by Ron Carlson
“You want to tell me this story?” Darwin asked.
“I’m going to say some of it,” Arthur told him.
“Something happened to him.”
“I was part of it and I should have prevented it. He was killed.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Darwin said. He had known there was someone dead in the story. Except for the business of driving, their stoppings for gasoline and a plate lunch at a truckstop, their commentary on the features of Idaho and the places Darwin had been or done this or that, Arthur Key’s story occupied the drive. The military vehicle had been sprung years ago and rode like it was built of rocks. Each word in Key’s story had to be punched into the noisy jeep cabspace, and he was careful with each.
He had decided to tell Darwin before they set out and he did not know the reason for his decision. Early in the trip he had told the other man, “This will change your opinion of me,” and Darwin had looked at him in the drafty jeep and replied, “Don’t get your hopes up.” In the roar of the wind and road, Arthur spoke in measured sentences and didn’t hurry.
After starting, he stopped and sat quietly for a mile and then two, his hands between his knees. He went around it all in his head and knew he could only start at the end, which he did.
Arthur Key had stayed in California until the funeral was over, the short graveside service in Westwood on a sharp sunny day, laden lightly with the smog, almost sweet, and then, after he had watched the mourners depart, the three film stars first in their town cars, and then the stuntman Damon Sloan in his, and then the two dozen others stepping awkwardly in the spring grass toward their own vehicles, he went once more to his brother’s grave. He was walking by taking each step and each step was expensive. It had been an entirely physical presence, the emotion that had possessed him since he had received the news. Even before he was sure of the terrible story, the pressure of his grief had begun in him, and he could tell that he could not stop or control it, simply stand under it as it mounted. He had no leverage.
The night of the first day, he had spoken to himself alone in his dark loft, surprised to be speaking in a whisper: it is what it is, he said. You have this now. It had taken every muscle he had to clear his worktables and organize the coming projects into the blue crates he and the crew used for each new job. He breathed noisily and steadily as if running slowly, and he used the breathing to gather each of his drawings and to order and file them and to print an order for each folder. After five hours of such work, the seven blue boxes were stacked by the stairs. Outside the window, California was dark. His worktables, beautiful long parsons’ tables, had been made for him by Harry and his crew the year he’d moved into the loft. The top of each table was a door from a renovation at UCLA, and they still bore their names in five-inch black letters burnished into the heavy oak: MEN, UTILITIES, WOMEN, LAUNDRY. Arthur Key read the words for the first time in four years; the tables had never been clear before. He stood still into the night, unable then to move. He had no name for it, for he was sure it wasn’t only the powerful guilt, something he’d never been bruised by in his life to the age of forty-two, but he knew he could not breathe deeply or stand fully up or turn his head or open his arms.
Now he looked at the grave of his brother. He wanted to say one word, Goodbye, and he could not get his mouth to open. He could not move his fingertips. After fifteen minutes, his friend and foreman Harry Burdett came over.
“You okay, Art?” Harry came around in front of Key and took his elbow. “You ready?”
“Do you have all the keys?” Arthur asked him. He had asked Harry this four times in the last two days. Saying it now with Harry’s hand on him freed Arthur Key enough for him to turn and begin walking to the car.
They had talked about the rest. He had told Harry that he needed to go for a while, that he needed to go for a while. That’s all I can say, Key told his friend. You handle Housetime and go forward from there. It will all be in the boxes. They had known each other for nine years, long enough. Harry didn’t need more. He’d learned long ago to tell just by the way Key walked onto the set whether to move fast or slow. He knew what to do now.
Good Measure was exactly halfway through a complicated project, four scenes in a film called Housetime from Fox, in which they’d constructed the corners of two large houses. The houses had to rotate at moments of the protagonist’s confusion. They were two-story clapboard houses with Georgian cornices, long paned windows on the second floor, and curtains in the windows. Standing at the edge of the Fox lot, the two odd pieces looked like the last remnants of an earthquake. Key had designed each with four railroad axles on large-gauge carousel tracking so they could roll in an arc of 120 degrees. His crew was used to him double-framing the undercarriages of all their projects, budgeting for it as the deals were made. On this project, Key had already overseen the construction of both frames. After they welded the steel armatures, he’d weight-tested it, and they were now building the platforms for the two faux fronts. Harry knew he could handle it all.
As they agreed, Harry drove Key to LAX and let him off at the curb. Key carried a small case. He was still in his suit. The two men did not talk, except for Harry to say when Key got out of the truck, “Take care.” He did not know where his friend was going.
The interior of the airport building felt like a vacuum to him. Arthur Key chose his destination by how long he thought he could go without standing up. Standing seemed to help. When he sat, the feeling of being crushed and airless was overpowering. In the dark suit waiting in the ticket line, he looked exactly like what he was: a big man who had come freshly from a funeral. He looked stricken, but he could not, even trying, change his face. With his American Express he bought a first-class ticket to Portland. One hour and forty minutes: he could do that.
In the midafternoon in Idaho, Darwin pulled the jeep into the expansive parking lot of the Double American truck plaza and the men stepped stiffly from the vehicle. “Let’s get a coffee,” Darwin said, “and stay out of this goddamn jeep for an hour.” It hadn’t been all Arthur talking; Darwin had talked about the winters here, how the ranch hunkered down in the short days and how he and Roman repaired every vehicle in turn top to bottom, good work in the stove-warmed machine shed. Arthur told as far into his story as he could. He wanted to tell about Alicia, but he knew he could not say, “I was involved with his wife. I was with her on the day.”
They had been in her bed when both of their cell phones began ringing. Hers was two bars of Chopin, and his was a four-note staccato bleat, not unlike a European siren. It was four in the afternoon and in the silver light in the ruined sheets, they had just turned and with her hands on his shoulders they had begun again. His mind was empty for the first time in his adult life, and he wasn’t even sure where he was when the devices began to sound.
With Alicia, in his brother’s bedroom, it was that strange. Moving again deeply and slowly, sweating, they were certainly not going to answer their phones. Alicia’s eyes were closed and she bumped Key’s forehead with hers softly and steadily. In her extremity she was crying. Key’s hands pressed firmly into her lower back. The telephones rang for minutes, stopping and then starting again. Ten minutes. When Alicia opened her eyes, Arthur Key saw her look, which was only serious, and then her face was taken with fear. They separated somehow; Key did not remember that, except that before Alicia answered her phone, she pulled the sheet up over herself, and she said, “Yes?”
This scene came in circles for him sometime every day, and he could not deflect it. With Darwin over coffee at the Double American truckstop, it came at him again and again. The two men sat silently at the long Formica counter, glad to be in the swampy air-conditioning for half an hour.
Outside, Darwin handed Arthur the jeep key and told him it wasn’t that far now. When Darwin climbed in the other side, he said, “I like Portland, but I know goddamn well that you didn’t stay there.”
“You ever sleep in your shoes?” Arthur Key asked Darwin.
&n
bsp; “God no. Why would you?”
In Portland, Key had had no plan. He drifted through the gray airport afternoon with the crowd and filed out of the building, the world a deep overcast though it wouldn’t be dark for two hours. Sometime later a guy in a green baseball cap asked the man in the dark suit if he wanted a cab. Without answering, Arthur climbed in the green and white taxi. Key didn’t, couldn’t answer any of the man’s questions except to say, “Hotel.” He was thereby taken to The Heathman Hotel downtown, disembarking as the lights were coming on up and down Broadway Street, the bars and the stores. He was aware of where he was now, and that he was in some kind of shock. His head was light. After checking in, he went up to his fifth-floor room, a small curtained room, dark and close, and he lay on the bed without even taking a glass of water. He lay down with his shoes on.
It was the maid, finally, who spoke to him. The DO NOT DISTURB sign had not moved for two days, and on the third, she used her key and stood in the darkened room before a man in a suit on the bed. She gasped, of course, thinking he was dead. The air was sour and the room still. Her half scream woke him from his grinding half dream, and he rolled his head to her. She left without closing the door. Arthur Key lay and watched the open door for an hour and then another hour. He had cramps in his arches that flickered steadily. In a state not sleep and not waking, he turned and put his feet on the floor. Bending his legs like that allowed the cramps to run up behind his knees and bite his quadriceps. This was a pain he could not ignore and he tried to stand. He could not. His mouth tasted intensely bitter. He sat up straight and gripped the edge of the bed. Finally, he pulled his shoes from his swollen feet and slumped to the floor to straighten his legs. He was lying like that when the door opened wide and the hall light spilled upon him along with the shadow of a woman in a business suit.
“Mr. Key,” she said. “Mr. Key?”
Arthur Key closed his eyes. The woman was a mile above him, her shape ominous and bizarre. It was odd for him there and he went through a few phrases, but offered none. He was surprised that he could think, and his second thought was that if he didn’t sit up, or do something, the hotel would probably call the police. He thought about sitting up. The woman was looking in his face.
“Should we call someone?” she asked. “Do you need some help?”
“Oh,” he lied. “I’m drunk. I’m so sorry.” Then he sat up and he felt the weight of the room in his head. “I’m just real drunk. This is embarrassing.” He slurred the word embarrassing without even trying. “I’ll be fine. I’ll sleep this off and check out in the morning.”
The woman stood up, her arms folded.
“I thought we should look in on you,” she said, backing out.
“Thank you,” he said. Talking was work. “I appreciate your kindness.” Again, he slurred appreciate, and he saw the door close. He sat there a long time thinking that he would try now to rub his face with his hand.
In the same clothes on the streets at midnight, he walked down Salmon Street to Eleventh. There were men in suits in the parks, homeless men in suits, and so as he walked by, not shuffling, not staggering, just walking if slowly, he fit in. It was a wet night right on the edge of being cold. He’d always known the temperature and he said aloud to no one, “Forty-nine degrees.”
He walked the five blocks on Eleventh to the bridge there, and he stepped forward on the walk lane out over the Willamette River in the broken dark of the city of Portland. He could catch a halo around the perimeter of his vision and he could feel a dull heartbeat in his elbows. His mouth was dry. Fragments of light glanced everywhere back off the river, and every lighted window upriver in the apartments and the convention center became a torn flame struggling in the water. The traffic was desultory; each car crossing the bridge felt like the last of the night. Hearing a noise he turned to see a group of joggers, ten men in white T-shirts headed his way on the walk path. They were singing something, which he then recognized as an old drinking song, and the phrase that was repeated every chorus was “Give it over, give it over, give it over, here take mine!” They were singing in a weird whisper and shaking the walkway just a little as they came by, their faces red, and a couple of the men nodded at him, and the last guy, wearing a pointed white nightcap, called back to him. “Dude. Don’t jump. They fish you right out and it’s jail. Totally humiliating. Go up to the pier, where they can’t see you. That water is cold.”
He wasn’t going to jump. He was breathing the air, and then he had his cell phone in his hand and he dialed Alicia’s number. He could hear people at her place, and she said hello twice before he said hello. “Arthur,” she said sharply.
“I’m sorry,” he said. The line was full of conversation, five or six voices in Alicia’s place.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“I’m okay. I’m going to be gone, and I wanted you to know.”
“Hold on, Arthur,” she said, and he heard the noises diminish and a door shut. “There, I’m in the bedroom. Where are you?”
“I’m gone. I’ll be away. Alicia. This is difficult.” Key was speaking slowly, drawing each word from a dark part of his chest. “I couldn’t stay and sort it out or whatever it would be.” He lifted the phone from his ear and looked at it. “Forgive me.” Then he struggled to say, “If there is anything you need, call Harry.”
“Art. Don’t. Everything’s taken care of here. Don and Emile and a few friends are over. We had a roast and potatoes, the whole dinner.”
“That sounds good.”
“Are you out in the weather?”
“I’m walking around.”
“Arthur,” Alicia said.
“What?”
“Be kind to yourself. This wasn’t your fault.”
The phone dropped. Arthur Key did not know how it occurred, just that he watched the silver cell spin brightly into the waters of the night river. He stood up from leaning on the heavy iron rail. The bar was a five-inch pipe with seventy years of black enamel on it. He traced its length to the upright and admired the flange there and the facing bolts, all custom work from a foundry so long ago. An ironworks, for christsakes. Arthur Key put his hands in his suitcoat pockets and started to walk. His brain was empty for a minute and so he opened his dry lips and said to the sky, “Give it over, give it over.” The tune was catchy, but he could not sing.
Arthur Key sat on the steps of St. Mary’s Cathedral until dawn. He was surprised that he could sleep there, but he was out of the little wind and when he opened his eyes in the dark and saw the first silhouettes of the park and the tenements across the street, he was glad to be cold. The stone steps had chilled him where he reclined, and now too something else was happening: he was hungry. And he had to piss.
Behind the church in a crushed stone parking lot, he stood between the parish van and a white Lexus and combed his hair with both hands while he urinated, making the small steps of someone on a cell phone. He was wondering if he should speak aloud for a while but decided no. He felt the day pull at him, the way new days did, but he fought it easily by remembering the phone call, the grave, Alicia naked when she answered her cell.
At eight, the big church doors opened and Arthur Key followed six or seven women into the sanctuary. He watched them precede him up the center aisle, kneel and cross themselves. Without them, he could not have come forward. He was able to sit in the third pew from the back. The priest in the maroon distance was lighting candles and the entire dark room had the air of preparation about it, of housekeeping. Arthur Key was not Catholic, but he certainly believed in something.
All he could think now was to get out of town. He walked six blocks to the bus station, and it too seemed a kind of church to him, the penitents, the benches. The first bus was east: Pendleton, Boise, Pocatello.
NINE
ARTHUR KEY SLOWED the old flatbed truck to ten miles an hour and leaned to run his thumb across the scratched dial screen, cleaning a strip in the dust so he could check the odometer. “That’s twenty-one
miles,” he said and he stopped the vehicle in the middle of the bladed sandy road. It was exactly noon. The sky was only white, bleached by a seamless high-altitude cloud cover, no shape in the elevated void in any direction, and the wind was steady and even as if it were a permanent feature of the desert around them, the sparse sage and periodic igneous cairns of porous red cinders. Ronnie slid out of the truck and climbed onto the bed and then onto the roof of the cab. Rabbits fled in every direction, stopping, returning, many seeking shelter under the truck itself. Key extended the binoculars out his window straight up with his left hand, and Ronnie knelt and took them from him. Darwin and Arthur again unrolled the USGS map of the quadrant. They’d given up trying to hold it open on the truck’s hood in the wind.
“Straight east,” Key called up to Ronnie. His arm pointed. “Anything?” Arthur Key and Darwin sat in the cab listening to the young man’s footsteps on the truck roof.
“It’s weird,” the young man said.
“Can you see the Pyramid?” They had named the bare pinnacle a mile east of their encampment the Pyramid. Ronnie had been on the roof of the cab four times already.
“There’s about six.”
Darwin unfolded his map another section and ran his pencil out the mining road they were on and made a dash. “Twenty-one miles. Stop it right here.” They squinted at his pencil as he ran it east to the river. “It’s over there about a mile. We’re close. We needed a clear day. The sun’s up there somewhere.” It appeared to be everywhere. They heard two quick steps and heard Ronnie take a knee on the cab; he swore and the wind ripped the words away. His feet appeared in the rear window.