And I'd say, "Okay, look here: you're quarterbacking the Green Bay Packers. It's fourth down and three in the third quarter, fourth, and three, and you're behind, nineteen to ten, a quarter to go. You're on their thirty. Okay . . . what do you do?"
He'd shuffle around, looking around, looking at the ball. "I don't know. I don't care."
"You'd go for the three-point field goal, nutty, and why don't you care?"
"I just don't is all."
"Don't you want your team to get the league championship? You need that field goal three points. Then, see, after the field goal you got a chance to pick up the six and one and put you out ahead nineteen to twenty."
"No, I don't."
"Don't?"
"Care if they win the league championship. None at all."
And I'd finally get pissed. "Okay then, why are you playing if you don't care?" And he'd walk off from the ball.
"I'm not. I never will."
Like that. And it was the same in a lot of other ways. He couldn't seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating. That's why he was so easy to shuck, I guess, because he was just content as you please to accept whatever demon I might happen to trot in--especially if I made it kinda vague. Like . . . well, another thing comes to mind: When he was a little kid he'd always be out on the dock in a life jacket waiting when we come in from work; bright orange life jacket, like an orange popsicle. He'd stand there, hugging a piling and watching us through his glasses, and like as not the first thing I'd say would be some kind of bull. "Lee, bub," I'd say, "you got any idea what I found up on them hills today?"
"No." He'd look away from me with a frown on his face, telling himself he wasn't gonna get took this time. Not after I'd shucked him so bad the day before. No sirree bob! Not little bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, book-reading Leland Stanford who already knew the multiplication tables up to the sevens and could add a dozen figures in his head. So he'd stand, and fiddle, and flip rocks into the river while we packed away the gear. But you could bet he was interested, for all his ignoring.
I'd act like I'd dismissed the subject, keep on working.
Finally he'd say, "No . . . I don't think you found anything."
I'd shrug and keep on packing the gear in the boathouse.
"Maybe you saw something is all, but you never found anything."
I'd give him a long look like I was oh, trying to dee-cide whether to tell him or not, him being just a kid and all; he'd start getting fidgety.
"Come on, Hank; what was it you saw?"
And I'd say, "It was a Hide-behind, Lee." Then I'd look around to see if anybody might be overhearing such a god-awful news; nobody but the dogs. I'd lower my voice. "Yessir, a honest-to-goodness Hide-behind. Shoot. I been hopin' we wouldn't have any more trouble with those fellows. Had enough of 'em in the thirties. But now, oh gracious me . . ."
Then I'd maybe click my tongue and shake my head, make to look over the boat or something, like what'd been said was aplenty. Or like it didn't look to me he was even interested. But all the time knowing I'd sunk the hook clean to the shank. He'd follow me to the house, keeping still long as he could, scared to ask because I'd fooled him so last week with that whopper about the one-winged pinnacle grouse that flew in circles, or the sidehill dodger that had its uphill leg inches shorter than its downhill leg so's it could maneuver easy on the slopes. He'd be still. He knew better. But always, finally, if I waited long enough, he'd have to break down and ask.
"Okay, then, what's a Hide-behind supposed to be?"
"A Hide-behind?" I'd give him what Joe Ben called my ten-count squint, then say, "You never heard tell of the Hide-behind? I'll be a sonofabitch. Hey, Henry, goddammit . . . listen to this: Leland Stanford here never heard tell of the Hide-behind. What do you think of that?"
The old man would turn at the door, his tight little hairy gut pooching out where he'd already unbuttoned his pants and long johns to get comfortable, and give the kid a look like there was just no more hope for such a ninny. "It figures." Then go on in the house.
"Lee, bub," I would tell him, toting him on in the house on my hip, "the Hide-behind is one of the worst cree-churs a logging man can be plagued with. One of the very worst. He's little , not big at all, actually, but fast, oh Christ, fast as quicksilver. And he stays behind a man's back all the time so no matter how quick you turn he's run the other way, out of your seeing. You can hear one of 'em sometimes when it's real still in the swamp, and when the wind ain't blowing. Or sometimes you can catch just the least glimpse of him outa the corner of your eye. You ever notice, when you're alone out in the woods, seein' just a speck of something outa the corner of your eye? Then when you turn, whooshee, nothing?"
He'd nod yes, eyes big as saucers.
"And the Hide-behind will hang right in there behind a fellow and wait; he makes sure they're all alone, the two of them--because the Hide-behind is scared to glom on to a man if somebody else might be around who could get him before he can wrench his fangs loose and make a getaway, he's wide open then--stay right behind a fellow till he's deep in the woods and bam! Lay it to him."
And he'd look from me to the old man reading the paper, half believing and half suspicious, and think it over awhile. Then he'd ask, "Okay, if he's always behind you how'd you know he was there?"
I'd sit and pull him in closer. Pull him right to where I could whisper to him. "There's one thing about a Hide-behind: they don't show in a mirror. Just like vampires don't, you know? So this afternoon when I think I heard something slipping along behind me I reached in my pocket for my compass--this compass right here, see how it reflects good as a mirror?--and I held it up and looked behind me. And goddammit, Lee, you know? I couldn't see nothing!"
He stood there with his mouth open, and I knew I still had him and might of really poured it on if the old man hadn't went to sputtering and choking and got me to where I couldn't keep a straight face. Then it would be just like all the other times when he'd find himself hooked. "Ah, Hank," the kid would holler, "ah, Hank," then go storming off to his mother, who would give us a hard look and take him away from such lying lowbrows as us.
So during the ride across the river, when I see how skittish he gets from my deviling him, I half expect him to holler, "Ah, Hank!" and go storming off. But things are different. As high-mettled and spooky and skittish as he still looks, I know he's not a six-year-old any more. Behind those tight-honed features I can still see some of the old Lee, the little boy Lee I used to carry on my hip up from the dock, sitting there wondering how much of his crazy half-brother's bullshit should he swallow, but things are different now. For one thing he's a college graduate--the first that a family of illiterates can point to--and all that education has whetted him pretty keen.
For another, there's nobody for him to go storming off to any more.
Watching him there across the boat from me, I see something in his eyes that lets me know he's in no condition for any of my prime stupidity. He looks like this time it's him that suspects a Hide-behind after him, like the ground is pretty shaky underfoot and things like what I said to him aren't making it any steadier. So I mark myself down for a good butt-kicking when I get myself alone later, and try to make things a little easier the rest of the boat ride by asking him about school. He snaps at the chance, goes to running on about classes and seminars and the pressure of academic politics and keeps it up a blue streak all the way on toward the dock, idling that boat along slow as Christmas. All the time keeping a keen weather eye ahead for sunken snags, or checking up at the clouds, or watching a kingfisher dive, anything to keep from having to look at me. He doesn't want to look at me. He doesn't want to meet my eyes. So I quit looking at him, except sideways now and then while he talks.
He's made a good-sized gink, bigger than any of us would ever of expected. He must be an easy six foot, an inch or two taller than me and probably outweighs me a good twenty pounds, for all
his lankiness. He's all knobby shoulders and elbows and knees through the white shirt and slacks he's wearing, hair long at the ears, glasses with rims that look like they'd peter a man's neck out holding them up, a tweed jacket laid across his knees with a bulge in the pocket I'd give eight-to-five was a pipe . . . ball-point pen in his shirt pocket, dirty low-cut tennis shoes, dirty state-property gym socks. And I swear he looks like death warmed over. For one thing his face is all burned, like he fell asleep under a sunlamp; and there's big inky pools under the eyes; and where he used to be deadpan as an owl, he's took on a kind of beaten and fretful grin, like his mother had. Except there's just the barest crook to his version, showing he knows just a skosh more than she did. And probably wishes he didn't. When he talks, that crook comes into his grin for just a flicker, just a wink, making him look sadder than ever because the crook turns it into one of those grins you see on a man across the card table when you lay your full house on his ace-high straight and it's been happening like that all day and he's got inside information it's going on happening like that all night. The way Boney Stokes grinned when he'd take the rag away from his cough and look down in it and see that his condition was just as bad as he feared . . . grinning because--well, look: . . . Boney Stokes was this oldtime acquaintance of Henry's and figured the best way to pass the time of day was by gradually dying. Every so often Joe Ben--who figured the best way to pass the time of day was never gradually, but full steam ahead--would come across Boney at the Snag or when Boney and the old man were playing dominoes for the Centennial bucks Boney'd taken in at the store during Oregon Centennial and had hung on to past time to redeem, and Joe would rush over and pump Boney's hand and tell him how good he looked.
"Mr. Stokes, you're lookin' sicker'n I seen you in months."
"I know, Joe, I know."
"You seeing a doctor? Oh yeah, I'm sure you are, I tell ya you come on over to services this Saturday night and we'll see if Brother Walker can do you some good. I've seen him bring round some men with one foot in the grave and scuffin' up dirt with the other."
Boney'd shake his head. "I don't know, Joe. I'm afraid we've let my condition get too advanced."
Joe Ben'd reach up and take the old ghoul by the chin and turn his head first to one side, then the other, squinting close at the wrinkled craters where the eyes were sunk. "Might be. Oh yeah, it might be. Too far gone for even the help of Divine Power." And leave Boney sitting there, blooming with bad health.
For Joe Ben, see, was that way; probably one of the most accommodating guys in the world. That is, he came to be one of the most accommodating. He didn't use to be when he was little. As kids we was together about as much as later, but then he didn't have a lot going. Sometimes he wouldn't say more'n a word or so a week. This was because he was afraid what he might say would be something he'd picked up hearing his old man say. He looked so much like old Ben Stamper that he was scared to death he would grow up to be the same person. He even looked a lot like him, they tell me, clear back on the day he was born, with the shiny black hair and the pretty face, and he got to looking more like him every year. In high school he would stand in front of the locker-room mirror and screw up his mouth all sorts of ways and try to hold the face he made, but it didn't work; girls were already panting after him like women were always panting after Uncle Ben. As Joe got more handsome he got more scared, until the summer before our senior year he was about to give in to it and admit he didn't have any say-so about what he was going to be--he'd even got him a slick-looking Mercury like his dad used to have, all primered and chopped with zebra seats--when just in the nick of time he got into some kind of hassle off there in the state park with the homeliest girl in school, and she shredded his pretty face with a brush-cutting knife. He never said much about what brought on the hassle, but it sure changed him. With a new face he figured he was able to open up and become himself.
"Hank, I tell you, if I'd waited another year look where I'd be now."
At the time he said this, Joe's old man had just disappeared into the mountains never to be seen alive again; Joe claimed he'd just barely escaped the same fate.
"Maybe so; but I want to know what happened out there in the state park with you and that little owl, Joby."
"Ain't she a corker? I'm gonna marry that girl, Hank; you see if I don't. Just as quick as they get all these stitches out. Oh yeah, things're due to be fine!"
He married Jan while I was overseas and by the time I got back he already had a boy and a girl. And both of them pretty as any doll, pretty as he had even been. I wondered if he was worried about that.
"No. That's fine." He grinned, jumping around, tickling one, then the other, and laughing enough for all three. "Because the prettier they are the less likely they are to look like their old man, you see? Oh yeah. You see, they got their own row to hoe right from the start."
He had three more kids, each one more a doll than the last. By the time Jan was pregnant with the last one Joe Ben had got in pretty deep in the Church of God and Metaphysical Science and was beginning to pay attention to omens. So when that last child was born he declared that it was to be the clincher, on account of the various omens that took place on the day it was born. And there was some doozers. There was a big hurricane in Texas; and a whale swam into Wakonda Bay at high tide and grounded himself on the flats and made the whole town sick for a month before a demolition crew from Seattle got shut of him; and the remains of Ben Stamper was found in a lonely mountain cabin full of girlie books; and that night old Henry got the telegram from New York saying his wife had jumped forty stories to her death.
That news got to me a hell of a lot more than it did to the old man. I studied about it a good long while. And riding across in the boat I come awful near to just blurting out and asking Lee about the circumstances of that jump and what he figured brought it on; but I decided against it for the same reason I decided against asking him why he'd give up the big-time Yale University life he was coming on so strong about, to come back and help us out logging. I just kept still. I figured I already said plenty and that he will talk about such things in his own good time.
We get to the dock and I tie up the boat and throw a little tarp over the motor after I shut it off. I think for just a second about asking Lee to shut off the motor while I tie up--figuring he'd grab that live plug like old Henry does at least once a week and shock the shit out of himself--but I decide against that too. I'm deciding against things right and left, it looks like. Because for one thing I'm thinking more and more that there is some kind of truly big strain on the kid. He's quit talking and is looking around at the place. His eyes are kind of glassy. And there's a silence stretched between us like barbed wire. But for all of that I feel pretty good. He did come back; by god he did come back. I cough and spit in the water and look out to where the sun's tumbling toward the bay like a big dusty red rose. In the fall when they burn the stubble off the fields the sun gets this dusty hazy color, and the mare's-tail clouds whipping along near Wakonda Head look like goldenrod bent over by the wind. It's always real pretty. You can almost hear it ring in the sky.
"Look yonder," I say, pointing at the sunset.
He turns slow, batting his eyes like he's in a daze. "What?" he says.
"There. Look there. There where the sun is."
"There what?" WATCH OUT. "Where?"
I start to tell him but I see he just can't see it, it's clear he can't. No more than a color-blind man can see color. Something is really haywire with him. So I say, "Nothing, nothing. A salmon jumped is all. You missed it."
"Oh yeah?" Lee keeps his gaze turned from his brother, but is alert to his every move: WATCH OUT NOW . . .
I keep telling myself to go shake his hand and tell him how glad I am that he's come, but I know it's something I can't pull off. I couldn't do that no more than I could kiss the old man's whiskery chin and tell him how bad I feel about him getting busted up. Or no more than the old man could pat my back and tell me what a goddamn good j
ob I been doing since he got busted up and I been handling the work of two. It just ain't our style. So the kid and me just kind of stand there sucking on our teeth until the whole crew of hounds wakes up to the fact that there's folks about and all come loping out to see if maybe we can't use their wonderful assistance in some way or other. They grin and grovel and wag their worthless tails and put on just about the finest display of whining and yowling and carrying on that I've seen since the last time somebody got out of a boat a whole hour ago.
"Christ, look at 'em. One of these days I'll drown the whole smelly lot of 'em. Ain't they a mess?"
A couple jump up on my bare leg while I'm trying to pull my pants back on and they're just so unbearable happy to see me that nothing'll do but to rake my leg clean to the bone. I go to whipping at them with my pants. "Get back, you sonsabitches! Get the hell down from me! You got to jump on somebody, jump up on Leland Stanford here; he's got pants on. Go welcome him, you got to welcome somebody."
Lee reaches out his hand: But watch it; be careful . . .
And for the first time in his brainless life one of the fools minds what somebody tells him. One old deaf, half-blind redbone with mange on his rump, he gets down from me and limps over and licks at Lee's hand. Lee stands there a second . . . the colors about Lee and his half-brother strike against the ringing air; sky-blue, cloud-white, ringing, and that sparkling patch of