Bucking the Sun, page 16
Even after his site inventory and double-checking his checklist, Owen was taking his time. Actually, monumental what-ifs were taking his time. What if they blew out the pipeline’s flexible steel ball joints when they ran the pumps up to the pressure of sixty pounds per square inch. What if they burned up one of these fancy sonofabitching super-expensive electric motors first thing. What if Owen Duff turned into a puddle of worrysweat right here and now.
Fillmaster, was he. Then he had better master the goddamn fill.
“Give it the soup, Cal.”
Calhoun told the operator to put on the power but for Christ’s sake easy, and the seven-foot-diameter cutterhead slowly, ponderously, began to whirl. When its revolutions per minute came up to speed, the operator hit the boom controls, the massive A-frame boom at the nose of the dredge lowered the cutter shaft into the lip of the riverbank. The entire dredge, the size of half a street of houses, shuddered. “Jesus Mercy Christ, Duff,” indeed. The 700-horsepower motor driving the cutter shaft, the 2,500-horsepower motors running the suction pumps in tandem, all of the dredging force bucked against the huge steel spud posts anchoring the dredge into place at the stern. The Gallatin thrummed with working machinery, none of which blew out, burned up, or caused fatality in Owen Duff.
The thirteenth of October, and they had done it: less than one year since the first axebites into the Fort Peck bottomland, its earth was being moved onto the axis of the dam.
Then they saw him, all of them, Charlene and Rosellen side by side cheering along with the crowd on the bluff out back of the Ad Building, Meg tense with pride on the doorstep of the cookhouse, Kate on tiptoes in the whooping bunch outside the Rondola Cafe when the word passed that the dredge was being started up, Bruce grinning like mad on the roof of the lever house of the next dredge being built in the boatyard, Neil watching in fascination while propped in his climber’s belt twenty feet up a piling, Hugh bleak but intent at the foot of another piling: saw Owen come leaping ashore. Owen running. Sprinting along the dredge-line, then loping to save breath, then running as hard as he could again. He stopped beneath the last stanchion before the carrypipe, as close to the gushing cascade of water and muck as it was safe to go.
Harvested wheat, when it pours out of the spout of a combine, spews down in an exalted golden rain. To Owen, the muck falling from the carrypipe was that golden.
“Honestly. You’ll be playing house out behind here between coffee refills, next.”
“Igloo, that’d need to be.”
“Nhn. Rubbing noses.”
“For a start. Eskimo kindling.”
“And then make mad pash.”
“A girl can hope.”
The two young women laughed back and forth across their window-side table in the Rondola Cafe. Rosellen was having the chicken and dumplings, Kate the ham steak, and winter was having Fort Peck for supper.
“So you’re over yours?” Rosellen kept matters going. “I wish to gosh I was.”
“Ran enough irrigation through myself, I ought to be,” Kate offhandedly answered. “Did I tell you Bruce right away wanted to know if he was going to come down with ‘sisteritis or whatever it is,’ too? I told him since I was out of commission, he might as well be.”
The dry granular snow of a ground blizzard stung at the window beside them. Rosellen made a face out at the weather, and Kate warned her not to be teasing it that way. This time of day had become their own, shared, prized—dusk’s bonus of traded confidences that had to be spent then and there. Rosellen coming off work at the personnel section in the nearby Ad Building and Kate about to go on shift here at waitressing, suppertime was the perfect crisscross where the two of them could compare newlywed life (Kate’s extra few months of experience had immeasurably helped Rosellen when her own case of cystitis cropped up) and swap whatever else was on their minds. Right now, there was nothing else in Rosellen’s mind besides Kate’s confiding of lunchtime passion with Bruce. Kidding each other, leaning in to glean what the other one thought about this or that, not oblivious to the fact that they were the Rondola’s main attraction, the two of them bobbed like corks, Kate the slim wine-bottle variety, Rosellen as robust as a brandy stopper.
“Oh, did I tell you? Neil has off Friday night, he traded shifts with somebody. Now we can go to the show with you and Bruce.” Rosellen made another face in the weather’s direction. “Probably be The Call of the Wild.”
“I have to hand it to Neil, driving in this,” Kate drew a finger squiggle on the wintry window. Out in the early dark, whenever the snow-carrying wind stopped long enough to catch its breath, the lights of the diversion tunnel project constellated against the opposite bluff on the river valley. Determined to see what could be done under the nose of winter, the dambuilders were pouring concrete for the huge portals of the tunnels; so far, they had learned they could get away with pouring it at temperatures down to seventeen degrees below zero. Almost as audaciously, up beyond the diversion tunnels the spillway excavation had begun, a gouge a mile long into the winter-stiffened earth. Neil had latched on as a driver there; not of the beloved Ford Triple A but a drafty rattling beast of a dumptruck, on the four-to-midnight shift, colder than the inverse of Hell. Lifelong veteran of Fort Peck winters that she was, Kate shook her head at Rosellen over how miserable her hubby must be about now and said, “Not this kid. They’d have to tie me to the wagon.”
“Where’s that come from?” People, the thousand and one ways they talked, always intrigued Rosellen.
“It’s a saying, is all. Didn’t you hear me just say it?”
• • •
When spring came, Neil was vowing, he would go back to his own trucking with never a murmur no matter how tough any haul turned out to be. Better to be master of his own coracle than a mate in this polar dumptruck fleet. The constantly gnawing wind, the snow which either flew around insidiously in the spillway pit as dry as salt or so fat and flakey you could barely see the dumptruck ahead of you in line, the night always so black, hell, so bleak. Huh uh; no more winters of this. What he wished right now, if the truth were told, was that there was some way to bring into the freezing damned truck the warmth of being a newlywed in bed. He needed to wish beyond that, of course, for Rosellen to hurry up and be over with this whatever-itis in her plumbing. This on top of the monthly intermission which he’d known about, sort of. Women were surprisingly complicated.
• • •
“Maybe that’d be the way to keep him on the wagon,” Rosellen shifted to. “Our disreputable pa-in-law.”
“You’d have to go some to find ropes thicker than he is thirsty,” Kate evaluated.
“What do you suppose gets into a person, to go off and tie one on—see there, you’ve got me doing it. To go off on the crazy binges he does, I mean.”
“Beats me. Meg would be about enough to keep me on my good behavior.”
What Bruce termed their nightly sessions of “blahdy blah” and Charlene characterized as the pair of them being “as thick as thieves,” the two young women viewed as necessary oracle sessions on the family they had married into. They raked patterns in the Duffs, and the next day, as if the night’s wind had wiped everything fresh, they could start over again. Hugh, who was wintering as if alcohol was his personal antifreeze, perturbed them both.
• • •
When spring finally came, Hugh was vowing as he hoisted yet another drink in the Wheeler Inn just then, he would try out Meg on finding work for themselves, any work, on farms down along the Yellowstone River valley. Owen’s ilk hadn’t got around to damming up the Yellowstone yet.
• • •
“But maybe she’s the other side of his habit,” Rosellen went farther afield than usual. “Meg and her, hnn, opinions on life.”
“That’s supposed to drive him to drink?” Kate sounded skeptical as only she could. “Huh uh, I still say it’s only ever a short stroll for him.”
The window beside them shook so hard it chattered. “Listen to it bluster out there.” In businesslike fashion Kate rubbed a peekhole in the frost as if to check on whether the river had blown away in that gust. “At this rate, it’s going to be a while until skinny-dipping season.”
“Oho! That’s next on the mad pash list? Lunch at the old swimming hole?”
“Hey, why am I the skinny-dipping expert here?” Kate tossed off. “It’s the same river where you grew up.”
Marriage and Neil and instructive joking with Kate quite often gave Rosellen the short-of-breath feeling that she was catching up on a lot about life but still had a ways to go. The rueful grin she sent Kate now outright admitted it. “See, though, you didn’t grow up with Charlene for a boss.”
• • •
After Charlene big-sistered herself off to commerce and romance in Bozeman, the Missouri River in an odd way took her place with Rosellen. In the drabness of Toston, the loneliness of that scissor-simple Tebbet household, Rosellen often turned to the river for company, slipping away for hours at a time across the highway bridge to the opposite bank. There on the west bank, the ospreys nested high in the cottonwoods and fished the river with their talons; around town, they would be shot at as fish thieves. Just under the osprey nest, a particular eddy at a bend of the river always looked tempting for skinny-dipping, but Rosellen never quite gave in. She knew Charlene had been right about that much, the danger in the water, that swimming alone in this river was asking for it. Rosellen’s answer was to hug the Missouri as closely as she could without slipping into it. Telling herself she would go only a little farther, trace the riverbank around one more bend, she always ended up following its course all the way upstream to where it wound out of the stony hogback hills a couple of miles above Toston. They were the ugliest hills in Montana, she was pretty sure (Charlene had been totally sure), but the Missouri pranced out of them high, wide and handsome, its waters freshly braided together from the Gallatin, Madison and Jefferson rivers at the Three Forks headwaters. The steady-stepping river sought into the valley around Toston as if just released, and while she did not yet know how to put it into words, that was Rosellen, too.
• • •
“Uh huh. She’s a little hard to outgrow, I suppose,” Kate left it at. Whereas she did not particularly dislike Charlene, she did not feel compelled to like her either. She figured there probably was not much wrong with Charlene that, say, putting in a nightly eight hours as a waitress wouldn’t cure in a hurry. Yet she knew from Rosellen that Charlene had worked, clerked, and so maybe it really was not a matter of job, it was more a matter of Charlene. Generally when it came to the sister issue, Rosellen in front of all the Duff in-laws acted as though Charlene was not too bad a bargain, but privately she agreed with Kate that Charlene could stand to have her nose brought down out of the clouds. Along that same front, there was Fort Owen for the two of them to try to puzzle out. Owen they still were doing some deciding about, whether it was just intrinsically fascinating to have a high mucketymuck brother-in-law wrestling an entire dam into place or whether his brain sometimes was too big for its britches, so to speak.
• • •
Assuming spring ever came, Owen was vowing this very minute in the small pool of illumination from his droplight, he in this office was going to be goddamn good and ready, the dredging setup was going to be doubly goddamn good and ready, to move an average of three million cubic yards of earthfill a month. Nineteen thirty-five was going to have to be the year this dam took shape, big unmistakable goddamn shape.
• • •
And then Bruce.
“Something’s on his mind, besides the part in his hair,” Kate reported. “Can you always spot that, with Neil?”
“You better bet,” Rosellen testified. “When he’s hauling, I can tell how his trip went by how the truck pulls into the yard.”
“Mm hmm. Whoops, I’m about on.” Kate gathered their dishes in a professional pile and went behind the counter to start her shift. Rosellen assembled herself into heavy coat and overshoes and mitts and scarf and drove home. They put away tonight and set course for tomorrow’s talkative supper together, these happy two, who were holding back from each other hardly anything under the sun.
• • •
Bruce had been thinking about this all week, a span of concentration that had his head buzzing.
A kind of tingle built up behind his ears as he at last reached the point of telling himself ask, go ask, they can’t any more than tell you no.
The minute his shift ended, he tromped up the gangplank onto the workbarge.
The barge boss, Taine, looked at him questioningly. “Medwick want something?”
“No, I do.” Bruce swallowed hard and nodded toward the bow of the barge, where a man in a diving suit was descending into the water. “I want to be the next him.”
“That a fact,” said Taine with supreme neutrality. “Ever done any diving, and where?”
“Uh, not yet,” Bruce said. “But I’m ready to give it a try, right here right now.”
“Are you,” said the barge boss. “And your qualifications are what?”
Bruce seemed genuinely affronted. “Doesn’t being crazy enough to do it count for enough?”
Taine sized him up with more interest. “Just how old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” Bruce vouched unreliably. “Like the rifle.”
“All right, then, hotshot. I’ll clear it with Medwick for you to report here in the morning. We’ll try you out as diver’s tender for Bonestiel. Then if you still think you want to go under the river, Bonestiel can show you what crazy really is.”
• • •
Actually, Bonestiel, a Louisianan, was more than willing to show Bruce the ropes of diving. He himself, Bonestiel proclaimed, was directly headed back to Louisiana’s warmer waters, not to mention its warmer air, warmer earth, warmer food, and warmer women. And so Bruce marked his true immersion into Fort Peck by apprenticing in the under-river world as murky and slow as Bonestiel’s accent.
• • •
Meg acted as if she wanted to scold Bruce but couldn’t figure out where to start on the size of the chore. Hugh announced that he had lived too long, punished now by this spectacle of one of his own sons drawing actual money to parade along the bottom of a river. Owen was surprised to find himself for once proud of Bruce; diving was serious going. Charlene figured Bruce was as bull-goose loony as usual. Rosellen was torn between concern for Kate’s sake and a guilty thrill at having a diver for a brother-in-law. Neil only warned Bruce to keep his window shut in that diving suit.
Kate put it to him without any such preamble:
“So, are you trying to kill yourself?”
“Honeybunch, you know I wouldn’t ever—”
Bruce paused. Beside him on the noon bed, Kate, calm and lanky and thoroughly undressed, was looking at him as if she simply wanted to know, one way or the other. That was another thing that tickled him about her. She didn’t try to shoo him away from the interesting parts of life.
He lay back and searched the ceiling for some way to tell her the extraordinary feeling, the for-once right fit, that diving gave him. “It’s better than about anything but you, hon. It’s . . . scary.”
She studied him sideways. Owen had pointed out to her that, in a diving suit with lead weights slung on him and the short tether of the air hose, at least there would be no question of where Bruce was and what he was engaged in.
Waiting for him to say more, she finally recognized his silence for the confession it was. She propped herself up on an elbow and made sure:
“That’s what’s so good about it? That it’s scary?”
“Uh huh. Is that too crazy?”
“It’s up there pretty far. So you are out to kill yourself? Have the diving do it for you, that’s the idea?”
“Huh uh.”
“What, then. If all you want is to get a kick out of scaring yourself, you could just walk a trestle blindfolded.”
Bruce cast her a look out of the corner of his eye, but otherwise stayed unmoving on the bed. “I better explain,” he said, “before you get too excited about being the Widow Duff.”
“That wouldn’t excite me,” Kate said. “I prefer a husband alive.”
“That’s just it.” Bruce’s forehead furrowed in unaccustomed concentration. “See, that’s kind of what diving is for me. It’s spooky to have all your air coming through a little hose, and never quite knowing how strong the river current is going to be when you get down there, and then how you have to handle stuff real careful, not rip the diving suit—that’s what I mean by scary. But scary in a good way, can you savvy? A way that says, ‘Hey, do this wrong and you’re fish food. But do it right, and you’re Mister River himself.’ See what I’m getting at?” He was up on his side, earnestly turned toward her now. “It’s a mix, is what it is, scary and okay along with it. And not just anybody is cut out for that, you know?”
She was starting to.
Kate took stock as Bruce’s hand found its way to her thigh. Of all of life’s dangers, she was married to a man who was choosing the river. Third time in a row, in the line of Millay women. Third time lucky. She weighed the saying, wondering how it applied.
She touched him commensurately where he was touching her. “I should have married Neil. I’d only have to savvy a truck.”
“Neil in his birthday suit here, instead of me?” Bruce’s hand busied on her. “Talk about scary.”
Something approximating spring, at last, and as work at the dam site stirred in 1935’s first days of thaw, so did the towns.
For a place barely past its first birthday, Wheeler showed atrocious age-spots where ashes and dishwater had been thrown all winter, wrinkles of ruts in every street and alley, and the general dishevelment of a veteran tramp. Its sibling downstream from the dam, Park Grove, had just wakened to the fact that whole neighborhoods were going to be eaten by the dredges, but the rest of the scatter of Fort Peck’s shacky suburbs were starting to hear the sing of hammers again. The workforce, talk had it, was about to increase by another thousand wallets.
