Bucking the Sun, page 41
“But you can see enough to work down there?” Colonel Parmenter asked.
“Yeah,” Bruce answered with untimely honesty. “Just enough.”
All in God’s world they wanted from this day, the Corps officers and the engineers and the apprehensive diving barge crew and for that matter Bruce, was the one more diving shift it would take to finish bracing the footings of the channel trestle. If they could get the bracing done, in Sangster’s estimation, everything ought to hold. If they didn’t, and higher water and a jam-up of snags and other trash found the right pressure to put against an unbraced section, then—Sangster mourned out in Dear John tones—that’s all she wrote.
“I still say we need to wait and see how long before the flood crest is due to get here,” Owen maintained. He watched for the effect on Colonel Parmenter, never easy to gauge either. Then he swung toward Bruce. Come on, Bruce. For once in your life, take it a little slow. “What does our government diver think?”
“That this would be a nice time,” Bruce said as if the idea had just hit him, “for about a two-week vacation.”
The bullgang, languishing along the top of the dam next to the trestle, heard the round of laughter come up from the diving barge and wondered to each other what was so funny down there in the big drink. Neil had shed his climbing gear and was lying back with his hands under his head, trying to just listen to the laughter come and go or to nap or anything except to think about the trestle and high water and random danger flicked down like a playing card out of the sky, but the thinking would not go away. Next to him, unusually untalkative, sat Darius, watching down the slope of the dam to the diving barge and the specific figure of Bruce.
“You know, though, sir,” Bruce spoke up again, with Owen snapping a look at him, “I’d kind of like to get it over with. I’m ready to go down”—he a little theatrically peered at the lusty water—“whenever you say.”
Jesus, where does he get it from, piped in hot from the Old Man? Owen was trying to hold his temper, knowing himself already riled about the screw-up in the pipe hauling. If he could get his hands on the joker who poured sugar in the gas tanks of his haul trucks . . . Bruce, though, was the immediate issue. Here’s Bruce Duff for you, world—never happy unless he’s in trouble up to his bottom lip. Aloud, actually quite loud, Owen said:
“And I think we don’t want to go off half-cocked here. Look, how about this, everybody,” by which he meant Colonel Parmenter. “We get the noon reading from Tansy Creek”—the nearest measuring station—“and if the river is cresting at Tansy, okay, we’ll know it’ll hit here a couple of hours from then. That’ll make it tight, but there’ll still be time enough for Bruce to go down and finish his bracing. Right, Bruce?”
Sure, you bet, Ownie know-it-all, if everything goes right. If I don’t drop my wrench in the silt. If I don’t black out any too many minutes at a time. If this and if that. “I’d still rather start the dive now,” Bruce argued, “and have a little more time down there just in case everything—”
“Damn it, though,” Owen broke in, “what if we get the noon reading and the crest is past Tansy Creek? What if it’s at about”—he took a breath and looked bleakly at Bruce—“the Nettle Creek coulee? Then it’d hit here while you’re down on the dive. That wouldn’t be such a hot thing to have happen, would it, Bruce?”
“I can’t guarantee holding this barge in the middle of something like that,” the barge boss Taine spoke up.
Bruce cut Taine off with an angry swipe of his hand. “Hey, here,” he was still directing his argument to Owen, “I’m the goddamn one on the spot who has to—”
“I still say it’s a matter of timing,” Owen insisted, “we’ve got to know when the sonofabitching crest will get here and work from—”
“Gentlemen.”
Both Duff brothers appeared startled at the word from Colonel Parmenter. The colonel gazed back and forth between Bruce and Owen.
“I don’t wish to lose a diver, I don’t wish to lose this barge, I don’t wish to lose the trestle,” he solemnly enumerated, even if those didn’t particularly add up. “Everyone take a break. We’ll wait for the noon reading from the Tansy Creek station.”
• • •
Looking steamed, Bruce climbed the face of the dam as though he was charging up San Juan Hill. Near the top, the sight of Darius slowed him considerably; he had been treading with care around his uncle, not to mention Proxy’s volcanic vicinity, ever since the night in the Blue Eagle. Aw, hell, he can just hunker up and stay sore, if that’s what he wants, Bruce decided. “Unk,” he acknowledged stiffly.
“Nephie,” Darius returned commensurately.
Neil was sitting up, yawning but impatient. “What’s the deal?” he asked Bruce. “You bigwigs got the river figured out?”
Bruce stopped short. Christ Jesus, now him. Neil seemed to be on the prod pretty often, anymore.
Holding his temper—there had to be some limit to how many brothers, uncles, and whatnot a guy could take on in one day—Bruce laid out river matters for Neil, primarily in profanity, then glanced over his shoulder as if the barge argument was following him. “Let’s clear out of here until Owen gets off the warpath,” he concluded. “Come on, I’ll stand you to coffee and pie.”
Tactics. Take care of those and they’ll take care of— “Mind if I tag along?” Darius spoke up.
Bruce thawed so visibly Darius was almost embarrassed. “You bet, Unk. You can explain to us how one Duff can be such a horse’s patoot”—he jerked his head in the vicinity of the barge and Owen—“while the rest of us are so perfectly nice.”
The Rondola was brimming with customers as usual, but places at the end of the counter were being vacated by a railroad crew, and the three Duffs moved right onto stools still warm from the gandydancers’ fannies. Bruce winked at the waitress. “We came to brighten your day, Better Half.”
“Surrounded, am I,” Kate greeted them, dealing out three cups and pouring coffee. “Won’t the dam fall down without you characters leaning against it?”
“We left Owen in charge,” Bruce muttered, “so it wouldn’t dare.”
“Hi, Kate, how you doing?” Neil was pleased to get her in on this. He had forgotten she’d be on shift or he would have proposed this Rondola sideshow himself, to try to settle Bruce down some. “Been trying to drill some common sense into this husband of yours, about how much water it’s wise to walk under.”
“Better get a big auger,” she said.
Neil shot a glance at Bruce, expecting him to blow up. Instead, looking less riled than when he’d stomped away from the river, Bruce said so soberly it was comical: “There, hear that? This is what she does to me.”
“Kate, merciful,” Darius flashed in with. “Tell us, what’s the pastry prospect?”
“There’s pie, and it’s rhubarb.”
“Saves on the strain of deciding, anyway,” Bruce said. “Hon, put this on our tab, will you—I went out of my mind and told these guys I’d treat.”
Neil and Bruce watched restlessly as Darius poured cream and sugar on his slice of rhubarb pie, then dug into theirs unadorned. While Bruce and Darius—mostly Bruce—talked trestle through mouthfuls, Neil let his gaze drift after Kate as she wielded the relentless coffeepot and swept dishes to and from customers. That little exchange between her and Bruce, wham bam; nothing moony about the state of their marriage, it looked like. Watching her at waitressing, he liked the way she never scurried, just covered the territory. Kind of interesting, actually, to rest the eyes on Kate’s long silky build, although he was reminded of Bruce’s original assessment that you couldn’t see her coming around a corner.
On her next pass along the counter she came over to them again with the coffeepot.
“Not I,” Darius declined again, one cup of the stuff more than adequate with him.
“Had all I can stand, too,” Neil said against another refill. Which sounded stiffer than he’d intended, so he glanced up at Kate and kidded: “Bruce claims there’s something in the coffee here and that’s how you got him.”
Kate judiciously looked in the pot she was holding as Bruce chortled and the other two sat there grinning.
She killed off Bruce’s chortle by pouring Neil’s and Darius’s cups to overflowing and skipping his. With all the nonchalance in the world she told him, “You already had some, remember?”
• • •
The noon reading of the river depth left no further room for argument. The flood crest had just passed Tansy Creek, it would hit Fort Peck in another few hours, and while Bruce could grind his teeth all he wanted, he also had to hustle into his diving suit. There was time enough left for a standard dive, Owen had been right about that. But where the hell does he get the idea, Bruce was still thinking furiously as his helmet snicked into place, that this’ll be a standard dive?
• • •
“The damned knothead of a kid did it, Charlalene! Bruce goosed the moose!”
Owen bounced into the house so full of strange beans that she at first thought he had come home drunk. Now she recognized it as engineer elation. “You’re pinning medals on Bruce?” Charlene checked to make sure. “Since when?”
“The trestle! He—”
• • •
“—got done with the bracing in jig time,” Neil was telling rapt Rosellen, “he didn’t even take his whole diving shift. The barge bunch looked like they couldn’t believe it, him signaling already he had it whipped, down there. You should’ve seen him, though, when that helmet came off him—old Bruce looked like one relieved puppy.” Neil himself looked as if he was thinking back step-by-step on the history of Bruce.
“Oh,” he thought to say, though. “Saw Kate today, too.”
• • •
Darius was kissing places on her, lingering here, darting there. Proxy nibbled her lip in pleasure. He did know how to get a woman’s attention. She could feel every least maneuver of his mouth, tongue practiced as a cat’s. Charting planet to planet on her, slow delicate orbit of first the aureole on one breast and then same on the other, then on to teasing each erect crest, somehow finding time in the soft valley between to say things. God, you wouldn’t think a Scotchman could make love talk, would you.
“Hnnnn?” she brought herself out enough to respond. “What, sugar-bush?”
“Laid eyes on Kate today,” he was saying as if just reminded. “She’s a bit flat in the netherlands, isn’t she.”
• • •
Hugh had to admit he didn’t care much for their rattling. Far, far better to hear the buggers than not, though.
By the nature of things, each rattlesnake was peeved, stirred up at its boulder cave being derricked away or yelling men trespassing into its vicinity, by the time Hugh was called to the scene. He was assigned the west half of the dam, which had the headstart in rockwork on the face of the dam and thus more snake business. Now that the riprap loads were rolling across the trestle to the east half too, a second snakecatcher had been put on over there and Hugh had heard practical jokes were being pulled on him, a dead rattler cozily coiled behind his lunchbox when he went to pick it up, for instance. No one pulled anything on Hugh Duff.
He stayed perched judiciously on a stone slab and scouted around for his latest poisonous customer. Invariably the snake was reported as being the size of the Loch Ness monster, but they were damnably hard to spot, the pattern on their backs blending so with their surroundings. In a way he was grateful to that angry buzz of the rattle, as a warning device. Poised there, he was outfitted with a sheephook, its seven-foot handle a healthy length, while the narrow springsteel neck of hook designed to snare the hind leg of a sheep did nicely enough around the circumference of a rattlesnake. Hugh’s procedure was elemental but not necessarily simple. Yank a rattler out of its striking position, like a coil of enfevered rope. Then pin it down (make sure it’s pinned down), in back of its wedge of head, with the flexible neck of the sheephook. Then reach in and employ the machete, which he carried at his waist in a scabbard that would have suited an admiral.
• • •
And so now I am married to the St. Patrick of Fort Peck. There he goes—Sir Hugh, of the Serpent-Ridding Hussars.
She had Jackie on an outing, on a walk along the bluff where they could look down and see the trains run. The boy attended closely to anything that went on wheels. Unfortunately, thought Meg, he seemed to be thoroughly his father’s son in that. Bruce and momentum, kid-skin and glove. She hoped Kate wasn’t tiring of his velocity. Not that she herself was the leading expert at keeping up with the demands that were men. These days, these lovely walks with Jackie, Meg spent the major share of her attention on the lanky figure with the shepherd’s crook, there on the boulder dike in the middistance. How then can he keep being the same Hugh, having traded himself in wholesale as he did in Chicago? Are we stone, under it all, as Owen’s dam will be there at the lakewater?
“See Gramp?” she tried to point him out to Jackie. “Gramp, down there letting daylight into the snakes—see him?”
The child, though, had caught sight of color dancing by in the air. “Mum Mum,” he called for her attention, pointing after the dancing thing. “Buttafly.”
“Jack. I’m glad you brought that up,” Meg said to him, as usual speaking to the child as though they both were Prime Ministers. “There now is something I have never understood—a butterfly does fly, I grant you, but do you see anything the least bit buttery about it? Would you not say, Jack, a better name for the lovely tiny beast would be ‘flutterby’?”
Bright-eyed, her conversation partner considered this with the quizzical smile that reminded her so of Owen.
“Fluttaby,” the boy agreed.
• • •
Ah, now he saw the adversary, patterned-green circles of itself under it as the snake lay looped to strike. Pink mouth hotly open, twin fangs prepared, the better to dagger and poison you with, my dear.
Quick as a pirate, Hugh grappled down with the sheephook, spilled the nestled snake sideways into a curving series of writhes, pressed down with the neck of the hook, then delivered the chop with the machete.
His heart and breathing always sped up by about twice during this. Hours at a time went by, though, in snakework, when he did not think about a bottle of anything.
Now he employed the other item he carried on this job, a fisherman’s creel. With another slash of the machete, he lopped the rattle off the defunct snake and dropped it in the creel with the others. “I don’t see how you can go those snakes, Hugh,” Birdie had said to him more than once. In the spirit of enterprise, though, Birdie shellacked the rattles Hugh provided, glued them on little wooden bases and sold them. Already the tails of rattlesnakes were showing up all over Wheeler beneath the mounted skulls of buffalo.
Four days before the river was to be closed off, in the middle of an already complicated enough afternoon of jigsawing the dredge-lines back together downstream from the dam, Owen was called to the field telephone.
“Sangster. Sounds like he’s got a hair crosswise,” the pipehaul foreman warned before handing him the phone.
“Owen,” said the thin voice on the other end, “you better come see something.”
“What, at the trestle again? I’ll be right—”
“Huh uh,” the fieldphone voice now sounded as if it was having trouble believing itself. “This is at the truss bridge again.”
• • •
His first look at the slumped earth, within spitting distance of the truss bridge, sent Owen white-faced. Sangster’s was whiter.
The slipped section of fill resembled a muddy scallop shell perhaps two hundred feet long and a hundred high. It had slid, still in one arched piece, several feet down into the river channel. Scoured away underneath by the flood, loosened by the rapid fall of the floodwater, who knew what the precise cause was: it had slid. The arc of gap where the shell edge had pulled away from the dam was spookily neat, as if a hill had just taken an innocent step forward from the mountain of earthfill. There was nothing innocent about it. The shifted heap of fill was throwing enormous weight down against the main pier of the railroad bridge.
“It holding okay?” Owen tore his eyes away from the sickening dam slippage to ask about the health of Sangster’s bridge.
“Not really.” Sangster even still sounded pale. “Out of line about a foot already, and more to come. That pier’s cracked.”
Owen spoke six or eight expletives, rapid-fire.
“I agree,” Sangster said. “But we’ve got to do something besides cuss at it.”
They knew they had only minutes before the official car delivered Colonel Parmenter and Major Santee and general hell.
• • •
They already had the gravel cars going by the time the Ad Building contingent descended. First thing first, everyone could see that much. If they lost the truss bridge they lost the railroad loop, the key to plugging the river; they would lose the entire dam schedule, they would lose all advantage over the river for Christ knew how long. Thirty timely railcars of gravel, dumped on the weak side of the cracked concrete pier to temporarily shore it up, saved them from that at least for the moment. But now came the question of holding together both the bridge’s underpinning and the channel shoulder of the dam until they could get the river plugged.
Owen and Sangster and everybody in the vicinity nervously sized up the Corps officers as the briefing was convened there at the river. Colonel Parmenter appeared to be wishing for the Philippines. Major Santee looked a little smirky, as he often did when things went wrong.
The colonel made short work of discussion. “What about this, Duff?”
What about what? What the floodwater did along here, so that neither I nor God Almighty can guarantee you that chunk of earthfill won’t move some more, won’t cave off and take the bridge with it, in the next four days or the next four minutes? That there was only, what, one chance in five that we’d get the highest water of the whole project this spring, but that’s exactly the thing we did get? Or that what I most want right now, the one thing I can think of to maybe stabilize the fill that’s slipped, is to have high water up against it again? What are you going to think of any of my whats, Colonel?
