“Hey,” I said, standing up in the boat. “What’s the story? Where’s Orland and his two boys? Lard-assing in the mill there out of the wet while they leave you to hold the boat for ’em?”
“No,” he said.
“What’d they do? Decide to ride up with John on the truck?”
“Orland an’ the others ain’t coming to work today,” he said. He stood there holding onto that rope leading down into the fog to the boat, like a big old bashful kid hold of something he can’t understand. “I’m the only one going. And . . .”
“And . . . ?” I waited for him to get on with it.
“Orland called to say him and his boys all got the Asian flu. He said a lot of folks in town got it, Floyd Evenwrite, and Howie Evans and—”
“I don’t give a shit about Floyd Evenwrite and Howie Evans,” I told him. “What about our bunch? What about Little Lou? Did he call? And Big Lou? Shit
fire
, Orland’s boys; now wouldn’t that frost you? And what about John? He got the sour-mash flu, I imagine, an’ can’t even drive the truck up there?”
“I don’t know,” Andy said. “I just heard the phone in the mill ring and I taken the messages. Orland said—”
“What about Bob? I suppose he’s got the
ingrown toenails
or something. . . .”
“I don’t know about what he’s got. I told him we still had a lot of logs to go to make that contract, but Orland said not to expect sick people to—”
“Well shit fire,” I said. “That just about makes the lot of ’em, don’t it? First it’s Big Lou, then Collins, then that damned fiddlefooted brother-in-law of Orland’s who wasn’t worth a goddam anyhow. Now Orland and his boys. I’m goddamned but I never thought they’d fade so fast with just a little rain and hard work.”
And Lee said, “The thanes fly from us,” or some such crap.
And Andy said, “It ain’t just the rain and hard work, Hank. You see, there’s a lot of folks in town saying they don’t like what’s—”
“I don’t give a god
dam
who likes what and who don’t!” I told him, louder’n I’d aimed to. “And if the folks in town think this is gonna make me short on that contract, then they take me for a whole lot more fool than I am. Next time anybody calls in how sick they are by god just tell ’em that’s all right that’s just fine, because your old Uncle Hank made
a mistake
keeping count an’ we’ll make it just fine with the four or five of us.”
Andy looked up. “I don’t see how,” he said. “We got this whole boom to fill an’ then two more.”
“One more,” Joe Ben said, giving Andy a big wink. “Folks got to get up pretty early to get a jump on us. Long time ago me and Hank started slipping logs in that slough up behind the house at night, pulling a few at a time with the motorboat. Oh
yeah
, people got to get up pret-tee ear-lee!”
Andy grinned, and I told him to get on in the boat. I could see he was pleased that I had that other boom hid, that we still had a chance to make our contract. Really pleased. And that got me to thinking just how many people wasn’t going to be the least
bit
pleased. A god-awful amount, I realized. This made me feel funny, thinking for the first time just how many there was
didn’t
want the contract made. I just sat there a minute, studying about it, looking out across the mist toward the anchor pilings up past the mill where the booms were snubbed. And then I got this goofy urge; it’s hard to explain, but all of a sudden I found myself wanting to see those booms again, wanting to see them so goddam
much
right then that I felt like I was going batty! There was a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards between us and those pilings, covered with mist like a big blanket of dirty snow. Underneath that blanket was the booms, better than four months backbreaking ass-bleeding labor, millions of board feet of lumber, thousands of logs out of sight under there, nudging and scraping and rubbing against each other as the river current moved past under them so they were making an actual sound above the motor and the rain . . . a kind of a surly, complaining murmur, like a big throng of people muttering to each other.
I didn’t have any real need to check them logs. I told myself that. Even if they were covered with mist I still knew them damn near by heart. I’d watched them stand as a forest when I first took a drive up to see if I wanted to make a bid, seen them all thick and green, like a big piece of green herring-bone wool. I’d watched them mown from the sky. I’d bucked and chokered and yarded and loaded them. I’d heard the way the branding hammer sounded against them with a woody thock when I knocked a big crooked S into the end of each log; I’d heard them rumble off the truck into the water. . . . Still, listening to them out of sight there some way made me doubt what I knew. I wanted to grab that layer of mist by the edge and jerk it up for just a moment, like jerking a carpet up from the floor so you could see the pattern underneath. I wanted to look at them. For just a second. Like I maybe needed the sight to reassure me—not that they were still there—but that they were . . . what? Still as
big
as I remembered? Could be. Maybe I wanted to see that they hadn’t been gradually worn and eroded by the continual rubbing and grinding, down to the size of saplings and pile posts.
Andy got himself settled. I shook myself to try to get shut of my foolishness and turned back to the motor. But just as I started to throttle the motor Joe Ben gave a hiss like a snake and grabbed me by the sleeve and pointed off up river.
“There, Hank,
there
,” he whispered. “What’d I tell you?”
I looked. A lone honker, separated by the storm just like Joe’d figured, was flying dead for us. Everybody froze. We watched him come, stretching his long black neck from side to side as he searched around him, flapping along, honking over and over the same question. “Guh-
luke?
” he would honk, then be still and listen a while before calling again. “Guh-
luke?
” . . . not exactly afraid, not the way I’ve heard other geese call when they were lost. Different. Almost human, the way he was asking it. “Guh-luke . . . ? Guh-
luke
. . . ?”
It was a sound like . . . I remember thinking . . . a sound kind of like Joe’s little girl Squeaky made the time she come running in from the barn hollering that her special cat was in the bottom of the milk can drowned and
where was everything?
She wasn’t crying or carrying on, just hollering my cat got
drowned where is everybody?
She wouldn’t calm down till she’d gone all over the whole house and talked to everybody and seen everything. That was the same notion I got hearing that lost goose honking: that he wasn’t so much just asking where the lost flock was—he was wanting to know where the river was, and the bank, and
everything
hooked up with his life.
Where is my world?
he was wanting to know,
and where the hell am I if I can’t locate it?
He had lost his way and was out there flying the river, out of his head looking for it. He was trying to check around quick and get everything in its place, like Squeaky had needed to do when she’d lost her cat, and like me wanting to see them logs again. Only with me, I couldn’t figure what I thought I’d lost: no cats that I could think of, and I don’t know as I was missing a flock . . . or ever even
had
a way. But I still knew the feeling. . . .
While I was studying about this, I heard Joe whisper, “Meat in the pot,” and saw him reach down into the fog for the shotgun. (
The black barrel of the gun comes up out of the mist. The goose doesn’t see us. He keeps coming.
) I watched Joby run his finger down the muzzle, checking for a mud clog—an unconscious habit that anybody picks up after years of squatting in a muddy duck blind. He drew in his breath . . . (
The goose swells closer to us. I move my face inside the rubber poncho hood to see if the kid is watching. He ain’t even turned toward the goose. He’s turned looking at my face. And he’s grinning.
) . . . then, just as the goose comes within range, I said, “Forget it.” “What?” Joby said. His jaw dropped a foot. I said again, as casual as I could, “Forget it,” and gunned the motor out into midstream. The goose veered sharply overhead, making a slight whistling sound with his wings, he was so close. Poor Joe just sat there with his jaw hung open. I knew he’d be pretty disappointed—bagging a Canada honker is a pretty big deal; more buck deer are killed every year in Oregon than Canada geese, because geese don’t decoy worth beans and if you set out to slip up on a flock in a field you’re in for about a three-day crawl through the mud with the wily bastards always keeping just a
hair
out of shotgun range . . . pretty near the only chance you got is to luck onto one, and that happens about as much as lucking onto a pirate chest. So Joby had every right to be disappointed. Anybody would, if someone screwed up his first and maybe only chance for a honker.
He sat there watching that big pearl-colored bird fading off into the sky till it was out of sight. Then he turned and just looked at me. “What’s the sense?” I said to him; I turned away from his look and watched the bow split the fog. “We couldn’t of located him in this crappy fog even if you did knock him down, could we now?”
He still just sat there with his trap open, looking for all the world like Harpo Marx.
“Well, Jesus H. Christ!” I said. “If I’d known you wanted to just
kill
a goose I wouldn’t of stopped you! But I thought I heard you say ‘bag’ one. If you’re just looking to kill something, maybe you’d like to go out on the jetty this weekend with the 30-06 and shoot some of the seals playing in the bay? Okay? Or dynamite some trout in the sloughs, maybe?”
That got him. Les Gibbons used to dynamite the deep sloughs above our place and gather the fish in a boat. Once Joe and me skin-dived to the bottom of one of these holes after a blast, and there was dead trout piled up down there by the hundreds; only about one out of fifty floated up. So when I mentioned dynamiting fish, that really got him. He closed his mouth and looked sheepish. “I didn’t think, Hankus,” he said. “An’ I forgot how you hate to see a animal killed an’ lost.” I didn’t say anything and he added. “Especially the way you feel about the Canada goose race. I just didn’t follow your reasoning right off. I got all in a boil seeing him. Wasn’t thinking good. I understand now.”
I left it at that, with him thinking he understood a reasoning that I could barely follow myself. How could I expect him to understand that my feeling toward the goose as a race was doing a slow but sure turnover—what with squadron after squadron of the bastards ruining my sleep—and that it was this one particular lost goose that I didn’t want shot because he sounded like he was asking
Where is everything? Where is everything?
. . . how the hell could I expect poor rattleheaded Joby to understand that?
In town the arrival of the Asian flu only served to bring the citizens more tightly together in their campaign: “
Another
cross to bear but if we just all stick together in the fight
any
cross comes along will surely be bearable.” Snuffling and coughing, they continued to stick together. Eyes rimmed with misery and backs bent beneath a whole truckload of crosses, they trudged to front doors of Stampers living in town and reminded wives to tell their husbands to let Hank Stamper know what folks thought about him trying to set himself up against friends and neighbors, against his very home town! “No man is a island, honey,” they reminded the wives; and the wives told the husbands, “No woman is going to stand for this sort of injustice, I don’t care if you do lose your Exmas bonus!” and the husbands phoned the house up the river to say the Asian flu made it impossible to come to work.
And when all the Stamper wives had laid down the law, and all Stamper husbands in town had contracted the flu, then the citizens carried the battle to the enemy himself. “No sir, no man is a goddam island,” they let Hank know on the phone, “not you nor nobody!”—all hours of the night. Viv stopped answering the phone during the day (she had already stopped going into Wakonda to shop, and was even experiencing chilly stares when she went as far away as Florence); she even asked if they might not have their phone disconnected. Hank only grinned and replied, “What for? So’s all my friends and neighbors can say, ‘Stamper has had to shut his phone off; we
must
be getting to him’? Kitten, we don’t want to get our good friends an’ neighbors all het up over nothing, do we?” He had acted so amused and nonchalant about the whole business that Viv couldn’t help wondering if he actually meant it. Nothing seemed to get to him. He seemed more impervious than ever, even to that flu bug; he snuffled a little bit, naturally (he always snuffled a little bit, though, because of his broken nose), and sometimes he came home sounding hoarse (from hollering at the rest of the sick slackers, he told her in a joking boast), but he obviously wasn’t nearly as ill as the others. Everybody else in the house, from the baby all the way to the old man, was having stomach aches and lung congestion. Nothing serious—Lee got better and worse; Joe Ben took three aspirins when his sinuses hurt him, then swore off artificial medicines as soon as the headache let up enough for him to remember his church’s doctrine of faith-healing; Jan spent a night vomiting out the window to the dogs below . . . nothing serious, but everybody had been bitten deep enough by the bug going around to show a
few
symptoms. Not Hank. Hank just kept chugging along day after day without signs of a let-up. Like a machine. She couldn’t help wondering sometimes whether he was made out of flesh and blood and bones, like the rest of them, or out of workboot leather and Diesel fuel, and blackjack oak dipped in creosote.
Viv wondered at Hank’s uncanny strength; the old man bragged about it every chance he had to get to town; even Lee had occasion to doubt the existence of the weakness that he was dedicated to prove, to his brother and himself:
A further possibility, Peters, is that I may be holding back my Sunday punch because I am afraid that Hank will not be fazed by it. Thus far my belief in the iron man’s vulnerability is based only on a few uncertain glimpses of rust spots. What if these spots are the whole of his weakness? What if I had been wrong in my whole precept and he actually turns out to be invulnerable? It would be like working for years developing as ultimate a weapon as one could conceive, only to find that the target was completely unscathed by it. Such a prospect might give a fellow pause, don’t you think?