“There ’tis, Carl. What’s left of the river, hmm?”
“Shut up, Harv, I don’t need to hear about it.” Sounding fit to be tied, the sheriff shot a look over to where I still was taking in everything wide-eyed, and growled, “We’re just past Fort Peck Dam, the outlaw is talking about.” His mouth twisted. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t think the Missouri River worked good enough by itself, so he stuck in a king hell bastard of a dam,” a new piece of cussing for me to tuck away.
“Biggest dirt dam in Creation.” The sheriff was becoming really worked up now. “Biggest gyp of the American taxpayer there ever was, if you ask me.” He scrunched up worse yet, squinting at the river as if the grievance still rubbing him raw was the water’s fault. “Every knothead looking for a nickel came and signed on for a job, and next thing I knew, I’m the law enforcement having to deal with a dozen Fort Peck shantytowns with bars and whorehouses that didn’t shut down day or night.”
“I know.” I nodded sagely. “I’m from there.”
That was a mistake. His apple-doll face turning sour, the sheriff spoke as if he had caught me red-handed. “You wouldn’t be pulling my leg, would you?”
? ? ?
SO MUCH FOR the value of the unvarnished truth.
For it was absolute fact that I was born in one of those damsite shantytowns the sheriff despised. By then, 1939, the Fort Peck Dam work was winding down but there still was employment for skilled heavy equipment operators like my father, Bud Cameron, catskinner. Young and full of beans, he was one of those ambitious farmboys raring to switch from horses to horsepower, and he must have been something to see sitting up tall on the back of a bumblebee-yellow Caterpillar bulldozer, manipulating the scraper blade down to the last chosen inch of earth, on some raw slope of the immense dam.
I may as well tell the rest of the Cameron family story, what there is of it. My mother, teenage girl with soft eyes and fashionably bobbed dark hair according to the Brownie box camera photos from the time, was waitressing there at the damsite in an around-the-clock cafe where Gram was day cook. I imagine Gram met it with resignation when, much as her younger self Dorothea Smythe had met roustabout Pete Blegen in the cook tent of a Glacier Park roadwork construction camp twenty years earlier, her daughter Peggy fell for the cocky young catskinner across the counter. Fell right into at least one of his capable arms, I can guarantee, because this live wire who became my father always had a necker knob, the gizmo that clamped onto the steering wheel for handy one-fisted driving, on every car he ever owned, from Model A to final Ford pickup.
Marriage came quick, and so did I. I had my footings poured, to use the Fort Peck term, in a thrown-together shacktown called Palookaville. Later, whenever we were living at some construction site or in another crude housing, my parents would think back to that time of a drafty tar paper shack between us and weather of sixty below, and say, “Well, it beats Palookaville anyway.” Once the Fort Peck work shut down for good, we began a life of roving the watersheds along the Rockies. My father was six feet of restlessness and after the Depression there were irrigation and reservoir projects booming in practically every valley under the mountains, where a man who knew his stuff when it came to operating heavy equipment could readily find work. For her part, my mother learned bookkeeping, and jointly employable Bud and Peg Cameron moved from one construction camp to the next, with me in tow.