Bucking the Sun, page 49
Rescued, and with somebody’s practically new mackinaw jacket draped over him, and deposited to the hospital where the ambulatory ones such as him had to wait while the worse injured were rushed into care, he found a corner to limply sit in and ache, watching the parade of casualties pour in. Muddied and bloodied, the thirty or so men who had undergone the slide and lived weren’t much recognizable, but toward the last Birdie saw Neil, bunged up but obviously going to make it, brought in by Owen and some of the rescue workers, and was glad of that.
Right in the middle of the hospital hubbub a flustered timekeeper pressed into service by the Ad Building was running around with a clipboard, taking down names of survivors.
Birdie, one of the world’s talents at overhearing, caught the timekeeper’s voice when that pintsize sheriff popped in to check with him: “We’re up to three known dead and five still missing.”
When the sheriff whirled back out, the timekeeper scanned the hospital uproar for any fresh arrivals and lit up when he finally spotted Birdie. He hustled over, pencil and clipboard ready, to take Birdie’s name.
Birdie looked him in the eye and said as if badly put upon:
“Duff. But don’t you already got me down there, from when I come in the door?”
“Aw, yeah, hell, I’m sorry,” the embarrassed timekeeper said, his finger finding Duff, N. on his hasty list. “You guys look all alike with the mud on you.”
That was all it took. By nightfall the name of Birdie Hinch was everlastingly among Fort Peck’s missing, and the man he had been was hopping a boxcar on a Great Northern train bound for the Pacific Coast and a next life.
• • •
They crammed into Neil’s hospital room the minute the doctor would let them.
Except for the way his face drew down a little on one side in the direction of the sharp complaints from his ribs, he looked like a Neil who had been severely scrubbed, bleached and wrung dry and was happy that was over. Sitting beside his bed Rosellen, eyes wide, kept watching him as if he might go out of sight against the hospital sheets in the manner a winter-pale rabbit does against snow.
“Neil,” Meg began, “that was a ride we do not want you to repeat.”
“Came pretty close to the line that time, didn’t you, brother,” Bruce began, in what sounded oddly like envy.
A majority of the Duffs chimed in that way, Neil able to grin and kid them back between winces. But everyone uncomfortably knew that the worst casualty in the room was Owen, who looked as though he’d been hammered directly on the heart. Charlene stayed always next to him, not saying much.
Proxy, to contribute, said Owen ought to take up fortune-telling, if he was able to pick out where Neil ended up in all that crap of the slide.
“All I could see of him were eyes and teeth,” Owen managed to vouch.
One saves the other, and by doing, something of himself, Meg was pursed with thinking, rue and relief and an oddly sad love mixing in her as she watched her sons. The ladders of this family run up and down, both, don’t they ever, Owen.
“You’d grin too when you saw it wasn’t some geezer with a halo and wings coming for you,” Neil spoke up from the bed. Then, as if he had been giving this some thought, he said: “Unk, you must’ve known a shortcut off the dam.”
Hugh stirred, and sensed a warning look from Proxy as he did. He too had been curious, at Darius’s spotless deliverance while the rest of the bullgang and poor devil Birdie were handed a flood of mud. In no position himself to bring up precise whereabouts at the time of the slide, Hugh awaited with terrible interest Darius’s answer on this.
More fool you, Neil, to be scrabbling around at that trap rather than tending to the goings-on around you, as I was. Aloud, though, Darius had ready: “Nature called at the right time and in the right way, in my fortunate case, Neil. I was on my way to visit the littlest of houses, when the dam began to shimmy.”
Small Jackie, tongue-tied for once in this confusing hospital visit, was awed at Grand Unk ’Rius telling everybody about going to the little house.
Darius shook his head to show them all his wonder at his own escape.
“I gave a shout,” he declared, looking to the hospital bed as though Neil had been truant.
In the starchy sheets, Neil tried to remember. The shudder of the dredgeline, the tremor he had thought was a big piece of equipment ramming the pipe, was the first thing that would come back. Then the ground under him giving way, and his instinctive scramble atop the dredgeline. Life as he now possessed it began with those.
Owen stared across him to Darius. He couldn’t recall any shout from Darius either, only the wordless sprinting figure who had flown past him on the dam crest. “I didn’t hear that,” Owen said, “but you did whistle by me getting off the dam.”
Darius locked eyes with him. “Now, Owen, I’ll deny to my last breath that I was running. But I will say, I overtook a good many who were.”
The assembled Duffs at last laughed, all but Owen and Hugh.
Stained with disaster but still standing, Fort Peck Dam met each morning now in the company of hollow-eyed engineers and Corps officers and construction bosses. They took turns staying up nights in the Ad Building, emerging with a fresh day’s schedule for the work of repair, and then machines and crews would go warily into the half-mile gouge of the slide area.
“It went fast,” Darius mused. “You wouldn’t think soil could outrun a man. Eight men.”
He and Proxy had formed the habit of watching out the houseboat window at this work, before time for their own. By now, pretty sure she had seen what there was to see, Proxy had gone back to favorite morning pursuits, such as propping up on the bed and studying her picture in the old copy of LIFE. Darius had sometimes warned her, humorously, that she would wear that page out with looking. But right now he was all intent himself as he watched a railroad speeder go across the dam to the slide area and stop, the section crew climb off. “Very damn nearly nine, counting our Neil,” Darius said as if in afterthought.
Proxy still did not say anything.
He kept watching the railroad repair crew as he asked: “Where exactly again were you when the news came, love?”
“The usual.” The sound of her turning the pages. “Yakking with Tom Harry. He was telling me again all about how he plans to pull up stakes and go off where he can see a mountain any time he feels like it, and I was saying to him gopher holes are more his style. Same old routine.”
“Liar, liar,” Darius crooned in schoolyard singsong, then dropped his voice harshly: “cunt on fire.”
Proxy sat up rigidly on the bed and stared at his back.
“Woman, you think I don’t hear? You ought to be married to yourself—you’d soon find out. Every loose mouth at Fort Peck lets me know who you’ve been with. Oh, casually, of course. Merely making a bit of joke. ‘Saw that goodlooking wife of yours dancing the pockets off of old Smitty, wish I had a means of support like that,’ ” he mimicked. He kept on looking out the window. “When the slide went, you were monkeying around with Hugh.”
Proxy hurled the magazine at his back. “Whatever the hell happened to ‘we don’t need to oversee each other just because we’re married’?”
Darius reached down, swung around and slammed the magazine back at her, pages wildly flapping. “I didn’t count on caring so much about you!”
“Huh uh, Darius,” Proxy told him tensely but levelly. “What you didn’t count on is caring about any frigging thing but those politics of yours.”
“And you?” he said in worse than a whisper. “You know all the ins and outs of caring about, do you, Proxy?”
• • •
He walked out onto the silent spillway, alone this time.
Why didn’t I savvy . . .
In the back of his mind he was aware of the watchman’s uneasiness, off behind him on the approach to the highway bridge over the spillway, where he had parked the government pickup. But Owen Duff made a lot of people uneasy, since the slide.
Neil, in that mess . . . it would have to be . . . job I put him on . . . why’d I ever . . .
This time Owen was atop the spillway’s imperial gate piers pictured by the LIFE camera, the highway bridge going across them like the lofty trough of an aqueduct. Beneath the slowly walking man and the midair highway were the sixteen great gates of the spillway, waiting to regulate overflow from the lake into the spillway channel. If the dam, his dam, would ever hold together long enough to produce an overflow.
When he reached the middle of the structure, Owen stepped up out of the road onto the walkway and halted there, hands resting on the waist-high balustrade while he stared down at the vast concrete trench below as if it mirrored everything.
The sonofabitching Bearpaw shale. Here they had known to rocksaw the exposed shale and haul it out, or to face it over with waterproof bituminous compound; known they did not dare let any scour of moisture in to crumble that shale to mud under the heavy concrete channel. But no, Duff, you couldn’t carry that idea for only three miles over those hills and . . .
Why hadn’t he demanded rockcutting the entire face of that bluff, or bitumen sealing of everything in sight, or a mammoth retaining wall, something, anything, back there at the east abutment where that bank of shale kept tormenting his core pool. Having the bluff, one whole wall of the valley, as the anchor bank of the core pool was supposed to have been an advantage; sure, bits of it might crumble, but as soon as the impervious fill built up onto it and the core pool water was drained away, there the sealed east end of the dam was supposed to be, natural and perpetual. Except that shale sidehill had its own ideas about how it was going to behave around water, didn’t it, Duff. The lost face of the dam’s east section—now he knew, too late he knew—had slid on a wettened under-bank of that shale like a hog on ice. Huh uh, slicker and quicker than that, even. Owen could envision instantly the railroad tracks, like pieces of a model-train setup neatly pulled apart, out there on the several slide-islands. Couldn’t have asked for smoother sledding. The geologists— Christ, toboggan experts would’ve been better—the geologists back there at the core sampling and porosity tests had missed the deep-seep process, that saturation could keep spreading down through the abutment shale like water through a monstrous sponge. The Kansas City blueprinters of the dam had missed it. And he himself had missed it, in worrying about what the shale was doing to his core pool instead of what his core pool was doing to the Bearpaw shale.
The board of inquiry wasn’t going to miss it.
Owen leaned into the balustrade, elbows on it now, still seeming to contemplate the mile-long concrete floor down there. Corps scuttlebutt had it that Quigley, the Harvard brain on the investigating board, was saying the dam was not worth finishing. Its other eight engineering whizzes, though, were not likely to conclude that a slide of 3 percent of its total earthfill was anywhere near fatal to Fort Peck Dam. No, they were going to want the slide fixed, weren’t they, and by whatever prescription needed to make certain it did not happen again.
Engineering truly was a clever whore, Owen Duff at this moment would have told you in something like wonder and nausea: no sooner did it allure a person into committing a phenomenal disaster than it came flirting back with the exact cure. He had seen the fix to be made there in the dusk of slide day, after he had Neil to the hospital and found his dazed way back to the edge of the gouge in the dam. Piledrive a secondary cutoff wall, cover it with a fifty-foot core of impervious fill, then replace the dredged material in a gentler slope; with that kind of barrier and a dry and compacted mass over it, the shale would have no way to pull the rug out from under four million yards of earthfill again. That was all that was necessary on fixing the slide.
On himself, Owen was not at all sure what was needed. Over the side here, off this bridge onto that expanse of concrete, would do it quick enough. Be like dropping an egg off a cliff. He knew to the specified inch the height of this spillway gate structure; plus a three-foot balustrade to climb up onto and drop from. The equivalent of a six-story building, down to death. Not a record, but far enough.
Or stay. Stay in life. Face down the board of inquiry—I followed every spec, on the core pool, the fill, everything; the core of the dam never budged, did it; the dam didn’t go out, did it—and make the case for fixing the slide area as he knew how. Fixing it might take a year, time enough to get himself back to normal. Whatever the hell normal was, anymore.
Like a man dizzy, Owen backed away from the balustrade.
• • •
Kate was doing battle with the ready-counter of the Rondola, asking whether her orders of ham and eggs were past the oink and cluck stage yet, when in Mr. Important walked and marched right past the counterful of customers. He turned her around to him, lifted her off the floor in a full-length bear hug, and carted her like that through the swinging door into the kitchen.
Dola and Ron and the dishwasher swiveled to the arrival of the enwrapped pair, then looked studiously elsewhere.
It was only inches worth, but Kate stared worlds into Bruce’s face until he set her down.
“All the fixing up after the slide?—they’ve decided they have to bring in a dozen divers for it,” he told her, grinning a mile. “The inside skinny is that we’ll be diving here all next year, maybe more. And guess who’s being made the lead guy.”
Kate’s dazed expression failing to change, he spelled it out for her.
“I’ve got all the seniority, hon. Crew chief—that’ll be me, just got told. At twice the money.”
Finally out of things to reel off to her, Bruce was the one who looked dazed. “Katy, we’ve got it made, again.”
Part Eight
THE SHERIFF
1991
With grunts of pain that he could barely prevent from being yelps Carl Kinnick rolled the wheelchair to his bed, reached over and yanked down hard on the emergency call cord.
The nurse was there in under a minute. She whipped into the room, white britches swishing, then stopped short at the sight of him, scrunched in his wheelchair same as ever.
“Going on the dam trip,” he notified her.
“Like fuck huh uh, you are.” In her surprise she forgot to professionally cushion the words with his name. “Can’t, can you? The way your hip hurts you?”
“Don’t care.” He kept squinting at her as neutrally as he could, needing her help on this.
All she would have to do to dispose of this situation was to ask him the four little words, “Did you sign up?” Shit no, he hadn’t signed up for the outing to the dam, she knew. He hadn’t done anything except sit here and be ornery for as long as she had worked here. Why on my shift? she reflected as she angrily stretched past him to flip the emergency call button back to OFF. Why couldn’t the old poot take it into his head to go to bingo tonight, if he finally wants to get out of his room? She didn’t even really have to think through all the kinds of trouble involved in letting him go to the dam. They would need to take the cabulance van instead of the rec bus because of him in his wheelchair, and Mosteller the driver would shit a brick about that. Doris the recreation director went miles out of her way to avoid Carl Kinnick ever since that birthday party fiasco; she’d be spooked silly to have him show up for her pittypat little visit to Fort Peck this afternoon. Howls would go up from the other residents on the excursion, too, the nurse could just about hear those already: old devil him anyway, has to spoil it for everybody else, coming along and sitting there like death warmed over.
On the other hand, such as it was, the Little Prick had never before shown her he really wanted anything.
“If I let you,” she said in her tone that kidded and didn’t, “promise not to come back?”
• • •
Mosteller, the longhaired driver, had earphones on and wobbled his head from side to side in tune with whatever musical racket it was he was listening to. In the old days the sheriff would have slapped a reckless-driving ticket on him so fast his head would swim.
There weren’t all that many on the dam trip. The bridge-club biddies from the third floor, and Theresa Machias who used to work at the courthouse and was the only one who so much as said hello to him, and old Danvers who was half ga-ga three-quarters of the time, and of course Doris, who kept slipping nervous eyecorner glances at him. He wished the dirtymouthed young nurse was along.
He and the wheelchair were cinched in at the back of the cabulance, the others’ gray heads and Danvers’s empty bald one poking up in front of him from the bench seats. Tail gunner on the hearse, he thought of, and pursed a tiny smile to himself.
This very first part, right out of town, was the only bit of this familiar route he cared anything about. The intense green, a color almost savage (although the sheriff found it restful), of the cottonwoods concentrated along the Milk River, before the road headed over the ridge toward the Missouri. Otherwise this drive down from Glasgow still did not amount to much, by his standards of interest. The traffic deaths of speedball damworkers had all happened before white roadside crosses were put up to mark car-wreck fatalities, so the sheriff couldn’t even pick out the spots where he’d had to gather up the crushed and flung bodies.
What still surprised him, as the cabulance topped the last rise before starting down to the river, was that the town of Wheeler had vanished absolutely. The hasty frame buildings had been easy pickings, torn down for salvage or hauled away to farms and ranches for use as granaries and chicken coops. The sheriff enjoyed the thought of Wheeler ending up as barnyards.
Fort Peck, the town of, still featured the big dark hotel and the Swiss gingerbread theater, and a Corps of Engineers office with a Spanishy red roof in the permanent portion of the old Ad Building. Then it thinned radically, to a couple of neighborhoods of cookie cutter houses fixed up and a luncho-gaso-laundromat. Not nearly as gone as Wheeler, New Deal, Square Deal and all the others, but plenty depleted.
