Sometimes a Great Notion (22 page)

He’s made a good-sized gink, bigger than any of us would ever of expected. He must be an easy six foot, an inch or two taller than me and probably outweighs me a good twenty pounds, for all his lankiness. He’s all knobby shoulders and elbows and knees through the white shirt and slacks he’s wearing, hair long at the ears, glasses with rims that look like they’d peter a man’s neck out holding them up, a tweed jacket laid across his knees with a bulge in the pocket I’d give eight-to-five was a pipe . . . ball-point pen in his shirt pocket, dirty low-cut tennis shoes, dirty state-property gym socks. And I swear he looks like death warmed over. For one thing his face is all burned, like he fell asleep under a sunlamp; and there’s big inky pools under the eyes; and where he used to be deadpan as an owl, he’s took on a kind of beaten and fretful grin, like his mother had. Except there’s just the barest crook to his version, showing he knows just a skosh more than she did. And probably wishes he didn’t. When he talks, that crook comes into his grin for just a flicker, just a wink, making him look sadder than ever because the crook turns it into one of those grins you see on a man across the card table when you lay your full house on his ace-high straight and it’s been happening like that all day and he’s got inside information it’s going on happening like that all night. The way Boney Stokes grinned when he’d take the rag away from his cough and look down in it and see that his condition was just as bad as he feared . . . grinning because—well, look: . . . Boney Stokes was this oldtime acquaintance of Henry’s and figured the best way to pass the time of day was by gradually dying. Every so often Joe Ben—who figured the best way to pass the time of day was
never
gradually, but full steam ahead—would come across Boney at the Snag or when Boney and the old man were playing dominoes for the Centennial bucks Boney’d taken in at the store during Oregon Centennial and had hung on to past time to redeem, and Joe would rush over and pump Boney’s hand and tell him how good he looked.

“Mr. Stokes, you’re lookin’ sicker’n I seen you in months.”

“I know, Joe, I know.”

“You seeing a doctor? Oh yeah, I’m sure you are, I tell ya you come on over to services this Saturday night and we’ll see if Brother Walker can do you some good. I’ve seen him bring round some men with one foot in the grave and scuffin’ up dirt with the other.”

Boney’d shake his head. “I don’t know, Joe. I’m afraid we’ve let my condition get too advanced.”

Joe Ben’d reach up and take the old ghoul by the chin and turn his head first to one side, then the other, squinting close at the wrinkled craters where the eyes were sunk. “Might be. Oh yeah, it
might
be. Too far gone for even the help of Divine Power.” And leave Boney sitting there, blooming with bad health.

For Joe Ben, see, was
that
way; probably one of the most accommodating guys in the world. That is, he came to be one of the most accommodating. He didn’t use to be when he was little. As kids we was together about as much as later, but then he didn’t have a lot going. Sometimes he wouldn’t say more’n a word or so a week. This was because he was afraid what he might say would be something he’d picked up hearing his old man say. He looked so much like old Ben Stamper that he was scared to death he would grow up to be the same person. He even looked a lot like him, they tell me, clear back on the day he was born, with the shiny black hair and the pretty face, and he got to looking more like him every year. In high school he would stand in front of the locker-room mirror and screw up his mouth all sorts of ways and try to hold the face he made, but it didn’t work; girls were already panting after him like women were always panting after Uncle Ben. As Joe got more handsome he got more scared, until the summer before our senior year he was about to give in to it and admit he didn’t have any say-so about what he was going to be—he’d even got him a slick-looking Mercury like his dad used to have, all primered and chopped with zebra seats—when just in the nick of time he got into some kind of hassle off there in the state park with the homeliest girl in school, and she shredded his pretty face with a brush-cutting knife. He never said much about what brought on the hassle, but it sure changed him. With a new face he figured he was able to open up and become himself.

“Hank, I tell you, if I’d waited another year look where I’d be now.”

At the time he said this, Joe’s old man had just disappeared into the mountains never to be seen alive again; Joe claimed he’d just barely escaped the same fate.

“Maybe so; but I want to know what
happened
out there in the state park with you and that little owl, Joby.”

“Ain’t she a corker? I’m gonna marry that girl, Hank; you see if I don’t. Just as quick as they get all these stitches out. Oh yeah, things’re due to be
fine!
”

He married Jan while I was overseas and by the time I got back he already had a boy and a girl. And both of them pretty as any doll, pretty as he had even been. I wondered if he was worried about that.

“No. That’s fine.” He grinned, jumping around, tickling one, then the other, and laughing enough for all three. “Because the
prettier
they are the less likely they are to look like their old man, you see? Oh yeah. You see, they got their own row to hoe right from the start.”

He had three more kids, each one more a doll than the last. By the time Jan was pregnant with the last one Joe Ben had got in pretty deep in the Church of God and Metaphysical Science and was beginning to pay attention to omens. So when that last child was born he declared that it was to be the clincher, on account of the various
omens
that took place on the day it was born. And there was some doozers. There was a big hurricane in Texas; and a whale swam into Wakonda Bay at high tide and grounded himself on the flats and made the whole town sick for a month before a demolition crew from Seattle got shut of him; and the remains of Ben Stamper was found in a lonely mountain cabin full of girlie books; and that night old Henry got the telegram from New York saying his wife had jumped forty stories to her death.

That news got to me a hell of a lot more than it did to the old man. I studied about it a good long while. And riding across in the boat I come awful near to just blurting out and asking Lee about the circumstances of that jump and what he figured brought it on; but I decided against it for the same reason I decided against asking him why he’d give up the big-time Yale University life he was coming on so strong about, to come back and help us out logging. I just kept still. I figured I already said plenty and that he will talk about such things in his own good time.

We get to the dock and I tie up the boat and throw a little tarp over the motor after I shut it off. I think for just a second about asking Lee to shut off the motor while I tie up—figuring he’d grab that live plug like old Henry does at least once a week and shock the shit out of himself—but I decide against that too. I’m deciding against things right and left, it looks like. Because for one thing I’m thinking more and more that there is some kind of truly big strain on the kid. He’s quit talking and is looking around at the place. His eyes are kind of glassy. And there’s a silence stretched between us like barbed wire. But for all of that I feel pretty good. He did come back; by god he did come back. I cough and spit in the water and look out to where the sun’s tumbling toward the bay like a big dusty red rose. In the fall when they burn the stubble off the fields the sun gets this dusty hazy color, and the mare’s-tail clouds whipping along near Wakonda Head look like goldenrod bent over by the wind. It’s always real pretty. You can almost hear it ring in the sky.

“Look yonder,” I say, pointing at the sunset.

He turns slow, batting his eyes like he’s in a daze. “What?” he says.

“There. Look there. There where the sun is.”

“There
what?
” WATCH OUT. “Where?”

I start to tell him but I see he just can’t see it, it’s clear he can’t. No more than a color-blind man can see color. Something is really haywire with him. So I say, “Nothing, nothing. A salmon jumped is all. You missed it.”

“Oh yeah?”
Lee keeps his gaze turned from his brother, but is alert to his every move: WATCH OUT NOW . . .

I keep telling myself to go shake his hand and tell him how glad I am that he’s come, but I know it’s something I can’t pull off. I couldn’t do that no more than I could kiss the old man’s whiskery chin and tell him how bad I feel about him getting busted up. Or no more than the old man could pat my back and tell me what a goddamn good job I been doing since he got busted up and I been handling the work of two. It just ain’t our style. So the kid and me just kind of stand there sucking on our teeth until the whole crew of hounds wakes up to the fact that there’s folks about and all come loping out to see if maybe we can’t use their wonderful assistance in some way or other. They grin and grovel and wag their worthless tails and put on just about the finest display of whining and yowling and carrying on that I’ve seen since the last time somebody got out of a boat a whole hour ago.

“Christ, look at ’em. One of these days I’ll drown the whole smelly lot of ’em. Ain’t they a mess?”

A couple jump up on my bare leg while I’m trying to pull my pants back on and they’re just so unbearable happy to see me that nothing’ll do but to rake my leg clean to the bone. I go to whipping at them with my pants. “Get back, you sonsabitches! Get the hell down from me! You got to jump on somebody, jump up on Leland Stanford here; he’s got pants on. Go welcome him, you got to welcome somebody.”

And for the first time in his brainless life one of the fools minds what somebody tells him. One old deaf, half-blind redbone with mange on his rump, he gets down from me and limps over and licks at Lee’s hand. Lee stands there a second . . .
the colors about Lee and his half-brother strike against the ringing air; sky-blue, cloud-white, ringing, and that sparkling patch of

yellow. Lee watches. Where is this place?
. . . and then the kid puts his jacket on the boathouse and squats down, and you’d think that damned dog hadn’t had anybody to scratch his ear in a century, the way he responds. I finish pulling my pants on and pick up my sweat shirt and stand and wait for Lee to finish. He stands up and the dog rears up and puts both paws on his chest. I start to holler him down but Lee says no, wait a minute:
Wait; wait, please.
. . . “Hank . . . is this Plover? Is this old Plover? I mean, Plover was old even when I was a kid . . . Could he still—”

“Why, by god, that
is
old Plover, Lee. How did you know? Is he that old? Lord, I guess he must be if he was around when you was. By god, look there; he acts like he recollects who you are!”

Lee grins at me, then pulls the dog’s muzzle right up next to his face. “Plover? Hi, Plover, hi . . .” he keeps saying over and over. “. . . hi there old Plover, hi . . .” he says. . . .
blue and white and yellow, and red, where that flag swings in the breeze.

The trees shimmer behind an invisible veil of lupine smoke. The old house rears soundless and gigantic against the distant mountains and leans down over the dock: What house is this?
I stand there watching the kid and that old hound, shaking my head. “Boy and his dog,” I say, “And don’t that beat the band: just look at the old buzzard carry on; I believe he does remember who you are, bub. Look at him. He’s tickled to have you back, you know that?”

I shake my head again, then pick up my boots and walk on up the planks toward the house, leaving Lee back there overcome with the hello he was getting from that old deaf hound, determined to do what I could to help straighten that kid out, thinking I’m gonna have to shape him up before he comes clean apart. Poor kid. Tears in his eyes like a damned girl. Am I ever gonna have to shape him up. But not right now. Later. Leave him be right now.

So I walked on in the house, determined and diplomatic (besides I didn’t want to be around in case my little brother, who had a college education and could add a dozen sums in his head by the time he was six, got to remembering that old Plover had been at the very least ten or eleven and a lame old yard dog to boot when Lee’d left. And that was twelve years ago. Which would put the dog pretty far along, pretty old. I can’t come up with the exact figure right off, but, I mean, I may not be a college graduate but I know that there’s times that you’re better off being a little dense in things like arithmetic).

What land is this?
Lee continued to ask himself.
What am I doing here?
A breeze ruffled the inverted world on the gently rocking water beside the dock, shattering the clouds and sky and mountains into a bright mosaic. The breeze died. The mosaic cleared, and again the world throbbed upside down in a wobbling, eerie flux. Lee turned his eyes from the reflection, gave the dog’s bony gray head a last rub, then stood up to look after his brother. Hank was walking barefoot up the dock, carrying his sweat shirt over a freckled shoulder and his boots clamped between thumb and finger of that maimed hand. Lee marveled at the scamper of small muscles across the narrow white back, at the swing of the arms and the lift of the neck.

Did it take that much muscle just to walk, or was Hank showing off his manly development? Every movement constituted open aggression against the very air through which Hank passed. He doesn’t just breathe, Lee decided, listening to Hank’s broken-nosed puffing, he gobbles the oxygen. He doesn’t just walk; he consumes distance step by carnivorous step. Open aggression is what it is all right, he concluded.

Yet couldn’t help but notice the way those shoulders seemed to savor the swing of the arms, or the way those feet relished the feel of the dock.
These people . . . am I one of these people?

The wood that led along the dock was so perforated by years of calk boots, soaked by rain, dried and perforated and soaked again, that it had attained the quality of a rich, firm silver-gray carpet of finely woven wool. The planks sprang beneath the step, slapping the river. The pilings along which the dock moved up and down with the rise and fall of the river were worn flat with rubbing next to the dock and draped with shaggy mollusks the rest of the way around; three feet above the surface of the river these barnacles and mussels sizzled and clicked in the sun, talking of tides past and tides to come.