Chapter 87

Maybe I don’t hear so good no more, but I can still keep up appearances. Jenny, she takes the glass Teddy brought but she don’t let it soothe her down none. She sucks it down without taking her eyes offn me. Seems to me she’s awful caught up in something don’t have any bearing on her. But then, she’s never gone overboard for me. When she’s done with her whisky she sets down the glass and says, “Anyhow, you can’t make delivery anyhow. Not by Thanksgiving. Nobody can.” 550 ken kesey I just grin at her and shrug like I ain’t got no more idee than a duck what she means about Thanksgiving. Wondering what’s eating at her, by god. Maybe without a little cash floating around and niggers here not able to get drunk, she’s been having a tough time getting victims. Could be. This business is affecting everybody, I reckon. Maybe the way it’s affecting Jenny is giving her the hot britches. She keeps glaring at me; then she says nobody can make it by Thanksgiving and I tell her I am awful sorry but I just cannot make out what she is driving at. She tips her glass again and puts it back on the counter. And then says again, “No, you won’t make it.” This time in a spooky goddam fashion that someway bothers me, by god. Enough I have to ask, “What you mean I won’t make it? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, what’s to stop me?” And she says, “I get my revenge on you, Henry Stamper ...I been working with bat bones all week. . . .” “So bat bones is gonna stop me? Boy howdy, and you Indians—” “No. Not just bat bones, not only. . . .” “What else, then?” I ask, getting peeved a little. “What is this thing you got workin’ for you so fierce?” “The moon,” is all she says, “the moon,” and walks back in the direction of the women’s toilet, leaving me standing there studying that one over . . . The other citizens in the bar went disappointedly back to their drinks and their conversations; they had thought for a minute that Jenny might really light into the old turtle. But no, they decided, when she’d left, just more of her bull about the moon and the stars. . . . So they dismissed her and drew finger patterns on the formica tabletops with the condensate from their drinks and wished something would happen. Only Henry, with his lean, slanting back to the room, gave serious thought to Jenny’s words. The moon? He finished his drink slowly....“The moon, huh?” he said again to himself, frowning. Then, slowly, reached for the wallet from his pocket. “What if . . . ?” He took a tiny book from one of the wallet’s compartments and riffled through the pages, stopping, running a cracked black nail down a list of tiny numbers. “Let’s see. sometimes a great notion November; what if—” Then abruptly shoved wallet and book into his pocket, lurched out through the door to the pick-up. “Christ . . . what if she hadn’t said something?” He drove east, out of town, without pausing for stop signs or even considering going back to the doctor’s office for Lee. When he passed the mill he swung off to the side of the highway and called out to Andy, “How they doin’ up there?” Andy was dragging a huge log into place with a peavey pole; the small motorboat he was using to retrieve the logs as they showed up in the river chugged through the opening in a boom. “Pretty good,” the boy called back. “About ten. An’ bigger’n any I ever see before.” “How’s the river mark? Up, ain’t it?” “Up a scosh, yeah; why? It ain’t up much, not near enough to trouble us. . . .” “But it’s still ebbing fast, ain’t it? While it’s rising? Ain’t that right, it’s ebbing.” Before Andy answered he stood up in the boat bottom to look across the surface of the water; chunks of bark and debris were indeed still moving rapidly down river toward the sea. Slightly confounded now, he turned the boat and putted to check the marker on one of the check-pilings to be sure he hadn’t misread the depth. No; he’d been right. It was rising, and at a fair clip, though the river was still ebbing fast. “Yeah,” he called slowly over his shoulder, “it’s running out an’ rising at the same time. Uncle Henry, what you make of that? The water coming up while the river’s running down?” But the old man had already thrown the pick-up back into gear and was picking up speed on the highway up river. The moon. The moon, huh? Well, maybe so the moon. Well, okay, the moon. But I can whup it too. I by god can whup the moon too. ... When the Amazon in the nurse’s uniform finally led me to the doctor’s office for examination, the doctor wasn’t even concerned enough over my pitiful fever-racked frame to be present; in fact, it was the Amazon that ministered to me, and I didn’t see the good doctor himself until she had completed my treatment and showed me to another office where a mountain of 552 ken kesey flesh trapped within a white smock whistled and sighed from an ancient swivel chair. “Leland Stamper? I’m Doctor Layton. You got a minute? Sit down.” “I have a minute, probably more, in fact; I’m waiting for my father to return for me, but if it’s all the same to you, I think I shall continue to stand. I’m paying homage to the penicillin shot.” The doctor grinned at me through his purple jowls and held out a gold cigarette case. “Smoke?” I took one and thanked him. While I lit the cigarette he leaned torturously back in his chair and regarded me with that look generally reserved by deans for wayward sophomores. I waited for him to get into whatever it was he was planning to lecture about, wondering if he didn’t have better things to do with his valuable time than to waste it on a young stranger bent on adultery. He ponderously lit his own cigarette, then leaned back like a white blimp exhaling smoke. I tried putting on my best look of annoyed impatience, but something in his manner, in the way he relished the pause, turned my impatience to discomfort. I naturally assumed he had called me in to make a citizen’s appeal to brother Hank through me, as most of the rest of the strikebound town had been doing to every available Stamper, but he took his cigarette from his fat red butt of mouth and said instead, “I just wanted to have a look at your face was all. Because your posterior has a certain nostalgic significance; your posterior happened to be one of the very first in a long line of posteriors that I had the opportunity to whack. You were born my first year practicing, you see.” I told him he could have seen the article itself a moment ago if he’d been on his toes. “Oh, posteriors don’t change much. Not like faces. How’s your mom, by the way? I certainly hated to see you two leave here when—” “She’s dead,” I said flatly. “You hadn’t heard? Not quite a year. Now, if there’s nothing else?” The chair squeaked and complained as he leaned back forward. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, tapping the ash into the sometimes a great notion wastepaper basket. “No, that’s all.” He looked at the chart the nurse had given him. “Just come back in three days for a follow-up. And watch out. Oh, and say hello to Hank for me when you—” “Watch out?” I stared at him. The fat face underwent an abrupt transition before my eyes, from clod of a doctor to arch-criminal in white. “Watch out?” “Yes, you know,” he said; then, after a knowing wink, added, “for exhaustion, cold, et cetera.” He coughed, frowned at the cigarette, tossed it in the basket with the ashes, as I tried to fathom just how deep the knowing went beneath that wink. “Yes, you can lick this thing,” he said with heavy overtones, “if you don’t let it catch you with your pants down.” “What thing?” “This Asian flu bug, what did you think I meant?” He regarded me innocently from beneath eyelids bloated and positively drooping with wickedness. I was suddenly certain that he knew everything, the whole plan, the entire intended vengeance, everything! In some diabolic Sydney Greenstreet fashion, he had amassed a complete brochure of all my activities. . . . “Maybe we could have a chat the next time you come in, huh?” he purred, lips dripping innuendoes. “Until then, like I said, watch out.” Terrified, I hurried out to the waiting room, with his echo pursuing me like a hound baying watch OUT...OUT ... OUT . . . What was happening? I wrung my hands. What had gone wrong? How had he known? And where was my father...? On the slope Hank stopped the shriek of his saw and tilted the metal brim of his hat back to watch the lean, stiff-moving figure of old Henry work its way down a switchback deer trail, curious and amused (but, as a matter of fact, none too surprised that the old man had come back out. I had been halfway suspecting as much since I’d saw him look over the set-up and watch Joe unload the old-time equipment. I’d halfway figured he’d get into town and get a little juiced and decide to come back out and show us how it used to be done. But, as he got closer, I noticed he looked pretty sober, like there was more on 554 ken kesey his mind than just futzing around shooting the bull and getting in everybody’s way. There was something about the way he moved that I recognized as special, about the way he hustled— a mixture of worry and joy and excitement as he jerked his neck and tossed the white shock of hair around where it kept getting washed down in his eyes. It called to my mind the kind of grim giddiness that I hadn’t seen in him in god knows how long, years and years, but that I recognized right off, even fifty yards off and him in a leg cast. I stopped my cutting. I laid my saw down, lit a fresh cigarette off my stub, and watched him come...scrabbling, grabbing vines and roots as he heaved that stiff leg before him—heave, then lurching forward, pole-vaulting forward almost over that muddied cast, finding a foothold with the one good, cork-booted leg, then throwing that cast ahead of him again— relentless and grim and comical all at once. “Whoa back a little,” I hollered up the hill at him. “You’ll pop a gasket, you old fool. Slow down. Nobody’s after you.” He didn’t answer back. I hadn’t expected that he would, puffing and panting like he was. Where’s the kid? But he didn’t slow down, either. What’s he done with the kid? “Lee up in the pick-up?” I called again and started angling toward him. “Or was he so goddam sick he couldn’t even make the ride back with half a dozen cotter pins?” “Left ’im,” he said, short of breath. “Town.” He didn’t say anything again until he reached the log I had been bucking and leaned his hip up against it for a rest. “Ah, lor’,” he gasped. “Ah, lor’.” For a minute I was worried: his eyes were rolling; his face was as white as his hair; his throat seemed clogged . . . he tipped his pink old toothless mouth up to the rain, sucking in great breaths of the wet air. “Ah, lor’ almighty,” he said, finally getting a good breath. He ran a tongue around his lips that looked like a tongue out of a boot. “Shoo! Took ’er faster’n I planned. Shooee!” “Well, Jesus H. Christ I hope to shout,” I said, relieved as well as a little hacked off at being so worried. “What the shit do you mean, come ball-assin’ down that hill like a wild stallion? I’m damned if I want you poppin’ some gasket where I sometimes a great notion have to tote you back up to that pick-up. You’d be heavy with that load you got on.” I could see he’d had him a couple by the way he was colored up, but he was a long way from drunk. “Lef ’ the boy in town,” he said, standing up and looking around him. “Where’s Joe Benjamin? Get him over here.” “He’s the other side of those outcroppin’s—what the hell’s wrong with you, anyhow?” I saw he was steamed up with more than Teddy’s whisky. “What happened back there in town?” “Give Joe Ben a whistle,” he told me. He walked a few steps from the log, surveying the lay of the land. After looking it over he says, “You workin’ land too level. No good now. Too much effort to get the bastards moving. We’ll move on, down yonder past that little swale, where it’s steeper. It’s dangerous, but we’re in kind of a bind. Where the hell’s Joe Ben!” I gave Joe another whistle. “Now cool off and tell me what you’re so steamed up about.” “Let’s wait,” he says. He was still puffing pretty bad. “Till Joe Ben gets here. Here’s the pins. I left in a hurry. I didn’t have time to pick up the boy. Whooee. My lungs ain’t so good any more. . . .” And I saw there wasn’t any sense doing anything but wait. . . .) After another hour spent in that pungent waiting room, an hour of pure terror and paranoia spent pretending to read back issues of McCall’s and True Romance under the nurse’s supervision and wondering just how much that devil of a doctor knew, I resigned myself to admitting that the old man wasn’t coming back for me and that perhaps the doctor didn’t know anything. I faked a yawn. I stood up and blew my nose loudly on a handkerchief so overused that the Amazon winced with disgust at the nasty old thing. “Could get yourself some paper from the john,” she advised me over the top of her magazine, “ ’n’ throw that unsanitary thing away.” A dozen parting replies passed through my mind as I pulled on my jacket, but I was still too cowed by my recent experience with the woman and her needle to be able to voice them. Instead I paused at the door and meekly announced I was going to walk downtown. “If my father comes back, could you please tell him I’ll probably be at Grissom’s?” 556 ken kesey I waited for an answer. She did not seem to have heard at first. Her face did not rise from the book, but as I stood there, like a schoolboy waiting to be excused, the curl of her slurring voice traced the curl of her lip perfectly. “You right sure you can make it without fainting again?” She licked her thumb to flip a page. “And don’t let the door slam.” Between my clenched teeth I cursed her soundly, as well as the hypodermic, the doctor, and my thoughtless father, cursed them all and threatened dire revenge for each and every one in his turn ...and closed the door behind me with a coward’s care. In the puddled walk outside the clinic I stood wondering what to do, feeling completely foiled. My chances to get Viv alone seemed to grow slimmer and slimmer. How would I get back out there unless old Henry came back? And yet, without thinking of it, when I started for town I avoided the only street on which he might drive if he came to look for me, taking instead, “for old time’s sake,” the old broken walk that would take me past the schoolhouse . . . “in case that doctor comes looking.” Sulking, furtive, alert—hands hanging cold and cocked at my sides instead of warm in my pockets—I advanced cautiously through billowing rain down a long row of memories, ready for anything. The rickety, slithery wooden walk took me past forlorn fishermen’s shacks ominous and smoky and quilted with assorted patches made from snuff-can lids and flattened Prince Albert tins: There the Mad Scandinavian lives; “a baby-eater,” my schoolmates used to claim as they tossed apples at his windows; “you skeered, Leland?” ...past the cottage where the janitor had lived with all the rumors that janitors always live with, past the squat brick furnace building that heated the school, past the shaggy wall of stacked waste lumber that fired the furnace ...and, strangely, I didn’t relax my caution most of the long walk. Then, when almost at once my groundless fears did leave me—why so scared? How stupid I had been, thinking that jowly fool knew anything; what a stupid worry!—I realized that I was standing in front of the schoolhouse, my age-old citadel of Learning, of Truth, and my sanctuary. But fear was not replaced by peace: as I strolled along the sometimes a great notion walk edging my sanctuary’s play yard, my alert pose turned to one of slouching dejection and remorse as I trailed my knuckles along the cyclone-fence enclosure past a school I’d never belonged to, past a playground loud with lunch-hour memories of teams I’d never played on. Through the fence, I saw I was passing the baseball diamond. Where the “big kids” had played when I was a first-grader; where the “little kids” played after I reached grade four . . . “Little kids?” Hank once asked. “Yeah, you know, the dumb kids, the stupes who couldn’t enjoy a book in all their lives.” Now this old rationalization seemed pitifully thin to me; big kid or little, first grade or fourth, Leland, old chap, you know you would have given your whole collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs to have joined that noisy, disorganized group. Isn’t that so? Isn’t it! As I looked through the dripping crisscross of wire to the runneling field I found myself wryly asking When do I get to play, fellers, when do I get chosen? Everybody’s had a turn but me. Come on. Choose me for a change. The fellers hung back. No nine-year-old demagogue of the diamond rushed forward, freckled with good old American sandlot sunshine, to point with the greasy finger of a fielder’s mitt and say, “I choose you for my team.” Nobody shouted, “You’re needed, Leland, you’ll come through strong in a clutch.” But fellers, I pleaded into the whorled ear of rain, fair’s fair, now, isn’t it? Fair’s fair? Yet, even in the face of that time-revered truth, the phantoms hung back; fair might be fair and all, they couldn’t argue with that, but when it came to first basemen—or second or third— they wanted a cool head and a brave heart, not some dang punk who throws his fist up in front of his specs every time he sees a fast one skipping in his general direction. But guys . . . Not some dang sissy who falters, fidgets, and finally faints dead away and wakes up five minutes later with his trousers around his ankles and an ammonia capsule under his nose—just because a nurse pricked him from behind with a little penicillin. Wait, fellers; it wasn’t just a prick. The needle was this long! 558 ken kesey This long, the sissy says. This long. Willya listen at him. It was so! Please, fellers...maybe home base? Home base. Willya just listen at the pantywaist....C’mon; let’s get at it . . . They shifted back into time and I walked on again, past the ball-field while the wind booed and the rain hissed through the chicken-wire backstop and the regular team held down sodden home plate against all comers. I turned toward town, away from the school where I had received straight A’s in everything but recess. Some sanctuary. Oh, sure, my fear had been pacified by the sight of that institute of learning—at least I no longer expected the doctor to swoop down on me like a fat vampire; for, like a church, the school served as my defense against such demons—but in the demon’s place grew a terrible emptiness, a great malignant vacuum. No demons, but no teammates either. Seemed it was always like that. A person might almost think they were one and the same. . . . On the slope Hank smoked in patient silence beside his father while he heard the dissonant squeak of Joe Ben’s little radio draw closer through the dripping firs. (The old man still stood leaned up against the log, working his jaw in thought; his white hair was plastered to his bony skull now and hung streaming from the back of his head, sort of like wet cobwebs. “Steeper land like that over yonder,” he kept mumbling. “Hm. Yeah. Over there like that. We can get half again the cutting. Uhuh. I bet we can. . . .” I was a little awed by the change that had come over the old coon; it seemed that the cast had broken to reveal a younger and at the same time more mature person. I watched old Henry appraise the land and announce which trees we was gonna cut, how, in what order, and so forth...and I got to feeling like I was seeing a once-familiar but almost-forgotten man. I mean...this wasn’t the old yarn-spinning, bullshitting character that had been thundering damn near unnoticed through the house and the local bars for the last six months. Not the noisy joke of a year before either. No, I realized gradually, this is the boomer I used to follow on cruising walks twenty years before, the calm, stubborn, confident rock of a man who had taught sometimes a great notion me how to tie a bowline with one hand and how to place a dutchman block in an undercut so’s the tree would fall so cunthair perfect that he could put a stake where he aimed for it to fall, then by god drive that stake into the ground with the trunk! I kept still, looking at him. Like I was scared if I said something this phantom might disappear. And as Henry talked— haltingly, yet deliberate and certain all the same—I felt myself commence to relax. Like I’d had a couple quarts of beer. I let my lungs pull deep and easy and felt a kind of repose, almost like sleep, go running through me. It felt good. It was the first time, I realized, that I’d felt relaxed in—oh, Christ, except for last night with Viv rubbing my back—in what seemed years and years. Hot damn, I figured; the old old Henry is back; let him hold the handles a spell while I take a breather. So I didn’t say anything until Joby was almost there. I let him carry on for a while with his instructions before I reminded him that that slope me and Joby’d been working was exactly the one he’d pointed out for us to work that morning. “Remember?” I grinned at him. “You said just down from that outcropping?” “That’s all right, that’s all right,” he says, not the least concerned, and went on to say, “But I said that account of this place was safest. An’ that was this morning. We ain’t got time for that, not no more, not now. Down yonder she’ll be a little trickier, but we can fall half again the bastards we can fall up here. Anyhow I’ll tell you when Joe gets up here. Now hush and let me think a minute.” So I hushed and let him think, wondering how long it had been since I’d been able to do that . . .) I left the school and playground and spent most of the rest of that lonely morn over dreary cups of drugstore coffee brought me by a dour Grissom who seemed to hold me solely responsible for his lack of business. During this time I revised and revamped my demon-teammate theory—improving on symbolism, sharpening the effect, stretching it to cover all possible woes. ...I could stretch it far beyond grammar school. All through prep school I avoided that playground, all through college I had stayed safely in the classroom, secure behind a 560 ken kesey bastion of books, and played no base at all on the field outside. Not first or second, not third. Certainly not home. Secure but homeless. Homeless even in the town of my home-town team, with no base to play. No arms in all the wet world to enfold me, no armchair by the cozy fire to hold me. And, now, on top of it all, I was deserted, deserted at the hospital, left to the merciless hoofs of galloping pneumonia, by my own pitiless father. Oh, Father, Father, where can you be...? (“Gettin’ drownt,” I tell Hank. “Out in the weather thisaway, I should of brung more better gear.” I lean my bum hip against the log again to take the weight offn the cast and I take me a little knit cap from my pocket and pull it on. It ain’t gonna keep my head dry none, but it’ll soak up enough rain to keep it from running into my eyes. Joe Ben, he comes scrambling up the hill practically on all fours, looking like some kinda animal scared outa the ground. “What’s up? What’s up?” He looks from Hank to me, then settles himself on the log and looks down the direction we’re looking. He’s itching to pieces to know what’s up but he knows he’ll get told when I’m ready to tell him, so he don’t ask again. “Well sir.” I pat my old cap into place and spit. “We got to finish our cuttin’,” I tell them, “an’ finish it today.” Just like that. Hank and Joe Ben light up cigarettes and wait to see what it’s all about. I say, “It’s full moon, an’ a poor time for it. I bet this mornin’ was a good minus-one-five or minus-two tide. Real low. When we left the house this mornin’ the river shoulda been low enough to show barnacles on the pilings, ain’t that so? With a tide so low? Huh? But did we see any barnacles? Or did anybody look . . . ?” I look right at Hank. “Did you check the marker at the house this mornin’ against the tide chart?” He shakes his head. I spit and look disgusted at him. Joe says, “What’s it mean, anyway?” “What it means,” I tell them, “is the game is all, is jick, jack, joker, and the game for Evenwrite and Draeger an’ that bunch of goddam feather-beddin’ so-slists is eg-zactly what it means! Unless we really get in high gear. What it means...is there must be damn heavy rain up country; there’s more water comin’ out’n the upper branches’n anybody figured. We’re in for maybe one sonofabitch of a flood! sometimes a great notion Not tonight, probably, no, I doubt it tonight. Unless she really cuts loose a storm. And she could, but let’s say not. Let’s say it keeps on like it’s goin’. By tomorrow or the next day nobody’ll be able to hang onto a boom of logs, not us nor WP. So we got to deliver before it crests. Now. Let’s say, oh, say, it’s about ten-thirty now, so that means eleven, twelve, one, two . . . so let’s say we get two of the bastards an hour, pushin’ it, two of these. . . .” I take me a look up one of the firs standing there. She’s a good one. Like they used to be. “At seventeen board feet, times two, times—what did I figure? five hours’ cuttin’?— times five hours, say six hours; we can have Andy to stay up all night at the mill with a boat and spotlight watchin’ for the latecomers... yeah, we can do that. So. Anyhow. Figuring six real highballin’ hours of cutting, nothin’ goes wrong, we—let’s see now...hum ...” The old man talked on, darting the brown tip of his tongue over his lips and occasionally pausing to spit, speaking more to himself than to the others. Hank finished his cigarette and lit another, nodding now and then as he listened (content to let the old guy call the shots and run the show. Damned content, to be honest with you. Henry kept rambling on. After telling Joe and me all the details and outlining to us all the dangers and doubts, he finally got around to allowing, “But, yessir, we can hack it,” like I knew he would. “With even a little margin, if we hump our tails. ’N’ then tomorrow we got to rent a tug an’ ran the booms down to Wakonda Pacific, quicker the better. Not wait for Thanksgivin’. Get ’em off our hands before we lose ’em. Well ...be tight, but we can whup it.” “You bet!” Joe said. “Oh yeah!” Business like this was right up Joby’s alley. “So . . . ?” the old man said, talking straight ahead. “What do you say?” I knew it was me he was asking. “Be tough,” I tell him, “with Orland and Layton and the others buffaloed by Even-write and the rest of the town. I mean, it’ll be tough making a drive on that high a river, with that many booms and us so shorthanded. . . .” 562 ken kesey “I know it’ll be tough, goddammit! That ain’t what I asked. . . .” “Hey!” Joby snaps his fingers: “I know: we can get some of the Wakonda Pacific foremen!” He’s excited and chomping at the bit. “See, they got to help us, don’t you see? They don’t want to lose their winter millwork. With Mama Olson’s tug, and some of them WP bosses, we’ll be pretty as you please, right in the good Lord’s warm little fist.” “We’ll take that jump,” the old man says, pushing himself up from the log, “when it comes up. Right now I’m sayin’ can we cut our quota today? All of it. Just us three?” “Sure! Sure we can, oh yeah, there ain’t nothing—” “I was askin’ you, Hank. . . .” I knew he was. I squinted through the blue film of cigarette smoke, out across the fern and salal and blackberry, through the brute black straight trunks of those trees down to the river, trying to ask myself, Can we or can’t we? But I didn’t know; I just couldn’t tell. The three of us he said. Meaning two and one old man. Two tired jacks and one old crippled man. It’s crazy, and I said to myself, and I knew I should say Nothing doing to the old man, say it’s too risky, forget it, flick it. . . . But some way he didn’t seem like an old crippled man to me then. It wasn’t like I was standing there talking with the wild and woolly town character any more, but with some fierce young jack who had just walked up out of the years ready to spit on his palms and take over again. I looked at him, waiting there. What could I tell him? If he says we can whip it, all right, maybe he knows, let him take over. “I’m askin’ you, boy....” Because all I know is that the only way you can keep this jack from out of the past from trying to whip it was with a club and a rope, so I say all right. “All right, Henry, let’s try it.” You probably know more about this kind of logging than me and Joby put together. So all right, head out. You run it. I’m tired rassling it. I got other things on my mind. You take it. Me, just turn me on and aim me. That’s how I’d like it, anyhow. I’m tired, but I’ll work. If you take over. If you just turn me on and aim me it’s fine and dandy with this boy . . .) After Grissom had the effrontery to ask me to pay for the sometimes a great notion magazine I spilled coffee on, I decided to go mope elsewhere. I crossed the street and entered the Sea Breeze Cafe and Grill, the very apotheosis of short-order America: two waitresses in wilted uniforms chatting at the cash register; lipstick stain on coffee mugs; bleak array of candy; insomniac flies waiting out the rain; a plastic penful of doughnuts; and, on the wall above the Coca-Cola calendar, the methodical creaking creep of a bent second hand across a Dr. Pepper clock ...the perfect place for a man to sit and commune with nature. I climbed onto one of the leatherette stools, ordered coffee, and purchased freedom for one of the penned-up doughnuts. The shortest of the waitresses brought my order, took my money, made my change, and returned to the cash register to play her accordion of neck to her bored companion ...never really acknowledging my presence to herself. I ate the doughnut and reiterated my woes with fresh coffee, trying not to think ahead, trying not to ask myself, What am I waiting for? The second hand creaked a meaningless dirge. An ancient refrigerator complained in the cluttered kitchen, and the second hand cranked out a dreary fare of short-order time—tepid seconds, stale minutes, the drab diet that He Who Hesitates must always be satisfied with... As the rain quickened on the slopes the three men set about work. Hank jerked the starter rope on his saw and wondered why the saw should feel so feather-light ( just take it over and it’s dandy with me. . . .) when his arms felt so heavy. Henry walked the length of the log, looking for a place to set a check, and wished he’d brought a plastic bag or some damn thing to wrap around his cast so’s it wouldn’t soak up water and weigh him down even worse than ordinary. On the other hand Joe Ben, leaping back downhill to the log he had been working on when interrupted by Hank’s whistle, felt as though the mud caking his boots was actually becoming lighter. He felt even more nimble and buoyant than usual. Everything was going fine. He’d been worried over something earlier that morning— can’t even remember now—but everything was turning out just the way he liked it: old Henry’s dramatic arrival, the news of the tides, the planning in terse, muted voices, that brass-band 564 ken kesey feeling rising among them, beating out we got to make that first down, we got to, and you block for me, Joby, and I’ll tear ’em apart! Yeah boy! That brassy beat of high-school idealism and determination that he liked best of all: beating out we got, got to, got to! over and over until the words became we will, we will, we will!—and when I put my hand on the log and vault over it I feel like if I don’t hold back I’ll just sail right off in the sky—the log’s ready to go—it was ready when Hank whistled—all the dickens needs now’s a good shove to get it over the rock it’s hung against. Let’s see here ... Joe circled the end of the log and looked at the jack. It was screwed out to its maximum length, with one end anchored against a rock and the other biting into the bark of the log. To unscrew it meant that the log would fall back a few inches while he anchored the jack against another rock. “Bug that,” he said aloud, laughing, and told himself, “Don’t give a inch!”He wedged his compact little body in on top of the jack, with his shoulders against the rock and his boots against the log. I give a yeah-h-h shovebethou you dickens cast into the uh uh sea! Yeah! She teeters over the rock, rolls against a stump picking up speed, spins off the stump, and slides straight as an arrow whew down the hill to within a bare half-yard of the river! Good deal, I’d say. “Hey . . .” Joe stood up and shouted over his shoulder at Hank and old Henry, watching him. “See that? Oh man; no sense messin’ around, the way I see it. Now, you fellas want me to kick that one downhill and save you the effort?” Laughing, he skidded down the slope with the jack light under his arm and his boots flying. And the little transistor bumping and squeaking against his neck . . . I know you love me An’ happy we could be If some folks would leave us alone. . . . All righty now—I screw the jack short again and wedge it under the log and twist! He watched the butt of it bite the juicy bark. The wooden screw of the implement lengthened out with his cranking. The log rolled a few feet, paused—this time she sometimes a great notion pitches crashing through shredding fern blackberry vines and into the river. Yes sir, all righty, there! He picked up his jack, slung it across his shoulder by the strap, and swarmed up the hill on all fours—who-so-ever!—snorting and whooping as he came, like a water spider fleeing to high ground. His face was scratched and red when he reached the second log, where Hank worked the saw. “Hankus, ain’t you finished bucking this thing yet? Henry, it looks like me’n you have to carry our load an’ then some to make up for this loafer!” Then vaulted over the log, the mud on his boots turning to wings: and whosoever shall not doubt in his heart, he will, by golly, he will ...! In her shack Indian Jenny hummed over an astrologer’s chart that was patterned mysteriously with glass rings interlacing! Lee sipped coffee at the Sea Breeze. At the house Viv finished up the last of the dishes and wondered what to start on next. With Jan and the kids staying at the new place, there’s not so much rush. And it’s nice to set my own pace. I enjoy Jan and the kids here, and I’ll miss them when they move into the other place, but it’s nice to be here and set my own pace. Boy oh boy, is it quiet just here alone... Standing in the center of the big living room, watching the river, feeling distracted and flushed, anxious almost . . . like I’m expecting something to happen. One of the kids to holler, I guess. I know what’ll calm me down; take a nice long hot soak in the tub. Aren’t you the Miss Lazy Britches? But gee, is it still and quiet... Hank wiped his nose on the wet cuff of his sweat shirt sticking from his poncho, then grabbed the saw again and dug into the trunk of the tree before him, feeling the relaxation of labor, of simple uncomplicated labor, run through his body like a warm liquid. . . . (Like a sleep, sort of. More relaxing than some sleeps a guy could name. I never minded work so much. I could of got along right well just doing a plain eight-to-five with the bull telling what to do and where to do it. If he had been a decent bull and fairly reasonable about that what and where. Yes I could of. . . .) Everything was going pretty good. The logs fell good and the wind stayed down. Henry helped 566 ken kesey where he was able, picking the trees, figuring the troughs, arranging the screwjacks in place, using his experience instead of bones he knew were brittle as chalk ...wheezing, spitting, thinking a man can whup it, even he don’t have nothin’ but knowhow left, even his legs like butter and his arms and hands like cracking glass and he don’t have nothin’ but his knowhow left—he can still help whup it! Downhill Joe Ben paced off twenty-five steps and cut through his log, feeling the screaming vibration of the chain saw tingle up his arms and accumulate in his back muscles like a charge of electrical power... building, yeah, rising oh yeah and a little more and I’ll just grab this log up and bust it over my knee! Watch if I don’t. . . . On the counter of the Sea Breeze Cafe and Grill was a selection box for our youth’s music. To pass the wait (I told myself I was waiting for my father to show up at the Snag across the street) I took a survey of what Young America was singing these days. Let’s see . . . we’ve got Terry Keller “Coming with Summer”—very neat—a “Stranger on the Shore” called— s’help me—Mister Acker Bilk. Earl Grant “Swinging Gently”; Sam Cook “Twistin’ the Night Away”; Kingston Trio “Jane Jane Janing”...Brothers Four ...Highwaymen (singing “Birdman of Alcatraz,” a ballad, based on the movie, that is based on the book, that is based on the life of a lifer who has probably never even heard of the Highwaymen . . .) the Skyliners . . . Joey Dee and the Starlighters...Pete Hanly doing “Dardanella” (how did that slip in?), Clyde McSomebody asking “Let’s Forget about the Past” ...and currently number one, at least in the Sea Breeze Cafe and Grill, a waitress with three pounds of nose under thirty ounces of powder accompanying herself on a tub of dishes while she sings “Why Hang Around?” I muttered in my coffee cup. “Because I’m waiting for my daddy to come get me.” Which convinced no one. . . . The hillside rang with the tight whine of cutting; the sound of work in the woods was like insects in the walls. Numb clubs of feet registered the blow against the cold earth only by the pained jarring in the bones. Henry dragged a screwjack to a new log. Joe Ben sang along with his radio: sometimes a great notion “Leaning, leaning, Safe and secure from all alarms . . .” The forest fought against the attack on its age-old domain with all the age-old weapons nature could muster: blackberries strung out barbed barricades; the wind shook widow-makers crashing down from high rotted snags; boulders reared silently from the ground to block slides that had looked smooth and clear a moment before; streams turned solid trails into creeping ruts of icy brown lava. ...And in the tops of the huge trees, the very rain seemed to work at fixing the trees standing, threading the million green needles in an attempt to stitch the trees upright against the sky. But the trees continued to fall, gasping long sighs and kawhumping against the spongy earth. To be trimmed and bucked into logs. To be coaxed and cajoled downhill into the river with unflagging regularity. In spite of all nature could do to stop it. Leaning on the ev-ver-last-ting arms. As the trees fell and the hours passed, the three men grew accustomed to one another’s abilities and drawbacks. Few words actually passed between them; they communicated with the unspoken language of labor toward a shared end, becoming more and more an efficient, skilled team as they worked their way across the steep slopes; becoming almost one man, one worker who knew his body and his skill and knew how to use them without waste or overlap. Henry chose the trees, picked the troughs where they would fall, placed the jacks where they would do the most good. And stepped back out of the way. Here she slides! See? A man can whup it goddammit with nothin’ but his experience an’ stickto-’
er, goddam if he can’t. ...Hank did the falling and trimming, wielding the cumbersome chain saw tirelessly in his long, cable-strong arms, as relentless as a machine; working not fast but steadily, mechanically, and certainly far past the point where other fallers would have rested, pausing only to refuel 568 ken kesey the saw or to place a new cigarette in the corner of his mouth when his lips felt the old one burning near—taking the pack from the pouch of his sweat shirt, shaking a cigarette into view, withdrawing it with his lips ...touching the old butt for the first time with his muddy gloves when he removed it to light the new smoke. Such pauses were brief and widely separated in the terrible labor, yet he almost enjoyed returning to work, getting back in the groove, not thinking, just doing the work just like it was eight to five and none of that other crap to worry about, just letting somebody turn me on and aim me at what and where is just the way I like it. The way it used to be.