Bucking the Sun, page 43
Something moved, whirled, at the corner of the sheriff’s vision, and he twisted in that direction with his hand on his gun butt. Tornado of pigeons, scared up from the grain elevator on the other side of the railroad tracks. Nerves. The sheriff wished he didn’t have any.
One more patriotic blast the Glasgow high school Kiltie band now let loose with, red-kneed in the October wind. The crowd had been gathering for hours, the street behind the depot solid with people across to the Goodkind Block and all the way down to the Coleman Hotel, and wouldn’t you know there’d be at least one, some smart-aleck Caruso at the front of the throng warbling out a popular mock version:
“My country ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of Franklin D.,
next thing to king!
Won’t you please run again,
Third term for fun again . . . ”
The serenade did not actually constitute disturbance of the peace—hell, the peace was already disturbed by the President himself—so the sheriff folded his arms and turned around to reconnoiter the trackside situation again. The delegations wanting this or that had been busily trooping through the presidential Pullman, and the schedule pretty quick called for Roosevelt to emerge onto the rear platform to smile and wave at the crowd, then descend into the open touring car for the drive to the dam. About time, the sheriff told himself as he was given the high sign by McIntyre, the President’s secretary, to step up into the Pullman with the final delegation of supplicants.
In there, the presidential parlor car was surprisingly old-fangled. Velvety. Kind of musty, to tell the truth. Not that Carl Kinnick was there to sightsee. He knew from the ’34 visit that the presidential rail quarters would be chockful of important hands to be shaken, and he first of all made sure of Governor Ayers’s and Senator Murray’s and Congressman O’Connell’s and then merely shook whosever until it came his turn at the President’s. Giving the sheriff the most famous smile this side of the man in the moon, Roosevelt assured him how perfectly delightful it was to be in Glasgow once more.
Even the FDR handshake—the master campaigner’s proffer of just-enough: this much touch of my flesh shall ye have, and not a pore more—provoked the sheriff, as he stepped back to watch the political menagerie in here sort itself out. Conspicuous by his absence this time was Senator Wheeler, who by now was at odds with the President for the New Deal having veered so far to the left. Here and appearing thoroughly unhappy about it was Congressman O’Connell, who appeared to suspect that Roosevelt didn’t know where real left was located. The thought of FDR dainty-handing his way through the whole damned national picture like this, maybe even for another term after this one, was just about more than Carl Kinnick cared to look ahead at.
Right now, though, the local officeholders were going to be accorded the privilege of following FDR out onto the train’s rear platform so their constituents could view them in the presidential presence. Roosevelt had to be got onto his feet. The sheriff was determined not to miss this. He forged his way around the end of the milling group of aides and politicos in the Pullman so he would have the clearest possible shot at seeing. A Secret Service agent scrutinized him sharply, then evidently decided this was only a short man’s natural behavior.
From the waist up, Roosevelt there in his chair was monumental. Even his head seemed sizes larger than anyone else’s. Commensurate shoulders and chest. The sheriff knew the story, how Roosevelt swam, swam, swam after polio hit him. All that work in the water and the exertion of the wheelchair had built him a torso that would have done a lumberjack proud.
The legs, though.
Even to the unsympathetic sheriff it appeared pitiful and painful, Roosevelt’s ritual of going clenched from the jaw on down, gearing himself for the lurch upward so the metal leg braces could be locked to hold him in a standing position, his son James there on his left, his weak side, to provide firm tensed biceps he could grip onto, now the President of the United States grunting himself ready, then the actual massive tottering rise like—
The sheriff didn’t know like what, but it was damn sure unforgettable.
• • •
The town of Wheeler, democratic and Democratic, antic and frantic, was boiling over for Roosevelt.
Cheers sang out at the approach of the motorcade of the President who put the country back to work, who provided a wage to those whose pockets had been emptied by the Depression, and, not incidentally, who reopened the nation’s saloons. Theoretically the damwork was going on uninterrupted until FDR’s big speech upon leaving Fort Peck, but somehow there were crews, complete with foremen, who saw the President from vantage points such as the Wheeler Inn and the Blue Eagle as well as from the jobsite later on. Toddlers and taxi dancers and cardsharps and Corps wives in their Sunday best jammed in next to the damworkers on the board sidewalks. When at last it arrived in the procession, the open touring car gave them their money’s worth, the confident presidential smile and wave as Roosevelt was borne along the main street of Wheeler until the motorcade proceeded, naturally, to Delano Heights.
• • •
Back in the jampacked Blue Eagle, a patron shouted out: “How about a free round in honor of the President?”
“How about go screw yourself,” Tom Harry replied from the busy cash register.
• • •
As the motorcade wound down the ridge to the dam, the sheriff in the follow-car behind the President’s brooded ahead. Not that Franklin D. himself seemed to have a care in the world, jovially letting his ear be bent by Colonel Parmenter in the jump seat or the governor or the senator alongside him on the big backseat. The man truly did possess the ultimate politician’s knack of appearing interested in every gopher hole and dandelion.
All Carl Kinnick could think about was what could go wrong, here in his county, as the rajah of the Hudson River was shown the conquered Missouri, transported across the great earthfill, shown the entire sprawling dam project from the overlook on the east abutment, then driven up into the hills to the spillway and at last to the spur railroad where the special train had been brought around for the presidential speechmaking.
The sheriff’s heart, or at least the place where he pinned his badge, sank as the speaking site and the winter harbor parking lot grew into view. There and waiting were thousands. Thousands of cars, to only start the matter off; the intermittent sun caroming off all those windshields, the dazzle of vehicles looked like the mass lot at Ford’s Rouge River plant. And it didn’t take much figuring of how many people would have piled into each car to come to this and then adding on, what, ten thousand damworkers already swarming around here—Sheriff Kinnick knew this was going to be even worse than his worst dream of it.
The sheriff hopped out fast when the motorcade pulled up alongside the special train. He spotted his undersheriff Peyser, a head taller than the rest of the cordon at the back end of the train. Cussing his way through the crowd, the sheriff wriggled in to make sure Peyser was doing what he was supposed to, keep an eye on the radio guys who were putting up microphones on tall stands to catch the President’s speech from the train’s rear platform.
“How you doing, Carl,” the undersheriff placidly greeted him.
Sheriff Kinnick scowled at the poker-faced Peyser in return, then stared up through the grillwork of the rear platform to where the hen herd of politicians was forming up around Roosevelt and his microphones.
What if somebody took a shot here at Roosevelt the way that crackpot did back East in ’33?
The sheriff was no connoisseur of history, but he knew a lot about blame. Oh, sure, the gunman there in ’33 potted the Chicago mayor right next to FDR instead. But people in Montana were good shots. No, if the President—particularly this President—was killed in Carl Kinnick’s county, that would be it for his career as sheriff. He’d might as well go pick grit with the chickens, if that happened.
And unfortunately he could think of just countless ways it could happen. Somebody mad about being let go from his job at the dam. Some liquored-up bottomlander who was sore about losing his land to the dam. Some Republican driven nuts by the New Deal. Some Communist; you never knew what that bughouse bunch was up to, but the report was that they hated FDR for keeping the country from going far enough to the left; incredible to the sheriff.
Or some woman. So far as he knew, women hadn’t taken their turn yet at assassinating. (Congressman O’Connell’s young knockout of a wife, prettily stationed right up there at the presidential elbow. Beauty turned beast, bango. Wouldn’t that be a setup.) God, if the women ever started cutting loose . . .
So there was every kind of possibility here in this Fort Peck crowd, and one of the uncomfortable thoughts wasn’t only the danger to Roosevelt. Supposedly the Secret Service bodyguards were to shield the President from assassin peril, but where were those boys when the Chicago mayor got picked off? The sheriff knew that if it came to that, if he spotted somebody here yanking out a gun, he’d have to put himself between that gun barrel and Roosevelt. He’d take death. There wasn’t any choice, sheriffing.
• • •
As the governor launched into amplified greetings to Roosevelt and his trainload, the sheriff went and claimed the roof of the cab of the truck that had been pulled up parallel to the presidential Pullman for the newspaper photographers and reporters to see over the crowd.
“Governor Ayers, and I almost said ‘My old friends of Fort Peck,’ because some of you were here three years ago.”
The presidential voice now, and if the sheriff had been a praying man he would have asked that Roosevelt just say it was nice to be in Montana, accept a bouquet and kiss Miss 4-H Beef on the cheek, and scoot back inside the railroad car. But the sheriff knew FDR, blast his lordly guts, was not going to pass up a chance at an all-out speech.
Roosevelt looked out around the Fort Peck valley and at the dam as if making sure of something.
“The one thing that I have specialized on ever since I started collecting postage stamps at the age of ten years is geography. The geography, especially, of the United States.”
The squire next door, this familiar kindly confiding tone of Roosevelt’s was. The sheriff shook his head. You had to half-admire how much the man could get away with. But then after predictably wafting himself and his audience out here “beside the wide Missouri,” FDR turned up the oratory:
“This great river gathers into story, the written and told tributary, out of passages cut by large desires. Beginning, so far as we know, with the first cleaving of its water, by downstream Indian adventurers whose tribal name for ‘canoe’ was ‘missouri’—never bettered, may I say, as a beautiful name for an inspiring river. Then came Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, the day-by-day eyes and inks that captured onto paper for us the two-thousand-three-hundred-mile arch of the river from St. Louis to its Three Forks headwaters. Then followed the building of forts, America coming west by military and trading post handholds along the Missouri’s immense chain of drainage. From that, the axe-quick renunciation of the river’s forest silence as woodhawks, perhaps within sight of here where we stand today, chopped trees into boiler-lengths to feed the steamboats. And onward, then, to the imprints of homesteaders and townplanters on the floodplain of this great river. Until now, a little more than one-third of the way through this century, the pattern is as set as cry and echo, each annal desiring a next—the human tide and the Missouri River, hungrily flowing together into storied destiny.”
Roosevelt paused, to let the applause roll before he went on to the invocation of the dam and the useful work it had brought and the future in which every drop of the river’s water would do its duty. The sheriff stared at him from his trucktop, finally grasping this President’s bargain with danger and all else.
Surfacing. That was what it was like, the way Roosevelt rose. The sheriff himself was only a so-so swimmer, nothing like this famous habitue of therapeutically warm pools, but he suddenly savvied FDR’s way of thrusting himself up out of that wheelchair. Breaking upward through the polio that had sucked him down into it; rising past the political turbulence that ought to have sunk him. And once up there, having breached crippling infirmity and gravity and whatever the hell else, the irons clamped on his more or less legs to hold him in place, the presidential sonofabitch presided. You couldn’t not listen to him, the sheriff had to admit, even if you thought you couldn’t stand any more of that voice sanded so smooth by old family money. No, you listened, to his old tricks, new tricks, whatever he brought up to the surface with him this time. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt dove up into the air, onto a political platform and on out into the ethers of radio, he took you over by all the tricks that ever swam.
The majority of the President’s hearers in the crowd had seasons of Fort Peck behind them, the making of the dam the prime calendar of their lives, and like the intent little sheriff, they listened as if they were being paged, one after another. Damworkers of every stripe, householders of Wheeler and the other shantytowns and the apple-pie Fort Peck townsite, in their thousands they took in the grand words FDR had come to give them. There were absences. Nan and J.L. Hill, with the wages of laundry and dynamite, gone back to their ranch country of English Creek. Jaarala self-vanished, of course. But others and others were here, shareholders in this day. The Birdie Hinches of this earth, by that name and many others. Tom Harry in shining fresh shirt and blackest bow tie. The crisp officers of the Corps. Years’ worth of Duffs, in plentiful scattering across this Fort Peck scene. The Fort Peck they had cooked for, and notched its paydays one after another. Hairdressed. Waited on. Danced with and more. That they had cleared brush off. Built dredges for. Walked beneath in diving uniform. Fashioned an earthfill onto. Carpentered and dug and labored for in a dozen different ways. Now they listened hard to the great voice telling them this dam was theirs as much as anybody’s. A searching eye with enough patience could have picked the tribe of them out of even this crowd, family resemblance in the way they stood akimbo but attentive, like soldiers picketed, one here, another over across, pair there, the Duffs as ever unmistakably in evidence. All but two.
• • •
No one would notice, today. That much they knew about this. The rest was the treacherous part.
Where they were, the sound of Roosevelt and the crowd’s roars of applause were a distant surf.
They kissed hard, as if to get past any doubts.
Holding to each other, they clung so close their heartbeats registered on each other’s skin. When they broke apart for breath, her fingers walked up the cleft in the middle of his chest. She asked, “Are you thinking about suppertime?”
“No.” Last thing on his mind; the way they were touching each other crowded out all else. “Why would I be?”
“That’s when we have to start pretending.” He knew what she meant. From here on, careful at home, careful at family get-togethers, to not say each other’s name too often. Or too seldom. “I’m not going to like that,” she whispered, although there was no need for whispering. “It just came to me, the feeling of dreading supper tonight. And I wondered if maybe I was picking it up from you.”
His hand cupped the back of her head as if weighing its contents judiciously. “Am I getting myself in with a mind reader here?”
Her fingers went back down the dale there on his chest. Not whispering now, but softly enough, she offered: “I suppose we’ll see.”
“Then we had better hope it doesn’t run in the family,” he provided back to her.
Slowly their hands moved down on each other to where things begin.
Part Seven
SLIPPAGE
1938
“Know something, Shannon? I’m hungry for mountains.”
“Tom, what the sweet hell do you expect me to do about that?” Although she immediately knew.
“All I’m saying, it doesn’t hurt anybody to think ahead. Fort Peck isn’t going to last for—”
“Cut the guff. How quick are you pulling out?” she demanded.
“While yet. Before winter hits again.” Proxy kept up her ice pick gaze at him until he had to specify. “End of October. Gonna try it over in the Two Medicine country. Pretty, around there.” He folded his arms on his chest, looked at her and said as if reminding them both: “Mountains.”
“Have fun.” Proxy’s smile was so slanted that Tom Harry muttered about bookkeeping to tend to and strode to his back office. She watched him go, the entire length of the Blue Eagle. She would miss this place, not to mention its contribution to her stash of Durham sackfuls of dollars. Wouldn’t be the first in either category, though. Jee Zuz, though. End of October. Next month already. Tom was playing his cards so close to his chest they had to be read through the back of his shirt. One thing sure, she was in no mood to fend with some new cherry of an owner here; didn’t want the hassle of breaking a fresh one in to the way she went about things. The new stupe probably wouldn’t even have a Packard. Briefly she wondered whether to ask Tom to put in a word for her with Ruby Smith. That skag Snow White was working the Wheeler Inn, though; room for two milk-blondes? Proxy decided not to ask, she didn’t want to be obligated. As Tom Harry had always put it, no hobblegations.
