Sunsets and Silencers

"The Canyon Sleepers" Fiction by Donelle Dreese 

The Canyon Sleepers

From behind a narrow oak tree, Mary Ann peered down into the forest canyon at Jordan. He had fallen asleep on a bed of damp, crumbling leaves.  Her vision adjusted to the distance and she observed the canyon as it grew crisp with lines and shapes as darkness fell over the landscape.  Jordan's eyelids flickered in his fitful sleep, and she knew that he would not wake anytime soon.

Less than a year ago, she had moved to a new city. Near her apartment there was a broad stretching park, Redleaf Woods, not far from the airport.  On the park’s wooded trails, she walked a thick path in the summer months, when it seemed the trees had been in bloom forever, and she often heard the roar of airplanes taking off a short distance away.  The sound always gave her a rush in her chest. She imagined herself as a passenger, free to explore, to go anywhere in the world.  What she really wanted was to experience the certainty of space and vastness, the expanse of the ocean, and far-spreading cornfields, or the desert.  But the undergrowth in Redleaf Woods made her feel claustrophobic, as if the plants and vines wanted to push themselves from their soil beds and wrap around her ankles so she couldn't walk or run away .             

Mary Ann thought that Jordan loved her to the degree that he hated her.  He wanted to give her everything, it seemed.  He wanted to buy her anything she wanted, to show her the farthest corners of the blue world, but then, he wanted to hurt her as well, and his cruelty was dark. 

In a way, Mary Ann understood this.  It reminded her of how she felt when she went to Niagara Falls and stood inches from the railing, peering over at the quiet, white arc of water that plunged into a deep, rocky oblivion.  The current foamed and flowed; it carved and sliced a yawning river canyon spinning with jade and emerald whirlpools.  There was something silky and sensuously alluring about it, yet it filled her with such incredible horror that she never went back. 

Perhaps her actions were coming from that same place where fear and attraction live. That day,  after the visiting the falls, she had decided to go to a nearby shopping plaza. While there she had bought and assembled a basket of gifts for Jordan. She thought she would surprise him at his doorstep, bearing fruits and flowers, to recreate that sense of spontaneity that was such a thrill when they first fell in love.  If he wasn’t there, she would wait for him and hand him the basket of gifts as he walked in the door. 

She fantasized about his face, how he would look shocked, then start to smile, and maybe he would run his fingers over the satin cloth of the purple négligée that blossomed from the basket.  It was a two-hour drive, so she hurried through the checkout line and left town, stopping at a windy gas station on the outskirts of the city.  She drove south through first sun, then an autumn storm, then the darkness, which had freshly fallen when she arrived at Jordan’s apartment.  Mary Ann sat in the car for a short while and stared blankly at his front door, which she could clearly see from her vantage point on the other side of the street.  She saw herself on the street, or one much like it, many years ago walking, elbows locked with her lover whose abuses she mistook for love notes.  She still felt ashamed for her devotion, how she stayed even after he put his fist through her bedroom window.

In the passenger’s seat of her car was the gift for Jordan, a basket filled with his favorite nonperishable foods, a bottle of Brandy, dried strawberries, macadamia nuts, a candle, matches, and the deep purple silk négligée folded up and tucked into the side.  As she gathered the basket and arranged its contents, she heard a door slam, then another.  She looked over at the parking lot and saw Jordan had come home, but he was not alone. 

In the streetlight, she could see that the woman wore a brightly colored orange scarf around her neck, a color Mary Ann would never wear.  Some keys faintly rattled as she watched the woman give the overnight bag to Jordan to hold while she unlocked his door.  Mary Ann had choices. She wanted to think this time before reacting. 

Her legs and hands shook violently and the adrenaline in her body made the porch lights and headlights from other cars passing by explode in front of her.  She kept saying to herself over and over again, I've been asleep, I've been asleep. 

The fury lingered through the evening hours. She felt justified in wanting to wreck Jordan’s life . But soon, this feeling began to transform into a quiet resolve, cooling the shock and fever inside of her.  She took her cell phone from the glove compartment and dialed his number.  He didn’t answer, though through the window of her car, Mary Ann could see that his front room lights were on. Periodically, she saw shadows behind the curtains, moving like ghosts. 

On one dialing his voicemail picked up her call, and she left a message saying that she was on her way to see him.  Perhaps she wanted to give him a chance to send his houseguest to a hotel, but more likely, an angry part of her wanted to make him panic.  She imagined him nervous, a concerned look on his face, a distracted demeanor, the portrait of a liar.   

When she pressed the OFF button on the cell phone, something unexpected came over her, a monstrous and singular calm, almost resembling joy, like the unimaginable hope when the eye of the hurricane is overhead.   The darkness outside contrasted the lightness that was slowly growing inside of her.  She hoped it wasn’t fleeting or some false euphoria created by a part of her mind trying to escape the shadows of what she knew to be true.  She was, if nothing else, self aware. When falling into an abyss, not only was she aware of the fact that she was heading south and that it was going to hurt, but she could usually determine the rock strata and wind velocity on the way down.  But, just because she knew these things didn’t mean she could stop the fall.  She looked up from the steering wheel, her cheeks still wet with tears, and stared firmly into a streetlight.  With all of the hurt she too had felt in the relationship with Jordan during the past tumultuous year, she had not made this choice. 

She started her car and pulled on to Interstate 95 to head back north. 

By the time she was half way home, she ate nearly all the food in the basket she had bought for Jordan.  She left an apple and a bag of pine nuts for lunch the next day.  Mary Ann watched the highway lights flicker by in the darkness, and she wondered if she would ever make this same drive again – would she find herself at this place again, in the middle of the night, eating her love from a gift basket. 

When she arrived at her apartment, it was four in the morning.  She went into the bathroom and slipped on the négligée she had taken to wear for Jordan.  She poured a tall glass of the brandy and held it in the air watching the brandy swirl in the glass over her head.  Mary Ann sat for an hour, quietly sipping, running her fingers over the thin, polished surface of the négligée.  She didn’t know what to think of Jordan, or the night’s events, which began to take on elements of the surreal, though still tangible.  She went to bed for an hour but couldn’t sleep, wondering if she jumped to an awful conclusion too quickly. 

She felt betrayed. She felt detached. She felt liberated.  She somehow knew that the path she had been walking was going to lead to this clearing.  She knew it had to.  She had this feeling; it was like cool water running over a hot wound. 

In the early evening of the following day, she went for a walk along one of Redleaf’s woodland paths covered in warm, mustard, autumn colors and she lifted her head high to breathe in the air .  She almost didn’t go.  She knew that if Jordan were to look for her, this is where he would look.  He would be wondering why she didn’t show up at his apartment last night after she made the phone call.  He would see her car in the parking lot at the trail head, but all she thought about was how the sky was cloudy, but not dark, fresh but not cold, moist but not humid.  The path led over a small stream canyon, with a bridge bonding its sides in order to cross its width and the dwindling tributary that once must have been something.  She still dreamed of seeing the Grand Canyon.    

On her walk, Mary Ann heard the familiar sound of a thundering jet lift from the runway carrying passengers to their hopes or hassles.  The engines echoed loudly, but rarely could she see the planes through the trees.  She imagined in her head the fire blowing from beneath the wings and the plane’s nose cocked upward, pushing through gravity with stunning force.  She thought of Jordan and how he was with her the first time she flew in a commercial jet, when they had taken a trip to visit friends in Arizona, how she wasn’t scared, but rather very curious.

Maybe they would go to the Grand Canyon.  Maybe there is some way she could look Jordan in the face and not see the shades of warning: red, the color of blood, the color of brandy and apple, the purple négligée, the orange scarf.  Maybe they were already there.  In mid-thought, the explosion startled Mary Ann, but she never saw the direction from which it came, headlong into the narrow canyon of Redleaf Woods.  Private planes had crashed in Redleaf before, but only once before did a jet of that size pummel through its trees, too long ago, long before she lived near the park.

Later that evening, as close as he could get to the crash site, Jordan knelt in the bottom of the canyon next to the small stream that held a few pieces of crash debris.  Mary Ann knew he would come to look for her. 

It had been easy before she saw him, and felt his energy, as she had always felt it so many times before, that familiar dark rumble of distant thunder.  Mary Ann felt her skin tighten and her ears become sharp and hollow, like the two times in her life when she heard a voice in a room say her name, generic and plain, but her name as surely as she heard the clock tick or the dog take a deep breath in his sleep.  But there was no one there, and the voice was not one that she recognized.  She watched Jordan by the moonlight that was streaking through the trees.  She wanted to speak, but she knew she would see honesty if she remained silent behind the trees.  In the distance, she could hear the firemen, policemen, airline officials and investigators hardening themselves to do their jobs.  She wondered if Jordan thought she had been hit by the plane while hiking.  

Every now and then, a thin blade of spotlight cut down through the trees passing the orange tape that outlined the site and bled into the water lightly gurgling over small, round stones.  She could see the moss growing on the stones, and the dead pine needles that gathered had exposed the roots of trees.  Jordan’s eyes seemed to turn blurry with grief.  She thought that whatever he had been running from, in her, in himself, in the world, was there in front of him now. 

Perhaps he thought if he loved another woman he could get away.  Maybe he thought that if he worked all day that he could avoid it, that he would be too tired to face it. Maybe if he told enough lies he could make a world where those lies were true. His masks would protect him.  Mary Ann’s body was filled with an incompatible mix of disgust and sympathy, resentment and adoration.  She wondered if he felt responsible, not because of all that he had done, but because of all that had to happen. 

A faint glimmer of light from the eastern horizon filled the forest with thin black shadows. He fell asleep there, a child on a bed of pumpkin-colored leaves.  Mary Ann quietly crept down to the bottom of the canyon and sat on a rock near his face, swollen and in pain.  She didn’t wake him.  She didn’t say anything.  She only thought, how are we going to clean up this disaster? Mary Ann closed her eyes and imagined herself in the middle of a wide, golden stretch of prairie where the blowing grass whispered as the stems stroked one another.  In the distance, she vaguely heard the rescue crews discussing the crash a good distance away.  Jordan’s eyes were dark underneath, sunken in.  She closed her eyes and rested her head back in the curve of a tree trunk behind her and thought of the Grand Canyon, how everything but the sky diminishes in its space. She had heard that seeing the Grand Canyon could strike an inexplicable awe in a person, but she wanted to see it for herself someday.  She wanted to leave this narrow ravine that smelled of smoke and gasoline.  Even though she couldn't see the trail, she pulled herself away from the tree trunk and started walking.  She had a sense of what was ahead – a steep hill, branches scraping her face in the dark, a high probability that she would get terribly lost.  Looking straight down at her feet with her boots pointed forward, she kept walking.

Dr. Donelle Dreese is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Northern Kentucky University.  Donelle had her work published in numerous magazines and journals including the Journal of Kentucky Studies, Appalachian Heritage, Terminus, Gulf Stream Magazine, Organization & Environment, andISLE: Interdisciplinary Study in Literature and the Environment. In 2008, her chapbook of poetry, A Wild Turn, was published by Finishing Line Press, and in 2010, her book of environmental writing, America's Natural Places: East and Northeast was published by Greenwood Press.  Finally, Dreese’s second chapbook of poetry, Looking for a Sunday Afternoon, was published in 2010 by Pudding House Publications.