Bucking the Sun, page 31
“I’ve been talking some to Sangster about that. Seems to us, we ought to just use the buzzsaw process.”
• • •
The contraption resembled a mammoth nasty insect. A long low chassis, two wheels at the back beneath an engine out of a Fordson tractor, and at the front where the stinger would be, a three-foot-diameter buzzsaw blade. Ungainly and makeshift, when the thing was started up it blared like a captive motorcycle and when the whirling sawblade met the ice there was a ceaseless ear-reaming whine, and as Sangster and Owen had guessed, it could cut ice like nobody’s business.
Bruce, for one, was unimpressed. “I still don’t savvy what good this is gonna do,” he maintained, obviously reluctant to put his effort into either savvying or ice hauling.
Darius did see the principle of the job he and Bruce and several dozen others were about to be put to, clustered out here on the river like Dutchmen who’d forgotten their skates. But that did not make the task any less dismaying to him, either. Wrestling blocks of ice from the stiffened river was going to be cold heavy work.
“Aw, Walt,” Bruce tried on Jepperson, their new foreman, “we probably can’t even haul ice out as fast as the river’ll make more.”
“One way to find out,” Walt Jepperson told him, telling them all.
They sawed the ice out in slabs as big as steamer trunks, then grappled a sling around one end of the slab, then signalled to the operator of a windlass which slid each ice block up a long ramp onto the riverbank, where a stacking crew built a careful pile of them. You’d have thought ice was the latest in construction material.
“Duff, you be the rigging slinger,” Jepperson had assigned to Bruce. “Other Duff, you might as well help him out with that,” he told Darius, perhaps moved by how miserable the older Scotchman looked while standing around between the transit of slabs.
The two of them took turns trudging back from the ramp with the sling and tow rope. Darius steadily tromped around in a circle to keep from freezing while waiting his turn with the rigging. As Bruce approached with the sling over his shoulder and the length of rope snaking behind him on the ice, Darius thought out loud:
“Have a guess as to what I’d rather be doing.”
Bruce did not always fathom this uncle, but he figured he had a pretty good chance on this. “Warming your toes on Proxy’s tummy.”
Darius quit stomping and peered at Bruce. Then he downright giggled. “Toes!” The rest of the day, every so often he would hoot, “Toes!”
• • •
The river found one last way to give the Fort Peck winterers a bad time.
Darius and Bruce had been watching the situation build, out in the main current downstream from their ice pond, and wondered. Owen had been eyeballing the middle of the river the past week and didn’t even need to wonder, he knew too well what this was adding up to out there. Huge chunks of ice were mounting and mounting, a jagged barricade clogging the flow of the Missouri.
“Just what we always wanted, a dam out ahead of the dam,” ran the sarcastic reaction around the Ad Building. Came the day when the Corps officers trooped up onto the bluff to have a look, their overshoes buckled firmly so that their pants bloused out like jodhpurs and their breath making an echelon of little clouds. The eight men of the civilian engineering staff formed a motley covey around them. A little off to one side stood the colonel’s silent, ever-present driver. As usual Owen took a ribbing about his buffalo coat, and as usual he was the only one of them complacently warm as they stood around in the snow.
Colonel Parmenter studied the ice jam with distaste and addressed them compositely:
“We weren’t thrown off schedule by the other ice jams, the other winters. What’s the worst this one could do?”
An alarming number of the civvie engineers had versions to offer. Nevins from the tunnel project lost no time predicting some washout, he couldn’t specify how much or how little, along the diversion channel banks if the ice jam caused real flooding. Owen pounced in to point out the possibility of delay in the dredging startup, after they’d spent a month’s worth of effort in clearing out ice to avoid precisely that. A couple of others had their dire say. Then Sangster, not wearing his glasses because the nosepieces hurt his nose in the cold, squinted and formulated:
“How about, it’ll take out the truss bridge.”
Fourteen trained minds simultaneously calculated what a sheer mess that would be. If the railroad truss bridge went, swept away by ice floes on the rampage, the dam construction would be stopped in its tracks for nobody knew how long, the diversion tunnels would be stopped, the spillway would be stopped. Everything they could think of would be stopped except the instructional chalk in engineering classes which would be studying this fiasco for the next hundred years.
Everyone on the bluff knew what Colonel Parmenter was going to say before he finally puffed out an exasperated plume of breath and ordered:
“Blow the bugger.”
• • •
Bruce never after was sure how J.L. Hill roped him into the job of dynamiting the ice jam.
It seemed to happen in as purely simple a fashion as J.L.’s neighborly stroll over to him there on the ice-cutting pond and borrowing him like a cup of sugar. “Kind of like to have somebody along who knows the river,” Bruce was suddenly hearing out of J.L., “and you’ve been on both the top and bottom of it.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Danamite,” as J.L. said it, “is best to handle when it’s cold.” He looked at Bruce as if that should take care of all worries.
Stunned, Bruce tried surreptitiously to check J.L.’s mittened hands, see if he still had the trembling. Tunnel pneumonia had been only the half of it, that time last fall when J.L. was hospitalized; from what Bruce had heard, something on the packing paper of dynamite boxes had given J.L. Hill a shaking affliction. “I thought you still weren’t feeling any too good.”
“I’m not. But if you think I’m going to pass up a crack at blasting something like this”—J.L. jerked his head in the general direction of the frozen river—“you’ve got another think coming.”
“Yeah, well, it’d be up to Jepperson or not, whether he can spare me,” Bruce stalled.
“Jepperson says it’s jake with him. Already transferred your pay record for tomorrow. You draw an extra thirty cents an hour, working with danamite.”
“Thanks all to hell, J.L.,” Bruce managed to express. “That’ll make me feel a lot more prosperous in my coffin.”
J.L. nodded as if in acknowledgment, still looking straight at Bruce. Lunch his way out of this one, why doesn’t he. Aloud, J.L. said: “We’ll put the danamite to it in the morning.”
• • •
The morning came without horizons, a milky sky fading down into the snowy bluffs above the valley of the Missouri. From the east bank of the river where J.L. and three other men from the powder gang and Bruce were grouped, the ice pack in midriver was ghostly, slurred.
Since J.L. was not supposed to be around the packing paper, two of the others were prying open the wooden box which held sticks of dynamite. Bruce nervously watched back and forth between the dynamite box and where a man named Quincy was fondling blasting caps. A trudge of half a mile or more out across the corrugated river lay between them and the ice jam.
“We just . . . walk out there with this stuff?” Bruce asked.
“Walk kind of careful, is a good idea,” J.L. answered without losing count of the coils of detonation wire he was shakily accumulating.
None of these detonationists, it turned out, had ever dealt with ice before, although they assured Bruce they had blown up most other known substances. Quincy had helped to blast out a log jam once. “Logs went flying pretty as anything,” he reminisced. “It’s just only a matter of placing the charge right.”
“Yeah, but where’s that”—Bruce nodded toward the jumbled geography of ice out in front of them—“in a deal like this?”
“You’re the river guy,” J.L. said, the flint-gray eyes straight at Bruce again. “That’s where you come in, showing us where the channel’s the deepest and fastest and so on.”
• • •
Smithereens, ran in Bruce’s mind. What are those? Little smithers, but what’s a smither? Nothing he hankered to learn about from firsthand experience, he was dead cer—he was certain of that much.
Steady, he told himself as he kept abreast of J.L. and the other three as they trudged across the ice with their explosive goods. The motorcycle didn’t get him, he went on telling himself, the mud avalanche in the pump barge didn’t get him, the diving didn’t get him (yet crept into that last one), so why should one little excursion with dynamite get him?
Because! Because (a.) J.L. Hill trembles like an ash grove in a high wind, and (b.) there was that highly unfortunate pass Bruce made at Nan Hill and (b.1.) Bruce didn’t even know this part but the neighbor across the alley, Tarpley, had figured it bore mentioning to J.L. that he’d seen Bruce Duff slinking home from the Hills’ house one noontime, and (c.) the competence of the other three here in the blast crew was a totally unknown quantity to Bruce except for Quincy’s pleasure in causing log-size items to fly, and (d.) this was not some piece of equipment that Bruce himself was in charge of, such as a motorcycle or a diving suit, this was the cast-iron winter river and a guessing game of dynamite.
Bruce wished he had not yet been born.
The cold river air, meanwhile, was damp and penetrating. He felt it meet the sweat on his body, and resignedly figured pneumonia next onto his list of mortal hazards here.
“Somewhere around here, you think?”
J.L. was addressing him, he realized.
“Uh, let me study this out a little.” Bruce sighted through the two halves of the dam to the dark steel webwork of the railroad bridge, trying to put together in his mind his underwater hours and this vast ice lid, to divine where the channel ran strongest.
“Back a ways toward shore, is where I’d do it,” he at last suggested. He took a chance and pointed at a pyramid-pile of ice chunks, a hundred yards in that direction. “About there, maybe.”
The four dynamiters gazed back along their tracks in the snow, then at Bruce. One of them who had not said anything so far scowled and stated: “What we don’t want is to have to come back out here a second time, and try blow this.”
“Yeah, that’d be tricky,” J.L. agreed. “Quite a lot better not to be prancing around on ice you’ve already used danamite on.”
Bruce felt all eight eyes on him. “You’re downright sure,” J.L. was asking, “that’s the fastest part of the river?”
“Pretty sure. Now, downright sure, J.L., I don’t just know how to be that sure when there’s all this ice on top of—”
“What we wanted. Right, boys?” J.L. hefted his plunger box. “Advice from the horse’s mouth.”
The other three snickered mightily and fell in line like elves behind J.L. as he headed for the ice pyramid.
• • •
The detonation preparations went fast, as though everyone wanted to get this over with.
While two of the men embedded the sticks of dynamite and J.L. began affixing the blasting caps, Bruce and the other man spliced wires from the caps into the firing wire and began unreeling it all the way to the plunger box. “Don’t be letting that wire touch those terminals until I get there,” J.L. warned over his shoulder, and Bruce definitely didn’t.
When all was in readiness, the dynamite quartet plus Bruce gathered around the plunger box on the welcome solid ground of the riverbank. Spectators flocked up onto various high points. In the Ad Building contingent on the crest of the dam, Bruce could discern shaggy-coated Owen looking like the world’s tallest leanest buffalo. At the end of another lineup of gawkers stood Neil, arms folded, probably with a grin on him like a Chessy cat; if people insisted on getting Neil and him mixed up, Bruce considered, conscription into the iceberg squad would have been a good time for it. Actually, though, Bruce was starting to feel better about this dynamite deal. Originally he’d thought of invoking the fact that he was freshly a father, although J.L. Hill and Fort Peck foremen in general didn’t seem overly impressed, and he had almost gone to Owen to get him out of this, but goddamn it, if he was the government diver he was the one who was supposed to know the course of the river, wasn’t he. Now he nodded in synchronization with the other blasters when J.L. Hill asked, “Everybody happy with this so far?”
J.L. looked in every direction, twice, then shouted out the warning of blasting:
“FIRE IN THE HOLE!”
As soon as that had echoed away, he pushed the plunger.
The explosion was a healthy boom, and a satisfying shower of ice hunks rained down in the middle of the river, and the ice pack massively shifted, grinding and groaning. Then jammed again.
“Goddamn/sonofabitch/bastard!” was heard in mixed chorus from the other three, but neither J.L. nor Bruce spoke. Until after a minute J.L. provided:
“A little bit off, on that one. I think I know where to set the next one by myself.”
Bruce knew he could not let that be the case. “I’ll go with,” he said shortly.
• • •
Out they trudged again, J.L. Hill with his plunger box under an arm and a sack of blasting caps swinging from one quivery hand and coils of detonation wire in the other, Bruce two steps behind carrying the dynamite charge in both hands like a museum vase.
The icescape in front of them had been stirred around marginally by their first try, but mainly it was still jumbled, still jammed, still massively more ice than the river seemed to know what to do with.
J.L. halted well short of where they had set the previous charge and said, “Let’s think this out a little bit.”
He put down his detonating equipment, Bruce gladly doing the same with the dynamite.
As J.L. walked off a little way to squint at the ice conformation ahead, Bruce trailed him but kept his mouth conspicuously shut as though giving J.L. more thinking space.
The two of them heard the ice groan, then a sound more ragged than that. They could not see any difference yet in the pile of floes ahead of them, but it sounded for all the world as if the heavy winter load of the river was shifting.
“Whoa, a minute,” Bruce heard out of J.L. “Maybe we aren’t even going to have to give it another shot of dan—”
The ice cracked at their feet. Then crumbled, mushed up and fell away, beneath J.L.
He was in the water to his waist, arms flung out on the slushy edge of the unbroken ice where Bruce was backpedaling away. For the first time, J.L. Hill looked perturbed.
Aw, don’t, river, was the full thought that came to Bruce and stayed with him. He hated having to, but he flopped down in the slush and wriggled his way on his belly to the ice edge where J.L. was clinging. He got his mittened hands under J.L.’s armpits and pulled for all he was worth.
J.L. was gripping into Bruce’s coat at the shoulders, clenching so hard that the coat bunched onto the scruff of Bruce’s neck and half over his head. “Let go . . . up . . . there!” Bruce got out in gasps, slush against his face and down the front of his neck. “Elbows—put your . . . elbows . . . to work . . . damn it . . . J.L. . . . ” J.L. hung on to him, his eyes oddly calm as they stayed locked on Bruce’s from inches away; then he let go his grip and began levering himself up onto the ice with his elbows as Bruce tugged away.
Upright on the ice and lurching for shore, J.L. soaked from the waist down, Bruce from the waist up, the mismatched halves of a freezing being were met by those who had been onlooking from shore and were bundled into Colonel Parmenter’s staff car with the heater turned up full blast. After the pair of them were thawed and looked over at the hospital and declared not much the worse for wear but delivered home with orders to rest up, J.L. turned to Bruce, before Bruce climbed out of the ambulance to go in to Kate and he to go in to Nan, and said:
“All right. We’ll call this even.”
They all thought spring couldn’t come fast enough to suit them, but whatever it was about 1936, the melting season highballed in as overdone as winter had been. Toasty chinook winds billowed in all the way from Hawaii, it felt like, warm gales from the west that would pin your eyelids back.
Christ along the Yukon, though. Can this be right? If this keeps up . . .
Fort Peck’s snow enthusiastically degenerated into Fort Peck’s mud. Clods of clay like squashed bricks were churned up everywhere by the crawler tracks of the bulldozers. Tough damworkers watched their chance to sidle off alone and stand for a minute as if looking around for something, actually just to sniff the talcum smell of spring.
. . . and there’s no reason that I can see yet why it can’t keep up . . .
Wheeler looked leprous, its usual state at the start of spring. With snow going off in patches, rubbish resurfaced from the previous autumn, usually squarely amid a backyard swamp of mud, and the thaw also revealed the gray remains of that slaggy soft coal which all winter long had produced more ashes than heat.
. . . we’re going to be moving fill as easy as passing the butter.
From startup on the fifteenth of April until only the first of May, Owen’s quartet of dredges moved nearly a million more cubic yards than in the same span of time that had been so cruel and fumbling the year before. Week by week after that, he checked and rechecked his figures, and unmistakably they kept jumping. The holy average of three million yards of riverbottom muck to be dredged and piped up onto the dam every month, hah. Owen could see ahead now—it would be August—when the dredging pace would reach an exalted total of four million yards a month.
• • •
“Toston? Oh, my cousin lives there—Etta Drozner? I bet you must know her. I’ll have to write to her that we met up, here of all places.”
You just do that, old biddy, Charlene thought, and resisted the urge to frizz the back of the woman’s head to a fare-thee-well. Here was one more reason why Charlene wanted out of Fort Peck and for that matter Montana, everybody knowing everybody else’s business in the entire state. She had gone all through school with horsefaced Etta Drozner, you bet, and could have enjoyably enough passed the rest of her life without ever thinking of her again. Now the word was on its way back to Toston that Charlene, Helen Tebbet’s older girl, was hairdressing, too.
