Bucking the Sun by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

The dreamwork of Fort Peck built through the November nights, turbulent, drifting on the dark change of season and work and prospect, restless inside the bone hulls of fate, thousands of sleep-made privacies tossing and turning. Wheeler, with its alcohol content, tended toward inward uproar: showdowns, arguments won on a second try, woozy otherwise-unimaginable sexual situations. In the Fort Peck townsite along Officers’ Row, the dreams held a tendency toward hierarchy, Colonel Parmenter’s vision of a command post in the blissful sweltering Philippines and Mrs. Parmenter’s nocturnal jaunt backward thirty years and thirty pounds to her cotillion debut both overriding, say, Captain Brascoe’s delirious armwaving scene with garbagemen who were delivering garbage into his tidy streets instead of hauling it away. Across a few of those streets, in the barracks, Darius dreamt back to Scotland. One floor up from him, Jaarala in his slumber was shaking dice against Tom Harry and Ruby Smith, and winning.

In both towns, in the course of any night, more than one man dreamt of Proxy Shannon.

Within the walls of the Duffs, Hugh was on mental horseback, riding a workhorse—it seemed to be the broad-beamed dun nag they had called “Hippo,” back on the homestead—through the snowdrifts of the road between Fort Peck and Glasgow. He thought it odd he was drawing a wage for this, merely riding around in the snow, but who was he to complain. Meg, beside him and not, was on the bandstand of the Blue Eagle, where she could peer over the heads of the crowd, watching and watching, until finally she saw him come in through the door, the tall familiar figure of Hugh. It was Hugh, wasn’t it? Bruce slept the sleep of the underwater walker, stupefied but unalarmed, while Kate wanted out of the dream she was in, where she was trying to wait on customers in the Rondola and feed Jack on her breast at the same time and the smartasses along the counter kept saying, I’ll have what Jackie’s having. Meanwhile Rosellen was stalled in a reverie version of the Wheeler post office, waiting for the mail. Every time she went up to the wicket window and asked Is there any for me?, the postmaster would say Did you bring a gunnysack for it?, then laugh and turn away. Minutes before, Neil woke up on a rancher’s approach road halfway between the coal mine and Fort Peck, having pulled over to doze when he thought he might fall asleep at the wheel, and now had climbed out and was walking around and around the truck to get himself warm and awake enough to drive home. Charlene, by contrast, was steaming in her dream, trying to run a beauty shop the size of Cunningham’s department store, customers in chairs even up on the mezzanine, and the only help she had was Meg who kept asking, Charlene, tell me again what to do when they say they want the works. And working at sleep next to Charlene, in

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