Sometimes a Great Notion (101 page)

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 . . .)

Through the heavy glass door of the hospital I pushed, to a welcoming of warm air and the same old Amazon in white reading the same movie magazine. “You must
live
here,” I remarked, trying to be friendly. “Days, nights, and Thanksgivings.”

“Mr. Stamper?” she asked with a good deal of suspicion. She then leaned nervously toward me. “You . . . are you feeling
woozy,
Mr. Stamper?”

“It’s woozy weather,” I reminded her with some hesitation.

“I mean feelin’
bad?
” She rose from her magazine, eyeing me warily. “I mean I
know
you been under an enormous strain . . .”

“Your sympathy is very much appreciated,” I told her, becoming more puzzled, “but I don’t think I’m going to faint again, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

“Faint? Yes . . . maybe you can sit down while . . . I’ll just whisk off an’ fetch the doctor. You wait here, now, hear me . . . ?”

Before I could reply she had whisked off in a cloud of starch dust that hung in her wake like exhaust. I stared after her, perplexed by her sprinting departure. Certainly a change from our last encounter. What scared her? I wondered for a few moments, then concluded it was my new look. “The new presence of black disdain in my features . . . that’s what.” I curled my lip coldly. “Threw a bit of fright into the poor drudge is what, to come face to chilling face with the Total Absence of Fear . . .”

Then I bent to place a quarter in the cigarette machine and, in the mirror, caught sight of the visage that had sent her scurrying—a chiller all right: not quite so much a look of black disdain, I conceded, studying an unkempt, unshaven wastepaper basket of a face that peered back at me with red-rimmed and terror-filled eyes, as a look of bleak destruction. But a chiller, nevertheless.

I was a sight. Along with no bath there had been no mirror in my hotel room and I had not been witness to the decay. It had come with the insidious stealth of mildew; just as the wallpaper had become tracked overnight with the little delicate footprints of gray blight, my face had been marked by the passage of neglect. No wonder the Mad Scandinavian had chosen to cower behind his bolted door! After three days of cigarettes, private eyes, and mildew, mine was not exactly the face at which
any
one—regardless of humor or nationality—would rush forth armed only with a fish.

The nurse returned with the bulky doctor in tow. Even this archfiend’s filthy- and fat-minded good fellowship was intimidated by my appearance: he was unable to think of a single insinuation, he was so overcome.

“Good lord, boy, you look just awful!”

“Thank you. I cultivated the look especially for the visit. I didn’t want my poor father to think I was ridiculing his present condition by showing up looking all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“I don’t believe you have to worry about what old Henry’s thinking these days,” the doctor said.

“Pretty bad?”

He nodded. “Far too bad to give a hang if anybody’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed or not. You should have come earlier; as it is now, you might be disappointed in his reaction to your—what’d you call it?—‘cultivated look’?”

“Perhaps,” I said, noticing that the good doctor was getting his old snide equilibrium back. “Shall we see?”

“Take it easy; you don’t look capable of walking that far.”

After a pulse check convinced him I was in no immediate danger, he allowed me to have a look at the shredded remnants of my illustrious sire. Not a very pleasant experience . . . The room smelled of urine; the air was warm and hothouse moist; the bed had side-guards. The old man’s hardened grin had cracked in his baking nightmares, and a thin thread of red ran from his lips down his whiskered chin to his neck, like a lorgnette string attached to a wire-rimmed plaster smile. I stood looking down at him for as long as I was able—I’ve no idea if it was seconds or minutes—while the old fellow clacked and clattered against sleep with a bony tongue. One time he went so far as to open a matted eye to look at me and command, “Wag it an’ shake it. Suck yer gut in an’ git goddammit to affairs!” But ere I could comment, the eye closed, the tongue stopped, and the conversation was terminated.

I followed the doctor’s broad backside down the corridor away from the old man’s room, wishing that, just once, just this
one time
, my father had been more explicit about these affairs that I had been so long trying to git goddammit to . . .

On the pillowcase before her, Jenny sees a nebulous mouth forming; she has a quick sip from her glass, wipes her lips on the rough forearm of her sweater, scoops up the shells, and casts again, very hungry and very tired, but sensing the approach of something too big and too wonderful to risk missing in sleep . . . Teddy unlocks the door of the Snag and steps into air set like gelatin with stale smoke and flat beer and wild-cherry toilet disinfectant; it is early, much earlier than he usually opens, and his eyes are puffier than usual from his interrupted sleep, but, like Jenny, he anticipates the approach of something too big to sleep through.

Unlike Jenny, however, Teddy doesn’t feel that he has had any part in bringing it about; he is only an observer, a spectator—content to just open up the arena and let other forces and bigger men cast the shells . . .