The Hour of Lead (27 page)

For the most part, he'd pounded himself into a hard shape, but, in his infirm moments, he recalled Wendy's fingers measuring and cutting his hair as if they were expert at touching him. She had worked from behind and her breasts listed into his back. His soaped hair wet his skin, and her breath, when she scrutinized her work, warmed it. In his room, tacked to the wood-paneled walls, were magazine photographs, a hundred different faces. The only thing they shared was some resemblance to her.

He had not thought of his mother's name nor heard it in twenty years. Seeing the word in a forty-year-old newspaper rattled him. He hauled the issue to a desk with a light where he could see her better. The pages had yellowed and the pictures appeared transparent as ghosts. She was pretty, beautiful even, and the boy, well, he was just a boy.

He walked to city hall and opened the building with his master key and hunted Lawson's paperwork. None appeared to exist, which in itself was not surprising. He had no trouble putting the woman who had taken him and his mother in to the name Lawson and recognized them as mother and son. And she had shared her house with Wendy Worden as well. Finally he found, years later in the records, a scrawled marriage certificate: Wendy Worden to Matthew L. Lawson. He lit a cigarette and chuckled. His visitor had wanted a hired hand, but this work he would have performed for free.

In his office, he called the counties in the eastern portion of the state. He spoke to deputies because at one time or another he'd antagonized each county's sheriff with his unwillingness to extradite prisoners. Most saw law as something of a fraternity and expected assistance from their brethren. Lucky, though, wasn't inclined toward brotherly love. Most every county knew a big man who had raised hell. Lawson's features were plain: brown eyes, brown hair; there was little left for an edge aside from his size.

Lucky drove through town in his squad car. He pulled over a high school boy for chirping his tires. He got out of his car with his citation book, but the air was cool and crisp and the trees white with frost. The streets were small and lined with well-kept houses, lights splashed some windows, and smoke barreled from the chimneys. A black line of state highway cut through town. Cars eased over the slick road, and a yellow county truck had begun sanding. It was a nice place to live, more pleasant than most. He let the boy off with a warning, then went back and cleaned out his desk. It had been a good job, to his liking anyhow.

29

C
OULEE
D
AM WAS TWO TOWNS
. One, a row of flat single-floored houses that rimmed the river's east side, was inhabited by the engineers who conjured the sorcery required to stop a million years of river and the contractors entrusted to fashion their witchery into steel and concrete. The other, a cluttered array of canvas tents, had been hurriedly erected to house those who performed the labor.

The dam itself was busy as a hive. On both sides of the river powder monkeys drilled and blasted. Their explosions shook the coulee all hours of a day, dust and rock scattering hundreds of feet every direction. Below, loaders filled twenty-ton belly dumpers with unnaturally sheared granite slabs, which they deposited upon the riprap lining both riverbanks. On the cleared cliffs, jackhammer operators dangled by ropes a hundred feet from the top to beat the rock smooth. Drillers in a similar apparatus followed, auguring rebar and conduit into the rock to secure the structure. In the river, another crew drove enormous squared pylons into the bottom until they had constructed a watertight circle a quarter acre or so. Pumps pulled
the water clear and steam shovels clawed the mud to bedrock. Then more jackhammers and rebar, and then forms, then concrete.

The quartermaster offered Matt and Wendy a blanket and sheets and assigned Matt bucket duty on a cement crew. The job consisted of waiting for the crane to dip a bucket into wet cement; he then straddled the boom cable, his feet balanced upon the bucket lip until over the pour site. The crane operator could hydraulic the bucket shut with gears, but once filled, the pressure couldn't manage the weight and a man was required. The bucket jockey kicked the latches until the concrete fell from under him. The chore required booting both the bucket sides free at once. If not, the bucket wobbled and the man hung on one foot, or worse, dangled by his hands on the boom cable. Or, the jockey could split and end up straddling both halves. Fighting for balance swung the cable, which caused the bucket to spin or buckle.

The hand opposite Matt was named Mills, a gaunt fellow with a weathered brow and a beard that saw a razor once a week at most. A ball cap hooded his eyes, and he would screw it to his ears before each pass. They didn't speak; even their lunches had been staggered to keep one crane in operation.

•

H
IS FIRST PAYDAY
, M
ATT DID
not have time enough to draw. He saw to it that Wendy and the child were fed and down, then toted a cut log in front of the tent for a stool and started a fire. A few campfires glowed: lead men; the lines of lackeys, like Matt himself, climbed the beaten trails to Grand Coulee's B Street. Dawn, they returned. A lantern or flashlight occasionally bobbed, leading their way, the men shadows and laughter. Some wretched. The night was like so much water, a few feet in front or behind and the rest was a mystery. It was not unlike day in that regard.

Each man fought to his bunk, shackled to his lot. Matt had no call to lord it over them. They would wake in pain, but so would he. Alcohol wouldn't be the source, but drinking didn't form drunks either. Matt remained sentinel at his self-assigned post all day Saturday and through the night once more, ceasing only to fetch meals or retrieve firewood. Sunday morning, the low fog socked itself inside the coulee then burned off. Most of the men lingered in the tents even after the breakfast call. Matt listened as they groused through late morning until they emptied their whiskey jugs and resorted to concocting cocktails of gasoline and milk called Heat.

The only consistency was the river. Its hum continued despite the plans and toiling of the hundreds on its banks. Behind Matt, inside the tent, were a wife and a child. He wanted to be filled with them like the drunks with their bottle, like the channel with its river, but he was too leaky a vessel. They might fill him and fill him until they were empty and still he would be, as well. Wendy saw that and, as the months passed, kept Angel with her nights. Children loved so hard they inherited their parents' wounds, and Wendy hoped to suture the child before she bled out.

For a while, he and Wendy sipped the hot, bitter coffee. Church bells clanged, and motors started throughout the town. Matt watched cars back from their driveways and cross the bridge downriver in procession.

“You ever go to church?” he asked Wendy.

She nodded. “For a while. I didn't care for it and I was stubborn.”

“I wished I'd gone,” Matt said.

“You did,” she told him. “You used to come get me right after.”

She worked her coffee and spoke nothing more. Matt listened to her breaths. He saw her lingering, owning the words to soothe him but not the sentiment. After nineteen years, Matt had encountered her once again on the porch of his mother's house. The evening was soundless, not even cattle lowed in the pastures. Old Peach was
silent, just foundations and burned wood. A deer herd explored the streets and browsed lawns. Matt peered toward the knoll where he'd buried Luke and his father.

“Them roses must be hardy.”

“I tended them,” she said. “I lived here.”

Here?”

“With your mother,” Wendy said.

This stopped Matt.

“My Lord,” he said. “You took care of her and the place.”

She nodded.

“I can't leave this baby,” he said.

“I wouldn't expect so,” Wendy replied.

The Justice of the Peace was an old deputy. In lieu of a pension, he earned fifty dollars a month to arrange the burials of those too poor for the trimmings and marrying folks too godless for church, he stared at the ruffian before him and the poor woman and child he would marry him to.

“You want to do this?” he asked the woman.

Wendy didn't reply. The land was gone, but her father would invest in another business in a town on higher ground. Considering what the government offered on the ranches, a business would fetch enough to start clean, with inventory. In time, Wendy would likely manage the enterprise. Her father trusted her. But that path required a retreat, if not stated implied, and she did not yet have surrender in her. It was poor rationale for marrying a man but it was hers.

“The country is drowning but that don't mean you got to marry the first deadbeat that asks, child or not. I can find you work and a bunk.”

“I do,” Wendy said.

“I haven't asked yet.”

“Well, when you do, that's my answer.”

The man delivered the vows and they repeated the parts meant for each and signed a certificate.

As for Matt, his mother had abandoned her land, which was only a memory anyway; the money for it was in her purse, where it should be, he figured. Like an animal, he reverted to instinct. He worked through the mountains the next three days. The snow was four feet high in places and travel slow. Queenie bounded gamely through the drifts for an hour but eventually abandoned them for better prospects. As they climbed, the tree shapes turned poorly drawn cones, abstractions of trees as if snow had commandeered the Earth's contours, scooping and piling horizons with the wind before freezes until the thaws clotted them into new forms. Twice the horses stepped into deep hollows beneath the hoary cloak. The wish of the horses' hooves punching through the snowpack and the creak of their saddles and possibles and the occasional clang of the bridles against their metal hoops were all that punctuated the silence. Matt remained on the glean for a sign he could recall or a site to weather night. She followed like a tired soldier. He couldn't guess what she thought, so he made no attempt.

Camps, they rolled themselves together under heavy blankets in a snow cave, the child between them like a stove heating two rooms. That Wendy remained mornings when he woke and stoked the fire and boiled the coffee still confounded him. He guessed she'd set off any time and a thing in him welcomed her parting; her silence, agreeable at almost any other time in his life, served to remind him only now of the stilled voices in his head.

They discovered a Forest Service hut for the summer fire watch. Inside were a stove and a single bed frame. The child fussed and Wendy opened a leather satchel and offered her a frilly shirt. She fisted the lace and rubbed it in her hands and finally chewed it to a grey mush. Evening, Matt returned with an elk's hindquarters. The rest he had lashed to a high tree bough to deny the coyotes a share.
A half jug of milk remained, and Matt fed the baby while Wendy turned the elk steaks, substituting a tin plate for a skillet. Frying the meat evenly was impossible so what they ate was both seared and raw, and the black blood slid down their chins as if they were animals ten thousand years before when fire was as much a threat as a boon.

Wendy reclined on their pallet and gazed at a gap where the mud hadn't stuck between the log walls. Matt stood and undressed himself. He bent himself and knelt at her side. She lifted her hands to fend him off, then stared at them there. She shook her head in surrender and undressed.

Matt saw her privates under him, just a hair-covered mouth swallowing his own makings. He felt like the air had thinned. Wendy's eyes closed and her face clenched. She whimpered. After, Matt dressed and stood sentry outside, staring at the moon. He wondered if he could ever touch a person without busting them open.

The baby began a wet hack the second week. Matt hooked his little finger into her tiny throat and dragged green phlegm from her. When she went feverish, Wendy employed cold rags and steamed water, but it did little good.

“Are you going to let us die?” Wendy asked. She needed him like food. She'd taken his name and his watery seed not for what she felt or even what she remembered of him, but for his presence. He could find food and keep a fire. He could frighten others. It wasn't desire blocking her way to Matt, but it did not move her his direction either. The mistake of the boy embarrassed her and it had worn a track into her memory.

“Would you like it better if I did?”

She smiled. He had returned her faithlessness with his own. He commenced to prepare the horses and after a time, she disappeared into the cabin to wrap the baby. They rode that night into the village
of Kettle Falls. The ferry was closed and they forded a narrow place below the kettles the Indians scaffolded for the salmon run. Their wet clothes froze to them as soon as they left the river. Matt had tied Angel into a bundle and strapped her to his back, which kept her dry. The doctor's wife answered the door. The doctor put a plastic tent over the child and a machine pumped treated steam into it. Three days later, Angel was well enough for travel and they headed to the coulee and work.

And now he had work, but little more. Wendy offered him the baby, now four months old. He took her and dropped his face close and allowed her tiny hand to tap it. Her eyes blinked at him like he was the sky. She rarely cried; Wendy often cited her worth on such matters. Matt figured it differently. Crying did no good; it was wasted time. The child was only being smart.