“All right. But I played golf in those sandals. I wore them at the best beaches on the coast. Took them right in the water too. I loaned them for a night to the prettiest woman I ever saw …”
“I never do anything easy.”
“I’ve driven over the whole country with nothing else along but those very sandals. Why, I even took them into the army with me …”
Camper pulled, squeezed and tucked the cuffs of his flannel trousers into the carved black tops of the boots, touched the shiny steerheads on the leather, scraped off a bit of dried earth under the arch and stood up once to feel his weight slide back on the wobbling, worn down heels.
“These sandals ain’t too uncomfortable,” said Luke.
The torchlights of the welders were another steel ring higher on the turbine tower. Ready for coffee, the night crew looked away from the glare and saw, through darkened hoods and across forty miles of clear water, the sharp handsaw ridges of a country from which the air had been exhausted.
“I used to come across all kinds of things every work day.” Camper sat with his legs crossed to the side of the table, nodding one boot up and down. “Dishpans, wagon wheels, anything you can think of. Why, one afternoon I even found an outboard motor. I cleaned the mud off, scrubbed it, worked on it, nearly got it going too. But you was never down to that river bed often.”
“I kept away from it pretty much.”
“I know. You was on the range when it happened. I heard later. Well, I’ll tell you, I never got over it.”
The watchman in the power house, wearing new striped pants and a trainman’s cap, dozed in a cane bottom chair tilted back against the steel plate of a moistened wall. Current was passed from contact to copper contact in the machinery pit, and the seismograph took down the track of the earth and progress of a blindly swimming man inside, in erratic, automatic writing.