Chapter 15

 Finally satisfied, he left the bathroom to begin packing. He took only his clothes and a few books, throwing them into his roommate’s suitcase. Haphazardly, he stuck notes and bits of paper in his pockets. He returned to the bathroom and carefully emptied half the contents of each pill bottle into an old Marlboro pack and put the rolled-up pack in the pocket of a pair of slacks in his suitcase. The bottles he put in the toe of a battered tennis shoe; then stuffed a dirty sweat sock after them and placed the shoe under Peters’ bed. He started to put his portable typewriter in its case, then became suddenly frantic with haste and left it overturned on the table. “Addresses!” He tore through the drawers of his desk until he found a small leather-covered book, but after leafing through it tore out one page and threw the rest to the floor. Finally, holding the big suitcase with both hands and breathing rapidly, he took a quick look around—“Okay”—and dashed out to the car. He pushed the suitcase into the back seat and jumped in and slammed the door. The thump hurt his ears. “No windows open.” And hot, oven-grill dashboard... He tried twice for the reverse gear, gave up and put it in forward, turning across the lawn and back on the driveway until he was facing the street. But he didn’t pull onto the street. He sat, racing the motor, looking out at the clean sweep of pavement passing in front of him. “Come on, man . . .” His ears were ringing from the door slam, as they had after the blast. He raced the motor, urging the car to decide which way to turn onto the street. “Come on, man...be serious.” Gearshift hot as a poker, and ears ringing ...finally, palm to face to somehow press away the ringing—I seemed to feel a tendoned hand playfully squeezing my knee, and a bagpipe’s whirling skirl wheezing in my throat—and discovers that he is weeping again; squeezing, wheezing and rattling the scene...and it is then— “Or if you can’t be serious,” I scolded, “at least be rational; who could possibly in this wasted world . . . ?”—that he remembers the postcard lying on the porch. (. . . the clouds file past. The bartender brings ’em on. The jukebox bubbles. And at the house Hank shouts hoarsely into a roomful of resistance: “. . . but goddammit what we’re talking about ain’t whether we’re gonna be the most popular folks in town if we sell to WP ...but about where we gonna get us some more labor?” He stops, looking about at the faces. “So . . . has anybody got any suggestions? Or want to volunteer for extra work?” After a short silence Joe Ben pops a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth and holds up his hand. “I definitely ain’t volunteering for more labor,” he says, chewing, then bends his mouth back to his hand and begins spitting out the seeded hulls, “but I might have a little suggestion . . .”) The card was on the bottom step—a threepenny postcard in heavy black pencil with one line showing black and blacker, larger and larger than all the rest of the message. “You should be a big enough guy now, bub.” At first, I refused to believe it; but that hand kept squeezing my knee and those pipes kept wheezing in my chest, until a mirthless laughter began to spew out, as uncontrollable and uncalled-for as had been my attack of griefless tears—“From home...oh Christ, a card from the kinfo’k!”—and I was finally forced to face up to its existence. I walked back to sit in the idling car to read it, trying to control my spasms of laughter enough to make out the print. It was signed Uncle Joe Ben, and even through my mirth I could make out that the message was penciled in a rambling grade-school hand that could be none but Joe’s. “Sure. Uncle Joe’s hand. Absolutely.” But it was the heavier, surer addition at the bottom that commanded my eye, and as I read it it wasn’t Uncle Joe’s hand but Brother Hank’s voice that recited the words inside my head. “Leland. Old Henry stove up bad in accident—the show is in a bad tight for help—we need somebody but has to be a Stamper to keep unyon off our necks—good pay if you think your equal to it—” Then stab in a different pen hand: “You should be a big enough, etc.” And after that, after this outrageous and out-sized signature—a signature written in capitals, “Something so fitting about big brother printing his signature in capitals . . .”— there was added an ungainly attempt at cordiality. “P & S you ain’t even met my wife Vivian bub. You sort of got a sister now too.” This last line was perhaps what broke the spell. The thought of my brother mated was so ludicrous that I found some actual humor in the idea, enough to give me a real laugh and the courage of contempt besides. “Bah!” I exclaimed contemptuously, tossing the card to the back seat and in the teeth of the ghost of the past grinning at me there from beneath his logger’s hat. “I know what you are: naught but a product of my indigestion. A touch of cole slaw perhaps become spoiled in my refrigerator. A bit of underdone potato eaten last night. Humbug! There’s more of gravy than of the grave to you!” But, like his Dickensian counterpart, the specter of my older brother rose forth with a terrible clamor, rattling his log chain, and cried out in a dreadful voice, “You’re a big guy now!” and sent me careening from the driveway out into the street, laughing still but now with some reason: the irony in this pat, nick-of-time a great notion arrival of this quote Unexpected Letter unquote had given me my first bit of fun in months. “The idea! asking me to come back and help the business ...as if I had nothing else in the world to do but jump to the aid of a logging outfit.” And had given me as well someplace to go. By noon I had sold the VW—or what I owned of it—taking five hundred dollars less than I knew it was worth, and by one o’clock I was dragging Peters’ suitcase and the paper sack full of junk cleaned from the glove compartment to the bus depot, ready for the trip. Which, according to the ticket-pusher, would take a solid three days of driving. I had close to an hour before my bus left, and, after I had spent fifteen minutes at the paperback counter putting it off, I finally succumbed to my conscience and placed a call to Peters at the department. When I told him I was at the depot waiting for a bus to take me home he at first misunderstood. “A bus? What happened to the car? Just hang there, why don’t you, and I’ll cut my seminar and pick you up.” “I appreciate your offer, but I shouldn’t think you would want to lose the three days; six days, actually, there and back . . .” “Six days where and back? Lee damn you, what’s happening? Where are you?” “Just a minute...” “You at the bus depot no shit?” “Just a moment . . .” I opened the door of the booth and held the phone out into the raucous comings and goings of the depot. “What do you think?” I asked, shouting at the receiver. I felt strangely giddy and lightheaded; the combination of barbiturate and amphetamine was making me feel both feverish and drunk, as though one was putting me to sleep and the other was turning that sleep into a freewheeling, highly charged dream. “And when I speak of home, Peters, my man”—I closed the door of the booth again, and sat down on the upended suitcase—“I do not mean that scholar’s squalor we’ve been living in these last eight months—which is now, by the way, in the process of being aerated as you’ll see—but I mean home! The West Coast! Oregon!” After a moment he asked, “Why?” becoming a little suspicious. “To seek out my lost roots,” I answered gaily, trying to ease his suspicion. “To stir up old fires, to eat fatted calves.” “Lee, what’s happened?” Peters asked, now more patient than suspicious. “You out of your gourd? I mean, what’s wrong?” “Well, I shaved my beard, for one thing—” “Lee! Don’t give me this other shit . . .”