Chapter 92

Through the tiers of blue smoke Hank watched the final scene of the drama; he had dropped out; he had become a spectator that just happened by for the last act, to sit in the very last row of a darkened balcony unseen and catch lines blown intermittent and disconnected through a drafty theater. He stared down on the two figures with unfocused eyes. He made no effort to concentrate. Without listening, he knew the lines by heart; without looking, he saw the action. A bit player with his part finished, waiting around to sometimes a great notion see the end, almost bored, almost dozing over familiar lines, until a repeated phrase told him it was drawing to that end. “Hank did it because he didn’t want ...to risk anybody else hurt.” “I don’t think so....” Bleakly running down as the lights dimmed. “He did it because ...he didn’t want to risk anybody.” “I don’t hardly think so, Henry.” As the curtain closed, as the echoes stood up to leave: He wouldn’t of done it for any other reason—he didn’t want to have anybody to have to take the risk just for—I guess not, old fellow, because there wasn’t anybody but him left—He did it because—I guess not—because everybody left and he knows he can’t run them logs down by himself—He did it because ...he finally saw how it was . . . because ...he finally saw that there wasn’t any sense. Because of rust, of rot. Of push, of squeeze. Because there is really no strength beyond the strength of those around you. Because of weakness. Because of no grit, no grit anywhere at all and labor availeth not. Because all is vanity and vexation of the spirit. Because of that drum on the donkey forever breaking down. Of bruises from springbacks. Of sinus headaches and ingrown toenails. Of rain and the seas are still not full. Because of everything coming so thick and so fast for so long for so very long for finally too long.... “Henry, Hank is nobody’s fool ...he knows better than.” Because strength is a joke, a fake. “He’s a smart boy, Henry, he sees how the land lays ...it just is not a one-man world, never was . . . no mortal man can long endure . . .” Because sometimes the only way to keep from losing everything is to give everything up. Because sometimes strength must for the sake of winning give in to— “My, oh my,” Boney said cheerfully, looking at a big pocket watch, “it’s got late.” He got up, stood up out of his chair again and finished up buttoning his coat. He coughed a little. He took the old man’s hand up from the bed like picking up a rag and he shook it. “I got to be gettin’ home, I guess, Henry,” he says. “Long walk for a man our age, weather like it is”—and then 640 ken kesey dropped the hand back down. He shook his head. “I hated to be the bearer of the tidings about Joe Ben, Henry. I know how fond you all were of him. I’d as leave tore my tongue out as been the one to tell you. Oh ...here. I’ll leave this with you. Whyn’t you have the nurse put you some out in a saucer so you can get to it easier? Well. Anthing you want me to bring when I come back? The Saturday Evening Post? I got a lot of back issues. Here. Let me sit this TV up on the chest-of-drawers where you can get you a straight bead on her. Might as well ruin the old eyes too, hadn’t we?” He flicked on the machine and turned to go before it warmed up. He stopped at that door again and looked back at the old man fingering at his nose. Boney’d clean forgot I was in the room. Both of them had. “Chin up, old fellow,” he said to Henry. “What do you bet we’re still around chewin’ the fat when the rest of these boys have cashed it in. Okay, don’t let me hear about you giving that nurse a hard time, hey? So long....” And he walked out, strutting like a man with a good ten years of coughing and complaining left in him. I stepped out from where I’d been hid at the foot of the bed and started to say something to the old man, but with the way he looked I didn’t figure it would do a whole lot of good. “Papa,” I started, “you see what happened was—” “Hm,” he says. “Well anyway,” he says, staring straight ahead at that TV, “anyway I still got ...a good sense of smell for a nigger so old ...an’ a man can still lick it he keeps ...but Hank he...but then I woulda thought ...I suppose we . . . they got that cast on wrong . . .” And on like that, with his talk dipping into his thoughts now and again. He was looking kind of poleaxed. The dope getting to him. But not just that. His whole face is changing, getting calm and peaceful. The muscles under his cheekbones relaxing, letting the grin droop down; the lines between his eyes unraveling like old cotton string. The morphine’s making him drowsy....Then the eyes themselves went dull, like whoever was in there, like whatever was still left inside there, just went away through a door, leaving the empty body behind pumping air and blood and the empty face propped sometimes a great notion up there in the blue flicker of that television, like an old suit of threadbare skin somebody’d tossed onto a bed....) The lights flutter. The room drones as though the air is filled with big, drowsy flies. Muffled ...muted ... inurned between deep cotton-soft sheathings of morphine, the old man rolls his head and parts the sheath enough to look up a long spiraling of redwood columns supporting a high deep-green dome. A woodpecker hammers the air unseen; a jay screeches brightly across, pulling the eye around splash blue! “Wheeoo, lookit that!” to a splintering sight of the May Day sun trying to shine through the needles. “What a day! Man alive.” Pollen hangs in the windless still, solidifying the one yellow-bright beam from treetop to the ground . . . “Haw! Look yonder . . .” where a twirl of butterflies white and busy as stars flush from a patch of sheep sorrel at his tread, where no other white man’s foot has ever trod before. “Maybe no man’s foot of no color ever before!” He looks up one of the columns and spits on his hands. “Okay, stan’ clear. What d’ya think? I’m a bear got to hibernate? Let me have some bullyjacks. We got things to do. Cats to kill, eggs to hatch, trees to chop, an’ ground to scratch . . . stan’ clear, dammit!” “Calm . . . calm does it, Mr. Stamper. We’re calm and peaceful now.” “Who says I couldn’t? Just you stand outa my way. Never you mind. Hum, man alive...Let me clear my ears a second.” And no other white man’s ax has ever sounded. “Oh. The springboard. Oh, the misery whip.” Then the sun is brushed momentarily aside by the gleaming green sweep of a thousand thousand rushing needles. “Wham! Right down the old slot.” That was May, in the twenties, when redwoods still stood. Above, the dome is broken. The sun springs back, flooding light down over a stretch of ground unlighted for a thousand thousand years. “Jees H. Christ, what time must it gettin’ to be? Whoa. Just a minute now, what you think you’re doin’?” Scrappy, a little kitten, white and purply blue, just like a chicken gizzard, you know, useta scratch the bejesus outa— “Ouch? Now what are you—” “There we go now. It’s all over. Calm and peaceful, now. It’s done. Rest now. Calm and peaceful . . .” 642 ken kesey Ray and Rod are setting up on the bandstand when Even-write arrives at the Snag. The taut tuning of amplified steel stretches out into the darkening street. Andy, sitting in the jeep, hears it and takes his harmonica from his pocket, beats it against his thigh to remove the lint and sunflower-seed shells, and blows softly into it; he has decided he’d as leave wait and ride back up with Hank and Viv as hitchhike. Across the street he sees Hank hurrying toward the wet clatter of the Snag’s neons and wonders forlornly how long he will have to wait.... (By the time I come out of the hospital my belly was boiling around till I didn’t know whether I could make it to the Snag for a shot or not. The only thing I wanted was about three fingers of Johnny Walker, something to put the lid on the boiling down there. That damn little hospital room had been worse than the jeep box. My diamond-bright day had got duller and duller, and the way I was feeling I didn’t know whether the world was going to last anyway. The Snag was mighty crowded for so early; most of the guys who hadn’t gone to the cemetery had stopped off and they were pretty well oiled. They quieted a little when I first came in, but then they all came hustling over like they couldn’t wait to shake the hand of the man who’d kept them out of a job for two months. Evenwrite bought me a whisky. The band got going and the old good-time honky-tonk sound started cranking up, like old times. And Indian Jenny dropped in and started buying drinks for the drunks. And Biggy Newton was there, looking tough. And Les Gibbons, slobbering and blubbering and staggering around. And, though it wasn’t but Wednesday, the next day being Thanksgiving and a holiday made it just like good old Saturday night at the Snag the way it used to be, except that it’s not, just like old times, except that it’s different, with the guitars whanging and the beer flowing and the boys whooping and hollering and cussing one another and matching nickels and shuffling the shuffleboard... except that it just isn’t the same. I don’t know how, but I know that it isn’t. I know it’s different. And so does everyone else.) In the droning hospital room, remember? On the community sometimes a great notion boat trip? On that Fourth of July celebration—The River Is Your Highway—some of the folks, they got sick account of not being used to water, so sick they thought sure they was gonna die, then finally got sicker and wished they would. Motorboat races on the river; contestants joking back and forth—“Ben, we can win this boogin’ event with some leetle doin’, what d’ya say?”—and when it’s over “Them dern Stamper boys, ya see what they done? They put a big smithy bellows at the intake o’ their carburetor an’ forced air in . . . we gonna allow that?” But that’s July. This is May, May Day, let’s see . . . Another section of the green dome is ripped swishing away from the bluejay sky, crashing, falling across ghost fern and salal and witch hazel, and sun crashing after it. “Git them hayburners up here an’ hooked on goddammit before she mosses over an’ rots o’ age!” At the Snag, shaved and shined and sharp as a razor, Ray begins to lift the crowd to his heights, and Rod along with them. The beat had picked up; the people been pouring in; and the copper pot in front of the mike stand filled with green and silver. “Gray days, hurryin’ by . . .” Ray slapped the strings with a callused thumb, let his vision swim, and grinned out at the coast-to-coast TV hook-up; a year from now, his Trendex only a mildly impressive forty-one—next year he’d kick it over fifty.... “. . . when you’re in love, my how they fly.” The whole town was drunk with sunshine, optimism, and ringer whisky, delirious with good times. “Never saw the sun, shinin’ so bright; never saw things lookin’ so right—” Teddy looked through his long lashes—never saw as many people drinking as hard or laughing as much. You see one or two this way most of the time. Sometimes as high as thirty or forty, after a big salmon run or a big log-camp fight. But never before, only thing near it was at the peak of the recession scare. I don’t understand. So much drinking. Even toasting Hank Stamper... (My couple of whiskies didn’t do me a bit of good. I tell the boys they got to excuse me but I can feel my little flu bug coming up outa his hidey-hole, preparing for another attack. I thanked them for the drinks and pulled my jacket on. When I left I waved to them all and told them to keep up the good work, that it was 644 ken kesey heartening for a man to see his fellows laboring so hard to get shut of the alcohol surplus, and they all laughed and told me to hurry back as soon as I could to give them a hand—that it was gonna be just like old times again. But every one of us knows that it won’t ever again be the same . . .) Unsheathed . . . wild ...the first of May in the redwoods, out all day long till dark and the next day Sunday and no work but I hike back up just the same, alone, to see what it’s like cut clean... the morning sun walks across new ground, ground unlighted for a thousand thousand years, and finds dew necklaces strung by spiders across the sleek green throats of Darlingtonias. Funny weed, them flycatchers. Lots of funny plants. Them Indians eat a outfit called a wapatoo, a tuber-like affair that grows under water in the sloughs, squaws wade around barefoot and grub them outen the mud with their toes. Touch-me-nots spring like traps when you touch them. Dwarf iris supposed to been planted by little people useta live in the woods. The pitch-ogres, remember them? awful boogers ...kid won’t go out at night on account the pitch-ogres might mingle with them and they’ll stick to death. Death always right handy. On the beach, so close to the water that the waves sometimes touch it, a grave is marked by a cedar cross and daffodils stunted by salt air . . . little Illabelle Sitkins one day sits out on the back step and cracks open all the apricot seeds her ma’d throwed out whilst canning apricots. July thirteenth, nineteen ought—hell, I don’t know: and she eats the pits because they taste like almonds you get for Christmas and dies of the bellyache. I’ve tried ’em myself. July 15: We had services at the Toms house for Illabelle, then all run foot-races on the beach after the burying. Aug. 19: John kills a she-bear. Sept. 4: Rained twenty-eight hours solid. Water under kitchen. Sept. 5: Rain and sleet and some snow. Big wind. Tree smashed up the smokehouse. Sept. 6: got timbers to brace up smokehouse. Nov. 11: Lord’s Day the old lady very ill. Had doctor in he stayed all night. Ben trapped some minks and got chewed up and the doctor patched him up too. Nov. 13: Dog ate some salmon washed up, pretty sick and broke down in the hindquarters. Went into town and Stokes givemesomemedicine forhim. Stokes, damn you, Hank did it sometimes a great notion because he seen that . . . Stayed to argue with him and help him hull wheat.... because he seen that maybe too many folks’d get hurt if. . . . Stokes said he wouldn’t charge up the medicine but I ought to send my mama to Eugene to Hospital. Hell with that. Nov. 15: Went to Arnold Eggleston’s place for road works meeting. John and me come on home but Ben stayed and danced and got beat up by Sam Montgomery. Dog better when we get home. Old lady too...But where’s Hank? “There goes a good old boy,” Evenwrite proclaims when he sees Hank’s jeep pass. “Stubborn, but straight,” agrees Sitkins. “A real squareshooter,” the Real Estate Hotwire adds and drinks to it. From behind his bar Teddy pauses in his polishing to see what will happen now that the guest of honor has taken his leave. That the laughter and talk had been a bit strained while Hank was present was no surprise to Teddy; it didn’t take an expert on barroom psychology to understand that the merrymaking should have been a little tense under the circumstances. But now that the circumstances had removed himself, what would happen? How would they act? Teddy watched. He could usually predict, almost to the joke, or the curse, how his patrons would react after one of them had departed, but all day today their actions had been so anomalous, so out-of-theordinary, that he didn’t even dare to guess. He watched, through a deep-sea cast of smoke . . . As the band continued, finishing up a request, and Howie Evans twisted his chin sideways to pop a stiff vertebra. And Jenny buzzed heavily from table to table with her fistful of Indian compensation, buying drinks and dribbling change, from table to table like a rubber-booted bee. A usual Saturday night, Teddy thought; sporadic laughter, coughing, nose-blowing, cursing. Just like. Except. What? (Andy was still in the jeep when I got there, tootling on his harmonica. Playing “Wabash Cannonball.” “Damn!” I said. “Heave over. Damn. That damn harmonica. I thought it was Joe’s little radio, and that—” I didn’t finish and he stuck the 646 ken kesey thing back in his pocket. Then he said, “Hank? You ain’t, by any chance, got any intentions ...tomorrow—” “Of runnin’ them logs? Hell’s fire, I ain’t got any intentions of runnin’ anything more than a fever tomorrow, Andy. What’s wrong with you, anyhow? We ain’t even got a quota to run!” “Yeah we do,” he said. “I made a count. That last log filled it.” “Hell,” I said. “Didn’t you hear what Bismarck said? That WP don’t even want them no more, the way the river’s comin’ up. What the hell’s wrong with you?” “I just wanted to know,” he mumbled and hushed up. I got the jeep started and headed out to pick up Viv. I was ready to call it a day....) “Gawd almighty damn.” Les Gibbons lurched suddenly up from the booth when he noticed that Hank had left. Halfway up he became tangled about a chair leg and his lurch turned into an awkward struggle that reminded Big Newton of a man trying to wrench himself from a mudhole. “...a mighty damn,” Les repeated when he was standing; he looked about the room with the blue bunting of his lips fluttering limply about his shouting. “I am one ...fierce ... motherjumper!” Big tilted a bloodshot eye to check and didn’t quite see it that way. “You don’t look too fierce to me, Motherjumper.” Les was only piqued to more ferocity by the dissension; he squinted through the smoke at the laughing faces to try to see who’d dared doubt the first half of his title. “Fierce enough,” he proclaimed, “to tear a new asshole in whatever nigger said that!” There was more laughter, more jeering, but since no nigger was hurrying forward through the smoke to have his anatomy rearranged, Les sighed and elaborated. “Fierce enough that I jes’ think I’ll go over an’ kick the hound outa that Hank Stamper over there!” “Danged if I don’t believe, Les, that you’re about ten seconds late,” Big said into his beer. “Hank just drove off.” “Then I’ll foller him right to his hole and kick the hound outa him there!” “Who’d tote you ’cross river to his house?” Big wanted to know. “Or would you expect him to come get you?” Les squinted again but was still unable to locate his gadfly. “I sometimes a great notion won’t need a totin’!” he shouted, as though the gadfly was all the way down at the depot end of the barroom instead of sitting in the chair right across from him. “I’d swim ’er, is what; I’d swim that river!” “Bull, Gibbons,” Howie Evans said; maybe Big could be patient, but some others were trying to hear the music and becoming more and more aggravated with this liver-lipped ape. “You’d drown ten foot from bank.” “Yeah, Les,” another chimed in, “an’ pollute the river for a month. Kill all the fish, probably most of the ducks....” “Yeah, Les, and we don’t want you drownin’ and killin’ the game. You stay here in the warm and don’t risk yourself.” Les wasn’t to be pacified by their concern. “You think I can’t swim that river?” “Les.” This time Big looked up, like a big lion raising its head off its forepaws. “I know you can’t swim that river.” Les looked quickly about and saw who was speaking, thought for a moment about what Big had said, and decided not to appear immodest by arguing the point. “Yeah, well,” he said, setting back into his place in the booth like a man deciding mud ain’t so bad after all, “Hank Stamper ain’t the only one able to swim a river, y’know.” “Maybe not, but he’s the only one that happens to come to my mind just this minute.” “I don’t know ’bout that,” Les said petulantly. “You hear what Grissom said the doc said who went out there?” Sitkins asked Big. “He said Hank got home that night an’ found the boat missin’ and swum across. I swear to golly, that’s what they said.” “That night after those goons Floyd hired from Reedsport worked him over?” “That’s what they say.” “Jesus Christ,” Howie Evans said. “You gotta give him credit for spunk even if he don’t have a lot of sense. Hurt that bad, I woulda bet money when he left here he couldn’t of walked, let ’lone swum a river.” “Maybe,” Les said, “he weren’t hurt so bad as ever’body thought.” 648 ken kesey “What are you talking about?” Big demanded. “I don’t know. Maybe he weren’t hurt so bad as he acted. Maybe he just sulled to fool you.” “Are you kidding me, Les?” Big gripped his beer glass, feeling himself growing more angry at this blockhead than he’d thought possible. A little more and—“Listen, somebody better straighten you out before you say somethin’ to him personally an’ get your neck broke. Listen here: you talk about him sulling . . . ain’t I spent three evenings right here in this bar entertaining you fellows by trying to make him do something along just that line? I worked him over about as terrible as a man can be worked over and still stand up—worse’n any little slappin’ around—and, boy, I tell ya: if he ever sulled by god you could of fooled me!” “Amen to that.” One of the Sitkins brothers nodded knowingly. “Not Hank Stamper.” “Look here,” Big continued, his voice trembling strangely. “You see where them teeth’re missing? Hank slapped them out for me that Halloween night after he got up off the floor about the sixth time. If he was sullin’ then, you sure coulda fooled these here teeth. I tell you what, Les; before you take on Hank, what do you say me an’ you spar around some? To warm you up, sort of ...?” “Ah, Big,” Les said, “you know how I talk—” “I said let’s spar around some, godblessit!” The band had stopped. Big had pushed back from the table and was rising in front of Les like a mountain. Les appeared to sink deeper into his mud. “I said, let’s get up, Gibbons! Get the fuck up!” And the room, suddenly so quiet the deep drumming of the oil burning in the heater could be heard, felt that strange trembling fully. Waiting. Teddy swiveled softly from the laundry bag where he had just placed his dishtowel, moving carefully to keep from disturbing his specimens. Before him, the long room seemed stretched even longer by the silence, taut as a wire. But not the clenched anticipation that usually precedes a fight. Again, something different . . . what is it, this fear? Across the turned heads Teddy saw Les Gibbons, the shabby sometimes a great notion form shrunk beneath the towering, outlandish bulk of Big Newton—a scene made even more ridiculous, even more comical, by Newton’s monumental rage; look how furious he is with that pathetic Les! Big’s face was blazing; his neck was corded with the bind of his shoulders; his chin quivered so that Teddy could easily see it, far away as he was. So much fury at such pathetic insignificance? It’s a wonder someone doesn’t break up laughing. Except—Teddy put down his polishing rag—except it isn’t rage. No! Down the beautifully grained bartop, polished to an expensive luster by his years of face-watching, Teddy saw for one instant a common face—Not rage or caution either—a face he had never seen before in all his polishing years. As a collector of expressions, he thought he had seen and studied them all; it was his hobby, his business. For years of endless, outcast nights he had watched an endless sea of idiots tossed wave on wave across the beach of his bar...watched, and skillfully gauged every wink and grin, and carefully analyzed every fat drop of anxious sweat, every scared tremble of hand and frightened swallowing. My, yes, if anything, he knew expressions . . . but never this face, never before this expression of ...of— Then Rod slaps his guitar—“An-ee-time . . .”—shooting Ray a look to wake him up; “. . . you’re thinkin’ of me . . .” Ray joins in halfheartedly: “An-ee-time . . . you’re feelin’ blue . . .” And the taut wire of silence snaps, the tableau thaws. Big Newton thunders off to pee, his face once more bleak and surly. Les Gibbons laughs a blubbering laugh that sounds as though it had come up through purple clay. Mrs. Carleson’s daughter begins rattling glasses in the sink. Evenwrite wanders out, looking either dazed or drunk. Jenny tugs on a drunk arm lackadaisically, her usual tenacity missing. Howie Evans contorts his unlovely back to relieve old kinks, looking for a woman. The Sitkins boys begin wordlessly razzing Les about his near-annihilation. Evenwrite starts his car and drives slowly east up Main with nine beers heavy and joyless in his belly. Old Henry shades his eyes against the May Day sun that shines through the broken green dome across a flowered meadow of months. January, nineteen-twenty-one, as I recollect, after the storm they still call the High Blow, Ben is farting around for one reason or the other 650 ken kesey down south of Florence near the mouth of the Siltcoos and he sees four whales left by the tides with the bar too low for them to swim back out to sea. And he—wait till I get that photograph—he gets a rowboat and rows out there and kills all four of them with an ax, so help me god! June bugs, hot and humming, hummmmming. No. January? Oh yeah, Ben? Well, nobody’d believe he wasn’t telling a whopper till me and John borrowed a camera from Stokes and—what in thunder did I do with that picture, anyhow? Around here someplace ...I saw last...let’s see...Nov. 17: Doctor out again to see the old lady. Says she looks mainly tired is all. Says dog is good as he’ll get after salmon sickness, gimpy in the hindquarters but will be fine, will be able to trail just as good as— Nov. 19: Dog died. Old Red? Brownie? No, Old Gray . . . from eating salmon, spine bowed the wrong direction and died. Nov. 24: Thanksgiving—a different year?—old lady died. John and me build coffin out of Idaho pine. Doctor says he don’t know why. Stokes says cannot endure. Hell with that. I say she just Hank? Hank boy, oh Hank don’t you know that the old lady just Hank boy you can’t laid down and died boy? Hank boy if you the sun leaps springs back can’t keep sun crashing on ground shadowed a thousand thousand “Hank, goddammit, straighten up there!” “Mr. Stamper! Lie back down! Doctor... Doctor, a hand, please!” “And never by god give a boogin’!” A pretty good world you keep the shadows off. Salmonberries: pale, translucent orange with a taste more delicate than the color. “Listen to me now, Hank, son, I’m talkin’ to ya!” Butterflies busy as stars. “Mr. Stamper . . . calm and easy now...” The Walking Preacher, remember? talkin’ over Mama when she died, tell that he one time baptized a fella in sour mash; a real loud, shoutin’ preacher sonofabitch you could hear carryin’ on a good two miles, always hungry, always digging at his big nose, always talking about Christian Charity . . . oh, those winters! “Stokes, blast you, bringing out them cast-offs!” Missionary barrels, packed by churches back East always a big hullabaloo when the barrel came in on the boat, always the buttons cut off all the sometimes a grea t notion donated clothes, always teeth outen the combs . . . “Stokes by god I’ll wear leaves an’ comb my hair with fishbones afore I’ll!” The sun crashes into green shadows unlighted . . . “Before I’ll give a goddam inch to your goddam!” . . . springs back, cracking through the dome. “Calm and peaceful, Mr. Stamper, there we go, now, there we go it’ll just be a moment . . .” Crashing once more out of blue behind the gathering rush... “. . . hush, hush, hush.” “He’s asleep. Thanks for the help.” The milky light flutters. The nurse draws deep, cotton-soft gray curtains down over the first of May. Andy drops Hank and Viv off at the house and drives the jeep on up to the mill to row his skiff back across in the rain. Big Newton tries to compose himself on the can by scratching letters from the wash your hands before returning to work sign decaled on the toilet door, changing the first line to was you had and adding a question mark after work. Ray finally wakes up enough from the shock the silence has given him to step up the beat and the volume. Jenny, growing suddenly weary of this game of maneuvering drunks, thumps out the door, having thought of another game. Just as Simone, resigned and irreligious in lascivious scarlet, whisks in the same door and surrenders the sweet-cake na.veté in her heart forever. “Hey-hey, look who just flew in. How do, Simone; long time no see.” “Boys . . .” “An’ goodness me, all feathered out like she’s right off a magazine cover!” “Thank you; I think it is nice. It is a gift....” “Howie. Say, Howie, Simone’s here; Simone’s back, Howie....” “Tut. Simone’s back, everybody. Who will buy me a beer, a lot of beer, please?” “Teddy. A drink for zee little lady from Frawnce.... No, a drink for everybody!” Teddy turns from the face for the glasses draining on the towel beside Mrs. Carleson’s daughter—this expression. Now I know. Now I see—his plump little body still tingling with the charge of that taut instant. I thought this day, this sunshine, this 652 ken kesey well-being was selling all this alcohol. I thought all my notions why people drink was all wrong when this lovely day ...but now I see. In the falling dark his neons begin to stir. His hands come alive. Glasses tink together, the till rings.... It just took some time to see what was happening. I thought I had collected all the dark situations; I thought I knew them. I thought I knew all the expressions, I thought I had seen all the fears . . . while the music and laughter glorious good times blaze under his smoky ceiling . . . but never this face before; never absolute, unspeakable, supreme terror! There occurs to me now one last anecdote, a bit long; skip it if you wish, it has nothing to do with the story. ...I put it in because it seems to me somehow pertinent—if not to plot or parable, at least to purpose. About a guy I met in the nuthouse, a Mr. Siggs, a nervous, quick-featured self-schooled hick who had spent all his fifty or so years except for Service time in the eastern Oregon town of his birth. A reader of encyclopedias, a memorizer of Milton, a writer of a column called “Words to Adjust By” in the Patients’ Paper...a completely capable and sufficient person, yet this intense little self-styled scholar was perhaps the most uncomfortable man on the ward. Siggs was terribly paranoid in crowds, equally hung up in one-to-one situations, and seemed to enjoy no ease at all except by himself inside a book. And no one could have been more shocked than myself when he volunteered for the job as Ward Public Relations Director. “Masochism?” I asked him when I heard of his new position. “What do you mean?” He fidgeted, hedging away from my eyes, but I went on. “I mean this Public Relations job . . . why are you taking on this business of dealing with big groups of people when you’re apparently so much more at ease alone?” At this Mr. Siggs stopped fidgeting and looked at me; he had large, heavy-lidded eyes that could burn with sudden unblinking intensity. “Just before I came in here...I took a job, stock outrider. In a shack hid away outside Baker. A place a hundred miles from noplace. Nobody, nothing, far as I could see. Sweet, high country; beautiful ...Not even a cedar tree. Took along complete set of Great Books. All the classics, ten dollars a month, book salesman took it out of my wages in Baker. Beautiful country. See a thousand miles any direction, like it was all mine. A million stars, a million 654 ken kesey sage blossoms—all mine. Yes, beautiful . . . Couldn’t make it, though. Committed myself after a month and a half.” His face softened and his blue stare dimmed again beneath his half-closed lids; he grinned at me; I could see him forcing himself to try to relax. “Oh, you’re right. Yes, you are: I am a loner, a born one. And someday I will make it—that shack, I mean. Yes. I will, you’ll see. But not like last time. Not to hide. No. Next time I try it it will be first because I choose to, then because it is where I am most comfortable. Only sensible plan; sure of it. But ...a fellow has to get so he can deal with these Public Relations, before he can truly make it. Make it like that . . . alone . . . in some shack. A man has to know he had a choice before he can enjoy what he chose. I know now. That a human has to make it with other humans ...before he can make it with himself.” I had a therapeutic addition to this: “And vice versa, Mr. Siggs: he has to make it with himself before branching out.” He agreed, reluctantly, but he still agreed. Because at that time we both considered this addition pretty psychologically profound and—in spite of its chicken-or-egg overtones—the very last word in “Words to Adjust By” at that time. Recently, however, I found that there were even further additions. A few months ago I was sage-hen hunting in the Ochoco Mountains—high, spare, lonely plains country and certainly as far from noplace as any place I know—and I ran into Mr. Siggs again, a healthier, younger-looking Mr. Siggs, tanned, bearded, and calm as a lizard on a sunny stone. After overcoming our mutual surprise, we recalled our conversation after his acceptance of the Public Relations job, and I asked how his plans had worked out. Perfectly—after some successful therapy he’d been discharged with honors over a year ago, had his outriding job, his Great Books, his shack ...loved it. But didn’t he still occasionally wonder if he were really choosing his shack or still just hiding in it? Nope. Wasn’t he lonely? Nope. Well wasn’t he bored, then, with all this sunshine and adjustment? He shook his head. “After you get so you can make it with other people, and make it with yourself, there’s still sometimes a great notion work to be done; you still have the main party to deal with . . .” “The ‘main party’?” I asked, right then starting to suspect that statement about his being discharged “with honors.” “What do you mean, Mr. Siggs? The ‘main party’? You mean deal with Nature? God?” “Yes, it could be,” he remarked, rolling on his rock to warm his other side and closing his eyes against the sun. “Nature or God. Or it could be Time. Or Death. Or just the stars and the sage blossoms. Don’t know yet. . . .” He yawned, then raised his little head and fixed me once more with that same intense look, a demented bright-blue look galvanized by some drive beneath his leathery face that sunshine—or therapy—could never adjust. . . . “I am fifty-three,” he said sharply. “Took fifty years, half a century, just to get to where I could deal with something my own size. Don’t expect me to work this other thing out overnight. So long.” The eyes closed and he seemed to sleep, a skinny backcountry Buddha, on a hot rock miles from noplace. I walked on, back toward camp, trying to decide if he was saner or crazier than when I last saw him. I decided he was. Thanksgiving morn finds the town suffering under a drizzling gray overcast and a driving black hangover, with a mouthful of yesterday’s cigarettes, and thankful for nothing but the knowledge that all such mornings pass. This morning Big Newton tries to purge himself of the day before with soda and vinegar. Howie Evans uses a spoonful of Sal Hepatica and a half-bottle of French toilet water, genuine from Paris, which he steals from Simone and takes to his wife as a peace offering. Jenny uses a page from Timothy. Les Gibbons tries cold water when, running down to the riverbank, he slips while shouting to Andy rowing past; Andy heaves on downstream, toward the mill, rowing obliviously past the man floundering and cursing in the reedy shallows, as though he is rowing in his sleep. Viv brushes at her teeth with salt. Ray sits muggle-headed on the 656 ken kesey edge of the bed and tries to wash away his darker feelings with the bright memory of his success last night and the glowing prospect of his future. Simone tries to wash away similar feelings, using the Blood of the Lamb. Evenwrite uses Vicks VapoRub and the words from an old song of his father’s. ...When that line of smoky fire is drawn Tell me which side are you on? ...then gives up asking and falls asleep in the tub. Jenny is more tenacious. The Bible page gone, she returns to her shack, tired but resolute. Ever since leaving the bar last night, she has been working doggedly at the old childhood ritual that was responsible for her early departure from the Snag. This is a kid’s game with clam shells, recalled after all these years, a game the little girls of the tribe used to play to call up the image of the men the gods had ordained to be their mates. Across the foot of her dingy cot Jenny has arranged a white pillowcase as a background; once clean, the pillowcase now has a graying smudge in its center left by hours of casting and picking up shells. She stands above the pillowcase, bends slightly at her thick waist, moves her two clasped hands in a slow cir-cle...then opens the hands, sprinkling a patter of opulent, surf-sanded shells onto the cloth. She studies them a moment, singing, “This bed is been manless too long too long, this bed is been manless too long . . .”—to the tune of “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More.” She nods at what she sees and scoops the shells back into her hand to begin again: “Wah-kon-da-ahgah hear my song . . . this bed is been manless too long too long . . .” When Jenny was fifteen the trouble was that the bed hadn’t been manless long enough; “Jenny, you too young,” her brothers had tried to tell her, “to go into business....What kind of business this, anyway?” “With Father. A trade. He voted for Roosevelt.” “He’s a fool. Listen, why don’t you come with us? Down the coast to the place Hoover built for us. Place better than this; good house, facilities inside and out...and we get paid for living on sometimes a great notion it down the coast there. So why don’t you? . . . Mud anyway you look at it.” Jenny shook her head and turned a trim hip before the bright new house trailer that her brothers had bought for the move to the reservation; “I think I just stay if it’s fine with all you.” The dim aluminum image gave her a resolute nod of approval; then she lifted an orange skirt to display trim brown legs bare to the belly button....“Father say the Indians come under the New Deal just the same as anybody. He say me and him got a trade if we decide we wan’ to apply it. You like my legs?” Her brothers gaped. “Jenny! My God! Put down your clothes! Father’s a crazy fool. You come on down coast.” She hiked the skirt behind and turned, looking back over her shoulder at the brown spread of her mirrored ass. “He said if we stay right around here where they logging, we retire rich quick from our business. Mmm ...how do you like orange, huh?” Five years later her father demonstrated his crazy-foolishness by spending their savings on a new house made with sawed boards, split shingles, plastered in all the rooms . . . right next door to the Pringle mansion. That was his mistake; an Indian might have a business, he might even get by with a house with plaster rooms and shingles, but by god he oughta know better’n to put that house an’ business right next door to a decent God-fearing Christian woman! especially if that woman is Pucker Pringle. The incensed citizenry burned the house before Jenny so much as spent one night under its new roof, then in a fit of righteousness drove the poor father to the hills. Jenny they allowed to remain, providing she come down in her aspirations as well as her prices, and move to a less observant neighborhood . . . “It ain’t so bad,” she told her brothers when they came to repossess her. “They give me this nice cabin out here. An’ I ain’t lonesome. I dance in the dance hall whenever I want to dance. That’s why I stay, maybe.” She neglected to mention the green-eyed young logger she had vowed to trap. “Also I get fifteen, twenty dollars a week . . . what the Government give you boys?” She didn’t mind the comedown, either in price or in property; 658 ken kesey with no one to divide with, she was actually making more take-home than before. Besides, she liked being back on the clam-flats. She had never got used to the smell of that hotel room, or the sound of people you didn’t know always walking past where you slept at night, waking you up and you laying there not knowing. “At least when you hear a footstep slop-slopping across the mud at midnight, in coldest night in January, you know somebody is come to see you.” The trouble was that with the passing of Januaries and the steady diet of clams, wapatoos, and choctaw beer, the brown ass grew broader and the footsteps became more and more infrequent. Financially, Jenny was quite comfortable: the land about her shack was abundant with cash as well as clams; literally hundreds of snuff cans containing fifteen or twenty dollars in bills enriched that mud. She had learned well the lesson of humility taught by her father: Don’t make a business look too successful—hide it. And, for a number of years, the frequency with which she was seen laboring away with shovel at all hours of the day and night prompted large tips of pity. So she didn’t hurt for money. But, as the footsteps slackened, she came to miss the company. Enough to want to change things. This time she made the trip. She found her brothers whittling myrtlewood bric-a-brac in an army barracks tent. They offered her a box to sit on. “The government hasn’t got around to buildin’ the houses now, with this war going on,” they apologized. “But soon now...” “Never mind. What tent’s the old goatman put in? I got to talk to him. I need some magic.” The shaman took one look and advised her that it would take mighty magic to change things now, mighty big magic, bigger magic that he could lay his hands on. Okay, she would find it. In Coos Bay she bought a Thomas Mann novel and tried all the bus ride back to Wakonda to find out just where was this mountain full of magic this man was talking about. She gave up as she crossed the bridge into town, and tossed the book into the river. After that she brought her research material home from the lending library: it looked as though she might be in for a long haul with this magic thing, and a lot of books; and there sometimes a great notion was no sense buying any more than you had to when there were obviously so many going to be disappointments like the dud this phony German wrote. There were for sure a lot of disappointments and duds, but she had plodded ahead with rubber-booted determination, working to alleviate her problem by attacking it at two levels: when she was home alone in her shack she plied an occult gleaned from haphazard thousands of books, a bastard brew of magic, unpredictable and nameless ...when she was in the Snag she plied free glasses of Teddy’s liquor on drunks, a bastard brew often as unpredictable and nameless as her magic, though it might be straight from a bottle marked Bourbon De Luxe. Over all, this second method had been far more successful than her spells and chants: on a good night with enough different drunks to work with, she could generally fill her manless bed at least briefly and, if the situation was right and she picked carefully, could sometimes even get a man still sober enough to be capable of filling more than just the bed. Last night had been ideal for the administration of this method: the men had started drinking early and were drunk enough when she arrived that there was little need for her to spend her money for drinks. Within an hour she had had two old friends at different tables ask her if she was still using that same sealskin blanket on her cot, and a fisherman barely forty years old remarked that maybe she needed help scraping the barnacles off that keel ...an ideal situation! But she had suddenly ceased her buying and her heavy-set flirting and collapsed in a chair by herself. Somewhere two men had been talking about Henry Stamper: seen ’im in the hospital an’ that there old turtle looked like he was finally getting set to buy his piece of dirt. She had known this, of course—old man like that, a dead certainty he wasn’t gonna live forever ...but it wasn’t until she heard someone else say it that the dead certainty became a fact. Henry Stamper was gonna be gone, pretty soon now; the last ragged remnant of her green-eyed logger was gonna be gone... And, realizing this, she found she was no longer interested in bringing home one of these other men from the Snag. Not even 660 ken kesey the stout-looking fisherman. Dejected, she had slumped deeper into the chair, still holding the glass of liquor she’d purchased as bait for the fisherman. With a gulp she drank it herself. Need it. Got no man ahead of me, no one I can see ahead of me at all . . . And just as she was about to order another glass, the old Indian seashell game came to her, the man-seeing ritual, coming from no whiteman’s book or no white god’s gospel but from her own childhood. She belched loudly, pushed herself to her feet, and thumped out, grim and gas-filled and indefatigable, across a score of manless years . . . “Too long, too long, too long,” she chants querulously. “Manless too damn long”—and makes another toss with the seashells. She sips absently from her glass of brackish liquid and studies the pattern on the pillowcase. The pattern is getting better every toss. At first, for a long time, there was nothing. Just scattered seashells. Then there was an eye, repeating itself in toss after toss. Then two eyes, then a nose! And now this whole face just like this for six or seven times in a row getting clearer all the time...! She scoops up the shells and circles her hands slowly: “...too long, too long, too long, too long . . . this bed is been manless too long . . .” In town the Real Estate Hotwire finally gets through to that nigger lawyer in Portland and finds that it is even worse than his sister feared . . . “Everything, sis, not just the insurance, he left her everything!” Even the theater, which he had expected was returning home to roost in his office for another six months. He shakes his head at his sister sitting across the desk from him. “She got the works. That snake must have lost his mind. Don’t cry, Sissy-Britches, we’ll fight it, of course. I told that nigger lawyer we weren’t about to stand still for his kind of black—” He stops abruptly, staring at the little wooden figure forming beneath his whittling knife ...Blast! And that family from California threatening to move into his unrented four-room stucco out Nahamish... that would be a fine kettle of fish if they got away with it. And—hey, b’ gorry!—those two letters asking about living upstairs in that room over his office . . . sometimes a great notion they sure never sent along any photograph! Blast and double blast! Won’t they ever leave a man alone to make a mark in this ratrace? Must they always come slipping in to make trouble just when there’s better times right round the bend? Blast the bunch of haunts ...get away, get away! He flings the figure into the wastebasket after its shavings, giving up ...whoever heard of a colored Johnny Redfeather, anyway? Just as Simone disposes of her own haunting statue, putting it at the very back of the very highest shelf in the closet and stuffing her old wedding gown in front of it, feeling herself finally beyond the help of a virgin idol....What good was such an idol to her now? Could a virgin be expected to understand safety jelly? or Listerine gargle? or the cold cyst that swelled like a frozen bubble beneath her skin, the cold, empty hollow left when you for now and evermore relinquished Virtue, and Contrition, and even Shame? Don’t make me laugh, Mary-doll . . . And as Ray finally stands up and walks away from the bed to the grimy sink in the corner of their room, giving up his attempt to brighten the morning with memory. He takes the cracked enamel basin and fills it with warm water. After putting the basin on the forbidden hot plate behind their trunk, he sits in the hardback chair and lights a cigarette, watching Rod rock and roll about the bed, snoring in three-four time. “Rodney, boy . . .” Ray whispers, “you never was all that bad with your beat, you know? For all my bugging you. You had your slow times and your fast times but you was usually in there pretty close. Me, man, I got a beat strict as a clock. And perfect pitch, you know? Oh, I ain’t coming on, I’m just saying what I know. It’s the straight stuff. I mean, I know it’s there . . . like last night, with everything swinging all the way, on top of it, tips, requests . . . nothing to stop me from going clear to the top, you know, man? I got Blue Skies, and a clear road, and not a thing in my way, not! one! solitary! thing! Rod man, to keep me from wailing clear to the top of the heap!” He stops. The clock ticks. He daubs out the half-smoked cigarette in a chili-stained dish and stands up. He hears the water boiling briskly in the enameled pan. He walks across to the bed and pulls his guitar case from beneath the bureau and flips the 662 ken kesey snaps open. He takes out the instrument and places it on the floor beside the case ...then for a moment just stands, looking down at the instrument’s workmanship, at the pearl inlay, at the rhythmed flow of the cherrywood grain set off by the six parallels of gleaming steel ...damned pretty, sorta like a good, organized run; freedom and style and order. He smiles at the guitar, then closes his eyes and steps onto it with both bare feet. The wires stretch, the cherrywood creaks. Damned pretty, god-damned pretty . . . He jumps into the air. No reason, on a pretty piece like this, a man couldn’t go all— There is a chonging crash. Rod rears up startled from his snores to see his roommate leaping up and down on the jagged ruin of his steel guitar. “Ray!” Rod swings his feet from beneath the blanket; Ray turns in his direction a face both harried and dreamily peaceful . . . “Ray, man, wait!” But before he can reach his friend, Ray has dashed across the room and plunged both fists to the wrists in the boiling water . . . Lee is awakened by the scream, first excusing the sound: those two musicians across the hall, raising an awful row... but then a bang, then another scream, then running in the hall, shouting, doors opening . . . well, just one more nightmare to wake to. He gets out of bed and dresses hurriedly, spurred to haste by the mysterious activity for the first time in three days. Except for meals, he has spent almost all of his time since leaving the house there in the hotel room, in his bed, reading, dozing, waking ...sometimes awakened by the touch of slim, cool fingers tracing his skin, only to open his eyes and find that the room has become too hot again and the fingers are only rivulets of sweat ...then rolling over to doze—and wait—some more. And sometimes wondering, in his waiting stupor, whether those slim fingers, or the slim and ethereal girl who had applied them, had ever been more than a fantasy of temperature . . . By the time he has dressed and headed down to the lobby, the manager and his teen-aged son have helped the musician corner his berserk roommate in the phone booth. Rod has pulled on Ray’s trousers in the excitement, and they fit ridiculously tight about his thighs and waist. He is pleading in a gentle whisper at sometimes a great notion the booth. Standing on the stairs, Lee is able to look down into the booth and see the other man sitting with both knees jammed against the door, his head tipped sideways almost coquettishly as he fondly chides his two boiled hands lifted before him. Lee watches as a small crowd gathers. Occasionally Rod will look back over his shoulder and explain to one of the newcomers, “Ray’s always been high-strung. Taut, like a G string. A sensitive musician is always high-strung. He had a lot of plans for the future, see, but it seems like he was just strung too tight and high to finish a gig, you see . . .” The sheriff arrives with a tool box; they are getting ready to dismantle the booth door with screwdrivers and a claw hammer when Lee decides he has seen enough. Buttoning his coat, he continues on down the steps and out onto the sidewalk, stopping outside the hotel to look up and down the street and wonder now what? What are my plans for the future? Way-all, I concluded . . . one thing is certain: I’ll have to be sure and know of a good convenient phone booth in case I also turn out to be strung too high to finish the gig. Actually, this was in no way an accurate analysis of my mood... because I felt about as low-strung as a man can feel and still manage something as active as a slow stroll. I shuffled disconsolately down Main, as tranquil as the soft gray rain drifting about me, my hands hibernating in the deep, furry pockets of the jacket Joe Ben had given me that first day in the woods, and my head in an aimless fuzz. Three days of paperback mysteries in my aquarium of a hotel room had apparently mildewed all my motivation. I simply walked, neither going, nor fleeing, any place at all. And when I found that my wandering had brought me to Neawashea Street, near the hospital where my father was reported to be crumbling apart, I turned off, not really so much because I wanted to see the old man— though I had been damning myself for two days for putting off the visit—as because the hospital was the nearest dry place at the moment. I was walking back along the same forbidding route that I had traversed in terror a few days before, but it seemed forbidding no longer, and I didn’t feel the slightest fright. And when I 664 ken kesey felt none of the old muscle-knitting thrill at passing the cemetery, none of the apprehensive tingle as I approached the shack of the Mad Scandinavian Fisherman known to rush forth unexpectedly from his dank tarpaper lair and attack hapless pedestrians with a chinook salmon, I was struck with that feeling of inconsolable loss that the satiated big-game hunter must experience when he returns to camp, through the suddenly monotonous jungle, having slain whatever demon he feared the very most. My steely eyes, once alert and aglitter with the excitement of the hunt, had waxed muddy and dull behind fogged lenses that I made no attempt to clean.