The Other Side Of Silence

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Will Rodriguez was the only person he told where he was going. There was nobody else to tell, really. He had no close friends except for Will, and theirs was mostly a work-related friendship; and Timmy was three years gone now and his folks both dead, too. Geena could have guessed, of course. She knew him that well, though not nearly well enough to understand his reasons. She’d think the same thing she always did when he went to the desert. And she’d be wrong.

October was one of the Valley’s best months. All months in the Monument were good, even July and August when the midday temperatures sometimes exceeded 120 degrees and Death Valley justified its Paiute Indian name, Tomesha-ground afire. If a sere desert climate held no terrors for you, if you respected it and accepted it on its terms, the attractions far outweighed the drawbacks.

Still, he’d always been partial to October, the early part of the month, so in that sense Geena’s timing couldn’t have been better. The beginning of the tourist season was still a month away, daytime temperatures seldom reached 100 degrees, and the constantly changing light show created by sun and wind and clouds was at its most spectacular. You could stay in one place all day, from dawn to dusk-Zabriskie Point, say, or the sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells-and with each ten-degree rise and fall of the sun, the colors of rock and sand hills changed from dark rose to burnished gold, from chocolate brown to purple and indigo and gray-black, with a spectrum of subtler shades in between.

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