Bucking the Sun, page 35
“How was that?” asked Darius, still standing on the brake.
Proxy unbraced her arms from the dashboard and caught her breath. “Darius, you drive like a man with a paper ass.”
Forehead furrowed, he said: “I thought I was beginning to catch the knack.”
“It’d help,” she stated yet one more time, “if you’d remember-to-use-the-frigging-clutch.”
“Ah. Ah,” he said sagely. “The other foot-lever. Depress that one together with the brake, do I need to?”
“Scoot your tail over here,” she instructed wearily. “Watch me again, okay?” She climbed over him and nestled behind the steering wheel, backed the Ford Triple A around, and drove up the huge excavation toward where the spillway gates were under construction, reciting the gears to still-furrowed Darius as she shifted through them, calling his attention to the clutch the whole while.
“How do you come by this?” he eventually asked about her automotive teamstering ability.
Proxy lit up at this chance to embroider out loud as she gunned the truck back to the head of the spillway. “That bootlegger I told you about?” she launched into. “That I was the private nurse for? Learned all the driving tricks there are from him. I drove loads in from Canada for him while he was laid up. At the border crossing they wouldn’t suspect me, see. They’d ask what I was hauling and I’d bat my baby-blues and just say, ‘Crockery. My missionary aunt died in Lethbridge and left me all the family dishes.’ ”
“That definitely explains everything,” Darius remarked.
“Your turn again, chickadee,” Proxy said, wheeling the truck around so that it faced down the spillway cut to the distant river again. Before switching places with him, though, she thought she ought to offer: “Tell you what—if you want, I’ll go to Plentywood with you this next time while you’re getting used to this overgrown flivver of Neil’s. Share the driving with you.”
Instantaneously, “No.”
Proxy gave him a look.
“I need the driving practice, don’t I,” Darius tried to clothe his naked refusal. “And I know you’re never much one for political doings.”
And I’m not good enough for your Bolshie band? Is that it, too? She debated with herself about whether to pitch into him with that, but decided it would save her a lot of trouble—not to mention some excruciating hours of watching Darius herd this truck along a highway—if she left the Red Corner to him.
• • •
“Mother, I didn’t know you had it—”
“Owen. Never mind, please.” She was dandling Jackie on her knee, his doll-like hands in hers, cantering him to Banbury Cross; the more deeply solemn she promised him “rings on your fingers and bells on your toes, Jack shall have music wherever he goes,” the happier the gape of smile on the child.
Righty right. Never mind. Owen fidgeted, inside and out. This household is so famously well off, almost up there next to the Vanderbilts. You and the Old Man are just going to have money to burn, sure, uh huh. He’ll burn through the only wages you’ve got left, anyway, and does he ever know how. For the third time in as many minutes, Owen wondered why he was expending his lunch hour this way. Meg was minding Jackie while Kate had her hair done; ergo, Kate was off gaining a fresh perm, and probably a good time in the blankets as well if this was one of the noons when Bruce popped home, while he, Owen, was perfectly welcome to share a nursery rhyme. He tried to stow all that and concentrate on the business at hand. “Let me put it like this, then, Mother. If you’ve sacked the cookhouse, what the deuce do you think you’re going to do from here on?”
Meg bucked Jackie on her knee some more. “This,” she said.
• • •
“Bruce is actually going to let you?” The news that Kate was going back to waitressing intrigued Charlene, who wondered what kind of campaign it must have taken. “What’d you have to do, Katy, kick him in the slats?”
“He talked himself into it after a while,” she responded, streaming water as Charlene finished the rinse. Even as wet as an otter, Kate looked imperturbable, life floating no surprises past her, or so she seemed to Charlene. But what the heck do I know, though, Charlene thought. Maybe being married to Bruce is interesting in a way. Dessert all the time, instead of what’s supposed to be good for you. “Last night he reached the point where he said if I wanted to go back to herding flies at the Rondola, he supposed it was up to me,” Kate’s report went on, “and so I am.”
“Mmm, and our ma-in-law and Jackie are a good match, at least until he gets old enough to talk back to her,” Charlene said while turbaning Kate’s head with a towel and bringing her up out of the rinse sink. “Handy.”
“Owen will have the dam done by then,” Kate said offhandedly. “We’ll all be scattering.”
“That’s supposed to be the case.” Charlene did not say aloud and I for one can barely bear to wait, but it conveyed itself. Vigorously drying Kate’s hair, she heard her say something. “Katy, sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”
“My working—we always need the stupid money,” Kate said in a clear and level tone. “It just goes.”
“Mmm,” said Charlene, cosigner with Owen of notes financing Neil’s truck and Bruce’s diving rig, and delicately left it at that.
• • •
“Ever hear the one about the kid in school?” Proxy asked, not waiting on an answer. “They’ve all got their teeny-tiny primers out on their teeny-tiny desks, and little Johnny raises his hand and asks the teacher, ‘Is this readin’ or is it writin’? Because if it’s readin’, it’s sure writ rotten.’ ”
Nervous as she already was, Rosellen’s giggly nhn came out almost a hiccup.
“Hey, though.” Proxy ran her eye down the listings on the cover of THE ALABASTER QUARTERLY. “ ‘The Wreck of the Prairie Schooner.’ Sounds like this place.” The houseboat, because she and Darius were the only ones ever here, presented just two spots to sit amid the spill of tossed clothes and random groceries and much else that had never been put away, and Rosellen was meticulously drawn up on that other perch. Proxy glanced curiously at her, then back at the little magazine, with the curiosity distinctly turned off. “Well, thanks, Boots, I can always use some reading material. I’ll get to it sometime when—”
“Proxy, I have to ask. Will you read it right this minute? Please.”
What, just because some other smarty thought of calling a high-and-dry houseboat a prairie schooner, too? Proxy shot her a pinsharp look, then shrugged and began perusing the story.
“Uh huh,” eventually she pronounced, Rosellen breathless for more. But Proxy flipped back to the first page and with a little mocking smile read off: “ ‘By Nell DuForest’?”
“That’s my nom—I used a pen name.”
“Oh, one of those. I’ve known people who ended up in the pen for how they used names, sure.” Seeing the panic on Rosellen, Proxy said: “Kidding. Come on, don’t go goosy. How come you did that, though, hide your name? Don’t the rest of the tribe know you wrote this?”
“Neil, is all. Plus you.”
“Naturally I’m honored all to hell.” Proxy’s tone was more amused than piqued, but some of both. “How come you chose to let me in on your little nommy plume?”
“I didn’t feel right, about your not knowing I’d written something with, well, sort of you in it and so I—”
“Don’t kid me,” Proxy demolished that, rough as a rasp. “That’s not why.”
Rosellen surprised her with a flinchy grin, still looking a little guilty and perched-on-a-pincushion but grinning most definitely. Rosellen, Proxy had always figured, had to know the score more than she let on, but from her own veteran standpoint she couldn’t help but regard her as primarily still a cute kid, although now that she stopped and thought about it Rosellen had been married ages longer than she herself had, and reportedly Rosellen ruled the roost over there at dam headquarters with that lickety-split typewriter of hers—Proxy redid her estimate before the bright-eyed younger woman even finished owning up:
“You’ve got me, on that. I guess I didn’t care a snap whether you knew I’d drawn on your, humm, past career. You maybe want to throw me out on my ear. But I need to know, does it ring right? The sound of things there in the story?”
Proxy pursed her lips judiciously. “It’s kind of . . . watered-down.”
“Well, you bet. I can’t put in every last little hotsy-totsy detail.”
“Nah, not that.” Proxy thumbed through the story. “I mean you make it sound like a doctor visit or something, the business with the joes. Me in here—”
“Proxy, no, she’s not exactly y—”
“—what’s the name . . . ‘Easter Russell.’ ” There’s one I’ll have to remember to use sometime. “It sounds in here like I don’t care if any of the bastards know their way around in bed or not, I just herd them through. That’s not quite it.” Proxy stopped to think. “Okay, it’s a lot of it, but it’s not all of it—any line of work has its complications, huh? Men have got those things on them for a good reason. So, a hobo girlo like Easter and me, we might as well make the most of it whenever we can, don’t you think?”
Rosellen looked as if she wanted to be writing this down on something. “So you don’t just herd—”
“Matter of attitude, is all it is,” Proxy proclaimed. “Men are like anything else, you could throw away the majority of them and no loss. But that doesn’t mean they can’t do you some good, if you play your cards right.” Proxy paused for obvious thought. “Take Kate,” she said matter-of-factly. “She has to play kissynums with a short deck, now doesn’t she.”
Rosellen’s blank expression—in fact, what was more than blank?—made Proxy impatient. She pressed her hands flat onto her breasts to proportion them down to Kate’s size, which took some doing. “Fried eggs, is about what she has to work with, see? But that Bruce of hers is all over her, all the time, from every indication. So she must make up for it in attitude, that’s what I’m saying.”
“And you never run short on attitude?” Rosellen sounded as though her throat had gone a little dry.
“These days, I get a lot of help,” Proxy gave a self-mocking laugh and tossed her hand around to indicate the marital houseboat. “Far as I can tell, Darius can hang his cap on the front of his pants about any time of the day or night. Some guys are just always ready to go.” Proxy stopped to reconsider. “Well, not always, maybe, but pretty damn—” She broke off upon noticing that the expression on Rosellen’s face still wasn’t the greatest. “I guess this isn’t doing your story any good, though, huh?”
Proxy dipped back into THE ALABASTER QUARTERLY, but then glanced up as if in afterthought. “How’s Neil?”
“Fine. Busy.”
“Huh uh, how is he at the needful? What we were just talking about. The jazz in bed.”
“Oh. Good. I guess.” As Proxy kept watching her, something flared in Rosellen’s eyes. “I don’t have a whole set of comparisons.”
Vitamin G. Guts. “Okay, I asked for that,” Proxy said, sounding a bit pleased. Once more she put her finger and attention into the literary block of print. “Listen, though. This part where I—”
“It’s not really you. I mean, I changed lots about—”
“—tell this Pierre shitepoke that if he’s going to get tough with me—”
“—really, you’re not the—”
“—he better have his casket clothes on. I like that part.”
Rosellen knew from a hundred missives from editors what the next word was going to be.
“But.”
On that creed Proxy seemed to be gathering her forces.
“Truthfully? The whole jigaree, Rosellen? I don’t get how it comes out.” She frowned intensely into the last page of the story. “I mean, this.” In a Sunday-school reciting voice she read: “. . . their two shadows across the prairie like reflections pendant in water before them.”
“See, but, what that is,” Rosellen mustered, “there’s meant to be a sense of everything sort of hanging out there ahead of them—”
“Honey, I know what a pendant is. But you mean that’s all? Easter and Pierre just end up there stuck with each other, like clothespegs on a line?”
“It’s, well, implied.”
“I guess I like mine a little more plied.”
Employ the eraser, hnn, Proxy, you’re telling me, Rosellen thought. Drat the endings, how to work out a version of people that was—well, conclusive. What were the cusswords Neil and Bruce let loose with whenever they were good and mad at something? Cat shit, rat shit, and guano. She’d like to have used those now.
Finally, though, she puffed out her cheeks, then let the exasperation leak out in a rueful grin. “All right. I wanted to know. Now I sure as the devil do.”
Before Rosellen could gather to go, though, Proxy lifted a finger inquisitively, as if testing a breeze. “Now you tell me something, okay? It’s probably no big secret I—work extra at the Blue Eagle, some nights. When I come in here, those times, Darius is dead to the world and we don’t, umm, get up to anything until the next morning or noon or sometime.” To Rosellen, for the first time since the shivaree night Proxy seemed jumpy. “Listen,” she was asking urgently, “this married stuff—would it be better if I hurry my butt home and be here when he comes off work, do you think?”
“It maybe wouldn’t hurt,” Rosellen said conservatively.
“I ask you because that Neil of yours is gone so much. I mean, I know it’s not his fault, in a way. But he doesn’t seem to figure he has to be on hand, any particular time. And you seem to put up okay with that. So, I wondered. Whether it matters a hoot or not.”
“Proxy, I . . . every . . . ”
“You’re going to tell me we have to freehand it as we go along, like everything else?” Proxy laughed, but it sounded salty. “Major news, huh, Rosellen?”
“I don’t know about everything else. But in marriage, yes, I guess that’s the news.”
Summer turned its corner at Labor Day, the heat records and giant days of work and long blue evenings under empires of stars behind now.
On the holiday itself, the three couples and the child were on a picnic at a place better than it sounded, Nettle Creek. Upriver from Fort Peck far enough that the dredges looked like white trinkets, the overlook offered a pleasant grassy coulee below and the soft rattle of cottonwood leaves over the jumpable little creek. They knew cold weather would have its way before long, but this first September Monday was well behaved, perfect early fall. Ample supply of picnic sunshine for them, with a few pantaloon clouds shelved in the sky off to the west.
“This is more like it,” Neil approved.
By now they were full of food, sated with Kate’s fried chicken which everyone swore they could taste before they even picked up a piece and Charlene’s salad specialty with noodles broad as a finger and rich with a seasoning she refused to disclose, the feast topped off with pie of the venison mincemeat that Rosellen made from deer neck, magical. Owen, eldest, had had to do a mock recital of the Old Man’s inevitable pronouncement after such a holiday meal: I have had an elegant sufficiency, any more would be a detrimental superfluity. Earlier the men had hunted, not very far nor ambitiously, for Hun pheasants. The women had traded war stories from work. Jackie had been passed around among the six of them like a lucky charm.
Rosellen tickled Neil’s ear with a piece of grass until he batted at the imaginary fly, and they all got a charge out of that. She sat up and took in the scenery again. Gazing over into the coulee and cottonwood grove, she asked: “So will this go in the lake?”
Owen sent her a look.
“Hey, I’m not being critical,” she said with a hasty laugh. “I was just thinking about, when the dam is done—”
“—and the gophers get this country back,” Bruce chipped in—
“—when the dam is done,” Rosellen threw a pinch of dust at Bruce, “what the valley will look like, all in through here. It’ll be like the sea came back, won’t it?” She hoped that was the way to put it, to show Owen he and she had a meeting of minds on the glory of the dam. Charlene could yawn all she wanted about Fort Peck, but anybody with any imagination could see that the dam was going to redo this part of the world.
Owen sat up now, too, enough to study the capacious river valley and the join of the coulee. “You got it, we’re building an ark lot here,” he ratified Rosellen’s little rhapsody. “I’d estimate it’ll fill up along this stretch about to the base of that rimrock. Couple of years from now, we can picnic up top there and be catching fish at the same time.”
“Not yours truly,” vowed Bruce from flat on his back and hat over his face. “Off to the deep sea by then, for me and you and Master Jack, right, Katy?”
“Why not, you were pearldiving when I met you,” said Kate.
“I can see it now, ‘TREASURE CHESTS FOUND FOR YOU AND YOUR DISHES DONE AT THE SAME TIME,’ ” came from Charlene, who never missed a chance on Bruce.
“Sure, pick on a guy when he’s down,” Bruce droned drowsily under the hat.
“Somebody else is about to go down for the count, aren’t you, Jackson,” Kate scooped the little boy in. “Squirming won’t get you out of it. A NAP, a NAP, a nap nap NAP, for Jack Jack JACK!” she nuzzled at him until he reluctantly chortled. With the child corraled in her arms, Kate looked over at the truck parked facing into the sun.
“I’ll pull it around,” Neil volunteered. “Get Snickelfritz a little shade.” He climbed in and started the engine.
“Hey, wait!” Bruce yelped, remembering. “I stood the Hun gun—”
His yell came too late. The truck had driven over the .22 rifle he had left standing against the front bumper.
“Aw, horseshit!” When Bruce scrabbled the rifle up out of the grass, there was a noticeable bow in its barrel.
“Could be good for shooting around corners,” Owen called over to him. “You might need that capability, when the Old Man finds out what you’ve done to his gun.”
