Sometimes a Great Notion (84 page)

In town, after a brief stop for parts, Henry dropped me at the doctor’s office to drive on to the Snag, where he said he could “pass the wait profitably.” I told him I would wait in the outer room if he wasn’t back when the doctor finished with me, and I walked to the desk; a forty-five-year-old Amazon in white informed me that I would have to wait, asked me to be seated, then glared at me for an hour over the top of a magazine while I fought sleep on a septic-scented couch and wished I could join my old father at his place of profitable waiting. . . .

After I drop the kid at the doctor’s I decide to drive on to the Snag for a little slash. See what’s the news. Mainly me, it looks like. My coming in kind of stirs things up a mite, but I say piss on ’em and head for the bar. I have me two whiskies while I read the scribbled notes pinned up there near the door, advertising all kinds of paraphernalia, and I’m about to get me a third when Indian Jenny comes driving through the door like a big old cow. She blinks around and sees me and she comes bearing down on me with fire in her eye.

“You!” she says to me, “you all, your whole family,
you
, you’re bad as hell on us, being so stubborn.”

“Jenny! By god now, you like a drink? Teddy, see what Jenny here’d like.” I act like everything’s normal as pie, just like I done at Stokes’s. I’m darned if I show them I know better. Maybe I don’t hear so good no more, but I can still keep up appearances. Jenny, she takes the glass Teddy brought but she don’t let it soothe her down none. She sucks it down without taking her eyes offn me. Seems to me she’s awful caught up in something don’t have any bearing on her. But then, she’s never gone overboard for me. When she’s done with her whisky she sets down the glass and says, “Anyhow, you can’t make delivery anyhow. Not by Thanksgiving. Nobody can.”

I just grin at her and shrug like I ain’t got no more idee than a duck what she means about Thanksgiving. Wondering what’s eating at her, by god. Maybe without a little cash floating around and niggers here not able to get drunk, she’s been having a tough time getting victims. Could be. This business is affecting everybody, I reckon. Maybe the way it’s affecting Jenny is giving her the hot britches. She keeps glaring at me; then she says
no
body can make it by Thanksgiving and I tell her I am awful sorry but I just
cannot
make out what she is driving at. She tips her glass again and puts it back on the counter. And then says again, “No, you won’t make it.” This time in a spooky goddam fashion that someway
bothers
me, by god. Enough I have to ask, “What you
mean
I won’t make it? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, what’s to stop me?”

And she says, “I get my revenge on you, Henry Stamper . . . I been working with bat bones all week. . . .”

“So bat bones is gonna stop me? Boy howdy, and you Indians—”

“No. Not just bat bones, not
only. . . .
”

“What else, then?” I ask, getting peeved a little. “What is this thing you got workin’ for you so fierce?”

“The moon,” is all she says, “the moon,” and walks back in the direction of the women’s toilet, leaving me standing there studying
that
one over . . .

The other citizens in the bar went disappointedly back to their drinks and their conversations; they had thought for a minute that Jenny might really light into the old turtle. But no, they decided, when she’d left, just more of her bull about the moon and the stars. . . . So they dismissed her and drew finger patterns on the formica tabletops with the condensate from their drinks and wished something would happen.

Only Henry, with his lean, slanting back to the room, gave serious thought to Jenny’s words. The
moon?
He finished his drink slowly. . . . “The
moon
, huh?” he said again to himself, frowning. Then, slowly, reached for the wallet from his pocket. “What if . . . ?” He took a tiny book from one of the wallet’s compartments and riffled through the pages, stopping, running a cracked black nail down a list of tiny numbers. “Let’s see.

November; what if—” Then abruptly shoved wallet and book into his pocket, lurched out through the door to the pick-up. “Christ . . . what if she hadn’t
said
something?” He drove east, out of town, without pausing for stop signs or even considering going back to the doctor’s office for Lee. When he passed the mill he swung off to the side of the highway and called out to Andy, “How they doin’ up there?”

Andy was dragging a huge log into place with a peavey pole; the small motorboat he was using to retrieve the logs as they showed up in the river chugged through the opening in a boom. “Pretty good,” the boy called back. “About ten. An’ bigger’n any I ever see before.”

“How’s the river mark? Up, ain’t it?”

“Up a scosh, yeah; why? It ain’t up much, not near enough to trouble us. . . .”

“But it’s still ebbing fast, ain’t it? While it’s rising? Ain’t that right, it’s ebbing.”

Before Andy answered he stood up in the boat bottom to look across the surface of the water; chunks of bark and debris were indeed still moving rapidly down river toward the sea. Slightly confounded now, he turned the boat and putted to check the marker on one of the check-pilings to be sure he hadn’t misread the depth. No; he’d been right. It was rising, and at a fair clip, though the river was still ebbing fast. “Yeah,” he called slowly over his shoulder, “it’s running out an’ rising at the same time. Uncle Henry, what you make of that? The water coming up while the river’s running down?”

But the old man had already thrown the pick-up back into gear and was picking up speed on the highway up river. The moon. The
moon
, huh? Well, maybe so the moon. Well, okay, the moon. But I can whup it too. I by god can whup the moon too. . . .

When the Amazon in the nurse’s uniform finally led me to the doctor’s office for examination, the doctor wasn’t even concerned enough over my pitiful fever-racked frame to be present; in fact, it was the Amazon that ministered to me, and I didn’t see the good doctor himself until she had completed my treatment and showed me to another office where a mountain of flesh trapped within a white smock whistled and sighed from an ancient swivel chair.

“Leland Stamper? I’m Doctor Layton. You got a minute? Sit down.”

“I have a minute, probably more, in fact; I’m waiting for my father to return for me, but if it’s all the same to you, I think I shall continue to stand. I’m paying homage to the penicillin shot.”

The doctor grinned at me through his purple jowls and held out a gold cigarette case. “Smoke?” I took one and thanked him. While I lit the cigarette he leaned torturously back in his chair and regarded me with that look generally reserved by deans for wayward sophomores. I waited for him to get into whatever it was he was planning to lecture about, wondering if he didn’t have better things to do with his valuable time than to waste it on a young stranger bent on adultery. He ponderously lit his own cigarette, then leaned back like a white blimp exhaling smoke. I tried putting on my best look of annoyed impatience, but something in his manner, in the way he relished the pause, turned my impatience to discomfort.

I naturally assumed he had called me in to make a citizen’s appeal to brother Hank through me, as most of the rest of the strikebound town had been doing to every available Stamper, but he took his cigarette from his fat red butt of mouth and said instead, “I just wanted to have a look at your face was all. Because your
posterior
has a certain nostalgic significance; your posterior happened to be one of the very first in a long line of posteriors that I had the opportunity to whack. You were born my first year practicing, you see.”

I told him he could have seen the article itself a moment ago if he’d been on his toes.

“Oh, posteriors don’t change much. Not like faces. How’s your mom, by the way? I certainly hated to see you two leave here when—”

“She’s dead,” I said flatly. “You hadn’t heard? Not quite a year. Now, if there’s nothing else?”

The chair squeaked and complained as he leaned back forward. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, tapping the ash into the wastepaper basket. “No, that’s all.” He looked at the chart the nurse had given him. “Just come back in three days for a follow-up. And watch out. Oh, and say hello to Hank for me when you—”

“Watch out?” I stared at him. The fat face underwent an abrupt transition before my eyes, from clod of a doctor to arch-criminal in white. “Watch
out?
”

“Yes,
you
know,” he said; then, after a knowing wink, added, “for exhaustion, cold, et cetera.” He coughed, frowned at the cigarette, tossed it in the basket with the ashes, as I tried to fathom just how deep the knowing went beneath that wink. “Yes, you can lick this thing,” he said with heavy overtones, “if you don’t let it catch you with your pants down.”

“What thing?”

“This Asian flu bug, what did you
think
I meant?” He regarded me innocently from beneath eyelids bloated and positively drooping with wickedness. I was suddenly certain that he knew everything, the whole plan, the entire intended vengeance,
everything!
In some diabolic Sydney Greenstreet fashion, he had amassed a complete brochure of all my activities. . . . “Maybe we could have a
chat
the next time you come in, huh?” he purred, lips dripping innuendoes. “Until then, like I said, watch out.”

Terrified, I hurried out to the waiting room, with his echo pursuing me like a hound baying watch OUT . . . OUT . . . OUT . . . What was happening? I wrung my hands. What had gone wrong? How had he known? And where was my father . . . ?

On the slope Hank stopped the shriek of his saw and tilted the metal brim of his hat back to watch the lean, stiff-moving figure of old Henry work its way down a switchback deer trail, curious and amused (but, as a matter of fact, none too surprised that the old man had come back out. I had been halfway suspecting as much since I’d saw him look over the set-up and watch Joe unload the old-time equipment. I’d halfway figured he’d get into town and get a little juiced and decide to come back out and show us how it used to be done. But, as he got closer, I noticed he looked pretty sober, like there was more on his mind than just futzing around shooting the bull and getting in everybody’s way. There was something about the way he moved that I recognized as special, about the way he hustled—a mixture of worry and joy and excitement as he jerked his neck and tossed the white shock of hair around where it kept getting washed down in his eyes. It called to my mind the kind of grim giddiness that I hadn’t seen in him in god knows how long, years and years, but that I recognized right off, even fifty yards off and him in a leg cast.

I stopped my cutting. I laid my saw down, lit a fresh cigarette off my stub, and watched him come . . . scrabbling, grabbing vines and roots as he heaved that stiff leg before him—heave, then lurching forward, pole-vaulting forward almost over that muddied cast, finding a foothold with the one good, cork-booted leg, then throwing that cast ahead of him again—relentless and grim and comical all at once.

“Whoa back a little,” I hollered up the hill at him. “You’ll pop a gasket, you old fool. Slow down. Nobody’s after you.”

He didn’t answer back. I hadn’t expected that he would, puffing and panting like he was.
Where’s the kid?
But he didn’t slow down, either.
What’s he done with the kid?

“Lee up in the pick-up?” I called again and started angling toward him. “Or was he so goddam sick he couldn’t even make the ride back with half a dozen cotter pins?”

“Left ’im,” he said, short of breath. “Town.” He didn’t say anything again until he reached the log I had been bucking and leaned his hip up against it for a rest. “Ah, lor’,” he gasped. “Ah, lor’.” For a minute I was worried: his eyes were rolling; his face was as white as his hair; his throat seemed clogged . . . he tipped his pink old toothless mouth up to the rain, sucking in great breaths of the wet air. “Ah, lor’ almighty,” he said, finally getting a good breath. He ran a tongue around his lips that looked like a tongue out of a boot. “Shoo! Took ’er faster’n I planned. Shooee!”

“Well, Jesus H. Christ I hope to shout,” I said, relieved as well as a little hacked off at being so worried. “What the shit do you mean, come ball-assin’ down that hill like a wild stallion? I’m damned if I want you poppin’ some gasket where I

have to tote you back up to that pick-up. You’d be heavy with that load you got on.” I could see he’d had him a couple by the way he was colored up, but he was a long way from drunk.

“Lef ’ the boy in town,” he said, standing up and looking around him. “Where’s Joe Benjamin? Get him over here.”

“He’s the other side of those outcroppin’s—what the hell’s wrong with you, anyhow?” I saw he was steamed up with more than Teddy’s whisky. “What happened back there in town?”

“Give Joe Ben a whistle,” he told me. He walked a few steps from the log, surveying the lay of the land. After looking it over he says, “You workin’ land too level. No good now. Too much effort to get the bastards moving. We’ll move on, down yonder past that little swale, where it’s steeper. It’s dangerous, but we’re in kind of a bind. Where the
hell’s
Joe Ben!”

I gave Joe another whistle. “Now cool off and tell me what you’re so steamed up about.”

“Let’s wait,” he says. He was still puffing pretty bad. “Till Joe Ben gets here. Here’s the pins. I left in a hurry. I didn’t have time to pick up the boy. Whooee. My lungs ain’t so good any more. . . .” And I saw there wasn’t any sense doing anything but wait. . . .)

After another hour spent in that pungent waiting room, an hour of pure terror and paranoia spent pretending to read back issues of
McCall’s
and
True Romance
under the nurse’s supervision and wondering just how much that devil of a doctor knew, I resigned myself to admitting that the old man wasn’t coming back for me and that perhaps the doctor didn’t know anything. I faked a yawn. I stood up and blew my nose loudly on a handkerchief so overused that the Amazon winced with disgust at the nasty old thing. “Could get yourself some paper from the john,” she advised me over the top of her magazine, “ ’n’ throw that unsanitary thing away.”