SPECIAL FRIEND OF THE DINEH
“As an expression of appreciation and friendship for authentically portraying the strength and dignity of traditional Navajo culture.”
The answer to the “Where do you get the ideas” question is that writers’ minds are a jumbled, chaotic attic cluttered with plot notions, useful characters, settings for events, bits and pieces of information, overheard remarks, ironies, cloud formations, bumper sticker slogans, unresolved problems, bon mots, tragedies, heroics, etc. One’s memory contains enough stuff to produce three or four longer versions of War and Peace if only one could sort it out and form it into a coherent fable.
That leads to the next FAQ. “When do you write?” One writes while peeling potatoes, driving to work, standing in line, suffering through a boring movie, eating oatmeal, digging out dandelions, trying to drift off into naptime sleep. Finally when the sorting is mostly completed and the next scene is set in the imagination, one goes to the computer and types it onto the screen.
I liken the writer to the bag lady pushing her stolen shopping cart through life collecting throwaway stuff, which, who knows, might be useful some way some day. It’s an apt analogy and I can’t imagine a better profession for such scavenging than journalism, where “If it ain’t interesting it ain’t news.” The dinky little state capital at Santa Fe, with its mixture of artists, Indian cultures, nuclear scientists, ski bums, refugees from embarrassed kinfolks, hippies drifting down from their big communes around Taos, etc., was a fruitful place for a wannabe novelist to load his shopping cart.
That’s true wherever a reporter works. Borger gave me the wise, amiable, and honorable sheriff who, with some Navajo culture added, became Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn.
So what memories come to mind after forty years?
I see a well-dressed young matron happily shopping in an upscale department store in Oklahoma City—a woman I’d watched a month earlier as murder trial defendant facing a charge she had killed her sleeping husband and their baby. At the same time I was covering another trial—an orphanage runaway who had abducted a vacationing family of four and killed them for their money and their car. Both defendants pleaded insanity. She was represented by the best legal team her wealthy family could hire. He was represented by a court-appointed lawyer. She was committed to a mental hospital until cured. He was sentenced to life in prison. There should be at least a short story in how quickly a rich girl’s insanity is cured and a poor boy’s overlooked.
A teenage boy sitting nervously on a bench in the police station—the only survivor of a fire that killed his mother and two younger sisters. Why was he sitting there? I don’t know. Neither, I suspect, did he. Probably because firemen found him crying and distraught outside the flaming building and didn’t know what to do with him. While awaiting whatever happens next he seems to have indicted himself for negligent homicide. He chooses me, waiting down the bench to talk to the captain, as his jury. He explains why only he is alive—persuading me, but not himself. Another short story waiting to be written.
General Dwight Eisenhower, newly retired, at a press conference. His aide, a newly retired colonel, has sternly instructed the half-dozen reporters present in his hotel suite that the general will talk only about the nonprofit association he now heads. No political questions will be allowed. The general talks. He asks if we have questions. “General,” says a retired one-stripe private, “it’s said you’re willing to accept the Republican nomination for President. Is that true?” The ex-five-star general glowers at the ex-one-stripe private, snaps out a “no comment,” and thus completes for me a glorious moment of civilian status fully savored.
Johnson Murray, son of former governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, has been elected to the post his father held. I am sent to interview the old man. His home is a second-floor room of a down-and-outer hotel on Fourth Street. We had met briefly a year before. He’d come into the Oklahoma State Senate chamber with a book sack filled with copies of The History of Oklahoma. He’d written it and while he was governor the state Board of Education had adopted it as the text required in all schools. Now he was going up and down the aisle, a skinny, bent, and bearded old man, offering copies for sale to the Senators and stopping to chat with us at the press table.
He opened his hotel room door to my knock and stood in his socks, inviting me in, holding the shoes he’d been polishing in his hands. “Another chance to sell you my Oklahoma history,” he said, “but you want to talk about Johnson.”
I did, but he didn’t. He wanted to talk about Alfalfa Bill, of how he had wrestled control of the Democratic Party from the oil exploiters, of deeds he’d done for the poor, of sending the Oklahoma National Guard to seize control of the Red River highway bridges when Texas tried to put in tollbooths, and so forth. For me that was old news, and back at the UP Bureau Carter Bradley was waiting for what Alfalfa Bill had to say about his son’s election. I maneuvered him back to that.
“He’s not all that bright,” said Alfalfa Bill. “Not as smart as you’d hope. But then, the people of Oklahoma weren’t voting for my boy. They were remembering Alfalfa Bill.” Which is the way I wrote it. Bradley tossed it back to me. “Just you and the old man in the room,” he said. “Use your head. This gets printed. Tomorrow we’re running his denial. Never said a word of that. Never even talked to you. Which is what our retraction has to say.”
So my revised story reported that former governor Alfalfa Bill Murray says he thinks the election of his son reflects good memories folks have of him, recalls some of his exploits as Oklahoma’s first Indian governor, and provides enough details of the poverty in which he is living to put a little dent in the generalization about political corruption. I’m left with one of those intensely graphic memories of a proud old man in a dingy room who shares a bathroom down a long hallway with the same poor folks he tried to help. I haven’t found a use for it in fiction yet, but I can’t get it out of the shopping cart.
Another incident I’ve never forgotten was directly useful in a novel and had a lot to do with making me dead serious about trying to become a novelist. It happened at Santa Fe.
The call from the deputy warden was directly to the point. Robert Smallwood, scheduled to die that evening for a cold-blooded double murder, had asked to talk to me. If I wanted to see him, be at the prison main entrance at 2 P.M. “Just me?” I asked. “You and John Curtis,” he said. “Curtis said he’d come.”
Curtis was manager of the Santa Fe bureau of the Associated Press but we were friends as well as competitors and made the fifteen-mile drive from Santa Fe to what was then the “new prison” in his car. Smallwood was the news story of the day. At midnight he would become the first person executed in New Mexico’s shiny new gas chamber. He had been condemned for murdering a newlywed couple who had stopped to help him with a stalled (and stolen) car and he was a suspect in a list of other unsolved homicides. Such a death row visit was not new to me, and certainly not to Curtis, who was years my senior in the reporting business. We didn’t expect much. Smallwood would reassert his innocence, or (better for our purposes) he’d admit the deed, proclaim his sorrow, and ask us to plead with the governor for a stay of execution. Or he would promise to reveal the identity of the actual killer. Who could guess? Neither of us expected a big story and we didn’t get one.
Instead, I got a notion implanted in my brain; a sort of life-changing weirdness that never went away. It was the thought that fiction can sometimes tell the truth better than facts. After listening to what Smallwood had to say I tried to write a short story, and kept trying until I finally got one written. It was bad. I didn’t try to get it published. But I kept it and Smallwood remained in my memory until, years later, I needed him. Then he became Colton Wolf in People of Darkness. Those who have read that book already know what Curtis and I heard on death row of Cell Block 3 that afternoon.
Death Row included five cells, their barred doors facing a row of high windows through which sunlight streamed that afternoon. We
were ushered into the sunny corridor, and a guard provided us folding chairs. Four of the cells were empty. Smallwood was awaiting us, standing at the door of his. We introduced ourselves, getting through the formal courtesy required on meeting a human who has nine hours left to live.
Smallwood was embarrassed, hesitant, but finally he got to the reason he had invited us there.
Would we be writing about what was happening to him tonight?
We would be.
Would the stories go around the country, where a lot of people would see them?
Well, yes. At least they would be sent out to newspapers and radio stations.
Good, Smallwood said.
“Good? Why?” I asked.
“Maybe my mother will see it,” he said. “If she knows about it, I think she’ll come and get my body.”
“Give us her name and address,” John said. “We’ll make sure she knows.”
Smallwood stood at the door, his hands gripping the bars, eyes down, preparing himself to tell two strangers of the humiliation that had ruled his life, giving me a visual memory that can no more be erased than that of the helmet filled with part of its owner’s skull—another tattoo on my brain. I still see, for example, the smooth stub of the finger from which he’d lost the last two joints, see that stub move as he loosened, and tightened, and loosened, his hold on the bars.
Smallwood didn’t know his mother’s address. He didn’t know her name. He doubted his name was Smallwood. It was the name of the man she’d been with the last time he’d seen her.
“And when was that?”
He remembered the date exactly. His twelfth birthday. He’d been chased away by the man his mother was living with, had been living in a school friend’s garage, had come back to his mother’s trailer and found the space vacant. The trailer court manager had no idea where they had gone. Smallwood had been hunting her ever since, around the country and down through the years, accumulating a criminal record on the way, looting America for whatever it had taken to keep the chase going and his hope alive. First car theft as a juvenile, shoplifting, more car theft, burglary, and finally worse. He thought his mother might have gone to California. He thought his mother had come from somewhere in the midwest, remembering talk of big shade trees over the street.
John and I asked the routine questions. How about the murders for which he was about to die? He just shook his head. What had he ordered for the traditional last meal? He wasn’t hungry and hadn’t decided. What did he think about dying? The prison padre had taught him about Jesus and he didn’t think Father Theodore had any reason to lie to him. He’d be going to a better life and they said dying didn’t hurt much. He produced a shy smile when he said that, and said he wondered how they learned that without trying it. Then he’d pointed to scar tissue on the side of his neck. He said: “I can stand pain pretty well,” and produced another shy, deprecatory smile. But he’d like to go home, just once. It would be good, he said “to be buried with my family.”
Smallwood walked into the execution room about ten minutes before midnight with the chaplain beside him, the warden walking in front and two guards behind, and John and I watching from the witness gallery. The chaplain answered some final question, patted his arm. They embraced. The guard held open the door of the chamber. Smallwood, a tall man, bumped his head on the metal threshold, grimaced at the pain of that, and eased back into the chair to make it easier for the guard to fasten the straps. The door was closed. The warden looked at his watch, signaled. Somewhere someone closed an electrical circuit causing cyanide pellets to drop into a container of acid beneath Smallwood’s chair. We could see a faint mist of fumes rising. Smallwood glanced out at us, an expression I interpreted as a mixture of embarrassment and fright. Then he inhaled.
I wrote my report for the next day’s edition that night, of the details of the execution going smoothly, of Smallwood’s demeanor, of the crime he died for, something of the young Good Samaritans he had murdered, and of the other crimes for which other states had warrants issued for him. I think I gave his hunt for his mother a paragraph and I know I mentioned his hope that she would come for him and take him home for burial. I didn’t think she would and she didn’t.
I was left wondering if Smallwood’s mother had any better luck forgetting him than I did. I was left thinking the bare bones story I’d done left too much unsaid. Here was the Mid-Century Tragedy of American culture. If I was going to be a writer, I should be able to do something with it. I wrote a sort of minimalist short story, in which the reader sees the reporter just back from the execution in the empty, predawn wire service bureau, putting his yarn together, working against the electric clock behind him and the three-hundred-word space allotted it on the trunk wire, sorting out what he has seen and his memories of his interview with the man about to die. I left it totally devoid of emotion or opinion—trying to cause the reader to see and hear precisely what the reporter had seen. As the above might suggest, it wasn’t much of a short story. I stuck it in my Unfinished Business box and there it sat, refusing to be forgotten. Smallwood didn’t fit in a short story. He needed to be a character in a novel. Years later, he came alive again as Colton Wolf in People of Darkness, and more years later, the old story came out of the drawer, underwent another rewrite, and was published as “First Lead Gasser.”
That incident kept alive my yearning to become a fiction writer—kept it alive until one evening in 1961 Marie suggested I drop out of the news business and “Just do it.”
The ad agency that designed the “Just do it” slogan for the Nike Shoe folks, the “anthem for the totally irresponsible,” did it to encourage the young to pay a hundred and fifty bucks for $15 sneakers. It worked for Nike, but it didn’t seem to fit our situation as it stood in 1961.
Things had changed since we’d moved to Santa Fe. Most notably, we now had five children. If Marie was dismayed by this economic problem she didn’t show it. Her position was based on one hard fact and a double presumption. The fact was that the six-day-week, long-hours schedule I was working allowed neither time nor energy for anything creative. The presumption was that we could support our gang of seven until I became a successful author and that I would be good enough at yarn spinning to actually get a book published. Marie had more confidence in my writing than I did.
There’s an odd side to this that will be hard to understand by those not blessed by having a spouse who really loves them. Marie personally shuns celebrity, is embarrassed by it. She believed for years that giving talks, doing book signings, having fans confront me for autographs was onerous to me, a cross that I bravely bore because the author role required it. Usually she reads me like a book but she had trouble believing that I enjoy this. Thus came our leap into the dark—from newspaper editor to a part-time university job and the immersion as graduate student into the world of classic literature, which I’d missed studying journalism. I wondered for a while how I had been reckless enough to do it, but there’s no real mystery there. It was because Marie (Oh, woman of infinite faith) got me to believing I was as talented, competent, etc., as she believed I was.
25
Life Among the Flower Children
The middle sixties were the ideal time to start if one was fated to spend almost twenty years teaching journalism at a university. Student lethargy still ruled as late as 1963, providing a taste of lecturing to a disinterested audience. But even then the long, loud, and lusty revolution was moving in. Before I could conclude that a professor’s life tended to be boring, the late sixties were upon us and students were showing up full of fire, demanding to be taught something relevant, protesting war, the establishment, parking tickets, poorly prepared lectures, prejudices against pot smoking, unisex rest rooms, police brutality, and so forth.
Odd as this may sound, it was a wonderful time to be teaching. Students were interested, grade mania and the resulting grade inflation had barely emerged, the curse of political correctness had not yet paralyzed deans and department chairm
en and corrupted the faculty. Teaching a roomful of bright young folks who yearned to learn and were willing to argue forced you to defend your position. Sometimes you couldn’t. You were learning as much as they were, and it was fun. It wasn’t until the early eighties that lethargy restored itself. The numbing dogma of PC hung over the campus, tolerating no opinions except the anointed ones. With free speech and free thought ruled out by inquisitors running Women’s Studies and the various minorities studies, the joy of learning had seeped out of students. With it went joy of teaching. Time to quit.
Keen Rafferty retired as Journalism Department chairman after breaking me in and I was moved by default into the job no one wanted. At first I taught Introduction to News Writing, the News Writing Laboratory, Advanced Reporting and History of Journalism. As enrollment, and our faculty grew, making such things possible, I developed two courses of my own. One we named Social Effects of Mass Communications, which gave me a chance to reteach what H. H. Herbert had taught me at Oklahoma and grind my own accumulated axes. However the course I dearly loved, of which I boast when the opportunity arises, was Persuasive Writing.
By the 1960s almost everyone (the exceptions being editorial writers) understood that editorials are not persuasive. They simply report the position of the newspapers’ owners. Actual persuasion is accomplished on the news pages. I had always suspected this, but the Borger News-Herald provided an opportunity to test it. The titular editor, who represented the owner’s position, wrote essay after essay on the editorial page endorsing the incumbent congressman as a true-blue archconservative and attacking his Young Lawyer challenger on grounds that the fervency of his anti-communism and therefore his patriotism was doubtful. However, we in the newsroom liked Young Lawyer. We found an excuse to do a human interest article about him. We found a way to work his photo into a thing we did on father-son relationships. The Sunday before the election, there he was on the front page helping set up tables at a church picnic while the paper’s official opinion on the editorial page rated him a possible communist sympathizer. Guess who won? Young Lawyer by a bunch.
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 25
