How three damaged men work their way to redemption.
How three damaged men work their way to redemption.

By Michael Dirda
Sunday, June 3, 2007

FIVE SKIES

By Ron Carlson

Viking. 244 pp. $23.95

What is the main element of fiction aimed primarily at men? It's certainly not love. In such traditionally masculine genres as private eye mysteries, techno-thrillers, paperback adventure novels, westerns and "hard" science fiction, there is one common theme: "Men at Work." These are all books about guys going about their jobs and doing them well, despite personal sorrows or enemy action. After all, the great dream of nearly every man is to be regarded as someone who knows his business, a professional, the person whom people turn to when they need help that is more than merely adequate. Skill, craftsmanship, quiet mastery -- these are what men admire in others and one day hope to possess themselves. This isn't to deny such ambitions or qualities to women, by no means, but a man deeply defines himself, consciously or not, by the work he does and how well he does it. Work is his validation and refuge, and sometimes his healer.

Ron Carlson's Five Skies is a novel about three damaged men who work together for a summer in Idaho building a ramp. This doesn't sound like much of a plot, I know. But if one invests any work -- building a ramp or writing a novel -- with sufficient attention, care and reverence, the result can be a kind of prayer. Certainly, the three racked souls of Five Skies are all in need of spiritual and emotional succor. Arthur Key is a middle-aged, self-taught engineer, guilt-ridden by a terrible mistake; Darwin Gallegos is a 60ish ranch foreman, broken-hearted and wounded by an irremediable loss; and Ronnie Panelli is a skinny 20-year-old kid, a thief and a runaway, who yearns for respect and love. The novel relates in part how these three grow into a kind of family, as they move toward tragedy and redemption.

Carlson's style -- low-key, deliberate, reminiscent of both early Hemingway and contemporary James Salter -- possesses the kind of serene assurance that disdains the show-offy. Carlson doesn't need it, since he can turn even a shopping list into a poem:

"He had a list in his pocket and he began assembling the items: wooden stakes; heavy twine; steel hinges; two hundred yards of rope; a one-inch tempered steel drill bit; forty yard-long dowels, diameter one inch; a basket of steel fittings; boxes of wood screws; bags of brads; a roof stapler and staples; five gallons of wood sealer; five gallons of white enamel; spray enamel; white, black, red; coarse-bristle paintbrushes; four paint rollers with extension handles; ten bags of posthole mix; five gallons of creosote; and a shopping cart of miscellaneous small tools, including chisels, a rasp and a fine Stanley wood plane."

It's not enough, of course, just to buy such supplies and equipment; you need to know how to use them properly. And Arthur Key does. He's big and strong and avoids useless action; he's also cautious and alert to every contingency: "He hated not being able to see it all. He hated operations where the cause-effect wasn't 99 percent. He'd broken in every crew and every crew member with that mantra: 99 percent certainty and also all of the possibilities in the last 1 percent." Arthur cannot forgive himself because just once passion led him to violate his principles, and disaster resulted.

Darwin, who spent most of his life on a ranch near their worksite, has cut himself off from all that he loves because of the desolation he feels over his now-lost happiness. He doesn't wish to be healed, but long days of physical labor help him, as they do Arthur: Men have always turned to obsessive, hard work as a refuge from confusion and pain. Like Nick Adams in Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River," Darwin finds in cooking a kind of momentary grace:

"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. . . . 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 the foldable legs in the open air. Beside the thing hung the two cook towels and on a hook, the big spatula."

As for Ronnie: He is the savior of them all. Because of his lack of foresight, he is injured and taken into the nearby town -- named Mercy, no less -- for medical treatment. There he meets the sexually victimized Traci, in need of a good man. Ronnie gradually becomes that man, as he learns how to believe in both himself and the work of his hands. Near the climax of the novel, Arthur observes the two young people together:

"He turned and saw in the theater of the lighted room, Traci washing Ronnie's face with a rag, her hand on his bare shoulder as a brace as she scrubbed up behind his ear and around his neck, under his chin, rinsing the rag and then his face and the other ear and his chest as he stood with his eyes closed. It was love. Arthur stood transfixed. Love had been no friend to Arthur, and even now seeing it in others alarmed him in a way he could never explain -- with a kind of sickening hope."

At first it seems as if Five Skies might become a study in madness or obsession, like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but once the men start to interact with the people of Mercy, an already serious novel starts to grow more intense. Traci's old boyfriend wants her back. Drunken louts nose around the construction site. The stunt motorcyclist, for whom the ramp is being built, comes to visit. Arthur knows that she will break every bone in her body when she lands, but she remains undeterred. There is, however, an idyllic afternoon of fishing and swimming, then a feast just before the ramp is finished. The reader begins to hope that the three men will find the happiness they deserve.

Against our transient human sorrows Carlson subtly juxtaposes the ongoing natural world -- the skies of Idaho, the steep gorge with the rushing river at its bottom, the dark starry nights, the omnipresence of death, when rabbits scream as a hawk strikes. Only Carlson's sure sense of balance keeps his novel back from the edge of portentousness, though I hoped for a less melodramatic ending. Not that what we have isn't carefully prepared, and appropriate, too. But still. Like Arthur, readers sometimes find themselves full of a kind of sickening hope. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com.