Chapter 38

 He sat at the motor, grim and trembling. No one spoke, no eyes looked. And for a third time I experienced that feeling of combative elation that a long-shot challenger must feel when he notices a small but decided limp in his massive opponent’s seven-league stride. (The whole blamed trip. Just sitting there like a lump, trying to find the toehold to start with, trying to figure some way of working up to all the things I got to say, all the things I got to ask. But I can’t make it. I introduce him to John when we pick him up in front of his shack, and John’s able to get a hell of a lot more going with him than me. It seems they’re both big on Seven Crown. John offers him a slash from the Thermos of the stuff he always carries, and they talk about how it is with a little coffee added. They got a common ground. Even Orland’s three boys do better than me. When I wake them up from the rear end of the crummy truck and introduce them to Lee they’re able to shoot the bull a few minutes, asking him questions about New York and what’s it like, before they go back to sleep. Even them lugs. sometimes a great notion I pour it to that old rattletrap. We’re running a little late, what with waiting breakfast on the kid. The sun’s already coming through the trees. We head out up Blueclay Road toward the North Spur of Breakneck, where the show is, and after about a half-hour bouncing and bumping and nobody saying word one to nobody else we get up to the site. The slashing piles are still smoking from yesterday’s burning, and the sun’s rose out of the branches and is promising to make a long hot sticky sonofabitch of a day of it. I slide out from behind the wheel and go around and open the door and stand there stretching and scratching my belly while the truck empties, kind of not looking at him. “What do you think?” I ask Joe Ben. “Did we or did we not come up with a fine day to welcome old Leland Stanford home to the woods?” Joe, he tips an eye up for a check with his Big Time Weatherman just to be sure and says, “Oh yeah! Maybe get a little on the toasty side before the sun sets, but the way I look at it all the signs point to a day with a heart of gold. Ain’t that the way you read it, Leland?” The boy is shaking like a dog shitting peach pits, still cold from the river ride. He frowns over at Joe like he isn’t sure whether he’s being spoofed or not, then he grins and says, “I’m afraid I failed to take any courses on astrological signs, Joe; I’ll have to trust to your interpretation.” This tickles Joe to pieces. Joe digs big words, especially when they’re aimed at him. He giggles and spits and goes to hauling out all the paraphernalia for the day—maps and hard hats and “Boy, be sure an’ take these gloves!” and candy bars and snuff cans and pocket knives, and, naturally, the little transistor radio he keeps near him all day—passing them around like a munitions officer issuing arms before a big battle. He hands Lee his hard hat and goes prancing around, tilting his head this way and that to get a good look at the way it sits, saying “Um . . . oh yeah ...say there... wait ...here we go,” and fooling with it till he gets it settled the way he wants it. Then he starts giving Lee a rundown on what to expect and what’s happening and what to look out for working the woods. “The main thing,” Joe says, “oh yeah, the mainest thing . . . is, when you fall, fall in the direction of your work. Conserve 200 ken kesey yourself.” He demonstrates how to conserve yourself by doing a couple of nose dives as we amble along. “The whole notion of loggin’ is very simple if you get onto it. It comes to this: the idea is to make a tree into a log and a log into a plank. Now, when it’s standin’ up vertical it’s a tree, and when it’s laid down it’s a felled tree. And then we buck it into lengths of thirty-two feet an’ them lengths are logs. Then we drag them logs acrost to where the truck is and lift ’em up onto the truck an’ then the truck drives ’em down to the bridge at Swedesgap where the government scalers cheat us an’ then we take ’em on down to our mill an’ dump ’em into the water. When we get enough of ’em in the water we drag ’em up into the mill and we cut ’em up an’ we got planks, lumber.” He stops to twiddle with the dial of his transistor, trying to pick up one of the Eugene stations. “Or, sometimes, instead of cuttin’, we just sell the logs outright.” I look over at him to see how he means that, but he’s holding the radio to his ear. “Ah. Now it’s comin’ through. Oh man, Lee, you ever see the beat of one of these little outfits? Listen to that tone.” He shakes his head at his little radio and twists the dial loud as it’ll go. The tinny screech of some awful Western is squeezed out into the forest. “Makes the day a joy,” he says, grinning till you’d think he’d pop; a little thing like that radio could give Joe Ben a thousand dollars’ worth of kicks, just about any little thing could. You broke my heart an’ tol’ me lies, Left me cold without good-bys; Oh, your frosty eyes . . . We stop walking right near where Andy’s starting his chain saw. The saw chokes and barks and dies and barks again with a rising snarl. Andy grins over at us and hollers, “Commencin’!” cocks an eye up above for widow-makers, then touches the saw’s blurred teeth against the flank of a big fir. A fountain of white fir sparks spew against the sun. We stand and watch him make his undercut and sight the tree. He’s made it a little too much sloped, so he cuts him a dutchman and slides it in to account for the extra inch or so, and goes around to the other side sometimes a great notion and goes at it with the saw again. When the tree creaks and tips and goes whooshing down I glance over to check the boy and see he’s impressed by it. That makes me feel better. I’d begun to wonder if it’s possible at all to talk with him; I’d begun to wonder if maybe what a man learns over twelve years in a world so different is like a foreign language that uses some of the words from our world but not enough to be familiar to us, not enough so we can talk. But when I see him watch that tree come down I think, There’s that; just like any man I ever knew, he likes to see a tree felled. There is that, by Christ. “Well,” I say, “we ain’t makin’ anything but shadows. Let’s get hold of it.” And we start walking again. Joby leaves to fire up the donkey. Lee follows me across a clearing toward the edge of the woods. At the edge of a pile of slashing and dozed berry vine the clearing quits and the trees plunge into the sky. It’s the part of the show I like best, this edge, where the cutting stops and the forest starts. I’m always reminded of the edge of a grain field where the reaper has stopped. Behind us the donkey engine begins wheezing and gagging. I see Joe sitting like a twisted bird high up in his spiny nest of levers and cables and wires, grabbing at the throttle. The radio sits in front of him, sometimes carrying across to us, sometimes swallowed up by the noise. A ball of blue smoke explodes from the exhaust and I think the whole machine is going to shake itself to death. “That goddamned outfit should of been retired with the old man,” I say. The boy doesn’t say anything. We start walking again. Somewhere I hear the knock of an ax where John is chopping off branches. Like a wooden bell ringing. And that squeal of Joe’s radio coming and going on little breezes. All these things, the way a day gets going, the sound and all, and seeing Lee dig that tree falling, make me feel a whole lot better. I decide maybe it’s not going to be such a bear as I thought. Overhead the highlines that swoop to the spar tree are commencing to bob and jiggle and strum the air. I point up at them. “That’s your row to hoe, bub, that line. I aim to see if you can stand up under the strain of setting choker, by god, so just resign 202 ken kesey your ass to your fate.” I’m meaning to rib him a little.