Bucking the Sun, page 23
“Owen, I’m so sorry,” the gray-haired secretary indicated the heap of paperwork she was typing up, “but he already was by here and had a batch.”
April, that horrid half-assed half month of startup, had been as close to a write-off as Owen ever wanted to come in this business of dredging. April of ’35 he just wanted to kick under the bed of the river and forget.
“BJ, I’m kind of up against it here, I need this monthly report typed up for the—”
“It’s lunchtime, Owen,” Betty Jane of the henna hair told him serenely. “And then I have to take dictation from Major Santee.”
The month of May gave him hope. The dredging still had a hiccup now and then, but they had met the 3,000,000 cubic yards goal. In June, he’d thought he had the job knocked, absolute easy stuff this around-the-clock dredging: the total of cubic yards moved was a fat 10 percent above goal. But now July, here in his hand, made bad reading; at the bottom of his compilation of daily dredging averages the number was three million, but damn barely. Owen Duff did not like to scrape by that way, and with August-September-October-November yet to come in his dredging year, and right now when he should be out there on the dredgeline trying to figure out how to boost the flow of fill, he was having to stomp around here in the Ad Building trying to find somebody, just anybody, to type—
“Rosellen, hey, glad I caught you before—uhm, you went to lunch.”
Her fingers had jumped off the keys when she heard his voice behind her, and she swung her head around toward him and swooped blank paper onto the top of whatever she’d been typing, all at the same time.
Experienced as he was with Charlene, who never liked a surprise unless she was delivering it, Owen hurried to say:
“Excuse me all over the place. It’s just that I’m in dire need on my monthly report, and saw you sitting in here, and so—”
“No, no, that’s all right. I eat in, these days. I’m—” she vaguely indicated toward her typewriter and its hidden contents “—practicing my speed.”
Owen didn’t buy that at all. Christ, woman, you get any faster, they’ll have to invent an asbestos typewriter. But while he was standing there trying to keep his face straight, Rosellen crinkled her caught-kid grin at him and gave him the joshing turn of words that Charlene sometimes did:
“What can I do you for?”
Pesky just that quick, was she. Owen stuck tightly to business instead of repartee. “This blasted report, that has to go in to the colonel half an hour ago. Can you whiz through it for me this once?”
Rosellen plucked it from him and told him she’d see what she could do. Owen walked off to the clatter of her typewriter resuming behind him, still wondering about her noonhour secret pages. Neil had better-to-Christ hope they’re not love letters.
• • •
Three envelopes, long and white.
Independence Square in Philadelphia, the first return address.
Arlington Street in Boston.
Park Avenue in New York, New York.
Rosellen wildly wanted to rip them open right there in the post office, but thought no, take them home. Tingly suspense. Then giddy triumph. She could use this, in another story.
At the kitchen table, she slit open the envelopes and the worst messages of her life fell out. The Saturday Evening Post regretted it had no use for “The Steel Daisy,” the Atlantic Monthly was rejecting “Janie’s Doll,” and Collier’s had turned down “Expectations.”
The rejection slips stunned her, but under her mortification there was a greater panic: what had they done with her stories? A second slip lay under one of the rejection notices: Due to the numerous submissions we receive, we cannot return any manuscript unaccompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Rosellen felt herself blush, probably to the roots of her toenails. So these were the ground rules of being a writer. Her carefully typed stories had been thrown in wastebaskets in Philadelphia, Boston and New York. Thank heaven she still had the notebook pages.
Nothing fazed Neil. When he came home and found her red-eyed and blurty with the triple bad news, he kissed her enough to start taking her mind off Philadelphia etcetera, then sat her down.
“You keep at it,” he instructed as Rosellen hung on his every word. “That’s the only advantage, with people like us. Just keeping at it, until the other ones drop.”
• • •
Bide.
Most definitely, Darius was biding.
He could perform the Missouri River boatyard tasks with whatever the mental equivalent of a little finger was, and devote the rest of his thinking to the other matters.
Tactics.
At the moment, there did not seem any exertion great enough to bring Meg his way, but he was willing to wait and see whether the leverage ever changed, there.
As to the politics at Plentywood, well, that passion couldn’t be requited instantly either; Mott himself had told him as much.
Meanwhile the time had to be passed some way. There was always that about biding.
He persevered in the taverns of Wheeler, impossible though it was to become accustomed to the glorified water that Americans called beer. Taking care not to cross payday paths with Hugh, he favored the Buckhorn, one of the smaller and more orderly drinkeries, until the evening when he was on his way there and a human form flying out of the Blue Eagle nearly bowled him over.
The figure, one of the tunnel gang from the look of his mucky overalls, ended up woozily on hands and knees in the gutter after hurtling past Darius. In the doorway of the Blue Eagle stood Tom Harry, the majority of his white shirt torn off but his bow tie still in place.
“This ain’t Butte,” Tom Harry stated to the ejected customer. “You don’t hop up on my bandstand any time you feel like it and sing ‘Mother Machree.’ ”
Doctrine always interested Darius. He headed into Tom Harry’s realm.
A three-instrument band called the Melodeons was blasting away, behind a contributions box with a sign reading prominently FEED THE KITTY. Dancing was epidemic. Darius secured a beer from a hamhanded man behind the bar and settled in to watch.
His attention went at once to a white-blonde head of hair; or rather, his attention glanced off that of the woman, who gazed around the Blue Eagle as if judging donkeys.
Darius watched her as she danced snugly with a young damworker, smiled her way out of his paid-for grasp as the dancetune wound down, then went back to her stool at the far end of the bar. She wore trousers, or whatever silly thing were they called in this country—slacks? Darius saw nothing slack about the way her form molded out the fabric. Upward, her breasts were silkily held by a blouse with a midnight sheen to it.
Darius headed down to the end of the bar to work out the rules.
Just then the saloonkeeper appeared, fresh white shirt on.
“The real money here is in being your haberdasher, Tom,” the woman was saying to him. “When you bounce a guy like that, maybe you ought to just do it in your undershirt.”
“Shannon, you concentrate on peeling the shirts off these—” Tom Harry broke off as Darius materialized at her side. “Customer for you, looks like. Another beer to wet the other end of your whistle too, chum?”
“Assuredly,” Darius said.
Tom Harry thrust him a bottle, then vacated to a short distance down the bar.
American propositioning tactics still were none too clear to Darius. The lewd old music hall joke—The Honorable Member from Groinwich . . . is rising . . . to a point of order—by now was pertinent, but he wasn’t sure that was the best approach here.
The woman had been looking him over in quick, crisp glances. “Care to dance?” she recited. Warm as an ice pick, thus far, but everything else about her was attractive enough.
“No, dancing isn’t my field.”
“Whichever, you’re supposed to be buying me a drink first.”
“Ah.” Darius called out to Tom Harry, “A dram for the lady, please, Prime Minister.”
The drink came and more of Darius’s money went. “Are you his?” Darius indicated Tom Harry, now stationed at the cash register, with the slightest nod of his head.
“No.” She gave Darius a dead-level stare. “I’m mine.”
“You’re luckier in your ownership than most, then,” he said drily. “What I meant was, how does this transaction work? Does he”—Darius did the slight nod toward Tom Harry again—“provide the premises?”
“I use his car, out back,” she said. “Packard DeLuxe. It’s got a backseat the size of an ambulance.”
“I’m not much one for doing it in vehicles,” Darius said. “It sounds a bit rushed, for what I have in mind.”
“Isn’t this my lucky night, the only man at Fort Peck who’s proud to be a slowpoke,” she mocked. “I suppose you can come up with someplace more leisurely?”
“I was counting on you to. After you finish business for the evening.”
• • •
Until two that morning, quitting time, Proxy Shannon couldn’t help wondering what she had waiting for her in this odd duck of a Scotchman. Most men hated the idea of any other man being with her. This one simply sat there and watched as she worked, a little amused look flitting across his face once when a tunnel mucker, still in his rubber boots, arrived in what was obviously a flaming hurry and sped out back with her. Hardest thing about the business, as far as she was concerned, was the male conviction that they were all something rare; but this specimen waiting patiently for her didn’t seem to mind the rest of the parade.
Just before two, she caught his eye and indicated he should meet her in back of the saloon. Darius went out the front and around the building, and she was waiting beside the car. “Borrowed it from Tom to go home in,” she said, and held out the car key to him.
Darius hesitated. “Is it far? Can’t we simply foot it?”
“Everything’s far here,” Proxy informed him. He still didn’t take the key. “You really aren’t one for cars, are you. What’s the matter now?”
“I don’t know the driving.”
“Fella,” Proxy told him as she opened the door on the driver’s side and climbed behind the steering wheel, “sometime tonight, you’re going to have to contribute something.”
The Packard sped out of Wheeler, across into the smaller scatter of buildings called Delano Heights and on through the even more scattered and sarcastically named neighborhood called Lakeview, then downward toward the river. Proxy parked the car on the riverbank above a strew of boxy forms. As Darius’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he realized they were houseboats.
“The one on the far end,” she told him, and led the way, her slacks and hair moonlit against the dark of the river.
When she turned up the wick on the kerosene lamp, Darius saw that the inside of the houseboat was as mussy as a daw’s nest. Amid the clutter, he had to search twice to spy the bed. The houseboat rocked slightly as the Missouri roiled past.
Darius chortled. “I didn’t know seamanship was going to be a requirement, too.”
Proxy had made no move toward the bed, and that wisecrack or whatever it was caused her to look sharply at him. Gaunt handsome joker, but that didn’t count. Business did. She said only: “More than that’s required, you know.”
“Yes. Well, now,” he studied her. “What is the tariff?”
Out back of the Blue Eagle it was two dollars a go, plus extra for French and on up the menu; but here, her own premises and all and this cluck fresh off a boat of a different kind, she took a calculated chance and announced:
“Five dollars.”
He pulled out a pursy kind of wallet she had never seen before and took his own good time about fingering through the American money which all looked greenly identical to him. At last he sorted out a ten-dollar bill and a five, holding them up to her carefully before putting the money on the table by the lamp. “Here’s for three goes.”
• • •
“You’re a perfectly dreadful housekeeper,” he observed from amid the tussle of bedcovers the next morning.
“Houseboatkeeper,” she corrected him in that mocking way. “Whole different deal, when you can just throw stuff over the side when it piles up and gets too rank. And anyway, since when does somebody like me have to come with doilies.”
“I like it that you’re on the river, though,” he said as if thinking out loud. He turned and gave her a studying gaze. “It commends your taste.”
“My taste in men,” she figured she’d better begin letting him know, “never lasts until breakfast.”
“That probably commends your taste, too.” He gave her a surprisingly attractive thin-faced smile.
“No ‘probably’ about it,” she notified him. “Okay, Bosephus. The circus is over. Everybody up, out, we all had our money’s worth—”
“Wait. One formality.” He put a businesslike arm across her as she started to roll out of bed. “What’s your name, then?” He’d heard the publican call her Shannon, but even in America a last name must be a last name.
“Proxy.”
Darius stared at her, unsettled. I hope to God I heard an r in that.
“That’s a new one on me,” he ventured. “What, was your father a legal scholar?”
She hooted. “Him? Neither one!”
“What’s it from, then?” Darius persisted. “I mean, it’s perfectly fine by me, whatever you wish to dub yourself. Society oughtn’t be permitted to put a person in lifelong irons by fastening onto you some name that you utterly don’t—”
Wherever that was headed, she cut it off with:
“It’s a nickname I picked up, is all. Short for peroxide.”
She saw he still didn’t have a clue, and wondered what century Scotland was back in. “My hair, stupe. How do you think I get this blonde?”
“Ah!” He nodded and nodded as if he savvied everything about her now, which Proxy entirely doubted.
“You’re one to talk,” she pointed out sharply. “Dah-RYE-us. Where’s that kind of fandoodle come from?”
“My father was in his Persian period,” Darius said. “He went nights, ancient history classes at the Mechanics’ Institution. I’ve always told my brother Hugh he was lucky that was over with by the time he came along, or he’d have ended up Xerxes.”
He turned back to her. “What’s your real one, though?”
“Oh,” she mulled a moment and with a skewed smile brought out: “Susannah.”
“Susannah Shannon?” He looked inordinately pleased. Men will always go for anything sappy enough, Proxy found confirmed for the hundredth time. “But that’s utter music, woman!” he enthused. “Person could dance a reel to that.”
“Proxy,” she said uncategorically, “is what I go by.”
Two nights later, he was back for more.
• • •
Something for you, Meg, Hugh had been meaning to say. Hand her his share of the trade beads, make a joke about having gone all the way back to old Fort Peck to shop for jewelry for his wife. But he didn’t, not quite yet. He knotted the azure trove of beads in a corner of one of the oil rags Neil kept behind the truck seat, then tied the little bundle to one of the coil springs up under the seat, out of sight. Save them, he could just hear that fancy tongue of Darius saying, for when the time is propitious.
In bed is the only way he knows how to make up, Meg mused. The Hugh Duff definition of everything, is that? For that matter, is it going to be mine?
• • •
“You work too hard,” Charlene was telling Owen.
“That’s how hard it takes,” Owen told her tiredly.
• • •
“Gotta be your carburetor.” Bruce had his head under the hood of the truck alongside Neil’s. “That or your gas line. Probably both need blowing out.”
“Wasn’t I born lucky,” Neil said, “to know somebody who’s full of government air.”
• • •
“How you doing now?”
“I feel big as a house.”
“But Kate, does it feel like there’s an honest-to-goodness person there inside of you, or some kind of other thing that’ll, you know, turn out to be a person?”
“You ask stuff that most people don’t even want to think about, anybody ever tell you that?”
“Oh, are you back in that awful mood? Does that come and go, or do you generally just feel stinko?”
“Rosellen, I’m so pregnant I could bust. If I’m lucky, I’ll bust. So, okay, then? That satisfy your curiosity?”
• • •
“Let me borrow your office, Tom.”
“Shannon, what you haven’t thought of to borrow from me hasn’t been invented yet.” Nonetheless he waved her toward the back of the saloon and turned his attention to the bar commerce again.
Proxy locked the door behind her, then stepped to the office’s sole window and yanked down the greenblind shade.
Privacy thus insured, with one hand on Tom Harry’s desk to balance herself she whipped off one shoe and then the other, then took down her slacks and in a practiced quick unbuttoning was out of her blouse as well. Underwear and stockings she didn’t wear on the job, they only complicated matters and besides, the joes fell for that in a big way, naked lady under a couple of pearl buttons.
Barefoot all over, she dippered water into Tom Harry’s washbasin and began using his washcloth on herself. Ran the chilly soppy cloth over her breasts first, there was always some reassurance in how quick her nipples stood up and saluted. (Another thing the joes fell for.) She scrubbed on downward, flinching but thorough. Told herself what she had to keep telling herself in this line of work: Take care of the merchandise, Prox. Don’t let it show wear and tear. Wurr and turr, would be Darius’s version. She wondered whether all Scotchmen had their voiceboxes in their noses.
She didn’t often do this, take a spit bath before going home with an overnighter. But there was no real chance to clean herself up at the houseboat, these nights, before the bed went into gear—this nightly tomcat was no different from the rest of men on that, naturally inclined toward the horizontal—and besides, sacktime with this one counted for a lot. Darius Duff unhesitatingly paid for extra stuff, and extras onto the extras. Whatever—more likely whoever—this joe was trying to get over, he had it bad.
