Chapter 31

“You ’bout ready, hon? You wanted to be there at seven.” The door opened, Viv stepped out, buttoning up a white car coat. “Who did I hear?” “That was the kid, hon. That was him. He did for a fact show up. . . . What do you think of that?” “Your brother? Let me say hello—” She started for Lee’s room, but Hank held her arm. “Not right now,” he whispered. “He looks in a pretty sorry state. Wait till he rests up a piece.” They walked to the stairs and started down. “You can meet him when you get back from town. Or tomorrow. Right now you’re runnin’ late as it is. . . . What took you so long, anyhow?” “Oh, Hank ...I don’t know. I just don’t know if I want to go in or not.” “Well, hell’s fire, then, don’t. There’s sure nobody here pushing you.” “But Elizabeth called me especially—” “Shoot. Elizabeth Pringle; old Pucker Pringle’s daughter . . .” “She—they all acted so darned hurt, though, that first meeting; when I wouldn’t play their word game. Other girls didn’t play and nobody minded; what did I say that was so wrong?” “You said no. To some people that’s always wrong.” “I suppose. And I guess I really haven’t made much effort to be friendly.” “Have they? Have they ever come out here to visit you? I told you before we was married not to expect to win any popularity contests. Honey, you’re the cutthroat’s wife, they’re bound to be a little snicky to you.” “It isn’t that. It isn’t just that . . .” She paused for a moment to study her make-up in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs. “It seems like they want to take something out on me. Like they have a grudge or something . . .” Hank released her arm and walked on toward the door; “No, honey,” he said, looking at the grain on the big door, “it’s nothin’ at all but you being soft in the heart; so you’re pecked at.” He smiled, recalling something. “Man alive: you shoulda seen Myra, Lee’s mom—you shoulda seen how she dealt with that bunch of hens.” “But Hank, I would like to be friends with them, some of them ...” “Yes sir,” he remembered fondly, “she knew how to tell them to go piss up a rope, the bunch of heifers. C’mon, let’s make it.” Viv followed him down the porch steps onto the lawn, resolving to try to be a little less soft in the heart this time, and trying to remember if she used to have to try so hard to make friends, back home only a few years ago: Have I changed so much in only a few years? North, on the highway heading back to Portland, Floyd Evenwrite sweats in the gravel to change a tire not two months old and already blowed goddammitall out! And every time the lug wrench slips in the dark he peels another inch of skin from his knuckles, gets a good grip on his leaky bowels, and runs again through the string of names he’d been calling Hank Stamper ever since the fiasco at the house: “. . . cocksuckin’, asslickin’, fartknockin’, shiteatin’ . . .”—in a curious methodical, rhythmed chant that is becoming almost reverent. And Jonathan Draeger, in a motel in Eugene, runs his finger down the list of people he is supposed to see, counting twelve in all, twelve meetings before he continues on over to this Wakonda to see this—he checked the list—this Hank Stamper and talk some sense into him ...thirteen meetings, unlucky thirteen, before he can anticipate returning home. Oh well; a rolling stone and all that. Closes the little book, yawns, and begins searching for his tube of Desenex. And Hank returns from ferrying Viv across to the jeep just in time to hear Joe Ben call from the porch, “Hustle up here an’ give me a hand; the old man’s got a earwig crawled into his leg cast and he’s goin’ at himself with a ballpeen hammer!” “Th’ least o’ my worries,” Hank mutters, amused, hurriedly mooring fast the motorboat. And in Wakonda, in a bright Main Street office, acquired by foreclosure, the Real Estate Hotwire broods as he gouges pieces of white pine from the half-carved figure in his lap. He takes special pains with the face; sometimes, if he didn’t take pains, these faces came to look like a wooden caricature of a recent general and President. The Hotwire had served in the European Theater in the early forties as a mess sergeant, gaining a small reputation as a real go-getter of a chef. It was there that he met the man that was to haunt the next twenty years of his life. One morning this particular general and his entire entourage of aides, assistants, and asswipers had arrived in camp for a meeting. The general had announced he would mess with the enlisted men and was pleased to discover that one particular mess-bench boasted one particular go-getter of a chef. At noon he and his entourage filed past that bench. He complimented the go-getter on the smell of the food and commended him on the appearance of his kitchen, then, minutes later, complained of something alien in his ox-tail soup. This particular something turned out to be a German officer’s ring which the Hotwire had bought from an infantryman to send home to his father. He was petrified when he saw what it was. Not only did he refuse to claim the bauble and deny having ever laid eyes on it before, he went as well on to insist—though the point had never been questioned—that the bone which the ring had graced was definitely an ox-tail bone. The expression of the general’s face showed him his error, but it was too late to retract it. And he spent the remainder of the war in a constant sweat waiting for an ax that never fell, and was discharged a nervous and bewildered man. What had happened? He’d been so certain of reprisal. He didn’t understand what had stayed that terrible ax until years later that same general had the evil audacity to run for President and the insidious gall to be elected. Now, now it would come! And did. A recession fell. His budding restaurant business withered and died without blooming. In his heart he always knew that this financial drought was nothing but a diabolic tactic perpetrated on the whole innocent nation for the sole purpose of squeezing dry his root-beer stand. Not that he cared that much for his business, but the whole nation! All that suffering! He couldn’t help feeling partly responsible. If it hadn’t been for him, it would have never happened. And what other disasters lay ahead? Even worse ones. He made it through the eight years of that general’s term by nothing short of the grace of God and his wife’s needlework and was just now getting so he could pick up a newspaper without fear of finding himself declared a traitor and ordered shot on sight, was just beginning to make some headway in a very tricky world. If this nasty strike didn’t break his back. This strike? Could the same old ...? No. He decides not; it is somebody else now that has it in for him, that’s all there is to it. Moodily he gouges at the little wooden figure in his lap, grinding his teeth against old memories. ...The sonofabitch could have at least returned the ring! And, above the town, the timbered ridges move, steadily, under the edge of the silver moon, like stacks of lath passing beneath a gleaming and silent circle saw. Behind the grange hall berry vines feel for handholds with tough, blind fingers. Wood rots quietly in the cannery house. The salt wind blowing off the ocean sucks the life from pistons, gears, wiring, transmissions. . . . On the Main Street a short, plump, plush-looking pastry of a woman leaves the Snag and stalks up the sidewalk with short, angry steps. The evening mist collects in her eyelashes and the street lights glaze her curly black hair. She passes friends in a fury, looking neither right nor left. Her round, breadloaf shoulders are stiff with indignation. Her mouth is a grim dab of raspberry jam. She holds this air of outraged morality until she turns the corner of Shahelem Street and is out of sight of Main. There she stops against the fender of her little Studebaker, and the leavening goes out of her wrath. “Oh, oh, oh.” She sinks against the dew-glazed fender with a dejected sigh like a cake falling. . . . Her name was Simone and she was French. After marrying a paratrooper in 1945 she had come to Oregon, like a character strayed from the pages of de Maupassant. She hadn’t seen her husband since he’d disappeared without so much as a parting Geronimo of farewell seven years ago, leaving her a mortgaged car, a down-payment washer and dryer, and five children still owned largely by the hospital. Though slightly embittered by the treachery, she had nevertheless managed to keep her head above water by keeping her buoyant little body under the covers, sleeping from charitable bed to bed with beneficent logger after logger. Never for pay, of course—she was a professed Catholic and a devout amateur—but for love, only for love, and whatever reasonable fringe benefits might be thrown in. So amiable was this little muffin of misfortune, so reasonable were her benefactors, that after seven years the washer-dryer was hers flat out, the car was nearly paid off, and the children no longer had to report monthly to the Hospital Finance Plan. Yet, in spite of her success, it had somehow never occurred to the townspeople, any more than it had to her, to consider this style of making ends meet the slightest bit shady. Contrary to popular rumors, a small town is not always so eager to cast the first stone. Not at the risk of hitting a good thing. Expedience, in a small town, often must pre-empt morality. The women of the town said, “Simone’s as nice a little soul as I ever met, I don’t care if she is foreign.” Because the hook shop in Coos Bay charged ten dollars a throw, twenty-five a night. The men said, “Simone’s a good, clean kid.” Because Coos Bay was noted for the scratchingest men in the state. “And maybe she’s no saint,” the women allowed, “but she’s certainly no Indian Jenny.” So Simone kept her amateur standing. Whenever it was questioned, men and women alike rose to her defense. “She’s a sweet little mother,” the women said. “She’s had a tough shake,” the men said, “and I for one am always plenty willing to help her out in a pinch.” And helped her out in a pinch faithfully and regularly. But just helped. Her regular means of support came from the occasional cooking jobs she held. Why, everybody knew this. And until tonight the plump little woman had never thought to question what everybody else knew. She had been drinking beer with Howie Evans, a topper from Wakonda Pacific who wore on a chain around his neck a vertebra that had been removed in the hospital after a fall. The lack of the bone in his back, or the weight of it around his neck, gave him an odd stoop that produced horror in his wife, disgust in his mother-in-law, and a flood of maternal pity in Simone. They had been talking politely all evening while bumping knees under the table, and when the proper number of beers had been drunk she had observed that it was getting late. Howie had helped her into her coat and mentioned in passing that he thought he might drop over to his brother’s cabin to see if his brother would like to help him put a lid on the night. Simone knew Howie’s brother was serving one-to-eight in Vacaville for passing bad checks; she waited for Howie to go on, smiling happily at the thought of trying to rub some of that crook out of poor Howie’s back in the brother’s cabin in the brother’s absence. She gazed up at him and wet her lips, but just as she could see the question rising to the surface—“An’ I was thinking, Simone, how, if you ain’t got anything else going”—he had suddenly stopped. Howie stepped away from her. “By godfrey, Simone,” he said after a moment, giggling at her and shaking his head with dawning wonder. “By godfrey, I was aiming to ask you if you might like—” Again he stopped. “Huh, now. I’ll be darned. How about that. I never thunk of that before.” She frowned as he giggled in head-shaking amazement at some fact he’d never thunk of before. He shrugged and held out both work-shiny hands, palms up, as though showing her they were empty. He continued to giggle nervously and shake his head. “I’m broke, Simone, chicken...that’s what. Busted. This dang strike. And the house payments and so forth, with me being out of work so long ...I just clean ain’t got the cash for it.” “The cash? The cash? The cash for what?” “For you, chicken. I ain’t got the cash for you.” She had snapped into rigid, scandalized outrage, slapped his face decorously, and stomped from the bar. She was certainly no Indian Jenny! So angry had she been with the implication, that the two quarts of beer—a mere drop ordinarily—had commenced to boil and bubble savagely inside her, and by the time she reached the car she had been forced to give them up. And weakened by the vomiting—limp, resting her dimpled baby’s hand on the fender of the car that in one more month would be hers—the realization strikes her as absolutely and irrevocably as it did Howie, and she gives in to a long-denied truth. “Never never never again!” she swears aloud as she sobs there in the street with horrible shame—“Never again, Holy Mother, I swear!”—dimly searching the doughy matter of her mind for someone to blame, someone to hate. She thinks at first of her ex-husband—“The deserter! The heartless runaway”— but he is both too weak and too inaccessible to blame satisfactorily. It must be someone else, someone closer, and stronger, and big enough to bear the burden of blame she is baking in her hot little oven of a heart . . . The finger points, Evenwrite curses. Draeger sleeps. The Real Estate Man hacks at his white pine carving, studying the features and crooning absently as the white chips fly. Across the street his brother-in-law closes a thin ledger and walks despondently to the drinking fountain in the lobby to rinse the red ink from his bleached hands. Jenny, breathing hoar-frost at the moon, collects tiny tree frogs in a chamois bag; whenever she plucks one of the half-frozen creatures from a limb or rock she mutters the words memorized that afternoon from the Classic Comics she took from the drugstore while Grissom took his Coke into the storeroom for a lace of paregoric: “ ‘Double, double, toil an’ trouble.’ ” The toad squirms in her fingers; she feels her pulse quicken. “ ‘Fire burn an’ cold one bubble...’ ” (Later she steamed her catch along with a bay leaf she had picked, and ate them with butter and lemon.) Out in the dunes, under the roof of a lodgepole pine, a fly agaric pushes up through a pine-needle floor like something sneaking out of hell. In the deer-grass meadows the long last of the summer’s flowers take long last looks through the fall’s first frost at the dark garden of stars and wave their windy good-bys: the spiderwort and blue verrain, the trout lily and adder’s tongue, the bleeding heart and pearly everlasting, and the carrion weed with its death-scented bloom. In the Scandinavian slums at the edge of town bloodroot vines reach garroting fingers for knotholes, warpholes, and window sills. The tide grinds piling against dock, dock against piling. Batteries corrode. Cables ravel. Lee sleeps with his lips parted in an expression of childlike terror and dreams childhood dreams of falling, running, being chased, and falling, over and over until abruptly awakened by a noise so close and loud that at first he thinks it only a dream noise lingering in his ears. But the noise continues. Suddenly wide awake, he lurches to his feet beside the bed; he stands there trembling, eyes pressed against the always treacherous darkness. Strangely enough it isn’t the surroundings that confound him; he knows immediately where he is. He is in his old room, in the old house, on the Wakonda Auga. But he is completely unable to recall why. Why is he here? And when? Something is banging inside his ear, but at what point in his existence is all this black cacophony taking place? “Huh? Huh?” His head twists back and forth in the center of a tornado of dim objects. “What?” Like a child being awakened to panic by a sudden and strange new sound. Except ...this sound was not exactly new; it was the mocking echo of something that had once been very familiar (wait; it’ll come back in a moment) . . . of something once heard very frequently. And that was why the sound was so damned confusing: because I recognized it. As my eyes became more accustomed to the room I saw it wasn’t as dark as I had first thought (a small shaft of light cuts across the room to spotlight his jacket) nor was the sound the fifty-decibel roar it had seemed (the jacket lies on the foot of his bed with its arms wrapped about itself in a frozen agony of fright. The small shaft of light comes through a hole from the room next door . . .) and instead of my ear it came from somewhere outside the window. Touching the smooth bedstead, I walked around the bed, then hesitatingly across the room to that gray square of light and raised it. The sound cut sharply through the chill fall air: “Whack whack whack . . . sometimes a great notion thonggggg . . . whack whack whack.” I bent and put my head through the open window and saw below the buttery gleam of a kerosene lantern sliding along the bank foundation. A low fog muffled the light, yet seemed to amplify the sound. The lantern would pause, suspended, shimmering like an iridescent piece of night-blooming fluff—“Whack whack whack”—then move on a few yards before pausing again: “Thongggg.” I then remembered I used to lie humming Beethoven’s Fifth, “Whack whack whack thongggg!” Dum dum dum dong! And then I remembered it was Hank out on the bank before he went to bed, working his way along a dew-slick plank walkway with a hammer and a lantern, striking at the boards and cables as he listened for the sound that might indicate a spike loosened by the constant drag of the river, or a wire frayed by rust. . . . A nightly ritual, I remembered, this ordeal out shoring up the embankment. I was overcome with relief and nostalgia, and, for the first time since setting foot inside the racketing old house, able to appreciate some of the scene’s noisy humor and relax with it. (He looks away from the light in the wall, toward the window . . .) The sound stirred up a gaudy whirl of musty old funny-paper fantasies—not the sort of nightmares that accompanied the sound of log-trucks, but fantasies of a much more controllable nature.