The Benefactor

Beaver always said the reason the dam washed out was Jack Schmidt. Jack was the man he hired to build the pipeworks that ran through the dam for draining excess water. They consulted a couple of engineers, found them too elaborate, and got busy doing it their own way. Beaver scoured the county buying every kind of used pipe and pipe valve he could find, forming a series of rusty piles.

“Bill, you got enough pipe there to drain this thing straight into the Missouri River,” Jack said.

“Oh, hell, now, Jack,” replied Beaver. “You ought to be on Jack Paar.”

Jack used his Ford station wagon—the back end full of tools mixed in with baby items — to extricate the parts he wanted and get them lined up in the flat meadow below the future dam. For a couple of weeks he was out there in the August sun with his acetylene torch, cutting and welding. Beaver stopped by half a dozen times a day to check progress and argue about Jack’s decisions. Sometimes he’d drop off another load of pipes and valves.

“Bill, how many of these drain valves you plannin’to build?” Jack asked once.

“The way you keep cutting everything too short I probably don’t have enough iron here for one.”

“You got enough iron there to build another Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Are you a welder or a goddam comedian?”

“For right now I’m a welder,” answered Schmidt, smiling in a way Beaver never did like.

The drain system took shape in the field, looking like a fossil reconstruction of some sea monster from the age of iron-based life forms. The creature was all neck, with a funnel shaped mouth at one end and a single iron wheel at the other, attached to a complicated sphincter-clump of iron. The neck segments weren’t joined yet — that part had to wait until the excavation progressed to a certain point.

“I still say you’re better off with a dual system,” Jack said when the welding was almost completed.

“I’ve got a goddam 10-inch feed? That’ll drain [**check caculation] 14,000 gallons a day, sixty gallons an hour. There ain’t no rainstorm in the history of Missouri that’s gonna need more than that.”

“When you’re talkin’ about nature I don’t think it hurts to be a little extra safe.”

Beaver liked Jack Schmidt’s abilities as a welder, and had ideas he might even be handy at carpentry when the time came to do some building; plus, the young man was willing to work cheap. Beaver considered him a real find. But what he could not stand was Jack’s confidence in himself outside the areas of his experience. The worst thing was that Jack felt free to state his opinion on almost anything. Beaver was ten years older than the other man, had been all over the United States and the Pacific as a navy seaman, as a boy had helped his family survive the depression with an ??ingeniusness rarely seen in Arkansas, and on top of that, goddamnit, he was paying the kid to work for him, not the other way around.

“You just started jacking off about two years ago and you’re already a goddamned expert on nature!” said Beaver.

“Even the army corps of engineers says to plan for double the anticipated load,” said the young man, a little miffed.

“They’d put in triple if they thought the taxpayers’d pay for it! The army corps of engineers is in the business of guaranteeing themselves a job. Hell, it don’t take an army of college graduates and twenty-five million dollars to build a dam. Henry Bunge and me could build another lake of the Ozarks right down her in “O” ?? Road valley, and it wouldn’t take fifteen years.”

“We oughta at least have two intakes,” said Jack.

“If we build it right, goddamnit, one intake’s more than enough. And it will be right if you listen to me once in awhile.”

“I’m sure we’re gonna be fine, Bill. It’s just that I’ll recommend going for the extra security since we got the pipe for it. But it is your lake.”

“I could drain Lake Michigan with this! If I keep paying you to learn pipe welding and give me advice on every goddammed thing, I won’t even have a lake to drain.”

Excavation had already begun as Jack was putting the finishing touches on the drain works. Beaver wrote him a check for three weeks of work and said he’d be using Jack again, but already Beaver has reservations about the relationship. The young man made him nervous, and kept him angry all the time. Beaver needed people who weren’t full of their own ideas. He had more than enough of his own.

One evening a few days later, Beaver drove up the valley to look at the day’s excavation one more time and saw Schmidt’s station wagon parked at the foot of what was already starting to look a little like a lake dam.

Schmidt was showing off his work to his wife, holding his baby in one arm and pointing things out with the other. Beaver stopped his car at a distance and watched.

He didn’t like it. He disliked it even more when Jack’s pointing moved from the pipe works to the valley at large — sketching for his wife the dimensions of the future lake, the height and width of the future dam.

Beaver saw the young wife touch her face with both hands as Jack indicated the size of the dam. And then he saw both of them laughing.

Beaver started his engine and drove up alongside the family.

“Howdy, Bill,” said Jack.

“Hello, Jack,” said Beaver from the car.

“I was just showing Kathy what we done.”

“It’s really gonna be amazing, Bill,” said Jack’s wife. Beaver thought she was pretty. A little too big in the hips, which Beaver liked as much as the next guy, but she had the same kind of cocky confidence her husband had. They seemed to think they were something special, even though all they had was a house trailer and a quarter acre of ground. Beaver had his family living in a mobile home, too — it was actually a little smaller than Jack’s—but Beaver had 230 acres of ground and some very definite plans—well, the plans themselves were vague, but the outcome wasn’t—of being becoming ?? very successful, very rich, and unquestionably special within the next year or two.

“Now, I don’t mind you coming on the property, but I want you to let me know first,” said Beaver.

Jack and his wife were both smiling before he said that. Jack’s wife’s smile disappeared a little faster than Jack’s but she didn’t say anything. Jack looked off to the side for a moment as it sunk in. Then he looked Beaver straight in the eye.

“You want me to ask before I bring my wife up here to show her what I built.”

“I want to know who’s on my property. I can’t afford to have people up here trying to dear down everything I’m building.”

“I woulda though you could trust me.”

“”Goddammit, Jack, I got a major investment here. I’m not saying I don’t trust you. I want to use you on a lot of things. We’re gonna be doing some things here that no one around here’s ever seen. Or even dreamed about.”

Jack and his wife looked at one another.

“I don’t think I’ll be working for you anymore, Bill.”

It made Beaver speechless for a moment. Then his face turned red.

“What are you talking about. I gave you the first half interesting job you’ve ever had. Shit, you’re sitting out there cutting scrap down for a dollar a ton. What the hell else do you think you got going for you?”

“I got things going for me you don’t even know about, Beaver. I’ll tell you something else. This crazy hole of yours is gonna be the worst thing you ever had happen.”

“Get the hell off my property. I don’t want to see you anywhere around anything of mine again.”

Jack and his wife both snickered.

“You’re making your own disaster,” said Kathy. All of a sudden she didn’t seem pretty at all.

“Get out of here before I call the sheriff.” said Beaver.

“We’ll see who ends up calling the sheriff,” said Jack, taking his family away.

“We don’t need your goddam dollar fifty cents an hour,” hollered Jack’s wife.

Beaver didn’t say anything else. He waited 

for them to drive off and followed them all the way to Highway D, as if to make sure they left.

It was just one more thing for Beaver to be steamed about. There were always a number of things going on that had him red in the face and yelling. It seemed to give his mind an extra spin. And people sometimes seemed to pay more attention to him when he was hammering away at someone else’s incompetence or stupidity. Jack became one of the people Beaver could always fall back on to criticize. He wasn’t the only one in the area who found the young man too big for his britches.

Well, when the dam was at the right height, Beaver himself, along with the less than intelligent Brogen brothers, moved the drain system into place a piece at a time and assembled it, six or more massive bolts per joint to tighten down with nuts the size of doughnuts. The only hard part was getting the intake pipe in place. It weighed about a ton and had to be stood vertically enough to get the first couple bolts started. Trying to get that much tonnage into precise position by means of a bulldozer and two guys who couldn’t remember what clockwise meant was enough to make anyone curse like a barking dog. But after an hour that felt like a part of World War I, the big pipe was in place, its funnel poised for intake about 30 feet above what would eventually be lake bottom. The mouth was covered with one-inch stainless steel mesh. In the unlikely event it ever got covered with algae or a couple of big snapping turtles, it would be possible, although not easy, to clean it off, hopefully from a boat, but using a diver if necessary.

“That’s the goddam best piece of engineering in this part of Missouri,” Beaver told his workers. “As long as Schmidt didn’t piss in his own welding. That’s gonna be there after the next ice age.”

“You better cover up that hole on top or you’ll lose the water outa your lake,” said Mitchell Brogen, generally considered to be the smarter of the brothers, probably because he was cross-eyed. Anything he said was more intelligent than you would expect from someone who seemed constantly interested in the bridge of his nose.

“Mitchell,” said Beaver, laughing, “if dumb ideas were worth a nickel a piece you’d be a goddamn millionaire.”

“You’re a goddam millionaire,” teased Mac Brogen, “You with your dumb ideas.”

Beaver told his wife all about it that evening. She and the kids watched him giggling until he was red in the face and tears were running from his eyes.

“Those boys are so dumb!” said Beaver.

“Mm-mmm,” said his wife in a chiding way, as if agreeing.

“We’ve got the best damn lake valve in Missouri,” bragged her husband. “I oughta get the army corps of engineers down here to see how it should be done!”

Well, as everyone in that part of the county was soon to know, Beaver’s lake draining mechanism may have been perfect as far as it went, which is the sort of thing over which reasonable people may differ, there not being a well-known standard to go by, but the thing no one can argue over is that it just didn’t go far enough.

As the lake began filling alarmingly fast, as much as he hated to do it, Beaver opened the valve. He liked seeing it work—water shot from it with a force that was truly staggering—but Beaver’s impatience to see the lake full left him sick to his stomach, seeing all that proprietary water escaping down the creek.

Soon he was wishing he could double the size of that escaping flow. As water began fingering its way across the top of the dam, and the fingers began pushing muddy gouges into the dirt, and the gouges began merging with one another and deepening, Beaver had reason to remember Jack Schmidt’s advice.

“That son of a bitch sabotaged me!” Beaver exploded. He exploded on and on, cursing Jack Schmidt and delineating his flaws. It was an explosive period in general. The sky was busy cracking open a fresh deluge of cold early-spring rain the size of spit gobs. Bunge was up above him atop the high dam pushing pieces of the hillside into the running gullies, the dozer rumbling like artillery. Beaver had too much on his mind to formulate exactly how it was that Schmidt had prepared this destruction, but it wasn’t long before he found himself remembering Schmidt’s and Schmidt’s wife sneering prediction that evening at the pipes. As Beaver, alone on a hillside, watched the lake run out a deepening gorge in the middle of his once once terrific dam, he made a vow. It wasn’t unusual for him to make vows, but his one had a more lasting effect than most of the ones he had made, and was to make later.

“I’m gonna show those bastards. Jack Schmidt and all those laughing, jealous sons of bitches who can’t stand to see someone make something. I’ve got too many damn good ideas to sit back and crap my life away. They’re all gonna look up and see me sitting there, the biggest son of a bitch they ever saw, giving every goddamned one of them something to finally enjoy.”