“Glad to see you,” Joby said. “Gettin’ a little deep all of—”
“Joe! I can’t! The log here!” I fumbled with the starting rope of my saw, damn near raving.
My hands are shaking again.
“I mean I won’t be
able
to cut—I mean look at the goddam waterline where I have to—” The saw whirred. Joe’s face darkened when he saw what I meant. The log was deep enough in the water that I wouldn’t be able to cut through it without submerging the saw’s motor. That’s why I couldn’t make myself cool down. I knew, before, up the hill, that I couldn’t cut it. Maybe before then. “Look out,” I said anyway. “I’ll see what we—”
Again Hank jabbed the guard prongs of the saw into the bark and tipped the whirring teeth. Joe clinched his eyes as the chips and sawdust flew past him into the berry vines over his shoulder. He felt the chips of bark sting his cheek briefly, then heard the saw sput and gurgle, then stop. It was quiet again; the rain and radio—
As you go through life make this your goal . . .
Joe opened his eyes; out across the river he could see Mary’s Peak blurred by rain and the fast-falling dusk. But anyway. Whosoever don’t doubt . . . don’t
hafta
worry. Hank tried to jerk the saw free to start it again, but it was stuck.
“No good anyway. Never do it, Joe.”
“Look, Hankus, it’s okay.” Whosoever knows in his heart. “I know it’s okay . . . because look:
all
we got to do is wait. An’ have a little faith. Because look, man: things is already seen to. Ain’t this tide coming up gonna float this thing offn me in a minute? Oh yeah, now
ain’t
it?”
Hank looked at the log. “I don’t know . . . the way it’s sitting. It’s got to do some rising before it’ll lift.”
“Then we’ll do some waiting,” Joe Ben said confidently. “I just wish I’d waited one day to swear off smoking. But I can stand it.”
“Sure,” Hank said.
“Sure. We’ll just wait.”
And waited. While the sky before them, over the river, thickened with rain, and the forest behind shushed the wind to listen to the tinny music reeling out below. While freshets gushed icy mud into gullies, gullies into creeks, along banks wattled by erosion.
While the waves, back up the coast at the Devil’s Jailhouse, thudded higher and higher toward escape up the cancered rock wall, and the clouds combed overhead, in from the sea over the surf, and broke against the high slopes to rake back the way they had come.
While Viv rose from a hot tub of water and hummed herself dry before an electric heater in a room that smelled of rose oil.
And while the distance between the old house and my rain-soaked and relentless shoes clicked steadily away, my resolution mounted: Eight miles through this rain, eight miserable miles . . . why, if I can make that, I can make
anything . . .
Hank tried to set the screwjacks to move the log, but they only twisted into the mud.
“What we need is a horse,” Hank said, cursing the jacks.
“An’ then how?” Joe asked, amused by Hank’s frustration at the log. “Hook on and drag it over me up the hill? No, what you need is a
whale
in the river yonder to pull it off that way. You bet. Know where we can rent a good stout whale broke to harness?”
“How you doin’? You feel it lightenin’ any yet?”
“Maybe some. I can’t tell. Because I’m cold as a witch’s
tit
, if you got to know. How much has it come up?”
“Only another couple inches,” Hank lied and lit another cigarette. He offered Joe a drag, but Joe, after eying the smoke, allowed as how he’d best keep his promises to the Lord, things being the way they were. Hank smoked in silence.
The kingfishers waited ceremoniously on the branches over the river.
... watch the doughnut, not the hole.
When the water reached Joe Ben’s neck Hank dived under the surface and braced his shoulder against the bark and tried to budge the log. But it would have taken a two-hundred-horse Diesel to move that weight and he knew it. He also knew that the way the log lay, slanting up the bank, it was going to take considerable water to float it off. And when it did move it was likely to roll up bank, more onto Joe.
Occasionally a kingfisher would dive, then return to the branch without chancing the water.
Joe had turned down the radio and they talked some now. About the old man lying up the hill under Hank’s parka, about the job and how they’d call J. J. Bismarck, the head man at Wakonda Pacific, first thing they got to a phone and score some non-union help for the run tomorrow.
“Maybe get old Jerome Bismarck hisself out there in corks doin’ the river-run twist—wouldn’t that be a sight to behold? J. J. Bismarck floppin’ around in the water, all four hundred pounds of him? Lord, Lord . . .”
Hank laughed at the thought. “Okay, buster, but let me call to your attention the first time you tried to pond-monkey. Remember? Right in the middle of January, and there was ice all around the logs?”
“No. No, I don’t recall nothing about that. Not a thing.”
“No? Why, I guess I should refresh your memory. You’d put on about a dozen sweat shirts and a set of rain pants and a big mackinaw—”
“Nope. That wasn’t me. I never owned no mackinaw. Some other boy . . .”
“And first jack outa the box you fell in and went down like a rock. Just one little whoop. And it took half the mill crew to haul you out, you weighed so much. I like to died laughing.”
“Somebody else. I’m always light and agile. And, anyhow, what about you the time you was wearin’ that scarf that Barbara knitted for you and it got caught in the chain saw—for a while there we didn’t know whether you was goin’ out by hanging or
decapitation!
How ’bout
that?
”
“You remember that time the wrestling team drove to Bend for a dual match—talkin’ about clothes—and big old Bruce Shaw brought along a
tuxedo
because the coach told him to dress?”
“Lord, Lord—Bruce Shaw . . .”
“Bruce the moose—he just kept growing.”
“Ain’t that the truth! Oh yeah. He was in our congregation for a while, did I tell you that? Falling down and talking in tongues. Dangerous to get too close; he was bigger’n he was in high school.”
“Lordy that was pretty big. He was two-eighty or -ninety then. . . .”
“After he quit comin’ to services I lost track of him. What come of him, hear tell?”
“He got in a bad car wreck seven or so years ago . . . Hey, I ever tell you? I run into him, not long after that very wreck, I guess, over in Eugene at Melody Ranch. I saw him at the dance and said hiya Bruce, friendly enough, but he was salty as hell about something, just scowled at me like he’d break me in
half.
And—listen to this, I never told you this—I got a real skinful that night, one of the fullest ever. That summer, home from the service. Really bombed. I
shoulda
passed out, but I made the mistake of thinking I was up to maneuvering
around,
you see. So I left the dance and went out and started walking, see, and this
tree
accosted me, man, kept me pinned down for hours. Because I’m really loaded and . . . it’s dark and late . . . and I’m walking along and I come up to this tree—with sap running down on it, just
standing
there. It’s old Shaw, big as life and twice as ugly. Shaw, I’m certain of it; old Bruce the moose . . . and man, he looks
bad!
He’s got his shirt off and his arms all spread out and he’s got scabs all down the front of him. I stand there and say, ‘Hey there, Shaw, how’s it hangin’?’ Nothing. ‘What’s happening lately, Shaw boy?’ He still don’t say nothing, but man he
looks bad.
I ask him how things are up at the dam where he was working and how is his
girl
, and his mom, and I don’t know what all, and he just
stands
there—big and bad-looking. So finally—after I’ve been shivering in front o’ him, thinking he’s after me for some business I can’t even recall—I go to sliding around him. I sorta put myself in my pocket and slide
away
around him and on down the street, and I don’t know old Shaw’s a tree till I see he’s still standing there in the morning.”
“Oh
yeah?
You never told me that.”
“Swear to God.”
“Jesus. Pinned down by a tree.”
While they were laughing the squeak of the radio suddenly stopped. “Oh dadgum; I forgot to take my radio from around my neck. Dadgum . . . it’s ruint. Now don’t you laugh, dang you. I thought a lot of that little outfit.” Then broke into giggles himself.
But without his radio Joe’s laughter gave to chattering. Hank’s laughter only increased. “Whoee. After you braggin’ about not breaking it when a log rolled over you; now you dunk it . . . oh lord, oh
me. . . .
” Joe tried to join him. Their laughter stretched out across the water. The kingfishers watched from between solemnly hunched shoulders. As they were laughing a sudden gust of wind blew a small wave into Joe Ben’s mouth. Joe choked and spat and laughed some more . . . then turned to ask Hank, in a voice too full of kidding, “Now you ain’t about to let this here old river just up and
drown
me, are you?”
“This river? Why, by gosh; is Joe Ben Stamper worryin’ this old river? Sounds screwy. Because man, I thought all you had to do was call your Big Buddy and He’d just aim His finger an’ the water’d just hallelujah
snap
back away from you.”
“Yeah, but I’ve explained this: I hate to
bother
Him if some of us can handle it. Hate to call anybody out in this stuff, especially Him.”
“Okay; I can see that; He’s probably got a lot on His mind.”
“You bet. It’s a busy season, Christmas coming. Then all them trouble spots. Laos, Vietnam . . .”
“And lots of goiters to tend to in Oklahoma. Oh, I can see how you’d hesitate . . .”
“That’s right. That’s right. Oklahoma needs Him special this year. I believe Oral Roberts has got Him signed on down there right now, shooting a TV series. But the thing is”—Joe raised his chin to avoid another small wave—“this dang
water
keeps getting’ up my nose. I’ll tell you what, Hankus: maybe you better hustle up to the pick-up after a length of hose . . . it might just be a while before this log begins to float.”
You’d never thought it possible, but Joby was commencing to sound worried. “What is this noise?” I ask him. “Is this the boy who says, ‘Accept your lot and hold your mouth right!’ . . . scared of a little wet? Besides, Joby, it’s a good three-fourths mile up hill to that pick-up; you want to be alone all that time?”
“No,” he says very fast, and quotes: “ ‘It ain’t so good that man should be alone.’ Genesis. Just before He whopped up Eve. But, still and all, maybe you oughta run get that hose. . . .”
I splashed into the water beside Joe and stood with my hand resting on his shoulder.
“No,” I told him. “It’s a fifteen-minute run up to that pick-up and a fifteen-minute run back and at the rate the—well,
one
thing; I’m just too
wore out
to go runnin’ around here and there, this way and that, at your every little whim-wham. An’ you can’t run your neck out like you are much longer neither. You remember that leatherback terrapin we caught in the slough bottom once? An’ put in a tub with too much water—two, three inches—and nothing for him to climb up on? He didn’t drown, you remember? He stood on the bottom of the tub and stretched his neck for so long and out so far to breathe that he
stretched
himself to death. . . . And, where I ain’t worried that you’ll drown, there
is
some chance you might stretch yourself to death.” Joe tried to laugh, then shut his mouth before another wave got him. “Anyhow, that log should come up from there right away. An’, if worst comes to worst, I can always give you mouth-to-mouth till it rises.”
“Well,
sure
; sure, that’s the truth,” he said. “I hadn’t
thought
of that.” He brought his lips together for a bit as the water lapped up to his face. “Oh yeah; you can always give me mouth-to-mouth.”
“Just so long as you don’t get
worried
under there . . .”
“Worried? I ain’t worried. Just cold. I know you’ll do somethin’.”
“Sure.”
“Just like we used to trade off with one aqualung under water.”
“Sure. It’s no different.”
“Just like it.”
I stood there in the water beside the log, shivering.
“All a man is
ever
got to do is hold his mouth right an’ keep his faith. An’ wait . . .” He clamped his mouth.
“Sure,” I finished for him while the wave passed. “Just wait. And think about good times ahead.”
“Right! And—boy oh boy—Thanksgiving in a few days,” Joe remembered, smacking his lips. “That’s something, that’s good times. ’N’ this business will be all over. We’ll have to really do something
full-size
for Thanksgiving.”
“Damn right.”
Just stood there and shivered, feeling like maybe the time for doing something full-size had long gone. . . .
The kingfishers waited. . . . The rain buzzed pensively against the river, adding drop after drop . . . while Hank spent the last darkening hours of that day clinging to the bark of the log, the sharp brown fingers of the current dragging at his legs—shivering at first, then cold beyond cold and no longer shivering—carrying lungs full of air to a face invisible beneath the water. . . . All Joe has to do, he told himself, is keep from panicking, keep up his spirits.
Joe seemed in the best of spirits. Even after his little scarred face had been submerged Hank could still hear sputtering giggles, and when he ducked his face under still feel that goofy, half-wit grin against Joe’s lips. The situation seemed so bizarre to them both that for a time they felt silly and foolish and made the job of transferring the air more difficult and dangerous with their laughing, both realizing it, but unable to stop.
For a time they were unable to think of anything except sonofagun I bet we look like fools; I bet if old Henry up there came to an’ saw this we’d never be shut of him kidding us, not in the next hundred years. And, for a time, even after all the situation’s ludicrous humor was exhausted for Hank, he still could feel the amusement beneath the water. This kept his hopes alive; as long’s the little fart is
laughing
under there we’ll make out. I can carry him air all night if it comes to it. As long as he’s got faith enough to see it’s funny. As long as I still feel him grinning. That’s what’ll save his ass, him still getting a boot out of being in a bad fix; him still holding his mouth right. . . .