Lone Rock

by Duane Lindsay

  He pulled off the shoulder at a sandy wash near a crossroads and stepped out of the truck. He was glad there wasn’t any snow. Walking up to the interstate he saw a rusty sign, Lone Rock, six miles. The name conjured a glacial orphan left over from the last ice age, irresistible to a new climber. In the distance he saw a small bump in the otherwise featureless plain.

  A couple of miles in he spotted another sign. It was old wood, badly weathered, the letters burned deep and creosoted black. An arrow pointed across the flats. Two ruts traced ragged lines in the earth and Adrian bounced along at ten miles per hour

  His car lurched and here was Lone Rock. He peered upward through the windshield, got out and stared. Dark gray, almost black basalt jutted up out of the ground at least two hundred feet. A volcanic plug like a miniature Devil’s Tower. The rock face was sheer and beautiful, beckoning like a siren. The rock looked solid enough, though the base was scree and talus, but there were cracks and hand holds. Before he could stop himself he was plotting a route to the top. Of course, he didn’t have time now...or the equipment...or the strength to climb it.

  The road circled around to the south side. He ducked back into the truck and jounced along in low gear, edging past the rusting hulk of an old Chevy filled with bullet holes. Who, he wondered, would shoot a car?

  Beyond the car was the back of Lone Rock and his eyes brightened. From the summit the rear side tapered down to a talus slope. Sure, the stuff would be loose and slippery, but it was climbable.

  He was out of shape and the going was slow. It took nearly twenty minutes to reach the top and when he got there he was puffing like a locomotive. He pulled himself up and rested.

  The top was bare rock, wind swept clean a millennium ago. Nothing grew here. The wind tugged at Adrian, pushing him, testing whether it would try to push him off as well.

  He stepped right to the edge, the toes of his boots hanging out over the void and stared. Beneath his feet was a drop of more than two hundred feet.

  To the east, less than ten miles away was the range of mountains, at the edge of vision were the snow-capped peaks of the Sawatch Range above Salt Lake City.

  A jet contrail traced an icy trail through the sparkling blue sky. Off north, the alkali flats vanished at the end of the world. In the distance was 1-80. Cars were dots the size of pin heads; tractor trailers like ants. He could hear their distant drone. Farther was the long line of a freight train going west.

  He took a deep breath of pure air, catching a hint of sage, and felt his vision of life expanding. It was as if he had grown wings and could fly down from this spire; as if he was a caterpillar no longer, but now a butterfly.

  Adrian stood at the door of the trailer, looking out at the job site. To his left rose the towers, a maze of sharp angles and purposeful steel, a surrealists nightmare. Everything else was brown sand and rock, windblown, desolate and bare.

  He looked up at the dark clouds disturbing the afternoon sun. The wind had grown to a steady pressure that flapped his faded coverall and made him squint against the blowing sand. Occasionally the trailer trembled like a dog shaking off fleas. The first snow was coming.

  He was alone. The crews had left early, fearing the coming storm, a stream of trucks and buses that rattled down the rocky dirt road to the interstate. He could still see them in the distance, a smoke plume of rising dust.

  He’d been here for a week this trip, working alone on the programming in the main building, occasionally wandering around the huge erector set that was the toxic waste incinerator. Opening was scheduled for next June when they’d bring in the trucks full of industrial crud: Mercury, acids, Sulfides, Copper, Ammonia compounds and other nightmare stuff. The worst the planet had available, all right here in this desolate landscape at the edge of the Utah salt flats.

  They destroyed Sarin gas on Johnson Atoll in the Pacific. The stocks of those bombs were the worst. Built in the fifties for some paranoid’s delusion, the canisters were now rusting and the contents at risk of seeing the light of day. One part per million could kill and they had tons of it.

  The other incinerator was in Toelle, ten minutes outside of town,40 miles from Salt Lake City.

  The sight of the towers and beams rising above the desert failed to give him the usual boost of spirit. The metal catwalks looked gossamer and insubstantial against the rolling thunder of the sky, the huge tanks insignificant in the face of Nature’s petulance. These storms had crossed the desert for eternity, scouring the ground, grinding rocks into dust. They were here before Man and they would remain when this tiny point of light had vanished. Logic and reason were nothing, the storm would inevitably triumph.

  Adrian shuddered at the thought and looked at the sky again. The storm would be here soon. A strong gust wobbled the flimsy green plastic of the porta - john and tipped it over with a dull thud. It skidded a few feet in the dust and stopped, leaking an unpleasant blue fluid to the ground.

  Now we’re all sad but not happy, thought Adrian. He turned back into the dingy trailer, wondering, as he always did on cloudy days, why it had to be brown. Brown paneling, brown trim, built in wooden desk, tan blinds on the small windows, Even the floor, once white, was stained to chocolate by dirt from endless work boots. In the corner, piles of boots, faded and muddy. On the table sat brown leather tool belts and cardboard boxes of parts.

  He thought of the Studebaker, back in the garage in Denver, visualizing that shocking yellow Toby was so proud of. He looked again at his dusty brown world and wondered about himself. Was the bold statement a bad thing or a cry for meaning in a dull world? Somehow the thought depressed him.

  He should have left with the others. A gust of wind shook the building. He hoped the tie down straps would hold and remembered the old adage: God made tornados –and trailer parks for target practice.

  He closed up his laptop and decided to go. Pieburn would be here next Monday, which would be a nice change, and it would do no one any good to die in a freak storm. It took only a few minutes to shrug out of his coveralls and work boots, replacing them with street clothes. His thin shoes felt flimsy on the rocky ground as he dashed to the truck with his computer, stacks of files and two huge books of programming documents.

  The wind tugged at him, pulling the truck door out of his hand and Adrian looked up to see the first flakes of snow spiraling to the ground. One, two, three...six thousand...fourteen million, the storm came quickly. He ran to the trailer, pulled the door shut and latched it. Ran back to the truck and rumbled to the guard shack..

  “You’ re the last one, Adrian,” yelled the guard through the blowing snow. Already it was getting hard to see. He held a clipboard against his chest to keep it dry.

  “You leaving soon?” Adrian asked.

  “Right now. This is gonna be a bad one. The first one always is.”

  “See you Monday.”

  “If the place is still here.”

  The drive to Wendover took two hours, a nightmare of squinting through the windshield. Adrian sat hunched over the wheel straining to see the white lines of the road.

  Twice he was passed by cars that flew by at ninety. Adrian had no such confidence. He drove like an old woman and made it to the Casino feeling stiff.

  An hour in a deep red porcelain bathtub soaked away the tension and Adrian decided to go down to an early dinner. He got dressed and drifted to the elevator, saw his reflection in the elevator mirrors and considered himself. He wasn’t a geek, he thought; not really. Lots of people wore...it was a reasonable way to dress...not everyone wore jeans...

  The elevator came and he entered, his thoughts as troubled as the weather. He walked between a thousand beeping machines, past endless gamblers pulling infinite levers, waiting for the small chance of fortune. He sat alone at a table in the restaurant.

  The week at the job had been fine, with the distraction of work, but now, on this unscheduled time off, he began to realize that he didn’t actually like being alone. The thought surprised him. He ordered prime
rib, the permanent special at all Casinos, and thought about Maggie.

  For the first time in his life he wanted someone to talk to, someone to eat and laugh with. How many years had he wasted alone? He felt a sense of time passing and it made him feel sad.

  “Another drink?” asked a waitress.

  “Sure.”

  He dipped meat into au jus and wondered how he’d come to Wendover, Nevada. Casinos were lousy places to be alone. The waitress brought his drink and he sipped it absently, wishing he was anywhere else..

  He finished his meal and returned to the room. On impulse he grabbed the telephone.

  “Hello?” Maggie’s voice.

  “Hey,” he said. “It’s me.”

  “Adrian.” She sounded pleased and Adrian wondered if she really was or if he just needed her to be. “This is a surprise.”

  “I’m not bothering you?”

  “Never,” she said. “I was just practicing. How about you?”

  “We’ve got a storm here and the plant shut down. I’m in the Hotel.”

  “Alone?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “On a Saturday.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you called me? Cool.”

  Adrian leaned back and adjusted the pillows. The phone rested against his chin. The room was dark from the storm but he left the lights out, feeling intimate, as if he and Maggie were together.

  “I just wanted to talk,” he said, adding impulsively, before he had a chance to think. ‘”I wish you were here.” After long silence he said, “Maggie?”

  “I’m not practicing anymore.”

  Much later he went down to the Casino and gambled until midnight, playing two dollar Blackjack until he won an exhilarating sixteen dollars.

  32 – Take Me to Bed

  “Do You believe?” Adrian said aloud. He stretched out his arm and felt around the rock, feeling for a handhold, found one and pulled himself up. He looked down and saw his Toyota about sixty feet below on the scree pile at the base of Lone Rock. It resembled a boxy red cherry dropped on the ground by a careless bird.

  It was his fifth visit to Lone Rock.

  He turned his head and checked his progress. Perhaps another fifty feet to the top. It was actually a very easy climb. From three sides Lone Rock was a sheer perpendicular wall, resembling a tall can abandoned on the empty plain. But from the South the tower became a gentler, easier climb, no more than seventy degrees, with handholds and boulders everywhere.

  Simple. He puffed out his cheeks, blew out and continued climbing. In five minutes, breathing lightly, he crested the summit and rolled to his feet, on top at last. He walked forward about twenty feet as a gentle wind tugged at his hair, pawed at his light blue shirt like a raccoon seeking treats.

  He stood roughly in the center of the flat top, staring into infinity. The view went on forever. There were no trees, no bushes, not a blade of grass, the entire surface had been scrubbed raw by the deceptively complacent breeze. Adrian pictured this peak during a winter storm, with the wind howling across the great salt flats, encountering no resistance until Lone Rock itself. He imagined the sky dark with purple clouds, screeching with electrical power, gigantic spikes of lightning.

  A butterfly drifted past his vision. distracting him. The sun gleamed in the blue sky, the earth a pastel impression of tans and grays.

  “Do you believe in God?” Roger had asked. Adrian walked forward over the cracked rock surface until he reached the north edge. He stepped right up, the toes of his sneakers hanging over the rim. He peered down the steep side to the broken rocks. They looked like teeth, jagged and broken. or the ruins of a fallen medieval castle, shattered by time and war.

  Do you believe in God? Standing here at the edge, feeling the world stretch out beneath him, he could say yes. There had to be something more...something better. Was that God?

  Adrian sat, letting his feet dangle over the void. He could climb down, even this steep side, and the knowledge pleased him. He was reminded that pride was a sin, and wondered why. How could this emotion be wrong? It was a recognition of his power, his strength and skill. It was an acknowledgment that he’d accomplished something great. Wasn’t this what God wanted? To reach for Heaven itself? The feeling was pure.

  Did that mean he didn’t believe in God? He scratched his cheek and wondered at himself, asking these questions. His whole life he’d never been bothered by the spiritual, claiming that engineering, the cool clearness of logic, was all important. Important, he decided, but not everything, He felt glad to get away from the job for a while, away from the crew. He liked them, and surprisingly, they seemed to enjoy being around him. The camaraderie was a joy. But Lone Rock wasn’t something to share.

  Maggie had changed him. The transformation from the cloistered Adrian Beck to this inherently bolder person sitting with his feel dangling over the edge of eternity had been coming for a while. Since the attack on the bus? Before that, though he couldn’t quite decide when. Would he have become this new person without the savage beating that awful night? Weren’t all births the result of blood and pain? And if so, why? A lousy way to get things done, he decided.

  He thought of Maggie. She was—he searched for words—settled on wonderful. It was woefully inadequate. He could no more describe his feelings for her than he could describe what he was seeing here.

  In the distance a train inched along invisible tracks heading west. It was a long one, perhaps a hundred cars or more, filled with salt from the Morton plant near Toelle. From Adrian’s aerie it seemed tiny, like an insect crawling across a vast plate.

  His thoughts returned to Maggie. He smiled to think of her, imagined her face, the tangled red hair, the slightly crooked lips. He listened to his memory and heard her play the piano, touching the keys of the complicated mechanical musical instrument. He realized that she had a skill not unlike his own; to build a melody with logic and science and skill. Hers was an art of beauty and communication. She built with music, he built with wires and computers. Each created what they believed to be true.

  Was creation God? By definition, he thought, it had to be. To create, whether it was life or art or a bridge across a chasm deeper than this height he so casually perched over; that was an act of Godliness. So how could people believe they were less than God? He looked around. Everything he saw was a part of Nature. But Man had mined the earth, built his cities, flown through the skies. And once, long ago, he had dared to walk upon the face of another world.

  Again Maggie. He heard her song, the one she played most often and, off key, he sang it with her.” You made me love you...” Her voice was a fragile thing, as gentle as a fawn, her voice an instrument of such power it could reach into a heart and change it to her vision.

  “You know you made me love you...”

  That was the answer he’d come here to find. Did he believe? Yes, he did. He believed he was in love Maggie Powers. He leaned over the edge and wondered which precipice was steeper.

  “That’s right, sixteen dollars.”

  “Adrian! Sixteen?”

  He sat back on the living room sofa with an expression of smug satisfaction. He nodded. “Yup, sixteen. They paid me in cash too. I didn’t have to report it to the Feds. So what’ll it be, little lady? The sky’s the limit. Dinner, dancing, drinking...anything in the world that sixteen dollars can get you.”

  Maggie swooned, “Adrian, how I’ve dreamed of this.” She burst out laughing and fell against him. Twisting around, settling in, she found a comfortable position and looked up.

  Adrian kissed her. The room was dimly lit and warm from a small fire. The couch where they huddled felt like an oasis. The radio played some formless jazz thing of piano, bass and drums, no vocals. Maggie got distracted by singers and was forever trying to match her voice to the song, in melody or harmony. If there was already a harmony she did another, or invented a counterpoint. Adrian, unskilled in music, recognized a remarkable ability. Personally he couldn’t carry a tune w
ith a tractor and a work order..

  She kissed him back, her eyes closed, and settled lower with a sigh. “You’re getting pretty good at this.”

  “Thank you ma’am,” he said and kissed her again. In his whole life he’d never dreamed that anything could feel like this. He never realized his mind could be emptied, his emotions sent whirling like planets in space. The way he felt when kissing Maggie Powers.

  His hand rested on her stomach, and he idly caressed the blue wool, feeling her body beneath his hand, He was awkward about this, and inexperienced, and a little afraid. He’d come so far from a shy introvert, and even farther from the paranoid and damaged victim running to Denver to be a hermit. That person craved solitude, Adrian craved Maggie.

  She ran a finger across his cheek. Her touch sent chills down his spine when she brushed against the live skin near the scar tissue. “You’re like a pirate.”

  He laughed. “Hardly. A pirate’s accountant maybe. Or the boat engineer. Or the guy who steers the boat, with that wheel thing.”

  “That wheel thing?”

  “It’s a nautical term. Women just don’t understand.”

  “I like this,” she said. “When do you go back?”

  “Monday.” Tonight was Saturday. Adrian was puzzled by the abrupt subject change, but everything Maggie did was surprising. He usually just went along. “Thanks for picking me up.”

  “I like to; you’re alone too much.” She breathed deeply as if making a decision, and kissed him again. She put her hand on his and slowly, watching his eyes, moved it up her sweater, She stopped when it reached her breast, and she kissed him again.

  Astonished, Adrian felt the softness beneath the thick wool, the pressure of her hand, her lips on his and he felt shaky inside. He sensed that change was going to overcome him and he would never be the same. And he experienced a tug of regret that this was happening when he was thirty-four, rather than sixteen.

  She pulled away from the kiss and caressed his hand as if to underscore that he was touching her.” Take me to bed,” she said.