Dan Simmons - Phases of Gravity

They had cut firewood all Sunday morning in the hills above Lonerock. Baedecker had enjoyed the hard work, the sweat evaporating quickly in the high, cool air. Then they had loaded the pickup, eaten a lunch of thick corned-beef sandwiches with plenty of mustard, had a couple of beers from the cooler, driven back to Lonerock, had a beer or two on the way, unloaded the truck, stacked the wood in the shed behind Dave's house, had a beer, brought the truck back, and had a couple of beers with Kink. Then they had returned to the house to sit on the porch and drink beer.

It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when Dave made his announcement. 'Jesus, drunk from beer,' he said. 'That's high school stuff, Richard.'

'Affirmative,' said Baedecker.

'Hey, you know what we forgot to do? We forgot to tell you to have me remind you to remind me to take you up to see my dad's ranch.'

'Yes,' said Baedecker. 'Remind me to remind you to do that tomorrow.'

'Nuts with that,' said Dave. 'Let's do it now.' Baedecker followed him down to the jeep and watched as Dave tossed things into the backseat. Baedecker eased himself into the passenger seat, taking care not to spill his beer. 'What're we, moving up there or what?'

'Have dinner there,' said Dave, setting the last of the cargo in place and clambering into the left seat. 'Ignition sequence countdown.'

'Check,' said Baedecker, swiveling to look at the heaped backseat.

'Cooler?'

'Check.'

'Beer?'

'Check.'

'Barbecue grill?'

'Check.'

'Hamburgers?'

'Check.'

'Buns?'

'Check . . . no, wait a minute. Red light on the . . . no, there they are, under the charcoal. Check.'

'Charcoal?'

'Check.'

'Lighter fluid?'

'Check.'

'Flashlight?'

'Check.'

'Winchester?'

'Check. What the hell do we need that for?'

'Rattlesnakes,' said Dave. 'Lots of rattlers up there. Lots of rattlers down here, come to think of it. Been real warm this fall. Still out.'

'Oh.'

'S-IVB LH2 precool and fast fill, S-IC LOX tank replenish, glycol fuel jacket topping.'

'Check,' said Baedecker. He pulled a tab on a beer and handed it to Dave. 'We have ignition,' said Dave and started the jeep, backed out of the drive, turned in a cloud of dust, and accelerated north down Main Street at high speed. They sped past the rusted gas pump. 'Houston, we have cleared the tower,' drawled Dave.

'Roger,' said Baedecker.

Dave swung onto a narrow road leading northeast into a canyon. The jeep bounced along the ruts for a quarter of a mile and then emerged onto smoother ground. 'Roll and pitch program completed,' said Dave. 'Stand by for Mode One Charlie.'

'Affirmative,' said Baedecker. They rattled over a cattleguard, and some charcoal bounced out of the bag and disappeared into the dust cloud behind them. 'Inboard cutoff,' said Baedecker. 'Stand by for staging.' The jeep's right wheel jolted over a large rock, Dave's AIR FORCE 1 cap flew off his head and ended up in the backseat under the small charcoal grill. 'Tower jettison,' said Dave.

'Roger.'

They rounded a hairpin curve and began climbing a steep grade. Dave shifted down into second gear and then into first. 'Be advised, Houston,' he said, 'we are GO for staging.' They leveled off on a ridge far above the valley. The jeep trail led along a narrow strip with boulders to the left and a sheer dropoff to the right. 'Affirmative,' said Baedecker. 'GYSA.'

'KYAG,' said Dave.

It was more than six miles. The road ran along treeless ridgetops, dropped into a shadowed canyon, and climbed out across a flat expanse of high desert so that it was half an hour before Dave turned onto a graveled county road and the ranch finally came into view. They drove across a broken cattleguard and down a lane overgrown with sagebrush before pulling to a stop in front of an abandoned wood-frame building. Baedecker could see a barn and a huddle of smaller outbuildings beyond.

They walked through the brittle grass to the house with Baedecker watching for snakes every inch of the way. The ranch house showed signs of long abandonment — windows gone, plaster fallen in most of the rooms, banister missing on the stairway, a rear porch collapsed on one side — but it was also easy to see that it had been built with care and precision. The porch continued around three sides of the building and there the hand-carved gingerbread remained, the interior woodwork had been meticulously crafted, and the large stones in the central fireplace obviously had been set by hand.

'How long has it been empty?' asked Baedecker as they stepped through the litter of plaster in the kitchen.

'Pop died in ‘56,' said Dave. 'A couple of families owned it for a while right after that, but they never had a chance of making a go of it. It's damn hard to make a living around here on a small spread. Pop could never decide if he wanted to be a farmer or a rancher. He didn't have enough water to make a go of the farm, and never had enough pasture to do justice to ranching.'

'How old were you when your father died?' Dave took a long drink of beer and stood looking out the kitchen window. 'Seventeen,' he said. 'That was the first summer I didn't take the train out and stay here. I had a girlfriend and a summer job in Tulsa. Important things to do.' He tossed the beer can in the sink. 'Come on out back. I want to show you something.' They walked past the barn and smaller buildings. As with the main house, the barn had been built to last. Baedecker read the place of manufacture on the large hinges — Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Patented 1906. They crossed a section of field and Baedecker was just beginning to think about snakes again when Dave stopped, pointed to a large, circular depression in the pasture, and said, 'Coot Lake.' It took Baedecker a minute to see it. The mound they were standing on would have been part of the east bank, the rotted wood underfoot a trough to the south part of the irrigation ditch that fed water to the pond, and the washed-out gully to the north the dam itself. Fifty yards across the sunken area was the other dike with half a dozen dusty cottonwoods hanging over the weed-strewn slope that had been the west bank.

'Richard,' said Dave, 'do you ever wonder how much of your life you've spent trying to please the dead?' Baedecker sipped his beer and thought about this as Dave sat on a rock and stripped a long strand of grass for chewing.

'I think we underestimate how much of our own lives we devote to trying to meet the expectations of the dead,' continued Dave. 'We don't even think about it, we just do.' He pointed to a cluster of weeds and bushes twenty yards across the low meadow. 'That's where we had our old raft tied. Sort of a float. The water was only about seven or eight feet deep there, but I wasn't allowed to swim on the south side of it because it was filled with reeds and water plants so your feet'd get all tangled up. Pop'd rip ‘em out every year and they'd be back every summer. He lost one of his old hunting dogs out there before I was born. Then one summer — it must've been during my third summer out here, I was about nine, I think — my dog Blackie got all tangled up in the stuff when he was swimming out to join me on the raft.' Dave paused and chewed on his stalk of grass. The sun was almost setting, and the shadows from the cottonwoods stretched far out over the dead pond. 'Blackie was mostly a Lab,' he said. 'Pop gave him to me when I was born, and for some reason that was very important to me. Maybe that's why he stayed my dog even though I only saw him summers after I was six and Ma and I moved away. We didn't have room for him in Tulsa. Still, it's like he waited all year for those ten weeks each summer. I don't know why it was so important that he and I were the same age, that he'd been born almost the same time I was, but it was.