Chapter 3

None a great notion 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 pickups 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 a great notion 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 . . .”