Dennis stepped back, taking his hand off Chub’s shoulder, and stuck an elbow in Al’s ribs.
“You see that, Al? Now there’s a smart man. That’s the thing Uncle Tom didn’t bargain for. Chub, you can count on Al and me to do just that little thing.”
“Do just what little thing?” asked Chub, genuinely puzzled.
“Like you said. If the job goes wrong, the boss gets blamed. So if the boss don’t behave, the job goes wrong.”
“Uh-huh,” agreed Al with the conviction of mental simplicity.
Chub double-took this extraordinary logical process and grasped wildly at anger as the conversation slid out from under him. “I didn’t say any such thing! This job is goin’ to get done, no matter what! There’ll be no damn goldbrick badge on me or anybody else around here if I can help it.”
“That’s the ol’ fight,” feinted Dennis. “We’ll show that guy what we think of his kind of slowdown.”
“You talk too much,” said Chub, and escaped with the remnants of coherence. Every time he talked with Dennis he walked away feeling as if he had an unwanted membership card stuck in his pocket that he couldn’t throw away with a clear conscience.
Rivera ran his road up under the bluff, swung the Seven around, punched out the master clutch and throttled down, idling. Tom was making his pass with the pan, and as he approached, Rivera slipped out of the seat and behind the tractor, laying a sensitive hand on the final drive casing and sprocket bushings, checking for overheating. Tom pulled alongside and beckoned him up on the pan tractor.
“Que pasa, Goony? Anything wrong?”
Rivera shook his head and grinned. “Nothing wrong. She is perfect, that ‘de siete.’ She—”
“That what? ‘Daisy Etta’?”
“De siete. In Spanish, D-7. It means something in English?”
“Got you wrong,” smiled Tom. “But Daisy Etta is a girl’s name in English, all the same.”
He shifted the pan tractor into neutral and engaged the clutch, and jumped off the machine. Rivera followed. They climbed aboard the Seven, Tom at the controls.
Rivera said, “Daisy Etta,” and grinned so widely that a soft little clucking noise came from behind his back teeth. He reached out his hand, crooked his little finger around one of the tall steering clutch levers, and pulled it all the way back. Tom laughed outright.
“You got something there,” he said. “The easiest runnin’ cat ever built. Hydraulic steerin’ clutches and brakes that’ll bring you to a dead stop if you spit on ’em. Forward an’ reverse lever so’s you got all your speeds front and backwards. A little different from the old jobs. They had no booster springs, eight-ten years ago; took a sixty-pound pull to get a steerin’ clutch back. Cuttin’ a side-hill with an angle-dozer really was a job in them days. You try it sometime, dozin’ with one hand, holdin’ her nose out o’ the bank with the other, ten hours a day. And what’d it get you? Eighty cents an hour an’ ” — Tom took his cigarette and butted the fiery end out against the horny palm of his hand — “these.”
“Santa Mariai!”
“Want to talk to you, Goony. Want to look over the bluff, too, at that stone up there. It’ll take Kelly pret’ near an hour to get this far and sumped in, anyhow.”
They growled up the slope, Tom feeling the ground under the four-foot brush, taking her up in a zigzag course like a hairpin road on a mountainside. Though the Seven carried a muffler on the exhaust stack that stuck up out of the hood before them, the blat of four big cylinders hauling fourteen tons of steel upgrade could outshout any man’s conversation, so they sat without talking, Tom driving, Rivera watching his hands flick over the controls.
The bluff started in a low ridge running almost the length of the little island, like a lopsided backbone. Towards the centre it rose abruptly, sent a wing out towards the rocky outcropping at the beach where their equipment had been unloaded, and then rose again to a small, almost square plateau area, half a mile across. It was humpy and rough until they could see all of it, when they realized how incredibly level it was, under the brush and ruins that covered it. In the centre — and exactly in the centre they realized suddenly — was a low, overgrown mound. Tom threw out the clutch and revved her down.
“Survey report said there was stone up here,” Tom said, vaulting out of the seat. “Let’s walk around some.”
They walked towards the knoll, Tom’s eyes casting about as he went. He stooped down into the heavy, short grass and scooped up a piece of stone, blue-grey, hard and brittle.
“Rivera — look at this. This is what the report was talking about. See — more of it. All in small pieces, though. We need big stuff for the bog if we can get it.”
“Good stone?” asked Rivera.
“Yes, boy — but it don’t belong here. Th’ whole island’s sand and marl and sandstone on the outcrop down yonder. This here’s a bluestone, like diamond clay. Harder’n blazes. I never saw this stuff on a marl hill before. Or near one. Anyhow, root around and see if there is any big stuff.”
They walked on. Rivera suddenly dipped down and pulled grass aside.
“Tom — here’s a beeg one.”
Tom came over and looked down at the corner of stone ticking up out of the topsoil. “Yeh. Goony, get your girl-friend over here and we’ll root it out.”
Rivera sprinted back to the idling dozer and climbed aboard. He brought the machine over to where Tom waited, stopped, stood up and peered over the front of the machine to locate the stone, then sat down and shifted gears. Before he could move the machine Tom was on the fender beside him, checking him with a hand on his arm.
“No, boy — no. Not third. First. And half throttle. That’s it. Don’t try to bash a rock out of the ground. Go on up to it easy; set your blade against it, lift it out, don’t boot it out. Take it with the middle of your blade, not the corner — get the load on both hydraulic cylinders. Who told you to do like that?”
“No one tol’ me, Tom. I see a man do it, I do it.”
“Yeah? Who was it?”
“Dennis, but—”
“Listen, Goony, if you want to learn anything from Dennis, watch him while he’s on a pan. He dozes like he talks. That reminds me — what I wanted to talk to you about. You ever have any trouble with him?”
Rivera spread his hands. “How I have trouble when he never talk to me?”
“Well, that’s all right then. You keep it that way. Dennis is O.K., I guess, but you better keep away from him.”
He went on to tell the boy then about what Peebles had said concerning being an operator and a mechanic at the same time. Rivera’s lean dark face fell, and his hand strayed to the blade control, touching it lightly, feeling the composition grip and the machined locknuts that help it. When Tom had quite finished he said:
“O.K., Tom — if you want, you break ’em, I feex ’em. But if you wan’ help some time, I run Daisy Etta for you, no?”
“Sure, kid, sure. But don’t forget, no man can do everything.”
“You can do everything,” said the boy.
Tom leaped off the machine and Rivera shifted into first and crept up to the stone, setting the blade gently against it. Taking the load, the mighty engine audibly bunched its muscles; Rivera opened the throttle a little and the machine set solidly against the stone, the tracks slipping, digging into the ground, piling loose earth up behind. Tom raised a fist, thumb up, and the boy began lifting his blade. The Seven lowered her snout like an ox pulling through mud; the front of the tracks buried themselves deeper and the blade slipped upwards an inch on the rock, as if it were on a ratchet. The stone shifted, and suddenly heaved itself up out of the earth that covered it, bulging the sod aside like a ship’s slow bow-wave. And the blade lost its grip and slipped over the stone. Rivera slapped out the master clutch within an ace of letting the mass of it poke through his radiator core. Reversing, he set the blade against it again and rolled it at last into daylight.