Canyons Read Online Free

lose, he thought, looking at the scenery blur by—sometimes no matter what you do you lose.
    And this was one of those times.
    Two days, no, three days ago he’d been standing in the kitchen and his mother had been smiling and saying:
    “We’re going camping with Bill and his youth group.”
    And his mind had raced through a thousand excuses, some new, some old. She had started going to this new church and she’d met Bill at a church dinner and Bill was active with a youth group—she had explained it later to Brennan, her cheeks glowing. But he hadn’t known that at the moment, at the second, the instant when he thought of all the excuses. I’m busy, I have to work, Stoney has a lot of new lawns—the cards flipped through in his mind and he opened his mouth to use one of them but there was such a hopeful look in his mother’s eyes, such a childlike hopeful look that the words that came out had nothing to do with what he was thinking:
    “Oh? That will be nice.”
    Dead, he thought looking out the window of the van. I was dead when I opened my mouth.
    And once he’d said that he couldn’t get out of it. Not really. And his mother
had
wanted it so badly, or seemed to.
    And he’d thought, oh well, it won’t be so bad. Overnight out in the desert with Bill and his mother and some kids from Bill’s church youth group. How bad could it be?
    He almost smiled now, thinking back on it, would have smiled except that it
had
turned out so awful. The kids—there were seven of them, all boys, all about eight years old—were monsters. They were all over the van like gremlins, wouldn’t let themselves be buckled in, and with Bill and Brennan’s mother in the front seat and Brennan in the back with the kids—he thought of them as the pack—the main load of work with the children dropped on Brennan.
    It was like being in a nest of rats. They climbed on the seats, bit each other, fought, and wouldn’t do anything Brennan told them to do. One of them, a boy named Ralph Beecher, just sat in the corner of the backseat kicking anybody who came within range.
    By the time they were out of El Paso, Brennan knew he was in trouble and within twenty miles of the highway heading north he had his hands full. He tried holding them down, pushing them away, scowling, swearing at them—nothing worked and finally he turned away and ignored them, stared out the window and wished he were anywhere else.
    Bill was nice enough, and that was the problem, really.He was too nice. He didn’t bother to say anything to the kids and they took that for permission to do anything they wanted to do—which stopped just short of unscrewing each other’s heads.
    When they had driven fifty or sixty miles Bill suddenly slowed the van and took a narrow, winding road that led off east into the desert, toward the canyons.
    It did not look like they were going toward any kind of campground, Brennan thought, looking over his mother’s shoulder out the front window of the van. The road grew worse and worse and at last they were winding over rocks and sand and through sand dunes on little more than a narrow trail. Eventually even that ended.
    “Now,” Bill said, getting out and stretching, “we walk.”
    “Walk?”
    Brennan couldn’t help himself, his voice had a definite down tone to it and his mother shot him a warning look. Walk—with these kids? Brennan got out of the van and shook his head, you’d have to have a whip and a chair.
    But if Bill heard his voice he gave no indication. He took gear from the rack on top of the van, laughing and talking and pointing.
    “See that canyon?”
    Over them rose the rock canyons leading up to the mountains. They had driven past several of them on the highway and turned into the fourth or fifth one. Brennan couldn’t tell for sure now that they were so close to the bluff wall.
    “It’s called Horse Canyon. I came up here once years ago hiking and found a trail to a spring in the back of it. That’s where