Sometimes a Great Notion (3 page)

Yet, actually—he watches the scenery swim past his windshield—it doesn’t seem such an unpleasant land, for all the rainfall. It seems rather nice and peaceful, rather easy. Not as nice as California, God knows, but the weather is certainly far nicer than weather back East or in the Middle West. It’s a bountiful land, too, so it’s easy as far as survival goes. Even that slow, musical Indian name is easy: Wakonda Auga. Wah-kon-dah-ah-gah-h-h. And those homes built along the shoreline, some next to the highway and some across—those are very nice homes and not at all the sort one would imagine housing a terrible depression. (
Homes of retired pharmacists and hardware-men, Mr. Draeger.
) All this complaining about the terrible hardship brought on by the strike . . . these homes seem a far cry from terrible hardship. (
Homes of weekend tourists and summertime residents who winter over in the Valley and make enough to take it comfy near the up-river salmon run in the fall.
) And quite modern, too, to find in a country one might think of as somewhat primitive. Nice little places. Modern, but tastefully so. In the ranch-style motif. With enough yard between the house and the river to allow for additions. (
With enough yard, Mr. Draeger, between the house and the river to allow for the yearly six inches the Wakonda Auga takes as its yearly toll.
) It has always seemed odd, though: no houses at all on the bank—or no houses at all on the bank if one excludes the blasted Stamper home. One would think that some houses would be built on the bank for convenience’s sake. That has always seemed peculiar about this area. . . .

Draeger bends his big Pontiac around the riverside curves, feeling feverish and mellow and well fed, with a sense of recent accomplishments, listlessly musing about a peculiarity that the very house he muses about would find not the least bit peculiar. The houses know about riverside living. Even the modern weekend summertime places have learned. The old houses, the very old houses that were built of cedar shake and lodgepole by the first settlers at the turn of the eighteen-hundreds, were long ago jacked up and dragged back from the bank by borrowed teams of horses and logging oxen. Or, if they were too big to move, were abandoned to tip headlong into the water as the river sucked away the foundations.

Many of the settlers’ houses were lost this way. They had all wanted to build along the river’s edge in those first years, for convenience’s sake, to be close to their transportation, their “Highway of Water,” as the river is referred to frequently in yellowed newspapers in the Wakonda Library. The settlers had hurried to claim banksite lots, not knowing at first that their highway had a habit of eating away its banks and all that those banks might hold. It took these settlers a while to learn about the river and its habits. Listen:

“She’s a brute, she is. She got my house last winter an’ my barn this, by gum. Swallered ’em up.”

“So you wouldn’t recommend my building here waterside?”

“Wouldn’t recommend or wouldn’t not recommend, neither one. Do what you please. I just tell you what I seen. That’s all.”

“But if what you say is so, if it
is
widenin’ out at that rate, then figure it: a hundred years ago there wouldn’t have been no river at
all
.”

“It’s all in the way you look at it. She runs both directions, don’t she? So maybe the river ain’t carryin’ the land out to sea like the government is tellin’ us; maybe it’s the sea carryin’ the water in to the
land
.”

“Dang. You think so? How would
that
be . . . ?”

A while to learn about the river and to realize that they must plan their homesites with an acknowledged zone of respect for its steady appetite, surrender a hundred or so yards to its hungry future. No laws were ever passed enforcing this zone. None were needed. Along the whole twenty miles, from Breakback Gully, where the river crashes out of the flowering dogwood, all the way to the eel-grassed shores at Wakonda Bay, where it fans into the sea, no houses at all stand on the bank. Or no houses at all on the bank if one excludes that blasted home, if one excludes this single house that acknowledged no zone of respect for
nobody
and surrendered seldom a scant inch, let alone a hundred or so yards. This house stands where it stood; it has not been jacked up and dragged back, nor has it been abandoned to become a sunken hotel for muskrats and otters. It is known through most of the western part of the state as the Old Stamper Place, to people who have never even seen it, because it stands as a monument to a piece of extinct geography, marking the place where the river’s bank once held . . . Look:

It, the house, protrudes out into the river on a peninsula of its own making, on an unsightly jetty of land shored up on all sides with logs, ropes, cables, burlap bags filled with cement and rocks, welded irrigation pipe, old trestle girders, and bent train rails. White timbers less than a year old cross ancient worm-rutted pilings. Bright silvery nailheads blink alongside oldtime squarehead spikes rusted blind. Pieces of corrugated aluminum roofing jut from frameworks of iron vehicle frames. Barrel staves reinforce sheets of fraying plywood. And all this haphazard collection is laced together and drawn back firm against the land by webs of wire rope and log chain. These webs join four main two-inch heavy-duty wire-core construction cables that are lashed to four big anchoring firs behind the house. The trees are protected from the sawing bite of the cables by a wrapping of two-by-fours and have supporting guy lines of their own running to wooden deadmen buried deep in the mountainside.

Under normal circumstances the house presents an impressive sight: a two-story monument of wood and obstinacy that has neither retreated from the creep of erosion nor surrendered to the terrible pull of the river. But today, during flood time, with a crowd of half-drunk loggers on the bank across, with parked press cars, a state patrol car, pick-ups, jeeps, mud-daubed yellow crew carriers, and more vehicles arriving every minute to line the embankment between the highway and river, the house is a downright spectacle.

Draeger’s foot lifts from the accelerator the instant he turns the bend that brings the scene into view. “Oh dear God,” he moans, his feeling of accomplishment and well-being giving way to that feverish melancholy. And to something more: to a kind of sick foreboding.

“What have the fools done now?” he wonders. And can see that good old California Vitamin D suddenly receding out of sight down another three or four weeks of rain-soaked negotiations. “Oh
damn
, what can have happened!”

As his car coasts closer he recognizes some of the men through the slashing windshield wipers—Gibbons, Sorensen, Henderson, Owens, and the lump in the sports coat probably Evenwrite—all loggers, union members he has come to know in the last few weeks. A crowd of forty or fifty in all, some squatting on their haunches in the three-walled garage next to the highway; some sitting in the collection of steamy cars and pick-ups lining the embankment; others sitting on crates beneath a small makeshift lean-to made of a Pepsi-Cola sign ripped from its mooring: BE SOCIABLE—with a bottle lifted to wet red lips four feet across . . .

But most of the fools standing out in the rain, he sees, in spite of the ample room in the dry garage or beneath the sign, standing out there as though they have lived and worked and logged in wet so long that they are no longer capable of distinguishing it from the dry. “But
what?
”

He swings across the road toward the crowd, rolling down his window. On the bank a stubble-faced logger in stagged pants and a webbed aluminum hat has cupped his mouth with gloved hands and is shouting drunkenly across the water—“Hank STAMMMMPerrrr ... Hank STAMMMPerrr”—with such dedicated concentration that he doesn’t turn even when Draeger’s lurching car sloshes mud from the ruts onto the back of his coat. Draeger starts to speak to the man but can’t recall his name and drives on toward the thicker part of the crowd where the lump in the sports coat stands. The lump turns and squints at the approach of the automobile, rubbing vigorously at wet latex features with a freckled red rubber hand. Yes, it’s Evenwrite. All five and a half boozy feet of him. He comes slogging his way toward Draeger’s car.

“Why now, look here, boys. Why, just lookee here. Look who come back to teach me some more lessons about how to rise to power in the labor world. Why, ain’t that nice.”

“Floyd.” Draeger greets the man pleasantly. “Boys . . .”

“Very pleasant surprise, Mr. Draeger,” Evenwrite says, grinning down at the open window, “seeing you up and about on such a miserable day.”

“Surprise? But Floyd, I was under the impression that I was expected.”

“Daw-
gone!
” Evenwrite bongs the roof of the car. “That is the truth. For Thanksgivin’ supper. But, see, Mr. Draeger, they’s been a
little
change of plans.”

“Oh?” Draeger says. Then looks about at the crowd. “Accident? Somebody drive off into the drink?”

Evenwrite turns to inform his buddies, “Mr. Draeger wants to know, boys, if somebody drove off into the drink.” He turns back and shakes his head. “Naw, Mr. Draeger, nothing so fortunate as all that.”

“I see”—slowly, calmly, not yet knowing what to make of the man’s tone. “So? what exactly did happen?”

“Happen? Why nothing
happened
, Mr. Draeger. Nothing yet. You might say we—us boys—are here to see nothing does. You might say that us boys are here to take up where your methods left off.”

“What do you mean ‘left off,’ Floyd?”—voice still calm, still quite pleasant, but . . .
that sick foreboding is spreading from stomach up through lungs and heart like an icy flame.
“Why not just tell me what has happened?”

“Why, by jumping Jesus—” Evenwrite realizes with dawning incredulity—“he
don’t know!
Why, boys, Johnny B. Draeger he don’t even the fuck
know!
How do you account for
that?
Our own leader and he ain’t even
heard!
”

“I heard that the contracts were drawn and ready, Floyd. I heard that the committee met last night and all were in complete accord.” His mouth feels quite dry
the flame reaching up
to the throat—oh damn; Stamper couldn’t have
—But he swallows and asks imperturbably, “Has Hank changed his plans?”

Evenwrite bongs the car top again, angry now. “
I’ll
by godfrey say he changed his plans. He just chucked ’em out the
window
is how he changed his plans!”

“The whole agreement?”

“The
whole
motherkilling agreement. That’s right. The
whole
deal we were so certain of”—
bong!
—“just like that. Looks to me like you called a wrong shot this
one time
, Draeger. Oh me . . .” Evenwrite shakes his head, anger giving way to profound gloom, as though he had just announced the end of the world. “We are right where we started before you came.”

In spite of the doomsday tone in Evenwrite’s dramatics, Draeger can easily perceive the triumph behind the words. Of course the fat fool must crow a bit, Draeger realizes, even though my defeat is his own.
But how could Stamper have changed his mind?
“You are certain?” he asks.

Evenwrite shuts his eyes and nods. “You must of made a slight miscalculation.”

“How peculiar,” Draeger mutters, trying to keep any sound of alarm from his voice. Never show alarm, he always maintained. Jotted in a notebook in his breast pocket: “Alarm, when used for anything less than a fire or an air attack, is certain to muddle the mind, unsettle the senses, and, in most cases, more than double the danger.”
But where is that slight miscalculation?
He looks back at Evenwrite. “What were his reasons? What did he give as his reasons?”

Evenwrite’s features snap back to anger. “I’m the bastard’s brother? His bunkmate maybe? How do you expect me—how do you expect
any-motherkilling-one
to know Hank Stamper’s reasons? Shit. I figure myself doing damned good keeping track of his
actions
, let alone his reasons!”

“But you had to find out about those actions in some manner, Floyd; did he float a message into town in a bottle?”

“The same as, practically. Les called me from the Snag to say he heard Hank’s wife come in and tell it to Lee, that smartass brother of Hank’s, tell that Hank was planning to rent a tug and make the run after all.”

Draeger looks toward Gibbons. “Did you overhear any reason for this sudden change?”

“Well, the
boy
seemed to know why, the way he ranted around. . . .”

“All right, then, did you ask him?”

“Why no, I never; I just put in a call to Floyd. You reckon I shoulda?”

Draeger runs his gloved hands over the steering wheel, admonishing himself for getting so stupidly upset by the fool’s mocking innocence. Must be this fever. “All right. If I went in to talk with this boy do you think he might explain Stamper’s change of mind? I mean if I asked him?”

“I doubt it, Mr. Draeger. Because he’s gone.” Evenwrite waits a moment, grinning. “Hank’s wife’s still in there, though. Now you, with all your methods, you might get something out of her. . . .”

The men laugh, but Draeger appears lost in thought. He moves his hands over the plastic of the steering wheel. A lone mallard whistles past low overhead, tilting a purple eye at the crowd. Under the canneries, the tomcats are crying. Draeger feels the smooth plastic through the glove’s leather for a moment, then looks back up. “But didn’t you try to call Hank? To ask him personally? I mean—”

“Call? Call? Hellsfire, what do you think we been doin’ ever since we got out here? Listen to Gibbons hollering yonder.”

“I mean the phone. Didn’t you try to phone?”

“Of course we tried to phone.”

“Well . . . ? What was his answer? I mean—”

“His answer?” Evenwrite rubs his face again. “Why, I’ll show you what his answer was—is. Howie! Come over here’th them glasses. Mr. Draeger here wants to know what Hank’s answer is.”