Born Savages - Cora Brent Page 0,82
as clearly as if I was already there. It would be clean, the air crisp. It would look nothing like the desert. There, in the Big Sky Country, I could salvage the peace of mind I’d lost the minute an oily California opportunist called for a man named Oscar Savage.
Somehow though I wind up in Flagstaff and decide the world might look a little more cheerful after some sleep. My phone remains in my glove compartment and I haven’t touched it. It makes my head hurt a little bit to think of how much it’ll be blowing the fuck up if I actually dare to turn it on.
There’s no reason for me to hang around in Flagstaff for an entire day but that’s exactly what I do. Four hours get swallowed up in a black hole at a greasy café that serves good coffee and buzzes with the chatter of tourists en route to the Grand Canyon. Even though I’ve seen the Grand Canyon before, there isn’t anything on earth quite like it so I abruptly decide that I ought to see it again.
On my way out of Flagstaff I stop to pick up some supplies. It’s enough to camp out comfortably for at least a week although I don’t really have any sort of a timeline in mind right now. No one on earth knows where I am. As I follow a line of cars on US Route 180 I wonder if I should examine why I can’t seem to find my way out of the state of Arizona.
If I say I’m not thinking about her I’d be lying. If I insist that my own actions deserve an ounce of pride I’d be lying about that too. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve royally screwed up.
Since it’s summer, the park is pretty crowded. It’s mostly families of all shapes and sizes posing by the rim, grinning ear to ear before a backdrop of one of earth’s most stupendous wonders. Snaking down the Bright Angel Trail behind slow-moving crowds and tourist-laden pack mules isn’t appealing at the moment so I decide to go hunt down a place to settle. I grab a spot in the middle of a crowded campground and pitch the cheap tent I’d impulsively purchased in town.
It doesn’t take long to get set up. The faint breeze blowing through the tall evergreens is a welcome change from the bleak blaze that scorches the central part of the state. But once I get a look around I realize this is bound to be pretty far from the journey of serenity I had in mind. There are kids tearing pell-mell every which way, music blaring, couples bickering, grills smoking and dogs barking. The campsites are so close together I can almost reach one-handed into my neighbor’s site and spear a brat from the hibachi.
On my other side, a family rolls into camp in a stuffed minivan that spits out two restless little boys as soon as the wheels stop moving. A man who probably spends as much time outdoors as I spend dressed in a kilt spills out of the driver’s side and I expect to hear him start bellowing at the kids. But he just smiles at them indulgently and leans against the van as his boys start fencing with long sticks. After wiping his sweaty red face with the hem of his shirt he starts unloading a ton of crap from the back. His tent is one of those monsters that’s large enough to be a small house and I can tell he’s gong to have a hell of a time getting it to stand. He seems to realize that too. Dismay is written all over his face when he gets a load of the size of the thing and all the poles and stakes involved. Meanwhile, a woman exits the van, checks the kids and walks over to him. She’s pretty. Petite and dark-haired, with a gracefulness about her, she takes the man’s arm and rests her head on his shoulder in a way that any red-blooded guy would envy.
He kisses her on the forehead and says something, pointing to the two boys. I shouldn’t be staring and listening but I can’t hear anything anyway because someone nearby has decided everyone within a one-mile radius needs Taylor Swift telling them to shake it.
The woman nods, kisses his lips, and calls to the boys, who apparently have rhyming names ending in ‘aden’. The three of them