Five Skies

by Ron Carlson

  Darwin saw Arthur Key looking across at him astonished at the speech and maybe worried, he couldn’t tell, but he could not stop himself from talking. “And that’s the video store in the old Mercy Restaurant which had been originally established by two families that dropped off from the Oregon Trail. And there, the Bradshaw Auto Parts in the defunct Liberty Bar, which closed in 1967 after two men were shot over a silver hatband or a hat, one; and the Antlers, the best place to eat in town still, which was once Baum Jewelry. One of the guys from the ranch is now the cook. When old man Baum ran his store, I bought my own wife a ruby pin there; it was something, a ship or a robin, some jewelry.” He turned right into Arthur Key’s gaze and said, “And the clinic. We are here. Everything is going to be all right.”

  Arriving in the gravel parking lot in front of the clinic, they pulled up aside one other car, a white Oldsmobile big as a boat. Panelli’s eyes were glass, his face a luminous gray. He was conscious, but let Arthur Key carry him into the clinic. His wound was a classic radical puncture wound; there had been little bleeding, the wood dagger and stanch, friend and enemy at once.

  Darwin had to get the receptionist to open the medical side of the clinic. They had interrupted her studies. Her desk was spread with the dozen pamphlets and worksheets for her real estate correspondence course. Key looked at her—a woman in a brown sweater who was probably thirty-two years old—from the distance from which he witnessed all the useless commerce of the world and he felt the dark open under him as she stood and came around the dreadful display of written material on the counter, her eyes on Ronnie’s ashen face. Arthur Key hated this woman with unutterable force for that second and he clenched his jaw and held it. He hated her and he hated that he had become a man who looked at useless behavior as a capital crime. He wanted to clear her desk with his forearm, tear the entire installation from the room and hurl it through the dirty front window into the street. Key’s vision dimmed and then he focused again on the room and followed the woman and Darwin down the hall to an examination room. Ronnie Panelli was now unconscious, his face a gray monochrome. The woman said something to Darwin and left the room.

  “No way,” Arthur Key said to Darwin, indicating the examination table. “I’ll just hold him.”

  Before they could say anything else, a diminutive man in medical whites slipped into the room and opened one of Ronnie’s eyes with a thumb. The man pulled the blood pressure collar off the wall and handed it to Darwin. “Put it there,” he told him, pointing to Panelli’s upper right arm. Then, to Arthur Key, he said, “Are you okay, holding him?”

  “Yes.”

  The man was moving quickly and Key appreciated that. He felt the pulse and applied the stethoscope. Then he checked under the chin and behind the ears. “I don’t see it,” the short man said. “What happened? Wasn’t it an explosion?” His bright blond hair ran thin and precious across his pink scalp. “Are you mining?”

  “Utility pole,” Darwin said. “Fell. Slipped.”

  “Good,” the man said, reappraising the awful splinter. He touched the sharp end of the thing. “A treated pole. He’s going to taste creosote for a week or two if we can wake him up.” He stepped to the door and said, “Linda, get Randy over here.”

  The female voice came back, “I already called.”

  “When Randy rides in, we’ll get this sliver out of the boy and send him back into battle. Put him here,” he said patting the table, “and we’ll warm him up.”

  “You’re not the doctor,” Key said, carefully adjusting Ronnie on the high table.

  Now the man was setting up an IV stand. “No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m Bob Freeman.” He handed Art a blanket. “Let’s get him comfortable. There’s no doctor in Mercy. I’m the dentist. He didn’t hurt his mouth, did he?”

  The dentist Bob Freeman turned out to be all right. He had keys to the cabinets and he was careful giving Ronnie the tetanus shot. After they’d treated Ronnie for shock, elevating his feet and inserting the intravenous tube, Bob took Darwin back to the waiting room to do paperwork. He never looked at Key, marveled at his size, strength, any of it, and Arthur felt the muscles through his neck relax a measure. He felt absolutely claimed by the tiny rooms of the clinic, the white acoustic ceiling only inches above his head. He stood still by sheer pressure of will, finally relaxing his jaw and letting his arms descend along his sides. Panelli lay sideways on the table, slack, his face now two muted shades of blue. A moment later Bob Freeman came back into the room and asked him to step outside.

  “It’s superficial,” Freeman told him. They were sitting on the railroad ties that lined the clinic’s small patch of dead lawn. “I’m pretty sure it’s a simple puncture and that none of the muscles are involved.” The smaller man sat with his elbows on his knees and gestured with one hand. “Got a smoke?”

  “You don’t smoke,” Arthur Key told him.

  “Who’s going to know, you?” Freeman smiled.

  Arthur Key shook out one of his cigarettes. “The Mormon dentist has a cigarette.”

  “Hey, seize the day,” Freeman said, setting the end of the cigarette against Key’s match. “I’ve got other virtues. Where you guys working?”

  “South of here on the river.”

  “At Diff’s place? Are they really doing that?”

  “We’re putting in the power poles. It’s going to happen. Who’s Diff?”

  “Curtis Diff. That’s all his from the Vernal Cliffs to the river. He’s cattle and potatoes and some mining and everything else, I guess, even this deal with you guys out there, which he is just doing to piss everybody up here off. The town doesn’t care for that man. He’s too rich and he’s too happy. You’ll hear about it or have some visitors, I’m sure. Remember, Knievel did it years ago, that mess?” Freeman pointed. “That was way north at the narrow gorge.” A yellow Subaru wagon pulled into the gravel parking lot of the clinic and a kid in a blue windbreaker got out with two large tackle boxes. “Hey, Bob,” the kid said. He had a thick run of freckles that disappeared into the tremendous strand of red hair that grew down his forehead like a challenge.

  “Hey, Randy. We got something ugly now. You got a bolt cutter?”

  “We’re ready,” he said.

  Arthur Key liked these men immediately. The young EMT was already in the building.

  “Come on. I’m sure he’ll have something for us to do.”

  Inside, Darwin was holding Panelli in a modified sitting position while the EMT tenderly worked the piece of wood that protruded from his shoulder in a small, slow circle. “This is from a telephone pole,” he said to Darwin.

  “We were setting poles.”

  “Entered here,” the EMT said, pointing to Panelli’s back.

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing else?” he asked Bob.

  “Just the puncture. Maybe shock.”

  And that seemed to be all the young redheaded man needed to know. He knelt and opened the huge medical boxes, their trays unfolding in four tiers. He selected the bolt cutters from one and fit it against the spear where it emerged from Ronnie’s upper shoulder. He adjusted the bite. He handed a package of gauze to Bob Freeman, along with two bottles of disinfectant. “We’ve had our tetanus shot today,” Randy said.

  “Yes, we have,” Bob said.

  Randy lifted the bolt cutter again, placing the blades flush with Panelli’s skin and closed the handles. There was a crunch as the wood was sheared away. Putting down the huge clippers, Randy grabbed the piece of wood from behind Panelli and pulled it. Nothing happened. Ronnie Panelli’s head jostled. “Oh, shit,” Randy said.

  Arthur Key moved up and put his hand on Panelli’s shoulder as if it were a gearshift knob and with the other hand he pulled the large splinter from Ronnie’s flesh in one steady slow movement. Immediately Randy bent his eye to the wound, which then began to flush with blood.

  “Clean?” Bob said.

  “Clean enough,” Randy said. “No muscles. He won’t be able to lift this arm fo
r a few days and he’s going to be as blue as you get from here to here.” Randy touched Panelli at the shoulder and the waist. “But he’s still warm.”

  The dentist was now working at the wound front and back with gauze pads and disinfectant while Randy prepared two pressure bandages. Ronnie Panelli opened his eyes and closed them again. There was some pink below his chinbone.

  Now with the boy on the table, Darwin moved back to the doorway. He could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights, and his heart was chugging. It was funny what shook you. Here he’d come back to the ranch, this world, for the money, but being in town opened it all again. When his wife Corina had died in January, he’d left this country for good and now he was back.

  “You guys mining?” Randy said as he put away his gear and washed up.

  “We’re the crew putting power poles on Diff’s ranch,” Arthur Key said, looking at Darwin. “So he can raise hell with you guys.”

  “No problem,” Randy said, already backing out. “Just don’t drop any more and you’ll all survive.”

  As the young EMT left, a girl of about ten or eleven appeared in the doorway wearing a dental bib. “Shauna,” Bob Freeman said. “Good. We’re all done here. Everybody’s fine. We can get back in the chair now.” He led her out, turning at the door. “You guys have fun out there. Call me if you chip a tooth.”

  Now Panelli’s complexion had changed utterly, his face rosy and dark, and his eyes were open. He lay on his back. “It never hurt until now,” he said to Darwin. “Now I can feel it.”

  “Good,” Darwin said. “You’re okay. Stay here and rest. Art and I are going to pick up a few things around town and we’ll be back for you about six. Can you do that?”

  Ronnie Panelli closed and opened his eyes a few times. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean no. Don’t leave me here. I’ll go with you.” He slid his right leg off the table, and when it fell, he lay back and closed his eyes. Darwin took Ronnie’s foot and lifted his leg back onto the table and carefully untied his workboots. He put his hand on Ronnie’s forehead and heard the boy’s breathing as he slept.

  It was outside that Arthur Key discovered he still had the sizable wooden splinter in his hand. He threw it into weeds beside the clinic.

  “He’s going to be all right,” Darwin told him as they got in the jeep. “Let’s get what we need, come back for him, have some supper in town, and get back to the site tonight.”

  “Fine by me,” Key said.

  Darwin turned back to town and drove toward the farmers’ exchange. Darwin didn’t know how to get to what was bothering the larger man; he was so obviously troubled. He’d seen other people hurt or had a hand in it, but now wasn’t the time to speak about such things. There’d be time. “We had some injuries. There’s always stuff on a ranch.”

  “What was the worst?” Arthur asked him.

  “We had a man break his back,” Darwin said. “He fell off a tractor. And we had a guy killed, but he was drunk coming back from town. I think the other guy was drunk too.” He pulled the big truck parallel to the broken sidewalk, and the two men climbed down. They stepped up the steep curb on Main Street and went into the old bank building: Schindler’s Mercantile.

  The huge vaulted room was of some comfort, the broad neat aisles, the blond hardwood floor, the banks of new tools and parts, the balconies of nails and screws. Both Schindlers were at work today, the old man and his thirty-year-old son. The old man nodded at Darwin, and Arthur Key noted that the two knew each other. Their meeting was not loud or loaded with the high jocularity of men who see each other regularly through the work year, the way that he, Arthur, had known some of his jobbers in Los Angeles. He had always been in places like this, larger places really, warehouses of specific trades, huge auto parts sheds and plumbing supply depots and electrical houses where the aisles were wide enough for golf carts and where he was always greeted with the hale bravado of bullshit that workingmen exchanged. In Los Angeles County there were two hundred countermen at these places who knew his name. If he were to reappear tomorrow they would call out, “Oh, well, Key’s back. Who said he fell in the well? How’s it hanging, Arthur? And what are we up to today?” They’d seen his work in movies and would introduce him down the counter to the head of some contracting firm as the man who made the bridge fall down in that one film and balanced that semitrailer over a cliff in another. Entering those shops had been good, almost bracing, as his company started up and gained recognition.

  Now he stood halfway back in the big sunny room full of general hardware, one hand on the huge spool of yellow nylon rope, pleased with its weave and manufacture, and he listened as the old hardware man Schindler and Darwin spoke quietly over the cash register. They seemed to him the picture of continuity and he imagined them for a second to be lifelong friends, something he would have wanted, but then he shook his head and saw it again: he was tired, stressed out from the deal with Ronnie, and his thoughts were nothing but some fatuous illusion.

  He had a list in his pocket and he began assembling the items: wooden stakes; heavy twine; steel hinges; two hundred yards of the rope; a one-inch tempered steel drill bit; forty-yard-long dowels, diameter one inch; a basket of steel fittings; boxes of wood screws; bags of brads; a roof stapler and staples; five gallons of wood sealer; five gallons of white enamel; spray enamel, white, black, red; coarse-bristle paintbrushes; four paint rollers with extension handles; ten bags of posthole mix; five gallons of creosote; and a shopping cart of miscellaneous small tools, including chisels, a rasp and a fine Stanley wood plane.

  In addition, he and Darwin ordered the lumber they needed, including twenty-four sheets of one-inch plywood, grade A, to be delivered in two days out of Boise. As the young Schindler packed Arthur Key’s purchases into cartons, Darwin stood aside, assessing the equipment, smiling. Key saw the look and said, “Do it right the first time.”

  “I’ve got no problem with this,” Darwin said. “Get what you want. They’ll pay for it.”

  “I didn’t see a transit,” Key said to the young man.

  “They’re all out on jobs. We won’t get one back until say August; they’re monthly rentals.”

  “We’re okay,” Darwin said. “Do we need one?”

  “Do you know the span?”

  “Do we need to? We’ve got the drawings, what it says there.”

  Key turned to the older Schindler. “Who’s here in the region? Surveyors? Isn’t there a road crew?”

  “They’re paving up over the saddle to 71. They should be there all week.”

  Darwin said to Key, “I know where that is.” He smiled at old Schindler and shook his hand. “I’m going to take my engineer here up there to borrow some equipment. We’re doing this job right the first time.”

  “Diff will like that,” Schindler said. “If it’s going to be a mess, might as well be a royal mess. We’ll get your lumber out by the first. Somebody will be there, won’t they?”

  “They will,” Darwin said. “We live there now.”

  “Good news. Well, say hello to the old man from this old man.”

  “I’ll do it,” Darwin said.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” Schindler said.

  “I’m not back. I’m here for this project, but I’m not back.”

  It was twenty miles north to the saddle and they drove up behind the cluster of orange state vehicles just before five. The old road had been bladed into a sharp row of asphalt and dirt that dipped and rose two miles over the hill. There wasn’t a man around. Idaho fell away from them in grassy dales to the purple edge of mountains on every side, and the sky was a thin wash of cumulous bright white in the angled sun. In the empty place Arthur felt the vacant rush of terror, the guilt he had known for what had happened in California. He was tired now and he’d spent what he didn’t have getting through this day. He should have gone with Gary, his brother; he should have checked out the worksite; he should have stayed away from Alicia. He had gone where he couldn’t see and there was only harm in it,
and this loss of equilibrium.

  Key had Darwin drive up beside the road grader and he could tell before putting his hand on the side that the machine was cold. “They quit early.”

  “It’s a road crew.” Behind Darwin the high plain of Idaho ran into the glimmering mirage of smoke and the mountains of Nevada south on the horizon. Over the rise, they found three men in gray parkas about to climb into separate state vans. Here there was a late-day breeze riding the contour of the broad bare hill and in the last sunlight it offered a general chill. The foreman was a young man named Clark LaRosa. He stepped toward them to shake hands, and Darwin was surprised to hear him call Art Key by name.

  THREE

  FIVE DAYS LATER, in a scattered cold wind that gusted all day, a dirty yellow road grader cut a first pass through the sage on the gray plateau of the new worksite, the ruined blade just grazing the primordial soil that had pressed there undisturbed since the gorge below was a storm-driven rivulet nosing its way south, hundreds of miles from the sea. The machine was old and used hard, rusted fully at every dent, the pale yellow state-guard paint oxidized everywhere else to a papery white. It too ran in fits, creeping and jerking, as the blade cut and pushed and then found only air for a second before the next bite of hillock or sage or the odd rock. The throaty roar of the vintage diesel was torn into sections like the black knots of exhaust and ripped away in the overcast bellows of the day. Ronnie Panelli drove the grader, sitting in the drafty cab and bouncing as the terrain dictated. He was paying attention. He’d bladed almost to the rocky canyon, inching the big wheels until he was ten feet from the edge and he could see the river glimmering in a string so far below, and then he’d set the blade as he’d been instructed by Arthur Key and powered forward, steering by the stakes they’d set in the dark early day. It was a quarter mile in a straight line to the farm road.