Chapter 56

“He acts like ...he don’t have any reason, ever any reason, to fight.” “Maybe he don’t.” “If Lee don’t”—Hank stared into the fire—“then there’s nobody does.” The vetch rattled and Uncle growled. Something moved at the edge of the light. Hank leaped to his feet. TIRED tired cold but HIM! The dog seemed to have two tails, issuing from hindquarters swollen large enough to handle even another two. “Oh Jesus! There’s a snake got her!” She tries to snap at them when they pick her up. She doesn’t remember who they are. They are all part of it now. Like the MOON and the FIRE, and the LOG and the BEAR, all HOT COLD DARK in her fevered confusion, and part of the same big ENEMY the way the WATER has become part, and REST; even SLEEP . . . It is late. The big clock-in-a-horse ticks soulfully. With the station off the air, Indian Jenny’s father can only sit and watch the blank screen that pulses before him like a filmed blue-white eye. Gradually from the eye troops a ragged line of disorderly memories and myths. They begin circling a pine-knot fire burning for sixty years. And finally sit where they please, overlapping each other like transparent years snipped from a cellophane calendar. “Once upon a time,” says the milkstoned eye, and everyone leans to listen... Henry bickers fitfully with a young shadow from the past. Lee strikes a match, fascinated. Molly whines, out of her head, in something’s carrying arms. At the Wakonda Hotel, in the room they share, Ray and Rod haggle past midnight over the expenses they have incurred since coming to work for Teddy. Ray is trying to whistle Hank Thompson’s guitar intro to “A Jewel Here on Earth,” but he is sleepy and edgy and the wienies Rod boiled for supper on the hot plate, being so unruly in his stomach, make it hard for him to get the right tone. Suddenly he stops whistling and flings the handful of papers he has been reading into the basket. “Fuck it! Fuck it all!”  “Take it easy, man! it’s just this strike.” Rod tries to soothe his friend. “Face it, man, until this motherin’ strike is settled and there’s more cash running loose, maybe we should take off to Eureka and make some bucks at your brother’s parking lot. What do you think?” Ray is staring at the battered guitar case showing from beneath his bed. Finally he holds up his hands and looks them over. “I don’t know, man,” he says. “Let’s face it; neither of us is getting any younger. Sometimes I feel like just, oh . . . fuck it!” At the dock in front of the old house Hank lays the unconscious dog in the boat and stands up. “Do me a favor, Joby; drive her to the vet’s for me...?” Joe is surprised and suddenly wide awake. “What? I mean all right, but—” “I want to cover the bank foundation tonight.” “Again? Why, you gonna check that foundation to death.” “No. It’s just ...Those clouds worry me.” “Well ...okay.” And, leaving Hank on the dock, as he guides the boat across the dark river, with his face in a bemused frown, like a scar over scars ...Joe finds he is worried also— about something more than clouds, but not sure what. Old Henry, in his rumbling bed, tosses and turns and talks to bygone beauties while his false teeth watch from their glass of water by his bedside. Viv hugs her pillow in the dark, wondering why isn’t he coming to bed—tonight! to her! now!—and remembers spending night after night alone in her bed full of dolls “Way up yonder, top of the sky . . .” while her parents were away with the truck selling produce in Denver or Colorado Springs, and the dark room full of dolls’ ears listening to every note: “. . . blue jay lives in a silver eye.” Joe climbs the stairs, already asleep and dreaming. Jan waits like a lump in a room full of lumpy sleeping bags, too shy in her flannel-nightgown sleep to entertain even the dimmest of dreams. Hank stands on the dock, rubbing his palms nervously up and down his thighs, lips tight. Lee sits wide awake on his bed with his shoes off, relighting his little cigarette and looking down at his long outburst of writing . . . I would apologize for my delay in writing were I not convinced you would enjoy, much more than an apology, my quaint explanation for this letter: I have just come up to my room after a grisly hassle with Brother Hank, (do you recall? I think you made acquaintance with his ectoplasmic counterpart in a coffee house in the village) and I decided it would only be fair to give my nerve endings the solace of a joint. The pot was safe where I had secured it—cuddled in a cold cream jar at the bottom of the shaving kit Mona gave me—but where the bleeding papers: pot without papers, man, what kind of funny shit is that? It is beer without an opener. It is opium without a pipe. Our thermosed lives are, at best, nine-tenths of the time padded by vacuum and sealed by silvered silicon, but, for all their artificiality, we are generally able to find means for unstoppering them now and then, and enjoy at least some portion of addlepated freedom. Are we not? I mean, even the most square moral-ridden and socially-middled saddle-brow manages at some moment to drink enough to pop his stopper and enjoy a romp in the primroses. And that just with crude booze. So how can something so hip as a Pond jar full of pot be cursed to unfulfilled frustration by a lack of papers? I rant, I rave with frustration. I even consider rolling it in magazine paper. Then...a flashbulb of remembrance; my wallet! Of course; didn’t I put a pack of zig-zag gummed wheatstraws in my wallet that night we all got so zonked at Jan’s and the three of us composed that immortal children’s classic Fuckleberry Hen? I quick to my trousers and feel for my wallet. Ah. Ah yes. There are the papers, and there the typed story still folded about them— “See. See Rooster Booster run. See him jump Fuckleberry Hen. See him jam it in. Jam, jam, jam.”—and what else flits out of the little package and flutters to the floor like a dying moth? A scrap of lipsticked Kleenex on which is written Peters’ department phone number. I sigh. I languish with memories. Good old Peters ...back there enjoying the good academic life. Hmm . . . y’know, do the tortured soul good to commune with him. I believe I shall drop him a line. So, I transcribe here that line (if this damned unreliable ballpoint pen stops skipping) while I blow up the three joints I have rolled. Three, I hear him gasp, three joints? Alone up in his room? Three? Yes, three, I answer calmly. For after this particular day I feel entitled to the 1st, I want the 2nd and oh God I need the 3rd! The 1st is a just payment for being good and working hard. The 2nd for enjoyment. The 3rd is to remind me to never never never again be duped into believing anything but the worst of one’s relatives. As a variation of W. C. Fields’ great truth, How can anyone who likes dogs and little children be anything but all bad? First, as I fire up number one, I will give you what brief history I can afford: since the day I fled the realm of the mind for that of the muscle I have been cursed by having to pay homage to the wounds of both: physically, I have been forced for ten fiendish hours a day six solid days a week to subject my sinews to such sadistic stress as walking, running, stumbling, fumbling, falling down and getting back up and walking again as I all the while drag a rusty iron cable the obstinance of which is rivaled solely by the obstinance of the gargantuan log I am supposed to tie said cable around. I have had my bodily bones bunked and cracked, chunked and whacked by every rock stump root trunk within a fifty-foot radius as I fled that log so that cable wouldn’t jerk it over me; I have had to stand there pant and fainting trying to endure berryvines, nettles, sunstroke, blisters, mosquitoes, nosee’ums and prickly heat in the brief respite alloted me while I waited for that cable to drop its log a hundred yards away and come hissing and snapping back for a new assault (something of Dante, don’t you think?) I mean not only have I suffered all these physical horrors, but I have, if anything,inthislandwhere Icame to give my mind a rest, increased my mental menaces a million-fold! (Pardon my bad alliterative and endure my brief intermission while I um umm puff puff relight this joint ...there we go.) Dearest comrade, the point I wish to make with all this preambling penmanship is simply that I have been far too put upon to get either my lazy mind or my lazy ass to repaying your wonderful letter’s most welcomed visit to this prehistoric land. Also, and at the risk of being honest, I actually have been more than ever beset by the slings and arrows of outrageous introspection...
more than I was a month ago, even. (What did Pearson say about the apartment? Your other letter made no mention.) And for a couple of ironic reasons: you see, with the passing of these last few nightmare weeks here in this house I came to raze, living with these ogres I came to annihilate, I had contracted a malady I thought myself completely immunized against; I had come down with a bad case of Benevolence, with complications of Fondness and Distended Sympathy. You laugh? You snigger in your affected lipbeard that I could let my resistance run so low as to fall victim to that virus? Well, if you do, I can only point next door and smugly say, “Okay, my snide friend, you live three weeks in the same house with that chick and let’s see if you can keep up your resistance!” For I believe that ’twas she, the chick, the wildwoods flower wife of my sworn-destroyed brother, that stayed my vengeful hand and, till now, has kept my wrath from falling. Three weeks lost in my plot. Because, you must understand, it was she that my mind sought out as the undipped heel of my Achilles-like brother, and she was the only thing in the house which I hesitated to harm. This bind was brought to stalemate by the fact that my brother has been especially nice to me; I couldn’t hate him quite enough to offset my fondness for the girl. It was even-steven. Until tonight. You should, Peters, at this point, begin to detect the plot line even though you join the story one hundred pages deep. To sum up, in as you have missed the first four installments there are only these facts to establish: Bitter Leland Stanford Stamper returns home intending to do his older half-brother some unconceived but horrible harm for diddling young Leland’s mama, but in spite of his good intentions he has gradually been duped into sympathy for the arch step-fiend: we find Leland at the start of this episode, pitifully drunken and reasonless after an evening’s sipping of this sympathy. Things look bad. It looks like he’s going under. But, as you shall see, an unusual incident, almost a miracle, snaps our hero to his senses. It is this miracle for which I now give thanks by lighting this second joint at the altar of the Great God Pot. . . . We had just returned from a little foray into the woods and snacked on the leftovers of Viv’s wonderful supper, and I had been waxing more and more banal as the evening wore on, and somehow the conversation between myself and my brother had wandered arm-in-drunken-arm through talk of school—“What actual is it you been studying?”—to talk of graduation— “Watcha aim to do with it to make a living?”—to talk of this and that and finally to the talk of music, of all things, Peters, music! To tell you the truth I can’t recall how we arrived at the subject— alcohol, exhaustion and pot have eroded the edges from my memory—but it seems we were discussing (discussing, I wish you to note; we had even reached the point of discussion ...a long way in three weeks from silent plotting of sinister doom) discussing the merits of life in the lovely but provincial West Coast as compared to the sophisticated but ugly East Coast when, in the course of championing the East, I mentioned that the one edge that the West Coasters must concede to the East was that it boasted far greater opportunities to hear good music. Hank was ready to concede no such thing ...listen: “Be easy,” said he in his quaint way, “ain’t you awriting your own numbers on the scale? What you reckon to be good music up against what my ideas are...might not fit all the notches. Just what do you mean ‘good music’?” I was in a philanthropic state of mind so for the sake of argument I agreed to meet him on a fair ground; remembering the old, remorseless driving rhythm and blues 78’s of Joe Turner and Fats Domino that Hank used to assail my boyhood nights with, I agreed we would speak only of jazz. And after the usual amount of hemming and hawing and beating around the bush we got down to the thing all jazz enthusiasts are always working toward with their discussions; we went to get out our records. Hank commenced rummaging through drawers and boxes. From my suitcase upstairs I carried down my locked attaché case of favorites. But once again Hank and I realized very quickly that, even though we had arbitrated Jazz the Good Music we would discuss, we were still worlds apart as to what was Good Jazz. (They sat for a long time, across the room from each other, elbows on knees, head down . . . concentrating as though playing chess, the moves coming at the end of each band: Lee played a selection from Brubeck; Hank played Joe Williams singing “Red Sails in the Sunset”; Lee played Fred Katz; Hank countered with Fats Domino . . .) “That stuff of yours,” said Hank, “sounds like the musicians all squat to pee. La lee la lee la lee.” “That stuff of yours,” said I, “sounds like the musicians all suffer from St. Vitus’ Dance. Bam bam bam bam, the epileptic stomp—” (“Now look a minute,” Hank said, aiming his finger at Lee “what do you think them guys learn them horns for? Learn to sing that for? Huh? Well it ain’t just to show how good they can finger the keys. Or to show how foxy they are at making some plumbline, T-square, to-the-inch... some kinda, oh, precision arrangement; da duh de da da; da duh dee da da . . . that crap. Bub, that sort of stuff might be a lot of fun for some white piano player who graduated from music college, something he can try ’n’ work out like a crossword puzzle, but a man who learns to blow so he can blow jazz, he isn’t worried what kinda grade some professor’s giving him!” “Why, will you listen to him, Viv,” Lee said. “Brother Hank has let the cat out of the bag; he can articulate about more than the price of the cut fir per board feet or the wretched state of our donkey engine, or the ‘sonofabitching’ union! He does have the power of speech in spite of other rumors.” Hank dropped his head and grinned. “Shit now”—he rubbed the tip of his nose with the knuckle of his thumb—“I guess I did get up on a soapbox for a minute there. But I suppose, it comes down to it, there’s a lot to what you say; it used to be that if there is one thing—other than the sonofabitchin’ union—that I could get a good heat going on, it was music. We useta—me and Mel Sorenson, and Henderson and that bunch...Joe Ben, too, before he got saved so big—useta sit for hours in Harvey’s cycle shop down in Coos Bay listening to this great collection Harvey played all the time . . . and you should have heard us then! We thought Joe Turner had come right outa heaven to give us the skinny. We thought somebody was finally playing our music—this was after listening to hillbilly-Western till we foundered. I mean there was sides taken, the Western fans and the rhythm and blues fans ...we had real fights about it! We were ripe to fight about something anyway; I decided once that most of our bunch were mad ’cause we’d got cheated outa fightin’ the Japs and Germans and didn’t know yet we had Korea to fight about. So those first bop records made good causes.” Hank let his head sink to rest on the back of the chair, closed his eyes on his reverie, and reminisced for a few minutes about obscure tenormen and drummers completely unmindful of the boneless dance of Jimmy Giuffre on the phonograph... “But you may be right,” he said, finishing up along with the last few bars of Lee’s Giuffre record; “I probably haven’t kept up with what’s been going on. But I know one thing: that old blues and boogie and bop had some man to it.”) And Hank said, “That manure they’re playin’ there hasn’t got any more balls than it does beat. I like somethin’ with a little more balls on it.” And I said, “Such a prejudice must limit you terribly.” And he said, “Are we gonna be like that?” And I said, “I should think you would want to at least exclude such things as the female sex from such a sweeping statement.” And he said, “I should think this outfit snuggling her little tail up against me here would make a qualification like that pretty damned unnecessary, but, if you are goin’ to be hard-nosed about it ...” But I waved it off (see: still trying to be fair, a Good Guy) and said, “Sorry, Hank, sorry.” Then, my friend—to show you how grave my affliction was, how deeply rooted the cancer—I went so far as to attempt to repair the rent my tongue had sliced in our tender new fellowship. I said I had been only jesting and that, Sure brother, I understand what you were talking about that music was meant for. I told him that there were, in fact, two recognized schools of Jazz, Black Jazz and White Jazz, and that what he was referring to as Masculine was no doubt the Black Jazz school.