The program read:
JOHN SALTEAU has presented Native American stories, songs, and dances at the Cherry City Cherry Festival, the Cultural Awareness Celebration in Cheboygan, Native Tradition Days in Saginaw, the Sleeping Bear Folklore Fair in Glen Arbor, and at Interlochen’s Summer Arts for Kids Festival, and he performs regularly in libraries, schools, and other educational and cultural settings. A full-blooded Ojibway Indian, Salteau has worked as a lumberjack, a construction worker, a long-distance trucker, and a short order cook. He recently returned to Northwest Michigan after an absence of twenty years.
Nice little foxhole there to climb into. Twenty years, and you know the way Indians died off, pickling themselves with hair tonic and smoking their lungs black with tax-free cigarettes and stuffing their arteries with trans fats. Who’d be left to remember who had been where? She liked, too, the Boy’s Book litany of romantic occupations, the sorts of jobs that she could see a predelinquent Saltino thrilling to in his cot in Darkest Brooklyn. There had to be a thousand of these storytellers plying their trade around the Great Lakes, each with some mythically gritty background, like you couldn’t strum a guitar or shake a rattle if you programmed computers or adjusted insurance claims. Not all of them pretended to be Indians, though that wasn’t unheard of either. It was just another of the hustles that Indian culture had been reduced to. Blankets, pots, storytelling, casino gambling. It amused her that it was the last that struck so many people as being particularly profane. She looked at the picture of Salteau, banging that drum with the palm of his hand. There were the acne scars. She straightened three fingers and, joining them, rapidly drummed them against her open mouth: woo woo woo woo woo woo woo woo!
9
SHE assembled him piece by piece, out of scraps, a flyer here, listings of some town’s Weekender coverage there. She came across a dozen pictures on Flickr of a performance he’d given in Manistee. She almost wished, just to be able to feel surprised, that she didn’t already know what the pictures themselves, and their captions, told her: John Salteau, Manistee, June 2007. That was all. Crowds and sunshine. Baseball caps, T-shirts tucked neatly into creased, acid-wash jeans. White sneakers. She went to Borders and read children’s books on Native American legends. Atrocious books, really, all pretending to a kind of overarching wisdom about life and death, a native understanding of the delicate communion between man, nature, and spirit; standard stuff. Just once she’d like to read a story about some hunter getting his face ripped off by a grizzly. The best Indian story she’d ever heard had to do with a captured Oglala Sioux who’d laughingly denigrated his torturers’ mothers, sisters, and daughters while they sliced off his nose, his ears, gouged out his eyes. That wasn’t in any of these books, though. But it wasn’t as if anyone actually reviewed Salteau, i.e., discussed what he said, sang, or danced critically or in any kind of detail. Uniformly, the news items were of the “and a good time was had by all” variety, touching equally on the storytelling, the candle-dipping, the cherry pie, the weather. She worried that Nables’s doubts were quietly being vindicated. What exactly did she want out of this? She sucked hard on a nicotine lozenge, shoved her hair out of her face. Corroboration might be key. She ogled the pictures on Flickr hungrily but discovered that the disguise he’d assembled was impregnably generic, a particularly colorful piece of clip art. That she could know without confirmation was the investigative challenge that she was encountering for the first time in her career. She had Becky’s claims, but she doubted somehow that Becky would go on the record. She kept digging around, unearthing endless discrete information. Magic of the Internet: a trillion “facts,” zero cohesion. Or, rather, total cohesion: the Internet managed to atomize the patterns of individual lives into their endlessly replicable fractal components; the announcements, the rosters, the rankings, the professional listings, the genealogical discussions, the court decrees, the quotes, the miniature scandals, the obits, all the endless vanities gratified by the free availability of massive server racks in climate-controlled facilities.
Then she discovered that Salteau had a regular gig at a public library in Cherry City. Twenty-minute drive from Manitou Sands, some balls. A storm system was lacing North Dakota and Minnesota with snow, snow measured in feet, and was heading southeast, so Kat arranged her trip literally on the go, making the plane reservations via phone as she took a cab to her place to pack an overnight bag. She was worried that the airport in Cherry City might close, that he might disappear for real. It was a possibility. She asked the cab to wait for her.
Justin behaved with calm agitation after she entered the apartment, following her from room to room and wringing his hands. Who ever would have thought that she’d pray there wouldn’t be conversation? The dream of her life, growing up with a grandfather who might say three dozen words to her in a day, was to hear talk all the time, no haven’t-had-my-coffee-yet, no just-let-me-relax—and now silence suited her at home. Silence was peace. What a life. There’s always the door, Kat, she said to herself. Take down a bigger bag and pack it with more things and don’t come back. Justin followed her around and then parked himself on the threshold of the sunporch, cruciform, one hand gripping either side of the broad frame in which the flung-open double doors were hung, his back to the bright little unheated room. He watched her as she moved around the apartment, swiftly gathering her things. Didn’t even need a bigger bag. The days of the steamer trunk were over. Just needed her phone, her laptop, a wallet full of cards, and she could begin a new life this afternoon if she wanted. Nothing had to tie her to a place or to a past. She knew that. Personal history was a string of numbers. The days of the orally preserved reputation were over. The numbers just had to add up to something neither delinquent nor criminal and match the name. Who cares who had done what to whom? The days of the small town were over. It just took a plane ticket to discover that the balm of night could make anyplace feel like home. Home was within the pages of the right magazine. Your authority derived from the story you recognized to be about yourself. You adopted it, told it, then found other people who told the same story. The days of evading witnesses were over. The witnesses eliminated themselves; faded into the fabric of new jobs, new cities, new pastimes, new friends; multiple vectors diverging from a common originating point. The days of people were over. It was a vast democratic plurality of groups out there—political parties, associations, alumni, fans, account holders, veterans, employees, signatories, professions, and end users. Join and vanish. Learn the secret handshake, get the secret haircut. Try to be a person and you realized just how alone you really were. The only thing to do was to break away, shed what marked you before you were shed and disowned.
She didn’t see how making any big gestures would help now, though. The days of big gestures were over too, for her, at least. Big gestures were a threat after a certain age, the destabilizing activity of dangerous people. At her stage of life, everything was about—the jargon rhapsodized about—incremental growth and change. Any duplicity could be rationalized and explained away by the exhibition of some painstakingly acquired sophistication: a degree, a job, a cause, a taste for vintage vinyl. She’d been absolutely ruthless to Danhoff, kind man that he was, leaving without warning and then serving him with papers, and the nicely stage-managed theme of that betrayal had been “Outgrowing the Older Man.” To Danhoff, yeah, it probably had seemed like a big gesture, but that was her particular shot at incremental growth and change, and his friends had forgiven her almost as lavishly as they’d pitied him. Familiar soap story, a woman figuring out on the wing what marriage actually meant to her, free to discard her superseded choice. The common perception of her purity of motive had been established by her disinterest in pursuing her legal right to their community property, though the Craftsman house she’d kindly ceded to him must have been the coldest of comforts.
The very same suitcase she’d packed back then sat waiting for her on the shelf in the closet. She had no idea why she now felt stuck where she was. A matter o
f paralysis. Or of dreading the hang-time interval spent in the situation between situations, afflicted with the saddest of nostalgias for a contentment that hadn’t existed. Growth and change, inconsistency and destruction. She just wanted to get on the plane before the storm came down and shut the airport.
“When are you coming back?” Justin asked.
“I have things scheduled through Thursday morning. And I’ll probably need to talk to people, do some driving around. I don’t know. Friday afternoon maybe?”
“What about this storm? What if they close the airports?” A whine buzzed at the far edge of the questions, like something under stress.
“Then I’ll be there until the airport opens.”
“Did you want to.” He stopped himself, possibly remembering some arcane objection to phraseology and emphasis she’d made during an argument. “I was hoping you’d come to this restaurant with me on Friday night. Salvadorean-Asian fusion. It’s supposed to be nice.”
“I’m sure it’s nice.”
“Did you want to come with me? Or not?”
“It’s not a question of do I want to come or not. It’s a question of will I be back.”
“How does someone learn to talk this way?”
“What way?”
“The way you do. Not a question of this, it’s a question of that. Always squirming out from under responsibility. To me. Obviously it is a question of this.”
“I’m confused. A question of what, again?”
“Whether you want to come or not. Otherwise you wouldn’t have planned things this way.”
“I can’t plan them any other way. The plans are made around things that are in the middle of happening. The things keep happening regardless. They don’t work their schedule around me. Why don’t you reschedule? We can go on Sunday night.”
“I want to go on Friday. The fish is fresh.” He gestured, as if at an imaginary plate of fresh fish.
“I can’t do anything about that.”
“Yes, you can. You can make sure you’re back.”
“What do you want me to do? Walk?”
“It’s not the weather. It’s not the weather that’s stopping you. It’s your habitual inability to make even the smallest of commitments.”
“This is a commitment. It’s an assignment. In Michigan. Where there’s about to be a blizzard.”
“To me, I mean.”
“I make plenty of commitments to you.” She thought about that empty anonymous suitcase in the closet.
“Like what?”
“You spend too much damn time in restaurants. Not everything gets cooked to order. You can’t send everything back when it’s not exactly to your liking. That’s what restaurants are for. You get a break from compromise. The rest of the time, this is it.”
“Fuck you and your bullshit metaphors.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Why? It’s bullshit.”
“Not that part.”
“What? ‘Fuck you’? You’re too sensitive? Fuck you! See? Are you hurt? Are you bleeding?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am hurt.”
“You better get out of here then, don’t miss your important flight on my account, come back whenever the hell you want, it’s not like there’s anything new or revealing or instructive about this argument in particular.”
“No,” she said. “There isn’t.” She slung her purse and laptop over her shoulder and lifted the suitcase and, after gazing around the room to see if there was anything she might have missed, turned and left.
She received five text messages from Justin while she rode in the cab to Midway.
I am really sorry.
I hate talking to you that way too but sometimes i get so mad. Maybe we can talk this out in a more civilized way. Id really like to do this without screaming at (Pt 1 of 2)
each other. On sunday? (i dont have to order the fish) (Pt 2 of 2)
I love you.
Hello?
The reflex of comforting him, of assuaging his fears, of forgiving the boy crouched behind the props, took over, and she stubbed in the words, the reassurance and avowals, that would silence him, finally.
PART 2
THE ETERNAL SILENCE OF INFINITE SPACES
10
I DIRECTED the journalist to Gagliardi’s, a dusty place that smelled of coffee, cheese, and vinegar. She arrived before me, not having offered to drive me over, whether out of a sensible cautiousness or because she assumed I had my own car I don’t know. I felt the vague embarrassment one feels over being a pedestrian in America, so I didn’t push the point; in fact, I’d jogged there as best I could down plowed side streets, arriving out of breath.
We sat at a table with a piece of gingham oilcloth thrown over it in the place’s back room, rumored once to have been a speakeasy that served Canadian booze offloaded from powerful boats anchored several hundred yards offshore. The ceilings were low and vaulted, and the room was dimly lit by old-fashioned sconces placed along the exposed brick walls. The place was an intimate trap for light and sound and, if not for the food (messy sandwiches), it would have been a perfect spot for a seduction supper. In fact, the only other patrons were a couple of teenagers teasing each other over the remains of their meal: disregarding her laughing protests, he kept dipping his potato chips in her milkshake, bothering her in a way that made me recognize that even the most sophisticated flirtation was only maybe two degrees removed from this kind of blocked expression of primal interest. I hadn’t ordered any potato chips.
“So you’re a reclusive writer. Like whatsisname,” she said.
Her own name was Kat. She looked very sleek indeed sitting opposite me, not in the regional chic that sometimes makes people from even the wealthiest enclaves look as if they’ve climbed out of a hay wagon when they step off a plane at Kennedy or Heathrow. All the more reason not to let her get away with casually feigning ignorance.
“ ‘Whatsisname’?”
“Thomas Pynchon,” she said finally.
“Ah. Well, I don’t think Pynchon’s too reclusive. He lives on the famously congested Upper West Side of Manhattan. Stalker central, if the truth be known. You don’t have to be remotely famous to have strangers become unduly interested in you there, to become an unwitting part of the street life. There are some things even gentrification can’t quite kill off. And his wife’s a literary agent. It’s not exactly living on a pillar in the desert.”
“But no interviews, no photos, no appearances.”
“Books, though. What more can you ask of a writer?”
“Access?”
“To what, is the big question. Before I ever published a word I thought how wonderful it would be when I finally got interviewed and had the chance to express all my brilliant ideas and opinions. To be famous. But it turned out Rilke was right, that fame is no more than the quintessence of all the misunderstandings collecting around a new name. Usually it’s the famous who turn out to be the voyeurs, gazing into the abyss and wondering how to conform to its shapelessness, how to coincide with its needs and projections. That’s not a writer’s job.”
“So what is?”
“To avoid the argument altogether. The chimera of ‘dialogue’ with your audience. Imagine putting all your faith in language only to discover that lots of people are just waiting for an opening where they can shout you down, tell you how wrong you are. Let them shout the book down. By then you’re long gone. A novel should be like the calling card of an unknown killer. Who is this monster and what motivates him to do these terrible things? I don’t want to be the youthful-looking author smilingly waving a reporter into his sun-splashed living room.”
She smiled at me, popping open a dark blue canister and shaking a nicotine lozenge into her palm. “But you can control your image.”
“Only if you’re preoccupied with having an image to begin with. You just want to hand an interviewer a copy of your book, and they want to know what you’ve got in the medicine cabinet.”
<
br /> “Is that what happened to you?”
“Literally. And mindful as I was about wanting to stick to the subject of my work, I was totally caught off guard by the question.”
“You showed him?”
“Her. Yes. Dream of fame. And journalists really don’t like reticence, do they?”
“Most famous medicine cabinet in New York.” She shook her head; pushed the hair out of her face.
“For about two days, yep. Lexapro and Advil and fifty-five yards of minty-flavored floss. Big whoop—but what kind of write-up about a mere book can compete with copy dealing in lurid personal facts? A friend of mine made a casual remark to some guy who was profiling her about how her older daughter was having trouble in the third grade. Perfectly normal kid, some brat in class was making her life miserable—you know how school can be. So the piece comes out and it says that she and her husband are deeply concerned about their daughter’s struggles with a learning disability. They tried to keep it from her, but of course some of her classmates’ parents saw it, and grilled their kids, and the upshot is that the poor kid gets pegged for the rest of the year as ‘the Retard.’ That’s literary fame. I get the attitude of a Pynchon, after that. Just give them the book: anything beyond that gets slippery.”
The Fugitives Page 8
