The Last American Martyr

by Tom Winton; Rolffimages

  At this point I began to wonder why this mysterious man was getting into such a heavy spiel. Yet at the same time, I welcomed his wise words. He didn't know me from Adam but, as he opened up to me, it somehow felt very natural. It seemed as if I had known him far longer than I actually had.

  “I'm sorry for ranting,” he said, punching out his smoke. “I've been alone here for quite some time now.”

  “You know, Mister McClure, it's really weird...”

  “Please,” he interrupted, shaking his head and waving one hand as if he were dusting the air, “please, call me Darius.”

  “OK ... Darius, sure. Like I was saying, it's really weird. Most of the folks here in White Pine, I’ve known all my life. Good people, for the most part. But I’ve known you, what, fifteen minutes, and here I am feeling as if I know you better than any of them. Is that crazy or what?”

  He looked through the window straight in front of us, surveying the deep green pines and blue sky above. A small smile, a nostalgic smile, found its way to his mouth. Then he peered into his near empty beer can as if he were searching for the perfect response in there. After swishing the contents around once or twice he looked back at me.

  “Funny you say that, Jake,” he said, still wearing that subtle smile, “because when I was a young man, back in New York during the late sixties and early seventies, my friends and I made a full-time job out of chasing the ladies. Whew! What a time that was to be young—the best. Anyway, in the course of seven, maybe eight years, we must have hit every club and disco from Manhattan to the Hamptons. OK, that's a stretch, but you get my drift. What I’m trying to say is I met an awful lot of girls in those places. And I can't count the times when, after talking to them for just ten minutes or so, they said almost the exact same thing you just did. You know, something like, this is weird, but I just met you and I feel like I've know you for a long time. Every time I heard that, it was music to my ears. I was a very fortunate young man to be able to communicate the way I did.”

  With that his eyes fell again to the now empty can, and he said, “How about another, Jake?”

  I checked my watch: three-thirty. Kyle, the postmaster and only other employee at our tiny White Pine Post Office, would be closing up in half an hour. But I didn’t want to leave quite yet. I had a key to the PO, and numerous times before I had let myself in and locked up when I left.

  “Sure, I’ll have another. That would be great.” Then I pulled out my cell and said, “Just let me call the office, tell the head-honcho I’m going to be a bit late.”

  “Go right ahead. I want to get Solace here a slice of raw carrot too. She loves them. Be right back.”

  Just as I finished the call, Darius came back into the paneled room. He saw me looking in the direction of that framed newspaper. After glancing at the article himself, he hesitated for a split-second. Then he handed me one of the cold beers and sat back down. He lit another Carlton, took a swig of the beer, and said, “Well…I guess the proverbial cat is out of the bag now.”

  Talk about getting caught with your mitts in the old cookie jar! I hadn’t the foggiest where this was going from here. I’d never felt so uncomfortable in my life. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I should get out of this chair, make up some bullshit excuse, tell him, Oh, I just remembered I have to blah, blah, blah, and then hit the bricks. I squirmed a few times, cleared my throat, and tried to hold onto one of the few ridiculous options racing through my mind. I don’t smoke, but I came damn close to asking him for a cigarette. I’d have done anything to fill those long, silent seconds.

  But finally Thomas Soles, Nobel Prize laureate, broke the silence. With Solace the terrier now on his lap licking the bottom of his moist can, he turned to me and said, “Jake, from here on out, why don’t you just call me Tom?”

  Chapter 3

  “Sure…I can call you Tom.”

  You have no idea how badly I wanted out of that trailer. I wished I was in my jeep, cannon-balling down Split Branch Road, bouncing off the inside roof. But what could I do? And in all honesty, how could I not be curious. It’s not every day you get the opportunity to sit down with a Nobel laureate, particularly such an enigmatic one.

  What Tom Soles said next, he said very slowly. I could tell he was weighing every word, trying them out inside his head before choosing just the right ones. Gently smoothing the tawny fur on Solace’s back, he said, “Jake, it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to confide in anybody other than my publisher, and as rarely as I speak to her, it’s always on the telephone. I’m sixty-one years old now, and I don’t know how much time I have left. I’ve been on the run for a year and a half now—on the lam, if you will. I’ve had very few meaningful, face-to-face conversations in all that time.

  He paused for a sip, and probably to get his next words right. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what he was preparing to tell me. I had a wife and two sons. I didn’t want to get involved in anything I shouldn’t. He’d been on the run for a year and a half! From what? What could this possibly be leading to? I had no answers, yet something kept me from bowing out of the conversation. And it continued.

  “After all my years on this planet, I’ve become a pretty fair judge of character, Jake. And my instincts tell me you’re a trustworthy person. That’s a rare attribute, nowadays. Plus, you just saved my life. That alone is a damn good reason for feeling a certain affinity towards someone. Anyway…believe me; I never dreamed I’d open up to someone I’ve only known for such a short time. As I said, I’m getting closer to the dirt. It’s very possible that I have far less time left than you might think. I desperately need to share my experiences and my fears, so here goes.”

  Tom then turned and nodded at the Times’ article, “You know about the Nobel Prize, am I correct?”

  “Well, yes, I saw the picture there and I was inquisitive. Ever since I started delivering your mail, I thought you looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place you. Of course, I’ve heard about you on the news and all.”

  “Are you interested in knowing more?”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble with the law?”

  “No, no,” he said with a slow shake of the head and a melancholic smile, “my problems have nothing to do with breaking laws, only with speaking the truth.”

  “That’s fine then, I suppose.” I said, really knowing deep down it might not be, still feeling trouble could be attached to what he might tell me. “But why…what do you mean you’ve been on the lam?”

  He turned away from me and again looked out the window alongside the article and the picture. As if searching for the answer to my question in those towering green pines or the endless blue space above them, he drew on his cigarette. After exhaling at the whirling fan above, he turned back to me and said, “This is going to sound kind of absurd, Jake, but when I say I’ve been on the lam, the run, whatever, I’m not even sure who, if anybody, is after me.”

  I must have looked at him as if he had four arms because a knowing look rose on his face and he chuckled before continuing.

  “Do you like to read, Jake?”

  “Sure, but mostly on my lunch breaks. Not much at home. I’ve got a wife with an endless honey-do list, two kids with more energy than the electric company, and six acres that also need constant attention. I’m always busy. But I do like reading…guys like Conroy and Jim Harrison, you know, fairly dramatic stuff.”

  “Well that’s terrific. I’m glad you read because I have an idea. You see, telling you my entire story would take days, sitting here like this, and now we both know you don’t have that kind of spare time. Don’t get me wrong, I sure hope you continue stopping over here. I really enjoy talking with you. Any time my car’s out front you’re more than welcome to come to the door. Anyway, back to my idea. How would you like to read a manuscript of mine? It’s a memoir. Not a life story but it details what has happened to me since I won the prize. It explains everything you might want to know about this loony old man and why he’s holing up in a thirty-fi
ve-year-old trailer in the North Maine Woods. Also, if you read it, you’ll fully understand why I’m so desperate to share what I’ve been through.”

  “Yeah … Tom, I’d like that,” I said, and I truly meant it.

  He then put his palm up, spread his fingers, and punctuated some of his words as he spoke.

  “Fine, then. I’ll only give you one chapter at a time. I’d like to do it that way for two reasons, number one, you’ll have to stop over and visit me from time to time—to return them and pick up more. The second reason is I’m in no way finished yet. I’ve still got, probably, a few months’ worth of work ahead of me. What do you say? Does that sound OK?”

  By now my curiosity had gotten the best of me. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the manuscript. But I had to be honest. “Sure,” I said, “I’d like that, very much. But like you said, if I feel like I’m going places I don’t belong, I’ll have to stop.”

  “Fair enough. That’s fandamtastic, Jake! Hell, you might even find a few of the punctuation errors my editor is always chiding me about. If you do, I’d appreciate you circling them for me. You just might save me some of her good-natured heat.”

  Nodding my head in agreement, trying to appear capable, I didn’t say anything.

  “Yep, I know what you’re thinking, Jake. People do think that anyone who’s won the award is some sort of demigod. I don’t know about all the rest of them, but I put my socks on each morning the same way everybody else does. Hell, I barely got through high school English, that’s why my punctuation is only so-so. Of course, in all fairness to myself, I never was in that English class all that often.”

  Tom then jerked his thumb toward the narrow hallway and said, “Just like everyone else, I also straddle the toilet most mornings. Being so regular may be an achievement for somebody my age,” he said, chuckling again, “but besides that, all I am is a simple man who’s made some relevant observations and shed light on them in a simple book. That’s it! I’m nothing more.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve got a feeling there’s a bit more to you than that.”

  “I don’t know, maybe a bit more. Maybe the one small gift I was born with is an elevated degree of insightfulness. Someone, whose name now slips me, once did say, ‘There’s very little difference in the way most men think but that small difference can be huge.’ Maybe he was on to something.”

  Tom drained the last of his beer, gently lowered Solace to the carpet, and said, “Wait here just a minute. I’ll get the first chapter.”

  A few minutes later, as he walked me to my jeep, Tom Soles said, “Remember, if you begin to read anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, anything at all, just stop there and return the manuscript. I’ll understand. And do me one more favor, if you would. Please don’t tell anybody, not a soul, that my name is Thomas Soles.”

  I assured him I wouldn’t and cranked up the engine. Then, as I went to put her in reverse, he leaned into the open window and said in a weary, yet relieved tone, “Thank you so much for doing this, Jake. You don’t know how badly I wanted somebody to read this in case…in case something unforeseen happens to me.”

  Chapter 4

  While negotiating the ruts and bumps on Split Branch Road, I kept stealing glances at the paper-clipped pages lying on the mail shelf beside me. It was a Saturday, and I knew darned well I’d never be able to wait till lunchtime Monday to dig into them.

  So that night, after my wife, Sigrid, and the boys fell asleep, I grabbed my robe and tip-toed downstairs to the workshop. I threw a single log in the stove and settled into one of the two old upholstered chairs I keep down there for when my pals come over. Of course, I read every page of chapter one. From then on, for the next five months, I couldn’t wait for Saturdays to roll around. Tom had said, at the very outset, he only wanted me to read one chapter a week. I wasn’t going to push it. Maybe that in itself was an intended lesson for me. Maybe my new friend was teaching me the meaning of patience. I don’t know, but I do know I learned an awful lot from his writings. The deeper I got into this manuscript the more I wanted to read on. Each paragraph demanded that I go onto the next. What follows here is verbatim what I read. You’ll notice it had no title—Thomas Soles hadn’t yet come up with one.

  Had I, an unemployed doorman, never written that book, my life wouldn’t have taken such a harrowing turn. Had it not sold so well, I wouldn’t have needed to be on the lam like I have for so many months now. But I did write my book, and I’ll pay for that until the last shovel of cold dirt is dumped over my grave. What’s done is done. I can’t undo a thing, even if I wanted to. On the other side of the coin, the words I strung together did have at least one positive effect. They seem to have broadened the entire world’s perception of selfishness and greed. Many called my plainly-written book, a “revelator.” Others were livid over the messages in its pages.

  My thoughts about the unfair distribution of wealth in societies everywhere created a fiery uproar from pole to pole. There were massive marches and demonstrations in 17 different countries. From America to Zimbabwe, folks young and old turned out in astounding numbers. Their marching footsteps caused the entire planet to tremor. Class systems everywhere were suddenly being questioned, and in many places challenged. All this because of the thoughts I, a previously unpublished author, scrawled into Spiral notebooks at a Formica table in my Queens, New York tenement.

  For two long years, I sat in that kitchen, staring out the window, searching for inspiration beyond the fire escape and all the sad brown buildings. Somehow, uncertain as I was, I did finish the book, and it was published. A year after that everything changed. It doesn’t happen often, the odds are miniscule, but every once in a while a small person rises from the depths of obscurity and manages to shake the entire world. It happened in 2008 when I, dressed in a secondhand Goodwill suit, stepped onto the worldwide stage in Stockholm, Sweden and accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. People everywhere were astounded that a first time author could be awarded such an honor, but the Nobel Committee felt that the book’s world-wide impact was undeniable and unprecedented.

  Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who founded the prize, might have exploded in his casket that day had he known who the prize went to. The gold medal with his face on it, the diploma bearing a citation, and a million dollars went to me, Thomas Soles, a plain-speaking man who had railed against the very same system that made Nobel a very wealthy man.

  Just like Alfred Nobel, I didn’t have any secondary education. Well, actually, I did manage to complete two night courses at Queens College. After that, the Draft Board changed my plans. I wanted to go nights for one more term. At that point I’d have had enough credits to attend the city-funded New York college fulltime, tuition free. All I would have had to come up with was the cost of books. But, as it had been all my young life, the answer was a resounding NO. I spent the next 23 months in the U.S. Army, half that time in Viet Nam. I was in the infantry but have no desire to talk about that. As a matter of fact, I need not to talk about it.

  After being discharged from the military in 1971, my money problems didn’t get a whole lot better until thirty-six years later when my revolutionary book was picked up by a major publisher. Then things really changed. Money started coming at me from all directions.

  A year later, to the blare of trumpets and the flash of cameras, I received a standing ovation at the Swedish Academy along with a check for a million dollars. One would have thought I’d be on easy street after that, but not me. Just as I’d done the previous year with my burgeoning book royalties, I planned to keep very little of the award money. Almost all of it would go to needy charities, again. All I wanted was enough. As a matter of fact, the title of the book that won me the Nobel Prize was Enough is Enough. Unfortunately, not everybody who read it agreed with the title or anything on its pages. At the very top of the system I had criticized, there were some extremely powerful people, concerned people, who were very, very upset.

  Thirty-o
ne thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean, American Airlines flight 1402 was less than an hour from landing at Kennedy Airport. Pulling my uncertain eyes from the quivering wing outside the three-layered acrylic window, I said to my wife, Elaina, “Those drinks we had in London are helping, but I still don’t like it.”

  “I must have told you fifty times, it’s no big thing. You were so upset…for nothing.”

  “Just the same, if it was for anything less than the award, I wouldn’t be up here.”

  “All right, Tom, we’re almost home,” Elaina said, closing her Newsweek, returning it to the pouch on the seat in front of her. After brushing one of her long black hairs from her jeans, she straightened up in her seat, looked past me at the clear blue October sky outside the window and said, “We need to talk about the money, you know.”

  “Aw come on, Elaina, not that. You know how I feel about that. I don’t want to talk about it now, not here on a plane full of strangers.”

  “This isn’t going away, Tom. Not this time. We’ve got to talk. I promised I wouldn’t say another word about it until we left Stockholm, and I didn’t. I didn’t want to ruin everything.”

  Then she paused for a moment. Her perturbed look lost its edge and she failed to fight back a small smile. “Look Tom…OK…you know I’m still pinching myself. I can’t believe you’ve actually won The Nobel Prize. Every time I think about it, I get goose bumps. Things like that just don’t happen to people like us. All those uncertain hours, days, and months you spent in the kitchen writing your book…you didn’t even think it would get published.”