Bucking the Sun, page 27
When he heard the knock now, he raised his voice just enough to be heard outside. “You found it.”
About all he could make out of this one as she stepped into the darkened room was that her hair was unnaturally pale, nearly the silvered-up color of the moon on a clear night. As usual he couldn’t see the face in any detail and didn’t care; face wasn’t the part that interested him on these occasions. To his surprise, this one stopped there by the door and said:
“You do keep it darker than a black cat’s ass in here, sheriff, sir.”
He didn’t say anything to that, as it was self-evident. He listened to the slidy sounds of her undressing. When she padded over to the bed, he asked:
“You’re who?”
“Does that matter any?” Proxy had been all set to say something like “Claudette” as usual, but somehow decided the hell with it, brass would do. She still was huffy about Tom Harry having sent her on this, even though she had dickered double the usual price out of him; if Tom and the other Wheeler nightspot owners had to slip some satisfaction to little Kinnickinnick here every couple of weeks, that was their problem, not hers. Quite where this risky attitude came from, she didn’t know. Usually the thing to do was to tell herself a joe was a joe except when he was a John D. and then the enthusiasm could be found to exert herself on his wallet somewhat more; but tonight, she was in just no mood to pretend. Nor did she care what he was going to think, sheriff or no sheriff. After all, she had been run out of better towns than this.
This one isn’t scared, the sheriff thought to himself, and wasn’t sure whether he liked that fact or not.
“I need to tell you what’s involved here?” he asked.
“I hear you like—you always want a trip around the world,” she said.
As much as it galled him to know they talked about him, he was relieved not to have to issue minute instructions. “That’s the deal, all right,” he said gruffly. Then: “That sort of thing suit you?”
“That doesn’t matter either, does it,” he heard her say, and then her mouth began to make its ports of call on his small body.
• • •
Workforce roster in hand, around him dredgeline pontoons being built as fast as hammers could go and the swing shift about to come in the gate and keep the pace going, Cecil Medwick looked upon his boatyard and found it good. Except for one Scottish thistle.
Medwick watched Darius Duff handling work with an ease that, if you did not know better, could be mistaken for inattention. Most of these Fort Peck workers had cut their teeth on rural manual labor, so that the only style they knew was to tear into a job and muscle it into surrender. But Darius more—Medwick wasn’t sure he even had the right word for it—teased away at the construction of pontoons and pump boats and the like. His work was good as gold, that wasn’t the problem. He was just—different. And evidently going to stay that way, Medwick had found out. The time he caught Darius putting in a couple of bulkheads where he was sure one would serve, he asked: “Where the hell did you learn to do it that way?” Darius had looked at him with a perfectly serious face and answered, “Building the Queen Mary.”
Granted, a man could learn his boatbuilding trade on the Clyde River or up the Woogadooga and Medwick wouldn’t care, so long as the guy really knew his stuff. No, that wasn’t what was bugging Medwick. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about Darius did not fit. The guy rang wrong as a solder dollar.
The shift changed, and Medwick traded gab with the men coming on, but he still watched the stiff-spined figure of Darius Duff until it went out the boatyard gate. Medwick knew in his sleep that the best way to can a guy was always FFI, failure to follow instructions. But that method of firing wouldn’t work with Darius, because Darius did follow the goddamn things, he simply did so in a way that told you he knew better.
Maybe, though, just maybe there was another shot at showing him the road. Medwick had been feeling it in the air all evening, and its little stings of cold were starting to hit the backs of his hands with nasty regularity now. He took another look at his clipboard with the roster on it, thinking through the angles. Owen Duff was always a major consideration, but from what Medwick heard about the dredge averages, Owen was maybe having his own troubles. So Owen might not be so hot a hotshot from now on, looking out for every Duff on two legs. And if that was to be the case . . .
Medwick moved his finger down the roster and checked the letter after Darius’s name. There it sat, the way to discharge him, good old S for single. After the dredging shutdown, and the Fort Peck fleet was tucked into the winter harbor, a proportion of the workforce would be laid off seasonally, so-called. Preference for being kept on went to the M’s, family men.
Satisfied, Medwick unclipped his roster and stuck it inside his coat to protect it from the faster falling snow.
• • •
“Well, fuck and fooey.” In disgust Owen directed an angry heel at the frozen mud of the riverbank. His spirited try didn’t even dent the substance. Overnight, with the help of a north wind and a dusting of dry snow, the banks of the Missouri had turned into brown iron. And his hope of dredging on into December hadn’t even made it to November; this was the thirty-first of October, and it looked like shutdown.
Owen unloosed a few more stanzas of cussing, but absently, already studying the dredge fleet and the dull gray morning as if adding up a column of numbers and checking the unwelcome sum. “Max, what do you think the chances are of lucking out on a week or two of thaw?”
“Zero, or maybe just none,” Sangster provided.
“You’re telling me to stash it all in winter harbor, just accept shutdown six or seven weeks earlier than we had to last year.”
“Uh huh.”
“You’re telling me I could get my tail in real trouble if I fiddlefart around and get the whole dredging setup frozen into the river.”
“You bet.”
“What I like about you, Max, is the way you present an argument.” Owen shoved his hands even deeper into his coat pockets, pulled his chin into his coat collar and peered from under his brows up the bluff toward the Ad Building. “Isn’t the colonel just really going to love this news for breakfast.” With Sangster in step beside him, he set off to deliver the word of shutdown.
Wouldn’t you know it. Last year I had only the one dredge and the weather let us peck away on the fill until Christmas Eve. Now I’ve got the four of them up and going and it’s the earliest winter since the Ice Age. Okay, okay, take it easy, Duff, these things happen. Next year is what I better start worrying about now. Figure out April, this time.
Holy cow, though. For that matter, fooey and fuck, again. All of a mighty sudden there’s three million cubic yards of fill that I’m short this year. That ain’t canary feed, as Max would tell me. Next year we—we, hell; me, myself and I—are going to need to move mud like it’s never been moved before. Meanwhile, welcome to winter harbor, everybody.
The dreamwork of Fort Peck built through the November nights, turbulent, drifting on the dark change of season and work and prospect, restless inside the bone hulls of fate, thousands of sleep-made privacies tossing and turning. Wheeler, with its alcohol content, tended toward inward uproar: showdowns, arguments won on a second try, woozy otherwise-unimaginable sexual situations. In the Fort Peck townsite along Officers’ Row, the dreams held a tendency toward hierarchy, Colonel Parmenter’s vision of a command post in the blissful sweltering Philippines and Mrs. Parmenter’s nocturnal jaunt backward thirty years and thirty pounds to her cotillion debut both overriding, say, Captain Brascoe’s delirious armwaving scene with garbagemen who were delivering garbage into his tidy streets instead of hauling it away. Across a few of those streets, in the barracks, Darius dreamt back to Scotland. One floor up from him, Jaarala in his slumber was shaking dice against Tom Harry and Ruby Smith, and winning.
In both towns, in the course of any night, more than one man dreamt of Proxy Shannon.
Within the walls of the Duffs, Hugh was on mental horseback, riding a workhorse—it seemed to be the broad-beamed dun nag they had called “Hippo,” back on the homestead—through the snowdrifts of the road between Fort Peck and Glasgow. He thought it odd he was drawing a wage for this, merely riding around in the snow, but who was he to complain. Meg, beside him and not, was on the bandstand of the Blue Eagle, where she could peer over the heads of the crowd, watching and watching, until finally she saw him come in through the door, the tall familiar figure of Hugh. It was Hugh, wasn’t it? Bruce slept the sleep of the underwater walker, stupefied but unalarmed, while Kate wanted out of the dream she was in, where she was trying to wait on customers in the Rondola and feed Jack on her breast at the same time and the smartasses along the counter kept saying, I’ll have what Jackie’s having. Meanwhile Rosellen was stalled in a reverie version of the Wheeler post office, waiting for the mail. Every time she went up to the wicket window and asked Is there any for me?, the postmaster would say Did you bring a gunnysack for it?, then laugh and turn away. Minutes before, Neil woke up on a rancher’s approach road halfway between the coal mine and Fort Peck, having pulled over to doze when he thought he might fall asleep at the wheel, and now had climbed out and was walking around and around the truck to get himself warm and awake enough to drive home. Charlene, by contrast, was steaming in her dream, trying to run a beauty shop the size of Cunningham’s department store, customers in chairs even up on the mezzanine, and the only help she had was Meg who kept asking, Charlene, tell me again what to do when they say they want the works. And working at sleep next to Charlene, in sessions that were more like naps linked together, lay Owen, perpetually trying to get somewhere on a train, but every single time the conductor came by and demanded his ticket, he could not find the thing.
• • •
Owen stood it until the Monday before Thanksgiving, when with the holiday ahead and the weekend and a couple of compensatory days off for the overtime that was owed him, he was going to be a man of leisure. None too soon, either. The recessional of the dredge fleet, off the river and into hibernation in the winter harbor, was over and done with, but after that first hard freeze and whiff of snow, the weather had turned infuriating. Persistently cold and nasty but not that cold, not enough to form meaningful ice on the Missouri River. And he badly wanted the evidence of ice, immediate thick humped-up drastic ice, to ratify the shutdown of dredging. More than evidently, so did the Corps mucketymucks. He had been tromping around overseeing the dismantling of the dredge hookups on a gusty cold afternoon (but not that cold) when a message was brought down to him from Major Santee, asking whether current conditions weatherwise warranted reconsideration of shutdown decision. Back up the hill to the Ad Building went the message with Owen’s familiar dashed penciling in the margin CONTINUE RECOMMEND SHUTDOWN BUT UTY. Up To You: Santee was one peeved marshmallow at having the decision bucked back to him that way, but he ended up not countermanding Owen on shutdown.
And since then, Owen’s work had consisted of a lot of staring down the road, so to speak. Next-year calculations to be done on piping the fill in from enough dredge-pits to keep the dam inexorably growing, and the question of how to regulate the waterlevel in the core pool which would be bigger and trickier than ever, and the guessing game of where to pick up enough added dredging output to make up for this year’s three million cubic yard shortfall. Owen by that Monday before Thanksgiving had noticed he was jiggling his knee pretty much constantly as he thought over the year that lay ahead.
Charlene was home when he reached there these days, shutting the beauty shop earlier as winter layoffs sobered Fort Peck’s expenditures. After they had kissed and she started to turn back toward making supper, his hand and arm caught her waist again. Before she could even reverse her direction, she heard:
“Maybe we better go across the mountains and have a look.”
It took her a moment to catch up.
“Live it up in Spokane, a night,” Owen was saying his way toward it. He met her eyes with his. “Then go on to Grand Coulee and see what we think.”
Excitement knocked under Charlene’s ribs. “I’ll write the Everetts, right tonight.” They’d been friends with Connie and Ev all the Bozeman years, before Ev latched on as one of the first engineers hired for Grand Coulee Dam.
“Yeah, do.” Owen hesitated. “For now, let’s just tell people here we’re taking a trip through Glacier Park before the snow really starts to fly.”
• • •
He felt they had to tell Max and Pam Sangster the truth, and she could not bring herself to up and go without saying at least something to Rosellen and therefore Neil. But otherwise that was their leave-taking of Fort Peck, few words to anyone and those less than fact. Half a dozen days ahead yet before anybody, even the rest of the Duffs, would know they had gone off to climb a fresh ladder. The two of them (mostly Charlene) worked it out that by taking all their clothes, they wouldn’t even need to come back for their other things; Rosellen and Neil could send or store whatever was wanted. A telegram from Owen to the Ad Building—COULEE JOB UNPASSABLE UP—would do the rest. The A-1 Beauty Shop could be advertised for sale, and Charlene could come back by train long enough to handle that whenever there was a taker.
So, truant from the world, they aimed themselves west toward the Rockies, swapping at the wheel of the Chevy every hour or so as the railroad towns of the High Line gazetteered away behind them, MALTA HARLEM ZURICH HAVRE KREMLIN, and the mountains slowly defined into crag and timberface and snowfield in front of them. Through Glacier National Park, the cliff-clinging curlicues of Going to the Sun highway kept Owen grinning at the ways the engineers had managed to graft the road onto the mountains, Charlene enjoying watching him at it. The night in Spokane, they made love in an auto court, feeling fantastically free to create all the rumpus they could, what with only vehicles in garage stalls on either side of their room. After sleeping in and a leisurely late start, at last they were on the plunge of the road to the Columbia River, dark with afternoon shadow. In a mile-wide gorge, amid the slate color of the riverwater, the dam at Grand Coulee was rising like a scaffolded cliff. Grand Coulee’s construction town appeared to be a diluted Wheeler, but Charlene was determined to think the best of it.
The next morning Ev Everett sneaked a job button and an inspector’s hard hat for Owen, and with them on he could prowl the huge project of concrete. He knew Grand Coulee Dam in theory, but a look around said it more strongly. Canyonwork, this was; the ends of the dam anchored into cliffs, granite bedrock at its base. The organizational lines were altogether different from Fort Peck, too; this was a Bureau of Reclamation dam, no puffed-up Kansas City colonels, majors, or captains. While Owen inspected Grand Coulee, Charlene visited two years’ worth with Connie Everett, and learned to her delight that other Bozeman couples she and Owen had lost track of, the Lowells and the Krebses, were here on this dam, too. The men came home for lunch, then Owen went off with Ev to be introduced around the Grand Coulee version of the Ad Building. Conversations there confirmed what Owen mostly had heard already, that the Columbia was on its way to becoming one massive generating device, an entire sequence of dynamo-feeding dams that could be regulated with a few flicks of a few switches. The feed of power, he was shown on charts, was potentially colossal, from the little reddened coils of toasters on a million breakfast tables on up to the new potline method of cooking up giant amounts of the light metal called aluminum. Of time and the electric river, huh, ran his thoughts. Well, maybe it is time. Hook up an entire river drainage and see what it can be made to do, maybe it is time to get in on that.
When the men returned after work, Connie and Charlene cooked rib eye steaks for supper and afterward the two couples drank beer. Close to the end of the second bottle apiece, Ev reiterated that he was positive there would be no problem in getting Owen hired on. A little dreamy with the beer, Charlene was watching out the living room window at the nighttime lattice of lights on Grand Coulee Dam, as if even the swing shift crew was helping to dim away Fort Peck. And then Owen was saying:
“We’re going back, first thing in the morning.”
• • •
The two of them lay on the Everetts’ fold-out davenport, Owen catching sleep in those chainlink naps of his while Charlene was stretched beside him stiff as a post, waiting and waiting for the night to be over. She wasn’t going to fight in whispers.
Nor did her stormiest tones make any difference on Owen, the next morning when they went out to the car.
“They’ve got this dam knocked,” he told her. “They’ll be at it for years yet, but they’ve already reached the point where they can build it like they’re reading off a grocery list. And that’s—that doesn’t feel like it fits, for me. I feel like I’d be throwing away Fort Peck.”
Well, yes; Charlene had thought that was the whole point.
“Can’t blame you for getting worked up over this.” He himself was considerably that way, she saw. “But we came and took a look, and Charlene, damned if I could see myself just stacking concrete on top of concrete. I know coming here got your hopes up. It did mine, too. But huh uh. I stood around here listening to these juice jockeys talk about how they’re going to be able to electric-up your zipper of your pants, if that’s what you want, and all I could think about was how many of those watts it would take to cure the pump lag in my poor sonofabitching overworked dredges.”
Facing around from the steering wheel to her as he was, the set of his mouth told her as much as his words; the quizzical underline he had brought to Grand Coulee was gone.
“I know it’s tough,” he said to her. “But let’s go home.”
• • •
Neil came humming home late for supper because of delivering coal, and Rosellen didn’t care, and when he kissed her she knew his nose would leave a coaldust smudge on her, and she didn’t care about that either. He headed to the washbasin to clean up and she had intended to let him get done with that and sit down for supper, but she couldn’t hold it any longer.
