Chapter 27

“There’s one thing about a Hide-behind: they don’t show in a mirror. Just like vampires don’t, you know? So this afternoon when I think I heard something slipping along behind me I reached in my pocket for my compass—this compass right here, see how it reflects good as a mirror?—and I held it up and looked behind me. And goddammit, Lee, you know? I couldn’t see nothing!” He stood there with his mouth open, and I knew I still had him and might of really poured it on if the old man hadn’t went to sputtering and choking and got me to where I couldn’t keep a straight face. Then it would be just like all the other times when he’d find himself hooked. “Ah, Hank,” the kid would holler, “ah, Hank,” then go storming off to his mother, who would give us a hard look and take him away from such lying lowbrows as us. So during the ride across the river, when I see how skittish he gets from my deviling him, I half expect him to holler, “Ah, Hank!” and go storming off. But things are different. As high-mettled and spooky and skittish as he still looks, I know he’s not a six-year-old any more. Behind those tight-honed features I can still see some of the old Lee, the little boy Lee I used to carry on my hip up from the dock, sitting there wondering how much of his crazy half-brother’s bullshit should he swallow, but things are different now. For one thing he’s a college graduate—the first that a family of illiterates can point to—and all that education has whetted him pretty keen. For another, there’s nobody for him to go storming off to any more. Watching him there across the boat from me, I see something in his eyes that lets me know he’s in no condition for any of my prime stupidity. He looks like this time it’s him that suspects a Hide-behind after him, like the ground is pretty shaky underfoot and things like what I said to him aren’t making it any steadier. So I mark myself down for a good butt-kicking when I get myself alone later, and try to make things a little easier the rest of the boat ride by asking him about school. He snaps at the chance, goes to running on about classes and seminars and the pressure of academic politics and keeps it up a blue streak all the way on toward the dock, idling that boat along slow as Christmas. All the time keeping a keen weather eye ahead for sunken snags, or checking up at the clouds, or watching a kingfisher dive, anything to keep from having to look at me. He doesn’t want to look at me. He doesn’t want to meet my eyes. So I quit looking at him, except sideways now and then while he talks. He’s made a good-sized gink, bigger than any of us would ever of expected. He must be an easy six foot, an inch or two taller than me and probably outweighs me a good twenty pounds, for all his lankiness. He’s all knobby shoulders and elbows and knees through the white shirt and slacks he’s wearing, hair long at the ears, glasses with rims that look like they’d peter a man’s neck out holding them up, a tweed jacket laid across his knees with a bulge in the pocket I’d give eight-to-five was a pipe... ball-point pen in his shirt pocket, dirty low-cut tennis shoes, dirty state-property gym socks. And I swear he looks like death warmed over. For one thing his face is all burned, like he fell asleep under a sunlamp; and there’s big inky pools under the eyes; and where he used to be deadpan as an owl, he’s took on a kind of beaten and fretful grin, like his mother had. Except there’s just the barest crook to his version, showing he knows just a skosh more than she did. And probably wishes he didn’t. When he talks, that crook comes into his grin for just a flicker, just a wink, making him look sadder than ever because the crook turns it into one of those grins you see on a man across the card table when you lay your full house on his ace-high straight and it’s been happening like that all day and he’s got inside information it’s going on happening like that all night. The way Boney Stokes grinned when he’d take the rag away from his cough and look down in it and see that his condition was just as bad as he feared . . . grinning because— well, look: . . . Boney Stokes was this oldtime acquaintance of Henry’s and figured the best way to pass the time of day was by gradually dying. Every so often Joe Ben—who figured the best way to pass the time of day was never gradually, but full steam ahead—would come across Boney at the Snag or when Boney and the old man were playing dominoes for the Centennial bucks Boney’d taken in at the store during Oregon Centennial and had hung on to past time to redeem, and Joe would rush over and pump Boney’s hand and tell him how good he looked. “Mr. Stokes, you’re lookin’ sicker’n I seen you in months.” “I know, Joe, I know.” “You seeing a doctor? Oh yeah, I’m sure you are, I tell ya you come on over to services this Saturday night and we’ll see if Brother Walker can do you some good. I’ve seen him bring round some men with one foot in the grave and scuffin’ up dirt with the other.” Boney’d shake his head. “I don’t know, Joe. I’m afraid we’ve let my condition get too advanced.” Joe Ben’d reach up and take the old ghoul by the chin and turn his head first to one side, then the other, squinting close at the wrinkled craters where the eyes were sunk. “Might be. Oh yeah, it might be. Too far gone for even the help of Divine Power.” And leave Boney sitting there, blooming with bad health. For Joe Ben, see, was that way; probably one of the most accommodating guys in the world. That is, he came to be one of the most accommodating. He didn’t use to be when he was little. As kids we was together about as much as later, but then he didn’t have a lot going. Sometimes he wouldn’t say more’n a word or so a week. This was because he was afraid what he might say would be something he’d picked up hearing his old man say. He looked so much like old Ben Stamper that he was scared to death he would grow up to be the same person. He even looked a lot like him, they tell me, clear back on the day he was born, with the shiny black hair and the pretty face, and he got to looking more like him every year. In high school he would stand in front of the locker-room mirror and screw up his mouth all sorts of ways and try to hold the face he made, but it didn’t work; girls were already panting after him like women were always panting after Uncle Ben. As Joe got more handsome he got more scared, until the summer before our senior year he was about to give in to it and admit he didn’t have any say-so about what he was going to be—he’d even got him a slick-looking Mercury like his dad used to have, all primered and chopped with zebra seats—when just in the nick of time he got into some kind of hassle off there in the state park with the homeliest girl in school, and she shredded his pretty face with a brush-cutting knife. He never said much about what brought on the hassle, but it sure changed him. With a new face he figured he was able to open up and become himself. “Hank, I tell you, if I’d waited another year look where I’d be now.” At the time he said this, Joe’s old man had just disappeared into the mountains never to be seen alive again; Joe claimed he’d just barely escaped the same fate. “Maybe so; but I want to know what happened out there in the state park with you and that little owl, Joby.” “Ain’t she a corker? I’m gonna marry that girl, Hank; you see if I don’t. Just as quick as they get all these stitches out. Oh yeah, things’re due to be fine!” He married Jan while I was overseas and by the time I got back he already had a boy and a girl. And both of them pretty as any doll, pretty as he had even been. I wondered if he was worried about that. “No. That’s fine.” He grinned, jumping around, tickling one, then the other, and laughing enough for all three. “Because the prettier they are the less likely they are to look like their old man, you see? Oh yeah. You see, they got their own row to hoe right from the start.” He had three more kids, each one more a doll than the last. By the time Jan was pregnant with the last one Joe Ben had got in pretty deep in the Church of God and Metaphysical Science and was beginning to pay attention to omens. So when that last child was born he declared that it was to be the clincher, on account of the various omens that took place on the day it was born. And there was some doozers. There was a big hurricane in Texas; and a whale swam into Wakonda Bay at high tide and grounded himself on the flats and made the whole town sick for a month before a demolition crew from Seattle got shut of him; and the remains of Ben Stamper was found in a lonely mountain cabin full of girlie books; and that night old Henry got the telegram from New York saying his wife had jumped forty stories to her death. That news got to me a hell of a lot more than it did to the old man. I studied about it a good long while. And riding across in the boat I come awful near to just blurting out and asking Lee about the circumstances of that jump and what he figured brought it on; but I decided against it for the same reason I decided against asking him why he’d give up the big-time Yale University life he was coming on so strong about, to come back and help us out logging. I just kept still. I figured I already said plenty and that he will talk about such things in his own good time. We get to the dock and I tie up the boat and throw a little tarp over the motor after I shut it off.