Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [75]
“The mountain is still talking to you,” Prager said.
“Are they–have they set off the blasts down where we were?”
“Not till the end of this shift,” Oliver said. “Those were probably in the Bush tunnel.”
“And some prisoners in there are shoveling up money,” said Mr. Kendall.
7
“You won’t get much sketching done in this,” Oliver said.
“If it doesn’t clear I’ll just take a walk.”
The trail was half lost in fog, the overcast squatted on the mountain. Stranger, padding ahead, disappeared within fifteen yards. From somewhere, all around, above, below, came the tinkle of moving bells, and in a few minutes the aguador materialized below them–big sombrero, goatskin chaps, pinto horse. Leading his three mules, each with two kegs of water balanced on the pack saddle, he came picking uphill at an inhumane pace, his spurs digging rhythmically into the pinto’s flanks. Broadly smiling, he saluted them: Susan had drawn him a few days before and made him famous. One, two, three, the hurrying mules passed, leaving the smell of dung diffused in the gray air.
There was no one at the watertank, the boxes hung crooked and empty on the meatbox tree. Across the gully Cornish Camp poked roofs and smoking chimneys into the fog, revealing a gable here, a corner there, like a quick suggestive sketch left deliberately incomplete. “You coming down?” Oliver said.
“I might as well.”
Going down, they walked into a clear pocket under the fog. Main Street lay glumly exposed up the opposite slope–post office and company store, Mother Fall’s, employment office, a raggle taggle of cottages set every which way, at every distance from the street. There was no one in sight, though smoke dove groundward from every stovepipe. In the gully eroded along the street side by last winter’s rains, a dog backed up, dragging a bone that might have come from a mammoth, and growled at Stranger, who stood above him and watched. Not a breath stirred the dry grass, dry thistles, dry mustard stalks, scattered papers.
“She’s a tough-looking place,” Oliver said. “I like your pictures better than the real thing.”
“Since I started to draw it I don’t seem to mind it so much.”
“Ready to follow Mary’s advice and settle down here for life?”
She laughed. “Not quite.” But then she added, “Certainly for a while, if your job was here.”
“You’d starve for talk.”
“Boykins is a pretty good substitute.” She took his arm, climbing up the steep street in the fog, swinging the packet of drawing materials; and at the top she turned sideways and skipped beside him, watching him. “And I like having commissions,” she said. “Altogether, it’s not the dullest life you brought me to. I can stand it for quite a while yet.”
He gave her an odd, dry look. “You may not have the chance.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said.”
“Have you been talking to someone about another job?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t own the mine,” Oliver said. “I only work here.”
They were going along the crest of the knoll, on Shakerag Street (Susan had put it in her sketch as a bit of local picturesqueness). The engineers’ office stood alone in the midst of high weeds. When Oliver unlocked the door, stale indoor smells rushed out to join the taint of garbage and woodsmoke that filled the air outside. She inhaled unaired pipe smoke, dust, art gum, India ink, the neatsfoot-oil odor of boots, and stood flapping the door back and forth to freshen the place.
Oliver stood before the long drafting table and stared down at the map tacked there. Absently he filled his pipe, interrupted his hands to lean and follow with one finger a line on the map, straightened again, tamping the tobacco into the bowl with his thumb. It was as if he had become invisible the moment he entered the office. His mind had gone away and left her. In the same way, in the evening, he would lock the door behind him and turn his attention back to her, the baby, the household. She had some of that single-mindedness herself, and respected it, but it exasperated her to be totally forgotten, standing there idiotically waving up a breeze with the door. A hundred times she had tried to get him to talk about things that had happened at work, and got only grunts and monosyllables.