by Ron Carlson
Gary and Alicia took an apartment in Santa Monica, and Arthur got Gary lined up as a sales representative with one of the hardware suppliers he knew. Alicia found a slot teaching theater at a private dayschool. They all spent a lot of time together, and at first Arthur tried honestly to get them to reconsider the move. Los Angeles was expensive and no place really to start a family. But it was another new stage for Gary. He bought a small white Chrysler convertible and started making calls. He and Alicia would come by and Gary would always say, “We’ve got to get you a woman.”
Arthur Key was furiously busy running two crews. His company, Good Measure, did all kinds of field projects for the film studios, but he had become the expert on extreme vehicle positioning, and because his safety record was exactly 100 percent, the contracts he took on were all big tickets. Executives knew they could save a hundred thousand dollars in emergency insurance by using Key, and he prospered. He drew the line at crashes, explosions and fires. “You can burn it up when I’m done,” he was famous for saying. “I’ll make it look like it’s about to fall or that it has fallen, but no fires during our contract. Not even a small one while my men are on the site.”
He had begun his career in Los Angeles as a freelance grip, and by the end of the second week, he had work for months. Art was a man who could immediately assess the problem, inventory the materials and line men up. In a world of laborers who stood back chewing their gum, he was a standout. Soon opportunities for independent projects came his way. For months he built parts of things that appeared in the frame, and his ability to conceive of what the frame was surprised the directors and producers. He bought the little warehouse he was leasing in South Venice, near the waterfront, and he tore out the walls in the second floor which had been a warren of plasterboard offices, one of which he’d lived in for a year. There he made himself a loft with windows on three sides. The great pleasure in this was making a roomy workspace along one bank of windows, and he was at those drawing tables and computers late into the night.
His days in Los Angeles were dear days, the mornings he went to the current worksite, whatever film it might be, and met with his foreman Harry Burdett and his four-person field team, offering help if they needed it. Twice a week, he had lunch with producers, either at their studios or out in town, and he listened to their hopes to put a yacht in an office building for a comedy or have two houses move closer together, yard by yard, in a thriller. Then he spent the afternoon at his favorite thing: back in the shop he built the devices of his own design, and he felt only blessed by having great bins of levers and pulleys and rope and chains, and an entire wall of utility goods of all sorts, including hinges and springs and hardwood dowels and steel rods. Some days he welded with his crew or built frames from lumber. He employed nine people in all, including two women (one the best welder he’d ever met), and he liked moving among the craftsmen and watching things come together. They tested everything before it went out in the red Good Measure trucks.
Alicia and Gary came down to Arthur Key’s loft two and then three nights a week, carting a take-out dinner and bottles of wine, and Arthur felt obligated to spend time with them. Gary wanted to get into film, and he saw Arthur as the way. He started showing up on job sites, and at first Art would walk him through the plan, how they were going to hang the tractor trailer over a bridge, where they would run the chains and hide the counterweights. Gary’s head was always scanning the areas for the actors or stuntmen or director. He got to know Arthur’s foremen and talked his way close to the action even when Arthur wasn’t there.
The difference between the two brothers was marked. Gary was ebullient, personable. He immediately upon arriving in California started wearing open-throated silk shirts with a small silver chain. He wore linen trousers and expensive loafers. He looked the part. Arthur was quiet. He wore chambray work shirts even after hours and ankle-high workboots with khakis. He spoke, if he spoke, second. He did not go to parties.
His brother, frankly, made him nervous. When Alicia and Gary would bring a woman with them to his place, a friend of a friend, somebody for Arthur to meet, it was terrible. The women would come because Gary would have talked them into it, and Arthur told him to stop it. He explained that he had his work and that next fall he’d meet a woman, certainly, or next spring, and he’d take company. He folded his hands together over his plate and said, “Women are everywhere. I’ve seen them. You’ll be the first to meet her.” He was trying to be jocular but it came out like a homily. The night he made that little speech, Alicia had come back from the car for something she’d forgotten though there was nothing, and she came straight to Arthur, pushing him into his kitchen, where she took his elbows and she said, “Don’t you do that.” Then with her face serious and close, she said the rest: “I want to be that woman.”
He shook it off, but a few months later Arthur steered a weeklong project to the little theater at Alicia’s school, supplying a dozen huge corny flats for scenes in a film that took place in a high school theater. These figures were all monstrous animal silhouettes, a ten-foot duck, a car-size alligator, a camel, and as Arthur was installing them in the fly, Alicia came down and asked if the theater could keep them when the shoot was finished.
“It would be a nice donation, just the materials,” she said.
Arthur was helping one of his crew adjust the chain clips to the support on the huge rabbit. He stopped and looked at her, a blond-haired woman in Clark Kent glasses and a maroon cardigan in the air-conditioned theater. He pointed to the director, who was halfway back in the auditorium. “See that man right there.” She started to go, and he added, “Tell him it’s okay by me.”
The director was pleased not to have them hauled back to his property lot. They were already budgeted out. The following weekend, Arthur met Alicia at the school, and working alone, he rehung the flats in the spaces where she wanted them. “It’s going to be a hell of a play when you finally use these,” he said, walking around the colorful figures where they lay on the stage. He separated and hooked the chains in pairs to the steel grommets in the animals. “This duck is going to stop the show.”
Early in the afternoon, he’d lifted each creature into the fly, except a sitting bear which now filled the back of the stage like King Kong, his head cocked as if listening to something. Arthur Key climbed down the ladder and found he was alone in the dark theater. Then he heard the side door open and Alicia came in with two white paper bags. He hadn’t realized she’d been gone. They sat on the stage apron and ate croissant sandwiches and potato salad on paper plates. She’d brought a thermos of milky coffee and they drank that out of the same red plastic cup. This was the first time they’d been alone and Arthur felt at sea, undermined, lit. Lunch with a pretty woman. He didn’t notice she was nervous, because he was nervous.
Two weeks later, she took him to a late thank-you lunch, though he told her it wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t like him to have a lunch that wasn’t business. They were at the Dockside in Venice alone on the terrace in an imperceptible light rain, a mist. He liked that she preferred being out along the rail like this instead of inside the café, out of the weather. He liked the way she dressed in her long-sleeved white blouses and silk vests, her shirtwaist dresses, her glasses. She had become the soft edge of his long days. He hadn’t touched her. Below them in the gray day, a big crew was trying to film a commercial on the front of one of the yachts. It was slow going. A girl came out in a black bikini and lay on the huge white deck while they worked the lights left to right, then a grip brought her a blanket, and everybody waited while they did the lights again one, two, three. They could see a man in a white dinner jacket inside the cabin on a cell phone.
“What do you think they’re advertising?” he asked Alicia.
“It’s not the boat and it’s not the bikini,” she said. “That guy’s got some serious hair cream, but so far, the only thing I would buy is that blanket.”
He smiled. The girl on the boat lay still as a mummy, cle
arly unhappy. “It does look good.”
Alicia was looking at him now, and very quietly she put down her fork and stood and so he stood, a question still on his face. Their Caesar salads were only just begun. Arthur Key dropped some money on the table and followed her around the wet decking to the half-empty parking lot of the Dockside. He knew that every step was over the line, north of north. At his truck he helped her with her door, but she stepped back and they kissed for the first time. Arthur Key was aware of himself as sharply as he had ever been, his body in a truck. He had felt his affection for the young woman blooming for the year he’d known her. He liked her delicate voice and her precise diction and the way she paused sometimes before she spoke. They drove to the apartment where she lived with Gary on a hillside with a wide view of the trees and rooftops as they trailed away toward UCLA and downtown. They didn’t speak. She was flushed, and he flooded with gratitude when she got out of the truck and shut the door carefully. The rain was light and even and as she looked at him through the window, he saw the water gather on her face. Then she walked around the truck and he lowered his window so she could put her hand on his arm, just that, before she turned and went inside.
SIX
IT TOOK ALL OF A MORNING to reassemble the Idaho state road grader, and Ronnie and Arthur Key struggled in the cool shade under the rough machine, dragging the blade with its new supports in the dirt. Ronnie held the two big wrenches while Arthur angled the blade up, aligning the braces. When he saw that their improvised repair would fit perfectly, Arthur hooted once sharply, and Darwin looked over at the two men from where he was putting the kitchen galley away. In the high-contrast light with the vast world beyond them across the canyon, they looked like two men in the belly of an insect. He saw Ronnie hand Arthur the big steel crescent wrench.
When they crawled out, Arthur climbed aboard and started the rumbling vehicle and fed the fuel down until it ran without fighting. The black diesel exhaust rose and then stood in plumes visible for minutes, an inky staccato punctuation in the blue sky. Ronnie and Darwin could see him manipulating the blade up and down and then angling it left and right, forward and back. Then the grader roared and rolled back through the campsite out to where Arthur parked it by the barbed-wire fence.
Darwin had poured some more coffee for the three of them and set the cups uneasily on the tailgate of the jeep, amid the dried overlapping maps of spilled coffee there. “Ronnie,” he said. “Let’s build a table, shall we?”
Drinking the coffee, they talked about the project. Ronnie wanted to go get the lumber and start nailing things together. Darwin asked him what his plan was, and Arthur Key drew a couple of sketches.
“It’s a table,” Ronnie said. “I’ve got it covered. I know what to do. You guys go ahead and start that camera platform.” He grabbed the circular saw from the toolbox, pointed at Arthur and added, “Safety first.”
The table took all day. Ronnie had cut six six-foot planks for the top in twenty minutes and then, after walking around the parts for half an hour, went to Arthur and asked a few questions. Art lined him up with the pine one-by-two connecting braces and a design for the legs, two sturdy X’s which would require forty-five-degree cuts and a connecting bolt. Late in the day, with the solid tabletop upside down on the earth and the legs starting to take shape, Ronnie got a little proud of it and he walked around the assembly with the power drill and a pocket full of a hundred drywall screws. Just before Darwin quit the small platform that he and Arthur were building on the canyon rim and walked across the campsite to cook, Ronnie put his drill in the box and went back and lifted the edge of his wooden creation into the evening air, tipping it right side up onto its legs. He was brushing the dirt off when Arthur came across the yard. They carried it over near the tent and set it down and then moved it again, right between the tent and Darwin’s cookstation. Ronnie boosted himself up and sat on it, swinging his workboots in the last light.
Later that night when they’d sat down to eat Darwin’s elk stew, Arthur accused him of trying to make a monument.
“You want me to make a table that’s going to spill the soup?” Ronnie answered.
Arthur watched the younger man eat for a moment and then said, “This is a hell of a first table for a carpenter like yourself.”
“It’s a stable table,” Darwin said. “We could use it to work on an engine if we founder.”
“It is a damn good table,” Key said, fingering the indentations where Ronnie has used three screws at each joint. “Are there any screws left?”
They ate in the spring twilight, their bowls steaming into the air. Finally Arthur Key said that night, “It is your first table and a fine job. I’m going to put my elbows on it.” And he did. “You’ll be a while before you out-table this deal.”
A moment later, wiping his bowl with a section of the rye bread that Darwin supplied, Ronnie said without looking up, “I could paint it tomorrow if you guys wanted me to.”
The troughs for the footings were shallow and the cement pads themselves would be the size of stepping-stones. Arthur Key measured and cut a piece of forty-foot sisal rope, and he and Ronnie used it as the leg of a compass to walk out and mark the quarter-mile line along which the aluminum seating would be erected. Ronnie had a backpack of pine stakes and he knelt and drove one in the northeast corner of each footing, the way Arthur had shown him. There would be eighty footings. The two men worked and walked out through the sage, not talking; Arthur stood on the east and then the west corner of each set, so Ronnie could double-check each stake. The sky was a patterned field of cumulus headed east, and when one blocked the sun, the air grew cold and Ronnie felt the chills along his upper arms. When the sun was unobstructed, Ronnie could feel it burning his neck.
From the campsite, Darwin blew the Acme Thunderer whistle, and Arthur stood and waved. It was lunch and Ronnie gathered the roll of flagging. On the way back to camp, the two men flagged each stake with a short fluorescent tape, so they could find them in a week when they did the cement work. Carrying their coiled rope and gear, the men approached the sky blue table. They sat on upended milk crates and Darwin turned from the stove stand and slid tin plates of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches down to each. There was a tub of pasta salad and a bowl of red apples and hard-boiled eggs already on the new table. The two coats of enamel were just dry to the touch and the display appeared the subject of a gaudy still life.
“Looks good,” Ronnie said.
“There’s coffee,” Darwin told them.
Key got up to retrieve his cup. “Diff is coming at three?”
“That’s what he said.”
Ronnie looked up.
“It’s okay, Ronnie,” Art told him. “He’s not a cop.”
“I’m not afraid of cops. I don’t get what we’re fucking doing.”
“He’s taking us down to the river. You want to get down to the river, don’t you? We’re going fishing with the landlord. He wants to show off his ranch, the rest of it. I expect he wants to meet us and see his old friend Darwin.”
“So much more of God’s country. It doesn’t stop,” Ronnie said.
Darwin had a funny look on his face, a shadow Key had seen before. “This isn’t,” the older man said.
Arthur Key knew instantly it was the spot. He had known that the older man was wounded, and he’d thought it had been wear and tear, disappointment. Now it fell into place. Key knew also not to say anything further about it. He picked up his second sandwich and one of the eggs and stirred his coffee.
“Can you balance an egg on end, Ronnie?” Arthur asked.
“Is this one of your engineering challenges?”
Arthur stood the egg and it rolled. He held it still and it rolled again. He handed it to Ronnie. Ronnie set the egg, holding it five seconds. It rolled. “Not here.”
Darwin stepped up and took the egg. “It’s an old joke,” he said, tapping the egg so it cracked and stood.
“No, it’s a new one. Let me show you something ab
out your beautiful table.” He took another egg and set it up and then slid it over to the dimple where paint had almost filled one of the screw holes, standing it there.
“Two geniuses at work,” Ronnie said. He stood the other two eggs in indentations on the tabletop. “Now we do need a camera.”
“You ever been fishing?” Arthur Key asked Ronnie.
“Golf balls.”
Darwin looked at him.
“A business opportunity,” Key said, and Ronnie nodded.
“A buck apiece.”
“In Chicago?”
“Near there,” he said. He stood and picked up an apple. “I told you I worked as a caddy. Are we taking a break until our little trip?”
“Are you a good golfer?” Darwin asked him.
“I played a lot of golf,” Ronnie said.
“Did you ever play golf?” Darwin asked Key.
“I’ve seen it played,” Arthur Key said. He had stood up and was heading for the tent. “My brother,” he started. He had thought he would say the entire sentence, “My brother liked golf,” and he had the words arranged in his head, ready, but he now could not go on. Of all things, he never thought he’d crash over a sentence with the word golf in it. He walked into the tent. They had tied back the flaps to air in the spring weather. He retrieved his notebook of drawings from his suitcase along with his pencils and he came back to the blue table.
“You’ve got a brother who is a golfer?” Darwin persisted.
