” Minnetonka classics, Trudy thought. Moose hide.

The session with Eagleflyer—whom Trudy had met for the first time in Seligman—was more like a visit with an old friend from another lifetime. She remembered driving through the birthplace of Route 66 souvenirs, how embarrassed she’d been when they pulled up to the humble bungalow in their conspicuous rent-a-beast. They were offered iced tea by the dark-eyed medicine woman with long black braids, and chatted easily in a cramped living room under the abstract gaze of a tribe of kachina dolls. Rennie lived with her two children, Dakota and Summer—lanky twin teens in Iron Maiden t-shirts—who were bashful in their manners, though wide-eyed and curious. 

Trudy felt compelled to explain the rental. “That car isn’t us…isn’t me.” 

“Coulda fooled me,” Rennie replied, before her solemn look transformed into a wide grin. “Oh, I know it’s not,” she laughed.

The cleansing ritual took place in a huge tepee behind the house, in a yard feathered with burnt grass. Long poles splayed from a topknot and anchored the tepee to the dusty ground. Stiches zippered above the opening like a scar. Trudy looked to Tommy, as if to say, “Did you know about this?” He shrugged his shoulders and gestured toward Rennie. 

“What did you expect? I’m Indian,” Rennie said, putting Trudy at ease again.

They approached the tepee in a band. The twins stopped short at what seemed to be an invisible barrier. “Nice meeting you,” they sang, running off.

Rennie ducked inside, leaving Tommy and Trudy momentarily at a loss. Trudy ran her hand along the taut, bleached material. She sensed an ancient presence, and possibly magic. 

“It came in a flat pack. The kids put it up,” Rennie shouted from inside.

Trudy shuffled in place, unsure. Tommy went first. Rennie looked out. “You are welcome to watch.” 

Trudy recalled Rennie Eagleflyer chanting rhythmically as she performed the cleansing ritual, until Tommy touched Trudy lightly on her arm, bringing her back to the present. She watched the landscape emerge slowly, as if from a developing Polaroid, from a blurry dream into sharper reality. 

“We’d better go,” Tommy urged. “Remember what we were told.” 

“I know, I know. Get there before high noon.” 

He helped her on with her pack, gingerly adjusting it to her shoulders. “You all right? Any pain?” Trudy nodded. She was okay. “I’ll get the water,” he said. 

The couple descended only a few hundred feet before a mule train forced them off the trail. Trudy slid the palm of one hand along the other in a reflexive gesture. She thought about Rennie Eagleflyer’s advice: “Don’t mistake an Indian’s silence for disregard.” She’d taught them an Indian handshake. “Should you be invited to do so,” she added.

Trudy made out the words Positive Vibration above the image of Bob Marley on the t-shirt worn by a dispassionate youth leading the mule train. She glanced covertly at straight black hair brushing his thin shoulders, kept in place by a colorful headband: green, yellow, and red. He made no eye contact and she knew that she would not be invited to greet him. He pressed on, under headphones, to a silent beat. A wiry, medium-sized dog of indistinguishable breed trotted alongside the boy. 

“I wish we had a dog with us,” said Trudy.

Tommy looked up from retying the laces on his sneakers. “What’s that about?” 

She watched as the team headed up the trail. “What’s what about? It would be nice to have a dog. I’d feel better with a dog.” 

“Huh. You don’t feel safe now? Tru?” 

“Well no, not exactly.” She looked around at the scarred canyon walls, rocky amaranthine layers materializing in first light, surrounding an alien landscape. “I’d feel safer with a dog.”

Just ahead a muscular black hound appeared. Its face was covered with a tannish mask, like a canine Lone Ranger. It stared at Tommy who advised Trudy to turn really, really slowly. 

“You wanted a dog,” he said quietly, indicating with his chin. They had been told about the many feral dogs in the canyon. The dogs belonged to no one. Be careful, but don’t be afraid, Rennie had said. Tommy said quietly, “Let’s just keep walking, see what happens.” 

The dog trotted ahead, turning his massive head toward them now and then. Tommy was frankly nervous. Trudy felt surprisingly at ease. “He looks like he’s a mix of some kind,” she said. “Maybe a Rottweiler?”

“Rennie called them Rez dogs, I think,” Tommy said.

“Sounds about right,” she said.

They reached the canyon floor and changed into hiking boots. After a while the dog sprinted ahead, darting around a bend. They suspected he was gone. As they neared the turn they heard a low, snarling chorus. Cautiously they peered around. Like some fiendish dog orchestra, a disparate pack of mongrels—fangs bared—formed a semicircle around their dog while he leveled his dark eyes on Trudy and Tommy. The dogs snarled and bawled until their conductor turned to them, lowered his head, and baring his teeth, silenced them while the couple scooted ahead on the trail. 

Trudy looked back, but Tommy urged her to keep going. 

A few minutes later the black hound bounded ahead of them. Trudy suggested they stop to eat. “All of us,” she said. She unwrapped and shared her peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the dog. 

They hiked until they came to what looked like a washout on the trail. Tommy was sure they were still headed northeast. The dog barked in disagreement. 

The sun was arcing higher. “The sun rises in the east, right?” Trudy asked.

“It changes,” Tommy said.

She could tell he was unsure and it made her nervous. “It would not be cool to be lost,” she said evenly.

Tommy started in one direction, but the dog heaved against him, pushing Tommy in another direction. 

“Follow the dog,” said Trudy.

They did, soon reconnecting with an obvious trail. A savory aroma of cottonwoods and willows rose around them in the keen light of morning. The heat was fierce, still hours away from high noon. 

Trudy paused, red-faced. “Can we stop for a breather?” 

Before Tommy could fuss over the question of her shoulder, she said she just wanted to sit for a bit, take it all in. He scanned the area looking for shade. Trudy filled the empty sandwich bag with water. She told him she was fine; he should feel free to explore. “I’ve got my hat,” she said. “And the dog.” 

She shed her backpack and dug out a kerchief, which she soaked with water and tied around her neck. The dog guzzled water greedily from the plastic bag before he slumped against her leg. Trudy watched as Tommy stepped cautiously off the trail, camera in hand. She tried to raise her arm to wave and gasped at a piercing reminder that her shoulder was frozen. Nothing would change until she had surgery. 

Trudy stroked the dog’s head. She’d lost her job in June. There’d been a debauched send-off from her co-workers. She’d stumbled drunk from the cab, fallen, and hurt her shoulder. She lied to Tommy, telling him she’d held the cumbersome back door of a bus for an old lady. That act of kindness had wrenched her shoulder. He eyed her warily, doubtfully assessing her condition. “You took the bus?” he asked. 

They’d been loopily in love at first sight. His sly observations about everything left her shrieking with laughter and she returned the favor. Trudy was sixteen, a student at a public high school in Midtown that specialized in the arts. Tommy was eighteen, having dropped out in his freshman year from the same school to play bass in a rock band. He was bad-boy handsome, tall and muscular in an urban, less scary Johnny Cash kind of way. He’d never veered from tight black jeans and denim jackets and ignored the ’60s trend to tie-dye and bell-bottoms. Trudy was a slender, dark-haired, sharp-tongued poet who knew the back streets on the Lower East Side like every corner of her chaotic bedroom in the Jacob Riis housing projects. Tommy had migrated downtown from the Bronx after he’d left school. He’d seen Trudy read her poetry in Tompkins Square Park. He fell hard when she tore a hole in a heckler—a guy twice Tommy’s size—at an open mic. Two years later, defying their parents, Tommy and Trudy hitched a ride to Baltimore and came back married. 

Thirty-two years. Trudy shivered a little, rousing the dog. An icicle of memory slid down her shoulder, prickling her arm. Tommy in sandals or sneakers and cargo shorts. An expanding waistline had relegated tight jeans to distant memory. He needed room to breathe, he said. She warmed to the comforting heft of the dog as it settled back into her. She’d counted on Tommy once for that mass, the emotional padding that allowed her to vent the pressures of the job with minimal collateral damage. He kept up the reassuring backbeat to their marriage while her job as an editor had given them a comfortable living with a trove of perks. Those perks were gone now. That pressure was gone. Maybe she needed a dog more than a husband.

Nothing, she thought, had happened as planned. After all the hoopla, the turn of the millennium turned out to be a non-event. January of 2001 brought rumors of layoffs. By June she was out. She’d made good money. In some ways she felt she’d been paying for the creative life she’d given up, while Tommy had gotten to keep his all that time. Now, with her income gone and his gigs dwindling, she had no idea what they would do. There were not many artists out there like Patti Smith, still hitting it with older band members. What paid jobs Tommy was able to wrangle were mostly folk, backing up some heroic relic, or recording with young songwriters armed with a bank balance and a website. Tommy had said they would be all right. She’d countered that the Mayans still had a chance to blow it all up in 2012.

Tommy returned and the three of them got back on the trail. They discovered wet soil in parts and a puddle with what looked like tadpoles skimming the greenish surface. When sunlight covered the canyon wall, its intensity bored right through them. The earthy tones gave way to meatier red rocks. Rennie Eagleflyer’s warning about dehydration and heatstroke reminded Trudy to gulp often from the plastic gallon jug. 

The dog bounded from the trail and disappeared behind a cluster of willows and scrubby thicket. They heard his excited barking and a splashing sound, like wet cheers.

“This time I know where I’m going,” Tommy said. “And that is not the right direction.”

Trudy asked him to help her off with her backpack. She ignored his questioning look. “Trust the dog,” she said. They followed the noises and discovered an oasis. The dog romped in a pool of the bluest-green water they had ever seen. Bootlaces were quickly undone.

Refreshed, they approached the entrance to the village of Supai. Behind a rough-hewn corral a feeble-looking horse gazed languidly at the newcomers. Undistinguished wood-frame houses appeared. Peach trees offered fruit and shade. Trudy turned to thank the dog and discovered he had gone. She emptied her water bottle in one gulp.

They followed a main dirt road until they came to the area called downtown. The road took them past the cafe and a school. They followed the schoolyard fence until they arrived at the lodge, a dark, two-story nondescript wooden structure set against a spectacular backdrop of the Canyon walls. They checked in. Trudy, as was her habit, proffered her credit card. The heavy-set woman behind the desk shook her head. 

“No credit, Tru,” Tommy said. “We have enough cash, I think.”

Urban instinct kicked in. Trudy asked the sleepy-eyed woman if there was a cash machine.

Expressionless, the woman replied, “See those big boulders out there, by the cafe?”

Trudy nodded. 

“You slide the card between them….”

After a brief, confused moment Trudy laughed. “You’ve done this before.”

A barely perceptible smile appeared on the moon-faced woman as she handed them a key.

They climbed the stairs to the top level to find a runty tan mutt with pink nose and pink lips asleep outside the door to their room. He rose, stretched and then trotted down the stairs. Pink Lips arrived every evening. He left as soon as they emerged in the morning. 

In the days ahead they were never without a dog. 

Another that looked like a re-packaged Doberman escorted them to the monumental Havasu Falls the next day. The currents were strong and swift. Non-swimmers, they dared not venture too close to the spumescent whorl at the bottom of the falls. The hound settled on a shaded picnic table until Tommy and Trudy had exhausted themselves in the deliriously bracing liquid mineral that seemingly spilled from the sky. 

By the third day Trudy’s shoulder pain was becoming unmanageable. She’d kept it from Tommy, unwilling to dampen his obvious bliss. And, she had to admit, the rugged harmony of the place went a long way in distracting her from herself. The beauty was overwhelming. Often in the evening it felt unreal—an enchanted world. 

For days, girls from the village had been rehearsing on a stage erected for an upcoming festival. It was a perfect place to lie down in the dark and stare up at the breathtaking arena of night. Tommy found constellations in swathes of luminous lace. Trudy squealed unabashedly at every shooting star. 

“Did you make a wish?” he asked. 

“I did,” she said. 

There were fewer visitors in August and the cook at the only cafe—a bare-bones structure—befriended them, providing a meatless chili with their fry bread at every meal. Like the woman at the lodge, the cook was doughy with girth and moved slowly—her round, weathered face an impenetrable moon. Trudy never once thought about bruschetta and garlic and pasta or that self-generating candle in the back room of John’s on East 12th Street. The woman told them about the great flood of ’97, four years ago that week. August was prime time for flash flooding and the village had been decimated. When Tommy asked about safeguards she replied, “We are indigenous people. We don’t build walls. Nature takes its course and we rebuild.” 

They sat at a long picnic table on the shaded porch of the cafe. The heat was stultifying. Cicadas shrieked in a teeth-clenching chorus, like a glee club on amphetamines. Reggae music billowed from the kitchen, comforting as slow-rising yeast. Dogs—a comic variety of crossbreeds—surrounded them, still as a taxidermist’s display. Tommy sensed Trudy was in discomfort. Trudy brushed him off. One of the older dogs rose, hobbling stiffly to her. He placed a blond paw on her shoulder. He threw his toothless head back and howled. 

After Trudy’s session with the tens unit the following morning, they stepped over the sleeping Pink Lips and headed for Mooney Falls. They had saved the precipitous sandstone challenge for last. A low-riding, spiky-haired mongrel—halfway between a schnauzer and a dachshund—led the way.

Posted signs warned extreme caution, and risk figured largely in the trail’s description. Tommy started down. Trudy followed, slower and far less confident. She stepped carefully through a small cave and then panicked in the open. Trudy eyed the wet rocks, the rusted chains. Tommy shouted above the roar of the falls that the ladders were slippery, and he motioned for her to wait. She imagined the gory scene two hundred feet below. She’d be horribly maimed. He would have to climb back up with her tied to his back. Encumbered, they would fall to their deaths.

Trudy pointed to her shoulder, shook her head and grimaced. “Have fun,” she croaked. “Take your time.”

She was red-faced and lathered with sweat. Hikers were forced to retreat or press out of her way as she scrabbled back up the trail. She was sure they heard the hollow sound of fear in her chest. She aimed for the blinding sun above.

At the top of the trail, Trudy took stock of her surroundings. The little dog was nowhere to be seen. She shuddered at what might have been. The roar of falling water did nothing to assuage her anxiety. Dragonflies zipped and dived, snapping her into the present. She skirted around head-bobbing lizards and monarch butterflies immobilized by the heat. At the creek she removed her boots and socks, lowered herself carefully to the bank and sank her bare feet into the cool rushing water.

Here was a verdant oasis sprung from a parched landscape. Trudy thought about what Rennie Eagleflyer had told her in the tepee, right after Trudy’s spirit had been cleansed with turkey feathers and just before Rennie had plunged her arm, up to the elbow, into Trudy’s stomach to remove bad spirits. Just like Supai village, often parched and battered by floods, there is still fresh water in every living soul. “The gods watch over us in many forms,” Rennie had said. 

Tommy had come up with the idea for the trip. Trudy had rejected it immediately. They were going to have to tighten their belts. He was persuasive and kept bringing her attention to websites he’d found on the Internet. When she stopped objecting—showed some interest—he reacted as if it was settled. He threw himself into planning the adventure with what she could only describe as joy. They joked about the adventure ahead. Trudy sensed a fleeting return to their common hilarity. 

She had called herself a poet once. Published a few chapbooks. Her poems appeared in chapbooks downtown. She performed in venues like the disused gas station on Avenue B and festivals in Tompkins Square Park. Her close friend was an elfin, speed-talking punk rocker named Suzie Q. Back then they were freelancers at Hachette and would remain best friends. They riffed on everything their synergy afforded them. They fought the good fight, clutching shot glasses of bourbon like grenades. They stabbed the stale air of late nights with sweet-smelling joints, cheered whatever punk band Tommy was in and then struggled through a corporate day. By the time places like Nuyorican Poets Cafe breathed life into the downtown scene, Trudy’s life as a poet was gasping for air.

She went back to school at night. Susan went home to Ohio. Trudy rose up through the ranks at Hachette, when you could still get in on the ground floor. Susan remade herself, married, and homeschooled her kids. Then she got her Bachelor of Environmental Studies degree. When Jim Carroll died, Trudy and Susan mourned their hero in so many phone calls, weeping immodestly. They called those days of poetry and rock “the blue times of torment,” a long way from now.

Trudy drew her head from side to side, easing the tightness in her neck. The creek ran through a cathedral of whip-thin willows that fanned under the taller, sturdier cottonwood trees. Cool water lapped at her bare feet, making a sound like a quiet hymn and calming her immeasurably. She twisted as best she could to look over her shoulder. She was utterly alone. 

How long does it take, she mused, to learn how to listen to the tree people, and the rock people, and the water people? Would she ever gain that eagle-eyed vision?

She ducked suddenly, an involuntary reaction to a looming shadow that skated overhead. She saw the wingspread first as it fanned its innumerable greyish-blue feather fingers, nearly touching her. A majestic creature—that she would later learn was a great blue heron—lowered its dark, wire-thin legs like landing gear and lit soundlessly onto the creek. It turned its head and looked directly at her. Trudy’s breath quickened. She held its gaze for the split second it took before the bird stretched its serpentine neck and, seemingly lifting its massive body with the strength of its beak, soared out of sight.

Later, in their hotel room, she never thought to ask Tommy about his Mooney adventure and only briefly mentioned the heron. A power outage meant no air conditioning. The bathroom mirror reflected her red face, sweating and weary. She moaned that she was getting old overnight. 

“You are far from getting old,” Tommy said. 

“I am old,” she insisted, adding that she had once turned heads. 

“But you hate that, being objectified,” Tommy said. “You always told me how much it irritated you when men…when you wanted to be taken seriously.” 

“I hate feeling invisible even more,” she said. 

“What’s wrong with that?” he said. “You want to take writing seriously? Isn’t it better to be invisible, like a spy?”

She turned from him, unsure.

“I’ll give you some space,” Tommy said. “Maybe get a little rest? We have a long night ahead of us.”

Trudy heard him greet Pink Lips. She lay on the thin covering of the double bed in their spartan room, shuddering at a troublesome memory. It was a sorry bunch that had accompanied her to an Irish bar in Times Square the night of her going-away party. They had all recognized the warning signs in the office. She just wanted to raise a little ruckus for a change. When a man who had been on his own raised his glass to her, she returned the flirt. Many drinks later she followed him to a dark corner in back of the bar and, though she could not remember it entirely, she knew she had gone too far. 

Tommy returned, waking Trudy from a deeply unsettling sleep. Before midnight they set out for an open field where an all-night ceremonial powwow for sacred loved ones was in progress. They flicked off their flashlights as soon as the sound of bells displaced a cricket chorus. They drew closer, but remained a respectful distance from an open-air shed constructed for the occasion. An ever-changing group of celebrants in full ceremonial costume came and went to pulsating drumbeats. A low chant, like a magnified heartbeat, echoed across the field. Trudy could just make out bands of tiny bells encircling ankles and wrists. 

Onlookers from the lodge and campsite bunched together in a wary herd. Trudy and Tommy remained apart from them. She turned her back on Tommy and tried to conjure her own sacred loved one. Soon her father appeared. There was no evidence of the physical and emotional pain that had ravaged him in life. He spoke to her and reminded her of the things he used to fix when he restored antiques. Did she remember when he suggested applying gold leaf along the break in a customer’s repaired ceramic vase or lamp? He said he could tell what kind of person would accept or reject the idea of a golden seam. 

“You are more beautiful for having been broken,” he said. 

At sunrise the following morning, they headed for the makeshift helipad, nothing more than a dusty clearing dotted with debris and dogs. An inebriated Indian man, his face balled like a pocket in an old baseball glove, motioned for them to wait. There was no one else on the line. They were still on Indian time. Pink Lips bounded from the pack and settled at Trudy’s feet. She had been persuaded to helicopter out when Rennie Eagleflyer had described how difficult the return hike would be in the dark. Trudy had heard only the words tarantulas and snakes.

“I saw my father last night. In the field, during that ceremony,” Trudy said. “He spoke to me.”

Tommy hesitated. “It wasn’t your dad,” he said finally.

“Who was that who was talking to me then?” She acknowledged
the drunken man who waved them into the helicopter. “I swear it was my dad.”

“It was me,” Tommy said. “I was reminding you of what your dad used to tell you. About the gold leaf and being broken.” 

“Am I lost?” Trudy asked as they moved toward the helicopter. She allowed Tommy to carry her backpack. She gripped her hat tightly as the man and dog backed away from the rotating blades.

“No, you are not. You are found,” Tommy said, as they settled into their seats. “You just have a funny way of getting there.”

The helicopter rose like an armored dragonfly.  Trudy gazed at the receding floor of the canyon. She mentally retraced their steps to the village and gasped at the sunlit palette that striped the canyon walls. 

“I have something to tell you,” she shouted over the deafening whump-whump-whump above them.

Tommy focused the camera lens at the window and with his back to her he hollered, “Better to wait and tell me later.” 

 “What? Why?” she yelled.

He turned to her, his expression unreadable. “You may get your head chopped off so it might not matter.”