Sometimes a Great Notion Page 7

  "You?" the boy says. "You guess you'll--"

  "Yeah, bub, I just guess I'll ride on along to town with you instead of comin' in later. My bike ain't runnin' to form anyhow--that sound all right, Henry?"

  The hounds, suddenly aware of the activity on the dock, come pouring from beneath the house and charge barking down the plank walk. "Fine with me," the old man says and steps into the boat. The woman follows, her face lowered. Hank pushes the hounds away and steps in, almost overloading the boat. The boy still stands, with a look of disbelief, surrounded by dogs.

  "Well, sonny?" Henry looks up, squinting against the sun behind the boy. "You comin' along or not? Dang that glare. Where the hell's that hat?"

  The boy gets in and sits on a trunk near his mother.

  "Yonder I see it, under that box. D'ya mind, Myra?"

  The woman proffers the hat. Joe Ben brings out the folded gray square of canvas, and Hank takes it from him.

  "What you say, Henry?" Hank asks, reaching for the oars. "You want me to take it across?"

  The old man shakes his head and takes up the oars himself. Joe Ben unties the rope and, bracing himself against a piling, shoves the boat away from him into the current. "See you people later. G'by, Myra. G'by, Lee, hang tough." Henry cranes his head around for a sight on the landing at the garage across and commences to pull with a steady, measured strength, green eyes shaded beneath the brim of the tin hat.

  The blossom-covered surface of the river is smooth, stretched taut from bank to bank like a polka-dotted fabric. The prow of the boat rips a passage through with a sizzling hiss. The woman keeps her eyes closed, withdrawn into some vague half-sleep, as though fighting the pain of a headache. Henry rows steadily. Hank looks off down river where fishducks are slapping the water with beaded wings. Little Lee squirms nervously atop his perch on the trunk at the back of the boat.

  "Well now,"--old Henry spaces his words between oar strokes. "Well now, Leland"--in a detached, remote, inviolable voice--"I'm sorry you think you need"--cords snapping in his neck as he leans backward with the pull--"need a back East schooling . . . but that's the long and short of it, I reckon . . . this ain't no easy row to hoe out here . . . specially if you ain't allus feeling up to snuff . . . and some just ain't equal to it. . . . But it's okeedoke . . . I want you to do proud back there . . ." A litany spoken over me, Lee thinks later, listened to only for the rhythm, a chant in a primitive dialect, an incantation perpetrating a spell; anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once. He thinks one time, years later. ". . . yes, do yourself and all of us proud . . ." (Now it's done, Hank thought. Then. Taking them across to the train. Now it's finished, and I won't ever see no more of her again.) ". . . an', well, when you get stronger . . ." (I was right about not seeing her no more . . .) A litany, chanted over me . . . (I was right about that much--) They row through the glittering water. And reflections swirling gently among the flower petals. Jonas rows alongside, muffled from the neck down in green fog: You have to know. Lee meets himself coming back across twelve years after with twelve years of decay penciled on his pale face, and translucent hands cupping a vial of poison for Brother Hank. . . . or, more aptly, like a spell. . . . (But I was wrong about it being finished. Dead wrong.) You have to know there is no profit and all our labor avoideth naught. Jonas pulls, straining at the fog. Joe Ben goes into a state park with a brush knife and an angel's face, seeking freedom. Hank crawls through a tunnel of blackberry vines, seeking thorny imprisonment. The arm twists and slowly untwists. The logger sitting in the mud calls curses across the water. "I'm hollowed out with loneliness," the woman cries. The water moves. The boat moves with measured heaves. Rain begins to fall suddenly; the wink of a million white eyes on the water. Hank looks up, intending to offer the woman his hat to protect her, but she has drawn a quilt over her dark hair against the rain. The red and yellow and blue patchwork shape heaves softly up and down, tossed by waves the boat does not feel. Hank shrugs and closes his mouth. He spreads out the tarp and turns to look down river again, but his eyes connect with the boy's, locking there finally.

  For long seconds the two stare at each other.

  Hank is the first to break the painful current of the stare. Dropping his eyes, he grins warmly and attempts to pass off the tension by reaching out to playfully squeeze the boy's knee-bone. "What ya say, bub? You going to like New York for a home? All them . . . museums and galleries and that sort of thing? All them cute little college mice after you, you being such a big stud logger from the north woods?"

  "Mmm, wait, I--"

  Henry laughs. "That's right, Leland"--pulling steadily--"that's how I got your mama . . . them Eastern girls just go all to pieces . . . at the sight of one of us big good-lookin' lumberjacks . . . just you ask her if that ain't so."

  "Mm. Oh, I--" (Just you ask her. Just you ask her . . .)

  The boy's head goes back, mouth opening.

  "What's the trouble, son?"

  "Oh . . . I . . . Mmm--" (The taunt was wordlessly repeated to every ear but the old man's: "Just you ask her"--an echoing litany that became a spell.)

  "I ask ya, what's the trouble?" Henry stops rowing. "You feeling sick again? The sinus trouble?"

  The boy's hand clutches his lips, to try to control his voice, mangling the words with his fingers. He shakes his head, making a humming sound through his fingers.

  "No? Maybe--maybe, then, it's the boat rockin'. You get hold of something to make you sick this morning?"

  He doesn't see the tears until the boy's face comes forward again. The boy appears not to have heard the old man. Henry shakes his head. "Must of been somethin' godawful rich to make you so sick."

  The boy isn't looking at Henry. He is glaring at his brother. He thinks the words have come from Hank. "You . . . just . . . wait," he says, squeezing out the threat. "Mmm. Mm boy, Hank, someday you'll get it for what you--"

  "Me? Me?" Hank erupts, twisting in his seat. "You're lucky I don't bust your scrawny little neck! Because let me tell you, bub--"

  "You just wait till--"

  "--if you wasn't a kid and I found out what you'd been--"

  "--till I'm a big guy!"

  "--found about what a lowdown, crummy--in fact, I might even of gone back like she--"

  "--just wait till I'm big enough to--"

  "--but you'd just pull the same crummy--"

  "What!" Old Henry silences the outburst. "In God's creation! Are you two talking about!"

  The brothers look at the bottom of the boat. The hump of colored quilt is very still. Finally Hank laughs. "Ah, some little business me an' the kid had. No big deal, right, bub?"

  Silence forces the boy to nod weakly. Old Henry takes up the oars again, apparently satisfied, and rows on; Hank mumbles that them prone to gettin' seasick ought to know better'n eat rich foods before getting into a boat. The boy controls his tears. He clamps his jaw and turns pompously to look off into the water, after whispering, "You, . . ." one more time, indicating with crossed arms that he has said all he intends to say on the subject. "Yeah . . . just . . . you . . . wait."

  And remains so silent all the rest of the boat ride and car trip on in to the Wakonda station--even while Hank is offering comical good-bys and good wishes to him and his mother at the train--remains so silent, so dramatically grim and brooding and vengeful, that it would seem he, not his older brother, were the one waiting.

  And whether Lee consciously thought about it or not, he waited twelve years--before a postcard arrived from Joe Ben Stamper in Wakonda, Oregon, saying that old Henry was out of commission with a bad arm and leg and plenty old anyhow and the logging operation was in a kind of tight and they needed another man up in the woods to help them meet a contract deadline--another Stamper, natch, to keep them clear of the union--so since you're the only footloose relative left not already working for us, what you say, Lee? If you think you're equal to it, we could sure use another jack . . .

  And penciled at the bottom, in a thicker, stronger hand: Y
ou should be a big enough guy now, bub.

  I often feel it would be nice to have a pitchman handy to push the product. A winking, grinning, vegetable-slicing salesman, a scrawny State Fair con artist with a throat mike hung over his beckoning Adam's apple, to lean from his booth, white cuffs rolled from hypnotic long-fingered hands, to con the attention and ballyhoo the passing eyes: "Lookee lookee look! At this little Wonder of the Everyday World, fellas and gals. A viz-yoo-al rarity, I'm certain you'll agree. Tilt it, tip it, peer through it from any position . . . and your gaze you'll notice comes out someplace else. Seenow: the spheres lie concentrically one inside the other like diminishing glass balls becoming so minute! . . . you cannot perceive the smallest without the aid of scientific devices. Yessir, a real rarity, buddies, a ab-so-lute-ly unique article I'm positive you'll agree. . . ."

  Yet, all up and down the West Coast, there are little towns much like Wakonda. Up as far as Victoria and down as far as Eureka. Towns dependent on what they are able to wrest from the sea in front of them and from the mountains behind, trapped between both. Towns all hamstrung by geographic economies, by rubber-stamp mayors and chambers of commerce, by quagmire time . . . canneries all peeling dollar-a-quart Army surplus paint, mills all sprouting moss between curling shingles . . . all so nearly alike that they might be nested one inside the other like hollow toys. Wiring all corroding, machinery all decaying. People all forever complaining about tough times and trouble, about bad work and worse pay, about cold winds blowing and colder winters coming . . .

  There will be a small scatter of boxlike dwellings somewhere near a mill, usually on a river, and a cannery on the docks, needing a new floor. The main street is a stripe of wet asphalt smeared with barroom neon. If there is a stoplight, it is more a status symbol than a safety precaution . . . Traffic Commissioner at the City Council: "Those boys up there't Nahalem got two stoplights! I can't see no reason we don't even have one. The trouble with this town, by Gawd, is not enough Civic Pride."

  That's the trouble as he sees it.

  There is a movie-show house, open Thurs., Fri. & Sat. Nites, located next door to a laundry, both establishments owned by the same sallow and somber businessman. The theater marquee reads: THE GUNS OF NAVARONE G PECK & THREE SHIRTS 99C/ THIS WEAK ONLY."

  According to this bleached citizen the trouble is not enough E's.

  Across the street, behind windows filled with curl-cornered photographs of retouched homes and farmhouses, the Real Estate Man sits with a lapful of white pine shavings . . . The bald brother-in-law of the sad-eyed movie-laundry magnate, this Real Estate Man is known as a shrewd cooky with a mortgage and a hotwire speaker at the Tuesday Jaycee luncheons: "She's a comin' area, boys, she's a sleepin' giant. We had some trouble, sure. Still have, because of eight hard years under the administration of that tight-fisted Army bastard in the White House, but now we're out of the woods, we're roundin' the turn!"

  And on his desk his collection of free-to-the-customer statues, little white pine replicas of Johnny Redfeather whittled by the Real Estate Man's own skilled fingers, stand like a stalwart Community Chest army and turn their wooden eyes out the window down a long row of empty storefronts. Where FOR RENT signs on the doors make forlorn appeals for someone to come back and take the whitewash from the windows and put it back on the walls, come back and fill the shelves with bright tin rows of deviled meat and spiced beans, fill the glass-topped candy counter with cartons of Day's Work, Copenhagen, Skol, Climax; fill the benches around the woodstove with the booming throng of bearded, steaming, calk-booted men who used to--a while back, three or four decades back--pay three or four times the city price for a dozen eggs; men who dealt only in paper money because pants pockets weren't mended to hold anything as measly as a two-bit piece. FOR RENT, FOR SALE, FOR LEASE say the signs on the doors, "Prosperity and New Frontiers," says the Real Estate Hotwire over a glass of beer. The shrewd cooky whose only deal since Founder's Day involved his sister's flour-faced husband and a little rundown bankrupt movie-show house next to the laundry. "You damn betcha. Smooth slidin' from here on. Our only trouble is we have just suffered a minor recession under the regime of that general!"

  But the citizens in Wakonda begin to disagree--toward agreement. The union members at first contend: "The trouble ain't administration, it's automation. Homelite saws, one-man yarders, mobile donkeys--why half the men can cut twice the trees. The solution is simple: the wood-worker's got to have the six-hour day, just like the shingle-weavers've got. Boys, give us the Six-Hour Day with Eight-Hour Pay, and I tell you we'll put all our members to cuttin' twice the trees!"

  And all the members holler and whistle and stamp their agreement, even though they know that later, in the bar after the meeting, some wet blanket will always recall that "the trouble is we ain't got twice the trees any more; some snake in the grass chopped down a big bunch over the last fifty or so years."

  "No! No!" says the Real Estate Man. "What's wrong isn't the lack of timber--it is a lack of Goals!"

  "Perhaps," says the Reverend Brother Walker of the Church of God and Metaphysical Science, "it is a lack of God." He takes a calculated sip of his beer before he goes on. "Our present spiritual trouble is certainly greater than our economic trouble."

  "Certainly! Far be it from me to de-emphasize that, but--"

  "But what Mr. Loop means, Brother Walker, is a man needs a little meat and taters to keep his morale up."

  "Man's got to live, Brother."

  "Yes, but 'not by bread alone,' remember?"

  "Certainly! But not, by God, just by God alone neither."

  "And I say if we ain't got the timber to cut--"

  "There's wood and aplenty! Ain't Hank Stamper cuttin' full time with his show? Ain't he? Huh?"

  They all take a thoughtful drink.

  "So the trouble ain't lack of timber . . ."

  "Nope. No siree . . ."

  They had been drinking and discussing since early afternoon at the huge oval table traditionally reserved for such caucuses, and, while they formed no official organization, this casual group of eight or ten citizens, they were nevertheless recognized as the ruling body of the town's opinion and their decisions were as sanctified as the hall where they met.

  "Innerestin' point, you know--about Hank Stamper?"

  This hall, the Snag Saloon, is a few doors down from the movie-show house and across the street from the grange hall. Its interior is no more out of the ordinary than its patrons--the booths and stools are replicas of similar settings in similar logging-town bars--but its streetfront is spectacular in the extreme. The wide front window contains an assortment of neon signs that have been collected from the fronts of numerous competing bars that Teddy has forced out of business over the years, and when the dusk falls and Teddy throws the switch under his bar, the sudden effect on the unsuspecting drinker is sometimes so terrifying that the crash of a dropped glass accompanies the crash of light. The neons fill the front of the bar with a shifting dance of color. The colors flicker and twist, crowding for window space, overlapping and intertwining and hissing like electronic snakes. Twisting and untwisting. So bright and so clashing are the many signs that on a dark night their effect is almost audible. On a dark, wet night they create an ear-splitting din. Listen: Next to the door a fire-crimson sign shrills out, Red Dragon; a green and yellow blinker just below this one insists on The Nite Cap and flashes a martini glass with a cherry in it; beside this is a huge orange creation bellowing COME AN' GIT IT!; and beside this The Bullskinner shoots a darting red arrow to the barbershop next door. The Gull and the Black Kat scream back and forth at each other in discordant reds greens. The Alibi and the Crab Pot and the Wakonda House clash together. All the beer companies shout competing slogans: It's the water . . . and Where there's life . . . and Mabel, Black Label . . .

  Yet, the Snag, which boasts a score of banners, has no sign of its own. Years ago the words Snag Saloon & Grill had been painted onto the greened glass of the windows, but as Teddy began b
uying other bars and closing them, he scraped off more and more of the green to make room for the captured neons which he flaunted like enemy scalps. On a clear day, when the neons are off, a man standing close might make out the dim edges of a few letters on the glass, but nothing you could really call a name. And on a dark night, when the neons are on, they overlap too much for any one to stand out.

  There is one sign, however, that is afforded individual distinction; this is not an electric display but an elaborately scrolled shingle hanging alone by two eyescrews above the door. Acquired not by his usual financial onslaught on competition but by a past marriage that lasted only four months, this practically unnoticed sign is Teddy's favorite above all the blarers and blinkers; in a calm and tasteful blue this obscure little sign reminds all the others to "Remember . . . One Drink Is Too Many. WCTU."

  A short, plump polyp of man in a land of rangy loggers, Teddy is appeased by his collection of signs. Napoleon needed no elevator shoes to make him as big as the next man: he had a chestful of medals. It was these symbols of success that proved his size. Yes, wearing his medals he could remain silent while the brutes whined about their troubles . . .

  "Teddybear--another round."

  ... and slobbered in their glasses . . .

  "Teddy?"

  ... and died of slow, brute fear . . .

  "Teddy! Damn it, boy, let's come to life."

  "Yes, sir." He was jarred from his thoughts. "Oh, yes, sir, beer?" "Christ yes, beer." "Coming right up, sir. . . ." Standing at the end of the bar, hearing the barroom chatter through the haze of light, he could become completely removed from their crude, bellowing world. Now, in a great fluster, he rushed back and forth behind the bar, his aplomb shattered. His fat fingers shook as he gathered a supply of glasses. "Be right with you." He hustled their order to the table with a great show of haste to make up for the delay. But they had already returned to their discussion of the local trouble, ignoring him. Sure. Already the big idiots had to ignore him. They were afraid to look too close. It is threatening to perceive superiority in someone so much--