Chapter 86

He scrambled after the spinning aluminum hat and caught it before it hit the ground. He came panting back to where Hank stood grinning. “Hot dog and man alive,” he exclaimed studying the swinging trees to cover the flush of embarrassment brought on by the open fondness of Hank’s grin, “she is a windy one tonight, friend; oh yeah.” “Not as windy as some,” Hank judged, telling himself that as winds and friends went, all in all, a man could do a whole lot worse than old Joby and the storms he blew. A whole hell of a lot worse. Because even when he was as obvious as a forty-milean-hour gale you still couldn’t help wanting to go along with him. Most people, when they tried to cheer you up, didn’t make fools out of themselves; they could be a lot more subtle about it than Joe could with his prancing and hollering, but they couldn’t be nearly as successful. I think this was because he didn’t try to be subtle; he didn’t care if he made a fool out of himself, just so long as he made you happy with the fool. And as we hurried around, buttoning up the show for the night, I was so tickled at him working to improve my mood that I clean forgot for a while what’d caused the mood in the first place. Right up to when we headed up to the crummy I couldn’t remember (He’s sitting there awake; I tell him to scoot over...); then I heard a flock of geese off down country and toward the 528 ken kesey town and I remembered just exactly what was bugging me (I ask him what he’d been doin’ to pass the day. He says writing. I ask if it was more poetry and he looks at me like he doesn’t have the vaguest inkling what I’m talking about), because hearing them geese is just like the phone ringing; even with the wire tore out it’s still the same yammering, the same crazy pestering and wheedling, even if I can’t make out the words. And hearing the geese, and thinking about the phone wire being tore out...that screwy phone call from the night before finally came back to me. It had been dangling just out of my memory’s line of vision ever since last night, like one of those dreams when you can remember the feeling but not the dream. I started the crummy and headed off to the boat at the bottom of the hill, trying to get the memory straight. The whole conversation started coming back to me, clear as a bell; I still wasn’t sure right then whether it had really happened or was just a dream, but, real or a dream, I could remember it damn near word for word. It was from Willard Eggleston, the little gink who used to run the laundry. He was all keyed up and excited and so screwy-sounding I thought at first he was actually drunk. I was still about nine-tenths asleep and he was trying to tell me some story about him and the colored girl that used to work for him, and about their child—this was what made me think he was drunk—about the child the two of them had had. I just listened for a while, polite, like I did with the other calls, but after he rambled on long enough I began to see this wasn’t like the others; I began to see he wasn’t just calling to give me a hard time, that there was something else on his mind behind all of his rambling and roaming talk. I let him go on; pretty soon he drew a long breath and said, “That’s the story, Mr. Stamper; just like it happened. Every bit the truth, I don’t care what you think.” I said, “All right, Willard, I’ll go along with you, but—” “Every word of it the Lord’s pure truth. I know, I personally know, so I don’t care if you go along with me or not—” “All right, all right; but you had more on your mind when you called than telling me how proud you are to be able to sire yourself a pickaninny—” “A boy, Mr. Stamper, a son! and not sometimes a great notion just sire him; I was able to pay for his way in the world like a man should for his son—” “Okay, have it your way: a son, but—” “—until you went and made it impossible for a fellow to make profit enough to pay for the overhead—” “I might hafta be showed just exactly how I did that, Willard, but for the sake of argument—” “You’ve all but bankrupted the whole town;do you need to be showed that?” “All I need is just for you to get on around to what you had on your mind when—” “I’m doing exactly that, Mr. Stamper—” “—because there’s a lot of other anonymous callers these days waitin’ their turn at me; I don’t want to tie up the line too long with one when so many—” “I am not anonymous, Mr. Stamper; I want you to be sure of that; this is Eggleston, Willard—” “Eggleston; all right, Willard, now just what is it you had to tell me—other’n your secret loves—at, ah, twelve-twenty-two in the morning?” “Just this, Mr. Stamper: I’m on my way this very moment to kill myself. Ah? No wise comment? This wasn’t what you expected, I’ll bet? Not from Willard Eggleston, I’ll bet? But it’s as true as I’m standing here. You’ll see. No, don’t try to stop me. And don’t try to phone the police, because they couldn’t reach the place before I do anyway, and if you phoned they would know I phoned you, wouldn’t they? And that I phoned to tell you it was your fault that I was forced into—” “Forced? Willard, now listen—” “Yes, forced, Mr. Stamper. You see, I have a very large policy with double indemnity in case of violent death, naming as beneficiary my son. Of course, until he’s twenty-one it will—” “Willard, those companies don’t pay on suicide!” “That’s why I can’t have you telling anyone, Mr. Stamper. You see now? I am dying for my son. I’ve arranged everything to look like an accident. But if you were to—” “Willard, you know what I think?” “—to tell anyone about this phone call then I would have died in vain, wouldn’t that be true? And your guilt would then be doubled—” “I think that you been seeing too many of your own movies.” “No, Mr. Stamper! You wait! I know you people think that I’m totally without courage, that I’m just ‘that spineless Willard Eggleston.’ But you’ll see. Oh yes. And don’t bother trying to stop me, my mind is made up.” “I ain’t trying to stop you from anything, Willard.” “You’ll see tomorrow; oh yes, you’ll see 530 ken kesey what kind of spine—” “I ain’t trying to stop anybody from anything, but you know, that looks to me like a pretty poor excuse for spine as far as I’m concerned—” “It’s no use trying to talk me out of it.” “What I’d call a man with spine is a man able to pay for his kid by living for him, no matter how hard it comes—” “I’m sorry, sorry, but you’re just wasting your breath.” “—not by dying for him. That’s a lot of crap, Willard, dying for somebody.” “Just whistling at the wind, Mr. Stamper.” “That’s the one thing that everybody in the world can do, ain’t it, Willard? is die . . . living is the hassle.” “No use, Mr. Stamper, not the slightest. I’ve made my decision.” “Well, good luck, then, Willard. . . .” “There’s no way anyone can—what” “I said ‘Good luck.’ ” “Good luck? Good luck? Then you don’t believe I’m going to do it!” “Yeah ...I think I do; I think I probably do. But I’m tired, and not thinking too sharp, and ‘good luck’ is about the best I can offer.” “The best you can offer? Good luck? To someone who—” “Christ almighty, Willard; you want me to read you a page of scripture or something? ‘Good luck’ seems as good as anything in your case; it’s better than ‘Have fun.’ Or ‘Bon voyage.’ Or ‘Sweet dreams.’ Or just plain old ‘Good-by.’ Let’s leave it like that, Willard: Good luck, and I’ll toss in the good-by for good measure . . . okeydoke?” “But I haven’t—” “I got to try to get some sleep, Willard. So, with all my heart, good luck—” “—completely finished telling—” “—and good-by.” “Stamper!” Willard hears the phone buzz in his ear. “Wait, please. . . .” He stands in the booth, surrounded by his three dimly lit reflections, listening to that electric hum. This isn’t the way he planned it; not at all. He wonders if he should call back, make the man understand! But he knows calling back won’t do any good because the man obviously does believe his story, whether he understands completely or not. Yes. There is every indication that he believes him. But . . . no evidence at all that he was concerned; not even the slightest! Willard returns the receiver back to its black cradle. The phone thanks him for his dime with a polite clatter as it drops the coin from the points into the box. Willard stares at the phone for a long time, not thinking of anything at all; until his sometimes a great notion breathing fogs the images from the glass walls and his feet and calves go to sleep. Back in his car he starts the motor and turns up Necanicum Street toward the coastal highway, driving slowly through the twisting rain. The enthusiasm he felt at his house is all but gone. The anticipation dampened, the adventure of the night blunted. By that man’s cruel indifference. How could the devil not care? How could he have the heart to not care even the slightest? How could he have the right! He reaches the highway and turns north, traveling along the edge of the dunes in a gradual rise toward the palisades where the Wakonda lighthouse stirs the thickening sky. The muffled cadence of the surf to his left annoys him and he turns on the radio to drown it out, but it is too late to pick up local stations and the terrain is becoming too hilly to pick up Eugene or Portland; he switches it off. He continues to rise, following the flicker of white guardposts that line the cliff side of the highway; he is too high now to hear the surf, but a feeling of annoyance continues to nag at him. . . . That Hank Stamper and his talk about spine; what kind of way is that for a man to react to such a desperate phone call, just brushing it off with a good luck and good-by? . . . What gave him the right? By the time he reaches the stone-fenced view point near the top his chin is quivering, and by the time he is approaching the turn the hot-rod crowd calls Bustass Curve, his whole body is quaking with grim outrage. He drives on past the turn. He has half a mind to go back and make another call, by golly! Even if the man doesn’t understand completely, he has no right to be so heartless. Not when he is so much to blame! him and the rest of that bunch. No! No, he certainly does not! Willard pulls into the drive that leads off to the lighthouse, and backs out, turning around. Fuming with indignation, he heads back toward town. No, by golly; no right! Hank Stamper is no better than anybody else! I have every bit as much spine as he does! And I will prove it! To him! And Jelly! And everybody! Yes I will! And I’ll do everything possible to help drag him off his high horse! Yes I will! I promise, I swear I will . . . And, hissing down from the palisades along the wet, winding 532 ken kesey pavement, swollen with anger and determination and life, Willard goes into a slide on the very turn he had picked weeks before, and unintentionally keeps both his appointment and his promise. . . . “Oh...heard tell over the news, I did...you recollect that puny little drink of water owned the laundry till he took over the picture show a year or so back? Willard Eggleston? Well sir, they scraped his carcass offn the rocks out by Wakonda Head this mornin’. Slammed through the guard rail, he did, sometime last night.” The old man followed this piece of information with a loud belch and returned to the less spectacular gossip about the townspeople’s trials and tribulations. He hadn’t expected any of us to pay the news much attention; the man was too vague an entity to concern any of us. Even Joe, who usually could be counted on for elaboration about any of the local citizenry, admitted that he knew about as much about the unfortunate carcass as I did: that the little man sold tickets to the movies and had displayed about as much life as did an arcade fortune-telling dummy in his little glass case. Nobody knew much about him. . . . Yet the news of this lifeless thing’s death doubled Brother Hank over like a cannonball to the stomach, producing sudden coughing and a sheet-white face. Joe’s immediate diagnosis was “Bone in the throat! Bone stuck in the throat!” and he was out of the chair like a shot and banging away at Hank’s back before any of the rest of us even had time to suggest a cure. The old man’s opinion was “Leave off poundin’ on him, for god’s sake . . . all he’s doin’ is gettin’ set to sneeze”—and he held his snuff can in front of Hank’s mouth as though the snuff might coax the reluctant sneeze forth with its aroma. Hank pushed both Joe and the can away. “Damn!” he declared. “I’m not trying to choke or sneeze, neither one! I’m all right. I just had a tinge in my back is all, but Joe beat it to death.” “Are you sure you’re all right?” Viv asked. “What do you mean, a tinge?” “Yes, I’m sure.” He insisted he was perfectly all right and, sometimes a great notion much to my disappointment, neglected to answer her second question (I would have enjoyed knowing what a “tinge” was myself ), choosing instead to get up from the table and stride across to the refrigerator. “Don’t we have a can of cold beer on the place?” “Don’t have a can of no kind of beer.” The old man shook his head. “Not beer, wine, nor whisky, an’ I’m drastic low on snuff, by god, if you want to hear some real tragic news.” “What’s the matter? I thought we had a standin’ order at Stokes’s?” “I guess you ain’t heard,” Jan said. “Henry’s old friend Stokes has cut us off. Stopped delivery.” “Friend? That ol’ spook? Shoot, I ain’t no more friend to that—” “Stopped delivery? How come?” “He said it was because there wasn’t any other stops out this way for his delivery truck to make,” Jan answered from beneath her eyelids. “But the real reason is—” Hank slammed the refrigerator door. “Yeah; his real reason is . . .” He picked up the clock from the stove and looked at it; everyone waited for him to go on; even the kids had stoped eating and were exchanging the scared glances kids exchange when the big folks is actin’ funny. But Hank decided not to go into real reasons: “I think I’ll go on up and hit the sack,” he said, putting the clock back. “An’ miss Wells Fargo?” Squeaky asked incredulously, lifting an eyebrow. “You don’t ever miss Wells Fargo, Hank.” “Dale Robertson’ll have to handle Wells Fargo without me tonight, Squeaks.” The little girl pursed her lips and lifted both eyebrows at that; oh boy, the big folks was really actin’ funny tonight. Before he left the kitchen Viv hurried across to feel his forehead, but he said all he needed was a decent night’s little sleep without phone calls, not a head rub, and clumped on up the stairs in his boots. Viv looked after him, worried and wordless. And her worry and wordlessness worried me. Especially the wordlessness, in view of Hank’s footwear: it was as unusual for cork boots to pass the first step without Viv’s calling out, 534 ken kesey “Boots,” as it was for Dale Robertson to ride the Wells Fargo stage without Hank sitting glued to the TV set with Squeaky on his lap. I couldn’t understand my brother’s funny actin’ any more than Squeaky could (I did know, however, that it was no more brought on by a mere lack of sleep than by bone in the throat; his reaction to the theater-owner’s death was so classic a reaction to bad news that he might have taught Macduff a thing or two) but I was very quick to pick up on Viv’s concern. “He’s more a man than I am,” I said with grudging good nature, “because I certainly could use a head rub.” She seemed not to hear. “Yes. I admire the man his health. . . .” I stood up, groaning. “He was able to make it up those stairs, at least.” “You going up to bed too, Lee?” she asked, turning at last to me. “Going to attempt it. Everybody wish me luck.” She was looking back at the stairwell again. “I’ll drop around to your room in a bit,” she said absently, and added, “I wish I could find that thermometer.” So, with mysterious WATCH OUT still echoing in my head, I vowed that the time had come. Tomorrow was V-day, without fail. And if I could not understand the qualms I felt, I could nevertheless still understand that a dilution of Viv’s concern was in the offing unless I moved quickly. I could still understand that if one is to alter iron at all he’d best strike while that iron is still hot. I didn’t need a thermometer for that. . . . The old house is noisy even without television. The children talk in whispers, and the rain outside seems to whisper back, but the geese call full-throated and brazen as Hank lies listening. ...(I don’t even bring a paper to read. I just hop right in the sack. I’m about asleep when I hear the kid come up and go on down to his room. He’s coughing a little, sounds about as real as the cough Boney Stokes been putting on thirty years. I listen to see if anybody else comes up, but there’s a flock goes so loud I can’t hear. Thousands and thousands and thousands. Flying round and round and round the house. Thousands and thousands and thousands. Banging against the roof, crashing sometimes a great notion through the walls till the house is full of them gray feathers beaks at my ear hard and hollering at me beating chest and neck and face hard whacking wings of thousands and thousands louder than—) I woke up, feeling like something was haywire. The house was dark and quiet and at the foot of the bed the glow-dial clock said it was about half past one. I laid there, trying to figure what had woke me. The wind was blowing outside, crashing rain against the window so hard it sounded every once in a while like that old river out there was rising up in the dark and striking at the house like a big swaying snake of water. But that wasn’t what woke me; if I was woke up by every little wind kicking against the window I would of died of exhaustion years ago. Looking back, it’s easy to figure what it was: the geese had all shut up. There wasn’t a sound, not a hoot nor a honk. And the hole left in the night by their honking was like a big roaring vacuum; enough to wake anybody. But at the time I didn’t realize that. . . . I slid out of bed, taking it real easy to keep from waking Viv, and I got hold of the six-cell light I keep in the room. The way the weather was carrying on out there I decided I maybe ought to have a look at the foundation, seeing as I hadn’t checked before going to bed. I walked over to the window and put my face up near the glass and shined the light off in the direction of the bank. I don’t know why. Laziness, I reckon. Because I knew that even on a clear day it was next to impossible to see the foundation from that window on account of the hedge. But I reckon I was just punchy enough to hope this time it would be different and I would see the bank and it would be fine. . . . Out past the glass there seemed to be nothing but rain being whipped around in long filmy sheets, like the banners of the wind. I was just standing there, stroking the beam of that light back and forth, still about half sacked-out, when all of a sudden I see out yonder a face! A human face! floating out there on the rain, wide-eyed, wild-haired, with a mouth twisted in horror like a thing been trapped outside in the storm for centuries! I don’t know how long I stared at it—maybe five seconds or 536 ken kesey five minutes—before I gave a yell and jumped back from the window. And saw the face mimic my actions. Oh! Oh for chrissakes . . . It’s just a reflection, nothing but a reflection. . . . But so help me god, it was about the wildest thing I ever had happen to me; the worst scare I ever had in my life. Worse than in Korea. Worse even than the time I seen the tree falling at me and I tripped right underneath it and fell next to a stump and the tree hit that stump like a two-ton maul driving a stake; the stump was pounded a good six inches into the ground but it protected me so I didn’t suffer no more than the loss of my breakfast. That particular incident shook me so bad I laid there without moving for a good ten minutes, but I tell you so help me god, that wasn’t nowhere near the scare I got from that reflection. I heard Viv hustle around behind me. “What is it, honey?” “Nothing,” I told her. “Nothing. I just thought for a minute there the bogey man was after me.” I laughed a little. “Thought the old boy had come for my ass at last. I looked out the window to check the foundation, and there the sonofabitch was, face looking like death warmed over.” I laughed again, and finally turned from the window and walked to sit on the edge of the bed beside her. “Yessiree, a regular fiend in the night. See him yonder?” I shined the light up toward my face again so’s Viv could see the reflection for herself, and made a face at her in the window. We both laughed, and she reached out to take my arm and hold it against her cheek, the way she used to do when she was pregnant. “You were tossing and turning so; did you finally get to sleep?” “Yeah. I guess them geese finally give up tryin’ to get in.” “What woke you, the storm?” “Yeah. The rain woke me, I imagine. The wind. She’s walkin’ and talkin’ out there tonight. Dang. I bet that river’s comin’ up, too. Well, you know what that means . . .” “You’re not going down to check, are you? It’s not that bad. It’s just blowing a lot. It couldn’t have come up so much since you checked after supper.” sometimes a great notion “Yeah . . . except I didn’t check tonight after supper, remember? I had a bone in my throat.” “But it was all right when you came home from work; that was just before supper....” “I don’t know,” I told her. “I should go check. It’d be safest.” “Honey, don’t,” she said and squeezed my arm. “Yep, one hell of a scare,” I said, shaking my head. “Most like it was the dream had a lot to do with it; getting me ripe for a scare, sort of. I’d been dreaming again that college dream again, you know? Only this time the reason I quit wasn’t because I was just too duncy to hack it, but because Ma’d died. I come home from school and found the old lady dead, like the time when I was a kid. It happened just like it really did: I found her bent nearly double, with her face in the launder tray. And when I touched her she tipped sideways and banged to the floor, still bent, like she was frozen bent, like a piece of a root. ‘Probably a stroke,’ was what Dr. Layton said. ‘Probably suffered a stroke while she was washing and fell in the water, drown before she could come to.’ Hmm. . . . Only in this dream I’m not a kid; I’m twenty or so. Hmm. . . .” I thought about it a minute, then asked Viv, “What you suppose, Doctor; am I completely schitzish?” “You’re completely nuts. Get under the covers. . . .” “Funny, ain’t it ...the geese hushing up all at once. I almost think that’s what woke me.” Looking back, I know damn well that’s what woke me. “That or the rain knocking to remind me I ain’t checked the foundation tonight . . .” Looking back, a guy can always pick him out some topnotch reasons to explain what happened. He can say the reason he woke up like he did was because the geese hushed; and the reason that reflection spooked him so was the dream he’d been having leaving him in a kind of spooky frame of mind... (I sit there on the bed, listening to the rain. I can feel her cheek pushed up against my bicep, all warm and smooth, and her hair falling down in my lap. “I’m sure it’s all right, honey,” she says. “What’s that?” I say. “The foundation,” she says. . . .) A guy can even look back and see that the thing that happened 538 ken kesey the next day at work was because of them dreams and reasons, along with thinking about that nut Willard Eggleston, and with all that week working so hard and not sleep enough when I got home...he can look back and say there was the why of it . . . (I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I say. “I know I ought to go down there and check, just run a light over the waterline to see how things are...but oh lord god,” I say, “how I hate the thought of pulling on a pair of ice-cold boots and go slopping out in that soup . . .”) Even that flu bug that was going the rounds, a fellow could add that on, looking back . . . (I reach over for my trousers off the back of the hard chair. “Especially,” I say, “the way my kidneys are giving me hell. . . .” “Your kidneys?” she says. “Yeah, you remember, they used to bother me some just after we was married; Layton said it was from riding all the way across the country on the cycle with no support on; floating kidney or something was what he called it. Hadn’t troubled me none for the last couple years. Till today. I skidded offn a peeled one and whanged hell outa my rear end and back—” “Oh,” she says, “bad? Let me look.” She flicks on the bed light. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “Sure,” she says. “Sure, it’s always okay with you.” She sits up and gets hold of the scruff of my hair and pulls me back over on the bed. “Now roll over to your stomach and let me look.”) Yeah, a fellow can look back and add up all the reasons and say, “Well, it ain’t really so hard to figure how come I was so punchy and so logy, and so careless out working the state park the next day, what with all the hassles banging at me so long; no, not really so hard...” (She pulls up my undershirt. “Hon-ey! . . . it’s all raw.” “Yeah,” I say into the covers, “but nothin’ to fuss over. Nothing you can do with a bruised butt anyhow but pee blood for a few days while it heals. I tell you, though: you might see can you unravel some of the kinks in my shoulders while you got me here...okeedoke?”) But just the same, being able to look back and give reasons and all that still don’t do much toward making a man proud of what happened because of them reasons. Not if he can look sometimes a great notion back as well and see how he could have kept it from—no, not could; look back and see how he by god should have kept it from happening. There’s shames a man can never reason away, though he looks back and piles up reasons over them forty dozen deep. And maybe those are the shames a man never should reason away . . . (She gets up and goes to the dresser for something and switches on the electric heater on her way back. She’s wearing the nightgown with the one broken strap. I smell that she’s got the analgesic before it touches my back. “Boy,” I say, “that’s all right. I sure didn’t realize how knotted up I was.” She hums along with the electric heater for a while, then commences to sing in just this least little whisper possible. “Redbird in a sycamore tree-ee, singing out his song,” she sings. “Big black snake crawls up that tree and swallows that poor boy whole.” “That’s nice,” I tell her. “Dang, that’s nice. . . .” She rubs round and around and around; and it is nice, it’s very nice . . .) Hank breathes deeply, his lips damp against the back of his forearm as he lies on his stomach. The hands slither over him like a warm and fragrant oil. The heater beside the bed purrs pleasantly, glowing at him from across the room in a deep orange spiral. Viv sings: “Bluejay pulled a four-horse plow Sparrow why not you-oo? ’Cause my legs is little an’ long An’ they might get broke in two.” He rolls to his back. In thick, warm oil. And reaches his maimed hand languorously up to take the dangling strap and pull her down toward him . . . Wild geese flying through the air Through the sky of blue-oo... The rain strikes against the window and draws back and strikes again without effect. The wind strums the four insulated power lines that swoop over the river to the house, making the 540 ken kesey house hum in deep response. Hank falls asleep with the lamp still burning and the heater still purring, and the slim liquid hands once again flowing warmly across his back . . . They’re now a-floating where the south sun glows So why not me and you. . . . Sometimes—after futile all-nights—deserts fill my workhouse and smoking sand gets in my eyes . . . and I must split the swollen cabin to check the dawn, to find: the creek still parties with the moon ...the thrusting pine and whippoorwills still celebrate the sun. It generally works, and things are cool, but sometimes— after cutting out—nothing out there happens but the night. And those days were best forgotten. In the morning Lee refused absolutely to rise from bed; there would be no carrier to sleep the day away in at the new grounds, and he was damned if he’d get out of the house just to sit like a mudflat Indian under a rubber poncho, frustrated and frozen, while the rain slowly washed the remaining shreds of his life downhill into the river. He was determined to remain firmly in bed; no amount of persuasion on Joe Ben’s part was going to work this morning. “Lee, boy, think of this.” Joe raised a finger significantly. “You don’t even have to ride the boat up river this time. We’re taking the pick-up all the way to the job.” Then the finger began to jab, icy and insistent— “Come on. Hop up; get up now—” “What?” I was shaken from warm dreams of victory by that cold little jab of reality. “What? Get up? Are you serious, Joe?” “Certainly,” he told me seriously, then launched a new sales campaign. Through a scrim of sleepy I saw Joe Ben’s fanatic eyes crackling green at me from their orange rims. A happy Caliban. He was offering me some kind of nice little excursion in the pickup. I half listened, sitting up and reaching for another handful of aspirins from the dish beside my bed. All night long I had been chewing them like salted peanuts to foil any attempt a thermometer might make to reveal my actual sickness. 542 ken kesey “Josephus,” I interrupted, “a ride in the pick-up somehow just does not compete with the ride I’m now taking. Have a handful of aspirin. Get a nice buzz on.” I leaned back and pulled the covers over my head, remembering that this was the day I had chosen for my assault, for the final step in my plans. To stay home. With the remembering, excitement began to run through me, but I managed to keep my voice appropriately weak and muffled. . . . “No, Joe. No no no, I’m sick sick sick”—and at the same time allow just enough of an edge of malicious amusement show to let Joe know better. I reasoned that Brother Hank had sent him on this mission to my bedroom, for I was positive that Hank too understood the importance of this day. Everything had led up to it. It could not be denied. At long last it was inevitable that I would have to spend the day home from work...alone... except for the old man, who slept most of the mornings and sometimes a good part of the afternoons if he didn’t go into town, and for Viv. The thought of my brother’s anxiety lent a new dimension to my undercover excitement, as well as a glow to my frozen extremities. “Forget it, Joe. No. I’m not going.” I burrowed deeper. “But Lee, boy, you might be needed!” “Joe, stop, you’re getting my rear cold. Besides”—I raised an edge of the sheet to eye him meaningfully—“just why is it that my company is so important? Needed? I don’t recall being needed before. Why now, Joe? Why now does poor Hank feel it necessary to have me continually in sight? Is he afraid to leave me alone? Some harm come to me, perhaps?” “What are you talking, poor Hank?” He jerked away my quilt; “Hank don’t have nothing to do with my comin’ up here; what’s wrong with you? Hank don’t give a snap one way or the other. No sir! I came up here thinking you’d be interested—as a scholar—interested in the way logging was one time performed. History, man, yeah, history right out there! Come on with us, what do you say?” I laughed and struggled to repossess the quilt from Joe. “Joe, tell Hank that as far as history goes, that I—as a scholar—don’t give a snap one way or the other myself. Night-night.” And drew my head back into the warm darkness, pretending to sleep . . . sometimes a great notion Joe Ben turned and walked away from Lee, scratching the tip of his nose with a broken nail. Out in the hall he saw Viv coming out of old Henry’s bedroom. His face brightened and he took her hand. “Viv, honeybun, I—we all—we need you to do a thing for us! Need it real bad. The old boy up and around? He was gonna give us last-minute advice on handlogging. Oh yeah. Anyway. Look, we need somebody to run us up to the job in the pick-up and then get back to town and get a set of cotter pins soon’s the stores open. Need ’em bad, honeybun. Now you been close to Leland and all . . . also! I think the boy should drop in on Doctor Layton. I don’t like the sound of that throat.” She smiled at him. “You’re one to talk about the way a throat sounds.” Joe’s voice would frighten a bear. “Me? The trouble is—didn’t I ever tell you this?—the doctor didn’t beat all the phlegm outa me when I was born. It ain’t a sickness with me. I’m too lovable to be sick. But what do you think about Lee?” “I don’t know, Joe,” she answered. He went on talking and she waited to see what he was getting at. Viv knew when Joe Ben was rearranging the truth to his own ends; everyone generally knew except Joe. Even when the reasons behind his rearrangements were obscure, people usually went along with Joe because they had learned that in the end his reasons were always unselfish. When she saw he had finished his jittery outburst, Viv nodded and agreed to talk with Lee, though she was still in the dark about his motives. Frowning, her slim light brows drawn together, she went to Lee’s room and knocked on the door. “Lee?” Thump thump thump. “Who’s there?” I mumbled from beneath my quilt. “Go away.” Hank will now have to try himself, I thought, since Joe has failed, and maybe get angry enough at my malingering to lose his cool. Thump thump? The door opened and I steeled myself. WATCH OUT. Zero hour. If he did lose his cool the game would be mine. He was approaching the bait once more; the trap lay in readiness. All he needed to do was get a little angry, just enough to poke the trigger (my nose, I hoped; please 544 ken kesey my nose and not my lovely teeth, after all those years of braces and agony having them straightened). I would squeal in terror. Viv would rush to my aid, defending me against the cad, soothing my poor nose as he fumed with frustration ...and the game would be mine, nothing left for me but to take her away. So imagine my shock when I saw, instead of Hank, it was Viv who lifted that quilt to peek in. “Morning,” she piped. “No,” I groaned. She was insistent. “Morning, Lee; up up up.” “Can’t,” I groaned again, but she said I must get up. To go to town. She told me she would worry unless I went to see a doctor about my throat and the swollen glands in my neck. “So up, Lee; I don’t plan to take no or can’t for an answer. Get some warm clothes on while I tell Hank to wait”—and left before I could protest further. Puzzled, I managed to drag myself from the warm bed and shuffle down to another morose breakfast in the steamy kitchen. The tinny music of Joe’s radio only emphasized the silence. I ate slowly, curious, completely at a loss to understand her insistence on medical attention. Did she also object to my being left behind? Could she be worried about being alone with one so obviously harmless? Impossible. I ruminated slyly over my oatmeal and was right on the verge of making crafty alterations in my plans—Viv could drive me in; my fever, you know, feeling a bit giddy—when a second unforeseen event turned up to further complicate matters. Old Henry, all decked out in his going-t’-town best, came rumbling down the steps, hawking terrific hornlike blasts from an early-morning larynx as he struggled to pull on a heavy sheepskin-lined parka. ...“Here we go, bullies, here we go.” I sighed. It was going to be that sort of day.... “Yep, here we go. Today we really whup ’er, boys! Hm. Look at the rain. Fine-looking weather. Goddam, looks almost like you was aimin’ to run off without me.” They all turned from the table to watch the old man work to pull on the parka; when he turned they saw he had removed his arm cast.. . . “Henry,” Viv, she says to me when she sees. “Oh, Henry.” She’s standing at the table, about to give Leland some sausage, sometimes a great notion when she points at my wrist with the fork. “All right,” she says. “What did you do with it?” “Goddam thing came off whilst I slept, if you got to know,” I tell her. “So when I heard you talking I thought to myself: Henry, you better ride into that doctor with Leland to see about should you maybe take the one off your leg.” I knocked agin the pant leg with my knuckles to show them how holler it sounds. “Hear that? I ain’t sure but the damn leg rotted clean away in there. So I’m goin’ along, if nobody minds too much.” “Okay,” Hank, he says. “Let’s get with it. We ought to make it there right at daylight.” Joe Ben, he rides in the back of the pick-up with the equipment. Hank, he drives. Beside Hank, Leland, he sits, nodding with his eyes closed, and next to the door I sit, trying to get squirmed around to some comfortable position for the goddam booging plaster leg. On the ride up to the new show site I try to give the boys some notion of what to expect up there today. Explaining as much as I can about handlogging, about this and that, about a man really oughten to be cutting in this wind and rain but since you can’t get around it then you go to more’n ever pay attention to the drift of the rain, to the gusts you see off in the distance comin’—you can see ’em, off there, shakin’ the tops of trees like some big goddamn invis’ble bird flyin’ at ya—an’ watch those ’cause they can kill ya ...but you mainly got to be watchful after the stick is on the ground whilst you’re buckin’ it because you are fallin’ the bastard to slide anyhow an’ she ain’t always so polite as to wait for ready set go ...and you mainly most of all need to study the trough she ought to take down hill, an’ there’s where a man needs to know his beans! “Takes some experience, huh?” “Yes sir! Know his onions!” My fossilized father had taken it into his head that he had to ride into town with us, and nothing would budge him. During the pick-up ride he talked on and on, rocking back and forth with his left hand cradled against his chest. The hand was blue and thin-looking, more like the limb of something ripped untimely from the womb than the hand of an octogenarian. He 546 ken kesey rocked the hand, cooing over it in a bemused, sing-song way as we drove toward the state park. When he spoke of some particularly exciting aspect of logging the hand stirred restlessly. I watched its fetal movements, wondering what I would say to the doctor at the hospital . . . “Needs to be on the jump every second, a man does . . .” They reached the end of the paved road. Hank consulted a section quadrangle map to see that it matched the section marker tacked to the tree. “Hold it here . . .” (Figuring that I’d best double check before we started work: tired and none too clear-headed . . .) “What’s that section shingle yonder read, Joe?” (I didn’t want to have the hill cleared, then find I was cutting the wrong forest. Joe called back a number and it checked; this was our show. “Better look around, bub.” I nudged Lee upright. “Better wake up and watch the turns or you won’t make ’er back to the highway, let ’lone be able to drive back up here tonight to pick us up,” I told him. He looks at me. I don’t know. I just feel tired. The pick-up rocked and pitched up a steep pan of streaming ruts, then leveled off and traveled for a few minutes along the ridge before I stopped it out on the lip of a rim. I opened the door and took a look down: below us, down one steep sonofagun of a hill through the shaggy trunks of firs, was the river. I pulled on the emergency brake and put the pick-up into neutral. “This is our slope,” I said. “The state park commission want these trees cleared to give tourists a view of the river. I imagine from this high they can see the coast from here too. Can you find your way back, bub?” “I’ll be along with him,” the old man said, before Lee could answer, “and I could get back here with my head in a sack.” The old man’s voice had grown real calm as we got closer to the site. There was none of that tomfool childish sound been in his talk of late. And when he looked off at-the tree trunks, the huge looming trunks never seen anywhere any more except in government parks, his face set-up hard and his old toothless mouth pulled down. “I can show him the way back here in pitch dark an’ hurricane,” he says and gives the kid another nudge . . .) “What?” Once more I was jolted awake. Just as Hank had sometimes a great notion predicted, we had reached the work site in a dead heat with gray dawn. Henry had reached into the cab to goose me awake for a look. Through the window I saw firs fingering the interminable rosary of rain. The old man stood, talking and pointing down through a shaggy opening in the forest. Hank got out and walked to his side, leaving me to sit in the muttering pickup. Joe Ben was shivering from his long ride in the back, anxious for the old man to finish his grabbing so he could get to work and warm up, but Brother Hank’s attitude toward Henry had become very attentive, almost respectful for some reason. Their conversation drifted in through the heater vents under the dash... (“Blamed right; worked many a slope just like this one forty years ago.” “Fierce terrain.” “Worked many a one fiercer,” the old man let me know. “Hear you tell it, this country use to all be eighty-degree slopes with earthquakes and geysers,” I said, shucking him a little. He frowned and scratched his wet old noggin. “I can’t call to mind any geysers right off,” he said. “But I admit earthquakes plagued us some.” And we both laughed a little, taking it easy while Lee came to enough to manage driving Why can’t he wake up? and while Joe drug the stuff out of the back end...) At the rear of the pick-up, a ways apart from Hank and old Henry, Joe Ben was already unloading the gear; the saws and gas cans stood already against the fender and he was dragging out the old wooden hand-carved screwjacks and leaning these alongside the sleek and shiny Homelite saws, hurriedly, ready to get with it, hot to get at it and show old Hank that by golly just me and him is enough and then some! So I shag that gear out like a tiger. Hank and Henry talk. The kid gets out but he don’t offer to help. He just stands watching, coughing occasionally into his fist like he’s about to drop dead on the spot. Behind me there with Hank the old man stands at the edge of the road—that limp hand cradled in his other hairy claw— looking off down the hill—the rain swirls about the trees, the sound of gullies being dug into the mountainside is like the 548 ken kesey sound of a busy highway roaring past somewhere nearby— Hank and me’ll show ’em. The old man raises his hand to point to an outcropping of mossy rock. “Set up over yonder,” he says to Hank. “Start low close to the river an’ work up. These here bastards are big. We won’t need but a day or so cuttin’ to fill the contract.” “How about stopping time, do you reckon?” Hank asks. “We don’t want to float logs past Andy in the dark, do we?” The old man wrinkles his face, thinks about that a minute. “That’s something, that is something . . . let me see, from here it’ll take oh, a good hour’n half to float to him. Now, the river’s high and the tide’s ebbin’. Say one good hour, you say so Joe Ben?” I tell him sure and he says, “So stop cuttin’ one good hour before dark, ’bout tide change.” He turns and starts back toward the pick-up. “I’ll see that them cotter pins get back up here quick as possible.” He catches Lee by the sleeve and shakes him. “You alive, boy? Or you need some ass-kickin’ to bring you to? Get in there. You drive. Let’s wag it an’ shag it. Say, by the by, Hank . . .” The old man aims his finger at Hank. (As the pick-up was backing up and turning, leaving me and Joe in the rain there, Henry rolled down the window and called back, “What the hell you mean any goddam way, runnin’ down so low on cotter pins? Do I hafta do all the thinkin’ for this worthless outfit? Do I hafta do all the goddam figgerin’?” Then they faded off. There the kid goes. Back to the valley, there he goes. . . . Joe Ben grinned at me as the pick-up drove off with the old man still calling. “Hardboiled ol’ owl, ain’t he?” Joe said and started dancing off toward the outcropping Henry had pointed out, rearing to get at it. I follow after the squeak of Joe’s radio. Like in a dream. Can’t seem to get my mind off that pick-up, on my business. And we headed out . . .) On Main Street old Henry went into Stokes’s Hardware— hoping I’ll run onto the old spook, sort of—for them cotter pins. Leland, he stays behind in the pick-up to wait for me. Stokes ain’t there, but the nigger behind the counter, he’s damned rattled to see me. He kind of shudders when I ask for the pins, and starts to tell me sorry, Mr. Stamper, but Mr. Stokes sometimes a great notion said no service . . . so I say piss on him I’ll serve myself, and look and find the size I want and pick them from the shelf myself before the proprietor can think of a good answer to that. “Much obliged,” I tell him real nice. “Just put ’em on the Stamper tab.” And I go back out and get in the pick-up, where the boy’s setting there waiting. “Let’s go, son. Before we get accused o’ robbery.” In town, after a brief stop for parts, Henry dropped me at the doctor’s office to drive on to the Snag, where he said he could “pass the wait profitably.” I told him I would wait in the outer room if he wasn’t back when the doctor finished with me, and I walked to the desk; a forty-five-year-old Amazon in white informed me that I would have to wait, asked me to be seated, then glared at me for an hour over the top of a magazine while I fought sleep on a septic-scented couch and wished I could join my old father at his place of profitable waiting. . . . After I drop the kid at the doctor’s I decide to drive on to the Snag for a little slash. See what’s the news. Mainly me, it looks like. My coming in kind of stirs things up a mite, but I say piss on ’em and head for the bar. I have me two whiskies while I read the scribbled notes pinned up there near the door, advertising all kinds of paraphernalia, and I’m about to get me a third when Indian Jenny comes driving through the door like a big old cow. She blinks around and sees me and she comes bearing down on me with fire in her eye. “You!” she says to me, “you all, your whole family, you, you’re bad as hell on us, being so stubborn.” “Jenny! By god now, you like a drink? Teddy, see what Jenny here’d like.” I act like everything’s normal as pie, just like I done at Stokes’s. I’m darned if I show them I know better.