I got the idea that food wasn’t that important to Rex. It was me he was excited about. Wayne had been excited too, but this was different. Schoeninger was too proud to fall all over himself, too old at eighty-five to play the sycophant, but I could tell from the keenness of his gaze, the expansiveness of his stories, the way he would lean forward on his elbows to be sure he heard every word, that this was a major deal.
Ramona was still wary as hell. What was she thinking? That I was going to leap across the table and stab him with a fork? But she loosened up once she got some wine in her.
“So, V.S., do you read any of these younger writers?” Rex said. I pointed to my cheek to let him know I was still chewing. “I can’t keep up with it all. The kids all rave about this Jesus’ Son. You know that book?”
I nodded, swallowing hard. I hate Brussels sprouts. They remind me of mutant cabbages.
“Pretty strong stuff,” Schoeninger said.
Ramona refilled her glass to the brim. “If I’m not mistaken, this is a very fine wine,” she said.
“I figured it was a special night,” I said.
“Mailer was down here last year. Walking on canes, couldn’t hear, could barely see, but still feisty as hell. And Capote . . . now, that was a sad end. The thing about Updike, he keeps battling, I admire that, but those last books really have fallen off, don’t you think, V.S.?”
“Mmm,” I said. “Ramona, could I bother you for the salt?”
“That South African fellow . . . you know who I’m talking about . . . the name will come to me in a minute . . . first-rate.” Schoeninger used a charred scrap of English muffin to mop up his gravy. “But I’m worried, V.S.”
“And what is it you’re worried about?”
“The future of publishing. The world has changed so much since you and I got in the business. You know what I think the turning point was? I think it was the Cosby advance. Remember that?”
“Remember it?” I said. “How could I forget it?”
“Everything went to hell after that. The big celebrity books, the chains came in . . . Sales were down, what, thirty percent last year?”
“I don’t keep track of that stuff,” I said.
That stopped him for a second, as if he thought I might be copping an attitude. “Huh,” he said. “I guess that’s because you’re a wiser man than I am.”
“Not wiser,” I said. “I just don’t like to make myself crazy.”
After some half-frozen strawberries and cheap ice cream, Ramona brought out this humongous present for me. Judging from the size, it could have been a TV set, a footstool, a desktop computer, and even after I tore off the wrapping I still couldn’t tell what it was. I lifted what looked like an oddly shaped piece of carry-on luggage onto the table (it was light as a feather), and undid the latches.
Inside was a cream-colored cowboy hat.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
“We hope it fits,” Ramona said. “If it doesn’t, we can take it back.”
“Try it on,” Rex said.
I lifted it carefully out of its traveling case and set it gingerly on my head. They both smiled.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Go take a look,” Rex said.
I rose from my chair and peered into the mirror on the kitchen wall. My first thought was that it made me look like a squirrel being swallowed by a pancake.
“It’s wonderful,” Ramona said, but she was about half drunk and not to be trusted.
I tilted the front brim back and took another glance in the mirror. I still didn’t quite look like Gene Autry joshing with the boys down at the corral, but it was an improvement.
“Pretty good,” I said. “Pretty doggone good.” All my life I’d wanted a cowboy hat and nobody had ever given me one. It sounds stupid, but of all the things people had done for me since I’d landed in Austin, this was the one that got to me.
“You don’t think it’s too big?” Rex said.
“I think it’s perfect,” I said. When I shook his hand, his grip was almost more heartfelt than my own.
“Okay, you two,” Ramona said. “Hold it right there.”
Just like that she was gone. I stood by Rex’s chair, bewildered, but in seconds she was back, fiddling with a camera.
My eyes went wide. I opened my mouth to protest, but I was too rattled for any words to come. Rex leapt to the rescue.
“Whoa, now, whoa,” he said. “Ramona, I think you can just put that camera away. Our friend here isn’t a big one for pictures. Am I right, V.S.? Come on, I want to show you where I work.”
Rex took me on a tour of his study. The books went floor to ceiling, and about half of them seemed to be ones that he’d written, thick as bricks, in English as well as in translation. He pointed out all the different editions—Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew, Farsi, Tagalog.
He led me through a canyon of teetering encyclopedias, yellowing papers drooping over the edges of shelves. A long table was piled high with ring notebooks, mailing envelopes, dictionaries, and atlases.
The novel he was finishing was about Texas, and on his desk was a play set of the Alamo. It was the kind of thing I’d been nuts about when I was a kid—the ranks of two-inch-tall Mexican soldiers in their blue coats, Santa Anna mounted on a plastic horse, Davy Crockett and his doomed pals hunkered down behind crumbling adobe walls, their muskets raised to their shoulders.
He showed me the library he’d been putting together for his Texas book, pulling out old photo albums of cowpunchers and Comanche warriors, muddy oil fields and migrant workers picking grapefruit on the banks of the Rio Grande.
It was amazing. I’d been expecting the worst, but Schoeninger wasn’t nearly as nasty a piece of work as I’d thought he’d be, and it didn’t look as if I was in any danger of being punched out. There was even something like charm to him, beneath all that crustiness. Hell, I thought, this could end up being a cakewalk. I checked out the mirror on the closet door and adjusted the brim of my hat. I was one cool dude.
“So how far along are you?” I asked.
“About seven hundred pages. Ramona and I still have some research to do, but we’re getting close.”
“That knocks me out. Congratulations. You work every day?”
“Seven-thirty until twelve-thirty,” he said.
“Wow.”
Stacks of paper were everywhere. After I reached across to straighten a pile that was tilting like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I idly picked a page off the top and glanced at it.
The room became very still. I looked back at Rex. His gaze was so level and unflinching I was glad he didn’t have a weapon in his hand. He let a photo album fall shut. I felt like one of those tourists who forget to take off their shoes before entering a mosque.
“This is it?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “But it’s just a draft.”
I glanced at the quivering page again, but it was impossible to concentrate with those crocodile eyes glaring at me. “It looks terrific,” I said.
“You didn’t actually read it, did you?”
“Not really.”
“You glanced at it.”
“Right.” I set the page back where it belonged. Rex had something more to say, I could tell, but he wasn’t saying it. “What?” I said.
“Cut-and-paste sludge. Wasn’t that the term?” I felt my mouth go dry. “I’m not trying to start a fight,” he said. “But that is the quote, I believe.” He took one of the tin soldiers off the table and shook it in his hand like a man about to roll dice. “We said some terrible things to one another.”
I pushed my cowboy hat a bit farther up on my forehead. “But here we are,” I said.
“Here we are,” he said. “And I think there’s some important things we have to teach these kids.”
I couldn’t imagine what those things could be, but I wasn’t going to argue. “You mean you and me together?”
“You and me together,” he said.
I went in to the institute on Sunday afternoon when no one was around to work on a letter to V. S. Mohle. I must have done five or six drafts, making sure I got everything just right, printed it out on official letterhead, and forged Wayne’s signature at the bottom. I said I’d gotten his phone call and was sorry that there had been difficulties, but that I understood. While everyone was disappointed, we’d been lucky enough to hire a top-notch teacher at the last minute. “No apologies necessary,” I wrote. “We’re up to our ears with work right now. Why don’t we just talk next spring?”
Sealing the envelope made me feel a little queasy. Any kind of letter was a risk, particularly when you were dealing with a lunatic like Mohle. There was no telling what he might do. I was just playing the odds. I walked two blocks and slipped the letter in the mailbox in front of the chemistry building.
Living the way I do, you learn to cover all the angles. I had already taken my credit cards with the different names, the phony driver’s licenses, and bogus Social Security numbers out of my wallet, sealed them up in a manila packet, and taped the packet to the underside of my desk at the institute. I was afraid of leaving them at my house where my landlady or the maid might stumble across them, and I sure as hell didn’t want them on me in case I got pulled over by some traffic cop.
For my second meeting with the fellows I had them do an in-class exercise, which, Wayne had assured me, was a great way to kill an hour. It was one of his favorites: “Describe a field as seen by a cow. Do not mention the cow.”
The students went at it, heads down, noses inches from the paper, knees jiggling a mile a minute. Now and then there would be a groan, a sigh, a quick sip of a water bottle, an angry yank of the hair. Every couple of minutes Dominique would look up at me, a faraway look in her eye, sucking at the tip of her pen, and then back to work she would go. The only one who seemed to be having a good time was Mel, who wrote furiously, dashing off page after page, smiling the whole time.
Not wanting to make them more nervous than they already were, I went out of the room for a bit. I strolled into my office, watered my plants, and when I came back I stood in the doorway. I just watched the students for a minute or two, one hand resting on the tall bookcase filled with all the Schoeninger books. I had never seen people working so hard! As I pushed away from the bookcase, I felt it rock forward, and made a mental note to say something to Mildred. The last thing we needed was for it to collapse and snuff out all these promising literary careers under a ton of Schoeninger best sellers.
I went back to my chair and told them to finish up. When they were through, I asked them to go around and read what they’d written. If I’d thought listening to them talk about their work was tough, that was nothing in comparison to having to listen to them read it. What a bunch of goop! I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. There were lots of descriptions of ryegrass and fire-ant nests and sun glistening off of rusted barbed wire, which they all seemed to take deadly seriously. When Nick used the term “herbivorean ease” in one of his sentences, I cracked up, thinking he had to be joking, but judging from the way he looked at me, he wasn’t.
When we went around the room for comments, they just covered one another’s asses. They’d start off with “I love the voice” or “I was intrigued by the egret motif” or “I want to congratulate you on the level of the writing.” Then, just to prove how honest they were, they’d toss in a little mild criticism. “It might be interesting if you introduced the dead calf by the muddy stream earlier in the piece.”
As for me, I was no fool. There are times when it’s best to just go with the flow. “Excellent point,” I’d say. “I agree about the voice. Once you get the voice, you’re off and running.” Or: “I think Brett really put his finger on it. He took the words right out of my mouth, I swear to God.”
It would have been a total love-fest if it hadn’t been for old Mel. He wasn’t quite the son of a bitch he’d been in the first class, but everyone could tell from the tone of his voice just how bored he was. “It’s okay,” he’d say, “I’ve got no problem with that,” or “Cool, I think it’s cool,” or “I don’t know that I could say anything everybody else hasn’t already said.” Every time he opened his mouth, the tension in the room cranked up a little higher. Plus, the way he kept rubbing his nose made me suspicious.
It was finally his turn to read. The opening line got the whole class sitting up straight in their chairs. “Each morning before dawn, I felt the tiny cold green fingers massaging my teats.” Talk about a whacko story: it was about this alien who comes down in a spaceship to milk this Holstein and then flies off into the clouds to feed his starving family on a dying star. I was pretty sure I’d told them all to limit what they wrote to a page or two, but this sucker went on forever.
The class sat there, stunned. Some of the details were seriously weird. There was the soft gurgling sound the little frog man makes as he pulls and squeezes, the sloshing of the milk in the bucket as the little alien struggles up the metal steps into his spaceship, the Holstein sneaking around, trying to keep the rest of the herd from knowing what she’s up to each morning, secretly proud that she’s found a purpose to her life that went beyond her species and even her own planet.
I kept checking the clock. Five minutes passed, and then ten. Was the boy mentally ill? Was he going to pull out a rifle and gun us all down when he finished? How could Wayne have let him into this program? Everyone in class was looking over at me, waiting for me to do something.
“Hey, Mel?”
“Yeah?”
“I think that’s probably enough.”
“I’ve only got a couple more pages.”
“No, no, that’s good. We’ve only got a few minutes and I want to get people’s reactions.”
The class was steaming, particularly the women. “I really didn’t connect to it,” Bryn said. Dominique passed, with a disgusted wave of the hand. “I think I’d have to hear it again,” was all that Nick would say. Mel sat stone-faced at the back of the room, scratching his elbow.
“So what did you think about it?” he said.
“You talking to me?” I said.
“Yeah.”
A sound from the hallway made me look up. Ramona and a Buddhist priest in a saffron robe had just come up the stairs. She opened the door to her office and the two of them disappeared inside.
“It was kind of over my head, to tell you the truth,” I said.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
He gave his nose another vigorous rub. “So what do you think of magic realism?”
“Magic what?” I said.
“Magic realism,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it. The little bastard was setting me up. They may have fooled me once with that Great Gatsby crap, but they weren’t going to fool me again.
“I have a question for you,” I said. “What do you think about Magic Markers?”
“Magic Markers?” Mel screwed up his face.
“Yeah, Magic Markers.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about them.”
“You ever notice that if you leave the cap off for a couple of hours they get all dried out and you can never use them again? Think about it.”
After class I snuck into Ramona’s office and shut the door behind me, lifting the knob gingerly so it would close without a click. A bronze casting of Schoeninger’s hands at a typewriter sat on a small table in the corner. The hollow arms were whacked off just short of the elbows, giving the sculpture a Texas Chain Saw Massacre kind of feel. On one of the bookshelves there was a picture of her as a girl, sitting on a horse. She was a little chubby, wore glasses, and even though she was trying to smile, she looked absolutely terrified.
I leafed through the correspondence on her desk. It seemed to be mostly fan mail, and I swear seventy percent of it was requests for money.
It was unbelievable, the things people wanted funding for: a photographic expedition to Antarctica, a Japane
se art museum in Butte, Montana, a colon cancer research center, a one-man show based on the life of Woodrow Wilson that would travel to all the high schools throughout the land. Best of all was a handwritten note from Tonga.
Dear Sir,
FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE
I am writing you to see financial assistance from you. Due to the ethnic tension, which has been went on for the last three years until now, we have been suffered a lot from the militia groups. Our gardens have been destroyed by militia groups. Our houses have been burnt down.
Therefore I am decided to seek for financial assistance. So that we may start to rebuild our house, schools and hospitals. I hope that you understand very much and hope to hear from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Robert M. Kotiama
NB—Grateful if you could send me a copy of a book called Millionaire Next Door.
I folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. As I set it on the desk, a piece of paper floated to the floor. I picked it up. It was an invoice from the Taliaferro Detective Agency on Wabash Avenue in Chicago. The bill was forty-five hundred dollars for the months of June, July, and August.
Chapter Six
You wouldn’t believe how many books there are about the Wampanoags—stuff on hut-building, arrow-chipping, and at least a half dozen volumes on the tragic story of King Philip’s War.
I must have been reading for three hours a day, trying to turn myself into an expert. It was heavy slogging, but I knew that if I was going to pull the wool over Schoeninger’s eyes, I needed to know my stuff.
Thursday night I was sitting on my couch, honing up on the clamshell jewelry of the coastal tribes, when I heard a banging on the front door.
I slammed my book shut, slid the bucket of KFC onto the kitchen counter, and went to see who it was. I pushed the curtain back in the front hall with a finger, and then let it drop. Rex and Ramona were standing on the front step.
My heart went into overdrive, but it was too late to pretend I wasn’t there. I took a couple of deep breaths to calm myself, flung open the door, and gave them the big hello.
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