“Hello, operator, do you have a listing in Lake Geneva for a Dr. Furbo, or a medical clinic, health farm or spa with that name? You do? Furbo Reinclination and Redefinition Projects. That must be it. Is there an address? Yes, please. Thank you.” Pace wrote down the telephone number and address the operator gave him. Perhaps Dr. Furbo wasn’t just a nut. Pace decided to go to Lake Geneva and find out.
Pace rented a car and drove from Chicago into Wisconsin, a state he had never entered before. Unfortunately, whenever he thought about Wisconsin, he recalled reading about the gruesome murders committed by a farmer named Ed Gein, back in the early 1960’s; and, more recently, the equally ghastly killings conducted in Milwaukee by Jeffrey Dahmer. Both men had apparently been guilty of cannibalism; and, in Gein’s case, using human skin to make lampshades, as the Nazis had done after flaying the corpses of Jews and Gypsies. The other things Pace associated with Wisconsin were beer and cheese.
Lake Geneva was a resort town: swimming and hiking in summer, skiing in winter. Pace drove to the center of town and stopped into a convenience store where he bought a bottle of root beer—they didn’t carry Barq’s, so he settled for Dad’s—and asked the clerk at the register for the best route to Warren Spahn Road. The clerk, who, Pace guessed, was in his late teens or very early twenties, told him to head east four and a half miles and he’d run into it.
“Do you know who Warren Spahn was?” Pace asked the clerk.
“No, sir.”
“The winningest left-handed pitcher in major league history. Won three hundred sixty three games. Pitched mostly for the Milwaukee Braves in the 1950’s and ’60s. He’s in the Hall of Fame.”
“He must be an old man now.”
“He’s dead.”
Pace gave the boy a dollar and told him to keep the change.
“Sorry, sir,” said the clerk, “but the root beer’s a dollar and a half.”
Pace dug another dollar out of one of his pockets, put it down on the counter, said, “Forgot I’m up north,” and walked out of the store.
He found Warren Spahn Road and bent right, the only direction he could go. There were no houses on either side of the road, only birch trees, which Pace found quite beautiful. He thought about Spahn pitching against Juan Marichal in a famous game in which they each posted goose eggs until Willie Mays homered for the Giants in the bottom of the sixteenth inning to beat the Braves. Both pitchers used a high leg kick when they wound up to disguise the ball and throw off the hitter’s timing. Pace could not think of a single pitcher in the major leagues who employed that technique in the present day.
The deeper Pace drove into the woods the darker it got. The sun was going down fast and Pace sped up. After several miles, he turned on the headlights. Just as the final sliver of daylight slipped away, Pace saw a sign at the entrance to a gravel driveway on the driver’s side of the road. Hand-lettered in black on a white board were the words: DR. BORIS FURBO, SCIENTIST-PHILOSOPHER-ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOLACE, ENTER HERE BUT KEEP IN MIND THAT THERE IS ALWAYS A TRADE OFF.
Pace turned in and headed up the driveway. Lights were on in a two-story house. Parked in front of the house was a 1955 black Cadillac hearse. Pace pulled up next to it, cut his engine, got out of the car and slowly walked toward the house.
7
“By virtue of the fact that you sought me out and have understood the purpose of my book, if not the precise meaning, I invite you to remain and study with me. All intelligent seekers sooner or later realize that a teacher is necessary to their development. The most important part of knowing is knowing when you will never know. No and Know are non-exclusive antitheses of both Virtual and Repugnant Paradox. Even Einstein and, later, the unfortunate Gödel, decided that there was indeed a Desirable Gap. The question this provokes, of course, is how to process regret without falling prey to the Jonah Compulsion, which Gödel called Informal Fallacy, or some such nonsense. Are you hungry?”
Pace had been listening to Dr. Furbo for two hours. What Furbo had to say about knowing and not knowing reminded Pace of something but he could not remember exactly what.
“Yes, Dr. Furbo. I’m both hungry and a little tired.”
Furbo jumped up from the large wicker rocking chair in which he had been sitting.
“I’ll barbecue some spare ribs, then,” he said. “I’m in the fourth week of the Bromige-Rosen Diet. First week, potatoes and oatmeal; second week, collard greens and dandelion soup; third week, pasta and ice cream; fourth week, ribs and beer. Bromige-Rosen recommend beer be taken only twice a day, but since there are to be four feedings per day, I find it a tad difficult not to imbibe with each serving. I’m looking forward to next week’s menu of sauerkraut and honeydew melon. No fish in Bromige-Rosen; absolutely verboten. I agree entirely. All fish carry the undetectable funambular cell, which causes vertigo.”
“If the cell is undetectable,” Pace said, “how do you know fish carry it?”
“Molecular deviation detected centuries ago by the Mesopotamians. They were the pioneers of ichthyology, did all their work in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Everyone credits the Egyptians but they were just the first to alter their diet by decree. No pharaoh ever expired due to funambular seizure, remember that.”
Pace fell asleep in Dr. Furbo’s attic guest room following his having heartily partaken of a slab of beef ribs slathered with the doctor’s original sauce, which recipe included a modest dash of Chiefland, Florida, boar urine.
“That’s what gives it such a lively undertaste,” Furbo informed Pace.
Late the next morning Pace awoke feeling slightly sick to his stomach and thought immediately of the boar urine in the barbecue sauce. He dressed and went downstairs and found Dr. Furbo, all seventy-nine inches of him, still dressed as he had been the night before in a black suit with a black shirt and black tie, stretched out on the kitchen floor with his eyes closed and not moving.
“Dr. Furbo, are you all right?” Pace shouted into the doctor’s right ear.
Furbo did not budge. Pace knelt down and felt the doctor’s left hand. The fingers were cold and slightly stiff. His chest was not rising and falling. Pace stood up and looked at Furbo. He had not noticed until now a deep indentation on the far right side of Furbo’s forehead. Pace used a wall telephone in the kitchen to dial O.
“Hello, operator, could you please connect me to the police? I want to report a death.”
While he waited for the police to arrive, Pace took a look around the livingroom. An open book lay on the coffee table. It was The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. At the top of page 88, underlined in red pencil, was the title of Chapter 17: “Towards the End of Which The Herb-Doctor Proves Himself a Forgiver of Injuries.”
8
As Pace pulled out of Dr. Furbo’s driveway, it began to rain. He recalled the final sentence of Faulkner’s novel, Sanctuary, or part of it: “it was the season of rain and death.” Dr. Furbo’s sudden demise seemed to Pace a terrible portent of things to come, as if wherever he went death would insist on his keeping company. The rain increased. Pace could not remember ever having such a convincing feeling of foreboding. The most important part of knowing, Dr. Furbo instructed, is knowing when you’ll never know. Sailor would have probably called Dr. Furbo a crank or a kook, Pace thought, but not Lula. His mother kept more of an open mind and would study on the vagaries of No and Know.
Another thing the deceased doctor said was that the term simple-minded had acquired an undeservedly onerous definition. When asked how he had been able to endure torture at the hands of the Turks, Dr. Furbo recounted, T.E. Lawrence had replied that the trick is simply to not mind.
Pace had overheard one of the attendants loading Dr. Furbo’s body into an ambulance say to another attendant, “This guy used to teach biology at Tecumseh High. My sister, Estelle, was in his class when he got fired for telling them that the only way mankind could avoid extinction was if everyone
was inoculated with a partial solution of Javanese violet viper venom and wild boar sperm.” For a moment Pace considered telling them about Dr. Furbo’s barbecue sauce recipe but he let it go.
If this was indeed the season of rain and death, Pace decided, turning up the windshield wiper speed a notch, he would keep searching for an explanation until the very end. As the men pushed the stretcher bearing Furbo’s corpse into the rear of the ambulance, Pace had noticed a small syringe sticking out from the doctor’s right ankle. What had he injected into himself, Pace wondered, knowing he would never know. Suddenly, Pace realized that he did not mind.
9
Pace decided to leave Chicago, but before he did he went back to the Art Institute to see once more Seurat’s great painting. He paid particular attention to the monkey in the foreground, and was reminded of something else Dr. Furbo said: If animals have the ability to reason, which they do, why is it that they do not believe in God?
Pace bought a 2003 midnight blue Ford F-150 truck and headed southwest. Twenty years before, when he had lived in Los Angeles and worked as an assistant to various film producers and directors, he’d always meant to take a vacation and explore the other western states but had never found the time. Now there was nothing to prevent him from doing so. Pace felt good driving so he kept at it, stopping only for gas and food and at cheap motels to sleep. He was not in need of conversation, so he kept exchanges with people to a polite minimum. His brief but intense encounter with Dr. Furbo had convinced Pace that the only path to the Up-Down would be of his own devising. Despite Furbo’s oddball theories and strange antics, there was no doubt in Pace’s mind that the man had been sincere in his quest for the answers to the fundamental questions that had puzzled and virtually stupefied man since the Big Three, as the doctor called them, had first sizzled in a human being’s brain pan, those being What? How? and Why?
One morning in Gila Bend, Arizona, Pace woke up and remembered his dream of the night before. In the dream several women were sitting in a room around a table. Three or four of the women were smoking cigarettes, one of whom Pace recognized to be Lula as she was in her twenties. In the room, which was dimly lit by small lamps with red shades, was a dark shape that moved around as the women talked. The women seemed not to notice this dark shape, or at least paid it no attention. Pace could not understand what the women were saying but they all seemed quite contented and calm. One of the women stood up and was immediately absorbed by the dark shape, but the others went on with their conversation. When Pace awakened he realized that the woman who had disappeared was his mother.
The desert was too hot so Pace headed north. His destination was Wyoming, a state he had never visited but whose name had a mythical quality for him. As a child, Pace and Lula had used Wyoming as an imaginary idyll, a place where nothing bad could happen, a kind of magical land. His mother had never been in Wyoming, either; nor, to Pace’s knowledge, had Sailor. Whenever Lula made up a story to tell Pace at bedtime she would end it by saying, “and they all lived happily ever after in Wyoming.” He no longer believed this, of course, but the closer he got to Wyoming, the cooler the air became.
10
Once he was in Wyoming, Pace avoided cities, such as Laramie, and tourist meccas like Jackson Hole. He wound his way along two-lane roads and stopped in a mountain town malignantly named, old Hollywood western-style, Dead Indian. Pace parked his pick-up in front of a bar called Frank’s X, and went inside.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Two men wearing brown Stetsons were seated on stools at the bar and four men wearing brown Stetsons sat singly at four tables. There was one bartender, hatless, with a long ponytail and Fu Man Chu mustache, wearing a gray T-shirt with the words TRY AGAIN LATER printed on the front of it. Pace sat down on a stool at the bar. Above the shelves of bottles opposite him was a large, framed black and white photograph of a nude woman lying on a white fur-covered couch with a black dog, its tongue hanging out, sitting up near her feet, staring at the camera.
“Go ahead, ask me,” the bartender said to Pace. “Everybody comes in here the first time does.”
“Who is she?” Pace asked.
“Frank’s ex-wife.”
“Frank own this bar?”
“Used to. After the divorce, she shot and killed him.”
“Why after the divorce?”
“Everything Frank had he put in his mother’s name before so Malaysia couldn’t take it.”
“What happened to Malaysia?”
“Split after she shot Frank. Word is she’s in Cambodia, married to a general in the Cambodian army. Cambodia don’t have an extradition treaty with the United States. Don’t expect Malaysia coming back any time soon, especially to Dead Indian. What’ll it be?”
“Beer. Anything Mexican, if you have it.”
The bartender put a bottle of Negra Modelo on the bar, opened it and placed a glass next to it. Pace laid down a five dollar bill. The bartender picked it up and turned around to work the cash register. Written on the back of his T-shirt were the words ON SECOND THOUGHT, DON’T.
The bartender turned back around and put down three singles. One of the Stetsons who’d been sitting at a table went over to the jukebox and dropped in a few coins, all of which clattered into the change receptacle. Skeeter Davis began singing “Am I That Easy To Forget?”
“I haven’t seen an old Rock-ola like that for a while,” Pace said.
“Frank’s. He rigged it so it don’t cost anything to play the records. Just gotta put in the silver, take it back. All the 45s were Frank’s, too. Most pretty wore out now.”
“Frank’s mother owns the bar, I assume.”
“That’s what sent Malaysia over the top. She figured on gettin’ the place and when she found out Frank’s mother owned it, Malaysia grabbed his Colt Python and ended any debate before it could begin.”
Pace drank his Negra Modelo straight from the bottle.
“You lookin’ to buy property? Plenty available.”
“No, I’m just passin’ through.”
“We don’t get many passers through, Dead Indian bein’ somewhere off the beaten track.”
“I’m surprised the politically correct committee haven’t tried to make you change the town’s name. Or have they?”
“This is Wyoming, mister.”
“I’ve heard that line before, in a movie, only with a different name. By the way, mine’s Pace Ripley.”
“Big Douglas.”
They shook hands.
“Big?”
“Yeah. My brother and I are fraternal twins. I’m the bigger one.”
“Don’t tell me your brother’s called Little.”
Big grinned. “Shorty,” he said.
Pace smiled and nodded.
“What was the movie?” asked Big. “The one with the different name?”
“This is Ames, mister,” said Pace. “The Hustler, with Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson. Only straight pool played there.”
“Only sight worth stoppin’ to see around here is an unusual rock formation on the side of a mountain looks like two arrows pointin’ in opposite directions. Most people call it Two Way but the Shoshone name for it is the Up-Down.”
“How do I get there?” asked Pace.
Big told him and Pace left without touching the three singles on the bar.
It took him almost an hour on a rock-strewn, unpaved road to get to the Up-Down. As soon as he saw it, Pace stopped, got out of the truck and hiked along a narrow path to the edge of the mountain in order to view the formation more closely. On the side was a tall rock shaped like an arrow on the top that pointed to the sky; appended to it was another rock, also with an arrow-shaped formation at the tip, pointing down. On the right-side ledge of the south pointing arrow was an eagle’s nest in which Pace could see the downy heads of two baby bald eagles. He’d never before seen eagles in the w
ild, so he lay flat and hung over the precipice as far as he could to take a better look.
Just then Pace heard a loud noise that sounded like “frap, frap,” followed by an eardrum-piercing screech. He turned and saw an enormous bald eagle, its talons extended and poised to rip into his flesh, descending upon him. As Pace fell, he remembered what it was that he could not at Dr. Furbo’s. In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden, when Martin is drowning, London wrote, “At the instant he knew, he ceased to know.” Before hitting the ground, Pace knew he had reached the very end and that there would be no explanation for anything.
Part Two
1
Pace did not die. After he fell from the ledge, he suffered a severe head injury on impact with the outcropping below, on which he landed and broke both legs. He was found, unconscious, by a pair of hikers, a man and a woman, whose names he never learned and whom he never met. They managed to get him to a hospital and departed. All he was able to learn later, from a nurse who attended him in the emergency room, was that the couple was apparently from Iceland and that the man bore a startling resemblance to the actor Robert Ryan.
Pace eventually made his way to Bay St. Clement, North Carolina, where he took up residence in a cottage on Dalceda Delahoussaye’s property, which, of course, he had in turn inherited from his mother, Lula. The main house was rented to a young couple, a high school history teacher and his wife, who worked as a landscape architect. For several weeks after Pace arrived, he was burdened by casts on both legs and was frequently bothered by dizzy spells most likely caused by a concussion. The young woman was of great help to Pace during this period of his recovery, making sure that his basic needs were met, that he ate properly and was as comfortable as possible.
The Up-Down Page 2
