Sweet Thursday

9 Whom the Gods Love[46] They Drive Nuts

To a casual observer Cannery Row might have seemed a series of self-contained and selfish units, each functioning alone with no reference to the others. There was little visible connection between La Ida’s, the Bear Flag, the grocery (still known as Lee Chong’s Heavenly Flower Grocery), the Palace Flop house, and Western Biological Laboratories. The fact is that each was bound by gossamer threads of steel to all the others—hurt one, and you aroused vengeance in all. Let sadness come to one, and all wept.

Doc was more than first citizen of Cannery Row. He was healer of the wounded soul and the cut finger. Strongly entrenched in legality though he was, he found himself constantly edged into infringements by the needs of his friends, and anyone could hustle him for a buck without half trying. When trouble came to Doc it was everybody’s trouble.

What was Doc’s trouble? Even he didn’t know. He was deeply, grievingly unhappy. For hours on end he sat at his desk with a yellow pad before him and his needle-sharp pencils lined up. Sometimes his wastebasket was full of crushed, scribbled pages, and at others not even a doodle went down. Then he would move to the aquarium and stare into it. And his voices howled and cried and moaned. “Write!” said his top voice, and “Search!” sang his middle voice, and his lowest voice sighed, “Lonesome! Lonesome!” He did not go down without a struggle. He resurrected old love affairs, he swam deep in music, he read the Sorrows of Werther,[47] but the voices would not leave him. The beckoning yellow pages became his enemies. One by one the octopi died in the aquarium. He had worn thin the excuse of his lack of a proper microscope. When the last octopus died he leaped on this as his excuse. When his friends visited him he would explain, “You see, I can’t go on without specimens, and I can’t get any more until the spring tides. As soon as I have specimens and a new microscope I can whip the paper right off.”

His friends sensed his pain and caught it and carried it away with them. They knew the time was coming when they would have to do something.

In the Palace Flop house a little meeting occurred—occurred, because no one called it, no one planned it, and yet everyone knew what it was about.

Wide Ida brooded hugely. The Bear Flag was represented by Agnes, Mabel, and Becky. All the boys were accounted for. The meeting began casually and obliquely, as all meetings should.

Hazel said, “Wide Ida throwed out a drunk last night and sprained her shoulder.”

“I ain’t as young as I used to be,” Wide Ida said gloomily.

“The drunk dared her,” said Hazel. “He didn’t even touch the sidewalk going out. If they was an Olympic event for A and C,[48] Wide Ida would win it easy.”

“Sprained my shoulder up,” said Wide Ida.

They kept skirting their problem.

Mack said, “How’s Fauna been?”

“Pretty good. She got problems,” said Agnes.

Becky was delicately picking off nail polish. “That Fauna,” she said, “she’s a wonder. She’s giving us tablesetting lessons. I bet if they was thirty-five forks, she’d know what every one of them was for.”

“Ain’t they to eat with?” Hazel asked.

“Jesus, what a ignorant!” said Becky. “I bet you don’t know a dessert fork from a hole in the ground.”

Hazel said belligerently, “You know what a Jackson fork[49] is for?”

“No, what?”

“Just leave it lay and see who’s a ignorant,” said Hazel.

Wide Ida asked, “Any change with Doc?”

“No,” said Mack. “I went over to see him last night. I wisht there was something we could do.”

They fell to musing. If the times were hard on Doc, they were equally hard on his friends who loved him. Once he had been infallible. There was nothing he could not do because there was nothing he wanted to do very much. And in spite of themselves a little contempt for him was growing in his friends—a kind and loving contempt that might never have happened if he had not once been so great. People who had once spoken his name with awe now felt better than he because he was no better than they.

“I ain’t got an idea’s how to proceed,” said Mack.

Hazel said, “How’s about if we ask Fauna to do his horoscope? She’s doing me right now.”

“You ain’t got no future,” said Mack.

“I have too,” said Hazel. “I bet Fauna could tell us what to do about Doc.”

Mack looked interested. “It’s better than nothing,” he said. “Hoc sunt. Eddie, you dig up one of them kegs you buried during the war. Hazel, you ask Fauna to come over for a drink. Tell her to bring her star stuff.”

“Maybe she’s got me finished,” said Hazel.

It was a matter of some sorrow to Fauna that she didn’t entirely believe in astrology, but she had found that nearly everyone wants to believe that the stars take notice of us. Her science gave her a means for telling people what they ought to do, and Fauna had definite ideas about what everybody ought to do.

In spite of her secret skepticism, every once in a while she turned up a reading that astonished her. Hazel’s horoscope had her breathless and baffled. She seriously considered burning it and never telling him.

Hazel led her to the Palace Flop house and Mack poured her a drink from the keg. She tossed it off, still deep in thought.

“You got my stars wrote down?” Hazel demanded anxiously.

Fauna regarded him sorrowfully. “I don’t want to tell you,” she said.

“Why not? Is it bad?”

“Awful,” said Fauna.

“Come on, tell me. I can take it.”

Fauna sighed. “I’ve checked it over and over,” she said. “You sure you give me your true birthday?”

“Sure.”

“Then I don’t see how it can be wrong.” She turned wearily and faced the others. “The stars say Hazel’s going to be President of the United States.”

There was a shocked silence.

“I don’t believe it,” said Mack.

“I don’t want to be President,” Hazel said, and he didn’t.

“There is no choice,” said Fauna. “The stars have spoke. You will go to Washington.”

“I don’t want to!” Hazel cried. “I don’t know nobody there.”

“I wonder where we could all go,” said Whitey No. 2. “I seen some islands in the Pacific that was pretty nice. But hell, Hazel would have them too. The U.S. got a mandate.”

“I won’t take it,” said Hazel.

Mack said, “We could kill him.”

“His stars don’t say it,” Fauna said. “He’s going to live to seventy-eight and die from a spoiled oyster.”

“I don’t like oysters,” said Hazel.

“Maybe you’ll learn in Washington.”

Mack said, “Maybe you made a mistake.”

“That’s what I hoped,” said Fauna. “I went over and over it. No, sir! Hazel is going to be President.”

“Well, we’ve weathered some pretty bad ones,” Eddie offered forlornly.

“Ain’t they no way I can tell them I won’t do it? Hell, I’ll hide out!” said Hazel desperately.

Fauna shook her head dismally. “I’ll check again,” she said, “but I don’t think you got a prayer. You got nine toes, Hazel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, count.”

Hazel took off his shoes and moved his lips. “Nine,” he said bitterly.

“That’s what the horoscope said. We can only pray it’s for the best.”

“Lord!” said Whitey No. 2. “That’s what I call a nine-to-one prayer. Fauna, now you’ve went and made a president out of a sow’s ear, how about getting Doc’s paper wrote?”

“Who’s a sow’s ear?” Hazel demanded.

“William Henry Harrison.”[50]

“Oh!” said Hazel. “Oh, yeah!”

Agnes piped up in her hoarse soprano, “Doc just ain’t himself. I took him a pint and he didn’t hardly pass the time a day. Just set there looking at that yellow paper. Know what was on that paper?”

“Eggs,” said Whitey No. 1.

“No. I don’t like to tell. It ain’t nice.”

“Hot damn!” said Mack. “Maybe he’s getting well. Go on—what?”

“Well,” said Agnes in a shocked voice, “he’d drew a picture of a lady without no clothes on, and right beside that was one of them damn devilfish, only it was smoking a pipe. Don’t hardly seem like the old Doc.”

Wide Ida shook herself out of a mountainous lethargy. “He used to be the easygoingest guy in the world. Now he’s got a wild hair. Anybody else but Doc, I’d figure it was a dame. But hell! Doc can take dames or let them alone.”

Mack said, “He could even take dames and let them alone.”

Fauna put her hands on her hips. “You fellas sure there ain’t a girl hiding out where he can’t get to her?”

“No,” said Hazel. “I wisht he’d snap out of it. Go over and talk to him, and he don’t say nothing and he don’t listen.”

“Let’s run a few dames past him and see if he picks up,” said Whitey No. 2.

Mack said, “I don’t believe in it but I wish Fauna would do a job on Doc. Might give us an idea.”

Fauna said, “I never seen nobody that wanted me to do a horoscope that believed in it. I ain’t sure I believe in it myself. Sure I’ll do Doc. When’s his birthday?”

With surprise they realized that no one could remember.

“Seems like it was in autumn,” said Eddie.

“Got to have it,” Fauna said. “Mack, you think you could find out?”

“I guess so. Say, Fauna, if you ain’t got too much integrity, could you maybe rig it a little?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, kind of tell him to lay off his goddam paper and get back to horsing around.”

“What’s wrong with his paper if only he gets it wrote?” Hazel demanded.

Mack scratched his stomach. “I guess we got to face it,” he said. “Doc wants to write that crazy paper. Driving himself nuts with it. Know what I think? Doc ain’t never going to write that paper.”

Hazel stood up. “What d’you mean?”

“Well, you know them kind of people they call accident prone? No matter what they do they get hurt. It’s like they want accidents. Well, I think Doc don’t really want to write that paper.”

Whitey No. 1 said, “He sure goes about it the hard way.”

“Ever hear of a substitute?” said Mack.

“You mean like on the bench at football?” Eddie asked.

“Hell no!” said Mack. “I mean like a guy is using something to cover up something else—and maybe he don’t even know it himself.”

Hazel demanded, “You running Doc down?”

“Take it easy,” said Mack. “I think Doc’s scared to write that paper because he knows it’s crazy. Quod erat demonstrandum.”[51]

“Huh?” asked Fauna.

“Q.E.D.,” said Mack.

“Oh!” said Fauna. “Sure.”