An’ what was that dream I had? Something bound to be awful...” “This country will rot a man like a corpse,” was Jonathan Draeger’s response when he looked from his hotel window onto a Main Street running an inch of black water. “Rain,” was all Teddy had to say, watching the falling texture of the sky through his bedside lace curtains. “Rain.” Those Halloween clouds had continued to roll in off the sea all the rumbling night—a surly multitude, angry at being kept waiting so long, and full of moody determination to make up for time lost. Pouring out rain as they went, they had rolled over the beaches and town, into the farmlands and low hills, finally piling headlong up against the wall of the Coastal Range mountains with a soft, massive inertia. All night long. A few piled to the mountaintops and over into the Willamette Valley with their overloads of rain, but the majority, the great bulk of that multitude gathered and blown from the distant stretches of the sea, came rebounding heavily back into the other clouds. They exploded above the town like colliding lakes. The garrison of speargrass that picketed the edges of the dunes was beaten flat by the clouds’ advance guard; with the fallen green spear-points pointing the way the attack had gone by graying dawn. A torrent of water that ran from the dunes back to the sea, in measured sweeps, as though enormous waves were combing overhead and breaking far inland... swept the beaches clean of a whole summer’s debris by gray daylight. And along parts of the Oregon coast there are clusters of seaside trees permanently bent by a wind that blows everlastingly landward across all the Oregon beaches—whole groves of strangled cedars and spruce bent in an attitude of paralyzed recoil, as though frozen by a dreadful Medusa revealed centuries ago by lightning ...and by midmorning of that first day after October, the little short-tailed mice that dwelt between the roots of these trees had crept from their homes and, for the first time in local remembrance, were moving in droves east, toward higher ground, afraid that such a rain would surely raise the sea and flood their burrows. . . . “Oh me, oh me; the mice are leavin’ their holes. We’re in for a bad one,” was the way Evenwrite viewed the migration. “The rodents are moving into town to winter with the riffraff,” Draeger decided moodily, and wrote “A Man Is Known By The Mice He Keeps” in his notebook. “I think I had better go down and open the place early this Sunday,” Teddy decided and hurried to the bathroom mirror to see if he needed a shave this week. At the moorage that first day the old Scandinavian fishermen watched the black rolling of clouds overhead and added extra hawsers to their boats. In her shack near the clamflats Indian Jenny melted pitch, candlewax, and an old pocket comb on the stove, used the mixture to calk gathering wet spots in her ceiling, pressing the searing gum into cracks and holes with her broad, shovel-callused thumb as she hummed tonelessly along with the lonely drone of rain. On Main Street the townspeople sprinted from awning to awning with lowered heads, dodging puddles, skirting the spew of rainspouts. As frantic and as flustered in their movements as the drenched mice fleeing the safety of their burrows; even the oldest of mossbacked residents was bewildered, even the stanchest logger generally proud of his laconic acceptance of weather—“Can’t never get wet enough for me!”—and his endurance of legendary rains of the past, even these veterans appeared shaken by the sudden, determined ferocity of that first day’s rain. “Comin’ down like a cow wettin’ on a flat rock,” they called to one another. “Like ten cows. Like a goddamn hundred!” they called as they dashed from awning to doorway, from doorway to awning. “I hear it’s a record,” they assured one another all afternoon over beers in the Snag, “a goddam record.” Yet when the report came in over Teddy’s bartop radio at the end of the day, the precipitation count was by no means a record. “Four inches recorded since midnight.” It wasn’t even phenomenal. “Jus’ four inches? That all? I mean, that’s a lot of rain, surely, but I tell ya! the way it was coming down out there today didn’t ack like four inches, it acted like four goddamn hundred!” Just four inches, Teddy thought sarcastically, just four little inches. “I think somebody made a mistake,” Evenwrite thought moodily. “Those smartasses down at the Coast Guard station, where do they get this crap, draw a number out of a hat? Shit, the ditch out behind my place had a good foot of water in it by noon! What makes those smartasses think they can measure water any better than anybody else?” Four inches of rain—Teddy simpered—and the fear hidden all summer shoots up and blooms overnight. He floated soundlessly about the dim avenues of his bar, like a plump little water spider in a white apron and shirt, black slacks and tiny pointed crepe-soled shoes, Blooms all funny-colored and different-shaped, tending his web with remote servility. But all the colors and shapes spring from that same weed of fear.... His small dark lips pursed in a practiced smile, and his tiny black eyes noticing everything in the whole dingy expanse of his barroom limits—the man fingering the coin-return slot on the juke, the trio in the booth near the back stubbing cigarettes out on the table, the feet getting heavier, tongues getting thicker . . . seeing everything except the grained bartop or rows of glasses at which he polished constantly. And that weed is rooted in all of us. It is in me as well as in Floyd Evenwrite or Lester Gibbons. But I am different. I know that it is not brought to blooming by the rain. It is brought to blooming by nothing more than stupidity. And the native dirt here is rich in stupidity. Teddy considered himself something of an expert on fear and stupidity; he had studied them for years. He had a constant supply of specimens. Now he shifted his covert gaze to watch Jonathan Draeger, the union official that Evenwrite had called up to help with this strike foolishness, come through the arch of neons wearing a hat and a very............