"Look: the old sun might come out, and it almost Thanksgivin'. How come? It never did that before . . ."
"Old sun is gonna come out to look is how come . . . to see is it springtime yet," was how the phenomenon was interpreted by a Siuslow Street Grade School meteorologist in galoshes and mud-daubed tresses. "To see if it is time to have springtime is how come . . ."
"Ain't," a junior colleague, behind her one whole grade and a boy at that, had the gall to dissent. "Ain't it a-tall."
"The ol' rain some way quit rainin', see, an' the sun he waked up an' he says, 'It quit rainin' . . . maybe time for spring. I better see. . . . ' "
"That ain't it," he kept on, "that ain't it a-tall."
"And so," she went on, ignoring him, "and so . . ." She drew a deep breath and lifted her shoulders in a gesture of bored certainty. "... the ol' sun is simpah-lee come sneaking out to see what time it is."
"No. That . . . just . . . ain't . . . it. Not a-tall."
She tried to remain silent, knowing it was best not to dignify these sillies by replying, but the mysterious measured tone of his statement, suggesting knowledge of other data, had anticipated and cleverly baited that silence. The muddy meteorologist detected a vacillation of faith in her audience--too much vacillation to simpalee ignore.
"All right, smarty-pants!" She turned on him. "You tell us how come there's sunshine out an' it almost Thanksgiving."
Smarty-pants, a big-nosed, big-eared skeptic in taped-together eyeglasses and a screaming Nylaglo raincoat, raised his eyes and looked gravely up at the seminary watching him from the creaking merry-go-round. They waited. The pressure was on. There was no two ways about it: he'd opened his mouth one time too many and now he had to put up or shut up, and he was going to have to put up some extremely persuasive logic to overcome the girl's lead, for not only was she backed by some pretty sound argument and her own bright red Frisbee, which she tossed and caught at unpredictable intervals; she was a second-grader to boot. He cleared his throat and called on authority to help make up the gap.
"My daddy said last night, my daddy said . . . that it's gonna be clear sonofabitchin' skies now that the sky's cleared."
"Poot!" She wasn't one to fall for a closed argument. "But how come?"
"Because--my daddy said--" He paused, kneaded his brow to recall the verbatim beauty of the reason, darkening his countenance and simultaneously building suspense with a devastating sense of timing. "Because--" His face cleared; the old memory had come through once again. "That hardnosed Stamper bunch is finally knuckled under, is what." He delivered the clincher. "Because that sonofabitchin' Hank Stamper is fine-a-lee called off his deal with Wakonda Pacific!"
Right on cue the sun slid above a cloudbank, sharp, keen, and freshly bright, to illuminate the playground with an icy white glare. Without another word the girl turned and galoshed off toward the swings, whipped and knowing it; it was a great loss of prestige, but there was simply no way to dispute the statement of authority when it was being seconded by the actual appearance of the party in question. No, she was forced to bow to the truth: the sun had come out because of the capitulation of the Stampers, not because it suspected an early spring.
Though, in fact, it did seem very much like spring. Dying dandelions woke to that keen-edged sun and managed a last bloom. Beaten grass lifted straight. Meadowlarks sung in the cattails. And by noon of that second rainless day the town was so thick with the warm, steamy air of Oregon springtime that even the adults recognized the presence of that sun.
The sun tried to draw off some of the moisture that had gathered in its brief absence. The roofs steamed. The walls steamed. The railroad ties in weed-grown fields steamed. In Swede Row off Nahamish Street, where the fishermen lived, their drab shacks, primerless and paintless and soaked through and through, gave off such a cloud of hissing silver mist that the whole row appeared to have caught fire from the unexpected arrival of the November sun.
"Bitchin' weather, don't you say?" said the Real Estate Man on the South Main sidewalk as he strode, with his coat over his shoulder and good times just around the bend, beside Brother Walker of the First Pentecostal Church of God and Metaphysics. He drew a great lungful of optimism, puffed out his chest to the sun like a chicken drying its feathers, and repeated, "Bitch-ing."
"Ah." Brother Walker was not very enthusiastic about this particular description.
"What I mean is"--damn these guys make a guy feel like he can't let go and talk American--"is this kind of climate in late November is truly extra-ordinary, extra-ordinary, don't you agree?"
Brother Walker smiled. That was better. He nodded. . . . "The Lord is merciful," he announced with confidence.
"You bet!"
"Yes, yes, merciful . . ."
"Big times coming," was the Real Estate Man's evaluation. "We're out of the woods; around that old corner." He was tingling with joy and ease; he thought of all the little Johnny Red-feathers he had carved recently, how their faces had grown so like Hank Stamper's that he had almost gone bats. Now all that was over. And just in time. "Yep. Prosperity round the bend . . . now that everybody's been set to rights."
"Yes . . . the Lord is merciful," Brother Walker said again cheerfully, adding this time, "and eternally just."
They strode on down the puddled walk, a dealer in dirt and a peddler of sky, chance comrades for a while because of their shared destination and their corresponding views of destiny, both beaming their brightest and dreaming of great transactions of earth and air--tingling and cheerful, real pinnacles of optimism, masters of the bright outlook . . . but still only amateurs compared to the dead man they were on their way to bury.
At the parlor Lilienthal studies old snapshots and adds last hurried touches to make this loved one look just as natural as life. He wants everything in this ceremony to be especially just as natural, so the kin won't object to the bill: the bill is padded heavily to cover the loss he took the day before by burying that miserly Willard Eggleston and the poor old drunk who used to cut shingle bolts; a ranger had found the old man passed on in his shack and brought him in, and a coroner is legally bound to attend to such deceased finds, though the poor souls are without a relative to their name and have been passed-on for a week. . . . So Lilienthal takes extra pains and special efforts with this loved one, partially to pay for, partially to make up for, the treatment that other hunk of rotten meat received yesterday. . . .
At her shack on the clamflats Indian Jenny sits on her cot in a position as close as she can come to the full lotus. She has been meditating ever since the news of the accident reached her; now she is stiff and hungry and she suspects that a family of earwigs has taken up residence in the back of her skirt. But she waits, motionless, and tries to think as Alan Watts told her to think. Not that she has much hope any longer of solving her problem by this method; mainly she is just dallying: she just doesn't want to go into town yet for further news. Further news, she has realized since hearing of the developments up river, cannot possibly be anything but bad news . . . and she doesn't know which will dismay her most, hearing that Henry Stamper still lives or hearing that he has died.
She closes her eyes and redoubles her efforts to think of nothing, or almost nothing, or at least of nothing as unpleasant as her aching thighs, or Henry Stamper, or earwigs . . .
At the Wakonda Arms, Rod looks up from his newspaper to see Ray come buck-and-winging through the door with his cheeks glowing and his arms filled with green-papered bundles. "Puttin' on my white tie . . . gettin' out my tails." Ray tumbled the load onto the bed. "Fish and soup, Roderick my man, fish and soup this p.m. Cash, too. Teddy paid, after nearly two months; it's a drag that poor little Willard wasn't around to enjoy the event, after bugging us about our cleaning bill for so long. Too bad, Willy-o; you'd of waited a few days, you could of split fulfilled." He clicked into his dance step again, skipping over to the chest of drawers. "But look here, I got to get hold of the old ax. Come to daddy, baby; I got to get the old phalanges
limbered. . . ."
Rod watched from the bed as Ray pulled the guitar case from beneath the chest of drawers. He gave up on his paper, but for all Ray's buoyant good tidings, he decided to hold his finger on his place in the want ads. "What you coming on so about?" he asked as Ray began tuning the instrument. "Hey! Did Teddy finally agree about upping our cut?"
"Nope." Ting ting ting.
"You heard from that moneypockets uncle of yours? Huh? You heard from Rhonda Ann in Astoria? Damn you, if you and her--" "Nope, nope, nope-a-dope." Ting ting ting-a-ting. "Baybee! does a change in weather like this screw up the ol' strings." T-eeng t-eeng.
Rod rolled to his hip and spread the newspaper against the sun streaming through the dust-starched curtains, returning to the want ads. "Then if you're tuning that outfit planning a gig tonight, you might's well figure on pickin' lead and bass both. 'Cause man I mean screw it. I'm not taking it . . . ten bucks a night and no tips for a month, I don't hafta take that sound and I told Teddy so."
Ray looked up from his tuning, his face a wide grin. "Man . . . tell you what I'm gonna do: just because I'm such a sterling fellow, tonight . . . you can have the whole ten and I'll be happy with the tips. Cool?"
No answer came from beneath the paper, but a suspicious silence.
"Cool, then, okay? Because I tell you, Roderick. There's things you ain't heard and veins you ain't got your fingers on; it's gonna be tips up the geetus from here on out and loot and luck all the way to Nashville. Hoo-hoo! I don't know about you, but I'm goin' to the moon, you sour-mouthed pessimist. To the moon. Dig?"
From beneath his paper the pessimist remained silent, digging only that the last time Ray came buck-and-winging into a hotel room to go to coming on like this the nut had ended up, instead of in Nashville, on the emergency ward in a stinking little hospital outside of Albany or Corvallis or someplace like that, with a hose down his big mouth after a fistful of Nembutals.
"Get up from there, man," Ray shouted. "Get shuckin'. Get out your machine an' let's get the kinks loose. Get your chin off your chest and get on the sunny side of the street and pack up your troubles. . . ." Chang: C-chord. Chong: F, G-seventh, G ... " 'Cause, man, it's--" Chang: C-chord again and "Blue skies, smilin' at me . . . nothin' but blue skies--"
"For maybe one or two days." A voice rose from the want ads and clouded the air with dismal forecasts of approaching low fronts. "For maybe one or two crummy days, then what kind of motherin' skies?"
"Go ahead." Ray grinned. "Sit there under a paper and rot. This boy's gonna get his pickin' and strummin' hand sharpened up and take it straight to the top. Tonight's the start. Sweet joy and victory is gonna fill the old Snag tonight, you see if it don't. Because, man"--chang tink a tink--"Nothin' but blue skies . . . do I skooby-dooby seeEEE. . ."
In the Snag, Teddy looks at the blue sky through his cold scribble of neon and has a slightly different reaction to the unusual change in weather. . . . Blue skies isn't barroom weather. You need rain for bringing in the drinkers; this kind of day people drink lemonade. You need rain and dark, and cold. . . . That's the stuff to start the fear running, to keep the fools drinking.
He'd been concerned with fear and fools ever since Draeger had told him with a wink the day before that Hank Stamper had just called to say that the shooting match was done. "The 'shooting match,' Mr. Draeger?" " 'The whole by god shooting match,' as Hank put it. He said that because of 'developments,' Teddy, he couldn't see how he could possibly make his deadline. Developments . . ." Draeger grinned proudly at him. "I told you we'd show these muscleheads, didn't I?"
Teddy had responded with a blush and some mumbled agreement, pleased that Draeger had chosen to be so intimate with him, but, all taken into consideration, rather saddened by the news that the whole by god shooting match was ended; the trouble with the Stampers may have hurt the rest of the town, but it had certainly kept his own till ringing. He would miss that sound. . . . "What'll you do now, Mr. Draeger?" And miss even more this forceful and wise and handsome relief from all the fools that patronized his place. "Go back to California, I suppose?"
"I'm afraid so." Draeger's cultured voice had been a delightful interlude--intelligent, calm, kind but not pitying like the others. "Yes, Ted, I'm off to Eugene now to tie up some things, then I'm coming back to share Thanksgiving with the Evenwrites, but after that . . . it's back to sunny southland."
"All your . . . all the trouble up here is cleared up?"
Draeger grinned across the bar, laying down a five for his I. W. Harpers. "Wouldn't you say so, Teddy? Keep the change--but, all kidding aside, wouldn't you say it was cleared up?"
Teddy nodded resignedly; he'd always known Draeger would show the muscleheads. . . . "I guess so. Yes. Yes, I'm sure it is, Mr. Draeger . . . the whole by god shootin' match, all cleared up."
Now, only a day later, Teddy wasn't so sure. The let-up in business that he'd expected to accompany the town's good fortune had yet to begin; it should have started, by his reckoning, as soon as the flush of victory had been drunk away last night. But, if anything, business had picked up instead of let up. When he consulted the neat set of records he kept in his head, and checked under "Quarts Consumed per Customer," he found that individual consumption was up close to twenty per cent over last week, and, while he couldn't be sure of "Customers per Cubic Foot per Hour" until the peak time tonight, all indications pointed to a top-notch crowd. At the rate men were dropping in already, it looked like the Snag would be filled tonight.
But, unlike Ray, Teddy knew his customers too well to ever believe that sweet joy could fill a bar. Or victory either. Teddy knew that it took something much stronger than those two watery reasons to fill a bar. Especially with the weather so nice. If it were still raining, he mused, looking at his neons dead and powerless under the bright sunshine, I might understand. If it were raining and dark and cold, then I might know what was forcing them here, but with weather like this--
"Teddy, Teddy, Teddy . . ." At one of the tables near the window, Boney Stokes squinted against the sun. "Shouldn't we have us a shade or blinds or something to pull over that terrible glare?"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Stokes."
"A curtain or some-thing?" His meatless old hand pawed at the light. "To protect tired old eyes?"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Stokes; I sent the blinds off to Eugene for cleaning when the rains started. I just never in a hundred years thought we'd get any more sun, I sure didn't. But let me see . . ." He turned to the laundry box behind the bar; in the mirror Boney's reflection blinked hollowly after him. Stupid old eyes, always looking for something to whine about . . . "Perhaps I might be able to pin up some cloth and help?"
"Okay, you do that." Then Boney craned his neck, squinting at the street. "No. Wait. Best not, I reckon. No. I want to be sure and see him when he drives out to the cemetery. . . ."
"Who's that, Mr. Stokes?"
"Never mind. I just . . . don't feel like attendin' the funeral--my lungs and so on--and I want to watch them drive by to the buryin' ground. I'll just sit here. I can endure the glare; I reckon I'll just have to. . . ."
"Very well."
Teddy returned the dishtowel to its box, glancing again at the reflection of the skinny man. Repulsive old specter. Stupid old eyes, cold as marble; and vicious, too, in a stupid way. Boney Stokes's eyes never have seen anything but rain and dreariness, so it's no mystery him being in here on such a pretty day; he's seen nothing but fear all the days of his stupid life. But these others, all these others . . . "Teddy! Get your pink little rear in gear, by gory; there's drinkin' to be done!" He rippled soundlessly down the bar with his pink little rear switching in tight black trousers, toward the draft taps where a crowd of sweat-shirted shamblers had gathered again already with empty glasses. "Yes sir, what'll it be, sir?" But what about all these others? No fear seemed to cloud their fool's firmament, or no more than usual anyway. . . . What drove these men in, like cattle to the barn in a thunderstorm, on this crystal-clear day? Could it be that his cher
ished equations and formulas of man, based on years of correctly relating alcohol intake to fear output, were finally being proved imperfect? For what awful fear could possibly lurk beneath all this noisy joy and victory? How could a storm strong enough to drive such a large herd into his long, barnlike bar be thundering behind all this blue sky and sunshine?
Evenwrite, panting at the bathroom mirror, finds himself wondering along about the same lines as Teddy, only with less eloquence: Why ain't I happy with how things worked out?--as he arranges the oversized knot on his tie to try to conceal the unbuttoned gap in his collar. "God! Damn! Dammit!" But why ain't I pleased . . . ?--wrenching at the collar furiously.
He hated white shirts anyhow, never had liked 'em, wouldn't even wear the things to big muckymuck meetings--frig 'em; they ain't no better bird just because they can afford better feathers!--and he didn't see why he couldn't use the same argument on a dolled-up corpse. His wife saw differently. "Maybe poor Joe Stamper won't kick about your blue Catalina Casual with the stripes, but I wouldn't go to a funeral dressed like that dead!"
He'd argued, but he saw her point, and he'd been forced to dig down through the drawers after the shirt he'd been married in, only to find that the goddam collar had shrunk a good goddam two inches.
"Jesus, Mama," he called out to his wife, leaning from the bathroom door, "what'd you wash this shirt in to shrink it so bad?"
"Your white shirt?" his wife called back. "Hasn't been near water since our first wedding anniversary, buster. When you got drunk and decided that if a man was high enough he didn't need no such stuff and tossed it in the punch."
"Yeah, well, if that's so . . ." he trailed off weakly, jerking the tie unknotted to start over. Then why ain't I happy with how things worked out?