Free The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes

misty fathoms trailing seaward. Where once bleak needles and spines had popped crookedly from the banks and a few flowers increasingly withered into the plain and disappeared, only the dust from the southward slope, swirling into the air, and a few animal bones and tin cans from a still deeper generation, survived. One small city of the plain lasted to welcome the tourist trade and issue reports on the depth of the almost foreign, dark pan of water. And yet, from the construction yard diggings, from the bits of wire in the sand and a beer bottle that might be found instead of a wreath, inscription, or shredded flag on the graded fresh slope of earth, from the drippings that seethed out of its dark insides and were measured, it seemed that the luck of gamblers, engineers and women had appeared, and from the bare mound indistinguishable from the bluffs at dusk, the highways, planned townsites and rock formations pushing west had stopped, fossilized and emerged.
    It moved. The needles, cylinder and ink lines blurring on the heat smeared graph in the slight shade of evening, tended by the old watchman in the power house, detected a creeping, downstream motion in the dam. Leaned against by the weight of water, it was pushing southward on a calendar of branding, brushfires and centuries to come, toward the gulf. Visitors hung their mouths and would not believe, and yet the hill eased down the rotting shale a beetle’sleg each several anniversaries, the pride of the men of Gov City who would have to move fast to keep up with it. But if this same machine, teletyping the journey into town, was turned upon the fields, the dry range, the badlands themselves, the same trembling and worry would perhaps be seen in the point of the hapless needle, the same discouraging pulse encountered, the flux, the same activity. It might measure the extinction of the snake or a dry finger widening in erosion.
    They smoothed it with a shovel. They thrived in the shadow of the dam but kept to the bottom of the mound. Only the cowboy trod upon its sweltering slope above his kin, only small parties of electricians dragged their wires on its baking crest. Few took the top road. They could see it from their horseshoe windows but rarely climbed it, unlike the tourists who arrived each week in season, labored over the trackless dirt, not steep but long, gauging upon it little prints that would evaporate by dusk, to stand panting for a moment, cover their heads with handkerchiefs and say: “I had an uncle had a farm out there. Used to graze under them miles of water.”
    If the employment of dredge and suction pump had done little toward changing the contour and imperfections of an already dry south, it had done nothing to the land northward but submerged it— havoc was hardly tossed upon a natural sea bottom. The outriders on a Sunday fished over the old barn. The current swelled upon pasture, receded from field, sinking or skirting raised sandstone islands or covered dunes with a virgin darkness. And it barely washed the sand and granite sea side of the dam. It held. They told the visitors that it would.
    They spoke of it as dry land. But the land they chose to walk upon had never been scooped out by caterpillar nor been flung showering, fine as grain, from spades. Shapeless in the darkness,they never watched it when in their cars parked on roadless, adjoining bluffs, and more certainly, never watched the moon from blankets spread across the crest. But of its own accord and from its own weight fissures appeared and deceptively closed, trapping wrestling mice and young lizards. By them the whole ten years of work must someday crack apart one dry season, and sift away like earth pitched against a screen.
    No one saw the Gov City man shoveled under. He died at the drop of a lash, was noticeably absent only after a count of heads. The lip of new pumped clay melted with the downward breath of an elevator through its shaft, left the end of the trestle and the