Bucking the Sun, page 29
“Going to what?”
“Exercise-your-new-hip-joint,” she stipulated as levelly as she could.
To her surprise, Kinnick squinched up that dried-apple-doll face and seemed to think over the matter. But then he pronounced:
“Doubtful.”
“Mr. Kinnick, you’re a case in more ways than one,” the nurse spoke in a sweet-sour tone which she knew couldn’t land her in any trouble, and went out of his room.
He hated to see her go, as always. The little spots of time when she was in his room were the only sample of real woman he had, anymore.
Peyser.
Norman Peyser.
That was the overgrown undersheriff’s name, it came back to him now, along with the guy’s football-shaped face. Naturally the big lummox hadn’t had a shred of a theory as to what happened in that truck at the dam and so he, the sheriff, had to do it all on the Duff case, from scratch. The undersheriff wordlessly in tow, Carl Kinnick traipsed the Fort Peck project and its rickety towns from one end to the other—good God, one set of Duffs lived like badgers on a houseboat; what kind of people were these?—as he tried to figure out that truck shenanigan. Go around and question them all. Work on them, make them account for every minute of their whereabouts that night of the drownings. Sort through the possible motives, although the Duffs were a bunch you could not easily nail down; every time you thought you had a motive clear, some new angle popped out from another Duff. And while he was working on them, plenty was going on amongst them, he could sense. Against him, against the world of justice he represented, they closed ranks. But he was as sure as anything that they were having some pitched fights, and there were obvious silences; the, what, eight of them surviving the drowned pair were trying to sort out what they had left, which even the sheriff could see amounted to one another, not the most comfortable sum after what had happened. Dealing with that family of Duffs, the sheriff for the first time in his life entertained the thought that maybe orphans did not have it so hard after all.
Well, what the hell can you do, though, when you come right down to the pussypurr question of how people are going to behave.
Almost a dozen terms in office, and he still hadn’t been able to predict with any real certainty. He had sheriffed as hard as he knew how, given his every day and far too much of his nights on behalf of law and order in Valley County, and in the end they threw him out just because he happened to be wearing the same political eartag as Tricky Dick Nixon. Sure, he knew that some were saying, even then, that Carl Kinnick was older than bunions and ought to be tossed onto the retirement heap. But didn’t something like his perseverance on those Duffs, that truck, the river, go to show that he—
He moved wrong on the hip, and gasped with pain. God, how could his own body jab him so. He considered buzzing for the nurse, ask her to dig out a pain pill from the bottle in his top dresser drawer. But he detested pills, about as much as he despised asking for help.
Slowly he caught his breath and waited out the misery in his hip, taking a look around his room for the how manyeth time. This place. Not much to recommend it, life in here, but he was doing what he could with it. Meals, which everybody else in here tried to make a big deal, he merely went through with because he had to. Ate alone whenever he could, and purely silent if somebody ended up having to share a table with him. And only one good television night in the week, when he could watch America’s Most Wanted, with the sound off. Give himself a chance to study the wanted-poster faces, and try to guess ahead in the crime reenactments the actors did.
Beyond those few things, getting by in here was a matter of maintaining his orneriness the way he did. By now he had a full theory of it: a philosophy of why to be difficult, if anybody ever took the trouble to ask him. All right, there were those who’d say he did not even need to work at being mean, it came as natural to him as a morning piss. But that radically underestimated the effort he was making, if they only knew. Huh uh, this was an entire new deal, the extent to which he made himself stay furious against the walled-in world. Everything else had shriveled up; his pecker no longer worked, his hip gave him constant torment, he sat here at the mercy of white uniforms twenty-four hours a day. (Yet people thought he was in a problem mood because he was lonely; the dumb bastards, they didn’t even know he always had the Duffs.) So this was what he had arrived at, careful and constant exercise at staying stubborn. Crabby, contrary, owly, behaving like a mean little hyena: whatever term you care to call it by, he would tell you that the capacity for being ornery was the one power left to a person in old age.
Finally Carl Kinnick checked the calendar again, and this circled day. September 22nd again. That and the fancily printed 1991. Huh. The century had reached the point where it read the same forwards or backwards. He wouldn’t be that way himself for another eight years yet, would he, at ninety-nine. There had been a spell of years when he hated aging, could not figure out why people shouldn’t just conk out at some given point, like car batteries do the month after their warranty is up. During that time he half wished that he had not corrected his patrol car’s veer toward the ditch that Watergate election night. But ending up as blood, gristle, and windshield shards didn’t appeal, now that he could study back on that alternative. No, Carl Kinnick had got over wanting death’s quick cure of everything. Traveling with the century wasn’t easy, but so what.
Part Five
PLUGGING THE RIVER
1936–1937
It was the middle of February and the wind had been shoving at the north side of the house all of 1936 so far. This morning, the stillness woke Meg up. She burrowed out from under the six blankets heaped over her and Hugh, just far enough to raise her head and listen into the crystalline silence. The cold of the air pinched inside her nose.
“Hugh!” She turtled her head back under the load of covers and desperately nestled herself spoon-fashion against the length of him in his longhandle underwear. “Hugh-it’s-freezing!”
Groggily he rumbled: “Margaret, it’d be news if it wasn’t. We’ve had freezing weather since around October, for God’s sake.”
“I mean, in here! The fire’s gone out!”
Hugh absorbed this. Then said in the tone of a man wronged: “Goddamn that soft coal.”
He lurched from under the mound of bedding toward the stove and could tell at once this was not merely the feel of a fireless house, this was deep cold. He rattled open the firebox of the stove and swore at the dead ash of the coal he had banked the fire with at bedtime. Crumpling yesterday’s entire Glasgow Courier, he stuffed it in the stove, grabbed up a double handful of kindling and chucked that on top of the paper, and, shivering hard now, made himself position dry sticks of wood atop it all so the flame would draw. He struck a match and lit the paper and hovered miserably until the kindling at last caught fire too. Then he lunged back to bed. Meg rewarded him with a clasp of warm arms. At that moment, the thermometer outside the Fort Peck Administration Building read 61 degrees below zero.
• • •
Bruce was goddamned if he was going to walk anywhere in this kind of weather. Before getting the stove going, he dumped the cold ashes in an empty lardpail, then used the kerosene can to sop them. In his cap and mackinaw, he ran out to the car, knelt in the snow, shoved the pail under the oilpan, leaned back as far as he could and tossed in a match. When he was reasonably sure the flaming kerosene was settling down enough not to burn up the car, he jumped back in the house to wait for the crankcase oil to thaw enough so he could start the engine and drive down to the winter harbor.
• • •
Owen was goddamned if he was going to fool around with a car in this kind of weather. He put on dress socks, then worksocks, then wool socks; piled on two pair of pants over long underwear, and a flannel shirt over his work one. He molded some newspaper into his overshoes for insulation, put them on, wrestled into the buffalo hunter coat he’d bought for just this eventuality, clapped his cap on with the earflaps down, bandannaed a scarf across his nose and mouth, stuck one of his office oxfords in each side pocket, pulled on thick mittens and walked to work at the winter harbor.
• • •
“ ’19, that was another cold bastard of a winter,” Tom Harry reflected. Proxy had not been in the sin business long enough to have other big winters for comparison, so it seemed to be up to him to forecast the economic climate accompanying such cold. “On the one hand, this kind of weather, you’d think guys wouldn’t have anything better to do than drink and diddle,” he set out. “Hell, people even manage to do it up north in igloos, after all.” He paused, then asked with a rare note of uncertainty: “Don’t they?”
“How the frig do I know? This place”—Proxy indicated the frosted-over front windows of the empty Blue Eagle—“is the only igloo I’ve been in.”
“I about went bust, though, there in ’19,” Tom Harry recounted. “Guys holed up, wouldn’t come downtown just because it was a little cold. A lot like now, Shannon.” He still called her that, even though she regularly pointed out that she had a married name now.
“Things are tough all over, Tom,” she gave him with her mildest mocking smile. “Even the birds are walking.”
“Shannon, what would you think about a buddy night at your end of things, maybe once a week—What’re you looking at me like that for? The moviehouse does it every so often, has one guy pay and lets his buddy in free. Builds up the trade.”
“Speaking for myself, I’ll go take up choirwork before I ever let two guys have a poke for the price of one.”
“Okay, okay, just an idea, all it was. Jesus Christ, though, you’re getting awfully particular since you had your knot tied.” He gave her a sidelong look. “How is married life anyway?”
“Not half bad.”
“Holy state of maddermoany.” He shook his head. “I could never see it, myself.”
“That’s sure frigging astonishing to find out.”
“Sarcasm never got anybody past St. Peter. Now come on, give me a hand with the thinking here.”
“How would hot toddies go?”
“They wouldn’t. The only time a Montanan will sip a toddy is when he’s halfway to pneumonia.”
“Rum, then?” Proxy began to take on a faraway look. “Did I ever tell you about my uncle who raised St. Bernard dogs and the time there was this coyote in heat and—”
“No, you didn’t and you’re not going to. This is a goddamned business meeting, Shannon. Besides, where the hell would I get rum? Half the time I can’t even get the Great Falls beer trucks to come up here, the way the roads’ve been.” He shook his head. “You call that thinking?”
“O-kay, Tom,” Proxy intoned, “you show me what real thinking is.”
Tom Harry passed a hand over his face, turned around, dusted off his cash register, turned around toward Proxy again, and studied off into the empty barroom and dance floor. Finally he said:
“I don’t think it looks good, until spring.”
“So should we close up shop?”
“Hell, no.” He looked as if she had insulted him down to his shorts. “What kind of a way is that to run a saloon?”
Back at the onset of winter, in the courthouse at Glasgow, Proxy had needed to think madly to recall “Susannah” as the given name she’d furnished Darius and then she had to give him a dig with her elbow when he started to fill in “Renfrewshire” as county of residence instead of “Valley,” but they managed to do the deed, nuptially.
“What now?” she asked him a little nervously when the Justice of the Peace was through with them. “Give each other a bath in a washtub of champagne?”
He looked surprised. “We get the family over with, of course. Then we settle in like old dozing spaniels.” He pulled her to him and there on the Justice of the Peace’s front porch gave her a kiss that she felt to her ankles. “Don’t you know thing one about married life, woman?”
But the jitters caught up with Darius as soon as groom and bride began making the rounds. Inches inside the doorway at Owen and Charlene’s, an exceedingly thin grin plastered on him, he introduced Proxy. “I’ve gone and got you an aunt. Please may I present Proxy, ah, Duff, she would be now, wouldn’t she.”
“Uh huh,” issued out of Owen as he gave that night’s first blink of recognition. Jesus, that one. Perfectly vivid in memory was the evening Proxy flattened the redheaded taxi dancer. “Well. Congratulations. Come in. Uh, sit down.”
“Yes, do,” said Charlene, all interested. Here you go, Owen. You wanted Fort Peck, here’s a case of it in the family for you. She looked Darius in the eye and then Floozy, no, Proxy it was, wasn’t it. “You’ve got to get over being bashful newlyweds sometime.”
“No, no, we’re not staying,” Darius interjected. “We merely called by to enlighten you.”
Proxy studied Charlene. “I’ve seen you.”
The altitude of Charlene’s eyebrows said it was mutual. “I operate the A-1,” she responded. She studied Proxy’s bottle-blonde hair. “If you’re ever in need.”
“Anything off for family members?”
“Proxy, love,” said Darius, “we’ve to—”
“Sit down,” said Owen again, “take a load off, why don’t—”
“I wouldn’t think discounts are a good idea,” Charlene said cheerily, “in any business.”
Proxy laughed, and her smile began to skew treacherously. “Dancing the dimes out of joes doesn’t leave much room for bargaining, you’re right, but—”
“Really, we’ve to be going,” Darius hastily stepped in. “Calling in on Bruce and Kate next,” he explained, as if it were a continental journey. Capturing Proxy by an elbow, he steered for the door.
“Hey, wait.”
Darius and Proxy turned around at something in Owen’s blurt.
What the hell do I know about a combination like this, or you either, Charlene, hmm? A bareheaded decision about how we act, that’s all that’s up to us. Darius and a wifey who could kick the giblets out of Joe Louis, that’s his problem.
“How about if we come along?” Owen said, Charlene beside him nodding keen agreement. “Make it more of a family shindig, that way.”
By the time Bruce and Kate and the baby snowballed into the procession and the whole bunch of them reached Neil and Rosellen’s, they were too many for the Packard that Proxy had borrowed from Tom Harry, but Neil and Bruce charged out into the night to rig up the truck so they could all ride in that. They crowded and kidded, and their every sound carried on the cold night air to Wheeler neighborhoods half a mile away. It having been unanimously voiced that brides and mothers with small children rated the cab of the truck, Proxy scooched in next to Neil then Kate next to her with Jackie in a bundle. Jee Zuz! A papoose, too, even. Proxy always figured she had her work cut out for her in trying to be sociable with women who weren’t in the trade; but at least the Charlene one could dish it out, and the other two didn’t seem any slouches either. The men she had noticed separately around town before, but seeing them in one bunch tonight made her realize they were all Darius’s basic Duff frame of rake handles and doorknobs. And if Darius was a fair sample, they had the stamina of wolfhounds.
Now banging broke out on the roof of the truck cab, along with urgings to Neil to tromp on the gas and at least give the frost a run for its money. Charlene and Rosellen and Darius and Owen and Bruce, in caps, coats and blankets close to mummification, stood up behind the cab and held on to the boxboards, giddy with the purified air of the winter night and the colder glitter of starshine overhead. Every one of them knew that in chasing off on this makeshift shivaree they were showing about as much sense as a pan of gooseberries, but was it their fault if nonsense was suddenly contagious?
They piled out at Meg and Hugh’s house, calling mock warnings ahead that they had lovebirds out here.
Hugh took the announcement with a prudent if not successfully deadpan expression, Meg took it like a pin under the skin. What was to be done, though, with the entire family grinning in the doorway?
“Come—come in. Sit yourselves. Kate, Jackie can be tucked in our bed. Hugh, take their coats while I—” The production of coffee began. Hugh insisted they all move on into the Blue Room. Gamely confronting the blueprint decor, Proxy declared it real interesting, it somehow reminded her of a place she once worked in that had mirrors everywh— Darius asked if the coffee was ready yet. Speaking of ready, Hugh tossed back at him, Darius had taken a scandalous length of time to gird himself up for matrimony, had he not? Sounding as valiant as he could, Darius maintained that he had been converted overnight by the example of the other husbands in this room attaining such magnificent mates. Tell us, Jealous! one of the men chimed above the general acclamation, he thought it might have been Owen. Just then Rosellen, clued in by swift whispers from Charlene on the way over in the truck, wanted to know from Proxy how she ever got into taxi dancing. Oh, Proxy generalized, from pretty early in life she had been on her own. On her back is more like it, Charlene thought and smothered a giggle. Owen, his arm around her, gave her a complicit hug; for his part, he was looking ahead with fascination to the mixed tints of Red and peroxide. Neil was pondering the avarice of love, how it was capable of snatching the socks off anybody at any time. Bruce for once was tongue-tied; to him Darius was old as the hills, but here he was, fixed up with the kind of woman who could do it to a guy until his eyes popped. Kate meanwhile was wondering what the various ways were that Darius and Proxy reached mad pash, as much practice as they’d probably both had; Bruce in bed pretty much had one gear—true, it was high gear—and so a person could not entirely help wondering, could she, how others went about matters. She thought to herself, I wonder if Rosellen knows what I’m thinking . . .
“And here I thought you were a confirmed bachelor,” Meg said in lowest tone to Darius when he happened to drift over next to her while the others were carrying on.
“I thought that too, Meg. We were both off.”
Proxy was making sure to watch, with quick little angled glances, as Darius and Meg traded something else too low to hear, and then Darius conspicuously rejoined the general ruckus. So that’s where that stood; behind bottled brother Hugh’s back. Darius, you’re quite the family man. But you didn’t get very far with her, did you, or you wouldn’t have thrown in with me. Serves you right; that drypuss sis-in-law there looks to me like a lost cause from the first.
“Exercise-your-new-hip-joint,” she stipulated as levelly as she could.
To her surprise, Kinnick squinched up that dried-apple-doll face and seemed to think over the matter. But then he pronounced:
“Doubtful.”
“Mr. Kinnick, you’re a case in more ways than one,” the nurse spoke in a sweet-sour tone which she knew couldn’t land her in any trouble, and went out of his room.
He hated to see her go, as always. The little spots of time when she was in his room were the only sample of real woman he had, anymore.
Peyser.
Norman Peyser.
That was the overgrown undersheriff’s name, it came back to him now, along with the guy’s football-shaped face. Naturally the big lummox hadn’t had a shred of a theory as to what happened in that truck at the dam and so he, the sheriff, had to do it all on the Duff case, from scratch. The undersheriff wordlessly in tow, Carl Kinnick traipsed the Fort Peck project and its rickety towns from one end to the other—good God, one set of Duffs lived like badgers on a houseboat; what kind of people were these?—as he tried to figure out that truck shenanigan. Go around and question them all. Work on them, make them account for every minute of their whereabouts that night of the drownings. Sort through the possible motives, although the Duffs were a bunch you could not easily nail down; every time you thought you had a motive clear, some new angle popped out from another Duff. And while he was working on them, plenty was going on amongst them, he could sense. Against him, against the world of justice he represented, they closed ranks. But he was as sure as anything that they were having some pitched fights, and there were obvious silences; the, what, eight of them surviving the drowned pair were trying to sort out what they had left, which even the sheriff could see amounted to one another, not the most comfortable sum after what had happened. Dealing with that family of Duffs, the sheriff for the first time in his life entertained the thought that maybe orphans did not have it so hard after all.
Well, what the hell can you do, though, when you come right down to the pussypurr question of how people are going to behave.
Almost a dozen terms in office, and he still hadn’t been able to predict with any real certainty. He had sheriffed as hard as he knew how, given his every day and far too much of his nights on behalf of law and order in Valley County, and in the end they threw him out just because he happened to be wearing the same political eartag as Tricky Dick Nixon. Sure, he knew that some were saying, even then, that Carl Kinnick was older than bunions and ought to be tossed onto the retirement heap. But didn’t something like his perseverance on those Duffs, that truck, the river, go to show that he—
He moved wrong on the hip, and gasped with pain. God, how could his own body jab him so. He considered buzzing for the nurse, ask her to dig out a pain pill from the bottle in his top dresser drawer. But he detested pills, about as much as he despised asking for help.
Slowly he caught his breath and waited out the misery in his hip, taking a look around his room for the how manyeth time. This place. Not much to recommend it, life in here, but he was doing what he could with it. Meals, which everybody else in here tried to make a big deal, he merely went through with because he had to. Ate alone whenever he could, and purely silent if somebody ended up having to share a table with him. And only one good television night in the week, when he could watch America’s Most Wanted, with the sound off. Give himself a chance to study the wanted-poster faces, and try to guess ahead in the crime reenactments the actors did.
Beyond those few things, getting by in here was a matter of maintaining his orneriness the way he did. By now he had a full theory of it: a philosophy of why to be difficult, if anybody ever took the trouble to ask him. All right, there were those who’d say he did not even need to work at being mean, it came as natural to him as a morning piss. But that radically underestimated the effort he was making, if they only knew. Huh uh, this was an entire new deal, the extent to which he made himself stay furious against the walled-in world. Everything else had shriveled up; his pecker no longer worked, his hip gave him constant torment, he sat here at the mercy of white uniforms twenty-four hours a day. (Yet people thought he was in a problem mood because he was lonely; the dumb bastards, they didn’t even know he always had the Duffs.) So this was what he had arrived at, careful and constant exercise at staying stubborn. Crabby, contrary, owly, behaving like a mean little hyena: whatever term you care to call it by, he would tell you that the capacity for being ornery was the one power left to a person in old age.
Finally Carl Kinnick checked the calendar again, and this circled day. September 22nd again. That and the fancily printed 1991. Huh. The century had reached the point where it read the same forwards or backwards. He wouldn’t be that way himself for another eight years yet, would he, at ninety-nine. There had been a spell of years when he hated aging, could not figure out why people shouldn’t just conk out at some given point, like car batteries do the month after their warranty is up. During that time he half wished that he had not corrected his patrol car’s veer toward the ditch that Watergate election night. But ending up as blood, gristle, and windshield shards didn’t appeal, now that he could study back on that alternative. No, Carl Kinnick had got over wanting death’s quick cure of everything. Traveling with the century wasn’t easy, but so what.
Part Five
PLUGGING THE RIVER
1936–1937
It was the middle of February and the wind had been shoving at the north side of the house all of 1936 so far. This morning, the stillness woke Meg up. She burrowed out from under the six blankets heaped over her and Hugh, just far enough to raise her head and listen into the crystalline silence. The cold of the air pinched inside her nose.
“Hugh!” She turtled her head back under the load of covers and desperately nestled herself spoon-fashion against the length of him in his longhandle underwear. “Hugh-it’s-freezing!”
Groggily he rumbled: “Margaret, it’d be news if it wasn’t. We’ve had freezing weather since around October, for God’s sake.”
“I mean, in here! The fire’s gone out!”
Hugh absorbed this. Then said in the tone of a man wronged: “Goddamn that soft coal.”
He lurched from under the mound of bedding toward the stove and could tell at once this was not merely the feel of a fireless house, this was deep cold. He rattled open the firebox of the stove and swore at the dead ash of the coal he had banked the fire with at bedtime. Crumpling yesterday’s entire Glasgow Courier, he stuffed it in the stove, grabbed up a double handful of kindling and chucked that on top of the paper, and, shivering hard now, made himself position dry sticks of wood atop it all so the flame would draw. He struck a match and lit the paper and hovered miserably until the kindling at last caught fire too. Then he lunged back to bed. Meg rewarded him with a clasp of warm arms. At that moment, the thermometer outside the Fort Peck Administration Building read 61 degrees below zero.
• • •
Bruce was goddamned if he was going to walk anywhere in this kind of weather. Before getting the stove going, he dumped the cold ashes in an empty lardpail, then used the kerosene can to sop them. In his cap and mackinaw, he ran out to the car, knelt in the snow, shoved the pail under the oilpan, leaned back as far as he could and tossed in a match. When he was reasonably sure the flaming kerosene was settling down enough not to burn up the car, he jumped back in the house to wait for the crankcase oil to thaw enough so he could start the engine and drive down to the winter harbor.
• • •
Owen was goddamned if he was going to fool around with a car in this kind of weather. He put on dress socks, then worksocks, then wool socks; piled on two pair of pants over long underwear, and a flannel shirt over his work one. He molded some newspaper into his overshoes for insulation, put them on, wrestled into the buffalo hunter coat he’d bought for just this eventuality, clapped his cap on with the earflaps down, bandannaed a scarf across his nose and mouth, stuck one of his office oxfords in each side pocket, pulled on thick mittens and walked to work at the winter harbor.
• • •
“ ’19, that was another cold bastard of a winter,” Tom Harry reflected. Proxy had not been in the sin business long enough to have other big winters for comparison, so it seemed to be up to him to forecast the economic climate accompanying such cold. “On the one hand, this kind of weather, you’d think guys wouldn’t have anything better to do than drink and diddle,” he set out. “Hell, people even manage to do it up north in igloos, after all.” He paused, then asked with a rare note of uncertainty: “Don’t they?”
“How the frig do I know? This place”—Proxy indicated the frosted-over front windows of the empty Blue Eagle—“is the only igloo I’ve been in.”
“I about went bust, though, there in ’19,” Tom Harry recounted. “Guys holed up, wouldn’t come downtown just because it was a little cold. A lot like now, Shannon.” He still called her that, even though she regularly pointed out that she had a married name now.
“Things are tough all over, Tom,” she gave him with her mildest mocking smile. “Even the birds are walking.”
“Shannon, what would you think about a buddy night at your end of things, maybe once a week—What’re you looking at me like that for? The moviehouse does it every so often, has one guy pay and lets his buddy in free. Builds up the trade.”
“Speaking for myself, I’ll go take up choirwork before I ever let two guys have a poke for the price of one.”
“Okay, okay, just an idea, all it was. Jesus Christ, though, you’re getting awfully particular since you had your knot tied.” He gave her a sidelong look. “How is married life anyway?”
“Not half bad.”
“Holy state of maddermoany.” He shook his head. “I could never see it, myself.”
“That’s sure frigging astonishing to find out.”
“Sarcasm never got anybody past St. Peter. Now come on, give me a hand with the thinking here.”
“How would hot toddies go?”
“They wouldn’t. The only time a Montanan will sip a toddy is when he’s halfway to pneumonia.”
“Rum, then?” Proxy began to take on a faraway look. “Did I ever tell you about my uncle who raised St. Bernard dogs and the time there was this coyote in heat and—”
“No, you didn’t and you’re not going to. This is a goddamned business meeting, Shannon. Besides, where the hell would I get rum? Half the time I can’t even get the Great Falls beer trucks to come up here, the way the roads’ve been.” He shook his head. “You call that thinking?”
“O-kay, Tom,” Proxy intoned, “you show me what real thinking is.”
Tom Harry passed a hand over his face, turned around, dusted off his cash register, turned around toward Proxy again, and studied off into the empty barroom and dance floor. Finally he said:
“I don’t think it looks good, until spring.”
“So should we close up shop?”
“Hell, no.” He looked as if she had insulted him down to his shorts. “What kind of a way is that to run a saloon?”
Back at the onset of winter, in the courthouse at Glasgow, Proxy had needed to think madly to recall “Susannah” as the given name she’d furnished Darius and then she had to give him a dig with her elbow when he started to fill in “Renfrewshire” as county of residence instead of “Valley,” but they managed to do the deed, nuptially.
“What now?” she asked him a little nervously when the Justice of the Peace was through with them. “Give each other a bath in a washtub of champagne?”
He looked surprised. “We get the family over with, of course. Then we settle in like old dozing spaniels.” He pulled her to him and there on the Justice of the Peace’s front porch gave her a kiss that she felt to her ankles. “Don’t you know thing one about married life, woman?”
But the jitters caught up with Darius as soon as groom and bride began making the rounds. Inches inside the doorway at Owen and Charlene’s, an exceedingly thin grin plastered on him, he introduced Proxy. “I’ve gone and got you an aunt. Please may I present Proxy, ah, Duff, she would be now, wouldn’t she.”
“Uh huh,” issued out of Owen as he gave that night’s first blink of recognition. Jesus, that one. Perfectly vivid in memory was the evening Proxy flattened the redheaded taxi dancer. “Well. Congratulations. Come in. Uh, sit down.”
“Yes, do,” said Charlene, all interested. Here you go, Owen. You wanted Fort Peck, here’s a case of it in the family for you. She looked Darius in the eye and then Floozy, no, Proxy it was, wasn’t it. “You’ve got to get over being bashful newlyweds sometime.”
“No, no, we’re not staying,” Darius interjected. “We merely called by to enlighten you.”
Proxy studied Charlene. “I’ve seen you.”
The altitude of Charlene’s eyebrows said it was mutual. “I operate the A-1,” she responded. She studied Proxy’s bottle-blonde hair. “If you’re ever in need.”
“Anything off for family members?”
“Proxy, love,” said Darius, “we’ve to—”
“Sit down,” said Owen again, “take a load off, why don’t—”
“I wouldn’t think discounts are a good idea,” Charlene said cheerily, “in any business.”
Proxy laughed, and her smile began to skew treacherously. “Dancing the dimes out of joes doesn’t leave much room for bargaining, you’re right, but—”
“Really, we’ve to be going,” Darius hastily stepped in. “Calling in on Bruce and Kate next,” he explained, as if it were a continental journey. Capturing Proxy by an elbow, he steered for the door.
“Hey, wait.”
Darius and Proxy turned around at something in Owen’s blurt.
What the hell do I know about a combination like this, or you either, Charlene, hmm? A bareheaded decision about how we act, that’s all that’s up to us. Darius and a wifey who could kick the giblets out of Joe Louis, that’s his problem.
“How about if we come along?” Owen said, Charlene beside him nodding keen agreement. “Make it more of a family shindig, that way.”
By the time Bruce and Kate and the baby snowballed into the procession and the whole bunch of them reached Neil and Rosellen’s, they were too many for the Packard that Proxy had borrowed from Tom Harry, but Neil and Bruce charged out into the night to rig up the truck so they could all ride in that. They crowded and kidded, and their every sound carried on the cold night air to Wheeler neighborhoods half a mile away. It having been unanimously voiced that brides and mothers with small children rated the cab of the truck, Proxy scooched in next to Neil then Kate next to her with Jackie in a bundle. Jee Zuz! A papoose, too, even. Proxy always figured she had her work cut out for her in trying to be sociable with women who weren’t in the trade; but at least the Charlene one could dish it out, and the other two didn’t seem any slouches either. The men she had noticed separately around town before, but seeing them in one bunch tonight made her realize they were all Darius’s basic Duff frame of rake handles and doorknobs. And if Darius was a fair sample, they had the stamina of wolfhounds.
Now banging broke out on the roof of the truck cab, along with urgings to Neil to tromp on the gas and at least give the frost a run for its money. Charlene and Rosellen and Darius and Owen and Bruce, in caps, coats and blankets close to mummification, stood up behind the cab and held on to the boxboards, giddy with the purified air of the winter night and the colder glitter of starshine overhead. Every one of them knew that in chasing off on this makeshift shivaree they were showing about as much sense as a pan of gooseberries, but was it their fault if nonsense was suddenly contagious?
They piled out at Meg and Hugh’s house, calling mock warnings ahead that they had lovebirds out here.
Hugh took the announcement with a prudent if not successfully deadpan expression, Meg took it like a pin under the skin. What was to be done, though, with the entire family grinning in the doorway?
“Come—come in. Sit yourselves. Kate, Jackie can be tucked in our bed. Hugh, take their coats while I—” The production of coffee began. Hugh insisted they all move on into the Blue Room. Gamely confronting the blueprint decor, Proxy declared it real interesting, it somehow reminded her of a place she once worked in that had mirrors everywh— Darius asked if the coffee was ready yet. Speaking of ready, Hugh tossed back at him, Darius had taken a scandalous length of time to gird himself up for matrimony, had he not? Sounding as valiant as he could, Darius maintained that he had been converted overnight by the example of the other husbands in this room attaining such magnificent mates. Tell us, Jealous! one of the men chimed above the general acclamation, he thought it might have been Owen. Just then Rosellen, clued in by swift whispers from Charlene on the way over in the truck, wanted to know from Proxy how she ever got into taxi dancing. Oh, Proxy generalized, from pretty early in life she had been on her own. On her back is more like it, Charlene thought and smothered a giggle. Owen, his arm around her, gave her a complicit hug; for his part, he was looking ahead with fascination to the mixed tints of Red and peroxide. Neil was pondering the avarice of love, how it was capable of snatching the socks off anybody at any time. Bruce for once was tongue-tied; to him Darius was old as the hills, but here he was, fixed up with the kind of woman who could do it to a guy until his eyes popped. Kate meanwhile was wondering what the various ways were that Darius and Proxy reached mad pash, as much practice as they’d probably both had; Bruce in bed pretty much had one gear—true, it was high gear—and so a person could not entirely help wondering, could she, how others went about matters. She thought to herself, I wonder if Rosellen knows what I’m thinking . . .
“And here I thought you were a confirmed bachelor,” Meg said in lowest tone to Darius when he happened to drift over next to her while the others were carrying on.
“I thought that too, Meg. We were both off.”
Proxy was making sure to watch, with quick little angled glances, as Darius and Meg traded something else too low to hear, and then Darius conspicuously rejoined the general ruckus. So that’s where that stood; behind bottled brother Hugh’s back. Darius, you’re quite the family man. But you didn’t get very far with her, did you, or you wouldn’t have thrown in with me. Serves you right; that drypuss sis-in-law there looks to me like a lost cause from the first.
