Chapter 44

“Oh no.” She laughed. “No words. I don’t think I even remember words. Sometimes I remember a writer’s words—like a line he wrote that I thought was real nice—but those are his words, you see?” He didn’t see, but neither did he worry about it. Hank had adjusted to his wife’s peculiarities as she had to his; if she was gone fifty per cent of the time, off someplace in another world while her body stayed behind humming over the housework, well, that was her world and her business. He didn’t feel he had the ability to follow her into those reveries or the right to call her back out. What went on inside, that was nobody’s business but whoever’s it went on inside of, was the way Hank looked at it. Besides, the fifty per cent she gave him, wasn’t that “a hell of a lot more’n most guys get outa their female even if they get the whole hunderd?” “I couldn’t say.” Lee hedged at Hank’s question. “I think it would depend on the female, and on which half she gave.” “Viv gives the best half all right,” Hank assured him. “An’ as far as the female goes, you tell me what you think along that line after you get a look at her.” “I’ll do that”—still savoring that half-nude image seen through the hole not a half an hour before. “But do you think I’ll be able to judge the whole ‘hunderd’ per cent without seeing all of it?” Brother Hank’s grin was swarming with secrets. “If you mean do you get a look at the whole hunderd of Viv, well I can’t rightly say; that’s up to her. But I got a hunch you might have to make do with the little bit showin’—like the legs an’ face—and judge what’s underneath like you’d judge how much iceberg’s under water. Viv ain’t one of these honky-tonk honeys I used to run with, Leland. She’s shy. Joe says she’s one of these ‘still-water-runs-deeps.’ You’ll see. I think you’ll like her.” Hank had straddled a chair near the foot of my bed and was waiting, chin on the chairback, while I dressed to come down for supper. And was being remarkably cheerful compared to the snarling silence that had flowed from him since my outburst over his rigging story at lunch. He had even gone so far as to bring me up a cup of coffee to rouse me from my stupor, little realizing that this particular stupor—unlike the faint that followed my first contact with physical labor earlier that day— had been induced by his wife’s performance in tears and a half-slip. And along with the coffee a pair of clean socks. “Till we get your suitcase from the depot.” I smiled and thanked him, as puzzled by his change of mood as he must have been by mine. I knew my change was rooted firmly in reason: I had realized the imprudence of my afternoon of animosity—the clever assassin doesn’t worm his way into the king’s castle only to blow his chance of success by telling the king what he thinks of him. Certainly not. Quite the opposite. He is charming, witty, fawning, and he applauds the king’s tales of triumph, however paltry they may be. It is the way the game is played. And for this reason I was suspicious of Hank’s generosity—I saw no reason for the king to seek the favor of the assassin, and I therefore advised myself I’d best watch out. He’s being nice for some sneaky reason; beware! But it is sometimes difficult to be very wary if people keep being nice to you, and I didn’t know then that these underhanded tactics of niceness and warmth assailing my resolved revenge were to continue for so long. So I drank the coffee and welcomed the socks—watching out, of course, for tricks—laced my shoes and combed my hair and followed him down to the kitchen to meet his wife, never for one minute imagining that the sneaky wench would be even more underhanded and nice and warm than her sneak of a husband, and even harder to watch out for. The wench was turned to the stove, with that hair coiling down to her apron strings. And as lovely in the hard kitchen light as she had been in the mellow glow of her room. Hank pulled her toward me by the rear of the pleated skirt that I knew must be still warm from the iron; he turned her around by the sleeve of the blouse that had needed a button sewn on. “Viv, this is Leland.” She brushed a lock from her forehead, offered her hand, and smiled a soft hello. I nodded. “Well, what’s your judgment?” Hank asked, stepping back from her like a horse-trader from a prize two-year-old. “I would at least have to check her teeth.” “I reckon we could see to that.” The girl swatted his hand from her. “What on earth... What’s he been talking about, Leland?” “ ‘Lee,’ if you would.” “Or ‘bub,’ ” Hank added, and answered for me. “Why, I ain’t been talking nothin’ but good about you, honey. Ain’t that so, bub?” “He said half of you was better than all of most women—” “An’ Lee said he’d have to hold judgment on that till he could see all of you, hon.” He reached for the buttons of her blouse. “So if you’ll just—”“Hank...!” She raised the spoon and Hank hopped agilely out of range. “But honey, we got to settle this thing . . .” “Not right here in the kitchen.” She took my arm coquettishly, lifting her nose at him. “Leland, Lee and me’ll settle it some other time—all by ourselves.” Then gave a brazen little toss of her head to seal the bargain. “Done!” I said, as she spun laughing back toward the stove. But neither the laughing spin nor the brazen toss could hide the blush that rose like a red tide—out of a bra that I knew was fastened left-cup-to-strap by a silver safety pin. Hank yawned at his wife’s flirtations. “All I ask is you feed me first. I could eat a snake. How about you, bub?” “All I ask is the sustenance to climb those stairs back up to my bed.” “The fish’ll be a few minutes yet,” she said. “Jan has gone out to the barn for some more eggs. Ask Joe if all the kids are washed and ready, could you, Lee? And I think I hear Henry honking now; would you run across to get him, Hank?” “Damn, but he’s gettin’ to be a regular tomcat . . .” Hank left to start the boat and I went into the other room to help Joe Ben hose down his herd, with the treacherous smells and sounds and sights of that supper scene swirling about me like the background of a State Department propaganda film calculated to sell the American Way of Life to every hungry and lonely and homeless wretch in every hope-lost hamlet in every have-not nation in the world—“Don’t listen to that Commy crap you dumb gooks, this is what we really live like in the good ol’ Yew Ess Aye!”—and felt stir in my blood the first cancerous budding of an emotion that was not to go beneath the scalpel of sense until almost a month later, when it had almost got too firm a hold to remove... And Molly the hound tries again to rise, whimpering as her paws push at the cold earth; she stands a twisted second on all fours, but the moon is too cold and heavy and she collapses again beneath its frozen weight. And Teddy the bartender peers through his tangled neons at the darkening twist of river past the firehouse, and wistfully wishes it were January: these Indian Summers, they are good for nothing but crickets and mosquitoes and old windbags dribbling out their money a dime at a time. Give me some rain, some bad weather, and watch me roll the dollars. Give me a dark smeary shiny night full of rain. That’s when the fear starts. That’s when you sell the juice! And Viv, through a lock of hair, watches Lee as he pats uncertainly at the dripping face of Joe Ben’s girl with a towel. He’s never washed a little kid before in his life, she realizes; can you beat that? What an odd boy, so gaunt and ghosty sort of. With eyes like he’s been to the edge and looked over... His shirt gets splashed as he washes the child, and he puts aside the towel to roll up his sleeves. Viv sees his inflamed skin. “Oh...your arms!” He shrugs and blows on a smarting wrist. “They were a little too long for my shirtsleeves, I’m afraid.” “Let me put on some witch hazel. Squeaky, honey,” she calls to the porch, “would you toss in that bottle of witch hazel? Here, Lee, sit a minute. Old Henry hasn’t come in anyhow. Sit here ...” She dabs on the liquid with a folded dishtowel. Pungent smells of spice and alcohol burn in the warm air of the kitchen. His arms lie on the checkered tablecloth, as inert as two cuts of meat on the butcher’s counter. Neither of them speaks. They hear the approach of the motorboat, and old Henry’s drunken singing. Viv shakes her head at the sound, smiling. Lee asks how she feels about having another animal to care for. “Another animal?” “Sure. Look at this menagerie.” The singing outside is louder. “First, you have old Henry, who is bound to need a lot of attention—” “Not really so much,” she says. “He doesn’t drink that much. Just when his leg hurts him.” “—I meant attention because of his accident, his age. And then there are the kids, you probably help take care of Joe Ben’s kids, don’t you? and all the dogs and the cow? And I imagine if the truth were known that even brother Hank has needed the gentle touch of witch hazel—” “No,” she muses, “he doesn’t seem to.” “Anyway, aren’t you somewhat discouraged when faced with another liability to do for?” “Do you always consider yourself that? A liability?” Lee grins at her, rolling his sleeves back down. “I think my question has priority.” “Oh”—taking a strand of hair in the corner of her mouth—“I suppose it does keep me on the jump, old Henry says that’s the only way to keep from getting moss on your back—but when I think about it—” “That’s right! That’s right!” The back door swings open and Henry enters, carrying his dentures in his hand. “I say in Oregon you got to keep on the jump ...to put the hair on your chest an’ keep the moss off your rump. Good evening, all, an’ good health. Here y’go, girlie.” He pitches the teeth to Viv; they hiss, grinning in the bright kitchen light. “Hose these off for me, willya? I dropped ’em in the yard there an’ a goddam dog tried to put ’em on. Whup! See the way she nabbed them teeth on the fly there, boy? Keep ’em on the jump. Mm-mmm! I was right, I smelt that salmon bakin’ clean back to the Evans place.” Viv turns from the sink, drying the teeth on a dishtowel. “Lee, now that I think about it,” she says, as though speaking to the teeth; she lifts her head from her task and smiles at him. “I don’t think I’ll be discouraged ...compared to some I could mention, you will be a pure joy to do for.” Molly the hound pants at the moon with shallow, bright breaths. Teddy listens for rain. Lee—it is a month later—sits on his bed with his shoes off and his pants legs lifted gingerly from ankles inflamed by the half-drunk hunting trip he has just come in from, and he tells the anxious shadows that he can tend to his own cuts, thank you . . . “And with something far more soothing than witch hazel too!” On the table beside his bed three thin reddish-brown cigarettes are lying atop a cold-cream jar. A spiral notebook is waiting on a record jacket propped against his knees. A ballpoint pen and a book of matches lie in his lap. He gives the pillows behind his back a few settling punches, then, finally satisfied with the arrangement, he takes up one of the cigarettes and lights it, filling his lungs and holding the smoke a long time before he breathes it out with a long, hissing “Yessssss.” He takes another drag. As he smokes he scoots deeper in the bed. When the cigarette is half gone he begins to write. He smiles occasionally as he rereads a line that particularly pleases him. His writing is at first neat and even, and the sentences congeal without correction on the page: Box 1, Route 1 Wakonda, Oregon Halloween Norwick House New Haven, Conn. Dear Peters: “Good God, betimes the means that makes us strangers!” At which point, if you are up on Willy the Shake as you should be with the o’erlooming approach of prelims, you should have replied: “Sir, amen.” Did you? No matter. For in all good faith I must confess I’m not myself certain which play the speech comes from. Macbeth, I think, though it could as easily be from a dozen other histories or tragedies. I have been home one month now and, as you can see, the dank and drippy climate of Oregon has mildewed my memory and I substitute surmise for certainty . . . And Viv shooed them all from the kitchen “. . . or I’ll never get supper finished.” And it happened, in the course of trying to bring Joe Ben’s kids to what Joe called “up next to godliness,” Viv saw the scratches on my arms. She dropped what she was doing at the stove and insisted on treating me with some kind of folk medicine that made me wish I had the scratches back, but I bit my tongue and kept my cool, watching how much the girl enjoyed playing nurse. Here, I thought to myself, is most certainly my weapon. Now how to wield it? So, my wounds attended to, I repaired to the living room to await supper and to try to formulate a plan of use for this weapon. No, it shouldn’t be so difficult. That first night my efforts were distracted by the old man. His rattletrap energy made thought next to impossible. He clumped and thumped up and down, to and fro across the overlarge room, like an obsolete wind-up toy, useless and worthless, yet still not run down. He switched on the TV on one of his passes; it began blaring patched platitudes and keeping us up on the latest in the Great Deodorant War—“Not those drippy sprays, not those sssticky roll-ons . . . just a simple dab and be sure of all-day safety!” No one watched or listened; the machine’s blaring was as senseless and as ignored as the old man’s raving nostalgia, but no one presented a motion for silence. It was somehow obvious that any attempt to turn off either would have precipitated a squall of protest more devastating than both. I tried to maneuver my brother into telling me more about his wife, but just as we were getting around to her the old man observed that there was some folks who preferred talkin’ to eatin’ but damned if he was one of ’em! And led an exodus into the kitchen. The following day was more toil and exhaustion, much the same as the first except that I controlled my hostility toward Brother Hank. And he continued his goodwill campaign toward me. And the ensuing days found me thinking less and less about my forsworn vengeance and feeling more and more positive about my avowed enemy. I tried to rationalize this to my mental mediator when he warned me to WATCH OUT for the primrose path. I insisted that I had to devote my full attention during the days to the task of keeping out from under rolling logs, and in the evenings I was too wasted to think constructively of revenge—“And that’s why I haven’t come up with something yet.” But Old Reliable wasn’t put off that easily. “Yeah, I know, but—” BUT YOU’VE BARELY SPOKEN WITH HER. “Well, that’s true, but—” ALMOST LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE AVOIDING HER. “I guess it looks that way, but—” I’M WORRIED . . . SHE’S TOO NICE . . . BETTER WATCH OUT— “Watch out? What in God’s name do you think has kept me away from her? I am watching out! Because she is too nice! She’s warm and sweet and treacherous; I have to be careful about this...” To tell the truth, in our common heart we were both worried. And afraid. Because it wasn’t just Viv: the whole diabolical houseful was being warm and sweet and treacherous, from my serpent brother down to the littlest snake-in-the-weeds infant. I was beginning to care for them. And as that cancerous emotion swelled within my heart so did my poor heart’s fear. Swollen heart. This is an insidious malady chiefly common in that mythical organ that pumps life through the veins of the ego: care, coronary care, complicated by galloping fear. The go-away-closer disease. Starving for contact and calling it poison when it is offered. We learn young to be leery of contact: Never open up, we learn...you want somebody running their dirty old fingers over your soul’s privates? Never accept candy from strangers. Or from friends. Sneak off a sack of gumdrops when nobody’s looking if you can, but don’t accept, never accept . . . You want somebody taking advantage? And above all, never care, never never never care. Because it is caring that lulls you into letting down your guard and leaving up your shades ...you want some fink knowing what you are really likedowninside? And we might even add to this list the simple rule “Never Drink Past Your Limit.” For ’twas drink, I think, the dirty devil drink, that finally rusted through the last lock on the last door guarding my convalescing ego . . . rusted the lock and melted the bolt and sprung the hinges until, before I knew what I was doing, I was talking with my brother about my mother. I found myself telling him the whole story—the disappointments, the drinking, the despair, the death. “I was real sorry to hear about it,” he said when I finished. I had just completed my second week in the woods and we were celebrating the miracle of no-bones-broken with a quart of beer apiece. Hank had plucked a stick of kindling from the beaten cardboard box behind the stove and was curling long white strips from it with his pocketknife. “When I heard I wired back that there should be some flowers—a wreath, I think—did you see it?” “No, I didn’t see it,” I told him somewhat coldly, angry at myself for telling as much as I had, angry at him for listening— “But then, there were such a number of wreaths one might easily have missed it”—but essentially angry with the memory of that one wreath. One wreath! Only one! Mother’s family had chosen to ignore the death of this family disgrace—an educated Jezebel, they sniffed, a drinker, a dreamer, a dabbler in palmistry, phrenology, and promiscuity, a forty-five-year-old beatnik chick in black tights who not only had the indecency to blacken the family name by running off to the northern wilds with some old motheaten geezer and having a kid by him, but who compounded the shame by coming back and messing up her middle age as well, along with a sizable portion of the New York sidewalk—and as much as I had despised them at the time for refusing to send so much as a bunch of violets, I had despised Hank even more for his presumptuous wreath of white carnations. It was late. We had switched from beer to wine. The place seemed hellishly calm. Joe Ben and his brood were spending the night at their new house, planning to meet the dawn with a paintbrush. Henry had climbed stairs to a rumbling wooden sleep. Viv curled on the couch next to Hank, a lovely puzzle, speaking only with wide amber eyes and her sweet little denim rump, until the eyes closed and she pulled a sheepskin robe over the rump and went diplomatically to sleep. The old house ticked like a great wooden, erratic clock and outside occasional drifting logs thunked against the dock. Underneath us between the floor and the ground hounds whimpered, heroes or cowards in personal dreams. Above, the old man threw some perfumed memory a bony screw. My brother sat across the room from me under a tassel-shaded floor lamp, whittling, he himself carved in shadow, varnished by light . . . “Yes, there were a lot of wreaths . . .” I lied.