Sometimes a Great Notion (55 page)

“Right down here, Mr. Stamper, your shoulder.” My mind became frantic as I felt more hands on me. . . .
Unless you play it smart, unless you acknowledge your fate and accept it. Like the car. . . .
“Get your shoulder here, Mr. Stamper.”

“You better not . . . my brother will . . .”

“Your brother will what, Mr. Stamper? Your brother isn’t here. All alone, you said.” . . .
He doesn’t struggle against them; they begin to weary of the sport without a struggle . . .
“My goodness, you got wet, Mr. Stamper.” . . .
And even when they step back he doesn’t try to come out of the water that is breaking waist deep . . .
“You must really
like
the water, Mr. Stamper.” . . .
He turns instead toward the incoming froth of the waves, looking out at the beautiful line of the horizon, then at the frantic efforts of the silly birds. All the poor silly devils need do is run run run and then wait . . . for that cold final crack to stop the whole insufferable hassle. A half-dozen steps and you end this frantic game. You don’t win, but you don’t lose, either. A stalemate is the best you can hope for, don’t you see? The very best . . .

“Look.”

“Who’s that?”

“Oh Christ-o-Friday. It
is
him. . . .”

“Split! Everybody split!”

The driver leads and the others follow, sprinting off toward the dunes. Lee doesn’t notice them leaving. He is tossed off balance by a wave. He is completely under for a moment, and when his face rolls into the air once more, serene and thoughtful, he sees again that tranquil horizon: You come into this scene begging for quarter. Silly bird. You spend all your time calling King’s-X, hoping to halt the game temporarily. You could learn from the fox and his sharpie ways. Screw it. Forget King’s-X. Stop the game completely, stop the frantic hassle. Call it a draw while there’s still a chance. WATCH OUT. No; concede. WATCH OUT! WATCH OUT! WATCH OUT! YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME! Just see if I can’t. I concede . . .
“Lee!”
I call it a draw
. . . “Bub!”—
and walks toward horizon, into the lifting white embrace of the water . . .
“Goddammit anyhow—” . . .
into the rolling gray What?
“Lee!”

“What? Hank?” I pushed myself up from the sand where the Dayglo Gang had thrown me. “Hank?” And through the lace of foam frozen briefly in the air, I saw him coming over the rocks of the jetty. Not running yet; walking fast but not running. His fists clenched and his arms swinging and his boots spitting sand, but not running. They ran, the Plastic People, all five of them, they ran as if the devil were after them. But Hank
just walked. He never for a moment blew his cool. . . . Through distance and his foam-flecked glasses, Lee watches the scene on the beach. He watches the teen-agers flee as Hank closes the distance (“O Heavenly Father, I see your old light coming!”) He is still being wallowed about by the waves out past the car as he watches Hank come. He makes no move toward deeper or shallower water—but, wait a minute! what’s Brother Hank doing out here in place of his wildwoods wife?—no decision until an overpowering curiosity finally breaks the deadlock and he begins floundering awkwardly through the snowy foam toward the beach where Hank waits with his hands in his pockets. All right, it may be a frantic hassle but you can call it a draw some other day
. . . not even to come into the water to my rescue did he blow his cool;
but, wait a minute: what’s he doing out here instead of
. . . he just stood on the bank with his hands in his pockets, watching me fight my way out of the surf. “Damn, Lee,” he encouraged me when I got close enough, “if you ain’t about the poorest excuse for a swimmer I ever saw, I’ll eat my hat.”

I couldn’t even make a clever reply. I plopped to the sand, gasping and spent and feeling as if I had swallowed my weight in salt water. “You could . . . have . . . at least—”

“I tell you one thing that would help,” Hank said, grinning down at me; “you’d do better wearing a
bathin’
suit ’stead of corduroy pants an’ a sports jacket next time you go swimmin’ with your friends.”

“Friends?”
I wheezed. “They were a gang of toughs . . . trying to kill me. You were almost too late . . . they might have . . .
drowned
me!”

“Next time I come I’ll bring a bugle an’ blow the cavalry charge. What reason did they give, by the way, for the drownin’?”

“A very good reason . . . as I recall.” I was still lying on my side with the waves lapping hungrily at my feet, and I had to think a moment before I could remember what that very good reason was. “Oh yes . . . because I’m a Stamper. That was their reason.”

“Reason aplenty, it seems,” he said, and finally condescended to lean over and help me to my feet. “Let’s get over to Joby’s an’ get you in some dry clothes. Boy. Look there at you. That’s something. How a man can be damn near
drowned
by a gang of toughs and still never lose his specs. That’s truly something.”

“Never mind that. What are you doing here? What happened to Viv—the rock oysters?”

“I got the jeep parked just back of the driftwood there. Come on. Look out, grab your shoes! That wave like to got ’em . . .”

By the time Lee has retrieved his shoes Hank has already started back up the beach, in the same hurrying walk: Where did you come from, brother, like a Mephistopheles in logging boots? (Out on the dark dunes more and more of the light showed in the hole; the little boy beat at his cramped thighs with mounting anticipation: “Yes! Yes! Yes God yes!”—more and more, brighter and closer, slowly . . .) Why did you come instead of her?
“What are you doing here?” I repeated, jogging to catch up with him.

“Something’s come up. Joe Ben tried to find you after church but you’d gone. He gave me a call on the phone. . . .”

“Where’s Viv?”

“What? Viv couldn’t make it. I asked her to stay and help Andy tally up the booms . . . ’cause the heat is suddenly on. Joe phoned to say there was a meeting of Evenwrite and the boys, and the top union dog of the whole business. He said that they got the whole story about our deal with WP. Everybody knows. An’ that the whole town’s got their tit in a wringer.”
. . . You were jealous, Lee decides triumphantly; you had misgivings about letting her come in to me! (Slowly brighter and closer . . .)
“So you came?” I asked, feeling my disappointment turn to a covert elation. . . .
And your jealousy has given me strength to make the moon wait another month.
“In Viv’s place?”

“Christ yes I came in her place,” he answered, flapping his hands against his pants legs to rid them of the sand that he’d picked up helping me to my feet. “I told you that once. What’s the matter’th you? one them punks bust you across the head or something? Come on! Let’s get up to that jeep; I want to get into the Snag an’ see how the winds are blowin’.”

“Sure. Okay, brother.” I fell in behind him. “Right with you.”

My pot hangover disappeared, and, in spite of the cold, I was blooming with sudden enthusiasm: he had come in her place! He was already sweating the possibility of a scene! My feeble embryo of a plan was proceeding better than I had hoped . . .
They move up the beach. Hank in front and Lee grimly shivering behind: We are joined, brother, shackled together for all our lives, just as the birds and the waves are immutably tuned together, in a song of patience and panic. We have been tuned thus for years, me piping and pecking after morsels while you crashed and roared (Closer and brighter, the light almost there now; the little boy held his breath at the approaching glow of salvation . . .) but now, brother, the roles are switching, and you are beginning to plaintively pipe the tune of panic and I am beginning the melancholy long withdrawing roar of patience . . .
and I faced the future with a confident smirk.

“Right behind you, brother mine. Lead on. Lead on. . . .”

Lee’s steps stretch out to keep up with Hank. Indian Jenny prepares her soul for another attack on her manless world. The old boltcutter empties his last bottle of Thunderbird and decides to start for town before full dark. The clouds swarm up from the sea, black-booted and brave with the coming of night. The wind springs up from the slough bottoms. The dunes darken (
the boy watches the light
). In the mountains past the town, where the streams grow thirsty for winter, the lightning uncurls and begins to flutter in the fir trees, white-orange and black, for Halloween . . . (
Then, finally, after cold minutes or hours or weeks—he has no idea—the earth above the waiting boy has moved far enough. The light is in full view. And the glow of salvation is nothing but that same moon that led him across the dunes, a thin paring of moon that has gradually centered itself in his meager patch of far-off sky
) . . . in that kind of sky . . . (
“Leee-land . . .”
) in that kind of world.

“Leeee-land; oh, Leeee-land . . .” The boy doesn’t hear; he stares at the moon, a thread-thin crescent hanging there between the stars like the last of a faded Cheshire cat—everything gone but the black reminder and the jeering grin . . . and this time the boy’s weeping is not of the cold or the fright of falling into a dark hole, or of anything else he has ever cried about before . . .

“Leeeeelan’ boy, answer me . . . !” The call comes again, nearer, but he doesn’t answer. He feels that his voice is trapped like his weeping, beneath a cold lid of wind. Nothing can ever get out.

“Leland? Bub . . . ?”

The hole sinks deeper and deeper into the earth and is just beginning to strangle his consciousness when he feels something hail against the back of his neck. Sand. He raises his eyes up to the hole: The grin is gone! A face is there!

“Is that you, bub? You all right?” And a flashlight! “Gaw
damn
, bub, you gave me a real run for my money!”

With no tool but his pocket knife it takes Hank most of an hour to cut the limbs from a little scrub pine that he dragged onto the dunes. He works as near to the mouth of the hole as he feels safe, so the boy will be able to hear his labors. As he works he tries to talk constantly, keeping up an unconcerned-sounding flow of jokes and stories and shouted commands to the hound—“Come back here an’ forget chasing those rabbits, you ol’ potlicker!”—that listens, puzzled, from the spot where Hank tied him before starting. “Dang that ol’ gadabout dog.” He clucks loudly, then crawls to the hole on his belly again to check on the boy, whispering, “That’s the kid. Sit good an’ still. Don’t fret. But don’t rustle around down there any more’n you have to, neither.”

He bellies back from the hole and returns to his work on the little pine; his nonchalant and rambling narrative is just the opposite of his frenzied hacking and whittling.

“Say now, bub, you know? Ever since I got here I been thinkin’ . . . that this whole situation sure does put me in mind of something. An’ it just now come to me what it was. It was the time old Henry and your Uncle Ben an’ me—I was just about your age at the time, too, I guess—all drove over to Uncle Aaron’s place up in Mapleton to help him dig a big hole for a
outhouse. . . .
”

He works swiftly but carefully at the tree; he could remove the branches more quickly by breaking them off, but then they would break off next to the trunk . . . he has to leave enough sticking out for the boy to hang on to, but not enough to scrape the sides of that hole—any little jostling could bring it all down.

“Your Uncle Aaron, you see, couldn’t do with just
any
old five-or six-feet hole under his crapper—he wanted it
deep.
He had got it into his head some way that if it wasn’t
deep
enough the roots from the garden could get to it an’ he’d end up with carrots tastin’ like turds. Now. Hang tough a minute; I’m gonna bring the ladder an’ try to get it down.”

He slides toward the hole again, dragging the tree with him; the branches have all been removed except those opposing each other, and these have been cut off a few inches from the skinny trunk. The result is a wobbly ladder some thirty feet long. Without standing, he up-ends the tree and begins to lower it very carefully down, talking all the while.

“Well, so we went at that hole, the dirt just aflyin’ because it was loamy an’ pretty soft diggin’—feel the ladder yet, bub? you holler when it gets down to where you can feel it—an’ pretty quick we’d dug down about fifteen feet—Don’t you feel it yet, for chrissakes? I’m prodded up against something.”

He pulls the light from his pocket and shines it down; the butt of the trunk is resting against the boy’s leg. “My leg’s too cold, Hank, I didn’t feel it on my leg.”

“You mean you can’t climb out on it?”

The boy shakes his head. “No,” he says without emotion. “I can’t feel my legs.”

Hank shines the light around the tube; it might stand another hundred years or it might cave in in another ten minutes. Likely ten minutes. He can’t chance going for help; he’ll have to go down and carry him out. He scoots back from the hole and turns over on his back and comes at it again, feet first. An inch at a time he lowers himself through the opening.

“So we’d dug down fifteen feet . . . an’ Uncle Ben an’ Uncle Aaron was at the bottom, Henry an’ me up top haulin’ off the dirt . . . easy, easy does it . . . then Uncle Ben says he just had to go to the house for some water, would be right back, he says. Ah, gotcha, bub. Now; can you hang onto my belt?”

“I can’t feel my fingers, Hank. I think my fingers died.”

“You just dyin’ a little bit at a time, huh?”

“My fingers and my legs, Hank,” the boy answers flatly. “They died first.”

“You’re just cold. Here. Let’s see what we can work out. . . .”

After some effort he removes his belt and loops it beneath the boy’s shoulders; he ties the end of it through the leather trade patch at the back of his jeans and begins a slow climb back up the cramped tube; only during this climb does his casual tone flag. “Okay. Now listen, Lee: I didn’t figure this scrub pine supportin’ anything but you, not me an’ you together. So help by climbin’ if you can. But if you can’t help, for Jesus H. Christ don’t go to kicking and squirming! Here we go. . . .”