On the street outside he shook his head and repeated, “Hank Stamper . . . just won’t sell.”
“What difference?” Draeger said happily. “We aren’t even going to make an offer.”
“Then where we going?”
“Just for a walk, Floyd. A stroll. I just thought folks would be more inclined to
believe
we made that offer if we strolled down toward the docks. . . .”
“Believe? What are you talking about? Hank Stamper’ll never believe we went up to his place just because we—”
“But he’ll be the
only one
who won’t believe it, Floyd.” He chuckled, confident. “By the way, do you play cribbage? Fine game for two. Come on; I have a board up in my hotel room. . . . There should be just about enough time to teach you while we supposedly have another ‘joyride.’ ”
And back in the bar Teddy, standing in his spot by the window, is the only one to see them double back from the docks and duck into the side door of the hotel.
You are a force, a force.
He nods slowly when the light switches on in one of the hotel’s upstairs rooms. Why, it’s almost like Mr. Draeger
wanted
him to see the ruse;
You know I always stand by this window
. . . it’s a real confidence!
“We,” you said to me . . . “we”
—and feels his plump little body stretch nearly to bursting as his initial admiration and awe swells to love and beyond—to adulation, to worship.
When my father mustered out of the Navy in 1945 we moved from a fair-sized town near Mare Island, where he had been stationed, to the “Old Jarnaggan Place” in the Willamette Valley—a two-story farmhouse thirty miles from Eugene, where Daddy had a job, fifteen miles from Coburg, where I would attend the third grade, and a good million light-years from the highway, where the nearest other human being could be found. Electricity had penetrated as far as the kitchen and living room, but to illuminate any of the rest of the house one needed to go through the entire Coleman lantern bit, replete with ash mantles, a nickel-plated handpump, and white gasoline which was considered too dangerous for a third-grader who should be old enough by now to sleep in the dark, for goodness’ sakes! And my second-floor bedroom was indeed dark. Damned dark. A back-country night in a one-window room during a tar-bucket rain, in the sort of dark where nothing at all happens when you open and close your eyes. There is simply no light. But, like water, this thick dark affords tremendous conductivity to sounds of unknown sources. And after I had lain three or four bulge-eyed hours of my first night in my new bed, I began to perceive one of these very sounds: something hard, heavy, and horrible, rumbling and thudding insanely from one side of the hall to the other, coming steadily closer. My head lifted from the pillow. I stared in the direction of my door, filling the void with demented monster crabs and drunken robots as the noise came relentlessly on through my door, into my room. . . . (I recall thinking when I discovered Edgar Allan Poe’s world some years after: Yes; this is sure the way it sometimes is!) I lay with my head lifted. I didn’t call out; I felt totally bereft of voice, the way you feel when you try calling out of the confines of a
dream. And as I waited an odd, recurring light at my window began to illuminate the room—a brief, quick glow, separated by long intervals of identically timed darkness. The rain had stopped and the clouds lifted, allowing the sweeping beam of a beacon from a cropduster’s airfield to swing across my upstairs window (I traced down this mystery light weeks later); from the stroboscope impressions given me by this periodic flash I was able to solve my mystery: a small rat had scored a large walnut from the storeroom down the hall and was trying to corral it against something solid so he could gnaw through its stubborn shell. The nut kept skittering away from the rat’s teeth, and the rat kept chasing after it and rolling it back against the wooden wall, which amplified his gnawing like a sounding board. Teamed thus, the two of them had worked their way from the storeroom, along the baseboard, all the way to my open door. Just a mouse, that light showed me, just a little old field rat. I breathed and let my head fall back to the pillow: just a mouse chewing a nut. That’s all. That’s all it—But what’s this light that keeps flashing past like a ghost or something flying round and around the house looking for a place to get in? . . . What is this
awful light?
The same November rain that drove the mice from their holes and beat the eelgrass flat also stirred up the mightiest flock of migrating geese the coast had seen in centuries. At night, above the lullabying roll of the wind and rain, the ring of their voices could be heard, the free, bright, yodeling toll of Canada honkers. They were stirred south all the way from Dawson Creek by the storm, feeding in the oat-stubble by day and flying southward by night; and the great honking set up by this nightly flight came pealing like mountain bells down from the peaks of the wind, through the clouds, and into the little muddy towns that line the coastal flyways.
When most of the citizens of these little towns woke to hear them tolling past their rooftops, they only heard “Winter is here, winter is here,” like a taunting, malevolent chant, over and over; “Winter is here, winter is here . . .”
Willard Eggleston, the bald and bespectacled brother-in-law of the Real Estate Hotwire in Wakonda, listens more carefully one quiet night through the chipped round hole that opens from his ticket window onto a street wet and shiny with the light of the theater marquee, and remarks to himself and the empty street: “The geese have their special secrets too, I bet. They are singing out all the secrets of the dark, and no one to listen but me.”
And when Lee happens to hear a small flock flying over the parked carrier wagon where he sits, at the stumpy edge of the logged-off show, waiting for Hank and Joe Ben and Andy to finish burning the slashing, the sound prompts him to remark in a letter he is writing to Peters in an old ledger he discovered under the seat:
We are kept on the move by continual reminders of the lateness of the hour, Peters: nature signals to us in her numerous ways that we’d best get our ass in gear while we can, because the summer is never going to last, my darlings, never. Just now a flock of geese passing over calls out to me “Go south! Follow the sun! If you wait too long it will be too late.” And I get all manicky just hearing them. . . .
But Hank hears the geese call a dozen different thoughts, stimulating a dozen dozen feelings—envy and resentment, worship and bitterness—making him long to join in their reeling southward song, cut loose,
leave!
A variety of thoughts and feelings, flowing and blending and breaking apart in sudden octaves, like the sound that set them off . . .
The towns listened to the geese tell them, “Winter is here,” that first week, and despised the geese for rubbing it in. All the little coast towns listened, and all despised the geese in those first dingy November days. Because the irrevocable fact of winter is never a particularly rosy picture (But
this
winter, here in Wakonda, it’s gonna be worse even than the last), and these first nights of November are always tough because they are a preview of a hundred such nights to come (Yeah, but,
this
time it’s special tough, because we got no job, no income, no roll socked away for the rainy days this time . . . here in Wakonda) . . . does anyone ever like harbingers of such tidings?
And winter was certainly there. All along the coast that first week of November, while the geese swept noisily down from the north, a flock of darker clouds swept viciously in from the sea’s western horizon. The clouds combed overhead and broke against the mountains like waves breaking, and the water ran back toward the sea . . . clouds like waves breaking, or like clawed hands thrust grasping up from depths to furrow the earth with gray-nailed fingers. Like the hands of something trapped and determined to claw its way up on land, or pull the land down beneath the sea. The hands reached up and out, to Breakleg and Breakrib, to Mary’s Peak and Tillamook and Nahamish, to west-facing slopes along all the coast, and the blind fingers scratched bleeding gullies in the slopes. These gullies bled into bigger gullies, bigger gullies into freshets dry all summer, freshets into ditches choked full of Canada thistle and buffalo weed, and these ran into Elk Creek and Lorain Creek and Wildman Creek and Tyee Creek and Tenmile Creek; sharp, steep noisy creeks, looking like saw-teeth on the map. And these creeks crashed into the Nehalem and the Siletz and the Alsea and the Smith and the Longtom and the Siuslaw and the Umpqua and the Wakonda Auga, and these rivers ran to the sea, brown and flat with the clots of swirling yellow foam clinging to their surfaces, running to the sea like lathered animals.
“Winter is here,” the geese proclaimed, flying from river to river over the little towns, “winter is here.” A winter just like last year (But last year we was able to blame them Reds and their bomb tests, screwing up the weather), and just like the winter before that (But
that
winter, think back now, there was all them
hurricanes
down in Florida that blew us up more than our share of rain), and just like the winters a thousand years before these little coast towns ever existed. (But those years were just winters, those towns just towns . . .
this
year, I tell you, in Wakonda, things
is
truly different!)
In the bars and bowling alleys the men of these little towns packed snuff under stained lips and cleaned their ears with matchsticks, gave each other stiff, knowing nods as they watched the rain hopping in the street, and listened to the geese. “Lots of rain. Listen at them boogers shag it up there—
they
know it’s a lot. It’s all them frigging
satellites
the government keeps shooting up in the air, is what’s causing it. Just like you shoot a cannon inta the clouds to get rain. That’s who done it. Those numskulls in the
Pentagon
made a
slip-up!
”
The geese might claim that it was winter just like the year before, just like a thousand years before, but these little towns found it helped to survive an unpleasant inevitability if you regarded it as a slip-up and found something to blame it on. It eased the outlook a little if you had some scapegoat to point a finger at: the Reds, the satellites, the hurricanes down south. . . .
The logger men in these little towns could blame the construction men: “Loosenin’ the dirt with all them damn roads you’re buildin’!” The construction men could blame the logger men: “
You
, you ax-happy nuts, takin’ out all the brush off the watershed, layin’ the mountainsides naked . . . what can you expect?”
The younger people found ways to blame the older generation, who had borned them into this mess; the older people blamed the churches. The churches, not to be outdone, put it all at the feet of the Lord: “Oh yay-us,
now!
Haven’t I been saying so? Havn’t I
now!
again and again, warned you to stand up in His light
now
and live by His laws
now
and not chance His
awful wrath?
Yay-us
now!
Now
look
: the
Arm
of the Lord is on its way; the
flood
waters chastiseth!”
Which is just another way of blaming, and perhaps the best way, because there is solace and a certain stoical peace in blaming everything on the rain, and then blaming something as uncontrollable as the rain on something as indifferent as the Arm of the Lord.
Because nothing can be done about the rain except blaming. And if nothing can be done about it, why get yourself in a sweat about it? Matter of fact, it can be convenient to have around. Got troubles with the old lady? It’s the rain. Got worries and frets about the way the old bus is falling to pieces right under you? It’s the ruttin’ rain. Got a deep, hollow ache bleeding cold down inside the secret heart of you from too many deals fallen through? too many nights in bed with the little woman without being able to get it up? too much bitter and not enough sweet? Yeah? That there, brother, is just as well blamed on the rain; falls on the just and unjust alike, falls all day long all winter long every winter every year, and you might just as well give up and admit that’s the way it’s gonna be, and go take a little snooze. Or you’ll be mouthin’ the barrel of your twelve-gauge the way Evert Petersen at Mapleton did last year, or samplin’ snail-killer the way both the Meirwold boys did over to Sweet Home. Roll with the blow, that’s the easy out, blame it on the rain and bend with the wind, and lean back and catch yourself forty winks—you can sleep real sound when the rain is lullabying you (But I tell you things is
different
this year in Wakonda) real nice and sound . . . (because geese ain’t
letting
us sleep, and the Lord ain’t
taking
the blame, not this year, in Wakonda . . .)
Because that year, in Wakonda, the citizens truly weren’t being allowed the easy out. They weren’t being allowed to lean back as the days passed and nights slid by. They weren’t being allowed to make themselves comfortable by blaming it on the rain, or on the Lord, or the Reds, or the satellites.
Not when it was so goddam evident, so right-before-your-eyes obvious, that in Wakonda, that year, the town’s worries and woes were being caused by nobody else but that goddam hardnose up the river! And rain is one thing and, fine, maybe you can’t do nothing about the weather except
yak
about it, but Hank Stamper is a
different
breed of cat from the rain! And you can maybe put the blame on the Arm of the Lord those years when that arm puts a stranglehold of frost on the woods so tight it freezes all the way to your pay envelope, and maybe you can roll with the blow of the wind if there’s nothing else except the wind blowing . . . but when the arm is the arm of Hank Stamper strangling off your income, and you damn well know that the blow is being dealt by the
fist
on that arm, then you find yourself having a pretty hard time blaming your woes on anything other than that arm!