“Downstream”

“Downstream” is a song fragment by The Rainmakers placed before the opening chapter of The Tommyknockers. Its brief exchange turns a question about the atomic bomb into a refusal of moral accounting, setting a bluntly comic, unsettling tone before the story begins.

Placement and Form

The fragment appears in the opening material of Book I, immediately before the chapter titled “Anderson Stumbles.” It is credited to The Rainmakers and identified as “Downstream.” Rather than narrating an event in the novel’s present, the song supplies an epigraph: a compact voice and attitude through which the reader approaches the story that follows.

The lyric is arranged as a call-and-response. A speaker recalls that “we” picked up Harry Truman as he floated down from Independence; the group asks about the war, then about the bomb and whether he regrets using it. Truman answers, “Good riddance!” to the question about the war, and then evades the question about the bomb by asking for a bottle and telling the others to mind their own business. The sequence moves from a seemingly absurd encounter to a pointed refusal to account for a consequential decision.

War, the Bomb, and Evasion

The exchange makes responsibility its central tension. The question about the bomb is direct and explicitly asks whether Truman is sorry; the answer does not address remorse. Instead, the request for a drink and the dismissal of the question replace moral reflection with deflection. The lyric’s humor depends on that mismatch: the stakes are immense, but the response is casual and self-protective.

The earlier reply, “Good riddance!”, is similarly compressed. It closes off discussion of the war rather than explaining what its end meant or what it cost. Read together, the two answers make evasion recur: a grave historical subject is raised, then met with a curt phrase or a change of subject. The fragment does not offer a considered historical argument; it dramatizes the discomfort of asking someone powerful to answer for what has been done.

Tone and Opening Function

The lyric’s conversational phrasing and comic incongruity keep its criticism from becoming solemn exposition. The image of Truman floating down from Independence places a public figure in an impossible, almost folkloric encounter, while the bottle and the rebuff pull the exchange toward ordinary talk. That collision makes the joke uneasy: the casualness is part of the point, not a resolution of the question.

As a threshold to “Anderson Stumbles,” the epigraph introduces a pattern of levity around subjects that carry serious consequences. Its focus on the gap between a question and the answer it receives also primes attention to what characters may acknowledge, evade, or refuse to explain. The song does not disclose the novel’s plot, but it gives the opening a frame of irreverent skepticism about authority and accountability.