CG Dominguez

The Still and The Sublime

No half-way work, no vain pretense, can satisfy the soul.
- George H. Kirkley

They meet, first, in the little diner across from the old hotel in Greybull, the spring of ‘66.

The man Kit’s there to see is already waiting for him when he arrives, both hands cupped around a mug of black coffee. He’s sitting so still, soft-focused eyes pinned to some flaw in the formica tabletop with all the contemplative tranquility of a monk, Kit hesitates before breaking his concentration. But the thing has got to be done.

He doesn’t stand when Kit greets him, his heavy, dark eyes quietly tracking Kit as he makes his way from the door to the corner booth. He shakes Kit’s hand with a surprising gentleness; none of that bruising grip, the caveman posturing black-tie types use in the business to assert a masculinity they worry they’ve let slip through their fingertips. Or maybe he’s just formed his own opinions about the well-tailored shirt Kit has yet to change out of and decided it would be best not to spook the city boy before he can get a hold of his share of Kit’s money.

Either way, Kit doesn’t see why they should have any problems working well together.

Molina came recommended by the tap-keeper at the little bar beneath the hotel, a gruff man with a generous pour and no tolerance for the sad sacks who tried to get their drinks on credit.

“Never heard him try to cheat anyone, or drag his feet on a contract. Might be he says no, though. He can’t take every job.”

A promising recommendation. And now he’s here, watching the man he’s hired to steward his swan song looking nervous over a plate of toast and eggs.

They eat before they talk, which Kit feels to be the civilized thing. He finds himself suddenly voracious, tucking into his short stack and omelet and a tall glass of orange juice that he polishes off with a smack of his lips. Molina picks at his breakfast like a bird.

The meal accomplished, plates cleared away, Kit thinks his companion looks a little more at ease. Relieved, maybe, by the fact that Kit had demanded so little small talk from him while they ate.

“Well now,” he says, pulling the great leather portfolio from behind him. “We should probably get to it.”

The plans go out over the table, still tacky in places with spots of sweet coffee gone dry. But Kit only needs the blueprints for Molina’s sake; if called upon, he could recreate the layout and elevation both from memory, down to the scaled millimeter.

Molina takes in the geometric splay of Kit’s masterwork; the simple elevation, the spare floor plan, the modest scale and proportions. As Kit watches, a sweet little frown forms on his forehead, a squint-eyed look of burgeoning confusion.

“You’re sure about this?”

As if Kit had brought the wrong blueprints with him. As though he could be anything but certain.

“Why do you ask?” Kit figures it’s better to nail down any real misgivings now, while he still has a chance of finding someone else to hire.

“The men building out here,” Molina starts, choosing his words with methodical care, “they want hunting lodges. Chalets. Bloated log-cabin type shit.”

“That’s their prerogative.”

“But that’s not what this is.”

“Not at all.”

“Is this the kind of thing you usually design for your clients?”

Kit’s grin widens to a Cheshire curve.

“Not at all.”

They drive out to the site together. There is nothing to distinguish the lot from the vast acreage sprawling all around in every direction, except for the packed-dirt drive that turns off from the main road, the new aluminum mailbox staked into the dirt. The massed foothills of the Big Horns rise in a soapy haze a few miles off, too distant and dust-choked to make much of a view.

But Kit didn’t come out this far for mountain vistas. What he wants, truth be told, is sky. He wants sky, and by God he’s going to get himself some. A big scoop of it just for him, his own great round mouthful of it.

The well is already dug, the electrical routed out from the grid in Greybull. He would have to make and take his phone calls from the public box in town for a while, but that doesn’t bother him. Molina takes all this in, and other things too. He looks at the grade of the road and the lay of the foundations, collating what he sees on the ground and what Kit’s shown him. Once the spring mud firms up, they will be good as roses.

“Shouldn’t be a tough spot,” Molina says, after long silence.

Kit reaches under the passenger seat, grabs a brown paper bag and pulls two beers from it. He pops the tops with his keyring and holds one out to his companion.

“That settle it?”

Molina considers. Kit wonders if he manages to do anything without some long, syrupy moment of rumination. Then the rims of their bottles click together, a binding contract.

“Does your client mind me asking,” Molina says, eyes on the horizon, peering out from under the shade of his square hand, “what he wants with a place like that all the way out here?”

“Well I sure hope he doesn’t mind,” Kit says, taking a pull of his beer. “He’s me.”

“You?”

“I’m throwing it in. I made my money, and I think I’d like to do something nice with it.”

Molina frowns. For lack of anything else to do, he drinks. Kit can hear him thinking.

“What will you do out here?”

Kit shrugs. He hadn’t really thought so far ahead. He never did.

“Not sure. Draft. Probably put together a lot of plans that will never see the daylight. But I don’t mind that so much. Catch up on my reading. Learn to climb, or drive down to Jackson and ski a little.”

Molina’s eyebrows drift upwards, a subtle indication of surprise.

“Why? What’d you expect me to say?”

“The men who build out here are usually in it for the fly fishing. Or they want to play Cowboys and Indians.”

Kit huffs, inadvertently blowing a low note from the neck of his bottle, like the leader in a jug band.

“More like Cowboys and ATF Agents, from what I hear. But that’s not my line at all. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“That’s good,” Molina says, with a hint of humor. “You’d make a lousy rancher.”

“No shit.” A pull. Another pause. “That what you did, before? Ranch handing?”

“I like having my own workshop better. And ranching’s messy.”

“I imagine it must be.”

They split another round in the Tin Cup, surrounded by old-timers who tin their piss-thin lager with tomato juice.

Kit thinks how he might have preferred a bottle of whiskey to go and a romp in his hotel room, but it was only a craving. He can be a good boy sometimes, too.

Kit remembers it well; the first time came here. He recalls the drive from the little airport, still in his suit, wrinkled to shit from twenty-four hours of wear, but he didn’t care. The first cold bolt of clean air into his lungs was enough to renew him, remake him, make him feel bathed and refreshed in the flowing waters of grace.

And then his rented Cadillac broke down beside an irrigation gutter, stinking with waste from the calf-cow operation down the road. He walked and walked along the flat ribbon of tarmac till he saw the sign of land for sale: a hundred acres with nothing that needed doing, a little landscape that already knew how to take care of itself.

And Kit saw it; on the horizon, like a dream. He saw the house, the whole bare-slat mass of it, birthed fully formed from his own imagination like the job was already done. Like the dozens of hours spent drafting and re-drafting all finished in the space of an instant. The house, the perfect house, the one he knew he had to have, that all his labors up ‘till now had prepared him for.

He made a few phone calls, when he trudged back into town. He called for a tow. He called his bank. And then he called his boss and put in his notice. He was through. Something in the high, brisk clarity of the air had got into his blood. Doubts, it seemed, were tougher to maintain at this altitude.

He had seen the house, seen his destiny. All he needed now was to find someone to build it for him.

As promised, the mud-melt dries. The creeks shrink down to fit back within their summer banks. And work begins.

They spread out under the bright sky to talk details.

The Shakers, he explained, thought they were building their own slice of heaven on earth, a literal piece of it. They thought God lived in the empty spaces that men moved through, lived in the spear of light that holds the dust motes up. So they didn’t build places for any other purpose but to live and work in them, and to catch and use the light. Skylights over staircases, single great gable windows. They proportioned their buildings like Grecian temples, only without any of the decorative flourishes favored by the classical world, believing them to be in poor taste.

Kit talks him through all the old methods; the box-framing, the plank and beam composition of the floors, all the traditional workings he’s sure Molina’s never had the opportunity to learn all the way out here. But Molina listens attentively, thoughtfully, until Kit almost forgets he has an audience, imagining he could go on and on forever.

Kit comes to site most days, but he doesn’t linger, not wanting Molina to imagine himself over-supervised.

He sometimes works alone, but more often with one other man, introduced as Cousin Pascal — burly and clumsy and talkative where Molina is none of these things. They work fast, even though the cost of their labor is metered out by the day. Molina wants the place done, he says, before winter comes. He wants Kit to get his share of the light he’s been so long in craving.

Kit lets the days flow through his fingers like loose pearls, falling away from their broken strand. And he remembers how angry he was when his car broke down and he thinks less and less about how to go hunting for the sublime when it doesn’t want itself to be found.

And the only constant in the changing light and weather is the way he can feel his old life drifting farther and farther and farther off like a barrel hurled from the side of a sailing ship, bobbing away in the waves, lost to the horizon.

The first big summer storm comes down from the mountains. Kit watches it from the window of the Tin Cup Inn, the roiling green and yellow clouds forming over the Jackson range, like bad milk curdling in hot coffee.

Snowflakes form, congealing out of the charged air. Kit can’t help himself. He leaps bow-legged into the cab of his rented truck and streaks out to the building site. Molina is already taking shelter in the open hollow of his van, peering out into the storm and drinking coffee from a battered thermos, legs hanging from the back bumper.

“Just wanted to see it,” Kit says, all he knows to give by way of explanation. Molina doesn’t try and argue with him, or insist it’s a madcap thing to do. Kit already knows it is, doesn’t need to be told twice about it.

They get the roof up together; the three of them. Kit, and Molina, and silent Cousin Pas (who Kit begins to suspect is so quiet because he doesn’t speak much English, so Kit tries to be polite and not engage in too much conversation in which he can’t participate.) It takes one hot, glorious day to raise the rafters, one more to lay the planks, one to put the tin down. Stepping back, Kit can see it, really see it for the first time since it came to him in his vision. The silhouette fills just the right amount of space on the horizon, cuts just the right shape. It’s perfect.

To celebrate, Molina takes them to a different place, where Kit’s never been before. It’s quieter, calmer. The light is softer. Kit gets drunk quicker than he has in a long time.

He designs Molina a house to live in, too. The idle hours must be filled somehow. And he gleans enough data from their conversations to give him a pretty good idea of his likes and dislikes.

The site would be key, he thinks, chewed-down nub of a pencil between his foreteeth. Something high up on a ridge, tucked into a protective clutch of boulders and cliff, the kind of place a mountain lion might choose to dig its den in. Someplace to lend an air of defensibility, of vigilant solitude.

He thinks about the castles he remembers, dotted all along the sinuous courses of the Rhine, when he took his own little Grand Tour once upon a time, falling into bed with men from Dublin to Strasbourg to Croatia and back again, more of an education than college ever offered him.

But Molina’s house. That’s a pretty puzzle for him to solve. Echoes of old martial practicality can only get one so far; what no one tells you about castles is they’re beastly to live in. He doesn’t want that for Molina. After so much toil, so much rotten luck, a man deserves a place to be comfortable.

So the house on the ridge won’t shut out the world, even as it might appear to lord over it a little. He takes his cues from the proportions of the farmsteads still dotted around; snug, easy to heat, and opens up the elevation; proposing big sash windows in kitchen and den. The bedroom would have a shielded view clear down to the bottom of the valley, but would look up as well as down. He knows Molina doesn’t need the sun to wake him, but wouldn’t be bothered either by the fall of light on his face in the morning.

The walls come up, ready to prep and plaster. They source their own ingredients, combine and pour them through an old cement mixer. The old recipe has a thickness like clotted cream, works on nice and smooth, and they lay it down in long, sensual sweeps of their trowels.

The stuff still gets everywhere, even being careful as they are, little flecks of fake snow caught in the crisp waves of Molina’s hair, the bristle of his mustache. Kit cards his fingers over his own scalp, and feels the way it sticks in places, crusted by the limewash.

They call it a day. Molina held to his promise to drive them both, when the weather looked doubtful, and the Caddy couldn’t be trusted (though that car had done a heroic job, ferrying him all over the West).

They bump shoulders on the bench seat. Something about the meditative rhythm of the work today has got him feeling lighter than normal, like he’s liable to float up off the seat if he isn’t careful to stay put. He’s glad Molina is doing the driving, either way. He drives with a languid smoothness, changing gears like he’s sculling; pulling the paddles in long, flowing movements (like the old Chinese ladies Kit knows, who practice tai chi in a park down the street from his apartment in Glendale.).

Leaning close, Kit catches a whiff of Molina’s smell: plain bar soap and antiperspirant, and suddenly his mouth is dust-dry.

“Got time for a drink?” Kit asks.

“Just the one, maybe.”

But Kit’s been at this a long while. He knows how to read certain signs. Sure, it’s occurred to him. Sure, he’s let the thought of it keep him company on long, cold nights. But he’s long-since learned his lesson about mixing the personal and the professional together. He’s been burned often enough.

And what was more, he had gotten over the old, dangerous urge to take risks, to make a move on someone, not knowing if they would answer back in kind or take a swing at him. The little charge, the frisson of threat had only been a turn-on for so long. Time has taught him better.

He lets Molina down easy. And the man goes easy, too.

But Kit thinks he knows how it will go, with time. He knows this thing will keep, that it will wait for him in the tall grass. He means to put down roots here, where Molina has already dug himself deep, and mayhap they will grow together, the little tendrils of their tension intertwining down in the dirt.

But he will let the future form itself, with time. He will let it be an empty space, waiting for the light of God to fill it up, and them with it.

He will be patient.

C.G. Dominguez is a Puerto Rican physician-in-training working and writing in the American Midwest with her wife, her dog, and her black raspberry patch.