Bucking the Sun, page 46
Her mind kept marching back to that blasted iron. Expensive purchase, Bruce.
Now, finally, she heard Owen’s pickup door slam, and he came charging in, stopping short and blinking at the sight of her, radically barbered and with her bandaged leg up on the footstool.
He crossed the room and sat on the footstool, his hand lightly cupping her ankle, the nearest safe place to touch.
“I hear you had yourself quite a morning.”
“Mmhmm. One like that will do me, for good.”
Hurt no, scar yes, more of a scrape than a cut, heal up in couple of weeks, lucky it wasn’t a lot worse . . . when they had done the topic of her leg, Owen said as if carefully taking stock:
“Glad you got the kid out.”
“You’re glad. That was the part that scared the pants off me, Jackie in there.” Now that it was over, the boy seemed to her the best kid in the world.
Owen kept nodding. With everything going on inside of him, he knew he had to be extra careful in what he said. As utterly sympathetic as he was toward Charlene about the fire, he also was spitting mad that there would inevitably need to be another loan to Bruce and company. He knew it was the day that had him out of sorts, not to mention the shock of coming home to a shorn and wan Charlene, but he still felt entitled to be damned good and tired of having to pull strings for members of this family. It’s neverending. Wouldn’t you think somebody could hang on to what they got, for a change? No, now, that wasn’t fair, not even toward Bruce who had never heard of a piggybank, or at least it wasn’t what an attentive husband ought to be stewing about while Charlene sat here looking badly used. To buck her up, he commended:
“When that undersheriff gave me the news, he said you had to have been cool as a cucumber, staying in there and trying to tackle that fire the way you did.”
“What about dumber than a truckload of them, too, for trying to fill a hot iron.” As Owen opened his mouth to loyally knock that down, she said in quickstep: “No, I didn’t know it was hot, it was not my fault, nobody’s fault, it could have happened to Eenie, Meenie, Minie or Moe.” She stopped, to put together the next. “But something about it was dumb, Owen. The, I don’t know, the situation was dumb, if nothing else.”
“It must be catching,” he surprised her with. She saw that he suddenly looked as tired as she felt. “Lot of dumb situation going around,” he went on, absently stroking her ankle. “I got greeted with a gravel train that broke loose last night. A cut of twenty cars. They’re scrap iron now.” He brought his attention up from the ankle and white-wrapped shin to her face. “That’s why they couldn’t track me down for you sooner. I was up there at the spillway, trying to get somebody to tell me how long that siding will be out of commission.”
Charlene quickly put a hand to her leg so he might think her wince came from there. “That’s dreadful, Ownie. Is it . . . going to put you off schedule?”
“It doesn’t make a fillmaster’s life one goddamn bit easier, that’s for sure. Now I have to tackle the colonel and Santee on squeezing in a few more gravel cars per train until—” he broke off the work talk, a little guiltily. “Well. I’m glad you’re in one piece.”
“Mmhmm. Pretty much.”
Rat-a-tat-ta— Knuckles on the front door seemed to spring it open, and Bruce was standing there.
“Came to see the firebug.”
Before Owen could launch up from the footstool, Charlene started trying to fend: “Sorry about how that ironing job turned out, Bruce. Really, I—”
“Hey, never mind.”
Plainly Bruce was in an ashen state of mind. Who wouldn’t be? Owen had to admit, still tensed to head him off. But Bruce didn’t seem to need any heading off. “I hate it that you got banged up yourself,” he told Charlene, giving her the most solemn expression she’d ever seen from him. She looked grateful beyond measure.
Big of the kid, thought Owen, amazed. If somebody had just burned up everything I owned, I’m not sure I’d—
Turning to Owen, Bruce kept his face arranged to hide what he felt. Christ Jesus, this was hard. He’d still rather take a beating than to have to deal with Owen. But he managed to say the rest of what he intended. “Mother’s got matters under control—Kate and Jackie are getting her royal treatment. I seem to have a housing situation to talk to you about, though, Ownie.”
Owen swallowed, and nodded.
• • •
They lived with Mum Mum and Gramp now. Daddy, Mommy, him.
“For good?” he asked Mommy.
She told him, “For worse, seems like, Jackiebox.”
Daddy heard and gave her a frown and him a tickle and told him they were going to live in a tailor house soon.
Every morning now Darius stepped out onto the deck of the houseboat feeling the world had gone farther downhill.
The minuet of the cowards, London and Paris to Munich and Berchtesgaden, played night after night from the pitiless radio. Proxy would arrive home in the small hours and find him hunched, captive to listening, mind on the Czechs and the Sudetenland Germans and the frantic diplomats and Hitler’s troop movements. The first few times, she came over to where he sat, and did things to him until Europe couldn’t compete. But when this kept on, the choir of woe from the radio holding him there each night, it irritated her to have to draw his attention that way—it used to be, he was all volunteer—and she took to stepping past him, turning the radio down low, and with her fingers making a mocking walkie-walkie exit up his sleeve and over his back and away, she drifted to bed alone.
He knew he could not get by with being automatic toward Proxy. Not for long. Part of him knew too that hypnotic flames such as Munich were the oldest hopelessness, man fated to be more savage than any creature the world had seen yet. It would have settled everything, the corner of dour logic in Darius Duff said, if the first human looking into a fire had gone blind from it. Cats or ravens could have evolved into the arbiters of life. But no, the human species had learned to peek, and then to eye each other across the dancing blaze and argue the distribution of firepits. Politics, the answering corners of Darius said, were a necessary madness. If the argument with our own natures did not go on, why exist? And so, all apologies to Proxy and her wares, but these nights he was away to that other desire.
• • •
“Rough luck about Bruce and Kate and the lad.”
“Yeah,” Owen ground out around the sandwich he was wolfing into, “you bet.” Darius was right on that score at least. Bruce seemed to take it as a matter of course when Owen came through with not only a transfusion of money but the idea of his and Charlene’s old trailer house, now sitting surplus in Park Grove, which was taking some real finagling with the Corps. Not the easiest item to fit through channels, a kid brother with pernicious anemia of the wallet. Acting as if his household burned down every day, Bruce merely had said “Getting us a ringside seat for your dredging, huh, Ownie?” And it was true, the Gallatin held sway in that vicinity, slurping away at a neighborhood of abandoned shanties, and its giant pipeline and all three from the other dredges snaked right through town—life in Park Grove, down from the dam, had the reputation of being like living under a sink. Owen felt sorry for Kate, reduced to those circumstances, but for Bruce, not noticeably.
“Is that to be the story of what you in this country call ‘the American century,’ do you think?” Darius was suddenly at. These noon jousts of theirs often took sharp turns, and this one caught Owen mired in a mouthful of sandwich. Chewing fast to catch up, he stared inquisitively at Darius.
“Bruce and company hiphopping from handout to handout, makework to make-work,” Darius inclined his head to the half-dredged sprawl of Park Grove below the dam. “While Owen and company”—here he mimicked doffing his cap to the dam and the Corps townsite beyond—“are the masters with the blueprints.”
Owen swallowed furiously. “You’ve been here since I forget when and you still don’t savvy thing one about Fort Peck.”
“I ‘savvy,’ as you say, that it has paid off handsomely for you. A good house for you and the lovely Charlene, a fancy wage, doubtless your pick of a next job as Roosevelt doles out these projects. While the rest of—”
“Is that what you think I’m at, here? Jesus aching Christ, Darius. You make me tired. I’m at this job to do it up royally, build this dam the best way I know how. That’s the point, to any of this.”
“Ah, but is it. Isn’t it more the point to keep society lulled with a bit of work, a bit of wage, while there’s no real solving of anything?”
“Lull—? Where’s anybody who’s lulled, around here? These guys are going to go around saying until their dying breath, ‘I worked on Fort Peck.’ ”
“But you’ll always sing the lead, won’t you.”
“What the hell is it you think, that a mob of people can just fling themselves at something and it’ll be built? You can’t get away with that. They couldn’t even at Dnieperstroy. The Sovietskis had Cooper and Company in there as engineers, somebody’s got to be answerable when you’re build—”
“ ‘Knowhow, the American language,’ I’m sure.”
“In any language! Even in Red!” Owen was up and standing over him. Now he shouted over the top of Darius’s head. “Max!” Sangster, middistance figure overseeing an extension of the dredgeline strutwork, turned and waved. “Cover until I get back, okay?” Owen called to him through cupped hands. “And ring up Jepperson, would you, and tell him I’m detaching this one”—he jerked a quick thumb at Darius—“for a little while.” Then he spun around to his uncle, frowning intently at him and then down the abutment slope to the motor pool vehicles. “Get in the pickup.”
Darius cocked his head warily. “What would be the reason for that?”
“There’s something I want to show you at the spillway.”
“Hold on, Owen—I’ve had the ha’penny tour of the spillway once already, you know.”
“Get in the goddamn pickup before I stuff you in it!”
Darius closeted his anger in the face of Owen’s worse case of it, and climbed in the government pickup. Owen veered over to the nearest ransack shack where tools and supplies were kept, grabbed a sizable empty box and flung it in the back of the pickup. Then, mystifying Darius, he drove without a word across the dam, the opposite direction from the spillway, and up into the Fort Peck townsite. At the bowling alley, he jammed to a halt. Darius could not resist asking:
“Are we going to settle this with a duel of skittles?”
Still wordless, Owen slammed out of the pickup and into the bowling alley and soon came back with the box full, heaving it with a grunt into the back of the pickup. He glowered at Darius for a moment through the back window of the cab, then jumped in again and drove across the dam, this time unmistakably into the maze of humpy little hills that would bring them out beside the spillway, and its rail spur.
Darius appraised Owen, stonily driving, and felt a sense of arguer’s stimulation along with his apprehension. He had missed Jaarala something fierce; someone who grasped by habit, almost by bloodright, the need to chew at the heels of the powers that be. He even pined a bit for Mott, bent trumpet though he had turned out to be.
Darius tensed as the pickup barreled down a hill to where acetylene flickers threw light and shadow over an iron valley of wreckage, the cutting torches at work on railcars crumpled and tangled like a kicked set of toys.
Sabot, Owen. A wooden shoe—French, as it happens. The word is from that, sabotage is. But I suppose you know so, educated fool that you are.
The first time, the wrench into the gearteeth, was mad fury; Darius himself would not have called it anything other. Tactics, however, were fury pounded cold and snippered into actions, were they not.
The movement, you see, Owen. You think you know by book what it is about, what I am about. And you can’t, poor learned mealmate. “In the mind of every man, hidden under the ashes, a quickening fire”—biblical to me as your blueprints are to you. Tactic by tactic, “compatible with the minimum of brutality”: my gospel, old Sorel’s as far as he went, you would pry at instantly, ask “Who gets to set the minimum?” I could tell you—but must never—that it sometimes sets itself; that a George Crawfurd and I blunder it back and forth between us until, bad surprise, one of us exists no more. But here within our family enterprise, as you regard Fort Peck, metal is the minimum.
The machine-breakers. Did you ever read up on them, in your earnest engineering courses? Not a man at this dam, except perhaps you, would know the name “Ned Ludd” if it floated in his breakfast bowl. But what a bogeyman old Ned was, set loose by laborers when they burned hayricks and clothiers’ mills, broke up knitting looms and wrecked the winding gears at mine pits. You’re a man of numbers, you’ll appreciate this: before the Luddites were done making their point by riot, London had to put them down with an army the size of those it was sending against Napoleon. But even that didn’t put paid to the tactic itself. Were Jaarala here, he could tell you of the IWW’s knack of slowing a sawmill with but one spike driven into a log.
And here we’re all at making this one great machine of yours, this dam, are we not. And why? To take everyone’s mind off any cause except perfecting the gadget, a thing that turns running water into standing water. Cleverest sink plug in the world, this Fort Peck machine.
So what I have done to machinery in a few nights of slipping sabots into the works, Owen, dear, is to make the kings of things know. Your Corps. Your construction companies. Your dolemaster Roosevelt. For that matter, you, who have no quarrel with the order of things so long as it meets schedules and sets records. But those who put their hands to the work ought to own that work, Owen. That’s flat basic. That’s the meaning of the movement, poor battered bastard piece of history that it is. Of myself, we may as well say. As long as there is one spoor of the movement—I somehow seem to have become that minimum, here—the rest of you are made to know that the order of things can be turned upside down.
Mind awhirl, Darius cut glances from the smashed gravel cars just ahead to the unreadable profile of Owen. As they pulled even with the railroad spur, Owen swept a tallying look along the wreck and the repair work.
And drove on by.
Before Darius quite caught his breath, they were alongside the huge concrete trench of the spillway, Owen jouncing them down through the hills next to the gape of it, Darius having to keep watch back and forth between his possessed nephew and the mile-long fan of spillway floor below his side of the pickup.
The pickup roared to the service ramp which angled down onto the spillway. The watchman there, appalled to have this traffic, waved them on in a hurry when Owen flashed his particular job button.
Now, by God, Darius. Push the political wool away from your eyes for once. Now you’re about to see some solving.
Owen drove up the spillway, no longer the dirt canyon where Proxy gave Darius lessons in how to herd the truck but a vast inclined floor of concrete sections as neat and new as fresh linoleum. Halfway along, Owen abruptly pulled to a halt.
“Sit,” he said to Darius as he would to a dog.
He himself bailed out of the pickup cab, hefted the box from the back, and over at the center seam of the concrete sections, a groove perhaps half the size of a rain gutter, he yanked bowling pins out by the neck and meticulously set them up, all ten at last standing at attention in their triangle formation. Darius watched silently.
Back into the pickup, Owen drove a ways while watching the rearview mirror. When he stopped this time, Darius knew to get out with him.
The pins were specks in the distance, against the fresh gray of the concrete. Owen hefted the bowling ball out of the box. Going over to the seam in the concrete, he put the bowling ball down onto the shallow groove and gave just enough of a push to start the black ball rolling. The two men listened to the slight rumble as the ball rolled and rolled, holding to the hairline mark of channel in the middle of the concrete expanse, until it looked the size of a BB demolishing the formation of the pins.
“That’s engineering,” said Owen, after the distant clatter. “ ‘Know-how,’ if that’s the best you can stand to call it.” He swept his hand around to indicate the concrete canyon they were in. “This was all hills and coulees, shalebanks until Hell wouldn’t have it—you couldn’t have flown pigeons through here without them getting dizzy. Now take a look. Go ahead. Look!”
Darius with obvious reluctance moved his eyes from Owen to the immense straight gout of the spillway, half a mile of concrete ahead of them to where it met the river below the dam and even more of it behind them where the colossal spillgates stood.
“A mile of concrete in here,” Owen resumed intensely, “laid two feet thick, down a five percent grade, and all of it so goddamn exact and smooth that ball rolled along it without ever bouncing, didn’t it. Blueprints and specs and hard-ass engineers and crews who want to go about it right, this is the kind of thing we can give the world. It’s what the dam is going to be, something that works like it’s supposed to. We know how on this, you bet we do. Those pie in the sky politics of yours, though, they can’t ever take the world in hand this same way. You can work on how to run people until you turn blue, be my guest, but I’m going to keep doing what I can see a real result on. Dams, jobs. The actual factual, Darius.”
“If I ever see the light, I’m sure it’ll be because you brained me with it,” Darius said with surprising surrender. “Does this conclude the sermon for today?”
Owen actually had been set to argue on and on, until he had Darius’s cuckoo politics backed into the corner where they belonged. He was somehow disappointed to see this expression on Darius, which looked oddly like a smile of relief.
• • •
“You know my inclination about the stoppage rate,” the colonel said. “Zero would be a nice number to have.”
Both supposed to be at ease in front of his desk, Major Santee and Captain Brascoe conspicuously waited for each other to respond first.
