Five Skies

by Ron Carlson

  The wind was cold, no spring in it at all, no warm strand, and it gusted against the two men watching Panelli’s work. Darwin and Arthur stood by the stacks of lumber, but there was no shelter. They could see Ronnie, chin up, craning to keep each stake in sight as he struggled with the oversize steering wheel. The young man had surprised them both by saying yes when Key asked if he wanted to drive it, blade the runway. The shoulder was sore, but Ronnie could raise his arm and there was color in his cheeks. His bouncing on the cracked leather seat played unevenly on the accelerator and the vehicle jerked and plunged as it shaved the sandy hillocks and tore at the clusters of sage.

  Key watched, almost smiled, pleased that the kid was okay, and that the road grader, with a fresh oil change and the rusted radiator flushed, now ran without grinding or stalling. The state operator had lined Ronnie up yesterday afternoon: the clutch, the brake, the four gears and the blade angle and elevations. Now Darwin, keeping his hands both in his work jacket pockets, bumped Key with his elbow and nodded toward the tent. “Let’s get a coffee,” he said. “Ronnie will be all right.”

  The tent was warm, the stove pounding out heat, and Arthur Key threw his jacket on his cot and sat down beside it. The tent was tightly secured, though the sides bellied now, filling and falling with the steady late-winter wind. He pulled his notebook of drawings out of his kit box under the bed frame. Darwin swung the large blue enamel coffeepot over the two tin cups and poured. Arthur could see Darwin’s face closed up; the day for some reason had claimed him. “My wife disliked the wind tremendously.” Darwin, still in his coat, spoke quietly in a voice that Arthur had not heard before. “She grew up in a windy place in Sonora, summer and winter the air moved through their house, even with the doors closed. Her brothers as boys raced little paper boats along the floor. There were few trees in her town and those trees were bent always with the wind.” Darwin put the coffeepot on the edge of the stove and sat on his cot. “At Diff’s ranch in the early spring like this we’d have a full week of wind.” He looked at Arthur and the larger man knew this was Darwin’s news. “She’d get real quiet that week.” Darwin set his cup carefully on the cooling deck of the stove and stepped from the tent. The canvas walls billowed and fell taut and then billowed. It was a comfort to hear the road grader laboring, the work nothing but six levels of engine noise. Arthur Key was not practiced at talking, except for the pragmatic discussions which had always steered and conducted his days. When to meet, what to bring, how to ready and where to start. The inventory and the schedule and the honest appraisal of what had been accomplished. But there was something about him now that needed another talk, needed it, and he knew it was not in his vocabulary. There had been times when he’d exchanged a glance with Darwin that, if it had held, would have led to the first sentence that Arthur Key had ever said. He wanted to tell his story to someone other than himself, and he could not.

  The tent flap opened again, ripping with the day, and Darwin came back now with a shrug and his changed face, everything brought back to the moment. “This wind,” he said. “Does the weather affect you, Arthur Key?”

  Arthur Key had been preparing a sentence about Darwin’s wife, a question, and it fled. He drank the milky coffee and said: “I like a good long day. Sometimes in Ohio, certain days in January and February could be short. I didn’t care about the cold, but I was working for the city repairing vehicles, and I didn’t care for it to get dark when I was halfway through something. Most of it was fieldwork, out on the street somewhere. It’d be about noon and we’d see the lights in the houses going on. All that dark.”

  “Automotive repair,” Darwin said.

  “These were garbage trucks.”

  “A garbage truck is a complicated machine.”

  Key said, “I repaired their hydraulics.”

  “But now you’ve been in construction.”

  “That’s right. We build things, structures and mechanical devices.”

  “The man yesterday said these things were in films.”

  Outside, the road grader thrummed and sighed, its roar muted in the wind. Arthur felt himself drawn again to the edge of what he wanted to talk about. “Most of the work is for the film companies. Somebody needs part of something in the picture, a fence or a dwelling. We never build a whole house.”

  “So you build one side.”

  “One side or a corner. Sometimes just a frame with a tile roof. Even with a barn it was only three sides. Wouldn’t keep a horse in.”

  “Ohio,” Darwin said.

  “It’s fine,” Arthur said. “I grew up there. It was green and it was hilly where we lived. Not like this.”

  “There are hills in Idaho. Mountains, and plenty.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “The main ranch is in a valley south of here. Our house was on a hill there.” Darwin pointed downriver.

  “How long did you live there?”

  Now Darwin spoke again with a narrowed voice. “Fifty years.”

  “Your wife passed away. When was it?”

  “January,” Darwin said.

  “And you left that place.”

  “I did. I have.”

  “I hope to get down there,” Arthur Key said. “See it, meet your old boss.”

  The road crew had delivered the road grader yesterday afternoon, two men, one in a state vehicle, a white Ford 150, followed a while later by the high-riding grader as it crawled up the dusty farm road. They were through with their roadwork, and it would be parked until August. The man who knew Key was happy to loan it for a week. He had parked his truck and come over and talked about Diff’s project, which was already half famous in the area. It was the state highway foreman, Clark LaRosa, and he had worked at the Santa Anita racetrack five years before when Arthur Key’s company had done a project there. He and Key walked the length of the staked runway all the way from the gate to the lip of the great canyon. La Rosa’s mustache was a gray plume, which jumped as he spoke.

  “You guys are blading a road to nowhere,” the man said. “Even when you finish building your monster ramp here, this is a road like nothing I’ve done.” He had his hands in his pockets and he leaned and spit over the rock shelf. “It is strictly a one-way street.” A few minutes later the big yellow machine lumbered into the yard, and the driver climbed down, a man in overalls that Clark introduced as Rudy. Rudy took a look at the material and equipment in the encampment and said, “Well, here’s some stuff.” Darwin furnished them each with a beer, and they stood around the raw wood table that Ronnie was building for the camp.

  At the Santa Anita racetrack Arthur Key’s company had constructed two horse barns that were to be blown over in the scene. Key remembered the project, of course, the light-duty hydraulic units he’d employed. “It was good stuff,” Clark LaRosa said to the other men standing around the table. Ronnie was mesmerized by the mustache; it made the man look judicial. “I mean these looked like old barns, the wood, the doors, the old paned windows. Walking by you’d think they were a hundred years old, but we’d seen them go up the week before.”

  “What’d they do?” Ronnie asked the man. “What were they for?”

  Clark LaRosa put his beer on the plank tabletop, ran a finger along the bottom of his mustache and told the story using his hands. “It was a cool thing,” he said. “I’m glad I saw it. The deal was for the storm to come through and these old barns, which were trouble anyway and were supposed to have been replaced by the wicked old track owners or something, were going to fall down, and horses were going to be injured, somebody’s good horse in particular, I think.”

  “Whose horse was it?” Ronnie asked Key.

  “Some horse,” Key said. “Some boy’s. No, it was a girl’s horse.”

  “It was. There was a girl about twelve around there, braids and the like.”

  “So it fell on her horse?” Ronnie asked.

  “Back up,” Rudy said. “He made the thing to fall down? Clark, are we off the clock today?”

  L
aRosa nodded and Darwin handed Rudy another beer.

  “Listen,” the foreman continued. “They look like barns, old barns, we don’t know. I’m keeping the track drained and dragged, and watching this through a couple of weeks. Then one day there’s a major fuss. Twenty trucks and all the shit they can haul. Well, I’ve seen a movie company before, and we all go over, and these goddamn barns fall down like a house of cards.” LaRosa lifted his hands to stop the story. “But they go over in slow motion while Mr. Key here walks the property, showing how it works to the bosses, the film guys. They can stop this at any time, and they do. It goes over halfway, stop. Another five feet, stop, like that until it’s all on the ground in a ruin. Afterward”—here he lifted his forearm to the vertical—“they both go back up like a man standing up from a chair. Perfect: two barns again. It was something.”

  “They needed to get the horses out,” Darwin said. He was smiling.

  “That’s right,” Arthur said. “They film at different speeds. It’s a trick.”

  “Some trick,” LaRosa said. “They put it down and up twenty times in two days, and then they put some horses in there and let them run out while the thing went down, and later the girl came out and screamed for a while. I think they filmed the thing one night, I wasn’t there. Then four days later, the whole program’s packed up and gone, not a scrap of barn-wood, not a nail. Bare ground. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Was the girl okay?” Ronnie said. “Her horse?”

  “You should do the same thing out here,” LaRosa went on. “Make this deal so it unfolds piece by piece to the far side so somebody doesn’t ride their motorbike into the little river. Thanks for the beer.”

  They shook hands. Rudy thanked them for the beer and climbed in the white state truck. Ronnie was already aboard the road grader, opening the door, sitting in the cab, working the elevation lever, the angle.

  Now, in the billowing tent, Arthur opened his notebook on his lap and stared at his sketch of the ramp. He’d never drawn anything, even a portion of an entity, like it. He turned the book so Darwin could see the structure again. “We’re going to cantilever it almost twenty feet.” Arthur pointed to the substructure and where it anchored below in the cliff shelf. “We’ll pour eight footings.” He pointed them out in the overhead view. “And this upright frame will all be those eight-by-eights, or better, railroad ties. The cross members are four-by-eights.” It was a beautiful drawing in three levels: the symmetrical square uprights, the grid frame for the platform, and the ramp deck itself reaching out over the void.

  “How do we attach these?” Darwin pointed to the place underneath where the frame met the topdeck. “Does a man hang from a rope with one hand and a wrench? Is there some movie trick I don’t see?”

  “We’ll figure that out,” Arthur said. He was pleased that his new friend had pointed out the one problem in the schematic. “But until then, you should start working out. Practice hanging with one hand and driving home a carriage bolt with the other.”

  Key had not finished his sentence when the men felt an odd concussion. The tent rippled in the wind, but this shock ripped at the ground. Key thought immediately that it was the road grader’s transmission tearing out. The two men pushed out into the raw day as the terrible noise exploded into the unmistakable scream of metal bending. There was a wrenching squawk like a bell gone wrong and then the grinding of the great old steel blade biting rock. It was a spectacular sight, the pale elongated machine run off the edge of the escarpment, rocking there in a weird balance, its front tires hanging into the ravine, the rear tires, motorbox, drivercab, and Ronnie Panelli tilted up, buoying almost a foot off the ground. The fulcrum here was the ruined blade, folded now under this new weight.

  Art pushed Darwin toward their big flatbed, saying, “Get the truck.” He ran to meet Ronnie, who now was out of the cab and seeing how to jump down. “Whoa, whoa,” Key stopped him. “Wait a minute. Only jump if I say.”

  “My boot slipped on the brake pedal,” Ronnie said.

  “I know it did,” Key said, climbing the rungs to stand by the young man. His added weight did not adjust the tilt. “I think it’s pretty secure on that blade. And all the real weight is back here.”

  Darwin backed the big truck up to the block motorbox of the road grader and chained the come-along to the steel tow hook. He walked around to see the state of things. He yelled through the wind, “We can’t drag it off of that. The blade’s a stone-cold anchor.”

  With the two machines secured together, Key and Ronnie climbed down. The road grader sat nose down, wheels agoggle, but it had taken a hard high center which wasn’t fragile in the least.

  “Where’s your camera, Ronnie?” Arthur Key said to the young man. “You’ll want to show them this when you take your driving test.”

  “The pedals are slippery. My boots kept sliding off.”

  “The rubber covers for those pedals came off forty years ago. Don’t worry about it,” Key said, trying to shake the minor panic out of his throat. He stepped back a step and then another, measuring the problem. “We’ll need to lever it up before we tow it back off that blade,” he said. “You get hurt?”

  “I thought I was going over,” Ronnie said. “My foot slipped.” He pulled at his pantleg and his right leg above the boot was barked four inches, bleeding. The wind ripped at his open jacket and he stood and after two tries zipped it shut.

  “You hit your head?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, we’re good then. We’re going to need two of those eight-by-eights and some two-by-fours as cross members. Let’s clean up that leg a little and then get our hammers.”

  In the warm tent, out of the wind, Darwin knelt and swabbed Ronnie’s shin with alcohol. “Okay?” he asked the boy.

  Ronnie sat sober. “I’m okay.”

  “Hurt?”

  “I’m fucking everything right up.”

  They heard Key call from outside: “Let’s do this, boys.”

  They nailed a simple frame so the big timbers would stay parallel. They lodged the heavy wooden frame at forty-five degrees under the front of the machine, finally roping it in place. When the device was secure, Arthur Key looked at the entire plan: the truck, the chain, the road grader, the lever and the front wheels hung out in the windy canyon. “We’re making up this tune as we go along.”

  The accident had cost them the day, and now they stopped and had a late lunch of rolled tortillas stuffed with cheddar cheese, shredded steak and the crisp green salsa that Darwin’s wife had bottled. They ate it in the tent and went over the next part, when they would try to tow it all up over the blade and back onto its wheels. Key gestured to Darwin with his coffee cup. “I’ll start it up and get it in neutral. When I signal, give her hell.” Arthur turned to Ronnie, who hadn’t eaten two bites and who sat on his cot looking cold and scolded as the tent caught the wind in pockets and the canvas bellied and fell. “You’ll be on the back of the truck. If I come down and those wheels bite, snap the come-along free and you guys get out of the way.”

  Ronnie sat still. He’d put his plate on his bedding. “Ronnie,” Arthur went on. “It was not your fault. I should have checked out those pedals. It wouldn’t have been right for anybody. This machine should have been retired a long time ago.” He got no response. “You scared?” He put his hand carefully on Ronnie’s injured shoulder. “You did not go over the edge. We’re in the warm tent drinking coffee. How’s that shoulder? Come on, boy, this is the good part.” Darwin did not show his smile. He stood and pushed out through the tent flap into the gray windy day.

  Outside ten minutes later, Key checked the two jerry-rigged wooden timbers propped under the front of the trapped machine. He knew he was guessing at the angle. If it was too acute, the whole thing would act as a brake, stop the tow and possibly propel the old machine farther over the gorge. If it was too wide, it could simply slip and something he couldn’t see would happen. He hated not being able to see it all. He hated operations where the c
ause-effect wasn’t 99 percent. He’d broken in every crew and every crew member with that mantra: 99 percent certainty and also all of the possibilities in the last 1 percent. That was why he refused to be involved in active car stunts, fires or explosions. He’d worked one job where two cars pass in a one-car alley, and he had seen the producer wave off the variables and hope for the best. Arthur wanted to know the weight of the vehicles, establish their center of gravity, and if not, use chains or wire, but it was hurry and hope in the end and a crash that stopped work for a week. He hated not knowing.

  In the cab of the worn road grader, Arthur swung the door open and secured the latch. The clutch and the brake pedals were small shiny steel ovals, the gas pedal was gone, just a rod. He marveled darkly that he had been willing to let Ronnie even handle this thing. It had been good for Key to have the boy, lining him up, teaching him this and that these days. It kept Key away from looking in or back, but now it had led him to this mistake. He pulled out the choke and adjusted the throttle. When he pushed the cracked starter button, the huge machine trembled and assumed a rheumy roar that shook it all and he could feel the back end floating around, but it started and coughed and the black smoke once again fled in the sharp wind. He adjusted the rpms and wrangled the old bent gearshift into neutral. He could see Darwin in the cab of the flatbed waiting. The truck was running and Ronnie stood on the bed with one hand on the cab watching it all.