The sewer trench yawned open like a mass grave. I was up top, above the trench where we had just put down 20 feet of mainline pipe. Hank was in the box, grunting and whispering “goddam you” to himself as he fumbled with a bucket of pipe lubricant. Loader Rob sat in the idling loader, fulfilling his destiny. We had just gotten back from eating lunch in downtown Driggs, and the reckoning of the undone work before us encroached like a fog.
At lunch, our coworker Jace had laid into us, his unwilling audience, with the fringe encounters of his storied sex life as I ate away at my quarter of our jointly-purchased supreme pizza. Every time the waitress left the table, Loader Rob would watch her move away, remarking to the table that she was giving him a “bone stand.” And like this, we rolled on from job-to-job, a pathetic monolith of obscenity, lust and appetite, digging trenches, eating bad food, putting down sticks of pipe, marking the time from morning to lunch, then lunch to sundown.
That day was hot, that job site shadeless. I leaned against the Jumping Jack, sticky under a sheet of sweat, waiting for my cue to descend into the box and wildly tamp the loose Idaho clay around the pipe. Loader Rob sat comfortably in the air-conditioned cab on his throne, and every now and then I’d climb the side ladder to talk, which he always welcomed. Loader Rob was an artist of heavy machinery, as his nickname testified. The unspoken protocols of construction nicknames determine that you can only be labeled by the name of your job function if you’re horrible at it (thereby heaping shame) or if you’re a virtuoso. Rob was the latter. He could steadily clear away yards of earth by the half inch if we had suspicion that unmarked utilities lurked beneath the soil. He was an odd mix of familial steadiness and social depravity, and everyone liked him.
Hank continued grumbling away down in the hole. Loader Rob threw open his cab door and with a heavy grin shouted down over the sound of the engine,
“Hank, you done sodomizin’ that fitting?”
Hank raised his leathern face, smirking, looking like a Naugahyde mannequin with blue eyes and white stubble. He gave us a shaky thumbs-up, signaling me to lower the Jumping Jack down, then hop in and do my part as he prepped the next stretch of ground for another stick of pipe.
I gave a few tugs on the pull cord of the Jumping Jack, and it came alive with a reckless conniption, blurting out acrid blue smoke. I strong-armed it back and forth down the length of the pipe, its resistant heft like handling a wild animal. Leaning against a shovel, Hank watched steadily from the side, waiting for a chance to micromanage.
“That’ll do,” he barked through the spit of the engine.
Petty as it was, I kept at it just to let him know that I decided my own job’s fate. This isn’t to say that I disliked Hank. We normally got along. The sanctimony sometimes irked me, though he arguably had a right to lord over me. He’d seen more than most people, had been with the company longer than anyone. His hands bore the stigmata of the labor of decades, a visible script of bar fights, frostbite, errant hammers, radiator spew. They were wooden and sable, pieces of frost-hardened tar: as Loader Rob often said, Hank’s hands had “gone to seed.”
The basic program of the day, of all the days: dig a trench, set the box, prep the ground, drop the sticks, hook them up, check the grade, tamp the ground, re-check the grade, adjust if necessary. Repeat indefinitely. It was simple work, with necessary episodes of precision. Normally we moved through jobs quickly, but today we were short on help. Jace and Red Dave left after lunch, on orders to help out the other crew on a new bridge crossing the Henry’s Fork near Ashton. It was a federal project, and they were pulling in Davis-Bacon wages of 32 bucks an hour plus time and a half overtime, which they were already well into, and it was only Thursday. We were stuck in Driggs putting sewer pipe in the ground like assholes. The world felt aligned against us, so we worked an indignant pace, even though this upset Hank.
The direction of our work faced the Tetons, and today they shot out and up into the depths of a mostly cloudless sky, unobstructed and coldly august. They commanded the horizon, magnetizing all views from the valley floor. When I wasn’t working, talking to Loader Rob or taking unwanted instruction from Hank, I was gazing at the peaks, reveling in their majesty. I’d climbed most of them, and right now I wanted their gunmetal radiance. I imagined those gaunt heights, the shrill calls of pika, the glacial air in eternal swirl even in mid-August as I slowly basted on the valley floor at their feet.
All that day as we worked, if Rob’s loader was idle, we would hear the buzz of Piper Cubs and Cessnas as they came and went from the Driggs airport, across the state highway not far to our East. Some gliders looped and turned languidly in the air, mocking our terrestrial condition with their hapless leisure.
At the moment, I was up on the loader talking to Rob in the cab, uninterestedly listening to him go on about girls he “should’ve hooked up with” in high school, getting paid for it. Hank had climbed out of the pit dragging a length of chain. He stood on the side of the trench, wiped his face with his cap, and scowled up at Rob and me. I noticed Hank’s disapproval, which was nothing new. For whatever reason, I looked down to him and asked, “Yo Hanker, what if one of these gliders suddenly came down—right now. What would you do?”
Hank chewed the inside of his lip, squinting toward the gliders. “I’d keep laying down pipe, like I’m paid to do,” he said, as expected.
Loader Rob gave a snort. “I’d bust ass over there and see what I could scrounge up.”
I laughed at the image of Loader Rob sauntering away from a horrific mass of wreckage with maybe a busted CB Radio and half empty bag of sunflower seeds.
Gazing back up at the gliders, I said to Rob, “That’d be wild if one of them did crash.” We watched them, hanging aloft, spiraling in the high thermals.
Right then, as if choreographed, as if on cue in the most absurdly impossible way, the glider nearest us detached itself from the indolence of its orbit. It banked upward abruptly, coming almost perpendicular to the earth, nose toward the sky. It hung there serenely for the briefest moment. It then went falling leaf, plummeted fast in a thousand-foot nosedive to the earth, a mile from us. We lost sight of its impact to a stand of trees on the horizon. A second later we heard the sound, muffled by barley fields and aspens.
“Shit,” I said.
“Christ,” said Rob.
Hank just turned his head and took off his cap, with a look of disgust. For whatever reason, my first thought was that he saw this as my fault. But Hank knew the score.
I jumped off the loader and sprinted to the pickup, Rob following behind me with the keys. We tore out of the work yard, Rob driving, me navigating our direction, keeping my eyes fixed on the cloud of expanding beige dust that marked the fall of the glider.
Rob negotiated the dirt roads, fishtailing through intersections and running the stop sign at the state highway. He leaned over the wheel like a man exhausted, wearing a grim look. “Christ Christ Christ,” he whispered. Crossing the highway, we reached a road that bordered a field cut down to stubble. Some eighty feet out in the rows, the crippled mass of the glider jutted up from the ground like a broken white insect. We skidded to a stop in the field and ran toward the scene. All things changed.
Topiary-like shapes of fine dust slowly rotated in the air, and the sunlight was caught in them. Columns of opalescent particulate billowed softly like a gown. They washed the earth in a pearloid shimmer, as if we had entered a sacred and veiled room. Paper was strewn about the field, as were serrated pieces of massacred white fiberglass: cockpit, hull, wing. Infinite shards of glass threw sun and color back to the sky. And a wild, unnerving silence breathed around the scene.
We were not the first to arrive. Two crews: one of Mexican laborers and the other of white teenage farmhands pulled up just as we did, all of us on the heels of an EMT from the airport. The EMT rushed toward the wreckage. Rob and I came behind the EMT toward the hull. The closer we came, the more this new world took shape. From the pickup it looked like a small pile of laundry—an insignificant mound of summer clothing dropped in the clay dust. But now we were close enough to see that it was the supine body of a man. He was flat against the ground, his arms out from his side, both palms to the earth, as if on a fallen crucifix. The limbs and hands, posed in this way, almost made him seem as if he was clinging to the soil for fear of plummeting skyward. It seemed unnatural, unexpected. His shirt was pulled up around his chest, which was muddled and rosy—not bruised, but flushed. His face seemed composed, serene. His eyes and mouth were closed, chin raised, as if at attention. His shoes were completely gone, and his socks were oddly bunched, looking as if someone had tried to pull them off.
The EMT administered to the body in each way he knew. The body never moved. The rest of us came around the two in a loose huddle, one of the teens asking if we could do anything.
“Just please stay back,” said the EMT, between chest compressions. One of the white boys trudged away from the circle with a yard-sale indifference, looking at the items on the ground, uninterested. The Mexican farmhands moved back, eyeing the scene with a practiced caution, not showing their cards. The white boy picked up a piece of the glider and the EMT snapped at him, his hand making tomahawk motions at the kid to emphasize his words. “PUT that shit DOWN and back the FUCK up—PLEASE.”
Loader Rob and I moved away, off to the side, watching the triage. Small jostlings, manipulations, sensing the body beneath him.
The faces of the migrant workers, all roughly equidistant from the ground, looked like those of stone gods. They didn’t avert their eyes, didn’t react. Who knew what they had seen in their time. They looked toward the body, dusty now as the swirl of earth began settling around and upon us. The EMT spoke into a small microphone pinned to his collar, a crackle of static, a siren had begun sounding near the airport.
Rob was motionless. His eyes locked on the heap of man on the valley floor. In one quick glance, I took him in: fist clenched, wire jaw. In his look—desire, anticipation.
But now, the EMT raised himself up to kneel at the man’s side, no longer touching the body. He shook his head slowly. He looked at Rob and I with a resigned twist in his mouth and exhaled. He gave us the same slow head shake. Loader Rob shifted, slightly. A faint sharp exhalation. I stared across the void to the face of the dead man in the dust. Something bereft, the way the mouth, the face, held themselves aloft without signification, without intent. Here an outworn glove on the ground, a vacant shell on a foreign beach.
“Shit. What the fuck.” Rob said quietly. I nodded, numbly. I just kept staring at the man’s socks, wondering why they sat halfway off, bunched oddly around the arches of his feet. As if it were a comfortable thing.
The finality of the scene began to wedge its way into my brain, elbows out, the concreteness of a mortality I always thought I reckoned sat atop me. It was cliché, cinematic, but I knew that this body, mere seconds prior, contained the ineffable. It had some élan. An essence. Now it would never move again. Whatever of his deep love, terror, sublimity, was squandered in a dusty field of shorn wheat, victim of the entropy of a few seconds’ time. This one small parcel of valley floor birthed what I later learned was a cataclysm of grief for a wife son daughter, an ocean of faces beyond. We were on the ground floor of the agony, witness to the throbbing tendrils of a nascent and indivertible pain, soon shouldered by a family. Somewhere, many who loved him were going about their daily functions, content. They folded laundry, ate sandwiches, danced away fruitless minutes, unaware of the dark wave that was even now slowly mounting, travelling toward them. The thought sickened me. None of us will escape it, entirely. One day, certainly, I would be locked in rote action, unaware of the turning wheels at work, of great forces grinding out a devastating heartsickness that I couldn’t reverse and couldn’t withstand. And that hapless, fallow pocket of intervening time, those idiotic quarter hours between event and my discovery, how would I fill them? With what senselessness? A rock plate shifts on the seafloor leagues away and the coastal villages become fated for a later desolation. I couldn’t think about this.
We drove back across the highway to our worksite. The fields in that valley spilled away in all directions like scalding water. Some were bursting and green, some with golden stalks razed to the dust, ready for harrowing and the next life. They dripped rich with the fat of the land. My body pressed into the seat as we drove. I thought about all the blood inside me, and how it just needed an opening to escape.
We pulled into the yard and sat in the pickup for a moment, idling in park. “That was a fucking thing,” said Rob in a low tone. I looked at him, nodding in mute reverence. Rob’s hat was off for the first time this week, and I noticed his head, shaven clean. I remembered why. A young son. Chemo. Solidarity. A young, beautiful son who left this world. And Rob, still shaving his head years after. All about me hung weight I thought I understood, but couldn’t. Gravity like a forest slowly growing upon my head and arms. Rob peered out the window, squinting toward the silent expanse of the Tetons. Other planes and gliders followed trajectories across the sky. A chain of impatient traffic extended behind a slow-moving grain combine on the highway. A colorful sign on the wall of the feedlot next to our worksite inquired if we’d asked our vet about Purina. A picture of a witless dog going on with its doggy life.
We killed the engine and left the truck, trudging the yard back toward the pit. There was the loader, there were our tools, our sticks of pipe, the purpose for our being in Driggs that day. There stood Hank atop the pit, no tell in his face. With his head cocked down, speaking into the front collar of his haggard brushpopper, Hank asked what we had seen. I gave him a retelling. He didn’t look up. Didn’t nod acknowledgment, wince, or break. My version told, a silence fell over us, despite the sounds around us. A country radio station from the feedlot. A Jake Brake on the highway. Rob didn’t qualify what I’d said, just looked down like Hank and I. Seeing us from a distance, someone would think we were a group in prayer. We might well have been. I reeled with the finality of it all, of the intervening seconds before the end, and the change of what a moment might do. A change of decision, a different choice of breakfast or a different outfit and the orientation of your life heading to a place from where it can’t come back. And I knew life cannot be lived this way. I might have conjured some cliché moral for the scene, something about being present in the moments of your life, seizing the day, caring more, some shit. It might often be in the seizing that we are taken upon ourselves. I didn’t know. We can’t know.
Hank broke the stillness by turning toward the pit. “Well,” he said, softly, resignedly, “I s’pose we’d best finish this line while we’ve got the light.” Taking hold of the chain, he eased his leathern body into the bottom of the trench. He lifted a pair of deer hide gloves from off the pipe and pulled them over his ancient hands.
Joe Griffin's creative work has been featured in publications including Terrain, JuxtaProse, and The New Union UK. He lives in Idaho, where he is a professor of rhetoric and composition. When he's not teaching, grading, or spending time with his family, he is most likely falling into a river in the intermountain west.
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