Chapter 58

 Listen to them. Grim missionaries of So What! Three chocolate-coated vacuums calling So What! All a drag man, all a hassle man, all too much not enough something else nothing at all So What! All three ask it together, then each at a time, then all together again. SO WHAT? SO SO SO WHAT so so so what? All together, then the trumpet, then the tenor, then the alto, then all together again SOOOOOO what? All three vacuums, transparent lips to the glass brass bells of three brass horns, sucking in at the three brass bells, fingering reverse indrawn music of despair, playing pictures on the desert SO what? tossed hot chance of skeleton dice over dunes sifting rust ...burnt land, burnt sky, burnt black moon ...burnt cities wind scattering hot memo papers no one to read them SOOO what? in houses sundered with big look and WHOOO what? . . . burn if don’t shame empty up lay empty hot give stay SO loose what? look where is go is empty go so empty hot so frozen what and who The pen reaches the bottom of the page, but he doesn’t open the notebook for more paper. He sits, staring at a little hourglass-shaped patch of light cast onto his wall through a crack in his lampshade, very still, only his finger moving as he taps out slow rhythms on the paper. He sits until his eyes begin to water, then he gathers up the scattered pages of his writing and tears them into stamp-sized pieces, working on each with bemused interest until he has a lapful of confetti. He throws the torn paper from his window into the October breeze and returns to bed. He falls asleep watching the little fragment of light vibrate across his wall, thinking how much more efficient it would be filling an hourglass with photons instead of those unruly grains of sand. Up river from the Stamper house and south, back into the sudden thrust of mountains, up the deep granite canyon of the South Fork of the Wakonda Auga, I know a place where you can sometimes sing along with yourself if you take the notion. You stand on a wooded slope overlooking the crooked little deep-green river far below, and sing into a lofty amphitheater of naked rock scooped from the steep mountain across the way: “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream . . .”—and just as you start on your merrily-merrilies, the echo comes in, “Row, row, row . . .” right on cue. So you sing with the echo. But you must be careful in choosing your key or your tempo; there is no changing of the pitch if you start too high, no slowing down of the tempo if you start too fast ...because an echo is an inflexible and pitiless taskmaster: you sing the echo’s way because it is damned sure not going to sing yours. And even after you leave this mossy acoustical phenomenon to go on with your hiking or fishing, you cannot help feeling, for a long time after, that any jig you whistle, hymn you hum, or song you sing is somehow immutably tuned to an echo yet unheard, or relentlessly echoing a tune long forgotten— And the old wino boltcutter, who lives in this sort of world, not far from this granite cliff, and cuts his shinglebolts from logged-out slopes on the bank of that crooked fork of the Wakonda, gets cursing drunk to celebrate the coming thirty-first of October (the same way he paid tribute to the thirty other days) and spends his night in a Thunderbird dream joining those echoes in complete antiphonal choruses, singing against the scooped-out stone of his sixty years across a deep green river of wine, and awakes before daylight with a roaring in his ears. Just a few minutes before Viv dropped off to sleep, after tossing for hours trying to recall the words to a ridiculous childhood song: “Way up yonder, top of the sky . . .” The bolt-cutter coughs for a while, then sits up in his bed, giving up his songs to the museum dark: “It’s all a lotta horseshit.” And in her dreams Viv finishes her verse: “ ‘. . . blue-jay lives in a silver eye. Buckeye Jim, you can’t go . . . go weave an’ spin, you can’t go ...Buckeye Jim.’ A lullaby, Mother sings it to me when I am a baby. Who do I sing it to, way up top of the sky? I don’t know. I don’t understand...” Beside her, breathing deeply, Hank mirrors the image of an oft-repeated high-school dream—to go on to college an’ by Jesus show the bastards just who’s a dumbass jock an’ who ain’t—and down the hall, still high as a kite though sound asleep, Lee thrashes about in a bed full of roaches, crutches, and burnt paper matches, and, having already chanted his own inquisition, judged himself guilty, and pronounced his sentence—death...by shrinking—he sets about composing a ballad to sing his praises after he is gone: a musical epic that would commemorate all his heroic victories on the field of combat and all his mighty feats in the arena of love...to the stirring beat of drums drums drums . . . —And sometimes, as you sing, you cannot help feeling that the unheard echoes and tunes forgotten are echoes of other voices and tunes of other singers . . . in that kind of world. At dawn the band of black clouds that slipped into town under cover of darkness can be seen loitering on the horizon like unemployed ghosts, impatient already for the day to be over so they can get to their Halloween pranks. The lightning from the night before now hangs upside down in the firs up in the mountains, waiting out the day in electric slumber, like a recharging bat. And a scavenger wind, ribbed and mangy, runs the frosted fields, whimpering with hunger, cold and stiff and terribly lonesome for its buddy the bat overhead there, snoring sparks in the tree limbs . . . in that kind of world. Runs and whimpers and clicks its frost teeth. As the aged and feeble sun slides up (cautiously, of course, in that kind of world, and because it is Halloween Indian Jenny opens her reddened eyes, even more cautiously. Sluggish and hung over after a night dedicated to hexing Hank Stamper for refusing to let his father marry an Indian...she rises from her freshly sheeted cot, crosses herself providently, and, wearing nothing more than an arrangement of the knitted wool blankets the government last year apportioned for her tribe (her tribe consists of herself, her father, a half-dozen mongrel brothers getting steadily fatter somewhere in the next county; the blankets consist of wool, also mongrel, but getting steadily thinner), pads out across the chocolate-pudding mudflats to pay homage to the new day by reading from the Bible that waits beside the smoothed sawn plywood hole of her toilet. The Bible had come with the blankets and was a holy thing, like the plastic Jesus she’d stolen from the dashboard of Simone’s Studebaker, or the bottle of aquavit that had materialized on her table one night after she had chanted out loud the mystic words from a dream about her father: she had called out the words in terror and halfhearted hope, and come morning, there the bottle had been, a talisman with a label in a magical language that she was never able to read. She was never able to reconstruct the chant, either. Like the bottle, which she had forced herself to ration sip by pious sip over many months, the Bible had also enjoyed a long reign; she obliged herself, however cold the damp bay air, however uncomfortable the harsh edges of the plywood, to read the entire page before tearing it out. The religious discipline had paid off in kind. As she arranged the blankets about her heavy brown flanks and picked up the book she thought she detected deep within her a definite revelation that was certainly more than last night’s pepperoni. But she jumped to no conclusions. For, while she was certainly a devout woman, given to diverse worships, she had more than once been disappointed in her spiritual experiments and hadn’t really expected much action to come out of this reading business. She had entered into the Contract with the Book essentially because her subscription to Horoscope had run out and the bottle of Holy Aquavit had— quite unmiraculously, and in spite of all the best spells that the worst of Alistair Crowley could offer—run dry. “Read of this the first thing every morning,” the man who brought her the blankets prescribed. “Read it religiously, all the way through, it shall touch your soul.” Well, all right. It couldn’t be as worthless as that Healing Prayer Cloth that she’d ordered from San Diego, and it couldn’t possibly be as terrible as that jolt of peyote she’d ordered from Laredo (“Eat eight, mate,” had been this cult’s typed instructions, “and you got an Electra-Jet to Heaven”). So all right, she told the man and took the book, with a halfhearted show of gratitude, she’d try anything. But what she had lacked in enthusiasm she had made up for in staying power and now her devotion was beginning to show fruit. Now, eyes bulging toward the page as she shuddered, straining to rid herself of sin, she suddenly experienced a stinging needle of pain and saw—inside that little hut!—a beautiful spiraling of stars. Think of that, she marveled, shuddering once more, just think of that: she was only twelve days into Deuteronomy and already she had marked her soul! Now if she could just figure how to get these stars into her hexes . . . Teddy the bartender prepares for the approach of All Hallows Eve by dusting his neon with a feather duster and removing the fried flies from his electro-kill screen with a Brillo pad. Floyd Evenwrite practices reading the preamble of International Woodsmen of the World aloud before a bathroom mirror toward the afternoon’s meeting with Jonny Draeger and the grievance committee. The Real Estate Hotwire, always a shrewd cooky, greets the morning by soaping innocuous sayings on his own window, as he has done every Halloween for years; “Got to be one hop out in front.” He snickers, smearing soap. “When the other galoots are just coming to the starting line, got to be two steps gone.” He’d adopted this procedure after finding his window maliciously decorated one Halloween night with what he decided must have been paraffin of a most unusual type—“probably something manufactured by the government special”—for, scrub as he might, he had never been able to rid his window of the memory of that evening. Detergent wouldn’t touch it; gasoline only hid it temporarily from sight; and even these many years later, when the light was right, the apparently spotless window would cast a dim but readable shadow on the floor before his desk. With no small amount of research, he had established that the vandals who skulked this most unholy of October nights had a decided inclination toward panes unsullied and tended to bypass windows already soaped. A kind of unwritten law, he suspected: don’t muck up a buddy’s job. So he was determined to be one hop out in front with soap before the other galoots got to the starting line with more of that paraffin. So great was the triumph the Hotwire felt the following morn, when he came to find his windows untouched by any mark but his own, that he failed to notice that his was the only disfigured window on the whole street; owing to parties and apple-bobbings— initiated by the adults, the tamed vandals of those yestere’ens, for the purpose of keeping their offspring in out of the wet— paraffin, soap, and the whole art of window-waxing had gone completely out of vogue. Even when this was pointed out to him he refused to discontinue the precaution. “A stitch in time is worth a pound of cure”—he remembered one of Joe Ben Stamper’s philosophies, scrawling wow across the glass with a flourish. “Besides, I ask you: who needs ‘Zorro Go Home’ two inches deep in paraffin right across their business?” Joe Ben leaps from bed and confronts the Halloween Saturday just about the same as he confronted any other Saturday when the Pentecostal Church of God and Metaphysical Science was holding services. Because, as far as Joe was concerned, every day could be Halloween if you held your mouth right. And Joe had a grin like a jack-o’-lantern. And, unlike the candle in the pumpkin he’d picked and fixed for the kids, the candle behind Joe’s carved features needed no special occasion, no official day set aside for ghouls and goblins; it could be ignited by anything. Oh yeah ...the discovery of a cricket in his drinking glass at the sink (“Good sign! You bet. Chinese say crickets bring all kinds fat luck.”) ...the number of Rice Krispies that might have snapped, crackled, and popped over the top of his bowl onto the breakfast table (“Four of ’em! See? See? It’s the fourth month and this is my fourth bowl of cereal and Jesus said to Lazarus, Come forth. And ain’t my name Little Joe, which is two and two or I’ll eat my hat!”) or kindled to a ruddy glow by nothing more than a simple sight that pleased his simple mind... such as the sweet pink flame of the morning sun through the window alighting on the sleeping faces of his children. The kids usually slept scattered about the floor of his room in sleeping bags, just any old place, but last night they had quite unconsciously aligned themselves so that a single trickle of sun leaking through a single tear in a shade could skip from brow to glowing brow. And since no coincidences marred Joe Ben’s auspicious world, this wondrous arrangement of faces threaded like pink pearls on the one tiny strand of sunshine was exactly the sort of datum he usually parlayed into a riot of prophecy, but this time the plain visual beauty of the sight so overwhelmed him that he was blinded to its metaphysical significance. He grasped his head in both hands to shore up a skull too thin to contain such high voltage. It would blow him to bits. “Oh God,” he moaned aloud, closing his eyes. “Oh oh oh God.” Then, recovering just as quickly, he tiptoed about the room in his skivvies, licking the tip of a finger and touching each of the five children as Brother Walker did in his baptism ceremonies. “No liquid nowhere in the world”—Joe paraphrased Brother Walker’s philosophy—“is as big a deal in the eyes of our Saviour as good ol’ human spit.” The impulsive baptism over, Joe scrunched down and crept back across the floor, striving intensely to make no noise, lifting his knees high and bringing his toes down with painful caution, elbows tight against his ribs like the plucked wings of a muscle-bound stewing chicken sneaking away across the kitchen floor behind the chef ’s back. At the window he let up the shade and stood fingering his navel while he grinned out at the waking day. He lifted his arms above his head, fists doubled, and stretched out his straightest and yawned. Yet, stretched out or scrunched down, Joe still looked like some kind of poorly plucked fugitive from the butcher’s bench. His bowed legs were lumpy with muscles cramped too tight against muscles squeezed too tight against other muscles; his back was pinched and knotted, and his stubby arms swiveled from shoulders which would have graced a six-footer but served only to distort a five-sixer. When a carnival came to Wakonda Joe could barely wait to get down and give the weight-guessers fits; estimates would undershoot or overshoot the actual one-fifty-five by sometimes as much as forty pounds.