On the night of July 29 Mr. Deems sent out a bulldozer. In the morning, where the roque courts had been, there was only a deep, ragged hole in the ground. If he’d had time he would have continued God’s solution. He’d have filled the hole with water.
They ran Mr. Deems out of Pacific Grove. They would have tarred and feathered him if they could have caught him, but he was safe in Monterey, cooking his yen shi over a peanut-oil lamp.
Every July 30, to this day, the whole town of Pacific Grove gets together and burns Mr. Deems in effigy. They make a celebration of it, dress up a life-size figure, and hang it from a pine tree. Later they burn it. People march underneath with torches, and the poor helpless figure of Mr. Deems goes up in smoke every year.
There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn’t necessarily a lie even if it didn’t necessarily happen.
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.”
46
Whom the Gods Love…: Parody of a line by Greek tragic dramatist Euripides (480 BCE–406 BCE): “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
47
48
A and C: “Ass and collar”—a bouncer’s move, used to grab hold of and then eject a patron. Steinbeck mentions the technique in chapter 23 of