Squires Hall knocks on the door and Harry is down the stairs and out into the stifling street almost before he knows he’s moved. The cars and the noise and the shouts combine to bounce the heat straight into his brain, his ears are ringing and he feels as if he’s left a tangential piece of himself up in that room.
Hall has changed into clean work clothes and boots, wears them with the natural elegance of a mama’s boy, though Harry has heard it said that Hall is as tough as a goat.
They go around the corner to a small flat-bed truck with board sides cargo covered by two tarps tight secure. Hall steers out to Fremont Street, and Harry can tell from the start that it’s a powerful machine, will traverse a hundred miles of dry gulch and shale wash without a groan.
“What you got under there?” Harry asks.
“6 cylinder, purrs real nice.”
“You work at the dam.”
“My brother does. High-scaling. I work with Leonora”
Harry is impressed. High-scalers are the men who hang from ropes on tiny wooden seats and jackhammer the canyon walls, smoothing and shaping the rock to take the concrete.
“Apache is he?”
“Paiute.” The traffic is stop and go this time of the day. “So you’re Maltese are you, Malta Harry?”
Harry looks out the side window. A kid sees him, blows a smoke ring his way.
“You know where Malta is?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
“I couldn’t do it, that’s for certain, would if I could, out in the air and the light instead of the ninth circle of hell shovelling muck. Even so, Rita wouldn’t let it — she fails to understand it’s more dangerous in the tunnel than dangling on a rope hundreds of feet in the air.”
They speed up, head out of town. Harry considers what he knows: the Chuck Tender is the guy who positions the drill bit against the rock, prior to the drilling. The drills are six or eight feet long, the holes they make then packed with dynamite and charges placed, fuses set, each task a different expertise. This is a knowledge you can’t get from books, only from working the rock unique to its own habitation.
Up until now Harry’s the bottom guy on the crew — the mucker clears the debris after the explosion. This means an extra twelve and a half cents an hour, a dollar and a quarter a day. But more than that, it means a new skill, a step up.
The whole set-up is screwy. Why him? Because Lennie gives Jim the go-ahead? Screwy isn’t quite the word for her. Or this guy.
“So what do you do out there. You aren’t exactly built for hammering.”
“That’s right, pops. I’m built for speed,” and with that Squires Hall shoots them out of town, shows what the truck can do on the stretch of paved highway before the Boulder City turnoff. He swings the truck around, pulls to a stop in a cloud of dust behind Lou’s adobe bar.
Lou emerges from the back door, drying his hands on a dish towel and squinting at the light. It’s always night inside. “I got nothing for you,” he shouts.
“Relax, it’s not me who’s come to see you.”
Harry opens the truck door and steps down. “Good afternoon Lou, has Cady been by?”
“Three, four days back. He was in a bad way, I’m telling you, kipped the night out here in his car. I pray for him, Harry, him and Alma.”
“Save your prayers Lou. What happened, where did he go?”
“You should have taken the cloth, Harry, and saved yourself. I left water out for him, some fruit. When I got back he was gone. I hear he went into the desert.”
Hall has been listening, head perched out the truck. “Who says? Who saw him?”
“Mike got it from Fresno Freddie.” Lou knows it sounds weak. “So I asked around a bit, quiet you know, seems like a man was found half dead out by Spider Dry Creek a couple of days ago.”
“Who by?”
“They don’t say.”
“Was he driving a Moon?”
“You’d need a better machine than that to get so far.”
“It’s him, I know it is, it’s got to be!”
“Hold up, Harry.” Hall slides out of the truck, saunters over. Lou hands him a glass of lemon water.
“Pavel’s territory,” Hall says. “I’ll go looking for Cady, first I’ll drop you closer to home.”
“He’s my buddy, he’s just lost Alma, lost his love. He needs me.”
Lou looks at him. “You need an introduction to get within ten miles of Pavel. Listen to Mr. Hall. Better he goes alone.”
Harry has no choice. There are supply chains to consider. He nods reluctantly, climbs back into the cab.
They drive until they reach the first Reclamation Service Reservation sign, then Hall drops him off and spins out north-east to the desert. Harry trudges up to the bundle of squat stucco buildings on the ridge — the employment office, the administrative building, and a tented mess hall open to the sky where hopeful workers waiting for a call are served water and jerky. This late in the day, the concentration of the sun upon the ground is oppressive, everyone hides in whatever shade they can find.
Harry walks out in the open, watching the ground for a hint of spiders and scorpions as they wake up and stir themselves to hunt. Its a long walk to Hemenway Wash, but he knows someone will be along soon enough to give him a ride.
The descending sun makes of this place a wide and spectacular landscape, filled with deep shadows and the colors of the rocks and sands and sky suddenly vivid in contrast. He wants to rejoice in this moment of unexpected beauty, but cannot — for the first time since coming out here he feels weary, defeated: Alma is dead, Cady vanished, a scorching sun that never relents — and that obscenity of a town back there with crowds starving in the streets as the casinos rake money into overflowing pockets.
A deliberate function of capitalism, two interests colluding . . . colliding? He hears a car coming down behind him, the mellow purr of the Ranger’s Packard, as beautiful a machine as ever adorned these byways.
“Hop in Harry, I’m going your way.”
Claude Williams makes believe his desert fiefdom is a regular city suburb. His wife Marjorie writes a weekly column for the local paper — Williamsburg. Not Ragtown, not Hellhole, Williamsburg — full of local gossip and household hints, just like any other small-town paper.
“Spotted you back at the gate,” Claude says, “but I had to clear up a few things.”
“It’s all right Claude, I needed the walk, clear my head.”
“So what’s the scoop?”
“He just disappeared, as if he never existed. No tracks, nothing.”
“Drives a Moon don’t he, beauty to drive on the highway, skims smooth as can be. Maybe on a hard desert crust it won’t leave a track.”
“You mean nothing too obvious we could see from the road?”
“That’s right, Harry. We might have to take a closer look.”
“You know Squires Hall?”
“I’ve heard tell of him.” Claude sounds dubious.
“He’s out there looking for him now.”
“Figures. His brother’s okay — half-brother really — but from what I hear the younger one’s a queer.”
“I thought as much. Lordie, you never know where
they’re going to crop up.”
“Let’s be charitable, shall we? I wouldn’t rent him a place in Williamsburg.” Claude taps the cigarette lighter with determined finesse, jaw set, shakes out a Lucky from the pack. “You worried about Cady?”
“What is worry but the primary manifestation of our human qualities,” Harry says, and instantly feels like a fool.
Claude pretends not to hear him. “Only yesterday,” he says, “we had two kids had to take into care. Dad staked them out naked on the sand because they misbehaved. The neighbors damn near tore him to pieces, had a hard time getting him into custody alive.”
“Rest assured . . .” Harry starts to say.
“I tell you, that’s yet another story that won’t get anywhere near Marge’s column.”
“ . . . Rita and I are in agreement, we won’t give up Russ to care, wee’ll look after him until Cady is ready, however long it takes.”
“Any help we can give you only have to ask. Marge will be happy, she loves to show we’re good people out here.”
“Also I have to figure out how to bury Alma. I don’t have the authority.”
“You say he just vanished into thin air?”
“Not a trace.”
Claude slows the car slightly, takes a good long sideways look at Harry. Whatever he sees there decides him not to press further and he speeds up. Harry stares out at the barren rocks. Far to the east the sky starts to darken.
“I’ll put up a notice in the mess tent at River Camp. We’ll have a collection, and I’ll take care of the paperwork. It’ll be in Marge’s next column, you can count on it.”
Claude stops the car at the edge of Ragtown and Harry climbs out. “Thanks Claude.” He slumps off to the scatter of shacks across the desert floor. Home is close, and as he nears he hears the sound of a baby crying behind burlap walls.
Life is far from easy for these folks. Where could Cady be? Clutching a bottle is a likely place...