Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

completely removed from their crude, bellowing world. Now, in a great fluster, he rushed back and forth behind the bar, his aplomb shattered. His fat fingers shook as he gathered a supply of glasses. “Be right with you.” He hustled their order to the table with a great show of haste to make up for the delay. But they had already returned to their discussion of the local trouble, ignoring him. Sure. Already the big idiots had to ignore him. They were afraid to look too close. It is threatening to perceive superiority in someone so much—
    “Teddy!”
    “Yes sir. I forgot; you said light? I’ll change it just as soon as we get the rest of these glasses . . .”
    But the man was already drinking his beer. Teddy moved back behind his bar, crepe-soled and spectral and ignored.
    The electrified screen door at the front of the bar opened, and through the sunny arch of glass came another figure—larger, older, clumping loudly past in calked boots—yet a figure somehow as spectral as Teddy. This was the hermit of the area, a heavy-bearded gray man known only as “that old wino boltcutter from someplace out the South Fork.” Once a topnotch rigger, he was now so old and crippled he was reduced to making a living driving a broken-springed pick-up into the logged-over slopes around the area, where he cut down cedar snags one or two days a week and split them into shingle-bolts. These he sold to the shingle mill on the other side of town at ten cents a bolt. A great comedown, rigger to boltcutter. And the ignominy of this comedown had apparently rotted away most of that apparatus which projects a man’s presence; he moved past the eye like something shrouded in fog, and after he had passed, no one could agree for certain on his description or even, for certain, on his existence. Yet, because he was so seldom seen at the Snag (even though he drove right past it at least once a week) his presence could not be ignored as could Teddy’s. He was too much a rarity, and Teddy was only a fixture. He paused for a moment to listen to the men’s talk before going to the bar. Under his scrutiny the conversation faltered, faded, and died out completely. Then he snuffed loudly in his beard and moved away without speaking.
    He had his own ideas about what the trouble was.
    The discussion didn’t resume until the old man had purchased a large glass of red wine from Teddy and gimped his way on back to the gloomy rear of the bar.
    “Poor old duffer,” the Real Estate Man managed, the first to overcome the momentary feeling of nervousness that had descended on the table.
    “Yeah,” said the logger in the beaten gray hat.
    “That stuff you hear about him is the real McCoy, you know.”
    “Wine?”
    “Cheap port. I hear tell he gets it from Stokes by the case, a case a week.”
    “Too bad,” said the movie-laundry owner.
    “Tsk, tsk,” said Brother Walker. And, as he had learned the comment from Joe Palooka , it came out “tisk tisk,” the way he assumed it was pronounced.
    “Yeah. Too damn bad.”
    “Too damn many years in the woods for an old fellow; it’s a shame.”
    “Shame?” said the logger. “It’s a fuckin’ crime , is what it is, pardon me, Brother Walker, but I feel strongly about it.” Then, moved to even greater passion and recalling his interrupted argument, he slammed his black-fuzzed fist down on the table. “But it is a fuckin’ crime! And a sin! That a poor old jack like him should hafta—Listen now: pensions and guaranteed annual wage, ain’t that what Floyd Evenwrite been preachin’ about for nearly two years?”
    “That’s right, that is the truth.”
    They were getting back in gear again.
    “The trouble with this town is we can’t get behind the very organization that is built to help us: the union! ”
    “My God; ain’t Floyd been sayin’ so? He says Jonathan Bailey Draeger says that Wakonda is years behind the other woods towns. And that has become my thinking exactly.”
    “And that