by Ron Carlson
Arthur Key sat and opened his oversize notebook. In it he had drawings of each component of the project on the plateau, but he had not drawn the ramp yet. These were freehand sketches, simple and out of scale, with the accurate measurements inserted: the approach, the long line of bleachers. He turned to a page showing the gap of the canyon. There was no number for the yardage between the two arrows.
“We need that transit.”
“What’s that?” Ronnie said. He had gone over to the lumber bale and sat in the shade there, his legs straight out on the ground, eating his apple.
Darwin lifted his crate and moved around to look at the drawing with Key. “How close do we need to know?”
“Is there a hurry, Darwin? Is there a bonus for doing this wrong?” He didn’t care about speaking sharply. “I need to know to an inch. I need to know how much the people who are going to do this hideous thing weigh. I have an idea about their motorcycles, but I want to know the rest.”
“It’s two hundred and sixty yards across,” Ronnie said. He was taking a bite and then studying his apple carefully. “A two-iron with the wind.”
“And you know that because?”
“Art,” Ronnie said, lifting his hand out to the river. “I looked. I look across the thing every day. It’s right over there, a short par four.”
“Diff said it was about four hundred yards,” Darwin said. “Does that help?”
“Look,” Key said, turning his notebook to a blank page. “Let’s get a transit. It’s the difference between some kids breaking all their bones in the sage or falling half a mile. We’re ahead of schedule, right? We won’t get this seating for a month. When I know the gap, we can build the ramp in two weeks, I think.”
Darwin had risen and was pouring himself another cup. He raised the enameled pot in a gesture to Arthur Key and Key nodded. “Whatever you want, Art,” Darwin said. “It’s going well. We can wait.” The clouds made a monstrous map of the sky, and they continued to fold and cover and cool the high desert world every twenty minutes. “We can get over to the other side and shoot back, if you want.”
“If there’s time, I’d like that.” Key turned to Ronnie, who now was carefully going around the scant core of his apple. “You can’t use that golf stuff out here. This isn’t the Winnetka Country Club; this is the West. It looks like you can just jump over something, so clear and so close. You can’t jump over it. There’s a ton of air you’re not considering. You’ll see when we’re down in there today.”
“Whatever,” Ronnie said, struggling back up and throwing his apple core toward the farm road. He walked over past their portable john and stood out in the sage with his back to them, pissing.
“He’ll get used to pissing out in the world, and find himself unable to go east again,” Art said to Darwin. “A genuine cowboy.” They watched Ronnie hitch his shoulders as he adjusted his pants. He spit dramatically.
“And where are you from?” Darwin said. “If you’d like to really say.”
“I’ll let you know,” Art said. He was now running his hand along the bevel that Ronnie had cut in each end of the table with the belt sander, a nice touch. “And you can tell me why this isn’t God’s country anymore.”
Two hours later, they heard a vehicle approaching and saw the train of dust it raised rolling south. It was Curtis Diff’s big silver Suburban. He wheeled through the narrow gate without slowing and pulled into the workyard and stopped. Ronnie stood from where he knelt cutting five-gallon buckets into sleeves with the jigsaw, the way that Arthur had lined him up: eight inches off the top, another section eight inches lower and then finally cutting off the bottom. At his feet were a dozen of these white hoops in a pile. Darwin had watched them work together. Key had run the heavy yellow extension cord from the chugging generator, and he used the power drill on each pail, punching three quarter-inch starter holes for the stubby blade of the jigsaw. It was clear from the way Ronnie leaned in and watched the larger man work that he wanted to get it right. They formed the picture of a lesson with Ronnie leaning to see the way Arthur made the cuts. When he started sawing the circumference of the first white plastic bucket, Ronnie held the edge in his left hand with the confidence of a pro. There were moments like this that Darwin liked this project. These plastic circles would be forms for the bleacher footings.
“Jesus,” Diff said, stepping out of the truck and taking in the stacks of lumber and equipment. “We got a little city going here. There hasn’t been this much new lumber in Fendall County since they built the whorehouse in Mercy. No wonder everybody’s pissed off at us.” He was a tall man in a plaid western shirt with scalloped pockets, and he left the truck door open and took long strides along the graded approach to the ramp-site until he stood on the lip of the precipice. “Whoa mama!” he yelled. “Better them than me.”
By this time Darwin and Arthur Key had come up from where they had been hauling lumber to the camera platform position. Diff seized Darwin’s hand and reeled him in to a hug. “Qué pasa, my friend?” he said. “Sorry it’s been so long. You knew I took Lynn to Europe, right? Jesus, what a trip. They got more churches than the Mormons, but they seriously need an electrician!” He laughed but then held Darwin by the shoulders and looked into his face. “How are you? Okay?”
“We’re good,” Darwin said, moving past the personal question. “We’ve got some expert help here.” He pointed at Arthur Key.
“You’re Art Key,” Diff said. “I know about your work. What are you, on vacation?”
“I am,” Key said, stepping up and shaking the older man’s hand. Curtis Diff was seventy years old that summer with red cheeks and long wavy gray hair combed straight back.
“Where’s the heavy equipment operator?”
Darwin introduced Ronnie whose shirt was coated with plastic crumbs. “We’re making some forms for the footings.”
“You’re doing more than that. This is the whole shiterie.” He pointed to the line of bare telephone poles. “When do you get electricity?”
“Today or tomorrow,” Darwin said. “Phone too.”
“Sonofabitch, this is something.” Diff turned again to face the abyss. “What’s that platform?” He nodded at the area Key had staked a hundred yards farther along the rim.
“That’s the camera station.”
“Of course it is. No sense in losing an expensive two-wheeler without taking pictures.” He shook his head. “I brought you out a case of wine and a transit.” He brushed at the front of Ronnie’s shirt. “Let’s go fishing, shall we? I can see if I stay out here, you’ll put me to work. It’s French wine. We plundered that place.”
They drove twenty miles south on the ranch road in the Suburban, through the sage plain and then along through a series of domed hills where pines grew in shadowlike formations on the side of each. The road became a powdered two-track smooth and sinuous winding through the scattered cattle who didn’t lift a head to watch the men pass.
“These are yours too,” Arthur Key said to Curtis Diff. Darwin had arranged that Key sit in the front for the ride. He did not want to be quizzed about his well-being, and Key could furnish all the updates on their work on the plateau.
“They must be,” Diff said. His place, the ranch called Rio Difficulto, was ninety square miles: open range mostly with three rivers and some timber, which had been amassed through his family via their work with the railroad and by supplying potatoes during both world wars. He had pointed out the various landmarks on the drive, where the road turned east for his homestead, as he called it, the string of cabins which had been his grandfather’s summer place, now abandoned, the roads heading off toward the mines, the hot springs, the fall hunting. They passed a camp of three tents and four white vans which Diff explained was a group from the university studying the ospreys.
Diff had immediately noted that it was Darwin’s wife Corina who had, forty years before, named the place. She and Darwin had come to work for him, and she’d become the financial manager and sometimes
cook for Diff while Darwin was ranch foreman. “She overheard me explaining something on the phone with the governor or the bishop or the town manager up in Mercy, yet again one more argument, like this deal here up at the plateau with you guys, and when I hung up she was shaking her head and she said it.” Diff looked up and nodded at Darwin in the rearview mirror. “Rio Difficulto. Christ, I was as mad as you get, and when I understood what she had said there at the desk, I had to laugh. She nailed me to the door with that one. Rio Difficulto. She was a good woman.”
Arthur had turned to Darwin in the backseat. “And she died this winter?”
“January,” Diff said.
“That’s when you moved to Idaho Falls.”
“My son’s up there.” Darwin’s expression did not change.
“He’s a good man,” Diff said with enthusiasm. “Got his own little company. I’d like to get him down here. I was lucky to get Darwin back for this ramp. Everybody doesn’t have to goddamn move away.”
Diff drove too fast it seemed at first, cruising along the smooth, winding two-track, and then it became apparent he knew the roads very well, being his. The road rose out of the hills onto a barren plain of sandy badlands, and Diff pointed out the clusters of antelope in the distance on each side. Finally, he turned off through a gate in the single-strand fence and assumed a smaller road, ragweed and speargrass tall in the center. “Gentlemen, now we’ll go down to Diff’s Landing.” He turned to Ronnie in the backseat. “Don’t worry, young man. I’ll keep it on the road. This is a track my grandfather carved with nine bona fide Chinese heroes in the year 1899. It took all summer.”
Above them now, the sky had stopped and the clouds were backing up like bricks. The gray day was kind on the eyes and the clarity of the grass and the rock walls emerged.
The road such as it was followed a dry creek bed for a mile until the drainage deepened, and the vehicle dropped into a channeled ravine, crisscrossing the sandy creek bed every hundred yards, dipping and swinging in descent. This wash grew in magnitude, a broad arroyo choked with huge boulders and ancient cottonwoods, and finally Diff slowed the Suburban and stopped in the sandy wash under one of the gigantic trees. Before them now in the looming distance was a strange striated red wall. “I always piss here,” Diff said, getting out. “So it isn’t scared out of me in this next section. I recommend it.” The men climbed out of the car in a kind of wonder under the magnified and illusory rock wall which seemed to be very close but was not. A moment later they gathered in front of the dusty car. “Which way would you go?” he asked Ronnie. “Right or left?” Ronnie walked out another fifty yards to the fall mark, where the sandy basin fell into the river gorge, a spillage of a thousand twenty-ton stones which descended, as far as he could see to the blue river. He also could see that the weedy track had been cut both north and south. The other men walked up.
“You choose one,” Diff said, “and we’ll try her. One of these goes only two hundred yards and gets cliffed out. Then these hardheaded road builders came back and started the other way and success was theirs. They were good and had learned road making on the railroad. Go ahead. Choose.”
“It was all hand tools,” Arthur Key said to no one.
“Every man on that crew got a hundred dollars and a train ticket to Oakland. They had a party at the bottom. Granddad brought a team and a buckboard down the road and they roasted a pig. All summer, he’d been taking their recipes. Ask Darwin. Rio Difficulto has the finest Chinese cuisine in the West.”
“I know,” Arthur Key said.
“The river is not right there, is it?” Ronnie pointed straight down to the water.
“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” Diff said. “No. That water is almost a quarter mile below the line of those rocks.”
Back in the car, Ronnie closed his door and saw Darwin lift his left thumb. He said, “I’ve already driven over the edge once, Mr. Diff. I’m going to ask you to take us down the right way, but just to make sure, take a left at the cliff.”
Diff laughed. “Let’s try it. We’re a little bigger than a buckboard, but hey, we have got to go fishing!”
At the bend the road changed from sand to a flinty ledge of rocks, each one, Key realized, broken by hand. The trail as it was cut in the steep cliffside was exactly one vehicle wide. The men had all the windows open and Key and Ronnie, on the passenger side of the vehicle, could see only down. The mountainside was the length of an arm from Darwin’s window as Diff dropped them section by section down the old cut. Fully half the time, the only thing visible over the hood was the river, a distant blue illusion. “Is this something?” Diff said. “There were days when they didn’t go five feet.”
“They moved a lot of material,” Key said.
“It’s like one of your movies,” Diff said.
“It’s like they make the movies look,” Key said. “This is much better.” The drop below his elbow was four hundred feet.
“What’s the better part?” Ronnie said, and Diff laughed again.
The Suburban dropped and lurched a tire at a time. “Does anybody want to walk?” Diff said.
“How does that work?” Ronnie said. “Darwin can’t open his door and I’d drop straight down onto those white rocks.”
“Limestone,” Diff said. He was having fun.
“When was the last time you drove down here?” Arthur asked him.
“I come down every year, once a year, need to or not. In a goddamn ranch full of weird little places, this landing is a place there haven’t been twenty people since that party with the Chinamen.” He pulled the wheel, correcting under the loose shale. “Now, Mr. Key, what is it that finds you in lost Idaho working with the best ranch manager in the West?”
“I can tell you without lying that I needed a break,” Arthur told him. “I wanted to get away for a while and think it all over.”
“The big picture?”
“That’s right.” Key pointed quickly. “Watch it there.” They had inched around a rocky cornice, and a juniper trunk had fallen across their path like a twisted gate. Diff stopped the car.
Key opened his door and looked down the cliffside. He could now see the river, razor blue in the red rocks. By holding his doorframe and then grabbing the lip of the fender and grille, he was able to edge to the front of the car.
“I’ve got a chainsaw,” Diff called.
“We may need it,” Art said, bending to the trunk.
“We won’t need it,” Ronnie said. They watched the big man lift the fallen tree to his belt level and then walk it forward until the broken roots snapped and gravel showered onto the ledge road. Arthur dropped the deadwood, stepped over it, hoisted it again, walked it to the road ledge and let it tumble down the cliff.
The big car squirmed down, down, along the mountainside. “It’s like driving on piles of pennies,” Diff said. “But don’t worry. Darwin knows I’ve been down this drunk, in the dark, and once I had to back all the way up to the top. And Mr. Key,” Diff said, taking his eyes away from the sweeping panorama and facing the big man across the seat, “we’ve mainly hired people who needed to be away from someplace else, and I’m just saying welcome.”
“What’s that?” Ronnie said. “Up on the other side.”
Diff leaned forward and looked. “Those are sheep, bighorns.”
“I can see two rams,” Art said.
Diff pointed as the car continued sliding down the trail. “There’s a ewe lying just above them. See her?”
“I do. How many are there?”
“My dad started with fourteen pairs in about 1960. We had eighty something two years ago.”
“Eighty-seven,” Darwin said.
“What do they do?” Ronnie asked.
“That’s it right there,” Diff said. “They stand in the rocks. We point them out to greenhorns. They’re just using the habitat. They lived here a hundred years ago, they say.”
Now Diff stopped fully at a sharp corner in the descent. Darwin squeezed out of his door and fou
nd his way forward as Diff began the crazy turn. “Real tight. Tighter,” Darwin was saying. “Whoa. Back a bit,” and Diff reversed two feet. “Now tight again.” In this manner, they maneuvered the car through the last straightaway onto the river bottom.
“Welcome to Shanghai Landing,” Diff said. “A recreational paradise.” He pulled the car up beside the red stone pillars of an open ramada. The flat roof was constructed of long deadwood poles. The canyon wall across the river rose straight up, a deep red in the afternoon shadow, and the escarpment they’d driven down loomed behind them like a shut door. From below like this, the cut of the road was barely visible, making it seem that they’d just landed in this strange rocky room. “Let’s fish!” It was then that they could hear the river talking, though the roar was gone, just the water running over rock.
Diff opened the back of the car and the men unloaded all his coolers and gearboxes. In the ramada was a stone table, cobbled together crudely and around it six stout stumps, a permanent picnic.
“Who’s the mason?” Art asked, piecing together the flyrod that Darwin had handed him.
“I’m not union, but this table is almost fifty-five years old, not counting repairs.”
“You did the spring wall too?” Key pointed to a pool against the mountain, ringed with the same red stones cemented together to form a brimming pool. “Is that steam?”
“Hot spring, Art. I tell you guys. This is the place to come if you’re courting. We got the fish, the picnic, and the hot tub, but it doesn’t matter.” Diff showed his teeth in his laughter. “By the time you reach the bottom, you’re in love.”
The river came through this park winding in a perfect S and the sand and willows and twenty gigantic cottonwoods were half in the shade. The air rode down the river fragrant with water and willows. Darwin and Arthur walked down across a gravel bar and began to cast into a blue eddy below the riffle. The trout struck immediately and at the same time both men reeled struggling fish to the riverbank. Darwin knelt and removed the fly from his fish, showing the cutthroat to Arthur before setting it back in the stream. Then he did the same with Arthur’s fish, also a twelve-inch trout.
