“You ’bout ready, hon? You wanted to be there at seven.” The door opened, Viv stepped out, buttoning up a white car coat. “Who did I hear?” “That was the kid, hon. That was him. He did for a fact show up. . . . What do you think of that?” “Your brother? Let me say hello—” She started for Lee’s room, but Hank held her arm. “Not right now,” he whispered. “He looks in a pretty sorry state. Wait till he rests up a piece.” They walked to the stairs and started down. “You can meet him when you get back from town. Or tomorrow. Right now you’re runnin’ late as it is. . . . What took you so long, anyhow?” “Oh, Hank ...I don’t know. I just don’t know if I want to go in or not.” “Well, hell’s fire, then, don’t. There’s sure nobody here pushing you.” “But Elizabeth called me especially—” “Shoot. Elizabeth Pringle; old Pucker Pringle’s daughter . . .” “She—they all acted so darned hurt, though, that first meeting; when I wouldn’t play their word game. Other girls didn’t play and nobody minded; what did I say that was so wrong?” “You said no. To some people that’s always wrong.” “I suppose. And I guess I really haven’t made much effort to be friendly.” “Have they? Have they ever come out here to visit you? I told you before we was married not to expect to win any popularity contests. Honey, you’re the cutthroat’s wife, they’re bound to be a little snicky to you.” “It isn’t that. It isn’t just that . . .” She paused for a moment to study her make-up in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs. “It seems like they want to take something out on me. Like they have a grudge or something . . .” Hank released her arm and walked on toward the door; “No, honey,” he said, looking at the grain on the big door, “it’s nothin’ at all but you being soft in the heart; so you’re pecked at.” He smiled, recalling something. “Man alive: you shoulda seen Myra, Lee’s mom—you shoulda seen how she dealt with that bunch of hens.” “But Hank, I would like to be friends with them, some of them ...” “Yes sir,” he remembered fondly, “she knew how to tell them to go piss up a rope, the bunch of heifers. C’mon, let’s make it.” Viv followed him down the porch steps onto the lawn, resolving to try to be a little less soft in the heart this time, and trying to remember if she used to have to try so hard to make friends, back home only a few years ago: Have I changed so much in only a few years? North, on the highway heading back to Portland, Floyd Evenwrite sweats in the gravel to change a tire not two months old and already blowed goddammitall out! And every time the lug wrench slips in the dark he peels another inch of skin from his knuckles, gets a good grip on his leaky bowels, and runs again through the string of names he’d been calling Hank Stamper ever since the fiasco at the house: “. . . cocksuckin’, asslickin’, fartknockin’, shiteatin’ . . .”—in a curious methodical, rhythmed chant that is becoming almost reverent. And Jonathan Draeger, in a motel in Eugene, runs his finger down the list of people he is supposed to see, counting twelve in all, twelve meetings before he continues on over to this Wakonda to see this—he checked the list—this Hank Stamper and talk some sense into him ...thirteen meetings, unlucky thirteen, before he can anticipate returning home. Oh well; a rolling stone and all that. Closes the little book, yawns, and begins searching for his tube of Desenex. And Hank returns from ferrying Viv across to the jeep just in time to hear Joe Ben call from the porch, “Hustle up here an’ give me a hand; the old man’s got a earwig crawled into his leg cast and he’s goin’ at himself with a ballpeen hammer!” “Th’ least o’ my worries,” Hank mutters, amused, hurriedly mooring fast the motorboat. And in Wakonda, in a bright Main Street office, acquired by foreclosure, the Real Estate Hotwire broods as he gouges pieces of white pine from the half-carved figure in his lap. He takes special pains with the face; sometimes, if he didn’t take pains, these faces came to look like a wooden caricature of a recent general and President. The Hotwire had served in the European Theater in the early forties as a mess sergeant, gaining a small reputation as a real go-getter of a chef. It was there that he met the man that was to haunt the next twenty years of his life. One morning this particular general and his entire entourage of aides, assistants, and asswipers had arrived in camp for a meeting. The general had announced he would mess with the enlisted men and was pleased to discover that one particular mess-bench boasted one particular go-getter of a chef. At noon he and his entourage filed past that bench. He complimented the go-getter on the smell of the food and commended him on the appearance of his kitchen, then, minutes later, complained of something alien in his ox-tail soup. This particular something turned out to be a German officer’s ring which the Hotwire had bought from an infantryman to send home to his father. He was petrified when he saw what it was. Not only did he refuse to claim the bauble and deny having ever laid eyes on it before, he went as well on to insist—though the point had never been questioned—that the bone which the ring had graced was definitely an ox-tail bone. The expression of the general’s face showed him his error, but it was too late to retract it. And he spent the remainder of the war in a constant sweat waiting for an ax that never fell, and was discharged a nervous and bewildered man. What had happened? He’d been so certain of reprisal. He didn’t understand what had stayed that terrible ax until years later that same general had the evil audacity to run for President and the insidious gall to be elected. Now, now it would come! And did. A recession fell. His budding restaurant business withered and died without blooming. In his heart he always knew that this financial drought was nothing but a diabolic tactic perpetrated on the whole innocent nation for the sole purpose of squeezing dry his root-beer stand. Not that he cared that much for his business, but the whole nation! All that suffering! He couldn’t help feeling partly responsible. If it hadn’t been for him, it would have never happened. And what other disasters lay ahead? Even worse ones. He made it through the eight years of that general’s term by nothing short of the grace of God and his wife’s needlework and was just now getting so he could pick up a newspaper without fear of finding himself declared a traitor and ordered shot on sight, was just beginning to make some headway in a very tricky world. If this nasty strike didn’t break his back. This strike? Could the same old ...? No. He decides not; it is somebody else now that has it in for him, that’s all there is to it. Moodily he gouges at the little wooden figure in his lap, grinding his teeth against old memories. ...The sonofabitch could have at least returned the ring! And, above the town, the timbered ridges move, steadily, under the edge of the silver moon, like stacks of lath passing beneath a gleaming and silent circle saw. Behind the grange hall berry vines feel for handholds with tough, blind fingers. Wood rots quietly in the cannery house. The salt wind blowing off the ocean sucks the life from pistons, gears, wiring, transmissions. . . . On the Main Street a short, plump, plush-looking pastry of a woman leaves the Snag and stalks up the sidewalk with short, angry steps. The evening mist collects in her eyelashes and the street lights glaze her curly black hair. She passes friends in a fury, looking neither right nor left. Her round, breadloaf shoulders are stiff with indignation. Her mouth is a grim dab of raspberry jam. She holds this air of outraged morality until she turns the corner of Shahelem Street and is out of sight of Main. There she stops against the fender of her little Studebaker, and the leavening goes out of her wrath. “Oh, oh, oh.” She sinks against the dew-glazed fender with a dejected sigh like a cake falling. . . . Her name was Simone and she was French. After marrying a paratrooper in 1945 she had come to Oregon, like a character strayed from the pages of de Maupassant. She hadn’t seen her husband since he’d disappeared without so much as a parting Geronimo of farewell seven years ago, leaving her a mortgaged car, a down-payment washer and dryer, and five children still owned largely by the hospital. Though slightly embittered by the treachery, she had nevertheless managed to keep her head above water by keeping her buoyant little body under the covers, sleeping from charitable bed to bed with beneficent logger after logger. Never for pay, of course—she was a professed Catholic and a devout amateur—but for love, only for love, and whatever reasonable fringe benefits might be thrown in. So amiable was this little muffin of misfortune, so reasonable were her benefactors, that after seven years the washer-dryer was hers flat out, the car was nearly paid off, and the children no longer had to report monthly to the Hospital Finance Plan. Yet, in spite of her success, it had somehow never occurred to the townspeople, any more than i............