Sometimes a Great Notion

  And the old wino boltcutter, who lives in this sort of world, not far from this granite cliff, and cuts his shinglebolts from logged-out slopes on the bank of that crooked fork of the Wakonda, gets cursing drunk to celebrate the coming thirty-first of October (the same way he paid tribute to the thirty other days) and spends his night in a Thunderbird dream joining those echoes in complete antiphonal choruses, singing against the scooped-out stone of his sixty years across a deep green river of wine, and awakes before daylight with a roaring in his ears. Just a few minutes before Viv dropped off to sleep, after tossing for hours trying to recall the words to a ridiculous childhood song: "Way up yonder, top of the sky . . ." The boltcutter coughs for a while, then sits up in his bed, giving up his songs to the museum dark: "It's all a lotta horseshit." And in her dreams Viv finishes her verse: " '. . . blue-jay lives in a silver eye. Buckeye Jim, you can't go . . . go weave an' spin, you can't go . . . Buckeye Jim.' A lullaby, Mother sings it to me when I am a baby. Who do I sing it to, way up top of the sky? I don't know. I don't understand . . ."

  Beside her, breathing deeply, Hank mirrors the image of an oft-repeated high-school dream--to go on to college an' by Jesus show the bastards just who's a dumbass jock an' who ain't--and down the hall, still high as a kite though sound asleep, Lee thrashes about in a bed full of roaches, crutches, and burnt paper matches, and, having already chanted his own inquisition, judged himself guilty, and pronounced his sentence--death . . . by shrinking--he sets about composing a ballad to sing his praises after he is gone: a musical epic that would commemorate all his heroic victories on the field of combat and all his mighty feats in the arena of love . . . to the stirring beat of drums drums drums . . .

  --And sometimes, as you sing, you cannot help feeling that the unheard echoes and tunes forgotten are echoes of other voices and tunes of other singers . . . in that kind of world.

  At dawn the band of black clouds that slipped into town under cover of darkness can be seen loitering on the horizon like unemployed ghosts, impatient already for the day to be over so they can get to their Halloween pranks. The lightning from the night before now hangs upside down in the firs up in the mountains, waiting out the day in electric slumber, like a recharging bat. And a scavenger wind, ribbed and mangy, runs the frosted fields, whimpering with hunger, cold and stiff and terribly lonesome for its buddy the bat overhead there, snoring sparks in the tree limbs . . . in that kind of world. Runs and whimpers and clicks its frost teeth.

  As the aged and feeble sun slides up (cautiously, of course, in that kind of world, and because it is Halloween Indian Jenny opens her reddened eyes, even more cautiously. Sluggish and hung over after a night dedicated to hexing Hank Stamper for refusing to let his father marry an Indian . . . she rises from her freshly sheeted cot, crosses herself providently, and, wearing nothing more than an arrangement of the knitted wool blankets the government last year apportioned for her tribe (her tribe consists of herself, her father, a half-dozen mongrel brothers getting steadily fatter somewhere in the next county; the blankets consist of wool, also mongrel, but getting steadily thinner), pads out across the chocolate-pudding mudflats to pay homage to the new day by reading from the Bible that waits beside the smoothed sawn plywood hole of her toilet. The Bible had come with the blankets and was a holy thing, like the plastic Jesus she'd stolen from the dashboard of Simone's Studebaker, or the bottle of aquavit that had materialized on her table one night after she had chanted out loud the mystic words from a dream about her father: she had called out the words in terror and halfhearted hope, and come morning, there the bottle had been, a talisman with a label in a magical language that she was never able to read. She was never able to reconstruct the chant, either.

  Like the bottle, which she had forced herself to ration sip by pious sip over many months, the Bible had also enjoyed a long reign; she obliged herself, however cold the damp bay air, however uncomfortable the harsh edges of the plywood, to read the entire page before tearing it out. The religious discipline had paid off in kind. As she arranged the blankets about her heavy brown flanks and picked up the book she thought she detected deep within her a definite revelation that was certainly more than last night's pepperoni. But she jumped to no conclusions. For, while she was certainly a devout woman, given to diverse worships, she had more than once been disappointed in her spiritual experiments and hadn't really expected much action to come out of this reading business. She had entered into the Contract with the Book essentially because her subscription to Horoscope had run out and the bottle of Holy Aquavit had--quite unmiraculously, and in spite of all the best spells that the worst of Alistair Crowley could offer--run dry. "Read of this the first thing every morning," the man who brought her the blankets prescribed. "Read it religiously, all the way through, it shall touch your soul." Well, all right. It couldn't be as worthless as that Healing Prayer Cloth that she'd ordered from San Diego, and it couldn't possibly be as terrible as that jolt of peyote she'd ordered from Laredo ("Eat eight, mate," had been this cult's typed instructions, "and you got an Electra-Jet to Heaven"). So all right, she told the man and took the book, with a halfhearted show of gratitude, she'd try anything. But what she had lacked in enthusiasm she had made up for in staying power and now her devotion was beginning to show fruit. Now, eyes bulging toward the page as she shuddered, straining to rid herself of sin, she suddenly experienced a stinging needle of pain and saw--inside that little hut!--a beautiful spiraling of stars. Think of that, she marveled, shuddering once more, just think of that: she was only twelve days into Deuteronomy and already she had marked her soul! Now if she could just figure how to get these stars into her hexes . . .

  Teddy the bartender prepares for the approach of All Hallows Eve by dusting his neon with a feather duster and removing the fried flies from his electro-kill screen with a Brillo pad. Floyd Evenwrite practices reading the preamble of International Woodsmen of the World aloud before a bathroom mirror toward the afternoon's meeting with Jonny Draeger and the grievance committee. The Real Estate Hotwire, always a shrewd cooky, greets the morning by soaping innocuous sayings on his own window, as he has done every Halloween for years; "Got to be one hop out in front." He snickers, smearing soap. "When the other galoots are just coming to the starting line, got to be two steps gone." He'd adopted this procedure after finding his window maliciously decorated one Halloween night with what he decided must have been paraffin of a most unusual type--"probably something manufactured by the government special"--for, scrub as he might, he had never been able to rid his window of the memory of that evening. Detergent wouldn't touch it; gasoline only hid it temporarily from sight; and even these many years later, when the light was right, the apparently spotless window would cast a dim but readable shadow on the floor before his desk.

  With no small amount of research, he had established that the vandals who skulked this most unholy of October nights had a decided inclination toward panes unsullied and tended to bypass windows already soaped. A kind of unwritten law, he suspected: don't muck up a buddy's job. So he was determined to be one hop out in front with soap before the other galoots got to the starting line with more of that paraffin. So great was the triumph the Hotwire felt the following morn, when he came to find his windows untouched by any mark but his own, that he failed to notice that his was the only disfigured window on the whole street; owing to parties and apple-bobbings--initiated by the adults, the tamed vandals of those yestere'ens, for the purpose of keeping their offspring in out of the wet--paraffin, soap, and the whole art of window-waxing had gone completely out of vogue. Even when this was pointed out to him he refused to discontinue the precaution. "A stitch in time is worth a pound of cure"--he remembered one of Joe Ben Stamper's philosophies, scrawling wow across the glass with a flourish. "Besides, I ask you: who needs 'Zorro Go Home' two inches deep in paraffin right across their business?"

  Joe Ben leaps from bed and confronts the Halloween Saturday just about the same as he confronted any other Saturday when
the Pentecostal Church of God and Metaphysical Science was holding services. Because, as far as Joe was concerned, every day could be Halloween if you held your mouth right. And Joe had a grin like a jack-o'-lantern. And, unlike the candle in the pumpkin he'd picked and fixed for the kids, the candle behind Joe's carved features needed no special occasion, no official day set aside for ghouls and goblins; it could be ignited by anything. Oh yeah . . . the discovery of a cricket in his drinking glass at the sink ("Good sign! You bet. Chinese say crickets bring all kinds fat luck.") . . . the number of Rice Krispies that might have snapped, crackled, and popped over the top of his bowl onto the breakfast table ("Four of 'em! See? See? It's the fourth month and this is my fourth bowl of cereal and Jesus said to Lazarus, Come forth. And ain't my name Little Joe, which is two and two or I'll eat my hat!") or kindled to a ruddy glow by nothing more than a simple sight that pleased his simple mind . . . such as the sweet pink flame of the morning sun through the window alighting on the sleeping faces of his children.

  The kids usually slept scattered about the floor of his room in sleeping bags, just any old place, but last night they had quite unconsciously aligned themselves so that a single trickle of sun leaking through a single tear in a shade could skip from brow to glowing brow. And since no coincidences marred Joe Ben's auspicious world, this wondrous arrangement of faces threaded like pink pearls on the one tiny strand of sunshine was exactly the sort of datum he usually parlayed into a riot of prophecy, but this time the plain visual beauty of the sight so overwhelmed him that he was blinded to its metaphysical significance. He grasped his head in both hands to shore up a skull too thin to contain such high voltage. It would blow him to bits. "Oh God," he moaned aloud, closing his eyes. "Oh oh oh God." Then, recovering just as quickly, he tiptoed about the room in his skivvies, licking the tip of a finger and touching each of the five children as Brother Walker did in his baptism ceremonies. "No liquid nowhere in the world"--Joe paraphrased Brother Walker's philosophy--"is as big a deal in the eyes of our Saviour as good ol' human spit."

  The impulsive baptism over, Joe scrunched down and crept back across the floor, striving intensely to make no noise, lifting his knees high and bringing his toes down with painful caution, elbows tight against his ribs like the plucked wings of a muscle-bound stewing chicken sneaking away across the kitchen floor behind the chef's back. At the window he let up the shade and stood fingering his navel while he grinned out at the waking day. He lifted his arms above his head, fists doubled, and stretched out his straightest and yawned.

  Yet, stretched out or scrunched down, Joe still looked like some kind of poorly plucked fugitive from the butcher's bench. His bowed legs were lumpy with muscles cramped too tight against muscles squeezed too tight against other muscles; his back was pinched and knotted, and his stubby arms swiveled from shoulders which would have graced a six-footer but served only to distort a five-sixer.

  When a carnival came to Wakonda Joe could barely wait to get down and give the weight-guessers fits; estimates would undershoot or overshoot the actual one-fifty-five by sometimes as much as forty pounds. He looked as if he should have been bigger or smaller, it was difficult to say which. Seeing him scampering about the woods, transistor radio bumping against his chest like an electronic locket, you might think he needed antennae, a glass helmet and a size four space suit.

  Seeing him years before, still straight and graceful as a young pine, with the face of a teen-age Adonis, you would have thought him one of the most strikingly handsome young men in the world; what this Adonis had become was a triumph of indefatigable will as well as a showcase of perseverance. He seemed to have been issued a skin many sizes too small and chest and shoulders too large. Without a shirt he seemed to have no neck; with a shirt on he seemed to have on shoulder pads. Encountering this apparition in stagged-off pants and three sweat shirts chugging toward you on the boulevard, elbows out, balled fists chest-high, spread legs thrusting splayed boots against a springy earth, one might expect to see a halfback with the football sprinting close on his heels . . . were it not that the jack-o'-lantern lodged there between the shoulder pads made it extremely clear that it was not football that was being played, but some kind of queer joke . . .

  On exactly whom was not quite so clear.

  He pulled the shade back down. The shaft of light skipped again precisely across the sleeping faces, hesitating for an instant in the center of each little forehead to examine the drop of good old human spit. And as Joe struggled into his cold clothes he recited a prayer of thanks in a reverent whisper in the general direction of the chest of drawers, while the jack-o'-lantern looked on balefully with puzzled, sooty eyes and grinned a mildewed grin: a joke was being played, all right. That much was clear. And it might have been easier to figure on whom if Joe had refrained from grinning back.

  Saturdays were busy for Joe. That was when he worked off his rent obligation. He had lived off and on at the old house across the Wakonda for most of his life, staying there as long as six or eight months at a time during his childhood, while his father gallivanted up and down the coast possessed with the frenzied squandering of a life that was burning a hole in his pants. Rent money was never mentioned or even considered; Joe knew he had paid old Henry ten times over with the countless hours of free overtime he'd put in at the show or the mill, paid board and room for himself and the woman and kids and then some. That wasn't it. To old Henry he owed nothing, but to the house, the house itself, to the actual flesh of paint and bone of wood of the old house he knew he owed a debt so large it could never be repaid. Never, never in a thousand years! So, as the day drew near when he would move into his own home, he had become a dervish of repairs, determined to make that deadline of never and repay that unpayable debt. Gleefully slapping paint or mending shakes, he rushed to square things with the pile of wood that had sheltered him so undemandingly for so long, certain sure, as he damned near always was certain of practically anything he decided was worth being sure of, that he would some way, right at the last, with a terrific spurt of last-minute nailing and puttying and calking, succeed in meeting that impossible deadline and pay off the debt he had already decided for certain sure was un-pay-offable. "Old house, old house," he crooned, straddling the topmost peak with a hammer in his hand and nails bristling from his mouth, "I'll have you shinin' like a new dime by the time I leave here. Oh, you know it. You'll stand a thousand years!"

  He patted the mossy withers lovingly. "A thousand years"--he was certain. A lot of roof left to shingle and outside to shake in the three or four weekends before he moved, but he would finish, by gosh, by golly and--if it meant Sending Out for the Divine Help--by God!

  The thought caused a little buzz of excitement to go through him; though he'd come pretty close, he'd never actually come to that point of really Sending Out yet. Oh, he'd prayed for things, but that's different, that ain't like Sending Out. You can pray for just about anything, but Sending Out for Divine Help!--well . . . it ain't ordering from Monkey Ward. It'll be there, don't ever doubt it a second--oh yeah--but you wait till there's something of a size, not just the donkey cable busted or a root hung in your--last night, now, last night with Hank so down from his argument with Lee, I come near to Sending--but I'm glad I held off. Only thing Hank has to do is quit worrying about it and go ahead and do what he knows already he's gonna do--like I knew he knew that he was gonna walk back out into the woods to look for old Molly because it's in him to do--to accept what he already knows is all he need do. . . . Yeah, I'm glad I didn't Send Out--because he'll come through even if he don't Believe, except I sure never seen him throwed before like Leland's throwed him. If he'd just quit patty-caking and accept what he knows already: that there's nothing but to go ahead and straighten the kid up when he gets outa line and Hank sure don't need anybody to Send Out for him some help when it comes to that sort of--But for a long time now, a year, since we heard about her killing herself--No, no that can't be, it's--ah--it's just that all this with the union, and
then Lee too, he's throwed off kilter a little bit. He'll come back around, if he'd just--like anybody else destined to responsibility, like any of the chosen people--learn he's got to dig what he knows already , then everything's gonna be fine again--oh yeah--gonna be prime . . .

  All this imprecise, rough-shingled thinking while the October sun pushed through the smoky blue layers of October sky, to bravely look toward November . . . and the black rat-pack of clouds, hiding on the horizon, seemed as far away as January.

  Joe Ben scooted gradually along the peak of the roof, face bright orange, eyes clear green with white showing all around the pupil, and as he moved jerkily along, tacking down the new cedar shingles, he liked to look back occasionally at the bright contrast of new wood lined against old--the line ragged and rough, but bright nevertheless. He would study the line a moment, then set to again, hammering away at his rough-split shingles and whittling his rough-tooled thoughts, certain sure that everything would come along fine, be a gas, turn out prime . . . if you just held your mouth right and accepted what you knew already was gonna hafta be done. You bet! And if the joke was on Joe he was determined to be the first to laugh as well as the last to admit it.