Bucking the Sun, page 39
“Hey, what. You’ve got this wrong,” Bruce tried to muster. “A turn around the dancefloor is all it was.”
Darius kept on eyeing him. Couldn’t face a fact if his life depended on it. Hugh’s old failing.
• • •
Birdie Hinch nearly jumped out of his skin, and did hop down from his perch in poker table territory, when Hugh spoke up behind him.
“Birdie, I believe you have something of mine.”
Birdie rubbed at his nose with the back of his hand, taking a racoonlike peek at Hugh as he did so. “You told me don’t give it back to you, unless you was sober.”
“Sober is a relative term. Now, if you please, fork it over.”
“Stone cold sober, is what you said.”
“This is no time to turn scrupulous, man.” Hugh stepped closer, teetered over him. His face was nearly in Birdie’s. Breath like a brewery on overtime. Birdie bit a lip uneasily.
“Birdie, that money.” Hugh was frowning, considerably at himself for asking back the safekeeping sum, the half that was left of Darius’s payoff to him; but preponderantly at Birdie, righteous little banker all of a sudden. “I need it. Right now. Let’s go, wherever you’ve stashed it.”
When Birdie Hinch did not move, Hugh’s control went. “Damn it!” he burst out. “Don’t make me give you a knuckie sandwich! My money, go get—”
“Two can fight, Hugh.” Birdie swiftly kneed the taller man in the groin, then turned and ran.
“Whu—!” Hugh let out, half doubled over. Birdie hadn’t laid into him very hard, but it didn’t take much there.
He stayed hunched a moment, until fury overcame his hurt. Still clutching himself, he slowly leaned back and craned as high as he could, to catch sight of the fleeing back of Birdie as it appeared and disappeared through the maze of people in the Wheeler Inn. Birdie was squirming through the outer edge of the crowd, nearly to the door, as Hugh took out after him.
• • •
“—didn’t mean anything by it, that’s the way people dance,” Bruce was saying.
“—not accusing you of anything, merely informing you for your own health,” Darius was saying.
• • •
“If it isn’t my horseshoe honey.” Proxy gave Birdie the little tickle in the ribs reserved for regular customers. “Look, I’m real sorry, Oklahoma, but tonight has gotten kind of busy.”
“This ain’t about that,” Birdie rattled out. Although he sorely wished it was. “Hugh is on a tear. Somebody better do something about him besides me.” Birdie’s words were still in the air as he ducked back into the Blue Eagle crowd and wove for the back door.
• • •
Hugh swayed in the front doorway, still fumbling at his pants. He’d had to pause at the alley to take a leak, dimly relieved that he still could. Now he sorted the sardined clientele of the Blue Eagle for Birdie. His inspection, though, caught on a piece of headgear visible just above the others at the bar. That Dutch-boy cap of Darius’s, or whatever it was.
Everybody I know is sartorial but me, a great pity toward himself came over Hugh. Birdie forgotten, he lunged off toward the bar and the cap and Darius.
• • •
“—if that’s the way you feel about it,” Bruce was sounding hurt.
“—the only way there is to feel about it,” Darius was sounding grim, “so the next time you think you can play twinkletoes with—”
“The two of you better quit feeling around,” Proxy broke in, “and get the net out for— Speak of the devil.”
“With the tongues of men and of angels, and cymbals and tinkles and such, eh?” Hugh barged in to the bunch, proud to declaim with the best of them. Old Ninian Duff and the Reverend Neverless Milne, between the two of them hadn’t they done the guts out of half a dozen Bibles? Family line. It always told. Which brought Hugh’s thoughts around to Bruce, unexpectedly present. “Where’s Jackie? Why’re’nt you home?”
“Mother’s taking care of him, don’t goddamn worry yourself about that,” Bruce fumed. “She can take a crack at you next.”
“In due course,” his father granted, giving him a tragic wink.
Darius, who himself had been putting away drinks like a camel this evening, looked perplexed at the load Hugh had on. “Hugh,” he asked in wonder, “do you tamp it into yourself?”
By now Hugh had focused onto Proxy. His head nodding in grave consideration, he asked as though concerned:
“And how’re tricks, Proxy?”
“Hey, farmer.” As she spoke it, it amounted to a summons to etiquette. “The last I heard, it doesn’t cost anything to be civil.”
Hugh looked surprised, gallantly wounded, and sly all at once. Darius was about to say that they had all had enough of an evening when Bruce beat him to it. “Come on, Dad, FDR is probably already in bed, let’s us—”
“The election!” Hugh exclaimed, remembering. “Darius, you’ve ever been quite a follower of politics, haven’t you. Always trying to make new britches out of old curtains, back there at the Clydeside? Tell us, as a connoisseur of things political. What’d you think of the election?”
“Unk is in mourning,” Bruce could not resist.
“No!” Hugh let out, all amazement. “Do you suppose the big bugs conspired at things again, Darius?” Hugh brought his right thumb up to eye level, looked at it with fixation, then tapped the pad of it significantly with his opposite forefinger. “As the moron said over the empty mustard jar, ‘This has all the fingerprints of a hidden hand.’ ”
“Hugh, you—” Darius grabbed out at his brother.
“What’s going on here?” a new voice shouldered in. “Been getting reports you people are about at each other’s throats.”
The undersheriff, Peyser, was big enough to obtain the immediate attention of even Hugh.
“Eh, the harness bull of justice! Watch out now, miscreants. Officer, sir, I wish to report a matter of considerable missing mon—”
“Hush, Hugh.” Darius forced a smile at Peyser and squeezed the back of Hugh’s neck as hard as he could with one hand.
Bruce, blinking a mile a minute at the sudden lawman, stepped in close on the other side, where his father stood wobbling. Proxy, the only one in the bunch who appeared to Peyser to be in a sane condition, was pursed up like a radish tester.
In the background, Peyser saw Tom Harry throw up his hands and stalk off to the farthest end of the saloon.
Shifting his weight, the undersheriff studied this collection of Duffs, then glanced over his shoulder. Sheriff Kinnick himself was in town tonight, trying to hold the lid on Wheeler. The sheriff was working one side of the street while Peyser was supposed to be laying down the law to the other. These rangutangs know how to celebrate, so a certain amount of bottle behavior we just have to put up with, Kinnick had enunciated the night’s policy. But whenever any of them reach the fuck-you stage, that’s it. Toss them in the cooler. On the other hand, the sheriff wasn’t the one who had to live in the same town with these Blue Eagle hammerheads.
“You going to take him home and hang him out to dry,” Peyser finally rumbled, “or do I have to?”
“We’re about to have the matter in hand,” Darius said quickly, “are we not, Bruce.”
“Sure are,” the younger man brazened. Peyser looked at him narrowly; he’d thought this was the trucker one, Neil, but no, it was the former madcap motorcyclist. With great obviousness Bruce was gripping his father’s arm energetically. “Else what’s a family for, huh, Dad?”
Hugh glared straight ahead at the undersheriff. “WHERE’S MY MONEY, YOU TIN-STAR FUCKAROON?” he bellowed.
Peyser warily considered him, meanwhile putting a hand in his back pocket where he carried handcuffs. The guy really was as pie-eyed as a boiled owl. The undersheriff looked from the drunken one to the twitchy set on either side of him; Peyser would have felt a lot better about this if the high-powered bigwig Duff from the dam, Owen, was around.
“They can handle it, Norm,” Proxy spoke up, not quite sure why she bothered. “Honest.”
“They better. That sheriff of mine would just as soon billyclub a specimen like this as look at him.”
“We’re on our way,” Darius vowed. “After you, constable.”
Proxy, though, was the first to move in the wake of the big undersheriff. “Tom is going to cream his jeans if I don’t get back on the dance line right now. Nighty-night, all,” she left them with, one last pang to Bruce.
“If I help you steer him out of here, can you handle him home, do you think?” Darius asked as though thinking might be a new event for Bruce.
“You bet,” Bruce maintained, stonily meeting his uncle’s eyes.
Stepping around to start breaking a trail to the door, Darius glimpsed the open gap at the front of Hugh’s pants. “Damn it, man, you’re unbuttoned. You’ll get us all arrested yet for letting your steed out of your barn.”
“Eh?”
Darius let out a royal sigh. “Here, I’ll do you up.” He moved close in front of Hugh to shield the doing of it and began to button Hugh’s fly.
Hugh swayed, then rasped out:
“Aren’t you the clever whore, too.”
Bruce froze, figuring this was it, Duff blood was about to cascade.
Darius’s hands stopped, then did up the last button of Hugh’s fly. As he stepped back from his brother his voice shook but he managed to say: “Better go home with the boy now, Hugh. You’ve had a mouthful more than you should’ve.”
• • •
In the morning he met himself in the mirror and backed away. If beauty was skin-deep, Hugh Duff had definitely been skinned. Even his reflection looked shaky, and his facial color was off, except where it streaked like peppermint in his eyeballs.
Never given to easy confessions, even Hugh had to admit this was beyond dismal. The record for morning-after heebie-jeebies. Reluctantly he tried running his tongue around the inside of his cottony mouth, only half-hearing what Meg was telling him from the other side of the kitchen until he caught the words cannot stand to be under the same roof anymore, when you are as you were last night. Hugh. Hugh, I am going to have to leave—
“That won’t be necessary, Margaret. I’ll go.”
“You?” Meg erupted. “You? Where is there for you to go?”
He turned around to her, her outburst stoppered at the sight of his face. Hugh had a look on him she had not fully seen since his days of courting her in Inverley.
• • •
Owen was as incredulous as she had been.
“He took off out of here just like that? Where the hell to?”
His mother deliberately looked away from him before she answered:
“He said to tell you he’s gone to college.”
• • •
The jag boss searched his suitcase, then the chest of drawers, then under the mattress, for the third morning in a row.
Hugh watched him, melancholy for them both. Since the jag boss, a thickset back-of-the-Yards Chicagoan named O’Shea, stayed with him day and night, when exactly could Hugh have conjured alcohol into the room? Hugh all too well knew he had another twenty-five days ahead here at the Carteret Curative Institute, but O’Shea evidently was here for all time, inspector general of the satchels of drunks.
“Clean as an angel’s drawers,” Hugh’s keeper announced, also for the third morning in a row. He cocked his ear to the sound of the cart in the hallway. “And here comes your slug of concrete.”
Hugh wasn’t saying much. The heavy gray concoction, which had to be taken every two hours, tasted like bad whiskey, hot malted milk, and chalk. It crossed his mind that not even Darius’s money, soberly beseeched out of Birdie Hinch for absolutely this purpose, could buy flavor here.
In subsequent days Hugh Duff went through moods he hadn’t known were in him. He jumped O’Shea the fifth morning—the relentless cleanliness of angel’s drawers no doubt accounted for it—and after O’Shea pinned him and then stepped back with a grin, Hugh realized where he stood. Christ, man, he could’ve cleaned your clock six ways to Sunday. Watching his behavior from then on, Hugh without a stumble advanced to shots in the arm, hypodermics of pink something or other, and onward to jiggers of the nasty yellow goop which was the Carteret secret remedy; all of it dope of some kind, he figured, but he didn’t care as long as it did the job on him. Outside the Institute windows, Chicago blared in the night. After the first week the jag boss was gone; in his place, dollops of wax which could be used to plug the ears if North Rush Street sang too temptingly. The Carteret philosophy prided itself on going hard on hardcase drinkers: this is the belly of the booze beast, this is Jonah’s bed in the whale, and you had better lay stretched there scared and sober in the dark to make yourself know you can survive it. Hugh ingested on schedule, sat up straight in the Amen Corner sessions every afternoon along with meatpacking heirs and Southern cotton traders. After two weeks of this, the blessed midpoint, he was granted permission to go out to a movie with the other inmates who had been toeing the line. With a corporal’s guard of O’Shea and a couple of orderlies, they trooped around the corner to the Windsor Theatre. To the bafflement of the other moviegoers, at nine o’clock sharp, fifty men simultaneously took out little vials and drank them in one toss, their community gulp of the Carteret cure.
• • •
When the first issue of the magazine reached him by somebody slyly shoving it along the counter of the Downtowner Cafe in Glasgow, the sheriff had a heart-stopping moment over the opening frieze-photo of taxi dancers and damworkers draped over one another and the big black-type underline 10,000 MONTANA RELIEF WORKERS MAKE WHOOPEE ON SATURDAY NIGHT. Then he remembered he’d just been safely reelected for the next four years.
Even so, Carl Kinnick felt as though he was being scrubbed down with gravel as he flipped his way through the magazine piece. Cowless cow towns—rickety as git-up-and-git—saloons wide open—all-night whooperies—taxi dancers lope around with their fares in something halfway between the old barroom stomp and the lackadaisical stroll of the college boys at Roseland—Red Light suburb—the only idle bedsprings are the broken ones—Franklin Roosevelt has a Wild West—
That last one, Wild West, the magazine smart alecks managed to use seven times in nine pages, by the sheriff’s fuming tally. On the other hand, they counted up only six shantytowns for Fort Peck, missing the actual total by ten or so.
Sheriff Kinnick sat there not knowing what to think, looking at the dead-accurate pictures (including the one of some anonymous blonde number tossing down a drink under that damned FDR campaign poster in the Blue Eagle) and the haywire lingo, until he turned to the very front of the magazine. There the editors announced that in sending their camera eye to explore this exciting time in history that would be known as the American century, they were presenting Fort Peck Dam on the cover. Although it wasn’t. The structure pictured, looking like the kind of massive parapet Mussolini would love to strut on while he made speeches, was the concrete piers of the spillway gates, three miles away from the actual dirt dam. This, said the editors and the cover of the new magazine, was LIFE. Well, maybe.
The truth is not in that woman. Meg, masked with I-am-after-all-a-Milne-of-Inverley manners, watched as Proxy held the attention of Hugh and Darius and even Owen and apparently even Charlene.
Although, really, it must be—she doesn’t expend any of it when she talks.
“. . . but that’s how those dance marathons are,” Proxy concluded with a flourish, looking around the Sunday dinner table at them all. “Real long.” This latest story had been about the time in Hibbing, Minnesota, when she and her partner danced for so many hours straight that the contest judges gave up and paid them to quit.
“You’ve got more constitution than I have, then,” Charlene said as if comparing histories. “I’d have perished of boredom first, Prox.”
“Just in case any of us take up marathon dancing, what did you do to keep yourself occupied?” Owen prodded Proxy along some more. He always liked to see how far out on a limb she would let herself get, when she started storying.
“Umm, nothing worth mentioning,” was all he could draw out of her, though. Proxy tried to watch her step where Owen was concerned—after all, who in her right mind would want to cross tomahawks with Charlene?
“Spent the time reading the Good Book, naturally,” Darius interposed.
“You’re one to talk,” that brought him from Hugh. “You’d have parroted poetry the whole while.”
“That reminds me,” Proxy sailed on again, “do you know this one?” Prim as a spelling-bee contestant, she reeled off:
“She offered her honor,
He honored her offer;
And so all night long,
it was on ’er and off ’er.”
Charlene giggled at that more than Owen thought was strictly deserved, but then he let loose a laugh, too. Hugh and Darius gave their indecipherable chuckles, so close to identical. Meg pasted on what she was pretty sure was the last Sunday-best smile in her and reminded herself that she had a full week ahead to get over Proxy before they all went through this again. For the benefit of Hugh, which was to say in the furtherance of his Carteret cure, she had enlisted Darius and Owen and Charlene for these round-robins of what amounted to sentry duty, and that meant putting up with Proxy, bag of yarn that she is. Meg fiddled with her spoon and then her fork and listened to the January freshet of wind in the kitchen stovepipe as the others razzed Proxy’s taste in poetry.
So, happy 1937, Hugh Carlyle Duff. Year one of your Reform Act. When we shall see whether the mend holds. For now, she would shoo them all into the Blue Room and follow up with more coffee and poundcake, whenever Proxy shut up.
She thinks she is somebody, Proxy retaliated against the fidgets of Meg’s fork and spoon. Face it though, Prox, there had to have been a time back in that thistle patch they’re all from when she could have had her pick of Hugh or Darius. So maybe she is.
Janus is the two-faced god, and while Kate could not have specifically told you that, she knew all about the fickle behavior of his namesake month. Snow and blow, clear away and then gray, with mocking icicle grins hung on the Rondola’s eaves—this was January for you. Every start of every year of her life had taken place in such weather, Fort Peck weather, and Bruce’s talk of Louisiana and California notwithstanding, anywhere with a sunshine coast and warm water to be dived, she would not be surprised to find herself still here when the next ice age came by. Although, she did mention to herself in this mood, there were women who punched their own tickets in life, got themselves to elsewhere; Proxy was well traveled, you could say that for her in more ways than one.
