Bucking the Sun, page 26
By the winter of ’34, Darius’s wing of the labor movement and the middle-of-the-road Trades Union Council were in blind alliance simply to try to keep people fed. There were those, Darius included, who believed the TUC couldn’t find its guts with both hands during the General Strike, but resentment never made a meal; food tickets had to be distributed to the unemployed, and Darius was to spell his TUC counterpart at the Woodturners Hall the afternoon of doling out tickets there. He arrived to a mob piled against the closed hall.
Darius struggled, half-swam, through the swarm of men.
“I’m from the Clydeside flying squad! Let me through, we’ll get the distribution going, let me for christ’s sake through!”
He shoved and was shoved to the door of the hall, where he managed to negotiate the men there—some of them fortunately recognized him—into letting him unlock the door and go in alone. Then he had to push in against the resisting shoulder from inside.
“Crawfurd, you great fool, it’s me, Duff!”
Darius wrenched through the narrowly opened door, then he and the other slammed it and leaned their backs against it, looking at each other. George Crawfurd was white as nunnery paint.
“We’re in the shit,” the TUC man whispered to Darius. “They allotted us but five hundred tickets. Christ only knows how many are howling out there.”
An easy riotful, Darius could agree. Still, the pair of them had to do what they could.
“None the neverless,” Darius intoned, then laughed. Crawfurd gaped at him like a beached fish.
“We need to get cracking at this,” Darius told him as the outside clamor began to rise again, “or they’ll be in here all over us. I’ll pass them through one at a time, you hand the tickets.”
Crawfurd backed away doubtfully, pulling a table and chair to one side, away from the direct sluice of the doorway.
Darius turned around to the door. Unlocked it, rammed it open and flung himself sidewise into the doorframe, his back straight and tight against one side and his right foot up as high as he could against the jamb on the other side, making a barrier of his cocked leg.
“One at a time, boys, under the leg!” he shouted into the mass of faces. “Our man George Crawfurd, inside, has your food tickets. But we’ve got to do it orderly or it can’t get done. Easy go now, here, you be first”—he reached out and tugged at a thick-shouldered man who appeared to be the most explosive of the bunch. “Under the bridge. If you’ll fit, we can put through anybody up to drayhorses.”
That drew a tentative laugh from the human wall. The thickset man hesitated, then ducked awkwardly under Darius’s leg, his back bumping the underside of Darius’s thigh as he waddled under and through.
“Easy go,” Darius said again, to the next man. “It’s the only right leg I’ve got, so scoot as low as you can, that’s the way . . . Another, now.” He reached out for a sleeve, any nearest sleeve, and tugged indicatively downward. “That’s it, down to the scenic route. I know this’d be more interesting if my name was Fifi, but . . . ”
For the next hours and hundreds upon hundreds of men, Darius stayed jammed in the doorway, a cork against the hungry human sea. When he spotted a particularly small man coming, he would make the switch and put his other foot up on the doorjamb, to rest the aching leg.
Twice, too, he had to drop his leg and fight off doorbreakers, men who lost their heads, whether from panic, fury or desperation it didn’t matter, and lunged blindly at the doorway. Both times he had the luck that the nearest men on line instantly turned into his allies, swatting sense into the berserk ones.
Even a good many of the better-behaved men were wild-eyed, plunging into the arch of Darius’s leg. Many others simply looked dog-miserable, ashamed of taking this dole, even if it came from their labor brethren.
Then out of the head of the line raged a man with a thin, pinched face, a twitchy manner, and a screeching disbelief.
“What’s it to you whether we starve or not?” he unloosed from inches away.
“It would offend me,” Darius railed back, “to see people die like midges!” Grabbing the man by the scruff of the neck, he ducked him on through beneath his leg.
Through it all he kept count, deliberately making it obvious, as proctorial as possible. If he would stay intent and orderly about this, the incipient mob would. Possibly. He let the running stream of numbers purl under his aching leg, his weariness and fear. He found his flat pencil, and each time that he had counted twenty men, he would reach up and score the lead across the doorframe above him.
At last the waiting men were a wedge several deep instead of dozens. Darius shifted his eyes carefully among this remainder, the last men which would mean they were the angriest. He let the next few go uncounted beneath his leg as he looked up at the doorframe and tallied the twenties. Twenty of them themselves, which it took him a groggy moment to work out as equaling four hundred. He swung his gaze back to the waiting remnant and, but for the vital matter of demeanor, could have cheered. There were going to be enough food tickets, by a sound margin.
• • •
Darius had the tortured back of a keelhauling victim. From his rump to the base of his neck, skin was gone in several places and what was left was red and raw. Crawfurd uncorked a pint of whiskey and handed it to him. The shirtless man swigged, shuddered, swigged again and nodded his thanks. Then with obvious pain he put on his coat.
“You’re sure you want anything touching that back?” Crawfurd asked.
“No,” Darius expelled, “but can’t you see them arresting me for public indecency if I don’t?”
“You did a grand job of work here today,” Crawfurd said. “It was a near thing, too—we’ve only a dozen tickets left. Minus yours, of course”—he thumbed one from the thin sheaf and put it on the table beside Darius—“and my own,” putting that one in his coat pocket. “I’ll turn these other few back to the committee first thing in the morning.”
Darius stood silent, weaving just noticeably, the coat draped over his shirtless upper body.
“Another lift of this?”
Crawfurd held out the whiskey to him again.
“George,” Crawfurd heard Darius Duff say coldly, “turn out your pockets.”
The shorter man kept his gaze on Darius and tried a laugh. “What’s this, now. Darius, man, you’ve had a massive day—”
“Give or take goddamn few,” Darius’s voice came to him wearily but fiercely, “I put four hundred and forty-eight men through that doorway. That plus our two plus that ten you’re so busy showing off to me comes out at four hundred and sixty tickets, doesn’t it. Where’re the other forty you’ve palmed?”
Crawfurd cast a disturbed look at the figure before him, damned ladder of a man. He was not predisposed in favor of Darius Duff, who according to gossip along the Clyde had a plentiful history of bedmates among his female Red mates. George Crawfurd, a bit of a trimmer in everything but family matters, wasn’t going to be chided by a sleepabout.
“It’s not that way at all,” Crawfurd began to protest hotly. “You must’ve miscounted, or maybe I—”
Darius slammed him against the wall, one hand holding the neck of Crawfurd’s shirt while the other felt at his pockets. The searching hand found the extra sheaf of food tickets in the inside pocket of Crawfurd’s jacket.
“It’s none of your damned business!” Crawfurd shouted. “A man has a right to—” he broke off and swung an arm around onto Darius’s back, thumping as hard as he could with his fist. Darius gasped and arched his back, but wrenched out the wad of tickets. Crawfurd grabbed that wrist, trying to make him turn loose of them. They scuffled until Crawfurd pounded Darius’s back again, and as Darius groaned, Crawfurd forced his hand against the table, clawing for the tickets. Too late he glimpsed the lead pipe in Darius’s other hand.
• • •
“Who, mannerly me?”
Darius swung off the bed, keeping his face away from Proxy after that unmissing guess of hers. In the trouble to the top of his neck? More like over the peak of his head. He went to the waterbucket and drank from the dipper, the cold galvanized taste going down in big swallows. He remembered the exact sound, like a dropped sack of meal, of Crawfurd’s skull splitting, he could trace out every inch of how that foolish death had come to happen. Crawfurd, don’t. This time, man, don’t do as you did, and spare us both the . . . But there wasn’t a second time, was there, where Crawfurd was concerned. The once was the all.
Proxy could tell trouble a mile off, and Darius was only from her to the waterbucket.
Isn’t this just ducky, she mulled over as she watched him, I find one with a little money and who halfway has some smarts, and he’s some kind of hoodoo in the old country.
He knew she was calculating him. He tried to muster a smile but didn’t nearly make it. “What obtains, do you think? Regarding me.”
“You mean should I bounce your butt off this houseboat sooner rather than later?”
“That’s the essence, Proxy, yes.” He did manage a bit of smile now but of the sad sort.
“This Red stuff, and these tictacs of yours over there in Outer Nowhere,” she gave a little thrust of her head in the approximate direction of Plentywood. “Are they catching?”
“Some people are quite immune,” he admitted. “But you, I would hope—”
“Darius. If they pin something on you, will any get on me?”
He looked at her, in that dry way that she figured Scotchmen adopted at the time they were weaned. “Your reputation probably will not suffer, Proxy, even if mine should happen to.”
Neil had made the discovery of coal. The seam of it was a couple of hours’ drive straight east along the Missouri, to where Big Muddy Creek found its way down out of the Plentywood country and joined the river. As a mining operation it did not amount to much—the coal crew had to crawl in on hands and knees to dig the skinny seam—and neither did the coal, soft slightly brownish lignite junk that burned like punk. But Neil already knew life wasn’t guaranteed to be a scuttle of anthracite, and so he garnered a ton of the soft coal at a time, all but living in the truck after he got off his dredgeline shift. Wheeler and the other matchbox towns now were showing coal heaps in backyards where he and the Ford Triple A had deposited woodpiles the autumn before, and Neil told himself that if he didn’t turn into a zombie and drive the truck off the bridge into Big Muddy Creek one of these dark evenings, he and Rosellen were going to have the world by the tail after a few more trucking seasons.
He blew in for supper now, though, to find Rosellen looking both excited and perturbed.
“Get a billydoo from one of those magazines?” he barely had to guess.
“Really did, this time,” she said, somewhere between rueful and thoughtful. “Not one of their printed-up rejections—an honest-to-God letter from the editor.”
“Well, that’s progress!” He studied the mixture of expression she still had. “Don’t you think?”
“It is and it isn’t.” What Rosellen had dreamt of was an editor’s letter, a telegram would have been even better, saying eager to publish whatever you care to send . . . “He said my endings need work.” In fact, the sentence that stood out in the actual editor’s message was, There is an adage, Miss Duff, about the writer’s requisite scrutiny of his previous tries: ‘Employ the eraser.’ “He said they’re too much like O. Henry.”
“Who the hell is Old Henry?”
She saw how instantly angry Neil was on her behalf. Before she could say anything, he was telling her:
“This guy, editor or whatever he is. Write him a letter. Right now, why don’t you. Tell him to go take a flying jump.”
She charged over and hugged him, coaldust and all, coaxing each other out of their mood with the familiar press of body against body. But there still was a trickle of fear in her, that the editor might be right. Not only right, but that she maybe could not do any better with endings or any of the rest of it than she already had.
• • •
“Scurf,” Meg said. “All babies get scurf.”
“Yeah, but—” Bruce looked at Kate and she at him, mutually dismayed over the ugly patch of dry scaly skin on the exact top of Jackie’s head.
“Kate.” Meg’s commander-in-chief tone. “It is no lasting reflection on you as a mother.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“A little scurf on him or not, he’s a beaner,” Hugh declared. He grinned across the bassinet at Kate and said, “The family line has taken a distinct upturn,” suddenly convincing her of the virtue of Jackie having grandparents.
“Hey, didn’t I have something to do with—”
“No offense intended, Bruce.”
• • •
The night after going off to Plentywood again with Jaarala, Darius hove into the Blue Eagle at his usual time and there was no Proxy.
“She said to tell you she’s out finding gold tonight,” Tom Harry relayed. “I were you, I wouldn’t wait up.”
“Ah,” Darius digested this news. “What’s that name you and she have for a customer with a heavy purse, a John Q.?”
“John D.,” Tom Harry provided drily, “as in Rockefeller.”
“The very one, of course.” Darius shifted from one foot to the other, casting long-faced gazes around the confines of the Blue Eagle. “Well, then, now.” He put a hand in his pocket toward coinage, upon second thought drew it back out.
“Cripes sake, fella, you look like somebody just took a leak on your leg,” Tom Harry diagnosed for him. “Belly up here, I’ll stand you a beer. Hate to see a man too bollixed to buy himself a drink.”
“What’s this under the category of, ‘The devil’s good to his own’?” Darius marveled as Tom Harry uncapped a beer and positioned it in front of him. “Or have you merely gone mad?”
“Duff, I wouldn’t trade you for a pinto pony. Come on back into the office a minute, there’s something interesting you’ve got to see.”
Darius and bottle strolled after him to the cubbyhole office off to the side of the bandstand. Tom Harry opened the door and stepped back. Darius stepped in and found himself facing a large man who wore the obvious item of interest, a badge.
At Darius’s look, Tom Harry lifted his shoulders in a shrug and closed the door after himself.
“Name’s Peyser,” the man said, holding out a thick mitt of hand. On his hip rode a pistol with an ivory butt the size of a hunting horn. “I’m the undersheriff down at this end of the county.”
Crawfurd, oh Christ, Crawfurd and Duff, you’ll die facing the monument screamed a chorus together in Darius’s head, but he managed to shake the undersheriff’s meaty hand and drop into the straightback chair the man indicated.
“Where’d you land in here from?” Peyser started right in.
“Glasgow,” Darius said without specifying which nation.
Peyser grunted as if that was what he had expected. “Something you better know about,” he said as if Darius had come to him for advice. “I was appointed to this badge by a sheriff who is hell on wheels about politics. He’s hell on wheels about most things, but politics really fires him up. Particularly those that go pretty far in a certain direction. Off toward Plentywood, say.”
Not Crawfurd then, sang in Darius. At least not yet.
Bold with relief, he mustered:
“I had no idea there’s a law in America against going for a Saturday drive.”
“If you’re claiming that a man’s political persuasion isn’t against the law in this country, that’s true, as far as it goes. But Sheriff Kinnick, if he was here, would point out to you that we can generally come up with some law that a person is on the stray side of.” The undersheriff leaned forward as if getting down to business. “There’s feeling that goes back a long way against radicals—Wobs and such. Troublemaking, wildcat strikes, sabotage—that’s the kind of stuff the Wobblies got themselves a reputation for, in case you didn’t know.”
“That’s their reputation, is it,” Darius said as if marveling. “And here I thought the Industrial Workers of the World, to give them their rightful name, were known for being put in front of a firing squad in your Utah, shot on the docks in your state of Washington, and hanged from the nearest trestle in places such as your Butte.”
“I won’t say those didn’t happen, too,” the undersheriff said. “Lots happens.” Peyser eyed Darius as if calculating how large he had to spell it out for him. All the way, he decided.
“If you get on the wrong side of Sheriff Kinnick,” the undersheriff said unequivocally, “he’s the type who will nail your pecker to a tree and give you only a rusty saw to get loose with.”
“Ah, thank you, no,” Darius said. “Point taken.”
“But,” Peyser patiently kept on, “Sheriff Kinnick isn’t here, is he. So, to keep me from having to keep track of you for him, why don’t you be a little choosier about who you hang out with.”
By Clydeside reflex, Darius instantly set about to split that doctrinal hair. “Everywhere?”
“No, hell no, only around here. Up in Plentywood, I don’t give a poop what you do. That’s not our jurisdiction.”
“So I’m to mend my manners when I’m not in a car with a certain party,” Darius pursued, “but once we hie off together . . . ?”
“That pretty much ought to do it,” the beefy undersheriff said in the same spelling-out voice. “As far as I’m concerned, Jaarala’s okay. Some will tell you he’s one of those bughouse cases, off the deep end politically. That’s only the Scandihoovian in him, I figure.”
Darius took a swallow of beer and carefully tried: “That sounds like perhaps a different tack from your Sheriff Kinnick’s.”
“This job’s a job.” Peyser looked impassively at Darius. “If I had to agree with everything any boss thinks, where the hell would I ever work?”
• • •
He always dealt with them naked, waiting in bed with only a sheet over him, lights off, his mouth a little dry with anticipation until whichever floozie it was this time rapped on his door.
