The Scale and the Bonfire

Kelly Sander was forty-three years old, a veterinarian, and by nine that night she had already apologized to her GPS twice for calling it names. The detour around Ogallala had added ninety minutes to her drive to the rural clinic where she'd be filling in for two weeks, and the motel she'd booked had a vending machine that ate quarters and a front desk clerk who looked at her like she'd asked him to perform surgery. So when she saw the orange glow of a bonfire off the county road, big enough to have its own weather, she pulled her Subaru onto the gravel shoulder and got out just to stretch her legs.

The glow came from behind a long low building with a sign she couldn't quite read in the dark. A wide bay door stood open, spilling fluorescent light onto concrete, and beyond it she could see the silhouettes of tall metal gantries against the last of the fire's light. It looked industrial and abandoned and interesting all at once, which was three more adjectives than the motel had earned.

"Hello?" she called into the bay, because she was forty-three, not stupid. "Anybody here? I'm not trespassing, I'm just nosy!"

Nobody answered, so she stepped inside.

The place was enormous. Rubber conveyor belts ran the length of the building like dormant snakes, and overhead catwalks crossed the darkness at heights that made her knees file a mental complaint. The air smelled like dust and machine oil and, faintly, woodsmoke drifting in from the fire. Near the far end, a tall man stood behind a tripod, frowning at something on a plate mounted atop it, turning a knob and then frowning harder.

"Doing what, exactly?" Kelly asked.

"Adjusting," the man said, without looking up.

"Adjusting what?"

"Everything." He turned another knob, sighed, and finally straightened and gave her a look. He was maybe thirty-eight, wiry, with the kind of glasses that suggested he'd lost a pair in every state he'd worked. "Gideon Peabody. I'm contracted to this terminal. You're the woman who announced herself to an empty building."

"Kelly Sander. I'm a vet, I'm passing through, and I have the judgment of someone who's been in a car for six hours. What is that thing?"

"A level staff on a tripod," he said, patting it. "I measure geoid undulation."

There was a pause that Kelly felt obliged to fill. "That sounds like a diagnosis you'd give a horse."

"It's the difference between the mathematical model of the earth and where gravity actually puts sea level," Gideon said, with the tone of a man who had explained this at dinner parties and been punished for it. "Gravity isn't uniform. The ground rises and dips relative to the reference surface. I survey those dips so the terminal's elevation data is actually correct instead of theoretically correct."

"Uh huh." Kelly nodded slowly. "So it's fancy pothole measuring."

The look he gave her could have curdled milk. "It is precision geodesy."

"It's fancy pothole measuring with better equipment," she said, grinning now because she couldn't help it. "Admit it. You're the pothole guy."

"I am the man whose data keeps grain trucks from bottoming out on weigh station ramps, but sure. Pothole guy." He went back to his knob, clearly hoping she'd evaporate.

She did not evaporate. She was, instead, drawn to the small control booth near the middle of the bay, a glassed-in box with a chair, a clipboard, and a shelf of odds and ends that some worker had accumulated over the years like a magpie. On the shelf sat a little brass object as big as a soap bar, hinged, with a marble platform and a needle and a dial. She picked it up and it clicked pleasantly in her hand.

"What's this thing?" she called over.

Gideon glanced at it and, for the first time all evening, looked something other than annoyed. "That's the old man's scale. The blacksmith. Letter scale, brass, older than both of us put together and then some. He used to weigh his steel shavings on it, every day, and log the weight in a notebook like it was scripture. Forty years of shavings."

"Forty years of weighing metal dust," Kelly said. "And they call my job obsessive."

"Your job involves being bitten. His didn't." Gideon came over and took the scale from her hands with unexpected gentleness, opening the little lid and watching the needle settle to zero. "He retired last month. That bonfire out there was for him. Whole town came. They fired his forge one last time and then let it go cold."

Kelly looked out the open bay door. The bonfire had burned down from a monster to a big sullen red heap, a few figures still standing around it, and beyond it she could see the blacksmith's shop, dark and quiet, the anvil in the doorway catching a little firelight like it was waiting for someone.

"That's kind of sad," she said.

"It's accurate," Gideon said. "Everything ends up a relic. Including this." He set the scale back on the shelf, needle still at zero, and gave her a sideways look. "Including me, in about nine days, when my contract runs out and they hand the elevation data to somebody cheaper."

"Oh, you're not allowed to be mopey. I'm the one driving to a town with one stoplight to cover for a guy who's having gallbladder surgery. You don't get mopey rights."

"I wasn't aware mopey rights were rationed."

"They are. By me. I'm a veterinarian, it's basically my whole job to decide who's suffering and whether it's serious." She looked up at the catwalk, maybe twenty feet up, a narrow steel walkway running along the gantry with a railing and a lot of nothing on either side. "Okay. Boredom has officially won. Let's play a game."

Gideon looked at her the way you'd look at a dog that had just brought you a dead bird. "What kind of game?"

"A nerve game. One minute. You stand on that catwalk, no equipment, no clipboard, no fiddling with anything, hands on the railing the whole time. A full sixty seconds of doing nothing. I bet you can't do it."

"That's not a bet, that's standing."

"It's harder than it sounds for a man who can't leave a knob alone for five minutes!" Kelly jabbed a finger at his tripod. "You've adjusted that thing four times since I got here. You're not capable of a minute of stillness."

"I am entirely capable of stillness."

"Prove it. If you make the minute, I'll..." She cast around. "I'll admit geodesy is a real science to your face, out loud, like a normal adult."

"And if I don't?"

"If you don't, you have to explain geoid undulation to me again, but this time you have to use the words 'fancy pothole measuring' with a straight face."

Gideon considered this. The fire outside popped, and one of the last figures by it laughed at something. The needle on the little brass scale sat at zero, patient as a saint.

"This is a game with no stakes," he said.

"Games with stakes are work. This is a game with pride, which is free and which you clearly have a surplus of."

He took off his glasses, cleaned them on his shirt, and put them back on, which she was beginning to understand was his version of shuffling cards. "Fine. One minute. Timing starts when?"

Kelly pulled out her phone. "When I say so. Go on, up the stairs. I'll count from down here where I can see you and the whole bay."

Gideon walked to the stairwell with the dignity of a man who was absolutely not being dared into anything, and climbed. Kelly watched him go up, watched him step onto the catwalk, watched him put both hands on the railing exactly as instructed. From below he looked taller and lankier, silhouetted against the gantry lights.

"Ready?" she called.

"Born ready," he called back, in a voice that suggested he had never been ready for anything in his life.

"Go!"

She watched the seconds tick. He stood there, hands on the rail, staring out over the belts and the dark. At about thirty seconds his right hand twitched toward nothing, an itch for a knob that wasn't there, and Kelly laughed out loud in the empty bay.

"Hands," she shouted.

"They are hands. They're on the rail."

"Fifty seconds. Don't you dare check that tripod with your mind."

He made it, barely, stepping back onto the landing with the expression of a man who had just been freed from prison and wanted to pretend he hadn't minded it. Kelly was still grinning when he came down the stairs.

"Well?" he said.

"Well what?"

"Say it. Geodesy is a real science."

Kelly picked up the brass scale off the shelf and turned it over in her hands, needle at zero, dial steady. She had a thought, a big one, the kind you get at the end of a six-hour drive when your judgment went out for gas two states ago.

"It's a real science," she said. "And I have a follow-up dare."

Gideon looked at her, then at the scale, then back at her, and something in his face said he was already regretting however he'd spent the last ten minutes.

"Oh no," he said. "What kind of follow-up dare?"

"Nothing bad," Kelly said, setting the scale down on a crate like it was a piece of evidence in a trial she was about to lose. "A dare for me this time. Fair's fair, you stood up there and suffered, now I suffer."

"Suffering on a catwalk is not the same category as whatever you're inventing right now," Gideon said, but he didn't walk away, which she counted as a victory.

"Here's the dare. You go back up on the catwalk. You stay there and you watch. I climb on that conveyor belt down here, and I take off my shirt, one button at a time, and then I..." She waved a hand vaguely at herself. "I entertain myself. While you watch. From twenty feet up, where you can't do anything about it."

Gideon took his glasses off, cleaned them, and put them back on, which by now she knew was his version of screaming into a pillow. "You want me to watch you masturbate on a conveyor belt in a cargo terminal."

"When you say it like that it sounds insane."

"It sounds insane in every formulation I can construct."