Five Skies

by Ron Carlson

  “They’ve been waiting for us,” Arthur said.

  “There’s always fish here,” Darwin told him. “You can practice keeping it away from them.”

  “Diff wants you back at the ranch.”

  Darwin eyed Arthur Key, surprised that he would say something obvious.

  “He knows I couldn’t stay.”

  “Was Diff this easy to work for or is he showing off today?”

  “It’s not his problem. He’s a decent man.” Darwin moved off along the gravel bar airing his line back and forth, lazily. The conversation was concluded.

  Upstream, Diff worked with Ronnie Panelli, showing him how the open-faced reel operated. They had a clothespin on the end of the line, casting that into the channel. Diff would take the pole every other cast and speak about touch and setting the hook, and the young man would then try two or three times. They saw Darwin step up and take another fish, his rod bent as he played the fish in. Finally, Diff showed Ronnie the tawny fly. “This is the ticket, right here.” He had the tiny fly on the flat of his thumb and he tied it deftly to the filmy leader, whispering as he did: “Over, over, over, through and back.” He snipped the extra leader with his clippers and handed the line to Ronnie. They walked a worn path through a clump of willows to a corner on the river and Diff showed him where to try for, under the cutbank below them.

  Ronnie was a little sharp with his back cast, yanking it, but his cast billowed and ran in a true line across the swelling eddy, like a seam, and the fly popped lightly onto the surface where the shadow of the earthen bank cut into the water. The fish struck instantly, coming out of the water in a twist, and then Ronnie was beyond his training. The pole jerked and he jerked it back, surprised it had come to life. He pulled and reeled. Diff came over from his own pole, but too late for Ronnie’s line, which was run up into a fabulous hairball now.

  “I got one,” Ronnie said. His reel stalled, choked by the backlash. Diff showed him how to pull the line through the eyelets. But the fish undid those efforts.

  “You’re going to have to work him for a while. Keep the tension even. I think you’ve caught the better part of supper on there. But don’t touch that reel anymore.”

  Five minutes later there was a pool of the yellow floating line at Ronnie’s feet and he took the net from Diff and scooped his big fish from the river. “We’re keeping him,” Diff said, quickly squaring the fish on his knee and tapping him smartly behind the cranium. “He’s a beauty.” He held the trout up. “See these dots? He’s a cutthroat.” He placed him in the wicker creel. “Now come on over here and we’ll see to that reel.”

  Darwin and Arthur were out of sight in the downstream canyon. Ronnie sat on a flat rock working on the snarled line. The sky had closed now and become a luminescent charcoal ceiling scalloped with glowing seams. Diff showed him how to tease out the line tenderly, a few loops at a time. Diff was fishing from a fallen log, waving his line in the air and casting sweetly in the positions of the clock: ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, each time quickly taking a trout, then across the riffle, and kneeling to release it. After the sixth or seventh, Ronnie called, “Is that the same fish?”

  “Nobody’s that dumb,” Diff called back, laughing.

  Ronnie picked at the widening tangle of line as he looked up. He could feel the air thicker now, like the mottled dark cloud cover. He traced this gleaming ceiling north to south in the narrow corridor of rock. “I am,” he said aloud. “I’m that dumb.” Above them the sky seemed to tighten. For no reason, Ronnie remembered being under a bed in a condominium he’d been burglarizing, some new place. Half the units weren’t even occupied yet. He’d heard a noise like a door and he had dropped onto his fingertips on the new hardwood floor and slid under the bed. It wasn’t even dusty there yet. It was one of the strange times, because he gave himself over from fear to a kind of vacant wonder, staring at the gauzy liner of the box springs four inches from his nose. He wondered about the making of the thing, and he almost went to sleep. He wondered, filled with wonder that he was in such a place, that this was who he had become; the wonder was a kind of vertigo and he never again in his life as a thief shook it fully off. He listened from under the new bed and he lost track of time. Later he slid out still heavier than when he had gone there, and he lifted a small glass box full of pierced earrings, which he couldn’t even give away at the golf course. Everyone knew he was a thief by then and lowballed him mercilessly.

  Now the sky was stitched in bulbous dark plates which mesmerized Ronnie, pulling him somewhere, he felt. He knew the air was pushing down the canyon, drawing off the top of the river, an avalanche of air, the breeze doubling as the weather closed.

  Diff had continued to take fish; he released the last and came over. “Get it?”

  “Close.” The nasty tangle was a loose ball now. Diff helped Ronnie and it opened nicely and fell apart. They pulled it all out and Diff held the tension while Ronnie steadily turned it back onto the reel. “You are good to go,” the man told him. “Let’s catch and keep some before this storm plays hell.”

  It didn’t rain for an hour. The air washed down the canyon in long trains, gusting in swirls, all of it full of wet rock and cedar and the dusky smell of willows. Ronnie followed Diff upstream, room by room, on the river’s edge, parking sharply when the older man did and concentrating on the work before him. Having fouled the reel once, he was careful with his thumbs and stopped the line both forward and back. There were fish everywhere, and Ronnie became adept at taking a knee in the stream and releasing the bright trout. Once, when he had waded in and felt the pressure on his knees, he understood this was the river again and again, all night and all day and the hours between night and day; how could it keep on and who was watching it? He fished. When the first rain came in a ripping wall, he had lost track of how many he had taken.

  By the time Darwin and Arthur Key filed up the river trail, Diff and Ronnie had erected a ten-foot canvas cover over the ramada’s skeletal roof. Diff had a camp box of hors d’oeuvres laid open, a vintage thing with compartments with cheese and crackers and smoked oysters and tiny carrots with dip. At one end of the stone table, he’d set up his two-burner propane and he was sautéing two large trout in a black iron pan. There was a bottle of gin and two limes. There were bottles of red wine and a bottle of white on ice. Ronnie raised his bottle of Pacifico and pointed. “I caught those two.”

  The rain was light but general, popping softly against the canvas. The gray world now smelled of mesquite and wet stone. Key’s stringer held ten trout. They’d been gutted already, and he put them in the proper cooler. “Grab a glass,” Diff told the men. “We’re having cocktails on the veranda.”

  At dinner, Diff showed Ronnie how to pull the skeleton from the trout. They had a wooden tub of creamy Caesar salad and sourdough bread with their fish, sitting around the old stone table. “This was the first thing I did when I came back from the navy in 1945,” Diff told them, placing his hand on the tabletop. “I lived down here alone for a month and built this, and repaired the spring wall, and ate fish until I felt like I was not either on a boat or in the Philippines. In October, I walked up that road and went to work for my pa.” He pointed at Ronnie and said, “I was your age.”

  He looked at Darwin and added, “It was clearly the right thing to do. I’ve told Darwin here that he should just come on back and work with us, like he’s done all his goddamn life, but no. After forty years now, he’s got to live in town.”

  “If it keeps raining, I’ll walk up that road,” Ronnie said.

  “Time for a change,” Darwin said to the table.

  Arthur watched the exchange as he tore off another crust of bread and filled his mouth with wine. It was a remarkable place to him. The storm which was still building felt like a treasure in the vast rocky arena rich with sage and wet limestone and living wood. There were three more trout on the platter, browned skins gleaming with olive oil. Diff stood and slid one onto Ronnie’s plate and Darwin’s and Arth
ur’s. “Eat up,” he said. “We have a long tradition of eating with our fingers this far from the world.” He pulled a fillet from the fish on his plate and dropped it into his mouth.

  “It’s a feast,” Arthur noted. Darwin had moved to the perimeter of the shelter and was facing the upstream wind.

  “Every day’s a feast on the Rio Difficulto,” Curtis Diff said. A moment later he filled his glass with wine and stood up. The rain had now doubled and snapped steadily against their canvas cover. He pulled his boots off and then his pants, folding them with his shirt. In a second he was naked. He put his boots back on, and his bare white ass disappeared into the dark rain. “There’s towels in the car. Don’t come over barefoot or without a drink.”

  “A hot tub?” Ronnie asked. He was still picking at his fish. “How dirty am I?” He went to the car and undressed, walking back to the table in a towel and his shoes to grab a fresh beer.

  “Sounds good to me,” Arthur said. “He’s a character.”

  In the hot spring, the rain fell through the steam. The spring issued from the bottom of the cliff face and collected in a stone pool which had been augmented by a porous rock wall, cemented and now grown with moss and which leaked throughout. The men were silent in the strange place. Key could feel the warm water at the nicks in his hands and forearms. He knew that Darwin wasn’t coming over. Ronnie kept submerging. The world around them was black, the rain dark, and the steaming water ebony.

  “When I’m in here, I wish I still smoked cigars,” Diff said.

  “We’re smoking just fine.”

  “It feels a long way from home, though, doesn’t it, Mr. Key?” They were just dim faces in the steam.

  “It does,” Arthur said. “But that’s why we came, right, sir?”

  “I don’t know.” He was quiet, then pointed at Ronnie. “We came to wash the soot off this young heavy equipment operator. I thought you guys might need a break and Darwin would want to see it all again.”

  “I did. It’s good.” They could see Darwin’s profile in the dinner shelter, drinking his wine.

  Suddenly Key turned and the old man’s face was almost against his. Arthur could see his eyes, the pale blue wash in the small light. Curtis Diff spoke quietly, ashes in his voice. “It was my fault, you know, with his wife. We didn’t have warning of the wind shear, but I should have circled once; I always do it. In the crosswind I could barely hold, and we nearly lost it all. We caught on one wheel, and she hit her head just the way you can’t do twice. And here we’ve got the rest.”

  Ronnie’s eyes were two points of white above the dark water. It was quiet now in the deep canyon, the river a wind whisper under everything. The older man stood and sat on the wall with his white back steaming while he pulled his boots on. “Take your time,” he told them. “There’s no hurry in the rain. We’ll get the gear and go up when you’re ready.” The two remaining men had washed between their toes by now and as Diff walked away they rinsed and rerinsed their hair.

  “Fuck all,” Ronnie said. The young man worked the towel modestly as he stood, then sat on the rock wall. His hair was back in a slick sheath down his neck. “My mother liked my hair. But I’d like to get a haircut tomorrow.” He swung his leg over and out of the hot water. The rain pinched him and he ran in his shoes to the car, complaining in uhs and ohs.

  Diff had Arthur drive up the ruined road. “Don’t worry about it. You may scrape on the one corner, but a car wants to stay on the road.” Ronnie sat in the back and covered his eyes.

  “I don’t know why you do that,” Arthur told him. “I can’t see anything either.” The windshield was a speckled sheet, the wipers revealing only the powerful headlight beams crashing against the rocks on the far wall of the canyon. There was some slippage, the rear end shifting over the wet gravel. At the sharp corner, Key kept the accelerator down, and he pivoted around the tight spot without scraping the cliff. When they lifted into the upper arroyo, the sandy road had become a stream, but easily passable. At the gate to the ranch road, Key made the turn and Diff said, “Until next year.”

  Ronnie fell asleep in that last half hour, the road smooth mud, the rain a covering friction. Key checked Darwin’s stony eyes in the mirror, but there was no story there, through all the rising rainy country of Diff’s ranch. He knew that Diff had hoped the trip would soften Darwin. They were good men with the death of the woman between them now; the death of Corina, Key saw, was like a murder to Darwin, God’s accident, the one that stops everyone. Arthur Key slowed and wheeled the heavy vehicle into the ramp encampment. Rain was upon everything in the tidy area. “Who lives here?” he said.

  “I appreciate that, Arthur,” Diff said. They’d opened the doors but sat inside. “Roman said you’d been over and looked at the roof on our old chapel. It would be a good three-day job when you’re done here. I’ll double what you’re getting paid.” Darwin got out and opened the rear doors. His silence goaded the old man. “Goddamn it, man; it’s not a big job.”

  “I’m not going over there, Diff.” Darwin had lifted a cooler from the back.

  Diff jumped out into the rain, mad as if he’d been mad all day. “Goddamn it, man. People die.” He walked around and confronted Darwin. They were both wet in a moment. “She was an extraordinary woman and we all miss her, but you’re being a goddamned fool.” Diff was raging. “Goddamn, Darwin, your boy doesn’t want you over there in Idaho Falls meddling in his goddamned business. He knows what to do, just like you did. You’ve got a good place here, good work, god damn your goddamn bonehead.” Diff had to stop. Key and Ronnie Panelli had gathered their gear and also stood in the rain.

  “Oh, don’t listen to me. Finish the goddamn ramp for these California clowns and do whatever in hell you are going to do. God knows I’m cashing their checks.” He went to the Suburban and started it up. Then the men heard it shut down. Diff stepped out and came back to the blue table beaded with the rain. They were all four quiet in the wet night. “Good night, everybody.” He rolled his hand at Ronnie. “You did real good for a first day with a fly. We’ll try to do it again.”

  SEVEN

  IN THE FRESH MORNING, Ronnie Panelli stood on the sandy earth and leaned arms and shoulders into the driver’s side floor of the cab of the big white flatbed truck. He was stirring the two-element epoxy on a paper plate the way Arthur Key had shown him from where he stood on the passenger side. Key reached and held the two new rubber pedal sleeves so Ronnie could coat the underside of each with the powerful glue. “Press it there,” Art told the boy, pointing at the clutch. “And the brake now.” Ronnie fitted the pads onto the metal armatures.

  “Do I push?”

  “No. It’s perfect. That will set like steel in ten minutes and then you can drive all over the county.”

  “I’m just going to town.”

  “And it is a wonderful town,” Arthur Key said. He’d been kidding Ronnie a little all morning. They had woken to the sky a perfect trick, a magnified color well beyond cobalt. Tangible and tender, the air and the earth after the rain seemed minted, some rare promise in the leverage of the early sunshine. Rags of mist stood twisting in the atmosphere. When the truck repair was finished, Arthur and Darwin were driving today up to Idaho Falls in the old jeep to see Darwin’s son. He was having the one-year anniversary of his little construction business; he’d paid off the backhoe and they were going to celebrate. Darwin also wanted his old chainsaw, which had a safety bar and didn’t torque as much as the new saws. They’d need it for the ramp frame, and Ronnie was going to do a lot of that cutting.

  Ronnie had begged off, and none of them spoke of it, but they all knew why, and Arthur had been nicking at it all morning. “That town is just full of beautiful women. Let’s see. There’s that woman who works at the bank and that other one…”

  They had already given him a list for the hardware: carriage bolts, two large chisels, a wrench set, and they told him to pick up the ordered twenty ten-foot railroad ties from the lumberyard. They had a good ch
ainsaw, and Arthur had determined to fabricate the understructure of the ramp with these timbers, setting and notching them to support the overcanyon cantilever.

  “I’ll get the gear.”

  Arthur tested the edges of the new pedal pads and found them solid. “And stop and see that nurse. Her mother runs the Antlers.”

  The sky was ice blue, magnifying the perimeter of the world after all the rain. Darwin had come up in his traveling clothes, a long-sleeved white shirt and a tan leather vest. “Traci is a nice girl. Her mother told me she’ll be visiting our worksite soon.”

  Ronnie looked stricken. He stood away from the truck, gathering the tubes of epoxy, and went to the tent. Arthur closed the passenger door and came around and closed the driver side door. “Things are looking up. New pedals for the brake and the clutch,” he called to closing tent flaps. “Are you ready, Darwin? Let’s go see your boy.”

  As soon as they had driven off, Ronnie pulled his shirt off and washed his face and combed his hair and put on one of the blue work shirts Darwin had given him. He tucked this shirt into his jeans, oiled his boots and drove the flatbed truck to Mercy. The new pedal grips were a help.

  In town, he went to the First Idaho Bank and deposited his check. He got another money order for his mother and he walked next door to the post office and mailed that. As a return address, he just put his initials so she would open the letter. He wanted to say something in each of these mailings to let her know this was a job and not something he was doing wrong, but he could not. The first time he’d mailed her money, he stood at the table in the post office window and he printed out a little letter, but even as he was writing it, he felt it was an excuse. He would not have called it pride, but he was too proud to explain himself. She’d get the money and that was all he could do.

  Across the street in the Antlers, he waited until Marion was finished taking an order at the bar. When she saw him, she came around and they stood just outside the back entry.