Sometimes a Great Notion (100 page)

 

... then gives up asking and falls asleep in the tub.

Jenny is more tenacious. The Bible page gone, she returns to her shack, tired but resolute. Ever since leaving the bar last night, she has been working doggedly at the old childhood ritual that was responsible for her early departure from the Snag. This is a kid’s game with clam shells, recalled after all these years, a game the little girls of the tribe used to play to call up the image of the men the gods had ordained to be their mates. Across the foot of her dingy cot Jenny has arranged a white pillowcase as a background; once clean, the pillowcase now has a graying smudge in its center left by hours of casting and picking up shells. She stands above the pillowcase, bends slightly at her thick waist, moves her two clasped hands in a slow circle . . . then opens the hands, sprinkling a patter of opulent, surf-sanded shells onto the cloth. She studies them a moment, singing, “This bed is been manless too long too long, this bed is been manless too long . . .”—to the tune of “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More.” She nods at what she sees and scoops the shells back into her hand to begin again: “Wah-kon-da-ah-gah hear my song . . . this bed is been manless too long too long . . .”

When Jenny was fifteen the trouble was that the bed hadn’t been manless long enough; “Jenny, you too
young
,” her brothers had tried to tell her, “to go into business. . . . What
kind
of business this, anyway?”

“With Father. A trade. He voted for Roosevelt.”

“He’s a fool. Listen, why don’t you come with us? Down the coast to the place Hoover built for us. Place better than this; good house, facilities inside and out . . . and we get paid for living on it down the coast there. So why don’t you? . . . Mud anyway you look at it.”

Jenny shook her head and turned a trim hip before the bright new house trailer that her brothers had bought for the move to the reservation; “I think I just stay if it’s fine with all you.” The dim aluminum image gave her a resolute nod of approval; then she lifted an orange skirt to display trim brown legs bare to the belly button. . . . “Father say the Indians come under the New Deal just the same as anybody. He say me and him got a trade if we decide we wan’ to apply it. You like my legs?”

Her brothers gaped. “Jenny! My God! Put down your clothes! Father’s a crazy fool. You come on down coast.”

She hiked the skirt behind and turned, looking back over her shoulder at the brown spread of her mirrored ass. “He said if we stay right around here where they logging, we retire rich quick from our business. Mmm . . . how do you like orange, huh?”

Five years later her father demonstrated his crazy-foolishness by spending their savings on a new house made with sawed boards, split shingles, plastered in all the rooms . . . right next door to the Pringle mansion. That was his mistake; an Indian might have a business, he might even get by with a house with plaster rooms and shingles, but by god he oughta know better’n to put that house an’ business right next door to a decent God-fearing Christian
woman!
especially if that woman is Pucker Pringle. The incensed citizenry burned the house before Jenny so much as spent one night under its new roof, then in a fit of righteousness drove the poor father to the hills. Jenny they allowed to remain, providing she come down in her aspirations as well as her prices, and move to a less observant neighborhood . . .

“It ain’t so bad,” she told her brothers when they came to repossess her. “They give me this nice cabin out here. An’ I ain’t lonesome. I dance in the dance hall whenever I want to dance. That’s why I stay, maybe.” She neglected to mention the green-eyed young logger she had vowed to trap. “Also I get fifteen, twenty dollars a week . . . what the Government give
you
boys?”

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.