The Beetle Leg

in 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.

“No supper. You’re too late.”

“That’s right,” Bohn’s eyes in the plate, hiding the mouth with the back of his hand, “kitchen’s closed.”

For Lou his mouth was open, his chin still sagged. The berries, the purple fish roe, still hung in the air and filled a vanished face; she saw a crawling, half digested bunch of grapes, a birthmark — at a single mouthful — swelling into sight between his lips. Bohn never looked at her again.

He had an old man’s kidney. He had an old man’s tumorous girth and thickly dying wind, a hardening on the surface of his armpits. Chest and shoulders were solidified against youth, bulged in what he assumed to be the paunch of middle age; he was strapping, suffered a neuralgia in winter, a painful unlimbering in the spring. A few fingers were broken, snubbed, since an old man labors from stone to knife to saw to possible tractor accident and back to the single burning of a match flame short in argument. He could laugh, sparsely, at the exploits of men over fifty who enacted, he believed, all they claimed; his own prowess, he told them, had been struck off, like a head of hair, by maturity. And he was, except for a few patches that had to be shaved monthly by a barber, bald; lost by pernicious exposure to the sun, kept from water and finally pulled out one night in a troubled sleep by bloody, rasping fingertips. He mimicked, with unclean, pyretic dignity, the limp folds under the chin, the cockles in the cheeks, the gasp of wisdom and inflammation, the rock-like, seasoned cough of the prime, half invalided buck.

Bohn argued at, commanded his world and saw it under the pale of bitter years when imaginary friends die off. From this weathered mask and within this swollen body of whore-wounded time — he was thirty years old — skipped eyes blue and lively, curious for abuse, soured at the sight of visiting women passing close and strange among the undershirts, the beards of the members of his town.

“Thegna’s finished for the day, pooed over all the cabbage you care to, ain’t you, Thegna?” And now and then, instead of speaking to or looking at the mustang buster, he thrust an arm across the table, struck the wood to keep the small man in his place. “You loved the boys already, ain’t you, Thegna?” The one arm on her waist, the other, just out of reach, aiming at the Finn, “In Fat Chance worried all of us at once.”

Lou looked quickly at the small but rotund cook.

Bohn broke away. He stood up and immediately, with a clatter of sticks, the frail, the chronically thin ex-rider left the table.

Bohn stopped in the doorway and whispered once more to the trussed and stocky, water-eyed and trembling woman. “Thegna, did you pull on your big hip boots when the dam slid in?”

She nodded, back against the stove, and continued to bow up and down her flushed and weeping head. The apron shot up in warm and baffled flight.

“Thegna here will learn you,” he said as he quickly passed the flash of blue-green silk.

Lou escaped the flaying of the tumbling canes.

He shied, big and halting as he was, at the web texture of the flyless slacks and at the emerald apparatus that lived and breathed, but further at the metal relic buried in the middle of her chest, visible, through the silk, in its modest wedge. At that time it was the only cross in Mistletoe, Lou the only woman despite several who gathered in the cook’s room for cards.

Below the window and under the stare of searchlights brilliant atop dry and root choked posts, a file of creaking men sat still the length of the dormitory wall. Their backs were encrusted to the glittering tar board and they could not stir, singly mushroomed in a row, did not twist white and curious faces toward the upstairs window at the sound of women, the exchange, starting overhead, of far carrying tones and smiles. The sound was enough, was robbed of sweetness near the ground by the chemically white light and itching in their feet; by the guitar that was struck now and then shortly above the rattling of the pails, crouched upon by the player who sang, suddenly muffled, as a man talking to himself and not in serenade.

Tin helmets at their sides, after a day of clinging to the turbine tower and before bed, they stilled the creeping of the fungus across their feet by immersion, waved them automatically, spreading the toes, in the medicinal, violet fluid that filled the pails. Septic patches of flaking skin and trails of the discharge from the soles of their feet caked the bottoms of their shoes and in the early morning reimpregnated cooling sores, fired, a sudden yeast, under men’s weight on the earth. But at night they rolled their trousers above the knee, sat still. Beyond the crushed glass of the lot they faced and away in the darkness, stretched open snares and painful walks, sand, black brush and the dam. They hung their heads, at night retreated in blue denim and with phosphorescent joints and bones to the gritty wall — and did not, after women slept and from the porch of a store, watch through heavy cobwebbed evenings for a moonrise. The women were awake.

“You better tell me about him,” demanded Lou. She leaned at the window and several times, in the beginning, looked down on the black and waxen heads, well lit naked legs, the narrow backs. “Been here before and damned himself. Or had a good time.” She glanced down again — searchlights hit her egg blue breast and sparkling cross — and breathed deeply, staring after caterpillars curled on a branch. “He’s short.” She looked at the gold braids, tarnished, at the cook with canvas hips, and she began to breathe like the fat woman, through her mouth. Already, giggling and without a word, the cook’s head shook in denial, admitting no eye on her bosom, no rocks thrown. “He sweats in bed,” said Camper’s wife. “He can stick things into himself and not feel. If he’s mad he cries. Remember?”

The journeying man was followed: a bandog with a trailing chain, by fighters brawling a hundred steps behind, by a fish that escaped in the years before or a woman pointing no sooner had he passed. He stepped fidgeting through the darkness, thinking now and then of the dead man, while, in the body of one and the backbiting of the other, he was described between two women lashed together for the night.

“A blue spot on his chest? Punches you in his sleep? Come on,” Lou urged in the foreknowledge of a young girl, “you weren’t just cooking all that time.” And she played upon the drawstrings of the bag they shared, pledged that dual experience imposed by birth — in its welter all men were innocent — to outlast, roundabout and broad, the lone conception men carried in a joke and for which they fought time and again. “Any other place I wouldn’t have missed him,” trying to judge the years and deducting pounds accordingly, squinting at the woman’s shape of old, “telling me he just come here to fish! He can do that in the bathtub.” And the cook stood stolid, no keener than when she had backed against the stove.

Lou flung away her own blonde hair. She slouched, eyes level with the cook’s, gained weight, inched like a man to the window where perfume would be safely lost into the salty night. Had she a bandana she would have tied it around her head, blown out her cheeks. She hid her bright fingers in the pockets of her slacks. She swayed, gone white, as if she too had just kissed a mouth thick with pie and tobacco leaves, just come from a man in black blucher shoes and pants swelled with a bladder beneath the belt. “Think,” she said, “I want to know. Did he have the nerve?” Then, against the snapping of the guitar and smell of scattered red pepper seeds: “He ran straight to it all right. Like a buried bone!”

Thegna revolved, clapped both hands into crimson cheeks and spun so that the back of her head became as blunt and sealed as her face. Her eyes disappeared, popped in pain — nerves, glitter, fluid— into her head as in laughter an egg or thimble is suddenly swallowed whole and the body continues to shake while vomiting through the nose. In the old days Thegna had fired upon thieving Indians, shot her rifle on the fourth of July and, unarmed, stormed once to the reservation to organize a convention of stercoricolous squaws. She was the first to order a crystal set and the last to give up wearing a money belt. One braid flew loose and clung flatly to her shortened arm’s thick end, one breast trailed the other.

“Stop it,” hissed Camper’s wife, “shut up!”

But the laughter of the cook was dry, the fat goose flurry came in silence and the earth jug color rose, ebbed, beamed from her body, friendless, harmless, a howl on lips too old to part. Without stopping or turning to the door she spoke: “Fatima,” words clearly, distinctly extracted from the pounding bulk, “this is the visiting lady. She’ll play with us.”

Three disappointed women and then a fourth made long-jointed simple gestures toward the chairs they wished to sit in. They smelled of the tedder and handfuls of dry grass. Their heads turned slowly from objects knocked against to the cook, to Camper’s wife, moved along a thread of angular, impaired vision with apologetic sidelong sweeps, with shrugs of caution. They took single heavy steps as if the room had been reversed since the night before. Tall, large bones easily injured, deprived of something they were intent upon, not noticing and hardly afraid of the stranger, they fiddled, settled to restlessness somehow conscious of the years it would take them to make friends.

“You sit anywhere, Mrs.,” said the cook, “we don’t play partners.”

And Lou heard a sudden back country blow on metal strings — a hand clapped across the neck of the guitar below — and thought, bitterly hoped, that it might jerk them into the corridors, send them dancing.

A few old couples waltzed. They came from some watering point, perhaps near the hills, or from some dry plot of garden even further away than One Hundred Acres Grassland. Their overalls bagged, buttons flashed, armpits darkened halfway to belts and sashes.

Luke looked them over. He stepped by silent women, by men fanning themselves with wide brimmed hats, and approached the band. The cornet player stood up. Streamers sagged the whole length of the gym, and the raffling wheel, red, yellow and green with rusty nails driven round the hub to catch the tab and pick the winner, was pushed out of the way behind the bandstand, taller than a man.

The two dime collectors at the door in white shirtsleeves and muddy boots, shared a pack of cigarettes and ripped matches across their britches. They began to whistle a song together that their fathers, two buddy muckers, had taught them from Reshuffle days.

“Hey, Luke,” two little girls stood out of reach and clutched each other’s arms, “where’s Mr. Bohn? Where is he, Luke?”

He considered for a moment and then: “Bohn ain’t worked his way up this far as yet.”

An old man and woman, he in his straw sun hat and she hiding her face in smiles, were urged to keep dancing by scattered applause and the hoots of children.

“Great dance, eh, Luke?”

As the man with moustaches saw Luke stride to the shower stairs, he called, “If Bohn gets here, I’ll tell him he needs a good cold washing.”

“Much obliged.”

Luke switched on the light, cut loose the torrent of water piped directly from the dam, left his boots on the bottom step and catching his breath, soaped and drenched himself. The slippery wooden slats cut into and relieved his itching feet.

The stalls were made of planking from the scaffolds. Black and smooth after years of steaming and under the spray of alkaline soap, uneven in height and thickness, chopped into bath hole walls and darkened by ten years of scrubbers, these boards had been the beams and stanchions of the trestle across the river, had been the ribs and machine marred decks of barges. They were salvaged from long piles on the banks, turned from sea craft to bridge, to tool shed, scrapped and saved. They were never burned. A few long awkward unsinkable beams had been hooked from the still churning water around the catastrophe itself. They survived the Slide, floated and were towed landward to dry. At one time the river was filled with the lattice of new lumber, white sawdust fell on the muddy current and the prairie ranchers, riding out of the dunes and through the tents on the bluff to watch, saw wood come into the sand country and not only cut, but cut to special sizes. They stole it until guards mounted on the piles. Then they joined the crews to be near it.

The walls of the shower stalls were rough above the shoulder line from hobnail boots and still bore the deep impression of the chains. The spike holes were large enough to peer through. Meetings were made in the showers, began or ended there in the roar of midnight waters behind soaked green trenchcoats hung across the openings. The waste troughs under the floor slats were caked white and year after year pieces of soap, fallen through the bars, clogged the wired drains, turned thick and dissolved.

Luke washed under his arms, hunching forward to keep his hat and cigarette out of the wild stream, stuck one leg and then the other into the spray and hopped out, shaking, cold, standing on his toes as if he still wore high heels. He hurried to the stairway, a white bowlegged ranger dressed down to the neck and was dry before the shirt, pants and boots were pulled from the heap. He swung shut the iron wheel of the valve and heard the many damp closets dripping in the darkness.

He reached the landing of the stairs in time to hear the shooting, to see the musicians jump and the old men slam the women out of the way. He heard the grinding of the tires, the squawk of mudguard mounted horns, the scraping of the rider’s boots steadying their machines. One of the dime collectors appeared in the doorway.

“Do they come in or not?”

They listened and some peered into the darkness beyond. They could see only the other dime collector watching his feet. Luke climbed to the bandstand. Some went to one side of the room, a few to the other. Luke counted the hands.

By a terrible application of brakes and a violent twisting of accelerators, the heavy engined motorcycles ground into a tight, whirling, dust-churning circle in the center of the street as the drivers threw down one heel and lay the machines on their sides, jerkined Indians. They made three revolutions, knocking stones against the gymnasium walls. The Red Devils worked and struggled in their glistening saddles to brake and then explode the engines as the silver ornaments, the enormous taillamps, the sleek black gas tanks ending in their crotches blazed in the light from the doorway. Their gauntlets grasped and pulled on the widespread steel horns.

Several of the light cycles were doubly ridden but in the speed, the smoke, the clamor, it was impossible to tell which were men and which women. At the end of the last circle the lead machine and its small tightly belted driver cut off in a straight line toward the south and in a thin, flashing column the Red Devils disappeared into the black country and the exhaust flares clipped out one by one.

The raised windows and grates rattled for a moment with the sudden, unpleasant chock and starting of engines and the band began to play.

“They had jewels all over them,” said the boy.

Luke wiped his face, throat and upper chest with his neckerchief. “We don’t want to hear about it,” he said.