Sometimes a Great Notion (60 page)

In fact, the whole evening was difficult to read. I was less positive than ever about what he had hoped to accomplish by taking me to the debacle. But one thing was certain: If he had wished to show me—as I half suspected—that I had better watch my step in my relationship with certain female parties because, if provoked, he was capable of violence . . . then he had at least proved his capabilities in that area most successfully.

“I have never,” I said to no one in particular, “in all my life, witnessed anything, anything nearly so vicious, so brutal . . .”

Hank didn’t move, and Joe Ben said only, “It was just a fight, a plain old fist fight, and Hank whipped a fella.”

“No. I’ve seen fist fights before. It wasn’t that. . . .” I paused, trying to clear my head enough to phrase my feelings. I had drunk more than I intended after the fight, trying to blot the scene from my mind. “It was like . . . when that man knocked him over the chair, then, like Hank went insane,
berserk!
”

“Big is a pretty big boy, Leland. Hank had to come on pretty strong to take him. . . .”

“Berserk! . . . like some kind of
animal!
” And wished I had drunk more.

The car drums through the night. Joe Ben stares solemnly ahead. Hank slumps against Lee’s shoulder, appearing to sleep. Lee watches reruns projected slow-motion against the dark, rain-glutted clouds that sweep overhead, and wishes more than ever that he had spent the day home in bed.

Joe Ben parks the jeep outside the garage on the gravel, to make less distance to carry the drunken Hank to the boat. Hank mumbles and groans all the way across. At the dock in front of the house he rouses himself enough to awkwardly kick the pack of hounds aside so he can walk to the end of the planks. There he strikes a match and sways out over the oily black water to study the depth marker on the piling. . . .

“Not tonight, Hank.” Joe took his elbow. “Let’s leave it go tonight. . . .”

“Now, now, Joby . . . the rains’ve commenced. We got to be ever on the alert, you know that. ’Ternal vigilance is the price.” He cupped the match’s frightened little flame and bent close to the dark mark that indicated the water’s peak. “Ah. Just two inches from last night. We’re in God’s pocket, men. Carry on.”

They guided him on up the incline as he kicked and shouted at the overjoyed hounds. . . .

The boltcutter climbs into his bed without taking off his wet clothes. It has commenced. He hears the rain on the roof, like soft nails being driven into the rotten wood. It has commenced, all right. And it’ll go on now for six months.

Indian Jenny recalls a prediction and regards the rain as an omen, but falls asleep before she can remember the rest of her prediction or interpret the omen’s meaning . . .

In his cold room at the end of the long meandering hallway old Henry lies, quilted over by old odors of sweat and fungus, of ointments and sour breathing—“A man he can keep hisself ”—grinding his two-teeth-that-meet against each other in his sleep. He has been disturbed by the dogs’ barking. He grumbles and frets, fighting to hang onto the sleep and keep back the pain that pounds like the surf all day against the woody shore of his body. He doggedly refuses to take the doctor’s sleeping medications—“Smearin’ up my vision”—and sometimes goes for nearly a week before he passes out. Now he grumbles and curses in an in-between fog that is not quite sleep, not yet consciousness.

“Damn the goddamn,” he said softly.

“Grab a root an’ dig,” he said.

The barking ceased and he became calm and still and stiff beneath his green blankets, like a tree fallen and covered where it fell by a spreading moss . . .

Joe Ben stands alone in his room, wondering if he should stay the night or go back in to Jan and the kids; the strain of indecision knots his features. He wishes somebody would give him some advice on these heavy questions.

On the bureau the jack-o’-lantern, half covered now with fine gray-green hair, has sunk into a puddle of clear, viscous liquid. It watches Joe struggle with his problems and grins a mildewed grin, looking like a happy drank exhausted by his revels but not yet completely passed out; if the pumpkin has any advice, he is just too shot to give it.

In his room Lee lies, hoping he will not be ill. The last three weeks wheel around his bed in full carrousel gallop. “Whirlies,” he diagnoses, “pot hangover.” Every event, every bruise and scratch and blister comes cavorting past, all made with intricate detail by a skilled Swiss woodcarver. They pass in review for him like a carved cavalry. He lies dreamily in the center of the wheeling display, trying to decide which steed he will be riding tonight. After some minutes of careful scrutiny he chooses “That one there!”—a high-prancing filly with slim flanks and sleek withers and a flowing golden mane, and leans to whisper in her lifted ear: “Really, you should have seen him . . . like a primitive animal . . . brutal and beautiful all at once.”

And at the other end of the hall Hank sits slumped in a straight-backed wooden chair with his shirt and shoes off, breathing loudly through a clotted nose while Viv dabs at his cuts with cotton dipped in alcohol. He flinches and jerks and giggles at each touch of the cold cotton, and tears flow red down his cheeks. Viv catches the bloodstained tears in her cotton.

“I know, sweetheart, I know,” she croons, trailing her slender fingers over his arms, “I know”—caressing and rubbing him until the tears stop and he lurches upright. He stares blankly about him for a moment. Then his eyes clear and he slaps his belly.

“Saynow.” He grins. “Why, look who’s here.” He flips the buckle of his belt and works at the buttons with swollen hands. Viv watches, aching to come to the aid of those drunken, fumbling fingers. “’Fraid I might’ve tied one on tonight, did Joe Ben tell you? Was compelled to kick the tar outa Biggy Newton again. Oh . . . you an’ Andy get that tally sheet for the booms? Fine. Oh lord, me for some Zs.” He drops his trousers and falls into bed. “I’m sorry, honey, if I was any trouble to you. . . .”

She smiles down at him—“Don’t be silly”—shaking her head. Her hair sweeps out with the movement and she catches a lock in her lips. She stands looking fondly down at him, watching sleep slacken the jaw, loosen the lips, until the face of Hank Stamper is replaced by that of a long-lost somebody—the Somebody she fell in love with, the face she first saw lying unconscious and bleeding on a dirty cot in her uncle’s jail—tired, and tender, and a very vulnerable face.

She pushes the annoysome hair back from her face and leans close to the sleeping stranger. “Hello, honeybunch,” she whispers, as a child whispers to a doll when she doesn’t want anyone to hear because she is too old for such baby stuff. . . . “You know? I tried to remember the words of a song today, and you know, I couldn’t remember? It goes: ‘Away up yonder, top o’ the sky . . .’ and I can’t remember what else. Can you? Can you?”

The only answer is the labored breathing. She closes her eyes and presses her fingertips against her eyelids until the dark is filled with whirling sparks, but the bubble beneath her breasts remains cold and hollow. She presses harder, making her eyeballs shoot with pain, and harder still . . .

While Hank dreams that he is at the top of his class and nobody is trying to pull him down, nobody is trying to push him off, nobody but himself even knows that he is up there.

 

Teddy, the part-time bartender and full-time owner of the Snag, though he might have been compelled to take open issue with the woodcarver’s choice of cocktails, would have been, of all the men in Wakonda, the man most likely to believe in the woodcarver’s principle. For the town’s leanest days were inordinately Teddy’s fattest, the town’s darkest nights his brightest. He turned more liquor Halloween night at the crowd’s disappointment than he would have sold if Big Newton had knocked Hank Stamper’s head off . . . and the Halloween rain that brought a deluge of despair down on the striking loggers the following day brought a jingle of joy from Teddy’s till.

Floyd Evenwrite’s reaction to the rain was somewhat different. “Oh me, oh me, oh me.” He woke late Sunday morning, hung over and suspicious of the effect of last night’s beer on his bowels. “Look at it come down out there. Dirty motherin’ rain! An’ what was that dream I had? Something bound to be awful . . .”

“This country will rot a man like a corpse,” was Jonathan Draeger’s response when he looked from his hotel window onto a Main Street running an inch of black water.

“Rain,” was all Teddy had to say, watching the falling texture of the sky through his bedside lace curtains. “Rain.”

Those Halloween clouds had continued to roll in off the sea all the rumbling night—a surly multitude, angry at being kept waiting so long, and full of moody determination to make up for time lost. Pouring out rain as they went, they had rolled over the beaches and town, into the farmlands and low hills, finally piling headlong up against the wall of the Coastal Range mountains with a soft, massive inertia. All night long. A few piled to the mountaintops and over into the Willamette Valley with their overloads of rain, but the majority, the great bulk of that multitude gathered and blown from the distant stretches of the sea, came rebounding heavily back into the other clouds. They exploded above the town like colliding lakes.

The garrison of speargrass that picketed the edges of the dunes was beaten flat by the clouds’ advance guard; with the fallen green spear-points pointing the way the attack had gone by graying dawn.

A torrent of water that ran from the dunes back to the sea, in measured sweeps, as though enormous waves were combing overhead and breaking far inland . . . swept the beaches clean of a whole summer’s debris by gray daylight.

And along parts of the Oregon coast there are clusters of seaside trees permanently bent by a wind that blows everlastingly landward across all the Oregon beaches—whole groves of strangled cedars and spruce bent in an attitude of paralyzed recoil, as though frozen by a dreadful Medusa revealed centuries ago by lightning . . . and by midmorning of that first day after October, the little short-tailed mice that dwelt between the roots of these trees had crept from their homes and, for the first time in local remembrance, were moving in droves east, toward higher ground, afraid that such a rain would surely raise the sea and flood their burrows. . . .

“Oh me, oh me; the mice are leavin’ their holes. We’re in for a bad one,” was the way Evenwrite viewed the migration.

“The rodents are moving into town to winter with the riffraff,” Draeger decided moodily, and wrote “A Man Is Known By The Mice He Keeps” in his notebook.

“I think I had better go down and open the place early this Sunday,” Teddy decided and hurried to the bathroom mirror to see if he needed a shave this week.

At the moorage that first day the old Scandinavian fishermen watched the black rolling of clouds overhead and added extra hawsers to their boats. In her shack near the clamflats Indian Jenny melted pitch, candlewax, and an old pocket comb on the stove, used the mixture to calk gathering wet spots in her ceiling, pressing the searing gum into cracks and holes with her broad, shovel-callused thumb as she hummed tonelessly along with the lonely drone of rain. On Main Street the townspeople sprinted from awning to awning with lowered heads, dodging puddles, skirting the spew of rainspouts. As frantic and as flustered in their movements as the drenched mice fleeing the safety of their burrows; even the oldest of mossbacked residents was bewildered, even the stanchest logger generally proud of his laconic acceptance of weather—“Can’t never get wet enough for me!”—and his endurance of legendary rains of the past, even these veterans appeared shaken by the sudden, determined ferocity of that first day’s rain.

“Comin’ down like a cow wettin’ on a flat rock,” they called to one another. “Like ten cows. Like a goddamn
hundred!
” they called as they dashed from awning to doorway, from doorway to awning.

“I hear it’s a record,” they assured one another all afternoon over beers in the Snag, “a goddam record.”

Yet when the report came in over Teddy’s bartop radio at the end of the day, the precipitation count was by no means a record. “Four inches recorded since midnight.” It wasn’t even phenomenal. “Jus’ four inches? That all? I mean, that’s a lot of rain, surely, but I tell ya! the way it was coming down out there today didn’t ack like four inches, it acted like four goddamn
hundred!
”

Just four inches
, Teddy thought sarcastically,
just four little inches.

“I think somebody made a mistake,” Evenwrite thought moodily. “Those smartasses down at the Coast Guard station, where do they get this crap, draw a number out of a hat? Shit, the ditch out behind my place had a good foot of water in it by noon! What makes those smartasses think they can measure water any better than anybody else?”

Four inches of rain
—Teddy simpered—
and the fear hidden all summer shoots up and blooms overnight.
He floated soundlessly about the dim avenues of his bar, like a plump little water spider in a white apron and shirt, black slacks and tiny pointed crepe-soled shoes,
Blooms all funny-colored and different-shaped,
tending his web with remote servility.
But all the colors and shapes spring from that same weed of fear. . . .
His small dark lips pursed in a practiced smile, and his tiny black eyes noticing everything in the whole dingy expanse of his barroom limits—the man fingering the coin-return slot on the juke, the trio in the booth near the back stubbing cigarettes out on the table, the feet getting heavier, tongues getting thicker . . . seeing everything except the grained bartop or rows of glasses at which he polished constantly.
And that weed is rooted in all of us. It is in me as well as in Floyd Evenwrite or Lester Gibbons. But I am different. I know that it is not brought to blooming by the rain. It is brought to blooming by nothing more than stupidity. And the native dirt here is rich in stupidity.