Sometimes a Great Notion (12 page)

... and, with this just-for-fun contest, begins springing on herself an old, old trap.

While Jonathan Bailey Draeger, comfortable under his electric blanket watching an old Bette Davis movie on his free TV, takes from the nightstand beside his bed the little notebook and adds to his last note: “And women, when confronted by superiors, substitute for drink the crippling liquor of their sex.”

While Floyd Evenwrite jumps from his car and rubber-balls his grumpy way across the parking apron toward the door of a roadside bar on the outskirts of Portland, mad at everything in sight. While the old wino boltcutter listens to the citizens in the Snag talk about tough times and trouble. And the electric screen pops and snaps at hapless flies. And Hank Snow presses loudly onward:

 

And, East, the mailman drops the card and is answered by a blast that lifts him like a cork before a wave and tosses him all the way back to the middle of the lawn.

“Hoo-
what!
”

After a timeless period of severed consciousness—while his head cleared, while the lawn bucked and tossed, rippled and glittered like a square of rolling emerald sea—the mailman perceived a far-off ringing. This ringing gradually filled the fissure torn in his senses. Numbly he rose to his hands and knees and watched time ticking red off the end of his bloodied nose. He remained all-foured in this bemused state, aware only of his bleeding nose and the shatters of demolished windows that lay about him, until a crackling of walked-on glass from the cottage porch brought him scrambling to his feet in a wide-eyed fury.

“What!” he demanded. “What the everloving devil”—swinging about, holding his bag clutched tight over his fly in the event of a recurrence of the eruption—“is going on here,
you!
” Thin, lint-filled smoke parted momentarily to emit a tall young man with a face covered with soot and flecks of tobacco clinging like pockmarks. The mailman watched the scorched apparition swing its head to meet its interrogator’s eyes and lick blackened lips through the singed remnants of a beard. The face was at first blank, stunned, then the features clicked abruptly into positions intended to convey the pretentious insolence of a fop; this affected expression of amused arrogance and disdain was made even more phony by the comically blackened face, so obviously phony that it appeared to be more a caricature of contempt than an affectation—like a mime’s expression. Yet there was something about the very falseness of the attitude—perhaps the acknowledged falseness—that vastly increased its stinging effect. The mailman began again to protest—“I mean just what do you think you’re
doing
, you . . .”—but was so enraged by the taunting expression that his anger sputtered away to frustration. They stood facing each other another few moments, then the scorched mask closed its lashless eyelids, as though it had seen enough of irate federal employees, and informed the mailman haughtily, “I
think
—I’m attempting to kill myself, thank you; but I’m not quite sure I’ve found exactly the right method. Now, if you will excuse me a moment, I’ll have another go.”

Then pompously—and still making the sharpness of his contempt somehow explicit in his mockery of himself—the young man turned and walked back across the porch, into the smoking house. Leaving the mailman standing in front of the steps, feeling strangely puzzled and more disoriented than he had been since rising from the lawn. Which reels and rolls, and glitters in the sun . . .

The jukebox bubbles and throbs. The clouds troop past. Draeger slips off to dream of a labeled world. Teddy studies fear through a polished shot glass. Evenwrite pushes through the door of the Big-time Bar and Aristocratic Cuisine, planning to have a drink or two to unkink the kinks he picked up sitting in that goddam straightback chair reading that goddam meticulous report that little spy had compiled—hard to fit the sort of citified finks like him, or the sort of red tape that made this sort of report necessary, in with the picture of honest-to-god
men
who had started the whole labor game, the good old Wobs, the Wobblies, but it looked like that’s what it’d come to so that’s how you gotta play it—anyhow . . . aiming to drink, unkink, unwind and unlimber over a couple beers, and to once more prove to any one of these big-city bigasses in here who might doubt it, that Floyd Evenwrite, ex-bushler and chokersetter from the little pissant town of Florence, was just as goddam good as anybody else
whateverthefuck
size of the city they come from! “Barkeep!” He thumps the bartop with both balled fists for service. “Bring ’em on an’ keep ’em comin’!”

And to prove to himself that these balled and sweating hands are still the fists they always were.

At the house the relatives begin to arrive for the meeting, and Hank slips away for a drink—not to unlimber, but to fortify himself for another round. At the mudflats clouds line up grandly between moon and sea, and Indian Jenny’s contest to pick from her populous past the man she had liked
very
best is cut off in mid-reverie by the appearance of an intruder memory in the ranks: old Henry Stamper, his hands in his mackinaw pockets and his stubborn green eyes mocking her from the face he wore thirty years ago—“Bastid!”—stubborn, mocking and disdainful of Jenny’s wares since that day she set up shop on the clamflats so long back. She saw his wink again, and heard his snicker, and that haunting whisper, “Y’know what I think?” Out of the half-dozen men who had stood at her front stoop making mumbled wisecracks thirty years ago her obsidian eyes had been on Henry Stamper’s handsome features, so his had been the only remark she heard:

“I think anybody’d hump a injun,” she heard him say, “would hump a she-bear.”

“Would
what?
” she asked slowly.

Surprised at being overheard, Henry didn’t have time to think up a tactful substitute so he repeated it with bravado. “Would hump a she-bear . . .”

“Bastid!” she squeaked; his intended compliment to masculine courage became an unforgivable insult to both her race and her sex. “You—you bastid, you get
gone
from here! This is one injun,
one
Indian you won’ hump. I won’ hump you till, till—” she drew herself up, recalling her heritage, filled her lungs and threw back her shoulders—“till all the moons in the Great Moon is gone an’ all the tides in the Great Tide is come.”

And watched him shrug unconcernedly and disappear, still green-eyed and still handsome, back over the muddy horizon of her memory—“who cares for you anyway, you old donkey?”—with her heart still tagging behind, wondering, Just how many moons and tides
is
that exactly?

And Lee, having located his glasses and cleaned the soot from their one unbroken lens, studied the singed ruin of his face and beard in the toothpaste-spattered bathroom mirror and asked himself two questions: one springing from a dim and faraway childhood memory—“What is it like to wake up dead?”—and the other from an event much less distant: “I thought I saw that hand drop a postcard . . . from where on this world might I receive a postcard?”

The face in the mirror didn’t seem to know what or where, or even care very much, but only looked back at him with thirsty eyes. He drew a glass of water and opened the medicine cabinet on a large array of pill bottles; chemicals waiting like tickets for whatever ride the heart desired. But he was undecided as to the direction he wanted the ticket to take him: he felt a definite need for something to bring him down after that blast, but he also felt that he needed to be lifted to a state of hustle and bustle, especially if he were to go somewhere before that federal employee returned with some hard-headed New England fuzz who might ask a lot of fuzzy questions. Like: “Why should one wish to wake up dead
any
way?” Which direction was most necessary, up or down? He compromised and took two phenobarbs and two Dexedrines, washed them down, then began hurriedly hacking away at the remains of his demolished beard.

By the time he had finished shaving he had resolved to leave town. If there was one thing he had no inclination toward right now it was a big scene with the police and the landlord and the postal authorities and Christ knows who else decides to make it his business. Neither did he want to face his roommate, whose dissertation papers were spread like confetti about all three small rooms of the cottage. Anyway, why not? As far as school went he’d long ago concluded that it would be a waste of both his time and the department’s to take the tests over again; he hadn’t opened a textbook in months, or any other book except the collection of old comics kept locked beside his bed in a battered Navy surplus footlocker. So why not? Why not just split, just take the VW and cut out to . . . the City, probably, borrow some on the car, see if he could move in again with Belemy and Jimmy Little—except . . . Jimmy, the last time, after he had moved out of Mother’s apartment that summer, had come on so funny like . . . but that might have been imagination. Or projection. Anyway, until things blow over, as they say . . . it would be best probably if—

The sight of his washed and shaved face in the mirror startled him from his reverie. There were tears flowing from both eyes. It seemed that he was crying. He felt no grief, no remorse, none of the emotions he traditionally associated with the memory of tears—but the tears were there. The sight at once disgusted him and frightened him—that red stranger’s face there, with one cracked lens and an expression of vacuous peace, spewing tears like a damned faucet.

He turned and rushed from the bathroom into the clutter of books and papers about his bed. He hunted about the rooms until he found his pair of prescription dark glasses in among the stacks of dirty dishes on the table. He polished the glasses hurriedly with a napkin and switched them for the pair he wore.

He returned to the bathroom for another look. The glasses were indeed an improvement; his face didn’t look half so bad with a sea-green tint.

He smiled and assumed a look of jaunty insolence, tipping his head back slightly. A devil-may-care look. He let his eyes droop. A look of a rootless roamer, a vagabond. He put a cigarette between his lips. A look of a man who could pull up stakes at any time and flee the melee . . .

Finally satisfied, he left the bathroom to begin packing.

He took only his clothes and a few books, throwing them into his roommate’s suitcase. Haphazardly, he stuck notes and bits of paper in his pockets.

He returned to the bathroom and carefully emptied half the contents of each pill bottle into an old Marlboro pack and put the rolled-up pack in the pocket of a pair of slacks in his suitcase. The bottles he put in the toe of a battered tennis shoe; then stuffed a dirty sweat sock after them and placed the shoe under Peters’ bed.

He started to put his portable typewriter in its case, then became suddenly frantic with haste and left it overturned on the table.

“Addresses!” He tore through the drawers of his desk until he found a small leather-covered book, but after leafing through it tore out one page and threw the rest to the floor.

Finally, holding the big suitcase with both hands and breathing rapidly, he took a quick look around—“Okay”—and dashed out to the car. He pushed the suitcase into the back seat and jumped in and slammed the door. The thump hurt his ears. “No windows open.” And hot, oven-grill dashboard . . .

He tried twice for the reverse gear, gave up and put it in forward, turning across the lawn and back on the driveway until he was facing the street. But he didn’t pull onto the street. He sat, racing the motor, looking out at the clean sweep of pavement passing in front of him. “Come on, man . . .” His ears were ringing from the door slam, as they had after the blast. He raced the motor, urging the car to decide which way to turn onto the street. “Come on, man . . . be serious.” Gearshift hot as a poker, and ears ringing . . . finally, palm to face to somehow press away the ringing—I seemed to feel a tendoned hand playfully squeezing my knee, and a bagpipe’s whirling skirl wheezing in my throat—and discovers that he is weeping again; squeezing, wheezing and rattling the scene . . . and it is then—“Or if you can’t be serious,” I scolded, “at least be
rational
;
who
could
possibly
in this wasted world . . . ?”—that he remembers the postcard lying on the porch.

(. . . the clouds file past. The bartender brings ’em on. The jukebox bubbles. And at the house Hank shouts hoarsely into a roomful of resistance: “. . . but goddammit what we’re talking about
ain’t
whether we’re gonna be the most
popular
folks in town if we sell to WP . . . but about
where
we gonna get us some more labor?” He stops, looking about at the faces. “So . . . has anybody got any suggestions? Or want to volunteer for extra work?” After a short silence Joe Ben pops a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth and holds up his hand. “I
defi
nitely ain’t volunteering for more labor,” he says, chewing, then bends his mouth back to his hand and begins spitting out the seeded hulls, “but I
might
have a little suggestion . . .”)

The card was on the bottom step—a threepenny postcard in heavy black pencil with one line showing black and blacker, larger and larger than all the rest of the message.

At first, I refused to believe it; but that hand kept squeezing my knee and those pipes kept wheezing in my chest, until a mirthless laughter began to spew out, as uncontrollable and uncalled-for as had been my attack of griefless tears—“From home . . . oh Christ, a card from the
kinfo’k!
”—and I was finally forced to face up to its existence.

I walked back to sit in the idling car to read it, trying to control my spasms of laughter enough to make out the print. It was signed Uncle Joe Ben, and even through my mirth I could make out that the message was penciled in a rambling grade-school hand that could be none but Joe’s. “Sure. Uncle Joe’s hand. Absolutely.” But it was the heavier, surer addition at the bottom that commanded my eye, and as I read it it wasn’t Uncle Joe’s hand but Brother Hank’s voice that recited the words inside my head.