Chapter 4

"It has been said, and truly, that everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry, and fierce as the animals. Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity. The soft evolve out. Except for the sleek and oily growths like the poison ivy -- oh yes, indeed -- that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down in those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons." -- Excerpt from The Journey Home by Edward Abbey

From my very first week on the job, I'd heard rumors from other rangers about a narrow slot canyon containing a spectacular ruin called Cliff House, built by ancestors of the modern-day Pueblo Indians sometime in the early AD 1200's. That was as old as England's Westminster Abbey! The ranger station's small library had a scientific report describing this site and I devoured it, vowing to someday visit this intriguing abandoned outpost of a lost civilization. The report said it contained dozens of masonry rooms snuggled beneath a massive overhang of sandstone that had protected it from the elements for nearly a millennium. Indeed, the report's photos showed one interior room containing a wall painting depicting different phases of the moon, suggesting the ancient ones' who'd lived there had rudimentary understanding of astronomy. I'd studied such things in college, so this was right up my alley!

After hinting about a visit to Cliff House, my boss granted permission to go on patrol. Not wanting me to head off in the desert alone, he directed Brooke to accompany me with the proviso that afterwards we were to write up an inspection report on this isolated piece of history. Getting to the site proved to be an ordeal in itself. First, we had to snake the government Jeep along narrow dirt roads for nearly two hours, much of the time creeping slowly along in four-wheel drive. Then we traversed on foot another mile and a half across mesa top backcountry before descending into a steep walled desert canyon at least 300 feet deep.

The rock shelter containing Cliff House was half way up the opposite side of this rocky crevass! This was proving to be an all day trip and to describe the terrain as rugged would be an understatement. Despite the heat, Brooke and I wore long denim jeans to ward off cuts and scracthes a myriad of desert plants were capable of dolling out. We arrived at the place grimy and out of breath, and saw immediately there would be no evidence of other recent visitors. It was far too isolated to be impacted by casual tourists or hikers, and it appeared the ruin had remained in the same condition for centuries. We saw no other human footprints on its sandy floors, causing my co-worker to exclaim that we were the first visitors that year!

During my brief time as a seasonal ranger I'd been to dozens of archaeological sites, but this place ranked a 10! The ground all around it was covered with a scatter of broken pottery shards, flint chippings and bits of dried corn cob -- a vast outdoor museum! We quickly worked our way through the checklist of standard inspection questions and since I had some archaeological training, Brooke followed behind me taking notes as I described what we saw. God, I couldn't believe we were actually getting paid to do this type of work! When finished, we sat on a low rock wall built four centuries before the Mayflower reached Plymouth and proceeded to eat lunch. Gazing down the canyon at a verdant ribbon of cottonwood trees topping a dry rocky streambed, the view was postcard perfect. The only noise was wind or an occasional wren trilling at it played the updrafts.

If there was a drawback to the place, it was an overabundance of ancient prickly pear cactus spines, all ground up and imperceptible on cliff dwelling's dirt floors. Already a couple had imbedded my hand. I'd read somewhere that small nocturnal rodents called pack rats built complex nests of twigs called "middens," typicaly incorporating prickly pear cactus leaves for protection against predators. These creatures nested in caves and rock shelters, which coincidentially was the preferred location for hard to reach cliff dwellings. Unfortunately, all that remained of packrat nests here at Cliff House were the tiny barbs of this cactus. Although I didn't yet know it, this would become a big issue later in the day!

It seemed marijuana was impossible to find in Utah's Mormon country, and I had been waiting for the right occasion to smoke the single joint I owned (it came in a care package from my sister back in North Carolina). Brooke had been acting rather morose and I thought smoking the joint would cheer her up. I'd seen her toot up cocaine two weeks earlier with her boyfriend Tim from Arizona, and thought she'd enjoy getting high. So I was disappointed when she declined. God, that girl was a bundle of mixed emotional metaphors! Brooke said that while hiking across the mesa to Cliff House, she'd been reflecting on why she took the job as a backcountry ranger. It was to be a complete respite from men, but nothing seemed to work.

She was also trying to kick drugs and booze, and had hoped that living at an isolated ranger station would be an opportunity to dry out —a self-imposed sobriety of sorts. I'd heard this all before and could now recite the little slut's confession nearly by heart. Basically, her stab at abstinence was a failure since it seemed nothing could reign in an impulsive streak of risqué behavior. My co-worker began to sob, cursing her fucked up life. Right then, I could agree, thinking I had a very messed up babe on my hands. Over the month and a half I'd known Brooke, she'd become my regular fuck partner, not to mention servicing the lucky guys who'd drive hundreds of miles to the ranger station just to get laid. Hardly a day went by when she wasn't getting dicked by somebody!

Now in tears, Brooke blurted out that she was a complete failure! Unfortunately for me, right at that instant I'd quietly nursed a growing hardon, thinking that screwing the wench at this remote location would be a nice way to cap off the hike. But my dick now shriveled. Then, with another burst of self-remorse, Brooke squeezed my hand and without prompting confided that she'd always loved Tim, the half-Asian, half-Anglo guy who occasionally came to visit and get some nookie. I didn't much like this pasty-skinned wanna-be biker, who after feeding my colleague several lines of cocaine had pushed her upright against the ranger station's storage shed and reamed her, right out in plain sight where I witnessed everything. This in turn set off a string of events cumulating in my rape of Brooke a couple of days later. What a perverted twist of events that had been! I'd nearly fled the state!

After finishing our lunch we remained perched on the ancient stone wall. Brooke didn't pause in her increasingly manic discourse, again saying that she loved the guy! But there was anguish in the way she said this. Dumping out words almost like a confession, she told me a secret known only to a handful of others. To my astonishment, she admitted that Tim was actually her half brother! What happened was that while Brooke was still a baby, her full blooded Japanese mother had an affair with an Anglo man, Tim being the product of that liaison. The girl was by now on a frenzied talking streak, and to slow her down I asked how the sexual thing between she and her half brother had started. I expected her to say it happened during high school or college, but learned it began when they were infants.

Not that they actually had sex at that tender age, but Brooke explained that as was custom with the Japanese, her mother bathed both she and her brother together at the same time, and when they were old enough to not require constant adult supervision they were left alone to wash themselves. I always thought this was a cultural thing — not the act of incest, but rather familial bathing! But by the time Brooke was nine and Tim was just eight years old, having sex with each other in a large wooden tub full of hot water was part of their regular routine. As Brooke said this, her eyes took on a far away look as if cherishing fond memories. From the way she described things, it was inevitable that word of this was leaked to her brother's friends and they eventually came on to her so that even before reaching puberty, she'd made the rounds with virtually all the neighborhood boys.

Good God! This was more than I really needed to hear -- I wasn't a therapist and didn't know how to respond. But some kind words from me hopefully would staunch Brooke's continued tears. So after putting away the dregs of my lunch I inched closer to the girl until our knees touched. This was one occasion when I thought Brooke would resist my advances and push me away. But she didn't, and as we continued to talk she let me rub my hands along her smooth denim covered thighs. This calmed her down and eventually she stopped sobbing.

Remembering the joint, I again told Brooke that it had been months since I'd gotten high and pulled the little hand rolled cigarette out of my shirt pocket to light the thing up. At first, Brooke refused to accept the joint when I passed it to her, saying it'd make her horny and right then she wasn't in the mood to have sex with anybody. But she didn't slide away from me either, and soon we were both wreathed in a pall of the pungent smelling marijuana smoke. The girl actually giggled when I puffed a series of wispy, perfectly round rings in her direction. After taking a particularly big toke, I leaned over and pulled her lips to mine, exhaling all the still potent smoke deep down into her lungs. This broke the dam and we proceeded to pass the joint back and forth until it finally burned to ash, our mouths and tongues lingering together between puffs of pot.

As we blew smoke into each other's lungs, Brooke leaned into me, pressing her nearly flat chest into mine. Her gloomy state of mind dissipated and she seemed to enjoy the closeness, not resisting as I gently rubbed my hand against her petite breasts. Rather than assault the girl, I took it slowly this time and pointed out small cliff swallows, whose skillful acrobatics allowed them to fly at high speeds straight toward the vertical walls of the steep ravine before veering off at the last instant. Distracting Brooke by describing the geologic forces that had created the place, I managed to loosen all the buttons on her uniform shirt. She then allowed me to pull the thing off and didn't complain when I tossed it to the dirt behind us. She did the same to me, and we were both naked from the waist up.

Now that my stoned colleague was half disrobed, I sucked an erect nipple into my mouth. This was followed by a most passionate of kisses. With lips pressed fully against mine, her tongue lashed about in my mouth. Brooke's newly avowed respite from men was very short lived indeed — maybe four hours at most! My penis was stiff and I would have pushed this game of foreplay further had a depraved thought not popped into my cannabis addled brain. Brooke was still manic and very talkative, so I asked her to describe the most erotic thing she'd done as a kid, thinking it would be something with Tim, her half-brother.

The story was not what I expected, and I was taken aback as she described a torrid affair with an older cousin that took place on a cruise ship heading to Alaska. At the time she'd been just twelve, while her cousin was twenty-two years old — just my age! After beginning this revelation, Brooke glanced at my bulging crotch and said I was very wicked for forcing her to talk about stuff she'd repressed for years! I thought this was a joke, but there was real sadness in way she said it and from the look on her face, this was a serious confession. Still, that didn't stop her from spilling the rest of this story.

Prior to that Alaskan cruise, Brooke told me she'd not had a single romantic inclination toward anybody and that having sex with her brother and his friends was done for fun and recreation. This all changed with her cousin, whose name was Paul. Indeed, a ten year age difference meant they had virtually nothing in common when together at family gatherings. Apparently the relatives all intended to stay in a string of rooms booked on the same deck of the large ship, but more people showed up than expected and two additional cabins had to be booked several decks away. Since she was just twelve, there was apparently some debate as to whether Brooke was old enough to be given one of these. But her mother thought it would be safe if her older cousin stayed in the adjoining suite, bunking up with her half brother Tim, who was then just eleven years old.