The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Is writing making your home life unhappy?

  Does your writing make you careless of your family’s welfare?

  Is writing jeopardizing your job or business?

  Have you ever gotten into financial difficulties because of writing?

  Is writing affecting your reputation?

  Do you lie about your writing?

  Have you become extremely self-centered and selfish?

  Do you hold bitter resentment toward certain people—wife, husband, employer, associate, or friend—and do you continue to harbor these resentments?

  Have you lost your self-respect?

  The ladies of bow, and the gentlemen too, loved his speech, and Cathlin was proud to watch their faces during it, almost as if it really were her husband who was giving it to them. Afterward, before adjourning for the sessions on how to sell to religious periodicals and how to cope with rejection slips, the members were as eager to shake Cathlin’s hand as they were to shake his, almost as if they knew she’d put him up to it.

  The speech had a lasting effect on the convention: Everybody made a beeline for the Halfmoon Pub, where they lost their tensions, built up their self-confidence, escaped their worries and troubles, and shed their guilts, inferiorities, and fears. Among these people, you were startled to notice, was bold Bolshakov. If not Bolshakov, his twin. No trench coat, and no widow’s peak in his hairline, but wouldn’t he disguise himself as a…perhaps a Bodarks dentist? He appeared, however, to be with some women who were clearly bow ladies. Could even Bolshakov have ingratiated himself so quickly with the natives?

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” I. said. He truly was exhausted. Driving for hours nonstop had not drained him as much as preparing and giving that speech. “I’d better go ride and tie.”

  Don’t leave me just yet, you wrote. Do you see that man over there, sitting with those women? If I am not mistaken, that is Bolshakov, the North Ireland psychiatrist, the prick.

  I. squinted his eyes and studied the man, and you waited in dread to hear him say, “Yes, that’s the guy who gave me his card when I was leaving the mansion.” But he didn’t. All he said was, “Are you sure?”

  Does he look familiar to you? you wrote.

  “From your description of him in Geordie Lad, yes. Looks just like the creep. But come on, Cathlin, what would he be doing here in Arcata Springs?”

  You wrote, You have not yet read the chapters of Geordie Lad that will make it very clear why he would be following me, trying to kill me.

  “Well, gosh, Cathlin, do you want me to go ask him if he’s a shrink? He looks more like a dentist to me. Or an insurance salesman from Cabool, Missouri.”

  You sighed. The man had not thrown a single glance in your direction. Finally you wrote, I am being silly. Forgive me. You go on and get some sleep.

  I. got up. For appearance’s sake, he gave you a kiss. Or maybe it wasn’t only for appearance’s sake. Shortly after he left, the man you’d mistaken for Bolshakov also got up, with one of the ladies, and left, without having thrown you a glance. You removed your hat and your sunglasses and joined the fun. Morris the cat, as if waiting for I.’s departure, leapt into your lap and began purring.

  Several people wanted to talk with you, to ask you what it was like living with the “celebrated” author. One of the ladies slapped you on the wrist and said, “You’re not really married to him, now, are you? You’re not wearing any ring.” And you had to confess that you were living in sin.

  “Are you a Russkie or something?” another lady asked. “Where’d you get that accent?”

  You passed up an opportunity to attend sessions or workshops on Environmental Writing and Selling Your First Novel (although you might have learned some helpful hints in the latter meeting). After tiring of the ladies in the pub, you visited the game room, where people were playing cards, checkers, and chess. Morris followed you down there. You got yourself into a couple of chess games and demolished your opponents so handily that one of them asked, “Are you a Russkie or something? Where’d you learn to play like that?”

  Later, declining an invitation to accompany a group taking the bus to the Passion Play, you and Morris rode the elevator up to the observation deck on the fourth floor, and you got your first complete view of the lovely surrounding countryside, although a distant hill was grotesquely marred by that colossal cement hunk called Christ of the Bodarks: a quasi-primitive statue of a stiff, legless man with his arms outspread. I. had not told Cathlin that this town, for all its charm, was smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, and you, dear Kat, an unbeliever not because of Soviet atheism so much as Svanetian paganism, were going to find yourself sometimes exhilarated by the religious poshlost of these people.

  Morris and I stood beside you, he visible, I not, and I was almost tempted to take inhabitance of his body, but it was much too early in our relationship for that. You did not know it then, but you were standing on the observation deck (near one of those huge, robot-like coin-operated binoculars-on-swivels, which for a dime would have given you a close look at Christ’s stern face) almost within touching distance of the slate-roofed slopes of the penthouse peak wherein, just a few years later, you would have your own lavishly appointed triplex suite of rooms with its futuristic kitchen where you could whip up one of those chicken dishes that grace the pages of Kat’s Quick Chick Cookbook, and, if not your “dozen absolutely beautiful cats of every color and breed,” at least this selfsame Morris, who would attach himself to you and in whose physical entity I would attempt to manifest what remained of my spiritual entity. I was so glad to have you there, at last, that I was desperate to give you a foreglimpse of your future, to point out to you the penthouse’s highest picture window, where your bedroom would be, to show you even the window ledge on which Morris (or my incarnation), by then permanently attached to you, would bask away his old age, approaching nineteen. But I could not yet speak to you of these things so that you could hear me. Nor could I contrive to have Morris communicate with you in any manner.

  I did the next best thing. I “arranged,” if we must persist in using that verb, for you to be approached by my kinsman, or rather kinswoman, kinschild really, a charming girl just a couple of years older than yourself, whom you’d already briefly met, and to whom you assumed, wrongly, that Morris belonged. Sharon was a golden blonde with blue eyes that seemed to have depths of experience (in such contrast to your innocent eyes), and her eyes came to gaze into yours almost with recognition, as if she knew the history of your soul.

  Beneath the deck railing’s gas lamps, she leaned her arms on the iron balustrade in a meditative pose identical to your own, right beside you. “Is you Cathlin or Kati?” she asked.

  You stared into those deep blue eyes. What was this? You didn’t mind being mistaken for a Russkie but you didn’t want to be somebody you were trying not to be. “I beg your pardon?” you said frostily.

  “I said, ‘Is your castle in Arcaty?’” She tried to correct her lisp.

  “‘Arcaty’?”

  “Here,” she said. “Arcata Springs. We just call it Arcaty.”

  “‘Castle’?”

  “Don’t you know, they call this place the Halfmoon Castle? ‘A Castle in the Air High Atop the Bodarks.’ I was just wondering if you’d found your long-sought castle, that you dreamt of all those nights in Lisedi.”

  “In where, pardon me?”

  “‘Endlessly,’ I said. Do you have trouble with English, or is it me?”

  “Not as much as I used to,” you said.

  She offered you a cigarette, a filtered Tarreyton, and took one herself, and lit yours for you. Then she exhaled her smoke with the words “Where the devil did you find I.?” So you told her that you’d been a student of his, the past term, in the municipal university of that burgh, far away. “That’s just like him, seducing a student,” she said.

  “Do you know him?” you asked. He hadn’t seemed to recognize her during registration.

  “I know his stuff,�
� she said, and you understood that all-purpose “stuff” to mean his writing. “And I know his country. My name’s Sharon.” She told you her last name too, but you didn’t hear it or understand it. It started with I but wasn’t I.’s. She wasn’t related.

  Morris had continued to rub himself up against your leg and was completely ignoring her. Of course, many cats are often more friendly to strangers than to their own masters. “You have a nice cat,” you remarked. “He’s beautiful.”

  “Morris isn’t mine,” she told you. “He doesn’t belong to anybody. He just sort of comes with the hotel, and some people call him the General Manager. He just wandered in, as a kitten, seven years ago, and took over the place.”

  “Have you worked here long?”

  “Here in Arcaty, or here in the hotel? The hotel job I just started. I’ve been in Arcaty for a few years. But I grew up in Sticker Hound.” She waited for your response, and when there was none, she asked, “Haven’t you read any of his stuff?”

  “I just started reading some last night,” you declared.

  “Hasn’t he told you about Sticker Hound?” she asked. You shook your head. She explained. “That’s the name—one of the names—of the town that he writes all his stuff about, ’way off in the deepest, lostest part of the Bodarks. Do me a favor, will you? Do us all a favor. Ask him when was the last time he came back to visit Sticker Hound. And then ask him when he ever plans to come again.”

  Chapter twenty-nine

  “ ‘Sticker hound’?” he said, reading your card. “Where did you meet this girl?” You wrote another card while he was getting dressed and combing his hair. It was late at night, you were ready for bed, for your share of ride-and-tie, but he was just getting up. And he was still half-asleep. “Sticker Hound?” he said again. Then slowly recognition spread over his face. “Oh,” he said. “I think you might have misunderstood her. Sharon, huh? Yes. If I’m not mistaken, she’s Vernon Ingledew’s older sister, one of Hank’s four daughters. Or was it five? Anyway, what she must have been saying to you was the name of that village—only it isn’t an inhabited village anymore—it was named Stick Around.”

  She wanted me to ask you when was the last time you were there?

  “Why didn’t she ask me herself, when we were checking in?” he said.

  She also wanted me to ask when you plan to visit Stick Around again.

  “Maybe she’s on night duty at the desk,” he said. “I’ll go see. Have a nice beddie-bye and ride-and-tie.”

  You slept a full eight hours, more than your share of the ride-and-tie, but he was not waiting for the bed when you woke. You showered and dressed and went downstairs. The desk clerk was not Sharon but Cathy. You asked her if she’d seen him. She said he was in the Crystal Room, and there you found him having coffee with the man you’d mistaken the day before for Bolshakov. Both men got to their feet as you entered, and I. motioned for you to join them. You hadn’t had breakfast yet, although it was lunchtime, and your head wasn’t clear enough to discount the possibility that this could be Bolshakov.

  “Speak of the devil,” I. said to you. “We were just talking about you.” He gave you a wry grin, and there was something in his eyes that made you suspect, for a terrible moment, that Bolshakov had been telling I. all of the untruths he had fabricated about you. I. spoke to him: “Dr. MacLean, this is Cathlin McWalter herself.” Then he said to Cathlin, “Sweetheart, you were right. He’s not an insurance salesman from Cabool or a dentist. He’s a sure-enough psychiatrist!” Your knees buckled, and I. grabbed your elbow. “Not from North Ireland, though! He practices in West Plains, Missouri.”

  “Hiya,” said Dr. MacLean. “Pleased to meet you.” He didn’t sound anything at all like Bolshakov. I. was motioning for the three of you to sit, but the doctor said, “I’ve really got to run. The wife is over there waiting for lunch. Nice to’ve met you, Cath. You take care of this guy, hear?” The doctor departed.

  “Nice guy,” I. remarked after you’d ordered some brunch. “He’s not a bow member himself; just keeping his wife company. She writes children’s books.”

  What were you telling him about me? you wrote.

  “Oh, I was just mentioning that you’d been getting treatment for your eye trouble, and I wondered if he knew anything about photodysphoria. According to him, it is pretty psychosomatic. He told me a little story about Dr. Alvah Jackson, the man who first discovered the halfmoon spring, after the Osage Indians had left it, back around 1832. Jackson’s twelve-year-old son, Timothy, had a sort of photodysphoria that almost blinded him, but after treating the boy with water from the halfmoon spring, his son was apparently cured. For years after that, the doctor bottled and sold the water as ‘Dr. Jackson’s Eye-Water.’ Too bad they don’t make it or sell it anymore. Dr. MacLean says that all the springs of Arcata Springs are now polluted, and you can’t even use them to bathe in.”

  Did you find Sharon? your next note asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. He said nothing else. It was almost as if you’d introduced an unpleasant subject or something he wanted to avoid. His attention shifted to the Crystal Room’s head table, which was filling up with the officers of bow and the day’s guest speakers. Following lunch, a very pretty girl with dark hair, introduced by Mrs. Mazzarelli as “our most distinguished writer, and a resident of right here in Arcaty, the one and only Halfmoon Berryfairy,” gave a speech on the subject How I Use the Bodarks, which was so encouraging that it made you too, Cathlin McWalter, believe that you could write about the Bodarks. But she was followed by a lengthy succession of ladies who read their poems, mostly saccharine odes and funereal dithyrambs.

  You slipped a card to your companion: Maybe the club should be called not BOW but SCRAPE: Sisters Composing Romances And Pretty Elegies.

  He laughed. Several members cast him looks, because the poem currently being declaimed was somber, even pathetic. But then it was all over, except for the afternoon workshops, which I. was not required to attend.

  He rose from his table. You rose with him. He looked at you for a while, smiling…or perhaps smirking. Then he asked, “Are you ready to go to Stick Around? Or Sticker Hound, as the case might be?”

  You nodded.

  “Wear your jeans,” he said.

  As you were leaving the hotel, standing out front waiting while I. returned to get the suitcases, there was Morris, to say good-bye to you.

  “You be a good kitty, Morris,” you said to him. “And I’ll be back, don’t you worry.”

  I. was at your elbow, with the suitcases. “How come you can talk to the damned cat,” he asked, “but not to me?”

  Chapter thirty

  But it was I. who did not talk, all the way to Stick Around. He seemed to be lost in thought, perhaps dwelling upon the world of his fiction that he had created out of Stick Around, that he had not successfully re-created for going on five years now. Perhaps he was a little scared, or apprehensive, not wanting to find that the actual Stick Around was nothing at all like his idealized conception of it. He had no illusions that it would be anything other than a ghost town. He knew that no one was living in the village itself, that the few remaining citizens were all on the outskirts of the village, and that the abandoned buildings of the village would be either in ruins or in bad repair. But he didn’t really know what to expect, seeing again with his own eyes what he had only seen in his imagination for years.

  If that was what he was thinking, you thought, then you could easily identify and sympathize with him, because you knew that if you were ever permitted to see Svanetia again, it might be nothing at all like the gorgeous place you’d seen only inside your head (and heart) all these years. Indeed, the closer you got to this Stick Around, leaving behind the big highway and climbing up into the remote fastnesses of “Isaac County,” passing across the Buffalo River (a real name; he didn’t need booze to cross) through the mountain-locked village that was the small county seat, “Jessup,” and then taking an unpaved back road that meandered toward the dying
-but-still-post-officed village of “Acropolis,” you began to be constantly reminded of Svanetia. There were no enormous glacier-clad peaks like Ushba or Layla as backdrops, but the small mountains uprose ever more precipitously and were covered with the great oaks, beeches, and junipers that reminded you of Svanetia’s woodlands, and the flowery meadows…Ah, the meadows were thick with ripening hay that took you right back to the fields of Lisedi. You rolled down your window to inhale the air.

  Here you were, Kat, almost home. I was beside myself with—I nearly said impatience, but if there’s one commodity we ghosts have in endless abundance, it’s patience. No, I was beside myself with triumph: This was the culmination of all the tricks, large and small, that I had pulled in order to get you here. My biggest trick was your driver, and unfortunately his services were about to end. I still had not made up my mind just how to get rid of him. Soon I would want him to “get lost,” and I decided I would practice by having him literally get lost.

  As the steep dirt road climbed south of Acropolis, I gave I. a fork in it, and he took the wrong one. The prong he took became increasingly rough, weedy, and circuitous. He had, for the first time, to stop and shift the Blazer’s gears from two-wheel to four-wheel, to use the gear called “low lock.” He also had to take the tomato plants off the dashboard, to keep them from falling off. He arranged them on the floor behind the seat. After a steep mile on this route, the trail petered out.

  “I thought I knew this country, but I guess I don’t.” It was the first time he had spoken since leaving Arcaty, seventy miles before.

  You wanted to write on a card, Are we lost?, but the Blazer was bouncing so much you couldn’t hold your ballpoint steady. Once, the car hit a bump so severe that your wig shifted its position, and you had to right it as inconspicuously as possible.

  One of I.’s several flaws was that he was never able to admit defeat, nor to backtrack from a stubborn destination. He could not turn around. If he had gone back to the place where he’d taken the wrong turn, all would have been well. But he insisted on going back only as far as the next westward divergent trail, which was scarcely better than the one you were on. This trail, which obviously hadn’t been used for years, meandered up hill and down vale all over the countryside, like the sledge paths of your Mount Layla. The only advantage of it, because it clearly wasn’t getting you anywhere, was that it afforded you a view, in passing, of some interesting mushrooms. You couldn’t ask I. to stop so you could get a closer look at them.