Sometimes a Great Notion (51 page)

Joe Ben leaps from bed and confronts the Halloween Saturday just about the same as he confronted any
other
Saturday when the Pentecostal Church of God and Metaphysical Science was holding services. Because, as far as Joe was concerned, every day could be Halloween if you held your mouth right. And Joe had a grin like a jack-o’-lantern. And, unlike the candle in the pumpkin he’d picked and fixed for the kids, the candle behind Joe’s carved features needed no special occasion, no official day set aside for ghouls and goblins; it could be ignited by anything. Oh yeah . . . the discovery of a cricket in his drinking glass at the sink (“Good sign! You bet. Chinese say crickets bring all kinds fat luck.”) . . . the number of Rice Krispies that might have snapped, crackled, and popped over the top of his bowl onto the breakfast table (“Four of ’em! See? See? It’s the fourth month and this is my fourth bowl of cereal and Jesus said to Lazarus, Come forth. And ain’t my name
Little
Joe
, which is two and two or I’ll eat my hat!”) or kindled to a ruddy glow by nothing more than a simple sight that pleased his simple mind . . . such as the sweet pink flame of the morning sun through the window alighting on the sleeping faces of his children.

The kids usually slept scattered about the floor of his room in sleeping bags, just any old place, but last night they had quite unconsciously aligned themselves so that a single trickle of sun leaking through a single tear in a shade could skip from brow to glowing brow. And since no coincidences marred Joe Ben’s auspicious world, this wondrous arrangement of faces threaded like pink pearls on the one tiny strand of sunshine was
exactly
the sort of datum he usually parlayed into a riot of prophecy, but this time the plain visual beauty of the sight so overwhelmed him that he was blinded to its metaphysical significance. He grasped his head in both hands to shore up a skull too thin to contain such high voltage. It would blow him to bits. “Oh God,” he moaned aloud, closing his eyes. “Oh oh oh God.” Then, recovering just as quickly, he tiptoed about the room in his skivvies, licking the tip of a finger and touching each of the five children as Brother Walker did in his baptism ceremonies. “No liquid nowhere in the world”—Joe paraphrased Brother Walker’s philosophy—“is as big a deal in the eyes of our Saviour as good ol’ human spit.”

The impulsive baptism over, Joe scrunched down and crept back across the floor, striving intensely to make no noise, lifting his knees high and bringing his toes down with painful caution, elbows tight against his ribs like the plucked wings of a muscle-bound stewing chicken sneaking away across the kitchen floor behind the chef’s back. At the window he let up the shade and stood fingering his navel while he grinned out at the waking day. He lifted his arms above his head, fists doubled, and stretched out his straightest and yawned.

Yet, stretched out or scrunched down, Joe still looked like some kind of poorly plucked fugitive from the butcher’s bench. His bowed legs were lumpy with muscles cramped too tight against muscles squeezed too tight against other muscles; his back was pinched and knotted, and his stubby arms swiveled from shoulders which would have graced a six-footer but served only to distort a five-sixer.

When a carnival came to Wakonda Joe could barely wait to get down and give the weight-guessers fits; estimates would undershoot or overshoot the actual one-fifty-five by sometimes as much as forty pounds. He looked as if he should have been bigger or smaller, it was difficult to say which. Seeing him scampering about the woods, transistor radio bumping against his chest like an electronic locket, you might think he needed antennae, a glass helmet and a size four space suit.

Seeing him years before, still straight and graceful as a young pine, with the face of a teen-age Adonis, you would have thought him one of the most strikingly handsome young men in the world; what this Adonis had become was a triumph of indefatigable will as well as a showcase of perseverance. He seemed to have been issued a skin many sizes too small and chest and shoulders too large. Without a shirt he seemed to have no neck; with a shirt on he seemed to have on shoulder pads. Encountering this apparition in stagged-off pants and
three
sweat shirts chugging toward you on the boulevard, elbows out, balled fists chest-high, spread legs thrusting splayed boots against a springy earth, one might expect to see a halfback with the football sprinting close on his heels . . . were it not that the jack-o’-lantern lodged there between the shoulder pads made it extremely clear that it was not football that was being played, but some kind of queer joke . . .

On exactly whom was not quite so clear.

He pulled the shade back down. The shaft of light skipped again precisely across the sleeping faces, hesitating for an instant in the center of each little forehead to examine the drop of good old human spit. And as Joe struggled into his cold clothes he recited a prayer of thanks in a reverent whisper in the general direction of the chest of drawers, while the jack-o’-lantern looked on balefully with puzzled, sooty eyes and grinned a mildewed grin: a joke was being played, all right. That much was clear. And it might have been easier to figure on
whom
if Joe had refrained from grinning back.

Saturdays were busy for Joe. That was when he worked off his rent obligation. He had lived off and on at the old house across the Wakonda for most of his life, staying there as long as six or eight months at a time during his childhood, while his father gallivanted up and down the coast possessed with the frenzied squandering of a life that was burning a hole in his pants. Rent money was never mentioned or even considered; Joe knew he had paid old Henry ten times over with the countless hours of free overtime he’d put in at the show or the mill, paid board and room for himself and the woman and kids and then some. That wasn’t it. To old Henry he owed nothing, but to the house, the house itself, to the actual flesh of paint and bone of wood of the old house he knew he owed a debt so large it could never be repaid. Never, never in a thousand years! So, as the day drew near when he would move into his own home, he had become a dervish of repairs, determined to make that deadline of never and repay that unpayable debt. Gleefully slapping paint or mending shakes, he rushed to square things with the pile of wood that had sheltered him so undemandingly for so long, certain sure, as he damned near always was certain of practically anything he decided was worth being sure of, that he would some way, right at the last, with a terrific spurt of last-minute nailing and puttying and calking, succeed in meeting that impossible deadline and pay off the debt he had already decided for certain sure was un-pay-offable. “Old house, old house,” he crooned, straddling the topmost peak with a hammer in his hand and nails bristling from his mouth, “I’ll have you shinin’ like a new dime by the time I leave here. Oh, you know it. You’ll stand a
thousand
years!”

He patted the mossy withers lovingly. “A
thousand
years”—he was certain. A lot of roof left to shingle and outside to shake in the three or four weekends before he moved, but he would finish, by gosh, by golly and—if it meant Sending Out for the Divine Help—by God!

The thought caused a little buzz of excitement to go through him; though he’d come pretty close, he’d never actually come to that point of really Sending Out yet. Oh, he’d prayed for things, but that’s different, that ain’t like Sending Out. You can pray for just about anything, but Sending Out for Divine Help!—well . . . it ain’t ordering from Monkey Ward. It’ll
be there
, don’t ever doubt it a second—oh yeah—but you wait till there’s something of a
size
, not just the donkey cable busted or a root hung in your—last night, now, last night with Hank so down from his argument with Lee, I come near to Sending—but I’m glad I held off. Only thing Hank has to do is quit worrying about it and go ahead and do what he knows already he’s gonna do—like I knew he knew that he was gonna walk back out into the woods to look for old Molly because it’s in him to do—to accept what he already knows is all he need do. . . . Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t Send Out—because he’ll come through even if he don’t Believe, except I sure never seen him throwed before like Leland’s throwed him. If he’d just quit patty-caking and accept what he
knows already
: that there’s nothing but to go ahead and straighten the kid up when he gets outa line and Hank sure don’t need anybody to Send Out for him some help when it comes to
that
sort of—But for a long time now, a year, since we heard about her killing herself—No, no that can’t be, it’s—ah—it’s just that all this with the union, and then Lee too, he’s throwed off kilter a little bit. He’ll come back around, if he’d
just
—like anybody else destined to responsibility, like any of the chosen people—learn he’s got to dig what he
knows already
, then everything’s gonna be fine again—oh yeah—gonna be
prime
. . .

All this imprecise, rough-shingled thinking while the October sun pushed through the smoky blue layers of October sky, to bravely look toward November . . . and the black rat-pack of clouds, hiding on the horizon, seemed as far away as January.

Joe Ben scooted gradually along the peak of the roof, face bright orange, eyes clear green with white showing all around the pupil, and as he moved jerkily along, tacking down the new cedar shingles, he liked to look back occasionally at the bright contrast of new wood lined against old—the line ragged and rough, but bright nevertheless. He would study the line a moment, then set to again, hammering away at his rough-split shingles and whittling his rough-tooled thoughts, certain sure that everything would come along fine, be a gas, turn out prime . . . if you just held your mouth right and accepted what you knew already was gonna hafta be done. You
bet!
And if the joke was on Joe he was determined to be the first to laugh as well as the last to admit it.

At Viv’s call to lunch Joe climbed down the ladder, content that he had fixed the roof and Hank’s worries both at the same time. There was nothing to it; just get Hank and the boy together and have everybody talk things out. Whatever was chewing at them, he was sure all it needed was a good healthy airing. They weren’t neither of them nincompoops. They could surely see it wasn’t any good going around with chips on their shoulders, they could surely see that. Nothing could be gained, and, if it kept on, Hank stood to lose sleep he needed to keep the job rolling. Lee stood to lose a mouthful of teeth. That was all there was to it. He’d make them see the lay of the land.

But after checking out the scene at the lunch table he decided to hold off for a few days on his suggestion for mediation. Hank brooded behind a newspaper with heavy, rumbling silence, and Lee, smoking and staring out the kitchen window with tragic, defeated eyes and an anemic pallor to his cheeks, didn’t look capable of sustaining the shock of a haircut, let alone the loss of a mouthful of teeth. Looking at Lee, Joe was amazed that this could be the same person he had watched just yesterday scale a fifteen-degree slope at a run with a choker chain in his hand. He sure looked brought down and troubled, Lee did . . .

“You better get hold of some of them eggs, Leland,” Joe advised, “before you expire on the spot. Oh, I know what’s botherin’ you; you slep’ too late. You oughta been up there on the roof with me, breathing of the firmament.”

Lee turns slowly to give Joe a trenchant smile.
“I was up there with you, Josephus. In spirit.” I had decided before coming to breakfast that it would best serve my plan to win Viv’s sympathy by being bitter and hurt as a result of Hank’s overbearing treatment of me last night. “Yes, in spirit I was up there from the first crack of dawn and rattle of daylight. I was up there with you every stroke of that hammer.”

Joe slapped his cheek. “I never thought for a
second.
And that’s d’rectly above your room, ain’t it? Oh man, you musta thought things was really comin’ apart in man-sized chunks. You reckon you’ll pull through? You still got just oh the
faintest
tremble to your lip. . . .”

“I
did
consider running to warn Henny Penny and Foxy Loxy,” I laughed. In spite of my resolute bitterness, I couldn’t help being amused by Joe Ben. “But I do reckon I’ll pull through, though, shellshock notwithstanding.”

“I’m truly sorry,” Joe apologized. “I know how a man who’s got to be woked up all the time durin’ the week hates to be woked on the weekend when he doesn’t got to.”

“Apology accepted”—and wondered: But how can you know, Joe? How can you possibly know how I feel about being woked, Joe, when you’ve probably been up before dawn every day of your life?

Joe Ben constituted a phenomenon to me in more ways than one; quite apart from his appearance, he was one of those extremely remarkable beings whose hearts pump pure elixir of Benzedrine through a body made of latex rubber. Always high, always on the go, always looking overnourished and under-fleshed, for all he ate. He devoted so much energy to his meals that one was apt to wonder how he kept from expiring in the very act of eating, like the car that died at the gas station because it burned fuel faster than the pump could deliver it.