Chapter 25

When he woke in the morning he looked out and saw the boats were fine and the river wasn’t much higher than usual. He hurried through breakfast, then took the box he had prepared and ran out toward the cage. He went first to the barn to pick up some burlap sacks to put in the bottom of the box. The morning was cold; a light frost was sifted into all the shadows and the cow breath was like skim milk in the air. Hank pulled some sacks from the pile in the feed room, scattering mice, and ran on out through the back door. The chill air in his lungs made him feel light and silly. He turned the corner and stopped: the bank! (About the time I went to nodding into my dream about the cats, Floyd and old man Syverson who used to run the little mill at Myrtleville had really got into it about something; they snapped me out of it, hollering back and forth at each other to beat hell.) . . . The whole bank where the cage stood is gone; the new bank shines bright and clean, as though a quick slice had been made into the earth last night with the edge of a huge moon-stropped razor. (“Syverson,” Evenwrite yells, “don’t be so dunderheaded; I’m talkin’ sense!” And Syverson says, “Bull. What you mean, sense!” “Sense! I’m talking sense!” “Bull. You talkin’ sign over t’ you all the say-so I got of my business is what you talkin’!”) At the bottom of this slice, in the mud and roots, the corner of the cage protrudes above the turgid surface of the river. Floating in the corner behind the wire mesh are the contents of the cage—the rubber balls, the torn cloth Teddy bear, the wicker basket and sodden bedding, and the shrunken bodies of the three cats. (“How much’s it want,” Syverson yells, “how much, this organization you tell us about?” “Dang it, Syve, all it wants is what’s fair—” “Fair! It wants advantage is what.”) Looking so very small with their wet fur plastered against their bodies, so small and wet and ugly. (“Okay! okay!” Floyd hollered, getting rattled, “but all it wants is its fair advantage!”) He doesn’t want to cry; he hasn’t allowed himself to cry in years. And to stop that old scalding memory mounting in his nose and throat he forces himself to imagine exactly what it must have been like—the crumbling, the cage rocking, then falling with the slice of earth into the water, the three cats thrown from their warm bed and submerged in straggling icy death, caged and unable to swim to the surface. He visualizes every detail with painful care and then runs the scene over and over through his mind until it is grooved into him, until a call from the house puts a stop to his torture. . . . (Everybody laughed when Floyd made that slip, even old Floyd himself. And for some time after folks kidded him about it. “All it wants is its fair advantage.” But me, not paying attention, nodding on and off; thinking about my drowned cats and my new Johnson outboard at the bottom of the drink, I kind of switched what he said to something else.) Until the pain and guilt and loss are replaced by something different, something larger . . . After putting the box and gunny sacks down I went back into the house and got my lunch along with that bony little peck the old lady laid on my cheek every morning. Then I went out to where old Henry was readying the boat to ferry me and Joe Ben across to wait for the school bus. I kept still, hoping neither of them’d notice me not having the box of cats like I’d planned. ( ...replaced for good by something far stronger than guilt or loss.) And they might not of, because the motorboat wouldn’t start, it being so cold, and after Henry had jerked and kicked and cussed and raved at it for about ten minutes he finally barked the hide off his knuckles and then he wasn’t in any shape to notice anything. We all got into the row boat and I thought I was gonna make it, but on the way across old bright-eyed Joe Ben gave a yell and pointed at the bank. “The cat cage! Hank, the cat cage!” I didn’t say anything. The old man stopped rowing and looked, then turned to me. I frigged around, acting like I was all wrapped up tying my shoe or something. But pretty quick I saw they weren’t gonna let me off the hook without I said something or other. So I just shrugged and told them, cool and matter-of-fact, “It’s a dirty deal, is all. Nothing but just a crappy deal.” “Sure,” the old man said. “The way the football bounces.” “Sure,” Joe Ben said. “Just a tough break,” I said. “Sure,” they said. “But boy, I’ll tell ya I’ll tell—you . . .” I could feel that cool, matter-of-fact tone slipping away, but couldn’t do diddle about it. “If I ever—ever, I don’t care when—get me any more of them bobcats—oh, Christ, Henry, that crappy river, I should, I should of—” And when I couldn’t go on I went to beating at the side of the boat until the old man took me by the fist and stopped me. And after that the whole thing was done and shut and forgot. None of the family ever mentioned it. For a while kids at school asked me how about them bobcats I was always blowing about, how come I hadn’t brought them bobcats to school? ...but I just told them to fuck off, and after I told them enough times and showed them I meant what I said a time or two, nobody mentioned it any more. So I forgot it. Leastways the part of a man that remembers out loud forgot it. But years later it used to wonder me just how come I’d sometimes get all of a sudden so itchy to cut out from basketball practice, or from a date. It would really wonder me. To other people—Coach Lewellyn or a drinking buddy, or whatever honey I might have been necking with—I would say that if I waited too long the river would be up too high to cross. “Report of high water,” I’d say. “If she gets up too big there’s a chance the boat might be pulled loose and there I’d be, you know, up that ol’ creek without that ol’ canoe.” I’d tell buddies and coaches that I had to beat it home “on account of that ol’ Wakonda is risin’ like a wall between me and the supper table.” I’d tell dates just ready to tip over that “sorry kid, I got to up and hustle or the boat might be swamped.” But myself, I’d tell myself, Stamper, you got deals going with it, with that river. Face it. You might’ve put all kinds of stories on the little girlies from Reedsport, but when it comes right down to it you know them stories are so much crap and you got deals going with that snake of a river. It was like me and that river had drawn ourselves a little contract, a little grudge match, and without me knowing exactly why. “It’s like this, sweetie-britches,” I might say to some little high-school honey we was parked someplace, steaming up the windows of the old man’s pick-up in some Saturday-night battle of the bra. “It’s like if I don’t go now, then it might be shiver all night long waitin’ to get across; it’s rainin’, look out there at it come down like a cow wettin’ on a flat rock!” Feed her any dumb tale but know what you meant was you had to—for some reason I didn’t know then—had to get home and get into a slicker and corks and get a hammer and nails and lay on the timbers like a crazy man, maybe even give up a sure hump just to freeze a half an hour out on that goddamned jetty! And I never understood why until that afternoon in Wakonda at the union meeting, sitting there remembering how I’d lost my bobcats, looking out the window of the grange hall at the spot where my boat had sunk in the bay, and hearing Floyd Even-write say to old man Syverson: “All it wants is its fair advantage.” So as close as I can come to explaining it, friends and neighbors, that is why that river is no buddy of mine. It’s maybe the buddy of the brant geese and the steelhead. It is mighty likely a buddy of old lady Pringle and her Pioneer Club in Wakonda— they hold oldtime get-togethers on the docks every Fourth of July in honor of the first time some old moccasined hobo come paddling across in his dugout a hundred years ago, the Highway of Pioneers they call it ...and who the hell knows, maybe it was, just like now it is the railroad we use to float our log booms down—but it still is no personal friend of mine. Not just the thing about the bobcats; I could tell you a hundred stories, probably, give you a hundred reasons showing why I got to fight that river. Oh, fine reasons; because you can spend a good deal of time thinking during those thinking times, when you’re taking timber cruises walking all day long with nothing to do but check the pedometer on your foot, or sitting for hours in a  stand blowing a game call, or milking in the morning when Viv is laid up with cramps—a lot of time, and I got a lot of things about myself straight in my mind: I know, for an instance, that, if you want to play this way, you can make the river stand for all sorts of other things. But doing that it seems to me is taking your eye off the ball; making it more than what it is lessens it. Just to see it clear is plenty. Just to feel it cold against you or watch it flood or smell it when the damn thing backs up from Wakonda with all the town’s garbage and sewage and dead crud floating around in it stinking up a breeze, that is plenty. And the best way to see it is not looking behind it—or beneath it or beyond it—but dead at it. And to remember that all it wants is its fair advantage. So by keeping my eye on the ball I found it just came down to this: that that river was after some things I figured belonged to me. It’d already got some and was all the time working to get some more. And in as how I was well known as one of the Ten Toughest Hombres this side of the Rockies, I aimed to do my best to hinder it. And as far as I was concerned, hindering something meant— had always meant—going after it with everything you got, fighting and kicking, stomping and gouging, and cussing it when everything else went sour. And being just as strong in the hassle as you got it in you to be. Now that’s real logical, don’t you think? That’s real simple. If You Wants to Win, You Does Your Best. Why, a body could paint that on a plaque and hang it up over his bedstead. He could live by it. It could be like one of the Ten Commandments for success. “If You Wants to Win You Does Your Best.”