The sign at the mouth of the canyon says BELL CROSSING 11. Somebody shot it in 1994, the hole is still there to the left of the B, and the sign has been wrong for three years and nobody has taken it down.
I zero the trip meter at the cattle guard and go.
Four-thirty in the morning, twenty-six degrees, which is nothing, which is October behaving itself. The heater in this truck has two settings and they are the same setting, so I drive with the window cracked two inches because otherwise the windscreen fogs and I would rather be cold than blind. The headlights reach about sixty feet and then give up. Past that it is the shape of the canyon against a sky that has not started yet.
Ninety gallons in the tank on the bed. Call it four hundred and fifty miles if I keep her under forty and don’t idle.
The first two miles are the first two miles. Nye River on the left, down about eleven feet this time of year, loud enough that you would not hear a vehicle coming the other way if there were vehicles. The road here is decent because I made it decent in August, crown holding, the soft edge above the second bend cut back and re-gravelled with the last of the three-quarter minus. Nobody is ever going to thank me for that shoulder and it is one of the better things I have done.
At mile four the canyon should open out. There is a place where the wall steps back and you get about two hundred yards of sky, and a stock gate, and the burnt snag that has been falling over since I was in school.
Mile four goes past. Mile five. At mile seven the wall steps back and there is the snag.
So: today is not a short one.
The number is what I am out here for. Every trip has one. You take the distance the map says and the distance the truck says and you divide, and before all this the answer was one, every time, for everybody, forever, which is a thing nobody thought about because nobody thinks about the ground being where it is.
Now it is a number that gets handed to you at the start and does not change while you are inside it. Eleven miles that starts as eleven miles finishes as eleven miles. Eleven miles that starts as two hundred finishes as two hundred, and there is no way to find out which one you got except to drive it far enough to know.
A mule deer comes up out of the barrow ditch at mile nine and I am on the brakes and off them and she is gone up the cut, and my coffee is in my lap. Wonderful.
Only out. That is the other half of it. Inside the valley the ground is the ground — nine-tenths to one and a bit, which is measurement error, which is the road and the tyres and me. It is the rim that does it. Cross the ridgeline and you draw. Nobody knows why and I have stopped being interested in why, the same way I stopped being interested in why the clinic is only open Tuesdays. It is Tuesdays. Plan around Tuesdays.
And you cannot look. That is the part that people from before do not get, when there were still people from before ringing up to ask. There is no gauge for it. You cannot send a drone, you cannot phone the far end, you cannot stand at the top of Kenner’s field with binoculars and see how long the road is today. The trip meter is the whole instrument. The fuel gauge is the whole instrument. To learn today’s number you spend today’s number, and then you know it, and then it is gone and tomorrow is a different number.
Mile twenty-two. The gauge has come off full and settled where it settles.
I drive.
There is a stretch between forty and ninety where it is the same two hundred yards of canyon over and over and you have to be careful about what your head does with that. I count culverts. There are nine between the cattle guard and Bell Crossing, or there were, and they come at the same places regardless, which is the strangest part and the part I have never been able to say to anybody without their face doing something. The culverts are where I put them. The bends are where they are. The snag is where it fell. It is the same road. There is just more of it.
At some point the sky does start. Grey, then the ridge lines come up out of it, then light on the rock on the west wall about three hundred feet above me, coming down slow. It is the only good hour and it lasts about forty minutes and I get it more than anybody else in the county, which is not a thing I would say out loud.
Two hundred and forty on the meter. Two hundred and fifty. Still running, still fine, gauge coming down the way it comes down.
I have a rule about the gauge. Half means home. It is not a feeling, it is a line: at half I turn around wherever I am, because the way back draws its own number and I have watched what happens to people who forgot that. Today I am at a shade under two thirds when the canyon lets go of the road and the grade eases and there is the guardrail, and the junction, and the state highway going left and right across the end of everything like a line somebody drew.
Two hundred and sixty-five miles. For eleven.
I pull into the lot at the gas station that closed in the first year, and I sit.
The pumps are still there with the hoses coiled. The window has a poster in it for a fishing derby on a lake ninety miles from here, and the poster has gone the colour of weak tea. There is a car on the highway northbound and it does not slow down and why would it.
Four minutes. I have not got out of this truck at Bell Crossing since the first year.
Somebody bolted a plastic tub to the sign post at the junction, the kind that holds four litres of screenwash, with a hinged lid and a bungee across it. I do not know who. There has never been a name on it and nobody in the valley has ever claimed it, and it was there in the November of the first year when it was not there in the October.
There is a notebook in it. People who got out wrote in it — name, date, where they were going — and then they got in whatever was waiting for them on the highway and went. I wrote in it once, in the first year, not because I was going anywhere but because there was a pen on a string and it seemed like the thing you did.
C. Bayliss, Ardith. Staying.
Which was not information. Which was me being twenty years younger than I am, in a coat, at a junction, with a pen.
The last entry in it is from March of last year. I know that because Idris looked, in the spring, on a run, and told me about it in the shop afterwards with his hands round a cup, and then neither of us said anything for a while and then we talked about the grader.
The first year I got out. The first year everybody got out, and there were people at the junction, actual people, a man from the state with a clipboard and a woman who said she was from a university, and they took readings for a while and then the readings stopped meaning anything to them and they went home. I do not blame them. If I had somewhere else to be I would be there.
The first morning, the actual first one, the school bus ran the canyon at ten past seven the way it had run it every weekday for forty years. Ray Tolbert driving, twenty-two kids, eleven miles to the consolidated school at Bell Crossing and eleven back at half past three. He came in at twenty to twelve with the needle on the peg and twenty-two children who had been on a bus since breakfast, and he went to the office and told them he had done ninety-one miles to get there and eleven to get home, and they wrote him up for it. Not for lying. For the fuel.
That paperwork is still in a drawer in the annex. I have read it. It is two pages and it is very polite and the phrase it uses is unaccounted consumption.
Ray is in Spokane now with his daughter. He got out in the March of the first year, when the number was still small enough that getting out was a decision people made on a Tuesday and told you about afterwards.
I zero the meter again. That is the part that matters. The way back is a new trip and a new draw and there is no relationship at all between the two, which is a thing I have explained eleven hundred times and which people still refuse to believe because it does not feel like how a road should work.
Then I turn around and go home and it takes forty-two miles.
3.8. Under four. I say a word about it that I would not say in front of Emmett.
There is nothing to say about a 3.8. You drive forty-two miles, the sun is properly up by the second half of it, and you are home before the morning is really morning. It is the closest thing left to the way things were, and it is the worst part of the day, because for about an hour you can forget and then you have to stop forgetting.
I come down past the school at twenty past ten and there are lights on in the gym and nine bicycles in the rack.
The shop is a steel building with a sand shed off the north end and a fuel tank on a stand behind it, and the light over the door has been on since 1997 as far as I know. Idris’s pickup is not there. I look at the space where it is not and I do the arithmetic on that too, which is a habit I would like to break.
Inside it is forty degrees and smells of diesel and cold concrete. The radio on the bench is on, because I leave it on, because it only gets one station and that station is in a town four hundred miles away and has no idea any of this is happening. Right now a man is talking about a high school volleyball tournament. The girls from Cutler went to three sets. I know more about the Cutler volleyball programme than I know about anybody under thirty in this valley.
Before anything else I do the walk-around, because you do the walk-around. Tyres, which are fine. The bed tank strapping, which is fine. Under the front end with the light, looking for the wet shine that means something has started weeping, and there isn’t one. The offside front has a stone bruise in the sidewall I have been watching since July and it has not got worse and it will not get better and there is no tyre in this valley to replace it with.
Then the grader, which nobody has run since the twelfth of September, because there has been nothing worth grading. The moldboard is down on blocks and the cutting edge on the right-hand third is worn past where you would let it go if edges were a thing that existed. I put my hand on it. Cold, and about a quarter inch of steel where there should be an inch.
My father ran this grader for nineteen years and got to replace the edges twice a season. He would have had something to say about a quarter of an inch. He would have said it in front of people.
The fuel log is on a clipboard on a nail. I write the date, the vehicle, ninety gallons out last night, the trip meters both ways, and the number. Then I write it again on the board, which is duplication, which I know it is. The clipboard is for a county that has an auditor. The board is for people.
Idris’s pickup is still not there. It is twenty-five past ten. He was not on this run and had no reason to be here at four, and every reason to be here by eight, and there is a version of this morning where I do not count the hours and I have not been able to find my way into that version since about August.
The board is on the wall over the bench. Whiteboard, four foot by three, taken from the school when they consolidated the grades and had spare. Tray at the bottom with two markers and the end of a third.
I write the numbers in a row, left to right, in the order they happened.
I used to put them in a column. A column looks like an opinion. A column has a top and a bottom and it invites a person to stand in front of it and decide what it is telling them, and then argue with me about it. A row is just what happened. You start at the left and you read to the right and you can go as far as you like or stop whenever you want, and it is not saying anything to you, it is just there.
There are thirty-one numbers on it now. The first one on the far left is from the second of September.
24.1 out. 3.8 back.
I cap the marker and stand there longer than the writing takes.
Then I go out and read the tank.
Two hundred and eleven.
It was two hundred and seventy-two yesterday. The sixty-one gallons in between is what it cost to find out that the canyon ran 24.1 on the morning of the second of October, which is not a fact anybody asked for, and which cannot be got any other way, and which will be a different fact tomorrow.
Two hundred and eleven gallons. Sixty-one people. The truck does four and a half to the gallon with weight in it, on a good day, on a flat, which this is not.
I stand at the tank with my hand on the fill cap and I do the division, and I do not say the answer, not out loud, not to the tank, not to the man on the radio talking about Cutler volleyball.
Emmett is in the doorway of the shop when I come back round. Coat on over his pyjamas, boots on the wrong feet, nine years old and up at six because he has never once slept past six in his life.
“You went.”
“I went.”
“What was it?”
“Twenty-four one.”
He moves his mouth a little, the way he does, and his shoulders come down half an inch. “That’s more than the last one.”
“The last one was nineteen six.”
“So it’s four and a half more.” He is not showing off. He genuinely wants it confirmed.
“Four point five more.”
“Can I come on the next one.”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t do anything. I’d sit.”
“I know you would.”
“Then why.”
There are about four answers and three of them are the truth. I give him the one that is a fact. “Because you’re not fuel, bud. You’re weight.”
He thinks about that seriously, which is worse than if he had cried, and then he nods like we have settled something and goes over to look at the board. He has to stand close. He reads the row left to right with his hands in his coat pockets, all thirty-one of them, mouth going, the way he counts.
He gets to the end and stops.
“Mum.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want me to turn the radio off?”
That is not what he was going to ask.
“Leave it,” I say.