Five Skies

by Ron Carlson

  Darwin strode back to Arthur Key. “If he doesn’t cut a finger off, we’ll keep him,” the older man said and smiled. “He hasn’t worked very much.” He pointed past Key to the plans. “Can you do it?”

  “This is a shitty little job,” Key said. He wanted his voice full of blame.

  “It could be,” Darwin said. “Let’s walk here. Get away from the noise a little.” Ronnie was in a rhythm now and there was a cut every few seconds. Darwin led them out toward the gorge.

  “Who’s your man in the pickup?”

  “Just a consultant. An engineer.”

  “Not much of one. His little plans are wrong top to bottom. But it doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, somebody’s going to get killed out here.” Key had raised his voice and pointed out over the river. “Right here. That’s all this means.”

  Darwin kept his eyes on Key’s, holding his gaze. Suddenly a small white-tailed hawk flared before them, rising from the canyon, so close Key could see the grain of the talons. They watched the hawk make a quick tour over where Ronnie Panelli worked at the pile of wood. “The saw scream made him think something was hurt up here. A rabbit or a fawn,” Darwin said. The hawk disappeared into the sky.

  “There’s deer?”

  “Antelope. Deer. Elk sometimes.”

  “You’re going to ruin a pretty good place with this project of yours.”

  Darwin pushed the pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and shook one out to Key. They sat down on the broken rock shelf above the river and smoked.

  “You can build it, can’t you?” Darwin said. “You’re my man.”

  “Anybody could build it. This piece of shit. I take it this is a one-use item.”

  “Those decisions have been made elsewhere.”

  “And you want to do it.”

  “I’m the foreman on a pretty good ninety-day job. The money’s good and I need the money. One life ended. I’m doing this now. It’s just my next thing.” Here Darwin came up to Arthur, leveled his face before the larger man, and said with a forthright tone that could not be mistaken: “But, I want to do it right.” Key liked the way Darwin spoke directly to him, and he had known since they met that he trusted this man, and he’d always been right about people in that regard. He had been ready to leave, to ask for a ride back to town, to any town really, to quit this rare place and commence again the nickel-and-dime days he’d been living for these terrible weeks; in fact, he could see himself once again sitting on the edge of a starched bed somewhere in a rented room the way he’d spent some afternoons since his flight from California and his wrongdoing, but now he saw he was in because he trusted this man. The river flashed in its ribbon far beneath them like some trick of light in the arch recess of the canyon. Across the plateau a short distance Ronnie pressed his steel circular saw into the screaming lumber. Arthur Key felt the decision turn in him and settle. He would just do it as a job, not get involved in anything else. As Darwin had said, the decisions were made elsewhere.

  “We can do it,” he said. He took Darwin’s upper arm in his hand and squeezed it in a friendly gesture. “I was really hoping this would be a bridge. That would have been more than I could chew, but I was hoping.”

  Darwin nodded at him.

  “But we’re going to have to redo those plans. Will that work?”

  “I’ll get you anything you need.”

  The saw had stopped and the distant rush of the river rose up to them. They could see the pile of bright boards Ronnie Panelli had sawn. The young man himself was at the jeep now, leaning over the blueprints.

  Arthur Key nodded at the truck and the trailer of material and equipment. “You’ve about got it all. We’re going to want plywood, any grade, for those three-quarter-inch sheets of particleboard. We won’t work with that stuff. And we may need some more cement. Let’s make the boy some lunch and then dig those holes.”

  TWO

  THEY WORKED INTO the early dark the first day, but the three men had equipment trouble, and they didn’t drill any postholes. Darwin had stepped off the intervals and marked where to dig, but the tractor didn’t cooperate. The day would prove like so many days at the campsite to be too small a thing for the plans they made. Too often even as the days lengthened through spring and into the high Idaho summer and the two-hour twilight, the irrevocable night would rise up between them in the middle of their workings, Key turning to Darwin for the level and not being able to see him there with the instrument ready. They fell into a pattern then without having to speak about it, retrieving their gear, lifting all the tools off the bare ground into the tractor shovel or laying them on the hood of the Farmall, and a listener would have heard only this certain clanking as the hammers and chisels and crowbars and screwdrivers were gathered against the night. “Nothing worse in the morning than finding a crescent wrench in the dirt,” Key had told Ronnie Panelli the second or third day, when the young man finally understood what a crescent wrench was, the whole nomenclature of tools coming to him in daily increments, a lesson he resisted only for the moment before he saw that these tools were somehow his too, that he would get to wield them, be expected to, without assistance. He knew the language of only two things before this and one was the street and the other was golf, his life as a caddy. If the weather threatened, the men took the extra time to locate and place the tools in the large waterproof ammo chest by their tent. And so their days ended with this regard for their tools and the days began, as they squinted over coffee, in the exhilarating open air knowing where the shovel was, the chain, the awl.

  On the first day, after a lunch of roast beef sandwiches on the sourdough rolls Darwin had brought from Pocatello, they’d fitted the tractor power takeoff assembly with the eight-foot auger, and already the light had lurched so that shadows were twice as long as things and the various wild birds began traversing the high sky. That first lunch had been odd, Darwin sawing the bread on his makeshift tailgate table with the butcher knife they would all learn to use, a tool big as a hacksaw, while Ronnie Panelli stood in front of the truck, well away from Arthur Key. And then the sandwiches themselves, each the size of a loaf, the largest sandwich Ronnie Panelli had ever had in his hands, were outsize for only a moment until the magnitude of the place registered once again; midafternoon in such a world required food this big. Panelli held his sandwich in both hands and tore at it still standing in front of the truck, keeping the vehicle between Key and himself, while the other two men sat on a bale of two-by-sixes and talked.

  The bread was fresh and rough. Darwin watched Arthur eat. “Good?” he said. Arthur Key nodded, and Darwin went ahead. “Listen, do you want this job?” He pointed north where the sky was ripped with flags of rained-out cloud fragments stark in the blue day. “If you want, we can eat and just take you back to Pocatello.”

  Key, glad for the sun on his face, the warmth, looked up, chewing. He shook his head. “I don’t want that drive again.”

  Darwin set his sandwich on the cutting board and twisted open the big jar of pickles offering it to Arthur Key. “Just let me know,” he said. “We can pump up those tires and that snow will be long gone.”

  After a minute, Arthur Key said, “It is a good sandwich, certainly good enough for who it’s for.” He held it up. “A little wine wouldn’t hurt.”

  “A good red wine?” Darwin said.

  “Any red wine. White wine is not for drinking. White wine is something to do with your hands.”

  The older man laughed. They both talked through their chewing.

  “There’s water here,” Darwin called to Ronnie Panelli. He meant the five-gallon cistern that now sat near the tent. When there was no answer, Darwin added, “You don’t have to stand out there and eat. There’s room on the bench.” Panelli didn’t turn. The sun at just after one o’clock on the plateau was flat and, if a person stood still out of the light chill wind, warm. It was actually sixty degrees and would be twenty-five by midnight. These were the days that the ancient rock worked against itself, press
ing and shrinking away, the red sandstone binding and yielding, calving a boulder into the vast gorge every century, even though they stood ready—rows of hundred-ton rocks—all along the ruined, steadfast lip of the canyon.

  Darwin ate. He eyed Arthur Key. He was trying to say something and have it lead to the next thing, the thing he didn’t know. He considered and then retreated. Finally, he tried, “But drinking isn’t it for you. That’s not why we have you here.”

  Key looked up from his eating as if he was as comfortable with this agenda as with any. His look showed that other men had tried for his secrets. “No,” Arthur Key said. “It isn’t. I’m just traveling.”

  “Well, no matter,” Darwin said. It was early in the season and he still wanted his power poles and his job done right more than he wanted to know about this large man who leaned against the jeep tailgate beside him. “We’ve got some work out here in the country, bit by bit. Today, water and the power poles, and in a night or two we’ll have our wine.”

  But they didn’t even unload the poles until almost noon the next day with all that lay before them in preparation. First, a while later, there was the sweet moment when Ronnie Panelli came around the corner of the Ford, walking slowly back toward the two men with his hand on the fender, his expression different now after eating, already his chemistry changed twenty-four hours after leaving Pocatello, a town where he had spent a bad month and not had a square meal. Arthur Key, himself now different too having settled into this brief life on the plateau, this job, and not being chafed by a single second guess, said across to the younger man, “What then, you eat the whole damn thing?” And in a flash Panelli’s face took it as accusation, as it had taken everything said to it for years and years and years, ten years at least of his twenty, but then something happened that had never happened to him before because he took it in as accusation and it changed to something that showed on his face as pride, really what is called a shit-eating grin rose despite his galled determination to hate Key forever for having thrown him down this morning. There was a half second when Darwin watched and then without deciding to, he led them into the laughter which rang there.

  “You’re goddamn right, I ate it,” Panelli said. “I came back here looking for another.”

  “You deserve it,” Key told him. “Look at that house.” They turned to take in the large white tent, the only edifice in the round world.

  “I know,” Panelli said. “Look at that wood; somebody cut that up.” Unhidden in his voice were the first naked notes of pride, joyous and sobering. “That saw is wild.”

  But assembling the auger took the rest of the light. It was eight feet in length, one piece, two hundred pounds of stainless steel, new. Key couldn’t remember seeing a new one before, and the shiny curved blade reminded him of the money behind such a project. The bit on the new tool was a wrong fit in the old tractor’s drive, and the men wrestled with it past the golden smoky sunset. The tractor and the auger had been manufactured fifty years apart in different countries and Arthur Key had to re-rig the takeoff acceptor. It all would have taken another day had Darwin not had Key to stand and steady the huge device while he and Ronnie crawled up the power takeoff mechanism to hold it in line so they could secure it with Arthur’s homemade cotter bolt. Arthur, with his arm around the steel auger like a lover, tapped the bolt through the upper brace with a small sledgehammer, each tap a smart steel snap. He told Ronnie, who by now was greasy to his elbows, “Sometimes engineering comes down to using a bigger hammer.”

  In the early dark, Darwin climbed into the Farmall seat and started the tractor. When he engaged the auxiliary switch and the takeoff clutch and the auger began to twirl, Ronnie Panelli called into the twilight already thick with bats and swallows risen from the canyon wall, “All right!”

  It had been a day. They gathered their scattered tools, the pliers and the monkey wrench and all of the hammers and the oil can, and putting them away, the men retreated to the tent. They took another minute with the hissing gas lantern looking for discarded bolts and steel lock washers. They could feel on their shoulders and bare heads the unmeasured chill descending as if in netted sheets from space as darkness filled and doubled. There were still the army surplus cots to erect by flashlight. They had a brief discussion about the stove, the sum of which was that Ronnie wanted to take the hour it would require to install the stove tonight; his wood lay in a pile like a rich promise. While they reasoned, Darwin’s old lantern glared and blinked from where it hung on the tent tether. But the older men prevailed by promising to do it in the morning and then by climbing in their bedrolls and being quiet, which left no argument but sleep.

  The fourth day on the plateau at Rio Difficulto after drilling all ten of the foundation holes for the utility poles at forty-yard intervals from the ranch road to the encampment and grinding an inch off the leading edge of their new auger in the sand and clay and red sandstone, Darwin, Arthur Key and Ronnie Panelli put their tools away early in the afternoon and quit the site, headed for Mercy all three in the front of the old jeep, which made a cramped twenty-mile ride with Key’s size and Panelli’s injury.

  Behind them six of the long brown posts stood loose in the ground, like the beginnings of a crazy fence for giants. They drove without speaking because there was nothing to say. Darwin had warned them that the doctor wouldn’t be in Mercy, that he’d have to come out from Twin Falls, but there were a couple of EMTs and the clinic was well stocked with the kind of material they would need to remove the ragged pine splinter from Ronnie’s shoulder.

  Arthur Key didn’t speak because he didn’t want to say again, as he had when they set out on the clay road after every time they jostled, “Are you okay?” and have Ronnie lie in his strange voice, “Yeah.”

  And Ronnie Panelli didn’t speak because his head kept going milky, and he thought he was going to die. The dirty foot-long spear of wood was right there, protruding from the top of his shoulder, both front and back, taking all his thoughts away, as he leaned forward, his head in his hands.

  The sixth pole had slipped. The three men had drilled all the holes and cleaned them to seven feet, Ronnie on his belly in the dirt with the shovel as if he owned each one. Using the lift bucket on the Farmall tractor, they’d chained and hoisted the treated telephone poles one by one and levered them each into a socket. They were solid fits in the rigid earth and Darwin was pleased about how little cement they’d have to mix later. Art had rolled and muscled so many of the wooden timbers through the day, kicking the round poles over the chain, that Ronnie had also started acting like they weren’t a thousand pounds. When the sixth pole rose to forty-five degrees, Ronnie had shouldered under it the way he’d seen Arthur do all day and then the heavy post stopped, suddenly biting into the side of the earthen hole and catching Ronnie. When it broke free, it took him to the ground like an insult, the big sliver nailing him there.

  Now the jeep rode smoothly over the dirt-packed road. Deeply, quietly, in a room of his mind that he had closed and secured so well, once and for all, he had thought, Arthur Key was thinking it all over: the big things in his life, the things he could see from this distance, were certainly his fault, and he was trying to figure if this too was of his making. They had cut Ronnie’s shirt off right after the pole had slipped and pinned him just long enough to gouge him this way, and Key could see the exit wound and the sharp bloody edges of the section of wood. It was high in the shoulder, but it looked serious. Darwin looked over at him and the look said simply that: This could be serious.

  In half an hour they crossed the abandoned rail trestle which had carried tons of potatoes to the west coast during World War II, now clogged with the ebullient weeds of spring which sprang from every crack in the earth, and the little truck rose onto the paved section of G 17 known as Main Street in Mercy, Idaho, passing the green-garden lawn of the Mormon church and slowing through the patchwork of Mercy—even the unpainted ramshackle assemblage of Main Street sending Arthur Key a note of warning; he had
n’t realized how much the remote encampment met his atavistic need for clear days free of anything at all like civilization. This old town seemed a hundred layers of ten thousand decisions, only a few of them even interesting.

  Darwin began talking as soon as the town of Mercy came into view, looking like a cowlick at the alluvial edge of a vast farming plain, bordered along one side by the beginnings of the Mertz mountain range and the other by the river gorge.

  He told them that with the exception of the scattering of homes that surrounded the little town, there were only two structures in Mercy still functioning as what they were originally erected: the pink brick L.D.S. ward house surrounded by its stunning green lawn, which exhibited a lush healthiness that ran counter to so much of the local landscaping; and the one-story flagstone medical and dental clinic at the other end of Main Street.

  Everything else along the street had had at least two incarnations and now he cited them, talking because he could, because he wanted to flatten his own heartbeat, come out of the near panic. He liked this kid and he wanted Ronnie to be all right. He wanted him to be all right, and he was uncertain of everything. “The Sunrise Cafe,” he said, pointing to the yellow sun painted on the window peeking over a giant cup of coffee. “It was the old drygoods. Here’s Schindler’s, which is our hardware. You’ll be in there sometime certainly. It’s in what was the old Trail Bank building.” Darwin drove and pointed and talked as if he had an audience. “That First Security Bank was originally a hotel, the building was maybe the first in Mercy, and still the tallest with three stories. It’s had maybe twenty names, and was The Little Sky when we moved to the ranch forty years ago. There’s Gem Arts and Crafts where you can get stuff to make a scrapbook, like that, and it is in the lobby of the old Gem theater. There used to be a sign clear over the street, ‘The Gem,’ a big green arch which was nothing but a hazard. It finally got torn down by somebody towing a combine through town, oh, ten years ago.”