“Mr. Stamper . . .” Teddy began timidly.
“How you been, Floyd? Gettin’ fat? Mel . . . Les. Come on over here an’ let’s section up this bottle we—Teddy, you snake.”
“Mr. Stamper, it’s against the law to sell a bottle over the counter in Oregon. You must’ve forgot.”
“I didn’t forget, Teddy, but I’m home from the
wars!
I want to bust loose a little. What d’ya say, boys?”
The jukebox whirred. Evenwrite glanced at his watch, stood up, and stretched. “What do you say we raincheck that bottle till Saturday night, Hank. It’s goin’ on suppertime.”
“Mr. Stamper, I can’t sell . . .”
“Same with me, Hank,” Les said. “Good to see you though.”
“And the rest of you niggers?” Hank addressed the others good-naturedly. “You got other irons in the fire, too, I suppose. Okay, it’s more for me. Teddy . . . ?”
“Mr. Stamper, I can’t sell . . .”
“Okay, okay. We’ll
all
raincheck it. See you birds later. I think I’ll drive around for a look at the town.”
They called farewells, his old friends with style and grit and other irons in the fire, and he left, wondering what had come over them. They acted tired, scared, asleep. Outside he noticed how dull the mountains looked and wondered if the whole world had gone to seed while he was off fighting to save it.
He drove on past the bay, past the commercial docks where blunt gray motors squatted in boats saying “buddha buddha buddha” while the fishermen tossed gleaming salmon into community coffins, past the clam flats and the gull-infested dump out the road through the dunes to the beach. He passed the heaps of driftwood and finally stopped at the foam’s edge to wait, stopped with the cycle propped between his legs in the hard wet sand to actually wait for something to happen, for some mystic revelation to explode in his mind making all things clear forever, holding his breath like a sorcerer just finished with all the steps necessary to some world-shaking spell. He was the first of the Stampers to complete the full circle west. He waited.
And the gulls cried, and the sand fleas swarmed over drowned surf birds, and the waves cracked against the earth with the methodic regularity of a clock ticking.
Hank laughed out loud and stomped the starter bar with his instep. “Okeedoke,” he said, laughing and stomping again. “Okeedoke, okeedoke, okeedoke . . .”
He returned then, with sand still in his pants cuffs and zinc ointment still on his nose, to the old wooden warren across that waiting river. And found the old man still on the levee, with hammer and nail and number nine cable, working still to make the river wait a little longer.
“I come home,” he let the old man know, and walked on up the path.
To the rattling woods for a few months with the smoke and wind and rain, to the mill for a few more, thinking that indoor work might settle an immigrant heart, that the zinc ointment of indoor air might salve his windburned hide—for a while even managed to convince himself that he liked the quarterbacking task of sitting that sawyer’s seat and handling all those controlling levers and buttons that made the big machines hump and run—then back again to the woods at the first crack of spring. But that
sky . . . !
How could a sky so full of blue feel so empty?
He worked those summer woods the hardest he had worked since training for the state wrestling championship his senior year at Wakonda High, but at the end of this season, when he was rock-hard and trained to a razor’s edge, there were no tournaments to enter, no opponents to pin, no medals to win.
“I’m going off again,” he let the old man know in the fall. “There’s somebody I got to see.”
“What the bleedin’ hell you
talkin’
about, right here at the peak of cuttin’? What the boogin’ devil you
talkin’
, somebody you got to see
why?
”
He grinned at the puffing red face. “Why? Well, I got to see this somebody, Henry, to see if I’m
that
Somebody. I won’t be gone more’n a couple weeks. I’ll straighten things around good before I take off.”
He left the old man fuming and cursing on the levee and walked to the house, and after two days going over the books with Janice and through the woods with Joe Ben packed a small bag and caught a train East, wearing tight new shoes and a stiff new flannel one-button roll.
There was no watermelon fair waiting for him that fall, but the oilcloth banner announcing last year’s event still hung from the wooden arch. It snapped and fluttered in a dusty red wind and the faded letters peeled and fell like strange leaves beneath the train’s wheels. He went first to the jail, where the uncle gave him directions and sold him a repossessed Chevy pick-up. He left the jail and the uncle and found Viv behind a tarpaper fruit stand on the highway, scratching estimated weights into the waxy green rind of a pile of melons with a sharp stick: look at a melon, think a few seconds, then scratch a number.
“You just guess?” he asked, coming up behind. “How do you know you’re right?”
She straightened up and shaded her eyes to look at him. A lock of the sorrel hair was sweated to her brow. “I’m generally pretty close,” she said.
She asked that he wait on the other side of the muslin curtain that separated her tiny room from the rest of the fruit stand. Hank thought that she would be ashamed for him to see the squalor of her dwelling, and complied in silence while she ducked through the curtain to pack. But what he mistook for shame was closer to reverence; in the little cluttered room that had been her home since her parents’ death, Viv was shriving herself like a nun before communion. She let her eyes roam over the room’s shabby walls—the travel pictures, the clippings, the arrangements of dried straw flowers, all the childhood adornments that she knew she must leave as sure as the walls themselves, until she finally let her eyes meet with those looking out at her from a wood-framed oval mirror. The face that looked out at her was cramped into the lower part of the mirror to avoid a crack in the glass, but it didn’t seem to mind the inconvenience; it smiled brightly back, wishing her luck. She glanced about once more and made a silent excited vow of allegiance to all the holy old dreams and hopes and ideals that these walls had held, then, chiding herself for being such a silly, kissed the face in the glass good-by.
And when she came out, with a small wicker bag in one hand, and in a sunflower-yellow cotton dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat that all but had a price tag hanging from it, she had two requests to make before they left. “When we get to where we’re going, to Oregon . . . you know what I’d like? You remember me talking about wanting a canary—”
“Sweetpants,” Hank interrupted, “I’ll get you a whole damn flock of birds if you want. I’ll get you doves and sparrows and cockatoos and canaries till the world looks level. Oh me, but you look pretty, you know that? About as pretty a thing as I think I ever saw. But . . . how come you tucked your hair all up in your hat like that? I like you better with it all hanging and swinging—”
“But it gets in the way so, all long, and gets so dirty—”
“Well then, maybe we’ll just have to dye it black.” He laughed, taking the bag and sweeping her along to the pick-up. “But we’ll leave it long.”
So she never made the second request.
She loved the lush greenery of her new home, and the old man, and Joe Ben and his family. She learned quickly how to fit in with the Stamper life. When old Henry accused Hank of picking a limp little Miss Mousie, Viv was compelled to change the old man’s mind the first time they went raccoon-hunting together by outwalking, outyelling, and outdrinking every man on the hunt and having to be dragged giggling and singing back out of the woods on a makeshift travois like an Indian wounded in battle. After that the old man stopped teasing her, and she went on a number of hunts. She didn’t care for the killing part, where the dogs tore up a screaming coon or fox, but she liked the walking part, and she liked to be with all of them, and she could let them think she didn’t mind the other if that’s what they wanted to think. She could be like that if they wanted.
As much as she took part in the Stamper activities, she still was obviously without a world truly her own. It bothered Hank at first and he thought he could help this by giving her her own room—“Not to sleep in, of course, just a place where you can go and sew and stuff, and it’s yours, do you see?” She didn’t, quite, but she went along with the idea; for one thing, it would be a good place to keep that bird he’d bought her from annoying the rest of the family, and for another she knew her private room made him feel better about having a world that she could never enter, a violent and brawling life that was to him what Viv’s “sewing room” was supposed to be to her. Sometimes, after tying one on in Wakonda, Hank would arrive home in time to meet Joe Ben on his way to church, and he would go to where Viv lay reading on the low couch in her room and sit in the hard chair facing her while he told her about his night in town. Viv would listen, hugging her knees, then switch out her lamp and take him to bed.
These blow-offs in town never bothered her. In fact, the only quirk in her husband’s personality that ever seemed to cause her remorse was Hank’s teeth-gritting stoicism in the face of pain; sometimes as they undressed for bed she would break into furious tears on the discovery of deep line-cut festering red on Hank’s thigh. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she would demand. Hank would grin shyly. “Ah, ’tain’t nothin’ but a scratch.” She threw her hands in the air. “Damn you! Damn you and your scratches to hell!” The scene always amused Hank and gave him such a glow of boyish pride that he went to great lengths to conceal his logging wounds from his wife; when a springback broke one of his ribs, she didn’t know it until he took off his shirt to wash; when he lost his two fingers in the donkey drum he wrapped the stubs and didn’t mention the accident until Viv asked him why he was wearing his work gloves at the supper table. Dipping his head with embarrassment he said, “Why, I guess I just forgot to take ’em off at the door . . .” and drew a glove from a claw so mangled and clotted with blood and cable rust that it took Viv a hysterical half-hour to get the wound clean enough to realize that the whole hand wasn’t lost as well as three or four inches of the arm.
Sometimes Joe Ben’s wife, Janice, would corner Hank and hold him grinning against a wall with her solemn owl-eyed gaze and chide him for not respecting Viv’s secret spiritual needs and giving the poor girl a little more chance to be a wife.
“Don’t you mean chance to be a nursemaid, Jan? I appreciate your good intentions but take my word: Viv is wife aplenty. If she needs to doctor something I’ll get her a kittycat.” Besides, he added to himself, for anybody to figure what the devil Viv’s secret spiritual needs are or what to do about them you’d have to know her a hundred years. Have to be tuned in exactly to Viv’s wave length. And Jan might be good at figuring people’s needs but she wasn’t
that
good. . . .
(But I got a big boot out of Jan that way. She was always corralling me in a corner with some of her big-eyed advice. Which I usually let slide off me like water off a duck. But when she come up to me that first morning Lee was at the house and told me to be real easy with the boy and I said, “Easy? what do you mean easy? I intend to get some work outa the cuss is what,” and she said that wasn’t what she meant, that what she meant was not to get into some kind of argument with him right off, I knew what she was driving at; better than she did, in fact. Because what with Viv and me getting into it the night before about her always wanting to fraternize with those harpies in town, and getting into it again that same morning as she headed for the barn in a huff, I was in a pee-poor mood. And that’s the point: knowing this feeling like I did, I knew that if me and the kid started disagreeing about something I’d get an urge to pop somebody and it’d be just like me and that gleef in that bar in Colorado, only more so by a damned sight: I’d talk myself onto a limb again and end up getting pissed and kicking the living shit out of Lee . . . only this time it’d be worse than a little stretch in boot—we’d lose a badly needed woods hand. “What I mean, Hank,” Jan said, “is you find something safe to talk about when you talk to that boy.” I grinned at her and lifted her chin up with my finger and told her, “Janny lamb, you just ease yourself; I won’t talk about nothing with him but the weather and the woods. That’s a promise.” “Good,” she said and drew those waxy lids down over her eyes [I used to kid Joby about her being able to see through those lids like a frog], and headed off back to the kitchen to work on breakfast.
Soon as she left, Joby was on me about practically the same thing, only he wanted me to be sure I said
something
to Lee. “Tell him how he’s growed or
something
, Hank. Last night you was about as friendly to him as a leper.”
“By god, now,” I said, “you an’ Jan get together and rehearse this?”
“Just let the boy know he’s home, is all. You gotta keep in mind he’s one of the sensitives.”
Joe went on off, leaving me kind of peeved—they act like the place was a grade school welcoming first-graders. I thought I knew what they were both angling at though. And I was already wondering how I was going to make it with another sensitive in the house, especially the way Viv’d been since finding out about the WP contract. I knew I was going to have to walk on eggs just to keep peace.
I walked on over to his room anyhow and stood there a minute, listening to see if he was up and around or not. Henry had give him a holler a few minutes before, but he could of passed that off as a bad dream, the way the old devil sounded with his calling; since the old man’d been laid up he’d been big on being the first one out of bed, storming through the house rise-and-shining till I could of choked the old bastard. Nothing galls a man more than being yelled out of bed by somebody all full of piss, vinegar, and the knowledge that as soon as everybody else is off to the job then he can cripple back to the sack and sleep till noon.