The Beetle Leg (4 page)

“It was the Sheriff told me to come over,” said Wade and brushed at the soot streaks on his trousers.

Cap Leech stepped into the flames and slammed the door. Wade listened to the hurried sounds, the clattering of small objects, a ransacked scuffling. After a pause he heard the whisper of iron, the shooting of grated coal, and the sudden breathing of the fire. Leech reappeared from beneath the wagon, scowled, flung up the steps and fastened a padlock through the rings.

“Bring that lantern,” he said.

He sank into the sheepskin and pushed the stiff, long handled brake. Wade saw that on his feet he wore only a toe curled pair of bedroom slippers.

With the easing forward of the hickory lever and the release of the wooden grip which bound the wheels and which, on wallowing hills, was apt to lock and pitch the wagon into the limbs of a bare tree, smoke flattened from the pipe and the men leaned backward, pulled with the head down charge of a blind horse chased by fire. The driver held a loose rein, ran his other hand through the shedding yellow locks on the seat and, shaggy toes pointed restfully together, stared with eyes that never watered toward the horizon, above and beyond any obstacle that might have crossed their path. The son of a light boned suffragette, kept alive by a spirit half stimulant, half sleep, he bounced unconscious of the twisting wagon frame, the knocks of the makeshift caisson.

“Turn around! Turn around, you’ve passed it.”

“Whoa,” said Cap Leech, sending not a signal down the reins, and the horse stopped. An obedient, angular wrenching of the shafts, a tilt as one wheel skidded up and across the sidewalk planking, and again Wade’s damp wavy hair scratched in his eyes. The stove at their backs was fanned by speed, not wind, and occasionally, without
noise, chunked airy wads of ember from the funnel topped chimney, fireballs that floated in the wake of the blood letter.

The ministerial tie strings, knotted, but no longer in a bow, the high collar flapping about the neck, the ease with which he overrode the country familiar or not, all marked a man who had been anesthetized, against whose chest villagers of fifty years had spit their brains.

He drove with the one hand uselessly extended and peered far ahead of the low stars, dismissed without thinking Clare’s shut houses. He would travel unlighted roads to reach the distant end of the river, the last of his line. Echoing moans met him at the limits of every township.

Cap Leech did not stop his horse—wide at the rump it tapered to the small head, jet black prehistoric animal that could run forever —before the jail, but turned it instead, with a whisper to the pinned down ears, between the stone wall and vacant wooden wall. H? discovered, without an extra movement, the still and littered end of Clare. The wheels rocked in the glassy sand, the horse exhaled.

“You give me a ride here,” said Wade. Leech nimbly disappeared on the other side of the wagon. The silent flatlands, the lonely shrub, the plains, moved in upon the town and passed across the weeded railroad line carrying part of Clare off into the night, a few hundred yards into what was once grazing country, now shorn, beyond which there was nothing. Behind, on the streets they had just left, the loping body of a wild dog appeared at the cloudless, hardly sleeping skyline, turned and bounded into the jail.

“I’ll tell you what it says.” The Sheriff glanced at Wade, looked at Cap Leech from the side of his eye, wrinkled, brown, a mole. “Put his bag in the corner.” But for a moment longer he read to himself, holding with both hands the thumb-pressed pages of the yellow paper
book. The thick dry lips hung loose, dissociated from the mind that had been concentrating for a long while and in a bad light. “The new of the moon is best,” he said briefly and was again silent. To study, he needed the rough cut desk, gum, dust, and streaks of coal dark ink under his fingers. He was gathered over the printed sheet, deciphering sign by sign, breathing at the end of every sentence. Now and then he stopped and his eyes retraced slowly to the top of the page.

“Why don’t you let Wade there take your bag?”

But the zodiac was strong and he fell once more to creasing the paper against the round of his knee, tongue tip appearing at the corner of his mouth. He considered the indoor gardener’s calendar, a timetable of work, failure, and church holidays, with a slow beating of his heart and patient, slight movements in the cane chair. A gambled harvest, the weather, and days on which accidents were most likely to occur, he calculated; and he discovered, prodding the elements, that they were in the old of the moon. He shut it, leaned forward, and carefully lay it before him on sheets scrawled with dates of years long past and those still to come.

“Wade,” staring at Cap Leech, “go bring me that pointing dog. She shouldn’t be out back.”

The Sheriff stretched forth a palm like a large gland, then Leech; and they shook hands in the last quarter, some few hours after the Minnesota medicine man, hardly planning to pause, had entered Clare. And, having allowed the Sheriff to grasp his own quick fingers —despite lotions of disinfectants and the protection of rubber gloves in the past they were covered with growths of small warts—Cap Leech placed his black satchel on the desk between them, snapped it open. The odor of herbs and germicides, a sharp perfume, rose among the smells of leather and tarnished handcuffs. One smell
was strongest, living faintly upon the body of the man with the small bag. Leech pushed up the dirty rolls of his sleeves—nothing tied concealed to that gray flesh—and, reaching into the satchel, brought forth a small tin can and placed it also on the desk. The can and a few pieces of metal were all that remained of the Leech who in his youth had stood thin, well washed, and stern before the cadaver of an aged negro.

Ether. It lay in the bottom of the can like turpentine. The Sheriff bowed slowly forward, sniffed once, twice. He breathed such fumes never before found floating in the far-country kitchens. But, foreign as they were even to the Sheriff, they were fumes that vaguely suggested the fractured leg, were tainted with the going under or coming out of a whimpering sleep. His head nodded. Then the Sheriff straightened and, fumbling with the blade of a little knife, cut at the insides of an apple-large cob pipe. It filled his hand, was covered with kernelless pock holes, missing teeth. He puffed quickly and the sweet fumes disappeared in tobacco smoke.

“You use that on them, then,” said the Sheriff.

“Sometimes,” answered Leech, “sometimes I don’t.”

“It’s in your clothes.” The Clare Sheriff was invested with the office to inspect, whip, or detain any unique descendant of the fork country pale families, was in a position to remember when they settled and how well or poorly they had grown. But before him stood a man concerned even more than himself with noxious growth, who was allowed, obviously schooled, to approach his fellow men with the intimate puncture of a needle.

“Why don’t you sit down?” said the Sheriff. Now and then he still caught a taste, some sort of chloride or oxide, at least a poison, of the medicine man’s evaporating drug. “What else you got in that bag?” He picked up his pamphlet, licked his thumb, then with a
sweep cleared the smothered desk. “You fellows have it all,” he said in a friendly, uncertain voice to the stranger who, sixty himself, might have been discovered plucking under the chin an old man suffering a head cold. “Hurt them when you want to, collecting all those bottles and knives. But,” and the Sheriff looked to the door, “there’s not much doctoring or tooth pulling for you here.”

“That so.”

“I don’t believe there’s a tree standing within a hundred mile where you could hang a shingle. If there was, they’d tear it down.”

Cap Leech lifted the tin can, sniffed, fixed the cotton stopper. Those eye whites,, dull bits of glass pressed against the skin, hovered over the floor. Without raising them he began to laugh, “Open your hand.” Slowly, in the fat of the Sheriff’s upturned palm, he drew a circle with his broken fingertip. “Disease,” he said, “thriving. Catch a fly in your fist and you could infect the town.” Quickly, with the iced cotton, he swabbed the hand, let it go. “Clean. For awhile.”

“Wade,” the Sheriff drew back and called, “come here, Wade!”

In a stoop Wade pulled the pointer through the doorway. It brought with it the smell of rain, the smell of paws, forelegs and chest soaked in storm and caked with the mud of a downpour; it twisted its head, drops beating against its eyes, and shook, would have spattered the walls, between Wade’s knees. All day it shied and staggered under the sun. But by nightfall it was able to force moisture, to yelp at the shell-like roll of a cloudburst in its ears, to walk as if leaving puddles across the floor, to smell as if the rain had actually come down and driven it bleating and thin into a rivulet filling ditch.

Wade walked stiff-legged, raised his head to smile, and pulled, lifted the dog by its throat. All four of the animal’s legs were rigid, hind legs clamped straight up and down, front paws crossed over its
bleeding snout. He dropped the dog in the middle of the room, released the matted fur. His hands were wet, the bottoms of his trousers damp.

“Sheriff, this dog is scratched.”

“Scratched?”

“Yes, sir. She’s cut up.”

“Got ahold of her, did they?”

“Yes, sir. They must have claws.”

The first motorcycle the Sheriff saw appeared at dusk, bounded around a corner of the granary and sped without lights down one gutter of the sanded street. He had raised a hand against it, started at the whirr of wheels spoked with dirt and a few oily flower stems, and had begun to run clumsily, freshly shaved and scented, as it jumped the wooden walk, leapt, a small thunderbird, and flashed through a plate glass window.

The Sheriff sat down, stared thoughtfully at the animal whose rump still clung to the air, whose injured nose lay hidden. Then, slowly, he reached for it, lifted it with a brief grunt until its chest was on his lap. And he waited until the nose was uncovered, while it probed blindly, and at last allowed his fat cheek to be licked, touched with blood. He chuckled, “She’s been out back.”

After shoving and kissing the round face of the Sheriff—the tongue that was clamped between its own teeth flicked once the lobe of his ear—the slick keen head of the pointer dropped and with slow high climbing motions the dog stepped and pawed ungainly hind legs against his trousers, attempted to thrust and double its whole body onto his knees. The Sheriff held his breath, slowly pushed the pointer to the floor.

Without a murmur it slunk off. “She’s sick,” said the Sheriff and watched for some expression to curl across the healer’s cleft face. Not
a grimace appeared, but slowly, with slackening pulse, he seemed to unwind and, reaching once more the tin can for a whiff of salts, dropped a white hand tolerantly to the desk top. There was a switch up his spine, a spark of truth in the watery tapping of his fingers. “Don’t say anything,” the Sheriff stepped forward, then behind the desk, “I’ll do the talking.” He rubbed the prognosticator’s pamphlet against his beard. “He’ll listen,” thought the Sheriff, “no traveling man’s that good.”

Beyond them bloomed the desert that had starved to silence the calls of loveless dogs, buried under successive sand waves the hoof prints of single fading riders or the footprints of man and woman running with clothes bundled quickly beneath their arms. Any nomad tribes that had once burned raiding fires at night were gone, human drops sprinkled and spent in the sand, as bodies slipped from the edge of the horse blanket, had been settled upon and obscured by wingless insects or fried, like the heads of small but ruddy desert flowers, in the sun of one afternoon.

“I said,” stuffing a fistful of tobacco over the white ash in the bottom of the pipe, “there’s just one man who died out here. Only the one death that come to anything. For ten, even twelve years, in all that time there ain’t been a single robber shot in the head, no rancher fatally struck by snakes. It hasn’t been long enough for any man to grow old enough to die…”

The jail, with its door standing open and another locked, kept all men who spit or talked within its walls comfortable on gray lead painted floor or dry cane, confidential, close, by its very smell and heat of confinement, preserved them amidst the circles of the desert. No sound passed between the padlock and smoky boulder. The scratching of infected toes, the whispering from swollen, hair covered throats, died near the foundations of the jail. Away, no voice called
for help, the desert might have sunk from sight, beyond detection and points of the compass.

Only the soft voice croaking full of stories and the listener, at that hour, feeling just old enough to wait. The Sheriff looked up and down the page, turned, flipped another one and paused. “
Aquarius is poor
,” he said and thought, “That will hold him, ain’t a chemical sounds that good to the ear.” He added, “
Sagittarius is poor
, also.”

The purveyor of menthol, iodine, and peppermint stepped to the window as the drone continued. There were no dark house fronts, no flashing signs. Only the dented black plains stretched from the window to the horizon without a flicker of movement except for a shadow that now and then crossed the buzzing screen. For a long while Cap Leech stood pressed against the wall, listening. He looked toward the cow country for some speck of a herd against the night sky or a lone rider nodding over the pommel. The mosquitoes ticked against the screen in his face.

The Sheriff scowled into the magic page. “
Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die
.” He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.

It is a lawless country.

 

i
n the beginning, before the sights were even taken for Mistletoe, Government City, before the women and children arrived, when stray cows could stop wherever they pleased below the high ground to water, and the water in its turn could slug downstream to flood, when the nearest city, not including Clare which was only a post on the plain, was over the line into the next state—at that time, as winter came on and workers migrated to the project anyway, upon the whole head of the bluff there was founded a colony of a thousand tents that smoked like an Indian village through the hard snow. Ten or twenty men to a tent, they penny-anted by lantern light and only came out into the falling snow to watch when a load of shovels arrived or the crated yellow tractor was slid from the rear of a truck and left in a shallow dune to await spring. For days the men tramped out in small groups to lean over, and touch, and inspect the box of spare parts that someone had struck open with an iron bar. The temperature went down.

There were no streets and hardly a pathway, no community hall
or cookhouse; fires were built before each tent and the tin cans, thrown behind one, landed in the dooryard of the next and slid beneath the snow. A ton of steel cable was finally shipped in and remained a solid mountain for the winter. In hours when the snowfall ceased and the eye could travel far over the white flat lands, the new workers would creep from the tents and standing on the bluff in the wind, look down upon the widening overflow, the ice blocked river. New sheepskin coated friends were made in these lulls on the ridge.

Men landed in camp all through the months of sleet and snow. Tents trickled down the slope, clustered in pockets and mushroomed in four or five protected holes in the land. Fat Chance, Reshuffle, Dynamite, they were unrecorded towns still remembered by a few in Gov City.

The storms tossed heavier than ever on Christmas, the river was out of sight and only the explosions of the ice told them it was there below. Tent flaps were staked down, the cans burning a skim of gasoline covered them all with soot. Hardly a worker dared face the gales that out of the northern moose country turned and vaulted in the hail swept bowl; nor would they walk far on the cornerless white range. But one old driller, stumbling a few yards from his place in the circle, carrying a shovel and wad of excelsior, discovered, in a dry notch of stone and sand, a short green frozen twig of pine. He nailed it to the ridgepole. And grinning down at the men, shaking his beard that was still black, he threw the shovel into its public corner and pointed upward.

“That there’s Mistletoe!” he cried.

When it finally thawed and the river rose, when the mud sloshed over the top of their boots and shoepacks, the women came. From that time on the wash was hung to dry out of doors. In the sun—when it was warm and a fresh breeze rose from the receding banks—in
mid-morning, whole lines of workmen hunched forward on crates or squatted in the sand and earth that was still damp, with dirty towels on their shoulders, not turning to talk, staring off where birds were flying or hills emerging from the prairie, getting haircuts from their wives.

As the tide was stopped and in the dry season the river, at its weakest, was pinched off, the old bed became a flat of seepage and puddles of dead water. When the men turned the tideland into a shipyard, built barges and could swarm from one bank to the other, poles and lines were raised and Gov City finally telegraphed to Clare.

“There isn’t any town out here.”

“Sure there is,” said Camper to his wife, “not so small either, if I can find it.” He braced the fluid steering wheel against his stomach, squinted at the enormous thorny balls of sage that rolled in slow motion before the headlights.

“You’re dreaming again. No one’s dumb enough to put a town out here. Take us back to the highway.”

Sharp lifeless blades of prairie grass scratched at the undersides of the automobile, crackled to the slow turning of the tires. The armored vehicle with its veils of glass, shrouded in blunt searching beams of light and swinging, dipping its useless aerial in the hot air, prowled forward toward the unknown dried out river, now and then dropping its front bumper into a mound of sand. Camper pressed, released the accelerator with his sandaled foot, watched for signs of a track not wholly lost, saw only the yellow powder, the needles of a still and tangled earth. He felt that the inflated rubber of his car wheels must be crushing colonies of red ants, crazed lizards, bugs caught before they had time to hum and fly. He sat on the edge of the padded leather seat.

“What’s the matter with you? Turn around!”

“Only a minute now, Lou, you’ll see. A real town, I know it.”

“You can’t kid me. You just want a chance to use that tent. I’ll sleep in the car.”

He could not find it. Once he stopped the automobile—all its wide tapering body listed—and climbed out, leaving the door open, its sharp edge jammed in the sand. He looked back to the sound of the heavy engine on weeded soil, to the small light burning over the blue blouse, the green silk slacks of the woman. Then, bent double, he stepped in front of the headlights and peered closely at a few square feet of ground, looking for some trace of a house, a piece of wood once shaped by saw, a brick that had burned under the fire of a kiln; as if he expected to find the town or its remnants in a hole at his feet. The cowboy had spoken of it, he himself remembered it and yet, picking up a handful of grit and dust, perhaps she was right.

“I don’t see it,” he said. The bites itched on his chest and shoulders.

“I could tell from the highway,” his wife answered. “There weren’t any signs.”

Though not stopped by barrier—fence, rock or ravine—the automobile was sucked close to the loose and dibbled earth, slowed by the invisible roots of parasite plants stretched like strings across its path, exhausted of speed and air. Camper felt a harsh and lazy magnetism that, foot by foot, might crack its windows, strip it of paint and draw the stuffing from the seats. He watched for something to steer by.

“You can’t expect to find a town just anywhere,” said his wife.

And at that moment they were attacked for the second time during the night by snakes. They ran over it. Flat and elongated, driven upon in sleep, it wheeled, rattling from fangs to tail, chased them,
caught up with the car, slithered beneath it, raced ahead into the light and reared. The snake tottered, seemed to bounce when it became blind, and, as Camper touched the brake, lunged so that it appeared to have shoulders, smashed its flat pear skull against the solid, curved glass of one headlamp, piercing, thrusting to put out the light.

“Go back and kill it! Go on, get out of this car!”

Quickly he drove ahead, reaching one hand through the darkness to quiet her, and saw, hardly above the sands, the railless, short rotten planks of an abandoned sidewalk starting from the desert.

“I told you, I knew she was still here!”

Lou put her forehead against the glass.

She lifted the boy into his left arm, piled his right with towels. In a free hand he clutched the cowhide suitcase.

“There’s nobody here,” she hissed as they climbed the boot smooth dormitory steps. The rooms, down segregated corridors, were dark, not a light nor single man appeared in the foyer on the walls of which hung pictures—a girl, a horse’s head—torn from magazines. Standing together for a moment on the cold linoleum floor, Camper imagined forty bearded shovelers and forty china mugs stretched along the bare planks of a makeshift table: a silent, before dawn meal.

The soft, fibreboard walls of the corridor sagged, split at the bottoms. Sand swept across the floor. Camper padded forward, stopped, moved again in his extra wide, sea rotted sandals; behind him the red high heels of the woman cracked.

“Try that one, Lou,” he whispered, and in a narrow room, screen half ripped from the window, they looked upon a tousled iron bed, a body that slept beneath a raincoat.

“Here,” he said, “try ‘22’.” The number was splashed on the door in peeling whitewash.

“Open it yourself!”

Camper squeezed the rattling glass knob between his fingers, pushed, shielded by all he carried, leaned into the dust and mold. “No,” he whispered, staring a moment, “not this one, either.”

The lamp, beside a card table with a hole ripped in its center, worked, but the lock catch dangled from the door jamb.

“Keep the shades down,” he told her after each trip to the car, “there’s no sense letting everyone know we’re here.”

“Everyone! You got a nerve.” She sat on a campstool, stretched herself, blew down the front of her blouse. As soon as Camper had set up the cots and slipped the small revolver under one pillow, settled the boy in his mother’s bed and untangled the mosquito netting, he stooped and plied quickly, methodically, through his own valise. He removed the delicate rod, the clock-like reel, the green and yellow dun flies.

“The best fishing in the world is right here, Lou,” he mumbled and collected the bright and pointed gear.

She stood up, wet with silk. “You think I’ll swallow that? You got eyes, you’ve driven across it as well as me. After five hundred miles they wouldn’t dump garbage on and not a spot to get a drink in, you think I’m going to believe there’s water in this place? Let alone a fish!” She watched him pin the flies to his flowing collar, stick the collapsed rod in a pocket above his wide and boneless hip. She considered the smile on his face, the flipping hands.

Suddenly she rose still higher, spit, shouted after him down the rank and hollow hall: “You dirty little dog,” laughing, trembling at her own intuition, “you been here before!”

She was alone. She listened, pulled the sheet across the boy, went immediately to the window and raised the shade. And, breasts half thrust, half fallen against the screen, she found herself unable to move as she stared into a watchful, silent figure pressed close to the other side.

The creature continued to watch. It was made of leather. Straps, black buckles and breathing hose filled out a face as small as hers, stripped of hair and bound tightly in alligator skin. It was constructed as a baseball, bound about a small core of rubber. The driving goggles poked up from the shiny cork top and a pair of smoked glasses fastened in the leather gave it malevolent and overflowing eyes. There was a snapped flap on one side that hid an orifice drilled for earphones. Its snout was pressed against the screen, pushing a small bulge into the room.

The snout began to move. It poked without sight toward the flattened slippery flesh of Camper’s wife. And with that first sound of scraping she turned her back, swayed, stepped quickly from the room.

There were men, perhaps women, in the building who, thought Camper’s wife, still confiscated fatback and a few blunt tools from local ordinance and who, despite buck tooth, caved chin, lockjaw and blisters still existed, warped and blackened in the wake of the caterpillar and dusty mare. As she walked away from her own door left ajar, she heard the wriggling of their toes, put her ear against the walls, softly knocked. She sniffed for the spot where Camper himself, years before, had squinted through the screens or rolled asleep. With crimping fingers she tucked the bottom of her blouse into the slacks.

“He won’t catch anything,” she thought.

A light burned in the kitchen. She stood on the threshold and watched as an old woman, after setting a pie tin before one of two
men at the table and opening the stove on the coals, grunted, smiled, lifted heavy blue skirts and tucked a dollar bill, closely folded, into the top of a fattened snow white stocking.

“Sit down,” said Harry Bohn to the Finn, “I ain’t done dinner.”

“I’m going home.”

“Sit down.” Bohn began the pie and the crippled Finn, knocking a chair free of the table with one of his fluttering canes, sat on the edge of it, braces grinding, and watched him chew. Lou saw that the cook, Norwegian, fat, expected the whole pie to be eaten, saw that the small man, fidgeting, wore no clothes except his airy overalls. He was slight, wrapped around by the thinness tight upon a body that had lost weight never to regain it. His white canes tapped constantly, he drummed them as another might his fingertips.

“You wouldn’t run off on me, would you, Finn?”

“I got things. Lots of things to do, Bohn.” The top of his overalls flared stiffly from the middle of his back, one broad strap and brass button slipped from a shoulder, pinched, transparent. “So I can’t sit around with you,” snapped the lightweight ex-bronc rider, who in the beginning had ridden from many chutes with spurs entangled high on an animal’s withers.

“Tonight,” Bohn leaned back, his lips bubbled, “you’re going to.”

He saw the woman in the doorway. His mouth fell open—blue mash, blue gums and teeth—he saw her stare, he frowned and put his hands on the table as if to rise. “Yes, sir,” fingers sprung without thought into a fist, eyes back to the Finn, “we don’t get around it. You ain’t going to move, unless I say.” And the cook behind him, leaning between his needs, his body, and the fire, licking her lips as he, nodding before he spoke, looked at the same time toward the doorway and shook her silver braids, spoke to Camper’s wife.