Before He Finds Her by Michael Kardos Page A

strings while holding a conversation, either, so he laid the guitar back in its case. “I want to tell you a true story,” he said, “about something I did three days ago.”
    Eric’s eyes widened. After all these years, he was still protective of Ramsey. He still felt responsible. “I hope it’s nothing bad.”
    “No, you idiot. I went and saw the Grand Canyon.” Ramsey tossed a few empties into an open trash can. The beer was really for Paul and Wayne. Eric was in A.A., and Ramsey drank exactly one beer each rehearsal to prove to himself that he could stop after one. “Ever seen it?”
    “The Grand Canyon? Of course.”
    “I don’t mean in pictures.”
    “Then no, I haven’t seen it. Been too busy.”
    “Well, I been busy, too. But I was in Phoenix on Tuesday and my load-in got done early, and I said to myself it was time to see something I always wanted to see. Something I always heard you’ve never seen till you see it in person. So I drove through the desert, and when I got there I parked my truck and I saw it.”
    It felt familiar, telling Eric about something he did or someplace he went, though with a crucial difference. Early on in their friendship, Ramsey’s stories were usually confessions: The time he got drunk and beat up some prick outside the Pink Pony. The time he got canned for insubordination. He would confess, and Eric would listen and offer a few words to remind Ramsey that we weren’t simply the sum total of our mean-spirited actions.
    “So how was it?” Eric asked.
    Off and on these past couple of days, heading east, Ramsey considered how he might describe the indescribable. “It was big. And silent.” He frowned. “Damn. I can’t do it. There’s no words, you know?” There was only a feeling born of an expanse so wide that standing on the rim was like leaning over the surface of an empty planet. At the same time, he liked knowing it wasn’t some other planet but just dumb old America. And he liked knowing that he was experiencing the same stunned hush, the same loss for words, that other men had experienced for as long as there had been people to stand there and look. No, he couldn’t describe to Eric what he could barely describe to himself, about feeling small and unimportant, but in the best sense. You don’t matter as much as you think you do , the canyon told him, so lighten up . To get that feeling, to grasp the wisdom written on the immense canyon walls, you had to be there yourself. Otherwise, you sounded like the sort of hitchhiker Ramsey despised, blathering on and saying nothing.
    “I got high that day,” he said. So maybe this was a confession after all, he realized.
    “Weed?” Eric asked.
    “Amazing weed.”
    “Maybe not the best idea,” Eric said.
    “Maybe no, maybe yes,” Ramsey said. “What happened was, I got this idea into my head to climb down into the canyon a ways. There was a trail. It looked sort of steep, but what the hell.”
    “Sure. Worst that happens is you fall a few thousand feet to your death.”
    “Exactly. So about a half hour down the trail I can smell it. A minute later, I come across a couple of kids, guy and a girl, on a big flat rock soaking up the sun.”
    “Hanky panky?”
    Eric was thirty-nine, only five years older than Ramsey, but sometimes he sounded like a whole other generation. “No, they weren’t screwing or nothing. They were just sitting there, smoking and talking and looking out at everything. It was already a lot hotter there than up on the rim. It felt like July all of a sudden. They had a jug of water and they offered me some, and then they offered me the joint they were smoking, and I surprised myself by taking both. These kids, they were smart. In college. We talked.” Ramsey tried to recall the conversation. With a good conversation, though, where you’re just having it and connecting with other people, do you ever remember how it got good? “You got to understand the degree of beauty there,” he said.