John Hawkes: The Beetle Leg

“You never knew nothing about it,” she told Luke, “you were out where it was dry. You never even saw the Great Slide.” She moved the skillet a little off the fire.

Luke got up from the table and looked at the Mandan. “You do those dishes for Ma. You hear?” She leaned on the boards, hid her face behind her hands and went on eating.

“She never says anything when I’m around.” Ma licked at the edge of the spoon and opened the draft a notch.

“You just don’t understand how she speaks, that’s all.” Luke undid his belt and shuffled among a pile of men and women’s clothing until he found a fresh black and white checked shirt. He pulled on his best pair of boots and polished the toes with the blanket tip.

Smelling of hair oil — the Mandan groomed herself from the same bottle — he rolled the brim of his hat, wiped at the sweatband, and drew it sharply over his eyes. He hopped to the ground over the potato sacks with the same jump and spring with which he used to run across the barn dance floor when the river was still indefinitely harnessed and the proposed streets on the bluff were not approved by the central office. He stood in the light of the hurricane lamp and ahead, above the rise in the darkness where his own place ended, he saw the small glow in the sky, as if far into the plains a few branders crouched by embers and sets of cooling irons.

“Them boys are flaring up tonight for sure,” he said and, whistling through his teeth, stepped out of sight. The night shift men were on the scaffold welding and below, by an iron hut, Harry Bohn put a pot of coffee back on the fire and prepared to return to Mistletoe.

Ma turned from her skillet and called out. “Don’t you say anything against Mulge. I won’t have it!”

He was almost to the gate logs in the wire and he looked back once at the ranch house, through the door that appeared to open on an empty room. Against the mosquito horizon he made out the high, thick logged, stockade-like breaking corral and a moldy Mexican saddle athwart the top-most beam. He could have seen the slanting, tack room shack and the chicken rest behind, but between the horse and fowl structures and the ranch house itself there lay a patch of darkness broad enough to hide two dung wagons end to end or a pack of dogs.

They were waiting for him there. Each strap in place, not a buckle rattled. The Red Devils sat their machines quietly and their gloved hands waited over switches, ready to twist the handle grips for speed. They sat straight, tilted slightly forward, faces hidden by drawn goggles and fastened helmets, the front wheels in an even row all leaning to the left as tight polished boots raised, rested lightly on the starting pedals. The straight, grounded left legs were parallel in black flaring britches and from the several creatures sitting double, with arms locked patiently around wood hard belts, there was never a murmur. Not a foot slipped nor did the saddle springs creak. Between the empty corral and the woman’s kitchen the motorcycles filled the darkness, the first almost touching the logs and the last within arm’s length of the cardboard wall. The black, deep-grooved tires were clean and hard. It was as if they had made no flying circuits that evening nor left rubber burns and cuts in the sand where few humans gather, in the gullies of rattlesnakes or before the coils of braided whips. Their saddlebags were still unopened, they had not slept. They watched as hunters by a pond in the marsh from which a single old bird, flapping and beating across the flat water, is unable to rise. License plates had been stripped from the mudguards.

Luke Lampson walked on a dry ridge in the middle of the wagon track. After a quarter mile through failing truck gardens and stony sand, he met the asphalt highway, heard pebbles shake loose under the thistle, a scratching in the brambles. A thin lizard leaped from the ridge and away down the brown clay rut.

A breeze came from the funnel of badlands. Cooled across the water, it was warmed as soon as it touched these acres rising and falling from the boundary of the dam in flats and hollows. At times he could smell the fresh, exposed side of the mountain that had been under the water line all day. A buried man now drained above the tide. Luke wondered if his body ever shifted in the sand, he thought of it when seeding. “Someday he’ll worm himself right out to the open air,” the cowboy said. “Mighty like he’s crawling around in there right now, winding his way up toward the side I’ve-sown.” The whistle bleated beyond Gov City and the Metal and Lumber men climbed down.

Luke Lampson stopped to light up a Personally-Rolled. It was a long walk across three provinces.

Where the scuff country met the broad back of the highway and little clumps of sand and weed were kept from spreading by the long raised shoulder of the road, there, nosed to the edge of the empty speed lanes, he saw the head and taillights of a parked car. It was long. Between the yellow glare of fog and headlights and the blinking red danger arrows in the rear, stretched the darkness that was the car itself, too long to house in any ordinary driveway. Luke knew that on its sloping top, in aluminum racks, would be the airplane luggage, built up like blocks and, neatly strapped and rolled on top of it all, the tree green unused camping tent. Fresh wooden tent stakes, tied with clean white fishing line, would never be taken from the rear compartment.

“Tourists,” he thought. “One of those big black tires has let them down. They don’t know whether to spit on it or buy another.” The front light beams carried for two hundred yards and in that full white incandescence he could see the fence posts and a croo ked, hand painted Poison Water sign.

A man and woman crouched before the solid radiator in the light. They were holding something between them.

“Wrong,” thought Luke, “guess they’ve hit a dog. Or maybe a jack rabbit. Probably never seen them that big before.” He stepped over the wire, pushing it down between the rusted barbs, and shielded his eyes.

“He’s been bit,” said Camper, the owner of the car, and glanced at the boy between his knees. The man Camper wore a yellow, large collared shirt with even tails worn outside the flannel trousers. He watched Luke through dark cat-eye glasses and puffed in fast heavy breaths.

His wife loosed her perfume on the air as if she carried a broken phial of it in a hidden pocket of the green silk slacks. She got out of their way.

“You see, I had to stop. There weren’t any roadstands or hotels, not a light anywhere. So I just pulled off the road and stepped out of the light and then the kid has to come out too. For two hundred miles I wouldn’t stop, not with warning signs posted every fifty feet. It’s a hell of a thing when you can’t take a leak without kicking up a pack of rattlers.” His white socks bulged through the braided sandals and he slapped his arms.

The boy looked as if he had been dropped in a bucket of cold water.

Luke pushed his hat on the back of his head, and taking the tin box from his rear pocket, squatted opposite but close to Camper. The woman waited in the car, raising and lowering the aerial, pushing one station button after the next and heard only a squall of electricity on iron ore.

“I can see you ain’t from around here,” said Luke. He squinted into the light, fixed the blade into the little handle and draped the short length of hose, used as a siphon by some of the men in Clare, across his knee.

“Like hell,” answered the driver. “I know where I am. I used to work around here, but the wife doesn’t know it. Let me tell you, I practically built that dam alone. Yes, sir, I remember still, the ‘cheapest earth filled dam in the western hemisphere’ it was supposed to be. And the Slide — I suppose you know about it — was like a whole corner of the world fell in.”