BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 66

EARLY JUNE 1980

GLEN AND DAVID

"There's only one way to find out," Glen says drolly, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He takes a last puff, throws the butt into the disked soil. "Jump in."

They are out on Engleson's place, they've been talking about doing this since early spring. Glen was back from Sun Valley licking his wounds after a bad divorce, found work with John, who is his family's neighbor. The proximity of the Butte and Atomic City, the possibility of heading to there from here, drinking a few beers (or many), coming back after closing hours—it looked enticing, and you tend to be inventive when trying to break farming's solitary monotony.

Wrong time and wrong place, David thinks, but he lets himself be swept up into it. "The time for takin' tarts is when tarts is passin'"—he doesn't think this is what his uncle's wisdom was aimed at, but a wrench can be a hammer when you need one. He shuts down the tractor and jumps into the farm pickup. Glen turns off the farm two-way radio. "Going dark," he says. They head to the northwest corner, go through the fence that someone keeps cutting and onto the trail going through the desert. It heads right to the Big Butte, so they're told. They'll just have to improvise if it doesn't.

Two ruts snake between rock knolls and sometimes over them. Glen came prepared with a mini cooler containing a six pack and each of them already has a cold one in his hand. David knows where this probably leads but beginnings have such promise—he lets himself imagine that anything might happen in the next swath of time while knowing likely nothing of note will.

It's not quite a jailbreak but it has that element. The cut wires, the inside and outside, imprisonment by a job—self-imprisonment, sure, a tame version of incarceration, but still—and sudden freedom in the world. He doesn't know if Glen gets the rush that he does and he doesn't ask.

The road lacks forgiveness. Sharp rocks pepper it enough that diligence is required, the wrong speed and angle bound to end up in a flat tire. Or worse, a hole in the oil pan. Sometimes Glen comes to a place and nearly stops, inching his way around a precipice or mud hole—a late remnant of a not-so-recent rainstorm. Their destination Atomic City, out by the Butte. That hill gets a little bigger as they drive toward it.

They grab the last beer about the time David starts understanding how bad an idea this was.

***

The Atomic City bar isn't much bigger than a poor family's living room. It's attached to a cinderblock convenience store of minimal goods, the town being a mile off the through-highway and having only ten or twelve residents and an equal amount of empty buildings. The south window, small as it is, frames the Big Butte, and David can see movement, after a moment asks, "Are those parasailers?"

Elmer Delzer, from his stool behind the bar, says, "Paragliders, to be correct. Sailers are motorized. But, yup." He pauses. "Been doin' it for five, ten years now. Two guys got killed, six, seven years ago. Equipment failure. Forgetting to screw in a bolt or something like that. Guess that's not the equipment's fault, though, is it."

David stares at the spiraling pair, still rising in a thermal. "How do they keep from landing on the Site?"

"Don't. That's where they usually end up."

"How does that go over?" The Site—a secret government facility with rumored and unverified projects and aims—had dozens of nuclear reactors, thousands of employees, all sworn to secrecy. You didn't stray on to its land without being found and confronted in just a few minutes.

"'Bout as you'd expect. Gives Security something to do besides sleep."

David watches the pair move through the sky, far enough apart to not interfere with each other but close enough to interact in a sort of dance. Their movements, he thinks, don't different much from the hawks he was gawking at just a couple hours ago. Forty-eight, he had counted, spiraling in updrafts above his fallow work, one dropping now and then at a surprising speed to grab a rodent whose cover he'd exposed. On one trip around the acreage, he had watched a rabbit stare down a hawk, the bird having missed on his dive and, despite being only six feet away, unable to see the rabbit at close range. When the hawk, able to see from afar but not up close, turned his head, the rabbit moved toward escape, then stopped when the hawk's eye turned back toward him. Like the childhood game the kids played on the schoolhouse steps as they waited for the bus home: red light, green light, one-two-three, the leader said with his back turned, while the rest of them ran toward him, hoping not to be seen before he turned back around. If spotted, they were out of the game. Which the rabbit would be, too, were he espied.

Two men already sit at the ten customer bar, which may have been a diner at one time, judging from the round, spinning stools and the kind of counter seen in diners up and down the valley—a red vinyl top with silver metal trim. The men wear uniforms identifying them as BLM employees. "If I may," one says, excusing his interruption. "They have more control over their chutes than you'd think. They only end up on the Site if they run into unexpected conditions."

Glen, ever sarcastic, takes a deep drag on his cigarette, flicks its ash in a glass bowl. "And that never happens," he says with a deadpan delivery.

Both BLM men laugh. The speaker lifts his glass. "Touche."

The afternoon progresses, names get exchanged, the owner imbibing and revealing his plan to turn the place into a tourist destination that caters to gliders—who he assumes are rich. "Restaurant, high-end, the whole shebang," he says and no one has the heart to dispute the efficacy of his dream.

The BLM men have just come off the Butte, it turns out, where they cleaned up after the fire lookout who just quit—"Well, fired," says the other employee. "He took a wrong turn on the way down, just happened to be the first turn. It took us three days to pull the truck up, he's lucky he survived."

The first employee looks at Glen and David. "So," he surreptitiously says, "If you're looking for a job, there's an opening."

Glen turns to David. "There you are," he says. "You were just saying the other day you'd had enough of farming."

The second employee says, "You can start tomorrow." He takes a big drink. "Or, given the state we'll all be in tomorrow, make it the day after."

Not that many opportunities come his way. Especially not in this way. "Sold," David says, expecting regret at some point, either in the near future or the far.

They all clink glasses and the first BLM guy buys a round. "Courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management," he says, turning to his fellow worker. "Put that expense in the 'employee search expenses' column."

The trip back home after closing time requires two six packs, the going slower in the dark, the stops for urination frequent. Their first stop came when Glen was amazed while 'draining his lizard', his eyes accidentally catching the moon as a backdrop to the Butte. "Whoa!" he exclaimed, as if the notion of a moon, of a mountain on the desert, were news. "There ye be," he added, in what he thought was a Scottish accent. It worked for David.

***

"Think of me on those days you're on the tractor," says David, the trip back to Engleson's completed. It's three o'clock in the morning. "Try not to cry. I'll be perched above the valley like an aircraft controller."

"With no aircraft," Glen reminds him. He inhales smoke, makes a smoke ring, fully exhales, starts in a singsong voice, "I'm the King of Bunker Hill—"

David joins in. "I can fight and I can kill."

Amused by themselves, they lean against the truck, self-impressed. "I don't imagine everything here is where it started when we left," Glen says, indicating the tools, air compressor, and parts in the pickup bed.

"As long as it's still in there somewhere, you'll find it. Eventually."

David falls asleep in his truck, wakes at sunrise at Engleson's on his last day of farm work. He thinks.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston