Sometimes a Great Notion (26 page)

Except . . . this sound was not exactly new; it was the mocking echo of something that had once been very familiar (wait; it’ll come back in a moment) . . . of something once heard very frequently. And that was why the sound was so damned confusing: because I
recognized
it.

As my eyes became more accustomed to the room I saw it wasn’t as dark as I had first thought (
a small shaft of light cuts across the room to spotlight his jacket
) nor was the sound the fifty-decibel roar it had seemed (
the jacket lies on the foot of his bed with its arms wrapped about itself in a frozen agony of fright. The small shaft of light comes through a hole from the

room next door . . .
) and instead of my ear it came from somewhere outside the window. Touching the smooth bedstead, I walked around the bed, then hesitatingly across the room to that gray square of light and raised it. The sound cut sharply through the chill fall air: “Whack whack whack . . .
thonggggg
. . . whack whack whack.” I bent and put my head through the open window and saw below the buttery gleam of a kerosene lantern sliding along the bank foundation. A low fog muffled the light, yet seemed to amplify the sound. The lantern would pause, suspended, shimmering like an iridescent piece of night-blooming fluff—“Whack whack whack”—then move on a few yards before pausing again: “
Thongggg
.” I then remembered I used to lie humming Beethoven’s Fifth, “Whack whack whack
thongggg!
” Dum dum dum
dong!
And then I remembered it was Hank out on the bank before he went to bed, working his way along a dew-slick plank walkway with a hammer and a lantern, striking at the boards and cables as he listened for the sound that might indicate a spike loosened by the constant drag of the river, or a wire frayed by rust. . . .

A nightly ritual, I remembered, this ordeal out shoring up the embankment. I was overcome with relief and nostalgia, and, for the first time since setting foot inside the racketing old house, able to appreciate some of the scene’s noisy humor and relax with it. (
He looks away from the light in the wall, toward the window . . .
) The sound stirred up a gaudy whirl of musty old funny-paper fantasies—not the sort of nightmares that accompanied the sound of log-trucks, but fantasies of a much more controllable nature. At night I used to imagine I was perishing in a hellish prison, condemned for deeds I had not done. And brother Hank was the trusty old turnkey, making his nightly rounds, testing the bars with his ubiquitous nightstick as they did in all the Jimmy Cagney thrillers. Lights out! Lights out! Reverberating clash of power-operated gates; toot of the curfew. At my desk, in the forbidden light of a stashed candle, I fashion elaborate prison-break schemes involving smuggled tommy-guns, split-second timing, and cocksure cohorts with names like Johnny Wolf and Big Louie and The Arm, all of whom respond instantly to my signal tap on the plumbing: zero hour. Footsteps running across the dark yard. Searchlights! Sirens wailing! Two-dimensional figures in blue pop into sight on the walls, scattering machine-gun fire over the melee as the dead pile up. The prisoners retreat, snarling. The break is thwarted. Or so it appears to the casual eye. But this is just a ruse; Wolf and Big Louie and The Arm have been sacrificed to diversion in the yard, a mere distraction action, while I—and Mother—tunnel to freedom beneath the river.

I laughed a moment at the flickering drama and the dreamer that had written it (
he draws his head back in—“Sure, tunneling underneath the river; to freedom”—back in from the cold, pine-smoky night into the smell of mothballs and mice. . . .
), then began looking about the room to see if I could find any other remnants of this little playwright or his product. (
He can’t close the window; it is jammed open. He leaves and goes back to sit on the bed . . .
) I discovered nothing more in the room except a box of ancient comic books beneath the windowbox. (
He eats the cold pork and one of the pears, looking straight ahead at the still-open window. The smell of burning pine reaches him, chill and dark. . . .
) I sat for a time on the bed, wondering what my next move would be, while I leafed through a few of the black-outlined adventures of Plastic Man, Superman, Aquaman, Hawkman, and, of course, Captain Marvel. There were more Captain Marvels in the box than all the various other assorted marvels put together. (
He puts the plate on the floor and takes his jacket from the bed and bends to lay it aside on a chair; as he straightens back up, that beam of light that he has been so carefully avoiding catches him full in the face. . . .
) My one great hero, Captain Marvel, still head and shoulders above such late starters as Hamlet or Homer (
the beam holds him—“I used to imagine the wicked Sir Mordred doing his best to ensnare that nimble marauder of his castle. Gallant Sir Leland of Stanford who knows every secret tunnel and hidden stone stairway from the highest tower to the deepest dripping dungeon”—spears his face and holds it spitted there like some stage illusion head produced by hidden mirrors . . .
) and still my favorite over all the rest of the selection of super-doers. Because Captain Marvel was not continuously Captain Marvel. No. When he wasn’t flying around batting the heads of archfiends together he was a kid about ten or twelve named Billy Batson, a scrawny and ineffectual punk who could be transformed, to the accompaniment of lightning and thunder, into a cleft-chinned behemoth capable of
practically anything
. (
He sits for a very long time, looking at the light exploding through the hole in the wall. Outside the sound goes on in demented and insensate voodoo cadence. . . . “I used to dance to the crackle of electrodes and sing along with switches activating stiff-legged golems.” And the rest of the semi-lit room sifts out of his seeing . . .
) And all this kid had to do to bring off this transformation was say his word: Shazam: S for Solomon and wisdom; H for Hercules and strength; and so on with Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury. “Shazam.” I said the word softly aloud into the chilly room, smiling at myself but thinking: maybe it
wasn’t
really Captain Marvel that was my hero; maybe it was Billy Batson and his magic word. I always used to try to figure out what
my
word was,
my
magic phrase that would turn me instantly enormous and invulnerable . . . (
Finally the rest of the room is gone. There is just that bright hole, like a lone star in a black sky swelling to nova proportions—“I used to weave ectoplasmic afghans from the wispy effluvium left in the wake of Invisible Men . . .”
) In fact, wasn’t that perhaps what I was still searching for?
My
magic word? (
The light draws at him, pulling him up from the bed. . . .
)

The notion interested me; and I had leaned to examine the page more closely when I realized where the light came from that was illuminating my book: from the hole. From that forgotten hole in my wall that had once been my eyepiece to the hard and horny facts of life. From the hole that had opened into my mother’s room. (
He slides slowly across the floor in his stockinged feet. “I used to be shorter.” The spot of light moves from his eye down his face, from his face down his neck—“When I was ten years old and awakened in my flannel pajamas by werewolves next door, I used to be much shorter”—from his neck down his chest, becoming smaller and smaller until he stands against the wall and the spot is a silver coin in his pocket. . . .
)

I stared at the point of light across the room. I was amazed that Hank hadn’t plugged it by now, and for a crazy moment thought he had perhaps arranged for me to see the hole again, as he had arranged my room for my arrival. And maybe! he’d even arranged the room next door as well! (
He touches the
lighted rim of the small opening, feeling the notches made by the meat knife, smooth now, as though the passage of light has worn away the sharp edges—“I used to know its every notch. . . .”
) It was an odd anxiety. For a moment it was all I could do (
kneeling: “I used to—”
) to force myself to take the peek (
kneeling and shivering with the chill: “I used to see awful—”
) that would prove my fears foolish (
“. . . see awful ah! . . . Ahhh.”
). But one look was all I needed. I gave a sigh, then walked back to the bed for the pear and cookies. I munched them together happily, chiding my foolish trepidation and reminding myself that, luckily, time waits for no one, not even a schizophrenic with delusional tendencies. . . .

Because the room had in no way whatsoever resembled my mother’s.

I sat on the bed again for a long, indecisive moment, feeling pretty well drained—the long ride; the hectic greeting downstairs; now this room—but not quite drained enough to be bereft of a burning curiosity: I had to have another look at the room of the old house’s new mistress. (
He pulls a chair to the wall to allow himself more comfort with his spying. He finds he is too low when seated and finally turns the back of the chair to the wall and is able to make himself reasonably comfortable at about the right height with his knees on the chair’s cane bottom. He takes another bite from the pear and leans to the hole. . . .
)

The room had none of Mother’s furniture left in it, nor any of her pictures or curtains or embroidered pillows. Missing were the rows of fragrant, faceted bottles that had lined her dresser (
enormous jewels filled with gold-and-amber potions of love
) and gone was the big bed with its curlicue brass that had risen majestically above her (
the pipes of a grotesque organ tuned to the fluting of lust
). And the chairs (
draped with musky pink rayon
), and the dressing table (
brushing long black tresses before the mirror
), and the regiment of stuffed animals (
with collegiate colors and button eyes who had watched like rooters for the other team . . .
), all gone. Even the walls had been changed, the pale, ephemeral mauve changed to brilliant white. Nothing like her room . . . (
Yet as he looks he can’t help feeling that some subtle portion of her personality still lingers in the
room. “Very likely some object, some object that recalls a memory of a former furnishing; as the sound of the hammering had recalled an earlier night.” He scans the small room, attempting to uncover the disguised bit of nostalgia.
)

Now that I was rid of this foolish anxiety concerning this little cubicle next door, I was eager to know something of its tenant. The room was decorated simply, almost bare, almost vacant; but it was a calculated vacancy, as an Oriental print is almost vacant. Most unlike Mother’s chiffon and frill. A sewing machine and a lamp sat on one table, and a tall black vase of brown and scarlet vine-maple leaves sat on a smaller table near the couch. The couch seemed to be nothing more than a covered mattress on a platform of wood made from a door and a set of wrought iron legs; you see a hundred such makeshift couches in Village apartments, but those couches always suggested to me a kind of ostentatious poverty, not the clean, purposeful simplicity of this piece.

One hardback chair was pushed up to the table under the sewing machine; a bookcase made of bricks and planks painted light gray offered a raggedy selection of hardbounds and paper-backs; the floor was partially covered with a brightly colored hooked rug. Besides this rug and the vase of leaves the only other ornaments in the room were what appeared to be a small wooden watermelon on the bookcase, and a large piece of driftwood sitting on the floor and extending along my wall out of my line of vision.

(
The room has the atmosphere of a den, he thinks; of a sanctuary where someone—someone female, certainly . . . though he is at a loss to see what makes it so positively feminine—would go to read; and sew; and be alone. That’s it. That’s why it reminds me of Mother’s old room; her room had this same atmosphere of sanctuary, a private and personal castle keep where she might enjoy a few moments’ respite from that grimy horror going on downstairs. It is the same kind of place, a sort of Over the Rainbow Land wherein the weary soul can convalesce with bluebirds and troubles melt like lemon drops away above the chimney tops . . . that’s where you’ll find me . . .
)

I had decided at first glance that the room must belong to brother Hank’s wildwoods flower. Who else could have fashioned it? None of the men. Surely not that little potato I had met downstairs. So it
had
to be Hank’s wife; we must give the devil his due even if his due is devilishly hard to imagine as his mate. (
He removes his eye from the hole and sits there with his forehead against the cold wood; why should it come as a surprise that Hank has an exceptional woman for a wife? Quite the contrary; it would be a surprise if he did not. Because he has found his word and it is—
)

And while I was sitting there in the dark, ruminating over my pear and my thoughts about Hank, heroes, and how-am-I-ever-going-to-find-
my
-magic-words . . . (
the chair’s cane bottom suddenly cracks . . .
) I heard a call from across the river. (
He jackknifes through, cracking his chin on the back of the chair . . .
) It was a female voice (
the same rich bird-note from his dreams; he falls sideways, his knees trapped in the chair bottom . . .
) sliding in to me on the chill, misty air through my window. I heard it again, then heard someone start the motorboat to go across for the caller. (
On the floor he is able to push the chair from his legs . . . stands back up and hurries again to the window . . .
) After a few minutes I heard the boat return and a couple rumble up the plank incline from the dock. It was brother Hank, and he was obviously strung-out about something. They passed directly beneath my window. . . .

“. . . Honey, listen, I told you we can’t
afford
to get all tore up about what somebody like Dolly McKeever or what her pimply old man either for that matter, for what they think about the way I run my outfit. I ain’t in business to line their birdhouses.”