Bucking the Sun, page 21
“I’m still apprenticing at it,” Darius joked smoothly, and Hugh had to laugh. As quickly as he could recover, though, he gibed:
“Palmistry, at your age?”
“Now, now. Doing the nasty by oneself isn’t necessarily in the picture around here, is it,” Darius amplified, making reference to the Wheeler Inn’s commercial tinctures of blonde, brunette, redhead, and jet-black, although truth be known his own gambits had been in the straightforward brothels of Happy Hollow. Next he intoned, “As the Bible says, ‘Better to put your seed in the belly of a whore than to spill it on the ground.’ ”
Hugh took a deep thinking drink. “Where exactly does it say that?”
Darius gave a shrug. “On the flyleaf?”
Hugh roared a laugh. “That’s where your mind has always been at, all right, your fly!”
Do I owe him this much of a listen? wondered Darius. Do I owe him a damned thing?
“Hugh, do you suppose we could find some other burning topic than my—”
“Serious, though,” Hugh plunged on to. “There’s much to be said for the married state. You ought to give it consideration sometime. For one thing, being married saves on all the beforehand—” Hugh woozily searched for the word he wanted “—kitchy-coo. And it holds up well. The fucky part, if you take my meaning. Darius, you know, they say even a mouse grows tired of going in and out of the same hole. But I never have.”
In the hard moment that followed, the contempt that swelled up in Darius stoppered him from saying anything. His huge first impulse was to smash Hugh, which he fought down to an urge to hurl something viciously vulgar in return; but finally, swallowing with difficulty, he made himself confine to:
“That’s maybe enough of your bedroom secrets for one night. Thanks ever so much for the pond of beer and now if you don’t mind, I’ll head back—”
“Drew your attention, didn’t it.”
Hugh’s tone made Darius swing around and take a fresh look at him. He appeared appreciably less drunk than half a minute before.
“I wondered if you couldn’t stand some reminding,” he was going on, “that we’re man and woman, myself and Meg, and not the spring greens you were nibbling at in Inverley.”
As Darius eyed him, Hugh put a hand on the bar and pushed himself a bit straighter.
“Darius, this isn’t then. It hasn’t been some interlude you can whistle just like that, since I cleared out of Scotland with Meg. I’ve done considerable, and maybe failed at more. Hard to keep count, when something of this sort”—he gestured in a way to indicate the saloon, Wheeler, the dam project—“comes down on you. But I made a place. I made crops. I made three sons. Meg and I, we made our life, out of not much more than a boat ticket. And I won’t have you parading over here to undo that, if that’s what you have in mind.”
Bottled courage, Darius registered, or is it more?
In the paynight millrace of the Wheeler Inn, the brothers faced each other closely, one putting his huff to strongest use, the other waiting for him to abate. Tactics. Always the great question, those.
“I’m not out to, Hugh,” Darius gustily refuted undo. “The same years have gone by for me as for you, there’s a pile of life I’ve had since Inverley. My matrimony was with the Clydeside, my work there. You’ve never credited that in me, have you, how much I loved those bloody bedamned ships.” He paused. “Everything I was—involved in there went on its back like a beetle. But I still had a brother, didn’t I. You’re what’s left.” He chose to pivot the matter on that. “We both know there was a moment when I’d have gone around the world on my knees to gain Meg. No sense denying that. But she went with you, didn’t she. So, you won, then and there.”
“Went with?” Hugh seemed to be tasting the words. “She was my wife. She is my wife.”
“I can grasp that,” Darius concluded levelly. “If our parents raised a dim child, it wasn’t on my side of the mirror.”
• • •
Owen had not much more than come home from work and closed the door when there was a strenuous rapping on it.
He opened it to Bruce.
“Didn’t hear you roar in,” Owen said, taking a peek past Bruce toward the street. “Where’s your motor-sickle?”
“Kate made me give it up,” Bruce reported sheepishly. “She says if I’m going to be a father, I can’t go around with bug smushes on my incisors.”
“Cramps your style, all right, I can see that.” Owen made a pretense of inspecting Bruce’s mouth area. “Well, now that you’re afoot, better come in and rest.”
Inside the house, though, Bruce stayed on the balls of his feet, rambling from one side of the living room to the other as if he was there to visit the walls.
“Bruce, not to put too fine a point on this or anything—but what in pluperfect hell is on your mind now?”
“Ownie, I’ve got a shot at being the government diver.”
“No fooling.” Owen’s tone escalated as he grew sure that his chronically fooling-around kid brother for once wasn’t. “That’s pretty good going, buddy. It really is. Congratu—”
“First I need to buy Bonestiel’s outfit.” Bruce came up close to Owen. “See, Ownie, the diver has to have his own equipment. The government furnishes the, uh, air.”
“What are we looking at here then, just a diving suit, right?”
“And the air hose.”
“Well, sure, otherwise you’d have to practice holding your breath for some long time, wouldn’t you.”
“And the beltweights and the diving shoes and the telephone gear and the lifelines and the underwater lamps and the helmet.”
“Bruce. Let’s hear the total.”
Bruce named the figure as coolly as he could, but his Adam’s apple bobbed significantly afterward.
Owen also did a gulp.
“About as much as a Ford Triple A Truck happens to cost, you’re telling me.”
“Ownie, I hate like blazes to have to ask you for it. I’d—” Bruce fidgeted but kept his eyes straight into those of Owen “—I’d rather take a beating. But with the kid coming and everything, I can’t swing this myself. You’ll get it all back, I guarandamntee you. You have my word and you can have my hide after that, if you want. See, though, it takes money to make money, don’t they say? So if you’ll back me on this, then the quicker I can start diving, the faster you can get re—”
“Don’t hemorrhage yourself trying to convince me here,” Owen shut down that spate. The strength of conviction. Hard labor or a sizable sum, said the judge. Owen had already visited his choices in this, turn this hitherto harum-scarum brother down or give him a possible leg up. He was not sure how it would have come out if this were a case of Bruce solo, but with Kate and the impending baby in the picture too, that wasn’t nearly the question, was it.
“All right. You win. I’ll put up the do-re-mi, and we’ll work out how you fork it back to me.”
Bruce all but tattooed his thanks onto Owen, then left. In the quiet house, Owen did a very rare thing, pulling down from the canned goods cabinet the pint of Four Roses that he and Charlene kept on hand for a hot toddy whenever one of them had a cold, and pouring himself a short swift drink.
He could already hear it with Charlene. Owen, how long can you keep laying out money to them this way?
Nothing I intend to make a habit of, he’d say.
Then why do you keep doing it, she’d say.
And she’d be right.
“Something new has been added. You look like glory in its Sunday best.”
Meg spun around at the sound of him. The cookhouse kitchen, empty at this time of night except for her, and now him, suddenly seemed central to everything.
“Aren’t those pretty words.” She caught her breath a little. “You always could embroider with your tongue.”
“It is pretty hair, to go with the rest of you,” Darius said as if sincerely explaining. “My compliments to the imaginative Charlene.” By now he had covered most of the length of the kitchen and was lounging against a meatblock not far from her. “Not that my imagination has ever needed any adding to, Meggie, where you’re concerned.”
Now that this had come, after all the years, she found she still did not know her own mind. Or did she. At first she said nothing. Then:
“Darius, I have to scoot on home.”
“On payday night? When the rest of the citizenry is on the town?”
“I only dropped back by because I’d forgotten to take these for Kate.” Meg showed him the Mason jar and couldn’t help smiling a bit. “She’s at the stage of crazy cravings, and nothing compares with Mr. Jaarala’s pickled crab apples.”
Darius’s own smile came on instantly, and the half laugh that was the same as Hugh’s. “We’ll hope her tyke isn’t born puckered up.”
Meg was looking steadily at him. “And why are you in this particular vicinity, Darius, this particular night?”
“I was hanging about, is all. And am rewarded with this wonderful coincidence.”
“Really,” she held to her decision. “I have to be going home.”
“And what’s there for you?” he asked, all reason. He had been storing up for this since the standoff with Hugh the previous payday. “It holds up well,” does it. So does what I feel for her, you drifting tosspot. “Unless I miss my guess, Hugh beetled downtown as soon as he was off shift. He’ll be some while yet, drinking the town dry.”
“I’m surprised you’re not at it with him.”
“I’m surprised that you don’t see Hugh’s only my brother, while you’re you.”
“Darius, we’re not those peppered-up youngsters anymore.”
“We’re not down in our graves yet, either.”
“We may be if Hugh ever finds us like this.”
“He’s otherwhere, though, isn’t he. Meg, heart, let’s look at this matter afresh. We don’t have an ocean and the family you were raising and considerations of any other sort between us now.”
“That’s your idea of a fresh look? Going back to the bind we were in, before Hugh and I left Scotland?”
The noise of the door in the dining room made them both jump. Whoever had come in was still out of sight around the corner from the serving window.
Meg looked wildly around. The next thing she knew, Darius’s arm was around her and they were ducking into the pantry, out of the wide-open area of the kitchen.
She had to listen over the drum of her heart for the sounds out in the kitchen. Meanwhile Darius’s arm had not gone away.
There was some clumping, which came nearer and nearer, then stopped.
Then she could hear the almost soundless whistling, the blown air of the only tune Jaarala seemed to know.
“It’s the cook,” she let Darius know in the barest whisper, unsure whether to feel relieved or twice as alarmed.
Darius speculatively kissed her forehead.
Jaarala rummaged in the breadbox. Next he could be heard slicing, twice.
By now Darius had moved his hands under her arms and around onto her back and, having met resistance at her lips, was kissing through the neighborhood of her hairline along the side of her head, occasionally ranging his tongue into the delicate grooves of her ear. She tried not to think about how many other teases he could employ on her. She could feel the most definite one at the front of him.
Pasteboard carton being opened, gummier slicing. Velveeta cheese.
Jar lid coming off, tink of knife against its mouth. Slathered with mayonnaise.
She willed Jaarala to go eat his sandwich snack somewhere else, but no. He could be heard chewing, and he was a thorough chewer. That meant they had to be utterly still in the pantry, and Meg hung there in Darius’s clasp of arms, cheek to cheek and much else to much else.
At last came the sounds of Jaarala washing up his plate and bread-knife, then the whump of the dining room door as he went out. Meg put her hands flat on Darius’s chest and pushed herself back far enough to see squarely into his face. She thought she felt commendably calm, considering.
“That was unfair,” she said when she had the breath for it.
“I wonder if it was.” He put the tip of a finger into one of the curls coiling at the corner of neck and ear.
Meg surprised him. She put her own index finger against his breastbone like a small but substantial pointer and pushed herself away more effectively.
“If I ever do walk off from Hugh,” she said, “it will have to be in the open.” She gave him that look as if she were taking God’s inventory. “Not, Darius, in the pantry.”
• • •
She wished she knew how much the names mattered. It was a harder part than she had thought, making those up. But if she were to call the woman ‘Blondina’ and him . . .
Call them Ishmael, Heathcliff, Hester Prynne, Swann and the Duchess de Guermantes, Huck and Tom, Antonia Shimerda, Molly Bloom, Puck, Hamlet, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Flem Snopes, Lord Jim, Anna Karenina, Eugene Gant, Mrs. Dalloway: they answer, faultlessly, each time by making us a gift of all their wordly possessions.
Flaubert sends notes tinkling from Emma Bovary’s piano and at the other end of the village the bailiff’s clerk, “passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand” and we listen there with him ever after.
Cather prompts an anxious young Santa Fe seminarian to say, “One does not die of a cold,” and the Archbishop in the winter of age responds, “I shall not die of a cold, my son, I shall die of having lived,” and we accept that as true for us, too.
Mayakovsky, Russia’s cloud in trousers, jots to Lili Brik from his Crimean tour, “Lilik, I go off in all the directions there are!” and from London she postcards to him “Volosik, I kiss you right in the Parliament!” and we believe with them, there in those everlasting fevers of correspondence, their creed that love is the heart of everything.
Writers and the written, they haunt us as we most want to be haunted, in fogs of ink.
Rosellen knew little enough of this, yet she was on an updraft of it all. Her writing hand agonized, and cherished the agony. Time escaped, and she minded not at all.
It first came to her in the Ad Building, one of the times when she was turning out those reams of paychecks. The names, all these. If a person could know . . . She had sat up even straighter in her typing chair, posture of the thoughts suddenly pushing at her. And what the money will let them do, make them do . . . The idea went home with her and produced a tablet and a pencil, and she had been slaving away in stints ever since. Searching her imagination for grist. Lately she had been reading Now in November, and she thought Josephine W. Johnson had it ever so right: “Words and days and things seen that lie in the mind like stone.”
This was an evening when Neil’s trucking run had been only to Glasgow and back, and so when she came out of her haze of concentration over her pages and heard him cut the engine, she thought now was as good a time as any to let him in on her endeavor.
“Writing? You mean—like what, that penmanship they made us do in school?”
“No, stories. The kind in magazines.”
“No kidding? You been doing that? Let’s see one.”
Heart knocking on her breastbone, she handed him the little set of pages.
Neil slowly read of the people named Blondina and Merritt. He wasn’t sure whether he had heard the precise story before or not, but it was the type that practically stood in the air at Fort Peck: a High Line farm couple who had been grasshoppered out, the man desperately going halfway across the state the next spring to a wage job on a road project, the woman having to do the farming on her own, climbing off the tractor after each round of the field to go over to the pickup and check on their baby in a fruitbox cradle on the seat; the story ended as soon as they heard there was hiring at a place where a great dam was to be built.
“ ‘Shod in Weary Leather.’ You thought that up yourself, huh?”
“Nhn.”
“Well, I think it’s the greatest thing ever. You got any more?”
“I will have, the next time you’re away.”
She saw a look on Neil which said Is that what it takes? and hurriedly told him, “I fill the time with it when you’re off trucking, is all, Neilie. When you’re here, so much the better. The writing can go hang, then.”
“Okay, sure, you seem to be going strong on it.”
“It’s hard, though. I keep wishing I knew more about, oh, situations. People’s behavior and all that, the times when I can’t be around them to see.”
“Well, you watch when you can and use your imagination a little, and don’t you get to know more?”
“I don’t just mean more, Neil. Everything, I guess you’d have to call it.”
“Rosellen, honey, I’m all for you on this writing of yours. But you maybe don’t want to set your sights that high.”
“No, no. I won’t, I promise. I knew even while that was coming out of my mouth it was going to sound batty.” And that made twice, already, tonight. Her tongue needed to hear from her, she resolved. “What I meant was, trying to do these stories makes me think things over, in a way that I didn’t even know things had to be figured out before I put them down on—oh, fudge, Neil, that’s right back to batty in a hurry, isn’t it. But don’t you ever have that?” She put her hand on top of his, hoping he would follow suit. “Wanting to see on through the everyday run of stuff?”
To her relief, after a moment his broad hand came up and rested on hers. She chuckled and rapidly put her other on top of his. “Sure,” she heard him say as they grinned at each other and slappily piled hand on hand, “a hundred percent of the time.”
• • •
Hugh and Birdie were on the dredgeline drain traps now, transferred there by some Ad Building wiseacre whose initials Hugh was quite sure were O-w-e-n. The drain traps were mucky work, digging out cuds of clay and other obstructions, but Hugh Duff had dug into Missouri River earth plenty of times before, and Birdie came to each of these openable pockets of the pipeline with the interest of a weasel approaching a nest of eggs. Some of the damnedest items were being dredged up from the bottom of the river. They’d opened one trap to find it clogged with rusted barrel hoops and a very battered chamber pot, and lately there had been a chunk of the nameplate off the old sunken steamboat Far West. And fairly often the pipeline still would cough out a buffalo skull. Hugh cleaned those up and Birdie lugged them into Glasgow and peddled them. Hugh tucked away his share of the split as drinking money, while Birdie untucked his along with his dress shirt with the horseshoe embroidered on the back in Wheeler’s temples of temptation.
