Sometimes a Great Notion (76 page)

I waited for her to ask what that something was, but she only sat silently, her hands folded on the black overcoat.

“. . . They had a limitless supply of tomorrows to work with. If you didn’t make your dream today, well, there was always more days coming, more dreams full of more sound and fury and future: what if today was a hassle? There was always tomorrow to find the River Jordan, or Valhalla, or that special providence in the fall of a sparrow . . . we could believe in the Great Gettin’-up Morning coming someday because if it didn’t make it today there was always tomorrow.”

“And there isn’t any more?”

I looked up at her and grinned. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s pretty likely . . . that the alarm will go off at four-thirty, and I’ll be down making pancakes and coffee, just like yesterday.”

“Pretty likely, sure. But let’s say Jack comes home unexpectedly, all miffed at the steel magnates, his back aching and his vigor gone, and finds Jackie and Barry making it in his rocking chair . . . then what? Or, say, Nikita has one vodka too many and decides what-the-hell, then what? I’ll tell you. Zap; that’s all it takes. The little red button and
zap.
Right? And this little button makes a definite difference in our world; in our generation, ever since we’ve been old enough to read, our tomorrows have been at the mercy of this button. Well . . . at least we’ve quit kidding ourselves about the Great Gettin’-up Mornin’ acoming someday; when you can’t even be sure of having that ‘someday’ come along, you have the devil’s own time convincing yourself of that Mornin’.”

“Is it that?” she asked in a soft voice, once more examining her hands, “not being sure of that ‘someday’? Or is it not being sure of having that ‘somebody’?” Her face raised, framed by the contrasting black of the overcoat’s collar.

The best I could do was respond with a question of my own. “Have you ever read Wallace Stevens?” I asked, like a sophomore on a Coke date. “Wait. I’ll get you this book. . . .” And I fled to my room to recuperate. The light from the hole showed me the book on the bed, open to the poem I had been reading. I picked it up, keeping my place, but hesitated to return. For a moment I stood, sucking at my cheeks, still feeling that glow, then, like Nikita after too much vodka, decided what-the-hell and tiptoed quickly to the hole in the wall.

She hadn’t moved from the position I’d left her in, but her expression had changed to puzzlement and some concern for this nut next door who flea-hopped from room to room, from glib despondency to tongue-tied frustration. Safely separated by the wall, I found my cool returning. In another moment I would be able to go back in there and be as unruffled as Oscar Wilde at a tea. But as my cool came back, so did the sound of the motorboat. I barely had time to run back in with my book and point out a couple of poems she
must
read—“Be patient with Stevens; don’t force him; let him force you”—and make it back to my room before I heard those hard-heeled bare footsteps mounting the stairs again. And I lay awake for hours, hoping another phone call would give me that opportunity to be alone and unruffled with her.

As it happened that opportunity, by my own doing, became less and less likely as the days passed and the scene at the house grew stickier, until it was finally apparent that it would only happen if I made it happen. “That chance is now at hand,” I wrote to Peters in my ledger, after gnawing another slight point on the nub of the pencil,

 

And in her room with Lee’s book of poetry Viv tries to decipher the sense of vagueness that bathes her like diffused light.

“I don’t understand,” she says, frowning at the page. “I just don’t understand. . . .”

And down the hill from the carrier Hank steps back from the sizzling pile of burning trash to listen to the sky. Another low-flying flock is coming over. He runs to get his gun, then stops, feeling foolish. What the hell. . . . There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell seeing a goose through that smoke and rain. Let alone hitting one if you saw him. And the way things had been going since that meeting with the relatives—all the hassles by day and the honking by night—if I’d got that shotgun I might of just gone to throwing buckshot in the sky like a wild man, whether I saw anything or not. . . .

The day after that meeting with the relatives Joe Ben was up bright and early getting some shells ready, because it “looked like his day for sure.” He was prying open the tops of some Super X magnums and pouring out the B-Bs and filling the shells back up with chunks of these pencil sinkers he’d cut up; long strips of lead about as big around as a pencil, all chopped into pieces about a fourth-inch long. I told him he was wasting his time today, as foggy as it was, but he said he might get a chance coming home tonight because the fog would be rained down by then and he figured we’d get to come home early because of all the help we’d have now that all the mill crew was gonna help out. He was right about the fog but wrong about getting done early; only about two-thirds of the crew showed up—the rest had just the most
awful
colds, they told me—so it was pitch-dark by the time we started back.

That night a couple more phoned while we were eating to say they had fevers and couldn’t make it, and I told Joby it didn’t look like he could expect anything more than just morning hunting the next day either. He just looked up from his supper plate and shrugged and said it wasn’t gonna take more than morning hunting when the holy
signs
all lined up just right; when
that
time come along his old honker would be good as in the pot, he said, then leaned back over his plate and went to packing away the potatoes to fortify himself for the coming of that great lining-up of holy signs. (
All through the meal Lee keeps sniffing and rubbing his eyes. Viv says they
should take his temperature. He says he’s all right; this is just his way of expelling excess moisture, like a dog sweating from his nose. Before we go to bed Viv goes up and brings down the thermometer and gives it to him. He sits reading the paper with the thing stuck out of the corner of his mouth like a glass cigarette. Viv reads it and says he has about a degree, not anything fatal. . . . He asks if he couldn’t have a glass of hot lemon tea, that his mother always gave him hot lemon tea when he was coming down with a cold. Viv goes and makes it. She brings it in to him and he sits by the stove in the living room sipping the stuff, reading her some poems from that book . . .
)

Apparently, the signs didn’t line up for Joe worth a darn the next day; it wasn’t only foggy as ever, but only about a third of the crew showed up this time. And it was worse still the next day, and the next, and Joby was about to give it all up when one night toward the end of that week there came another big blow and a lot of geese going over, and in the morning it was cold and clear enough you could look out the kitchen window and see car lights going by across the river. It was raining, but not too hard, and even in the dark you see up in the sky well enough to make out the grocery flag on the pole.

“This is the morning, Hank, abso-
lutely,
you just wait and see if it ain’t. Everything is right; a storm, wind, lots of honking in the night, and now the mist is down. . . . Oh yeah,
every
thing is right!”

He was standing by the breakfast table oiling his gun, all excited (
There’s something funny
), while we waited for Viv to get the food on. (
There’s something funny again.
)

“Oh you know it,” he rambled on, “I bet there’s some poor old lonely lost honker out there calling for his brother geese and just
needing
to be put out of his misery. . . .” (
I turn in my chair and look around the kitchen. Viv is at the stove. Jan is slicing ham for sandwiches. The old man is out the back door somewhere, hawking and spitting. I cut in on Joe Ben’s ramblings: “Talkin’ about brother geese,” I say, “where’s the boy this morning?”

Lee comes into the kitchen just as I’m getting up from my plate. “Let’s move it, bub,” I tell him. He says all right and I go out to put on my boots. There’s something different happening but I don’t know what, or more there is something different going to happen and nobody knows for sure what. . . .
) “Yes siree
bob!
” Joby said, clashed the pump of his old J. C. Higgins 12-gauge a time or two. “You know how I know it’s my day? Because I gave up
coffee
today, been intendin’ to a long time, Brother Walker says it’s a sin. So by gosh I quit, an’ I’m ready to get my goose.”

Well, Joby was nearly right this once; it sure enough should’ve been his day to get him that honker. Everything was just as right as he said. I went outside to start the boat while Lee ate, and I saw why it was so clear. The rain and cold had sort of beat that mist down out of the sky. It was packed down on the river thick as snow and about four feet deep. I couldn’t even see the boat; I had to feel around to get it started. Lee and Joe come out and we headed out, traveling through that mist like the boat was submerged and our heads was periscopes. Joe was still beating his gums about what fat times he had ahead by now, not even about the goose he was going to get; as far as he was concerned that goose was good as in the pot, a settled issue, and he was going on to new glories.

“Fat times ahead,” he was saying. “Oh yeah. Not many more trips up in this boat. What do you figure, Hank? Another day or so at Breakleg, then clean-up, and that’s
her
for ridin’ this boat up river in the cold and dark, you boys
realize
that? That one more day or so is the
last
of this, the last we’ll ever have to look at those stump-jungles? Few more days, then we got
easy street
at that state park, cuttin’ those big old easy sticks like we was tourists gatherin’ huckleberries.”

I told him, “You’ll
think
gatherin’ huckleberries after about ten hours’ work out there twisting a screw jerk. Working that park with all the goddam restrictions they put on us’ll be just like going back a hundred years.”

“Oh yeah,
but
,” he said, closing one eye and holding up his finger, “but at
least
there won’t be no more fightin’ that donkey; you got to admit not having to fight that donkey is gonna be a gas.”

“I ain’t admitting anything is gonna be a gas until I try it out. What about you, bub?”

Lee turned and gave me a flimsy sort of grin and said, “Not when the only advantage seems to be the elimination of a piece of modern machinery . . . that doesn’t sound like much of a gas. . . .”

“Modern?”
Joe whooped. “You ain’t had to ride that monster you call a ‘modern machine,’ Lee; that outfit was wore out and old when old Henry was still a boy! You ain’t looking at the
bright
side. Remember, ‘I had no shoes and complained till I saw a man griping about his feet.’ ”

Lee shook his head. “Joe, if I didn’t have shoes and saw a
basket
case, I still wouldn’t have solved my own footwear problem. . . .”

“No; no, that’s so; that wouldn’t solve your problems. . . .” He thought a second, then he brightened up: “But you got to admit seeing a basket case, it would distract you from it a little bit!”

Lee laughed, giving up. “Joe, you are incorrigible, completely incorrigible. . . .”

Joe said thank you to that and was so flustered at being so flattered he didn’t say anything else until we got to the mill.

The fog around the mill was packed just as thick as it was at the house. It was lighter out now and we could see it better, and that mist looked more than ever like snow. I swung the boat in to about where I judged the dock to be, hoping there hadn’t been any change since I last saw the landing. Andy was standing there, alone and looking tired. He’d been standing guard at the mill every night since Evenwrite had tried to loose the booms. It’d been his idea. I’d given him a sleeping bag and a flashlight and the old eight-gauge goose cannon Henry’d ordered once from Mexico a long time back before everything under a ten-gauge was made illegal. Hell of a gun, used a shell about the size of a beer can and you had to pass the stock under your armpit and brace it against a tree or a rock to keep the recoil from breaking your shoulder; I’d told Andy why I gave that gun to him instead of a 30-30 or something easier handled, was that I didn’t expect him to kill anybody defending the place, to just fire that monster in the air if there was trouble and help would come running, probably all the way from the Pentagon with the racket it made.

Andy caught the rope Joe pitched him and pulled us up to the dock. I thought at first he was looking so drug account of he wasn’t getting a good night’s rest in the sleeping bag, but then I saw it was something else. He was alone.