Sometimes a Great Notion (58 page)

Then he closes his puffy eyes like he’ll pray now. Everybody is still. The coach sounds like Brother Walker’s blind brother, Brother Leonard the Seer, when he gets up to talk. Remember this, men, the coach says, remember this:

 

And Hank says, just loud enough, bullshit.

The coach doesn’t act like he heard. He never does. Because right behind his head is that big scoreboard donated by the Rotary, and all the records list down along it Hank Stamper, record-holder in this, Hank Stamper, record-holder in that, on almost every other name, so he knows better than argue with it. But Tommy Osterhaust turns and glares at Hank and says I don’t think that’s very funny, Stamper. And Hank says I almost give a rat’s ass what you think, Osterhaust. And so forth and so on until the coach stops it and starts the practice.

After shower everybody’s ready. Tommy Osterhaust talking low with a bunch of guys next to the foot-powder trough. Hank and me get dressed by ourselves, not talking. After we get dressed and Hank combs his hair we all go outside together and they fight in the gravel at the bus stop. And all the rest of the year everybody blames Hank for Wakonda High’s not winning district title and maybe even state, like we might of done if Tommy had been capable to play for us. And for a long time after that the talk in the Snag was that Hank Stamper would never of made the Shriners’ All-Star team if Osterhaust had been back there to divvy up some of the running. Hank never say anything about it even when they told him to his face. Just grins and shuffle his feet is all. Except one time. When me and him and Janice and Leota Nielsen all go out on the dunes and get drunk on wine and Leota brings the fight up because she’d been going with Tommy. We all think Hank’s passed out on the blanket with his hand over his eyes. I’m trying to tell her what really went on, that Tommy had been spoiling for a fight from the first day he set eyes on Hank and that it was really
him
, not Hank like everybody always says, really Tommy that wanted the fight. Yes, but, but just because Tommy
wanted
to fight I don’t see . . . well, if Hank didn’t really want to do it why did he beat him up so terrible?

I start to say something but Hank beats me to it. He doesn’t even move the hand off his eyes. He says Leota, sweetheart, when you come after me to do it you don’t want me doing some half-assed job, do you? Leota says what! And Hank repeats the same thing—you want the best I can put out, don’t you? Leota gets so upset we have to take her home. At her door she turns and hollers back, what do you think? you’re God’s gift to woman? Hank don’t answer but I holler some things at her that she doesn’t understand. About how she’s just like Tommy Osterhaust, only doesn’t fight as fair. I should keep still. It was the wine. I yell and she cries and yells some more; then her big brother comes out on the porch and he gets into it, hollering. He is one of Hank’s motorcycle buddies. Once they gypsied all the way to Grand Canyon. Now listen here, he says. Listen here, Stamper, you sonofabitch! He doesn’t understand. Hank tells me to drive the hell on. We pull out. He knows already about the brother but he doesn’t want to think about it yet. He can’t let himself think about it yet, though he sees already there’s another scrap brewing. But that he’s got to let it brew its course or everybody will figure him more a bully than they do already.

So . . . I guess . . . I ought’n’ to look for him to be any different with this business with Leland. He won’t cut across to the place where he
knows already
he’s going to have to knock the boy’s ears down. Because he way down keeps hoping it won’t come to pass. He’s
got
to keep hoping these things won’t come to pass. Or get hard and lonely as a old pit dog.

Oh, Hankus . . . Hank . . . I always say to you the thing to do is accept what your lot is. But that’s pure bull when I come down to it. Because you can’t accept that you can’t quit no more than you can quit, and you can’t cut across to what you know already no more than you can keep from hoping that what you already see coming won’t ever come. Because they are the same thing, every bit the same exact thing. . . .

“This meeting will now come to order! Everybody rise and pledge ’legiance . . .”

A gravel rapped. Joe Ben started up from his stump and then leaned back toward the open few inches of window. The hall inside was lighted now and most of the chairs were full. Howie Evans rapped the speaker’s stand and repeated, “This meeting is going to come to order!” He nodded and from a chair behind him Floyd Evenwrite rose with a handful of yellow papers. Floyd pushed Howie Evans aside and spread the papers on the stand.

“What is happening is this,” he said. Outside the window Joe Ben zipped his windbreaker higher and smelled the first far-away sprinkling of rain . . .

The old boltcutter finishes unloading his load of split wood at the shingle-weavers, and finds that he must sit down on the running board for a minute to rest before he can make it the few yards to the office to collect from the foreman. The smell of liver and onions reaches him from the house out behind the mill where the foreman and his wife live. He wishes he had a woman back at his house up the canyon, to fill the air with smells like liver and onions. He has wished the same wish before, of course, many times; even, in his drunker moments, has given the idea of marriage some drunken thought . . . But now, as he tries to stand, the full force of his years strikes him at the small of his back like a sixty-pound maul, and for the first time he admits to himself that the wish is hopeless: he will never have that woman: he is just too old—“Ah well, it’s best to live alone any-ways, what I say”—too rotten worthless dirty old.

The clouds swarm past. The wind rises. Lee fights his way through the frog-infested swamp, bound for the sea. Jenny considers trying another trip to the Bible, for good measure. Jonathan Draeger listens to the men’s overdramatic reactions to the news of the Stamper deal with Wakonda Pacific and writes: “The lowest of villains will push man to greater heights than the tallest of heroes.”

And by the time Floyd Evenwrite has swung into the summation of his exhaustive case against the Stampers, the spy for the other side is beating it up the sidewalk to make a report to headquarters, all concern for caution left back in the alley among the careless litter of garbage. He must phone Hank, tell him quick—but
quiet
, too. . . . His espionage work would give them a little edge over the union only if they kept it
quiet
; the union wouldn’t
know
that they knew. . . . But he must call
right away!
And the phone in the Snag, if not the most private, was certainly the closest. . . .

“Evenwrite told the whole story and
then
some,” Joe let Hank and everybody else in the bar know. “And them as was able to last out Floyd’s bull and get the drift sounded pretty salty. They says if you was going to be a leech on the town’s blood that the town was gonna have to treat you like a leech.

Pretty salty. They said you better keep outa their way, Hank. So what you think you’ll do?”

And when he hung up thought he heard someone in the bar ask what went on at the other end.

“Hank says he just might have to come in to town tonight an’ see about that,” Joe announced belligerently. “Oh, you betcha; anybody who supposes Hank Stamper is gonna be scared into hiding out up in the hills just because a few people shakes their fists at him is got another suppose comin’.”

Ray, the talented half of the Saturday Nite Dance Band, barely looked up from his scotch—“Big deal”—but at the other end of the bar Boney Stokes had more to say. “A pity, a pity . . . that Hank should have been ruint by the upbringing of his prideful father; with all his energy, he could have made a real contribution to society, not just be a clod washed out to sea. . . .”

“Watch that, Mr. Stokes,” Joe warned. “Hank’s no clod.”

But Boney was beyond warning; his eyes were fixed on tragedies beyond the walls. “ ‘
There
fore never send to know for whom the bell tolls,’ ” he tolled sonorously through his dirty handkerchief; “ ‘it tolls for
thee.
’ ”

“It tolls for horseshit,” contradicted a thinner voice from a gray beard at the back of the bar, thinking of liver and onions. “All horseshit. You’re alone all your life an’ you darn sure die alone, what I always say.”

Back with Jan and the kids, Joe Ben was able to contain his excitement only by venting it through a paintbrush; even then each minute dragged on him like an anchor dragging through gumbo mud. And by the time Hank showed up, with Leland shivering in tow, Joe had given all the window frames two coats of morning-mist white and was mixing up a third.

There were no extra clothes for Lee, so while Joe took the children around the area with their Halloween masks and paper sacks, and Hank drove to the A & W for hamburgers-to-go, Lee sat wrapped in a paint-spattered drop cloth before a panel heater, wishing he were home in bed; why Hank felt it necessary that he accompany them in their showdown tonight at the OK Saloon was a mystery. I’m a delicate sort of flower, he reminded himself wryly; perhaps he wants me around in case something starts, in hopes I’ll be trampled underfoot—what other reason could he have for insisting on my coming along?

Hank would have been hard put to supply a reason himself, though he knew it to be true that Lee’s presence at the Snag tonight was important to him . . . maybe because the kid needed to see first-hand what kind of world was going on around his head all the time without him ever seeing it, the
real
world with
real
hassles, not this fairybook world of his that he was having most of the time like a kind of
nightmare
that him and his kind’d made up to scare theirselfs with. Like that spooky crap he played the night before that he called music, when anybody could see that there wasn’t any more tune to it than there was sense. Maybe that’s one of the reasons for dragging him along to the Snag with us . . .

“Here’s a burger, bub. Choke it down.” He caught the white paper sack that Hank tossed him—“I want you to see how woods folks here deal with their hassles”—and ate, watching Hank with puzzled wariness (what
kind
of hassles?).

... Or it maybe was because I wanted the boy to have a try at going over this Niagara Falls in this coffee can with me just this one time, so he could see that this madman he was talking about could do even more’n come out of it alive—he could get a laugh or two out of the trip as well. (What
manner
of hassle are you referring to, brother? I wondered, as my confident smirk changed to a weak and worried smile. Not, by any chance, a hassle such as someone making a play for one of the woods folks’ wildwoods wife?)

By the time we finish our burgers and fries, Lee’s clothes are pretty well dry and Joe Ben is commencing to run circles around himself to get going. Joe just come back in from taking Squeaky and the twins and Johnny out around the area, and he is ready to do some tricking-or-treating of his own. Joe was always big on seeing a fuss if it was me getting fussed.

We drove up to the Snag in the pick-up because the jeep didn’t have the box up and the night looked a little upsy-daisy for open-air driving, what with it clear one minute with a nice little quarter-moon in a calm sky, and the next minute lightning and blowing flurries of rain and sleet. (These questions didn’t penetrate my earlier feeling of minor victory until Hank made such a point of bringing me to the Snag . . . then I began to come down from my cloud and get worried.) There are so many cars on Main we have to park all the way back to the firehouse and walk to the Snag. The place is running full tilt, with light and noise and people slopping clean out across the sidewalk into the street. The two guitar-players are doing “Under the Double Eagle” with their amplifiers turned to the limit. I never seen the place so booming. The stools at the long bar are filled completely, with men even standing turned sideways in the little spaces between the stools. The booths are filled, and Teddy’s got one of the waitresses over from the Sea Breeze helping him with the drinks. There are men standing the length of the shuffleboard and the bowling machine, men at the toilet door and men at the bandstand, and loud groups gathered drinking beer in every smoky niche and cranny all the way back to the bus depot. (And something in Brother Hank’s grim and grinning manner turned my worry to fear.) I’d had a notion it might be crowded, and I was prepared for it being wild, but the reception I get when me and Joby and Lee come in catches me clean off guard. I was halfway looking to have them go to throwing chairs and tables, and when they wave and grin and sing out howdies instead, it really throws me for a little while.

I walk past the shuffleboard and guys I barely know go to shouting acknowledgments at me like I was visiting kin. A place clears at the bar for the three of us and I call for three beers.

(My first thought was that Hank planned to call me out and humiliate me in front of the throng, administer in public a verbal flogging for my adulterous inclinations . . .)

Old buddies come up to slap my back and snap the elastic cross of my galluses. Motorcycle buddies come around to ask me how I been. Marine Corps buddies I ain’t heard from in years stop by for a long-time-no-see. Dozens of guys: “Hey, what’s happening, Hank, you old coon? Long time, by gosh. How’s it hangin’?” I shake the hands and laugh at the jokes and watch the faces bob around in the mirror behind the picket row of bottles.

Not a one of them says a thing about our contract with WP. Not a solitary
one!

(But after minutes passed without incident, I decided not: Brother Hank has something worse in mind, I decided.)

After a bit the greeting eases up and I get a chance to take a better look around. Boy! Even for a Saturday night, even for a Saturday night in the Snag in Wakonda, it’s still a doozer. There’s at least a two-cord truckload of guys at every table, hollering and laughing and sucking down the beer. And, by golly, there’s maybe twenty-five women! More women than I ever saw in the Snag. You’re usually lucky to have a Saturday with one woman to every ten men, but tonight there’s at least one to four.