by Ron Carlson
Arthur Key turned to him. “You don’t need to talk. We’ll just walk out a ways.”
The moon had now left the rust of the atmosphere lifting off the earth, and the men and their shadows ahead of Ronnie made fabulous jointed contraptions drifting over the granulated plain. Ronnie was glad to have Darwin ahead with his boots on if there were snakes.
After twenty minutes, they came to the first bend beneath the first low hillock, and Darwin stopped and stood, his hands in his pockets. The light and the angles had continued to shift and shorten, but the effect was powerful and quieting. “It’s funny to have company,” he said. Ronnie and Arthur waited to see if they would walk on or turn toward camp.
“Why can’t you guys sleep?” Ronnie asked. He was almost whispering. “Is this going to happen to me?”
Darwin turned to the boy, his face only a shadow.
“I had a crazy roommate at juvie two years ago and he was always waking me up. ‘Are you asleep? Are you asleep?’ Like that, and bumping me. ‘Are you asleep?’ But except for him, I can sleep. If I start thinking, I just play some golf. I set up in the thick rough, a bad lie under a tree and all I’ve got is a three-iron, and I take my time and I’m asleep before I make the backswing. I’ve done some things I’m sorry for now, and I’ve fucking disappointed everyone I’ve ever known, but my mother told me that God also loves the wicked. I don’t know, wicked is tough, but I’ll take it.”
“You’re not wicked,” Darwin said. He lifted his hands and started walking back to their summer quarters. Ronnie turned quickly; he did not want to be last in line now with nothing behind him except the thousand forms of the sage, if that was what they were. He fell in step with Arthur and they walked abreast behind the older man. Their shadows were cut with precision into the dusty road.
“I’d like to tape up where that asshole shot the tent,” Ronnie said. “Have we got something for it?” Arthur Key put his hand now on Ronnie’s shoulder, a moment, and then the three men swung their legs without talking toward the moonstruck camp.
With daylight, they painted the sides of the ramp park service brown, including the fold-down railing, and Ronnie painted the platform white. He rolled a first coat on before noon, walking back from the cliff edge like a man mopping a floor. He was tentative at first, near the lip, reaching with his pole and roller, then after that was established white in a three-foot margin, he relaxed and didn’t miss a spot, striping each section once and twice so no wood or the shadow of plywood showed through, not a single holiday. While the huge white surface was still wet, he and Arthur fanned a light spray of sand over the whole thing.
At lunch, Ronnie couldn’t stop looking over at the construction. The paint had changed it utterly, magnified its oddness in the natural world. Now, finally, it looked anomalous, brand new and out of place. Ronnie drank a huge tumbler of lime Kool-Aid down steadily without stopping. He’d taken the kerchief he’d worn all morning and tied it around his forehead, but still the sweat ran into his eyes. His brown shoulders shined wetly as he chewed on the large roast beef sandwich Darwin had set before him. He ate as if thinking about the next big thing to paint. The sandwiches over the summer had only gotten bigger, messier, as Ronnie had learned to like lettuce and then the grainy mustard and then onions, white and purple, anything that Arthur had, and now this sandwich brimmed with tomatoes and strips of Gruyère cheese and dripped green salsa and mayonnaise. Darwin filled Ronnie’s glass again.
“The second coat won’t take you an hour and will only be three gallons,” Arthur told Ronnie. “You can use the same roller. This isn’t fine work; we want to leave a surface.” He took the young man’s chin and turned his face up to see the bruise beneath his eye, and then he splayed Ronnie’s fingers to see where his knuckles had been blue, but now they were spotted with white paint, and Ronnie smiled. He put his feet out and showed his painted work boots.
“You’re a workingman, all right.”
“This is what you want to see,” Ronnie said, standing. He pulled his faded blue denim shirt out of his pants and showed Arthur the blue stain under his heart. “The first thing he did was kick me right here.” It was the size of a football. He put his finger in the purple center and made a white spot. “That was when I started fighting.”
Arthur Key put his hand on Ronnie’s lowest rib and moved it along with an even pressure. “Anything sharp?”
“All sore, nothing sharp.”
“You want some coffee, Arthur?” Darwin asked.
“Somebody’s coming,” Ronnie said. The men all looked north and before Darwin had poured the coffee, they saw Curtis Diff’s big blue Suburban come over the low hill.
“It’s the landlord,” Arthur said.
“And he’s about to see the biggest white thing in Idaho,” Ronnie said. “I’ll take some of that coffee.” He was tucking his shirt in. “Do the laundry, fight, paint.” Ronnie sat down to the last bite of his lunch and cocked his head. “And listen. There’s somebody else coming. Bigger.”
Roman Griffith was driving the Suburban and Curtis Diff got out of the passenger seat. “Oh shit, Roman,” he said loudly. “We’ve missed lunch.”
Roman waved at Darwin and came over and took the man’s hand. He looked all around. “Good,” he said. “You’re close. Get this done, because I’ve got some genuine projects back at the ranch.” He looked at Ronnie. “Who got paint all over this welder?” Now all the men shook hands and Darwin gestured with the big enameled coffeepot.
“Sure sure,” Diff said. He sat down at the table. “We saw your asphalt go through town and thought we’d come for an update.”
Now a red semitractor appeared on the hill pulling one and a half oval bins. There was a neon green two-wheel roller on a derrick behind the cab.
Ronnie stood. He’d been waiting for this. “Are we ready, Art?”
“We’re good right now,” Art told him. “You bladed that perfectly a long time ago. Watch this guy back these trailers.”
Arthur Key walked out to the ranch road and spoke to the driver for a minute and then the huge rig pulled past the gate forty yards and started backing. Art stood by the fence gatepole and whistled every ten seconds or so, and soon the half trailer rolled in the yard, just like a baby carriage, and then the larger bin followed and straightened as the driver brought the assemblage back along the bladed dirt runway, with Key walking beside it, an arm on the rear corner, until it was tangent with the great white wooden ramp.
The driver came around and climbed up to snap open the comealongs and attach the cables so his little lift winch could lower the steamroller. The hydraulics groaned as the strange-looking device was lifted free and swung into the air. Key guided it down until it sat in the sand.
“LeRoy!” Diff called, standing. “Get some of Darwin’s coffee before we do any road building.”
LeRoy waved and walked over to the campsite with Arthur Key. “Well, I’ll be damned,” the driver said. “It’s the big boss. They’re talking about this deal all the way to Canada.” He turned to Darwin. “That was some party at New Year’s, Darwin.” He lowered his voice and pulled his old ballcap off his head. “I heard about Corina, and I’m sorry for your loss.”
“It’s a new year,” Darwin said. He looked at Key. “Sit down, LeRoy.”
“I don’t want this load to cool too much, but I could have a half.”
Ronnie had already uncoiled the hose from the well pump and was laying it over to the green steamroller. Key saw the big crescent wrench in the young man’s back pocket, something he would have forgotten a month ago. They all drank coffee and watched Ronnie loosen the threaded steel plugs from each of the big drum wheels.
“This year about got away,” LeRoy said. “I was working that water plant above Jackpot, all that Idaho water for the Nevada casinos, and am only back with my rig for a month. Let’s have that party again, and this time I’ll bring an antelope. My brother and I are going to Wyoming in October. I mean if you want to.”
Ronni
e saw the men watching him as he fed the hose into the front wheeldrum and walked back across the yard in the steady sunlight to the pump. He pulled the handle up and they could hear the water hissing. “A gallon of water, according to Mr. Arthur Key, the mastermind up here, weighs eight pounds.” He crossed now over to the table. “How’s the oil in that thing?” he asked LeRoy.
LeRoy smiled. “Brand new,” he said to Ronnie. “This kid’s ready to go.”
“We are having that party,” Diff said. “Come a day early, so we can start cooking. And bring your brother, LeRoy. These years. We’ve got to start them right.”
LeRoy went to the steamroller and sat in the metal tractor seat and started the thing, choking it and then setting the idle. He showed Ronnie the two slotted gears: forward and reverse.
“We’re in the way of progress,” Diff said to Roman. “Let’s go back to the ranch before we get in trouble.” He’d been watching Darwin and now simply nodded and said, “We’ll see you around.”
“Come by,” Roman said, and the two men climbed in their vehicle, circled, and drove south.
LeRoy showed Arthur how to work the chute chains and lever on each of his trailers, and they began laying the steaming black asphalt. LeRoy ran a line of the black stuff in a conical stripe from the lip of the ramp out until the long trailer was empty and then using the second smaller load, they ran the bead evenly to the gate and in a short turn onto the ranch road itself. Arthur Key had made an elemental dray out of a railroad tie and the big chain, and he now dragged that over behind their little Farmall tractor, a machine that had done so much of the season’s work. Key had Ronnie stand on the railroad tie as he dragged it slowly out the same route. Then they turned and bladed it slowly back into a smooth broad cake, six feet wide, grainy black and glistening.
They had LeRoy run the steamroller, now at three thousand pounds, up onto the waiting surface and he showed Ronnie the graduated steering and told him to do the center first. Ronnie conducted the bright green machine the length of the roadway out the fencegate and around the short corner, making a shiny ribbon of the middle, and then he reversed, grinding slowly toward the wooden ramp, rolling the heavy drum wheel just onto the platform, ironing a seal there.
He then rolled the north edge of the road up and back and then the south edge. The camp was clear in the bright day. It was ninety degrees and the sky had blued out to a high white. Arthur dismantled his homemade plow and walked out to talk to LeRoy by his idling semitractor. The truck’s rhythmic purring and the crunch of the steel rollers were the only sounds in the world. Ronnie rode the two heavy rollers up and down the brand-new pavement, shining it like an apple.
When it was perfect and pronounced perfect by Ronnie, the men drained the water from the drums and reloaded the little road press onto LeRoy’s truck. After the asphalt man had departed, Ronnie found his paint roller where he had left it wrapped in wet plastic and commenced the second coat on the flying ramp at Rio Difficulto. He was now black tar and white paint and well into the day. It was still and hot. Ronnie roped each side of the folding rails and lowered and raised them to paint each side. They were heavy and he leaned into it. When each rail was erect, it formed a secure brace, and Arthur planned to bolt the three sides permanently in place when the show was all over. People would have to try to fall off this thing.
Arthur used the hour to measure and mark the middle of their smooth asphalt approach, so they could stripe it later with spraypainted white dashes. They would mark the platform with black dashes. Darwin had waved and gone into the tent to nap.
The air had stopped. The plateau smelled of the baking oil road. Ronnie was on the ramp coiling the rope. It was when the next vehicle, Marion’s Explorer, came up the old ranch road that Arthur Key saw what he saw. Marion turned into the camp, and he waved for her to stop short of the tent yard. He walked over and she slid down and retrieved a small blue cooler from the backseat along with two shirts, ironed on hangers.
“That was a great dinner and a long night last night, and it’s too early for these”—she showed him the brown bottles of beer on ice in the cooler—“but they’ll be good later. And you could wear one of these shirts anytime you please, Mr. Key.” She was handing him the shirts when he saw something.
NINETEEN
ARTHUR KEY KNEW what he had seen, but even then he put his hand up as if to grab Ronnie, grab the world beyond. The breath went out of him as if drawn by a kick. For some reason, he laid the shirts down on the ground and he turned and looked again. He must have looked at Marion, because now he could remember the fear on her face. Then he loped over to the flying ramp, and he ran across its perfect floor solid to the edge and the abyss below. While he ran, the air, the white air became the sky in a dream, in his morning thoughts and his stomach felt it all. He could see where Ronnie had been marking with the yellow wax crayons so they could paint the center line. The friction song of the river met him as a surprising noise. Ronnie had not cried out. Arthur scanned the cliffs below and the variegated broken palisades, and the great spillages of red rock, all magnified in the terrified air now, shimmering and hard to read. He could not see Ronnie. Behind him he heard Darwin shout from the campsite. There was another voice, maybe Marion’s. Key stood still and looked hard into the confusing depth and distance of the inscrutable canyon wall. Darwin called again, and Key’s hand now pointed down, although there was nothing he could perceive. He moved quickly deftly down the ramp and over onto the ground below, weaving through the shaded undercarriage in the timbers. He knew where the footing was, and he followed the trail out into the daylight again toward the three sandstone terraces where the men had sometimes lunched. He was trying to move carefully and said it aloud, “Move carefully. Watch these steps,” but he was not moving carefully and he knew he was running. “Don’t run,” he said. From the last stone table, Key could assume an angled look back at the rock face.
He saw the rope.
Without measuring, he started down a scree fall they’d never stepped in. There was no footing beneath this; they’d examined it. Leaning back in the broken rocks, he dug with his heels, sliding two and three feet with each footfall. He lost control of his descent, even stepping backward and kicking back for purchase, and his speed increased as in skiing, and he knew if he came to the lip of this spillage, he was going to fall. Arthur steered himself with his outspread hands in the fractured sandstone talus. He had to lie back completely to stop. Then he was sliding again without recourse. Now he heard Darwin call his name, and he could see the man above him on the ramp. His boots came to a rock the size of an easy chair and he did stop.
Key stood carefully and looked straight down into the distant silver-green river. He waved up at Darwin and pointed south and began to feel the rock on which he stood begin to slide. He was lost now and turned to face the fall when he came past a shelf and he stepped onto it, his heart kicking. There was room here for a minute, not two, and he heard the concussion of his last rock blasting itself against the canyon floor. He toed along the stone ledge, his hands grappling into the mountainside for any help. This route took him fifteen feet to another boulder which offered him no choice. He had to jump even to get a leg started and he climbed the protrusion, crawling full body on the sunheated sandstone. Then another boulder which he pulled himself over and then another on his knees. He could see the rope, two taut lines thirty yards farther. It hung straight and still. There was weight on it, he could tell. He could not see above to what it was snagged on. Key had to ascend through a wide crevasse riven in the red rock and then go across a narrow sill, which crumbled with each boot step. The old river was louder now, and its modulations seemed distinct; it sounded to Arthur Key like a loud and frightened conversation.
When he came upon the rope, he could not reach it. It was ten inches beyond his hand. In a moment of clear vision—free from thought or hope—Key waited. The two lines hung tightly about a foot apart and he could reach neither. Now he could not see Darwin. Neither could he
see by what means the rope was suspended. He could not get farther down from here, and there was no up. He could only go back. The river was talking now, and the discussion was like his breathing, and he drew a breath and when he let it out, it led him into the air. He was surprised to be in the air like that. He leaned out from the earth until the overbalance claimed him, and he closed a hand on each length of the rope where it hung. He was now at forty-five degrees, and his feet could not gather him back to the world. He stepped one foot from his ledge and then carefully lowered his weight onto his hands, and he stepped out into the air with the other. He was hanging above the talking river gorge. Then he slowly brought his hands together and clenched both strands and using his boots to grasp and drag a coil of rope, he descended hand by hand twenty yards to where the rope ran against the rock. Here he found purchase with his feet on a chiseled outcropping. He sat on the rough stone and looked over. Ronnie Panelli dangled ten yards below, upside down.
His first words were a broken whisper, and then his voice arrived and he said, “Ronnie.” Arthur Key kicked a heel hold into the granular canyon wall. His hands could get no tighter around the rough rope and he tested the weight, pulling it all up a foot. He’d felt the tipped pressure of vertigo, but now it rinsed away and settled and the air seemed as substantial as the rock. He wasn’t sick and he was not afraid. He would just do this. “Ronnie,” he called now, and he leaned against the broken rocks and he pulled, each lift an armlength. He did not know how Ronnie was caught in the rope, and he moved as a fluid, without stop and without jerking or hoisting out of time, just hand over hand bringing the boy back. The fluctuating sound of the river was his heartbeat in his ears. He had only one thought and that was: This is why I was made so big, so I could lift this boy.