by Ron Carlson
Ronnie had finished putting the excavation tools away, washing the shovels and parking the little tractor where their lumber stacks had stood. He went to the cook table and drew a glass of water. The dirt was driven into his hands and crusted around his sore wrists and he wanted to wash up. He had come to love the end of the day, the big bar of Lava soap on the sill of the washpan, the warm water lather and the cold water rinse. An evening wind had come up in short gusts and the rabbits lay in the sage with their ears down. Summer seemed stalled and the late-day weather now was laden with cumulus clouds bumped into haystacks and the false afternoon dark, lit by lightning in the black barrels so far away there was no thunder, just the periodic flashes. Some nights the storm broke, though, over the gorge and the lightning would step toward and then above their tent, the storm like a mob, the rain ripping up the night, big drops, an hour of crashing and then gone and the clean slate smell in the humbled sage. The sky was four shades of blue from east to west—a tipping plate—and in the north the sky was black and ticking with lightning in the distant mountains. It was eight o’clock and wouldn’t be dark for an hour. Ronnie saw Darwin look up from the strip steaks crackling on the griddle. They watched Arthur Key stepping among the prepared sections of the undercarriage, bending from time to time to strike one of the railroad ties with the large rasp he carried in his hand.
Ronnie said, “Those look good.”
Darwin covered the steaks with sliced potatoes and then overlapped all of it with the enameled lid of his roasting pot.
“He’s got the thing a little perfect,” Ronnie said. “But I’ll go over. He’s going to want to test fit it again.”
“Let’s go see.”
Arthur walked among the parts, knocking splinters off with his boots and sometimes running the rasp a stroke or two on the cut corners. The men were all tired and none had drunk enough water. They’d worked since noon finishing the holes in the cliffside and they had worked without speaking. When Ronnie came up, he stood behind Arthur and waited. When Arthur bent and turned a notched piece, Ronnie would lift the partner tie and make the fit. They checked every piece. Ronnie’s wrists were striped with scratches from his work with the splintered timbers. He had cut the receiver grooves with the crosscut saw and then knocked out the material in the wide notches with a steel wedge and a sledgehammer. None of them had knocked out cleanly, and Arthur had shown him how to use the wide chisel to clean each joint. The sections came together square and tight, so that when they laid the timbers down, Arthur Key had to kick them apart.
“You won’t need to bolt it,” Darwin said.
“Ronnie’s cut it right,” Key said. He knew Darwin was kidding. “But we’ll bolt it just in case.”
“I want to get at that big new socket wrench.”
The three men stood in the field of scattered lumber in the dark like figures in a nocturnal puzzle. The only sound now was the chuffing wind and the steady sizzling from the frying griddle. They were waiting for the word from Arthur that the day might be over.
“You wanted this right,” Arthur said to Darwin.
“We all did. It’s a good job.”
“You’ll want to go easy with that big wrench,” Arthur said to Ronnie. He heard it as he said it, the first unnecessary sentence in a hundred days. They all heard it.
Ronnie started to answer, and Key told the young man, “You know what to do. Let’s eat. We’ll put this all together tomorrow.”
That was last night. Now, in the flat blank hot center of the summer, Arthur Key could not help himself. He kicked the last sheet of pretty plywood around square and slid it into place.
“We’ll make him screw it in.”
The board knocked against the far piece and stuck. It was flush top and side but hung up on the facing sheet.
“Oh oh,” Ronnie said to Arthur. “Is this what we’re made of? Get out your arithmetic.”
Key dropped to a knee and eyed the fit. “Check it,” he told Ronnie.
Ronnie knelt and saw that it was almost a quarter inch. “Still,” he said. “You were close. Shall I kick it in? I’ll grab a bigger hammer.”
“No. No way,” Arthur said, pulling Ronnie up and taking in the whole expanse, the blond flooring of the ramp at Rio Difficulto. “Leave it and we shall see.”
Ronnie watched Key’s face.
Arthur pulled a yellow construction crayon out of his pocket and made a wavy line across the footing of the ramp, two feet from where it met the ground. “Tomorrow, you run the asphalt up to here and we’ll smooth this edge until you can’t feel it with your bare fingers. We don’t want this poor girl and her motorcycle to have their last memory be a bump.”
They had lifted a section of the railing and were going to commence attaching it where it would fold down when Ronnie said, “Car.” They both stood and looked, but there was nothing on the ranch road all the way to the hills. “It’s a car.” Ronnie stepped over and pulled his black T-shirt from the camp table and put it on.
A moment later a vehicle broke into view, trailing a little powdery dust, approaching the plateau. “Your ears,” Arthur said. It was a black Escalade SUV. “It’s the money,” Arthur told Ronnie. “Don’t expect to be appreciated for the next few minutes.”
Darwin came out of his truck and waved at Key and Panelli. Two men dressed as if for golf got out of the SUV, and then a petite woman with terrific dark hair stepped from the passenger seat. As with everyone, the men and the woman stood turning their heads for a moment, taking the place in, cautious to move in such a space. It was the time of day when everyone walked exactly in his own shadow, and Darwin ushered them over toward the canyon.
“Here’s the first folks to use your fence, Ronnie,” Arthur said. He and Ronnie now sat on the edge of the ramp and watched the visitors approach the open gorge. The men stood at the metal fence, making a space for the woman between them. They leaned on the top bar with their elbows, stilled by the spectacle. In the noon light, the panorama was pale red, pale green. Arthur Key was now sure he recognized the woman. She had starred in a spectacular credit card commercial three years before, and the project had been a Ferris wheel that he had made to roll down a suburban street before the computer graphics guys finished it off. Her name was Gabriella Smith, and she had since become very famous as the darling of world wrestling, where she was featured as a sort of virgin queen, the girl, better than the rest, for whom they all fought. She was thirty-four or-five but looked nineteen.
“She the rider?”
“She is,” Key said.
“She’s tiny. She doesn’t go a hundred pounds.” Ronnie was staring across at her. “Arthur, she might make it.”
Arthur Key watched Darwin now as he pointed out where the bleachers would be erected. He pointed down to the camera platform and then back to the ramp. When he did that, the two men each raised a hand in a wave and Arthur and Ronnie nodded back. The young woman still stared into the chasm.
“If she’s going ninety-five miles per hour when she’s right here”—Arthur tapped the wooden decking—“then she’ll go out with the proper velocity and she’ll be up one hundred and ten feet above the plane when she is exactly two thirds the way across, and then she’ll fall with her machine onto the far side with a margin—depending on winds of less than five miles—of exactly thirty-five feet, at least, and she will not stay on the machine at all but hit as if she’d jumped from a nine-story window.”
Now Darwin was leading the group across the worksite to where Arthur and Ronnie sat. Arthur spoke quietly. “Her bones are small, but she’ll break them all.”
“Jesus,” Ronnie said. “Really.”
“It’s not fate, Ronnie.” Arthur handed the young man his notebook. “It’s science.”
As the group neared, Gabriella Smith stepped forward toward Arthur Key and extended her hand. “Mr. Key,” she said.
Arthur spoke to Darwin. “We’ve met.” Everyone shook hands now. The two men were Brent Goodall and Adam Embry, the two produc
ers.
“We have indeed,” Gabriella went on. “This is a man who can roll Ferris wheels.”
“Looks like it,” Brent Goodall said. “This is incredible what you’ve done here.” He waved his hand over the ramp, the area at large.
“I didn’t know we had Art Key on the job,” Adam said.
“No one did,” Ronnie said.
“Well, I feel better.” Gabriella had not let go of Arthur’s arm.
He stepped back a little and said, “You shouldn’t.”
“You’re really going to do this?” Ronnie said to the visitors.
“Barring an act of God,” Goodall said.
“He doesn’t act out here,” Arthur Key said. “It’s just us.”
The task of telling the short narrative of what was supposed to happen the day after Labor Day fell to Adam Embry and he explained the hour they had planned. It would not be live but taped live, he called it. They would bring in two and maybe three of the largest wrestling stars in the world—and he named their names—and there would be a helicopter camera as well as the one on the platform and a handheld. There was some uncertainty about the bleachers and the live audience since this was hell and gone from anyplace and the locals were uncooperative and uninterested and more than uncooperative and, frankly, more trouble than they were worth.
“We’ll erect them,” Key said. “The risers will be here tomorrow along with the asphalt for the runway. That’ll go here.”
Mr. Embry was still talking about the interviews they’d already taped, almost forty minutes, which they would intersperse with the taping from the site. Key took Gabriella’s elbow and led her back along the graded dirt runway. They walked all the way to the ranch road.
“You are an experienced rider,” he said.
“I have been training.”
“What is the bike?”
She told him. They were standing on the two-lane dirt ranch road. They could see Embry stepping around now on the ramp, talking to the three other men.
“You’ll need to be at forty when you make the gate turn,” he told her. “We’ll bank it for you, a little.”
“I can do that.”
“There needs to be no wind, not four miles an hour in any direction. If there is any wind…” He shook his head.
Gabriella Smith turned slowly in a full circle. She gave the impression of never being still, ready for the next minute before this one was finished. Her hair worked in the sunlight as she moved about, five different browns all shining. He wanted to read something from her that was careful or afraid, but it wasn’t there. Talking to this person on the real road magnified the summer for Arthur Key; it affected his stomach. Here it was and he saw the panorama just like every project he’d turned down for reality television.
“What a place,” she said. Arthur Key stood now with his hands in his pockets in the hot sun. “Have you done all this?” she asked him. “How long have you been out here?”
“Have them strip the bike. They can take everything off and paint it silver, but have them strip it.”
“I have some gear, you know. A little chute, if I need, and I know how to use it. Everything is padded.”
“You’ve never jumped this far.”
“But I could have. And here, there is nothing in the way. No junk to jump, no cars, no fires, no crowd.”
He looked at her, the kind of woman he’d met again and again in Los Angeles: beautiful in a unique way, smart and ambitious for stardom. Finally two things at once: cheap and special. It was what had confused him about California the most, the people who wanted to be famous. He’d lived his life such that every time someone he didn’t recognize came up and knew his name, it unnerved him. His brother had wanted it, and his brother Gary had the looks for it.
“No,” he said, again looking down at the petite woman beside him. “There’s no junk and no fire. Just the river.”
FIFTEEN
AT FOUR-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, Ronnie heard a strange wheeze as if someone had stepped on a squeeze toy, and he sat up in the dark tent and then he heard a pan clatter and a scream. The cry was unmistakable, one they’d heard every third day for the season, a rabbit under an eagle or a hawk, but now in the blue light from the east, Ronnie stood in his boxer shorts on the wooden apron of the tent in the granular gray predawn and watched the coyote, gray and yellow, lope back up the entry road as if it were a path made for him, a rabbit in his jaws.
“Goddamnit,” he said. He pulled on his boots and began to walk through the sage to pee against the two-strand wire along the ranch road.
“Goddamnit is right,” Darwin said, coming into the day, buttoning his chambray shirt. Sleeping was finished.
From inside the tent, Arthur Key called, “If you wouldn’t fatten them up like that, they might have a chance to get away.” Darwin had put the coffee on, the blue flame on the propane stove hissing, when Key came out of the tent.
Ronnie walked back, kicking his boots, throwing the laces. “You’ve pissed on every corner of this property by now,” Arthur told him. “Those coyotes must smell welcome in it. You could bottle it and use it as a hunting lure.”
“You bottle it,” the young man said.
“We got a job for you, D,” Arthur told his older friend. “Bring that drill motor and a handful of those four-inch screws.” Arthur Key was dressed for the day in a flannel shirt the sleeves of which had been cut off a month before. He walked off toward the ramp.
“What?” Darwin said. “Now we’re starting before coffee?”
“You’re the foreman.”
Ronnie cut over through the brush still in his green plaid boxers, taking those long steps in his work boots. His arms were folded over his bare chest in the fresh morning.
“That’s got to be wonderful for that coyote, having a bread-fed rabbit like that. You’re changing the food chain top to bottom, Ronnie. Did you know that bunny’s name?”
“Goddamn coyote,” Ronnie said. He stood at the ground edge of the massive wooden ramp. The night’s dew lifted around them smelling of sage and dust and now the sky changed every minute, paler, paler, more pale.
“You shouldn’t have returned that rifle,” Key told him. “You could stand guard.”
“And I’d shoot the sonofabitch,” Ronnie said. “These rabbits aren’t hurting anything.”
“There’s an argument,” Arthur said.
“What am I doing now?” Darwin said. “Is this the last sheet did you say?”
“It is. This last one.” Arthur Key tapped the plywood with his toe. “We saved it for you.”
Ronnie stepped closer. “Look at that.” The sheet of plywood was snug in place. It fit now. Key looked at him. “I got it. It shrunk in the night. Congratulations, you genius.”
Darwin, on a knee, was driving the screws along their partners in the neighboring sheets, each fastener squealing as it cinched down and dimpled. When he drove the last screw, he stood.
“Ta da,” Ronnie said quietly. The plate of the ramp appeared a theatrical stage, a dark low square against the million facets of the pink rocks of the far canyon wall.
“We’ve still got this rail and the painting and the asphalt and those bleachers.”
“And we can do that,” Ronnie said. “I say ‘ta da.’ This is the biggest thing I ever did.”
Key reached and shook the young man’s hand. “Good work too,” he said. They all shook hands in the early light and then the three men walked up onto the wooden structure. They took small steps to the canyon lip. Halfway, Key instructed Ronnie to tie his boots.
“Come on.”
“You’re on the worksite. Safety first. I’m not climbing down to pick you up. Tie those laces and we’ll take a look.”
The view from the protruding edge was difficult to fix, stabilize. The twisting rope of the river deep in the gray morning shade seemed now straight below and it kept nudging the men, pulling their knees, or so it seemed, and Ronnie had to step back.
“What do we do after t
his? What have I got, two more checks?”
“Or three,” Darwin said.
“Go back to Pocatello to that grange hall with that hammer and that toolbelt, and you’ll be building garages all fall; that’ll lead to something, that’ll lead to the next thing for you,” Arthur told him. “You could start a table outlet.”
“The next thing. Is that what it comes down to?” Ronnie looked across at the tent, the campsite, the table.
“That’s the whole lesson, I think.”
Ronnie backed another six feet. His two friends now appeared statues in the sky. A smudge took Ronnie’s eyes and he rubbed at it and focused again on the thing which became a flock of birds at the rim of the atmosphere. “What are they?” he pointed.
The men turned and Darwin said, “Cranes. They’ll be in Canada by noon.”
“Canada,” Ronnie said. “I forgot about that. What’s the next thing for you? What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to finish the rail,” Arthur said. “And paint this pretty plywood so the weather can’t have it right away, and then I don’t know. It’s been a summer.”
“We’re going to eat first, right?” Ronnie said. He was still watching the distant flight.
“You going back to California?”
“I should.” Arthur Key looked at Darwin. “It’s probably time to do what I should. I think I’m almost able, ready for the next thing.” He was experimenting with the words, and they weren’t exactly right, he noted, but they were close. Since telling his story to Darwin on the way to Idaho Falls, Arthur Key had felt simplified and quiet.
