Gwen, in Green

“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.