Bucking the Sun, page 8
“Look, junior, the last jackleg sonofabitch of a carpenter left me in the lurch here. I need the real item. Every minute this place isn’t making me money it’s costing me money. Fort Peck’s got carpenters up the gigi, and they’re all out there”—he waved toward the dam site—“on Franklin D.’s payroll, God bless him.”
By now Bruce had his head in the structure beside Neil’s. Off behind the stack of floorboards stood a pile of cardboard boxes that advertised Mighty Mac bib overalls and Peerless worksocks and so on. “Opening a line of dry goods, huh?”
“Wet,” came the sarcastic correction. “Buddyboy, you’re looking at the Blue Eagle Tavern. Or would be, if it had a sonofabitching floor in it.”
“We can lay your floor for you,” Neil asserted. “Give us a crack at it, Mr.—?”
“Harry. Tom Harry.” The man in the suit looked at the pair of them as skeptically as if checking the sex on new puppies. “This’d need to be done on a strict contract basis. Meet the deadline, or no pay—I can’t be forking out to jacklegs who don’t come through on the job. You two ever worked that way before?”
“All our lives,” Bruce tried to testify, Neil cutting him off with:
“Say we do contract it, what’d be the pay?”
Tom Harry named his price.
“You’re on!” Neil and Bruce told him in chorus.
It was Neil who cast a second look at the stack of floorboards and thought to ask:
“How long have we got to do this flooring?”
“Tonight,” said Tom Harry.
• • •
Neil and Bruce hammered while Hugh hefted lengths of floorboards and Tom Harry sat and smoked cigarettes.
The hammer sounds racketed into the Wheeler night. Wham wham wham, Neil’s was a steady three-beat delivery onto each nailhead; Bruce’s tended to surround the matter, WHAM wham-am WHAM-am. While the hammers hit those higher notes, a pile driver gave bass whumps beside the river. The bluffs of the Missouri here had heard din before—the bawling rumble of buffalo herds, the last-stand discourse of Sitting Bull’s winter camp before the summer of the Little Big Horn, the axes of steamboat woodhawks—but there had been half a century of comparative silence since any of those. Now and for years to come, a river of sound waited to drown down onto the site of Fort Peck—the opera shrieks of shale saws, the incessant comings and goings of locomotives and bulldozers and trucks, the falsetto of steam whistles, the attacks of jackhammers. Tonight the Duffs began their accompaniment of that full clamor of work. Tonight the true first pinions of the Fort Peck project were being driven: the pilings of the railroad trestle, the nails of the Blue Eagle’s floor.
To the great surprise of the Duffs, the flooring proved to be hardwood, high-grade. Nice seasoned tightgrained tongue-and-groove oak; lovely, really, if you weren’t trying to drive nails into it or lugging twelve-foot boards of it all night long. Hugh, at the lumber pile, had a bit of perspective that Bruce and Neil, kneeling in arm-earnest exertion on the fresh flooring, lacked. “You could dance on this stuff.”
Tom Harry blew a cumulus of blue smoke and said, “What the hell did you think the point of this is? Civic beautification?”
“Taxi dancing,” Hugh identified, as if he knew the boulevards of the world. “Hate to be the one to tell you, but the Wheeler Inn has beat you to it. Half the women west of Chicago are already working that dive.”
“Check out the arithmetic,” Tom Harry said, unperturbed. “Soon as this dam project really gets geared up, there’ll be three shifts a day—one gang working, one sleeping, and that will still leave about thirty-five hundred men off shift, any hour of the day or night. Not going to be any shortage of guys hanging around hot to trot, don’t worry.”
• • •
Neil tried to take the floor-laying task in little seasons. He would fit his end of a board into place, immediately drive the nails to snug it, catch his breath while Bruce whaled away at the far end, then start down the length of the wood, nailing it at every joist while Bruce similarly worked toward the middle.
Before tonight, Neil was exulting to himself, he wouldn’t have said his prospect of becoming a contractor at Fort Peck was anything to write home about. He still wondered whether a handshake with Tom Harry constituted the full basis of a contract. But only as long ago as this morning, he hadn’t known enough about it to even wonder, had he. One major fact stood out clearly to him: this flooring deal wasn’t any so-much-per-hour as decided by somebody else, it was going to be a lump-sum payoff for Duffs working like Duffs. And wasn’t that something?
Either his hammer or Bruce’s consistently drowned out parts of the conversation between Hugh and Tom Harry, so that they seemed to be carrying on a grave discussion in addled shorthand:
“You really—blam—there’ll be—bang—thousand people in this—whamblam—excuse for a town?”
“Twice that. Simple arithmetic—blam—thousand making a living from the dam and—bang—thousand making a—whammedy-blam—living off them.”
“Where’s—bang—good in that?”
“I didn’t say a—blam—thing about good, I’m just—whang—you it’s going to happen.”
• • •
By midnight, Bruce was convinced that his future was going to die out in nailheads. He had a vision of himself: his right arm drooping down eighteen inches longer than his left, the entire right side of his body from his cramped foot to his raw knee to his aching shoulder swollen up irreparably from all this hammering. He would come out of this night looking like half a gorilla, he was convinced.
He nearly keeled onto his face in relief when Tom Harry announced he always ate a bite at this time of night and if the Duffs were interested, he supposed they could chow down with him.
The saloon owner resorted to his stack of cardboard boxes, pulling one out with a grunt, then began handing around to Hugh and Neil and Bruce tin cans that had no labels.
One of them asked, “What’ve we got here?”
“How would I know?” Tom Harry answered. “The labels came off at some forest fire camp, that’s how I was able to buy the stuff cheap.”
The men ate, plums preceding beans. Then the three Duffs were back at the flooring.
• • •
It was Bruce, head down, who hammered his way to the footings at the back of the building and, still on his knees, reared back with a grateful sigh to rest. He immediately found that he was looking not at the footings of the back wall, but the supports of a platform of considerable size.
“Bandstand,” Tom Harry identified it for him.
Even in his stupefied state, Bruce gave it a try:
“Now, the floor of a bandstand wasn’t brought up in our deal.”
“Floor is floor,” stated Tom Harry.
• • •
Around 3:00 a.m., Tom Harry said: “There’s an outside chance you knotheads might get this done.” The tavern impresario stepped over to his cardboard boxes again. Out of the top one he lifted a mounted deer head, lugged it over to the wall along the floored section, stood on a sawhorse and hung the piece of taxidermy as high as he could reach. Back to his next box, which produced the snarling head of a grizzly bear.
Tom Harry cradled the tremendous head, he and it glowering back at the bleary stares of the Duffs.
“Deecor,” he explained, and went off to affix the baleful grizzly above the front door.
An entire safari of stuffed heads gradually aligned the four walls of the Blue Eagle saloon, until Tom Harry came at last to a flat box. Reverently he plucked out the wadded-up newspapers protecting the picture frame, and, just above where his cash register would be, hung the campaign portrait and its bold print:
A GALLANT LEADER—
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
By dawn, Hugh and Neil looked done in and Bruce could barely creep, but you could have skated figure eights across the fresh floor of the Blue Eagle Tavern.
With a practiced thumb, Tom Harry riffled out the green bills of the contract price and held the money out to Neil.
“Tell you what,” the saloonkeeper gruffly invited the numb trio, “come back in half an hour when I get the bar set up and a bottle opened, and I’ll let you buy the first round of drinks ever served in the Blue Eagle.”
• • •
“You can jitney down with me,” Owen had said, reasonable as pie, “and come back on your own after you help get Mother’s place kicked into shape.” Here then they and the Monday morning of it were. Outside the Downtowner Cafe in Glasgow, Charlene and Owen and two dozen damworkers trooped into the first jitney bus of the day. The workers were quiet, in honor of a wife, and she could feel the generalized envy, which made her even a little more proud of Owen and herself than usual.
When the jitney drove down over the Fort Peck bluff, miles of muck and machinery sprawled across the bottomland—twice as much of everything, it seemed, since Charlene had last seen the dam site. Other jitney buses and crew trucks were disgorging workmen by the hundreds, a human chaos pouring out on top of the mechanical one. Owen again pointed out to her the preparations at the Fort Peck townsite, but she couldn’t tell if there had been any real progress yet. The one sure measurement she knew how to make here was that she could see more of the river each time, the channel edge sharper as new sections of the riverbank were denuded of timber. The bus made a stop in the inexact middle of Wheeler, and Owen and she stepped off. If the Fort Peck dam site was becoming a jungle of mud and grotesque equipment, the so-called town of Wheeler was running amok like an overgrown Hooverville. Everything looked like a back alley. And from all the bottomland clearance effort, everyone had woodpiles the size of haystacks. (Cottonwood was about the worst firewood there was, but free wood was free wood.) It crossed her mind that a lot of Wheeler’s so-called houses would be better burned in the stove and the firewood stacked up for shelter. But she kept that to herself as she and Owen picked their way to his parents’ shanty.
“Here you go, Mother,” Owen announced. “Brought you the other love of my life.” Then Owen Duff strode off to engineer his dam, and Meg Milne Duff and Charlene Tebbet Duff were left to fend with each other and the long day ahead.
“Charlene.” Meg had a way of saying the name as if it was a sentence unto itself. She keenly asked, pretty sure she knew: “How are you liking Glasgow?”
Charlene restrained herself to saying Glasgow was quite a place, different, going night and day.
“Funny that they put that name to it, I still think,” Meg seemed to muse to herself, the Scottish burr very much in her throaty voice. Charlene was apprehensive that this was going to lead into some kind of Old Country story—old countries were part of the territory Charlene was determined to climb away from in life—and so she rapidly changed the topic to the surefire:
“How’s everyone doing?”
Meg brightened right up at that, and although Charlene mainly still thought of Neil as a skim-milker and Bruce as a wild jackass and Hugh as she wasn’t quite sure what, she found herself a little intrigued by Meg’s blends of tart pride in each of the Duffs of the dam.
• • •
The first dredge, the Gallatin, was aswarm with timberers and caulkers and shipwrights at other tasks Bruce realized he was going to have to figure out in a hurry, as he reported aboard. He knew this was a break, being shifted up onto the dredge-outfitting crew, and he couldn’t help looking pleased with himself as the boatyard foreman, Medwick, had him sign onto the roster.
Bruce cocked his head and asked, “Say, are you any relation to—”
“No,” the stocky foreman said by rote, heartily sick of having to tell the world he was no kin to Ducky Medwick, the St. Louis Cardinals outfielder. He wished Ducky Medwick had gone into the priesthood.
He took a look at Bruce and wished, too, that he had been sent somebody besides yet another drylander to help build this dredge. But Cecil Medwick said only, “Draw your tools at the ransack shack and we’ll see what we can do with you.”
• • •
Now that he had been picked for the trestle crew, Neil had risen spectacularly. He had become brace monkey.
It fatigued any normal human being to watch him. Using telephone poleman’s climbing spikes, he would scale a trestle piling, dragging up with him the pneumatic drill and the length of air hose that powered it. In place up there, twice as high as a house, he had to bring the hefty drill and its twenty-inch-long bit above his head, position the apparatus so that it would bore through the piling at the desired angle, and hold it there while the air pressure fed the drill into the wood. Whenever they could, Bruce and Hugh and Meg and Owen sneaked glances at Neil up there, the ribbons of drilled wood festooning down from him, the drill held overhead as if he were making a matador’s stiff-armed plunge into the bull. The other Duffs knew this was out-of-this-world work, but they didn’t know the half of it either, the tricks of the trade he was picking up. In the climbing, he had needed to unlearn the natural tendency to shinny and instead climb with one side of his body at a time, right leg and arm up and clamped into place, then left leg and arm up in the same clamp-step, then both right limbs again, on and on. That was the first trick, and the next, once he was up there thirty feet, was to lean back into thin air, absolutely trusting the climber’s harness around his waist while he put all his strength to the pneumatic drill.
“Takes a little getting used to,” was all Neil said of this.
• • •
Hugh, though. Hugh was having none of the spurious notion that there was such a thing as advancement, in make-work such as this. He would do as he was doing. Go each day in a bone-rattling crew truck a little farther into the bottomland. Hop down and head with his axe into the reachable enemy, the Missouri’s army of brush. Work himself numb.
• • •
Under her report on the men’s jobs, Meg was wondering about Charlene. How much time she spent on keeping her hair so perfect, and the extent to which she was kicking herself for having tossed her job in Bozeman over her shoulder, and why she and Owen were waiting so long to have children. I wonder why I even bother to wonder, though. Meg was not alone among the Duffs in thinking the answers were on the surface of Charlene; everything about her seemed a bit self-elevated. But, Meg had to remind herself again, if Owen—
Owen’s mother seemed to have a mood a minute, as far as Charlene could see. Meanwhile, Charlene was fairly itching to do something about the housekeeping in this shack, which somehow seemed gauntly unlived-in and wildly cluttered at the same time. Wouldn’t you just know, the only thing in here that looks like anything is Owen’s blueprints. “Well, better put me to work,” she more than volunteered.
They spent considerable time deploying boxes and shuffling furniture around before either of them realized they were putting together two opposite households. Charlene would clear a boxful (“These are all knickknacks—it’s a shame you don’t have space for them here”) out of sight under the bed only to have Meg shortly resurrect it (“I need these where I can get at them”). They sparred through half the morning with packings and unpackings.
“Let’s say,” Meg at last said carefully, “this will do, for now.”
“If you think so,” Charlene replied with determined neutrality.
She couldn’t manage, though, to stop glancing around the two rooms of shambles, still not sure what she was seeing here in the house of Meg. A craving for disorder? Some loco brand of order that was all Meg’s own? Whichever, Charlene could have done without it in a mother-in-law.
Out came cups and coffee, a ritual either woman could have performed under ether. But instead of plain cookies, Meg produced a plateful of golden ring-shaped ones with a delicate dusting of sugar crystals. Charlene disliked sugary dustings, but went through the obligation of picking up one of the things. It was so light it almost flew up out of her hand. She took a bite. The most delicious item she had ever tasted.
“Mmm. What do you call these?”
“I call them booty from the cookhouse,” Meg said with a wry expression, “but Mr. Jaarala calls them ballenacrunchers.” Jaarala took considerable explaining, as did his cooking wizardry, both women glad to have something definite to fill the air with.
But when that topic ran dry, they simultaneously knew that Charlene herself was going to be their next.
Meg did manage to put most of a smile on it as she asked:
“What do you find to do with yourself?”
Good question. See the sights of Glasgow, by walking to the post office and back. Correspond with her salesgirl chums at Cunningham’s, but that had been dropping off lately, at the Bozeman end. Cook three meals a day on the trailer house’s tiny sheepherder stove, at least there was some challenge to that. Read. Sit. Breathe. Yawn.
“Crosswords, a lot,” Charlene found to reply.
“Those puzzle thingies?” Meg could not help looking surprised, if not shocked.
“Mmhmm. You can learn a lot. New words. It kind of turns a person into a dictionary.” Owen was already one, or something beyond. “Ownie, I’ve looked up everything on water there is—what can they possibly mean, ‘shortest name for a river,’ two letters?” He thought for two seconds and said, “Po.” And naturally, it fit.
“Well,” said Meg, letting it stand as a full sentence. Then resorted to: “When they build that Fort Peck town and you’re right here—”
“—it should be better then, yes,” Charlene filled in before she could. It was bound to be better, in an actual house in a real neighborhood with all the other wives of engineers and Corps officers, close at hand to Owen’s work. These days, this Glasgow captivity, the problem with watching Owen engineer the Fort Peck Dam was that she never saw Owen. Her Owen. The one who kept being a surprise, always putting some fresh tickle into life for her. Here and now in this session with Meg, though, she kept to “Everybody is pretty much on the run until then,” loyally saving him out of it.
To her great surprise, Meg said it for her. “He can be devilishly solitary, our Owen.”
Charlene nibbled at another ballenacruncher, thinking hard. Was Owen’s own mother taking her side? If so, how far? Lord, the ins and outs of these Duffs.
