Bucking the Sun, page 24
Only problem was, he was running through his money as if he had haystacks of it, which Proxy doubted. She hated to slow up on him. Beneath that bed in the houseboat was a suitcase which held neat rows of the pocket sacks Bull Durham tobacco came in. A used Durham sack would hold exactly twenty silver dollars, and Proxy was filling them assiduously; the only bank she trusted was the bank of the Missouri River. Yet how much good would it do her to pump money out of Darius so fast that even he would catch on; a John D. of this sort didn’t often crop up. So, string him along, or grab it off as it comes? Come on, Prox, make up your mind, this shouldn’t take a frigging Act of Congress.
She toweled off, then reassembled herself into the silklike blouse and snug slacks. Doing up her face in Tom Harry’s mirror, Proxy Shannon was short of beautiful but more than qualified as provocative. She had a spoilsport diagonal smile, which, paradoxically, the sharper she slanted it, the broader its force on the male recipient. Look very closely and there could be found a few battlelines at the corners of her hazel eyes, but again, these simply confirmed to the male order that she knew what to do with all this arsenal of hers.
• • •
This could not be a sound idea, Darius told himself, this amount of Proxy.
Yet could it.
He examined the matter. The other Duffs shared him around at Sunday dinner—once a month for him and Hugh to be at the same table seemed to be about the right interval, just now—but otherwise he didn’t much cross paths with any of them except for Owen, busy bee whose overseeing often brought him to the boatyard. Darius was quite sure he was not missed during his traipses to Plentywood with Jaarala every second Saturday, so why would a nightly hour or two, well, all right, several, in somewhat dubious company be noticed either?
Besides, the kind of company he was finding on the houseboat was its own best argument. He still ached for Meg, and Proxy expertly extracted that ache, at least the physical portion of it.
He stirred himself, back to giving her a listening smile as she was telling him about—if he was following this correctly—her stint as personal nurse to a bootlegger.
“It was real too bad, but he was one sick pup,” Proxy’s narrative had reached. “His own homebrew did it to him. Fusel oil poisoning—see, he didn’t get all that junk out of his brew and when he tasted it some, that’s all she wrote, Buster. You ever see anybody with fusel oil poisoning?”
He shook his head, rapt.
“They turn blue as a robin’s egg,” she told him in a confidential tone.
Darius shuddered and decided he was getting off easy with only ill-tasting American beer.
“What became of him, then?” he urged her on.
“I brought him out of it. All I could do. Day and night, I stayed with him, kept making him sweat that stuff out of himself.” She rolled her head back and forth on the pillow in evident wonder at the memory. “You know what? He paid me double what he was supposed to, he was just so hopped up with gratitude.”
Incredible woman, really. She had already told him about the time an Indian chief on the Fort Peck Reservation had wanted to make her one of his wives, and the episode of, if he understood it right, an alphabetical elk who had been roped during a cattle gather near her uncle’s ranch in one of the Dakotas and branded one end to the other with cattle brands from Lazy A to Flying Z. True, Darius had detected a bit of a tendency for Proxy to be cast large in her own stories, but then aren’t we all.
“Proxy, where do you come from?” he suddenly wanted to know. “Originally, I mean.”
“As much as anywhere, the Twin Cities.”
“And those duo are—?”
Proxy raised her eyebrows, then gave him a laugh. “Wheeler and Fort Peck, can’t you tell by looking?”
“Enough about nativity, evidently.” He cast a glance across her to the alarm clock. “I’ll need to be going, won’t I. First, though, as the Irishman said on his wedding night, ‘Could I trouble ye again, Miss Shannon?’ That bit we were doing last night, I could stand another session of that.”
“A sixty-nine?” she asked with professional consideration. “Or the sidewinder?”
“Well, one and then the other, what about.” He raised up on an elbow, though, grimacing in the direction of a dog’s nightsplitting barks. “Blast that cur. A man can’t hear himself function.” He climbed out of bed, went over to the window and called out, “Quiet down, pot licker.”
“Don’t you know anything? Dogs speak German.” She padded to the window and let loose at the top of her voice, “Raus!”
The barking stopped.
“Devastating.” Darius gave her an appreciative chuckle, then a caress that started high and ended low. “But then, you naturally are, Proxy.” He stepped toward the chair where his pants and wallet were. “While I’m up, I’ll tend to the pecuniary—”
“Never mind,” she said, “I’ll take it out in trade.” She saw his face light up. “Not that kind, pudhead. Do some chores around here for a change. Split some wood, pack out the ashes. Start just about anywhere.” She turned her naked back on him and started toward the bed, then said as if it had just occurred to her: “Make breakfast.”
Charlene was pretty much right about how draining his workdays were, Owen had to admit. The start of October, now, and so far today he had managed to be snappish to Rosellen (“What,” she’d asked when he took a look at the freshly typed September dredging total and swore. “Did I make a mistake?” “Maybe this whole sonofabitching process is a mistake,” he’d said and stomped off, leaving her mystified) and had riled Major Santee by insisting on Sangster for some booster pump engineering when the major wanted him on something else (“Glad I married a nurse,” Sangster said of the Ad Building atmosphere, “she can help me put my straitjacket on”) and he was only now getting to his ostensible task, troubleshooting the dredging. Owen jounced down the bluff from the Ad Building, digging his heels in to keep his balance, toward the wall of soupy earth that was his dam and the temperamental maze of pipes and pontoons and trestles that were his dredgeline. He could not help wondering what the engineers at Grand Coulee and Bonneville and Boulder were doing at this moment. Probably sitting around in carpet slippers, solving crossword puzzles.
But Fort Peck was making monthly average progress of three million cubic yards, just. They still were atoning for April. A strong August had made up for some of that early lag, but September didn’t pick up the monthly average as much, which was what had set Owen to cussing earlier this morning.
So now we got Octember left to go, he put his mind to. October, November, and whatever December will let us have before snow piles up to our belly buttons again. One nice sixty-day month out of that, just maintaining a hundred thousand yards of fill a day, and there it’ll be, sufficient unto the goddamn year. Won’t matter what the calendar says, just see it all as autumn on the Montana Riviera. Take it day by day, sixty more times out of about the next seventy-five, is what I’ve got to do. Move the mud, that’s the daily drill, Duff.
Owen was up onto the west half of the dam by now, the broad and brown Missouri flowing through between this and the east half, and upstream in front of him lay the quadruple sprawl of pipelines and timbering stuck in muck and clawed-out pits where the dredges were cutting and sucking.
Yet wasn’t it pretty.
The pipeline-trestle strutworks strode across the distance like cadets with a palanquin on their backs.
The four pipelines themselves were each two-mile-long thongs, lacing the river valley to the new bluff of dam.
The white dredges, and the four brown fields where they were digging away, looked almost like diligent farms.
And all of it, the long pendants of pipes and machinery, day and night flickered with light where arc welders were rebuilding dredge pumps and cutterheads: Owen’s constellation of blue flashes.
• • •
At the day’s start of business in the Blue Eagle, Tom Harry let drop:
“You’ve got an admirer.”
“I thought I had nations of them,” Proxy said warily.
“Judging by the wear and tear on my Packard, that could be. Watch it, though. Don’t go tooting that Skywegian’s bagpipe for him so much you forget our arrangement here.”
“He’s after-hours.”
“I can tell. At one minute to two, he straightens his cap, says to his pecker, ‘Hello, down there, ready for another ride on a houseboat?’ and off he goes with you.”
“Tom, you don’t run me after I pack up out of here for the night.”
“Then don’t be letting some bughouse lawyer run you either, all I’m saying. That’s not like you, Shannon.”
Tom Harry turned away from her toward his cash register, but then flinched and uttered, “Jesus, what the—?” Reaching behind himself, he plucked the beer-soaked back of his white shirt away from his hide.
“Sorry about spilling all that perfectly good beer,” Proxy was telling him, empty glass aslant in her hand. “That’s not like me, is it.”
• • •
Even Darius, chary with any credit to the Fort Peck way of doing things, was taken with the implication of the dredgeline.
“It’s an aqueduct, isn’t it,” he said to Owen during their daily lunch joust. “For muck, instead of water.”
“That’s kind of a cockeyed way of looking at it, but yeah, basically,” Owen granted.
“Does that make your Corps of Engineers the new Romans?”
“I forget, Darius, didn’t they kick the crap out of the Persians once?”
• • •
The dam was a foolkiller, they never dared forget that.
Hugh and Birdie were clearing a trap in the section of dredgeline nearest the diversion tunnels when hubbub broke out at the railroad trestle just above them.
The two of them climbed the side of the dam to see what was up. One of the gravel crew had stepped down into a dumpcar of pea gravel, where his hat had blown off to, just as the dump-doors sprung open. Between the drop to the diversion tunnel portal below and the beating he took from the gravel, the poor sap never had a chance.
A foreman, looking green around the gills, came up from the tunnel portal and told everybody to knock off the gawking, get back to work.
“Them tunnels aren’t any too good a luck, are they,” said Birdie as the pair of them slowly made their way back down the dam. Hugh knew what he meant. Tunnel pneumonia was rampant among the crews digging the four huge diversion boreholes that the river was destined into. The dynamiter J.L. Hill, next door to Bruce and Kate, had lately come down with it. Between that and accidents that could happen while you were reaching for your hat . . .
Hugh had to say, “You do wonder if there are pockets of that kind of luck, yes.”
• • •
“Incredible, really though, Owen, how your Roosevelt can put a Corps of Engineers bit here and a WPA piece there and a pack of contractors in around the edges, and it’s all supposed to stand in one stack.”
“Whatever works, I guess he figures.” Owen started going through a sandwich as if he was famished. He even hurries his digestive process, Darius was convinced. “You take that prunehead Hoover,” Owen provided between rapid munches, “his notion of things was, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ ”
Owen was never on hand for long at the boatyard these noons, but the two of them crammed in a remarkable amount of the world’s doings. There was plenty to go around. Spain. Ethiopia. Germany. As usual it was not clear what was going on in Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics rather, but Darius had edgily agreed with Owen that Stalin seemed to be knocking people around a bit much. Occasionally they even brought the discussion down to Fort Peck.
As now, when Medwick strutted by them with a curt greeting. Belly on him like a burglar’s sack, ran Darius’s thought, but he phrased it down to:
“There’s a man with ‘boss’ written all over him, in his own hand.”
“Yeah,” Owen agreed, “there are times when I’d like to bring the full force and effect of a two-by-four down on Cece. But he does come through with my pontoons and pump boats, eventually.”
“On the Clyde,” Darius mused, “we’d have had a standing committee on Medwick.”
Owen had finished off his food and was tanking up on black coffee. He blew lightly onto his thermos cup of it for a moment before saying:
“Tell me something, Darius. How come you chose here instead of someplace like, oh, say, Dnieperstroy.”
• • •
The rivers faced each other from opposite pages of the world. The Missouri longer and arching and more sinuous, the Dnieper blunter and right-angled and to the point. Two hundred Ukraine miles above the Dnieper’s discharge into the Black Sea, the Dnieperstroy Dam took the river in through teeth of sectioned concrete, the greatest power feed that had ever been achieved. Each river no longer a moving road, but something more like a giant hose, the Dnieper through its dynamos and the Missouri through its diversion tunnels were to hum out the bragging rights of each government. Dnieperstroy’s peasant thousands of workers were meant to announce Communism’s capability, the Soviet achievement: We have abolished Sunday. The Fort Peck project was using the Missouri as its writ of ever-contriving America: We deal with tomorrow as it comes.
• • •
Darius gave Owen the swiftest of looks, then tried to joke past the question. “But Owen, my man, I don’t know how to speak a word of Dnieperstroyski.”
But from what I savvy about the Clydeside, uncle of mine, you’ve probably talked some leftski of some kind. He told Darius as much with simply his return gaze.
Darius studied him back, then reached for his thermos bottle and took his time about pouring a cupful of moderately-toned tea. “Along the Clyde, political wrangle was simply everyday conversation.”
“Any particular brand?”
“Basic as springwater, is all,” Darius lilted. “A lad of parts, such as yourself here, must know that there are mountains of reading on this all the way up to Marx—”
“Marx? The man’s dead, Darius—what does he know about anything anymore?”
“—and I’ve done a fair bit of that reading, you can bet your Sunday britches, Owen, my man.” Owen had noticed Darius’s tendency to grow more fancy before coming to the point. “But me, now, I know it most by gut,” he was arriving at. “That the working class has always been hounded by the owning class. There does seem to me a clear bit of adjustment available there. That if they were one and the same, there’d be nobody to do the hounding.”
As with everything else he had ever read, Owen’s college course on political economy had sopped in and stayed; even before Darius was done, he had found the term for this particular pie in the sky.
“Syndicalism,” he murmured. “That what you’re about, for crying out loud? Sorel and his general strike, that’s just going to topple everything neatly into your—excuse me all to hell, the working class’s—lap? The Wobblies were for that, in this country, and all it got them were some good songs and lots of jail sentences.”
“ ‘Neatly,’ now, I don’t think that necessarily applies to—”
“Jesus H., Darius, that syndicat setup of worker committee this and worker committee that, wouldn’t it be like trying to build a locomotive on a bicycle frame?”
Darius blinked, and in an instant of instinct, decided what he had better confine himself to in this scrimmage with Owen.
“I’ve been in more strikes than you’ve had hot breakfasts,” he confessed ruefully. “But again, Owen, what’s a man to do? Strikes were the way of it on the Clyde, they’re how we brought up wages and conditions.”
“Sorel’s big idea, as I remember it, was more about bringing down governments than bringing up wages.”
“What can you expect of a Frenchman, they never think small. Now, a Fabian female acquaintance I once had—”
“Let’s whoa on the theory stuff,” Owen decreed, “right about here. I don’t have time to go through all the spectrums of Red with you.” He hesitated. “For that matter, I don’t think I even want to know some of what you maybe believe. But what you better keep in mind is that you aren’t back there in the Soviet of the Clyde now.” He did not bother to indicate the gray dromedary hills in the direction of the spillway, the high silent bluffs overtopping the river valley, the six-square-mile scatter of the dam workforce at their separate projects like tribal encampments.
“Peckerstroy I don’t think is in the cards here, Darius. Detroit, the waterfronts out on the Coast,” Owen named off for him, “Butte, even. If strikes are your game, that’s more the territory. But not here. Hell, people here are flat-out grateful just to have a job.”
“As am I.” Darius gave him a quick keen smile. “Owen, about my being here. Maybe it’s an interlude. Maybe it’ll prove to be an entirely new tune. But I can’t not care about what I’ve worked for. I think I’d do away with myself, before that.”
“Strong talk,” Owen remarked. “You take your politics awful damn seriously.”
“The running of the world, I take seriously, yes. I’ve never seen why it has to be left to the big bugs. Even this interesting Roosevelt of yours—all this work here, the wages, the whacking great dam itself, it’s all rather something he and his crowd are doling out, isn’t it.”
“Darius,” Owen told him stonily, “I’m only a medium bug, okay? Some guys give me orders, and I give orders to other guys, and I don’t know how the hell else to make anything work. I’m in this because the Fort Peck Dam is going to be built, and that’s what I do, figure out ways to build. Sermons are never going to help me at that.”
Kate strained.
“You keep that up, dear, it’s coming,” the nurse said.
The watermelon bulge of herself and the baby rose before her in the hospital sheets. Along with agonized and exhausted, she was madder than hell about how long it takes to put things together. All her life she had seen things be born, kittens by the carload, pups every time you turned around, lambs sliding out in a wet slink and the more difficult calves and colts, and it had not once occurred to her how the puzzling act of delivery would be with her. Too casual about it to take that “twilight sleep” dope they’d offered her, but how about some kind of midnight anesthesia to put her out cold right now? Didn’t matter, didn’t MAT-ter, she raged, too late UHH now, it was occurring all at once now, like pain of a lifetime’s ailments concentrated between her thighs.
