Even worse ones. He made it through the eight years of that general's term by nothing short of the grace of God and his wife's needlework and was just now getting so he could pick up a newspaper without fear of finding himself declared a traitor and ordered shot on sight, was just beginning to make some headway in a very tricky world. If this nasty strike didn't break his back. This strike? Could the same old . . . ? No. He decides not; it is somebody else now that has it in for him, that's all there is to it. Moodily he gouges at the little wooden figure in his lap, grinding his teeth against old memories. . . . The sonofabitch could have at least returned the ring!
And, above the town, the timbered ridges move, steadily, under the edge of the silver moon, like stacks of lath passing beneath a gleaming and silent circle saw. Behind the grange hall berry vines feel for handholds with tough, blind fingers. Wood rots quietly in the cannery house. The salt wind blowing off the ocean sucks the life from pistons, gears, wiring, transmissions. . . . On the Main Street a short, plump, plush-looking pastry of a woman leaves the Snag and stalks up the sidewalk with short, angry steps. The evening mist collects in her eyelashes and the street lights glaze her curly black hair. She passes friends in a fury, looking neither right nor left. Her round, breadloaf shoulders are stiff with indignation. Her mouth is a grim dab of raspberry jam. She holds this air of outraged morality until she turns the corner of Shahelem Street and is out of sight of Main. There she stops against the fender of her little Studebaker, and the leavening goes out of her wrath. "Oh, oh, oh." She sinks against the dew-glazed fender with a dejected sigh like a cake falling. . . .
Her name was Simone and she was French. After marrying a paratrooper in 1945 she had come to Oregon, like a character strayed from the pages of de Maupassant. She hadn't seen her husband since he'd disappeared without so much as a parting Geronimo of farewell seven years ago, leaving her a mortgaged car, a down-payment washer and dryer, and five children still owned largely by the hospital. Though slightly embittered by the treachery, she had nevertheless managed to keep her head above water by keeping her buoyant little body under the covers, sleeping from charitable bed to bed with beneficent logger after logger. Never for pay, of course--she was a professed Catholic and a devout amateur--but for love, only for love, and whatever reasonable fringe benefits might be thrown in. So amiable was this little muffin of misfortune, so reasonable were her benefactors, that after seven years the washer-dryer was hers flat out, the car was nearly paid off, and the children no longer had to report monthly to the Hospital Finance Plan. Yet, in spite of her success, it had somehow never occurred to the townspeople, any more than it had to her, to consider this style of making ends meet the slightest bit shady. Contrary to popular rumors, a small town is not always so eager to cast the first stone. Not at the risk of hitting a good thing. Expedience, in a small town, often must pre-empt morality. The women of the town said, "Simone's as nice a little soul as I ever met, I don't care if she is foreign." Because the hook shop in Coos Bay charged ten dollars a throw, twenty-five a night.
The men said, "Simone's a good, clean kid." Because Coos Bay was noted for the scratchingest men in the state.
"And maybe she's no saint," the women allowed, "but she's certainly no Indian Jenny."
So Simone kept her amateur standing. Whenever it was questioned, men and women alike rose to her defense. "She's a sweet little mother," the women said. "She's had a tough shake," the men said, "and I for one am always plenty willing to help her out in a pinch."
And helped her out in a pinch faithfully and regularly. But just helped. Her regular means of support came from the occasional cooking jobs she held. Why, everybody knew this. And until tonight the plump little woman had never thought to question what everybody else knew.
She had been drinking beer with Howie Evans, a topper from Wakonda Pacific who wore on a chain around his neck a vertebra that had been removed in the hospital after a fall. The lack of the bone in his back, or the weight of it around his neck, gave him an odd stoop that produced horror in his wife, disgust in his mother-in-law, and a flood of maternal pity in Simone. They had been talking politely all evening while bumping knees under the table, and when the proper number of beers had been drunk she had observed that it was getting late. Howie had helped her into her coat and mentioned in passing that he thought he might drop over to his brother's cabin to see if his brother would like to help him put a lid on the night. Simone knew Howie's brother was serving one-to-eight in Vacaville for passing bad checks; she waited for Howie to go on, smiling happily at the thought of trying to rub some of that crook out of poor Howie's back in the brother's cabin in the brother's absence. She gazed up at him and wet her lips, but just as she could see the question rising to the surface--"An' I was thinking, Simone, how, if you ain't got anything else going"--he had suddenly stopped.
Howie stepped away from her. "By godfrey, Simone," he said after a moment, giggling at her and shaking his head with dawning wonder. "By godfrey, I was aiming to ask you if you might like--" Again he stopped. "Huh, now. I'll be darned. How about that. I never thunk of that before."
She frowned as he giggled in head-shaking amazement at some fact he'd never thunk of before. He shrugged and held out both work-shiny hands, palms up, as though showing her they were empty. He continued to giggle nervously and shake his head.
"I'm broke, Simone, chicken . . . that's what. Busted. This dang strike. And the house payments and so forth, with me being out of work so long . . . I just clean ain't got the cash for it."
"The cash? The cash? The cash for what?"
"For you, chicken. I ain't got the cash for you."
She had snapped into rigid, scandalized outrage, slapped his face decorously, and stomped from the bar. She was certainly no Indian Jenny! So angry had she been with the implication, that the two quarts of beer--a mere drop ordinarily--had commenced to boil and bubble savagely inside her, and by the time she reached the car she had been forced to give them up.
And weakened by the vomiting--limp, resting her dimpled baby's hand on the fender of the car that in one more month would be hers--the realization strikes her as absolutely and irrevocably as it did Howie, and she gives in to a long-denied truth. "Never never never again!" she swears aloud as she sobs there in the street with horrible shame--"Never again, Holy Mother, I swear!"--dimly searching the doughy matter of her mind for someone to blame, someone to hate. She thinks at first of her ex-husband--"The deserter! The heartless runaway"--but he is both too weak and too inaccessible to blame satisfactorily. It must be someone else, someone closer, and stronger, and big enough to bear the burden of blame she is baking in her hot little oven of a heart . . .
The finger points, Evenwrite curses. Draeger sleeps. The Real Estate Man hacks at his white pine carving, studying the features and crooning absently as the white chips fly. Across the street his brother-in-law closes a thin ledger and walks despondently to the drinking fountain in the lobby to rinse the red ink from his bleached hands. Jenny, breathing hoar-frost at the moon, collects tiny tree frogs in a chamois bag; whenever she plucks one of the half-frozen creatures from a limb or rock she mutters the words memorized that afternoon from the Classic Comics she took from the drugstore while Grissom took his Coke into the storeroom for a lace of paregoric: " 'Double, double, toil an' trouble.' " The toad squirms in her fingers; she feels her pulse quicken. " 'Fire burn an' cold one bubble . . . ' " (Later she steamed her catch along with a bay leaf she had picked, and ate them with butter and lemon.) Out in the dunes, under the roof of a lodgepole pine, a fly agaric pushes up through a pine-needle floor like something sneaking out of hell. In the deer-grass meadows the long last of the summer's flowers take long last looks through the fall's first frost at the dark garden of stars and wave their windy good-bys: the spiderwort and blue verrain, the trout lily and adder's tongue, the bleeding heart and pearly everlasting, and the carrion weed with its death-scented bloom. In the Scandinavian slums at the edge of town bloodroot vines reach
garroting fingers for knotholes, warpholes, and window sills. The tide grinds piling against dock, dock against piling. Batteries corrode. Cables ravel. Lee sleeps with his lips parted in an expression of childlike terror and dreams childhood dreams of falling, running, being chased, and falling, over and over until abruptly awakened by a noise so close and loud that at first he thinks it only a dream noise lingering in his ears. But the noise continues. Suddenly wide awake, he lurches to his feet beside the bed; he stands there trembling, eyes pressed against the always treacherous darkness. Strangely enough it isn't the surroundings that confound him; he knows immediately where he is. He is in his old room, in the old house, on the Wakonda Auga. But he is completely unable to recall why. Why is he here? And when? Something is banging inside his ear, but at what point in his existence is all this black cacophony taking place? "Huh? Huh?" His head twists back and forth in the center of a tornado of dim objects. "What?" Like a child being awakened to panic by a sudden and strange new sound.
Except . . . this sound was not exactly new; it was the mocking echo of something that had once been very familiar (wait; it'll come back in a moment) . . . of something once heard very frequently. And that was why the sound was so damned confusing: because I recognized it.
As my eyes became more accustomed to the room I saw it wasn't as dark as I had first thought (a small shaft of light cuts across the room to spotlight his jacket) nor was the sound the fifty-decibel roar it had seemed (the jacket lies on the foot of his bed with its arms wrapped about itself in a frozen agony of fright. The small shaft of light comes through a hole from the
room next door . . .) and instead of my ear it came from somewhere outside the window. Touching the smooth bedstead, I walked around the bed, then hesitatingly across the room to that gray square of light and raised it. The sound cut sharply through the chill fall air: "Whack whack whack . . . thonggggg . . . whack whack whack." I bent and put my head through the open window and saw below the buttery gleam of a kerosene lantern sliding along the bank foundation. A low fog muffled the light, yet seemed to amplify the sound. The lantern would pause, suspended, shimmering like an iridescent piece of night-blooming fluff--"Whack whack whack"--then move on a few yards before pausing again: "Thongggg." I then remembered I used to lie humming Beethoven's Fifth, "Whack whack whack thongggg!" Dum dum dum dong! And then I remembered it was Hank out on the bank before he went to bed, working his way along a dew-slick plank walkway with a hammer and a lantern, striking at the boards and cables as he listened for the sound that might indicate a spike loosened by the constant drag of the river, or a wire frayed by rust. . . .
A nightly ritual, I remembered, this ordeal out shoring up the embankment. I was overcome with relief and nostalgia, and, for the first time since setting foot inside the racketing old house, able to appreciate some of the scene's noisy humor and relax with it. (He looks away from the light in the wall, toward the window . . .) The sound stirred up a gaudy whirl of musty old funny-paper fantasies--not the sort of nightmares that accompanied the sound of log-trucks, but fantasies of a much more controllable nature. At night I used to imagine I was perishing in a hellish prison, condemned for deeds I had not done. And brother Hank was the trusty old turnkey, making his nightly rounds, testing the bars with his ubiquitous nightstick as they did in all the Jimmy Cagney thrillers. Lights out! Lights out! Reverberating clash of power-operated gates; toot of the curfew. At my desk, in the forbidden light of a stashed candle, I fashion elaborate prison-break schemes involving smuggled tommy-guns, split-second timing, and cocksure cohorts with names like Johnny Wolf and Big Louie and The Arm, all of whom respond instantly to my signal tap on the plumbing: zero hour. Footsteps running across the dark yard. Searchlights! Sirens wailing! Two-dimensional figures in blue pop into sight on the walls, scattering machine-gun fire over the melee as the dead pile up. The prisoners retreat, snarling. The break is thwarted. Or so it appears to the casual eye. But this is just a ruse; Wolf and Big Louie and The Arm have been sacrificed to diversion in the yard, a mere distraction action, while I--and Mother--tunnel to freedom beneath the river.
I laughed a moment at the flickering drama and the dreamer that had written it (he draws his head back in--"Sure, tunneling underneath the river; to freedom"--back in from the cold, pine-smoky night into the smell of mothballs and mice. . . .), then began looking about the room to see if I could find any other remnants of this little playwright or his product. (He can't close the window; it is jammed open. He leaves and goes back to sit on the bed . . .) I discovered nothing more in the room except a box of ancient comic books beneath the windowbox. (He eats the cold pork and one of the pears, looking straight ahead at the still-open window. The smell of burning pine reaches him, chill and dark. . . .) I sat for a time on the bed, wondering what my next move would be, while I leafed through a few of the black-outlined adventures of Plastic Man, Superman, Aquaman, Hawkman, and, of course, Captain Marvel. There were more Captain Marvels in the box than all the various other assorted marvels put together. (He puts the plate on the floor and takes his jacket from the bed and bends to lay it aside on a chair; as he straightens back up, that beam of light that he has been so carefully avoiding catches him full in the face. . . .) My one great hero, Captain Marvel, still head and shoulders above such late starters as Hamlet or Homer (the beam holds him--"I used to imagine the wicked Sir Mordred doing his best to ensnare that nimble marauder of his castle. Gallant Sir Leland of Stanford who knows every secret tunnel and hidden stone stairway from the highest tower to the deepest dripping dungeon"--spears his face and holds it spitted there like some stage illusion head produced by hidden mirrors . . .) and still my favorite over all the rest of the selection of super-doers. Because Captain Marvel was not continuously Captain Marvel. No. When he wasn't flying around batting the heads of archfiends together he was a kid about ten or twelve named Billy Batson, a scrawny and ineffectual punk who could be transformed, to the accompaniment of lightning and thunder, into a cleft-chinned behemoth capable of practically anything. (He sits for a very long time, looking at the light exploding through the hole in the wall. Outside the sound goes on in demented and insensate voodoo cadence. . . . "I used to dance to the crackle of electrodes and sing along with switches activating stiff-legged golems." And the rest of the semi-lit room sifts out of his seeing . . .) And all this kid had to do to bring off this transformation was say his word: Shazam: S for Solomon and wisdom; H for Hercules and strength; and so on with Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury. "Shazam." I said the word softly aloud into the chilly room, smiling at myself but thinking: maybe it wasn't really Captain Marvel that was my hero; maybe it was Billy Batson and his magic word. I always used to try to figure out what my word was, my magic phrase that would turn me instantly enormous and invulnerable . . . (Finally the rest of the room is gone. There is just that bright hole, like a lone star in a black sky swelling to nova proportions--"I used to weave ectoplasmic afghans from the wispy effluvium left in the wake of Invisible Men . . .") In fact, wasn't that perhaps what I was still searching for? My magic word? (The light draws at him, pulling him up from the bed. . . .)
The notion interested me; and I had leaned to examine the page more closely when I realized where the light came from that was illuminating my book: from the hole. From that forgotten hole in my wall that had once been my eyepiece to the hard and horny facts of life. From the hole that had opened into my mother's room. (He slides slowly across the floor in his stockinged feet. "I used to be shorter." The spot of light moves from his eye down his face, from his face down his neck--"When I was ten years old and awakened in my flannel pajamas by werewolves next door, I used to be much shorter"--from his neck down his chest, becoming smaller and smaller until he stands against the wall and the spot is a silver coin in his pocket. . . .)
I stared at the point of light across the room. I was amazed that Hank hadn't plugged it by now, and for a crazy moment thought he had perhaps arranged for me to see the hole again, as he had arranged my
room for my arrival. And maybe! he'd even arranged the room next door as well! (He touches the lighted rim of the small opening, feeling the notches made by the meat knife, smooth now, as though the passage of light has worn away the sharp edges--"I used to know its every notch. . . .") It was an odd anxiety. For a moment it was all I could do (kneeling: "I used to--") to force myself to take the peek (kneeling and shivering with the chill: "I used to see awful--") that would prove my fears foolish (". . . see awful ah! . . . Ahhh."). But one look was all I needed. I gave a sigh, then walked back to the bed for the pear and cookies. I munched them together happily, chiding my foolish trepidation and reminding myself that, luckily, time waits for no one, not even a schizophrenic with delusional tendencies. . . .