GORGE by Katherine Hurley
Graham made me lunch the day we left for the Red River Gorge. That was eleven years ago. I had just finished my sophomore year of college and come home for the summer. Graham, though two years older, hadn’t yet left. He’d found a desk job at the Cincinnati Public Library and was making plans to move somewhere with a beach, though he wasn’t sure where or when. We’d been friends since we were kids. That summer, because hardly anyone else our age was around, we saw each other almost every day. When summer ended, though, so did our time together. We ran into each other once or twice over the years, but it was never the same. Lunch that day, like all the meals Graham made, was created from flavors that met like banging pots in the night. Into the boxed macaroni mix, he had stirred cloves of crushed garlic and tablespoons of cayenne pepper. On top, he’d sprinkled dried onion flakes and Louisiana hot sauce.
“The secret is the cayenne,” Graham explained, his voice muffled by a mouthful of food. He scanned my face, his gaze landing around my mouth. From the few bites I’d eaten, I could feel a hot rash spreading like an inkblot from my lips and into my cheeks. Graham reached across the table and rubbed his thumb across my chin. He was beautiful in a way that belonged to women. His brown wavy hair was pulled into a ponytail at the back of his neck and his eyes looked particularly green that day, maybe because of his tan or maybe because they reflected his turquoise t-shirt. It was one of his favorites; the cotton so thin in the shoulders that his skin shone through.
“I’ll get you some milk,” he said and got up to find the gallon in his parent’s refrigerator. Earlier in the summer, when we were drunk, Graham had tried to kiss me, but I’d backed away before his lips could touch mine. He confessed that he loved me and I confessed that I didn’t love him back, that I would never love him back. He’d stayed away for a few days but then, after a while, everything returned to normal and we pretended the exchange had never happened. This dynamic became part of us, ordinary in the way that anything can be ordinary if it sticks around long enough.
After we finished lunch, we packed Graham’s car. It was the third time in a month and half that we’d made the three-hour drive towards Lexington and into the southern Kentucky woods. The best spots to camp were on top of the sandstone cliffs, overlooking the steep rock ridges and deep green valleys. There, above the tree line, we could look at the stars, hundreds more than in the yellow-black Cincinnati sky. Sometimes, we caught a breeze and even though it felt like it had gust from the belly of an oven, it was a godsend in that still moist heat. The hike was almost an hour straight uphill and I’d made Graham promise we wouldn’t do it under the midday sun. Last time, I’d almost fainted, my backpack plastered to my skin and threatening to take me down with its weight. I’d poured half a bottle of water onto my forehead, letting it trickle down my face and through my hair. I hadn’t realized that Graham only packed two bottles for the three-day trip. He figured we’d use his iodine tablets, he’d said, and drink from the cool streams that wound their way through the Gorge. I made us turn around and hike back to the car to buy more water. We’d never seen an active meth lab, but there were plenty of them in those woods. More than once, we’d come across a spot where one had been, the land near the water cleared treeless, the dirt overturned so that it looked like an abandoned construction site. With or without iodine, there was no way I was going to drink from those streams.
When we started on the Ohio freeway, the clouds stretched into thin white strips. By the time we neared the Gorge, winding our way through the narrow valley roads, they had changed completely, cloaking the sky in thick gray cotton. They blocked the sun, but sealed in the heat. In a circle above the trees, the black shadow of a buzzard glided, its wings outstretched.
“I wonder how many words they have for green,” Graham said, rolling down his window to a blast of warm air and the smell of wet, burnt wood.
“What?”
I flipped off the air conditioning and instantly felt a sticky film form on my skin.
“You know how Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow? I bet these people have a bunch for all these shades of green.”
“I think you’re supposed to call them Inuits. And I don’t think that’s true, the snow thing. I think they probably have the same number as we do.”
Graham shrugged.
In the Gorge valleys, the plants spilled from the earth in layers, covering every surface, including rocks and tree trunks, in dense green life. There were as many shades as there were species; the yellowish birch against darker splashes of magnolia and poplar, white-speckled ivy dotting carpets of green-black moss. I squinted and the shades merged, turning the woods into the surface of a green ocean.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you’re right about the green.”
We stopped to buy water at the same place we had last time, the only convenience store in the area. The small parking lot was a thin layer of white pebbles spread across the ground. The stones crunched under our tires. The store, which looked more like an abandoned cabin, sold an odd array of products. In the back, a refrigerator with a glass door held sweating bottles of water and pop, but also Styrofoam cups full of dirt and earthworms. On the store’s shelves sat dusty cans of pork and beans, a few boxes of cereal and large glass jars of pickled eggs. Last time, the man behind the counter had watched me pull the water bottles from the fridge and tuck them under my arms. When I approached the counter, he stared straight at my chest. My nipples had hardened from the cool bottles against my skin. I put the bottles on the counter and crossed my arms, blocking his view. He decided to roll a cigarette. I waited while he folded wads of tobacco into the thin paper with his large, tar-stained fingertips. He licked the sides of the cigarette, sliding it back and forth against his tongue, before lighting its tip and exhaling a thick cloud of smoke.
“What can I do fer ya?” The cigarette hung from the wet inside of his lip.
“How much for the waters?” I asked.
“One bottle. One dollar,” he said and nodded towards a hand-written sign which said exactly that. I slid my money across the counter. “Thanks,” I said, and turned to leave, knowing the man’s eyes were following me.
This time, I decided to let Graham go in. While I waited in the car, a thin teenage girl came out of the store, the screen door slamming behind her. She sat on the step and rested her elbows on her knees and her chin on top of her knuckles. Her blonde hair hung in greasy strands across her face. She wore jean shorts and an oversized t-shirt with faded letters that may have once spelled the name of a band. I wondered if she was the cigarette man’s daughter. I hoped she wasn’t his girlfriend. Above the girl’s head, near a rusted metal gutter, I spotted a hummingbird. Its wings fluttered into a blur of movement. For a moment, it hovered and I could see a small shock of red feathers under its beak. When it zipped away I looked down at the girl. She was staring straight at me. I smiled, but her face was frozen in an expression somewhere between hatred and boredom. I pretended to search for something in the glove compartment. Each time I looked up, she was still there watching me, even after Graham had climbed into his seat and shifted the car into reverse.
“Well, that was creepy,” I said.
“What?”
With my hand hidden in my lap, I pointed towards the girl, but she was scratching the head of a small gray cat that looped itself between her bare ankles. Now, the girl looked small and sweet, nothing like she had just moments ago.
“Never mind.”
“Someone’s gonna be a momma,” Graham said and when I followed his path of vision, I saw that the cat’s belly was swollen, her nipples nearly skimming the pebbled ground.
As he drove, Graham turned the radio dial through bursts of static. Only one station came through clearly and listening to it had become our favorite pre-camping activity. Sometimes, the station played bluegrass recordings, often so old that the pluck of strings blended into a tinny buzz. All the songs were about heartache. We could tell from the whine of the singers’ voices, even when we couldn’t make out their words. During the commercial breaks, Graham turned down the volume and sang, making up lyrics as he went along. Last time, he’d created an entire song about his woman leaving him for his best friend’s dog. He’d belted it to the tune of Ring of Fire. I chimed in during the horn sections, my fingers dancing across the keys of an invisible trumpet. This time, though, we caught the end of a religious program, the animated sermon of a Pentecostal preacher. Earlier, we’d passed a small roadside church. The sign in front was painted with the image of a large white fist squeezing a bouquet of snakes, their black bodies falling like ribbons. Underneath was a verse from the Bible: “Behold, I give unto you the power to tread serpents.” Snake handling was still a common practice in these parts and, listening to the broadcasted message of this preacher, I wasn’t surprised.
“There’s a time to heal, but there is also time to kill,” he said in a thick Kentucky accent. His words climbed on top of one another like ants. He urged us to repent, reminding us that the wicked will not inherit God’s kingdom.
“Our Lord did not die on his cross for drug users and homosexual offenders.”
“Wow,” I said and turned to look at Graham, expecting him to laugh, but he stared straight ahead, his hands fastened to the steering wheel. I nudged him in the arm. “Hello? You hear that?”
“Yeah.”
“Crazy, right?”
“They’re crazy, but at least they have some ground rules,” he said.
I studied the side of his face. “That guy is a nutjob. Tell me you’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not,” he said “I mean, yeah, obviously the guy’s nuts. I’m not even talking about him. I’m just saying, you have to admit, it would be nice to believe like that. To have that kind of guidance, that clear idea of what matters, what’s right. Even if it’s the wrong idea. It would be a relief.”
“Graham, we do have an idea,” I said. “I mean, you don’t have to be a zealot to know wrong and right, to believe in something.”
“You don’t know what you believe. You definitely don’t know what I believe. Sorry, but you don’t. What happens when things fall apart? Talk to me when your world turns to shit. Then we’ll see.”
We turned a bend and there was the entrance to the Nada Tunnel, a one-way passage into the Gorge. It had been hand-carved for logging railcars in the early 1900s. The entrance looked like a black mouth in the huge rock. It swallowed you into a long stretch of darkness so complete that it felt subterranean. Driving through always made me a little claustrophobic.
“Nothing’s going to fall apart,” I said.
We entered the tunnel and Graham flipped on his brights, throwing deep shadows onto the jagged rock walls. He slammed his palm into the horn and a blast of sound echoed off the rock. The tunnel’s acoustics were well-known to people who visited the Gorge; honking while driving through had become ritual. Graham tipped his head back and began to howl, his voice rising above the steady wail of the horn. With his free hand, he slapped his mouth, imitating a Native American war cry. The sound was tremendous, pulsing through my eardrums and into my chest. I took a deep breath, gathering the air for a scream, but when I opened my mouth, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let go. Just scream, I thought, but it was no use. Instead, I hummed, as loudly as I could, searching for a pitch somewhere between the bleating car horn and Graham’s squall. I could barely hear myself, but I could feel the vibration in my vocal cords. Somehow, though, instead of adding to the noise, my hum seemed to neutralize its chaos.
“You have to let it breathe,” I explained, squatting next to the fire pit. It was too hot for a fire, but without one, it didn’t feel like real camping. Plus, the smoke would keep the mosquitoes at bay. I watched as Graham piled logs on top of one another and tried to light them with a torch of rolled newspaper. Again and again, the flame flickered against the dense wood before smoldering, the paper disappearing behind thick white smoke. Eventually, I took over while Graham set up our tent. I gathered handfuls of smaller sticks, dropping them into a messy pile in the ash. I weighed the larger logs in my palm, stacking the light pieces into a pyramid and tossing the heavier ones back into the woods. Even if it was dry to the touch, I could tell when the wood was saturated, the wetness rotting it from the inside out.
That night, we decided to walk to the edge of the sandstone cliff. The moon was almost full, bright enough to cast shadows that obscured the rocky path with the illusion of depth. Graham reached for my hand; it was easy to lose your footing on these cliffs. Nearly every other weekend, someone got drunk and fell, sometimes to their death. Often, we spotted the names of the dead carved into rock, the chisel of letters like a child’s handwriting. We’d decided to camp near Gray’s Arch, a natural rock bridge, which was, in fact, named after a climber who fell from it, cracking his skull on the way down.
When we reached the end of the path, we crawled like slow, giant crabs across the rock and maneuvered ourselves to the ledge, sitting with our legs dangled over the canyon of treetops. Sometimes, a slight wind blew and it carried voices, indistinct but definitely human, reminding us that we weren’t alone in these woods. I leaned back, my palms pressed into the rock and watched stars appear like pinpricks through the purplish sky.
“What is that?” Graham said, his neck stretched forward. I sat up and searched the trees for the glowing eyes of something nocturnal. Then I saw it: a large cloud that seemed to be resting on the tree tops. A moment later, it appeared more distinctly and I realized that it was rolling towards us, a wave of fog that reminded me of dry ice. As it approached, the temperature dropped until, finally, we were inside the cloud and I couldn’t see more than a foot or two in front of my face. The world beyond that disappeared. Again, Graham reached for my hand. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with this new, cool air. Just then, something dark appeared and buzzed past my ear. My heart leapt into my throat and before I could even react, there was another black thing and then a whole swarm of them. I could feel the wind of their wings on my face and through my hair. I slammed my body back against the rock, covered my head and closed my eyes. I’d seen bats here before, hanging at the entrance of rock alcoves, their tiny bodies folded into black shiny balls. I’d never seen one in flight. After a moment or two, when the flutter of wings stopped and the air felt warm again, I opened my eyes. Graham was sitting up straight. He turned around and looked at me, smiling hugely.
“Bats,” he said.
I exhaled, realizing that I’d been holding my breath. “Bats,” I said back. Graham started to laugh, softly at first but then harder and harder. His laughter split the silence, bouncing off rocks so that it sounded like several people were laughing, everyone sharing the same joke from their hidden spots within the canyon. I laughed too.
“You’re nuts,” I said and Graham leaned all the way back, laying next to me on the rock.
“Bats,” he said again and pressed his lips against mine. This time, I didn’t pull away. I let him slide his hands against the wet skin under my shirt and peel the shorts from my legs. When he climbed on top of me, I wrapped my arms around his back and anchored my fingers into the flesh of his shoulder blades. It happened in a frenzy of moisture and warmth. It was over in seconds, but not before I knew I had done something awful. When Graham collapsed, his hot breath in sick-sweet bursts against my neck, his slippery weight pressed me into the hard, sharp rock.
The next morning, I woke up feeling like I might vomit. The tent was a greenhouse; the air reeking of mold. I was drenched. I lifted Graham’s arm off of my chest and he turned over, mumbling in his sleep. I unzipped the door flap and stepped outside, where it was only slightly cooler. Our fire had burnt out hours ago, but the smell of smoke lingered, trapped in that heavy air. Between my legs, there was last night’s wetness. I squeezed my hands into tight fists, pressing my fingernails against my palms. What had I done? It sat in my stomach like a bag of rocks. The night before, after we’d walked back from the ledge and we lay side by side in the tent, Graham had traced my eyebrows with his index finger. In the darkness, I could imagine the way he looked at me, his eyes dewy with affection. I’d pretended to sleep. I knew he was thinking that my feelings had changed, that today would be our new beginning. I didn’t want to be there when he woke up, to face him in the morning light. I decided to take a walk.
It was easy to forget that the cliffs and the valleys were part of the same ecosystem, that a sixty minute hike could yield such different environments. Here, instead of the valley’s spill of plant-life, which reminded me of a rainforest, there were pine trees and bramble. Trees jutted sideways from cracks in cliff walls. Out of the sandy soil grew bushes with hard, thick leaves that looked glossy, like they’d been rubbed with grease.
I chose a trail that lined the canyon. To my right, the rock dropped off. The edge of the world, I thought, but I was too scared to get close enough to look down. In my gut was the same magnetic pull I always felt when I was up high and by myself. It happened on rooftops and balconies and sometimes even when I looked out skyscraper windows. Where did it come from, this black urge? It had occurred to me before: that maybe the fear of heights wasn’t about falling, but about jumping, about being unable to resist the call of the devil inside. I didn’t have a suicidal bone in my body, but I could feel it now, that sick gravity pulling me towards the ledge. It could happen so quickly, in the blink of an eye. A leap. I walked along the far left side of the trail.
About a mile into my hike, I passed an old picnic table, its wood faded to a yellow that made me think of bone. Underneath it, something shimmered, catching my eye. It was a dead hummingbird. I picked it up and examined it. It was the same kind as the one I’d seen at the convenience store, that same splotch of red feathers at the neck. Up close, I could see that its body was checkered with green and black feathers. In my hand, the bird looked tiny, as if death had made it smaller, stealing away whatever space life occupied. I remembered reading somewhere that hummingbirds’ hearts beat ten times a second, that they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms than any other creature. I wondered if this one’s heart had given out, if it had fallen from the sky in the instant of that final beat. I decided to turn around and bring the hummingbird back to Graham, who appreciated odd gifts. The bird would bring a moment of levity before the talk I knew we had to have.
The day was heating up by the second. I knotted the front of my shirt and tucked the ball of fabric into my bra. A pair of yellow warblers darted among the trees. They chirped back and forth to one another, sounding more like cicadas than birds. Just off the path, a massive red-orange rock towered above the tree line. It jutted from the earth like a giant tooth. I walked underneath an overhang. Above me, the rock looked porous and pocked, like honeycomb. For thousands of years, these walls sheltered the people who lived here. Twice, Graham had found arrow heads underneath them. I reached up and rubbed my finger along the smooth inside of what looked like an inverted bubble of rock.
Behind me, something rustled in the trees, making me jump. I whipped around. There, about twenty feet away, leaning against a tree trunk, was a man. He was backlit; the climbing sun behind him. Through the glare, I could see his pale bulging stomach. His hand cupped his naked crotch; his jeans were a pile around his ankles. He had a thick reddish beard and small slit eyes, which seemed to be fixed on my bare stomach. He released a low groan. I took a step back, but for what may have been two seconds or ten, I was frozen. Finally, a squirrel jumped onto a nearby branch, shaking its leaves and jolting me out of my stupor. I turned and ran back towards the path, leaping through weeds that must have been nettle. A hot itch swarmed across my shins. For a minute or two, I ran as fast as I could and didn’t look back. Then, I slowed down to a walk. I turned around, scanning the woods for movement, but saw nothing. I swallowed the air in gulps, trying to catch my breath. Somehow, I knew that the man had not followed me, that I was safe. Even when I was standing in front of him, I knew I wasn’t in any real danger. He had scared me, of course, with his sudden presence and his nudity, with the animal in his eyes and voice, but even if I couldn’t have explained it, I knew that somehow I was protected.
When I got back to the tent, Graham wasn’t in it. I thought I’d rebuild the fire and make us breakfast while I waited for him to return, but then I heard his voice in the distance. I wondered who he could be talking to, considering for a panicked second that he’d run into the naked man, but that was impossible. I followed the sound of his voice and, as I got closer, realized that he was singing. He’d taken a trail opposite mine, away from the canyon’s ledge. On this path, there were more trees, a canopy of pine that shaded the soft needled ground. Every few seconds, I stopped and listened, waiting for his song to guide me.
I could smell the water before I heard it. The trail crossed over a shallow stream and I knew that Graham would have climbed down to it so I did too. The sandy soil had tinged the water a brownish red. I stepped from one rock to the next, focusing on my balance. After my foot slipped a couple of times, I decided to abandon my plan and walked in the water. It spilled into my shoes in a cool gush. With each step, the soft mud creek bed suctioned my feet. I walked against the current and after few minutes, I spotted a waterfall. It spilled in a straight line from the tip of a rock overhang nearly twenty feet overheard. At the bottom of the water’s stream, there was Graham, totally naked, taking a shower. I stopped and the second I did, my shoes sunk deep into the mud, almost to my ankles. Graham’s head was tipped back so that the water careened off his forehead and swept the hair away from his face. He looked so small, standing there under the water; his nudity soft, his body miniaturized by the huge rocks behind him. His hands dangled at his sides and, for an instant, I imagined him as a child. I realized that I was still holding the hummingbird. Its weight was like a coin in my hand. I inspected it for damage, but couldn’t see any. When I looked up, Graham had noticed I was there. He looked at me, smiling in a way that told me again that he believed everything would be different now.
“What do you have?” he asked, shouting over the crash of water. He stepped away from the waterfall and into a patch of sunshine. His wet body glistened in the late morning light.
“A present,” I said and stretched out my arm. I knew, though, that he was too far away to see what I held. With my feet planted in the bed of mud, I couldn’t move without losing my balance. Graham sheltered his eyes with his hand and squinted, leaning forward. We both stared at it; I at the glimmer of a small, dead bird and he at something unknown, this object cradled in my palm.
Katherine Hurley’s short stories have appeared in the CAF Review and The Cold Side of the Pillow.