by Ron Carlson
“I can see that.”
“Come on over. Your troubles with dogs are long gone. You’re not going to steal anything, are you?”
“Shut up.”
Ronnie was approaching, tentatively, stopping short and holding his hands on his shoulders as either of the black dogs turned to him. Finally the animals saw they had him and worked their noses along his legs while he stood frozen before them. Arthur Key watched a man with a hammer emerge from beside the little stone building at the top of the ranch yard. He’d been parsing a pile of charred timber there, and his overalls were blasted with soot.
“Greetings!” he said.
“What are you digging for?” Arthur asked him.
The man’s smile was magnified and he said with pleasure, “Today, it’s the Lord’s work. I’m peeling the old steel truss braces off the burned chapel roof.”
“You’re going to use them again?” Key asked. “They aren’t cooked?”
“These are old World War One pieces, heavy gauge, probably the first steel braces ever used.” He held up a blackened steel piece. “They go a pound each.”
“Was it lightning?”
“It was.”
The man patted his legs and the dogs relented, leaving Ronnie a statue, and they came around and lay under the truck. “Idaho gets more lightning than anyplace I know of,” Ronnie said. “It’s a place that wants to strike you dead. The sky won’t quit.”
The man set his hammer and the burned rafter brace on the flatbed truck and said, “Now you broke something.” He peered under the bent supports of the grader blade. “And it looks like a bona fide antique. What’d you hit?”
Key stepped over and snapped open both come-alongs. He grabbed the big blade in one hand and pulled it around so they were looking at the bent attachment bars. “Can we cut here and brace this with some angle iron?”
“That’s exactly what we’ll do.” The man smiled at Key. “You all are Darwin’s guys, aren’t you?”
“We are,” Key said. “And you are Mr. Roman Griffith.”
Griffith shook his hand. “And happy about it.” He reached for Ronnie’s hand. “Howdy, son. Those dogs won’t bite you. And there’ll be no lightning today. Can you weld?”
Using a rolling engine crane, they unloaded the broken metal part and laid it on the painted cement floor in the roomy repair shed. The place was impressive, and Key took it in: the tool cabinets, the bins of parts, the small paint booth. Roman Griffith was set up to do some work.
“Darwin wouldn’t come over, would he?” Roman Griffith said.
“He’s got a day,” Key told the man.
“Let’s cut these absolutely off and make something up,” Griffith said, tapping the ruined steel tubes. “It’s simple and it’ll work.” He went to the wall and wheeled over the cart with the cutting torch apparatus. He sparked the torch and knelt above the bent blade supports. The flame bloomed and then he touched it down to a blue blade and applied it to the old steel. In a moment the cut was established and he ran the torch around the perimeter of the first upright. When it clattered to the floor, he stood and handed the live torch to Ronnie. “Is this the man?” he said.
“He’s ready,” Key said. “It is a torch after all, Ronnie. At least to start.”
Ronnie knelt and hesitated. Arthur Key took his hand and guided the torch to the second support. When the metal glowed and the cut began, Key stood and said, “Keep it straight. Go slow.” Ronnie was rapt in the work, cautious, and he took his time following the melting line. After a minute, he stood and lifted the welding hood he’d been given.
“You better finish,” he told Roman. “So we don’t have to do it twice.”
“You’re on it,” Griffith said. “Cut that last side.”
Ronnie applied the torch again and reopened the cut. The bar fell away neatly a moment later. When he stood this time, he said, “We’re welding.”
“We’re cutting,” Griffith said, thrusting the hot bars into a metal bucket of water. “We’ll weld by and by.”
Key was at the bin of scrap metal, sorting through the odd bits, rebar and tubing. Griffith joined him, and they found four heavy angle bars and brought them over. “We’re making a four-star strut for this one-star grader,” Key said.
“Ain’t that the way with government work,” Griffith said. He quickly laid the bars on the cement and struck a tack with the torch at the top and the bottom, making a tube. Pouring water over the spot welds, he picked up the tube and placed it against the fitting on the blade where it measured just right. He tacked the other bar together.
“Run a bead right down this seam,” Griffith told him. “When the rod starts to melt, keep moving slowly, pushing back the bead every inch. Like this.” Griffith snapped his own hood forward and knelt to the work. The bead melted into the seam like putty. In a minute, the welder stood up and lifted open his hood. “It don’t have to be perfect. It just has to be strong enough to blade the nasty roads of Idaho for another fifty years.”
“Don’t touch any of it, even with those gloves, Ronnie,” Key told his friend.
Ronnie knelt and stabbed at the starting place until Arthur Key finally braced his arms and brought the welding rod into the flame.
“Can you see it now?” Key said.
“I’m good,” Ronnie said back, muffled through the welding hood. And he was good, if slow. The bead wandered but he filled the gap steadily until one side was closed and ready. Using a pair of vise grips, Roman Griffith picked up the hot metal piece and turned it over so Ronnie could start on the second joint.
“Run that joint,” Roman told him. “And then go ahead and weld that second unit right here.” He pointed to the other angle irons. “Use the clamps. If you get in trouble throw this bucket of water on the whole deal. We’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
Roman stood and he and Arthur Key watched the young man reassume a stance over the metalwork and begin to weld. Ronnie was slow and sure, bumping back the bead as it filled the crevice.
Griffith nodded at Key and led him out of the work shed into the brimming Idaho sunlight. “You guys are having fun over there with Diff’s project. That kid’s a fast study.”
“We’re all right. It’s something to do this summer.”
Griffith caught that remark and appraised the larger man. “Oh, and you didn’t have anything going on?” He led Key around the metal building to an old golfcart, which they boarded.
“I was free,” Key told him.
“Nobody’s free,” Griffith said. “I’ve got ten things doing and I’m a peon.”
Key wasn’t up to it. He wasn’t going to fence and fend with this good craftsman. “Darwin was a friend of yours.”
“Was. Is.” The low open vehicle wheeled through the ranch dooryard and Griffith conducted it up a gravel two-track past one ranchhouse and then past another where the road ended in a cul-de-sac. “My friend Darwin lived in that last house and this patch here was his wife’s garden. It’s still his house if he wants it.” Griffith pulled himself out onto the ground. “Come on.” He led Key up a narrow deer trail through the flourishing bunchgrass to a hillock overlooking the ranch in general. There was a short black iron fence around the grave. “This is her.”
Key could read the stone: CORINA GALLEGOS 1933–2000.
“It happened in a goddamn minute. She cooked us all, twenty-six folks, a New Year’s brunch—Diff had flown in all this stuff from La Paz, swordfish and fresh tuna and big old crabs—and Corina made a jumbalaya or some such, good good stuff, and she laughed in the faces of those of us who were pale and hungover, god it was the last one of a hundred good times here. That’s the kind of outfit this is. For that party there was six airplanes. Diff is a generous guy. Then here’s what happened.”
Roman Griffith leaned on the iron fence that marked the grave. “A week after the party Corina’s mother died in Albuquerque and Diff dropped it all and flew her down there in his twin-engine plane. He uses a pilot most times, a guy from B
urley, but he flew her himself. He knows what to do. The old woman had been eighty-eight. It was on the way back, right out here, that they came into the wind.” Roman leaned back and pointed out to the runway. “It was a warm day in January, no snow. The wind came across and wanted to put the plane on a wing, and they bumped and she hit her head on the side of the glass and Diff looked like he’d broke his nose, but it was just blood. She was all, no problem, no problem, and then didn’t feel good two days, headache and dizzy, and finally Darwin decided to drive her to the doctor in Twin, and she died in the car, some brain injury. We went up there right away. I drove because Diff was a wildman, but Darwin was stone by then and would not come back to this place.
“She was a woman like no other and the heart of this goddamn place, the mother of this good ranch. Darwin wasn’t going to stay. Diff argued with him, got drunk and made hell and back out of one night. They had some words, and Darwin said some hard words about God in heaven, like that, hard news it was, just shit and shit and fuckall and Diff was drunk and screaming. But no way. He still wants Darwin back.” Griffith looked at Key. “We all do. There’s a hole here and everybody knows it. He was a fine foreman. But no. He come down and shook my hand and said nothing. Winter. He went up to Idaho Falls to see his boy, and then this spring Diff came up with this bullshit on the mesa, though I heard he’s making one ton of money from the movie people, or television, one. Diff is doing this to try to get his best friend back, but I don’t see how that works.”
Arthur Key had not been to a graveside since standing near his brother’s and he had found his balance on both feet, his hands clasped together in front. It was a beautiful gravesite with the black iron fence and the grasses on the sloping hills. The ranch yard below was like a drawing by a child, roomy and elemental.
“Did you weld this grate?”
“I did.”
“I appreciate your bringing me up here.”
Roman led Key back to the golfcart. “You’ve been down there awhile now. I know for a fact that Darwin is a friend of yours. Every man is. I thought you’d like to know about him. He’s making a mistake to go up to Idaho Falls, but I guess he’s got to.”
They drove back down the easy road now, and Arthur Key looked at Darwin’s house, the porch overlooking the ranch, the weathervane on the chimney a blue heron in flight. When they reached the dooryard, Ronnie had already laid out the blade and the new supports for the final welding. He’d used sisal rope to snug it all taut while he ran a bead. There was a loop of burned rope on the floor nearby and splashes of water covered the cement. The two black dogs now lay inside the doorway in the shade watching him. “It’s a smart cookie,” Griffith said. The two men watched Ronnie as he knelt and moved with confidence over the last two steel fixtures.
“When you finish blading your big important road,” Griffith told Key, pointing to the damaged stone building at the head of the ranch yard, “come back out here and help me paint this barn and put a new roof on that old chapel.”
FIVE
THE MEN SPENT TIME every day at the cliff’s edge, alone and sometimes together, looking into the sky, a great deal of which seemed there to be below them. There wasn’t a clean precipice but a short step down and then another out onto the flat top of the sandstone column that served as a corner for this portion of the ancient tableland. It was the size of a room and would be where the men would erect the motorcycle ramp at the plateau on the ranch Rio Difficulto. The red stone was scarred freshly where Ronnie had backed the old road grader. At the edge of this pocked stone, out of which tiny sage and miscellaneous tenacious brush grew, there was a shambling rocky declivity at eighty degrees for another hundred yards and then a clear line straight down to the river. In the morning, the gorge was in shadow, purple, black and scarlet, and the unlimited air from the sandy shelf seemed pulled into the yawning open space. All afternoon as the deep cliffside fell under the direct sun and baked, the draft shifted and pooled out of the canyon in thermal plumes, lifting the hair of whoever sat on that last rock and drank his coffee or pulled the burrs from his socks.
It was on this red stone bench that Darwin found Arthur Key every breaking morning. They fell into a pattern in their days wherein after dinner in the twilight, while Key and Panelli located and secured the tools, the older man would set up the coffee in their large enamel pot and place it on the propane stove out on the cookbench. There was at that time in the day always the washkettle on the stove, the water warm enough to be ladled into the men’s washcloths, and they washed their faces this way and scrubbed behind their ears with pleasure before going to bed. In the tent lodge, they undressed in the dark and climbed into their sleeping bags on the cots. They did not talk beyond a question or two about the next day’s labors or what day it was exactly, the number and the name, though Wednesday was the same as Thursday in such a place.
Panelli slept first, his breath marching away smoothly, though he dreamed and twisted in the nights, and more than once in their season on the plateau, Key stepped from his cot and took Ronnie’s shoulder until the young man shuddered still and slept again. Darwin was silent on his cot, and Arthur Key could feel the pressure for a while as if his friend wanted to speak, let the things unsettled take words, and even without the discussions Key sensed Darwin’s grief and his anger over his lost wife. Darwin had used them to create a steely edge in himself which he wore like a new thing, something not quite the right size, too small and too big at the same time. Key was never sure if Darwin slept or not, though he hoped he did. There were nights when he knew the other man went barefoot out of the tent at the hour of two or three, and Arthur Key never followed him. He hoped Darwin’s mind was not full of unbidden moments that just appeared in ragged intervals but never became a story, just flashes that flared until he could see them and try by force to close down. Key lay in the lodge tent on his cot and rode through his mistakes every night.
A few minutes after five every morning, Arthur Key carried his boots and his lined jacket into the cold new day and turned on the propane stove. While the coffee rose to percolate, he sat on another of the many milk crates and shook his shoes and socks, and he put on his footgear. The men were wearing their socks two and three days in a row, and he had gone over footcare with Panelli. They left the foot powder on a shelf under the stove. In the cold, with a blue line along the eastern mountains and the dark sky still brimming with the tilted starwheels, Key tried to keep his mind empty.
He couldn’t do it, and he was disappointed in his will. He could not prevent the same mental loop from beginning. It wasn’t memory and it wasn’t logic. It was a sickening series of gray moments and faces, many of them his brother and his sister-in-law, Alicia, and before he had poured his coffee from the steaming pot in the dark and tossed in a tablespoon of powdered creamer, he was affected, sick. There were times when he thought, I should just make a list and burn it to see if that would work.
He would have written his last conversation with his brother, and that he did not go with Gary and pull him from harm, and he would have written down the whole afternoon as it broke. He remembered Dayton making the calls at midnight twenty years ago, waking people until he found out where the party was, and he remembered having traveled there, apartments, and once on a golf course, places he was not welcome, and goddamn fighting with Gary, who was drunk and shining, even lifting him up like an animal and carting him home while Gary’s coterie of friends watched and made disparaging remarks, though not ever very loud. Key knew that he’d been a better man then, but it was no help.
And he knew he would have written the night he met Alicia, years ago, when he hauled Gary, drunk and fighting him, from the blue twilight of a wedding reception. The party was breaking up and Gary spun and shouted, No, Art, I’m okay, these people are my people. He had the neck of a bottle of champagne in his hand and there were grass stains already on the knees of his seersucker trousers. Arthur pried the bottle from his brother’s hand and it was as if it had been holding him
up for he collapsed and vomited on the parquet dance floor. Arthur carried him to the car and felt someone beside him, the girl, and when he laid Gary in the backseat she got in the front. She was the only young woman with glasses at the event. I’m Alicia, she said. Later, after he’d put Gary to bed and come back down in his mother’s house, Arthur Key found Alicia in the kitchen having tea with his mother. Arthur made the same excuses for Gary; he does love a party. He looked at Alicia and said, “We both love him.”
She was young but what she said sounded weary: “We both drive him home.”
Arthur drove her back to her car at the country club and she came around to his window in the dark. She said, “Will he get better do you think?”
He knew what she was asking, but he said, “He’ll be better by noon.” Her touch on his arm at that moment stayed with him. He was alone and determined and he wanted to find a way out of Ohio.
But he made no list, just let it all live in him. He stood with the heaviness and walked in his work boots over to the rocky apron of the mesa.
He wanted a way to abandon his thoughts, even for a few days, enough for a deep breath, but he was aware that he could not. They arose and he was no better for them. They arose every day. He was glad to move, to walk, but they arose every day. At times when the labor was demanding and continual, as when they dug the many footings for the bleachers, his thoughts disappeared and the work was everything.
When Gary and his wife Alicia had come to Southern California, Arthur knew it wasn’t great news. Gary had folded many tents, staying with one public relations company for almost four years; that was his record. He was what? Too young. He knew how to measure his drinking so it seemed charmed to his acquaintances. He was an incredibly personal guy whose charisma would last for a year and by then most times he had earned a place in the group. What he was great at was prepared public speaking, a talking head on filmstrips and the like. He’d go to the top of the class on his popularity, and then Gary would coast for a year and then he would founder. He loved the new jobs. If it was new, he could do it and when it fell to the details, the day-to-day, the troubles would start. Arthur had taken many of the phone calls. Gary, he was jocular and acerbic, laughing at the assholes he was working with or whom he had just quit. He had a dramatic gift and laughed through the stories, describing the faces and offering what he said and what they said in return, and then what he said as the parting shot.