Because the room had in no way whatsoever resembled my mother's.
I sat on the bed again for a long, indecisive moment, feeling pretty well drained--the long ride; the hectic greeting downstairs; now this room--but not quite drained enough to be bereft of a burning curiosity: I had to have another look at the room of the old house's new mistress. (He pulls a chair to the wall to allow himself more comfort with his spying. He finds he is too low when seated and finally turns the back of the chair to the wall and is able to make himself reasonably comfortable at about the right height with his knees on the chair's cane bottom. He takes another bite from the pear and leans to the hole. . . .)
The room had none of Mother's furniture left in it, nor any of her pictures or curtains or embroidered pillows. Missing were the rows of fragrant, faceted bottles that had lined her dresser (enormous jewels filled with gold-and-amber potions of love) and gone was the big bed with its curlicue brass that had risen majestically above her (the pipes of a grotesque organ tuned to the fluting of lust). And the chairs (draped with musky pink rayon), and the dressing table (brushing long black tresses before the mirror), and the regiment of stuffed animals (with collegiate colors and button eyes who had watched like rooters for the other team . . .), all gone. Even the walls had been changed, the pale, ephemeral mauve changed to brilliant white. Nothing like her room . . . (Yet as he looks he can't help feeling that some subtle portion of her personality still lingers in the room. "Very likely some object, some object that recalls a memory of a former furnishing; as the sound of the hammering had recalled an earlier night." He scans the small room, attempting to uncover the disguised bit of nostalgia.)
Now that I was rid of this foolish anxiety concerning this little cubicle next door, I was eager to know something of its tenant. The room was decorated simply, almost bare, almost vacant; but it was a calculated vacancy, as an Oriental print is almost vacant. Most unlike Mother's chiffon and frill. A sewing machine and a lamp sat on one table, and a tall black vase of brown and scarlet vine-maple leaves sat on a smaller table near the couch. The couch seemed to be nothing more than a covered mattress on a platform of wood made from a door and a set of wrought iron legs; you see a hundred such makeshift couches in Village apartments, but those couches always suggested to me a kind of ostentatious poverty, not the clean, purposeful simplicity of this piece.
One hardback chair was pushed up to the table under the sewing machine; a bookcase made of bricks and planks painted light gray offered a raggedy selection of hardbounds and paperbacks; the floor was partially covered with a brightly colored hooked rug. Besides this rug and the vase of leaves the only other ornaments in the room were what appeared to be a small wooden watermelon on the bookcase, and a large piece of driftwood sitting on the floor and extending along my wall out of my line of vision.
(The room has the atmosphere of a den, he thinks; of a sanctuary where someone--someone female, certainly . . . though he is at a loss to see what makes it so positively feminine--would go to read; and sew; and be alone. That's it. That's why it reminds me of Mother's old room; her room had this same atmosphere of sanctuary, a private and personal castle keep where she might enjoy a few moments' respite from that grimy horror going on downstairs. It is the same kind of place, a sort of Over the Rainbow Land wherein the weary soul can convalesce with bluebirds and troubles melt like lemon drops away above the chimney tops . . . that's where you'll find me . . .)
I had decided at first glance that the room must belong to brother Hank's wildwoods flower. Who else could have fashioned it? None of the men. Surely not that little potato I had met downstairs. So it had to be Hank's wife; we must give the devil his due even if his due is devilishly hard to imagine as his mate. (He removes his eye from the hole and sits there with his forehead against the cold wood; why should it come as a surprise that Hank has an exceptional woman for a wife? Quite the contrary; it would be a surprise if he did not. Because he has found his word and it is--)
And while I was sitting there in the dark, ruminating over my pear and my thoughts about Hank, heroes, and how-am-I-ever-going-to-find- my-magic-words . . . (the chair's cane bottom suddenly cracks . . .) I heard a call from across the river. (He jackknifes through, cracking his chin on the back of the chair . . .) It was a female voice (the same rich bird-note from his dreams; he falls sideways, his knees trapped in the chair bottom . . .) sliding in to me on the chill, misty air through my window. I heard it again, then heard someone start the motorboat to go across for the caller. (On the floor he is able to push the chair from his legs . . . stands back up and hurries again to the window . . .) After a few minutes I heard the boat return and a couple rumble up the plank incline from the dock. It was brother Hank, and he was obviously strung-out about something. They passed directly beneath my window. . . .
". . . Honey, listen, I told you we can't afford to get all tore up about what somebody like Dolly McKeever or what her pimply old man either for that matter, for what they think about the way I run my outfit. I ain't in business to line their birdhouses."
The other voice sounded close to tears. "All Dolly McKeever said was to ask you."
"Okay, you asked me. Next time you see her you tell her you asked me."
"There won't be a next time. I can't keep--I can't take that much catty stuff. From people I--I--"
"Oh, Christ now. Here. Don't get all snarled up. You'll make it through. This won't last much longer."
"Not much longer? They don't even know. What about when Floyd Evenwrite gets back. He can have that report duplicated, can't he?"
"Okay, okay."
"He's bound to let people know--"
"Okay, so he lets other people know. None of the wives out here ever got elected the queen of the May. But they endured it. . . . Boy, you ought to have endured some of the catty stuff aimed at, say, Henry's second wife, or--"
I barely heard the girl's muttered comment--"I feel like I maybe have"--then the front door slammed on the conversation. In a few moments I heard sobbing in the next room. I held my breath and waited. The door closed and I heard Hank's pleading whisper. "I'm sorry, kitten. Please, I was just hacked off at McKeever. Not you. C'mon to bed and we'll see about it in the morning. I'll talk to the old man about it in the morning. C'mon, Viv, kitten, please. . . . Please . . . ?"
As quietly as possible I climbed back into bed and covered up, and lay for a long time before I fell asleep, listening to Hank beg in a tired, irritated, and most unheroic whisper from next door. (He closes his eyes, smiling slightly. "I used to think in his comic-book domain there could be no equals: There was but one Captain Marvel and little Billy was his prophet . . .") And I thought again of the limp I had noticed earlier that afternoon in Hank's swimming stride. A limp and a whine: these were the first of much evidence I would try to amass to convince myself that this man wasn't really so much; he wasn't really going to be so hard to measure up to or pull down when the time came. ("I used to try. Eyes clenched prayerfully I used to exhaust every possible pronunciation of that magic Shazam before resigning myself that no one, especially me, could ever hope to contest that mighty Orange Giant of the cleft chin and codpiece . . .") And that it wasn't going to be really so hard finding--this time, this second try--("I used to try . . .") finding my magic word. ("But it didn't occur to me until now . . . that I might not only have been saying the wrong Shazam, but that I must also have been seeking lightning from the wrong source . . .") And fell asleep to dream of flying instead of falling . . .
Next door to Lee, alone in her room, Viv broods as she combs out her hair for bed: maybe she should have said something to Hank before letting him storm off to bed; something to let him know she doesn't really care what Dolly McKeever says--or her pimply old man either . . . but . . . why can't he see it my way just once? Then scolds herself for her self-indulgence and rises to turn out the light.
In Wakonda the Real Estate Man finishes his carving and places it alongside the others: well, the face doesn't resemble tha
t general this time, by gosh--although, there is something kind of familiar about the features, ridiculously familiar, frighteningly familiar--and feels the carving knife go sweaty in his palm.
And in Portland, Floyd Evenwrite turns his practiced cursing on the union flunky who has not made a duplicate and won't be able to compile a report in less than two weeks because he is going to the hospital in the morning to have a hernia tucked . . . the damn little snake!
And Simone falls asleep before her candlelit Virgin, certain that the little wooden figure is convinced of her purity, but more than ever tangled in her own doubts. And Jenny rises from bed with a pain in her stomach, throws the leftovers of her boiled tree toads into the slop jar, and burns her illustrated copy of Macbeth in the stove. And the old boltcutter, having shouted so long across the river and drunk so much thunderbird, begins to forget that the voice calling to him is his own. And the vines and tides climb; and mildew stalks the front-room rug where Hank left wet footprints; and the river roams the fields like a glistening bird of prey.
To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you. I once had a pet pine squirrel named Omar who lived in the cotton secret and springy dark of our old green davenport; Omar knew that davenport; he knew from the Inside what I only sat on from the Out, and trusted his knowledge to keep him from being squashed by my ignorance. He survived until a red plaid blanket--spread to camouflage the worn-out Outside--confused him so he lost his faith in his familiarity with the In. Instead of trying to incorporate a plaid exterior into the scheme of his world he moved to the rainspout at the back of the house and was drowned in the first fall shower, probably still blaming that blanket: damn this world that just won't hold still for us! Damn it anyway!
Of Hank's wife the loungers lounging outside the union office or sitting in the Snag know this:
"She come from outa state. She reads books but's no back-East big-city bluenose like old Henry's second woman. And she's mighty nice, to my thinking."
"Maybe so, but--"
"Oh, she's a dust-bowl girl. And skinny as second-growth pine. But I wouldn't kick her from between the sheets."
"No; neither would I but--"
"She's a very sweet kid, Viv is. Always friendly when you run into her . . ."
"Yeah, I know all that, but . . . there's something peculiar about her, you know?"
"Well, hell, remember where she's living at; the fact that any woman survives over in that snake pit is a case for Ripley. And bound to make her a little ding-y . . ."
"I don't mean that. I mean--well, say, how come Hank don't ever bring her around town?"
"Same reason nobody brings in his old woman, Mel, you dumb cluck: cause she'd cramp his style if he wanted to cut up a little. Hank ain't above honky-tonking some. Remember how he used to go tearing off to the beach with Anne May Grissom or Barbara the Barmaid from Yachats or one of those carhops out at the A and W Root Beer place hanging on to him and that motorcycle for dear life?"
"Yeah, Mel; and besides . . . it probably ain't too pleasant for her in town, people feeling like they do. So he keeps her home and happy, as the saying goes . . ."
"Yeah, but that's one of the things I mean: what kind of woman would stand for that noise like she has? I tell you, there's something funny about her . . ."
"Maybe so, but--funny something and all--I still wouldn't kick her out from between the sheets."
And refuse to speak more about that funny something.
They also know many other things about Viv that they never speak of, as though they fear that to admit noticing the girl's peculiar floating walk, or her slender, flickering hands, or her white neck, or the way she sometimes wears a small cluster of leaves on her blouse like a corsage, would be admitting more than a passing attention. Talk of Simone's billowing breasts is frequently heard in front of the union hall, as well as occasional debates arguing how many feet of number-four line some intrepid adventurer would need for an exploration of Indian Jenny's cavern. In fact, except for Viv, any local female anatomy is target for talk; but when Viv comes up in the conversation the men act as though they have noticed only the scantiest qualities: Nice kid . . . friendly . . . little on the lean side but meat's sweeter close to the bone. As though that is all she has going. As though by omission they categorically deny noticing more.
Viv came from Colorado, from a hot, flat, swart town where scorpions hid in black cracks in the clay and tumbleweeds lined the fences to watch the cattle trucks roll by. Rocky Ford was the town's name, and, across a white wooden arch that supported a green wooden watermelon and spanned the incoming railroad, was lettered the town's fame: "The Watermelon Capitol of the World." The arch has fallen now, but when Hank came wheeling across from New York--July, zigzagging west from Connecticut on the Harley he'd bought with his muster-out pay--the painted legend and the wooden watermelon both glazed bright green in the sulphur sun and a wide oilcloth banner announced the Annual Watermelon Fair, All the Melon a Man can Eat . . . FREE!!!!
"Hard to beat a deal like that," Hank concluded amiably and geared the cycle down to avoid the crowd mingling through the streets in flowered shirts and billowing slacks, sullen straw hats and hazy blue bib overalls. He called to the first baked face that turned slowly in the direction of his cycle, "Hey, Dad, which way to the free melons?" The question had surprising effect. The baked face shattered in a pattern of cracks like a clay pond bed drying suddenly in the terrific sun. "Sure!" the mouth croaked. "Sure! I work myself rag-assed t' give melons away t' the first, t' the first smelly hobo who comes--" Then, as the face had shattered, the voice crumbled, becoming a rusty outraged squeak like a well sucking dust. Hank drove on, leaving the man clutching at his swollen red neck.
"I'd probably do better," he decided, "asking one of the townspeople, or the tourists . . . and leave the poor devils from the farms alone. They act a little salty about free produce."
He drove slowly, down a main street bright with red and white striped bunting and rodeo posters, feeling the sweat start on his forehead now that he'd slackened his speed. This is Hank's bell. He liked driving a motorcycle on a July afternoon with his shirt unbuttoned for the wind to whip his sweat chill. He even liked smart-ass boys tossing torpedoes at the wheels to make the cycle rear in fright. He liked the look of people milling about the sidewalks with bright satin ribbons pinned to their breast pockets, dangling little wooden melons. He liked cranky children, smeared with mustard, clutching long sticks to fat green balloons striped to look like watermelons; and hot women sitting shadowed in pick-ups fanning their cheeks with Watchtower pamphlets; and the melons stacked on gleaming straw in the backs of these pick-ups lettered across the tailgate with white shoe polish. FOUR BITS EACH THREE FOR A DOLLAR. He liked the month. His money belt held almost a thousand dollars in muster pay and he liked being free from the bone-dissolving grasp of the United States Military with a thousand dollars' muster pay sweated against his hide under his pants, a good new used cycle between his legs, and a whole country to roam across at just the speed he chose. This is Hank's bell ringing. . . . Yet--yet with all these myriad joys going for him, Hank had never in his life been more unhappy and less able to explain why.
Because in spite of all these things so enjoyable, there was something off kilter. He couldn't say exactly what was off, but after days of denying it he was finally grudgingly admitting that he and the world just were not seeing eye to eye. And it griped him that this was so.
A band pumped at a lagging march somewhere up the street and Hank felt that lagging beat hammer at his temples in the brassy glare. Maybe he needed a straw hat, he thought, and plucked one from the head of the first passer-by who looked like he had the same head size; the hatless man stared with his mouth open, but seeing the look on Hank's face remembered he had a better hat at home on the draining-board anyway. Hank rolled the cycle against a pole where a flag hung limp in the windless heat and went into a grocery fo
r a quart of cold beer; he held the paper sack twisted about the bottleneck and drank the beer as he worked his way down the sidewalk in the direction of the band music. He tried to smile, but his face felt as baked as the farmers'. Besides, why bother? The hicks look like hicks and the tourists and townspeople keep glancing from left to right, looking for photographers from Life or watching out for exploding torpedoes from the smart-ass kids. Everyone, he thought, looks like they're waiting for something to happen, or pissed because they just missed it. "Oh, just the heat," he told himself.
He'd seen these same faces fixed with these same looks in every town and city he'd driven through since he'd left New York. "The trouble," he told himself, "is nothing but the heat, and the World Situation." Still, the people he met, why were they all either hurrying nervously to some deal, some big shady deal that they didn't really believe would ever materialize? or all bitching halfheartedly because that deal had just fallen through? Their alert preoccupation annoyed him. Dammit, he'd just returned from a police action that had taken more lives than the First World War, to find the Dodgers in a slump, frozen apple pie just like Mom useta make in all the supermarkets, and a sour stench in the sweet land of liberty he'd risked his life defending. Plus an unusual foreign worry on the Average American Guy he'd just saved from the insidious peril of Communism. What the hell was wrong? There was a kind of bland despair and the sky was filled with tinfoil. What was wrong with people? He didn't remember people around Wakonda being so damned watered down, or so revved up either. "Those boys out West, they got style . . . grit." But as he pushed his face into the arid American wind and moved through Missouri, Kansas, Colorado without observing any evidence of that style or grit, he had grown more and more uneasy. "The heat, and that muddle overseas"--he tried to diagnose a national malady. "That's really all it is." (But how come it's every place I look? from the littlest kid to the oldest rummy?) "And of course the humidity," he added lamely. (But how come I felt like I was going wild with a sort of bloated exasperation and I had to hold in for all I was worth to keep from popping one of those sunstruck faces and yelling wake up, blast your ass, wake up and look around you! Here I am just back from risking my hide in Korea making America safe from the Commies . . . Wake up an' take advantage.