Bucking the Sun, page 22
“Tell you, Hugh,” Birdie was confiding at high pitch as they unbolted the next drain trap, “I’ve done it with all nationalities and some from Texas, but this blonde number last night, she just makes you want to die and leave it in there forever. You know the one I mean? That kind of milk-haired one, there in the Blue Eagle—”
“Snow White there in the Wheeler Inn, you mean,” Hugh responded, grunting as he opened the catchment in the pipeline and began breaking out the clay clog with a shovel. “I’ve laid eyes on her, yes.” Birdie’s bedtime history had to contend for attention with his own, lately. After the night there in the saloon where he had told Darius in no uncertain terms how things stood, he felt he had better do his part at home, too. He’d made up with Meg, and cozied her under the covers these nights in a kind of second honeymoon. Strut in here from Scotland as though he were God’s gift to Meg, did Darius think. Hugh Duff would show him, how a man and a woman weathered the little jangles between them. “Eyes only, mind you, Birdie,” he went on in this new spirit of things. “I’m severely married, you know.”
“Uh uh, not that Snow White one, this’s another—what’s those there, Hugh?”
Both men got down on their knees on the muddy riverbank.
Hugh meticulously scooped the small round objects out of the scum of sediment in the trap bottom, spat on them and rubbed them between his palm and his fingers. Tiny planets of glassy blue.
“Beads.” Hugh fondled them, thinking. “From the fort, wouldn’t you think? When they were trading with the Indians here?”
Birdie too was looking speculative. “Wonder if they’ll work on that blonde number.”
“The duded-up one is Plimpton, the newspaper guy,” Jaarala whispered to Darius as people milled into Plentywood’s clapboard Temple of Labor. Darius mentally marked the plumpish editor, in a pearl-gray suit and vest, there at the end of the front row. From issues slipped to him by Jaarala in the barracks, Darius knew that The Producers News was a wordslinging fiesta, even by radical standards. “He gets against somebody in that newspaper of his and he tears them a new asshole,” Jaarala favorably critiqued Plimpton’s journalism now. “Him and Mott have worked together a long time.”
The crowd grew, and Jaarala kept on naming off the ones he knew, abundantly Scandinavian from the sound of it, as Darius tried to make himself at home in the Red Corner of Montana.
• • •
Clydesiders were said to spoon the politics of the left into themselves along with their oatmeal, and the young riveter Darius Duff hungrily sat up to that table. His first feast there was the rent strike, when the city streets boiled with marching people; Scotland had found its feet at last, Darius exulted. The columns from the factories and the shipyards poured into Glasgow, passing a column of soldiers embarking for the war in France. “Down your tools, boys!” shouted the civilian army to the uniformed one.
Then Darius, tall in the human swell, could see the lines of the tenement women who had fomented the strike, and the great crowd that packed the streets around the Sheriff’s Court. Faces by the thousands and thousands, a maw of mouths and eyes for the powers that be to look out upon, festival and class war feeding each other as they disbelievingly watched.
Each new minute of the massing forces brought a bolt of excitement to Darius. By then he had been in attendance at a hundred meetings, a dozen committees, a thousand arguments over Georges Sorel’s doctrine of the general strike (“to render the maintenance of socialism compatible with the minimum of brutality,” Darius could reel off by heart) versus parliamentary gradualism (“Having been preyed on does not entitle one to prey back,” Ramsay MacDonald kept scolding them from Westminster). And now here it was, exactly as Sorel, in the densest of the arguing Bibles of the left, had prophesied: mass belief, passion, mania, whatever you cared to term it, the ingredient that forged the early Christians against the Romans and that turned Paris upside down street by street in the French Revolution was working in this epic strike of 1915. Chapter and verse, the workers triumphing with the weight of their numbers.
Waken Darius Duff from a coma at the age of one hundred and he still would remember the taking of Glasgow, those few high hours. In street after street, bobbing atop rafts of posterboard, “Red Willie” Gallacher and other speakers held forth, held the moment, held poised the human mass that could pull down the city stone by stone if it took the notion. The ruling powers buckled. The Sheriff’s Court session was called off, the government in London promised a law against rent-gouging.
But from that day, Darius was to see more and like it less. Periodically the Clydeside would writhe and rise, and nothing lasting would come of it. Like a stick driven into the beach of history, the rent strike marked a high tide of worker power. The next two tries at a major strike were met with barrings and arrests, and when the “forty-hour strike” was called in 1919, machine-gun nests were waiting at Glasgow’s strategic street corners.
So, were you Darius, you learned to await the next chance, and the one after that.
• • •
As if having saved the most for last, Jaarala inclined his head toward front and center of the meeting room and said:
“The highpockets one, that’s Mott.”
Darius and Jaarala both were tallish men. Mott overtopped them and everyone else in sight by at least six inches.
At first Darius thought Lawrence Mott was the most awkward specimen he had ever seen. Hands the size of stallion hooves, big flat feet, that towering body as knobbly as if made up out of pipe fittings; the face, otherwise uneventful, shocking for its eyeglasses, lensed thick as milkbottle bottoms. Mott’s world, as a boy, had amounted to an un-edged blur and he had been put into a school for the blind until it was discovered he was hardskulled enough to get by in life, blurred or not. Ultimately a grinder of optical lenses was reached in Germany who could accomplish the thick goggles Mott’s eyes required, and with that weakness corrected he behaved as if no other was conceivable. Mott’s term as sheriff of Sheridan County, along with the slate of other barely concealed radicals he pulled along with him into other offices, was rough-and-tumble even by Montana political standards. According to widespread whisper, he had funded his left-wing political machine on the gratitude of bootleggers whom he let traverse his jurisdiction into the liquid riches of Canada.
If Mott as a tactician sounded promising, on a speaking platform the man was an absolute revelation, Darius now found. Mott was an unerring picker at society’s scabs. In a pitiless brass voice, one you would not want to hear if you had your hand in the cookie jar, he gave the audience the faces and figures of their enemies.
The Wall Streeters, as fatuous as they were fat.
The copper kings of Butte, the muscle-mined wealth of Montana engorged in them as unmistakably as a pig going through a python.
The lumber barons—
Abruptly Jaarala was up out of his chair beside Darius.
“In the woods during the war, the goddamn bastards wouldn’t even let us have living conditions the same as what was called for in prisoner-of-war camps.”
It was the longest sentence anyone had heard out of Jaarala.
Darius stared at his companion traveler, realizing that Jaarala hated the world’s bosses all the way down to bedrock. Hard to think of Timmo Jaarala ever having been young, or of the century’s issues not rolling off his round shoulders, but the lumberjack camps of his early years had turned many, like him, into fervents of the Industrial Workers of the World, the argufying street-fighting song-writing Wobblies, the I-Won’t-Work agitators who preached one big union and the downfall of capitalist bosses that would flow from that. Usually silent Jaarala putting himself up for political adoption of this sort? Bedbugs, lice, maggoty bacon, murderously indifferent new machinery, unstable wages and hours, and long evenings in drafty bunkhouses to talk it over might do that to a person.
Jaarala sat down, looking shy and mute again. Mott gave him a long, slow, dramatic approving nod, then tore on into the rest of his list of oppressors, the grain cartel, the railroad nabobs, the whole Rockefelling Morganatic gang. A few minutes of Mott at his hottest and you could absolutely see into their mansions, viciously luxurious.
And this audience did at least half his work for him, Darius saw. As they listened to Mott, their faces wore the hard set of righteousness: of those who worked the land and could not understand why they had to sell a truckload of wheat to be able to buy a barrel of gasoline. Work your fields and yourself and your family until all were played out, and then some gut-robber took the gains? And grasshopper infestations on top of that? And blizzards of dust on top of those? Things shouldn’t add up that way, it wasn’t right, this audience of seared-out farm people said with their set faces.
The New Deal was a raw deal too, Mott thundered to them next. There could be no true new deal under capitalism, any honest shuffle of the deck had to have some of the reforms that the Wall Street ruling class yipped about as socialism. And that’s where he, Lawrence Mott, and the Fusion ticket came in. Fusion, taking ideas from the left but holding to the pocketbook interests of workers and farmers, was the only sane route, he told them as if giving directions to Eden. The man knows how to play these people like the pipes, Darius marveled at the audience’s raptness and his own. Roosevelt was not going far enough, Mott now reached. None of them in Washington or Helena or for that matter the county courthouse right next door here in Plentywood, by Mott’s unsparing lefthanded yardstick not a one of them was going far enough.
• • •
Darius stayed at Jaarala’s elbow afterward, waiting for their chance at Mott. As the crowd filed by to shake hands with the peering bone-rack figure, Darius put the thought of the moment out loud:
“The man is as clever with his tongue as a hummingbird, Tim. How the devil did he ever lose office?”
“They pattycaked him in ’32,” Jaarala stated, elaborating that the Democrats had not run candidates for a number of county offices in exchange for the Republicans not putting up anyone for sheriff, the combined voting strength of both parties against Mott and his slate. “But those buggers don’t trust each other enough to cut that kind of deal every time.”
“Mister Jaarala,” Mott greeted when the others were gone, clapping him on the shoulder with a hand that whopped like a skillet. The gargantuan eyeglasses found Darius’s face and took it in, whether in sheriff style or comradely appraisal Darius wasn’t sure. “And you’ve brought us help from across the pond, you say.”
Plentywood Temple of Labor or not, this was oddly like a tea-time visit, Darius being ceremoniously introduced to Aagot Mott next and then their bright-eyed eight-year-old son, Harald, who had sat quietly next to his mother in the front row while Bolshevism rolled over him like Sunday school scripture. It could not hurt the cause, Darius thought, that Lawrence Mott had married into this community of Danes and Norwegians; the word socialism was not likely to scare these Scandinavians into a tizzy. Darius knew he still had to feel his way in America, but so far so good, here. A sharp-toothed newspaper. The golden mouth of Mott. A following fed up with half measures. They had the apparatus, here.
Mott’s hand cradled the lad’s head against his leg as he talked with Darius and Jaarala of timing and tactics. “Next year is election year again,” Mott led to, as if telling them the grain would be gold. He leaned back beside a windowframe shorter than he was and goggled down at Darius. “Mister Duff, are you a veteran of election battles?” Mott somehow crooned it with the unspoken but resonant note of too?
“I have nothing against elections,” Darius said, “so long as we win them.”
“That’s the stunt,” Mott agreed, grimacing. “That winning.” Then, as if it was all part and parcel, he asked Darius the outlook for organizing on the quiet among the damworkers. The Communist Party of the U.S.A., a perfectly legal organization but frowned upon when it worked in the open, would be keenly interested in anything that could be done with a workforce such as Fort Peck’s, Mott hardly had to tell him.
“Right now it would be worse than herding cats,” Darius estimated. Nor do I dare take on that sort of attention to myself just yet, do I. Thanks to Crawfurd. I’ve pitched in with the Bolshies times before, they won their scars along with us on the Clydeside, but thanks to damnable Crawfurd I need time before— “Wouldn’t you say so, Tim, Fort Peck is not ripe quite yet and the best we can do for the cause is to stay available?” Jaarala provided a sad affirming bob of his head. “Everyone at the dam is in one kind of a scamper or another,” Darius elaborated. “They’re up nights, trying to spend their wages fast enough.”
Mott looked both unsurprised and disapproving. “Roosevelt and his crowd can’t shovel money to them forever. When the makework runs out and people see that nothing has gotten better, then is when they will listen. Bide your time, Mister Duff. In this calling, we have to do a lot of biding.”
• • •
“I dunno, Bruce, do I have to watch this? My money going to the bottom of the river, with you wrapped inside?”
“Come on, Ownie. Do you good to see how we do things here at the business end of the river.”
Uh huh. I’ve seen disasters in the making before, Owen thought, but went onto the diving barge with Bruce.
Taine, the barge boss, obviously wasn’t any too thrilled to have the fillmaster looking over his shoulder as he broke in a new diver, but Owen took care to tell him, “Nothing official about this, Al. I’m not even here, okay?”
Bruce already had started soaping up. The vulcanized rubber cuffs of the diving suit had to fit so tightly onto his wrists that water could not work its way under. Watching, Owen began to savvy that he had been wrong in a major way about Bruce needing him here as an audience. Bruce was his own audience.
Before the eyes of the barge crew and Owen, he began turning both rubbery and metallic. The diving suit was sheet rubber sandwiched between tough layers of twill, but over the top half of that went the corselet, the metal breast plate. A good deal of fuss surrounded the corselet; it had to be bolted to a strap arrangement around the neck of the suit, clamping the rubber collar against the corselet rim to make a watertight joint. Or you’re liable to get a drink of water you didn’t ask for, huh, Bruce? Owen was intrigued in spite of himself with the daring that this took.
When the tender and Taine himself finished grunting and tugging and bolting and backed away, there sat Bruce, or rather his head, wearing a leather cap with telephone receivers embedded to fit down over his ears, looking like a pilot in a huge Katinka doll.
I wonder how many dollars a pound this comes out to, Owen brooded as he scanned the bulky diving suit. He and Charlene had had words over his loan to Bruce. Hers were: I’m not sure, Owen, I can rake the money in as fast as you can shovel it out to them.
Now the tender gingerly lifted the copper helmet in both hands and stepped directly behind Bruce.
Owen realized he was watching a crowning.
The entire atmosphere on the diving barge had changed. From Taine’s more attentive regard, to the tender’s softer tone of voice, the figure in the diving suit was drawing something out of the crew that had not been there before. No one joked now. No one moved unnecessarily. Owen uneasily wondered whether this brother of his could carry off all that seemed to be expected of him. Wouldn’t it be just like Bruce to get under forty feet of water and call upstairs, “Hey, I thought I was signing up for the balloon corps!”
The tender put the helmet over Bruce’s head, the front glass turned eerily a bit toward Owen as if a Cyclops was eyeing him askance. Then the helmet was turned an eighth of a turn in the corselet joint. My God, is that all? rose in Owen. It just snicks into place, against all the water in the Missouri?
Through it all Bruce had behaved as though Owen was nowhere around. But the amphibian apparition turned now and gave Owen a stubby thumbs-up.
Owen stayed for the descent into the river, nervously watching the barge crew nervously handle Bruce’s airhose, and found himself still staying, gazing down into the river, even after the water darkness hid Bruce from sight and the only sign that he was down there was Taine’s constant telephone conversation.
“Can I?” Owen asked, gesturing.
Taine squirmed, caught between the unwelcome request and Owen’s status as fillmaster. “Generally not a good idea to break the diver’s concentration in any way. But this is more of a tryout run. So, okay, this once.”
Owen went over to Taine and was handed the telephone headpiece. “Bruce? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, I’m right here, Ownie.”
“Now I know we’ve got this river whipped. Top to bottom.”
• • •
But the river fought him on the arithmetic every day of every month, on through that spring and summer.
The number that Owen Duff lived by, and regularly wondered if he was going to perish by, was three with six zeroes after it. Three million cubic yards of earthfill a month had to be dredged, piped, and poured out into the core pool atop the dam, and by the sacred writ of Fort Peck, the schedule, it needed to be done for seven months out of the year, winter or no winter, high spring runoff or no high spring runoff, breakdowns or no breakdowns.
“Marchette, I wonder if you could get right at my monthly report for me. The colonel’s going to have kittens if I don’t hand him—”
