The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “Ot! Ot!” you began to lament. But something had to be done. He was clearly incapacitated.

  Only poltergeists make things move. I, your garden variety ghost, had never before so much as rattled a mirror. Sure, I’d messed around with a couple of radios, but that was a matter of invisible waves or sparks, not physical objects like steering wheels and gas pedals. I was nearly as panicked as I. But somebody had to do something to get you off that bridge and across the great river. Visible even in the darkness, because floodlighted, was the great parabolic arch, gleaming aluminum, Saarinen-designed, officially the Jefferson Memorial Arch but called the Gateway. Here you were, dear Kat, at the Gate. I. couldn’t get you through it. You’d have to do something yourself.

  But I think I held your hands as you grabbed the wheel and I think I held your feet as you thrust one of them toward the gas pedal and with the other one attempted to lift his heavy foot off the brake. His foot was frozen. “FOOT OFF BRAKE!” you screamed at him.

  “What?” he said. He hadn’t heard you, but just the sound of mute Cathlin speaking something other than “Och” had loosened his foot on the brake, and you got it off, and the Blazer began to creep forward again. It seemed to take forever, but you steered it over the water, then far enough beyond the water that he regained his awareness, his composure, his driving skill.

  Miles beyond St. Louis, switched to Interstate 44 now, he was still breathing hard, and he asked Cathlin in wonderment, “How did you do that, if you can’t drive?”

  But there was no way in the dark of the car, without turning on the dome light, that he could read any answer she cared to write. So she was spared trying to explain that she hadn’t done it, that somebody, maybe Anangka, had “taken over.”

  Rolla, Missouri, was the last real town you passed through; the rest of them from here on in will have to be pseudonymous. I. told Cathlin he had several friends in Rolla, and he even deliberated with himself, aloud, the possibility of stopping there, but it was the wee hours before dawn, no one was awake yet, and he decided to drive on. But Rolla, he explained to Cathlin, was the portal to the Bodarks; these hills all around, although you couldn’t see them, were the first foothills of the Bodark Mountains. By the time the sun came up and you had reached the city of “Summerfield,” you were on the mostly flatlands of the dull “Summerfield Plateau,” and I. could not yet point out any mountains to Cathlin to remind her of Londonderry.

  Summerfield also has an Eagle Hotel, as well as many other nonmotels, but I. would not leave the interstate, even though Cathlin was flashing the same cards from the morning before: Could you stop soon? Aren’t you exhausted? I. shook his head and concentrated with demonic intensity upon the road ahead of him, until at last he could point out a mountain of sorts, not very high, but a mountain all the same, the first since leaving the burgh where you’d spent the winter. It was full springtime now, and full daylight now. Even from the dull, tedious interstate you could see flowers, and the omnipresent pink-blooming Cercis canadensis and the white-blooming Cornus florida. I. was so intent upon the road you lost your sense of discomfort over the possibility of his seeing you clearly in the daylight, and what little you had of this discomfort soon was forgotten as you studied the changing scenery and even began to imagine, out there in those woods, that special boletic reek that makes your nostrils dilate: the dark, dank, satisfying blend of damp moss, rich earth, and rotting leaves.

  Suddenly I. pulled over to the shoulder and stopped, although there were no bridges in sight ahead. He jumped out of the Blazer and ran to the roadside and fell to his knees. You thought perhaps he was going to upheave his consumption of bourbon and the “fast food” that had nourished the two of you at many stops along the route. He knelt forward and brought his face right down to the earth.

  He returned to you with crumbs of dirt still clinging to his lips, and he declared, “That’s the state line. We’re here!”

  And you realized that he had gone to kiss his native soil.

  Chapter twenty-seven

  The Halfmoon Hotel was built of native limestone in 1886, originally as a mountain retreat for wealthy railroad executives and their families (Lawren Carnegie once slept there, when he was still alive). It is five stories of one hundred rooms, high on a hilltop overlooking the quaint Victorian spa of Arcata Springs, an alpine village of steep, narrow, winding streets lined here with shops, there with massive limestone walls and huge shade trees. After its heyday as a rich man’s lodge, the Halfmoon had a second incarnation for twenty-four years as a junior college for girls, Halfmoon College; and later, during the depression, it suffered a third incarnation as the hospital of a quack doctor who claimed to cure cancer, and among the several ghosts who have taken up permanent inhabitance of the place are a couple of nurses who endlessly wheel gurneys with terminal lymphoma and carcinoma patients and are sometimes spotted by the modern guests, who are motel-shunning tourists enchanted by the views, the elegance, and the promotional slogan, “A Castle in the Air High Atop the Bodarks.”

  It is indeed a castle, its peaked roofs and towers looming over the town, and your first sight of it, sweet Kat, would be a delicious jolt of recognition—not of anything from your past, because in all honesty not even its rugged stonemasonry reminded you of the towers of Svanetia, but of a kind of answer to that half-formulated search that we all carry around with us all our lives, most of us never finding anything.

  The first part of the Ot! you began to sigh was so long, a vowel so continuous, that by the time you got to the end of the exclamation you had the presence of mind to change the terminal consonant to k insteadof t and make a Scottish “Och.” Then you wrote on a card for I., It is fabulous!

  “Anything like that in Londonderry?” he asked. You shook your head and went on shaking it. You would be even more fascinated when you discovered, as you would soon, that the original settlers of the town had not been the railroad executives or even the earliest health seeking white Americans, but Indians. Long before the water-faddist bathers, dippers, and drinkers of the 1880s mushroomed the village into a city, the Osage Indians had discovered the curative properties of the springs and had a small village of their own on the mountain where the Halfmoon would come to be. Indeed, they named the principal spring of water flowing out of the mountain’s east slope (water good for curing erysipelas, scrofula, photodysphoria, and dyspepsia, but not cancer or hebephilia) Mionba Athigezhe Nithní, Osage speech for Magic-Water-Beneath-the-Two-Horned-Moon, and this halfmoon spring gave its name to the hotel. Checking in at the magnificent curving walnut-and-marble registration desk, I. discovered that the room reserved for him by bow, in expectation that he would be alone, contained only one bed, albeit a double. “Have you ever heard of our colonial American custom of ‘bundling’?” he asked Cathlin, and when she shook her head, he said to the clerk, “My wife and I would really prefer twin beds.”

  The clerk, a girl named Sharon, gave Cathlin a glance, then said, with a slight lisp, “We have no twin beds together. There are some rooms with a double and a twin, a queen and a twin, or a king and a queen, and some with two doubles, but…”

  I. was having trouble hearing all of this. “Anything,” he said, “so long as they’re separate.”

  “…but they are all taken,” clerk Sharon went on. “The bow meeting has reserved everything.” You learned then that the name of the organization is pronounced as something done from the waist, rhyming with how, the Indian greeting.

  But I. missed the pronunciation and said, “I’m the main speaker at the bow meeting,” pronouncing it to rhyme with go, an injunction of leave-taking. The clerk glanced again at Cathlin and studied I. Neither of you were very presentable; neither of you had bathed since leaving the burgh, and Cathlin’s dress was wrinkled from the long car ride; I. was dressed in his customary grungy shirt and trousers, and he hadn’t shaved for two days.

  “There are many motels along the highway,” the clerk said.

  A cat leapt up onto the registrati
on desk and settled there as if he owned the place. He was a yellow-striped tabby with a white-ringed tail, fat, and you could not resist stroking him—the first time you’d had your hand on a real cat in years. Worse, you could not resist asking Sharon her cat’s name. She answered, “Morris,” the terminal s lisped as th. You hoped that I. had not overheard the exchange.

  Cathlin began to write on a card and gave it to I. Go ahead and take the one reserved. We can work out something.

  I. smiled hugely at the clerk and waved the card at her and said, “My wife, who is here in hopes the water can cure her aphasia, says that it’s okay if we take the one we’ve got.”

  Sharon said, “But I should warn you, that room has a history of being haunted.” She lightly lisped her s’s again.

  Was she trying to get them to go? You wrote quickly, Tell her I love ghosts.

  “My wife hopes your ghosts are friendly,” I. said. “Now do I have to hire a bellhop or can I carry my own stuff?”

  Finding Room 218 without a bellhop was slightly difficult: The brass numerals had been removed from the door, and only a pentimento of the numerals was still faintly visible. Detecting the room number, 218, you nearly blurted that it was the same number as the room you’d recently vacated at the Elmores’ mansion. But you soon discovered some major differences: It was considerably smaller than your room in the mansion had been, yet the view beyond the walnut jalousies was far grander (spoiled only at one edge by an enormous cement statue of a robed male with extended arms, possibly meant to be Jesus), the furniture was much swanker (at least the bed was not a murphybed but an ornately head-boarded Victorian), the yellow floral wallpaper matched the window draperies, and, strange to relate or to discover, there wasn’t a single mirror in the room. Not even in the bathroom, which had gleaming tiles and porcelains and chromiums but no silverbacks. How could you, after showering (which you immediately did), look at Cathlin afterward to restore her disguise? At your request, I. went down to complain to Sharon and returned with a hand mirror, which was better than nothing.

  Then there was the problem of the smallish bed. You were so tired that you were ready to tumble into it even if half of it was occupied by a grown man, a very large man. But even if you could risk waking up to find yourself in his arms, you couldn’t risk waking up to find that your wig and sunglasses had come off. I. solved the problem by graciously offering to let you take a nap while he reconnoitered the Halfmoon Pub. You fished in your purse for a much-used card: Aren’t you exhausted? and showed it to him once more. He shook his head and said he was too excited to sleep. So you thanked him, but you requested that he leave the key with you and knock when he returned. You didn’t want him letting himself into the room if you were sleeping.

  I. was Ah when he came back, hours later. He was thoroughly Ah. You came out of a very deep sleep, during which you’d alternated between dreams about the Osage Indians (although you knew nothing about them) and your old familiar dream of climbing and descending an endless sequence of stone steps, concrete steps, wooden steps, staircases that led up or down to significant places whose significance always eluded you. You answered Ah’s knock, using the hand mirror to make sure it was Cathlin who let him in. She managed to understand, from his slurred speech, that in the Halfmoon Pub he’d encountered a gaggle of the ladies of bow, who had bought his many drinks and attempted to engage him in conversation and used up every last one of his cards. He was out of cards. He had resorted to paper bar napkins and had a fistful of those, which you read after he had fallen into the bed for a long sleep, embracing the pillow you’d vacated. Many of these women had covered the napkins with their names, home addresses, their current room numbers, and the red bow-shaped imprints of their lipstick. Many of them had, apparently, read all of I.’s novels with, apparently, much appreciation and relish. You regretted that you’d never had a chance to read anything of his. You resolved to do so as soon as you got “settled.”

  While I. slept, you also read the hotel’s list of services, which was vast: in addition to the Halfmoon Pub, there was the main dining room, called the Crystal Room, a movie theater, and an observation deck on the top floor, a game room in the basement, outdoor games of tennis and shuffleboard near the swimming pool, and a hiking trail. There was also a bus that took an audience to the Passion Play, and a carriagelike vehicle called Tally-Ho that took guests down to the town’s shops and later to something called the Cook-Out. At 5:00 P.M., you put on your dzhinsy and your only fresh blouse and decided to leave off the extravagant hat and sunglasses, as long as I. was sleeping. But you wore your red wig, and you rode off on the Tally-Ho to the Cook-Out, for a real American eat-and-sing, with hot dogs, baked beans, potato salad, dill pickles, rolls, and pop. One of the songs everybody sang was “Loch Lomond,” which you had previously learned from the book. Some of the picnickers, apparently all bow members, had their children with them, and there were a couple of adorable boys, age eleven or thirteen, that you would have loved to become acquainted with, if you’d had the courage. One of their fathers flirted with you and tried to persuade you to go off on the hiking trail with him “and hunt for mushrooms or something,” but you told him your husband was sleeping and might wake up anytime. “Are you a Russkie or something?” he said. “Where’d you get that accent?”

  You learned, from your conversation with him, that the membership of bow was not exclusively female, nor was it limited to amateur wordsmiths. There were artists and photographers also aspiring to publication, and several males, young and old, published and unpublished. The president was a man, even if all the other officers were women. A monthly newsletter, Take A BOW, kept members informed of workshops, contests, events, and hot tips on free-lancing, and the March and April issues had given prominent mention to this annual convention, at which the main speakers would be the two most celebrated Bodark writers, I. himself and a woman named Halfmoon Berryfairy. “Yes,” you said, in your Russkie accent. “I am Mrs. I.”

  “No shit?” the man said. “Well, hey, tell me something. If it’s not too personal. Does the guy do all the stuff in bed that he writes about?”

  You gave the man a coy sidelong glance and said, “He does things in bed he never writes about.”

  Chapter twenty-eight

  When I. woke up, sometime in the middle of the night, and was ready to give the bed back to you, he found you reading one of his novels, which you’d fetched from a box in the back of the Blazer. The novel had a bookmark: Kenny’s pamphlet, 20 Questions for Alcoholism. When I. woke up, you inserted this back where it had been and you closed the book. The main effect of his fiction on you was to make you want to write, and you were burning to get back to Geordie Lad.

  Before giving the bed back to you, I. told you of an old Bodark custom called “ride-and-tie”: when two travelers on a long trip had only one horse between them, one of them would ride so many miles ahead of the other, dismount, tie the horse, and continue on foot. When the other traveler, on foot, arrived at the horse, he would untie it and ride on so many miles beyond the first traveler before dismounting and tying the horse. And so on, taking turns. “That’s what we’re doing with this bed,” I. said. “Riding and tying. I wish we could ride together.”

  The horse won’t hold us, you wrote.

  “Do you sleep with those sunglasses on?” he asked as you got into bed.

  If there is any light, you wrote.

  “I was going to sit here, while you slept, and work on my speech,” he said. “But I guess I could put out the light and go down to the lobby.” He looked at his watch. “Nobody’s up at this hour. The Halfmoon Pub is closed. I don’t have any notion what I’m going to talk about tomorrow…or, rather, today, because I’m supposed to speak right after lunch. I’ve never given a speech to a writers’ group before. Have you got any ideas?”

  Sleepy though you were, you tried to think. You could not imagine, then or ever (and you’ve turned down many an invitation since), telling people how to write, or speaking to a
hotel full of free lances, broken lances, daggers, and toothpicks. You got the bookmark, Kenny’s pamphlet on alcoholism, out of his book and gave it to him, and you wrote on a card, Maybe this will inspire you.

  He stared at it, and then at you, as if you weren’t any help at all. But he took the pamphlet and turned out the light and went down to the lobby.

  The next day, or rather, later that same day, in the Crystal Room, to the assemblage of a hundred members of bow, who had during their consumption of luncheon cast an occasional appraising glance at Cathlin sitting beside him at the head table, I., or rather, Ah, who had fortified himself in advance with the all-morning help of a bottle of bourbon, rose after the flattering introduction by Agnes Roundtree Mazzarelli and said, “Somebody recently gave me a pamphlet published by A.A., called 20 Questions for Alcoholism, and just this morning it occurred to me that you can take that list, go through it, substitute the word write for the word drink, and come up with a perfect list of questions to determine whether or not you are a genuine, dedicated, incurable writer. As follows:

  Do you ever crave to write at a definite time daily?

  Do you feel under tension much of the time while not writing?

  Do you need to write the next morning?

  Do you lose time from work due to writing?

  Have you ever had a ‘blackout’ (complete loss of memory) as a result of writing?

  Do you write to build up your self-confidence?

  Do you write to escape from worries or troubles?

  Do you have feelings of guilt or inferiority?

  Are you at times possessed with unreasonable fears?

  Do you write because you are shy with other people?

  Have you become noticeably short-tempered, irritable, opinionated?