Five Skies Read online

  What ensued in the dark snowy field ten miles northwest of Burley, Idaho, was that Arthur Key and Darwin immediately looked to see that their load had not shifted, which it had not. The whole time the snow unabated settled on their uncovered heads and shoulders, as Arthur checked the six chain hitches. Ronnie Panelli sat in the cab, cold and unhappy, his hands pressed between his knees, his pale face vaguely blue. When Darwin attempted to move the truck up the slight incline, they found it only slid. Arthur Key instructed Darwin to lower the pressure in the dual rear tires ten pounds each as he adjusted the front tires. “Try it again,” Arthur said, disappearing to the rear.

  “Stay clear of the back!” Darwin hollered. He started the engine, adjusted the rpms and began to ease out the clutch. He didn’t want to spin the tires. It all held; as the engine whine rose, the truck did not move. Then as Darwin was certain he was about to lose the lock and slide, the truck bumped once strangely, and Darwin knew that Key had jostled the entire vehicle. It began to creep up the slope. He was quick to guide it along the lowest angle until he leveled out and sat idling on the frontage road.

  It was a wonderful feeling having been forty seconds before destined to spend the night in the snowfield in the truck and hire a tow late tomorrow, losing all the luck he’d felt he’d had, and now he was made again, the night which had been so old a minute ago was nothing now but promise in the beautiful snow. He clapped Ronnie Panelli on the shoulder. “Here we go!”

  The blue terror was gone from Ronnie’s face, but he still looked miserable. He rolled with Darwin’s push, keeping his hands between his knees. “Yeah,” he said. “This is the life, all right. You’re the Big Boss and he’s the fucking giant…”

  “Let’s keep it on the road now,” Arthur Key said, pulling himself up into the truck, bumping Panelli. “Stay under forty with the tires down like this.” His hands were red and muddy, and his blue denim shirt hung soaking on the axis of his shoulders. Ronnie moved away from the wet man and adjusted the heater lever, an act that again had little luck making things happen. Darwin navigated the truck by means of the road markers, back along the frontage road, staying centered and finally mounting the interstate, and ten minutes later they again passed the point where they had skidded. Their tracks were gone, already covered by the snowfall, but they could see the absence suddenly of the markers along the highway and then the gap in the stock fence. “Yeah,” Ronnie Panelli said. “We got it made. This is absolutely the highway to heaven. I can just tell.”

  Now in the brittle morning sunlight, Arthur Key held out his enamel mug and Darwin poured the first cup of coffee steaming from the old percolator pot. The air was sharp and clean in Arthur’s head and he was hungry.

  “There’s cream for that in the orange cooler,” Darwin told him. Arthur opened the large Igloo and smiled at the colorful array of provisions packed there like a puzzle. He poured some half-and-half into his coffee. Darwin had sawed thick pieces of sourdough bread and set them into the stove’s wire toast rack and he was breaking eggs—four, five, six—into the sizzling bacon grease.

  He paused and looked at Key.

  “He’ll be back,” Arthur told him.

  Darwin broke three more eggs which bubbled white immediately in the hot pan. He decided to speak. “You two want this job or should I just take you back to Pocatello?”

  Arthur Key stood before his new boss. They watched the eggs stiffen. “We’re here,” he said. “Let’s look it over. I don’t want that drive again.”

  “Just let me know,” Darwin said. “The roads are well dry by now.”

  Ronnie Panelli came back into view on the old ranch road a few minutes later, his shadow shorter with the sun higher now and his shoulders lower. He was shuffling slowly toward the camp, his hands in his pockets, even though every startled rabbit startled him, and he approached the two men without speaking.

  He looked at the laden frying pan as it steamed and then looked from Arthur Key to Darwin. “What?” he said. “Good morning.”

  Just before noon the plans arrived. After breakfast, Ronnie Panelli had climbed into the closed cab of the big Ford and wrapped his sleeping bag around himself, the one Darwin had issued, and begun smoking cigarettes waiting for the sun to warm things up. The other two men walked the area and Darwin inventoried the materials for Arthur Key.

  “It’s not a house, then,” Key said.

  Darwin was noncommittal. He replaced the canvas and cinched it down. The sun was at things now, cutting the frost, and the brush stirred as creatures began taking a look. The purring of quail was general. He wanted to show his new man that all this stuff was A grade. As they walked out to the clay road that had brought them to the high plateau of the worksite, Darwin noted again Arthur Key’s size and was pleased. He literally walked in his shadow. Darwin was still uneasy, but he wanted to keep this man; it would make the job go right.

  “Where you from?” he said.

  “California,” Key answered. He said the word in a way that shut that door and Darwin knew it. He didn’t care, really; you hired a crew and they came from somewhere. The trick was to line them up right and tight, let them adopt the job and keep them happy. This wasn’t a permanent job or anything for the real ranch; this was just a rough summer. The clay ranch road was a quarter mile from the lip of the gorge. Arthur Key turned at the gate and eyed the prospect. “This private property?”

  “Yes it is. It’s all part of the ranch where I worked.”

  “And we’re going to run a power line, but it’s not a cabin.”

  They could see Panelli trying to extricate himself from the sleeping bag and climb out of the cab of the truck. He was having difficulty and ended up almost falling. They watched him kicking out of the bedroll though his curses couldn’t reach them.

  “We’re going to set the poles. Idaho Power will run the line.”

  “There’s some money here. Who’s paying for this mystery project?”

  “Lot of people. Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you anything you need for this job. We’ll go over the plans and I’ll get you anything you need.” Key was smiling as if he’d heard this or something like it before. Darwin couldn’t read him. “It’s a nice place, right?”

  “Beautiful,” Key said. He started back. “We’ll fix that.”

  Darwin gave Ronnie Panelli a pair of his steel-toed Red Wing work boots almost new and they fit, and so Arthur Key and Darwin got to watch Ronnie walk a big circle in those shoes. “Now you’re making some footprints,” Arthur said. “Though they’ll be harder to run in.”

  Ronnie looked at him and kept walking, long strides. He hadn’t had new shoes in over a year. Darwin gave Ronnie the job of erecting their quarters, a large white canvas elkhunter’s lodge, room inside for four cots, a woodstove, and a small table. They selected a level site on one side of the area up against the sage and he began unpacking the tubular frame.

  “See,” Arthur Key said to Darwin. “Listen. He’s not grumbling. He’s a good worker. He’s made the decision not to sleep under the truck tonight.”

  Darwin wasn’t sure, but he was hoping.

  “Is the stove here?” Ronnie Panelli called. He was on his knees sorting the parts. He liked this work. He liked that they’d left him alone to do it; he could figure out a tent.

  “Yes, sir,” Darwin answered. “We can unload the stove when you’re ready.”

  “It’s going to be toasty,” Arthur told him. “Better than the Hilton.”

  “I’ve never been in a Hilton in my life.”

  Darwin started the Farmall tractor and backed up to the crated portable john. Arthur Key attached the chain to the upper portion and Darwin dragged it off thirty yards beyond the lodge. Key used a bar to disassemble the rough wooden crate and then rocked the small structure level in the sandy soil. The work and the snorting tractor and the sun on his arms pleased Arthur Key. The air temperature was almost fifty. Ronnie fought with the steel tubes and the cluster connectors for a while and then took what he
had apart again and laid the pieces out in the dirt so he could tell the corners from the roof peaks, and then he started again at one end and snugged the frame together front to back.

  Key drew a deep breath and looked out across the arc of the earth wrinkled and steaming in the distance. On the western horizon the blue sky was always ruined and working with ascending clouds, flumes and thin streams of gas. At night once or twice a week, they would see irregular tongues of flame, tiny, miles away in the mystery of the distance. Beneath their feet a hundred miles of magma would shift and the sunsets would be green and orange for a week.

  Darwin parked the tractor and started to help draw the rippled canvas over the lodge frame, and in the second that Arthur Key exhaled, the memory of his crime chilled his heart again; he used the word crime when he thought of it—and he thought of it unbidden. He should have protected his brother and he had not. He had let his own selfishness blind him, and he used the word selfishness when he thought of it. And he knew he had been blind, because he had made an entire life of seeing until last March. He winced with the tide such memory delivered and he said his brother’s name, Gary. He wanted it right in his face. The snow and the cold empty day and now the sun in the big fresh place had taken his guard down.

  Darwin and Ronnie pulled at the reluctant canvas, heavy and stalled in its folds. It kept collapsing at their feet. “Just where are we then?” Ronnie said. “I know for a sure fact that there is nothing down that way. At all.” He pointed south.

  “That’s Ranch Road G Seven,” Darwin said, standing up and waving his hand the other way. He was breathing hard. “Seventeen miles north is Mercy.”

  “That’s a town.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Idaho, right? Still Idaho.”

  “Yes, we’re still in Idaho and so is Mercy.”

  They had the canvas unfolded to its length and Darwin studied the frame which angled up to over eight feet at its apex. “Let me get the rope,” he said and walked off toward the Ford. Skinny Ronnie Panelli stood amid the half ton of drapery like a character caught in the wrong myth. Arthur Key, smiling, came over.

  “How do you like it so far?”

  “Okay by me.” Ronnie stepped heavily across the big pile of canvas. “Big place, nobody around, put up tents. I won’t have to stand on the fucking street corner in the morning hoping to get hired. I’ll take it.”

  Darwin came back with a heavy coil of rope and began to open it in loops on the ground. He was going to tie it to the lodge cover in three places and drag it all up and over with the Farmall.

  “Here.” Key stopped him. “Do this.” He lifted a bundle of the canvas in the center and hoisted it above his head. “Pull your ends around each side.” As the other two men did this, he moved into the tent frame, holding the canvas over his head. Seesawing it from Ronnie to Darwin they were able to work it up and over the rooftop and begin to pull it down the other side while Key lifted and fed the piled canvas to them. With the thing almost complete, there was a hitch that required Arthur Key to go inside the tent and shake the frame so that the seam along the roof beam fell into place. The canvas mated on the frame and settled. When Key came out, Darwin and Ronnie were backing through the sage to take in their accomplishment.

  “How big is your crew?” Key asked him. The tent seemed huge.

  “I don’t know,” Darwin said. “You tell me after you’ve seen the plans. This may be the crew.”

  “Where’s that stove?” Ronnie Panelli said. He couldn’t take his eyes off the tent. “This is fucking cool. We’re making a camp here.”

  By the middle of the day, they had unloaded the crated woodstove and backed the tractor away as a dark cherry Chevrolet four-wheel-drive pickup turned in the gate and bounced toward them slowly along the rutted two-track. The vehicle was startling, as all approaches are in lonely places, and this was a beautiful truck with a double cab and dual wheels under the rear fenders which arched and sparkled like something fabulous. Key and Panelli watched the truck with a begrudged awe. They’d been on the river plateau half a day and they already knew how to look on this deep red truck as an intruder. The three men actually backed a step as it drove in. Then Darwin handed Ronnie the crowbar. The young man was already lined up with the generator and the circular saw; his instructions were to uncrate the stove and then cut all the stack of cratewood two-by-twos into stove lengths. The big pickup had wheeled in a circle and parked so that they could read the blocked and shadowed lettering on the door: BABCOCK ENGINEERING, TWIN FALLS.

  Darwin went over to the truck, hesitating for a minute as a signal to Arthur Key to come along, but Key stayed behind. He and Ronnie watched a pale young man in an expensive plaid shirt and bright brown boots climb out of the cab and extract a roll of blueprints from the toolbox in the bed of the truck. He handed the plans to Darwin and they spoke for a moment, sighting an imaginary line to the river that the young man drew in the air with the blade of his hand. Then they spoke several minutes more, toeing the ground, and talking the way men do on the pitcher’s mound in baseball games, making no eye contact whatsoever, looking past each other and tucking in their shirts with a finger, as if everything had been settled long ago in the big book that rested shut somewhere else far away, and Arthur Key noted this with interest, seeing that Darwin responded to the other man with too much deference, too stoic in the pressure of the orders being given.

  “Nice vehicle,” Ronnie Panelli said.

  “You’re a shoplifter,” Key kidded him. “You wouldn’t touch that truck.”

  They watched the man in the plaid shirt climb back into the Chevrolet and do an easy U-turn in the dirt, headed out.

  “I wouldn’t touch a truck like that because you can see it ten miles. They’d catch me for it.”

  “They caught you for shoplifting.”

  Ronnie’s face, too thin for guile, looked hurt. “A few times. They caught me a few times. I took some cars. I’m not afraid of taking a car if I need it.”

  Darwin was walking their way with a long blueprint tube in his hand. Before he could reach them, Arthur Key turned to Ronnie Panelli and said, “You took your father’s car the day you left. Everybody does it. It’s not car theft; it’s escape. I was just kidding. Don’t be proud of thievery. Be happy we’re out here. This is just right. Like you said—we’re making camp. And, we’re about to find out the big mystery.” He said the last so that Darwin could hear and the older man responded by nodding and waving them on, to the tailgate of the little open jeep. “I can see we’re going to need a proper table.”

  They unrolled the paper sheets and kicked four stones loose from the sandy soil to hold down the corners. Ronnie Panelli said, “Okay, so what is it?” He didn’t understand the intensity with which the other two men stared at the plans. There was something going on. Arthur Key studied the smudged purple sheet with its intersecting lines long beyond Ronnie’s ability to figure it.

  “Can you do it?” Darwin asked Key. He was speaking quietly.

  There were two of the large sheets; Key looked at both carefully. A minute passed, the minute between morning and afternoon. Panelli knew it was the strangest moment of the day. He wasn’t used to silence this way, three men in the open. “Okay,” he said at last. “So, let’s do it. Let’s build it.”

  “Just a minute, son,” Darwin said, which was two wrong things at once, the call for patience and the word son.

  Panelli danced away; he knew how to behave now, or thought he did. “Just a minute? Good. Come on, you two. We can do this. What is it? Hey, look at that tent. Are you listening? Hey, Conan the Engineer, what is the problem? Let’s just—”

  Key had him in both hands in less than a second and held him out like some sour varmint, one hand closing the collar of Panelli’s shirt. “Call me that again,” Arthur Key said. His tone was even. Darwin hadn’t moved. “Go ahead. Use your little shoplifter’s wit one more time.” Panelli’s workboots were just off the ground and it was clear to them all that Key coul
d throw him over the jeep.

  He knew enough to meet the larger man’s eyes and say, as best he could, “No, I don’t believe I will. Let me fucking go.”

  Key dropped him into the dirt, tossing him onto his side into the sage dust, and he was sorry for it in less than a second. Ronnie Panelli started to scramble up and then sat again, his elbows on his knees still as a statue avoiding both men’s looks. Darwin looked at Arthur Key simply to give him again the next move. Key said to Ronnie Panelli, “Let’s get up.” Darwin turned back to the plans, adjusting the rock weights, business as usual. Panelli did not move. “Here. Come on, Ronnie,” Key said. And though Key didn’t step toward him, Panelli lifted his chin quickly, affronted. After a second, tears appeared in his eyes. “Oh, Christ,” Key said. “Come on.” Of course when he went to lift the young man, there was a struggle. Ronnie skittered away in the brush and then ran off a few paces. Key considered following and then just stood there, finally, dropping his chin and shaking his head. He turned and went back to the tailgate of the jeep where Darwin waited over the sheets of blueprint. There was an expectant look on Darwin’s face, and Key met it with “Yeah, I can see what it is.” He said it with disgust.

  “Just a moment,” Darwin said, and he went out to Ronnie in the bushes and led him over to the generator, the saw, the pile of rough crate boards. Key heard the generator kick up and begin to blather, then he heard the circular saw fire two or three brisk bursts. Darwin was showing Ronnie how to saw the white crate pine into stove lengths. Arthur Key rolled his shoulders and felt the tension there. Such a beautiful place. The blueprints ruffled in the breeze. He was thinking it over and he just didn’t know. In his business in Los Angeles, he’d avoided such work, projects like this, stupidity and a lot of money meeting in some bad, temporary place. He watched Darwin take the saw back from the young man and turn him so he wouldn’t cut himself or the cord and then hand it back. Key liked it here and he knew he needed to be here, but the job was wrong. It was fresh in the early afternoon and soon it would be late day and then the evening on this plateau. He scanned the western horizon as he would twenty times a day for the two months he would spend here and he saw the great folds of the floating ranges and the ancient cones among them in the white-blue sky. It was all sky here and never the same sky; he was standing in it. Now Ronnie had the circular saw in hand and the air was filled with the high ringing of the steel blade as it trilled through the lumber.