Sometimes a Great Notion (17 page)

And inside the bus, reclined in his seat near the window, Lee dozed and woke, and dozed again, seldom opening more than one eye at a time to watch America flash past behind his tinted glasses: SLOW . . . STOP . . . RESUME SPEED . . . STEP UP TO QUALITY . . . with elegant young sociables entertaining each other at a cookout . . . IT’S WHAT’S UP FRONT with the same young sociables elegantly relaxing indoors after the ordeal outside . . . CAUTION . . . SLOW . . . STOP . . . RESUME SPEED . . .

Lee dozed and woke, moving west over the bus’s big strumming engine; (
Evenwrite leapfrogs down the Southbound 99, from restroom to restroom
) dozing and waking indifferently, and watching the roadsigns explode past; (
Draeger cruises up from Red Bluff, stopping frequently for coffee and writing in his book
) and was rather glad that he hadn’t bought that paperback novel (
Jenny watches the clouds marshaling out to sea, and begins a low singsong deepdown chant, “Oh clouds . . . oh rain . . .”
). From New Haven to Newark, to Pittsburgh WHERE THERE’S LIFE with lots of even teeth, lots of spaghetti and garlic bread THERE’S BUD and beer cans turned label-to-camera (
Dyin’ of the drizzlin’ shits, goddammitall! Evenwrite chalked another mark up against his Nemesis as he swung to stop at another station
). Cleveland and Chicago “Get your kicks . . . on Route 66! (
“Café owners are more frustrated than the common laborer,” Draeger writes. “The common laborer answers only to the foreman; the café owner answers to every patron who stops in”
) St. Louis . . . Columbia . . . Kansas City for a MAN SIZE way to stop perspiration odor MENNEN SPEED STICK with the scent that’s all man! (
Who does that hardnose think he is, dammit, actin’ like God Almighty?
) Denver . . . Cheyenne . . . Laramie . . . Rock Springs THE SOFT COAL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. (
“The hardest man,” Draeger writes, “is but a shell.”
) Pocatello . . . Boise . . . WELCOME TO OREGON SPEED LIMIT STRICTLY ENFORCED. (
Just wait till I shove this report under that damned hardnose!
) . . . Burns . . . Bend . . . 88 MILES TO EUGENE OREGON’S SECOND MARKET (
“Man,” Draeger writes, “is . . . does . . . will . . . can’t . . .”
) . . . Sisters . . . Rainbow . . . Blue River (
“Oh clouds,” Jenny chants, “Oh rain . . . come against the man I say . . .”
) . . . Finn Rock . . . Vida . . . Leaburg . . . Springfield . . . and only in Eugene seemed to come awake. He had made his trip without quite realizing it. During stops he had bought candy bars and Coke and gone to the bathroom, then returned to his seat, though there might have been twenty minutes left before departure. But as he neared Eugene the scenery began to brush long-shut doors and rattle rusty locks, and as the bus—a different bus, rickety and uncomfortable—began the climb from Eugene into the long range of mountains that separates the coast from the Willamette Valley and the rest of the continent, he found himself becoming more alert and excited. He watched the green stand of mountains build before him, the densening of ditch growth, the clear, silver-shrouded clouds moored to the earth by straight and thin strands of autumn smoke, like dirigibles. And those great growling, gear-grinding log-trucks, charging out of the wilderness with grilled grins . . . they were like (like Grendel’s dam, I would probably throw in at this time or rather, then, at that time to keep the alliterative rolling, but as a child they were like terrible dragons that nightly came bawling down out of the bewitched mountains to make a shambles of my little-boy dreams. Airships of silver mist, GMC fiends . . . these resurrections, and by no means the last of the fancies of flight and fiend that would follow that postcard from Oregon. Airships of silver mist, GMC fiends . . . these resurrected childhood similes, these fancies of flight and ferocity were the first awakening sights in my days of riding. And the first indication that I had perhaps made a hasty choice.)

“I could still turn around and go back,” I reminded myself. “I could do that.”

“What’s that?” asked the man sitting across the aisle from me, an unshaven sack of odors that I had not noticed before. “What’s that you say?”

“Nothing. Excuse me; I was just thinking out loud.”

“I dream out loud, you know that? I do for a fact. Runs the old lady nuts.”

“Keeps her awake?” I asked cordially, a little embarrassed by my slip.

“Yeah. No, not the talkin’. She keeps awake all the time waitin’, see, for me to dream. She’s scared, see, she’ll miss me sayin’ somethin’ . . . I don’t mean just ketch me at somethin’—she knows I’m past gallavantin’, or she sure as hell should know—but just, she says, because it’s like a fortune-teller the way I carry on. I dream like the dickens, predictions an’ everything.”

To prove his point he let his head drop back to the pillow on the seat and closed his eyes. He grinned broadly—“You’ll see”—his lips slackened, parted, and in another minute he was snoring and muttering away. “Ya must not buy that place from Elkins. Mark this well . . .” Great God, I thought, looking at the yellow grillwork of this new dragon, what have you come back to?

I turned away from the stubble-cheeked sight beside me to stare out the bus window at the receding geometry of the Willamette Valley farmland—rectangle walnut groves, parallelograms of bean-fields, green trapezoid pastures dotted with red cattle; the abstract splash of autumn—and tried to assure myself, You have just come back to quaint old Oregon is all. That’s all, quaint, beautiful, blooming Oregon . . .

But the dreamer beside me hiccupped and added, “. . . place is jus’
overrun
with Canada thistle an’ nigger-heads.” And my reassuring picture of assurance faded like the wind.

(. . . only a few miles ahead of Lee’s bus, on the same road, Evenwrite decides to stop at the Stamper house before going on into Wakonda. He wants to confront Hank with the evidence, to see the look on the bastard’s face when he sees we got the goods on him!)

We crested the summit and started down. I caught sight of a sign on a narrow white bridge that stood like a guidepost in my memory. WILDMAN CREEK, the sign instructed me. Meaning the little stream we had just crossed. Fancy that, man, ol’ Wildman Creek; how my little imagination used to seize upon that name when I accompanied Mother on one of her frequent trips to Eugene and back. I leaned close to the window to see if any of the creatures I had fashioned still inhabited the prehistoric banks. Down a familiar stretch of highway Wildman Creek ran, snorting and squalling, foam whipping about the mossy teeth of rock, shaggy green hair of pine and cedar slashings, a beard matted with fern and berry vine . . . Through the fogging window I watched him as he crouched snarling in a little glade, catching his breath in a blue pool before he went leaping off again down a grade, tearing away bank and bottom in a frenzy of impatience, and I recalled that he was the first of the tributaries that would eventually merge down these slopes into big Wakonda Auga—the Shortest Big river (or Biggest Short, pick your own) in the world.

(
Joe Ben answered Evenwrite’s honking and took the boat across to get him. Inside the house they found Hank reading
the Sunday funnies. Evenwrite shoved the report under his nose and demanded, “How does this smell, Stamper?” Hank took a long sniff, looking about. “Smells like somebody in here dirtied his britches, Floyd. . . .”
)

And watching, seeing half-remembered farmhouses and landmarks stroking past, I couldn’t quite shake the sensation that the road I traveled moved not so much through miles and mountains, as back, through time. Just as the postcard had come forward. This uneasy sensation provoked a glance at my wrist, and I thereupon discovered that my days of inactivity had allowed my self-winder to unwind.

“Say, excuse me.” I turned again to the sack across from me. “Could you tell me the time?”

“
The time?
” His stubble split in a grin. “Golly, fella, we don’t have such a thing as
the
time. You from outa state, ain’t that so?”

I admitted it and he thrust hands in his pockets and laughed as though they were tickling him in there. “Time, eh? Time? They got the time so fouled up that I guess there doesn’t nobody really know it. You take me,” he offered, leaning the whole prize toward me. “Now you take me. I’m a millworker an’ I work switch shifts, sometimes weekends off, sometimes a day here, a night someplace else, so you’d think that’d be
enough
of a mess, wouldn’t you? But
then
they got this
time
thing and I sometimes work one day standard, the next day daylight. Sometimes even come to work on daylight and go home on standard. Oh boy, time? I tell you, you name it. We got fast time, slow time, daylight time, night time, Pacific time, good time, bad time . . . Yeah, if we Oregonians was hawking time we’d be able to offer some variety! Awfullest mix-up they ever had.”

He laughed and shook his head, looking as though he could not have enjoyed the confusion more. The trouble started, he explained, when the Portland district was legislated daylight time, and the rest of the state standard. “All them dang
farmers
got together is why daylight got beat for the rest of the state. Danged if I see why a cow can’t learn to get up at a different time just as easy as a man, do you?” During the ride I managed to find out that the chambers of commerce of other large cities—Salem, Eugene—had decided to follow Portland’s lead because it was better for their business, but the danged mud-balls in the country would have no part of such high-handed dealing with their polled wishes and they continued to do business on standard. So some towns didn’t officially change to daylight but adopted what they called fast time, to be used only during the week. Other towns used daylight only during store hours. “Anyway, what it comes down to is nobody in the whole danged all-fired state knowin’ what time it is. Don’t that take all?” I joined him in his laughter, then settled back to my window, pleased that the whole danged all-fired state was as ignorant of the time of day as I was; like brother Hank signing his name in capitals, it fit.

(
At the house Hank finished glancing through the report, then asked of Evenwrite, “How come such a big strike tryin’ to get a little free time, anyhow? What are you boys gonna do with a few extra hours a day if you get it?” “Never mind, that. In this day and age a fellow needs more free time.” “Might be, but I’m damned if I’m gonna foot the bill for that fellow’s free time.”
)

Down through the druid wood I saw Wildman join with Cleaver Creek, put on weight, exchange his lean and hungry look for one of more well-fed fanaticism. Then came Chichamoonga, the Indian Influence, whooping along with its banks war-painted with lupine and columbine. Then Dog Creek, then Olson Creek, then Weed Creek. Across a glacier-raked gorge I saw Lynx Falls spring hissing and spitting from her lair of fire-bright vine maple, claw the air with silver talons, then crash screeching into the tangle below. Darling Ida Creek slipped demurely from beneath a covered bridge to add her virginal presence, only to have the family name blackened immediately after by the bawdy rollicking of her brash sister, Jumping Nellie. There followed scores of relatives of various nationalities: White Man Creek, Dutchman Creek, Chinaman Creek, Deadman Creek, and even a Lost Creek, claiming with a vehement roar that, in spite of hundreds of other creeks in Oregon bearing the same name,
she
was the one and only original. . . .

Then Leaper Creek . . . Hideout Creek . . . Bossman Creek . . . I watched them one after another pass beneath their bridges to join in the gorge running alongside the highway, like members of a great clan marshaling into an army, rallying, swelling, marching to battle as the war chant became deeper and richer.

(
At the peak of the argument Old Henry came crashing in, making so much noise neither Hank nor Evenwrite could hear. Joe Ben took the old man aside. “Henry, you bein’ in here is gonna make things worse. How about you waiting over in the pantry—” “The boogerin’ pantry!” “Sure; that way you can sneak a listen without them being onto you, you see?”
)

Stamper Creek was the last of the small tributaries to join. Family history had it that this was the creek up which my Uncle Ben had disappeared in a frenzy of drink and despair to masturbate himself to death. This creek crossed under the highway, fell into the gorge with all the others, and these waters enlisted the South Fork, which had been rallying its own band from the mountains to my left, then, with a catching of breath and a racing of pulse, I saw what had a few miles back been wild streams and rivulets turn from charging green and white into the wide, composed, blueback surface of the Wakonda Auga, moving across the green valley like liquid steel.

There should have been background music.

(
Through the crack in the pantry door old Henry could hear Hank and Evenwrite speaking. The voices were angry, he could tell that much. He concentrated, trying to make out what they were saying, but his own breath was too loud; it roared about the little closet like a gale. Cain’t hear so red-hot no more. Breath pretty good, though, jest listen. He grinned at himself in the dark, smelling the apples in their boxes, the Clorox smell of rat droppings, the banana oil of the old shotgun he held . . . Yeah, and smell good, too. Keen nose still on the old dog. He grinned, fumbling with the shotgun in the dark, wishing he could hear clear enough to know what to do.
)

When the bus dropped on down out of the foothills and rounded a curve and I got my first look at the house across that cold blue surface, I received something of a pleasant shock; the old house was ten times more striking than I remembered. In fact, it did not seem possible that I could have forgotten its looking so magnificent. They must have rebuilt it completely, I thought. But as the bus drew closer I was forced to concede that I could discern no actual change, no repairs or renovations. If anything, it looked older. But, yes, that was it. Someone had removed the cracked coat of cheap white paint from all the sides. The window sills, the shutters, and all the other trimmings had been kept up in dark green, almost blue-green, but the rest of the house had been relieved of all paint; the crazy porch with its rough-hewn posts, the broad handsplit shaking that covered roof and sides, the huge front door—all had been stripped to allow the salt wind and bleaching rain to polish the wood to a rich pewter-gray shine.