Five Skies

by Ron Carlson

  Now Arthur Key pointed at Darwin and gave him the thumbs-up. The chain was taut. Darwin eased the clutch out and felt the weight pull at the rear of the truck, dragging it a full foot left, shaking Ronnie but not shaking him loose. Twelve feet of chain connected the vehicles. Then the flatbed truck found a purchase and they saw the grader come slowly back. The large wooden lever was binding, trenching in the clay, but the front wheels of the road machine began to rise. When the rear tires then came to earth, Key already had them in reverse and they pulled the timbers up to two o’clock, one, noon, where it all held for a strange second. Ronnie knelt and yanked the come-along open and it clattered into the sand as Darwin eased the truck forward, away, and up off the graded runway. Now Key punched it and the cocked frame of his machine lifted up, the front wheels now six feet off the ground and then backward and down, the wooden levers rolling back through eleven, ten, nine, and finally falling to the roadway where they were run over by the road grader, now on four wheels again, bouncing for a moment and then on four wheels for good, the blade hung down bent up almost double.

  FOUR

  DARWIN COULD COOK a breakfast fry like no one Arthur had ever seen. He was quick and quiet and before a person had his boots tied right, the sound and smell of bacon was in the morning air and then the skillet eggs with onions and ham, sometimes with the sharp cheddar he bought in the village in a big brick, and the thick fried bread, close to burned the way Darwin had learned the other two men liked it. Every day he fried a small pan of hash brown potatoes, lacing them with salsa from a mason jar he kept in the cooler. Ronnie didn’t like the burned bread at first, and then when he tried the extra piece the first week, he took over as the king of burned bread, claiming to have invented it, holding out for the darkest piece, black and smoking under a stripe of the tub butter. There was coffee all morning and all day and into the night. They cooked on the tent stove until the days warmed a little and then the three-burner camp stove on its foldable legs in the open air. Beside the thing hung the two cook towels and on a hook, the big spatula.

  “Can you weld?” Key asked Ronnie when he came out of the tent. Ronnie had become an expert at many things in his short time on the plateau. He emerged from the tent like an expert and he eyed the sky every day first thing, wandering off with his bootlaces untied all the way to the fenceline before he stood and urinated like an expert. All the while he measured the sky, and by the time he’d turned and strode back to the campsite, he was ready to tell them what the weather would really be.

  Today when he came back, he said, “I could probably weld. It’s a torch, right?”

  “What’s the weather, Ronnie?” Darwin asked. He raised the spatula and made two passes over the three plates with both frying pans and breakfast was served.

  “That wind has quit, at least,” he said. “I think we’re in for a gorgeous spring day here in the world,” he said. “Chilly tonight, but we can get something done today.”

  “Today, we’re going backward just a touch,” Arthur told him.

  Ronnie dunked his bread into the big mug of milky coffee. “How’s that?”

  “We’re going to weld those bent blade struts, so that Idaho can go on with her roadwork.” Key pointed his burned bread at where the old yellow road grader reclined in the bright sage like the rusted skeleton of a creature as primitive and forgotten as the isolated plateau. The big blade lay to one side.

  “I cannot weld that,” Ronnie said. “That’s got to be the biggest thing I ever broke.”

  “Never in a car crash, racing away in one of your stolen Mustangs?”

  “Never stole a car and never crashed one.”

  The sun cleared the first banks of eastern haze and shot the shadows of the men in antic relief out over the river canyon, printing their faces brightly in the day.

  “Your past as an outlaw is less colorful every day. The legend is absolutely drying up,” Key told him.

  “It never once was colorful.”

  “Well, that sounds like the attitude of a person ready to learn to weld.”

  An hour later they had loaded the grader blade on the flatbed and chained it down for the trip to the machine shop at Diff’s ranch. To load it, they had pulled one end in the bucket of their little tractor, and Key had braced the other as it ascended, his arms flexed. When it was up and almost clear on the truck bed, it had bound up. “Get away a minute,” Arthur Key had instructed Darwin, who had been helping him. “In case it goes down.” Key had then shoved it up clear and the old steel sheet had clattered heavily onto the truck platform.

  “Chain it down, Ronnie,” Arthur told him. Darwin tore a flat piece out of a grocery bag and drew them a map with a carpenter pencil. Finally, Art asked him, “You’re not coming?”

  “Absolutely not. I left that place,” Darwin told him. “You won’t need me. The old man will be there or Roman will be in the shop or thereabouts.”

  The drive was a bit of a treat, up in the high truck, and Arthur Key handed the rough map to Ronnie, who was excited to get out, see some new country. Ronnie opened and closed his fists, admiring his new calluses. “What is the deal with that guy?” he said. They bumped through the narrow gateway onto the ranch road, turning south. “He’s locked up tighter than you, big man.” Ronnie glanced to see if Arthur was offended. “Admit it, right? So weird. So fucking stiff. ‘Absolutely not. I left that place.’ Christ.”

  Arthur Key looked at the young man.

  “You’re not weird. I’m not saying you’re weird. But you guys.” Ronnie put his elbow in the open window and felt his bicep with his left hand.

  “His wife died.”

  Ronnie looked across at Arthur. “Well, I’m sorry for that, and I know that I don’t really know what it means. What did it do, change every fucking thing?”

  Arthur Key spread the torn brown map on the truck seat with his hand and saw the ranch turnoff was twelve miles. “Yes,” he said. “It probably does.”

  After a minute, Ronnie said, “There’s a lot of lifting.” The truck drove the well-worn farm road and Ronnie could see the low billow of dust generated from the dual rear tires in their wake.

  “There is,” Key said. “You’ll get big and strong and you won’t be able to hide in the small places.”

  “Listen, you can let all that shit go. I know what you think of me.”

  “What do I think of you?”

  “You don’t care for reckless punks.”

  “That’s true,” Arthur Key said. He drove with his left wrist on the top of the steering wheel. “We’ll see if that has anything to do with you.”

  “You were always big, like that—those muscles?”

  Key looked at the young man. “Yeah, from when I was a kid.”

  “You married?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Oh, the way you say that. The end. You guys are something.” The day and the daylight and the wilderness here, the low brown hills, whose ravines were clogged with long triangles of the deep green piñon pine, made it possible for such talk.

  “We are, are we?”

  “Oh, fuck,” Ronnie said. “What were you doing when you were my age?”

  “I’m not sure I was your age. When I was nineteen I was repairing garbage trucks.”

  “In where? Dayton, did you say?”

  The road dropped through a dry streambed and rose again to confront ten cows standing in the open road. Key slowed and eased up to the animals, who gave the truck no regard.

  “What are they, wild?”

  “Just get out and clap your hands.”

  “I’m not getting out. Honk the horn.”

  “Ronnie, move those cows.”

  The cattle did not step left or right.

  “Go.”

  Ronnie opened his door and the nearest beast turned away. By the time Ronnie clapped his hands and came to the front of the vehicle, the small group had started and were walking along the farm track. Seeing them go, Ronnie followed behind calling, “Hey, let�
��s go. Get out of the fucking way!” and slapping his hand along the side of his leg, and having some success he began to hurry them. They would not leave the road. Arthur Key watched the boy until the last cow hearing the slap too near turned back annoyed and stopped. Ronnie halted and made seven or eight little running steps backward, keeping his face on the animal and his hands out before him. The cow turned and they all slowly walked. Key switched off the truck and rubbed his eyes. The air was full of pine and mesquite here, and Arthur Key was not surprised that even now watching this kid with his first cows, his own heart hurt afresh.

  He could get through this day; his past was his blindspot. The year he was twelve he had risen to six-three, and his shoulders had grown broader than his father’s by the time he entered seventh grade in Dayton, Ohio. By high school he’d learned to speak last, tolerant of the kinds of introductions and commentary he received. He was the person that people felt they could come up to and put their hands on his shoulders. He played football because his father hoped he would, and he played extremely well, although with restraint. He’d never had a temper and those who tried to test him in this regard were met with diffidence and silence. His father worked for the city’s many-faceted maintenance department, and he secured Arthur Key a job in the motor pool garage, where Art became a kind of apprentice mechanic, eventually being transferred up to a team that repaired garbage trucks. He had a head for math, trigonometry and calculus, and these things linked with his workings in the huge leverages of the damaged city vehicles made him a brilliant street engineer; that became his phrase to describe himself through high school. He was in his second semester at Auburn when his father died in an accident with an elevator.

  Arthur dropped out and came home to help his mother square things up while his brother, Gary, graduated from high school. Every two weeks he had to find Gary at some kegger or other before the police came, and Arthur warned and scared his brother’s buddies. He went back to the city maintenance sheds, and in the year he was there, he saw and invented a better compressor design for the trash haulers, one less likely to fail. In all of his workings, with his hands and his head, he began to see engineering as a kind of balance. Things wanted to balance; you could use lack of balance for energy of all types. It was a strange epiphany to have looking into the shelf compactor of a greasy garbage truck, but he saw a kind of universal field application which would fuel his future career.

  Dayton wore on Arthur Key. His mother was well and only fifty years old, so when Gary matriculated at Antioch, headed for a major in communications, whatever that was, Arthur Key headed west. He had promised his mother to look after Gary, and he had. He had pulled the boy out of the wrong crowd and overseen his homework, and now that Gary had college, Arthur wanted more daylight. He was twenty years old.

  In Denver, he took a great job with a bleacher company, Stadium Services, which set up temporary bleacher seating at festivals, fairs, parades, road races and civic functions. He worked with a crew of five other men on two trucks. He loved being outdoors in the larger weather, and he instantly went to the head of the class, selecting the setup sites, directing the overview before diving into the various duties of erecting the seats. Some of this work was on hard gradients or in remote places, and he was called on because he could see what each site required. They did seating installations throughout the West; some were weeklong jobs setting up a dozen units along a bicycle race and then moving them every other day along the mountain route. Some were two-day rodeos or bridge dedications. Arthur Key planned each job top to bottom, then plunged into the physical setup with a kind of joy actually—something right done well.

  He lived in a single trailer in a park at the edge of Littleton by choice, paying his rent with maintenance work and banking his money away, five and then ten thousand dollars. The second June he was fired. He got into a famous fight with one of the firm’s honchos while assembling three thousand seats in a semicircle on a windy plateau just outside the gates of the Air Force Academy. Key had arrived at the last second to take over, and the first thing he did after seeing the deluxe chair-backed aluminum bleachers was order the crew to disassemble what they’d done and double-brace the entire structure along the back frame. The cantilever was too much if the upper deck happened to be full while the lower shelves emptied—which was the case many times at events. His order meant that the crew would still be bolting the last section when the event began. The manager, a guy named Laird, was still on-site, hanging out in fact to meet the vice president. Laird blew up and stopped the work short. The crew looked up. Half the braces were in place. He told Arthur Key that he was fired and to get out. The larger man stepped to his boss and said quietly, “You’re making a serious mistake. The balance in these last sections is not right.” He looked along the bright line of seats as the dignitaries and their wives stepped up the assembly. His only inclination, and it rushed him like a blow, was to turn and go to his car. He hated chance and he hated accidents. He studied them: every mezzanine that collapsed in a hotel, all the failed domes and arches and roof spans of sports arenas and airplane hangars and department stores laden with snow, and construction site calamities, even some earthquake damage and overloaded ferryboats. It was rarely material failure; it was design and construction failure.

  Arthur Key picked up his extended ratchet and crawled back under the seating and recommenced affixing the two-inch bolts. Two men joined him and they ignored the manager as he pointed at them to stop and yelled for them to stop and ordered them to and told them they were all fired and again to stop. It took half an hour for them to finish. They did not double-bolt any of the fittings as they planned, but Key knew one would suffice—if they had them all and not every other one.

  Eight months later he was in Venice, California, doing bodywork and minor mechanical work for UPS when he heard of a job with a scaffolding company which subcontracted to Paramount. It wasn’t long with that outfit before his ideas on-site were part of the program. He started being borrowed around informally, and he saw it for what it was: his chance. With his tools and a panel van, he began specialty work subsubcontracting one-of-a-kind jobs: creating and troubleshooting tricky setups. On his second job, he ran into one of the guys from Colorado who told him that all the bolts in the back deck were bent ninety degrees the next day. Without the bolts, the whole thing would have gone over. He said the manager, Laird, had been canned on the spot. He said that during teardown they’d had to cut the bent bolts with a torch.

  Ronnie was gone now, nothing in the ringing daylight except the hills, the trees, the truck and the dusty road ahead. Arthur grabbed a rag and cleaned the layered dirt from the cracked windshield, standing on the running board. He started the truck and crept in first gear along the tracked dirt road a quarter mile to where it bent following the gradual vale and then to the second turn and the third when he finally found Ronnie still driving the cattle, which were now in a single file, straight up the road. Arthur could hear the boy calling to his charges as he came up behind. Ronnie looked at Art and smiled, his shoulders saying, what is wrong here? Ronnie got in the truck. “Don’t say it,” he said.

  When the truck came up behind now, the last cow stepped into the sage and suddenly they all did, scattering slowly to both sides.

  “Seriously,” Ronnie said. “Are they lost?”

  At the turnoff for the ranch known as Rio Difficulto there was no huge log arch, but a small woodburned sign on a fencepost: DIFF. Arthur Key smiled: if this was the big ranch in a film, the gate would have been four tons and varnished. Two miles later the road, which wound in a generous serpentine between the humped brown hills, crossed an amber creek on a timber bridge which did not groan when they drove over. Key could see game trails zigzagging up the inclines. The valley became studded with old poplars and the men drove into the shade for the first time in the late morning. The creek now was beside them. “Smells good here,” Ronnie said as the road opened into the ranch yard.

  “Mr. Diff’s estat
e,” Arthur Key said. He had expected a big place, but this was more than a simple ranch site. The three-story main house was as big a log building as Key had ever seen. It sat on a fine red stone foundation and was circled by a wide covered porch.

  “It’s a town,” Ronnie said. “Where are we now?”

  “Darwin lived here.”

  Well behind the mainhouse on the southern hillside were three other log residences, each with a double garage. Clothes hung on a line behind one of these homes. Across the dooryard from the main house was a classic red barn, newly painted, halfway down. The aluminum extension ladder leaned up under the two-story eave. Arthur Key slowed his truck and two dogs came around the house, both big black Labs, one with a gray muzzle. He drove past the barn to a row of pale gray metal outbuildings and stopped finally in front of the cement apron of one with the large bay door open. Ronnie was taking the place in: the basketball court between two huge poplars on the far side, the three kids hauling at the tire swing under the trees, near where the narrow stream ran, the corral beyond that and the six horses there, and at the end of the lane, the little brownstone building whose roof was generally collapsed. Next to it was a large garden plot in full leaf. Arthur could see the bladed gravel runway beyond that and a windsock drooping on its pole.

  As soon as Ronnie had stepped down, the two dogs found him from the back and he climbed up again into the vehicle. Then they drifted smoothly around the truck and each put a nose into one of Arthur Key’s palms as he bent to greet them. Key admired the way the ranch was set in the shallow valley, protected by the grassy sage slopes but affording plenty of light. A hundred years ago somebody had stood here and made some good decisions.

  The big dogs were affectionate. He could see they were father and son. Ronnie came down and watched Key handle and talk to the animals. “These are good guys,” Key told Ronnie.