Bucking the Sun, page 13
She was lanky, poker-faced, with inspiring green eyes. Auburn hair, bobbed. Bruce took a little longer than necessary to enunciate what he ate for breakfast every morning of his life, hotcakes and fried eggs, up, if that wouldn’t cause her too much troub—
“STACK OF JACKS AND A PAIR, SUNNYSIDE,” she called over her shoulder while pouring him a brimming mug of coffee, then sidestepped along the teeming counter doing refills. There were three other waitresses constantly flying by to the ready-counter that opened off into the kitchen, but he sized up this one while she worked. Slender. Straight-backed. Tall, for a woman. Not much balcony on her, there in the uniform blouse, but some, some.
The waitress behaved like one of those people who can do any number of things at once—here she was dealing out a tableful of plates while glancing from group to group to see who needed coffee or wanted dessert, and maintaining small talk along with it. Bruce wanted to be like that, a juggler of life. In his most preening moments, he figured he was getting there.
Business racketed in the cafe while he ate, dozens of conversations bouncing off the low greasy ceiling, the wall-top frieze of commercially printed clever signs adding a visual din to the spoken. He tried to figure out how to make time with the ever-busy waitress; his inventive requests for more coffee brought him just that, coffee.
Then on one of his eye-follows of her, as she stacked dirty dishes on her arm and carried them in to the continual kitchen calamity, he spotted the heap of dishes at the sink. Draining his coffee cup and plunking down his meal money and what he figured was a staggering tip, he headed into the kitchen.
Dola and another woman were so busy frying and grilling and buttering and gravying that they didn’t even notice Bruce’s existence. He proceeded to the sink and rolled up his sleeves. Over at the meatblock, Ron was slicing an entire flitch of bacon as fast as he could make the butcher knife move.
“Stand some help on these dishes, can you?” Bruce called across and without waiting plunged into the chore.
“Absolute rescue, is what we need,” Ron called back gratefully. “Our pearldiver went on a bender. A world of thanks, mister.”
Only the vicinity of it that involved the lanky waitress interested Bruce, and he made a point of turning and taking the dishes right out of her hands, saving her the scraping and stacking, whenever he saw her from the tail of his eye. He scrubbed, swabbed, rinsed, dried, piled up the clean plates; changed dishwater time and again as it turned gray and filmy; caught up on the logjam of silverware, even gained on the terrible pots and pans. Eventually he could just do the dishes as they arrived, which gave him more time to spectate the poker-faced waitress coming and going.
The Rondola’s trade eased off at midmorning, and the next time the waitress swished in and handed him a small stack of dirty dishes as she’d become accustomed to, Bruce didn’t take them. Instead he stood looking at her and came straight out with:
“I know how to dance, too.”
The waitress never even batted a cool green eye. “That makes two of us, then.”
• • •
Kate Millay. Wasn’t that just the peachiest name, Bruce asked himself sixty times an hour for the next several days.
He had squired Kate to the Blue Eagle the first night, not about to pass up that ace-in-the-hole boast of having nailed into place the very floor on which they were dancing, and whether it was that or the phase of the moon, the two of them seemed to click.
• • •
The sheriff was stepping out of his patrol car for a late bite of supper at the Downtowner Cafe in Glasgow when the motorcycle rocketed past him, not quite taking his car door with it.
About time I made an example out of one of these speed demons triggered in his mind, and he ducked back into the car and hit the starter and then the siren.
The motorcycle already had fogged into the night, out of town and down the road to Fort Peck, naturally. As with everything else to do with Fort Peck, Sheriff Kinnick wished the new highway had never happened. Word had reached him that the damworkers who lived in Glasgow were bragging about setting speed records, least minutes from the Glasgow city limits to the first shack of Wheeler. The county commissioners were climbing all over him about the speeding and the car wrecks, and as much as it graveled him to have to ask for help, Kinnick had put in a plea to the state for a highway patrolman. Although where was the state highway SOB right now, when he could have been some use in nailing this two-wheeled maniac.
The highway between Glasgow and Wheeler measured seventeen miles, and it took the sheriff a full dozen of those, pushing down hard on the accelerator, to draw within glimpse of the motorcycle. Or what, ahead as far as his headlights would reach, had to be the motorcycle, though it looked like a white flag whipping along at eighty miles an hour. His siren was not noticeably slowing the motorcycle miscreant, and the sheriff had started to wonder about the science of this situation: was the damnable motorcycle possibly traveling faster than the sound of his siren? The white whatever-it-was kept on billowing and flapping, cleaving the night up ahead. Carl Kinnick swallowed hard and trounced on the gas pedal just the little bit more that he dared to.
The patrol car gained enough that he could see her all: the white blouse, pulled untucked from her slacks by the wind of the ride as she hugged the back of the motorcyclist, the fabric tenting up and out from her shoulders like a cotton cape in a hurricane. Below, Kate’s long bare back; and the blazing white brassiere strap across it.
The sheriff stared as long as he dared, at a speed like this, then slacked off sharply on the gas pedal, jammed a hand to the siren switch and killed the wail. Coming down the main drag of Wheeler, he coasted to a complete stop while he watched the taillight of the motorcycle ember away into one of the streets of shacks.
The sheriff shook his head. But instead of turning around on the highway, he revved the patrol car again and sped ahead. He slammed through Wheeler like a rock through chickenhouse sheeting, past the dirt street where the motorcyclist and passenger had turned in, past the saloons and dance joints and brothels, speedometer needle jumping and jumping as he floored the gas pedal. Then, at the far end of Wheeler, he braked, turned around, and drove decorously back to Glasgow.
• • •
Neil of course was the first to know that Bruce was a goner. He had only to be around the two of them together for five minutes, Bruce going into the damnedest antic he could think of and Kate simply meeting it as if it was the time of day, before he figured She’s the brand for him and mentally began moving out to the barracks.
For the rest of the family, Bruce spelled it out in sugar, scarcely able to let go of her hand long enough for Kate to shake any of their congratulating ones. Everyone had to agree with his proud point that he’d brought home one who fit in with the Duff altitude. Indeed, Kate was not only up there in height but had strikingly thrifty construction; you could look her in the face and tell she was long-legged. Bruce was not the first Rondola customer and possibly not the last to find her angles of attraction intriguing, just enough here, there, wherever it counted, to add up. In ancient Greece the foes of the region of Laconia demanded surrender with the ultimatum If we conquer you at arms, we will kill you, and back came the message, If. Both the nature and build of Kate were along the laconic line of that if.
As the lovey pair made their rounds, Meg tapped her fingernail on the edge of her cup and thought about how far off she had been in her expectation that Bruce was going to have caravans of girlfriends before settling down at about age thirty-four.
Hugh could have done without one more female eye of judgment on him. He felt he was perpetually up against Meg’s medicinal scrutiny, and next had come Charlene with her attitude that the Duffs ought to puff themselves up like the duke’s balloon, and now here this Kate, deadly in the way she could sort you into your bin without a word said. Were there no jolly, neutral, unsharpened women that the Duff men could ever find?
Charlene was simply relieved to have Bruce no longer on the loose.
Smart enough not to show what a kick she was getting out of a clan of men who were tall enough for her—Bruce, Neil, Owen and Hugh in a bunch reminded her of pencils sticking out of a cup—Kate more than held her own with all the Duffs until Owen. History was the culprit. Out of all the tortuous routes that were depositing thousands of people willy-nilly at Fort Peck, Kate Millay’s story was the least expected: local. Her father, and his father before him, had been the ferryman on the Fort Peck cable-ferry, a glorified raft which had operated a little way upstream from the present dam site activity. (“About down the bluff from Happy Hollow, if you know where that is,” Kate had slipped in on Hugh with a straight face.) Owen, though, heard a faint echo in one of the side-canyons of his mind. “Millay. Millay. Wasn’t there somebody else by that name, in the Indian Agency when it was still here?”
“That was still us. My grandfather started out at that.”
Owen cocked his head in curiosity. Government clerks usually stayed government clerks. “How’d he get from that to running a prairie ferry?”
Kate gave him a very long look, and then the summary: “My grandmother used to say, over her next-to-dead body.”
• • •
High water everywhere when the original Millays, Kate’s grandparents, came to Fort Peck, every creek tearing at its banks as their wagon and wiry team of horses struggled across fording places on the journey from Miles City. Where the route was not flooded or muddy, it was dusty and acrawl with rattlesnakes emerging from winter. Henriette Millay was white-eyed by the time they reached the Missouri River. She also had come down with a ripping cough. Philip Millay could see across, not far downstream from the ferry crossing, to the stockaded trading post. He was to be the assistant agent at the Indian Agency there, a chance upward in the world from the Land Office clerkship in Miles City, but also a heartstopping traverse across such water.
The ferryman grimaced as he eyed the wretched pair, and then the high-running river. “I ordinarily wouldn’t, until this water lets up some,” he let Philip know. “But that’s a sick woman there.”
“Come, Henriette, we have to.”
“No,” wildly. “The water is too—”
“We must get you across.”
“No.” The cough tore out of her. She shook her head incessantly, refusing to look at the river.
Philip went to the back of the wagon for one of the ropes he picketed the horses with at night. Then he climbed back up to the wagon seat. “Give me your hands, Henriette.” She watched listlessly as those were tied, then began to scream as he wrapped the rope around and around her waist, lashing her to the iron support of the wagon seat. After he had knotted the rope, Philip put a hand over her mouth. Henriette stopped her screaming and simply stared at him. Swallowing hard, he said: “So you won’t . . . fall out.”
Kate’s grandmother told that on herself, when the distances of age lay between her and that crossing of terror, when at last the whispers connecting Philip Millay’s purchase of the Fort Peck ferry and missing funds at the Indian Agency had sufficiently abated. All families have stories, sometimes in what is not said in the outright telling. Kate knew as if by birthright that her grandmother had been brought hogtied into the Missouri River country not past falling but past jumping.
• • •
“Say again?” Owen followed up on Kate’s “next-to-dead” remark, as if they were having this conversation over a field telephone and the connection was bad. “What, you mean his quitting the government job spooked her that much?” Charlene ought to be over here hearing this, get a different slant on things.
“It was just something between them,” Kate said, looking him in the eye. “Some family matter.”
“Examining her pedigree?” Bruce was back on the scene, slipping an arm a long way around her willowy waist. “Bet you never thought I’d have out-of-state in-laws, Ownie, even if it is only North Dakota.”
To Owen’s questioning expression, Kate reported that her parents had moved to Bismarck. “Hell, that’s too bad,” he interjected. “Suppose your father would come back for a job here? We could use somebody who knows the river currents.”
Owen just asking for it from her this way—Bruce loved the moment.
As casually as if punching a meal ticket, Kate told Owen: “Probably shouldn’t hold your breath. He left here cussing about being drowned out by the dam.”
• • •
Their honeymoon was a half-hour flight in a Waco-10 biplane.
“Been up before?” the Fort Peck Air Excursions pilot asked as he strapped them in side by side in the cockpit behind him.
“Hell, no. We’re a goodlooking pair, but we’re not the Lindberghs,” Bruce informed him.
The pilot dipsydoodled at the start, to see how they’d take it. When Kate, upside down, broke into a little grin and Bruce outright laughed, he decided they’d be no fun, so he flew along the river, downstream as far as the town of Frazer where he banked the airplane tight around the grain elevator, then back up the Missouri, bumblebeeing atop the twisty course of the water. From there in the air Fort Peck looked as if an insanely wide roadbed was being laid across the river valley, the base of the dam a mile-broad mud terrace, all of it crawling with machinery. Bruce dapperly pointed to the boatyard, the dredge he’d been slapping paint onto a little over an hour ago, and Kate craned over the lip of the cockpit to see. The moment they were upstream from the tractorized sprawl of the dam project, she touched the pilot’s shoulder and motioned that she wanted him to fly lower. The plane lost more and more altitude, as she kept motioning downward with the flat of her hand, the flight path now below the rim of the bluffs, and Bruce was really beginning to notice how distinct the branches were in the tops of the cottonwoods reaching up for the plane’s bottom wing.
Abruptly Kate pointed: the landing and abandoned cable rig of the Fort Peck ferry, almost alongside the airplane rather than below it. Thousands of crossings made here, back and forth by the Millays before her, and now she was flying the route of the river itself, magical as a dragonfly.
The dynamiter’s wife watched, through clouds of laundry, as the newlyweds settled in next door. She did feel a bit sorry for the unattached brother, Neil, having to move out; on the other hand, the constant racket of truck or motorcycle roaring back and forth ought to calm down by half or more, now.
Nan Hill had had her eye on Duffs all her life and still couldn’t entirely make up her mind about them; quite what they constituted, quite how their stubborn streaks and brainstorms weighed out, in those disturbing long-boned exclamation mark bodies. The first of the Duffs she knew anything about were from Scotch Heaven, as if that green cleft of valley into the footings of the Rocky Mountains had been set aside for exactly their thistly sort. Back then, back there, a full three hundred miles from Fort Peck, rumor about wrathy Ninian Duff had hardened into legend—how he underwent early trouble on his homestead with loss of cattle, until a pair of suspected rustlers went somewhere off the face of the earth. From that kind of start, Ninian and Flora Duff parented the homesteading community along the North Fork of English Creek, anchors of example and lighthouses of beckon to the Erskines and Findlaters and Frews and McCaskills and Barclays and other populators of Scotch Heaven. Nan as a girl growing up in the west end of Gros Ventre would see Ninian Duff come tornadoing into town on one or another of his self-appointed Scotch Heaven civic tasks, black cloud of beard above his breathtaking blood bay team of horses. Ninian Duff looked like the station agent for Judgment Day, but he never failed to boom out going past, “Ay, good day there, Miss Nan.”
• • •
Ninian’s letter had instructed them to arrive in June, green advent of summer, but there were delays common with emigration, and the calendar of 1910 was on August when Hugh and Margaret Duff, young and edgy, stepped down from the train onto Montana ground. VALIER, the sign on the gable of the depot confidently heralded, as if the scatter of fresh woodframe buildings across the prairie already amounted to a town for the ages.
While Illinoisans and Belgians and all others thronged off the train and tried to sort themselves out for the homestead life ahead, the young Scottish couple paused. A knobblier version of Hugh, with a somber beard down to its chest, made its way toward them.
“You’re here and in one piece,” Ninian Duff boomed. “Good for you, Hugh lad. And this will be Margaret.” He noted the cool blue eyes, the face like any pretty girl’s except for the slip of the Maker’s chisel that gave her a pert mark there in the center of her chin. A bit combative by the look of her, but of good stock, at least according to report. Ninian gazed on down, to the tyke with a hand lost in each of theirs. “Ay, and the future, whose name I’ve forgot.”
“This is our Owen,” Meg supplied, with a cough at whatever was in the air. She saw that Hugh, with a fixed smile, was casting glances past his uncle to the hazy sky.
“We’ve a bit of a wagon journey ahead,” Ninian was saying. “We ought to start.” And in no time, their America trunk and suitcases and themselves aboard, they were rolling west into the pungent haze.
A copper sun smoldered in the murk. Meg held Owen in her lap and willed Hugh to ask what this universal smoke was about. Just when she was all but ready to put the question herself, Hugh licked his lips and asked: “Whatever is afire to this extent?”
“Forests,” Ninian replied shortly.
Meg had not yet seen anything taller than bunchgrass on their route. “How near?”
Ninian slapped the reins on the backs of his fast-stepping horses before answering her. “Idaho. The big forest fire is across over there, a few hundred miles or so. And we’ve one now in our own mountains, in north of Jericho Reef. Don’t worry any—even that one is a good distance from the North Fork.”
