SHORT STORIES BASED ON ROCK SONGS
#1
by Brian Henley
Copyright 2013 Brian Henley
It is the end of a season in the Dakotas. Heavy clouds scud across the sky. One minute it is bright blue summer, the sun hot and white and blinding off the white granite and water. The next it looks like rain. A moment later it will rain, and then more blinding sun. Below the sky are mountains, worn and tortured things with the rocks like broken teeth sticking out of the hills, and straggly pines with twisted trunks that cling to deadly slopes. On the side of one mountain, near a fast-running creek, is Rocky.
Rocky works a sluice. He built the sluice himself, after only ever having seen one or two. He cut the trees and shaped the planks, with rented tools, and bought the nails with dust he panned. He works the sluice himself. Up at the top he shovels dirt from the riverbank. When the hopper is full he grabs the buckets. Four buckets at a time, two in each hand. It’s as much as he can carry. He fills the buckets from the creek. He has to walk fifty feet downhill, and back up again, because that’s where the only pool is deep enough to fill a bucket. Stupid, it was, to put the sluice up above the pool, but that’s where the dirt was best. It was one or the other.
He labors back up the hill with full buckets. From his wrists to his elbows where his sleeves are rolled, and all around his neck and chest where his collar is loose, every sinew stands out against his skin. He breathes through gritted teeth. The dirt is trod to mud and the footing is bad. He almost spills twice. The second time takes him down on one knee. Standing, he hisses at the mud. It is a warning sound, a naked threat like a snake’s rattle, and it helps.
The buckets delivered, he pours them, one after another, on the dirt at the top of the sluice. Then he picks up the shovel.
Throughout the day he will do this a dozen times, a hundred times, as many times as he can while the light holds. If the days were longer he would do more. If they were shorter he would work blind.
When the first white men made it back from the Dakotas they described the landscape to their eastern friends. “Yes, yes,” the easterners said, “River valleys, pine forests, crags and peaks. Barren wastes and lonely sunsets. We’ve seen it all before.” But no, the travelers would say, you haven’t. And they’d describe it all again. They would describe it many times, to many people. They were as haunted men, always searching their listener’s eyes, desperate for that twinkle of understanding. They were looking for amazement, for awe, for the dawning awareness they had felt when they were there: that man is an insubstantial thing, a small and hapless thing, in the face of such staggering Creation. But there was no way an easterner could understand that. There was no way in hell. Excepting, of course, to stand in the midst of it themselves.
It is much later in the day. Working the shovel, Rocky’s hand is slipping. He looks down. It’s blood: blood on the handle, blood on his hand. Rocky inspects the hand. There are three bloody spots at the base of his fingers where the callouses have rubbed off. Three places, on one hand, weaker than his will. Inexcusable.
But he will show the hand, the traitor thing. He bends to work again. He will grasp the handle tighter. The weak points will wear away, he tells himself. All that will be left is strength.
The sun dips below the horizon. Rocky gathers his things. The dirt at the bottom of the sluice he discards. What has collected against the planks he sweeps into a sack. He will pan it later.
The sack is heavy. He grunts when he hoists it onto his shoulders. Wet dirt runs down his back. With one hand he steadies the sack. Shovel, pick, and pan he has to carry in his other hand. The sack is heavy. He starts for camp.
It is well into dark. Back at camp three men sit around a fire. They have already counted, and washed, and eaten and washed and stowed.
“Holy Jesus,” says one, the tall one. The other two look up from the fire.
Rocky stumbles into their firelight. He still carries the shovel, the pick and the pan, and the sack over a shoulder. His left hand, the one that carries the tools, is wrapped in a bloody bandage. His right trouser leg is blood from knee to ankle from stumbling with the buckets. His face is swollen sunburnt.
They watch as he trudges past, through their circle, and into the dark. “Whadjya do, fall off the mountain?” shouts the short man, the one holding a bottle, and cackles for the other two.
“Your steel still the reason that boy’s working himself to death?” the tall one asks the fire.
The short one drinks. “It is indeed,” he says happily.
The tall one nods. “You know as well as I do what use that boy intends for it.”
“What the boy does with his lawful purchases is none of my affair.”
The tall one nods. “You’re a rotten son of a bitch.”
The short one sets his jaw. “I got as much need of money and right to prosper as any man. You show me. You show me where any part of it’s illegal.”
“Of course I can’t,” the tall one says. “Nobody can. There ain’t no law to stop you. Excepting the one deep down, under all your bluster, under all the booze,” he casts a loaded glance at the bottle, “that says you know you shouldn’t.”
The short one stares a challenge at the tall one. “What the boy does with his lawful purchases,” he intones, “is none of my affair.” He spits into the fire.
Alone in his tent, his lantern lit and his chair pulled up to a crate, Rocky opens a cigar box. Inside is a lock of hair, astonishingly blond. It is tied up in a pale blue ribbon. He takes it out. He looks at it for a long time, rubbing it with his thumb.
With his bandaged hand he unbuttons his loose collar. Then with his clean hand he reaches the lock of hair inside his shirt, and holds it to his skin.
Days later, the sun shines down on Rocky’s claim. The air is still. The sluice is dry.
Rocky and the short man are still in camp. They meet between two tents. The short man is a different creature in the morning. Gone is the pugnaciousness. He is pale, nervous, and a little shaky.
He looks over his shoulder, as if checking for spies. “You know,” he starts, but then shuts up.
Rocky hands the short man a tobacco pouch. It jingles full of coins. The short man produces what looks like a bundle of leather thongs. Rocky begins to unwrap it.
The short man looks nervous. “You gotta check right now? It is what it is…” he trails off, unsure if he should continue. “You know ain’t nothing you do now gonna get your Nancy back of her own accord.”
Rocky is done unwrapping the thongs. In his hand is a Colt Peacemaker, heavy and dire. “Her name is McGill,” he says.
Amber stands behind the empty bar, her back to the empty saloon, absently polishing a glass. She has been polishing the same glass for half an hour.
She falls into reveries sometimes. Little quiet spells, she calls them, times when there isn’t a thought in her head that she can point to, but just feelings and the tail ends of thoughts. She thinks, when she thinks of it at all, that they probably have something to do with the baby. The feeling is the same, sort of, but muted somehow, like a watered-down beer. That and she always ends up a quiet spell with the thought of the baby in her head. How it would have looked. She always pictured it with brown eyes.
She has stopped polishing the glass. With an effort, she puts it back on the shelf. In the mirror she sees a figure at the bar. Quiet one, she thinks. The doors didn’t even squeak.
“Well howdy, stranger!” She bellows. She puts on her brash voice, her wanton-woman-unafraid voice. “What can we do you for?”
The stranger counts coins on the bar. He moves each one with a finger, his lips forming silent syllables. “How much is a room?” he asks. His
voice is soft after hers.
“Miners don’t get rooms,” she teases. “They come in on sprees!”
He does not move.
She sees now beneath the tan, and the dirt, and the grown-up gun around his hips he’s just a boy. His cheeks are downy, his sleeves and trouser legs rolled to fit. First timer, she thinks. He’s probably scared clean out of his mind.
She walks over so that she’s standing straight in front of him. The corset she wears beneath her gown pushes her breasts well above her plunging neckline. They are large, pale, and inviting. She leans over the bar, squeezes them together with her elbows.
He looks. Of course he looks. Boy or not, he’s got testicles, doesn’t he? But in his eyes is not the sharp ardor she expects. It’s something else, something immediately arresting. It takes her a moment to place it, but when she does she’s sure.
It is sadness. She steps back.
“I’ll tell you what,” she steps back again. “You stay right there.” She is headed out the back, towards the storeroom. “You stay right there and I’ll fix you up.” There’s some hamburger left in the cold cellar, she knows. And some onions. She has no idea why but suddenly she wants to feed him.
Rocky sits down on the single chair. He adjusts the wooden slats on the window. Rocky sits down on the bed.
He was unprepared for this. He has never been