Bucking the Sun, page 37
“Hey, maybe not all.” Half by habit—she didn’t usually have to perform this while steering a car—she reached across and put her hand on a friendly visit to the inside of his thigh; if that didn’t cheer him up, she didn’t know what would.
But Darius wasn’t having any. “Mott. I know he’s a grieved man,” she heard him say as if to himself. “But he lost all sense of tactics with that funeral.”
The camera came to town at the end of that summer. It took a look around, day by day, aimed by the famous photographer. First it found a metal-hooded welder at work on a dredge cutterhead big as a whale skull, and then a cow munching over a find in an overspilling garbage barrel in a spectacularly junky back alley of Wheeler. It registered Colonel Parmenter and Major Santee and Captain Brascoe spiffy and officious in their uniforms, but next Ruby Smith vigilantly eyeing the take in the Wheeler Inn. The camera seemed deliriously random, popping up on its tripod in unlikeliest places, but it knew what it knew. Into its film packs, on measured winks of light that would be distilled into famous magazine pages in New York City, were to be put Fort Peck Dam and the damworkers’ shantytowns.
• • •
Extra early, Neil started the truck’s long, low-gear climb out of the bottomland at the homestead, the morning fog off the river sealing away the terrain above so that only a steady amount of steep grade, about a hundred feet of sloping twin ruts, kept showing up ahead. The lugged drone of the truck was monotonously unchanging, too. Nonetheless, Neil whistled a bit, the warbly swatch of “Aura Lee” that it took a virtuoso to do; he could not help but feel he had the jump on the day, plenty of time to make this haul between now and noon when he had to go on shift at the dredgeline. Glad, too, to have the last of the floorboards and siding onto the truck and no more of these scavenger runs to the homestead. The Old Man can kiss the place goodbye now. He palmed the gearstick knob beside his knee for a moment, tattoo of vibration up from the gearbox into his hand. The Triple A took a beating on these hilly hauls, but he had it in mind to snag Bruce or Owen one of these soon weekends to help him take down the transmission, check the gearteeth and all.
The truck finally dug free of the fog, up toward the grass horizons of the ridgeland. Not quite dawn yet here, Neil was surprised to find; the sky was staying more inky than he expected, making him wonder if his watch was fast. Or maybe the fog had something to do with it. This last climb of the road from the homestead switchbacked into a long curve eastward, and even before the road topped the ridge, he saw that the lid of cloud lay on the river in that direction the entire way ahead. At Fort Peck they doubtless were cussing the damp gray morning, and he whistled some more at the prospect that the fog would burn off into a bright day by the time he hit the dam.
The sun came up now, Neil conscientiously squinting down toward the side of the road, same as he always did the first minutes of bucking the sun on any of these drives into dawn or dusk. Foggier than he’d thought; the cheatgrass along the bank of the road seemed dim today, not catching the first light in pastel flame flickers as usual.
Curious, Neil glanced up to gauge the sunrise and abruptly ducked his head as if slashed in the eye, both eyelids clamped shut but a green jagged arc of light under the left one.
Everything tipped. His hands on his eye had cost him the steering wheel, the truck off the edge of the road, then he balled himself up inside the rollover, hearing the sound of houseboards avalanching.
• • •
“What the dickens—?” Birdie Hinch flung down his shovel and got ready to run, if he only knew where. “It’s turning night again already!”
The dredgeline foreman himself appeared dumbstruck at the darkness falling at 6:30 a.m., until he remembered.
“Eclipse. It was on the radio. Couple of minutes’ worth, is all, then it’ll be regular light again. Everybody take a smoke, why not, while this gets over with.”
“End of the world, Birdie!” someone on the crew teased in the double dimness. “St. Peter’ll be sorting us out here in a minute, you better figure out which chicken you’re going to start repenting on.”
“Lay off him,” the foreman called out. Then to Birdie: “But don’t be gawking up there, in case that fog lifts. They say you can get your eyeballs fried by looking into one of those.”
• • •
Nothing broken on him. Except there in the eye, the green wound blazing there.
The power of panic drove Neil up out of the toppled truck, wrenching the driver’s-side door open into the sky overhead, then scrambling out like a frantic sailor through an escape hatch. He lit on the ground hard, the truck on its side hissing shrilly through its radiator. His back to the sunrise, he tried clapping a hand, then both hands, over the eye but it did not help any. The scald of color, the shape of a large glowworm, stayed vivid within the eye, no, Jesus, brighter! when he covered it that way.
Neil grasped by now that this was not from the shatter of the windshield, some sliver of glass. Somehow this was a slice of the sun itself driven into his eye. The, what was it called, corona, branded green into his vision; they’d been warned about it in school every so many years, blindness if you ever looked into an eclipse. But he hadn’t even known this morning there was going to be an— The thing swam, maddeningly front and center, always just out from his nose. This wasn’t blindness, this was maybe worse, something forever there you didn’t want to see, couldn’t stand to see but couldn’t keep from seeing. Hunched, Neil stared down at the ground, the crooked crown of sunfire against it. His throat tightened so much he felt half-choked as he tried to think how to deal with this. My God, how could you ever even sleep with this smoldering in your eye.
In a jolting lope he ran down the road toward the river. When he entered the fog, the sting of color grew even more vivid again, lifting and falling according to his strides but never leaving his vision, never dimming from its hot turquoise arc inside his eyeball.
Panting desperately from his plunge down the ridge and from the terror of the brand in his eye, Neil reached the river. He clambered out onto a gravel bar, dropped to his knees and madly sloshed water, handfuls as fast as he could scoop, onto the eye. The cold shock of the Missouri made him gasp, shudder, but he kept applying the water until his hands grew too numb. The fuzzy green eyebrow still glowed in the center of his vision.
He lurched to his feet, gravel clattering under him, the river purling past, and looked around wildly, trying to shoot glances here and there more quickly than the green tuft of fire could follow. But it was always there, in fact it seemed to squirm to wherever he looked an instant ahead of his sense of looking there. Impossible as outrunning your shadow, he realized.
But what, then—can’t go through life like this, can’t, this’d drive a person batty before—Got to do something with—
It hit him then, that maybe the only way to get the green burn out would be to have the eye taken out.
Doctors, do they do that? Jesus, though, can I even stand it long enough to get to a—
He knew nobody in his right mind could pluck his own eye out. What, though, if it drove him crazy enough to?
Quit thinking that! Don’t even—I—That’s crazy to even—But what’m I—
He was afraid to even cry, not knowing what that might do to the crippled eye. By now he had backed off the gravel bar, floundering up onto the riverbank. Dazzles of light came off the water at him now, the sun had cut through the fog. Neil ducked away, frantically turning his head toward the stand of cottonwoods. The green corona in his eye merged somewhat with the green mass of leaves.
Trembling, he tested this out. As long as he kept his eyes fixed into the cottonwood patch of green, the corona’s clinging glow seemed not quite so bright against it. Every time he shifted his eyes to anywhere else, there it flared. The alfalfa field, when he tried it, produced too deep a green, the sun-molten one crawled floridly atop it. He snapped his gaze back to the cottonwoods again.
Quivering with hope now, he forced himself to sit still on the riverbank, knees hugged to his chest, and stare on and on into the leaves. Surprisingly hard, to make yourself do nothing but stare. Rosellen. He thought about her, craved having her here but in the next instant decided no, how could he explain even to her what was going on in his eye. He tried to occupy himself with the place, thoughts of the past life here. Cold mornings, the boy him taking his turn at the chores starting with the milk cow, milking the first squirts onto his hands to warm them; Owen had taught him that trick. Bruce and him, twinned in even where they slept, those tussles the two of them waged over who was taking up too much of the bed, until the night the Old Man came into their room and laid a cedar fencepost down the center of the sheets for a boundary. The Old Man and Mother, their long devotion to disagreement about this place. The river chiming in, any season, road of water that the luck of a year either came on or didn’t. Their last winter here, the big freeze that left this stretch of the Missouri and its tributary Go-Devil Creek like a series of ice rinks; the cows from the Austin ranch that the Duffs were wintering on shares slipped and slid on the ice, the calves were born backwards that hellish calving time. Then, though, the annual hope that was alfalfa, the melt in the mountains coming down the canyon as rapid tan water and perking into the riverbank fields to push up the green growth. But before spring was half off the calendar, summer was crowding in, the Old Man going hermity once more, Mother skeptical about everything, Bruce itching to pull out, himself trying to fathom where things were heading. Summer of grasshoppers again. The view from the running board during the poisoning, the tires of the pickup leaving behind twin slicks of crushed grasshoppers. Then that feeb in the government Chevy. Then the dam. And the truck. And this . . .
Gradually he could determine that the green squiggle was fading, just perceptibly. After many minutes, it turned to dull red. Wild with relief, when he shifted his gaze off the cottonwood canopy now, after each blink the glow seemed to go down a little in color.
When the last of the sun scar was finally gone, Neil, drained as he was, thought to check his watch. As best he could tell, the immense time it had taken for the green fire to fade from his eyesight was an hour.
• • •
“It’s all beat to hell on that one side,” Owen diagnosed the truck after they had righted it with a tractor borrowed from the Austin ranch. “But the garage in Glasgow can bang most of that out, don’t you think?” He badly wanted Neil to think that, rather than notions toward a new truck. Charlene will have my scalp for sure if we lay out money for another damned rig.
Going through the motions with Owen of looking over the mistreated Model Triple A, while Rosellen tried to stay at his side and yet out of the way, Neil appeared both dulled down and uneasy. He still had trouble believing what had happened here had really happened. There was no telling how much longer Bruce was going to keep ragging the daylights out of him for trying to teach the truck to roll over like a cocker spaniel. His mother, on the other hand, stated “These things happen, Neil,” without managing to give it a reassuring sound. The Old Man had simply looked at him as if Neil had turned back into a nine-year-old. Except for Rosellen, he had only told any of them that the sun got in his eye and the truck flipped over when he lost sight of the edge of the road. He knew it was like saying he had been singed with a match when he had been jabbed by a red-hot (green-hot) branding iron. But how could he say to them he had been singled out by an eclipse?
“Sure some mess, huh?” Neil muttered to Rosellen as if he hadn’t heard Owen’s prescription for the truck.
“You’re not hurt, that’s all that counts. Tell me again. The eclipse and all,” she said yesterday after he’d had to hitch rides all the way back to Fort Peck and she was holding him.
She had begged to come with them on this salvage of the wreck and the interminable tow job ahead, and now she put her arm through Neil’s, the way she figured a wife was supposed to furnish adhesive encouragement here, although she was close to bursting with the belief that yesterday would have been her real chance. She would have given anything to have been along with him when the sun struck his eye, when the truck somersaulted. By now she had thought up all different versions, how she would have raced on foot the five miles to the Austin ranch for help or stayed and cradled him in her arms while the thing in his eye went away, whatever was best for him. Never in a jillion years would she have said so to Neil, bunged up and feeling low as he was, but the same way she had been secretly a little thrilled by his inexplicable fistfight with the tough Swede that time, what had happened to him here put her imagination on full perk.
Past her, Owen snuck another hard look at Neil. It wasn’t like Neil to spill a truck on a straight dry stretch of road like this; Owen felt half-embarrassed for his brother the minute he saw the wreck site. Maybe there was some angle to this that Neil wasn’t owning up to, but it was an odd damned piece of driving.
“That’s what you think we better do, then?” Owen applied on him again. “Give the guys at Moore Motors a go at pounding it back into shape?”
“Sure,” Neil at last said, swallowing. “I guess.”
• • •
The camera all but licked the lips of its lens when the big tunnel liners, plate steel culverts thirty feet in diameter and cobwebbed inside with crisscross support rods to hold them rigid until they were placed in the diversion tunnels, came into view. What the famous photographer was famous for were photographs of sections of machinery so abstract they looked like metal fossils, and here was a spiral pattern, seashell magnified by industrial design to the size of a silo, to make you dizzy with awe. Workmen, silhouetted, were climbing all over in there, hitchhiking on midair, on the support rods—the rods and the boltcollars in the middle into which they were cinched were called tension spiders—and even one man clinging on the outside of the big round form, upper left, as if he was at the ten o’clock point of scaling the clockface of Big Ben. The tripod spraddled out, the camera eye focused. “That’s fine, perfect,” called out the photographer to the men glancing down in curiosity, “don’t look at the camera,” and not more than half of them did.
Darius sipped thermos tea, hanging at the edge of a group of catskinners greasing and fueling up their bulldozers. He had been up on the opposite side of the tunnel liner, bolting down a flange at the two o’clock spot, when he spied the photographer coming. Now he waited, deliberately out of the picture, impassively watching the others ride the tension spiders.
• • •
Rosellen popped out of the Ad Building at quitting time, pretty as a bouquet, yanking her aquamarine scarf out of her coatsleeve to put it on.
He stood a moment, just admiring, then fell into step with her.
“Thought I’d walk you home. Now that we’re afoot.”
“This isn’t the previous Neil,” she gave him a grin and glommed on to his arm in a kidding way. “Coming up to a married woman in broad daylight. Next thing, you’ll be asking directions to my room.”
Catercorner from the Ad Building, the hotel of their first night drew a comical gawk simultaneously from them both, then they chuckled together and began walking up through the kempt Corps townsite toward Wheeler.
November’s evidence was in the wind, chilly on Rosellen’s legs, teasing at Neil’s hat. This was nifty, though, she decided, sashaying home arm in arm, his familiar long frame the warmest thing in Fort Peck’s larder of wind. There was no fancier word needed for it. Nifty of him, too, to think to—
“Maybe we ought to clear out of here,” she heard come from him, not in any dreamy planning way but as if it had been pent up. “Tell Fort Peck we’ve had a sufficiency.”
“Neil, no. Why?”
“We’re going to need to eventually anyway. Trestle monkeys aren’t long for this world here. About all that’s left is the channel trestle and then my kind of work shuts down to—”
“Mine’ll still be going, though. The last two people on this dam will be one working and me doing paperwork and paychecks on him.” That didn’t bring the laugh from him she’d hoped for. A little wildly, she looked at him from the side, wondering where the Neil who always preached perseverance to her had gone. Clear out, when this place was going great guns? She couldn’t even imagine anything to match the dam, the stories, the ingredients of life here. “And didn’t you say yourself there’ll still be hauling jobs when they start topping off the dam?”
“Yeah, I did,” he said in a thin tone.
“Then, what? What, sweetheart?” she persisted. “Your accident? Is that what has you thinking like this?”
He bridled at her choice of words. What had happened, there with the truck, his eye, the green—he shook his head sharply. Beyond accident. Wasn’t “accident” something that happened to you when you were about half-asking for it, like not checking your safety belt and climbing spikes before you scaled up a bridge piling? This other came down out of the fairy blue and slugged you. Tried to blind you.
“Rosellen, I’m not asking for static over this. It was just an idea. I’ll—we’ll need to take a look at things before the topping-off gets underway, though.”
“I know.” She was still wondering how they had gotten into this nearest thing to a fight. “When we have to, we will.”
How in the name of Holy Pete can a guy be expected to sort it all out, wondered Neil. What was it that Owen said, To be a Tebbet. Sisters didn’t look to be an any more understandable proposition than brothers. Charlene would give just about anything to kiss off Fort Peck, Neil knew, and here Rosellen couldn’t be budged from the place.
They walked on home, not saying anything.
• • •
The camera went up in an airplane to look down on Fort Peck. Glimpses, though, were all it could manage; the dam project from overhead proved to be simply too big and sprawling and, well, unphotogenic. The four tall gatehouses that would regulate the river into the tunnels under the dam were being erected on geography that looked reptilian. The curved Fort Peck townsite, in its extreme regularities, looked like sets of false teeth in a rusty basin. So it went, uncooperative earth down there. The famous photographer was considerably less than pleased, but did manage to shoot a panorama of the town of Wheeler in underexposed glowery murk, which the editors in New York would have cropped off if they had not wanted a glowering murky sky over their notion of Wheeler. But how bright did New York look when it was two years old?
