Bucking the Sun, page 28
“I sold some writing.”
“You didn’t.” He spun to her, his expression lighting up. “You did? Wahoo! Which—how much—”
“To the Grit paper.”
“Uh huh!” He was eagerly toweling coaly water and wettened dust off himself. “So let’s have a look at it.”
She handed him The Weekly Grit, full of pithy tales and kernels of wit, with her thumb next to a line in the “Oh, Say!” column.
Neil read out loud:
“The wind, dancing in a dust dress.”
“Uhm?” He peeked inquiringly at her, shaking the pages of Grit as if more ought to fall out.
“That’s—what they took, from my ‘Dry Land’ story. But they paid twenty-five cents a word.”
“That beats the pants off hammer wages,” Neil rallied loyally. “Rosellen, this is just great. Gives you your start. Grab your coat and let’s go tell everybody. Bruce and Kate first, then—”
“No, wait. Not yet. They’ll think I’m . . . putting myself too high. It’s, well, it is only seven words, Neil.”
“What the hell about that, though? Old Shakespeare must have started with seven, sometime or another.” He watched her expression, which was an odd confessional smile amid firm shaking of her head. “What, you need this writing to be a secret?” he puzzled it out.
“For now.” Rosellen went to him. “You know about it. For me, that’s everybody.”
• • •
“Airplane ride, Jackie! RRR RRR ZOOOM RR RREAUGH!” The baby laughed down from where Bruce’s hands were holding him aloft. “Doesn’t he have a smile on him like a million dollars, Katy?”
“He’s a honey,” she agreed over her shoulder, still trying to pack their things and Jackie’s to go to Bismarck, the car nowhere near ready.
“So are you, Katycat, you know that? You really goddamn are.”
“And you’re a windjammer.”
• • •
Thanksgiving supper at the cookhouse, Hugh showed up when the rest of the eaters were starting on their second helpings. Thoroughly Hugh-style, Meg thought, dispatching herself across the kitchen to the serving window to tell him so.
But he shook his head when she started to dish up turkey and fixings for him. “I’ll wait and lift a fork with you, if you please, Margaret.”
After the dining hall had emptied out and the servers shed their cranberry- and gravy-wounded aprons and one lone morose pearldiver was beginning to scrub away at sink load after sink load of dishware and cutlery, Meg’s head appeared in the serving window again. She does still look like the top of the line with that hair, Hugh noted to himself one more time. She called over to him, “If you still want a witness to that eating habit of yours, come take a plate.”
He went up for the laden plate, Meg now busy dishing her own. In through the serving window, he could see Jaarala over by the stove, stirring this and shaking that. Hugh hesitated, then spoke out:
“Care to join us?”
“No, gonna eat off the stove. There’s always cookin’ needs watchin’,” came the response. But then Jaarala more or less looked at Hugh, and fleetingly even toward Meg. “Thanks anyhow.”
Meg and Hugh ate, across from each other at one of the long tables that seated forty-eight. Bruce and Kate were spending the holiday at her parents’ in North Dakota, to show off the baby. Neil was working a shift of overtime, since so many others of the dam force were off for the day, and Rosellen said she had something she needed to finish up at home. As to Darius, in circumstances such as this Meg was apt to mention him only in cautious general terms and Hugh to speak of him not at all. They did have the food to be comfortable with, turkey a la Jaarala roasted to a moist succulence and smooth mashed potatoes and heavenly gravy and cranberry relish with tiny taste nuggets of orange peel and corn pudding an ecstatic taste of which would put you to wondering with Hugh:
“What does old Cookalorum in there”—he nodded in the direction of Jaarala—“do to this?”
“Don’t I wish I could figure that out,” Meg said.
At pie, mincemeat that made the mouth water helplessly for more, it was her turn. “I was just thinking, what Owen said about Kate that once? That if Roosevelt his very self were to come into the Rondola, she’d wait on him as if he were anybody else until he was through and then tell him, ‘Save your fork, President, there’s pie.’ ”
“She would, too,” Hugh agreed, with a slightest chuckle.
When they finished the feast, Meg got up and brought back fresh cups of coffee.
Hugh took a strong sip, looking off out the window at the dam lights haloed by the frost in the air.
“We’ll soon have winter here again,” he said.
“We will,” she acknowledged guardedly.
She nursed her cup of coffee, wondering about the long nature of this marriage, while Hugh went into the other room of his mind.
He did not want to deal with his suspicion toward himself that had been building as he went to work on the dredgeline traps day after day, but it was growing inescapable. The furrowed path all the way from Inverley to the Missouri River homestead—had he been an impostor, all those years? Worse, a dabbler? A doubt such as this cut to a man’s core, that’s what it did. No reason it should, he kept insisting to himself. A drop of sweat, produced on hourly rate of pay, ought to be the same as any other drop of sweat, seasonally induced on a farm; but the sun-warm sweating done in a greening field surely somehow—Christ on a slick raft, man, Hugh told himself, you’d better not start trying to sort out sweat. Yet he found himself doing exactly that, these days. He was beginning to suspect that damwork was growing sinfully more comfortable to him than farming.
“A penny for them,” Meg said, to try to draw him out of his well of silence.
Hugh shook his head. “They’re worth positive millions.” He looked across at her, a familiar look that said his thoughts would not make themselves known until later, if ever.
Hugh is otherwhere, though, isn’t he pierced back to Meg from that pantry session with Darius. While she waited, waited, waited. Sometimes she had the patience of an imbecile, she thought.
• • •
“It would help on the employment, I’m told,” Darius stared at the houseboat ceiling and said, “if I were married.”
How can they be such total bastards without even half-trying, Proxy asked herself although it was no longer even a question, men. They swarm all over us and they want to play house on a houseboat with us and they tell us about every time they cut their finger with a jackknife when they were little boys, and then they slink off and marry some stupe who’s still got her cherry. That tightfart sister-in-law of his must’ve found him somebody. Neaten up the famn damily by marrying him off to whoever-the-hell. Jee Zuz, I’m so sick of the way they behave. I could just pigstick—everything furiously piling through Proxy all but blocked out the next from Darius:
“Do you suppose you could arrange to be there?”
Proxy stayed silent, the ceiling receiving a scouring stare from her. Finally she said:
“This is some kind of Scotch joke, right?”
“Isn’t this just the way of the damnable world?” Darius asked the ceiling. “Here I am, ready to enter marital bliss at last, and my intended chooses now to turn back into a coy virgin.”
Proxy raised on an elbow and looked down at him. “I hope I wouldn’t have to go that far.” She studied him like a skeptic buying wild honey in molasses country. “Are you serious? You’re serious.”
“I’m at least that bad. One stipulation, though.” He reached up and grasped a handful of the short hair at the back of her neck. “If you’ve had any proposal before this one, don’t tell me the comparison.”
Proxy didn’t say anything for a bit. Then:
“Say we go get licensed. What am I supposed to do with myself then, weave brooms?”
“You can do much what you like. I need some leeway myself, now and again.”
“The Bolshie business, you mean.”
“Ah, well, some of that. Then too, I’m a bit long in the tooth to be thoroughly domesticated. Simply because we’d be married doesn’t mean we need oversee each other every minute, does it?”
“I could stay on working for Tom? The dancing, I mean?”
“Assuredly.”
“If I once in a while see a John D., maybe a little backseat driv—?”
“Proxy, don’t go down a list with me! There’s such a thing as quitting while you’re ahead, woman.”
She moved over onto him. She licked a tantalizing course along his collarbone to the base of his throat, tongued a humid kiss into the hollow there, brushed the effective tips of her breasts across the rise of his chest once, twice, and again, then lingered above him with a diagonal smile. “Since when?”
Part Four
THE SHERIFF
1991
Bastard of a case, that truck-in-the-river shenanigan had been. Long after he had lost office and everything else but age, the sheriff thought his way back and forth through it. Staring out the window of his room in the Milk River Senior Care Center, he would take moments from 1938—that sight of the pair of bodies naked as Creation; or that clodhopper undersheriff, what was his name, mewing “Married, you bet; only not to each other”—and pull those pieces of time apart. Lay them out, conversations, expressions on faces, all the puzzlework of investigation, and sort them over. Try again to find his way into when he was just starting on the tricky process of figuring out what Duffs had done to Duffs.
“We can’t account for what happened any more than you can, Sheriff.”
One of them, one of that damned family, had made that baldfaced claim to him back there at the outset.
“And don’t think we haven’t tried.”
Huh, they hadn’t seen trying until they saw Carl Kinnick.
Beyond his window, same as ever—samer, it somehow seemed to him anymore—Glasgow streeted off below the bare northside hill the Senior Care Center sat on. Daylight at least alleviated one of his aggravations, the rooftop sign at the east end of the old downtown. Up there on daddy longlegs supports, in the dark before dawn it was sometimes burned out to EL VELT and other times it blazoned in full pink HOTEL ROOSEVELT. Either way, that name poked at the sheriff like a neon pitchfork. He always waited until daybreak took care of that sign to do what he did now, employ the wooden coathanger he used for opening the window by fitting the hook over the handle of the stiff latch and giving a both-hands pull to unlock it, then shoving a wooden end of the hanger against a corner of the glass to push the window as open as it would go. Air the place out, let in what he could against the institutional stuffiness. Even bad weather improved this place. Actually this appeared to be a good enough day outside, although you never knew, even here in September, if the clouds were going to build in from the west and by one o’clock be storming hard enough to knock down a nun.
Glasgow looked weathered in a lot of ways.
Up and down was the history of towns like this, of course, but it had been a while now since up. Things had boomed when the SAC air base came in, north of town—B-52 runways the fattest construction payroll since Fort Peck Dam. Then when it seemed as though we weren’t going to have to atomize the Soviet Union after all, the flyboys picked up and went. Empty base, bigger than the parade ground of Hell, just sitting there, weeding up. Concrete all over the prairie, while the dam holding back the Missouri was of dirt; it took a lot of government doing to get things that backward, the sheriff thought.
Grimacing, he slightly shifted position, there in his supposedly mobile confinement. He had been hating this wheelchair from the precise moment his fanny first met it.
“The two of them, out there that way—none of us knew anything like that was going on. Sheriff, we’re a family who’ve always had our differences. But you never can expect something of this sort, can you. It takes a lot now, for us to hold our heads up.” How hard that Duff case had started off. And kept on being. He could still remember how his heart stopped a little, there on the boulder face of the dam, when he grasped the fact that the two drowned bodies in the truck were not a simple pairing. How he started, on the instant, trying to reconstruct the chain of events. The watchman heard the splash at such and such a time, then the lapse with the diver grappling down there in the dark, then the truck coming to the surface nosefirst on the crane cable, water sheening from it. But the greater water, the river, shut off the scene of before that. Of what had drawn that truck to the bottom. The only sure thing he had then, in what had gone abruptly from a vehicular mishap to a full-fledged case of probable homicide, were unclad bodies—one of each, naturally—there in the truck cab. Intact-looking people, yet the spark gone from beneath the woman’s crown of hair, and from behind the man’s span of forehead. For his own benefit the sheriff had needed to study up some on forensic medicine in his job—the oldest dodo of a doctor always was appointed county coroner, and about half the time couldn’t even be trusted on cause of death—and so he knew that each brain, under the bonecap of each person’s head, was shaped something like a low leafy tree, a canopy of cortex. Under that canopy rested the brain’s constituent parts, rootlike. Looked at that way, the person was the family tree, in and of his or her self. Carrying everything that had gone before, familywise, back all the way to the dawns of history, there in that personal mental spread of tree. And for all that to just go, vanish—how people could let themselves be pruned out of life, through some weird situation they had put themselves into, was beyond Carl Kinnick. But then maybe that was why that man and that woman had ended up as victims, there in that sopping truck cab, and he as sheriff.
Ex-sheriff.
Xed out of the political picture in the ’74 election. He’d done every kind of electioneering he could think of in his own county that year, then gone down to Billings for the Republican congressional candidate’s last-gasp rally. This is what politics had come to, dragging yourself halfway across the state to try to get glimpsed on television along with a swarm of other tie-wearing stiff-smiling officeholders or would-be’s. Back in 1952 the sheriff had managed to switch parties in good style, declaring himself an Eisenhower man and contending that he of course would have been proud to remain a Democrat if that party’d had the common sense to nominate Ike instead of that eggbrain Adlai; pretty shrewd alibi, if he did say so himself. But it cost him in ’74. As he drove home from that Billings rally to Glasgow on election night, defeat drummed down on the Republicans, the car radio reporting the Democrats had obliterated the GOP congressional candidate, taken most of the state legislature, won across the board. Watergate and that creep Nixon; the sheriff drove north through the night listening to every detail of the national crapstorm cascading down on anything Republican, the moment at last arriving when the radio voice said “Even long-time sheriffs are being turned out of office in the Democratic sweep. Up in Valley County, Walt Jepperson is leading the incumbent Carl Kinnick by nearly five hundred votes . . . ”
Half a thousand votes. Good Christ, in Valley County a losing margin like that was as bad as five hundred million. As if the population of China had swarmed to the polls and all voted to kill him off as sheriff. Abruptly the tall grass at the edge of the highway danced in his headlights, the car drifting toward the ditch while he was in the trance of that election result, and he’d had to sheer the steering wheel hard to keep the car on the road. Wouldn’t that have been something pretty, too, giving the bastards a chance to say he couldn’t take defeat and went and committed suicide.
A knock on his room door shunted aside that train of thought. Two quick raps, by knuckles that knew what they were doing. Flinching all the way, the sheriff wheeled himself around to face the door, then said merely, “What.”
The nurse came in to check on the LP, as the old sheriff was called by the staff.
When she’d started working here she assumed it meant Long-Playing, like an old phonograph record, because of Carl Kinnick’s seemingly neverending longevity. Soon enough, though, she’d heard somebody refer to him as the Little Prick, and by then she understood. Just when you thought he couldn’t possibly surpass his record for orneriness, he found some way to. The time when the recreation director Doris, new on the job then, planned a surprise birthday party—must have been the LP’s eighty-fifth, ninetieth? who the hell could tell, or cared any—and gone to the trouble of digging around in the Valley County Museum to find a poster of Carl Kinnick running for election in the 1930s. Framed between his name on top and DEMOCRAT FOR SHERIFF underneath, pearl-gray Stetson tugged down in a businesslike way, he made quite the picture of a lawman, everybody thought. But he took one look at it and cussed out the recreation director unmercifully. It ended up with him shouting at Doris that if he ever wanted to be surprised, he’d let them know about it first.
Now Kinnick appraised the nurse’s body as he did every time she came into his room, aware that she didn’t like being looked over but also knowing he could get away with it. No sense being so old and crippled up if you couldn’t at least run your eyes across an attractive young flank.
Shitheaded old poot, the nurse thought, but said:
“How’s your hip today, Mr. Kinnick?”
“Hurts,” he reported, the same flat way he did every day.
“You’re supposed to exercise it more, you know that,” she said as she did every day. She herself could not see why a hip replacement had been done in a person this ungodly old. For that matter, why this contrary little man had agreed to undergo the operation. But old age is some other kind of territory, people exist in it by their own lights, she always had to remind herself in this job. At least Kinnick didn’t paw at her, the way the old grabber down the hall in 119 always tried.
“So are you going to?” she asked.
