Five Skies

by Ron Carlson

  “You want some toast? That was a walk.”

  “I’d eat it. I saw some deer. Four bucks right by the road.”

  “You see any snakes on the road?”

  “Why do they do that? That’s the kind of bullshit I can’t stand about this place. Some goddamned snake right in the way.” Ronnie sat down at the table. The two candles lit the edge of everything. “I appreciate it,” he said as Darwin dropped one of the heavy spoons by the enamel dish.

  “That’s a smart haircut,” Darwin said. “Looks good.” Ronnie put his hand up, remembering it, and he smiled against his will.

  Key sat at his corner of the table and did what he could to avoid Darwin’s look, but late on such a day it was going to come, the solid recognition. Ronnie was at his stew. With the short hair and his face a plate in the yellow candlelight, he appeared a child. Darwin nodded to the big man and said, “You did good. I’d still be over there talking to the truck.” When Arthur looked up, Darwin added, “Take a deep breath. The world still waits.”

  THIRTEEN

  THE PHONE SOUNDED at 3:30 A.M. Arthur Key, who had been waiting again under a thin membrane of sleep, swung his legs out of his cot after the first short ring. All of his sleep was like a waiting and it did not restore him. He had been wired tight from when he was a kid, a kind of alertness, readiness for the day, but this year had climbed into that without relent. His work and the long days on the plateau helped him sleep an hour and then two every night, but he rose too quickly through the dark and lay waiting every dawn. Now it was full dark in the tent, fresh but not cold and he quickly pulled on his trousers and then his boots, barefoot. He loved stepping into the world every day, and even now with the phone’s noise, the ring sounding like a cup of pennies falling in a glass jar, he stood under the great wheel of stars and breathed until his shoulders rose. In the corner of his eye he caught some movement and turned to the mess table. In the dark no shapes moved, and Key himself stood rigid. The phone rang again, and Key saw a shadow turn as a coyote there under the table stepped into the starlight and regarded the man. Another emerged and the two walked without sound in a quick circle out and around the lumber stacks, disappearing.

  Arthur Key stepped to the phone and lifted the receiver to his ear. The plates of stars at this hour had broken and slid upon one another, tilting, and he saw the bent handle of the Big Dipper standing straight out of the distant black horizon.

  “Dean?” a voice said on the wire. It was a woman and Arthur Key could sense the room she was in for there were people talking in the background and music somehow. He didn’t answer. He worked his eye sockets with two fingers and then looked again at the sky, an impossible array. Leaning his head against the rough telephone pole, he used it as a marker to measure the drifting satellites: four, five, six of them.

  “Dean. You there?” The woman’s voice was distorted, and Key understood she was probably drunk.

  “Hello,” he said. “You’ve got a wrong number. I’m sorry.”

  Before he could hang up, she said, “Take a minute.” Key could hear her inhalation, choking back a sob. “Allow me this favor. Do me just this one good deed. Call Dean to the telephone and instruct him to speak to me. It’s Pam.”

  Key listened to the room, some man across the space giving someone instructions, laughter, the lyric percussion of the music.

  “I’m going to hear his voice.”

  “He’s not here,” Arthur Key said. “You’ve reached Idaho.”

  “Idaho,” the woman said as a fact. She laughed. “You are sweet. Idaho. That is the biggest lie I’ve heard tonight. Did you understand that I need to talk to Dean?”

  “Listen,” Key said. He hadn’t talked on the telephone for a hundred days.

  “I’ll beg,” the woman said now, and her voice spiked and broke. “He knows I’ll beg. Please. Can you hear me begging?”

  Key put the receiver against his leg. He turned and saw the coyotes trot through the gate onto the farm road and cross into the open world. It was still dark east to west, the canopy netted with stars in flotillas. A fire blinked from sixty miles north on the horizon. He quickly raised the telephone again to his ear and said, “Dean went to Sacramento for a wedding. He’ll be back Friday. He wants to hear from you.” With the last word he set the receiver back on the hook and closed the metal cover of the phone box. The first light breeze lifted his hair warm in the fresh night smelling of the clay dust and dew. He didn’t like having his boots on without socks. He would get some clean socks and get properly dressed and put the coffee on. It was early, but he would start the coffee.

  Of the Los Angeles days, there was almost a year of Alicia and Gary coming by Arthur’s loft two and sometimes three times a week, with better wine than Arthur drank (because he drank very little, usually just a whiskey at the end of the day with Harry) and presents for him, fresh flowers, Alicia taking a proprietary hold of his place, and two Oriental rugs they couldn’t afford, and even once a pair of Gucci loafers, Gary saying, They’re Alicia’s idea of you getting with the program. Later, the times when he wore them, she stood closer to him. They liked Los Angeles and Gary was doing well as a sales rep, and Arthur had that thought: Gary was made to be a sales rep, a standout; he made a great first impression and later his name would come to mind first.

  But Gary wanted in. He had the film bug, and Arthur saw he had it. For a while, Arthur thought that maybe including Gary in a few gigs, taking Alicia and Gary to the parties, might be enough. They’d go somewhere and on the terrace would be three movie stars and Gary could use that in phone calls for a month, more than a month. So, Arthur stopped throwing the expensive paper invitations away. He got them every week, silver envelopes containing some packet of material that folded out or pinwheeled or became figures from a film or card castles or a gilded treasure map, sometimes a musical chip or a hologram. Invitations with fifty man-hours in them. So he started reading them; if Paramount wanted to throw a carnival on the lot, he’d go and take Gary and Alicia. Once there, Arthur found a station and stayed, talking to the three or four studio executives he dealt with regularly; sometimes an actor would come up and remember sitting in the upside-down train that he had suspended, things like that. It was at a party on Mulholland Drive, an actress’s house, that Gary got the introduction he’d wanted.

  The man who respected Arthur more than anyone in town was the oldest stuntman in the business, Damon Sloan. He had started as a kid in the late forties and once had ridden the wing of an airplane holding only a belt. He didn’t do that anymore, but he made it look like he did, and his mind in these matters was exactly parallel to Key’s. The man’s weakness, then, wasn’t safety: it was women. It was late afternoon in the tiered backyard on Mulholland Drive that Sloan met Alicia, by her design, and she held his arm (though she didn’t need to do anything to hold him except wear her white sweater with the polo stripes, which she had done very much on purpose) as they drank their drinks, her champagne and his dark beer. Gary and Alicia knew about Damon Sloan; his website was an absolute film archive. He was on the board of Sundance, and he was connected with every real independent filmmaker working. They laughed there in the smoggy late-day sunlight until Gary came up and introduced himself, and another drink later, they made plans to go out to dinner once Penn & Teller had finished their magic show promotion for the two hundred people who had helped make this recent film.

  Arthur Key stood to one side. He hated Penn & Teller, and he considered it a weakness to dislike them. When Alicia and Gary had heard they would be at the party, she’d gotten on the phone and started buzzing. But Arthur hated magic. It made people careless and hopeful, and he had a low tolerance for anything that disregarded cause-effect. Today, it was all glass. They were playing with glass, throwing it, putting their arms through glass. Arthur Key shook his head at himself; what an idiot he was, what a pathetic sad idiot. It was just a magic show, but he wanted to grab Penn and then Teller and say, Stop playing with the glass. Tell a funny story and
just stop. Arthur Key could work on the films, but he hated the parties.

  Alicia came up and took his arm and told him they were going on with Damon Sloan. He didn’t say anything. He told them he’d see them later. He didn’t trust his own advice and knew he was missing something fun loving. That had been the phrase. Fun loving. He’d thought of that moment at that party many times during this summer on the high dry desert plateau in Idaho.

  It was the moment that he first knew, or so it seemed to him later. One of the blocks holding him up had slipped and he let it slip. He had earned his life and now something, Alicia, had appeared and she was not earned and he was unable to get it square in his mind. At the Hollywood party, the sun lit the side of Alicia’s beautiful face. She turned to him and said, “I like your shoes,” and she lifted on her toes and kissed him on the mouth goodbye, and he had felt it start there. He watched Gary and Alicia leave with Damon Sloan, and he knew what Gary was going to do and what it would lead to, or so it seemed to him later. He knew about Alicia against him and the heartbeat it cost him, or so it seemed to him later. When this moment came to him in memory, he was frozen in it, unable to stop the rest, and his inability took his breath.

  Alicia was tender and comical and spoke to him close up in whispers with such forceful familiarity that he could only believe she knew him better than anyone else. For a month she had been playing what she called her cardiac research, searching for his heart and fumbling his shirtfront, saying, “Where’s your heart, mister? Where is it? Come on,” and she’d frisk him front and back. “Give it up. It is so mine. I definitely plan on having it, now where, exactly, is that thing?” He was not good at games and had no answer for her but held and turned as she went at him. She’d smile, her hands now on his face, a closed-mouth smile that Arthur could interpret only as confidence, surety, knowledge.

  At his place Alicia acted as the unacknowledged hostess. She knew Art’s news, his projects, said so. She talked like his partner in these things. Alicia set the table, adjusting anything a visitor might touch. Alicia spoke for Art if there was a chance, as if his opinions were understood only by her. Alicia herself knew she was doing it but could not help it. Even Gary cautioned her and she would do it again the next Friday. She had a key to his loft and would be there sometimes when Art and Gary would arrive.

  One night, Gary joined them late at Arthur’s place, breathless. He wore the high grin that Arthur had seen before; it always meant he’d quit his job. He carried a white shopping bag in which were two bottles of Dom Pérignon.

  “I want to explain this carefully,” Gary said, joining them over the seafood pasta dinner, “because we are in the company of my brother, the engineer.” He poured the champagne glass by glass. He set the bottle down and lifted his glass until they all touched it. “To my illustrious new career,” he said.

  They waited.

  “Did you see Damon Sloan?” Alicia asked.

  “I did. And, you are looking at the newest member of the ancient and venerated guild for stuntmen and actors, the temporary card of which I carry now in my wallet.”

  “What did you do?” Arthur said. He was already distracted by the proximity of Alicia, his feelings for her which he knew nothing about, and he wasn’t ready for his brother to flake out.

  “What I do is this,” Gary said. He held his hand out over the table. “I drive a black 1966 Mustang convertible between the avocado trees. This takes two days at least, depending if they use a helicopter shot, and by the time I enter the ranch yard, I’ve made more money than I made this past month.” He now moved his hand through the candle flame. “Then I drive through the flaming fence.” He was smiling and he looked at them all. “Through the flaming fence, which takes a day at least, and then I drive through the flaming house…” His hand slid over the second candle. “And this takes four days, because there are six setups before I come out the other side with a backseat full of chickens, roasted, of course.” He drank his champagne. “It is a dream and I am in it. My career has begun.”

  Art said quietly, “Whose film is it?”

  “It’s an indie. These guys are from Texas. They’ve done two beach movies down in Corpus Christi.”

  “What’s the name of the movie?”

  “The Golden Road.”

  “Wow,” said Alicia. “Congratulations.”

  “Is Damon involved?” Arthur asked.

  “He knows the guys, one of them.”

  “When is it?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll go out there with you. What are they using for the fire?”

  “Art,” Gary said, and he put his hand out on his brother’s wrist. “Don’t worry. Let me have this. I’ll go over everything with them, double. I promise. I can’t show up there with my big brother. This is a real good deal and it could lead to all the other good deals.” He put his arm around Alicia and pulled her to him. “Let me take care of it, big boy. Wish me the best, because this is the best.” He tapped Key’s hand and lifted his glass again, holding it until Arthur raised his own. Arthur Key wanted to say something, but he had a flaming fence in his head and was unable to get past it.

  Before he could call her, it was all achieved. Gary took the job and was up near Sacramento, filming his car stunts, when Alicia came for dinner and doing the dishes together, she and Arthur fell into an embrace. He was tired and anxious and in a moment he was lost or found, grateful to be not thinking. In his arms she said, “He’s used me up.” She reached to kiss him. “I want something now. Don’t talk.” Measurement was long past; all he knew was the desire to have this woman against him again, more fully than ever. It was like magic, he knew, worse than magic. His hands felt right on her back, and there were other things that seemed natural somehow, and at some point he made the decision to go ahead with her and take this.

  The next day, before he could regroup and gather how he felt, she came to his office and took him back to her apartment, and there it was again new and familiar, so far from the gravity he knew and lived in. It was heedless, as was the day before, acts like none he had committed, acts without regard for the tolerances or distance from safety. They were together there when the phone calls came.

  FOURTEEN

  DARWIN KNELT IN THE DIRT with the drill motor, screwing the uprights into the ramp railing. Each section was ten feet long, the top and bottom two-by-fours, and he had the outside rungs in place and was working toward the middle as if constructing a ladder. These would be hinged to the ramp perimeter at all sides. It was noon on a dry day in August and the raw wood was dotted with his sweat. He thumbed the perspiration from his eye and looked up to see the last sheet of plywood from the stack on the plateau walk by toward the wooden ramp on Rio Difficulto. The round white thermometer that Darwin had hung on the telephone pole indicated it was eighty-eight degrees. Ronnie had the last sheet of wood now, the way he’d carried each piece over the days, and to Darwin it appeared to be a beautiful sheet of grained material, a glove on top and one below, going to the canyon edge on two legs. There was no wind now, and the wind had played with Ronnie all week, pushing him over into the ground and pulling him powerfully, until he had become an expert sailor of plywood, reading the pressure and slicing into it at whatever tack was required not to be blown down. The sky was a flat eye, a stark pool of blue at the center rimmed by the gauzy pale horizon in 360 degrees.

  Arthur Key lay facedown in the flat sunlight on the ramp deck marking with a thick red carpenter’s pencil the vertical walls where the hinges for the railings would go. He had designed the collapsible rail, and sections of the thing lay in the sandy sage. Darwin worked the last piece. When he saw Ronnie approaching, Key arose and went to him and took the leading edge of the board in his hand and guided Ronnie up onto the platform, where they laid it on their expansive floor, adjacent to the last open space. The four-by-eight slot of bare ground looked to both men like the last piece in the puzzle of the summer. They had screwed down the two outer pieces, because Key had wante
d it perfect: left side, right side and then the perfect middle sheet. It was a challenge, and when they’d finished drilling home the two framing plywood sections, Arthur Key had said, “Now we’ll see what we’re made of.”

  “You say some stuff,” Ronnie told his friend.

  Ronnie kicked it around so it would be ready and then he stepped up on it and said to Arthur Key, “Let’s wait for Darwin and have him set it in.”

  Key nodded at the young man.

  “He should have to do some of this,” Ronnie added. “I’m about tired here.”

  “You better not be,” Key told him. “You’ve got asphalt coming tomorrow.” He pointed back along the smooth bladed approach that ran to the ranch road.

  “Heavy equipment is my specialty,” Ronnie said. “This ramp is going to make it tough to put their little steamroller into the river.”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself.” Arthur stepped off the long wooden floor and lifted a section of the railing. “Let’s drill these out so we can finish up tomorrow.”

  They had sheeted the entire ramp from the canyon edge back: twelve feet by forty-eight feet, squaring and leveling as they moved back toward solid ground. Arthur had taken two days to set the first three sheets. They got the leading lip absolutely level on the massive railroad tie frame, but the angle back was wrong. Arthur shot it with the transom twice from each side, adjusting the slant until he had twelve degrees exactly. It meant shimming a bright new one-by-six on top of the substructure railroad ties, but as the dark came up that night, he saw it was right, and Ronnie drove the screws home. They drilled two dozen four-inch screws into each plywood section, buttressing the sides into a seamless flooring.

  The cantilevered undercarriage was composed of fitted ten-foot railroad ties, notched and cut exactly, each piece custom-made from the drawing that Arthur Key had been composing all summer. It was his from top to bottom. He had walked the canyon edge until he found the place where they could purchase as much cantilever as possible. He’d staked the place a month ago, and then they had gone into the canyon ledge and dug eight four-foot holes or as close to four feet as they could get through the rock. The digging required three days, and when the holes were clean and lay ready, Arthur Key spread all the railroad ties out on the ground, dragging them in an open grid like a diagram. Ronnie had coded each upright and crossbar, horizontal and diagonal, with spray paint, yellow and red, and the entire assembly appeared a kind of monstrous kit, twenty long dark ties cut with clean and formal housing joints lying about the sandy plateau. The men had their ten-inch carriage bolts in two galvanized buckets.