BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 71

DAVID AND KALI

I was told that before the season's end I should hike to the Butte's north cone and spend the night looking over the plain. There, the forty nuclear reactors of the top-secret "Site", purportedly small ones and mostly for test purposes, peppered the desert, their presence evident from the lights illuminating their perimeters. Kali and I chose a half-moon night with clear skies, the only chance of fires coming not from storms but careless campers or tourists—maybe a wheel spinning off a trailer and causing a roadside spark. We started out as the sun set, the walk to take about an hour, and I carried a pack that included a sleeping bag, a flashlight, water and some snacks.

We descended the slope of the home crater rim and then took the consequent ascent to the other cone, neither rim well-defined given the loess and sand that millennia had covered them with. We required the flashlight near the hike's end, my time estimate not off but misevaluating how quickly the light disappears. When we reached the top, our tiring trek proved worth the work. A sort of slow motion fireworks lit the desert, a constant kind, missing the element of dissipating and recurring light but still impressive. Like all spectacles, it stopped my mind's narrative. Thousands of workers labored below me, as hidden as the soil's subterranean organisms.

I laid the sleeping bag out, we shared some water and gazed at the scene, counting the areas, spotting what we thought were individuals walking outside some. Vehicle headlights occasionally turned on, left a lot, its trail elsewhere like a very slowly falling star. After a while, Kali looked toward me. "Do you think we need to worry about ticks?" she asked.

It was that season, and the sagebrush always presents the possibility. "Would you like me to check you?" I jokingly asked.

The question tweaked her interest. Her sly grin betrayed it. "It might require a hands-on approach," she said. "Given the low light."

I pretended to consider it. "I can do that."

She lay back on the bag, I unbuttoned her shirt and removed it. "This will be a slow process," I warned her.

"Thoroughness is a virtue, my grandmother always said."

There was enough light to provide slight shadows, and it occurred to me that visual artists understood light as most of us do not. I sought, however, not to understand it but to appreciate its effects. My eyes took in the long stretches of skin, the contours of clavicle, rib, sternum, breasts, the little hollows near bone and navel, all of which I carefully touched. "Nothing there," I said. "And nothing there."

I undid her belt, slowly pulled her shorts down, worked her panties down her legs and past her ankles. The night was still warm enough that her nakedness was comfortable. "This may require closer inspection," I said.

"By all means." Her voice was a strained whisper.

My hands paced their way over her legs, up to her thighs where hair began, my fingers finding the tuft and lingering there while I put my face to her ankles, kissing the bone there, moving up her shin, sometimes using my tongue. She made sounds of pleasure, a kind of guide for me, as my face found the cleft and rested. I buried my tongue in her, my hands went to her breasts, her legs parted, her knees rose. "I think I found one," I said, momentarily rising. "It may take some time to remove."

She pushed my head back down. "Make sure you get it. Be slow, though."

I took my time but it didn't take long. I rested my face there, feeling her body pulsate and never wanting to move away.

"What can I do for you?" she said when she had recovered.

"Your pleasure is my pleasure, my dear," I said. She dressed, the temperature on any desert dropping fast after dark but especially so atop the Butte. We sat and looked at the reactor array, every once in a while a vehicle's headlights connecting one facility to another. We invented constellation names for the array beneath us. We weren't particularly good at it—"Atom," "Einstein's Hair," "the Waldo," were our three best, but "the shovel" and "the boomerang" were the only two someone unversed in our private nomenclature could have guessed. "The Oldsmobile, The Milkshake, The Crochet Hook, The Armadillo." Finally, tired and cold, we used the flashlight to make our way back, though in a pinch the moonlight would have sufficed.

About halfway back, she said, "David?" I stopped and turned toward her. "That was nuclear."

I smiled, to make sure she saw the smile put the flashlight at my chin and shined it on my face. "Indeed it was. And tick free!"

***

Two weeks later, another fire started, this one man-made. It ended up bigger by far. It was started by someone I knew.

Farmers sometimes burned stubble after harvest to ease next year's tillage. Rid of trash, the soil turns freely. Otherwise, field residue impedes implements—plugs the disc, piles up on the chisel shanks, clogs the plow bottoms. If you plow stubble under year after year instead of burning, it builds up but doesn't deteriorate, requiring more and more nitrogen to break it down—nitrogen that crops need. Horst was burning barley stubble to prepare for a winter wheat crop. His fire got out of hand.

He couldn't get away with mistakes forgivable to farmers closer to town, where fires, at worst, might jump a fenceline to the neighbors', draw up a canal bank to an adjoining field, or move across a road. Horst's fields, bordering desert, required a disked perimeter as a fire line, separating it from the volatile cheatgrass on BLM ground. But a disk couldn't pass over his farm's rock knolls. Disking around them helped somewhat, but the disk's cutting action worked poorly when pulled on a curve. It slid, didn't dig in and roll the stubble under, leaving brief stretches that, in the right conditions, fire might trickle out through and into the desert. Which Horst's fire did. He called the fire in even before I spotted it.

I spent the next two weeks monitoring the blaze's movements. It spread with the winds, reaching Engleson's the same day it started. The fire tended northeast, the prevailing wind out of the southwest; northward for a time when it came from the south; eastward some on the afternoons it drove in from the west. Crews flew in from other states to help our strapped units. A half dozen bulldozers worked on fire lines but the blaze jumped these on gusty days. The dozers faced the same problem Horst did—rocky knolls with minimal, but still enough, vegetation to let the fire trickle through.

Twenty thousand acres. Thirty. Fifty. A hundred thousand. The fire made it to the Butte, closed all desert area roads, eventually shut down the highway running from Blackfoot to Arco. Had Kali been up on the Butte when that road closed she could have stayed with me, but instead we were effectively cut off.

The BLM gave me a choice as the fire closed in on the Butte, and I opted to weather the danger. Only a perfect alignment of conditions would threaten my life, the vegetation being sparse on the Butte's slopes. But if the wind pushed sparks from one plant to another, however widely spaced they were, a trickle of fire could come up to the summit and reach the lookout. Smoke presented more danger, but if things got bad I could always be helicoptered out—except in worst-case scenarios.

Anticipation depends on a perceived future. My vision that included Kali's reappearance gave way to her continued absence as the fire's life extended. I began fretting. Love, lacking the presence of that open pathway between us, took on a form closer to the one I'd always known, one associated with will.

And hope. Prayer, it came to me, is just a version of hope, an exertion of will upon the future. I didn't pray, but I hoped, unable to refrain from doing so. I radioed in coordinates, the locations of hot spots, the directions that fingers of fire took into the various sloughs of the desert, but I obsessed on Kali's absence during what became a miserable two weeks of prison. I could, of course, leave, go down the Butte's north face and head to Blackfoot, but duty prevailed—that was irrevocable, a character trait I couldn't erase.

What makes life difficult, I have come to believe, is the misuse of, the misunderstanding of, and the conflicting nature of different time frames. The speed of the fire, at least at my distance from it, seemed plodding, while near it—say, to the animals and insects in its path—it raced beyond the means to avoid it. The flow of my relationship with Kali, once moving at a speed attuned to our lives, now sputtered and clashed, and my need for her, desire for her, fear of losing her, took on a quickness too great to act upon. I lacked the rhythm necessary for a coherent existence, that lack threatening to pull me apart—though only figuratively, I knew. That knowledge was of no help as a calming aid.

The fire jumped Highway 26 north of the Butte, which got the Site fire crews involved. Already they had built fire lines and, lacking no budget restraints, did so with perfection. They set backfires to extend the dozer lines, thus protecting the nuclear facilities, and their fires met Horst's, extinguishing all of the various threads of flame in the absence of fuel. Farmers to the east established their firelines, too, and the lands surrounding their farms, arable and less rocky, posed less of a problem for creating breaks. When the fire went out, I packed up and went down the Butte, intent on seeing Kali, after calling headquarters and telling them I was quitting.

***

With the fire quenched, save for the mop-up, I drove down the Butte past both charred and untouched areas, the difference between them seemingly random but no doubt having a cause—an intersection of wind, vegetation and terrain in a specific moment of time, one unlike any other before it or after. Any significant rain now would erode the ash first and then the uppermost layer of soil, push it down the steep gulleys in thick streams of gray and black. At some point in the next couple months, unless no rain came, the road would wash out and become impassable. But I would be gone, the fires season over.

I kept the BLM 'Beast', a yellow truck, double cabbed, full length bed, in low gear, knowing the tales of foolish drivers losing their brakes on such slopes, the equally tragic stories of getting caught between gears, in neutral, unable to get the transmission engaged again.

Tempting as driving fast was, sensibility overrode the urge to hurry into town and get my agenda underway. The little war between those two proclivities started out with good intentions and was even enjoyable at first, but as it progressed on the way down the Butte it, as usual, turned into a cauldron, one first simmering and then coming to a boil. I knew how a horse felt when a lightning storm approached, how a cattle herd felt when the mosquitoes descended in hordes, and though it was a familiar sensation experienced since I could remember it was no easier to deal with now than it was when I was five years old.

So when I got to the valley floor I gunned it more than I should have, risking a rock on the oil pan in one place and getting mired where potholes still lingered. Luckily it was a sunny, windless day, pretty hot for mid-September, or the ashen areas, only rarely broken by surviving patches of sage and crested wheat, would have been incessantly blowing through my open windows. As it was, I ran into a dust devil that I first saw in my mirror some three miles off the Butte before it rambled a snaky, ash-filled path toward me. It engulfed me for a few seconds before passing on toward the Site. A reminder of something, I surmised, just didn't know what of.

***

I switched out the Beast for my car at the FHA office parking lot, where my parents had left it, transferred my gear and though needing a shower headed for the jewelry store.

It was my first time in such an establishment and, as luck would have it, one of the girls who worked there knew me from high school. I fought my embarrassment and stuck to my intention. She helped me pick out an engagement ring, made discrete suggestions trying to ferret out who the "lucky girl" was. If there was anyone in her ward that remembered me they'd know Sunday of my appearance, but they'd still have no inkling of the intended's identity.

I didn't know where Kali lived—we had, I now thought for the first time, curiously omitted specific details about our lives (I knew nothing of her family, did know she attended the Mormon Church, that fact having come up when I asked her to come up on a Sunday)—but she had told me she worked at Humpty's Dump so I headed there and ordered—vanilla shake and grilled cheese, just like in the old days. I asked if Kali was working. The two girls looked at each other, the blonde said, "She put in her two weeks, then got married." She looked to her companion and added mockingly, rolling her eyes, "In the Temple." She gestured with her hands to form an explosion or sorts and added a sound effect to accentuate the meaning. "Haven't seen her since."

The dark haired girl, not to be outdone by that gesture, made her own, cupping her belly and half-sang "hot cross bun," directing her eyes to her stomach. They both giggled. I got their meaning.

It was a bomb. I smiled sickly and nodded. "Ahh," I managed to say. I would have driven off without collecting my food but I had to save face—though the shame I experienced was private, its source no one else, but me. They had no idea of my relationship that, on one hand, once existed, and now, on the other, obviously had never been. The urge to run, though strong, yielded to the desire to not show weakness.

Since it doesn't take long to grill a sandwich and make a shake I was out of there quickly and down the road. I went to the beach, threw the food in the trash, took the ring and threw it in, too. But the repulsion I felt didn't leave with the items' absence. I felt sticky, felt a need to vomit that the body refused to consent to, felt an urge to scream, to run, to explode, to cry. But all I did was drive.

I had been here in this place before—the place where you can't be where you are but you have no place to go—too often. Being at a party and wanting out, but stuck far enough away from the door that I couldn't snake my way out without being waylaid by some drunk or stoner. Like someone falling off a cliff, I reached for the first thing to grab. There was college, there was farming, and since college had started three weeks before I couldn't go there—another excuse, I berated myself, then squelched that self-flagellation for the more immediate one.

I wanted to be away from people, like a wounded animal wanted to go off on my own. I would go back to farming, I decided, just to eliminate one mental battle, but before that there was the more immediate need for shelter. From everything and everyone.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston