The First Stoplight in Wallowa County

 

Northwest (September 4, 1988)

 

Charles Deemer

 

 

FLETCH HAD WOKEN UP without an alarm clock at 5:30 a.m., give or take ten minutes, for so many years that neither Sunday off nor a bad hangover could keep him in bed past six. On this Sunday the hangover was worse than usual because he had been lucky playing cards last night at Mel's Tavern, putting together a rare string of winning poker strategies. Twice he drew successfully to an inside straight. At stud, in the largest pot of the evening, he bluffed Jensen into folding three visible kings in deference to his own two aces up, even though he had only a junk deuce down. And more often than not, he folded the two pairs on which he habitually raised — and lost. When the game was over, Fletch walked away from the table almost $50 richer, most of which he spent setting up whiskey at the Cowboy Bar down Main Street.

Fletch rarely drank hard liquor, which made his first gesture this morning tentative — but right on time. Or so he thought.

The first hint that something was wrong was that the clock read four, not five-thirty. The second was that he could read the time at all. His Big Ben came from a preluminous era when clocks had big hands and little hands instead of radiant numerical displays. Fletch's big hand had not reached the bed lamp yet, and so he shouldn't have been able to read the time. But read it he did.

Fletch's room was located above the selfsame Mel's Tavern responsible for his hangover — or at least that had financed it. Looking out the window to Main Street, Fletch saw the one thing in the world that should not have been there: a stoplight. A genuine traffic light, swinging lightly in the summer breeze, showing him a devilish green even as it showed Swede's Tavern across the corner a diabolical red. As anyone in northeastern Oregon could tell you, there wasn't a single stoplight in all Wallowa County. Since Joseph was in the county, Fletch must be looking at some alcohol-induced mirage.

Moving in the green glow to the window, he leaned on the windowsill and stared out at the light. He scratched his belly and stared for a long time — until suddenly, impossibly, the green light turned yellow, and the yellow light turned red.

Fletch moved quickly then. He hurried back to bed and pulled the single sheet up over his head. He swore to quit whiskey forever, even to give up drinking beer — and this time for real.

 

NOT AN HOUR had passed before Renford was shaking him. Fletch never locked his door — in Joseph, locked doors were as rare as stoplights.

"You're not gonna believe this," Renford began.

By his usual waking time, Fletch had followed Renford into a growing crowd of men on Main Street, each man staring up at the stoplight with something between outrage and wonder. These were the early risers who started off the day with coffee at Tony's Cafe when it opened at six, workday or not. Each turned silent, as if standing before an inexplicable disaster. The speculation didn't begin until Tony's opened, where coffee cleared the mind.

"It's gotta be Divorak who done it," Fletch suggested, referring to the mayor.

In Joseph, being mayor is not really a job — at least not a full-time, paying one — and in the most recent election Divorak had won easily by garnering the write-in, sympathy vote. Election Day fell a few weeks after his stroke, and everyone knew that only makeshift work such as politics could keep Divorak out of the fields and away from the hard work now forbidden by his doctor.

To everyone's surprise, Divorak took an immediate liking to the job. He started hanging around City Hall even when there was nothing to do, which was most of the time. Moreover, lately he had been ending rare meetings of city business by yelping like a coyote, as if aiming to outdo the infamous "whoop whoop!" of Portland's mayor, Bud Clark. While no one actually believed that Divorak was trying to get on the Johnny Carson show, as Clark had done, nonetheless a man who yelped like a coyote wasn't entirely to be trusted.

Divorak, for example, stood fully behind the summer re-enactment of the Great Joseph Bank Robbery. At first, this idea for luring tourists from the Wallowa Lake campgrounds into town had been scoffed at, almost universally. The very idea that working farmers and ranchers would volunteer an hour or more in the middle of the day to playact at robbing the First State Bank building, long home to the historic museum, was ridiculous. So ridiculous, in fact, that no one was quite sure how such an idea had actually come to pass, so that all summer — on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays — grown men quit work to dress up like cowboy outlaws, much to the delight of hundreds of tourists (during Chief Joseph Days, thousands) who lined Main Street to watch the five-minute performance. The Great Joseph Bank Robbery was the promotional coup of the summer, and Mayor Divorak had been behind it from the beginning. Such a man was fully capable of putting up a traffic light for the tourists as well.

Such was Fletch's reasoning, and he was close to calling for a vigilante march on City Hall when someone pointed out that City Hall was rarely open — and never on Sunday. Before a consensus was reached on an alternative plan, the mayor himself walked into the cafe, beet-red and looking like another stroke was in progress.

Everyone started talking at once. The mayor was getting redder and redder, and Fletch worried that soon he would be yelping like a coyote, so he yelled for the crowd to give Divorak its full attention.

The mayor explained that he knew no more about the origin of the stoplight than anyone else. In fact, he had rousted his son-in-law, who worked for Power and Light, to get his truck over here right away so they could take the damn thing down. His son-in-law pointed out that it might be the county's doing, in which case the mayor of Joseph was powerless. Because it was Sunday, there was nothing to do but wait until morning, call the county, and find out what was going on. There followed considerable discussion about proper governmental chains of command, all of it speculative.

Fletch was never a man to trade action for discussion, and so he put his own plan to work. Gradually, with knowing nods, men began to slip out of the cafe, climbing into their pickups and driving home. Thirty minutes later the mayor was still holding court, mainly to tourists who eavesdropped over their breakfasts and wondered what all the fuss was about.

Suddenly a gunshot was heard — but too loud and resonant to have come from a single weapon. Mayor Divorak, Peg the waitress, Jimbo the cook, a handful of residents and a multitude of tourists, all rushed out onto Main Street to see what had happened.

Although the early morning breeze had died down, the stoplight was swinging wildly, all of its signals shattered. Below it a large crowd had formed; women stood beside their children, and in front of them was a foreboding circle of men, Fletch and Renford among them — men who, except for the different colors of their billed caps, could not have been told apart, they looked so much alike, cradling their smoking rifles and sporting their wide grins.

 

IT TOOK THREE red beers before Fletch figured out what had happened. Without a hangover, he would have figured it our immediately; under this morning's affliction, he couldn't think clearly until Vitamin C was back in his system.

"Renford," he said from a bar stool at Swede's. "You know who was responsible for that? Enterprise."

Of course! Having heard it, no one doubted it. No one doubted in at Swede's, or later across the street at Mel's, or at the Cowboy Bar, or at Tony's, where the dinner special was chicken-fried steak. It had to be Enterprise, the county seat, and the motive had to be jealousy.

The Great Joseph Bank Robbery must have had something to do with it as well. The re-enactment was based on an actual robbery on October 1, 1896, when three men held up the Old Joseph Bank. The leader of the gang had escaped with $2,000, but one compatriot had been killed and the other, a local boy named Tucker, had been captured and sent to prison. After getting out, Tucker returned to Joseph to become a successful sheep rancher and, eventually, vice-president of the very same bank he had helped rob. Of such stuff the West was made, and Enterprise had no story — not even a lie — that could match it.

If this were not humiliating enough, it was the year of two local centennials, and Joseph had raised its blue city banners three days before Enterprise had raised the red county ones. Rivalry between the two towns, which were only six miles apart, was always fierce, but this summer, with all the additional tourists coming for the centennial activities, competition was especially aggressive. Because Joseph clearly was winning the tourist sweepstakes, it would be just like someone from Enterprise to try and downplay the victory by creating a diversion. No one wanted to be stuck with the first stoplight in Wallowa County.

By evening, Fletch had sworn in a posse of sorts to take responsibility for the retaliation. They all agreed they would have to erect a stoplight in Enterprise — and that very night. The trouble began over where to put it.

Fletch wanted to erect it at the corner by the courthouse, across from where all the fancy new shops had gone in. Enterprise had become so gentrified that one could buy a cup of espresso, a cone of frozen yogurt, a scented candle, computer software, a salad with sprouts, a bamboo beach mat, any number of ridiculous T-shirts and strange greeting cards, and who knew what else, all without walking two blocks.

Renford wanted to attack more directly. He had a cousin camping at the lake, he explained, a cousin from California. Let his cousin hang around the taverns in Enterprise for a few days and learn who did it.

"We'll string the stoplight over his driveway," said Renford.

No, no, insisted a sheepman named Hancock. What is it that really separates Enterprise from Joseph? What most symbolizes Enterprise's departure from Wallowa traditions in order to enter the mainstream of progress? Clearly one thing. Enterprise has a Safeway store. Put the damn thing up in front of Safeway, was Hancock's idea.

Too much beer had brought out the intransigence in Fletch's posse, and for the next several hours little progress was made. In fact, they didn't get back on track until the bartender at the Cowboy Bar yelled last call. Then they quickly decided to draw straws among the six sites that had been suggested, and Fletch was drawing up the slips when Mayor Divorak walked in for a nightcap.

"Can you believe these tourists?" the mayor said, grinning. "As soon as my son-in-law got that stoplight down, some joker in a Winnebago pulled over and offered 50 bucks for it. He said his son wanted to put it up in his dorm room back in Portland."

If there was one place worse than Enterprise, it was Portland. By the time the bartender had shooed Fletch and his posse out onto Main Street, the focus of their insults had changed considerably.

"Look at Portland's crime rate," said Fletch. "You can't leave home without locking your door."

"They got drugs worse than L.A.," said Renford.

"Streets full of whores and winos," said the mayor, and he yelped like a coyote.

Others pointed out the lack of mountain-clear water and clean air in Portland, no fresh beef available, all that big city red tape, new freeways opening all the time, traffic you wouldn't believe, and no real beauty, certainly nothing like the Wallowas. Portland was a city that commissioned Beauty and got Portlandia, a copper statue of a scantily-clad lady holding a pitchfork.

They continued the litany of insults while ambling to their separate pickups. Compared to Portland, Enterprise was downright appealing, and so no one objected when Fletch suggested the six-mile drive to Toma's Restaurant, the only place short of La Grande where a fellow could get breakfast on a Sunday night.

The next morning, a working day, Fletch woke up at 5:30 on the money, rolled over and switched on the bed lamp. He was at Tony's shortly after 6, where he joined a table with Renford and others, and over many cups of coffee not one word was spoken about the strange and short life of the first stoplight in Wallowa County.