by Kelly Link
And in a Biblical epic, too.
After In Cold Blood, one thing led to another in his career. Capote became a talk show pet, the object of standup comedy routines, an instantly recognizable icon. And he kept writing. And with all the money and high-life available to him, and thirty years as a very public figure, he began to mix assorted petty feelings, thwarted desires, wish fulfillments and misunderstandings that those things can bring to the surface.
So one day he was giving an interview and he said something or was quoted as saying something, about Vidal that Jackie Kennedy (who was Vidal’s stepsister) or Lee Radziwill had told him.
When the interview came out, Vidal sued him for a bazillion simoleons.
Lots of people came out to the aid of one side or the other. Neither Jackie Kennedy Onassis or Lee Radziwill would give a deposition supporting Truman, or saying they had said it, or anything. It ended their friendship, finally and forever, with Capote.
The suit went on and on: even if Capote won, he was out a tenth the amount in legal fees, and finally in the later haze-filled days he issued a sort of apology which very carefully did not say what he had said was untrue, just that Capote was not there when it happened, and was sorry Vidal had been upset.
Truman had also, in the late 70s, published in Esquire part of his book Answered Prayers (for which he seems to have made up the quote from which to take his title, from St. Theresa, attribution of a pretty high sort) in which those, as they say, with a big enough clef can open many an a roman.
The society gates of hell slammed shut all around him. It was one thing to hang around with the jet set and be amusing and in on the fun; it was another to actually, and as a serious writer, tell other people about it.
He supposedly worked and reworked the book the next eight years, although to the world outside it seemed that Capote was surrounded by a cloud of bright blue bubbles, flashes of lightning, and more and more given to frequent visits to places for rich people in fear of their lives.
Bonney was in jail again, on other, ancillary murder charges, stemming from the efforts of the Territorial government to erase all the traces of the Lincoln County War. This essentially brought people out in to the open so their formerly quiet enemies could shoot them in the backs.
By that time Lew Wallace had finished his novel and it was to be published early in 1881.
The General wanted out of New Mexico in the worst way; he wanted the ambassadorship to Rome and the newly created Italy, and Ben-Hur he thought was his ticket out.
Unfortunately in the elections of 1880, the people had not kept in office the sitting President (who had, after all, ended Reconstruction in the South as payoff for the job, back in the election of 1876).
So Wallace got ready for his trip East, to press the flesh during the hooplah attendant on the publication of his novel.
Bonney wrote letters to the Governor in Santa Fe from jail, to the effect the General had betrayed a trust, and had never testified on his behalf at the first trial. He even wrote a letter to the General when Wallace was in Washington in January of 1881.
Ben-Hur was published to a lot of reverent hoorawing. He gave a copy to his present benefactor, Rutherford Birchard Hayes, who had rewarded him with the leisure of the Governorship of the New Mexico Territory that had allowed him to write the book.
More importantly, he gave one to James Abram Garfield, who would take office on March 4, 1881.
Then, a famous man, the novelist and general returned to his day-to-day job as executive of the podunk, trouble-ridden, vicious territory.
Nobody is sure, but they all agree on one thing: it started when the deputy put the manacles on Bonney and took him to the outhouse. Some say Bonney had big wrists and small hands. Others say a gun had been left in the latrine by friends or sympathizers.
There was a lot of shooting. When it was over, two deputies lay dead as doornails and Bonney, alias The Kid, was on the loose again.
A number of politicians, ranchers, gentlemen, plain decent folks and (surreptitiously) Army officers raised some money, and they put Patrick Garrett, a frontier ne’er-do-well, who’d both worn badges and shot them off other people wearing them, on the case.
Capote died in 1984. His last years had been ones of depression, alcoholism, substance abuse, medical problems, and trouble distinguishing between truth, fiction and the non-fiction novel, the planet Earth and the planet Mars.
Vidal lived in Italy, where Rome used to be.
The one thing they’re sure of is he was in the house with the girl, and early in the morning he got hungry, and went barefoot, shirtless, with only his pants on, out onto the long porch where a carcass hung, to cut off a strip of meat with his knife.
Some say it was a goat or beef that had been butchered the morning before Bonney showed up at night. Some say it was a deer that someone had brought in; others that it was a buffalo calf, one of the last from the Southern Herd, which would of course be romantic as hell, and right in keeping with the works of E. C. Z. Judson.
Whatever it was, Bonney cut a hunk off it, and started back down the verandah, heading toward the kitchen.
As he passed the door he had come out of, he heard a noise, like a boot on a board, from inside.
“Is that you, Pete?” he asked, and stepped into the room.
General Lew Wallace sat in a carriage with his wife at the Baltimore docks. All their bags and luggage were on the plankings around them. They watched them being loaded while well-wishing friends chatted away.
Wallace was the new ambassador to Constantinople; not the prize of Rome he had hoped for, but decent enough. Turkey was not yet the Sick Man of Europe.
He had been given the job by President Garfield, not yet the Dead Man of America (at the hands of a madman whose job had gone by the boards in the Recent Redivision of the Spoils).
A former colonel walked up to Wallace and said “Lewis, you will be pleased to know they have done for The Kid out in the Territory.”
“Well, thank you for telling me,” said the General. He looked at his luggage going aboard, and the ship building steam, and at the waters of the inner harbor.
“I am glad to know it, but it doesn’t really concern me any more. I washed my hands of the whole thing a while ago.”
“The fourth day out, and the Astraea—so the galley was named—speeding through the Ionian Sea. The sky was clear, and the wind blew as if bearing the good will of all the gods.”
THE INVISIBLE VALLEY
BY SU WEI
TRANSLATED BY AUSTIN WOERNER
AVAILABLE NOW IN TRADE PAPERBACK AND DRM-FREE EBOOK.
“A sensuous coming-of-age story set in a jungle during China’s Cultural Revolution, this historical novel flirts with the fantastic. . . . Early on, Lu is coerced into a “ghost marriage” with his foreman’s deceased daughter’s spirit, which allows her younger brother to marry. . . .
The novel’s high drama is matched by complex, colorful characters.This unique adventure of youth, identity, and the natural world intoxicates with overlapping mysteries.” Kirkus Reviews
“A remarkable work, pungent, funny, and mind-widening. Austin Woerner’s translation is nearly invisible: it erases all barriers of strangeness and places the reader deep within a Chinese experience that comes to seem as familiar to us as our own daily round — if ours too had ghost brides and very big snakes.”
— John Crowley, author of Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr
Their Eyes Like Dead Lamps
Izzy Wasserstein
I saw the car coming from a long way off, first as a line of dust up along the ridge, then bending its way forward, disappearing and reappearing behind the hills. A black sedan, gleaming in the late afternoon sun, the kind of car only city people owned, all but useless in the winter. Most people along the banks of the Marais des Cygnes River had trucks, and the cars you saw
were old and rusted and not bothered about the dirt that caked their sides. This car had the look of people who bothered.
“Some big shot,” I said. Cassie frowned. Her shoulders tensed. “I’ll see what’s up. You want to wait in the cellar?”
“I guess so,” she said, looking relieved I’d suggested it. She pulled aside the rug at the base of my fort and together we yanked open the wooden door. She grabbed her flashlight and dropped away into the darkness. I closed the door and covered it back up. This place had been a root cellar for someone, long ago, and now we were the only two people in the world who knew it existed.
The car stopped in front of my house and a man and woman walked up to the front porch, the way visitors would when they didn’t know us well enough to understand everyone came and went through the kitchen. Momma must have been watching, because she stepped out on the porch to meet them. Before long the three of them were coming this way.
I busied myself with my sketchbook in case anyone peeked in, but Momma knocked and I clambered out through the narrow door.
“Moira,” she said, her forehead wrinkled, “these folks are from the government. They’re looking for Cassie.”
I sized up the visitors. The man was wearing slacks and a white dress shirt already half sweated through, though it was a pleasant enough July day, and the woman stood uneasily on a pair of low heels that were still no match for the soft, gopher-infested stretch of yard between the house and my fort.
“Ain’t seen her,” I said, “all day.”
The two strangers glanced at each other, and Momma frowned.
“It’s very important,” the lady said. She knelt beside me and used the voice adults did when they thought kids were idiots. “We’re here to help her, but we can’t do that if we can’t find her.” Even then, ten years old, I knew how much you could rely on adults’ help.
“If I see her, I’ll tell her that,” I said.
“You don’t mind if I poke my head in?” Momma asked, and then I knew it was serious.
“Suit yourself,” I said, one of her favorite phrases. She knelt and stuck her head through the opening. The fort wasn’t much, really, a single room built of discarded wood and metal, littered with dolls and action figures, sketchbooks and pencils, old junk hauled from rummage sales and abandoned houses. The kind of stuff that gathers to people with lots more time than money.
No Cassie, of course.
“You’re sure you ain’t seen her?” Momma asked.
“Not all day,” I said.
When the people’s car had started back up the hill, Momma went back inside and I pulled aside the door and dropped down into the root cellar. The previous summer, we’d hauled down a plastic table and some chairs and set them in the center, surrounded by the sagging shelves and the ancient preserves rotting in darkness. A great place, we agreed, for a tea party or ghost stories. Cassie was sitting at the table, blinking at the sudden intrusion of light.
“They’re gone back up the hill,” I told her.
She brushed cobwebs from her hair and smiled. “Thanks.”
I didn’t ask her what was going on, wouldn’t have considered it. Not any more than she’d have asked me about where my father was. Something about the prairie builds that kind of reserve. Maybe it’s the wind.
“Momma won’t be watching once I come in for dinner,” I told her. Then it would be easy for her to sneak off. The house stood between us and the river, but this close to water the land was thick with trees, and we’d built the fort along a windbreak that someone had planted decades before. You could sneak along those trees, back up to the road, dart across it and be on her property in a few minutes. No one would see you if you didn’t want them to. We were experts at being unseen.
“Yeah.” She was looking down past the house, where the river was a band of silver in the late afternoon sun. “Someday, the River Riders will come for me.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d said that. It seemed like every kid at school had a story about the Riders, or the Bloody Widow of Miami County. My grandmother liked to tell of Sidhe nobles who had traveled with her people across the Atlantic.
“You ain’t seen Cassie?” Momma asked at dinner. Her forehead was still creased and I figured I might be in trouble.
“Yesterday,” I said, not quite meeting her eyes. Spam sandwiches with fresh tomatoes. My favorite.
“If you do see her, you tell me right away, you hear? Nobody’s seen her father in a while, and someone needs to look out for her.”
I didn’t know how adults decided which disappearances were part of the natural way of things, like my father running off, and which were a problem. But now I knew which one they thought about Cassie’s father. When Momma wasn’t looking, I put half my sandwich in my lap. Cassie would be hungry in the morning.
“You really think the River Riders will come for you?” I asked Cassie the next day. We were playing in the muddy banks half a mile from my house, just us, the cattails, the shade of overhanging trees. Overhead, a Prairie Falcon circled.
She looked at me strangely, pausing from her half-finished mud-castle. The river had been running high and fast all summer, and the banks were thick with mud that I tracked everywhere, much to Momma’s annoyance.
“I dunno,” she said, and was silent for a while before she went on. “I figure they watch the river. Or maybe they just ride down it, sometimes. They’ll come around sometimes for a few weeks, or just a night or two, and then I won’t see them for awhile.”
“Like carnival people?” This I knew something about.
She shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. Something like that. Do you want to go swimming?”
I didn’t see Cassie the next day, or the day after. Momma asked me about her, and I didn’t have to lie. Usually she’d have called me if she couldn’t play, but if she did that, Momma would know she had, and then the government people would know too and would hurry down from Osawatomie or even Kansas City.
The third day, when she wasn’t waiting for me at my fort, I grabbed a bag of chocolate-chip cookies and went over to her place. We preferred the privacy of the fort, but then, if her father wasn’t around, we’d have privacy at her place, too. It was no more than a mile from ours, over the old rail bridge that stayed open even when the river flooded. Her father’s property wasn’t much, a run-down shotgun house about two steps from abandoned, tucked between the sweep of the river and the low hills. His rusted-out Ford was sitting on blocks in the front yard, and for a moment I hesitated to knock.
When no one answered I pushed open the screen door and slipped inside, but there was just the usual piles of newspapers, auto parts, stacks of green-and-brown bottles, paper bags filled with who-knows-what, shards of pottery on strings dangling from the ceiling, clacking together as an old fan rotated back and forth across the invisible line where the living room and kitchen merged. The place smelled of damp and mold.
I’d never liked it in there, and I ducked back out and made my way down to the river. That’s where I spotted her, kneeling beside the bank, the water moving swiftly beyond her. I started to call her name, but it caught in my throat. Two shapes were beside her on the bank, obscured by the tall grass between us, and by the bright sunlight off the river. They were maybe half her size, with heads that reminded me of water moccasins and long, sinuous limbs. I stood, I don’t know for how long, perhaps fifty yards from her. Then a car backfired up the road, and I turned in surprise. When I looked back, she was alone, coming up the river toward me.
I smiled and waved, but there was a closed look to her face, the kind I knew, the kind Momma had when she told me it was just the two of us, now. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe my concern for my only friend outweighed my curiosity. Maybe it was just that I couldn’t escape the feeling we were being watched.
“I brought cookies,” I said, and she smiled.
If all this had happened two year
s earlier, I’d have accepted it easily. But the world starts to narrow, and by the time someone—your mother or your aunt or whoever—sits you down for The Talk, everything has calcified. If I’d been younger, I would probably remember all this as play, or as a trick my mind played to cover for what really happened. If I’d been older, maybe I wouldn’t have seen anything down by the bank besides Cassie.
That night I lay in bed, listening to the thunderstorm that swept in, as they often did, from the south and west, and thinking of those shapes along the bank, imagining sharp teeth, eyes like dead lamps. No one ever built a fort because the world was safe.
Cassie was waiting for me in the fort the next morning. She was curled up in my sleeping bag, reading. Maybe she’d been there all night. Sometimes she was, when her father was angry or gone.
“Mornin’,” I said, and handed her a box of Pop Tarts. I’m not sure how I knew she was hungry all the time. I don’t remember her ever complaining about it.
“Good mornin’.” She tore open the package and ate ravenously. She was wearing the same dress as yesterday, blue and green swirls, its hem ragged and muddy. I looked down at my jeans, faded but clean. When she was done, we talked about what we were going to do with the day. Cassie wanted to go to the brambles a ways down the river and pick blackberries. But that wasn’t what I wanted.
“Can I see them, Cassie?”
She scrunched her face up. “See who?”
“You know. Them. The River Riders.”
“They won’t talk to you.”
This felt like betrayal. “Why not?”
She looked at me with something like pity, which even then I couldn’t stand.
She pressed her hand over mine. “Don’t feel bad, Moira.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “They don’t make friends.”
“But you’re their friend.”
“No,” she said sadly. “I’m not. I’m just someone they—feel obliged to.”
“Obliged? For what?”
“Way back, my mom helped them.” She’d never talked about her mother before. “There was some problem they had, upriver. One night she took the truck and was out all night. Next day, she was real quiet. Since she left, the Riders check up on me, sometimes.” She looked away. Above us, a raven chattered. “I want blackberries,” she said.
