Sometimes a Great Notion (61 page)

Teddy considered himself something of an expert on fear and stupidity; he had studied them for years. He had a constant supply of specimens. Now he shifted his covert gaze to watch Jonathan Draeger, the union official that Evenwrite had called up to help with this strike foolishness, come through the arch of neons wearing a hat and a very light blue overcoat. Teddy’s eyes followed the man’s confident, well-fed movements as he removed the hat and coat. He had noticed him last night and had been curious about his calm interest in the brawl. Like himself—and perhaps Hank Stamper—this Mr. Draeger didn’t seem to fit into the same category as the rest of the specimens. There seemed something special about him that set him apart. Teddy felt himself different from the rest of the town because, while he might harbor a natural seed of fear like the others, he had the shrewd patience and intelligence to keep it from sprouting. Hank Stamper, on the other hand, was neither shrewd nor intelligent, but by some quirk of nature completely fearless. This Draeger was certainly this and more. . . . “Good evening, boys”; Draeger greeted the largest table and its assembly of citizens. “It appears we are having us some weather. Four inches to date, the paper said. . . .”

“Where’d they get their figures,” Evenwrite demanded, “this ‘four inches to date’?”

Draeger hung up the coat and hat and carefully brushed his trousers free of rain before answering. “From the United States Department of Weather Service, Floyd,” he explained, giving Evenwrite an understanding smile.
He is shrewd, this Mr. Draeger. He also appears intelligent; that certainly sets him apart. Fearless, too, maybe . . .
“Why do you ask, Floyd? Had you estimated more than four inches?”
. . . but there is something more.

“Um . . .” Evenwrite grunted at the question and shrugged sullenly. He was still hung over. And he wasn’t so goddam sure anyhow that he liked the way this goddam bigcity big-ass in his suntan and slacks was
responding
to the
gravity
of the situation. “. . . I didn’t say I estimated at all, Mr. Draeger.”

“Of course. I was just joking.”

“It
did
seem more than four inches,” the Real Estate Hotwire admitted. “But you know what
I
diagnose it, Floyd? You want to know? It was the shock
effect
, that’s what. Days of sunshine, the good weather that we had all the way to November kind of
constituting
a
soporific
, do you get what I mean? Then
blooey
, the sky falls on us.” He tilted back in the chair and his easy-going, affable Rotarian laugh spilled from his throat—“So we’re all running around like Chicken Little with her head chopped off. . . . Haw haw haw.” A laugh calculated to warm the cockles of every cold wet heart in the house; and maybe stimulate a little confidence in the land-buying situation. “So that’s all it was. Nothing to be alarmed about. We were running around telling ourselves the sky was falling. Haw haw haw.” The others all laughed and agreed with the shrewd explanation; that must have been it, the surprise effect, the suddenness . . . then the laughter stopped and Teddy saw them turn questioningly toward the smiling Draeger. “Don’t you diagnose it like that, Mr. Draeger?”

“I’m sure that must have been what happened,” he reassured them as Teddy watched.
All the others are afraid of the night, of the dark outside; I know they are . . .

“
I
ain’t so sure that’s what happened,” Evenwrite said suddenly, looking down at Draeger’s hands on the table; the hands were resting one on top of the other, nails clean, cuticles groomed, like two pompous and pedigreed show-dogs. He looked at his own hands and they seemed knotted and ugly, like mongrels made all red and hairless with mange—“No, I don’t think so”—but mongrels or not he was by god if he was gonna run them outa sight under the table!

“No? Then what better explanation do you have, Floyd?”
I know these others, animals, all scared of the forces in the dark; that’s why they buy TV sets, and buy Buick cars with red and green lights blink off and on in the holes in the hood . . . that’s why they flock to my neons. Like bugs attracted to streetlights, to fire. Anything to get out of the dark . . .

“Yeah, Floyd; you ack like you got somethin’ on your chest.”

“Yeah, Floyd . . .”

Evenwrite compressed his face into a pinched labyrinth of terrific concentration. He
did
have a better explanation, goddammit, if he could just put it the right way. He’d worked on it all night. It was a hell of a lot more than surprise effect, and there damned well
was
something to be alarmed about. All night long he had worked on the feeling—after the sight of Stamper clobbering that muscle-assed Newton had faded from his consciousness—lying half awake, half asleep, half drunk in his pitch-dark bedroom, trying to put his finger on an insistent and ominous worry, trying to make out the whispered warning beneath the rain, like cold wet lips against his ear—what
was
that dream? what was it somebody just whispered?—and by noon when he climbed from bed he had deciphered the wet warning.

“Look,” he started, trying to choose his words. “This rain coming like it did and . . .
upset
ting everybody like it did, is a lot more than just a all-of-a-sudden change of weather. As far as us woods boys are concerned—an’ the rest of you who make a livin’ off the woods payroll—this rain coming might as well be an atom bomb.”

He forced himself to not look at Draeger. He licked his lips and went on.

“This rain might as well be a tornado or an earthquake as far as us boys are concerned. And is liable to be just as tough to survive.” Don’t want to lay it on too thick, but they got to realize, goddammit . . .
he’s
got to realize! “You think about it a minute you’ll know what I mean.” He’s got to see this ain’t just one of these pipe-smoking parties like he usual sits in on, diddling in his notebook like he’s got all the goddam time in the world. “And you’ll see how come I been tryin’ to light a fire under you before it’s
too late
to survive.”

The men all took a drink, to reinforce themselves against whatever event Evenwrite’s ominous statement suggested they might be too late to survive.
Yes; all of them flee the shadows for the light. Some more, some less than others
. . . Then, just as Evenwrite opened his mouth to cap his build-up, the glass door rattled and Les Gibbons entered as though on cue. Everyone turned to watch Les’s lumbering dance as he shook the rain from his clothes. Evenwrite groaned at the disturbance, but Les didn’t get the hint; he stood slapping his soaked hat against his thigh, enjoying the spotlight his interruption had created. “That there river, fellas, she’s acomin’ up an’ that’s the truth. Boy howdy! I like to not made it. I tole the woman not to expect me back till mornin’, maybe, if it gets worse. So I hope somebody can put me up. Huh? Ifn I can’t make it back?”

Evenwrite’s annoyed face suddenly brightened as he saw a way to salvage his point. “You drive in, Les? Up to Scaler’s bridge an’ across?”

“I sure didn’t! My car ain’t give me any service at
all
ever since I lent it to my wife’s kid brother. Ruint it, I reckon. No, that’s why I say I barely made it: I had to give Stamper a phone call to come up and tote me across in his boat, an’ you know? I thought for a piece there the motherjumper wasn’t even gonna? Then he sent that Joe Ben ‘stead of comin’ himself, like he couldn’t waste his time on a ol’ boy up agin it.”

Evenwrite tried again. “But someone drove you home by way of Scaler’s last night, Les . . . how is it you didn’t call whoever drove you
then?
”

“Why, I just didn’t consider it
safe
, Floyd! My yard’s warshed
clean away.
Never did that before, even in ’forty-nine. So I had my doubts about sections o’ that road from my place to Scaler’s. No time for the water to soak, y’ see, fellas; what with this much rain all to once after such a long dry—”

“Ex-actly!” Evenwrite brought both fists down on the table with such sudden violence that Les stumbled backward over a chair. “What I was trying to tell you boys . . . just
exactly!
” Now by god we’ll just
see
about a better explanation. “You don’t know this, I guess, Mr. Draeger, but you boys, you know as good as I do, if you stop to think about it, what this hard rain comin’ down on bone-dry ground will do! What it will do to haulin’, to
the whole of woods-workin’
, if we don’t get on the ball and be goddam quick about it. I mean
do
something!”

He nodded, letting them think about it. Les stood stiff and uncomfortable, immobilized by the legs of an overturned chair and the passion in Evenwrite’s words. He had never seen Floyd so forceful. None of them had. They watched him in uncomprehending silence; he strained his features before going on, the way some men clear their throats:

“Because this ain’t just a rain, boys . . . it’s like the start of a execution.” He stood up and walked away from the table, rubbing the back of his thick neck. At the bar he turned. “A execution! A goddam knife tearing out ever’ goddam road on this side of the valley! Anybody want to cover my ten dollars that the Breakleg Spur is still in after that night of rain? Anybody want to try to take a crummy up to Pacific Camp or Feeny Creek by way of Spur Nineteen? I
told
you, goddam your thick heads”—his own round head swung from man to man—“and I tell you again, that if we ain’t back up on those slopes this
very goddam week!
this very sonofabitchin’ week, that, strike or no strike, picket or no picket, you can just mark her down that we’ll be spending every Monday mornin’ for the rest of this fuckin’ winter driving to Eugene to pick up unemployment checks!”

He turned his back on the men and stood for a moment, feeling the men watching him, and Draeger watching all of them. Well, that oughta satisfy them as a better explanation.

He waited, expecting Draeger to make a comment, but the silence he had wrought held, so he pushed it to its limit. He let his shoulders rise and fall in a heavy sigh. He rubbed his neck again. And when he turned back around, his red rubber-ball face had been arranged in sagging lines of fatigue and sacrifice. Teddy watched in the bar mirror
All like frightened insects
as Evenwrite returned to the table . . .
and of all of them Evenwrite is the most frightened.

“Boys . . . I mean . . . you
know
the story, don’t you? You know what I’m talking, what I
been
the fuck talking about for a
week
now! An’ even before then I warned ’em, Mr. Draeger, I told ’em about my suspicions . . .”

“Up till yesterday I kept that report secret, waiting till I was sure I was gonna get another copy . . .”

“Up till yesterday afternoon you boys thought we were in pretty fair shape. I couldn’t get any action stirred up with all my claims about the Stampers, could I? You thought: ‘Hang on a while more.’ You thought: ‘WP can’t hold out much longer; they got to have the logs. They got to have a cold deck stockpiled for spring work.’ You thought we had ’em by the short hairs, didn’t you? Because a lumber company, it just ain’t going to
make any money,
you thought,
without it has some lumber to sell!
You thought: ‘Okay, so Hank Stamper is makin’ hay while his sun shines, but that’s no skin offn our noses. Live an’ let live. Can’t knock a man for fightin’ for his honest dollar,’ you thought, now ain’t that so?” He paused to glare about at the men; he hoped Draeger noticed how they one and all—even the Real Estate Man and that brother-in-law of his—dropped their eyes before his accusing gaze.
Willard Eggleston, on the other side of Gibbons, he might be almost as scared as Floyd Evenwrite, though he does not make as much commotion.
“Yessir . . . ‘Can’t knock a man for fightin’ for his honest buck,’ you thought.”

Floyd had started to settle back into his chair. Now he jumped standing again. “But that’s just it, goddammit anyhow! All this time he
wasn’t
just makin’ his honest buck. While he was runnin’ around grinnin’ at us an’ shakin’ our hands he was cuttin’ our throats, just like that rain out there now is cuttin’ our log roads!”

Now Evenwrite was working to his climax; he was bent into a slight crouch, and he had let his voice become soft the way he’d seen Spencer Tracy do when he was whipping the cattle-men to action. “An’ I tell you boys this, you can mark her down: if we don’t some way talk that hardnosed so-and-so into breaking that . . .
underhanded
contract with Wakonda Pacific, if we don’t put the bind on them lard-butts owners like our strike was intended to do—get them running circles around themselves down there in Frisco and LA ’cause they need
logs
and
lumber
for the spring and they can’t stop to haggle about what they’re paying to get ’em—and if we don’t do this right soon, like before a couple of weeks of rain washes the roads so bad they can’t be fixed, you boys might as well tell your women either get used to the state’s fifty-two forty a week, or go to looking for you a different line of work!” He nodded with grim finality at his audience and, at last, turned triumphantly toward the isolated chair back from the others, where Draeger sat like a noncommittal casting director at an audition. “And ain’t that the way you see it, Jonny?”—flushed with confidence and drenched with sweat from standing too near the stove. “Ain’t that just about the way you’d sum up our position?”

Teddy watched. Draeger smiled pleasantly, giving no indication of what he thought of the performance.
The whole lot of them except this Mr. Draeger.
He looked thoughtfully down into his pipe. “What is it you are proposing, Floyd?”
This Mr. Draeger, he is really different.
“What are you proposing, Floyd?”