Bucking the Sun, page 10
“First off, flood control—” Owen began and realized his father had been lying in wait for those words.
“Eh, ignorant me. Here I had the notion from somewhere that there’s going to be a permanent flood, out of this,” Hugh pronounced. “A hundred and twenty-five miles or so of it, in back of your whackety great dam.”
“Hugh, drop this right now,” Meg warned.
“No, let him, Mother.” Owen drew a fortifying breath and looked at his father. Get it out of his system. Out of all our systems. “There’s a lot of politics behind this dam, I don’t kid myself about that. All down the Missouri, and then the Mississippi Valley on from there, people get flooded out in any wet year, and then they’re after somebody to do something about it. Partly this dam is on account of that, partly it’s Roosevelt having to put people to work somehow.”
“But I had work!” Hugh blurted.
Beside him, Meg had her eyes closed and wished she could do the same with her ears. Yet and again, here it came, Hugh’s refusal to see the homestead as it had become, these last years. When there weren’t too many grasshoppers, there was too little rain. When the crop was good, the price wasn’t. When the price was good, the crop wasn’t. For the life of her, Meg could not understand how he could stay so fixed to all that.
“We had work!” Hugh was exclaiming. “Bruce and Neil and”—he gazed at Owen, then away—“myself. The place—”
“It was blind work,” Meg told him tensely. “There was no seeing a living, these past summers.”
“Other summers would have come, Meg,” he said back to her, then targeted Owen again. “Your precious people downstream, who get their socks wet when it floods—why can’t they be told to put their enterprises on higher ground?”
“You can’t undo that much of things, that’s why,” Owen answered in ready exasperation. Meg glanced around apprehensively to see if the entire Blue Eagle by now was watching her husband and her son go at each other, but realized that even their raised voices didn’t make a dent in the din level.
“People are established there,” Owen was going on, “they’re determined to live where they want and—”
“And those of us who chose best higher up the river get drowned out because we’re fewer,” Hugh put in.
“Now that’s malarkey, and you know it.”
“I don’t know that, Owen. I don’t know that at all.”
“Then maybe it’s time you did. What is it you think, that Fort Peck Dam looked around for the person to inconvenience the most and chose exactly you? Dad, for crying out loud, there are dams being built right now on the Columbia, the Colorado, the Tennessee, the Sacramento, the you-name-it. It’s too bad we can’t build any of those without putting water over somebody. People have to contend with that, a little. But there’s no—”
“A little?”
“More than a little, then. Some. A lot! Is that better?”
“Bothers you, does it.” Hugh looked at Owen in cold satisfaction. “It fucking aye should. Margaret, I’m sorry about the language.”
“And I’m sorry about you,” Meg gave him, her voice up there with theirs now. “I thought there was more to you, Hugh Duff, than this mooncalf notion that we’ve been put out of a paradise that would send Eden to shame. That wasn’t the only place on the face of the earth where you can grow a stalk of alfalfa. The wages here, if we”—her look said you—“keep at it, can get us onto our feet, wherever we want. Hugh, the place, these years—the place made us a start but it never made us much else.”
“At least it was greatly more than a shack and an axe and a spoon,” Hugh hammered those words.
Owen made a last try. “You want to go back to basics, here’s one for you.” With the moisture condensed on the bottom of his beer bottle, he drew a damp straight line on the polished wood of the bar. “This is the Missouri, our place to here, right this minute.” Above that, he sketched a wet arc. “But the original river went like this, all the way up north of Havre and around, in the bed of what’s now the Milk River—you maybe didn’t know that, I bet, but until glacial times royally rearranged things, the Missouri River didn’t flow anywhere near our place.” Hydraulics 330, the course at Montana State College that made Owen sit up straighter and straighter; Professor Zell, by way of illustration, intoning to him and the other students about the incomparable forces of the glacial process, which Zell pronounced as if it rhymed with “no less.”
Tutor to his parents, Owen glanced up earnestly to make sure they, particularly the male one, were following this revelation of the Missouri River’s past. “So, see, what a river does, any river, is geologically temporary. Rivers are always changing, so here we’re just—”
“These are not glacier times!” Hugh thundered.
• • •
“Christ Jesus,” Bruce let out, as he and Neil halted at that voice and made the sighting at the bar of the Blue Eagle. “It’s the Old Man and Mother and the Reverend Ownie.”
Uncomfortably joining them, Neil proffered “How you doing, Ownie?” while Bruce said to nowhere, “Thought we’d get out of the house for a change.”
“A dire need of fresh air, no doubt,” said Meg.
Neil cleared his throat. “Bruce owes me a beer for letting him beat me by a million pins tonight, don’t you.” Bruce grunted and started trying to flag down Birdie Hinch.
“So,” Neil said next. He decided the dam would probably be the most popular topic. “Ownie, when’s the bigger work start?”
“Any day now.”
“Ask him how much more whacking down brush his dear old father can look forward to, why don’t you?” Hugh prompted loudly and took a tilt of his beer.
“A hundred and twenty-five miles or so.” Owen stared Hugh in the eye to be sure there’d be no mistaking his meaning.
Hugh choked on his beer. “All the way to our—?”
“All of it,” Owen vouched, “the whole lake bottom, if we can.”
“But you’re going to put water over all that anyway! What’s the point—”
“More frogskins,” Neil contributed.
“That’s about it,” Owen agreed. “Wages are the thing.” He cocked his head as if to angle this into Hugh most effectively. “You cussed as loud as anybody when this country came to a stop, I seem to remember.”
Hugh went right back at him. “This country will get going again, then, as long as everybody puts in enough hours on the woodpile?”
“You pair are going to wear your tongues out,” Meg tried to turn them off. Neil and Bruce, dumbstruck, were watching as if they had just been adopted into a family of cutthroats. “Christ all mighty,” Owen was saying in a gritted tone to Hugh’s last point, “it’s always more complicated than that.”
“Simple it down for me, then,” Hugh challenged. “Tell your old daftie of a father where this is going to lead to, this work that doesn’t need doing except so people can be paid for doing it.”
“Owen doesn’t have all night,” Meg put in.
“The loyalty of a loving Scotch wife,” Hugh announced to the rafters of the Blue Eagle. “There’s nothing like it except possibly ambush and slaughter.”
Just then, at the end of the bar next to the bandstand, a ruckus broke out among the taxi dancers.
“That’s my stool,” stated the one with white-blonde hair and aviatrix slacks. “More to the point, snooks, that’s my customer.”
“This stool doesn’t have your name on it anywhere I see,” maintained the plumpish redhead.
“Probably it’s got yours by now,” said the peroxide blonde, “from the weight of that fanny.”
“You’re the one to know about fannies,” the redhead retorted. “You peddle yours every chance you get.”
“At least I get the chance,” the blonde said coolly.
Owen, taking this in with the rest of the Duffs, reminded himself that he absolutely was going to have to start getting home earlier these evenings and do the night fantastic with Charlene. The platinum blonde—no, what was beyond platinum; chromium?—was starting to look pretty good to him. She clearly knew her business where her competition was concerned, keeping after the redhead: “Now, clear off of my stool and away from my customer.”
“You can have the stool when Jimsie and I dance,” cooed the redhead. “Isn’t that right, Jimsie?”
The blonde abruptly turned away and marched up a little set of stairs to the bandstand. There she turned around again, took a quick running start, and sailed off the bandstand, her spread legs catching the redhead around the waist and her arms locked around the copper head of hair. Like a toppling totem pole, the entwined women hit the floor, the redhead underneath.
“Ow,” Bruce commented feelingly. “Floorburn.”
Meg astonished and Hugh and Neil and Bruce and Owen deeply interested, the Duffs spectated as the blonde, still astraddle the redhead with the breath knocked out of her, groped for her opponent’s ears as handles to bang her head against the floor.
Before she could get fully underway at that, Tom Harry had vaulted the bar and swooped his arms around the blonde from behind, pulling her off the flattened redhead.
“For cripe’s sake, Shannon,” he complained, “you could of broken her neck. You could of broke both your necks, and then where the hell would I be?”
The blonde, now a tornado of elbows, tore free of her employer, caught hold of the customer Jimsie, and went out the back door with him in tow. Tom Harry shook his head and stooped to the redhead who was woozily attempting to sit up. “Music, Gert,” he directed the piano player. When the first hesitant notes of Roses of Picardy did not dissolve the thick circle of onlookers, Tom Harry looked up.
“Dance!” he roared. “This one’s on the house!”
The taxi dance women a little sulkily, the men eagerly, pairs of partners again filled the floor of the Blue Eagle.
“I’m going to call it a night,” Owen announced, “before the blood gets over our heads.” He still had the drive back to Glasgow, the day’s shale core samples to tabulate, and needed to assemble his thoughts for the morning’s inevitable series of briefings. He gave his father a minimum goodbye, each of them still wanting to clout some sense into the other; his mother a gallant kiss; and Neil and Bruce a wry last look. I’m the one who ought to be twins.
Bruce and Neil evaporated off to somewhere. Hugh turned to Meg and asked drily, “Enough Wheeler for you?”
“No,” she surprised him again, determinedly displaying her beer bottle with still a sip in it. “Not quite yet.”
The southern tip of Valley County, Montana, had become magnetized, Sheriff Kinnick grew convinced.
That spring and summer of 1934, besides Sangster weaving his railroad bridge up into the air above the channel and Owen’s fleet of dredges and barges amassing along the riverbank, work commenced on the four giant diversion tunnels to carry the river beneath the dam and on stripping away the fifteen thousand years of silt the Missouri had deposited where the core of the dam needed to rest with absolute firmness. Pile drivers, which already had everybody at Fort Peck ear-weary from pounding down the wooden trestle pilings day and night, in July remorselessly resumed with steel, the girders of the cutoff wall. And to the sheriff’s furious dismay, in August here came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, merrily dragging all the trappings of the presidency of the United States with him, to spend ten minutes giving his political benediction to the Fort Peck Dam. “Fort Peck is only a small percentage of the dream,” the President said in the direction of downstream constituencies. “Before American men and women get through with the job, we are going to make every ounce and every gallon of water that flows from the heavens and the hills count before it makes its way down to the Gulf of Mexico.” As far as Carl Kinnick was concerned, FDR could have simply jotted that onto White House stationery and dropped it in the mail, saving Valley County and its sheriff an immense amount of bother.
But bother kept coming, by the dozen. Just when the sheriff was getting used to the problem of Wheeler, would-be Wheelers sprang up everywhere around the dam site. Delano Heights, Lakeview, Midway, Parkdale, Willow Bend, Valley, McCone City, Park Grove, Idlewile, New Deal, Square Deal, Free Deal . . . like urchins imitating higher society, the places built themselves, shack by shanty by flophouse by gin mill, a new “town” for every month of the year 1934. Wheeler still predominated at such levels as taxi dancing and drink consumption and emporiums of prostitution, but what law officer in his right mind wanted whole towns cropping up in his jurisdiction before he had properly even heard of them? So, as some brand-new rough arrangement of neighborhood followed onto each spate of jobs created at Fort Peck, the sheriff sucked in his breath and told himself that all this was temporary.
If a person could just stand “temporary” as including the next four years.
• • •
Owen and Charlene’s trailer house now was parked on the official Fort Peck townsite, where the Corps had contractors simultaneously laying out curvaceous residential streets on the pattern of the Country Club suburb in Kansas City and erecting the mass of barracks that was going to make Fort Peck the biggest bunkhouse on the planet. There at the edge of the zone of construction, Charlene would not exactly have described herself as entertained, but at least the routine here was more diverting than Glasgow had been. Whenever he wasn’t in a meeting Owen would come home for lunch, a nice bookmark in the middle of the day, they both thought. And after work, as now, he could practically be back at the trailer house and kissing Charlene before his head knew he had left the office.
“Owen.”
He swung around, only a stone-skip from the trailer house. Neil was perched on a windowsill of a prefabricated barracks framework that hadn’t been there at lunchtime.
“Catching some air?” Owen asked him. Then, wondering more than he wanted to: “Or did Charlene put the run on you for not knowing when to take your hat off?”
Neil shook his head, letting Owen try to decipher that and his quiet grin.
“I need to ask you to pitch in on something,” Owen’s no-longer-such-a-kid brother said. “A business proposition.”
• • •
The next Saturday morning, they borrowed Tom Harry’s big Packard and away the bunch of them cruised, propelled by Neil’s idea. Meg vigilant between Owen and Hugh in the front seat, and Neil and Bruce spread all over the backseat as if practicing to be rich.
“Come on, Ownie, try this boat out,” Bruce urged. The fresh paving of the new State Route 24 went north ahead like a gray slither between a hundred miles of prairie on either side.
Owen was tempted to point out that the Duffs already were shooting along at their greatest velocity in history. In spite of being told to by Bruce, he actually was romping on the accelerator a little in the highway’s straighter stretches, the speedometer needle arcing over onto 60, more than enough to make Meg and Hugh purse up in apprehension, and he’d liked to have brought Bruce down a peg by telling him that the five of them were moving with the combined momentum of a person going 300 miles an hour, was that fast enough for him?
“Keep your shirt on, how about,” Owen stayed determinedly amiable. “We all get thrown in the calaboose for speeding, it’d be the Fort Peck record for most arrests in one family.”
“Not a good thought, eh, Bruce?” Hugh still was detouring his words around Owen, but at least they were words and not shouts. “How would they ever test the famous suction pumps without us?”
The whole carful laughed for a mile. The suction episode had come about because the boatyard boss, Medwick, was grousing over being shorthanded for a booster-pump test that needed to be run immediately and Bruce, helpful, cited his father and Birdie Hinch as willing temporaries. Medwick pulled the pair off the brushcutters’ crew truck and the next thing they knew they were aboard a bargelike pump unit moored to the riverbank. All this was, Medwick stressed to Hugh and Birdie and Bruce and a few other boatyard hands he had conscripted, was a simple rev test, to see how the floating barge behaved when the 2,500-horsepower pump was revved up. When he gave the word they’d run a few minutes of muck through the intake pipe and the pump and the outlet line, and that would be that. Medwick looked dubiously at Hugh, a farmer if he had ever seen one, and stuck him out on deck to watch against clogs at the intake. He put Birdie Hinch, senatorial-faced and nodding, in charge of the pump’s gate valve meant to prevent vacuum surges in the suction process. Bruce and the others took their posts in the pumphouse and Medwick started up the big pump. Things hummed and gushed nicely for a minute until Medwick yelled to Birdie to check on his gate valve. The Roman-nosed little man studied the wordage on the valve in professorial fashion, although as Hugh knew and Medwick didn’t, Birdie Hinch could not have spelled squat if you spotted him the k and the w. Then, veteran incompetent that he was, Birdie managed to flip the valve setting the only wrong way possible, totally backward. At once the suction pump sucked much too enthusiastically as a vacuum surge shot through the intake line, blowing off the top seals of the pump, sudden tons of silt and water gushing into the panicked pumphouse. The avalanche of mud, grit, and water flushed Medwick and the two men nearest him and on top of them Birdie out of the pumphouse in a tumbling act featuring yelling and cussing. Bruce, the last man washed out the side door, managed to flip the emergency switch on his way past and shut down the fiasco.
“Medwick never even so much as told me ‘thank you’,” Bruce complained now with profound mock hurt.
“I just wish you had closed that pumphouse door,” Owen chided him in similar tone. “You let a lot of good fill material get away.”
Meg, monitoring her men, glanced over her shoulder to smile at Neil, who gave her a wordless grin back. Intricate, families are, she thought. If this expedition had been Owen’s idea, Hugh would have scoffed it to death. If Hugh had proposed it, Owen would have been mortally dubious toward it. If Bruce had thought it up, everybody else would have written it off as a pipedream. Only Neil, quietly central as Switzerland, could have put this out on the table and not had it knocked off.
