Pulphead: Essays

by Sullivan, John Jeremiah

  Homicide, suicide, accident—the captain confirmed, incredibly, that none of the three had been ruled out. It was hard to get your mind around. Auto-lynching?

  A few days before I’d arrived, a law-enforcement source in another town had speculated to a newspaper reporter that if people wished to understand what had happened to Bill Sparkman, they needed to look into the David Carradine death. Carradine, you’ll recall, was found strung up in the closet of his Bangkok hotel room in what appeared to be an auto-erotic episode gone wrong.

  Or had this source, in mentioning Carradine, been referring to the actor’s family, some of whom continue to insist that his death was a murder made to look like auto-erotic asphyxiation?

  I lay down on the moss. It was perfectly soft; it had the softness of a mattress that a billionaire with a bad back would pay to have made for himself. Not the tiniest bit wet or muddy.

  If homicide—intentional or accidental—had it been a gay thing? Not the most enlightened question, but it came. You could certainly make Sparkman’s biography match up in a wink-wink way, if you wanted. Middle-aged bachelor, former altar boy, raised an adopted son alone, lifelong affiliation with the Boy Scouts, a grade-school substitute teacher, an effeminate voice. I knew the last detail from having heard a speech Sparkman gave, on the Internet, from last year. He was receiving his diploma from an online university. They asked him to serve as class speaker because his story inspired them. While working toward his degree, he’d been battling cancer and seemingly winning. A man with a round, pasty, friendly, bespectacled face and a crop of light reddish hair. In probably the most commonly reproduced photograph of him, he’s wearing a toboggan to cover his chemo baldness and reaching down past a young male student’s chest to point at something on a piece of paper.

  As I lay there, the spheres—pundo, talk radio, and blogo—crackled with talk of what had happened or not happened on this mossy hill. Had Sparkman run into some psychopathic meth cookers on his rounds, asked them how many people lived in their trailer and what they did for a living, and got himself choked to death?

  Those leaning left sensed a sweeping under the rug: the Glenn Becks and Michele Bachmanns had Sparkman’s blood on their hands. Meanwhile the right seized on every shadowy hint that his death may not even have been homicide, much less a political assassination. See how quick you liberals are to demonize us! The two sides hissed at each other, in a ritual as routine by now as a West Side Story number.

  Late orange butterflies moved over the moss bed. On the way here I’d passed road signs straight from the family Bible. Brightshade, Barbourville. In Barbourville my great-somethingth-grandmother Kate Adams presented a Union flag to the Home Guard during a ceremony. The college there still displays it. My people were those strange Southerners you don’t often read about in histories of the Civil War: white landowners who owned slaves but fought for the North on Republican principles. Kentucky cracked down the middle this way. That’s why you hear them say “brother against brother” about us. My ancestors freed their slaves with a kind of “Fine, run off, then” attitude—seeing no other course, maybe in the noblest cases relieved to be doing the right thing at last, to be on the side of furthering the great experiment, not holding it back.

  I heard a vehicle come down the road and waited for it to pass. It didn’t pass. That was nerve-racking. They’d seen my car. It’s hard to overstate how far back into the park this place is—less than a mile on, the road ends. If you dead-end in the Daniel Boone park, you’re pretty far into one of the largest contiguous green blobs of wooded mountainous land left in the United States. It can be seen from space. Coming in along the winding, dipping roads, I’d sighted canebrakes in the river bottoms. Very few of those left. It was time travel, Kentucky-wise. Not wanting to be paranoid, wanting less to be stupid, I waited. Whoever it was drove out of earshot.

  When I pulled away, I saw they hadn’t moved far. It was a sheriff’s deputy, parked in the middle of the road. His finding me here in all Clay County, unless he’d been watching the graveyard day and night, seemed Stephen Hawking–size, oddswise. Was I supposed to stop and get out? I sat behind him with the engine on awkwardly. I decided to pass him. As I went by, we waved. A smiling gray-mustached man with glasses. “Come on back,” he said, and just let me go by.

  For the next few miles, I was edgy. “Come on back.” Had that been creepy? A leeringly cynical mockery of the cherished “Come back, now, y’hear!”? Casually threatening?

  No, ironic. Paying attention to strangers who’d gone miles out of their way to visit fresh local crime scenes was solidly under the deputy’s aegis. Someone had called him about me. Hadn’t I become lost briefly and driven by a junkyard and made the dogs bark? That guy called. The deputy was probably amused by all of us lost-looking rubberneckers showing up with our GPSs, wanting to see the tree where Bill Sparkman died. When the deputy had said, “Come on back,” he’d meant, I know you never will. When he implied, I know you never will, he simultaneously meant, And I’m glad, because you’re almost certainly an opportunistic reverse-provincial clown who’ll go back to the office and try to make me look as stupid and scary as possible in what you write, despite the fact that we’ve been here since Boone in this forest, surviving, whereas you spend your life hopping around like a flea, chasing money.

  He may not have articulated these things when he said “Come on back,” but they were present as an undertone. Among Kentuckians, much is exchanged with the volume and tempo of grumbled stock phrases. The deputy and I had achieved perfect social transparency in the fleeting eye contact of that drive-by.

  None of which means I didn’t take a different, carefully eccentric route back to London, full of circle-backs and stops at country markets, to establish my presence for any future timeline of disappearance. In a gas station I heard a conversation about religion. I almost hesitate to reproduce it, because it sounds made up. The woman behind the counter and a bearded, even cartoonishly hillbilly-looking man who’d just bought a pack of generic cigarettes were talking. The man remarked that there were all sorts of religions right there in that part of Kentucky.

  “Did you ever see snakes?” the woman said. She meant snake handlers.

  “No,” said the man. “Did you?”

  “Not right out in the open,” the woman said. “But I knew people that had ’em in the back room.”

  While I paid, they exchanged some pieties on how everyone has his or her own beliefs, et cetera. Then the woman said, “It’s just like, ten people see a car accident, every single one is gonna tell the police something different” (a vivid way, I thought, of localizing the story about the blind men feeling an elephant).

  “Tell me which one of ’em gets out to help,” the man said, “that’s the one whose religion I’ll listen to.”

  The woman and I both stood there. I think we each understood in our own way that Snuffy Smith here had just dropped some upper-level wisdom on us through a parting in his tobacco-browned beard-nest.

  * * *

  At my hotel, I called Sparkman’s son, Josh, on the phone. I had met him earlier in the driveway of their house, where a sofa laden with heavy junk had been pushed up against the front door like a barricade and a large dog barked in a way that said he would bark until you left. I’d been leaving a note when Josh pulled in. A bearded kid with dark hair and worried eyes, formally polite but then unexpectedly talkative, he’d stopped by just to drop off some stuff. We could connect later.

  Josh was adamant that his father hadn’t killed himself. He repeated to me what he’d said to others: A man who fights cancer like that does not commit suicide. Bill Sparkman showed every day how badly he wanted to live. It angered Josh that the cops wouldn’t come out and at least give his father the dignity of victimhood. As a result of their dithering, a cloud of tawdriness had begun to settle over the whole business. Indeed, two of my formerly cooperative interviewees stood me up on my last day in London. People weren’t sure they wanted anything to do with this st
ory anymore.

  But Josh’s concerns about the delayed determination of death were practical, too. He wanted to hold on to his father’s modest ranch house, intended to be his inheritance. Bill Sparkman had worked for sixteen years to keep that house, so that he could leave it to Josh. Without the payout from his father’s life-insurance policy, Josh would lose it.

  He told me that even before people had begun trying to make his father’s death seem like suicide, the insurance company had been giving him problems, claiming his father had missed a payment. Possibly the policy was void before he died. Josh wanted to know if I knew any lawyers.

  He and his father had gone through a troubled phase the previous year—while Bill fought cancer, Josh was busted for receiving stolen property and ended up working at a Church’s Chicken in Tennessee—but they’d patched things up since then and saw each other not long before Bill died.

  The whole thing was sad as hell, if not worse. That was the real question, I suppose: Was it worse? Did it concern anyone but a few people here? The captain had cut straight to it: “Why are you here?” When Josh, too, stood me up the next day and night, I packed and flew home.

  * * *

  The official police pronouncement, when it came weeks later—I watched the captain announce it over a live video feed—was like a dark punch line. Sparkman’s death had been all about health care. He was financially ruined from fighting lymphoma without good insurance. Deep in debt, working multiple low-paying jobs to make his mortgage while trying to earn a slightly more lucrative degree, he took the census work as most people take it, out of necessity.

  The police investigation concluded that Sparkman had killed himself as part of a tragic insurance scam. He’d taken out two policies on himself not long before dying. The policies became void in the event of suicide, but not if it were murder. He’d just learned that his cancer was back. This was his only way of leaving Josh something. Josh knew nothing about it. One of the ways they solved the case was by studying how FED got written on Sparkman’s chest. There were clues in the formation of the letters that the wrist holding the pen had been bent, the way your wrist would be if you were trying to write on your own chest.

  * * *

  I saw my cousin again, at a party in the little lakeside village in northern Michigan where my mother’s family has spent every summer since the nineteenth century. It’s a kind of Victorian-cottage Utopia, frozen like Brigadoon, a little WASP heaven. The uncles were having a party for another of my cousins, the lobbyist’s brother, just back from serving as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan, “taking it to ’em,” as he said. And no joke, he’d been over there during the deadliest months since the invasion. I sensed an air of physical relief and lightness in my blond aunt, his mother.

  The lobbyist cousin said it was getting rough back in D.C. The public option had gained momentum coming out of the House. The last thing his boss had said to him, that very morning, was “We may be fucked.”

  From the front porch, we could see a deep green field where we had raced as kids; from the back, the postcard loveliness of the tiny harbor, where the white sails of the sportsmen’s boats hung motionless in the afternoon, moths on a pale blue wall. We had grown up here, in what for children was a kind of paradise, all courtesy of private insurance. Now my own daughter was running by, chasing a dog. How could anyone wish it away? It’s rather that everyone should have it.

  I asked my cousin if he could stay for a few more days or if he had to get back to D.C.

  “I have to get back,” he said. “This is headed for a showdown on the floor next month. Now’s when we go to work.” Lots of breakfasts, lots of office sweep-throughs. A senator was predicting “holy war.”

  “The circumstances and fortunes of men and families,” said Franklin, “are continually changing.”

  I hoped for my cousin to fail, and wished him luck.

  LA•HWI•NE•SKI: CAREER OF AN ECCENTRIC NATURALIST

  For Guy Davenport

  All the histories of America are mere fragments or dreams.

  —CONSTANTINE SAMUEL RAFINESQUE

  The Commonwealth of Kentucky is shaped like an alligator’s head. It is also shaped like the Commonwealth of Virginia, as if the latter were advancing westward by generation of mature clones. In a way this is so. The southern borders of these states are keyed to the same horizontal projection, one surveyed by the frontier planter William Byrd in 1728, while the rivers forming their northern extents fall back just opposite each other from the flanks of the Appalachian massif. There’s a mirroring there.

  In 1818 one of the few people able to give even a semicoherent accounting of the ancient processes responsible for it neared Louisville, Kentucky, aboard a long covered flatboat, which, following local custom, he called an ark. It was summer. He traveled down the Ohio, along the alligator’s eye. For a full ten years he’d gone by his mother’s name, Schmaltz—he’d spent them in British-ruled Sicily; one didn’t need to sound overly French—but by the time he reached Kentucky, on a botanical trip financed with a hundred dollars he’d wrung from some Pittsburgh bookmongers as advance on a “New and More Accurate Map of the Ohio’s Tributaries” (a map he actually drew, but which they never published), he had resumed the name of Constantine Rafinesque.

  “Who is Rafinesque, and what is his character?” once asked John Jacob Astor. Rafinesque himself grew dizzy before the complexity of the answer. “Versatility of talents,” he wrote, “is not uncommon in America, but those which I have exhibited … may appear to exceed belief: and yet it is a positive fact that in knowledge I have been a Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, Philanthropist…”

  The river arks only went downstream. The owners broke them and sold the lumber once they’d made their destinations. They were more like floating islands, often lashed together (as during Rafinesque’s trip) into caravans. An 1810 document says they were shaped like “parallelograms.” Some were as long as seventy feet. You lived in a cabin or out on deck, other times in a tent, with an open cooking fire. There were animals. To go ashore and come back, which you did whenever you wanted, you took your own, smaller boat, kept tied to the gunwale. Arks went slow when the water was slow, fast when it was fast, and crashed when it was very fast. Typically there were only three rowers. This distinctly American mode of travel sufficed throughout the interior for longer than a century and is now so gone we struggle to reconstitute its crudest features. It had no Twain. Rafinesque liked the arks because he could botanize as they drifted. He felt the vegetable pulse of the continent shuddering down its veins. The green world whispered to him. He tells us—in his short, hectic, wounded memoir, written near the end—precisely what it said: “You are a conqueror.”

  The New World had a way of never being new. Ever notice this? I don’t mean the Native Americans—that part’s obvious. Even in European terms, somebody was always already there. The first person De Soto met in Florida spoke Spanish. Was in fact a Spaniard! And was it the Plymouth voyage that had aboard a group of Indians coming back from a visit to London?

  Just so, Rafinesque, that first, famous time he crossed the mountains, had a whole prior American career, a kind of prologue. From 1802 to 1805 he was all through New England, in the fields, at the high tables, driven in jolting carriages by Revolutionary veterans desperate to talk plants. Most places they received him as a boy genius—nineteen when he arrived and recognized internationally for the bold precocity of his juvenile publications. Perhaps one or two better-known naturalists squinted at his “mania” for discovery. It was said he attempted to rename and reclassify the first common weed he spotted on American soil. (True.)

  Benjamin Rush, a Declaration signer and the first great American physician, offered Rafinesque an apprenticeship in his practice, medicine and botany being closer together then. Rafinesque refused. His destiny had been revealed to him and did not lie in the city. One must remember when he was here: 1803 to 1805 was th
e day of Lewis and Clark; Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery had reached the Far West. Later expeditions might look to the South, at Louisiana and Arkansas, or toward “the Apalachian mountains, the least known of all our mountains, and which,” wrote Rafinesque, “I pant to explore.” He was taken to meet Jefferson, and they started to correspond. The earth, which Rafinesque believed was an “organized animal rolling in space,” had arranged for him to be present and correctly positioned at that moment, as a continent of taxonomically pristine vastnesses offered itself to science. He would gladly, “messer. le president,” serve as official corps naturalist, being supremely and, though it gave him no pleasure to say so, uniquely qualified for the role. The New World, which Rafinesque called the Fourth World, had long ago been found; now it would be known.

  Jefferson either never received or else neglected the letter. He thought of Lewis and Clark as half a military thing and knew the “nine young men from Kentucky” wouldn’t stand the deadweight of an eccentric French polymath. Instead he sent Lewis to Philadelphia and paid for him to be tutored by the local savants. Rafinesque, who was teaching in the city and had allowed himself to credit a claim that soon he’d be asked to join the mission, must have seethed. He watched another man’s body step into his future, inhabit his moment. The things we’d know if they’d sent Rafinesque to the Pacific! There was his fevered interest in Indian languages alone—almost without parallel for his time. Even as it was, even on his own, he somehow talked the War Department into sending out vocabulary questionnaires to all of its Indian agents. One sees these mentioned with great esteem by linguists who have no idea Rafinesque was behind them.