Chapter 47

The insects up from the river to look over Teddy’s collection of neons pop and sizzle against the charged screen. The theater marquee switches on, and a frightened-looking little man with a green eyeshade on his bald head hurries next door from the laundry to answer the phone ringing in the ticket booth: high-school kids calling from Waldport to see what’s showing tonight. “Paul Newman and Geraldine Page in Williams’ drama Summer and Smoke to be shown once starting at eight o’clock and sleeping bags cleaned this week only one dollar.” Keep the morale up and the overhead down. He’ll make it yet. In his room at the Wakonda Arms Del Mar, Jonathan B. Draeger chews a Rollaid and rubs a salve into his chronic eczema, which has appeared this time on his neck. Last time the rash was on his chest and the time before on his stomach. Standing before the mirror, looking at his virile, masculine features topped by the close-cropped gray hair, he wonders if the next place it’ll strike will be his face. “It’s this coast climate. Everytime I come back I get it again. I rot like a dead dog.” Out in the bay the whistle buoy bobs moaning among the gentle swells, advising the fishing boats about the condition of the bar, and the tower on Wakonda Head lifts its four arms of light and begins flailing the rocks as darkness falls. In her room next to the clamflats Jenny stands motionless at the window, watching the out-of-work loggers searching the low tide with flashlights. “I bet they wouldn’t even come in for a bowl of chowder. I won’t even ask. But maybe I don’t keep my place clean enough, huh?”—and sets about scrubbing her two sheets in the sink. In his bathroom, face contorted in an all-out effort to overcome his constipation, Floyd Evenwrite curses Jonathan B. Draeger: The big-ass, he didn’t hardly look at the report! An’ it covered the logging history of this area all the way back to the middle fifties! If that don’t impress him, what will? In his tar-paper shack the Mad Scandinavian, having boiled the trilobite and eaten its meat, now makes an ashtray of its shell. In the kitchen Hank hushes the kids again to listen for the honk he thought he heard. In the Snag old Henry buys a bottle of illegal bourbon from Teddy and wraps it in yesterday’s Portland Oregonian. He bids the few stragglers who haven’t left for supper a grandiose good-by, then lurches out of the bar, rumbling his cast on the wooden walk, belching and cursing as he climbs into the mud-spattered pick-up and drives back up the river. “We whupped it, we did. You damn right.” Then: “I sure hope somebody’s there to hear me honk for a boat; I hurt too much to stand around waiting.” He drives very slowly, leaned toward the headlighted pavement. ...His false teeth making wet bite-marks on the seatcover beside him. And Molly’s panting grows slower and weaker . . . It was Lee who finally heard the old man’s honking plea drift from across the river. Lee had gone to the milkhouse for cream and was standing lost in thought at the river’s dark edge. He had just finished the meal Viv and Jan had cooked; deer liver and heart fried in onions, and gravy made from the drippings . . . boiled potatoes and fresh green beans and homemade bread, and for dessert baked apples were waiting. Viv had prepared the apples by coring them and filling the holes with brown sugar and cinnamon redhots, then topping each apple with a slice of butter before she put them in to bake. During the meal the kitchen had been filled with the spicy smell of their cooking, and all the kids had squealed delightedly when she brought the square Pyrex dish from the oven. “Hot, now, hot, watch it.” The apples sizzled in thick caramel-colored syrup. Lee had stared at the plate, feeling the heat of the open oven burn his forehead. “Hank,” Viv asked, “or Joe Ben, would one of you mind running out to the milkhouse and skim off some cream?” Hank had wiped his mouth and, grumbling, was pushing back his chair to stand, but Lee reached to take the tin spoon and bowl from Viv. “I’ll get it,” he had heard himself saying. “Hank killed our meat. Joe cleaned it. You and Jan cooked it—” “I salted it,” Johnny offered, grinning. “—and even the apples, Squeaky went to the orchard for the apples. So I—” He faltered, feeling suddenly very foolish as he stood at the back door, spoon in one hand, bowl in the other, and everyone turned waiting toward him. “So I just thought—” “That’s the boy!” Joe Ben saved him. “Root hog or die. Cutbaitorfish.Didn’tI tell you, Hank? Didn’t I say so about ol’ Lee?” “Bull,” Hank scoffed, “all he wants is a chance to get outa this madhouse.” “No sir! No sir! I told you. He’s shapin’ up, he’s comin’ around!” Hank shook his head, laughing. Joe Ben charged into a spontaneous theory equating muscle tone with divine intervention. And in the cool, dim concrete milkhouse, with antiseptic still standing in puddles on the concrete floor where Viv had washed up after milking, Lee leaned over a large stone crock and tried to keep his eyes from watering into the careful spoonfuls of cream he ladled into the bowl. That chlorine antiseptic is very bad for making the eyes water, he’d always heard. He was returning from the milkhouse with the bowl of skimmed cream cradled against his stomach when the honking of the pick-up across the river stopped him. It came like a signal from a dream. Tentatively, feeling barefoot for the path in the dusk, he started once more toward the festive light of the back-door window. The honk came again, and he stopped, his face bent over the bowl of cream. A quail in the orchard called its mate home to bed with a low, seductive whistle. On a slide of light Joe Ben’s irrepressible laugh spilled from the kitchen window, followed by the higher laughter of his children. The honk came again. His eyes burned where he had wiped them in the milkhouse. The honk came again, though he barely heard, watching the reflection of the moon stretch and shrink in the bowl of cream . . . When I was young and walked this way—somber, sallow, and morose as a mudball—when I was six and eight and ten and thought my life doled out to me in mean, cheap distances (“Run down to the bottomland with this bean can, bub, and scrounge us some blackberries for our corn flakes.” “Not me.”), when I was a boy and should have sprinted barefoot in bib overalls along these ways where quails piped and field mice hid... “why was I kept in Buster Brown oxfords and corduroy slacks and a room full of big-little books?” The moon didn’t know why, or wouldn’t answer. “Oh, man, what happened to my childhood?” Thinking back now, I see the moon quoting Gothic poetry to me: Even a man who is pure of heart And says his prayers at night May turn to a wolf when the wolfbane blooms And the autumn moon is bright. “I don’t care about what I’m going to turn into,” I told the moon. “At the moment, I’m not interested in my future, only my fouled-up past. Even werewolves and Captain Marvel had a childhood, didn’t they?” “You know,” the moon answered sonorously. “You know.” I stood with a bowl of fetched cream fragrant as alfalfa in my hands, watching the dark poultice of dusk draw bullbats from their hideaways, listening to their throated diving buzzes blending in years with that honking from across the river. “Why was I spun into an upstairs cocoon? This is a land for childhood frolic, with forests dark and magical and shady sloughs alive with chubs and mud-puppies, a land in which young and snub-nosed Dylan Thomas would have gamboled, red-cheeked and raucous as a strawberry, a town where Twain could trade rats and capture beetles, a chunk of wild beautiful insane America that Kerouac could have dug a good six or seven novels’ worth...why, then, did I refuse it as my world-to-grow-up-in?” The question had a new and fearful ring to me. Always before, whenever I brooded in some moody apartment with some melancholy wine and let my mind wander back to stand gaping, perplexed and horrified, on the brink of my past, I was able to fix the blame on some convenient villain: “It was my brother Hank; it was my ancient fossil of a father, who frightened and disgusted me; it was my mother, whose name be frailty . . . they were the ones who tore my young life asunder!” Or on some convenient trauma: “That tangle of arms and legs, sighs and sweat-wet hair telescoped through my bedroom peephole... that was what burned out my innocent eyes!” But that doubting moon wouldn’t let me get away with it. “Be fair, be fair; that event didn’t happen until you were almost eleven, until a century of blooming cherry trees and dragonflies and river-skipping barn swallows had already danced past. Can you blame the first ten years on the eleventh?” “No, but—” “Can you accuse your mother and father and half-brother of more crime than is usually committed against any sulky son anywhere?” “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Thus I conferred with the moon as October drew to a close. Three weeks after leaving New York with a suitcase full of certainty. Three weeks after infiltrating the Stamper castle with vague revenge simmering in my mind, three weeks of physical misery and wishywashy will, and still my revenge only simmered. Barely simmered, at that. In fact had grown rather cool. To tell the truth, had all but frozen in a corner of my memory; in the three weeks following my vow to pull Hank down, my intentions had cooled down and my heart warmed up, and a family of moths had taken up residence in my suitcase and chewed my slacks and my certainties full of holes. So with the devil’s-advocate moon grinning over my shoulder, with demure quails calling and bullbats diving and old Henry honking across the river that gurgled coyly to the stars, and with my stomach heavy with Viv’s cooking and my head light with Hank’s praise, right then and right there I decided to bury the hatchet.