John Hawkes - The Beetle Leg

The shrubbery didn’t cover us at all. I think he saw us from the first. I didn’t care if he did; the thing to do was to crouch down as we was and watch before jumping up to scare him or chase him away. I took my time. There are other times when you have to step right in, when you are Sheriff or even Deputy, and catch hold of a bare shoulder or head of hair, keeping your face turned back so as it don’t get bruised, and drag them off. Maybe you get splashed with a glass of beer or your hand gets bit, but they have to be broke apart. Fast. I would rather help a woman have a baby than fight with them that don’t or that don’t care. But sometimes it’s better not to move.

We watched.

We sat there in the sun like we had fish poles and all day to wait for what would happen, like that little girl and me would have supper when we got back and it could keep, with no trouble at home, until we did.

But the one we watched — he must have had his fish already. He looked fit. Fit enough to swim the river at least instead of squatting on the other bank. I think that girl knew it too. He might not have bolted either had I got right up and hollared at him. He liked it where he was. The girl pointed to her friend who sat alone on the sand about half way out a spit that stuck into the river but didn’t join the other side. It was the spot he would make for. If he decided to try.

“She’s afraid.”

“And you ain’t?” I whispered back. The towhead girl — plenty of our children out here have white hair, usually not cut too even — was drawing in the sand. Now and then she kind of pulled at her bathing suit or twisted her head and back like she might if she was older or like she wanted to get up and run.

As far as I could see, he didn’t care. He seemed to be staring at the water. I might have had him in the jail house, there was nothing about him said I couldn’t. On the other hand, there was nothing stamped him bad. I know when to bide my temper and just size up the stride of a man or the way he hangs back when you ask him what he is at. I tried to make out what his hands were doing, but he had them hid. I didn’t suspect him much, though I’d like to have seen if they were small and kind of pink with short tapering fingers.

He wasn’t suspecting either. He didn’t know how close I watch a man. I lit my pipe, seeing he wouldn’t go no matter what. I’ve seen all kinds, men I had to drive out and below town myself, set them down and make sure they headed south out of sight; others I caught before they entered. And if I stop a couple, I may let them go, I may not. You got to watch them if they are in pair.

But I have never seen one just squatting in the desert. He’s not sick, more like he’s healthier than most around here. Most men stop at a river bank to drink, cool their feet, and get across and be done with it. Here’s a man, I thought, is snarled with this river. He’ll have more trouble with it yet, I figured.

There wasn’t any tree to give him shade. You might see a man like him on an island — him and that opposite bank started to look that way to me — someone who had been left there or thrown ashore and you wouldn’t know whether to go up to him or not. It was too late to hail him now. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

But I wasn’t going to leave him there to do what he pleased. And he was set for something, because his pants were off, already rolled up and slung over his shoulder when we got there. My pipe went out and I found I was watching him so hard I sat chewing on it dry. He still wore his suspenders — bright yellow like a shirt I owned but which no Deputy could ever wear — and they just hung down, unfastened.

If there had been any kind of house around, I might have understood. But there he was, casting a small patch of shadow on water so dark it hardly showed, a man who didn’t look ready to cause trouble and didn’t seem to be got up for any kind of work. He was only half dressed and certainly alone, and yet he didn’t look to need no bothering. The towhead wasn’t minding him, I could see that.

I’m quick to feel out a stranger. In my job you find that other men ain’t like yourself, not when they open their mouths and you see they got no teeth or pull out a billfold filled with too much money or none at all. Most men is soft and childish or else they got to tell you something behind the house. For all I knew he was only looking at his picture in the water. It finally came to me I wasn’t going to sit there and wait for him.

“Honey,” I said, “I can’t arrest that man.” She didn’t answer. If I did, the jail would be full of them, men who have come home on foot or men just walking aways from a ranch they never left and that I ain’t happened to have seen before. We had too many in them days anyway. “He ain’t hurt,” I said. “He ain’t drunk. I don’t think he’s got a gun. That’s enough.” But he was something to stare at for an hour or two.

Either he’s a man escaped already from another prison, where he stayed in the fields or worked out on the roads — and that wasn’t likely — or else he comes naturally by his skin to stand the burn marks of such a sun. And that’s good. He had no hat. I can sit or even stand in it myself the whole day without my mind becoming clouded or even getting up a thirst. I could see that he could too. But there is a limit, when it seemed he didn’t want to talk.

I whispered, “Ain’t it time to go?”

“No,” she answered.

“Well, we are,” I said. Maybe he was looking at them little girls, the one hardly hid behind a thorn, the other sitting on her thin legs out there in the sand, maybe not. He must have felt as queer coming across two children that way as they did seeing a grown man perched down like he was on the edge of a river quiet. I don’t know what he thought when he saw me.

I figured that maybe if I stood up he would. He didn’t. I made the girl get up and brush the sand off herself too. When I stretch out, as I did then, I’m tall enough for a man to see me. I looked right at him, at his shirt tails that was as good as pants to another, at the easy way he slouched as if, had there been some driftwood within reach, he might have built a fire. He was young.

“I’ll drive you girls home,” I told them, “you’ll be missed.”

I thought that when we turned and walked away he would stop playing at us and swim across. I would have taken him in my car that day. Men sometimes misjudge a route out here, they’re liable to stray miles. They’re lucky if they get a ride.

He stayed.

He probably had a car himself, I never learned. He might have had it parked back behind a dune where I thought the country was flat as it is most everywhere; he probably found a hollow and hid it there with all the things he carried and everything that made him what he was inside it.

That’s where I should have looked for trouble.

aman lay buried just below the water level of the dam. He was embedded in the earth and entangled with a caterpillar, pump engine and a hundred feet of hose, somewhere inside the mountain that was protected from the lake on one side by rock and gravel and kept from erosion on its southward slope by partially grown rows of yellow grass. This man — he was remembered in Mistletoe, Government City, and would be as long as the Great Slide came to mind with every ale case struck open — was the brother of one who still hung on, having a place in the fields southwest of the official lines of the town. Boundaries were still marked with transit stakes ten years old.

In the sunset the survivor of the two, who had not taken part in the battle of the river and who had been on the range when the Slide occurred, drove his team of four horses across the sand of the southward slope, the machine under his seat spitting out seeds, grinding its unaligned rods. His voice carried all the way to the town on the bluff. He rode the boards holding the dry lines in one hand and a flattened cigarette pinched in the other, one knee cocked up and his hat pulled low over blackened cheeks and chin. Six days a week he nursed the animals across the sunward, dry side of the dam for twenty-five dollars a day, and the wind blew sand in his ears and blew the horses’ manes the wrong way. A few hundred yards above his head, from the sharp-rocked track across the top of the dam, the dark, rarely fished miles of water narrowed into a cone through the hills of the badlands. Below him, in the middle of the mosquito flat and at the edge of the man-made delta and surrounded by piles of iron pipe and small, corrugated iron huts, red lead painted sections of the half completed turbine tower rose among steel girders spiked with insulators and weighted with hundreds of high tension, lead-in wires.