I went through the packet of documents at least four times. What had gone on between Rex and his wife had been brutal. In a letter to his lawyer, Rex described walking in, finding his wife with another man, and pulling him off her. In a letter to her lawyer, she described him as a cold-hearted bastard, a phony, a snob, less than a real man, accused him of making her feel worthless from day one of their marriage, of having no interest in anything except advancing his own career. In an affidavit for the court he testified to coming home, finding her passed out on the floor, the baby wailing in its playpen.
It was hard to believe that this was the same guy who’d entertained us endlessly in the van with stories of outfoxing Afghan warlords and driving dogsleds across the Yukon. This was as down and dirty as it got. As long as there was a child, she had him by the short hairs. In the end he did what he had to do to be the man he wanted to be. He cut them both loose.
Rex was not a man you messed with. He’d obliterated Mohle, and he’d obliterated his ex-wife and kid. He was master of wiping the slate clean, but sometimes it didn’t wipe clean enough. Forty years later, he was still suffering. My job was to find a cure and, I promise you, it was not going to come cheap.
When I went back inside, they were singing “Wichita Lineman” and I joined in, swaying back and forth, our arms around one another’s shoulders.
As I was pouring myself one last glass of champagne, Mel came up and asked if I’d had a chance to look at his journal yet. I said that I hadn’t, but that I hoped to get to it soon. His bandanna was at such an alarming angle it made me think he’d either been partying way too hard or had suffered a serious head injury.
“This is all pretty great, huh?” I said.
“I guess,” he said. “I have to admit, it sounded kind of loony to me too, the idea of turning a tractor driver into a woman. So how did you know it was going to work?”
“You never do know,” I said. “The thing is, you’ve got to keep wrestling with the stuff until you get a real headlock on it. Throw it up against the wall and see who salutes it.” In the living room, Chester snapped pictures of LaTasha and Bryn, the two of them clowning for the camera in Panama hats and flashing peace signs.
“You ever get the feeling, Mel, that you’re really close to something great, but you can’t seem to take that last step?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
“Well, that’s when you’ve got to hang in there. No matter how frustrated or pissed off you are. It’s like opening a safe. You’ve just got to keep spinning that dial until you hit the right combination.”
“Huh,” he said. He couldn’t tell if I was being profound or if I was just drunk. I clapped him on the shoulder.
“But you already know this, don’t you, Mel? If you’ll excuse me, I should probably go see if I can find someone to give the old man a ride home.”
The next morning I turned my house upside down looking for the copy of Mel’s journal, and finally found the manila envelope under some old newspapers. I poured myself a strong coffee and settled down at the kitchen table with the stack of xeroxes. I didn’t expect it to be a lot of fun, but I figured the sooner I got the pushy little bastard off my back, the better.
It turned out I was in for a big surprise. In a way it was a mess—muddy pages with doodles and song lyrics and coffee-mug rings, but once you got past all that, it was pretty good reading. It was the story of these homeless kids Mel had ended up smoking dope with over the summer. A gang of them lived under a bridge in southern Oregon, about a mile from where Mel had been working. The girls brought in a little money by selling themselves to the truckers who came rolling through on the highway. The guys spent most of their time panhandling at the 7-Eleven and stripping copper tubing out of abandoned buildings.
Mel would drop by a couple of times a week to cop a joint and take his turn on the guitar. He had detailed notes on all of them—the runaway from Oklahoma called Muskrat, who had silver studs in both eyelids, prayed to Jesus every night, and couldn’t go to sleep without her teddy bear; the grimy leader of the pack named Brother Wilson, who claimed he was receiving messages from Mars. Mel must have had a knack, because they pretty much told him everything—about the crack-addict mother who had stuck Muskrat’s head in the oven, turned on the gas, and nearly killed her, about the alcoholic father who stormed out one Christmas Eve and was found dead in a snowdrift the next morning by a road crew, about Brother Wilson’s uncle, a one-legged race-car driver, who locked Brother Wilson in the cellar when he wet his bed.
I couldn’t quite figure out just how much Mel was buying into all their bullshit. At times it seemed like he was hip to it, at other times it seemed like he was swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. They were constantly hitting him up for money and, at the end of the summer, Brother Wilson stole the keys to Mel’s truck, drove it into a ditch, and cracked the differential.
Here it was, the final piece of the puzzle. If I couldn’t do something with what Mel had just given me, I was a disgrace to my profession. I spent the rest of the morning and half the afternoon pacing the floor, scrawling notes, weaving everything together. As they say in The Wings of Prometheus, to be a writer, you’ve got to be a magpie, steal a little from here, borrow a little from there, and that’s what I did. If I handled this right, I was going to break Rex’s heart and pick his pocket at the same time.
Chapter Thirteen
The week of my reading had arrived. With all that was going on, it had slipped up on me, but when I poked my head in Wayne’s office on Monday morning, I was still cool and relaxed, figuring I didn’t have much to worry about. But Wayne had a couple of surprises for me.
“So tell me again, Wayne, how many people are going to be there?”
“Pretty much just us. The students. Rex, of course. Ramona. Mildred. I asked Faith. I hope that’s okay.”
I sucked at my teeth. “No problem,” I said.
“And your landlady. She’s been asking about it. I really couldn’t not invite her.”
“I understand,” I said. He fiddled with his pen. I could tell from the way he was beaming up at me that he hadn’t quite come clean. “Anyone else?”
“Just one,” he said.
“And who’s that?”
“The president.”
I was dumbfounded. “Of the United States?”
“No. Of the university.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“V.S., it’s not going to be a problem, I promise you. He’s the nicest guy in the world and he’s the one who approved the appointment. He’s a huge fan.”
“A fan?” I wiped my hand over my mouth. “If there’s one thing in the world I don’t need, it’s more fans.” I’d wounded him, his eyes turning soft as a baby seal’s. I slapped his desk. “Just joking, Wayne, just joking. I’m sure it’s going to turn out fine.”
But was it going to be fine? I wasn’t so sure. I knew it sounded simple, as if all I had to do was stand up, read what Mohle had already written, and sit down again. But I’d never been to a reading, much less given one, and I knew from my students that readings were not to be taken lightly. This was not like teaching. When I taught, all I had to do was lie back in my chair, and act like the referee while the kids had at it. With this, I was going to be standing up front, all eyes on me, and everybody expecting me to thrill the pants off them.
I’d asked Wayne what section of the book I should read, but he was no help at all. “There are so many wonderful scenes, you really can’t go wrong. I’m sure whatever you pick will be terrific.”
I finally decided to do the last ten pages. It had a lot of funny stuff in it, plus there weren’t that many hard words. I probably spent ten hours in front of my bedroom mirror practicing all my gestures, working up the accents for the different characters. I marked the book up so I knew where to pause, where to make a witty off-the-cuff remark.
Was I overdoing it? Maybe I was. After all, I was going to be playing in front of a home crowd. But then there was Rex and the
university president. Rex would be tough enough, but the thought of reading to a guy with advanced degrees up the wazoo had me terrified.
The night of the reading I was nervous as a cat. Wayne and Faith came to pick me up at my house. Wayne was gussied up in his blazer and UNICEF tie and I could see that his wife had made sure he’d gotten a haircut. She looked pretty sharp herself in a Guatemalan shawl and clogs.
Faith couldn’t have been more excited, but Wayne was distracted and a little out of sorts. We pulled into the parking lot behind the Fiction Institute just as Ramona was helping Rex out of their van. They had the president of the university with them, a tall, Scandinavian-looking fellow with a hell of a handshake.
The institute was lit up like a cruise ship. All the lights were blazing in the house and there were lights in the yard too, shining up into the trees. Through the windows I could see people bustling around.
At the door Anton checked everybody off a list like he thought he was working security at the White House. The downstairs I could hardly recognize. Whoever had catered the thing had vanished, but it looked as if they must have been working all afternoon. All the desks were pushed into the corners, replaced by tables with fancy linen and fancy food—stuffed mushrooms and crabcakes and artistic chocolate desserts. A dozen wine bottles cooled in ice buckets.
We were the last to arrive. Upstairs the students were crowded around the conference table. My landlady, standing in the back and looking gorgeous, gave me a cheery wave.
It took a while to get settled in. I hid out in the hallway, going over what I’d marked to read while Wayne introduced the president to everybody. All the kids were coming up to Rex to offer condolences about his dog. It was clear how much they loved the guy. Of course they didn’t know the things I knew.
I had a lot more on my mind than any goddamned literary reading. There was no telling how many hours I’d put in refining my trap for Rex, but if I do say so myself, it was a masterpiece. This was no penny-ante pigeon drop in Grand Central, this was high art. All I needed now was the right moment to spring it.
When you have so much riding on something, you can’t be too careful. You’ve got to tend to the smallest detail. It was like those old Tarzan movies when they’re digging those elephant pits. Not only do you need to spend a week with shovels and picks making this big old hole and planting bamboo spikes in there, but then you’ve got to cover it all with branches and palm fronds and moss and stuff so it doesn’t look any different than the regular jungle floor.
Wayne’s introduction was a hell of a thing. I swear he went on for a half hour. He must have worked on it for a month. He had quotes from Mohle’s fifth-grade teachers and fancy Yale professors. He compared me to Mark Twain and Walt Whitman and a whole slew of other people I’d never heard of. He went on about how generations of young people around the world had been changed by the reading of my book. Down at the other end of the table Rex looked like a wolverine chewing on his intestines.
Wayne got more and more worked up. This whole time, I had to just sit in a chair next to him, staring at the back of his freshly shaven neck. He told a story about the lowest moment of his life, when Faith was pregnant with their second child and they were living in his in-laws’ basement. Every agent in New York had rejected his work and he had three hundred dollars in the bank.
Then one afternoon he wandered into a used bookstore and found an old copy of Eat Your Wheaties marked down to ninety-nine cents. The pages had turned yellow and half of them were falling out, but he sat down at a table by the window and began to read. He hadn’t looked at the book since he was a teenager and now it spoke to him in an entirely new way.
“What was it exactly?” Wayne asked. “The clarity of the voice? The beauty of the language? Whatever it was, all my self-loathing and doubt just fell away and I knew that I couldn’t give it up, couldn’t give up writing, whatever the cost. I knew that a life devoted to creating one thing as extraordinary as those crumbling pages was not a life wasted . . .”
Wayne’s lips started to tremble. He stopped to gather himself. “Let us make no mistake about it. Tonight we are present at one of the great moments in the history of American literature. Tonight it is our privilege to hear V. S. Mohle read from his work for the first time in his entire career.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. His nostrils quivered. It was a terrible thing to witness. “Please welcome . . .” His voice broke and he had to lower his head before he could continue. “V. S. Mohle!”
The place went wild with applause. Everybody rose from their seats. I got up out of my chair and gave Wayne a big hug, patting him on the back a few times to console him for not being me.
People kept clapping, even though I raised my hands a couple of times to calm them. In the end, all I could do was stand at the lectern, smiling and nodding, until they finally sat back down.
I cracked my book open and peered out over the audience. Faces shone with adoration. The president looked like he was about to pop, he was so proud. You would have thought I was Charles Lindbergh landing in Paris.
I began by thanking Wayne for his wonderful introduction. I thanked Rex and the president for bringing me here, and talked a little about my talented students.
“As I’m sure most of you are aware by now, there was a party the other night to celebrate one of these remarkable young people getting her book accepted. But let me assure you, there are going to be many, many more parties like it, for all of these kids . . .”
I adjusted the light on the lectern. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ramona whispering something in Rex’s ear. “Wayne’s asked me to read a little to you tonight, so I thought I’d take a shot at the final scene, where Hartley ends up in the ghost town in New Mexico. Some of you may remember it . . .”
Three or four of the students smiled as if I’d made the best joke. Of course they knew it. They’d probably memorized it word for word.
I figured I could scarcely go wrong with the ending, there was so much great stuff in it. Hartley and his buddy Alex have run away from high school and have been knocking around in the West for a month or so, but they’ve started to get on one another’s nerves. Their big dreams of working on a ranch haven’t panned out and the on-again, off-again search for Hartley’s father has been a complete bust.
But then in Denver they run into Hartley’s aunt, a tall goofy woman who collects glass giraffes. She hadn’t seen Hartley’s father for over a year, but she got a postcard from him just a few months before, saying that he was going off to live in a ghost town in New Mexico.
Before you know it the boys are on a Trailways bus, headed south. This was where I started reading, right at the part where they’re meeting all these wacky characters, including a garlic farmer who claims to be a former English lord, and some hippie girl who lives with Geronimo’s grandson on a mountain outside of Taos.
After a long drive through the night they arrive at this ghost town south of Santa Fe. Collapsing mine shafts dot the hillside and there are row after row of abandoned shacks. It’s Sunday afternoon and the only places showing any signs of life are a general store and a biker bar playing bluegrass music.
This is way too freaky for Alex, who just wants to get the hell out of there, but Hartley’s come too far to turn back now. The first place he tries is the bar, but nobody will give him so much as the time of day. For an hour they wander through the town, stopping everyone they meet but getting absolutely nowhere, until they run into a chatty little six-year-old sucking on a Popsicle on the steps of the general store.
Her name is Eleanor and she’s one of those cute kids who have a lot of cute things to say. She asks if they know what’s the fastest animal in the world, and when Hartley says it’s the cheetah, she’s impressed. Hartley asks her if she knows a man named Walker Dixon. She shakes her head no.
Hartley doesn’t let it drop. “How about a tall skinny man with a little mustache? From New York?” She keeps shaking her head. “With kind of big ears? Like mi
ne?”
Eleanor gets a puzzled look on her face. “Does he swallow spoons?”
“Yeah, he does,” Hartley says. It was his father’s one trick, his surefire way to entertain any kid under the age of eight.
“He lived here for a while,” Eleanor says. “But I don’t think he does anymore.” She’s a funny-looking little girl, this Eleanor. She’s got freckles and braids, droopy black socks, and a gingham dress out of Little House on the Prairie.
“Could you show us which house he lived in?” Hartley said.
“Oh, geez,” Alex says, but Hartley gives him a hard look to shut him up.
Eleanor tosses her Popsicle stick away and leads them back into the rows of miners’ shacks. Most of them are abandoned, but through some of the windows Hartley can see the shadows of people moving around.
A couple of mangy dogs start to follow them. Eleanor jabbers away. Did they know that llamas spit? Did they have a TV? She didn’t. Her mother didn’t believe in it. She went to New York with her mother once and they went to a museum where a giant whale hung from the ceiling. A lot of kids might have been afraid, but she wasn’t, because she knew it wasn’t real.
Alex limps along the coal streets. All he wants is a pay phone where he can call his parents and have them send him a plane ticket home. He’s sure the place is full of escaped felons and deranged drug dealers and that they’re about to be murdered. He has on the Haverford sweatshirt he’s worn the whole trip, hoping it would help him get laid if the girls they met on the buses thought he was old enough to be in college.
When they come to the shack where the man who swallowed spoons once lived, Alex decides he’ll just wait outside. Eleanor takes Hartley by the hand and leads him through the gate.
Famous Writers I Have Known Page 17
