The Beetle Leg (8 page)

They swept back, made room and left Luke Lampson’s mother her own bright place to stand. She waited, then spoke no louder:

“You’re all welcome.” She nodded, this little woman darkly turned out of the house, this last and oldest divulged by the desert. “I’ll see you off.” She looked at her younger son, but took no step. Ma caught her arm.

“Hattie,” Ma moved her, “can you get up on that seat alone?”

They stood her by the wheel. They stepped back and the old woman shortly swayed, a stalk snapped upwards from the sand by the iron, mud colored rim, a length of wire coiled and motionless in the spokes. The great pinwheel might have ground her cleanly into the dust and she would have crawled away with skin unbruised, with dry pulmonary parts intact. She and the wheel—its tapered bars, sanded rays, were longer than her two arms fully spread—looked as if they would never move again; one, the original means of carrying them from Boonville to the bloody plow handle, the other, that which was originally carried and turned to love in the night’s wagon ring around the fire. But had it turned, and had she fallen, her kerchief caught in the spokes nearest the ground, she would have hung before her feet once more touched the settling, noisy track. And when the wheel did turn, smoke hung thinly about its tin bucket nave where wood burned against wood and miles wound in carbon around the axle.

“You ride in the one behind mine. Mulge comes last.”

The animals awoke. Amid the scraping of slowly prodded hoofs, the slight sway of warty food buckets and rope ends under the wooden bodies, Ma remained at the front of the train holding his mother.

“Put Hattie right up there. That’s it, by me.”

Luke in the second wagon and his brother in the third did not
join the singing. The horses, as large as they were, crouched down to pull, their legs spraddled outwards like the flappers of young and panting dogs. Each wagon carried not only its own sounds of travel, the tug, twist and strain of the wooden windlass, but was loaded with the clatter of the other two and moved—one wagon could never make such noise—across the plains like a house athwart rollers.

High on the first prow, wedding bag under the backless seat and the sun softening the wool of her dress, Ma leaned in front of Hattie Lampson and spoke to the driver. The ranch, with no men left behind and guarded only by the Indian child, had disappeared down its faraway indentation in the glazed sand.

“Swing us a little to the other way. I sense it more to the right.”

The woman sawed the reins.

Thus they traveled a dog’s pace on an enormous field that once, perhaps, had been cultivated with shrub, tree and herb, now extinct, which swelled before their eyes at moments with a few head of cattle, with larvae that clustered and disappeared. Not another rider or wagon train crossed their path.

Ma held her hand clasped to her eyes and peered through the thin red line between her fingers. She sat high, a gunman who had crossed the route for forty years on a rocking coach.

“A mighty lot of you turned up.”

“Yep,” said the driver.

“Hattie,” Ma spoke louder, “I’m much obliged. Since you changed your mind.”

The mother of the Lampson boys said nothing, seated in the open heat between a woman almost married to her own son and another still married after rearing five grown men. For Hattie Lampson was taken during the trip to town. Her flat, boneless nose was cold. She nodded.

“Clare by dark,” said Ma to the driver, “maybe sooner.” She shifted. Her long skirts pulled, and she changed her chin to the other hand.

Hattie Lampson began to mumble on top of the hymn singing and turn of the wheels.

“I’m indebted to you ever,” said Ma and put her arm around the dwarfed shoulders. “You been here to give me courage.” Ma rattled, looked at her quickly and gave the cold little woman a rigorous and sudden hug. She snapped free. Ma eased her again under a brown arm and widely ruffled sleeve.

“Hattie. You ain’t going to be doggish. Not on a wedding day.”

They rode unmolested over the flat pan—fifty miles away there might have been a mountain range to seal them perfectly within the white disk passable and clear—and looking way to the ground Ma watched the last of the hoofs, so slowly dropped, switch and explode in dust. She felt under the seat for her finery.

“He’s probably thinking just like me. Now,” said Ma and fanned herself.

Hattie Lampson spoke: “He wasn’t brung up for such. Not to be handed straight over. Naked. He’ll work some now. There ain’t no family. There ain’t even any boys, men neither. You can’t pass them all out. They’re supposed to laze around home. Take care of their own farmyard, they was told.

“They get no pardon. It ain’t just any hound can go out shorn and keep his head up. I say they’re done. My younger has gone just like him. Bringing that Indian into the house is about as bad. Neither one can hold himself straight. They was behind my back.

“Around their age they start feeling worms inside and nothing I say will change it. Why, he’s been walking you sideways for two
years steady. And when he won’t touch no food, there’s enough to kill him right there.

“Some just worm themselves in. I ain’t going to be touched now the way you do. You ain’t going to get me to help you mix no water in his meal. Just to lie spread in the dish. I got to watch for him and keep him quiet. But I’m not sure he’ll make much noise anyway. Folks forget. They’ll forget the whole family.

“They won’t even remember what month it was. And he won’t, for sure. No one knows mine neither. You ain’t going to live long enough with my boy to get the yellow off his teeth or bleach out what I learned him. You’re too old.

“It wasn’t much. About when to come inside or out, is all. And if he’s found presumption to do more—and be offensive to some for the time being—I guess you ain’t going to get any good of it. Least to your face.

“I ain’t a person to have stood up for either one of them. I don’t like to see a man worrying about whether his hat is on to front or back. And taken to traveling around on foot, tucking at his shirt and leaning down to loose his shoes. But as of now I cut them off, the two of them.

“Maybe a woman ain’t fit to make something of them in the first place. Maybe I done wrong. And mine is even worse than most. Wherever them worms come from, that’s part the trouble.

“If you can be like me, and I ain’t ready to admit that, your trouble might not be more than mine. But a bad dog just gets worse. I ain’t sure what you’ll do to him; I won’t thank you for it.”

“Hattie,” Ma dropped her arm, “you better draw breath.”

The begrimed driver shook the reins, wiped her face and looked at the old woman. “Mrs. Lampson, you shouldn’t question so. It
ain’t right for you to hold out so harsh. This girl’s pure as snow.” She drove again.

“Hattie just ain’t feeling well,” said Ma. “We got to overlook it. She come along for the sake of Mulge and me. That’s enough. And she’s going to stand right up there in front of all them people whether she’s sick or not. So we got to make allowance. She’ll be nicer when it’s done. Won’t you, Hattie?”

For the last time his mother spoke and stopped mumbling. “I don’t know anything about snow. I ain’t ever seen none.”

They rode without wagon headed sails. Lava and a few skull halves cracked beneath the wheels. Towards dusk a wind from the surface of the sun swept their path and blew against them live, lightly running bunches of gray wire and weed which sang against the sides of the wagons, across the burning bush, caught in the spokes and harness, stuck like burrs in the horses’ manes. The storm passed, hardly ruffling the discomfort of so many old and rigid women.

Clare was nothing but a spot on the plain where the sand thinly billowed, kicked up by someone crossing the street, stirred by the closing of a swinging door. The women sat straight and smoothed themselves when they saw the small constant geyser raised by the mere presence of a few men. The horses suddenly began to pull, as if they too, heads to the ground, could see the camp town—Mistletoe was less than that at the time—and the hitching rail near the bare wood church.

They were stopped by a shout from the Sheriff.

“You can’t bring all them people in here. No, sir, not without a license!”

Luke, not his brother, climbed down. He beat his hat against a
sore unlimbered leg. He tucked in his shirt, loosening the muscles of his arms and back, drawing up his chest, and walked the length of the wagon train to the Sheriff.

“Howdy.” The man in khaki pants, knee high boots and Stetson, never left the barroom porch.

“I don’t see how you can keep us out,” said Luke.

The Sheriff leaned back against the post and again put the knife blade to his fingernails.

“All’s I got to do is call my boys. Of course, if you scatter, it’ll take us a little longer to round you up. But I wouldn’t.” The Sheriff brushed the parings from his vest, leaned forward and pushed the blade down a patent leather boot top to scratch his calf. The uncut nails on his red hands were longer than the manicured.

“But this here is a wedding!”

“Don’t matter. I don’t care if the whole pack aims to rut. You the man?”

“No, sir. I ain’t the one. That’s sure.”

The Sheriff raised his head and slowly scanned the wagons, looked at the quiet and waiting eyes of the women who stared back. In a low voice he muttered to the boy who stepped closer and listened with his back to the train. Then louder: “But that don’t make much difference. This town’s got a law. My men would be here in fifteen minutes, if I called.”

Luke heard the knocking of the horses. He smelled molasses and rubber gum, gun grease and a handful of browned leaves loose in a hot pants pocket. And suddenly he jumped onto the porch, two short steps loud on the swaydown boards.

“Well, now!” The Sheriff squinted.

Luke whispered in his ear. He spoke softly, using all his breath, against wax and smile, his own forehead near thick temples, his
boy’s chin low to the bulging collar. He broke out as he felt the air fall from his throat, not caring that he was unable to see the other’s eyes. The pistol butt pressed upwards against his thin stomach. The head bent slightly forward, looking for a damp match dropped in the dust. Luke spoke into it with haste, perhaps asking how many cartridges the gun would hold. The ear was yellow since the squat man, in jest when drunk, bragged and fixed into it the moist end of a smoking cigarette. Luke shut his eyes.

“All right,” the Sheriff gently stopped him, “let them by.”

The Clare geyser churned and climbed suddenly higher as they rolled.

Ma married, by bonfire light and to the music of a borrowed and portable celesta, in a roped-off lot behind the church which, at the last moment, she refused to enter. At some time, after food was found, and away from the crowd of women, Luke spread out his neckerchief and said to the Sheriff, “This here pie’s for Maverick. She ain’t never seen a wedding.”

Throughout the night, Luke’s first in town, and until the middle of the morning when the trip home was attempted, Ma sat alone by the stretched, flat, feverish body of her husband’s mother. Ma’s chair faced the open window—it was a short jump from the strange and empty room to the ground—and at her feet lay the satchel, tightly closed, and the old woman who cried out, in the racking of her shoulders and occasional thump of her hand against the floor, for sleep. Ma sat straight and listened for the sound of returning footsteps. Now and then she leaned down to dry the darkening forehead or touch the plaited hair already wild.

“You did come. And I’ve married me a torment. I deserve to sit here on a folding chair, not even able to ease you off to sleep. I nagged you the whole day. And all’s I got is a bare finger which, had a
ring been set on it—and you was right to keep it back—would have been yours, since he had none to give. It wasn’t mine to take. Nor was he. I guess it ain’t just me he’s shown he’s got no feeling for. And I can’t make it up to you. Since he’s left us both.”

 

r
ounding the corner of the Buckhouse—first four-sided, wooden shanty built among the tents, first building to turn a red false front and open hinged door on the dry grass and shapeless hills—Luke Lampson slowed his walk and stopped among the travelers still outside.

The Buckhouse had almost been a town itself and the prows and ribs of longboats, brought in by flatcar and having never reached the river, stuck up on either side in place of rock, horn, plant or doorstep in the sand. The tide had passed, leaving a small anchor and a few links of chain in the Buckhouse acreage which was marked at the farthest point by an old keg in a drift, blown over with weeds. Railroad tracks had come this way and gone. Now the slashed screens and narrow door, the green booths and back room out of town limits, faced on the highway and remained in darkness despite the headlights flashing up and past. But the frame house shook with the rumble of tires.

“What are you fellows doing here?” Luke Lampson untied his
tobacco bag and squinted into the changing colored lights that flickered outdoors from above the bar.

“Leaning, Luke.”

“Just leaning.”

“Watching the people driving by.”

They squatted in the grass by the red wall or stood, shoulders hunched against the planking, staring off at the night sky or up and down the black road. Their carrying sticks lay across their knees, ends fastened to personal belongings bundled like cabbage heads at each man’s side. Or the sticks were propped in a row at the wall, like racked rifles, and at each man’s toe there rested a woven football filled with undershirts, shoelaces and packages of glazed saltines. The red neckerchiefs, freshly tied, were new. Their coveralls were heavily dusted from the land they had crossed and they talked together, rustling newspapers in the darkness, of the last automobile they had seen.

“
Been many on the road
?” Slowly Luke fanned his hat. Heads leaned farther back, ears were scratched, possessions laid hold of, bugs flicked to the grass again. And one of them mumbled:

“About three hours back there was one. Four door.”

“Two door.”

“I reckon it was four!”

A magazine, with a zebra-skinned woman on the cover and pages damp—retrieved from a hole in the foundations of a barn—was held up to the light and admired. From beneath one pair of coveralls there thrust two shiny leather boots. A leather jacket could be seen at the collar and from the breast pocket there hung the broad white elastic strap of a pair of goggles. He did not speak but watched the cowboy with the rest.

“That must’ve been the car I met. Parked up the road apiece where the driver’s kid was snakebit.”

They stirred as if to rise and settled again, the spy among them silent, faces turned to the shadow.

“I reckon not. I don’t reckon a car like that’d ever stop out here.”

One pulled a bright new harmonica from his pocket and began to play. The man with the magazine finally turned past the cover, and from across the highway, where the store had competed with the Buckhouse ten years before, there was a sudden rustling in the brush and a pebble dropped into a hidden well.

“Keep a good watch, boys,” said Luke and squaring his hat stepped inside and up to the plywood bar. He was watched as he entered and the wheeze of the mouth organ softly faded.

Those who might have remembered that ears had been chewed off long ago in Buckhouse brawls and that women from over many borders, slipped by lax patrols, had been forced to whirl their skirts hip-high at gun point, had passed to other diggings and other cabarets of dried earth. Only a few, remembering how the fights and women had pushed their way outside and over to the porch of the store, driving the keeper through his rear window, lingered close to the old places, within a range of twenty miles.

The spangled, tinkling lantern shade, with red beads and panes of blue, still slid and turned around the single light globe, filling the quiet, summer evening air with twitching, faded streamers of color. There were twenty-two caliber bullet holes in the ceiling.

“Bowl of chowder and shot of muscatel,” said Luke. He rested his foot lightly on the lead pipe rail and stared, pinching his chin in his hands, at the cans of beer pyramided before the dusty mirror behind the bar.

“Bohn been around tonight?”

Revolving slowly, the tasseled lampshade turned the men first red, then blue, and caused dots of color to walk across the brown photograph of the dam over the mirror. The trestle, with small, erect figures holding tools posed stiffly at arm’s length, wrinkled, even under glass, across the wall. Ma had always claimed to be in the picture.

“Hey, Snake-Killer!”

Luke turned and in the last green booth, blurred and heavy in the colored lights, shirt unbuttoned and pulled aslant from white chest, he saw Camper laugh, flex the fishing pole in fat hands.

“Cowboy!” He stooped heavily to draw a match sharply on the dance floor. “You didn’t expect to see me again, eh? Or the wife either, I expect. Well, she ain’t here!” With both hands he caught the edge of the bench and laughed, turning pink as a new chip of glass slipped into place. Red mosquitoes clung to the shade.

“Howdy,” said Luke, and whispering, “I’ll take my drink and chowder at the table.”

Luke grinned, pushed his hat back over one ear, and the two men shook hands strongly, the cowboy’s arm rock hard at the elbow. Camper, with three empty glasses and fishing gear neatly spread before him, flushed, and suffering the bites of insects, still deftly and without a tremble held a reel to the light and probed, tuned, with the metallic point of a miniature screwdriver.

“I couldn’t keep away from it,” he said, “even if she hasn’t got much water in her. I had to see it.”

“I wouldn’t go on her in the dark if I was you.” Luke watched the eyes; they stared between white ears battened to the skull. “There’ll be more water in it than you think in the morning.”

“Just so there’s a foot to cover that lousy yellow ground, I don’t care. Couldn’t wait for morning. I know that dam like I know my
own golf course, every hole and trap in it.” He rubbed at the mosquito bites and for a moment was quiet, looking at the browned newspaper shot of the project above the bar.

“No. By sunup my wife’ll have the kid dressed in his swim trunks for traveling, the radio tuned up, the car loaded and headed towards sandstone and the line. I wouldn’t catch a thing.”

“You aim to try her in the dark?”

“There’s no wind, is there? There’s no danger, is there? They surface at night. I’m a hunter.” Camper twisted the head of a pin in the reel. “You took me for a tourist!” He reached across the table and shook Luke by the shoulder. “A sightseer! Why, hell, I was crawling around that river bed a whole year before they got anything like a staff of men out here. And I watched that boy drop out of sight almost before my eyes. Here, take a drink of this.”

They touched glasses and threw back their heads. The harmonica played again beyond the door.

“Say, listen,” said Camper, “before we get talking about it, and I know he’s your brother, I got something I’d like to ask you.”

Luke nodded, tightening his lips.

“I want to make a trade.”

“Well, now,” Luke lit up afresh and grinned, “I never mind a little bargaining.” He had bargained for Ma’s stove in a vacant barn on the edge of Clare, won against twenty bidders. When he bought his fourth plow pony from the Indians and paid them by note, the Mandan came with it carrying the tack, because of the color of his shirt and ferret jaws.

“I’ll oblige you. As best I’m able.” Hearing a slight sound or sensing that slit eyes had opened, darkly over his shoulder he added, “You keep yourself out of this, Sam. And bring another bottle.” His own eyes were on the man stopping in town just for the night, who
might make of! before sunrise, leave quickly when there were others on the street or be two hundred miles away before finding himself the loser. Luke never moved his head.

“Well, I’ll tell you right off.” Camper leaned forward and flatly said, “I’ve got to have those steerhorn boots of yours.” He drank unsteadily and spoke before he finished wiping his mouth, “Got to. They’ve been on my mind ever since you fixed up the kid.”

Luke slumped back against the soft new paint of the booth. “I never do anything without considering it.” He spoke softly. “What would Bohn think if I gave away my boots?”

“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?”