Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  "Oh, my God, what have they done to you ...?"

  They had pried off the four hubcaps and left the cluster of tire nuts exposed, the tires naked. They had stolen the side-view mirror from the driver's side. Someone had tried to unscrew the whole mounting for the piece, but the screwdriver had been either too big or too small for the screws; the work had left the screwheads maimed and useless; the thief had left the mounting in place and simply wrenched the mirror until it had snapped free at the ball joint. The ruptured joint looked to the driver like the raw and ragged socket of a man whose arm had been torn off.

  They had tried to violate the Volvo's interior with repeated digging and levering at the side-vent windows, but the Volvo had held. They had ripped the rubber water seal from under the window on the driver's side but they had not been able to spring the lock. They had tried to break one window: a small run of cracks, like a spider web blown against the glass, traced a pattern on the passenger's side. They had tried to get into the gas tank -- to siphon gas, to add sand, to insert a match -- but although they had mashed the tank-top lock, they had been unable to penetrate there. They had cranked under the hood, but the hood had held. Several teeth of the grille were pushed in, and one tooth had been bent outward until it had broken; it stuck out in front of the Volvo as if the car were carrying some crude bayonet.

  As a last gesture, the frustrated car rapists, the wretched band of Joliet punks -- or were they other motel guests, irritated by the foreign license plate, in disagreement with Vermont?... whoever, as a finally cruel and needless way of leaving, someone had taken an instrument (the corkscrew blade on a camper's knife?) and gouged a four-letter word into the lush red of the Volvo's hood. Indeed, deeper than the paint, it was a groove into the steel itself, SUCK was the word.

  "Suck?" the driver cried out. He covered the wound with his hand. "Bastards!" he screamed. "Swine, filthy creeps!" he roared. The wing of the motel he was facing must have slept 200 travelers; there was a ground-floor barracks and a second-floor barracks with a balcony. "Cowards, car-humpers!" the driver bellowed. "Who did it?" he demanded. Several doors along the balcony opened. Frightened, wakened men stood peering down at him -- women chattering behind them: "Who is it? What's happening?"

  "Suck!" the driver yelled. "Suck!"

  "It's six o'clock in the morning, fella," someone mumbled from a ground-floor door, then quickly stepped back inside and closed the door behind him.

  Genuine madness is not to be tampered with. If the driver had been drunk or simply boorish, those disturbed sleepers would have mangled him. But he was insane -- they could all see -- and there's nothing to do about that.

  "What's going on, Fred?"

  "Some guy losing his mind. Go back to sleep."

  Oh, Joliet, Illinois, you are worse than the purgatory I first took you for!

  The driver touched the oily ball joint where his trim mirror used to be. "You're going to be all right," he said. "Good as new, don't worry."

  SUCK! That foul word dug into his hood was so public it seemed to expose him -- the rude, leering ugliness of it shamed him. He saw Derek Marshall approaching his wife. "Hi! Need a ride home?"

  "All right," the driver told the Volvo, thickly. "All right, that's enough. I'll take you home."

  The gentleness of the driver was now impressive. It is incredible to find occasional discretion in human beings; some of the people on the second-floor balcony were actually closing their doors. The driver's hand hid the SUCK carved into his hood; he was crying. He had come all this way to leave his wife and all he had done was hurt his car.

  But no one can make it as far as Joliet, Illinois, and not be tempted to see the Mississippi River -- the main street of the Midwest, and the necessary crossing to the real Outwest. No, you haven't really been West until you've crossed the Mississippi; you can never say you've "been out there" until you've touched down in Iowa. If you have seen Iowa, you have seen the beginning.

  The driver knew this; he begged the Volvo to indulge him just a look. "We'll turn right around. I promise. I just want to see it," he said. "The Mississippi. And Iowa ..." where he might have gone.

  Sullenly, the Volvo carried him through Illinois: Starved Rock State Park, Wenona, Mendota, Henry, Kewanee, Geneseo, Rock Island and Moline. There was a rest plaza before the great bridge which spanned the Mississippi -- the bridge which carried you into Iowa. Ah, Davenport, West Liberty and Lake MacBride!

  But he would not see them, not now. He stood by the Volvo and watched the tea-colored, wide water of the Mississippi roll by; for someone who's seen the Atlantic Ocean, rivers aren't so special. But beyond the river ... there was Iowa ... and it looked really different from Illinois! He saw corn tassels going on forever, like an army of fresh young cheerleaders waving their feathers. Out there, too, big hogs grew; he knew that; he imagined them -- he had to -- because there wasn't actually a herd of pigs browsing on the other side of the Mississippi.

  "Someday..." the driver said, half in fear that this was true and half wishfully. The compromised Volvo sat there waiting for him; its bashed grille and the word SUCK pointed east.

  "Okay, okay," the driver said.

  Be thankful for what dim orientation you have. Listen: the driver could have gotten lost; in the muddle of his east-west decision, he could have headed north -- in the southbound lane!

  Missouri State Police Report # 459: "A red Volvo sedan, heading north in the southbound lane, appeared to have a poor sense of direction. The cement mixer who hit him was absolutely clear about its right-of-way in the passing lane. When the debris was sorted, a phone number was found. When his wife was called, another man answered. He said his name was Derek Marshall and that he'd give the news to the guy's wife as soon as she woke up."

  We should know: it can always be worse.

  Certainly, real trouble lay ahead. There was the complexity of the Sandusky exits to navigate, and the driver felt less than fresh. Ohio lay out there, waiting for him like years of a marriage he hadn't yet lived. But there was also the Volvo to think of; the Volvo seemed destined to never get over Vermont. And there would be delicate dealings to come with Derek Marshall; that seemed sure. We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

  He had seen the Mississippi and the lush, fertile flatland beyond. Who could say what sweet, dark mysteries Iowa might have revealed to him? Not to mention Nebraska. Or Wyoming! The driver's throat ached. And he had overlooked that he once more had to pass through Joliet, Illinois.

  Going home is hard. But what's to be said for staying away?

  In La Salle, Illinois, the driver had the Volvo checked over. The windshield wipers had to be replaced (he hadn't even noticed they were stolen), a temporary side-view mirror was mounted and some soothing antirust primer was painted into the gash which said SUCK. The Volvo's oil was full up, but the driver discovered that the vandals had tried to jam little pebbles in all the air valves -- hoping to deflate his tires as he drove. The gas-station attendant had to break the tank-top lock the rest of the way in order to give the Volvo some gas. Mileage 23.1 per gallon -- the Volvo was a tiger in the face of hardship.

  "I'll get you a paint job at home," the driver told the Volvo, grimly. "Just try to hang on."

  There was, after all, Indiana to look forward to. Some things, we're told, are even better "the second time around." His marriage struck him as an unfinished war between Ohio and Indiana -- a fragile balance of firepower, punctuated with occasional treaties. To bring Iowa into the picture would cause a drastic tilt. Or: some rivers are better not crossed? The national average is less than 25,000 miles on one set of tires, and many fall off much sooner. He had 46,251 miles on the Volvo -- his first set of tires.

  No, despite that enchanting, retreating portrait of the Iowa future, you cannot drive with your eyes on the rear-view mirror. And, yes, at this phase of the journey, the driver was determined to head back East. But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is bor
ing. And you pay for grace.

  Almost in Iowa (1973)

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  I loathe the subject of divorce -- my own especially. When people start telling me their divorce stories, I feel stricken with the same combination of pending illness and apprehension that I feel when encountering "turbulence" on an airplane and the pilot asks us all to put on our seatbelts; I want to get off the plane. I do not tell stories about my divorce, nor have I ever written about it -- nor would I. I feel most strongly that writers who have children, and who have been divorced, should not write about their divorces; to do so is a form of child abuse. I even detest watching movies about people who are divorcing; personally, I think that pornography is less offensive -- it's less personal.

  With this in mind, I haven't much to say about "Almost in Iowa," except that it is a story about divorce-- or at least about a pending divorce -- and therefore I hate it. My first choice was not to include it in this collection, but my publishers persuaded me that other people might like it. I yielded to their opinion, because I would never claim to have the slightest degree of objectivity on this subject. "Almost in Iowa" isn't about my divorce, anyway. I was first married in 1964 and divorced in 1982 -- almost 10 years after I wrote this story. (I met my second wife in 1986 and was remarried in 1987.)

  "Almost in Iowa" was first published in Esquire (November 1973). I suppose I once thought that the story was awfully clever; rereading it now, I am struck by a quality of loathsome cuteness -- not a very remarkable observation, because I have long associated Esquire with writing that is loathsomely cute or smart-ass (or both).

  The story also reminds me of a student's story I once made fun of -- that previously mentioned story about eating from the point of view of a fork. In this case, the car is a better character -- meaning a more developed character -- than the driver. A man who would leave his wife at a party in Vermont, and not call her to tell her where he was until he got to Illinois, is a shallow sort of lout; in "Almost in Iowa," my sympathies reside entirely with the Volvo.

  HOMAGE

  THE KING OF THE NOVEL

  1. Why I Like Charles Dickens; Why Some People Don't

  Great Expectations is the first novel I read that made me wish I had written it; it is the novel that made me want to be a novelist -- specifically, to move a reader as I was moved then. I believe that Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language; at the same time, it never deviates from its intention to move you to laughter and to tears. But there is more than one thing about this novel that some people don't like -- and there is one thing in particular that they don't like about Dickens in general. Here is the thing highest on the list that they don't like: the intention of a novel by Charles Dickens is to move you emotionally, not intellectually; and it is by emotional means that Dickens intends to influence you socially. Dickens is not an analyst; his writing is not analytical -- although it can be didactic. His genius is descriptive; he can describe a thing so vividly -- and so influentially -- that no one can look at that thing in the same way again.

  You cannot encounter the prisons in Dickens's novels and ever again feel completely self-righteous about prisoners being where they belong; you cannot encounter a lawyer of Mr. Jaggers's terrifying ambiguity and ever again put yourself willingly in a lawyer's hands--Jaggers, although only a minor character in Great Expectations, may be our literature's greatest indictment of living by abstract rules. Dickens has even provided me with a lasting vision of a critic; he is Bentley Drummle, "the next heir but one to a baronetcy," and "so sulky a fellow that he even took up a book as if its writer had done him an injury."

  Although his personal experiences with social evil had been brief and youthful, they never ceased to haunt Dickens -- the humiliation of his father in the debtors' prison at Marshalsea; his own three months' labor (at age 11) in a blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, pasting labels on bottles; and because of his father's money problems, the family's several moves -- especially, when Charles was nine, to meaner accommodations in Chatham, and shortly thereafter, away from the Chatham of his childhood. "I thought that life was sloppier than I expected to find it," he wrote. Yet his imagination was never impoverished; in David Copperfield, he wrote (remembering his life as a reader in his attic room at St. Mary's Place, Chatham), "I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature)." He had been Don Quixote, too -- and all the even less likely heroes of the Victorian fairy tales of his time. As Harry Stone has written: "It is hard to know which came first, Dickens's interest in fairy tales or his conditioning by them." Dickens's fine biographer, Edgar Johnson, describes the sources of the author's imagination similarly, claiming further that Dickens had devised "a new literary form, a kind of fairy tale that is at once humorous, heroic, and realistic."

  The Chatham of Dickens's childhood is sharply recalled in Great Expectations -- in the churchyard graves he could see from his attic room, and in the black convict hulk, "like a wicked Noah's ark," which he saw looming offshore on the boating trips he took up the Medway to the Thames; that is where he saw his first convicts, too. So much of the landscape of Great Expectations is Chatham's landscape: the foggy marshes, the river mist; and his real-life model for the Blue Boar was there in nearby Rochester, and Uncle Pumblechook's house was there -- and Satis House, where Miss Havisham lives. On walks with his father, from Gravesend to Rochester, they would pause in Kent and view the mansion atop a two-mile slope called Gad's Hill; his father told him that if he was very hardworking, he might get to live there one day. Given his family's Chatham circumstances, this must have been hard for young Charles to believe, but he did get to live there one day -- for the last 12 years of his life; he wrote Great Expectations there, and he died there. For readers who find Dickens's imagination farfetched, they should look at his life.

  His was an imagination fueled by personal unhappiness and the zeal of a social reformer. Like many successful people, he made good use of disappointments -- responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them. At 15, he left school; at 17, he was a law reporter; at 19, a parliamentary reporter. At 20, he was a witness to the unemployment, starvation, and cholera of the winter of 1831-32, and his first literary success, at 21, was made gloomy by the heartbreak of his first love. She was a banker's daughter, whose family shunned Dickens; years later, she returned to him in her embarrassing maturity -- she was plump and tiresome, then, and he shunned her. But when he first met her, her rejection made him work all the harder; Dickens never moped.

  He had what Edgar Johnson calls a "boundless confidence in the power of the will." One of his earliest reviews (by his future father-in-law; imagine that!) was absolutely right about the talents of the young author. "A close observer of character and manners," George Hogarth wrote about the 24-year-old Dickens, "with a strong sense of the ridiculous and a graphic faculty of placing in the most whimsical and amusing lights the follies and absurdities of human nature. He has the power, too, of producing tears as well as laughter. His pictures of the vices and wretchedness which abound in this vast city are sufficient to strike the heart of the most careless and insensitive reader."

  Indeed, Dickens's young star so outshone that of Robert Seymour, the Pickwick Papers's first illustrator, that Seymour blew his brains out with a muzzle-loader. By 1837 Dickens was already famous for Mr. Pickwick. He was only 25. He even took command of his hapless parents; having twice bailed his father out of debtors' prison, Dickens moved his parents forcibly from London to Exeter -- an attempt to prevent his feckless father from running up an unpayable tab in his famous son's name.

  Dickens's watchdog behavior regarding the social ills of his time could best be described, politically, as reform liberalism; yet he was not to be pinned down. His stance for the abolition of the death penalty, for example, was based on his belief that the death penalty did nothing to deter crime -- not out of sentiment for any malefactor. For
Dickens, "the major evil" -- as Johnson describes it -- "was the psychological effect of the horrible drama of hanging before a brutalized and gloating mob." He was tireless in his support of reform homes for women, and of countless services and charities for the poor; by the time of Dombey and Son (1846-48), he had a firmly developed ethic regarding the human greed evident in the world of competitive business-- and a strongly expressed moral outrage at the indifference shown to the welfare of the downtrodden; he had begun to see, past Oliver Twist (1837-39), that vice and cruelty were not randomly bestowed on individuals at birth but were the creations of society. And well before the time of Bleak House (1852-53), he had tenacious hold of the knowledge that "it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law."

  He was 30 when he had his first fling at editing "a great liberal newspaper," dedicated to the "Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education, Civil and Religious Liberty, and Equal Legislation"; he lasted only 17 days. With Household Words, he did much better; the magazine was as successful as many of his novels, full of what he called "social wonders, good and evil." Among the first to admire the writing of George Eliot, he was also among the first to guess her sex. "I have observed what seem to me to be such womanly touches," he wrote to her, "that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began." Of course, she was charmed -- and she confessed to him.