Chapter 70

An’ what was that dream I had? Something bound to be awful...” “This country will rot a man like a corpse,” was Jonathan Draeger’s response when he looked from his hotel window onto a Main Street running an inch of black water. “Rain,” was all Teddy had to say, watching the falling texture of the sky through his bedside lace curtains. “Rain.” Those Halloween clouds had continued to roll in off the sea all the rumbling night—a surly multitude, angry at being kept waiting so long, and full of moody determination to make up for time lost. Pouring out rain as they went, they had rolled over the beaches and town, into the farmlands and low hills, finally piling headlong up against the wall of the Coastal Range mountains with a soft, massive inertia. All night long. A few piled to the mountaintops and over into the Willamette Valley with their overloads of rain, but the majority, the great bulk of that multitude gathered and blown from the distant stretches of the sea, came rebounding heavily back into the other clouds. They exploded above the town like colliding lakes. The garrison of speargrass that picketed the edges of the dunes was beaten flat by the clouds’ advance guard; with the fallen green spear-points pointing the way the attack had gone by graying dawn. A torrent of water that ran from the dunes back to the sea, in measured sweeps, as though enormous waves were combing overhead and breaking far inland... swept the beaches clean of a whole summer’s debris by gray daylight. And along parts of the Oregon coast there are clusters of seaside trees permanently bent by a wind that blows everlastingly landward across all the Oregon beaches—whole groves of strangled cedars and spruce bent in an attitude of paralyzed recoil, as though frozen by a dreadful Medusa revealed centuries ago by lightning ...and by midmorning of that first day after October, the little short-tailed mice that dwelt between the roots of these trees had crept from their homes and, for the first time in local remembrance, were moving in droves east, toward higher ground, afraid that such a rain would surely raise the sea and flood their burrows. . . . “Oh me, oh me; the mice are leavin’ their holes. We’re in for a bad one,” was the way Evenwrite viewed the migration. “The rodents are moving into town to winter with the riffraff,” Draeger decided moodily, and wrote “A Man Is Known By The Mice He Keeps” in his notebook. “I think I had better go down and open the place early this Sunday,” Teddy decided and hurried to the bathroom mirror to see if he needed a shave this week. At the moorage that first day the old Scandinavian fishermen watched the black rolling of clouds overhead and added extra hawsers to their boats. In her shack near the clamflats Indian Jenny melted pitch, candlewax, and an old pocket comb on the stove, used the mixture to calk gathering wet spots in her ceiling, pressing the searing gum into cracks and holes with her broad, shovel-callused thumb as she hummed tonelessly along with the lonely drone of rain. On Main Street the townspeople sprinted from awning to awning with lowered heads, dodging puddles, skirting the spew of rainspouts. As frantic and as flustered in their movements as the drenched mice fleeing the safety of their burrows; even the oldest of mossbacked residents was bewildered, even the stanchest logger generally proud of his laconic acceptance of weather—“Can’t never get wet enough for me!”—and his endurance of legendary rains of the past, even these veterans appeared shaken by the sudden, determined ferocity of that first day’s rain. “Comin’ down like a cow wettin’ on a flat rock,” they called to one another. “Like ten cows. Like a goddamn hundred!” they called as they dashed from awning to doorway, from doorway to awning. “I hear it’s a record,” they assured one another all afternoon over beers in the Snag, “a goddam record.” Yet when the report came in over Teddy’s bartop radio at the end of the day, the precipitation count was by no means a record. “Four inches recorded since midnight.” It wasn’t even phenomenal. “Jus’ four inches? That all? I mean, that’s a lot of rain, surely, but I tell ya! the way it was coming down out there today didn’t ack like four inches, it acted like four goddamn hundred!” Just four inches, Teddy thought sarcastically, just four little inches. “I think somebody made a mistake,” Evenwrite thought moodily. “Those smartasses down at the Coast Guard station, where do they get this crap, draw a number out of a hat? Shit, the ditch out behind my place had a good foot of water in it by noon! What makes those smartasses think they can measure water any better than anybody else?” Four inches of rain—Teddy simpered—and the fear hidden all summer shoots up and blooms overnight. He floated soundlessly about the dim avenues of his bar, like a plump little water spider in a white apron and shirt, black slacks and tiny pointed crepe-soled shoes, Blooms all funny-colored and different-shaped, tending his web with remote servility. But all the colors and shapes spring from that same weed of fear.... His small dark lips pursed in a practiced smile, and his tiny black eyes noticing everything in the whole dingy expanse of his barroom limits—the man fingering the coin-return slot on the juke, the trio in the booth near the back stubbing cigarettes out on the table, the feet getting heavier, tongues getting thicker . . . seeing everything except the grained bartop or rows of glasses at which he polished constantly. And that weed is rooted in all of us. It is in me as well as in Floyd Evenwrite or Lester Gibbons. But I am different. I know that it is not brought to blooming by the rain. It is brought to blooming by nothing more than stupidity. And the native dirt here is rich in stupidity. Teddy considered himself something of an expert on fear and stupidity; he had studied them for years. He had a constant supply of specimens. Now he shifted his covert gaze to watch Jonathan Draeger, the union official that Evenwrite had called up to help with this strike foolishness, come through the arch of neons wearing a hat and a very light blue overcoat. Teddy’s eyes followed the man’s confident, well-fed movements as he removed the hat and coat. He had noticed him last night and had been curious about his calm interest in the brawl. Like himself—and perhaps Hank Stamper—this Mr. Draeger didn’t seem to fit into the same category as the rest of the specimens. There seemed something special about him that set him apart. Teddy felt himself different from the rest of the town because, while he might harbor a natural seed of fear like the others, he had the shrewd patience and intelligence to keep it from sprouting. Hank Stamper, on the other hand, was neither shrewd nor intelligent, but by some quirk of nature completely fearless. This Draeger was certainly this and more. . . . “Good evening, boys”; Draeger greeted the largest table and its assembly of citizens. “It appears we are having us some weather. Four inches to date, the paper said. . . .” “Where’d they get their figures,” Evenwrite demanded, “this ‘four inches to date’?” Draeger hung up the coat and hat and carefully brushed his trousers free of rain before answering. “From the United States Department of Weather Service, Floyd,” he explained, giving Evenwrite an understanding smile. He is shrewd, this Mr. Draeger. He also appears intelligent; that certainly sets him apart. Fearless, too, maybe... “Why do you ask, Floyd? Had you estimated more than four inches?” ...but there is something more. “Um . . .” Evenwrite grunted at the question and shrugged sullenly. He was still hung over. And he wasn’t so goddam sure anyhow that he liked the way this goddam bigcity big-ass in his suntan and slacks was responding to the gravity of the situation. “. . . I didn’t say I estimated at all, Mr. Draeger.” “Of course. I was just joking.” Something that sets him apart from the rest of these brainless fools, but from myself and Hank Stamper too. “It did seem more than four inches,” the Real Estate Hotwire admitted. “But you know what I diagnose it, Floyd? You want to know? It was the shock effect, that’s what. Days of sunshine, the good weather that we had all the way to November kind of constituting a soporific, do you get what I mean? Then blooey, the sky falls on us.” He tilted back in the chair and his easygoing, affable Rotarian laugh spilled from his throat—“So we’re all running around like Chicken Little with her head chopped off. ...Haw haw haw.” A laugh calculated to warm the cockles of every cold wet heart in the house; and maybe stimulate a little confidence in the land-buying situation. “So that’s all it was. Nothing to be alarmed about. We were running around telling ourselves the sky was falling. Haw haw haw.” The others all laughed and agreed with the shrewd explanation; that must have been it, the surprise effect, the suddenness . . . then the laughter stopped and Teddy saw them turn questioningly toward the smiling Draeger. “Don’t you diagnose it like that, Mr. Draeger?”  “I’m sure that must have been what happened,” he reassured them as Teddy watched. All the others are afraid of the night, of the dark outside; I know they are... “I ain’t so sure that’s what happened,” Evenwrite said suddenly, looking down at Draeger’s hands on the table; the hands were resting one on top of the other, nails clean, cuticles groomed, like two pompous and pedigreed show-dogs. He looked at his own hands and they seemed knotted and ugly, like mongrels made all red and hairless with mange—“No, I don’t think so”—but mongrels or not he was by god if he was gonna run them outa sight under the table! “No? Then what better explanation do you have, Floyd?” I know these others, animals, all scared of the forces in the dark; that’s why they buy TV sets, and buy Buick cars with red and green lights blink off and on in the holes in the hood... that’s why they flock to my neons. Like bugs attracted to streetlights, to fire. Anything to get out of the dark . . . “Yeah, Floyd; you ack like you got somethin’ on your chest.” “Yeah, Floyd . . .” Evenwrite compressed his face into a pinched labyrinth of terrific concentration. He did have a better explanation, goddammit, if he could just put it the right way. He’d worked on it all night. It was a hell of a lot more than surprise effect, and there damned well was something to be alarmed about. All night long he had worked on the feeling—after the sight of Stamper clobbering that muscle-assed Newton had faded from his consciousness—lying half awake, half asleep, half drunk in his pitch-dark bedroom, trying to put his finger on an insistent and ominous worry, trying to make out the whispered warning beneath the rain, like cold wet lips against his ear—what was that dream? what was it somebody just whispered?—and by noon when he climbed from bed he had deciphered the wet warning. “Look,” he started, trying to choose his words. “This rain coming like it did and... upsetting everybody like it did, is a lot more than just a all-of-a-sudden change of weather. As far as us woods boys are concerned—an’ the rest of you who make a livin’ off the woods payroll—this rain coming might as well be an atom bomb.” He forced himself to not look at Draeger. He licked his lips and went on. “This rain might as well be a tornado or an earthquake as far as us boys are concerned. And is liable to be just as tough to survive.” Don’t want to lay it on too thick, but they got to realize, goddammit . . . he’s got to realize! “You think about it a minute you’ll know what I mean.” He’s got to see this ain’t just one of these pipe-smoking parties like he usual sits in on, diddling in his notebook like he’s got all the goddam time in the world. “And you’ll see how come I been tryin’ to light a fire under you before it’s too late to survive.” The men all took a drink, to reinforce themselves against whatever event Evenwrite’s ominous statement suggested they might be too late to survive.