Chapter 21

I’m just stripping out the last of her.” Joe’s head withdrew. Hank put the milking stool back on top of the big box that housed the emergency generator and carried the pail of milk to the side door. He put his shoulder against the door and slid it wide, then returned to unlatch the stanchion from the cow’s drowsing head and hurry her back into the pasture with a slap on the flank. By the time he had walked back to the house with the pail of milk knocking against his leg, Viv had finished the dishes and Jan was upstairs getting her kids ready for bed. Joe was bent intently over the postcard on the breakfast table, rereading it. Hank put the pail down on the drainboard and wiped his hands on his thighs. “Let me have a look at it ...I suppose I should add something.” ...and the postman, sneezing blood over a tableful of third class, advises his superior: “I don’t think it was any accident; I think it was too perfect to be coincidental. I think that boy out there is a dangerous psycho and I think the blast was planned!” And the pinball machine flashes. And the clouds file past. The bus huffs and hisses its blunt nose out into the traffic finally, where it swings hugely, ceremoniously west through the bright, picture-postcard countryside. The hand appears. The postcard flutters, dips, explodes, splintering wood and window. The lawn bucks and glitters. Evenwrite spreads his rear end on another gas station toilet seat and opens another package of Tums. Jonathan Draeger leaves a meeting in Red Bluff before it is half over, with the excuse that he has to drive on north to Eugene, but goes instead to a café where he sits and writes in his notebook: “Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever—the blasphemer, the dissenter—will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies. A schoolboy hates the cocky-acting kid who says he can walk the fence and never fall. A woman despises the girl who is confident that her beauty will get her man. A worker is never so angered as by an owner who believes in the predominance of management. And this anger can be tapped and used.” And inside the bus, reclined in his seat near the window, Lee dozed and woke, and dozed again, seldom opening more than one eye at a time to watch America flash past behind his tinted glasses: Slow ... Stop ... Resume Speed ... Step up to quality . . . with elegant young sociables entertaining each other at a cookout . . . It’s what’s up front with the same young sociables elegantly relaxing indoors after the ordeal outside... Caution ... Slow ... Stop ... Resume speed ... Lee dozed and woke, moving west over the bus’s big strumming engine; (Evenwrite leapfrogs down the Southbound 99, from restroom to restroom) dozing and waking indifferently, and watching the roadsigns explode past; (Draeger cruises up from Red Bluff, stopping frequently for coffee and writing in his book) and was rather glad that he hadn’t bought that paperback novel (Jenny watches the clouds marshaling out to sea, and begins a low singsong deepdown chant, “Oh clouds . . . oh rain . . .”). From New Haven to Newark, to Pittsburgh Where there’s life with lots of even teeth, lots of spaghetti and garlic bread there’s Bud and beer cans turned label-tocamera (Dyin’ of the drizzlin’ shits, goddammitall! Evenwrite chalked another mark up against his Nemesis as he swung to stop at another station). Cleveland and Chicago “Get your kicks . . . on Route 66! (“Café owners are more frustrated than the common laborer,” Draeger writes. “The common laborer answers only to the foreman; the café owner answers to every patron who stops in”) St. Louis...Columbia...Kansas City for a man size way to stop perspiration odor Mennen speed stick with the scent that’s all man! (Who does that hardnose think he is, dammit, actin’ like God Almighty?) Denver... Cheyenne...Laramie ...Rock Springs The soft coal capital of the world. (“The hardest man,” Draeger writes, “is but a shell.”) Pocatello...Boise ... Welcome to Oregon speed limit strictly enforced. ( Just wait till I shove this report under that damned hardnose!)...Burns ...Bend...88 miles to Eugene Oregon’s second market (“Man,” Draeger writes, “is ...does... will... can’t . . .”)...Sisters ...Rainbow... Blue River (“Oh clouds,” Jenny chants, “Oh rain . . . come against the man I say . . .”) . . . Finn Rock...Vida... Leaburg . . . Springfield ...and only in Eugene seemed to come awake. He had made his trip without quite realizing it. During stops he had bought candy bars and Coke and gone to the bathroom, then returned to his seat, though there might have been twenty minutes left before departure. But as he neared Eugene the scenery began to brush long-shut doors and rattle rusty locks, and as the bus—a different bus, rickety and uncomfortable—began the climb from Eugene into the long range of mountains that separates the coast from the Willamette Valley and the rest of the continent, he found himself becoming more alert and excited. He watched the green stand of mountains build before him, the densening of ditch growth, the clear, silver-shrouded clouds moored to the earth by straight and thin strands of autumn smoke, like dirigibles. And those great growling, gear-grinding log-trucks, charging out of the wilderness with grilled grins ...they were like (like Grendel’s dam, I would probably throw in at this time or rather, then, at that time to keep the alliterative rolling, but as a child they were like terrible dragons that nightly came bawling down out of the bewitched mountains to make a shambles of my little-boy dreams. Airships of silver mist, GMC fiends ...these resurrections, and by no means the last of the fancies of flight and fiend that would follow that postcard from Oregon. Airships of silver mist, GMC fiends ...these resurrected childhood similes, these fancies of flight and ferocity were the first awakening sights in my days of riding. And the first indication that I had perhaps made a hasty choice.) “I could still turn around and go back,” I reminded myself. “I could do that.” “What’s that?” asked the man sitting across the aisle from me, an unshaven sack of odors that I had not noticed before. “What’s that you say?” “Nothing. Excuse me; I was just thinking out loud.” “I dream out loud, you know that? I do for a fact. Runs the old lady nuts.” “Keeps her awake?” I asked cordially, a little embarrassed by my slip. “Yeah. No, not the talkin’. She keeps awake all the time waitin’, see, for me to dream. She’s scared, see, she’ll miss me sayin’ somethin’...I don’t mean just ketch me at somethin’— she knows I’m past gallavantin’, or she sure as hell should know—but just, she says, because it’s like a fortune-teller the way I carry on. I dream like the dickens, predictions an’ everything.” To prove his point he let his head drop back to the pillow on the seat and closed his eyes. He grinned broadly—“You’ll see”—his lips slackened, parted, and in another minute he was snoring and muttering away. “Ya must not buy that place from Elkins. Mark this well . . .” Great God, I thought, looking at the yellow grillwork of this new dragon, what have you come back to? I turned away from the stubble-cheeked sight beside me to stare out the bus window at the receding geometry of the Willamette Valley farmland—rectangle walnut groves, parallelograms of bean-fields, green trapezoid pastures dotted with red cattle; the abstract splash of autumn—and tried to assure myself, You have just come back to quaint old Oregon is all. That’s all, quaint, beautiful, blooming Oregon . . . But the dreamer beside me hiccupped and added, “. . . place is jus’ overrun with Canada thistle an’ nigger-heads.” And my reassuring picture of assurance faded like the wind. (. . . only a few miles ahead of Lee’s bus, on the same road, Evenwrite decides to stop at the Stamper house before going on into Wakonda. He wants to confront Hank with the evidence, to see the look on the bastard’s face when he sees we got the goods on him!) We crested the summit and started down. I caught sight of a sign on a narrow white bridge that stood like a guidepost in my memory. wildman creek, the sign instructed me. Meaning the little stream we had just crossed. Fancy that, man, ol’ Wildman Creek; how my little imagination used to seize upon that name when I accompanied Mother on one of her frequent trips to Eugene and back. I leaned close to the window to see if any of the creatures I had fashioned still inhabited the prehistoric banks. Down a familiar stretch of highway Wildman Creek ran, snorting and squalling, foam whipping about the mossy teeth of rock, shaggy green hair of pine and cedar slashings, a beard matted with fern and berry vine... Through the fogging window I watched him as he crouched snarling in a little glade, catching his breath in a blue pool before he went leaping off again down a grade, tearing away bank and bottom in a frenzy of impatience, and I recalled that he was the first of the tributaries that would eventually merge down these slopes into big Wakonda Auga—the Shortest Big river (or Biggest Short, pick your own) in the world. (Joe Ben answered Evenwrite’s honking and took the boat across to get him. Inside the house they found Hank reading the Sunday funnies. Evenwrite shoved the report under his nose and demanded, “How does this smell, Stamper?” Hank took a long sniff, looking about. “Smells like somebody in here dirtied his britches, Floyd. . . .”) And watching, seeing half-remembered farmhouses and landmarks stroking past, I couldn’t quite shake the sensation that the road I traveled moved not so much through miles and mountains, as back, through time. Just as the postcard had come forward. This uneasy sensation provoked a glance at my wrist, and I thereupon discovered that my days of inactivity had allowed my self-winder to unwind.