Bucking the Sun, page 44
• • •
“Funnily enough, Owen, I am for war.”
They had been back at their surgery of the world, arguing through mouthfuls and dipping philosophical sustenance out of open lunchboxes, for the past week of noons during the spectacle of Munich. Darius, considerably red-eyed from sitting up nights with the radio and the Czechoslovakia crisis, could not help but feel history was dogging him personally. Down your tools, boys! The cobble streets of Scotland in ’15, ringing against war. The fields of death are hungry . . . They still were. Across them now, though, the big bugs in brown shirts, black shirts, trousseau of goose-steppers. There’s this bit, too: pick the bones of truth out of it and I myself have already employed war. Against Crawfurd.
“What, for King and country?” Owen winged in on him as if snapping down a playing card. “Where’s that in the workers’ catechism all of a sudden?”
“You have to understand, Owen, this Hitler is an armed daftie.”
• • •
Nineteen thirty-eight, Munich’s year, spun out of the sun in days spoked with fierce light and shadow.
Marx’s grave at Highgate in midnight gloom while a steel dawn slides across the eight time zones ruled by Stalin.
Hitler, howling hate in the Nuremberg torchlight.
Spain a political bed of cinders, under Franco. Italy, the dark bootprint of Mussolini.
Japan’s flag of a bloodbright rising sun, catching the morning across the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The United States can quench all this at our shores, say Senator Burton K. Wheeler and Charles Lindbergh and other isolationists. Water will do it, oceans lay between America and the world.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt and his people govern on the principle that almost anything, including water, can be amended.
• • •
“They’re feeding Europe to him like a tray of buns,” Darius went on. He shook his head at what passed for statesmen these days. “Joe Chamberlain’s chinless lad Neville. You can bet the best part of him ran down his daddy’s leg.”
Owen shifted a bit on the shale cutbank where he was sitting on his coat. His attention tended to drift when Darius got going on British political Pooh-Bahs. From this lunch spot on the east abutment, above the core pool, the dam lay below like a scale model on a classroom table and bone-weary as Owen was from the pace of work, he never grew tired of this instructive view. The jigsaw puzzle pieces around the edges of the project—railway spurs, haul roads, maintenance yards, the spillway three miles over the hills behind him—done now. The dam itself already functioning, the four giant steel-lined diversion tunnels taking the regulated flow of the entire fifty thousand square miles of the river drainage. The beautiful physics of this, the matter of the water funneled to become white foaming energy, the contained Missouri fauceting out of this one-of-a-kind dam, he had tried and tried to make Darius see. He was the one of the whole damn family who ought to be able to see it, grasp the process. But the only physic that seemed to interest Darius was the one he wanted to administer to the world and make it purge its political guts.
While Darius went down his list of major fools in charge of things, Owen contented himself with his inventory of the dam. Oh sure, a few items of it he happily could have done without. This shale under the seats of their pants, to name the foremost, with its tendency to crumble off the abutment and mess up the waterlevel in his core pool. Bearpaw, yeah, it wouldn’t take much of a bear to paw this crackerass rock apart.
To name the other, he never had liked the scheduling setup on the face of the dam, where he as fillmaster was responsible for the gravel layer but not the riprap work which was always treading on the gravel crew’s heels. How about all or nothing for me there on the facework? he’d tried on Major Santee. How about doing it the Corps way for once? the major put the kibosh on his try.
Minor stuff, though, either of those, compared with the big thing they were leaving to him, the topping-off. Twenty feet to go, on the last of the mountain of fill. Height of a nice two-story house, is all. Okay, it’d be a two-story house four miles long, but so what. Off in the haze along the autumn river, his dredges were flushing fill in from as much as five miles downstream and doing it smack on schedule. Darius was not a hundred percent wrong, the world was a worry, but Owen’s own bit of high ground couldn’t have looked better this cool September noon. He knew almost to the day, now, when Fort Peck would be topped off.
“And France.” Darius was shaking his head twice as strenuously. “The French, Owen, have gone steadily downhill ever since Sorel.”
“Speaking of downhill,” Owen seized that opening and stood up, unaccountably intent—to Darius—on not missing any minute he could spend on the dam. “We better get back down on the job, world or no world, while we still have one.”
The year was producing something like armor on the Fort Peck Dam, the riprap boulders steadily being lodged into place on the upstream side. A blanket of gravel was laid first, down the slope of the dam, so the gravel trains still ran incessantly across the ghost trestle. Bruce shook his head every time he glanced over there where the trestle had been systematically buried, footings and pilings and everything except the railroad track itself, every high-stepping inch of it now under two hundred feet of Owen’s earthfill sluiced in since last spring. No sign of the river channel, either; by now the dam made a solid blunt horizon across the entire valley, and while Bruce granted that it was nice all their work, especially his, had added up to this piece of geography the world had never before seen, it left him restless and bored.
Goddamn it, though, we ought to up and leave. Going to have to pull out anyway when . . . but yeah, when is when?
Bruce didn’t like being of two minds this way. Mostly he was on idle time anymore, “getting paid for drinking coffee” as he liked to boast of it, just a little. Whenever he was summoned to dive, these days it was usually to inspect the end wall of the inlet to the tunnels or to deal with something caught in the trash rack there where the river funneled through the dam. Lots of yawn time, though, as now. He wandered over to the middle of the dam, where the truck ramp came down to the snub-nosed dock called Port Peck, and watched the crane barge unload base boulders for the riprap, each one a truckload in itself. When the appeal of that shortly wore off, he prowled back to where the diving barge was moored, trying to look like a contented man of leisure.
But, he couldn’t help it, the not-diving made him hungry for the river. The lake, as it was awfully quickly turning into. The plugging of the river had changed the look of things there, underwater; without the channel flowing, the water had muddied up, gone filmy. Curtained. The last dive he’d done he had tried as many as three of the thousand-watt underwater lamps at once and they weren’t much better than, what, candles. Far from cursing it, the new darkness of the Missouri intrigued him. Nighttime in the river, midday. It all went with what Bonestiel had told him, when he was breaking Bruce in at diving. Watch out for the kill-line. A kill-line, said the Louisianan, was where the tidal salt of an ocean surged up a river delta and certain freshwater fish went belly-up. Difference is, you can’t see our kill-line. Which is why you got to watch for it—Bonestiel tapped him in the center of the forehead—in here. The Missouri’s new dark drew a diver’s kill-line a little closer, Bruce knew, but kept him on his toes more, too. And that was what Bruce wanted, that kind of edge to toe up to but no farther.
Standing on the idle diving barge, he yawned and wished a little something would go wrong, a clog in the trash rack maybe, so he could suit up and go down. It helped keep life interesting.
• • •
Hugh as dispatcher of rattlesnakes was still making the rest of the Duffs uneasy, but as Meg would have been the first to point out, when had he ever made them easy?
It’s not exactly a livelihood we can take with just anywhere, though, eh, Meggie?
WHOP. Another rattler off the living list.
Not sheathing his machete yet, staying poised atop the riprap until he was sure the severed snake didn’t have a companion down there in its lair, he pondered whether it was worthwhile to keep collecting the tails. The rattle trade was in decline, with the dam workforce at only about half what it was a year ago. Birdie insisted sales would take a turn up, anytime now, as soon as it dawned on everybody that now was their last chance for a Fort Peck keepsake, but Birdie was not someone you wanted to set your watch by. Although who was he, Hugh, to think that.
What am I, anymore? Graduate of Carteret, class of six hundred twenty-eight days ago. (KEEP TRACK. TAKE PRIDE IN YOUR NEW CALENDAR OF LIFE: another Carteret golden rule.) Dry days, every last blessed damned one of them. Now that I have the moisture out, though, I amount to—what? Farmless farmer. Damless damworker, about to be. Where our next wage is going to come from, I suppose we shall need to see, eh, Meggie? Winter in this country does have a way of concentrating the mind.
He stepped down off his refuge of riprap and took the rattle off the snake.
• • •
I am not a forgetter, Hugh. Haven’t you done well, at staying on the wagon; but there is still your large record, from before. To this day I can hear you, prating against Owen’s dam. Hugh the yew hewer, you scoffed at yourself when you were put at clearing the bottomland. “Meg,” you said, “this piddly work-by-the-hour, this is never us.” Fort Peck has not always been my cup of tea either, but without it, where would we be? Shorn of the boys’ wives, each of whom I occasionally wish I could give a good shake, but all in all, not a bad lot. Darius would be an ocean away, still, and while I cannot commend his taste for peroxide, he has stirred you to life more than once, has he not. (You are better off not knowing the stirrings he induced in me.) And we might lack Jack, companion of my unemployed days.
And you would be the specimen you so long were, a bottle worshipper anytime the moon changed.
So, we are past much. A corrected man, you of the Carteret cure, at least in that one habit. But there is yet old distance to be made up, between us. That, Hugh, has not changed.
• • •
She was practicing her eavesdropping. Charlene was in her hair but properly so, pushing a wave in and then making it hold with the marcelling iron, and while this was going on there was no reason not to rubber in on the A-1’s other customers, one woman done under the dryer and waiting to be combed out and her permed friend waiting for her and both with tireless tongues. Blue Eagle and dancing had been uttered.
“Who’s on?” the one asked.
“The Melody Mechanics,” said the other.
“Oh, them. I can’t stand to see that Three Finger Curly on the guitar. It gives me the willies, the way those stubs—”
Three Finger Curly! I never in a million years could get away with a name like that in a—
“I like the one who foodles around with the clarinet, though.”
Rosellen could not help but despair for a moment. Try as she might to invent people in her stories, in life they simply sat around and, well, foodled themselves beyond what she could think up.
Uneasily waiting to take her out for a bite at the Rondola before they went home, Neil was sitting up front by the coatrack, whizzing through magazines. The beauty shop even smelled to him like someplace a male shouldn’t be. The two biddies gabbing at the back had given him an acute looking-over when he wandered in and took a seat while Rosellen was being finished up, and Charlene had not helped matters any by kidding: “Relax and enjoy it, Neil. Blessed art thou, among women.”
He sneaked peeks between flipping pages, rare chance to see what went on in here. Each time the marcelling iron came out hot from its midget oven, Rosellen’s hair benefited that much more. Working over her, Charlene still had on a full-front apron from putting the chemicals in on the permed pair, but being Charlene, she simply looked like a million dollars that happened to be wearing an apron. Neil had heard that a place like Chicago had lady barbers, one of the prime attractions for ranchers who rode the trains in with their cattle, and he could see the benefits over having just any old guy rubbing the hair slickum in, yes he could.
Rosellen had her eyes closed now, waiting out Charlene’s ministrations to her hair. She had spent this week, which seemed like forever, typing up the Corps’ history of the dam project, Colonel Parmenter having instructed Major Santee to compile it and Major Santee having delegated it to Captain Brascoe, and Captain Brascoe might as well have written with only one letter of the alphabet, zzzzzz.
Churning out the captain’s version, Rosellen had wished, now that everybody’s time at Fort Peck was numbered, that Charlene or Kate or Meg or even Proxy had lived somewhere else, so that she could have written letter after letter telling whichever one all the things of these years here. (Toston would have done, for Charlene. Proxy was harder to imagine a place for, she had worn out so many addresses already.) That wasn’t quite it, because Charlene and any of the rest of them who had alit to Fort Peck, including Darius down from the moon, were all part of the story. There’d need to be another Charlene or whoever, the way Neil and Bruce were twins. In any case, someone out there on the other end of the words. But, lacking that correspondence in the invisible ink of wish, all she could do was keep ploughing along with Captain Brascoe’s compilation. Rosellen, not much one for sighing, sighed now. Hugh and Meg and no doubt Darius had a saying for doing anything that annoyingly useless: Pulling up nettles to clear a way into the thistles.
“About done, hon,” Charlene’s voice broke in on her drifting. Alert again, Rosellen realized Neil had been watching her get the beauty treatment, and she rewarded his patience with a quick grin and wink.
On his part, Neil had been saving this for supper, but for the sake of something to do besides sitting here like a bump on a log he offered it now:
“Your hubby is landing me a new job,” he said as if talking to Charlene about the weather.
“Hey, don’t I get to hear this, too?” Rosellen let out, as he’d figured she would.
“You’re hearing it, aren’t you?” Neil grinned at her over an opened magazine.
“All right, Secretive,” Charlene said. “We bite. What is it?”
“Poking traps.”
When he said that, he saw eyebrows go up in an identical way on both Rosellen and Charlene behind her. After a moment, it was Charlene who giggled and said, “In the footsteps of giants,” meaning Hugh and Birdie.
“Size twelves.” Neil shed the magazine, onto the pile he’d been through. “I’ll be working with Birdie, so it’s kind of an easy-chair job, in a way.”
Rosellen hoped she was looking convincingly surprised. She hoped a lot harder that her having wangled this fresh job for him would simmer Neil down on his inclination to quit Fort Peck before she was ready to. “Keep at it,” you’re always telling me. You don’t know the half of it. “ ‘Duff, Neil Milne, dredgeline trap inspector,’ ” she tried out loud, just the way she had it already down on the payroll roster. “I like the sound of that, Neiliepoke.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, wishing she wouldn’t call him that in the hearing of the biddies at the back, “it was Owen’s doing.”
“Too bad this didn’t work out so that we could all get together tonight,” Rosellen said on impulse, as much to Charlene as to Neil. The three couples of them, supper at the Rondola and then the movie and afterward maybe seeing what those Melody Mechanics amounted to, would have been fun; but Bruce and Kate anymore could only afford a night out on payday, a full week from now, and Owen was working late on paperwork he’d been putting off. “How about coming with for supper?” she tried for Charlene at least, make some kind of occasion out of this. “Birdie Hinch’s new right-hand man will probably even buy, hnn, Neil?”
“Likely to be chicken, real fresh,” Neil got in the spirit with Rosellen.
“Just because you’re beautified and ready to paint the town,” Charlene said to the back of Rosellen’s head. “Some of us know the meaning of work.” Addressing the intent two customers at the back of the shop: “Mrs. Foraker is going to have my scalp if I don’t get to hers right after this, isn’t that right, Mrs. Foraker?” The two tittered, and went back to an uneasy low conversation.
“It sounds like you’re stuck with only one of the famous Tebbet sisters for dining companionship,” Rosellen informed Neil in a kidding la-di-dah voice.
“Aw,” he registered disappointment. “Too bad you weren’t quints, my odds would be better.”
Just listen to them, Charlene thought as she manipulated the marcelling iron. A lot more than Rosellen, Charlene wished she and Owen had the night off, could go out with others and frolic. They both could stand that kind of a change. Nights lately, he had been giving her a hard time about life after Fort Peck. Or pretending to.
The Corps has levees on the Mississippi up the gigi, Charlalene, he teased. I could latch on there and build forty-foot versions of Fort Peck the rest of my life, how about.
Or worse yet:
They’re already talking about another big Missouri dam, over in North Dakota. Who knows, if they think this one is a sweet enough example they may go for dirt on that one, too.
She wasn’t sure how much of it was teasing. She figured Owen was not any too sure, either. What she had managed to pin him down on was leaving Fort Peck.
Around the time we put the dredges in winter harbor—he caught himself, and laughed with what sounded to her like rue. Okay, we’ll be quits with the dam around the first of November, does that suit you better? No winter harbor, this year.
• • •
