Hard and cold and small as a stone. Could just lie down. On the soft moss there. Sleep there. No . . .
This time he tied Uncle’s rope to his belt and carried two boughs, one in each hand. And lasted twenty minutes.
Or under the tree in the pine needles. Tired and cold and burning a long way. Sleep for a long time . . . No . . .
The third time Joe and Uncle made it as far as the slough bottom. The moon feinted this way and that, trying for a shot past the clouds. A beam of light threaded down through the trees and found a shrew ripping to pieces a frog twice its size, spotlighting them as though they were the main attraction of the evening. Uncle took one look and made a lunge that jerked Joe Ben free of his torches. They hissed to darkness in the deep, wet fern . . .
in the pine needles for a long time lie down, just sleep and not be cold or HOT ever again. No . . .
And it’s black. At the house Viv cries with a feeling of terrific and uncomprehending release, trying to understand what has just happened between Hank and Lee downstairs. Hank fumes angrily in the kitchen with a beer. Lee stands at his window, looking out across the river. “Where are you, moon? You and all your nonsense about magic macaroons? I’d like a word with you, if you don’t mind. . . .”
“Uncle! Father! Jesus!” Joe Ben stood petrified while Uncle consumed shrew and frog both. He tried some scripture—“Be thou a light unto my lamp,”—but it just didn’t satisfy. Not when there was . . .
something out there!
something always out there big and black and waiting to pull you under . . .
where the MOON won’t burn any more and the COLD and heavy hips
won’t drag. No . . . No!
Viv stops crying and turns to confront her room, where it seems she hears a mocking black-crow laugh somewhere behind her. There is just the empty cage. Old Henry, up in his bed, fights to whip a shadow with a knife in its boot, young, and nimble, and twice as elusive as usual because he dodges in and out of the years, first in the past then in the future where Henry can’t even see the cheating young sonofabitch! And Lee finds his hack-magic moon hiding sheepishly behind a crackling cloud: I spat a contemptuous oath in his direction:
that
for your hearts and flowers and bury-the-hatchet baloney! And that for your dose of Alice’s Patented Pituitary Stimulants you conned me into swallowing with a mouthful of cream—nothing but carnival hokum, medicine-show quackery that leaves a man worse off than he started!
Uncle began to whine at standing still so long, and Joe booted him in the rump to shut him up. The moon flashed off and on, signaling; in the mountains to the east silent lightning answered. Uncle whined again. “Shut up, dog! We’re all in this thing together, every one of us. He’s
out
there!”
HEAVY heavy COLD cold tired easy in the pine needles never cold any more. No! Yes; rest . . .
and Joe stood listening down into his fear for the booted tread of the man who never could walk the woods quietly—“But he
won’t
come after me, the devil; he knows; he’s waiting for me to come to him!”—and heard only the wind in the frosted red alder leaves. Lee turned from his window, leaving the moon and its medicine: I was going back to good old Shazam or its equivalent. Maybe the right magic word was harder to find than the right magic macaroon, but let’s face it, moon; those carbohydrates and polysaturates may put on weight and sweeten the disposition, but they’ve never been known to create instantaneous biceps of steel. I want
power
from my magic, not a pastry paunch. And lightning is one hell of a lot more powerful than leavening.
That lightning left a taste of pennies and a slight ringing in the air. Joe swallowed the taste and stretched his neck forward to hear the ringing better. “Uncle! You hear that? You hear something just then?” . . .
and it’s heavy heavy cold easy yes WHAT? yes just rest . . . hear WHAT?
Down from the hill it came again, a thin, keen whistle that rose sharply at the end like a curved brush-cutting knife. “That’s Hank at the shack!” Joe exclaimed. “Let’s go meet him, Uncle, let’s
go!
” Jubilant, they trotted back up the path in the direction of the sound as though the way had suddenly become brightly lit with floodlights . . .
yes WHAT? Molly lifts her muzzle from her paws and turns her head stiffly toward the sound of Hank’s WHISTLE WHAT? The air around smells heavy with BEAR, but the smell is not right now. This is the smell where the BEAR had first made a STAND. Right here. And she has run him. The WHISTLE cuts through the dark to her again WHAT? HIM? she pushes her front quarters up, and the one good hind leg, and starts WALKing once more HIM YES . . . WALK. As Lee prepares his writing tablet and rolls his three small cigarettes: “Dear Peters . . .” and Viv doesn’t understand, doesn’t understand . . .
Hank was sitting on the sack of decoys, smoking, when Joe Ben came into the firelight. “Why, I sure didn’t expect to hear you whistlin’ at the night,” Joe called jauntily. “I thought you’d be sawin’ wood down there a long time ago. Oh yeah. I mean
I
woulda. Nearly dozed off just walkin’ around . . .”
“No sign of Molly?” Hank continued to stare into the coals.
“Not hide ner hair. An’ I combed the Stamper Creek territory high an’ low.” He took a deep breath to stop his panting, lest Hank know he’d run all the way back to the fire, and walked to tie Uncle back to the shack, watching Hank stare at the fire. . . . “An’ what’s gnawing
your
bones?” he wanted to know.
Hank leaned back, lacing his fingers about one knee. He squinted against the smoke of his cigarette. “Oh . . . me an’ the kid kinda got into it.”
“Oh, no,
why?
” Joe asked reproachfully, then suddenly recalling how fast Viv and the boy had jumped apart when they showed up, asked, “What about . . . ?”
“What about don’t matter. Shit. Some little unimportant argument about
music.
That ain’t it.”
“It’s too bad,
too
bad. You know? You and him been hittin’ it off so good. After that first day, I said to myself, ‘This here maybe was a mistake.’ But then the ice thawed and
every
body was goin’ along and—”
“No,” Hank told the fire. “We weren’t hittin’ it off that good. Not really. We just wasn’t fightin’. . . .”
“You didn’t fight
now
, did you?” Joe asked, afraid he’d missed something. “I mean a fist-feet-and-fur-flyin’ fight?”
Hank continued to stare at the settling fire. “No, we didn’t fly any fur. Just yelled back and forth some.” He sat up and spat his cigarette into the coals. “But, by God, I think that right there is the bone that sticks in both our craws. Maybe that right there is the real thing that always keeps us from hitting it off. . . .”
“Yeah?” Joe Ben yawned, getting closer to the fire. “What’s that?” He yawned again; it had been a full day and a fuller night for Joe.
“That we
didn’t
fight. That he
won’t
, and I know it and he knows it. Maybe that right there is the thing keeps us just like oil and water.”
“That back East livin’ is made a coward out of him.” Joe’s eyes had closed, but Hank didn’t seem to notice.
“No, he’s no coward. Or he wouldn’t come on to where somebody’s gonna bust teeth out for him someday. No. It ain’t that he’s a coward . . . even though he might think he is. He’s big enough he knows he ain’t gonna get too bad a lickin’ even if he was whipped. I used to see him in grade school take crap off kids half his size, kids he
knew
couldn’t whip him. . . . But even when he knows he ain’t gonna get whipped, he acts like he knows he can’t win
neither!
”
“That’s right, that is right. . . .” Joe’s head was beginning to wobble.
“He acts like . . . he don’t have any reason, ever any reason, to fight.”
“Maybe he don’t.”
“If Lee don’t”—Hank stared into the fire—“then there’s
nobody
does.”
The vetch rattled and Uncle growled. Something moved at the edge of the light. Hank leaped to his feet.
TIRED tired cold but HIM!
The dog seemed to have two tails, issuing from hindquarters swollen large enough to handle even another two.
“Oh Jesus! There’s a snake got her!”
She tries to snap at them when they pick her up. She doesn’t remember who they are. They are all part of it now. Like the MOON and the FIRE, and the LOG and the BEAR, all HOT COLD DARK in her fevered confusion, and part of the same big ENEMY the way the WATER has become part, and REST; even SLEEP . . .
It is late. The big clock-in-a-horse ticks soulfully. With the station off the air, Indian Jenny’s father can only sit and watch the blank screen that pulses before him like a filmed blue-white eye. Gradually from the eye troops a ragged line of disorderly memories and myths. They begin circling a pine-knot fire burning for sixty years. And finally sit where they please, overlapping each other like transparent years snipped from a cellophane calendar. “Once upon a time,” says the milkstoned eye, and everyone leans to listen . . .
Henry bickers fitfully with a young shadow from the past. Lee strikes a match, fascinated. Molly whines, out of her head, in something’s carrying arms. At the Wakonda Hotel, in the room they share, Ray and Rod haggle past midnight over the expenses they have incurred since coming to work for Teddy. Ray is trying to whistle Hank Thompson’s guitar intro to “A Jewel Here on Earth,” but he is sleepy and edgy and the wienies Rod boiled for supper on the hot plate, being so unruly in his stomach, make it hard for him to get the right tone. Suddenly he stops whistling and flings the handful of papers he has been reading into the basket.
“Fuck it! Fuck it all!”
“Take it easy, man! it’s just this strike.” Rod tries to soothe his friend. “Face it, man, until this motherin’
strike
is settled and there’s more cash running loose, maybe we should take off to Eureka and make some bucks at your brother’s parking lot. What do you think?”
Ray is staring at the battered guitar case showing from beneath his bed. Finally he holds up his hands and looks them over. “I don’t know, man,” he says. “Let’s face it; neither of us is getting any younger. Sometimes I feel like just, oh . . . fuck it!”
At the dock in front of the old house Hank lays the unconscious dog in the boat and stands up. “Do me a favor, Joby; drive her to the vet’s for me . . . ?”
Joe is surprised and suddenly wide awake. “What? I mean all right, but—”
“I want to cover the bank foundation tonight.”
“
Again?
Why, you gonna check that foundation to death.”
“No. It’s just . . . Those clouds worry me.”
“Well . . . okay.” And, leaving Hank on the dock, as he guides the boat across the dark river, with his face in a bemused frown, like a scar over scars . . . Joe finds he is worried also—about something more than clouds, but not sure what.
Old Henry, in his rumbling bed, tosses and turns and talks to bygone beauties while his false teeth watch from their glass of water by his bedside. Viv hugs her pillow in the dark, wondering why isn’t he coming to bed—tonight! to her! now!—and remembers spending night after night alone in her bed full of dolls “Way up yonder, top of the sky . . .” while her parents were away with the truck selling produce in Denver or Colorado Springs, and the dark room full of dolls’ ears listening to every note: “. . .
blue
jay lives in a silver eye.” Joe climbs the stairs, already asleep and dreaming. Jan waits like a lump in a room full of lumpy sleeping bags, too shy in her flannel-nightgown sleep to entertain even the dimmest of dreams. Hank stands on the dock, rubbing his palms nervously up and down his thighs, lips tight. Lee sits wide awake on his bed with his shoes off, relighting his little cigarette and looking down at his long outburst of writing . . .
I would apologize for my delay in writing were I not convinced you would enjoy, much more than an apology, my quaint explanation for this letter: I have just come up to my room after a grisly hassle with Brother Hank, (do you recall? I think you made acquaintance with his ectoplasmic counterpart in a coffee house in the village) and I decided it would only be fair to give my nerve endings the solace of a joint. The pot was safe where I had secured it—cuddled in a cold cream jar at the bottom of the shaving kit Mona gave me—but where the bleeding papers: pot without papers, man, what kind of funny shit is
that
? It is beer without an opener. It is opium without a pipe. Our thermosed lives are, at best, nine-tenths of the time padded by vacuum and sealed by silvered silicon, but, for all their artificiality, we are generally able to find means for unstoppering them now and then, and enjoy at least some portion of addlepated freedom. Are we not? I mean, even the most square moral-ridden and socially-middled saddle-brow manages at
some
moment to drink enough to pop his stopper and enjoy a romp in the primroses. And that just with crude booze. So
how
can something so hip as a Pond jar full of pot be cursed to unfulfilled frustration by a lack of papers?
I rant, I rave with frustration. I even consider rolling it in magazine paper. Then . . . a flashbulb of remembrance; my wallet! Of course; didn’t I put a pack of zig-zag gummed wheatstraws in my wallet that night we all got so zonked at Jan’s and the three of us composed that immortal children’s classic
Fuckleberry Hen
? I quick to my trousers and feel for my wallet. Ah. Ah yes. There are the papers, and there the typed story still folded about them—“See. See Rooster Booster run. See him jump Fuckleberry Hen. See him jam it in. Jam, jam, jam.”—and what else flits out of the little package and flutters to the floor like a dying moth? A scrap of lipsticked Kleenex on which is written Peters’ department phone number. I sigh. I languish with memories. Good old Peters . . . back there enjoying the good academic life. Hmm . . . y’know, do the tortured soul good to commune with him. I believe I shall drop him a line.
So, I transcribe here that line (if this damned unreliable ball-point pen stops skipping) while I blow up the three joints I have rolled.
Three,
I hear him gasp,
three
joints? Alone up in his room? Three?
Yes, three, I answer calmly. For after this particular day I feel entitled to the 1st, I want the 2nd and oh God I
need
the 3rd! The 1st is a just payment for being good and working hard. The 2nd for enjoyment. The 3rd is to remind me to never never never again be duped into believing anything but the worst of one’s relatives. As a variation of W. C. Fields’ great truth, How can anyone who likes dogs and little children be anything
but
all bad?
First, as I fire up number one, I will give you what brief history I can afford: since the day I fled the realm of the mind for that of the muscle I have been cursed by having to pay homage to the wounds of both: physically, I have been forced for ten fiendish hours a day six solid days a week to subject my sinews to such sadistic stress as walking, running, stumbling, fumbling, falling down and getting back up and walking again as I all the while drag a rusty iron cable the obstinance of which is rivaled solely by the obstinance of the gargantuan log I am supposed to tie said cable around. I have had my bodily bones bunked and cracked, chunked and whacked by every rock stump root trunk within a fifty-foot radius as I fled that log so that cable wouldn’t jerk it over me; I have had to stand there pant and fainting trying to endure berryvines, nettles, sunstroke, blisters, mosquitoes, no-see’ums and prickly heat in the brief respite alloted me while I waited for that cable to drop its log a hundred yards away and come hissing and snapping back for a new assault (something of Dante, don’t you think?) I mean not only have I suffered all these physical horrors, but I
have,
if
anything
, in this land where I came to give my mind a rest,
increased my mental menaces a million-fold!
(Pardon my bad alliterative and endure my brief intermission while I um umm puff puff relight this joint . . . there we go.)
Dearest comrade, the point I wish to make with all this pre-ambling penmanship is simply that I have been
far too
put upon to get either my lazy mind
or
my lazy ass to repaying your wonderful letter’s most welcomed visit to this prehistoric land. Also, and at the risk of being honest, I actually
have been
more than ever beset by the slings and arrows of outrageous introspection . . . more than I was a month ago, even. (What did Pearson say about the apartment? Your other letter made no mention.) And for a couple of ironic reasons: you see, with the passing of these last few nightmare weeks here in this house I came to raze, living with these ogres I came to annihilate, I had contracted a malady I thought myself completely immunized against; I had come down with a bad case of Benevolence, with complications of Fondness and Distended Sympathy. You laugh? You snigger in your affected lipbeard that I could let my resistance run so low as to fall victim to that virus? Well, if you do, I can only point next door and smugly say, “Okay, my snide friend, you live three weeks in the same house with that chick and let’s see if
you
can keep up your resistance!”
For I believe that ’twas she, the chick, the wildwoods flower wife of my sworn-destroyed brother, that stayed my vengeful hand and, till now, has kept my wrath from falling. Three weeks lost in my plot. Because, you must understand, it was
she
that my mind sought out as the undipped heel of my Achilles-like brother, and
she
was the only thing in the house which I hesitated to harm. This bind was brought to stalemate by the fact that my brother has been especially nice to me; I couldn’t hate him quite enough to offset my fondness for the girl. It was even-steven. Until tonight.
You should, Peters, at this point, begin to detect the plot line even though you join the story one hundred pages deep. To sum up, in as you have missed the first four installments there are only these facts to establish: Bitter Leland Stanford Stamper returns home intending to do his older half-brother some unconceived but horrible harm for diddling young Leland’s mama, but in spite of his good intentions he has gradually been duped into sympathy for the arch step-fiend: we find Leland at the start of this episode, pitifully drunken and reasonless after an evening’s sipping of this sympathy. Things look bad. It looks like he’s going under. But, as you shall see, an unusual incident, almost a miracle, snaps our hero to his senses. It is this miracle for which I now give thanks by lighting this second joint at the altar of the Great God Pot. . . .
We had just returned from a little foray into the woods and snacked on the leftovers of Viv’s wonderful supper, and I had been waxing more and more banal as the evening wore on, and somehow the conversation between myself and my brother had wandered arm-in-drunken-arm through talk of school—“What actual
is it
you been studying?”—to talk of graduation—“Watcha aim to do with it to make a living?”—to talk of this and that and finally to the talk of music, of all things, Peters,
music!
To tell you the truth I can’t recall how we arrived at the subject—alcohol, exhaustion and pot have eroded the edges from my memory—but it seems we were discussing (discussing, I wish you to note; we had even reached the point of
discussion
. . . a long way in three weeks from silent plotting of sinister doom) discussing the merits of life in the lovely but provincial West Coast as compared to the sophisticated but ugly East Coast when, in the course of championing the East, I mentioned that the
one
edge that the West Coasters must concede to the East was that it boasted far greater opportunities to hear good music. Hank was ready to concede no such thing . . . listen:
“Be easy,” said he in his quaint way, “ain’t you awriting your own numbers on the scale? What
you
reckon to be good music up against what
my
ideas are . . . might not fit all the notches. Just what do you mean ‘good music’?”
I was in a philanthropic state of mind so for the sake of argument I agreed to meet him on a fair ground; remembering the old, remorseless driving rhythm and blues 78’s of Joe Turner and Fats Domino that Hank used to assail my boyhood nights with, I agreed we would speak only of jazz. And after the usual amount of hemming and hawing and beating around the bush we got down to the thing all jazz enthusiasts are
always
working toward with their discussions; we went to get out our records. Hank commenced rummaging through drawers and boxes. From my suitcase upstairs I carried down my locked attaché case of favorites. But once again Hank and I realized very quickly that, even though we had arbitrated Jazz the Good Music we would discuss, we were still worlds apart as to what was Good Jazz.