The Ridge We Never Talked About

The shuttle dropped us off at the bottom of a gravel track and said nothing about how we were supposed to get up the rest of it, so I walked. Thirty-five years old, boots full of grit, a conference lanyard flapping against my chest, and me huffing like the altitude was personal. Which in a way it was, because I'd come down here to Colombia to escape a week of land-use panels and ended up at a hostel that, according to the address printed on my itinerary, did not exist. The building at that address had been torn down years ago. No forwarding sign, no plaque, nothing. Just a driveway to nowhere, and a taxi driver who'd shrugged and pointed up the hill.

So I climbed, and when I crested the escarpment the glare off a tin roof nearly took my eyes out. Small gear shack, door open, hinges complaining in the wind. Beyond it the ridge ran out into empty air, and past that, way down, the town of San Kevin de Gaceno sat in its green bowl like change someone had dropped. The wind came over the edge steady and low, humming in the guy wires of a windsock like it was tuning up.

And there, on the launch ramp, kneeling over a harness with his thumbs buried in the buckles, was Brad.

I knew him before I processed knowing him. Ten years is a long time and it took about two seconds to spend it. He'd filled out through the shoulders, gone gray at the temples early the way some men do and get away with. Same hands though. I'd watched those hands rope and throw and once, memorably, do things I'd agreed at the time never to think about again.

He looked up. Squinted. Then he grinned like we were old friends instead of old rivals.

"Jack Turner," he called over the wind. "Hell of a place to run into a man."

"Brad." I said it flat, the way you'd say the weather. "They let you off the rodeo circuit?"

"Left it. Years back." He stood, dusted his knees. "I sharpen billhooks now. Hang-gliding guide in the off seasons. Keeps a man honest and airborne."

I did not ask what a billhook was. I regretted that later.

* * *

The conference itself was being held in the hostel's common room, which had once been somebody's living room and still had a couch nobody would claim. The morning session was on erosion, which is the kind of topic that sounds dull until you're standing on a ridge that is actively, visibly eroding, soil blowing off the lip in thin brown ribbons. The speaker was a Colombian agronomist with a laser pointer and no fear of silence. I was taking notes I'd never read.

Halfway through, the seat beside me creaked and there was Brad, folding his long frame down into it like he'd bought a ticket. He smelled like cedar and machine oil, and I kept my eyes on the laser pointer.

"You always did sit front left," he said quietly. "So you could get called on and look humble about it."

"That was strategy."

"It was showing off." He reached into his jacket and pulled out something wrapped in a square of grey cloth, set it on my notepad without ceremony. "Here. For when you get home."

I waited until the speaker turned away before unwrapping a corner. A prism. Glass, wedge-shaped, edges worn smooth, the kind of thing I'd last seen in a physics lab. It caught the projector light and threw a small bent rainbow across my knee.

"What is it?"

"Nicol prism. Polarizes light." He said it like it was nothing, but I caught the corner of his mouth. "I use one to check an edge when I'm sharpening. Hold a blade up to it, the light tells you the truth about your work. Where you've gone lazy. Where you've left a burr." He tapped the cloth. "Figured a rancher could use a way of seeing what's true."

"And you carry spares to conferences?"

"I carry one," he said, "for people I want looking closely."

I wrapped it back up before my hands could do anything stupid with it. The agronomist called on somebody. I wrote a word in my notes that was not a word.

* * *

The session broke for lunch and instead of joining the buffet line I found the hostel's alcove, a recess on the windward side where the plaster had been scoured back to stone and somebody had wedged a bench. I sat there with the prism in my lap and unwrapped it all the way for the first time.

It was heavier than it looked. Old, clearly, the glass gone slightly amber at one edge, the mounting bracket hand-filed by somebody who cared. I turned it over and the light came apart in my hands, every reflection split and sorted. When I angled it toward the window I caught my own face in it, doubled, one Jack and slightly beside him another Jack, and I sat there a beat too long looking at both.

The weight of it was familiar in a way that had nothing to do with glass. Ten years ago, after a rodeo party in Cheyenne that I remember in pieces, Brad and I had ended up somewhere private, and there had been a moment where everything got quiet and honest, and then a night, and then a morning where we both pretended with tremendous skill that it hadn't happened. I was twenty-five. So was he. We'd spent the previous two years competing for the same sponsorship, shaking the same hands, smiling at each other with our teeth. And then one night we didn't compete, and it scared me so badly I drove home early and took a different sponsorship route the whole next season just to avoid him.

I'd told myself it was about the money. Nobody had ever made me account for that story out loud, thank God.

I felt him before I saw him. Brad was standing at the mouth of the alcove with two paper plates, watching my hands on the glass. Not my face. My hands. There was something in the way he did it that made my fingers feel watched and capable at the same time.

"You still hold things like you're afraid they'll confess," he said.

"You still sneak up on people."

"I knocked. Internally." He handed me a plate. Some kind of arepa and a wedge of lime. We ate sitting side by side on a bench built for one and a half, knees almost touching, and the wind coming off the escarpment filled the alcove with that same low hum.

"You look good, Jack," he said, to the view, not to me.

"You look different."

"Different how?"

"Quieter. Like somebody turned down the volume on you."

He laughed, a real one. "Rodeo me was loud because he was scared. Billhook me is quiet because he's bored. There's a middle setting I'm still working on."

I wanted to ask what the middle setting looked like. I ate my arepa instead.

* * *

The afternoon session was worse than erosion, somehow, something about riparian easements that made me nostalgic for the erosion. Brad did not return to his seat beside me, which I noticed more than I wanted to. When it let out, near five, he was waiting at the door with his arms crossed, backlit by all that glare.

"There's a thing I do at the end of every day," he said. "Walk the ridge to the launch point. Wind's steady until sunset. You can see the whole valley light up, and the town, and on a clear day you can see the river doing whatever it's decided to do this year."

"That sounds like a tour."

"It is a tour. Free. I'm not selling anything." He tipped his head toward the shack. "Well. One thing. But it's not for sale."

"And the hostel?" I nodded at the sign, or the absence of one. "The address on my paperwork is a demolished building."

"Best detail about the place. They use an old address that's been demolished so the conference can't be found by accident. You have to want to get here." He smiled, and it was the old smile, the one that used to make me check my own stirrups. "You wanted to get here, Jack. You're standing on it."

The wind pushed past us toward the edge, steady, patient, like it had all the time in the world and knew something I didn't.

"Sunset's in about forty minutes," Brad said. "Ridge is that way. I'll walk slow."

I looked down at the prism in my pocket, heavy through the cloth, and I did not say no.

We walked slow, like he'd promised. The gravel up there wasn't gravel so much as broken shale, the kind that announces every step you take, and the wind came up off the valley in a long steady breath that never seemed to finish exhaling. The town sat below us in the haze, San Kevin de Gaceno laid out small and tidy, roofs catching the low light. From up there it looked like something you could cover with a thumb.

Brad talked the whole way, but easy, not performing. He pointed out where the river had cut a new bend after some flood year I'd missed. He named birds I would not remember. It struck me that he'd done this walk a few thousand times and still bothered to look at everything, which is maybe the difference between us in one sentence.

Then he stopped and pointed up, and I saw it. A line of faded fabric snagged on the rocks near the launch point, still flapping after what had to be years of wind. Some old competition banner, the kind they string along a ridge so pilots can read the wind, except this one wasn't attached to anything official anymore. It had outlived the event. The letters were bleached to almost nothing. You could see one word, maybe two, and not read them.

"That's from the last meet they held up here," Brad said. "Before they moved it down valley. I keep meaning to take it down and then I keep not doing it." He squinted at it. "Sort of respect it at this point."

I looked at that rag flapping in the wind and felt something in my chest I didn't have a clean name for. Ten years ago I would have known exactly which banner pole I'd helped plant, exactly which sponsor's name was on it, exactly where I'd stood when I lost or won. Now it was just cloth. And behind that thought came another one, older and meaner, the one about my body.

Here's the honest version, and I'll keep it short. I'm heavier than I was at twenty-five. Not dramatically, nothing anyone would write home about, but I carry it different now, around the middle, and I know it every time I buckle a tack or climb into a truck. Standing on that ridge, with Brad glancing over at me the way he does, sideways and quick, that knowledge climbed right up my spine. He was looking me over. I could feel it. And part of me wanted it and part of me braced for it, and both parts were doing math about the last time he'd seen me without a shirt.

He didn't say anything about it. That somehow made it worse and better at the same time.

At the launch point there was the shack he'd mentioned, small, corrugated roof, wind humming over it like a finger on a bottle. Laid flat against