Читать книгу Watershed - Mark Barr - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE

WHEN NATHAN REACHED THE DRUGSTORE, A BIG, TWO-TON Henley coated with a fine layer of red dust was already there, men crowded onto its flat bed. Nathan waved for them to hold up, and the men in the back yelled for him to hurry. He ran the last twenty yards, the leather of his shoes chewing into his feet, his hat clutched to his head. A half dozen hands reached out and pulled him up, then the truck was off, trailing a black plume of exhaust.

They were rough faces, some pleasant, scrubbed clean and red that morning in their rented rooms. Others were still shaking off the sleep, their crusted eyes lost while a callused finger worked idly in an ear or scratched a rib as the truck rode the track out to the river. Nathan took off his hat and held it between his knees when the air coming across the open bed of the truck nearly took it off. The others had their ragged farm hats tugged firmly about their ears, or else wore scarred and nicked hardhats from the site. Some sat on theirs like low stools. Nathan watched the faces for a while, waiting for someone to question him. One or two dug out breakfasts they had packed away. One nearer Nathan took out what looked to be a raw potato, which he didn’t eat but only spent some care cleaning before tucking it away again.

Three miles outside of town, the way split off from the road, became a gravel track that led to an open gate in a tall chainlink fence. To either side of the fence entrance men clustered, and the truck threaded slowly through them.

“Shouldn’t be in the way like that,” complained a man standing near the front. “They’re supposed to wait over there by them trees.” Nathan followed his gesture and spotted a larger group of ten or twelve sitting in the pine needles and leaning against trunks.

“What are they waiting for?” he asked.

“For one of us to die,” said another and the men laughed.

“Jobs.” A pinched-faced man on his left spat the word out at Nathan, his tone betraying how foolish he found the question. “Isn’t that what everyone is after these days?”

The truck pulled through the gate and followed a winding path through the trees. At the top of a rise, the river came into view. Nathan shifted up onto one knee. He caught only glimpses of the works through the leaves at first, but then they broke from the trees and it all came visible at once.

The cofferdam was huge. It spanned the entire middle section of the river, holding back the water to create a dry place, and into it men poured. From high on the hill, they were a thousand fretting specks coursing over the site. Ten thousand spires of rebar thrust up from the dam, their lower ends buried in concrete casings that were sunk to the bedrock. The length of the dam curved its back against the flow of the river as it spanned the channel. This would allow it to bear the weight of the water, like a Roman arch. Everywhere he looked, more concrete glowed dull white in the mid-morning sunlight.

The truck halted behind a row of low buildings. Someone had scrawled a list of obscenities across their back walls, the lettering running downhill as if the writer had grown tired. The men lurched into motion, rising in pairs and groups and dropping off the rear of the truck to walk down the hill. Nathan put his hat on and went around to the driver.

“Engineer’s office?” he asked, and the man moved his short cigar around in his mouth before pointing to a huddle of structures in the distance.

The front walk of the building was caked with mud from the site that had been tracked by the engineers’ and foremen’s boots. Nathan tried to pick his way around the larger clods. When he pulled the front door open, thick cigarette smoke and the early morning smell of hair cream surrounded him.

A dozen men sat at drafting tables, heads bent over plans and notebooks spread before them.

“What is it?” said one at a large desk near the back.

“I’m here to start work,” Nathan said.

“Name?” The man opened a ledger on his desk, began searching with a stained finger.

“McReaken,” he said, and this time it came out more naturally than it had with the boarding house woman.

“Yeah, you’re on the list. You were supposed to be here yesterday. You have trouble with the train?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re not the first. These yokels are congenitally incapable of running anything on time.”

Another man came in behind Nathan, brushed his way past him. “First of the concrete trucks just showed up, Mr. Maufrais,” he said.

Maufrais took his watch from his pocket, scowled. “I hope that they had a nice, relaxing breakfast.” He picked up the telephone, dialed. “Jack? Yeah, your concrete is here. Yeah, well. Just be glad that they showed up. Yeah.” He turned back to Nathan. “There’ll be a load of paperwork to fill out. I’m out of carbons until the supply truck shows up tomorrow, though, so you’ve got a reprieve until then.” The telephone rang again, and Maufrais answered it.

Nathan glanced around the room. Neat rows of men at desks with heads down over their work. A handful of slide rules hung along a sideboard at the end of the room. In Memphis, the men had christened their slide rules with names like Excalibur and Equation Slayer, or else had strode about the office with them sometimes slung low through their belts like pistols. Looking about the room, Nathan saw no playfulness here.

Maufrais hung up the telephone and regarded Nathan again, this time more thoroughly, starting with his dusty shoes and traveling up to his crooked tie knot.

“You understand that this position is probationary?” he said.

“I understood that was a possibility,” Nathan said. “Obviously, I had hoped—”

“It is more than a possibility. It’s a fact of the position. The probationary period will last ninety days. At the end of that time, you will either be offered a permanent position on the team, or else be asked to leave in order to make space for another candidate. There are occasionally special circumstances which may arise that can entitle a candidate to additional probationary time, but those are rare, so I wouldn’t really consider that an option.”

“Ninety days? I hadn’t realized that the timeframe would be so short.”

“Ninety days is generally sufficient.”

Three months, Nathan thought. All that he’d done, all that it had cost him to stand here, traded for three months at a chance. He frowned and Maufrais’ eyebrows rose.

“Do I take it you don’t want the job?” he asked.

“I do want the job,” Nathan said. “It’s only—”

“This is not an ordinary organization, and as such we expect the employees we take on to rise above the ordinary level. A probationary period helps us guarantee that. It’s been the paradox of working in this rural area: we’re awash in unskilled labor. They’re literally lining up at our gate, whereas obtaining skilled workers, the engineering class and above, has been more of a challenge. What tells us best is the work. We have found that paper credentials can be exaggerated.” At this, Nathan felt his stomach clench.

Maufrais beckoned, and a tall, gangly man in somber wool stood and joined them.

“This is Mr. Fitzsimmons,” Maufrais said. Nathan extended his hand, and Fitzsimmons’ grasp was cool. “Where shall we put him, John?”

Fitzsimmons looked out over the room then spoke in a low voice. “I was thinking, perhaps, Robinson?”

Maufrais consulted his ledger. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as well.” He retrieved a form from his top drawer and began filling it in. When he was finished, he called out, “Mr. Robinson? If you please, sir.”

Robinson rose and approached the desk. He glanced nervously among the three men. “Yes, sir?”

“Thank you for your efforts, but your services are no longer needed.” He proffered the form at Robinson. “Take this to bookkeeping and they’ll settle up for any pay you have coming.”

“But, Mr. Maufrais,” Robinson said. “Please.” He made no move to accept the paper.

Maufrais placed the slip on the edge of his desk. He glanced at Nathan as if surprised to find him still standing there.

“Clark?” Maufrais said. “How about you take Mr. McReaken on a short tour? Show him the site.”

A young, blonde man stood and went to get his jacket from the peg near the door. He gestured at Nathan, who remained at the front desk.

Maufrais directed himself to Nathan. “Focus on your work and all will be fine, Mr. McReaken. You will work, we will observe, and I think you’ll come to find we’ll know you very well. We’ll have your place sorted out by the time you return.”

Nathan joined Clark at the door, glancing back. Fitzsimmons was standing at Robinson’s shoulder.

“Come on now, Rich,” Fitzsimmons said. “You’re getting a letter and good pay. You can’t afford to leave here with a bad reference, can you?”

“Let’s go,” Clark said impatiently, and they went out.

The sun was hot against the face of the building, but it was good to be out in the light.

“It won’t do you any good to get yourself on his bad side,” Clark said. “When Maufrais says jump, it doesn’t pay to dawdle.” The young man looked to be twenty and went hatless, and his blonde hair was slicked back with pomade. In the morning sun, it shone as he turned to talk.

“That man, Robinson? Are they really firing him?”

Clark frowned at the question. “What did it look like?” he asked. “His time was just about up anyway. I guess Maufrais figured he didn’t need him any more now that you’d arrived.”

“Is that how it is, one man gets ejected when the next arrives?”

“Not always, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t happened before.”

“Doesn’t make me feel so good about my first day, booting someone out the door.”

Clark squinted at him in the full sun. “It’s not so great, but do you have other options?”

Nathan thought about it. “No,” he said.

“Then come on. They’ll be expecting us back before too long.”

They made their way down the cut earth of the hillside along a path that switched back on itself as it descended the steep bank. Near the bottom they came to the wall of the cofferdam, and Clark led them up a set of wooden stairs on one end.

“This,” Clark said, spreading his arms wide like a ringmaster, palms up, “is the works.”

Nathan nodded, his eyes scanning over the immensity. Men moved everywhere, in constant activity. The blue flicker of acetylene sparked here and there as the rebar was amassed into the skeleton for the concrete. At the far end, they were pouring the last of the foundations. Men in hardhats and gray-stained hip waders slogged through the slurry of rock and cement, working it down into the gaps with shovels. Others were loading wheelbarrows and hustling them down planks that had been laid out to lead to the outer edges. A foreman down in the pit yelled for more, and the driver yanked a lever at the back of the truck, releasing a torrent of wet cement. The truck pulled out of the way so the next could back in. A couple men with hoses began washing the truck’s apparatus, brown-green river water rinsing the gray off the chute until the burnished metal shone. Another yell, another drop, and the second truck advanced. Nathan counted twenty trucks in the line, and more were arriving, the cylindrical beds turning and turning to keep their loads from setting up too soon.

A rudimentary guardrail had been pieced together from scrap, and Nathan placed his hands on it, leaning out to look down to where the river pierced the base of the structure. It didn’t have the broad expanse of the Mississippi, but it wasn’t small by any estimating. He made a few attempts at calculating the weight of force of the water sliding past, but abandoned the effort, his concentration quailing at the thought of resisting such a constant, overwhelming force. He had an idea how it was done. They wouldn’t have fought the river all at once. They’d have diverted it, taken it on piece by piece. First they would have built the cofferdam that he and Clark stood upon. In the temporary workspace it provided, they’d have built the floodgates in place, wide open. When those were complete the workers would remove the diversion channel and simply let the water run through the open floodgates, a bull charging past as the matador waved his cape. The river would run until the main wall of the dam was complete. Only then, when they were ready, would they drop the gates, and the water would begin to rise on the upriver side.

“Here’s what you electrical boys will be interested in,” Clark said, and Nathan turned to see him pointing back up to where the road came down out of the hills. A convoy of trucks was arriving with large crates strapped to their flat beds. On two of the trucks, tarps covered loads nearly as large as the cabins on the hillside.

“Turbines?” Nathan asked, shielding his eyes for a better look.

“Had them cast up in Pittsburgh,” Clark said. “Maufrais has been waiting three weeks for them to arrive.” He pointed to a small mountain of crates that had been unloaded. “Those will be the water wheels. The foundations are already poured for them on the other end. When this dam is finished, they’ll make enough electricity to power every house and farm in the valley.”

The big trucks were now threading their way into the encampment of worker houses and offices on the far bank. Nathan turned on his heel, taking it all in, found more buildings back in the trees.

“It’s like a city,” Nathan said.

“Damn near is. There’s something like two thousand men on payroll. This dam was a godsend. Electricity will be nice, but it’s the jobs we mostly needed around here.”

Nathan scrutinized his guide anew. “You a local?”

Clark pointed his chin up the valley. “Grew up just over the ridge. And if I’m telling true, when I left for university, I never thought I’d be coming back. But here I am.”

“You have electricity at your place now?”

“My parents’ place. Not yet. My mother has been itching for it, though. She’s made a down payment on a clothes washing machine, and the electric lines haven’t made it any farther than the McKims’ farm just south of town.”

“It must have been a shock, coming back to live without it.”

“Like wearing clothes for a spell when all you’ve known is running around buck naked.” He winked at Nathan. “And then going back to being naked again.”

Nathan couldn’t help but grin at the young man.

A dozen men carrying lengths of rebar, their hands and shirts stained rust-colored from the metal, made their way down the hill past them now, calling and laughing with each other. They filed down a long, makeshift ladder that had been fixed to the wall of the channel.

“Seems like a lot of moving parts to keep up with,” Nathan said.

“You don’t know the half of it. There are a dozen of these construction crews—they’re locals mostly, plus what Maufrais could muster from the surrounding counties—and of course that’s just the labor. There’s also the people that support the construction.” He pointed to the various structures spread across the hillside as he spoke, “Motor pool, security, the lumber yard, accounting, supply depot.”

“I’ve worked on a few big projects before, but none were on anywhere this large a scale.”

“Oh, Maufrais and his group are playing at a whole other level. He’s got connections high up, they say. Roosevelt wants him for major projects spread over half the damned country as part of this New Deal spending. They’re talking national infrastructure. Any engineer who can make the cut, can join Maufrais’ inner circle. And he’s set for both a permanent job and the kind of work that means something.”

Nathan could feel the tug of it, the pulse of hope that was all the sharper for the span of time he’d gone without. “And the ones who don’t make the cut? They go like Robinson?”

“Ninety days, one way or the other. Either you’re in or you’re hitting the road.” Clark spit. “It’s tough, but that’s how it is. You get three months’ pay and a bit more experience. Make it count, Mr. McReaken. That’s my advice.”

“You’re on probation, too?”

Clark grimaced. “Twenty days down,” he said, then brightened. “It’s win-win for me, though. I’m itching to get out of these hills. If I’m not selected, I’m taking my resume and heading north. I’ll go wherever the jobs are.”

Nathan wanted to tell him how hard that road was, following the hope of work, but he didn’t see any gain in dampening the young man’s spirits. When he looked up, though, Clark’s face had gone hard and Nathan wondered if he’d somehow betrayed his skepticism. He followed Clark’s gaze up the hill, found the scarecrow figure of Fitzsimmons on the landing before the engineers’ building. He stood looking out over the valley, a cigarette in his mouth.

“I hate that son of a bitch,” Clark said and spit. “You watch yourself with him.” The wind shifted, a hot buffeting gust that kicked up the dust of the work site. Above them, Fitzsimmons’ suit flapped like a flag.

“He’s Maufrais’ second in command?”

“More like his hammer. Maufrais is the arm, and the arm decides where the hammer comes down, but Fitzsimmons will surprise you. He may not look too bright, but he’s got a knack for making himself look good, especially if it’s at our expense.”

They watched Fitzsimmons smoke.

“He chose Robinson,” Nathan said. “He was the one who decided.”

Clark spit again. “You can forget about Robinson already.”

Nathan rested his forearms on the rail. “So, it’s ninety days or bust.”

“That’s their game.”

“I need this job,” Nathan said. “I don’t have anything to fall back on. Not anymore.”

Clark narrowed his eyes at him, scrutinizing. “In a spot, huh?”

“You could say that.” As they’d talked a cool weight had slid inside his chest, pulling him down at his guts. He couldn’t go back now. Memphis was lost to him after what had happened. “I’ve got to make this work.”

“Well then, we’d better get back in there. I expect they’ll have your desk ready by now.”