Bucking the Sun, page 15
“Oh, hey!” She spotted the corps of taxi dancers at the far end of the bar and pointed with her index finger like a tiny pistol. “Are those the—”
“Those’re them,” said Neil tightly again, and steered her off to a table by the wall.
He surprised her, when he set off to fetch their beers, by knowing enough to circle around the bar mob and make his transaction directly with the dour saloonkeeper at the cash register. Then she saw him fishing around in the palm of his hand. More chickenfeed.
“Here you go. Great Falls’ finest, and onliest,” Neil presented her a longnecked bottle of Select, and hoisted his own in a fractional toast.
“This sure saves on firewood, doesn’t it,” Rosellen heard herself rattling out. He was looking at her blankly. “Prohibition being gone, I mean. Out from Toston, we used to see bootleg smoke all the time.” I’m yapping on like a ninny. He doesn’t even know where Toston is. No, wait, of course he does, on account of Charlene. “People had stills up just about any coulee.” Why did I get on to this? I’m making myself sound like I’m from the bootlegger boondocks. “One time”—once upon a time, story of my life—“Charlene and I went on the train to Loweth to visit our cousin there, and we counted seventeen of those little columns of smoke on our way. Just”—she had that index finger of hers out again, but this time in a sinuous little rising waver like smoke; you could almost catch the whiff—“every old where.”
“No kidding.” Neil noticed during this that she had a little nhn chuckle in her manner that reminded him of the first perk of a coffee pot. He decided he kind of liked that chuckle.
With the beer as prompter, they talked themselves into another round apiece and then he asked her if a dance sounded good.
Neil on a dancefloor, she rapidly discovered, was very smooth going indeed. Without managing to keep the surprise out of the question, she asked: “Where in the world did you learn to dance?”
“Grade school.” He smiled for the first time all night.
“Grade school, come on. Really?”
“Sure thing. We had a teacher, Mrs. Baugh, who was an old rip otherwise. But she made all of us, little kids on up, know how to dance. She said that way we’d always be able to get acquainted in town, have something we could join in on.” Rosellen had an interesting habit of keeping her eyes fastened on a person for longer than expected, as if trying to figure out whether he amounted to a bargain or not. Neil glanced down at her hair, same satin black as Charlene’s, and nearly told her how nice he thought it was, but finished his recital instead. “Old lady Baugh always started us off, boys would dance with boys and girls with girls, so we wouldn’t die of embarrassment. Mostly it fell to Owen to teach Bruce and me. He was the oldest, he was supposed to be the expert.”
Rosellen leaned back in his arms and contemplated him still further. “Seems to have worked.”
Neil considered. “To some extent. Although I’m not sure this is the kind of town Mrs. Baugh had in mind.”
There was another pair of beers involved, and closer dancing, and her telling him about having taken evening classes in typing and basic bookkeeping at the Lewis & Clark Business School in Helena while supporting herself with a day job as waitress in the Parrot Cafe and the complete surprise of the job opening at Fort Peck for a typist with a speed of sixty words a minute, minimum, and so now here she was, and even closer dancing, and him telling her the boundless future of haulage at Fort Peck, and closer dancing yet, before the two of them found themselves in the cab of the truck, trying out some kissing.
Rosellen’s head cleared, however, when she regarded the clammy seat of the truck.
“Let’s—go back,” she said.
Neil straightened up from her as if snapping out of a trance. “Sure,” was all he said.
Back at the hotel, though, she provided:
“Louise—my roomie—works late.”
“She does?” He swallowed. “That’s good. How late?”
“Pretty late.”
Neil looked at the hotel as if he’d never seen one before. “You mean, they’d just let me . . . kind of . . . come in with you?”
“Huh uh, they’re strict as the dickens. There’s a fire door, though.”
“In case of emergency,” he thought out loud, so solemnly it startled them both, then sent them into giggles.
Two minutes later, she entered her darkened room, and a minute after that, his tall thin form was there, too, in through the hallway fire door she’d released from the inside and wedged open for him with Louise’s tube of lipstick.
“We’re going to have to whisper,” she whispered nervously.
“That’s okay, it’s worth it,” he whispered back fervently.
Kissing resumed.
“This is crazy.”
“More than likely.”
Longer kissing.
“You’re quite the date.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Nhn. Here, I’ll . . . your fingers are big for buttons like these.”
“Maybe they’re better . . . here?”
“Yes. They’re doing fine there.”
• • •
The next morning Bruce met him with a smirk. “So did you get anywhere with her?”
“Considerable.”
Bruce’s smirk went. “You did not.”
“Doubt away,” Neil told him and serenely put the truck in gear.
• • •
Within days, Neil and Rosellen had scooted in to the county courthouse in Glasgow for their license, looked up a Justice of the Peace, and spoke their marriage vows as if they couldn’t wait to spurt the words out. Meg and Hugh and Owen and Charlene and Bruce and Kate met this variously with disbelief, awe, and amusement, but beyond that saw nothing to be done except stand back from this romance lest it knock them over.
“So, kiddo, here we are in the same family twice over.” Charlene seemed a little haughty in her congratulations, Rosellen thought.
“It’s your doing,” Rosellen couldn’t pass up the chance. “If you’d chaperoned me the way you always used to, Neil and I would still be shaking hands goodnight.”
At the shivaree which was threatening to become an almost monthly Duff family tradition, the bride and groom were celebrated in a fashion Rosellen had not even dared to dream of.
“Give us a song, Mother,” Neil popped right out with.
“Oh, would you?” Rosellen chimed in. “I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. I’d love for you to sing something for us.”
Easy girl, thought Charlene. Our ma-in-law takes her own sweet time about letting go of a son.
Meg pulled a face, made ready to give out devastating reasons why her voice was not up to the occasion, and then took a good look at Neil, bright of eye, earnest as a month of Sundays. After a moment, she said:
“Hugh. First chair accompaniment, if you please.”
With a mock formal bow, Hugh fetched a kitchen chair for her to stand on, then went to the wall of the shack and leaned back with his eyes closed to listen.
Facing the newly marrieds, with Owen and Charlene and Bruce and Kate camped around them like more veteran troops, Meg announced in a tone that Rosellen at first thought was a direct order: “Waken, Thou.”
Swallowing delicately, Meg clasped one hand in the other at the exact distance in front of hers where a hymnal would be held, and began to let her sons and daughters-in-law know what singing is.
“Seven long years I served for thee . . . ”
Her low rich contralto reached Hugh as if from another country, this voice of Margaret Milne of Inverley that could fill in if a tenor was missing in the choir. It all came back, the honey waterfall of her hair when she let it down, and this, the rich sound of the young in love.
“The glassy hill I clamb for thee,
The bloody shirt I wrang for thee—
Will thou no waken and turn to me?”
Clamb! Wrang! Rosellen was giddy with the glory of all this. This was like Weir of Hermiston, her favorite Robert Louis Stevenson book. The Scottish lingo, and the amazing part where the man character and the woman character keep eyeing each other in church. The woman wearing a frock cut low but drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between—how did he write it?—surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses. Not that she and Neil were being that open about it while his mother stood up there singing, she told herself, but couldn’t help giving him another little look. Everyone else in the shack could have told her that she and Neil were sending glances hummingbirds could feed on.
After the applause and Meg shushing them, and the beer had been poured in Charlene’s best glasses that she and Owen had brought for the occasion, Hugh made his way over to Rosellen, appraised her, and remarked:
“The Milne side of the family is a bit fierce in its ballads.”
“No, no! I thought it was a doozy!”
Rosellen ended up thinking that about the entire shivaree night. In the course of the evening she managed to make fast friends with Kate, and Neil held up well under the kidding from Owen and Bruce, and Meg and Hugh clucked appropriately over the whole brood.
The first second thoughts came to Charlene.
She couldn’t deny feeling some pride over Rosellen. The town of Toston had figured the Tebbet sisters were going to have to get by in the world on their slender ankles and promising chests, and though Rosellen was always going to be in the panther-beautiful shadow of Charlene, she was chesty and curvy enough in her own right to outdo Tosten’s expectations. But there was no denying either that Rosellen as a kid generally had the tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as if life was all peanut butter. Watching her in action now, as shapely outside and in as a Shakespearean ampersand, and cute as a wink besides, she still showed signs of being chronically young, at least to Charlene. Neil wasn’t more than knee-high in experience either, was he. Charlene knew he had just been starting to climb out moneywise with his trucking, and now look, here he was a family man with all that entailed. Charlene felt something like a pang about that hasty date she’d marshaled them into.
“How do you like that kid sister of mine?” she whispered to Owen when they were at the cake plate for second helpings of Jaarala’s scrumptious angelfood. “Evidently when she puts her mind to it, a guy doesn’t stand a chance.”
The fact of the matter was that Owen had less than liked the idea of Rosellen from the minute she popped up at Fort Peck, adding one more flank to an already complicated family situation. And he had been a dab perplexed by the courtship whirlwind that had just been witnessed. What, were Charlene and him the last people ever to wait until they could afford it before getting married? On the other hand, Neil right now looked so happy he might spontaneously combust, and Rosellen had not yet shown anything drastically wrong with herself except for being such a hopeless snip of a kid.
“Evidently,” Owen left it at, and dug into the cake.
Bruce had got Neil to one side. They grinned at each other, and clinked glasses. “So,” Bruce started in. “Where you going to spend your hornymoon?”
“In the truck,” Neil replied.
Bruce blinked at him.
“Moving in,” Neil explained with an even bigger grin, “up onto Broadway,” which of course meant Wheeler.
“If this gets any better,” Sangster confessed, “I won’t be able to stand it.” October, so far, had been like Christmas come early for the engineers.
“Some of us aren’t there yet,” Owen maintained, as nervous and happy as he had ever been in his life.
“Sure you are. All you have left to do is connect up the watchamadingus to the doohickey, then watch the mud poop out the other end.”
On the first, the absolute maiden morning of the month, not one clockhair behind schedule, power sang down the wires from the generating station at Great Falls three hundred miles away. Owen, at the substation when the massive voltage feed was hooked up, alternated between ecstasy at having this torrent of electricity at his command and apprehension at now having the entire feeder system and dredging operation on his shoulders, with a breathing space of less than two weeks to work out all the catches. Then on the fourth, courtesy of Sangster and his elegant long truss bridge for the trains, here came gravel. At river level, with each bombs-away avalanche from a dumpcar straight overhead, one hundred thousand pounds of gravel came down in a solid noise that had splashes at its edges. For the past nine days, the rest of Fort Peck’s construction noise had been punctuated by these barrages: forty successive enormous sounds like KASHOOSH, then the brief wait for the next trainload. And now, this very day, only the thirteenth of the month, dredging was about to commence.
“Mine will run quieter,” Owen shouted to Sangster next to him. If I can get this entire cobbled-together layout up and running at all.
“Well, sure, plumbing is SUPPOSED to run QUIETER than real MACHINERY,” Sangster yelled back over the clatter of a dumpcar and the thunder of another satisfying discharge of gravel to the toe of the dam.
But if the Gallatin, a dredge 170 feet long and 40 wide, waddling in the river under the load of the largest dredging equipment ever made, wasn’t real machinery, then Owen Duff did not want to know what was. The thing about dredging at Fort Peck, the aspect that had him simultaneously exhilarated and dry mouthed, was that his equipment as fillmaster amounted to miles of apparatus that had to run as one earth-eating dam-making machine. The Gallatin’s cutterhead, like a nightmarishly rough and gigantic dentist’s drill—taller than a man—was going to have to dig into the riverbank, and the dredge’s suction pumps were going to have to ingest the slurry of bank soil and river water, and the booster pumps along the dredgeline ashore were going to have to move this semi-liquid fill material through the big pipeline—the “plumbing” as Sangster called it—to where the slurry would gush out against the gravel barrier of the toe, the fill material mounding up and the water running off, creating the core of the dam.
What had to make it all go, and this was the Fort Peck dredging difference, was electricity. A hellish amount of electricity, to move this much earthfill and to loft it as high as this dam was going to rise. “Jesus Mercy Christ, Duff,” the electrical engineers moaned in fights during briefings, over Owen’s horsepower specifications to make his dredging system run. Moaning had never yet budged Owen Duff’s arithmetic. On the Fort Peck scale of dredging, each suction pump had to be driven by an electric motor with horsepower equal to a fleet of sixty Model AAA trucks, and there were two such pumps, needing two of those voracious motors, on each dredge, and ultimately he was going to have four dredges operating and a flock of pipeline booster pumps besides. He had held to the argument that it was either meet his power specs or cut back on the dam schedule, and the colonel inveterately held to the sacredness of the schedule, and so the juice jockeys ended up having to feed power into Owen’s dredges and dredgeline pumps by stringing big, stiff cable out across series of pontoons, electricity gone nautical. The Gallatin, here on start-up day, looked as if it was leading a pack of pontoons alongside it on leashes, each of which was a three-inch-thick conductor cable.
One side of Owen thought this was as nifty as the engineering process could possibly get, cycling the river’s own force so beautifully through the generating dynamo at Great Falls and across the prairie on the march-step forest of power poles and down through the feeder web of cables, putting out watts to spin the dredge’s cutterhead and the suction pumps’ impellers; refining the energy of the river to change the river. The other side of him, which had been scurrying for the past dozen days to try to make the carnival array of dredging and power apparatus hum in unison, yearned for the steam-engine dredge days, shovel the coal in and it’d make this move that, forget about hydro-electro-hydraulic elegance.
Just digging a little ditch, that’s all we’re doing this fall, don’t get antsy about it, Owen told himself again while he waited, antsy, for the dredge-master to finish his last-minute crew check.
Any fill we can move now is a leg up on next year, is all this is, sure, you bet.
The Gallatin’s task, before snow flew and the river iced over, was to cut a winter harbor for itself and the other dredges and barges; simply chew a nice docking channel, four hundred feet wide and a thousand feet long, at a right angle into the riverbank.
And not so incidentally, pump the dredged material most of a mile and spew it out as the very first earthfill onto the dam.
The dredgemaster at last sent down word that his crew was as ready as they’d ever be and Owen might as well come aboard.
Sangster wordlessly gave Owen the gesture they’d been trading since the previous autumn, a couple of yanks on an imaginary whistle cord the way a locomotive engineer would toot the highball signal, and headed up the bluff to the Ad Building to watch the dredge inaugurate itself.
The destination for Owen was the lever house on the dredge. Up there, where the captain would be presiding on an ordinary vessel, sat the operator with controls thumbing up around him like beer-spigot handles, and Calhoun the dredgemaster hovering behind him. On his way through the Gallatin’s labyrinth of cable drums and pump motors, Owen paused at the topside forward compartments. He tossed his work-gloves in onto the desk of the cabin that would serve as the fillmaster’s quarters—his quarters—when he was aboard, and breathlessly climbed on up into the lever house.
He had his own checklist, but before it, he ran a lingering gaze around the entirety of Fort Peck from the perch there high on the dredge.
Out here in the middle of figless nowhere, all this had been forced into being.
Four-mile construction sprawl of incipient water barrier and diversion tunnels.
Dozen towns.
Whole railroad.
Midair bridges.
Cat’s cradle lines of the electrical feeder system.
Pipeline on nearly a mile of strutting stanchions.
Boatyard teeming with fresh hulls.
The Gallatin herself.
Every detail colossal, and not a pore of it would ever have existed at Fort Peck if it were not for the idea of an earthfill dam.
