The Beetle Leg: Novel Read online

  “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 fr
om 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.

  “Tourists,” he thought. “One of those big black tires has let them down. They don’t know whether to spit on it or buy another.” The front light beams carried for two hundred yards and in that full white incandescence he could see the fence posts and a crooked, hand painted Poison Water sign.

  A man and woman crouched before the solid radiator in the light. They were holding something between them.

  “Wrong,” thought Luke, “guess they’ve hit a dog. Or maybe a jack rabbit. Probably never seen them that big before.” He stepped over the wire, pushing it down between the rusted barbs, and shielded his eyes.

  “He’s been bit,” said Camper, the owner of the car, and glanced at the boy between his knees. The man Camper wore a yellow, large collared shirt with even tails worn outside the flannel trousers. He watched Luke through dark cat-eye glasses and puffed in fast heavy breaths.

  His wife loosed her perfume on the air as if she carried a broken phial of it in a hidden pocket of the green silk slacks. She got out of their way.

  “You see, I had to stop. There weren’t any roadstands or hotels, not a light anywhere. So I just pulled off the road and stepped out of the light and then the kid has to come out too. For two hundred miles I wouldn’t stop, not with warning signs posted every fifty feet. It’s a hell of a thing when you can’t take a leak without kicking up a pack of rattlers.” His white socks bulged through the braided sandals and he slapped his arms.

  The boy looked as if he had been dropped in a bucket of cold water.

  Luke pushed his hat on the back of his head, and taking the tin box from his rear pocket, squatted opposite but close to Camper. The woman waited in the car, raising and lowering the aerial, pushing one station button after the next and heard only a squall of electricity on iron ore.

  “I can see you ain’t from around here,” said Luke. He squinted into the light, fixed the blade into the little handle and draped the short length of hose, used as a siphon by some of the men in Clare, across his knee.

  “Like hell,” answered the driver. “I know where I am. I used to work around here, but the wife doesn’t know it. Let me tell you, I practically built that dam alone. Yes, sir, I remember still, the ‘cheapest earth filled dam in the western hemisphere’ it was supposed to be. And the Slide—I suppose you know about it—was like a whole corner of the world fell in.”

  “I recollect it,” said Luke.

  “I was surprised not to find any lights, not even a lunch wagon on the road.” The driver leaned closer to watch. “I must’ve missed the turning into town. ‘There isn’t any town way out here,’ says my wife, but I know better. I thought we’d just fly through for a quick look around. And of course to stop some place. I was surprised to see the place so run down, not a sign or anything. Why, you wouldn’t even know the dam was here.”

  “It’s here all right,” said Luke.

  He twisted up the leg, tied the rubber hose so that the lower calf went white and the upper darkened, making the child appear ready for transfusion. Keeping the blade out of the child’s sight, he peered at the fang marks in the coloring flesh. A crack of static burst from the car. “Try another station, Lou,” called Camper and they heard the whirr as the window was rolled shut.

  His tin kit lay open in the dust at his heels, the extra blade catching the light, the label worn off the green corked bottle of iodine. Luke squeezed the leg, satisfied himself with the set of punctures, tightened the rubber tubing, shifted a bit, took up a packet of matches and, striking three or four, heated the blade.

  Luke had seen them stricken before: Ma was not immune to rattlers on the water trail and even the Mandan was struck one blow from a startled head. The snakes were driven further and further from the bluff and new highway, and gathered wherever a few rocks or sticks could hide them deeper in the fields. He had killed them with rake handles. Once he ground an old flathead down with his long heel. But still their bodies might dart from a forkful of hay or dash from under pail or wheel to strike.

  The blade turned blue. Luke once more picked up the leg and sank the point quickly in and out until two crosses had been cut and, the knife still hanging from his fingers, Camper holding the child’s shoulders, he relaxed his face and posture and sucked the wounds, his eyes growing heavy in the headlights, staring, as if the venom had a hard and needy taste to a man who, in all his youth on the infested range, had never himself been bitten. He took it as one of his four drays copped the bar of salt, hung over it, and kept it from the rest.

  Specks of red appeared on Camper’s yellow shirt and with one hand he swatted, all the while watching the cowboy draw, turn, spit and stoop again. The mosquitoes filtered across the headlight, hummed and settled, biting into the driver’s white arms and neck. “Hurry up,” called the woman, her voice muffled behind the glass.

  “This country’s hell on a man,” said Camper. He lit a cigarette and sat down more comfortably on the curving bumper. He watched the cowboy repack the tin and wipe his hands. “By the way,” he rubbed his arms, “how deep is she these days?”

  “Eighteen feet, six inches round noon,” answered Luke, “but she’s down a little now.”

  “That’s a lot of water.” He reached for his pocket. “I hate to be shoving off. Kind of like to wait until dawn and take a look around. I know there’s fishing. But the wife’ll be howling how she wants a hotel with screens on the windows and a girl to bring in the towels and washing water. Wait a minute,” he looked at Luke’s boots with steer heads carved above the ankles. “Can I gi
ve you something?”

  “Naw. You just come back sometime when the sun’s up and it’s been raining a few days before. Come back and see her when she’s brimming!”

  “I will,” called Camper, “I sure will.”

  Luke Lampson finally walked into the dark acres adjoining the few lamps and measured streets of Mistletoe. Approached from almost any side, it was open country, sand, clay and nests of weed; the horseshoe street was swept abruptly from a rutted field. Children’s dolls and slides always lay toward the flagpole center, never behind the houses on the plain. Luke entered town by picking his way between two single story cabins and crossing the street before him to the drugstore: Estrellita’s. He straightened his hat, brushed the burrs from his pants and pushed through the patched screen door.

  “Howdy, Lampson, howdy, Lampson,” murmured and softly echoed the men around oilclothed tables.

  “Evening, gentlemen.”

  He crossed to the counter and settled himself on a chromium stool.

  “A bottle of pop, Mary Jane,” he said to the little girl in apron and white soda fountain cap.

  Luke hooked his heels on a rung, spread his sharp knees and leaned over the straw. His back was to the men, his head hidden under the curled black brim. He looked into the rear kitchenette where an old man fried hamburgers and the girl did her lessons; he looked through the connecting door to the billiard room and back to his drink. There was only one light in the billiard hall, a pair of feet on the edge of a table and the row of cues. On the few nights of the week when a customer might enter, beer was served him and the light turned up. But those men who used to pride themselves on studied shots and drop ashes on the green cloth, now took to Estrellita’s. They watched the cowboy, his stooped shoulders, the split in his shirt, the white calf of his leg between the top of the boot and the rolled denim.

  “Any of you boys seen Bohn?”