Sometimes a Great Notion (67 page)

“You boys looks a little wasted, Floyd. . . . I tell you, come on here in the mill an’ we can get some coffee going.”

“No.” Evenwrite declined. “No thanks. We got to—”

“I’d offer you some hard stuff if I had some. Seems a shame. Joby, we ain’t got any brandy or bourbon, do we?”

“I’m afraid not. Not here. Some at the house, though, if you’d care—”

“That’s okay. We got to be going.”

“That’s too bad. I hate to be a bad host. But say, I tell ya what: you come back tomorrow night an’ we’ll see if we can’t be better prepared.”

The three men stood in a line, waiting the way children wait before the principal’s desk. “N-n-no, thanks, Hank,” Les chattered. “Uh—uh—we wouldn’t want to put you out.”

“Les, by god, you should be gettin’
accustomed
to this water.”

“Yeah. Ain’t that the truth, Hank. Well, by gosh, I don’t have to tell you how obliged. Anyhow. I guess we ought to be goin’.”

“Who’s out there on the road in the car? Some others? Floyd, you’ll tell ’em, won’t you, that I’m sorry I wasn’t better prepared. Will you tell ’em that? And tell ’em we’ll sure see to getting in some brandy or the like for the future.”

All the next day Floyd spent in the bathtub, and used the whole new bottle of Vick’s. It was Thursday before he made another attempt to dissuade Hank. Alone this time, he drove up to Scaler’s bridge and parked his car out of sight up a back road; while the government men were talking with John Stamper in the little shack, he slipped out on the blind side with a hammer and a bag of tenpenny spikes. He managed to get four of the spikes driven out of sight beneath the bark of the logs before the sound of the shack door opening ran him back to the bushes. He waited there in the rain, shivering and chewing at his lip, until the truck went back up and returned with a new load; then he popped out again to plant a few more spikes. He knew he might have to mine hundreds of logs in this way to be sure of getting one into the mainsaw’s teeth, because most of the logs were being boomed up to be sold to WP. And so what if WP loses a few blades too? Serve both the sonsabitches right.

He worked all day, and when dusk settled he complimented himself on a job thoroughly done. He dragged back to his car and drove into town. He ate the cold left-overs in the kitchen, then drove on in to see if news of a Stamper breakdown had yet reached the Snag. It had. Along with the news that the Stamper mill workers were all being transferred to woods work for the rest of the year. “McElroy said that Joe Ben said,” the first man Floyd met told him, “that Hank is got sawn lumber aplenty and was just
looking
for some excuse to move his whole crew into the woods to get at this WP contract.”

Evenwrite didn’t say anything; he stood, silent and chilled, wondering why he wasn’t more surprised by the news.

“An’ you know what?” the man went on. “You know what me ’n’ the boys an’ a lot of others reckon?”

He shook his head slowly. “No. What is it you ’n’ the boys reckon?”

“That Hank Stamper hisself brought off this breakdown for just such a reason. It’s just like him to pull a trick like that.”

Evenwrite agreed and turned to go. He had almost reached the door when he heard his name called. Draeger was coming out of the toilet, buttoning his jacket. “Wait, Floyd. . . .” Dumbly, and still without surprise, he watched the man’s amiable face growing larger as it approached him down the double row of booths. “Wait just a moment.” Like one of the head-on shots of trains in a movie show. “I have something here for you.” Stopping a moment at a booth to pick up something, then looming forward again, not like something really moving closer but like one of them pictures of trains projected on a screen, crashing larger and larger onward without moving a goddam bit. “Hank Stamper was by looking for you. . . .” Till it’s right on top of you, blacking out the whole screen with its crashing, right on over you and it still ain’t moved; you ain’t even felt it. “He left a gift for you.”

“Huh?” He shook himself from his reverie. “Gift?”

“This. Hank Stamper asked if I wouldn’t give this to you. He said he was by your house but you weren’t there, so he came to the Snag. Here.”

He took the brown bottle-shaped paper sack from Draeger by the neck, looking down at the twisted top.

“Aren’t you going to open it? I must say you have more restraint than I do. A gift drives me nuts until I see what it is. The difference between a married man with family and a bachelor, I suppose. . . .”

“I know what’s in it,” Floyd said in a flat voice. “It’s a bottle. So. Hank Stamper just come in? An’ said, ‘Give this to Floyd Evenwrite’? Is that what happened?”

“No. He told me to tell you—ah, what was it? I’ve lost the exact words but he said something like, let’s see—it’ll surprise you—”

Floyd watched the man pause to recall a message that he knew was no more lost to Draeger than it would be a surprise to him. “Oh yes, Hank said, ‘Give Floyd this brandy for me along with my sincerest thanks.’ Or something to that effect. Aren’t you going to open it? There’s something else in the sack. I could hear it tingling about. . . .”

“No, I guess not. I know what that is too. It’s nails.”

“Nails? Like carpentering nails?”

“That’s right.”

Draeger smiled and shook his head in amused puzzlement and winked at Teddy. “These boys up here are sometimes blamed difficult to fathom, aren’t they, Teddy?”

“Yes sir.”
I doubt that any boys anywhere are very difficult for you to fathom, Mr. Draeger
. . . .

The following Saturday night brought in another topnotch crowd. The long room pulsated with light blue smoke and the heavy blues beat of Rod’s guitar (Teddy had been forced to offer the band an additional three-fifty apiece to come in; although the deluge of despair didn’t hamper the alcohol sales, it stopped completely such frivolities as the tips that usually accounted for the bulk of the band’s take); the music flowed as melancholy and as free as dark draft beer. Ever since the November dark had settled down from the clouds the men had been swarming to the flickering lure of his neons like moths in a July twilight. Teddy rippled back and forth from tables to booths to bar in his crepe-soled haste—a plump, silent scurry that seemed actually the antithesis of movement—emptying ashtrays, filling glasses, spiriting away loose change with covert skill, and, tonight, barely hearing the old charge that he had been once again filling his empty Jack Daniels bottles with cheaper liquor. The charge was levied against him with such regularity—“Bust your fat little ass, Teddy, what sorta crap you giving us
now!
”—that he was sometimes afraid he would lose control and shout to the rooftops how much truth was in what the idiots considered merely a teasing accusation.

“. . . I mean, Teddy boy, I ain’t one to complain about you cuttin’ expensive liquor with cheap—you
know
that; I’m about as easy a man to please as you’ll find any place, no highfalutin tastes or that sorta thing—but I will by god draw the motherin’
line
on havin’ my bourbon diluted with Mennen’s Skin Bracer!”

And the men would laugh, craning heads from booth and back bar to enjoy Teddy’s blushing reaction to the joke. It had become a once-, sometimes a twice-a-night ritual. In fact, he recently had become so tired of being accused of diluting with Mennen’s that he was currently contemplating just that. Not that it would make any difference: he knew that there wasn’t a man among them with taste civilized enough to tell anything more than the temperature of a liquid, just as surely as he knew that not a one suspected the truth of their jest. When he was reminded of this, the knowledge would fill him both with fury at the indictment (They have no right making such slanderous charges without proof!) and with a contempt that made it possible to keep the fury in control (Morons, if they only knew . . .)

Lately, however, when confronted by the charge, the fury had become almost unmanageable: he would flutter his lashes and blush and mumble out a frightened denial, all the while vowing behind his fawning stammer: No more Ten High for these morons. They do not deserve it! Not even Bourbon De Luxe. From now on the Jack Daniels these morons get will come right out of a fruit jar and I hope they
all
go stone blind!—still apologizing out loud, of course, “Sir, I am very sorry,” and offering to stiffen the drink with another jigger free on the house. “Please, sir, let me—”

The moron would always wave the offer aside—“Ah, fergit it, Teddy, fergit it. What the dickens: it ’uz worth the shavin’ lotion just seein’ you blush so pretty”—and, quite often, drop a few pieces of change on the bar with a kind of nervous magnanimity. “Here . . . keep the gravel.”

And the men would laugh. And Teddy would ripple away in his buoyant shoes with a sixty-cent tip and a weak smile drawn like a curtain over a mouthful of hate, to the far end of the bar, where he would stand sulking and hurt and furious, waiting for the healing light of his neons to give him relief. Here was his peace and his sanctuary, the only comfort in his solitary and friendless world. And lately, while his business was better than ever, and although his belief in his superiority in a world of terrified nincompoops was beyond doubt, he had needed an increasing amount of this hissing comfort: there were nights, after standing, head bowed and humble before the drunken spray of one of his funnyman patrons, when he found himself forced to convalesce for half an hour or more at this end of the bar, smiling, with one hand lightly on the bartop, like something needing the protection of a shell—for half an hour before the throbbing lights could massage away the outrage. During these periods he would seem quite unchanged, greeting each new arrival with his usual formal manner, fiddling with the long key-chain that looped across the round bulge of his apron, calling out the hour when asked . . . and even if any of the customers
had
chanced to observe him closely, as he stood there with different hues of red and orange and magenta fluttering across his blank face—

“Teddy, goddam you little octopus, could you come down here outa your cave and pour some of that clear-looking stuff out of that Gilbey’s gin bottle into this glass of mine? There’s a good boy . . .”—even so, they would have attributed the color to nothing more than the pulsing neons.

But this night, in spite of an uncommon collection of bruising insults, Teddy spent very little time recuperating under the light of his neons. In the first place he was too busy: the disheartening news of the Stamper lumber-mill crew’s move up to the woods had kept him pumping liquor almost as fast as had the Stamper-Newton fight a week before; and this time he hadn’t called in the waitress from the Sea Breeze to lend him a hand. So he was far too busy scurrying after orders to afford himself the luxury of pouting under his lamps whenever one of the morons made some remark. In the first place.

And, in the second, didn’t really need the balm of his lights as much as usual: not only was he especially soothed by the muted pitch of worry that rose from each of the tables blending with the rising smoke—“Teddy, goddammit, I tell ya . . . somethin’ is
haywire
here. . . .” “Yes sir, Mr. Evenwrite.” “Somethin’
terrible
wrong . . .”—rose blending to hang congealed and blue all over the room . . . but he was already in a delicious state of thrilled anticipation owing to a phone call he had received that afternoon from Jonathan Draeger: after telling him that he was calling long distance from Eugene and asking that he do him a favor—“I’ll be there this evening; would you please see if you can keep Floyd Evenwrite indoors and out of trouble until I arrive?”—Draeger had put Teddy in a heart-thumping swirl by adding, “We’ll show these muscleheads just what a little thoughtful patience can accomplish, won’t we, Ted?”

All the rest of that afternoon and evening that tiny intimacy had glowed in Teddy’s chest. We, Draeger had said;
we!
Such a word, coming from such a man, could outshine all the neons in Oregon!

Evenwrite had come in after supper, a little before seven, with his face redder than usual and his breath laced with the sweet smell of brandy. “Yeah, somethin’ wrong . . .” he announced again, knotting his features terribly.

“What’s that, Mr. Evenwrite?”

“Haw?” Evenwrite looked up, blinking stupidly.

“You said something about something being wrong . . .”

“Hell yes, somethin’ wrong. With this
drink
, I was talkin’ about! What’d you think I was talkin’ about?”

In response Teddy lowered his lashes and gazed at the wienie-fingered, rusty-knuckled paw resting on the richly grained surface of the bar. Beside this monstrosity his own curled hand—eternally bluish from so many hours in the wash-water cleaning glasses, the flesh appearing to approach transparency the way meat does after pickling—looked even bluer and smaller than usual. He waited timidly, face bent in an attitude of abject and persevering embarrassment. “What about it, sir? the drink . . . ?”

“Well, right this minute it’s
empty
is what about it. You could fill it back up for a start. That’d help some.”

Teddy brought out a bottle and refilled the glass; Evenwrite picked it up and started to walk back to his table.

“Oh. That will be fifty cents, Mr. Evenwrite.”

“Fifty cents! You mean to tell me you’re askin’ money for this stuff? Teddy, I wasn’t planning to drink it, I was goin’ into the head and give myself a shampoo with it.”

Teddy looked back down. The men at Evenwrite’s table laughed, always welcoming the comic interlude Teddy brought to their serious, grim, down-to-business discussions. Then Evenwrite guffawed himself and slapped a four-bit piece down on the bartop as though squashing a bug. Teddy picked it up gently and carried it to the cash register, relishing an exquisite and curious new fear just garnered from the emotional clutter of Evenwrite’s face,
This is one thing, Mr. Draeger, that sets you apart from me and the muscleheads both
: carefully rolling the new specimen over and over with a connoisseur’s studied appreciation. . . .
I can just escape fear; you can create it.