The Dam Tender

by Jeffrey Greene

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

The road out here was so bad, he could probably risk sleeping for a couple hours, potential firing offense though it was. That is, if he could get to sleep, if he could ever hope to sleep again. He took a final drag and tossed the cigarette, and as he watched it arc and fall, seeding the wet sand with sparks, he seemed to hear a faint, almost furtive sound of high-pitched laughter.

He stood abruptly and left the hut, walking a full circle around the back while straining to see or hear something. All he heard was a distant rumble of thunder, and realized that the storm had now darkened a good third of the western sky. The thunder must have been what he’d heard, distorted by the roar of water into what had sounded to his scoured nerves like a woman laughing. But there was no longer any doubt: he was in a for a storm. He drew a cup of cold water from the thermos and drank it down, only now realizing how parched he was. He drank more.

Now, he thought, with a chopping motion of his hand. Now, now, now... There was no past and no future, not really. It was always just now, ten million years ago, ten million from whenever. And he was fool enough to think he could wall himself off from any of those moments that constituted his past.

He pulled the netting down over his face and turned slowly in all directions. There was a voice from the very recent past in his head, as insistent as mosquito wings, speaking words he was helpless to suppress, seeming to hover in the air around his face, as if entangled in the netting.

What does it look like I’m doing? I’m leaving you, Einstein, like I should have years ago. Told you what’d happen if you didn’t quit that stupid watchman’s job and bid on something that actually pays the bills. Told you, told you, told you. And now I’m voting with my feet.

He was surprised to find himself feeling hungry. For his last meal, he thought, the condemned man ate a ham and cheese on rye with mustard and pickles, a bag of potato chips and a mealy apple. After eating, he closed his eyes, trying to let the shouting water obliterate thought.

He was sweating inside the rain suit, especially now in the pressurized stillness preceding a thunderstorm. Then, like a plywood door splitting in two, dry thunder cracked open the sky. Low, fast-moving clouds sagged earthward and lightning strikes were much closer now, only a few seconds between stroke and thunder. He walked outside, and as he stood there facing west, waiting for the freshening wind that would briefly cool things off just before the rain came, he saw something his eyes couldn’t understand. It looked like a person stretched out full-length on the pipe, head facing the discharge, arms dangling lifelessly.

He lifted the netting, squinted his eyes to improve his slight near-sightedness and walked slowly toward the pit, feeling his face twisting painfully into a grinning mask. He knew he was alone here, the last man on earth for the next six-and-a-half hours, yet his boots dragged in the sand and he was panting through his teeth.

When he was about ten yards from the edge of the pit he stopped, knelt down and squinted again. There was nothing there. It was the rounded top of a sand mound on the far side of the pit, its lower half cut off by the pipe, the darkness encouraging the illusion of a human body sprawled along the top of the pipe.

He pulled the netting over his face and sat down on the pipe, still breathing hard, sweat dripping under his clothes and into his eyes. Was he to see her everywhere now, in every dim shape, every disturbed piece of ground? Hear sounds too terrible to name each time he closed his eyes? Was there nothing left but this?

He bounded off the pipe as lightning struck near the dragline, the blinding spark and crash of thunder simultaneous, then a rushing wind came, skittering paper litter and styrofoam cups across the sand. Instinctive joy took over, the dangerous joy of oncoming storms, and he lifted the mosquito net away from his face just as a sand-stinging gust blew off his hat. He let it go for the moment, basking in the coolness of sweat evaporating on his face and neck, the mosquitoes blown away along with his fearful thoughts. A fat drop of rain hit his eyebrow, then from a few drops it came a deluge. He found his hat and put it on, then turned to run back to the hut.

An explosively loud thunderbolt dazzled him into a terrified crouch, and in the microsecond before the darkness returned he saw a blanket-wrapped shape huddled in the corner of the hut, one long white hand holding the edges closed over the face. This time he couldn’t explain it away. He would have chosen a tornado over whatever was waiting for him in there, and stumbling backward, he fled to the road, slogging up the flooding morass with all his strength, too panicked even to consider where he was going or what he was running from. The deep mud quickly wore him out, and despair did the rest: he tripped and fell into the muck.

On his hands and knees, feeling wind-driven rain forcing itself under his collar and trickling down his back, and warm water flowing around his hands as the road became a creek, he tried to pull himself together. Barely two hours into his shift, and he’d spooked himself into a state like this. Hadn’t he known there was no place he could hide where memory wouldn’t follow? Somehow he had to learn to go on as before, even though he knew his old life was over.

He stood, then turned reluctantly, as if led by bailiffs, and began climbing back up the hill to the hut, nearly blinded by wind-blown rain. From this distance the hut’s doorway was a gaping hole into perfect darkness, and he cursed himself for leaving the flashlight behind. Two forces of ungovernable fear, one purely visceral, the other spiritual, kept him as if between two ropes pulled taut, and he found himself preferring a soaking to facing the hut.

Then a thunderbolt crashed overhead, so loud and close that he leapt straight up and came down running hard for the hut. At the entrance, the overhang sheltering him at least partially from the rain, he stared into the windowless space, and a bray of appalled laughter tore loose. Could it really have been just his brown grocery bag with his white hard hat laid over the top, roughly resembling a bundled human shape? Was he that far gone?

He used the rain sluicing off the overhang to wash the mud off his hands and the knees of rain pants, then turned on the flashlight and sat down, pulling out the rolled towel he used as a cushion and dried his face, hair and neck. The rain battering the roof was deafening but also calming. He used to think that inside a metal box was the worst possible place to be in a violent thunderstorm, but the old-timers had told him that the hut functioned as a lightning rod and no dam tender had ever been electrocuted, so he’d stopped bolting out into the rain and taking his chances in the open, where the danger was far greater.

He turned off the light and sat in the dark. Death by lightning would be quick, though, quicker than nerves could register. He had often imagined sitting here when lightning struck the hut: all those thousands of amperes super-heating the steel, turning him into an ash silhouette baked into the wall. Too bad it couldn’t happen, not even if he took off his rubber boots and sat barefooted with his back against the wall. It would solve everything.

His father’s vicious sarcasm shouted down the storm:

“Nobody deserves to get off that easily, Julius. Especially you. “Extraspecially me,” he said aloud. “And you, Miss Mistletoe of 1947, who brought his little punching bag into the world, where were you while Dear Old was working on his combinations? Wait, I know: getting your black belt in mixology.”

“Hate me to your heart’s content, kid. I deserve it for checking out on my onliest. But he just warmed up on you. I was always the main event.”

A decade dead and buried, both of them, as if they’d never existed. Except here, rioting inside the old time machine with no off button.

“Oh, there’s an off button, Julie girl.”

“Don’t call me that. I hate it almost as much as I hate you.”

“Isn’t that why we’re all here? To watch you push it?”

If only he could sleep. He’d choose nightmares over another minute of these memories. They were driving him crazy. And Moses on a stick, what a flood. Enough rain to float coffins out of their... the thought jerked him to his feet, and he stalked the tiny space of the hut, trying to tamp down panic.

The crashing strikes had passed; now it was strobing high up in the clouds, flickering stabs of daylight. If it was raining like this where he’d... Would it? No; no. Why his arms were so tired: he’d dug the hole deeper than was strictly necessary to insure permanent...

Easier to start digging a grave than to stop, isn’t it?

He looked at his blistered hands. He’d dug like an animal, as if believing he could bury his remorse along with his love. Only after smoothing over the dirt and spreading leaves and branches had it hit him how close to defeat he was, how sick of his own stink, ready to drive to the nearest police station and get it over with. Almost. Why hadn’t he? Well, plenty of time for that, time enough for everything in the few hours between now and daylight. On any other night shift, the dawn was his impatiently awaited deliverance from monotony, mosquitoes and exile from lawful sleep. Tonight he wished for a century of darkness.

There is a moment in even the worst thunderstorm when you know that it’s past its prime. The booming gales domesticate into a straight, hard rain, and though a close strike can still happen, flinching unease gives way to relief. He stepped outside long enough to shine his flashlight along the pipe until it stopped and held on the surging water, then turned it off and cleaned his boots before sitting down.

He moved his bag to the floor, applied more repellant, and using the damp towel as a pillow, stretched out as far as he was able on his side and closed his eyes. The rain on the roof was a curdled drone that dissipated thought, the lightning already miles away. He expected nothing, but he must have been tireder than he realized, for in spite of the mosquitoes — no amount of rain could discourage them — he slept.

It was night. He was sitting on the pipe, the hut vaguely behind him, but instead of the treeless wasteland of the mine, he was somehow in the hammocky bush country behind the small house and acreage he’d inherited west of Lakeland. He was listening to the call of a nightjar, a chuck-will’s widow, that had an echoing, subterranean quality, as if it were calling from the bottom of a well, the four-beat “chuck-will’s-wi-dow” tirelessly, mechanically repeating at precise, two-second intervals.

As he listened in fascinated dread, the four-note call seemed to subtly change in character, and he gradually realized that the bird was calling not to a prospective mate hidden somewhere in the night woods, but directly addressing him, and with each iteration the call was lowering in pitch and tone, sounding less bird-like and more human, more feminine and, as the garbled syllables began to clarify, more familiar:

“Chuck-will’s-wid-ow. Luck-kills-wi-dow. Just-dig-the-hole. Just-feed-the-hole. Just-kill-yourself. Just-kill-your-self. Just-kill-your-self. Just-kill-your-self.” The one that woke him was a wheedling, yet somehow harsh and peremptory whisper spoken so close to his ear that he felt her cold breath: “Jules, kill yourself.”

The storm had long since moved east, the rain subsided to a soft drizzle. He sat up, his head in his hands, his neck, face and hands itching from the many bites where the repellant had failed to deter them. He sat very still, then abruptly stood and rummaged in his grocery bag until he came up with something wrapped in oil cloth.

He unwrapped it, staring at the .38 pistol, still smelling of cordite, then picked it up, its ugly weight like a judgment. His plans for the gun had been vague. He saw himself working his way down the steep dirt bank of the dam to the edge of one of the flooded pits, then throwing it as far as he could into the deep water.

Or he pictured himself in an end game with the police, who had easily followed the many careless clues he’d left behind and traced him to the mine. He saw so clearly their satisfied expressions as they rode in the WCO’s truck out to the dam, checking their weapons, confident in their knowledge that he’d obligingly boxed himself in. In that scenario the last move would be his, not merely a resignation from the game of fox and hound but from everything.

How long would it be, really, before her absence was noted, his story of her desertion disbelieved, the badged Furies sicced on him? And then the protracted, public dance of retribution, its end as inevitable as the act itself could have been predicted from the vector of his life and the forces that had acted on him from birth until this moment. What his father had done to his mother, he too, ten years later, had done to his wife, and the final choice made by the man he’d spent his whole life trying not to become was the same one he was facing now.

He liked it here, the freedom of solitude, the benevolent night, the impartial stars. Was there a better place for what he must have known was why he’d decided to show up for work tonight: to face judgment and sentence, carried out by the condemned man and witnessed only by the stars and the ghosts inseparable from his flesh?

First he had a long drink of cold water, then took off the rain suit and the mosquito hat, stuffed the gun into his waistband and stepped outside. The mosquitoes, indifferent to the gravity of the moment, eagerly fed. Get it while it’s still warm. Most of the western sky had cleared, and the Big Dipper was visible in spite of the horizon seemingly strung with the lights of other mines.

This was where he wanted to be. He couldn’t go home, and had no stomach for running. He wanted to be buried here, and where else were so many potential graves already dug? Still, his hands shook and his heart labored as he walked to the discharge, then straddled the pipe where it left the bank and thrust out fifteen feet or so over the whitewater torrent it created.

He hitched himself forward, a few inches at a time, careful not to lose his balance, until he was just behind the flow. Holding himself in place with one hand on the pipe and his tightly flexed legs, he pulled out the gun, clicked off the safety, and held it close to his body as he stared down into the swirling pool. He might float a ways downstream, or get caught in an eddy and linger there, slowly covering with sand. Would he be fully buried by morning? He hoped so.

It occurred to him that he should have left a note for the police, with detailed directions to Linda’s grave. The thought troubled him, and he started to move backwards toward the bank. Halfway back he paused, then lifted the gun, pressed the barrel against the skin behind his left ear and pulled the trigger. Listing in the direction of the bullet’s path, he tumbled off the pipe, the splash of the pistol’s drop coming a second ahead of his own.