Chapter 68

Now listen here, he says. Listen here, Stamper, you sonofabitch! He doesn’t understand. Hank tells me to drive the hell on. We pull out. He knows already about the brother but he doesn’t want to think about it yet. He can’t let himself think about it yet, though he sees already there’s another scrap brewing. But that he’s got to let it brew its course or everybody will figure him more a bully than they do already. So ...I guess ...I ought’n’ to look for him to be any different with this business with Leland. He won’t cut across to the place where he knows already he’s going to have to knock the boy’s ears down. Because he way down keeps hoping it won’t come to pass. He’s got to keep hoping these things won’t come to pass. Or get hard and lonely as a old pit dog. Oh, Hankus ...Hank...I always say to you the thing to do is accept what your lot is. But that’s pure bull when I come down to it. Because you can’t accept that you can’t quit no more than you can quit, and you can’t cut across to what you know already no more than you can keep from hoping that what you already see coming won’t ever come. Because they are the same thing, every bit the same exact thing. . . . “This meeting will now come to order! Everybody rise and pledge ’legiance . . .” A gravel rapped. Joe Ben started up from his stump and then leaned back toward the open few inches of window. The hall inside was lighted now and most of the chairs were full. Howie Evans rapped the speaker’s stand and repeated, “This meeting is going to come to order!” He nodded and from a chair behind him Floyd Evenwrite rose with a handful of yellow papers. Floyd pushed Howie Evans aside and spread the papers on the stand. “What is happening is this,” he said. Outside the window Joe Ben zipped his windbreaker higher and smelled the first faraway sprinkling of rain . . . The old boltcutter finishes unloading his load of split wood at the shingle-weavers, and finds that he must sit down on the running board for a minute to rest before he can make it the few yards to the office to collect from the foreman. The smell of liver and onions reaches him from the house out behind the mill where the foreman and his wife live. He wishes he had a woman back at his house up the canyon, to fill the air with smells like liver and onions. He has wished the same wish before, of course, many times; even, in his drunker moments, has given the idea of marriage some drunken thought ...But now, as he tries to stand, the full force of his years strikes him at the small of his back like a sixty-pound maul, and for the first time he admits to himself that the wish is hopeless: he will never have that woman: he is just too old—“Ah well, it’s best to live alone anyways, what I say”—too rotten worthless dirty old. The clouds swarm past. The wind rises. Lee fights his way through the frog-infested swamp, bound for the sea. Jenny considers trying another trip to the Bible, for good measure. Jonathan Draeger listens to the men’s overdramatic reactions to the news of the Stamper deal with Wakonda Pacific and writes: “The lowest of villains will push man to greater heights than the tallest of heroes.” And by the time Floyd Evenwrite has swung into the summation of his exhaustive case against the Stampers, the spy for the other side is beating it up the sidewalk to make a report to headquarters, all concern for caution left back in the alley among the careless litter of garbage. He must phone Hank, tell him quick—but quiet, too. ...His espionage work would give them a little edge over the union only if they kept it quiet; the union wouldn’t know that they knew....But he must call right away! And the phone in the Snag, if not the most private, was certainly the closest. . . . “Evenwrite told the whole story and then some,” Joe let Hank and everybody else in the bar know. “And them as was able to last out Floyd’s bull and get the drift sounded pretty salty. They says if you was going to be a leech on the town’s blood that the town was gonna have to treat you like a leech. Pretty salty. They said you better keep outa their way, Hank. So what you think you’ll do?” And when he hung up thought he heard someone in the bar ask what went on at the other end. “Hank says he just might have to come in to town tonight an’ see about that,” Joe announced belligerently. “Oh, you betcha; anybody who supposes Hank Stamper is gonna be scared into hiding out up in the hills just because a few people shakes their fists at him is got another suppose comin’.” Ray, the talented half of the Saturday Nite Dance Band, barely looked up from his scotch—“Big deal”—but at the other end of the bar Boney Stokes had more to say. “A pity, a pity . . . that Hank should have been ruint by the upbringing of his prideful father; with all his energy, he could have made a real contribution to society, not just be a clod washed out to sea. . . .” “Watch that, Mr. Stokes,” Joe warned. “Hank’s no clod.” But Boney was beyond warning; his eyes were fixed on tragedies beyond the walls. “ ‘Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls,’ ” he tolled sonorously through his dirty handkerchief; “ ‘it tolls for thee.’” “It tolls for horseshit,” contradicted a thinner voice from a gray beard at the back of the bar, thinking of liver and onions. “All horseshit. You’re alone all your life an’ you darn sure die alone, what I always say.” Back with Jan and the kids, Joe Ben was able to contain his excitement only by venting it through a paintbrush; even then each minute dragged on him like an anchor dragging through gumbo mud. And by the time Hank showed up, with Leland shivering in tow, Joe had given all the window frames two coats of morning-mist white and was mixing up a third. There were no extra clothes for Lee, so while Joe took the children around the area with their Halloween masks and paper sacks, and Hank drove to the A & W for hamburgers-to-go, Lee sat wrapped in a paint-spattered drop cloth before a panel heater, wishing he were home in bed; why Hank felt it necessary that he accompany them in their showdown tonight at the OK Saloon was a mystery. I’m a delicate sort of flower, he reminded himself wryly; perhaps he wants me around in case something starts, in hopes I’ll be trampled underfoot—what other reason could he have for insisting on my coming along? Hank would have been hard put to supply a reason himself, though he knew it to be true that Lee’s presence at the Snag tonight was important to him ...maybe because the kid needed to see first-hand what kind of world was going on around his head all the time without him ever seeing it, the real world with real hassles, not this fairybook world of his that he was having most of the time like a kind of nightmare that him and his kind’d made up to scare theirselfs with. Like that spooky crap he played the night before that he called music, when anybody could see that there wasn’t any more tune to it than there was sense. Maybe that’s one of the reasons for dragging him along to the Snag with us . . . “Here’s a burger, bub. Choke it down.” He caught the white paper sack that Hank tossed him—“I want you to see how woods folks here deal with their hassles”—and ate, watching Hank with puzzled wariness (what kind of hassles?). . . . Or it maybe was because I wanted the boy to have a try at going over this Niagara Falls in this coffee can with me just this one time, so he could see that this madman he was talking about could do even more’n come out of it alive—he could get a laugh or two out of the trip as well. (What manner of hassle are you referring to, brother? I wondered, as my confident smirk changed to a weak and worried smile. Not, by any chance, a hassle such as someone making a play for one of the woods folks’ wildwoods wife?) By the time we finish our burgers and fries, Lee’s clothes are pretty well dry and Joe Ben is commencing to run circles around himself to get going. Joe just come back in from taking Squeaky and the twins and Johnny out around the area, and he is ready to do some tricking-or-treating of his own. Joe was always big on seeing a fuss if it was me getting fussed. We drove up to the Snag in the pick-up because the jeep didn’t have the box up and the night looked a little upsy-daisy for open-air driving, what with it clear one minute with a nice little quarter-moon in a calm sky, and the next minute lightning and blowing flurries of rain and sleet. (These questions didn’t penetrate my earlier feeling of minor victory until Hank made such a point of bringing me to the Snag ...then I began to come down from my cloud and get worried.) There are so many cars on Main we have to park all the way back to the firehouse and walk to the Snag. The place is running full tilt, with light and noise and people slopping clean out across the sidewalk into the street. The two guitar-players are doing “Under the Double Eagle” with their amplifiers turned to the limit. I never seen the place so booming. The stools at the long bar are filled completely, with men even standing turned sideways in the little spaces between the stools. The booths are filled, and Teddy’s got one of the waitresses over from the Sea Breeze helping him with the drinks. There are men standing the length of the shuffleboard and the bowling machine, men at the toilet door and men at the bandstand, and loud groups gathered drinking beer in every smoky niche and cranny all the way back to the bus depot. (And something in Brother Hank’s grim and grinning manner turned my worry to fear.) I’d had a notion it might be crowded, and I was prepared for it being wild, but the reception I get when me and Joby and Lee come in catches me clean off guard. I was halfway looking to have them go to throwing chairs and tables, and when they wave and grin and sing out howdies instead, it really throws me for a little while. I walk past the shuffleboard and guys I barely know go to shouting acknowledgments at me like I was visiting kin. A place clears at the bar for the three of us and I call for three beers. (My first thought was that Hank planned to call me out and humiliate me in front of the throng, administer in public a verbal flogging for my adulterous inclinations . . .) Old buddies come up to slap my back and snap the elastic cross of my galluses. Motorcycle buddies come around to ask me how I been. Marine Corps buddies I ain’t heard from in years stop by for a long-time-no-see. Dozens of guys: “Hey, what’s happening, Hank, you old coon? Long time, by gosh. How’s it hangin’?” I shake the hands and laugh at the jokes and watch the faces bob around in the mirror behind the picket row of bottles. Not a one of them says a thing about our contract with WP. Not a solitary one! (But after minutes passed without incident, I decided not: Brother Hank has something worse in mind, I decided.) After a bit the greeting eases up and I get a chance to take a better look around. Boy! Even for a Saturday night, even for a Saturday night in the Snag in Wakonda, it’s still a doozer. There’s at least a two-cord truckload of guys at every table, hollering and laughing and sucking down the beer. And, by golly, there’s maybe twenty-five women! More women than I ever saw in the Snag. You’re usually lucky to have a Saturday with one woman to every ten men, but tonight there’s at least one to four. And that’s what puts me onto what’s happening: women don’t come out in a pack like this to a bar unless there’s going to be a good band, or a raffle, or unless there’s a sure fight. Especially a fight. Nothing like the possibility of a little scuffle to bring out the ladies. Squeakers and squealers, squallers and squawkers, I’ve seen every high-heeled and red-sweatered one of them at some time or another boring in on some drunk Dempsey in a hard hat who’s just punched down her daddy, swarming all over the poor guy twice as murderous as daddy did. Just like at the rassling match. You ever notice the first three rows at ringside at the armory are always filled with nothing but red mouths like gouged screams, hollering to strangle that dirty villain up there, kick his head off? (Something even more edifying than humiliation WATCH OUT! more pointed than a word-whipping! Hank, Joe Ben, everyone in the bar seemed to be awaiting the arrival of the lion I was to be thrown to RUN WHILE THERE IS TIME!) If I was a rassler I bet I’d have some real nasty dreams about those first three rows. Matter of fact I’m liable to have some real nasty dreams about this bevy of sweeties right here before the night’s over. I order me another drink, this time whisky, Johnny Walker. Why is it, I wonder, I always buy good liquor if I’m expecting a fuss. Usually it’s beer beer beer, one after the other, nice and mellow and slow. (MAKE A BREAK FOR IT!) Maybe it’s because beer is slow; and that I need something faster than that. (RUN! RUN, YOU FOOL! CAN’T YOU SMELL THE CROWD’S BLOODLUST?) Bay-bee, but she is fierce in here tonight! Did all these high-spirited coons come down just to watch somebody stomp the shit out of me? Why, it makes a man humble and a little proud, it does for a fact. (But just as I was about to bolt for the door NOW, FOOL Hank succeeded in once more shattering my certainty . . .) I lean over to Joby, who is still puzzled by our reception. “You figure it out yet?” “What? This? Me? No, by golly, I sure ain’t.” “Well, I just bet you that new spinnin’ reel of yours against my old one that we can expect a visit from Biggy Newton before the night’s out.” “Oh,” Joe says.