Sometimes a Great Notion (92 page)

Then, finally knew what I had been warned to WATCH OUT for.

(
And if you can only fake being strong, not being weak, then the kid has done to me what I set off to do to him! He’s shaped me up. He’s made me to quit faking.

He’s straightened me out.
)

 

. . . And the citizens of the little West Coast towns, not infrequently, needed some time to even begin
recognizing
that it had happened, let alone to get around to figuring it out. For this reason their centennials are never a great success—many oldtimers from bygone times are reluctant to admit those times are gone by. For this reason a nondescript bog in a meadow is still called Boomer’s Ferry . . . though Mr. Boomer, his cable-drawn ferry, and the wide slough that once floated them, have long since sunk into nondescript mud. For this reason it takes almost a day after the rain has stopped in Wakonda for the men to straighten up out of their hump-shouldered shuffle, almost a day after the wind has quit whipping the water before the women remove the newspaper calking from beneath doors. After one whole rainless day they are willing to say that it by god
might
be clearing up at that, after a rainless day and night the men and women are even compelled to go so far as to admit that it has
stopped
, but it takes the mentality of a
child
to think that the sun might actually come out, here, in November, right in the dead of winter.

“Look: the old
sun
might come out, and it almost
Thanksgivin’.
How come? It never did
that
before . . .”

“Old sun is gonna come out to
look
is how come . . . to see is it
spring
time yet,” was how the phenomenon was interpreted by a Siuslow Street Grade School meteorologist in galoshes and mud-daubed tresses. “To see if it is time to have springtime is how come . . .”

“Ain’t,” a junior colleague, behind her one whole grade and a boy at that, had the gall to dissent. “Ain’t it a-tall.”

“The ol’ rain some way quit rainin’, see, an’ the sun he waked up an’ he says, ‘It quit rainin’ . . . maybe time for spring. I better see. . . . ’ ”

“That ain’t it,” he kept on, “that ain’t it a-tall.”

“And so,” she went on, ignoring him, “and so . . .” She drew a deep breath and lifted her shoulders in a gesture of bored certainty. “... the ol’ sun is simpah-lee come sneaking out to see what
time
it is.”

“No. That . . . just . . . ain’t . . . it. Not a-tall.”

She tried to remain silent, knowing it was best not to dignify these sillies by replying, but the mysterious measured tone of his statement, suggesting knowledge of other data, had anticipated and cleverly baited that silence. The muddy meteorologist detected a vacillation of faith in her audience—too much vacillation to simpalee ignore.

“
All
right, smarty-pants!” She turned on him. “You tell us how come there’s sunshine out an’ it almost Thanksgiving.”

Smarty-pants, a big-nosed, big-eared skeptic in taped-together eyeglasses and a screaming Nylaglo raincoat, raised his eyes and looked gravely up at the seminary watching him from the creaking merry-go-round. They waited. The pressure was on. There was no two ways about it: he’d opened his mouth one time too many and now he had to put up or shut up, and he was going to have to put up some extremely persuasive logic to overcome the girl’s lead, for not only was she backed by some pretty sound argument and her own bright red Frisbee, which she tossed and caught at unpredictable intervals; she was a second-grader to boot. He cleared his throat and called on authority to help make up the gap.

“My daddy said last night, my
daddy
said . . . that it’s gonna be clear sonofabitchin’ skies now that the sky’s cleared.”

“Poot!” She wasn’t one to fall for a closed argument. “But how
come?”

“Because—my
daddy
said—” He paused, kneaded his brow to recall the verbatim beauty of the reason, darkening his countenance and simultaneously building suspense with a devastating sense of timing. “Be
cause
—” His face cleared; the old memory had come through once again. “That hardnosed Stamper bunch is finally knuckled under, is what.” He delivered the clincher. “Because that sonofabitchin’ Hank Stamper is
fine-a-lee
called off his deal with Wakonda Pacific!”

Right on cue the sun slid above a cloudbank, sharp, keen, and freshly bright, to illuminate the playground with an icy white glare. Without another word the girl turned and galoshed off toward the swings, whipped and knowing it; it was a great loss of prestige, but there was simply no way to dispute the statement of authority when it was being seconded by the actual appearance of the party in question. No, she was forced to bow to the truth: the sun had come out because of the capitulation of the Stampers, not because it suspected an early spring.

Though, in fact, it did seem very much like spring. Dying dandelions woke to that keen-edged sun and managed a last bloom. Beaten grass lifted straight. Meadowlarks sung in the cattails. And by noon of that second rainless day the town was so thick with the warm, steamy air of Oregon springtime that even the adults recognized the presence of that sun.

The sun tried to draw off some of the moisture that had gathered in its brief absence. The roofs steamed. The walls steamed. The railroad ties in weed-grown fields steamed. In Swede Row off Nahamish Street, where the fishermen lived, their drab shacks, primerless and paintless and soaked through and through, gave off such a cloud of hissing silver mist that the whole row appeared to have caught fire from the unexpected arrival of the November sun.

“Bitchin’ weather, don’t you say?” said the Real Estate Man on the South Main sidewalk as he strode, with his coat over his shoulder and good times just around the bend, beside Brother Walker of the First Pentecostal Church of God and Metaphysics. He drew a great lungful of optimism, puffed out his chest to the sun like a chicken drying its feathers, and repeated, “Bitch-
ing.
”

“Ah.” Brother Walker was not very enthusiastic about this particular description.

“What I
mean
is”—damn these guys make a guy feel like he can’t let go and talk American—“is this kind of climate in late November is truly
extra
-ordinary,
extra
-ordinary, don’t you agree?”

Brother Walker smiled. That was better. He nodded. . . . “The Lord is merciful,” he announced with confidence.

“You bet!”

“Yes, yes, merciful . . .”

“Big times coming,” was the Real Estate Man’s evaluation. “We’re out of the woods; around that old corner.” He was tingling with joy and ease; he thought of all the little Johnny Red-feathers he had carved recently, how their faces had grown so like Hank Stamper’s that he had almost gone bats. Now all that was over. And just in time. “Yep. Prosperity
round
the bend . . . now that everybody’s been set to rights.”

“Yes . . . the Lord is merciful,” Brother Walker said again cheerfully, adding this time, “and eternally
just.
”

They strode on down the puddled walk, a dealer in dirt and a peddler of sky, chance comrades for a while because of their shared destination and their corresponding views of destiny, both beaming their brightest and dreaming of great transactions of earth and air—tingling and cheerful, real pinnacles of optimism, masters of the bright outlook . . . but still only amateurs compared to the dead man they were on their way to bury.

At the parlor Lilienthal studies old snapshots and adds last hurried touches to make this loved one look just as natural as life. He wants everything in this ceremony to be
especially
just as natural, so the kin won’t object to the bill: the bill is padded heavily to cover the loss he took the day before by burying that miserly Willard Eggleston and the poor old drunk who used to cut shingle bolts; a ranger had found the old man passed on in his shack and brought him in, and a coroner is legally
bound
to attend to such deceased finds, though the poor souls are without a relative to their name and have been passed-on for a week. . . . So Lilienthal takes extra pains and special efforts with
this
loved one, partially to pay for, partially to make up for, the treatment that other hunk of rotten meat received yesterday. . . .

At her shack on the clamflats Indian Jenny sits on her cot in a position as close as she can come to the full lotus. She has been meditating ever since the news of the accident reached her; now she is stiff and hungry and she suspects that a family of earwigs has taken up residence in the back of her skirt. But she waits, motionless, and tries to think as Alan Watts told her to think. Not that she has much hope any longer of solving her problem by this method; mainly she is just dallying: she just doesn’t want to go into town yet for further news. Further news, she has realized since hearing of the developments up river, cannot possibly be anything but
bad
news . . . and she doesn’t know which will dismay her most, hearing that Henry Stamper still lives or hearing that he has died.

She closes her eyes and redoubles her efforts to think of nothing, or almost nothing, or at least of nothing as unpleasant as her aching thighs, or Henry Stamper, or earwigs . . .

At the Wakonda Arms, Rod looks up from his newspaper to see Ray come buck-and-winging through the door with his cheeks glowing and his arms filled with green-papered bundles.
“Puttin’ on my white tie . . . gettin’ out my tails.”
Ray tumbled the load onto the bed. “Fish and soup, Roderick my man, fish and soup this p.m.
Cash
, too. Teddy paid, after nearly two months; it’s a drag that poor little Willard wasn’t around to enjoy the event, after bugging us about our cleaning bill for so long. Too bad, Willy-o; you’d of waited a few days, you could of split fulfilled.” He clicked into his dance step again, skipping over to the chest of drawers. “But look here, I got to get hold of the old ax. Come to daddy, baby; I got to get the old phalanges limbered. . . .”

Rod watched from the bed as Ray pulled the guitar case from beneath the chest of drawers. He gave up on his paper, but for all Ray’s buoyant good tidings, he decided to hold his finger on his place in the want ads. “What you coming on so about?” he asked as Ray began tuning the instrument. “Hey! Did Teddy finally agree about upping our cut?”

“Nope.”
Ting ting ting.

“You heard from that moneypockets uncle of yours? Huh? You heard from Rhonda Ann in Astoria? Damn you, if you and her—” “Nope, nope, nope-a-dope.”
Ting ting ting-a-ting.
“Bay
bee!
does a change in weather like this screw up the ol’ strings.”
T-eeng t-eeng.

Rod rolled to his hip and spread the newspaper against the sun streaming through the dust-starched curtains, returning to the want ads. “Then if you’re tuning that outfit planning a gig tonight, you might’s well figure on pickin’ lead and bass both. ’Cause man I mean
screw
it. I’m not taking it . . . ten bucks a night and no tips for a month, I don’t hafta take that sound and I told Teddy so.”

Ray looked up from his tuning, his face a wide grin. “Man . . . tell you what I’m gonna do: just because I’m such a sterling fellow,
tonight . . .
you can have the whole ten and I’ll be happy with the tips. Cool?”

No answer came from beneath the paper, but a suspicious silence.

“Cool, then, okay? Because I tell you, Roderick. There’s things you ain’t heard and veins you ain’t got your fingers on; it’s gonna be tips up the geetus from here on out and loot and luck all the way to Nashville. Hoo-
hoo!
I don’t know about you, but I’m goin’ to the
moon
, you sour-mouthed pessimist. To the moon. Dig?”

From beneath his paper the pessimist remained silent, digging only that the last time Ray came buck-and-winging into a hotel room to go to coming on like this the nut had ended up, instead of in Nashville, on the emergency ward in a stinking little hospital outside of Albany or Corvallis or someplace like that, with a
hose
down his big mouth after a fistful of Nembutals.

“Get up from there, man,” Ray shouted. “Get shuckin’. Get out your machine an’ let’s get the kinks loose. Get your chin off your chest and get on the sunny side of the street and pack up your troubles. . . .”
Chang
: C-chord.
Chong
: F, G-seventh, G ... “ ’Cause, man, it’s—”
Chang
: C-chord again and “
Blue skies, smilin’ at me . . . nothin’ but blue skies
—”

“For maybe one or two days.” A voice rose from the want ads and clouded the air with dismal forecasts of approaching low fronts. “For maybe one or two crummy days,
then
what kind of motherin’ skies?”

“Go ahead.” Ray grinned. “Sit there under a paper and rot. This boy’s gonna get his pickin’ and strummin’ hand sharpened up and take it straight to the top. Tonight’s the start. Sweet joy and victory is gonna fill the old Snag tonight, you see if it don’t. Because, man”—chang tink a tink—
“Nothin’ but blue skies . . . do I skooby-dooby seeEEE. . .”

In the Snag, Teddy looks at the blue sky through his cold scribble of neon and has a slightly different reaction to the unusual change in weather. . . . Blue skies isn’t barroom weather. You need rain for bringing in the drinkers; this kind of day people drink lemonade. You need
rain
and
dark
, and
cold. . . . That’s
the stuff to start the fear running, to keep the fools drinking.