The Long Valley (18 page)

I winked back at him. “Take a dog next time.” I imitated his clipped sentences. We drank our whiskey and went back to our chairs. Timothy Ratz won a game of solitaire and piled his cards and moved up on the bar.

I looked back at the table under which Johnny Bear lay. He had rolled over on his stomach. His foolish, smiling face looked out at the room. His head moved and he peered all about, like an animal about to leave its den. And then he came sliding out and stood up. There was a paradox about his movement. He looked twisted and shapeless, and yet he moved with complete lack of effort.

Johnny Bear crept up the room toward the bar, smiling about at the men he passed. In front of the bar his insistent question arose. “Whiskey? Whiskey?” It was like a bird call. I don’t know what kind of bird, but I’ve heard it—two notes on a rising scale, asking a question over and over, “Whiskey? Whiskey?”

The conversation in the room stopped, but no one came forward to lay money on the counter. Johnny smiled plaintively. “Whiskey?”

Then he tried to cozen them. Out of his throat an angry woman’s voice issued. “I tell you it was all bone. Twenty cents a pound, and half bone.” And then a man, “Yes, ma’am. I didn’t know it. I’ll give you some sausage to make it up.”

Johnny Bear looked around expectantly. “Whiskey?” Still none of the men offered to come forward. Johnny crept to the front of the room and crouched. I whispered, “What’s he doing?”

Alex said, “Sh. Looking through a window Listen!”

A woman’s voice came, a cold, sure voice, the words clipped. “I can’t quite understand it. Are you some kind of monster? I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen you.”

Another woman’s voice answered her, a voice low and hoarse with misery. “Maybe I am a monster. I can’t help it. I can’t help it.”

“You
must
help it,” the cold voice broke in. “Why you’d be better dead.”

I heard a soft sobbing coming from the thick smiling lips of Johnny Bear. The sobbing of a woman in hopelessness. I looked around at Alex. He was sitting stiffly, his eyes wide open and unblinking. I opened my mouth to whisper a question, but he waved me silent. I glanced about the room. All the men were stiff and listening. The sobbing stopped. “Haven’t you ever felt that way, Emalin?”

Alex caught his breath sharply at the name. The cold voice announced, “Certainly not.”

“Never in the night? Not ever—ever in your life?”

“If I had,” the cold voice said, “if ever I had, I would cut that part of me away. Now stop your whining, Amy. I won’t stand for it. If you don’t get control of your nerves I’ll see about having some medical treatment for you. Now go to your prayers.”

Johnny Bear smiled on. “Whiskey?”

Two men advanced without a word and put down coins. Fat Carl filled two glasses and, when Johnny Bear tossed off one after the other, Carl filled one again. Everyone knew by that how moved he was. There were no drinks on the house at the Buffalo Bar. Johnny Bear smiled about the room and then he went out with that creeping gait of his. The doors folded together after him, slowly without a sound.

Conversation did not spring up again. Everyone in the room seemed to have a problem to settle in his own mind. One by one they drifted out and the back-swing of the doors brought in little puffs of tule fog. Alex got up and walked out and I followed him.

The night was nasty with the evil-smelling fog. It seemed to cling to the buildings and to reach out with free arms into the air. I doubled my pace and caught up with Alex. “What was it?” I demanded. “What was it all about?”

For a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer. But then he stopped and turned to me. “Oh, damn it. Listen! Every town has its aristocrats, its family above reproach. Emalin and Amy Hawkins are our aristocrats, maiden ladies, kind people. Their father was a congressman. I don’t like this. Johnny Bear shouldn’t do it. Why! they feed him. Those men shouldn’t give him whiskey. He’ll haunt that house now.... Now he knows he can get whiskey for it.”

I asked, “Are they relatives of yours?”

“No, but they’re—why, they aren’t like other people. They have the farm next to mine. Some Chinese farm it on shares. You see, it’s hard to explain. The Hawkins women, they’re symbols. They’re what we tell our kids when we want to—well, to describe good people.”

“Well,” I protested, “Nothing Johnny Bear said would hurt them, would it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. I mean, I kind of know. Oh! Go on to bed. I didn’t bring the Ford. I’m going to walk out home.” He turned and hurried into that slow squirming mist.

I walked along to Mrs. Ratz’ boarding house. I could hear the chuttering of the Diesel engine off in the swamp and the clang of the big steel mouth that ate its way through the ground. It was Saturday night. The dredger would stop at seven Sunday morning and rest until midnight Sunday. I could tell by the sound that everything was all right. I climbed the narrow stairs to my room. Once in bed I left the light burning for a while and stared at the pale insipid flowers on the wallpaper. I thought of those two voices speaking out of Johnny Bear’s mouth. They were authentic voices, not reproductions. Remembering the tones, I could see the women who had spoken, the chill-voiced Emalin, and the loose, misery-broken face of Amy. I wondered what caused the misery. Was it just the lonely suffering of a middle-aged woman? It hardly seemed so to me, for there was too much fear in the voice. I went to sleep with the light on and had to get up later and turn it off.

About eight the next morning I walked down across the swamp to the dredger. The crew was busy bending some new wire to the drums and coiling the worn cable for removal. I looked over the job and at about eleven o’clock walked back to Loma. In front of Mrs. Ratz’ boarding house Alex Hartnell sat in a model T Ford touring car. He called to me, “I was just going to the dredger to get you. I knocked off a couple of chickens this morning. Thought you might like to come out and help with them.”

I accepted joyfully. Our cook was a good cook, a big pasty man; but lately I had found a dislike for him arising in me. He smoked Cuban cigarettes in a bamboo holder. I didn’t like the way his fingers twitched in the morning. His hands were clean—floury like a miller’s hands. I never knew before why they called them moth millers, those little flying bugs. Anyway I climbed into the Ford beside Alex and we drove down the hill to the rich land of the southwest. The sun shone brilliantly on the black earth. When I was little, a Catholic boy told me that the sun always shone on Sunday, if only for a moment, because it was God’s day. I always meant to keep track to see if it were true. We rattled down to the level plain.

Alex shouted, “Remember about the Hawkinses?”

“Of course I remember.”

He pointed ahead. “That’s the house.”

Little of the house could be seen, for a high thick hedge of cypress surrounded it. There must be a small garden inside the square too. Only the roof and the tops of the windows showed over the hedge. I could see that the house was painted tan, trimmed with dark brown, a combination favored for railroad stations and schools in California. There were two wicket gates in the front and side of the hedge. The barn was outside the green barrier to the rear of the house. The hedge was clipped square. It looked incredibly thick and strong.

“The hedge keeps the wind out,” Alex shouted above the roar of the Ford.

“It doesn’t keep Johnny Bear out,” I said.

A shadow crossed his face. He waved at a whitewashed square building standing out in the field. “That’s where the Chink share-croppers live. Good workers. I wish I had some like them.”

At that moment from behind the comer of the hedge a horse and buggy appeared and turned into the road. The grey horse was old but well groomed, the buggy shiny and the harness polished. There was a big silver H on the outside of each blinder. It seemed to me that the check-rein was too short for such an old horse.

Alex cried, “There they are now, on their way to church.”

We took off our hats and bowed to the women as they went by, and they nodded formally to us. I had a good look at them. It was a shock to me. They looked almost exactly as I thought they would. Johnny Bear was more monstrous even than I had known, if by the tone of voice he could describe the features of his people. I didn’t have to ask which was Emalin and which was Amy. The clear straight eyes, the sharp sure chin, the mouth cut with the precision of a diamond, the stiff, curveless figure, that was Emalin. Amy was very like her, but so unlike. Her edges were soft. Her eyes were warm, her mouth full. There was a swell to her breast, and yet she did look like Emalin. But whereas Emalin’s mouth was straight by nature, Amy
held
her mouth straight. Emalin must have been fifty or fifty-five and Amy about ten years younger. I had only a moment to look at them, and I never saw them again. It seems strange that I don’t know anyone in the world better than those two women.

Alex was shouting, “You see what I meant about aristocrats?”

I nodded. It was easy to see. A community would feel kind of—safe, having women like that about. A place like Loma with its fogs, with its great swamp like a hideous sin, needed, really needed, the Hawkins women. A few years there might do things to a man’s mind if those women weren’t there to balance matters.

It was a good dinner. Alex’s sister fried the chicken in butter and did everything else right. I grew more suspicious and uncharitable toward our cook. We sat around in the dining-room and drank really good brandy.

I said, “I can’t see why you ever go into the Buffalo. That whiskey is—”

“I know,” said Alex. “But the Buffalo is the mind of Loma. It’s our newspaper, our theatre and our club.”

This was so true that when Alex started the Ford and prepared to take me back I knew, and he knew, we would go for an hour or two to the Buffalo Bar.

We were nearly into town. The feeble lights of the car splashed about on the road. Another car rattled toward us. Alex swung across the road and stopped. “It’s the doctor, Doctor Holmes,” he explained. The oncoming car pulled up because it couldn’t get around us. Alex called, “Say, Doc, I was going to ask you to take a look at my sister. She’s got a swelling on her throat.”

Doctor Holmes called back, “All right, Alex, I’ll take a look. Pull out, will you? I’m in a hurry.”

Alex was deliberate. “Who’s sick, Doc?”

“Why, Miss Amy had a little spell. Miss Emalin phoned in and asked me to hurry. Get out of the way, will you?”

Alex squawked his car back and let the doctor by. We drove on. I was about to remark that the night was clear when, looking ahead, I saw the rags of fog creeping around the hill from the swamp side and climbing like slow snakes on the top of Loma. The Ford shuddered to a stop in front of the Buffalo. We went in.

Fat Carl moved toward us, wiping a glass on his apron. He reached under the bar for the nearby bottle. “What’ll it be?”

“Whiskey.”

For a moment a faint smile seemed to flit over the fat sullen face. The room was full. My dredger crew was there, all except the cook. He was probably on the scow, smoking his Cuban cigarettes in a bamboo holder. He didn’t drink. That was enough to make me suspicious of him. Two deck hands and an engineer and three levermen were there. The levermen were arguing about a cutting. The old lumber adage certainly held for them: “Women in the woods and logging in the honky-tonk.”

That was the quietest bar I ever saw. There weren’t any fights, not much singing and no tricks. Somehow the sullen baleful eyes of Fat Carl made drinking a quiet, efficient business rather than a noisy game. Timothy Ratz was playing solitaire at one of the round tables. Alex and I drank our whiskey. No chairs were available, so we just stayed leaning against the bar, talking about sports and markets and adventures we had had or pretended we had—just a casual barroom conversation. Now and then we bought another drink. I guess we hung around for a couple of hours. Alex had already said he was going home, and I felt like it. The dredger crew trooped out, for they had to start work at midnight.

The doors unfolded silently, and Johnny Bear crept into the room, swinging his long arms, nodding his big hairy head and smiling foolishly about. His square feet were like cats’ feet.

“Whiskey?” he chirruped. No one encouraged him. He got out his wares. He was down on his stomach the way he had been when he got to me. Sing-song nasal words came out, Chinese I thought. And then it seemed to me that the same words were repeated in another voice, slower and not nasally. Johnny Bear raised his shaggy head and asked, “Whiskey?” He got to his feet with effortless ease. I was interested. I wanted to see him perform. I slid a quarter along the bar. Johnny gulped his drink. A moment later I wished I hadn’t. I was afraid to look at Alex, for Johnny Bear crept to the middle of the room and took that window pose of his.

The chill voice of Emalin said, “She’s in here, doctor.” I closed my eyes against the looks of Johnny Bear, and the moment I did he went out. It was Emalin Hawkins who had spoken.

I had heard the doctor’s voice in the road, and it was his veritable voice that replied, “Ah—you said a fainting fit?”

“Yes, doctor.”

There was a little pause, and then the doctor’s voice again, very softly, “Why did she do it, Emalin?”

“Why did she do what?” There was almost a threat in the question.

“I’m your doctor, Emalin. I was your father’s doctor. You’ve got to tell me things. Don’t you think I’ve seen that kind of a mark on the neck before? How long was she hanging before you got her down?”

There was a longer pause then. The chill left the woman’s voice. It was soft, almost a whisper. “Two or three minutes. Will she be all right, doctor?”

“Oh, yes, she’ll come around. She’s not badly hurt. Why did she do it?”

The answering voice was even colder than it had been at first. It was frozen. “I don’t know, sir.”