Bucking the Sun, page 32
Fiddlesticks. But what can you do, if somebody insists on being a fool. When she closed up the beauty shop at the end of the afternoon, she told herself she had better walk home the long way, give herself a spring airing. See if that would help the merry month of May at Fort Peck, anthill of the construction world, any.
That roundabout route drew her along the side of the neatcut Corps town which was nearest the river, the blufftop view there the same one of the dam site as Owen had first shown her, except that instead of Christmas white everything for miles now was the color of unsuccessful fudge. As she always had to do with the dam project, which changed all the time as mammoth things were being built and things twice that size were being gouged out, Charlene scanned through the scraped-brown sprawl until the railroad truss bridge gave her her bearings. A long lattice box of steel which spanned the Missouri with nothing under it but two hundred feet of air and water, Sangster’s running jump across the river, Owen called it. Whether or not the truss bridge was as miraculous as he said, she could always read the dark VVV of its girders from up here.
Owen’s dredge fleet, she knew, lay out of sight upstream behind the west half of the dam, but she was proud of herself for managing to pick out, even at this distance, the dredges’ constant input into the core pool; the piped waterfalls that unloaded the fill material in their steady gush. And right there near each of those cascades, the human specks that were the dredgeline maintenance crews.
What maintains love?
Every night anymore, she and Owen threw the supper dishes at each other. No, they didn’t. But they might as well, the battle of Fort Peck seemed determined to go on in all guises. Owen was flying so high as fill-master this time around that he looked ready to crow with joy when he totted up the fill figures each night. That’s fine, well and good, she had tried on him a time or two, then why wouldn’t this be the best chance to clear out with everything you came here for? You whipped the dredging setup and the boost problem and the ice. They’ll write you up as the engineer who got the kinks out of the Fort Peck project. Owen, why not take all that now as ammunition onto the next job? And regularly back from him, the vocal equivalent of a volley of crockery. Huh uh, we’ve got to see it through, Charlene. I wish to Christ you could get that into your head. To build a dam you’ve got to build it all, there’s no halfway that’s even worth talking about. And nothing is really whipped here. We don’t even have the river plugged yet, for crying out loud.
Crying out loud, mm, Ownie? Their situation could stand more of that, too. This was not the time of day to be thinking about sheet music, the bedtime variety, but what was she supposed to do when the thought kept at her? The Bozeman memories—for that matter, one from Glasgow—of the rumpus Owen and she used to make, the outcry of coming to each other in the bare skins of dark; then, as they lay spent, she would ever so slowly provide her hip and leg in a cat rub against his and he would respond to the luxury of that, or if not, then her hand, seeming to drift, touching there where he went hard; and then a second go. She couldn’t really say it was an exact comparison, but she and Owen needed a second go at sorting out Fort Peck.
Somewhere down there in the dam confusion, rocksaw teeth started cutting into shale with a piercing howl, stopped, started up again, stopped, started. The playful shriek only added to her theory that they liked the commotion of Fort Peck, the excitement when things went wrong, even the dangers of it, men did. While she herself just could not see the attraction. What she yearned for was the day she and Owen would leave here, climb in the car and go. No, wash the car first. She didn’t want to take even Fort Peck’s dust with them.
But for now Charlene stayed, hands thrust into the pockets of her frock, there on the bluff a minute more and looked steadily at the truss bridge, the one item of the Fort Peck Dam she knew something sure about.
• • •
Across from Toston, the river wide between them and the adult world, the girls stalked in the willows until they could peek upward to the osprey nest in the big dead cottonwood tree. They did not have to wait long before the fish hawk flew in, a trout in its talons to feed its young. The Tebbet sisters watched a while and then Charlene hugged her arms across her chest—her breasts had begun to come and she monitored them frequently that way—and said it was time to go home. Rosellen was still only a slip of herself, pesky, curious about everything. When they got back to the highway bridge from this osprey outing, they met a cattle drive, cowboys from the Sixteenmile country in the mountains back of Toston. Charlene hurried Rosellen and herself across the bridge and over to a telephone pole they could stand half behind to watch without spooking the herd of cattle. The bridge was a trio of trusses with dark steel girders up its sides and overhead, and the cattle did not like the look of it. The bawling herd wadded itself up at the approach to the bridge. A slender rider wearing spectacles guided his horse into the cows and with the end of a lariat fought a little bunch of cattle out onto the bridge. Instead of pushing the bunch into a trot, though, the cowboy reined back to the foot of the bridge. He did this three times, nudging a bunch of cows out a little way but then retreating, which disappointed Rosellen no end—she wanted to see what it would be like if the whole herd hightailed over the bridge at once. Charlene had to agree that this seemed like a dumb slow way to move cows. The rider wasn’t very far from the pair of them when he backed his horse around for the next batch of cattle, so she spoke up:
“Why do you fool around with a few at a time, if you want them all to go across?”
The cowboy winked at her. “Easier to show you than tell you, sis. Hop up behind. Then I’ll give Missy there her turn.” He slipped his boot out of the stirrup, the empty U of it now an open invitation for her to climb on behind his saddle.
For an instant Charlene wished somebody else was there to nix this. His back that she would have to hold on tight against, her new chest and all. The cowboy was old enough to be her and Rosellen’s father. But not as old as their father.
“Oh, Charlene!” Rosellen hopped with every word. “Can we? You first! Then me! Aren’t we going to?”
“You have to stay right here,” Charlene issued, “until I get back. If you so much as move, I’ll spank you inside-out.” Her little sister could be a real handful when she put her mind to it. Rosellen might have her nose in a book one minute and be inspired to climb the dizzying fire ladder on the grain elevator the next. “Promise, now? You won’t—”
“I won’t move an inch!” Rosellen hugged the telephone pole for proof.
In the next instant, Charlene was up onto the horse and riding double behind the cowboy as he worked a considerable number of cattle out onto the bridge and this time hazed them into a dead run. But midway across the bridge, centrally atop the Missouri, the cowboy reined the horse to a standstill and glanced half over his shoulder toward Charlene as if to say, You wanted to know.
She could feel it, all right, even up there on the horse: the shivering of the bridge. The mass vibration set up by the cows’ running hooves, a thunder shaking the bridge from inside its plank roadbed and metal girders.
Quickly the cowboy spurred his horse around toward the approach to the bridge and shut down on the next cattle who tried to run, deliberately breaking the dangerous quaking rhythm. Push some, hold some. Charlene swung down off the horse onto the bank and boosted Rosellen up behind the cowboy’s saddle so that she, too, could go onto the vibrating bridge and know something new. That everything trembles, sometime.
• • •
Rosellen was about ready to give up. She had sent out “Glacier of Mercury” to every magazine from Country Gentleman to Woman’s Home Companion and the editors must have been waiting behind the mail slots like baseball catchers, the rejections came back so fast.
She knew she shouldn’t let it get her down; Nome wasn’t built in a day, as everyone at Fort Peck went around saying when the square winter palace of ice slabs piled up and up on the riverbank. Maybe writing, getting anything taken by one of the numbskulls in charge of magazines, was like that. Sling the stories out, and eventually one of them would stack up properly with the ice blocks that were editors’ hearts. Right now, though, she wished she could have a chin session over this with Kate, who of course was scarce anymore, having her hands full with the baby. But she knew anyway what Kate would say: “So if it makes you blue, don’t do it.” Which to Rosellen didn’t seem to cover the trying-to-write dilemma, somehow. Only Neil, and not even him entirely, savvied how depressing the constant stream of rejection letters were for her. “It about drives me crazy, to do the absolute best I can and they shoot it right back in the next mail,” she had burst out. “They’ll catch on someday,” he had said back in his steady way. “You put in your time at it and you’ll get there eventually.”
On this Saturday, though, instead of getting underway at the writing, Rosellen doodled. Black squares, midnight in a coal mine. Zigzag mountains, terra firma going vice versa. She sat there and sat there at the kitchen table, trying to cook up stories, but it was all succotash today. She wished she had climbed in the truck and gone with Neil on his run to the Duff homestead.
• • •
Neil was experiencing gumbo. He had been around oceans of it, every spring while he was growing up here, but it was still amazing how mud could wad up on the rear dual wheels of the Triple A until you had to get in there with the end of a tire iron and more often than not your own bare hands and claw the stuff out. By this point of this trip he and the truck were both painted with the gumbo, but the load he’d put on ought to give him enough traction to make it up the long slope out of here, he was reasonably sure. Now that the homestead was reduced to lumber, he had promised the Old Man he’d haul it all, they’d leave the place clean as a bone, but that didn’t necessarily mean he had to do it all in mud season, did it. If he pecked away at it in loads when he had no other trucking to do, he’d still be able to finish up here by summer’s end. For right now, he wished he was sitting at home watching Rosellen write.
• • •
“Yours is all ready.” Nan Hill produced the large bundle of freshly done laundry. How and under what circumstances, Nan could only guess, but women of this sort went through clothes even faster than the damworkers. “Did you want to take Mr. Harry’s shirts for him, too?”
“Makes no nevermind to me,” Proxy assented, “as long as you collect from the tightwad rather than me having to try to.” She took the stack of shirts wrapped in butcher paper and tied with string, and set it atop her own bundle. She kept on peering next door, though, toward what she could see of Bruce and Kate’s house through the lines of laundry kicking up in the wind. Hard to figure, how things take the cockeyed turns they do. “I’m in-laws with your neighbors now,” she tested on the washerwoman, as if saying it out loud would make it sound any less wacky.
“So I hear.” Nan Hill gave this latest Duff a neutral smile, thinking that the biblical remains of old Ninian Duff must be churning loudly in his English Creek grave.
Proxy eyed the small, neat woman, pretty in a somewhat worn way. Married to some guy with a case of the dynamite shakes, from what she’d heard. That must make it interesting when he eats his peas.
“Tell me one damn thing,” Proxy blurted, then indicated with her gaze the mass of laundry that this wren of a woman had drudged at today, drudged at every day. “Why do you go around here smiling?”
Had anyone else asked, Nan might have lightly recited the sunny day, the stimulating breeze, the glad sight of the day’s loads of washing done and hung. But she found herself saying to Proxy Duff:
“So that I won’t forget how.”
Proxy watched the sails of garment bucking on the wind. She saw a shirt with a large pattern of a horseshoe sewn on the back, and laughed. “We’ve got at least one customer in common.”
• • •
At the early show that night, gathering their strength to go dancing afterward, the three couples nudged and chuckled among themselves as the cartoon came on with a typewriter keyboard busily going SPLICK SPLICK SPLICK as a cockroach wearing a porkpie hat hopped from key to key to introduce himself as archy and his friend, the cat from the alley outside the newspaper office, as mehitabel. Rosellen giggled the most of any of them at archy’s bouncy typing as it splatted onto the bottom of the movie screen, and whispered along the row to the others that she could use a crew of bugs like that for paydays. Neil and Bruce sat back grinning like grade school kids again; every movie they ever saw was their favorite the minute it came on. Folded comfortably into his seat Owen relaxed as competently as he did everything else, and even Charlene loosened up appreciably on these get-together nights, in Kate’s considered opinion. More than any of them Kate, after the past half-year of tooth and nail motherhood, was ready for a night out. She wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea, she was simply glad of a whole babyfree evening at last, with Bruce’s arm cozily around her and the funny stuff occurring up there on the screen with mehitabel, who was convinced she had been Cleopatra in an earlier life (cleopatra was of course the best archy could do for her because he couldn’t work the shift key), and the big brute of a rat named freddy. Then, though, came mehitabel’s lament of her current life—what have i done to deserve all these kittens—and Kate shrank a little lower in her seat as though singled out. She knew she had all the right feelings for her baby, there was no way she would trade Jackie for—well, not having him. But mehitabel’s yowl hit home in her, if a person was going to be honest about it and Kate habitually was. When Jackie wasn’t spitting up he was producing at the other end, it seemed like, not even to mention the crying, the feeding, muss and fuss of all kinds. You could love that kind of a little mess-maker, Kate with weariness had come to believe, but you couldn’t necessarily like one every minute of every day. It wasn’t like mad pash with, well, Bruce on their old noonhours, where the feelings took care of themselves, no complications. So, she sank into that seat as if taking cover, a little wary of mehitabel and herself. It ended up not that funny a cartoon anyway, because it was the one where freddy the rat, full of poisoned cheese, took on the banana-boat tarantula who had got loose in the newspaper office and was making everyone’s life miserable. After the brave rat triumphed and succumbed, archy batted out a key at a time, we dropped freddy off the fire escape into the alley with military honors. Resolutely Kate looked forward to going dancing.
• • •
Next thing to useless. Shame to have to admit it about himself, but there was no getting around it. Take tonight. Payday night, and him with no pay. Had to resort to the pretense of walking for exercise. Not that she made any great show of believing him. But she didn’t have to bother to, did she. Wageless as he was, she plainly counted on, he couldn’t inflict much on himself. She had a point. There was that about being an invalid, it didn’t pay worth a damn.
If he were the decider over it all, he would stamp himself underfoot like a grasshopper. On the other hand, not so fast. Hugh had never been one to write himself off entirely. In lieu of life, there was always some other plan. And for once he had been ahead of himself, putting the trade beads away when he had. True, tonight it took a little doing to find the truck among everything parked at the recreation hall, but he had persevered. In there at the dance, he well knew, were Owen and Charlene and Neil and Rosellen and Bruce and Kate and combinations thereof; they ought to get together more, someone of them had the bright idea, and so Jackie was left with him and Meg (well, Meg at the moment) while they kicked up their heels. Dance up a storm, you six, before the time goes . . . When he at last tracked down where Neil had parked the truck, he had only to feel around under the seat until his hand found the handkerchief bundle of beads. Next stop, downtown Wheeler. He still had to shun the Blue Eagle, where Proxy’s presence virtually guaranteed Darius’s. Unto the Wheeler Inn, then, barter the beads there. Bargaining with Ruby Smith was like gnawing the bark off a tree, but at last she scooped the tiny blue beads into the palm of her hand and told the bartender how many beers to set him up, not nearly as many as he liked. Craved.
So, then, now. Only half in the bag, are you, Hugh, eh? he estimated himself. And the walk home, in the night that was pitifully early yet, was causing even that much to wear off. The intoxicating air of Montana. Didn’t he wish it were so.
Half was some, it wasn’t none. If I had the money for it, his thoughts ran to where they had become accustomed to lately, I think I’d do the thing. Outright damn do it. But it takes such a considerable . . .
Ask Owen? Not ready for that yet, not that hard up. Yet. No, work was the largesse from Owen. Darius, now, Darius at this late date was showing signs of wanting to be a charitable big brother. Frogs will be kissing princesses, next. Hugh had let slip something about his money wish and Darius quick wanted to know Hold on, Hugh, what would you do with the wherewithal if you had any? Be damned if he’d spill his guts to Darius. Back at work soon now, how recuperated did you have to be to poke traps on Ownie’s blessed dredgeline. Maybe find treasure there. Right, Hugh, depend on it, he chided himself. Pirate gold on the tropical Missouri. No, find a way, he’d have to, to put his pay away until he had enough. He had priced it out, the necessary sum, and it amounted to a lot of putting away. Not easy. Never easy.
Home before he knew it, and now Meg inspected him as he came in. That ditchline of mouth on her and on Owen. But she couldn’t help showing a bit of pleased surprise. Hugh looked not much the worse for wear. Turning off the money on him maybe worked. (Among other steps, she had cornered Birdie Hinch and threatened him with dismemberment if he lent Hugh funds to drink.)
“You’re good and early,” she commended.
