by Ivan Doig
“You’re like one of those spy stories,” Pop said grimly. “Every time anything clears up and halfway makes sense, some other damn thing comes along.”
During this, Del sent him a silent look of appeal, and I admit I added an extra-strength one of my own. If rummy old sheepherders couldn’t be left in that awful place of predicament, the lurch, how could he abandon poor one-eared Delano Robertson to it? He couldn’t let that be on his conscience, could he? Could he?
He withstood us in silence as long as he could. “Lay off while I consolidate my thinking, okay?” he snapped. “Rule number one is, don’t rush into things.”
I wasn’t letting him get away with that. “Are you sure, Pop? I thought it was, you got to play the hand you been dealt.”
He gave me a darkly furrowed look. Followed by one at Del. “Cripes, why couldn’t you have two good ears instead of getting yourself hit in the head by some goofy kind of stick?”
“Actually, I’ve asked myself that,” Del said delicately.
“For starters,” Pop now reeled off as if in an argument with himself, “Fort Peck isn’t just a hop, skip, and jump from here, it’s way to hell and gone across the state. And there’s two half-pint actors with their hearts set on me taking them to a certain play in Valier at the same time, right, Rusty?”
I would like to say I instantaneously and bravely made my decision. In reality, for the longest few seconds I went back and forth like a swinging gate before deciding. Lady Bracknell would have to prevail without me. “Zoe can ride with Bill Reinking. I want to go with you and Del to the mud-thing reunion.”
No sound followed that except for the rain drumming on the roof, accompaniment of the summer. Del tensely watched the two of us, his good ear slightly turned our way. Looking like he badly needed a cigarette, Pop lit one and proceeded to growl his way through any number of reasons not to go to Fort Peck—the howl Earl Zane would send up about postponing the sale of the saloon, the howl from Howie when he was tapped for bartending without any notice, the howl customers would put up when they came into the Medicine Lodge to lay eyes on its nationally famous bartender and he wasn’t there, and so on.
Finally running out of growls, he took one last exasperated drag on his cigarette.
“The hell with it, let them howl. If it’ll make the two of you quit looking like kicked puppies, we’ll go gab with mudjacks.”
5
AS POP WOULD have put it, anyone with a brain in his cranium grasps what a lumberjack does. And it’s no great mental feat to figure out a steeplejack, even if you’ve never seen one climbing the peak of a church. But a mudjack? If Fort Peck was the damnedest dirt dam in all of Creation, as he said, why weren’t its builders called dirtjacks? Perched restlessly in back of the two very different heads in the front seat that midweek morning while Del drove the Gab Lab at no more than the speed limit even on long, empty stretches of the highway—surely the only vehicle in Montana behaving so—I asked just that.
“Use your thinking part, kiddo.” Still growly about the trip, Pop took the question as if he had been waiting for something to do besides watch grain fields go by too slowly. We’d had to pile ourselves and everything else into the van even earlier than for a fishing trip, and dawn found us heading east on the plains with the mountains of the Two Medicine country already slipping from sight behind us. The day came bright and washed after the latest deluge, but besides constant wheat and occasional farmhouses crouched behind scrubby trees planted as windbreaks—Igdrasil would have stood out like a redwood in this landscape—there was nothing much to look at. Boring as the geography was, I attached plenty of meaning to it. Somewhere not distant in the gray prairie to the north was the start of Canada, scene of those trips of his that had driven me wild. Were they really over, with the back-room accumulation to be dealt with somehow? I would have to worry about that some other time. Right now the lesson of the day was as basic as dirt, according to his tone of voice.
“Say you wanted to take one of those buttes”—he was squinting into the distance toward the only landmarks anywhere around, the Sweetgrass Hills, rising like three Treasure Islands on the horizon—“and use it to dam up the Missouri River. What’s the slickest way to move that much fill?”
“Uhm, lots and lots of trucks?”
Wrong, his expression told me, not even close. “You’d be trucking for a hundred years. Naw, what you want to do is add water,” he said, as though mixing the simplest drink. “Dredge up the soil, turn it into mud, a kind of slurry anyhow, and then pipe the stuff to wherever you want it. Dump enough of it and guess what, you’ve got a dam.”
Okay, that explained mudjacks enough for me. But he wasn’t through. Shifting around as though the passenger seat and for that matter the Volkswagen van was too small for him, he lit a cigarette, already his third of the day, and blew smoke as if letting off steam. “I bet you didn’t know Fort Peck had the biggest dredges ever built.” This tidbit of information was provided as if for my benefit, but doubtless for that of the straining listener in the driver’s seat as well.
“Every piece of machinery on those mudboats was the biggest of its kind,” we heard next. “Just the cutter heads alone stood higher than the feather on a tall Indian.” He smoked and spoke very quietly, apparently drawn back in spite of himself to that time of making a mountain of mud and moving it. Del, hands tight on the steering wheel, looked agonized at not being able to write this down.
“Those things took a real bite out of the riverbank at a time,” the dredge tale went on, “a whole hillside would be gone before you could give it a second look, and you’d wonder where the hell it went to. Then way down at the end of the pipeline”—he flourished his cigarette toward the horizon until the ash was about to drop—“you’d see this brown geyser shooting out, and mudjack crews all over the dam like an anthill that had been stirred up.” He paused, with timing any actor would have envied. “It was quite the sight.”
Was this great or what? Boats in the middle of Montana with teeth huge enough to eat hills. Geysers of muck adding up to the biggest dam on the planet. My very own father right there, witnessing the famous mudjacks at their muddiest. I was back on top of the world. The magnitude of Fort Peck in his telling of it gripped me the way the notion of a thirty-year winter had, and Zoe’s magical presence in the back room, and the selection of the Medicine Lodge as the most pleasurable of all the saloons in the state, and family fame in newspapers far and wide, and Delano Robertson arriving in a cloud of sheep, the entire cascade of this one-of-a-kind year; the idea of outsize life, the feeling of being present as things happened way beyond ordinary in human experience. I suppose it was something like a mental fever, the headiest kind to have. Ever since Pop consolidated his thinking there in the hallway of the house, where my finger snap still echoed, my imagination and I knew no limits, and at twelve or at any other known age, there is no spell more dizzying.
Besides, as Zoe would have said, the Zanes didn’t have their weenie hands on the Medicine Lodge yet. Temporary luck was better than none, right?
Now Del in his eager-beaver way began asking Pop about this, that, and the other at Fort Peck. Crouched there with the van’s cargo stacked almost against my hip pockets, I listened for all I was worth. It was up to me to tell Zoe everything that happened, just as she had vowed to give me the full report on The Importance of Being Earnest and Mrs. Reinking’s cross-eyed bit, so I nearly stretched my neck into the front seat when Del all of a sudden popped out with, “Is it true you built the Blue Eagle in one day?”
Pop snorted. “Where did you get that haywire idea?” He couldn’t help looking rather pleased with himself, though. “I had the floor laid in one night, is all. There was a family of honyocker farmers by the name of Duff, they were working fools. Three of them hammered all night until their arms about dropped off, and I was serving drinks by breakfast time.”
“How enterprising of you,” Del enthused.
Pop shrugged. “You got to take the chance when it comes, that’s rule number—” He caught my look and broke off. “Hey, is this as fast as this crate will go?”
“Hmm?” Del speeded up the van fractionally. He himself kept going full tilt at trying to find out about everything back there in the Depression years. Even his crew cut seemed to be standing at sharper attention now that he had Pop talking even the slightest bit about the Blue Eagle. I was burning up to ask the question that I for so long had wanted to, but did not get the chance before Del switched to, “Do you mind telling me, Tom, why you left Fort Peck before the dam was finished?”
Pop took so long to answer that I thought he wasn’t going to. Finally his silence broke. “It was time.” He was back to being rough as a rasp. “Every winter was colder than an Eskimo’s butt, for one thing. And in the summer you’d fry.” He shook his head. “Nature had it in for the place, bad.”
“Yes, but you were right in the middle of so much that was happening,” Del sounded wistful, “all that history being made.”
“What the hell, aren’t we always?”
And that was that, for anything worthwhile about my father’s experience at the damnedest dirt dam of all time.
—
WE REACHED THE DAM before I fully realized it. I was expecting something as grand as the Egyptian pyramids, rising against the sky, as mighty as eternity. But Fort Peck stretched across what must have been a gentle valley between high bluffs, and all that caught the eye at first was an immense sheet of water that met a very broad, grassy slope, like a glacier stopped by a rise of the land. As we drove down from the west bluff, though, I saw the fantastic gush of water way down at the foot of that rise, the entire Missouri River discharging out of a tunnel—I may have been imagining, but the air seemed to tremble from the force of that white torrent as we drew nearer—and there was no mistaking that the earthen bank of the dam simply was so huge, it seemed a natural feature of the landscape.
Del drove onto the dam and a considerable distance across to a wayside overlook where we could get out and stretch and have a look around. There on the tremendously tall and long dike, even Pop, I believe, climbed out like a pilgrim at a fateful shrine.
It still was quite the sight, all these years after a much younger Tom Harry marveled at the mud starting to fly. A mountain’s worth of boulders lined the entire water side of the four-mile length of the dam, and the whole piece of engineering was staggering to think of, the heavy lid of rocks and gravel pressing down on what had started as mud fill, to compress everything in place and hold back the biggest river of the West. The sparkling lake, picture-perfect with circling white pelicans gravely looking down their long beaks at the water below, was like Rainbow Reservoir magnified countless times. I could see why the people who built one of the wonders of the modern world here would proudly hold a Mudjack Reunion, even if my reluctant father had to be taken by an ear—Del’s deaf one—to join in.
As the three of us gazed around from the overlook, my curiosity finally burst. “Where was it, Pop?”
“Where was what?”
“You know! The Blue Eagle!”
He gave me a dodgy look, which was not at all the answer I wanted, until Del jumped in to my support. “I was going to ask if Rusty didn’t.”
“If it isn’t one of you, it’s the other,” Pop grumbled. “I thought there was a law against double jeopardy.” Nonetheless, he squared around toward the high bluff we had driven down and pointed halfway up the slope. “Okay, see that wide spot in the road? You’re looking at the town of Wheeler. The highway was the main drag and there was a whole lineup of saloons, mine”—he stumbled slightly on the word—“right smack in the middle.”
Where there was nothing but bunchgrass and tumbleweeds? I let Del ask the obvious. “What happened to the buildings?”
“Torn down or moved,” came the curt response. “I bet we saw plenty of them on the way here—chicken coops and toolsheds.”
I couldn’t contain my dismay. “Even the Blue Eagle?”
“It was big enough to make a nice barn, kiddo.”
Wheeler’s fate of disappearance, Pop went on to tell us, was also that of the town of Idlewile. And of Parkdale, Park Grove, Midway, Valley, McCone City, Lakeview, Willow Bend, Delano Heights, New Deal, Square Deal, and Free Deal, all of the workers’ shantytowns that sprang up at the dam site in the 1930s like Hoovervilles with paydays. Del and I hung on his every word as he described how twenty thousand people lived any crazy way they could while the wages lasted, in tar paper shacks and drafty government barracks and any other kind of shelter that could be slapped together and called housing. It made the life of Two Medicine sheepherders seem luxurious.
“Help me with something, please,” Del asked as if stumped on his homework. “From everything I’ve been able to find out, the town of Wheeler had no shortage of saloons. The Buckhorn Club, the Wheeler Inn—”
“Yeah, and Ed’s Place, and the Bar X,” the recital seemed to improve Pop’s mood. “The Dew Drop Inn, terrible name for a joint. The Mint and the Stockman, you can’t have a genuine drinking town without those.”
“—yet the one that sticks in people’s minds is the Blue Eagle. How in the world did you win over so many customers against so much competition?”
Pop actually laughed a little. “Easy as pie. I took the front door off its hinges, first thing.”
Del looked as if he hadn’t heard that quite right, but I knew I had, and I still goggled.
“Word got around fast that the Blue Eagle never closed, day or night,” Pop spelled out. “Couldn’t close, no door, see? Three shifts were running on the dam, around the clock, so we had guys coming in from midnight to dawn as well as all day long.” From the glint in his eye, this was one satisfying memory of Fort Peck. “Eventually I put the door back on and closed the joint late at night like a sane person, but that didn’t matter by then.” He shrugged. “You get the right kind of reputation, Delano, and you’ve got it made.”
The other two of us could have heard more and more of his secrets of success, but he broke off the discourse all too soon. “Enough of that. We better get to getting, or we won’t be ready at the damn reunion.”
Carried away by a sense of the occasion, however, Del insisted on taking a picture before we budged from the dam, and went scrambling into the Gab Lab to find his camera. He had to squirm in from the front seat through the space where I’d been sitting, because the back of the van was so loaded with our cargo, and we could hear him grunting as he shifted things around to reach the camera. “Do you think we brought too much?” I worried to Pop. “He doesn’t have any room in there to get his recording stuff ready.”
“Unless mudjacks have changed,” he said without concern, “there’s no such thing as too much. Delano will have to fend as best he can, it’ll be good for him. This’d all be easier if he wasn’t as green as goose crap.” Edgily he walked to the railing of the wayside, peered over to the water, then grimaced toward the van. “I wish to hell he’d hurry up. This spot gives me the willies. It slid, you know.”
I knew no such thing, which was becoming chronic where Fort Peck was concerned.
“This part of the dam gave way in ’38,” Pop impatiently enlightened me. “Killed eight mudjacks in the slide.” He indicated the boulder-banked slope down to the lake. “It happened before they got the rocks onto it, this was all fresh fill, and a quarter of a mile of it along here slipped loose and slid into the rezavoy.” He shook his head. “They were lucky the whole thing didn’t go, or it’d have drowned out every place from here to Saint Louie.”
My toes curling, I glanced down at the dam fill under us. “Wh-where were you when it happened?”
“Where would I be? Slinging drinks in the Blue Eagle.”
“Found it!” Del sang o
ut, brandishing the camera and motioning for us to stand together at the outer edge of the dam, which I would have been happier to do if Pop hadn’t mentioned the big slide. He held still for the photograph—it shows one of us big-eyed as a puppy for whatever the day would bring, and the other looking like he was about to have teeth pulled; you can guess which was which—but the instant the shutter was clicked, he had us into action. “Let’s go to the government burg and see what’s what,” he directed Del, and we headed back to shore.
—
THE LITTLE TOWN carrying the Fort Peck name had outlasted all the others by housing the federal workers who tended the dam and its powerhouse, and it appeared determined to make up in neat identical streets of houses for the notorious messiness of the shantytowns. Lawns blazed green, like swatches of a golf course. Besides those spotless neighborhoods there was a tiny business section that Del cruised us into. Old hotel, post office, gas station, grocery store—the store had a big fresh sign saying ICE!
“Pull in here,” Pop spoke up. “It’s time to give your expense account some exercise.”
Del parked and none too willingly pulled out his wallet.
“Give Rusty, oh, twenty bucks,” Pop instructed, “that ought to do it.” He turned to me and told me the plan. “Delano, better go in with him to help carry it.”
Del balked. “The Library of Congress powers that be don’t like odd expendi—”
“What they don’t know back there won’t hurt them. Call it emergency rations.”
It was my turn to balk. “What if the store person doesn’t want to sell that much?”
“No sweat,” Pop waved that off and instructed me on how to handle matters inside.
Repeating over and over to myself what I was supposed to say, I advanced toward the store with trepidation. This was not like doing a bit when Zoe was the only audience. Beside me, Del looked as uncertain as I was.