Five Skies
Page 23
Darwin sat up when he heard the thing collapse, and he stood and walked with Arthur over to the precipice where they stood out of the thinning smoke and saw the glowing litter down the rockside cliff, scattered embers and the red edges of paper-thin wood the size of a hand. Their eyes were out and unadjusted, but they knew the canyon was dark again under the starlight, and now they could hear the river chanting again as it would chant tomorrow and in the season to come.
Darwin had his hands in his pockets. “You got it all,” he said.
Arthur Key watched the flickering remnants below them die bit by bit.
“Let’s go down to the ranch tonight,” Darwin said. “I don’t want to stay out here. Do you?”
“I don’t.”
The men assembled their kits and they tied the tent closed and cleared up their kitchen, putting everything away. Darwin drove them slowly out of the campsite and south on the ranch road. Arthur tapped the overhead light in the cab and looked at Ronnie’s papers. They were drawings. He had drawn each project: the tent, the utility poles, the runway, the ramp, the fence, even the camera station. There was a sideview of the canyon with a dimension arrow in it and a question mark in the middle. He’d put his name on each page and at the top of each had marked “Not to scale.”
OCTOBER
IN OCTOBER of the year on the abandoned plateau above the deep river canyon, a vehicle approached along the hard dirt of the old ranch road. It was the white flatbed truck, and the driver slowed at the gate and turned into the weed-grown campsite. What remained was a short inventory of the summer story: the camera platform which had now three colors of spray paint on it, graffiti names and figures, and the wooden rail was broken out and in pieces on the ground; the pallet floor where the workers’ tent had been; a short stack of lumber and plywood; a steel fence along the canyon perimeter; and the dozens of cement circles scattered in the larger mesa; they would have been footings for the stadium seats. The asphalt path was now bleached gray and lined with bright green bunchgrass thriving in the runoff. The ramp site was a pocket of charred red rock also now dotted with the green thistles and weeds of fall. When locals came out here, one would point at the burned rock and use that hand in the air to try to exaggerate the size of the great wooden ramp. Then the lightning strike, also with the hands lifting spread, as if they’d been eyewitnesses, as if they’d stood here on the very night.
Now the old white truck drove up and circled and stopped, throwing a spavined autumnal shadow, and Roman Griffith slid out of the passenger seat and walked over to the bare tent flooring. Darwin was driving and he came around the back of the truck and pried the first pallet loose with his shovel handle and threw it onto the truck. In a minute after loading the debris, Darwin drifted over to the chain-link fence and looked again into the chasm, now crisp, deep red and blue in the October light. Today he could barely hear the river. When he went back over to the truck, Roman had stacked the pallets and loaded most of the lumber. Darwin told him, “We can take the particleboard, but I won’t work with it.”
“We’ve got planking for the roof,” Roman said. “We’ll just get this out of here before somebody throws it in the canyon or burns it up. We can use it for a walkway if it rains.” He was securing his chains now and slid the hook end over to Darwin, who set it in the truck sleeve. “Let’s cruise,” Roman said. “We’re done here.”
Darwin pulled himself up into the truck and shut the door. He wheeled the vehicle in a large turn through the sage, not bothering to back up. He stopped at the ranch road and the two men took half an hour and sistered a section of two-by-four to the broken gatepost with two screws and three wire cinches. Then they tied two strands of barbed wire across the gate gap. It wouldn’t stop anybody who knew to come out here, but it would no longer be an open invitation.