The Beetle Leg: Novel Read online

  “But I’m talking about a trade …”

  “How could I drive the team?”

  “You don’t need them like I do …”

  “Besides,” Luke tucked his feet back under the bench, “Mulge give me these boots. For my birthday. We drove clear to Daisy—that was beyond Clare and over the line—to pick them out.”

  “But look here!” Quickly Camper reached under the table, fumbled, and pulled up a yellow sandal. “I mean to trade!” He gave it to Luke.

  And after a moment: “That’s different.” Luke held it forth to the dim colored lights meant for the skirt-high dance. “It sure is.”

  “Go ahead. Try it on.”

  The cowboy studied first one sandal then the other, felt the white rope soles and yellow leather thongs that crisscrossed the foot from toe to ankle. Weighing a soft piece of beachwear in either hand he called again over his shoulder, “Don’t you worry about me, Sam.”

  “Here,” whispered Lou’s husband, “just let me feel one of those steerhorns …”

  “Leave that boot alone. I ain’t done looking.”

  “All right. But I played golf in those sandals. I wore them at the best beaches on the coast. Took them right in the water too. I loaned them for a night to the prettiest woman I ever saw …”

  “I never do anything easy.”

  “I’ve driven over the whole country with nothing else along but those very sandals. Why, I even took them into the army with me …”

  Camper pulled, squeezed and tucked the cuffs of his flannel trousers into the carved black tops of the boots, touched the shiny steerheads on the leather, scraped off a bit of dried earth under the arch and stood up once to feel his weight slide back on the wobbling, worn down heels.

  “These sandals ain’t too uncomfortable,” said Luke.

  The torchlights of the welders were another steel ring higher on the turbine tower. Ready for coffee, the night crew looked away from the glare and saw, through darkened hoods and across forty miles of clear water, the sharp handsaw ridges of a country from which the air had been exhausted.

  “I used to come across all kinds of things every work day.” Camper sat with his legs crossed to the side of the table, nodding one boot up and down. “Dishpans, wagon wheels, anything you can think of. Why, one afternoon I even found an outboard motor. I cleaned the mud off, scrubbed it, worked on it, nearly got it going too. But you was never down to that river bed often.”

  “I kept away from it pretty much.”

  “I know. You was on the range when it happened. I heard later. Well, I’ll tell you, I never got over it.”

  The watchman in the power house, wearing new striped pants and a trainman’s cap, dozed in a cane bottom chair tilted back against the steel plate of a moistened wall. Current was passed from contact to copper contact in the machinery pit, and the seismograph took down the track of the earth and progress of a blindly swimming man inside, in erratic, automatic writing.

  “I only knew him by name.” Camper kept his eyes half shut and talked as if to a widow. “I’m not sure that I ever really saw him at all.”

  “I never seen him much myself.” Luke’s eyes smarted from the wine.

  “But I knew who he was—after,” the other said quickly. “I remember when we were in the payroll line. I’d hear his name called out somewhere way up front. Then he’d yell back ‘ho!’ and I always knew that fellow was early for the right occasion. If there was new equipment, he’d get it, no chit or nothing. If there was a free medical inspection, he’d be there.”

  “He wasn’t good for much around the house …”

  “Well, I don’t know what we’d done without him, working the way I hear he did.”

  “And as far as going into a field or on the prairie, not him.”

  “But he went on the project, right down into the trough where a damn big river used to run, worked with machinery that could chew a man to pieces.” Camper kept his eyes on his hands and drew one of his long matchsticks under the nails. “I can tell what it must feel like, having a brother like him. I know you got an idea of what we all went through.

  “I saw him,” Camper raised his head and forced down the other’s eyes, “only I didn’t know it was him. The engine was moving out to the end of the track, over our heads of course, the mud was sticking around us tight as ever, we sang a little, just about time to quit—and it happened. I looked up, shovel lifted about to my knees, and saw three men on the top of the new section. Two moved a little dirt, I could see their straw hats nodding around, boots turning in the mud, slowing down, waiting for the whistle. But the third one, standing further up where everyone could see him, why, he’d already stopped. There he was, just leaning on his shovel, just propped up there not even bothering to talk …”

  Luke jumped from the booth, sandals cracking flatly on the floor, and ran to the bar, holding it with one hand, pointing at the project photograph with the other, “See him up there? That’s my brother! Mulge, what do you say, Mulge?”

  The black car pulled sharply from the highway, drove straight at the Buckhouse and parked, hood flush against the door, headlights filling the room.

  “Lampson, what are you yelling about?” wheezed Harry Bohn.

  “I’m Camper,” said the fisherman as he introduced himself.

  “I shouldn’t have let him out,” said Camper’s wife.

  “But all of us had a hand on him,” laughed a squatting welder.

  “Why didn’t you stop him, then?”

  “Slipped away,” said the welder.

  One boy, one Mexican, and the white haired linesman who had flown slowly from north to south in bird ways and built transit barracks on the plains, lifted their eyes to a woman’s golden quarters and felt, smiling or silent, their white ribs. They had sucked the saguaro in the desert and bred fungus in the bottom of their shoes. They pulled each other’s teeth with strands of unraveled hemp. Their helmets lay upturned at their sides in wait for another softening of the earth or for news of waters gathering again at the head of the river into which, years before, they had waded stripped to the waist and ears still loud with the clattering of Thegna’s iron.

  “It’s too late now. But,” stooping low to another face, a woman searching the hordes on litters, “where would he go first?”

  “Not far, lady, but none of us dared follow him too close.”

  “You,” quickly to the next, “where would he go?”

  A few sat with hands folded on shirts spread across their laps, covering their loins with leaves, one polished a small fruit against his thigh. A towel, fringed like a Spanish shawl, draped a pair of shoulders, one head was capped with a handkerchief knotted at the corners.

  And sullenly from down the line: “Maybe he’d hunt up Luke.”

  “What’s that?” She looked for the man who spoke, hurried from one end of the white shot wall to the other, walked more slowly now to choose between three or four. All shook their heads, none moved, men slashed by cable, once felled in the tracks of the donkey engine. “Maybe not. Might call for the old woman.”

  And ten men down: “Anyway, you wouldn’t catch him in to Clare.”

  “But, lady,” Lou Camper saw, pounced on, the moving of the lips, felt the brass end of his finger rub her slacks, “we don’t dwell on his coming back.” And the firm finger touched her again.

  “They’d riot again if he come back.”

  “That’s right, after all we mourned.”

  And from the drawling boy: “Not every town would make as much of him as us.”

  “We’ll leave in the morning then,” said Lou. The men nodded. “Who,” smiling at the boy, “would know him if they saw him?”

  “Everybody. But,” raising a half cured cheek and open mouth, “he’d be a sorry sight if he showed up.” The Mexican, neck of the guitar resting against the hollow of his hip, reached into the bucket, drew forth a foot nipped by fish, dyed purple on the brown. He pulled it into the light.

  “You,” sai
d Camper’s wife, “do you remember him?”

  For answer his head bowed over the gravel.

  “He’d be forty years old now,” a brisk voice started, “and not liked near so well.”

  “Lady, don’t ask us any more.”

  Before men who paused long in the quarters of the moon and hid possessions quietly in their rolled shirts, she thought of the small dog returned to the forgotten bush and the small town scratching for its son.

  “In those days you could have followed him down the street.”

  “That’s right,” a moment later, “in any place but Clare.”

  The night was loaded distantly with the smell of old shell cases and powder already shot. The welders, unlike hog men or men of the hills, were unable to keep silent in front of her, their mouths were not stunned shut and awry. And now and then, to break the stare of the silken woman, they mentioned him, a brief description of wet wash as telltale as his small footprints in the mud, the sound of their voices through larynx and nose still pinched and awed with the knell of the one death. There was no flood but of light, and in the light no clash of cocks or bodies, only the lime glass garden and woman whose whispering relations with any one of the sitting men could have sacked as little and exposed as much as the accident which, with a clap of land, had rocked the little purgatory.

  “And if he stopped, you could have touched him.”

  “If you caught his eye, and if he’d heard your name.”

  Old Lifeline lay in the darkness before her men, no longer muddy but pocketed thin as rainwater over the pits of sludge. The tidal, raft-bearing sweep of her was gone, her gray capped current locked in a few poison berries dried by the banks. Her pitch evaporated, the flood pulled from her like the tubes of a butchered ox; she licked without stench or stomach the lower crude pyramids of the dam, above it, barely covered the rooftops of impounded farms. In the days before, howled upon, steeped in froth, she had rocked the speck of a cowman seated cross-legged upon his bobbing horse, had matted many a dappled mane and washed afield dog-paddling ponies.

  But now, from Mistletoe to the end, to her most remote and dismal channels, and to the sea, she lay, with gaps from bend to bend, bell clear above the burdening offal. The welders were sometimes called upon to point her out. They had to kneel low to dip their hands at noon.

  The young boy dug at his heel and a shiftless rattling of the pails sounded instead of lap of water behind the dormitory. None of them moved and, each to his stool, sat in file as if one hidden hand of each was wedged, trousers covering the manacles, into a split and gripping rail.

  “It was hard to believe he was gone.”

  “Turned his back on us.”

  “Some of us called him, hollared after him from the bluff, damn fools that we were.”

  “There was one soft sound that would have raised your hair—like a great animal digesting bran. Him or the dam we couldn’t tell.”

  “Jonah.”

  And after a pause: “Except if it had been a whale, he might have escaped.”

  At that moment one Red Devil, lost from the rest, dashed to the edge of light, stopped and revved his engine. Standing with legs spread eagle, holding the machine quickly in both hands, he nervously twisted the throttle grip, blasted the sand with exhaust, and looked over his shoulder toward the trailing dogs. He sat like a bird still flying, in dead motion the wind still seemed to flatten his driving clothes. The small and wary goggles flashed in the floodlamps. The starting pedal vibrated beneath his calf. It was loosely wired to the oily makeshift frame. Now and then a short claw tugged at the strap around the neck, the knees bent rapidly up and down as if the heels were about to shoot in all directions and he twitched, pulled at the chipped and battered motorcycle and lifted his nose toward the freshly scented path. Behind him the scampering dogs with rough fur and winded ribs, jaws clamped on hanging tongues in the over-country race, drew near with forced cries and shaggy heads, bewildered in the sudden opportunity to run. With each crafty burst of the engine, the barks, a sound hoarse and long unheard, started anew. They seemed to be running through the air, these animals lured from under stoops and from the foot of tumbled dusty beds.

  Suddenly, small oblong head jerked toward the men and woman cowered at the wall, he raised his fist. For a moment it jutted sharply from the sharkskin body. Then he crouched, kicked his feet, and sped diagonally across the lot like a thin and spotted deer before the bough stands of fumbling hunters.

  In the following silence they stirred again, one coughed.

  “You see, mamm,” whispering, still watching the hole in the darkness where the rider had disappeared, “we ain’t forgot.”

  Lou Camper climbed slowly to her feet. The dogs did not appear.

  four men stood at the roadside. They were led by one who seemed to know the country and who, as they paused, scanned it with the scarred and suspicious eyes of an old strong man. They had left the Buckhouse quickly but still were far from the waters behind the dam. Only now, out of breath and brought to a rustling stop by the pain in the largest’s legs, did they begin to talk and touch shoulder to shoulder, bumping in the darkness.

  “How are you, Bohn?”

  “I’m ahead of you, Lampson,” pulling the fat but beardless chin, “because you boys don’t have to try so hard.”

  “Camper,” interrupted the perspiring fisherman, “remember that name?”

  “He heard you,” murmured Luke.

  “I knew his brother,” persisted Camper to the old buck, nodding at Luke, “by sight, anyway.”

  Harry Bohn bit the tobacco plug, three inches long, round as a broom handle, then swung himself away and faced the north. The hair on the sides and back of his head was a tinted silver, black at the ends in the darkness.

  “Harry, he can’t think of anything else, is all,” said Luke.

  “I can’t either,” said the Finn, twisting and hopping, “and I’m going to get back to town, Bohn, where I can do something about it.”

  “You stand right there. With me.”

  In the broad and gray cat face the quick eyes shut and opened, and Bohn’s small lips, thin and stunted from a touch of the wailing forceps, yawned over a little cavity and trembled. “We’ll go on together, both of us.” He lowered his head, clenched one hand into a fist, grunted, and with the other gently rubbed his burning heart. “He ain’t open to the public,” feeling his trousers with the calmness of age as he spoke, back still turned to Camper, “no matter how much they crane. Get as old as me and you know that.”

  Harry Bohn, by miracle born of a dead mother and thereafter in his youth—he looked quickly over his shoulder lest he be caught thinking of it—drawn to the expressionless genitals of animals as the Sheriff was in a later day, doted upon the stomach kept distended with effort, and lest they be torn to pieces, slept with his hands drawn in from the edges of the bed. “You’re lucky,” the doctor told the boy before he fled, “you wasn’t buried with her right then and there. Now be good.” And in the darkness of the night, with muscle of the athlete pitted against the hermit’s birthmark, he briefly stepped aside for the passing of water—as another might turn his head to cough—and swallowed a black and spongy pill picked from a matchbox. Then Bohn burst with feebleness and fought, with laughter and pains of senility, a past in which life moved deep within the woman’s body though her hands were cold.

  “I’m still ahold of myself, Lampson. At least I ain’t out looking around like these boys here.”

  “We’re just walking, Harry.”

  “I know,” attempting to make his bass voice crack, “looking around for sweet tooth.”

  “We’re out to fish,” said Camper and tapped the dismantled rod.

  “I got shirts to wash, lighting wires to put across the floor, Bohn, with half my fence down, a window lead to hang and plenty of time except you use it all!”

  “Finn, you ain’t nearly home yet.”

  Except for Bohn each might have run his way, ducked his head to escape
the dark and empty road, the still plain from which, even at night, the buffalo could be seen to creep. All but Camper, who might have wandered to his death. The spare men—they had hands that were of one piece and put to purpose like the head of a hammer, bodies that appeared to have come first through the mist of nettles, skin which over a period of time ejected splinters, were obviously men by the hanging of hat brims and the constant sound of their breathing—shook the dust from their clothes and rubbed their shins as if they had stumbled on the way. Camper urged them forward, the Finn back. As they talked, picking at each other’s sleeves, they looked up, listened for the faint jumping of the fish or cry of the wolf. It was not only Camper who, unto himself, licked his mouth for a taste of the imaginary spawn of game and feared through the night the footfall of the hunted. The great natural wilds lay around them without dens or lairs.

  “I got to go back, Bohn. I got to rope my cabin down. My place isn’t going to be swept away!”

  “What do you worry for,” said Luke, “when Harry’s with you? My mother worried about the same thing. She said it after Mulge fell in the dam. But One Hundred Acres Grassland ain’t going to turn to dust.”

  Camper quietly stepped back and waited.

  “All right. Shake them canes on out of here. If you want to.”

  Luke no longer heard them. The fisherman, the cripple, and the old pink-cheeked man were bent aside by the wideness of the sky and in a moment, with hard lines at the corners of his mouth and crow-feet white at the points of his eyes, he returned to the image of his mother and heard her chair rocking on the gravel. Rarely he thought of her, but if so, if it came upon him as he plowed across the dam, he checked his horses and held them to a standstill until she passed. He saw her now, sitting uncovered in the sun a few yards from the cabin. She talked to strangers, pointed with crackling fingers toward the fowl she could hardly see. Even after the Slide and word of the death that brought her own, her voice would suddenly begin beyond the silent house. “That one there that lays,” he heard her, smiling at someone come to mourn, “I like her, and the one next by it I had since a child, and the one that’s blind and chokes when it crows, and that one with the comb who can’t crow, I like him too. And that other, that’s the last, she’s a good bird.” He could hear the visitor take off his hat. His mother scraped her rocking chair in the sand. And it was at such moments that, receiving a passerby, she talked as a young girl and coyly rolled her eyes. But, by a trick of age, the pupils disappeared and only the whites remained in the posed head above the smile.