Bucking the Sun, page 11
They were nearly there by now. Bruce took a last chance to razz his father about the shortest boatyard career in history. “Medwick told me, Dad, he’d have kept you and Birdie on if he had an unlimited supply of suction pumps and barges.”
“Tears as big as horse turds rolled down his cheeks, I’m sure,” Hugh said drily. “Margaret, I’m—”
“—sorry about the language, you every time are,” Meg chanted to him. “Owen, Bruce, Neil, any of you,” she lightly inquired, “do you know where I can send a man to have his tongue scraped?”
The Packard swept into Glasgow. Homely as it was, a town deposited onto bald nowhere by railroad iron, Glasgow nonetheless looked Parisian after Wheeler. Meg made mental note of a paint store.
Owen parked a block down the street from Moore Motors, Hugh having pointed out the fiscal suicide in pulling up to an automotive dealership in a swanky Packard.
At once the Duff sons fanned out through the lot of used trucks, Meg and Hugh sticking with Neil. Their show of support perhaps paid off. It was Neil who spotted the big Model AAA wide-body.
He approached the truck as if he could rub it and have three wishes granted.
The ton-and-a-half Ford had a distinctive cab, with a little cap peak of outside visor above the windshield, and out in front of that an impressively long hood atop fenders arched as judiciously as the shoulder-flaps of Roman armor. At the opposite end of the wheelbase, the rear wheels were duals, fourfold traction that appealed to anyone who had ever fought Montana mud. Besides that, the Triple A was a favorite in the High Line oilfields for its roomy cab, letting four roughnecks—if they weren’t too brawny—ride abreast during pipe hauls. True, the cab, hood, fenders and the rest of this Triple A had seen better days, quite a number of them. The paint had to be guessed at as the original Ford “any color you want as long as it’s black.” From farm experience, though, the Duffs knew that when sun and other elements had blistered a piece of machinery down to blue metal, it was just getting nicely broken in.
“Not bad,” Owen came over and praised.
“Mr. Jaarala says that although Henry Ford should be taken out and shot,” Meg provided, “his trucks are sound.”
“It does look like it’s hell for stout,” Hugh came up with.
“That’s what we want,” confirmed Bruce. Then generously deferred: “Don’t we, Neil.”
Neil was too stricken with truck-itis to answer. The Model Triple A seemed to stand there like a well-broken pack animal, in waiting agreement with him and what he had grasped about Fort Peck. That everything Fort Peck needed had to be hauled in from somewhere. The dam site itself was no more self-sufficient than a polar base camp. Right now Owen’s fellow engineers were bending railroad iron down from the Great Northern in a spur line for construction supplies, and there’d eventually be another rail line from the quarry at Snake Butte just to bring in rock—rock! A place that didn’t even have rocks of its own, that told you something.
No, Neil had it figured cold. That loads of whatever kind (heating stoves, workshoes, bulldozer attachments, angle iron, two-by-fours, kerosene, groceries—good grief, even drinking water) were going to have to be brought in to Fort Peck and the worker towns almost endlessly until the dam was completed, and he might as well be the trucker of some of those loads. With family backing, such as Bruce to occasionally spell him in the driving and the other Duffs giving a hand as needed, this could be an enterprise for them all, why not. Even Charlene, Neil had been proud to find out, was kicking in on this in her own way. She had outright volunteered to have the celebratory meal ready for them when they came home to Fort Peck as truck tycoons.
The four Duff men all but took the Triple A apart bolt by bolt, in assuring themselves the truck was in decent running condition.
They are something to see together, if I do say so myself. Meg, sitting in the driver’s seat out of the sun, watched the quartet of long-boned forms bending over the engine in front of her in learned disputation about aluminum pistons. Put a frame around them and the curious can line up for guesses.
Aren’t they a lot for the heart to stand, Mrs. Duff?
—The heart picks and chooses, more than you might think.
If you had it to do over, would you put so much bright into your eldest son?
—Ask him yourself, you need to on that. Mothers and even wives do not dare answer everything.
And the dual set of sons—would you have two at once, again?
—A major question, there, whether it has been fair to either.
Your sparring partner Hugh—how do you account for him, as your mate for a lifetime?
—I am still working on that, to this moment.
“We can stouten up the springs,” Hugh was chipping in, through the windshield in front of her. “Put in new leaves. I can tend to that.” He was sure Birdie Hinch would know the whereabouts of heavy-duty spring-leaves in the dam site supply building. Neil and Bruce were vying with each other about how high to make the new boxboards. Owen, looking bemused, was writing out the check for a downpayment.
• • •
One of Neil’s figurings about the Duff trucking enterprise could not have been more completely off. Bruce showed no interest whatsoever in driving any of the hauls. “Your set of wheels, Neilie, you get to use them. I’ll pitch in on the loading and unloading.”
It took precisely a week for Bruce’s abstinence from the truck to be explained. That next Saturday, he bought a motorcycle.
• • •
The world looked different from behind the steering wheel of the Model Triple A. Neil all but lived in the truck, taking on short runs after his trestle shift, mostly loads of firewood that he would deliver out of the bottomland, then on Saturdays and Sundays he would line up longer hauls, need-it consignments of equipment or spare parts that a contractor wanted in a hurry from Glasgow or Havre or even Great Falls. On the local stuff, evenings, Owen, or Hugh if he could drag enough energy out of himself after a day of bashing brush, or Meg—not Charlene yet, though—had been helping him out at tossing stovewood off the truck; and naturally Bruce was a windmill at this, able to empty a load while most people would still be standing around looking at it. But then away Bruce would scoot, round-goggled pilot on that motorcycle, burning up miles to no advantage that Neil could see. Why did people have any trouble at all telling the two of them apart?
About now Bruce would be whistling into his graveyard shift at the Missouri River boatyard while here Neil was on the other side of the Continental Divide, across the entire Rocky Mountains, at the lumbermill town of Coram with a hard-driven four hundred miles behind him since he got off the early shift at Fort Peck that morning. He had managed to get the truck loaded with lumber before utter dark, and now he would sleep stretched out on the seat of the cab, then before daybreak start the drive east, back to Fort Peck. Wake up cold and stiff, but climb down and walk around the truck a dozen or so times to stir himself awake, then head onto the highway. By sunrise he would be on the plains out from Browning, and while the sun seared up through the highway, just as he had met it sinking molten through this same road at sunset yesterday, he would crimp his hatbrim lower, duck his head a little to one side, squint at the highway’s edge and the borrow pit, and as a last resort slow down the truck. But he wouldn’t ever stop. If he had to buck the sun, morning or evening, its trajectory and his stubbornly coinciding, so be it.
Almost a little scary, how undodging and powerful the view of things seemed to Neil now. Time spent in the truck brought him thought after thought about the routes of life. He went back and forth over the past year, the homestead to Fort Peck. The homestead had been—well, home. Neil was one who liked living by seasons, and the changing complexion of each year within the canyon had suited him fine, the overnight green when spring arrived and then the gradual tanning of summer; he could take almost a chameleon comfort in those surroundings. It required no leap of his imagination to have seen himself staying on there, working the home place, watching for a chance to marry a schoolteacher. And the Old Man was not wrong about the crop. Alfalfa seed was a kind of annual gold. If you could last out the bad years, farming that riverbank bar, the good ones would be heavenly.
But Fort Peck was a jillion times more interesting. Hectic, yes, scruffy, you bet, and somewhat dangerous into the bargain. Nor could he see the point of work shifts done strictly by the clock.
Yet Neil could not help but think, here in the last mindturnings before sleep, that the chance to be in on Fort Peck outweighed any of that, the lull of what he had known on the homestead or the bothers of being a timeclock worker.
He rolled over on the truck seat, his hip grazing the knob of the gears-tick, as if it was nuzzling him for more hauling of the infinite bits and pieces needed at the boatyard, the trestle, the workers’ towns, the diversion tunnels, the spillway . . . the only envy Neil would admit he had of Owen was that capacity to see how Fort Peck’s scatteration of projects was all going to fit together into one gigantic functioning dam, presto, by some exact day.
• • •
The two of them were in the best kind of tangle, from his hand submerged in her hair, fingers spread there in a loving sift, restlessly making strands, cupping the curve of the back of her head, her arms fastened tight across his back and her legs locking the lower part of him to her, while his other hand stroked curves there; between, the touchings that happened without any guiding, the hard buds of her breasts and the hilt fullness of his erection; and everywhere else summer on their skin, at last out from under the bedcovers of autumn and winter and spring, this chance to wrap around each other on the white open of sheets an arousal in itself; now the coming-in, she understood why the word come was applied so many ways to this, Charlene could say it herself within the murmured chant of darling, can you, there, yes, you can and not even mean it as dirty, mean it as come to her without the, well, the in and all, the egg-puddle that was the male messy contribution to this, the girls at the department store used to laugh about how men were always spilling their tapioca, she giggled far down in her throat; so much better, this, than the beginner’s moan which could pass for a groan, or vice versa—love tutored this, even though she’d had to learn the language of it herself, although that wasn’t quite fair either, Owen had had some inspirations, whispers, help me a little, as now, there, let me, now you, the bed sound too, a sudden gallop to it, what, he thought, what’s she . . . Oh listen to us, she thought, noisy, we’re so—the bed, it’s never—that’s not—
The insistent knocking on the trailer house door froze them.
The urgent voice asking “Owen? Owen, are you there?” did worse, dissolving their coupled position.
Rolling off the bed, Owen lurched into pants, angrily threw on a shirt and started to tuck it in, then thought better of that and let it drape over his front. “Okay!” he yelled at the knocking. “Okay, okay! Coming!”
When he opened the door, his mother was there in the moonlight. She looked silvery, Owen needing a moment to realize she still was wearing her cookhouse uniform. “I hated to, Owen,” she was saying. “At this hour. But—”
“That’s okay,” he lied. He cleared his throat and blinked hard a few times. “Come up, come in.” He gave her a hand up into the trailer house. “What’s wrong?”
Charlene whipped around the partition from the bedroom to where they were, the white chenille bedspread wrapped around her. Owen and Meg both stared at her apparel, nubbins and tassels everywhere on her.
“Your father,” Meg resumed to Owen. “He hasn’t come home at all. I didn’t know where else to turn.” She glanced at Charlene with what Charlene considered a characteristic mother-in-law hex expression of both Sorry and Serves you right. “Neil went off on a haul after work and Bruce is on shift until morning, so I—” Meg swallowed, then raggedly started up again: “Payday, this was, and we were going to go downtown together the way we’ve been doing, all orderly, but he—”
“Okay,” Owen said with an expulsion of breath. “I’ll go find him.” He glanced back and forth at Charlene in her bedspread and Meg in her cookhouse uniform. “Can you two—”
“We’ll be just ducky,” Charlene said stiffly.
Not knowing what more to say except yet another “Okay,” Owen headed out into the night.
• • •
It was a sweet soft summer night to be out in, Owen had to grant his father that. A full moon, silver as a new dollar. By now the day’s heat had gentled down entirely and these hours across midnight and earliest morning had the crystal quality that brings on vows to practice more poetry or astronomy. (Best of all, though, Owen still thought, for what he and Charlene had been doing. He had already made up his mind to ask her, whenever he got back from this, if she had saved his place.) The new skeleton frames of buildings by the dozens were moonlit as he hightailed it through the Fort Peck townsite, walking as fast as he could. From the cutoff wall in the bottomland came the buh-THUD buh-THUD of pile drivers, incessant mating call that would go on until carpenters’ hammers started again here in the morning. Immediately below Owen, along the river, the boatyard was lit up. The dredge Gallatin had been launched, first vessel on this stretch of the Missouri since God knew when, and now finishing-work was being done. Bruce and the other boatrats, caulking and painting the long white dredge, perfecting the first of Owen’s earthfill fleet. Get it done! Finish your goddamn finishing-work! The dumb fury of that—the dredge couldn’t be put to use anyway until the dam’s cutoff wall was far enough along, weeks from now—told Owen he had better simmer down, tend to his task of truant officer.
He crossed into Wheeler, and hubbub. In the wide center strip of the main street a softball game was in full roar, enough illumination from the moon and the downtown beerjoints to play by, more or less. “Swat it, Ott!” the team at bat was howling. The batter with a foot-in-the-bucket stance was said to be the brother of Mel Ott of the New York Giants, and while who the hell knew whether there was any truth to that, he was a wicked pull hitter. Owen veered very wide around the first-base side while the guy ripped a grounder whose last bounce was off the first baseman’s chest. Skirting the spectacle, Owen thought of also telling Charlene the two of them were going to have to take up softball, it was something you could play at night.
Then he was utterly, coldly furious again.
Jesus Dudley Christ. This is all I need—any of us need. The Old Man out here somewhere on another one of his benders. I’d like to bend him, the old sap. What gets into him? Can’t he stand prosperity? Try and try to pull this family one step ahead and there he goes, right back. I just don’t savvy it. I do not savvy it, how he can—
Directly ahead of the figure of Owen, the main street of Wheeler pulsated in the prairie night, ogling back at the moon, winking suggestively at the constellations. Spit on your hands and hone your hooves, Centaurus, and we’ll make you into a dambuilder. Cassiopeia, darling, you can find work in this town. Gemini, you twins eternally stuck with each other, we have some of those around, too. None of which registered on Owen Duff, neither Wheeler’s summonings to the stars nor its narrower neon urgings for him to Drink Budweiser or Choose Great Falls Select, as he set his mouth and started his search.
“He stomped out of here a couple hours ago,” Tom Harry reported, Owen knowing almost before he heard the words that his father getting tanked up here in the Duffs’ home port, the Blue Eagle, would have been altogether too simple.
Before Owen spun to go, the barkeeper nodded a slightest nod of apology to him.
“Sorry, Duff”—he called all of them that—“I should’ve coldcocked him and slung him into the back room for you.”
Owen trudged down the block toward the vividly audible Wheeler Inn. He was not sure he was employing logic, maybe more like going back into evolution, to try the Wheeler Inn next, the oldest and biggest of the downtown drink-and-dance places, Ruby Smith’s place. Supposedly Ruby had been through all this before, in the Klondike gold rush, and wherever she had learned it, she did know how to draw a full house. Owen was hardly inside the door before one of Ruby’s veterans, a hard blonde whom everyone called Snow White, strutted up as if welcoming him home from farthest foreign parts.
“You look like the right kind of dance would do you some good,” she prescribed.
A lot of things would. “I’m taken, sis. You seen anything of a guy who looks like me, but older and ornerier?”
“Can’t imagine that recipe, buster,” Snow White gave him with a huff of dismissal.
I hardly can either, he thought, but I damn well better. Hugh Duff, the Houdini of the Missouri. Where would the old coyote go?
• • •
Charlene was making coffee, no small trick with one hand, the other keeping the bedspread from cascading off her. By all rules of civility she ought to go and put some clothes on, she knew, but the bare feeling under the bedspread shawled around her this way was a stimulating reminder of what she and Owen had been busy at.
“Charlene, really, you needn’t.”
Besides, if manners were the issue, what was her mother-in-law doing interloping here in the dead of night, strayed-off husband or no strayed-off husband? This can’t have been the first time Meg ever had to face an empty side of the bed.
“Charlene. This is putting you out more than I ever intended, fixing coffee and all.”
Payday, though, did add something a little more serious; Charlene could grant that. She’d gathered from one of Owen’s steamings about his father that Hugh threw money into the wind when he went off on one of these toots.
“I’m not even sure I should stay for a cup, Charlene. I probably should just take myself—”
Charlene silently laid out two cups and both women concentrated on the coffeepot for a while, until it began to chug.
Charlene poured, then delivered a cup in front of Meg along with what she had worked herself up to asking:
