“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.
no one wants to hear what I got to say,” said Ma.
Day or night could not be measured by what she did or the way she dressed. Her bedding on the floor was always open and roughed as if she had just climbed wearily from it or was about to lay herself down again for a moment’s uneasy rest. She napped all through the night. The sun might be breaking or clouding over as she stood at the stove changing her dressing, reaching for the roll of bandage between the red bottle and pepper tin, peering at her forearm sore by the light of the coals. She stood on a little patch of carpet before the stove summer or winter, in the early evening or the long middle breath of the night, and wore her stocking cap and slippers, daytime dress and high socks.