Now listen here, he says. Listen here, Stamper, you sonofabitch! He doesn’t understand. Hank tells me to drive the hell on. We pull out. He knows already about the brother but he doesn’t want to think about it yet. He can’t let himself think about it yet, though he sees already there’s another scrap brewing. But that he’s got to let it brew its course or everybody will figure him more a bully than they do already. So ...I guess ...I ought’n’ to look for him to be any different with this business with Leland. He won’t cut across to the place where he knows already he’s going to have to knock the boy’s ears down. Because he way down keeps hoping it won’t come to pass. He’s got to keep hoping these things won’t come to pass. Or get hard and lonely as a old pit dog. Oh, Hankus ...Hank...I always say to you the thing to do is accept what your lot is. But that’s pure bull when I come down to it. Because you can’t accept that you can’t quit no more than you can quit, and you can’t cut across to what you know already no more than you can keep from hoping that what you already see coming won’t ever come. Because they are the same thing, every bit the same exact thing. . . . “This meeting will now come to order! Everybody rise and pledge ’legiance . . .” A gravel rapped. Joe Ben started up from his stump and then leaned back toward the open few inches of window. The hall inside was lighted now and most of the chairs were full. Howie Evans rapped the speaker’s stand and repeated, “This meeting is going to come to order!” He nodded and from a chair behind him Floyd Evenwrite rose with a handful of yellow papers. Floyd pushed Howie Evans aside and spread the papers on the stand. “What is happening is this,” he said. Outside the window Joe Ben zipped his windbreaker higher and smelled the first faraway sprinkling of rain . . . The old boltcutter finishes unloading his load of split wood at the shingle-weavers, and finds that he must sit down on the running board for a minute to rest before he can make it the few yards to the office to collect from the foreman. The smell of liver and onions reaches him from the house out behind the mill where the foreman and his wife live. He wishes he had a woman back at his house up the canyon, to fill the air with smells like liver and onions. He has wished the same wish before, of course, many times; even, in his drunker moments, has given the idea of marriage some drunken thought ...But now, as he tries to stand, the full force of his years strikes him at the small of his back like a sixty-pound maul, and for the first time he admits to himself that the wish is hopeless: he will never have that woman: he is just too old—“Ah well, it’s best to live alone anyways, what I say”—too rotten worthless dirty old. The clouds swarm past. The wind rises. Lee fights his way through the frog-infested swamp, bound for the sea. Jenny considers trying another trip to the Bible, for good measure. Jonathan Draeger listens to the men’s overdramatic reactions to the news of the Stamper deal with Wakonda Pacific and writes: “The lowest of villains will push man to greater heights than the tallest of heroes.” And by the time Floyd Evenwrite has swung into the summation of his exhaustive case against the Stampers, the spy for the other side is beating it up the sidewalk to make a report to headquarters, all concern for caution left back in the alley among the careless litter of garbage. He must phone Hank, tell him quick—but quiet, too. ...His espionage work would give them a little edge over the union only if they kept it quiet; the union wouldn’t know that they knew....But he must call right away! And the phone in the Snag, if not the most private, was certainly the closest. . . . “Evenwrite told the whole story and then some,” Joe let Hank and everybody else in the bar know. “And them as was able to last out Floyd’s bull and get the drift sounded pretty salty. They says if you was going to be a leech on the town’s blood that the town was gonna have to treat you like a leech. Pretty salty. They said you better keep outa their way, Hank. So what you think you’ll do?” And when he hung up thought he heard someone in the bar ask what went on at the other end. “Hank says he just might have to come in to town tonight an’ see about that,” Joe announced belligerently. “Oh, you betcha; anybody who supposes Hank Stamper is gonna be scared into hiding out up in the hills just because a few people shakes their fists at him is got another suppose comin’.” Ray, the talented half of the Saturday Nite Dance Band, barely looked up from his scotch—“Big deal”—but at the other end of the bar Boney Stokes had more to say. “A pity, a pity . . . that Hank should have been ruint by the upbringing of his prideful father; with all his energy, he could have made a real contribution to society, not just be a clod washed out to sea. . . .” “Watch that, Mr. Stokes,” Joe warned. “Hank’s no clod.” But Boney was beyond warning; his eyes were fixed on tragedies beyond the walls. “ ‘Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls,’ ” he tolled sonorously through his dirty handkerchief; “ ‘it tolls for thee.’” “It tolls for horseshit,” contradicted a thinner voice from a gray beard at the back of the bar, thinking of liver and onions. “All horseshit. You’re alone all your life an’ you darn sure die alone, what I always say.” Back with Jan and the kids, Joe Ben was able to contain his excitement only by venting it through a paintbrush; even then each minute dragged on him like an anchor dragging through gumbo mud. And by the time Hank showed up, with Leland shivering in tow, Joe had given all the window frames two coats of morning-mist white and was mixing up a third. There were no extra clothes for Lee, so while Joe took the children around the area with their Halloween masks and paper sacks, and Hank drove to the A & W for hamburgers-to-go, Lee sat wrapped in a paint-spattered drop cloth before a panel heater, wishing he were home in bed; why Hank felt it necessary that he accompany them in their showdown tonight at the OK Saloon was a mystery. I’m a delicate sort of flower, he reminded himself wryly; perhaps he wants me around in case something starts, in hopes I’ll be trampled underfoot—what other reason could he have for insisting on my coming along? Hank would have been hard put to supply a reason himself, though he knew it to be true that Lee’s presence at the Snag tonight was important to him ...maybe because the kid needed to see first-hand what kind of world was going on around his head all the time without him ever seeing it, the real world with real hassles, not this fairybook world of his that he was having mos............