The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  A month or so after that, I received a picture postcard of the quaint square in downtown Fateville, on the back of which he had written, I am reading Georgie Boy. Have you read anything of mine? Touché, old Ingraham.

  It was a poor season for business at the Halfmoon; the motels on the highway were siphoning off the tourist trade, and there were occasions when I had the Crystal Room to myself at breakfast or lunch. The management was even considering closing down the building for the winter. I would be without a place to live, and, much as I appreciated an offer from Sharon to move in with her in Stick Around, I really preferred the advantages, such as they were, of my town life in Arcaty.

  Then Trevor Kola, the illustrious Hollywood filmmaker, bought the movie rights to Georgie Boy for, as it was reported, “a very high six figures,” making it possible for me to lease the entire north wing of the top floor of the Halfmoon, along with the penthouse that rose two flights above it, and I had a delightful winter, supervising the conversion of that floor and penthouse into one spacious triplex apartment, complete with a vast futuristic kitchen wherein I could use the latest microchip appliances and fixtures to prepare one of my Svanetian chicken dishes, khenagi or tsitsila shkimerulat, and two rooms devoted entirely to a huge walk-in closet wherein I could hang my burgeoning wardrobe, flanking a bathroom with pool-size sunken tub and Jacuzzi (requiring the lowering of the ceiling in the servant’s bedroom directly below it), and a sauna-cum-shower that would easily accommodate a party. What fun I had equipping my music room! The speakers alone, Hartley Concertmasters, cost me over five thousand dollars, and I spent at least that much on a record collection.

  There was also (why am I using the past tense? There is. I see it from where I pen—or pencil—these words) a chess nook, a special room without the windows that distract one with the gorgeous view of the hills surrounding Arcaty, devoted to a special chess table with a Bombay inlaid mother-of-pearl chessboard, upon which I placed an eighteenth-century Dieppe bone-carved chess set, found for me by my dealer-friend Lennie Lewin of the Esoterica Gallery on Spring Street.

  It was in that chess nook that I first played, and played with, young Travis Coe, at a time in his life when he was, if my reader can believe this, almost totally unknown.

  II

  In those days before he ever had a lesson in diction, he pronounced his name “Tray-viss,” as in B. Traven, and I, knowing no better, came to pronounce it that way too. The facts of his origins are all too familiar to readers of movie magazines and Sunday supplements: He was a foundling, of sorts, born in the mountain fastnesses west of Stick Around, in a still-primitive area of the rural Bodarks where, as he put it, “the Coes is so thick their dogs caint tell ’em apart,” his mother a Coe girl of thirteen who was first cousin to her inseminator, a Coe not much older than she—the two of them keeping him only long enough to name him, and then leaving him on the cabin doorstep of a spinster aunt, Fannie Coe, who grudgingly but dutifully raised him from infancy, teaching him the language and the ways of the deepest backwoods, to the age of twelve, when he ran away from home to see the sights of the nearest “city,” actually just the large town I have called “Harriman.” Trying to find his way home after discovering that Harriman had hardly been worth the trouble, he got confused on the highway and took the westerly instead of the southerly direction, which led him in due course to Arcata Springs, where he began living hand-to-mouth, artfully dodging the truant officers and welfare officers who couldn’t get him to stand still long enough to be fingerprinted, let alone placed in a foster home and returned to school.

  His formal education had ended with the fourth grade of the consolidated school to which he’d ridden a yellow school bus for four years from Aunt Fannie’s cabin. Of the American “three r’s,” he was terrible in ’rithmetic, could scarcely ’rite his own name, but was, somehow, excellent in reading. And that was how I met him.

  One chill morning in February I’d walked down the hill to the Arcata Springs Public Library, that small limestone edifice (with a pair of Doric columns and a frieze) donated to the town by the philanthropic cousin of my old spook acquaintance Lawren. I was searching for a book, John Joseph Matthews’s Wah’kon-tah, which was crucial to the research on the Osage Indians that I was contemplating for my as-yet-uncommenced second novel—I knew I could not rest on my laurels much longer, or allow V. Kelian to rest on his, but I had vacillated for some time between trying to write a novel with a Svanetian setting, which might not be very popular in English-speaking countries, or indulging my longtime fascination with the American Indian to write something about my adopted country.

  The librarian informed me that Wah’kon-tah had been checked out. When I protested, she, casting a glance toward the front door, told me that the library had a policy of never revealing the identity of one borrower to another, but that she could tell me that the book would probably be back “very shortly” because the borrower, who had just taken it that morning, was a “very fast” reader. For the price of a postcard, I could leave my name and address, and they would notify me as soon as the book was returned. When I gave my address as the Halfmoon, the librarian said, “Oh, you are just passing through?”

  “No,” I said, “I live at the Halfmoon,” and I resisted the impulse to call her attention to the copy of Georgie Boy that was propped up on the counter under a sign that said, THIS WEEK’S NO. 1 BESTSELLER.

  Disappointed at leaving without Wah’kon-tah, I was astonished to discover, sitting on the front parapet at the top of the library’s steep stairsteps, precariously high above Spring Street, busily absorbed in reading that very book, the boy who was destined to enter my life and heart. In the best tradition of contemporary confessional literature by and about the famous in American culture, I can now reveal that it was Travis Coe to whom I was referring in that recent Paris Review interview (see below: the audacious question was, “Just as Monsieur Humbert was genuinely in love with his Lolita, or Dolores, haven’t you ever found yourself similarly in love with one of your boys?” and I replied, “Only one”).

  He moved his lips as he read, and his lips were a blur. They were full but not broad. His yellow hair was not combed; perhaps it had not been combed recently, nor trimmed in quite some time. The morning sun was warming up the day, and the burgeoning freckles on his cheeks were like little sunbeams, but it was still cold February, and his jacket was inches too short for his freckled arms and couldn’t be zipped up the front, so that his dirty, frayed plaid flannel shirt was exposed. His shoes, or sneakers, were woeful, and there was a gaping hole in the knee of one his trousers…This was a year or so before the national fad for wearing blue jeans full of deliberate holes. But his freckled face, although it was still bowed over the book, was washed and clean and surpassingly lovely, and I had a great urge to get a better look at it, to say something that would make him look up at me.

  “Would you rather believe in Wah’kon-tah than in God?” I asked. To the Osages, the name means something like “Mysterious Great Spirit.”

  For a long moment he did not look up, and when he did, he glanced first at me, quickly, then to the left and to the right of him to see if there was anybody else I might be addressing. At length he said, scratching his head with one hand and laying a finger of the other hand on his chest, “Me?” and when I nodded, he said, “I didn’t hear ye.” I repeated my question, and instead of answering it he asked me, “Air ye a hooky cop?”

  I thought perhaps it was an Osage Indian word. “Hoog’kee-kop? What’s that?”

  “Air ye aimin to git me back to the schoolhouse?”

  I think I understood, then, that he was truant and was mistaking me for a truant officer. “Why, no, I was just planning to read Wah’kon-tah myself, but you beat me to it.” He scratched his head again, then closed the book and held it out to me. I would not take it. “No, no,” I said. “You go ahead and read it, and I’ll just check it out when you return it to the library.” He reopened the book and made a pretense of resuming his
reading of it, but he was clearly uncomfortable and continued scratching his head, waiting for me to go away. I still could scarcely believe that a boy just on the edge of puberty would be reading a thick, heavy volume on the Osage Indians, even if Matthews was something of a popularizer. It was almost as if this kid and myself were the only two persons in the world with any interest in the Osages, and here we were together in the same town where once those Indians had roamed and bathed and made love. I couldn’t let him go out of my sight.

  “Could I buy you something to drink?” I offered. “A Coke or something?”

  He looked up at me again, and his eyes narrowed. He retarded the hand that was scratching his head. “The last lady tried to buy me a Coke,” he declared, “she also tried to get me to go back to the schoolhouse.”

  “I swear to you that I’m not a hooky cop or whatever. I’d just like to buy you something to drink…and perhaps talk about Wah’kon-tah.”

  He studied me. The hand on his head dropped to his lap. “Would you also give me a dollar?”

  I studied him, pondering his question for a moment until I realized that he was—what’s the expression?—he was panhandling. “Sure,” I said, and I opened my purse and took out not a dollar but a ten, and offered it to him. His narrowed eyes opened greatly at the sight of it, and he took it quickly, as if afraid I might have second thoughts or expect him to make change. He stood up, closing the book and holding it at his side.

  We walked together—and he was almost as tall as I—down Spring Street to one of the cafes near the New Orleans Hotel, which took its name from all the cast iron on its front. He ordered not a Coke but a cup of coffee and then asked me, “Could I also get me a doughnut?”

  “Have a dozen doughnuts, if you want,” I said. He ordered and ate four doughnuts and had three cups of coffee, to my one. Afterward, when I lit my cigarette, he looked at me so expectantly that I offered him one too, and he took it eagerly. We were the only people in the room except for the waitress, and if she frowned upon my giving a cigarette to a kid, that was her problem, as they say. “What’s your name?” I asked him. “Tray-vis,” he said. “What’s your’n?”

  “You may call me Kat,” I told him.

  He resumed scratching his head. “Like in kitty-kat?” he asked.

  I nodded and asked, “Do you live in Arcaty?” He nodded. “Where?” I asked. “Near here?”

  He gave his head an encompassing toss in a noncommittal direction. “Oh, jist hither and yon,” he said. “Whereabouts do you live at?”

  “Do you know the Halfmoon?” I asked.

  “Why, shore,” he said, and tossed his head in a definite direction. “Up yonder on the mountain. I figgered ye was a tourister. You don’t sound like ye come from this part of the country.”

  “I live at the Halfmoon,” I told him. “Permanently.”

  He gave me a quizzical look and once more scratched his head. “Is that a fack, now? Do you own the place?”

  “No, I just have a bunch of rooms there, on the top floor and penthouse.”

  “A whole bunch, huh? What do ye do for yore money? Or didje just inherit it or some’pn?”

  I laughed. “How do you know I’ve got so much?”

  “You jist gave me a big chunk of it, didn’t ye?” he grinned. “And you jist have the look of a lady who’s loaded.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m a writer, and I wrote a book that made a lot of money.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me,” he said, with genuine awe, and his fingers burrowed into his scalp once more. “What’s the name of it? Could be I’ve done read it myself.”

  I debated whether to tell him. I was warming to him by the minute and fantasizing the “project” I could make of him, and I knew that eventually, if not this very night, he would find out the title of my book. So why not tell him now? Because I was still committed to preserving the secrecy that surrounded my nom de plume. But curiosity got the better of me: could it possibly be that this uncouth but not unlettered child of the backwoods had actually at least heard of my novel? “Do you read fiction?” I asked him.

  “You mean whopper tales?” he asked. “Yeah, that’s my favorite kind of book. Made-up stories. Novels.”

  “Did you ever hear of a novel called Georgie Boy?”

  “Sure, I heared of it,” he declared. “Matter a fact, I even seen it a-settin there on the counter in the lie-berry. Matter a fact, I even tried to check it out, but the lie-berrian said it wasn’t fitten for children, though she orter know I aint exactly no child no more.”

  “Well, I wrote it,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Unt-uh. That book was wrote by a feller name of V. Kelian. I don’t know what the V is fer. Maybe Virgil.”

  “Vladimirovna,” I pronounced. “It’s my middle name.”

  “What-all kind of middle name is that?” he wanted to know.

  “Russian,” I said. “It means ‘daughter of Walter.’”

  “You’re a Com’nist?” he wondered.

  I shook my head. “I’m neither Communist nor Russian. I came from a beautiful country called Georgia, which the Russians conquered.”

  “I never been east of the Mississippi,” he said, “but I heared tell of Georgia.”

  “Not that Georgia. Mine was a European country in the Caucasus Mountains.”

  “That’s the one I mean,” he said. “Where that Com’nist boss name of Joe Stalin come from. I read all about it.”

  “You read an awful lot,” I observed.

  “Ain’t much else to do,” he declared sadly. “Won’t nobody give me a job of work, on account of I’m too young.”

  “What work could you do?” I asked.

  “Jist anything, near ’bouts,” he said proudly. “I don’t reckon I’m old enough to write books, like you do, not yet anyhow. But I could do near ’bouts anything else.”

  “All right,” I said, smiling, “I could offer you a job as my houseboy.”

  His eyes made that squint again, in disbelief, and I began to wonder if he kept scratching his head out of genuine befuddlement or if perhaps he had some skin itch. “Air ye a-funnin me?” he asked. I thought about his verb and decided it meant something like “making fun of.” I shook my head, sincerely. “What-all does a houseboy have to do?” he asked.

  I counted off some random things on my ten fingers. “Could you feed my cat? Bring up the newspaper and the mail? Dust the furniture? Run the bath? Help in the kitchen?” To each of these he nodded. “Could you polish my shoes? Carry packages home from shopping trips? Return books to the library for me? Check a few out?” He nodded. I had just one finger left. “Could you rub my back?”

  “Why, shore,” he said. Then he grinned and narrowed those eyes once more. “You want me to sleep with you, too? Or have you already got somebody that does that?”

  My turn to narrow my eyes and grin. “Are you experienced in such work?”

  “I never been nobody’s houseboy before,” he declared. “But if you got the money, I could do anything you pay me for.”

  “Would you like to see my rooms?”

  “Why not?” he said. “Let’s go.” He stood up.

  “What about your parents? Do you want to let them know where you’re going?”

  “Parents?” He snorted a kind of sardonic laugh. “My momma wasn’t much older than me when I was born, and I aint seen her since. I saw my daddy, once, from a distance, when somebody pointed him out to me, and one look was all I could stand.”

  “So who do you live with?” I asked.

  “You,” he said.

  III

  Vicariously I was able to inspect my new twelve-room triplex apartment, through the awestruck eyes of Travis Coe. He revealed to me that the classmates he’d once had in the fourth grade had called him Coelumbus (shortened eventually to just Lum), and it seemed to me that he was looking at my rooms with the wonder and astonishment and, yes, fulfillment with which Christopher Columbus must have first laid eyes on the New Worl
d. Because when he’d left home, left his Aunt Fannie’s cabin and the nineteenth-century world of the Bodarks behind him, and set out on the journey that would take him eventually to stardom, he was setting out, as Columbus had, to discover a passage to a fabled world of riches that he had only read and heard about and that he scarcely believed he would ever find.

  He was so absorbed with my rooms he forgot to scratch his head. He would point at a door and ask, “Who lives in there?” and when I would explain that that was simply one more of my rooms, he would shake his head, and then he would point at a stairway and ask, “Who lives up there?” and when I took him up to the second level and he found another stairway leading to the top level and he asked again, “So who lives up there?” and I said my own bedroom was up there he asked, “You mean you got all three of these floors all to yourself!”

  “And you,” I said.

  Even though my library (on the first level) was not yet stocked with books, it seemed to be the room that most fascinated my new companion (“I never even heared tell of nobody havin a whole lieberry room all to theirself”), and I was charmed when he decided to contribute to the stocking of the room by placing his copy of Wah’kon-tah in the middle of an empty stretch of walnut shelf and declaring, “There! Now we both can use it.”

  It was in the library that Travis met Morris. Whether Travis had an indifference to the concept of pets in general (not realizing that he himself was about to become one), or whether Morris simply had an instinctive dislike for young boys, the kid and the cat never would hit it off together.

  After the library, he was most captivated by my personal rooms in the penthouse’s top level. He simply could not believe the sunken bathtub. “Why, there’s swimmin’ holes up on Thomas Creek aint near as big as that!” he exclaimed. And although I was tempted to offer on the spot to let him take a skinny-dip in it and try out its gushing Jacuzzi whirlpools, I was constrained to point out that his own room below, in the servant’s quarters, had its own bathtub-with-shower, amply sizable for a thorough dip if not a swim. He found the fact of having his own quarters (on the main level with a splendid northward view) incredible. When he stood on the threshold of his bedroom, unable to move, unable to say anything, unable even to scratch his head, I suggested I might leave him alone while I looked at the morning’s mail, and he was able, at last, to sigh and say, “I do believe I done died and come up here to Heaven.” And he grinned at me and asked, “And wasn’t I too young to die, anyhow?”