Chapter 84

 She hadn’t moved from the position I’d left her in, but her expression had changed to puzzlement and some concern for this nut next door who flea-hopped from room to room, from glib despondency to tongue-tied frustration. Safely separated by the wall, I found my cool returning. In another moment I would be able to go back in there and be as unruffled as Oscar Wilde at a tea. But as my cool came back, so did the sound of the motorboat. I barely had time to run back in with my book and point out a couple of poems she must read—“Be patient with Stevens; don’t force him; let him force you”—and make it back to my room before I heard those hard-heeled bare footsteps mounting the stairs again. And I lay awake for hours, hoping another phone call would give me that opportunity to be alone and unruffled with her. As it happened that opportunity, by my own doing, became less and less likely as the days passed and the scene at the house grew stickier, until it was finally apparent that it would only happen if I made it happen. “That chance is now at hand,” I wrote to Peters in my ledger, after gnawing another slight point on the nub of the pencil, and all I need do is screw my courage to the sticking point and take that chance. But still I hesitate. Is it courage that I lack? Is that the explanation for my warner’s WATCH OUT? In these days when a man’s courage hangs between his legs and can be read like a thermometer, do I hesitate going through with my plan because simple old masculinity doubts make me afraid to risk sticking my courage to the screwing point? I don’t know, in truth I just don’t know.... And in her room with Lee’s book of poetry Viv tries to decipher the sense of vagueness that bathes her like diffused light. 498 ken kesey “I don’t understand,” she says, frowning at the page. “I just don’t understand. . . .” And down the hill from the carrier Hank steps back from the sizzling pile of burning trash to listen to the sky. Another low-flying flock is coming over. He runs to get his gun, then stops, feeling foolish. What the hell. ...There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell seeing a goose through that smoke and rain. Let alone hitting one if you saw him. And the way things had been going since that meeting with the relatives—all the hassles by day and the honking by night—if I’d got that shotgun I might of just gone to throwing buckshot in the sky like a wild man, whether I saw anything or not. . . . The day after that meeting with the relatives Joe Ben was up bright and early getting some shells ready, because it “looked like his day for sure.” He was prying open the tops of some Super X magnums and pouring out the B-Bs and filling the shells back up with chunks of these pencil sinkers he’d cut up; long strips of lead about as big around as a pencil, all chopped into pieces about a fourth-inch long. I told him he was wasting his time today, as foggy as it was, but he said he might get a chance coming home tonight because the fog would be rained down by then and he figured we’d get to come home early because of all the help we’d have now that all the mill crew was gonna help out. He was right about the fog but wrong about getting done early; only about two-thirds of the crew showed up—the rest had just the most awful colds, they told me—so it was pitch-dark by the time we started back. That night a couple more phoned while we were eating to say they had fevers and couldn’t make it, and I told Joby it didn’t look like he could expect anything more than just morning hunting the next day either. He just looked up from his supper plate and shrugged and said it wasn’t gonna take more than morning hunting when the holy signs all lined up just right; when that time come along his old honker would be good as in the pot, he said, then leaned back over his plate and went to packing away the potatoes to fortify himself for the coming of that great lining-up of holy signs. (All through the meal Lee keeps sniffing and rubbing his eyes. Viv says they sometimes a great notion should take his temperature. He says he’s all right; this is just his way of expelling excess moisture, like a dog sweating from his nose. Before we go to bed Viv goes up and brings down the thermometer and gives it to him. He sits reading the paper with the thing stuck out of the corner of his mouth like a glass cigarette. Viv reads it and says he has about a degree, not anything fatal. ...He asks if he couldn’t have a glass of hot lemon tea, that his mother always gave him hot lemon tea when he was coming down with a cold. Viv goes and makes it. She brings it in to him and he sits by the stove in the living room sipping the stuff, reading her some poems from that book . . .) Apparently, the signs didn’t line up for Joe worth a darn the next day; it wasn’t only foggy as ever, but only about a third of the crew showed up this time. And it was worse still the next day, and the next, and Joby was about to give it all up when one night toward the end of that week there came another big blow and a lot of geese going over, and in the morning it was cold and clear enough you could look out the kitchen window and see car lights going by across the river. It was raining, but not too hard, and even in the dark you see up in the sky well enough to make out the grocery flag on the pole. “This is the morning, Hank, abso-lutely, you just wait and see if it ain’t. Everything is right; a storm, wind, lots of honking in the night, and now the mist is down. . . . Oh yeah, everything is right!” He was standing by the breakfast table oiling his gun, all excited (There’s something funny), while we waited for Viv to get the food on. (There’s something funny again.) “Oh you know it,” he rambled on, “I bet there’s some poor old lonely lost honker out there calling for his brother geese and just needing to be put out of his misery. . . .” (I turn in my chair and look around the kitchen. Viv is at the stove. Jan is slicing ham for sandwiches. The old man is out the back door somewhere, hawking and spitting. I cut in on Joe Ben’s ramblings: “Talkin’ about brother geese,” I say, “where’s the boy this morning?” There’s a minute nobody says anything. Something is funny. Then Joe Ben says, “Lee’ll be right along, I imagine; I hollered at him just a bit ago when I come past his room.” 500 ken kesey “He wasn’t up?” I say. “Well ...he was dressing,” Joe Ben says. “Well he’d better get to shagging it,” I say. “He’s gettin’ harder to get movin’ every morning.” “He told me,” Viv says, “that he didn’t feel too good this morning. . . .” “Now is that the truth? Joe an’ me out last night till midnight hammering on that foundation, an’ Lee don’t feel good! That’s something. . . .” Nobody says anything. Joe Ben comes and sits down and Viv comes over with the skillet. She takes the pancake turner and hikes some sausages on the plate for me. I go to eating these. It’s hot in the kitchen and the windows are all steamed shut. Joe Ben’s got his radio turned on. It’d be nice to just sit here and read the paper . . . pleasant. Lee comes into the kitchen just as I’m getting up from my plate. “Let’s move it, bub,” I tell him. He says all right and I go out to put on my boots. There’s something different happening but I don’t know what, or more there is something different going to happen and nobody knows for sure what. . . .) “Yes siree bob!” Joby said, clashed the pump of his old J. C. Higgins 12-gauge a time or two. “You know how I know it’s my day? Because I gave up coffee today, been intendin’ to a long time, Brother Walker says it’s a sin. So by gosh I quit, an’ I’m ready to get my goose.” Well, Joby was nearly right this once; it sure enough should’ve been his day to get him that honker. Everything was just as right as he said. I went outside to start the boat while Lee ate, and I saw why it was so clear. The rain and cold had sort of beat that mist down out of the sky. It was packed down on the river thick as snow and about four feet deep. I couldn’t even see the boat; I had to feel around to get it started. Lee and Joe come out and we headed out, traveling through that mist like the boat was submerged and our heads was periscopes. Joe was still beating his gums about what fat times he had ahead by now, not even about the goose he was going to get; as far as he was concerned that goose was good as in the pot, a settled issue, and he was going on to new glories. sometimes a great notion “Fat times ahead,” he was saying. “Oh yeah. Not many more trips up in this boat. What do you figure, Hank? Another day or so at Breakleg, then clean-up, and that’s her for ridin’ this boat up river in the cold and dark, you boys realize that? That one more day or so is the last of this, the last we’ll ever have to look at those stump-jungles? Few more days, then we got easy street at that state park, cuttin’ those big old easy sticks like we was tourists gatherin’ huckleberries.” I told him, “You’ll think gatherin’ huckleberries after about ten hours’ work out there twisting a screw jerk. Working that park with all the goddam restrictions they put on us’ll be just like going back a hundred years.” “Oh yeah, but,” he said, closing one eye and holding up his finger, “but at least there won’t be no more fightin’ that donkey; you got to admit not having to fight that donkey is gonna be a gas.” “I ain’t admitting anything is gonna be a gas until I try it out. What about you, bub?” Lee turned and gave me a flimsy sort of grin and said, “Not when the only advantage seems to be the elimination of a piece of modern machinery ...that doesn’t sound like much of a gas. ...” “Modern?” Joe whooped. “You ain’t had to ride that monster you call a ‘modern machine,’ Lee; that outfit was wore out and old when old Henry was still a boy! You ain’t looking at the bright side. Remember, ‘I had no shoes and complained till I saw a man griping about his feet.’ ” Lee shook his head. “Joe, if I didn’t have shoes and saw a basket case, I still wouldn’t have solved my own footwear problem. . . .” “No; no, that’s so; that wouldn’t solve your problems. . . .” He thought a second, then he brightened up: “But you got to admit seeing a basket case, it would distract you from it a little bit!” Lee laughed, giving up. “Joe, you are incorrigible, completely incorrigible. . . .” Joe said thank you to that and was so flustered at being so flattered he didn’t say anything else until we got to the mill. 502 ken kesey The fog around the mill was packed just as thick as it was at the house. It was lighter out now and we could see it better, and that mist looked more than ever like snow. I swung the boat in to about where I judged the dock to be, hoping there hadn’t been any change since I last saw the landing. Andy was standing there, alone and looking tired. He’d been standing guard at the mill every night since Evenwrite had tried to loose the booms. It’d been his idea. I’d given him a sleeping bag and a flashlight and the old eight-gauge goose cannon Henry’d ordered once from Mexico a long time back before everything under a ten-gauge was made illegal. Hell of a gun, used a shell about the size of a beer can and you had to pass the stock under your armpit and brace it against a tree or a rock to keep the recoil from breaking your shoulder; I’d told Andy why I gave that gun to him instead of a 30-30 or something easier handled, was that I didn’t expect him to kill anybody defending the place, to just fire that monster in the air if there was trouble and help would come running, probably all the way from the Pentagon with the racket it made. Andy caught the rope Joe pitched him and pulled us up to the dock. I thought at first he was looking so drug account of he wasn’t getting a good night’s rest in the sleeping bag, but then I saw it was something else. He was alone. “Hey,” I said, standing up in the boat. “What’s the story? Where’s Orland and his two boys? Lard-assing in the mill there out of the wet while they leave you to hold the boat for ’em?” “No,” he said. “What’d they do? Decide to ride up with John on the truck?” “Orland an’ the others ain’t coming to work today,” he said. He stood there holding onto that rope leading down into the fog to the boat, like a big old bashful kid hold of something he can’t understand. “I’m the only one going. And...” “And...?” I waited for him to get on with it. “Orland called to say him and his boys all got the Asian flu. He said a lot of folks in town got it, Floyd Evenwrite, and Howie Evans and—” “I don’t give a shit about Floyd Evenwrite and Howie Evans,” I told him. “What about our bunch? What about Little sometimes a great notion Lou? Did he call? And Big Lou? Shit fire, Orland’s boys; now wouldn’t that frost you? And what about John? He got the sour-mash flu, I imagine, an’ can’t even drive the truck up there?” “I don’t know,” Andy said. “I just heard the phone in the mill ring and I taken the messages. Orland said—” “What about Bob? I suppose he’s got the ingrown toenails or something. . . .” “I don’t know about what he’s got. I told him we still had a lot of logs to go to make that contract, but Orland said not to expect sick people to—” “Well shit fire,” I said. “That just about makes the lot of ’em, don’t it? First it’s Big Lou, then Collins, then that damned fiddlefooted brother-in-law of Orland’s who wasn’t worth a god-dam anyhow. Now Orland and his boys. I’m goddamned but I never thought they’d fade so fast with just a little rain and hard work.” And Lee said, “The thanes fly from us,” or some such crap. And Andy said, “It ain’t just the rain and hard work, Hank. You see, there’s a lot of folks in town saying they don’t like what’s—” “I don’t give a goddam who likes what and who don’t!” I told him, louder’n I’d aimed to. “And if the folks in town think this is gonna make me short on that contract, then they take me for a whole lot more fool than I am. Next time anybody calls in how sick they are by god just tell ’em that’s all right that’s just fine, because your old Uncle Hank made a mistake keeping count an’ we’ll make it just fine with the four or five of us.” Andy looked up. “I don’t see how,” he said. “We got this whole boom to fill an’ then two more.” “One more,” Joe Ben said, giving Andy a big wink. “Folks got to get up pretty early to get a jump on us. Long time ago me and Hank started slipping logs in that slough up behind the house at night, pulling a few at a time with the motorboat. Oh yeah, people got to get up pret-tee ear-lee!” Andy grinned, and I told him to get on in the boat. I could see he was pleased that I had that other boom hid, that we still had a chance to make our contract. Really pleased. And that got me 504 ken kesey to thinking just how many people wasn’t going to be the least bit pleased. A god-awful amount, I realized. This made me feel funny, thinking for the first time just how many there was didn’t want the contract made. I just sat there a minute, studying about it, looking out across the mist toward the anchor pilings up past the mill where the booms were snubbed. And then I got this goofy urge; it’s hard to explain, but all of a sudden I found myself wanting to see those booms again, wanting to see them so goddam much right then that I felt like I was going batty! There was a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards between us and those pilings, covered with mist like a big blanket of dirty snow. Underneath that blanket was the booms, better than four months backbreaking ass-bleeding labor, millions of board feet of lumber, thousands of logs out of sight under there, nudging and scraping and rubbing against each other as the river current moved past under them so they were making an actual sound above the motor and the rain...a kind of a surly, complaining murmur, like a big throng of people muttering to each other. I didn’t have any real need to check them logs. I told myself that. Even if they were covered with mist I still knew them damn near by heart. I’d watched them stand as a forest when I first took a drive up to see if I wanted to make a bid, seen them all thick and green, like a big piece of green herring-bone wool. I’d watched them mown from the sky. I’d bucked and chokered and yarded and loaded them. I’d heard the way the branding hammer sounded against them with a woody thock when I knocked a big crooked S into the end of each log; I’d heard them rumble off the truck into the water.... Still, listening to them out of sight there some way made me doubt what I knew. I wanted to grab that layer of mist by the edge and jerk it up for just a moment, like jerking a carpet up from the floor so you could see the pattern underneath. I wanted to look at them. For just a second. Like I maybe needed the sight to reassure me— not that they were still there—but that they were . . . what? Still as big as I remembered? Could be. Maybe I wanted to see that they hadn’t been gradually worn and eroded by the continual rubbing and grinding, down to the size of saplings and pile posts. sometimes a great notion Andy got himself settled. I shook myself to try to get shut of my foolishness and turned back to the motor. But just as I started to throttle the motor Joe Ben gave a hiss like a snake and grabbed me by the sleeve and pointed off up river. “There, Hank, there,” he whispered. “What’d I tell you?” I looked. A lone honker, separated by the storm just like Joe’d figured, was flying dead for us. Everybody froze. We watched him come, stretching his long black neck from side to side as he searched around him, flapping along, honking over and over the same question. “Guh-luke?” he would honk, then be still and listen a while before calling again. “Guh-luke?”... not exactly afraid, not the way I’ve heard other geese call when they were lost. Different. Almost human, the way he was asking it. “Guh-luke ...? Guh-luke ...?” It was a sound like ...I remember thinking ...a sound kind of like Joe’s little girl Squeaky made the time she come running in from the barn hollering that her special cat was in the bottom of the milk can drowned and where was everything? She wasn’t crying or carrying on, just hollering my cat got drowned where is everybody? She wouldn’t calm down till she’d gone all over the whole house and talked to everybody and seen everything. That was the same notion I got hearing that lost goose honking: that he wasn’t so much just asking where the lost flock was—he was wanting to know where the river was, and the bank, and everything hooked up with his life. Where is my world? he was wanting to know, and where the hell am I if I can’t locate it? He had lost his way and was out there flying the river, out of his head looking for it. He was trying to check around quick and get everything in its place, like Squeaky had needed to do when she’d lost her cat, and like me wanting to see them logs again. Only with me, I couldn’t figure what I thought I’d lost: no cats that I could think of, and I don’t know as I was missing a flock ...or ever even had a way. But I still knew the feeling. . . . While I was studying about this, I heard Joe whisper, “Meat in the pot,” and saw him reach down into the fog for the shotgun. (The black barrel of the gun comes up out of the mist. The goose doesn’t see us. He keeps coming.) I watched Joby run his finger down the muzzle, checking for a mud clog—an 506 ken kesey unconscious habit that anybody picks up after years of squatting in a muddy duck blind. He drew in his breath...(The goose swells closer to us. I move my face inside the rubber poncho hood to see if the kid is watching. He ain’t even turned toward the goose. He’s turned looking at my face. And he’s grinning.)...then, just as the goose comes within range, I said, “Forget it.” “What?” Joby said. His jaw dropped a foot. I said again, as casual as I could, “Forget it,” and gunned the motor out into midstream. The goose veered sharply overhead, making a slight whistling sound with his wings, he was so close. Poor Joe just sat there with his jaw hung open. I knew he’d be pretty disappointed—bagging a Canada honker is a pretty big deal; more buck deer are killed every year in Oregon than Canada geese, because geese don’t decoy worth beans and if you set out to slip up on a flock in a field you’re in for about a three-day crawl through the mud with the wily bastards always keeping just a hair out of shotgun range . . . pretty near the only chance you got is to luck onto one, and that happens about as much as lucking onto a pirate chest. So Joby had every right to be disappointed. Anybody would, if someone screwed up his first and maybe only chance for a honker. He sat there watching that big pearl-colored bird fading off into the sky till it was out of sight. Then he turned and just looked at me. “What’s the sense?” I said to him; I turned away from his look and watched the bow split the fog. “We couldn’t of located him in this crappy fog even if you did knock him down, could we now?” He still just sat there with his trap open, looking for all the world like Harpo Marx. “Well, Jesus H. Christ!” I said. “If I’d known you wanted to just kill a goose I wouldn’t of stopped you! But I thought I heard you say ‘bag’ one. If you’re just looking to kill something, maybe you’d like to go out on the jetty this weekend with the 30-06 and shoot some of the seals playing in the bay? Okay? Or dynamite some trout in the sloughs, maybe?” That got him. Les Gibbons used to dynamite the deep sloughs above our place and gather the fish in a boat. Once Joe and me skin-dived to the bottom of one of these holes after a sometimes a great notion blast, and there was dead trout piled up down there by the hundreds; only about one out of fifty floated up. So when I mentioned dynamiting fish, that really got him. He closed his mouth and looked sheepish. “I didn’t think, Hankus,” he said. “An’ I forgot how you hate to see a animal killed an’ lost.” I didn’t say anything and he added. “Especially the way you feel about the Canada goose race. I just didn’t follow your reasoning right off. I got all in a boil seeing him. Wasn’t thinking good. I understand now.” I left it at that, with him thinking he understood a reasoning that I could barely follow myself. How could I expect him to understand that my feeling toward the goose as a race was doing a slow but sure turnover—what with squadron after squadron of the bastards ruining my sleep—and that it was this one particular lost goose that I didn’t want shot because he sounded like he was asking Where is everything? Where is everything? ...how the hell could I expect poor rattleheaded Joby to understand that? In town the arrival of the Asian flu only served to bring the citizens more tightly together in their campaign: “Another cross to bear but if we just all stick together in the fight any cross comes along will surely be bearable.” Snuffling and coughing, they continued to stick together. Eyes rimmed with misery and backs bent beneath a whole truckload of crosses, they trudged to front doors of Stampers living in town and reminded wives to tell their husbands to let Hank Stamper know what folks thought about him trying to set himself up against friends and neighbors, against his very home town! “No man is a island, honey,” they reminded the wives; and the wives told the husbands, “No woman is going to stand for this sort of injustice, I don’t care if you do lose your Exmas bonus!” and the husbands phoned the house up the river to say the Asian flu made it impossible to come to work. And when all the Stamper wives had laid down the law, and all Stamper husbands in town had contracted the flu, then the citizens carried the battle to the enemy himself. “No sir, no man is a goddam island,” they let Hank know on the phone, 508 ken kesey “not you nor nobody!”—all hours of the night. Viv stopped answering the phone during the day (she had already stopped going into Wakonda to shop, and was even experiencing chilly stares when she went as far away as Florence); she even asked if they might not have their phone disconnected. Hank only grinned and replied, “What for? So’s all my friends and neighbors can say, ‘Stamper has had to shut his phone off; we must be getting to him’? Kitten, we don’t want to get our good friends an’ neighbors all het up over nothing, do we?” He had acted so amused and nonchalant about the whole business that Viv couldn’t help wondering if he actually meant it. Nothing seemed to get to him. He seemed more impervious than ever, even to that flu bug; he snuffled a little bit, naturally (he always snuffled a little bit, though, because of his broken nose), and sometimes he came home sounding hoarse (from hollering at the rest of the sick slackers, he told her in a joking boast), but he obviously wasn’t nearly as ill as the others. Everybody else in the house, from the baby all the way to the old man, was having stomach aches and lung congestion. Nothing serious—Lee got better and worse; Joe Ben took three aspirins when his sinuses hurt him, then swore off artificial medicines as soon as the headache let up enough for him to remember his church’s doctrine of faith-healing; Jan spent a night vomiting out the window to the dogs below...nothing serious, but everybody had been bitten deep enough by the bug going around to show a few symptoms. Not Hank. Hank just kept chugging along day after day without signs of a let-up. Like a machine. She couldn’t help wondering sometimes whether he was made out of flesh and blood and bones, like the rest of them, or out of workboot leather and Diesel fuel, and blackjack oak dipped in creosote. Viv wondered at Hank’s uncanny strength; the old man bragged about it every chance he had to get to town; even Lee had occasion to doubt the existence of the weakness that he was dedicated to prove, to his brother and himself: A further possibility, Peters, is that I may be holding back my Sunday punch because I am afraid that Hank will not be fazed by it. Thus far my belief in the iron man’s vulnerability is based only sometimes a great notion on a few uncertain glimpses of rust spots. What if these spots are the whole of his weakness? What if I had been wrong in my whole precept and he actually turns out to be invulnerable? It would be like working for years developing as ultimate a weapon as one could conceive, only to find that the target was completely unscathed by it. Such a prospect might give a fellow pause, don’t you think? In fact, it was Joe Ben, whose faith in Hank’s invulnerability had been a long-time joke, who was the first to glimpse for certain those spots of rust. He saw these spots in the way Hank brooded over his supper coffee, in the sharp way he spoke to Viv or the kids, in a dozen places. Joe tried to avert his gaze, and most of the time managed to smother his misgivings under surges of enthusiasm, but it was these same surges that began to gradually reveal to Hank the very misgivings Joe was trying to smother. They were all tired and edgy with overwork. By the end of that week there were only five left working: Hank and Joe, Andy, Lee, and, surprisingly, John. John was the only outsider relative left (Andy was never considered with the “outsider folks”; while he was a more distant relation than most, his absence from the job would have surprised everyone as much as Joe Ben’s would have), and Joe could see that John was beginning to get the itch to join the other defectors. The five of them had worked doggedly all that day, falling and cleaning up the few logs still standing in their spread, until they were numb with cold and fatigue. They had finished all the cutting and hauling; nothing was left but the clearing required by the Forest Service. Not the sort of work for a trucker, Joe knew, but he knew as well that Hank needed the help of everyone, including John. They were all standing near Hank at the spar tree, looking out across the slopes they had cut. It was already growing dark, the night drifting down with the rain. John made a circle to check his load, then mounted to the cab and waited. Joe watched Hank draw at the cigarette angling out of the corner of his mouth. “Take us most of tomorrow to doze the place clean and set 510 ken kesey the slash to burning,” Hank said. One eye was squinted against the cigarette’s looping smoke. “We’d of got to it today if we’d had one other man helpin’. That means we’re gonna be short a day an’ maybe have to work this weekend.” Joe watched the others. “Andy, you make it this weekend?” Hank asked while he continued to look down the slope. “I know that’ll be twelve days straight for you, without a let-up, but whatcha say?” The boy was leaning against the muddy side of the carrier, stubbing out a hole in the ground with the toe of his boot. He lifted a shoulder in a shrug and said without looking up, “I can make it.” “Good goin’.” Hank turned toward the log truck, where John sat looking straight ahead through the clicking wipers on the windshield. The smoke of John’s cigar rolled from the open window and up to mix with the flutter of exhaust. He was waiting for Hank to repeat his question. When Hank only looked at him he began to fidget with the choke knob, then finally blurted out, “Hank, look here: you don’t need me up here tomorrow for burnin’ slash. And I hate to chance the rig on this road more’n I have to, the way the bedrock’s washing loose.” The motor of the truck idled; a sleepy, restful sound; smoke rose from the stack to blend with the rain and oncoming night. Hank continued to watch John narrowly until he went on. “Blast it ...the way I see it you boys’ll be falling direct to the river at this state-park deal, without much use for a trucker.” He licked his lips. “So the way I see it . . . Thanksgiving on its way and all . . .” Hank waited until the man’s voice trailed to a stop. “Okay, John,” he said evenly. “I reckon we can get by. You go ahead an’ tie one on.” John was stung by this for a moment, then nodded and reached for the gear. “I might do just that.” Joe Ben climbed into the carrier and started the motor, wondering at Hank’s noncommittal acceptance of John’s desertion. Why hadn’t he pushed John more? They needed every man they could get, and Hank could have put a lot more squeeze on than that ...how come he didn’t? On the drive back down Joe opened his mouth sometimes a great notion a number of times to ask something about it, something funny to take the gloom off, but always stopped when he realized he couldn’t think of a funny thing at all. After supper Viv wanted to phone Orland and his family to ask how they felt. From behind his newspaper Hank said, “I guess not, Viv. I guess we’ll find out in good time.” “But I think we should find out now, Hank, in case . . .” “I don’t believe we better call,” he said. “That Asia flu is damned contagious; we wouldn’t want to pick up somethin’ over the phone from Orland.” He gave a short laugh and went back to his paper. Viv wasn’t ready to drop it. “Hank. Honey, we should know. There’s the kids, and Janice. And Lee had that temperature last night and tonight he had to lie right down after supper, so I know he doesn’t feel so good—” “Lee still doesn’t feel so good, huh? Along with Orland? And Big and Little Lou and the rest? Doggone, sounds like a epidemic.” She ignored his sarcasm. “And I think we should find out from Olivia what the symptoms are.” Joe was on the couch, helping Jan get the kids in pajamas. He watched Hank put down the paper. “You want to know what the symptoms are? Hell, I can tell you what they are: the symptoms are clear as glass. First, see, it rains. Then it gets a little chilly. Then it gets muddy and tough goin’ on the hills. Then one morning you get to thinking how much nicer it’d be layin’ in bed all day with your finger up your ass instead of goin’ out in the goddam woods workin’ yourself punchy! Those are the symptoms, if you want to know. In Orland’s case I got a notion there’s probably some special complications, like living next door to Floyd Evenwrite, but as far as just the usual symptoms go, you can’t miss ’em.” “What about a temperature? Don’t you think a three-degree fever means something?” He laughed and picked up the paper again. “What I think don’t means beans, so we’ll just leave that out. I mean I could think all sorts of stuff; in the Marines I used to think maybe the guys who got put on sick call by rubbin’ a thermometer on their 512 ken kesey pant leg wasn’t so sick as they’d like you to believe, but I couldn’t be sure of that. So let’s just forget what I think and I’ll tell you what I know. I know we ain’t calling Orland; I know I’m going up to the bedroom to finish the paper if you think I can make it without catching something in the drafty hall; and then I know—shit, never mind.” He rolled his paper into a tight club and started for the door; at the stairwell he stopped and turned and pointed it back at the table.