Free The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes Page A

steam engine atop it swaying loosely and cataclysmic for a moment, vertical beams dripping small pebbles and slime. Then, as the structure snapped with a minimum of screeching timber, it carried the catafalque, its joints of wood and forward-most portions of the bridge of skill, into the hollow hand and to the bottom. Two weeks of scaffold were rebuilt and another donkey engine ordered from the yards. Advancing slowly, testing each step with a gentle, forward foot—but the sound was gone, the earth firm again—they reached, one by one, the crest of disaster, a wide settled trough of mud barely higher than the freshly, nakedly drained original bed. And though they searched and tried to remember, the incalculable loss of small tools could not be reckoned. They were called back to solid ground by an engineer’s whistle blowing from the bluff, and the sound of low lapping water followed them from the scene of such toil, from the miasmal landscape.
    Tent after tent in Mistletoe collapsed, canvas sides sprawled in the sand, ridge poles cracked and, as shock clouds passed dryly over the rope-marked streets, rumors rose, subsided, and the town got drunk. Though the lid of the portmanteau had dropped and no oneknew what was lain away, packed just under the eye of the town, though there was nothing to do but pump, shovel, raise up the earth and grade, “Squashed, that’s what he was,” said many and disorder grew. “By now, he’s slid into China,” and coolies cried above the dam, rolling it with boulders, while a country that was thought to go no further than the sea, went down.
    Thegna cried the loudest. She caught the spirit of the Slide in sawed-off gum boots, canvas gloves and apron. She worked. From the hour when the full-swing diggings were evacuated and the entire project quit in midstream to the day when they crept once more to the grizzled flat, as the dam seethed, settled and worked the body to the least disturbing depths, she stood alone in the cook tent and perspired. She fried her entire store of beans and hacked open cans of beef to last three days; she barred them from the tent and boiled coffee. They were sobered by her taking on and listened as she runted from the piece of iron on the ground before the stove to the plank tables, setting out tinware, blowing into the apron.
    “It doesn’t do much good to say he’s buried in there,” she heard Bohn talking softly in the sun outside and wiped her eyes, “why, it’s just like saying, ‘I’ve got a brother buried in the. Rocky Mountains’.”
    Quickly she put the food in plain sight, untied the entrance flaps, slipped under the tent wall in the rear. With line, basket and rusty hook, she made her way to the tidewater and darkness under the one wooden bridge in the country, fixed her gear and sat down to fish for eels.
    It was only one of many eyesores, one hump in a chain of knolls, adding nothing but an artificial lake, obscuring nothing but two hoof beaten points on opposite banks where cattle used to swim across and land. Whatever went into the making or whatever had fallenshort of the great pile, it hardened in the sun, swelled at the base and now grew suddenly higher if watched in the pink light of noon. They were finishing it off. But despite the metal lampposts ready to light the crestway when switches were installed, despite the orange half-finished steel tower, bodies could still have slept full length in the crevices or been swimming blindly through the dark muck of the center. The wooden bridge downstream was gone, the cuts were dry, the old campfires gone out in Dynamite, old trails blown away and the sides of the dam left untraveled. Still, it drew spectators from the corn-land and at least one old woman back to its mountainous pathways, to accidental crags and ravines.
    Ma fixed on her bonnet with mosquito netting and took up her basket. She left her skewing sticks and skimmer, wooden paddle spoon, file knives, tin cup and a heap of seasoned