"Early an' bright," Joe Ben called back. "An' it's been like that all day long. Brought home a little present, too."
She watched Hank and Lee heave something from the bottom of the boat, wrapped in heavy tarpaulin. Hank settled it into his shoulder and walked grinning toward her as the hounds leaped for sniffs at the bundle.
Viv put her hands on her hips, the sheets beneath one arm. "All right, what have we poached today?"
Joe came bounding up to Viv, bearing a swollen neckerchief.
"We run across another one of them horned rabbits up in the hills, Viv, and Hank just had to put him out of his misery. That's the kind of day I mean. Here." He thrust the neckerchief to her, pendulous and bloody with its burden. "We thought you might wanta fry up his liver for supper tonight."
"Get that dirty thing away from my sheets now. Hello, honey. Hello, Lee; I see you have blood on your sweat shirt too; are you part of this felony?"
"Only before and after the fact; I allowed the crime and now I plan to partake of the spoils. So I'm afraid I'm innocent of nothing but the deed."
"Let's tote him on out to the barn and skin him out, bub. Joby, would you call Coos Bay and see they get to work findin' another screw gear for that bastardly drum?"
"I'll do it. I will do it. An' what about another couple chokers? The way Lee was throwing that one of his today it'll be wore about by the time we get a extra."
"Is the old man home, Viv?"
"Before dark? Before that crowd in the Snag goes to supper?"
Hank laughed, leaning into the weight of the deer as he mounted the ramp. "Well, you go on an' get that liver started; if the old tomcat ain't home by the time it's done, then we'll eat without him. C'mon, bub, if you plan to partake of this dog you better damn well plan on helpin' skin him. . . ."
At the Snag Indian Jenny bangs through the screen and stands blinking a moment as her sullen, mud-colored eyes grow accustomed to the light. She sees old Henry, then looks quickly away, momentarily confused. She sees Ray and Rod and makes for them past the row of barstools, moving purposefully, squat and blunt and pushing her cedar-hewn face before her as one might push a war shield. On this shield of cheekbone and forehead and chin are dabs of make-up that are arranged differently every day, though the expression beneath the make-up never changes. When her pension check arrives every month and she comes in to sit and celebrate the government's generosity by drinking one bourbon-over-snuff after another until a primitive council-fire music is kindled behind her dull eyes and she rises to shuffle about the room in a heavy-footed dance, and always stumbles and always falls . . . always across a table of fishermen or bushelers or truck-drivers who take no offense because they are always drunker than she (the townspeople talk of Jenny's canny skill at never falling over a man less drunk than she is), and then rises and takes a sleeve between stubby nail-painted fingers and squints into the face at the end of it: "You're drunk. You come on now. I'll take you home all right." But even then, with her prize in tow as she weaves out of the bar, the shield never changes, the expression stays, still somewhere between blunt ferocity and brute pathos.
Now she bears down on the Saturday Night Dance Band. They note her approach and smile their Saturday Night smiles; Jenny is a big tipper when she requests a song. Ray holds up his hand. "Hey there, Jenny girl." She stops inches short of bowling them over and blinks down, nearsighted and fierce from her near encounter with Henry.
"You boys play too fast last week. This week you play slower, you hear me? Then maybe somebody gets to dance except them little dittybops. Here. . . ." She dips into the pocket of her gold-fringed shirt and brings forth a snarl of bills. She separates two dollars and presses them firmly on top of the table as though gluing them there. "Slow tunes."
"Hey, Jenny girl; many thanks, many thanks."
"Okay then."
"And this Saturday we play so nice and slow you'll think we was drugged. Sit down a while, why don't you? Relax. Dig the juke--"
She has already turned and is purposefully heading for the door; a busy, purposeful woman with a tight schedule of errands just such as this to keep, and no time for jukebox folderol.
When we was sixteen, we courted each other. . . .
The insects up from the river to look over Teddy's collection of neons pop and sizzle against the charged screen. The theater marquee switches on, and a frightened-looking little man with a green eyeshade on his bald head hurries next door from the laundry to answer the phone ringing in the ticket booth: high-school kids calling from Waldport to see what's showing tonight. "Paul Newman and Geraldine Page in Williams' drama Summer and Smoke to be shown once starting at eight o'clock and sleeping bags cleaned this week only one dollar." Keep the morale up and the overhead down. He'll make it yet.
In his room at the Wakonda Arms Del Mar, Jonathan B. Draeger chews a Rollaid and rubs a salve into his chronic eczema, which has appeared this time on his neck. Last time the rash was on his chest and the time before on his stomach. Standing before the mirror, looking at his virile, masculine features topped by the close-cropped gray hair, he wonders if the next place it'll strike will be his face. "It's this coast climate. Everytime I come back I get it again. I rot like a dead dog."
Out in the bay the whistle buoy bobs moaning among the gentle swells, advising the fishing boats about the condition of the bar, and the tower on Wakonda Head lifts its four arms of light and begins flailing the rocks as darkness falls. In her room next to the clamflats Jenny stands motionless at the window, watching the out-of-work loggers searching the low tide with flashlights. "I bet they wouldn't even come in for a bowl of chowder. I won't even ask. But maybe I don't keep my place clean enough, huh?"--and sets about scrubbing her two sheets in the sink. In his bathroom, face contorted in an all-out effort to overcome his constipation, Floyd Evenwrite curses Jonathan B. Draeger: The big-ass, he didn't hardly look at the report! An' it covered the logging history of this area all the way back to the middle fifties! If that don't impress him, what will? In his tar-paper shack the Mad Scandinavian, having boiled the trilobite and eaten its meat, now makes an ashtray of its shell. In the kitchen Hank hushes the kids again to listen for the honk he thought he heard. In the Snag old Henry buys a bottle of illegal bourbon from Teddy and wraps it in yesterday's Portland Oregonian. He bids the few stragglers who haven't left for supper a grandiose good-by, then lurches out of the bar, rumbling his cast on the wooden walk, belching and cursing as he climbs into the mud-spattered pick-up and drives back up the river. "We whupped it, we did. You damn right." Then: "I sure hope somebody's there to hear me honk for a boat; I hurt too much to stand around waiting." He drives very slowly, leaned toward the headlighted pavement. . . . His false teeth making wet bite-marks on the seatcover beside him. And Molly's panting grows slower and weaker . . .
It was Lee who finally heard the old man's honking plea drift from across the river. Lee had gone to the milkhouse for cream and was standing lost in thought at the river's dark edge. He had just finished the meal Viv and Jan had cooked; deer liver and heart fried in onions, and gravy made from the drippings . . . boiled potatoes and fresh green beans and homemade bread, and for dessert baked apples were waiting. Viv had prepared the apples by coring them and filling the holes with brown sugar and cinnamon redhots, then topping each apple with a slice of butter before she put them in to bake. During the meal the kitchen had been filled with the spicy smell of their cooking, and all the kids had squealed delightedly when she brought the square Pyrex dish from the oven. "Hot, now, hot, watch it." The apples sizzled in thick caramel-colored syrup. Lee had stared at the plate, feeling the heat of the open oven burn his forehead. "Hank," Viv asked, "or Joe Ben, would one of you mind running out to the milkhouse and skim off some cream?"
Hank had wiped his mouth and, grumbling, was pushing back his chair to stand, but Lee reached to take the tin spoon and bowl from Viv. "I'll get it," he had heard himself saying. "Hank killed our meat. Joe cleaned it. You and Jan cooked it--"
"I salted it,
" Johnny offered, grinning.
"--and even the apples, Squeaky went to the orchard for the apples. So I--" He faltered, feeling suddenly very foolish as he stood at the back door, spoon in one hand, bowl in the other, and everyone turned waiting toward him. "So I just thought--"
"That's the boy!" Joe Ben saved him. "Root hog or die. Cut bait or fish. Didn't I tell you, Hank? Didn't I say so about ol' Lee?"
"Bull," Hank scoffed, "all he wants is a chance to get outa this madhouse."
"No sir! No sir! I told you. He's shapin' up, he's comin' around!"
Hank shook his head, laughing. Joe Ben charged into a spontaneous theory equating muscle tone with divine intervention. And in the cool, dim concrete milkhouse, with antiseptic still standing in puddles on the concrete floor where Viv had washed up after milking, Lee leaned over a large stone crock and tried to keep his eyes from watering into the careful spoonfuls of cream he ladled into the bowl. That chlorine antiseptic is very bad for making the eyes water, he'd always heard.
He was returning from the milkhouse with the bowl of skimmed cream cradled against his stomach when the honking of the pick-up across the river stopped him. It came like a signal from a dream. Tentatively, feeling barefoot for the path in the dusk, he started once more toward the festive light of the back-door window. The honk came again, and he stopped, his face bent over the bowl of cream. A quail in the orchard called its mate home to bed with a low, seductive whistle. On a slide of light Joe Ben's irrepressible laugh spilled from the kitchen window, followed by the higher laughter of his children. The honk came again. His eyes burned where he had wiped them in the milkhouse. The honk came again, though he barely heard, watching the reflection of the moon stretch and shrink in the bowl of cream . . .
When I was young and walked this way--somber, sallow, and morose as a mudball--when I was six and eight and ten and thought my life doled out to me in mean, cheap distances ("Run down to the bottomland with this bean can, bub, and scrounge us some blackberries for our corn flakes." "Not me."), when I was a boy and should have sprinted barefoot in bib overalls along these ways where quails piped and field mice hid . . . "why was I kept in Buster Brown oxfords and corduroy slacks and a room full of big-little books?"
The moon didn't know why, or wouldn't answer.
"Oh, man, what happened to my childhood?"
Thinking back now, I see the moon quoting Gothic poetry to me:
Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers at night
May turn to a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.
"I don't care about what I'm going to turn into," I told the moon. "At the moment, I'm not interested in my future, only my fouled-up past. Even werewolves and Captain Marvel had a childhood, didn't they?"
"You know," the moon answered sonorously. "You know."
I stood with a bowl of fetched cream fragrant as alfalfa in my hands, watching the dark poultice of dusk draw bullbats from their hideaways, listening to their throated diving buzzes blending in years with that honking from across the river.
"Why was I spun into an upstairs cocoon? This is a land for childhood frolic, with forests dark and magical and shady sloughs alive with chubs and mud-puppies, a land in which young and snub-nosed Dylan Thomas would have gamboled, red-cheeked and raucous as a strawberry, a town where Twain could trade rats and capture beetles, a chunk of wild beautiful insane America that Kerouac could have dug a good six or seven novels' worth . . . why, then, did I refuse it as my world-to-grow-up-in?"
The question had a new and fearful ring to me. Always before, whenever I brooded in some moody apartment with some melancholy wine and let my mind wander back to stand gaping, perplexed and horrified, on the brink of my past, I was able to fix the blame on some convenient villain: "It was my brother Hank; it was my ancient fossil of a father, who frightened and disgusted me; it was my mother, whose name be frailty . . . they were the ones who tore my young life asunder!"
Or on some convenient trauma: "That tangle of arms and legs, sighs and sweat-wet hair telescoped through my bedroom peephole . . . that was what burned out my innocent eyes!"
But that doubting moon wouldn't let me get away with it. "Be fair, be fair; that event didn't happen until you were almost eleven, until a century of blooming cherry trees and dragonflies and river-skipping barn swallows had already danced past. Can you blame the first ten years on the eleventh?"
"No, but--"
"Can you accuse your mother and father and half-brother of more crime than is usually committed against any sulky son anywhere?"
"I don't know, I don't know."
Thus I conferred with the moon as October drew to a close.
Three weeks after leaving New York with a suitcase full of certainty. Three weeks after infiltrating the Stamper castle with vague revenge simmering in my mind, three weeks of physical misery and wishywashy will, and still my revenge only simmered. Barely simmered, at that. In fact had grown rather cool. To tell the truth, had all but frozen in a corner of my memory; in the three weeks following my vow to pull Hank down, my intentions had cooled down and my heart warmed up, and a family of moths had taken up residence in my suitcase and chewed my slacks and my certainties full of holes.
So with the devil's-advocate moon grinning over my shoulder, with demure quails calling and bullbats diving and old Henry honking across the river that gurgled coyly to the stars, and with my stomach heavy with Viv's cooking and my head light with Hank's praise, right then and right there I decided to bury the hatchet. I would blame my sad beginnings on no fiend but my own. Live and let live. Forgive me as I forgive my debtors. The man who seeks revenge digs two graves.
"So all right."
Careless with victory, the moon leaned too far and fell into the cream. It swam there like half a golden macaroon, tempting me until I brought it to my lips. I opened my body to that fabled milk and that enchanted cooky. Like Alice I would expand, my life would now be changed. All those years barking various Shazams up the wrong tree--you'd think a foxy kid like me woulda known better. Magic words are too hard to come by, too tricky to pronounce, too unpredictable. Steady proper diet is the secret to growth. It has to be. I should have learned long ago. A sweet disposition, easy-going digestion, the proper diet, and love thy neighbor as thy brother and thy brother as thyself. "I'll do it!" I decided--"Love him as myself!"--and maybe that was where I made my mistake, right then and right there; for if thee is fashioning all love after that thee holds for thine own self, then thee had best make a damnably thorough inspection of thy model . . .
Lee, in his cold room, smokes and writes; after he completes a paragraph he waits a long motionless moment before beginning the next:
I have a difficult time knowing where to begin, Peters; so much has happened since I've been here, and so little . . . it all started so many years ago, and yet seems as though it only started this afternoon as I fetched a fatal flagon of cream for the baked apples. Never trust a baked apple, dear friend . . . but I suppose I should bring you more up to date before imposing any morals . . .
By the time I got back the kitchen was impatient with the smell of baked apple and cinnamon, and Hank was just lacing on his boots to come look for me. "Damn anyhow, boy; we decided you'd got et by the skeeters or something out there."
My throat was so choked with the heady effect of that milk and that moon that I could only respond by holding out the bowl of cream. "Oh, look," squeaked Squeaky, Joe's five-year-old, "mus-tash! Mus-tash! Uncle Lee has been into the cream. Mm-mm, Uncle Lee, mm-mmm on you"--and stroked her pink finger at me, shaming me into a blush that I am sure must have seemed far out of proportion to my crime.
"We 'uz just about to send the dogs out after you," Joe said.
I wiped my mouth with the dishtowel to hide the blush. "I just heard the old man sending the clarion call from across the bank," I offered as an explanation. "He's waiting over there now."
"And what do ya bet?" Hank
said. "Oiled to the gills again."
Joe Ben rolled his eyes and wrinkled his nose in a gnome's grin. "Old Henry is big stuff in town these days," he said, as though personally responsible. "Oh yeah. They say the girls aren't nowheres safe near him an' that cane. But didn't I tell you, Hank? That there's to be trial and tribulation and suffering but, man, didn't I tell you? There is balm in Gilead. Oh yeah!"
"No fool like an old one."
Viv dipped a finger into the cream and touched it to her tongue. "Don't you start on my old hero now. I think that he has plenty of balm coming. He's worked, golly, how many years building up this business?"
"Fifty, sixty," Hank said. "Who knows? The old coon never lets on to anybody how old he is. Well, I bet he's over there crappin' bricks." He dabbed at his mouth with the sleeve of his sweat shirt and pushed back his chair.
"No, Hank, wait . . ." I heard myself saying. "Please. I'd like to do it"--surprising god knows which of us the most. Hank stopped, half up from his chair, and gawked at me, and I averted my face and went after my cream mustache with the dishtowel again. "I'll . . . I mean, it's just that I haven't had a chance to drive the boat since the day I arrived so I was thinking . . ."
I trailed off to an embarrassed dishtowel-muffled mumble under the glare of Hank's spreading grin. He let himself back down in the chair and tipped it back to look across the table at Joe. "Well by god, Joby, what do you think of that? First the cream, now the boat--"
"Oh yeah! An' don't forget findin' choker holes underneath all the logs, don't forget that!"
"--and this was the nigger we was scared to write 'cause he wouldn't never fit in with our illiterate make-do way of living."
"All right," I said, trying to shroud my pleasure in petulance, "if I'd known it was going to perpetrate such a stupid fuss--"
"No! No!" Joe shouted, scrambling up from his chair. "Here; I'll even go out with you and show you how to start the motor. . . ."
"Joby?" Hank stopped him, then coughed a clever cough into his smile hand. "I believe Lee can handle it on his own. . . ."