The Beetle Leg (2 page)

That’s where I should have looked for trouble.

 

a
man lay buried just below the water level of the dam. He was embedded in the earth and entangled with a caterpillar, pump engine and a hundred feet of hose, somewhere inside the mountain that was protected from the lake on one side by rock and gravel and kept from erosion on its southward slope by partially grown rows of yellow grass. This man—he was remembered in Mistletoe, Government City, and would be as long as the Great Slide came to mind with every ale case struck open—was the brother of one who still hung on, having a place in the fields southwest of the official lines of the town. Boundaries were still marked with transit stakes ten years old.

In the sunset the survivor of the two, who had not taken part in the battle of the river and who had been on the range when the Slide occurred, drove his team of four horses across the sand of the southward slope, the machine under his seat spitting out seeds, grinding its unaligned rods. His voice carried all the way to the town on the bluff. He rode the boards holding the dry lines in one hand and a flattened cigarette pinched in the other, one knee cocked up and his
hat pulled low over blackened cheeks and chin. Six days a week he nursed the animals across the sunward, dry side of the dam for twenty-five dollars a day, and the wind blew sand in his ears and blew the horses’ manes the wrong way. A few hundred yards above his head, from the sharp-rocked track across the top of the dam, the dark, rarely fished miles of water narrowed into a cone through the hills of the badlands. Below him, in the middle of the mosquito flat and at the edge of the man-made delta and surrounded by piles of iron pipe and small, corrugated iron huts, red lead painted sections of the half completed turbine tower rose among steel girders spiked with insulators and weighted with hundreds of high tension, lead-in wires.

The day shift of the Metal and Lumber Company had stopped work an hour ago, and now the cowboy drove his team without the firing of the riveters or torches blasting sand from the air. For a moment the sun touched the black mounds of earth behind the tower and drifted off, down the almost dry channel as far as he could see, where once the wide river would have lost its mud color and changed to orange, then purple, in the days before Mistletoe even existed and when the fishing was good any place he sat down to cast.

When he heard a shrill faraway whistle in Clare, twenty miles away, he climbed down, unhitched the team, left the old machine for the night still dropping a few seeds, and let the horses tug him easily toward home on the end of the reins. For a whole day he had been sowing flowers, back and forth, on the mile long stretch of his brother’s grave, and now the horses were tired and he was thirsty. Man and animals cut down from the crest of the dam to the high weeded plateau, basined in the rear by the long gravel approach and fronting on the filled in section of the horseshoe town. Soon the crest would be topped with a macadam road and the street lamps, if ever wired and the last switches installed, would be lit against the horizon.

The four brown dray horses chomped slowly across the dry track, swaying in the rear but shaking their round noses and twitching their ears in excitement, stumbling now and then in a hole by the road so heavily that it seemed they must fall. Passing one prong of the few hundred brown houses of Mistletoe, Luke Lampson waved to the Finn, a crippled ex-bronc rider hammering on a stoop with two white canes.

Then, digging his long heels into the turf, he pulled the horses as a station wagon swung close, raising the dust. He waved again, this time at the tin helmeted Metal and Lumber night shift men, setting off to throw sparks from the tower until dawn. He followed the thin sticks hung from a string of barbed wire through the darkening fields, slapping at the mosquitoes that bit through his pants, until, after once more placing a few light logs across the gate, he could look down on the plank and tar paper buildings of his ranch. He turned the horses loose and they trotted downhill, for all their age like young dogs.

“Slow down there,” he called, afraid that they would hit the wire in the darkness and skin open their broad two-sided chests. He splashed water on his face at the washstand by the house and looked over the bare country toward Mistletoe. He could see the light of fine sparks from the tower; they were at work already.

Only a few mile twists of wire sheared the damp land into fields and made it claim to a farm, a ranch, a fallen barn. Phosphorescent clumps of weed and sage rolled airily in sight, but lone animals moved invisibly though a hoof click on stone carried for miles through the warm evening.

Mosquitoes beat against the inside and outside of the windows and Luke Lampson’s horses thudded out of range of the house and, motionless, hung their heads over the furthest stretch of wire. Luke
stomped up the steps, two potato sacks filled with sand, pushed open the door wobbling on leather hinges, and walked across the leaning floor to the bunk on his bowed, tightly denimed, tired legs.

“Evening, Ma,” he said and pulled off the cracked, square-toed, lady-size cowboy boots. And, more tiredly, under his breath:

“Evening, Maverick,” and he glanced once at the Mandan who squatted by the dusty blanket hanging from the foot of the bunk. The black hair hung over her face.

The woman at the wood stove shook the skillet and it spit on the red iron.

“What’s the matter, Ma, you out of sorts?”

“Not so’s anybody’d see.”

Luke lay back on the pile of covers and, lighting a short end of cigarette, flipped the wooden match to a tin can of water on the far side of the room. A pair of antlers, patches of hair and dried skin stuck to the yellow bone chip of skull, hung crookedly on the wall above the can. An old branch lay cradled in the horns. Luke rubbed his feet together—even in summer he wore thick-woven socks—and, with the toes of one foot sticking through a long raveling hole, scratched. The Mandan, crouching out of sight and never smiling, reached up one dark arm and with a long stem of hay tickled at the bare toes. But the black little feet, tough with rocks and hot with sand, did not feel it. He went on smoking.

“At least you could make her help. Me doing all this heavy work.”

“Go on, Maverick, give her a hand.”

The Indian climbed slowly to her feet, pulled down her red sweater, smoothed her faded, straw covered plaid skirt and padding to the open shelves, reached for thick lipped cups and plates. Her charm bracelets jangled as each piece of china was set heavily on the dark planks of the table. She kept out of the stove woman’s way.

“That’s the one job I like doing myself.” Ma splattered onions in the pan. “Light work. And I never get to do it.”

“Go fetch some water,” Luke said to the girl. “Shut the door,” he called. It remained open and mosquitoes hummed in and out.

“I ain’t here the whole day long,” Luke swung his feet to the floor. “I don’t see what’s to keep you from sprawling right here on this bunk from sunup to dark. If you want.” Luke’s face, black with the sun, would fit a palm of the woman’s hand and when he rocked across the floor it caught the fire from the stove. He rolled like a child playing sailor, loosening his neckerchief.

Ma shook her head. “That’s where she sneaks off to. I couldn’t do it.” The Mandan returned with the load of water; she carried the bucket almost as lightly as the older woman, who could lug six brimming gallons the whole mile long trail as easily as two pint jars of honey. Reaching under the bunk, the Indian pulled out her dusty, high heeled, patent leather store shoes. She squeezed them onto bare feet and sat down to table. She ate from the edge of the knife, her black sides of hair falling into the bowl of food. Now and then she watched the cowboy scowling into his mug behind the hurricane lamp.

Ma never sat to any meal. She kept her back to the world and her face toward the red range, toward the cartons of matches, the row of pans and long handled forks. Sometimes she pushed the lid off the skillet and stole a bite on a long blackened prong or a sip from a wooden spoon. She refilled their plates without turning around. But the Mandan had to pour the coffee.

The deep dish skillet, as big around as a butter tub, was never off the stove and the flames were never allowed to die from under it. The fat was rarely changed and it boiled and snapped from one month to the next. Whether it was a piece of fish dropped into it or a slab of
beef pulled out, it tasted of the black countryside. Tempered by the heat of wood coals, warming the room itself in winter, the skillet was slated over with layer on layer of charred mineral, encrusted with drippings, accumulating from the inside out fragments of every meal. Not a night went by but what Ma, quickly awakened in the darkness, got up to feed the fire and make sure the skillet burned. It was Ma’s pot, the iron of her life, to which came the pickings of her garden, the produce of her monthly shopping trips to Clare, the eggs she got each morning from the coop and whatever Luke might bring home at night—rhubarb, apples or a quarter head of cabbage. She kept it steaming.

Ma was not Luke Lampson’s mother. Hattie Lampson now lay buried on the bluff where once the tents were pitched. Ma had married, to the south in Clare and when the project was first conceived, Luke’s older brother, the Lampson incarcerated in the dam. Sometimes, rarely, wearing rubber boots and a shawl and carrying an egg basket, she would walk the high shoulder of mud, rock and gravel, and look down the water toward the badlands.

“You never knew nothing about it,” she told Luke, “you were out where it was dry. You never even saw the Great Slide.” She moved the skillet a little off the fire.

Luke got up from the table and looked at the Mandan. “You do those dishes for Ma. You hear?” She leaned on the boards, hid her face behind her hands and went on eating.

“She never says anything when I’m around.” Ma licked at the edge of the spoon and opened the draft a notch.

“You just don’t understand how she speaks, that’s all.” Luke undid his belt and shuffled among a pile of men and women’s clothing until he found a fresh black and white checked shirt. He pulled on his best pair of boots and polished the toes with the blanket tip.

Smelling of hair oil—the Mandan groomed herself from the same bottle—he rolled the brim of his hat, wiped at the sweatband, and drew it sharply over his eyes. He hopped to the ground over the potato sacks with the same jump and spring with which he used to run across the barn dance floor when the river was still indefinitely harnessed and the proposed streets on the bluff were not approved by the central office. He stood in the light of the hurricane lamp and ahead, above the rise in the darkness where his own place ended, he saw the small glow in the sky, as if far into the plains a few branders crouched by embers and sets of cooling irons.

“Them boys are flaring up tonight for sure,” he said and, whistling through his teeth, stepped out of sight. The night shift men were on the scaffold welding and below, by an iron hut, Harry Bohn put a pot of coffee back on the fire and prepared to return to Mistletoe.

Ma turned from her skillet and called out. “Don’t you say anything against Mulge. I won’t have it!”

He was almost to the gate logs in the wire and he looked back once at the ranch house, through the door that appeared to open on an empty room. Against the mosquito horizon he made out the high, thick logged, stockade-like breaking corral and a moldy Mexican saddle athwart the top-most beam. He could have seen the slanting, tack room shack and the chicken rest behind, but between the horse and fowl structures and the ranch house itself there lay a patch of darkness broad enough to hide two dung wagons end to end or a pack of dogs.

They were waiting for him there. Each strap in place, not a buckle rattled. The Red Devils sat their machines quietly and their gloved hands waited over switches, ready to twist the handle grips for speed. They sat straight, tilted slightly forward, faces hidden by drawn goggles and fastened helmets, the front wheels in an even row
all leaning to the left as tight polished boots raised, rested lightly on the starting pedals. The straight, grounded left legs were parallel in black flaring britches and from the several creatures sitting double, with arms locked patiently around wood hard belts, there was never a murmur. Not a foot slipped nor did the saddle springs creak. Between the empty corral and the woman’s kitchen the motorcycles filled the darkness, the first almost touching the logs and the last within arm’s length of the cardboard wall. The black, deep-grooved tires were clean and hard. It was as if they had made no flying circuits that evening nor left rubber burns and cuts in the sand where few humans gather, in the gullies of rattlesnakes or before the coils of braided whips. Their saddlebags were still unopened, they had not slept. They watched as hunters by a pond in the marsh from which a single old bird, flapping and beating across the flat water, is unable to rise. License plates had been stripped from the mudguards.

Luke Lampson walked on a dry ridge in the middle of the wagon track. After a quarter mile through failing truck gardens and stony sand, he met the asphalt highway, heard pebbles shake loose under the thistle, a scratching in the brambles. A thin lizard leaped from the ridge and away down the brown clay rut.

A breeze came from the funnel of badlands. Cooled across the water, it was warmed as soon as it touched these acres rising and falling from the boundary of the dam in flats and hollows. At times he could smell the fresh, exposed side of the mountain that had been under the water line all day. A buried man now drained above the tide. Luke wondered if his body ever shifted in the sand, he thought of it when seeding. “Someday he’ll worm himself right out to the open air,” the cowboy said. “Mighty like he’s crawling around in there right now, winding his way up toward the side I’ve-sown.” The
whistle bleated beyond Gov City and the Metal and Lumber men climbed down.

Luke Lampson stopped to light up a Personally-Rolled. It was a long walk across three provinces.

Where the scuff country met the broad back of the highway and little clumps of sand and weed were kept from spreading by the long raised shoulder of the road, there, nosed to the edge of the empty speed lanes, he saw the head and taillights of a parked car. It was long. Between the yellow glare of fog and headlights and the blinking red danger arrows in the rear, stretched the darkness that was the car itself, too long to house in any ordinary driveway. Luke knew that on its sloping top, in aluminum racks, would be the airplane luggage, built up like blocks and, neatly strapped and rolled on top of it all, the tree green unused camping tent. Fresh wooden tent stakes, tied with clean white fishing line, would never be taken from the rear compartment.