December 1 - December 24, 1998

At daybreak on Saturday, December 23rd, Jay stepped out of the El Tovar Hotel and onto the porch. He dropped his backpack on one of the wooden chairs and breathed in the brisk air. In it, he found no trace of the summer warmth he and the others enjoyed while hiking Bright Angel trail the day before. Sometime in the night, winter had arrived. Enjoying the bright and fine canyon morning, Jay felt virtuous because he seemed to be the first one in the group up and out.

Then, glancing across the lot, he saw the rental car.

Although the white Chevy was where he had left it the night before when he and the others returned to the hotel from the IMAX theater, it was now half-way in, half-way out of the parking space. The windshield wipers were flapping frantically, and from the tail pipe came a cold fog of exhaust. Jay spotted Julia through the window. Her head was down. She was hugging the steering wheel.

He jogged across the lot to the car, then opened the door and pulled her out. "Jules, I don't think you should fly home, if that's your plan." Although he didn't see her luggage in the back. "You shouldn't be alone. Not today."

She shook her head. "That's not where I was headed," she explained. "There's some place else I need to be, something I feel like I have to do when I get there, but to be honest with you, I don't know exactly what that is."

"Is it far?"

She nodded. "Farther than you'll want to go, I suspect. About 150 miles."

"What about the others? What about the hike down Kabib?"

"They'll be okay without us," she said, "without me, anyway."

But would he and Julia be all right without them, Jay wondered to himself. He had been counting on his friends to distract him, and to help distract Julia, from remembering too much on this day that was the first anniversary of Paco's death. For Jay, distraction was the trip's whole point.

"I wouldn't ask you to do this, except that as soon as I put it in reverse, I got the usual panic attack," Julia confessed. "If you could just get me where I have to be, once I get there, maybe then I can figure out what it is that needs doing."

"What if I don't take you?" he asked. He really didn't want to. He just wanted to stick to the plan, to focus his attention, and Julia's, on hiking the arduous Kabib trail, deflecting it from the anniversary.

The raw and desperate helplessness in Julia's face made him turn away. When he looked back her expression had shifted. It was a precise replica of the one that always bunched Paco's features whenever he wanted Jay to stop behaving sans serifly.

Because Julia had gotten it so incredibly right, and because for Jay that look was a genuine sight for sore eyes (even if it was his least favorite in Paco's repertoire), he felt himself softening; if only enough to at least hear Julia out.

She must have sensed that, too, because she told him, a bit breathlessly and as quickly as she could before he stopped listening, about the eagle she had seen yesterday on Bright Angel trail, about the dream she had last night, and where it was that morning she felt she so acutely needed him to take her.

When she finished, he couldn't believe he could have been so idiotic as to bring her to Arizona without anticipating that something like this might happen. At that moment he deeply regretted that he hadn't opted to take them skiing in Mammoth or Telluride, regretted that to him the idea of a Canyon Christmas had been so overwhelmingly seductive, that until he secured the necessary reservations (no mean feat), he had been unable to think of little else.

As Julia continued to explain things, Jay began constructing several arguments against the field trip she was proposing. But then, when she finally confided in him, told him the real reason--apart from her grief over losing Paco--why she wasn't bouncing back, the look on Jay's face puzzled her. She had expected him to scoff and turn away. He wasn't doing that. She couldn't discern what he was feeling.

What Jay was feeling at that moment was relief. Julia's misery as she described it might easily be his own. That last night when Paco asked Jay to come close to the bed it was because Paco had a task for Jay, a last request. Honoring it, even though it was a continuing effort, almost a second career, and one that demanded patience Jay never conceived he had, somehow made Paco's death easier to bear. He shuddered at the thought of how he would feel about himself if he had done nothing.

In fact, in the year since Paco died, Jay had directed a million prayers of thanks to his friend. He marveled that Paco had known the exact task to set him to guarantee that he (Jay) would finally learn the lesson Paco had been trying to teach him in life. It was something that came naturally to Paco but never very easily to Jay, and it was simple, really, consisting of nothing more than remembering that extremely self-centered human beings cut off their noses to spite their faces by denying themselves the chance to experience the acute pleasure to be enjoyed by giving generously of oneself to others. Well, now Jay was getting the hang of it. Sort of, anyway. Living by it wasn't second nature yet, but still. . .And, it was beginning to have an effect on him. It was altering his relationship with everyone.

Thinking about all this, Jay realized two things: first, that taking Julia where she wanted to be that day was, of course, part of his "Task," and secondly, because in the past he had been caught on the wrong side of numerous too-little-too-late situations, himself, he knew from experience too little too late was usually preferable to nothing at all, and might in some way still count (if only in Julia's mind). With that, he knew he had no real choice but to do what Julia wanted.

***

Past the Tuysan ruins and museum they drove, past the juncture of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers near the gorge. Julia was in the passenger seat. In her lap were the maps and guide she had purchased in the gift shop of the El Tovar Hotel. She envied Jay because he was so at ease, and so completely in command, behind the wheel. Until last summer, she had always felt that way when driving, too.

They had traveled about 75 miles. For most of the last ninety minutes, he had chatted casually, almost non-stop, about the advertising campaigns for the studio's winter and spring releases. He had dished her the studio gossip, and also told her that he seemed to be falling in love with his new assistant, Polly. Jay surprised Julia back in the parking lot of the El Tovar when he so suddenly capitulated to her request. His continuing affability also surprised her. Ten miles back, however, Julia had asked him to tell her what he knew about what happened after Paco's mother left. Jay hadn't said a word since.

As they left Highway 64 West near Cameron, Arizona they stopped for breakfast at the Cameron Trading Post. While Jay ate his blueberry waffles, Julia cut her food--eggs, pancakes, sausage--into tiny pieces and moved them from one side of the plate and back again as she always did when she couldn't eat, but wanted Jay to think she was.

"When his mother took off, I think Paco had a sort of breakdown," Jay suddenly said. Julia looked up in amazement that Jay, himself, was now re-introducing the topic. Looking at her, spearing a piece of sausage from her plate and swallowing it, he shrugged. "Why not? I don't think I'm betraying him any by telling you now . . . Anyway, for a couple of years running when we were kids, Paco and I went to the same summer camp. We always went for the two weeks just before Labor Day, before school started.

"The night before we were supposed to go that year, Sal called my mother. He told her Paco had a bad summer cold and he was going to keep him out of camp. He implied Paco would come later; the second week. But Paco didn't come at all.

"With one thing and another, I didn't see him until the morning of the first day of school. We met that day on the subway platform like we did every school day. I could see right away something wasn't right. I asked him what was bothering him." Jay pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and angled what looked to Julia like a business card from its worn folds. He put it on the table between them. "Instead of answering, Paco handed me that."

Julia picked up the card and examined it. The stock was gray, heavy, and spongy with age. She recognized Paco's handwriting. Julia tried to summon up an image of Paco, a grave and grief-stricken fifteen-year-old boy, slipping this card to his best friend. The boy was a version of Paco Julia had little inkling about.

Jay continued. "That was all there was to it: except he didn't eat or sleep for a while, and his grades went to hell, and he started hanging out with some pretty dangerous creepnoids from the old 86th Street hood. Around Thanksgiving, he and a couple of the others got caught ripping off car stereos."

"What happened then?"

"Paco got probation. His record was eventually expunged. At Christmas, Sal took him to Paris and London. He dragged him, by the scruff of his neck at first, through every damn museum and gallery he could find until he had arted the meanness out of him. But the anger was always there," Jay finished.

"Not at the end," Julia said shaking her head.

"Evidently," said Jay.

From Cameron, Jay and Julia traveled north on Highway 89. When they passed the Moencopi Wash, Julia focused her eyes north and saw the spires of Coal Canyon. Her dream the night before, made it all seem so ethereally familiar to her.

At Tuba City, they drove southeast on Highway 264. The first Hopi settlement they encountered was Moenkopi, a collection of trailers, pre-fabs, and much older clay and stone houses. They stopped to read a historical roadside marker that informed them that at a spot near this settlement, the Mormons established Arizona's first Woolen Mill, where they had hoped to make use of Navaho and Hopi wool and labor. The mill failed.

Although the day remained bright, as Julia and Jay returned to the rental car, an icy whip of wintry wind cracked across the vast plain and swirled around them, snapping the legs of their jeans and the hems of their jackets.

Beginning their ascent up the steep grade of Third Mesa--from the west, the opposite direction Sal Berelli had entered all those years ago--Julia and Jay passed the village of Bacavi, established in 1907, then Hotevilla, with its terraced gardens. Soon after, they passed Old Oraibi, dating back to about 1200 AD, which some believe is the oldest settlement on the Mesas. On Second Mesa, they passed through Kykotsmovi, saw the Museum and Cultural Center, then the village of Shungopavi, as they wound ever upwards, mostly in silence as each observed the anniversary of Paco's death in their own private way.

Near Polacca, they missed the turn-off for First Mesa and were halfway to Keams Canyon when they realized their mistake. They doubled-back and found the dog-leg road. After a few miles, they finally got their first glimpse of the villages atop First Mesa, which seemed to rise out of the cold whirls of dust from nowhere like "Brigadoon" from the mists of a remote Scottish bog.

October 21, 1960

Juanita's ceremonial wedding robe is finished. She has returned to her mother's home carrying the robe across her arms (part of the ceremony) and with her brown puppy treading silently after her. As is the custom in this matrilineal society, Dewey was to follow her there and take up residence. Thus far, he has not done so.

He informed me this afternoon, as I helped him herd one of the village's flocks of sheep to a lower pasture, that he has no intention of ever following her. He wouldn't say why. But when I looked at him I was suddenly sure he knows everything and has for some time. In any case, his decision not to follow Juanita to her mother's house renders their marriage null and void, but without loss of face for either of them. They are now completely free to marry other people . . .

Dewey's younger brother has just come in to the lean-to to tell me Dewey is waiting for me at the end of the promontory past ancient Walpi. The young boy (14) looks so grave and angry. I feel as though he's Dewey's second, come to challenge me to a duel.

I have no choice but to cap my pen, put this journal aside, and walk out there to meet him.

(to be continued)

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