Bucking the Sun, page 40
January, though, probably made even Proxy hole up on the houseboat, Kate figured. Snuggle in there with Darius; breakfast, lunch, and dinner in bed, she wouldn’t be surprised. Noontimes past, Bruce and herself used to about beat down the door getting at each other, hadn’t they. Not so much anymore. Jackie’s presence in the shack, that of course made a difference. But even on those occasions when Meg, bless her cactus heart, kept Jackie a while extra, it wasn’t a sure thing that Bruce would find his way home in time for an opportunity together. Kate wanted to be fair to him on this score of settling down, so-called, in some parts of life and not others. Bruce was always going to go around inviting lightning, as Owen said about him. Yet he was a good enough father toward Jackie. Better than that, actually. When he was around.
For now, all that Kate decided was to take January in sips, times like this when meal business went slack and she could carry a cup of coffee for herself over by the cafe’s front window. She rubbed the usual spot in the window frost to see out again. Out there, the river, iced and white, the source of her chronic dream of somebody—lately it had been Jackie and her, both—tied to the ferried wagon the way Grandmère Henriette had been. Kate didn’t put much credit in dreams. Didn’t think she did, anyway. Nearer in view, cut in a long channel pointing toward the Rondola, was the winter harbor, the dredges moored there. She remembered every detail of how her father, late each year when the Missouri grew dangerous with ice, would skid the flatbottomed ferry out onto the riverbank, drain the converted Fordson tractor engine that powered its windlass, take down the bridle pulley from the long cable across the river, and begin to wait out winter. All the harbors in the head.
Neil climbed down from the truck into the snow, only ankle-deep here on the ridge above the Duff homestead. Winter had swept through without murderous cold, at least to this point of early March, and after testing the weather he decided he could work without his coat on.
He clomped across the ditch, his overshoes scrunching on the dry snow, and went over to the white lump on the prairie. Owen and he had taken care to pile the spilled lumber good and tight before they towed the truck in to Glasgow last fall, and the stack looked intact, but even in this mild, open winter it had collected a sizable bank of snow and so the boards were bound to be frozen to each other. The worst was going to be how wet his gloves would get, mauling the boards out of the snow, but he had a spare old pair somewhere under the seat of the truck.
He’d had every intention of plunging right at the work, but he found himself stalling, giving in. At last he turned around and took the look he had been dreading, down the long slope to the river and the stand of trees beyond the stark patch that had been the homestead buildings. The leaves, in the time since he stared so desperately into them that eclipse dawn, had turned and fallen and the cottonwoods stood bare and skeletal. My God, what if it’d happened this time of year. That green thing would still be crawling in my—
He knew it was batty to resent the blind bad luck of being singled out by the sun. That one unerasable moment here when all he’d done was to glance up from the verge of the road in curiosity about the out-of-kilter sunrise, and bang: everything turned upside down and a hell of a repair bill on the truck. A happenstance he couldn’t have done anything about, he’d told himself over and over. But there were times ever since then when he wanted to take a swing at something. While Rosellen had chosen the exact same time to turn fierce about sticking with Fort Peck, instead of seeing about life for themselves somewhere less treacherous. He couldn’t put his finger on it, why he and she couldn’t seem to connect better on this one argument. As he kept telling her, trestle work and hauling at the dam weren’t going to last, so before awful long she was going to have to argue with the calendar as well as him about their time to go.
He discovered he was shivering, and turned and dived to work on the lumber pile.
In a land usually beholden to wind, today’s breeze was only the gentlest of stirrings. Come, this breeze laughed, help me chase the grass and set the wildflowers to jigging on their stem legs.
Laughing along with it, Juanita and Gilbert next . . .
Nhn, what do they do next, old Nita and Gil, about whom I barely give a hang? Leaning back from her typewriter, Rosellen ran both hands through her hair and checked on the sundial of spring she had been watching out the Ad Building window: a patch of snow, gone gray and ugly, which clung to the side of a coulee between the Corps townsite and Wheeler. That snowbank dwindled markedly these April days, but spring was coming more easily out there than it was on her pages. So, are stories going into hibernation on me? That’s interesting. What would be the opposite, when warm weather— She got out KNOW YOUR ANTONYMS! and there hibernation’s reverse was, “aestivation: a state of dormancy or torpor during the summer or periods of drought.” She had to chuckle. That could explain a lot about Juanita’s and Gilbert’s reluctance to show any life on the paper this noon hour, they were out there aestivating.
Antonyms put aside, she glanced around again, needing to keep watch so that Owen didn’t suddenly show up over her shoulder wanting his dratted monthly dredging report and become curious about what was in her typewriter. She’d tried to get the report off her desk and onto his, but Max Sangster was in with him and they were talking over something about the dam hot and heavy. The clock wasn’t doing her any favors either. Why was noon always the shortest hour?
Daydreamy as a glazed figurine, Rosellen did not look like someone with all of life on her desk. Yet there she sat, steaming to know people’s sensations, stories, the private roads of their lives. Right now what she really wished she had the story of, knew how to tell, was Neil running into the eclipse the way he had. But he was like a porcupine about that one topic. When she had tried to coax details out of him, he asked her right back whether she wanted to know about it or just write about it. Both. All. She was surprised he would even put the question like that. Neil, sugarboat, why won’t you turn loose of that eye episode? I know it must have been awful for you at the time. But it didn’t even leave a sty, did it? He shook his head. Then why—? All he would say after that was that she should stick to making stories up.
Stickum wasn’t the only ingredient, whatever Neil thought. Kate had told her last fall that the famous photographer ate supper in the Rondola every night with GONE WITH THE WIND propped open in front of her. That book was longer than the Bible, and a good deal more windy, despite its title. Yet people read it until they almost passed out from the effort. Disgruntled—is there gruntled?—Rosellen took a hard look into her typewriter at Juanita and Gilbert and the laughing breeze, and pulled out the sheet of paper and crumpled it.
Time to move the circus. Owen as ringmaster, fillmaster, scarcely took time to breathe; his figure, thin as a rake, but that beehive of a head, seemed to be wherever anyone looked while twenty total miles of dredgeline were being uncoupled in twelve-and-a-half-foot sections of massive pipe and hauled by an army of trucks to new strutworks waiting on the downstream side of the dam. All four dredges, Owen’s great white wagons of the Missouri, were going to parade one final time through the river channel between the halves of the dam and take ready positions, downstream, to gnaw at the river’s banks and bottom afresh. From here on out, all of the dredging would happen downstream, because after the start of this summer the river would be plugged. No more channel, once the boulder-and-gravel barrier was dumped into place at the upstream face. Even by Owen’s impatient standards, the mouth of the channel there was already changing in startling fashion; an eight-hundred-foot trestle, sudden forest of pilings shooting up out of the water, was going into place in the gap between the dam halves.
With this final trestle and its railroad track being highballed into place, the dam site now from, say, famous-photographer altitude looked like a model-railroad layout: the track vaulting the bottomland and river on the high pilings of the new trestle and following the east bluff of the river around to the downstream top of the dam, then crossing back over the water on the steel truss bridge there. This oval was going to be used relentlessly for closure of the river, trains steaming out onto the trestle with barrier material and exiting back across the truss bridge, the go-round continuing with train after train until the river no longer flowed. Owen and Sangster and the other engineers looked forward to it like kids promised a train set for good behavior.
Yet, as he prowled his pipelines and booster stations and dredges, he had the sensation of leaving a neighborhood he loved, this upstream stretch of the river where the earth had been made to flow into new form. For certain, he and his tons of apparatus had changed the neighborhood no little bit. Dredging cuts lay around him like square flooded fields. Time, though, to go.
Owen paused, to pull out his Eversharp and then a notebook. He had two of them going now, one in each shirt pocket, for the day-by-day dredging and for the big move downstream. He quirked a little smile at himself as he made sure he had the right notebook. To readily tell them apart from here on, he wrote in crisp lead on the cover of the one for the move:
EXODUS.
• • •
Someone on high, whom he correctly suspected to be Owen, had taken pity on Darius this past winter and instead of freezing half to death at ice cutting, he had been merely chilled to the marrow every day in a pour job down in the tunnel-gate shafts. Then and now, concrete was being poured furiously, and to Darius’s surprise, with hoisting cranes going overhead and the operatic clamor of machinery and the odd crannies of workspots down in the shaft forms and the way the silolike walls took gradual curvaceous form, the work reminded him of shipyard life more than anything had yet at Fort Peck. Now that the weather was momentarily so winsome, though, he lingered up top before going down with the other two bullgang men for the next batch of pour.
“Duff, what the dickens they doing up there?” Rosocki called up out of the bottom of the shaft to him. “We been waiting forever on this pour. Tell them to get their ass in gear, would you, so we can be out of this gopher hole.”
Darius peered around over his shoulder. Down the dam slope from him and the shaft mouth, a driver of a cement truck had swung out onto the running board to take a dubious look at the rise where he had to back up. Darius watched the rear of the truck approaching as the driver revved it in reverse gear, but then the vehicle shuddered ahead, short of the pouring hopper, before the driver could get the brakes on. The foreman Miliron was on his way over, looking dire.
Darius reported into the shaft, “They’re trying to teach the truck manners,” then went down the ladder steps nailed to two-by-fours of the shaftwall form with the odd shambling grace that always made others stop and watch him, a scarecrow dancing ballet. As Darius touched foot to the bottom of the shaft, he heard Miliron yell at the truck driver, “We’re behind on this pour! Damn it, get that thing up here!”
Darius chuckled and turned toward Rosocki and Cates to say something about the universal tone of voice of foremen, Clydeside to Fort Peck. As he did, a shadow fell over the three of them, instantly followed by the sound of metal slammed into metal.
Rosocki and Cates squeezed themselves against the side of the shaft as if papering themselves to it, Darius flinging himself into their clutching arms. The pouring hopper, struck by the truck, plunged into the shaft with a grating roar.
The crash deafened them for a moment, then the stunned three stared at the shaftwall. The hopper as it plummeted had scraped down the wall, breaking like matchsticks every step of the two-by-four ladder Darius had just shimmied down.
“God Almighty had his hand on your shoulder that time, Duff,” Rosocki said shakily.
Darius said absolutely nothing. Even after an extension ladder was brought and he and Cates and Rosocki climbed out to the scared apologies of the truckdriver and the grudging commendation of the foreman for not getting themselves killed, Darius still did not have a word to say.
That night, someone lodged a wrench in the gearteeth of the project’s biggest hoisting crane, crippling it.
• • •
By the tens of tons, rock was flowing onto the dam now. Trainloads of quarry stone were being brought in from two hours away, at Snake Butte—as the name promised, rattlesnakes accompanied the cargoes of boulders, and caused everybody at Fort Peck to think more carefully about where they stepped—and then the loads were discharged on the slope at the west end of the dam, where heavy equipment was beginning to place all this rock to form riprap, the breakwater-like artificial shore which would withstand the waves of Fort Peck Lake when the dam filled.
Bruce wished rock had never been invented. All spring, he had been diving to the footings of the new trestle, which straddled the river at the upstream face of the dam and in effect was going to be the haul road for the mountain of rock as riprap was emplaced on the full four-mile width of the dam. It was the middle of May now. The engineers, Owen very much included, demanded that the trestle be done by the start of June so that they could run their rock trains across it to the eastern half of the dam; then by the end of June, they wanted to be able to stand trains on top of the trestle and merrily dump boulders and gravel over the side until they had the river plugged. All well and good and dandy-fine for the engineers, it seemed to Bruce; for him, it meant underwater handling of braces and bolting in the hardest part of the river, the heart of the current. Unlike Sangster’s truss bridge at the downstream end of the channel, an elegant cat’s cradle of steel girders that suspended itself across the river, the trestle walked through the river on stilts, actually thick wooden pilings, and every one of them carried brace specifications that made Bruce sweat beads of his soul. If he messed up, went woozy from the bends and forgot to bolt down one end of a braceplate, then when the weight of a sitting trainload of rock came onto—he didn’t want to think about it, and couldn’t get it off his mind.
Up through the water, aloft in the strutwork of the trestle, Neil had been called in as brace monkey. Swaying over the river on a safety belt—he swore he could feel the thrum of the current, the Missouri humming in the wood of the pilings—he didn’t like the channel trestle project any better than Bruce did.
Floodwater, they both gladly could have done without.
• • •
In that pleasantest spring, the water trickling down rock faces and soft coulees began to swell as the snowpack in the Rocky Mountains turned to mush. Down a 50,000-square-mile slab of the continent the trickles began to feed the creeks, Blacktail and Newlin and English and Cut Bank and Hound and Cow and some hundreds of others that were the capillaries of the vast geography of drainage from Bozeman to St. Louis. One by one the myriad creeks began to lift the rivers, the basic trio of Gallatin, Madison, and Jefferson in their collecting-basin valleys of southmost Montana; then, beyond where those three formed into the headwaters of the Missouri, north across six hundred miles, other river after other river muscularly began to contribute high water, the Dearborn, the Smith, the Sun, the Teton, the Marias, the Judith, the Musselshell. By the time the water reached Fort Peck, several hundred brimming creeks and ten enlarged rivers were running as one.
• • •
Great, just sonofabitching great. The one spring when we could use a little cooperation from the river, it’s running twice as much water as it did other springs. Where does it even get it all from, the colonel and the major peeing their pants about the schedule? Sangster is going to have conniptions if they have to shut down on bracing that trestle. I’m going to have something myself if all this sets back the plug date. Where the hell am I supposed to put fill by then if the channel isn’t—
“Eh, Owen. A minute of your time?”
Hugh had headed him off before he could reach the government pickup and start for the briefing at the trestle. “Dad,” he acknowledged, trying to think why his father wasn’t over at the dredgeline poking traps. Christ, was the dredgeline clogged? Had the Old Man and Birdie let—
“There’s a job I want on,” said his father, just like that.
At long wonderful last. Owen tried not to spoil this by looking too pleased. “Well, sure, good. Anything short of my own, just name it.”
“Snakecatcher.”
“Sn—? Are you out of your pickled mind?”
“Not pickled anymore, remember?”
But what’s the difference, if you’re going to behave like this. Owen worked his mouth without saying anything, trying to study his father afresh. Now that Hugh had turned dry, he went around with the willed aplomb of a firewalker. But, thought Owen, refurbished dignity or rectitude or whatever the blazes it was didn’t particularly qualify him for— “Dad, listen. Since when do you know anything about handling rattlesnakes?”
Unfazed, Hugh told him:
“My idea of it is, it would give a man something to concentrate on.”
• • •
Snagboats were on busy duty upstream from the dam channel, grappling out the most threatening tree trunks and logs before they could build up dangerously against the shins of the trestle. Still, everyone aboard the diving barge was keeping half an eye on that stretch of the river, colonel’s briefing or no colonel’s briefing. If, say, a floating forest of big cottonwoods suddenly showed up around that bend of the Missouri, there was going to be a unanimous footrace for the high ground of the dam.
By now even the color of the river looked mean, a sullen muddy tone as if lava was corrupting the water.
