“I don’t know,” she said. “There is an answer, I suppose.”
“Not on this earth,” George said.
12
“Really, I think that it’s foolish to go on spending money that way,” Gwen was saying. She’d spent Monday and Tuesday in peace, the only sounds of heavy equipment coming from far across the waterway. She was clearing the breakfast table and George was finishing his second cup of coffee and frowning up at her. “He’s a perfectly nice old man. He’s a delightful conversationalist, but I feel as if we’re paying money to have me listen to him talk, and that isn’t the way it’s supposed to work. Is it?”
“I have to take his machine back,” George said.
“Why not wait until Friday?” she asked. “You can drop it off and we’ll take in a movie or something.”
“Does that mean that you’re not going back to see King?”
“Do you think I need to?” She stood behind him and pressed her breasts into his shoulders. She’d taken to going braless around the house. It was nice. She was built for it and it was, for George, quite a novelty. Nothing like being able to grab a loving handful of softness unharnessed. He thought it over. She’d been a doll since the scary incident with the cat, no hang-ups, no problems.
“Well, honey, we’ll leave that up to you,” he said.
“I think the main thing is that by talking to Dr. King, even briefly, I’ve been able to talk to myself. I’ve learned a lot.”
“Miracle cure,” he said, turning to put his arms around her and pushing the side of his face into her stomach.
“Buddy, if you’re planning to go to work, you’d better stop that.” He was caressing the roundness of her hips.
“I really should,” he said. “But I could be late.”
“No,” she said, laughing, pulling out of his arms. “I’ll be the woman behind the man and send you off to conquer the electronics world.”
“Or Sam Davis’s ship-to-shore radio, as the case may be,” George said, rising, kissing her and then pulling away to brush his teeth and gargle with a vigorous action. She waved him down the drive and closed the door. It wasn’t that she wanted him to go. No. She wanted to be near him, always, but there were other things.
She waited for ten minutes, standing patiently just inside the door, ear cocked to catch the sound of the M.G. in case he decided to come back, in case he’d forgotten something. Then she moved quickly to the balcony overlooking the clear pond. She listened, looked, and walked down the steps, leaving her shoes on the decking. At the edge of the pond she halted and listened again. She was alone. She waded into the water, inches deep, moving her feet carefully, slipping them among the pulpy bottom growth. Ankle deep, she began to move her feet slowly, sinking them into the soft, cool sand. When they were covered, she stood very still, let her arms hang loosely at her sides, closed her eyes, and lifted her face to the sun.
At the main construction site of the generating plant there was the usual bedlam of noise, huge machines, rivet guns, welders, trucks, and voices. An official of the power company was making an inspection tour and was being given the red carpet treatment by Jack Flores, site boss for the prime contractor. The official wore a lightweight suit and a hard hat. Flores, an outside man, was in freshly pressed khaki. The tour had begun early and was being climaxed by a view of the entire site from atop the reactor building. The official was impressed. Flores was pleased, for he was four days ahead of schedule.
When the official had seen enough, they climbed down and got into a four-wheel-drive vehicle, Flores driving. He cut across the huge site, pointing out progress as he went, crossed a small highway under which the canal had been dug, a new bridge installed. Flores could see that the man was impressed. He himself always got a gut feeling when he saw a project really beginning to shape up. He’d been on some big jobs, but this one was a real gasser. He always felt as if he were back on the desert in Arizona, where he’d grown up, when he drove across the site and down the canal. The barren, roiled soil extended, a half-mile wide, on a straight line arrowing for the ocean five miles away. Man, the shit had been moved, and the trees cleared and burned. Not a blade of grass was left standing, although it would grow back eventually alongside the cooling canal.
The draglines were working, digging into the soft sand. The heat rose from them, and diesel fumes sweetened the air. Jack drove to the end of the current dig, and they were almost to the waterway. He cut off through old timber roads, made it to the beach highway, and pulled off again to give a guided tour of the vast, raw earth of the catch basin. Then he aimed the car across the bridge and onto the island. He drove quickly up to the ocean side, where work was temporarily halted on digging into the dunes. The equipment was there, untended, but then no one was going to steal a drag line mounted on a barge. He pointed out the cut where the canal would come across the island and bounced off into the raw earth toward the remaining trees.
He was a bit put out when he saw the dozer standing there idle. “Operator’s taking a break, I guess,” he said. He didn’t really have to alibi to the power company man. The jerk didn’t know from shit about construction. But when he was making a V.I.P. tour he wanted his men working, and working hard. “We’re not pushing it on this end,” he said. “The big job is on the other side. Then we’ll be into the dredging of the marsh for a few months. There’s plenty of time to finish up over here, so we’ve just got two machines working.”
The other dozer was idle, too. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen Billy Daniels’s old car down on the road. Bastards were probably laying out drunk.
From the inland edge of the last remaining trees in the area to be cleared, you could see across the marsh to the high dikes of the holding basin. Flores stopped the car and pointed out the route of the canal across the marsh. With his own clear vision, he was able to follow the line of survey flags all the way. While the power company guy was gawking, he walked to the dozer and put his hand on the side of the hood. It was cold. It hadn’t even been cranked up, and it was well into the day, almost noon. Moreover, there hadn’t been anything done since the last rain. He furrowed his brow. There’d been a helluva rain on Friday. That meant Daniels and Peebles hadn’t hit a lick since sometime Friday, that they hadn’t been in to work at all on Monday or Tuesday. He’d hand-picked them for this job and they’d let him down, but there was no real harm done. He’d been pushing construction crews long enough to know that men came and men went. Dozers could be pushed by just about any jerk with enough sense to mash pedals. He’d see to it, though, that Peebles and Daniels didn’t work for any of the big boys as long as they lived. He’d put the word out on those two cruds.
He bought dinner for the visiting official in town, dropped him back at the main office, and went out onto the site. No point in trying to get anyone over on the island until the next morning. He went into his office and checked on available men, selected one, and sent him word that he wanted to see him just before the four o’clock whistle. His guess was that Daniels and Peebles would try to clock a full week’s work. Judging from the progress they had made, they’d been going great guns out there. They had probably thought they’d be able to birddog it a little and take a few days off, get paid for them, and still come in with the job finished under the gun. Well, those two bastards had a surprise coming. He made a note to check their time cards on Friday, if he didn’t see them before then. Meanwhile, he had a million and one things on his mind. He started on them one at a time.
The dozer started up at seven on Thursday, waking Gwen. The alarm went off a few minutes later, but she was wide awake, sitting up in bed listening. She could hear the muffled roar of the engine and could feel the results. She was preoccupied during breakfast. George asked her if she felt all right. She shook her head. “Just a little draggy,” she said.