The Beetle Leg (9 page)

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,” said 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.

 

f
our 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.

“Look,” said Camper, “fish won’t bite after four o’clock.”

“What good will they do you?” The Finn danced on the metal beneath his heels. “You’d better be out taking pictures—you got a flash?—or buying some mosquito dope if you aim to stay.”

“Harry,” Luke shook himself and touched the black-winged arm, “shall we show them a thing or two?”

Slowly they started up the road.

Properly, absorbed in care, they prepared to bury Luke Lampson’s mother on the bluff. The body, not changed the least five hours after death, strong as ever in constitution, had spent no time in the Lampson cabin but waited for interment helplessly by the side of the grave. That morning she had predicted hail. Luke spoke for them all: “We better cart her over before it starts.”

But a calm settled on them when the spot was reached, firm sight of the trench fixed narrowly in the ground determining each to take his time. They made allowance for the storm. Deliberate movements and dry throats, long faces and speculation lengthened the afternoon and suspended the effects of sun and cloud. Her last word done—Luke sent a message with the body—no argument was given in the presence of his mother and not a memory nor bitter sentiment invoked. Each suggestion, and members of the party wished to express no more, was wrapped in several minutes’ contemplation and answered in silence by those immediate to the dead.

Hattie Lampson wanted to cause no trouble. After her prediction, coming at the time it did and despite the morning sun, was taken as more than a warning and caused Luke to walk far in the empty lots for horses, she forced quiet even upon herself and attempted to appear asleep. But the eye of a woman who felled eagles with a rifle and downed them to bounce in the dust with heads smashed by a single dum-dum bullet, fluttered and refused to flatten permanently until she spoke:

“Don’t leave me about this house. Just put me over Mulge, just lie me so as I can look down on him.”

Her surviving son’s old friends, receiving the actual remains among them and charged with picking the location, repeated the message to each other several times until they straightened her on the
ground they thought she meant and dug beside her. They sighted along shovels and determined that she hover where she wished.

“Do you think she might find it better down aways?”

“She can’t be fooled. There’s just one proper view of him. She knowed that, even when she ain’t been up this way for months.”

They nodded and neatly tamped the sides of the grave. The distance between the words that came from her own mouth and the choice they finally made, by disturbing the earth, was great. But once at work, cutting a thin cube and shoveling a place that would be ringed round with visitors ever after—since she was specifically located and he was not and few wanted to traipse a whole mile and perhaps not even find him—they felt her satisfied and spoke no more about it. They were the artisans, even less concerned with her long life than the lawfully compassioned who gathered as quickly as they could and stayed until the burial, when ended, brought a hasty darkness following on the edge of the storm.

She died young. Deformities around the mouth and unraveling lines in face and hands were hardly honored by those who peered some hundred miles to the sunset and who said: “She looks to be about the same, I guess.” Except for the Slide, hers was the first Gov City death and, catastrophe or not, was the first natural death among them. Many were as old as she in frame and flesh, were just as keen and liable to the same youthful, pretended sleep. But they were allowed to attend her death and stared long, now and then, at the sleeveless gown and shoes hooked on her at the end.

Hattie Lampson had not been snatched away. Man or woman, perhaps they expected the sudden disappearance, the fault in the shell of earth and death between shifts. They had clamored once, found nothing to do, hardly anything to see. Wreaths, if available, could never be dropped from a safe spot into mud. Cries and an excuse for
history came by accident without an hour of sorrow or memorable handling of the dead.

The completion of the grave was the first event, accomplished more rapidly than planned with the easy removal of the lumps of earth. Arrivals appeared slowly. Climbing the bluff, they paused for breath and, having been told where they would find her, face up and sleeping as fixedly as stone—there was no chance to lose her—they looked heavenward and speculated on the cloudburst. Without alarm, more reticent than ever, had they decided on or even wished for the construction of a coffin, it might have taken forty days to ready, working on weekends and in the evening. As it was, the earth was excavated, tools already cleaned and out of sight, and nothing remained but to take their time and study her, discuss it, seal her in and loosen on their heads the hail that waited in abeyance.

Perhaps a slight wind should have hummed across the miles of black land, bearing the faint lowing of faraway cattle or the sound of wheels grinding on Luke’s wagon. But there was only air enough for each and no sign of her living son until he actually carried her hand-chest into their midst, seesawing heavily on his shoulder. Ma and the Mandan stayed behind him.

“Sit down, Luke. There’s no rush.”

They pointed to his mother on the ground. They used no nails. Hers was a fair embroidery and the expression on the closed, depressed face—wise at the small curves of the mouth, a few scattered inclinations on the brow—was the same that settled on or pinched her when her boys had not come home.

Luke sent her out of the cabin to the tableland when she died. He sent her into the charge of friends who, while he cleared her things, expressed to herself, not him, their sanction and willingness to help. He left open the door and windows when he set out with the chest
and the two women who, including himself, Hattie Lampson in the end firmly claimed to be her family.

Not many wanted anything from the trunk. Her last deposit, it was divided into one pile they could choose from and one to discard. She herself had once pulled the travois that carried it. Now it was lightened and, as hinges noiselessly crumpled, was relieved of the furniture of the dead. They took without asking and gave no thanks to a process that bestowed upon them only cloth and clay.

Each man present looked at her, not having to breathe the heat, loosely covered, and some noticed that she no longer wore her spectacles and that the lids appeared white and tired: “But not her face in general, mind you. Don’t reckon that’s changed at all.”

And each man recognized to speak with a friend or two and, if silent, looked long at strangers as if they also had touched her and taken up some trinket from a dusty pocket, an object slowly appropriated from the crocheted shroud. A few left empty handed. But, while on the bluff, jaws set and without moving a pace, they stalked in the sand the pleated, stitched ninety pounds of the dead.

Her son, who never had listened to her, lay below. She was on top, shaded by followers, clasped in a small rigorous attitude beside a grave that did not gape nor call attention to itself. Those mutterings that were not speech, but which she unconditionally declaimed and seemed to have meaning to herself, were done. The peppered, flat sealed nose, the small sloping top of the skull wherein once lay the secret of preserving health in the dry heat of the afternoon and of remaining lazy, this aboriginal shape of hers was done with chores and elevated to extreme old age. Not having died in some drinkless caravan blown under the sand, not even strong enough for a trip to her son’s grave mile in final days of life, it could at least be said that she would remain intact as long as any in earth or burial cave. They
readied beads to drop beside her. The volunteer, who undertook to fulfill her own last wish and make of her a landmark, to dispose of her, to make and break a final contact between the live and dead, squinted toward the plain, then at the halted sky, and shook his head. He lifted her.