Southern Cross the Dog (17 page)

The heat rose into his cheeks.

Of course you should! What do you mean?

We're talking about livelihood, Mr. Catkill. Just like how I got to go out there and work my crew, that's my livelihood. And how you got to go into your nice cool office with all your papers and your books and things—well, that's your livelihood, and I'm not faulting you for that. But you take that away from a trapper, you're taking away his bread, his meat, his whole way of life. You're asking for trouble.

Mr. Catkill narrowed his eyes and looked the foreman up and down, at the trails of mud that'd dried across his belly. It wouldn't be hard to have Burke transferred to some garbage detail or even fired. Except for the problems at Panther, his work record was exemplary. But the dam needed men of singular vision. Burke did not understand. The story of any great country is a story of creating value from nothing. From dirt and dust and patience. From one man there can spring cities. This was the problem with his type. The lack of vision. The absence of will. The unwillingness to sacrifice.

THERE WAS A CRACK AND
they turned toward the door. Outside, voices were shouting over the rain. Mr. Catkill had started to speak but already Burke had rushed out to the site.

The men had massed and clustered all along the tributary edge. Get a rope!, someone called.

Stay back. Everyone stay back.

Mr. Catkill ignored the warning and pushed through. There had been a blowout in the basin and the river had swept up one of Burke's crew. Water flooded into the trenches, smashing down the weak retaining walls. Out toward the break, he could see the crewman. He was small and pale, spinning helplessly toward the river.

Don't move, someone shouted. It was the foreman. We'll get you out of there!

Burke lowered himself waist deep into water. He gathered the slack of rope around his hips and cinched it tight. He ordered three of his men to brace the other end, then he eased out into the basin. A ridge of silt rose up under his feet, darkening the water. Burke inched closer.

Mr. Catkill could see the crewman's small white hands grasping for the soft mud. He was slipping. It gave way in wet sloughs. Burke was almost upon him now. He had his hands up, trying to keep his balance. Burke swooped forward and snatched the man into his arms. The rope went taut and the men anchored tight against the weight.

There was a great whoop and the men cheered their foreman. Quickly, they hauled the rope back in. Mr. Catkill watched. One grown man cradling another. They pulled them up off the banks and wrapped the fallen man in a blanket before laying him out under the heat lamps. A hail of cheers went up as the foreman unknotted the rope from his waist. Burke looked almost defiant, coiling the rope around his arm.

Mr. Catkill averted his eyes. He looked into the basin.

Burke!, he cried.

Mr. Catkill pointed. His voice was high and clipped.

Look! The pump!

Somehow it had fallen in during the blowout. The crate rolled now on the current, making toward the break.

For God's sake, Burke. Don't let it get away.

No one would move. Catkill's teeth were chattering. The rain was smashing around him. He could still see the box gliding slowly downstream. Mocking him. For a moment Mr. Catkill could not understand what was happening. He was aware of the wall of bright gleaming eyes that were fixed upon him. The men's faces were dark and dirty, their hair set in wild cakey clumps. This was a mistake, he realized. He should not have come here.

There was a flash of movement. Something went up into the air, over their heads. Mr. Catkill looked up. It soared up, then plummeted back down to the earth. It lay muddy and inert at his feet. A work shirt.

Chatham!, someone cried.

Mr. Catkill turned. The men surged together, tightening around a single point. One of the crewmen, a Negro, burst his way through a wall of arms. The Negro raced toward him and Mr. Catkill put up his hands, tensing for the blow. But the Negro ran past him to the tributary edge. Burke reached out. It was too late. He grabbed at the empty air, and in one swift movement the Negro launched himself into the yellow water.

L
ast year on his twenty-first birthday Robert had fetched himself a shave and gone to a movie, a double feature. He shrank into the sticky velvet of his seat. The theater was full of people—dozens of staring eyes, silent as trees. He could feel their heat clouding the air, drawing over him. On the screen a white woman billowed out big and silky in her sun hat. Dust popped and crackled on her cheeks. It'd been eight years already since the fire in Bruce. It was a memory he kept tasting, faint like metal in blood.

He couldn't sit all the way through the first film. On the sidewalk, the afternoon was bright and hot. There were cinders in his eyes, and he mashed his palms into his sockets.

Around the corner, he found a bar with a
COLOREDS WELCOME
sign hanging from the door. The trash was piled to the windows, and a cloud of moths danced on the glass. Inside, the bar was empty and a stale smell like wet wool hung in the air. An electric fan was going, moving the dust around. He turned to leave when a man came in through a trapdoor from behind the counter. He was a white man, short and fat with swollen cheeks. His oily hair was parted in the middle. The man smiled and motioned with his smooth, fish-pale arms.

Sit at the counter?

He leaned over and wiped a stool with a rag.

Robert sat down and the seat was smooth with grease.

What can I get you?

I don't have but fifteen cents.

The man looked him over slowly. How 'bout a sandwich?, he asked. On the house.

The sandwich was stale and oversalted. Still he wolfed it down, chewing the hard rough bread. When he swallowed, he tasted blood and tongued the bright sting in his cheek.

New in town?

Robert looked at the man carefully.

It's just that I never seen you around here before.

I bale cotton on the Jones-Tennessy plantation.

That so?

That's so.

He turned back to his sandwich. The man rested his hands on his belt and the air shifted inside him. He cleared his throat and busied himself with filling up a glass with a pitcher of water.

What's your name, son?

Billy, he lied.

Those hands of yours are awful soft-looking for handling baling wire.

Robert stood up and pushed off from the counter.

Thanks for the sandwich, he said.

Now wait a minute. I was just talking.

Robert started for the door, but it opened inward in front of him. It would've smashed into him if he hadn't jumped out of the way. There was a girl on the other side. She looked up at him, startled.

That's my daughter, the man said from behind him. He was grinning.

Your daughter?

The girl was colored and there were wires in her teeth. Her eyes were big and staring, flecks of gold in the iris. She was smiling up at him.

You can call her Marie, he said.

Is that really your daughter?

Maybe, the man said. Are you interested?

The girl had already started to working. She was looking him up and down, dragging her smooth nail down the front of his shirt.

I haven't got but fifteen cents, he said. The man didn't say anything so Robert took her hand in his and said it again. Just fifteen cents.

She don't hear you. This one is deaf and dumb, the man said.

The girl slipped her hand from his and rested her arms on his shoulders, framing the sides of his neck. Her skin was cool and slippery smooth.

I think she likes you, the man said.

IN THE TINY BACK ROOM,
she moved expertly in the dark, first stripping off his belt, then his shirt. She went for the small flannel bag around his neck but he guided her hand away. No, he said. She tried again and he squeezed her fingers. No! He thought maybe she heard him because she didn't try again. Instead, they fell blindly onto the bed. She worked him through the zipper of his trousers and he wondered if her eyes were better on account of her being deaf. Could she see his face then, the lean and ashen hollow of his cheeks? She was warm at his tip. She slid down, soft, grasping. The breath went out of him. He felt his insides being drawn out. A weak queasy feeling flowed up his stomach, into his throat. The pressure built behind his eyes.

On the ceiling there were stripes of sunlight between the slats from where the afternoon was casting through. There was someone upstairs, their footfalls dislodging fine grains down over the bed. The girl was small and lithe, her body passing through the slashes of light. He leaned back and she shoveled down on him. He felt himself sinking first through the pillows, the sheets, into the mattress, then deeper still, to floor then stone then earth, down and down, into that cold low chamber. He opened his eyes and she was there still, her braces sharp and catching the sun.

When he came, she caught it in her palm and wiped it on his stomach. He didn't move, exhausted. The blood was thumping in his temples. He heard her moving in the dark, rifling through his clothes. He heard the dull thump of his shoes, the insole lifting, his last twenty dollars melting away.

THE NEXT DAY ON THE
train out of town, he got hooked for freight-hopping. The railroad bulls came down with their fists and boots and clubs. He thought he heard his nose break. There was a crunch and his head filled with salt and iron. Not so beautiful, one of them said. His body was a rag doll, tumbling out of the car. The ground was hard and loveless. Behind his eyelids, there was the sun, warm and red. He spat strings of black into the dust. He listened to the bulls gather, the crackle of grit under their soles. They kicked him awhile, burying their toes into his ribs. He kept his eyes shut and tried not to yell. When they'd finished, they carried him into their car and drove.

He felt ashamed about the lie he told, the name he'd given to that girl. He wasn't sure why he'd done it, why it had been the name to come to him. He told himself it was a coincidence.

A bag went over his head and he could smell his own damp breath blowing back against him. It was sour and foul like something had rotted in his mouth.

The car ride seemed to go forever. The men were talking but he couldn't make out their words over the thumping of his pulse. His throat had tightened and he gagged on his own fluid. He thought in his confusion that they'd got the noose around him. Then he realized it was just the devil around his neck. He'd been pulling hard on the loop of twine.

When the car stopped, someone lifted him up by his arm and stood him on his feet.

This'll do.

They pulled the bag from his head. There was so much light, he thought his eyes might crack. His knees started to crumbling.

Please, he said.

Someone said something. A word of warning, maybe. Then a bright warm pain opened in the side of his head and he was gone.

In that deepening black, he dreamed again of the Dog. Not the Widow Percy's dog he'd seen in Bruce but a large black hound—lean and sleek—that looked out at him with deep piercing eyes from which no light could escape.

When he awoke, the grass was tattooed to his cheek. He sat up. His skull was crowded with pain. In the upper sky he could see the first splatter of starlight descending down. Then in the low violet bands, the sun set behind the western hills. He was in a field, unmarked save for a small creek a few yards down, burbling along the yellowed grasses. How long had he been unconscious? Hours? Days? Years? He touched the side of his head. The blood was still sticky. He pushed against the pain and stood himself up. Then he moved slowly toward the water. Grasshoppers grazed past him, their wings grinding through the air.

He sat down on a rock and listened to the blood click in his septum. The air was starting to cool. The pain eased into a dull humming ache. He leaned out over the water and washed the blood from his face. Then he angled his mouth into the stream and swallowed. It hurt going down but he drank again, sucking the inky cold water, drawing it in. His heart was beating. He was alive. He was still alive. Above him, there was the ancient sky, yoking back the heavens. Still holding. His eyes started to well.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, HE WENT
on foot following two gleaming rails into the next town. In Hollandale, a boy was giving out leaflets written in a bad hand:
$2 a day. Strong backs wanted.
It gave the address of a small brick building a mile from the main stretch. He went upstairs and put his name on a piece of paper. The next morning, he climbed on the back of a truck and, with half a dozen other men, was driven out to Panther Swamp.

For a month he cleared the land, hacking through thorn and brush, laying down pounds of tree killer. There were fifteen-hour days crossing through the wet country, trailing the chalky white poison into the swamp. When the weather turned, he pierced the plates of hard earth to where the soil was warm and black and musky and he'd gouge out the brittle tangle of taproots with a spade. It was hard work and by day's end, his back would scream and his muscles would lie slack and dumb on his bones. On the truck ride back to the company apartments in Hollandale, he couldn't feel anything, just the warm throb where his legs had been. Out beyond the truck bed, the country darkened around him. There were lights in the far-off farmhouses and he'd try to count them before they'd pass or blink away.

He took an advance on his pay for an upstairs room in a boardinghouse on the edge of Hollandale. It was four walls and whatever light made it through the branches of the maple outside his window. He ate his dinners on the sill, looking out away from town. It was an empty country, big with sky and grass. On the weekends, he could see the small plots on the town's fringe, a gold-colored tractor chugging in the distance. A ribbon of smoke rose up from the distant chimneys, gray and curling and pretty, and his mind would set to wandering.

There were years now, marching fat and wide through the valley of his brain. He thought of Ellis and Etta, who were most probably dead now or at least good as dead. He thought of Hermalie. When they'd dug that limp small body out of the ash, he had barely recognized her. He stood at that windowsill, his food cooling, his head emptying. There were too many days for too much world, too much time to wrong and be wronged. And each day weighed on him heavier than the last—so much sun, so much sky and cloud—and he reached through those years, before Bruce and the Hotel Beau-Miel, to that miserable ramshackle cabin—his father, his mother, his brother, shaking beetles from their clothes, and part of him reasoned that somewhere still, they were there, the hearth fires going, the air heavy with sweet ash. He pictured his father's hand, forever big and warm on the back of his neck.

IN THREE MONTHS HE FOUND
his way to George Burke's crew, mucking out in the deep swamp. The crew worked seventeen-hour days, six days a week out in the mosquito nests, trying to slow the flow of the river. They dug trenches and piled mud and mixed concrete for the diverting walls. In the mornings, the men would watch their foreman wade out from the banks, clearing the rocks into the silver run. His shirt was off, showing his broad tan back. Burke would float a yellow rope into the channel, and the end would catch in the current, speeding forward, straightening out its slack. A man some meters downstream would call the time, signaling for Burke to halter the slack. Then he'd wade back, the rope coiled about his shoulders. Too fast, he'd call to the men. Still too fast.

The work was grueling, but Robert admired Burke. He never cheated him his pay or kept him from the machine work. In Burke's crew, he was allowed to drive plow trucks and graders and dig cranes. By day's end, climbing up to his apartment, he could still feel the hum of the engines in his body, the buzzing in his bones. His blood was toxic, the tang of diesel in his spit. He'd enter the dark room, sling off his boots, and lay his clothes out carefully on the chair back. But on his mattress, every nerve worked raw, he closed his eyes, and there on the other side of dreaming, the Dog waited.

Morning would come and the days would draw on. The order had come down for his crew to be reassigned to demolition duty. For months they turned chunks of green country into a fine burnt powder. Level this dam, bury that hill, fill that gully. They stopped their ears with cotton, and when the all clear was given, it was Robert who depressed the plunger. The ground quaked and an awful noise wracked the sky. They tucked their heads to their knees against the hail of mud and stone. His mouth was full of cordite. He brought his head up again and the ground was new, clear. The world hummed for hours after each detonation. He stepped from behind the bunker and walked across the halo of scorched earth. He stood at the center of the crater, measuring by sight its width and depth. He multiplied the poundage in his head. It was fortifying—the landscape blasting to pieces around him. Birds fled the trees. The blast traveled through his bones, rattled his teeth. The cascade of after-dust lashed his cheek. Slowly air and noise and birdsong returned again to the world. He was still there. Anchored. There was a freedom in that. He discovered the sphere of his reach, like a fighter, Death dancing just beyond his jabs.

He could not stop.

At every demolition, he'd pack more and more explosives into the charges and would ignore the safety protocols, often depressing the plunger before all the men could get to cover. He thrilled at every blast, standing exposed beyond the safety of the trench. He drew out the cotton from his ears and let the godly crack drive through his skull.

He grinned at the outraged earth.

Once there'd been a choke in the run and Burke took the crew upriver to investigate. By midafternoon, they found a beaver dam, eighty yards across, climbing six feet high from bed to pitch, stanching off one of the minor tributaries. A wall of mud and sticks and stone bowed into the stream. The surrounding marshland was soft with flooding. Protocol dictated that the crew was to shovel out the dam by hand and set out poison to keep the beavers from building again. To do it safely, it would be a month of backbreaking toil in mosquito country, cracking up the bits of stone and twig with shovels, little by little, and little by little widening the artery.