Tom is sittingv in his boxer shorts, cross-legged, on the Navaho rug . He barely flinches when she strikes him. He is in deep concentration. Natasha is in her bra and panties when she slaps his face. Her taut, brown thigh muscles bend as she leans forward to strike him as if she is serving a forehand smash to an opponent. “Do you ever go out of this fucking room? I never should come out here with you! You can’t even make love. What? Are you afraid? I cannot live like this!”
They first met in the canyon when she visited with a tour group. She was instantly attracted to his powerful presence, his magnificent dark eyes, his calm smile, and his confident athleticism. But now, as she watches his pitiful, sulking form on the rug, she feels a deep anger welling up inside her.
He watches her as she begins to pull up her tight shorts, and then he stares into the fireplace. She slips on her silk blouse, and that’s when he sees the dream again:
Yawning hollow of the ancient gorge—he walks with the old chief to the edge of Guano Point on the West Rim—the place where his father worked many years before, digging the bat droppings for the white man’s compost—until his father jumped, or was pushed—a mile straight down—no guardrail, no warning signs, barely any evidence of humanity at all. The old Guano Mine closed many years now, leaving a dark cavern that whispers hidden desires to the young Hualapai, Tom Walema. He throws stones into the cave—an arm so accurate and strong one of tourists—a baseball scout for the Cleveland Indians, Mike Fetters—pays for his private boarding school tuition in Williams where he is developed into a baseball pitching phenomenon. There is talk in high school of the next Jim Thorpe as he letters in four sports. However, the dream comes back to him on nights when the moon is full, or when the breeze is especially dry and warm, streaming into his bedroom through the open window. Or later, on the road with the Cleveland Indians—in one of the many cities of the white man—he cries into his pillow and wishes he had never left the canyon. The old chief speaks to him on his day of initiation into manhood, before he leaves for the white man’s world, “The canyon is the beginning of our people,” the old man’s tawny, wrinkled face hovers in his mind like a golden beacon, “Our idea is that we were created here in the canyon. Formed right from this red clay. This is our stronghold. The white man comes and sends the cavalry after us, but the cavalry can’t get back to us because we are in the canyon mother. Back in the 1800s, when we are rounded up and forced to relocate to the deserts of California, a lot of our people perish on our Trail of Tears. But a lot of our people escape and go right back into the canyons. And the canyons speak to us, even when we are far away. They call to us and tell us we must return—no matter what the cost—for they are our salvation—they are our birthplace and our place of journey into the land of our ancestors.” The old man leaves him alone to fend for himself out in the wilds of the canyon, and he is re-born. The trees talk to him, the waters shimmer below at the bottom of the great divide, and the winds sing to him. The variety of animals he meets on the trail nod at him in greeting. Inside the cave—his father’s cave—he discovers the world of the leather-winged guardian angels, his brothers, who often follow him outside in the twilight to catch the mosquitoes before they can get to him. He watches the winged mammals hanging, socializing, while suspended in mid-air, and the males’ genitalia grow to huge proportions during breeding time. It is the dream that gives him his tribal name of “Cave Bat.” The dream is that of a man who dwells inside the cave and is half-bat and half-human—a vampire—a tall, dark Hualapai with leather wings that extend out to the ends of his long, tapering fingers. This batman is the protector of the canyon, a spectacular fornicator, and a noble defender of the spirit world!
* * *
One month earlier . . . Natasha is inside the sanitarium room with Tom, and she now practices her new Hopi technique of breathing slowly, in and out, believing she can direct the cosmos in her lungs. Dancing Bear says, “It’s a metaphor for the contracting and expanding universe.” The technique works with her tennis serve. She got into the semi-finals of the French Open the month before. Breathing in the universe, breathing out the universe. Ka-pow! Serving a planet! Zoom! There goes a star! Those years of practice, as a young orphan in Bucharest, got her a trip to America, and now there are millions of dollars to be made competing on country club courts and in the men’s magazines posing nude for those insatiable voyeurs. But today, times are hard. A crazy German fan stabs her. Her baseball pitcher husband is having a nervous breakdown. What is next?
Tom is going with her to the Grand Canyon where they first met years before. They are trying to get their marriage back together after Tom’s collapse—his nervous breakdown—and Tom is looking at her anxiously, hopefully, as if she holds all the answers. She does not. After a few moments of her breathing and his staring, he finally begins to speak.
“Natasha, baby, we can do it. I know we can. Remember that first time? After the World Series? I shutout the Braves twice, and we took them four games to none? That’s when I began to see it. I couldn’t play anymore next season, remember honey? It was on me so big. The dream. I cried like a baby during that night game in St. Louis, and Eddie came out to the mound and didn’t know what to do. You were watching on TV when I told him the canyon was calling me home. I needed to become whole again. I needed to visit my ancestors and make amends.”
Natasha touches his arm, gently, trying not to look at his wrist. It is still bandaged. She moves closer to him on the bed. The room is nicely decorated with seascape paintings, flowers in vases, and walls the curative color of green. “You need to rest. We rest there, and then we will see. I can’t make promises, but we’ll see. Has been long time since we were there, no? I do not know if we can ever be the same again.”
* * *
Sunup in the Grand Canyon is probably the most stupefying earthly experience. As the light from the rising sun devours the shadows—the miles and miles of darkness encircle the rim—as though some gigantic void progressively becomes conscious of itself, filling the abysmal gorge with burgeoning vitality. The small animals come out of hiding first, the wrens, the rabbits, the squirrels, all scattering across the newborn desert landscape under a cacophony of bird songs. Then, the tall figure of a blonde woman escapes the gorge near Angel’s Flight. She wears hiking boots and jeans, and her breath clouds into the early morning air, as she pushes up onto the edge of the rim.
Moments later, as Natasha enters the cabin, she notices the woman next-door for the first time. The Italian newlywed named Marie. She is peeping her head from behind the curtains. Tom is not inside. The phone rings, she walks over, picks it up, self-consciously brushing her right hand through her hair. “Yes? Oh, Bear! Don’t worry. I’ll get him out there before noon. Everything’s ready? Good. I have the tickets. It won’t be long, Bear.”
* * *
Circling Hawk of the Hualapai leads his dozen or so tourists past the Guano Mine on their way to the planned barbecue on the plateau just below the West Rim. The Hualapai and Hopi tour guides often tell the legend of the Grand Canyon Vampire to tourists on hikes down the West Rim. They tell this story in all seriousness, but the tourists laugh, some perhaps nervously, especially when the sun is going down, and the shadows along the walls of the great canyon form shapes that resemble creatures from another world. It is told that the Canyon Vampire chooses the young newlywed women of the group because he has seductive powers far beyond those of mortal men, and he also knows these young women are still groggy with passion from the long hours of love-making with their new husbands. He carries her, as she still remains fast asleep, and he takes her into a cave or inside an abandoned mine and fixes her a meal of sumptuous delight. When she awakens, they dine together by candlelight, and, afterward, he chants to her the ancient songs of the tribe. He tells her he is the protector of young love and that if she will let him make love to her, she will forever be protected from evil spirits.
They are the only humans for miles, and the figure inside the mine watches as they point in his general direction, as he stands silently, invisibly, deep inside the gloom. He remembers the story he read in the white man’s philosophy class at the community college in Williams. Plato’s “The Cave.” He never understood the professor’s speech about the light from the fire being mistaken for reality on the wall of the cave. He knows it is the white man’s confusion. Only the animals are not confused. That’s why we see inside them to their spirits. We try to become as they live—without confusion—fusing our limited, human strength into the dazzling brilliance of absolute, brutal awareness!
A few minutes after the tourists pass by him, the dark figure inside the cave steps out into the midday sunlight. The sound of crunching rock and human footsteps sends him scurrying back into the shadows like a rat. He pulls the blade from its sheath and holds it against his hairless cheek. Its metal is cold and resistant. He pushes the flat side deeper. The tall figure approaches. The cave dweller ducks behind an old guano vat and waits for the other man to get closer. Leather wings explode as the blade slices home. Squeals of mammalian terror erupt from the cave as clouds of black-winged, darting spirits rush out into the scorching sunshine.
* * *
Natasha waits on a bench near Angel’s Flight for the old Santa Fe steam engine to arrive. The train was re-activated in the early 1980s as a way to keep the traffic into the park at a minimum. Even so, there are still hundreds of tourists from all over the world encircling her, making her self-conscious, and her mind flashes back to the day the crazed German fan jumped-out at her and slashed her shoulder, just below the clavicle. She glances all around, obviously expecting someone, and, as she does this, she keeps folding and unfolding two tickets in her hands.
Natasha sees a tall figure coming down the hill toward her from the Angel’s Flight Hotel. Her heart fills with joy, then terror—she knows that walk! Panic shoots through her athletic limbs like an electric current. She bolts up, runs out of the shelter of the train depot, and knocks over two Japanese tourists who stand nearby. They curse at her, but she flees, breaking into a run, sprinting away from the train station and into the afternoon heat.
But the tall man runs faster, conditioned by years of wind sprints, and he is nearly upon her as she reaches the top of the hill. The vast expanse of the canyon drops into a free-fall of over 500 feet as he charges into her with a viscous body-block, and his superior weight propels her body up and over the edge. He sees the look of surprised horror in her blue, Romanian eyes, as her body plunges out, and then down, screaming into the depths of the canyon mother. He does not stop to watch, however. He keeps running, past the screaming old woman who points after him, past the other tourists who stare out over the edge, and watch, as the young woman’s body glances off the first of the several triangular, jutting plateaus with a sickening thud that can be heard from high above. A tall, gangly teenager with a Grand Canyon tee shirt is leaning out over the railing when the body collides with rock at its final resting place, and he shouts, “Jesus Christ! Her head flew clean off her shoulders!”
* * *
Cave Bat stands and watches the sun go down from the mouth of his new home. His brothers are active again, ready to journey with him out into the night to protect the world from the evil spirits of the murdered dead. He can feel the leather of his wings. He tests them, once, twice, and he gets certain buoyancy from their leathery weight, so he flaps them even more furiously, insanely, at the gathering darkness. The dream is one with his being. He stirs with his brothers and sisters as they prepare for flight. Crying out in vain for the lost souls of his ancestors, he runs out of the mine and into the yawning breadth of infinite beginnings and endings. Down, plunging forever down, descending into the spreading canyon and mother night.
* * *
Marie Antonelli, on vacation from Rome, is filled with the excitement of young love and the future of being with Paulo for the rest of her life. As she walks alone on the edge of the West Rim, the sun is about to descend behind the monumental scarlet glory that is the Grand Canyon. Her body is filled with Paulo’s juices, and she loves the tingle that gives her. She inhales the evening’s cool air, exhales, and remembers, obliquely, that Paulo had said he wanted some kind of snack—besides her.
As she is turning to leave the rim trail, she hears the soft, mournful melody of a flute escape the trees just below her. There is a clear path down below, a ledge, and she can see the opening of a cave. The song is like nothing she has ever heard before, and she is captivated. The sun, in all its mystery of setting, tells her there is something tantalizing and friendly in that cave, so she begins to circle around the path that leads below. The crunching sound of her boots on the path combines with the flute’s tune, and she can feel the soft, cool wind caress her warm face, still aglow from their lovemaking moments before.
When she reaches the mouth of the cave, she is still entranced, as if in a mammalian cocoon, and when she sees him, standing tall and mysterious in the gloom, she knows he will also be her lover. His arms encircle her, and he lifts her, up into the broad strength of his chest, into the sacrificial warmth of his solid, leather wings.
She does not hear the squeals of the bats, as they stir, ready to go out for the night. His bite fills her with deafening, yet knowing, rapture.
At first, she does not understand the story he begins to tell her, as it is not in her tongue. But soon, as he finally sets her down, and they both gaze out at the sinking sun, the words begin to materialize, like beacons of light upon the shadows now forming on the gigantic red walls of the canyon. Her eyelids grow heavy, as she hears his words whisper, a phantom on the wind, “I am the guardian of young love. Stay with me, and I will protect you.”
# # #
