Chapter 61

“Or after—” “Oh no, I mean right after The Dream! And let me tell you. You want to hear something make your hair stand up on end? As soon, the very instant I took them vows, the very instant I took them vows and drunk that water diluted right from the River Jordan, you know what taken place? You know what?” I laughed and told him I would be afraid to guess. “Jan, she got pregnant with our firstborn is just exactly what!” “That’s so. I did. Right after.” “Right after,” he emphasized. “Incredible,” I marveled. “It’s hard to imagine an elixir of such potency. She became pregnant the moment after you drank the diluted water?” “Yes sir! The very instant.” “I’d have given something to witness that event.” “Oh, man, the Strength of the Lord is a Caution.” Joe shook his head respectfully. “Like Brother Walker tell us, ‘God is a Highballer in Heaven.’ A highballer, see, is a old loggin’ term for a guy who did about twice as much as others. ‘A Highballer in Heaven with a Lowballer in Hell!’ That’s the kind of talk Brother Walker uses, Leland; he doesn’t come on with a lot of this highhanded crap other preachers talk. He lays ’em right on the line!” “That’s so. Right on the line.” The pale daylight moon darts along through the trees, keeping them in sight. That drivel about men being affected by the full moon—wolfbane and so on—is nonsense, complete nonsense... Joe and his wife continued talking about their church all the way in to Wakonda. I had planned to beg off attending the services by developing a sudden headache, but Joe’s enthusiasm was such that I couldn’t disappoint him and was compelled to accompany him to the carnival grounds, where a huge two-masted maroon tent housed his version of God. We were early. The folding chairs placed in neat rows about the bright woodshaving-strewn interior of the tent were only partly filled with long-jowled fishermen or loggers, haunted by their own dreams of windy death. Joe and Jan insisted on taking their usual seats in the front row. “Where Brother Walker really gets his teeth into you, Leland; c’mon.” But I declined, saying I would feel conspicuous. “And, as I am a newcomer in the Lord’s tent, Joe, I think it might be best to try my first sample of this potent new faith from the back row, out of reach of the good brother’s molars, all right?” And from this vantage point I was able to slip up the aisle a few minutes after services jumped off, without disturbing the worship of the red-faced believers or the rock-and-roll catechism that Brother Walker’s blind wife was whanging out on her electric steel guitar. I got out of that tent just in time. Complete and utter nonsense. Those other times when the moon happened to be full, nothing but coincidences; coincidence and nothing more. I say just in time because when I got outside I found a weird and whirly feeling sifting down on me from the thumb-smudged sky, a giddy and giggly sensation foaming up out of the cracked earth. Then it finally dawned on me: Nitwit, you have a pot hangover is all. The “aftergrass,” Peters called it. Residual high that occasionally comes on about noon the day after blowing up too much of the Mexican laughing grass the night before. Nothing very dire. Compared to the living death of an alcohol hangover, this day-after high is a small price to pay for a night-before kick. There’s no sickness; no headache; none of the baked tongue or bowled eyeballs that alcohol leaves one with—only a minor euphoria, and a dreamy, air-walking, time-stretching state that is often very pleasant. But it can tend to make the world appear a little goofy, and if one is in a goofy situation anyway—like a rhythm-and-blues church—it can tend to make it a lot goofier. So I say just in time because when the high first started to come on—to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers” played dance-time on a steel guitar as Brother Walker screamed for converts to stand and seek their salvation—I didn’t relate it to being high the night before and, for a few maddening moments, teetered on the verge of trooping forth up that sawdust path to metaphysical glory. In the lot outside I scribbled a note to Joe and placed it beneath the wiper blade on the pick-up, asking that he forgive my early departure, saying I would have stayed but that “even from the back row I felt the power of Brother Walker’s bite; such holiness must be taken at first in small doses.” He sees the moon again, reflected in the pick-up window: You don’t scare me. Not a bit of it. In fact, I’m in better shape than during your quarter or half . . . (“Here’s as good a place to start as any.” Hank stopped the pick-up and pointed to a yard already choked with twilight. “Just knock an’ say ‘Trick or treat’ is all there is to it, bub ...head out.”)...because the chips are falling my way for the first time in my life . . . I struck out for town, which seemed to lie hundreds of miles to the north across a vacant lot. Banking slightly to the leeward, I turned on an impulse from Alagahea Street down the long broken backbone of Swede Row, trip-tapping along the old wooden-vertebrae sidewalk, running my knuckles along the bleached picket ribs of the Scandinavian yards. He keeps watch on it following ominously behind the maple trees....(The child lifted his mask and stared at the house. “But we’re at Swede Row, Hank! This is Swede Row!”) He sees it slide behind clouds.... Christian Soldiers still marched Onward across the scattered wood shavings of my tented skull, but from the heathen Nordic yards skinny blond children with knees like doorknobs peered out at me from behind godless Viking masks. “Look the man. Hey, watcha scared of? Hey hey hey!” Hell with you and your macaroons and wolfbane. I’m in good shape; for the first time in my life the faint odor of distant victory blows my direction (Hank laughed. “A Swede ain’t no different from any other nigger. Now get on; there’s some other kids from your class goin’.”); so how can you expect me to be coerced by a noon moon, and such a sallow one at that? I stepped up my dreamy pace, eager to put behind me the noise, the hubbub, the midway of bones and the whole Valhalla carnival, eager to get across town to the long, withdrawing roar of bracing salt sea, where Viv would be waiting with open arms and closed eyes. Lee’s steps fall faster and faster until he is near to running and his breath coming fast. (The boy stood at the gate and looked into the murky, weed-lurking yard. At the very next house a Mickey Mouse and a masked cowboy no older than himself held forth sacks for the blackmailed booty. If they could do it, surely he could. He wasn’t scared of the dark yard, not really, like he let Hank think, or of what he might find behind the door—just some old fat Swede fishwife. No, he wasn’t really scared of Swede Row ...but his hand wouldn’t lift the gate’s hand-carved latch.) The scene in town was as chaotic as the outskirts. A fever-cheeked real-estate man soaping his windows winked at me over a bar of Dial and hoped I was enjoying my stay, and a moth-eaten yellow rag of a tomcat tried to entice me into the alley to view his collection of dirty pictures. Boney Stokes stalked his shadow out of the barbershop and into the bar, where he bought it a drink. Grissom frowned at my approach—“Here come that Stamper kid to read my books for nothing”—and frowned when I walked on past—“So! My books is not good enough for his educated tastes!”—and a miniature rubber-faced werewolf leaned against the doorjamb, passing the time with a yo-yo while he waited for dark. The sun is cold though very bright and sharp; the chrome ornaments on the cars stand out in glistening relief; atop the telephone poles the insulators gleam with brilliant emerald luminance of their own ...but Lee walks with his eyes strained wide as though through a dark night (Finally the boy managed to get through the gate and across the yard, only to stop once more at the door. Fear paralyzed his fingers again, but this time he knew that the thing he feared lay not in back of that door, but behind him! back across that yard! waiting in the pick-up! Without thinking another second, he jumped from the porch and ran. “Bub, hold it. Where—?” Around the corner of the house. “Bub! Bub! Wait; it’s okay!” Into the tall weeds, where he hid until Hank was past. “Lee! Lee-land, where you at?” Then jumped up and ran again, and ran and ran and ran) and already feels an evening chill in the afternoon wind. Once more I accelerated my pace and when I glanced back over my shoulder I saw I had given the Christian Army the slip and ditched the Vikings and the real-estate man; the yellow tom still followed me, but his devil-may-care look of lascivious determination was beginning to tire. I turned from Main down Ocean Way, all but running, and was just complimenting myself on a clean getaway from all my demons when a machine swerved to halt on the roadbank, scratching gravel beside me like an amorous dragon. “Hey, dad, we give you a lift somewhere?” From a whiskerless face too young to buy beer glinted a pair of onyx eyes old before the Black Plague hit Europe. “We’re makin’ the A and W, hey, dad. We’ll take you that far. Climb aboard.” The molded white front door swung open to reveal a band sinister enough to make the masked Viking look like a merit-badge contender and the werewolf seem a whimpering old Dog Tray. A crew twice as frightening because they wore no masks or costumes.