by Rich Horton
“Sure thing,” I said.
“And that I love him?”
“Of course.”
“And that I’ll always know who he really is?”
Hugh thought a second before saying, “Okay.”
The old lady pointed at Hugh. “You’d better be careful when you see him. He can take on any form.”
“Believe me, lady, I know the type,” Hugh said.
The family turned and headed back for the door one by one. The littlest Mullard sibling, the girl with the glasses, waited until last and handed us each something out of the pocket of her sweater: crosses fashioned from Popsicle sticks.
“In case he comes at night,” she said. Then she followed her family out through our woods and into the sunshine.
Hugh shook his head and tossed his Popsicle cross to a grip. “Can we get some footage shot today?” he barked.
Tony, by the way, was not particularly religious, which is one of about ten thousand things I liked about him. It would have been hard to be in those years, living like we were. The only place to feel and think differently than everyone else was on silly spaceman shows like Acres of Perhaps . . . shows you watched with thousands of other people alone in the dark.
We found David where we usually did when he wasn’t at the studio: hunched in a booth at the Derby typing away on the portable with a glass of something clear and poisonous by his side. Hugh slid onto one seat and I slid onto the other right next to David.
“So, Leroy, tell us about Melody,” I said.
He paused with his fingers above the keys but then plunged them down again almost in a chord to finish the sentence. He batted the carriage lever and sent it clunking to the far side.
“Melody,” he said, “is the most beautiful and brilliant woman in the world, and I don’t want to even think about your eyes on her.”
“Well, everybody at the studio had eyes on her today,” I said. “She came looking for you.”
“Brought her whole clan,” Hugh added.
“Probably spelled with a K,” I said.
David tapped a Chesterfield from a pack and lit it. There was a shimmy in his hands. “That so?” he said.
“That’s so,” I said. I gave him time to take a drag and let out a whisper of smoke, maybe think of something to say next. When he said nothing, I did instead.
“So tell us how your marriage in a hick town crushed your artistic sensibilities until you had to break free, please. I’d like to hear it for the hundredth time, and I’ll bet your version is the best.”
“I didn’t want to leave her. I had to.”
I leaned back from the table. “Ohhhh. You had to.”
He waved his cigarette near his face. “Look, I didn’t want to end up here, for Christ’s sake. I’m from Jenkins Notch, North Carolina, and I spent my first twenty years thinking I’d be right happy working in a farmer’s store until I could afford a place of my own. I’m a hick, whatever you assholes think, and I’m not here because I want to be famous or rich. Shit, look at you guys.”
The waitress was sliding a gin and tonic over to Hugh, who came here so often he didn’t have to order it.
“Writing is your job. You talk about it, think about it, work out ways to do it better. I want to get rid of it.”
I said, “Yes, it’s a bitch to be a genius. We get it.”
“No, you don’t. I’d go home with Melody right now if she was here. If I could.”
“Nothing’s stopping you,” I said. “Except maybe an aversion to decency.”
“It wasn’t like that,” David said. “I liked living there. I loved living with her. We were like limbs of the same tree growing back together after a fire. Even her sweat smelled good, you know? I’d come home and she’d be flushed from walking back from the schoolhouse where she taught and she’d have this scent of . . . the whole earth, really. Like a creek smells in the summer, or firewood in the winter.”
That was eerily and terrifyingly sweet for him to say. This was a man who’d written a script about how every Mercury rocket runs on mulched pixies for fuel, after all.
“I didn’t used to drink when I lived back there.” His twang had come back and he sounded possessed by himself. “But there was this family—probably still is—called the McDantrys and they made moonshine out in the woods. They sold it in town from their truck, and some idiot got some for Melody and me for a wedding present.”
“Something borrowed, something blue, something toxic . . . ” I started before trailing off.
“And one night she and I are in the new house and we’re rough-housing and laughing and she gets it into her head to try the stuff. ‘Nobody here but us chickens,’ she says, taking the Mason jar off the top shelf of the pantry and twisting off the cap. The fumes distorted her face right before she took a big pull from it, and then she handed it to me.”
“So what are you going to do? Let her unman you?” Hugh asked.
“Right. I woke up the next morning in a rocking chair with a fawn licking from the streak of vomit down the front of my shirt. All the windows of the house were broken. Inside, I hear this sobbing.”
He lit another cigarette and exhaled from his mouth.
“I go in, and sure enough, there’s Melody all beat up, her face puffy and bulging like a rotten plum. She’s crying and I try to console her, but she hides behind the kitchen table and won’t let me near her. I’m all looking down at my hands and I want to cut them off.
“But I’m still not thinking clearly enough, so I stagger off to the woods to find the McDantrys. They sold bad stuff, right? I could have fucking killed someone. And if I still had it in me, I might as well let them have a little.”
By then in David’s story, Hugh had gotten this look on his face that he wanted to write this down in case it got good. I’ll admit I wasn’t thinking much differently myself. Hell, we could use the forest set we’d already built.
But then the story got strange even by our standards.
“Out back of the Mullard property was a swamp of pines and cypress trees stretching for miles. The ground there is blackened mud and the canopy is all grown together. The McDantrys had put planks across the cypress knees so you’d walk on this tottering path zigging and zagging through the woods. Some were slick with mold so I had to be careful, but I followed them as far as they went—a long damned way.
“It got as dark as dusk back there, and it wouldn’t have been hard to lose your sense of time. So it might have been an hour or even three until I came upon a big rotten cypress stump the folks around there called the Old Knot. When I say ‘big,’ I mean easily the size of a bus, hollowed in the middle like a bottomless well.
“There was a still there all right, camouflaged with broken branches. I was tempted to kick it off into the pit but, frankly, I’d have preferred to do that to the McDantrys.
“Of course, none were there. So I set about to wait. I walked around on the planks a bit, holding out my arms to keep my balance. I fiddled with the still to see how it worked. And then I leaned over and looked down into the stump.”
“What did you see?” Hugh asked.
“I didn’t see anything,” David said. “It was dark. But I heard a hollow whistle, a little like the Knot was breathing—like it was the mouth of some wooden giant asleep under a blanket of mud. I reached my hand over the middle and the breeze was cool and rhythmic.”
The waitress set a beer in front of me and I flinched.
“The weirdest thing was that when I shifted my weight on the board and it let out a squeal, the breeze stopped. Like something was holding its breath for me. And I wanted badly for it to start again—like when a friend jumps into a quarry pond and doesn’t come up in what seems like forever?
“ ‘Hey,’ I shouted, but there was no answer.
“I got this idea I had to climb down there no matter how far it went, had to squeeze its heart with both my arms to start it again. That was crazy—for all I knew, it was a nest of rattlesnakes.
; “But standing there thinking it over, I was okay with that. What else did anybody need me for? The least I could do was make Melody a happy widow instead of a miserable wife.
“So I leaned and leaned like a coward until gravity made the decision for me.”
“Jesus,” Hugh said.
“I fell for a long, long time—so long that I had dreams. The vibration of cold whispers on my ears. The tremble of fingers up and down my arms. Something with claws combing over my scalp. I smelled oceans from other places, imagined music played with water and leaves.”
Bullshit, I thought . . . but didn’t say.
“And then I hit the ground. Or so I figured—I woke up flat on my face in my own front yard. Melody came running out and kissed me and said we’d never talk about it again and it wasn’t my fault and she’d still love me forever.”
Here he paused.
“Well, a funny thing occurred to me that night, naked with our sweat soaked into the sheets and our scents on each other’s lips. What if this was the bottom of the Old Knot, with a different Melody and a different house and a different town? What if up there somewhere was a woman still scared of me? And why wasn’t this one?”
Leave it to David Findley, or Leroy Whatever, to have the world’s most sublime and esoteric drinking blackout.
“After, I had weird dreams of what was going on here or up there, and I noticed things didn’t always connect. I’d think I’d said something here but really I’d said it in a dream up top of the Old Knot, or I’d lose a day in one place or the other. Folks got nervous around me because I’d stare off somewhere and then write down what I could in a notebook I got from the dime store. When that wasn’t fast enough, I got the typewriter.”
“So why’d you leave?” Hugh asked.
“Melody wasn’t worried at first when I clattered away in the kitchen with a board balanced on the arms of a chair. But then I stopped sleeping and going to work. I stopped leaving the house and shaving. I stopped talking, stopped focusing on anything in front of me. She called over my folks to talk sense to me. Reverend Pritchett stopped by. And when I heard them talking about ‘getting me out,’ I decided I’d better get myself out first. I packed up one night and lit out west. And the only thing I can make or sell is . . . whatever that fall gave me.”
David drank the rest of his liquor in one long swallow. You’d think he’d have learned not to do that from his own story.
And that’s what it was: a story. A good one, like all of his, but a tall tale myth meant to make him seem like the Paul Bunyan of weird fiction or something.
“So you drank bad moonshine, beat up your wife while barely conscious, stumbled into the woods, and got a concussion after falling into an old tree stump?” I said.
David eyed me calmly. “Yeah, if you think so.”
“One of those McDantry people dragged you back home where you came to, and ever since, you’ve suffered the lingering effects of your concussion, plus some uncharacteristic guilt. Mystery solved.”
“If you say so,” he said.
Hugh, not helping, asked, “So there are different versions of us back where you came from?”
“Yeah,” David said. “Barry here is writing for the Saturday Evening Post.”
Hugh and I stared and he let us dangle a moment before laughing.
“Barry, I have no idea if you even exist, here or there. I’m not sure I’m creative enough to invent you or Hugh. Or, shit, all of Hollywood. Who would imagine the studio system? Jesus, I hope not me.”
Then, being writers, we spent the night getting drunk and bitching about the money men.
You know, Tony and I never got to speed around the desert in a Karmann Ghia convertible like David did with his girlfriends. We could never fight in public with me chasing him out of a restaurant to apologize, either, or walk close on the pier. We lived in a closet built for two for fifty years, and when I finally found the guts to step out, he was too sick to step out with me.
The saying goes that to be great is to be misunderstood, and most people assume this also means that to be misunderstood is to be great. But there are lots of misunderstood people who are a long way from greatness.
When I crawled into my bed beside Tony that night, I wondered which one David “Leroy” Findley was: a visionary or some delusional hick good at sounding like one. Or maybe there wasn’t a difference.
What did “Woodsy” even mean when you thought about it? Anybody can film random movements and rely on the viewers’ perceptions to make it art, but unless it says something, what’s the damned point? Acres of Perhaps wasn’t in the “giving-voice-to-David’s-demons” business; it was in the “entertaining-and-enlightening” one. We made people think about race, nostalgia, paranoia . . . not the stitching of the Universe. Someone could create the Clorox Kafka Hour for that.
Tony rolled over under his sheets to face me. We’d just moved to this Craftsman bungalow in Venice then, and air conditioning was a science fictional concept to us. Even a fan was something that cost money, and so he slept without much on at all. I remember this now only because, well, I thought right then that Tony was as good as Melody any day of the week.
I told him what had happened, about the Mullard family and David’s secret identity, about how the whole genius act had a clichéd story behind it—except for the falling into the netherworld part which was pure delusion. He listened with his head propped up in his hand under the moonlight, asking questions and nodding at the answers.
At the end, he asked, “So what is he going to do?”
David had ducked the question at the Derby so I could only offer my guess. “He’ll probably keep avoiding her until she gives up and goes home.”
He considered a moment. “You sound angry about it.”
“I don’t think angry is the right word. Annoyed. I’m annoyed things are easier for him because he has people like Hugh and Melody and me carrying his load of the ordinary.”
“You know what I think?” That was one of my favorite phrases of his; it was like a motor revving. “Men like David make women into muses so they have someone to blame when they don’t deliver the goods. And they make women into anti-muses, too.”
“Anti-muses.”
“Yeah. Like this poor Melody. She’s the boat anchor mooring him to reality, right? So he builds it all up until she seems to be after his soul, and then he’s justified in leaving her.”
Tony was a part-time illustrator for magazines in L.A. and San Francisco, and he had a way of drawing exactly what you needed to see but no more. He sometimes did it with words, too.
“Do you think I’m that way?”
He smiled and reached for my hands. “You don’t have a muse, love. In the same way astronauts and carpenters don’t. You just do things.”
Tony never misunderstood me, and sometimes that was consolation enough for not being great.
I’d leaned in closer when there came a thunder of fists against the front door.
Tony sighed and gathered up the blankets around him. Then he reached for his cigarettes and said, “Better go see what David wants.”
“What makes you think it’s David?”
He tapped the end of the pack. “It’s the way his life works.”
I pulled on an undershirt over my pajama pants and headed for the door. A shadowed head bobbed in the window, and I could tell from the wild spray of hair that it really was David.
“What do you want?” I asked through the door.
“Barry! You’ve got to let me in. They’re after me.”
“Who?”
“Melody and her folks!”
I imagined them walking down the street with torches and pitchforks, and I’ll admit I liked the image.
“Where are they?”
“They’re here,” he cried, twisting the doorknob and thumping himself against it.
I opened the door and he stumbled inside. He tried his best to slam it again but I was holding it.
“This is silly,” I s
aid. “They’re people. Be with her, don’t be with her—just tell her the truth.”
Out in the darkened street, I saw the Mullard family walking abreast in a single line, patrolling with flashlights like you would if searching for a lost dog. They pivoted as one group at the end of my driveway and marched toward us.
“Okay,” I said, closing the door.
David did me the courtesy of bolting it shut. He reached for a chair to prop under it but I stopped him.
I watched through the window as the Mullards formed an arc around the entrance to my house like Christmas carolers. Melody left the group and knocked gently.
“Mr. Weyrich? I think Leroy is inside your house. Can he come out so we can talk to him?”
“Hold on a moment,” I yelled. Then, turning to David, I whispered, “What do you expect me to do?”
“Tell them to go away. Tell them you’re calling the cops.”
“Mr. Weyrich?” This time it was the mother. “That’s my daughter’s lawful husband in there.”
David shook his head but I leaned closer to the window. “Look, I don’t want to be involved in this at all. Maybe everybody should call it a night, get some sleep, and then get together somewhere tomorrow to talk it all over.”
The Mullards closed in.
“Hey, Tony,” David said.
Tony was leaning in the hallway in his navy blue pajamas. He lowered his cigarette from his lips and said, “Hello, David.”
“You’ve got to talk some sense into her, Tony.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Why me?”
“Because you have feelings and things,” David said quickly, still peering through the window.
I watched as the two brothers broke off from the group and out of my vision. I wondered if I’d remembered to lock the back door. Then I wondered if it wouldn’t be just as well for these guys to carry David out of my house and my life. Maybe I could hurry and unlock it—
Tony came closer. “Melody, honey?”
“Yes,” was the quiet response.
“My name is Tony. I’m Barry’s roommate.”
Isn’t that funny how quickly it ran off his tongue? He didn’t even have to pause anymore.
