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look up and can barely make out the WELCOME I’ve seen a hundred times. It’s Wayne’s canvas tonight. He drops me the rope.
    My face and fingertips go numb in the sharp midnight cold. The air is thin—another hundred and fifty feet above sea level—and I’m shaky when I get to the top and get the godawful-heavy CO 2 tanks hoisted up with us. Heights are not as intimidating in the softness of moonlight. I look down. Who has not thought about what jumping into shadow would be like, before you have to be pushed, knowing from cold memory what is there in the daylight? Would you pass out in the air from fear? Would you still be alive after landing? Without the conviction to pull it off, these thoughtsare pretty harmless. I lock the couplings in, adjust the regulator, and Wayne is in business at fifty psi. “I’m cold,” he says. “What took you so long?” But he’s been busy painting in his mind, preparing, sweat beading on his high forehead and breath freezing on his beard in the stinging wind, an athlete. His eyes are dark and intent, pen-and-ink Zeus eyes from junior high textbooks.
    I can see the dim reflection on my trailer, across the valley. From here it looks cold and empty, like a beer can in a field, looks like it will blow away and keep blowing and not stop for barbed wire or Nebraska in the western wind. Two window’s are lit at the Afghans, yellow and warm like cabin lanterns. Wayne’s drafty house. Lights are on, Robin is awake, grading papers, pacing, worrying. Coyotes are singing.
    The heavy, old, and leaky Paasche airbrush hisses, a high-pressure serpent in Wayne’s hands. His strokes are swift and graceful. He turns his head only to spit over the edge. I watch for police cars and hit him on the back when I see the lights below. We freeze for a moment until the headlights turn away—a bread truck, a mine truck—then he starts in again, blending densities with over-spray, caressing with pressure. His painting becomes a mating dance, which has been rehearsed hundreds of times in his mind. I am cold. Wayne gradually strips as he sweats and soon he’s down to only dark, holey polypropylene underwear and backwards Rockies cap. He pauses, wheezing, only to switch the airbrush tips I retrieve from the rucksack of tools on my back, dump the paint cup, and for me to change colors: True Blue, Grass Green, Spectrum Yellow, Ruby Red. I clean tips and hand the fresh brushes to Wayne like a caddy. It’s hard for me to make out the painting completely. Wayne slows to work in detail. The half hours grow into hours, history.
    “You’ll see it when it’s light and it’s finished,” Wayne tells me when I disturb him once to ask what it is. “To tell you now wouldbe to drain my creative energy, to change what I have, risk killing fruition.”
    “Okay,” I say. It is all I say for the next few hours. The painting is coming alive.
    The moon has moved across the sky It’s getting lighter out. The hills go from midnight moonlit blue to morning lark. I see deep concern in his face—not panic, but he picks up his pace. I trust in Wayne, though cheating time is something even Wayne Kerr cannot do.
    “That’s it,” he says, putting his overalls back on. With the finest brush tip I pulled up here, this is what he signs in black letters too small to see from below:
w. kerr.
I let out the deep part of my breath that I’ve been holding all night. We double-check everything, drop the tanks on the rope, descend the ladder, Wayne first, and hustle to the truck. Wayne gets there before me, cranks the old V-8 over while I collapse the ladder, strap it to the truck, lift the tanks and rucksack in. The cab is warm by the time I open the door, the radio is on, Wayne is whistling.

    At my trailer we open beers, unfold lawn recliners in the snow that is my front yard, and wait for sunrise to unveil the nights work. “Apollo, get your dead ass over Sarpy Ridge!” yells Wayne so that the town below might hear. It’s still