“Oh?”
“Well, I don’t know anything about this particular machine,” George said.
“My main interest is in the movements of electrodermal currents,” King said. “I bought this expensive toy thinking that I would prove some theories I have regarding emotions. But the electrodes here give absolutely no readings.”
“Well,” George said, “the principle behind the thing is simple. If I had the schematics—”
“I think, yes,” King said, digging into a drawer, coming up with a thick book of electrical diagrams. “If these mean anything to you.”
George thumbed through them and found the one he wanted. He furrowed his brow in thought. “Couldn’t be but one or two things,” he said.
“Young man,” King said. “If you could fix this diabolical thing I’d be forever grateful.”
“Well, I don’t have any equipment here,” George said. Gwen could see that he was interested. Being able to put his hands on a new and complicated piece of electronic gear was pure bliss to George.
“Take it with you. It’s taking up space, gathering dust. I used to have the couch here.” Dr. King gestured. “Where it is now the sun gets in my eyes unless I close the shades.”
“In an M.G.?” Gwen laughed.
“I can come over in the pick-up,” George said, hooked.
He did. He arose early the next morning, leaving Gwen asleep, with a note on the bedside table. She was awakened late by the growl of the heavy equipment. At first, she thought it was across the waterway, where the cranes and drag lines and earth movers were piling a fifteen-foot-high dike to hold stinking marsh mud. Then she realized that they were closer. She’d had the dream again. She was not refreshed by her night’s sleep. She dozed. She awoke, screaming aloud. She had experienced the sensation of having her upper torso twisted and ripped away from her lower body.
Two big Cat bulldozers had been moved onto Pine Tree island. There was plenty of time. Two could do the job nicely, since there was only a half-mile strip of woodland to be cleared. It would take months to dredge the canal across the marsh. The operators were buddies who had worked for the prime contractor of the generating plant for two years, having signed on as heavy equipment operators at a job in Texas. They’d followed the construction jobs since. Billy Daniels was twenty-five and unmarried, a handsome, long-haired, husky kid from Dallas. He liked women, booze, and hunting quail, about in that order. He had a way with all of his pet hobbies. His buddy, Jock Peebles, was a year older, more quiet, but able to kill a fifth of bourbon and still function. Billy was more at ease with the girls, and had lined up both of them with a pair of sisters in Port City. He got into his girl’s pants the first night by promising to love her forever and take her with him when the job moved on. There was no real danger in making the promise, because the current job was good for three more years.
Billy and Jock shared a mobile home parked on the far side of Ocean City in a new trailer park. There was an old gal from Tennessee there—married, two kids, husband a welder on the night shift—who had been giving Billy the eye. He had his eye on her, too. He made a ten-dollar bet with Jock that he’d be in her pants within thirty days.
Surveyors had been through before the dozers. The outlines of the cut were there. Bush axes had laid low the brush along the lines, and you could stand on one end of the area and look all the way through along the surveyed lines. Since it takes room to work a big Cat, Jock went crunching inland from the beach road, leaving Billy to start on the edge. Most of the trees were small, and you could push up a helluva pile of them with one straight run. Now and then Billy would come on a biggie, and those he liked. He liked plowing into a huge pine with the blade raised a couple of feet, hitting with a jar which he felt all the way to his balls, the tracks digging and then spinning as the big pine fought back. It was, Billy thought, having undergone the unpleasant experience just a few months back, sort of like a dentist pulling a stubborn wisdom tooth. He had to rock the bastard, pushing and loosening, then the big push and the tree’s tap root snapping below ground, sometimes with a crack that he could hear. Then the whole thing would come out, caught on his sharp dozer blade, to topple with a hissing fall, and then a big whooshing crash with limbs breaking and pine cones flying everywhere.
Pushing a Cat was good loot and it paid for a lot of good booze and bought pretties for reluctant women. Billy was good at it. He was better than Jock, and Jock was a damned good Cat man. But Billy could outwork him and did with regularity. In no time, he had a cleared place, raw earth torn, torn roots bleeding sap. He then began to push the fallen trees and brush into the cleared area. After it dried a little, the laborers would come around, douse it with gasoline, and burn it. Fresh-pushed trees were the devil to burn. It took days and a lot of gas to do it.
Billy figured he and Jock could make the job last two weeks, if they paced it. It could have been finished in ten days, but then they’d have to go back over the creek to work with that bastard foreman who, one day, was going to get his teeth altered by Billy’s fist. He liked being all alone, just him and Jock in the woods, with the big Cat growling and heating up. Sweat began to soak through his denims, broken branches and pine cones falling clip, clop on the top of his protective cage.
Billy saw the girl just before he was ready to knock off for lunch. He was working automatically in an area of twisted, small oaks, and his mind was on the ham and egg sandwiches in his lunch pail. She was standing on the edge of the growing cut area, under a pine. Her arms were crossed in front of her so that he couldn’t tell whether or not she had a good set, but she looked good otherwise. Her hair was neat and done up in one of those sophisticated, simple buns. Her legs, encased in slacks, looked good. He couldn’t see her face from that distance, but faces didn’t mean too much to him, just so they didn’t need a paper sack to put over them. She was still there when he made a turn and pushed a pile of fallen trees into the growing mound at the center of the cut.
He’d been saving a big oak. He’d cleared around it, because it was a monster and would take all the Cat could give. He wanted room to work it. He was used to having people watch him work the Cat. People were fascinated by power. Girls liked dozer operators, maybe because they thought some of that power was transferred to their loins. So he was doing his job and putting on a show at the same time when he rammed the big oak, causing it to shiver to the top of its hundred-year-old mass. Man, it was a mother. It fought and fought, but the power of the big Cat was just too much. The tree dropped a few brittle limbs on him when he hit it hard, the limbs crashing and crunching atop his protective cage, but in the end it went over, with a groan of splintering wood which could be heard over the roar of the big diesel engine. The thing went down on its outstretched limbs. They shattered under the weight of the main trunk. For a while, there it was, crash, crunch, snap. Billy looked over toward where the girl was standing. As he watched, she turned and disappeared into the woods, but not before he saw enough to arouse his interest. Billy was a fanny man. She had a fine one. He didn’t say anything about his audience to Jock. Hell, a man can only share so much with his buddy. While he ate he wondered if she had been just a passing tourist or if she lived nearby. He hoped the latter. At any rate, he’d be watching for her.
Gwen had been drawn to the canal cut by the noise and by something else, a nagging sense of something, duty, curiosity, disgust. It was just too nebulous to define, that feeling, but she’d been saddened by what she saw. It reminded her of the air view of the area. Hundreds of acres of former woodland now bare and blowing sand. When the big oak went down, she felt like weeping. A hundred years to grow, outliving generations of man, surviving hurricanes, drought, fire. It took the machine about ten minutes to negate a century of growth. She was moody and hot after her walk through the woods. She walked to the clear pond and pulled off her shoes. The water was delicious on her feet, but she did not even consider a swim. Without George around, the pool looked deep and lonely. George’s swimming activity had flattened the tall grass at the edge of the water. She sat down, feeling a slight dampness on her seat. She splashed her feet idly, trying to dispel the gloom. The roar of the heavy equipment, at least of the bulldozers nearest her, was silenced. Nature, however, is never totally silent. She heard birds rustling the leaves in the uncleared areas, a squirrel calling, the caw of a crow, and the lovely trill of a mockingbird. Gradually, a feeling of contentment came over her.