Sometimes a Great Notion (13 page)

“Leland. Old Henry stove up bad in accident—the show is in a bad tight for help—we need somebody but has to be a Stamper to keep unyon off our necks—good pay if you think your equal to it—” Then
stab
in a different pen hand: “You should be a big enough, etc.” And after that, after this outrageous and out-sized signature—a signature written in capitals, “Something so
fitting
about big brother printing his signature in capitals . . .”—there was added an ungainly attempt at cordiality.

“P & S you ain’t even met my wife Vivian bub. You sort of got a sister now too.”

This last line was perhaps what broke the spell. The thought of my brother mated was so ludicrous that I found some actual humor in the idea, enough to give me a real laugh and the courage of contempt besides. “Bah!” I exclaimed contemptuously, tossing the card to the back seat and in the teeth of the ghost of the past grinning at me there from beneath his logger’s hat. “I know what you are: naught but a product of my indigestion. A touch of cole slaw perhaps become spoiled in my refrigerator. A bit of underdone potato eaten last night. Humbug! There’s more of gravy than of the grave to you!”

But, like his Dickensian counterpart, the specter of my older brother rose forth with a terrible clamor, rattling his log chain, and cried out in a dreadful voice, “You’re a big guy now!” and sent me careening from the driveway out into the street, laughing still but now with some reason: the irony in this pat, nick-of-time arrival of this quote Unexpected Letter unquote had given me my first bit of fun in months. “The idea! asking me to come back and help the business . . . as if I had nothing else in the world to do but jump to the aid of a logging outfit.”

And had given me as well someplace to go.

By noon I had sold the VW—or what I owned of it—taking five hundred dollars less than I knew it was worth, and by one o’clock I was dragging Peters’ suitcase and the paper sack full of junk cleaned from the glove compartment to the bus depot, ready for the trip. Which, according to the ticket-pusher, would take a solid three days of driving.

I had close to an hour before my bus left, and, after I had spent fifteen minutes at the paperback counter putting it off, I finally succumbed to my conscience and placed a call to Peters at the department. When I told him I was at the depot waiting for a bus to take me home he at first misunderstood. “A bus? What happened to the car? Just hang there, why don’t you, and I’ll cut my seminar and pick you up.”

“I appreciate your offer, but I shouldn’t think you would want to lose the three days; six days, actually, there and back . . .”

“Six days
where
and back? Lee damn you, what’s happening? Where are you?”

“Just a minute . . .”

“You at the bus depot no shit?”

“Just a moment . . .” I opened the door of the booth and held the phone out into the raucous comings and goings of the depot. “What do you think?” I asked, shouting at the receiver. I felt strangely giddy and lightheaded; the combination of barbiturate and amphetamine was making me feel both feverish and drunk, as though one was putting me to sleep and the other was turning that sleep into a freewheeling, highly charged dream. “And when I speak of
home
, Peters, my man”—I closed the door of the booth again, and sat down on the upended suitcase—“I do not mean that scholar’s squalor we’ve been living in these last eight months—which is now, by the way, in the process of being aerated as you’ll see—but I mean home! The West Coast!
Oregon!
”

After a moment he asked, “Why?” becoming a little suspicious.

“To seek out my lost roots,” I answered gaily, trying to ease his suspicion. “To stir up old fires, to eat fatted calves.”

“Lee, what’s happened?” Peters asked, now more patient than suspicious. “You out of your gourd? I mean, what’s wrong?”

“Well, I shaved my beard, for one thing—”

“Lee! Don’t give me this other shit . . .” In spite of my attempt at gaiety I could hear both suspicion and patience giving away to concerned anger, the very thing I wanted to avoid. “Just tell me goddammit
why!
”

It wasn’t the reaction I had been hoping for from Peters. Far from it.

I was disappointed and put out with him for getting so wrought up while I was being so cool. At the time I thought it unlike him to be so demanding (not realizing until later how fucked-up I must have sounded) and damned unfair of him to disregard so flagrantly the rules of our relationship. We had ideas about relationship. We both agreed that each pair of people must have a mutually compatible system all their own within which they can communicate, or communication falls like the Tower of Babel. A man should be able to expect his wife to play the role of Wife—be she bitchy or dutiful—when she relates to him. For her lover she may have a completely different role, but at home, on the Husband-Wife set, she must stay within the confines of that part. Or we would all wander around never knowing our friends from our strangers. And in our eight months of rooming together and years-long friendship, this homely, lantern-jawed Negro and I had established a clear set of limits within which we knew we could comfortably communicate, a sort of dramatic tradition wherein he always played the sagacious and slow-talking Uncle Remus to my intellectual dandy. Within this framework, behind our shammed masks, we had been able to approach the most extreme personal truths in our conversations without suffering the embarrassment of such intimacies. I preferred it that way, even under the new conditions, and I tried again.

“The apple orchards will be in fruit; the air thick with the smell of warm mint and blackberry—ah, I hear my native land a-beckoning to me. Besides, I have a score there to settle.”

“Oh
man
—” he started to protest from the other end of the line, but I went on unheeding, unable to stop.

“No, listen: I received a postcard. Let me recreate the scene for you—condensed somewhat, because my bus will soon be loading. But listen, it was a superbly styled vignette of some kind or other: I had just returned from walking on the beach—down toward Mona’s place; I didn’t go in; her damned sister was there—anyway I had just come in after what I always like to think of as one of my ‘TB or not TB’ walks, and, after a few decisive coughs, I
finally
decided to take
arms
against a
sea
of troubles . . . and flick it all in for good.”

“Lee, come on please; what is it you’re—”

“Just listen. Hear me out.” I drew nervously from my cigarette. “Interruptions only mar the meter.” I heard the rattle of machinery nearby. A plump Tom Sawyer had just activated the pinball machine next to my glass booth; the lights spun in a hysterical tallying of astronomical scoring, numbers mounting with a rapid-fire banging. I hurried on.

“I walk in through our careful clutter. It’s about noon, a bit before. The apartment is cold; you’ve left that damned garage door open again—”

“Shit; if somebody didn’t let a little cold air in on you you’d never get out of bed. Decided what? What do you mean you finally decided—”

“Hush. Watch closely. I close the door and lock it. Dishtowel, wet, across the bottom. Check all windows, moving cryptically about my task. Then open all the jets on all the wall heaters—no, hush, just listen—turn on all the burners on that godawful grimy stove you left . . . I remember the pilot light on the water heater . . . go back, kneel piously at the little door to blow it out (the flame spewed symbolically from three jets, describing a fiery cross. You would have applauded my cool: I draw a breath . . . ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our’—
pfft
—‘ends.’) Then, satisfied with the arrangement, having removed my shoes, you will notice—a gentleman to the last—I climb onto the bed to await sleep. Who knows what dreams? Then. I decide—even the Mad Dane of Denmark would have allotted himself a last cigarette, I mean, if that wishy-washy coward had ever had
my
courage, or my cigarettes—and
just then
, beautifully timed, just as this ghostly hand appeared, fixed, in that little window you know above the mail slot, to drop its message calling me home . . .
just
as the card fluttered to the floor . . . I flicked my cigarette lighter and blew out all the windows in the place.”

I waited. Peters was silent while I had another drag on my cigarette.

“So. It was my usual way—a rotten failure. But with a rather nice turn this time, don’t you think? I wasn’t hurt. Singed a little, my beard and eyebrows gone, no loss, and my watch stopped—let’s see: it’s going again now. But it knocked the poor postman all the way down the steps into the hydrangeas. I suspect you’ll find his carcass there when you get home from class, plucked by the gulls, nothing remaining but his mailbag and cap. No, listen: there’s a pinball machine going insane right next to the booth and I can’t hear you anyway. So just listen. After a rather sticky moment or two spent trying to understand why I wasn’t dead, I got up and walked to the door—oh hey! I remember thinking, the first thing after the blast: ‘Well, Leland, you blew it.’ Isn’t that nice?—and find that card. With growing incredulity I decipher the tight little penciled scrawl. What? A card from home? Asking me to come back and help out? How very
timely
, considering that I’ve been living the last three months off the earnings of my spade roommate. . . . Then, listen: standing there, I heard this voice. ‘WATCH OUT!’ the voice booms, with the brutal authority of panic. ‘WATCH OUT! LOOK OUT FROM BEHIND!’ I’ve told you about this voice. An old and familiar friend, perhaps the oldest of all my mental Board of Directors; the true arbiter of all my interior negotiations and easily distinguished from all other members of the board—you remember me telling you?—by his loud upper-case mandates. ‘WATCH OUT!’ he booms. ‘LOOK OUT FROM BEHIND!’ So I spin quickly to face my attacker. ‘BE-HIND! ’ he screams again. ‘LOOK OUT FROM BEHIND!’ I spin again, to no avail. And again, faster, and again, getting dizzy as hell—all to no avail. And you know why, Peters? Because one can
never
, no matter how fast he is on the spin, face an attack from behind.”

I paused a moment and closed my eyes. The booth racketed about me in a sort of anarchy. I placed my hand over the mouthpiece and drew a deep breath, hoping to calm myself. I could hear the loudspeaker outside, pealing unintelligible instructions, and the pinball’s machine-gunning. But as soon as I heard Peters start, “Lee, why don’t you just wait for me to—” I was off again.

“So, after this little ritual . . . I stand there in our demolished doorway with that terrible card dancing in my hand. Completely forgetting that I wanted to be gone before the postman could fetch the fuzz in to ask about my health—by the way: the cops didn’t come but while I was shaving the gas company arrived to shut off the gas. No reason given; I don’t know whether they just happened to pick that moment to take action because we haven’t paid our bill or whether the public utilities are taking it upon themselves to punish anyone using their product for nefarious ends by subjecting them to cold canned soup and chilly nights. Anyway, standing there with that little slip of penciled paper in my poor fricasseed fingers and a ringing in my ears ten decibels louder than the ringing the explosion had caused, I had a great insight into myself: while it was certainly humiliating to discover myself so affected by that postcard, it was even
more
surprising. Because . . . well, hell, I thought I was beyond being bugged by my past, you know, I thought I had cemented myself forever from the years of my youth; I was certain that Doctor Maynard and I had succeeded in dismantling the past, second by ticking second, like a time-bomb team; I thought we’d left the treacherous device deactivated and dead, powerless to affect me. And see: since I had considered myself cut loose from my past I had seen no reason to guard that direction. Right? Thus it was all for naught, the ‘Watch outs,’ the spinning. Because all my beautiful fortifications, built so cunningly and carefully on Maynard’s couch, had been designed in accord with information indicating that the only dangers lay in
front, ahead
of me—and were fortifications, alas, quite powerless against even the meagerest offensive from the rear. Dig? So that postcard, sneaking up as it had from behind, had caught me more unawares than my aborted suicide; the explosion, though certainly a bit of a shocker, was nevertheless
immediately
comprehensible, you see? A here-and-now holocaust. But this postcard was a kidney kick out of the past, coming by the
most
devious route. It had jumped all
customary
postal tracks, of course, to travel through dark time zones and bleak wastelands of yore, accompanied by the eerie wailing note of an oscilloscope and other science-fiction movie background music . . . speeding through nimbus shadows and along the undulating mist of bubbling dry ice . . . then we cut to close-up: ah. A solitary crystal hand appearing at my mail slot . . . floating there for an instant, like chemical statuary designed to immediately dissolve as soon as it deposits the invitation that requests my humble presence at a gathering being held twelve (twelve? that long ago? Jesus . . .)
twelve
years previous to the day of its delivery! Whew! Any wonder it left me a little ringy?”

I didn’t wait for an answer, or pause when the voice at the other end attempted to interrupt my manic monologue. As the loudspeaker announced departures and the pinball scoreboard outside the booth clattered and clashed and ran its meaningless numbers upwards in maddened acceleration, I kept talking, compulsively filling the phone with words in order not to leave an opening of silence for Peters to speak into. Or, more accurately, to question into. I think I must have phoned Peters, not so much out of thoughtfulness for an old friend as out of a need to verbalize my reasons, and a desperate wish to logically
explain
my actions—but I wanted to explain without anyone questioning my explanations. I must have suspected that any extensive probing would surely reveal—to Peters, to myself—that I really had no logical explanation, either for my abortive attempt at suicide or for my impulsive decision to return home.