Canyon Secret (23 page)

The boys jumped and stepped back from the luxury sedan parked under a withering cottonwood tree. The taller boy yelled back at the quickly approaching man, “We was just lookin’ at her. Go screw yourself you old prick!” They sprinted away, nervously laughing as they disappeared down the alley toward the back of Whitey’s Bar.

Roy stood by his two-tone yellow luxury car that looked out of place in the midst of older Chevy trucks and well used cars from the 1930’s and 40’s. With his bare hand, he rubbed the slightly noticeable mark left by the boys touching his car as they admired the beautiful lines. He mumbled to himself as he noticed dust on the Washington license plates. “Goddamn hick town. Can’t wait to get back to Seattle.” He brushed the dust from his shoes with the cloth he retrieved from the floor behind the driver’s seat. After adjusting his mirror, he started the eight-cylinder engine and drove to the two-lane highway that ran below Martin City.

Once he cleared Columbia Falls he relaxed. He placed the envelope with the twenty-five hundred dollars into the glove compartment. With this payment, he’d pay off the short loan on his two month old Capri. The hot August air brushed his salt and peppered flattop back as he pressured the gas pedal up to sixty-five miles an hour. Soon he’d be racing toward Spokane where he planned to take a hotel room at the Davenport. He liked the way they cared for his car in the underground parking garage.

As he cruised along, Roy flashed on his meeting in Martin City. Seemed like the same day over again when he met and planned to kill that skinny fella in Coulee City. This guy in Hungry Horse will make the third man he eliminated for Slick Hansen as he called his employer. Slick dressed the same most of the time. Blue suit, gray tie, hair perfectly combed. He looked like he just climbed out of the bathtub. But he paid on time and his marks were easy. This one’ll be the same. One shot through the head at fifty yards. No problem.

After all, he made head shots in Germany during the war from three-hundred, four-hundred yards and never missed. That was his job for the U.S. Army. Kill Germans. It was more fun to kill them at a distance. He and one of his buddies bet on long distance shots.

He never got to meet any of them before he killed them. These Dam workers were different. He’d actually talked to the other two men several times before he took them down. Roy planned to get real friendly with this Sednick fella before he killed him. It was more interesting that way. He could get closer and the challenge of a night shot also interested him.

On the way back to the contractor’s office where he worked, R.T. Hansen loosened his gray tie a little and rolled his neck to relieve the tightness that plagued him whenever he met with Devers. Devers frightened him. He hoped there was another way around killing David. But there wasn’t. David knew too much. Once he laundered the money, he wasn’t needed any longer. He became a liability. Just like the other two men. It was just the way of things. He suspected that maybe Devers thought the same way about him. Nothing to lose for a man like Devers. Their business ended with Sednick. “I better put a twist to the ending of this story if I plan to stay alive.”

“O
nly sixteen days ago, Johnny Davis died unnecessarily! Now another one of our vibrators got killed today. It’s got to stop!” The anger in Jiggs Quinn’s voice roared in the faces of the safety-first committee members. “There’s not an excuse in hell that can cover how a crane can fall off a crawler track atop a cliff and land on a man below working a concrete pour covering a water line. No goddamn excuse in hell!”

The other members of the committee sat silently as the words banged against the metal walls of Superintendent Scalf’s makeshift office. Two bosses, a member of each union craft, and Scalf conducted their weekly morning meeting. W.R. Scalf started to respond, but Jiggs cut him off with a continuation of his tirade. He slapped down the front-page copy of the
Hungry Horse News
. The grizzly photographs of Shorty’s death punctuated Jigg’s point. “Too dangerous of work anymore! We got to slow her down some. I don’t care if the President of the United States is gonna throw the switch on October 1st. We’re pushing too hard, too fast, W.R.

“Whatever happened to safety first for Christ’s sake?”

“Hold on there Jiggs! The weather caused Shorty’s death. It was an act of God. There was no way we could’ve seen that short-out with the power. The wet conditions—”

“Bullshit! Act of God, my sweet ass. We should’ve shut her down for the dayshift. Let things dry out some. We all feel under the gun all the time. That crawler today should’ve been supported with another bulldozer and more tie down cables. Too many men in too much of a goddamn hurry.”

Buck Morris stared at Jiggs. He couldn’t rein in his temper and grief for the loss of another good man any longer. “Maybe you been at this too long, Quinn! You can’t cut the mustard anymore. You—”

Jiggs Quinn rose out of his gray metal chair with his calloused hands firmly gripped to the edge of the table. He now directed his tirade at Morris. With a trickle of snoose seeping down the side of his mouth he yelled at Morris, “You sayin’ I caused Johnny’s death. You sayin’ that, you dirty son-of-a-bitch!”

The ironworkers superintendent Dick Kearney stepped in, “Knock it off, Jiggs! You too, Buck! This ain’t gettin’ us nowhere. Let’s cool off and meet back here tomorrow. In the meantime, we can all be thinkin’ of some ways to prevent accidents for the comin’ weeks.”

Jiggs pushed away from the table, and stormed out of the office. W.R. sat back in his chair and folded his arms. His blood pressure boiled, and his head pounded. He caught his breath and said, “Dick’s right. Back here at 7:30 tomorrow mornin’.” The men quietly picked up their note pads, slid back their chairs, and left.

Scalfs’ secretary, Mary, hesitated before she entered his office. She opened the door only halfway. “Sorry to interrupt W.R., but there’s an agent from the FBI on the telephone. He wants to make an appointment with you in the next two days.”

He shook his head back and forth and then signaled her to forward the call to him. “Just what I need now, Mary. The goddamn FBI. What’s next, an earthquake that’ll take out the Dam?”

She faked a half-hearted smile and returned to her phone.

Mikhail looked out the window of Bill’s Texaco Station while he held the black telephone against his ear. He watched Bill wash the windshield of the logging truck while his son pumped gas. His daughter Kat enthusiastically caught him up on the weekly news from Butte. She apparently had finished one too many cups of coffee. “Daddy, the strike settlement was in the paper this morning, and the union agreed to a 3 percent increase on the cost of living increase.”

Mikhail switched the phone into his other hand,” What was the total wage increase?”

Kat scrolled down the news article with her index finger. “Oh, here it is. Let’s see. This brings the total wage increase into the six to six and a half percent range. Is that pretty good, Daddy?”

In his head he calculated what that meant in increase wages for him. “Not too bad. Anything on health insurance?”

Her finger continued to search the Montana Standard front-page article, “It says that there isn’t any increase in insurance, but there is a good increase in the pension each month. It also says the Company backed off the demand for cross-productivity, whatever that is.”

Mikhail swiveled in the worn rocking chair in the gas station, “Ya. I’m happy they got the pension increase. Too bad about nothin’ goin’ on with the insurance. That was somethin’ I was after—” He caught himself as he remembered he wasn’t returning to Butte. “Anything new about people sellin’ their houses in McQueen?”

She sipped the final drops from her pink plastic coffee cup. “George told me yesterday that the Company’s man got close to signing the first deal with the Marinkovichs. The rest of the neighborhood is up in arms with the Marinkovichs maybe sellin’ out. We goin’ to sell our house before we move up to Columbia Falls in October?”

A few seconds breezed by as Mikhail’s stomach flip-flopped with the thought of selling their place. He promised himself to hold out for a while, but he wanted the money from the sale of his house in Butte to buy a nice place in Columbia Falls. He decided not to talk to Katya about it. He would come down in person to deal with the business of selling the family home and dealing with his neighbors and close friends. “We’ll just wait and see how this goes, Katya. Don’t worry about it now. We’ll get you and Anna moved up here before we do anythin’.”

“That’s a relief. Just movin’ away from Butte is goin’ to be tough enough without losin’ our McQueen friends. They’re like part of our family.”

Mikhail knew it was time to change the subject. He needed time to make a plan. “How’s Anna feelin’ this week?”

Her voice changed and her excitement sailed through the phone lines, “Daddy. Your granddaughter took a few steps today. This portable oxygen tank is wonderful. George rigged a harness around her waist that will let her pull the small tank around with her. She’s so thrilled.”

He licked his lips and swallowed hard. “She walked?”

“Yes, that’s what usually happens when you take a few steps.” She laughed and rested back in her chair. “She can also go a little longer without the oxygen mask around her mouth. Her eating has improved and everything. We’ll be ready to move in October all right.”

“Well, someone else wants to use the phone, Honey. When she wakes up from her nap, tell her how proud I am of her.” He wiped the tears from his cheek and turned away from the other Dam worker waiting to use the phone. “I’ll call you next Sunday, okay?”

“Okay, Daddy. Say hi to Tom and John Nolan. Goodbye now.”

Mikhail hung up the phone and walked into the men’s room. As he used the urinal, it occurred to him that his daughter never mentioned her husband. He took this as a good sign. His family would be together again in about seven weeks.

A
sh they drove toward the Going to the Sun Road, Tomas shared the information in the Glacier Park Travel Guide.

The Going To The Sun Road in Glacier National Park stretches across fifty-two miles of alpine heights and connects East and West Glacier. Men armed with shovels, hemp climbing ropes, and several tons of explosives carved a road that followed one of the most difficult and expensive routes in United States road building history. Engineers from the Bureau of Public Roads and the National Park Service designed the road together and laid the foundation for road building in America.

In 1910, transcontinental highway projects sprang up as auto travel became popular throughout the country. Major William Logan looked to build a road through Glacier Park’s backcountry. The only road in Glacier at that time was a washed out wagon trail that connected Belton to Apgar near the foot of McDonald Lake. One recommendation for connecting East and West Glacier was to build a road that lead from Belton, along McDonald Lake, over Logan Pass and into St. Mary’s Lake on the eastern front of Glacier National Park. The project employed about three-hundred men who moved two-hundred fifty tons of explosives. Men were paid by the cubic yards of material moved. The workers used four three-ton locomotives with dump cars and three-thousand feet of gauged track, portable compressors, a Fortson tractor, two graders, and anassortment of trucks, teams, and wagons. The work season was two-hundred days long, and the men moved snow by hand.

The Garden Wall, a shale rock face from which the Sun Road was carved, is a long steep slope eventually rising to sheer cliffs some one-thousand vertical feet above the road cut. The extreme nature of the surrounding environment often forced survey and construction crews to hang suspended from old hemp ropes. The western leg of the Transmountain Highway reached Logan Pass on October 20, 1928. The new road from the west to Logan Pass opened to car traffic the following June.

Final touches of the completion of the Sun Road were made on July 7, 1933 at a total cost of one-million seven-hundred thousand dollars. With masonry guardrails constructed from the very same rock excavated for the roadbed, the Sun Road stands as a tribute not only to civil engineering, but also to aesthetic beauty. Retaining walls blend into the hill and its contours snake in and out of view, making Going to the Sun one of the least obtrusive paved roads in the country. Opening and dedication ceremonies were held on July 15, 1933. More than four thousand visitors watched the ceremonies including delegates from formerly hostile tribes of Blackfoot, Flathead and Kootenai Indians who gathered for a ceremonial offering of peace and passing of the pipe. The celebration marked twenty years of planning and building.

Tomas stopped reading the travel guide and laid it on his lap. He’d picked up the guide at the visitor center upon entering Glacier Park. As they passed through the first turn after reaching the loop on the Sun Road, he carefully looked out the side window of Clifford’s 1949 Ford Sedan. He spoke so quietly that Clifford leaned his right ear toward the middle of the bench seat just to hear, “Pretty hard to believe that them men hung over the sides swingin’ on ropes. And we think we work on a scary job.”

Without answering, Clifford shifted back into second gear as the road grade climbed. A station wagon stuffed with kids hanging out of the windows crawled by going down the road. Tomas continued with his nervous chatter, “Do you think somebody like us twenty years from now will be lookin’ at Hungry Horse Dam and wonder how we did stuff?” He didn’t wait for Clifford to answer, “And Clifford, can you imagine workin’ that hard for a buck fifteen an hour? Holy smokes.”

Clifford pulled his car to a stop in a pull out area where a group of people stood outside of their cars. He shook his head as he watched a little girl feed part of her sandwich to a black bear while her dad took a picture of her. Another bear sat and begged for food from another group of kids about twenty feet away. “They shouldn’t do that. Bears aren’t meant to be tame. Someone’s going to get hurt.” Clifford put the car in gear and pulled out back onto the road.