Sometimes a Great Notion

  "What scene is that? I don't understand."

  "What? Oh, I'm sorry; I didn't mean to come on so jaded. What scene? This one, the rain, those geese up there with their hard-luck stories . . . this, this same world. They all tried to do something with it. Dante did his best to build himself a hell because a hell presuppose a heaven. Baudelaire scarfed hashish and looked inside. Nothing there. Nothing but dreams and delusion. They all were driven by the need for something else. But when the drive was over, and the dreaming and the deluding worn out, they all ended up with the same dull old scene. But, look, you see, Viv, they had an advantage with their scene, they had something we've lost . . ."

  I waited for her to ask what that something was, but she only sat silently, her hands folded on the black overcoat.

  ". . . They had a limitless supply of tomorrows to work with. If you didn't make your dream today, well, there was always more days coming, more dreams full of more sound and fury and future: what if today was a hassle? There was always tomorrow to find the River Jordan, or Valhalla, or that special providence in the fall of a sparrow . . . we could believe in the Great Gettin'-up Morning coming someday because if it didn't make it today there was always tomorrow."

  "And there isn't any more?"

  I looked up at her and grinned. "What do you think?"

  "I think it's pretty likely . . . that the alarm will go off at four-thirty, and I'll be down making pancakes and coffee, just like yesterday."

  "Pretty likely, sure. But let's say Jack comes home unexpectedly, all miffed at the steel magnates, his back aching and his vigor gone, and finds Jackie and Barry making it in his rocking chair . . . then what? Or, say, Nikita has one vodka too many and decides what-the-hell, then what? I'll tell you. Zap; that's all it takes. The little red button and zap. Right? And this little button makes a definite difference in our world; in our generation, ever since we've been old enough to read, our tomorrows have been at the mercy of this button. Well . . . at least we've quit kidding ourselves about the Great Gettin'-up Mornin' acoming someday; when you can't even be sure of having that 'someday' come along, you have the devil's own time convincing yourself of that Mornin'."

  "Is it that?" she asked in a soft voice, once more examining her hands, "not being sure of that 'someday'? Or is it not being sure of having that 'somebody'?" Her face raised, framed by the contrasting black of the overcoat's collar.

  The best I could do was respond with a question of my own. "Have you ever read Wallace Stevens?" I asked, like a sophomore on a Coke date. "Wait. I'll get you this book. . . ." And I fled to my room to recuperate. The light from the hole showed me the book on the bed, open to the poem I had been reading. I picked it up, keeping my place, but hesitated to return. For a moment I stood, sucking at my cheeks, still feeling that glow, then, like Nikita after too much vodka, decided what-the-hell and tiptoed quickly to the hole in the wall.

  She hadn't moved from the position I'd left her in, but her expression had changed to puzzlement and some concern for this nut next door who flea-hopped from room to room, from glib despondency to tongue-tied frustration. Safely separated by the wall, I found my cool returning. In another moment I would be able to go back in there and be as unruffled as Oscar Wilde at a tea. But as my cool came back, so did the sound of the motorboat. I barely had time to run back in with my book and point out a couple of poems she must read--"Be patient with Stevens; don't force him; let him force you"--and make it back to my room before I heard those hard-heeled bare footsteps mounting the stairs again. And I lay awake for hours, hoping another phone call would give me that opportunity to be alone and unruffled with her.

  As it happened that opportunity, by my own doing, became less and less likely as the days passed and the scene at the house grew stickier, until it was finally apparent that it would only happen if I made it happen. "That chance is now at hand," I wrote to Peters in my ledger, after gnawing another slight point on the nub of the pencil,

  and all I need do is screw my courage to the sticking point and take that chance. But still I hesitate. Is it courage that I lack? Is that the explanation for my warner's WATCH OUT? In these days when a man's courage hangs between his legs and can be read like a thermometer, do I hesitate going through with my plan because simple old masculinity doubts make me afraid to risk sticking my courage to the screwing point? I don't know, in truth I just don't know. . . .

  And in her room with Lee's book of poetry Viv tries to decipher the sense of vagueness that bathes her like diffused light.

  "I don't understand," she says, frowning at the page. "I just don't understand. . . ."

  And down the hill from the carrier Hank steps back from the sizzling pile of burning trash to listen to the sky. Another low-flying flock is coming over. He runs to get his gun, then stops, feeling foolish. What the hell. . . . There wasn't a snowball's chance in hell seeing a goose through that smoke and rain. Let alone hitting one if you saw him. And the way things had been going since that meeting with the relatives--all the hassles by day and the honking by night--if I'd got that shotgun I might of just gone to throwing buckshot in the sky like a wild man, whether I saw anything or not. . . .

  The day after that meeting with the relatives Joe Ben was up bright and early getting some shells ready, because it "looked like his day for sure." He was prying open the tops of some Super X magnums and pouring out the B-Bs and filling the shells back up with chunks of these pencil sinkers he'd cut up; long strips of lead about as big around as a pencil, all chopped into pieces about a fourth-inch long. I told him he was wasting his time today, as foggy as it was, but he said he might get a chance coming home tonight because the fog would be rained down by then and he figured we'd get to come home early because of all the help we'd have now that all the mill crew was gonna help out. He was right about the fog but wrong about getting done early; only about two-thirds of the crew showed up--the rest had just the most awful colds, they told me--so it was pitch-dark by the time we started back.

  That night a couple more phoned while we were eating to say they had fevers and couldn't make it, and I told Joby it didn't look like he could expect anything more than just morning hunting the next day either. He just looked up from his supper plate and shrugged and said it wasn't gonna take more than morning hunting when the holy signs all lined up just right; when that time come along his old honker would be good as in the pot, he said, then leaned back over his plate and went to packing away the potatoes to fortify himself for the coming of that great lining-up of holy signs. (All through the meal Lee keeps sniffing and rubbing his eyes. Viv says they should take his temperature. He says he's all right; this is just his way of expelling excess moisture, like a dog sweating from his nose. Before we go to bed Viv goes up and brings down the thermometer and gives it to him. He sits reading the paper with the thing stuck out of the corner of his mouth like a glass cigarette. Viv reads it and says he has about a degree, not anything fatal. . . . He asks if he couldn't have a glass of hot lemon tea, that his mother always gave him hot lemon tea when he was coming down with a cold. Viv goes and makes it. She brings it in to him and he sits by the stove in the living room sipping the stuff, reading her some poems from that book . . .)

  Apparently, the signs didn't line up for Joe worth a darn the next day; it wasn't only foggy as ever, but only about a third of the crew showed up this time. And it was worse still the next day, and the next, and Joby was about to give it all up when one night toward the end of that week there came another big blow and a lot of geese going over, and in the morning it was cold and clear enough you could look out the kitchen window and see car lights going by across the river. It was raining, but not too hard, and even in the dark you see up in the sky well enough to make out the grocery flag on the pole.

  "This is the morning, Hank, abso-lutely, you just wait and see if it ain't. Everything is right; a storm, wind, lots of honking in the night, and now the mist is down. . . . Oh yeah, everything is right!"

  He was standing by t
he breakfast table oiling his gun, all excited (There's something funny), while we waited for Viv to get the food on. (There's something funny again.)

  "Oh you know it," he rambled on, "I bet there's some poor old lonely lost honker out there calling for his brother geese and just needing to be put out of his misery. . . ." (I turn in my chair and look around the kitchen. Viv is at the stove. Jan is slicing ham for sandwiches. The old man is out the back door somewhere, hawking and spitting. I cut in on Joe Ben's ramblings: "Talkin' about brother geese," I say, "where's the boy this morning?"

  There's a minute nobody says anything. Something is funny. Then Joe Ben says, "Lee'll be right along, I imagine; I hollered at him just a bit ago when I come past his room."

  "He wasn't up?" I say.

  "Well . . . he was dressing," Joe Ben says.

  "Well he'd better get to shagging it," I say. "He's gettin' harder to get movin' every morning."

  "He told me," Viv says, "that he didn't feel too good this morning. . . ."

  "Now is that the truth? Joe an' me out last night till midnight hammering on that foundation, an' Lee don't feel good! That's something. . . ."

  Nobody says anything. Joe Ben comes and sits down and Viv comes over with the skillet. She takes the pancake turner and hikes some sausages on the plate for me. I go to eating these. It's hot in the kitchen and the windows are all steamed shut. Joe Ben's got his radio turned on. It'd be nice to just sit here and read the paper . . . pleasant.

  Lee comes into the kitchen just as I'm getting up from my plate. "Let's move it, bub," I tell him. He says all right and I go out to put on my boots. There's something different happening but I don't know what, or more there is something different going to happen and nobody knows for sure what. . . .) "Yes siree bob!" Joby said, clashed the pump of his old J. C. Higgins 12-gauge a time or two. "You know how I know it's my day? Because I gave up coffee today, been intendin' to a long time, Brother Walker says it's a sin. So by gosh I quit, an' I'm ready to get my goose."

  Well, Joby was nearly right this once; it sure enough should've been his day to get him that honker. Everything was just as right as he said. I went outside to start the boat while Lee ate, and I saw why it was so clear. The rain and cold had sort of beat that mist down out of the sky. It was packed down on the river thick as snow and about four feet deep. I couldn't even see the boat; I had to feel around to get it started. Lee and Joe come out and we headed out, traveling through that mist like the boat was submerged and our heads was periscopes. Joe was still beating his gums about what fat times he had ahead by now, not even about the goose he was going to get; as far as he was concerned that goose was good as in the pot, a settled issue, and he was going on to new glories.

  "Fat times ahead," he was saying. "Oh yeah. Not many more trips up in this boat. What do you figure, Hank? Another day or so at Breakleg, then clean-up, and that's her for ridin' this boat up river in the cold and dark, you boys realize that? That one more day or so is the last of this, the last we'll ever have to look at those stump-jungles? Few more days, then we got easy street at that state park, cuttin' those big old easy sticks like we was tourists gatherin' huckleberries."

  I told him, "You'll think gatherin' huckleberries after about ten hours' work out there twisting a screw jerk. Working that park with all the goddam restrictions they put on us'll be just like going back a hundred years."

  "Oh yeah, but," he said, closing one eye and holding up his finger, "but at least there won't be no more fightin' that donkey; you got to admit not having to fight that donkey is gonna be a gas."

  "I ain't admitting anything is gonna be a gas until I try it out. What about you, bub?"

  Lee turned and gave me a flimsy sort of grin and said, "Not when the only advantage seems to be the elimination of a piece of modern machinery . . . that doesn't sound like much of a gas. . . ."

  "Modern?" Joe whooped. "You ain't had to ride that monster you call a 'modern machine,' Lee; that outfit was wore out and old when old Henry was still a boy! You ain't looking at the bright side. Remember, 'I had no shoes and complained till I saw a man griping about his feet.' "

  Lee shook his head. "Joe, if I didn't have shoes and saw a basket case, I still wouldn't have solved my own footwear problem. . . ."

  "No; no, that's so; that wouldn't solve your problems. . . ." He thought a second, then he brightened up: "But you got to admit seeing a basket case, it would distract you from it a little bit!"

  Lee laughed, giving up. "Joe, you are incorrigible, completely incorrigible. . . ."

  Joe said thank you to that and was so flustered at being so flattered he didn't say anything else until we got to the mill.

  The fog around the mill was packed just as thick as it was at the house. It was lighter out now and we could see it better, and that mist looked more than ever like snow. I swung the boat in to about where I judged the dock to be, hoping there hadn't been any change since I last saw the landing. Andy was standing there, alone and looking tired. He'd been standing guard at the mill every night since Evenwrite had tried to loose the booms. It'd been his idea. I'd given him a sleeping bag and a flashlight and the old eight-gauge goose cannon Henry'd ordered once from Mexico a long time back before everything under a ten-gauge was made illegal. Hell of a gun, used a shell about the size of a beer can and you had to pass the stock under your armpit and brace it against a tree or a rock to keep the recoil from breaking your shoulder; I'd told Andy why I gave that gun to him instead of a 30-30 or something easier handled, was that I didn't expect him to kill anybody defending the place, to just fire that monster in the air if there was trouble and help would come running, probably all the way from the Pentagon with the racket it made.

  Andy caught the rope Joe pitched him and pulled us up to the dock. I thought at first he was looking so drug account of he wasn't getting a good night's rest in the sleeping bag, but then I saw it was something else. He was alone.

  "Hey," I said, standing up in the boat. "What's the story? Where's Orland and his two boys? Lard-assing in the mill there out of the wet while they leave you to hold the boat for 'em?"

  "No," he said.

  "What'd they do? Decide to ride up with John on the truck?"

  "Orland an' the others ain't coming to work today," he said. He stood there holding onto that rope leading down into the fog to the boat, like a big old bashful kid hold of something he can't understand. "I'm the only one going. And . . ."

  "And . . . ?" I waited for him to get on with it.

  "Orland called to say him and his boys all got the Asian flu. He said a lot of folks in town got it, Floyd Evenwrite, and Howie Evans and--"

  "I don't give a shit about Floyd Evenwrite and Howie Evans," I told him. "What about our bunch? What about Little Lou? Did he call? And Big Lou? Shit fire, Orland's boys; now wouldn't that frost you? And what about John? He got the sour-mash flu, I imagine, an' can't even drive the truck up there?"

  "I don't know," Andy said. "I just heard the phone in the mill ring and I taken the messages. Orland said--"

  "What about Bob? I suppose he's got the ingrown toenails or something. . . ."

  "I don't know about what he's got. I told him we still had a lot of logs to go to make that contract, but Orland said not to expect sick people to--"

  "Well shit fire," I said. "That just about makes the lot of 'em, don't it? First it's Big Lou, then Collins, then that damned fiddlefooted brother-in-law of Orland's who wasn't worth a goddam anyhow. Now Orland and his boys. I'm goddamned but I never thought they'd fade so fast with just a little rain and hard work."

  And Lee said, "The thanes fly from us," or some such crap.

  And Andy said, "It ain't just the rain and hard work, Hank. You see, there's a lot of folks in town saying they don't like what's--"

  "I don't give a goddam who likes what and who don't!" I told him, louder'n I'd aimed to. "And if the folks in town think this is gonna make me short on that contract, then they take me for a whole lot more fool than I am. Next tim
e anybody calls in how sick they are by god just tell 'em that's all right that's just fine, because your old Uncle Hank made a mistake keeping count an' we'll make it just fine with the four or five of us."

  Andy looked up. "I don't see how," he said. "We got this whole boom to fill an' then two more."

  "One more," Joe Ben said, giving Andy a big wink. "Folks got to get up pretty early to get a jump on us. Long time ago me and Hank started slipping logs in that slough up behind the house at night, pulling a few at a time with the motorboat. Oh yeah, people got to get up pret-tee ear-lee!"

  Andy grinned, and I told him to get on in the boat. I could see he was pleased that I had that other boom hid, that we still had a chance to make our contract. Really pleased. And that got me to thinking just how many people wasn't going to be the least bit pleased. A godawful amount, I realized. This made me feel funny, thinking for the first time just how many there was didn't want the contract made. I just sat there a minute, studying about it, looking out across the mist toward the anchor pilings up past the mill where the booms were snubbed. And then I got this goofy urge; it's hard to explain, but all of a sudden I found myself wanting to see those booms again, wanting to see them so goddam much right then that I felt like I was going batty! There was a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards between us and those pilings, covered with mist like a big blanket of dirty snow. Underneath that blanket was the booms, better than four months backbreaking ass-bleeding labor, millions of board feet of lumber, thousands of logs out of sight under there, nudging and scraping and rubbing against each other as the river current moved past under them so they were making an actual sound above the motor and the rain . . . a kind of a surly, complaining murmur, like a big throng of people muttering to each other.