Sometimes a Great Notion (56 page)

He emerges into the wind and straddles the hole, standing. As he draws the boy up after him by the belt he feels the sand surrounding the hole begin to crumble. He takes a breath and heaves, falling backward and pulling the boy onto him. From the hole there is a soft
thump
and for a moment a dusty cloud of rotten wood smell hangs above the sand, then is chased away before the sandslinging hoofs of that gritty wind. “Let’s get our asses gone from here,” Hank says in a hollow voice and starts back across the dunes with the dog at his heels and the boy piggyback.

“I reckon you know what you got into,” he says after a few minutes of silence.

“A devil’s stovepipe, I guess.”

“Yeah. That’s what the old man calls them. I didn’t know there was any left. You see, bub, this here was a pine forest a long, long time ago. These dunes didn’t useta be here, just trees. But the winds kept bankin’ the sand higher and higher and finally covered up the forest. Clean to the top of the trees. And the trees eventually rotted out, leaving these
hollows
where they useta be, maybe just barely covered at the top. An’ you stepped into one. A pretty good one, too, thank your lucky stars, because most people who fall into a stovepipe pull the stovepipe in after ’em an’ then . . . But what I want to know is what in the goddam hell were you doin’ out here anyway, headin’ across the dunes to the ocean in the dead of night? Huh? Tell me that.”

The boy doesn’t speak; his face is cold and wet against Hank’s neck, and the dilapidated mask flaps about them on its elastic string. Hank doesn’t ask again.

“Anyhow, you ain’t never to come out here again. The devil’s stovepipe ain’t none too pleasant a place to spend a night, even Halloween. It’s lucky, too, I had me this old bluetick dog because the wind had blowed away all your tracks. . . . Yeah. Oh! Say now—about what happened to ol’ Uncle
Aaron
the time he got in dutch in a hole. See, in the barnyard where we was putting in the hole, there was this old horse that Aaron kept around for his kids to ride, a old blind gelding who was twenty years if he was a day. Aaron’d had him all his worthless life, that old horse, and wouldn’t get shut of him for nothing. So that old horse knew ever’ inch of that barnyard, from the house to the fence and the barn to the pigpen. We kids used to put us on blindfolds and gallop him to scare ourselves, but he never hit a post or nothing. Well, anyhow, while we was there digging this outhouse hole, none of us’d even thought about that horse. Except Uncle Ben. And that was just the sort of thing Ben could think of. When he come up out of the hole for a water break he hollers back at Aaron and says, ‘Henry and the boy are going with me for a sip, Aaron; we’ll be back shortly!’ He pulled us off a piece from the hole and put a finger to his lips to me and Papa and says in a whisper, ‘Okay, now, shush. Watch this.’

“ ‘Watch
what
, you damn fool?’ Papa says, and Ben says, ‘Just keep shushed an’ watch this . . .’

“So Papa and I stood there. Ben went to trotting across the barnyard at that hole, pawing the ground with his boots and snorting. Keeping back far enough to where Aaron couldn’t see him. He even kicks a couple clods into the hole.

“ ‘Whoa!’ Aaron yells. ‘Whoa! Get back there, damn you, get
back!
You’ll fall in here on me! Get back.’

“Ben kept it up, knocking more and more clods down. Aaron kept hollering whoa, louder and louder. Then all of a sudden the damnedest thing you ever saw; there was some scrambling and scuffling down there, and then
zoom
up out of there Aaron come! fifteen sheer foot of dirt, and not a rope nor a ladder, like a man shot out of a cannon. He never did know how he managed it. Papa and Ben hoorawed him about it all the way to the house and back. And you know, when we get back, what do you think? Down at the bottom of that hole there’s this old blind horse, sure enough, dead as hell.”

When I finished telling little Lee that tale about the horse I had expected him to laugh, or call me a liar, or something. But he didn’t twitch a muscle. And I’d expected him to be scared stiff when I got him out of that dune hole, but he’d fooled me there too. He didn’t act scared at all. He was limp and relaxed—peaceful, kind of. . . . I would ask him if he was okay and he’d say he was fine. I asked him if he was scared down there and he said for a while, and then he wasn’t. I asked him how come? I said, “Boy, I was scared from the second I went down that hole on that pine ladder to the second I come out.” And he thought for a while and said, “That canary I had? I was always scared somebody would leave a window open and a cold wind would kill it. And then the wind did kill it and I wasn’t scared any more of that.” And he sounded darn near happy about it. And now, when I ask him if he wasn’t scared of them punks that was giving him a hard time there on the beach, he acts the same way, giddy, like he’d been drinking. I ask him, “Didn’t them fool kids know that car could roll on you out in the surf that way?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. They weren’t exactly worried about it.”

“Well, weren’t
you?
” I ask him.

“Not as much as you were,” he says and sits there grinning with his teeth rattling together from the cold while I drive to Joe’s place; he looks pretty pleased about something. But for all his grins and good humor I can’t shake this nagging notion that he’d come to the ocean for the same reason he was headed across them dunes as a kid, and that I maybe had something to do with it this time too. Maybe the fuss I had with him last night after the hunt, maybe something else. Lord knows.

I fill him in a little on what’s happened since this morning, how Evenwrite has come back with another report, so that people all know where the bone is buried now. “That’s probably one of the reasons them punks was giving you a tough time.”

“And that explains their change of attitude,” he says. “They gave me a ride earlier this afternoon and they weren’t exactly pleasant, but neither were they trying to drown me—they must have heard the news at the root-beer dive. Maybe that’s even why they came driving down on the beach, to find me.”

I tell him that could well be. “We’re none too popular around town right now. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised but what somebody on Main Street starts taking pot shots at us just for general purposes,” I say, only half kidding.

“So naturally that’s right where we are going: to Main Street.”

“That’s right,” I tell him. “To Main Street quick as we finish over at Joe Ben’s.”

“May I ask why?”

“Why? Because I’m goddamned if I’m gonna let a bunch of niggers tell me whether I can come into town or not, I don’t care how hacked they are at me—tell me whether I can have a Saturday-night drink in a public bar.”

“Even if you weren’t planning to have that Saturday-night drink in the first place?”

“Yeah,” I tell him; I can tell by the way he starts using his prissy tone that he can’t see my real thinking on it, no more than I can see his thinking on wanting to take a long swim in the cold ocean “—that is right.”

“Curious,” he says. “And is that why Joe Ben called you? Because he knew you wouldn’t want to miss a chance to come into town and take advantage of the public hostility?”

“That’s right,” I tell him, getting a little hacked. “There ain’t nothin’ I like better than walkin’ into a room knowin’ everybody there would like to take a pot shot at me. You bet. I like to take advantage is exactly right,” I tell him, knowing he ain’t going to see it anyhow.

“I understand perfectly; it’s like the madman who goes over Niagara Falls in a coffee can because that’s as good a way as any to get dead.”

“That’s right,” I tell him, knowing he don’t understand it at all—that it’s more because it’s as good a way as any to stay alive. . . .

 

And when Brother Walker had unplugged the organ and turned off the current of his wife’s electric guitar and finally brought his roaring sermon to a sweaty stop, all the dancing tripped-out congregation blinked and sighed and ruefully returned to the world of their weekday selves . . . except Joe Ben, wild-stepping and still sky-bound, with eyes that showed white all the way around the green iris and a soul that soared to a currentless music Sunday through Saturday. And never knew he was tripped-off at all.

When he left the tent with his family in tow he walked to the pick-up and found Lee’s note, but before he had time to decide what to think about it one of the fellow followers of the faith had been so swept up by the services that he had felt called upon to put aside his natural antagonism toward the Stampers and bring it to Brother Joe Ben’s attention that a certain
meeting
was to be held shortly at the grange hall: “A meetin’ I bet is due to really affect you sonofabitching Stampers, too . . . this afternoon, with Evenwrite an’ the Strike Committee
an
’ Mr. Jonathan B. Draeger
hisself!
” he wanted Joe to know. “An’ if what comes to light in the course of this meeting is what we all
expeck
to come to light, Brother Stamper, then you heartless sonofabitches better be prepared to suffer the conch-aquences!”

After the man stalked off, Joe stood for a time considering the information. If the conch-aquences of what come to light in that grange-hall meeting could affect him and the family so, well then maybe he just should observe that meeting personally. . . . It seemed the least he could do, after that church brother’d had the common decency to tell him about it.

He looked about briefly for Lee, then piled Jan and the kids into the pick-up and drove them out to the new house, where he left them with instructions for painting, then headed back to town. He returned to Wakonda by a wonderfully devious and roundabout route, angling closer and closer with meticulous caution until he had slipped up on the bayward side of Main Street without a soul the wiser. He parked the pick-up in the great banks of seeding Scotch broom behind the cannery and had a final cigarette while the bursting pods fired rattling shots at the windshield. He finished his cigarette, stepped out into the sunless afternoon, flipped up the collar of his leather jacket, and began sneaking up on Main Street as if he were stalking a wild and wounded beast and afraid of its turning and charging.

The Scotch broom gave him cover until he reached the fishbone-strewn dock beneath the cannery. This concealed him up to the corner where the fire station was. After that it was clearing; the open stretch of Main yawned before him.

He hitched up his trousers and struck up a merry whistle and stepped onto the walk, trying to affect an air of casual and purposeless strolling. He even found a beer can to kick along.

He strolled safely past the Sea Breeze Cafe, past the soaped window of the real-estate office, past the five-and-dime, where a pasted display of black cats made of construction paper and pipe-cleaner whiskers observed his nonchalant stealth with respectful orange eyes. He cut across the street so he was opposite the Snag and walked on, his hands in the chest pockets of the cracked leather coat and his scarred face bent toward the cracked walk. He walked with a forced slowness that emphasized more than concealed his urgency. When he had passed and was out of sight of the Snag’s front windows he looked furtively up and down the block, then broke into a run back across the street. He settled again into his slow, casual walk, his back hunched and slanted slightly and his bowed legs taut with restraint. When he reached the place where the alley ran back beside the grange hall, he stopped, stepped completely off the sidewalk out into the gutter, squinted a casual eye down that alley like a town-league pitcher looking to a catcher for signals . . . looked over his shoulder left, and over his shoulder right, checking the Snag up the street at third and the clouds leading off of first base down the street, then practically leaped out of sight into the narrow alleyway, as though the pitcher had suddenly decided he could dash unnoticed past the batter, ball in hand.

All in all, he could not have drawn more attention to his actions with flags and cannonfire, but it was fortunately nearing dinnertime, with the Saturday ball game on TV and the sky dim and nobody on the streets to care about his actions anyway. Still, he stood with his back against the plank siding of the grange hall for a moment and listened for footsteps. The only sound came from the whistle buoy in the bay and the famished wind scratching in the garbage. Satisfied, Joe hurried on to the rear of the hall and leaped silently to the top of a woodbox and walked along it to a window. He looked through the window at the dim rows of folding chairs, then raised the pane a few inches, carefully. He tried for a moment to squat comfortably under the open window, gave up, and jumped down from the woodbox and heaved a great chopping stump up. It hit with the sound of a bass drum, and the open window banged shut. He climbed back on the woodbox, reopened the window, pushed the stump beneath it, and sat down to wait, with his leather elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. He sighed and for the first time wondered why for the love of God in Heaven was he doing this, sitting here waiting to hear what he and Hank had both known for months was due to be said? Why? And why worry about how to tell Hank? or what Hank would do? Hank’ll just have to pull himself together and tell them, “Up yours,” like he knew already he would. Like Hank
knows
already he will have to tell them when they finish all the bullshooting and horseplaying that they are going to have to do in there. Like Hank has
always
had to do when all’s said and when all’s done, on account of that’s his place, no matter how he don’t like it. So why does Hank waste his time stewing about it?