by Ron Carlson
“Traci home?” Ronnie said.
“You know she’s home,” Marion said. There was a grin playing under her words. “She said you two were going camping.”
“We’re going out to the river gorge, yeah.”
Marion stepped up and put a finger in one of Ronnie’s belt loops. “You be careful. Things are going just fine, and it is a real good time for you to be real careful. Traci isn’t just anybody.”
“I know that, ma’am,” Ronnie said.
“I don’t know why I like you, but don’t you ruin that.” She let go of him and held his eyes for a second for emphasis. “I’ll see you both back here by noon.”
“Yes, you will,” he said.
Marion went by him and picked four mugs off the bar and laid them in the soapy sink. Ronnie slipped out past the cook station to the back door. As he turned from setting the screen door closed, someone took his arm and spun him around and jolted him with two square fists in the chest so suddenly he was on his ass in the dirt. “Where’s your bodyguards, you little shit?”
Ronnie didn’t want to get this shirt dirty. He looked up at the kid standing above him. “You going to kick me now?” he said.
“Where are your friends?” It was a guy Ronnie recognized, a young guy with a tight haircut in an untucked flannel shirt, yellow and black, with no sleeves. He had the biceps you get from lifting.
Ronnie stood up.
“Where are your friends?”
The kid punched Ronnie again in the chest, looking around after he had done it.
“I want you to stop hitting me,” Ronnie said. This was a new era for him, and every time he spoke now, he was surprised. He was surprised to have gumption, one of his mother’s words, one she’d used against him, saying he didn’t have any. He was surprised to speak and by what he said, and he was surprised he didn’t scramble up and run. He’d been hit, but he’d never fought. He’d run out of his shirt twice, leaving it, or most of it, in a guy’s fist when he’d been caught in a carport, under a Mercedes, his pockets full of dresser cash.
“That is not going to happen,” the young man said now, stepping again after Ronnie Panelli.
The back door slapped and Marion stood there in her apron. “Darren.”
“I know what I’m doing here,” Darren told the woman.
“You are going to get yourself arrested again.”
“That would take a phone call.”
Ronnie stood and brushed himself off. “I’ll fight him,” he said. “But I want to take this off first.” He unbuttoned his blue shirt deliberately and hung it on the rearview mirror of the cook’s rusty Datsun, parked against the building. His scar was a red carbuncle on his shoulder. He now turned and faced Darren, his hands at his sides, unmoving.
“You’re skinny as a rat.”
“Let’s just fight,” Ronnie said quietly.
Darren had backed a step and folded his arms. “You are such an asshole,” the boy said.
Marion had returned to the back door with the white phone receiver in her hand, which she held out for Darren to see.
“You are so full of it, Marion. This little rat is going to screw you and Traci over, big-time.”
Ronnie stepped toward Darren and lifted his left hand out, fingers splayed, as if to measure the air. Darren backed sharply.
“You get, Darren. Just go. Or,” Marion said, waving the telephone, “we can see if Jim wants to hear your opinions.”
Darren swore and started to leave. He pointed a finger at Ronnie. “I’ll find you. You touch Traci, and I’ll smell it on her and I’ll find you.”
Ronnie put his arm down and surprised himself again by saying quietly, “I’m right here.” It was so good to say what he meant; he’d never had that before. He was going to take a step toward the young man when Darren dropped his shoulders and backed away, walking among the vehicles parked at odd angles in the weeds of the parking lot and around the corner of the building. Ronnie retrieved his shirt and buttoned it up.
Marion was still at the door. “You got any food?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’re going to cook some chicken in olive oil, and I’ve got the makings for breakfast.”
“Coffee?”
“We’ve got coffee.”
“Traci likes milk in her coffee.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I know. I’ve got some half-and-half.”
Marion put her head down as if thinking it over and finally lifted it and said, “Well, get going. You guys be careful.”
“It’s okay,” Ronnie said to Marion, waving his hand to dismiss the matter. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks. Really, thanks.”
At the hardware store, Ronnie picked up a small case of carriage bolts and the large set of socket wrenches and the rest of their gear, and then he backed the big flatbed truck out into the lumberyard behind the old wooden hardware store. Mr. Schindler, the owner, met him by the two big stacks of railroad ties and guided him to the ten-footers.
“It’s no surprise to me that Diff is making his own railroad now,” Schindler said as he pulled on his gloves and hoisted the end of one of the long ties. Ronnie lifted his end and they started sliding the timbers onto the truck.
“These are going to be the ramp frame,” Ronnie told the older man. “They’re treated and stronger.” Ronnie didn’t care for wisecracks about the project on the mesa.
“Well, I imagine it will be just strong enough.”
They laid the railroad ties onto the truck and Ronnie signed the paperwork. Then he threw his weight into it and chained the load with extra care, clamping the two come-alongs as tight as he could get them.
“That load won’t get away.”
Ronnie turned and it was Traci, leaning against the front of his truck, her arms folded, her face smiling and her brown hair lifting a little in the breeze. He was shucking his gloves and she said, “What are you going to do, shake my hand?” She hugged him, one arm over his shoulder and the other under his arm.
“Where’d you come from?” he said.
“I was born in Paris, Idaho, if you want to know, but more recently I walked from my house and down that alley, so we wouldn’t have to have all of the spectators in town see your truck at my house.”
“Your boyfriend already met me behind the Antlers.”
She had let him go now, all but an elbow in her hand, and she said, “You look good to me.”
He couldn’t hold his face up to such a comment, but he averted his eyes and said, “I appreciate that.” He pulled open the driver’s door. “Hop in.”
“Did he say anything? Darren?” She threw her canvas kit into the cab and climbed up on the big bench seat.
“Just that he’s not done with me. That guy does not like me.”
“Forget him.” She slid over to her door and then all the way back against Ronnie where he leaned to start the vehicle. “Just forget him.” Her words were good to hear, but there was something else, something hurt and bitter in them.
“There’s a Paris, Idaho?”
“You need to get out more. Where’d you come from?” She laughed and suddenly ducked her head down and put it on the leg of his jeans.
“What are you doing?”
“Just drive. I’ll stay down here, right here until we get to the turnoff, and no one except my mother will know where I am. Drive. Put it in gear and drive.”
In that manner, they drove up the back alley behind the bank and the little clinic and then onto Main Street in Mercy, the scattering of cars and folks walking there, and then out past the elementary school marquee announcing school starting September 4 and the town fields of alfalfa and onto the two-lane county road five miles to Diff’s ranch road and then nine miles on that clay path to the worksite on the river gorge. She lay down the entire way, looking up into his face, interrupting their conversation from time to time to count the birds as they crossed in the windshield above her.
The feeling Ronnie got when they turned onto the ranch road was delicious, this
freedom of being with a girl he liked, going out to a place he felt stronger about every day. He loved driving the old truck and was aware of her eyes on his arm as he shifted the big floor gearshift, and he was aware of her head on his thigh as he clutched and then pedaled the gas through the many changes.
His career with women was not a career. He had never had a girlfriend. There had been a girl at the country club whose name had been Vicky Lattimore and who was only a slut. She’d been brought to the caddies’ clubhouse by some of the older caddies, though she was just Ronnie’s age and had been in some of his junior high classes. She was unafraid to do sexual things to the boys there in front of other boys, and several times he took a turn sitting on the long bench behind the small building, a bench riddled and splintered from where golfers forever had bent over and tied on their golf spikes. He knew that she was a slut and it was a word that everyone used, but he also knew that she had power over him, and there were days when he’d finish caddying a round or sometimes two and he would be back there alone, cleaning clubs, and he would catch himself hoping she was around. He didn’t like the way he felt when she was there, but there was nothing he could do about it. Eventually, a month before that last summer was over, the pro heard about her visits, and came down and fired four kids, including Ronnie. It was that day, three years ago, that he went in the back door of the main clubhouse and picked through three wallets, taking over four hundred dollars and a Platinum American Express card. The only good thing about that had been that he’d been sixteen and so it was juvie for four months. In classes there, he’d been taught the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as the Ten Commandments and how to balance a checkbook and what compound interest was. The information was so arcane that he made a quiet decision about further school right there. When he got out, his mother wept and wept, overjoyed to have her boy back, but he knew he was not back. He was ashamed of what he had done, but he did not know what the feeling was. He knew he had disappointed his mother, but he took the pain he felt to be simply who he was. And he started stealing things, because as he’d been told in juvie: he was a thief. It was the first thing he’d ever been called, and he took their word for it.
As they proceeded in the truck, Traci would assess where they were. “These are the power lines running along the town fields. Way off south you can see the abandoned farmstead. It is called the Olsens’ but they lived there five families back. It’s a party house sometimes in the spring; the week before high school graduates, you can lose your virginity there without hardly trying.”
“Did you?”
“We just met and that’s a personal question. But, no.”
When a bird would cross the sky, Traci still laying on Ronnie’s leg would say what it was, each time reciting the whole list as it grew: nine sparrows on the wire, two ravens, a hawk, a raven, a hawk, one seagull, two little birds, two little birds, a red-tail.
“Was that guy your boyfriend?”
“Darren was my boyfriend last year.”
“Your mother doesn’t like him.”
“Forget Darren. We’re forgetting Darren.”
Ronnie Panelli could not forget Darren. “A year is a long time.”
After a moment, Traci said, “A year is a long time.”
Ronnie slowed and shifted down for the left turn.
Traci said, “Now you’re turning onto Diff’s ranch, the dirt road and we are now going south.”
“Was he not good to you?”
“Forget him. I’ve forgotten him.”
“Did something happen?”
“Nine sparrows on the wire, two ravens, a hawk, a raven, a hawk, one lost seagull…”
Ronnie stopped the truck sharply and slid quickly out of the door onto the running board, looking at the sky in every direction. “There is no bird here. You can stop that.”
Traci’s head was now back fully on the truck seat, and she looked at him upside down.
“What happened with Darren? Tell me. Did he make you do things?”
“It was a year,” she said. “We did things.”
They were stopped in the open sage plain; only the far mountains ringed them, marking the world. He came back into the cab and lifted her head onto his leg. Now her eyes were shut.
“It didn’t seem like he was making me. I was almost eighteen; that’s old. I didn’t know about it. I thought we were supposed to do stuff and for a while I thought I liked it.”
Ronnie sat still in the idling truck.
“You can drive,” she said. “It will make it easier.”
So he eased the flatbed into gear and edged forward on the dirt road.
“He wanted me to drop out of school and move out to his place with him and his dad. He’s learning engines and thought he could get a job with the state or the railroad. My mom wouldn’t let me go out with him at the end, and he’d come to our place and he’d lock us in my room and make me…You want to know this?”
Ronnie drove slowly over the well-worn two-track.
“Do you know I’ve never been on a date?”
“He took you on dates.”
“Never. When he could still take me, he took me to the quickest place and we did stuff in his car. He took me to keggers and made me do stuff in the car while he sat and waved to his buddies. I didn’t know what to do.” Traci sat up and wiped her eyes. She slid back against the passenger door, sitting legs crossed now facing him.
“In my locked room he made me take my clothes off and then he’d talk to my mother through the door, saying I was sure an eager beaver, other things, until she threw him out.”
“She threw him out?”
“After I told her what it was, the next time she came home from the Antlers and found he’d locked us in there, she knocked with a pan, and then came through the door with a hammer. In our house.”
Ronnie’s jaw was tight, and he felt the taste for trouble, the old taste when he didn’t care what happened. He wanted to go back to town and find the other young man. “When was the last time he touched you?”
“February. He came to the school and waited. When I went with my friends, he grabbed me, my arm. I told him not to touch me and after a minute he let go.”
“What does he do now?”
“He comes by in his truck every night, parks in front of our house, across the street.”
“Let’s go back to town and settle this up,” Ronnie said.
“Ronnie,” Traci said, taking his wrist in her hand. “Forget him. Look at this.” She waved at the broad desolate world. “Let’s have the day we came for. Forget him, please. I’m so sorry I knew him.”
Ronnie Panelli was vexed and simmering in a place he had not been before. The day had changed, deepened, and he knew that much. His concern for this girl had changed also and he could not quite get his thinking around all of it.
“Two ospreys.” She pointed to the big birds winging slowly, easily over where Ronnie knew the open canyon ran.
“And these guys,” Ronnie said, indicating the flock of white seagulls crossing in a desultory gaggle. “So far from the ocean.”
“They’re Mormons,” Traci said.
Ronnie slowed and maneuvered the big truck through the ranch gate on the worksite at the plateau sometimes called Rio Difficulto.
In an hour he had toured Traci around the campsite and they had huddled together on the broken rock ledge over the river canyon, the ancient river working its ancient duty. They sat on the sandstone over the shadowed vault in such a way that he understood he should put his arm around her. He had little control over the moment. The gorge had always claimed him, and now his sense that he was alone with this girl felt suddenly only heavy. He couldn’t lift his arm. They could smell the water in the arid world. She leaned and touched his shoulder with her shoulder, but his ability to move and his ability to speak a word had been taken from him. He had thought he could handle this, but now he simply could not touch bottom and was swimming in the new hour. He cared too much now to screw thi
s up, and it all seemed swirling. There were ten ways to ruin it, and he wanted none of them.
“Remember what a pain in the ass you were about oatmeal?” Traci said. She was talking about the two days he’d spent in her house after his shoulder injury. “You acted like you’d never had it.”
“I didn’t want you to go to any trouble.”
“Oatmeal,” she said again and turned in proximity to be kissed, but Ronnie did not act upon it.
“I’d been in Idaho three weeks, and I didn’t know you.”
“Ronnie,” Traci said, her face now on his. “You knew me.”
“I liked you, but I figured you’d think I was…”
“What? You were hurt.”
“Yeah, hurt. I was just another injured guy. Your mother…”
“My mother let me talk to you. That woman let me talk to you. A boy! Think about it. I mean, a man.”
The sound of the river came to them in ribbons, sometimes a hollow rush, and sometimes an echo. They watched from afar the tiny white dots drift across the blue-green water back and forth below them, rapacious ospreys plying the river, sometimes rising in eager circles through the anticlines to become winged shapes and then birds in the clear air immediately beside and then above them.
Ronnie had listened to her speaking from his lofty perch, and he had his knees and his elbows craned and folded. He looked at Traci, and it all came over him like the warm winds sometimes had this strange summer, where he’d be huddled with a chill, sweated through and picking up tools or odd bits as the sun shouldered the far mountains, and suddenly he’d feel his chest coat with the dry air and he’d smell the sand and feel his shirt inflate with the momentary heat of the earth.
He used the infusion to stand up. Not knowing what to say at all, and being as far from any natural impulse as he had ever been, he said, “Come on.” He was thankful to have the next thing. “Let’s go see about cooking.”
Ronnie Panelli had been watching Darwin for a few weeks and understood the cause-effect of recipe work. He lit the propane stove to low. Traci saw his preparations: the bowl of chicken breasts in garlic and tarragon from the ice chest, and his brandishing the cast-iron frying pan, which he put on the burner.
