“He acts like ...he don’t have any reason, ever any reason, to fight.” “Maybe he don’t.” “If Lee don’t”—Hank stared into the fire—“then there’s nobody does.” The vetch rattled and Uncle growled. Something moved at the edge of the light. Hank leaped to his feet. TIRED tired cold but HIM! The dog seemed to have two tails, issuing from hindquarters swollen large enough to handle even another two. “Oh Jesus! There’s a snake got her!” She tries to snap at them when they pick her up. She doesn’t remember who they are. They are all part of it now. Like the MOON and the FIRE, and the LOG and the BEAR, all HOT COLD DARK in her fevered confusion, and part of the same big ENEMY the way the WATER has become part, and REST; even SLEEP . . . It is late. The big clock-in-a-horse ticks soulfully. With the station off the air, Indian Jenny’s father can only sit and watch the blank screen that pulses before him like a filmed blue-white eye. Gradually from the eye troops a ragged line of disorderly memories and myths. They begin circling a pine-knot fire burning for sixty years. And finally sit where they please, overlapping each other like transparent years snipped from a cellophane calendar. “Once upon a time,” says the milkstoned eye, and everyone leans to listen... Henry bickers fitfully with a young shadow from the past. Lee strikes a match, fascinated. Molly whines, out of her head, in something’s carrying arms. At the Wakonda Hotel, in the room they share, Ray and Rod haggle past midnight over the expenses they have incurred since coming to work for Teddy. Ray is trying to whistle Hank Thompson’s guitar intro to “A Jewel Here on Earth,” but he is sleepy and edgy and the wienies Rod boiled for supper on the hot plate, being so unruly in his stomach, make it hard for him to get the right tone. Suddenly he stops whistling and flings the handful of papers he has been reading into the basket. “Fuck it! Fuck it all!”  “Take it easy, man! it’s just this strike.” Rod tries to soothe his friend. “Face it, man, until this motherin’ strike is settled and there’s more cash running loose, maybe we should take off to Eureka and make some bucks at your brother’s parking lot. What do you think?” Ray is staring at the battered guitar case showing from beneath his bed. Finally he holds up his hands and looks them over. “I don’t know, man,” he says. “Let’s face it; neither of us is getting any younger. Sometimes I feel like just, oh . . . fuck it!” At the dock in front of the old house Hank lays the unconscious dog in the boat and stands up. “Do me a favor, Joby; drive her to the vet’s for me...?” Joe is surprised and suddenly wide awake. “What? I mean all right, but—” “I want to cover the bank foundation tonight.” “Again? Why, you gonna check that foundation to death.” “No. It’s just ...Those clouds worry me.” “Well ...okay.” And, leaving Hank on the dock, as he guides the boat across the dark river, with his face in a bemused frown, like a scar over scars ...Joe finds he is worried also— about something more than clouds, but not sure what. Old Henry, in his rumbling bed, tosses and turns and talks to bygone beauties while his false teeth watch from their glass of water by his bedside. Viv hugs her pillow in the dark, wondering why isn’t he coming to bed—tonight! to her! now!—and remembers spending night after night alone in her bed full of dolls “Way up yonder, top of the sky . . .” while her parents were away with the truck selling produce in Denver or Colorado Springs, and the dark room full of dolls’ ears listening to every note: “. . . blue jay lives in a silver eye.” Joe climbs the stairs, already asleep and dreaming. Jan waits like a lump in a room full of lumpy sleeping bags, too shy in her flannel-nightgown sleep to entertain even the dimmest of dreams. Hank stands on the dock, rubbing his palms nervously up and down his thighs, lips tight. Lee sits wide awake on his bed with his shoes off, relighting his little cigarette and looking down at his long outburst of writing . . . I would apologize for my delay in writing were I not convinced you would enjoy, much more than an apology, my quaint explanation for this letter: I have just come up to my room after a grisly hassle with Brother Hank, (do you recall? I think you made acquaintance with his ectoplasmic counterpart in a coffee house in the village) and I decided it would only be fair to give my nerve endings the solace of a joint. The pot was safe where I had secured it—cuddled in a cold cream jar at the bottom of the shaving kit Mona gave me—but where the bleeding papers: pot without papers, man, what kind of funny shit is that? It is beer without an opener. It is opium without a pipe. Our thermosed lives are, at best, nine-tenths of the time padded by vacuum and sealed by silvered silicon, but, for all their artificiality, we are generally able to find means for unstoppering them now and then, and enjoy at least some portion of addlepated freedom. Are we not? I mean, even the most square moral-ridden and socially-middled saddle-brow manages at some moment to drink enough to pop his stopper and enjoy a romp in the primroses. And that just with crude booze. So how can something so hip as a Pond jar full of pot be cursed to unfulfilled frustration by a lack of papers? I rant, I rave with frustration. I even consider rolling it in magazine paper. Then...a flashbulb of remembrance; my wallet! Of course; didn’t I put a pack of zig-zag gummed wheatstraws in my wallet that night we all got so zonked at Jan’s and the three of us composed that immortal children’s classic Fuckleberry Hen? I quick to my trousers and feel for my wallet. Ah. Ah yes. There are the papers, and there the typed story still folded about them— “See. See Rooster Booster run. See him jump Fuckleberry Hen. See him jam it in. Jam, jam, jam.”—and what else flits out of the little package and flutters to the floor like a dying moth? A scrap of lipsticked Kleenex on which is written Peters’ department phone number. I sigh. I languish with memories. Good old Peters ...back there enjoying the good academic life. Hmm . . . y’know, do the tortured soul good to commune with him. I believe I shall drop him a line. So, I transcribe here that line (if this damned unreliable ballpoint pen stops skipping) while I blow up the three joints I have rolled. Three, I hear him gasp, three joints? Alone up in his room? Three? Yes, three, I answer calmly. For after this particular day I feel entitled to the 1st, I want the 2nd and oh God I need the 3rd! The 1st is a just payment for being good and working hard. The 2nd for enjoyment. The 3rd is to remind me to never never never again be duped into believing anything but the worst of one’s relatives. As a variation of W. C. Fields’ great truth, How can anyone who likes dogs and little children be anything but all bad? First, as I fire up number one, I will give you what brief history I can afford: since the day I fled the realm of the mind for that of the muscle I have been cursed by having to pay homage to the wounds of both: physically, I have been forced for ten fiendish hours a day six solid days a week to subject my sinews to such sadistic stress as walking, running, stumbling, fumbling, falling down and getting back up and walking again as I all the while drag a rusty iron cable the obstinance of which is rivaled solely by the obstinance of the gargantuan log I am supposed to tie said cable around. I have had my bodily bones bunked and cracked, chunked and whacked by every rock stump root trunk within a fifty-foot radius as I fled that log so that cable wouldn’t jerk it over me; I have had to stand there pant and fainting trying to endure berryvines, nettles, sunstroke, blisters, mosquitoes, nosee’ums and prickly heat in the brief respite alloted me while I waited for that cable to drop its log a hundred yards away and come hissing and snapping back for a new assault (something of Dante, don’t you think?) I mean not only have I suffered all these physical horrors, but I have, if anything,inthislandwhere Icame to give my mind a rest, increased my mental menaces a million-fold! (Pardon my bad alliterative and endure my brief intermission while I um umm puff puff relight this joint ...there we go.) Dearest comrade, the point I wish to make with all this preambling penmanship is simply that I have been far too put upon to get either my lazy mind or my lazy ass to repaying your wonderful letter’s most welcomed visit to this prehistoric land. Also, and at the risk of being honest, I actually have been more than ever beset by the slings and arrows of outrageous introspection...
more than I was a month ago, even. (What did Pearson say about the apartment? Yo............