Bucking the Sun, page 25
She hung on to the bed rails and convulsed the lower half of her body, feeling as if she was taking the biggest grunt of her life and it was not enough, not yet . . .
She closed her eyes so hard that the corners of her eyelids hurt, so she let them shoot open, staring at the hospital room ceiling, beaverboard, why do the idiots call it that, it’s not made of beavers . . .
The doctorly advice that she ought to concentrate made her peeved on top of angry: as if a person could think of anything else but this, this delivering, unloading . . . Giving birth—if she could just give, she would—it had to be grunted out, it had to be . . .
“Here comes the head. Here we go, nurse.” We? If we were having this, why was she getting all the grief? “I have it, nurse, I have him.” Doctor’s voice, cheerful as cherry pie. “Mrs. Duff, you have a son here.”
Kate panted, swallowed, shuddered. They repeated to her that she was a mother now.
• • •
The Duffs piled into the hospital room the next noon. Beat up from the hard birth as she was, Kate on her pile of pillows gave them a pale grin. For his part, Bruce looked like parenthood was a tune he had casually written by himself. Everybody crowded around the bed to gauge the red-faced bundle in the crook of Kate’s arm, and they unanimously declared him the best ever.
“What do you think we named him?” Bruce asked. “Give you seven guesses.”
Donald, Meg hazarded.
Pasquale, and Squally for short, Hugh joked, making Kate mad at him for weeks to come.
Junior, Owen thought for sure, and was genuinely taken aback when Bruce smirked and shook his head huh uh.
Probably something like Robert, Roderick, or Ronald, said Charlene as if that was the way it ought to be.
Merritt, offered Rosellen.
Brewster, Neil came up with.
Tim, Darius surprised everyone with.
The parental couple shyly grinned back and forth over the baby, as if giving each other the christening privilege. It was Kate who revealed:
“Jack. He’s Jack, aren’t you, hon.”
“As in crackerjack,” Bruce could not resist adding.
• • •
In bed, Darius reported:
“All of a damned sudden, I’m a great-uncle.”
Proxy reached down on him and fondled. “I’d have said a little above average, maybe.”
“Madness, though.” In the darkness of the houseboat she could just see the profile of his face, upturned as if the ceiling and beyond was being read from. “Bringing a child into this world, what with all the fixing the damnable place needs.”
Proxy didn’t say anything, and her hand did not stay there long.
• • •
The mother and child both were fine, fine, the newest father at Fort Peck learned to recite to the diving-barge crew and Kate’s co-workers at the Rondola and any other interested parties, the doctor merely wanted her to rest up a few more days before letting her come home.
Her absence, though, left Bruce unmoored, drifty in both mind and the rest of him. The house seemed to him dead as a tomb. The thick silence of noon followed him into the kitchen, where he halted and tried to get his bearings for this lunch hour. He crossed to the breadbox, opened it, snapped it closed again without taking out so much as a crust. He was hungry in a different way than food could satisfy.
Tense with that feeling of not quite knowing himself, he went and stripped the sheets from the bed, bundled into them the dirty clothes Kate had told him not to worry about because Rosellen had offered to do them with hers on Saturday, and plunged out the back door and across into the Hills’ yard. Best route against anyone seeing him, there between Nan’s lines of laundry. Schooner sails of sheets and pennants of undies danced whitely on the wind as he passed. His heart going like a piston, he rapped on the Hills’ back door.
Nan opened, surprise turning swiftly into her tidy smile. “I understand you’re a proud father.”
Neither of those fit how he felt at that moment, but he managed a grin. “Yeah, so they keep telling me.”
“Here, those can go in the basket there,” Nan steered Bruce’s armload of bedding and such into an empty wicker clothes basket. She did not have the heart to tell him she had offered to Kate to do this wash and been told it already was taken care of, thanks a million anyway.
Bruce deposited the clothes and stepped back, but not awfully far. I hadn’t oughta notta, the damned lines of a song were going in his head like a radio that wouldn’t shut off, but I really gotta gotta . . . Trying to sound like a natural neighbor, he asked:
“How’s J.L. getting along?”
“Better. They want to keep him in the hospital to watch him a few more days yet.” Nan kept her smile, but was poised in a way suggesting she had a Himalaya of laundry to get to.
“Quite a thing, isn’t it,” Bruce said as if amazed by the sudden thought of it. “Each of us on our own like this.”
Nan Hill did not blush, did not look away in any melting maiden style, did not even entirely drop her smile.
“Speaking of that,” she said, “I’d better get on with my day so you can get on with yours.” She added in a tone that brought red to his ears: “I know I’m keeping you from your lunch.”
• • •
As if it was a given, Darius went over and sat with Proxy at a relatively quiet table along the far wall of the Blue Eagle whenever she took a break from dancing and other activities, these nights. Along with his beer, this Friday night he carried what he had just heard from Jaarala.
“Plimpton’s out.”
“What’s that mean, ‘out’?”
“Been expelled. From the Party. He claims he quit, but . . . ”
“Tim. I’m not in this for these damnable arguments over your Trotsky and your thisky and your thatky. All I want, all I’ve ever wanted, is a full say for the workers.”
“How you get to that, without all this other, I just can’t help you with.” Jaarala’s baggy face looked bleak, but then it generally did. He eyed Darius as if testing a board on a bridge. “Both of us’ve heard the choir break up before. I figure I’ll go over there tomorrow like usual and see how things stand.”
Darius said nothing for a moment and then told Jaarala yes, of course, that made sound sense, he’d accompany him. So tomorrow there would be the nearly half-day journey to Plentywood again, hour after hour of Tim Jaarala’s wearying old-maidish driving across the dun geography. Damn the geography, geography was the blubber of America, great fat spaces between the human clusters. Darius almost felt nostalgia for Great Britain’s vertical class system, kick it in the shins at the Clydeside and draw an immediate yelp in the House of Lords, whereas here everything went bending away out of sight over ridge after—
“Think the rain’ll hurt the rhubarb?”
Proxy’s tone practically crackled in Darius’s ears.
“Sorry. I was a bit drifty there.” Realizing he had better put away politics for the night, Darius made eye contact across the table to her. Encountering cool weather there, he sent his gaze on south toward what looked like the warmer clime of her nearly sheer blouse. He cleared his throat. “Proxy, love, any chance you can make an early evening of it tonight? Tomorrow—”
“—‘I canna manage to be aroond,’ ” she flourished the mockery before those words could troop out of him. “Naturally, you can’t. Which is real too bad, because I had a Saturday night doozy I wanted to tell you.”
“I hope it’ll save?”
“I don’t know that it will. See, it’s one of those you just can’t stop yourself from thinking about. Mystery, kind of. There’s this bird who shows up, pretty much out of nowhere. He manages to get on at the dam, does his job, doesn’t call any attention to himself. Sugar probably doesn’t even melt in his tea, he goes about everything so hushy. Then along with that, he finds somebody enough of a stupe to take him home with her. Snuggles right in with her, night after night after night after night, except every other Saturday. Poof, he’s gone, every other Saturday. Funny, isn’t it, for a guy who likes a helping or two of nookie all those other nights. Doesn’t come around, ever, those every other Saturdays.” Proxy addressed the night at large. “Where do he go, and what do he do?”
“Proxy, I’ve told you. An extra shift—”
“Extra shift, your earhole. I’ve asked around. Nosiree, no sign of Darius Duff on the boatyard crew those Saturday nights. What somebody did see, though, was Darius Duff toodling down the road with that sad sack who cooks at the barracks. I suppose the two of you go off on baloney picnics together?”
“It—has to do with political things.”
“People like Tom Harry keep yapping that everything does.” Proxy had on her ice pick expression. “This big dam out in the middle of where there’s never been nobody but gophers, Tom says is a political thing. Whoopedy-do for political things, then. You trotting off with a beanburner every couple of weeks, though, that doesn’t sound like political generally does.”
Darius was looking more unstrung with every minute. This was a front he hadn’t expected to have to defend himself on. Even to himself he sounded wounded and lame: “I can’t really tell you, Proxy. It’s, don’t you see, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the pair of us, and so I need to ask you to not—” he broke off raggedly and grimaced upward. “And what do you want, sonny?”
A young roustabout, red-haired but otherwise green as grass, had mustered himself enough to approach their table. Shifting from one foot to the other but standing his ground, the kid managed to sing out: “A dance with the lady?”
The pair at the table seemed to take a long time to digest this request. The kid fidgeted. “I didn’t want to butt in or anything. But I been waiting most of an hour, and I’m gonna have to go on shift pretty quick.”
“I’ll give you a shift up your—” Darius furiously lurched from his chair and made a roundhouse grab which would have taken the red out of the kid’s hair if it had connected, then started for him around the table. Proxy jumped up and with veteran skill interposed herself.
“Snookie pie, this actually isn’t the best time for us to foxtrot.” She propelled the kid toward the millrace of taxi dancers and customers at the far end of the bar. “One of the other ladies will be glad to dance your socks off, okay?”
She turned back to Darius. He still was poised there motionless, halfway around and half across as if he had run aground on the table. It didn’t take much of a guiding shove from her to put him back blindly into his chair. “Try not to take on the world,” she instructed, “while I go get you some nourishment.”
She went to the front of the bar, absolute farthest from Tom Harry, to order a double whiskey. He marched down on her there anyway.
“Shannon, what the bejesus is going on over there, Latin lessons? You’re supposed to be out on the floor—”
“He’s a little riled up, Tom. I’ll—”
“—dancing, not gassing the sonofabitching—”
“—make up the difference on the dance take and—”
“—night away with some yayhoo crying in his—”
“TOM, I HAVE TO!” Proxy divulged at not quite the top of her voice, but near enough. She stared nearby customers back to whatever they’d been doing, then leaned across the bar toward Tom Harry and said into his face:
“I’m the one who got him going on—what he’s going on. So, I’ll buy out my frigging dance take tonight, and I’ll tell frigging Darius not to show his mug around here tomorrow night, and you won’t have a thing in the frigging world to howl about, now will you.”
Muttering, Tom Harry headed back to his cash register. Proxy sipped the double whiskey down to where it wouldn’t spill, carried the glass across the room and deposited it in front of Darius. “Here. Nerve medicine.”
Darius looked as if he was about to pop out of his skin.
“Drink it,” Proxy tapped a fingernail indicatively against the oversize shotglass, “or I’m going to rub it in your hair.”
Not seeming to see, Darius automatically closed a hand around the glass and drew it up for a gulping drink.
“Here.” She frisked him until she found a handkerchief in one of his hip pockets, planted it in his hand, then lifted his hand to the wet trail down his cheek.
“You shouldn’t look at a crying man,” he managed to say as he dabbed, “it’s seven years’ bad luck.”
“They’ll just have to stand in line with the rest of my luck.” She folded her arms beneath her breasts in the I’m waiting, stupe gesture recognized by Tom Harry across the entire length of the Blue Eagle. Darius took some time at it before words were found.
“Jaarala knows some persons somewhere who’re interested in changing matters,” he started in.
“The Red Corner,” she said impatiently. “Puh-lenty-wood.”
Her short circuit of the apparatus of explanation he was building up to knocked him speechless for a minute. His voice, once he found it, strained out:
“I thought you didn’t give a fiddle about political matters.”
“Never bothered to ask, though, did you. Anyway, I don’t.”
Darius studied her, wiping his cheeks with a sleeve. “Proxy, can we—this is a bit public for political elucidation.”
“Everything sounds better on a houseboat, I suppose you think.”
• • •
“So how come you have to sneak out of town for these politics?”
“That’s where they are, that’s the damned point! Don’t you see?”
“Darius, there’s some stuff I know that would curl your toes, okay?” More by habit than intention they had rushed to bed as soon as they reached the houseboat, and the now-familiar touch of their bodies along each other was simply part of the atmosphere there. But Darius realized that tonight Proxy was heating up in not the accustomed sense. “Maybe I don’t give a flip about these politics of yours,” her words struck him like pebbles of warning, “but you better not ever think you can write me off with ‘Don’t you see?’ I see quite a frigging lot when I want to, Scotchpotch.”
“I’ve no doubt of that now,” he could say with sincerity.
“Keep it in mind then,” she recommended. “So what’s all this with you dipping your wick in politics?”
“Back in Scotland I was in the movement . . . ”
“What’d you ever move?”
“Proxy, if Marx’d had to answer to you, he’d still be sorting his umlauts from his apostrophes.”
“Sor-ry,” she said derisively, but snuggled closer to him.
Wary, he waited a minute. Then the long struggle began unspooling out of him, litany of trying to find the political moment, the pivot of rule.
“We all but had the bastards in ’14,” he bitterly arrived at. “Proxy, I tell you, we had them like this.” Above where she lay, she could just discern in the darkness that Darius had lifted his left hand and closed it into a fist. It was a good guess that fist was clenched so tightly the knuckles had gone pale. “The Triple Alliance,” his voice journeyed on. “The railwaymen, the miners, and the dockworkers,” he named them off like bellpeals. “They were readying to shut down the country, and that would have brought out enough of the rest of us in support. We’d have changed the face of history, turnable whore that she is.”
Proxy went tense as a cat at a fur show, but Darius shot on:
“But the war came. And before you could say Tommy, men lined up in ranks to kill men just like themselves.”
She made no pronouncement about the world’s majority of stupes, but almost.
“We nearly had them again in ’26, the General Strike.” Darius lightly pounded his fists together, knuckles against knuckles, like rams’ heads meeting. “That was to be the time.” His fury came and went again, with the rasping memory of the warships standing gray but distinct out there on the Clyde while ashore the strikebreakers wrested back the docks and power stations and tram lines, sailors and police and blacklegs conspiring to keep the General Strike from ever living up to its name.
“The hard times, that was the next chance.” His chest rising and falling as if still catching breath from then, Darius recited to Proxy the hunger marches of ’31 and ’32, the Depression-desperate crowds that took to the streets and struggled with the police, the perfidy of Ramsay MacDonald’s government, the flare-up along the Clydeside this past winter . . . there at 1934, his voice stopped for a moment, then stumbled out with:
“There was some trouble.”
Alongside him in the wordless minute after that, Proxy puckered her lips and began to blow silently and steadily toward the side of Darius’s neck, perhaps six inches away.
When that eventually drew his attention and he turned his head in her direction, she cut off the little stream of air.
“Unless I miss my guess,” she said, “you were in it up to the top of your neck.”
• • •
The crackdown had begun in ’32, led by the London police. Up the length of Great Britain, the tactic now was to charge into the marchers and crowds of the unemployed, break their numbers with the swing of truncheons. The Clydeside had been delivered blows before, and by experts, but there was no sense having your brains scrambled on a regular basis. Darius, by then a member of his committee’s flying squad—movement veterans who were dispatched into the streets whenever trouble or opportunity flared—adapted to the times by carrying a piece of lead pipe, just short enough to fit in the deep side pocket of his jacket, just long enough to have some effect against a policeman’s club. He and others of the flying squad particularly watched for young coppers in the street skirmishes; catch one unaware and you could give him a shiver, the whack of your lead pipe against his oak truncheon stinging his hand. Doctrine lay behind even such street guerrilla tactics, after all: the minimum of brutality compatible with . . .
