Five Skies

by Ron Carlson

  “None for me,” he said. He finished pouring their mugs full of lime Kool-Aid.

  “You ever go on a picnic?” Arthur asked Ronnie. “Take your girlfriend to the park?”

  Ronnie’s mouth was full, chewing. Finally, he answered: “I might have. I ate in the park.”

  “Is eating in the park a picnic?” Arthur asked Darwin.

  “A picnic is no casual matter,” the older man said. “A picnic is a serious endeavor.”

  “There’s the planning. This isn’t a bag of burgers in the car.”

  “To eat a lunch in the daylight out-of-doors on a blanket with a young woman,” Darwin said, “is courtship. You would only do such a thing with your intended.”

  “You two are so full of shit that it is a wonder of nature.” Ronnie drank his Kool-Aid greedily.

  Darwin slid his milk crate stool back and stood up. He went into the tent and returned with a folded blanket of green plaid. He gave it to Ronnie.

  “Nice,” the young man said. “This is for my big picnic?”

  “Be careful with it,” Darwin said. “But, yes, it will be a good start.”

  “Now all you need is some fried chicken and some napkins.”

  “Wine, glasses, silverware, pasta salad, salt and pepper, brownies,” Darwin said. He had made them a pan of swollen brownies in his Dutchoven the night before and pulled the bag from the foodbox now and set it on the table.

  “I don’t like wine,” Ronnie said.

  “It’s not about you. Take the wine in case. You can drink Kool-Aid.”

  He stood and refilled each of their mugs with the sweet green drink. “I will.”

  “Ronnie,” Art said. “Don’t feed the rabbits.” All during their lunch Ronnie had been tossing bits of lettuce over near the corner of the tall bundle of lumber. He’d been feeding a dozen or so of the bravest rabbits for weeks.

  Ronnie stood up now. “They’ve never seen lettuce before. Not for a thousand years, as you’d say.” He picked up the ruins of his lunch, the plate, his crumpled napkin, tossing his fork in the washtub and the paper in the trash barrel. “This is the best job I personally have ever had, but that does not mean you two are not just full of shit.” He grabbed his gloves out of his back pocket with a flourish and pulled them on. “Now I’m going to gas the tractor and drill ten more holes.”

  As he walked away, Arthur said, “Don’t bring her out here. It won’t be a picnic out here.” Ronnie didn’t turn to the remark.

  When the postholes for the steel fence were dug, each dark spot circled by perfect rings of the rusty earth, Arthur removed the power takeoff from the tractor and took Ronnie out near the gate, where they changed the oil. Arthur guided the young man through the process, removing the fine-threaded plug and catching the thick black oil in a plastic vinegar bottle which he cut in half with his pocketknife. Using the top of the bottle as a funnel, Ronnie poured four quarts of fresh oil into the vehicle.

  “You ever watch television?” he asked the big man.

  “No,” Arthur said.

  “I used to watch a lot of television. They had sets in the dayrooms at juvie, and I watched it.”

  “What did you see?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. I don’t remember. God, day in and day out.”

  “You want us to get a television now that we’ve got power.”

  Ronnie was pouring the oil carefully and looked up at Arthur. “Oh god no. I was just talking.” When he looked up from the last quart, Ronnie said, “Somebody’s coming.”

  Key listened and then said, “That’s the river. The wind changed.”

  “No, listen.”

  Twenty seconds later Key heard it too, a vehicle approaching, which became a green pickup truck. Arthur walked up the dirt road, spilling the dirty oil in a stripe up the middle of the white gravel. “You got ears like a rabbit,” Key told the boy. “There’s some real-life traffic today.”

  The green and white carryall pickup slowed and eased up beside Key and Panelli. “Dudes,” the driver said. He was a small man with a razor-line mustache, and he had a worn-out piece of paper pinched in his fingers. He held it out the window to Arthur Key, who saw it was a penciled map. “Just where are we, then?” It was the telephone company.

  TWELVE

  THE TWILIGHT THICKENED until the two men nailing the brace on the two-by-four guardrail became a pair of silhouettes with hammers. They worked without talking. The entire camera platform had been cut and measured all afternoon: the decking which they screwed down with the power drill and the gated rail, sixty uprights and the top bar. They’d been setting and nailing these cut pieces for two hours now, and like people who read as the day fails, they didn’t see that they’d lost the light. At close range, they could see everything they needed. At three, Darwin had driven Ronnie into town for dinner with Marion and Traci. The young woman would drive him home later. Off south half a mile, a coyote had been calling and then gave off calling. That was when Darwin looked up and saw the stars burning through the dark. The encampment had gathered itself in such failed light into five dark blocks.

  “This day is tipped over,” Darwin said.

  Arthur Key stepped off the deck and pulled the last five sections of railing onto the boards. “Let’s save these for Ronnie. It’d be bad luck to finish this tonight. He can polish off this little crow’s nest.”

  Darwin had the drill. “Where’s the case for this?”

  The two men saw how dark it had become and they stood and scanned around their feet.

  “Don’t let me kick it into the river,” Key said. He found it on the single entry step they’d erected, and he handed it to Darwin.

  “You believe in luck?” Darwin said.

  “I believe in everything,” Arthur Key said. “I believe in work. I believe in day and night and whatever this is called when the day’s over but it won’t get dark.”

  They walked back toward the tent and now felt the chill that had been working along the canyon for the past hour.

  “But that’s not what you were asking.”

  “I don’t know. I think I was asking if you wanted a little whiskey.”

  “I believe in having a little whiskey. Just to clean out my old coffee cup.” Key felt good. His head was empty. He put his hammer and gloves in his toolbox and grabbed his Levi’s jacket from the peg above his cot inside the huge tent. Darwin lit the candle lanterns on the blue table and he poured a lick of George Dickel into the two cups.

  “You want some ice?”

  “I don’t,” Key told him. “I don’t want to get started on the niceties.”

  “No sense in that.” Darwin touched his cup to Key’s and took a sip. The two men sat in the quiet dark. The river was just a whisper now and the sky continued to bloom with stars. Silent on the sage mesa, they felt the whiskey warm in their throats, and the silence seemed to Key to be a kind of balance between one thing and the next, a fulcrum of some sort, as solid and substantial as the weight of whatever it carried. In any section of the tricky night sky, satellites slid, and other lights moved at intervals. It was for a moment like he was in his own head, Key thought, everything was so far away, pinned against the far wall of knowing, the distances between him and the next thing were vast and still opening. He felt the cold air behind his ears and down his neck.

  “Were you ever in a fight?” Darwin asked him. “A big man like you. Didn’t people want to fight you?”

  “Sort of. I mean yes. It happened a couple of times when I was in the wrong place, a bar. Early on when we’d close a job down, I’d go out with the guys to celebrate and if I stayed say until ten or eleven, some smartass would come for me, bump me, call me a name, like that. I wanted to throw these guys around, but I never did. Sad, isn’t it?”

  “You’d leave the bar,” Darwin said quietly.

  “I wasn’t much of a bar guy.”

  “What did you do to celebrate?”

  “Not too much. It was enough for me to have done the job right.”
He lifted his cup for another splash. “Now that is sad. But I was pleased and didn’t feel the need to go anywhere or buy something or whatever. Most times, almost all the time, I had a new job to plan, and that felt real good. I thought sometimes of my dad, how much he would have liked some of the work I had, but mostly I’d make my notes on what to do better next time, what to do again, what not to do again, and go home.”

  Darwin had fired up the two-burner propane stove which they had begun using as the nights warmed up, and he had their pot of stew out. He was cutting an onion into it, letting the pieces drop into the simmering mixture. “You want toast?” he asked his friend.

  “Let’s fry up some bread on the skillet,” Art said, handing him the flat tray from their wooden galley cabinet. Darwin sliced two thick pieces from the sourdough loaf while butter melted and pooled on the warming steel. He tossed the bread there and moved the pieces around in the butter with his knife.

  “I know you didn’t have a wife. Did you have a dog?”

  “No dog.”

  Darwin drank down his whiskey. “Now that’s pathetic right there.”

  Key laughed softly.

  A minute later they could smell the bread browning at the edges. Darwin stirred the stew. “The onions are stiff, but this stew is ready.”

  They let the bread burn a minute more and then Darwin turned off the stove and ladled out two enameled bowls of stew.

  “I like the bread burned a bit like this,” Darwin said. The bowls of stew were beautiful on the blue table in the lantern light. The lanterns hissed faintly and the stove ticked sharply cooling down.

  “It’s good enough for who it’s for,” Darwin said, sitting opposite the big man. They ate the evening meal and wiped their bowls with the final crusts.

  “My wife always left a bite of bread,” Darwin said.

  “I’ve seen it that way,” Art said. “My dad would do it.”

  “Why’d she do it?” Darwin said. “Even when we were still hungry, young I mean. We’d eat and she’d leave a bite, a corner.”

  “Did you ask her about it?”

  Darwin sat still. The men’s faces were above the lightfall from their lamps, and Arthur could not discern his friend’s expression. “No,” he said finally. “I didn’t get the chance.”

  “Maybe it’s in the Bible,” Arthur said. “I don’t know that book, but could it be in there?”

  “Goddamn Bible anyway,” Darwin said. He drank his whiskey off and poured another inch. He stood up and took their dishes to the washtub.

  Arthur joined him and took the bowls, wiping them out and then rinsing from the clean barrel. “I sense you want to argue about this, Darwin, but it’s not my argument.”

  “You think there’s a god anywhere near this poor place?” Darwin said. He wasn’t speaking loudly.

  “That also is not a discussion I can have,” Arthur Key told him. “You’ll have to contact the professors on that one.”

  “No I won’t,” Darwin said quickly.

  Now under the whirring of the river there was another sound or something like a sound which became a faint rhythm like breathing and then a shadow drifting along the farm road toward the camp. The figure turned in at the gate, and both Arthur and Darwin knew it was Ronnie Panelli. He didn’t see them and when Arthur called his name, he stopped.

  “What time is it?” Ronnie said across the yard.

  “Come on over. We’re having a drink,” Darwin said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “What did you do? Where’s Traci?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Come over.”

  “That’s fine. I walked back. I’m going to hang out for a while.” Ronnie turned, faltering, and then moved back toward the lumber stack. A moment later, they saw the cab light of the flatbed truck go on and then off, and the sound of the door shut.

  “Oh, for godsakes,” Darwin said. He lifted the whiskey bottle. “One more?”

  “That’s a long walk,” Arthur told him. “You better go over there.”

  “We’re drinking here.” Darwin put a short splash in his own cup. “In this I’m no good,” he said. “I can’t talk.”

  “No,” Art said. “I cannot. I’m no good.”

  “I’m worse, my friend. It would be a mistake for me to go over there.”

  The two men sat in the dark, touching their cups down in moist circles on the heavy blue table.

  Art reached the bottle and poured himself a touch, drinking it right down. “We’re drinking. You go over and talk to him and if it won’t go, I’ll try it.”

  “He’s in the truck for the night,” Darwin said. “Something went bad in town. I wouldn’t know where to start, where to take it or how to get out. You go. I’ll save you some whiskey.”

  Arthur Key breathed in and then out. “I’ll give it one shot.” He stood in the gloom and immediately felt the pull of the sky. He was out of place, too large, a long way from the ground. He seized a water bottle to hold him down, and he walked to the old truck.

  Ronnie had the windows rolled up, and he was smoking in there. Arthur knocked on the driver window. Ronnie wouldn’t turn his head. Arthur rapped again. “Hey, you don’t smoke.”

  The young man blew a stream of smoke into the windshield. He would not look at Key. The larger man gave it a minute and then took the door handle and stepped very close to the glass. “You don’t want me to do this.”

  Ronnie finally looked at his friend. “I smoke. I can smoke.”

  “What happened?”

  “I walked home. I don’t belong over there.”

  “All the way?”

  “I’ve been walking. I got a ride from some geezer to the bridge cutoff.”

  “Is Traci okay?”

  “I’m okay. I’m going to sit in here for a while.”

  They were still speaking through the glass. “What did you fight about?”

  “No fight. Really, Arthur, no fight. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Where’d you go?” Art’s breath bloomed on the window and the cab filled with the smoke from Ronnie’s cigarette.

  “We were at her house. Marion came home. We were cooking.”

  Arthur Key just waited. He stood still by the window and put his hands in his pockets in a posture of eternal waiting. “Did you tell her what you were doing out here? About the job?”

  “She knows about that.”

  “Roll down the window. You’re going to choke.”

  “I told her where I was from, about my mom, about running away.” Ronnie looked at Arthur, his face a ruin. He rolled the window down and spoke softly now. “I told her I’d been in jail.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “Why did I tell her that? What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m nuts since I’ve been out here.” His short laugh sounded queasy. “I’m fucking upside down out here. Christ, Arthur, I told her I’d been in jail.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “We were cooking some spaghetti and she went in the other room, and when I was alone I figured out what I had just told her. We were just talking about how her dad had been rough, and I’m nuts anymore and I told her that I’d been in jail. When she left the room, I went out the back door. I was insane to tell her. She’s only known bad guys. What is the matter with me? Talking? I walked about a mile and some old guy lifted me to the cutoff. I’ve been walking.” Ronnie had put out the cigarette and was rubbing his face with both of his hands. He went on. “I’m not going to go through chapter and verse of my little life with that girl. I could for a minute imagine telling her about breaking and entering, about stuff I took. I’m not even here right now. I’m a crazy man for acting this way.”

  Arthur Key stood and looked down, breathing, and then up at the stars in their clusters. He looked over at Darwin in the shadows, the little yellow candle dots. “You want some stew?” Arthur Key asked him.

  “You guys eat?”

  Key opened the truck door and Ronnie climbed down.
His hair was gone, cut to a buzz, and Arthur Key put his hand on Ronnie’s head. “She cut your hair.”

  “Art,” the boy used the name as if it was part of his terrible logic, tearing to a new page in their book. “I screwed it up. This is important. This is only the second important thing I’ve even been close to. The first was running and I knew it, when I got out of bed in the middle of the night in my mother’s house and I dressed, I knew it wasn’t the same old bullshit, smalltime stupidity. I knew I’d be this sorry for it forever, but I went. I ran. My mother doesn’t even know where I am and it’s seven, eight months. I could have stayed and gone to court and then to jail again. I’d still be in jail; it was going to be two years. Two fucking years.” Ronnie Panelli shook, a young man not a hundred and sixty pounds, a month away from twenty. He bit at it for a while but then just cried, standing and shaking.

  “Ronnie,” Arthur Key said. They stood in the thick dark, the air simply nothing, a host for shapes. “You were a thief. It was a shitty little thing. No one expects you to go and put everything back.”

  Ronnie’s shoulders were rolled as far forward as shoulders go and his hands thrust deep, tight in his pockets could not still his crying.

  Key went on. “Listen, son. Take a deep breath right now.” Key took the boy’s shoulders and pulled them back as Ronnie inhaled. “Now blow it out and get over it. You’ll see her again. You’ll talk. The world still waits on you.”

  Ronnie shivered. He let his shorn head fall against Key’s chest for the briefest second. “I walked out here.”

  “I know you did.”

  “You guys in bed?”

  “You tell her that you were a thief, but you let that life go. Tell her the truth. You’re a carpenter.”

  “I am not.”

  “You better be. We’ve got some work out here tomorrow.”

  “Right, I know,” Ronnie said. He was weary now. Key could hear the kettle over on the cook shelf in the dark as Darwin stirred the leftover stew.