Sometimes a Great Notion (28 page)

I bring this up, this occasional urge to pop somebody and wake them up, because it was one urge I knew I was going to have trouble with now that the kid was back. The urge generally follows that feeling of bloat and exasperation. Like it wasn’t long after I got that bloaty feeling cycling across country that me and some gleef in a bar got into it pretty good. In that town where I met Viv. A big guy, about three sheets gone and me about the same. He made some crack about the military when he saw a drunk soldier on the street outside the bar and I told him if it wasn’t for that soldier out there he’d maybe be over in Siberia right now working off that spongy gut instead of sitting with his ugly nose in a beer. . . . He came back with something about me being a typical product of Pentagon propaganda and I said something about his looking like the product of somebody’s bullshit himself and before we knew it we were in a devil of an argument. Now I knew better. I knew even before we got it rolling that this here was the type asshole that subscribed to magazines like the
Nation
and
Atlantic
and probably even read them, and that I didn’t stand a
snowball’s
chance against him in an argument; but I was too oiled to keep my mouth shut. And it was like it usually is when I get in an argument with somebody who knows more asleep than I do wide awake: I talked myself out on one of these little crickety limbs to no place and ended up hanging out there like a damned fool; with the adrenalin pumping and my mouth flapping its wings to try to fly farther ferchrissakes out instead of retreating
back
along that same illogical limb I got my dumb ass out on in the first place. So after I’d talked myself out far enough with this guy I got down to doing what I’d been working up to all along.)

As he walked down the sidewalk of the small Colorado truck-farming town during fair time, feeling the brass band beat at his ears, his anger mounted with the mercury in the thermometer. His kidneys throbbed from the long jarring on the cycle. The quart of beer had given him a dull headache. The slow, stumbling, worn-out beat of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” was a stinging insult to a man just out of uniform. And when a suntanned stroller in a bar with his flowered shirt unbuttoned to his hairy navel decided to calmly discuss some of the faults of the current foreign policy it was the last straw; (and just like
I
should of known better than to get into it with a guy who I could tell was bound to beat my ears down with facts and figures,
this
gleef should of known better than to kept on arguing with some guy who
he
could tell was eventually going to have to kick the living shit out of him . . .) after ten minutes of discussion Hank found himself cursing that ragged red and white and gold high-school band with the lagging beat through the bars of his cell window. (And I ended up the day cooling my heels in the local jug.)

He hollered at the band until he became hoarse and self-conscious under the gaze of a crowd of large boys who gathered under his window to watch him; then he retired to his cot and plopped down in a cloud of dust that drifted through the beams of sun streaming between the bars. He smiled to himself. Apparently he’d made quite a spectacle out there, been the big event of the day. Through the window he could still hear the awed story of his fight being told and retold by the fortunate witnesses. Within an hour he had grown six inches and had a terrible scar running across his face, and it had taken ten men to subdue his drunken frenzy. (Of course, this feeling doesn’t last long—in fact, my cross-country exasperation was gone as soon as I’d busted that guy in Rocky Ford, so I didn’t even much mind the little rest with the law; and that’s where Viv and me met for the first time, too, in that jail—but that’s getting off the track . . .)

Hank was wakened by a rapping on the bars. The cell was stifling and he lay soaked in sweat. The bars undulated grotesquely before his eyes for a second, then snapped straight; there stood a cop in khaki sweated dark under both arms; at his side was the tourist Hank had swatted, his face swollen and blue under the tan. A girl drifted past behind the two, half-transparent in the heat like some creature glimpsed uncertainly out of the corner of the eye.

“Accordin’ to your things,” the cop said, “you just got back from overseas.”

Hank nodded, trying to smile, trying to catch another glimpse of that girl. In the limbs of the chinaberry tree beyond the bars a bug creaked in the heat.

“You were in the Marines,” the tourist informed him, a little nostalgically. “I served in the Pacific during the war . . . did you see any combat?”

It took Hank perhaps a second to size up what was happening, probably less. He dropped his head. He nodded woefully. He caught the bridge of his nose between thumb and finger and massaged it with his eyes closed. How was it? the tourist wanted to know, the Korean fighting? Hank told him he couldn’t talk about it yet. Why me? the tourist asked, as though he might cry, why did you come after
me?
Hank shrugged and brushed his dusty hair back from his eyes. “I guess,” he murmured softly, “it was because you were the biggest one I could find.”

He said it for effect, but speaking it—I’m sorry, mister, but you were just right—he realized that the reason wasn’t far from the truth.

The cop and the tourist retired to the other side of the room and, after some whispering, returned to announce that charges were being dropped provided Hank apologized and got his danged machine outa town by sundown. As Hank was proclaiming his sorrow he was once again aware of the moving apparition that slid across the background. Outside, against the white-hot firing-squad wall of the stucco jail, he blinked at the sun and waited. He knew the girl had been intensely aware of him in there. Just like a woman who doesn’t turn at your whistle is aware. That’s a woman you can hustle. After a few moments the girl slipped out from the back of the jail and stood beside him, shimmering against the heat of the stucco wall. She asked if he’d like a place where he could wash up and relax. He asked if she had such a place handy.

They made love that night outside town in the straw-filled bed of a pick-up. Their clothes lay nearby on the bank of a muddy pond where an irrigation ditch had been dammed by the town boys for swimming. They could hear the water trickling over the top of the dam and the frogs serenading one another across the water. A cottonwood stood nearby, sifting lint onto their naked bodies like warm snow.
This is Hank’s bell; clear now, clear . . .

The pick-up belonged to the girl’s uncle. She had borrowed it to drive to Pueblo to a movie and had driven to the bar where Hank waited. He had followed her into the fields on his cycle. And as he lay in the sweet-smelling straw beside her, feeling the stars on his bare stomach, had asked for the girl’s story: where was she from? what did she do? what did she like? From experience he knew that women felt entitled to this type of talk as a kind of payment; he always complied dutifully with halfhearted interest:

“What I mean is,” he said, yawning, “is
tell
me about yourself.”

“There’s no need for that,” the girl replied in a contented voice.

Hank waited a while in silence. The girl began humming a simple little tune while he lay perplexed, wondering if she understood as much as her statement seemed to imply; he decided not.

“No. Listen, sweetheart; I’m serious. Tell me, oh . . . what you
want
out of life.”

“What I want.” She sounded amused. “Now, do you really care? I mean come on, there isn’t any need, really; it’s fine just being a man and a woman; it’s fine.” She thought a moment. “Well, look: my aunt took me to Mesa Verde Indian dwellings one summer when I was sixteen. And at the Indian dances a boy and I kept looking at each other. All during the first part of the dance. The Indians were fat and old and I didn’t truly care who was the bird god or who was the sun god and the boy didn’t either. I think we were both much more beautiful than the dances. I remember I wore Levis and a plaid blouse; and oh, my hair was braided. The boy had very dark skin, foreign I think . . . dark, dark as one of the Indians even. And he had on leather shorts like you see mountain-climbers wear. And the moon was shining. I told my aunt I had to go to the john and I went out on the edge of the cliff and waited till he came. We made love right there on the sandstone. He could have been foreign, you know? . . . Neither of us ever spoke a word.”

She rolled her face toward him, pulling her hair back so he could see her dim smile.

“So, anyway . . . do you really want to know what I
want
out of life?”

“Yeah,” Hank said slowly, beginning to mean it. “Yes, I think I do.”

She rolled again to her back and crossed her hands behind her head. “Well . . . of course I want a home and some kids and like that, all the usual things. . . .”

“And the unusual things?”

This time she waited a while before she spoke. “I guess . . .” she said slowly, “I want somebody. All I mean to my uncle and aunt is help at the jail and the fruit stand. I want a lot of other unusual things too, like a page-boy cut, and a good sewing machine and a German roller singing canary like I remember my mother had—but mostly, I guess, I want to really mean something to somebody, be something to somebody more’n just a jail cook and a watermelon weigher.”

“Like what? What do you want to be?”

“Whatever this Somebody wants, I guess.” Not sounding at all like she was guessing.

“Dang, now; that don’t sound like much of a ambition to me. What if this Somebody just happens to
want
a cook an’ a melon tender, then where’d you be?”

“He won’t,” she answered.

“Who?” Hank asked, with more concern in his voice than he intended. “Who won’t?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She laughed, and again answered his unspoken question. “Just the Somebody. Whoever he someday turns out to be.”

Hank was relieved. “Boy, if you ain’t a case: waiting someday to be a
some
thing to a
Some
body you don’t even know, yet. And, yeah, how about that? How will you
know
this Somebody when you come across him?”

“I won’t know . . .” she said, and sat up to slide over the side of the pick-up, with the quiet and lazy speed of a cat; she stood in the wet sand of the ditch bank, coiling her hair into a loose knot at the back of her head, “... he will.” And turned her back to him.

“Hey. Where you going?”

“It’s all right,” she answered in a whisper, “just in the ditch,” then stepped into the water so delicately that the frogs across the ditch continued singing undisturbed.
This is Hank’s bell ringing . . .

There was no moon, but the night was bright and clear and the girl’s naked body seemed almost to glow she was so pale. How in the world could she keep so white, Hank wondered, in a country where even the bartenders are baked brown?

The girl began humming again. She turned facing the pick-up and stood for a moment facing him, ankle-deep in the pond full of stars and cottonwood fluff, then, still humming, began walking slowly backward. Hank watched her pale body dissolve from the feet upwards into the dark as the water grew gradually deeper—her knees, her trim hips made feminine only by a trimmer waist, her stomach, her dots of nipple—until only her face flickered bodiless there under the cottonwood. The sight was incredible. “Suck egg mule,” he whispered to himself, “if she ain’t something.”

“I like the water,” the girl remarked matter-of-factly, and disappeared altogether without a ripple and with an effect so eerie that Hank had to argue with his impulses by reminding himself that the ditch was only four feet or so at the deepest. He stared transfixed at the circling water. He’d never felt himself so hooked by a girl; and while she remained under water he wondered, half amused and half frightened, just which of them had been doing the hustling.

And the sky, he noticed, no longer seemed made of tinfoil.

He stayed over the next day, meeting the girl’s aunt, who was married to the cop. He read detective magazines while he waited for her to return from her cleaning chores at the jail. He still wasn’t able to pin her down about her age or background or anything, though he found out from the wire-haired aunt that her parents were dead and she lived most of the time at a fruit stand out on the highway. They spent another night in the pick-up, but Hank was becoming uneasy. He told the girl he had to leave at dawn, be back later, okay? She smiled and told him that it had been very fine, and when he kicked his motorcycle to noisy life in the gray plains dawn she stood on the hood of the pick-up and waved as he pulled a great plume of white dust down the road out of sight.

Up through Denver, over the Rabbit Ears into Wyoming, where an icy wind cut his face so raw that he had to have a doctor in Rock Springs prescribe an ointment . . . down to Utah and another fight, this time in the City of the Saints . . . along the Snake River caddis flies hatched and died against his goggles . . . into Oregon.

As he came down out of the twisting Santiam Pass into the green explosion of the Willamette Valley he realized that he had almost completed a circle. West, west, sailing out of San Francisco west and after two years landing on the Eastern Seaboard, where his ancestors had first set foot. He’d traveled in a straight line and completed a circle.

He roared down out of the Coast Range and passed the old house across the river without even slowing. He was eager to see some of the good old woodsmen around town. Men with style and grit. He entered the Snag triumphantly, bringing his boots down hard.

“Sonofabitch if this place isn’t got as much riffraff in it as the day I left. Hey there, Teddy.”

“Why hello, Mr. Stamper,” Teddy said politely. The other men smiled and waved casually.

“Let’s have us a bottle, Teddyboy. A whole bottle . . . let’s see. Make her Jim Beam, by God!” He leaned his elbows on the bar and beamed at the patrons sitting with lunch pails on the tables beside their beers.