by Ron Carlson
“I will,” Darwin said, rising. “I’ll be right back.”
When he disappeared into the back, Key and Panelli could hear the two men speaking Spanish loudly for a minute, a laughing greeting, and then the voices subsided.
“Could you live in a town like this?” Ronnie asked Key.
“Nice town,” Key said back. Arthur touched Ronnie’s glass with his own. The beer was a creamy bitter and Key felt it open his throat. “Why not?”
“Too small. Don’t you think? I’ve never been in a small town before. Bunch of guys here already know me.”
“Ronnie,” Arthur said. “You didn’t waste any time cutting a wide swath through the single women in town.”
“I passed out and hit my fucking head on the floor.” He pointed. “I was sitting right there and I went down hard.”
“After being told to rest in the clinic.”
“And Traci and her mom took me over to their place.”
“That’s how it always starts,” Key said. He was now surprised again to be able to kid this way. His range of motion was growing. His worry about the campsite had subsided.
Ronnie leaned up on the scarred wooden table with both elbows. “But, seriously, this is a weird little place, isn’t it?” He turned and nodded at the five mounted antelope heads on the old dark paneled wall of the Antlers. “I have never in my life seen that before. Something about that is not exactly right.”
“This is the West, Ronnie. There’s some stuff.”
“You know what they look like? I saw them in the mirror the day I came in here, and they scared the shit out of me. I thought they were watching it all, like judges. I’ve dreamed about them, these five guys. When I was hurt, I saw them watching.”
Key examined his friend for moment over the top of his glass, the bitter beer wonderful in his mouth. It was a privilege to sit like this in a restaurant booth and know that sometime soon the food would come. It was good to have a chair with a back, and he leaned back now.
“She’s a nice girl,” Key said. “And you’ve been good about it. You keep on and see what happens. This could be a very fine town for you. We’ll have a little supper here and then find her so you can give her your note, and we’ll go back to camp and work another week.” The sentence sounded like good work itself, sane and filled with promise.
Darwin came back out with his buddy Hector. The man was somewhere in his thirties and wore a short white cook’s hat and an apron. Key and Ronnie stood to shake his hand. After the introductions, Hector said, “His wife taught me the secrets of the culinary trade at Diff’s place. Did you ever see the kitchen out there?”
“We haven’t.”
“Diff’s old man had the right idea,” Hector went on. “That kitchen is the largest room on the entire place except for the barn. We cooked.”
“Hector’s part owner here,” Darwin said. “His wife teaches school.”
“Shall we talk or shall we eat?” Marion said from behind them. She balanced the three large white oval plates before her as well as a basket of hot rolls in a folded checked cloth.
“Next time have some Mexican or the Chinese,” Hector told them as they climbed back into the booth while their plates slid onto the table. “I’ve got an Idaho fu yung that will make you well.”
“Will do,” Key told him. Darwin and Hector shook hands, and the cook went back around the bar.
Arthur Key ordered one more beer and looked at the steaming plate of gravied steak before him. His plate had exactly twice the mashed potatoes and meat that Darwin’s did. “This looks a little customized,” he said.
“The cook’s a friend of ours,” Darwin said.
“He is now.”
In the window booth of the Antlers Bar and Cafe, the three men ate without talking. Ronnie ran a big circle of ketchup onto his fries and dusted them with salt and ate them four at a time when he wasn’t tearing at his sandwich. The two other men worked knife and fork into their steaming dinners. The sirloin tips were fall-apart and savory.
Finally, a faint parenthesis of ketchup at each corner of his mouth, and his mouth full of French fries, Ronnie said, “What we should have done is got a boxful of those black-eared rabbits and brought them with us to our side of the canyon. Kick that gene pool in the ass. Get some superrabbits on the old mesa.”
Arthur Key considered his remark and then made it. “I’m not sure we want to play god with the rabbit tribes.”
“How old is that river gorge?” Ronnie asked.
There was no answer but the door yawned open behind them and the two people they had seen in their campsite came into the Antlers. They were speaking noisily, the girl saying, “And the rest is just so much bullshit and you know it since you are a expert in the bullshit department, King Bullshit is who you are.” She laughed. Darwin put his hand over onto Ronnie’s arm and pinned it to the table to signal the younger man to stay quiet. Arthur Key saw him and turned to see the boy and the girl take stools at the bar. The men stopped eating.
“Nothing is going to happen here,” Arthur said to his table.
Marion came out of the kitchen and stood before the two. “Buster, this young lady is not old enough to sit at the bar.”
“She might be,” the boy said. “She’s got her ID now.”
“She might be two weeks older than when I told you guys this same thing two weeks ago. Now, you can take a table or you can drive up to Concept where they’ll serve children, or so I hear.”
The girl stood and squirmed a hand into her cutoff jeans pocket.
“Don’t bother, honey. I don’t care if it cost you a hundred bucks and came all the way from Boise. I’m not serving you.”
Now the girl had a driver’s license in her hand, but Marion wouldn’t look at it. The girl was tapping the card on the bar, one-two, one-two.
“Don’t do that, Gina,” Buster told her.
“How much bullshit is this?” she said.
“Let’s just sit over here.” He tried to guide her back past the window booth to a table by the wall, under the line of mounted pronghorns.
“I’m still having a beer,” the girl said, loudly.
“Not in here, you’re not,” Marion said, grabbing two menus.
“We got whiskey in the truck anyway,” Gina said to the room. Buster had guided her to a chair which she kicked at and it barked on the old hardwood floor. Key had watched the kid, noting that he didn’t have a belt or knife or anything large enough to be a firearm in his pocket. He had resumed eating, though it was all different now.
“What you looking at?” the girl Gina said.
Darwin still pressed Ronnie’s arm.
“Nothing,” Ronnie said. “I wasn’t looking.”
Marion came and stood at the table, her bartender’s face on, weary but ready to do what might be next. “You guys want some of Hector’s pie?”
Behind her the boy Buster was trying to get the girl to quiet down.
Darwin had his wallet out and told her to wrap half a pie so they could take it. They had to get back. The room was very small now.
Stepping out the back door was relief and Art took a breath, and then walking to the truck was also a relief and the men kicked their feet without talking.
“What are we doing?” Ronnie said. “They’re right fucking there.”
“We’ve got work to do,” Arthur said. “And as sweet as it might have been to hear you comment on that girl’s tattoo, it would have changed the day for us.”
“I was going to compliment her dancing ability and ask her to stay off the table.”
“Same,” Arthur said.
“Ronnie,” Marion called from the back door, motioning him over. Arthur followed the young man returning to the building. He had to. “I hear you are quite the gentleman,” she told him. “I just want to say good for you.”
Ronnie looked at her. “I appreciate that.”
“We’ll see you soon, I hope,” Marion said.
Ronnie nodded. Arthur Key stopped him with a hand
on his arm. “Give her the note.”
“What?” Ronnie said.
“He’s going to give you something, but you’ve got to promise not to read it.”
Ronnie squirmed, but Arthur held him.
“What is it?” she said.
Ronnie stood still finally and quickly fished the creased paper out of his back pocket and handed it to the woman in her apron behind the old cafe.
ELEVEN
THE FOURTH OF JULY passed unnoticed on the plateau and without remark. A week later, Arthur asked Darwin when it had been, had they missed the Fourth, and they narrowed it to one of three nights when they had sat at Ronnie’s table after dinner in the charcoal twilight under the clouds of bats emerging from the vermilion canyon walls. As always in some ebony quadrant of the sky there were ghosted flashes of an electrical storm blooming like small stars and some nights two storms north and south so far distant as to seem tricks of the eye. They decided that one of them may have been the fireworks at Mercy, perhaps.
By mid-July they’d skirted the tent, tying up the sides and fastening the door flaps open. From time to time, they’d lower the windward side if there was a storm or just a blow, but mostly it was warm until midnight and the open air helped. Darwin set up his big yellow Igloo cooler on a short square stand Ronnie had made from two-by-four scraps (and painted blue with the last of the gallon), and twice a week he’d drop a block of ice in the cooler, and the men drank the cold water from insulated mugs with their initials inked on the sides. At night with the tent open in the dark, they heard the varmints moving in the sage, the rabbits as they settled, always one being taken by a coyote or a hawk, a quick scream or two, but nothing that could slow the train of sleep that claimed them in the same order: Ronnie, Darwin, Arthur Key, though now his mind worried him only a minute after he had reclined.
When the mornings came up now, the sky was bifurcated by the electrical wires that Idaho Power had erected on the trunk line. The black cables ruined a little something for Key, made the place smaller. Tamed it. They’d come with a cherry picker truck and run the wires through insulators on each tall post right up near the tent. When they’d arrived, the two guys in khakis and white company T-shirts drove up to the tent yard. Their toolbelts were jammed with devices of their trade and heavy insulated pliers.
“How long you guys living here?” the driver asked Darwin.
“Through August.”
“This is that television deal,” the other man said. “You guys are the motorcycle program, right? That little girl who wants to be the new Evel what’s-his-name.”
Hearing about it this way, being called out of the dream of the project, bothered Arthur Key, and he went back to the canyon where he had been helping Ronnie dig small-diameter postholes for the chain-link fence which would line the rim. Their challenge in this regard was to find the solid ground still close enough to the edge to afford a view. Key had already decided to have the steel posts only ten feet apart. He’d spent his whole life looking at balcony rails with too few supports. This fence was going to keep people from falling; they certainly were going to lean on it. Ronnie was in the seat of the little Farmall tractor, backing to each spot, and Arthur guided the small auger where he wanted it.
“When is August?” Ronnie asked him.
“You don’t know your months?’
“I don’t know what day it is.”
“I don’t either,” Key told him. “It’s late June. July. August.” The big man guided the steel blade into the spade hole he’d made. “Go,” he told Ronnie, and Ronnie switched on the auger motor and the drill turned into the dirt. Each hole was three feet deep, which would leave a five-foot pole.
“You ever build a fence before?” Arthur asked him.
“You know I haven’t.”
“This is hardly work,” he told Ronnie, pointing at the rolls of chain link, the bales of pipe, the boxes of fittings. “It’s a kit. Like an Erector set.”
“Okay,” the boy said. “You ready to move?”
“Go.”
Ronnie motored the tractor forward and then backed to the next marked spot.
“You don’t know what an Erector set is, do you?”
“Is it like a toy?”
“What’d you play with as a kid?”
“I wasn’t a kid. I’m a kid now.”
Key pointed at Ronnie. “You’re not a kid now. You’re a journeyman in the construction arts. But your dad didn’t get you an Erector set.”
“Just tell me what it is. My dad wasn’t exactly around.”
“Ever?”
“I might have met the man.”
“This was down in Joliet?” Arthur had spray-painted a yellow dot on the auger at three feet and he watched it now. The thick red dirt rolled out of the hole in waves.
“Not in but all around. We moved some.”
Key waved at Ronnie. “That’s enough, lift her out.” Ronnie raised the auger and turned it off. Arthur walked the canyon edge to the next mark. Below him a hundred yards two small eagles rode their wings in the glassy air. Today he could smell the river, the water on the rocks, the topmost spill of a hundred tons of air slowly bumping and roiling down the vivid gorge.
Ronnie drove out into the sage twenty feet. He had become expert with the standard transmissions, and he reversed fluidly and backed again to where Key now waited, his arm out to receive the post digger. “Good. You’re good.”
“What grade did you finish?” He set the blade and said, “Go.”
Ronnie started the auger. “Tenth, eleventh.”
“You got to high school?”
“Ninth.”
Every time the rotating drill would strike rock or shudder, Key would shake the armature until it broke through or freed itself.
“When did you first get arrested?”
“Come on, Art. Let’s make a fence.”
“We’re talking.”
“Okay, when’d you get arrested? Just what the fuck is your sad story, big man?”
They could hear the blade rankling rock and the motor groaned. “Shut it down,” he told the boy. They lifted the steel post digger from the ground and Arthur went back and picked up the six-foot St. Albans bar. He dropped it into the hole and tapped a few times experimentally. Then he assumed a grip and lifted the heavy steel bar straight up. He drove it into the hole and Ronnie felt the tump it made striking sandstone. Arthur instantly pulled the bar out and dropped it into the sand. He folded his arms and stuffed his hands under his arms and looked at Ronnie. “Don’t ever do that without gloves.” He walked off a little ways, breathing through his nose. He could see the two guys from the electrical company move their cherry picker to the next pole and begin again. A two-man crew like that was good to watch; they knew the drill and did three hours’ work in one. Still, the two heavy black wires looked odd to Key, out of place. He drew a breath and pulled his leather work gloves out of his back pocket and put them on.
“You okay?” Ronnie said.
“I should have had my gloves on. Put your gloves on.”
“I’m just driving.”
“Put them on.” Ronnie pulled his gloves on.
Arthur Key picked up the steel bar and again drove it into the shallow posthole. Then twice and three, four, five, six times. He finally stood and dropped the bar to the side and guided the auger back in. “Let’s see what we see,” he said. This time when Ronnie started the auger there was another noise as it engaged the ground, a grinding snap, and pieces of broken red rock began to spill over the lip as the bit went down. At three feet, Arthur signaled and Ronnie hoisted the turning auger up into the air.
They continued down the line, the fresh atmosphere of the river rising over Arthur Key as he worked the precipice. The fence was to be one hundred and ten yards in a winding line along the edge, thirty-two holes. When Darwin whistled them for lunch, there were ten to go. Arthur Key lifted the auger armature and locked it in place so Ronnie could take the tractor and gas it after they ate.
>
The two linesmen were finishing the outlet boxes at the base of the last pole, two boxes: 110 and 220. They drilled the boxes fast against the wooden post, and then they stood and opened and closed the latched doors.
“You’re all set,” one of the men told Darwin.
“Why do we need that?” Ronnie asked Arthur Key. They had removed their gloves and were working at their hands in the whitewash bucket.
“We don’t,” Key told him. “It’s for the show. There’s going to be some lights and some cameras and such. More than generators could do.”
“Is he going to build a permanent structure out here?” the company man asked Darwin. He was looking at the stacks of plywood and lumber. His partner had walked over to the edge of the gorge and now returned appraising the various features of the construction site.
“I don’t think so.”
“This all smells a lot like money,” the man said.
“It’s like those temples where they sacrificed the virgins,” his partner said. “It’s going to be something. I may drive down from Boise. You going to build a ramp?”
“Too much community college for Brad,” the driver said to Darwin.
“The Incas had a whole temple for it. A hundred tons of stone so they could cut some girl’s throat.”
“Enough with the Incas,” the driver said. “Those are hot now,” he told Darwin, indicating the electrical boxes. “You’re good to go.”
“Thanks,” Darwin said. “You want to stay out and have some lunch?” He was cutting thick ham sandwiches diagonally with the butcher knife and tomatoes protruded.
“No, thanks. Whenever we get down here, we swing back up through Theron and eat at the Black Cat. If you haven’t been up there, it’s worth the trip. If you’re crazy for curly fries and buffalo burgers.”
After the power company truck drove away, the men took the paper plates laden with the sandwiches thick with cheddar and purple onions and romaine and mustard and sat at the blue table. Darwin had a jar of potato salad and Ronnie coated his with black pepper the way he’d learned that Arthur Key ate his. Art set the two-gallon glass jar of giant dill pickles on the blue table and speared one out with the long knife, slicing it quickly lengthwise and dropping half onto Ronnie’s plate. “This is a handsome picnic,” Arthur Key said. “You want a pickle, Darwin?”