Five Skies Read online

  FIVE SKIES

  Also by Ron Carlson

  Stories

  News of the World

  Plan B for the Middle Class

  The Hotel Eden

  At the Jim Bridger

  A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories

  Novels

  Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Truants

  For Young Readers

  The Speed of Light

  FIVE SKIES

  RON CARLSON

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2007 by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Ron Carlson, 2007

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 1-4295-3213-0

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For Gail Hochman

  FIVE SKIES

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  OCTOBER

  ONE

  IT WAS A COLD MAY in all of Idaho, and as the month began there were only a few short stacks of lumber and construction gear on the plateau above the remote river gorge, along with all the game trails and the manifold signs of rabbits who were native to the place and who now moved cautiously around the three men sleeping on the ground.

  The first time Arthur Key saw the plateau at the far edge of the ranch called Rio Difficulto, he was lying in a sleeping bag in the frigid open air at dawn, or a little before it, in the deep gray light through which so many creatures jostled in the sage. He was a big man and had slept in rough sections, shouldering the oversize Coleman sleeping bag up over his right arm and then his left by turns. A screaming rabbit had woken him, the cries thin and shrill in their extremity sounding only like a woman to him, only like a crime. They beat into the fading darkness like a two-note whistle, then suddenly stopped, and Arthur Key lifted his head and scanned the area. At first he didn’t know where he was, which rooming house, but he knew the low black line of the crenellated mountain horizon was a hundred miles distant. The large Ford flatbed—still loaded—was parked off in the sage, cocked unevenly because of their having let so much air out of the tires the night before. Beside it he could see a small open army surplus jeep with a winch on the front bumper, and behind that a pile of material, a stack of large lumber in stays, the small tractor, a blue portable john still in its rough wooden crate, the frost on everything silver in the new light. There was nothing else, no building, no tent, no small trailer across the work yard. He closed his eyes and smiled. Darwin had said room and board.

  Arthur Key put his hand on his head and felt the frost in his hair. In the new silence, he could now hear another sound which at first he assumed to be some pressure in his head. Then as he yawned and cleared his ears he guessed it was the flat high harmonics of an intercontinental flight, San Francisco to Boston, but as the vibration persisted he sat up and listened again. There were fluctuations in it like those in human speech, and a rhythm as if a generator were running somewhere a half mile away. He wanted it to be a generator, the gas-driven generator that would be running the galley trailer where coffee would be ready, hot coffee and absolutely anything else.

  In the past six weeks, mornings had been kindest to him. He had saved himself for two things: waking and having some coffee, and then, of course, the day caught up with him and he put his head down and worked, whatever it was. He’d just finished two weeks in Pocatello working cement on the foundations for new storage units. He told himself he was trying to regroup, to get a grip, but he now knew, after this time away from the life he had ruined, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

  The sound wasn’t a generator and it wasn’t people talking. When he stood, he knew it was at some distance a river, and as he walked toward it and saw clearly the mortifying fissure through which such a vast river ran, the geology of the entire plateau settled in his mind as an entity, a huge primitive place that few men had seen. He went to the edge of the sandstone gorge and looked down. In the deep gloom he could see the electric white gashes where the water boiled over the boulders. Here the sound was terrific, magnified, real. It sucked the air away and drew you toward it. Key measured up the river, estimating the vertical canyon at fifteen hundred feet. He couldn’t sense the width. Below him as his dizziness abated he saw a shadow sweep and then an osprey rose into his face, a small cutthroat trout in one talon. Across the chasm the first sunlight clipped the western echelon of ruined mountains and cones of the badland volcanoes at the edge of the world, and they were gray and red and gold in the moment. Two low spires of smoke smudged the sky far away; it would be early in the year for such fires.

  Key heard a sharp painful sigh and turned to see a figure moving on the ranch road, a thin man whose shadow in the new sun cut a hundred yards toward the canyon. It was the kid, Ronnie. He was walking away in the barren place and then Arthur Key saw the man begin to run in the cold, a stride purposeful and beautiful at once. Key folded his arms and watched until the shadow streamed slowly south and disappeared.

  Darwin Gallegos, still in his sleeping bag, had watched the young man move to the gate and run away. He’d already seen the big man, Arthur, move to the canyon edge. The sun was up now, but it was not warmer, and the frost filled every shadow and coated the glass of the two vehicles. He crawled out of his sleeping bag and laced up his boots and put on his jacket. He was unfolding the metal stove table and opening the s
tove when the big man, Arthur Key, came back from his tour.

  “Where’d Ronnie go?”

  Darwin was a little sick now that he realized he’d made a mistake by hiring these two. He’d been desperate—it had been late in the day and the country was full of men who couldn’t work, wouldn’t work, and they were hard to get rid of. Just driving back to Pocatello would cost him more than a day. He’d been tired and he was fooled by the big man’s size, he knew now. Darwin lit the propane and set the coffeepot on the burner while he pulled the heavy cast-iron frying pan from the cookbox. In forty years at the ranch he’d hired maybe six bad apples, and now for the first time on his own he’d started with an error.

  “How well do you know the boy?”

  “Three days. He joined a cement crew as we were finishing the storage unit foundations in Pocatello. He was day labor and worked all day long, though he is not a cement man.”

  “I think he’s run off.”

  “He’s run before, he told me. He’s had reasons. But he may be all right.”

  When Ronnie had opened his eyes, he’d seen the big man, Art, walk over past the trucks, his breath torn balloons trailing behind. It was cold. It was headache cold. Ronnie was still wearing his Levi’s, and he felt his old ragged Nikes there halfway down by his belly. Beside him in the sage he could see the top of the head of the guy who had hired them yesterday in Pocatello, Darwin Something. Oh, Christ, it was cold in the gray world. Ronnie put his head back in the sleeping bag and covered it up. He hated this. When he was cold like this, and he’d proved it to himself, he’d rather be in jail. A year ago he’d waited as long as he could bear it in the jail work release in Rockford, but he’d walked away in late April and walked back two days later, too cold to think. He still did not move and worked his shoes on and then eased himself out into the frosty new day. By now he remembered the truck ride in the snow, the trouble and arriving here.

  Without a sound, the way he had moved so many times in his life, he stood and stepped away through the sandy soil, past the big white truck which had brought them to the place, past the other equipment. He was out of here the way he had fled a dozen weird jobs. Two dozen. There would be something and he would be away. Art, the big man, had been decent, but this was all wrong. He nearly ran into the barbed-wire fence but found the gate and the stupid dirt two-track ranch road and he trotted out onto it and he stopped. North there was nothing but the world, the low dark hills and not a light. South was the steel sky and a distant horizon. There was frost on the fence posts and the edges of all the sagebrush. This was a wild place. He looked up and down the road, and then Ronnie Panelli, sick at not seeing a bus stop or an alley or a parking lot, some vehicle to hide in, turned south and started to run.

  Darwin laid rashers of bacon into the huge black frying pan. He was cooking breakfast on his old camp stove, the dish towel over his shoulder. He would have liked to have had the tent up and a table constructed, but he hadn’t known he’d hire anybody in Pocatello. Now, goddamn it, he’d feed them and take them back.

  Yesterday had felt like luck. The whole day had run smoothly, one—two—three. The utility poles had been already separated at the lumberyard and ready to load, and he’d had no difficulty in locating and packing all the hardware, couplings, and wire, as well as the bright new posthole auger. He’d gassed up and driven by the old Grange near the railroad station just on the off chance that it might be open. He’d seen Key and Panelli smoking cigarettes on the stone steps, and the sight of Key, his size, his obvious strength, so soon after Darwin Gallegos himself had worried the ten half-ton poles onto the truck made Darwin feel lucky and he’d stopped and spoken to them.

  When he’d approached and stood above them, Key had extended his pack of cigarettes, certain that this dark-faced stranger was out of work too and wanted to spend the sweet heart of the twilight there talking the way strange men talk to each other on the swept steps of the hiring hall. You meet somebody new, his history anything, a big unknown story that you know only the end of—something went wrong or stopped; he’s sitting there too, eight or nine bucks in the whole world, maybe less, nothing now but the gathering darkness and finding a place to go.

  Darwin had taken the cigarette and sat beside them. He could tell that they didn’t know each other very well, had probably met that day, and that the younger one, the smaller one, had been in jail; his look went all over the place—he was pale and starved and jangled. But Darwin had known some men who had been in jail who had worked out just right, and for years you could count on them. The strong one was even larger up close, his biceps defined even through the blue long-sleeved denim workshirt. As Key lit the smoke for him, Darwin asked back, “Ever do any carpentry?”

  The answer came slowly. “Yes, sir, I have. There’s some of that work in this town. We’re about to frame some storage sheds. Day labor.” The large man’s eyes were gray and clear. He wasn’t in trouble, Darwin thought, but there was damage of some kind.

  “Ever do any construction drawing?”

  The man looked at Darwin, his eyes full of a knowing confidence. Then they narrowed and he laughed. The man nudged the kid. “Well,” he said, “you’re looking at two prime architects.”

  “What’s the pay?” the young man said. “I can do it. What’s the pay?” His dark curly hair shined in the early evening light. He looked like Sinatra at nineteen. “Is it a day a time, like this shit?”

  “I only need one man,” Darwin said.

  “Then there you go, Ronnie,” the big man said. He looked at Darwin and lifted the younger man by the forearm. “Good luck.”

  Darwin said, “Just a moment.” He looked into the gray eyes again. “You can work from construction drawings?”

  “Yes, sir, if they’re sensible I can do that.” Then, for the first time, the big man sat up and folded his arms, but it was clear that they were talking about more than his strength. “And I can do it well. I have experience.” He nodded at Ronnie. “And I have a partner.”

  “I see that,” Darwin said. “He looks like a good man too.”

  “What’s the pay?” Ronnie said. “And when do we start?”

  Over chicken-fried steaks and mashed potatoes in the Cliffside Cafe, they traded names and Darwin told them it would be ten, maybe twelve weeks at a hundred dollars a day, paid on Fridays, plus room and board. The kid, Ronnie, lit up to that, his forehead widening, but he was too canny to say anything. The other, Arthur Key, sopped up the gravy with his toast and nodded at Darwin. “Good enough,” he said. “If the work is good.”

  It was the moment that the waitress was pouring second coffees, and they were about to order apple pie with ice cream, that Darwin wondered if this was a good idea. These two men had appeared and it was one-stop shopping. He knew not to hurry and he had hurried. He had thought he would be traveling back to Rio Difficulto alone with the materials and then on the next day to Twin Falls to hire a crew. He watched Arthur Key spoon some of the vanilla ice cream into his coffee, and Darwin made up his mind and reached for the check.

  So then he had his two-man crew and they drove carefully in the big truck back along the railroad tracks to the rooming house where Art and Ronnie retrieved their small traveling kits ending that chapter in each of their lives. It was full dark and the temperature had dropped hard. The three now picked up one more coffee each for Darwin and Arthur and a can of cola for Ronnie at the famous Double American Truckstop at the junction with 86, a highway they mounted and took west. In the cold May dark, as 86 became 84, they hit a rain which was rain for only a moment and then a light sleet that thickened. Darwin drove. The windshield closed and opened each beat and the tires stopped sucking at the pavement and now began a steady roaring splash.

  “Idaho,” Ronnie said. He sat between the two men in the cab of the big Ford flatbed. The heater emitted a faint hum. “What is this, winter? I hate this.”

  “Let’s take him back,” Arthur Key said. “I’m sure it’s balmy in Pocatello.”

&
nbsp; The precipitation intensified, the sleet sharp and drier now as it tried for snow. Along the interstate, semis were parked, their flashers periodic in the white night, between them occasionally a passenger car lodged, waiting out the weather. As they passed north of Burley, they crossed into the coming snow, the storm coming down along the Aleutians and crossing west through Oregon, all snow for a thousand miles and here already six inches on the roadway. The sky was an uninterrupted cascade. The men were silent in the truck. Here there was no traffic and Darwin slowed as he squinted for the road markers.

  Even going only fifty they left the highway. Darwin went by the book. When he felt the front end lift and he knew he had lost it, he didn’t brake, and as they floated gradually sideways, he steered into the skid. It didn’t help. Ronnie tensed, stabbing his feet into the floor, and Arthur Key braced himself, his arms along the frame. At forty they began shearing the road markers, the huge Ford and its fifteen-ton cargo cutting the metal posts off as if clipping weeds, each one making a simple snap and disappearing. Darwin was eyes ahead, looking for what they would really hit, breathless, knowing the fifty-five-foot utility poles would come through the cab like the very weight of the world, but nothing appeared, and at twenty the vehicle suddenly dropped and swerved back onto its aligned path, throwing the men together against Arthur Key as the Ford nosed through a wire stock fence with a hard rocking dip and up onto what Darwin took to be, under the fresh snow, an access road parallel to the interstate.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Ronnie said, climbing over Arthur and dropping to the ground. “Shit, shit, just shit! This damn Idaho!” He was wet in a second, covered by the soft petals of snow still descending, an impenetrable blanket through the quiet night. Darwin and Arthur looked at the thin young man, hugging his arms and blowing hissing curses into the snow.