Sometimes a Great Notion

  She didn't mind the comedown, either in price or in property; with no one to divide with, she was actually making more take-home than before. Besides, she liked being back on the clamflats. She had never got used to the smell of that hotel room, or the sound of people you didn't know always walking past where you slept at night, waking you up and you laying there not knowing. "At least when you hear a footstep slop-slopping across the mud at midnight, in coldest night in January, you know somebody is come to see you."

  The trouble was that with the passing of Januaries and the steady diet of clams, wapatoos, and choctaw beer, the brown ass grew broader and the footsteps became more and more infrequent. Financially, Jenny was quite comfortable: the land about her shack was abundant with cash as well as clams; literally hundreds of snuff cans containing fifteen or twenty dollars in bills enriched that mud. She had learned well the lesson of humility taught by her father: Don't make a business look too successful--hide it. And, for a number of years, the frequency with which she was seen laboring away with shovel at all hours of the day and night prompted large tips of pity. So she didn't hurt for money. But, as the footsteps slackened, she came to miss the company. Enough to want to change things.

  This time she made the trip. She found her brothers whittling myrtlewood bric-a-brac in an army barracks tent. They offered her a box to sit on. "The government hasn't got around to buildin' the houses now, with this war going on," they apologized. "But soon now . . ."

  "Never mind. What tent's the old goatman put in? I got to talk to him. I need some magic."

  The shaman took one look and advised her that it would take mighty magic to change things now, mighty big magic, bigger magic that he could lay his hands on. Okay, she would find it. In Coos Bay she bought a Thomas Mann novel and tried all the bus ride back to Wakonda to find out just where was this mountain full of magic this man was talking about. She gave up as she crossed the bridge into town, and tossed the book into the river. After that she brought her research material home from the lending library: it looked as though she might be in for a long haul with this magic thing, and a lot of books; and there was no sense buying any more than you had to when there were obviously so many going to be disappointments like the dud this phony German wrote.

  There were for sure a lot of disappointments and duds, but she had plodded ahead with rubber-booted determination, working to alleviate her problem by attacking it at two levels: when she was home alone in her shack she plied an occult gleaned from haphazard thousands of books, a bastard brew of magic, unpredictable and nameless . . . when she was in the Snag she plied free glasses of Teddy's liquor on drunks, a bastard brew often as unpredictable and nameless as her magic, though it might be straight from a bottle marked Bourbon De Luxe. Over all, this second method had been far more successful than her spells and chants: on a good night with enough different drunks to work with, she could generally fill her manless bed at least briefly and, if the situation was right and she picked carefully, could sometimes even get a man still sober enough to be capable of filling more than just the bed.

  Last night had been ideal for the administration of this method: the men had started drinking early and were drunk enough when she arrived that there was little need for her to spend her money for drinks. Within an hour she had had two old friends at different tables ask her if she was still using that same sealskin blanket on her cot, and a fisherman barely forty years old remarked that maybe she needed help scraping the barnacles off that keel . . . an ideal situation!

  But she had suddenly ceased her buying and her heavy-set flirting and collapsed in a chair by herself. Somewhere two men had been talking about Henry Stamper: seen 'im in the hospital an' that there old turtle looked like he was finally getting set to buy his piece of dirt. She had known this, of course--old man like that, a dead certainty he wasn't gonna live forever . . . but it wasn't until she heard someone else say it that the dead certainty became a fact. Henry Stamper was gonna be gone, pretty soon now; the last ragged remnant of her green-eyed logger was gonna be gone . . .

  And, realizing this, she found she was no longer interested in bringing home one of these other men from the Snag. Not even the stout-looking fisherman. Dejected, she had slumped deeper into the chair, still holding the glass of liquor she'd purchased as bait for the fisherman. With a gulp she drank it herself. Need it. Got no man ahead of me, no one I can see ahead of me at all . . .

  And just as she was about to order another glass, the old Indian seashell game came to her, the man-seeing ritual, coming from no whiteman's book or no white god's gospel but from her own childhood. She belched loudly, pushed herself to her feet, and thumped out, grim and gas-filled and indefatigable, across a score of manless years . . .

  "Too long, too long, too long," she chants querulously. "Manless too damn long"--and makes another toss with the seashells. She sips absently from her glass of brackish liquid and studies the pattern on the pillowcase. The pattern is getting better every toss. At first, for a long time, there was nothing. Just scattered seashells. Then there was an eye, repeating itself in toss after toss. Then two eyes, then a nose! And now this whole face just like this for six or seven times in a row getting clearer all the time . . . !

  She scoops up the shells and circles her hands slowly: ". . . too long, too long, too long, too long . . . this bed is been manless too long . . ."

  In town the Real Estate Hotwire finally gets through to that nigger lawyer in Portland and finds that it is even worse than his sister feared . . . "Everything, sis, not just the insurance, he left her everything!" Even the theater, which he had expected was returning home to roost in his office for another six months. He shakes his head at his sister sitting across the desk from him. "She got the works. That snake must have lost his mind. Don't cry, Sissy-Britches, we'll fight it, of course. I told that nigger lawyer we weren't about to stand still for his kind of black--"

  He stops abruptly, staring at the little wooden figure forming beneath his whittling knife . . . Blast! And that family from California threatening to move into his unrented four-room stucco out Nahamish . . . that would be a fine kettle of fish if they got away with it. And--hey, b' gorry!--those two letters asking about living upstairs in that room over his office . . . they sure never sent along any photograph! Blast and double blast! Won't they ever leave a man alone to make a mark in this ratrace? Must they always come slipping in to make trouble just when there's better times right round the bend? Blast the bunch of haunts . . . get away, get away! He flings the figure into the wastebasket after its shavings, giving up . . . whoever heard of a colored Johnny Redfeather, anyway?

  Just as Simone disposes of her own haunting statue, putting it at the very back of the very highest shelf in the closet and stuffing her old wedding gown in front of it, feeling herself finally beyond the help of a virgin idol. . . . What good was such an idol to her now? Could a virgin be expected to understand safety jelly? or Listerine gargle? or the cold cyst that swelled like a frozen bubble beneath her skin, the cold, empty hollow left when you for now and evermore relinquished Virtue, and Contrition, and even Shame? Don't make me laugh, Mary-doll . . .

  And as Ray finally stands up and walks away from the bed to the grimy sink in the corner of their room, giving up his attempt to brighten the morning with memory. He takes the cracked enamel basin and fills it with warm water. After putting the basin on the forbidden hot plate behind their trunk, he sits in the hardback chair and lights a cigarette, watching Rod rock and roll about the bed, snoring in three-four time. "Rodney, boy . . ." Ray whispers, "you never was all that bad with your beat, you know? For all my bugging you. You had your slow times and your fast times but you was usually in there pretty close. Me, man, I got a beat strict as a clock. And perfect pitch, you know? Oh, I ain't coming on, I'm just saying what I know. It's the straight stuff. I mean, I know it's there . . . like last night, with everything swinging all the way, on top of it, tips, requests . . . nothing to stop me from going clear to the top,
you know, man? I got Blue Skies, and a clear road, and not a thing in my way, not! one! solitary! thing! Rod man, to keep me from wailing clear to the top of the heap!"

  He stops. The clock ticks. He daubs out the half-smoked cigarette in a chili-stained dish and stands up. He hears the water boiling briskly in the enameled pan. He walks across to the bed and pulls his guitar case from beneath the bureau and flips the snaps open. He takes out the instrument and places it on the floor beside the case . . . then for a moment just stands, looking down at the instrument's workmanship, at the pearl inlay, at the rhythmed flow of the cherrywood grain set off by the six parallels of gleaming steel . . . damned pretty, sorta like a good, organized run; freedom and style and order. He smiles at the guitar, then closes his eyes and steps onto it with both bare feet. The wires stretch, the cherrywood creaks. Damned pretty, goddamned pretty . . . He jumps into the air. No reason, on a pretty piece like this, a man couldn't go all--

  There is a chonging crash. Rod rears up startled from his snores to see his roommate leaping up and down on the jagged ruin of his steel guitar. "Ray!" Rod swings his feet from beneath the blanket; Ray turns in his direction a face both harried and dreamily peaceful . . . "Ray, man, wait!" But before he can reach his friend, Ray has dashed across the room and plunged both fists to the wrists in the boiling water . . .

  Lee is awakened by the scream, first excusing the sound: those two musicians across the hall, raising an awful row . . . but then a bang, then another scream, then running in the hall, shouting, doors opening . . . well, just one more nightmare to wake to.

  He gets out of bed and dresses hurriedly, spurred to haste by the mysterious activity for the first time in three days. Except for meals, he has spent almost all of his time since leaving the house there in the hotel room, in his bed, reading, dozing, waking . . . sometimes awakened by the touch of slim, cool fingers tracing his skin, only to open his eyes and find that the room has become too hot again and the fingers are only rivulets of sweat . . . then rolling over to doze--and wait--some more.

  And sometimes wondering, in his waiting stupor, whether those slim fingers, or the slim and ethereal girl who had applied them, had ever been more than a fantasy of temperature . . .

  By the time he has dressed and headed down to the lobby, the manager and his teen-aged son have helped the musician corner his berserk roommate in the phone booth. Rod has pulled on Ray's trousers in the excitement, and they fit ridiculously tight about his thighs and waist. He is pleading in a gentle whisper at the booth. Standing on the stairs, Lee is able to look down into the booth and see the other man sitting with both knees jammed against the door, his head tipped sideways almost coquettishly as he fondly chides his two boiled hands lifted before him. Lee watches as a small crowd gathers. Occasionally Rod will look back over his shoulder and explain to one of the new-comers, "Ray's always been high-strung. Taut, likeaGstring. A sensitive musician is always high-strung. He had a lot of plans for the future, see, but it seems like he was just strung too tight and high to finish a gig, you see . . ."

  The sheriff arrives with a tool box; they are getting ready to dismantle the booth door with screwdrivers and a claw hammer when Lee decides he has seen enough. Buttoning his coat, he continues on down the steps and out onto the sidewalk, stopping outside the hotel to look up and down the street and wonder now what? What are my plans for the future? Way-all, I concluded . . . one thing is certain: I'll have to be sure and know of a good convenient phone booth in case I also turn out to be strung too high to finish the gig.

  Actually, this was in no way an accurate analysis of my mood . . . because I felt about as low-strung as a man can feel and still manage something as active as a slow stroll. I shuffled disconsolately down Main, as tranquil as the soft gray rain drifting about me, my hands hibernating in the deep, furry pockets of the jacket Joe Ben had given me that first day in the woods, and my head in an aimless fuzz. Three days of paperback mysteries in my aquarium of a hotel room had apparently mildewed all my motivation. I simply walked, neither going, nor fleeing, any place at all. And when I found that my wandering had brought me to Neawashea Street, near the hospital where my father was reported to be crumbling apart, I turned off, not really so much because I wanted to see the old man--though I had been damning myself for two days for putting off the visit--as because the hospital was the nearest dry place at the moment.

  I was walking back along the same forbidding route that I had traversed in terror a few days before, but it seemed forbidding no longer, and I didn't feel the slightest fright. And when I felt none of the old muscle-knitting thrill at passing the cemetery, none of the apprehensive tingle as I approached the shack of the Mad Scandinavian Fisherman known to rush forth unexpectedly from his dank tarpaper lair and attack hapless pedestrians with a chinook salmon, I was struck with that feeling of inconsolable loss that the satiated big-game hunter must experience when he returns to camp, through the suddenly monotonous jungle, having slain whatever demon he feared the very most. My steely eyes, once alert and aglitter with the excitement of the hunt, had waxed muddy and dull behind fogged lenses that I made no attempt to clean. My sentinel ears no longer pricked outward to catch warning snap of the telltale twig, turning instead inward to the dull murmur of introspection. My sense of touch was disconnected by the cold. My taste buds atrophied. My keen nose, that had but a few days previous run silently ahead gleaning the shadows for the scent of danger, now only ran, not at all silently . . .

  For the hunt was done, the danger past, the demon defeated . . . and what's left for a nose to keep keen for? "We must learn to accept the change," I tried to advise us. "We survived the slaughter of God and all his Heavenly Host quite handily; why, then, should we get so hung up over doing in the devil?"

  But this advice served not at all to tighten my low string. Seemed to make it lower, if anything. There was nothing left. I was finished. Hardly caring, I realized at last that here was the thing Old Reliable had warned me to watch out for--the post-duel depression; my revenge against Brother Hank completed, what was left but the trip back East? A dreary journey at best, especially when made alone. How much less dreary, I couldn't help thinking, the trip would be, were one accompanied by a congenial travel companion--how much more pleasant . . .

  So, for three days, since our night together, I had put off leaving and hid out in a three-dollar no-bath room, waiting and hoping that this companion would come seeking me. For three days and three nights. But I would wait no longer; my last three dollars were slept up, I badly needed a bath, and I think I had known all along that my hoping was hopeless; deep inside, I had known Viv would not come seeking me--I had seen to that--and I couldn't bring myself to go after her . . .

  While I might be fearless and all that, what with the devil done in, I still hadn't reached the point of being able to go out to the devil's house for no other reason than to ask his wife to come away with me.

  I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets as I approached the hospital, low-strung and wishing that I had either more courage to go with my fearlessness, or a good cowardly excuse for returning to the old house just one more time . . .

  Viv washes off her toothbrush and returns it to the rack; and, holding her hair back with one hand, bends to the faucet to rinse her mouth out. She brushes with salt, to keep her teeth bright. She washes out the taste and straightens back up and faces her image in the medicine-cabinet mirror. She frowns: what is it? What she sees--or doesn't see--in the face makes her uncomfortable; it isn't age; the moist Oregon climate keeps the skin quite young, without cracking and lining. Skinny, but no, it isn't the lack of flesh, either; she has always liked her rather underfed look. So . . . something else . . . that she doesn't yet understand.

  She tries to smile at the face. "Say, little girl . . ." she whispers out loud, "how have you been?" But the expression that answers is as abstruse to her as to others who constantly try to plumb its mystery. What is it . . . ? She can brush with salt to keep the smile gleaming
, but she is unable to reach behind the gleam . . .

  "Foofawraw," she says and switches out the bathroom light. "That's the sort of thinking that leads a girl to drink." She closes the door behind her and goes downstairs to sit on the arm of Hank's chair and squeeze his hand tightly while the TV set booms "GO! GO! GO!"

  "Be half time here in a minute," Hank says. "What about a egg sandwich or something?" (I was watching the Thanksgiving Day Classic when Viv came in . . . Missouri and Oklahoma, still nothing to nothing at the end of the second quarter with less than five minutes to play . . .)

  "How about turkey-noodle soup instead, honey? I can open a can and heat it?"

  "Fine Anything, I don't care . . . just so's we can finish it during the half. And a beer if we got one."

  "Not a sign," she said.

  "Didn't you hang out the beer flag for Stokes?"

  "Stokes doesn't deliver any more, remember? Up this far . . . ?"

  "Okay, okay . . ."

  (It was past noon and I'd laid in the sack till game time with a heat pad on my lower back, hadn't had any breakfast and was hungry. Viv got up and slipped off to the kitchen, barely making a sound in her tennis shoes. The house was damn quiet with just the two of us. Even with the TV turned way up, the house was too quiet for my liking. That lonely, killing quiet of nobody talking with anybody, of no kids squealing and giggling, no Joby coming on with some wild notion, no old Henry helling around . . . and the little times when Viv and I said something to each other, it seemed like it was quieter than ever. Because we were just talking, not with anybody at all. I hadn't really noticed the silence till then--I guess I'd been too busy with the funeral and what all to notice--and I hadn't really started to appreciate what a thorough goddam job the kid had made of it till I got the chance to notice this silence, and to wonder if Viv and me'd ever be able to talk with each other again. Yeah, you had to give the kid credit . . .)