Bucking the Sun, page 34
At a roaring pace, the big dozer bore down on the setting-up crew for the dredge Jefferson. Once there, the bright yellow machine and the five tall skinny men perched all over it tried nonchalantly to rumble on past.
“Hey!” called out the startled foreman there. “Where the dickens do you think you’re—”
“Got a priority order,” Owen called back in a voice twice as loud, “to clear something off the site, up the river.”
Charlene and Rosellen and Meg and Kate and the baby and, hostess to it all, Proxy were already waiting at the houseboat.
It took some doing, not to mention some splashing and cussing, but the men managed to loop a cable around the houseboat at waterline and winch it up taut to the idling D-10. Watching back over his shoulder, Neil eased the Caterpillar ahead and the houseboat was drawn up through the soft mud onto the bank.
Bruce cheered and Rosellen clapped and the rest enthused in other ways, even Meg joining in a bit at the feat of this. But Darius was shouting to Neil, “Wait, wait, wait.”
When Neil halted the tow, Darius sprang up onto the houseboat and delved inside. After a minute, he reappeared with an empty beer bottle and hopped down to the ground.
“I’ve been in on the launch of a good number of them into the wet,” Darius was in high good humor, “but this is the first time in the other direction. It’s what I would call an occasion, is it not.”
He knelt to the river, holding the bottle neck tipped into the flow. When the bottle had filled, Darius held it out and said quietly:
“Do the honors, love.”
Proxy’s cheeks colored. She sneaked a look around at all the Duffs to see if they were going to make fun of her on this. None showed any sign of it. They were the damnedest bunch to try to figure out. Tear into each other at the drop of a hat, but stand together if the world so much as looked cross-eyed at them.
Proxy came over by Darius, took the bottle, and turned to the houseboat.
“O-kay, then I christen you the—” and she stopped.
“Prairie Schooner,” Rosellen provided, which Owen thought was really pretty good.
“Damn right,” said Proxy, and smashed the brown bottle over the stern.
The houseboat slid on the prairie grass, the bulldozer leading it up the ridge. Neil was quick-learning enough as a catskinner to steer clear of dips and cutbanks, although occasionally the houseboat plowed through a mound of dirt around a gopher hole or badger den. Hugh and Meg volunteered to take Jackie with them in the truck to the crest of the ridgeline. The rest chose to tag along beside the tow job, kidding, laughing, the great bald blue sky of summer’s best evening over them.
At the top of the bluff, Neil maneuvered the houseboat to Darius’s orders and Proxy’s counterorders, walking it into place with careful yanks on the D-10’s steering levers.
Owen, who had backed off to watch this emplacement process with a professional critical eye, all at once broke out laughing.
“What,” Charlene asked, coming over to him with crossed arms and a little smile. “What’s tickling your funnybone?”
“Nothing,” he had to maintain to her, had to keep the jingle of it to himself. What had hit him as he watched the siting of the houseboat, afloat on the grass above Wheeler, above the river, above all of Fort Peck: Proxy and Marxy’s ark.
• • •
The fingerprinting of Fort Peck occurred the next Monday, a day hotter for some than even the soaring Ad Building thermometer indicated.
“New regulation from the alphabet guys in Washington, D.C.,” was all that anyone in charge could tell the workers. That, and to line up at the personnel annex to the Ad Building first thing that morning.
• • •
The line tailed out onto the prairie. Word was rapidly passed back that inside the annex the government types who had come over from Butte to do the fingerprinting were tripled up on the job, funneling people to three separate desks at a time. Even so, everybody griped about how long this was bound to take and about having to carry the new identification cards with their thumbprint on it—the paperpushers must have worked their tiny minds overtime to come up with this, it was universally agreed in the long line.
Several ahead of him there in the impatient rank, Hugh recognized a beaky nose in profile. He asked the man behind him to save his place, then stormed up and pulled the figure away, behind the nearest parked car.
“Birdie, you great fool! What do you think you’re doing here?” There already had been a perceptible evaporation from Fort Peck of those who did not want the arm of the law registering any more about them than it’d already had occasion to.
“I checked with that undersheriff guy,” Birdie whispered. “He says he never heard of them getting fingerprints off of feathers.”
Hugh’s mouth came open, but he had nothing to controvert that. Besides, Birdie was staring at him and wanting to know, “Was we supposed to dress up for this?”
Uncomfortably peeking down at the white shirt prominent beneath the bib straps of his overalls, Hugh furnished: “Must not’ve noticed what I was putting on. The morning after can be that way.”
• • •
The fingerprinting was supposed to have come without warning, but of course Fort Peck’s tide of rumor ran days ahead of anything. So, Darius had plenty of chance to think through the matter. Let the American government make its daub of his flesh in its ink and take the chance that the imprint would never wend off to Scotland Yard and the Crawfurd, George HOMICIDE case file there. Or pack up himself and Proxy and go. Neither appealed. Which had brought him here, a dozen spots behind Hugh in the shuffling and conversing throng of men, as the line snaked slowly into the propped-open double doors of the personnel annex. As soon as he could crane a look in from the corridor, Darius had a panicky moment when he saw Rosellen there in the office. He tucked himself as thoroughly as he could behind the broad-shouldered pipefitter ahead of him in line and watched. Evidently Rosellen’s was one of the desks commandeered by the fingerprinters and she simply needed something out of one of the drawers. Spying Hugh, though, as he lent his right thumb to an inkpad at another of the desks, she waited to walk out with him. Button-bright at his side, she kidded Hugh about having a black thumb now instead of a green one until he declared to her he was going to wash off Uncle Sam’s ink this very moment. As Hugh veered into the men’s restroom and she went on down the corridor, Darius relaxed slightly. No one else familiar was in the office or on line around him now.
He began coughing as he stepped toward a desk, a different one from where Hugh had gone through, and tried to smother it with his hand as he gave his name and address and nearest relative—it still startled him a bit to designate Proxy—to the card-typing male clerk. When told to put his signature on the identification card he managed to do so despite the spasm, but as he started to provide his thumb to the man doing the fingerprinting, a really wracking outbreak hit him, gagging him, doubling him over with his hand over his nose and mouth.
“Hey, now, take it easy,” the fingerprinter said, coming around the desk to whomp him on the back. Darius at last straightened up, eyes running and nose sniffling. “Catarrh,” he pronounced, which in his burr sounded perilously like the onset of another glottal earthquake. He looked apologetically at his damply slimed right hand, the fingerprinter giving it his full regard too.
“The old handkerchief’s a bit full,” Darius croaked and snuffled, drawing out of his pocket a ghastly yellow-mottled limp rag, “but—”
“Oh, for cripes sake,” the government man broke in on him. “Go clean that off with water,” he ordered with disgust, setting aside Darius’s identification card and fingerprint form, “then come back and cut in line so we can finish you up.”
Obediently off to the restroom went Darius. To the figure at the sink next to him, wearing a shirt as memorably white as his own and identical bib overalls, he said: “Confusion to our enemies, Hugh.”
“Yours, anyway,” Hugh told him tightly, went out and edged back into line, bracing to present his well-scrubbed thumb in place of Darius’s.
“Where’ve you had your thumb that you don’t want anyone to know about?” he had asked when Darius waylaid him the night before.
“It’s, well, I’m embarrassed to even tell you, Hugh, but it dates back to the Clydeside. An old matter of politics, a person would have to say.”
Was Jerusalem builded here. Whinstone streets and roundheaded walls of rock and every second Scot granitic with an idea to perfect the world, that was the land he and Darius derived from. Will not cease from Mental Fight. It surprised Hugh less than he would have expected—somehow he now had the translation of something familiar—that Darius had been into the thick of it at the Clydeside. Old Ninian Duff and that telegraphic bombardment from the Bible, Darius and his Blake and who knew what other songbirds of dogma. Men of the word, his uncle, his brother.
Darius now told him as if making a clean breast of everything since puberty:
“They barred me from the shipyards, there at the last. You remember they liked to make a habit of that, the big bugs—bar a person if he’d been too active in favor of a strike. And I’d become a bit active. So you can understand I don’t want them matching me up here with any of that over here—I’m not honestly one of you preferentially hired Montana specimens, am I.”
Hugh understood enough; that Darius for whatever reason would vanish off the map of Fort Peck rather than undergo this fool fingerprinting. He was thinking over the advantages of that when Darius came out with:
“Money, you mentioned a time back, Hugh. This stunt would be worth that to me.” (And to Proxy, although she did not know it. A certain size of metal washer exactly matched that of a silver dollar and, while Darius regretted it, whatever necessary of Proxy’s stash of Bull Durham sacks were about to hold washers.)
Hugh knew his needed sum to the very penny. To make sure, he doubled it in what he named to Darius.
Blowing his nose vigorously, which provided his face some cover from his handkerchief and his left hand, Hugh barged his way to the head of the line, right thumb at the ready.
The man in charge of the inkpad glanced up, recognizing the telltale white shirt and the general lineaments of the snuffly figure, and said in annoyance, “Hold your horses, mister.” He processed the person at the head of the line and seemed about to go on to the next one, leaving Hugh standing there prominent to the world.
“AHAHARGHH!” Hugh cleared his throat in mucous-churning detonation, making as if to bring his right hand up to the phlegm supply.
“Oh, for—” the fingerprinter grabbed his hand, drawing it down to the inkpad as he fumbled for the paperwork that had been set aside. Taking hold of Hugh’s thumb, he rapidly made the impression of it first onto the identification card and then onto the employment record of Darius Duff. “You want to go invest in some cough medicine, fellow,” the man muttered to Hugh without giving him so much as a look.
• • •
“You’re pitching in on this pretty enthusiastically.” No sooner was Hugh outside the Ad Building than the voice made him jump. He shot a glance along the line, now longer than ever, and found Owen’s face there.
As Hugh came over, Owen, appearing bemused, jerked his head to indicate the army-size column behind him. “I thought I saw all your dredgeline crew together back there somewhere. You’re the first guy in the whole bunch I’ve ever been able to get ahead of me on any schedule.”
“Figured I’d get the nuisance over with early,” Hugh held to.
“Yeah, I know. Nobody’s favorite thing, more paper plastered on us.” Owen gave a little grimace. “You know the deal about Fort Peck, though, don’t you? The weight of the paperwork has to come out even with the weight of the dam.”
His father laughed at that to an extent which surprised Owen. Then Hugh went on his way, fortified in the reasoning he and Darius had reached the evening before, that if ever it was noticed his thumbprint was on Darius’s identification card the assumption would be clerical error, a mix-up somehow because of the same last name, a piece of paper somehow handled wrong; in paperwork was their foe, his and Darius’s, and in paperwork was their salvation.
Not even the fingerprinters themselves would have disagreed with that proposition. On through the day, whorl after whorl, professionally and automatically they did what they had been sent to do, compile the shadows that men left whenever they touched anything. Even at the end of the day when the last damworker was given back his smudged thumb the fingerprint crew did not start home for Butte, but simply went across to the Fort Peck hotel for the night. They knew from experience that they would have some business tomorrow, too, men who would show up on the job claiming they’d been sick or hungover or otherwise detoured and now, sheepish or resigned, would be told to go get fingerprinted or keep on going. The fingerprinters, and the authorities behind them, were realistic enough to accept the paperwork bargain, that either an identity be registered in lasting ink or its possessor perform a vanishing act.
Among those already gone for good was Tim Jaarala.
MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB
AND IT WAS MADE OF MUTTON.
EVERY TIME IT WAGGED ITS TAIL
IT SHOWED ITS LANDON BUTTON.
The sheriff sighed. He passed on by the political ditty neatly lettered and tacked up beside Tom Harry’s evidently permanent Franklin D. Roosevelt campaign poster, and made his way toward the bar. You wouldn’t catch the sheriff arguing against that writing on the wall, actually; the only way Alf Landon and the Republicans were going to see the White House was if they got in line with the tourists. But what a hell of a note elections were, and this one in particular, as far as Carl Kinnick was concerned. That Red goon Mott was running again over in Sheridan County. The Democratic congressional candidate from across the mountains, O’Connell, was another wildman. The whole country seemed to be turning pink around the edges. And Carl Kinnick, who to be sheriff had to be elected, knew nothing to do but tuck himself under the wing of Roosevelt again.
It had taken the proprietor of the Blue Eagle about two seconds to cotton on to the sheriff’s presence on his premises; the sheriff often wished the rest of the citizenry was as swift on the uptake as bartenders and prostitutes.
While Sheriff Kinnick picked his way to the bar, Tom Harry was doing a rapid inventory. Shannon was on a day off, couldn’t be her bringing this little law dick down here from Glasgow. Birdie Hinch was nearby guzzling a beer, but Birdie always took off like a shot if he didn’t like the way a cop looked at him, and today Birdie was eyeing the approaching sheriff with merely professional curiosity. Crossing off suspects, Tom Harry didn’t like how the list narrowed toward himself.
“Help you, sheriff?” he asked, hoping he sounded just dubious enough.
“You could put up this poster.” The sheriff had tried this both ways, making Peyser or another undersheriff or some so-called campaign worker traipse around with this stuff, or do the traipsing himself, and the evidence was clear. His campaign posters went up and stayed up if he inflicted them in person.
Tom Harry held the poster out at arm’s length and went over it as if it were an eyechart. “Heck of a likeness.” The head-and-shoulders picture of the sheriff with his Stetson cocked down didn’t reveal how much of him was hat.
When he realized that Kinnick was going to stand there frowning until he saw the poster go up, Tom Harry plastered it on the big mirror behind the bar. When the sheriff still stood there looking edgy, Tom Harry took over the frown and asked:
“Something else, sheriff? Bring you anything? Blonde or otherwise?”
Kinnick was finishing up his estimate of the saloon, not very crowded at this time of day. “On the contrary,” he said, straining to be civil. “I figured I’d buy a round for the house. Goes with this campaign crap, you know.”
Tom Harry all but smiled. “Big of you, sheriff. Everybody in here will vote for you early and often. Got one thing to attend to, then we’ll get your round of drinks set right up.” He stopped by Birdie Hinch and whispered something that sent Birdie sidling toward the door. By the time the first of the Blue Eagle denizens had a drink in their hands and were shouting thanks in the sheriff’s direction, crowds were on their way in from the Wheeler Inn and the Buckhorn Club and the other joints where Birdie was spreading the word. The sheriff stoically pulled out his wallet at each fresh onslaught. Just because he hated Wheeler didn’t alter the fact that it was full of votes for a Democratic candidate for anything.
• • •
Hugh dropped into a chair at the kitchen table, not knowing whether to hoot or commiserate.
“Fired from government work? Meg, I didn’t know you had it in you.”
Elbow to the table, chin propped to her small tight fist, Meg said as if prosecuting: “The man could not even crack an egg properly. It was unbelievable.”
He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth as though that was certainly the case.
With her free hand she moved the salt and pepper shakers into alignments until they shouldered together in the center of the table with a resigned clink. “Besides, I will have you know I was not so much fired as quit.”
Hugh kept his eyebrows up in interest until she burst out:
“Hugh, really, the end result was some of both.” It had come to war between her and Jaarala’s successor, a sallow ex-Army cook named Platt, with due speed. “The man is a . . . a . . . a beanburner. I finally had to tell him in plainest English—well, you needn’t know what I told him.”
I can about imagine, though. “Where, eh, would you say this leaves us, Meg?”
On the spot. Very much on the spot, is how I would describe it, at least in your case, Hugh. Aloud, though, she kept to: “With you as the provider of the paycheck now, naturally.”
• • •
The truck beetled down the middle of the spillway cut, at uncertain speeds and evidently trying to follow the haul road, although tending to drift off one side of the roadtrack and then the other. As the river end of the spillway grew near, the vehicle sped up, slowed, sped up again, then jerked to a halt as if lassoed.
