“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?”
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.”