Chapter 23

His arm pumped him onward. He was impressive in a plaid shirt and a pair of knee-length wool undershorts and a plaster cast that ran in one piece from the tip of one foot seemingly all the way up his side and out over his shoulder, forcing him to carry that arm bent before him as though ossified there. Why, the old trouper has grown so venerably ancient, I thought, that he is preserving his matchless idiocy for posterity by gradually having himself done over in limestone (if anybody goddammit thinks for one minit that just because I’m I’m I’m). He swayed and teetered in his restricted advance and struck at the welter of hounds with the shotgun, which served alternately as firearm, crutch, and club. He reached the dock and I could hear the thundering boom of his plaster leg as it sounded on the boards, the report reaching me a second after the foot set down, so the sound appeared to issue from the lifting foot instead of the dock. He lumbered forward down the dock like a comic Frankenstein’s monster, booming that foot, striking about with that gun, and cursing so fast and loud that the words were sacrificed to wholesale noise (because I never yet rose to see the GODDAM day I weren’t up to RUNNING my own SONVABITCHING affairs and if any BASTARD thinks). The man in the boat jerked the motor to life and threw off the mooring just as the three other characters in this drama came running from the house and down onto the dock: two men and what I ventured to think a woman in jeans and an orange-colored apron, and a long braid flopping down the back of the ubiquitous sweat shirt. She passed the two men and scampered across the dock to try to calm Old Henry’s raving; the two men held back, letting him rave his damnedest and laughing so they could barely walk. Henry ignored the calming and laughing alike and continued to rail at the man in the boat, who must have concluded that the gun was empty or broken because he had pulled a safe twenty yards away from the dock and was idling the boat at a standstill into the current so he could have his turn at shouting back at the others. All up and down the river I could see startled gulls flapping airward in a frightened flight from the uproar. (Oh lordy what am I doing with this here scattergun? Oh lordy I don’t hear so good. I truly do not . . .) Henry appeared to be tiring. One of the men, the taller one, who I decided must be Hank—what other Caucasian ever moved with that slack-limbed indolence?—left the others and loped into the boatshed and reappeared, bent in an odd position as he shielded something with his cupped hands. He stood at the edge of the dock in this position for a moment, then straightened up to throw whatever he held in the direction of the boat. (Oh lordy, what’s happening?) And then there was nothing but silence as the whole cast—the figures on the dock, the petrified brown lump in the boat, even the pack of dogs— stood perfectly still and quiet for perhaps two and three-quarters seconds before a thundering blast right next to the boat jammed a white column of water forty feet into the hot, smoky air, kawhooomp! like an Old Faithful erupting in the middle of the river. As the water fell back into the boat the men on the dock roared with laughter. They stumbled with their laughter, they grew weak with it, they finally collapsed under it like drunks. Even Old Henry’s cursing became so diluted with laughter that he was finally forced to lean weakly against a piling, no longer able to support both himself and the colossal amusement that shook him. The lump in the boat saw Hank heading back into the shed to reload and overcame his shellshock enough to gun the boat motor on full so that he was out of range of Hank’s next throw by a good three feet. The explosion bucked the boat forward like a surfboard catching a fifteen-foot comber, and this set off new hysterics on the dock. (Anyhow by god I guess I showed him he can’t tell me how to run my my . . . business, hear good or no!) The boat pulled up to the landing where I watched, and the man grabbed for a hold on one of the bumper tires that were dangling in the water. He leaped out onto the landing without tying the boat or turning off the motor, and I was compelled to make a courageous lunge to catch the rope at the rear of the boat lest it escape pilotless down river. As I stood there with my feet braced, holding the boat while it tugged to be off again like a whale on a leash, I thanked the man pleasantly for bringing transportation across to me and congratulated him on the little welcoming-home skit he had so generously taken part in. He stopped gathering what was left of his papers and raised a reddened round face in my direction, seeming to notice me for the first time. “And I’ll just bet you’re another one of the scabbin’ bastards!” He thrust his Jiggs-like face in my direction. Little rivulets of water running out of his frizzy red hair kept getting in his eyes, forcing him to blink and rub at the sockets with both fists like a child crying. “Ain’t I right?” he demanded, rubbing and blinking. “Huh? Ain’t I now?” But before I could summon an appropriately clever answer he turned and lurched up the planks toward his new car, cursing so mournfully that I wasn’t sure whether to laugh at the man or pity him. I lashed the impatient boat to a mooring and went back to the garage for the jacket I had left lying on the jeep. When I returned I saw across the way that Hank had removed his shirt and shoes and was in the process of pulling down his trousers. He and the other man—Joe Ben, from the banty-legged way he stood—were still laughing. Old Henry was working his way back up the bank toward the house, much more laboriously than he had come down. As Hank pulled a leg from his pants he supported himself by leaning a hand on the shoulder of the woman standing near him. This must be brother Hank’s pale wildwoods flower, I decided; barefooty and fattened out round and comfortable on huckleberry and pemmican. Hank finished with his pants and made a flat, whacking dive into the river, the same racing dive I had watched him practice years ago as I peeked from behind curtains of my room. As he started stroking across I noticed that the neat, strength-conserving stroke of the racing swimmer was somehow marred. There was a hitch in the smoothness of the movement every two or three strokes, a jog in the rhythm that seemed caused by something other than a lack of practice; if one could be permitted the term in reference to a swimmer, I suppose we might say that Hank had developed a limp. As I watched I thought, I was right, he is past his prime; the old giant is weakening. Perhaps that recompense of blood will not be so difficult to claim as I feared. Heartened by this thought I got into the boat, untied the rope, and with some experimenting managed to turn the bow about and head in Hank’s direction. The boat moved only slightly faster than idling speed, but I couldn’t fathom the throttle on the motor and had to proceed at the rate Jiggs had left for me; by the time I had putted out to Hank he was better than halfway across. When I got close he stopped swimming and trod water, squinting against the water to see who was picking him up, as he waited for me to stop the boat for him. But I found I was no more able to slow the motor than I had been able to speed it up. I had to make three runs before Hank realized I couldn’t stop for him; he got a hand over the side on the third time by and jerked himself on board, his long, veined arm snapping his body into the air like an arrow fired from a lemonwood bow. As he rolled into the boat I saw why he had limped in his swimming stroke and why he had used only the one hand to pull himself from the water: two fingers were missing from the other, but other than that he still seemed pretty much in prime. He lay for a moment in the bottom of the boat, blowing water, then climbed onto a seat facing me. He dropped his face into his hand as though he were rubbing the bridge of his nose, or wiping the water from his mouth; this was his characteristic attempt to either hide the grin you already knew was there, or to draw your attention to it. Watching him, watching the way he had jerked himself into the boat with flawless physical control and now watching the composure with which he confronted me—at ease, as though he had not only known it was me coming to pick him up but had planned it that way—I felt the momentary optimism I had experienced back on the dock replaced by a surge of apprehension. . . . If the giant is weakening WATCH OUT! WATCH OUT! then he has chosen a poor way to demonstrate it. Still he didn’t speak. I fumbled out some apology for being unable to stop the motor to pick him up, and was about to explain that Yale offered no course on seamanship when he raised his wet eyebrows—without moving his face, without lifting it from his hand—raised his brown and beaded eyebrows and looked at me with eyes as bright and green and poisonous as copper sulfate crystals. “You had three tries, bub,” he observed wryly, “and missed me every time; now don’t that frost you?” . . . While Indian Jenny, having swallowed enough snuff and whisky to make her feel confident of her race’s ability to influence certain phenomena, looked out through the spider web that laced her lone window and finished her spell: “Oh clouds ...oh rain. I call down all sorts bad weather an’ bad luck on Hank Stamper, uh-huh!” Then turned her black little eyes back into the empty shack to see if the shadows were impressed. ...And Jonathan Draeger, in a motel in Eugene, wrote: “Man will do away with anything that threatens him with loneliness—even himself.” ...And Lee, riding with his brother across the river toward the old house, wondered, Home again all right, but now what? All up and down the coast there are little towns like Wakonda, logging bars like the Snag, where weary little men talk about hard times and trouble. The old wino boltcutter has seen them all, has heard all the talk. He has been listening over his shoulder all afternoon, hearing the younger men talk about the trouble nowadays as though their dissatisfaction is a recent development, a sign of unusual times. He listened for a long time while they talked and pounded the table and read bits from the Eugene Register Guard blaming the despondency on “these troubled times of Brinkmanship, Blamesmanship, and Bombsmanship.” He listened to them accuse the federal government of turning America into a nation of softies, then listened to them condemn the same body for its hardhearted refusal to help the faltering town through the recession. He usually makes it a rule on his drinking trips into town to remain aloof from nonsense such as this, but when he hears the delegation agreeing that much of the community’s woes can be laid at the feet of the Stampers and their stubborn refusal to unionize, it is too much for him to take. The man with the union button is in the middle of explaining that these times demand more sacrifice on the part of the goddamned individual, when the old boltcutter rises noisily to his feet. “These times?” He advances on them, his bottle held dramatically aloft. “What do you think, everything used to be apple-pie ’n’ ice cream?” The citizens look up in surprised indignation; it is regarded as something of a breach in local protocol to interrupt these sessions. “That bomb talk? All horseshit.” He rears over their table, unsteady in a cloud of blue smoke. “That depression talk and that other business, that strike business? More horseshit. For twenty years, thirty years, forty years, all th’ way back to the Big War, somebody been sayin’ oh me, the trouble is such, oh my the trouble is so; the trouble is the ray-dio, the trouble is the Republicans, the trouble is the Democrats, the trouble is the Commy-ists . . .” He spat on the floor with a pecking motion of his head. “All horseshit.” “What, in your opinion, is the trouble?” The Real Estate Man tilts back his chair and grins up at the intruder, preparing to humor him. But the old fellow beats him to the punch; he laughs sadly, the sudden anger turning as suddenly to pity; he shakes his head and looks about at the citizens—“You boys, you boys . . .”—then places his empty bottle on the table and crooks a long, knob-knuckled forefinger around the neck of a full bottle and shuffles out of the bright sun that slants through the Snag’s front window. “Don’t you see it’s just the same plain old horseshit as always?” You can make a mark across the night with the tip of an embered stick, and you can actually see it fixed in its finity. You can be absolutely certain of its treacherous impermanence. And that is all. Hank knew . . . As well as he knew that the Wakonda has not always run this course. (Yeah...you want to know something about rivers, friends and neighbors?) Along its twenty miles numerous switchbacks and oxbows, sloughs and backwaters mark its old channel. (You want me to tell you a thing or two about rivers?) Some of these sloughs are kept clean by small currents from nearby streams, making them a chain of clear, deep, greenglass pools where great chubs lie on the bottom like sunken logs; in the winter the pools in these sloughs are nightly stopovers for chevrons of brant geese flying south down the coast; in the spring the pole willows along the banks arch long graceful limbs out over the water; when an angler breeze baits the tree, the leafy tips tickle the surface and tiny fingerling salmon and steelhead dart up to strike, sometimes shooting clear into the sunshine like little silver bullets fired from the depths. (Funny thing is, I didn’t learn this thing about rivers from the old man or any of the uncles, or even Boney Stokes, but from old Floyd Evenwrite, a couple years ago, that first time Floyd and us locked horns about the union.) Some sloughs are flooded spear-fields of cattail and skunk cabbage where loons and widgeon breed; some are bogs where maple leaves and eelgrass and snakeweed skeleton with decay and silently dissolve into purple, oil-sheened mud; and some of the sloughs have silted in completely and dried enough to become rich blue-green deer pastures or two-story-high berry thickets. (The way it happened I’d come to town to meet with Floyd Evenwrite that first time this Closed Shop business came up and instead of taking the cycle I figured I’d use the boat to try out this brand-new Johnson Seahorse 25 I’d picked up in Eugene not a week before, and swinging in toward the municipal dock I whanged into something floating out of sight; probably an old deadfall washed loose, and the boat and motor went down like a rock and I had to swim it, mad as hell and sure as shooting in no frigging mood to talk Labor Organization.) There is one such berry thicket up river from the Stamper house, a thicket so dense, so woven and tangled that even the bears avoid it: from the mossy bones of deer and elk trapped trying to trample a path rises a wall of thorns that appears totally impenetrable. (In the meeting Floyd did most of the talking, but I didn’t do my share of the listening. I couldn’t get my mind on him. I just sat there looking out the window where my boat and motor had sunk, feeling my Sunday slacks shrink dry on me.) But when Hank was a boy of ten he found a way to penetrate this thorny wall: he discovered that the rabbits and raccoons had tunneled an elaborate subway system next to the ground, and by pulling on a hooded oilskin poncho to protect his hide from the thorns, he was able to half crawl, half worm his way through that snarl of vines. (Floyd kept talking on and on; I knew he was expecting me and the half-dozen or so other gyppo men to be mowed right over by his logic. I don’t know about them other boys, but for myself I wasn’t able to follow him worth sour apples. My pants dried; it got warmer; I pulled on my motorcycle shades so’s he couldn’t see if I dropped off during his talk; and I leaned back and sulked about that boat and motor.) When the spring sun was bright above the thicket, enough light filtered down through the leaves so he was able to see, and he would spend hours on his hands and knees exploring the smooth passageways. He frequently came face to face with a fellow explorer, an old boar coon, who, the first time he encountered the boy, had huffed and growled and hissed, then turned loose a musk that put a skunk to shame, but as they met again and again the old masked outlaw gradually came to regard this hooded intruder as something of a partner in crime; in a dim passageway of thorn the boy and the animal stand nose to nose and compare booty before they go on with their furtive ramblings: “What you got, old coon? A fresh wapatoo? Well, look here at my gopher skull . . .” (Floyd talked on and on and on and—what with sitting there half asleep stewing about the boat and river and all—I got to thinking about something that’d happened a long time before, something I’d clean forgot about . . .) He found countless treasures in the passageways: a foxtail caught in the thorns; a fossilized bug that still struggled against a millennium of mud; a rusted ball-and-cap pistol that reeked still of rum and romance ...but never anything near to equaling the discovery made one chilly April afternoon. (I got to thinking about the bobcats I found in the berry vines, is what; I got to remembering them bobcats.) There were three kittens at the end of a strange new passageway, three kittens with their blue-gray eyes but a few days open, peering up at him from a mossy, hair-lined nest. Except for the nub of a tiny tail, and the tassels of hair at the tip of each tiny ear, they looked much the same as barn kittens that Henry drowned by the sackful every summer. The boy stared wide-eyed at them playing in their nest, overcome by his remarkable good fortune.