Bucking the Sun, page 33
“Early, at least,” he gave her, overdignified as always when he’d had a few.
She decided to risk it. There weren’t even the makings for breakfast in the house and besides, now it seemed safe enough to cash her paycheck at the grocery store, with Hugh off his prowl. “I need to run to the store. Quick and back.”
“The coast is clear now, Meg, eh? All along the shores of Bohemia.”
Maybe he was not quite as sober as he looked. “Hugh, understand me. Jackie is asleep. Can you take care of him for just a few minutes, or can you not? Are you—feeling all right?”
“Margaret, woman, I am perfectly capable of minding my own grandson,” he asserted.
“I’ll be no time,” she told him.
But coming home, from two streets away she could hear Jackie squalling, and hastened toward the house to comfort him and afflict Hugh.
I will beat on him unmercifully, she vowed, I will throw him piecemeal into the street. If he has let harm come to that child—
Before she could yank the screen door open, Hugh’s voice came, and the sound of him walking a slow back-and-forth as he had done when the crying baby he held was named Owen or Neil or Bruce.
“Where begin and where end, Jackiejack. Here you are already, the next Duff, while those of us so far barely know how to breathe circles on a looking glass. Were I you, Jack, I’d be bawling all the time about this crew you’ve come into, I would.” The child obliged with a screech of Eaahh! “Yes, yes, yes, that’s the boy. Cry it out.” Jackie’s bawling began to lessen as Hugh soothingly talked on. “You’ve a grandfather, myself here, who’s had practice at being a thorough fool. Did you know that yet, Jack? And your father is something of the same, and vulcanized and underwater about it to boot. We have to hope he’ll stay in one piece long enough to bring you up. Your mother, by some wild accident, is at least somewhere in the neighborhood of common sense. Whether Kate as Momma will outweigh the rest of this family, we shall have to see, Jack my man. You’ve one aunt who’s as sharp as a pinch, and an aunt and an uncle who think motion must be progress. Then there’s your grand-uncle, who in a wild-ass way chases after the wrongs of the world. Not that the world doesn’t need chasing. And we’ve taken into the family, or she us, your great-aunt Proxy. An approximate—how should we say, Jack? Dancing doxy, foxy dancer? Your Aunty Proxy will give you tales to tell in your old age, Jack lad.” Hugh’s pacing and the little patting sound on Jack were the only sounds for a few seconds, and then the murmuring of the child and Hugh’s musing again. “The only one of us making a real go of it is your uncle who knows how to stop up rivers. Just now the world thinks that’s something that needs doing, and so here we be, Jack, the lot of us dabbing away at Owen’s great dam. Ah now, right you are, to squall over that.” As Meg reached for the handle of the screen door again, she heard: “Your grandmother, did I think to mention, Jackie? Your grandmother I am still trying to figure out after battalions of years.”
It was pith helmet summer at Fort Peck now, too hot for hats. All those, including the five male Duffs, who hooted at the light bowl-brimmed headpieces the first day the Corps officers sported them were fervently wearing them by the end of the first week of swelter. Shirts off, torsos oiled with sweat, ten thousand men, the most ever on an American dam, clambered in and out of the diversion tunnels and across the trench floor of the spillway and along the serpentine miles of dredgelines and everywhere on the sloped face of the damfill as if it were Tut’s tomb. There were groans throughout the Ad Building when Major Santee won the office pool on how far the mercury in the thermometer traveled up and down at Fort Peck that year: 175 degrees, from February’s 61 below to July’s 114 above. Another record, naturally.
• • •
Jaarala, baggy-eyed as if he was at the end of a long choring day instead of just beginning one, came by for Darius on Saturday with the latest poker-induced loan of a vehicle, this one an olive-green Nash which bore a distinct resemblance to a tortoise. They set off for Plentywood with Jaarala’s serene foot on the accelerator.
Coarse weather again. The sun like a ladle of molten steel swinging over them the next many hours. The big car’s wing windows drew in hot moving air in place of the one other choice, hot motionless air. Wincing constantly against the road glare and the rush of air like convection off a stovetop, Darius understood why Americans are a squinting race.
Out of nowhere, which was to say the interminable equator of highway beyond Wolf Point, Jaarala imparted:
“We’ll maybe get the goddamn bastards this time.”
Darius’s eyelids, half-drawn shades, opened for business. Evidently 1936 was going to be the year Jaarala had something to say.
“There’s a bin of them to be got,” Darius responded. “That’s certain.”
Jaarala nodded a fraction. “Their time is about goddamn up. People are gonna catch on that the bastards who been running things run it all for theirselves.”
“How far up the slate do you think there’s any hope?” Darius took the chance to ask. As best he could tell, the election that coming autumn extended from thimble inspector to Roosevelt, that mountain of cork. In such universal running for office, Lawrence Mott taking control of a county would be one thing, but for the CPUSA to make a broader showing would be monumentally another.
“That I can’t really say,” Jaarala answered slowly. “So goddamn many people think it’s only a matter of who talks the slickest.”
“There’s a color of truth to that, Tim.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily say so. Mott at least bow-wows in the right direction. That’s pretty much where we need to start from, don’t we?”
And go where. Up the teetertotter on thesis and down on antithesis, and sweetly level on synthesis. And then deciphering that, the map to the dialectical holy land, past Marx’s desk and out onto the cobblestones with Sorel and by way of the Clydeside, where I put in a soldier’s years, and across here to the timberbeast camps where you slaved, Tim. And how far have we come? The movement is stacked up with bloody apparatus in Russia, and it’s being warred on in Spain, and in this America when we back a Mott we have to call him a Fusion candidate. But against is at least a direction of some sort, isn’t it, Tim. We do this against the bastards who own and run it all. How dare they. How goddamn dare they, in your terms, Tim. Push comes to shove, someday. We’re to help it come, aren’t we . . .
“Are things okay with you?” Jaarala had turned his head from the road to look at him in concern.
Darius ran a hand over his eyes. “The weather’s a bit on my nerves. Montana doesn’t seem to have seasons, merely Hot and Cold.”
• • •
Peter Stapfer was nervous without his Hutterite cap, new as he was at putting together enough of a fib to explain where it had gone.
Clad in communal black, knowing he was as obvious as an overgrown crow in this strange town, he hastened back toward the vegetable truck, the two younger men from the Colony peering fretfully down the main street to see what had become of him. Ears of sweetcorn, tomatoes, cabbages, snapbeans and peas in the pod lay boxed, each lovely in its row, in the back of the Studebaker truck, and a barrage of customers impatiently milled around waiting to buy. Peter was the bearded one in charge of this venture, the vegetable boss of the Frenchman River Colony, and in the Hutterite way of doing things he alone would handle the money here. He knew he also had to be the firm example of how the Colony, one of the communes born of Anabaptism in Moravia many generations ago, could deal with the outside world and yet not be of it; could stand under God’s wing but go forth with their wares; each of the younger Hutterites had been along on selling trips to Saskatchewan towns such as Shaunavon and Swift Current, but they had never seen anything like Wheeler, Montana.
Peter Stapfer ostensibly had gone into the Blue Eagle Tavern to get American money for making change, in the vegetable selling.
“Excuse me. I haf Canadian money.” He held up the much-folded little batch of bills the Colony boss had entrusted him with for this trip. “Can I gif it you, for United States?”
Tom Harry studied the black-trigged man who looked scared as a caught kid, in spite of the beginnings of gray in that chinline beard on him.
“Don’t see why not,” he muttered finally. “We need some of the Canadian dinero every so often.” He took the bills the man thrust at him and started for the cash register, then turned back. “What are you, fellow, House of David?”
“N-no,” Peter Stapfer said unsurely. “Hutterite. Our kommune—our colony iss in Saskatchewan.”
As the saloon proprietor resumed his way to the cash register, Peter Stapfer became aware of the woman whose hair reminded him of cornsilk and whose blouse knew neither shame nor restraint. She was boldly sizing him up and down, in a way he would not ever dare to with her, and her gaze seemed to be lingering in a vicinity unexpected to him, the top of his head.
“Spiffy cap,” the woman was saying, right to him. “Where do you get one like that?”
“Ve . . . ve make them. All our wear, clothing, iss our own hand.”
“I know somebody who’s got just the head for one of those,” Proxy decided with a wicked grin. “I’ll buy yours from you, Jasper, how about.”
Peter Stapfer’s heart nearly stopped then and there. He had hoped for this very thing, although the cap was not what he had meant to part with. Down his right pantleg, from his waist into his boot, was hidden one of the short stock whips made at the Colony. Cattle ranchers prized them for their handiness in the shipping pens, and Peter Stapfer had intended to bargain the whip for what he wanted. But no one in this house of Hell resembled a cattle rancher.
Indeed, the saloon proprietor now made mockery by calling down the bar to the woman: “Jiminy Christmas, Shannon, you gonna get religion next?”
“Tom, blow it out your—” Proxy veered, but then came back to business. “Come on, fellow, how much are you asking for that cap?”
Peter faced the woman and managed to utter:
“Money iss . . . no use to me.”
Proxy returned his look with a mixture of resignation and scorn. “Sure. I ought’ve known. Another Holy Joe who wants to take sin out in trade. All right, deacon, you can come have your little diddle. Let’s go. But that better be a good cap.”
As he grasped what the woman meant, Peter Stapfer blushed to his heels.
“No! No, not . . . that.”
He cast a glance over his shoulder, worried that one of the younger men would come searching for him and find him talking to this Jezebel. “I gif you the cap for a picture.” He spun his hands in search of the fuller word. “Photograph.”
“What of?” Proxy asked, eyes sharply narrowed.
“Me. To haf.”
“That’s all you want? Just your picture taken?”
Peter Stapfer bobbed his head.
“Just a picture of yourself,” Proxy made doubly sure, “not of us doing—any funny business.”
The man bobbed and blushed some more. Proxy called out, “Tom. Let me borrow your Brownie a minute.”
“I must trust you,” Peter Stapfer said to her rapidly. “The Colony, they cannot know of this. Ve do not . . . haf such things, images, photographs. Mail it, please, in this.” He thrust at her a seed company envelope of the sort that came to him as vegetable boss of the Colony.
Nodding slowly, Proxy took it from him.
Minutes later, completing his hurried return to the vegetable truck, Peter Stapfer panted up to the pair of younger Hutterites awaiting him. He gestured to his bare head. “They are thiefs, here.”
There. He had not actually said his cap was stolen, and among this awful collection of people surely must be some who qualified as thieves.
The younger men did not even seem to notice. They were asking Peter Stapfer in frantic German if now they could begin selling the summer’s vegetables.
• • •
Returning from Plentywood, Darius eased open the door of the houseboat so as not to break Proxy’s sleep.
He immediately saw he needn’t have bothered.
In the lamplight Proxy was sitting up in bed, on top of the covers, stone naked except for the cap on her head.
“Got something for you,” she greeted him, her smile at its crooked best.
Darius blinked it all in, only a little red star lacking above the blunt proletarian brim of the cap. Although Lenin likely never wore his like this.
Darius’s smile now was at its utmost, too.
“Yes, I see that,” he said, going to her. “And a cap as well.”
• • •
The decompression chamber was the one thing about diving that Bruce had never liked, but that was before today. Today he lay in it gratefully and more than a little scared.
Other times, only a few, he’d asked for the chamber more as a precaution, whenever the ascent back to the barge didn’t feel quite right. At only river depths, the bends weren’t supposed to be much of a problem. This time, though, blooey. He’d been tightening a big hex nut on a braceplate forty feet down when the next thing he knew he was wondering what the wrench was for in his vulcanized gloved hands and the barge boss Taine was in the midst of a conversation with him on the helmet squawk box and when he casually said he was feeling a little woozy, Taine fished him up in careful stages and clapped him into the chamber.
What spooked Bruce was that missing time, between when he was nicely going about his business with the wrench and waking up, so to speak, in midyarn with Taine. Hadn’t happened before. Alertness was always what happened to him there under the river. In the diving suit he felt as if he was at last wearing life; as if existence had come and found him and wrapped itself plumply around him. The top moments of motorcycle speed, sure, they’d been fine; but the transformed gait beneath the river, where he went along as solemn as one of those old pharaohs, that suited him so much better. According to how the river was running, leisurely and normal or fast with runoff, he might be weighted with as little as twenty pounds of lead or as much as eighty. Bruce would never have thought so beforehand, but the eighty-pound days were the ones he especially liked, the surge of the river meeting him strong and tricky as he descended from the diving barge and made his way down to affix a brace on a piling. Then the rooted feeling, from his fifteen-pound shoes and the lead weights on the belt of the diving suit; the calm, contained view out the circle eye of the helmet; he couldn’t have invented it better himself. The only hard part was the time limit, only two hours of diving work allowed and then two hours of bunktime in the barge cabin, gathering strength again. Or as now, in the decompression chamber, letting the effect of the river work out of his bloodstream. Lying here this long, he was pretty sure he was getting over being scared, but he still was curious. Those moments that went missing; he wondered where they go.
Another day, another surprise out of Proxy. When Darius got off work and came home to the houseboat to burn himself some supper, she was still there instead of at the Blue Eagle. More precisely, she had set up shop at the table, operating a little hand-machine which took cigarette papers and loose tobacco and rolled them into cigarettes. The American genius for perfecting the trivial never ceased to astonish Darius.
“Tom’s giving me his Durham sacks these days if I roll him his cigarettes,” Proxy said, sounding quite pleased with the deal.
“Generous Tom,” Darius restricted himself to, not wanting to be drawn deeper into the topic of Bull Durham sacks and their contents. He was about to start rummaging for supper when he saw that Proxy had something more on her mind.
“One of those spitshine Army birds was just here.”
“Ah? Wanting what?”
“Us out of here.”
“Out . . . what, off this—?” Darius’s words stumbled. “Off this houseboat? But we live here! It’s ours!”
“Houseboat and all, they want gone.” Proxy concentrated on her cigarette rolling. “Moving a dredge in. They’re going to take this whole part of the riverbank.”
“But I quite like this vessel of ours.” Darius sank into a chair across the table from her and the cigarette makings.
“Somehow I don’t think that matters a smidge to the Army birds, Darius.”
He passed a hand over his face. He tried to imagine how it would be, living in one of the shantytowns. His comings and goings would be evident; the feel of being watched, nosed at. Whatever living quarters they could find, likely to be no better than that hovel Meg and Hugh were in. “Proxy, I’m not sure I can—”
“Could be fun,” she cut him off, “when you think about it.”
He stared across the houseboat at her.
“Anybody can make a boat rock on water,” she said. “How are you at getting one going on dry land?”
• • •
The bulldozer crew foreman Vern Bantry glowered at the quintet of Duffs. Any of the four restlessly ranked behind Owen he would not have lent a rollerskate to, let alone a bulldozer. Owen the fillmaster was a considerably other matter, though. But even so . . .
“Does it really have to be one of my D-10s?” Bantry demanded.
“Afraid so,” Owen tried answering minimally. When Bantry kept eyeing him, Owen provided: “We’ve got something we need to move and it’s going to take a sonofabitching lot of pulling power.”
Bantry looked twice as suspicious now. “What’s the something?”
“It’s nothing anywhere on the project,” Owen assured him and mentally added unless you include the river.
Bantry was back down to merely skeptical. “A D-10 Cat doesn’t run itself. Who’s your catskinner here?”
“I—” Bruce brightly started to speak up for himself.
“No,” Bantry declared.
“Neil can operate it,” Owen said fast.
The dozer foreman ignored the rest of them and told Owen, “Get it back here by next shift or they’ll fire all our asses.” Then thought a moment and amended, “Fire and jail all our asses.”
• • •
The ten-cylindered Caterpillar bulldozer, Neil proudly at the levers, detached itself from the turmoil of earthmoving at the upstream face of the dam and like a stupendous bumblebee began lurching along the west bank of the Missouri.
