Steel Wings

by Stephen Wunderli

Off the tourist highway in Southeastern Utah, beyond the Atomic Blue Motor Inn, down a long gravel drive, sits a single-wide trailer with a broken rear axle. It’s some thirty feet from the slough rising out of the flat where the final destination of the home was supposed to be. Corydon declined the cost of a backhoe to move it and built a work shed at a thirty-degree angle to the trailer to give a little more shade in July. The workshop is bigger than the trailer, as a home is only a place to sleep, but work takes more space with secondhand welders, pipe benders, a band saw, and various sizes of grinders. The back of the shed can be opened to the sunset, each screw, holding down the salvaged tin walls and roof, dipped in liquid rubber to keep the rain out. Corydon trellised a grapevine between the two structures and dumps kitchen scraps at its base. He welded a sign and mounted it next to the driveway on his hundred acres of sand that simply says STEEL. The grapevine died.

Corydon was born short, yet his feet are big—a size eleven—which seems grossly out of proportion to his four-foot-seven stature, and a good reason for him not having married. He worked as an aircraft mechanic, beginning in high school when he joined ROTC but was an inch short to qualify for full service. So, he tunes the engines of tourist-hopping single wings but never flies. Height restrictions kept him from flight school, but he can turn a wrench and hear a sticky piston at full throttle. He once rode the landing gear of the Beechcraft used by Moab Tours over the Colorado River because the pilot kicked the garage dog and the town parents hated the pilot for buying beer for the local high school girls. The dog was the last straw. Corydon told the FAA agent he was working on the landing gear when the pilot took off, ignoring his cries for help. No high school girls wanted to drink with the pilot after that. His wings had been clipped. Nobody thanked Corydon, they just felt sorry for him and called him “the midget of Moab.“

He went back to work cleaning fuel filters and seating valves. The work is a two-day-a-week job, Thursday and Friday, getting ready for weekend tourists and the occasional film crew scout. The rest of the week is spent in his shed, the big garage door open to let in a breeze before the sun angles. The ghastly, red rock tumors bulge out of the desert, their shadows marching toward Corydon, portending the night with stars like sparks rising into the night from the grinder. The peace of taking rusted skin off metal rods in preparation for welding draws Corydon’s face closer to the filed edge, chamfered with just enough void to accept molten metal in the joint. His beard smolders from flecks of hot steel nesting in the whiskers. He doesn’t see the pickup truck swaying down the long drive, kicking up dust. The noise of the grinder dims Corydon’s hearing; he doesn’t hear the steel door behind him creak open. He only feels the hand on his shoulder.

He jumps and drops the grinder. “Judas Priest!”

“Sorry about that,” Brock says. He’s the local ranger and stands much taller, hunched over Corydon like a bear. He has nicked his face shaving, probably thinking the news will want to interview him.

Corydon throws his helmet to the floor and puts his fist to his chest to calm his heart. “I thought you were the Grim Reaper.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Brock says. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you that way.”

“You got a warrant for that kind of appearance?”

“I got an emergency only you can help with.”

“You got deer on the high school roof again?” Corydon asks, knowing kids pull the same pranks every year. Not very original.

“No.”

“Too early for me to play the Christmas elf.”

“Search and rescue,” Brock says, straightening up with self-importance.

“Tourist?”

“Yes. German kid about seven years old. Stuck in Moonshine Cave. Nobody can get to her.”

“Nobody would sit on the landing gear to get Lars the pervert fired either, and look where that got me?”

“She needs you Cor. You don’t gotta to do it for the town.”

Corydon pulls off his thick leather gloves and hangs them on the long delicate steel wing he is working on. It drifts under the weight of the glove, gracefully swaying as if under some unfelt wind. The balance is perfect. The skeleton needs only a gossamer cover.

“You got rope?” Corydon asks, but before Brock can answer Corydon continues, “I’ll grab mine and the harness.”

The truck is still idling when Corydon tosses the gear into the back alongside separate bundles of pink and yellow, mountaineering ropes, each a hundred feet long. The carabiners clamber on the steel bed. “How long has she been there?”

“Almost an hour.”

“Head up or down?” Corydon asks.

“She went in headfirst; we can see her feet. She can’t speak English, so it’s hard to know how she is. All we hear is whimpering.”

Brock legs into the cab, taps a switch with his knuckle, and amber lights in the grill flash on, painting the hood in a blaze of orange. Corydon hoists himself in like a Russian acrobat. The truck leaves an arc of dust, cuts across Main Street, onto Parley Ave, and drops onto the gravel road that carves past the campground and RV dump toward Tapioca Canyon with Moonshine Cave at its end. The road is clogged with four-wheelers, pickup trucks, and Alberto’s Taco Van.

“Dammit to hell,” Brock says. “Got more tourist watchers than tourists.”

Brock blares the horn, but it’s no use. The vehicles are jammed seven deep. “Guess we’re walking.”

Corydon jumps out of the truck and waits for Brock to unload the ropes and harness. He’s used to depending on taller people to drop down gear he can’t reach. He shoulders the rope and slings the harness around his neck, and the two of them portage around the vehicle dam on the scree that has fallen off cliffs above them for thousands of years. They pass under a petroglyph of a mother giving birth to a child, the head surrounded by hatch marks signifying some kind of supernatural event. The crowd of gawkers are all facing the hole that local kids call The Dragon’s Ass because of the sulphury smell it emits. The hole is three feet off the ground, and the sandstone, embedded with quartz crystals, is worn around the sphincter by so many visitors over the years. Inside the cave, the tunnel declines sharply—the result of a primordial bubble that rose out of the volcanic slurry, leaving an opening in the bowels of the earth. The German family is there at the edge, calling to their daughter, “Hilfe kommt!”

The crowd parts. Delbert is guarding the entrance. The big tow truck driver tried to get his truck close enough to drop the cable but managed to jackknife against the narrow walls of the canyon, creating the jam instead. “She’s slipped into the left fork. How she got through is beyond me. Every time someone goes in there, it knocks dirt loose on top of her. The kid is real scared.”

“OK, get these people back,” Brock ordered.

Delbert spreads his arms out wide, waggling the onlookers back. His giant meal-sack belly anchors him to the ground. He’s hurricane-proof. Corydon walks underneath the right arm without ducking, as if striding through a peach orchard. He stops at the entrance and steps into his roofing harness, buckling it down tight. “Two ropes,” he says. “Pink on the harness for safety., yellow on my ankle. Pull me up by the yellow one. Got it?”

“Got it,” Brock answers, tying a bowline in each. “I want you to give me a count every five seconds. If we don’t hear a count, we’ll assume you fainted and pull you up. Got it?”

“Got it. Feel me tug on the pink three times, you know I got hold of her,” Corydon says, adjusting the strap on the headlamp.

Brock nods. Delbert secures the ropes to the cable of his truck and whines the winch taught. “All set.”

Corydon climbs into The Dragon’s Ass. The ropes slither behind him, sixty feet quickly. “COUNT!” The ropes pause, then slither a little more. Brock feels the ropes for vibrations, trying to decipher where Corydon is. “COUNT!” The winch whines. “COUNT!” Both ropes are running through Brock’s hands. He keeps them taught as Corydon slinks like a parasite into the bowels of the earth to retrieve a human young one. The lamp illuminates the entire route, a diameter the same as an irrigation culvert, polyps emerging from the sides but worn down on the bottom. COUNT! The colon bends slightly and narrows just a bit. Corydon knows if he keeps right, following the oil-stamped walls from so many visitor’s hands, he will drop down into the cavern, an underground cathedral with small hoodoos and the names of high school lovers carved on the ceiling that required girlfriends to stand on fleeting boyfriends’ shoulders to etch. But on the left is a sixteen-foot offshoot that drops almost straight down, just big enough for a child to slip into and wedge as the hole grows narrower. Kids call it The Hemorrhoid and go right by, knowing it leads nowhere and would be the cause of great pain. This is where the girl is, an organism from the billions that roam and die on the surface, but this one migrated differently, lost balance in the dark, confused by shadows and echoes.

Corydon lays on his stomach, the hole is not much bigger than his head. He coughs sand from his lungs, billion-year-old granules apathetic to his life. He pulls his arms forward with a loop of the yellow rope in his hand and wriggles like a snake, then undulates like a worm, his body exhaling to reduce girth, extending, inhaling, pausing, exhaling, extending.

Up top, Delbert is sweating. “We should pull him up. He’s suffocating.”

“No,” Brock says. “The rope is still drawing. He’s in The Hemorrhoid now. Slow going.” Two teenage girls step forward and take selfies next to Brock.

“Please stay back.”

The Medevac helicopter roars overhead. The flat plain leading to the cave entrance is clogged with cars. The chopper circles and retreats to the parking lot, which is also full. It hovers. Paramedics on four-wheelers ride the scree as far as they can, lay out a backboard, and wait.

Exhale. Extend. Corydon is now twelve feet into The Hemorrhoid, and the air is getting difficult to breathe. He sees the small soles of the girl’s sneakers. When he reaches out to touch them, they light up and squeak. Inhale. He pulls them off, and her socks. The feet move slightly. She is alive. From his Superman position, Corydon deftly ties the rope around the girl’s ankles, the same knot used to rope a calf. He tugs three times hard on the rope. Exhale.

“He’s got her!” Brock cries out.

Delbert stumbles as he turns to the winch. He thrusts the lever sideways and cable winds onto the cylinder, then a knot and two ropes, yellow and pink. It doesn’t seem to any of the bystanders with their phones aimed at The Dragon’s Ass that this much rope went down. A news helicopter whirrs overhead, kicking up grit and jockeying for airspace against the Medevac chopper. The cylinder winds, wringing dust from the ropes. Another news crew is running from the parking lot, lugging cameras and falling down on the uneven terrain. They will be late and ask for a re-enactment.

The taught ropes move from the bottom of the opening to the middle, and Brock knows they are close. His palms are sandpapered and raw. “Here they come!”

The girl’s parents try to climb into the entrance, but Brock stops them by shouting out the only German word he knows from old war movies. “Schnell!” This left them confused.

Suddenly, feet appear, two small and two large, jutting out like a breeched calf. Brock and the German father pull on the ankles, and Corydon appears, holding the girl close to his chest—an adjustment he made once inside the main tunnel to protect her. She raises her head slightly, revealing long scrapes on her face. The tips of her fingers are bloody. In her panic, she tried to dig down to free herself. There are rope burns on her ankles because the knots held. The girl is ripped out of Corydon’s arms by her mother. She says something he cannot understand. The father turns to Brock and embraces him, howling out fear and tears and deep gasps of revival. He can barely stand and drapes on Brock. Corydon removes the harness.

The paramedics arrive and set the girl on the backboard. They check her pulse and her breathing, feel for broken bones, and give her sips of water. All the while, she sobs in confusion and childlike yearning to be embraced. No one thinks to move their cars. A dusty sun has moved closer to the sandstone ridge, mottled with iron and cutting a maternal shoulder into the sky. Another news crew arrives but is declined a re-enactment. They settle for a quick shot of the rescuers and child, but Corydon is too small to make it into frame. The horde of bystanders carries the child on the backboard atop their shoulders, weaving down the trail, in and out of vehicles, bearing the small miracle to the ambulance. Brock directs traffic. Delbert’s battery is dead; he weeps in his cab. Corydon lies down in the cave, his feet jutting out, his face feeling the sulfuric breeze washing up from the bowels of the earth. He closes his eyes and falls fast asleep.

When Corydon wakes up, it is evening. The crowd of people has disappeared. He climbs out of The Dragon’s Ass and stands among the bulges of sandstone and the halo of descending light above them. He waits until he can see stars before picking up his harness and moving down the trail. The first wind of autumn blows out of the canyon, cooler than the summer breezes. He follows the trail pocked by so many visitors, then the tire tracks on the dirt road and onto the asphalt. He crosses Main Street unnoticed. The moon is full up when he arrives at the steel garage. Nothing has changed. The tools are all where he left them. He rolls open the big doors in the back and gazes out at the landscape, so primitive, so unyielding. He plugs in the grinder and finishes the chamfers on the struts he started in the morning. There is no one to watch as he bends and tacks the last pieces into place; the thin steel rods have become giant, gothic wings. He unrolls the gossamer and cuts to shape, folding the edges over, gluing, stretching, and finally lacquering the fabric so it will tighten stiff. The wings span the length of the two-car workshop. As Corydon waits for them to dry, he wonders why Brock didn’t notice them. They were nearly done—black, skeletal bat wings. He clips the roofing harness onto the loops that are welded in the exact place where his weight will balance for flight, and he waits for the lacquer to dry.

The Milky Way lies across the sky, a great omnipotent stream that led primitive ancestors to better hunting grounds. It courses above an insignificant cliff that edges Corydon’s property, carved by an ancient receding river. It is the place where Corydon throws bottles filled with the ashes of letters written to his mother, hoping in some cosmic way the messages will reach her. I saved a girl today. He throws the bottle high into the air and watches it arc into the steep canyon below, disappearing for a breath and then exploding with a faint thud, like the sound of a cat jumping off the couch onto a wooden floor. Corydon trudges back to the workshop. It is still an hour before dawn.

The wings are dry. Corydon feels each seam and weld. He unhooks them from the cables by which they hang and tilts them out the door. Once in the desert, the wings appear small. He steps into the harness and tightens the straps. The wind begins. It rolls across the sand and sage, like an ancient ocean, scuttling dried cedar bark against rounded boulders and closing the bilateral eyelids of desert tortoises. The landscape falls into the stature of children’s building blocks as Corydon walks, eyes on the sky, wind growing stronger as the air warms, rising out of the canyon bottoms, pushing into heavens, coiling and turbulent above him.

The edge is where most people hesitate. Seeing the bottom causes a rethinking. Corydon won’t hesitate, he won’t let himself. He grips the underside rods, kicks his work boots off, and runs, runs full speed, each stride gaining in length as air drafts underneath the wings. COUNT Stride. COUNT Stride. With his head tilted back, Corydon’s last step is up, never touching the ground, climbing the air, the breath of the canyon, as it exhales again and again.

BIO: Stephen Wunderli is a freelance writer for The Foundation for a Better Life and The Denver Gazette. He is the recipient of the United Nations Time for Peace award, and the Bridport Prize in literature.